To all but the favored few perfectly acquainted with China, Professor J. J. M. De Groot's "The Religion of the Chinese" will be an instructive work, for the ordinary popular theory of Chinese religion begins and ends with the name of Confucius, and the knowledge that one of his precepts is the Chinese equivalent of the Golden Rule. The reason probably lies in the comparatively slight change in the Chinese faith since its birth, and consequently its lack of such manifestations of itself as minds trained in a Christian atmosphere easily recognize as religious. Its core being universalistic animism, there is no marvel which those who hold it may not accept as truth, no measure for the terror or the ferocity to which they may be aroused by acts and aspects seeming perfectly innocent and harmless to a Buddhist or a Christian. Hence the innumerable tales of popular outbreaks. and governmental measures against missionaries, and against secular for eigners dwelling among them, and hence more than one war, and more than one occasion for foreign interference with matters in which the behavior of the Chinese appears to themselves not only natural but inevitable. The Caucasian calls them inscrutable, meaning only that they puzzle him, but the actuality of the quality will first appear to many a reader of Professor De Groot's pages. Briefly, there is nothing created either by God or by man in which the Chinese religion does not recognize at least two spirits, one good, and one evil, and both having power over man. The air, earth, and water teem with such spirits, and there is no end to the pranks within their conception and capacity, nor is there any limit to the respect rendered to them by all. from the emperor to the most ignorant peasant. The Confucianist, in exact proportion to the measure of his learning, rises superior to these beings, and

becomes all the more firmly convinced and the more eager to teach that Buddhism and Christianity are mischievous and demoniacal. The worship not only of ancestors, but of the Emperor and of living men of influence and power naturally follows, and also sacrifice to the spirits animating everything from a rock to a star. A late development is Taoism which among a multitude of other things teaches a wholesome humility and unselfishness, but is so intimately blended with animism and Confucianism as to be less beneficial than might be supposed. Buddhism, always a solvent of any religion with which it comes in contact, has weakened both Confucianism and Taoism and by its establishment of monasteries and pagodas kept itself constantly before the popular mind. and by its theory that its religious buildings were centres of beneficent atmospheric influence has for 1500 years been a potent factor in Chinese life. Its high abstract ethics are beneficent in their influence, but are half neutralized by superstition, and the whole system is at war with Confucianism, which has for more than a millennium striven to expel it from the empire. The result of all this is as St. Hilaire showed some forty-five years ago, that every man more or less dissembles his actual belief, and that dissensions, quarrels, rebellions, which to an outsider seem entirely secular, are really religious in their origin. Many of the sectaries have developed ideas akin to Christianity and these men are the most offensive to the state and, in Professor De Groot's opinion, form the field to which missionaries may safely turn their attention with hope of success. This is the barest outline of the book, which is full of matter that one might call curious were it not so potent for good or evil in the duration of an empire and the spiritual existence of a race numbered by myriads. The Macmillan Co.

Those who turn an American, or an Anglo-American, eye on a British General Election will not take long to decide that we are still mere amateurs in the arts of campaign management. Everything about an English election must, I should think, strike an American as unorganized, desultory, and haphazard. By the side of the scientific and business-like thoroughness which even a novice in political generalship throws into his work over there, we are judged ignorant of the very alphabet of electioneering. We have no "primaries," no "conventions," and only the shadow of a machine. Our system of nominating candidates, compared with theirs, seems the mere sport of chance. Neither of our two great historic parties possesses any representative gathering able to put forward a programme that shall be binding on all its candidates. Any ten men in an English constituency can nominate any candidate they please, and that candidate need not have been born in the constituency, need not have any connection with it, and is at all times free to formulate his own little platform and to run on it just as he pleases. Most of our electioneering is voluntary and unpaid. The law tries hard to limit the amount that may be spent on it. Election day in Great Britain is not a public holiday. Indeed, there is no such thing as election day in Great Britain. Americans spend four months discussing the rival candidates and policies in a Presidential campaign, but the actual voting is over and done with simultaneously, from one end of the Union to the other, in a space of twelve hours. In Great Britain it takes three weeks to vote for a new Parliament and as a rule rather less to talk about it.

But it is rather in the tactics than in the structural strategy of a cam

paign that the differences between an English and an American election are brought out most clearly. It would, I think, pay our parties to send their chief agents over to America while a Presidential contest is being fought out. They would then have a chance of learning the supreme utility of clubs. Clubs spring up during an American election on the slightest excuse and often on none at all. They are founded on every conceivable basis. There are lawyers' clubs and merchants' clubs, chemists' assistants' clubs and railway employees' clubs, clubs for Poles, Italians, negroes, Germans, Irishmen, Jews and Scandinavians-clubs, in short, for every race, every profession, every occupation, every locality, and almost every form of athletic exercise. Nearly all of these clubs adopt a semimilitary organization and a special uniform. They help the canvassers, distribute leaflets, hold meetings, organize parades and processions, and generally, in their own ingenious words. "boom things right along." A good many of them are purely peripatetic, and further the cause by promenading the streets with banners, torches, and horns night after night. It has been estimated that there are always from a million to a million and a half people enrolled in these auxiliary clubs that spring up during a campaign and disappear when it is over. Adding these to the regular and professional workers, it is probable that, out of a voting population of fifteen millions, the actual and active campaigners are not less than three millions.

Very few of these are women. There is nothing in America that corresponds to the Primrose League, just as there is nothing that at all resembles the Carlton or National Liberal Club. The social earthquake that accompanies a

General Election in Great Britain is unknown in America, where politics and society, to the loss of both, are absolutely unconnected. Even at the great mass meetings it is the rarest thing to see any considerable number of women, and until 1896 their appearance on the stump or in campaign clubs was virtually unheard of. Taken as a whole,

the sex in America, and not least in those rudimentary Western States where women have been given the vote, regards politics as a purely masculine pursuit in which it has scarcely any desire to take part. American women have, it is true, appeared as duly accredited delegates at the National Conventions; the Prohibitionists, who seek to suppress the manufacture and sale of intoxicants, not merely countenance but welcome their co-operation; in the anti-slavery agitation of the 'fifties they took an honorable and effective part, and of late years they have shown an increasing desire to intervene in munic ipal elections in opposition to the regular parties and on behalf of the independent candidate. But as a sex they stand almost wholly aloof from active participation in national politics. Their suffrage movement and their suffrage societies are flabby things compared with our own, and are balanced and very largely neutralized by countermovements and counter-organizations, promoted and maintained by women to save them from being dragged into the political arena. On the whole, the American woman, so easily dominant in the social life of her country and so very much to the forefront of its moral and philanthropic endeavors, is in politics a "negligible quantity." Why is this? It is partly because, as a sex, women in America have few legal or political grievances, and because, as women, they have had their full share in the benefits of that "free expansion of the individual" which M. Ostrogorski has correctly diagnosed as "the

mainspring of American life." Most of the traditional inequalities and disabilities sanctioned by the common law of European countries in the civil status of women, and especially of married women, have in America been abolished, while at the same time the career has been thrown as widely open to feminine as to masculine talent. The American woman does not trouble about her "rights," because she has few, if any, "wrongs," and because she has somewhat lost the collective sense of sex in the enjoyment of her personal privileges. Moreover, American politics are a good deal of a mystery even to American men, very few of whom, unless they are in the business, know what is being done behind the scenes, while to women, as to nearly all outsiders, they are flatly incomprehensible. One could as easily imagine a woman to be an authority on strategy and tactics as on the operations which Americans exalt by the name of politics. These operations, too, are for the most part carried on by men who are not conspicuous for their refinement and who do not hesitate to resort to manœuvres that would sound queerly in a drawing-room. American women are too squeamish for the emergencies of American politics and too sensitive to endure their irredeemable vulgarity. Nor, as I have said, do politics and society go hand in hand. A Senator's wife may be a considerable personage in Washington, but she is so only on the understanding that she does not interfere in politics. The bosses and the machine have between them killed the very possibility of a political salon. American women, again, as a sex are only drawn towards public affairs when some great moral or humanitarian issue is at stake. Tariff schedules and vague battling with the railways and the trusts do not interest them, and the mercenary atmosphere of most American politics simply re