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Mystery, of treasure buried by fleeing Frenchmen nearly two hundred years ago and dug for at intervals ever since, their memories of cold and hunger, of poaching and fighting and triumphant hunting, pass into the blood of the listener. Five years ago, a few hundred yards up Burnt Hill Brook, I saw a paddle nailed crosswise to a tree. On it was scribbled the name of a young Frenchman, drowned there on the spring drive, with the date. This summer both name and date have been washed out by the rain, but no human hand will ever touch that rude cross, and no Miramichi man forgets it. Life on the river shares in the immense dignity of Death.

VII

Let us come back to our fishing. Among all these constant reminders of our ignorance, these equally constant but tiny accretions to our knowledge of the woods and the river, there are strange flashes of self-knowledge, too. Perhaps it is the sort of revelation for which hermits once tarried long in waste and solitary places. You come back to yourself. Companionship in the woods is essential if one is to keep his sanity, but a few hours of absolute solitude make for sanity also. Here you are, the same person that fished here five years or a score of years before, with the same slender collection of virtues, possibly, but certainly with the same large assortment of faults. Are you cursed with impatience, indecision, pedantry, envy, covetousness, and idolatry? An evening's fishing will betray you as remorselessly as the Day of Judgment.

I confess to wonderment and irritation over the fisherman- though there are legions of his type- who is always certain that he has done the right thing in the right way. If he loses a fish,

it is demonstrably the fault of the fish or of the reel or of the fast water or of the guide who was too slow with the gaff. I like much better the lad who asks, 'Dad, did I strike that laker too quick, or was I too slow?' Note that he does not blame either the fish or the tackle, but only himself! And we debate the question hour after hour, while the boat swings at anchor on our little Vermont lake and we wait for another strike. Neither of us knows the right answer, and both of us are entirely happy - having inherited an inquiring strain of blood, some ability for seeing both sides of a question, and a deep respect for 'hunches.'

It was a fisherman on our lake, by the way, who once gave me a thoroughly local interpretation of the story of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes. In this lake the biggest trout lie in pockets along the edge of the ledges, sixty or seventy feet down, and it takes a good eye for landmarks to anchor the boat precisely in the right spot. Often one side of the boat, when two men are fishing, will have all the luck that four or five feet of difference in latitude or longitude meaning success or failure in reaching the big lakers with your minnow. Hence my old friend's cautious and entirely reverent attempt at New Testament exegesis: 'Mr. Perry, don't you think that when Our Lord told the disciples to let down the net on the other side of the boat, He had a hunch that they was anchored just on the aidge of a laidge?'

I cannot say that there was anything miraculous about our draught of fishes on the Miramichi this summer, unless it be in the number and size and splendid fighting quality of the grilse. The salmon fishing was below the average. But somehow the great pork barrel on the east porch of the cabin kept filling steadily with salted fish, and by and

by we began to feel the premonitions of departure. Ominous yellow leaves appear on the tips of the young white birches across the river. We have no other calendar with us than such signs of the passing weeks, and a hint from the cook that we must hold back a little on this or that delicacy. I notice that G., who expects some trout fishing elsewhere in August, begins to talk about the fun of dry-fly fishing with your very lightest tackle

some brimming meadow brook where there would be no danger of a rushing grilse or salmon wrecking your rod. Alas for the inconsistency of fishermen! We hook and release every day, here on the river, trout that would astonish our friends at home, and already, with shoulder blades still aching with swinging a salmon rod, we are dreaming of meadow brooks in New England. And nothing is more certain than that when we are floating our tiniest flies again over one of those brooks we shall dream of the sudden sullen plunge of a salmon!

The final morning comes, and that 'one more' cast, which every angler knows. For me it is always an excessively solemn rite and is usually unattended with any luck whatever. But on this occasion, as I was slowly reeling in, a besotted salmon, hovering in the ripple not six yards below me, seemed to decide from the melancholy look upon my face that it was now or never! I struck, for once, just as he flashed, and he was so well hooked that even I could not have lost him. He weighed only ten pounds, but I am sure that he possessed a most magnanimous soul.

VOL. 139 NO. 4

B

Reluctantly we settled ourselves into the canoes at last, at the head of the 'Pond,' bound homeward. As I took a final look at the rough water between my canoe and the ledge on the opposite shore, a huge salmon leaped, as if with an ironic gesture of farewell. He looked exactly like the monster that had carried off my Dusty Miller and a bit of broken leader, in that very spot, ten days before. Well, I hope now that he will rub that fly off upon the rocks long before the spawning season! I had hated to lose him, but I cannot help admiring, this morning, that sardonic parting assertion of superiority. 'Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?' he seems to shout as he plunges down, while the river, for a moment, seems strangely flat and empty.

'Perhaps not, old fellow,' I whisper to him, as I pick up the bow paddle instead of a rod and we head downstream. 'Perhaps not, but there is another summer coming! Au revoir! May no poacher's net entangle you or otter tear you. May you not linger under the river ice all winter and become a mere "black salmon" to rise hungrily in the broad eddies at any lure next spring. May you rather go down proudly into the North Atlantic and take your lordly ease in the great deep until some full tide next June. Then may you make gallantly the long uphill climb against one hundred and thirty miles of tumbling water and settle again in the old pool under the gray ledge. And if in some soft July twilight you swirl up once more at a Dusty Miller or a Silver Doctor, may it be a fair fight, and may the leader hold!'

AMENITIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

BY H. H. POWERS

In the course of a morning walk while waiting for my friends in the little Japanese inn to be ready for breakfast, I climbed a neighboring hill for its view over the Inland Sea. Suddenly my attention was arrested by a rustling noise, accompanied by little squeaks, in the grass near by. Looking in the direction indicated, I saw a beautiful snake with markings such as I had never seen before, making his way through the grass with a frog he had seized, who was uttering the squeaks that I had heard. As the frog's legs were spread wide on either side, the snake found it impossible to push him ahead through the grass, and so he was wriggling backward and dragging the frog after him. I had never seen a snake move backward and had never heard a frog squeak, so I watched them with interest for the brief moment before they disappeared from view. Then I returned to the inn and recounted my adventure to the little group of friends with whom I was traveling. They listened with such interest as the incident merited, but the reaction in one case was unexpected. A charming young woman said with tears in her voice, 'Did n't you help the frog?'

We smiled at this exhibition of sympathy, but liked her the better for it. Yet no one seconded her suggestion or seemed to think that I ought to have helped the frog. They seemed to realize that sympathy should be tempered by discrimination. The impulse to

I

help the under dog is universal among associated beings. There can be no human society, not even a wolf pack, without a certain mitigation of the competitive struggle. Hence the impulse to take the side of the weak against the strong. But the strong may have the right of it. Nay, in the long run theirs is manifestly the better case. For it is not for the interest of the race that the weak should inherit the earth.

I am prompted to these suggestions by recent developments in our international relations. Our situation as a nation is peculiar. We are, or believe ourselves to be, the most powerful nation in the world. We are at the same time the most detached. We feel international responsibilities less than any other nation and our criticisms of national policies are restrained by neither experience nor fear. The facetious advice to young debaters always to debate questions they know nothing about, as they would thus be less hampered by facts, quite fits our case. In foreign affairs America is the paradise of the doctrinaire and the sentimentalist, the champion of the under dog.

China seems for the moment to be the under dog. Foreign Powers have compelled her to open her doors to their commerce, they have restricted her right to tax their imports, they have compelled her to set aside districts in which their nationals may live and which they may develop and govern as they see fit, and they have compelled

her to grant them within these areas, and in a measure wherever they go, the privilege of living under their own laws and of administering these laws through courts of their own creation. In other words, foreign Powers have moved into China, bag and baggage, and have carried their national cultural establishments with them. While they avoid the term 'annexation,' and recognize in Chinese sovereignty a certain reversionary right to these territories when they are through with them, that sovereignty is for the present entirely in abeyance in the 'concessions,' those marvelous settlements which the Western Powers have created on Chinese soil. Even outside the concessions the foreigner, in a sense, plants his national flag on the spot where he stands. And all this he seems well content to continue, and shows no sign either of leaving or of surrendering his privileges. Such is the Chinese indictment, which, barring certain large omissions, fairly states the facts.

All this went on comparatively unnoticed for half a century simply be cause our attention was not called to it. But of late this attitude has changed. China has found a voice in a small but growing class impregnated with Western ideas that deeply resents the unreciprocal relation and demands for China the same recognition of sovereignty which is accorded to other nations. This means the recognition of no other law or police authority than that of China in Chinese territory. It means the end of consular courts and of restrictions upon taxation. And generous impulse among us is prompt to respond to the appeal. We are exhorted to stop bullying China.

There is not one of the Western nations to-day that is not willing and eager to do that very thing.

How do we know this? Because in an analogous case they did it, and did

it without coercion or exhortation; because, further, the system is costly and vexatious. The Powers do not establish concessions and organize a police force and maintain consular courts for the fun of it. They have no more desire to do these things in Shanghai than they have to do them in New York. It is a burden to maintain these establishments. Only the uninitiated regard it as a privilege. If the Powers hesitate to abolish them it is for reasons of historic import which it behoves us to consider.

II

The system did not originate in China. It is much more ancient — how ancient we cannot say. I suspect that the Greek quarter in Memphis on the banks of the Nile three thousand years ago was much like a Chinese concession. Japan, too, had similar settlements in Korea centuries ago. We have little knowledge of the arrangements governing these settlements, but we may safely assume that they were under the control of their own inhabitants and governed by their customs and laws.

The system first appears in clear outline in connection with the Venetian empire. When Venice joined the crusades she made it a condition of her coöperation that a portion of every city captured should be placed under her jurisdiction. Here she established a Venetian quarter, building warehouses, docks, and all the essentials of commerce. Here, too, her law was established with all the machinery for its administration. It became a Venice in miniature, sometimes more. The Venetian quarter in Constantinople, a concession voluntarily granted, is said to have contained two hundred thousand inhabitants, a population equal to that of Venice herself. Eventually these settlements dotted every island and coast of the Mediterranean.

Whatever may have been the motive for establishing these settlements, their justification is to be found in the fact that Venice had developed a body of commercial law and a system of administration which was infinitely superior to that of the countries with which she had to deal. Many of them had no body of law and were ruled by edict that is, by autocratic caprice tempered by ill-defined custom. Even with good intentions such procedure was incapable of regulating the complex relations which the highly developed commerce of Venice involved.

When the Turks fell heir to the East, they had no thought of abolishing this system, but sought rather to encourage and extend it. With the long-coveted Constantinople now in their possession, but shrunk to a tenth of its former size and with grass growing in its streets, they turned to this system of privileged settlements as the means of restoring its commercial supremacy. Not at all under compulsion, but with eagerness and an eye to commercial advantage, they renewed and enlarged these privileges of self-government. It did not seem at all an unreasonable thing that commercial communities of highly developed peoples should live under their own laws and regulate their affairs in a manner suited to their needs. These privileges were therefore in the strictest sense concessions granted by a Power, perhaps the strongest in Europe, in the interest of its own convenience and advantage. These concessions were eventually extended to all foreigners as well as to the subject Christian populations, all in the interest of the State. It allowed these populations to live under laws with which they were familiar, and saved the Turks the trouble of regulating affairs which they did not understand. Above all it gave the merchant the necessary inducement to restore the prosperity of the State.

The system continued with little change until its abolition during the World War. But changes in the nations themselves greatly modified its character. Turkey decayed, while the Western Powers grew strong. As the gulf widened between the unadaptable Turk and the progressive West, the foreigner increasingly prized his independence and exploited his privileged position. The 'capitulations,' as the system was called, thus came to be recognized as the normal relation between nations whose social and legal systems were widely divergent.

When, about the middle of the nineteenth century, China and Japan were brought within the orbit of Western commerce, the system of exterritoriality was adopted as a matter of necessity. I shall not recall the incidents of this transaction, which involved several wars and a naval demonstration on our part which failed of becoming a war only because it cowed the Japanese into submission. If I were to challenge the policy of the Western Powers I think I should choose this point for attack. If we ever wronged the Eastern nations it was when we insisted upon trading with them at a time when they were unwilling that we should do so. But to discuss the legitimacy of a commercial expansion which no power on earth could have prevented and to which all peoples are now reconciled is as futile as to discuss the ethics of the solar system. I will pass this period with but the single remark that there never was an opium war properly so designated that is, a war in which the use of opium by the Chinese was either the object aimed at or the chief object attained. It is unfortunate that Britain was obliged to establish the most fundamental of all commercial principles, the right of property against confiscation, in connection with a commodity since fallen into deserved discredit, but

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