tolerant, impatient and disgusted with him. . . . In public all men do more or less play-acting. Wilson was no exception. He wanted to speak for the common crowd, but in private he frequently found it difficult to tolerate them. His was a strange aloofness, and his political fortunes had a strange ascent. Full of the petty theories he had been teaching the university students, and unfettered with practical political experience or definite plan, he got off to a running start and made the whole distance to the pinnacle of greatest power at a tremendous moment in the world's history. He was his own favorite confidant, at heart a solitary man "voyaging through strange seas of thought alone."

It is a book which must always be very seriously reckoned with in all further histories of Woodrow Wilson and his times, and in all evaluations of his character and career.

There remains before us another contribution to history made by one who was both the most intimate observer of the doings which he records and the most conspicuous factor in them. Nogales Bey, as the author of Four Years beneath the Crescent was known during the period of which he writes, is a soldier of fortune and a man of letters, notably accomplished in both capacities; a Venezuelan, who fought for Spain and against America in Cuba, was during the World War the Inspector-General of Turkish forces in Armenia, and then Military Governor of Turkish Sinai. His authority as a chronicler of one of the most sanguinary and lurid chapters in the history of that war is therefore unsurpassed, and there is satisfactory reason for esteeming as highly the impartiality and sincerity of his account. He was a witness of the horrors of the Armenian massacres and deportations, and for them he is no apologist. But he makes it clear, and this is his most important contribution to the history of that hideous time, that those crimes against humanity were the work of the Kurds and "irregular" bodies of Turks, and that "the Regular Army of the Ottomans was entirely innocent." This we should be inclined to accept as true; mindful of the fact that the "Bulgarian atrocities" of the eighteen-seventies, which, when disclosed by Eugene Schuyler and J. A. MacGahan, shocked the civilized world and started William E. Gladstone on his Midlothian crusade, were the work of "irregular" Bashi-Bazouks, and that only for a time in the reign of Abdul the Damned was the regular Turkish army de

tailed for such service. It may be added that the disgust of the troops at this detail marked the beginning of the end for Abdul Hamid. The damning circumstance of the case, however, is that during the World War as well as in the Hamidian infamies all the crimes of the "irregulars" were not only condoned but approved and perhaps instigated and encouraged by the chief civil authorities. Señor Nogales makes this fact as plain and as emphatic as he does the non-participation of the regular army, and thus fixes culpability upon the Ottoman Government.

And this raises the consideration, perhaps the most suggestive of all in this fascinating and thought-inspiring volume, whether that ordered and enlightened discipline which is too often aspersed as "militarism" does not in fact often make for humanity as well as for peace. "He jests at scars that never felt a wound.” Had some civilian politician been in control at Appomattox, would he have told the Southern soldiers to keep their horses, for "they would need them for the spring plowing"? Had the settlement of the World War been entrusted to the men who won the Marne and held Verdun, would the world have been cursed with the ineptitudes of the Treaty of Versailles? And by analogy, if the men who write history were more often the men who make history, should we not have in our history books more of the simple, direct and convincing truth?

WILLIS FLETCHER JOHNSON.

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER-NOVEMBER, 1926

UNCLE SHYLOCK LOOKS ABROAD

BY THE EDITOR

I. TO JOHN BULL

UNCLE SHYLOCK reports a rising barometer. Thus far the European "ill will" which in the early summer threatened to engulf his fair land in dire calamity, mental, moral, spiritual, financial and commercial, has not made a dent in his thick skin. Although, in consideration of all the circumstances, he did feel the title somewhat rasping at first, his sense of humor already enables him to accept it with a smile. After all, it is no more irritating than the "Hog" he was dubbed by contemptuous Spain not so long ago when he was paying her twenty million dollars for distant islands which he did not want as a gift and would pay twenty times twenty now to be well rid of. So long, too, as old John Bull can give a grunt of satisfaction at "Perfidious Albion,' as implying a marvel in diplomacy, and Mlle. Marianne can regard the calling of her offspring "Froggies" as a tribute to her culinary art, there seems to be no real reason why Uncle Sam should balk at a term which does at any rate signify tacit admission of a debt.

Yes, indeed, Uncle Shylock is "quite all right," as they say in the Mother Country; "Sam" was well enough in our bucolic days but it really ceased to be apt when Dobbin succumbed to Ford and was gradually becoming as shopworn as the English Channel. The bald heads of Wall Street find it congenial naturally and the

Copyright, 1926, by North American Review Corporation. All rights reserved.