T

HE carabao is a noble animal of about four hundred tons displacement, and occupies twelve-thirteenths of the available breathing space on the island of Luzon.

He is neat, but not gaudy, and in his general appearance somewhat resembles that delightful creature the Prum, so called because it is not a fish. He consists principally of a pair of horns and a martyrized expression of countenance, and is considered by scientists to be a cross between the millennium and full army rations.

He lives a simple and frugal life, and spends all of it in making up his mind to execute a sudden move. Then he dies. At this sudden interruption of his projects he is generally about eighty-three years of age.

When not in use as a means of furthering the interests of interurban transportation, the carabao is kept submerged in water. This is done in order to preserve his unruffled temper, and also to furnish a novel sport, unheard of in other parts of the globe. Carabao-fishing is a pleasant recreation for the natives in the small hours of the morning.

As above intimated, the carabao of the Philippines is principally used as a drayhorse, and in this capacity presents many advantages over his equine cousin. He does not shy at cable-cars, does not interfere, and never in the history of the islands has he been known to run away. He is gentle and kind in all harness, and can be handled with equal success by children or adults; he heeds neither.

There is a prescribed and unvarying method to be followed in driving a carabao, which comes of long practice and an astute knowledge of the animal's playful ways.

After having been hitched to a cart with due ceremony, the carabao will immediately lie down in the street, more to enable

you to perfect yourself in the proper pronunciation of the many epithets in the Spanish vocabulary than out of any spirit of meanness.

As soon as you have sufficiently aired your profanity, kick him twice on the left side, and with a club or any other available means of persuasion plant a powerful blow on his head. He will then get up, unless you have fractured his skull, in which case it will be necessary for you to obtain another carabao and begin all over again.

As soon as he is on his feet, you must place your tongue firmly against the roof of the mouth, stiffen the muscles of the throat, and give vent to a series of sounds such as usually accompany the payment of a tribute to Neptune when about twenty-four hours out of port. As he hears these the carabao will move slowly forward.

Now prod him incessantly with your club, and keep on uttering the abovedescribed exhortation, and the chances are that he will move ahead at least five yards before stopping again. Repeat the same operations as before, and by dint of patience and perseverance you will arrive at your destination.

The carabao played an important part in the "late unpleasantness," being generally used during the siege of Manila as an article of nutrition. He has left a lasting effect upon those who partook of him-the slow, sluggish movements and the dullness of comprehension of most of the natives being entirely due to the enormous amounts of carabao meat which they have eaten.

As a domestic animal, however, the carabao is not an unqualified success, and we would discourage our American friends from the idea of adding one to their collections of curios.

We have in mind the experience of an

HE Fourth of July celebrations of later years have shown a conspicuous falling-off in the more exuberant qualities of patriotic oratory. There must be some reason for the somewhat chastened demeanor with which we enter upon our national festivity, since the abandon of midsummer gaiety to which we formerly yielded appears to be modified by a somewhat Puritanic dread of our own merriment. Perhaps we are growing old, or, at all events, mature, nationally. It is the pace that tells, and we have lived fast. We are accumulating possessions; we are growing wealthy; and wealth is the prerogative of middle age, at least. The heyday of our Jeffersonian youth is past, and the responsibilities of wealth are sitting heavily upon our shoulders. There is no need to quote statistics and to pile up the achievements of our citizens end on end to make the heap the higher; we are informed on every hand that the world's highways are lumbered with the goods of our store, and our name looms large on the international ledger. Nationally, we have grown rich. Step by step we have advanced commercially until the end is almost in sight, and the dominance of the world's markets is the goal close ahead. We have discovered the unlimited provision made for us in the natural resources of our country. We have devoted our talents to the preparation of these resources for the market. We have proved ourselves masters of the art of making commodities. We have a pæan which we hum, a prophecy with which we cheer ourselves in the midst of our toil-the workshop of the world will be ours; we shall be the great manufacturing nation; we shall be the greatest and strongest exponent of the era of commercialism.

And why not? In order to succeed, we must be of our time, and who is so fitted to succeed as ourselves? We were born with the birth of the commercial idea. Commerce has been the breath of our nostils; we have lived for it and by it, we have fought for it, and the progenitors of our stock stand aghast at the result of VOL. XXXVI-4

their teaching as exemplified in us. Some of our members are inclined to deprecate this view of ourselves and our immediate destiny; but this is foolish, and somewhat snobbish. We came here for the most part with a wholesome detestation of European feudal notions and certain very definite ideals of our own, which we have set to work to realize, and have proved ourselves to be eminently capable and suited to the task. Why should we be otherwise than proud of commercial success? It is the essential of modern life, and the fate of an uncommercial nation. has recently been rendered painfully obvious by us. Besides, it has brought us all other things with it; the nobility of Europe is ours to purchase; the political powers of Europe grow more and more accommodating. accommodating. Wealth, concrete wealth, is what counts. It is, in fact, the only thing which counts in the international sphere, and concrete wealth is precisely what we have gained.

From the Declaration of Independence to the establishment of a great empire is a tremendous leap, but we have almost accomplished it, and in perfect safety and security. If the result has not been all that one could have wished, if events have proved that we are to some extent the creatures of a capricious fate, let us rather be thankful that such fate has on the whole been on our side, than hypercritical because our ideals seem somehow to have been left behind on the journey. The "embattled farmer "" has evolved into the successful oil or coal magnate where he has not left his farm and gone to work at somewhat precarious and uncertain wages for the evolved magnate, but the result is the same in either case. The farmer turned commercialist outdoes the European in the markets, and when the magnate aforesaid does not require their services, the others, in blue shirts, armed with Krag-Jorgensens make as effective a disposition of the remains of feudalism in the Antilles and Philippines as did their progenitors of the same feudal pretensions in the New England Colonies.

There can be no question that America is the typical nation of to-day. The The nearest approach to her, Great Britain, still carries the weight of royalty, and still labors under restrictions of formal conventionalities which an aristocracy and a recognized code, imposed from above, lay upon her. The freedom from these, to which the American was born, the English progressionist is still desirous of purchasing at the cost of incessant labor.

Why should any of us even pretend to desire those things which college professors continually tell us that we should sigh for? Stung by criticism of our materialism, some of our numbers go to Paris and other European cities, and there by painful degrees learn habits of indolence, but never come to feel really at home. This pretended distaste for the hurry, the bustle, and the constant excitement of our life, and this fancied yearning for a more peaceful and quiet existence, are entirely unnatural, as far as we are concerned. As a matter of fact, we are never so happy as when we are in a hurry, never so rested as when we have unlimited work to do. This love of perpetual movement is an essential quality of our day, a characteristic of an age commercial, and therefore energetic. It carries the stamp, the unmistakable mark of industrial progress. Even the oldest and most sedate of peoples are galvanized into a show of activity by the introduction of the modern system into their midst.

All of which is apropos of a recently published article.

Lady Jeune has been edifying us by a study of the effects of "The American Spirit upon English Society." One is inclined to wonder what connection this spirit has with the more generally known and appreciated spirit of 76. Yet the association of ideas becomes obvious upon a cursory examination.

The American spirit of '76 was the local manifestation of a universal force. The salons of Paris were not altogether free from its influence, and aristocrats who at first flirted with the electric current of the new idea paid the penalty of their daring in too many instances. In clubs and coffee-houses everywhere this spirit manifested itself in eager dispute, the spirit

of revolt, of idealism embodied in strong phrases. When the soldiers of the American Revolution showed that they were able to support within the limits of their own frontiers that which they maintained to be an elementary truth of universal application, their material success still further aided the idea, and Europe, smitten with the contagion, burst into rebellion and reveled in war for a score of years or more. It was an age of ideas; the philosopher ran rampant through the continents. It would perhaps be more correct to say that it was the age of an idea, the idea of "rights." Long years afterwards poor Mazzini endeavored to rally the forces of Europe to similar efforts for another idea, that of "association," and failed ignominiously. So that the idea of rights has up to the present been the prevailing notion. The Declaration of Independence provided a standard to which political action has been continually referred. It placed the United States politically in the lead of the world. Henceforward this republic was to be the exemplar to which the democracy of other countries would endeavor to conform. Unborn democracies still undreamed of were to follow its lead, and the new Canadian and Australian federations were to find in the Constitution of the United States their mentor and preceptor. The Declaration of Independence justified itself as a general formula; the report of the colonial rifles awoke the fighting instinct in the restive European middle class. The mark made by it upon modern history is ineffaceable.

Now, for Lady Jeune: The Declaration of Independence has inseparably connected the American with the independence idea. He or she is regarded everywhere as the independent person par excellence, and the distinguishing feature of the American spirit to which Lady Jeune makes reference is its independence of the restraints of exclusive society as the term was formerly understood. A contrast is drawn between society as it was in the hands of the old aristocratic clique and society as it is today, a conglomerate. This contrast has given rise to much searching of heart, and the very class which profits by it is, of course, the most critical of it. But society is, as it always must be, fairly representa

tive of the dominant classes and the ruling spirit of the time. If to-day it is a heterogeneous collection of aristocrats, financiers, adventurers, and successful people generally, it must be remembered that this same delightful combination is engaged in making the wars and administering the governments of the world. There is no longer the old worn-out question to debate as to whether the rule of the tyrannical noble and ecclesiastic was better than that of the debased noble and the elevated trader. We have long ceased to trouble ourselves with such futile discussions. Each system has been equally inevitable. Each has been merely the creature of the particular period which produced it, each tossed up out of nothing, as it were, to disappear into the void again when the conditions upon which it depends have given place to a new arrangement of circumstances.

To impute the disarrangement of uncomfortable European social conventionalities, as so many people do, to American maliciousness, is to utterly mistake the position of the American abroad. Americans may rebel more early against the survival of traditional social ceremonial than those more accustomed to it. But it is not because they object to the ceremonial. As a matter of fact, they have gone to Europe for no other purpose than to become part and parcel of a show which is not being performed in their own country. The American in Europe is merely the advance guard. He or she takes naturally a position which those of other countries will be driven to adopt by reason of the trend of things, and the barriers created in the days of a provincial feudalism and maintained by dint of limitation and timidity will of necessity disappear.

The

The Declaration of Independence, then, not only marked a new disintegrating political force, but also a new disintegrating social force. The one is a counterpart of the other. "A free career for talent" is equally the motto of the American Revolution with that of France. center of power was shifted by the Revolution. The army of farmers and traders called by it into the field vanquished the chivalry of royal England. The force of the royal idea of aristocratic assumption, of ecclesiastical dignity, of social prestige,

broke finally when the colonists held their own, finally, if not obviously. The very military machine by which the English Government endeavored to achieve its purposes shows the marks of the decline. The democratization of the British army, the most conservative next to the church perhaps of all organizations, gives proof sufficient of the tendencies at work. But this is hardly worth discussing.. If anything is admitted, either with blessing or malediction, it is the fact of the democratic tendencies of the present age. What is the meaning of the term democratic, as so far understood, but the freedom of the individual to make his career, independent of the restrictions, local and class, which were imposed upon him under the feudal regime? Under modern conditions the individual has a practically free and unimpeded course in his career, which in a system essentially commercial, is generally the making of money, or rather the acquiring thereof; and having been successful according to the social requirements of the time, he thus becomes free of the social guild.

The feudal lord, with all that feudal lordship implied, was essential to the old system. The money lord, the coal baron, or the petroleum king is equally essential to the present one. The Declaration of Independence is the one great historic monument set up like a dividing-line between the ancient and the modern empires,-that of the feudal aristocrat, and that of the bourgeois.

But with all its limitations, and in spite of its ineradicable vulgarity, the modern system is the best which has yet been evolved. This does not imply by any means that it is the one which renders sweetness and contentment, of life more possible or more easy of attainment than any other preceding organization of society. Neither do the opportunities held out by it for the personal accumulation of wealth constitute it the best. From the point of view of ideal personal morality it is perhaps more demoralizing than any of the preceding systems; but under it man is at all events comparatively free politically, and herein lies its great superiority. To the free all things are possible; and even liberty, which has produced a carnival of Philistinism, is pref