Circumstances have made the United States to a large extent the representatives of Western civilization as opposed to the States of Asia, and it may be that in time this situation may so develop as to induce a life-anddeath struggle; but it is quite clear now that neither Power desires to hasten that day, and if possible both would no doubt gladly avert it. That is more than might have been hoped for by many even a few months ago, though the Saturday Review has never taken the alarmist view with regard to the immediate aims of Japan. It may, however, be well to remember that in 1904 there was in China a boycott of American goods, quite as determined as the present Turkish boycott of Austrian goods. There was also great soreness against Japan throughout the States on account of her successful competition in Chinese markets, to which the boycott in no small degree contributed. From the summer of 1906 to that of 1907 the immigration question was acutely threatening grave results. So it is satisfactory that the two Powers are now able to sign this The Saturday Review.

agreement, though it contains nothing new. The fact that we can consider it as enunciating mere platitudes is perhaps not the least satisfying part of it.

The really interesting problem which is not settled but rather raised by the agreement is whether we can take it as involving a repudiation by each party of future rivalry or whether it is merely an expedient for smoothing over existing grounds of friction. When Japan has securely fixed her grip on Manchuria and Korea, will she be more ready to contest the claim of the United States to exclude her citizens, and when she is richer will she be more likely to become aggressive? No answer can be found to such questions in this arrangement, which, as we have already pointed out, has no binding force or sanction. But race struggles and international convulsions are never likely to be prevented by treaties, as all experience shows. It is more to the point that the United States will be in a much more advantageous position when the Panama Canal is finished and their fleet stronger than Japan's.

"The attempt to classify one's acquaintance is the common sport of the thinker," we read in an amusing little American book about bores-and people who are not bores, for whom no name exists in the King's English ("Are You a Bromide?" by Gelett Burgess; A. F. Bird; 2s. 6d. net). It seems that in New York it has lately become the fashion to call bores "bromides" and entertaining people "sulphites." The present writer is not chemist enough to be quite certain about the literal meaning of the latter term, but the psychic distinction is clear, and its interest

does not rest upon correctness of analogy.

Every generation has its own bores. They change with the fashion; but there are never any less of them. Το quote our American author again, "the bromidic tendency" is innate. Both it and the "sulphitic" tendency may be traced in almost all children. The question is which in time will prevail. There is no talker in the world so thought-provoking as an intelligent child, and even stupid children ask questions which go to the root of all matters. In a single sentence they

will cleave their way through rubbishheaps of words which have been accumulating for years, and touch one of those quick problems which the philosophers have covered up with reasoning, but have never in reality solved. The multitudes of stories about clever children have a broad foundation in fact. The childish mind will often emit a spark which looks very like genius, though of course in the vast majority of cases it all comes to nothing. On the other hand, all children, even the sharpest, show at times an inane pleasure in reiteration. Some instinct seems to move them to sterilize their minds by repetition. They will tell or will demand the same story, chant the same rhyme, or sing the same tune or bar of a tune, till their elders implore them for mercy, while a given word or cliché will appear in almost every sentence they utter for days on end.

Either they grow out of this tendency as time goes on or they do not. If not, they become bores of different patterns, according to their ability, bent of mind, and education. Suppose,

for instance, that they are naturally very sensitive. The sensitive bore is no sooner grown up than he has a grievance. Some one, he assures the world, has treated him badly, and he cannot bring himself to drop the subject. Or perhaps he is of too generous a disposition to entertain a grudge against any individual. In that case the broad backs of Providence and the public bear the brunt of his perpetual irritation. The rates, the Radicals, the wrongs of the middle and upper classes, or else the wicked selfishness of the rich in withstanding the popular desire for revolution are never out of his mouth, except when he is cursing the climate. Now there is no one in the world with whom it is so difficult to sympathize as the habitual grumbler. The most the kindest person can do is to pretend. The world-even the

small world of the village, class, or circle is seldom very kind, and it never makes any pretence. So the man with a grievance is apt to find himself alone with it. His acquaintance flee from him. "He bores me to death," they say, as they prepare to live without him.

Then there is the bore of a naturally arbitrary disposition. He is always harping upon his conclusions. According as he is pugnacious or the reverse, he takes it for granted that his interlocutor does or does not agree with him. He will make the strongest statements in the most violent terms, apparently buoyed up by the assurance that he is carrying his audience with him. Should he meet with little response, he will make them all over again with more explanation and more adjectives and adverbs, and having reduced his audience to silence, he experiences all the joy of a man who has given grand expression to the common sentiments of the many, and feels a glow of goodwill towards all men. Possibly, however, the same arbitrary disposition may express itself differently. He may throw down a challenge almost always the same challenge in different words-to every one he comes across; and if they do not pick it up, he will do so himself, making lame answer to his own theses, and throw it down again till his adversary consents to fight or shamelessly runs away. Now and then an arbitrary bore will follow a middle course and become instructive. He has a message, and is heroically determined that all men shall listen to it. Sometimes they have heard it before, and sometimes they do not want to hear it at all; but deliver it he will, again and again, and at length.

Perhaps the most subtle of all bores is what we may call the plausible bore, the man whom you do not find out at first to be a bore at all, who, perhaps, you never do find out, but

who succeeds in making you bore yourself.

He has very often something of a mesmeric effect. As a rule his views and sentiments are conventional in the extreme, and he has a strong tendency to moralize; or he may be studiously non-moral and unconventional; but anyway, his power over words is considerable. The tone of his mind is catching, like some tones of voice or peculiarities of accent; and those whom he talks to find themselves talking like him, and are alternately amused and shocked at the insincerity or banality of expression towards which they find themselves tempted in his company. They long for a third person to break the spell, and determine to avoid all further tête-à-tête with the crypto-bore.

Naturally ambitious people, again, should they happen to be bores, are terribly wearing. An inordinate desire to shine in conversation generally ends by making a man a wet-blanket. Should he feel himself to be humorous, and become facetious, he will probably lead every man in his company to rivet his attention upon means of escape. It is a remarkable fact that a facetious woman is a rare-we had almost said an unknown-phenomenon. The present writer never met one, but no one knows what the fates may have in store; and after such a boast of good fortune it might be a desirable precaution to "touch wood." But if there are no women in this subdivision of the bores, they have subdivisions to themselves. There is a manifestation of "the bromidic tendency" in women which is perhaps more mentally suffocating than any which it assumes in the other sex. It is not easy to describe, though it is common enough among a certain section of the cultivated, and perhaps we might call it the angelic pose. They stand perpetually in an attitude of pardon towards the world at large, and in order to maintain this beautiful position they The Spectator.

are forced to bemuse themselves and bore their friends with a constant repetition of certain transcendental formulæ. Good and evil, pain and ecstasy, black and white, are, they assure their bewildered listeners, all the same if only one can soar so high above the actual as not to see the difference between them, and at this height they assert ad nauseam that they themselves have successfully arrived.

One practical question forces itself upon the mind after considering these various types of bores. Can bores improve? Is there any process of psychic chemistry whereby a "bromide" may become a "sulphite?" Perhaps the disease is curable in its earlier stages by the will-power of the patient. But it will be said: "Do bores know that they are bores?" That is a question which every man must ask himself.

Most of

Or

us have put away in a seldom visited corner of our minds a distasteful remembrance of having been on some occasion or occasions a great bore. We insisted on talking about something we were full of, or we persisted in running on about nothing at all. perhaps, if we were too polite to ask for any undue share in the conversational game, we purposely "crabbed" the other players. The odd thing is that we had at the back of our mind all the time a consciousness of what we were doing, but we seemed to ourselves to be possessed. Has it not happened to us since to see another man do the same thing, and to feel a little sorry for him at the bottom of our hearts even while we were wishing him at Jericho? At such a moment of social self-examination we may perhaps have been led to consider the means we took to cure ourselves. Probably, however, our meditations may have been cut short by one of those unconquerable doubts which can only be laid by a change of subject,-Are we cured?

It is the final proof of the civilization of the French that they have learned to understand the cat. In no country, since the dog-loving Greeks overthrew the maturer culture of Egypt, has she been a popular idol, or extorted the reverence of crowds. But in France, at least, there is literary testimony in her favor, and the French intellect has bestowed upon the task of comprehending her a talent and a devotion, which we have squandered on the horse and the dog. Balzac described the passion of one of Napoleon's veterans in Egypt for a leopardess, with a sureness of insight and a depth of feeling that proclaim him a devotee of the cat tribe. Gautier has been eloquent and fantastic about the cat. Loti has been tender and graceful, and his essay on the death of an aged cat has a sincerity and truth which are wanting in his sugared writing about Oriental women. A man must put self aside who loves a cat; there is in all the range of sentiment no emotion so entirely disinterested. We have before us a small volume of minor verse which carries this distinguished tradition yet a little further. It is a eulogy, relieved by humor and marked by what is rarer still, a nice and accurate study of cats. M. Alfred Ruffin not only loves cats; he loves them for the true reasons. He loves them for their grace and their elegance, reverences their self-sufficiency and their sublimity, accepts their egoism, and feels a becoming awe at the concentration of diabolic vigor which can reveal itself, under the stress of passion, in the limbs of a fireside Tom. He sings the mistress whom no praise can corrupt, the friend whose intimacy flatters no human vanity. He paints

"Le Livre des Chats." Par Alfred Ruffin Paris: Alphonse Lemerre.

her amid rare vases and works of art, admiring herself more than any masterpiece. He delights to tell of her ravages among his precious china, and exclaims as he contemplates the sublimity of her indifference, "One might as well accuse the pyramids." He tells of the mingled prudence and courage with which she meets the perils of a street where every journey is an anabasis through barbarian lands. He dwells with a sane and restrained tenderness on the rare moments in her relations with her human servants, when her habitual tolerance warms into an almost maternal affection.

The

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It is doubtless because we are an Imperial people that we have taken as our patron Saint George who was in the flesh a not impeccable army contractor. For the same reason we maintain a patriotic cult of the dog. dog is the tame native among beasts, the national scout in the politics of the animal world. He has been conquered, and he tells us for ever that he is glad to be conquered. He declares with every ripple of his tail that we are the superior race. He wears his collar like a uniform of khaki. He bands himself in traitorous packs to pursue his fellow animals for our service. hunts his brother, the fox, as the "tame" Boers hunted De Wet. He has the air, when he begs on his haunches for a bone, of appealing to us to take up the white man's burden. All his service is a flattery, all his friendship a servility. He graduated for his post in society before ever man had tamed him. He tamed himself in the life of gregarious packs, in which the old bullied the young and the weak fawned on the strong. The cat, on the other hand, has emerged from no shameful gregarious past. He was ever an individual, and even civiliza

bined with that same arching of the back which makes him in combat terrible and great, is really a self-centred expression of satisfaction or pleasurable expectation. For once that he rubs himself upon a human leg at such times, he rubs twice upon a chair or a tree. He is not stroking the leg to flatter it; he is stroking himself by means of the leg. Equally ill-observed is the current notion that his chronic disobedience and his failure to come at call are due to some want of intelligence. It is his profound individualism, his triumphant self-sufficiency, which make him disdain to obey or to learn tricks like a dog.

To respect the cat is the beginning of the æsthetic sense. At a stage of culture when utility governs all its judgments, mankind prefers the dog. Let it advance to a level at which it can admire an object of beauty with a disinterested passion, and it will venerate this egoist among animals, who suffices for himself. Only in the mouth of the egoist is egoism in others a matter of reproach. To the cultivated mind the cat has the charm of completeness, the satisfaction which makes a sonnet more than an epic, a fugue more than a rhapsody. The ancients figured eternity as a snake biting its own tail. There will yet arise a philosopher who will conceive the Absolute as a gigantic and self-satisfied cat, purring as it clasps in a com

fortable round its own perfections, and uttering as it purrs that line of Edmund Spenser's about the Cosmos"It loved itself, because itself was fair."

There is, however, a deeper reason why the cat is, in the domestic hierarchy, a relatively unpopular animal. It is not content to stand aloof from all human activities; it views them with a disquieting disdain. It is the anchorite who makes our luxuries foolish, the anarchist who rebukes our organizations and our politics. The dog, within the limits of his understanding, must share in all we do, scratch when we dig and retrieve when we hunt. When his understanding fails him, he looks at us with a mute appeal for enlightenment, like some Galatea waiting for the breath of life. The cat in the same circumstances stares severely. winks one eye, and goes to sleep. More than the lilies of the field she rebukes us for our care for the morrow. The student Faust in the old engravings had always a human skull among the vain instruments and the barren alembics in his study. A cat blinking at midnight among your papers and your books declares with more eloquence than any skull the vanity of knowledge and uselessness of striving. Mahomet, nursing a cat one day, was minded to rise upon some great errand of revelation or conquest. But, man of action though he was, he was Oriental enough to value her passivity. He cut off the sleeve of his robe, and left her seated on it. There comes to those who love a cat a further questioning, which is the paralysis of all morality. Why, after all, should one rise at all, and what is worth the sacrifice of a sleeve? The cat enjoys the march of seasons, spins through space with the stars, and shares in her quietism the inevitable life of the universe. In all our hurrying, can we do more? She sits among creative work, the in