ing six months in the Orient. The great question there, so newspaper interviews report him as saying, is that of China:

Both Englishmen and Japanese see the necessity of maintaining China intact, but it is feared, now that Russia has taken Manchuria, that it will try to encroach gradually on some of the other eighteen provinces of China, and when it gets them it will do as that country has done hitherto-put a duty on all foreign goods. Englishmen and Japanese feel that America should stand with them in preventing

the dismemberment of China. China should maintain its independent position, but its doors should be kept open. It means much to England and Japan and not less to America. There is a hope in the Orient among reading men that China itself may become aroused so that it may itself hold its domain intact. But it is not yet sufficiently awakened. That is the sad phase of it. The Chinese are a patient, industrious people. They can live in any climate, away in the arctic or far south in the tropics. They can make money anywhere. Such a race, it is felt, ought to arouse itself in this dilemma.

We

The policy of preserving China intact seems now a belated one, in view of the fact that Russia is absorbing the northern provinces, Germany an eastern province, France the extreme south, and even the British Government's representative in the House of Commons is silent on the "independence of the Government at Peking." These facts, however, only demand closer attention to our commercial outlook. believe, in the words of the writer of an article in the August "Atlantic Monthly," that, secure in a splendid isolation, and confident in the permanent sufficiency of our domestic market, we have too often regarded the Oriental problem as academic, and its solution as immaterial to our welfare. Admiral Dewey's guns, however, stirred us to a keen sense both of our needs and of our responsibilities. advent to "a seat in the court martial of Powers which is trying the case of China" may or may not change the verdict of the majority in favor of summary decapitation and dissection. At all events, that advent means a protest against spheres of influence which endanger our treaty rights it has had success already in inducing the tardy opening to foreign trade of Kiaochau by Germany, and of Talienwan by Russia; but it must not lead us into further complications than those which may attend that insistence.

Our

Another result is one which may and should affect us nearer home-the reali

zation of the fact that we are demanding ultra protection here, but free trade abroad.

Metaphysical Healing

A correspondent in another column makes as strong a case as, in our judgment, can be made for the doctrine that Christian Scientists should be allowed by the State to practice their healing art on the hypothesis that disease is only a mortal thought and can be cured by thinking. The question thus raised is a large one, and involves the whole problem of the relation of law to liberty.

In most modern communities the principle is recognized that the State has a right to regulate all employments which, for any reason, involve a hazard to the community. On this principle the State, at least in many cases, regulates the sale of dynamite, gunpowder, poisons, and alcoholic liquors; on this principle it forbids men to practice law or medicine, to put up drugs for the sick, or to act as pilots or engineers, without previous special education and training, attested by an official examination. In our judgment, these prohibiting provisions might well be extended to plumbers and motormen, perhaps to other employments. We see no reason why Christian Scientists should claim exemption from this general principle of law.

In New York State, to practice the healing art a coarse of special instruction is required by law, which necessitates. ordinarily three years at the least. The curriculum in the Christian Science College, when there was one, lasted three weeks, and involved twelve lessons of one half-day each. Mrs. Eddy informed the public that "persons contemplating a course at the Massachusetts Metaphysi cal College can prepare for it through 1.0 books except the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.'' Ought the State to allow any one to set up as a healer on the basis of twelve lessons, occupying three months, and embracing only two books? We reply unhesitatingly in the negative.

Suppose a Mormon were to set up as a pilot, claim divine guidance, and insist on his right to take steamships in and out of New York Harbor on the strength of

Nor does this position deny the right of a Christian Scientist to go without a doctor, or even to avail himself of a mental healer. It denies the right of the mental healer to practice his mental healing as a profession, for pay. And it is idle to assume, as is sometimes done, that the mental healers do not practice mental healing for pay. Mrs. Eddy tells us that pay is itself a help in the healing. "Christian Science," she says, "demonstrates that the patient who pays whatever he is able to pay for being healed is more apt to recover than he who withholds a slight equivalent for health." The healer prescribes no drug for the patient, but he prescribes a fee for himself.

Nor does the fact that the mental healer prescribes no drug take him out of the category of professional physicians. The practice of medicine does not consist in the prescription of drugs. In many cases no drugs are prescribed. The practice of medicine consists in a knowledge of the body and the laws which regulate the functions, and of such counsel to the patient based on that knowledge as will enable him to comply with those laws. Sometimes it involves prescription of medicine to aid; sometimes it consists wholly of advice what food to eat and what bodily habits to maintain. Any one who undertakes for pay to heal disease is a medical practitioner, whether he administers drugs or not, whether he calls himself allopath, homeopath, eclectic, or mental healer, whether he calls the trouble which he is called in to remedy a disease or a mortal thought.

We hold, then, that the State has a right and a duty to determine, by such tests as it chooses to prescribe, who is competent to practice the healing art, and that men

Valets and Heroes

Goethe's famous interpretation of that cheap proverb, "No man is a hero to his valet," is so familiar that it is almost safe to take it for granted that every one knows it; but the truth in that interpretation is so profound that, like all other great commonplaces, it ought to have endless repetition. No man is a hero to his valet, said Goethe, because it takes a hero to recognize a hero. In other words, the man with the spirit of a valet finds the valet in all his associates; the man with the spirit of a hero finds a touch of heroism in his fellows. Most of the judgments of men and women which are uttered in conversation are worthless as estimates of character; their only value lies in the light which they throw upon the temper and point of view of the would-be judges. The wise man never accepts the judgment of other people about his fellows, except in those very rare cases in which he finds a man or woman of distinctly judicial temper directed by large intelligence. The wrongs inflicted by inadequate and misleading judgments are frightful when one stops to think of them. In every community there are men and women who are totally misunderstood by their neighbors because some energetic and voluble person has formed and conveyed to the community a misleading impression in regard to them. When one remembers how the estimate of a character affixes itself to that character and becomes accepted as a standard judgment, it is amazing with what carelessness such opinions are expressed. The lack of care on the part of some people in passing judgment upon their fellows is so great that it amounts practically to unscrupulousness.

No one should ever express an opinion about another unless he is willing to put

about it. The news has a different flavor, anyway, when one is away from home; somehow the crimes seem horrible and not fascinating when one sees them presented in unfamiliar headlines and against a background of green trees; and the great events which would arouse one's eager curiosity when at home are seen indifferently and as through a glass, darkly, when he is at the seashore and wearing his smoked spectacles to save his eyes from the glare. The Spectator has been perfectly delighted to see how readily he could turn from printed pages to men and women and sky and shore and wayside flowers, and forget to think, and just be happy in living.

But though he took no notes and registered no "impressions," the writing habit is strong in the Spectator, and now that he is in the harness again he is tempted to condense some of his nebulous memories into a drop of printer's ink-if printer's ink comes in drops-the Spectator isn't quite sure. One thought that came naturally to the Spectator during one of his excursions was of the delightfully interesting way in which history's panorama unfolds itself to those who wait till the panorama is painted and then look back. Life is so much more entertaining because we haven't all of us the gift of prophecy, and cannot see ahead! If we could, there would be no pleasant surprises. And then we wouldn't believe our second-sight if we had it. It would seem too incredible. The Iroquois Indians who a few hundred years ago had undisputed possession of the beautiful valley which afterward became the scene of the Battle of Saratoga could not have believed, the Spectator thought as he drove over the battlefield, that their hunting-grounds would in a few years utterly pass away from them, and become the scene of a great contest that was to decide "American" destiny-a destiny in which they, the original Americans, were to have almost no part; and the few thousand heroic patriots who there paved the way for a free continent could as little have credited the wondrous changes of our century, or realized that a great gay summer city would spring up near to their battlefield, from which pilgrimages would be made to their monument with its for

ever-to-be-unfilled niche for one of the bravest of their leaders, who was yet to be known as the basest of Americans. And if our eyes were opened to another century, would they not see just as strange and unrealizable transformations? How interesting it all is, and will be!

The Spectator passed a few days in another place where the lesson that the old order changes was also most impressive. Ichabod the glory has departed— would perhaps be the name with which the survivors of the ancien régime of Nantucket would like to rechristen the island. They love to tell of the brave days of old, when Nantucket's ships were on every sea, when the flourishing port had more inhabitants than the city of Brooklyn of that time, when the old houses were full of treasures brought from every land, the spoil of her roving captains, and when the great intellectual lights of the Nation were proud to be called upon to address a Nantucket audience. And now, they say, the great fleet of ships has passed away, the commerce is extinct, the old houses have been burned down or broken up, the treasures have passed into alien hands, and the island has become the haunt of the summer boarder! A dismal fate indeed-for all but the boarder! And yet the Spectator found that some things remain. There are a few of the old houses left with the "walk" on the roof, from which the skipper's wife could look far out to sea to learn whether her Jack was to be home again. There is the town crier, with his quaint cry, as the Spectator happened to hear it one evening, of "Roll of bills-forty dollars-lost this afternoon. Finder will be rewarded. Apply to Cliff House." There is the two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old house, the oldest on the island, with its familiar legend of the drunken Indian falling through the closet where he was hiding with murderous intent, and its pathetic bric-à-brac of figureheads and nameboards of vessels wrecked on the island. There is 'Sconset, with its queer little boxes of houses, its Town Pump, and its antediluvian railway running to Nantucket town. There is the Historical Room in the abandoned Quaker meeting-house, with its curios from all over the world, and especially its century-old log books