Among the latest "problem" books to appear is "A Nation's Crime," by Mrs. I. Lowenberg, author of "The Irresistible Current." The book deals with that much-vexed question of marriage and divorce, and while one might easily think that the subject had been dealt with from every possible viewpoint by modern writ ers, there is much in Mrs. Lowenberg's work that will command interest, and, we think, approval.

Divorce laws presuppose marriage laws, and all laws are coercion. It may be that laws in many, or in most cases, are benign and far-seeing, but they fix limits they bind and fetter-and the human heart, at its noblest, craves freedom. It is all very well to legislate about matters of trade or commerce, but it is entirely a different matter when it comes to the framing of laws for the coercion of the holiest of human feelings. The primary social institution is marriage, the negation of that is divorce. To-day, Mrs. Lowenberg says in her story, the negation threatens to destroy the institution itself.

The tale is that of a young American girl, Anne Lane, who is of English parentage. Her father, whom she loves dearly, desires her to marry a man for whom she cares not at all, and she acquiesces. In a few years the union becomes intolerable, and she goes to Reno, where she secures a divorce. Immediately afterward she marries Roy Allerson, the sweetheart of her girlhood days. Two children are born them, Victoria and Stephen.

Years go by, and Victoria becomes a beautiful girl. She is engaged to a French nobleman, but on the very eve of her marriage, the marriage of her father and mother is declared illegal, and the girl herself is thus illegitimate. The Supreme Court upholds the decision.

The marriage with the French nobleman cannot take place for family objections, and in the trail of these events comes the death of one of the young lovers.

The young lives wrecked by the undeserved stigma, the broken hopes and the suffering encompassed, in the name of "Justice," all might have been prevented by the existence of sane legal enactments on a matter than which there is none more close to the home life, the inner life, of the whole people to-day.

But the story is a hopeful one despite the tragedy and the heart-ache which it contains, and readers of "A Nation's Crime" will find the interest in the story itself sustained throughout, apart altogether from the motive which inspires the production of the tale.

"A Nation's Crime," by Mrs. I. Lowenberg. 12mo., published by the Neale Publishing Company, New York and Washington. $1.50 postpaid.

I

T IS A STRANGE anomaly that the Marquesan, by long odds the fastestdisappearing of the Polynesian races, is made up of individuals of incomparably finer physique than those of any other of the islands of the South Pacific. Of a dozen natives picked at random from the beach of Taio-hae, there are probably not over three or four that will not show more or less of dark head above the end of a six-foot tape, and the breadth and muscling of each will be in proportion to his height. The women are likewise of good size and figure, and, when undisfigured with tatooing, of considerable beauty as well. Both sexes accomplish prodigious feats of walking, swimming and rowing, and both invariably bear up remarkably under hardship and privation such as that incident to being driven to sea for weeks in an open boat. As a matter of fact, the startling decrease in the population of the group, except for occasional epidemics, is due to scarcity of births and a lack of vitality in the children rather than to an abnormal number of deaths among the adults. This condition is largely traceable to the existence of more or less active forms of various blood diseases introduced by whites of the Pacific whaling fleet of half a century ago, and to certain vicious practices in connection with the prevention of child-bearing prevalent in the over-populous days of the group. Cannibalism and intertribal wars have frequently been assigned as potent factors in the decimation, but it is notable that neither has

had such effect in the Solomons or New Hebrides, where both are prevalent to-day.

The early explorers estimated the population of the island of Nukahiva at from 30,000 to 40,000. In 1804 there was believed to be not over 18,000 on the island, and in 1836 but 8,000. A French census in 1856 enumerated but 2960, which number had fallen to 800 by 1880. In 1889 Stevenson found Taio-hae a lively village with a club, barracks, hotels, numerous stores and a considerable colony of French officials; Hatiheu and Anaho were villages of upwards of a hundred natives each. At the time of my visit-three years ago— there remained in Taio-hae but three French officials and a single German trader, while the native population was just short of ninety. Hatiheu and Anaho had but a few over a hundred inhabitants between them.

In the veins of the Nukahivan of to-day course two strains of foreign blood of widely diverse origin. During the latter part of the 16th and for most of the 17th century, the island was a rendezvous for a large colony of buccaneers who had chosen that location for the advantages it gave them in preying upon the Spanish galleon plying between. Peru and Panama, as well as in raiding settlements on the intervening coast of South America. These pirates, after some years of fighting, brought the natives of the Taio-hae and Hatiheu districts into a state of complete subjection, while their relations with the tribes of the interior appears to have been

in the nature of an armed neutrality. The subject natives were employed at sea as sailors and boatmen, and on land as gardeners and herdsmen. The cattle, pigs and goats brought to the island by the freebooters must have been the progenitors of the wild animals of these species which abound there to-day. With the natives of the interior, some trading for food was carried on at times when drought on the coast made short crops of cocoanuts, breadfruit and bananas.

When gold gave out in Peru and buccaneering became unprofitable, the Nukahiva pirate colonies gradually changed back to native villages. After the last of the strangers had died, their descendants, through intermarriage with pure blooded natives, reverted little by little to the predominating type until the evidences of the blood of white men survived only in straighter hair and features and harder eyes, a sharper and more uncertain temper and an increase of dignity.

For some decades in the middle of the last century, Nukahiva was the base of a large portion of the Pacific whaling fleet.

Ships spent months at a time in Taio-hae, refitting and reprovisioning, and the island gained many new and undesirable inhabitants through desertions from their crews. The worst epidemic of smallpox ever recorded in the South Pacific was started in Nukahiva by a maroon from a whaler, and the present day prevalence of blood and skin disease is directly traceable to a similar source.

The moral laxity of the Marquesan of to-day is undoubtedly a legacy of these two occupations by the lowest of the sea's riffraff, pirates and whalers. In Nukahiva chastity is quite unknown in any class, and a century of work on the part of some missionaries has left scarcely a mark upon the morals of the people. They are prone to throw themselves at every opportunity into the most unlicensed debauchery, and they know no law save that of appetites. The feasts of the present generation of Nukahivans aside from cannibalism, which is still practiced whenever the chances for escaping detection are favorable are howling orgies of two and three days' duration, their riotous excesses un