agitators and demagogues who howl about classes and masses being pitted against each other. These men endured the same hardships, ate, slept, and died togetherall good American citizens, fighting for liberty against oppression. That one battle consumed all the ammunition of a thousand blatherskites, who have tried to destroy American principles and American comradeship and American patriotism by claiming that the Government was run in the interest of the few to the detriment of the many.

El Caney and The two serious battles San Juan were at El Caney and San Juan, both places stormed on the same day, and both dearly-bought victories. The reports of the officers are not yet public, but the list of casualties alone tells the tale. In this battle, in addition to the other volunteers, the Seventyfirst N. Y. bore a conspicuous part as its losses prove. These losses were partly because they used the old Springfield rifles, with the old-fashioned powder. Whenever they shot their smoke made a target for the Spaniards. The two positions were eminences well defended by stone forts, and the approaches were rendered difficult by barriers of barbed wire, which were overcome with the greatest difficulty. The battle in some respects resembled that of Franklin in the Civil War, but then men of the same blood met each other and those outside the wall could not get over. In the present case the men fought with desperation, and it should be said that the colored regiments of regulars particularly distinguished themselves. The volunteers were as steady as the regulars and won golden opinions not only from our generals but from the foreign officers who accompanied our army and made observations on all that passed. In both battles there were rushes at the enemy against orders.

One gen

eral was directed to call his men back, but he could not and would not. One regiment was implored by a British officer not to go forward as it was certain destruction. When they rushed on the onlooker broke into tears, for he knew it would be a useless massacre. He, however, did not know what our men were made of. The positions were both taken, after hard hand-to-hand fighting, but it is safe to say that had our men been behind the works that were deemed impreg

nable they could not have been driven out. All of the foreign officers who were present unite in saying that the fighting on this occasion was the most determined in modern history. It made a deep impression on them, especially the fact that the volunteers fought as well as the regulars, and when their reports to their Governments are published they will make interesting reading.

This practically ended the fighting around Santiago, and, as peace-rumors have assumed a definite shape, by the time this is read the war may happily be over.

The Moral of It All

We come now to the moral of this history. Americans make good soldiers, because they have intelligence, and fight with an object in view. They use their own judgment when it is possible to do so, and they shoot to kill and not merely to burn powder. They learn tactics easily and seldom lose their nerve, unless led away by their officers. The expert knowledge of tactics and evolutions acquired by long training in continental armies they do not aspire to, nor is it necessary, as experience has shown. It is no rash statement to say that there are now 250,000 men soldiers in this country, most of whom have had but a few weeks' training, who could hold their own with any similar sized army in the world on any battlefield, except that requiring great and complicated manoeuvres. The use of long range rifles make these latter a matter of less consideration than was the case when a musket would kill only at a few hundred yards.

So remarkable were the results of the Santiago campaign, that the nations of Europe are beginning to wonder whether, after all, they have not made a mistake in their military system of compulsory service. They argue that if we can make such an army in three months, there is no need for them to make every man spend three years in training. It is to be feared that the argument is not entirely conclusive, as we believe that the spirit of our institutions makes better soldiers of our people, just as it makes better citizens, than those of the continental nations.

No Great Stand- But there is a moral for ing Army our own use. We have demonstrated that we do not need a large standing army, for we can raise one at any time that is good

enough for any purpose. We do need, however, a well-organized State militia, which will give men enough training so that when war comes we shall not be totally unprepared. We need a larger and better National Guard, which can be cheaply kept up, but which will be a sufficient army for defence or for aggressive purposes, if needed. The American volunteer is, first of all, a good citizen. When war is over he wants to go back to civil life, and he is a better citizen obviously than the man who is for peace at any price. If this war shall result in extending our boundaries, we shall not need a large standing army. We shall want a larger navy, but we need have no fear that the nation will slip into militarism. War is an evil always, but it is often a mixed evil. I do not believe that the result of this war will be to make the American nation unduly aggressive or incite us to long for military conquest. But it will give us a more just apprecia

Τ'

tion of ourselves, and that is just as important for a nation as for a man. Pride is good for men and nations, but vanity is the ruin of both. When the boys come marching home again, they will become good citizens, and soon the country will Most go on its way as calmly as before. of those who have been under fire will have had all the fighting they want, and they will not be anxious to pick a quarrel for the sake of another war, while the country will know what to depend on in any time of national trial.

There are some, alas! who will never come back. They have given their lives for their country, and comparatively few as they are, the sacrifice has been great and in the shadow of their deaths we may well restrain any undue boasting of our military glory. Let us hope that at least another generation will pass before our boys are called to the front once more, but when the call comes we know that there will be millions to respond.

JOSEPH M. ROGERS.

Not

HE war, in the past three or four months of its course, has diverted public attention almost entirely from the Klondike, once in nearly everyone's mouth. The region has, however, not lost its attractions or failed to yield handsomely of its golden treasure. all, of course, who have gone thither have been fortunate; many, indeed, have been "stranded," and await philanthrophic effort to seek them out and return them, wiser men, to their homes. But the steamship arrivals at Seattle bring back not a few who, despite the rigors of the region, have found inordinate wealth, which will, doubtless, make some people happy, and, perhaps, with its owners, many wretched, by the use to which the newlyacquired riches is put. The total anticipated yield, for the present year, of the Klondike mines is estimated at ten million dollars, one-third of which, it is said, has already arrived at the Puget Sound ports. As was natural, the heaviest disappointments were sustained by those least fitted for the hard work entailed, and who knew nothing of mining ores or of the art of extracting them, and who, moreover, were inadequately equipped,

in coming to the region, with even the necessaries of life. Their misfortunes, in a sense, would not be so calamitous if their fate deterred others, with like slender outfit and equally unable to rough it, from rushing into the territory and courting similar disaster. For the strong and experienced miner the condition of things at the Klondike is less appalling. The gold is undoubtedly there, and the streams. are of almost incredible richness. Το those accustomed to mining and inured to the life, the rewards are tolerably certain, with the chances in favor of an occasional great haul. But the privations are many, and the necessary labor and toil herculean.

Interest in these gold-fields has recently been much quickened by the appearance of a carefully prepared and most useful volume from the pens of mining experts, and those familiar with the Yukon mining country. It is issued, with an abundance of maps and artistic illustrations, by the enterprising publishers of the "Chicago Record," one of the few journals of the country which has long maintained a correspondent at the mines, and is necessarily familiar with the means of

getting there, and with the mode of work and life among the gold-hunters. The attractive volume is entitled "Klondike : The Chicago Record's Book for GoldSeekers." The work has merit far beyond the ephemeral "catch-penny " issues of the press, hastily thrown together to lure the "tenderfoot" to whose cupidity the Alaskan gold-fields have appealed. There are abysses of instructive information in the book, to meet intelligent wants, such as we have rarely met with outside

winters are long and cold. The summer lasts from the middle of May to September 1. After this, there is tolerably fine weather up to November 1, when the winter sets in and the Yukon freezes to a depth of five and a half feet. In the Klondike region in midwinter the sun rises about 10 o'clock A. M. and sets from 2 to 3 P. M., the total length of daylight being about four hours. As the sun, at this Arctic latitude, rises but a few degrees above the horizon, and on many

government blue books or official and expert reports. This information is embraced in twenty-five chapters, brimful of valuable facts concerning the country, the area and character of the gold-fields, the means of getting there and how to acquire mining rights, with other essential information in regard to the climate, necessary outfit, and the expense of living. The work, as we have said, is also usefully illustrated, with maps and photographs. A realistic example of one of the latter embellishes the present page.

Perhaps the most interesting gleanings we can make, in brief space, from the book will be those touching the climate. The chief thing to be said on this topic is that the summers are short and the

days is wholly obscured, the dreariness of the winter months may be imagined. The mercury frequently falls to 60 degrees below zero. In summer there is about twenty hours of daylight; the temperature then varies from 60° to 100° in the shade. Mining under these extreme conditions is, therefore, environed with difficulties. The rainfall in Alaska is excessive on the coast; cloud and fog naturally abound, there being on an average but sixty-six clear days in the year. Inland, the climate is drier and less dis agreeable. From want of vegetables at the Klondike, scurvy is prevalent in winter, and many enervating ailments come in its train.

G. M. A.

W"

'HEN, in the year 1822, Champollion published his "Lettre à Monsieur Dacier," the ideas of the educated classes in Europe concerning the Nile Valley and its peoples were not essentially different from the notions held by the Greeks throughout the classic period and later. From the seventh century B. C., the Hellenes began to come into close contact with the Nile peoples; and probably for a thousand years before that time, a commerce between the Greek islands and the Nile Delta had been maintained. But with the accession of a new philo-Hellenic dynasty, in the middle of the seventh century, the Greeks began to settle in large numbers in Egypt, especially in the cities of the Delta, even founding new cities of their own, of which the flourishing Naukratis was the most successful and famous, and only gave way to the later but greater Alexandria. Egypt was a land especially adapted to produce impressions of the weird and the mysterious. The mind of the Greek, on the other hand, was peculiarly constituted to receive just such impressions. So rational-minded an annalist as Herodotus, who visited Egypt in the middle of the fifth century B. C., was completely deceived by the quiet but assured demeanor of the Egyptian, who found for all he did a tradition which his fathers had respected for untold centuries. There were no problems; there was a traditional usage for every exigency; the wisdom of all the ages was codified in their rolls, until Herodotus believed that he had here found the beginning of all wisdom, the solution of all mystery, and, above all, what pleased him most, the origin of the Greek mythology. This impression was heightened by the vast monuments and buildings, the construction of which was a mystery, by the mystic writings which covered their walls from cornice to base, by the strange river, whose like he had not met in all his travels, and, especially the mysterious religion, behind whose remarkable ritual he could and did imagine the deepest arcana of the gods.

However, this impression of the historian was reasonable when compared with the stories which his credulous countrymen took home with them, until we find, as the popular impression through

out the Græco-Roman world, the belief that in Egypt was to be sought the home of all hidden wisdom and the source of all knowledge. With the influx of the Moslems, in the seventh century A. D., the ancient tongue of the Pharaohs was gradually displaced by the language of Mohammed, the tongue which still reigns upon the shores of the Nile. Hence it is, that we are able to make the above remark, that the ideas of the educated classes in Europe concerning the Nile Valley were not essentially different, at the beginning of this century, from those held by the Greeks, from whom, indeed, like the wisdom of Aristotle, these ideas had come down as an inheritance.

With the decipherment of Champollion, all was different. A study of the life and culture which we find embodied in hieroglyphic literature has revealed to us the Egyptian as a man like ourselves, master of no hidden mysteries, wielding no occult forces; a man whose achievements in engineering and the arts, astonishing as they still are, were but the results of ideas and of processes as intelligible as our own. Therefore, if the Nile Valley has no such irrational wonders to reveal to us, as many once imagined, it has, nevertheless, become a great repository where the life of an ancient people has been better and more fully preserved to us than anywhere else. In other climates, under less favorable skies, where rains and winds will ultimately bring down any salient superstructure, everything which embodied in material form the culture of early ages has either utterly vanished or suffered irreparable damage. Even in the friendly climate of Italy, it was necessary to overwhelm a city with the débris of volcanic explosion in order to preserve it in any measure unaltered to our own day. And even where climate has not succeeded in accomplishing its work of destruction, the forces of man, either wilfully, as in war, or unconsciously in the course of the changes which time unavoidably brings, have destroyed or mutilated beyond usefulness the best material works of the early past. But in Egypt, no such natural catastrophe as we have described was necessary. There no rain falls. Any article, however frail, if covered with the friendly sand on the

borders of the Libyan Desert and left undisturbed, will survive with very little change for thousands of years. Even of such frail fabrics as papyrus or linen this is equally true. In Haskell Oriental Museum of the University of Chicago, there is pure white linen cloth, the bandages of a mummy which was laid in those Libyan sands five thousand years ago, and it is now as soft and white as on the day when it was woven by fingers which were dust a thousand years before Abraham lived.

It is for this reason rather than that the

Egyptians are older than any other people, that we are able to study the original work of their hands, their life, and thought more fully than among any other people. And when we remember that the Nile Valley has been dominated by many different peoples through successive centuries, we shall see that they, too, have left remains of their successive civilizations equally well preserved, which we may now study. Although the Mycenean rulers never controlled the Nile Valley, they traded there, and the products of their culture, beautifully painted pottery and the like, have been found lying side by side with the work of Egyptian craftsmen two thousand years B. C. The great collection of ancient weights in Haskell Oriental Museum, some two thousand specimens, very well illustrates further how later civilizations are to be found, as it were, imbedded and preserved with the culture which was native to the Nile Valley. As you walk down the line of cases, in which these collections are installed, you pass by, successively, ancient Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Phoenician, Hebrew, Persian, Greek, Roman, and Saracen weights, chiefly of stone, some of metal. All these were found within a comparatively small area, and especially at Naukratis, in the Nile Delta, where in the centuries immediately before Christ, all the world was trading. Where else under the sun could one find so many super-imposed strata represent

Knowing, as we do, that the people of Israel once sojourned in the Nile Valley, we shall see, in view of the above facts, that the desire to find some surviving evidence of their presence there was a natural one. Many have studied the monuments of the Nile with only this end in view; and a great many interesting illustrations of the life of Israel, pictured to us in the earlier books of the Old Testament, have been found. At Beni-hasan, for example, in the tomb of a Twelfth Dynasty noble, we find a wall-painting which is so well known that it has found its way into many teachers' Bibles. It represents the entrance of a Semitic family into Egypt, bringing a gift of eyecosmetic to the nobleman. The frequent scenes in which we see a favorite functionary rewarded with a collar of gold in the presence of the Pharaoh recall, of course, the similar distinction shown to Joseph by his king. Again, the representation of foreign slaves employed in the mixing and moulding of clay into bricks in the Theban tomb of Rekhmere naturally suggested the similar employment of the Israelites at the very same period; especially in view of the accompanying inscription:

"The captivity which his Majesty brought in order to build for himself a temple."

Much of this and similar illustrative material bearing on the story of Israel has