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 is a well-founded Czechoslovak claim against the Magyars for restitution. When Karolyi had to evacuate Slovakia last winter, he swept it bare of machinery, cattle and above all of railway rolling stock; and in May Bela Kuhn in his invasion of southern half of Slovakia repeated the operation. Now the Roumanians took from the Magyars not only what was really Magyar property, but also what had been stolen from the Slovaks. The Czechoslovak government had relied on the peace conference to settle its clams against the Magyar Republic; the Roumanians spurned the peace conference and helped themselves. It must be confessed that the authority of the statesmen gathered in Paris has sustained a great diminution as a result of the Roumanian adventure.

This will have an effect on the solution of the Teschen dispute between the Czechs and the Poles. Conferences were held in Cracow early in August between commissions of the two nations, but they led to no result. The Poles insisted on plebiscite; the Czechs opposed it. They took their stand on historical grounds; Teschen has been connected with Bohemia for the last six hundred years. Poles claim eastern Galicia on historical grounds, although the majority of the population there is overwhelmingly Ruthenian, but in case of Teschen they ignore Bohemian historical rights and appeal to right of self-determination. The Czechs felt compelled to oppose popular voting in Teschen for this reason also, that the Poles are in wrongful occupation of the majority of the district and have been intimidating the population to make them vote in favor of Polish rule. Since the Czech-Polish conference could not reach an agreement, it is now up to the peace conference to decide the dispute. A few months ago a decision of the Allies, even if unfavorable, would have been accepted as final; now the prestige of the peace conference has suffered a serious blow.

In internal politics the new coalition government of the socialist block and the farmers’ party seems firmly in the saddle. The democrats and the people’s party are in opposition and their criticism is sometimes very inconvenient to the ministry which cannot perform miracles and cure the country of its pains. But the coalition holds and will probably continue in power, until the new elections. It is planned to hold the elections in December on the basis of a new electoral law which is described elsewhere. But the program of the government calls for the adoption of the constitution by the present National Assembly, mainly for the reason that Germans and Magyars who will be represented in the first popularly elected legislature are not trusted to cooperate in the enactment of the fundamental laws of the Republic. There is no intention of oppressing these racial minorities, and the electoral law is framed so as to give them the full representation to which they are entitled. But the constitution will provide for a unitary state with wide local self-government, and not a sort of a dual monarchy, as the Germans would want—a separate German state alongside of the Czechoslovak state in one republic. The Czechoslovaks are willing to concede to the Germans—and to Magyar minorities as well—all rights of citizens, rights to schools, to their own cultural life; but the character of the republic, and especially in its external relations, will be neither German nor neutral. It will be distinctly Czechoslovak.

The National Assembly, after it had turned over to the committee the governmental franchise bill, adjourned for a vacation on July 24. It will meet again early in September. Before adjournment it granted the government authority to borrow 60 million lire in Italy to defray cost of transportation of American food and to buy cotton yarn from Italian mills. Economic questions are still very difficult to solve. The country needs credit to buy raw materials for its factories; without credit foreign commerce is seriously hampered. There is an official foreign exchange bureau in Prague to whom every one is obliged to turn over credits in foreign currencies; this bureau in turn assigns foreign currency to such importers, as can satisfy the ministry of commerce of the necessity of their proposed importation for domestic industry. But there is not enough foreign currency available to provide for the great needs of the country, and French and British and American exporters will not accept payment in Czechoslovak crowns. Some business has been done with Swiss merchants who accepted crowns in pay ment and sold them in America below cost,


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 The orderly seeking information as to horse-ailments, Tietjens said:

"The school of horse-copers, to which Lord Beichan belongs, believes in the hardening of all horse-flesh other than racing cattle." They bred racing-cattle. Under six blankets apiece! Personally Tietjens did not believe in the hardening process and would not permit any animal over which he had control to be submitted to it It had been observed that if any animal was kept at a lower temperature than that of its normal climatic condition it would contract diseases to which ordinarily it was not susceptible If you keep a chicken for two days in a pail of water it will contract human scarlet-fever or mumps if injected with either bacillus. If you remove the chicken from the water, dry it, and restore it to its normal conditions, the scarlet-fever or the mumps will die out of the animal He said to the orderly: "You are an intelligent man. What deduction do you draw?"

The orderly looked away over the valley of the Seine.

"I suppose, sir," he said, "that our 'osses, being kept alwise cold in their standings, 'as hillnesses they wouldn't otherwise 'ave."

"Well then," Tietjens said, "keep the poor animals. warm."

He considered that here was the makings of a very nasty row for himself if, by any means, his sayings came round to the ears of Lord Beichan. But that he had to chance. He could not let a horse for which he was responsible be martyred There was too much to think about so that nothing at all stood out to be thought of. The sun was glowing. The valley of the Seine was blue-grey, like a Gobelin tapes-

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 try. Over it all hung the shadow of a deceased Welsh soldier. An odd skylark was declaiming over an empty field behind the incinerators' headquarters An odd lark. For as a rule larks do not sing in December. Larks sing only when courting, or over the nest The bird must be oversexed. O Nine Morgan was the other thing, that accounting for the prize-fighter!

They dropped down a mud lane between brick walls into the town


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 thus depressing the value of the Czechoslovak crown from a ratio of 15 to the ratio of 22 to the dollar.

The country needs a foreign loan to buy cotton, copper, rubber, oils, steel alloys etc. So far only those industries depending for their material upon agriculture are producing and exporting. The present high price of sugar will help to balance Czechoslovak exports and imports; it is estimated that the Republic will sell one billion crowns worth of refined sugar from its 1919 crop. Give the Czechoslovak Republic the necessary credit, and it will soon be on a sound economic basis, creating new values by the skill and industry of its people.

It was a pleasant surprise to tens of thousands of people who know Professor Bohumil Šimek personally, when they read the announcement last month that the ancient University of Prague conferred upon Professor Šimek the honorary degree of doctor of philosophy. For Šimek is not only a scholar whose scientific achievements entitle him to honors from institutions of learning, but he is also a man of public spirit, a popular speaker and a leader of his people.

He was born on a small farm near Shueyville, Iowa, on June 25, 1861. His father was one of those patriots who in 1848 took an active part in the revolutionary movement in Bohemia, and when the absolutist regime was restored, he was object of so much attention on the part of Austrian authorities that he emigrated to America in 1856. Young Bohumil received his first education on the Iowa prairie, and helping his father with farm work he learned to love Nature, to the study of which he later devoted his life. After passing through public schools in Iowa City he entered the Iowa State University and graduated in 1883 as civil engineer. He felt no desire for a money-making career, and devotion to pure science and desire to make himself useful to the community led him to become a teacher. For two years after his graduation he taught at the Iowa City Academy. In 1865 we find him doing advanced work at the Johns Hopkins Marine Laboratory at Beaufort, N. C. From 1885 to 1888 he was science teacher at the Iowa City High School.

His career up to now had been similar to that of thousands of young men, born in this country of Bohemian parents. But whereas most of these young doctors and lawyers and businessmen pick up just enough of their mother’s speech to talk to their Bohemian clients and customers, young Šimek knew the language of his parents as well, as he knew the language of his native country. It is interesting, almost startling to those who know something of Bohemian life in America, to find that this high school teacher who had never been within five thousand miles of Bohemia, made use of vacation time to teach children of Bohemian settlers in Iowa, how to read and write the language of their parents.

During these years Šimek published his first papers on geology and zoology, and the work was so good that he was called to be instructor in the University of Nebraska. He was there from 1888 to 1890, when he returned to his Alma Mater, the Iowa State University, to be instructor in the department of botany. He was promoted successively to assistant professor, professor, head of department, and now is director of the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory,. [sic] In 1912, 1916 and 1918 Prof. Šimek was directing chiefly research work in botany.

In 1902 he had completed work for doctor’s degree, but expecting to take it in Prague only accepted in Iowa the degree of Master of Science. His long projected visit to Europe and Bohemia was delayed by repeated sickness in the family. Finally he went across in 1914, and for one semester he lectured at the Prague University on plant ecology, thus inaugurating an exchange of professors between the oldest university of Central Europe and the very modern state universities of America. It was in appreciation of his scientific work and of his courtesy in lecturing at the university that the Prague university senate decided to confer upon him the honorary degree of doctor of philosophy, but the


text: No More Parades/Chapter 4

title: No More Parades/Chapter 4


text: The Czechoslovak Review/Volume 3/Gradual Return to Normal Life


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 the dry season. There were representatives of the three chief forms of the West African bog. The large deep swamps were best to deal with, because they make a break in the forest, and the sun can come down on their surface and bake a crust, over which you can go, if you go quickly. From experience in Devonian bogs, I knew pace was our best chance, and I fancy I earned one of my nicknames among the Fans on these. The Fans went across all right with a rapid striding glide, but the other men erred from excess of caution, and while hesitating as to where was the next safe place to plant their feet, the place that they were standing on went in with a glug. Moreover, they would keep together, which was more than the crust would stand. The portly Pagan and the Passenger gave us a fine job in one bog, by sinking in close together. Some of us slashed off boughs of trees and tore off handfuls of hard canna leaves, while others threw them round the sinking victims to form a sort of raft, and then with the aid of bush-rope, of course, they were hauled out.

The worst sort of swamp, and the most frequent hereabouts, is the deep narrow one that has no crust on, because it is too much shaded by the forest. The slopes of the ravines too are usually covered with an undergrowth of shenja, beautiful beyond description, but right bad to go through. I soon learnt to dread seeing the man in front going down hill, or to find myself doing so, for it meant that within the next half hour we should be battling through a patch of shenja. I believe there are few effects that can compare with the beauty of them, with the golden sunlight coming down through the upper forest's branches on to their exquisitely shaped, hard, dark green leaves, making them look as if they were sprinkled with golden sequins. Their long green stalks, which support the leaves and bear little bunches of crimson berries, take every graceful curve imaginable, and the whole affair is free from insects; and when you have said this, you have said all there is to say in favour of shenja, for those long green stalks of theirs are as tough as twisted wire, and the graceful curves go to the making of a net, which rises round you shoulder high, and the hard green leaves when lying on the ground are fearfully slippery. It is not nice going down


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Rh of their Colonel. And I was proud of them also. They deserved a dashing leader.

The night promised to be a stormy one, which was very much to my liking. It was my desire to keep my departure most secret, for it was evident that if the English heard that I had been detached from the army they would naturally conclude that something important was about to happen. My horse was taken, therefore, beyond the picket line, as if for watering, and I followed and mounted him there. I had a map, a compass, and a paper of instructions from the Marshal, and with these in the bosom of my tunic and my sabre at my side I set out upon my adventure.

A thin rain was falling and there was no moon, so you may imagine that it was not very cheerful. But my heart was light at the thought of the honour which had been done me and the glory which awaited me. This exploit should be one more in that brilliant series which was to change my sabre into a bâton. Ah, how we dreamed, we foolish fellows, young, and drunk with success! Could I have foreseen that night as I rode, the chosen man of sixty thousand, that I should spend my life planting cabbages on a hundred francs a month! Oh, my youth, my hopes, my comrades! But the wheel turns and never stops. Forgive me, my friends, for an old man has his weakness.

My route, then, lay across the face of the high ground of Torres Vedras, then over a streamlet, past a farmhouse which had been burned down and was now only a landmark, then through a forest of young cork oaks, and so to the monastery of San Antonio, which marked the left of the English position. Here I turned south and rode quietly over the downs, for it was at this point that Massena thought that it would be most easy for me to find my way unobserved through the position. I went very slowly, for it was so dark that I could not see my hand in front of me. In such cases I leave my bridle loose and let my horse pick its own way. Voltigeur went confidently forward, and I was very content to sit upon his back and to peer about me, avoiding every light. For three hours we advanced in this cautious way, until it seemed to me that I must have left all danger behind me. I then pushed on more briskly, for I wished to be in the rear of the whole army by daybreak. There are many vineyards in these parts which in winter become open plains, and a horseman finds few difficulties in his way.

But Massena had underrated the cunning of these English, for it appears that there was not one line of defence but three, and it was the third, which was the most formidable, through which I was at that instant passing. As I rode, elated at my own success, a lantern flashed suddenly before me, and I saw the glint of polished gun-barrels and the gleam of a red coat.


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 through them, particularly when nature is so arranged that the edge of the bank you are descending is a rock-wall ten or twelve feet high with a swamp of unknown depth at its foot; this arrangement was very frequent on the second and third day's marches, and into these swamps the shenja seemed to want to send you head first and get you suffocated. It is still less pleasant, however, going up the other side of the ravine when you have got through your swamp. You have to fight your way upwards among rough rocks, through this hard tough network of stems; and it took it out of all of us except the Fans.

These narrow shaded swamps gave us a world of trouble and took up a good deal of time. Sometimes the leader of the party would make three or four attempts before he found a ford, going on until the black, batter-like ooze came up round his neck, and then turning back and trying in another place; while the rest of the party sat upon the bank until the ford was found, feeling it was unnecessary to throw away human life, and that the more men there were paddling about in that swamp, the more chance there was that a hole in the bottom of it would be found; and when a hole is found, the discoverer is liable to leave his bones in it. If I happened to be in front, the duty of finding the ford fell on me; for none of us after leaving Efoua knew the swamps personally. I was too frightened of the Fan, and too nervous and uncertain of the stuff my other men were made of, to dare show the white feather at anything that turned up. The Fan took my conduct as a matter of course, never having travelled with white men before, or learnt the way some of them require carrying over swamps and rivers and so on. I dare say I might have taken things easier, but I was like the immortal Schmelzle, during that omnibus journey he made on his way to Flætz in the thunder-storm—afraid to be afraid. I am very certain I should have fared very differently had I entered a region occupied by a powerful and ferocious tribe like the Fan, from some districts on the West Coast, where the inhabitants are used to find the white man incapable of personal exertion, requiring to be carried in a hammock, or wheeled in a go-cart or a Bath-chair about the streets of their coast towns, depend-


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114 unaware I have a grievance. No doubt it is your Chancellor who cited me to appear at too early an hour."

The President, cooled by the quiet dignity of the beggar, turned a questioning glance upon the outraged Chancellor, who was crimson and quivering with confusion and indignation.

"It is usual t-t-to summon persons before the c-c-commencement of the meeting," he stammered hotly. "We cannot tell how long the prior business will take."

"Then I would respectfully submit to the Chief of the Elders," said Manasseh, "that at the next meeting of his august body he move a resolution that persons cited to appear before the Mahamad shall take precedence of all other business."

The Chief of the Elders looked helplessly at the President of the Mahamad, who was equally at sea. "However, I will not press that point now," added Manasseh, "nor will I draw the attention of the committee to the careless, perfunctory manner in which the document summoning me was drawn up, so that, had I been a stickler for accuracy, I need not have answered to the name of Manasseh da Costa."

" But that is your name," protested the Chancellor.

"If you will examine the Charity List," said Manasseh magnificently, "you will see that my name is Manasseh Bueno Barzillai Azevedo da Costa. But you are keeping the gentlemen of the Mahamad waiting." And with a magnanimous air of dismissing the past, he seated himself on the nearest empty chair at the foot of the table, leaned his elbows on the table, and his face on his hands, and gazed across at the President immediately opposite. The Councillors were so taken aback by his unexpected bearing that this additional audacity was scarcely noted. But the Chancellor, wounded in his inmost instincts, exclaimed irately,


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 to the institution of monarchy. It was not merely Louis Capet (as they inaccurately called their sovereign) and his wife, "the Austrian," whom they wished to be rid of. Such was their doctrinaire fury, fostered by the superficial teaching of the philosophers, that their desire was to put down from their seats the hereditary rulers of all civilised countries. '"Wherever there is a throne we have an enemy," said Hérault de Séchelles the year before at the Legislative Assembly; while Danton, who was fated to die with him on the same scaffold, declared, at the Convention, whose first act had been the formal abolition of royalty in France, that that newly elected body ought to act as a committee of insurrection against all the kings in the universe.

The French revolutionists did not confine themselves to mouthing their international theories. The Convention sent agents to London and other capitals to spread the revolutionary doctrine: it encouraged deputations to come from England and other countries to discuss with it the best ways of securing "liberty": it issued a decree promising fraternal aid to all peoples that should revolt against their established rulers. All monarchies were thus put on their defence, and constitutional England had to follow the lead of the despotisms of the Continent in taking up the challenge thrown down by the champions of the new order of things. It was the war with the French Republic, under the conduct of Mr Pitt, which first counteracted the diffusion of anti-monarchic principles among the people of England. They were subsequently checked at the fountain-head by the Jacobin general, Bonaparte, who organised the Revolution in a way unexpected by


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 or terrorists, and at the same time made it odious to the English nation.

The revolutionary germ had never taken root in England as a purely philosophic doctrine. Thomas Paine, who argued that "all hereditary government is in its nature tyranny," had no extensive following among his countrymen, in spite of the large circulation of his reply to Burke's memorable Reflections on the French Revolution—the Rights of Man, which Erskine brilliantly defended when the author was indicted for the publication of that work. Had Paine been a popular hero he might have braved his condemnation, instead of flying, before his trial, to France, where citizenship had already been conferred on him, and where on landing he was sent by the Pas de Calais as deputy to the Convention. In that relentless assembly, four months later, he voted and spoke with great courage against the execution of Louis XVI., thus showing how relatively moderate were the extremest revolutionary opinions produced on English soil. But although the progress of the revolutionary doctrine in England was arrested by the spectacle of what it had led to in France, circumstances combined to attenuate the loyalty of the people and to spread the spirit of disaffection, first aroused by the preaching of the anti-monarchical gospel in France, in the period which had seen our revolted American colonies established as


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 ing for the defence of their settlement on a body of black soldiers. This is not so in Congo Français, and I had behind me the prestige of a set of white men to whom for the native to say, "You shall not do such and such a thing;" "You shall not go to such and such a place," would mean that those things would be done. I soon found the name of Hatton and Cookson's agent-general for this district, Mr. Hudson, was one to conjure with among the trading tribes; and the Ajumba, moreover, although their knowledge of white men had been small, yet those they had been accustomed to see were fine specimens. Mr. Fildes, Mr. Cockshut, M. Jacot, Dr. Pélessier, Père Lejeune, M. Gacon, Mr. Whittaker, and that vivacious French official, were not men any man, black or white, would willingly ruffle; and in addition there was the memory among the black traders of that white man MacTaggart," whom an enterprising trading tribe near Setta Khama had had the hardihood to tackle, shooting him, and then towing him behind a canoe and slashing him all over with their knives the while; yet he survived, and tackled them again in a way that must almost pathetically have astonished those simple savages, after the real good work they had put in to the killing of him. Of course it was hard to live up to these ideals, and I do not pretend to have succeeded, or rather that I should have succeeded had the real strain been put on me.

Particularly sure am I that I should never flourish under the treatment Mr. MacTaggart habitually receives. I had the pleasure of meeting him on my way home the other day and found him quite convalescent from another overdose of steel. He had gone, about six weeks previously with divers other white men, on a perfectly peaceable mission into a town. The treacherous inhabitants, after receiving them kindly and talking the palaver, went for Mr. MacTaggart as the party were returning to their boats, with sharpened cutlasses; took the top off his head, and a large chip out of the back of it, and then, evidently knowing their man, proceeded to remove him in his stunned condition into the bush on a door. They there thought of taking off his head thoroughly, to make a Ju Ju of. The securing of the head of a notably brave man is a great desideratum among West Coast tribes, and they thought


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“Beloved, try the spirits.” There are many spirits we do not want to have anything to do with. There is our own spirit; the flesh and the devil. There are many spirits contending, and many times we let our own spirit rule and make ourselves think it is God; the same, with the flesh and the devil.

Sometimes we know it is not God, but we want to have our own way. If we have the Holy Ghost we can prove the spirits, because everything the Holy Ghost does is confirmed by the Word. We do not want to trust to tongues and interpretations, you must measure things by the word; we must measure tongues and demonstrations by the Word, and if they do not agree with the Word, we must not accept them; everything must be measured by the Word.

We do know God and the voice of God, but the devil can come as an angel of light. When you are in the Holy Ghost, that is the time the devil tries to get in and lead you astray. The Holy Ghost is revealing some secret things; at the same time the devil comes in, and if you are not careful, you will listen to what he has to say and follow him.

Once I was having a wonderful vision, and right in the midst of it, the devil said to me, “You are going to die.” I was very poorly and was worked nearly to death and I listened to the devil for a minute; then I stopped to hear what God wanted to teach me.

I said, “What is this God is showing me? Does this agree with what God is showing?” I saw there was a big difference. God touched my forehead, the seat of intellect and reason; my mouth, signifying courage and power to give forth the message; and I could not die if I was to do this; if I was to give the people His message, I was not going to die.

There was someone in the meeting here God was blessing,

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 their own red guards. Thus when the conflict between the Leather Workers' Union and the Leather Manufacturers' Association dragged on in many factories, the employers were driven away and the factories seized by the factory committees. On the 5th of October, 1917, the Moscow Regional Metal Workers' Conference, at which 138,000 workers were represented demanded "an energetic campaign for a radical change in the basis of economic policy, the nationalisation of the larger syndicated petroleum, coal, sugar and metal industries, also of the Banks and of the means of transport." The Conference further recommended to carry out and to "encourage the initiative in the localities for the speediest realisation of workers' control of industry." Everyone can understand what to "encourage initiative for workers' control" meant in this sharp class struggle. Affairs reached the stage of violent and immediate introduction of workers' control. On the 9th of October 1,000 delegates, representing 200,000 textile workers in the Moscow region, promised support to the Soviets and called them to determined action in fighting against the sabotage of the employers and the treacherous conduct of the provisional government. The situation became more complicated. Here and there local strikes broke out which led to nothing. The excellently organised employers deliberately provoked the workers to local strikes in order to defeat them separately.

In the factories a fight was proceeding for the right to control the economic resources of the country. The working class of Russia, by the logic of the class struggle, had come right up to the conquest of government power. The social tangle could not be unravelled, it could only be cut, and this was done by the October revolution.

The furious contest between the trade unions and the employers, as we saw, proceeded in every factory and works long before the October revolution. The trade unions and their organs, the factory committees, convinced themselves by practice and experience of the necessity of a violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie. It was for that reason that they were in the front ranks of the battle in the October revolution against the provisional government and the coalition.

The unions and the factory committees, formed a red guard. They posted armed detachments for fighting against the government as well as for the protection of the factories. The unions and the Councils of Trade Unions had their representatives in the military revolutionary committees, their premises were used by the staffs of revolutionary troops, (the staff of the Moscow revolutionary troops were for some time situated on the premises of the Moscow Metal Workers' Union); they formed red cross detachments and were the first to place their technical staff and machinery at the disposal of the new Soviet government for the management of the State.

In those great days of severe and sharp fighting the trade unions had to fight not only against cossacks, junkers and the bourgeoisie, but even against several trade unions which at that decisive moment stood on the side of the Provisional Govern-


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 by securing Mr. MacTaggart's head they would do this, and also remove him from his then sphere of activity, the prevention of gin smuggling. Their plan seems excellent in theory; but I would not stake any money on its having succeeded, even if they had been able to get him well away on that door, which owing to his companions they were not. It is almost as risky to be notoriously brave among a West African tribe, as it is to be notoriously holy in the East. I know another case in which they desired to collect the head of a gentleman for their Ju Ju house. It showed in this case a lofty devotion on their part, for it would have caused them grave domestic inconvenience to have removed, at one fell swoop, their entire set of tradesmen. Still more did it show an artistic feeling of a high order; for the head is a very handsome one. Though they command my respect as a fellow collector by the care they took in the attempt to collect it by shooting the specimen in the legs, from other standpoints I am very glad they have failed. This idea of the advantage of having a big man's head is somewhat like the Eastern one that I remember reading of in one of Richard Burton's memoirs. He was once among some very pious Easterns disguised as a dervish and enjoying such an amount of admiration from them that he felt safe and content, until one day a native friend came to him, secretly, and advised him to fly, "because the people of this city are desirous of having the shrine of a very holy man among them both because of the spiritual advantages it bestows, and the temporal ones arising from pilgrims coming to the town from other places to visit it, and they have decided that you are so very holy, and wise, and learned in the Koran that you will do." Burton left.

But to return to that gorilla-land forest. All the rivers we crossed on the first, second, and third day I was told went into one or other of the branches of the Ogowé, showing that the long slope of land between the Ogowé and the Rembwé is towards the Ogowé. The stone of which the mountains were composed was that same hard black rock that I had found on the Sierra del Cristal, by the Ogowé rapids; only hereabouts there was not amongst it those great masses of white quartz,


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 which are so prominent a feature from Talagouga upwards in the Ogowé valley; neither were the mountains anything like so high, but they had the same abruptness of shape. They look like very old parts of the same range worn down to stumps by the disintegrating forces of the torrential rain and sun, and the dense forest growing on them. Frost of course they had not been subject to, but rocks, I noticed, were often being somewhat similarly split by rootlets having got into some tiny crevice, and by gradual growth enlarged it to a crack.

Of our troubles among the timber falls on these mountains I have already spoken; and these were at their worst between Efoua and Egaja. I had suffered a good deal from thirst that day, unboiled water being my ibet and we were all very nearly tired out with the athletic sports since leaving Efoua. One thing only we knew about Egaja for sure, and that was that not one of us had a friend there, and that it was a town of extra evil repute, so we were not feeling very cheerful when towards evening time we struck its outermost plantations, their immediate vicinity being announced to us by Silence treading full and fair on to a sharp ebony spike driven into the narrow path and hurting himself. Fortunately, after we passed this first plantation, we came upon a camp of rubber collectors—four young men I got one of them to carry Silence's load and show us the way into the town, when on we went into more plantations.

There is nothing more tiresome than finding your path going into a plantation, because it fades out in the cleared ground, or starts playing games with a lot of other little paths that are running about amongst the crops, and no West African path goes straight into a stream or a plantation, and straight out the other side, so you have a nice time picking it up again.

We were spared a good deal of fine varied walking by our new friend the rubber collector; for I noticed he led us out by a path nearly at right angles to the one by which we had entered. He then pitched into a pit which was half full of thorns, and which he observed he did not know was there, demonstrating that an African guide can speak the truth. When he had got out, he handed back Silence's load and got


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 republic. In the first place, the war with France, which had diverted the nation from theoretical sympathy with the French Revolution, while enriching certain classes of the community, soon caused lasting distress among the people. Economic trouble has always been a more potent factor of sedition than the propagation of doctrine. Even the French Revolution, in the earlier stages of which ideas played a most important part, would not have attained sufficient force to sweep away the monarchy, but for its economic causes. In England, where the genius of the people is not doctrinaire, the governing institutions have never, since 1688, been menaced at times of well-distributed national prosperity. To the popular distress was added the discontent inspired in all classes by certain members of the family of the sovereign, himself disabled by mental disorder, which had first temporarily afflicted him on the eve of the French Revolution. When the malady of George III. became chronic and necessitated a permanent regency, even highly-placed Englishmen became lukewarm in their attachment to the royal house. Colonel Wardle, as mover of the appointment of the parliamentary committee to investigate the conduct of the Duke of York, which brought about that prince's resignation as


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 ment. The overwhelming majority of the trade unions were forthe October revolution, only an insignificant section being against it. All the unions uniting factory workers like the metal workers, textile workers and leather workers were for the October revolution, while the commercial and bank employees' unions were against it. In those unions which united higher and lower employees like railwaymen and post and telegraph workers, the lower grade employees were for the October revolution, while the office staff and the higher officials were against it. The only exception of a purely proletarian union being against the October revolution were the printers, who came out actively in defence of the Provisional Government and the "freedom of the Press," understanding by, that the freedom of the bourgeoisie and government press to continue at the most acute moment of armed conflict to pervert the consciousness of the masses.

The struggle between the workers and the employees assumed an extremely sharp form particularly when the notorious sabotage of the officials began which expressed itself in stopping work in all government institutions and the deliberate disorganisation of the State and administrative technical machinery. Here the struggle went on not merely between unions, but within the government and commercial employees' unions, where the workers and the lower staff concentrated all their efforts to restart work in the departments. The word sabotage became the most shameful word among the Russian proletariat, because the strike of the officials was practically directed against the working class and its frantic efforts to extricate itself from the political and economic cul-de-sac. The unions were confronted with the question whether strikes were permissible in a period when power was passing into the hands of the working class, and the unions through their largest organisations answered—no. The Moscow Council of Trade Unions at the beginning of November, 1917, carried a resolution which says "the unions consider that while a proletarian government is in power a political strike is to be considered as sabotage against which the most determined measures must be taken. To take the place of workers refusing to work, for that reason is not blacklegging, but a means of fighting sabotage and counter revolution." The trade union movement as a whole adopted the same point of view that no strike directed against the socialist revolution and its upholders, the working class, could be permitted. A strike of employees and officials usually began when a commissary of the new Soviet government appeared. The strikes, morally and materially supported by the partisans of the overthrown Kerensky government, rendered the relations between the technical intellectuals or employees and the workers so strained that even at the present moment there are traces of estrangement between the workers and the employees, the latter being distrusted. Thus, from the first days of the October revolution, the trade unions had to submit the question of the right to strike for reconsideration. The experience of the struggle led the Russian trade unions to the following practical conclusion:—to strike against the bourgeoisie is the sacred


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 by a boy. Well, that must be ten years ago, and Joe's twenty-four now."

"And a good man in the woods, you say?"

"None better. The most capable on this continent, I verily believe."

I was surprised at Sir Andrew's superlatives, for he was the last man to overstate his case.

"What makes you say that?"

"A habit of speaking the truth, my dear friend. If Joe is free and can go with you, you will get your moose with the sixty-inch horns, I have very little doubt."

"I am afraid there is very slight chance of his being free. You must not forget it's just the beginning of the still-hunting season."

"I know that, but I believe he was retained by the Britwells, who employed him last year, and now at the last minute old man Britwell has decided that he is too busy to go into camp this fall. But there may still be this difficulty. I understand that November Joe has entered into some sort of contract with the Provincial Police."

"With the police?" I repeated.

"Yes. He is to help them in such cases as

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 and recognised by a pair of idle voyagers. Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note. Another amazingly potent though less artistically finished tale is The Wendigo, where we are confronted by horrible evidences of a vast forest dæmon about which North Woods lumbermen whisper at evening. The manner in which certain footprints tell certain unbelievable things is really a marked triumph in craftsmanship. In An Episode In A Lodging House we behold frightful presences summoned out of black space by a sorcerer, and The Listener tells of the awful psychic residuum creeping about an old house where a leper died. In the volume titled Incredible Adventures occur some of the finest tales which the author has yet produced, leading the fancy to wild rites on nocturnal hills, to secret and terrible aspects lurking behind stolid scenes, and to unimaginable vaults of mystery below the sands and pyramids of Egypt; all with a serious finesse and delicacy that convince where a cruder or lighter treatment would merely amuse. Some of these accounts are hardly stories at all, but rather studies in elusive impressions and half-remembered snatches of dream. Plot is everywhere negligible, and atmosphere reigns untrammelled.

John Silence—Physician Extraordinary is a book of five related tales, through which a single character runs his triumphant course. Marred only by traces of the popular and conventional detective-story atmosphere,—for Dr. Silence is one of those benevolent geniuses who employ their remarkable powers to aid worthy fellow-men in difficulty—these narratives contain some of the author’s best work, and produce an illusion at once emphatic and lasting. The opening tale, A Psychical Invasion, relates what befel a sensitive author in a house once the scene of dark deeds, and how a legion of fiends was exorcised. Ancient Sorceries, perhaps the finest tale in the book, gives an almost hypnotically vivid account of an old French town where once the unholy Sabbath was kept by all the people in the form of cats. In The Nemesis Of Fire a hideous elemental is evoked by new-spilt blood, whilst Secret Worship tells of a German school where Satanism held sway, and where long afterward an evil aura remained. The Camp Of The Dog is a werewolf tale, but is weakened by moralisation and professional “occultism.”

Too subtle, perhaps, for definite classification as horror-tales, yet possibly more truly artistic in an absolute sense, are such delicate phantasies as Jimbo or The Centaur. Mr. Blackwood achieves in these novels a close and palpitant approach to the inmost substance of dream, and works enormous havock with the conventional barriers between reality and imagination.

Unexcelled in the sorcery of crystalline singing prose, and supreme in the creation of a gorgeous and languorous world of iridescently exotic vision, is Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Eighteenth Baron Dunsany, whose tales and short plays form an almost unique element in our literature. Inventor of a new mythology and weaver of surprising folklore, Lord Dunsany stands dedicated to a strange world of fantastic beauty, and pledged to eternal warfare against the coarseness and ugliness of diurnal reality. His point of view is the most truly cosmic of any held in the literature of any period. As sensitive as Poe to dramatic values and the significance of isolated words and details, and far better equipped rhetorically through a simple lyric style based on the prose of the King James Bible, this author draws with tremendous effectiveness on nearly every body of myth and legend within the circle of European culture; producing a composite or eclectic cycle of phantasy in which Eastern colour, Hellenic form, Teutonic sombreness and Celtic wistfulness are so superbly blended that each sustains and supplements the rest without sacrifice of perfect congruity and homogeneity. In most cases Dunsany’s lands are fabulous—“beyond the East”, or “at the edge of the world.” His system of original personal and place names, with roots drawn from classical, Oriental, and other sources, is a marvel of versatile inventiveness and poetic discrimination; as one may see from such specimens as “Argimenes”, “Bethmoora”, “Poltarnees”, “Camorak”, “Iluriel”, or “Sardathrion”.

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115 THE KING OF SCHNORRERS. 115

" Stand up, sir. These chairs are for the gentlemen of the Mahamad."

" And being gentlemen," added Manasseh crushingly, " they know better than to keep an old man on his legs any longer."

" If you were a gentleman," retorted the Chancellor, " you would take that thing off your head."

" If you were not a Man-of-the-Earth," rejoined the beggar, " you would know that it is not a mark of disrespect for the Mahamad, but of respect for the Law, which is higher than the Mahamad. The rich man can afford to neglect our holy religion, but the poor man has only the Law. It is his sole luxury."

The pathetic tremor in his voice stirred a confused sense of wrong-doing and injustice in the Councillors' breasts. The President felt vaguely that the edge of his coming impressive rebuke had been turned, if, indeed, he did not sit rebuked instead. Irritated, he turned on the Chancellor, and bade him hold his peace.

" He means well," said Manasseh deprecatingly. " He cannot be expected to have the fine instincts of the gentle- men of the Mahamad. May I ask you, sir," he concluded, " to proceed with the business for which you have sum- moned me? I have several appointments to keep with clients."

The President's bediamonded fingers recommenced their ill-tempered tattoo ; he was fuming inwardly with a sense of baffled wrath, of righteous indignation made unrighteous. "Is it true, sir," he burst forth at last in the most terrible accents he could command in the circumstances, " that you meditate giving your daughter in marriage to a Polish Jew?"

" No," replied Manasseh curtly.


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 a dash of tobacco for his help; he left us to devote the rest of his evening by his forest fire to unthorning himself, while we proceeded to wade a swift, deepish river that crossed the path he told us led into Egaja, and then went across another bit of forest and down hill again. "Oh, bless those swamps!" thought I, "here's another," but no—not this time. Across the bottom of the steep ravine, from one side to another, lay an enormous tree as a bridge, about fifteen feet above a river, which rushed beneath it, over a boulder-encumbered bed. I took in the situation at a glance, and then and there I would have changed that bridge for any swamp I have ever seen, yea, even for a certain bush-rope bridge in which I once wound myself up like a buzzing fly in a spider's web. I was fearfully tired, and my legs shivered under me after the falls, and emotions of the previous part of the day, and my boots were slippery with water soaking.

The Fans went into the river, and half swam, half waded across. All the Ajumba, save Pagan, followed, and Ngouta got across with their assistance. Pagan thought he would try the bridge, and I thought I would watch how the thing worked. He got about three yards along it and then slipped, but caught the tree with his hands as he fell, and hauled himself back to my side again; then he went down the bank and through the water. This was not calculated to improve one's nerve; I knew by now I had got to go by the bridge, for I saw I was not strong enough in my tired state to fight the water. If only the wretched thing had had its bark on it would have been better, but it was bare, bald, and round, and a slip meant death on the rocks below. I rushed it, and reached the other side in safety, whereby poor Pagan got chaffed about his failure by the others, who said they had gone through the water just to wash their feet.

The other side, when we got there, did not seem much worth reaching, being a swampy fringe at the bottom of a steep hillside, and after a few yards the path turned into a stream or backwater of the river. It was hedged with thickly pleached bushes, and covered with liquid water on the top of semi-liquid mud. Now and again for a change you had a foot of water on top of fearfully slippery harder mud, and then


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John 15:26, 27. Jesus is speaking of the coming of the Holy Ghost. “But when the Comforter is come whom I will send unto you from the Father, He shall testify of Me.

He is the Holy Ghost. The Lord speaks of the Holy Ghost as a person as much as He would of one of the Apostles. On the day of Pentecost, they were all of one accord, in one place and something happened.

It will every day if you have the Spirit. “Suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a mighty rushing wind.” This was the Holy Ghost when He came to stay. “There appeared unto them cloven tongues like unto fire, and it sat on each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.”

When this was noised abroad, multitudes came together. What was noised abroad? That these people were all speaking in other languages. The news went through Jerusalem and the multitude came together; and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language; and those who came were men out of every nation under heaven.

They heard these hundred and twenty speak in their own language wherein they were born. This is what gathered the people and confounded them. “They were all amazed and marveled, saying one to another, Behold! are not all these that speak Galileans? And how hear we every man in our own tongue wherein we were born?” “We do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.”

The Holy Ghost is a wonderful person, not a myth or shadow. Pentecost is the greatest thing that ever happened in God’s work, when the Holy Ghost came in to stay. He came and took possession of 120 men and women; He sat upon their heads in cloven tongues of fire, and went in and took possession of their bodies; then of their vocal organs; and they spoke, every one, as He gave them utterance.

They spoke in languages they had never learned, and did not know what they were saying. The Holy Ghost took possession

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 may lie within the scope of his special experience. He is, indeed, the very last person I should like to have upon my trail had I committed a murder."

I laughed.

"You think he'd run you down?"

"If I left a sign or a track behind me, he would. He is a most skilled and minute observer, and you must not forget that the speciality of a Sherlock Holmes is the everyday routine of a woodsman. Observation and deduction are part and parcel of his daily existence. He literally reads as he runs. The floor of the forest is his page. And when a crime is committed in the woods, these facts are very fortunate."

"In what way?"

"My dear James, have you never given any consideration to the markedly different circumstances which surround the wide subject of crime and its detection, where the locality is shifted from a populous or even settled country to the loneliness of some wild region? In the midst of a city, any crime of magnitude is very frequently discovered within a few hours of its committal."

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 94 The militarization and coercion of labor has proceeded so far as to lead to a movement of revolt even within these governmental "trade unions" and within the Communist Party itself. The revolt began as a reaction against the extreme violence of the head of the Red Army, Trotzky. We take the following from the friendly New Statesman of London; it is amply supported by Soviet documents:

It is well known that early in 1920 Trotsky made an attempt to militarise industry by transforming a few of the Red armies into labor battalions.

At first these "Labor armies" aroused much hope and were greatly advertised by the Communists as the last word in a reconstruction crusade, but they soon proved an utter failure.

Only 20–24 per cent. of the soldiers actually did any work—and that in a wasteful and grossly unproductive way. The rest were occupied in supplying them and in preserving the military character of the institution.

After a short period of enthusiasm and exaltation, the experiment was recognized as a wasteful delusion, and the Polish attack made an end of it before its folly became too obvious.

Trotsky, however, did not give up the idea of applying military methods to industry. As the Acting Commissar for Transport, in the absence of Krassin, he introduced military discipline on the railways.

Commissars, revolutionary tribunals, political intelligence and supervision replaced ordinary methods of management.

Elections, even of a limited scope and under pressure, which are still tolerated in other unions, were completely abolished, all officers of the Railway Union being appointed by the Chief Commissar.

All this could be tolerated during the war, because the railways were justly considered a part of the war


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116 116 THE KING OF SCHNORRERS.

"No?" articulated the President, while a murmur of astonishment went round the table at this unexpected collapse of the whole case.

"Why, your daughter admitted it to my wife," said the Councillor on Manasseh's right.

Manasseh turned to him, expostulant, tilting his chair and body towards him. " My daughter is going to marry a Polish Jew," he explained with argumentative forefinger, " but I do not meditate giving her to him."

" Oh, then, you will refuse your consent," said the Coun- cillor, hitching his chair back so as to escape the beggar's progressive propinquity. " By no means," quoth Manasseh in surprised accents, as he drew his chair nearer again, " I have already consented. I do not meditate consenting. That word argues an inconclusive attitude."

" None of your quibbles, sirrah," cried the President, while a scarlet flush mantled on his dark countenance. " Do you not know that the union you contemplate is dis- graceful and degrading to you, to your daughter, and to the community which has done so much for you ? What ! A Sephardi marry a Tedesco ! Shameful."

" And do you think I do not feel the shame as deeply as you?" enquired Manasseh, with infinite pathos. "Do you think, gentlemen, that I have not suffered from this passion of a Tedesco for my daughter? I came here expecting your sympathy, and do you offer me reproach? Perhaps you think, sir" — here he turned again to his right-hand neighbour, who, in his anxiety to evade his pertinacious proximity, had half-wheeled his chair round, offering only his back to the argumentative forefinger — " perhaps you think, because I have consented, that I cannot condole with you, that I am not at one with you in lamenting this blot on our common 'scutcheon ; perhaps you think " —


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 Rh machine, but with the war over, the railwaymen began to protest against military management.

Other unions, too, raised their voice against the permanent militarization of the railways.

At the beginning of November (1920) the Conference of Trade Unions passed a resolution which recommended "the most energetic and systematic struggle against centralism, militarization, bureaucratism as well as autocratic and minute tutelage of the workers ' unions."

The conference expressed also its conviction that "it is high time for the Railway Union to abolish military methods and return to ordinary proletarian democracy within the union."

But Trotsky—the head of the union—ignored the decision of the conference. Pointing out the manifest improvement of the transport under his management, he started a campaign for the adoption of military methods all round as the basis for a new efficiency in industry.

Far from denying his action in appointing the chiefs of the railway unions, Trotzky defended it at the congress of the transport workers. His speech is quoted in the New York Call of January 14, 1921, as follows:


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117 THE KING OF SCHNORRERS. 117

here he adroitly twisted his chair into argumentative posi- tion on the other side of the Councillor, rounding him like a cape — " that, because you have no sympathy with my tribulation, I have no sympathy with yours. But, if I have consented, it is only because it was the best I could do for my daughter. In my heart of hearts I have repudi- ated her, so that she may practically be considered an orphan, and, as such, a fit person to receive the marriage dowry bequeathed by Rodriguez Real, peace be upon him."

"This is no laughing matter, sir," thundered the Presi- dent, stung into forgetfulness of his dignity by thinking too much of it.

" No, indeed," said Manasseh sympathetically, wheeling to the right so as to confront the President, who went on stormily, " Are you aware, sir, of the penalties you risk by persisting in your course?"

" I risk no penalties," replied the beggar.

" Indeed ! Then do you think anyone may trample with impunity upon our ancient Ascamot? "

" Our ancient Ascamot ! " repeated Manasseh in surprise. "What have they to say against a Sephardi marrying a Tedesco?"

The audacity of the question rendered the Council breathless. Manasseh had to answer it himself.

"They have nothing to say. There is no such Ascama." There was a moment of awful silence. It was as though he had disavowed the Decalogue.

" Do you question the first principle of our constitution?" said the President at last, in low, ominous tones. " Do you deny that your daughter is a traitress? Do you — ? "

"Ask your Chancellor," calmly interrupted Manasseh. " He is a Man-of-the-Earth, but he should know your


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118 118 THE KING OF SCHNORRERS.

statutes, and he will tell you that my daughter's conduct is nowhere forbidden."

" Silence, sir," cried the President testily. " Mr. Chan- cellor, read the Ascama"

The Chancellor wriggled on his chair, his face flushing and paling by turns ; all eyes were bent upon him in anxious suspense. He hemmed and ha'd and coughed, and took snuff, and blew his nose elaborately.

"There is n-n-no express Ascanta," he stuttered at last. Manasseh sat still, in unpretentious triumph.

The Councillor who was now become his right-hand neighbour was the first to break the dazed silence, and it was his first intervention.

"Of course, it was never actually put into writing," he said in stern reproof. " It has never been legislated against, because it has never been conceived possible. These things are an instinct with every right-minded Sephardi. Have we ever legislated against marrying Christians?" Manasseh veered round half a point of the compass, and fixed the new opponent with his argumentative forefinger. " Cer- tainly we have," he replied unexpectedly. " In Section XX., Paragraph II." He quoted the Ascama by heart, rolling out the sonorous Portuguese like a solemn indictment. "If our legislators had intended to prohibit intermarriage with the German community, they would have prohibited it."

"There is the Traditional Law as well as the Written," said the Chancellor, recovering himself. " It is so in our holy religion, it is so in our constitution."

" Yes, there are precedents assuredly," cried the Presi- dent eagerly.

" There is the case of one of our Treasurers in the time of George II.," said the little Chancellor, blossoming under the sunshine of the President's encouragement, and naming the


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 we light-heartedly took headers into the bush, sideways, or sat down; and when it was not proceeding on the evil tenor of its way, like this, it had holes in it; in fact, I fancy the bottom of the holes was the true level, for it came near being as full of holes as a fishing-net, and it was very quaint to see the man in front, who had been paddling along knee-deep before, now plop down with the water round his shoulders; and getting out of these slippery pockets, which were sometimes a tight fit, was difficult.

However that is the path you have got to go by, if you're not wise enough to stop at home; the little bay of shrub over-grown swamp fringing the river on one side and on the other running up to the mountain side.

At last we came to a sandy bank, and on that bank stood Egaja, the town with an evil name even among the Fan, but where we had got to stay, fair or foul. We went into it through its palaver house, and soon had the usual row.

I had detected signs of trouble among my men during the whole day; the Ajumba were tired, and dissatisfied with the Fans; the Fans were in high feather, openly insolent to Ngouta, and anxious for me to stay in this delightful locality, and go hunting with them and divers other choice spirits, whom they assured me we could easily get to join us at Efoua. Ngouta kept away from them, and I was worried about him on account of his cold and loss of voice. I kept peace as well as I could, explaining to the Fans I had not enough money with me now, because I had not, when starting, expected such magnificent opportunities to be placed at my disposal; and promising to come back next year—a promise I hope to keep—and then we would go and have a grand time of it. This state of a party was a dangerous one in which to enter a strange Fan town, where our security lay in our being united. When the first burst of Egaja conversation began to boil down into something reasonable, I found that a villainous-looking scoundrel, smeared with soot and draped in a fragment of genuine antique cloth, was a head chief in mourning. He placed a house at my disposal, quite a mansion, for it had no less than four apartments. The first one was almost


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 96 At the congress of the trade unions held early in 1921, Trotzky declared: "It will be necessary to reorganize the unions without delay, that is, first of all to shift the personnel of the more responsible positions." In other words, he proposed to apply generally the system of appointment of labor union officials by the Communist Party—which he had already instituted on the railways. The name he gave to this policy was: "democracy in the matter of production." Even Lenin himself at this meeting made fun of this strange perversion of language—although it is entirely typical of the usual Bolshevist inversions in the use of words. Lenin declared that Trotzky's plan was merely an increase of "bureaucratism." (From report of the All-Russian Conference of Professional or Labor Unions, Pravda, January 13, 1921.)

Lenin accused Trotzky of lack of tact in discussing these matters in public. Lenin's own methods are more secretive. He believes that the all-powerful Communist Party, aided by the Red Terror and the Extraordinary Commission, can secure the "election" of "trade union" officials by the methods hitherto employed. What these methods are we can see from a passage already quoted:

Lenin's "trade union" program, as he declared at the above meeting, is that the unions should be "per-


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 Rh suaded" to institute tribunals in order to increase production for the Soviet Government and punish "labor desertion." (See the previous chapter.)

Of course, the "trade union" revolt could not amount to much under the Bolshevist rule. Two factions, however, offered a very vigorous resistance and under the Soviet tyranny it is significant that they did manage, after all, to obtain a certain number of votes. This opposition is divided between the faction which proposed to restore the Soviet rule and a so-called Syndicalist faction. Neither of them suggests any concession whatever to the peasant majority of Russia, but both seem fairly strongly opposed to a continuation of the present Communist Party rule. The New Statesman correctly sums up the opposition of these factions as follows:

If we consider Trotzky's militarist-bureaucratic proposals as the extreme left, then the extreme right is taken up by the group of the "Labor Opposition," headed by Shliapnikov—chairman of the Metal Workers' Union—the strongest Russian union.

The "Labor Opposition" demands that the entire economy of the Republic should be taken over by a congress of producers, organized in producers' unions. This is a consistent syndicalist conception, based on the belief that economic matters should be left entirely to labor organizations.

Bitterly criticizing the bureaucratic tutelage over the unions by the Communist party, the "Labor Opposition" advocates complete self-government in the factories.

Another faction, headed by Ossinsky and Sapronov, calls itself the group of "Democratic Centralism." This group is one with the "Labor Opposition" in demanding democratic reforms and active participation of the


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Rh tites in the company of young women. Do you help me thereto!' To him his eldest son born of Devayani then said, 'What needest thou, O king! Dost thou want to have our youth?' Yayati then told him, 'Accept thou my decrepitude. O son! with thy youth I would enjoy myself. During the time of a great sacrifice I have been cursed by the Minu Usana (Sukra.) O sons, I would enjoy myself with your youth. Take any of ye this my decrepitude and with my body rule ye my kingdom. I would enjoy myself with a renovated body. Therefore, ye my sone, take ye my decrepitude!' But none of his sons took his decrepitude. Then his youngest son Puru said unto him, 'O king, enjoy thou once again with a renovated body and returned youth! I shall take thy decrepitude and at thy command rule thy kingdom.' Thus addressed, the royal sage, by virtue of his ascetic power, then transferred his own decrepitude unto that high-souled son of his. And with the youth of Puru the monarch became a young man; while with the monarch's age Puru ruled his kingdom.

"Then, after a thousand years had passed away, Yayati, that tiger among kings, remained as strong and powerful as a tiger. And he enjoyed for a long time the companionship of his two wives. And in the gardens of (the king of the Gandharvas), the king also enjoyed the company of the Apsara Viswachi. But even after all this, the great king found his appetites unsatiated. The king then recollected the following truths contained in the Puranas. 'Truly, one's appetites are never satiated with enjoyment. On the other hand, like sacrificial butter poured into the fire, they flame up with indulgence. Even if one enjoyeth the whole earth with its wealth, diamonds and gold, animals and women, one is not yet satiated. It is only when man doth not commit any sin in respect of any living thing, in heart, deed, or word, it is then that he attaineth to purity as that of Brahma. When one feareth nothing, when one is not feared by any thing, when one wisheth for nothing, when one injureth nothing, it is then that one attaineth to the purity of Brahma.' The wise monarch seeing this and satisfied that one's appetites are never satiated, set his mind at rest by meditation, and took back from his son


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 {c|CHAPTER LXIII}}

Last Chapter of James. Verse fourteen is for the church. Remember it is not for sinners. “Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him: with oil in the name of the Lord: and the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.”

“Confess your faults one to another.” You have to be pretty straight when you come to God. “Pray one for another that ye might be healed. “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.”

Elijah was a man like other men, not an angel, and he prayed that it might not rain, and it rained not for three years and six months. He prayed again and God heard him and sent the rain. This chapter is for us; it applies to us. All through the chapter it refers to the days we are living in.

When these things come to pass know that the end draweth near. This chapter brings us down to the last days.

Verse 7. In the east they had the early rain to start the grain. They could not tell anything about the harvest until they received the latter rain. If it came abundantly there would be a good harvest.

The Apostle says to us, “Wait for the latter rain; be ye also patient unto the coming of the Lord.” When the latter rain is falling we know the coming of the Lord is near. We are getting the early rain, and will get the latter rain before long. He is getting the Bride ready.

The Apostle is speaking to the church. If any one is sick among you, don’t run for the doctor, or send him to the hospital, but let the sick ones send for the elders. The elders were supposed to be men endued with the Holy Ghost, who would come and pray over him, anointing him with oil, and he should

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 98 unions in the management of industry, but is dead against the syndicalist conception of the Metal Workers' Union. Their chief demand is for the re-establishment of the Soviet Constitution.

The official Lenin resolution received 336 votes at the conference, Trotzky's resolution 50, and that of the Labor Opposition 18.

What was the result of this conference? Far from bringing any relaxation of the Communist dictatorship it resulted in putting at the head of the railroads the one man in Russia who is noted as more violent than Trotzky himself, namely, Lenin's right arm, Djerjinsky, chief of the frightful Extraordinary Commission. Such is labor reform and "democratization" in Soviet Russia! As we read in a dispatch of April 19, 1920:

President Djerjinsky of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission of the People's Commissary of the Interior, who is also Chairman of the Extraordinary Commission for the Improvement of Conditions of Life of the Workers, Chairman of the Extraordinary Commission for the Care of Children and of several other extraordinary commissions, has been appointed People's Commissary of Transport and Communications. The present Commissary, M. Emshanoff, becomes Under Secretary.

The decree of the Central Executive Committee explicitly announces that Djerjinsky will maintain all his other positions, thus becoming still more powerful. During the recent animated discussion of the position of the trade unions, Trotzky was severely criticized for introducing military methods into the management of the railways. Trotzky was obliged to retire as Commissary of Transport and Emshanoff returned to the normal methods of management only to give way in a


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 ly receive the same improvement during the term, as if it had been laid up at interest at its commencement.

126. The periods of conversion of interest into principal, and of the payment of the annuity being still designated as in No. 120; since in $$n$$ years, the number of periods of conversion will be $$\nu n$$, in the

1st Case, Where the interest is convertible $$\mu$$ times in each of the intervals between the payments of the annuity, we have $$\left ( 1+\frac{r}{\nu} \right ) ^{\nu n} \text{V} = \frac{a}{\pi} \cdot \frac{\left ( 1+\frac{r}{\nu} \right ) ^{\nu n} - 1}{\left ( 1+\frac{r}{\nu} \right ) ^\mu - 1} = \text{M}$$, (117, 121, and 125). In the 2d Case, when the annuity is payable $$\mu$$ times, in each interval between the conversions of interest, $$\left ( 1+\frac{r}{\nu} \right ) ^{\nu n} \text{V} = a \left [ \frac{1}{r}+\frac{\mu-1}{2\pi} \right ] \cdot \left [ (1+\frac{r}{\nu})^{\nu n} - 1 \right ] = \text{M}$$, (117, 122, and 125).

And, in the 3d Case, when the annuity is always payable at the same time that the interest is convertible, $$\left ( 1+\frac{r}{\nu} \right ) ^{\nu n} \text{V} = \frac{a}{r} \left [ (1+\frac{r}{\nu})^{\nu n} - 1 \right ] = \text{M}$$, (117, 123, and 125).

127. According as $$\nu$$ and $$\pi$$ are each equal to 1, 2, 4, or are infinite; that is, according as the interest and the annuity are each payable yearly, half-yearly, quarterly, or continually, let $$\text{M}$$ be denoted by $$y'$$, $$h'$$, $$q'$$, or $$c'$$;

128. Example 1. What will L. 320 amount to, when improved at compound interest during 40 years; the rate of interest being 4 ''per cent. per annum?''

By the first formula in No. 116, the operation will be as follows:

And the answer is L. 1536, 6s. 6½d.

129. Ex. 2. If the interest were convertible into principal every half-year, the operation, according to No. 117, would be thus:

So that in this case the amount would be L. 1560, 2s. 9½d.

130. Ex. 3. Required the present value of an annuity of L. 250 for 30 years, reckoning interest at 5 per cent.

By the third formula in No. 116, the operation will be thus:

And the required value is L. 3843, 2s, 3¼d.

131. Ex. 4. The rest being still the same, if the annuity in the last example be payable half-yearly, in the formula of No. 122, $$\nu$$ will be equal to 1, $$\pi=2$$, and $$\mu=2$$; that formula will therefore become $$a \left ( \frac{1}{r}+\frac{1}{4} \right ) \cdot \left [1-(1+r)^{-n} \right ] = \text{V}$$; and the operation will be thus:

The value of the annuity will, therefore, in this case, be L. 3891, 3s.

132. Ex. 5. To what sum will an annuity of L. 120 for 20 years amount, when each payment is improved at compound interest, from the time of its becoming due until the expiration of the term; the rate of interest being 6 per cent.?

The operation by the second formula in No. 116 is thus:

And the amount required is L. 4414, 5s, 5d.

133. Ex. 6. The rest being the same as in the last example; if both the interest and the annuity be payable half-yearly, the amount will be determined by the second of the formulæ given in No. 127; which, in this case, will become $$\frac{120}{0{\cdot}6} \left [ (1{\cdot}03)^{40} - 1 \right ]$$, and the operation will be as follows:


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 entirely occupied by a bedstead frame that was being made up inside on account of the small size of the door.

This had to be removed before we could get in with the baggage at all. While this removal was being effected with as much damage to the house and the article as if it were a quarter-day affair in England, the other chief arrived. He had been sent for, being away down the river fishing when we arrived. I saw at once he was a very superior man to any of the chiefs I had yet met with. It was not his attire, remarkable though that was for the district, for it consisted of a gentleman's black frock-coat such as is given in the ivory bundle, a bright blue felt sombrero hat, an ample cloth of Boma check; but his face and general bearing was distinctive, and very powerful and intelligent; and I knew that Egaja, for good or bad, owed its name to this man, and not to the mere sensual, brutal-looking one. He was exceedingly courteous, ordering his people to bring me a stool and one for himself, and then a fly-whisk to battle with the evening cloud of sand-flies. I got Pagan to come and act as interpreter while the rest were stowing the baggage, &c. After compliments, "Tell the chief," I said, "that I hear this town of his is thief town."

"Better not, sir," says Pagan.

"Go on," said I, "or I'll tell him myself."

So Pagan did. It was a sad blow to the chief.

"Thief town, this highly respectable town of Egaja! a town whose moral conduct in all matters (Shedule) was an example to all towns, called a thief town! Oh, what a wicked world!"

I said it was; but I would reserve my opinion as to whether Egaja was a part of the wicked world or a star-like exception, until I had experienced it myself. We then discoursed on many matters, and I got a great deal of interesting fetish information out of the chief, which was valuable to me, because the whole of this district had not been in contact with white culture; and altogether I and the chief became great friends.

Just when I was going in to have my much-desired tea, he brought me his mother—an old lady, evidently very bright and able, but, poor woman, with the most disgusting hand and


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 Rh few weeks to Djerjinsky, who will introduce on the railways the methods of the Extraordinary Commission.

No better illustration of the Bolshevist policy towards labor unions could be offered than the picture given in the appeal to the labor world sent out towards the end of 1920 by the Moscow Printers' Union. We reproduce it here in full, with the exception of a few irrelevant sentences:

The Printers' Union of Moscow is the last trade union organization that has remained faithful to the principles of the independence of the trade unions and their separate existence as a class organization.

The Moscow Printers' Union defends these principles because a trade union organization can neither subject itself to nor permit itself to be absorbed by the organs of the government under the conditions now existing when private property is not abolished, when the state is the largest if not the only entrepreneur, when the purchase and sale of labor power is completely conserved—in a word, when labor's independent and free organs of defense and protection from the pressure of the other classes are indispensable.

In the domain of labor policy the practice of the Soviet government during the three years of its existence presents a striking example of this idea.

The Moscow Printers' Union believes that it is absolutely necessary to carry on a campaign of discussion amongst the proletariat against the political, economic, and administrative monstrosities practiced by the party in power.

For taking this position, for conducting this battle of principles, the Communists hate the printers in a manner surpassing even their hatred for the bourgeoisie and the landlords, at present non-existent in Russia.


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 100 The Communists extend one hand to such counter-revolutionary leaders as Broussiloff and Goutor, the Czar's chief generals, and with the other hand, loaded with all sorts of extraordinary laws against the socialists, they oppress with all their power a group of proletarians whose sole crime is that they have had the hardihood to refuse to accept the Communist maxims, presented to them ready-made by the party in power.

The fearlessness of this group, of proletarians reached an insupportable point for the masters of the situation when the representatives of the English workers came to Russia. On this occasion the printers organized a meeting in which hymns of praise in honor of the Communist party were not heard but where, on the other hand, the truth respecting actual conditions in Soviet Russia was openly proclaimed.

The Communists, outraged by this meeting, immediately began to persecute the printers. They shrank from no lie and no calumny in the attainment of their purpose, which was to manufacture a false public opinion preparatory to the vigorous punishment they had determined to inflict on the Printers' Union.

It was not difficult for the Communists to administer this punishment, for the printers, like all the other Russian workers, are deprived of the possibility of printing everything that displeases the Communists. For having printed the resolution adopted by the mass meeting in honor of the English comrades, Comrade Zavcharoff was arrested. The Printers' Union was interdicted from printing the stenographic report of the meeting. The independent unions were also deprived of their own papers.

The Communists decided to punish the printers severely, especially because it was impossible for them to oppose the opinion of the workers in other industrial branches to the opinions held by the printers. The party in power would without doubt have met with defeat in a free assembly where the two points of view—that


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1 Cor. 2:9-14. This is not understood by any one except he has the Holy Ghost. “Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for those that love Him. But God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.”

Many today apply this to eternity, to the other world; they think we never know these things until we get into another world. I am glad the scripture explains itself. “Eye hath not seen,” in the natural state. God hath—in the present—revealed unto us by His Spirit. How? By His Spirit, in this world. “The Spirit searcheth all things; yea, the deep things of God.”

I desire to call your attention, especially, to the 14th verse. “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness to him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”

The natural man cannot understand this wonderful scripture. There are two classes of men; the spiritual man and the natural man. The natural man is in the “gall of bitterness”; the spiritual man is born of God and walks in the Spirit; he gets out into the deep. The natural man can never discern spiritual things, never hear and understand the work of the Lord; these things pass all human understanding. The wisdom of this world, intellect and science, can never understand the spiritual things of God.

There are two kinds of wisdom; the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. The wisdom from above, the natural man cannot comprehend; it never enters his imagination to think of the things God hath prepared for those who love Him.

He hath prepared already, and He hath revealed them to us by His Spirit. His Spirit lets us down into the deep things, even the deep things of God. This is what we preach, what we practice, and what we stand on. The work of the Spirit is

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 arm I have ever seen. I am ashamed to say I came very near being sympathetically sick in the African manner on the spot. I felt I could not attend to it, and have my tea afterwards, so I directed one of the canoe-shaped little tubs, used for beating up the manioc in, to be brought and filled with hot water, and then putting into it a heavy dose of Condy's fluid, I made her sit down and lay the whole arm in it, and went and had my tea. As soon as I had done I went outside, and getting some of the many surrounding ladies to hold bush-lights, I examined the case. The whole hand was a mass of yellow pus, streaked with sanies, large ulcers were burrowing into the fore-arm, while in the arm-pit was a big abscess. I opened the abscess at once, and then the old lady frightened me nearly out of my wits by gently subsiding, I thought dying, but I soon found out merely going to sleep. I then washed the abscess well out, and having got a lot of baked plantains, I made a big poultice of them, mixed with boiling water and more Condy in the tub, and laid her arm right in this; and propping her up all round and covering her over with cloths I requisitioned from her son, I left her to have her nap while I went into the history of the case, which was that some forty-eight hours ago she had been wading along the bank, catching crawfish, and had been stung by "a fish like a snake"; so I presume the ulcers were an old-standing palaver. The hand had been a good deal torn by the creature, and the pain and swelling had been so great she had not had a minute's sleep since. As soon as the poultice got chilled I took her arm out and cleaned it again, and wound it round with dressing, and had her ladyship carried bodily, still asleep, into her hut, and after rousing her up, giving her a dose of that fine preparation, ''pil. crotonis cum hydrargi'', saw her tucked up on her own plank bedstead for the night, sound asleep again. The chief was very anxious to have some pills too; so I gave him some, with firm injunctions only to take one at the first time. I knew that that one would teach him not to take more than one for ever after, better than I could do if I talked from June to January. Then all the afflicted of Egaja turned up, and wanted medical advice. There was evidently a good stiff epidemic of the yaws about; lots of cases of dūm with the


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 Beauty rather than terror is the keynote of Dunsany’s work. He loves the vivid green of jade and of copper domes, and the delicate flush of sunset on the ivory minarets of impossible dream-cities. Humour and irony, too, are often present to impart a gentle cynicism and modify what might otherwise possess a naive intensity. Nevertheless, as is inevitable in a master of triumphant unreality, there are occasional touches of cosmic fright which come well within the authentic tradition. Dunsany loves to hint slyly and adroitly of monstrous things and incredible dooms, as one hints in a fairy tale. In The Book Of Wonder we read of Hlo-Hlo, the gigantic spider-idol which does not always stay at home; of what the Sphinx feared in the forest; of Slith, the thief who jumps over the edge of the world after seeing a certain light lit and knowing who lit it; of the anthropophagous Gibbelins, who inhabit an evil tower and guard a treasure; of the Gnoles, who live in the forest and from whom it is not well to steal; of the City of Never, and the eyes that watch in the Under Pits; and of kindred things of darkness. A Dreamer’s Tales tells of the mystery that sent forth all men from Bethmoora in the desert; of the vast gate of Perdondaris, that was carved from a single piece of ivory; and of the voyage of poor old Bill, whose captain cursed the crew and paid calls on nasty-looking isles new-risen from the sea, with low thatched cottages having evil, obscure windows.

Many of Dunsany’s short plays are replete with spectral fear. In The Gods Of The Mountain seven beggars impersonate the seven green idols on a distant hill, and enjoy ease and honour in a city of worshippers until they hear that the real idols are missing from their wonted seats. A very ungainly sight in the dusk is reported to them—“rock should not walk in the evening”—and at last, as they sit awaiting the arrival of a troop of dancers, they note that the approaching footsteps are heavier than those of good dancers ought to be. Then things ensue, and in the end the presumptuous blasphemers are turned to green jade statues by the very walking statues whose sanctity they outraged. But mere plot is the very least merit of this marvellously effective play. The incidents and developments are those of a supreme master, so that the whole forms one of the most important contributions of the present age not only to drama, but to literature in general. A Night At An Inn tells of four thieves who have stolen the emerald eye of Klesh, a monstrous Hindoo god. They lure to their room and succeed in slaying the three priestly avengers who are on their track, but in the night Klesh comes gropingly for his eye; and having gained it and departed, calls each of the despoilers out into the darkness for an unnamed punishment. In The Laughter Of The Gods there is a doomed city at the jungle’s edge, and a ghostly lutanist heard only by those about to die; (cf. Alice’s spectral harpsichord in Hawthorne’s House Of The Seven Gables) whilst The Queen’s Enemies retells the anecdote of Herodotus in which a vengeful princess invites her foes to a subterranean banquet and lets in the Nile to drown them.

But no amount of mere description can convey more than a fraction of Lord Dunsany’s pervasive charm. His prismatic cities and unheard-of rites are touched with a sureness which only mastery can engender, and we thrill with a sense of actual participation in his secret mysteries. To the truly imaginative he is a talisman and a key unlocking rich storehouses of dream and fragmentary memory; so that we may think of him not only as a poet, but as one who makes each reader a poet as well.

At the opposite pole of genius from Lord Dunsany, and gifted with an almost diabolic power of calling horror by gentle steps from the midst of prosaic daily life, is the scholarly Montague Rhodes James, Provost of Eton College, antiquary of note, and recognised authority on mediæval manuscripts and cathedral history. Dr. James, long fond of telling spectral tales at Christmastide, has become by slow degrees a literary weird fictionist of the very first rank; and has developed a distinctive style and method likely to serve as models for an enduring line of disciples.

The art of Dr. James is by no means haphazard, and in the preface to one of his collections he has formulated three very

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, was voted the freedom of the City of London, while within the House of Commons he was supported by members as respectable as Wilberforce, at the height of his renown, and Althorp, at the beginning of his career. Three years later, at the trial of Leigh Hunt for libelling the Prince Regent, Brougham defended the accused with such sympathetic warmth that Chief Justice Ellenborough, in summing up, declared that the eminent advocate "had inoculated himself with all the poison and mischief which the libel was calculated to effect."

The consequence of this combination of influences, the doctrine first imported from France, the public distress and the feeling inspired by some of the royal princes was that when the war was ended, near the close of the long reign of George III., a contemporary historian, reviewing the situation, avowed with regret that in all ranks of society there was "scarcely a company in which certain illustrious personages were mentioned without their names being degraded by some disrespectful or reproachful epithet, the loyalty of the most loyal having become a very cool and calculating sentiment." Impartial observers began, with fear, to wonder whether the ancient monarchy of England, which had been renewed at the last English Revolution without a symptom of republicanism manifesting itself in the land, might not go the way of the old regime in France.

These fears were rendered acute by the death of the


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120 120 THE KING OF SCHNORRERS.

Treasurer, guffawing grimly. He sat opposite Manasseh, and next to the Chancellor.

"Is it fines you are thinking of?" said Manasseh with a scornful glance across the table. " Very well, fine me — if you can afford it. You know that I am a student, a son of the Law, who has no resources but what you allow him. If you care to pay this fine it is your affair. There is always room in the poor-box. I am always glad to hear of fines. You had better make up your mind to the inevitable, gentlemen. Have I not had to do it? There is no Ascama to prevent my son-in-law having all the usual privileges — in fact, it was to ask that he might receive the bridegroom's call to the Law on the Sabbath before his marriage that I really came. By Section III., Paragraph I., you are empowered to admit any person about to marry the daughter of a Yahid." Again the sonorous Portuguese rang out, thrilling the Councillors with all that quintessential awfulness of ancient statutes in a tongue not understood. It was not till a quarter of a century later that the Ascamot were translated into English, and from that moment their authority was doomed.

The Chancellor was the first to recover from the quota- tion. Daily contact with these archaic sanctities had dulled his awe, and the President's impotent irritation spurred him to action.

" But you are not a Yahid," he said quietly. " By Para- graph V. of the same section, any one whose name appears on the Charity List ceases to be a Yahid."

" And a vastly proper law," said Manasseh with irony. " Everybody may vote but the Schnorrer." And, ignoring the Chancellor's point at great length, he remarked con- fidentially to the Chief of the Elders, at whose elbow he was still encamped, " It is curious how few of your Elders


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121 THE KING OF SCHNORRERS. 121

perceive that those who take the charity are the pillars of the Synagogue. What keeps your community together? Fines. What ensures respect for your constitution? Fines. What makes every man do his duty ? Fines. What rules this very Mahamad ? Fines. And it is the poor who pro- vide an outlet for all these moneys. Egad, do you think your members would for a moment tolerate your penalties, if they did not know the money was laid out in 'good deeds ' ? Charity is the salt of riches, says the Talmud, and, indeed, it is the salt that preserves your community."

" Have done, sir, have done ! " shouted the President, losing all regard for those grave amenities of the ancient Council Chamber which Manasseh did his best to maintain. " Do you forget to whom you are talking? "

" I am talking to the Chief of the Elders," said Manasseh in a wounded tone, " but if you would like me to address myself to you — " and wheeling round the Chief of the Elders, he landed his chair next to the President's.

" Silence, fellow ! " thundered the President, shrinking spasmodically from his confidential contact. " You have no right to a voice at all ; as the Chancellor has reminded us, you are not even a Yahid, a congregant."

"Then the laws do not apply to me," retorted the beggar quietly. " It is only the Yahid who is privileged to do this, who is prohibited from doing that. No Ascama mentions the Schnorrer, or gives you any authority over him."

" On the contrary," said the Chancellor, seeing the Presi- dent disconcerted again, " he is bound to attend the week- day services. But this man hardly ever does, sir." " I never do," corrected Manasseh, with touching sadness. " That is another of the privileges I have to forego in order to take your charity ; I cannot risk appearing to my Maker in the light of a mercenary."


text: Land Protection Plan - Wyoming Toad Conservation Area/Chapter 2—Area Description and Resources


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122 122 THE KING OF SCHNORRERS.

" And what prevents you taking your turn in the grave- yard watches?" sneered the Chancellor.

The antagonists were now close together, one on either side of the President of the Mahamad, who was wedged between the two bobbing, quarrelling figures, his complexion altering momently for the blacker, and his fingers working nervously.

"What prevents me?" replied Manasseh. " My age. It would be a sin against heaven to spend a night in the cemetery. If the body-snatchers did come they might find a corpse to their hand in the watch-tower. But I do my duty — I always pay a substitute."

" No doubt," said the Treasurer. " I remember your asking me for the money to keep an old man out of the cemetery. Now I see what you meant."

"Yes," began two others, " and I — "

" Order, gentlemen, order," interrupted the President desperately, for the afternoon was flitting, the sun was set- ting, and the shadows of twilight were falling. "You must not argue with the man. Hark you, my fine fellow, we re- fuse to sanction this marriage ; it shall not be performed by our ministers, nor can we dream of admitting your son-in- law as a Yahid."

"Then admit him on your Charity List," said Manasseh.

" We are more likely to strike you off! And, by gad ! " cried the President, tattooing on the table with his whole fist, " if you don't stop this scandal instanter, we will send you howling."

" Is it excommunication you threaten ? " said Manasseh, using to his feet. There was a menacing glitter in his eye.

" This scandal must be stopped," repeated the President, agitatedly rising in involuntary imitation.

" Any member of the Mahamad could stop it in a twink-