Re-Views of the Literary History of Canada

Re-Views of the Literary History of Canada

By J.D. Logan

From The Canadian Magazine, December 1916

Essay II – Canadian Fictionists and other Creative Prose Writers

It is unfortunate that hitherto Canadian verse has occupied the centre of the critical stage and has had the spotlight of sympathetic criticism fo­cused upon it. Hardly has Canadian fiction and imaginative prose in other genres had even the fringes of the limelight of appreciative criticism thrown upon its evolution and quali­ties. Mr. Marquis has devoted a con­siderable section of his monograph to a more or less sketchy, though con­structive, review of Canadian fiction. As a bird’s-eye view of the history of Canadian fiction, and as a succinct fresh estimate of its literary distinc­tion and value, his review is inform­ing and critically sane. But even Mr. Marquis hastens to state that “the chief glory of Canadian literature is its poetry”. The truth is that Cana­dian fiction, taken in the large to in­clude such imaginative genres as novels, romances, tales, prose idyls, animal stories, and creative comedy or humour, has a more distinctively nativistic origin and history, and a more distinctively national note, than has Canadian poetry. Here I may not wait to explain in this essay how the spotlight appreciative criticism and of consequent fame has been de­flected from Canadian fiction or ima­ginative prose to Canadian poetry. I need all the available space to pre­sent fresh constructive views of Cana­dian imaginative prose, and thus to signalize its real glory—which, let me add, only in fine craftsmanship and sustained inspiration is, at its best, less impressive, if less conspicuous, than the glory of Canadian poetry. Here, however, before passing, I may say that the critical neglect of Canadian imaginative prose has been due chiefly to two causes. Poetry is intrinsically a more in­viting and engaging literary species than is prose for critical treatment and appreciation. Aside from that, foreign, as well as native-born, critics of Canadian literature have had no really regardful eye for the historic process. They were concerned only with individuals and literary works, as if both were absolutely discrete entities that simply happened. Their criticisms were merely private appre­ciations or personal opinions. Who­ever, then, considers Canadian fiction and other imaginative prose genres strictly with his eye on the historic process in them, disclosing their be­ginnings and evolution, will do Cana­dian literature and literary criticism a genuine service. The present essay attempts such a service.

In the history of Canadian fiction and other imaginative prose genres I observe a Pioneer, Colonial, or Pre-Confederation period, and a strictly Canadian, or Post-Confederation period; and in the latter, at least so far as the novel and the romance are con­cerned, first, a tentative period, and, secondly, a constructive, systematic, or renaissance period. As a ready aid to recalling important persons and dates in a historico-critical review of the creative prose writers of Canada,

I note that Canadian nativistic fic­tion began virtually one hundred years after the first genuine work of English fiction had appeared, and that the original creators of fiction, both in England and in Canada, bore the same patronymic, or family name —Richardson. In 1740 Samuel Rich­ardson published his “Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded”. It is the first specimen in English of the authentic novel; for though composed in the form of letters, there runs through the epistles a skilfully constructed and coherent plot; and plot is essential to the authentic novel. In 1832 Major John Richardson, born near Niagara Falls, published his “Wacousta; or, The Prophecy”, and, in 1840, its sequel, “The Canadian Brothers; or, The Prophecy Fulfilled”. They are authentic novels of the romantic type, having, as they do, respectably constructed plots, and being filled with the romance of the passion of love, heightened with thrilling adven­ture and incident, and coloured with pictures of aboriginal character and life against a background of nature in the wild. We may, then, put it down in our mental note-book that the first nativistic fiction, having the authentic Canadian note and having the right to be included by the liter­ary historian and critic in the corpus of Canadian literature as such, ap­peared considerably prior to Confed­eration.

The literary annalist, no doubt, would date the beginning of fiction in Canada with the appearance of “The History of Emily Montague” in 1769, a romance written and published by Mrs. Frances Brooke, wife of Rev. John Brooke, Chaplain of the British Forces at Quebec under the Carleton regime. Apart from its mat­ter, which is lively in movement and made sprightly with engaging characterization and with the colour of social life and of wild nature during the decade following the Fall of Que­bec, Mrs. Brooke’s novel is imitative, being written in the epistolary man­ner of Samuel Richardson. While, in­deed, it affords pleasurable reading, “The History of Emily Montague” is to be valued rather as a social and historical document, in as much as it faithfully depicts the customs and manners of the times in British North America after the conquest of the French. As literature and as history the book is strictly Colonial. There were other Colonial writers of ima­ginative prose. They are, however, to be accepted as quasi-fictionists; for they had no genius for invention, characterization, and realistic nature-painting in words. Including Mrs. Brooke, all the writers of fiction in Canada, preceding John Richardson, were, as Mr. Marquis phrases it, “birds of passage”, and have no right to be considered as producers of a Canadian nativistic fiction. As “birds of passage”, they have merely a right to have their existence and work noted in an inclusive Literary History of Canada.

Now, as Samuel Richardson was the creator of the English novel as such, that is, of fiction with plot, and as Sir Walter Scott was the creator of the English historical novel or ro­mance, so James Fenimore Cooper was the creator of the distinctively American historical romance, and John Richardson was the creator of the distinctively Canadian historical romance. Moreover, all four were equally original, independent, and in­dividual; Samuel Richardson’s novels were a pure invention in literary species; Scott's historical romances were also a pure invention in literary species; and as Scott had no influence on the inspiration and the methods of Cooper, so, as 1 shall show, con­trary to received opinion, Cooper had no influence on the inspiration and the methods of John Richardson. Un­less a constructive critic can show the originality and independence of John Richardson as a literary creator, the critic cannot mark a true beginning of Canadian nativistic fiction, trace an evolution in it, estimate its liter­ary value, fix its place in the corpus of English, as well as Canadian lit­erature, and thus disclose its relative distinction and glory when compared with British and American fiction, or when, on the other hand, compared with Canadian nativistic poetry. Let us, then, consider the formative in­fluences which shaped and inspired the genius of John Richardson, the first Canadian novelist as such, the creator of the Canadian nativistic his­torical romance.

Richardson was born near Niagara Palls in 1796 (seven years after Coop­er) and spent his childhood and early adolescent days till he was sixteen years of age, that is, up to the out­break of the War of 1812, in the vicin­ity of the Falls and of Detroit. On the outbreak of the war, he enlisted in Brock’s army. Up to that time, young Richardson, during his most impressionable and receptive years, was entertained by his grandparents and parents with tales of Pontiac’s siege of Detroit, and stories of the thrilling and romantic and tragic events in the history of the Niagara and Detroit districts—events which are surely amongst the most enthral­ling and stirring in the vividly ro­mantic history of Canada and the United States. These early days of Richardson’s were thus replete with rare and unique formative influences; they created in him the love of romance, of the heroic past of his own country, and later, when he came to write, afforded him the inspiration and the material really to write au­thentic Canadian historical novels or romances.

Two other formative influences, besides those exercised over his heart and imagination by his grandparents and parents, have been noted by cer­tain critics as determining Richard­son’s genius, inspiration, and literary methods. In the War of 1812 he had fought side by side with the noble Indian warrior Tecumseh. Further, on his own confession, he had, as he puts it, “absolutely devoured three times” Cooper's Indian romance, “The Last of the Mohicans”. Some critics, therefore, hold that Richardson was a mere imitator of Cooper: that, first, he studied the mind and ways of In­dians at second-hand in the pages of Cooper’s romance, and that, secondly, he acquired the art of writing fiction from Cooper’s volume. There is not any real ground for such beliefs. Mr. Marquis rightly holds that as a his­torical romancer Richardson was orig­inal and independent. I hold the same belief, but I do so for reasons which differ from those that Mr. Marquis and others advance. On the first count, that Richardson got his know­ledge of Indians at second-hand from Coopers pages, I submit that such an opinion requires an absurd anachron­ism to make it possible and true. The War of 1812. during which Richard­son fought side by side with Tecum­seh, began fourteen years before the publication of “The Last of the Mo­hicans”, (1826), or long before Rich­ardson could have read a page of Cooper. Richardson’s genius was ro­mantically formed in his early days; and during his association with Te­cumseh he came to know Indian psychology and character at first­hand. That is indisputable. Again, on the second count, that Richardson acquired the art of novel-writing from Cooper, I submit that the Canadian romancer had learned the art of novel-writing, and had published novels some years before be published “Wacousta”. There was, for instance, his “Ecarte; or, The Salons of Paris”, published in 1828. Rut this is a sort of demi-monde novel, dealing with the evils of gambling, and, of course, far from the romantic passion, thrilling incident, and all the colour of life and nature that appear in Richardson’s “Wacousta” and “The Canadian Bro­thers”. Possibly Richardson may have got from his reading of Cooper some “coaching” in the mere mechanics of writing romance. Yet, when we com­pare the diction, sentential structure, descriptive epithets and imagery, and the general style of the two romancers, Richardson, if not a better plot-mak­er than Cooper, is the superior crafts­man and stylist, a fact which is proof presumptive that the Canadian romanancer developed independently his own mechanics of literary composi­tion. Finally, in the fine art of char­acter-drawing, Richardson is more veracious and incisive than Cooper. When we compare the American novelist’s characters with those of the Canadian, we find that Cooper’s are more like “studies” from books than pictures drawn from real life, where­as Richardson’s Indians are very near to the real Indian, very life-like: the heroic in them is heroic enough, that is to say, human and natural. Rich­ardson’s Indian characters, then, are original creations — absolutely his own. Also his own are the other char­acters (soldiers, fur-traders, French Canadians, etc.), the plots, all the stirring incidents and the colour of the Canadian background from na­ture. Of his romances, “Wacousta” and “The Canadian Brothers”, the only aesthetic criticisms worth while making are that not infrequently Richardson forces the dramatic in them into the melo-dramatic, that he puts into the mouths of his charac­ters utterances which are unnatural or not in keeping with the position and circumstances of the speakers, and that he suits his historical facts to his own purposes.

In sum, then, since Richardson had his genius romantically formed, and had engaged in the art of fiction, long before he had read Cooper, the only possible influence Cooper could have had on Richardson was to incite him to emulate the American romancer. Emulation, incited by a contempor­ary author, does not imply imitation, and has no significance in original literary creation. Taken by and large, John Richardson was the first creator of Canadian nativistic fiction as such. He had first-rate powers of invention, was a respectable craftsman, and pro­duced at least two original romances that are worthy to be included in the corpus of general English literature, and to have a distinctive niche in the corpus of Canadian nativistic litera­ture.

Contemporary with Richardson, a man of greater creative genius and versatility, who, in fact, became the foremost native-born writer of his time in British North America, gave to the world a species of the fiction of characterization and of the critic­ism of society and manners that for originality and enduring appeal to all classes is the most remarkable pro­duced by a Canadian man of letters, and amongst the most remarkable produced by any modern man of let­ters as such. This man was Thomas Chandler Haliburton, who, if he did not absolutely create a species of fic­tion without plot interest, at least gave it new form and potency, as he did, in those ingenious volumes which have Sam Slick as their chief inspirer and central character. Though born in Nova Scotia, Haliburton’s genius was indigenous, not so much to Nova Scotia or to Canada, as to the world; and the fiction he produced belongs, not so much to Canadian nativistic literature and to general English lit­erature, as to world literature.

It is as a systematic creative humourist, embracing, as it were, in one genius the gifts of Benjamin Frank­lin, Charles Dickens, Artemas Ward, Josh Billings, and Mark Twain, that Haliburton has won a unique and permanent place in Canadian, Eng­lish, and world literature. This is the only angle from which it is worth while for genuine criticism to view and estimate the genius and creative prose of Haliburton. Those who deal in literary dominoes, and who call such diversion criticism, may pother with the fact that Longfellow, by his own confession, actually did read Haliburton’s account of the expulsion of the Acadians, or with the possi­bility that Parkman may have read the whole of Haliburton’s "Historical anti Statistical Account of Nova Sco­tia”. Longfellow and Parkman mere­ly turned to Haliburton, just as Shakespeare, Scott, and Tennyson turned to Plutarch, the Chroniclers, and the “Morte d’Arthur”, as “sources” of material for plays, ro­mances. and idyls; and the “influence” of Haliburton on the creative genius and invention of the American poet and historian was as insignificant as that of the author of the “Morte d’Arthur” on the poetic invention of Tennyson. But it is very highly sig­nificant that Haliburton was the author of a distinct—and alas! ex­tinct—type of creative comedy or humour, that he was the foremost sys­tematic humourist of his time on the North American continent, that he was in his day the supreme aphorist and epigrammatist of the English­speaking peoples, and that his wit and wisdom remain part of the warp and woof of modern world literature. In comic character-drawing Haliburton takes a place beside Cervantes, Dic­kens, Daudet, and Mark Twain. His Sam Slick, and even his minor char­acters, are amongst the best imagina­tive creations of modern fiction, Sam Slick himself being as unique—in­dividual, real, human, and fascinating —as Don Quixote, Pickwick, Tartaran or Huckleberry Finn, while being distinguishable from these others by aphoristic speech that in form is bril­liant wit and humour, but that in substance is enduring wisdom.

Now, it is this abiding philosophical quality of Haliburton’s wit and hu­mour, as we get it chiefly in the ut­terances of Sam Slick, that construc­tive criticism seizes on to remove the superstition which Artemns Ward first created by declaring that Haliburton was “the founder of the Am­erican school of humour”, and which so acute and well-informed a Cana­dian critic as Mr. Marquis has gone to pains to perpetuate by submitting that “American humour received its first impulse from ‘Sam Slick’; and Haliburton was, moreover, the first writer to use the American dialect in literature. Artemas Ward, Josh Bill­ing and Mark Twain are, in a way, mere imitators of Haliburton, and he is their superior”. There is not a single grain of truth in any of these claims, except possibly that Ward, Billings and Twain imitated or adopt­ed Haliburton’s so-called American dialect, if a manufactured potpourri of Yankee localisms and slang and mis-spelled diction can justly be call­ed “the American dialect”. Haliburton created the shrewd Yankee pedlar and humourist, Sam Slick, and then put him as a “character”, and his wit and humour, uttered in a dialect which virtually existed in New Eng­land, into literature. That is all Hali­burton ever had to do with American humour. He certainly was not the founder or the father of the Ameri­can school of humour. The real “father” of American humour—that is, the humour of sheer exaggerated nonsense, having on the face of it seriousness and veracity—was Ben­jamin Franklin who in 1765, or thirty years before Haliburton was born, produced the first example of what is popularly meant by American hu­mour. The example is to be found in a letter by Franklin to one of the eighteenth century London news­papers to offset the idiotic views which Englishmen then held about the British colonies, including Can­ada, in America. I quote from the letter in part:

“I beg to say that all the articles of news that seem improbable are not mere inventions. The very tails of the Ameri­can sheep are so laden with wool that each has a little car or wagon on four little wheels to support and keep it from trailing on the ground. Would they caulk their ships, would they even litter their horses with wool, if it were not both plenty and cheap. . . . Their engaging three hundred silk throwsters here in one week for New York was treated as a fable, because, forsooth, they have ‘no silk there to throw’. Those who make this objection, perhaps do not know that at the same time the agents from the King of Spain were at Quebec to contract for one thousand pieces of cannon to be made there for the fortification of Mexico. . . . And yet all this is as certainly true, as the account said to be from Quebec, in all the papers last week, that the inhabitants of Canada are making preparations for a cod and whale fishery ‘this summer in the Upper Lakes'. Ignorant people may object that the Upper Lakes are fresh, and that cod and whales are salt water fish; but let them know, sir, that cod, like other fish when attacked by their enemies, fly into any water where they can be safest; that whales when they have a mind to eat cod, pursue them wherever they fly; and that the grand leap of the whale in the chase up the Falls of Niagara is esteemed by all who have seen it as one of the finest spectacles in nature.”

That was written by Franklin in the eighteenth century, and it is writ­ten in the newspaper style of Addi­son. Yet any well-read student of the history of literature who did not recognize the authorship would likely credit it to Mark Twain. But Haliburton, Ward and Billings wrote their humour in a specious or perverted dialect. How, then, can it be said, with any plausibility, that Haliburton “fathered” or “gave impulse” to American humour? Moreover, Frank­lin began early the publication of “Poor Richard’s Almanac,” a quasi-literary periodical which gave vogue in America to that sort of aphoristic or humorous wisdom which is also uttered by Haliburton’s chief char­acter, Sam Slick. It is more than probable that Haliburton had read “Poor Richard”. Are we to conclude that Franklin is the literary “father” of Haliburton as a humourist and aphorist, and that Sam Slick’s epi­grams are an imitation of “Poor Rich­ard’s” bits of practical wisdom? There is, in fact, no plausibility in either view that Haliburton is the “father” of American humour or that Franklin is the “father” of Haliburtonian; that is, Canadian humour. Possibly Haliburton got some “coach­ing” in the methods of humour from Franklin.

Still, Haliburton created Canadian nativistic humour—and has left no successors. He was the first systema­tic humourist of the Provinces that have become the Dominion of Can­ada—original in time and original in inventing the humorous character, Sam Slick, and in being the first to use the so-called American dialect as speech for wit and humour, and to employ wit, wisdom and kindly sa­tire—not, note, exaggerated nonsense after the American manner—as hu­mour. And so Thomas Chandler Haliburton, a native son of Nova Scotia, appears as the foremost man of letters of the Colonial Canadian period who had first-rate creative genius and who has won a unique and permanent place, not only in Canadian and in English literature, but also in world literature. He is the only native-born Canadian writer to whom we can justly apply the epi­thet “great”. As Mr. Marquis puts it: “Of him we can say, as Ben John­son said of Shakespeare—‘He is not of an age, but for all time’ ”.

After Richardson and Haliburton there were no Colonial or Pre-Confed­eration fictionists of any constructive significance in Canadian nativistic letters. The first stage of the new constructive period in Canadian fic­tion began with William Kirby’s his­torical romance, “The Golden Dog” (“Le Chien d’Or”), published in 1877, that is, ten years after Confed­eration, or twenty years before the publication of Roberts’s “In Divers Tones”, which inaugurated the First Renaissance in Canadian nativistic and national poetry. It may be ob­jected that because Kirby was born in England, he is not rightfully to be regarded as a Canadian. He came, however, to Canada when he was but fifteen years of age, was resident in Canada for forty-five years before he produced and published “The Golden Dog”, and chose the theme, setting, and colour of his romance from Cana­dian history and social life. Essen­tially, therefore, Kirby was a genuine Canadian man of letters. But it is not aesthetically or as a work of artis­tic fiction that Kirby’s romance “The Golden Dog” is important, but in its constructive and inspirational influ­ence on other Canadian fictionists. In that regard it is more important than Richardson’s “Wacousta”, and better entitled than Richardson’s romance to a permanent place in the corpus of Canadian literature. In “The Golden Dog” Kirby went back for his in­spiration to the romantic and heroic past of Canada, and thus brought to the notice of future fictionists the wealth of novelistic material that lay in the unknown or the forgotten Can­adian past. In short., Kirby and “The Golden Dog” were the literary pro­genitors of a series of romances that have a Canadian historical basis and Canadian incident and colour. While his own historical romance was a ten­tative production, that is, not succeed­ed by other romances on Kirby’s part, “The Golden Dog” was, as it were, the harbinger of the spring and summer that were to be in Canadian nativistic and national fiction.

The systematic Renaissance in the scope, themes and technic of Cana­dian fiction and other imaginative prose began about a decade after the Renaissance in Canadian poetry, and resulted in an impressive body of Canadian nativistic fiction in all of the chief genres—novels, romances, tales, prose idyls, animal stories and social satire and humour. Here I may merely mention the most significant names in the Renaissance period of Canadian fiction. I lead off with Miss Marshall Saunders, who in 1889 pub­lished her “My Spanish Sailor”, whereas Mr. Marquis gives preference to Sir Gilbert Parker and his “Pierre and His People”, published in 1890. Parker is indubitably the most emin­ent of Canadian fictionists, but in scope he tends to be Imperial, rather than Canadian, even in those novels which have a Canadian historical basis, setting and colour, as, for in­stance, in his “The Seats of the Mighty” (1896). Miss Saunders is pervasively Canadian, quite as inven­tive as Parker, and technically a bet­ter craftsman than he. I might have led off with Mr. W. D. Lighthall’s “The Young Seigneur”, published in 1888, were it not that this work is a socio-political study and not a genu­ine novel. In romantic fiction of the Renaissance period, the salient names, then, are Miss Saunders, Sir Gilbert Parker, Charles G. D. Roberts, Wil­fred Campbell, Duncan Campbell Scott, Charles W. Gordon (Ralph Connor), Edward W. Thomson, J. Macdonald Oxley, W. A. Fraser, Mrs. Grace Dean MacLeod Rogers, Miss Alice Jones, Mrs. Carleton Jones, Norman Duncan, and Arthur String­er; and beginning again with Lucy M. Montgomery (Mrs. Ewan Mac­Donald), the still later generation of Canadian fictionists, as, for instance, Alan Sullivan, Peter MacFarlanc, Mrs. Isabel Ecclestone MacKay, Mrs. Virna Sheard, the really creative art­ist amongst them all being the author of “Anne of Green Gables”. In an­other genre of fiction, namely, social satire and humour, Sara Jeanette Duncan (Mrs. Cotes), stands by her­self as the foremost Canadian woman of letters in her special field, just as Miss Saunders stands by herself in the fiction of the humanitarian ani­mal story, as Ernest Thompson-Seton and C. G. D. Roberts remain sui gen­eris in the fiction of the psychological animal story, and as Stephen Leacock remains alone in creative literary comedy or humour and wit. All the foregoing Canadian fictionists, save “Ralph Connor”, whatever be the genre they have essayed, have been moved to write by artistic inspiration and aims, and, on the whole, have suc­ceeded admirably. Some of them have won world-wide reputation for first-rate invention, enlivening incident and colourization, and incisive char­acterization; others have achieved international reputation; and others are on the way to appreciation wider than what they receive in their own coun­try. Taken all in all, they have creat­ed a very respectable body of fiction and imaginative prose, quite worthy, if it does not shine with equal glory, to have an honourable place beside the body of Canadian creative poetry.

In this essay I have applied the historico-critical method to the appreciation and evaluation of Canadian nativistic and national fiction or imaginative prose, signalizing only constructive authors and movements. From Richardson and Haliburton to Kirby, and from Kirby to Miss Saun­ders and Sir Gilbert Parker, and then onwards to Lucy M. Montgomery and her confreres or contemporaries we have noted a genuine evolution in lit­erary species and eventually the sys­tematic production of a body of prose that has aesthetic beauty or dignity, artistic structure, and imaginative and spiritual appeal. Some of it will have a permanent place only in Cana­dian literature; some of it is worthy to be included, as it is, in the general corpus of English literature; and all the best of it, despite the contempt of those myopic critics who find lit­erature only in antique tomes and lit­erary beauties only in the supreme masters, is genuine literature. I hold to that—unswervingly.

Carving a Cocoa-nut

Carving a Cocoa-nut (1877) Cornhill Magazine

THE MILK IN THE COCOA-NUT.

By GRANT ALLEN.

FOR many centuries the occult problem how to account for the milk in the cocoa-nut has awakened the profoundest interest alike of ingenious infancy and of maturer scientific age. Though it can not be truthfully affirmed of it, as of the cosmogony or creation of the world, in "The Vicar of Wakefield," that it "has puzzled the philosophers of all ages" (for Sanchoniathon was certainly ignorant of the very existence of that delicious juice, and Manetho doubtless went to his grave without ever having tasted it fresh from the nut under a tropical veranda), yet it may be safely asserted that for the last three hundred years the philosopher who has not at some time or other of his life meditated upon that abstruse question, is unworthy of such an exalted name. The cosmogony and the milk in the cocoa-nut are, however, a great deal closer together in thought than Sanchoniathon or Manetho, or the rogue who quoted them so glibly, is ever at all likely, in his wildest moments, to have imagined.

The cocoa-nut, in fact, is a subject well deserving of the most sympathetic treatment at the gentle hands of grateful humanity. No other plant is useful to us in so many diverse and remarkable manners. It has been truly said of that friend of man, the domestic pig, that he is all good, from the end of his snout to the tip of his tail; but even the pig, though he furnishes us with so many necessaries or luxuries—from tooth-brushes to sausages, from ham to lard, from pepsine-wine to pork pies—does not nearly approach, in the multiplicity and variety of his virtues, the all-sufficing and world-supplying cocoa-nut. A Chinese proverb says that there are as many useful properties in the cocoa-nut palm as there are days in the year; and a Polynesian saying tells us that the man who plants a cocoa-nut plants meat and drink, hearth and home, vessels and clothing, for himself and his children after him. Like the great Mr. Whiteley, the invaluable palm-tree might modestly advertise itself as a universal provider. The solid part of the nut supplies food almost alone to thousands of people daily, and the milk serves them for drink, thus acting as an efficient filter to the water absorbed by the roots in the most polluted or malarious regions. If you tap the flower-stalk you get a sweet juice, which can be boiled down into the peculiar sugar called (in the charming dialect of commerce) jaggery; or it can be fermented into a very nasty spirit known as palm-wine, toddy, or arrack; or it can be mixed with bitter herbs and roots to make that delectable compound "native beer." If you squeeze the dry nut you get cocoa-nut oil, which is as good as lard for frying when fresh, and is "an excellent substitute for butter at breakfast," on tropical tables. Under the mysterious name of copra (which most of us have seen with awe described in the market reports as "firm" or "weak," "receding" or "steady") it forms the main or only export of many oceanic islands, and is largely imported into this realm of England, where the thicker portion is called stearine, and used for making sundry candles with fanciful names, while the clear oil is employed for burning in ordinary lamps. In the process of purification, it yields glycerine; and it enters largely into the manufacture of most better-class soaps. The fiber that surrounds the nut makes up the other mysterious article of commerce known as coir, which is twisted into stout ropes, or woven into cocoa-nut matting and ordinary door-mats. Brushes and brooms are also made of it, and it is used, not always in the most honest fashion, in place of real horse-hair, in stuffing cushions. The shell, cut in half, supplies good cups, and is artistically carved by the Polynesians, Japanese, Hindoos, and other benighted heathen, who have not yet learned the true methods of civilized machine-made shoddy manufacture. The leaves serve as excellent thatch; on the flat blades, prepared like papyrus, the most famous Buddhist manuscripts are written; the long mid-ribs or branches (strictly speaking, the leaf-stalks) answer admirably for rafters, posts, or fencing; the fibrous sheath at the base is a remarkable natural imitation of cloth, employed for strainers, wrappers, and native hats; while the trunk, or stem, passes in carpentry under the name of porcupine-wood, and produces beautiful effects as a wonderfully-colored cabinet-maker's material. These are only a few selected instances out of the innumerable uses of the cocoa-nut palm.

Apart even from the manifold merits of the tree that bears it, the milk itself has many and great claims to our respect and esteem, as everybody who has ever drunk it in its native surroundings will enthusiastically admit. In England, to be sure, the white milk in the dry nuts is a very poor stuff, sickly, and strong-flavored and rather indigestible. But in the tropics, cocoa-nut milk, or, as we oftener call it there, cocoa-nut water, is a very different and vastly superior sort of beverage. At eleven o'clock every morning, when you are hot and tired with the day's work, your black servant, clad from head to foot in his cool clean white linen suit, brings you in a tall soda-glass full of a clear, light, crystal liquid, temptingly displayed against the yellow background of a chased Benares brass-work tray. The lump of ice bobs enticingly up and down in the center of the tumbler, or clinks musically against the edge of the glass as he carries it along. You take the cool cup thankfully and swallow it down at one long draught; fresh as a May morning, pure as an English hill-side spring, delicate as—well, as cocoa-nut water. None but itself can be its parallel. It is certainly the most delicious, dainty, transparent, crystal drink ever invented. How did it get there, and what is it for?

In the early green stage at which cocoa-nuts are generally picked for household use in the tropics, the shell hasn't yet solidified into a hard, stony coat, but still remains quite soft enough to be readily cut through with a sharp table-knife—just like young walnuts picked for pickling. If you cut one across while it's in this unsophisticated state, it is easy enough to see the arrangement of the interior, and the part borne by the milk in the development and growth of the mature nut. The ordinary tropical way of opening cocoa-nuts for table, indeed, is by cutting off the top of the shell and rind in successive slices, at the end where the three pores are situated, until you reach the level of the water, which fills up the whole interior. The nutty part around the inside of the shell is then extremely soft and jelly-like, so that it can be readily eaten with a spoon: but as a matter of fact very few people ever do eat the flesh at all. After their first few months in the tropics, they lose the taste for this comparatively indigestible part, and confine themselves entirely (like patients at a German spa) to drinking the water. A young cocoa-nut is thus seen to consist, first of a green outer skin, then of a fibrous coat, which afterward becomes the hair, and next of a harder shell which finally gets quite woody; while inside all comes the actual seed or unripe nut itself. The office of the cocoa-nut water is the deposition of the nutty part around the side of the shell; it is, so to speak, the mother-liquid, from which the harder eatable portion is afterward derived. This state is not uncommon in embryo seeds. In a very young pea, for example, the inside is quite watery, and only the outer skin is at all solid, as we have all observed when green peas first come into season. But the special peculiarity of the cocoa-nut consists in the fact that this liquid condition of the interior continues even after the nut is ripe, and that is the really curious point about the milk in the cocoa-nut which does actually need accounting for.

In order to understand it one ought to examine a cocoa-nut in the act of budding, and to do this it is by no means necessary to visit the West Indies or the Pacific Islands; all you need to do is to ask a Covent Garden fruit-salesman to get you a few "growers." On the voyage to England, a certain number of precocious cocoa-nuts, stimulated by the congenial warmth and damp of most ship-holds, usually begin to sprout before their time; and these waste nuts are sold by the dealers at a low rate to East End children and inquiring botanists. An examination of a "grower" very soon convinces one what is the use of the milk in the cocoa-nut.

It must be duly bone in mind, to begin with, that the prime end and object of the nut is not to be eaten raw by the ingenious monkey, or to be converted by lordly man into cocoa-nut biscuits, or cocoa-nut pudding, but simply and solely to reproduce the cocoa-nut palm in sufficient numbers to future generations. For this purpose the nut has slowly acquired by natural selection a number of protective defenses against its numerous enemies, which serve to guard it admirably in the native state from almost all possible animal depredators. First of all, the actual nut or seed itself consists of a tiny embryo plant, placed just inside the softest of the three pores or pits at the end of the shell, and surrounded by a vast quantity of nutritious pulp, destined to feed and support it during its earliest unprotected days, if not otherwise diverted by man or monkey. But, as whatever feeds a young plant will also feed an animal, and as many animals betray a felonious desire to appropriate to their own wicked ends the food-stuffs laid up by the palm for the use of its own seedling, the cocoa-nut has been compelled to inclose this particularly large and rich kernel in a very solid and defensive shell. And, once more, since the palm grows at a very great height from the ground—I have seen them up to ninety feet in favorable circumstances—this shell stands a very good chance of getting broken in tumbling to the earth, so that it has been necessary to surround it with a mass of soft and yielding fibrous material, which breaks its fall, and acts as a buffer to it when it comes in contact with the soil beneath. So many protections has the cocoa-nut gradually devised for itself by the continuous survival of the best adapted among numberless and endless spontaneous variations of all its kind in past time.

Now, when the cocoa-nut has actually reached the ground at last, and proceeds to sprout in the spot where chance (perhaps in the bodily shape of a disappointed monkey) has chosen to cast it, these numerous safeguards and solid envelopes naturally begin to prove decided nuisances to the embryo within. It starts under the great disadvantage of being hermetically sealed within a solid wooden shell, so that no water can possibly get at it to aid it as most other seeds are aided in the process of germination. Fancy yourself a seed-pea, anxious to sprout, but coated all round with a hard covering of impermeable sealing-wax, and you will be in a position faintly to appreciate the unfortunate predicament of a grower cocoa-nut. Natural selection, however—that deus ex machina of modern science, which can perform such endless wonders, if only you give it time enough to work in and variations enough to work upon—natural selection has come to the rescue of the unhappy plant by leaving it a little hole at the top of the shell, out of which it can push its feathery green head without difficulty. Everybody knows that if you look at the sharp end of a cocoa-nut you will see three little brown pits or depressions on its surface. Most people also know that two of these are firmly stopped up (for a reason to which I shall presently recur), but that the third one is only closed by a slight film or very thin shell, which can be easily bored through with a pocket-knife, so as to let the milk run off before cracking the shell. So much we have all learned during our ardent pursuit of natural knowledge on half-holidays in early life. But we probably then failed to observe that just opposite this soft hole lies a small, roundish knob, imbedded in the pulp or eatable portion, which knob is in fact the embryo palm or seedling, for whose ultimate benefit the whole arrangement (in brown and green) has been invented. That is very much the way with man: he notices what concerns his own appetite, and omits all the really important parts of the whole subject. We think the use of the hole is to let out the milk; but the nut knows that its real object is to let out the seedling. The knob grows out at last into the young plantlet, and it is by means of the soft hole that it makes its escape through the shell to the air and the sunshine which it seeks without.

This brings us really down at last to the true raison d’être for the milk in the cocoa-nut. As the seed or kernel can not easily get at much water from outside, it has a good supply of water laid up for it ready beforehand within its own encircling shell. The mother-liquid from which the pulp or nutty part has been deposited remains in the center, as the milk, till the tiny embryo begins to sprout. As soon as it does so, the little knob which was at first so very small enlarges rapidly and absorbs the water, till it grows out into a big, spongy cellular mass, which at last almost fills up the entire shell. At the same time, its other end pushes its way out through the soft hole, and then gives birth to a growing bud at the top—the future stem and leaves—and to a number of long threads beneath—the future roots. Meanwhile, the spongy mass inside begins gradually to absorb all the nutty part, using up its oils and starches for the purpose of feeding the young plant above, until it is of an age to expand its leaves to the open tropical sunlight and shift for itself in the struggle for life. It seems at first sight very hard to understand how any tissue so solid as the pulp of cocoa-nut can be thus softened and absorbed without any visible cause; but in the subtile chemistry of living vegetation such a transformation is comparatively simple and easy to perform. Nature sometimes works much greater miracles than this in the same way: for example, what is called vegetable ivory, a substance so solid that it can be carved or turned only with great difficulty, is really the kernel of another palm-nut, allied to the cocoa-palm, and its very stony particles are all similarly absorbed during germination by the dissolving power of the young seedling.

Why, however, has the cocoa-nut three pores at the top instead of one, and why are two out of the three so carefully and firmly sealed up? The explanation of this strange peculiarity is only to be found in the ancestral history of the cocoa-nut kind. Most nuts, indeed, start in their earlier stage as if they meant to produce two or more seeds each; but, as they ripen, all the seeds except one become abortive. The almond, for example, has in the flower two seeds or kernels to each nut; but in the ripe state there is generally only one, though occasionally we find an almond with two—a philopena, as we commonly call it—just to keep in memory the original arrangement of its earlier ancestors. The reason for this is that plants whose fruits have no special protection for their seeds are obliged to produce a great many of them at once, in order that one seed in a thousand may finally survive the onslaughts of their Argus-eyed enemies; but, when they learn to protect themselves by hard coverings from birds and beasts, they can dispense with some of these supernumerary seeds, and put more nutriment into each one of those that they still retain. Compare, for example, the innumerable small round seedlets of the poppy-head with the solitary large and richly-stored seed of the walnut, or the tiny black specks of mustard and cress with the single compact and well-filled seed of the filbert and the acorn. To the very end, however, most nuts begin in the flower as if they meant to produce a whole capsuleful of small unstored and unprotected seeds, like their original ancestors; it is only at the last moment that they recollect themselves, suppress all their ovules except one, and store that one with all the best and oiliest food-stuffs at their disposal. The nuts, in fact, have learned by long experience that it is better to be the only son and heir of a wealthy house, set up in life with a good capital to begin upon, than to be one of a poor family of thirteen needy and unprovided children.

Now, the cocoa-nuts are descended from a great tribe—the palms and lilies—which have as their main distinguishing peculiarity the arrangement of parts in their flowers and fruits by threes each. For example, in the most typical flowers of this great group, there are three green outer calyx-pieces, three bright-colored petals, three long outer stamens, three short inner stamens, three valves to the capsule, and three seeds or three rows of seeds in each fruit. Many palms still keep pretty well to this primitive arrangement, but a few of them which have specially protected or highly developed fruits or nuts have lost in their later stages the threefold disposition in the fruit, and possess only one seed, often a very large one. There is no better and more typical nut in the whole world than a cocoa-nut—that is to say, from our present point of view at least, though the fear of that awful person, the botanical Smelfungus, compels me to add that this is not quite technically true. Smelfungus, indeed, would insist upon it that the cocoa-nut is not a nut at all, and would thrill us with the delightful information, innocently conveyed in that delicious dialect of which he is so great a master, that it is really "a drupaceous fruit with a fibrous mesocarp." Still, in spite of Smelfungus with his nice, hair-splitting distinctions, it remains true that humanity at large will still call a nut a nut, and that the cocoa-nut is the highest known development of the peculiar nutty tactics. It has the largest and most richly stored seed of any known plant; and this seed is surrounded by one of the hardest and most unmanageable of any known shells. Hence the cocoa-nut has readily been able to dispense with the three kernels which each nut used in its earlier and less developed days to produce. But though the palm has thus taken to reducing the number of its seeds in each fruit to the lowest possible point consistent with its continued existence at all, it still goes on retaining many signs of its ancient threefold arrangement. The ancestral and most deeply ingrained habits persist in the earlier stages; it is only in the mature form that the later acquired habits begin fully to predominate. Even so our own boys pass through an essentially savage childhood of ogres and fairies, bows and arrows, sugar-plums and barbaric nursery tales, as well as a romantic boyhood of mediaeval chivalry and adventure, before they steady down into that crowning glory of our race, the solid, sober, matter-of-fact, commercial British Philistine. Hence the cocoa-nut in its unstripped state is roughly triangular in form, its angles answering to the separate three fruits of simpler palms; and it has three pits or weak places in the shell, through which the embryos of the three original kernels used to force their way out. But as only one of them is now needed, that one alone is left soft; the other two, which would be merely a source of weakness to the plant if unprotected, are covered in the existing nut by harder shell. Doubtless they serve in part to deceive the too inquisitive monkey or other enemy, who probably concludes that, if one of the pits is hard and impermeable, the other two are so likewise.

Though I have now, I hope, satisfactorily accounted for the milk in the cocoa-nut, and incidentally for some other matters in its economy as well, I am loath to leave the young seedling, whom I have brought so far on his way, to the tender mercies of the winds and storms and tropical animals, some of whom are extremely fond of his juicy and delicate shoots. Indeed, the growing point or bud of most palms is a very pleasant succulent vegetable, and one kind—the West Indian mountain-cabbage—deserves a better and more justly descriptive name, for it is really much more like seakale or asparagus. I shall try to follow our young seedling on in life, therefore, so as to give, while I am about it, a fairly comprehensive and complete biography of a single flourishing cocoa-nut palm.

Beginning, then, with the fall of the nut from the parent-tree, the troubles of the future palm confront it at once in the shape of the nut-eating crab. This evil-disposed crustacean is common around the sea-coast of the Eastern tropical islands, which is also the region mainly affected by the cocoa-nut palm; for cocoa-nuts are essentially shore-loving trees, and thrive best in the immediate neighborhood of the sea. Among the fallen nuts, the clumsy-looking thief of a crab (his appropriate Latin name is Birgus latro) makes great and dreaded havoc. To assist him in his unlawful object he has developed a pair of front legs, with specially strong and heavy claws, supplemented by a last or tail-end pair armed only with very narrow and slender pincers. He subsists entirely upon a cocoa-nut diet. Setting to work upon a big fallen nut—with the husk on, cocoa-nuts measure in the raw state about twelve inches the long way—he tears off all the coarse fiber bit by bit, and gets down at last to the hard shell. Then he hammers away with his heavy claw on the softest eye-hole till he has pounded an opening right through it. This done he twists round his body so as to turn his back upon the cocoa-nut he is operating upon (crabs are never famous either for good manners or gracefulness) and proceeds awkwardly but effectually to extract all the white kernel or pulp through the breach with his narrow pair of hind pincers. Like man, too, the robber-crab knows the value of the outer husk as well as of the eatable nut itself, for he collects the fiber in surprising quantities to line his burrow and lies upon it, the clumsy sybarite, for a luxurious couch. Alas, however, for the helplessness of crabs and the rapacity and cunning of all-appropriating man! The spoil-sport Malay digs up the nest for the sake of the fiber it contains, which spares him the trouble of picking junk on his own account, and then he eats the industrious crab who has laid it all up, while he melts down the great lump of fat under the robber's capacious tail, and sometimes gets from it as much as a good quart of what may be practically considered as limpid cocoa-nut oil. Sic vos non vobis is certainly the melancholy refrain of all natural history. The cocoa-nut palm intends the oil for the nourishment of its own seedling; the crab feloniously appropriates it and stores it up under his capacious tail for future personal use; the Malay steals it again from the thief for his own purposes; and ten to one the Dutch or English merchant beguiles it from him with sized calico or poisoned rum, and transmits it to Europe, where it serves to lighten our nights and assist at our matutinal tub, to point a moral and adorn the present tale.

If, however, our cocoa-nut is lucky enough to escape the robber-crabs, the pigs, and the monkeys, as well as to avoid falling into the hands of man, and being converted into the copra of commerce, or sold from a costermonger's barrow in the chilly streets of ungenial London at a penny a slice, it may very probably succeed in germinating after the fashion I have already described, and pushing up its head through the surrounding foliage to the sunlight above. As a rule, the cocoa-nut has been dropped by its mother-tree on the sandy soil of a sea-beach; and this is the spot it best loves, and where it grows to the stateliest height. Sometimes, however, it falls into the sea itself, and then the loose husk buoys it up, so that it floats away bravely till it is cast by the waves upon some distant coral reef or desert island. It is this power of floating and surviving a long voyage that has dispersed the cocoa-nut so widely among oceanic islands, where so few plants are generally to be found. Indeed, on many atolls or isolated reefs (for example, on Keeling Island) it is the only tree or shrub that grows in any quantity, and on it the pigs, the poultry, the ducks, and the land-crabs of the place entirely subsist. In any case, wherever it happens to strike, the young cocoa-nut sends up at first a fine rosette of big, spreading leaves, not raised as afterward on a tall stem, but springing direct from the ground in a wide circle, something like a very big and graceful fern. In this early stage nothing can be more beautiful or more essentially tropical in appearance than a plantation of young cocoa-nuts. Their long, feathery leaves spreading out in great clumps from the buried stock, and waving with lithe motion before the strong sea-breeze of the Indies, are the very embodiment of those deceptive ideal tropics which, alas! are to be found in actual reality nowhere on earth save in the artificial palm-houses at Kew, and the Casino Gardens at too entrancing Monte Carlo.

For the first two or three years the young palms must be well watered, and the soil around them opened; after which the tall, graceful stem begins to rise rapidly into the open air. In this condition it may be literally said to make the tropics—those fallacious tropics, I mean, of painters and poets, of "Enoch Arden" and of "Locksley Hall." You may observe that, whenever an artist wants to make a tropical picture, he puts a group of cocoa-nut palms in the foreground, as much as to say, "You see there's no deception; these are the genuine, unadulterated tropics." But as to painting the tropics without the palms, he might just as well think of painting the desert without the camels. At eight or ten years old the tree flowers, bearing blossoms of the ordinary palm-type, degraded likenesses of the lilies and yuccas, greenish and inconspicuous, but visited by insects for the sake of their pollen. The flower, however, is fertilized by the wind, which carries the pollen-grains from one bunch of blossoms to another. Then the nuts gradually swell out to an enormous size, and ripen very slowly, even under the brilliant tropical sun. (I will admit that the tropics are hot, though in other respects I hold them to be arrant impostors, like that precocious American youth who announced on his tenth birthday that in his opinion life wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.) But the worst thing about the cocoa-nut palm, the missionaries always say, is the fatal fact that, when once fairly started, it goes on bearing fruit uninterruptedly for forty years. This is very immoral and wrong of the ill-conditioned tree, because it encourages the idyllic Polynesian to lie under the palms all day long, cooling his limbs in the sea occasionally, sporting with Amaryllis in the shade, or with the tangles of Neæra's hair, and waiting for the nuts to drop down in due time, when he ought (according to European notions) to be killing himself with hard work under a blazing sky, raising cotton, sugar, indigo, and coffee, for the immediate benefit of the white merchant,and the ultimate advantage of the British public. It doesn't enforce habits of steady industry and perseverance, the good missionaries say; it doesn't induce the native to feel that burning desire for Manchester piece-goods and the other blessings of civilization which ought properly to accompany the propagation of the missionary in foreign parts. You stick your nut in the sand; you sit by a few years and watch it growing; you pick up the ripe fruits as they fall from the tree; and you sell them at last for illimitable red cloth to the Manchester piece-goods merchant. Nothing could be more simple or more satisfactory. And yet it is difficult to see the precise moral distinction between the owner of a cocoa-nut grove in the South-Sea Islands and the owner of a coal-mine or a big estate in commercial England. Each lounges decorously through life after his own fashion; only the one lounges in a Russia-leather chair at a club in Pall Mall, while the other lounges in a nice soft dust-heap beside a rolling surf in Tahiti or the Hawaiian Archipelago.

Curiously enough, at a little distance from the sandy levels or alluvial flats of the sea-shore, the sea-loving cocoa-nut will not bring its nuts to perfection. It will grow, indeed, but it will not thrive or fruit in due season. On the coast-line of Southern India, immense groves of cocoa-nuts fringe the shore for miles and miles together; and in some parts, as in Travancore, they form the chief agricultural staple of the whole country. "The state has hence facetiously been called Cocoanutcore," says its historian; which charmingly illustrates the true Anglo-Indian notion of what constitutes facetiousness, and ought to strike the last nail into the coffin of a competitive examination system. A good tree in full bearing should produce one hundred and twenty cocoa-nuts in a season; so that a very small grove is quite sufficient to maintain a respectable family in decency and comfort. Ah, what a mistake the English climate made when it left off its primitive warmth of the Tertiary period, and got chilled by the ice and snow of the Glacial epoch down to its present misty and dreary wheat-growing condition! If it were not for that, those odious habits of steady industry and perseverance might never have been developed in ourselves at all, and we might be lazily picking copra off our own cocoa-palms, to this day, to export in return for the piece-goods of some Arctic Manchester situated somewhere about the north of Spitzbergen or the New Siberian Islands.

Even as things stand at the present day, however, it is wonderful how much use we modern Englishmen now make in our own houses of this far Eastern nut, whose very name still bears upon its face the impress of its originally savage origin. From morning to night we never leave off being indebted to it. We wash with it as old brown Windsor or glycerine soap the moment we leave our beds. We walk across our passages on the mats made from its fiber. We sweep our rooms with its brushes, and wipe our feet on it as we enter our doors. As rope, it ties up our trunks and packages; in the hands of the house-maids it scrubs our floors; or else, woven into coarse cloth, it acts as a covering for bales and furniture sent by rail or steamboat. The confectioner undermines our digestion in early life with cocoanut candy; the cook tempts us later on with cocoa-nut cake; and Messrs. Huntley and Palmer cordially invite us to complete the ruin with cocoa-nut biscuits. We anoint our chapped hands with one of its preparations after washing; and grease the wheels of our carriages with another to make them run smoothly. Finally, we use the oil to burn in our reading-lamps, and light ourselves at last to bed with stearine-candles. Altogether, an amateur census of a single small English cottage results in the startling discovery that it contains twenty-seven distinct articles which owe their origin in one way or another to the cocoa-nut palm. And yet we affect, in our black ingratitude, to despise the question of the milk in the cocoa-nut.—Cornhill Magazine.

Meeting the Crime Wave

Meeting the Crime Wave: A Comparison of Methods

By Joseph Gollomb

From “The Nation” magazine January 21, 1921

This story is a lot more representative of the work of Joseph Gollomb than my previous post. I'll try and create a bibliography in the near future./drf

The crime wave now afflicting the whole world is a logical aftermath of the war. Economic distress—poverty, insufficient food, clothing, and fuel—the loosing of men’s animal passions, coupled with the general disorgani­zation of our social structure, are producing their inevita­ble effect. While its manifestations vary, subject to local conditions, the disease knows no geographic boundaries, but its treatment is still largely national. Moreover, the police power of the world has been rudely shaken by events. It needs reconstruction, revitalization, and above all in­creased international cooperation. The American has, of course, always taken it for granted that his police organiza­tion is the best on earth, his system of detection the shrewd­est, most scientific, most persevering. Present-day New Yorkers, in the face of a mounting epidemic of unsolved murder and robbery, may perhaps entertain a lurking doubt. But it is questionable whether we could ever justly boast of anything in this direction but a mistaken pride. The actual claims of France and Britain—in fact and fiction—seem more valid. What have we comparable to the great Bertillon and to M. Lecoq? What traditions to equal the famous Scotland Yard organization, what hero of detection superior to Sherlock Holmes? As for Germany, its “verboten” has become notorious as the symbol of the omni­present and ever-watchful arm of the law. We shall do well to study our neighbors’ methods.

The tracking by society of the men who prey on man is already something of a sport and sometimes an art—in fiction. In real life it is a crusade, a science, a profession; there is no sporting ethics in it as yet and police prefer the shortest way to the kill whether it is good sport, art, or neither. But the quarry has grown clever with science and technique, and the hunter has had to keep up with him. The result is that so infinitely complex, delicate, and manifold have become the means and weapons of crime and of man hunting with X-ray, dictaphone, micro-photography, chem­ical reagents, psychoanalysis, organization technique, card cataloguing, and ten thousand other devices that the modern detective has come to exercise something of the care of the artist in choosing weapon and trail in his hunt. It is inter­esting to observe, therefore, the differences in the manner of man hunting shown by the detective systems of London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, and how in their hunting they reveal their racial traits. Let us consider four actual cases.

In a half-asleep residential section of east London is a neglected three-story private dwelling with heavy shutters and doors, inconspicuous and unattractive. It was just the kind of house for which an old man, calling himself Smithers, had been looking. For twenty years he had been accu­mulating money by buying all kinds of objects and no ques­tions asked. He could drive a shrewd bargain and his busi­ness associates usually acceded to his terms, though not without many a curse and often more or less impressive threats. Smithers did not mind the former; but as he grew more and more rich he worried about the threats. He knew his customers. So he tried to hide his riches and lived penuriously. Fear of being murdered and robbed drove him from his business to a retreat. The house, by reason of its inconspicuousness, its strong doors and windows, attracted him and he bought it. He secured every possible entrance with bars and double locks and had his home wired so that nobody could touch a door knob, window sash, or grating without setting an electric bell ringing. In addition he arranged it so that if any one detected the wiring and cut it, the loosened wire, dragged down by a leaden weight, would fall on a cartridge and exploding it would give as effective notice of danger as the electric bell. He lived by himself, received no one, and attracted as little attention as he could.

Nevertheless, one day tradesmen began to wonder why he did not take in off the front steps the articles he had ordered delivered. The police were notified, an entrance was forced. Smithers was found murdered. The burglar alarm had been cut, under the fallen leaden weight was found a pad of cloth and the cartridge unexploded. A strong-box had been rifled. Whoever had done the business was no novice. There was not a finger-print to be found, the work having obviously been done in gloves. The only clue left for the police to work on was a small dark-lantern, a child’s toy without doubt, which had been contemptuously left behind by the burglars.

Scotland Yard went to work on the case characteristically. A conference was held of the Central Office Squad, consist­ing of four chief inspectors, ten detective inspectors, nine­teen detective sergeants, and fourteen detective constables. They went at their problem like a team, captained, but working as one. There was no star performer. With only the child’s lantern to work on as a clue, the problem became at first mere drudgery. A tedious round of manufacturers and toy shops followed to determine if possible where that lantern was bought. In this search team-work was every­thing, individual cleverness nothing. Finally it seemed probable that the lantern was such as a mother in one of several tenement districts in London would buy for a seven-year-old child.

A simple plan was devised as the next phase of the hunt. A detective who had a seven-year-old son was assigned to allow his boy to play with the lantern in the streets of the quarter from which it might have come and to see what hap­pened. For a week nothing at all happened, and father and son were asked to repeat their task in the adjoining district. Here the simple device brought no better results and again they were assigned new territory. This happened several times, until it began to look as though nothing at all would come of it. But with the doggedness of the race Scotland Yard hung on to the trail. Then one day a little boy of the quarter edged up to the policeman’s son, looked sharply at the lantern with which the youngster was playing, and set up a wail.

“I want mah lantern!” he said.

“’Tain’t your lantern!” the policeman’s son retorted in­dignantly.

“Yes, it is! I know it is!”

The detective came forward. “Are you sure?” he asked, gently. “Because my son has had it for many weeks, you know.”

“ ’Ere, I’ll prove it’s mine,” the stranger boy said. “W’en mah wick burned out I cut off a little piece of my sister’s flannel petticoat for a new wick.”

The detective opened the lantern and examining the wick found it to be of flannel, as the boy had said. “We’ll have to ask your mother about this,” the detective said. “If you’re telling the truth you shall have your lantern back.”

The three went to the boy’s mother, a widow who kept boarders. The woman, honest and hard working, con­firmed her son’s claim. The detective kept his word, re­turned the lantern, but questioning the widow further found out that the boy missed the lantern at about the same time that two of her boarders had left without paying their board bills. One had told her that he was an electrician, the other a plumber’s apprentice, and she remembered seeing tools of their trade, or what she thought were such, in their room.

Followed then another series of weary searches by the men of Scotland Yard; searches among young plumbers and among electricians; in the underworld for two young fel­lows answering to the descriptions the widow gave; in the files of criminal records in Scotland Yard; in more expen­sive boarding houses and in dance resorts. Nothing short of a big organization imbued with team work and bulldog perseverance could have accomplished that search. But at last two young men were found whom the widow, unknown to them, identified as her former boarders.

The police had as yet nothing more serious against them than unpaid board bills. So they secretly kept them under surveillance. It was thus they learned that the young men were fond of target shooting with a revolver at trees in the country. The bullets extracted from the trees proved to be of the same exceptionally large caliber as that found in the murdered miser’s brain. Tactfully, patiently, a corps of detectives searched into the past of the two men, each finding out some seemingly unimportant item. But the whole was becoming a net in which one day the two men found themselves inextricably fast on the charge of the mur­der and robbery of Smithers.

Now let us contrast with this man hunt another under similar circumstances in Paris. There had been a remark­able series of burglaries in the aristocratic Etoile section. In each case the burglar—for there was every sign that one man was committing them—took art objects of considerable value but never of such marked uniqueness that they could not be disposed of without difficulty or danger. Indeed the man’s skill in entering well-guarded homes, in gathering his loot, and in disposing of it was such that the Paris police had not a trace to work on. This man, too, worked with gloves, so that there was never a finger-print left of his visits.

The Paris police, so to speak, ran around in circles trying to find his trail. One theory was as little fruitful as another and each man on the hunt followed his own. One detective- inspector, let us call him Dornay, struck out on a lone hunt. Posing as a nouveau-riche art collector and bon vivant, he made scores of acquaintances in the fast set where his quarry might conceivably be found. In this way he became interested in a rather quiet, alert man who knew where good values in art objects could be had. Dornay showed more friendliness than the other accepted and, apparently hurt in feelings, the detective thereafter avoided the un­sociable man, whom he knew by the name of Laroche. Thus far Dornay had only a nebulous theory about Laroche’s connection with the elusive burglar he was hunting. It was so nebulous that the detective could not convince his colleagues sufficiently to secure the number of men needed to keep track of all of Laroche’s movements, for the latter had an uncanny way of eluding Dornay’s vigilance. There­upon Dornay determined to get Laroche unconsciously either to clear or to implicate himself. Watching one night outside Laroche’s hotel he saw the latter leave in evening dress. Dornay stole up to the man’s room, let himself in with a skeleton key, and made a thorough search. The only dis­coveries that interested him were a much-used pair of gloves and the water caraffe and drinking glass Laroche kept on a little stand to the left of his bed. With a file Dor­nay rubbed gently at a spot in the thumb of the left-hand glove until little more than a thin filament of chamois remained, which, however would not be noticeable at a care­less glance. Then the detective carefully polished clean the outsides of the caraffe and the drinking glass. He took noth­ing with him when he left. But next morning, when La­roche again left the hotel Dornay stole back into the room and eagerly examined the caraffe and the drinking glass. With a camel’s-hair brush he dusted some graphite powder on it until Laroche’s finger-prints showed clearly. Substi­tuting other glassware Dornay carefully brought Laroche’s to police headquarters.

Three weeks later still another burglary was reported, bearing all the marks of the elusive burglar. But this time the police found faint impressions of a left thumb—and only that. It was, however, sufficient. Dornay’s instinct and little plot had won. As he knew, the moisture of the human finger is sufficient to leave a print even through gloves if the intervening texture is thin. And the finger­prints on the scene of the latest burglary were identical with those on Laroche’s caraffe and drinking glass.

Call it Anglo-Saxon love of team-play, or a racial disin­clination of the individual to shove himself forward at the expense of the group interest, or whatever other trait it illustrates, the Scotland Yard treatment of the Smithers murder mystery was characteristic. Certainly the instinct for organization and organized effort, which has made Scot­land Yard the foremost man-hunting medium in the world, is the inspiration not of individuals but of the race. In contrast in method was the Paris police treatment of the Laroche burglaries. The Frenchman is keenly individual in his work. It makes him less patient, therefore less effi­cient in organization, and consequently throws him back again on individual effort. He is much more prone, as a detective, to hunt by himself than with his colleagues.

Like the Anglo-Saxon gift for organization is the Ger­man passion for it. But there is a vital difference between the two in the outcome of the organization, a difference which is illustrated in the treatment by the Berlin detective force of a murder mystery that occurred in that city sev­eral years ago. The under-secretary for one of the impor­tant governmental departments was found dead near his home in a Berlin suburb. He had evidently been seized from behind, garroted until dead, dragged into an alley and robbed. It was not till late the next day that his body was found; no one had been seen lurking about the scene of the crime; so that the police had practically nothing to work on, other than the manner of the crime.

But they have a machine in the Berlin police department that works almost automatically in the solution of such mysteries. It is typically a German product in the thor­oughness of its organization, in the ruthlessness of its oper­ation, in the vastness and at the same time in the minute­ness of its product. Its principal part is the Meldewesen. Every citizen and visitor in Germany, the former from the day of his birth, the latter from the day of arrival, is re­corded at police headquarters, a card for each individual, and every card is kept up to date. If, for instance, the police want to know something about Carl Schmidt, respect­able citizen, in three minutes after his name reaches police headquarters they know the date, place, and circumstances of his birth, a brief history of each of his parents—if Ger­man, a cross-reference to their individual cards will give a complete history; his education, religion, successive resi­dences, dates of removals, names of business and other asso­ciates—again cross-references afford fuller information on each of these; the name of his wife, date of marriage, names, and other data of his children; dates of the death of any of the family, place of burial; names and histories of servants, employees, etc. At Berlin this Meldewesen depart­ment contains over 20,000,000 cards today, occupies 158 rooms, requires 290 employees, and is daily growing in size. The cards of names commencing with H alone take up ten rooms, S requiring seventeen.

What happens to any individual in Germany who fails to register can be seen in the working of the Razzia system, which is used as a complement to the Meldewesen, and which the police of Berlin proceeded to use in the case of the strangled under-secretary. The Razzia consists of police raids without warrants on gathering places of every kind and even on private dwellings. Every person caught in such a raid is required to give a complete account of him­self or herself. This account is checked up with the record in Meldewesen. If there is a discrepancy, it means anything from a fine, for a first offense for failing to register, to prison if it is repeated.

In this particular case the Berlin police raided Jungfernheide, an amusement park. Of the people there, three hun­dred could not give a clear account of discrepancies between their status then and what the Meldewesen showed. They were all arrested and a minute investigation of each case begun. Out of the three hundred sixty were found to be “wanted” by the police of other cities for various crimes. At the same time that this sifting was going on a special “murder commission,” appointed to deal only with this par­ticular case, was proceeding with coordinating investiga­tions. Such a commission consisting of seven or eight men as a rule, but calling in as many others as necessary, usually includes three or four of the higher officials of the detective force, a police surgeon, a photographer, and one or two men from some highly specialized detective squad. There are thirty-one such squads, each sharply specialized. These squads are known by numbers and the classes of crimes they deal with. For instance: 1. Church thefts, counter­feiting, safe-breaking. 2. Thefts on stairs, streets, squares, hallways, cemeteries, gardens, lead pipes, zinc, etc. 6. Larcenies in flats, tenements, apartments. 7. Burglaries in flats, tenements, apartments. 11. Thefts of overcoats, umbrellas, canes, in restaurants, waiting rooms, institu­tions, etc. 24. Usury, postal frauds. 31. Perjury.

To the special commission in this case were added two members of a squad specializing on highway robberies and an expert on stranglers. These men sifted out the mountain of cards dealing with every individual who could even in the remotest way be suspected of a possible connection with the murder of Under-Secretary Rheinthal. Meanwhile forty-two individuals caught in the Jungfemheide were waiting in prison together with other suspects arrested without warrant or charge. The search revealed that one of the women detained was the mistress of a man against whom were recorded in the police departments of two cities three former highway robberies and a burglary in which the victim was found nearly dead of strangulation, and through the elaborate system of records of the man’s accom­plices, friends, and family, he was finally caught. Once in the clutches of the police the celebrated method of “sweat­ing” or “third degree,” which includes every possible means of coercion, pinned the man to the crime itself and he con­fessed.

Clearly, then, what solved the Rheinthal mystery was a machine, which is what the German passion for organiza­tion produces, rather than a team, as in the case of Scot­land Yard. With the Germans organization reduces its human elements to cogs and parts of an automaton. In Eng­land it binds human beings into a group, which retains initiative on the part of the individual and adds to it the increased competence of the group. In France organiza­tion is the minor fact, the individual is everything.

Aside from the emphasis which national and racial traits give to their different ways of man hunting, these things are also determined by the manner in which men are chosen in these countries to become detectives. In England the instinct is against the creation of a man-hunting class. Scotland Yard, therefore, looks for its raw material among the common people, preferably those near the soil. The Metropolitan Police send scouting teams into the country and offer sufficiently inviting terms to splendid physical specimens to join the police force of London. They investi­gate most carefully the moral character of the applicants, take the successful ones to London, and school them to become one of the world-famous force of “bobbies.” Then if a man shows special aptitude for detective work he has to pass an examination, is given a special training in the detective school of Scotland Yard, and is allowed to work his way up to the top of the system as fast as merit entitles him to promotion. Three elements in his education are con­stantly stressed—the jealously guarded right of every citizen to untrammeled freedom until sufficient evidence is available to justify arrest; the subordination of individual benefit to the good of the group; the duty of every individual to develop initiative and some degree of specialization.

In Germany the practice is to limit the detective force to men who have had at least nine years’ training in the regular army. By the time a candidate becomes a member of the detective staff he is usually past the plastic stage of life and set in his ways. His army life has drilled every vestige of individuality out of him. He is confronted with a future in which he can rise only a grade or two, no matter how efficient he turns out to be. The higher ranks in the service can be reached only through a university training. The result is that the German detective can be depended upon only to follow a routine. It is a machine that the German system demands, rather than an organization.

In Vienna the detective system can draw on neither a people gifted with regimentalized efficiency, nor the individ­ual efficiency of the Scotland Yard man or the French detec­tive. Yet the man hunting done by the Vienna police equals in efficiency any other in Europe. For, in the professorial chairs, the laboratories, and the research departments of Austrian universities man hunting has attained its highest development. In Vienna it is not organization or the indi­vidual detective or a marvelous machine that hunts the criminal most successfully, but modern science with its microscope, chemical reagents, the orderly processes of in­ductive reasoning, carried out by professors, and a minimum contribution on the part of the professional detective.

Let us illustrate with the murder and robbery of a mil­lionaire recluse who lived in a villa on the border of Wiener Wald. He was found dead in his barn, his skull crushed in with some blunt instrument which could not be found. The only clue left by the murderer was a workman’s cap. Dr. Gross in his celebrated work on criminal investiga­tion, which is the most exhaustive study of the science of man hunting in existence, stresses the importance of hairs and dust as clues. The inside of the cap, therefore, was carefully examined and two hairs found, which were not those of the murdered man. These hairs were placed under the microscope, experts called in, and the following was ascer­tained as the description of the man to whom those hairs belonged: “Man about forty-five years old; robust constitu­tion; turning bald; brown hair, nearly gray and recently cut.” The cap was placed in a tough paper bag, sealed, and beaten with a stick as hard as possible. When it was opened again there was dust at the bottom of the bag. This dust was microscopically examined and chemically analyzed. Disregarding the elements that came obviously from the floor of the barn where the cap was found it was discovered that wood dust, such as is found in the shop of a carpenter, predominated. But there were also found minute particles of glue. The combination pointed to a wood joiner.

There was such a man living near the scene of the crime, who also answered to the description derived from the two hairs, a man of morose temperament rendered desperate by drink and poverty. A search of his premises for the instru­ment which might have caused the death of the murdered man yielded a hammer and two mortar pestles. The ham­mer with its octagonal nose was found incapable of inflict­ing the shape of the wound in the man’s skull. The pestles fitted. There were two of them, an iron one rusted in spots and a polished brass one. The rust spots on the iron one were found on chemical analysis to be due to water. But under the metal polish of the brass pestle, when it was carefully scraped away, were found remnants of stains which on analysis and microscopic examination proved to be blood. By a system of reagents developed by Professor Uhlenhut the blood was found to be that of the murdered man. After the investigation had proceeded a little further the murderer broke down and confessed his guilt.

Nothing is too small or insignificant to furnish clues to the Vienna school of laboratory detectives. The marks of teeth on a cigar holder left on the scene of the murder were found to indicate unusually long canines, a clue which led to the murderer. The dust found in pocket knives or clasp knives with which crimes had been committed brought many a criminal to justice wholly through laboratory methods.

The readiness of the German police to search, arrest, and detain citizens on the slightest ground, and the methods em­ployed by the French police in extracting confessions from suspected persons vary fundamentally from the procedure followed in man hunting by the English. When a Scotland Yard man, backed with a warrant, makes an arrest he is compelled by law to say to his prisoner: “Do you wish to make any statement? I warn you that anything you say now may be used against you. You are not required to make any statement.” It is generally acknowledged that a confession extorted from an accused would be barred as evidence in English courts. In contrast to this is the brilliant record made by a Paris detective in tricking arrested suspects into confessions. This man would cultivate the friendship of the accused, say, of murder. Outside of prison the detective would spend most of his time investigating not so much evidence of the prisoner’s guilt but his grievance against the murdered man. Then one day he would rush into the ac­cused man’s cell, his face burning with indignation. “My friend!” he would exclaim. “I don’t understand why you hesitate for one instant in confessing that you killed that snake! I am not a bad man myself. But if any man ruined my business and outraged the woman I love and did a tenth of the vile things that snake did to you, I would kill him and be proud of it!” “Isn’t that so?” the accused would ex­claim—and find himself betrayed.

In England a man’s home is his castle and a detective is limited accordingly. No search can be effected, no arrest made without a warrant based on such evidence as will con­vince a judge in open court. In Berlin a police lieutenant boasted with truth to a student of European police meth­ods : “I can have my neighbor arrested, his house searched, and the man detained in prison for twenty hours even if he is innocent as a lamb. And I can do it without a process beforehand or being made to answer for it afterward.”

This free hand the German police has, together with the infinitely elaborate net in which the German public con­sents to live, gives its detectives a tremendous advantage over the English. A man’s house in Germany is not his cas­tle; an accused can be forced to testify against himself; the habeas corpus is not the institution it is in England. As Sir William Harcourt said: “You must not be surprised if the English police is sometimes foiled, baffled, or defeated. . . . It is the price England pays for a system which she justly prefers.” On the other hand the German system does not necessarily argue a slavish people. The German is equally surprised at the English lack of the institution of the Meldewesen and other aids to the police. “What do peo­ple in England do to find where a certain criminal is?” a German asked in discussing the Meldewesen. “And why should I resent the Meldewesen when it operates to protect me against the criminal? Also suppose I want to find out the address of any man in Berlin or Dresden. For a small fee the police will get it for me. As for the right of search and arrest, well, an innocent man will not suffer long. In return he gets the protection of a system from which the criminal undergoes a maximum of insecurity.”

As the criminal becomes more and more international in his operations, more and more cosmopolitan in his knowl­edge of the ways of man hunters, so the latter, too, are forced to become broader in their hunting methods. The science and some of the organization technique of the Aus­trians and the Germans are being added to the equipment of Scotland Yard. Republican Germany, on the other hand, is modifying some of the autocratic police abuses established by an imperial regime. Paris police are working in close harmony with Scotland Yard and are assimilating from them some of the lessons of team work. Vienna is borrow­ing German organization and Scotland Yard emphasis on the selection of the raw material of its detective force and has surpassed Scotland Yard in the educational training it now gives its operatives. Some day there may even come true the dream of several visionaries among police chiefs—an international police headquarters in The Hague or in some other city from where man hunting in Europe will proceed on a world-wide scope and with the combined skill of all nations.