But in turn we draw the perfect right to interpret such a treaty as we please, and to our greatest disadvantage. In diplomacy such is the usual procedure. The treaty in question may have an hundred articles covering all points under the sun, but what interests the present discussion is that by this treaty Yokohama may have, and likely has, secured the right to use Petropavlovsk for war purposes. It is a rather commodious harbor in Russian Kamchatka, and lies about fourteen hundred miles due west of Dutch Harbor, and forms a convenient half-way point between the latter and Yokohama. freezes in winter, but for a summer campaign it would prove most convenient.

It

Dutch Harbor and Honolulu, once in hostile hands, would hold an offensive line facing our coast, just as we did in the opposite direction when we held the line. In such a case not only Alaska, but the Philippines and Samoa fall without a shot, and the strategical slate is made clear for an attack against our coast by the landing of troops or by just blocking us in by seapower. In other words, if this line falls out of our hands, then the new owners will own the ocean right up to the threemile limit of our coast. And the reader will be only grasping at straws if he now pictures a belated fleet coming to the rescue by way of Panama. The distance from Panama to Honolulu is just as far as from Honolulu to Manila, and therefore too long to make with efficiency and assurance of success after the bases at the end of the route have been lost.

Now we come to sum up by saying that the fact of a secret treaty, the occupation of new control-points, and the feverish haste with which a powerful offensive navy is being built on this ocean is what is meant by the sentence in the early part of the article that the cards are now being shuffled for a mighty play to determine who is to control the Pacific Ocean.

If this is so, why are we not at work on Dutch Harbor, and why has not the Government thought out a comprehensive plan of action that will square with the importance of our future? The answer,

and only answer, is that nationally we are still in the locomotor ataxia stage of uncoördinated thought or action. We have an army and a navy, to be sure. But the army thinks one way, the navy thinks along some other, and, most important, the state department, beautifully oblivious. of all, thinks about other things. As far as getting the most of an established policy. goes, we are a sort of Spain all over again. But with this difference: our stumbling along is of a lucky form, and, without much thinking, we have generally been able in the past to compliment ourselves that nothing succeeds like success.

An instance in point is that the present European War is frightening us into building a proper fleet. This will probably enable us to appear in the Pacific with a possibly superior force just in the nick of time. If we get our fleet built first, and it is recognized as decidedly superior, there may be no game in the Pacific at all. In other words, if the other side does not see its way clear to win, it will not feel like playing. Such is the meaning of sea-power and such is the insurance that it brings.

These remarks should give an idea to the composite everybody that it is such matter as this that would come to be the chief business before the "National Council of Defense," if Congress ever comes to enact that most important body into existence. Experts among the official classes in the government services understand such questions as these well enough, but they are without the necessary prestige to meet public opinion and have nothing to do with establishing national policies, without which nothing of great importance can be done.

Until such a body comes into existence we remain only half a factor in treating that great catalogue of questions intimately connected with policy and manifest destiny, and which can be treated properly. only by a body drawn largely from the highest political representatives of the country, assisted and supplemented by the technical and professional officials of the Government.

It is the only way in which national policies, as separated from the internal. affairs of the country, can become established, and allied questions lifted out of the maze of incoherence in which they now float. It is to be noted, and it is highly gratifying, that we are attaining some progress in this regard. For ten years or so the proposition to create a Council of National Defense has been before Congress. The Baltimore Democratic Convention of 1912 adopted a plank in its platform favoring the creation of such a body. After four years, and just as the administration is about to close, the present Congress brings forth a provision as a rider to the army appropriation act. It has nothing to do with the army, but as that bill carried a mass of extraneous legislation, it was incorporated as one of a numerous list of riders.

The section in question prescribes that a Council of National Defense is established for coördination of industries and resources for the national security and welfare, to consist of the secretaries of war, navy, interior, agriculture, commerce, and labor, and to be assisted by an advisory commission of not more than seven persons, each of whom shall have special knowledge of some industry, public utility, or development of some natural resource, or be otherwise specially qualified, in the opinion of the council, for performance of the duties provided, the commission to serve without compensation, etc.

For a Council of National Defense the measure means nothing. Why it was prepared in this emasculated form by Mr. Hay, the chairman of the military committee of the House, in whose hands it was, is due to several reasons. The first probable reason is that in the minds of congressmen and our general public the belief is strong that there is such a thing as passive defense. Thus this new body is authorized to study and evolve a plan how best to munition or feed armies to repel Asiatic hordes, if such were landed on our

Pacific coast. The reader, it seems sure, must clearly comprehend by now that if an enemy is so much as even able to land on that coast he has the struggle mostly won. The advantage of position is all with him.

Another probable reason for the bill taking the form it has is that Congress may have been uncertain what such a council might do, and so, to avoid being embarrassed by it, first, they clipped its wings, by taking away the Secretary of State, whose presence is absolutely necessary if this body is to have the necessary prestige in matters of national policy; and, second, in limiting the functions of the council to matters far removed from questions of policy. The reader of current events of the last two years must realize how painfully lacking we are in not having such a body to furnish correlated data and to furnish a plan for the harmonizing of the departments of the Government. Not only do we lose in prestige by not having such, but in treasure we waste tens of millions through each of the government departments working in its own separate way. Just a point for proof: the chamber of commerce of Galveston, Texas, applied to a congressman that the city should be defended from sea attack, and he introduced a bill for a fort to cost half a million or more, which the war department built and garrisoned. No other government in the world could afford to be so wasteful as to carry out such a measure when the obvious solution would be to decide that the defense of this place from the sea rested upon the control of the Gulf of Mexico, a matter entirely within the keeping of the navy. But there is no coördinating department of the Government to make just such decision except the President himself, who is already too overswamped with just such details.

The result is that where not a cent was needed, a half a million or more was spent because there was no other way of meeting the matter. All this is the folly of an uncoördinated government.

TOD

O-DAY he lives in Bokhara, in the old quarter of the desert town that the natives call Bokhara-i-Shereef. He

has a store in a bazaar not far from the Samarkand Gate, where he sells the goldthreaded brocades of Khiva and the striped Bokhariot belts that the caravanmen exchange for brick-pressed tea across the border in Chinese Turkestan, and where, methodically filling his pipe with tobacco from the carved pumpkin-shell at his elbow, he praises the greatness of Russia and the wisdom of the czar.

There, at noon every day, his ten-yearold son comes to him, bringing clean and well-spiced food from the market.

"Look at him!" he says often, proudly pinching the supple arms of the lad, and exhibiting him as he would a pedigreed stallion. "Sinews and muscles and a farseeing eye, and no nerves-none at all. Because of which I give thanks to Allah the Wise-judging, the opener of the door of knowledge with the key of His mercy. For one day my son will wear a plaited, green coat and a tall chugerma cap of white fur, and serve the czar. He will learn to shoot straight, very straight, and then," he adds, with a meaning smile, if he happens to be speaking to one of the three men whom he trusts,-"then he will desert. But he will return, perhaps,"rapidly snapping his fingers to ward off misfortunes,-"he will return to his regiment, and he will not be very much punished."

A true Russian man he calls himself, and his name, too, has a Russian purring and deep ringing to it-"Pavel Alikhanski." Also there is talk in the town that he is in the pay of that great Bokharan magnate, the kushbegi, friend of the czar, bringing tales to him about his Highness the ameer, and receiving milled gold for the telling of them. And why cannot the kushbegi be the future Ameer of Bokhara

if, indeed, the talcs be cunningly woven and Russia willing?

But ten years ago, when I called him friend, his name was not Alikhanski. Then he called himself Wazir Ali-Khan Sulaymani, that last name giving clue to his nation and race; for "Sulaymani" means "descendant of King Solomon," and it is known in half the world that the Afghans claim this resplendent Hebrew potentate as their breed's remote sire.

In those days he lived in a certain gray and turbulent city not far from the northeastern foot-hills of the Himalayas, where three great empires link elbows and swap lies and intrigues and occasional murders,. and where the Afghan mist falls down. like a veil of purple-gray chiffon. In those days neither Russia nor the czar was on his lips, and he called himself an Herati, an Afghan from Herat, city-bred and city-courteous, but with a strain of maternal blood that linked him to the mountains and the sharp, red feuds of the mountains. But city-bred he was, and as such he lisped Persian, sipped coffee flavored with musk, and gave soft answer to harsh word.

He did not keep shop then, and none. knew his business, though we all tried to find out, chiefly I, serving the Ameer of Afghanistan in that far city, and retailing the gossip of the inner bazaars from the border to the rose gardens of Kabul, where the governor sits in state and holds durbar.

But money he had, also breeding, also a certain winsome gentleness of spirit and speech, a soft moving of high-veined hands, well-kept, and finger-nails darkened with henna in an effeminate man

ner.

He spent many a day in the hills, the Khwadja Hills, called poetically Hill A12, C5, K-K67, and so forth, in the Russian and British survey-maps. There

he would shoot bighorns and an occasional northern tiger that had drifted down in the wake of the outer Mongolian snows. This was strange, for an Afghan does not kill for the sake of killing, the sake of sport. He kills only for the sake of food or of feud.

Nor could he explain even to himself why three or four times every month he left his comfortable town house and went into the hills, up and down, following the call of the wilderness; through the gut of the deep-cleft Nadakshi Pass; up beyond the table-lands, pleasant with apricot- and mulberry-trees; still farther up to the smoke-dimmed height of the Salt Hills, where he stained his soft, city-bred hands with the dirt of the tent-peg and the oily soot of his rifle.

his mother's side, and thus the marriage had been a proper thing, since we of Afghanistan do not believe in mating with strangers.

Tall, hook-nosed, white-skinned, with gray-black, flashing eyes and the build of a lean she-panther, not unbeautiful, and fit mother for a strong man's sons, I saw her often. For these hillwomen despise the customs of the sheltered towns; they will not cover their bodies with the swathing farandjés, nor their faces with the chasband, the horsehair veil of the city

women.

Ali-Khan loved her. He loved her with that love which comes to fortunate men once in a lifetime-once and not oftener. His spoken love was as his hands, soft and smooth and courtly and slightly

"My mother came from the hills," he replied, "and it is perhaps her blood screaming in my veins which makes me. take to the hills, to kill bighorn and snowtiger instead of killing brother Afghans."

"You do not believe in feuds?" I was astonished, for I was young in those days. Again he laughed.

"I do believe in feud," he said; "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. A true saying, and a wise one. But what worth is there to me in killing my enemy if my enemy's son will kill me in the course of time? An unfinished feud is a useless thing. For, tell me, can even the fleetest horse escape its own tail? Can the naked tear their clothes? Can a dead horse eat grass?"

So month after month he went into the hills, and he came back, his soul filled with the sights he had seen, his spirit peopled with the tales and the memories of the hills. Often I spent the evening with him, and he would digest his experiences in the acrid fumes of his bamboo pipe. He smoked opium in those days.

Then one day he came back from the hills a married man.

She was a hillwoman of the MoustaffaKhel tribe, and her name was Bibi Halima. She was a distant cousin of his on

gifts for her adornment, and he would write poems to her in the Persian man

ner.

And she? Did she love him?

Assuredly, though she was silent. The women of Afghanistan do not speak of love unless they are courtezans. They bear children,-sons, if Allah wills, -and what else is there for woman in the eyes of woman or of man? Also, since love is sacrifice, can there be greater proof of love than the pain of giving birth?

No, Bibi Halima did not weave words of love, cunning and soft. Perhaps she thought her husband's spoken love-words in keeping with his henna-stained fingernails, an effeminacy of the city, smacking of soft Persia and softer Stamboul, the famed town of the West.

She did not speak of love, but the time was near when she was about to give answer, lusty, screaming answer. She expected a child.

"May Allah grant that it be a manchild," she said to her husband and to her mother, a strong-boned, hook-nosed old hag of a hillwoman who had come down into the city to soothe her daughter's pains with her knowledge-"a man-child, broadbodied and without a blemish!"

"Aye, by God, the holder of the scale of law! A man-child, a twirler O