Various

“ Thus warmly, eloquently, and shrewdly did Kuropatkin condemn the Yalu adventure, and thus clearly did he see, on the political horizon, the ruinous consequences that it would have for Russia. But why did not this bold and clear-sighted accuser protest against the decision of the Port Arthur council? Why, after making a few caustic remarks about Bezobrazoff, did he sign the minutes of the council which put the Yalu adventure under the protection of Russian troops, and thus stopped the evacuation of Manchuria? Why? Simply because, at that time, everybody was afraid of Bezobrazoff. ”

“ The shadow of Marat darkened the whole picture, and in the background stood the scaffold, which liberty was mounting in company with the victims of this murderer, at whose name one shuddered, as at the mention of death. Marat, without Danton's courage or the integrity of Robespierre, seemed but a wild beast bent on devouring France.
Charlotte saw her beloved country in its death agony, she saw the victims and the tyrant. She sought to avenge the one, to punish the other, to save all.
Many a long summer night did she lie awake in her little attic room at Caen, wondering what she should do. ”

“ Miss Cheriton smiled too. "Mr. Bronson has spoken of it to me."
"Has he?" asked Marie-Aimée, brightening still further, rainbow-like, and immediately at greater ease with Miss Cheriton, from a responsiveness she felt in her smile when the ever fertile subject of the tour was broached, dear in its time to Anthony Bronson's heart. "That's good. For it will in part explain.... Don't you agree with me that laughing together makes a stronger bond than even weeping? Well, on that tour, what we did best and chiefly, was to laugh. ”

“ They are what the lawyers call "leading cases." They lay down clearly and dispassionately the law which marks the rights of the public to remain unmolested by the conflict of labor and capital at war. Such decisions are in American law what the Treaty of Paris is in the Law of Nations—a declaration of the rights of neutrals.
If, as a candidate for the presidency, Mr. Taft is to suffer from unpopularity created in any quarter by these decisions which he made as judge, he must endure it, for the search for popularity is not a part of the functions of a judge. ”

“ Miss Cheriton had shaken hands, with expressions of pleasure in making her aquaintance, had offered her a seat, and taken one, before Marie-Aimée had been able to do more than clear her throat.
Miss Cheriton had allotted her a seat well in the lights; her curiosity about this caller could do no less; wherefore Marie-Aimée's reddened eyes at first refused a square encounter. But shortly, while Miss Cheriton was forcing a dullish conversation, Marie-Aimée forgot herself, and looked Miss Cheriton in the face; full as interested as she in the looks of the other at close range. ”

“ In a little while I shall go out of your life forever. I shall be nothing to you but a memory. It is hard enough to have to die, do not make it harder for me."
"Charlotte!" cried the young man in an agonized voice, "you shall not go out of my life like this! I will kill myself! I will share your fate. I cannot live without you!"
The girl gazed up at him with a look of infinite tenderness and pity. "Do you really love me?" she asked.
"Charlotte——"
"Remember then that the price of love is sacrifice; and do as I ask." She sat down on the edge of the hard bed and drew him down beside her. ”

“ I will not avoid doing what I think is right, though it should draw on me the whole artillery of libels; all that falsehood and malice can invent or that the credulity of a deluded populace can swallow.
The two qualities which make a great judge are wisdom and moral courage. No great judge ever lived who did not possess them both. When the Phelan case was on trial before Judge Taft, it was a time of tremendous excitement. It was the very crisis of a great strike. The friends of the Judge feared for his life and asked him not to read his decision from the bench. ”

“ We ourselves were not ready to fight, and resolved that it should not come to fighting. We made demands, but we had no intention of using weapons to enforce them—and, it may be added, they were not worth going to war about. We always thought, moreover, that the question whether there should be war or peace depended upon us, and we wholly overlooked Japan's stubborn determination to enforce demands that had for her such vital importance, and also her reliance upon our military unreadiness. Thus the negotiations were carried on by the respective parties under unequal conditions. ”

“ An hour later, when the warder, Richard, entered the cell, he found the young artist still on his knees, convulsive sobs shaking his whole body, while tears of anguish rained down his cheeks and fell unheeded upon a long lock of hair which he was holding tenderly in his hands and which he now and again raised to his lips.
With a grunt, half scorn, half sympathy, the old warder shook his head and, closing the door quickly behind him, stole away in search of the more cheerful society of his wife and little Jean. ”

“ TAFT AND LABOR
BY
GEORGE W. ALGER A labor record considered solely in its utilitarian aspect as a vote-getting device is not especially important to the general public. The attitude of a presidential candidate, however, towards the industrial and social problems of the working people is another matter. Does he know what they are? Does he see the great economic questions of labor and capital with eyes blinded by class prejudice or does he see them with the clear vision of a statesman? Does he intend to play a man's part in helping to solve them? ”

“ Marie-Aimée swept her hand across her forehead. "And I," she continued, raising her voice in a tone of plaintive exculpation, "I was born mad for music! A voice has power over me like a spell. And I am flesh and blood! And so——" she ended feebly, "do you wonder?"
Silence, while Marie-Aimée turned her face wholly from the light. But even while she made application of her little damp pocket-handkerchief, a stealing sense warmed her in all her woe that she had somehow made a friend of Miss Cheriton. ”

“ And for today, let us go back to camp and leave it."
Piet was a little resentful of these things that had arrived to disturb the course of his work. First, the sudden stranger who left no spoor where he walked, and now the anchor lying where the roots of his home should be—they were beyond the calculations of an upright Boer. Like many more sophisticated men, Piet relied on his environment possessing a certain quality; when foreign elements colored it, when it was flavored with unascertained ingredients, a sort of helplessness sapped his powers; he was like a man walking blindfold. ”

“ Suppression of the labor organizations will not insure it; they should not and cannot be suppressed. Nor is there on the other hand any protection for the public if at the demands of a class, no matter how large its voting strength, the peace of the whole country is to be jeopardized by weakening the foundations of law which impose just limitations on industrial warfare. We need for president a man who will recognize and protect the just rights of both rich and poor and thereby protect American democracy against its class enemies. By these standards Mr. Taft must be judged. ”

“ Only so far as the necessity to earn a living made it imperative did she go about. Wherefore some whose invitations she refused said, "Nevers is moping. It is a pity she can't behave like the rest who have to suffer from the fickleness of man!"
A critical, less friendly attitude of the world toward her was beginning at last, through her dismal preoccupation, to penetrate her heart with its novel chill, and make the city where she had always lived seem not like home any more. She looked about, bewildered, for escape. The day of the Bronson-Cheriton wedding, too, was close at hand ”

“ This change of route, which proved to be so unfortunate, was the first striking proof of the fact that Russia, in the Far East, had begun a policy of energetic action. The occupation of Port Arthur, the foundation of Dalny, the construction of the southern branch of the railway, the formation of a commercial fleet on the Pacific, and the timber enterprise of State Councillor Bezobrazoff on the Yalu River in northern Korea, were all links of one and the same chain, which was to unite permanently the destinies of Russia and the destinies of the Far East—and thus bring gain to Russia. ”

“ I have had an active part in a great many political campaigns and probably addressed as many popular meetings as any man now living; and I have always found that whenever any public question under public discussion had in it any moral element, an appeal to the moral sense of the people proved uniformly the most powerful argument. I do not, of course, mean to say that there were not at all times many persons accessible to selfish motives and liable to yield to the seduction of the opportunity for unrighteous gain, and that such evil influences were not at times hard to overcome. ”

“ Marie-Aimée repeated her little French gesture of resignation. "When it comes to contending with the evil mind of the world, how can one hope to do it? I used to believe in the world, I loved it. I have lately discovered it to be such that I care very little what I lose with it. Its good opinion? I don't want it any more!"
"Quite right, Miss Nevers. You are as right as possible in valuing the opinion of the world lightly. Still, the loss of all that comes to make life pleasant, from being on good terms with it, is serious. ”

“ Marie-Aimée raised her face, all sickened protest and repudiation. "Everything you have said, and have made to sound so heinous, might, differently worded, fit perfectly into one's description of a nice normal boy. And is a boy unworthy of one's love? Say that Anthony Bronson remained all his life a boy, and who will contradict you? It is the same nature, that reaches out so simply toward what pleases him, that wants what it wants without thought of afterwards. ”

“ When at last I was able to play in "Captain Brassbound's Conversion" I found Bernard Shaw wonderfully patient at rehearsal. I look upon him as a good, kind, gentle creature whose "brainstorms" are due to the Irishman's love of a fight; they never spring from malice or anger. It doesn't answer to take Bernard Shaw seriously. He is not a man of convictions; that is one of the charms of his plays, to me, at least. One never knows how the cat is really jumping. But it jumps. Bernard Shaw is alive, with nine lives, like the cat. ”

“ It must not be forgotten that Japan can not only put quickly into the field, in Korea or Manchuria, a well organized and well trained army of from 150,000 to 180,000 men, but can do this without drawing at all heavily upon her population. If we take the German ratio of regular troops to population, namely, one per cent, we shall see that Japan, with her forty-seven millions of people, can maintain a force of 400,000 soldiers in time of peace, and 1,000,000 in time of war. ”

“ We are confronted in the second drawing with a striking contrast to the first, in that the merits of vigorous and harmoniously balanced line and form are supplanted by the more tender effects of atmosphere, and the vigorous stroke becomes gentle in its handling of the delicate trees worn by the winds and but half seen through the uncertain twilight. Here, perhaps, the man is more in evidence than the draftsman, and the sensitive and sympathetic spirit of the artist seems abstracted for a time from the more tangible qualities which are the chief glory of the former work. ”

“ So it is with some sense of relief that we may turn our attention upon the achievements of an artist like Thomas R. Manley, whose drawings are reproduced here, not that they may be the subject of a written discourse, but that of themselves they may give pleasure to a wider public than it has hitherto been their fortune to command. They are the product of a quiet and orderly development carried on outside the clamor of the modern movement, simple masterpieces of landscape drawing as it has been practised since the days of Claude Lorrain. ”

“ He neither knew nor cared for baseball, football, or any of the lesser sports which excite young America at playtime. He had, indeed, at first extended tentative invitations to a chosen few of his class-mates to engage in a fencing bout, but, finding that art entirely unknown, he contented himself, during recess, with sitting on the bench and reading from a French book, over the top of which he sometimes stared at his hot, excited school-mates with insolent superiority. ”

“ I wonder," said Andrew F. Biron, manager of the White Star Mine, to his sister, as he watched, with drawn brows, André François, immaculate in a white flannel suit, bare-kneed and sailor-hatted, go down the street attended by the ministering Angélique, "what Providence had against me when it picked me for the father of Andrew François?"
"He is certainly the strangest child I have ever known," answered his sister irrelevantly, "and I have had experience with a good many—an old maid always does, you know."
"What he needs is to mix up with the other boys—to become Americanized. ”