IN

N THE REVIEW OF REVIEWS for August, 1908, there appeared a description of several applications of the gyroscopic principle, including the Brennan monorail. The recent exhibition of Mr. Brennan's invention before the Royal Society of England has confirmed in almost every particular the remarkable promises made on the occasion of the first exhibition, held under the same auspices in 1907. At that time Mr. Brennan exhibited a small car, which traveled on a single rail or cableway and kept its equilibrium perfectly even while rounding curves and when its load was shifted from one side to the other. This equilibrium was preserved by means of a pair of wheels that were rotated at high speed in opposite directions. Just as a top is kept from falling while spinning at high speed, these rotating wheels prevented the car from toppling over. It was nothing more nor less than the principle of the gyroscope, long understood by physicists, but not yet a matter of popular knowledge. Experts freely predicted a revolution in railroad practice.

has been at work developing details which would permit of using the same principle on a much larger car suitable for carrying heavy loads. The car exhibited in November last before the Royal Society was fourteen feet long, thirteen feet high, and ten feet wide. It weighed twenty-two tons. Carrying a load of forty passengers, the car traveled on a single rail around a circular track 220 yards in circumference. The balance was perfectly kept by means of two gyroscopes, weighing three-quarters of a ton each and revolving at a speed of 3000 revolutions per minte. The wheels were incased and ran in a vacuum so as to reduce friction to a minimum. A gasolene engine was used, to keep the gyroscope spinning and also to propel the car. Attempts were made to destroy the equilibrium by shifting the passengers suddenly from one side to the other, but the gyroscope wheels when subjected to this severe test restored the balance at once. The precessional action that always accompanies the gyroscopic motion was overcome by means of friction devices.

a slight deviation from a true line would result in no damage, whereas when two parallel tracks are used they must both be kept perfectly parallel and in perfect alignment. Otherwise the car will run off the track or will rock violently if one side dips below the other. Thus a double-rail track is more difficult to keep in repair than two monorails, for the reason that the two rails are interde

pendent and variation in one must not take place without a corresponding variation in the other. In rounding curves there is always danger of spreading the tracks where a double-rail track is used, while with a monorail line should the side thrust be sufficient to shift the rail there would be no tendency on the part of the car wheels to leave the track.

DES ESPITE the undisputed growth of imperialism and the constant accretion of vast empires, there are not wanting signs (says Albert Wirth, writing in the Neue Rundschau) that this is pre-eminently the day of nationalism. Herr Wirth, who is a well-known German journalist and traveler, has recently returned from an extended journey throughout the civilized world. He is firmly convinced that the smaller nationalities of the earth are more in evidence to-day than ever before. Here is some of his testimony:

In 1905 the Russian Poles awoke and gained self-consciousness, but at the same time the Lithuanians also awoke. All at once the Lithuanians possessed a number of newspapers and an abundance of national leagues. They already demand the use of the Lithuanian language in the church. The Poles are against it, but the Russians, who at an earlier time oppressed both Lithuanians and Poles, now aid the weaker party, the Lithuanians. Divide et impera. Further down in the south Great Russians, Ruthenians, and Poles fight one another, and all of them together are against the Jew and the German.

Such dissensions, however, exist, the German writer continues, because they are not the result of sophistic diplomats; they are an elemental phenomenon.

A phenomenon of that nature may, of course, be diplomatically utilized or ignored. It is a phenomenon that may be observed in Protestant South Africa and in Catholic Brazil, in the Christian world as well as in the Buddhistic and Mohammedan world; in short, in all parts of the globe. Australia is prejudiced against the yellow race and the Hawaiian Kanakas and has excluded Dalmatian vineyard laborers. She received the North American fleet with the greatest enthusiasm, as an aid against the dangerous Japanese and their immigration. She sees with the greatest displeasure that some of her white subjects already serve under Chinese employers. Between the Boers and the Eng lishmen the dissension disappeared with astonishing rapidity because both are threatened by the black peril." In South America there is

going on a struggle between indigenous whites and white immigrants. Then there exists a rupture also between white and colored people, more pronounced in the northern part. There is finally a war on between education and barbarism, between the civilization of the cultivated plain and the wildness of the jungle, influence here than elsewhere. The Luso-Bramarsh, and mountain. Language is of lesser zilian is hardly less prejudiced against the Portuguese than against the Italians and Germans; the inhabitant of Chile despises Spaniards, Swiss, and Frenchmen in an equal manner. With the Indians the indigenous people are mostly not on bad terms, since President Juarez of Mexico was a full blooded Indian, and in the veins of many noble people of Chile flow the blood of Araucanos; the Gauchos of the Argentine Republic are half-Indian.

In the United States, Herr Wirth contends, the conflict of nationalities is a characteristic of the State.

It is observed recently that nationalism in the United States is on the increase. Germans, Irishmen, negroes, have all become more conscious of their individualities than at any previous time. To a great extent that is a consequence of the new colonial and imperialistic policy; at the same time a consequence of the served that in mixed marriages, where the wife natural alienation from England. I have obis a Spaniard, the children learn Spanish better or exclusively. I have met Irishmen and negroes who spoke German fluently, having grown up in Pennsylvania. In Canada the French cannot be destroyed, as their number, two millions and a quarter, is not exceeded by that of the English. Consequently the French feel very comfortable, especially as even their Premier, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, came from their midst. They have not the least desire to join the Union, for they would be crushed, while now their privileges are respected; that is the innermost reason of their loyalty. Otherwise they have no liking for the English, especially as they are extremely eager Catholics.

In France, three-quarters of a million Bretons and some hundred thousand Basques and Corsicans stand aloof from the general body.

In Spain, Catalonians and Castilians are sepa

rated by a deep gulf. In Belgium, Walloons and Flemish struggle against each other. In Germany there are even three kinds of national enemies The Frenchmen of Lorraine, the Danes and the Poles, besides some minor ones, -Mazurs and Lithuanians. In Austria, Russia, and Turkey the struggle of nationalities is an everyday phenomenon, but even Scandinavia, peaceable as she is, has gone through similar experiences. Northern Europe, with its thin population, has preserved three or even four (Iceland) national types.

In Persia, Kurds, Armenians, Arabs, inhabitants of Beluchistan and Tatars of Aderbeijan; in India, Siam, China, Siberia, everywhere there is extreme disruption. Japan has a hard nut to crack in Formosa, being in a minority (1 to 60) against the Chinese and the Chinaized folk. Korea only has experienced no inner disruption and also no Irredentism, although she is filled with great indignation against the Japanese invasion. I am inclined to think that the granite-like, strong peculiarity of the Koreans will gain the victory.

Do

men of genius make good husbands? In an article in the Nineteenth Century and After Mr. Sidney Low answers this question with a decided No!" He suggests various reasons why they do not as a matter of fact and why they ought not in the interest of the race itself. First, as to the matter of fact, is it not true that the great writer either does not marry, or, if he does marry, the union turns out badly?

In order to prove his case Mr. Low takes a list of sixty-eight distinguished writers of the English language. Of these twenty-five never married at all; of the remaining fortythree, twenty were fairly satisfactory and twenty-three were unfortunate and sometimes disastrous. He finds the same result follow from the examination of the lives of distinguished women of letters.

The following is an analysis of his list. Unhappy marriages: Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pepys, Swift, Addison, Sterne, Boswell, Burns, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Hazlitt, Lytton, Carlyle, Ruskin, Landor, Dickens, Thackeray, Rossetti, Fitzgerald. Note that Mr. Low includes among the unhappy marriages those in which the husbands, like Boswell and Burns, were unfaithful to their wives. The wives of Shelley and Rossetti committed suicide. The wives of Southey and Thackeray became insane.

The happily married in the list are as follows: Bunyan, Defoe, Steele, Fielding, Smollett, Johnson, Sheridan, Crabbe, Wordsworth, Scott, Leigh Hunt, Moore, De Quincey, Darwin, Froude, Matthew Arnold, Kingsley, Tennyson, Browning, and William Morris. It is difficult to understand on what principle Mr. Low divides the sheep from

mar

not a model of fidelity, is said to have “ ried not unhappily." Mr. Low suggests that Johnson's marriage was unfortunate because his friends and contemporaries regarded it as grotesque. But, surely, what the neighbors say is no test of the success or failure of a marriage. Johnson himself was more than satisfied with his wife.

The following is Mr. Low's list of men of letters who did not marry: Hobbes, Newton, Locke, Congreve, Otway, Pope, Prior, Richardson, James Thomson, Gray, Hume, Adam Smith, Goldsmith, Gibbon, Cowper, Bentham, Keats, Charles Lamb, Macaulay, Newman, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Charles Reade, James Thomson (B.V.), and Walter Pater. The list, whatever criticism may be passed upon it, is very interesting and suggestive.

Mr. Low raises the question whether failure in matrimony is the penalty of eminence generally or merely of literary eminence; and then proceeds to discuss the question as to the causes of the comparative failure of the marriages of men of letters. He puts forward, with some plausibility, the theory of a friend of his, that this failure is simply due to the fact that they see too much of each other. A literary man lives in the house all day, and, therefore, he and his wife see too much of each other. If Mr. Carlyle had been compelled to attend at an office from ten to four o'clock daily Mrs. Carlyle might have been a happier woman. People who are always together get on each other's nerves in time; a good deal of voluntary short separation is the best prescription for avoiding a judicial separation and divorce.

66

race of