mark of identity a ring of Charisius. A clever harpnd girl puts two and two together, and by pretending that ed she is the mother of the baby elicits a confession from M: Charisius. He acknowledges the child as his own. Smicrines hears of it, and again attempts to persuade Pamphila to divorce her husband. Even though she has da rival, Pamphila is staunch. Charisius overhears enough of the argument to be thoroughly humbled. The reminder of his own lapse from propriety had already broken his philosophic self-satisfaction, and his sudden realisation that he was a cad by comparison with his wife effected a transformation.

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'What a paragon I was! Fair fame my standard, true he insight into right and wrong my sole research, my own life without a flaw, exempt from passion! Oh, fate has done well. I deserved exactly what I get. For once I betrayed the fact that I was human. You miserable wretch, so you will take a lofty tone, so you will preach? So you can't forgive your wife the wrong she suffered in her own despite ? Ah, but you shall have evidence of your own failings of the same kind; and she, when her turn comes, will be gentle with you, while you are making her an outcast. The multitude shall see in you at once a boor, a loser, and a fool. What a light she threw on your intentions by what she said just now to her father: she had come to her husband to share with him the ups and downs of life; she must stay with him and face the situation. But you, like some Sir Touch-me-not, full of self-righteousness, behaved worse than a barbarian. What will your clever schemes mean to her? Suitors will shun her, her father will misuse her-deuce take the father; I'll say to his face: "Will you, Smicrines, kindly cease to meddle in my affairs? There's no question of my wife separating from me. What do you mean by upsetting Pamphila and browbeating her?”'

It is no more than poetic justice that, as soon as Charisius has resolved to let nothing stand between him and his wife, he should be informed by the crafty harpgirl that she was only posing as mother of his son, and that she had found the real mother, who is no other than his own wife, Pamphila. The play ends amid universal rejoicing. It will be noted It will be noted that, though Menander's characters are convincing, his plots take a great deal for granted that the modern spectator would prefer not to concede.

In the second play, the girl who gets her hair cut short is Glycera. She and a twin brother were foundlings. The brother, Moschion, was adopted by a wealthy lady and knows nothing of his humble origin. Glycera was taken in by a poor woman. Misfortunes came, and Glycera, having no dowry, was lucky to get established as the mistress of a typical soldier, the roystering, lavish, blunt Polemon. Glycera knew that she was a foundling and that Moschion was her brother, but said nothing in order not to undermine Moschion's social position. It so happened, however, that Glycera caught Moschion's eye. He, therefore, found an opportunity to give her a more than brotherly embrace. She returned the embrace merely as a sister. Unfortunately, Polemon arrived just in time to catch the pair and drew his own conclusions. Glycera could give no satisfactory explanation, and her lover with soldierly impetuosity drew his sword and left her shorn of her locks, an object of derision and aversion. To be brief, Polemon is in despair at the loss of Glycera's affection. When she herself takes refuge with a lady next door, he is reduced to a state of mingled fury and abasement that is extremely comic. All comes out right in the end, for Glycera finds her long-lost father, discloses the fact that Moschion is her brother, and, having attained wealth and social position, condescends to marry her old lover, who was not only penitent and abject, but had utterly given up hope when he heard of Glycera's good fortune. The play ends, of course, with a wedding feast.

Menander's treatment of women and of love has been so often imitated that his plays might be taken for commonplace melodrama by the uninitiated. So true it is that the romance of one generation is the classicism of the next, and classicism when it has gone to seed is despised and rejected by the fresh young critics of a later generation. Nevertheless, Menander's treatment of women bears comparison very well with that of the Victorians. The heroines of Dickens are the merest clinging vines without half the independent personality of Glycera and Pamphila. Thackeray's good women are insipid. Trollope's heroines are at their best when grovelling abjectly at the feet of a complacent demigod with auburn side-whiskers. George Meredith in England

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and Walt Whitman in America, to name but two among many, preached anew the old gospel of the fourthalthy century Greek writers. As we look back now upon Teen Menander's work, it may even seem narrow in its am devotion to the theme of love. The fact remains that in this field Menander was a pathfinder, and that for gmore than two thousand years the trail he marked out four has been the beaten track of romantic fiction.

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Women are assuredly freer now than in Menander's i day. There are ition There are even some signs that they may yet turn the tables on the men. Sir James Barrie has in such plays as 'What Every Woman Knows' given us en the woman's view of life and of men. It must be confessed that the men come out very badly by comparison. Barrie is, however, cunning enough to sugar the pill with his whimsical humour. Instead of raging at the insult to the male sex implied in such plays, we merely bs smile jovially to see what perverted notions of life and love the dear ladies have, God bless them! When a woman plays the same game in all seriousness, that is another matter. Clemence Dane has had produced two plays in which quite brazenly she made all her men stupid, raving, childish dummies, useful merely to give the women an opportunity to exhibit their powers of heroic self-sacrifice. Her first play, A Bill of Divorcement,' was successful, because the hero, being mad, was excusable. Her second play, 'The Way Things Happen,' failed, perhaps for good reasons. To explain, however, the savage criticism it received from the embattled male critics, we must understand how completely it made men contemptible in comparison with women. There may come into existence some day a literature so unkind to men that critics in considering it will discuss, not the development of feminism, but the development of an appreciation of the good qualities and the claims to freedom of the male sex. The fact that no one has found it necessary to coin the word masculinism seems to prove that men have thus far had the best of it.

L. A. POST.

Art. 11. THE INDUSTRIAL OUTLOOK OF FRANCE.

AT the close of the War, the highest authorities entertained the opinion that France, with her innumerable wounds, would necessarily take many years to recover her industrial prosperity. And when, a little later, the franc exchange, which had been artificially maintained during the War, started on its downward slide from parity, this development only confirmed them in their opinion. For they held that, though a falling exchange might afford some stimulus to industry, it would be nothing more than an artificial, temporary, and illusive aid. So they stood unshaken in their view as to the impossibility of any early or complete recovery for industrial France. Things, however, turned out decisively otherwise, at any rate until nearly the close of 1926. It is true that industry in France appeared at first to be following the course marked out by these melancholy anticipations. For, after a spurt of intense activity in 1919 and 1920, there was a sudden set-back of business in the second half of the latter year. But this set-back continued only up to March 1921. From that moment there was a swift and steady recovery, so that, at the opening of 1922, unemployment had vanished and full industrial activity had been resumed.

This industrial prosperity maintained itself on an increasing scale. Indeed, so rapid and sensational was the revival that, already in 1922, French external trade attained its pre-war volume. From that point it has gone on from strength to strength. The annual average foreign trade of France, exports and imports, during the five years before the War was about 14 milliard francs in value. In the calendar year 1926 it was a little over 119 milliard francs in value. Reducing the francs of 1926 to their average gold equivalent, this means that the 14 milliards of pre-war foreign trade had grown to 20 milliards in 1926. If we make the same calculation in metric tonnage instead of in francs, we shall find that the average foreign trade of France for the five pre-war years was 57 million tons. In 1926 it was 78 million tons. Thus the advance is 42 per cent. in values and 37 per cent. in tonnage.

This result is confirmed if we look a little deeper, and take not merely the figures of the external trade, which RAM constitutes, of course, only a portion of the trade of a nation, but the figures of French production as a whole. Here we must have recourse to an inquiry conducted on n behalf of the American Institute of Economics and to published in 1925 under the title of 'The French Debt Problem.' After an exhaustive analysis the conclusion was reached that already in 1924, French industry is on the whole considerably more productive than it was in 1913. The general conclusion was that, comparing 1924 with 1913 as 100, 'agriculture was 90; coal, 110; iron ore, pig iron, and steel, 130; metal trades, 115; cotton goods, 106; woollens, 79; silk, 117; leather, 120; building, 125; paper, 75. A rough weighting, in accordance with the relative importance of the industries, gives a general index of production of 105.' It is added that 'one may safely conclude from the foregoing analysis that the total volume of production in France was greater in 1924 than in 1913.' This was still more decidedly true of 1925 and 1926. What has been the cause of this unexpected achievement?

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By way of clearing the ground let us begin by reciting and estimating the weighty economic arguments which made it appear so clearly, and yet erroneously, that France after the War would be industrially incapacitated for many years. In the first place, France had suffered such stupendous losses in industrial and intellectual man power that rapid recovery in any field of activity seemed quite ruled out. In the words of M. Poincaré, of all the Allies France had to pay the highest tribute in human lives. 1,400,000 of her citizens were killed, and the number of her crippled, wounded, and incapacitated men must be estimated at a figure at least as high.' * Who can measure the industrial loss sustained by a stationary population when the flower, and much more than the flower, of it is thus suddenly swept away from the field of production?

The second factor which rendered France's economic recovery presumably impossible was the destruction of

* France at the Cross Roads,' by M. Poincaré, in 'Morning Post,' Feb. 9, 1926.