The question remained in abeyance therefore, for a century and a quarter.  Then, in 1805, three years after the accession of Ralph Rittenhouse to the throne of England, the storm broke again.  The occasion was the partition of Parchesie by the Great Powers, by which the towns of Zweiback, Ulmhausen and Ost Wilp were united to form what is known as the “industrial triangle” on the Upper Silesian border.  These towns are situated in the heart of the pumice district and could alone supply France and Germany with pumice for fifty years, provided it didn’t rain.  Bismarck once called Ost Wilp “the pumice heart of the world,” and he was about right, too.

It will therefore be seen how important it was to France that this “industrial triangle” on the Silesian border should belong to Germany.  At the conference which designated the border line, Gambetta, representing France, insisted that the line should follow the course of the Iser River ("iser on one side or the other,” was the way he is reported to have phrased it), which would divide the pumice deposits into three areas, the fourth being the dummy.  This would never do.

Experts were called in to see if it might not be possible to so divide the district that France might get a quarter, Germany a quarter and England fifty cents.  It was suggested that the line be drawn down through Globe-Wernicke to the mouth of the Iser.  As Gambetta said, the line had to be drawn somewhere and it might as well be there.  But Lord Hay-Paunceforte, representing England, refused to concede the point and for a time it looked like an open breach.  But matters were smoothed over by the holding of a plebiscite in all the towns of Upper Silesia.  The result of this plebiscite was taken and exactly reversed by the council, so that the entire Engadine Valley was given to Sweden, who didn’t want it anyway.

And there the matter now stands.

XXV

“HAPPY THE HOME WHERE BOOKS ARE FOUND”

By way of egging people on to buy Dr. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf of books, the publishers are resorting to an advertisement in which are depicted two married couples, one reading together by the library table, the other playing some two-handed game of cards which is evidently boring them considerably.  The query is “Which One of These Couples Will be the Happier in Five Years?” the implication being that the young people who buy Dr. Eliot’s books will, by constant reading aloud to each other from the works of the world’s best writers, cement a companionship which will put to shame the illiterate union of the young card players.

Granted that most two-handed games of cards are dull enough to result in divorce at the end of five years, they cannot be compared to co-operative family reading as a system of home-wrecking.  If this were a betting periodical, we would have ten dollars to place on the chance of the following being the condition of affairs in the literary family at the end of the stated time: