We cannot but contrast this happy issue with the turbulence and disorder in which our country lived before the Great War of Liberation.

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We are delighted to learn from our despatches from Boston that the Hohenzollern Institute (formerly Harvard University) is to be opened next autumn.  By express permission of the Imperial Government, classes in English will be permitted for half an hour each day.

By the clemency of the Emperor the sentences of W. H. Taft, and W. Wilson have been commuted from the sentence of fifty years imprisonment to imprisonment for life.  We hope, in a special supplement, to be able to add the full list of sentences, executions, imprisonments, fines, and attainders that have been promulgated in honour of the birthday of our Imperial Sovereign.

4.—­War and Peace at the Galaxy Club

The Great Peace Kermesse at the Galaxy Club, to which I have the honour to belong, held with a view to wipe out the Peace Deficit of the Club, has just ended.  For three weeks our club house has been a blaze of illumination.  We have had four orchestras in attendance.  There have been suppers and dances every night.  Our members have not spared themselves.

The Kermesse is now over.  We have time, as our lady members are saying, to turn round.

For the moment we are sitting listening, amid bursts of applause, to our treasurer’s statement.  As we hear it we realise that this Peace Kermesse has proved the culmination and crown of four winters’ war work.

But I must explain from the beginning.

Our efforts began with the very opening of the war.  We felt that a rich organisation like ours ought to do something for the relief of the Belgians.  At the same time we felt that our members would rather receive something in the way of entertainment for their money than give it straight out of their pockets.

We therefore decided first to hold a public lecture in the club, and engaged the services of Professor Dry to lecture on the causes of the war.

In view of the circumstances, Professor Dry very kindly reduced his lecture fee, which (he assured us) is generally two hundred and fifty dollars, to two hundred and forty.

The lecture was most interesting.  Professor Dry traced the causes of the War backwards through the Middle Ages.  He showed that it represented the conflict of the brachiocephalic culture of the Wendic races with the dolichocephalic culture of the Alpine stock.  At the time when the lights went out he had got it back to the eighth century before Christ.

Unfortunately the night, being extremely wet, was unfavourable.  Few of our members care to turn out to lectures in wet weather.  The treasurer was compelled to announce to the Committee a net deficit of two hundred dollars.  Some of the ladies of the Committee moved that the entire deficit be sent to the Belgians, but were overruled by the interference of the men.