CHRISTOPHER CULLEY has drawn a real woman, and at least two human and
well-observed men. I will not give you in detail the varied course
of _Naomi's_ romance, which ends in a perfect orgy of battle, with
sheriffs and shooting, redskins and revolvers--in short, all the
effects that Mr. HAWTREY not long ago so successfully illustrated on
the stage. To sum up, I should describe _Naomi of the Mountains_ as
melodrama with a difference--the difference residing in its clever
character-drawing and some touches of genuine emotion which lift it
above the ordinary. And this from one to whom the Wild West in fiction
has long been a weariness is something more than tepid praise.

* * * * *

Sir CHARLES WALDSTEIN, author of the thoughtful _Aristodemocracy_, is
a thinker with an internationalist mind. But pray don't think he's
not a whole-hogger about the War. In _What Germany is Fighting For_
(LONGMANS) he analyses the Germans' statement of their war-aims and
does good service by presenting an excellent translation, with comment
and epilogue, of the famous manifesto of "The Six Associations," and
the "Independent Committee for a German Peace." It is an insolent,
humourless, immoral document. Anything like it published in England
would be laughed out of court by Englishmen. It is difficult to keep
one's temper when one reads all this nauseating stuff about the
little German lamb being threatened by the wolf, England (or Russia
or France, as best suits the current paragraph), and Germany's fine
solicitude for the freedom of the seas. It is no disrespect to Sir
CHARLES WALDSTEIN that his acute and dispassionate comment is not so
forcible an argument to hold us unflinchingly to the essence of our
task as any page of the manifesto itself. The German, with all his
craft, has an almost unlimited capacity for giving himself away. It