To the matter-of-fact modern, especially to the boastingly practical man, with his instinctive preference for illusory paper investments, all historic associations are suspicious, sentmental, savoring of anything save permanent security and safe return. But here, as everywhere else, the would-be economic Philistine is non-economic. For on the least consideration these historic positions are justified; people prospered longest there, and so have left most mark; for it is surely where population was most numerous and most rich that it could leave most tombs or treasures, could best build temple or tower. Here or anywhere it is just where one ruling civilization after the other fixed itself, just where we find the mark of Phoenician priest or Greek despot, of Roman proconsul or Byzantine ruler, of mediæval abbot or grandmaster, or where Turkish conqueror has been followed in his turn by Greek usurer, that your shrewd agricultural prospector, after keen scrutiny of soil and climate, of water and health, will probably fix himself in turn, and often find the very strategic point of old the best for market or port to-day.

Farther on, above the pretty village of Episcopi, stands the noble Acropolis of ancient Curium, its temples shattered, its hippodrome now a long ellipse of ruin amid returning natural forest, its valleys filled with tombs. Past picturesque cliff and precipice and landslip goes the winding hill-path; above the endless pistacia-scrub rise thousands of wild olives and wild carobs, each awaiting the grafter. Once amid all this wildness we find a little long-forgotten grove of ancient olives, their silvery vesture, their undying youth full of the solemn beauty of the Holy Wisdom herself. For Pallas of the olive-grove is no dead goddess, as they teach that know of her only in books. As in each VOL. XV. 761

LIVING AGE.

Our every-day agricultural and economic science often forgets that with agricultural things there go agricultural thoughts, the one as real and as permanent as the other. But the more thoughtful comparative agriculturist is wont to point out, for instance, how the traditional turbulence of Corsica is associated with its chestnut forests and its impenetrable "maquis;" how the misery of Sicily is almost as closely associated with the prickly pear as Irish poverty with the potato; or how the useful carob, with its lavish yet irregular shower of coarse fruit without labor, is the very tree of the prodigal.

The associations of agriculture with social culture, and of both with spirituality and cult, as this of Pallas and her olive-tree, which to the Philistine even as scholar, seem mere old-world poetic fancies, are the very constants of social geography; permanent laws, that is, of human life, material, social, and moral, throughout the Mediterranean lands. From one side has started the living mythologist with his "Golden Bough," from another independently sets out the thinking agriculturist and botanist with his social geography. But already they begin to meet; and both begin to see how, for the future as for the past, the longtended olives stand with the house of peace, and how amid the deep-rooted palms there is literally flowing, albeit silently and to the surface view unseen, the water which bears the essential concrete possibility of restoring at once material and social order, and with these the moral order also, of renewing the sound social mind in sound

economic embodiment. In such ways both begin to understand the traditional sacredness of the palm-tree, and to think out together how the palmoasis became the holy city, the goal of pilgrimage, at length the prototype of Paradise. With water or irrigation goes ever the water of a bettered social and individual life.

Nor need we stop short of practical politics. In town, where we see of the Eastern question only its daily urban discussion and detail, it may seem strange to think or speak, especially of the things townsfolk profess to settle, in terms of the thoughts and labors of the rustic year. But if the desired "Reforms," mean anything, they admittedly involve corresponding financial reforms, fiscal reforms; and where there are practically no manufactures, and commerce turns on agricultural output, what can these reforms come down to but agriculture? So the Eastern Question is ultimately Agricultural Question. One main ineptitude of the Great Powers has been the agricultural ineptitude of their representatives, who have been diplomatic or military, parliamentary or journalistic, almost to a man. Their futility is but the common urban incapacity to govern agricultural populations, to deal with rustic questions.

an

Let us start afresh, however, from this most generalized aspect of the Eastern question as fundamentally economic and agricultural; let us get back to the source of its persistent antagonism of races and religions in the immemorial duel of nomad and sedentary, of shepherd and peasant. Thus we are ready to understand, in the mass or in detail, the reciprocal aggressions of flock and field, and to study, in the jealous antagonism of the shepherd and field-watchman around the Cyprus village, the "cellular pathology" of the body politic.

With the advance of disforesting and desiccation, of mutual impoverishment, comes on the economic ruin of both. In a terrible wave of conquest, the philosophy and religion of destiny triumphs, yet the moment of Moham

medan tolerance with it, the more since the first nomad conquerors are comparatively few and mostly of simple and temperate lives, and the social struggle is thus abated for a season. But, as it returns, faith sours into fanaticism, order becomes oppression, and repression reverts to massacre. In the natural Western protest against these, however, the elemental facts of geographical economics are forgotten, their ultimate developments in religion, government (and the degeneration of these), are next interpreted as the initial cause, and thus we get the common crusading speech and leading article. In ways like this one comes to hunger less for the morning newspaper, to think less of anything powers or politicians may vote or say, but to see more and more clearly with Candide, “Il faut cultiver son jardin." And thus we go home to Nicosia to buy and tend that first-seen palm-oasis, to reopen its ruined wells, to mend its broken cisterns; for here for Arab or Turk is the old-world earthly paradise. But here, also, the Greek may find his olive and plant his vine, the Persian his fig and almond, the Jew adorn his simple feast with citron and pomegranate, the Armenian tend his grove of mulberries. Around all these, too, there is room for the roaming flock, the half-wild shepherd. Thus we may read, and, if it may be, write, in silent yet living and spreading symbol, what is so hard to say in these days of futile word and bloody deed, that the future of the East lies not in the struggle, not in the victorious or beaten isolation of its con trasted races, but in their co-operation as complementary races; not in the cou flict, but in the synthesis, of its fragmentary philosophies, in such union of labor and thought as may again literally lead from the ruined well its lifegiving waters, and melt also from these frozen religions their imprisoned water of life. For wherever at this moment two Easterns are quarrelling in their poverty, four or six or ten might soon be co-operating in wealth and peace. At once the actual cleansing and reopening of the ruined wells of our oasis

demonstrates this; with proportionally trifling outlay the water-supply well-nigh doubles, and with this ap pear new possibilities of fertility and population, and of course a correspondg rise of acre-values as well. Naturally, as with a remedy or a weapon, there are two questions, of quality and of quantity, and, like physician or soldier, we take up that of quality of principle first.

Returning to the south-western coast, the forest region suddenly ends at a day's ride west of Limassol, and a new landscape opens, that of historic Paphos, and long, bare perspectives of parallel hill slopes sweep down into the goodly plain, watered by at least one perennial river. While the scholar has unearthed the massive foundations of the ruined temple, and the medieval antiquary mourned over knightly tower and hall in their fallen estate of loft and byre, the geologist has sometimes pointed out that the height these stand on is a well-marked raised beach, and asked whether the story of the foamborn goddess was not meant to express or at least include that of her island home. As in classic times, the west wind commonly prevails, the Mediterranean swell swings full upon the shore, and so we have ever that long fringe of snowy foam by which these poet-priests of sailor peoples were wont to watch their goddess rise. For the goddess of love and passion this old and ever renewed symbol fitly outlives her statues and shrines; this immortal energy of nature is a fit parallel to the unceasing renewal of life. Nor are future symbols wanting. Now, as of old, the waves stir strange sea creatures from their depths, and the surf teems and literally froths with their awaking life in spring. Most symbolic of all, the white foam rises, not from the deep clear Mediterranean blue, but from a heaving zone turbid with the inrush of torrential rivers. For this goddess, as for her serener rival of the intellectual life, there has been

no

death, but an immortal change; her mysteries have not vanished. What naturalist doubts that life rose from

the sea? What youth but dreams in some fashion of the choice of Paris? Of Aphrodite of old, of evolution of sex now, there are ever exoteric and esoteric readings, material and spiritual cults, each intensifying and deepening as the world grows on.

us.

Another of the great excursions of the island is eastward to Salamis and Famagusta. A little north of the ruined Græco-Roman city stands the yet earlier Mykenian citadel; a little south of the ruined mediæval city stands the mean modern town. So here in an hour's ride the essential procession of European history rises before Nor are great scenes of worlddrama wanting, from Paul and Barnabas in the forum of Salamis to Othello and Desdemona in their tower. For in this strange island of tomb and temple there echo everywhere the voices of Love and Death. Nowhere better than in Famagusta can we see the stately mediæval world with its piety and heroism, for nowhere stand nobler churches within more gallantly defended walls. Nowhere, alas, more clear are the lapsed ideals, the corresponding material squalor of modern life, than in the ruinous hovels of the Turkish village, shrinking within the city walls, or in the sordid lanes and cafés of the modern Greek townlet spreading without.

Yet neither is dead; the old Turkish spirit lives in the strong, silent faces at the mosque; the Hellenic spirit sparkles from the children's eyes. Even the sordid modern village gains upon us. In every dirty café the arches spring light and true, as from the medieval workman's hands, and one sees with fresh clearness that architecture is not a function of paper plans, unrolled by those clerkly gentlemen we call architects in the west, for their drilled mechanics to copy, but that the masons themselves build like bees without architects, because they are architects, to this day the freemasons of old. There can be few more pleasing sights for any who know and care for traditional cr. ft and individual skill. This arch-building one can see anywhere in

Cyprus; but here at Varoschia is a local industry even more ancient, and more widely fascinating-the potteries. And if the forms, when reminiscent of classic shapes, be so rather as regenerations than as active survivals of the old art-spirit, let us not wholly blame the producer. We admire, or think we admire, the Greek vases from the tombs; we blame the living Greeks for not making the like; yet do we not ourselves live contentedly àmid the meanest crockery of any ceramic period, at best relieved by Oriental ornaments in utter contrast to our needs and ways? Let but some museum, some educated consumer here and there give at once an outlet and an impulse to better things, and no local industry in the world would be more easy of renascence. As by these masons the House Beautiful might again be simply built, so with these potters it might again be adorned. Similarly, good metal-workers are still in the bazaars, good needlewomen likewise not far to seek, for this and that old style of Eastern embroidery still lingers among the villages, though Western "education," with its Kindergarten ornament and aniline color, already poisons the town. Here, toen, as elsewhere in Cyprus, the ways of active initiative lie open.

Yet one more excursion, this time to the northward. Across the cereal plain, we come to low barren hills, treeless and soilless, where, after too many years of Treasury delay, the present energetic forest officer has found some scanty means to make a successful beginning of afforestation, the acacia taking as kindly to these dry gorges as does the eucalyptus to its marshy levels. From these barrens the scene suddenly changes, thanks to a good spring, to the loveliest of oasis valleys, full of watercourses and busy mills, houses and gardens, corn and trees. After an hour of stumbling and scrambling (for the good roads of Cyprus, as of so many other places, are essentially the tentacles of town, not the arteries of the village), we reach the spring, and thence wind

the

on by a precipitous hill-path, past the splintered giant fist of Pentedactylon, and thence to a new landscape, indeed another world, of sharper contrast than any of us had seen on two sides of a mountain range before. On the south side the narrow oasis valley up which we had climbed the landscape is practically treeless. On the north, the cypress, pine, and arbutus forest thickly clothes the heights, while the deep-gorged lower plateau slopes gently to the sea, rich and beautiful in its perennial light-grey and dark evergreen of olive and carob, stretching far as the eye can reach on either side of the little provincial capital of Kerynia, itself a townlet and suburb grouped around a gigantic Venetian fort.

Here, then, we reach the fullest beauty of Cyprus, indeed the full beauty of the Mediterranean. The lovely plain, well-watered and wellwooded, the pleasant, prosperous-looking farms with their springs and fountains, the picturesquely perched villages on the hillsides, the noble mountain range with its peaks and cliffs, make up a panorama not to be forgotten. On one side of the slope above Kyrenia we see the glorious abbey of Bella Pais, and crowning the three thou sand feet peak above the town, towers the extraordinary castle-labyrinth and turret-medley of St. Hilarion-complex as a drawing of Dürer's, fantastic in its intense light and shade as a woodcut of Doré's. Here, at any rate, there is little wonder that, to the romantic traveller, Cyprus seems an enchanted island. But our journey is not merely, nor mainly, in search of the picturesque and the romantic, though both artist and photographer are in their element; we are also a scientific party on business, that is, in search of the practical, of the miraculous; and we are in high feather especially over one particular combination of these, the rediscovering for ourselves of the old miracle of Moses's rod. Not a divining rod, of course, for we read that he "smote" the rock, and the waters "gushed forth," which (if a re-revised reading be still admissible) means that

For in these too calcareous countries the springs are constantly sealing themselves up with a crust, just like a kettle with its deposit, and so year by year they run less freely; nay, in time one little outlet after another becomes closed altogether, and thus most, it may be even all, of the water supply disappears, with corresponding shrinkage of fertility, which peasant and ruler (Turk and Briton alike) seem to have accepted hitherto in the same ignorant fatalism. At one spring a few kicks and scratches set free enough water to prove this view to all concerned, and an hour of pickaxe and crowbar gives a permanent increase of twenty or more per cent.; at another, where the crust is thick and old, hard work is wanted; at another, skilled miners and perhaps a charge of dynamite would be required. But it is safe to say there is probably not one spring, along the northern chain at least, which has ever been properly developed, or which might not be vastly and permanently improved at an expense altogether in significant in comparison with the agricultural return. The want of Cyprus is water, peasant and official alike truly tell you; yet in no district, so far as our journey went, are the water resources even properly known, much less properly exploited. Again, even of such water as is obtained too much is either wasted for irrigation or wasted in overirrigation; this latter often so copious as to sicken and drown the roots; to cake, and choke, and impoverish the soil. It is manifest that such an island, with its many small but various and varied sources of supply, is not to be treated by any rough and wholesale engineering application of the methods of the vast yet comparatively simpler Indian or Egyptian plains with their perennial rivers. It is rather for Cyprus to offer to larger countries a comparative microcosm of irrigation methods, in which economy and efficiency of local adaptation might readily combine so becoming the spot where not only the Eastern, but also the

young colonist for the Cape or Australia may pause to learn his business more simply and rapidly than on the immense scale of these larger countries. Here, in fact, far more than in these great countries, one can see much within little space. And thus by cheap and simple methods we might, on the one hand, vastly improve Cyprus for the Cypriote, a much-needed service which it is full time we should undertake; and, on the other, make Cyprus an object-lesson and trainingschool for the East, for India and the Colonies. It is safe to predict also that this would help forward the incipient reaction towards a renewal of ancient, simple, and economic irrigation methods, away from undue dependence

on

gigantic and costly engineering works. This reaction is beginning, for instance, to be expressed by Californian or Dakotan irrigation engineers, who, after long dependence on mighty reservoirs and costly dams, on expensive artesian wells, have of late been re-discovering for themselves that "underflow" on which most of the simple, effective and economical irrigation of antiquity and the Middle Ages was wont to depend in Cyprus and through the East.

Nor is Cyprus a potential centre and school of hydrogeology and irrigation alone, but of agriculture also, of acclimatization as well. With finer climate and better soil than the Riviera, much might surely be done, alike again for the island itself in the first place, for the East also, for the empire as a whole. Far away it is, no doubt, as our small island and our small European distances go; but it is well-nigh at our doors as compared with the mighty distances of empire, and on its very main street also. For what else have we to compare within one night's run from Alexandria or Port Said? Here, too, within a single farm, lie zones of culture for which we might elsewhere have to go half round the world. Beginning with date-palm and banana, we pass to pomegranate and to orange, to mulberry and to fig, to olive and to