THE MANNERS TART. An old and worn out Tart once sat on the pantry shelf and as it dried and stiffened, thus it soliloquized: “In my youth men fought over me, not to possess me, but that each should pass me to his neighbor. “I was a fair Tart, greatly to be prized, but the manners of all were such that I was left alone on the table, the last of my kind, the Manners Tart, and they all withdrew, feigning indifference. “The cook, having made many of my brethren, cared not for me, so I, created to rejoice the soul of man, sit here, a cold and cheerless thing at which the rats gnaw nightly. “There was a little boy at the table, but why speak of him? He stretched out his hand for me, but detecting a slight frown between the eyebrows of his mother, he withdrew it and my chance was gone. “The little boy was the only one that sympathized with me; he knew that a Tart is short lived at best; that the only modest ambition of a Tart is to gladden some one in life and to overhear a few words of praise as it passes away. “But alas! I am a failure, and all because I move in a circle that makes a merit of self-sacrifice. I do not understand such things, but——” here a pang of mold struck to the Tart’s heart and it relapsed into unconsciousness. If it had understood it would have said—“there are many joys in the world that die unrejoiced over because no man will have the courage to do what he wants to do.” CLARA CAHILL PARK. DETROIT, August, 1895. A MATTER OF BACKGROUND. If the war in the extreme East just ended has done no more for humanity, it has demonstrated the unfitness in these days of a nation that has no perspective. Philosophers we have had, and eke reformers, who saw no farther than their noses. But here is a great people whose polity is exclusive, whose art recognizes no relation of distance, whose social code is rigidly formal and openly mercenary, whose methods in war consisted up to a late date of noise and stenches and hideous banners designed to frighten an enemy. With rare powers of detail, the art of China is lifeless and without spirituality or suggestive force. With centuries of training in literary industry, its lore is the elaborate repetition of didactic sayings thousands of years old. There is no background in its pictures. There is no constructive basis in its social theory. All is flat surface, repression, imitation. Yet here is the oldest nation in the world in continuous history. We need not wonder it has fallen at last. The marvel is that it stood so long. The student of history may well ask what has held back destroying hands through so many centuries of the world’s unrest.