to every nook and corner of the watery globe.

Hamburg is the chief European port of departure for emigrants bound to America, and the German government has given this company a monopoly of transporting them. On the water front is the emigrant station in which are gathered, year by year, so many thousands of brave, ignorant, hopeful men and women who seek kindlier fortune in a strange and distant land. The station is, in fact, a model town, planned, equipped, and maintained with that elaborate, scientific thoroughness which is characteristic of the modern Germany. This town, surrounded by a wall of masonry, comprises many small streets adorned with trees and flower-beds and lined with rows of neat, ornamental buildings, detached and resembling cottages. There are several churches, attractive to behold, in which the followers of various creeds may worship with their own priests, pastors, and ceremonials. There are even hotels, apart from the general living quarters, and modestly luxurious, where for a small extra payment the emigrant may lord it over the common herd. A brass band gives daily concerts, and here you have the practical yet sentimental German in another guise. He knows that homesickness swells the hospital list and that music and dancing will cheer the heart of the forlorn, bewildered emigrant.

As these aliens stare wonderingly from the crowded fore-decks of the steamers in New York harbor, they appear unkempt, uncouth, more or less barbarous. But the critical spectator should view them before they have been ground through the Hamburg mill where as many as four thousand at one time may be awaiting shipment. These wild-eyed, shaggy peasants in boots and shawls and furs and sheepskins seem to themselves to be dwelling in a place of enchantment which must be a foretaste of the golden America. There is first an ordeal to be endured, however, after eighteen interpreters have sorted out the jumble of men and women fetched by rail and barge from parts of Europe that are still feudal, mediaval, and unwashed. Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, Bohemian, Croatian, Servian, Dalmatian, Roumanian, Slav, Hungarian, and the rest, they are sifted and inspected and tagged and boiled and scrubbed and disinfected within an inch of their frightened lives, and the transformation makes them look comparatively spick-and-span.

This huge, smoothly-geared machine for recruiting and shipping these people is most admirably conducted, and perhaps we in America should be grateful that such good care is taken of our citizens in the raw. One cannot help reflecting, however, that such a system is but a part of the traffic of a great shipping corporation which makes

emigration as easy and attractive as possible for the sake of the passage money. They are so much human merchandise, and their personal destinies, and the problems created by their great inflow into the slums and ghettos of American cities, are of no concern to the capable officials of the model town on the Hamburg harbor-side, a show place peculiarly interesting yet disturbing because of the very perfection of its operation. It suggests the arrangement of the docks and quays, so devised as to handle every manner of cargo with the greatest economy and efficiency, to stimulate commerce and to divert it from other ports. Whether or not it is for the best interests of the United States that the same kind of ingenious intelligence should be employed in stimulating an incessant tide of emigration from Northern Europe is a debatable question of grave import.

That Hamburg has spent one hundred million dollars in the creation of its modern harbor and is making ready to invest fifty millions more in bettering these facilities conveys in tabloid form an idea of the sheer bigness and boldness of this German competition for the business of the seas. Cuxhaven, at the mouth of the Elbe, is seventyfive miles distant, so that Hamburg is far inland and most of this long stretch of river had to be dredged to make a channel for deep-draught ships. It has required some

thing more than lusty strength and money to achieve such things as these. There has been also the vision, the imagination, the faith in the future, grand strategy displayed not in war, but in peace.

At first sight, this harbor is a confused picture, magnificent for its movement and color, but not to be viewed in passing as one is able to survey the sweep of the Scheldt in front of Antwerp or the Thames below London. The Elbe appears to be lost among the docks which extend gigantic arms in every direction, not as series of enclosed basins, but as stone wharves beside which the ships rise and fall with the small tide, just as they moor at the wooden piers of New York. The port is composed of many Hafens or harbors whose banks are the walls of masonry partly enclosing them.

Hamburg and the adjoining city of Altona rise from the water's edge, their situation boldly commanding, and look across the river to this world of modern docks and quays which is reached by means of little ferry steamers that dodge and skitter in and out among the great ships like so many bright insects. They run from one Hafen to another, amiably pause to scrape alongside vessels anchored in the stream, perhaps transferring a group of sunburned seamen with their corded sea-chests, and poke into a myriad of curious corners. To board one of these little steamers is to visit far

countries in miniature for the cost of a few pennies, to gaze at the ships and sailors of some sixty-odd different lines, steam and sail, which depart from Hamburg.

Geography flavored with adventure may be studied to advantage merely by stepping

swept, or to creep into torrid lagoons to traffic with kinky-headed natives. Woerman 'boats, German East-Africa, German West-Africa, and Hamburg-American packets, you must go to Hamburg and board one of these, or catch it en route, as Col. Theodore Roosevelt did,

if you would go steaming away to the ports that run from Aden to Delagoa Bay and from the Bight of Benin to Benguela. And you will readily understand, after trip around the harbor, why Herr Karl Hagenbeck chose Hamburg as the site of his huge zoological park, or wild animal department store. That sacred British institution, the "P. and O.," has been seriously disturbed by the audacity of the Germans in invading the ocean trade of the Orient and winning popularity among passengers by treating them, not with haughty condescension, but with genial, solicitous courtesy. Here you may see the large, comfortable steamers, all berthed in a row, which are familiar to the mooring buoys of Singapore, Hong-Kong, and Yokohama. Beyond them lift the masts and funnels of the Kosmos steamers which double the Horn and skirt the west coast as far as Puget Sound, and the GermanAustralian line which flaunts the tri-color of the Fatherland beside the red ensign of England in the roadsteads of Melbourne and Sydney.

ashore and walking along one of these docks between the ranks of ships and warehouses. The outgoing merchandise is stencilled with the names of queer, outlandish ports which you thought existed only to addle the intellects of school children. All around the coast of Africa the Germans send their steamers to wait off sandy beaches, comber

Hamburg harbor makes its appeal en masse, as a pageant whose scenes are grouped with a kind of splendid prodigality. One great, indented Hafen after another opens to view and out in the fairway are oth

to write the epitaph of the deep-water, square-rigged ship. They have created a modern steel fleet of much larger vessels than any other of their kind afloat, engaged, for the most part, in the South American trade. Of these, the Preussen attracted notice not long ago by stranding in the English Channel. Her sister ship, the Potosi has broken all sailing records between Peru and Europe during voyage after voyage, her average speed as fast as that of most cargo steamers and surpassing the historic achievements of the American sky-sail clippers of the last century.

Equipped with all manner of auxiliary engines for handling heavy sails, for lighting by electricity and heating by steam, these huge, five-masted ships seem to have revived an almost vanished epoch. Their crews are no broken, drunken pier-head jumpers and greenhorns swept up from the scum of the water front, but sturdy, ruddy German younkers, every man of them. They take fiddle, trombone, cornet, and accordeon to sea with them and it does the heart good to hear one of these forecastle orchestras, perhaps twenty strong, playing lustily and with no small skill wherever these ships cast anchor. American boys forsook the sea largely because American ships were floating hells, an ugly truth too often glossed over in discussing our lost merchant marine.

Any guidebook of Hamburg will supply the ballast of facts and figures concerning the highly developed methods of mechanical helps whereby merchandise is handled between ship and quay with more speed and at less cost than anywhere else. The gist of it is that the port displays the German industrial and commercial efficiency at the very top notch and goes far to explain why the Reichstag has ungrudgingly voted larger and larger naval estimates. The Kaiser's people have wealth and men afloat that are worth protecting, and worth fighting for, if needs be.

The backgrounds of the harbor add much to the impressions of extraordinary vitality and enterprise. Ship-building plants make a continual clangor, the gaunt frames of ocean steamers and battleships in the making tower from the water's edge, and among the serried ribs and girders toil ten thousand artisans. Beyond the funnels of the shipping are the taller chimneys of factories and power-houses. In the city itself, admirable because of the dignified solidity of its architecture, old buildings are being swept away on every hand and from the harbor the scaffolding surrounding the new and larger structures looks like so many gigantic cobwebs scattered here and there, suggesting bits of Manhattan Island as seen from the North River ferry.