published last week, with its wonderful 'The contents of Mr. Rhodes' will as request of money to foun scholarships at Oxford, not only for Englishmen resident in the British Isles and for English Colonists beyond the seas, but for American who in language are one with us, and Germans, who are bound to us by ties of kinship, must by this time be known as well in Shanghai as it is here, for it could not have taken long to waft the news by electric agency to the four corners of the globe, To-day, however, men's minds are exercised about what has been termed the Empire Maker's "Political Will" which in point of fact is no will at all, but just a letter written some twelve years ago to Mr. W.. Stead and published by him in this month's number of Review of Reviews." Whether the writer, had he gone through the missive again during the past few months, would have endorsed all he wrote in 1890 is " matter for speoulation. In any case the document is of great interest at the present juncture, avd has formed the motif of the premier leading article in most of to-day's daily papers. The leading idea of the letter seems to be that millionaires should combine and form 'a secret society, on much the same lines as the Jesuits, but for the accumulation of money. Mr. Rhodes called this idea his "pavent," and somewhat sadly says, "Tt isa fearful thought to feel that you possess a patent, and to doubt whether our life will last' you through the cireumlocution of the forms of the patent office. have the inner conviction that if T can live I have thought out something that is worthy of being registered at the patent office; the fear is, shall Ihave the time and the opportunity?" He believed that by means of the accumulation of the wealth of all our greatest menied men it would be possible not yet, but say in a hundred years" to accomplish the federation of the entire English speaking race of the world, and so effect for us what the Society of Jesus accomplished for the Catholic Church immediately after the Reformation. The idea of course is magnificent in conception, but it is a question whether its originator had not years ago found it unworkable.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.