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Here is Mr. Kipling at his best, and here, too, is a link somewhat simpler and readier to hand than that much-desired bond of cultivation which Mr. Oscar Wilde assures us will one day knit the world together. The time when Germany will no longer hate France, "because the prose of France is perfect," seems still as far-off as it is fair; the day when "intellectual criticism will bind Europe together" dawns only in the dreamland of desire. Mr. Wilde makes himself merry at the expense of "Peace Societies, so dear to the sentimentalists, and proposals for unarmed International Arbitration, so popular among those who have never read history;" but criticism, the mediator of the future, "will annihilate race prejudices by insisting upon the unity of the human mind in the variety of its forms. If we are tempted to make war upon