parity and equality in which the two States are considered.

San Marino has coined its own money, though at present the Italian monetary system is adopted. It has its own postage stamps, the ever - present three towers being engraved in different colors in accordance with their value. The interna

tional telegraph and postal regulations are placed in the hands of the Italian Government.

Anomalous as it may seem, the little Republic has, on rare occasions in the past, bestowed titles of nobility upon foreigners who have greatly benefited the country. As for its nobility or patrician order, which seems to have crept in during the seventeenth century, when the title was given the regents, later councils eliminated such distinctions among a free people. The patrician families whose names are enrolled upon the Republic's "Book of Gold" are those who have performed exceptional services for the community.

THE REPUBLIC'S ORDER OF KNIGHTHOOD

There is a knightly order of five grades called the Equestrian Order of Civil and Military Merit. The first three grades are bestowed for service to the Republic; the last two for service to humanity.

All the forms and ancient customs are very dear to the people. The peasants evince a wonderful reverence for their country. These contadini live among

their vines and fields, with their sheep and their great white cattle, keeping alive customs that are only picturesque memories in other lands. Here the women, sitting in the dooryard, carding the wool or spinning the flax, have ever before them the unchanging outline of the threetowered mountain. plow, behind the great white oxen, seem Men guiding the ever laboring toward the protecting heights of the guardian citadel.

On Sundays, the outpouring from the churches in the castelli, or villages, is a colorful picture of peasant life which could have been posed a hundred or many hundred years ago. And a sight which makes the Republic a decided contrast to Italy, only a few miles away, is the number of young men, living over again today the customs of their fathers. A change in their habits would be a disaster.

San Marino has had its opportunities to change from unassuming quiet and simple integrity. Some years ago an alluring offer was made to turn the Republic into another Monte Carlo. Though it would have meant wealth to the citizens as well as the government, the offer was rejected.

The littlest Republic in the world, true. to the precepts of its fourth century Christian founder, the Dalmatian stonecutter, has perhaps found the secret of eternal peace and perpetual liberty in the modesty of its pretensions.

W

HILE lacking the romantic interest and religious significance of their triumphant Holy Land campaign, which resulted in the elevation of the Christian cross once more over Jerusalem, no military operation of British forces in the Near East has been of greater importance than the recent occupation of Baku, the great oil city of the Russian Empire.

Four-fifths of all the oil produced in Russia comes from the 2,700 wells of the two vast oil fields of the Baku region. In 1915 (the latest available statistics,

owing to the chaotic conditions which have obtained for two years throughout the Slav dominions) the Baku output was more than seven million tons of oil. The lighter grades formerly were transported by pipe line to Batum, on the Black Sea.

Baku is built in the form of an amphitheater on the south side of the Apsheron peninsula, which juts far out into the Caspian Sea. It is said to derive its name from the violent squalls (badkube) which frequently strike this section of the west Caspian coast.

Although there was a settlement at this

point as early as the sixth century, Baku, which is now a town of nearly 250,000 inhabitants, did not become a Russian possession until a little more than a hundred years ago. The upper part of the city, corresponding to the back rows of an amphitheater, is the picturesque Tatar quarter, with numerous narrow lanes and oriental bazaars. The most striking architectural feature of the place is the massive Kis Kale, or Maiden's Tower, a monument of the Byzantine period, which rises to a height of nearly 150 feet. Centuries before the wealth of the Baku oil fields was realized, Persian fireworshipers discovered natural gas issuing from the fissures of rock in this vicinity, and a few miles from the modern city there may still be seen the ruins

of an ancient temple where these burning jets from the lower regions were the objects of adoration.

Aside from its importance as the Tampico of Europe, Baku had several thriving industrial establishments at the outbreak of the war, such as tobacco fac tories, flour mills, and sulphuric-acid works. Its trade with Persia and the Transcaucasus territory is active in peace times, the principal articles of commerce being raw silks, cotton, fruits, wines, and rice.

In addition to its advantages as a seaport, Baku has in recent years enjoyed railway connections both with Batum, 560 miles to the west by way of Tiflis, and with Rostov-on-the-Don, 818 miles to the northwest.

T

HE human mind cannot conceive of millions; to most of us even

tens of thousands convey no concrete idea save that of a numeral and four ciphers. Let this, then, be a story of America's ships and American shipbuilding in the language of units.

Our merchant fleets, already created and those to be, are the great, pulsing arteries supplying our armies abroad with all that constitutes the life-blood of fighting forces-food, clothing, ammunition, machine-guns, artillery, locomotives, airplanes, ambulances, reinforcements!

Ships in sufficiency spell victory. And to make that victory sure the American Government has authorized the United States Shipping Board to expend, as quickly as it can pay men for labor and material, a sum nine times as large as the value of all the gold and silver produced by all the mines of the earth during the year 1916; a sum nearly fifteen times as great as the cost of the Panama Canal; more than seven times as much as the original vast appropriation for our airplane program.

When that sum is exhausted as much more will be placed at the disposal of the Shipping Board, provided the ships are forthcoming in numbers never before built in the same length of time by any

nation, or by all the nations of the world combined. Quantity of production, quality of production, and speed of production constitute the supreme aim of the shipbuilding program in the minds of Americans today; the cost is secondary and for subsequent consideration.

THREE TONS PER FIGHTING MAN

Why the quantity and why the haste? The answer lies in the historic fact that two million American soldiers are now in France fighting for the cause of a free world, and in the historic promise that by next July that number will have swelled. to four million. Every individual man of that army requires three tons of shipping to keep him supplied with the essentials of life and of effective warfare. Not three tons of supplies, but three tons of shipping plying constantly back and forth across the Atlantic, month in and month out, through calm and storm, autumn, winter, spring, and summer. Every soldier-be he in base camp far behind the lines, in aviation training camp, in port of debarkation, in labor battalion, or among the shock troops of the front_line-requires that three tons of shipping be set aside, consecrated to his particular needs.

Four million men in France, twelve million tons of shipping on the Atlantic