Cosmopolitan 1906-09: Vol 41 Iss 5

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Cosmopolitan Magazine Vol. XLI SEPTEMBER, 1906 No. 5 Panama—the Human Side BY POULTNEY BIGELOW I. Historical and Sanitary So great is President Roosevelt's interest in the Panama Canal that he is to break a famous precedent and visit the Isthmus. No doubt he will examine conditions as thoroughly as the forewarned coming of so distinguished an official will allow. If he could but go unknown and unheralded he would see a great deal more. Meanwhile, the Cosmopolitan desires to call the attention of Mr. Roosevelt and the country at large toa few matters of vital importance in the construction of the work. This and the two following articles are the result of Mr. Bigelow’s second visit to Panama. He will show, among other things, that real-estate ownership among canal officials is re- sponsible for the crowding of unsanitary Colon, and that the employment of white labor on the canal is an unnecessary waste of human life and money. It will be remembered that some previous statements of his which called forth much criticism last winter were based on a very superficial examination of conditions on the Isthmus. The Cosmopoli- tan asked Mr. Bigelow to return to the scene of operations. He remained there six weeks, giving special aftention to what he calls the “ human side” of Panama—mafters that cannot be neglected without disastrous results in all great constructive opera- tions in tropical countries.—Editor's Note. gotten; nor was it again treated as a com- mercial project until the rise of Venice as Queen of the Adriatic. From medieval days down to the time of De Lesseps the projects remained incomplete for reasons often anal- ogous to those which have interfered with our own Isthmian projects. Leibnitz, the great philosopher, sub- mitted the question to Louis XIV of France; but to Napoleon is due the credit of being written history; the koe than aay great nations of antiquity ‘siypil were mighty builders of mY canals. The Suez Canal had ey been a waterway fourteen a4 centuries before the birth of @i Christ. History says that once a timid monarch filled it in for fear of a military inva- sion. In the tenth century before Christ it was dug anew by an Egyptian king, and the chronicle of the time says that one hundred and twenty thousand workmen perished at the labor. In the days of the Mohammedan rulers it was once more filled in and for- the first to give practical impetus to the project in modern times. When he went to Egypt, a part of his instructions related to piercing the Isthmus of Suez; and he per- sonally made an extensive surveying and exploring expedition in the winter of 1798-9, 455

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456 tracing a portion of the ancient lines and making the first full report on the subject- a report which, a generation later, was des- tined to rouse the enthusiasm of De Lesseps. Napoleon fixed ten years as the time needed for building the canal—and that is just the time which was consumed (1859-1869). The Napoleonic project failed for political reasons. France was at war and remained at war until the battle of Waterloo con- demned the illustrious canal-projector to St. Helena—and his wars demonstrated the fact that so long as Great Britain was mis- tress at sea, no French ships were secure at Suez or anywhere else abroad. In 1846 an international committee took up once more the Suez work—this time in the broadest spirit of universal good-will among nations. Suez was not to be fortified. Let our Christian brethren in Congress note this when they talk of guns at Panama. The history of Suez must not be forgotten, for at every step it offers us encouragement and warning. Far be it from me to bank on analogies—there are no real analogies, but the human mind works in that way. We learn by fables and parables, and the par- 1906, by F. C. Hemment WHY A STEAM LAUNDRY IS NEEDED AT PANAMA. Cosmopolitan Magazine able of De Lesseps helps us to understand the present tangle at Panama. Suez was a task to De Lesseps far greater than Panama is tous to-day. The four great difficulties in his way were diplomatic, financial, labor, and administrative. He found in the Egypt of 1832 a decrepit sovereign who was nominally vassal to a still more decrepit ruler at C onstantinople. He had to secure concessions and assistance from one retro- grade court, and then have them ratified by another still more difficult to manage. Those who know the politics of Central America will appreciate the situation. But De Lesseps was a Frenchman, and at that time Britain looked suspiciously upon a canal at Suez controlled by her rival. So here was the same trouble that we found in our early efforts to pierce the Isthmus at Nic aragua, immediately after the discovery of gold in California. But a disinterested comparison will convince us that in nearly every particular—political, diplomatic, cli- matic, labor, financial, administrative—the French task at Suez was more difficult than is ours at Panama. However, De Lesseps, at Suez, was aided CLOTHES DRYING IN AN UNHEALTHFUL SPOT

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Copyright, 1906, by F. C. Hemment COLON’S WATER SUPPLY BY by a combination of fortunate circum- stances. To begin with, he knew his ground both diplomatically and geograph- ically. As a young man he had been sta- tioned for six years in Egypt in a consular capacity (1832-38). During those years he had carefully studied the famous Napole- onic report, and had become enthusiastic on the subject. But at the moment no project could seem more chimerical, for diplomatic and financial reasons. On the throne of Egypt was a cruel, narrow, and bigoted viceroy—no hope from that quarter, no money procurable under such auspices. But twenty-two years after De Lesseps’ first arrival in Egypt, in 1854, this viceroy died suddenly, and there came to the throne a successor who was a personal friend to the Frenchman, and a young man interested in modern progress. In that same winter De Lesseps submitted his scheme to the new viceroy, who then and there promised his support—material no less than political. So at one stroke the two chief difficulties were overcome, thanks to the training and tact of a single energetic and enthusiastic man, whom the orthodox denounced as a dreamer. But that was not all. on the throne of France. Napoleon IIT was His wife was re- YOUTHFUL NATIVES, WATER-MAINS BEFORE THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT LAID lated to De Lesseps; and thus the Suez Canal received the support of the French government at a time when France and England were on relatively cordial terms, having been allies in the Crimean War. Diplomatic and financial questions having been happily set at rest, there remained questions of labor and administration. The climate along the Suez Canal is no better than that at Panama. Both have conditions that balance each other. The Suez labor-question resolved itself into sani- tation for some twenty-five thousand Egyptian natives who were paid at local rates—about twenty cents a day, including food. Here we have the analogy of the West Indian negro digging the Panama Canal—and as between the two there is little to choose. The normal wages of the negro are about the same as those of the Egyptian—and for the same reason. A good foreman gets good work out of each. A polit’cal foreman does not. The cases of Panama and Suez are alto- gether different, you say. Not altogether. The question of a canal across the American Isthmus has been diffi- cult of solution heretofore owing to diplo- matic entanglements, first with Britain, at the time of our enthusiasm for a Nicaraguan 457

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458 route, and latterly with Central American states. We have been fifty years in securing political control of territory through w hich to run our canal. And even now the two cities of Panama and Colon are under alien rule save in the vague matter of sanitation. But our diplomatic difficulties appear to be solved—and our financial as well; for we assume that our people will continue to vote their hundreds of millions; that no war will ever embarrass us; that we are happily protected against all European combina- tions. Let us assume all that. Next the labor-matter. De Lesseps had to bring the bulk of his labor from afar, just as we are bringing it from different alien territories. Port Said differs but slightly from Colon, so far as climate and anthro- pology are concerned. Each is a new crea- tion made up of people who have been attracted there from all corners of the world to make their fortunes out of the canal. But Colon is by nature the healthier of the two, thanks to the generous trade- wind. . De Lesseps had but recovered from the shock of the Franco-German war when his indomitable spirit busied itself with his next tisk, and ten yearsafter the opening of Suez, subscriptions were pouring in for Panama. But 1879 was not 1869. There was no Napoleon in France, there was no Eugénie to intercede for him. In Central America was no sympathetic khedive; De Lesseps had to deal with a strange medley of Spaniard, negro, and Indian—to say nothing of political beach-combers from our shores. He had counted upon the warm support of the Washington government. He saw in our cities statues to Lafayette; but for his Panama canal he heard only fair phrases. He was no longer young—forty-seven years had passed since his first visit to Suez—and he had been trained to habits which he was not inclined to change of a sudden. At Panama he landed not merely as a stranger but as something to be plundered. At every turn he had to deal with corrupt and mercenary officials whose only interest in the canal was to secure his money. We who to-day see the hundreds of tasteful cottages, the excellent dry dock, the wharves, the splendid mz isonry work, and the miles of track and rolling-stock, left by De Lesseps, can with difficulty picture the misery that must have reigned when there Cosmopolitan Magazine were nothing but jungle and the native huts for shelter. In 1879 the great work was organized, and in ten years it went into bankruptcy. Five years more and the French government sentenced to varying terms of penal servi- tude many notable financiers and _politi- cians—some for acc epting bribes, others for having offered bribes, and all for having swindled the public and robbed the state. De Lesseps fought a great battle—and lost. But during his years on the Isthmus of Panama he did good work as engineer and builder—he has left us sixteen miles of canal excavated; has shown us how to go ahead; has left us the buildings in which we to-day find shelter, and the machinery with which we are to- day seeking to make a good record as excavators. We therefore approach the task of building this canal with immense advantages. Of the four serious problems, those of diplomacy and finance appear to be happily solved. Let us look at the next: labor. When an army of twenty or thirty thou- sand men moves, the first duty of the com- manding officer is to see that it pitches its tents facing the sunshine; that there is a slope to carry off surface water; that there are suitable trenches in which to bury the refuse; that the water is fit to drink; that bathing facilities are secured if possible. This is not the work of doctors of medicine —their education is on quite other lines. These simple things are learned by any soldier at the outset of his career. An im- mense amount of money has been spent at Panama in rearing costly hospitals, main- taining expensive phy sicians, and still more expensive nurses. These are excellent things, but, like the yarks of New York and the monuments of Washington, they are only for the few who have the time and money to reach them. It is not enough for the soldier to be told that he has a fine sani- tary outfit many miles away at headquar- ters for the benefit of the general and his family. That is all right for the general, but hard on the man on the skirmish-line, who, when the fever catches him, has to lie and shiver and die where he falls. At Colon are some twenty thousand people, living ea soil controlled by the United States, paying rent to the United States, nominally subject to American sani- tary laws, liable to imprisonment for per- mitting a mosquito to hatch on the premises,

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and all working for the glory of our country When I landed there and the great canal. at the end of November, 1905, I found men at work building a gutter was to collect the surface water called Second Street, and empty it at sea, near the corner of the Garfield House and close below the new hospital. No openings had been left for the water to seep through into this concrete drain. Those were made later, as an afterthought, by breaking through the cement with a_pick. The openings at the sea had defective iron flaps along so- Copyright, 1906, by F¥. C. Hemment MR. BIGELOW DRAWING WATER FROM THE which sometimes prevented the dirty water from running away, but never prevented high tide from entering and flooding the very street the gutter was intended to keep dry. The length of this gutter was covered, on the occasion of my visit, by an awning such as we erect for weddings and recep- tions. The explanation given to me was that this was to protect the negroes from the sun! Three months later I was again in Colon, and found the gutter completed— nay, already a picturesque ruin—and the laughing- stock of the place. It could never have done any good, even had it been con- structed honestly. Panama—the Human Side whose purpose PUBLIC 459 You ask, as a taxpayer, how does such an sictgiennnal man get a job on the canal? You have touched the spot! The answer must be brutal. It is mainly the incompe- tent or the corrupt who care to risk their reputation (or their liver) on the Isthmus, under present conditions. Most of these incompetents have passed so-called civil- service examinations—and that is why the Panaman thinks that our civil-service exam- inations are little better than a farce. When a man tells you on the Isthmus that he is an engineer you don’t know whether he has MAINS, COLON, FOR PURPOSES OF ANALYSIS tended a soda-water fountain or run an elevator. On my first visit there I saw in the swamp at the northern end of D Street a dredge that had lain there idle for three months, and apparently was there for good. Tet me say, parenthetically, that the whole of Colon, this glorious gateway of the Isthmus, is an island about one mile long and almost a mile wide. Its edges are swept by the delicious trade-winds off the Caribbean Sea, but immediately back of this front row of favored seats the whole place is a swamp, even during the so-called dry season. As I write (July, 1906) Colon’s

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THE FIVE-HUNDRED-MILLION-GALLON streets are mostly under water in spite of official assurances to the contrary. The tide rises only a foot or so, and the wells are of doubtful utility, for the water is tainted with the cesspool and latrine refuse. Go to the Panama Railway, which is owned by the United States government, and you will find that many of the canal officials own lots on this pestiferous island, and consequently have a pecuniary interest in congesting population here so that rents may rise. Colon has almost doubled its population within the last six months; but so far from affording the people more space on which to build, our officials there con- sistently refuse to furnish relief. We permit overcrowding in the tenements; we permit the buildings to crowd one against the other, thus shutting out fresh air and encouraging disease. In other words, if a cruel ruler were proposing the best means for dimin- ishing population, he could study with advantage our present municipal govern- ment of Colon, but to do this he must not confine his studies to officially doctored reports. Our administration permits no road from Colon out to the healthful hills imme- diately at our door. This is almost incred- ible; to-day the poor people who want to go 460 RESERVOIR AS IT WAS LAST SPRING out and visit the graves of their friends at Monkey Hill must buy a ticket from the railway company or walk the railway ties. It costs five dollars gold to ride from Colon to Panama and back. On my tramp across the Isthmus I met scores of natives afoot, with packs on their backs, because they could not afford the fare. And not only have we built no roads or paths for the poor people, but the railway company leaves the culverts and bridges in a condition dan- gerous for beasts of burden. But to return to Colon. Do not be de- ceived by reports intended to make us believe that Colon is hopelessly unhealthful, but bad government makes any place un- healthful. Come with me to Demerara, at the mouth of the Essequibo River in British Guiana, still closer to the Equator. There you may see one of the most healthful cities of the tropical world situated on soil below sea-level. Walk the streets of Georgetown and talk with the people, and you will find that the soil is well drained and diked; that sanitary inspection is honestly done; that sewage is disposed of on practical and not theoretical lines; that the night-soil is removed from each house by officials. Consequently to-day Georgetown is as free from fever and dysentery any city of the United 32 as

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-anama—the Human Side States.* But at Colon the health-service is neither intelligent nor honest. The whole tenement section is like one smelling cess- pool—it is so at this moment. But to come back to that dredge. A political engineer or doctor was obviously in charge, for, instead of working in from the sea, he had carted it across the land to the middle of the island and had it turned the wrong way about. That was in November, 1905. But when I returned to Colon in March, 1906, the dredge was at work, and before I left in April it had traveled nearly one mile. One mile of narrow, shallow, evil-smelling ditch in six months! The little ditch should have been built on so- called E Street or Railway Avenue—an avenue which is to-day a swamp, but where many lots are owned by speculators in the employ of our government. They shrewdly foresaw that an open drain such as this would smell badly and consequently injure the value of their lots. So they had the canal built on the next street (only half so wide) where there is now scant space on either side for the traffic that is anticipated. This ditch now smells badly, for it takes the seepage of the neighboring soil, which is impregnated with impurity. Even the municipal sprinkling-carts find this water of dubious value. When the tide rises the banks overflow and spread the smell still more. On dark nights it is dangerous to hozse and man, and by day it is a monument to our sanitary administration. Where is Colonel Gorgas, who informs me officially that there is not a single case of some kind of fever on the Zone! The learned doctor has made the Zone look like a string of wire meat-boxes behind the screens of which our tame and timid officials collapse into rocking-chairs, marveling at the prog- ress of medical science! Our eminent mosquitologist has now frightened press and public so thoroughly that nothing remains but to issue wire-woven mosquito-proof armor to every man, woman, and child on the Isthmus, and then hand the water- mains over to the Standard Oil Company. When twenty thousand workingmen and their families are compelled by our govern- ment to pay exorbitant rent for shacks built over swamp-water, and when at the same time our medical authorities issue reports * My thanks are due to Luke M. Hill, ¢ town superin- tendent of Georgetown, British Guiana, for giving me detailed answers to my questions on this subject. 461 pronouncing the sanitation of the Zone as satisfactory, it is high time we asked ques- tions. The last order credited to Colonel Gorgas prior to my leaving the Isthmus was one forbidding the use of gutters along the eaves-—lest a mosquito find comfort there! This sort of thing is funny save to him who foots the bill for house alteration. The plain farmer drains his land. Then ‘let us drain Colon, as other great cities have been drained. Or if this seems too costly, then let us build a road and let the poor people go up onto the healthful ground three miles away. In other words, let us put an end to the political ring which controls real estate at Colon, and do something for the people who are dying of real disease, while some of our medical officials are playing with diseases of the fancy. The people of Colon were without a water supply when I arrived there at the end of 1905. This produced an epidemic of dysentery and typhoid, as I had foretold. The canal rulers called me names for telling this—but they did nothing to abate the suffering save in mendacious memoirs. President Roosevelt, in his famous report, assured the country that there was an abundance of water, a splendid reservoir with some five hundred millions of gallons bubbling over the dam daily—in short, that anyone criticizing the Colon water supply was an enemy of his country, or of the Panama Canal—the same thing. The Pres- ident’s chief tropical and hydraulic adviser had never seen this alleged reservoir— whereas on four occasions I tramped over its swampy expanse. There was no real water in that reservoir; nothing but some slimy, oozy stuff which the government was mixing with water pumped out of the old French canal near the sea—brackish, dirty stuff. The officials of Colon would not drink this water. The governor of Colon, Senor Melendez, who has a _ house at Cristobal, invited me to sample his drinking- water. So I drew from his tank a bottle of the alleged reservoir water in the presence of witnesses. I brought this to New York with me and offered five dollars to Professor Pellew of Columbia University if he would drink a glass of it—even a small glass. He declined. As Professor Pellew is one of our leading men of science, I asked him to give me an analysis of this water. He has done so—and pronounced it salt, and unfit to drink. Two other samples, one from the

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462 water station next to the United States Post-Office at Cristobal, and the other from a hydrant at the door of the railway office in Colon, were gathered in specially. sterilized bottles and sent in cold-storage chambers, one to the chief health-officer of Jamaica, and the other to Doctor Donovan, the health-officer of Port Royal, Jamaica. Each of these gentlemen acted independ- ently in securing for me the analysis of his separate sample. The analyses were made by the government chemist of Jamaica, a man of the highest professional standing. Of the three analyses the least favorable is that of Professor Pellew of New York. My reason for having analyses made in Jamaica is that Kingston is tropical, and the island is one from which comes the bulk of our labor on the Zone; and in that island, Kingston and Port Royal have practically solved questions which are vexing our politicians in regard to Colon. Mr. Roosevelt may easily learn the truth if he will but visit Colon disguised as a plain man seeking information from those who know, and not from men who have an ax to grind. If he is wise and visits Jamaica on the way he will see that the dirtiest part of Kingston compares favorably with the best parts of Colon. And yet there are ten dollars spent at Colon to one dollar at Kingston. The difference is not all stolen; it is wasted through political jobbery. I asked an honest doctor at Colon how it happened that he could daily notice the vile condition of the Colon tenements and not order some change. He answered me: “Well, I’ve thought of that. But it won’t do. There was a young doctor here who did complain about it; but. they silenced him— transferred him out of the way. Our poli- ticians want things left just as they are. There’s lots of graft in things just as they are. See!” Now for something practical. an island, yet there is not a single place where the poor people can take a bath. The water-front is monopolized either by docks, or hospitals, or official residences, or the slaughter-house. The house-drains of Colon is the officials lead directly into the water at the front, and hence the twenty thousand Cosmopolitan Magazine inhabitants are prev ented from securing one of the fines: tonics known to nature’s phar- macopeeia. I mean the salt bath. Why shouldn’t our government, which owns the land in C olon, give the people a patch of open ground where mothers may bring their babies down of an evening to sniff the sea breeze before going to sleep in the swamp? Why does our administration refuse to build a single road so that the poor people may have access to the farm country, and thus reduce the cost of food ? Why does our government at Colon screw exorbitant rents out of the people, and compel them to live in a swamp ? These are questions asked in good faith by all honest people on the Isthmus. No one dares discuss them in the Panama papers, for these are bound by golden links to the Panama Railway. But more important than all—Why is it that Mr. Roosevelt, through his appointees, denounces those who call his attention to the jobbery which is to-day a menace to any canal across the Isthmus? For instance, the alleged reservoir for Colon is wasting an immense sum of money. The job is an insult to American engineering, and a wrong to the national treasury. Our gov- ernment has undertaken to build it, and Colon will be told to pay for it. Colon, on the other hand, declines to accept it, pro- testing that it is badly built and that there is no water in the vicinity fit for any reservoir; and that this particular reservoir won’t hold water anyway. We can compel the Republic of Panama to pay us; we have money enough to per- suade her legislators to pronounce this reservoir good—but neither alternative is savory. Our government pretends to install sewers at Panama. They have been badly constructed; they emit offensive smells; they were built by some one who had to be taken care of politically; and therefore the Republic of Panama says to the United States, “ You have the right to supervise our sanitation, and may compel us to have sewers, but you cannot legally compel us to pay you for sewers which are worse than none.

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Diary of a Lion-Tamer BY CLAIRE HELIOT Thursday, March 8th. VERYTHING went wrong to- day. Arose at five-thirty to rehearse my lions. It was dark, like night. A fog was blowing in from Lake Michi- Felt sleepy and wanted Bao Nay) v4 gan. to go back to bed, but dressed and reached the the- ater at six o'clock. I found Fritz, my assistant, at the stage door, trying to awaken the night watchman, who had fallen asleep. Fritz pounded on the door and the lions began to roar. Then the watchman came and opened. Rehearsed until seven o’clock. Othello was in an ugly mood, and went through his work grudgingly. Perhaps it was the weather that made him feel so ugly. After breakfast read mail, and found a re- port from my lion-nursery near Leipzig in- forming me that Juliet had become the mother of three fine cubs a fortnight ago. At ten o'clock went automobiling. Car broke down in Washington Park, which, by the way, is named after George Washington, the first president of this country. Had no one with me, and took tramway back to hotel. Called up garage and had automobile sent for. Everything was all right at matinée, with exception of August, who was in a bad tem- per, and refused to go to his cage after performing. I kept my eye on the door. He grabbed at my whip, and I was forced to threaten him with the steel bar. A pretty curly-haired little girl in the front row cried, “Why don’t you push him, lady?” It made me laugh. Took long walk to Lincoln Park. What a wonderful place it is! I think this Chicago will some day be a beautiful city. The stretch of lake front is magnificent, and what splendid drives! 463

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464 Night performance before packed house. Lost my whip, and had to wait until it was found before going on stage. Discovered one of my Danish hounds had carried it to his kennel. String in my shoe became untied while I was with my pets, and I did not like to stop and tie it before the audience—so awkward. Had to be careful not to step on it. This was so particularly when I carried Sicchi to his cage on my shoulders. Some one told me to-day that Mr. Caicedo, the little South American gentleman who walks on the high wire, was the grandfather of three children and father of fourteen. It seems impossible, he is so active and young- looking. Had splendid offer to-day to appear in Australia and South Africa for three months next fall. Refused it. I want to go home to Leipzig. I am so homesick. Ordered new costume to-day from the merchant’s store, Marshall Field’s, who died not long ago. Had a letter to-day from a woman who lives in the city of Aurora. She wanted to know how to train lions. Romeo and Milo, who were ugly Thurs- day, are still locked in their box. To-mor- row I shall try to work with them again. I am asked by the CosMopoLiran to write some stories of my adventures during my nine years of lion-taming. These tales will be based upon my diary, from which the foregoing is an extract. They are true stories and may seem a little strange and wild to most people, but to me they have all been a part of the day’s work. Since Apri: 25, 1897, hardly a day has passed the greater part of which I have not spent in a lion’s cage. I love my twelve lions, and I think that they are the kindest and most intelligent animals in the world. I began to train the kings of the jungle when I was twenty-two years old. I lived in Leipzig, a short distance from the famous zoological gardens of that city, and after school I used to spend the greater part of my time wandering around thes gardens and studying the habits of the beasts on exhibi- tion there. Lions, of all the animals, at tracted me most strongly, and day after day my interest in them became more intense. I became acquainted with one of the di- rectors of the gardens, and when he noted my great affection for the lions he proposed that I should train a few of them. This | undertook, but at first was not successful, and after a month of patient work I was forced to abandon the attempt. Then I was given charge cf Nero, Ralph, and Cesar, three handsome young lions, each about eighteen months old. I found con- Cosmopolitan Magazine siderable difficulty in gaining the confi- dence of these beasts, but finally convinced them that I meant them no harm. This, as it seems to me, is the most potent feature of the lion-tamer’s art—his ability to im- press upon the beasts the fact that he can be depended upon always to deal kindly with them. : I began my training by feeding the lions three times a day from my naked hands. At first they hesitated to eat the meat | offered them. They would sniff at it sus- piciously, walk away and growl deep down in their throats, glaring at me, though I spoke kindly to them through the iron bars. A fortnight passed before they would readily accept the food from my _ hands, but after gaining a little confidence in me and seeing that I always gave them good meat, they would run to the side of the cage whenever my voice was heard and_frisk about like cats, in anticipation of a feast. When three weeks had passed I went into the cage and sat near the door with an iron rod in one hand and a whip in the other. This was the most trying time of my train- ing experience. At nine o’clock every morning I would enter the cage and sit there until noon. Then I would go home for luncheon and come back again at one o’clock to take up my vigil, which would continue until about five or six o’clock in the evening. Each day I would move my chair a little nearer to the lions, until finally, after a patient month of this sort of creeping, I reached their end of the cage and gently smoothed the mane of each beast with my hand. Then I began the difficult task of teaching each lion his name. This was accomplished after almost endless _ effort. Nero was the first to learn his name, which was done by my constant repetition of it. Soon afterward Caesar and Ralph would come when they were called, and then the real work of training began. In four months I had taught the three lions a number of simple tricks, and then I showed them in public. The first tricks learned by the three lions were rather primitive, but as time progressed new tricks and new lions were added, until at the end of two years I had nine beautiful beasts in my “act.” One of the greatest sorrows of my life was the death of Cesar about that time. He was attacked by inflammation of the

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HELIOT AND ONE OF HER PETS

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466 brain. I have always considered him my smartest lion. After the death of Cesar I added to the number of my pets until I had in my troupe twelve of the handsomest lions in captivity. Their names are Sicchi, Romeo, Nero, Luchs, Ajax, August, Othello, Hass, Milo, Anton, Cilo, and Ralph. I love all my lions, but Sicchi is my chum—my “pal.’”’ He understands me better than the others. He never does anything wrong. Once he bit me, but it was a playful accident. Sicchi is the big lion I carry to his cage on my shoulders at the end of my act. He weighs three hun- dred and sixty pounds, but I carry him with- out any great effort. When first I carried him he weighed only one hundred and twenty-five pounds and his weight strained my back, but after a week of trying Iwas able to bear him on my shoulders every day since then I have carried him. As he grew heavier I grew stronger, until now I lift him with little difficulty. You will want to know how Sicchi came to bite me. It was one night while I was performing in Leipzig. The lions roared very loudly and some woman in the audi ence screamed. Sicchi dropped the flag he was carrying in his mouth. L called “ Sicchi, Sicchi,? > and he grabbed my arm with his big teeth. He didn’t really mean to doit. He was excited. You see the staff of the flag was white and in the glare of the electric lights he mistook my arm for it, and grabbed it without noticing. The bite was very painful, and he held on until | called his name several times and com- manded him to let go. Then he released my arm. He slouched away to a corner and lay down, hiding his head under his paws. He was so ashamed. I think he was crying. The people did not know I had been bitten, for I hid the arm behind my back. I carried Sicchi straight to his cage. He jumped from my shoulders and the curtain descended. Did I whip him? No. I never whip my lions—I only make believe. I crack the whip over their heads if they are bad, but strike them—never. That is why they love me so. After Sicchi bit my arm it became terribly swollen, and for eight days I could not carry him, but with a physician’s atten- tion the wound was healed. Many people believe that it is fatal to a lion-trainer if one of the animals sees This is not so, as is proved by my experi- blood. and. Cosmopolitan Magazine ence with Sicchi, and by an occurrence at Blackpool, England, when Othello bit my finger while I was fondling him. Another erroneous belief exists among the public. Generally, it is thought that if a trainer falls his death is assured. I can show that this is incorrect by the following incident: One time I had a lion called Prince, who was supposed to have a vile temper. He was caged in a stable, and a groom who was harnessing a horse carelessly threw a blanket against the cage. Prince grabbed the blanket, and pulling it through the bars began to tear it to pieces. I was there, and went into his cage. He thought I had come to play with him, and as I snatched the blanket he slapped at me with one of his paws and inflicted a painful wound on my hip. I was knocked down by the force of the blow, and he leaped across me as if to pinion me on the floor. Right into his eyes [ screamed, “ Prince, allons!” and ‘he walked away like a big St. Bernard dog. As a result of this affair, I spent one day in bed. The doctor had to sew up the gash made by Prince’s paw. When a lion loves you, you are safe. He may bite or claw you accidentally. He will not kill you if you have been kind to him. Most trainers who are killed, are killed because they drink. When a man is drinking he should keep a long way from lions. They seem to know he is tipsy. They are afraid he will be cruel and then— flash! like a shot, they kill him. Only last summer, in Blackpool, a trainer went at night to show his lions to a friend. They had both been drinking heavily. Next morning the trainer was found i in the cage torn to pieces. The friend escaped. If you are good to lions, they will be good to you. Be positive with them, dominate them, but do not strike them. Their mem- ories are excellent, and when they think of their wrongs in an excitable moment, they are like men and take revenge. I am more afraid that my pets will hurt one another than that they will injure me. They are ex- tremely fretful when the seasons of the year are changing in the spring and fall. F ebru- ary, Marc h,: and April are the worst months, and the trainer who has been cruel to his lions must be careful during this bad time. They say that the best bred and highest toned animals make friends very slowly. If this is irue, lions are certainly the greatest

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Diary of iristocrats of the animal kingdom. One ff the most difficult tasks of a trainer’s ‘areer is to make cage-mates of two lions. Each wants to be boss of the cage, and both will fight, scratch, claw, and bite for days before one acknowledges the other as his commander. My Sicchi is the one lion | have known that will admit another lion to his cage and make friends quickly. But Sicchi has one peculiarity: he insists upon shaving his cage-mate as soon as the latter is housed with him. Milo his present cage-mate. Sicchi took off all his mane during the first week they were together, and he will not permit it to grow. I have put all sorts of distasteful stuff upon Milo’s mane, but Sicchi insists that the hair shall not grow, and he has his way. It is a mistaken belief that lions born in the jungle cannot be trained. Luchs and August, two of my present troupe, were jungle-born. August likes me, but he does not get along very well with Othello. Most of the trouble I have with my lions is made by these two. During my engagement with “ A Yankee Circus on Mars,” in Chicago, I was rehearsing my lions one morning at six o’clock on the stage of the Auditorium. August and Othello quarreled. They were just like two cats rolling and scratch- ing and biting each other on the floor, only it was a bigger fight and they made more noise. In an instant, all twelve lions were having a battle royal. Any one that had a grudge against another took advantage of this opportunity and tore into him. I stood Lion-Tamer in the center of the cage with my whip. They leaped over my head, ché ised one another around my feet and fought all over the cage, but throughout the excitement not one of those angry beasts so much as brushed against me. They love me and, therefore, they are careful not to harm me. I used up all of the French language I knew before I succeeded in restoring peace, and, when I finally did so, there were > enough scraps of hide and hair lying around the cage to make an elegant lion skin rug. Although my native tongue is German, I always speak French to my lions. They seem to understand it more readily. I sup- pose it is so sharp and quick, w hile German is so ponderous and slow. For instance, it is so much easier to say “ Allons @ place,’ than “Geh auf den Plats That is why French is the court language of the circus. Every night I write in German a chronicle of my day’s experiences with my lions, set- ting it all down very carefully, and hope some day to make a book of it. What I have told you is cis my diary and is true. Having no relations I am dependent upon my own efforts to make my way in the world. Although my work is very hard I love it, but at times I long for the quietude of home life. I hope that in three years I shall have saved up enough to be able ‘to discontinue lion-training and to live quietly at my country place, which is just outside of Leipzig, but I never intend to give up all my lions. I keep a number of young ones at my home and always enjoy playing with them and teaching them new tricks.

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Tine Nobel Prizes Purpose for which the Inventor of Nitroglycerin and Dynamite Left his Vast Fortune BY VANCE THOMPSON THE RED FORTUNI 5S you go from San Remo toward Taggia and the golf links, you pass the big white villa where Alfred Nobel died in December, 1896. The greater part of his life had been spent in inventing explosives and per fecting methods of manifold : death. His genius has made it possible to sink a fleet of battleships and obliterate half an army corps in one thor oughgoing monent. In his old age he thought of these things. Then, too, he fell under the influence of a very extra ordinary woman, the Baroness von Suttner. In books and public lectures she has long preached the sane doctrines of peace, and it was her novel, “ Lay Down Your Arms,” he which inspired the Tsar to summon th first peice congress at The Hague. “Try and convince me,’? Nobel wrote her once, “of the justice of your cause, and I will furnish the means of action that is to say, the funds.” In time the Baroness von Suttner su ceeded; and when Nobel died he left his l huge, red fortune to the cause of peace and the advancement of science. It was in its way a grin, philanthropic paradox. The income of his eight millions and more is divided into five equal parts and awarded yearly in prizes to those who have done most to “benefit humanity.’’ The five prizes are for discoveries in physics, chem istry, and medicine; for distinguished work in imaginative literature; and, lastly, for advancing the cause of peace among the nations. *The average value of a Nobel prize is forty thousaad dollars. It is worth while looking for a moment into the life of this strange old man. The 468 race of money-getters is always interesting, Of English origin, he was born in Stock- holm in 1833. His father constructed the first practical torpedoes, and dabbled for years in explosives. Wi rking together, father and son finally perfected nitro- glycerin. The successful experiment was made in their factory in Heleneborg. It resulted in a terrible explosion which killed one of the sons and completely paralyzed the old father. Yet this verv cat istrophe vas a successful demonstration of the value of the new explosive. It spelled out success and fortune. Success came, and the fortune, having blood at the root of re: grew into millions. Alfred Nobel went to Paris to secure financial backing for the invention. He told the French bankers that he had “an oil that could blow up the globe.” The bankers thought their interests lay in leaving the globe just about as it was, but Napoleon ITT, being less conservative, provided the necessary funds. A_ few years later the new explosive, in German hands, blew him off his throne. The fluid nitroglycerin was ultimately developed into dynamite. When Alfred Nobel had carried his invention to this perfect end he went to New York. His luggage consisted of a few trunks of dynamite. He used to say that not a hotel would take him in, and that the New Yorkers shunned him as though he had brought the pest in his pocket. So he went to San Francisco, where the first American plant for the manufacture of “giant powder” was established. Once before he had been in the United Staies. As a boy he worked in the shops of John Ericsson, to whom the world owes the modern battleship. His last achievement was the creation of ballastite, the first smokeless powder. Two inventions he left unfinished. One was the preparation of artificial silk; the other—and this was anxiously awaited in all the industrial

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The Nobel Prizes world—was the production of artificial rubber. He was a grim old man. During his last illness he bought a sphygmograph, and recorded the variations of his pulse. “T don’t know whether I have a heart in the figurative sense of the word,” he said, “but physiologically I have a heart, and it is a mighty bad one.” There was a sentimental side to this old millionaire, whose life was spent in collabo rating with violent death. In his youth 409 was that his explosives and formidable de- stroyers really made for peace, since they rendered war so deadly that humanity would be forced to declare against it. Ericsson, when he built the Monzttor, said much the same thing. It was his dream so to perfect the art of war that men would not dare to break the peace. Of course it is possible that these two great inventors were right; but if you go to the bottom of their thought you will discover that it rests upon the assumption that at some rHE Reverse of medal presented the winners of the he loved a young girl, but she died or married some one else. All his davs he mourned her, writing endless poems to her memory. In addition to these love-verses he left a Swedish play, “ Nemesis.” Withal he had theories. One of them was wel- comed by Mr. Andrew Carnegie. “ Ex- perience has taught me,” he said, “that no happiness goes with inherited fortunes. They serve merely to deaden the faculties. A man should leave to his heirs enough to start them in life, and no more. Work is not only the law of life but the source o happiness.” A more questionable theory HEALER Ni / prize for aise TeV LE 27n f2ciile fixed point human courage will fail—that the machine will beat the man. There is nothing in history to buttress up this con- tention; nor in one’s knowledge of human Men have never hesitated to go Bludgeons nature. up against any kind of weapon. ! and poisoned arrows, or steel cartridges and cordite—it has never mattered much. I do not think the cause of peace will gain much by changing weapons; you will have to change the breed of men. And you will have to find—what has never yet been found—the freezing-point of human cour- age.

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THE SEEKER Reverse of medal presented the winners of the Nobel prize for discoveries in natural science II THE MEEDS OF PEACE It was not until five years after his death that the Nobel Institute was finally estab- lished in Stockholm, and the first prizes awarded. This was in igor. The _ be- stowal of the peace prize had been intrusted to a committee elected by the Norwegian Parliament, the most notable member of which was Bjérnstjerne Bjérnson. Ac cording to the will, no one may apply directly for the prize; he must be proposed by a statesman, by a professor of law and political science, or by some member of the International Peace Commission. The first peace prize was divided between Jean Henry Dunant of Geneva, and Frederick Passy of Paris, two white-haired apostles of peace. To Monsieur Dunant, more than to anyone else, is due the creation of the Red Cross Society. It was at the bloody battle of Solferino in 1859 that he first realized how little the doctors and nurses could do unless they were given the freedom of the battlefield. Within four years he had spread his ideas so far that he was 470 able to convoke in Geneva an international congress, and at the second congress, in 1864, sixteen nations were officially repre- sented. The cross of Geneva was adopted as the sign of this new neutrality which covered the physicians, their aids, and their ambulances. In this work Dunant spent all his fortune. By the time the Red Cross was established all the world over, his last penny was gone; then for years he wandered precariously over Europe writing, and teaching languages in Paris, London, Stuttgart—until in his old age Nobel’s twerity thousand dollars lifted him from poverty. Now he lives at ease in a little Swiss town in the canton of Appenzell. He is seventy-four years of age, and very feeble. Frederick Passy, who was honored with him, has written and lectured for the last fifty years in France on economic questions He is one of the few free-traders in that old protected land. His first notable effort in the cause of peace was in 1867, when France and Prussia were at swords’ points over the Luxemburg question. He founded the first French peace society, and so stirred up public opinion that no

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rHE Reverse of medal presented the winners of the \ responsible statesman dared declare for war. His League of Peace failed to pre- vent the great Franco-German war of 1870, but it has not been without in- fluence in later days. Lastly he was one of the creators of the Interparliamentary Union for International Arbitration—the peace propagandists love pompous phrases —which met first in 1889. Probably no one has done more than he to base the dreams of the peace lovers on sound methods of international discussion and concession. The prize was again divided in 1902. Two Swiss peace propagandists were hon- ored. Elie Ducommun is secretary of the Permanent and International Bureau of Peace at Berne, which serves as a sort of clearing-house for the various peace associations in Europe and America. He is a journalist, and in prose and verse has preached the white crusade. Dr. Charles Albert Gobat is director of the Central Bureau of the Interparliamentary Union at Berne. He holds the threads of all the legislative efforts for peace in the parlia- ments of the world. Before taking up the work he gave himself to teaching and politics. SINGER prize for distinguished work inimaginative literature None of these men was widely known outside his own little circle of pacific friends. Nor had the world heard much of William Randal Cremer, the old English radical, who was given the prize in 1903. In Lon- don he edits the “ Arbitrator,” and was for a number of years a member of Parliament, sitting for one of the divisions of Shore- ditch. With Frederick Passy he founded the society for interparliamentary efforts toward arbitration, and has been for years the secretary. He was brought most prominently to the front by his agitation in favor of a treaty of arbitration between England and the United States. Twice he visited Washington, presenting memorials, signed by members of Parliament, to the President and to Congress. The prize of 1904 rewarded the anony- mous peace work of the Institute of Inter- national Law, of Ghent, in Belgium; and finally, in September, 1905, with strict justice the forty thousand dollars was given to the enthusiastic Bohemian baroness who converted Alfred Nobel to the grandeur of peace. Madame Bertha von Suttner was thirty-seven years old when she wrote her first book. In its way it was as epoch- 471

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472 Cosmopolitan Magazine marking a novel as “ Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Since it appeared in 1884, “Lay Down Your Arms” has made more friends for peace than all the polysyllabic societies of Kurope. Ill THE LAUREATES OF SCIENCE The history of modern science might be written without going outside the names. of the winners of the Nobel prizes for beneficent discoveries in physics, chemistry, and medicine. Roentgen was first with the rays that bear his name; then Lorentz of Leyden and Peter Zeeman of Amsterdam for their researches into the effects of magnetism on the phenomena of radiation; then Becquerel and Monsieur and Madame Curie. There was a just order in this dis- tribution of awards. Becquerel had worked for many years on phosphorescence, and to him and his father was due the discovery of uranium, which came after the Roentgen rays, out of which proceeded radium. A great deal of nonsense has been said and written about the famous discovery of Madame Curie and her husband. The properties of radium are not yet wholly known. Of all substances it is the most costly. If all that has been produced in the world were brought together it would lie on the point of a knife-blade. Nothing is so endowed with radio-activity. Without apparent diminution it continues to emit light, heat, and various other rays. Of course the most interesting question is as to the source of this continuous output. The theory that Madame Curie holds to- day is that radium is an unstable chemical element which does decompose in giving out heat, but with extreme slowness. In fact she has recently found that where radium is present there is constantly being formed a little quantity of helium gas. So, in reality, what one sees is the first example of the transformation of a chemical ele- ment. Neither Lord Rayleigh’s discovery of argon, nor the discoveries of Professor Lenard of Kiel, the later prize-winners, had such an air of magic as Madame Curie’s radium. A Pole by birth, she came to Paris long ago. It was while studying in the schools that she met Professor Curie and married him. He was a quiet, dreamy man who came little before the public. How much he had to do with the discovery of radium no one will ever know. His recent untimely death left his wife to carry on the experiments alone. The works for which the chemists were rewarded interest chiefly their fellow- chemists. Van’t Hoff’s laws of chemical dynamics, Fischer’s work on sugars, that of Arrhenius on electrolysis, and that of Sir William Ramsay on the gaseous ele ments of the air, lack dramatic interest. Of more human significance are the dis coveries in the domain of medical science. The first Nobel prize was rightly awarded to Professor von Behring of Marburg for his discoveries in serum therapeutics and its especial use in diphtheria. He placed in the hands of physicians a mighty weapon for combating disease and death. Since he received the Nobel prize in rgor he has gone far toward perfecting a cure for tuber culosis. “A little while must elapse,” he said the other day, “ before I can give it to the public in a practical way. ps the next tuber culosis congress is held in Washington in 1908, I hope to clan iain that at last the battle against human phthisis is in the way of being won.” Professor Koch was the first to discover the tuberculosis bacillus—it was for this the Nobel prize of 1905 was awarded him —but if the cure of consumption be indeed found it is thanks to the serum of Von Behring. Of almost equal benefit to humanity was Ronald Ross’s discovery of the parasite of malaria. Of course he merely completed the labor of scores of illustrious men who had worked on the subject since first the Jesuit missionaries found out the specific properties of quinine. Virchow, Pasteur, and Koch were his im mediate forerunners. What the young English scientist made clear was the precise manner in which the malarial infection reaches the human blood. Physicians had long recognized a vague connection between malarial fever and stagnant water. It was assumed even that the disease was due to miasmata exhaled from marshes and poi- sonous soil. This theory has been thrown to the dust- bin of science since Ronald Ross proved that the responsible author of malaria is the wicked little spotted-winged mosquito. The Ross method was applied in Havana Assistant Surgeon-General Gorgas, of A Ot. itt —

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gga The Nobel Prizes 473 the United States army. In the first year of his mosquito work, he practically blotted out yellow fever; there were only five cases —and the second year there were none. IV THE POETS AND PATRIOTS It was Nobel’s wish that the literary prize should be awarded to the authors whose writings were of an“ idealisti keep alive the fine feelings of race, of country, of patriotism. Doubtless from an idealistic viewpoint they are quite right; but in honoring patriotism they are bringing into eminence one of the most indefatigable enemies of The preservation of race, of national, traditions is a stumbling block in the way of that internationalism of good-feeling toward which the peace propa- gandists are jogging. The patriot is fighting man. Bjérnson was given the prize in 1903; and he is not so much an author as a flag—the symbol peace. always a 5 ALFRED Obverse of medal presented ¢ tendency.” What he had in mind may be gathered from the fact that Shelley was his favorite poet. The honor went first to Sully-Prudhomme, who is one of the most delicate poets of the last generation. Sweet and grave and calm, his poetry differs from almost all the hectic verse of modern days. Its quiet beauty was worthy the award. The second year Mommsen’s “Roman History” was chosen, though its idealism is perhaps disputable. In_ the succeeding years, however, the Swedish committee showed a clearly defined policy to reward those writers who had done most He NOBEI winners of the Nobel pri: that young Norway which has finally got itself free of its gentler Swedish sister. And Bjérnson, with his rather narrow Puritan- ism, his intellectual energy, his vanity— like that of a child—is a fair type of young Norway. You remember his famous re- mark, “There are two men of genius in Europe: I and Ibsen—admitting, that is, that Ibsen is a man of genius.”” Certainly no man of our day has left a broader mark upon the intellectual life of his own land; as author, orator, statesman he has done more than any one man to make Norway what it is.

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A474 Cosmopolitan Magazine The. laureates of 1904 were Echegaray and Mistral. The great Spanish dramatist is known in the United States by one play only, Ithink—* El Gran Galeato,” which was produced at the end of the last century by one of the short-lived “ free theaters” but in Spain he is ranked with the mas- ters of the drama and especially that diama which is essentially Spanish. Oddly enough, he spent a good part of his life as a teacher of mathematics. He wrote on geometry, tunnel-building, and sewers; he was forty when he wrote his first play. Frédéric Mistral, who received the other half of the prize, is a strange, old poet, whose fame has gone half around the world, though he writes in a dialect that is dying out even in his native Provence. Few Frenchmen can read “ Mireille,” save in translation. Yet for a little while, at least, Mistral has saved his native land from the business-like equality that is sweeping away all that is picturesque in Europe. He lives, as he has always lived, in the village of Maillane, near Avignon. It was there in the old square house that I saw him shortly after he had received his twenty thousand dollars. A soldierly old man, with gray mustaches and an imperial, he sat in his huge study—the many windows open on the g arden; and beyond the far line of the Alps—and talked of the Provengal renascence to which he has given his life. On one occasion the Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro, said to him: * All the languages which are not of the first order—like Eng- lish and German and _ French—are in danger of dying out, just as your native Provengal. So in defending your own historic language you are defending a crowd of little languages, the Finnish, the Portu- guese, the Swedis h, the Dutch, the Spanish, and the Norwegian, all of which are menaced by the great commercial lan- guages.” Doubtless that is why the Swedes were glad to recompense his work. The greater part of his prize money has been expended in the restoration of the ancient palace oi Arles, where he hopes to install a Provengal museum. Not without a little pride in the universality of American interests, I may state that Mistral’s readers in the United States have already subscribed ten thousand dollars to help him in carrying out his work. President Roosevelt was one of the sub- scribers, and Mistral showed me a copy f “ Mireille” which he was about to send to the White House. _ Mistral wl not, I fear, bring back the Arles of old, but he is doing all that can be done to preserve for his countrymen the heritage of art, literature, and legend left by the mighty ancestors. In Sienkiewicz, too, the Swedish Academy honored racial and national patriotism. It was not so much to the author of “ Quo Vadis” that they gave the prize of 1905 as it was to the Polish patriot whose work has kept alive the Polish ideal. It is not very well known that Henryk Sienkiewicz is a practical worker in the cause of Polish freedom, and more than once has felt the snaffle of the law. The author of “Quo Vadis” passed through Berlin some months ago on his way to Stockholm to receive the forty-thousand-dollar prize in person. He traveled in state, with a retinue of secretaries and translators; for it is a part of literary history that “Quo Vadis,” in book and play, has proved as profitable as the ownership of a mine on the Rand. You have had a word with the various men honored by the Nobel Institute; and what do you thidk., now, of the use to which the red fortune has been put? — have been laid upon the white heads « the stanchest old lovers of peace. Men already famous in the scientific world have been guerdoned with helpful money. Poets who have sung the old racial songs have been lifted into momentary notoriety; writers who saw a duty in patriotism have been commended in a fine financial way. But is the great white cause to which Alfred Nobel left his millions any further ad- vanced? In Europe alone there are six- teen millions of men under arms. The fighting tonnage of the seas is over four thousand millions. The annual military budgets of the great powers tower up into the billions of money. That is one side of the picture. And in the other you have a dozen amiable old Swedish gentlemer n sitting in the library—or on the ‘balcony—of the Nobelstiftelsen in the Norrlandsgatan of Stockholm, dividing the two hundred thousand dollars a year among the five men of “idealistic tendencies” “who have worked themselves into fame of some sort. There seems to be an inequality between the two forces. It is like fighting a city fire with a gilt-tipped bottle of rose-water. a I ee

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Graft and the Young Idea Thousands of High-School Boys Réply to the Cosmopolitan’s Pointed Questions as to Base Means of Making Money LA LL those instances,’ wrote Ed pectlte Burke, referring to the { Americans, “ whether real or fab ulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality is perplexed, /reason is staggered, and from which affrighted nature recoils, ‘ ZN are examples for the instruction SSA AK i} of their youth.”’ Zs The words may have been ut- tered yesterday, but to-day they are charged with an even deeper and more sinister meaning. While the air is filled with the clamor and débris of falling statues and edifices overturned by our present national house-cleaning, what is happening to our greatest hope for stancher foundations, the American schoolboy? Is the dust going to choke and blind him? Or will that intense scorn of the sham and the hypocrite which is one of the inherent characteristics of youth, give him clean breath through it all and vision clear enough to see that after all the hills are eternal, and make him still aspire to the skies though all human pedestals should prove to be upon sand ? Surely the question is deeply vital and worthy of inquiry. What does this healthy, curious - minded American schoolboy think of graft ?

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476 Cosmopolitan Magazine The word has not yet come to sound as terrible as “theft’’ or “stealing.’”’ It has even an element of humor in the sound of it. Has this boyish, ever-searching eye been able to penetrate the impudent, familiar disguise of the gentleman in his new varnish of slang, and to know him for the ruffian that he is ? To get at the heart of the matter the COSMOPOLITAN prepared a list of questions which, when answered by a representative number of our youth, would leave no doubt as to their general attitude, as a national body, toward the matter at issue. The list, accompanied by a letter, was sent to prin- cipals of high schools all over the country. The letter in each case was addressed to the principal, calling his attention to the im- portance of the issue, asking him to put the questions to one hundred of his brightest boys, and suggesting the value of the plan as a means for achieving a wiser adminis- tration of his educative opportunities. In nearly every instance the principals heartily codperated with us in trying to get at the truth, and the boys themselves gladly supported the cause of inquiry. The list of questions is as follows: “GRAFT QUESTIONS “From the Cosmopolitan Magazine “What is meant by the word ‘ graft’? “What is meant by the term ‘ official cor- ruption’? “Suppose that A has been intrusted with large sums of money belonging to B, C, and D, which sums he loans at interest to X with- out the knowledge or consent of B, C, and D. Is that, in your opinion, an honest act on the part of A? “Ts it dishonest ? “Tf dishonest, how should he be punished ? “Suppose you were working in an office and handling a large number of postage stamps, putting them upon office letters for your em- ployer, do vou think it would be right to use any of those stamps on your own private letters without making immediate payment therefor ? “Do you think it would be right to borrow the stamps without the knowledge of- your employer, with the intention of some day paying for or replacing them? “ Suppose you were a high government of- ficial, and a man owning a railroad should come to you and say: *‘ You, Mr. Officer, can secure for me the right to build my line through certain government lands. If you will do that I will give you and your family free passes on my railroad as long as you live and carry all your freight without charge.’ What would you say to the rail- road man? * Suppose that a man who had a contract to sell a thousand carloads of canned beef to the United States army had put a kind of cheap, poisonous preservative in the beef so that it was unfit to eat and made the sol- diers ill. Suppose you were employed by the government to find out all about the bad beef, so that the contractor who had _ pro- vided it might be punished, and suppose that contractor should offer you money to make such a report to your government that he would not be found guilty of the fraud, what would you do? * Suppose you were one of twelve jurors to judge of the guilt of an oil-merchant who had been disobeying the law, and the oil- merchant or some one hired by him should offer you a hundred shares of stock in the company if you would vote as a juror to find him not guilty, what would you do? “What should be done to you if you ac- cepted the stock? * Do you think that a government official or business corporation is less amenable to the law—not so liable to punishment—than is a private citizen? * Should not the rich and the poor be sub- ject to equal punishment for all crimes?” The replies were intensely interesting. Perhaps the most enlightening part of the investigation was the result of the first question on the list, “‘ What is meant by the word ‘graft’?’? Here are some replies chosen at random out of the many received: * Graft means taking in political life what is not rightfully yours.” “ Graft is the stealing or receiving of money or goods without consent of the employer or people.” * Graft is the taking of money or other ar- ticles on the sly.” “Graft is appropriating money from public funds.” * Graft is using public funds.” “Graft is the stealing of money that be- longs to others’ jobs.” “ Graft is money or otherwise, gotten with- out rightfully earning it.” “ Graft is appropriating public funds to pri- vate use.” One good young citizen speaks out in the stern terseness of his Puritan forbears, “ Graft is stealing.”” Another is just as sure, but more of a pedant. “To graft is to steal,” says he. The list continues: “Tt is the taking of property which you are not entitled to.” “It means the taking of something that does not belong to you.” “Tt is a term applied to money or objects obtained hy men thzough dishonest means 33

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Graft and the “Tt is receiving money or other things for things detrimental to the public and bene- ficial to a few.” “It is the use of some one else’s money for gain.” “It is the taking of public money by poli ticians.” a is the wrongful use of some one else’s money. ‘ “8 is the illegal stealing of some one else s money. ‘It is the embezzlement of public moneys for private use.” “Graft is taking money, offices, etc., necessarily illegal means, but by a pull.” “ By gre aft is meant the securing of money in an illegal way. ‘The word graft means unlawfully taking money, ‘It is the misuse of public confidence.” Graft, in the slang of the day, means the receiving of bribes.” Graft is next to stealing.” “The taking of public money by a man in public employment.’ It is taking more than you should get.’ “Graft is obtaining money by false means.” “Graft is that act by which a man strives to better himself by taking an unfair ad- vantage of others.” “It is the obtaining of money by your in- fluence or prominence.” by not A Biblical influence seems to exert itself over the phraseology of the answer, “ Graft is an evil corruption.” Another has almost a legal form of defini tion: “Graft is the act of procuring money by dishonorable means, be it either from individuals or from masses.” Still another defines graft well by the single word “boodle’’; and to the next question on the list, ‘“ What is meant by the term ‘official corruption’ ?’’ the same clear- sighted student of social conditions answers “oraft.”’ Here are some other answers to this second question: “Misuse or abuse of the powers belonging to any office.” ‘The reception of anything for votes or political influence.” “The taking of money by illegal means.”’ “A polite name for graft.” “It relates to government officers who hold their jobs for the graft they can get.” “ An office in which graft is a feature.” “It is the dishonesty existing among pwb- lic officials.” “Bad management of ment employees.” Face conduct in business.’ ‘The state of affairs in the goverr nent.’ offices by govern- How is that for a perfect anc incisive epigram! Then again: 477 Young Idea “ Negligence. of officers to punish the guilty.” * Power gained by bribery.” ‘Falseness in public office.’ ’ Bribing, giving. a pull.” ‘Taking bribes.” “ Going against the voters.” ‘Not living up to the office.” ‘Buying votes to put a certain ( ffice.” “A nice way of speaking of wrong done by government officers.” * Rottenness of office-holders.” The wickedness of some official.” “Some person who has been dishonest and is caught.” “ Not living up to the laws.” ‘Receiving money for deciding a question wrongly.” ‘Working things so that you yourself are benefited mainly.” * Betrayal of official trust.” “ Officers who allow their bought.” “ Officers representing the will of the peo- ple doing the will of a few for personal in- terest.” “A government official defrauding the gov- ernment.” ‘The disorganization of business or polit- ical office.” “It occurs when officials do not do their duty. e ‘It happens when an official accepts money to keep things secret.” ‘An official when he ‘does’ the public.” ‘The spirit which prompts men in high office to use the office for their own ends.” 3ribing of officers and heads of con- cerns.” * An expression of stealing.” ‘The thing that graft produces.” ‘It occurs when officials of the govern- ment do not live up to their oath of office.” *Malfeasance in office. man in word to be To the questions concerning A’s steward- ship the invariable answer was that he was dishonest. The fifth question, “If dishonest, how should he be punished ?”’ produced some wonderful replies. The savage that is said to be born in us and only veneered by the accumulating years is strongly evinced i most of these. The first boy who answers begins mildly, “Throw him out of society.’ Not everyone would be quite sure that this judge didn’t side with the prisoner. Others say: * Kall him.” ‘Send him to Sing Sing for life.” “ Give him to the men who lost the money.” “Mi ake him forfeit his honor.” “Make him pay double the st ole.’ * Place him in prison.” money he

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478 Cosmopolitan Magazine ‘He should be fined two hundred dollars, or state’s prison for him.” “He should be either fined or sent to prison.” * He should never be trusted again.” “He should be imprisoned until he re- funds the money.” “He should be punished legally if pos- sible, if not he should be ignored and shunned.” “Twenty years of state’s prison for him, with bread and water.” * Never trust him again.” “ Sing Sing for ten years.” “Let his friends punish him.” * Same as a thief; he really took it.” * Expose him!” : * As specified by the law.” * Long term in prison.” “Fined one-fifth of the sum loaned to X.” “He should be fined the amount intrusted to him.” “Put him in jail for not less than forty years nor more than fifty.” ‘Let him lose his reputation.” “Can't think of anything bad enough for him.” ‘IT would leave him to his own punish- ment.” “Hard labor in the chain-gang, so everybody could see his shame.” “He should be punished the same as a thief who breaks into your house and steals your valuables.” “He should be beaten with a cat-o’-nine- tails,” says a boy who is a reader of romance “He should lose his position,” says one who must surely know what that means. “The facts of his case should be pub- lished,” answers a youth who has the mak- ing of a newspaper man in him. In the answers to the sixth and seventh questions, about the use of an employer’s postage stamps, there was no dissent from the opinion that it was dishonest; but the question following, concerning the supposed conversation between the boy, as a “high government official,’ and the railroad owner, again drew forth various opinions. One says he would answer the railroad man by referring to the police. Others would address the designing magnate variously as follows: ‘No, because government people's benefit, not for a tion.” ‘Sir, I don’t do business that way. “T would say no, because that is what you call graft.” “The land belongs to the government, no to me.” o “T would refuse his offer.” “T would not grant his request without the consent of the public.” “T would tell him to get out of the office.” * Skiddoo! Twenty-three! ” “T would say, ‘No, sir, you will have to ask some one else.’ ” “Don’t try to tempt an honest man,” says one with an eye for melodramatic effect. ‘Get out of here,” says a worthy scion of rugged honesty. “T would not do it,” answers a mild soul. Others would say: ‘I am serving the people and not the rail- roads.” “Do what is just and right and you will get the grant in some other way.” “JT would do my duty, whatever that was.” “IT cannot be bribed.” ‘IT am an honest man and do not mean t be bought off.” ‘I would tell him to * beat it,’ and show him the door.” * That’s not the right way to do things.” “If the railroad was a benetit to the country I might accept,” says one with an equivocal mind. “Go, I take no bribes,” answers another dramatist. The unmistakable villainy suggested in the ninth question, in reference to the canned-beef inquiry, again brought the sternest judgments from the youthful tribunal. ‘I would have him pinched,” is the in- formal answer of an incorruptible soul. *T would arrest the contractor and refuse the monéy,” says one who is more precise, but none the less clear-eyed. The righteous anger of the answers clamors to be heard. Here are some of the voices: ‘I would say positively that I would not do it for him or anyone else.” ‘IT would not accept the money.” ‘T would expose him.” ‘I would report the meat harmful.” “I'd hold him down and make him eat a chunk of the meat.” ‘T will certainly report you as you are.” *T would reveal him and prosecute him.” ‘I would investigate further than I had done at first, and I would also make the re pott which the government had expected me to make.” ‘I would be a and expose the packer.” : “T would fulfill my office to the best of my ability. ‘T would make true report, and also one of attempted bribery.” : 2 “T would report the meat not fit to eat witness for the government ET

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Graft and the Young Idea 479 “T would hand in an honest report.” “T would tell him that he should make decent beef for the poor soldiers.” “T would not take his money, for he de- serves to be punished.” “T would hand him over to an officer of the law on the charge of graft.” “T would have no dealings with the man.” “T would not enter a false statement.” “T would see that he was rightly pun- ished.” The tenth question, concerning the trial of the oil-merchant, and involving the whole duty of jurors, brought a revelation of honesty no less strict. “Tf I accepted the stocks I should be pun- ished,” answers one who is surely fitted to judge, for he is willing to take his own medicine. “T ought to be found out and sen- tenced to jail,” says his no less rigorous mate. “T would say that no man could stop me voting the way I thought best,”’ answers one filled with the influences which founded the nation on a rock basis. “T would not vote for him,” replies one who is not to be snared. “T would vote him guilty,” is the verdict of a more conclusive mind. “Refuse his stock and put him in the stocks,” thunders one, with the playful humor of the makers of the Blue Laws. “T would tell the rest of the jury on him,” says one who needs support, but is none the less honest. “T would vote him guilty,” is the answer of hundreds to this question. To the next question, “ What should be done to you if you accepted the stock ?” the hopeful tribunal return answers that reveal the self-searching austerity of their natures to the fullest extent. “T ought to get the limit,” speaks the first voice heard; and the chorus that follows him does not depart from that standard—at least in grimness. Listen to them: “TI ought to be electrocuted.” “Twenty years in prison for me.” * I ought to get life.” “Thirty years at hard labor.” “I should be put to work on a treadmill.” “I should be punished to the fullest ex- tent of the law.” “T should be liable to be arrested,” is the answer of one who is kinder to himself than are most of his companions. “T ought to get five and a half years in prison,”’ says one who needs that extra six months for some purpose, but not until he has satisfied the demands of justice. “T should be tried for treason,” exclaims a youth with a moral sense more open to the picturesque than it is to the arrows of wick- edness. To the question whether a government official or business corporation is less amena- ble to the law than is a private citizen, such sound answers were given as to show that the youth of the land are thinking sanely on this matter which so often muddles those intrusted with the execution of justice. And to the last question on the list the invariable answer was that rich and poor should be equal before the law in punishment for all crimes. What now is the conclusion of the whole matter? It seems to be one that is as encouraging as it is definite and clear. Aside from the crudities of phraseology and the many laughable whimsicalities of the budding imaginations, the growth of the moral sense seems to be quite healthy and deep-rooted. It is, of course, not to be understood from the inflexible rigidity of these many judgments that there are no hypocrites among them, no boys who might act differently than they have answered. That is not the point. The point is that they know what is right. They have not been confused, nor turned aside, nor made care- less by the disillusionment produced by the public exposure of wrongdoing. On the contrary, the moral sense seems to be whetted and set on a finer edge by it. The principles upon which the Republic was founded have, no doubt, a great deal to do with this, but there is another factor, a modest but a powerful one, which must re- ceive its meed of praise for the result. It is the institution of the American Mother. If the boys’ eyes had not received a certain baptism and benediction at this clear fountain of honor, the “ principles our fore- fathers planted’? would probably seem a little too high and far off to receive a fixed attention.

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HH HH | The Hoe-Man in the Se } | BY EDWIN MARKHAM Author of “ The Man wit I The Child at the Loom e must not grind the seed corn.—JEFFERSON D NCE, so the story goes, an old Indian chieftain was shown the ways and won- ders of New York. He saw the cathedrals, the sky- scrapers, the bleak tene- ments, the blaring mansions, the crowded circus, the airy span of Brooklyn Bridge. “What is the most surpris ing thing you have seen?” asked several comfortable Christian gentlemen of this benighted pagan whose worship was a “bowing down to stocks and stones.” The savage shifted his red blanket, and an- NAA xy 4 ly US SAAB Y 480 Hoe, and Other Poens’ swered in three slow words, “ Little chil- dren working.” It has remained, then, for civilization to give the world an abominable custom which shocks the social ethics of even an unregenerate savage. For the Indian father does not ask his children to work, but leaves them free until the age of ma- turity, when they are ushered with solemn rites into the obligations of their elders. Some of us are wondering why our savage friends do not send their medicine men as missionaries, to shed upon our Christian darkness the light of barbarism. Child-labor is a new thing in human affairs. Ancient history records no such infamy. “Children,” says the Talmud, “must not be taken from the schools even to rebuild the Temple.”” In Greece and Rome the children of both slave and mas- ter fared alike in a common nursery. The KT

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————————, —_ The Hoe-Man trainers worked to build up strong and beautiful bodies, careless of the accident of lineage or fortune. But how different is our “ Christian civilization”! Seventeen hundred thousand children at work! Does the enumeration bring any significance to our minds when we say that an army of one million seven hundred thousand chil- dren are at work in our “ land of the free” ? This was the figure in 1900; now there are hundreds of thousands more. And many of them working their long ten or fourteen hours by day or by night, with only a mis- erable dime for wage! Can the heart take in the enormity? Picture the long procession of them— enough to people a modern Babylon—all held from the green fields, barred from school, shut out of home, dragged from play and sleep and rest, and set tramping in grim, forced march to the mills and mines and shops and offices in this our America—the land whose other name we have been told is Opportunity! We of the “upper crust” give our children books and beauty by day, and fold them into white beds at night; and we feel all this caretaking to be only the natural order of things. Do we ever think of the over two million children who—in free America —are pushed out as little burden-bearers to share the toils and strains and dangers of the world of battling men? Let us glance into the weaving-rooms of the cotton mills and behold in the hot, in the Making 481 damp, decaying atmosphere the little wan figures flying in hideous cotillion among looms and wheels—children choked and blinded by clouds of lint forever molting from the webs, children deafened by the jar and uproar of an eternal Niagara of AN ARMY THAT OUTWATCHES THE SUN DY DAY AND THE STARS BY NIGHT

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482 Cosmopolitan Magazine machines, children silenced utterly in the desert desolation in the heart of the never- ceasing clamor, children that seem like specter-shapes, doomed to silence and done with life, beckoning to one another across some thunder-shaken Inferno. Is it not shameful, is it not astounding, that this craft that was known to the toilers of Memphis and Shushan, of Sardis and l'admor, should now, after all the advance of the ages, be loaded in any degree upon the frail, half-formed bodies of little chil- dren? ‘To what purpose then is our “age of invention”? Why these machines at all, if they do not help to lift care from the soul and burden from the back? To what purpose is our “age of enlighten- ment,”’ if, just to cover our nakedness, we establish among us a barbarism that over- shadows the barbarism of the savage cycle ? Is this the wisdom of the wise? Is this the Christianity we boast of and parade in benighted Madagascar and unsaved Malabar? Is this what our orators mean when they jubilate over “civilization” and “the progress of the species’’? After all these ages, more children are crowded into this limbo of the loom than into any other cavern of our industrial abyss. In the Southern cotton mills, where the doors shut out the odor of the magnolia and shut in the reeking damps and clouds of lint, and where the mocking bird outside keeps obbligato to the whirring wheels within, we find a gaunt goblin army of children keeping their forced march on the factory-floors—an army that out- watches the sun by day and the stars by night. Eighty thousand children, mostly girls, are at work in the textile mills of the United States. The South, the center of the cotton industry, happens to have the bad eminence of being the leader in this social infamy. At the beginning of 1903 there were in the South twenty thousand children at the spindles. The “ Trades- man,” of Chattanooga, estimates that with the springing up of new mills there must now be fifty thousand children at the Southern looms. This is thirty per cent. of all the cotton workers of the = spectral army of pigmy people sucked i from the hills to dance beside the crazing wheels. Let us again reckon up this Devil’s toll. In the North (where, God knows, con- ditions are bad enough), for every one thousand workers over sixteen years of age there are eighty-three workers under sixteen (that young old-age of the working- child); while in the South, for every one thousand workers in the ‘mills over six- teen years of age there are three hundred and fifty-three under sixteen. Some of these are eight and nine years old, and some are only five and six. Fora day ora night at a stretch these little children do some one monotonous thing—abusing their eyes in watching the rushing threads; dwarfing their muscles in an eternity of petty movements; befouling their lungs by breathing flecks of flying cotton; bestowing ceaseless, anxious attention for hours, where science says that “a twenty-minute strain is long enough for a growing mind.” And these are not the children of recent immigrants, hardened by the effete con- ditions of foreign servitude. Nor are they negro children who have shifted their shackles from field to mill. They are white children of old and pure colonial stock. Think of it! Here is a people that has out- lived the bondage of England, that has seen the rise and fall of slavery—a peo- ple that must now fling their children into the clutches of capital, into the maw of the blind machine; must see their latest- born drag on in a base servility that re- minds us of the Saxon churl under the frown of the Norman lord. For Mammon is merciless. Fifty thousand children, mostly girls, are in the textile mills of the South. Six times as many children are working now as were working twenty years ago. Unless the conscience of the nation can be awak- ened, it will not be long before one hundred thousand children will be hobbling in hopeless lock-step to these Bastilles of labor. It will not be long till these little spinners shall be “far on the way’to be spiders and needles.” Think of the deadly drudgery in these cotton mills. Children rise at half-past four, commanded by the ogre scream of the factory whistle; they hurry, ill fed, unkempt, unwashed, half dressed, to the walls which shut out the day and which confine them amid the din and dust and merciless maze of the machines. Here, penned in little narrow lanes, they look and leap and reach and tie among acres and acres of looms. Always the snow of the lint in their faces, always the thunder of

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— The Hoe- the machines in their ears. A scant half- hour at noon breaks the twelve-hour vigil, for it is nightfall when the long hours end and the children may return to the bar- racks they call “home,” often too tired to wait for the cheerless meal which the mother, also working in the factory, must cook, after her factory -day is over. Fre- quently at noon and at night they fall asleep with the food unswallowed in the mouth. Frequently they snatch only a bite and curl up undressed on the bed, to gather strength for the same dull round to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow. When I was in the South I was every- where charmed by the bright courtesy of the cultured classes, but I was every- where depressed by the stark penury of the working-people. This penury stands grimly out in the gray monotonous nage that they call “ homes’ ’—dingy shacks, « bleak, barn-like structures. And for these dirty, desolate homes the workers must pay rent to the mill-owner. But the rent is graded according to the number of chil- dren sent to work in the mill. The more the children, the less the rent. Mammon is wise: he knows how to keep a cruel grip upon the tots at the fireside. And why do these children know no rest, no play, no learning, nothing but the grim grind of existence? Is it because we are all naked and shivering? Is it because there is sudden destitution in the land? Is it because pestilence walks at noonday ? Is it because war’s red hand is pillaging our storehouses and burning our cities? No, forsooth! Never before were the storehouses so crammed to bursting with bolts and bales of every warp and woof. No, forsooth! The children, while yet in the gristle, are ground down that a few more useless. millions m may be heaped up. We boast that we are leading the com- mercialism of the world, and we grind in our mills the bones of the little ones to make good our boast. Rev. Edgar Murphy of Montgomery, Alabama, has photographed many groups of these pathetic little toilers, all under twelve. Jane Addams saw in a_ night- factory a little girl of five, her teeth blacked with snuff, like all the little ones about her—a little girl who was busily and clum- sily tying threads in coarse muslin. The average child lives only four years after it enters the mills. Pneumonia stalks in the Man in the Making 483 damp, lint-filled rooms, and leads hun- dreds of the little ones out to rest. Hun- dreds more are maimed by the machinery, two or three for each of their elders. One old mill-hand carries sixty-four scars, the cruel record of the shuttles. * The labor commissioner of North Caro- lina reports that there are two hundred and sixty-one cotton mills in that state, in which nearly forty thousand people are employed, including nearly eight thousand children. The average daily wage of the men is fifty-seven cents, of the women thirty-nine cents, of the children twenty- two cents. The commissioner goes on to say: “I have talked with a little boy of seven years who worked for forty nights in Alabama, and with another child who, at six years of age, had been on the night- shift eleven months. Little boys turned out at two o’clock in the morning, afraid to go home, would beg a clerk in the mill for permission to lie down on the office- floor. In one city mill in the South, a doc- tor said he had amputated the fingers of more than one hundred children, mangled in the mill machinery, and that a horrible form of dropsy occurs frequently among the overworked children.” Irene Macfadyen of England, after in- specting our conditions, a year or two ago, wrote: “The physical, mental, and moral effect of these long hours of toil on the chil- dren is indescribably sad. Mill children are so stunted that every foreman will tell you that you cannot judge their ages. The lint in their lungs forms a perfect cultivat- ing medium for tuberculosis and pneu- monia, and consumption is common among them. Many die after a few years of this service.” The “W ashington Post,” com- menting on child-labor in the South, says: “The average life of the children after they go into the “mills is four years. It would be less cruel for a state to have children painlessly put to death than it is to permit them to be ground to death by this awful process.” All who have gone through the mills tell the same story of misery and _in- justice. Mrs. John Van Vorst, in her book, “The Woman Who Toils,’’ tells a piteous and moving story. This is a book which ought to go out as a cry of con- science over the nation. Among a thou- sand little tragedies, she tells of an overseer who said: “I have a hundred kids in here

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484 Cosmopolitan who ought to be over twelve, but some- times I have to ask the parents if they are bringing me _ triplets. They generally manage to have three between twelve and fourteen years old. Anything to get ’em in. But if they swear falsely, what can Ido?” Elbert Hubbard has been through the mills of South Carolina. “I know,” says he, “ the sweat-shops of Hester Street, New York; I am familiar with the vice, depravity, and degradation of White chapel, London; I have visited the Ghetto of Venice; I know the lot of the coal miners of Pennsylvania; and I know somewhat of Siberian atrocities; but for misery, woe, and hopeless suffering, I have never seen anything to equal the cotton-mill slavery of South Carolina.” But not alone upon the South lies the blame of these human hells. Many of the mills of the South are owned by New Eng- land capitalists, the machinery having been removed from the North to the South, so as to be near the cotton fields, near the water- power, and, shame to record, near the cheap labor of these ‘baby fingers, for the brief time before they shall be folded waxenly and forever. It was the New IT IS THE NORTHERN MONEY-GRUBBER WHO IS GRAFTING UPON OUR CIVILIZATION AND MORE TERRIBLE Magazine England shipper, greedy for gold at any cost, who carried the blacks to the South, planting the tree of slavery in our soil. And now it is the Northern money-grubber who is grafting upon our civilization this new and more terrible white slavery. “South Carolina weaves cotton that Massachusetts may wear silk!” This new slavery of the mills is worse than the old slavery of the cotton fields. For the negro of the old days was well fed and sure of shelter; he did his work under the open sky, singing as he toiled, and finding time to weave out of his mystic brain a wild balladry and a poeti: folklore. Sut the slavery of the white women and children sucks life dry of all vigor and all joy. These white workers are stunted, slow, and sad; their lives are emptied of passion and poetry. In the long revolu- tion of the wheel of Change, in the irony of the grim Destinies who laugh behind the veil, it is now the stiff-necked whites— they who of old would not work beside the negro—who in this generation must bear all the burden of the mill. The young negro, not cunning enough to speed the spindle, is spared. It is now the white child who is in bondage, while the little darky is out in the cotton fields under the open heavens. These white children often begin work in the mill with no fragment of education. And often after a year of this brain-blasting labor they lose the power to learn even the simple art of reading. There is sometimes a night-school for the little workers, but they often topple over with sleep at the desks, after the long grind of the day. Indeed they must not spend too many wakeful hours in the night-school, shorten- THIS NEW WHITE SLAVERY

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¢ their sleep-time; for the ogre of the must have all their strength at full iead in the early morning. The overseer ot afford to be sending his mounted poker-up” to their homes to rout them f bed day after day, nor can he be ually watching lest they fall asleep the mill-floor while working or eating Nor can he afford to keep a clerk busy docking the wages of these little sleep- starved workers for the constant mistakes ind accidents of the fatigued and fumbling fingers. For these little drudges are fined heir lacks and lapses; and they are sometimes in debt to the concern at the veek’s end. Bu sut worse than all the breakdown of the — | 0d is the breakdown of the soul in these FREQUENTLY AT NOON THEY FALL ASLEEP WITH THE FOOD UNSWALLOWED God-forgetting mills. are pu men jests. i nor ngry avide o oO riche Yh it 1e] Der the na Here bovs : girls > compan I rs¢ itt ( eCeK v 7 irom tl = ¢ tne } rr ,eqd rT ned >>] ) Pile Lese ] rirl Ss gner ¢ oO 5 ) ic east v s sses S iong e st

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486 Cosmopolitan Magazine who cried out, “ Be not afraid of them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both body and soul in hell.” The poor remnant of these young toilers, they who do not crumble down in an early death, or drift to the gutter or the brothel, are left, alas! to become fathers and mothers. Fathers and mothers, forsooth! What sort of fatherhood and motherhood can we hope for from these children robbed of childhood, from these children with the marrow sucked out of their bones and the beauty run out of their faces? Tragical is it beyond words to think that any of these poor human effigies should ever escape to engender their kind and to send on a still more pitiable progeny. What child worthy of the name can spring from the loins of these withered effigies of men? What babe worthy of the name can be mothered in the side of this wasted and weakened woman who has given her virgin vitality to the Moloch of the mill? And what wonder that, if expelled from the factory as no longer competent to be a cog or a pulley in the vast machine, they have no ambition but to sit idly in the sun? What wonder that the commonwealth, having fostered these dull degenerates, should be forced to care for them in her almshouses, her jails, her asylums? What wonder that only the cheapest and coarsest pleasures can stir their numb spirits? The things of the soul which they have missed, they will never know that they have missed. They sit idly in the sun, a sorrowful type of the savage created by civilization, a sad protest against Ci\ ilization—the starved, the stu ed, the stunned, who Well does Emerson cry ou speak no protest!- worse cotton, but give us bette men! Well does Carlyle cry out, “ Deliver me those rickety, perishing souls of infants, ind let the cotton trade take its chances.”’ What boots a social order that makes thousands of degenerates as the by-prod- uct of its exquisite linens and delicate muslins? Must we take our civilization on such terms as this? Must thousands fall and perish that a few may soar and shine ? het us rather go back to the of the sav ge, for “the | ly is more t a “The savage, the grim son of the forest, has at least a light step, sound body, a brood of lus and a treasure of poetic song. But our savage of civilization, what of him? Look at his wasted body, his empty face, his beauty-robbed existence. Men are such cravens before custom that they often think a thing right because it has been long in existence. But child- labor has about it no halo of antiquity. It is a thing of yesterday—a sudden toad- stool in the infernal garden. It shot up with the coming of steam and loom at the end of the eighteenth century. Eng- land began to fight the villany in 1802, yet to-day the black shadow of it lies wide upon America. The factory, we are told, must make a certain profit, or the owners (absentee proprietors generally, living in larded luxury will complain. Therefore the presi- dent is goaded on by the directors. He in turn whips up the overseer; the overseer takes it out of the workers. So the long end of the lash cuts red the backs of the little children. Need we wonder, then, that cotton-factory stock gives back portly profits—twenty-five, thirty-five, yes, even fifty per cent? It pays, my” masters, to grind little children into dividends! And - silks and muslins do not show the stain f blood, a Ithough thes are splashed with oe on God’s side. But is there no hand reached out to stay these children lured to their ee by the Pied Piper of Greed? Yes, a brave com- pany of men and women both North and South are banded for the rescue. At the center of this fighting phalanx is the Child- Labor Committee of New York city. Ar- supporting this center are t ‘on- League and and women’s whe. sc attered ver n. The church of tl ith, i steeples in the aie v of the of hurling anathema against ss ¢] 1 + c 99 e+ = + ~. to the least of these, too often stands complacent, acquiescent, silent. And s the men and women of mercy and rescue find themselves hindered by the icy inditf- eee « ent ae as “well as : Rob us of “child-I labor and we will geral our mills from your state.” This is the frequent threat of the mill-owners in t chambers and lobbies of legislation. And, alas! we are in a civilization where such threat avails. Still, in spite of the apath of the church, in spite of the assau capital, the friends of mercy have in al

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r states forced some sort of a protective aw: no child under twelve years of age vork, nor any for longer than eight lours, nor any without a common-school lucation. This reads fairly well; but a the statute-book is not always a law the factory-floor. The inspectors are iten vigilant and quick with conscience. Some mills desire to keep the law. But thers are crooked: they have their forged d perjured certificates, their double pay ils—one for the inspector, another for the counting-house. They have, also, the levice of bringing childreit in as “ moth ers’ helps,” giving the mothers a few more ennies for the baby fingers. Hard masters of mills, shiftless or hap less parents, even misguided children AT THE DANGER SIGNAL THE CHILDREN themselves, all conspire to hol slaves to the wheel. ti ll HIDE dren are their tong rehearsal. the inspector, children f . LO 1 hy DCUTTY BEHIND BALES

OF COT Yes, l ] ; even about their a; re idy with Keep a ne d ger .e : S nide ] } ner ere j roine l clng f ‘ ol ores thd 1 lid t ] o ot I ~< 1 } nd banded

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Story of Andrew Jackson BY ALFRED HENRY LEWIS Tllustrated by Hy. S. Watson Synopsis: The opening instalments tell the story of Jackson’s removal, in 1787, from North Carolina to the Cumberland, where his honesty and energy soon gain him the respect and confidence of the community as well as a good start in the legal profession. He serves in Congress in both houses, and on his resigning from the Senate is elected a judge of the supreme court of Tennessee. He leaves this to take up the life of a planter, and is soon after made a major-general of militia. In 1791, Jackson had married Rachel Donelson, who, it appeared, had not been divorced from her husband, Robards. Although the matter was straightened out legally two years later, Jackson's ene- mies make much capital out of the unfortunate situation, and he has many times to defend his wife’s honor. The gossip ceases after he has killed Charles Dickinson in a duel. Vill ENGLAND AND GRIM-VISAGED WAR § and oiled and laid away to that repose which they have won. No more will they be } summoned to defend the blooming Rachel. No one ¥ now speaks evil of her; for that tragedy which reddened a Kentucky May morning has sealed the lips of slander. The general does not speak of that battle at twelve paces in the poplar wood; and yet the blooming Rachel knows. She, like her lover-husband, never refers to it; but her worship of him finds multiplication, while he, toward her, grows more and more the Bayard. Much are they revered and looked up to along the Cumberland, he for his gentle loyalty, she for her love. The currents of time roll on, and the general is busy with his planting, his store- keeping, and his boat-building. He is fortunate, and the three-sided profits pile themselves into moderate riches. In the midst of his prosperity he is visited by Aaron Burr. The late vice president has killed Alexander Hamilton—a name de- spised along the Cumberland. Also he was aforetime the champion of Tennessee, when she asked the boon of statehood. For these sundry matters, as well as for what good, unconscious lessons in deport- ment were taught him by the courtly Colonel Burr, the general fails not to take that polished exile to his heart and to his 488 hearth. Colonel Burr is in and out of Nashville many times. He comes and goes and comes and goes and comes again; and writes his daughter Theodosia, “T am housed with General Jackson, who is one of those prompt, frank, loyal souls whom I like.” Colonel Burr draws a battle-map of Que- bec, shows where Montgomery fell, and re- lates how he bore that dead chieftain from the field. In the end he gives a dim outline of his dreams for the conquest of that Spanish America lying on the other side of the Mississippi, and to these latter tales of empire the general lends eager ear. By the general’s suggestion a dinner is given at the Nashville Inn in honor of Colonel Burr. The general presides and, with a heart full of anger against Barbary pirates, offers, among others, the toast, ‘Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute!”’ Colonel Burr, being dined, confides to the general how he is not without an ally in the Southwest, and says that Commander Wilkinson, in control for the government at New Orleans, stands ready to advance his anti-Spanish projects. At the name of Wilkinson, the general shakes his pru- dent head. He declares that Commander Wilkinson is a faithless, caitiff creature, with a brandified nose, a coward heart, and a weakness for breaking his word. The crafty Burr, confident to vanity of his own genius’ for intrigue, insists that he can trust Commander Wilkinson. Then he arranges with the general for the build- ing of a flotilla of flatboats at the latter’s vards, and goes his scheming way. Later, EE

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Ps Story of Andrew Jackson 489 wnen Colonel Burr is on trial for treason in Richmond, the general rides over the Blue Ridge to give him aid and comfort, and makes street-corner speeches defend- ing him, wherein he says things more ex- plicit than flattering concerning President Jefferson, who is urging the prosecution of Colonel Burr. The hours, never resting, never sleeping, march onward with our planter-general, until the procession in its passing is re- membered and spoken of under the name of vears. Then comes the war with Eng- land. That saber-scar on the general’s head begins to throb, and he sends word to Washington that he is ready, with twenty- five hundred of his hunting-shirt militia, to kill British wherever they shall be found. The government thanks him and orders him with his hunting-shirt followers to report to General Wilkinson at New Or- leans. The general does not like this, the Wilkinson in question being that red- nosed renegade against whom, long ago, he warned the ambitious Colonel Burr. For all that, orders are orders; and besides fight under any commander is not to be despised. Wherefore the general presently hurries his hunting-shirt forces aboard flatboats, and floats away on the convenient bosom of the Cumberland. He will go down that stream to the Ohio, and so to the Mississippi and to New Orleans. At Natchez word from General Wil kinson meets the general. He is told to land and wait for further orders. The general takes his boys of the hunting-shirt ashore, and pitches camp. Privily he un- bends in oaths and maledictions, all ad- dressed to the ex-grocer, Wilkinson; for he thinks the order, preventing his entrance into New Orleans, is born of the mean rivalry of that red-nosed ignobility. The general waits and curses Wilkinson for divers weeks. Then occurs one of those imbecilities of which only the witlessness of government is capable, and whereof the archives at Washington carry so many examples. The general receives a_ brief dispatch from the war secretary, “ dis- missing’? him and his hunting-shirt soldiers from the service of the United States. Not a word is said as to pay or provision for returning to the Cumberland. Having gotten the general and his little army several hundred wilderness miles from home, the thick-head government, with no intelligenceand as little heart, coolly reduces him and them to the practical status of vagrants; which feat accomplished, it walks away, as it were, hands in pockets, whistling “Vankee Doodle.” Possibly the govern- ment thinks that the general and his hunt ing-shirt friends can float upstream as they floated down. The general’s credit is golden, since he has ever been a fanatic about paying debts. Invoking that credit, he cashes a handful of drafts, and marches home with his hunt- ing-shirt contingent at his own expense. Also he indites to the war secretary a letter which reddens that official’s departmental ears, and causes his departmental head to buzz like a nest of hornets. Later, the government pays the general the amount of those drafts, not because it is right- since the argument of right has little Wash ington weight—but on the far more moving reason that Tennessee, in a rage, is pre- paring to desert the boneless President Madison for the Federalists. It is that thought which brings a ray of common sense to the besotted government, and his money to our general, now back in Ten- hessee, The bellicose general is vastly disap- pointed at missing a brush with invading British; for, aside from a saber-engrafted hatred of all English things and men, he is one to dote on fighting for fighting’s crimson sake, and is almost as well pleased with mere battle as with victory. How- ever, he is given scanty room for sorrowful reflections, since fate is hurrying to his relief with a private war of his own. The general, ever an expositor of the duello, and the peaceful hours resting heavily on his hands, goes out as second for a Captain Carroll against Mr. Jesse Benton. Captain Carroll is shot in the toe, and Mr. Benton in the leg; whereat the general and the Cumberland public groan over results so inadequate. Being thus shot in the leg, Mr. Benton displays his bad taste by falling into a fury with the general. He recounts what he regards as his wrongs to his brother Thomas, and that intemperate individual loses no time in taking up his brother’s quarrel. The pair say things of the general which would arouse the wrath of an image; with that the general calls for his saw-handles, and begins to plan trouble for those verbally reckless Bentons.

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490 Cosmopolitan Magazine The general takes with him as guide, philosopher, and friend, his faithful sub- altern, Colonel Coffee. The two establish themselves strategically at the Nashville Inn. Across the corner of the public square upon which the Nashville Inn finds hos- pitable frontage, stands the City Hotel. Sunning themselves upon the veranda of the latter hostelry, but with war written upon their angry visages, the general and the faithful Coffee perceive the brothers Benton. The enemies glare at one another, and the general says to Colonel Coffee that they will now go to the post-office. Since a trip to the post-office is calculated to bring them within touching distance of the brothers Benton, Colonel Coffee at once discerns the propriety of such a journey. The pair go to the post-office, staring haughtily at the brothers Benton as they pass. The brothers Benton, for their side, being apoplectic of habit, grow black in the face with rage. Having visited the post-office, and being now upon their return, the general and Colonel Coffee again draw near the apoplec- tic Bentons, glowering from their veranda. When within three feet of them, the general abruptly whips out one of those celebrated saw-handles, and jams its muzzle against the horrified stomach of brother Thomas Benton. That imperiled personage there- upon backs rapidly away from the saw- handle, which as rapidly follows; while the Nashville public, assembling on the run, confidently expects the general to shoot brother Thomas Benton in two. The general might have done so, and thus gratified the public, but the unexpected occurs. As brother Thomas Benton back briskly from the muzzle of the saw-handle, brother Jesse, who is not wanting in a genius for decision, whirls, and from a huge horse-pistol plants two balls in the general’s left shoulder. As the warrior goes down, Colonel Coffee empties his pistol at brother Thomas, who avoids hav- ing his head blown off only by the handy nearness of a cellar, into whose receptive depths he tumbles, just in what novelists call “the nick of time.’ As_ brother Thomas lapses into the cellar, young Hays, a nephew of the blooming Rachel, hurls brother Jesse to the floor, to which he makes heartfelt attempts to pin him with a dirk, but is baffled by the activity of the restless brother Jesse, who will not lie still to by pinned. The whole riot has not covered the space of sixty seconds, when the public, suddenly conceiving its duty to lie in that direction, seizes young Hays, releases the recumbent brother Jesse, disarms Colonel Coffee, fishes brother Thomas out of that receptive cellar, and carries the badly wounded general to a bed in the Nashville Inn. The City Hotel mentions its own beds, and lays claim to the injured general on the argu- ment that the battle has been fought in its bar. The claim is disallowed, and the general is conveyed to the rival hostelry aforesaid, as being peculiarly his own proper inn, since it is there he has ever repaired for billiards, mint juleps, and conferences over pipe and glass with his friends. Once in bed, the local surgeons burst in and offer to cut off the general’s arm. The offer is declined fiercely, and a_ poultice of slippery-elm bark is substituted for that proposed surgery. This latter medicament works wonders; under its soothing influ- ences and the revivifying effects of whiskey —both remedies being much in vogue along the Cumberland—the general begins to mend. The general, still the patient —_ t of a deal of slippery-elm bark and whiskey— the one applied externally and the other internally—has been in bed a month when the awful word arrives of the massacre at Fort Mims. Five hundred and fifty-three souls have been slaughtered, and Chief Weathersford, with all his Creeks, their valor sharpened by English gold and English fire-water, is reported to be on the warpath. The news brings the general out of bed in a moment. His friends remon- strate, the doctors command, the blooming Rachel pleads, but he puts them all aside. Gaunt of cheek, face white with weakness, left arm in a sling, he climbs painfully into the saddle and takes command. The general sends Colonel Coffee and his mounted riflemen to the fore, with orders to wait for him at Fayettesville. Meanwhile, he himself lingers briefly to enroll and organize his little army. A few weeks later he follows the doughty Coffee, and the entire command, horns full of powder, pouches heavy with bullets, hunting-knives whetted to a razor edge, moves southward after the hostile Creeks.

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Ce Story of Andrew Jackson 49! 1X THE GENERAL AT THE HORSESHOI The general goes to Fayettesville, and orders Colonel Coffee, with his eager five hundred, to Huntsville, as a point nearer the heart of savage war. Volunteers, each bringing his own rifle and riding his own horse, join Colonel Coffee, and he sends back inspiring word that his five hundred have grown to thirteen hundred, all thirst ing for Creek blood. Meanwhile, the ge meee weak and worn to a shadow, can ha — the saddle, and must be bathed ho in whiskey, to hold soul and body together. Unable to eat, he lives by his will alone, while the shot-shattered left arm, lest he faint with the awful agony h attends its least disturbance, is nd tightly to his side. The general takes the field, and presently mes up with the Creeks. He smites hip and thigh at Tallushatches, Talladega, and divers other places of equally complicated names, slaying hun dreds, while losing few himself. The Creeks give way before the invincible Wherever he goes they scatter n affrighted flock Pe blackbirds. Indian is terrible only when he is vinning. He is not upholstered, whether nentally or morally, for an uphill, losing var. The general would like it better if lis were otherwise. Could he but coax ‘vanescent enemy into a pitched battle, he would break his heart and his power vith one and the same blow. Chief Weathersford is as well aware of this defect in the Indian constitution as is the general. He himself is half white, and knows what points of strength and weak- 1ess belong with both the white man and the Indian. Wherefore, when now his Creeks have been beaten, and their hearts ire low in defeat, he makes no effort to lead them against the general’s front; but breaks them into squads and little bands, vith directions to harass the hunting-shirt men, and hang about their flanks in the name of flea-bite annoyance and isolated scalps. Thus is the general plagued and fatigued nigh unto death, without once being able to lay hand upon those skulking, hiding, flying foot-Parthians against whom he has come forth. Finally many a path less mile through wood and swamp, and reneral. many an unbridged river, lie between the nearest head of beef and the soldiers, clamorous for food. The military stomach, is the first great base of every military operation. The war-wise Frederick had it for his aphorism that an army is so much like a snake that it can move forward only on its belly. The general is made poiatels aware of this truism when he and his hunting-shirt men find themselves penned up with star- vation at Fort Strother. In the teeth of his troubles, however, he makes shift to send home an pepe papoose for the blooming Rachel to raise Famine takes command at Fort Strother, and the general writes, “He is an enemy I dread more than hostile Creeks—I mean the meager monster, Famine.” One day backwoods boy, whose appetite is even with his effrontery, waylays the general on his rounds and demands food ‘Here is what I was saving for supper,” says the general; “you may have that.” And he tosses the hungry one a double handful of acorns The starving hunting-shirt men mutiny they draw themselves up preparatory to marching north to find that home-fatness which awaits their coming on the Cumber- ind. At this the general changes his manner. Heretofore he has been the symbol of fatherly sympathy and toleration. He can make excuses for the grumbling of hungry men, and makes them. But this goes beyond grumbling, which, when all is in, comes to be no more than a health- ful blowing off of angry steam. This is desertion by wholesale. As the lean-flanked, rancorous ones line up to begin their homeward march, the 1 | ° ] general, haggard and emaciated by those Benton wounds and lack of food, rides out in front. Halting forty yards from the foremost mutineers, he swings from the saddle. In his right hand he carries a long 8-square rifle. This, since he has no left hand to support his aim, he runs across the saddle. Being ready, ( s on the hunting-shirt men to give the order to march if they dare ‘For by the Eternal,” says he, “* Il shoot down the first one of you who takes a for ward step! The sulky, hungry hunting-shirt scowl at the general. He scowls back at oS — _~ them with the wicked ferocity of a tiger,

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492 Cosmopolitan Magazine and an iron determination not to be re- voked. And thus they stand glaring— one against hundreds! Then the courage of the hungry hundreds oozes away, and they fall back before that menacing appari- tion which glowers at them along the rifle barrel. They melt away by the rear, those hunting-shirt men, and slink off to their quarters, ashamed of their weakness, yet afraidtogoon. At last, a herd of beeves quite as gaunt as the starved hunting-shirt men themselves, is driven in. Fires are set going and knives drawn. There is a measureless eating, belts are let out to the full-fed holes of other days, and mutiny like an evil spirit, takes its flight. The gorged hunting-shirt men, as though in amends for their scowlings and mutinous grumblings, beg to be led instantly against the Creeks. This the general is very willing to do, since he suspects the Creeks of pos- sessin g corn. The general’s scouts tell him that the scattered Creeks are collecting in force the Horseshoe. Upon the strength of news, one bright morninz the general ri out of Fort Strother, and his recuperated hunting-shirt men, two thousand strong, are at his back. The Horseshoe is a loop-like bend in the Tallapoosa, wh ul ne hundred heavil the open end yards wide, the taught the Creeks to throw up a f tion of logs. Behind this bul gathered the fighting tlow more than one thousand Arriving in front of the log bulwark, the g sneral, with the experienced Coffee, pushes forward to reconnoiter “We can thank t Brit says the general, tossing his hand toward the Creek defenses. writh the hh Weathersford, th the wl blood that’s in him, we uld never have le- signed it.” The te Ci LKeS a ggestiol 1 act ae dal from behind themselve es that poosa will d : do is lie | iglish-planned ‘log breastworks, and knock over whatever obnoxious paleface shows his head. This latter is an admirable programme, com- forting to the cockles of the aboriginal heart. There is one trouble, however: it won’t work. As the circuitous Coffee begins to swing wide for his stealthy creep to the rear, the general covers the strategy with a brace of brawling nine-pounders. Inside the log breastworks he hears the “tunk! tunk!” of the medicine drums, and the measured chant of the prophets promising victory In the midst of the prophetic chanting and the dull thumping of the tom-toms, the nine-pounders roar, and bu shot in the log breastworks. do no harm, and serve but to ribald mirth of the Creeks. englis h for oS = can insult, and give way in x general, wnom thev describe— in mind his lean form—as 1armless, because wan ing the nead epithet, and invit to come to tl The general p of th est signal of the redoubtable Colonel Coffee and his rit a walk, pick their oom vay through woods. It is a matter of no li themselvy es at u toe of the Horseshoe, of the ignorant Creeks. Between ind se One nundared DY the enemy wide, and d they see the canoes whicn tne stupidity of the Creeks has left without s much as a squaw or a papoose to guard them. In a moment a score of men thrown off their hunting-shirts, a ir the a rer. They cross like so many New- foundlands, 1 come out, dripping but happy, on the farther side. Presentl . i each of the score is upon his return towing a dozen of the largest canoes. Leaving a guard to look after the mot Colonel Coffee embarks his command he canoes, and ten minutes later the las man Jack of them is on the other they hear the boom nine-pounders and the yells and var-whoops of the Creeks. Also they dis- over the wi — f the Creeks, hidde iway with their squaws and papooses in thickety corner al the wood.

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LL SHOOT DOWN THE FIRST ONE OF YOU WHO TAKES A FORWARD STEP

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494 Cosmopolitan Magazine Colonel Coffee, who for all he is a back- woodsman is not without certain sparks of military skill, promptly sets fire to the wickiups, as an excellently sure method of both wringing the withers and distracting the attention of the fighting Creeks at the front. The flames go crackling skyward; the squaws and papooses rush, yelling, from the slight houses of wattled willow twigs and bark, and scuttle into the underbrush like rabbits. Unlike rabbits, being in the underbrush, they set up such a dismal tem- pest of howls .that those rearmost Creeks who hear it come running to learn what disaster has seized upon their households. Before they can make extensive inquiry, Colonel Coffee and his riflemen open on them with a storm of bullets, and then each man takes to a tree. The war now pro- ceeds Creek fashion, every man, white and red, fighting for himself. There is a difference, however; for while the hunting- shirt men are dead shots, the Creeks prove themselves such wretchedly bad marks- men—not understanding a rear sight, which article of gun-furniture is a mystery to the Indian mind even unto this day— as to provoke a deal of hunting-shirt laughter. Slowly but surely the Creeks give way before that low-flying sleet of lead; and as they give way, running from one tree to another, their hunting-shirt foe presses forward—as deadly a skirmish line as ever commander threw out. The quick ear of the general catches the firing down at the toe of the Horseshoe. It tells him that Colonel Coffee is busy with the Creek rear. Also he gets a far-off glimpse through the trees of the smoke and flames from those burning wickiups, and understands the message of them. Drawing off the futile nine-pounders, the general orders a charge, the amateur artillerists taking up their rifles with the others. At the word the hunting-shirt men rush forward and go over the log breast- works like cats. That one earliest to scale the breastworks—quick as a panther, strong as a bear—is Ensign Sam Houston. The Southwest will hear more of him before all is done. That lively youth, however, is not thinking of the future just now; for an arrow, excessively of the present, has pierced his thigh, and is demanding his whole attention. Shutting his teeth like a trap to control the pain, he snaps the shaft and draws the arrow from the wound. Once the hunting-shirt men are across the log breastworks, a slow and painstaking killing ensues. Not a Creek asks quarter; not a Creek accepts it when tendered. It is a fight to the death—a fight unsparing, relentless, grim. “Remember Fort Mims!’ shout the hunting-shirt men, working away with rifle and ax and knife. The Creeks, caught between the general and Colonel Coffee, hide in clumps of bushes or behind logs. From these slight coverts the hunting-shirt men flush them as setters flush birds, and shoot them as they run. Once a Creek is down, out flashes the ready hunting-knife and a Creek scalp is torn off; for the hunting-shirt men, on a principle that fights Satan with fire, have adopted the war habits of their red enemy. The hunting-shirt men range up and down, quartering those one hundred acres of Horseshoe wood and thicket like hounds, killing out in all directions. Now and then a warrior, sorely crowded, leaps into the Tallapoosa, and strikes for the opposite shore. His feather-tufted head is seen bobbing on the muddy surface of the river. To gentlemen who, offhand, make nothing of a turkey’s head at one hundred yards, those brown, bobbing, feather-tufted Creek heads are child’s play. A rifle cracks, the shot-pierced Creek springs clear of the vater with a death yell, and then goes bubbling to the bottom. Sometimes two rifles crack; in which double event the Creek takes with him to the bottom two bullets instead of one. The slaughter moves forward, slowly but satisfactorily, for hours. It is ten o clock in the night when the last Creek is killed, and the hunting-shirt men, hungry with a hard day’s work, may think of supper. Of the red one thousand and more who manncd those British-built forti- fications in the morning, not two score get away. It is, fairly speaking, the Creek Thermopyle. The general’s triumph at the Horseshoe puts the last paragraph to the last chapter of the Creeks. Also it disappoints certain English prospects, and defeats for all time those savage hopes of a general race-battle against the paleface, the fires of which the dead Tecumseh so long supported by his eloquence, and fed with deeds of valor. By way of a finishing touch, from which

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Story of Andrew Jackson the hue of romance is not wanting, the terrible Weathersford rides in on his famous gray war-horse, and gives himself up to the general. “You may kill me,” says Weathersford. “IT am ready to die, for I have beheld the destruction of my people. No will hereafter fear the Creeks; they are broken I come now to save the women one and gone. 495 by easy marches back to that impatient plenty which awaits them on the Cumber land. The public him with shout and toss of hat, while the blooming welcomes Rachel gives her hero measureless love and tenderness. The general’s hundred and fifty slaves, agog with joy and fire- water, make for round days. They would have enlarged that festival to one merry two From a painting by Van Derlyn MAJ.-GEN. ANDREW ind children who will starve in the for- The hunting-shirt men, not at all senti- nental, lift up their voices in favor of slay- ng the chief. At that the general steps in between. “The man who would kill a prisoner,” he cries, “is a dog and the son of a dog. To him who touches Weathersford, I promise a noose and the nearest tree.” Che general leads his hunting-shirt men JACKSON, U. S. A. three days, but the stern overseer intervenes to recall them to the laborious realities of life. As the general emerges from his fatigue and his sickness—albeit that Ben- ton-wounded left arm is still in a sling— a note is putin his hands. The note is from the War Department in Washington, and reads, “ Andrew Jackson of appointed major-general in the army of the United States, vice William Henry Harrison resigned.” Tennessee is (To be continued.)

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Chasing a Rainbow BY JACQUES FUTRELLE Lllustrated by William R. Leigh }HAVE known Mrs. Dick for several years. Let’s see; AD 41 knew her a year before MyAb }she came out. She married rey ex Dick her second season and NAS i they have been married ever PN K3 since, which is considered =f 4# quite remarkable in_ their 4set. Of course I admire Sher. She can make a mint julep that would—oh, never mind! and she has a most sisterly, sympathetic sort of way. She’s particularly strong on soothing broken hearts, too. I used to give her a good deal of practice. She knew all about my consuming passion for Isabel; no, come to think of it, it was Alice. Beautiful girl, Alice. Or was it Mary? I believe it was Mary. They are all so tangled up, somehow. No, I never was in love with Mrs. Dick —quite. I happened to be useful at her coming-out party, and sent her a bunch of violets every day for a few months, just in a little friendly sort of way, you know. Then Dick appeared; and I was ap- propriately broken-hearted as best man. Some disagreeable persons say I overacted. Be that as it may, I later put my heart down for the maid of honor to trample upon—and she did it. Since then Mrs. Dick and I have been friends. Deep down in my heart I believe she’s a matchmaker. Not that anyone ever accused her of it—Lord, no! But I had some little experiences which—which— well, anyway, when I came back once from California, where I’d been lIcoking after some mines for my Aunt Ruth, about the first thing that came before me was a note from Mrs. Dick “ordering me up.” Then I knew I was going to be euchred. “My dear Bobby”—she insists on calling me Bobby just as if I were a little dog; something momentous would happen if I should call her Mrs. Dickie. “My dear Bobbie,” the note said, “ Dick and 496 I order you up to the house immediately this reaches you. Dick is pining away for a sight of you and I’m just dying for you to meet my sister-in-law. (Of course!) Come up and hear all about her.”’ I went. Mrs. Dick fairly bubbled with delight at seeing me. Once I fancied she was going to kiss me; but she didn’t— confound it. Dick pounded me on the back ponderously, and almost dislocated my breathing machinery. “Where is she?’”’ I demanded excitedly. “T didn’t say she was here—here in this house, you silly,” said Mrs. Dick; “and I didn’t say you’d meet her this evening. You see it’s this way. Dick’s family has recently moved here from St. Louis, you know o “Yes, I know—St. Louis.” “ And Lucie—i-e, not y—— “T-e, that is,” I said. Mrs. Dick puckered her pretty brow, then passed. “Lucie is not visiting us at all. Of course you had concluded she was.” “T had concluded just that.” “But I’m going to have her up at the very earliest possible moment. I’m just dying to have you meet her.” She described Lucie for fifteen minutes, after which I was in full and undisputed possession of one fact at least—Mrs. Dick was just dying for me to meet her sister- in-law. Then she brought out a_ photo- graph which she said didn’t do half-justice to Lucie. Of course, I wouldn’t call Mrs. Dick a—well, I didn’t believe that half- justice thing, that’s all. Lucie was blond, blond with blue eyes—sunshine and azure. And her eyes laughed, laughed with you, not at you. Then and there Mrs. Dick extracted from me a solemn promise to come up whenever she might command and meet Lucie. Nothing was to interfere; mere ordinary business affairs were to go to smash at the beck of a pretty finger. I ”

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n 3} s — yD 2 mm < - & « & & < n 2 Uv Z < o Q a} an) Oo & < Zz n

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498 was willing. Just to show how willing I was, I took the photograph she had shown me, but she didn’t know it. I snatched glances at it at various times until the features were indelibly fixed in my brain. At last the command came. When I arrived at Mrs. Dick’s her face was almost tragic. “Isn’t it too awful?” she exclaimed. “Lucie had a terrible headache and simply couldn’t come.” “Of course,” I said. “Of course.” “Poor boy,” said Mrs. Dick. “ Here’s Laura Kimball. She will console you.” She did. But she’s a brunette. There’s none of the rainbow about her, blue eyes and sun-kissed hair. “T’m just dying for you to meet my sister-in-law,’ Mrs. Dick reiterated as I was leaving. Again, a few days later, I received the royal command. “And Lucie will surely be here,” said the note. “James, lay out my evening clothes,” I said with grim joy. “Yes, sir,” said James. cab at seven, sir.” “Cab? What cab, rible fear seized me. “You are to preside at the Yale class- dinner to-night,’ said James. That settled it. I wrote a apology to Mrs. Dick—an abject, groveling, beseechingly polite little note. It was all I could do. “ Confound it, I would like to meet her,” I exploded wrathfully. “Ves, sir,’”’ said James as my razor. There’s none of about James. The next time I saw Mrs. Dick she grasped my hand, and before I could ex- plain that I was to sail for Europe next day and had come to say good-by, she burst out with: “Tt’s just too provoking. Here Lucie has run off to Europe and I declare I was never so anxious for anything in my life as I was for you to meet her.” She almost ‘I ordered the James?” A_hor- we ord ot he stropped the ecstatic wept. “Cheer up, Mrs. Dick,” going to Europe, too.” “Oh, you dear,” she I said. “I’m bubbled. “I will give you a note of introduction to her. Of course you will meet her there.” Cosmopolitan Magazine “If not there, perhaps in heaven,” I said solemnly. “Do you expect to get a rain check where you’re going?” she asked as she sprawled a note of introduction. “She will be in London for a while,’ she went on, “and later in Paris. I'll write to her and tell her you’re coming.”’ “And I'll find her, Mrs. Dick,” I as- sured her. “If she’s in Europe I'll find her.”’ I was beginning to feel like somebody in a melodrama pursuing somebody else with “the paper.” I think I went to Europe on but I’ve forgotten what it was. Anywa' the first thing I did in London was t drive to her hotel. “Please send my card to Miss Lucie Gregory of New York,” I told the clerk jauntily. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “She left an hour ago for Paris.” And then I swore shook my fist under his 3y the sacred whiskers of the ossified potentates of India I will find her,” I bellowed. ‘From Britain’s seabound shore to the wilds of far Milwaukee; from the jungles of South Africa to the walls of fair Chicago; from the holy gates of Italy to the iniquitous depths of Brooklyn; from the north pole to the south, I will seek her, aye, and find.” I caught the next boat for Paris. I went at once to the hotel where I knew she great oath as I © l astonished nose would stop. ‘Is Miss Lucie Gregory of New York stopping here?” I asked. “Qui, m’sieur,” said the clerk bland smile. “ Hurray!” I exclaimed. 3ut she eez not in.” Thus my sun went out. “She eez out somewhere in ze—what you call him?—ze blue automobile,” the clerk explained. I left a note promising to call that even- ing, then went out and chartered an auto With no definite point in view, yet feeling that I would see Lucie now, I started cruising about, seeking always a sun-kissed head topping a blue car. In an auto I have always found it is possible to run across friends—particularly if I am driving. I frequently run across people that way— most unexpectedly, too. with a

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I FOUND MYSELF SITTING ON THE GROUND FACING A BADLY FRIGHTENED GIRL

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FRAULEIN FREDERICKA SCHWARTZKEPPLER WALKED ALMOST INTO MY ARMS

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At last I was rewarded. Ahead was a low speedy-looking blue machine, a block or more away—a Provost by the cut— and above it golden hair, clouds of it, fluttering in a white veil, loosely tied. It was Mrs. Dick’s sister-in-law. It came to me like an inspiration. I frequently have inspirations that way, so, with joy at my heart, I set sail for the blue car con- fidently. This time Lucie should not escape me. The blue Car was speeding along out the Rue de Something—I’ve forgotten what; anyway, it was toward Versailles— when I started in pursuit. In two min- utes I saw it was going to be an exciting race. This belief was confirmed when the girl with the sun-kissed hair—I already calling her Lucie—looked back at me. I waved my hand at her. She turned to her companion, an_ elderly woman, and said something. Then the speed of the blue machine was suddenly increased. “If she only knew she was running away from me she wouldn’t do it,” I com- plained to myself. In desperation I threw on the high-speed gear and got down to serious work. On and on we flew, she looking back occasionally. Then I them gaining slowly. Suddenly I noticed that the blue car was in trouble. I was only fifty feet back and shouted at Lucie. The car made one desperate spurt, and began to stop fast. One wheel struck a stone, the car twisted violently to one side with relaxed speed and ran plumb into a tree. I threw my brake on and in another moment we were all tangled up together in a snarl of wheels. Something hit me, revealing a hitherto unsuspected solar system; then I found myself sitting on the ground facing an extremely pretty and_ badly frightened girl with sun-kissed hair tum- bling down about her shoulders. An el- derly woman stood beside her. I knew it was up to me to say something, so I assumed my most pleasing tone. “ Pardon me,” I said, “is this Miss Lucie Gregory of New York?” F “Ach Gott!’ said the elderly woman fervently. 5 Then the girl opened her rosebud lips, but no pearls fell from them; instead there was a torrent of charming little French cuss words. I knew they were cuss was Saw Chasing a Rainbow 501 words because they were so earnest and heartfelt. Then out of the jumble came real words —intelligible words — United States sort of words that my dazed in- tellect could grasp and weave into a tangi- ble meaning; words softened by the pret- tiest, daintiest accent that—well, anyway, she spoke. “No,” she said severely, and my heart sank within me. “It is not Miss Gregory. It is Fraulein Fredericka Schwartzkeppler and mother.” * “Pleased to meet you,” I said feebly. I gazed thoughtfully at a round, capti- vating ankle half-smothered in a cloud of lace as I sought 1 way to explain. Then, ‘I trust you’ll pardon me,” I said; “I thought you were friends of mine.” “ Mein Gott, do you do all your friends dis?’’ demanded Mama _ Schwartz- keppler angrily. “Not all the time,” I purred gently. Then I recovered and assisted them to their feet, the Fraulein to two tiny, im- practicable sort of feet, wholly unfit for everyday use, and Mama Schwartzkeppler to her lumpy ones. Humbly, I inspected the tangle of wheels. Their car was a wreck; mine was all right. By the exercise of rare diplomacy I finally induced them to climb in my car, and drove them back to their hotel. Go- like ing, I told the whole story—that is, as much as I could conscientiously tell one extremely pretty girl about another ex- tremely pretty girl. At last they laughed; the clouds faded. The Fraulein’s laugh was a trill of delight, a—a—oh, never mind. Then they told me something about themselves, at least the Fraulein did They were from Berlin and were traveling nowhere particularly, just traveling. They would remain .a France for a few weeks, and then—their plans were unsettled. “ Do you ever expect to go to America?” I asked. The Fraulein looked at me and laughed. “Perhaps,” she said in her pretty ripply voice. “Perhaps, after a few months.” With renewed apologies and rather re- luctantly, I left them and went back to the hotel. Was Miss Gregory in? No, she hadn’t come in yet. So I returned to Fraulein Schwartzkeppler and _ her mama. They were delighted. I know they were because they said so. We had 6

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502 Cosmopolitan Magazine

dinner together d I got back to the hotel at ten o'clock. “She eez come and gone some more,” said the blan “Oh, dat ‘ card he handed out. It gave a new ad- dress where Lucie | i the ac to see vou. My sister-in

so much about vou began a mad chase.

Europe, with me

1 comet, alwavs bel it seemed my efforts were to something interfered. But once

came close n g her | as 1ewhere in Mrs. Dick had sent me Lucie davs So I went to eek Detore she $

due to arrive there, wrote her a note

] th ionits } hind coe, Helbert, the station behind lere s was to stop, and sat down t it. if she missed me again it would be er m a + - + T 1e€ LIT r Lait s due: si rig é ACK t t rt 7 Fr _ rushed d rh - Vii T ( = — L SS LUC I vy T ~ a i Ss K L la at ty I had CTOssead Elis I og riercel I ( ( red er g 1e < L tol er ~€f er a <Ne ~ “ TL - As ri e! T r s+ i v sne ada sé 1c me ( cone : zaden I gre esperate Compared the nte ercise I s getting chess re 4 T « m 1 it 1 T - DrOopOs Lhe L had an ide bev Sana Rous once t r ert Helbert = nee Tc ‘ Ten + ites later a ( lanaged ne¢ elegran [ K ne

I would look them

“Am waiting in Laden till you return.” Of course that was it. It couldn’t be inything else. I took time by the scruff of the ne addressed several improper remarks to the world at large—and went to Laden again. Lucie had received n telegram and had started for Helbert There is moment in everv man’s life

when he knows tnat vented mere words ot pression Vas 1 fool 1 There was id ha rs + - 1 tla Y th + . - 1] hat I wer Me are r me something et « i I structed the r potent rile rus . remé i r = some 7 r lat 7 reel K ied ster dn PR ‘ i SACU AZZiCU Int r neath oO N g something

~ a x @ Ke + ‘ a eee ock. A he Aw sorry I missed vou t Ve + e g é Rome Would i i¢ <e( t =€f€ u tnere ” But I did g I couldn’t stand the [ went Paris instead. Quite det I met Fraulein Schwart <eppler i her mama again. I jus a pened dr int ) | 1 sk if é vere there—anc¢ It Vas a retief tO snake tle lite, plump, firm, German 1,

ind to see a real girl after all my

ifter Lucie. There was nothing hemeral, none of the chimerical about sin Schwartzkeppler—there were just I

: l ne hundred and forty pounds of giri

. 1 N irtzkeppier told me, quite

that they were going to Egy ind invited me to go along. I declined, it told them if they ever came to America Then after I left hem I realized man’s inconsistency. Here er half the earth seeking

ir and blue eyes. [ 1ad

1 lingering sense of duly ] em T. o loated about fLurope fol ST ssi

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months. I had long ago given up all hope of ever seeing Lucie. Mrs. Dick didn’t have any sister-in-law. If she had ever had one I didn’t give a dingnation bow wow what became of her. In this frame of mind I returned to London and there, one day, I strolled into the British Museum. Harry Frawley of New York happened to be there. “By George!” he said. “If you had been here a minute sooner I could have ntroduced you to a charming American ” “Who?” I asked “Miss Lucie Gregory of New York.” “ Whete—where did she go?” I stam mered in my excitement. The old spirit of the chase was reawakened in an in ‘To her hotel,” said Harry. “ What’s the matter?” he called after me as I ran Away. “T’ve got to see her sure,” I shouted I took a four-wheeler to the hotel “Miss Gregory hasn’t been here for several months,” said the clerk. No! There wasn’t any Mrs. Dick’s sister-in-law. No mere flesh and_ blood could appear and disappear as she had done. That night I thought it all out, ifter which I had an inspiration—another one. Early next day, nine o’clock, it was, I went to another hotel. Perhaps she had stopped there. “Yes,” said the clerk, “ Miss Gregory has been here, but she left on the eight o’clock train for Liverpool to take a steamer for New York.” “When does the next train go?” I panted. “Tn an hour.” I was on it. I took a carriage at the station in Liverpool and was driven at full speed to the wharf. “The ship sailed an hour ago,” said the guard. My remarks then would be out of place here. But the fever of the hunt again had full possession of me. I took steamer for New York two days later. There a tele- gram was waiting for me. Something had gone to smash at Aunt Ruth’s mines; I was needed in California, immediately. I went. I was in New York only two hours. _A month later I came limping back to New York. I had forgotten all about Chasing a Rainbow 503 Lucie. On arrival in New York my blissful disregard of her existence was abruptly terminated. There was a note in my rooms from Mrs. Dick “Your Aunt Ruth tells me,’’ she said, that you will be here to-day Please come up to-night. I am se anxious to have you meet my sister-in-law. If any thing happens so you can’t come to-night, be sure to be at wharf No. at three o’clock to-morrow afternoon. Lucie and 1 party are going to sail from there for San Francisco by way of Panama.” I was dog-tired and went to bed. Next day I had to see Aunt Ruth for an hour, but I would have plenty of time afterward to go to the dock and achieve that im possible thing—meet Lucie So I was easy in my mind. I went to see Aunt Ruth, Central Park West, near Ninety third Street. From there I walked over to the elevated station at Ninety-third Street and started downtowr It was then only eleven o’clock. I had four hours to get to the dock. I took the Ninth Avenue elevated and for a while it rea Sut just south of the Forty-second Street station the train stopped. It was there for half an hour and I began to get nerv- ous. A rail was out of place, and here I was, caught between two stations. I went out and put it to the “L” guard, man to man. “T’ve got to cate h a steamer that sails early this afternoon,” Lexplained. “Let me get off and I'll walk back to the sta- ly looked promising tion.” ‘Nothin’ doin’,” he said brusquely “Tf you get out there you'll hit that third rail and jump so high you won’t come back till Thursday. Nothin’ doin’.” I coaxed, threatened, and swore, aided and abetted by a hundred others on the train. It was all wasted. We began to move at ten minutes to three o’clock. At the dock I met Mrs. Dick just about to step into her carriage. The steamer for Panama had sailed. “Don’t say a word,’’ I warned her fiercely, “or I'll choke your husband to death. I am not fit for publication.” “T was so anxious to have you meet my sister-in-law,” she gurgled. Then I told her the long, sad story of a blighted ambition; all of it. It took me three hours and cost her six cups of tea.

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504 Then, urged to sal Fran isé steamer when Cosmopolitan Magazine lecided to run across lost with all hands very nose, and t ! As the nding gol de n nearer to the dock , made out tl A Song BY FALLOW NORTON I MADE mv min ito a skv— mv farthest blue: 10oughts of you. p, deep sea sweetest grew, ks all spoke of you. cleft my w ach moment were a li This love of you where I am th ss My deep, my high, my anal my all!

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Wii; A French Revolution for One Cent BY ERNEST POOLE Illustrated by Phillipps Ward YaaSGHE quivering, hollow - eyed 20”, (Ts student of the Latin Quarter, MW] orating on the rights of man, GX banged the café table with } his , le fist; the -table, “y) little iron affair on the side- \ wat, tipped slightly. From on the edge a five-centime gon | slipped noiselessly off = a conve into the student’s gaping coat por ket. The oration banged on. The double- chinned waiter with the little, solemn eyes and the slick, black hair, shifted to the other foot. At the next table the affable gentleman in the fawn-colored frock coat took another sip of absinthe, twirled his fine-pointed mustache and smiled approv- ide The buxom cheese-madame from next door kept eying the ragged little treet gamin who stood, hands on hips, directly in front of the orator—now staring solemnly at those burning eyes and that **GARGON, REGARD THESE COINS”

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506 Cosmopolitan Magazine tumbled hair, now turning to wink at madame, and thus diverting her attention while his chubby partner crept stealthily behind her toward a big yellow cheese in her tiny shop. Three benevolent old gentlemen in brown straw hats stopped and listened, with holiday smiles. Across the narrow street, in the open window next mine, a young artist was sketching the student, languidly, for the heat was in- tense. Far above us from the little attic — = i 3 | i Pa \| i oe Me Y \ ““DOWN W E k NTS balcony two lovers leaned oy 1 look together through one opera glass. Another bang of the fist and the oration plunged into the French Revolution. To- day was the great day of France, the 14th of July, the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille! ‘Ah, Day—Day—Day Immortal the groans, the shrieks, the sublime, the magnificent frenzy, the Idea, the Poem, the Blood, the Man raising his fist for——”’ Down.came the fist! Crash—and the student’s fourth glass of absinthe lay shattered on the sidewalk, the amber fluid lost. A pause; then a toss of the poet’s narrow, shaggy head, a glance from those burning eyes, a superb gesture—all signaled the waiter to bring another drink. But the waite: stood solemn, motionless, statu- esque. Indignantly the poet’s hand grasped the tiny pile of coppers and shoved them waiterward. Nothing. Another glare; then in the dead silence the fat waiter spoke: “ Monsieur has had fourabsinthes. Mon- sieur has paid for three. I have gi monsieur the change, it is there—fort centimes. But forty centimes will not pa‘ for two more drinks. If monsieur \ show me more money——”’ * Ah! Garcon, you want money!”’ Alig amused smile played on the poet’s thin lips, as, stooping, he carelessly counted coppers. Suddenly he stooped so low his hat fell off. The waiter bent with dig icked it up from the pavement The poet “Garcon, regard these coins!’’ The waiter looked. Three ten-centime pieces and one five. A five-centime piece was missing. The poet’s dark eyes glis- tened “Gargon, I demand my forty cen- times, my property, my all, my rights my sacred rights!’’ But the waiter was again a statue. Only by the heave of the double chin could one tell that the throat behind it was contracting. He spoke slowly, doggedly. “Monsieur, [am a man. Monsieur, I gave you forty centimes.”’ “Garcon, I beg you to replace my —my hat!’’ The waiter stooped and carefully re- placed the hat on the dirty pavement. The poet’s face grew white. “Pig! Imbec oe “ Monsieur, I am a man.” “Gargon, you are a thief!” The fist banged again. ‘You disgrace this day— day of freedom, day of joy, day of glory! You! You cast on this day a blot of shame; you insult da belle France!’ And I—I defend her! I strike with this weak hand for freedom, I blot out, I demand liberty, I demand my rights—my property! QOuarante centimes! (Quavante centimes!’’ The poet rose on a chair, fell, rose again, damp curls flowing, arms extended, eyes ablaze. eo) __ -

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THE AFFABLE GENTLEMAN “Superb!’”’ cried the young artist, lean- ing suddenly far from his window. “Su- perb! Thegestureis superb! Vivel’art! A bas le gargon! Save him—save the poet! The gesture! Mon dieu! The gesture is superb!”’ _“ My heart brims!””? The gesture swayed slightly. “Thanks—I give you thanks! My new friend—my brother!’’ His eyes filled and his voice broke. “My comrade —my champion—my savior!’’ One long arm clasped his swaying little chest and the other reached up to the artist with a deep yearning. “Toyou! Iembrace! I kiss!” LEAPED UP ON A CHAIR “Ah! The Sublime!’’ The artist fran- tically grasped his pencil, head thrown back, eyes inspired. ‘“TheIdea! Let me catch! I draw! And you—you shall be immortal!’’ “ Ouarante centimes!”’ yelled the Immortal. “T lift my voice—my heart throbs—my rights—my liberty—my own! Quarante centimes! (Quarante centimes!”’ “ Ouarante centimes!”’ screamed the artist, furiously sketching. “Ouarante centimes!”’ gamin. “Ouarante centimes!”’ roared the piped the little mob.

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508 The narrow street was packed, heads leaned from a hund windows, del shrieks of laughter, calls, and shakings of hands. And over all, the picture, rose the Sublime, swaying on his snte £ the center of tne chair, arms extended and jerking rhythmic- ally up and down likea great master leading “ Ouarante centimes! Quar- QOuarante centimes!’? The roar beat in an orchestra. ante centimes! mob was controlled, the rhythm, the Idea was on top. The fat waiter with the slick i moved not, neither did he smile } , shiny hair e. But the double chin kept working faster in and out, the fat hands clinched the apron slowl; tighter, and e little eamed from their pink, shallow sockets. . Suddenly he ily mounted rushed across the street and heavily i h ] and 1! eves g = the front of the cheese-lady’s wagon. “A bas les aristocrats!) Down with the tyrants!”? His deep thundering voice brok« the rhythmic roar _of the mob. “V2 Marat! Vive Danton! Vive Robes pierre. The mob turned open-mouthed, silent “Down with the rich who defraud the oman, the artisan, the \ workin ANNON BALL AT THE iEAI SONSCIOUS STRANGLER LASS=C > SENT IT LI OF THE Cosmopolitan Magazine Down with the tyrant poor, poor Ww aiter! t Vive la partie social- Vive les prolétaires! iste!”’ One moment’s silence. Then the mob Paris split in two, France broke asunder, and the Class Struggle was begun. With a roar one-half the class-conscious mob swept over to the waiter. With a T smile the affable gentleman leaped up on 1 1 a chair, twirled his mustache, “Vive Varmée! Vive la loi! Vive la France!’’ he cried. Again the mob turne “ “a 9 A moi! A mot! iristocrat, and to his standard rushed the ae gate eee otner Naif, headed Dv the « ‘ive Varmée! Vive la France IVE La ste! De ¢ iristocrats ce r¢ ( With a roar the mob « ged and surged together. Hair was torn, insults flew, noses vent frantic. Chaos! rage, snatched his tele] to ring for the vatchful of tyrants, saw his strategy. In 1 few quick, ‘l-chosen, long words, VIarat junior ext lained the meanil gY Of the ick in terms of Karl Mar In a class- t nscious frenzy the mob howled to the reavens. Suddenly from his window the irtist — class-conscious, self - conscious — flung out his hands in a poetic gesture f farewell, leaped straight out from his vindow, clutched the telephone wire in mid-air and bore it to the earth amid frantic kisses, embracings, and tears. Alone and cut off now from all lawful help, the undaunted gentleman rushed here ind there, affable, smiling, cheering or his forces, the cheese-lady close behind him. Marat junior rushed on the gentleman and his apron—emblem of Work— dexterously over the aristocratic head. But as he dragged the polished parasite to a TC yssed the dust, suddenly the devoted cheese-lad: looking in vain for a weapon, rushed to her yurst in the rear door, seize: cheese-wagon, | 1 a huge, luscious Edam cheese and sent it like a cannon ball at the head of the class- onscious strangler. In an instant the battle, the roar, the Idea—all were changed. “Down with the petite shrieked the partie soctaliste. DOUr Zeots ve.

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IN AN INSTANT THE “Protect her! Save our neighbor!’’ led the tradesmen. Swipe de cheeses!” street gamin. And cheeses filled the air—red Edams, tunning whom they struck, huge Swiss cheeses, soft, voluptuous, like sirens tempt- ing heroes from the fray, German, French, Italian cheeses, Rocheforts, Camemberts, tiny, harmless to see, but bearing death to nostrils. And over all an aged Limburger led rejoicing in its power. The lady wrung her hands, then grabbed heese under each arm, and sat down on the curbstone, weeping. But again me her champion, affable, courteous, In a moment he had a commissary, i¢ of his ablest men and women reaching ‘ighbor’s cellar. And as if by magic t line sucked in the flying cheeses. Ina ‘teady stream they poured into the cellar A moment later only one Edam and ponderous battered old Swiss cheese ered in the air. And they too were icked in—by a second commissary leading piped the little MOB WENT INSANE up a side alley, \ isely arranged \ the little street gamin. And now suddenly all faces turned to heaven. Far above, between the two gray rows of buildings, a huge flag was waved slowly back and forth by the two lovers leaning arm in arm far out from their little rose balcony. And the flag was spotless red! “ Vive les socialistes!”’ roared half the mob, and while the roar rose to a thrilling chorus of shrieks and screams of adoration, suddenly Marat junior, ever watchful of tyrants, yelled: “Stop him! Pull him down!”? and pointed at the street door of the house of the lovers. The mob glared. Toolate! The affable gentleman, the cheese-madame, and five devoted fol- lowers had rushed in, slammed the door and were speeding up the seven flights of stairs like demons to disturb the lovers’ heaven above. There was yet time! The lovers might be saved! The flag might be defended! The mob surged to the attack. The locked door shivered, hesitated, and was about to crash in when from the wi

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510 Cosmopolitan Magazine THE POET HUNG SUBLIMELY ON WITH TOOTH AND NAIL dow close overhead a black, ominous fire hose was hurled by a stalwart arm. The mob shrieked as they recognized that arm —the arm of the cheese-lady. Down dangled the giant hose five feet over the heads of the besiegers. The next instant it writhed like a serpent in agony, then leaped like a thing alive, and cold water wrecker of riots—shot out on the crowd. The stream made fearful havoc. Men, women, and innocent children went heels over head down the steps. oper And now for a touch of pathos. The three benevolent old gentle- men had been caught long ago in the mob and hustled, benevolently be- wildered, through charge after charge. So con- fused were their faces, so dazed their smiles, that both mobs had _ used them simply as battering- rams till one straw hat was crushed far down over the right ear of its owner, a second was jammed tightly over its master’s spectacled nose, and a third was only a slender brown rim round the white hair of a frantic old gentle- man. These three innocent rams were now for the last time hurled to the front, Marat junior and his gang rushing them up to the door. At the same instant the black hose swished sharply in, the huge white stream struck with dull, sickening thuds, and the three benevolent old gentle- men rolled limply down the steps and into the gutter. Such is the fate of Charity— Sweet Charity—when the Class Struggle begins! The poet had seemed strangely confused ever since the Class Struggle began. He had been hustled, a huddled ball of human- ity quivering with anguish, under the feet of the mob, viewing the dark underside of war, the grim horror, the groans, the kicks, the sorrows. His sensitive soul had sobbed in agony, he had held his hands before his burning eyes. Then suddenly beneath him in the gutter he had felt a cold, wet something creeping, striking chills into his bones. The thing he dreaded most—the nightmare water—was upon him. With a shriek he had leaped up, his trousers soaked and clinging to his slender legs, and vaulting to a table he had suddenly spied the flag. In an instant his face had changed; the agony, the injustice, the wounds, swelling nose, torn curls, the wet trousers—all were forgotten. By the eyes, by the sway, by the increasing hiccough, you could tell that his soul had soared far above the kicks and the watery gutter. The Poet was with the Flag! “ Ah, flag—my flag!’’ -There was some- thing in the voice of that thin, wet, hollow- wr

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eved boy that sent a great soft hush over the mob. Faces turned suddenly. The Gesture was now pointing directly heaven- ward, motionless except for the hiccoughs. I could hear the artist near me sketching furiously. : “Ah, flag—my flag!”’ All the pathos, all the hopeless yearning of l’Aiglon was in that voice. One thin hand put back the hair from the delicate brow. ‘“ Ah, ah, ah! Flag—flag—two flags—two flags—I see two flags! Ah, flags—my flags—my two flags! Mine—mine—my own—my rights my property—my quarante centimes! Ah! 7 ’ ah! Quarante centimes! Quarante centimes: Quarante centimes! Quarante és ~The plaintive voice broke off. The Gesture fell. The fist clinched. The poet had sighted the waiter. The fat waiter with slick, black hair was gazing upat the red flag in heaven. One eye black, the other blazing, nose swelling, double chin contracting—there could be no mistake. This man loved that flag—the two flags. This man was the poet’s brother! With a sobbing cry, the Sublime bounded to the proletarian. They em- braced—again and yet again. The mob roared, the mob paired off and all began embracing. The fight was at an end. Brotherhood! Immortality! Tears! But no. Suddenly a huge red_ thing fluttered limply down from heaven. Brutal cries rang from the lovers’ ravished bower. More hose from the cheese-lady’s window. The flag fell on the steps, madame soaked it with water, mud and cheese stuck on. In an instant the mob went insane. Blood now flowed. Eyes before blackened were now bloody, frightful. Noses before swelling were now crushed sideways. Ears were torn and so was hair. Faces streamed, fingers scratched, fists struck out blindly. The poet towered over all on his table, his thin arms clasping the flag to his heart, his lips kissing the red. “ Flag—flag—my flag.” Around him stood his brothers to defend. Tables raised as shields, arms up- lifted, voices screaming, while the furious bourgeois tradesmen charged and charged in vain. Far above in the lovers’ bower I could see a face, delighted and demoniac. The affable gentleman smiled. I looked down the street and shuddered. For a block on either side the narrow way Was a surging mass of students—laughs, howls, blows, tears, curses! And through A French Revolution for One Cent 511 it all advanced slowly—an omnibus. I looked closer. The top of the omnibus was packed with peaceable holiday citizens who rose smiling, curious, and happy. But as the cries smote their ears and they felt the Idea, in an instant those people divided. Words rose, faces darkened, fists shook, eyes gleamed, bodies quivered. And as the great bus lumbered through, the little group on top leaned far down, grasping hands of new-found brothers. Gentleman heartened gentleman. Workman cheered workman. Students cheered everyone. All shouted directions. One young aristocrat even dove down from the ’bus, heels held firmly by a friend, and clutched the flag from the poet. The poet with a shriek hung sub- limely on with tooth and nail. He was dragged swaying toward the top of the ’bus. Screams, roars, frenzy! But in an instant six huge workmen, bakers, grasped his heels and bore the flag back to earth. I looked again. Down the street rode forty police. At full gallop they swept along. In the center they stopped, divided, and shoved the mob swiftly asunder. Wild screams sank to roars; roars slowly descended to distant grumbles; grumbles broke into far-away laughter, and the mob had melted. For a moment the little street was silent. Fight swooning women sat up. Three benevolent, kindly old gentlemen, pros- trate, groaned faintly. And then came pathos. The Sublime fell off his table, the waiter tenderly carried him to a chair—flag and all. One long look at the flag, one long look at the waiter. Then, ‘ Brother—my new, new brother,” he murmured, and stopped for one weak hiccough; “I give you all—my all—ah!— ah!—my all He rose and took off his coat and held it out to his brother. The brother moved not, neither did he smile. Only by the heave of his double chin could you describe his yearning. There was a long silence. In an ecstasy the young artist sketched the new Gesture. The Sublime gave one last, sudden, violent hiccough, his arm shook and from the gap- ing pocket of the coat there dropped on the table—a five-centime piece. One dim bewildered glance from the poet. A quick sob from the waiter—as quickly restrained. Then one last touch of ’Aiglon. ‘“ Ah!—ah!—ah!”’ And the revolution was over.

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What Life Means to Me BY BAILEY MILLARD 8 covered the meaning of the word “ liberty’’ this world ha been to me a pleasant andl habitable planet. Before that day ! had shared with many others the Great Misgiving— the fear born of the common idea that I might not be al to maintain myself upon tl earth ond to progress in the approved man- ner save by naenies rut een ay at some superfluous and distasteful task whereby I might make money. From my childhood I had imbibed from my elders the common wisdom that wealth was the lustrous mark at which mankir should aim its heart. When a wealthy appeared in our village he was looked uy with awe and referred to with reverence * He is rich,” they would say, impressivel; —— "ER sinc e the day that I dis owe ; . t The convincing amplitude of the term had its due effect upo d I would repe to myself — is rl ist children 1 mig 91 t ha e said *He isa ge \d.”’ Rarely in their I vould I hear man really was, but n he had. These luminous lessons helped me to a perfect meant. to attain a rid and g Starting out as a printer’s apprentice at i 1.) - i L ind tin rich two dollars a week, I found getting ri rather a slow task; but always I was sketch- 1g a future of purple and gold. I worked hard and acquired a good knowledge of trade. Then California beckoned a golder finger and I tramped across the ao San Francisco. There I worked still harder at printing and at journalism, w side dips into real-estate bargaining, great idea of opulence. In about ten years I acquired a wife, a small family y,a home, and a little money. But in — ill this time there was always before me, as sticking to my there is before nearly every toiler of small means or large, the inevitable Great Mis- giving. This Great Misgivin Sphinx at the roadside. What things would happen if I could not answ her question—that is to say, if I shoul cease to work and to gain? I hada man for saving and always with the end in view that I might acquire property and keep “ pro- eressing,’’ as I termed it. But even wl “ progressing’’ I was discernir to note that I was leading the sort of life to ch I would have hesitated to condemn a good-natured collie. Alwavs I was per- ot & rbed, confused, bothered, badgered, and hirl led about. en vor to discover ed Y J xistence I w road from time to time with a view ving x y helpful from t examples of thers I saw that nearl ill those inde- pendent toilers of a financial standing, simi- lar to m wwn felt themselves compelled to rk in much the same mitting w that I did. They, too, were whirled about. Those in my social class who spent their V4 ; t 4 ney freely in false living of the kind recommended by the good in debt and, therefore, in than myself. In fact the ving was even greater on ant So I would toil harder than ever. I would ve rich and free. But the more I acquired more clearly did I see that I was getting erv little out of life and that there was ’ a th m@m surely something vitally wrong with theory. Yet as people commonly held to that theory, and as it seemed to be the chief econ Sasi wisdom of s ciety, and not to be juestion ae I continued to cleave to it up to the very hour of my revolt. My particular notice of the lives of the men of affluence whom I had been emulating. I[ found that they were no nearer to a state ‘f happiness thanI was. Asa matter of fact, even where their wealth was not wrung yut of the necessities or the weaknesses of their fellow-men, or where they could revolt came soon after I began to take

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conscientiously say it was really their own, which was rare, they were still unhappier ind more whirled about than I was. But 1 when I closely considered the con fused, multifaced, and complex conditions that surrounded the man of ample abdomen who generally sat at the head of affairs in this or that great corporation, I got noinkling is to the reason why he could never hold a liday in his heart. He would freely con fess to me his lack of enjoyment, but never lid he seem to know the cause of it. Neither - | appreciated the reality of his posi hich was that he had set to work too sedulously and elaborately to attain the f happiness ever to be happy. . The ter his hoardings the greater seemed his sgiving. Though I did not know it at the ne, he, in common with myself and others, s the gull and dupe of a civilization that id set up its own dismal treadmill, and for relaxation had tried to be content with the sham pleasures of streets and clubs, caring ttle to follow the paths that led away from ns and temptations, or, in fact, to any e where complexity and the Great Mis giving were not. hen I set myself the serious task of fac- ind questioning the Great Misgiving. Was it true that fear of life was the neces sary condition of man? Was God con stantly setting snares and pitfalls for us? Was there a universal scheme to catch and defraud mankind at every turn? The idea is too horrible to entertain for a moment. And yet, as was evidenced by their desper- shifts and lifelong preparations for a security which did not secure, all men seemed to proceed upon that thesis. But was the logic of the position? I saw lat the wind played its own game of ca- pricious truantry, that the branches of the vaying trees tossed wild, wayward fingers, vriting “ whim,” that the ocean waves tum- led recklessly upon the beach, and that the sea-birds flew whither they would. Why civilized man so hindered and ham- pered at every turn ? might one be a human being and et De tree? This facing and questioning the Sphinx was the beginning of my revolt. In that too, was my Baphometic fire-baptism. Thr ugh the scorching, consuming flames of that hour the idea burned itself into me nat if life was the universal scheme of fraud which man had come to regard it, it was 1 What Life Means to Me 513 solely for the reason that he had made it so himsel} and had himself to thank for it. I had for a long time suspected that no mall part of the Great Misgiving lay in the fact that each individual seemed to think it necessary to live in the expectancy—gener- ally a very cheap expectancy—of everybody else. One’s friends and neighbors fixed one’ position in life, and one must occ upy that po ition. The average mind was the victim of a world that had set up certain tandards which, it occurred to me, were the direct result of a silly gregariousness, born of the civilized fear that an unspeakable degenera¢ \ would result if one did not dress like the mob, feed like the mob, toil like the mob, babble like the mob, and, generall 4 live and act like the mob. And the leaders of this mob, of which I, forsooth, was expec ted to be a integer—who were the gy hey were those same men of large visceral processes who had made of money, authority, luxury, and fashion such thick bandages to their eves that they could not see the ample things of life, the procreant truths of the universe. They were the men for whom joy was want- ing, poetry was stricken out—men into whose bleak lives the beautiful never entered and the divine yearning never came. Well, if those leaders were blind—and I could now ¢ learly see that the were blind— why should I continue to follow them? Why, indeed? In following them I had led a harsh and crabbed svstem of life—that is to say, the commonly lauded and preferred system—and this to me was no longer tolerable. I was probably aided to the foregoing conclusions by a course of reading, begin- ning with Marcus Aurelius, the flower of the Stoical philosophy. I had also studied Plato and had been impressed by the rigid figure of Socrates. I gota little good out of Seneca and Aristotle, but probably more out of Epictetus, the slave, whom I could the better appreciate, being alsoa slave. The constant inquiry of Epictetus, “* Doth any man hinder thee ?”’ set r than any other words of ibservient more ng the ancient sages. I decided that many men hindered me, and though I saw the philosopher’s point, which was that it mattered not what bodily slavery one might endure so long as the spirit was free, I seemed, somehow, to derive but meager comfort from the thought, though it still haunted me.

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514 Cosmopolitan Magazine Gradually, however, I was beginning to acquire the idea that individual liberty was the thing to be desired above all others. This stage of thought was strengthened by a long and close study of Stevenson, one of the most wholesome and human of philoso- phers. The fine, fragrant faith of this true world-citizen inspired me. Montaigne and Richter helped me, too, in their way. From Emerson I took something, but not much; but Carlyle scourged and scolded me to good purpose. A wonderful admonition of his pressed home to me for many a day and still compels me. It seemed to answer the dread whispers of the Great Misgiving. This admonition was, “Fear nothing but fear.” No other words in the language seem more directly and suitably to fit the evil case of the ever-harrowed human family. In my younger days men acquired great wealth by quiet means without question Those were times of great land grabs, stu- pendous railroad steals and other unchal- lenged villainies on the part of our captains of industry. But now came a period of investigation. I was amazed by the fre- quent revelations of enormous robberies— chiefly achieved by the subornation of weaker men, by the purchase of their man- hood—and was more amazed by the fact that these revelations raised against the offenders, many of whom prayed as fervently in their pews and were as highly sed no social ba r respected as before, and as much honored It seemed that to pile a Pelica of prayer upon one’s Ossa of offense was as good a way t reach heaven as any. Many of them had made and were still making their religion a means of gaining the confidence of their victims. I could not understand this. T my awakened sense it seemed more credit- able to the robber that he should employ the jimmy as his tool rather than the Bible. [I am not writing these things at random, nor without knowledge. In this countrv where the lawmakers are often the chiefest of lawbreakers, nearly every man has 2n opportunity to get money by fraud, and in the course of time my chance came. A land company that was working a golden lever at Washington sent an agent to me to ask me to serve as a “dummy”’ to enter upon and hold valuable land for it. For a fortnight I was tempted of this devil of a corporation, and—let me confess it as an example of human frailty in such velvet villainies as this, which one justifies to one’s conscience on the ground that “everybody does it’’—I should probably have yielded to the tempta- tion, made a fine start toward “ independent wealth,” and been a millionaire by this time but for one dismaying fact. This fact was that I should have to go upon the witness-stand and perjure myself like a plutocrat in order to earn my money. That frightened and sickened me, and I spurned the golden offer. This incident led me to an inquiry in the course of which I discovered that compara- tively few of the very large land holders in this country had become possessed of their broad domains save by schemes of fraud that in most cases amounted to downright robbery, and often through the instrumen- tality of high government officials who, had they committed any one of many lesser crimes, would have been jailed in short order But what was true of the largely landed I found also to be true of the men of great wealth generally. In other words, plutocrat in the great majority of instances spelled -f. It now seemed to me that, in every case, to say a man had millions was diately to put that man upon the witness- stand in his own defense. How did he those millions? Few, alas, might that question truthfully and to their com- plete credit. When Thoreau’s * Walden”’ fell into m hands I was ripe for it. That wonderful book, which seemed to me the greatest phil- sophic document ever produced by any American, did me much good and not a little harm. Its argument for simplicity life and for habitual grandeur of thought plifted me at times and then again it sank me into the deeps. For a long while I could think of nothing but Thoreau’s terrible arraignment of society, of men and their “dirty institutions.” At that time I should have been as fine an example of morbid psychology as the student of mental phe- nomena would have cared to encounter. I kept weighing Thoreau’s words against those of other moralists. His terrible tran- scendentalism by turns held and repelled But, after all, I feel that I should be very grateful to Thoreau, for out of him I got that for which I had been looking—the idea f what it really means to be a liberated human being. Yes, despite all his narrow- ness, I got that idea from him, and it seems

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sreat mass of mankind. Summed up, it i this—that we must so live that our want shall not crowd our needs out of our live Our wants are riches, luxury, and ease. Our needs, as they seem to me, are spiritual strength, valiant individuality without ag eression, and, above all things—liberty. Thoreau’s mistake was that to satisfy our ds we must reduce life to its lowest term ein a shanty on an acre of ground and e plainest of plain lives. But I did mmediately see his mistake. I became tremendously interested in all the literature { conspicuous examples of the simple fe, as Thoreau understood it, and actually tried it fora while. But that life, which is of ssitv one of ascetic rusticity, did not me happy. It was all very well for a od or a phase, and might be tried now with good results. On the whole, ably far better and certainly more le than the life of a man of lucre and iry obtained by questionable means; but lere is no reason why one should perma nently pursue it any more than that one should forever live in a cave in the moun tains or in one of those tall rows of coops lled apartment houses. In other words, human nature is human ture and it is not plastic to the designs of nscendentalists or of Utopian dream- ers of any school whatsoever. It may be that transcendentalism and socialism are steps rd a better way of life than that which lead. If so, God speed them! Al- most anything is better than the present idition. But it seems to me that it will ill eventually come around to our realizing ie fact that we must keep our feet upon the earth. I doubt if any vast system of frater- sm would make us happy for long, and nust be happy. In the public social system, as in religion and philosophy, if our scheme of life make us unhappy, we may be sure it is false. Who can hold that the processes would give us more Freedom, as I have found, after years of looking into philosophies of many kinds, does not lie in a cult or in the carrying out of iny regular programme. There is no use ing to get up clubs to be free. Not in this nor in anything else should we follow the gregarious habits of our forbears. No use 0 look to Altruria nor to Utopia. No use to look to the metropolis. No use to bury What Life Means to Me to me that it is still largely applicable to the one’ elf permanently in the country, nor in the city, but always to live in the heart of the cosmos, to be a true citizen of the world. No use to be Puritanic. We must have transgressed omewhat to have become tolerant, or even tolerable; but we must see to it that we do not irreparably wrong others by our transgression. To be free we must be truant at times to the hard-and-fast chool of present-day civilization We must even be vagrant and not ready to obey the signs of “No J respassing”’ where trespassing harms no one. We must not be “ Tespe table’’—that is to iv, we must not be long to that order of re pee tability or of religion which cloaks the clever criminal ind upholds the cheap dignity of dollars. We must look at men for what they are, and not for what they have or for what they have on Sut while we should be reasonablv toler- ant, we should let no one hinder or hamper us. I hold for a high aloofness, each man in his own aura, on his own hillock, not making apology, not seeking vindication, not cra‘ ing sympathy, but having his own ideals and fighting for them against the world. There is much work that is not worthy. There is one worthy work—the mainte- nance of a truth in which we believe and for which we are ever ready to make war when it is attacked. For your worthy man is always a fighter in the heart of him, though commonly peaceable and friendly enough— a fighter for principle. It is childish for us to think that war shall ever vanish from the earth. War is of the things that shall not be escaped, and there are mucl i than war. One of them is the bribery of weak jurors and legislators to treasonable acts against their neighbors and their nation, aiding and abetting the course of corpora- tions in vast schemes of spoliation. Another is that of little children toiling in factories and sweat-shops. Still another is a smooth mincing respectability that ] before the god of convention, and plays the a] 7 q j / a cringing lackey to dollared dolts who, in common with itself, have no glimmer of the meaning of liberated humanhood, and no reverence for the souls of real men There is no danger in a true and valiant individuality. Nothing can hurt the worthy man—not evil report, not ridicule, sult; for he shall have the ill-will of none but > not in OU li the unworthy t ought to raise everv good t man in his own respect to see Mean mouths

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516 snapping at him. But we should not mis- take mere disagreement with our views as necessarily proceeding from wrong minds. The longer we live the more we shall see the value of the careful consideration of the other man’s point of view. What opinion others have of us, however, is a matter of small moment. The worst scourging we shall ever receive will be that of our own hearts. Are we ungenerous? Do we hold too tightly to our own? We should remember that we have no asset so real as that which we have given away, if it be given to the worthy. Methinks now I know the meaning of true life, and it is not in getting and hoarding, not in putting my heel upon my fellow- being’s neck, not in that civilized pillage which we call “commerce,” nor yet in that strange malady which we call “ progress.”’ Real life is the pursuit of the ideal. When I step aside from that pursuit I do not live—I merely exist. To me the ideal is not in a dream of Utopia, not in any beatific and enervating Nirvana, but in doing my heart- work and looking upward. To that heart- work I must at times apply myself with all my powers of concentration whether I really accomplish it or not. For that alone is the work which I shall do graciously, be- comingly, and well. Life means many things to me, but it means chiefly this. Why? Because in my heart-work I find freedom, and without freedom lifé is not life to me, but merely existence, bounded on one side by Regret and on the other by the Great Misgiv- ing. No one can live happily who does not live honorably and temperately. We should be temperate even in temperance, and espe- cially in our preaching of it. There is sucha thing as getting drunk on one’s own ideas, and in that sense the Puritan is intemperate and must bear the evils of his intemperance, the chief of which is reaction. When the body hungers, When the soul hungers, We should do the things that satisfy the soul. We should not merely strive to accu- we feed it. mulate property without thought of the higher life, but always to combine and blend business and intellectual pursuits. Furthermore, we must not live by imita- we let it hunger. | Cosmopolitan Magazine tion, but by reason and by emotion. As a rule, the greater the number of people who do a thing, the worse that thing is likely to be. This is not true of matrimony. No man is leading a perfectly natural, rational, and happy life who is not wedded to some good woman. No woman is living the life for which nature designed her if she be not mated with some honorable, aspiring man. Again I say, real life means liberty, but no one can be free who cannot think for himself and act for himself. Originality, initiative, simplicity, a habit of high thought, a hatred of all shams, a readiness to fight for ideal truths, to make endless battle against the vicious of high rank or of low— these are the things that I would have taught to our youth in the schools. For if they know them, they shall have neither the burden of great poverty nor of great wealth, and they shall never feel the Great Mis- giving. To live plainly and without pretense a life of leisure, study, and action, never caring to play at precedence, nor to enjoy undue privilege; to have an ample endowment of common sense; to do my heart-work without fear of the hindrance of others, and without greed or rapacity; not to be too readily per- turbed by immaterial acts or conditions that are alien to my temperament, but to resist, even harshly, all encroachments upon my individual and civic rights; to enjoy now and again a bit of brisk living; to be wise enough to be foolish on occasion; to listen quietly, to talk gently and not overmuch; to have and to keep a few firm friends; to be much aloof from the crowd, yet near enough at times to feel the great heart-throb of humanity; to get as often as is good for me the grand content of the mountains and the widening influence of the sea; to be some- thing of a savage and something more of a child; to let my heart be played upon by the winds and move with the tossing boughs; to exult in the bright uprush of dawn or ina cain of wild music; always to retain the mystic relation I bear to the twilight, that its sadness may be my sadness and its glory my glory; in a word, to be in tune with the master-chord of creation, and, above all things, to be free! This is what true life means to me and I know of no better meaning.

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ETHEL BARK YMORE Why Women Are Greater Actors than Men BY ALAN DALE AVE you ever had the sen- sation, as you sat in a play- house and watched sound, healthy, able-bodied men pretending to be somebody else, uttering trifling plati- tudes, sitting on gold draw- ing-room chairs, or—worse still—cavorting around in 384 musical comedy—have you ever had the sensation that the much- vaunted dignity of the sex was singularly disturbed? Have you ever felt a desire to cry out to these men, “Go out into the 517 \ \ world and do something—build things, invent things, write things, talk things, but do stop posing as blooming, silly make- believes ”’ ? And then when you have thought all this—if you have—have you ever heaved a sigh of relief as the woman came on in sweet, feminine sincerity, and seemed to make the play live and pulsate, the “ pre- tending” less evidential, the pose not as heartless, and the absurdity distinctly lacking ? If you have not felt this, you are lucky, for you have some lovely illusions to work 37

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518 1 } upon. But the to every seasoned theatergoer. to feel some time that ac ting isa rather than a man’s, pursuit; of simulation is distinctly feminine rather than masculine; that while men may write plays (following the example of one Will iam Shakespeare, who had nothing of th “ pretender” in his make-up) and produce them (as Irving did), and build handsome, profitable theaters for their enactment, the finest actors are, always have always will be—women. Sensible mana- gers know thi intuitively. That is to say, they can’t explain it, though they i certain that it is so. The best stars are women. The stage attractions are feminine. Ask any “speculator”? which he I think, must come He is bound woman’s, mood, been, and most promising manage, a masculine or a feminine star and he will unhesitatingly select th latter. I think I can expl resent But I will just now fortress my remar by the statement tl Oo ma tor $ ever equaled, or nearl pproached, the magnificence and verisimilitude of Sarah Bernhardt. You can search through his tory, which (nobody will deny this), but there has never notes ma tors of been a male Bernhardt, it likely that there er WI ( ne The name of Mrs. Siddons wi oO suggest itself I always feel a terrible f ire ecause I never saw her in this life, though I m: have done so il otner 5 tne r | - tion of the art of g The same ma be said of Rachel, also in the shades. Not that it is necessary to go to the other world for big names. We have Eleonora Duse, whom no masculine piaver can appro we have Mrs. Leslie Carter lose genius was evolved by Belas L preceptor keet enough never to teach men. We have the clever, intellectual, winning little lady known as Minnie Maddern Fis ( many others who have © masculine synonyms It would be aeeure to evade the fact that the Sp lendid career of the late Si Henry Irving was perhaps made possible association > once-charming by his Ellen Terry. Irving was a great producer, he had a wonderful set of theater brains but as an actor he very frequently left one out in the cold. It was Ellen Terry that we loved in the Irving productions. It Cosmopolitan Magazine was her Beatrice, her Olivia, that we went She shed a glamour around the acting of Irving; it was her dramatic art that flavored and gave “reason of being” to Irving’s gigantic and unsurpassed dramatic productions. In London, where the actor is actor- manager and produces only the plays that he thinks will give the man the chance, thi condition is particularly noticeable. At the St. James’s Theater, where Mr. George Alexander is playing in Pinero’s “His House in Order,” it is Miss Irene Van who carries off the laurels. Such women as Lena Ashwell, Violet Va gh, Evelyn Millard, others, who nearly support masculine ; prove my conten tion. I to see. brugh and / stars, Invariably actor, ft: IS Makes ‘hat many he-star possibl nat actors KNOW it, ind curse It, Is women ] .e 1 1: “ - ah] leading ladies. The act him. Our star to-day caret fully " selects lady who will not do damage to his repu- tation. Nor need we necessarily blame him. It is purely a business proposition. Saat as j “ie We should probably do the same thing ives clever actress being engaged to support the Hacketts and the Favershams of to-day! il it this point smite me with the generally vould not disconcert me in the least. I am not fa denv the fact that we have had fi j again (I don’t pre sent; perhaps somebody will names of ee ' conceded to pe ictors who are tuous or biased e nough 2 them actors, and may have 10w where they are at vaiting a reincarnation); but I contend that, however fine they may have they would have been finer had they vomen. Acting is innate in the woman. A philosopher in Germany (he committed suicide) said that in nearly every woman there is a dash of the man, and in nearly every man a dash of the woman; and that the proportions vary. To this I add that the smaller the dash of man in womal! the better actor she will make; and that the greater the dash of woman in man, the better actor he vill be. Woman’s career on this globe has been a long series of simulations. Think what been, } + peen

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CLARA LIPMAN

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NGLIN a & =] % < MARG

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woman had undergone before she reached her present status as man’s equal. She has been the under-dog for centuries; and she has simulated, and pretended, and rused, and acted before she was allowed a chance to breathe. Imagine her once Why Women Are Greater Actors than Men S21 other the great actress is nearly always a woman who has borne children. The an- guish of the mother has some connection— inexplicable perhaps—with tragic intensity and dramatic power. Possibly Maurice Bernhardt, whose advent could not have MRS. as the mere bearer of children, then reflect upon her position to-day, when she would willingly give the art of child-bearing to her cook—if she dared! I don’t want to make ‘this discussion obstetric, but it is absolutely impossible to eliminate mater- nity from a debate on woman’s superior fitness as an actor. For some reason or LESLIE CARTER been desired, has had a great deal more to do with his mother’s greatness than he could possibly know. Undoubtedly Sarah realizes this, for is there not something of gratitude in her blind, unswerving devotion to this not particularly admirable son? Duse, whose pathos and force are as remarkable as anything on the stage

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Copyright by Aimé Dupont JULIA MARLOWE

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a 3) “~ ~~

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524 mother. So is Mrs. Leslie to-day, is a that this is an un- Carter. I do not say varying rule, but I merely note this as something more than a coincidence. There have been great actresses who have never had children, but I firmly believe that the woman who has known maternity has greatly enhanced her natural and instinc- tive dramatic powers. The coldness of Mary Anderson used to be a reproach. A lovely woman and a charming actress, there were still “bald spots” on her work which even her most enthusiastic admirers could scarcely gloss over. Probably to-day, if she returned to the stage, we should see the difference. The beauty, the winsome grace, and the “reluctance” of Julia Marlowe are in- disputable. She is one of our most cher- ished, and deservedly cherished, actors, yet to her list of successes she has never added the intense nor the tragic. The maternal note is missing—that vague, in- describable something that a woman- actor shows when she has realized her life’s mission. For, after all, it zs her life’s mission—isn’t it?—in spite of all the twaddle and the woman’s-rights nonsense that is dinned into our ears, day by day, by cold, metallic non-mothers. No masculine actor will agree with these remarks. That is quite sure, and not essentially deplorable. No man has yet succeeded in being a mother, and he will therefore resent what he may consider sweeping assertions. But I have tried not to be sweeping. I have left loopholes for all sorts of exceptions, though these, I am convinced, merely prove the rule. Moreover, why should man be woman’s equal in the art of acting? Has he not invariably succeeded in the realities of life—even when those realities have seemed to be essentially feminine? The best cook in the best appointed cuisine is always a man, yet one would scarcely suggest that gastronomy is masculine. The best maker of woman’s clothes, the finest designer and costumer, is a man. This has been looked upon for so long as woman’s dis- tinct province that she might naturally experience some malignant sensation of envy at such a condition. But does she? Not a bit of it. Noble creature! She goes to the man-dressmaker by preference, and rigs herself out to go in and win. Even the sewing-machine was a man’s inven- Cosmopolitan Magazine tion; so was the typewriter (perhaps he invented that, in self-defense, as a domestic relaxation). Man has the realities of life to his credit, and no woman can ever hope to get near his summit. Man is the painter and the sculptor; he is the novelist and the play- wright; he is the builder and the architect; he is the lawyer and the journalist. He is not the actor, though he makes, and has made, a bluff at it. -Acting, if it be an art at all, isa woman’s art. Acting is woman. Pretense, simulation, pose, tragedy, com- edy, and tragi-comedy are woman. Woman has had to “get along” with man for so m: iny centuries, to pursue him, to cajole him, to please him, to rule him, to “diplomatize” him, that her education in the art of acting (7f an art) has been com- plete. She could scarcely avoid being other than she is. She is the born actor, and when she “takes to the stage” as a means of livelihood she comes into her own. Even then she comes into it imperfectly until she has married and borne children, and thus equipped herself for the fray. Oh, the woman is so much more easily the actor thanis the man. If you ever have af- fronted your intelligence by sitting through those dreadful performances of * pupils” that occur so frequently in New Yo rk city, you must have noted the aptitude of the girls as compared with that of the boys. Often, often have I felt inclined to beg those misguided boys to cease their foolish dalliance and spend their money on something that would bring them in better results. But the girls are rarely bad. They take to it so naturally that they really need these schools only as a means of quickly acquiring technique—whatever that may be, and I am sure I don’t know for certain. The failures among the woman-actors are those who are not wholly womanly, those who are just a trifle “emancipated.”” Once let the woman poach on the man’s preserves and_ her ability as an actress is nothing more than his ability as an actor. The real woman, a pulpy weakness of nerves, non-reason, and impulse, will make the finest actress. In her there is no sug- gestion of the man. The man acts from in- tellectual, artistic, and speculative reasons. The woman acts because she has to; it is her nature, and she has acquired it after eons of struggle.

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The Treason of the Senate BY DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS Treason against t!e United States shall ecnsist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. -THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES, Article III, Section 3. VII people as “the interest think “ Beware The Rise of Foraker AN the Republican-Democrati: ‘merger’’ for protecting and aiding the big exploiters of the American people, there kis, physically and_ oratori- cally, no more attractive figure than Senator Foraker oof Ohio. In intellect he is not the equal of Knox, hardly the equal of Spooner or Bailey; he lacks the cold audacity which has got Aldrich and Elkins their enormous riches, though he has made the service to which he has devoted the last twenty-five years pay well enough to net him a large fortune and to keep him in the millionaire class, despite his extravagance. His chief usefulness to “the interests’? and to his private fortunes has been his oratory. He is about the best stump speaker at the com- mand of the backers of the merged political machines. Foraker’s beginnings were away back in the late seventies, when the domestic enemies of the people, enriched by the spoils of Civil-War contracts and bond jobbings, were covering their huge grabs of franchises and privileges in the nation and in the states by having their political agents wave the “bloody shirt’? and call on the people to “vote as they shot.” Nowadays, Foraker, like Aldrich, Bailey, Cannon, Williams, Spooner, and all the “merged,” is an ardent advocate of states’ rights, flares fiercely at any suggestion of repelling the national foes by national enactments, demands in the name of God and Constitution that the states be left to deal with “the interests’’—it being, of course, impossible for the states singly to do so. Butin the days when the “ bloody- shirt racket’? was as good for fooling the | | of socialism!”’ Foraker wasa wild and winning waver of the “bloody shirt.” Thus Foraker the protégé of the respectable traders of campaign con- tributions for licenses to loot, became the pet of his own Cincinnati’s notorious George Cox gang. They made him a judge; they and their pals throughout the state ran him for finally elected him, reélected him-—and gay and rich was the carnival he presided over. But when, in h now, became governor, 1889, he ran for another term, he was beaten. The people had had enough of him and his gang; stump oratory as a cover for public plundering ceased to charm. The people revolted against the rule of the “boys’’ calling themselves Republicans, and turned to the so-called Democratic who were equally “boyish,” and hungrier and clumsier about stuffing themselves. The Republican “boys’’ soon got back, but not “ Fire Alarm” Foraker; his public career, in office for which the people vote, was at an end. While waiting for a senatorship to be vacant so that the ‘‘ boys’’ could reénter him in the “service of the people’’ without their con- sent and all but beyond their reach, he became a lobbyist and the chief negotiator between the “boys”’ in control of the state legislature and “the interests’’ feeding upon Ohio’s rich resources and industrious popu- lation. We find him in 1892 installed, not in a Columbus hotel like a common lobby- ist, but in the state Capitol itself, using its library and committee-rooms as his offices. The legislature was called “the Foraker legislature’; the supreme court of the state was known as “the Foraker court.” An Immensely Profitable Job * boys”’ To relate his doings in detail would serve no useful purpose. There was the law permitting parallel railways to consolidate

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526 and so create monopoly and install ex- tortion; there was the Cincinnati water- works law, a_ six-million-dollar job for Foraker’s overlord, Cox, and the Cincinnati both Republican and Democratic —for, in Ohio, the two machines work in joyous harmony, with no quarrel except about which shall be harvester and which gleaner, just as they do in New York and Pennsylvania, in New Jersey and Illinois and Massachusetts, and so on through practically the entire list of states where there are two parties. But let us pass over the enactments of “the Foraker legislature’’ for financiers seeking to rob the people by means of railways and telephones and in- surance, etc., etc.; let us content ourselves with citing in some detail only Foraker’s immensely profitable street-railway job. He first tried to give the street railways of the state a free gift of a ninety-nine years’ franchise with freedom from taxation. This was too much even for patient Ohio; the “popular clamor’’ against this over- stiff dose of the “safe and sane”’ frightened the politicians, especially as the “ free- silver peril’? was beginning to loom. But, just after his legislature elected him to the Senate—that is, in April, 1896—he did pus sh through a bill authorizing the “boys” in control of Mark Hanna’s Cleveland and George Cox’s Cincinnati to grant a fifty years’ franchise to consolidating street railways—fifty years’ license freely to pick the pockets of workingmen and working- women by an extortionate five-cent fare! And, in spite of public uproar and adverse decisions of lower courts, the “law’’ held for Foraker’s home city, Cincinnati, thanks to supplementary acts of the legislature and to the decision of “ Foraker’s court.” He appeared before his court as lawyer for the robbers to give it the plausible legal pretext for this assault upon the wages of the poor. Cincinnati traction stock boomed to 130; the “law’’ netted the inside traction ring upward of ten million dollars. For- aker’s son is now vice president of the company and his brother is its counsel. It was charged that in addition to his stock profits he got a fee of one hundred thou- sand dollars. In denying this charge, the worthy senator said he got only a “ present of five thousand”? from an officer of the company! Such was our fiery patriot and “boys”? statesman’s first public act on his promo- tion to the field of national service, as a Cosmopolitan Magazine member of the body that is the final arbiter of the distribution of prosperity for us all. A most propitious inaugural! In 1896, Senator Foraker, paid attorney for the Southern (Morgan-Ryan) Railway Company, advised and urged the people of Cincinnati to sell their Cincinnati Southern (“Queen and Crescent’’) Rail- way for a paltry sum, compared to its value. His eloquence was in vain; the fact is, though his great personal vanity may still hide it from him, Ohio people know him for what he is. They like to hear him “wind-jam,” just as Wisconsin people like to hear Spooner “orate’’; but they would no more elect him to an office than Wisconsin people would Spooner, or than Texas people will Bailey when they get a little better acquainted with him. In 1905, the Southern Railway gang, having failed to get Cincinnati’s road outright, leased it for between three and four hundred thousand dollars a year more than the inter- est on the Foraker purchase price would have been—and at the end of sixty years Cincinnati will still own the road. What is Foraker’s record in the body that is, as we have seen, officered and used by and for treason against the people their struggle with our common enemy, the exploiters of industry, the trimmers of wages and savings ? Of course, like all the “ merged”’ senators, he has voted with the “party,” that is, with Aldrich, for all the great tariff and commerce measures for “the interests’; has voted against every notable measure in the people’s interest; like his fellow- conspirators, he has made occasional farcical, but with the unthinking highly ”? effective, shows of “independence’’ when his vote or voice was not needed by the “merger.” Aldrich has him as aid to Steve Elkins on the committee on interstate commerce, whose sins of omission and sins of commission are, as we noted last month, in large measure responsible for the fact that wages have remained about stationary for thirty years while rents and prices have greatly increased and the profits of the parasites upon capital and labor have become the wonder and the scandal of the world. Loot Side of Railway Business There is probably no senator who knows the loot side of the railway business so

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. ; ' i thoroughly as does Foraker—not even Spooner, not even Bailey, not even the presiding officer of the Senate, Vice Presi- dent Fairbanks, to whose railway-got millions we shall advert. Yet not a word has Foraker ever spoken against the colossal stealing, except the usual “hot PgR ID PTL on a. Say Toy JOSEPH BENSON FORAKER OF ‘ * . » gins oh | nn AN aOR NA fale ie te K att. St TSS Sa acai The Treason of the Senate 527 railways to “pool,” that is, to abolish even the pretense of competition. And last spring his “ great Constitutional speech” against the railway-rate bill was devoted to proving that under the Constitution the people have no right to regulate railway rates! j RANT RNS SRSA Ree lena San IES a NR OHIO, A LEADER OF THE SENATE, WHOSE RECORD SHOWS NO ACT OF FRIENDSHIP OR EVEN NEU- TRALITY TOWARD THE PEOPLE INTERESTS” air”? generalities to be expected of a rhe- torical politician; and not a measure has 1e introduced or advocated even looking oward lessening the enormous burden upon American industry through the monopolizing of the highways and_ the exaction of unequal and exorbitant tolls. He concocted and urged a bill to permit the IN THEIR STRUGGLE WITH *° THE To show how minute is his attention to the “problems of statesmanship”’ he is in the Senate to wrestle with: on December 17, 1902, Patterson of Colorado, one of the “unmerged”’ senators, asked unanimous - consent to a resolution directing the Inter- state Commerce Commission to send the Senate a report on the unsanitary sanitary

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appliances of sundry great railways; Kean of New Jersey, for the “ merger,”’ objected to this effort to look after the health of the vast traveling public, and the resolution went over; when it came up again on January 5, 1903, Foraker, for the “ merger,” had it referred to the committee on inter- state commerce. We have learned what that means. We can imagine what chance a measure for the people and against “the interests,” would have of escaping alive from a committee presided over by railway owner Steve Elkins, and containing railway owners Aldrich, Kean, and Foraker. Once more we search in vain the record of an avowed and admired leader of the Senate for a single act of friendship ar even of neutrality toward the people in their struggle against the great, the real enemy. Foraker in the Senate has always been against the people, always for his franchise- grabbing, stock-and-bond-watering, pocket- picking clients who have given him the retainers that make him rich. But, after all, what reason—except such trifles as honor and self-respect—has a Foraker for keeping his oath and serving the people? They didn’t send him to the Senate; they don’t keep him there; they didn’t pay him the sums which enable him to swagger in “society.” indeed, if they got a good, square chance they would probably “give it’? to him where he has for so many years been “giving it’? to them—in the region between the head and the shoulders. Lodge and the ‘*Boy’’ Methods Foraker naturally suggests Lodge. There are many surface differences between the senior senator from Ohio and the senior senator from Massachusetts. Foraker rose from poverty; Lodge was born rich, in- heriting one of those “rum and _ nigger’’ fortunes that form the basis of the amusing aristocratic pretenses of so many of the New England “old families.”” Foraker pretends to be democratic in his ideas; Lodge is frankly contemptuous of “the mob” and morbid on the subject of his haughty lineage. Foraker is as magnetic as Spooner or Knox, or as Depew used to be; Lodge is so vain and self-centered that he is almost friendless. Foraker is elo- quent and has originality of thought and expression; Lodge is as dry and common- place as an old-style college professor. These surface differences obscure from Cosmopolitan Magazine the casual lance the essential likeness of the two men—the fact that they are the product of precisely the same conditions, owe their office to them and are maintained in office by them. They are of about the same age—Foraker, sixty; Lodge, fifty-six and they entered public life at about the same time. Lodge, like Spooner and* Knox, makes a specialty of prim “respectability,” and does it with better countenance because he does not take “fees.’’ Also, he deceives because his manner is forbidding instead of apologetic, and because he has been care- ful rarely to speak for the “ merger’’ but only to vote with it and play its game by standing for “strict party discipline,” and has made foreign affairs seem to be his specialty. Like Foraker, he is a product of the petty grafters, not of the big grafters. In the days when the two were not thorough united, when the big respectable thieves in the two parties looked disdainfully down upon the Coxes and Crokers and “ Bath- house Johns,’’ Lodge, like Foraker, took sides with the “boys.” The last open battle in the Republican party between the “boys’’ and the “big fellows’? was over the nomination of Jim Blaine. Jim was the idol of the “boys,” was ab- horred by the “big fellows,” and also, of course, by the high-minded men still in- fluential in the party in those days. The “ boys’? won and nominated Blaine in 1884. Foraker was heart and soul with them: Lodge, striving in vain to establish himself in, politics in Massachusetts, then wholl: under the domination of the big tariff and railway corruptionists, hesitated at the Blaine dose. He almost bolted with the moral element and with those big financial backers of the party who thought Blaine demagogue and likely to do almost any- thing, even possibly to attack them, in his pursuit of his passion for popularity. The temptation to get political power triumphed over the desire to be thought moral and the natural hankering of a con- ventional man like Lodge to herd with his “social equals.”” Lodge swallowed Blaine. It has often been charged that Lodge is responsible for the low plane of Massa- chusetts politics, that he introduced the “boy”? methods. This, however, is unjust to Lodge. He simply conformed, stooped to use and to be used by the forces that have created and made powerful the chain of

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bosses and boodlers of which Aldrich and “the interests’? are the lock-links. The “‘Scholar’’ in Politics The Massachusetts Republican machine, deserted for the time by the big grafters, needed money; Lodge had money, and spent it freely. The machine needed 6“ respectability”’; in Massachusetts, to be a Lodge and a Cabot, a relative of the Quincys and the Adamses, is to be “re- spectable.” Lodge won the gratitude of the “boys”? throughout his state, became boss of the machine at Nahant, to which he had removed in the early eighties after his failure to get into politics in his native Ninth Ward of Boston. He beaten twice for Congress, in 1882 and again in 1884; but by 1886 his good work among the “boys’’ began to tell; he was elected, and held his place through three more elections until he intrigued himself into the senatorship. It must not be imagined that he abandoned for an instant his game of respectability. He spoke with heavy and therefore convincing solemnity for civil-service reform, got himself dubbed a “practical reformer,” a “successful type of the scholar in politics.””. The solemn farce goes far everywhere, nowhere farther than in New England. While Lodge was preach- ing civil-service reform like a dedicated missionary, he was filling the public service with his henchmen, was one of the most assiduous and successful securers of places for janitors, elevator men, messengers etc., ‘etc. One example out of scores, literally scores, which might be cited: In October, 1889, he drafted and put into the Republican state platform a strenuous civil-service plank; yet at the very time he was using his influence with the newly installed Republican national administra- tion to fill the Charlestown navy yard with his heelers. In the first seven months of that administration, when the “Blaine gang’? was still powerful with Harrison, there were eighteen removals at the Charles- town yard above the grade of laborer, two “extra’’ men were appointed, and xo less than forty Democratic laborers were re- moved. All these places were filled with Lodge “ boys.” We have seen enough to identify beneath the robe of the “gentleman scholar’’ the familiar coarse type of machine politician. Sut Lodge is not merely that; he is far Was The Treason of the Senate He, the disguised * boy,” got the senatorship by a deal with the “ big more dangerous. fellows” who had returned to the party which could be most useful to them in Massachusetts, just as they “stand by’’ the Democratic party in Texas. To realize the nature of this Lodge deal with the ‘big fellows’? through the eminently respectable Drapers, General W. F. and Eben, rich manufacturers and _ tariff- troughers of Hopetown, let us recall the once famous outburst of indignation from State Senator W. D. Butler on January 4, 1893, when, by the “snap’’ action of a foisted on the party Lodge was as its senatorial nominee: Caucus, \way back—perhaps two years ago in some instances—one of the candidajes who has been suggested with reference! this great and honorable office, began his efforts to obtain it. He employed methods never before heard of in this commonwealth with reference to this office. Prior to the election on November &th this state was gone over with a fine-tooth comb, not in the interest of the Republican party, but of the man who is a candidate for this place There has been and abuse of the ma- chine in his campaign that the precedent may be established in this state that no man can go to the United States Senate in the future except by resorting to similar means.” such a use At that time “Harper’s Weekly’’ was universally recognized as an organ of in- telligent, honest public opinion. In_ its issue of January 21, 1893, it summed up the authentic facts thus: ‘He (Lodge) pressed upon the legislature a ‘gerrymandering’ scheme from the shame- lessness of which even his followers recoiled; he laid the wires for the election of members (of the legislature) favorable to himself; he brought about the holding of a ‘snap’ cau- cus, outdoing our own Hills and Murphys. Had he devoted the ability and time and labor he squandered on this miserable busi- ness to the earnest study and treat- ment of public questions and to the establish- ment of a solid reputation as a statesman, the senatorship would have come to him as a free offering by a state proud of him, in- stead of his running after it | a man who would steal it if he could not g m i ret it honestly. And who elected Lodge to the Senate? From whom did he get this office “like a man who would steal it if he could not get it honestly’’? From a legislature that in its betrayal of the people, in its subserv- ience to public plunderers great and small,

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53 was the Massachusetts had known up to that time. It is manifestly impossible in the limits of these articles to go into of the Massachusetts Tegisla- rise of the machine of which Lodge is the chief manager and chief political beneficiarv—he leaves the financial spoils to others. The legislature has been bought again and again, every session, several times, by gas, railway, traction, and insurance interests; it has_ killed child-labor legislation, legislation seeking to prevent the extortion of monopoly; it is openly attended by an expensive and active lobby. At this writing it has once more been forced to make pretense of in- vestigating itself because it is being really worst the record ture since the investigated by District Attorney Moran and grand jury at Boston—this time because it killed a bill to stop that bare- faced form of plain stealing, the bucket- shop. Representative Frank Gethro, who was expelled last June for attempting to bribe fellow-members, became so enraged by the action of the “mob of hypocrites who have taken ten bribes to my one”’ that on June 23d he gave inside facts as to a typical session: *Scarcely a measure came before the House but came with it money offers for my vote from representatives, senators, and lob byists. . . I found what prices were being paid to ‘leaders, both senators and rep- resentatives, and to the rank and file, and de termined to get for eel the contract to buy a large block of votes. I agreed to buy Republican votes, got the contract and bought the votes. The Republican leaders told me if 1 would not divulge the names, they would stand by me. I depended entirely upon them for my escape in the investiga tion, and this was my fatal error.” And this is notoriously typical of the body which hi Is three times elected Lodge. A stream can rise no higher than its source that is not an axiom of physics only. If Lodge were a patriot, would he not have been using his talents and energies in striving to make decent the political con- ditions in his state? Vet never, not once, has he opened his lips against corruption there. We have seen that the “ boys’’ were with Lodge, and who the Massachusetts “ boys’”’ Since the healing of the factional between the “boys”? and “big are. quarrel fellows,” also. Their he has had these latter with him stronghold is the Arkwright 30 Cosmopolitan Magazine Club—and that is Lodge’s stronghold now. The idea of patriotism, of the glory that is American, which those gentlemen enter- tain, was well illustrated in the report of the committee they sent down South to see why it was compelling them to cut their huge dividends. Said the committee (De- cember, 1897) ‘The working day in North Carolina is twelve hours, and the price paid per day for common labor in the mills is from fifty to seventy-five cents. So far as we could learn there is no disposition to organize labor unions. . It seems a duty to apply at ence to the legislatures of the New England states to put us back on a footing with the manufacturers in other parts of the country. It is particularly incumbent on us to urge the legislature of Massachusetts to repeal the legislation reducing the hours of labor to fifty-cight.” How Lodge Works the People Not to be content with fair returns on their actual capital. Not to urge Lodge, their especial friend, to press legislation forbidding anybody anywhere to degrade and enserf an American man, woman, or child. But to try to get ¢en-hour laws and child-labor laws repealed! To “put us hack’’—what a significant phrase! And in 1905 the legislature that reélected Lodge for the third time killed in its upper house a bill prohibiting the employment of women and children in factories before six o’clock in the morning and after six at night. We are in a position now to understand why Lodge the senator has never done or tried to do anything effective for the people, why he has pretended to concern himself with foreign affairs, talking not against corporate oppressions or child-labor or the corruption of politics in the nation and in his own state, but about war with Ger- many, whose only difficulties with us have been when she refused to receive without inspection the rotten products of the beef trust and again when she refused to let the big insurance companies ravage the German people as the American people have since learned they were ravaging them. In all ages and countries “foreign affairs’? has been the specialty of the politician who wished to distract attention from the opera- tions of a devouring privileged class within his country’s borders. Lodge knows well that no country on earth would contemplate the insanity of making war on us with our boundless resources and our absolute un- | | | }

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e . ; ie Ss a AZo aiehe it fa ; LODGE OF SENATOR COARSE ‘* GENTLEMAN SCHOLAR” HENRY CALOT [TYPE OF MACHINE getatablenes But inasmuch as his pose of Spartan purity will not permit of his openly aiding “the interests’’ that finance his machine and rule his party, he “saves his-face’’ by manufacturing war clouds and puffing them away; thus, he can affect ignorance of the real war, the struggle between the people and their Senate- guarded and Senate-licensed plunderers, and can deceive the unthinking into be- lieving that he does not know what he is doing when he “stands pet’? on Aldrich’s aad, hice pa ae ein ee pen a a EPONA MRM i gtd Noe A AE SEEN A on ai : a ; ; me ie 33 % ae RAL vet ARP RRO, Ss ph ZEEE ES ig ONE MASSACHUSETTS, POLITICIAN, DISGUISED BY THI Ae eS a 7 A LIB eho Sed, Sahai, + Fa) OV nee — si, SO ERS 8 NTR aC” SORE ye Wiio T PHE FAMILIAR ROBE Of tHE tariff law for robbery chietly, or votes and even occasionally speaks in favor of some “safe and sane’? measure for the per- petuation of privilege. We need give space to only a few illus- trations of Lodge in senatorial action— not the Lodge who talks and occasionally proposes some petty futility of “ popular’’ legislation, but the real and efficient Lodge. On December 17, 1895, Senator Call of Florida moved that a special committee of five senators investigate the efforts of 531

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532 “the interests’’ to control federal elections and to influence legislation. Here was a chance for Lodge, the reformer, the de- nouncer of corruption. Did he speak for the resolution? No; he sat silent. Did he vote for it? On the contrary, when Hale of Maine, for the “merger,’’ moved its reference to the committee on privileges and elections, where it could be secretly strangled and buried, Lodge lined up in the “merger,” with Republicans like Elkins and Democrats like Brice of Ohio, to protect the corrupt sources of the “‘merger’s”’ revenues for financing the two party machines. As we have seen,’ the two obvious and conclusive tests of the treason of the Senate, and the obvious and conclusive proofs that the merger”? of the machines of the two parties on all vital questions, all questions affecting food, clothing, shelter, wages, prices, plunder, and privilege, is in force and effect, are found in the Senate’s atti- tude toward the high financiers who misuse the railways for wholesale robbery of the people and misuse the protective tariff system for binding the people and making them helpless under robbery. A Persistent ‘‘Standpatter’’ What is Lodge’s record on the tariff? In 1894 he spoke against the income tax and voted with the “merger’’ to inject more than four hundred robber amend- ments into the so-called Wilson, but really “merger,’’ bill to use the tariff for robbery. In 1897, Lodge lined up with the rest of Aldrich’s band to stuff the Dingley bill with “good things’’ for “the interests,” to make it over completely into a “ merger”’ measure, to make it the traitorous thing which that stalwart Republican, Governor Cummins of Iowa, thus concisely described last spring, *“ All the robberies and thefts cominitted by all the insurance officers since the life insur- ance business was originated do not amount to the extortion due to the Dingley law in one year Lodge is a “standpatter.””. And what is his record on the railway test of senatorial treason? Let us not linger on his part— that of the railway lawyer—in the debates and votes on the railway-rate bill. Like all the “merger’’ senators, he voted against the “unmerged”’ Republican La Follette’s Cosmopolitan Magazine amendments that would have made.it a reality of justice instead of a sham and a fraud. Let us not waste space in explain- ing his futile little “ popular’? amendments with which he sought to confuse the public mind as to his real self. Let us recall a real achievement, his specific proclamation of himself. It has been proved again and again that the people pay the railways for mail service no less than ten times what the express companies pay for exactly the same service, that by clearly extortionate charges the railways have got in loot about a billion dollars since 1873. Not since 1878 has there been a reduction of the rate. Again and again honest senators have tried to end this robbery, but the “merger’’ has alwavs prevented. The last very vigorous attempt was made in 1895 by Senator Blackburn of Kentucky, who, by the way, is being retired by the Louisville and Nash- ville Railway, which is almost as powerful a factor in Kentucky politics as are the New York Centraland the Boston and Maine in New England politics. When Blackburn moved an amendment to the post-office Isll giving the postmaster-general discre- tionary authority as to railway-mail rates, up jumped Lodge to defend “ the interests.” The debates on this and kindred motions in January and February, 1895, spread in the “Congressional Record,’ make ex- ceedingly interesting reading. Lodge is net an adroit debater; his shifts and squirms at that time were very amusing. Allison and other “ merger’? senators had to help him out, though they evidently enjoyed his unhappiness—he is unpopular in the Senate because of his obstreperous egotism and lack of tact. It was a sad plight for Lodge the poseur to have to face such hots as, for instance, Peffer’s in saying: *T asked Postmaster-General Wanamaker why he did not propose legislation, or why Congress did not act. His reply was that the ratlway companies see to it that the repre- sentatives in Congress in both branches take f the interests of the railway people, hat it is practically impossible t legislation in the way of red penses.” (Debate of February 11, pro- ig €X- 1SQ5.) When the debate ended, the “ merger”’ —the Senate then hada small ‘* Democratic” ma jority—voted down the attempt to reduce the railway steal. One more instance: On May rath of this year Senator La Follette proposed as the

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SENATOR WINTHROP MURRAY CRANE ALDRICH, AND CONSCIENTIOL ATOR penalty for rebate thievery a heavy fine and imprisonment for from two to five years at hard labor; that is, Mr. La Follette proposed that the law be no respecter of persons among thieves. Up rose Lodge to move that the imprisonment be for nol more than two years and without hard labor. Need it be said which amendment the Senate accepted ? But enough of Lodge. Clearly, he is like the other leaders of the Senate whose records we have examined; is of the “merger,” is against the people, is for To expect him to originate “the interests.”

SLY DEVOTED TO

DANA < hehe t epeieng cong vn UNEVEN Barca ete eh SARIN teen FE ERTS SEN- RULE MASSACHUSETTS, A. FAVORITE OF PLUTOCRATI¢ . or to endorse any measure of democratic justice would be like looking for potatoes among the roots of a dock-weed. Let us pass on to his new-elected colleague, Crane. Acts of Patriot Crane Crane is a paper, woollen goods, and shoe manufacturer, grown hugely rich by some of the most inexcusably predatory schedules in our tariff. Quiet, seemingly retiring, of great tact and adaptability, charitable, with aspirations to be a part of our aris- tocracy of wealth, “ birth,”’ and “ breeding”’ —such is Crane as a private man. But all 33

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534 Cosmopolitan Magazine that is of no interest or importance to the people. A man may be good to his family and friends, may pay his debts and give alms and attend both church and Sunday- school, and still may be a Rockefeller. A man may profess, indeed may have, the best motives in the world, and still be an enemy of his country. Benedict Arnold said, and probably believed, that it was for the best interests of the American people to have England take care of them. And the Cranes may honestly believe that the American people gin go to the “ demni- tion bow-wows”’ if “high finance’ didn’t take away from fa the surplus money they earn and might waste. They will “stand for’? the very worst plundering scheme of “thg interests’? as “better than mob rule.” Murray Crane was appointed to the Senate in October, 1904, by Governor Bates of Massachusetts, who had just ruined him- self politically for anything but a senator- ship or federal judgeship or other non- elective office by vetoing a bill forbidding the employment of women and children more than twelve hours a day. In 1905 Crane was elected to the Senate by a legis- lature whose upper house killed the same bill, reintroduced. But we have seen what kind of legislatures “the interests’ elect in Massachusetts. Crane had hardly taken his seat in the Senate when the “ merger’’ chose him for a place on the powerful com- mittee on interstate commerce. This, in itself, without the facts of the origin of his senatorial honors, would be enough to arouse strong suspicion of Crane; for new senators never get such places as that unless they come with home records which make Watch- man Aldrich sure they are “safe and sane.” What was Crane’s home record which satisfied Aldrich ? His crucial acts as governor were two— the Boston and Albany and the Fitchburg transactions. The Boston and Albany Railroad was built by a combination of pub lic and private capital, the city of Albany supplying one million dollars first and last, the people of Massachusetts $4,300,000 and the most valuable part of the franchise, and private capital supplying only eight hundred thou- sand. By a series of the familiar juggles of “the interests,” the share of Massachu- setts had been reduced and “the interests’’ were in control and were using the road to loot the people and to corrupt politics. Governor Crane had been a large stock- holder; but on his election, he virtuous ly got rid of his holdings—to his brother and partner, Zenas Crane! With mind thus completely freed from the faintest shadow of personal interest, he was ready to con- sider strictly on its merits the proposition which was made by “the interests,’ with vhom he was allied by person: il friends ships and by very large holdings in the infamous Bell T elephone monopoly and other similar enterprises for corrupting politics and levy- ing upon the industry of the people. The legislature, amid a storm of protests from the people and the independent press, accepted the terms of “the interests.” How He Sold Out the People What were those terms which Crane recommended and ratified and, so, made legal? Under the terms of the original charter, the state could have acquired the entire road for about thirty millions; and so rich a property was it, the state could have reduced freight charges twenty per cent. and still easily have ae annually enough entirely to have abolished state taxa- tion. Also, state ownership of the road meant freedom from monopoly. Under the Vanderbilt-Crane perpetual lease, the state gets only two million dollars a year and “the interests’? are absolutely free to loot and to monopolize. No wonder Crane refused even to recommend that the ques- tion be referred to the people for a vote. No wonder the legislature killed a bill to compel a popular vote before final action. No wonder Representative Dean of Wake- field was able to charge, during the debate, that it was “common rumor in the state house that members were receiving three hundred dollars apiece for their votes.” But this was not Crane’s worst. That worst is the Fitchburg transaction. The people of the state had built at great ex- pense the Hoosac tunnel, the key to New England for direct traffic with the rest of the country. The Boston and Maine, a harmonious part of the so-called Vander- bilt but really Rockefelier-Morgan branch of “the interests,” got various governors and legislatures of Massachusetts to loosen the state’s hold upon the tunnel and its traversing Fitchburg railway, until at last, with Crane in the governor’s chair and a good “safe and sane”’ legislature of Lodge’s

<< Si ye

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, “boys’’ in the Capitol, the time was ripe for the grand stroke. The state’s hold upon the system had been reduced to fifty thousand shares of the common stock, but these shares were necessary to “the in- terests’’? for complete control. By the familiar manipulations the common stock had been rendered completely worthless. The state commissioners in their report filed in January, 1900, gave the full facts of that corrupt performance. Did Crane proceed against his offending “ high finance” friends? Not Crane! When the Boston and Maine with an air of magnanimity offered thirty dollars a share for these fifty thousand shares which, if the laws had been enforced, would have been worth at least ten times that much, not to speak of their vreatest value—the guarantee of railway freedom for the people of New England —Governor Crane announced, not that they could not have them at any price, not even that they could have them at their real value, but that they could have them at par, that is, for five millions instead of one and a half millions. This offer was eagerly accepted by “the in- terests’? on January 29, I9g00. The people had been trained to regard the stock as all but worthless, their treacherous servants having let the Boston and Maine crowd depreciate it for so many years. So, the controlled press’s acclaim of Crane’s shrewdness and patriotism as a bargainer as echoed by the people until they began to realize that by the two transactions together they had been delivered over, bound hand and foot, to a transportation monopoly, and had got in return a sum that was paltry as a bare purchase price for the Fitchburg stock alone. If Crane had shown this kind of sagacity at bar- gaining in his private business, he would not be the vastly rich man he is to-day. He cannot divide the responsibility for the Mitchburg sell-out of the people who en- trusted him with the governorship. He personally made up the deal with Ledyard of the American Express Company and President Lucius Tuttle of the Boston and Maine —the famous Tuttle who domi- nates all New England politics and con- The ‘Treason of the Senate 535 sults with the New England senators whenever the railways want anything at Washington. The whole transaction, by the way, was in direct violation of the state law which declares that the Fitchburg line must be maintained “permanently as an independent line from Boston to points in New York state.” An Aldrich Favorite Is it strange that Crane, on his arrival in the Senate, should step at once into high favor with Aldrich? Is it not natural that he should at once get into Steve Elkins’ committee, which determines the present scandalously unjust distribution of the annual twenty thousand millions of inter- state commerce, the bulk of the year’s product of the brains and brawn and capital of the whole American people ? Foraker, Lodge, Crane—three more leaders of the Senate to be added to the valaxy whose records we have examined; three more seated in the body that is the final arbiter of wages and prices, and seated there in the interest of the only dangerous enemies of their country. As in the cases of Aldrich and Spooner and Bailey and Elkins and Knox, it is impossible to imagine these three originating or favoring or not fighting any mea‘ure that would disturb the greedily sucking lips of the class to which they belong, the class they associate with and serve. They are as harmonious with the present Senate as La Follette and Tillman are discordant. And of the three, Crane, the quiet, the good mixer, the sincerely and conscientiously devoted to plutocratic rule, is far the most danger- ous. When Aldrich passes, Crane will succeed him—unless Massachusetts learns that zood character and good motives are of no more importance than _ plausible speech, if the man’s acts be not for the public good. It would be more sensible to call in an English duke to decide a con- troversy between us and England, than it is to let such men as the Aldriches, Elkinses, Baileys, Lodges, and Cranes arbitrate between us and their friends, associates, and political sponsors, our enemies. (To be continued.) Next month, Allison and others of the Senate leaders.

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Im the Days of the Comet BY H. G. WELLS llustrated by BOOK THE THIRD: CHAPTER THE SECOND Synopsis: The previous instalments deal with happenings in En: LTenri Lanos THE NEW WORLD MY MOTHER’S LAST DAYS rland just before the Great Change, when a huge comet is threatening to come in contact with the earth. In addition to hard times and general discontent with existing social conditions, England has gone to war with Germany. The narrator, William Leadford, has become a socialist through the influence of his friend Parload. This move leads to the breaking of Leadford’s engagement to Nettie Stuart. The young man still loves the girl, and when she elopes with Edward Verrall, the son of her father’s employer, he follows the couple to a resort on the East coast. Here he attempts to kill the lovers with his revolver. But the shots go wild, and just then the earth, coming into the comet’s path, is enveloped in a gas which renders every living being unconscious, This state lasts a few hours. Humanity then awakes to a changed world. Men find that they have new aims, new ambitions, new desires. They begin to re- construct the world in a fashion dictated by the principles of human brotherhood. IT.eadford sees that he must give Nettie up to Verrall, and does so. EXT day I came home to Clayton. The new strange bright brighter there for the host of dark distressful memories of darkened childhood, toil- some youth, embittered ado- I MNef\ lescence, that wove about the -FZZ2 place for me. It seemed to me that I saw morning there for the first time. No chimneys smoked that day, no furnaces were burning; the people were busy with other things. The clear strong sun, the sparkle in the dustless air, made a strange gayety in the narrow streets. I passed a number of smiling people coming home from the public breakfasts that were given in the town hall -until better things could be arranged, and happened on Par- load among them. “ You were right about that comet,” I sang out at the sight of him; and he came toward me and clasped my hand. “What are people doing here ?”’ said I. “They’re sending us food from outside,” he said, “and we’re going to level all these slums—and shift into tents on the moors”’; and he began to tell me of many things that were being arranged, the Midland land 6 commissions had got to work with remark- able celerity and directness of purpose, and the redistribution of population was already planned in its broad outlines. He was work- ing at an improvised college of engineering. Until schemes of work were made out, almost everyone was going to school again to get as much technical training as possible against the demands of the huge enterprise of reconstruction that was now beginning. He walked with me to my door, and there I met old Pettigrew coming down the steps. He looked dusty and tired, but his eye was brighter than it used to be, and he carried in a rather unaccustomed manner a workman’s tool basket. “How’s the rheumatism, Mr. Petti- grew ?’’ I asked. “Diet,” said old Pettigrew, “can work wonders.” He looked me in the eye. “These houses,” he said, “will have to come down, I suppose, and our notions of property must undergo very considerable revision in the light of reason; but mean- while I’ve been doing something to patch that disgraceful roof of mine. To think that I could have dodged and evaded——” He raised a deprecatory hand, drew down the loose corners of his ample mouth, and shook his old head. “The past is past, Mr. Pettigrew.’ “Your poor dear mother! So good and ’

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honest a woman! So simple and_ kind and forgiving! To think of it! My dear young man’’—he said it manfully—* I’m ashamed.” “The whole world blushed at dawn the other day, Mr. Pettigrew,” I said, “and did it very prettily. That’s over now, God knows. Who is not ashamed of all that came before last Tuesday ?”’ I held out a forgiving hand, naively for- getful that in this place I was a thief, and he took it and went his way, shaking his head and repeating he was ashamed, but I think a little comforted. The door opened and my poor old moth- er’s face, marvelously cleaned, appeared. “Ah, Willie, boy! You! You!” I ran up the steps to her, for I feared she might fall. How she clung to me in the passage, the dear woman! But first she shut the front door. The old habit of respect for my un- accountable temper still swayed her. * Ah, deary!’”? she said, “ah, deary! But you were sorely tried,” and kept her face close to my shoulder, lest she should offend me by the sight of the tears that were in her eyes. She made a sort of gulping noise and was quiet for a while, holding me very tightly to her heart with her worn, long hands. She thanked me presently for my tele- gram, and I put my arm about her and drew her into the living-room. “It’s all well with me, mother dear,” I said, “and the dark times are over—are done with forever, mother.”’ Whereupon she had courage and gave way and sobbed aloud, none chiding her. She had not let me know she could still weep for five grimy years. II Dear heart! there remained for her but a very brief while in this world that had been renewed. I did not know how short that time would be, but the little I could do perhaps after all it was not little to her—to atone for the harshness of my days of wrath and rebellion, I did. I took care to be con- stantly with her, for I perceived now her curious need of me. It was not that we had ideas to exchange or pleasures to share, but she liked to see me at table, to watch me working, to have me go to and fro. There Was no toil for her any more in the world, but only such light services as are easy and In the Days of the Comet 537 pleasant for a worn and weary old woman to do, and I think she was happy even al her end. She kept to her queer old eighteenth- century version of religion, too, without a change. She had worn this particular amu- let so long it was a part of her. Yet the Change was evident even in that persist- ence. I said to her one day, “ But do you still believe in that hell of flame, dear mother? You—with your tender heart!’’ She vowed she did. Some theological intricacy made it necessary to her, but still— She looked thoughtfully at a bank of primulas before her for a time, and then laid her tremulous hand impressively on my arm. “You know, Willie dear,” she said, as though she was clearing up a childish misunderstanding of mine, “I don’t think anyone will go there. I never did think that.” Il That talk stands out in my memory be- cause of that agreeable theological decision of hers, but it was only one of a great num- ber of talks. It used to be pleasant in the afternoon, after the day’s work was done and before one went on with the evening’s study—how odd it would have seemed in the old time for a young man of the indus- trial class to be doing post-graduate work in sociology, and how much a matter of course it seems now!—to walk out into the gardens of Lowchester House, and smoke a cigarette or so and let her talk ramblingly of the things that interested her. Physically the Great Change did not do so very much to reinvigorate her—she had lived in that dismal underground kitchen in Clayton too long for any material rejuvenescence. She glowed out indeed as a dying spark among the ashes might glow under a draught of fresh air—and assuredly it hastened her end. But those closing days were very tranquil, full of an effortless contentment, With her, life was like a rainy, windy day that clears only to show the sunset after- glow—the light has passed. She acquired no new habits amid the comforts of the new life, did no new things, but only found a happier light upon the old. She lived with a number of other old ladies belonging to our commune in the upper rooms of Lowchester House. Those upper apartments were simple and ample, fine and well done in the Georgian style,

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538 and they had been organized to give the maximum of comfort and conveniences and to economize the need of skilled attendance. We had taken over the various “great houses,”’ as they used to be called, to make communal dining-rooms—their kitchens were convenienily large—and pleasant places for the old people of over sixty whose time of ease had come, and for similar pub- lic uses. We had done this not only with Lord Redcar’s house, but also with Checks- hill House—where old Mrs. Verrall made a dignified and capable hostess—and indeed with most of the fine residences in the beau- tiful wide country between the Four Towns district and the Welsh mountains. About these great houses there had usually been good out-buildings, laundries, married-ser- vants’ quarters, stabling, dairies, and the like, suitably masked by trees. We turned these into homes, and to them we added first tents and wood chalets and afterwards quadrangular residential buildings. In order to be near my mother I had two small rooms in the new collegiate buildings which our commune was almost the first to possess, and they were very convenient for the station of the high-speed electric railway that took me down to our daily conferences and my secretarial and statistical work in Clayton. Ours had been one of the first modern communes to get in order; we were greatly helped by the energy of Lord Redcar, who had a fine feeling for the picturesque asso- ciations of his ancestral home—the detour that took our line through the beeches and bracken and bluebells of the West Wood and saved the pleasant open wildness of the park was one of his suggestions—and we had many reasons to be proud of our sur- roundings. Nearly all the other communes that sprang up all over the pleasant park- land round the industrial valley of the Four Towns, as the workers moved out, came to us to study the architecture of the residen- tial squares and quadrangles with which we had replaced the back streets between the great houses and the ecclesiastical resi- dences about the cathedral, and the way in which we had adapted all these buildings to our new social needs. Some claimed to have improved on us. But they could not emulate the rhododendron garden out be- yond our shrubberies; that was a thing altogether our own in our part of England, because of its ripeness and of the rarity of good peat free from lime. Cosmopolitan Magazine These gardens had been planned under the third Lord Redcar, fifty years ago and more; they abounded in rhododendrons and azaleas, and were in places so well sheltered and sunny that great magnolias flourished and flowered. There were tall trees smoth- ered in crimson and yellow climbing roses, and an endless variety of flowering shrubs and fine conifers, and such pampas grass as no other garden could show. And barred by the broad shadows of these, were glades and broad spaces of emerald turf, and here and there banks of pegged roses and flower beds, and banks given over, some to spring bulbs, and some to primroses and primulas and polyanthuses. My mother loved these latter banks and the little round staring eyes of their innumerable yellow, ruddy- brown, and purple corollas, more than any- thing else the gardens could show, and in the spring of the Year of Scaffolding she would go with me day after day to the seat that showed them in the greatest multitude. It gave her, I think, among other agree- able impressions, a sense of gentle opulence. In the old time she had never known what it was to have more than enough of anything agreeable in the world at all. We would sit and think, or talk—there was a curious effect of complete understand- ing between us whether we talked or were still. “Heaven,” she said to me one day, “heaven is a garden.” I was moved to tease her a little. ‘“ There’s jewels, you know, walls and gates of jewels—and singing.” “For such as like them,” said my mother firmly, and thought for a while. “ There’ll be things for all of us, 0’ course. But for me it couldn’t be heaven, dear, unless it was a garden—a nice sunny garden. And feeling such as we’re fond of are close and handy by.” You of your happier generation cannot realize the wonderfulness of those early days in the new epoch, the sense of security, the extraordinary effects of contrast. In the morning, except in high summer, I was up before dawn, and breakfasted upon the swift, smooth train, and perhaps saw the sunrise as I rushed out of the little tunnel that pierced Clayton Crest, and so to work like a man. Now that we had got all the homes and schools and all the softness of life away from our coal and iron ore and clay, now that a thousand obstructive “rights”’

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and timidities had been swept aside, we could let ourselves go. So we merged this enterprise with that, cut across this or that anciently obstructive piece of private land, joined and separated, effected gigantic con- solidations and gigantic economies; and the valley, no longer a pit of squalid human tragedies and meanly conflicting industries, grew into a sort of beauty of its own, a sav- age inhuman beauty of force and machinery and flames. One was a Titan in that Etna. Then back one came at midday to bathe and change in the train, and so to the leis- urely gossiping lunch in the club dining- room in Lowchester House, and the refresh- ment of these green and sunlit afternoon tranquillities. Sometimes in her profounder moments my mother doubted whether all this last phase of her life was not a dream. “A dream,” I used to say, “a dream in- deed—but a dream that is one step nearer awakening than that nightmare of the former days.” She found great comfort and assurance in my altered clothes—she liked the new fash- ions of dress, she alleged. It was not simply altered clothes. I did grow two inches, broaden some inches round my chest, and increase in weight three stones before I was twenty-three. I wore a soft brown cloth and she would caress my sleeve and admire, it greatly—she had the woman’s sense of tex- ture very strong in her. Sometimes she would muse upon the past, rubbing together her poor rough hands— they never got softened. She told me much I had not heard before about my father, and her own early life. It was like finding flat and faded flowers in a book still faintly sweet, to realize that once my mother had been loved with passion, that my remote father had once shed hot tears of tenderness in her arms. And she would sometimes even speak tentatively of Nettie, in those narrow, old-world phrases that her lips could rob of all their bitter narrowness. “She wasn’t worthy of you, dear,” she would say abruptly, leaving me to guess the person she intended. “No man is worthy of a I answered. “No woman is worthy of a man’s. I loved her, dear mother, and that you cannot alter.” “There’s others,” she would muse. “Not for me,” I said. “No! I didn’t fire a shot that time; I burned my magazine. | woman’s love,” In the Days of the Comet 539 can’t begin again, mother, not from the beginning.” She sighed and said no more then. At another time she said—I think her words were, “ You'll be lonely when I’m gone, dear.” * You'll not think of going, then,”’ I said. “Eh, dear! but man and maid should come together.” I said nothing to that. “You brood overmuch on Nettie, dear. If I could see you married to some sweet girl of a woman, some good, kind girl——” * Dear mother, I’m married enough. Perhaps some day- Who knows? I can wait.” * But to have nothing to do with women!”’ “T have my friends. Don’t you worry, mother. There’s plentiful work for a man in this world though the heart of love is cast out from him. Nettie was life and beauty for me—is—will be. Don’t think I’ve lost too much, mother.” (Because in my heart I told myself the end had still to come. ) And once she sprang a question on me suddenly that surprised me. “Where are they now?” she asked. “Who?’’ ** Nettie and—him.”’ She had pierced to the marrow of my thoughts. “I don’t know,” I said shortly. Her shriveled hand just fluttered into touch of mine. “It’s she said, as if plead- ing; “indeed it is better so.”” There was something in her quivering old voice tat for a moment took me back across an epoch to the protests of the former time, to those counsels of submission, those appeals not to offend It, that had always stirred an angry spirit of rebellion within me. “That is the thing I doubt,” I said, and abruptly I felt I could talk no more to her of Nettie. I got up and walked away from her, and came back after a while, to speak of other things, with a bunch of daffodils for her in my hand. But I did not always spend my afternoons with her. There were days when my crushed hunger for Nettie rose again, and then I had to be alone; I walked, or bicycled, and presently I found a new inter- est and relief in learning to ride. For the horse was already very swiftly reaping the benefit of the Change. Hardly anywhere was the inhumanity of horse-traction to be better so,”

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540 found after the first vear of the new everywhere lugging and dragging and strain- ing were done by machines, and the horse had become a beautiful instrument for the pleasure and carriage of youth. I rode both in the saddle and, what is finer, naked and barebacked. I found violent good for the states of enormous melancholy that came upon me, and when at last horse riding palled, I went and joined the aviators ] 1 exercises were vno prac ti ed soaring upon aéroplanes e- vond Horsemarden Hill. But at least every alternate day I spent with my mother, and altogether I think I gave her f my afternoons. wo-third two-thirds IV When presently that illness, that fading weakness that made a many of the older people in the beginning of the new time, took hold upon my mother j euthanasia for so

there came Anna Reeves to da her after our new custom. She chose to com She was already known to us a little fron chance meetings and chance services she had done my mother in the ga She seemed then just one of those plainly good virls the world at its worst has never failed to produce, who were in the dark old times the hidden antiseptic of all « hustling hating, faithless lives. They made ir secret voiceless worship, tl did their steadfast, unselfish work as nurses LS faithful servants, saved her.

3ut it was like that with the poor always in the bad old times— When the doctor came at last he Lwavs. was angry. ‘Why wasn’t I called before? d, and he took no pains. He |

because some one hadn’t

She said these things very quietly with 3° 1 rit i drooping eyelids, like one who describ« dream. “Weare going to manage all these things better now,” I said, feeling a strange resentment at this pitiful little story her faded, matter-of-fact voice was telling me. ‘She talked,” my mother went on—“ she talked for her age wonderfully. Hippopota-

pS a mus.” het sand. ‘Hippopotamus, dear—quite plainly one day, when her father was showing her pic- ures. And her little prayers. ‘Now [ lay me down to sleep.’ I made her little socks. Knitted they was, dear, and the heel most

Her eyes were closed now. She spoke no longer to me, but to herself. She whispered other vague things, little sentences, ghosts 30

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SHE WOULD GO WITH ME DAY AFTER DAY TO THE SEAT THAT SHOWED THE FLOW ERS IN THE GREATEST MULTITUDE

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542 Cosmopolitan Magazine less dis Pre sé : 5 Sieé l ind it of the room m jueer! yy the thought of that life th *n glad and hopeful only to pass so inexplicably out of hope igain into nonentity, this sister of whom I had never heard Hbetore An tly [ was inal rage at al | t ble sorrows of the past, of tha great ocean of avoidable suffering of which this was but one luminous and quivering red drop. I walked in the garden and the garden was too small for me; I went out to ‘The past is past,” oss the gulf of wander on the moors. I cried, and all the while acr five and twenty years I could hear my poor mother’s heart-wrung weeping for that baby daughter who had suffered and died. In- deed that old spirit of rebellion has not altogether died in me, for all the transfor CHAPTER THE THIRD—B j j ] end m mother died 1ddenl, nd ae SUaadenLY, ana lel ame as a shock to me Diagnosis was still very in idequate it that time. The e defects 1 of their common training and were doing all they could to supply its deficiencies, but they were still extraordinarily ignorant. Some unintelligently observed factor of her illness came into play with her, and she be- ‘ame feverish and sank and died very quickly. I do not know what remedial measures were attempted; I hardly knew what was happening until the whole thing Vas OvVeFP. \t that time my attention was much en- gaged by the stir of the great Beltane festival that was held on May Day in the Year of Scaffolding. It was the first of the ten great rubbish burnings that opened the new age. Young people nowadays can scarcely hope to imagine the enormous quantities of pure litter and useless accumulation with which ve had t leal. Had we not set aside a special day and season, the whole world vould have been an incessant reek of small mation of the new time. I quieted down at last to a thin and austere comfort in thinking that the whole is not told to us; that it can- not perhaps be told to such minds as ours; and what was far more sustaining, that now > strength and courage and this new gift of wise love, whatever cruel and sad things marred the past, none of these sorrow- ful things that made the very wa woof of the old life, need now go on | ing. Wecould foresee, we could prevent and save. “The past is past,” I said, between sighing and resolve, as I came into view again on my homeward way of the hundred sunset-lit windows of old Lowchester House. “Those sorrows are sorrows n more.”’ But [ could not altogether cheat that com- mon sadness of the new time, that memory ind insoluble riddle of the countless lives that had stumbled and failed in pain and darkness before our air grew clear AND NEW YEAR’S EVE fires; and it was, I think, a happy idea t revive this ancient festival of the Mav and November fires. It was inevitable that the ld idea of purification should revive with the name; it was felt to be a burning of other than material incumbrances. [n- numerable quasi-spiritual things—deeds, locuments, debts, vindictive records— went up on those great flares. People passed praying between the fires, and it was . fine symbol of the new and wiser tolerance that had come to men, that those who still found their comfort in the orthodox faiths came hither unpersuaded to ll hate might be burned out of tl sions. For even in the fires of Baal, now eir profes- that men have done with base hatred, one may find the living God. Endless were the things we had to destroy in those great purgings. First, there were nearly all the houses and buildings of the old time. In the end we did not save in England one building in five thousand that was standing when the comet came. Year »y year, as we made our homes afresh in iccordance with the saner needs of our new social families, we swept away more and more of those horrible structures, the an- ient residential houses—hastily built, with ut imagination, without beauty, without ommon honesty, without even comfort or

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IT WAS THE FIRST OF THE TEN GREAT RUBBISH BURNINGS THAT OPENED THE NEW AGE

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544 convenience—in which the early twentieth century had been sheltered. We saved noth- ing but what was beautiful or interesting out of all their gaunt and melancholy abun- dance. The actual houses, of course, we could not drag to our fires; but we brought all their ill-fitting deal doors, their dread- ful window sashes, their servant-torment- ing staircases, their dank, dark cupboards, the verminous papers from their scaly walls, their dust- and dirt-sodden carpets, their ill-designed and yet pretentious tables and chairs, sideboards and chests of drawers, the old dirt-saturated books, their orna- ments—their dirty, decayed, and altogether painful ornaments, amidst which I remem- ber there were sometimes even stuffed dead birds /—we burned themall. The paint-plas- tered woodwork, with coat above coat of nasty paint—that in particular blazed finely. I have already tried to give you an impres- sion of old-world furniture, of Parload’s bedroom, my mother’s room, Mr. Gabbitas’s sitting-room, but, thank Heaven! there is nothing in life now to convey the peculiar dinginess of it all. For one thing, there is no more imperfect combustion of coal going on everywhere, and no roadways like grassless, open scars along the earth from which dust pours out perpetually. We burned and de- stroyed most of our private buildings and all the woodwork, all our furniture—except a few score thousand pieces of distinct and intentional beauty, from which our present forms have developed—nearly all our hang- ings and carpets, and also we destroyed almost every scrap of old-world clothing. Only a few carefully disinfected types and vestiges of that remain now in our museums. One writes now with a peculiar horror of the dress of the old world. The men’s clothes were worn without any cleansing process at all, except an occasional super- ficial brushing, for periods of a year or so; they were made of dark, obscurely mixed patterns to conceal the stage of defilement they had reached, and they were of a felted and porous texture admirably calculated to accumulate drifting matter. Many women wore skirts of similar substances, and of so long and inconvenient a form that they inevitably trailed among all the abomina- tions of our horse-frequented roads. It was our boast in England that the whole of our population was booted—their feet were for (To be concluded.) Cosmopolitan Magazine the most part ugly enough to need it—but it becomes now inconceivable how they could have imprisoned their feet in the amazing cases of leather and imitations of leather they used. I have heard it said that a large part of the physical decline that was appar- ent in our people during the closing years of the nineteenth century, though no doubt due in part to the miscellaneous badness of the food they ate, was in the main attributable to the vileness of the common footwear. They shirked open-air exercise altogether, because their boots wore out ruinously and pinched and hurt them if they took it. | have mentioned, I think, the part my own boots played in the squalid drama of my adolescence. I had a sense of unholy tri- umph over a fallen enemy when at last I found myself steering truck after truck of cheap boots and shoes (unsold stock from Swathinglea) to the run-off by the top of the Glanville blast furnaces. Most of our public buildings we destroyed and burned as we reshaped our plan of habi- tation. Our theater sheds, our banks and inconvenient business warrens, our fac- tories (these in the first year of all), and all the “unmeaning repetition’’ of silly little sham Gothic churches and meetinghouses, mean-looking shells of stone and mortar without love, invention, or any beauty at all in them, that men had thrust into the face of their sweated God, even as they thrust cheap food into the mouths of their sweated workers—all these we also swept away in the course of that first decade. Then we had the whole of the superseded steam- railway system to scrap and get rid of, sta- tions, signals, fences, rolling-stock—a plant of ill-planned, smoke-distributing nuisance apparatus that would, under former condi- tions, have maintained an offensive, dwin- dling, obstructive life for perhaps half a cen- tury. Then also there was a great harvest of fences, notice boards, hoardings, ugly sheds. All the corrugated iron in the world and everything that was smeared with tar, our gas works and petroleum stores, our horse vehicles and vans and lorries—all had to be erased. But I have said enough now perhaps to give some idea of the bulk and quality of our great bonfires, our burnings up, our meltings down, our toi) of sheer wreckage, over and above the constructive effort, in those early years.

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‘* PLEASE, MISTER, CAN I TO GET THEM OUT ? | | | ” The Big Tree A Tale of the New York Ghetto BY BRUNO LESSING Illustrated by F you must hang yourself,” says the Talmud, “choose a big tree.” But the thought of hanging was repugnant to Simkovitz, even in the lowest depths of his despondency. Jo There was something sinister % about the idea of a lingering, 4 suffocating death, and_ his distressed soul revolted. A revolyer-shot was so much quicker and neater—there was even something attrac- William Oberharadt tive, something fascinating, in the gleaming weapon that lay upon the table before him, reflecting in dazzling rays the light of the lamp beside it, and Simkovitz had promptly discarded the first half of the Talmudic injunction. But to the second half he clung with a grim tenacity that was worthy of a better purpose. He proposed to select a big tree. For Simkovitz had determined to take swift and tragic farewell of a world that had persistently frowned upon him, to end a life 545

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546 Cosmopolitan Magazine that had known nothing save cuffs and dis- tress, want and rebuffs. To enter upon the merits of the situation were to recount, in volume upon volume, every step of Simko- vitz’s career from the cradle in Russian Poland, where he first became cognizant of his existence, to the tenement-house in Delan ey street, W here, after a day’s introspection and self-analysis, he had decided to bring that exis- tence to a sudden end. In the course of this com- pilation an honest biog rapher might be able to produce what clerks term a “trial balance,’’ where would be set down, under the headings of debit and credit, the joys on the one hand, and on the other the sorrows, of Simkovitz; and from these the biog rapher might, with utmost fairness, deduce conclu- sions that, to a certain ex- tent, would justify or con- demn the conclusions of Simkovitz. Barraboth, his former partner in business, once said of Simkovitz: “ He is good in the heart, but in the head he is a grumbler, “*41N@ UPON THE Herrings he eats and gets HOPE PASSING the bad stomach. Then FOREVER if one him a look gives he thinks, * Ah! he is my enemy!’ kovitz, but I cannot stand him. I love Sim \ lunatic he is not, but he is—er—crazy. He looks dark at everything. He puts in his money foolish, but when he finds it stays in and don’t come out he thinks,‘ Ah! my enemies are against me!’ I like Simkovitz; but I couldn’t be partners no more with him. Never! He grumbles so much I nearly get to do it myself.” Be that as it may, the woes of Simkovitz had piled upon him in a mountainous mass that could no longer be borne. A few dollars still remained in the bank, but hope had fled. His partnership with his lifelong friend was ruptured beyond all possible repair. Alone, he saw no prospects of success in any busi- ness enterprise that he could think of. His friends had conspired to despise him, to snub him, to ruin him. The widow Sorkin RETREATING POS1 MAN AS IF HE might miss him—but no! Impossible! Had he not with his own eyes seen her smile tenderly upon Goldstein, who kept the deli- catessen store—the same perfidious Gold- stein from whom he had bought so many herrings! And speaking of herrings— there were still a few left, which Simkovitz proceeded to eat before carrying into execution his dreadful intention. When he had eaten the herrings and had washed them down with a glass of wine, there stole over his being a_ heart - warming glow that gave rise to some misgivings as to the wis- dom and the justice of his contemplated action. Were matters really so bad as they seemed? Was he absolutely positive Barraboth had dupe him? Was he sure that the widow Sorkin’s smile was the slightest shade more than friendly? Had he not exaggerated those countless slights of his for- mer friends? His eyes fell upon the shining revolver and he began to waver Why did they make re- wane warcninc VuVers so big and brutal- uis tire looking and deadly ? The minutes slipped by and Simkovitz vacil- lated and hesitated. But Nature, who neither vacillates nor hesitates, who deals with oceans and mountains as calmly, as firmly, and as remorselessly as she deals with stomachs and herrings, moved on ac- cording to her relentless laws and soon dis- pelled the doubts of Simkovitz. ‘The glow and the warmth faded away; and in their place came the deep gloom which had for so many days rested upon his soul. Oh, Indigestion, what woe you have caused upon earth! What dark deeds, what tragedies, what viciousness, what mean- nesses can, with truth, be ascribed to you! Could a historian but lay bare the springs of human action, the true sources of man’s changing emotions, how the gloomy page> would teem with your name! The Greeks omitted you from the Erinyes who guarded the gates of Hades; yet who that has read

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of the cruel caprices of the Grecian tyrants can doubt your handiwork? The Romans counted you not among the Furies; yet how many thousands were sacrificed at a nod prompted by you? And through all the long pageant of despots and conquerors, The Big Tree 547 spell of that warmth of herrings and wine, he had actually forgotten the great crash that he had planned, the cataclysm that was to console and nerve him at the fatal mo- ment, the big tree that his interpretation of the Talmud had enjoined upon him. The me SIMKOVITZ ROSE TO THE OCCASION AND BY A SIMPLE PROCESS DRIED THE TEARS IN HER EYES of monarchs and captains, of lords and lead- ers whose’slightest whim opened the flood- gates of death and devastation, how cease- less, how strenuous, has been your work! Poor Simkovitz! _ But it must be a big tree! During those ew moments of doubt, under the cheering warmth was gone; chill gloom reigned heav- ily in its place; waves of depression and of fierce resentment surged in alternate courses through his soul. The deed must be done! Uncork the vials of wrath! Let the light- ning strike and the thunder crash! Oh, could he but live to see it!

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e a x <x « iy ca o =

THE BOARD OF HEALTH THE INSPECTOR?” FROM SEND BY ME “FRIEND SIMKOVITZ, YOU

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He took another drink of wine—it seemed to burn like fire—and, drawing pen and paper toward him, he began to write, slowly and doggedly. And his pen framed these words: “To Moses Lazarus, president of the Syna gogue Beth Kohlem and boss of the whole- sale fur-store in Canal Strect—Mister: “When you see this word I shall be gone to my fathers with a bullet, but Barraboth, who was my partner, will be alive and you can vo for him. He is a cheater. He cheated me and he cheated you, because I know it and helped him. Life is too miserable when all goes wrong and your best friends go behind your back; but I am independent. I say Bah! to the world. Do you remember the big box of furs that were full of moth-holes? We said they were O. K. when you bought them, but you kept them too long in the cel- lar. It was a lie. Barraboth couldn’t get rid of them so he says to me old Lazarus is easy to fool because he doesn’t know nothing about furs or nothing else except the syna- gogue. So I packed them up nice and I lied to you too. It was Barraboth’s scheme. He thinks you are a fool. But I know you are a smart man, and when you take your business away from him and tell why to all the whole- salers Barraboth will be bankrupt. Send him to the prison. You can do nothing with me because I am dead. IGNAtTz SIMKovITz.”’ He read this composition over and over again, and decided to add a postscript: 3arraboth sold you imitation for beaver. We never had real beaver in the store. That was my scheme.” Then he wrote another letter: ‘To the Widow Sorkin: Good-by, false one. Take your Goldstein and marry him. Didn't I see you give him a loving smile? Good-by forever. I am dead. IGNATZz.” He then wrote a third epistle into which he poured the last drop of his cup of bitter- ness: “To the Board of Health—Mister: The herrings that Goldstein sells are poison. I ate some, and it made me so crazy that I have to kill myself. He is a false one. His herrings are false too. Put him in the prison, or he will poison the whole city. If a lady comes to see him when he is in the prison you can tell her she needn’t come in. It aint necessary. But be nice to her. The store is in Hester Street. “Tenatz Stmxovitz, killed by Goldstein’s herrings.” ; The task was done. The pent-up resent- ment of a lifetime had burst its confines and found tragic utterance. It was with a feeling almost akin to tingling joy that Simkovitz The Big Tree 549 donned hat and coat and sallied forth to post the three letters ere he settled down to contemplate the last and simplest step of all, the one that was to crown that night’s work with awful tragedy. There was even a faint smile upon his lips. The wrath of Lazarus when he learned that he had been duped, Barra- both’s ruin when the fury of Lazarus fell upon his head, the desolation of the widow Sorkin when she realized that she had driven him to his destruction, and, most vivid of all, the bewilderment of the per- fidious Goldstein when the minions of the law pounced upon him and dragged him off to a vile dungeon—all these rose in visions before him and filled him with grim happiness. One by one he dropped the let- ters into the letter-box and then, with a sigh, he slowly retraced his steps to the room where the big, shining revolver lay upon the table—waiting for him. How brightly the stars shone that night! It was late and all the Ghetto slept. How still it seemed! The air was balmy and soft—why did it not rain and thunder, why did not the wind blow fiercely and moan? “Tis my ill luck,’’ he thought. “It has stormed all week and just to-night it must be so fair.” But the deed must be done. He had chosen his tree. Slowly and wearily he climbed the long flights of stairs until he reached the floor upon which he lived. Then, suddenly, out of the darkness of the hallway came a piping, boyish voice, “Say, what floor does Ignatz Simkovitz live on?” “T’m him,” he answered, wondering what visitor could seek him at that late hour. Out of the gloom emerged a sleepy- looking messenger-boy, holding out an envelope that instantly filled Simkovitz with a sense of disastrous foreboding. The name it bore was unmistakably his—Ignatz Simkovitz—yet he hesitated to open it, feeling morally certain that fate was about to deal him another cruel blow. But even as he held it wearily before his eye, the con- soling reflection came to him: What cared he? Was he not about to die? Fate could hold no further terrors for him. With sud- den fortitude, he tore open the envelope. It contained a cablegram from his brother in Warsaw, Poland: “Grandfather dead. You get half. Send- ing it by post.” ’

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550 Cosmopolitan Magazine There are minds that respond almost in- stantaneously to every psychological im- pulse, focusing and refocusing their per- spective with lightning-like rapidity, travel- ing from mood to mood, from depths of de- spair to heights of transcendent joy, as swiftly as their brain-cells register each varying impression. From the roll-call of these psychological élite the name of Simko- vitz will, alas! be ever missing. The mes- senger-boy, describing the incident in his picturesque vernacular, said, “He was paralyzed.”? That, however, would imply a momentary arrest of Simkovitz’s mental functions, which would be far from the truth. On the contrary, he was thinking quite hard—very slowly, be sure, but with tremendous force. He thought of his grandfather. Yes, his grandfather was a rich man—how rich, Simkovitz had never known. Half? Ah, half a fortune must be lot of money, anyway—and his brother was sending him his share that very day. Why, he would be rich! Now he would have capital—he could succeed! Ha! at last his luck had changed; he could tri- umph over his enemies! Victory! The widow Sorkin would still be his! He could snap his fingers at the perfidious Goldstein —he was arich man! Ah! how he would enjoy life! Perish, dark thoughts! Hail to joy! “ Hooray!” It was Simkovitz; and the next moment he seized the astonished messenger-boy in his arms, and gave him a joyful hug for bring- ing the glad tidings. He entered his apart- ment treading on air. His eyes fell upon the shining revolver and he laughed to think that he had been about to destroy himself— he, Simkovitz, the happy, independent Simkovitz, heir to half a fortune. And then, he stood still, petrified with sudden shock, and a cold perspiration broke out all over his body. He had remembered the letters. The postman on his midnight tour of col- lection beheld a gaunt figure bending over the letter-box, peering intently through the narrow opening as if he were struggling to pierce the inky blackness within. The figure turned swiftly upon hearing the post- man’s footfalls and revealed the long black beard and worried countenance of Simkovitz. ‘“ Mister!”’ he exclaimed, panting with in- numerable emotions, striving pitifully to smile, wringing his hands in his great dis- tress. “ Mister!’ he gurgled, “three letters I have put in. It is by a mistake, mister. Please, mister, can I to get them out?” The postman gazed amazedly at the be- seeching smirk of Simkovitz and, without deigning a word of reply, opened the box and began to remove the letters it contained to his bag. Can I to take out two of the letters, mis- ter? Ple-e-e-ease!”’ No answer. Click! The box had been shut and locked. “One letter, mister! By a mistake!” The postman stood for an instant and scowled. * Ple-e-e-e-e-ease! ““You’re crazy!” vouchsafed the honest custodian of the mail, and without another word continued on his tour, leaving Simko- vitz standing in the lamplight with that im- ploring smile still upon his face, his hands still clasped, his figure still bent in an atti- tude of humble supplication, gazing, mo- tionless, upon the retreating postman as if he were watching hope passing out of his life forever. Slowly he came back to conscious life; and, even more slowly, the panorama of his painful situation unrolled itself before his mind. The letters would he delivered in the morning. They would probably be delivered simultaneously. The widow Sorkin would cry. Ah, well, that would do no harm—it might even redound to his own advantage by stirring depths of tenderness in her heart that could not be reached by other means. The Board of Health After all, Gold- stein deserved punishment; and while some of his friends might stigmatize his action as treachery, yet was he not an upright, con- scientious citizen of the community, and was it not his duty to expose such harmful traffic as the selling of poisoned herrings ? Let Goldstein suffer. But the letter to Lazarus! Woe! O Israel, woe! The pen that had laid bare the perfidy of Barraboth hhad confessed the dishonesty of Simkovitz! The same punishment that he had so cunningly contrived to fall upon the head of Barra- both would fall upon his own. Ruin! Dis- honor! The odium of all the East Side! He had even advised imprisonment—he, the independent Simkovitz, heir to half a for- tune. Now he saw the wide doors of the jail yawning to receive him. Oh, misery! Oh, woe! | Ha! An idea! He might yet intercept ”?

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ee TE — Sees The that letter. Lazarus was an old man and slept late. His clerk, the red-haired one Simkovitz remembered him perfectly, he was also sexton of the synagogue—opened the store early every morning. The clerk would see the letter before it reached his master. The clerk—ah, yes! An inspira tion’ He would plead with the clerk, he ld argue with him—if necessary, he 1 bribe him—yes, the clerk had blink lue eyes and looked dishonest. He C wuld be induced to betray his master. ul } ) The store of Moses Lazarus, wholesale dealer in furs, in Canal Street, was closed, but Simkovitz waited. For seven long, weary hours he waited. For seven painful hours he sat silently upon the doorstep waiting for day to come—day and the red- haired clerk who was also sexton of the For seven slow, dragging hours he sat, deep in thought, rehearsing over and over again the manner in which he would ipproach the clerk, the pleas and argu- ments that he would advance, and how much money, as a last resort, he would offer for that precious, incriminating letter. They were more numerous, more tumultuous thoughts than had ever beset his brain before, and that organ gradually grew numb and dazed. It occurred to him that he might go home and obtain a few hours’ sleep; but the bare thought of oversleeping the crucial moment w hen that letter arrived sent cold chills down his spine. He shut his eyes and tried to sleep, sitting there on the doorstep, but the same procession of ideas that he had already reviewed a hundred times began anew to file before his mind, and kept him awake. And so he sat and waited and mused, while one hour after another crawled slowly by, until the sky grew lighter and lighter, and Simkovitz realized that at last the day had dawned. “Hello, Mr. Simkovitz!” cried a cheery voice in Yiddish. “ You are an early busi- ness man.” The red-haired sexton-clerk had arrived. Simkovitz slowly rose to his feet, his joints almost creaking with stiffness and every muscle aching. While the clerk opened the door of the store and removed the shutters, he reviewed for the last time the plan of at- tack that he had decided to pursue and then, with a courage born of desperation, he opened fire. synagogue. Big ‘Tree 551 ‘I just dropped around,” he said, in as calm and matter-of-fact a tone as he could command, “te get a letter that I sent to your employer last night. About a bill. Oh, just a little mistake! I wanted to fix it up before Mr. Lazarus got it, don’t you see ?”’ The clerk’s mouth opened wide and he stared curiously at Simkovitz. Some subtle instinct warned the latter that his plan of at tack had been wrong. His face grew red; he began to stammer an amended explana- tion; he faltered; he hesitated; beads of per- spiration appeared upon his forehead; his countenance paled; tears came to his eyes; and then he broke down. The strain of his long vigil had been too great. “What is the matter, Mr. Simkovitz? You act queer.”’ Simkovitz laid his hands upon the clerk’s shoulders, and with the tears streaming down his face into the wilderness of his long beard, he poured forth the whole tale of his wretchedness. At first the clerk’s face as- sumed an expression of amusement, which gradually gave way to a grin that grew broader and broader until it seemed to in- volve even his heavy shock of red hair. But when Simkovitz came to the cablegram from Russia, the clerk whistled softly. He gazed queerly at Simkovitz through nar- rowed eyelids, and a look of deep cunning came into his face. “You are my friend!” cried Simkovitz. “Don’t vou remember how I always gave you a cigar when I had one to spare? You will save me now, won’t you? I have told you everything! Honest! You will give me that letter? You will, won’t you? I will open it when it comes and show you my signature to prove I wrote it. You are my friend! You will help me?” The clerk gazed at Simkovitz in silence for a moment and slowly that expansive grin again overspread his countenance. He be- stowed upon Simkovitz a wink pregnant with guile. Simkovitz felt icy fingers slowly gathering his heart in their clutch. “How much did your grandfather have ?” “YT don’t know,” answered Simkovitz. He could utter no more. Those icy fingers were slowly encompassing his whole being in their grasp. “Well,” said the clerk, quite cheerfully, “let us wait and see. be here.” A long silence ensued, during which Sim- The postman will soon

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552 kovitz could not take his eyes from the face of the clerk, who sat plunged in deep thought, stroking his chin pensively, oc- casionally casting a wondering glance at his companion. Presently the clerk, with his eyes raised to the ceiling, broke the silence. “Tt must be nice to have some one leave you money.” Simkovitz could not utter a sound. Still addressing the ceiling the clerk launched upon a monologue of disjointed comments, pausing a long while between sentences. “No one ever left me any money.” Pause. “T am thinking of going into business for myself.” Pause. “T have a little capital.” Pause. “ Ah, if some one would only leave me a little money!” Pause. “T really don’t want very much.” Pause. “ About a hundred dollars.” Pause. “Or if I could earn it in some way.” The door opened and the clerk sprang to his feet. Simkovitz tried to rise, too, but his muscles refused to obey his will. It was the postman holding out an envelope upon which Simkovitz swiftly recognized the fatal handwriting. His eyes became glued to the clerk’s face again. The latter gazed long and solemnly at the superscription and then, without a word of warning, tore open the envelope. Simkovitz wanted to scream, but his palate was dry and his throat seemed paralyzed. The red-haired clerk read the letter aloud and made running comments that ran through Simkovitz’s soul like knives. “*The big box of furs that were full of moth-holes.’ Ah, yes! I remember it. Mr. Lazarus was awfully mad about it. If he didn’t have such a high opinion of you he would never have taken it. ‘It was a lie’! What? Mr. Simkovitz, I’m astonished! A fine man like you! Why, that is a prison— but I will finish the letter first. H’m! ‘ Imi- tation beaver’! Terrible! Terrible! It is the worst I ever heard. If Mr. Lazarus ever sees this letter he will call the police.” But Simkovitz had no further comment to make. His ideas were spent. He was gazing at the clerk with the expression of a man who has learned that there can be no Cosmopolitan Magazine reprieve and sees his executioner approach. The clerk calmly folded the letter and put it in his pocket. Then, drawing his chair close to Simkovitz and grinning fiendishly, he whispered, : “A hundred dollars.” Light shone dimly in Simkovitz’s eyes, Here was a faint hope—woefully faint, but still it was hope. “T haven’t got it,’”’ he whispered. “But you will have it—when your fortune comes! I am willing to wait.” © The icy fingers slowly relaxed their hold and Simkovitz felt his heart beating again. He began to wring his hands as if to assure himself that those members had actually come back to life. Then he leaned forward eagerly, “Will you swear it on the Torah ? “Yes. But you must also swear on the Torah that you will pay the money.” Simkovitz tottered to his feet. “Come!” he cried, hoarsely. “We will both swear.” In silence they left the store and wended their way swiftly across the street toward a low brick building whose front bore the double star of Zion and over whose doorway hung the legend, “Synagogue Beth Koh- lem.” The clerk—let us now rather call him the sexton—unlocked the door and they passed down the long aisle of the interior to where the ark stood upon the platform. With reverential hands they drew forth the Scroll of the Law, and Simkovitz, lightly touching the precious relic, raised his voice, “T swear on the Torah to give you a hun- dred dollars when I get the money from Russia, if you don’t tell anybody in the world about that letter and give it back to ” me. Then the sexton, touching the Scroll in his turn, said, “T swear on the Torah that I will wait until you get your money from Russia, and if you give me a hundred dollars I will give you the letter and I will never open my mouth about it.” Upon reaching the sidewalk, Simkovitz wheeled suddenly and shook his fist in the clerk’s face. “ Thief!” he cried. But the clerk only grinned and patted the pocket that contained the letter. After a few hours’ sleep Simkovitz, with many misgivings, set forth to call upon the

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{ : The Big Tree widow Sorkin. Exactly why he went he could not have told. He had not the faint est idea what he would say to her; in fact, he even felt a strong reluctance to see her, for Simkovitz prized his dignity very highly, and he felt, vaguely, that his dignity had become slightly tarnished. But something seemed to drag him to her, some strong, mysterious force that could not be resisted, and, even while he rebelled against its in fluence, he found himself at her door. The widow greeted him with a smile—a quizzi- cal, mocking smile that brought the blood to his cheeks. “You are not yet dead?” she asked laughingly. There was an intonation in her voice that contrasted strangely with the smile upon her lips. He gazed at her curi- ously. What was that glistening in her eyes? Could it be tears? And that asians gladness that he now beheld illumining all her features—what could it mean? He ap- proached her, his eyes wide open, his heart beginning to beat rapidly. She strove to maintain an air of gayety; but the next moment her apron flew to her eyes and all her frame shook with sobbing. Simkovitz rose to the occasion and when, by a simple process (of ancient origin), he had dried the tears in her eyes and the look of happiness had settled upon her face as if it meant to stay there forever, they sat side by side, very close, clasping each other’s hand, and the widow’s head rested very snugly upon Simkovitz’s thrilled shoulder. “T knew you wouldn’t do it!” Simkovitz felt vaguely offended. “T would surely have done it if I hadn’t got a fortune from Russia.” “A fortune?” The widow sat bolt up- right and gazed at Simkovitz in amazement. He told her the whole story, omitting merely a few details that he deemed unnecessary to a clear exposition of the matter; and when he had finished the widow shook her head sadly. “Tenatz, ” she said, “I am sorry! I am really sorry! A fortune is not a good thing for you. All day long you will do no work except eat herrings, which give you the bad stomach and make you feel unhappy. It is better to work hard and eat herrings only on holidays. If you had no fortune you would work hard, and we should be, oh! so happy. When you used to work you had such a good heart and such a sweet temper; but when you made money easy and didn’t have c? JI on much work to do, you always ate herrings and grumbled.”’ Simkovitz stroked his beard thoughtfully. Could it be possible that his recent woes had been caused by lack of industry and surfeit of herrings? Still—a fortune was a fortune. “We will see, liebchen,” he said. “We will see!”” Then, after a long pause, “ Let us get married to-morrow!”’ Two weeks went by—two weeks crowded with happiness for Simkovitz and his wife. Barraboth had taken him back into partner ship, and Simkovitz had thrown himself into his work with an enthusiasm that amazed and delighted both his partner and his wife. Under the dietetic supervision of Mrs. Sim- kovitz, he gradually attained to a levei of health and cheerfulness that he had not known in many years. And, betwixt his duties and his happiness, the inheritance from the fatherland had almost slipped from his memory when, one morning, the postman brought a package fairly covered with Russian postage stamps. The letter was long and rambling, containing all the gossip of the neighborhood and a detailed chronicle of the doings of all his kinsfolk; but the pith of it was all in the first para- graph. * DEAR BrotHer: It was a great shock be- cause we thought he had more. He must have spent a terrible lot. He had many debts. I paid them all, and when I counted up I had 344 rubles left. I inclose a draft on a bank for 172 rubles, which is your share. Also his old silver watch. I keep the silver ring with the brown stone for myself.” Simkovitz read the letter to the end, then turned to the first paragraph and read it over three times. He shut his eyes and made a mental calculation of the relative value of Russian rubles and American dollars, and the quotient that he reached was one hun- dred and three dollars and a few cents. With a dreary sigh he handed the letter to his wife. As she read it her face bright- ened. “So!” she cried, joyfully. “It must be God’s will, after all, that you should not get a fortune all at once! He means that you should work for it. Ignatz, let us be noble! Let us take all this money—it is not much— and give to the good Mr. Lazarus for the poor of his synagogue. To make me happy ?” Simkovitz gazed at her and slowly the tears came into his eves. ; Will you, Ignatz?

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wn cn “Wife,” he said, with a long-drawn sigh, “you do not know. I have never told you. But—but the money is not mine. I have sworn.” With bowed head and in a faltering voice he told her the story of the fatal letter. “And when I have paid that red-haired thief his hundred dollars,”’ he concluded, “ I shall have three dollars left. Shall—shall I give that to Lazarus?” Mrs. Simkovitz, whose eyes had filled with tears during her husband’s heartrend- ing recital and who, once or twice while he was talking, had kissed his hand in silent expression of her loving sympathy, now leaned forward eagerly and cried: “Give it all to that bad man, Ignatz! Let him have every penny! The money can never bring us any luck. I would not even give it to the poor. Get back that terrible letter, and let him keep the money.” Simkovitz arose and kissed his wife upon the forehead. “You are right,” he said, slowly. “ Yes, you are perfectly right.” Since that memorable night that had marked the turning-point in the career of Ignatz Simkovitz, he had avoided Gold- 4 Cosmopolitan Magazine stein. But the Ghetto, after all, is small, and you cannot possibly avoid a man for- ever. So it happened one day that he met his enemy face to face. Goldstein looked prosperous and—a further indication of prosperity—greeted Simkovitz in English. “ Friend Simkovitz, you send by me from the Board of Health the inspector?” Simkovitz drew himself to his full height to meet the reproaches that he felt were about to fall from Goldstein’s lips, and pre- pared to reply with a rebuke that would forever silence the perfidious herring vender. “Came the inspector,” continued Gold- stein, “and says he was recommended by Mr. Simkovitz to buy a herring to take home to eat. And I says: ‘If lives a man who good herrings knows, it is my friend Simkovitz. He is a fine judger.’ So he takes one herring. Comes the next day; comes again the inspector. Another her- ring he buys. Comes the next day, and again he comes. And every day he comes to buy a herring. Sometimes when a party he gives, he buys ten herrings. He is a fine customer. Can’t you send me some more of your friends, Simkovitz?”’ But Simkovitz was speechless. Childless BY ELLA HIGGINSON When my soul’s lamp shall flutter dim and low, Flare, and go out, no child of mine will stand Beside my couch and with a tender hand Caresses on my feeble form bestow, And murmur, weeping, “ Ah, I loved her so!” No child of mine will kiss my frozen cheek Or kneel beside me and a prayer speak For my sad spirit passing lone and slow. But ah, when thro’ the gloom of that last night I have groped somehow, trembling and afraid Of unknown perils in my pathway wild, One will be waiting with her face alight And her lips sweet, as though she long had prayed— My mother—waiting for her childless child! NG 5 Sy tenn

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Insurance in Ancient America Translated from the Work of the Future Historian BY AMBROSE BIERCE ZAAMONG the principal causes of that popular discontent which brought about the stupendous events resulting in the downfall of the great American republic, _ histo- rians and archeologists are now agreed in reckoning in- surance. Of the exact nature (2 S83 of this factor in the problem of national life in that distant day, the fragmentary literature of the period leaves us imperfectly informed; many of its details have perished from human record, yet its outlines loom large through the mist of the ages and can be traced with precision. In the monumental work of Professor Golunk- Dorstro (“Some Account of the Insurance Delusion in Ancient America’’) we have its most considerable modern exposition; and Gakler’s well-known volume, “ The Follies of Antiquity,” contains much interesting matter relating to it. From these and other sources the student of human unreason can reconstruct that astounding fallacy of insur- ance as, from three joints of its tail, the great naturalist Bogramus restored the ancient elephant, from hoof to horn. The game of insurance, as practiced by the ancient Americans (and, as Gakler con- jectures, by some of the tribesmen of Europe), was gambling, pure and simple, despite the sentimental character that its proponents sought to impress upon some forms of it for the greater prosperity of their dealings with its dupes. Essentially, it was a bet between the insurer and the insured. The number of ways in which the wager was made—all devised by the insurer—was almost infinite, but in none of them was there a departure from the intrinsic nature of the transaction as seen in its simplest, frankest form, which we shall here ex- pound. To those unlearned in the economical in- stitutions of antiquity it is necessary to ex- plain that in ancient America, long prior to the Japanese conquest, individual owner- ship of property prevailed; every person Was permitted to get as much as he was able, and to hold it as his own without regard te his needs, or whether he made any good use of it or not. By some plan of dis- tribution not now understood even the habitable surface of the earth, with the minerals beneath, was parceled out among the favored few, and there was really no place except at sea where children of the others could lawfully be born. Upon a part of the dry land that he had been able to acquire, or had leased from another for the purpose, a man would build a house worth, say, ten thousand drusoes. (The ancient unit of value was the “dollar,”’ but nothing is now known as to its actual worth.) Long before the building was complete the owner was beset by “ touts’’ and “ cappers”’ of the insurance game, who poured into his ears the most ingenious expositions of the advantages of betting that it would burn down—for with incredible fatuity the people of that time continued, generation after generation, to build inflammable habita- tions. The persons whom the capper represented—they called themselves an “insurance company’’—stood ready to accept the bet, a fact which seems to have generated no suspicion in the mind of the house-owner. Theoretically, of course, if the house did burn, payment of the wager would partly or wholly recoup the winner of the bet for the loss of his house, but in fact the result of the transaction was com- monly very different. For the privilege of betting that his property would be de- stroyed by fire, the owner had to pay to the gentleman betting that it would not be, a certain percentage of its value every year, called a “premium.’”’ The amount of this was determined by the company, which employed statisticians and actuaries to fix it at sucha sum that, according to the law of probabilities, long before the house was “due to burn,’’ the company would have received more than the value of it in premi- ums. In other words, the owner of the house would himself supply the money to pay his bet, and a good deal more.

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5 wn But how, it may be asked, could the com- pany’s actuary know that the man’s house would last until he had paid in more than its insured value in premiums—more, that is to say, than the company would have to pay back? He could not, but from his statistics he could know how many houses in ten thousand of that kind burned in their first year, how many in their second, their third, and so on. That was all that he needed to know, the house-owners knowing nothing about it. He fixed his rates accord- ing to the facts, and the occasional loss of a bet in an individual instance did not affect the certainty of a general winning. Like other professional gamblers, the company expected to lose sometimes, yet knew that in the long run it must win; which meant that in any special case it would probably win. Witha thousand gambling games open to him in which the chances were equal, the infatu- ated dupe chose to “sit into’? one where they were against him! Deceived by the cappers’ fairy tales, dazed by the complex and incomprehensible “calculations’’ put forth for his undoing, and having ever in the ear of his imagination the crackle and roar of the impoverishing flames, he grasped at the hope of beating—in an un- welcome way, it is true—‘‘the man that kept the table.” He must have known for a certainty that if the company could afford to insure him, he could not afford to Jat it. He must have known that the whole body of the insured paid to the insurers more than the insurers paid to them; otherwise the business could not have been con- ducted. This they cheerfully admitted; indeed, they proudly affirmed it. In fact, insurance companies were the only profes- sional gamblers that had the incredible hardihood to parade their enormous win- nings as an inducement to play against their game. These winnings (“assets,’’ they called them) proved their ability, they said, to pay when they lost; and that was indu- bitably true. What they did not prove, un- fortunately, was the will to pay, which, from the imperfect court records of the period that have come down to us, appears frequently to have been Jacking. Gakler relates that in the instance of the city of San Farisco (somewhat doubtfully identified by Macronus as the modern fishing-village of Gharoo) the disinclination of the insurance companies to pay their bets had the most momentous consequences. 6 Cosmopolitan Magazine In the year 1906, as the ancients reckoned time, San Farisco was totally destroyed by fire. The conflagration was caused by the friction of a pig scratching itself against an angle of a wooden building. More than one hundred thousand persons perished, and the loss of property is estimated by Kobo-Do- garque at one and a half million drusoes. On more than two-thirds of this enormous sum the insurance companies had laid bets, and the greater part of it they refused to pay. In justification they pointed out that the deed performed by the pig was “an act of God,” who in the analogous instance of the express companies had been specifically forbidden to take any action affecting the interests of parties to a contract, or the re- sult of an agreed undertaking. In the ensuing litigation their attorneys cited two notable precedents. Several years before the San Farisco disaster, another American city had experienced a similar one through the upsetting of a lamp by the kick of a cow. In that case, also, the insurance companies had successfully denied their liability on the ground that the cow, manifestly incited by some supernatural power, had unlawfully influenced the result of a wager to which she was not a party. The companies defendant had contended that the recourse of the property-owners was against, not them, but the owner of the cow. In his decision sustaining that view and dismissing the case, a learned judge (afterward president of one of the defendant companies) had in the legal phraseology of the period pronounced the action of the cow an obvious and flagrant instance of “ butt- ing in.” Kobo- Dogarque believes that this decision was afterward reversed by an appellate court of opposite political com- plexion and the companies were compelled to compromise, but of this there is no record. It is certain that in the San Farisco case the precedent was triumphantly urged. Another precedent which the companies cited with a particular emphasis related to an unfortunate occurrence at a famous mil- lionaires’ club in London, the capital of the renowned king, Jon Bul. A gentleman passing in the street fell in a fit and was carried into the club in convulsions. Two members promptly made a bet upon his life. A physician who chanced to be pres- ent set to work upon the patient, when one of the members who had laid the wager came forward and restrained him, saying:

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Insurance in “Sir, I beg that you will attend to your own business. I have my money on that fit.” Doubtless these two notable precedents did not constitute the entire case of the de- fendants in the San Farisco insurance litiga- tion, but the additional arguments are lost to us. It is known only that after many years of bitter litigation public patience was exhausted and a comparatively trivial occurrence fired the combustible elements of popular indignation to a white heat in which the entire insurance business of the country was burned out of existence, together with all the gamblers who had in- vented and conducted it. The president of one of the defaulting companies was walk- ing one morning in a street of the new San Farisco, when he had the bad luck to step on the tail of a dog and was bitten in retaliation. Frenzied by the pain of the wound he gave the creature a savage kick and it ran howl- ing toward a group of idlers in front of a grocery store. In ancient America the dog was a sacred animal, worshiped by all sorts and conditions of tribesmen. The idlers at once raised a great cry and setting upon the offender beat him so that he died. Their act was infectious: men, women, and children trooped out of their dwellings by thousands to join them, brandishing what- ever weapons they could snatch, and utter- ing wild cries of vengeance. This formidable mob overpowered the police, and marching from one insurance office to another, suc- cessively demolished them all, slew such officers as they could lay hands on, and chased the fugitive survivors into the sea, “where,” says a quaint chronicle of the time, “they were eaten by their kindred, the sharks.” This carnival of violence continued all the day, and at set of sun not one person connected with any form of insurance remained alive. Ferocious and bloody as was the massa- cre, it was only the beginning. As the news of it went blazing and coruscating along the wires by which intelligence was then conveyed across the country, city after city caught the contagion. Everywhere, even in the small hamlets and the agricultural dis- tricts, the dupes rose against their dupers. The smoldering resentment of years burst into flame, and within a week all that was left of insurance in America was the record of a monstrous and cruel delusion written in the blood of its promoters. Ancient America 57 wn Students of the history of those troublous times need not be told what other and bloodier events logically followed that awful reprisal, until the whole stupendous edifice of popular government, temple and citadel of all fallacies and abuses, crashed to ruin, and among its fallen columns and scat- tered stones gave shelter to a diminishing population of skulking anarchists, who finally vanished from history into a dark- ness impenetrable to conjecture. It remains only to say in justice that of the many forms of gambling known of old as insurance, the kind called life insurance appears to have been most nearly a “square game.” In essence it was the same as fire insurance, marine insurance, accident in- surance, and so forth, with an added offen- siveness in that it was a betting on human lives—commonly by the policy-holder on lives that should have been most sacred to him and all the more immune from any taint of traffic. But it seems to have a just claim to the second place in the scale of crime indicated in an epigram of the period: “The next worse thing to an insur- ance business dishonestly conducted is an insurance business conducted honestly.” So far as we of to-day have knowledge of the matter, life insurance was conducted as honest gambling, as to both payment of bets and distribution of winnings. If accu- sations to the contrary were made they have not come down to us; the ink in which they were written has faded from the scroll of history. The only writer of antiquity who is known to have mentioned them at any considerable length is Tomlawson, nick- named, for some unknown reason, “the Bostonian,” an author of great repute in that age, according to Ginkler. From cer- tain fragments of the Bostonian’s work that were extant in Ginkler’s day, that acute historian inferred that life insurance was free from the base practices characterizing kindred forms of gambling, and that the care and investment of its profits were a trust honorably administered by those hav- ing them in custody — whom the elder author names. It is no small distinction to have been chosen by one’s country’s gods to instate in the seats of honor the philan- thropists and benefactors worthy to sit in what the greatest and most original of our contemporary poets has called, ‘The fierce light that beats upon a throne.”

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An Age of Common Sense BY ELBERT HUBBARD RYUTHER BURBANK, wiz- #): ard extraordinary, has re- cently made the very interest- ing statement that the one important factor in the evo- lution of a plant is environ- ment; and, moreover, in his mind, a man is merely a movable plant—the life of both man and plant having the same source. Heredity relates to the physical parentage of the individual. Environment can overcome, in degree, even adverse hereditary conditions. Heredity, itself, is a matter of environ- ment, and is always secondary to it. Unless environment be propitious, propagation is impossible. Hence the dictum of Bentham that marriages in England are in exact ratio to the price of corn. Love is a matter of physical conditions, and the quality of the love hinges on the environment. People who eat, drink, work, and play in a certain way, love in a certain way, and to prophesy how is not difficult. If they have children, these, living under similar conditions, are like their parents. Under a different environment the children become different from their parents. Hence, all progress hinges on a betterment of environment. The so-called law of heredity is a fatuous, foggy hypothesis, gratuitous and conjec- tural; but the law of environment is sure and absolute, and its results can be foretold with almost mathematical certainty. An Indian baby adopted by white parents before it is two years old will grow up with the manners, habits, and even the prejudices of its foster parents; while, on the other hand, a white child adopted by Indians grows up a savage, without ambition, aspira- tion, or the discontent that makes for suc- cess. And so the proposition is this: Environ- ment can overcome the strongest tendencies of heredity, and in heredity with a sameness of environment no progress is possible. The first great discovery made by man was that wood floats on water. That iron 558 will float, too, was not known until our own time. The making ships of wood is now practically a thing of the past. The second great discovery, but the very first in importance, was that friction will produce fire. It was a man by the name of Prometheus who made this discovery, and the legend has it that the gods were so jealous that they got right after him and he was stricken with liver complaint. That phosphorus would ignite with a very slight degree of friction was not known until yes- terday, and, lo! we have the parlor match. The treatment accorded to Prometheus by the gods proves to us that the gods are only men grown big, after all—a thing we have always suspected. The gods want no competition—they are monopolists—“ lest ye become as gods!”’ A very serious propo- sition, indeed; and so gods and men have always labored to keep strong men down and under. Genius is an offense. In 1878 I heard a professor of physics at Harvard lay down this syllogism: “All light is caused by combustion. There can be no fire without oxygen. Therefore, the sun is surrounded by oxygen.” From this he flung in the gratuity that the moon is a heavenly cadaver, having used up her oxygen. It was on October 6, 1879, at Menlo Park, New Jersey, that a man succeeded in sending a current of electricity through a thread in a vacuum, and called in wild de- light to his helpers in an adjoining room, “Come quick, boys; I’ve got it—I’ve got it!” He feared it would only last an instant. It lasted for forty-eight hours and not a man of the six watchers closed his eyes in sleep during that time. “No light without fire!’? Why, we pro- duce light, heat, and power now from a waterfall, with the thermometer at zero. “Lest ye become as gods!’? They had reason to fear, for they foresaw a day when men will drill Olympus full of holes with pneumatic drills and blow her to flinders by pressing a button. Emerson said that men are gods in ruins. What he meant was that a man is a god in knickerbockers.

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le HE speed and spirit with which the intrepid Jack Lon- don attacks any brisk bit of adventure are well known. He has already done a great many astonishing things, and has written about them in his own inimitable way. Now he is preparing to outdo him- self. He is going to sail around the world in a little boat with Mrs. London, and will doubtless have many inter- esting things to record. When the CosMOPOLITAN learned that Jack London was planning for this voyage, its editor immediately arranged with him to let this magazine have the exclusive story of his wanderings about the world. Work was begun on the building of the boat in San Francisco in February last and has con- tinued up to the present time, although it was somewhat delayed by the earthquake and fire. We are able to lay before our readers some of Mr. London’s characteristic com- ments on his proposed adventure as con- tained in letters to the editor. The first letter was written from San Francisco on February 18th of this year and in it Mr. London says: a y a Y IM IA FZ _ The keel is laid. The boat is to be forty- five feet long. It would have been a little bit shorter had I not found it impossible to squeeze in a bathroom otherwise. I sail in October. Hawaii is the first port of call; and from there we shall wander through the South Seas, Samoa, Tasmania, New Zealand, Australia, New Guinea, and up through the Philippines to Japan. Then Korea and China, and on down to India, Red Sea, Mediter- ranean, Black Sea and Baltic, and on across the Atlantic to New York, and then around the Horn to San Francisco. You can take a look at the inap and get an idea of the different countries I'll stop at along the way. I shall certainly put in a winter in St. Petersburg, and the chances are that I shall go up the Danube from the Black Sea to Vienna, and there isn’t a Euro- pean country in which I shall not spend from one to several months. This leisurely fash- ion will obtain throughout the whole trip. I shall not be in a rush. This boat is to be sailed by one friend and myself. There will be no sailors. My wife accompanies me. Of course, I'll take a cook along, and a cabin-boy; but these will be Asiatics, and will have no part in the sailorizing. The rig of the boat will be a compromise between a yawl and a schooner. It will be what is called the ketch-rig—the same rig that is used by the English fishing- boats on the Dogger Bank. I shall have a small engine on board, to be used only in case of emergency, such as in bad water among reefs and shoals, where a sudden calm in a fast current leaves a sail- boat helpless. Also, this engine is to be used for another purpose. When I strike a coun- try, say Egypt or France, I'll take the mast out and go up the Nile or the Seine under the power of the engine. I shall do this a great deal in the different countries—travel inland and live on board the boat at the same time. There is no reason at all why I shouldn’t in this fashion come up to Paris, and moor alongside the Latin Quarter, with a bow-line out to Notre Dame and a stern- line fast to the Morgue. . . . No writer of prominence, in the days of his prominence, has ever gone sailing around the world. Even Stevenson, in his South Sea cruise on the Casco, took a large boat and carried captain and crew; was himself the veriest passenger. But here I take a small boat, and with one friend, a man sixty years of age, navigate this boat around the world. rhere will be no sailors whatever; there will 559

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560 Cosmopolitan Magazine be. no sailing-m aster whatever. This friend, who is my wife’s uncle, and I will do all the navigating and all the sailorizing ourselves. We expect lots of action Sincerely yours, Jack Lonpon. Mr. London’s plan was to sail out of San Francisco on his long voyage-not later than October 1st, and it may be that he will be able to do so, although the earthquake interfered somewhat with his preparations. On June roth the adventurous voyager wrote as follows: While I still expect to get under way by October ‘Ist, mevert s the earthquake knocked the boat galley-west for the time being. It is only now that I am beginning to learn how much galley-west it was knocked. For instance, the hardwood for the ribs and timbers [I had thought was at the _ boat- builder’s at time of earthquake. Instead of that, it was in a freight-car on the wai from the East, and would have arrived two days after the earthquake every mer- chant in San Francisco ral ordered carloads of stock from the East. These thousands of carloads arriving before the merchants had a place to receive their con- tents, caused a frightful congestion, and I have just now managed to locate ar, sidetracked with a few thousand at Bakersfield The same way with the planking for the boat, that was coming down from Puget Sound This planking was ordered e best It \ pressly, in order to get the in San Francisco at the time of the h quake. Very fortunately it escaped being commandeered by government troops, and has just now, after all sorts of adventures, arrived at the boat-builder’s. And so with everything else. Nevertheless, by rushing matters I am still confident that I’ll get away October Ist. But it’s going to be a rush! As soon as I[ have some of the ribs up, and 1 a couple of planks, I'll have a picture taken But your plan of having me photographed with the boat won’t work just now. You can’t get me in juxtaposition with the boat when there ain’t no boat. sincerely yours, ~ Jack Lonpon. We feel sure our readers will agree with us that the series of articles which Jack London will write about his extraordinary voyage is likely to be the best he has ever written. He thinks so himself, and he is a very fair judge of his own work. One refreshing feature of the descrip- tion of the voyage will be quotations from sealed letters to be sent to Mr. London by prominent people all over the world. The envelopes containing these letters will be inscribed: ‘To be opened on the approach of a storm,” “To be opened when you sight Hawaii,” “To be opened in your saddest hour,” and so forth. Our readers will doubtless look forward with keen an- ticipation to the publication of these very unusual communications. ; & The accumulated evidence, by word and by letter, is all to the effect that, aside from “The Treason of the Senate,’”’ the Cosmo- POLITAN has published no series of arti that has held the interest of so many readers as that published under the title of ‘What Life Means to Me.” So ext dinary has been this interest that we ha been flooded with requests for back num- bers containing the widely read and often quoted articles by Jack London, in the March number, John Burroughs, in Ay nil, Edwin Markham, in June, and Julia Wa Howe, in July. It is rarely that large numbers of any one issue of a magazine are ordered by pe rsons not in the pe riodical trade, and it is with sat- isfaction that we set down the fact that hur dreds of extra copies of the Jack acim “ What-Life-Means-to-Me” article were ordered by private individuals, and many large orders were received for the magazines containing the Burroughs, Markham, a nd Howe essays. One physician ordered a thousand copies of the April number con- taining the Burroughs article. A limited number of copies of the maga- zine containing the “ What-Life-Means-to- Me” articles are still on hand, and will be supplied to readers at ten cents each. rd For months all eyes have been turned Westward, watching the building of the City Beautiful by the Golden Gate. James D. Phelan is a Californian writer of consid- erable prominence, who is at the same time a man of affairs in San Francisco and an authority on the subject of the rebuilding of the Pacific Coast metropolis. He has been making a close study of the rehabilitation of the fire-swept city, and his article on the “ Rise of the New San Francisco,” which is to appear in the October number, will be of great interest and of unusual value from the fact that he has peculiar advantages for the production of such a paper. ,

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The Last Laugh BY HARRY L. COHN Frontispiece illustration by J. N. Marchand IM THORPE was one of fy Alaska’s “bad men.” Twice he had been before the bar of justice, charged with serious crimes; but each time he had 1 managed to go free. These successes made him bold, ka but when he robbed the Kes} sluice boxes on number three % above discovery on Real Gold Creek, he was recognized, and was afterwards arrested by Frank Souva, the deputy United States marshal at Fairbanks. Souva had arrested Thorpe on both of his former experiences, and had furnished the evidence against him. There was no ques- tion as to his guilt this time, as sufficient testimony could be procured to prove it. Jails in interior Alaska were not as secure as those on the coast; neither had jailers had as much experience in watching prison- ers as elsewhere. It was only humane, thought the jailer at Fairbanks, to allow a barrel of water to stand in the main part of the jail. So also thought Thorpe, as he took one of the hoops and fashioned it into a saw with the aid of which he escaped. There were only three reasonable avenues of escape from Fairbanks: Nome, Dawson, and Valdez. Thorpe was familiar with the Dawson trail and this he chose. Six weeks after his escape he was arrested at Eagle, as he was trying to make his way over the boundary line. Here he was held until the Fairbanks officers could come for him. It was Souva who came. “Tough old sport,” said the jailer when the deputy marshal announced his inten- tion of returning with Thorpe over the ice. “Better let him board with me until the river opens.” “Rats! When the river opens he will be doing his ‘ bit’ down at McNeil’s Island.” “ Better look out for him; I tell you he’s tough.” “The tougher they are the better I like ‘em. I’ve known this fellow for some years.” There was a touch of braggadocio in the officer’s voice, but the jailer did not notice it. He knew Souva too well for that. Thorpe, sitting in his cell, could hear the conversation between the two men, and when he noted Souva’s determination to take him back over the ice, he managed to allow the scowl to relax, while the ghost of a smile played about his mouth. In such a plan there could not help being an element of chance, and he welcomed it. It was sixty below zero when they started. A heavy fog obscured all objects, but this did not interfere with their progress long, for as soon as they struck the river- bed, where the wind had lifted the frosty mist, the atmosphere was fairly clear. The ice was practically free from snow, just enough remaining to give the dogs a firm footing. All that day they traveled, stop- ping only long enough to boil some tea. Nothing other than was absolutely neces- sary was said between the two. Their loose parkas flapped against their bodies, but if either felt the severe cold he said nothing. Occasionally one of the dogs would give an excited yelp, which would be echoed by the rest of the pack. A convenient place was found to spend 561

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562 the night, and a camp was made. Souva had figured that he would arrive at the Red Fox road-house by nightfall, but he had not reckoned with the wind. The dogs were plainly tired, and so were the men, so he concluded to stop where they were. The dogs’ feed was cooked; and when their own scant meal of beans and tea had been consumed, Souva placed shackles on both the arms and feet of Thorpe, at which the prisoner complained. To this com- plaint, however, Souva was deaf. In the morning Thorpe refused to assist in the preparations for departure when requested to do so by Souva. “You don’t treat me like and I won’t work,” he said. “You don’t deserve even the a white man treatment officer. you are getting,” replied the “Where are those handcuffs ?” Thorpe did not answer, and Souva looked about him carefully. A hole in the bank of snow showed where Thorpe had thrown them “Go and dig them out,” said the officer, but Thorpe did not move. Souva did not waste words, but with a heavy blow from his fist brought the man to the ground, where he lay in about two feet of loose snow. As he attempted to rise, Souva again threw him back, so that he was completely hidden. At last he allowed Thorpe to get to his feet. “Go and get those irons,” said the officer, and this time Thorpe complied with the request. “Tf you will behave yourself I won’t put them on you while we are on the trail, but if you get gay again they go on both your hands and your feet and you ride the sled.” Thorpe understood the threat; one could only keep warm in the open on such a day by either running or walking. It was colder than the day before, and both men shivered as they prepared to start. As they turned a bend in the river, the lead-dog stopped of his own accord, whin- ing and looking back expectantly, as though waiting for further orders. Near the place, but on the other side, the river was open, and between the open water and where the men now stood, the ice was clear of snow. The wind came down the river like a hurri- cane. Souva unstrapped from the side of the sled two long steel- pointed prods and handed one of them to Thorpe. As they Cosmopolitan Magazine started again, the wind seemed to pick them up and hurl them to the side where the water was, but Souva guided the leader well into the bank where some footing was to be had. Once or twice, dogs and load started to slide across the ice, but the men were able to check them by setting their prods down firmly. It was unnerving work. They could not stop in the gale, for it was impossible to start a fire, and without one they would freeze. The dogs, too, realized the trouble; they had encountered glare ice before. Finally they came to a small bank and stopped. Souva went forward to adjust one of the dog-harnesses, and as he stooped down a leaping shadow caused him to jump aside. The pole, held by Thorpe, crashed onto the ice. The men stood looking at each other. “Tt would please me more than I can ex- press, to put a bullet in you,” said Souva. “You have told me that before.” “Yes, and I will do it, too, if you are not careful. Hold out those hands.” Thorpe made no move to obey the com- mand. Souva laid his hand on his revolver. “Jim, I have stood for just about Thorpe held out his mittened hands and the officer locked the handcuffs upon them. “Ought to put irons on your feet, too, and I will if you make another break.” Thorpe had been walking ahead of Souva, holding the handles at the back of the sled. He continued to walk in the same position, but now he held one handle with both hands. Another bend in the river could be seen where the banks appeared high enough to afford some protection from the wind, and there Souva decided tostop if it were possible to light a fire. The dogs recognized the pos- sible shelter, for they increased their speed. Suddenly, as they attempted to cross the mouth of a small creek, a tributary of the river, the wind struck them with renewed force, and dogs, sled, and men were forced across the ice toward the open water. “Take these things off and I’ll help you,” cried Thorpe as they started. Souva made no answer. “Give me a prod,” again cried the pris- oner. “To hell with you! you good.” But the matter-of-fact tone was belied by the manner in which the officer frantically A ducking will do

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drove his prod into the ice. Try as he would, the wind swept them along. Finally the leader caught a tuft of snow hang- ing to a snag, and whirled, running against the wind. The slide of the dogs and sled was broken, but not that of the men. Thorpe’s hands slipped off the handles, he fell to the ice and was borne in the direction of the water. Souva managed to check him- self. Nothing was said. The handcuffed man slid slowly in the direction of the running water. Then Souva started after him. Neither was now a dozen feet from the water. Souva came to a standstill and planted his prod firmly in the ice; again he thrust it in the same place. This small excavation gave his moccasined foot some hold and the officer leaned out, pointing the prod to the other man. _Thorpe was not more than two feet from the water when he reached up both hands and grasped the pole. Before Souva could pull him back to safety, his legs were wet to the knees. The dogs stood at the opposite bank, whining and looking back at the men. Souva placed Thorpe in front of him and pushed him against the wind. The pris- oner’s feet were soon in a solid case of ice. “Some day I will have you where I want you,” said Thorpe, as he was bundled onto the sled, and the dogs started forward at full speed. “Sooner have a fire right now to thaw out those toes, wouldn’t you?” asked Souva, with a malicious grin. They reached the bank and Souva quickly gathered what dry wood he could find about and heaped it together. The first match went out, and he bent over the twigs with more caution when he tried the second. A small blaze shot up, and he bent over to blow upon it. As he did so, Thorpe, who had crawled from the sled, struck at him with his manacled hands. Souva dodged just in time to receive the blow on his shoulder, almost stunning him. The fire was burning in a feeble manner, and Souva took out his revolver and point- ing it at the prisoner ordered him to hold out his arms. Thorpe did so and the hand- cuffs were unlocked. _ “Put your arms about that tree,” said Souva, pointing to a small pine which stood near them. “You were never a fellow to give anyone The Last Laugh 563 a show,” snarled the prisoner. ‘“ Wouldn’t do that even when we was kids.”’ “Hurry up!” answered Souva. The prisoner put his arms around the tree, and the handcuffs were again locked upon his wrists. Both men stood still. The cold was intense, and inactivity without a good fire meant death. “Guess you will be good for a few min- utes,” said Souva, glaring at the back of the man. “If you could have fixed me this way when we was kids, Frank,” said the prisoner at last, “maybe you could have got Anna, after all.” Pinched and cold as the officer’s face was, it burned when the prisoner uttered these words. Then a whiteness as of the snow settled in its place. Without a word he walked to where the man stood locked to the tree, and slapped him on the face; then he repeated the blow with added force. “Guess I ought to kill you,” said Souva, “and I would, only that would prevent that much-needed vacation down at McNeil’s.” Thorpe was not the man to take a blow without retaliation. One of his frozen feet shot out backward and landed in the pit of Souva’s stomach. The prisoner smiled as he heard Souva fall with a groan. Then he stood still, waiting whatever punishment Souva might see fit to inflict upon him. As none came, he began to grow uneasy. Standing as he was he could not see Souva, although he twisted his head trying to do so. Then he commenced to circle the tree with his arms outstretched. Every movement caused needle-like pains to shoot through his body, of which he knew the meaning. At last he stood facing the officer, who lay as he had first fallen. Thorpe smiled. Then he looked at the kindling, and noticed the fire had gone out. The smile died away. “Well, get up, you big baby,” he said at last. Souva did not stir. “Guess I’ve got myself in a hell of a boat,” he muttered. The dogs stood whining in their harnesses, whining and trembling with cold. Thorpe regarded Souva with a sort of fascination. He seemed to grow to immense proportions. The ice hanging to his mus- tache seemed of itself bigger than the man. The eyes were partly open, and the head was propped up so that they regarded Thorpe with a vacant stare.

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564 “Don’t look much like he did when he was a kid,” muttered the outlaw, as he stamped on the ground. Then it dawned upon him that his limbs were growing numb and that this numbness was gradually creeping up. He well knew its meaning, yet he was not the one to cry out. It was not his first day in Alaska. Help could not come along the river without his seeing it. Se he began jumping up and down, working his elbows out and in to keep up circulation. The tree was but a small one, and it oc- curred to him that it might be possible for him to climb to the top or at least far enough up to break it down, thus freeing himself. It proved hard work, but he started up, holding on with knees and elbows. The first branch was passed after great effort. But as he went higher the wind struck him, Cosmopolitan Magazine going to the very bones. He was growing numb all over, and he saw that his strength would not last until he could get to the top. So he started down, but his knees could no longer hold to the tree and he dropped. The first limb he had passed caught his arms and held him suspended in mid-air, The weight of his heavily clad body was almost wrenching his arms from their sock- ets, but this he did not notice. His head was leaning forward, his eyes on a direct line with those of the frozen officer. Thorpe was drowsy. The effort was not worth while. He wanted to sleep—sleep with his eyes open, watching his old play- mate. He wanted to dream of the days when he and Souva had attended the same country school. One of the dogs howled, but neither of the men heard. The Cold-Storage Chick Dr TWIN by E. Warde Blaisdell E WARDE BIAISDELS Rooster: Well, well; icicles in August! How does that happen ? Chick: Please, sir, I was hatched from a cold-storage egg.

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