Tom Watson's Magazine, Vol. I, No. 4

Poverty

BY JOHN H. GIRDNER, M.D.

I HAVE just read Mr. Robert Hunter’s book entitled “Poverty.” It contains much valuable information, mostly in the form of statistics and references to other publications concerning the poor in different parts of the United States and England. It is a good book of reference; but to my mind its principal virtue is as a thought provoker. The question, “What are you going to do about poverty?” stares the reader in the face from between the lines on every page, and it haunts him after he has laid the book aside.

We of the United States are accustomed to boast of our material wealth and prosperity. When the writer or the orator wishes to wring the hearts of his audience and deceive them into the belief that ours, as conducted at present, is the very best of all governments, he draws a harrowing picture of the dreadful suffering of the poor of London; and then we pull the Stars and Stripes a little more closely about us, and, as that other Pharisee, we thank God that we are not like other men. Before we shed any more tears over the poor of London let us see if we cannot find use for our tears nearer home.

Mr. Charles Booth made a thorough and exhaustive investigation into the conditions of poverty in London in 1891. He found that 1,300,000, or about 30 per cent. of the population of that city were unable to obtain the necessaries of life. This 30 per cent. were “living in conditions, if not of actual misery, at any rate bordering upon it.”

Mr. B. S. Rountree made a similar investigation in the typical provincial town of York, England. He found that about 28 per cent. of the inhabitants of York were living in destitution. Mr. Rountree adds: “We have been accustomed to look upon the poverty of London as exceptional, but when the result of careful investigation shows that the proportion of poverty in London is practically equaled in what may be regarded as a typical provincial town, we are forced to the startling probability that from 25 to 30 per cent. of the town populations of the United Kingdom are living in poverty.”

Let us turn from England to the United States, and see how much poverty there is in our own country, among our own workmen, or producing class.

The report of the State Board of Charities for New York State shows that an average of about 26 per cent. of the population were aided, by both private and public charities, during each of the three years 1897, 1898 and 1899; and according to the report of the official statistician of the city of Boston for 1903 more than 20 per cent. of the entire population of that city were aided by the public authorities alone. This does not include private charities. In fact, all statistics of charitable works are defective, because they can never include the efforts to relieve suffering and poverty made by those who do not let the left hand know what the right hand is doing.

Commenting on the above statistics from Boston and New York State, Mr. Hunter says: “If the figures are correct as published, the persons in New York State in distress in 1897, and in Boston in 1903, would equal proportionately the number of those in poverty in London.”

Here are other facts about poverty worth remembering: “In the face of widespread poverty, there have not been for over half a century in England so few paupers, either actually or proportionately, as there are now. The population of England has increased from 18,000,000 persons in 1851 to 29,000,000 in 1889. During this period the number of paupers actually fell off. London has lost in pauper population fifteen times as fast as she has gained in general population.”

On the other hand, the returns from the almshouses in the United States show that the number of paupers increased almost as fast as population during the decade from 1880 to 1890. In Hartford, Conn., which is said to be the richest per capita city in the United States, the number of paupers increased 50 per cent. during this same decade.

Now, when you hear a Republican spellbinder draw harrowing word-pictures of poverty among the English workmen, and paint glowing pictures of the marvelous wealth and happy condition of the workmen in our own country, and when you read editorials in subsidized protectionist newspapers about the “miseries of the working classes” in free trade England and the great prosperity among the highly protected workmen of the United States, just remember that according to the best information obtainable about twenty-five to thirty persons out of every hundred living in the towns and cities both in England and the United States suffer from poverty. And for the past forty years poverty has steadily decreased in England and steadily and rapidly increased in the United States. And no amount of ranting by the spellbinder or misrepresentation by the editor can alter these facts.

Mr. Hunter is of the opinion that 70,000 New York children go to school underfed. This statement caused astonishment and doubt in some quarters. But I contend that any trained physician who will note the very large percentage of anemic faces among the children as they issue from the public schoolhouses of this city will agree with me that Mr. Hunter’s estimate of 70,000 underfed children is most likely far below the mark.

The Children’s Aid Society and other charitable organizations maintain a number of industrial schools for poor children in this city. The total daily average of children attending these schools is 10,707. Inspector Lecktrecker recently made a thorough investigation into the condition of these children. Mr. Lecktrecker’s report goes into great detail. Summed up, the report shows that of the 10,707 children attending these industrial schools 8,852 are actually underfed by reason of poverty at home. It was found that the best breakfast that any of these 8,852 children had was a piece of bread and a cup of tea or coffee. A diet not only inadequate for nourishment, but actually destructive to a child’s nervous system.

A grown-up person only requires enough nourishment to repair the waste, wear and tear incident to the daily activities of brain and muscle. A child not only requires this, but it requires added nourishment for the growth and development of all the tissues of its body. No wonder we are raising up a class of people in this city which I have called in another place “Newyorkitics.” No wonder there is an ever-increasing procession of broken-down brains and nervous systems heading for the hospitals for insane. No wonder that crime is on the increase. What better can be expected from adults whose brains and nerves have been starved and stunted from birth?

But what exactly is poverty? Destitution of property; indigence; want of convenient means of subsistence; need. That is what the dictionary says poverty is. Want of convenient means of subsistence is the want of some one or all of the five chemical substances called proximate principles, which we take and must have to sustain animal life. The continual absence of these chemical substances from the human stomach, together with lack of clothing sufficient to protect the body against the elements, causes physical pain or suffering with degeneration and final death of the animal body. This is a literal scientific definition of the word poverty as applied to the animal or material man.

The adulteration of food which is carried on to such an alarming extent in the United States is an important factor in this poverty or underfeeding question. Even those who are able to buy a sufficient quantity of food have no assurance that the quality is such as will properly nourish their bodies.

When you satisfy the cravings of hunger by putting into the human stomach watered milk, or cheese which is part wax, or sugar mixed with plaster of Paris, or chocolate which contains only a suggestion of the rich cacao beans, or any of the adulterated articles of food for sale especially in the poorer sections of the city, you not only tax the system to digest and dispose of a quantity of useless and maybe poisonous material, but every tissue in the body is thereby robbed of its proper nourishment.

It is as much, or more, poverty and underfeeding to fill the stomach with material which does not contain the five proximate principles, i.e., nourishment, as not to fill it at all. The laws against substitution and adulteration of human food and drink ought to be more stringent than the laws against horse stealing. Yet, as I am informed, all efforts at such legislation are invariably met with the cry that it will interfere with the business interests of the country. Here, as in so many other instances, when an attempt is made to secure common justice and protection for the lives and property and rights of the plain people, we run up against the business interests. The curse of this country today is that everything, even human life, must be sacrificed when necessary to the business interests.

The industry captains are killing and maiming the people now just as the military captains used to do, and for the same objects—to satisfy greed and selfishness.

The negro slave in the South in slavery days was further removed from poverty and the fear of poverty than any man I have ever known. When his day’s work was finished he came home from the field or the shop and he found a substantial, well-cooked dinner awaiting him. After dinner he went to his comfortable cabin and sat before a blazing log fire, or, in warm weather, he sat out under the stars, fanned by the night winds. His wife and children were nearly always around him, as were his companions, the other slaves belonging to his master and the plantation.

This man did not have a single care or responsibility on earth. He did not have to meet a grinding landlord next day demanding rent. He did not have to cudgel his brains to find a way to meet a note due next week. He did not have to pay for food, clothes, light and heat for himself and his family. That pang of anguish so familiar to us all when we think of the possibility of our loved ones suffering from want and the fear of want when we are gone never wrung the heart of that black man. Child labor as it exists under the present system was unknown to the children of the black slaves. “Over the hills to the poor-house,” when age and decrepitude had made him no longer useful, had no terrors for the black slave. The “system” of slavery made it perfectly certain that his owner would provide food, clothes and shelter for him in his old days, and for his children, no matter what happened. This black man, slave as he was, had a better guarantee against poverty and the fear of poverty for himself and family than any life insurance company can give. Even Mr. Tom Lawson could not find fault with the security of this policy.

Another thing the slave father did not have to worry about was sickness in his family. When one of his children became ill an ambulance from a charity hospital did not back up in front of the negro quarters, cart the child off to become one patient more in Ward No. ——, and serve as “material” for a clinical lecture while it lived, and as “material” for the dissecting-table after it was dead. No, nothing of the kind happened. When the slave became ill the best medical skill and nursing were provided, and, if need be, the patient was taken to the “big house” where the master lived so the mistress could superintend the treatment, and in case of death the body was put in a neat coffin, and a procession composed of all the blacks and whites on the plantation followed the remains to the colored graveyard on the hill, burial services were read, a hymn sung and the body lowered to its final resting-place. This is a glimpse at the condition of the slave in life and death in slavery days. I am not putting in a brief in favor of chattel slavery. I was born an abolitionist. My father was a slave-owner and my early life was spent in the midst of it, yet I abhorred the system as a child, and that abhorrence has grown with years. But I am now writing about poverty, and my point is: that chattel slavery as it existed in the South is the only state of society I know of in which poverty and the fear of poverty among the workers or producing class were absolutely abolished by law.

Under the old system the negro was a slave, you say. So he was. But if I read Mr. Hunter’s book aright, the laborer under the present industrial system is also a slave. The laborer has a vote now and the slave did not. Yes, but the slave had a full dinner-pail all the time and the white voting laborer has not. The comparative value between his vote and a full dinner-pail in the mind of the white laborer under the present system was demonstrated in the election of 1896 and 1900, when he gladly gave his vote to the Republican Party for the mere promise of a full dinner-pail.

Tuck-of-Drum

BY ALFRED TRESIDDER SHEPPARD
(Copyright in Great Britain by A. T. Sheppard.)

AT nine o’clock Josephine beat a vigorous reveille on the drum that had led old troops into action. It was the second of December; the sun of Austerlitz shone on the grass and trees in the little front white garden, and was fast melting the delicate tracery of fern and frond on the oval window of Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum’s bedroom.

A curious name, Tuck-of-Drum; the echo of an ancient story told round camp-fires long burned out; a scrap of wreckage floating, like its owner, when the seas of years held so much that was forgotten. Dominique Laplume was proud of the name; for even the village children, whispering “Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum” behind his back, brought the flicker of a smile to his grizzled face and the ghost of a flash to eyes dim and watery with age.

On Austerlitz day, for many years, the drum had roused him from his slumbers. He had slept heavily, this old warrior; “a thousand thunders!” he said sometimes in self-excuse, “when one has made one’s bed as often on straw or the solid ground——”

His son, growing from childhood to manhood, plied the drumsticks in his time; he fell at Solferino. His son’s son held them in his turn; the earth still lay bare and trampled over him at Gravelotte. They had given much to France, these Laplumes. Now Josephine, with her black sleeves rolled high on her thin white arms, and her dimpled face set into desperate earnestness, took her dead father’s place, and thundered at the parchment until the old man’s husky voice answered the summons.

Her sabots clattered down the stairs. Coughing and grunting, Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum began to dress. The clothes he had worn the day—and many days—before hung from their pegs in a chintz-covered recess. On a rush-bottomed chair near the bed, carefully brushed and pipeclayed, lay coat, and belts, and breeches, and gaiters that had gathered mud, in their time, from half the kingdoms of Europe. On the dressing-table the cross of the Legion of Honor rested in its little leather case.

At last his shaking fingers opened the door. The drum lay outside; the drum, and, on the drum, the gigantic bearskin, bullet-bitten in old fights, moth-marked during long, idle years. He came downstairs in full regimentals. Madame Laplume was talking to the village postmaster at the open door. She ran to meet him. Her eyes were misty, for she remembered last year’s reveille; but there was a ring of gladness in her greeting.

“Good morning, grandfather!” she cried, kissing him on both cheeks; “a happy Austerlitz day. There is news, too——”

“News?” Dying fires flamed up for a second in his old eyes.

“D’Aurelles de Paladines is driving them back,” she said. “We won everywhere yesterday—everywhere. Chanzy has forced the Bavarians back on Orgères. We have taken Guillonville, Terminiers, Monnerville—and—and—where else, Josephine?”

“Goniers, Villepain, Faverolles,” little Josephine chimed in, repeating the names glibly, like a well-conned lesson.

“And they say the brave General Duerot has broken out of Paris, and is marching to join the Army of the Loire!”

“Good!”

Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum sat down stiffly, the joints in his long limbs cracking; he held the coffee-cup to his lips, but the coffee danced and splashed out. He jerked the cup down quickly, and brushed a drop from his mustache with an impatient hand.

“It is just as I have said,” he cried suddenly and fiercely, springing to his feet. “We have them like trapped rats! Did I not say so, Héloïse? Even the little Josephine has heard me. Listen, Josephine. These Germans, these enemies of our dear France, begin to pay for their folly. They hated us because our great Emperor led us once to all their capitals—to Stuttgart, to Dresden, to Munich, to Berlin—because their kings bowed hats-in-hand before the soldiers of France; because we cut up their country with our swords as I—look you!—cut this bread of mine.” And with nervous hands he sliced white, crust-ringed circles from the roll. “But now—ah, the Emperor, our great Emperor, is dead; and the Marshals and the Grande Armée have marched away. They found us asleep, unready; like rats, like locusts, they swarmed into our cornfields and our vineyards. But we are awake at last! We are ready at last! The revenge begins!”

“It begins,” echoed Madame Laplume. “But come, grandfather, your coffee grows cold, and——”

“The punishment begins!” he continued, his voice shrill as the neigh of an old war-horse. “Look you!” He held up a gnarled hand. “Here is Duerot, with the troops of Paris. Here”—he raised the other, its knotted fingers stretched out—“are De Paladines, Chanzy, De Sonis, Jauréguiberry, with the Army of the Loire. Now see; the Germans are between them.” He snatched a morsel of the bread he had been cutting and brought his palms together. “The Germans—the Germans——”

“You have cut your hand, grandfather,” cried Josephine.

He stopped, and looked dumbly at his palm. A splinter of crust had grazed the skin. The bread rolled to the floor.

“They are crushed,” he mumbled, bringing down his heel. “Miscreants! that they should dare to enter France! But they will pay for their folly; ah, they will pay well! I knew; I said it. ‘Wait,’ I said, when they came to us with their long faces and their stories of defeat. ‘France has slept; but she will shake herself and awake.’ Mon Dieu, yes. Why I—I who speak, my little Josephine, put a hundred to flight when I was young, with this little drum alone: that is why they call great-grandfather Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum, my dear. See, it is the sun of Austerlitz that shines on the white trees. Sixty-five long years ago—sixty-five long years ago—the great Emperor pinned this cross on my breast; ‘Ah, this is Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum,’ he said, pinching my ear, ‘who beat the charge in the village, and put a hundred to flight.’ That was nothing; we did those things. And again—today—the sun of Austerlitz——”

He broke off suddenly as the door opened and a fat old man, with a large, hairless, foolish face—the face of a great baby, still eying the world with wonder—entered the room. He, too, wore the uniform of the Emperor’s Guard. The veterans embraced.

“You have heard the news?” cried Laplume. “Ah, it is arranged. Austerlitz day—the day of Austerlitz—sees victory again for France, my dear Hippolyte. Sit down, sit down. Héloïse mixes the salad. Héloïse! Here is Monsieur Bergeret. It has been a struggle, my friend, but we have saved a bottle and a snack for today; we have arranged it, I say.” He sniffed, nudged his comrade and chuckled. A pleasant smell of cooking already pervaded the sitting-room, floating in from the kitchen in the rear.

Madame Laplume, who had vanished while Dominique was telling the child of France and its ancient glories, reappeared, with bare and powdery arms; Sergeant Hippolyte saluted, and passed a wavering hand over his foolish chin. Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum, talking garrulously all the while, patted his old comrade’s accoutrements into shape; fastened a button; untwisted a red shoulder-knot; rearranged an ill-adjusted strap. Age was dulling the Sergeant’s brain a little; “he does not wear as well as I,” thought Tuck-of-Drum, with the pathetic pride of age.

There was a metallic “tap-tap” and a clatter of sabots on the cobbles of the village street. “Jacques Dufour arrives!” cried Dominique Laplume, and flung the door open with a flourish.

It was like the gathering of ghosts from the past. It was a gathering of ghosts from the past. These three, with their wrinkled cheeks, their quavering voices, their scanty white hair, their battered uniforms and weapons—these three were all that were left of that band of young recruits who, in the great days of France, had marched down the village street, shouting the songs of the Empire, blowing kisses to fair faces in the windows and the roadsides, exchanging glances with bright eyes that had grown dim at last and closed on earth and all its color and glitter. Like spars, they floated still, scarred and encrusted by the waves of time that had engulfed a generation so heroic, stupendous.

Dufour, wrinkled, wizened, twisted with rheumatism, limped to his place. His grandson carried his musket and placed it in a corner by Bergeret’s; the old man had lost a limb at Quatre Bras and needed a stout stick to aid the wooden leg.

“I will come again at six, grandfather,” the boy piped shrilly in his ear. “I say I will come again to fetch you at six.”

“No, no; Pierre must stay,” interrupted Monsieur Laplume. “Eh? He must stay, too, and hear the stories of the olden days—the days of the glories of France.” The boy’s eyes lit up. “Come, we are ready. He shall sit by the little Josephine.”

By and bye Madame Laplume brought in the meal, steaming from the oven. Bottles of red wine were ranged on the table.

“There were five of us last year,” Dufour muttered. “Buffet and Deyrolles have dismissed.”

“Eight the year before,” said Bergeret, rubbing his hands and smiling vacuously.

“The ranks grow thin, comrades,” said Laplume. “Well, the first toast!”

They rose, and drank in silence to the memory of that great man whom they had fought and bled and suffered for long since—and still remembered and adored. They drank to the old Marshals, to the Grande Armée, to village comrades whose bones lay in the Peninsula, in Germany, in Belgium, in the churchyards of France, but whose faces, dim and mournful, still looked at them through the mists of years, and whose voices still echoed in their memories. They lit cigars and pipes; but the room was full of the smoke of ancient battles. They talked of Desaix, Bessières, Junot, Murat, Lannes, Masséna, Ney—the old, unforgotten names. If they could come again! Ah, if he could come again—how the scattered remnants of his lost legions would rally round him, and young France hurry to the eagles, and the glorious days return!

“But we are making an end; we are making an end,” cried Tuck-of-Drum fiercely, bringing down his fist and making plates and bottles jump with the vehemence of the blow. “Chanzy and Duerot have them in the trap at last. I said so—did I not? Even the little Josephine remembers. On the day of Austerlitz——”

An ominous booming, distant, sullen, like an echo of old years of strife, sounded in their ears.

“It is thunder!” cried Pierre. Little Josephine clutched her mother’s arm.

The veterans exchanged glances. “What the devil—” began Laplume. They flung open the door and stepped into the village street. Two or three people, white-faced, had stopped to listen.

The distant guns roared again. What were they doing there—then—in that direction? Tuck-of-Drum looked puzzled, doubtful. This day of all the year, this great day of his life, was bound up with all his thoughts; one hope, one conviction, possessed him, and had shone steadily through all the gloom of the last few months. The day of Austerlitz would see the eagle turn upon its foes; the sun of Austerlitz would look down upon the invading army scattered like chaff before the wind—crushed, rather, like grain between the two millstones, the armies of Paris and the Loire. The previous day’s successes confirmed him. But what were the guns doing there? The fighting should be far beyond Orgères by this time. He beat down a flicker of uncertainty.

“Bah, it goes well,” he muttered. “They make their last stand. Come, comrades, let us drink to Chanzy and the Army of the Loire.”

Poor, foolish Bergeret soon fell asleep, huddled in his chair; but the wine put fire into the veins of his comrades. Pierre and Josephine listened round-eyed as they talked of bivouacs and camp-fires; of ancient comrades and conquered cities; of Austerlitz and the heights of Pratzen, and the Menitz Lake.

“Sixty-five years ago at this very hour”—so the talk went on. “Do you remember? Have you forgotten?” They argued, they shouted, in their old voices that broke from gruffness into shrill quavers, ludicrous under other circumstances, but now pathetic. They moved bottles, glasses, salt-cellars, to illustrate the disposition of troops; in the blue smoke-clouds the children, drinking in their words, could almost catch the glint of the Cuirassiers’ breastplates, the glittering gold-lacing of the Hussars, the rise and fall of green epaulets as the voltigeurs moved into line, the yellow facings of Oudinot’s Grenadiers, the clamorous mêlée of horse and foot. They discussed the present fighting, the mistakes of generals; and here Héloïse, eager as they for the success of the cause which had cost her husband’s life, joined in with the names and dates and figures at her tongue’s tip. In the distance the sullen guns were booming.

“If I were with them!” sighed Tuck-of-Drum. “They had no room for the old soldier; yet I can beat a charge as well as ever! I—I who speak, could fire a musket with the best of them!”

“Grandfather volunteered,” piped Josephine.

“Yes,” said Héloïse, eying the old man proudly; “but they wanted him to take care of us. ‘You must look after the women and children for us, Monsieur Laplume,’ said the officer. ‘You have done your share for France in the field. You know what our great Emperor wrote, “It will be sufficient for you to say, ‘I was at the battle of Austerlitz,’ to authorize the reply, ‘Behold, a brave man.’”’”

Dominique Laplume waved a hand in depreciation, as if to brush aside the praise. “A brave man? Every Frenchman is brave. It is in the blood of France. We need not be proud of what we cannot help. We have been unfortunate, yes; badly led, yes; but the men—the men——”

The door opened suddenly. The village postmaster stood again at the entrance, his eyes starting, his face lemon-colored, his lips livid under the straggling beard. “All is lost!” he cried. “We are betrayed, defeated! Chanzy is driven back! The enemy advances!”

The door rattled in the grasp of his shaking hand. He limped off to spread the news of the disaster, which grew with his terror. Laplume, Dufour, Madame Héloïse, started to their feet and looked at each other blankly. The sudden, awe-struck silence woke Bergeret, who looked round with wide, foolish eyes. Josephine’s mouth twitched and tears gathered. Pierre clenched his brown fists.

“Come,” cried Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum suddenly. He donned the great bearskin, the others followed his example, Bergeret fumbling foolishly with its heavy chain. His baby face expressed wonder rather than the alarm, the bitter disappointment, the wrath, written on the faces of Madame Héloïse and Laplume and Dufour. Tuck-of-Drum girded on his sword and slung the straps of his drum over his old bent shoulders. He thrust Bergeret’s musket into the Sergeant’s hand. Dufour motioned to Pierre, and hobbled out; the boy followed him. Madame Héloïse Laplume ran to the door to intercept them. “Where are you going, grandfather? Where are you going?” she gasped.

“Stand back, Héloïse. We go to call the village. Stay here; stay with the little Josephine.”

She paused irresolute. After all, though they could do no good, what harm could they do—these three old men? They were going to call the village. Yet there was a look on the ancient soldier’s face she had not seen since the day of the first great reverse, when he had gone, with his head erect and old fires flashing in his dim blue eyes, to offer his feeble services to France.

Suddenly, loud and distinct above the distant booming of the guns, his drum sounded—beating an assembly in the quiet village street. She put her hand to her breast and ran out. If the Germans were really coming——

She clutched his arm.

“Are you mad, grandfather?” she gasped. “Come in; come in and finish your wine and pipes together. There are only boys and women and old men in the village. They can do nothing——”

He shook her off.

Well, even the enemy, cruel though they were, could never harm men so old, so feeble and defenseless. They would ride through, laughing in their beards, mouthing their uncouth jokes at the faded uniforms from which their sires had once fled in terror; but—no, they would never harm them. Josephine was crying softly within. She turned back to the house.

Up the centre of the village street marched Tuck-of-Drum, drumming, drumming with an energy surprising and pathetic, as though he could call from their weed-grown graves the lads who had once jumped so smartly to the rattle of the parchment.

“Rat-a-plan! rat-a-plan!” sounded the summons; his hands had not lost their cunning, though they ached and grew weary with the unwonted strain. Behind him staggered Bergeret, his great bearskin toppling forward over the fat, smooth, foolish face; Dufour hobbled in the rear, his stick and wooden leg tapping the cobbles; little Pierre, beside him, dragged the heavy musket.

Pale faces, working in terror, peered from the café of the Boule d’Or. Tuck-of-Drum burst open the door. On the little tables glasses of bock, tiny glasses of spirits, stood half emptied. The men had all risen; the tawdry, gilded mirrors, cracked and dusty, distorted their faces, showing them more pallid, more unhealthy even than in life. Three or four old men—not so old as the veterans by many years—three or four washed-out-looking lads, rejected even by the army that had dragged men in from the very highways and hedges to resist the invaders—turned startled looks on the newcomers.

“The enemy is coming!” said Tuck-of-Drum. “Comrades, let us march against them, like the men of Dreux, of Châteauneuf! Look—the sun of Austerlitz is going down! Today, all France must help——”

They exchanged glances; they huddled together like sheep.

“What is the use?” one muttered.

“Aye, what is the use?”

A youth sniggered vacuously. “You are sixty years too late, Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum. If the great Emperor could come back now, if France had a man—” The speaker shrugged his shoulders, spread out his hands with a gesture of helplessness and looked round for assent.

“If—if—if!” cried Dominique Laplume. “We will lead you—we, of the Grand Army! Today all France must rise. All must help. It is the great effort. Today France conquers—or is conquered. ‘If’ never won a battle. Come, I say! Jules Brienne, your grandfather carried an eagle at Marengo. Monsieur Grenier, your uncle fell by our side, fighting bravely, on the field of Austerlitz.”

He argued, ordered, entreated; in vain.

“Bah! Poltroons!” he muttered, and turned on his heel.

Again the drum sounded.

“Yes, go out and play with your toy, Papa Tuck-of-Drum,” cried young Brienne after him. Laplume did not hear. They marched next to the Café de l’Ecu. The village postmaster, shaking still and casting nervous looks round him like a frightened horse, was telling his story to a similar assembly.

“Pah!” muttered old Dufour, twirling his thin mustache, “these villages are the rubbish heaps of France. The men are all away.” Again the appeal was made. A fat man, with fishy eyes and yellow, pendulous cheeks, shrugged his shoulders and raised protesting hands. “What can we do? What can we do?”

“They would finish us all with a volley. We should be killed,” whined another man.

“Killed? And what then?” Laplume snorted with fierce contempt.

“Let us be killed then!” broke in Dufour, crashing his stick down on the sanded floor. “It would be worth it. A thousand times worth it! Let each village in France raise a wall of dead against the invaders!”

Bergeret nodded his foolish head again and again with emphasis. The fat man began to talk fast, volubly, excitedly, pouring torrents of abuse on the Emperor, generals, government, the enemy, waving his fat hands, shrugging his fat shoulders. The curtained door of the café opened. He stopped suddenly and lamely. A countryman burst in.

“They are coming—they are coming!” he shrieked. “I have seen them in the road. I ran through the woods. Hundreds of them! I have seen their lances—the sun on their lances!”

“Come!” cried Dominique Laplume in a voice of thunder. “In the name of France!”

No one stirred. He looked round, scorn in his old eyes. “We will go, then—Bergeret, Dufour—my old comrades.” His voice choked with bewilderment, disappointment, anger.

They went out. The air was sharp with frost. It was very still in the village. The sun, a red ball of fire, still glowed on the frosted trees; on the white and yellow walls of the cottages; on the white fields and white-cowled windmills; on the powdered cobbles of the street. A segment of moon, strangely like a pierrot head, thrust through curtains of cloud, its mouth whimsically awry, peered down sideways at the earth—at the white earth, where legions of tiny men, like ants, hurried to kill or be killed in their bewildering quarrels. The distances were blue—the shimmering steel-blue of winter distances. Here and there a column of black smoke, shot through again and again with tongues of fire, went up to heaven; the smoke of burning villages; little sacrifices France offered for her folly to gods not yet appeased.

“To the bridge,” said Tuck-of-Drum. They marched in silence. The drum was silent. At the end of the long, straggling street a tiny bridge spanned a frozen stream which the enemy must cross. By the side of it was a clump of bushes, so thick that, even leafless, they formed a screen behind which the veterans and the boy crouched down.

“They might have broken down the bridge at least,” grumbled Dufour. “Menitz was frozen, and the Emperor——”

“They are coming!” whispered Pierre.

His sharp ears, close to the ground, had caught the clip-clop of approaching hoofs.

Tuck-of-Drum drew his sword and rested its hilt on the rough wooden parapet of the bridge. “Fix bayonets!” he growled.

Sergeant Bergeret should have given the word, but he carried out the order placidly, drawing the sword from its scabbard and fixing it with his fumbling fingers. “Put it in for me,” muttered Dufour, handing his bayonet to Pierre. “Now give me the musket—so—and run home, good lad. Embrace me and then run home.”

He sat on the ground, his wooden leg stiff and straight in front of him, and clutched the bayonet. Pierre’s lips tightened; he did not move. “Go home, I say!”

“Hush, they come!” whispered Tuck-of-Drum.

Peering through the brushwood, they could see, on the road ahead, the pennoned lances of German Uhlans, rising and falling with the jolting of the horses. The hoofs clicked louder and louder on the frozen road.

Suddenly Tuck-of-Drum sprang up.

“The Guard will advance,” he growled, with a little hoarse laugh, the faint echo of one that men now dead had heard and talked of, long since. Joy, fierce, savage joy of fighting, dormant so long but not extinct, flared up and flashed in his faded eyes. And yet, with the joy, a rage terrible and righteous shook him as he saw the glitter of the steel, the fluttering pennons, the casques and foreign uniforms—the foes of France, violating the sacred soil of which the dust of his race had made.

His trembling hands clutching the drumsticks, he advanced to the centre of the bridge. Bergeret stood on his right, his bayonet extended. Dufour grasped the parapet, dragged himself up, groaning in spite of clenched teeth, planted his wooden leg firmly, and, leaning against the woodwork of the bridge, rested the butt of his weapon on the ground, the tremulous steel pointed toward the enemy. Pierre came to help him. “Go back! go back!” he growled, pushing the boy aside with all his feeble strength. Pierre slipped on the frozen earth and fell, clutching at the bushes. Suddenly Dominique Laplume sounded the pas de charge.

A strange, pitiful defiance this, echoing back through the deserted village street, floating mournfully out to the white, empty fields, sending its arrogant, useless challenge to the ribbon of white road ahead. “Rat-a-plan! rat-a-plan!” The old drum, that had sent a hundred men flocking like sheep before it—the old drum that Jules, who fell at Solferino, that Dominique, who fell at Gravelotte, had beaten on winter mornings of their boyhood—answered nobly to this last great effort, and seemed a living, sentient thing, entering into the brave spirit of the challenge.

There was a startled shout, a clatter of stones, as the Uhlans reined in their horses.

“They fly!” shrieked Tuck-of-Drum; “they—ah!”

Half a dozen carbines shot up and flashed fire. There was a hoarse cry in German; an officer struck aside the stock of a man’s weapon.

Dufour’s bayonet clattered down; he slid into the thicket, his wooden leg scoring a long, jagged line in the frosty road. Bergeret was on his knees, a light of strange intelligence dawning in his smooth, foolish face; quite suddenly he fell sideways on to his fallen bearskin, matted already with his blood.

Tuck-of-Drum still stood in the centre of the bridge. The drumsticks descended on a drum pierced and soundless—then dropped, one after the other, slowly, from his nerveless grasp. The world swung around him. The poplars down the roadway on which his glazing eyes were fixed marched, doubled, moved into echelon and square. “La Grande Armée! La Grande Armée!”

Was it the cry of the Germans, in wonder, in derision, in pity? Or did his quivering lips frame the words? Ghosts formed round him; the ghosts of the old battalions who had marched, long back, into silence. They swayed, they heaved, in countless numbers; file after file, rank after rank, regiment after regiment, formed up, doubled into place, and passed him by. He saw the flash of breastplates, the crimson fronts of the Polish lancers, the red plumes of the line, the bearskins of the Guards, the glittering eagles of France.

“My comrades—O my comrades!” He staggered forward, with stretched-out hands. A confused murmur buzzed in his ears; it swelled into a tumult—“and the shout of a king was among them.”

One hand sought the bearskin. Suddenly he fell face forward.

Under the wide sky, in the uniform of their dead Emperor, the three veterans lay together; a young boy crouched near them, bleeding from an unnoticed wound, and sobbing.

A night wind crept over the frozen fields; a little wind, like a sigh from France for her ruined homes, her smoking villages, her slain children, her lost cause and faded glories.

The sun of Austerlitz sank down behind the poplars.

The Southern Negro as a Property-Owner

BY LEONORA BECK ELLIS

BETWEEN the Southern negro as property and the Southern negro as a property-owner worthy of account, American progress has set its milestones thick and strongly marked. Yet, as mere years go, the time has been short indeed for a transition of meanings so vast.

The act of emancipation brought in its train several very serious problems, and more than one of these must be acknowledged to have grown graver with further-reaching complexities and involutions as the decades have passed. But in the present article these are not under consideration.

The point we desire to emphasize is that one of the most difficult questions brought to issue in the emancipation of the negro has already solved itself by what we are accustomed to call natural processes.

When the epochal pen-stroke fell and $3,000,000,000 worth of Southern property was suddenly obliterated as property, yet stood there in plain world’s view, like the metamorphosed dragon’s teeth, as men with the rights of men, there were masters of statecraft everywhere who faced one another blankly, asking how such a situation was to resolve itself. Not even the most sanguine saw any reason to hope that so complex an issue as that involved in the relation of the freedmen to the land could be brought to satisfactory or righteous solution until at least three or four generations had mingled dust with dust.

The relation of the freedmen to the soil! Here was the problem that must have given pause to an older state, a European nation, say, upon the eve of liberating at one stroke four millions of serfs.

But young nations, like young individuals, often let their deep convictions sweep them unprepared into strange conditions and perils, from which only the magnificent vitality of youth rescues them without disaster.

The United States Government has, for half a dozen years past, recognized it as a duty to compile and offer for public reading certain facts and figures relating to the progress of the negro in acquiring education, following different pursuits and trades, and accumulating property. Out of the various reports upon these subjects issued from the Department of Labor since 1897 it is probably the information set forth regarding the property-holdings of the former slaves and slaves’ children in three or four Southern states that will strike the greatest number of people with surprise, even with that form of astonishment which borders on unbelief. Yet this surprise is of the healthful type, and the unbelief passes when a closer investigation is made into the matter.

The closer investigation is undoubtedly worth while, and it will prove profitable for a little while to exchange general statements and sweeping surveys for definite figures, well verified data and typical cases within a limited territory.

Therefore, to illustrate clearly that particular phase of the negro’s progress, the adjustment of his relations to the land and his steadily advancing gains in real estate and other property-holdings, it will serve best to take the state of Georgia and present certain comparative data relating to the situation here.

Our choice of the commonwealth of Georgia for the setting forth of this matter, instead of some sister state, can be easily justified. Although the youngest of the original thirteen states, and the only one whose early constitution barred slavery from its boundaries, yet, when the Civil War came on Georgia had long been a slave state of great importance, and at once took a leading part in the struggle. Her people suffered heavier losses from the war, it is authoritatively claimed, than those of any other state except Virginia, the old order of things being more utterly wrecked and old landmarks more completely effaced here than elsewhere.

There are other reasons for our choice less disputable even than these. Georgia has the largest area of any state east of the Mississippi River, and, in her great sweep of 59,475 square miles, from the Appalachian Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean, exhibits the greatest diversity of soil, climate and physical features, all of which must be conceded to affect negro life and industry. Lying largely in the so-called “Black Belt,” the state still presents quite as marked a diversity of social conditions as of physical, nor have any of the former slave-holding states been more strongly affected than this by the industrial and educational movements which have stirred the South within the last few years. It is only fair to call attention, likewise, to the fact that, while Georgia is recognized as the centre of some of the most radical thought and action upon the negro question, yet this condition is counterbalanced by the existence within its borders of a mass of white voters who seem more than ordinarily swayed by an intense sense of justice to the black. Witness the manner in which all bills tending toward negro disfranchisement meet summary defeat before the Georgia Legislature, and, again, the defeat of the last year’s movement to divide the state’s educational funds in such a way as to allow to colored schools only the pro rata share representing taxes on the property of the negro.

Furthermore, it may be added here, that while the state has no Hampton or Tuskeegee within her borders, still she has most excellent public schools for negroes, and in several cities she is now giving them admirable training in manual and industrial arts along with the academic studies, as, notably, at Columbus; and she also has an important branch of her state university devoted to the industrial, technical and manual training of colored youths—that is, the Industrial College for Negroes at Savannah, a high-grade institution wholly supported by public funds.

If the selection of Georgia for a local study of the negro’s material progress does not yet appear justified, then the last, and in itself wholly adequate, reason may now be assigned, namely, that the state has the largest negro population of any in the Union, her colored people numbering 1,034,998, or a bare trifle under 50 per cent. of the entire population. Observe that in this state are congregated more than one-eighth as many blacks as are scattered throughout the remaining half a hundred states and territories of the Union.

New Year’s Day of 1863 saw 470,000 freedmen in Georgia, these in the main having been ushered into liberty in quite as destitute a condition, regarding land and other worldly possessions, as that in which they were ushered into existence. The exceptions to this generally prevalent destitution were favored slaves here and there whose former masters and mistresses, too often nearly destitute themselves, had deeded them little homesteads, or in some other way given them a start in independence. Or, again, there were exceptions in the case of the few thousands upon whom General Sherman and his associates had bestowed certain donatives in the shape of wages, usually unearned, and bounty money or lands, all distributed with the injudiciousness expected in such a situation.

Today, barely one generation’s space removed from that hour of strange and sorrowful conditions, these freedmen and their children pay taxes on more than a million acres of Georgia land, not to mention houses, household goods, stock, agricultural implements, merchandise and other taxable properties. If the situation speaks well for American life and opportunities, it also speaks well for the black man, and more eloquently still for his chances in the South.

The toilsome processes by which the Georgia negro has climbed from destitution to his present state of comparative prosperity deserve more than a passing glance. Do not think it was the same as if you or your neighbor, or even Mr. Riis’s European, who is to be refashioned into an American, should start today without money or lands, without friends except those destitute as yourselves. We should know where to turn, what work to take up, how to apply whatever of skill or energy or special aptitudes might exist within us. Failing of skill or marked aptitudes of our own, failing even of an ordinarily good education, we should at least have within us inherited instincts to help us out of the difficult situation. Above all, we should know what was in the world, what was worth striving for, where to set our aims.

But what of skill did the negro have, save in the rudimentary forms of agriculture? Whither, save for restraining influences, would his inherited instincts have led him? What did he know of life experientially beyond the log square of a slave’s cabin, or by observation and hearsay beyond the compass of the plantation lord’s domain?

No; set it down that the new freedman was poorer than the poorest, and, except in rare cases, more ignorant than can now be readily conceived of. In such condition, with no higher aims to impel him to work than the bare instinct of self-preservation, his work must of necessity be for many years only a bread-meat-and-shelter matter.

Yet, somehow—who can tell by what strange evolution?—working on blindly, gropingly, toilsomely, he has still contrived to press forward, until today, with a generation scarcely gone, he stands on a plane no one counted on his reaching under a hundred years. And the best of all his gains is that the most intelligent of his race have come to comprehend what true progress means, and to compare the slight space traversed by their people with the vast upward stretch reaching away in front of them.

During one of the large conventions which recently met in a Georgia city, a visitor from New England asked me, with genuine concern: “But where do your better class negroes live? Or are there no blacks decently housed, no places at least approximately clean and comfortable that they can claim as homes? In various cities through your section I have found only swarming and fetid negro quarters, the worst of slums, a menace to municipal health, both physical and moral. Is there nothing more hopeful than this to show for the race?”

Admitting the general truth of his imputation, I was still able to point out to him a few streets, or sections of streets, where the most intelligent and prosperous of the blacks of the city had made themselves real homes. Yet even these, he demurred, bordered too close upon those same slums he had been fretting over. For in Southern cities the people of this race keep together, it will be noted.

But I told my guest to come with me to the country if he would see the negro at his racial best. Agriculture, I assured him, had come very near to spelling out salvation for this people. Instance the state conference of colored farmers convening not so very long ago in Savannah. Nearly two hundred delegates were present, and everyone owned his own home, many being comparatively wealthy. One in particular was pointed out as worth $50,000, made entirely from agriculture.

In the country, then, we must still look for the best average of the negro’s home, his domestic life and virtues, as well as his industry and thrift. A brief investigation of conditions brought our New England friend to the same conclusion, and he went away much better satisfied as to the prospects of the race.

Certain facts and figures which interested this intelligent student of racial conditions will doubtless interest scores of others, and they are, therefore, offered in the present paper.

Georgia has 137 counties, each constituting a small commonwealth in itself. Being settled at irregular periods and under diverse circumstances, varying, moreover, in topography and character of the soil and climate, these counties exhibit each a different ratio of the negroes to the whites.

A glance at the maps may aid in forming a clear idea of the movements and growth of the black population in Georgia. In 1790, it will be observed, the counties near the coast were the only ones settled, and if the black folk were inconsiderable in numbers, so were the white.

But by 1800 the slaves were showing a rapid increase, and were being moved up the Savannah River, while from that time to 1840 the population, both white and black, exhibited a marked tendency to seek the rich lands of the interior, pushing westward and, a little later, southwestward.

At the close of the year 1900 the blacks of the state had increased from the few thousands of slaves of a century back, held chiefly on the coast, to more than a million free people, fairly well dispersed through all but the extreme mountain counties and paying taxes on many million dollars of Georgia property.

From the office of the comptroller-general of the state there is issued annually a full report of the property-holdings of both blacks and whites, set forth with exactness of detail county by county. From the file of these reports it is easy to make a comparative study, in brief or at length, of past changes, progress or retrogression, and the present status in any or all of the Georgia counties. But the general reader will be able to draw his conclusions from a glance at a few of these.

Chatham County, the original seat of settlement, is perhaps the best starting-point. It is located in Southeastern Georgia, washed by the Savannah River and the tides of the Atlantic, has for its county seat Savannah, the second city of the state, and comprises mainly a stretch of marshland, low islands and flat, sandy tracts. In early days a brisk slave trade brought many negroes to this county, and since the war the city of Savannah has attracted the freedmen in great numbers. The relations between whites and blacks have been more uniformly cordial here than elsewhere, the former being in the main of the original slave-holding class, and the latter largely house servants. The situation is thus in direct contrast to that in Atlanta, for instance. By the year 1790 there were already 8,313 blacks in Chatham County, as against 2,456 whites; while the census of a hundred years later shows an increase to 54,757 negroes and 22,966 whites.

Sherman’s celebrated field order, issued immediately after his investment of Savannah, gave hundreds of former slaves temporary possession of valuable lands on the coast and sea islands of this county, as it did to a lesser extent in certain other sections of the state. This tenure was in some cases brief, but in many others became permanent. Hence, even as early as 1875, we find the freedmen owning 1,491 acres of Chatham’s land, valued at upward of $70,000, besides town and city realty worth $152,760. Twenty-five years later they had multiplied these figures by four, approximately. No bad showing, when all things are taken into consideration.

Another coast county, Liberty, is beyond doubt the most interesting in its history of all the so-called “black counties.” This, too, is located in the southeastern portion of Georgia, a neighbor of Chatham’s, with much the same climate and topographical features, and was laid out in 1777. But the history of its first settlers deserves to be traced much further back, for, in 1695, there had come to South Carolina a little colony of New England Puritans, breaking off from the parent church at Dorchester, Mass., and led by Joseph Soul, a Harvard graduate and teacher. Their location in South Carolina having proved unhealthful, they were attracted by Oglethorpe’s little Georgia settlement, and, having secured a grant of 32,000 acres on the present site of Liberty County, they removed thither in 1752, their colony then numbering 280 whites and 536 negro slaves! The county was laid off as Midway, but later changed its name to Liberty. It should be remarked that when secession from the Union became an issue this county voted solidly against it.

After the Civil War the land here was thrown largely on the market, and at several places, notably Woodville, Ogeechee and Belmont, numbers of negroes united themselves into colonies and bought extensive tracts. There are now in the county nearly ten thousand negroes, with half that number of whites; and the former own more than 50,000 acres of land.

Appling is a county also in the southeastern portion of the state, but presenting a very different showing. It is a level county, inland, with poor soil, and the tide of slaves poured around it without touching it. In 1820 there were just eighty-six negroes within its borders. When manumission came there were only about seven hundred Appling County slaves to be set free. At the present time it is estimated that there are 3,000 negroes in the county, with more than twice that number of whites. But from the comptroller-general’s latest report it appears that the former own 17,946 acres of land, such land as it is!

Now run up to Central Georgia. Here is found the flourishing city of Macon, in the county of Bibb. The census of 1890 gave Macon a population of 22,746, of whom one-half were negroes. The land in this section is hilly, with soil mixed, good and bad. Twenty-five years ago there were something over 11,000 negroes in the county, outnumbering the whites by nearly two thousand, and they owned 2,611 acres of land. Now the blacks have a trifle more than doubled in numbers, as well as in property-holdings. Observe, too, the higher value of the negro’s farm lands in this section. His 4,500 acres of Bibb County land is now assessed at $413,300, which amount, added to his town and city realty and other taxable properties, makes an aggregate value of $719,380 in this county alone.

A little to the northeast of Bibb County lies Baldwin, of which Milledgeville, the former state capital, is the chief town. This was a very wealthy ante-bellum section, with large holdings in slaves as well as lands. When the Civil War began Baldwin County could muster 5,000 slaves, although of the whites, rich and poor, there were only 4,000. When the census of 1890 was taken the negroes had increased to 9,343, the whites only to 5,262. Last year the negroes were paying taxes on 6,501 acres of Baldwin County land, valued at $26,599, besides a large amount of city and town property and other possessions, the whole aggregating $104,592.

Take another county in Middle Georgia, a county of good lands but without a town of any size in it, therefore representing more nearly a plain agricultural average. Any one of a score might be selected. Let us say Butts, a small but prosperous county which was laid out in 1825 and at the outbreak of the war had 3,082 slaves and 3,375 whites. A quarter of a century ago its freedmen, numbering approximately 4,000 people, owned but ninety-seven acres of land in the entire county and $350 worth of town property. Have they climbed since 1875? In numbers they are now estimated at 7,000, against a like number of whites, and last year these negroes paid taxes on 1,613 acres of good average farming land, and on other property which ran the total valuation in Butts up to $49,941.

In the mountain counties of Georgia it has been different, the increase in number of negroes as well as their possessions being slow and uncertain, while the whites have maintained a steady progress in such sections. This, however, is clearly accounted for by the lesser ratio the agricultural interests bear to others in mountainous districts, and the dependence of the negroes upon the former. Glance at Gilmer County, with its sixty-nine blacks and almost 10,000 whites, the former paying taxes on a few hundred acres of rocky hillsides, and their whole county property aggregating, by the most recent returns, only $957, while the latter show taxable possessions valued at $728,000. In Rabun, Towns, Flannin and neighboring counties the situation shows much the same.

This brief study of typical counties may be closed with certain comparative data from Fulton, which contains the state’s capital, Atlanta, a progressive and rapidly growing city distinctly of the “New South” type. Fulton was not laid out until 1853, hence is relatively young in the sisterhood of counties. Only about 2,000 slaves were set free in this county. Compare the number with the 16,000 manumitted in Chatham. But today there are more than 50,000 negroes in Fulton, and, although they own but a thousand acres of land in the county, yet the aggregate value of their whole property is a bare trifle below one million dollars!

To extract the most important meanings from such figures is not difficult. In connection with them several facts should be kept in mind, the first of which is that the negro’s land-holdings in Georgia as well as in adjoining states are usually parceled out in very small individual lots. In a canvass of fifty-six typical counties of the state, the following table was established to show the average size of the farm lots among negro proprietors:

The fifty-six counties canvassed represent the majority of negro holdings in the state, and the average here established may fairly be taken as that of the state at large, or, indeed, of the agricultural South. The fact that a very large proportion of the farms are so limited in size as to amount only to gardens, or, in negro parlance, “patches,” augurs well rather than ill, for it means many small proprietors instead of merely a few large ones and the rest all renters or day laborers. Since out of 369,265 black people in the state ten years of age or over who are engaged in gainful occupations, almost two-thirds are employed in some line of agricultural work, is it not well that the million acres owned by negroes should be distributed in small holdings? It is easy to deduce from this the manifest decline of the metayer, or tenant system of farming. To be sure, these one-acre, or even ten-acre farms will seldom support the owner, though he may have the smallest family, or none at all. Such farms are largely instances of what may be called, in the German phrase, Parzellenbetriebe—that is, farms not large enough to occupy the labor of a family, but serving as sources of partial support to those with supplementary occupations. Yet, in many cases, these little plots of ground will grow to goodly farms within a few years. The same story has been traced a thousand times in the past quarter of a century.

It will be remarked, also, that the negro’s town and city property is increasing greatly. In 1880 the assessed value of such property was only $1,201,992, or 20 per cent. of their entire state property; while in 1902 it is $4,389,422, which is close to 29 per cent. of the state’s aggregate. Thus, while agriculture gave the freedman his start in self-maintenance, and is still his chief dependence, yet paths of employment and sources of revenue in cities are being discovered by him more and more as the years go by and his education progresses.

Before passing to the close, another point is worthy of especial note, interesting both the economist and the sociologist. In 1875 the assessed value of the household and kitchen furniture owned by all the negroes in the state, then numbering between six and seven million souls, was only $21,186, or something like three cents’ worth to each individual. But in 1902 the assessed value of the same class of property was $1,688,541, or a trifle over the value of a dollar and a half to each colored man, woman and child in the state. Upon this phase of development and progress no comment is needed.

In brief, then, the black people of Georgia paid taxes for 1902 on 1,175,291 acres of land, and upon an entire property aggregating $15,188,069 in assessed value. This means, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the negroes of Georgia, or, broadly speaking, the South, are accumulating property and acquiring homes. And since the negro with a home is almost sure to stand for law, order and civic faithfulness, it means, moreover, a reaching out toward higher standards of living, not material living alone, but social life, mental and moral striving and achievements.

Comprehending the situation in its fulness, no man can deny that the race is actually started on the road to better things than their past might have indicated that they were capable of attaining.

A Japanese Populist — A TEST OF RIGHTEOUSNESS — PATERNAL SOLICITUDE — WORLDLINESS SUPPRESSED — A SCHOOL OF PATIENCE — GOVERNMENT MAN-TRAPS — A THOUGHTFUL LANDLORD — COMPENSATING LEGISLATION — FOUR-HANDED FILIPINOS — NEMESIS — JUVENILE DEPRAVITY — MENDICANCY LIMITED — WINGED REFUGEES — A FASTING-CURE VICTORY — SKY LADDERS — A CHEERING PROSPECT

BY THOMAS C. HUTTEN
Author of “National Characteristics,” “The Farthest East”

TWO years ago a prominent Russian patriot admitted a misgiving that nothing but a miracle could shake the strongholds of Czarish despotism. It does not impeach the correctness of his view that the miracle has been accomplished.

A giant has entered the political arena; a new world power has risen from the dust of a Buddhist serf-kennel, and it is about time to recognize the fact that the marvel of evolution has been effected by progress in the direction of popular democracy.

The memorable vote of the daimios was a renunciation of class privileges. Of the forty amendments in the new constitution of the Japanese Empire, twenty-six tend to reform the abuses of class legislation. The nation controls two-thirds of its mines. Stockholders of a telegraph monopoly have been forced to accept a time limit of their contract. Six hundred and twenty miles of railroads are managed—and successfully managed—by a national board of administration. The Government, in the name of the nation, builds its own warships and welds its own armor-plates, instead of farming out jobs to the highest briber. The Ways and Means Committee of 1901 reduced direct taxation almost on the exact plan of the system recommended by the reformer Bakunin—reserving building lots in new cities and granting tenures from two to ten years at gradually increasing rates of rent.

Populist reforms have rendered the Government popular enough to make the nation invincible.

And the world-wide need of those reforms has been repeatedly urged by Japanese travelers, and with the emphasis of strong personal conviction, especially by a keen observer who visited Europe and North America in the summer of 1903.

Professor Yashinto Korioky, agent of a Tokio reform club, explored the United States without the assistance of the guides trained by our Star-spangled Uncle and with often remarkable results.

“Surprises,” he says, “indeed, began before we had set foot on the soil of the great moral Republic. Above the sea mist and above the gathering clouds a fire gleamed like a meteor on the western horizon, and one of the Chinese steerage passengers, venturing to inquire, ascertained that it was a statue of liberty, furnishing light to the world. The next moment a sailor struck him between the eyes, and he admitted that he saw several starlike, luminous objects.”

“The next morning,” he continues, “I got my traveling scrip, but was informed that our boat was moored on the wharf of an island, where immigrants are assorted according to the degree of their rectitude. Some pass the ordeal of scrutiny with ease, others with difficulty, for reasons which I was not always able to discern. I noticed, however, that the Government has coined shekels of silver with inscriptions expressing sentiments of virtue—“In God we trust,” or similar words—and whenever a traveler came provided with a goodly number of these tokens, his righteousness seemed to be taken for granted.”

“The investigations of the learned officials in some cases extended to articles of wearing apparel. One Canton trader had underlined his tunic with eighty yards of fine silk, which, being discovered, were unwound and confiscated to enforce a lesson of modesty in the matter of dress.”

“He was, however, allowed to proceed, more fortunate than two of his countrymen who had crossed the ocean for the first time, and were sent back at the expense of the Chinese contractors. Forty years ago these worldly toilers were admitted as freely as other foreigners; but it was noticed that they worked sixteen hours a day and seven days in the week, thus disregarding the duty of providing leisure for spiritual exercises. And as their lack of repentance was, moreover, aggravated by the rapid accumulation of coin, it was finally decided to remove them for the promotion of their higher interests.”

“Animals that are most carefully excluded from the residence quarters of Japanese towns enjoy the freedom of many American cities. Cats roam at large and dogs are permitted to defile public monuments.... After dark their clamor exceeds the vociferations of the East Indian jackals and robs thousands of sleep; but it is perhaps necessary that taxpaying citizens should be trained in lessons of self-denial.”

“Knowing my reputation for veracity, be prompt, my brother, to intercede if the unregenerate of your neighborhood should question the following facts: In the course of each year some 80,000,000 ox-loads of grain are manufactured into a health-destroying poison; ... coal stoves, pretty as the vases of Nagasaki, radiate warmth in winter; fans, operated by unseen forces, mitigate the heat of the summer season. Singers often warble with the skill of the sirens. In the neighborhood of these seductive traps the Government then posts its man-catchers and awaits results. It may seem incredible. But I have been informed that in Southern China monkeys are often captured by similar devices. When the poison begins to operate they fall bewildered, and their awakening in a cage the next morning must tend to mitigate the frivolity of their disposition.”

“The owner of the estate, we ascertained, was a timber merchant, as well as a pillar of virtue, and a large number of trees in the rear of the building had recently been felled—probably to give the neighborhood a more unobstructed view of heaven.”

“Those stock gamblers, whose conspiracies had ruined thousands, were not mistaken in their expectation that the law would protect them against the risk of a riot. Children, gambling for peanuts, are promptly arrested. The advantages of magisterial virtue cannot be overrated.”

“Apes, almost as dissolute as sparrows, are exhibited in the parks of several American cities.... In the Philippine Islands a large number of these animals has recently been captured and caged—probably to limit their opportunity for worldly enjoyments.”

“But we learned that the steam launch scudding along the west shore of the bay was a smuggler, and its pursuer a Government revenue tug. For weeks—perhaps for months—the contrabandists, of Canadian origin, had been selling meat at frivolous rates, and the avengers of sacrilege were now at their heels.”

“From the window of one of these air-trains, a package came clattering down on the sidewalk, scattering a shower of biscuits and hard-boiled eggs which were seized and devoured by the children of poverty before the guardians of law and order could interfere. One youngster of five or six years captured a piece of fruit cake and took to his heels with whoops of unregenerate glee, whereupon two older boys raced him down and deprived him of his prize—probably to restrain his penchant for dietetic luxuries.”

“Two constables dragged along a shrieking girl, who every now and then resisted progress by throwing herself on the ground.... Of what crime could a child of her age possibly have been guilty? ... It appeared that she had been begging in support of an invalid mother, thus tempting taxpaying citizens to an expenditure of coin that should have been reserved for other purposes....

“Begging, however, is not wholly prohibited. Politicians often solicit millions in behalf of candidates who pledge themselves to protect the associations of wealth and suppress the holiday amusements of the poor.”

“... saw nothing but a few crows and two kingfishers, flitting up and down the rocky banks of the brook. Experience had made them unapproachably shy, perhaps much to the regret of the neighboring saints, since they had probably been guilty of fishing on Sunday.”

“Some forty families had been evicted to make room for a trainload of meek immigrants, who agreed to subsist on potatoes and the promise of a better hereafter.”

“Seclusion in the upper cavities of these brick mountains must entail incredible hardships, ... but the landlords seem to hold that all these discomforts are compensated by the advantage of dwelling nearer heaven.”

“In Oriental cities, with rare exceptions, everything suggesting the thought of death is hidden out of view; no sculptor would venture to exhibit an assortment of gravestones; but people to whom life brings nothing but a roundabout of toil and tedium may find solace in contemplating mementoes of the hour that will witness the end of their doom.”

The philanthropic traveler left his native land with ideals presaging a universal brotherhood of nations—perhaps under the leadership of our great Republic—but admits that, under present circumstances, our popular policy of expansion is, at best, only an attempt to widen the ring-walls of our slave-pen, before its gates are closed by a syndicate of bloodsuckers and boodle legislators.

The King’s Image

BY WALTER E. GROGAN
Author of “The Dregs of Wrath,” “The King’s Sceptre,” “The Curse of the Fultons,” etc.

I KNEW him at once. He was grayer, he was grimmer, he was more than ever like a man of granite, hard and immobile, but I knew him. The sight of him gravely unfolding his table napkin and covering his thin knees at luncheon in the little hotel set my thoughts back over ten years. I was then a lad of sixteen. I had seen him constantly in the queer medieval streets of Tsalburg, the little capital of Ertaria in the Balkans. Gray and grim, he was then the General Commandant of the army, the iron right hand of the Wolf King Peter XII. He was grayer and grimmer now, but undoubtedly the man. For a while I racked my memory for his name. It came suddenly. General Hartzel! Undoubtedly the man.

The Times supplied me with many conjectures. The senile old King was dead; his heir, the Prince Paul, had lived his own life in Europe incognito, and the heir was not forthcoming. Rumor said he was in Paris.

For three days I watched the General. He knew no one at the hotel, he spoke to no one, but I saw him more than once in earnest conversation with a young man about my own age, about my own height, about my own color, but—for the sake of my own vanity—alike in no other particular. This was—the information was easily come by—the Comte de Troisétoilles, a young Frenchman of position, now considerably taken with the beautiful singer, Mlle. Aimée Bergeaux. That was the story noised about, and in proof thereof her little steam yacht rode in the harbor, he was constantly with her, and a rumor was essential to the place. A companion, large, fat, unmistakably German and delightfully placid, cast a broad, complacent smile of propriety over the romance.

My General, I noted, snarled at the soprano for whose smiles princes competed. He was thorough, was my General, dear man of stone. Venus herself would have been baffled by him. But he spoke earnestly and vehemently to the Count, he who was so taciturn.

On the evening of the third day I met my General on the south cliff by the absurd little fort. There was a streak of smoke on the horizon. He was shaking a fist at it, a violent, tempestuous fist.

I have been a prey to sudden impulses all my life. I had maintained an Englishman’s reserve for three days. I broke it suddenly on the cliff. I accosted the General in Ertarian.

“You are disturbed, General Hartzel,” I said.

He wheeled round surprisingly. His astonishment grew when he saw me, the silent companion of his luncheons.

“Monsieur speaks Ertarian,” he said.

“A little,” I answered modestly, yet with inward elation. To surprise a man of granite! Elation was surely pardonable.

“As a native,” he continued. I bowed. “It is wonderful! Are you Ertarian?”

“No,” I replied.

“No,” he echoed with regret. “You are English. I saw you smoke a pipe. But you know my real name? I am Captain Schneidlitz here.”

I laughed. “Pardon me, General, I have been amusing myself with your surprise. My father was British Minister at Tsalburg for many years. As a boy I spent my holidays there. Hence my accent.”

“Your name is—?” he demanded.

“Havensea,” I answered.

“Then your father is ——?”

“Exactly. I am now the head of my family. It is a large family, General. I have tens of aunts; my cousins are limitless. I pass an uneasy life trying to evade them and my unnecessary title. It is difficult—please respect my incognito as I respect yours, Captain Schneidlitz.”

“You dislike your title?” he asked eagerly.

“The coronet has given me a headache of the soul. You don’t know how terrible a British title is. It is a mere lever for opening bazaars, a free ticket to everybody’s dinners.”

“You object to yourself?” His question, the question of the man of granite, was tremulous with excitement.

“Pardon me,” I answered; “not to myself—but to the impossibility of being myself. I am an English peer. I have not even the picturesqueness of poverty. You do not understand. In Ertaria they do not hold flower shows. I do not object to myself—I object to Lord Havensea.”

The General looked round anxiously. A wide-breeched soldier was walking toward the fort; a white-stringed bonnet was going home. Seaward the streak of smoke blackened the eye of the sun. The sight of that caused the man of granite to swear solemnly in Ertarian—a language admitting a wide choice of expression to a man oppressed with a sense of wrong.

“I will reply to your first question,” he said. He spoke in a low voice. He was under some strong emotion. “I am disturbed. That little streak of smoke dissolving out there represents my hopes dissipated, evaporated. My hopes are the hopes of Ertaria. We are a small country, but we are proud.”

“A country’s pride invariably compensates for lack of acres.”

“It is a jest to you,” he said sadly. I had expected him to be angry at my flippant remark. The sadness of his voice slipped past my guard. Here at last I had found a man who could feel.

“Your pardon, General,” I said more soberly than I had previously spoken. “The pride of Ertaria I know rests upon an unstained national honor.”

“If you believed that!” he cried.

“I do,” I answered stoutly. “Frankly, you are all absurd, but it is a glorious absurdity. Small, hemmed in by enemies, you have kept an independence, noble and untainted, for seven hundred years.”

“You believe it! Why not?” he cried excitedly. “Your father, the dear Lord Havensea, loved us. He was our friend. His representations at St. James’s saved us once. You inherited his love. We are in peril now.”

“Ah,” said I, “the lost heir.”

“He is out there under that streak of smoke.”

“He was the Comte de Troisétoilles?”

“Yes. The French singer is Russian. You understand?”

“Kidnapped! Scratch a French soprano and you will find a Russian. My General!” I was indeed sorry for him. He was honest, was this man of granite. He loved his country. And Prince Paul—“Royal robes should cover men, not flattered fools.”

“You understand. The great game is lost. I love Ertaria as I love nothing else. I would pour out my blood willingly for her. That would be nothing. I have been the guardian of her honor. That was everything. And now the hand of the greedy Bear is stretched out for it. And it is lost. At least five minutes ago I said it was lost. But now you—you can save it—the great game, the honor of Ertaria, the independence, the life-blood!”

“I! My dear General, I am a tired English peer recovering from a surfeit of municipal and parochial addresses.”

“You—only you. You are an Englishman, you speak Ertarian, you resemble the Prince Paul somewhat; he is unknown in Ertaria. You are out of love with your own identity; you long for something else, for some other life——”

“My dear General, speak out the whole of your madness.”

“Come, Lord Havensea, and hold the throne!”

I was staggered, astounded. For a moment I watched the smoke becoming thinner and thinner. Suddenly it seemed to pop out. It was of course a trick of the imagination.

“You are an Englishman—therefore you have courage.”

It was transcendent flattery. A throne!

“It is madness, my General,” I said. His eyes sparkled.

“It is the madness we love,” he said softly. “And it is for the country, my country. The poor fool will come back. Don’t let it be too late. Keep the throne for him—and for us, for the Ertarian children unborn that they be not born the slaves of the Muscovite. You have read the history of Poland?”

“It is folly, but—” I commenced.

“The train starts tonight, my Prince, at eleven. The West Station. I will make all things ready.” The General looked out at the winking sun. The real Prince was kidnapped, but in his dire need Fate had tossed him a pseudo one.

It was the wildest of folly, of course, but once seriously embarked upon, it was remarkable how smoothly it ran. I returned to the hotel, paid my bill, sent my valet home to England, and met the General at the station. I entered the first-class compartment a private English gentleman—even my poor little title left in the custody of my lawyers in Ely Place—and across the Ertarian frontier I stepped out Paul V.

We alighted at a small station. There were three or four anxious-looking men on its slender platform. They were dressed in the frock coat of ceremony. One man only was conspicuous in a gorgeous uniform. It reminded me of my own Havensea livery. I was preparing to be royally gracious to him when Hartzel whispered he was the station-master. It was a brilliant morning; the sun lay on the white caps of the mountain pass and glistened; big butterflies painted the field; the air was clear, rarified. I was in excellent spirits.

The General watched the absurd little engine puff its way onward. Then he turned to me, took off his hat, knelt and kissed my hand. The spectacle of my man of granite kneeling, his honest, ugly face figured by emotion, struck me strangely.

“To my God, my Country and my King are my life and my honor dedicated,” he said, the quaint old formula of allegiance in Ertaria. The frock coats went through the same performance. It lacked the earnestness of the General and had a note of anxiety. They looked as though they were expecting a troop of Cossacks over the edge of the pass and were nervous. But the ceremony marked a step in the game. Until then I was in a transition state. I was no longer Lord Havensea, but I had not yet become King until I had stepped out of my uncomfortable compartment into a kingdom.

“Gentlemen,” I said in their own picturesque tongue, “you are the first of my subjects to welcome me. Not as King will I speak to you now, but as a fellow-worker, for my heart also is dedicated to God and Ertaria.”

That struck some spark into their dull faces.

“Seven centuries of liberty are in our hands,” said I. “The dead fathers of Ertaria have given us this heritage. It is that which I come to preserve—in peace if God wills, but if not, the history of Ertaria tells us how to act.”

Bombast if you will, but it brought life, valor, strength into their faces.

As for the man of granite, his eyes flashed. Ten minutes more and we were galloping up the white ribbon of a road toward Tsalburg, embarked upon as mad a mission as was ever enacted in this Balkan basin of mad missions. Our frock-coated friends remained behind. I kissed each on his scrubby cheek, and told him to guard our frontier. They swore to this with tears in their eyes.

“Well,” said I, “we have played the first act of the farce.”

“You have done well,” my mentor replied. “But this is no farce. It is a perilous game to play.”

“You did not tell me so before, General. A spice of danger gives it a zest.”

“You speak like a soldier.”

“I was a soldier—that was before I became a peer and was a personage. Shall I pass muster? Will they perceive I am no King? Will the people be with me?”

“Keep a brave heart and that will carry you through. The Russian Minister, of course, will know you are an impostor.”

“The deuce he will!”

“You must bluff him.”

“And four weeks ago I received the freedom of an English town from a successful grocer! Hartzel, my blood races! Here are romance, adventure! I am your debtor for life!”

“That debt may be liquidated at any moment,” he said grimly. For a minute his old face softened, and then it was as hard as ever. I knew that some touch of remorse had stabbed him. The game was nothing to me; he was staking my life for a cause in which I had no concern. Then came the thought of his country. No life mattered then.

That night we lay in a small town, and I was shown secretly to a few of the town’s chief men; and the next night we slept in the General’s house at Tsalburg. The rumor of my coming circulated furiously. At eleven o’clock, when I was preparing to rest, tired with my long journey, a mob assembled in the square outside and sang the national anthem for an hour or so. Hartzel harangued them from the balcony. I was fatigued. I could not be disturbed, but on the morrow their King would meet them. That was the purport of his speech. The national anthem broke out again, and presently, with the poetical inspiration of the nation, they sang a legendary serenade.

Hartzel came to my room and sat on the edge of my bed. I was nearly dead with fatigue, but he was inexorable.

“Tomorrow will see the crucial test of our scheme, so you must listen. There are two factions in Ertaria. In the late King’s reign I kept the Tertourgkis in abeyance.”

“The Tertourgkis!” I cried, memory stirring me. “They had some feud with the reigning family and—and there was a daughter.”

“You remember?” he said. “Prince Tertourgki is an old man. His wealth and his lands go to this daughter, his only child. She is very beautiful.”

“She was a beautiful child, dark and serene as night.”

“The Prince has claims to the throne. He is the descendant of the Tertourgkis, who reigned in the fifteenth century. They were despots, and a revolution set the Borros on the throne. The Prince has never abrogated his claim. There is a second cousin——”

“My General, the rest is easy to decipher. The second cousin has aspirations for the hand of the Princess Marie; he is the puppet of the Russians; the Tertourgkis’ influence is great; we fear the loyalty of the army; we must deal quickly with the second cousin.”

“You are quick at guessing,” the General answered slowly. “You know——”

“On my word, nothing—nothing but the name of the Princess Marie. When the world was younger, General, there was a large garden and a young schoolboy—he thought himself a man—and a little child and flowers. Together they made a happy time. The sun was always shining. The little child worshiped the big schoolboy—and he graciously permitted it.”

“Your father’s house! Ah, well, you know something, but not all. As the King lay dying I—I arranged a marriage between the Princess Marie and the absent Paul.”

I sat up in bed.

“The Prince Paul!” I exclaimed.

“The Prince Paul,” he assented stolidly. “He consented. The Prince looked kindly upon it; the Princess would not give a definite answer. When the Prince arrived, she said, she would give him her answer personally.”

“This is your arrangement?” I asked.

“It was a diplomatic stroke,” he said.

“You took an unwarrantable liberty,” I cried warmly. “Why was I not told of this before?”

“Because you would not have come.”

“And now?”

“Now it is different. You are caught in the toils.”

“It is an unwarrantable liberty! You have engaged me matrimonially without any reference to my feelings.”

“I have engaged Prince Paul.”

“Who am I?”

“Who you are for the present. My dear Havensea, you do not consider my position.”

“You have had precious little consideration for mine!”

“It is not yours. You are an actor playing a role. In a short while you will make a graceful bow and exit.”

“I am not at all sure that it will be graceful.”

“As you will. That does not matter at all. You play a part for a little while. They will not dare to keep the real Prince a prisoner for long.”

“I am to cheat this girl?”

“What does it matter? It is a royal alliance—there are no considerations but that of policy. I do not propose to marry you to her.”

“Thanks. That is considerate.”

“My dear Havensea, you are perturbed. The Princess is to marry the Crown. She is piqued at the long delay of the Prince. There is no question of sentiment.”

“Suppose there were?”

He looked at me curiously for a moment.

“That is a proposition I will not entertain,” he answered.

“I will not do it!” I cried angrily.

“You will,” he replied quietly. “You have already impersonated the King. Have you considered the consequences? I say nothing about you. You are a brave man. But you have already compromised many honest men—and one dishonest old man. We are only half civilized. That is part of our charm—at least to you. The people would be very angry. You would be killed!”

“By Jove, you are a pleasant philosopher!”

“To a brave man that may mean little—life is a mere stake. But the honest men and the dishonest old man would die also. You could not have my death upon your conscience!”

“You deserve it, my General; you deserve it, on my honor!”

“Possibly.” He waved it aside resolutely as a matter of small consequence. “There is also Ertaria. Shall we grant that the Princess may not be happy? Then there is one woman unhappy and a nation free. Havensea, you do not understand the stake for which we play. It is not a crown, nor a woman’s heart, but a nation’s freedom. The heel of Russia bruises the very souls of men. Russia knouts a man’s soul. Where is Poland today? It is a great game to save a nation from that curse.”

The man of granite spoke soberly. There was no impassioned appeal. He spoke of facts. As a boy I knew something of this terror of Russia. This rugged, hard man was a hero. He played his life not for advancement, but for the good of his country. My heart warmed to him. And, as he said, there was also Ertaria.

“I shall go through with it, General,” I said at length. Our hands closed on that; in the winking light of a candle I saw his eyes glitter. He did not speak for a full minute. Then he muttered in a low voice, “If you were only a Borro!”

“It would have been fatiguing,” I said. “I should have quarreled with you. There is not room on the throne for two men.”

He laughed abruptly at that.

The next morning General Hartzel aroused me at an unearthly hour. He made me dress in a steel-corseleted uniform. It was exceedingly gorgeous and stiff with gold lace.

“It is the uniform of the Colonel of the Royal Guards,” he told me.

“Promotion is rapid in Ertaria,” I said. “I was an unconsidered subaltern in our Blues.”

“The army is reviewed today on the Plain of Liberty,” he said, “by Prince Tertourgki. He is regent during your absence.”

“And the second cousin?”

“Is his aide-de-camp—Prince Otho. The Russian Minister will be there.”

“And his august name?” I demanded.

“Baron Ivaniski.”

“My dear General!” I cried. “There is a saying, ‘The luck of the Havenseas.’ The luck holds good. The Russian Bear shall dance, I promise you!”

“What does Your Majesty mean?”

“His Majesty knows a story, General, a pretty, ornate and most scandalous story. Ivaniski was an attaché at Berlin when my uncle was Ambassador. It will be the only good turn Uncle John has ever done me.”

For two mortal hours after a particularly disappointing breakfast—the General betrayed but an indifferent regard to cuisine—I was gracious to the peculiarly uninteresting big men of Tsalburg. I signed innumerable papers, and at a hint from the General kissed those worthy of the honor. It afforded them far more satisfaction than it did me.

At noon I mounted a black charger, and, accompanied only by the General, set out for the Plain of Liberty. Hartzel had misled—to use a euphemism—the populace as to my movements, so that it was merely at odd whiles that I was called upon to acknowledge shouts of greeting.

The Plain of Liberty is a tableland upon the hill that rises above the town. From it Tsalburg can be seen spread out in picturesque confusion. It is a big plain, and its name is derived from the presence in its centre of a huge column surmounted by a figure of Liberty. On the base of this column are inscribed the names of the more or less traditional heroes who are popularly supposed to have engineered the independence of the country. This column has become a subject of sentimental worship with the nation.

On this plain were assembled the populace of Tsalburg to witness the review of the major part of the troops of the country, some fifteen thousand. Prince Tertourgki had selected a place near the column as a saluting base, and the troops, when we arrived, were drawn up in review order. The column stood, as it were, a huge, gray sentinel between the Prince and the troops.

“Some of the officers I could trust expect you!” the General cried. “Spur on to the troops. Now is our crisis. The Baron has tampered with some of the regiments, but to what extent I cannot say. If the troops receive you Ertaria is saved.”

“Your true gambler risks all on a single throw!” I shouted, clapping spurs into my charger. It was a glorious gallop. My blood raced in my veins. My horse was maddened by the touch of the spur. I thundered on down the level turf. I saw the stir of surprise in the populace. I caught a waver of ranks as the troops craned forward to see me come. Then a flash of inspiration came to me. As I raced by the column I suddenly drew rein, flinging my horse back on his haunches. For a moment he lay crouched backward, and in that moment I had raised my sword in salute of the column. Then the charger leaped forward, and I rode to the front of the troops.

Such a shout greeted me as I have never heard before. It roared about my ears like thunder. “Long live the King!” they cried, and the populace took up the words, “Long live the King!”

I raised my hand and there was silence.

“Comrades,” I shouted, “we all alike serve under Liberty. The statue of our dead heroes watches over King and people.” Again the air was rent.

I turned. General Hartzel, following me, had just cantered up. On his grim, granite face was a smile like wintry sunshine.

“General Hartzel,” I cried, “you will march the troops past in review order!” Then I cantered over to the saluting base. I was King!

An old man in uniform was fidgeting about on a gray horse. At his side was a young officer, dark, almost swarthy, whispering eagerly. In a landau at the back sat a frock-coated gentleman with an order in his buttonhole. He had the broadness between the eyes of the Tartar. With him was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Out of her big black eyes shone the light of admiration. In a mist I saw again the small child in the garden, her wondering worship and the big English schoolboy.

“Prince,” I cried, “will you do me the honor of taking the salute?” I spoke to him so as to force an answer. The unexpected compliment flustered him.

“Your Majesty,” he faltered, “my usefulness is over.”

“No,” I replied, engineering my restive charger to the discomfiture of the second cousin, “we will work together for Ertaria, Prince.” I held out my hand, and in a moment the white-haired old fellow was off his horse and kneeling, kissing my hand. How the populace roared aloud their pleasure! The bands crashed out the national anthem, ladies fluttered their scarfs, a whole forest of hats waved in the air. I was King, and apparently popular. It was an exhilarating feeling. I thought of the real Paul shut up in a satinwood cabin on board a kicking little steam yacht, and smiled.

The Prince and I took the salute; he reined in to a respectful distance. Afterward I was conducted to the landau. The Prince stayed a moment to speak to the second cousin. I rode up alone and dismounted.

“Have you no welcome for the King, Princess Marie?” I asked.

“You know me? My father told you?” Her voice was serene, low, like silver bells on a summer evening.

“No. The Prince has said nothing. But I knew that the Princess Marie was the most beautiful woman in Ertaria.” She smiled at me. I met her smiling eyes. It was then I regretted that I was merely playing a part. The small child had grown into a wondrously beautiful woman. I know that from the moment my eyes met hers in that long look I loved her. Hers were eloquent also, so eloquent that she veiled them quickly with long, thick, black, curling lashes, and the rich color mounted to her cheek.

“But Your Majesty,” the Russian’s lips curled in a sneer, “has seen the Princess’s photograph.”

“One has no conception of sunlight from observation of the moon, Baron,” I answered.

“And you are really the King, Paul V.” His voice was challenging, his eyes were gleaming with anger. The elaborate and desperate project of kidnapping the Prince had failed at the very moment of its success. In his pocket, I thought, were the particulars of Paul’s involuntary voyage, and yet here was a king to thwart all his plans.

“And you are really the Baron Ivaniski—of Berlin?” He grew white to the lips at the concealed threat in my voice.

“Of Berlin?” he faltered. “I have no connection with Berlin.”

“Your memory is short, Baron. In November of ’84 you were surely in Berlin. I believe, if I tried, I could persuade you of that. Lord Derwenthurst was a friend of mine.”

“Ah, yes, I had forgotten,” he muttered. I could have laughed at him, he had become so craven and so cringing. Uncle John had told me of the Baron and his gambling debts, and his attempt to sell a Russian secret to us. Uncle John was too honest for a diplomat. He refused, and extracted from the young attaché a signed declaration of his treason. The alternative was that of forwarding the proposal to the Russian Ambassador.

Riding to the palace with my granite General, he expressed approval of my day’s work.

“Ah, General,” said I, “the public enthusiasm is stimulating. Not all the school children of my native town, bribed by oranges and buns, can shout like your honest people.”

“And the Princess?” he asked anxiously.

“And the Princess is divine.”

A week passed in a whirl of popular excitement. No one guessed; the Russian dared not speak openly. In any case I hardly think Russia would have avowed her kidnapping of the Prince. As it was, the Baron had too great a fear of the document he believed I held. On the second day the Princess gave me her answer. We were betrothed. Public joy expressed itself in gala nights at the Opera, in fireworks, in torchlight processions. And for me all the zest of the game I was playing departed. As I listened to Marie, as I learned from her own lips that she loved me, I realized bitterly the part I was playing. Not all the General’s sophistries could disguise it from me. I was cheating her. And her trust was perfect. I writhed under her praise, I was tortured by the possession of her love, a possession which, come by honestly, I would have treasured beyond all else.

On the eighth day, the evening of the gala ball, my granite General came to my private chamber.

“The Coquette entered Trieste last night,” he said harshly. I started. Coquette was the name of the soprano’s yacht.

“Well?” I replied. We stared at each other. General Hartzel had been growing brusk and ill-humored with me. I think he guessed at the romance.

“The King will be here tomorrow night.”

“Suppose I answer that by saying the King is here?”

“You will not do that. Your honor is engaged.”

“You have been teaching me to do without honor.”

“I must tell her tonight.”

I rose. “You will not. I will tell her.”

“You will seek to dissuade her!”

“I will tell her. It is my right, Hartzel.”

“You promise——?”

“I promise nothing. Man, do you think I will slink out of this like a whipped cur? I have cheated. I will confess.”

After the first ceremonial reception I slipped into the dark garden. My brain was hot. I wanted to feel the soft coolness of the night. In an avenue I stumbled upon the Prince Otho and the Russian Baron. They barred my way.

“Impostor!” cried the Prince. The news had leaked out. The Russian knew and had told his friend.

I took off my glove and struck him in the face.

“After the fourth waltz,” I said. “There is a moon. In the walled garden. And, gentlemen, whatever you may know, keep silence. Berlin will speak if you do.”

I sought Hartzel. He was not difficult to find. He was dogging my steps like a spy. I told him of my meeting in the garden, and asked him to be my second.

“He is a good swordsman,” he said. I think he was sorry.

“Then I sincerely hope the real Paul won’t miss his train. To have the throne vacant again would be annoying.”

“And you?” he asked.

“My dear General,” I said, with a smile, “when a man is giving up a pearl of infinite value he does not care much for the tarnished gold of his own life.”

The fourth waltz I danced with the Princess Marie.

“I wish to speak to you soberly, seriously, sedately, Marie. May I? Come to the little conservatory and sit out the thirteenth.”

“It is an unlucky number.”

“No number is unlucky that gives me your presence,” I said lightly.

In the moonlight we stripped to our shirts. It was nearly as light as day.

“This is a mistake,” my granite General said. He was thinking of the risk to his scheme and the ease with which both men could have been arrested.

“No, General. This may be reparation,” I answered.

Prince Otho was an excellent swordsman. That I knew at once. His wrist was supple and strong as steel. We engaged and fought slowly, cautiously. He had a dangerous, wicked riposte which I guarded twice, more by luck than by skill. Undoubtedly he was my master. I smiled grimly at this. I was sorry, because I wished to speak to Marie. And yet, perhaps, this was a better way. Ah, a scratch! I had turned too late, and the sting in my shoulder told me I was hit.

“He is hit! It is enough!” cried General Hartzel.

“A mere scratch!” I answered hotly, and we engaged again. It was evident the Prince was waiting for an opening to kill. Two opportunities for serious wounds he passed. Then suddenly he made a quick lunge over my guard. I stepped back quickly; he could not recover his guard; he fell back. Hartzel leaned over him.

“That ends it,” he said complacently. “Four weeks, at least, in bed. This is an accident, Baron.”

The thirteenth dance. The lights were very low. There was the heavy, thick scent of gardenias. The Chinese lanterns swayed curiously. When I pulled myself together they were still. The wound pricked unpleasantly.

Marie came.

“This is most unorthodox, Your Majesty,” she said mockingly. “Everyone is asking for you.”

“Will you sit down, dear?” I spoke very slowly. In truth the pain in my arm was like a red-hot steel needle. She sobered quickly. I could not see very well. I think she went white. She sat down meekly. I could see her big eyes, only her eyes.

“Paul!” she breathed.

“I am not Paul,” I said. “I am not King. I am only the King’s image, a poor counterfeit.”

“Paul!” she said again. Then she checked herself.

“He will be here tomorrow. My period of usefulness will be over. He—he was kidnapped. I came—because I was bored, because there was some chance of adventure, because an old man pleaded for his country. Now it is all over—the King comes, the King’s image is wanted no longer.”

“Paul, I want you,” she said in a low voice.

“I am not Paul. And—and, Marie, there is duty! A nation may groan under the tyranny of Russia unless—You understand, Marie. Our lives cannot always be ministers to our desires. We—we are caught in the toils; we can only obey, we can only do our duty, trusting that somehow it will be found good.”

“For us?” she asked.

“For your people.”

“You say that that is my duty, Paul?”

“Yes.”

“And you love me?”

“And I love you,” I answered. The lanterns were swinging madly now. Over their light was a new mist growing, growing. I bit my lip—but the throb of the wound was agony.

“I believe you, dear,” she said simply. “It—it seems hard that—that so much should rest upon one poor girl. I think I know what—you mean. The people shall be happy though the Queen’s heart break.” She rose and came toward me. She caught me by my wounded shoulder and kissed me. And with all the agony of it that kiss I hold in my heart always as a dear memory.

When she went the lanterns whirled, the mist shut down on my eyes, and I fell. General Hartzel found me.

The next morning early, recovered of my swoon, I rode out of Tsalburg. General Hartzel rode with me a little way.

“If you had only been the real King,” he said, with more feeling than I thought possible, “and not——”

“And not the King’s image,” I filled in. “It is a pity when the clay image has a living heart.”

The Story of a Suppressed Populist Newspaper

BY THOMAS H. TIBBLES
People’s Party Candidate for Vice-President

AT one time there were fifteen hundred weekly papers advocating the principles of the Omaha platform. Some of them had large plants, some only a few cases of type and a Washington press, but all were actuated by one purpose—to make conditions easier for those who toiled on farms, in shops, factories, mines and mills. Among those still fighting up to the first of April of this year was the Nebraska Independent. Many such papers were crushed by various devices, chief among which was that the great advertisers of the land, all being allied with Wall Street, refused to give them any business. Numerous instances could be cited where Populist papers were refused advertisements given to plutocratic papers not having one-tenth the circulation, and paid for at a higher rate than the proprietors of the Populist papers would have taken. In the files of the Nebraska Independent may be found scores of letters from advertising agents, who had been solicited for business, saying: “If you will make your paper an exclusively agricultural journal we will be glad to give you a good line of business, but we cannot patronize it as long as it advocates Populism.” Every reform editor has had the same experience.

Thirteen years ago the agricultural papers everywhere were publishing articles defending Populist principles. Then all at once such articles were seen in their pages no more, and immediately the papers were flooded with high-priced advertising. The religious press was caught in the same trap. It is strange that the devout readers of those papers never once had their suspicions aroused when they saw so many display advertisements of trusts, banks and promotion schemes in their modest little religious journals. Notwithstanding all such schemes, the Nebraska Independent lived and its circulation gradually extended into every state and territory. It became evident that to get rid of it other tactics would have to be employed. To destroy the paper was not the objective. It was to destroy the People’s Party. With the Independent in hostile hands the political fortifications built up by it in Nebraska and other states would be deserted and the Bryan, Belmont, Sheehan and Tom Taggart Democratic Party could walk in and take possession.

The main battle was fought in the Populist state convention August 10, 1904. The proposition to force a fusion with the Democrats under the lead of the most disreputable end of Wall Street, fresh from its victory in St. Louis, on the face of it was most absurd. But the doing of absurd things never ruffles the placid countenance of Mr. Bryan. The idea that there could be any real opposition to his imperial will in Nebraska, aside from the Republican Party, never seemed to enter his mind. Heretofore when Mr. Bryan entered a Democratic or Populist convention, the Fusion Populists and Democrats immediately bowed and worshiped. The only thing that convention had to do was to find out what Mr. Bryan wished and then proceed to do it with all possible haste. It became evident that this convention would have to be handled differently. Mr. Bryan all the winter, spring and summer had been denouncing Judge Parker as a “dishonest candidate, running on a dishonest platform,” and then he had come home from St. Louis, sat down at his desk and the first words that he wrote were: “I shall vote for Parker and Davis.” The Populists remembered how for eight years he had been coming to their conventions, and in his sweet and winning way telling them how noble they were to put principle above party and vote for men of another party if they thought they could advance reform by so doing. Many of them, who had always supported Mr. Bryan since he first appeared on the battlefields of politics, thought that the time had come when he should practice what he preached. Mr. Bryan realized that there was trouble ahead, but it was thought if the Nebraska Independent would support the Bryan plan that a fusion legislature could be elected that would send Mr. Bryan to the United States Senate.

The editor of the Independent was obstreperous. He had had enough of fusion with a party half of which was more disreputably plutocratic than the Republican Party, and whose “irrevocable” rules were so rigid that they required a man, upon a vote of a convention, to come out boldly before the people and advocate a policy he had denounced by pen and voice for eight years. All sorts of schemes were devised to bring this obstreperous editor into subjection to the imperial will of Mr. Bryan. The first was to send all the leading men of the state, from the Chief Justice down, to use persuasion. That failed. Then Mr. Bryan’s personal daily organ in the state tried a new deal. It poured out on Mr. Tibbles the most fulsome flattery day after day. It said if he would only say “fusion” every Populist in the state would obey his command. When all that failed Mr. Bryan came himself. The proposition that he made was that a fusion electoral ticket be put in the field composed of four Populists and four Democrats, Mr. Bryan saying that, “in the event of their election, each party could count the full vote as its own.” The proposition was instantly rejected. Others followed. Mr. Bryan came to the Independent editorial-room four different times, using all his eloquence and persuasive powers to get the editor to consent to and advocate a fusion with a party that had nominated Parker, and whose campaign was put into the hands of the most disreputable gang that ever sought Wall Street favor.

Mr. Bryan gave orders that everything visible, clear to the political horizon, and other things invisible lying behind the floating clouds, should be offered to the Populist convention providing that the Populists would fuse. The battle was fought out on the convention floor. Many Democrats had secured seats as delegates. One Democrat came over from his own convention and answered to the call of Thurston County in the Populist convention which had no delegates present, and voted the fifteen votes that county was entitled to every time for fusion. Out of the hell-broth brewed in that all-night session there floated upon the fusion scum Bryan, Belmont, Sheehan, Tom Taggart and, remember this last name, George W. Berge.

Nearly the whole state ticket was given to the Populists—only three unimportant offices being conceded to the Democrats, and Berge—George Washington Berge—captured the prize infamy, the fusion nomination for Governor. Bryan would allow no other name to be mentioned in the Democratic convention, although there were two or three Democrats there who had spent time and much money during the previous eight years fighting Bryan’s battles for him, and who had expressed a desire to receive a complimentary vote for that office. When Bryan speaks the Nebraska Democrat turns pale.

The Independent was still a thorn in the side of these fusionists. The editor openly declared that he never would vote for or support a Belmont-Bryan-Parker Democrat. Then it was that fusion itch for office and Bryan diplomacy joined forces to destroy the Independent. The plutocratic Republican attacks upon it had been of no avail, and week after week it had proclaimed the doctrines of the People’s Party for ten years. In an open fight against awful odds it had fought battle after battle, sometimes victorious and sometimes defeated, but it fought on. It took fusion treason, it took the work of men who constantly proclaimed themselves Populists, who insisted upon attending Populist conventions while their sole aim was to destroy the People’s Party, to do what all the hosts of plutocracy had failed to do.

As soon as the vote for fusion had been announced in the convention as prevailing, more than half the delegates present—whole counties had been voted for fusion when only one or two delegates were in the city—rose and left. The next morning they hired a hall and discussed the proposition of putting a straight Populist ticket in the field, but when it was remembered that the fusionists had the legal organization and the ticket would have to go on the ballot under some other name than People’s Party the project was abandoned. The result was that 20,000 Populists voted the Republican ticket, 30,000 stayed at home and refused to vote, and a little over 20,000 voted the Populist national ticket. The Senate of the Nebraska Legislature was solidly Republican; the House had only nine fusionists in it. Mr. Bryan saw to it that they all cast their votes for a straight Democrat for United States Senator. All that was necessary to get the fusionists to do that, both those who called themselves Democrats and those who called themselves Populists, was for them to imagine that they heard a far-off rumble that sounded like the voice of Bryan saying: “Vote for a Democrat.”

When the conventions were over and the campaign committees appointed, the fusionists found that it was a difficult thing to make a campaign in Nebraska. Something must be done to get the Independent to fight the battle for them, but the Independent still declared that it would not support a Parker Democrat. Then, sad to relate, the editor of the Independent got taken in himself.

The chairman of the Democratic State Committee, a brother-in-law to Bryan, came to Mr. Tibbles declaring that he represented Mr. Bryan and was speaking in Bryan’s name, and made the following proposition:

If Mr. Tibbles would spend most of his time out of the state during the campaign, and let the Independent support the fusion ticket, all of whose nominees except three were Populists, Mr. Bryan on his part would agree to go to Arizona or Colorado and get sick. He would continue to keep sick until the close of the campaign, so sick that he would not be able to make any political speeches at all. An exception was made in regard to Indiana. It was said that Mr. Bryan had promised to make three speeches in Indiana in support of his old personal friend who was running for Governor in that state, but it was further stipulated that these three speeches should not be political speeches, but repetitions of Mr. Bryan’s lecture on “Ideals.”

Mr. Bryan went to Arizona and sent home a letter saying that he was worse and would not be able to deliver any political speeches during the campaign. That letter was printed in the Lincoln daily papers and was shown to Mr. Tibbles as proof that Mr. Bryan was keeping his contract.

The chairman of the Democratic State Committee went to New York, saw Parker, Sheehan, Belmont, Tom Taggart and the rest of the band of financial and political pirates. He came home with money for campaign expenses. Then Mr. Bryan hired a special train and started out speech-making in Nebraska and in other states. The surprising rapidity with which his lung healed has never been equaled in all the history of medicine. But when the votes were counted it was learned that wherever Mr. Bryan spoke, whether from the rear end of his car, on a platform by the railway side, or in theatre or hall, a tidal wave of Republican votes followed him, although he pleaded with his Democratic hearers to be “regular.” Hundreds of thousands of Democrats listened to this man, who for eight years had been denouncing Wall Street and all its ways, and was now consorting with the most disreputable part of Wall Street, urging them to vote to keep it in power. Humiliated, sad at heart, their idol carrying the banner of the enemy, in the enemy’s ranks, they turned their backs in scorn upon Mr. Bryan, went to the polls and voted the Republican ticket. If they were to have Wall Street and plutocracy, they wanted the old, genuine article, not “something just as good.” The fusionists declared that wherever Watson or Tibbles spoke they made votes for Roosevelt. They did not make one Roosevelt vote where Bryan made a thousand.

Mr. Berge—George Washington Berge—received a large vote for Governor. That was because Mickey, the Republican, who was running for re-election, was cordially hated by the whole Republican Party. Thirty thousand Republicans voted for Berge, and then he was defeated. But Berge is a fusionist. He wants office, and especially the office of Governor of Nebraska.

It seemed necessary, if Mr. Bryan was to prove his undying love for the Democratic Party, to convince all Eastern Democrats that he would forever prove “regular” no matter who was nominated or what the platform was, and it seemed to the fusionists, if they were to have any of the spoils of victory when the national Government was captured, that the People’s Party must be destroyed. It must never hold another state or national convention. They all agreed that the party had done a wonderful work for the nation, that its principles were being everywhere adopted, but it must be crucified, officially pronounced dead and buried, and the first step toward that object was the destruction of the Nebraska Independent.

Mr. Berge is a lawyer. He never has had a day’s experience in a newspaper office. He announced that he would start a paper in Lincoln in opposition to the Independent. Then a proposition was made to the proprietor of the Independent to sell out. A very large price was offered. When the proprietor faced these facts he began to get discouraged. He had grown up in Lincoln. He had associated with these fusionists for years. The fight which he saw in the near future with these men was an unpleasant thing to contemplate. The cost of running a great newspaper plant is large. When it was known that the home advertising would in part be lost, and also a large share of the job work, the moment the editor defied Bryan and the fusionists, the outlook was gloomy. To those whom the Independent had always fought in the city and state were to be added hundreds of others who had passed as friends. And the proprietor became discouraged.

It is somewhat discouraging to go to a convention ostensibly composed of men of your own party and see the most active members of it engaged in a scheme to destroy your party. These have been the conditions in every Populist convention in the state of Nebraska since 1890. The only thing that prevented the party from being destroyed sooner was the Nebraska Independent. The fusionists became more and more convinced of that fact, and the scheme was invented to publish a paper in opposition in the same city, which, while claiming to be Populistic, would work for the destruction of the party. Credit for the invention belongs to George Washington Berge. The hope was entertained that when the People’s Party was destroyed all the Populists would go into the Democratic Party, and George Washington Berge would be Governor and W. J. Bryan United States Senator.

The proprietor of the Independent was bound in the contract transferring to George Washington Berge the title to the paper, not to engage in the business of publishing a reform paper for five years, but the fusionists found that it would be impossible to put any shackles on the editor. He intends to fight on. Just as all the world is beginning to accept Populist principles he does not propose to sheathe his sword and stand by, a passive spectator. The greatest battle of the age is to be fought. He “is going up against” that crowd again.

The columns of the Independent have been an open forum for any man who thought he had something that would benefit humanity. In the columns of the paper he could always voice his sentiments. Besides that, it has been a journal of economics, sociology, philosophy, ethics, finance, single tax, land, Government and all the decent news. Now it has gone into the hands of an ordinary Western lawyer who never read a standard work of authority on any one of these subjects. It is to be a personal organ after the fashion of the one that W. J. Bryan publishes in the same town. W. J. Bryan is the most accomplished orator of the day. He has personal acquaintances in every state and territory. Millions have met and shaken hands with him. George W. Berge has some acquaintances outside of Lancaster County, Nebraska, and besides that, Berge is a Populist engaged in destroying the Populist Party. These are his elements of success.

The Populists of the different states and territories who have been readers of the Independent will in the near future have a place to express their views and read discussions of the great problems that are pressing for solution. We will be heard. For years not a great daily would print a line in defense of the fundamental principles of Populism. Now magazines are making fortunes for their proprietors who have admitted some of these principles to their pages. Some of these magazines have a greater circulation than was ever known before anywhere in the world for monthly periodical literature. The People’s Party is not dead. The Nebraska Independent will rise from its ashes stronger and better than ever before. The vilest, rottenest, worst smelling spot in all the preserves of plutocracy is that place where the fusionist roams, seeking to destroy the organization that gave him the only opportunities of his life.

Pole Baker — SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS — CHAPTER VII — CHAPTER VIII — CHAPTER IX

BY WILL N. HARBEN
Author of “The Georgians,” “Abner Daniel,” etc.

In a small Georgia town a friendship has grown up between Pole Baker, reformed moonshiner and an unusual and likable character, and young Nelson Floyd, who was left as a baby in a mountain cabin by an unknown woman just before her death. Floyd, in the face of many trials and temptations, has worked his way up in the world and made a man of himself. Jeff Wade appears at the store, in which Floyd has become a partner, to avenge on him a rumored injustice to Wade’s sister. Pole Baker’s tact prevents a duel by making Floyd see that the unselfish course is for him to avoid a meeting. Cynthia Porter comes to the store, alarmed for Floyd’s safety. On his way home to his family Pole falls a victim to his besetting sin of drink. Cynthia rejects the suit of the Rev. Jason Hillhouse and refuses to act on his warnings against Floyd’s attentions. At a corn-shucking given by Pole, Floyd wins the right to kiss Cynthia, and on their way home claims his privilege without actually asking to marry her and proposes in vain that, since her mother dislikes him, she meet him at times on signal in the grape-arbor. That night, while Cynthia is regretting even her slight weakness, her suspicious and tactless mother half accuses her and hints that the worry over Cynthia and Floyd has caused her to fear an attack of insanity.

ON the following Saturday morning there was a considerable gathering of farmers at Springtown. A heavy fall of rain during the night had rendered the soil unfit for plowing, and it was a sort of enforced holiday. Many of them stood around Mayhew & Floyd’s store. Several women and children were seated between the two long counters, on boxes and the few available chairs. Nelson Floyd was at the high desk in the rear, occupied with business letters, when Pole Baker came in at the back door and stood near him, closely scanning the long room.

“Where’s the old man?” he asked when Floyd looked up and saw him.

“Not down yet; dry up, Pole! I was making a calculation and you knocked it hell-west and crooked.”

“Well, I reckon that kin wait. I’ve got a note fer you.” Pole was taking it from his coat pocket.

“Miss Cynthia?” Floyd asked eagerly.

“Not by a long shot,” said Pole. “I reckon maybe you’ll wish it was.” He threw the missive on the desk and went on in quite a portentous tone: “I come by Jeff Wade’s house, Nelson, on my way back from the mill. He was inside with his wife and childern, an’ as I was passin’ one of the little boys run out to the fence and called me in to whar he was. He’s a queer fellow! I saw he was tryin’ to keep his wife in the dark, fer what you reckon he said?”

“How do I know?” The young merchant, with a serious expression of face, had torn open the envelope but not yet unfolded the sheet of cheap, blue-lined writing paper.

“Why, he jest set thar in his chair before the fire, an’ as he handed it up to me he sorter looked knowin’ an’ said, said he: ‘Pole, I’m owin’ Mayhew & Floyd a little balance on my account, an’ they seem uneasy. I wish you’d take this here note to young Floyd. He’s always stood to me sorter, an’ I believe he’ll git old Mayhew to wait on me a little while.’”

“Did he say that, Pole?” Floyd had opened the note, but was looking straight into Baker’s eyes.

“Yes, he said them words, Nelson, although he knowed I was on hand that day when he paid off his bill in full. I couldn’t chip in thar before his wife, an’ the Lord knows I couldn’t tell him I had an idea what was in the note, so I rid on as fast as I could. I had a turn o’ meal under me an’ I tuck it off an’ hid it in the thicket t’other side o’ Duncan’s big spring. I wasn’t goin’ to carry a secret war message a-straddle o’ two bushels o’ meal warm from the rocks. An’ I’d bet my hat that scrap o’ paper means battle.”

Floyd read the note. There was scarcely a change in the expression of his face or a flicker of his eyelashes as he folded it with steady fingers and held it in his hand.

“Yes, he says he has got the whole story, Pole,” Floyd said. “He gives me fair warning as a man of honor to arm myself. He will be here at twelve o’clock to the minute.”

“Great God!” Pole ejaculated. “You hain’t one chance in a million to escape with yore life. You seed how he shot t’other day. He was excited then—he was as calm as a rock mountain when I seed him a while ago, an’ his ride to town will steady ’im more. He sorter drawed down his mouth at one corner an’ cocked up his eye, same as to say: ‘You understand; thar hain’t no use in upsettin’ women folks over a necessary matter o’ this sort.’ Looky here, Nelson, old friend, some’n has got to be done, an’ it’s got to be done in a hurry.”

“It will have to be done at twelve o’clock, anyway,” Floyd said calmly, a grim smile almost rising to his face. “That’s the hour he’s set.”

“Do you mean to tell me you are a-goin’ to set thar like a knot on a log an’ ’low that keen-eyed mountain sharpshooter to step up in that door an’ peg away at you?”

“No, I don’t mean that, exactly, Pole,” Floyd smiled coldly. “A man ought not to insult even his antagonist that way. You see, that would be making the offended party liable for wilful, cold-blooded murder before the law. No, I’ve got my gun here in the drawer, and we’ll make a pretense at fighting a duel, even if he downs me in the first round.”

“You are a darn fool, that’s what you are!” Pole was angry without knowing why. “Do you mean to tell me you are a-goin’ to put yore life up like that to gratify a scamp like Jeff Wade?”

“I’d deserve to be kicked off the face of the earth,” Floyd responded with firmness, “if I turned tail and ran. He seems to think I may light out; I judge that by his setting the time a couple of hours ahead, but I’ll give him satisfaction. I’m built that way, Pole. There is no use arguing about it.”

“My God, my God!” Pole said under his breath. “Hush! Thar comes Mayhew. I reckon you don’t want him to know about it!”

“No, he’d be in for swearing out a peace warrant. For all you do, don’t let him on to it, Pole. I want to write a letter or two, before Wade comes. Don’t let the old man interrupt me.”

“I’ll feel like I’m dancin’ on yore scaffold,” the farmer growled. “I want my mind free to—to study. Thar! He’s stopped to talk to Joe Peters. Say, Nelson, I see Mel Jones down thar talkin’ to a squad in front o’ the door; they’ve got the’r heads packed together as close as sardines. I see through it now. By God, I see through that!”

“What is it you see through, Pole?” Floyd looked up from Wade’s note, his brow furrowed.

“Why, Mel’s Jeff Wade’s fust cousin; he’s on to what’s up, an’ he’s confidin’ it to a few; it will be all over this town in five minutes, an’ the women an’ childern will hide out to keep from bein’ hit. Thar they come in at the front now, an’ they are around the old man like red ants round the body of a black one. He’ll be on to it in a minute. Thar, see? What did I tell you? He’s comin’ this way. You can tell by the old duck’s walk that he’s excited.”

Floyd muttered something that escaped Pole’s ears, and set to work writing. Mayhew came on rapidly, tapping his heavy cane on the floor, his eyes glued on the placid profile of his young partner.

“What’s this I hear?” he panted. “Has Jeff Wade sent you word that he was comin’ here to shoot you?”

Pole laughed out merrily, and, stepping forward, slapped the old merchant familiarly on the arm. “It’s a joke, Mr. Mayhew!” he said. “I put it up on Mel Jones as we rid in town; he’s always makin’ fun o’ women fer tattlin’, an’ said I to myse’f, said I, ‘I’ll see how deep that’s rooted under yore hide, old chap,’ an’ so I made that up out o’ whole cloth. I was jest tellin’ Nelson, here, that I’d bet a hoss to a ginger-cake that Mel ’ud not be able to keep it, an’ he hain’t. Nelson, by George, the triflin’ skunk let it out inside o’ ten minutes, although he swore to me he’d keep his mouth shet. I’ll make ’im set up the drinks on that.”

“Well, I don’t like such jokes!” Mayhew fumed. “Jokes like that and what’s at the bottom of them don’t do a reputable house any good. And I don’t want any more of them. Do you understand, sir?”

“Oh, yes, I won’t do it ag’in,” answered Pole in an almost absent-minded tone. His eyes were now on Floyd, and despite his assumed lightness of manner the real condition of things was bearing heavily on him. Just then a rough-looking farmer, in a suit of home-made jeans, straw hat and shoes worn through at the bottom, came back to them. He held in his hand the point of a plow and looked nervously about him.

“Everybody’s busy down in front,” he said, “an’ I want to git a quarter’s wuth o’ coffee.” His glance, full of curiosity, was now on Floyd’s face. “I want to stay till Wade comes, myself, but my old woman’s almost got a spasm. She says she seed enough bloodshed durin’ the war, an’ then she always liked Mr. Floyd. She says she’d mighty nigh as soon see an own brother laid out as him. Mr. Floyd sorter done us a favor two year back when he stood fer us on our corn crop, an’, as fer me, why, of course, I——”

“Look here, Bill Champ,” Pole burst out in a spontaneous laugh. “I thought you had more sense than to swallow a joke like that. Go tell yore old woman that I started that tale jest fer pure fun. Nelson here an’ Wade is good friends.”

“Oh, well, ef that’s it, that’s different,” the farmer said. “But from the way Mel Jones talked down thar a body would think you fellers was back here takin’ Mr. Floyd’s measure fer his box. I’ll go quiet my wife. She couldn’t talk of a thing all the way here this mornin’ but a new dress she was goin’ to git an’ now she’s fer hurryin’ back without even pickin’ out the cloth.”

“No, I don’t like this sort o’ thing,” old Mayhew growled as the customer moved away. “An’ I want you to remember that, Baker.”

“Ah, you dry up, old man!” Pole retorted, with a mechanical laugh. “You’d live longer an’ enjoy life better ef you’d joke more. Ef the marrow o’ my bones was as sour as yourn is I’d cut my throat or go into the vinegar business.”

At this juncture Captain Duncan came in the store and walked back to the trio.

“Good morning,” he said cheerily. “Say, Floyd, I’ve heard the news, and thought if you wanted to borrow a pair of real, good, old-fashioned dueling pistols, why, I’ve got a pair my father owned. They were once used by General——”

“It’s all a joke, Captain,” Pole broke in, winking at the planter and casting a look of warning at the now unobservant Mayhew.

“Oh, is that it?” Duncan was quick of perception. “To tell you the truth, I thought so, boys. Yes, yes”—he was studying Floyd’s calm face admiringly—“yes, it sounded to me like a prank somebody was playing. Well, I thought I’d go fishing this evening, and came in to get some hooks and lines. Fine weather, isn’t it? But the river’s muddy. I’ll go down and pick out some tackle.”

He had just gone when an old woman wearing a cheap breakfast shawl over her gray head, a dress of dingy solid black calico and a pair of old, heavy shoes approached from the door in the rear.

“I got yore summons, Mr. Mayhew,” she said in a thin, shaky voice. “Peter, my husband, was so downhearted that he wouldn’t come to town, an’ so I had to do it. So you are goin’ to foreclose on us? The mule an’ cow is all on earth we’ve got to make the crop on, and when they are gone we will be plumb ruined.”

The face of the old merchant was like carved stone.

“You got the goods, didn’t you, Mrs. Stark?” he asked harshly.

“Oh, yes, nobody hain’t disputin’ the account,” she answered plaintively.

“And you agreed faithfully if you didn’t pay this spring that the mule and cow would be our property?”

“Oh, yes, of course! As I say, Mr. Mayhew, I’m not blamin’ you-uns. Thar hain’t a thing for me an’ Peter to do but thrust ourselves on my daughter and son-in-law over in Fannin, but I’d rather die than go. We won’t be welcome; they are loaded down with childern too young to work. So it’s settled, Mr. Mayhew—I mean ef we drive over the mule an’ cow thar won’t be no lawsuit?”

“No, there won’t be any suit. I’d let this pass and give you more time, Mrs. Stark, but a thing like that can’t be kept quiet through the country, an’ there are fifty customers of ours over your way who ’ud be running here with some cock-and-bull story and we’d be left high and dry with the goods to pay for in market and nothing to show for it. We make our rules, Mrs. Stark, and they are clearly understood at the time the papers are signed.”

“Never you mind, Mrs. Stark, I’ll fix that all right.” It was Nelson Floyd who was speaking, and with a face full of pity and tenderness he had stepped forward and was offering to shake hands.

The little woman, her lips twitching and drawn, gave him her trembly hand, her eyes wide open in groping wonder.

“I don’t understand, Nelson—Mr. Floyd. You mean——?”

“I mean that I’ll have your entire account charged to me and you can take your time about paying it—next fall or the next, or any time it suits you. I’ll not press you for it, if you never pay it. I passed your place the other day, and your crop looks very promising. You are sure to get out of debt this coming fall.”

“Oh, Nelson—I—I don’t know what to do about it. Mr. Mayhew says——”

“But I say it’s all right,” Floyd broke in as he laid his hand softly on her shoulder. “Go down in front and buy what you need to run on. I’ll assume the risk, if there is any.”

Mayhew turned suddenly; his face was white and his lip shook.

“Do you mean to say that you are going to step in and——?”

“Step in nothing,” Floyd said calmly. “I hope I won’t have to remind you, sir, of our clearly written agreement of partnership in which it is plainly stated that I may use my judgment in regard to customers whenever I wish.”

“You’ll ruin us—you’ll break us all to smash, if you do this sort of thing,” Mayhew panted. “It will upset our whole system.”

“I don’t agree with you, sir,” Floyd answered, “but we won’t argue about it. If you don’t intend to abide by our agreement then say so and we will part company.”

Mayhew stared in alarm for a moment, then he said:

“There’s no use talking about parting. I only want to kind of hold you in check. You get your sympathies stirred up and make plunges sometimes when you ought to act with a clear head. You say the crop looks well; then, it’s all right. Go ahead, Mrs. Stark. Anything Nelson does is agreeable to me.”

“Well, it’s mighty good of you both,” the old woman said, wiping tears of joy from her eyes. “No, I won’t buy anything today. I’ll ride out to the farm as quick as I can and tell Peter the good news. He’s mighty nigh out of his senses about it.”

Mayhew followed her down into the store. It was as if he were ashamed to meet the quizzical look which Pole Baker had fixed upon him. He had no sooner turned his back than Pole faced Floyd and asked: “How does she stand by your ticker?”

Floyd looked at his watch. “It’s a quarter-past eleven,” he said.

“The hell it is!” Pole went to the back door and looked out at the dreary stable-yard and barn. He stood there for several minutes in deep thought. Then he seemed to make up his mind on something that was troubling him, for he suddenly thrust his hand into his hip-pocket and drew out a revolver and rapidly twirled the cylinder with his heavy thumb.

“Yes, I ’lowed I’d swore off from shootin’ scrapes,” he mused; “but I shore have to git in this ’un. I’d never look Sally an’ the childern in the face agin ef I was to stand still an’ let that dead shot kill the best friend me an’ them ever had. No, Poley, old boy, you’ve got to enlist this mornin’, an’ thar hain’t no two ways about it. I’d take a drink on that, but a feller’s aim hain’t wuth a dang when he sees double.”

His attention was suddenly attracted to Floyd, who had left his stool and was putting a revolver into the pocket of his sack coat. Pole shoved his own cautiously back into his pocket and went to his friend’s side.

“What you goin’ to do now?” he asked.

“I have just thought of something that ought to be attended to,” was Floyd’s answer. “Is Mel Jones still down there?”

“Yes; I see ’im now through the left-hand window,” said Pole. “Do you want to see ’im?”

“Yes.” Floyd moved in the direction indicated and Pole wonderingly followed. Outside on the pavement at the corner of the store Mel Jones stood talking to a group of eager listeners. He stopped when he saw Floyd, and looked in the opposite direction, but in a calm voice the young merchant called him.

“Mel, may I see you a minute?”

“Certainly.” The face of the gaunt farmer fell as he came forward, his eyes shifting uneasily.

“I got a message from Jeff Wade just now,” said Floyd.

“Oh, did you? Is that so?” the fellow exclaimed.

“Yes; he says he has a private matter to settle with me, and says he’ll be here at the store at twelve. Now, as you see, there are a good many people standing around—women and children, and somebody might get hurt or frightened. You know where Price’s spring is, down behind the old brick yard?”

“Oh, yes; I know where it is, Floyd.”

“Well, you will do me a favor if you will ride out to Wade’s and tell him I’ll meet him there. He could reach it without coming through town, and we’d escape a lot of prying people who would be in the way.”

“That’s a good idea,” said Jones, his strong face lighting up. “Yes, I’ll go tell ’im. I’m glad to see that you are a man o’ backbone, Floyd. Some ’lowed you’d throw up the sponge an’ leave fer parts unknown, but Jeff’s got to tackle the rale stuff. I kin see that, Floyd. Minnie Wade raised a lots o’ devilment, an’ my wife says whatever rumors spread about her was her own fault. But Jeff cayn’t be expected to see it through a woman’s eyes. I wish you was goin’ to meet a man that wasn’t sech a dead shot. I seed Jeff knock a squirrel out of a high tree with his six-shooter that three men had missed with rifles.”

“I’ll try to take care of myself, Mel. But you’d better hurry up and get to him before he starts to town.”

“Oh, I’ll git ’im all right,” said the farmer, and he went out to the hitching-rack, jumped on his horse and galloped away.

The group Jones had been talking to now drew near, their eyes and mouths open.

“It’s all off, boys,” Pole said, with one of his inscrutable laughs. “Explanations an’ apologies has been exchanged—no gore today. It was a big mistake all round.”

This version soon spread, and a sigh of relief went up from everybody. Fifteen minutes passed. Pole was standing in the front door of the store, cautiously watching Floyd, who had gone back to his desk to write a letter. Suddenly Pole missed him from his place.

“He’s tryin’ to give me the slip,” Pole said. “He’s gone out at the back door and has made fer the spring. Well, he kin think he’s throwed old Pole off, but he hain’t by a jugful. I know now which road Jeff Wade will come by, an’ I’ll see that skunk before Nelson does or no prayers hain’t answered.”

He went out to the hitching-rack, mounted, and, waving his hand to the few bystanders who were eying him curiously, rode away, his long legs swinging back and forth from the flanks of his horse. A quarter of a mile outside of the village he came to a portion of the road leading to Jeff Wade’s house that was densely shaded, and there he drew rein and dismounted.

“Thar hain’t no other way fer ’im to come,” he said, “an’ he’s my meat—that is, unless the damn fool kin be fetched to reason.”

There was a quilting party at Porter’s that day. Cynthia had invited some of her friends to help her, and the quilt, a big square of colored scraps, more or less artistically arranged in stars, crescents and floral wreaths, occupied the centre of the sitting-room. It was stitched to a frame of four smooth wooden bars, which were held together at the corners by pegs driven into gimlet holes and which rested on the backs of four chairs. The workers sat on two sides of it and stitched, with upward and downward strokes, toward the centre, the quilt being rolled up as the work progressed.

Hattie Mayhew was there, Kitty Welborn and two or three others. As usual they were teasing Cynthia about the young preacher.

“I know she’s the apple of his eye,” laughed Kitty Welborn. “He really can’t, as you said the other night, keep from looking at her during preaching. I noticed it particularly one Sunday not long ago and told Matt Digby that I’d be sure to get religion if a man bored it into me with eyes like his.”

“I certainly would go up to the mourners’ bench every time he called up repentant sinners,” said Hattie Mayhew. “I went up once while he was exhorting and he turned me over to Sister Perdue, that snaggle-toothed old maid. He didn’t even offer his hand.”

Cynthia said nothing, but she smiled good-naturedly as she rose from her chair and went to the side of the quilt near the crudely screened fireplace to see that the work was rolled evenly on the frame. While thus engaged her father came into the room, vigorously fanning himself with his old slouch hat. The girls knew he had been to the village, and all asked eagerly if he had brought them any letters.

“No, I clean forgot to go to the office,” he made slow answer as he threw himself into a big armchair with a rawhide bottom, near a window on the shaded side of the house.

“Why, father,” his daughter chided him, “you promised the girls faithfully to call at the office. I think that was very neglectful of you when you knew they would be here to dinner.”

“And he usually has a good memory,” spoke up Mrs. Porter, appearing in the doorway leading to the dining-room and kitchen. She was rolling flakes of dough from her lank hands and glanced at her husband reprovingly. “Nathan, what did you go and do that way for, when you knew Cynthia was trying to make her friends pass a pleasant day?”

“Well, I clean forgot it,” Porter said, quite undisturbed. “To tell you the truth, thar was so much excitement on all hands, with this un runnin’ in with fresh news, an’ that un sayin’ that maybe it was all a false alarm, that the post-office plumb slipped out o’ my head. Huh, I hain’t thought post-office once sence I left here! I don’t know whether I could ’a’ got in thar anyway, fer the Postmaster hisse’f was runnin’ round like a camp-meetin’ chicken with its head cut off. Besides, I tell you, gals, I made up my mind to hit the grit. I never was much of a hand to want to see wholesale bloodshed. Moreover, I’ve heard of many a spectator a-gittin’ shot in the arms an’ legs or some vital spot. No, I sorter thought I’d come on. Mandy, have you seen anything o’ my fly-flap? When company comes you an’ Cynthia jest try yoreselves on seein’ how many things you kin put out o’ place, an’ I’m gittin’ sick an’ tired o’——”

“Nathan, what’s going on in town?” broke in Mrs. Porter. “What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know what’s goin’ on now,” Porter drawled out as he slapped at a fly on his bald pate with an angry hand. “I say I don’t know what’s goin’ on now; but I know what was jest gittin’ ready to go on. I reckon the coroner’s goin’ on with the inquest ef he ain’t afeared of an ambush. Jeff Wade—” Porter suddenly bethought himself of something, and he rose, passed through the composite and palpable stare of the whole room and went to the clock on the mantelpiece and opened it. “Thar!” he said impatiently. “I wonder what hole or crack you-uns have stuck my chawin’ tobacco in. I put it right in the corner of this clock, right under the turpentine bottle.”

“There’s your fool tobacco!” Mrs. Porter exclaimed, running forward and taking the dark plug from beneath the clock. “Fill your mouth with it; maybe it will unlock your jaw. What is the trouble at Springtown?”

“I was jest startin’ to tell you,” said Porter, diving into his capacious trousers pocket for his knife and slowly opening the blade with his long thumbnail. “You see, Jeff Wade has at last got wind o’ all that gab about Minnie an’ Nelson Floyd, an’ he sent a war-cry by Pole Baker on hossback as fast as Pole could clip it to tell Floyd to arm an’ be ready at exactly twelve o’clock sharp.”

“I knew it would come,” said Mrs. Porter, a combination of finality and resignation in her harsh voice. “I knew Jeff Wade wasn’t going to allow that talk to go on.” She was looking at her daughter, who, white and wide-eyed, stood motionless behind Hattie Mayhew’s chair. For a moment no one spoke, though instinctively the general glance went to Cynthia, who, feeling it, turned to the window looking out upon the porch, and stood with her back to the room. Mrs. Porter broke the silence, her words directed to her daughter.

“Jeff Wade will kill that man if he was fool enough to wait and meet him. Do you think Floyd waited, Nathan?”

“No, he didn’t wait,” was Porter’s answer. “The plucky chap went ’im one better; he sent word by Mel Jones to tell Wade that it would be indecent to have a rumpus like that in town on a Saturday, when so many women an’ childern was settin’ round in bullet-range, an’ so, if it was agreeable he’d ruther have it in the open place at Price’s spring. Mel passed me as he was goin’ to Jeff with that word. It’s nearly one o’clock now, an’ it’s my candid opinion publicly expressed that Nelson Floyd has gone to meet a higher Power. I didn’t want to be hauled up at court as a witness, an’ so, as I say, I hit the grit. I’ve been tied up in other folks’s matters before this, an’ the court don’t allow enough fer witness fees to tempt me to set an’ listen to them long-winded lawyers talk fer a whole week on a stretch.”

“Poor fellow!” exclaimed Hattie Mayhew. “I’m right sorry for him. He was so handsome and sweet-natured. He had faults, but they may have been due to the hard life he had when he was a child. I must say I have always been sorry for him; he had the saddest look out of the eyes of any human being I ever saw.”

“And he knew how to use his eyes, too,” was the sting Mrs. Porter added to this charitable comment as her sharp gaze still rested on her daughter.

There was a sound at the window. Cynthia, with unsteady hands, was trying to raise the sash. She finally succeeded in doing this and placing the wooden prop under it. There was a steely look in her eyes and her features were set, her face pale.

“It’s very warm in here!” they heard her say. “There isn’t a bit of draught in the room. It’s that hot cook stove, mother; I will—I——”

She had turned and walked from the room.

Mrs. Porter sighed as she looked after the departing form.

“Did you notice her face, girls?” she asked. “It was as white as death itself. She looked as if she was about to faint. It’s all this talk about Floyd. Well, they were friends. I tried to get her to stop receiving his attentions, but she thought she knew better. Well, he has got his deserts, I reckon.”

“And all on account of the talk about that silly Minnie Wade!” cried Kitty Welborn, “when you know as well as I do, Mrs. Porter, that Thad Pelham—” The speaker glanced at Nathan Porter and paused.

“Oh, you needn’t let up on yore hen-cackle on my account,” that blunt worthy made haste to say. “I’ll go out an’ look at my new hogs. You gals are out fer a day o’ pleasure, an’ I wouldn’t interfere with the workin’ of yore jaws fer a purty.”

Mrs. Porter didn’t remain to hear Kitty Welborn finish her observation, but followed her daughter.

In the next room, which was the dining-room, an old woman sat at a window. She was dressed in dingy black calico, her snowy hair brushed smoothly down over a white wrinkled brow, and was fanning herself slowly with a turkey-feather fan. She had Mrs. Porter’s features and thinness of frame.

“Mother,” Mrs. Porter said, pausing before her, “didn’t Cynthia come in here just now?”

“Yes, she did,” replied the old woman. “She did. And I just want to know, Mandy, what you all have been saying to her? I want to know, I say?”

“We haven’t been saying anything to her as I know of,” said the farmer’s wife in slow, studious surprise.

“I know you have, I say, I know you have!” The withered hand holding the fan quivered in excitement. “I know you have, for I can always tell when that poor child is worried. I heard a little of it, too, but not all. I heard them mention Hillhouse’s name. I tell you, I am not going to sit still and let a whole pack of addle-pated women tease as good a girl as Cynthia is plumb to death.”

“I don’t think they were troubling her,” Mrs. Porter said, her face drawn in thought, her mind elsewhere.

“I know they were,” the old woman insisted. “She may have hidden it in there before you all, but when she came in here just now she stopped right near me and looked me full in the face, and never since she was a little baby have I seen such an odd look in her eyes. They looked like they were about to burst with tears. She saw me looking at her, and she come up behind me and laid her face down against my neck. She quivered all over, and then she said, ‘Oh, Granny! Oh, Granny!’ and then she straightened up and went right out at that door into the yard. I tell you, it’s got to let up. She sha’n’t have the life deviled out of her. If she don’t want to marry that preacher, she don’t have to. As for me, I’d rather have married any sort of man on earth when I was young than a long-legged, straight-faced preacher.”

“You say she went out in the yard?” said Mrs. Porter absently. “I wonder what she went out there for.”

Mrs. Porter went to the door and looked out. There was a clothesline stretched between two apple trees nearby, and Cynthia stood at it taking down a tablecloth. She turned with it in her arms and came to her mother.

“I just remembered,” she said, “that there isn’t a clean cloth for the table. Mother, the iron is hot on the stove. You go back to the girls and I’ll smooth this out and set the table.”

The eyes of the two met. Mrs. Porter took a deep breath. “All right,” she said. “I’ll go back to the company, but I’ve got something to say, and then I’m done for good. I want to say that I’m glad a daughter of mine has got the proper pride and spunk you have. I see you are not going to make a goose of yourself before visitors, and I’m proud of you. You are the right sort—especially after he’s acted in the scandalous way he has and—and laid you, even as good a girl as you, liable to be talked about for keeping company with him.”

The girl’s eyes sank. Something seemed to rise and struggle up within her, for her breast heaved and her shoulders quivered convulsively.

“I’ll fix the cloth,” she said in a low, forced voice, “and then I’ll set the table and call you.”

“All right”; Mrs. Porter was turning away. “I’ll try to keep them entertained till you come back.”

Beneath a big oak Pole stood holding his bridle-rein and waiting, his earnest gaze on the long road leading to Jeff Wade’s farm. Suddenly he descried a cloud of dust far ahead and he chuckled.

“He’s certainly on time,” he mused. “He must ’a’ had his hoss ready out in the thicket. Mel made good time, too. The dern devil is thirstin’ fer bloodshed. Mel’s that sort. By gum, that hain’t Wade; it’s Mel hisse’f, an’ he’s certainly layin’ the lash to his animal.”

In a gallop Jones bore down on him, riding as wildly as a cowboy, his broad hat in one hand, a heavy switch in the other. He drew rein when he recognized Baker.

“Did you deliver that message?” Pole questioned.

“Oh, yes, I finally got him alone; his wife seems to suspicion some’n, and she stuck to ’im like a leech. She’s a jealous woman, Pole, an’ I don’t know but what she kinder thought Jeff was up to some o’ his old shines. He was a sorter tough nut before he married, you know, an’ a man like that will do to watch.”

“Well, what did he say?” Pole asked.

“Why, he said ‘all hunkydory.’ The spring plan ketched him jest right. He said that one thing—o’ bloodyin’ up the main street in town—had bothered him more than anything else. He admired it in Floyd, too. Jeff said, ‘By gum! fer a town dude that feller’s got more backbone than I expected. He’s a foe wuth meetin’, an’ I reckon killin’ ’im won’t be sech a terrible disgrace as I was afeared it mought be.’”

“But whar are you headin’ fer in sech a rush?” Pole asked.

Jones laughed as he put his hat carefully on his shaggy head and pressed the broad brims up on the sides and to a point in front. “Why, Pole,” he answered, “to tell you the truth, I am headed fer that thar spring. I’m goin’ to acknowledge to you that, as long as I’ve lived in this world, I hain’t never been on hand at a shootin’ affair. Mighty nigh every man I know has seed oodlin’s of ’em, but my luck’s been agin me. About the most excitin’ thing I ever attended was a chicken fight, and so I determined to see this un. I know a big rock jest above that spring, and I’m a-goin’ to git thar in plenty o’ time. You let me git kivered all but my eyes, an’ I’ll run the resk o’ gettin’ hit from thar up. Whar you makin’ fer, Pole?”

“Me? Oh, I’m on the way home, Mel. I seed the biggest rattlesnake run across this road jest now I ever laid eyes on. I got down to settle his hash, but I didn’t have anything to hit ’im with, an’ I’m done stompin’ at them fellers sence Tobe Baker, my cousin, over at Hillbend, got bliffed on the knee.”

“Well, so long!” Mel laughed. “I’ll hunt rattlesnakes some other time. Are you plumb shore you hain’t got the jimmies agin’, Pole? Take my advice an’ don’t tell about seein’ snakes; it sets folks to thinkin’. Why, I seed you once in broad daylight when you swore black spiders was playin’ sweepstakes on yore shirt front.”

“So long, Mel!” Pole smiled and waved his hand. He made a fair pretense at getting ready to mount as Mel galloped away in a cloud of dust. The horseman was scarcely out of sight when a pair of fine black horses drawing a buggy came into view. The vehicle contained Captain Duncan and his daughter Evelyn. She was a delicate, rather pretty girl of nineteen or twenty, and she nodded pleasantly to Pole as her father stopped his horses.

“You are sure that thing’s off, are you, Baker?” the planter said, with a genial smile.

“Oh, yes, Captain.” Pole had his eyes on the young lady and had taken off his hat, and stood awkwardly swinging it against the baggy knees of his rough trousers.

“Well, I’m very glad,” Duncan said. “I know you told some of the crowd back at the store that it had been settled, but I didn’t know whether it was reliable or not.”

Pole’s glance shifted between plain truth and Evelyn Duncan’s refined face for a moment, and then he nodded. “Oh, yes, it was all a mistake, Captain. Reports get out, you know; and nothin’ hain’t as bad as gossip is after it’s crawled through a hundred mouths an’ over a hundred wigglin’ tongues.”

“Well, I’m glad, as I say,” the planter said as he jerked his reins and spoke to his horses.

As he whirled away Pole growled. “Damned ef I hain’t a-makin’ a regular signpost out o’ myself,” he mused, “an’ lyin’ to beat the Dutch. Ef that dern fool don’t come on purty soon he’ll—but thar he is now, comin’ on with a swoop—looks like his hoss is about to run from under ’im, his dern legs is so long. Now, looky here, Pole Baker, Esquire, hog-thief an’ liar, you are up agin about the most serious proposition you ever tackled, an’ ef you don’t mind what you are about you’ll have cold feet inside o’ ten minutes by the clock. You’ve set in to carry this thing through or die in the attempt, an’ time’s precious. The fust thing is to stop the blamed whelp; you cayn’t reason with a man that’s flyin’ through the air like he’s shot out of a gun, an’ Jeff Wade’s a-goin’ to be the devil to halt. He’s got the smell o’ blood, an’ that works on a mad man jest like it does on a bloodhound—he’s a-goin’ to run down some’n. The only thing in God’s world that’ll stop a man o’ that sort is to insult ’im, an’ I reckon I’ll have that to do in this case.”

Jeff Wade was riding rapidly. Just before he reached Pole he drew out his big silver open-faced watch and looked at it. He wore no coat and had on a gray flannel shirt open at the neck. Round his waist he wore a wide leather belt, from which, on his right side, protruded the glittering butt of a revolver of unusual size and length of barrel. Suddenly Pole led his own horse round, until the animal stood directly across the narrow road, rendering it impossible for the approaching rider to pass at the speed he was going.

“Hold on thar, Jeff!” Pole held up his hand. “Whar away? The mail hack hain’t in yet. I’ve jest left town.”

“I hain’t goin’ after no mail!” Wade said, his lips tight, a fixed stare in his big, earnest eyes. “I’m headed fer Price’s spring. I’m goin’ to put a few holes in that thar Nelson Floyd, ef I git the drap on him ’fore he does on me.”

“Huh!” Pole ejaculated; “no, you hain’t a-goin’ to see him, nuther; that is, not till me’n you’ve had a talk, Jeff Wade. You seem in a hurry, but thar’s a matter betwixt me an’ you that’s got to be attended to.”

“What the hell do you mean?” Wade demanded, a stare of irritated astonishment dawning in his eyes.

“Why, I mean that Nelson Floyd is a friend o’ mine, an’ he ain’t a-goin’ to be shot down like a dog by a man that could hit a nickel a hundred yards away nine times out o’ ten. You an’ me’s close together, an’ I reckon chances ’ud be somewhar about equal. I hain’t a brag shot, but I could hit a pouch as big as yourn is about as easy as you could me.”

“You—you—by God, do you mean to take this matter up?”

Jeff Wade slid off his horse and stood facing Pole.

“Yes, I do, Jeff; that is, unless you’ll listen to common sense. That’s what I’m here fer. I’m a-goin’ to stuff reason into you ef I have to make a new hole to put it in at. You are a-goin’ entirely too fast to live in an enlightened Christian age, an’ I’m here to call a halt. I’ve got some things to tell you. They are a-goin’ to hurt like pullin’ eye-teeth, an’ you may draw yore gun before I’m through, but I’m goin’ to make a try at it.”

“What the——?”

“Hold on, hold on, hold on, Jeff!” Pole raised a warning hand. “Keep that paw off’n that cannon in yore belt or thar’ll be a war right here before you hear my proclamation of the terms we kin both live by. Jeff, I am yore neighbor an’ friend. I love you mighty nigh like a brother, an’ I’m here to tell you that, with all yore grit an’ good qualities, you are makin’ a bellowin’ jackass o’ yoreself. An’ ef I let you put through yore present plans, you’ll weep in repentance fer it till you are let down in yore soggy grave. Thar’s two sides to every question, an’ you are lookin’ only at yore side o’ this un. You cayn’t tell how sorry I am about havin’ to take this step. I’ve been a friend to yore entire family—to yore brothers, an’ yore old daddy when he was alive. I mighty nigh swore a lie down in Atlanta to keep him out o’ limbo when he was arrested fer moonshinin’.”

“I know all that!” growled Wade; “but God——”

“Hold yore taters now, an’ listen! You mought as well take yore mind off’n that spring. You hain’t a-goin’ to git at Nelson Floyd without you walk over my dead body—an’ thar’s no efs an’ ands about that. You try to mount that hoss, an’ I’ll kill you ef it’s in my power. I say I’ve got some’n to tell you that you’ll wish you’d listened to. I know some’n about Minnie that will put a new color on this whole nasty business; an’ when you know it, ef you kill Nelson Floyd in cold blood, the law will jerk that stiff neck o’ yourn—jerk it till it’s limber.”

“You say you know some’n about Minnie?” The gaunt hand which till now had hovered over the butt of the big revolver hung down straight. He stood staring, his lip hanging loose, a sudden droop of indecision upon him.

“I know this much, Jeff,” Pole said, less sharply. “I know you are not after the fust offender agin yore family honor, an’ when I prove that to you I don’t believe you’ll look at it the same.”

“You say—you say——?”

“Listen now, Jeff, an’ don’t fly off the handle at a well-wisher sayin’ what he thinks has to be said in justice to all concerned. The truth is, you never seed Minnie like other folks has all along. You seed ’er grow up an’ she was yore pet. To you she was a regular angel; but other folks has knowed all along, Jeff, that she was born with a sorter light nature. Women folks, with the’r keen eyes, has knowed that ever since she got out o’ short dresses. Even yore own wife has said behind yore back a heap on this line that she was afeared to say to you. Not a soul has dared to talk plain to you, an’ even I wouldn’t do it except in this case o’ life an’ death.”

Wade shook back his long, coarse hair. He was panting like a tired dog. “I don’t believe a damn word of what you are a-sayin’!” he muttered, “an’ I’ll make you prove it, by God, or I’ll have yore life-blood!”

“Listen to me, Jeff,” Pole said gently. “I’m not goin’ to threaten any more. Believe me or not, but listen! You remember when Thad Pelham went off to Mexico a year or so ago?”

Wade made no reply, but there was a look of dawning comprehension in his great, blearing eyes.

“I see you remember that,” Pole went on. “Well, you know, too, that he was goin’ with Minnie a lot about that time—takin’ her buggy-ridin’ an’ to meetin’. He was a devil in pants; his whole family was bad. The men in it wouldn’t go in the gate o’ heaven ef a woman was winkin’ at ’em on the outside. Well, Thad started fer Mexico one day, an’ at the same time Minnie went on a visit to yore brother Joe in Calhoun.

“She went thar a year ago,” Wade said, “fer I bought ’er ticket at Parley.”

“She told you she went to Calhoun.” Pole’s eyes were mercifully averted. “I met her an’ Thad in Atlanta.”

Wade caught his breath. He shook from head to foot as with a chill.

“You say—Pole, you say——?”

Pole pulled at his mustache and looked down.

“Well, I reckon they wasn’t down thar to attend a Sunday-school convention, Jeff—they didn’t have that look to me. But I was so worried fer fear I mought be doin’ a woman injustice in my mind that, after they left me—to make sure, I went in the office o’ the hotel an’ made sure.”

Suddenly Wade put out his hand and laid it heavily on Pole’s shoulder. “Looky here, Baker,” he said, “if you are lying to me, I——”

“Hold on, hold on, Jeff Wade!” Pole broke in sternly. “Whenever you use words like them you smile! So fer, this has been a friendly talk, as I see it; but you begin to intimate that I’m a liar, an’ I’ll try my best to make you chaw the statement. You’re excited, but you mustn’t go too fur.”

“Well, I want the truth, by God, I want the truth!”

“Well, you are a-gittin’ it, with the measure runnin’ over,” Pole said, “an’ that ought to satisfy any reasonable man.”

“So you think then, that Nelson Floyd never done any—any o’ the things folks says he did—that ’twas jest report?”

“Well, I ain’t here to say that, nuther,” said Pole most diplomatically. “But la me! what a stark, ravin’ fool you was about to make o’ yoreself, Jeff!” Pole went on. “You started to do this thing today on yore sister’s account, when by doin’ it you would bust up her home an’ make her life miserable.”

“You mean——?”

“I mean that Joe Mitchell, that’s been dead stuck on Minnie sence she was a little gal, set up to her an’ proposed marriage. They got engaged an’ then every old snaggle-toothed busybody in these mountains set in to try to bust it up by totin’ tales about Floyd an’ others to ’im. As fast as one would come Minnie’d kill it, an’ show Joe what a foolish thing it was to listen to gossip, an’ Joe finally told ’em all to go to thunder, an’ they was married an’ moved on his farm in Texas. From all accounts they are doin’ well an’ are happy; but la me; they wouldn’t be that a-way long ef you’d ’a’ shot Nelson Floyd this mornin’.”

“You say they wouldn’t, Pole?”

“Huh, I reckon you wouldn’t dance a jig an’ sing alleluia ef you was to pick up a newspaper this mornin’ an’ read in type a foot long that yore wife’s brother, in another state, had laid a man out stiff as a board fer some’n that folks said had tuck place some time back betwixt the man an’ her.”

“Huh!” Wade’s glance was now on Pole’s face. “Huh, I reckon you are right, Pole, I reckon you are right. I wasn’t thinkin’ about that.”

“Thar was another duty you wasn’t a-thinkin’ about, too,” Pole said. “An’ that is yore duty to yore wife an’ childern that would be throwed helpless on the world ef this thing had ’a’ come off today.”

“Well, I don’t see that, anyway,” said Wade dejectedly.

“Well, I do, Jeff. You see, ef you’d ’a’ gone on an’ killed Floyd, after I halted you, I’d ’a’ been a witness agin you, an’ I’d ’a’ had to testify that I told you, in so many words, whar the rale blame laid, an’ no jury alive would ’a’ spared yore neck.”

“I reckon that’s so,” Wade admitted. “Well, I guess I’ll go back, Pole. I won’t go any further with it. I promise you not to molest that scamp. I’ll not trade any more at his shebang, an’ I’ll avoid ’im all I kin, but I’ll not kill ’im as I intended.”

“Now, you’re a-talkin’ with a clear head an’ a clean tongue.” Pole drew a breath of relief and stood silent as Wade drew his horse around, put his foot into the heavy wooden stirrup and mounted. Pole said nothing until Wade had ridden several paces homeward, then he called out to him, and beckoned him back with his hand, going to meet him, leading his horse.

“I just thought o’ some’n else, Jeff—some’n I want to say. I reckon I wouldn’t sleep sound tonight, or think of anything the rest o’ the day, ef I don’t git it off my mind.”

“What’s that, Pole?”

“Why, I don’t feel right about callin’ you to halt so rough jest now, an’ talkin’ about shootin’ holes in you an’ the like, fer I hain’t nothin’ agin you, Jeff. In fact, I’m yore friend now more than I ever was in my life. I feel fer you ’way down inside o’ me. The look on yore face cuts me as keen as a knife. I—I reckon, Jeff, that you sorter feel like—like yore little sister’s dead, don’t you?”

The rough face looking down from the horse filled. “Like she was dead an’ buried, Pole,” Wade answered.

“Well, Jeff”—Pole’s voice was husky—“don’t you ever think o’ what I said a while ago about shootin’. Jeff, I jest did that to git yore attention. You mought ’a’ blazed away at me, but I’ll be derned ef I believe I could ’a’ cocked or pulled trigger on you to ’a’ saved my soul.”

“Same here, old neighbor,” said Wade as he wiped his eyes on his shirt sleeve. “I wouldn’t ’a’ tuck them words from no other man on the face o’ God’s green globe.”

When Wade had ridden slowly away Pole mounted his own horse.

“Now, I’ll go tell Nelson that the danger is over,” he said. Suddenly he reined his horse in and sat looking thoughtfully at the ground.

“No, I won’t,” he finally decided. “He kin set thar an’ wonder what’s up. I was in a hair’s breadth o’ the grave, about to leave a sweet wife an’ kids to starvation jest beca’se of him. No, Nelsy, old boy, you look death in the eye fer a while; it won’t do you no harm.”

And Pole Baker rode to the thicket, where he had hidden his bag of cornmeal that morning, and took it home.

(To be continued.)

A Phase of the Money Problem Bankers Dare Not Discuss

BY ALBERT GRIFFIN
Author of “The Keynote: Substitute Honest Money for Fictitious Credit,” “The Hocus Pocus Money Boon”

BECAUSE of limited space, this paper contains little more than principles, facts and conclusions, without argument—and the subject is considered from the practical man’s standpoint rather than that of the theorizer. The one monetary proposition to which all schools agree is that “money is the medium of exchange.” To be used as such is its one and only universally admitted purpose—and no other characteristic is essential. No matter of what it consists, whatever is willingly used by people as their medium of exchange is money, and should be so recognized by everyone—but unfortunately, the greater part of it is not.

There is honest money and dishonest money. None is strictly honest that is not as good as the best—for exchange purposes. Ideal money has the same exchange value at all times, and everywhere—and the best money is that which is nearest the ideal. Without discussing what it should consist of, I hold that the material ought to be more substantial than a banker’s “confidence” that he will always be able to pay the most of his debts with mere debits and credits. As business cannot be done without money, and as each person needs enough of it to enable him to exchange his services and products for the services and products of others, it goes without saying that there ought to be enough to supply each and all liberally—and that no man, or set of men, should be allowed to affect materially this supply for selfish purposes.

To most people, the soundness of the “quantitative theory” of money is self-evident. Concisely stated, it is that, whenever the quantity of money in circulation increases faster than the exchanges to be made with it, commodities tend to rise in price—and vice versa—which is but the application to money of the inexorable law of supply and demand. While the soundness of this theory is generally admitted, every business man knows that sometimes facts seem to disprove it. In 1890, when the failure of Baring Brothers so nearly precipitated a panic throughout this country, the quantity of visible money in circulation was increasing; and the same fact was true in April, 1893, when the proceedings agreed upon at the conference between Secretary Carlisle and prominent New York bankers precipitated a fearful panic on the next business day—and yet, in both of these cases, the apparent conflict resulted from the suppression of a part of the facts.

Now for the explanation: In comparing the size or weight of two masses the whole of each must be contrasted with the whole of the other, and in comparing two actively operating forces all of the factors of each must be considered together, without regard to names. But, strange to say, three-fourths of what is being used and paid for as money, and which really does the work of money, and does nothing else, is denied the right of being called money by some doctrinaires—and also by bankers, when talking to the public. Although between May 1 and October 1, 1903, the volume of metallic and paper money actually increased, this something which had been doing the work of money was contracted $500,000,000 in New York City alone—but as it was not called money its relation to the results was not generally recognized.

Deposit banks are little more than clearing-houses; and the laws permit their owners to pay nine-tenths of their debts with money literally made by themselves—out of nothing—which they coolly call “liquid capital,” or “bank credit,” although it is neither capital nor credit. The real nature and far-reaching effects of this modern practice are not clearly understood by one in twenty even of the bankers themselves—and none of them dares discuss it publicly. The most of those that do not fully understand it feel that there is something wrong about it; and those that do understand it know that, if people once begin to study “the system,” they will demand radical changes in it—or its entire abolition.

Government reports for 1904 put the volume of metallic and paper money then in existence at $2,829,273,316—or $31.16 per capita; and the Comptroller’s report shows that the banks whose reports he consolidated were earning interest on more than $6,278,000,000 of money that had no existence—or $76.47 per capita. This stuff is what, for a dozen years, I have called “hocus pocus money.” It consists of nothing but, in the language of Professor Sidgwick, rows of figures on bank books; and yet it affects business, prices and values, exactly as that amount of real money would. Invisible, intangible and mythical, it is nevertheless very real—filling the land with prosperity, joy and song today, and disaster, tears and despair tomorrow, it is the most potent economic power ever known. Business men gladly accept it as money. The courts treat it as money. And, although, for technical reasons, most political economists do not do so, I insist that, to all intents and purposes, it is money, and should be so recognized. Indeed, until this shall be done, it will be impossible to frame a monetary system that will always work equitably and beneficently.

Between 1896 and 1904, as officially reported, the increase in the volume of visible money was, in millions, $1,322,000,000—or $9.75 per capita; but the quantity of hocus pocus money in use increased $5,275,000,000—or $43.42 per capita—the quantity of both kinds then actually in use being $107.63 per capita. This shows that four-fifths of the increase in the medium of exchange consists merely of the right given favored people to draw checks on banks to pay which no real money has been deposited.

In 1888, 5,866 bank reports showed that they were then collecting interest on $3.41 for each dollar of their capital available for “commercial loans”; but last year’s reports of the 13,772 national, state and private banks and loan and trust companies show that their aggregate capital (including surplus, undivided profits and bank-notes) amounted to $2,927,000,000. This was everything their owners had put into their business, and of it $2,743,000,000 had been paid out for bonds, stocks, real estate, real estate mortgages, etc., leaving only $183,000,000 available for “commercial loans.” And yet their “loans and discounts” aggregated $6,431,000,000, or $35.07 of “commercial loans” for every dollar of their not otherwise invested capital. If this is not “getting something for nothing” on a stupendous scale, I should like to know what would be so considered.

Remember, that these figures include all of the reported banks. Individual cases are incomparably worse. On December 2, 1899, the National City Bank, of New York City (the principal of the several hundred Standard Oil banks), had $6,709,216 of capital, surplus, etc.; its investments of capital aggregated $27,270,738; its available capital was therefore $20,561,519 less than nothing; and yet it was then actually earning interest on $60,906,034 of “loans and discounts,” making $81,467,553 of hocus pocus money. And remember further that, to make people more dependent on banks for this kind of money with which to do business, the volume of real money is kept as small as possible. This is the real reason why bankers engineered the contraction of the currency after the war and the demonetization of silver. But for them no class of business men would have consented to either of those economic crimes.

Here are a few more important facts:

1. Interest has to be paid to the banks on every dollar of hocus pocus money as long as it lives.

2. It lives, on an average, only about two months.

3. Every payment of a note or draft extinguishes the hocus pocus money involved in that transaction and contracts its volume that much, making it the most constantly and wildly fluctuating money ever known.

4. Whenever, for any reason, bankers fear a demand for an unusual amount of real money they make fewer “loans” and “call in” some that are outstanding, which destroys that part of the “liquid capital” that was in actual use as a medium of exchange and cramps the money market.

5. Bankers sometimes do these things unnecessarily, for the purpose of making a “bear market”; but it is also true that business conditions sometimes compel them to do so, as was the case in 1857 and 1873.

6. If the banks had on hand as much money as they reported (which is not always true), they, in 1888, owed $6.01 for every dollar they reported; and last year the proportion was $9.98 to $1. The sixty-two national banks in the central reserve cities are required to keep nearly 25 per cent. of their deposits on hand in cash; the 285 in the other reserve cities only 12½ per cent., and the 5,065 in non-reserve cities only 6 per cent. State bank requirements vary greatly, private banks and loan and trust companies are under few or no restrictions, and the loan and trust companies keep only about 2 per cent.

7. Less than one-tenth of the “deposits” in banks are real money—the others being mere promises of the banks to pay money to those who have bought (with notes) the right to draw checks against them—and it is simply impossible to so regulate the system as to prevent it from frequently working disastrously.

8. Contracting the volume of any kind of money that is willingly accepted by producers always causes suffering. Indeed, modern conditions require a large annual increase in the volume of money; and, with an insufficient supply of real money, it is not now possible to prevent the use of hocus pocus money.

9. It is well known that, when their interests seem to require it, great bankers defy the laws made to restrain them.

10. There ought to be places in which people can deposit money and know it will remain there until checked out by themselves.

For ten years I have called attention to the fact that there never has been, in this or any other country, a widespread commercial panic that was not caused solely by the sudden contraction of the hocus pocus money then being used by banks, and have challenged contradiction; but this challenge has never been accepted. Hocus pocus money is the one and only seriously disturbing factor that has always and everywhere preceded these catastrophes. Other causes aggravate them, but, with it eliminated, panics would be impossible, because it is this sudden, absolute destruction of the bank’s manufactured “liquid capital,” used by so many as their medium of exchange, which paralyzes their business operations and makes “the bottom drop out of the market,” as it were.

No words are lurid enough to portray properly the terrible evils and personal suffering that its use causes, and I submit that it is time people should begin to consider earnestly the question, Had we not better insist that some kind of real money shall be substituted for the unreal now in use, and thus permanently remove the cause that so often produces such baleful results? Conditions were never so favorable for doing this as they are now. No election is pending; the two great parties are lazily talking on similar platforms; all financial organs insist that the country is prospering; and, although people are deeply stirred, they are not excited.

The use of hocus pocus money, and its evil results, have increased steadily from the beginning of the deposit banking system. From time to time methods change, but every change increases the power and profits of the few—and the helplessness of the many. The gravest of these changes began to be felt about a decade ago. Leading bankers had always used some of their hocus pocus money for the promotion of their own schemes, but from that time the Rockefellers, Morgans and others have been systematically getting control of the principal deposit banking institutions, and using, not only a rapidly increasing proportion of their depositors’ real money, but also more of the hocus pocus money made possible by those deposits. Mr. Lawson and others have shown how this has been done on a gigantic scale, in specific cases, and of all unfossilized, sober-minded people I ask, can 999 business men afford to permit the thousandth man to continue appropriating to his own use the hocus pocus money their own deposits have made possible—and, in addition, help him to keep the volume of real money ruinously small? Indeed, would it not be idiotic folly to do so?

To me the problem appears to be: How can hocus pocus money be safely eliminated—or so restricted as to be harmless—and the quantity of real money so increased that all will, at all times, be able to exchange their products and services; that commercial panics and long periods of business depression will become impossible; and that a few men in each community will no longer have the power to ruin all who refuse to obey their orders?

Space will not permit me to tell here how this can be done, but I will say that, fortunately, this greatest and most overshadowing of the economic problems that confront humanity is the easiest of all to solve; that, as bankers are the controlling spirits in—or back of—nearly all trusts and combines, settling the money problems will make the solution of all the others easier; that it can be done without wronging anyone, or imposing additional burdens on the people; and that economic and social conditions would improve during the entire process.

But suppose that some of my conclusions may not be correct, does not the experience of the last hundred years prove, beyond controversy, that our banking and financial systems must be radically unsound in some very important particulars? And, if so, should we not insist upon their prompt improvement—or the substitution of better ones?

Every business man knows that, if the banks were required to keep larger reserves always on hand, they would be safer places of deposit. And they are equally well aware that the more real money there is in circulation the more prosperous and happy are the people. And the vitally important question is, not how far or how fast shall we go, but, shall we not begin to move steadily and determinedly in the direction of less danger and more permanent prosperity?

A Leaf From a Protective Tariff Catechism

(OVERHEARD IN A PROTECTIVE KINDERGARTEN)

BY JOEL BENTON

Q. WHAT is Protection?

A. It is placing a duty upon foreign goods, of many kinds, to enable American makers of similar goods who “plead the baby act” to get higher prices for those goods than they otherwise would. It is compelling all the people to pay taxes to a few of the people.

Q. Why is this favor given to the few people?

A. On account of the fact that they pay so much higher wages than foreign manufacturers do and to compel them to pay still higher wages.

Q. Is this necessary?

A. It is very necessary to the Republican Party; for it gives it an issue and its chief cause for existence. When it saw accomplished, by the fortune of war, the freedom of the slave, what could be more natural and glorious than its ready espousal of anti-freedom for commerce?

Q. Are “protective” duties always just equal to the difference between our wages and foreign wages?

A. That is what our argument implies; and, if our argument is true, that is all we can ask. But how is a noble army of patriots to be maintained, and how can election expenses be met if we do not—in our tariff—treble and more than quadruple this difference often?

Q. Are high wages given by our manufacturers without an equivalent advantage in return?

A. It is true of wages, as of other things—that they are ordinarily worth their price, so that our high-priced labor is really labor of low cost. But it is a mighty convenient subterfuge to keep this fact out of sight and by this means hoodwink the poor laborer for his vote.

Q. Do manufacturers keep a lobby at Washington for securing a tariff that makes them pay high wages and yet sell their goods at low prices?

A. That is what we very often say, substantially.

Q. Can our manufacturers sell goods abroad?

A. They do very largely over other tariff walls, and bear the expense of transportation and insurance and secure handsome profits. But the question is too delicate a one to enlarge upon.

Q. Does Mexico have a protective tariff?

A. She does. The plea for it there is that it is a defense against our high-priced labor. The Mexican peons work for very low prices and at a more than correspondingly high cost. It is one of the beauties of Protection that, whether labor costs little or much, you can plead for it for either reason.

Q. Does Protection help Agriculture?

A. It puts a tariff on hay, grain, potatoes, eggs, etc. Very little of any of these commodities are imported by us. When they are imported to any extent the farmers are the chief buyers, as they are of peas, beans and other seeds for planting. By paying the duty on all these things themselves they not only feel certain there is a duty, but they have the satisfaction of knowing they are not forgotten in the great “protective” scheme.

Q. Why is Protection called the American System?

A. This was the question Daniel Webster asked Henry Clay, who so named it, when they were not in accord upon the tariff. Webster was puzzled by the name, for he knew the system was European and medieval; but “American” sounds well and makes us consistent in berating foreign things and ideas.

Q. How does Protection help commerce?

A. Commerce is so foreign we don’t need to help it. So we let it go to the miserable foreigners—what we permit to exist. It is really better to pay the two hundred million dollars we pay them yearly to carry our goods than to let that amount of money pervert our high and noble doctrine.

Q. What is meant by having the tariff “revised by its friends”?

A. That, as the English say, is a good “half-crown phrase.” But its real meaning is to oppose revising the tariff in any way whatever. Several elections have been carried by this plea, and we are still working it for all it is worth. Of course no one goes to have his shoes mended to a shoemaker who is in favor of their holes and lack of heels, and no one selects depredators of hen-roosts to watch chicken thieves; but we must not defer to ordinary rules when “the noble citadel of Protection” is in danger.

Q. Is it understood that to change the tariff injures business?

A. We always say that, and charge to Free Trade the calamity that ensues.

Q. Suppose someone tells us there has been no Free Trade, and if Free Trade existed there would be no tariff to change, and therefore no injury from tariff changes?

A. Then is the time to look wise and say little. For our main object is to make Protection the source of all good and Free Trade the cause of all evil.

Q. How did it happen that, when hides were freed from duty in 1872—and even by the McKinley bill—they were taxed under the Dingley bill?

A. Well—but—let’s see. Why shouldn’t hides enjoy prosperity? It’s certain the big cattle dealers, who use the Government pastures without cost, profit by the duty, while we can claim it helps the farmers.

Q. Why are works of art tariff?

A. Not because the artists ask for Protection. They’re such curious people that they all oppose it. So we choose to be benevolent to them in spite of their eccentric behavior.

Q. What other peculiar tricks have our Protection wise men?

A. A pretty good one is to say that we are not tied up to any present or definite “schedules,” but to remember constantly that, if any change is made in the tariff, it must be one that goes up and never one that goes down. It was a great mistake for Garfield to say, “I believe in a Protection that leads to Free Trade.”

Q. What is Reciprocity?

A. It is—well, suppose you should build a bonfire and then pour water on it, or build a levee on the Mississippi and then punch holes through it. It is a part of our consistent scheme. Blaine knew, and who can dispute Blaine?

Q. What is Free Trade?

A. It is any scale of duties for any purpose that is the least bit lower than the Dingley bill. Everything that preceded that “bravest tariff ever made” is Free Trade. If some day Protection should climb to loftier heights, those who should oppose it by the lower Dingley bill would be Free Traders.

Here a boy, who got surreptitiously into the class, asked this unauthorized question:

Q. But you say this country has prospered under almost unbroken Protection. Now, since everything tariff-like before the Dingley bill is either Free Trade or Free Tradish, why is not all our prosperity up to the passage of that owing to Free Trade?

A. A boy cannot be expected to understand the flexibility of our nomenclature or the grandeur of a great principle. We are struggling to help “American Industries.” Must so little a thing as mere consistency stand between us and our friends? Boys should be seen and not heard.

Q. What is meant by American Industries?

A. Mainly manufactures. Of course these, and all protected interests, represent only from 5 to 8 per cent. of the real and total industries of the country. But they are the ones having large capital and power—the ones that can hire attorneys and maintain a lobby, and that have abundant “fat for frying” when important elections are at hand. Doesn’t “American Industries” sound well, if you only mouth it right, and roll it from the editorial pen and the platform often enough?

Q. How about the industries that are left out, or get merely nominal Protection?

A. The question is quite irrelevant. What more can they ask than to live in a “protected” country and be saved from Free Trade?

Q. Why do we protect woolen goods, and then de-protect manufacturers by “protecting” wool?

A. For the same reason that the boy cuts off a shoestring on one end and ties the cut-off piece on the other end. It amuses the boy and very likely helps us to get rid sooner of a foreign shoestring.

Q. Mention the value of Protection to American shipping.

A. It doesn’t hurt it; for, by its aid and the help of our navigation laws, there is none to hurt. The way to have ships is first to make it impossible for us to build them, and then give enough subsidy to make it possible. Now you see the little joker and now you don’t. Didn’t President Harrison almost shed tears when he hauled up the American flag on a steamer rescued from a foreign register? It isn’t possible to have Protection and have everything, but isn’t it lovely to make things impossible at much expense and then make them possible at more expense, and at last call in a President and have a melodramatic time about it? Besides all this, it employs money and promotes labor.

Q. Does Protection make wages high and goods manufactured low?

A. That is what our philosophers maintain. Manufacturers are so anxious to exist here, and it is so necessary that we should have them, that they must pay high for their labor and sell its product low. To avoid paying but a little for labor, and to be prevented from selling their goods at high prices, they are even willing to maintain expensive lobbies at Washington and contribute large sums for electing Protectionists to Congress, to say nothing of “hypnotizing” doubtful or opposing senators.

Q. Can the first part of the above answer be really so?

A. It must be. A Protection journal had for its headlines on a Protection article the other day the statement that for many years Protection had done for manufacturers just this: It has made the wages they give high and the prices they get low, and so they would be splendidly off if it were not for the shadow of that wicked Wilson bill.

Q. Does prosperity then consist in enlarging your expenses and reducing your income?

A. It always does in Wonderland and Topsy-Turvydom, and under Protection.

Q. But do not “protected” manufacturers import laborers?

A. Manufacturers are held by us to be benevolent. Of course they import laborers, in order that there may be more here to get the benefit of our higher wages.

Q. How about invention under Protection?

A. It isn’t necessary. So long as you can run the old ramshackle machinery, and be defended by the Government, you are saved the trouble of inventing newer and better methods. Some way might possibly be found if Yankee wit were once to be let loose, whereby we could compete with other nations in our manufactures, so that everybody would admit it, and then what would become of Protection? Remember constantly it isn’t the welfare of the people that is paramount; it is Protection.

Q. Protection being so much more necessary than free government, free soil, free speech, and so cherubically philanthropic when compared with the dreadfulness of British Free Trade, the question arises, How shall we maintain its propaganda?

A. We must first of all be very careful to say that Free Trade is British. Of course Magna Charta, including trial by jury and many other good things, are British too, but we mustn’t lose so good a stock argument. It is true, also, that England has prospered far more under Free Trade than she ever did under Protection. But the glorious Blaine accounted for that by saying that Free Trade might be good for England, but it must never come here. In other words, two and two make five or six over there, but here they fail to make four.

Q. What next must we do?

A. As our country has been very prosperous from its commencement, and we have had more or less Protection within that period, the best way is to say that all this has happened “under Protection.” It has happened under other things, too, both good and evil, because it couldn’t happen over them. But never let us forget that it was all caused by Protection. The very slight fact that our country was most prosperous when we had very low revenue duties is purely accidental and irrelevant. In Mr. Blaine’s history of his career in Congress he described the period of our greatest prosperity. But there was no election in view then, and he was careless enough to say that this period coincided with what is called the period of the Free Trade tariff of 1846. It was a dreadful mistake, because the statement was altogether too true, and Protection has no use for that which is merely true.

Q. There are other arguments, are there not?

A. A very decisive one is to call Free Trade a theory. For it is a theory of the Creator, who seemed to favor the idea of commerce along with civilization. But He, of course, left something for men to find out. The Chinese found out in the twelfth century that a big wall around their country would keep off nations that were savage and hostile; but the Republican Party have gone the Chinese one better and have walled off trade. No doubt some college Free Trader will ask you ironically if it is really the man who walks on his feet who is the theorist and innovator, and if the one who walks on stilts, and who tries to get everyone else on stilts, and who thinks it is a mistake that people were not born already stilted—as nations should have been already walled—is not one. But levity like this is what a great cause must not notice.

Q. What more must be said?

A. We must take pains to compare the United States with some foreign country. As we have already shown that everything good that has occurred here is wholly owing to Protection, we must take some foreign country and charge all that is bad there, such as the costly armies, the despotic or kingly rule, the dense population, the illiteracy, etcetera, to Free Trade. There are no really Free Trade countries in Europe except England, and possibly Belgium. They are protective in part. But they are foreign, and that is sufficient for the argument. Only put the excess of our benefits over theirs to the benefit of Protection, and all will be right.

Q. What shall we say about cheapness and dearness?

A. Didn’t the Apostle Paul say we must be all things to all men? If we do seem to oppose somewhat the solidarity of humanity, we meet in our arguments a variety of mental difficulties. Our Apostle Harrison went for dearness by not wanting to find a cheap coat, for fear he should find a cheap man under it. Another Apostle thought “cheap and nasty go together.” At the final period of a Presidential election, however, it is better to say that Protection makes things cheap, and our editors almost always take that cue. To be sure, if cheapness were our intention, Protection could not be established, and we could not cry out against “cheap pauper labor.” The arguments must therefore be shuffled—and cheap and dear must sometimes be taken and at other times denied. The question is more or less of a crux, but it is the beauty of the noble doctrine of Protection that all trivialities of this sort it majestically sweeps away. Not being amenable to any of the laws of human reason, it is not disturbed by such trifles as truth and consistency.

Q. But can’t we say the foreigner pays the tax?

A. We certainly can and we do. But this argument needs very cautious handling. Sometimes duties are collected through the Post-Office, when the cat is let out of the bag and the duty comes directly to the man to whom the package is addressed. If he asks to have it charged to the foreign country his goods came from, even a Republican postmaster will sometimes laugh at him. Such perverse incidents as this are what Artemus Ward might call “in-fe-lick-et-us”—very.

Q. How was it when Congress removed the tax from sugar?

A. Well—sugar isn’t everything. It won’t do to be too one-sided. We could not resist telling the public then that we had removed a heavy burden from its shoulders. We really hated to tax the foreigners so much.

Q. What can be argued about the terms Protection and Free Trade?

A. Argument is superfluous here. The very word Protection is an assumption that meets all our requirements. It forecloses argument and shuts off dispute. Who doesn’t wish to be “protected”? And how charming it sounds to say we are protected from burglars, from enemies and from the horrors of trade—that is, trade with a foreigner. It must be always understood that if you could stand near the Canada or Mexico boundary and make a good bargain on the other side—say, the purchase of a horse for fifty dollars less than you could purchase him in your own country—you would inflict upon yourself and your country just so much loss. But if you buy the horse here at a price higher by fifty dollars, or over a tariff, with the fifty dollars added, you enrich both yourself and your country. On this doctrine, which is our fundamental one, we must and can stake everything, and against it the frothy waves of Free Trade will beat in vain.

Q. Why is not Free Trade also a felicitous term?

A. Things that are in themselves good, and that are made free and abundant, are, we must admit, generally to be approved. Abundant health or abundant friendship or abundant money we have not yet thought it wise to consider objectionable. But there are exceptions to all rules. Abundant trade—or Free Trade—which is trade done voluntarily by shrewd and sane men in order to procure abundant money, is different. To have it otherwise would upset our whole system of philosophy. What was this land of the free made for, if its main purpose were not to put shackles on trade? What we want is to eat our own cake and have it too; to sell everything we can to foreigners and buy nothing from them, and finally to get fat by stewing in our own juice.

The term Free Trade—to refer to the original question—is now so asphyxiated by us, by our contempt of it, that it suggests a Pandora’s box of horrors the moment we mention it. To speak of it in this contemptuous way is really one of our strong arguments. What we want is to scream it out as a horror, to make it a bugbear. It is like telling children of some dreadful bogy lying in wait for them in the dark, or like Dr. Johnson’s experiment with the fishwoman of Billingsgate, when he called her a hypothenuse, a triangle, a parallelopipedon, and several other mathematical things of which she had not the faintest knowledge and which she consequently supposed were very bad.

No, whatever else we do, let us stick to our insistent and persistent screech against Free Trade.

Monopoly; The Power Behind the Trust

BY JOSEPH DANA MILLER

HOW comes it that a power in its unimpeded operations beneficent—namely, the force or forces of combination or co-operation—becomes under certain conditions so injurious to modern industry? Why is a union of two factories or many factories, of two companies or many companies, a signal to the community of anticipated extortion? And why should the development of natural laws—those of combination and co-operation—provoke a public demand for regulation, and those who avail themselves of these operations be deemed amenable to punishment?

We may grant that a perfected combination which should succeed in forestalling any given commodity would be criminal. The law from its very beginnings has so regarded all such attempts. It is conceivable that, under certain conditions, a mere agreement between individuals might perfect a combination clearly within the provision of the law compelling its forcible dissolution. But this is not conceivable under modern conditions where wide distribution of capital and free labor exists. Law, indeed, may create such monopolies, which it may by popular demand be called upon to destroy, undoing with one hand what it has done with the other. State-created monopolies have existed often in history—as notably in the reign of Queen Elizabeth—but because these have been created by direct act they have been exceedingly unpopular. So, in periods of greater public intelligence, and where the people exercise larger powers of government, it became necessary to accomplish the same result by indirect means, by putting into operation some general law under which monopoly could find a shelter, and the secret sources of which could not be so easily traced.

For, contrary to the almost universal opinion, monopoly is weak. It demands protection. And from what does it demand protection? From the all-powerful natural law of competition. The curious Socialist notion that competition leads to monopoly is true only in the sense that monopoly, seeing how powerless it is when threatened by the forces of competition, seeks the protection of such laws as it can secure, or which already exist, for the suppression of competition. And this brings us to the conclusion which is unavoidable that there are no monopolies save law-created monopolies.[1]

If this seem a novel proposition to the reader I will ask him not to grow impatient, for the demonstration will grow upon him as he reflects. It will seem novel, for if true all the laws and statutes for the regulation of combinations are so much waste of time and paper and the hours of legislatures and courts. In the acceptance of such explanation of the trust problem must go the rejection of many proposed remedies, among them the much-lauded one of “publicity.” While publicity is always to be commended and sought for in public or semi-public matters, it does not appear that laws enforcing publicity upon purely private industrial combinations are founded upon equity. Nor is it likely that publicity will assure us the possession of knowledge beyond what we already have through the work of independent investigators. Nor is it probable that enforced publicity will elicit impartial truth. This proposition is of a piece with the punitive theory in the treatment of the problem, a theory which has already led the people far astray. Men shrink instinctively from such stringent regulation, and this is a true index of the moral relation, if we may so speak, of this problem to legislation. But because they will not think clearly they return to the proposition of legal interposition.

Along with the remedy of “publicity” must go all laws, existing or proposed, limiting capitalization or stock watering. Beyond the fact that such laws would often force capitalization below the earning capacity—which is no unfair basis of capitalization—it must be said that the evils of stock watering are largely imaginary. It is true that over-capitalization may conceal from the public the real extent of monopoly profits, and is for this purpose, if for no other, often resorted to. But this of itself ought to constitute no valid reason for drastic legislation. Investors ought to be left free to take their own risks, and speculative ventures ought to be left free to fix their own capitalization, for otherwise perfectly legitimate, if largely speculative, business interests may be made to suffer injuriously to the interests of the community. But laying aside for the time all considerations of this kind, stock watering is only a symptom—a sign that monopolistic powers, and not legitimate business interests, are being capitalized.[2]

High capitalization, it is sometimes said, tends to increase price. It does offer temptation to increase of price, but nothing can put it within the power of combinations to increase price save the forces of monopoly. This power you do not increase or decrease by adding to the numbers of the counters, the considerations governing which are purely those of the stock-gambling fraternity.

National licensing of corporations to do business—a remedy proposed by Mr. Bryan and adopted by President Roosevelt—must also be dismissed. Obviously if the state has endowed corporations and armed them with letters of marque by authority of which they may prey upon commerce, it is the height of absurdity to ignore this feature of the question with talk about licensing them. In a very real sense they are already licensed, for it must be repeated that combinations do not create the monopoly, but merely avail themselves of the monopolistic powers created by society through acts of Government.

Of necessity all such laws must fail. This, it is scarcely necessary to say, has been the universal experience. And from future legislation no more is to be hoped than from past legislation, however well intentioned.

The reason why all this anti-trust legislation is futile is because, having created monopoly privileges, Government has appealed to the natural instincts of all men to seek these opportunities and benefits. Such laws are attempts to give effective form to the public’s foolish anathemas against impulses shared by everybody, and are therefore as futile as the Pope’s bull against the comet. When we understand that these great trusts are monopolies that Government has made, we will realize why it is that Government cannot unmake them by any other process than by removing the causes of their creation.[3] Books prescribing such anti-trust legislation may continue to cumber the libraries of our lawyers, and streams of statutes may continue to pour from the lawmaking bodies of states and Nation, but these will be either positively harmful or wholly harmless, never effective.

We are, indeed, “fooling” with natural laws, and we can do so only at our peril. The law of competition and the law of co-operation or combination are what they have often been called, the centripetal and centrifugal forces of social economics. Competition is often a painful but really a merciful process; it weeds out the useless and the inefficient; selects unerringly its business leaders; destroys, but where it destroys builds up; rescues from the mass the individuals and processes most fitted to survive, and out of chaos brings order. It replaces obsolete with more perfect organization, and where such organization becomes unwieldy it replaces organization with individuals, reverting to the earlier type of industry. Thus the country store is succeeded by the store in which is sold but one line of goods, and this is succeeded by the mammoth type of country store, the great city’s department store; and the development of the last named type seems again to revert to the second—viz., a congeries of stores in which each is distinct from the other, each attaining a reputation for competitive excellence in one line of goods, thus illustrating in the retail trade the interplay of the forces of competition and combination.

Just as there is a limit fixed to the bounds of competition, so there is a limit to the bounds of combination. The maximum of combination and the maximum of efficiency are not the same. There is a point in the progress of combination beyond which it does not, or would not naturally advance—and that is when it reaches the maximum of efficiency. It seems very likely that the element of monopoly in society today forces combination far beyond the point of the most efficient co-operation.

These natural laws may not be “regulated.” Such laws are not for regulation, but for obedience. We may impede, we may interrupt their operation, but only to our injury. The most we can do is to regulate our institution by these laws, as we trim a sail to the wind and tides; we do not attempt to “regulate” wind and tides; and these laws of co-operation and competition are of the same order—natural laws which to disobey is to be destroyed.

We hear much superficial talk about “the wastes of competition.” The Socialists play into the hands of the trust apologists who defend them on the ground that competition leads to waste. Beyond the fact that competition has never yet been fully tried, that it has never yet been wholly free, and that such waste as it entails is inseparable from the natural process which weeds out the incompetent, the antedated and the unskilled—a process of which the waste is but incidental to the conservation—is that these combinations do not seek primarily to escape the waste of competition so much as to avail themselves of those artificial laws which prevent competition from doing its perfect work.

The term expressing the opposite of competition is not combination, but monopoly. Professor Jenks, in his work, “The Trust Problem,” falls into this error when he speaks of combinations in the retail trade as overcoming the “friction” of competition, instancing associations of hardware dealers, druggists, etc. Here, he says, we have an element of combination from which he assumes the element of competition has been eliminated. But his error is in the analogy he seeks to establish between such agreements from which the element of competition cannot be expelled, and agreements which are based upon the control of some special privilege created by law, and of which the great railroad and industrial trusts are examples, and which people have in mind when they talk of the “trust problem.”

Clearly no monopoly exists nor can be made to exist in the retail trade. Agreements may be made, but they will be broken; and the fact that they can be broken by isolated individuals who can thus separate themselves from the combination, and by their separation cause it to dissolve, is proof that the monopoly element does not exist. For the monopoly element in the possession of the great trusts is the potent weapon with which the combinations can compel the recalcitrant member to return, or beat him into starvation. From mere agreements in the retail trade, such as Professor Jenks instances, the primary element of monopoly being absent, desertions are fatal, and for this reason such combinations are never effective as means for extortion, though they do often arrest the sacrifices of keenly competing retailers. And the illicit intrusion of such examples is a favorite trick of the trust apologist, who, when the evils of the trust are pointed out, grows righteously indignant over the right of men to combine—which nobody seriously disputes—or points out with superfluous wealth of illustration how combination effects the cheapening of production—which nobody ever really denies. For the same reason labor unions cannot be considered as effective monopolies—though the trust apologist does not forget them in his special pleas—for the reason that they possess no effective legal privilege.

But to avoid a possible misunderstanding let us now answer a query which may have risen in the mind of the reader. Is competition or combination the beneficent law of industry? Both; for one is the complement of the other. They exist together, and together they effect the industrial progress of the world. But monopoly is the negation of both, since further combination or co-operation is no longer possible where monopoly is complete. And where there is competition there will be combination, healthy, rational, continuous, and competition will determine its development and direction. The defense of the trust based upon the economic benefits resulting from the elimination of the unskilled is a defense of the principle of combination present under free competition, and is in no sense a defense of monopoly of which what we know as the “trust” is the manifestation. Such discussion, together with much talk of the wastes of competition, which helps to swell so many pretentious works on the trust problem, is so much irrelevant “padding.”

That the trusts avail themselves of all possible economies in production has often been urged in their defense. Certainly such economies are not needed to secure a monopoly in possession, nor does it seem that the greatest incentives to their adoption are present. The sacrifice of inventions rather than their use by these great monopolies is proof that they do much to prevent such economies. A monopoly can be induced to accept only with difficulty improved devices which under the spur of competition it would gladly avail itself of. Thus in the Post-Office, which is a monopoly, though a Government monopoly, improvements are introduced only with the greatest difficulty.

If combination can of itself effect monopoly, why are huge sums set aside by these great corporations to influence legislation? Why are contributions made to the campaign funds of the two great parties? Is it not because these combinations seek to perpetuate their monopolistic privileges? It may be said that it is contributed to effect the defeat of “strike bills.” But what would a business partnership, not in some way dependent upon previously existing legislation, care about “strike bills”? Why does the American Sugar Refining Company (according to the testimony of Mr. Havemeyer) contribute in some states to the Republican campaign fund, and in other states to the Democratic campaign fund?

As an example of the kind of defense urged by the trust apologists here is a work entitled, “The Trust; Its Book,” containing articles from the pens of Charles R. Flint, James J. Hill, S. C. T. Dodd, Francis B. Thurber, and others. It is a plea of “confession and avoidance.” The authors fight shy of even the hated term monopoly, and content themselves with defending the right of combination. Not one of them appears to think that the popular outcry against trusts is founded on anything but utter ignorance; and they therefore devote themselves to showing the advantages of large scale production—as if that were the question. All this seems purely disingenuous. It is hardly conceivable that men who know so well the effects of monopoly, who know how potent has been the use by combination of existing laws securing the possession of special privileges, should write this way from any other motive than to becloud the issue. We can acquit them of intentional deception far less readily than the professors of political economy. The latter may be at once exonerated, since it is incredible that men who have become involved in the self-created subtleties of modern economics should retain sufficient clearness of comprehension to see anything in its proper relation.

If it be true that there are no monopolies save law-created monopolies, it only remains for the state to undo the work it has done. The means by which the state, consciously or unconsciously, has fostered monopolies may be removed, and a new, and up to this time untried, method for remedying the evils of trusts be set in motion.

Before we can agree to this, however, we must understand what monopoly is. Briefly stated, it is the power to charge more than a competitive price for a commodity or service. This power can be permanently secured by the favor of Government, and in no other way. An agreement between individuals cannot accomplish it, since such agreements, even if they include all individuals in interest, which is impossible, or at all events inconceivable, would infallibly be broken. The only way such agreements may be made effective is for Government to make powerless, or nearly so, the potential competitive elements or individuals in interest. This it does in several ways, or to be explicit, chiefly in three ways.

By Land Laws,

Tax Laws,

Laws Regulating (or that fail to regulate) the use of the steam highways of the country.

I know of no other source of monopoly unless it be our patent laws. But these being—originally at least—rewards of invention, the injury results from their misuse.[4] Even the misuse of patent laws is not one of the chief potent influences in the perpetuation of monopoly. But without, in most cases, adding to the power of monopoly, which derives its strength from other causes, it puts in the hands of the great combinations the power to arrest progress. The value to society of an invention is in its use. Under present misuse of patents, inventions are held out of use and are often bought up and destroyed for the purpose of depriving competitors of the use of like improvements, or because such inventions would often reduce the machinery in present use to the value of old iron. Clearly, if industrial progress is to be made to yield its full results, some change in our patent laws is imperatively called for. Were the law of competition allowed to work freely, the use of such inventions, even under present patent laws, would be determined largely by the law of self-preservation. For the sources we have indicated are also the sources to a degree of the patent monopoly. In a competitive market for the use of an invention the inventor would be less likely to part with his invention, even under the present patent system. Where the bidding is artificially restricted the inventor sells at a disadvantage. Monopoly has the inventor at its mercy. But however this may be, nothing less than the free use of an invention to everyone willing to pay a royalty to the inventor for its use will do justice to the inventor and meet, at the same time, the interests of the great public and the necessary demands of industrial progress.

Certain superficial economists, misled by recent manifestations in trust building, have hastily concluded that the problem it presents is a new one. For example, Collier, in his work on the subject, says: “The problem of the trusts is a momentous one, yet it is unqualifiedly a new one.” Of course it is not new. It is the same old problem of monopoly, and the so-called trust problem is but a phase of it. It is the problem of monopoly crystallized. The evils of the trust rivet the public attention, not because they are more real than the evils of monopoly per se, but because they are more obvious. In some respects the trust, by combining certain elements of monopoly, tends to make monopoly more perfect and its operations more harmful. But it simply avails itself of monopolistic institutions—that is to say, it is built upon land, railroad or tax monopoly; it takes to itself certain privileges which society has created and which have hitherto been appropriated and exercised by individuals. It therefore immediately makes these evils concrete. The trust is thus a manifestation, and the people, with their customary thoughtlessness, attack the manifestation rather than the thing itself—the fruit of monopoly rather than the tree.

The great combinations which suggest themselves when we think of the trust problem—is there one of them which does not owe its existence to some monopoly privilege? What would the Standard Oil Company be but for its control of rights of way, sources of supply, railroad terminals and the preferential benefits it is enabled to secure? What is the Steel Trust but a network of artificial privilege? Has not Mr. Charles E. Russell clearly shown, in his recent articles in Everybody’s Magazine, that the Beef Trust draws its life-blood from its monopolization of railroad privileges? What would the Sugar Trust be without the favors it receives from the tariff in its control of the raw material? Could the Tobacco Trust exist save for the power of taxation which strangles competition?

Those mentioned include nearly all the greater trusts. A more detailed demonstration of the truth we are insisting upon could be given, but the reader can himself carry this line of analysis further. He will find that it explains the existence of every oppressive combination, and that it leaves little unresolved or unexplained. It may happen that injurious combinations will present themselves in which this element of monopoly does not clearly appear. But these are by-monopolies, so to speak, and their sources of power may be traced to indirect association with the giant monopolies.

Let us admit all the good there is in aggregated capital. Let us take the trust advocates at their word that industry should be left free of all meddling, repressive or restrictive legislation. Is there, then, a common ground upon which we can meet? To think so is to delude ourselves. For their objection is not so much to mischievous laws of this sort as to interferences with things as they are. Their plea for laissez faire is hollow and insincere; true laissez faire would render every combination of capital innocuous for evil; there would be no mammoth aggregations of wealth in the hands of single individuals and no plethoric incomes.

The law of competition, let the Socialists prate as they will, gives only to those who earn. But from the denial of this law (of competition) flows all existing inequality in the distribution of wealth. There are, it is true, great swollen fortunes, which seem unconnected with these artificial laws of monopoly. Some of these, while clearly not the result of greater enterprise or greater ability, seem to be due to cunningly arranged devices independent of existing monopoly laws. But this is so in appearance only. There are no such made-to-order arrangements of industrial combination that can be used for extortion. Competition is too keenly scrutinizing for such arrangements to go undetected. The inevitable day when imitation shall overtake them can only be permanently postponed by seeking the shelter of monopoly.

Some of these gigantic fortunes are the result of stock speculation. But these are incidental, and are the profits and losses of the gambling fraternity—a game really played with the counters of monopoly, like “chips” in a poker game, and the transference of which from one to another enriches or depletes the finances only of those who play. They do not concern the man who refrains from taking part in the game, and whether it be played with railroad stocks or industrials is no great matter. If these gamblers sometimes use the moneys on deposit in public institutions—as Mr. Lawson has asserted they do—that also is another question, though a momentous one.

With the dissolving of these giant combinations which would result from the removal of the laws of monopoly would disappear the great host of gamblers and stock jugglers. The great fortunes that result from the granting of legislative favors would also disappear, since there would be no longer any legislative favors to grant. And so with many other unjust possessions. And with them would be banished forever much that corrupts our social and political life.

The Heritage of Maxwell Fair — SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS — CHAPTER XI — CHAPTER XII

BY VINCENT HARPER
Author of “A Mortgage on the Brain”

(Conclusion)

Maxwell Fair, an Englishman who has amassed a colossal fortune on ’Change, inherits from his ancestors a remarkable tendency to devote his life to some object, generally a worthy, if peculiar one, which is extravagantly chivalrous. The story opens with Fair and Mrs. Fair standing over the body of a man who has just been shot in their house—a foreigner, who had claimed to be an old friend of Mrs. Fair. Fair sends her to her room, saying: “Leave everything to me.” He hides the body in a chest, and decides to close the house “for a trip on the Continent.” Fair tells the governess, Kate Mettleby, that he loves her; that there is no dishonor in his love, in spite of Mrs. Fair’s existence, and that, until an hour ago, he thought he could marry her—could “break the self-imposed conditions of his weird life-purpose.” They are interrupted before Kate, who really loves him, is made to understand. While the Fairs are entertaining a few old friends at dinner, Kate, not knowing that it contains Mrs. Fair’s blood-stained dress, is about to hide a parcel in the chest when she is startled by the entrance of Samuel Ferret, a detective from Scotland Yard. He tells her that he, with other detectives, is shadowing the foreign gentleman who came to the Fair house that day and has not yet left it. He persuades Kate to promise that she will follow the suspect when he leaves the house and then report at Scotland Yard. As soon as Ferret is gone she lifts the lid off the chest, drops the package into it, and, with a shriek, falls fainting to the floor. Mr. and Mrs. Fair run to her aid. On being revived Kate goes to Scotland Yard, where, in her anxiety to shield Maxwell Fair from suspicion, she inadvertently leads the detectives to think that a crime has been committed at the Fair house. The two detectives are piecing together the real facts from the clues she has given, when Ferret is summoned to the telephone by his associate, Wilson, whom he had left on guard in the home of the Fairs. Fair tells Sir Nelson Poynter, at the latter’s country place, that he has committed some crime, and explains that Mrs. Fair is not his wife—that a Cuban scoundrel had married her, already having a wife, and deserted her, and that he, Fair, had brought her and her children to England, giving her his name before the world, yet being her husband in name only. Sir Nelson and Fair’s other friends, Allyne and Travers, begin to suspect his sanity.

“BUT what is the ridiculous idea that has turned your head? What sort of idiotic crime would you ask us to believe that you have committed? Come, sir, out with it—what’s the charge against this villainous man?” asked Sir Nelson, with equal certainty and confidence.

“Only a trifle,” answered Fair. “Just a quiet little—murder!”

“That settles it,” shouted the good old fellow, thumping his knee with his clenched fist. “That settles it, sir. Sir Porter will have you in a straitjacket before night. Murder, eh? You burglar, forger, pirate—you!”

Fair waited until Sir Nelson had had his laugh, and then said with irritating persistency: “Quite another sort of jacket, I think, sir.”

“We’ll see, we’ll see,” retorted Sir Nelson, and then, abruptly changing the subject and his own expression, “but, I say, Fair, why have you never married Janet? She was, of course, free?”

“I don’t wonder at the question,” Fair replied, relieved at the change. “That of course was the first question which presented itself to my mind. But by the time that Janet came back into my life the old love had passed away—or perhaps I should put it another way—the love I now found myself bearing for her was of a different sort. I am a Fair, you know, Sir Nelson, and destiny demanded that the passion of my life be not like those of ordinary men. So Janet seemed to come to me not as a woman whom I might think of as a wife, but as a holy, consecrated, crucifying Idea which fate had destined should be the ‘Fair Folly’ of this generation. I think you know that each generation in our family has had its ‘folly.’”

“Yes,” answered Sir Nelson, shaking his head and letting his mind run back to the follies of the two generations of Fairs that he had known. “But your folly, my poor boy, has been so above the world’s standards of rational conduct that it is madness in our earthly eyes—or, perhaps, it is like the ‘foolishness of the saints,’ of which Saint Paul talks. But now, old hero—or madman—for reason’s sake, tell me of this accursed hallucination of yours—this blooming murder, you know. Have you killed the Pope or the Czar of Russia or Napoleon Bonaparte?”

“I appreciate your inability to accept the truth,” replied Fair. “But you must do so when I have told you all. You see, I have murdered so seldom that I was forgetting to tell you the details. Well, Sir Nelson, the rascal whom I——”

He was cut short by the sudden and alarming appearance of Kate Mettleby, who came running upon the terrace in traveling dress and quite out of breath. Both of the men rose and Sir Nelson watched Fair’s face with ill-disguised concern, which rapidly increased as Fair’s usual self-control gave place to evident uncontrollable nervousness and feverish excitement.

“Oh—Mr.—Fair,” gasped Kate, trying to get her breath; “thank God, you are here! I was—afraid—that”——

“Miss Mettleby,” interrupted Fair, advancing to meet her, “I supposed that you were halfway to Paris by this time. What has happened? You look ill.”

“Pardon me, sir,” answered Kate, “but—I’m out of breath—I ran.”

“Do you mind letting me see this young lady alone, Sir Nelson?” asked Fair, noticing that Sir Nelson stood, dazed and troubled, watching them.

“No, no—by all means,” quickly responded the old man eagerly. “I just wanted to see if she would not go in and refresh herself first. Allow me to advise Lady Poynter. The poor girl seems regularly done.”

“Oh, thank you, no, sir,” put in Kate, waving a protest; “I can stop only a moment. I must return to town on the next train, sir.”

“But you really can’t, you know,” said Sir Nelson. “You really must not think of returning without luncheon—it’s about ready, you know. I shall advise Lady Poynter that you are come,” and he hurried off.

“Well?” asked Fair when Kate looked up at him. “Tell me, Kate—and tell me quickly and without hesitation, for nothing can shock me now. So the worst of it—all of it—at once!”

“Where is Mrs. Fair?” Kate asked, with a look which begged piteously that the reply to her question be what she hoped. “She is here? Say that she is here!”

“Here?” cried out Fair, now thoroughly alarmed, a certain suspicion that had been gathering force shaping itself into something like certainty in his mind. “Here. Did she not start for Paris with you and the children? What can you mean?”

Kate struggled with the dreadful fears that were choking her.

“We all left the house together in the carriage and drove to the railway station, but there Mrs. Fair said that she wished to drive to a chemist’s shop, and we were to wait for her speedy return. She went off accordingly, and about twenty minutes later the carriage came back and John fetched this letter from Mrs. Fair to me. Take it and read it—it says that she desired me to take the children to Mrs. Barrington’s, and announced that she would communicate her change of plans to you. Oh, Mr. Fair, what does it all mean? I can bear little more of this suspense!”

“Poor old Janet!” groaned Fair, taking but not reading the letter which Kate handed to him. He walked up and down for a few seconds, then coming back to Kate said: “I see. I see it now. My God, what a woman! Wait here, dear, until I consult Sir Nelson, for we’ve got to act with life for the spur. This is a race, Kate—the maddest ever run!”

“But, Mr. Fair—Maxwell,” complained Kate, “tell me what it all means! I know about—that horror, you know, in the chest. I saw it. But no harm shall come to you, Maxwell, for I told them at Scotland Yard that it was not you—and they told me that they believed me.”

Fair jumped forward and could not believe what he heard, but the triumph on her poor little agonized face showed only too clearly that what she said was true.

“Scotland Yard?” he finally cried out. “Are you mad?” Then with a wild hysterical laugh that chilled her, he added: “So you kindly assured them that I was innocent, did you?”

“Yes,” she answered, failing to note the irony in his laugh, and conscious only of the loftiness of her motive. “Yes, for it would have broken my heart had they even whispered your name. Tell me! tell me! What is it? Whose body is that in the accursed chest? My mind is going—I can bear no more! Maxwell, I love you—I love you!”

“My poor little girl,” he said pityingly, looking down at her; “my Kate! We will talk it all over on our way to town—for I shall go back with you. Only you must be brave now. Remember that what I did with my hand I did not do with my heart, will you? My hand killed him; not my mind nor my will. Believe that, will you not, darling?”

“I will believe neither,” she cried bitterly. “You did not! you did not!”

“Hush!—they will hear you,” warned Fair, adding more gently: “Now wait here and say nothing to anyone. I will return at once—and we will catch the next train for town. Poor, poor Janet—good God, what work!”

He dashed into the house, and Kate sat as if dreaming on the garden seat. After trying to collect her thoughts and to fathom the deepening mystery which was overwhelming her, she suddenly caught sight of the torn letter which Mrs. March had dropped upon the seat. Acting mechanically and scarcely knowing what she was doing or that she was doing anything at all, she glanced at the piece of the letter which she had chanced to pick up—and at once her mind was awake. There was a name—a name and an address that startled her by their seeming incomprehensible coincidence with her thoughts at the moment. Hearing voices approaching before she had fully taken in the meaning of this new bit of perplexing tangle, she thrust the scrap of paper into her pocket. The next instant she saw Fair coming out of the door, carrying his portmanteau. At his side was Mrs. March.

“I am so sorry,” Mrs. March was saying as they came up to her. “You have your bag—which means that you are not waiting for luncheon. Must you really rush off in this way? I wanted to speak to you ever so much.”

“Yes,” Fair replied, putting down the bag and consulting a time-table; “awfully sorry, but I have just heard that Mrs. Fair was unable to proceed to Paris this morning, and, of course, I shall be very anxious until I see her and learn the cause. I think you have met Miss Mettleby, Mrs. March?”

“Oh, how do you do?” smiled Mrs. March, giving Kate a warm hand grasp.

“Good morning, Mrs. March,” responded Kate, and then to Fair: “I think, if you don’t mind, sir, I’ll go along through the park by myself. We have some time, I think, before the train is due. Good morning.”

“Do,” urged Fair, and when Kate had disappeared he turned to Mrs. March not very cheerfully: “You wished to confess something or other to me? Do, if you love me, make it something uproariously funny—or else choose another father confessor. I’m a bit edgy this morning, you know.”

“Oh, I’m sure you will think it the merriest news,” replied Mrs. March, with beaming good nature. “Maxwell—I’m married!”

Fair looked at her, stupefied. One expression followed another on his face, and then, when he had secured his usual genial expression, he said: “Not really? Well, all I can say is—one man is happy. But explain.”

“Wasn’t it just like me to slip over to Brussels and be married quietly? You know I hate the regulation fuss. And heaven has given me the love of a man whom I am sure you will love and respect when you know him. All heart and soul and honor—a knight and a poet.”

“Believe me, my dear friend,” answered Fair, “I wish you all the happiness that your good heart deserves. When may we congratulate you in a public manner? And what are we to call you henceforth?”

“It will seem strange to call me by my new name, won’t it—and a foreign name, too? My husband’s name is Don Pablo Mendes, formerly of Santiago de Cuba,” said Mrs. March, with a flush of happiness which blanched out and became the pallor of horror as she saw the effect on Fair.

He dropped the portmanteau, which he had picked up, stared as if stunned for a moment, and then with a tremendous effort to spare the wretched woman as long as possible, he said huskily: “I beg your pardon—the fact is, I am far from well—Good-bye!”

“I’m so sorry,” returned Mrs. March, satisfied that his singular conduct was really the result of a bad turn. “But tell me before you go, Maxwell—do you know my dear Spanish boy?”

“I can’t say that I do,” he stammered; “but really I shall miss my train—good-bye,” and before she could ask him anything more he was striding across the park.

“What strange behavior!” she said to herself as she watched him. “Maxwell of all men, too! The mirror of good form—and the one man who never fails to say the right thing at the right time. Ah, here he comes back to make the proper amends. Back so soon?” she asked as Fair rejoined her with his hat in his hand. “Forget something—or did you, like a good fellow, come back to say just one kind word?”

“Mrs. March,” he began, speaking with strange dignity and pain. “I have come back to implore your pardon. I lied to you. We shall never see each other again, and it was dastardly in me to try to shield myself from the horrible duty which as one of your oldest friends I owe you—the last thing, also, that I can ever do for you. You are a true woman and a great soul. Be great enough to face what I have now to tell you. I do know Pablo Mendes—and if you have not told any of your friends about your unspeakably deplorable marriage, for God’s sake do not tell them. You will understand why I say this, and bless me for saying it soon—you will thank me until your dying day. Your secret is, of course, sacred with me. Mrs. March, brace yourself now—life is a battle for us all—and victory is not for them that fight, but for them that bear—so hear me. You will never see your husband again. Give me your hand—so—are you ill? Courage now for a moment. Mendes is dead. I—Somebody, in there! Quick! Mrs. March has fainted!”

Not waiting to help carry her in, he bade Baggs tell Mr. Allyne and Mr. Travers to join him in town at once, and seeing that servants were already gone to fetch Lady Poynter, he sped along the avenue to overtake Miss Mettleby, whose skirts he saw through the shrubbery at some distance from the terrace. In ten minutes they were aboard the train.

At about eight o’clock that evening Fair, who had dined with Allyne and Travers at the club, reached his own door and, letting himself in, waited for their arrival in the small smoking-room on the first floor of the deserted and gloomy mansion. As he opened the street door he thought that he heard hasty footsteps on one of the upper stories, but soon he was able to rid himself of the unpleasant fancy, and sat quietly reading until his friends should come.

This they did in a very few minutes—considerably to his relief—and the three groped their way up the dark stairs and along the passage to the library, which room Fair told them was to be the scene of their conference. As they peered in at the door the black woodwork of the library made the gloom seem greater than in the passage, and as they hesitated Fair said: “Strike a match, will you, Travers?”

“Right you are—if I don’t break my neck first,” answered Travers, finally managing to get the match lighted and holding it high over his head.

“There we are,” said Fair. “Now I can find the electric light key.”

He found it and turned on the current, flooding the room with light. The sudden translation from total darkness to brilliant light, and the general feeling of mystery and stealth with which the house seemed to be filled, gave all of the men an uncomfortable sense of being engaged upon uncanny business.

“I feel like a cross between a burglar and a blooming ass,” said Allyne, to break the unbearable silence. “By Jove, Fair, my wealth is at your disposal, but I’ll be hanged if you can borrow much more of my nervous energy! What’s the beastly game, anyhow?”

“I do think,” added Travers, more seriously, “that we’ve followed you in the dark about as long as a decent regard for our feelings—as well as for your own interests—will permit. Seriously, old chap, I do not think we should allow you to go on in this way. Elucidate, like a good fellow.”

“On my honor, Dick,” replied Fair, speaking with great earnestness, “this is no fool’s errand that I have asked you and Allyne to undertake. It is the last favor that I shall ever ask you to do me. Sit down. I’ll go downstairs and see if I can’t scare up something to drink.”

“That’s the first rational thing you’ve said since yesterday,” said Allyne. “Go, by all means, old man, and make it brandy and soda.”

“Back in a moment,” answered Fair, disappearing.

“Honestly, Travers, what do you make of it?” asked Allyne when they were alone. “If it’s a joke he has carried it rather far. What is it?”

“Oh, Lord, I don’t know,” replied Travers wearily and with very genuine anxiety. “If it were any other man—but Fair is the coolest and sanest devil I ever knew. I don’t like this turn of affairs on my word. Money and women are the only two things that could bowl a chap over on his beam ends in this way, and Fair can show a clean slate under both of those heads—so I give it up. But I, for one, go no further.”

“Unless I am mistaken, his father or grandfather was mad,” whispered Allyne, pursing up his lips uncomfortingly; “but I never thought Maxwell dippy—that is, you know, not unusually so. He is devilish queer.”

“In England,” answered Travers, with a sneer, “everyone is thought mad who manifests any trace of originality. In the city they think Fair a bit off his head because he does everything that sacred British methods decry—and grows rich at it. And in society they think him singular because he has such a childish way of telling the truth. You and I know that he makes friends in society just as he makes money in the city. No, I don’t think Fair is mad—I wish to heaven I could think so.”

Allyne was striding up and down the room by this time, and when he next reached Travers he stopped and said: “Confound it, Travers, he can’t have done anything so rum as all this melodramatic rot would make one think. Give him credit for too good taste for that, at least.”

“Oh, never fear,” replied Travers, rising; “I’ve made up my mind. I’ll give him half an hour more. If he does not chuck this mystery and give us the key in plain English, I’ll report the case to his solicitor and medical man.”

“Here, too,” grunted Allyne, with a nervous shrug of his shoulders. “What a creepy, deuced idiotic thing to bring us up here tonight! The house feels like a tomb! By George, I wouldn’t stop here alone for the world. Did you see that man across the way when we came in? He watched us as if we were a gang of coiners. Lord! If they were to— What was that?”

Travers, also, had heard the noise, whatever it was, and both men turned nervously toward the door and listened. It was repeated, but faintly.

“It sounded like footsteps on the floor above,” said Travers.

“But Fair said there is nobody in the house,” answered Allyne, adding, with a return of his usual spirits: “I say, Travers, just run upstairs and have a look round, will you, that’s a good fellow?”

“You go,” replied Travers, smiling, but more in earnest than he would have cared to admit. “You are younger than I, and—but here’s Fair.”

Fair came in, carrying a tray on which were a number of decanters and glasses, which he placed on the table before he saw with surprise that the others were evidently acting under a strain of some sort.

“I say, old man, were you upstairs a moment ago?” asked Travers, with a disquietingly anxious look.

“Upstairs?” asked Fair, with growing uneasiness. “Why, no. I was below—ever since I left you. Why?”

“Nothing,” answered Travers, trying to throw a careless tone into his words. “Allyne thought he heard—There it is again!”

All three had heard it this time—and all belied with their eyes the smile which they forced to their lips.

“Wind in the chimney,” muttered Fair, disavowing all belief in his own words by going, not to the fireplace, but to the door to listen. “There is nobody in the house, anyway,” he added, still listening at the door.

“It sounded like bare feet—Ugh—give us a drop of brandy,” growled Allyne, pretending to more alarm than he really felt.

Fair returned to the table after closing the door into the passage, and pouring a stiff drink for each of them, said, with a laugh: “Here you go. That will hearten you up a bit, Allyne. Why, you look as though you expected to see a ghost. Never fear, old chap. Something much more substantial than spirits is at the bottom of this cheerful occasion.”

“There was a beastly sly fellow over the way when we came in,” said Allyne as he sat on the end of the table to drink. “Why the deuce did he watch us like that?”

“He probably wants me,” answered Fair seriously, “although he does not yet know that it is I he wants. We can ask him to escort me to jail as we go out of the house presently.”

Travers put down his glass with a bang, spilling the liquor, jumped up and swung around at Fair, thoroughly disgusted and exasperated.

“Really, Fair,” he began, “I’ve had about enough of this. Aren’t you pressing your little joke a bit too far? I was just saying to Allyne that I would give you half an hour. At the end of that time I——”

Again there was the sound of footsteps above their heads, and Travers stopped and all three looked toward the door as the steps seemed to come down the stairs. Fair was the first to regain composure.

“You give me half an hour,” he said to Travers, “but I shall require only ten minutes. Have a cigar, and—damn it, Allyne, let up, you know. Lock the door if you like, but for heaven’s sake quit your funk.”

“Thanks awfully,” retorted Allyne, locking the door so quickly that Fair and Travers laughed genuinely this time. “There! Now we are cozy, aren’t we just? A corpse and an undertaker and a hangman are all we want to complete our merry little party.”

“Shut up, Allyne!” shouted Travers, watching Fair’s face. “Now, Fair, for the love of sanity—what’s the answer?”

Fair poured out another drink for himself, and pushing the bottles toward Travers, threw himself full length upon a lounge. Puffing slowly at his fresh cigar, he began speaking with perfect composure:

“You fellows remember a Cuban by the name of Mendes—the man of whom I have often spoken to you, do you not? You know—Don Pablo Mendes—a great chess player?”

“Certainly—you spoke of him only yesterday. Friend of Lopez? Yes—well, what of him?” asked Travers, and Fair turned his head toward Allyne, who seemed to be listening for noises and not to him.

“I saw you speak to him one night at the opera,” said Allyne, without taking his eyes from the door. “Looked like a twin brother of the devil—diamonds, yellow fingers, hair oil, et cetera. Proceed, to wit, go on.”

“Yes, that’s the man,” answered Fair, and then leaning over to flick the ashes from his cigar into the hearth, he added, without the slightest excitement or emotion: “Well—I murdered him yesterday, you know.”

“You are drunk,” sweetly remarked Travers, with a look of infinite relief, as of course Fair now was admitting that he had been twigging them.

“Murdered him, eh?” grunted Allyne, executing a series of maneuvres that landed him on Fair’s chest. “Murdered a yellow cigarette twister, did you? What of that? Why, I strangled my grandmother last night.”

“By all that is holy,” Fair cried out hoarsely, “gentlemen, you sha’n’t go on in this way. If you will only allow me to tell my story, you will realize that I am a ruined man with death hanging over me, and, as my friends, I ask you to stand by me, to see that I face my fate and end my life in a way to prove that I was not altogether unworthy of two such friends. Will you do this?”

He turned his white, drawn face from one to the other beseechingly.

“Fair,” cried Travers, clutching his hand and speaking fast and like one who has passed beyond consternation into the very heart of abandonment, “if you are not mad, what does this mean? If you are in earnest—if this horrible thing is true—you know that Allyne and I would risk our lives to save yours, but why——?”

“Twenty times,” broke in Allyne, pushing Fair back into a seat. “We would risk twenty lives for you, old man; but if you have really rid the world of that unhung dog, why in the name of Mrs. Fair and the children, to say nothing of us and common sense, don’t you get away until we can get your defense in order? Forgive my fool tongue, old man, for, of course, I could not believe that this was anything but some new sort of game. Did the blackguard attack you? Don’t let the ugly business get on your nerves too much to let you see that this is no murder at all.”

“Yes,” put in Travers eagerly, groping through the dark to catch at any straw of hope or light. “And for God’s sake leave the country until your solicitor can prepare your case. Come, now, explain.”

“It’s a simple story,” began Fair more calmly now that he had got them to accept the situation. “The fool came here to extort blackmail—and I killed him. Mrs. Fair saw me, and, Travers, you saw my pistol, you remember—still warm and with one chamber discharged. The servants heard the shot. The man’s body is still in the house, and nothing remains but to give myself up to the police. Lopez knows the history of my relations with his friend, and he will be only too glad to testify that I had threatened to kill Mendes, against whom I had a long-standing grudge. The case against me is complete, you see, so I prefer to end it all by surrendering myself at once.”

“Not if we can stop you,” shouted Travers fiercely. “And as for the pistol—unless you go regularly off your head and tell them that I saw it, they will never know it. And, of course, you know, your wife’s testimony would not be taken against you, even if she should wish to give it.”

“But she is not my wife,” groaned Fair, looking up at him.

“What!” thundered Travers, significantly glancing at Allyne, who wheeled around to Fair and exclaimed: “Cæsar’s ghost! Look here, Fair, you are rubbing it in rather too deep, you know.”

“Oh, it will be a pretty story when it is told in the papers,” muttered Fair, his hands thrust deep in his pockets and his legs stretched out in front of him.

“Perhaps it will,” replied Travers, rising and going toward the door with his hat on, “but I don’t propose to hear you tell it. My God, man, you can’t expect us to hear it and then stand up and swear away your life! You’re mad. My duty is clear. Good night. Allyne, ring me up at the club in an hour. This is—” He did not finish the sentence, but hurried to the door, which he had reached when Fair spoke.

“All right, old man,” he said, without turning to Travers, “if you choose to desert. I have faced tight places before. I’m game now.”

“No, hang it, Fair,” answered Travers, coming back from the door and confronting Fair, “you know that I will not leave you; but why must you ask Allyne and me to learn all this—when we could otherwise swear to the fact of your being what we have always known you to be—yes, know you to be now—for, by gad, you can’t get me to believe you.”

“Hang the swearing,” said Allyne, trying to laugh. “If they get me on the witness stand, I’ll let them know what I think of greasy foreigners, and my views as to sending them where they belong. Go on, Fair, and tell us what they did next.”

“Then sit down, Travers, and hear me out,” replied Fair, filling the three glasses and regaining an air of quiet.

“Blaze away,” answered Travers, dropping into a chair with resignation. “At the bottom of a hole one can’t fall lower—so go on.”

“Have a drink, both of you, and we’ll get on,” said Fair, and all three sipped their drink in silence for some minutes. Then Fair said:

“Many years ago the noble woman whom you know as Mrs. Fair was married to the wretched man whom I killed yesterday. She afterward discovered that he had a living wife, and she, of course, therefore, found herself a nameless outcast. She appealed to me, and for two reasons I offered her the protection of my name. I had loved her some years before, and I inherited from my fathers a sort of morbid craving to sacrifice my life to a cause or purpose which the reason and the prudence of all normally minded men would discountenance.”

“Surely wedding such a glorious woman as Mrs. Fair was scarcely what one could look at as a sacrifice of one’s life,” protested Travers when Fair paused for a moment.

“She is indeed a queen, a priceless woman,” murmured Fair quietly, “but her children are not my children—she never became my wife. She has been a sacred vocation to me, and while men envied me the love of such a wife, I was really living the life of a celibate because of a mad, but inexorable, fixed idea. You fail to understand this? So do I. I only know that nothing in heaven or earth could have deterred me from assuming the position in which I have lived so long. This may be madness—but it is of the very essence of my being. And then I came to love another woman—and you may imagine what I suffered. But there was a satisfaction in it all which, of course, you men will be unable to comprehend. But, see the irony of fate. The only thing that made life possible has been dashed away from me. I lived supported by the thought that Janet and her children were saved from shame by my effacement, and now I must proclaim that they are not my flesh and blood, to shield them from the disgrace of being thought a murderer’s kin. Isn’t it horrible? But it is only fate’s swift way of damning me for what I had just been so weak as to decide to do. I was about to let my love—the gnawing hunger of a real life—have way. I had decided, on this very day, to proclaim my love for— Fellows, for God’s sake, never go back upon your destiny even if, as in my case, it should mean lifelong torture. After all, there may not be a hell after death, for there’s one on this side of the grave—and I am in it.”

He dropped his head on the edge of the table. Allyne, whose heart was like a child’s, could bear the sight of his agony no longer, and walked to the end of the room. Travers came over to Fair’s side and laid his hand on his head.

“This is the most stupendous thing I ever heard of, Fair,” he said; “and if there is such a thing as justice, you shall not suffer.”

“There is a thing called justice,” replied Fair, looking up, “and therefore I must die.”

“Not if you will allow us to save you from yourself,” cried Allyne, returning to them. “My soul, man, no case can be made out against you unless you make it yourself. Do let us act for you. Counsel must be secured at once. Come, come, I know the very man.”

“Presently, presently,” answered Fair. “I telegraphed Marshall, my solicitor, that we would call at his chambers tonight at ten. But before we go I want you two to have the case in detail. I promise to be governed by you and Marshall when you have all the facts. That’s reasonable.”

“Then there will be no difficulty, I promise you,” replied Allyne, with renewed good spirits. “Marshall has no romantic rubbish in his gray matter. Maxwell, you’re a disembodied ghost of some crusader who hasn’t heard that Adam and Eve left Paradise some time ago for good. I drink to you, Sir Altruist.”

“Thanks, old chap,” said Fair, with moistening eyes.

“By Jove, I feel better,” exclaimed Travers, stretching his arms and holding Fair by both shoulders. “I’d like to be worthy of you, Fair.”

“Oh, come, I say, Dick,” protested Fair. “In a few weeks it will be deucedly awkward to be asked if you were not a friend of mine.”

“We’ll see about that,” retorted Travers defiantly. “Now, the details.”

While they sat, Fair walked to and fro before them with folded arms.

“Well,” he began, “for five years I was happy in seeing Janet and her two boys safe under the shadow of my broken heart; but about a year ago Lopez came to me and told me that some disreputable Cuban acquaintances of his had learned poor Janet’s secret, and that a paltry hundred pounds would keep them quiet. I, of course, sent him about his business and reported the matter to the police. The Cubans quietly got hold of Janet—just how I was never quite sure—and played upon her love for her children until they extorted one sum after another from her without my knowledge. At last they demanded a sum so vast that the poor girl was compelled to appeal to me. I told her to ignore their letters, and had them shadowed by detectives. We discovered that Mendes himself was at the head of a gang whose plan was to get the secrets of rich families for blackmailing purposes, his private fortune having been gambled away on the Continent. More than once Lopez or Mendes has ruined a woman of standing, and while pretending to remain a devoted lover, has told the other, who would at once begin the extortion of hush money. Mendes came here yesterday—and I shot him like a dog. Now Lopez will show that I was the paramour of my victim’s wife, and that my crime followed naturally upon Mendes tracking his wife to my house, and there learning that I had palmed her off as my wife for years. Those are the facts. Complete, wouldn’t you say?”

Allyne, always more susceptible to all emotions than Travers, frankly looked the horror he felt as he began to realize the truly desperate situation in which Fair now was; but Travers, after thinking for a few moments in silence, spoke out bravely: “Confound it, man, isn’t it a principle of law that a man is innocent until proven guilty? Who knows that you killed the scoundrel? And if suspicion should be drawn toward you, why, then let them prove the charge if they can. And, anyhow, can’t you plead that you killed him while protecting Mrs. Fair? The blackguard’s character will make it difficult for Lopez to prove Mendes’s alleged relations with Janet. I’d be hanged if I’d be hanged just for the fun of it.”

“Ah, but my dear fellow,” returned Fair, arguing out his point in his customary cool way, “you forget. It is known that he came to this house. It is known that he did not leave it. His body, my dear friend—his corpse, you know, is a nasty bit of evidence that we can’t get rid of.”

“Do you mean to say,” answered Travers, face to face with the calm man, “do you mean to tell us that the—that the chap’s corpse, you know, was in the house last night while you and Janet were entertaining us? If you are the man you are, surely no woman at any rate could have stood that.”

“Ah, you don’t know her,” smiled Fair. “To save me—yes, to please me even, that woman would do anything—bear anything.”

“And she jolly well ought to,” put in Allyne, slapping Fair’s back, and then with a nervous look about the room: “I say, what did you do with the—with that infernal thing, you know?”

“With the body?” asked Fair, with entire freedom from excitement. “It is here yet.”

“Here?” cried Allyne angrily and sick with perplexity.

“In the house now?” asked Travers, scowling but not believing.

“Certainly,” replied Fair quietly. “What could I have done with it last night? You all came in within a few minutes of the deed. Yes, it is in the house—it is in this room now.”

“The devil you say!” exclaimed Allyne, facing about as if he feared that the dreadful thing was back of him somewhere.

“Rather a gruesome thing to joke about, isn’t it?” asked Travers sadly, and still utterly unable to believe what he heard.

“Horrible—but true,” answered Fair, with disconcerting calmness as he walked slowly over toward the chest by the fireplace, while Allyne and Travers watched him breathlessly. “It is here.”

He seemed to take an eternity to do whatever it was that he intended to do, but finally as he stood over the chest he said, looking from one to the other: “If a man ever had a more terrible guest under his roof than mine, I pity him. Look!”

As he said this he suddenly stooped and raised the lid of the chest. The two now thoroughly horrified men were standing on either side of him. They all peered, shuddering, into the chest. It was empty.

“Gone?” moaned Fair, for the first time betraying uncontrolled horror.

“That settles it,” shouted Travers, delirious with joy. “You see, you have been dreaming this whole cursed nightmare.”

Meanwhile Allyne was running about the room, swinging a chair over his head and shouting like a madman. Coming back to Fair he sang out with hysterical laughter: “Rest and quiet—rest—and qui—et, sir—that’s what we need. Ice on the head, hot water at the feet—and a month at sea. May I have the pleasure?” Before Fair could stop him he had waltzed him around the room. At last Fair broke away from him, and holding his hands to his splitting head, he brought them back to a full realization of the awful truth by the expression on his face.

“Hush!” he cried to Allyne. “For God’s sake, Allyne, stop it. I swear on my honor that I put it into this chest. It has been discovered by somebody and removed today. I sat up all night in this room, so that it must have been taken away today. Come. That’s the end. I might as well surrender without delay.”

“But wait, wait,” broke in Travers. “Who knew of it’s being here? Who could have discovered it? Now don’t be rash. Let us think before we act. How could it have been found? That is, if it ever was here.”

“Oh, there are a thousand ways in which it might have been found,” answered Fair, ignoring his unbelief.

“Did Mrs. Fair know about it?” asked Allyne, and was startled by the effect of his question.

Fair sprang up, thought for a moment, and then exclaimed: “By heaven, Allyne, that’s it. My God! Do you know what that means?” He clenched his hands and glared at them, stupefied with grief.

“It means,” said Travers, “that she has disposed of it. It means that your chances are a thousand-fold better than before.”

“No, no!” shrieked Fair. “It means—but no—she could not be so unspeakably unkind to the children as to try to prove that she killed him. No. I give it up, then. Come, come, I can’t bear this much longer. I must get the relief of surrendering myself. Come.”

“If you attempt to give yourself up, by gad, I’ll have you locked up for a dangerous lunatic,” said Travers, with strange new determination as he noticed how rapidly Fair was breaking. “I tell you, Fair, that— Hark! That was that beastly footstep again. I’m not a coward, but this— Hark!”

They listened with tense faces. Again the sound. And again.

“That was certainly a footstep—upstairs, too,” whispered Travers. “Come Fair, this is no place for you now. Allyne, if he refuses to come with us, help me to force him out of this hole. Hear me? Now come.”

Fair struggled away from their grasp and ran to the door, saying: “I will go with you, but I am going upstairs first—alone.”

“You are going to do nothing of the sort,” replied Travers, again grasping his arm and pulling him back.

“Don’t come with me, please,” pleaded Fair; “I’ll be only a minute.”

“Never fear,” answered Allyne at his other arm; “I wouldn’t go up there with anybody—but you are not going up, either. Out with him, Travers.”

“Yes, come, old man,” begged Travers earnestly. “Notify the police that thieves are in the house, call the fire brigade—anything, but don’t be a fool and expose yourself to you don’t know what danger. Come!”

They strained at him, and presently Fair gave in, saying: “Very well, it is getting a bit on my nerves, I confess. Go to the top of the stairs before I turn out the light. All ready? There.”

He turned out the light and felt his way to the stairs, down which Travers and Allyne preceded him, and the next moment they stepped out into the blessed coolness and relief of the street.

The instant that Fair turned out the light in the library a man stole quickly in from the adjoining study and groped his way to the chest in the total darkness. Just after the street door slammed two persons, who had been listening on the floor above the library, began whispering as they descended the stairs and approached that room.

Meanwhile Fair and his two friends called a cab and drove off eastward and soon were set down in the Strand near the law courts, proposing to make the remainder of their journey on foot.

At sixty Marshall, Maxwell Fair’s solicitor, found himself a bachelor, a solicitor with an income of twenty thousand pounds and a very decided attachment for his few wealthy clients and an aversion to new ones. Long past the necessity of accepting new clients, Marshall, like so many old Templars, asked for nothing but to be let alone among his books and cronies in the Inner Temple, and allowed to spend his brief holidays at his shooting-box by the Norfolk Broads.

It was with no very good grace, therefore, that he returned to town on that wet Sunday in response to an absurdly urgent telegram from Fair, whose usual business was exactly to old Marshall’s taste, since it consisted of drawing perfunctory documents having to do with real estate, and never involving critical issues of any sort.

But the snug thousands which Fair’s enormous interests brought to him annually made it impolitic to ignore his most uncharacteristic bit of hysterics. Accordingly, after dining in gloomy solitude at his quiet little chop-house, Marshall surprised his laundress by turning up at his chambers in the Inner Temple at nine o’clock on Sunday evening in a crusty temper. Fair would arrive at ten, so Marshall settled down for an hour with Browne’s “Religio Medici,” when to an irritating knock he sang out a curt, “Come in! come in!” and a lady entered.

“Mr. Marshall, I believe?” said the lady.

“Yes, madam,” replied Marshall, rising; “but my business hours—In fact, I am engaged—just leaving, you know—and, besides, I expect a gentleman by appointment at any moment.”

“I venture to think that, whatever his business may be, you will consider my case the one requiring immediate attention,” quietly answered the lady, seating herself, although the old solicitor had not suggested her doing so.

“Case? Case?” exclaimed Marshall. “Why, bless us all, I haven’t taken any new cases in years. Couldn’t think of it, madam.”

“But,” returned the lady vehemently, “a crime has been committed, and I——”

“Crime, you say?” shouted Marshall as if he were being insulted. “Good heavens, my good woman, do you imagine that I am interested in crime?”

“But Mr. Fair has, I think, some claim upon your advice and counsel?” replied the lady, with the assurance of one who trumps an ace.

“Mr. Fair has certainly every claim upon me,” answered Marshall, sitting down and becoming the cautious and alert barrister at once, “and I trust you will appreciate my unwillingness to discuss anything concerning my clients with strangers.”

“Strangers?” cried the woman, with such eagerness that Marshall began to fear all sorts of possible female entanglement. “Why, sir, I am his—I mean, I know Mr. Fair very well.”

“Really, madam,” protested the solicitor, now thoroughly certain that this woman and the urgent telegram were unpleasantly related. “Really, you know, I must beg you will call at some other time. Allow me to see you to your carriage.”

“It will be necessary for you to hear me,” replied the lady firmly. “I see that you do not remember me, but we have met before. You were at Mr. Fair’s place in Norfolk about five years ago. You were presented to Mrs. Maxwell Fair. Well, I am she.”

“Upon my word, dear madam,” exclaimed Marshall, jumping up, “I did, indeed, fail to recognize you. That’s a sign I’m getting old, is it not? This is an honor, really.”

“Alas, sir, I fear that you will think it anything but that,” replied Mrs. Fair nervously. “I desire to state before going into the matter which brought me here that I am not the wife of Mr. Maxwell Fair—Mr. Fair never married. I see that this fills you with amazement—pray, don’t misjudge him. Believe me, Mr. Fair deserves your deepest regard and admiration. My children are not his children. He has been a father, a brother, a chivalrous protector—that is all.”

“But, my dear madam, this is quite beyond belief,” stammered the solicitor.

“It is the truth, as you will learn presently from him. I came here simply to tell you that, whatever Mr. Fair may say, my crime does not involve him, as it would of course do if I were his wife. Now for my story.”

“I must remind you, Mrs. Fair,” interrupted Marshall sternly, “that if your crime, as you choose to call it, is to the prejudice to Mr. Fair, I must decline to hear your statement, as, in the event of any issue arising, I must, of course, act on his and not on your behalf.”

“But it is not a question as between Mr. Fair and me,” answered Mrs. Fair. “The simple and horrible fact is I killed a man yesterday—a Cuban named Pablo Mendes—a wretch who had blasted my life. He dared to pursue me even into my protector’s house. He heaped the foulest insults upon Mr. Fair and the children and me—so, in a mad access of frenzy and horror, I shot and instantly killed him. I desire to give myself up to the police. What shall I do, sir?”

Marshall was walking up and down now with his hands clasped behind his back, and for several moments he did not answer. Then he said as he stood confronting her: “If there were no witnesses, and the man can be proved to have been your traducer and persecutor, it would not be difficult to set up a powerful defense. He invaded your house, demanded money, threatened you—or, wait, wait—I have it! On failing to extort the money, he attacked you, and you, having anticipated just such an assault, had taken the precaution to be armed—and shot him down for the blackguard he was. Why, my dear Mrs. Fair, a jury would acquit you without leaving the courtroom.”

“Ah, but the facts are not as you state them,” cried Mrs. Fair, rising and grasping the old man’s hand feverishly. “There was no attack. And, oh, sir, I did it! I did it! I say I! Take me to the police—and make them believe that it was I—or—or—well, I can’t tell you now, but unless you make them believe me, something most horrible will occur. Do this—do this, Mr. Marshall, for God’s sake.”

“But we must consider this from every side,” replied Marshall, getting Mrs. Fair into a seat again and continuing his walk. “Give me a little time to think it out. Could you manage to return early in the morning? You are evidently very ill. Rest will refresh you—and, moreover, nothing can be done wisely tonight.”

“Very well—but tell me that you believe me—tell me that,” implored Mrs. Fair, rising to go. She was indeed nearly at the end.

“Of course I must accept your statement,” answered Marshall with much gentleness. “Yet it by no means follows that the consequences need be what you apprehend. Allow me to show you down to your carriage.”

“Here is my statement,” she said as she placed a document on the table and took the arm which the old solicitor offered her. “Act upon it, sir—it is a woman’s last story—written in her blood and that of her children. Act upon it, sir, act upon it—no matter what Mr. Fair says.”

“I promise nothing, madam,” replied Marshall, leading her to the door. “You are in no condition to take the best or the wisest view of this most incredible affair. Depend upon it, I shall act only for your best interest and that of Mr. Fair. Come.”

He led her down to the street and, after seeing her safely to her carriage, slowly retraced his steps into the quiet precincts of the Temple. When about to enter the door at the foot of his worn stairs, two men came walking quickly from the thoroughfare without, and one of them, recognizing him, said: “This is my friend Allyne—Lord Linklater’s son, you know, Mr. Marshall. May we have a few minutes of your time?—very urgent matter!”

“Travers?” said Marshall as he caught sight of his face under the gas lamp. “What on earth brings you to this old graveyard at this time? I know your honored father, Lord Linklater, Mr. Allyne. Come up, gentlemen.”

Once more the solicitor entertained no very pleasant conjectures as to the purpose of his visitors, whom he knew to be close personal friends of Maxwell Fair’s. The whole departure was as upsetting as it was sudden.

“Rather a beastly time to intrude upon you, Mr. Marshall,” said Travers apologetically as they seated themselves in Marshall’s library.

“And on the beastliest sort of business,” put in Allyne.

Mr. Marshall, finding nothing particular to say, remained silent.

“We were asked to come here this evening by Mr. Maxwell Fair,” said Travers, explaining. “He will be here at ten o’clock.”

“Yes?” softly remarked the imperturbable lawyer; “then we will wait.”

“The deuce you say,” protested Allyne in spite of the signal from Travers. “Why, we came ahead of him expressly.”

“Shut up, Allyne,” broke in Travers. “Fair knows that we are here, Mr. Marshall—in fact, we came rather at his suggestion. He gave us full permission to speak to you.”

“I shall, of course, be very glad to hear anything that you may deem it desirable to tell me. Pray proceed,” said Marshall not very eagerly.

“Well, then, sir, it is with the utmost sorrow that we have to tell you that we are convinced poor Fair has become suddenly insane on a certain dreadful subject,” went on Travers, irritated by Marshall’s manner.

“Ah, there we shall have to move very slowly—very—slowly,” said Marshall when Travers stopped. “Mr. Fair is thought to be of unsound mind on a number of subjects by a number of persons. He is so successful, you know—so original, that others who are merely British fail to understand him. Moreover, Fair is unselfish, sympathetic, altruistic—and of course appears mad to our smug, hoggish world.”

“Damn it,” exclaimed Allyne, “that’s all, as you say, but the dear fellow has gone clean off his head this time, you know. You just wait until Travers gives you the details.”

“I am waiting,” answered Marshall calmly.

“Before we come to that,” said Travers in answer to Marshall’s look, “I believe, Mr. Marshall, that you knew Fair’s father, did you not?”

“Intimately—and his grandfather also. What of them?”

“What sort were they?”

“Very much like Fair—both were thought mad.”

“In what way? They were men of tremendous will power and fixity of purpose, were they not? I have reason for asking.”

“Quite so. They were idealists, dreamers, monomaniacs—but why?”

“I thought as much. The stuff martyrs are made of. Tell us about them, if you don’t mind, Mr. Marshall,” said Travers, unaccountably insistent.

“Very well,” began Marshall, really glad to be able thus to kill time until Fair arrived. “His grandfather got it into his head that he was bound in honor to extricate his publishers—he was an author, you know—from their financial difficulties, although it was clearly proved in court that they had only their own speculative folly to thank for their failure. Well, poor old Fair lost his all and even mortgaged the Norfolk estates. In spite of his solicitors, he pressed forward eagerly to ruin, and died perfectly happy in the knowledge that he had lived up to his ideal. Mad—stark mad!”

“By Jove, it sounds like Fair all over again!” exclaimed Allyne.

“Yes,” went on the old lawyer, warming to his favorite work of decrying idealism of every sort. “Yes, gentlemen, and our Mr. Fair’s father was no better than his grandfather. He spent the first half of his life in freeing the estates from their heavy encumbrances—and the second half in throwing away all that he had accumulated in the first. His specialty was young geniuses—any kind of young genius, musical, literary, artistic. Any chap who could not get an editor to print his stuff could count on Fair bringing out an édition de luxe at his own expense. And any young woman had but to get her mother to tell him with tears in her eyes that she had wonderful musical promise and away she would go to Germany to be educated—of course at Fair’s expense. You probably know that he died in lodgings in Mile End, where he had removed in order to live among those whom he, poor old dreamer, imagined would appreciate his sympathy. He left our Mr. Fair nothing but the estates heavily mortgaged again.”

“And Maxwell is a chip of the old block,” commented Travers when the solicitor stopped. “But Mr. Marshall, he has done more than either his father or grandfather in the way of self-effacement. His life is one long tragedy for an idea. That is bad enough. But now he proposes actually to destroy himself for it. Unless we can prevent it, he will die.”

“Good heavens,” cried Marshall, unable to treat the terrible intensity on Travers’s face with his customary calmness. “It’s not quite so bad as that. What, in the name of reason, is the man about now?”

“Listen,” said Travers, glad to have at last roused the stoical man of law from his leathery, noncommittal expression, “Fair declares that he has committed a crime which will send him to the gallows— Why, what ails you?”

Travers stopped and stared at the lawyer, who was strangely delighted by his last few words. Marshall’s acute mind had evidently been scouting.

“Nothing,” replied Marshall, regaining his quiet manner; “I was thinking of a similar case that once came to my notice. Go on.”

“There is no evidence against him, and yet the wretched victim of his own high-flown notions is determined to go ahead to destruction. For God’s sake, sir, help us to prevent this, even by placing him in a madhouse.” Travers saw that his words touched the old man, but that professional caution and habitual reserve were restraining him from avowing his purpose, whatever it might be.

This angered Allyne, who broke in with the sneering comment: “The law keeps no end of rascals from getting their richly deserved medicine. I think it’s a jolly beastly outrage if it can’t prevent an innocent man from hanging himself.”

“The ways of the law,” answered Marshall, with cold judicial accent, “the ways of the law, Mr. Allyne, are not as our ways. The law proceeds without sentiment or bias, and must go straight to its object in the light of fact.”

“But, I tell you, the facts can’t be as Fair states them to be, don’t you know,” retorted Allyne hotly, galled by the lawyer’s coolness and formality.

“Then Mr. Fair has nothing to fear,” quietly replied Marshall. “It is ten o’clock. Fair is a punctual man—he will be here immediately. Suppose that we allow him to explain himself.”

“I’ll be hanged if I will let him go too far. Why, gentlemen, this is monstrous! Do you mean to say, Marshall, that you——?”

A knock interrupted Allyne, and immediately Fair came in, looking not at all as though he could possibly be the subject of his friend’s anxiety.

“I’m awfully sorry,” Fair began, “to learn from your laundress, Marshall, that my telegram brought you back to town from the country. I promise you it won’t happen again.”

“Nonsense,” returned Marshall, studying Fair closely, “I was only too glad of an excuse to come back to town. You know, we old Templars don’t enjoy the country—been caged here too long for that. Sit down, dear fellow. What can I get up for you—sherry?”

“Thanks, nothing for me. Perhaps the others——”

“Lord, no!” roared Allyne before Marshall could ask.

“Well, then, to the point,” said Fair, seating himself calmly and lighting a cigar with the air of a director of a company about to discuss the treasurer’s report. “Travers has told you, Marshall?”

“Nothing,” answered the solicitor. “We were discussing peculiarities of temperament. I was just telling your friends what people used to say of your father. You know, we are all mad on some subject.”

“I see,” replied Fair, smiling. “Allyne has mentioned madness and madhouses, I should say, about once every five minutes all day long.”

“Yes, and we mean it,” thundered Allyne. “At it now. This is rum.”

“I can put the facts before you in a word, Marshall,” said Fair.

“Do so. I am all attention,” returned the lawyer, settling back into his chair with a puzzling look, in which there was certainly a trace of amusement not easily explained.

“Some Cuban gentlemen have been extorting blackmail from certain aristocratic families,” went on Fair in a monotone, “and they had, without my knowledge, frightened Mrs. Fair into paying them considerable sums. The leader of the gang, one Pablo Mendes, came to my house yesterday, and finding him in the library with Mrs. Fair I killed him.”

“Proceed,” said Marshall when Fair paused to note the effect of his announcement, speaking with so much coolness that Fair jumped up and went on fiercely: “I tell you, I shot him down like a dog—murdered him in cold blood. The servants heard the report of the pistol. Travers came in a moment after the shooting and saw the pistol still warm. I hid the man’s body in a chest in the library, from which it was taken by somebody today—so any effort on my part to delay the hand of justice would be ridiculous. What shall I do?”

“Nothing!” exclaimed Marshall. Then he added, as if regretting the unguarded word: “That is, I can’t advise you until I know more. Go on.”

“That’s the game, Marshall,” put in Allyne, pleased by the lawyer’s manifest incredulity. “Fair, you idiot, do you fancy that everybody has gone off his head just because you have?”

“Oh, please, Mr. Allyne,” said Marshall deprecatingly.

“You take this rather coolly, I must say, Marshall,” remarked Fair when Travers had succeeded in pushing Allyne into a chair.

“I find coolness conducive to clear thinking,” replied Marshall.

“Well, then, I have nothing further to say. I have murdered a man. I have neither the heart nor the wish to set up a defense. Were I to clear myself by technicalities, it would become the duty of the police to try to establish the guilt of someone else. Would you have me sit by quietly, while they drew the net of skilfully devised circumstantial evidence around some innocent person? And to whom else could suspicion point? My servants—or, God help her, the woman who is known as my wife, and who is the noblest soul I ever met? If you cannot meet my arguments, I shall go at once to the police and surrender myself.”

“There will be plenty of time for all that,” replied Marshall, showing so little feeling that Allyne was on the point of breaking out again. “The police would not believe your story, I fear. You see, my dear fellow, your case is by no means unique. Only a very little while ago one very much like it was brought to my attention. A murder—or at all events, a death, had occurred. Suspicion pointed strongly to one of two persons—a gentleman of eccentric character, and the woman whom he had loved in early youth. Now mark the dramatic interest. Each of them confessed the crime to save the other, but, of course, as they both could not have been guilty, the court refused to entertain the charge against either. There was no evidence except the bogus confession of the two. I mention this case only to show you that too hasty action on your part now may spoil everything—and you may not be allowed the luxury of hanging.”

“But, Marshall,” said Fair, “the cases are not even remotely similar. Others will testify that I had the most powerful motives for my crime, and, unless I should be dastard enough to lie, nobody else can be suspected. Lopez knows that Mendes was my enemy. Janet knows that I was in the room when the murder was done. Travers knows that a pistol, which he identified as mine, had been discharged a few minutes before he saw me—at the very time that the servants heard the report in the library. Moreover, somebody discovered the body of my victim where I had hid it. On top of all this I confess the awful fact. What more can the law possibly require? You believe what I tell you, do you not?”

“Not one word of it!” fairly cried Marshall.

“Marshall,” Fair replied with terrible earnestness, “you say you doubt my word. Such a statement must be explained.”

“Certainly,” returned Marshall, now thoroughly in control of his feelings. “I will explain. I doubt your story because of its inherent improbability. Further, I doubt it because I knew your father, because I know yourself, and am aware that not even a shameful death on the gibbet could deter you from any purpose which you had come to think your destiny. Again, I doubt it because I know who the real murderer of Mendes is.”

The three men who heard these last slow, calm words sprang to their feet together, Fair quivering with a nameless horror, and his two friends delirious with joy.

Fair steadied himself against the lawyer’s table and said: “Marshall, this is not the time when you can play with me. I tell you to your face, that when you say that you know who the murderer is, you lie.”

The old man showed how deeply the insult cut into him, and facing the young man with his own face as white as Fair’s, he retorted: “Your father’s son can go very far with me, but no man can give me the lie. Recall that word, Fair.”

Travers looked imploringly at Fair as he replied.

“I do recall it—and beg your pardon,” said Fair eagerly. “I also demand an explanation of your singular conduct.”

“If you will all sit down,” replied the solicitor, “I will prove that I am right. But before I do so I want to say that in all my life I never heard of such sublime devotion, such utterly disinterested heroism. Gentlemen, nothing will ever be more of an honor to us than to be called the friends of Maxwell Fair.”

“Hear, hear!” shouted Allyne, but Travers said quietly to Marshall: “I fear this is scarcely kind of you just now—look at his face.”

The old lawyer looked at Fair, and going over to him grasped his hand.

“Forgive me, boy,” he said, “but I meant each word. To end this dreadful business I have merely to state that the unhappy creature who sent the scoundrel to his doom came here not an hour ago and made a full confession.”

“And on my honor I swear that every word she said was false,” said Fair.

“You, at least, believe me?” asked Marshall, turning to Travers.

“Most assuredly,” replied Travers.

Fair wheeled round at him, saying: “My God, are you men English gentlemen and going to allow an innocent woman to be hanged in order to save me?”

“I seem to hear your father speak in you,” remarked Marshall, “yet there is this difference, Fair. He would have died for a great purpose, but never for a lie or to defeat the ends of justice.”

Fair winced at this, and Travers said: “That’s the line, Marshall.”

“Not a word he has said can move me,” went on Fair, rising. “I want no man’s forced friendship. I have decided on a course. You choose to allow me to pursue it alone. Good-bye.”

He spoke with such feeling, and moved toward the door with so much majesty, that none of them attempted to stop him.

Before he reached the door it was opened and a closely cropped head appeared, and a soft, insinuating cockney voice said: “Beg pardon, I’m sure. Ferret, gentlemen; Ferret, of Scotland Yard.”

“You see, Marshall, others are not as incredulous as you. I am the man you want, Mr. Ferret,” said Fair as the detective came in and sat down.

“I’ll attend to you, sir, in a minute,” replied Ferret jauntily. “Perhaps these gentlemen will try a cigar in the gardens for a few minutes.”

“Oh, never mind them,” quickly returned Fair; “they know all. Proceed.”

“But you see, sir, they don’t know all,” replied Ferret.

“I think, Fair, that we would better let this man speak to you alone,” said Marshall, rising.

Ferret interposed: “I shall ask you to stop, if you don’t mind, Mr. Marshall.”

“As you like,” answered Marshall.

Travers and Allyne went downstairs after shaking Fair’s hand with very much mixed feelings.

Marshall and Fair turned to Ferret when the door was closed, and Fair said sternly: “I see that you have been rather impudently examining that sworn statement on the table there. It will save time if I tell you that it is false. The lady wrote it under a nervous strain. It is totally false.”

“Sure. It’s just as false as your own statement, Mr. Fair,” replied Ferret, winking knowingly at the solicitor, who failed to appreciate the fellow’s humor and resented his apparently unconscionable impertinence.

“What the devil do you mean?” asked Marshall angrily, yet with relief.

“I mean,” answered the cool one, “that, thanks to my little chum, it now becomes my painful duty to admit that I suspected Mr. Fair until about two hours ago. I now know that Mrs. Fair’s statement is false—and likewise Mr. Fair’s also. It’s the other gent’s statement that is the true one.”

“The other gentleman’s statement?” asked Fair fiercely. “Why, man, there was no other man in the room when the shot was fired.”

“Oh, I say, come now, Mr. Fair,” smilingly protested Ferret. “The gent as fired the shot was there, you know. You see, Mr. Marshall, it was this way. Mendes had threatened Mrs. Fair, and she went out and got the pistol, and at that moment Mr. Fair came into the room. Mendes shot himself, and Mr. Fair, hearing the shot and seeing the smoking pistol in Mrs. Fair’s hand, snatched it away from her and declared that it was he and not her that did the killing. She came here tonight and swore it was her, and now he comes and swears it was him. But Mendes swore just as he was dying that it was himself—and the priest will testify to that.”

“But, my heavens, man, Mendes died at once. I hid his body in——”

“In the chest,” interrupted the detective, grinning. “Yes, I know all about that. But, you see, Mendes did not die. He came to while you were at dinner. Our fellows followed him to his lodgings in Soho—and today my chum got hold of a letter that gave her the address, and she and I were with him when he died an hour ago—yes, and Mrs. Fair is there now.”

While he was speaking Fair sank back into his chair, as if unconscious of what was passing, but when Ferret paused he sprang up, crying, “Marshall, did you ever hear of anything so unspeakably glorious as Janet’s devotion?”

“Yes—once,” answered Marshall, with streaming eyes. “Your own, Fair.”

“But, Ferret,” went on Fair, when he had recovered his voice, “who is the chum who so materially assisted you? And where is Mrs. Fair now?”

“Mrs. Fair is by Mendes’s bedside. My chum is——”

The door opened and Kate Mettleby came hurrying in, breathless and worn. Ferret finished by saying: “My chum, gentlemen.”

“Oh, Mr. Fair,” began Kate, after Fair had presented Marshall to her with a word of explanation, “have you heard? Janet is with him—with Señor Mendes—it was awful—it was unbearably touching.”

“He is the father of her children, Kate,” said Fair gently, when Marshall and Ferret quietly stole out, leaving them together.

“Yes, I know—and—Maxwell—there is something—oh, how can I tell you? She came in and knelt by his bed with his head in her arms when the priest told her that he was dead. She knelt there half an hour, and when it was time for us to start to come here to meet you—Maxwell, can you bear it?—when I went and touched her shoulder and told her to come away—she—was dead.”

Kate’s head fell upon her folded arms on the table and her body shook with the strain of the awful day’s events. Fair suffered her to cry herself into a quieter state. Then he stooped and laying his hand on her head, he said: “Kate, the children have no mother now.”

THE END

Educational Department

THERE are thousands of boys and girls, some in the schools and colleges, some not, who are anxious to learn to develop themselves and rise. Many, many things they yearn to know which the class-room teachers do not teach. Many a subject they are eager to study, if somebody will but show the way. Often there are speeches to be made, essays to be written, debates to be prepared, and the boys and girls simply do not know how to start about it. For instance, they are suddenly required to write or speak on the question: “Should the Government own and operate the railroads?”

They have never read anything about it, perhaps. Therefore they inquire: “Where can we get some literature on the subject?” These young people do not want someone else to write their speeches or essays; they want nothing more than to be told where to get the materials to work with—the data upon which to construct their own argument.

When I was a boy I felt the need of that kind of help very keenly. How was I to know what books contained the information sought? Who could tell me? I soon found that teachers did not love to be bored by inquiries of that character, and therefore I had to browse around in the library at random for what was wanted. If the book needed was there, I generally found it, after wasting much time in the search. If it was not there, as frequently happened, I was at my row’s end. I had to debate without the full preparation which should have been made.

To help out many a student who may be troubled as I used to be, I am going to improvise and conduct in this Magazine a modest little Educational Department. Primarily it is meant for the young people. But the rule will be made as flexible as I feel like making it. Age limits are not fair—no matter whether Osler was joking or not. It is not my plan or purpose to write anybody’s speech or essay; but, where there is a subject of real importance to be discussed by word or pen, I am willing to direct the preparation of the student by telling him or her where the necessary information can be had. It would, perhaps, not be improper for me to suggest some general ideas on the subject to be discussed—these ideas to be worked out and put in form by the student. Often I may render good service to the boys and girls by telling them where the books they need can be bought at the lowest price. It took me many years to learn how to buy books, and it is a thing worth knowing—unless you have more money than I ever had.

The letters written to me in this department will be published as written; but the names of the writers will be withheld. Therefore, no correspondent need be embarrassed in making inquiries. My replies will be given in the Magazine.

Hereafter all letters asking for information—historical, literary, political, economic—will be answered through the Educational Department.

T. E. W.

It all depends on the motive. A young man who feels the inclination to enter politics for the purpose of contributing his share to honest administration should, by all means, do so.

Government does not take care of itself any more than a cotton crop does. Both require cultivation, management, head-work and hand-work.

We can never have good government unless good men become interested in politics. Perhaps there is not a nobler calling known to man than that of working for the public welfare in matters governmental—and this is politics.

A high-minded, warm-hearted philanthropist, like Mr. J. G. Phelps-Stokes, of New York, acts admirably when he ministers to the poor in the slums; but his work is still more effective when he gives his thought and his work to the removal of those abuses of government which produce the greater part of the miseries of those slums.

The grandest task which human intellect can set for itself today is the redemption of the government from the usurpers who have used the machinery of government to enrich themselves and to plunder their less fortunate brothers.

It is true that Henry Clay advised his sons, “Be dogs rather than politicians,” but this exclamation was made when Mr. Clay was in a fury of disappointment because he could not get to be President.

It is true that John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster died broken and disappointed men, but Mr. Webster had also set his heart upon being President, and Mr. Calhoun had devoted himself to an impossible program.

If a young man enters politics for the mere sake of getting office or personal advancement, his motives are sordid, and his life will be worth nothing to his fellow-man and nothing creditable to himself; but, if in conjunction with honorable ambition, he entertains the earnest desire to be useful to the community in which he lives by exercising his energies in political work, there is a glorious field for him.

If this combination of motives inspires you, my young friend, by all means yield to your inclination and “enter politics.”

The strongest arguments in favor of government ownership of railroads are:

First. Under modern conditions, the railroads are simply the public highways over which freight and passengers must pass, and public highways should never be owned by private citizens.

If freight and passengers go by water route, they must use navigable rivers, bays, gulfs, oceans. These public waterways belong to the public, and all men admit that they should.

Under modern conditions, freight and passengers are compelled to go by rail. We have to use the railroads whether we want to or not. In traveling any distance, it is no longer possible for the public to transact business by the use of the dirt roads, consequently the transportation lines are public in their nature and their uses, and should belong to the public.

They were not built by private capital, as a rule. In almost every case the railroads were paid for by public and private donations, and the charters granted represented simply a license issued for a public purpose; and of course that license can be revoked at any time, just compensation for vested interests first having been paid.

Second. As now operated, the railroads are ruinously oppressive in their charges. Enormous sums of money are being wrung from the people to pay dividends on watered stock—a fictitious value which has no existence except in ink on paper.

Third. Under the present system, the railroads have co-operated with excessive tariff rates in building up the trust, which publicly says to the people: “Pay my price for food, or starve”; “Pay my price for tools to work with, or let your fields become deserts.”

By the secret rebate, by discriminations of one kind or another, the independent operator has been driven out of the field everywhere and the tyranny of the trusts established.

Fourth. It would remove the greater part of the corruption which is the bane of our politics.

Railroad corporations maintain their lobbyists at the capital of the nation and at the capital of every state. They corrupt representatives, judges, aldermen, editors, politicians.

They finance national and local campaigns; their filthy finger-prints are to be found on almost every page of our public record.

The only possible way to get rid of this is to remove the motive. Put the railroads where the Post-Office Department is, and there will be no more motive for rebates, discriminations and wholesale bribery than there is in the operation of the Post-Office Department.

Fifth. Government ownership would make the service uniform, simplify it in every way and save vast sums by the consolidation of all the various lines into one great national system.

It would not need so many high-priced presidents, high-priced lawyers and high-priced lobbyists.

One very intelligent writer upon this subject, C. Wood Davis, figures out a saving of $160,000,000 on this item by consolidation.

Government ownership would abolish deadheadism.

Under our present system, the men who are most able to pay their way on the railroad ride free. The man who is least able to pay, not only has to pay for himself, but in the long run has to pay also for the deadheads who ride free. This will become obvious to anybody who will think about it for a moment.

Sixth. It would take away the power of the railroads to destroy any individual, any business or any community. It would save the thousands of lives which are now lost every year for lack of double tracks, safety appliances and reasonable hours of labor.

It would enable the cotton grower of the South to exchange his products with the corn grower of the West in such a way that the railroad would not get more for hauling the corn than the man who raised it got for it when he sold it.

At present the Southern farmer pays seventy-five and eighty cents per bushel, cash, for corn which the farmer of the West sold for thirty-five cents. The transportation companies get the lion’s share of that enormous difference.

It would put an end to strikes, and would put into the hands of the people a weapon with which they could destroy any combine among capitalists in any article of commerce.

Among other things, it would save the tremendous sum of $65,000,000 which the Federal Government now pays to the railroads every year for the carriage of the mails, and that saving could be applied to extending the Rural Free Delivery to the remotest parts of the country.

If the Government owned the railroads and carried its own mails in steel cars, the Post-Office Department would show a profit instead of a loss, and railway mail clerks would be able to insure their lives. At present they cannot insure their lives, for the reason that the Government allows them to be hauled around in flimsy dry-goods boxes, whose cost of construction is less than the annual rent which our Government pays for their use and which invariably get smashed to splinters whenever there is a collision.

A Democracy—it being the government of all by all and for the benefit of all—cannot continue to be a true democracy unless the laws conform to the democratic standard laid down by Thomas Jefferson—namely, “Equal and exact justice to all men, without special favors to any.”

An Aristocracy is a government in which the few make the laws for their own benefit, and rule the country for their own good.

Therefore it must be apparent to the most casual student that if we, by law, confer special favors upon any class of our citizens, we are building up an aristocracy and are departing from democratic principles.

(1) For instance, the power to create money and to regulate the volume thereof is a sovereign power belonging to the state.

In countries ruled by kings that power has always been one of the prerogatives of the crown, as was the power to make war and peace, to negotiate treaties and to levy taxes. It was recognized that the king could not continue in the full exercise of his kingly authority if he parted with the tremendous power of creating money.

Not until the English crown rested upon the head of the most dissolute of the Stuarts, Charles II, and he had become the slave of an abandoned woman—who was in turn the tool of a grasping corporation, the East India Company—was the power to create money transferred from the king to a corporation.

Ever since that day Great Britain has suffered from this surrender of sovereign power, and it was this mistake of the king which Alexander Hamilton, either through mistake or by design, adopted when he came to frame a financial system for the American people.

It was his express purpose to create an aristocracy of wealth, and he must have realized that when he took from the government the power to create money and put it into the hands of a private corporation he was creating an aristocracy of wealth.

The national banks of today represent an aristocracy of wealth, supported by the governmental function of creating currency.

There are, in round numbers, 5,000 national bankers who have in circulation $400,000,000 of their “promises to pay,” which the law practically makes legal tender.

In other words, their “promises to pay” are used as money.

There are 80,000,000 natural persons in this country; there are 5,000 corporations called national banks! The 80,000,000 natural persons may sign promissory notes for five dollars each, and these notes are simply commercial paper, having no circulation as money. The 5,000 national banks sign their promissory notes to the same amount—$400,000,000—and these notes constitute, for all practical purposes, a national currency—a national money.

The law gives them the special privilege of getting rich on what they owe. They have also the more dangerous power of enlarging and contracting the volume of currency, thus unsettling values, destroying markets and producing panics, as they did in 1893.

(2) The democratic principle of equal and exact justice to all men requires that the government should derive its revenue from a system of taxation which deals fairly with every citizen. Each man should contribute to the support of the government in proportion to his ability. And taxes should not be laid for the purpose of building up one man’s business at the expense of another’s.

Our tariff system, from which the government derives the greater part of its revenue, violates democratic principles.

Its purpose and result is to build up manufacturers at the expense of everybody not engaged in manufacturing. It gives the manufacturer a price which he could not get without the law which insures him the monopoly of the home market. All the world can compete with our laborers by sending immigrants to our shores; all the world can compete with our farmers; but nobody is allowed to compete with our manufacturers, and the result is the Trust, under which Americans combine to rob the helpless American citizen, who is not allowed to buy his food or his clothing or tools to work with from anyone except the American manufacturer.

By this system, which lays the taxes on the things which man buys, a citizen who is worth only a few hundred or a few thousand dollars pays just as much to the support of the Federal Government as is paid by the man who is worth tens of millions of dollars.

Consequently the inevitable tendency of the tariff system is to create a class which controls the government for its own enrichment; in other words, an aristocracy.

(3) Consider our corporation laws. Early in the history of our Government Chief Justice John Marshall decided that a charter granted to a corporation was a contract and could not be changed by the sovereign power of the state. This decision was not good law, and no good lawyer has ever considered it so. John Marshall had a great mind, but he was one of the rankest partisans that ever lived. He stretched every constitutional power in the effort to build up what Hamilton wanted—an aristocracy of wealth.

Just as a natural person is born into a community and lives in it subject to having his status changed by the will of the majority, expressed in a legal way, so a corporation, born into a community through its charter, should have been required to take the same chance of having its status changed, in a legal way, by the will of the majority.

A railroad corporation comes to the legislature and procures a charter to build a railroad; but the state cannot compel the corporation to build that railroad. In other words, the state cannot compel the execution of the powers granted under the charter; therefore such a charter lacks the very first element of a contract, because a contract is one in which each party can be compelled to perform his part or pay consequent damages. But, in pursuance of the decision of John Marshall in the Dartmouth College case, our state and national governments have erected a rule of the corporations, and they are now more powerful than the governments which created them.

The great transportation companies exercise the power to tax, and the people, who pay the taxes, have no representation in the councils of those who levy the taxes. This surely constitutes an aristocracy of the most powerful kind.

The railroads have the power to tax the life out of any industry, out of any section, out of any city or town; with rebates and discriminations they build up the Trusts which plunder the people.

By reason of the fact that they enjoy the privilege of taxing other people, they pay no Federal taxes to support the government. Whatever they may pay in the way of tariff on material which they use in the construction of roadbeds and rolling stock, they simply charge up to expense account and levy their rates so as to make the utmost possible profit over and above what they have paid out. The public cannot escape the freight rates and the passenger rates which the corporations levy. The public cannot help itself. The public is made to pay, in those freight and passenger rates, every dollar of tax which the railroads have paid to the state and Federal governments. Therefore, as in the case of the national banks and the manufacturers, we have a great class of corporations given special powers by law which are exercised at the expense of the masses of the people, and which escape all the burden of supporting the national Government by reason of the immunities and privileges which the law has made for their exclusive benefit.

Here, then, we have a complete illustration of aristocracy—the government of the few, by the few and for the few, instead of the ideal of Jefferson and Lincoln, “government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

The man who makes a corner in wheat thinks he can relieve all the suffering he caused by endowing a bed in a hospital.

The Track Walker

BY THEODORE DREISER
Author of “Sister Carrie”

IF you have nothing else to do some day when you are passing through the vast network of tracks of, for example, the great railway running northward out of New York, give a thought to the man who walks them for you, the man on whom your safety, in this particular place, so much depends.

He is a peculiar individual. His work is so very exceptional, so very different from your own. While you are sitting in your seat placidly wondering whether you are going to have a pleasant evening at the theatre or whether the business to which you are about to attend will be as profitable as you desire, he is out on the long track over which you are speeding, calmly examining the bolts that hold the shining metals together. Neither rain nor sleet can deter him. The presence of intense heat or intense cold has no effect on his labors. Day after day, at all hours and in all sorts of weather, he may be seen placidly plodding these iron highways, his wrench and sledge crossed over his shoulders, his eyes riveted on the rails, carefully watching to see whether any bolts are loose or any spikes sprung. Upward of two hundred cannon-ball flyers rush by him on what might be called a four-track bowling alley each day, and yet he dodges them all for perhaps as little as any laborer is paid. If he were not watchful, if he did not perform his work carefully and well, if he had a touch of malice or a feeling of vengefulness, he could wreck your train, mangle your body and send you praying and screaming to your Maker. There would be no sure way of detecting him.

Death lurks in this tunnel. Here, if anywhere, it may be said to be constantly watching. What with the noise, which is a perfect and continuous uproar, the smoke, which hangs like a thick, gloomy pall over everything, and the weak, ineffective lights which shine out on your near approach like will-o’-the-wisps, the chances of hearing and seeing the approach of any particular train are small. Side arches, or small pockets in the walls, are provided for the protection of the men, but these are not always to be reached in time when a train thunders out of the gloom. If you look sharp you may sometimes see a figure crouching in one of these as you scurry past. He is so close to the grinding wheels that the dust and soot of them are flung into his very soul.

And yet for all this the money that is paid these men is beggarly small. The work that they do is not considered exceptionally valuable. Fifteen cents an hour is all that they are paid, and this for ten to twelve hours’ work every day. That their lives are in constant danger is not of any point in the matter. They are supposed to work willingly for this, and they do. Only when one is picked off and his body mangled by a passing train is the grimness of the sacrifice emphasized, and then only for a moment. The space which such accident gets in the public prints is scarcely more than a line.

And now what would you say of men who would do this work for fifteen cents an hour? What estimate would you put on their mental capacity? Would you say that they are only worth what they can be made to work for? One of these men, an intelligent type of laborer, not a drinker, and one who did not even smoke, attracted the writer’s attention by the punctuality with which he crossed a given spot on his beat. He was a middle-aged man, married, and had three children. Day after day, week after week, he used to arrive at this particular spot, his eye alert, his step quick, and when a train approached he seemed to become aware of it as if by instinct. When finally asked by the writer why he did not get something better to do he said, “I have no trade. Where could I get more?”

This man was killed by a train. Sure as was his instinct and keen his eye, he was nevertheless caught one evening, and at the very place where he deemed himself most sure. His head was completely obliterated, and he had to be identified by his clothes. When he was removed another eager applicant was given his place, and now he is walking in the tunnel with a half-dozen others. If you question these men they will all tell you the same story. They do not want to do what they are doing, but it is better than nothing.

The House of Cards

The Say of Other Editors — “A FREE BREAKFAST TABLE” — FAR-SIGHTED CARLOS MORALES — CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION — LESE-MAJESTE — AUTOMOBILE MANSLAUGHTER

THE recent suggestion of a tariff tax on coffee, probably put out as a feeler, is responsible for the resurrection and reintroduction of the once familiar but never appropriate phrase at the head of this article. It was never appropriate; it was always a sarcastic sneer, rather than a statement of fact, because the memory of the most aged citizen runneth not to the time when “a free breakfast table,” a breakfast table untaxed as to itself, its equipment and the food and drink it bore, could be found in any American home. At this time, under the tariff of 1897, what could be more preposterously absurd than the notion that a tax on coffee would be a decree of banishment for that alleged boon?

The Post, being an advocate and defender of the policy of protection, although a condemner and contemner of the outrages incident to the stand-pat policy, is in no hurry to witness the advent of “a free breakfast table”; but the Post prefers that such a crass absurdity, such a stinging satire as this old shibboleth, should be returned forthwith to the dust and darkness from which it was dragged when the coffee tax proposition appeared.

The truth is, you go to breakfast clad in taxed garments, wearing no single article that is not taxed in the tariff; you sit in a chair that is taxed as to all the various materials that enter into it, and taxed as a whole; the table itself is similarly taxed, and we can think of no article on it that is free. Your tablecloth, your napkins and your napkin rings are all in the tariff schedules. Your fish or meat, your vegetables and fruit, your bread, your butter, your rolls, your griddle cakes, your sugar and syrup, your salt, vinegar, pepper, mustard, olive oil and all other condiments show up in the list of things taxed. So is it with your china or other crockery, and your knives, forks and spoons.

And your coffee is free only as to the raw bean. It is roasted over a taxed fire and in a taxed roaster, is stored in taxed receptacles and transported by taxed horses in taxed wagons; when retailed, it goes out in taxed bags, to be deposited in other taxed vessels. Having been ground in a taxed mill, your cook prepares it for the table by using a taxed coffee pot. If you use cream in your “free” coffee you must use taxed cream; if you use sugar in it you must use taxed sugar.

This is the “free breakfast table” whose exit will come if a duty is imposed on the raw coffee bean!—Washington Post.

That familiar old hymn, “In This Wheat By and Bye,” has lost its attractions for Jawn W. Gates and his accomplices.—New York American.

The United States is now in Santo Domingo; President Roosevelt, with a stroke of the pen, has fixed Don Carlos Morales firmly in the saddle. That cheerful and ingenious bandit begins to enjoy the unearned increment of the “status quo.” He can read now with a smile of the erstwhile terrible preparations of Jiminez and Barba. He can sit in his palace and rake in 45 per cent. of the customs revenues of his republic, collected for him and scrupulously accounted for. That was what Morales wanted, and he is happy. Domestic malice, foreign levy—nothing can touch him further.

If Cipriano Castro had one-tenth of the ingenuity of his brother bandit of the black republic he would have seen long ago that his present policy is foolish. Instead of making faces at the United States, Castro should have been busy inducing the foreigners in his country to set up a concurrent roar. He should have acknowledged the validity of claims of any kind and to any amount, the bigger the better. Then, at the psychological moment, he should have pointed to the imminent danger to the Monroe Doctrine, and begged the United States to enter and preserve order, collect his revenues and pay him a share of the proceeds.

If there is any other Central or South American dictator who is shaky on his pins, now is the time he should apply for relief. Let him take a lesson from Morales and imitate that “prudent and far-seeing statesman.” Forty-five per cent. of the revenues, in clean, hard coin, without work or worry, is better than all the revenues with danger of revolution and dismemberment.

Step up, gentlemen! The United States has a big navy, and it has nothing to do at home. Our duty is to protect our weak and struggling sister republics, and now that the Senate is out of the way, we propose to do it. We shall take right hold, and leave to the future the problem of how to let go.—Washington Post.

A man was killed at Lancaster, Ontario, while trying to rob a bank. There are still a few of the old-time robbers who have not learned that the proper method of robbing a bank is to work from the inside.—New York American.

A good sign of awakening conscience is evident by the protest from the ministers against accepting Rockefeller’s money that has been wrested from the people by indirection. The great success of the Standard Oil robberies has spawned upon the country hundreds of such corporations that plunder the public with even more skill than the Standard. If the church accepts this donation it will be as fatal to it as the thirty pieces of silver were to Judas. This protest against the gift by these ministers is a most courageous act. The Standard Oil tactics may lose every one of them their pulpits. The Standard Oil management will stoop to any kind of dirty work to perpetuate the system. They are attempting now to ruin Lawson, and, with all his astuteness and his millions of wealth to back him, they may succeed in doing so. The people should stand by Lawson to a man, and the congregations of these ministers that have dared to affront Rockefeller should see that none of his poisoned arrows reach them.—The Forum, Denver, Col.

We hear much of Christian Civilization, but we do not see so much of it. Let us consider briefly the Christian world:

Russia—Anarchy, rapine, bloodshed, pauperism and starvation.

Austro-Hungary—Disease, strife, strikes, poverty and pauperism of millions.

Italy—Overpopulation, dire poverty, with millions of the people actual beggars, excessive taxation and a practically bankrupt treasury.

England—Army of unemployed, a vast section of the population in a poverty so appalling that it makes one’s heart bleed to read the details.

Ireland—Practically a nation of paupers, not of their own volition either, but as a result of evil laws and customs which have destroyed the hopes of a gallant people.

Spain—Once the proud leader of nations, reduced to the rags and sores of Lazarus.

United States—In the grasp of graft, the people being robbed of their earnings at every turn by a lot of as conscienceless pirates as ever scuttled a ship, and a government apparently impotent.

Everywhere we find more or less the same evil conditions.

Our so-called Christian Civilization is as much like the genuine article as the Texas long-horn is like a thoroughbred Holstein.—The Commonweal, Atlanta, Ga.

I interpret Dr. Osler to mean: Young man, get a move on you if you want to amount to anything. If you are a failure at forty, you have missed your vocation; your experience may serve you to good purpose, but if you are dependent at sixty, why, “off with your head!”...

Our President says it is very wicked for the mail-carriers to organize and have a man lobby for them; still worse to organize and defeat a Congressman who was blocking their efforts to get better wages and conditions of employment. Why don’t the President call a halt on the corporation lobby (some of them having known offices in Washington with as many as ten clerks) who defeat men and measures. Let this be denied, but we do know that corporations fix nominating conventions where nominations are equivalent to election; especially naming those who say: “I am in the hands of my friends.”—Ohio Liberty Bell.

The Government issues money and loans it to the national banks at one-half of 1 per cent. per year. This is old party doctrine, for it has prevailed under the rule of both old parties. The People’s Party favors issuing the money direct to the people without the intervention of banking corporations. On this question do you agree with the Populists or old parties?—Missouri World.

Wouldn’t it be amusing if an individual owned the New York Post-Office, paying sweatshop wages to letter-carriers, working them all hours, discharging them without reason—putting girls in their places as much as possible—and charging twenty-five cents for a letter halfway across the continent?

Wouldn’t it be beautiful if a J. P. Morgan or Mr. August Belmont of the race-track could own all the industries and real estate of New York?

How nicely Mr. Morgan would capitalize such properties in Steel Trust fashion! And what a nice time Mr. Belmont would have with the labor unions! There would be plenty of work for strike-breakers.

The American people believe in public ownership of all properties actually created by the public—and public ownership they are going to have.—New York Evening Journal.

The slave-owners of today do not realize that they own slaves. And the slaves do not realize that they have owners. Formerly one man owned one, a dozen or a hundred slaves. Occasionally even more than that. Now a hundred thousand men each own a part of every slave. The great mass of the people are slaves to unjust systems, and everyone who profits by these systems is part owner of everyone who loses by them. If there could be a partition suit and every slave owner be set apart his share, the fact that there are slaves today, and millions of them, would be quite plain. It would be found that this man owns fifty slaves, that man a hundred and some as high as fifty thousand. Should the richest girl in the United States be given white girls only as her share of the slaves, she would have a thousand at least—a thousand white girl slaves. Some persons are part slave and part free, because they get a little more than the commonest kind of a living. Sixty million people in the United States are either all or part slave, and the number who are all slave is much greater than that of the black population in the days of chattel slavery. This new slavery exists because the owners do not realize that they are owners and the slaves do not realize that they are slaves. Years ago Mrs. Emery, of Lansing, Mich., wrote a little book, entitled “The Seven Financial Conspiracies Which Have Enslaved the American People.” The way to freedom is financial legislation in the interest of the people.—Missouri World.

The nation that prepares for war will sooner or later have war. We get just anything we prepare for, and we get nothing else. Everything that happens is a sequence; this happened today because you did that yesterday.—The Philistine.

In 1896 Mr. Bryan had undisputed control of the organized Democracy and was defeated.

In 1900 he still had control, and was defeated worse than before.

Now, let it be remembered that all the Western Populists, with their newspaper press—including such strong and widely circulated papers as the Nebraska Independent, supported him; and let it be further understood that now and in the future he will get no support from Populists or the Populist press; then figure out the lurid prospects Mr. Bryan has of sweeping the country in 1908.

Now, with this actual state of things confronting him, does anyone believe that Mr. Bryan has any hope of reorganizing the shattered ranks and disgraced leaders of the Democracy into a winning party in 1908?

And, if he has no such hope—and in reason he cannot have—what is his purpose putting so much into a cause that he knows is absolutely hopeless?

We can see but one reason for Mr. Bryan’s course, and that is that he intends to prevent the organization of a party that would unite the South and West, and defeat the plutocracy, thus restoring the Government to the original purpose of its great founders.

Mr. Bryan will hold in party slavery a great many Democrats who do not think—and unfortunately they are legion—and thus divide the men who ought to stand together, as it is evident they must fall together, making an easy victory for the Eastern money power.—People’s Tribune, Prescott, Ark.

“On account of insufficient laws regulating the matter, and the utter disregard of even these, hundreds of workmen, mostly foreigners, are being killed each year in the steel mills, blast furnaces and coal mines.”

Coroner Joseph G. Armstrong made this statement in addressing a jury in the case of a man killed at the plant of the American Steel and Wire Company. It was only a case of “another Hungarian killed in the mills,” as the Coroner expressed it, but Adelbert Merle, the Austro-Hungarian Consul-General in this city, backed by the Coroner, will appeal to the state, and, if necessary, to the Federal authorities, to do something to protect these men.

“During the first month of my term,” said Coroner Armstrong, “one plant alone, the Duquesne plant of the United States Steel Corporation, had twelve separate fatalities. That was the number reported to this office. How many more there were no one may ever know. I went to the officials of the corporation and entered a complaint. Then an order was issued that more care would have to be taken, and next month not a death was reported from the Duquesne plant.”

Said Consul-General Merle:

“A very large number of the Hungarians employed in the mills are American citizens, and some consideration should be given them on that account, if not on the score of humanity. It is proposed to organize the Hungarians and other foreigners who are voters and see if some action cannot be secured in the legislature to compel the mill owners to give better protection to the workmen.”

“The number of fatalities which occur in the steel mills, the blast furnaces and the coal mines in the Pittsburg district are never fully reported,” said an attaché of the consulate. “Scarcely a month goes by that we are not called upon to investigate the case of some workman who is reported to us as having ‘disappeared.’ At present we are working on two such cases. Both are identical as regards details.

“The men were stationed at the top of blast furnaces owned by the United States Steel Corporation to receive the cars of ore as they came up and dump them. There is only a small bridge for them to stand on. One misstep or awkward movement, and the man will follow the ore into the furnace. The men are not missed until it is noticed that the cars are not being dumped. No one knows what has become of them. Their coats and dinner pails await them at the bottom of the elevator, but the men never come to claim them. Then they are reported to have ‘disappeared.’ It is not known positively that they have fallen into the furnace, but there can be no other conclusion.”

The officials of the steel mills say they will do anything in their power to conduce to the safety of the men, and that the foremen in charge are mainly responsible for any dereliction.—New York World.

If a man should loan money at one-half of 1 per cent., and borrow it back at 8 per cent., and keep this up year after year, his family would have no trouble in getting him put under guardianship. The people through their Government are acting just as foolishly when they issue money to national banks....

A billion and a half of taxes. Another billion and a half of railroad charges. And a billion of interest, not counting the interest on public and railroad debts. A total of four billion dollars. This is the sum the people of the United States must pay each year whether money be scarce or plentiful. Is it any wonder times get harder when money gets scarcer?...

If the people could realize that their hard struggle to keep body and soul together and at the same time lay by a little for old age—making life a mere battle for existence—if they could realize that this struggle is made necessary by the present systems, that prosperity is the natural right of everyone who does his share of labor, they would be more easily induced to vote against monopoly rule. Populists should endeavor to dissatisfy the people with their present condition and show them that they should be getting so much more out of life.—Missouri World.

Because a passing steamer did not regard it necessary to give a tow to the Sylph the other day some of the frenzied Republican newspapers of the North seem to think there will be trouble with the skipper of the afore-mentioned steamer when T. Roosevelt gets back to civilization.

For the Sylph, they claim, is the President’s yacht, and certainly there must be punishment, prompt and dire, for any rover of the high seas who dares show lack of deep concern over her.

Lèse-majesté with a vengeance!

Of course, it does not occur to the frenzied Republican press that the Sylph is not the President’s yacht; that she is a vessel of the navy, kept in commission at public expense, and should be used only for public purposes; and that the President has no possible warrant in law for keeping her at Washington or taking her out to sea for the personal pleasure of himself or the members of his family.

If the Sylph is not needed in the active service of the country she ought to be taken out of commission; if she is needed by the navy she should be so used. In either event she is not the President’s yacht, nor should she be utilized as such at public expense.—Atlanta Constitution.

Within one week of the new season five persons have been killed by automobiles in this city, not counting the young man who fell from the “Seeing New York” omnibus. As many more have been very seriously hurt.

The heartlessness of some speed-maddened votaries has been again illustrated. There was the woman who in a Brooklyn street shrieked out: “Go on quickly, Harry; the man is killed!” There is that young man of the reckless rich class, whose autos are debited with two deaths and are a terror to thousands living, caught again running at eighteen miles an hour in the street. That “sports” might scorch to the Aqueduct races a little girl in Elmhurst yielded up her young life.

The man who drives his auto at dangerous speed is as responsible morally for the death he thereby causes as one would be who should fire a revolver at random down the same street and by “accident” kill a victim.

Manslaughter by automobile will continue until it is punished as severely as other manslaughter, and until the certain penalty of illegal speeding is jail, not for the driver, but for the owner.—New York World.

Mr. Thomas Lawson has tumbled from his lofty pedestal. Multiplied thousands of people in this goodly land of ours were venerating him, were reverencing him—some of them just about beginning to worship him. But he has proven himself to be only common clay. He was leading the van against the iniquities of “frenzied finance,” exposing the chicanery, the fraud, the swindling, the downright stealing every day perpetrated in the Stock Exchange dealings, the manipulation of stocks and bonds and the fleecing of the lambs. Now comes the news that in December last he made in stock speculations, as a votary at the altar of “frenzied finance,” $1,500,000, and in this mild and gentle month of April the comfortable figure of $1,000,000. Alas, alas! and lackaday! He was only human after all. His wings had not even begun to sprout.

—Southern Mercury.

If Bryan, Hearst and Dunne should succeed in raising the old hulk of Democracy, Cleveland, Hill and Gorman will scuttle it again. Better come out, boys, and take a new ship....

Dr. Washington Gladden is not going to let the Rockefeller gift rest. He says it is the right and duty of every American citizen to sit in judgment on Rockefeller and his methods.—Forum, Denver.

Judge A. B. Parker, in a speech in New York “Jefferson Day,” said the “defeat of the Democratic Party was emphasized by the unprecedented expenditure of money.” Everybody knows that there was not one-fifth as much used by the Republicans to defeat him as there was to defeat Bryan. Perhaps he meant the “unprecedented” use of money to secure him the nomination. What else could he mean?—The Jeffersonian, Thomson, Ga.

Stand for the referendum in the management of the business of the Farmers’ Union. By this means you will do away with the boss, especially the political boss. Demand the right to settle your own affairs, and do not leave it to self-constituted leaders.—The Watchman, Cleburne, Tex.

News Record — Government and Politics — General Home News — Russo-Japanese War — General Foreign News — Obituary

FROM APRIL 7 TO MAY 7, 1905

TOM WATSON’S MAGAZINE ADVERTISER

$10500 in Prizes

IT LOOKS EASY. CAN YOU DO IT?

How Soon will the Hour, Minute and Second Hands Again Appear Equal Distances Apart?

To popularize the name of the Ingersoll Dollar Watch, to get it on every tongue from ocean to ocean, it has been decided to offer 10,000 Ingersoll Watches to 10,000 people who can send us the correct solution of this problem before September 1, 1905.

SAM LOYD’S Ingersoll WATCH PROBLEM

It is the latest and cleverest problem by Sam Loyd, the world’s greatest puzzle genius, originator of “Pigs in Clover,” “How Old is Ann,” and other brilliant brain-teasers.

We hope through this widespread discussion to bring out the fact that the Ingersoll Watch is a practical timepiece, adequate to every requirement of nine-tenths of the American people because it is accurate and reliable.

No entry conditions are imposed. Send your solution right in.

The full problem is stated above and no further information can be given in fairness to all contestants. $500.00 in cash prizes in addition is offered to owners of Ingersoll Watches.

If you send 2c. stamp with solution you will receive acknowledgment of your answer, and a formal entry blank and conditions; or for 10c. the above and Sam Loyd’s book of celebrated puzzles.

Awards will be made in accordance with the correct solution furnished by Sam Loyd, which is locked in our safe, inaccessible to any one.

Ingersoll Watches are sold by 50,000 dealers throughout the country, or postpaid by us for $1.00. Booklet free.

Insist on an INGERSOLL—the name is on dial. Fully guaranteed.

ROBT. H. INGERSOLL & BRO.,
43 Jewelers’ Court, New York, N. Y.

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Have You Had My Free Lesson in Jiu-Jitsu?

If you do not already know that Jiu-Jitsu is the most wonderful system of physical training and self-defense in the world to-day I invite you to write for my FREE LESSON and demonstrate this to your own satisfaction.

YAE KICHI YABE, Late of the Ten-Shin
Ryu School of Japan.

It is to the persistent practice of Jiu-Jitsu that the Japanese owe their courage and success in battle, their almost superhuman strength and power of endurance, their low death rate and their material progress. Surely a system of physical training which has done so much for the Island Nation will interest you. Jiu-Jitsu not only embodies the ideal principles of attaining perfect health and perfect physical development, but as a means of self-defense it is as potent at short range as the deadliest weapon. A knowledge of its self-preserving principles renders a man or woman impregnable to every form of vicious attack.

Jealously Guarded Secrets Revealed.

For over two thousand years the principles of Jiu-Jitsu have been religiously guarded. By an imperial edict the teaching of the system was forbidden outside of Japan. The friendly feeling, however, existing between Japan and the United States has been instrumental in releasing Jiu-Jitsu from its oath-bound secrecy, and I have been delegated to teach, without reserve, all the secrets of this ancient art to Americans.

I have just written an intensely interesting book which explains and makes clear the principles of Jiu-Jitsu in a manner which will never be approached by any American writer. So long as the edition lasts this book, together with my first lesson in Jiu-Jitsu, will be sent free to interested persons. The lesson is fully illustrated and teaches one of the most effective methods known for disposing of a dangerous antagonist.

If you desire to learn all the closely guarded secrets of this marvelous science send your name and address, and you will receive the book and specimen lesson by return mail, postage paid.

Address
YAE KICHI YABE, 192T Realty Bldg., Rochester, N. Y.

YOU CANNOT AFFORD TO MISS A SINGLE COPY OF

THE ARENA

An Illustrated Review of Twentieth Century Thought

B. O. FLOWER, Editor

While THE ARENA discusses the great questions of the day in the domains of Ethics, Education, Religion, Philosophy, Science and Art, especial attention is given to

Political, Social and Economic Problems

as they relate in a vital way to the fundamental principles and demands of pure democracy.

A Few Notable Features of the JUNE Issue:

Municipal Black Plague. By Rudolph Blankenburg. The sixth of the series of papers on the corruption of politics in Pennsylvania.

Our Commerce with Latin America. By Prof. Frederic M. Noa.

In Prison and in Exile: Experiences of a Russian Student. Edited by William Lee Howard, M.D.

Juggling with Facts and Figures about Transportation; or, How the Railway Interests and their Special Pleaders are Seeking to Deceive the People. By W. G. Joerns.

Rise, Mighty Anglo-Saxons! By Katrina Trask (Mrs. Spencer Trask).

Beauty and Light. By Kenyon West. A plea for a sane and wholesome drama.

The Divorce Question: A Lawyer’s View. By Ernest Dale Owen.

Frederic Opper: A Cartoonist of Democracy. One of the series of illustrated sketches of the leading cartoonists. By B. O. Flower.

The Building of the City Beautiful. A serial by Joaquin Miller.

THE ARENA is one of the largest and handsomest original reviews of opinion in the English-speaking world. Each issue contains a number of full-page half-tones printed in sepia ink on India-tint paper. In addition to the regular contributions, there are several popular special departments, including Editorials, The Mirror of the Present, Book Studies, and Reviews of the best books of the day.

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25 Cents a Copy

Subscriptions, $2.50 Net a Year

(Foreign Subscriptions, 12s. 6d.)

ALBERT BRANDT, Publisher

TRENTON, N. J.

BOSTON, MASS.

COSTS YOU NOTHING TO TRY

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JOHN B. ROGERS & CO., “The Pioneers”

874 Jarvis Street, BINGHAMTON, N. Y.

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⅓ the cost

For Coal (even less in many cases) is the claim made for the Peck-Williamson UNDERFEED Furnace.

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• Well known people—
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In the Peck-Williamson UNDERFEED Furnace a ton of cheapest grade of coal is made to produce as much heat as a ton of the most costly grade; the coal is fed from below and the fire is on top—the rational way; the gases and smoke do not escape up the chimney as they do in ordinary furnaces, but are consumed as they pass up through the fire; immunity from gas, smoke and dirt; less ashes and no clinkers; simple and strong in construction, easy to operate.

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I WOULD LIKE

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Address Dr. BENJ. F. BYE, 301 North Illinois St., Indianapolis, Ind.

The above is my only office. All branches are closed.

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CHASE’S MAGAZINE

TO INTRODUCE CHASE’S MAGAZINE WE GIVE FOUNTAIN PEN, GOLD POINT, HARD RUBBER FANCY CARVED BARREL. A PERFECT FLOW OF INK, OR REFUND MONEY. ALL FOR

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A STANDARD SIZE MAGAZINE. 150 PAGES OF STORIES. ILLUSTRATED ARTICLES. ADDRESS: C. G. CHASE CO., No. 500, TERRE HAUTE, IND.

CHASE’S is an illustrated monthly Magazine of the standard size, containing current events and the best of short stories.

The following is a partial list of contributors:

• GERTRUDE ATHERTON
• A. E. MASON
• C. R. ROBBINS
• ADA WOODRUFF ANDERSON
• HELEN STORMS

Yearly Subscription, $1.00 per Year

Sample Copies, 10 Cents

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If BALDNESS and FALLING HAIR were caused by DISEASE

physicians would have long ago found a remedy. Tonics and lotions applied to the outside of the scalp do soften the hair—but that’s all. By exercising the arms, we build up muscle—not by outside applications of medicine. The arms, the body and the lower limbs can be exercised at will—but the scalp requires mechanical aid. Exercise makes the blood circulate, lack of exercise makes it stagnant. The Vacuum method is the kind of exercise that makes the blood circulate. It gently draws the rich blood to the scalp and feeds the shrunken hair roots. This causes the hair to grow. It is the simple, common-sense principle of physical culture applied to the scalp.

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We will send you, by prepaid express, an Evans Vacuum Cap, allowing you ample time to prove its virtue, and all we ask of you is to deposit the price of the appliance in the Jefferson Bank of St. Louis during the trial period, subject to your own order. If you do not cultivate a sufficient growth of hair to convince you that this method is effective, simply notify the bank and they will return your deposit.

A sixteen-page book, illustrated, will be sent you free.

Evans Vacuum Cap Co.

669 Fullerton Building

St. Louis

EYEGLASSES NOT NECESSARY

Eyesight Can Be Strengthened and All Forms of Diseased Eyes Cured Without Cutting or Drugging.

That the eyes can be strengthened so that eyeglasses can be dispensed with in the great majority of cases has been proven beyond a doubt by the testimony of thousands of people who have been cured by that wonderful little instrument called “Actina.” Actina also cures sore and granulated lids, Glaucoma, Iritis, &c., also removes Cataracts and Pterygiums, without cutting or drugging. Over seventy thousand Actinas have been sold, therefore it is not an experiment, but an absolute fact. The following letters are but samples of those that are received daily:—

Mrs. M. E. Champney, 242 West 135th st., New York City, writes:—“The ‘Actina’ cured me of Iritis, after the doctors said there was no cure outside an operation. I have been entirely well for over four months, can see to read and sew as well as before. I can honestly recommend ‘Actina’ for all afflictions of the eye.”

Emily Knapp, 920 Galina st., Milwaukee, Wis., writes:—“The ‘Actina’ I purchased from you a year ago saved my brother’s eyesight. My brother was near-sighted, wore number five and six glasses, and now he can go to school and do all his work and study without glasses.”

E. R. Holdbrook, Deputy County Clerk, Fairfax, Va., writes:—“‘Actina’ has cured my eyes so that I can do without glasses. I very seldom have headache now, and can study up to eleven o’clock after a hard day’s work at the office.”

Actina is not a drug or a lotion, but a small pocket battery, which can be used by old and young with perfect safety. It is impossible to do harm with Actina. Every member of the family can use the one Actina for any form of disease of the Eye, Ear, Throat or Head. Actina will last for years, and is always ready for use. Actina will be sent on trial postpaid.

If you send your name and address to the New York & London Electric Association, Dept. 37N, 929 Walnut St., Kansas City, Mo., you will receive absolutely FREE a valuable book—, Professor Wilson’s Treatise on the Eye and on Diseases in General. You can rest assured that your eyes can be cured, no matter how many doctors have failed.

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Superfluous Hair Destroyed Forever

FREE to Any Lady.

If you are afflicted with a humiliating, disfiguring growth of hair, or any other blemish on face, neck, arms or hands, write me at once and I will tell you FREE how to DESTROY IT FOREVER. Many claim to REMOVE the hair (temporarily). I enable you to absolutely kill it forever, in your own home, privately, painlessly, without the slightest risk of bad effects, and at the same time to secure a perfect complexion and BE BEAUTIFUL. Don’t experiment with dangerous apparatus, lotions, liquids, powders, etc. My method is indorsed by scientists and doctors, and is guaranteed by me. ($100,000 assets back of my guarantee.) Write to-day and be glad forever. Remember this offer is free. Simply write me.

D. J. MAHLER, 3405 Pawtucket Ave., East Providence, R.I.

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Don’t Be So Thin

How To Get A FIGURE LIKE THIS

A figure that is real and permanent, the figure of a physically perfect woman. To prove that it is unnecessary for any lady to be thin or scrawny, I will send you

ABSOLUTELY FREE

a trial treatment of Dr. Whitney’s Nerve and Flesh Builder sufficient to convince you that you can get a well-developed bust, beautiful neck, pretty arms, shapely shoulders, so that you can wear with pride low-necked gowns or the tight tailor-made suits so fashionable now. This remarkable remedy develops new flesh and fills out all hollow places, not by false stimulation but by removing the cause of thinness. Write to-day for Free Treatment and handsome booklet illustrated from life, sent in sealed package. THE C. L. JONES CO., 44-F Realty Bldg., Elmira, N. Y.

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SANOZOL
LOTION AND SOAP

Positive Cure For All Skin Diseases

THE WONDERFUL DISCOVERY OF THE FAMOUS SPECIALIST IN SKIN DISEASES, A. J. FULTON, M. D., BROOKLYN, N. Y.

SANOZOL TREATMENT IS EXTERNAL ONLY.

SUFFERERS FROM

ECZEMA, LUPUS, HERPES, RINGWORM, PRURIGO, SCROFULODERMA, SKIN CANCER, PEDICULOSIS, PSORIASIS, ECTHYMA, LICHEN, SYCOSIS, AND ALL OTHER FORMS OF ULCERATIVE, SCALY AND PARASITIC SKIN DISEASES FIND IMMEDIATE RELIEF AND PERMANENT CURE BY THE USE OF SANOZOL. IT REMOVES PIMPLES AND BLACKHEADS AND CURES SWEATY OR ACHING FEET.

SOME OF THE NOW FAMOUS CURES BY SANOZOL TREATMENT WERE FULLY DESCRIBED IN THE NEW YORK WORLD OF MARCH 9 AND THE BROOKLYN DAILY EAGLE OF MARCH 29, 1904.

THE SOAP

HAS NO EQUAL. ITS DAILY USE WITHOUT LOTION WILL GIVE YOUR FACE AND HANDS A PERFECT SKIN, RESTORING THE DEFUNCT RESPIRATORY CONDITIONS OF YOUR SKIN TO ITS NORMAL HEALTH, PRODUCING THE FRESHNESS OF YOUTH AND A GLOW OF HEALTH AND BEAUTY. TRY IT.

SANOZOL SOAP FOR SHAVING (No barber’s itch.)

Write for testimonials and full particulars of SANOZOL treatment (free of charge). Treatment requires combined use of Lotion and Soap. Sent on receipt of price or at druggists.

Lotion, full pint, $1.00; soap, 25c. per cake or jar (3 cakes, 65c.).

Address Sanozol Laboratory, Dept. B, 12. 100-102 Elton St., Brooklyn, N. Y.

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$7.98 DRESSES ANY MAN

With an All-Wool Cheviot Made-to-Measure Suit

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To introduce our famous made-to-measure custom tailoring we make this unequaled offer of a Suit made to your measure, in the latest English Sack Style, well made and durably trimmed for only $7.98. Equal to your local tailor’s $15 suit, and give you an extra pair of trousers of the same cloth as the suit, or a fancy pattern if desired, absolutely free. Send us your name and address and we will send you Free Samples of cloth, measurement blank and tapeline. Send no money but write to-day to

GENTS’ OUTFITTING CO.

Dept. 114, 242 Market St., Chicago.

Ref. First National Bank, Chicago.

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NEW BELMONT CO.,
W. J. Warrington, Sec. and Treas.

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The Eyes of the Country are Upon Chicago’s Progress Toward Municipal Ownership of Street Railways

For the accurate record and fair discussion of this struggle, read

THE PUBLIC

LOUIS F. POST, Editor

A Journal of Fundamental Democracy and a Weekly Narrative of History in the Making

Published Every Saturday in Chicago

All the Other Features in their Usual Excellence

Subscriptions: Yearly, $2.00; Half-Yearly, $1.00; Quarterly, 50c.

SEND FOR SAMPLE COPY

THE PUBLIC, FIRST NATIONAL BANK BUILDING, CHICAGO, ILL.

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FARM FOR SALE

320 acres of good farming land; good water right. Land so situated that every acre can be watered. Over one hundred acres now under cultivation. All good coal land as well as agricultural, containing a fairly good house, with Corrals, and within two and one-half miles from Buffalo, the County Seat of Johnson County. Price, $35.00 per acre, one-half cash, and balance, if desired, on time at 7 per cent. per annum.

ALVIN BENNETT, Buffalo, Wyo.

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STOP USING MORPHINE.

To prove that the Harris Treatment cures forever ALL drug habits, we will send

FREE

a trial package in plain wrapper, upon request. If you don’t need it send the name of a friend who does. We especially desire cases where other remedies have failed. Letters in strict confidence. Write us freely of your case. Our book (sealed) sent free.

Harris Institute, Room 539, 400 W. 23d St., New York

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NATURO

After 1,000 Years are you one of those who still use the uncomfortable, unhealthful, old-fashioned closet? After ten centuries of mistakes the

NATURO

the closet with the slant, is revolutionizing the world. The only sort of construction that is actually comfortable, healthful, cleanly.

Progressive physicians and leading architects are profoundly interested and endorse Naturo closets. Booklet 25, illustrated, with full details, free on request.

THE NATURO COMPANY, Salem, N. J.

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AGENTS FINE SAMPLE SENT ANYWHERE
On Receipt of $1.50

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I can Sell Your Real Estate or Business
NO MATTER WHERE LOCATED

Properties and business of all kinds sold quickly for cash in all parts of the United States. Don’t wait. Write to-day describing what you have to sell and give cash price on same.

A. P. Tone Wilson, Jr.

Real Estate Specialist

413 KANSAS AVE., TOPEKA, KAS.

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YOU NEED STAMMER NO MORE

Our method reveals the mystery of “Why You Stammer.” We begin by Correcting the Cause. You can actually avoid stammering from the first lesson. The Fon-Lin Method is nothing like any other. We CURE the failures of all other schools—some of these send their failures to us.

We correct all defects of speech—Stammering, Stuttering, Lisping, Tongue-tied Talk, Hairlip and Cleft-palate Indistinctness, Baby-talk and whatever else.

Our Work is Absolutely Guaranteed

Information, References and Terms on application.

CARSWELL INSTITUTE,
2315-17 N. 7th Street, Philadelphia, Pa.

An Ideal Sea Trip offered by the RED CROSS LINE

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A charming daylight sail through LONG ISLAND, VINEYARD and NANTUCKET SOUNDS. Fine view of picturesque NOVA SCOTIA and of the bold, rugged NEWFOUNDLAND COAST. A two weeks’ cruise at one-quarter the cost of going to Europe, and a greater change of air and scene. Steamers sail weekly, making the trip from New York to St. Johns and return in thirteen days, and there can be no more delightful ocean voyage for those who want rest and sea air. The steamers remain in Halifax one day both going and returning and two days in St. Johns, thus giving passengers an opportunity to visit these beautiful and interesting cities and surrounding country. The cost is low and the accommodations and service the very best. (STOP-OVER PRIVILEGES ALLOWED.)

For full information, dates of sailing and rates of fare apply to

BOWRING & CO.,—17 State St., New York

Of Vital Importance to Patriotic Citizens

National Documents

a collection of notable state papers chronologically arranged to form a documentary history of this country. It opens with the first Virginia Charter of 1606 and closes with the Panama Canal Act of 1904, and comprises all the important diplomatic treaties, official proclamations and legislative acts in American history.

Settle All Disputes Intelligently

You can trace from the original sources the development of this country as an independent power. Never before have these sources been brought together for your benefit. The volume contains 504 pages and a complete index enabling the reader to turn readily to any subject in which he may be interested. Bound in an artistic green crash cloth, stamped in gold. Printed in a plain, readable type on an opaque featherweight paper.

As a Special Offer to the readers of Tom Watson’s Magazine, we will send this book postpaid for 80 cents. Your order and remittance should be sent direct to TOM WATSON’S MAGAZINE, 121 W. 42d St. N. Y.

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“IT’S A PLEASURE TO SHAVE NOW”

Is Shaving A Pleasure to YOU?

It is to every man who uses “GEM” SAFETY RAZOR, because a clean, close, comfortable shave is always assured. Shave with a “GEM” on train or boat, in the country, anywhere—it’s the quickest, easiest, simplest way. There is but one way to grow rich—SAVE. Begin by stopping the “Barber Habit.” You spend 50 cents to $1.00 per week getting shaved, or $26.00 to $52.00 each year. Shave yourself, save the money and the time which is money. Two minutes suffices for a shave with the “GEM”—can’t cut yourself, and no fear of infection. Highest-grade materials, finest finish, imported blades—best English cutlery steel, edged by experts. Simple, durable, automatic, and built on scientific principles. The “GEM” has become the “Standard” by which others are judged.

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GEM CUTLERY CO.
Dept. 28, 34 Reade St., N. Y. City

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THE IMPROVED Boston Garter

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The Velvet Grip CUSHION BUTTON CLASP

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Send 50c. for Silk, 25c. for Cotton, Sample Pair

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Evans’ Ale

You may stand the bottle upside down or lay it on its side; Or shake it up, shake it down. It stays the same inside.

No Sediment.