Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers

EDITORIALS from the HEARST NEWSPAPERS {Arthur Brisbane}

CONTENTS
Why Are All Men Gamblers?
No Man Understands Iron
We Long for Immortal Imperfection—We Can't Have It.
Three Water-Drops Converse
Did We Once Live on the Moon?
William Henry Channing's Symphony
The Existence of God—Parable of the Blind Kittens
Have the Animals Souls?
Jesus' Attitude Toward Children
Study of the Character of God
The Fascinating Problem of Immortality
Discontent the Motive Power of Progress
The Automobile Will Make Us More Human
Let Us Be Thankful
The Harm That Is Done by Our Friends
Shall We Tame and Chain the Invisible Microbe As We Now Chain
Niagara?
The Elephant That Will Not Move Has Better Excuses Than We Have
for Folly Displayed
Let Us Be Thankful
What Will 999 Years Mean to the Human Race?
The Azores—A Small Lost World in a Universe of Water
No Napoleonic Chess Player on an Air Cushion
A Girl's Face in the Gaslight
The "Criminal" Class
The Wonderful Magnet
Who Is Independent? Nobody
When We Begin Using Land Under the Oceans
Where Your Body Came From
How Marriage Began
Man's Willingness to Work
The Human Brain Beats the Coal Mines
How the Other Planets Will Talk to Us
Shall We Do Without Sleep Some Day?
The Three Best Things in the World
The Value of Solitude
There Should Be a Monument to Time
A Mother's Work and Her Hopes
Your Work Is Your Brain's Gymnasium
The Steeple, Moving Like the Hand of a Clock
Cultivate Thought-Teach Your Brain to Work Early
The Wind Does Not Rule Your Destiny
One of the Many Corpses in the Johnstown Mine
"Limiting the Amount of a Day's Work"
Catching a Red-Hot Bolt
The Trusts and the Union—How Do They Differ?
France Has Learned Her Lesson
Union Men as Slave Owners
Again the Limited Day's Work
To the Merchants
What About the Chinese, Kind Sir?
150 against 150,000—We Favor the 150,000
To-day's World-Struggle
White-Rabbit Millionaires and Other Things
No Happiness Save in Mental and Physical Activity
The Owner of a Golden Mountain
The Human Weeds in Prison
Crime Is Dying Out
The Value of Poverty to the World
600 Teachers Now, 600,000 Good Americans in the Future
Education—The First Duty of Government
Poverty Is the Father of Vice, Crime and Failure
The Importance of Education Proved in Lincoln's Case
Knowledge Is Growth
A Whiskey Bottle
Those Who Laugh at a Drunken Man
Law Cannot Stop Drunkenness—Education Can
The Drunkard's Side of It
Drink a Slow Poison
To Those Who Drink Hard—You Have Slipped the Belt
Try Whiskey on Your Friend's Eyeball
What Are the Ten Best Books?
The Marvelous Balance of the Universe—A Lesson in the Texas Flood
The Earth Is Only a Front Yard
Last Week's Baby Will Surely Talk Some Day
The Good That Is Done by the Trusts
Trusts and the Senate
The Promising Toad's Head
Trusts Will Drive Labor Unions Into Politics
The Trusts Are National School Teachers
A Woman to Be Pitied
When Will Woman's Mental Life Begin?
The Cow That Kicks Her Weaned Calf Is All Heart
Respectable Women Who Listen to "Faust"
Why Women Should Vote
Astronomy- Woman's Future Work
Woman's Vanity Is Useful
To Editorial Writers—Adopt Ruskin's Main Idea
Imagination Without Dreaming the Secret of Material Success
The One Who Needs No Statue
The Vast Importance of Sleep
Woman Sustains, Guides and Controls the World
The Story of the Complaining Diamond
Don't Be in a Hurry, Young Gentlemen
hen the Baby Changed Into a Fourteen-year-old
The Eye That Weighs a Ton
What Animal Controls Your Spirit?
From Mammoths to Mosquitoes—From Murder to Hypocrisy
The Monkey and the Snake Fight
Too Little and Too Much
Do You Feel Discouraged?
Two Kinds of Discontent
What the Bartender Sees
What Should Be a Man's Object in Life?
Cruel Frightening of Children
It Is Natural for Children to Be Cruel
Two Thin Little Babies Are Left
A Baby Can Educate a Man

The articles in this book were published originally in the editorial columns of the various Hearst newspapers throughout the country.

These articles may have some interest for the student of modern happenings, because of the fact that the newspapers publishing them have an aggregate daily circulation of two millions of copies, and are read each day by no fewer than five millions of men and women. Such wide circulation of identical opinions on current events, in different parts of the country, is a new feature of our national life. The character of such writings, and their probable influence upon the public mind, whatever their lack of intrinsic merit, may be of sufficient importance to justify the publication of this collection of ephemeral writings.

WHY ARE ALL MEN GAMBLERS?

The annual report of the gambling house at Monte Carlo shows a profit of about $5,000,000.

A large collection of human beings travel from all parts of the world to Monte Carlo for the sake of giving $5,000,000 to the gambling concern there.

Wherever you look on earth to-day or in the past you find human beings gambling, and you will find the gambling instinct stronger than any other—stronger than the love of drink, infinitely stronger than the love of normal, honest gain.

* * *

Christopher Columbus's sailors gambled on the way over, and the Indians on this side were gambling while waiting to be discovered.

In an office overlooking Trinity graveyard, in New York City, an old man, past eighty, with a fortune of at least $50,000,000, gambles every day with all the excitement of youth. The fluctuations in his game bring to his sallow cheeks the color that no other human emotion could bring there.

On his way home this old man passes crowds of children in the streets and looks down, concerned and sorrowful, to find that they, too, are gambling.

They are matching pennies or shaking dice.

* * *

Clergymen are startled and amazed to find that women are gambling heavily.

They have gambled heavily ever since civilization has progressed far enough to give them large sums to gamble with.

Marie Antoinette staked thousands of louis at a time at
Versailles.

She was so wrapped up in gambling she could not see that her neck was in danger.

When the lava came down from Vesuvius it buried Pompeiians who were gambling.

The men who dig up the old monuments in Africa find gambling instruments crumbling away side by side with appliances for taking human life.

* * *

Nowhere in the lower forms of animal life, so far as we know, is there the slightest indication of the gambling instinct.

The monkey, the elephant, love whiskey, and easily become drunkards.

The passion for alcohol seems innate in animal life; even the wise ant can be readily induced to disgrace himself if alcohol is put near him.

For all the human weaknesses and mainsprings—ambition, affection, vanity, drunkenness, ferocity, greediness, cunning—we can find beginnings among the lower animals.

But man appears to have evolved from within himself the gambling instinct for his own especial damnation.

Where did the instinct come from? Why was it planted in us?

Like every other instinct with which intelligent nature endows us, it must have its good purpose, and it must not be judged merely in the corrupted form in which we study it at Monte Carlo or in Wall Street.

Perhaps the spirit of gambling is really only an atrophied, perverted form of the spirit of adventure.

Columbus staked his life and gambled, when he started across the water.

The leaders of the American Revolution expressly staked their lives, their fortunes and their "sacred honor" in signing the Declaration of Independence. They were noble gamblers, working for the welfare of their fellows.

Perhaps gambling is only a perverted form of intelligent ambition—we are all natural gamblers because we have within us the quality which makes us willing to risk our own comfort, security and present happiness for a result that seems better worth while.

The universality of the gambling instinct in human beings is certainly worthy of our study.

NO MAN UNDERSTANDS IRON HOW CAN WE HOPE TO UNDERSTAND GOD?

Is there laughter in heaven—or can nothing move the eternal heavenly calm?

If mirth exists among the perpetually blissful, how must the angels laugh when in idle moments they listen to our speculations concerning the Divinity? They peer down at us as we look at ants dragging home a fragment of dead caterpillar. They hear us say things like this:

If God exists, why does He not reveal himself to ME?

How could God exist before He created the world? Force cannot exist or demonstrate its existence without matter. How could a creator exist except with creation around him?

Where did He live before He made heaven?

If He is all-powerful, could He in five seconds make a six months' old calf? If He made it in five seconds it would not be six months old.

Nonsense more subtle comes from the educated, from those who know enough to be preposterous in a pretentious way.

Hear the wise man:

God does not exist, because I cannot prove His existence: I can prove everything else. With my law of gravitation I point to a speck in space and say: "You'll find a new planet there," and you find it. If a God existed could I not also point to Him? If I can trace a comet in its flight, could I not trace the comet's maker?

Huxley says: "The cosmic process has no sort of relation to moral ends." That's a philosopher's way of saying something foolish. Lalande, the astronomer, remarked that he had swept the entire heavens with his telescope and found no God there. That's funnier than any ant who should say: "I've searched this whole dead caterpillar and found no God, so THERE IS NO GOD." The corner of space which our telescopes can "sweep" is smaller, compared to the universe, than a dead caterpillar compared with this earth.

Moleschott, an able physiologist, believed that phosphorus was essential to mental activity. Perhaps he did prove that. But he said: "No thought without phosphorus," and thought he had wiped the human soul out of existence. Philosophers do not laugh at Moleschott. But they would laugh at a savage who would say:

"I have discovered that there is a catgut in a fiddle. No fiddle without catgut—no music without cats. Don't talk to me about soul or musical genius—it's all catgut."

We peek out at this universe from our half-developed corner of it. We see faintly the millions of huge suns circling with their planet families billions of miles away. We see our own little sun rise and set; we ask ourselves a thousand foolish questions of cause and Ruler—and because we cannot answer, we decry faith.

Wise doubter, look at a small piece of iron. It looks solid.
You suppose that its various parts touch. But submit it to cold.

You make it smaller. Then the particles did not touch. Do they touch now? No; relatively they are farther apart than this planet from its nearest neighbor.

That piece of iron, apparently solid, consists of clusters of atoms wonderfully grouped, each cluster called a molecule. The molecular cluster is invisible, millions of clusters in the smallest visible fragment. The atom is accepted by science as the final particle of matter. Its name indicates that it is supposed to be indivisible. When science gets to the atom it calmly gives up and says: "That is so small that it can no longer be divided." A reasonable enough conclusion on the surface, considering that you might have millions of atoms of iron in one corner of your eye and not know it.

But why should the atom be incapable of further division? If it is any size at all it can be thought of as split.

Where does the divisibility of matter end, if anywhere? What is there SOLID about iron? Nothing in reality, except that it seems to us solid. Already, with the X-ray, we can look through it. Forces such as heat and electricity pass through it more readily than through free air.

Science, which gradually finds things out, denying as it goes along everything one step beyond, tells you truly that the clusters of atoms in iron float in a sea of ether, just as do our planets going round the sun. Heat the iron intensely. What happens? You get what you call white heat. The white heat and the white light come from the increase of wave motion in this ether, and this ether, absolutely imponderable, of a tenuity inconceivable, possesses elasticity greater and more powerful than that of coiled steel. ——

So much for one small piece of iron, such as you would kick to one side in a junk heap. If it interests you, read pages 159 to 162 of John Fiske's admirable little book, "Through Nature to God." You will finish the book the day you get it.

If you are surprised to learn how much you did not know about iron—after living near bits of iron all your life—is it not just possible that your mind may be too feeble to conceive of God?

For the fly buzzing about the edge of Niagara Falls, the falls do not exist. The fly's brain cannot grasp their grandeur. It can understand only the speck of spray that falls on its wing.

You live with God around you, hopelessly incapable of perceiving His existence save through that faint spark of unconscious faith that was mercifully planted in you. Snuff that out with dull efforts at reason, and you have nothing.

WE LONG FOR IMMORTAL IMPERFECTION— WE CAN'T HAVE IT.

All our longings for immortality, all our plans for immortal life are based on the hope that Divine Providence will condescend to let us live in another world as we live here.

Each of us wants to be himself in the future life, and to see his friends as he knew them.

We want to preserve individuality forever and ever, when the stars shall have faded away and the days of matter ended.

But what is individuality except imperfection? You are different from Smith, Smith is different from Jones. But it is simply a difference of imperfect construction. One is more foolish than another, one is more irresponsibly moved to laughter or anger—that constitutes his personality.

Remove our imperfections and we should all be alike—smooth off all agglomerations of matter on all sides and everything would be spherical.

What would be the use of keeping so many of us if we were all perfect, and therefore all alike? One talks through his nose, one has a deep voice. But shall kind Providence provide two sets of wings for nose talkers and chest talkers? Why not make the two into one good talker and save one pair of wings?

Why not, in fact, keep just one perfect sample, and let all the rest placidly drift back to nothingness? Or, better, why not take all the goodness that there is in all the men and women that ever were and melt it all down into one cosmic human being? ——

The rain drops, the mist and the sprays of Niagara all go back to the ocean in time. Possibly we all go back at the end to the sea of divine wisdom, whence we were sent forth to do, well or badly, our little work down here:

Future punishment? We think not.

One drop of water revives the wounded hero—another helps to give wet feet and consumption to a little child. It all depends on circumstances.

Both drops go back to the ocean. There is no rule that sends the good drop to heaven and the other to boil forever and ever in a sulphur pit. ——

Troubles beset us when we think of a future state and our reason quarrels always with our longings. We all want—in heaven—to meet Voltaire with his very thin legs. But we cannot believe that those skinny shanks are to be immortal. We shall miss the snuff and the grease on Sam Johnson's collar. If an angel comes up neat and smiling and says "Permit me to introduce myself —I am the great lexicographer," we shall say "Tell that to some other angel. The great Samuel was dirty and wheezy, and I liked him that way."

And children. The idea of children in heaven flying about with their little fluffy wings is fascinating. But would eternal childhood be fair to them? If a babe dies while teething, shall it remain forever toothless? How shall its mother know it if it is allowed to grow up?

Listen to Heine—that marvellous genius of the Jewish race:

"Yes, yes! You talk of reunion in a transfigured shape. What would that be to me? I knew him in his old brown surtout, and so I would see him again. Thus he sat at table, the salt cellar and pepper caster on either hand. And if the pepper was on the right and the salt on the left hand he shifted them over. I knew him in a brown surtout, and so I would see him again."

Thus he spoke of his dead father. Thus many of us think and speak of those that are gone. How foolish to hope for the preservation of what is imperfect!

How important to have FAITH, and to feel that reality will surpass anticipation, and that whatever IS will be the best thing for us and satisfy us utterly.

THREE WATER DROPS CONVERSE

Three drops of water, stranded in a crevice on the side of an inland mountain, talked in this way:

First Drop—"They say there is an ocean whence we came and to which we shall return."

Second Drop—"They say we three drops are made in the image of that ocean; that as far as we go, which is not far, we are miniature oceans."

Third Drop—"Bosh and nonsense. There is no ocean. It is all superstition. Before we were born here, from the mist, what were we? When we evaporate in a few minutes what becomes of us? You two drops make me feel sorry for you. I know that when I cease reflecting that white cloud up there, that ends ME. I have no delusions about oceans or going back to anything." ——

You know what happened. The cloud formed into rain and our three drops were washed into a tiny trickling stream. The thin stream of rain ran into a brook, the brook into a river. Soon the three drops were back in the ocean—possibly without knowing it.

Shall we some day go rolling back to the ocean of cosmic wisdom whence we came?

Is it possible that man is indeed made in the image of God, as drops are made in the ocean's image—the individual men, like the individual drops, being sent forth to do necessary cosmic work through the universe, going back to the ocean after each errand is done, and so going back and forth, forever and ever?

That would not be such a mean destiny, we should say. It would certainly be a very democratic form of cosmic government. ——

Inferior men, inferior women, unworthy of comparison with perfect, cosmic wisdom?

Not at all. Not inferior men and women, but inferior mediums, inferior brains, bodies and planets through which to work.

Is one drop of water inferior to another? Is any inferior to the purest drop in the ocean?

No. But one drop runs through the gutter of a stable, another rolls from a mountain spring, a third carries in solution the germ of typhus. But all three came pure from the ocean and all will go back to the ocean pure.

DID WE ONCE LIVE ON THE MOON? AND SHALL WE MOVE ON TO THE SUN SOME FINE DAY?

The most interesting questions are such as these:

Whence did we come?

Whither are we going?

And, by the way, what are we? Are we of any true importance? Are we a permanent part of the universal scheme, privileged to move along through the ages and see the end as we have seen the beginning? Or are we, as advanced science says, merely like the weevil in the biscuit—no part of the Baker's plan?

Are we indestructible specks of cosmic intelligence, lighting up and animating one material body after another—never destroyed—or do we play on this earth the passing part of the microbe in the Brie cheese, which gives that cheese its flavor? ——

A great scientist, coldly analyzing the chemical processes essential to the creation of each new human being, scoffs at any possibility of immortality. With the microscope at his eye, he magnifies nature's mysteries; he sums up the investigations of the Hertwig brothers; he discourses learnedly of the nucleolus of the Cytula—or progeny cell. He declares that science is able to watch the creation of a human being, as it watches the progress of a chick in the egg. He asserts that each new creature is merely the result of a chemical process blending qualities of the mother and father. Having a "final beginning," man must have a final end. Man—a mixture of two sets of qualities—has no more chance of immortality than has beer, which is a mixture of malt and hops.

Read and think over this cold summing-up of our mean, limited destiny as science farthest advanced now sees it:

"It must appear utterly senseless now to speak of the immortality of the human person, when we know how this person, with all its individual qualities of body and mind, has arisen. How can this person possess an eternal life without end? The human person, like every other many-celled individual, IS BUT A PASSING PHENOMENON OF ORGANIC LIFE. With its death, the series of its vital activities ceases entirely, just as it began."

That certainly is discouraging to a man who for fifty years has sung "I want to be an angel."

Yet that is what Haeckel has to say about our chance of immortality. But the other side of the grave has the LAST say, and we think it will discredit Haeckel. We should even undertake to do that now and here in two columns of a yellow journal. But we are DETERMINED before the column ends to ask you what you think of our moon-earth-sun transmigration notion.

The sun is now a blazing mass, inconceivably huge, inconceivably fierce in our eyes. Its flames leap hundreds of thousands of miles into space. If our earth fell to the sun, it would melt as a snow-flake falling upon a blazing forest. We certainly do not readily look upon the sun as our future home, if we accept its present condition as permanent.

But once upon a time, hundreds of millions of years back, this earth used to look TO THE MOON, on a smaller scale, as the sun now looks to us. If there were on the moon at that time inferior human beings, in a low state of cosmic evolution, they undoubtedly had to thank the earth for their life, as we thank the sun. To them the earth, then incandescent, blazing with the heat that now reveals itself through volcanoes, was simply a whirling ball of fire, put in its place to warm them.

They could no more think that men would ever come to live here than we can now think of moving on to the sun. ——

In course of time this earth cooled off. It cooled so thoroughly that the moon died of cold. Life could no longer continue there.

The dead satellite's destiny thenceforward was to show gratitude for past heat by moving our tides and cheering our poets. As life died out on the cold moon which had given us temporary hospitality, life sprang into being on this planet, now fitted to support it.

Here, on a larger sphere, with greater opportunities, mankind is growing, and will far outstrip all that it could have done on the poor little moon.

Meanwhile, as we struggle on, improving slowly, the sun, as science proves, is cooling off in its turn. The flames become less fierce as the thousands of centuries roll by. When we shall have developed as much as possible on this limited planet, our home will be cooled and ready on the sun, centre of our life in this corner of space.

We shall move up a step—as boys do in the public schools. We shall have been moon men, earth men, and shall graduate into sun men. Think of a home so vast! On that grand star we shall lead lives worth while, and justify Huxley's belief that men exist somewhere compared to whom we should "be as black beetles compared to us."

The excitement of meeting our brothers from other planets as they move up to the sun in batchcs will be great.

WILLIAM HENRY CHANNING'S SYMPHONY

THE THOUGHT—

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common—this is my symphony.

WILLIAM HENRY CHANNING.

TO LIVE CONTENT WITH SMALL MEANS.

This means to realize to the full the possibilities of life. Contentment means ABSENCE OF WORRY. It is only when free from worry that the brain can act normally, up to its highest standard. The man content with small means does his best work, devotes his energies to that which is worth while, and not to acquiring that which has no value.

TO SEEK ELEGANCE RATHER THAN LUXURY.

The difference between elegance and luxury is the difference between the thin, graceful deer, browsing on the scanty but sufficient forest pasture, and the fat swine revelling in plentiful garbage.

REFINEMENT RATHER THAN FASHION.

The difference between refinement and fashion is the difference between brains and clothing, the difference between an Emerson or a Huxley and a Beau Brummel or other worthless but elaborately decked carcass.

TO BE WORTHY, NOT RESPECTABLE.

In other words, to be like Henry George, and not like the owner of a trust.

WEALTHY, NOT RICH.

The man who has a good wife and good children, enough to take care of them, but not enough to spoil them, is WEALTHY. He is happier than the man who is RICH enough to be worried, rich enough to make it certain that his children will be ruined by extravagance, and perhaps live to be ashamed of him.

TO LISTEN TO STARS AND BIRDS, BABES AND SAGES, WITH OPEN HEART.

This means to enjoy the noblest gifts that God has given to man. He is happy who takes more pleasure in a beautiful sunset than in the sight of a flunky with powdered hair, artificial calves and lofty manners, handing him something indigestible on a plate of gold.

TO STUDY HARD; TO THINK QUIETLY, ACT FRANKLY, TALK GENTLY.

To exercise in this way the brain that is given to us is to lead the life of a MAN, a life of self-control, a life that is worth while, that leads to something and helps forward the improvement of the race.

In the words which we have quoted at the top of this column
William Henry Channing has given a recipe for wise living. ——

WHO WAS CHANNING?

He was a good man, and a wise man. He was one of the most eloquent clergymen ever born in this country, and as sincere a friend of individual man and of the race in general as ever lived.

He was an enthusiast and an optimist—admirable combination.

He was born in 1810, and died in 1884. His biography has been written by Octavius B. Frothingham.

Channing saw the world through generous, charitable eyes.

He was an ardent admirer of Charles Fourier, and appreciated the philosophy and social law-giving of that gigantic intellect.

The quotation we print above is an index to his whole character, just as one flower tells the story of the beautiful garden in which it grew.

Channing, unlike many sayers of fine things, was personally as fine as the things he said. He was worthy even of his own best thoughts, and that can be said for few fine thinkers.

Admire him. Read some of his sermons and other writings if you have the chance.

THE EXISTENCE OF GOD—PARABLE OF THE BLIND KITTENS

The notion that small things, the petty details of life, such as money getting, marriage questions, etc., are uppermost in the modern human brain is entirely false.

If an editor asks: "Is marriage a failure?" he receives just so many answers, and then the interest dies out.

If he asks: "Should a wife have pin money?" or "What is the easiest way for a woman to earn a living?" he ceases to receive answers after a short time.

But to questions concerning the immortality of the soul, the existence of God, and man's destiny here and hereafter, the answers are endless. Letters on such matters have been received here by thousands. Every day the mail brings new and intelligent contributions to the questions that have kept men praying, thinking, fighting and hoping through the centuries:

"IS THERE A GOD, AND WILL MY SOUL LIVE FOREVER?" ——

Very interesting are the expressions of faith which fill a majority of the letters. Interesting also are the letters of doubters atheists, agnostics and the many intoxicated with a very little knowledge, who have decided to substitute their own wisdom and doubt for the belief of the ages—the belief in God and in personal immortality.

Many think science has discovered that we could get on very well without a God. But science has done just the contrary. And here, if you please, we shall build up a sort of parable: ——

A Man had a box full of motherless blind kittens. He was very kind to them. He put their box on wheels and moved it about to keep it in the sun. He gave them milk at regular intervals. With loving kindness he drove away the dog which growled and scared the little kittens into spitting and back raising.

The kittens trusted the Man, loved him and felt that they needed him. That was the age of faith.

One day a dog got a kitten and tore it to pieces.

The kitten had disobeyed orders and laws. It had crawled away from the box.

Another kitten, with one eye now partly open, got thoughtful and said: "There is no such thing as Man. Or, if there is such a thing, he is a monster to let little Willie get torn up. Don't talk to me about Kitten Wiliie being a sufferer through his own fault. I say there is no such thing as a Man. We kittens are bosses of the universe and must do our own fighting."

That speaker was the Ingersoll kitten.

A kitten of higher mental class opened both eyes just a little and actually made observations.

Said he: "I am a scientist. I discover that we owe nothing to
Man's kindness. We are governed by laws. This box is on wheels.

It rolls around in the sunlight of its own volition. True, I do not know who shoves it, but no Man could do it. Further, I discover that there is such a thing as the law of 'milk-passing.' Milk comes this way just so often. Its coming is nature's law. It has always come. It always will come. Good-night, I am going to sleep. But don't talk to me any more about a kind Man. It's all law, and I am certainly great, for I saw the laws first."

That was the Newton kitten, but he lacked the Newton faith.

We have no time to tell what the Darwin kitten said. He was very long-winded.

But this happened. The kittens grew up—such as did not perish through their own fault. They got their eyes fully opened. They saw the Man, recognized him and asked only to be allowed to stay in his house. "Excuse us," they said, "for being such foolish kittens. But you know our eyes were not quite open."

"Don't mention it," said the kind Man. "Go down cellar and help yourselves to mice."

That's the end of the parable. We are all blind kittens, and our few attempts at explaining nature's wonders and kindness only get us into deeper and deeper mysteries.

We discover that the earth goes round the sun. But the greatest scientist must admit his inability to tell or guess why it goes. "Give me the initial impulse," he says, "and all the rest is easy."

The blind kittens in their wagon say: "Give our wagon just one shove and we'll explain the rest."

The kitten gets hold of a law of "milk-passing" and substitutes that for man's individual kindness.

The feeble-minded agnostic seizes the law of gravitation and thinks he can discard God with gravity's help.

But the great mind that defined gravity's law was a religious mind—too profound to see anything final in its own feeble power.

Newton was no atheist. None better than he knew the mysterious character of his law. That it has worked from all eternity "directly as the mass and inversely as the square of the distance" he knew and told his fellow-creatures. That is all he knew and all that any man knows about it.

To-day Lord Kelvin, a worthy follower in Newton's steps, is asked to explain WHY gravity acts. He can only say:

"I accept no theory of gravitation. Present science has no right to attempt to explain gravitation. We know nothing about it. We simply know NOTHING about it."

Darwin asks, without answering his question:

"Who can explain what is the essence of the attraction of gravitation?" ——

To our doubting friends we say: Doubt if you must. But doubt intelligently and doubt first of all your own blind kitten wisdom. Remember that you at least know absolutely nothing. Study and think. Read. But don't let the half-developed wisdom of others choke up your brain and leave you a mere clogged-up doubting machine.

Whatever you do, never interfere with the faith of others. Spread KNOWLEDGE, spread FACTS. Keep to yourself the doubts that would disturb others' happiness and do them no good. Tell what you KNOW. Keep quiet about what you GUESS.

HAVE THE ANIMALS SOULS?

"For that which befalleth the sons of men, befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them; as the one dieth, so dieth the other; YEA, THEY HAVE ALL ONE BREATH; SO THAT A MAN HATH NO PRE-EMINENCE ABOVE A BEAST: for all is vanity.

"Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the
SPIRIT of the beast that goeth downward to the earth."
—Ecclesiastes iii., 19-21.

The surface of the earth, the air as high as we can study it, the depths of the sea, swarm with animal life.

The earth rolls around the sun bathed in its warm light. Millions of creatures die with every revolution of the little planet which is their home. And man "going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it" rules the little animals and the big ones and calls himself sole heir of immortality. He says: "For ME this earth was made and balanced in its wonderful journey; for ME alone the marvels of future life are reserved."

He digs up the strange creatures from the slimy depths of the ocean, studies and labels them.

He dissects one animal to study his own diseases. He skins another to cover his feet with leather. He eats one ox and hitches its brother to the plough. He uses nature's explosive forces to bring down the bird on the wing. He sweeps the rivers with his nets.

The stomach of the well-fed man is the graveyard of the animal kingdom.

When his dinner is finished, the man well fed strokes his stomach contentedly and says to himself:

All is well. For I have a soul and THEY have none. They have died to feed me. I am happy and they should be satisfied. ——

What is the nature of the spirit that directs our humble animal brothers and sisters? They cover the earth as long as we let them, give place to us as the human race increases, and, without any thought of organized resistance, die that we may live.

HAVE THESE ANIMALS SOULS?

You have seen the bird grieving over the destruction of its nest.

You have studied the pathetic eyes of the lost dog, and the sad submission of the tired, beaten horse.

Is there not soul in those stricken creatures, and spiritual feeling deeper than that displayed by many men?

First came all ANIMAL life, as we know it, and then came MAN.

Science and religion agree on this point, at least.

All owe their being to the same eternal FORCE. On this point again religion and science agree.

Is the life in animals merely a passing dream, or does it express in its humble way the promise of life eternal?

In Italy a scientific villain experimented on a dog to ascertain the power of maternal affection.

The dog was most cruelly tortured. Its newborn puppy was beside
it. Its nerves were racked, its spine injured, BUT WHENEVER
PERMITTED TO DO SO, THE POOR TORTURED, ANIMAL MOTHER TURNED ITS
HEAD TOWARD ITS WHINING CHILD AND LICKED IT AFFECTIONATELY.

Until it died there was nothing that could overcome maternal love in the heart of that poor dumb mother.

Is there not soul in such love as that?

JESUS' ATTITUDE TOWARD CHILDREN A SUNDAY SERMON

"Suffer the little children to come unto me; and forbid them not; for of such is the Kingdom of God."—Mark X., 14.

Jesus gave to the child its place in the world's society.

With all the power of divine authority He built around the feeblest among us a wall that has protected them through the ages.

Before His day the child existed only by sufferance. It had no rights.

It was but a counter, an infinitesimal atom. It was considered simply the property of the parent. Its father had power of life and death over it. The homeless dog that roams the streets to-day is more effectively shielded from cruelty than was the friendless child before Jesus came to live and to die for the weak and poor.

The law had said:

"The parent is ruler of the child, and may dispose of it as he sees fit."

But Jesus said—and these are the most beautiful and affecting words in all the moral law of the world:

"Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven."—Matthew xviii., 10.

No threats so terrifying as those aimed at men who should harm little children:

"It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."—Matthew xviii., 6.

It is impossible now to conceive the horrid indifference to childhood's rights which preceded the birth of Christianity.

Infanticide was not the exception, but a settled custom. So much so, that in Rome the "exposure" of children in desert places was almost a virtue, since it gave the child some slight chance of surviving.

Not a few, but thousands and tens of thousands of children were thus "exposed." They fell a prey to wild beasts, or to the human beasts, still more ferocious, who took the children to make slaves or criminals of them.

Jesus came, and a miracle was worked—a miracle that no man will deny.

This was the miracle:

Jesus said:

"For I say unto you, their angels behold the face of my Father which is in heaven."

Jesus spoke, and thousands of millions of men, through nineteen centuries, have believed, and obeyed the command.

Every man was warned that the child dying goes straightway into the presence of God, and there, looking upon His face, bears witness to the treatment meted out to him here.

Well might it be said of the man who mistreated such a child:

"It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."

Every man should study with awe and reverence the sad, lonely misunderstood life of Jesus, the friend of children. He had no home, and for companions only a few humble fishermen, to whom He spoke in simple parables, as to children.

"The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head."—Matthew viii., 20.

It was this childless, homeless Man that ever used His marvellous power to protect children.

It was He who gave to children their definite share in the kingdom of God.

Before His coming the wisdom of the world was devoted to telling the child ITS duty.

But Jesus explained to grown men THEIR duty toward children.

The family life was His ideal.

All men were His brothers, and, with Him, sons of God.

The loving kindness shown by God toward helpless men and women
THEY should show to helpless children.

Neither the rights nor the WISDOM of children must be despised:

"I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes; even so, Father; for so it seemed good in thy sight."—Luke x., 21.

Wherever Jesus went, children followed Him, and the tiniest little soul, in its mother's arms or tottering along in wide-eyed curiosity, could arrest His loving attention.

How beautiful is the picture that the Bible story presents to the mind!

Jesus is at Capernaum, on the sunny shore of the Sea of Galilee.

The Disciples—simple, honest men, often excited as to precedence and filled with deep longing to stand first in the Master's esteem—ask Him:

"Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?"—Matthew xviii., 1.

Around them is gathered the typical Oriental group, and many olive-skinned women, with their children:

"And Jesus called a little child unto Him, and set him in the midst of them and said: 'Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

"'Whosoever, therefore, shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

"'And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me.'"

Teach your children to think of and to love the divine Soul that pleaded their cause. Teach them that in all the words He uttered there can be found only love for them. No threats, no warnings— only love.

STUDY OF THE CHARACTER OF GOD

"Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said . . . .
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Declare, if thou hast understanding."—Job xxxviii. 1, 4.

Since men have lived on earth their feeble intellects have struggled to realize the majesty of God.

Succeeding nations and civilizations have expressed through laws or religions their puny conceptions of the power that controls the universe.

As mental and moral standards have improved, there has been constant improvement in the conception of God.

The Greeks and Romans imagined a variety of gods, and attributed to these the vices and weaknesses of men.

The Fijians worshipped a god who devoured the souls of the dead, inflicting torture in the eating, but mercifully releasing souls from pain when the meal was ended.

The ancient Mexicans went to war "because their gods demanded something to eat." Their armies fought "only endeavoring to take prisoners, that they might have men to feed those gods." ——

Even with the birth of the one great idea—THE UNITY OF GOD—the personality of the universal Creator was but a reflection of His worshippers.

He was a "jealous" God, a "man of war." "God Himself is with us for our captain."— Chron. xiii., 12.

God dwelt in a city made of nothing cheaper than gold and precious stones. For His own glory, He maintained a court Oriental in form, with strange beasts to sing His praises, and He tortured forever and ever creatures that He had made.

The present conception of an omnipotent God has changed greatly since the old days, when cruelty was the rule and was admired. There is to-day insistence on God's LOVE, on His JUSTICE, on His MERCY that "endureth forever"—there is practically no teaching of the old belief that a creature, born of circumstances, and good or bad as circumstances may determine, is to suffer endless torment under never-changing conditions of horror. ——

The writing of this editorial is based upon frequent reading of the book of Job. In that ancient and wonderful book, as in no other writing, the Jewish forces of poetry and of prophecy are exhausted in the effort to portray God's majesty.

All of the old prophet's knowledge of the world, all of his mystic notions of sidereal government, are used in the effort to glorify his Creator.

"Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days?

"Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go and say unto thee, Here we are?

"Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow?

"Gavest thou the goodly wings unto the peacocks?

"Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?

"Will he make many supplications unto thee? Will he speak soft words unto thee?

"Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail?"

Thus through chapters of greatest beauty the primitive mind seeks to portray for the benefit of other primitive minds the omnipotence of the world's Ruler. ——

What hope has man of conceiving, even approximately, the great law-giving Force that rules the universe? Shall we ever do more than attribute to Him those qualities which our own pygmy minds admire? Shall we forever conceive Him as a glorified "individual"?

We believe that in the Book of Job there is suggested the method of studying God that alone can aid us to a better, higher conception.

The study of God must be prosecuted through the study of astronomy, and this the old prophet foreshadows clearly:

"Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?

"Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?"

Long years ago children were taught to admire a god who created a leviathan, a unicorn, and "Behemoth."

Children of the future will be told:

You live on a globe twenty-five thousand miles round. It travels ceaselessly through space at a speed of eighteen miles a second. Compared to the huge sun that lights and gives us life, our earth is but a pinhead, and the sun itself is but one tiny dot in the ocean of space. Through that space the sun rushes on an errand unknown, carrying us with it.

Everything moves, revolves, rushes ceaselessly, yet a balance registering the one-thousandth part of a grain is not adjusted as nicely as these huge behemoths of limitless space. Laplace shows positive proof that the earth, travelling eighteen miles per second, has not changed the period of its rotation by the hundredth part of a second in two thousand years.

The mind of the future, imbued with respect for the Force that controls, conducts and makes the laws for the universe, will attain more nearly to a conception of God. But a study of God will remain man's chief and constant effort while he lives here. That study is never-ending.

THE FASCINATING PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY

(If you read this you will probably feel that you have wasted time.)

If you travel back far enough you can see in your mind's eye a primitive man with long, red hair, shivering in some icy pool. He has taken refuge there from a pursuing bear or other foe. He sees that he must die of cold or of the bear's teeth. His dark mind—product of a brain primitive and poor in convolutions—contemplates vaguely the prospect ahead of him. He hopes that after death he may through some mysterious kindness be permitted to meet again the red-haired women and the wolfish cave children left behind.

There, in the cave man's mind, is the first craving for immortality. Born in that poor brain long centuries ago, it has steadily grown stronger with man's mental development. ——

No man looks at death without looking beyond it. None but has a craving for a future life, with consciousness of his personality AND WITH RECOLLECTION OF FRIENDS, FACES AND DEEDS HERE.

Say to a man, "You shall be immortal, but you shall not know that you are you." He will not give you thanks for such immortality.

So strong is man's craving for personal, individual immortality that hell with its fires would be preferred by many to annihilation. The strongest argument against immortality—weak and ignorant at best—is but a frantic attempt of the mind to prove negatively the existence of what it covets.

Fortunately for human happiness in general, FAITH, covers the requirements of millions. They live and die contented, the instinct within them fortified by the teachings of a faith not to be questioned. ——

But what of the men and women who ask for evidence, or at least for plausible argument, proving the reasonableness of immortality? What can be said to please them?

Not much, alas! Probably because we are still so undeveloped that it would be, for many reasons, unsafe to let us know how great a future is before us. Strongest in hope is the argument of Charles Fourier, based on what he declared to be a natural law.

"Attractions are proportionate to destinies."

By this Fourier meant that a universal longing among human beings was certain proof that their ultimate destiny involved the fulfilment of the longing. The little girl fondling a doll foretells maternity. The hectoring boy foretells the soldier's career. No universal attraction, save with a destiny proportionate. ——

The human race since it began to think and believe has thought of and believed in immortality. The half wise declare that belief in immortality and a spirit world came to savage peoples through dreams, that it has been kept alive through superstition and the power of religion. Trivial, certainly, is such an explanation of a phenomenon as wide as mankind's existence. ——

A very consoling fact for the doubter is this. The strongest minds born on the earth have almost invariably, at some stage of development, rejected belief in immortality—only to return to the belief, or at least to the HOPE, with fuller age and riper wisdom. That no great mind has seen any positive argument against the hope of immortality is certainly comforting to all of us. Intelligence can always refute improbability and falsehood. ——

What about the nature of immortality? The Indian hopes for dogs and hunting, the Turk for a life of which the least said the better. The Christian, borrowing his ideas from the writings of the old Hebrews, looks forward to what may be called a solid gold existence—everything made of gold or of something more expensive.

We do not think that religious docility demands implicit belief in any of the published details of our future existence. Gold is not comfortable; jasper would not well replace the green turf.

Is it not more reasonable to assume, since immortality is to be ours, that it is ours now and always has been? We cannot imagine creation of the indestructible. Is it not sensible to take literally that most beautiful invocation: "Thy kingdom come ON EARTH as it is in heaven"?

We know that heaven cannot be above us or hell below; because as we whirl round in each twenty-four hour period those abodes would have to whirl also—quite unreasonable. ——

This earth would make a very good heaven—properly improved and managed. Wipe out human selfishness, and the Sahara and other deserts. Establish universal philanthropy, regulate the climate, confine human manual labor to the pushing of an electric button—all quite possible—and you have the sort of heaven that man would select if left to choose.

Why should we not come back here again and again, taking varying human forms, doing our duty well or badly each time according to our start in life, and finally enjoying perfect terrestrial happiness here as a finished race of immortal beings—immortal in the sense of being indestructible and of possessing the gift of perpetual reincarnation? ——

Now, this earthly reincarnation idea is what we have been driving at since the beginning of this particular article. What is the argument against prior and subsequent existence here? It is this:

"If I am to live here again, I must have lived here before. If I have lived here before I do not know it, and I do not look forward with pleasure to future existence here in which I shall not know myself."

This is a reasonable objection, certainly. Reincarnation without consciousness of former existences would miss half the fun. ——

But it is possible to be in too much of a hurry. Let us suppose that as yet we are not sufficiently developed to carry from one existence to another the memory of former existence. Suppose the time is to come when we shall suddenly advance as far beyond this intellectual stage as this stage of intellect is beyond that of the Bushman. Is it not conceivable that we may suddenly be enabled to recall all former existences and to remember all the various happenings of our former lives? May we not say, "There is Mrs. Jones. I was married to her six million years ago, and we quarrelled"? It seems quite hopeable.

You cannot deny that it is possible. For instance: You now lead a continuous existence. You know that you were alive three days ago and you remember what you did then. But a baby four weeks old does NOT know that he was alive three days ago and he does not know what he did then. He has not reached a stage where his mind can grasp even the fact of continuous existence. We may not have reached a stage enabling us to grasp continuous reincarnation.

Think of this, and see if you cannot get some comfort, or at least some amusing speculation out of it. ——

Science admits and thinks it proves that the inorganic atom of matter is indestructible—that it persists forever. Why should we not admit—and ultimately prove—that the atom of organic force called a soul is indestructible and exists forever?

Every atom of matter, every particle of force, existing in the visible universe will continue to exist billions of centuries after the universe shall have melted and lost its present shape. The nail on your finger will exist as separate atoms when the Milky Way shall have faded from the heavens. How does that strike you for immortality?

We predict that the mysterious force-atom called your soul will exist AND KNOW ITSELF AND ITS FRIENDS ten thousand billions of centuries from now and be as young as ever.

DISCONTENT THE MOTIVE POWER OF PROGRESS

At first the baby lies fiat on his back, eyes staring up at the ceiling.

By and by he gets tired of lying on his back. DISCONTENT with his condition makes him wriggle and wriggle. At last he succeeds in turning over.

If he were contented then, there would be no men on earth—only huge babies. But DISCONTENT again seizes him, and through discontent he learns to crawl.

Crawling—travelling on hands and knees—satisfied lower forms of animal life. It used to satisfy us, in the old days of early evolutionary stages.

But the human infant—thanks to inborn cravings—is DISCONTENTED with crawling. With much trouble and risk and many feeble totterings, he learns to walk erect. He gets up into a position that takes his eyes off the ground. He is able to look at the sun and stars and takes the position of a man. DISCONTENT is his mainspring at every stage. ——

What discontent does in the limited life of a child, it does on a much larger scale in the life of a man—and on a scale still larger in the life of a race.

You can always tell when a man has reached the limit of his possible development. He ceases to be discontented—or at least to show discontent actively.

Contentment, apathy, are signs of decadence and of a career ended in either a man or a nation.

If a baby lies still, no longer wiggling or trying to swallow his toe, you may be sure that he is seriously ill. The nation that no longer wiggles is in a condition as serious as that of the motionless infant. ——

The man or newspaper which imparts dissatisfaction—wise discontent to a nation or to individuals, gives them the motive power that brings improvement.

Ruskin as a young man declared that his one hope in life was to arouse "some dissatisfaction."

The constant aim of men in talking to each other, in writing for newspapers, even in writing novels, should be to arouse discontent.

In this column, as our readers will have noticed, the constant aim is to make the great crowd dissatisfied.

Only through discontent can changes come and are there not causes enough for discontent and need enough for changes?

A majority of the people half educated, and tens of thousands half fed.

Children run over daily because they have no playground but the gutter.

Men of noble aspirations kept down by hard work and poverty.

Children left locked up alone all day while their mothers work for a pittance.

Men, uncertain of their future and of their children's future, engage in a constant struggle for wealth that is not needed—a struggle that develops in the end a passion as useless as it is degrading.

Unless you believe that the world is perfect because YOU happen to have enough to eat and to wear, you should be discontented.

You should remember that the world's achievements and great changes have all come from discontent, and you should be, in as many ways as possible, a breeder of discontent among the human beings around you.

THE AUTOMOBILE WILL MAKE US MORE HUMAN

One of the commonest and most disagreeable sights in a big city is that of a strong, brutal human being beating a weak and overworked horse because it refuses to do what it cannot do.

Brutality inflicted upon horses is atrocious. But the bad effect of such unkind treatment of animals on HUMAN CHARACTER is far more serious than the actual physical suffering inflicted. ——

The perfection of the automobile will do much to improve human beings by taking away from their control and from brutal coercion submissive animals.

Everybody knows that the moral standard is raised immediately in a country when slavery is abolished.

In America we have abolished the slavery of human beings, but we still adhere to horse slavery, accompanied by all the worst forms of the old negro slavery. The faithful slave may be beaten and driven to death. The driver MUST BE BRUTALIZED.

Every day, on every street, you may see stupid, muscular boys and men jerking with all their might on the tender mouths of poor horses, only too willing to do their best.

This brutal indifference to the sufferings of animals makes us brutal and indifferent in other directions.

With the advent of the automobile and the disappearance of horses from our cities, horse slavery will be abolished and men, compelled to use their brains in dealing with machinery, will soon become more nearly human than they are at present. The practical abolition of the street-car horse is one great step in advance.

The abolition of the truck horse, carriage horse, cab horse, soon to come, will complete the dream of those modern and highly deserving abolitionists, the automobile inventors and manufacturers.

LET US BE THANKFUL

Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 1902.

Let us be thankful first of all for one great right:

The right, when dissatisfied, to SAY that we are dissatisfied, and to try to make things better.

Let us be thankful that every man—with few exceptions—has a holiday to-day.

However bad our national affairs may seem, let us be thankful they are no worse. And above all let us be thankful that we have the power and the constitutional right to change things, just as soon as we become wise enough to use our ballots. ——

Let us be devoutly thankful for the PUBLIC SCHOOLS, for the fact that every child is taught to read and encouraged to think. The nation now declares that a child has a right to food for the mind, as long as the child behaves properly. We are not so far from the day when human decency will declare that every child and every human being has a right to food for the BODY also, as long as they behave, and are ready for honest work. Let us be thankful for the constantly growing recognition of human rights.

The workingmen of America are better paid than they have ever been before. More of them than ever are at work, and the unions which protect them are more powerful than ever—let us be thankful for these facts. The whole nation prospers when the workers of the nation are busy and well paid.

Science has been, and is, making wonderful progress, explaining for us daily the problems of the universe. Every man must be thankful that highly specialized brains are constantly at work piling up knowledge for him.

As a nation we are too big to fear successful attack, and we are, it is to be hoped, too sensible to seek trouble with others. Let us be thankful that all things point to continued national, mental development on peaceful lines, free from the horrible wholesale murders, called war, that have bled and weakened all people through the ages. ——

Each of us individually has reason for thankfulness.

If you can feel that you are honestly trying to do your duty, that is much to be thankful for.

If you are dissatisfied with yourself, you should be thankful for the power of self-condemnation— and thankful especially that you have long and blessed TIME ahead of you to make up for your mistakes and improve your record.

We live in a wonderful age—wonderful in the fact that life and liberty are fairly secure; wonderful in freedom of conscience.

You can believe in Heaven, Hades, Christian Science, or in nothing at all—and as long as you do not interfere with others, no one can imprison you, or question, or burn you at the stake. ——

We should all be especially thankful for the steady awakening of the national mind. We all pursue wealth—and doubtless circumstances compel us to pay too much attention to that line of effort. But we are all THINKING also. There are a thousand times more thinking, reading men and women to-day in America alone than lived on earth half a century ago. Love of knowledge is spreading, and with love of knowledge, love of justice and a sense of fairness will always be found.

Our material prosperity is great. But it is out- balanced by our mental prosperity. We are becoming a nation of THINKING men and women, and since that means real development, we have all reason to be thankful.

THE HARM THAT IS DONE BY OUR FRIENDS

Thought lives through the ages, flies about over the earth, and goes on visiting fresh minds, after the mind that gave it birth has gone back to dust and nothingness.

An Italian wrote words to this effect:

"Man is commanded to forgive his enemies. Nowhere is imposed on him the far more difficult task of forgiving his friends."

Francis Bacon, the philosopher, read in England the words of the
Italian and quoted them.

Vincent W. Byars, a very able thinking man of St. Louis, read Bacon's quotation out there, and now, coming to New York, he says to this writer:

"Why don't you make an editorial on that old Italian saying quoted by Bacon?"

Italy—England—St. Louis—New York—thus the idea has hopped about, until to-day you get it in this column. A million of you read it, or at least glance at it; and so, if the idea has any value, it will go hopping on all over the earth's surface long after the steel press that prints this paper shall have crumbled away. ——

How little your ENEMIES can hurt you! How little harm they do, even when they try! You are warned against them and on your guard. The world knows they are your enemies, and discredits what they say.

It is quite easy to forgive our enemies, for they do us comparatively little harm.

But to forgive our friends would be hard indeed if we could realize how much harm they do us. ——

THE DRUNKARD'S FRIENDS

Who makes the drunkard? His enemies? No. The drunkard is made by his friends.

When it is known that he is inclined to drink no enemy is so vicious as to lead him on. No enemy slaps him on the back and begs him to take "just another drink." No enemy laughs down his poor, feeble attempts at reform. No enemy tells him that it will not hurt him "just this time," and that he really must not refuse to be a good fellow "just for once."

The drunkard is MADE a drunkard, is pushed into the last depths of drunkenness, by his friends.

And it is his friends who kick him and leave him and despise him when he has sunk into the mire.

Did ever the drunkard's enemy hurt him as much as the friend has hurt him? ——

AMBITION KILLED BY FRIENDS

A young man starts out to succeed in life. His enemy may lie about him, may call him worthless. He may think he is hurting him. If there is anything in the young man, the enemy's lies and discouraging words only spur him on to greater effort. They do him good.

It is the friend that ruins the young man by false, injudicious, unearned praise.

As artist, poet, writer, clerk, or in any other effort, the young man begins his work.

It is his friends who tell him that he is a splendid success, when he needs to be told that, at best, he has some slight chance of success, and that everything depends on desperate effort.

Look at the young, conceited fool who, instead of struggling on, rails at the world, feels that he is not appreciated. He is a failure—a sad, foolish failure. He has been made a failure, not by the attacks of his enemies, but by the more dangerous praise of his friends. ——

The lonely and friendless often succeed amazingly. "Multum incola fuit anima mea" ("My spirit hath been much alone") said the great Bacon. His mind fed on loneliness, on failure, and even on disgrace.

How much success is due to freedom from that harm which friendship does?

The reader can finish this editorial for himself with hundreds of other arguments. This is enough for a sample.

SHALL WE TAME AND CHAIN THE INVISIBLE MICROBE AS WE NOW CHAIN NIAGARA?

When Solomon was gathering his materials to build the Temple, his, large cedar trunks from Lebanon and his costly materials from everywhere, he used oxen, mules, camels.

With all his wisdom, he little dreamed that the day would come when his descendants, instead of using mules and huge beasts of burden, would heat water and with steam develop a force sufficient to tear his Temple from its foundation.

Still less did he dream that steam would eventually be superseded, as clumsy and primitive, by the invisible force of electricity.

When the thunder roared, the lightning flashed and his conscience troubled him, Solomon, turning away from his thousand wives and his numerous other doubtful associates, put his head under the richly embroidered pillow, worked, perhaps, by Sheba's own fair hands—it did not enter his mind that that lightning could be tamed and put to work.

Man has been gradually controlling and employing the various animals on the earth's surface. He taught the elephant to haul wood and water and to fight his battles. He trained the horse, the dog. He even taught falcons to bring him back birds from beyond the clouds, and otters to catch fish in the bottom of lakes and rivers.

Gradually he has made himself independent of his animal partners.

The rifle made the falcon useless; steam destroyed the importance of the horse and the ox.

But apparently we have only begun using animal life. We must run the whole gamut of the marvels of creation before conquering conditions on this earth. ——

We used to train the biggest dogs to kill wolves. The Government of the United States is now breeding darning-needles to kill mosquitoes.

A certain kind of wasp, with a black and white striped body, spends his time killing house-flies, and this creature could be bred and used to destroy the disease-spreading pests.

Even the invisible insect life can be made most useful to man and to his health.

The latest plan for disposing of city sewage involves the cultivation of microbes, to be employed as disinfectors.

Several towns in Illinois and in Wisconsin have established plants for the purification of sewage by means of microbe life. The collections of organisms invisible to the naked eye are to be kept in great antiseptic tanks, and employed in the purification of the city 's refuse.

Mosquitoes will ultimately be destroyed, undoubtedly, by breeding among them smaller creatures fatal to their existence.

Man, in his conquest and use of animal life, will run the gamut, from the biggest elephant, employed as a public executioner in India, to the invisible microbe, doing a work ten thousand times more important all over the globe.

These infinitesimal microbes, bred and controlled by science, will do regularly and methodically the work which buzzards and vultures have done on land, which sharks and dogfish have done at sea, throughout endless centuries.

To the marvellous workings of nature we cannot possibly give too much thought or too great admiration. Gardens are filled with beautiful flowers, and fields are fertile to-day because hundreds of years ago sea birds were devouring the carcasses of dead fish, acting as nature's scavengers, and building up the great guano fields of South America.

There is a Peruvian millionaire in his big yacht, and there is a rose in full bloom—the millionaire's money, the beauty of the rose, come from those birds that picked up the dead fish five hundred years ago.

It's an interesting world.

THE ELEPHANT THAT WILL NOT MOVE HAS BETTER EXCUSES THAN WE HAVE FOR FOLLY DISPLAYED

This is an editorial which we shall merely suggest, and which each reader will write out for himself.

In the Zoological Garden of New York a poor elephant has stood in chains for years. The animal was thought to be vicious, and was kept fastened tightly to one spot, that it might have no leeway to do damage.

A short time ago its keeper became convinced that the elephant would do no harm and might safely be unchained. The chains were taken off, and the keeper thought with satisfaction that the poor beast would now enjoy freedom and be made happy by the possibility of moving freely about its large inclosure.

The elephant did not move. The chains were gone, it was no longer tied, but it stood, and it still stands, in just the same spot.

The habit of slavery, of monotony, had become too strong. The elephant, though free, stands still, sadly swaying its heavy head, ignorant of the freedom that has come to it.

Men and women and children who see the elephant, and other men who write paragraphs for the newspapers, dilate on the poor animal's "stupidity."

"The elephant has been called the most intelligent of animals," says one writer, "but this elephant, that doesn't know when the chains are off, seems to prove that the elephant can be a good deal of a fool."

How easy it is for us human beings to see the faults in others, our fellows, and the animals below us.

But which one of us can truly say that he is not in exactly the same position as that poor elephant, fixed to one spot by the chains of long ago?

Are we not still standing as a race just as we stood years and centuries ago, ignorant of the freedom that has come to us?

Thousands of splendid men have worked, lived and died to free us from superstition, from credulity, from ignorance, yet still we stand in the same place, and fail to appreciate the freedom that is ours. ——

Millions of us, tied down by foolish superstition, are like that elephant—the chains are off, but we stand still.

The road to peace, happiness and universal progress has been shown us in the teachings of great leaders, but we still stand in the same old place, fighting, hating, cheating, suspecting, harming one another.

Here and there there is a little progress; gradually we begin to appreciate and enjoy the freedom that has been given to us with the striking away of old mental chains. The process is slow.

Look into your own mind. Do you take advantage of all the possibilities that are before you? Do you use your brain to control your existence, acts and habits for your own benefit and the benefit of others?

If not, you ought to sympathize with this poor elephant, and realize that as your brain exceeds his in bulk proportionately, so do you exceed him in the folly that misses opportunity.

LET US BE THANKFUL

You get tired of reading editorials in which one man, spouting from his editorial pulpit, lays down the law for you—without giving you a chance to reply or contradict.

So let us write this editorial together.

There you sit—the reader—in your street car, or perhaps clinging to a strap, and here we sit, impersonal editorial creature, thinking over thankfulness, Thanksgiving Day, and what reasons we have for feeling thankful.

Let us talk as few platitudes as possible, and try to get at a few of the inside workings of human life. ——

You look across the car and hate the fat man who lounges and spreads his feet around so boorishly.

LET US BE THANKFUL THAT WE SO READILY PERCEIVE THE SHORTCOMINGS OF OTHERS.

Much comfort is derived from others' failings. In the quiet evenings we talk of our neighbors' weaknesses and we enjoy them. By contrast we admire ourselves.

LET US BE THANKFUL THAT WE NEVER APPRECIATE OUR OWN LIMITATIONS.

Each man's children are beautiful and promising in his view.

He cannot see the hopeless construction of their foreheads, nor can he read in their eyes the sad absence of "speculation."

Let us be thankful for that. The future depends on the good care awarded to almost worthless specimens now. ——

FOR THE UNIVERSAL INSTINCT OF THANKFULNESS, LET BE DEEPLY THANKFUL.

The thick-lipped negro on the Congo finds a dead hippopotamus, half eaten by wild beasts, and in his woolly brain a dim, misty feeling of THANKFULNESS is born.

The Tartar bandit surprises mild Chinese conducting a tea caravan across the stony desert. He murders the mild Celestials and feels THANKFUL as he contemplates the booty.

A great Trust manager finds ways to add some millions to those which he already has and does not need. In THANKFUL mood he gives two millions or three to education.

As inborn, as instinctive as the beating of the heart in the human being is THANKFULNESS.

Thankfulness is the unconscious acknowledgment of a Higher Power.

It is the indestructible evidence of man's permanent belief in just government of the universe.

It is the most hopeful, the most promising feature of man's character.

For THANKFULNESS itself we should be thankful. ——

If you want to succeed, cultivate a feeling of hopeful thankfulness.

Hopefulness, thankfulness and success are as near akin as light, heat and motion—the same force underlies, makes up the first trio, as it does the second.

If you find it hard to be thankful, read a little of history, and thankfulness will come. Thousands of millions of men have lived and suffered to make your existence here at least bearable. You may not be satisfied, but you have comforts that were not dreamed of by the luckiest a few centuries back. You think the prosperous have too many privileges.

Perhaps they have. But when your great-grandfather was a young man a nobleman could order his lackeys to seize Voltaire the greatest mind in Europe—and beat him almost to death. Voltaire was locked up in the Bastile for complaining.

Thanks to the eternal row that Voltaire kicked up, you can never be treated as he was. So be thankful to Voltaire.

Be thankful to the long line of plucky men and fighters—not forgetting Christopher Columbus—who have gone before you.

Be thankful that you are alive in an interesting age with interesting events happening.

Be thankful also that with thankfulness you combine the feeling of dissatisfaction, of unrest that will push you ahead and give you cause for fresh thankfulness next year. ——

We are thankful to have you for a reader.

We are thankful for the criticisms and friendly comments that you occasionally send.

We hope that you will enjoy your dinner to-day and not regret it to-morrow.

WHAT WILL 999 YEARS MEAN TO THE HUMAN RACE

The street railroad company in the Borough of Brooklyn has just executed some leases to endure 999 years. Leases of property have also been made for the same period, though, of course, a lease of 999 years will be about as binding 999 years from now as would a lease of the great pyramid executed the day after it was finished, if such a lease should be presented at present to the Egyptian Government.

These preposterous leases are interesting because they bring vividly before the human mind the certainty of wonderful and splendid changes in human affairs.

The street railroad leases are especially fascinating to the imaginative mind.

They deal with present conditions and will seem inconceivably primitive hundreds of years before the leases will have ended.

These leases deal with miserable little electric cars crawling slowly over the face of the earth, at either end an underpaid, overworked man, and in the middle a crowd of poor, dissatisfied, ill-housed human beings.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine years from now the human race will not by any means have accomplished its destiny. It will still be struggling on toward the goal of real civilization.

But it will have grown far beyond the savage condition of life that marks the execution of these long leases.

Before these street railroad leases expire Brooklyn and all other cities as they now exist will have disappeared from the earth.

Perfect transportation, underground, overground and through the air, will enable human beings, if they choose, to live as far from their work as does the seagull or the eagle.

It will no longer be necessary to crowd together in miserable tenements, and homes will be scattered. Human beings undoubtedly will dwell in huge, splendidly managed structures, each in the centre of its own park, far from the noise and the brutality of modern city life.

Before the leases expire the combined cities of New York and Brooklyn and Yonkers and Coney Island and Montauk Point will have grown into an enormous, hideous human aggregation of fifty million or more human beings.

Even the city of a hundred millions may be seen.

But as that huge, monstrous city will have grown, so it will have died, as the monsters of former geological epochs grew and died in their turn.

The site of the vanished great city will be covered with gardens, and children in schools will be taught that human beings who once lived in the cliffs in the Far West afterward gathered together in horrible municipal ant-hills in the East, called cities, before they learned how to live comfortably. ——

Before those street railroad leases expire the present temporary mania for money will have run its course.

Once every important man felt that a certain number of slaves must be murdered at his funeral. Sometimes his favorite horse was shot. In scores of millions of cases his wife was burned alive with his corpse. We have outgrown that. Nowadays the great man who dies must leave behind him an accumulation of millions, which means that thousands of men have worked to give him what he did not need. Before these leases shall have expired that form of financial barbarism will have ceased to exist.

It is reasonable to hope that the coming thousand years will have seen the end of industrial feudalism, which has had its birth in our day, and which will run its course as did the military feudalism of the Middle Ages.

What a marvellous picture the world will present one thousand years from now!

The earth will be adequately populated.

Science will have conquered disease almost entirely. Each woman will be the mother of two children. She will not bring five or six into the world in order that two or three may live.

Competition will be replaced by emulation. The intelligent servant of government will work as loyally and enthusiastically for his government and for the people as the boy at college now works for his college football team.

The human mind will have wandered on many leagues in its search for a satisfying religion, getting always nearer to a clear conception of the grandeur of the universe, and further away from the superstition necessary to the moral control of a brutal semi-civilization.

Human beings will have learned that the noblest thing one man can do is to work for others.

Each will gladly contribute all his talent and strength to the welfare of all.

All will gladly recognize, applaud and richly reward the special ability of the individual.

There will be no poverty. Willingness to work will insure a comfortable livelihood. Education will have developed the average human intellect far beyond our conception. Nine-tenths of the human race have been able to read only within the past few years. What will a thousand years of universal education do? ——

The end of the leases of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company will find many of our problems solved.

It will find, however, the real work of man just beginning. The abstract work of the intellect, the proper organization of society as expressed in human passions, the study of the wonderful and beautiful universe outside of our own little planet, will then begin with the conquest of our material conditions.

THE AZORES—A SMALL LOST WORLD IN A UNIVERSE OF WATER

As you cross the Atlantic by the Southern route the "sighting of the Azores" is one incident of your voyage. Just before daybreak the ship is shaking and the passengers roused by the deep tones of the big steam whistle.

One by one shivering forms straggle up from below, like reluctant spirits answering a premature last call. Bare feet in slippers, and shivering forms with overcoats over nightgowns, gradually line the rails.

On the left there appears, apparently, a heavy, dark bank of clouds:

"The Azores!" shouts down from the bridge your yellow-whiskered captain, looking as cheerful and warm as though it were noon.

You watch, shiver and blink as the light grows stronger behind the pinkish clouds in the east. The dark cloud settles into solid land. You see it clearly. Sharply outlined against the sky stands, forty miles long, a mammoth saw with huge teeth, irregular, sharp. The power of old-time volcanoes made all of that land, and those sharp saw-teeth, pointing toward the sky, are the destroyers of long ago, cold and dead now, but telling ominously of the power that lies hidden below.

Between you and the brightening sunrise, suspended in the "crow's nest," half way up the mast, stands the sailor who watches the sea for you through the night. He calls out, and ahead to the left you see a small boat filled with human beings that seem scarcely as big as your finger. Your ship could plough through miles of such small boats— but out there in the ocean, just as well as inside the biggest court-house, LAW rules, and the big ship must turn out for the small fishing boat.

You realize the power and beauty of law, as our governor and sustainer. You see that laws of little men reach out two thousand miles into the sea. You think of the laws of the universe that stretch across the immeasurable distances of time and space, protecting ALL, and insuring ultimate fulfilment of the destinies of all the worlds.

As those fishermen of the Azores work safely, under full protection, in their little lost corner of the great ocean, so we, in our little world, our little insignificant corner of space, work out our tiny problems safely under the splendid protection of Divine Law and wisdom sent to us from some far- off point of which we know nothing.

The light of the rising sun brings out from shore many other small boats, each with its load of men who wave their arms to the steamship and cheer against the sound of the waves and wind. To them that ship is like the fast express that passes the country railroad station, or the comet that whirls round our sun and off again.

Those fishermen feel that THEY are the REAL world; the steamship and outside creation are only half imagined, interesting phenomena. You look down from the deck and the fishermen seem unreal little ornaments of your European excursion. And so the two sets of human beings go their ways—to each nothing is important, save that which each is doing.

There are great planets and suns that roll past us across this cosmic ocean of ether. Our pathetic little round earth looks to them as that fishing-boat of the Azores looks to you. And WE think of those great interstellar travellers as the fisherman in his little boat thinks of the ocean liner—the great star to us is merely an interesting feature of OUR sky. And we actually wonder whether there is any thought on that big, distant sun; any intelligence on the vast ship that ploughs the ocean of limitless space. ——

The high ridge of volcanic peaks and the others near it are made fertile and green by soil gradually developed through the centuries by seeds brought across the ocean by winds and birds.

The tops of the mountains are black lava. Lakes of black water fill some of the quiet craters. Only, here and there, the rising sulphur smoke from rocky fissures tells of heat and power smouldering.

The last great eruption of the volcanoes occurred a little more than two hundred years ago—so the inhabitants laugh if you speak of danger. They forget that two hundred years in the earth's life is as two minutes in the life of a man—and that what a man did two minutes since he may do again.

Fences are built across the fields of thin soil that cover the lava. Each inch of that land thrown up by fire "belongs" to some man. White houses stand at the edges of deep lava canyons running from the mountain tops to the sea's edge canyons made by pouring lava or by the splitting of the mountains under fearful pressure.

Children play about the blocks of lava—and all their lives, no matter where they may go, those children will think of that far-off island as the only real home, and of black lava blocks as the only REAL kind of stone.

From your passing boat you cannot see these children. Their little lives, lost in the far-off sea, seem as unimportant as the lives of the fish that swim below you.

But some child playing there to-day may be like that other island child, Napoleon, and live to make the rest of the world talk about the island that bred him. Or, better still, some one of those children, with a brain made powerful by solitude and noble thought, may have the idea that shall help us all, teach us more and more to think kindly of each other and help each other, instead of passing each other coldly and indifferently as the big ship passes the little, far-off island.

NO NAPOLEONIC CHESS PLAYER ON AN AIR CUSHION ZANGWILL'S IDEA IS FALSE—WHY CHESS PLAYING STUNTS GENIUS

Mr. Zangwill's keen intellect, straining hard for striking pictures and word effects, sees falsely the great general of the future. He says:

"The Napoleon of the future will be an epileptic chess player, carried about the field of battle on an air cushion."

In this condensed, picturesque fashion Mr. Zangwill expresses sententiously a number of mistaken ideas. He thinks that the game of war is like the game of chess, and that the future world conqueror will be a great chess player, using men as pawns and the world as his chess-board.

He observes the curious and interesting historical fact that of the world's great conquerors many, including the two greatest, Napoleon and Alexander, were afflicted with that mysterious disease, epilepsy. He concludes that the great general of the future will probably be a confirmed epileptic.

The ability of a fighting man to-day resides largely, of course, in the brain. The general's MUSCLES no longer count as a fighting factor. His battles are won or lost inside of his SKULL. Mr. Zangwill concludes that the future great general will have a mind developed to an abnormal extent at the expense of the body—he sees in the future world conqueror an abnormal creature, a giant brain perched on a miserable, wasted body, so feeble and delicate that it must be carried about the field of battle on an air cushion to prevent shocks. ——

The quotation from Zangwill which we print above contains only twenty-one words. Rarely have so many errors, so many fundamental yet plausible errors, been crowded into so little space.

The Napoleon of the future, the great conqueror, will NOT be a chess player. The real Napoleon whom we know had no love for chess or any other waste of time, or any other form of self- indulgence.

Chess is no game for a Napoleon, or for any other man who wants to embody real accomplishment in the story of his life.

CHESS IS A WEAK GAME, FOR IT ADMITS ALL KINDS OF RULES AND ALL KINDS OF FOREORDAINED IMPOSSIBILITIES.

The man who makes the world's great success will not be bound by rules. The great men of the world are great because they refuse to ADMIT impossibilities.

The man who plays chess has two knights, and these knights he can only send two squares in one direction and one square in another, or one square in one direction and two squares in the other. His two bishops can only move diagonally across the board, one on the white and one on the black. His castles lumber along on straight lines. His king cannot be touched or taken, and the game ends when the king is in fatal danger. The queen, in the dull game we call chess, can do almost anything.

But Napoleon was really a great man, and the game of life that he played was very different from the chess game.

When the king was in hopeless danger, Napoleon's game had just begun. Others before him had looked upon kings on the board of life as the chess player looks upon the wooden or ivory king before him.

But to Napoleon kings were pawns, to be moved around and made ridiculous. When he felt like it, he made pawns into kings—the descendant of one of his pawn-kings reigns to-day in Sweden.

Napoleon's game deprived the queen of all power—she was less than a pawn. HIS game sent the bishops hopping back and forth, diagonally or at right angles, as he saw fit. He created knights to his heart's content, and he taught them to move as he wanted.

Napoleon was great because there was nothing of the chess player about him. He did not admit of regular, foreordained moves on the chess-board or on the board of life. HE REFUSED TO CONSIDER ANYTHING IMPOSSIBLE UNTIL HE HAD TRIED IT. He tells us himself that he deserved credit for crossing the Alps, not that he accomplished a difficult feat, but because he refused to believe those who declared the feat impossible.

If anybody said "Check" to Napoleon, he kicked over the chess-board and began a new game of his own—that was what surprised the poor, dull old Austrian generals in Italy.

No; the real great man is no chess player, he has no chess player's mind. And do you, Mr. Reader, waste no time at chess, if you have any idea of being WORTH WHILE in a big or a little way. ——

The Napoleon of the future will be no epileptic. That terrible disease has afflicted many of the noblest intellects, and it is undoubtedly a disease brought on, or at least intensified, by great intellectual activity and a lack of co-ordination between the mental and physical operations of the body. But some great men have been great, not because of that terrible disease, but in spite of it. Science will conquer that trouble, as it has conquered others, and the scientist to do this work will be, himself, one of the world's great men. ——

The Napoleon of the future will be no huge-brained dwarf, with feeble body, carried on an air cushion.

It is true that many great men of to-day are relatively small in body. The gigantic muscle, thick legs, broad shoulders and hairy chests of the successful Viking have nothing to do with modern achievement.

But it is also true that to-day, as always, the healthy mind lives in a healthy body, and lives ON a healthy body.

As well expect to find the most perfect fruit on a withered, half-dead tree, as to find the most able brain in a withered, half-dead body. The blood is the life of the brain, and unless a HEALTHY body supplies HEALTHY blood the brain's chance is small.

Napoleon, it's true, was at one time a physical wreck—BUT DON'T
FORGET THAT HIS GREATNESS WAS ALSO A WRECK AT THAT TIME.

The GREAT Napoleon operated in a body tireless and powerful enough to remain thirty consecutive hours on horseback. It was a body so powerful that criminal neglect and stupid ignorance of the laws of health were powerless against it for many years.

The Napoleon that went to St. Helena dwelt in a worn-out body, a fat, degenerate perversion of the Napoleon that conquered the world.

The great conqueror of the future, ladies and gentlemen, will be a splendidly original brain, working through a perfectly developed body, AND WORKING FOR THE MASS OF THE PEOPLE, FOR THEIR FARE, NOT FOR THEIR CONQUEST AND OPPRESSION.

All of which is respectfully submitted to our readers for discussion and criticism.

A GIRL'S FACE IN THE GASLIGHT AND AN IMPORTANT PART OF THE WORLD'S WORK

On a corner of Rector street, down near the river, a loud drum was beating. A guitar and a tambourine competed shrilly with the drum's dull booming. Slowly a careless crowd gathered round the Salvation Army workers.

There were bare-headed women, little girls holding little babies in their arms, sailors drunk, and one or two sober, 'longshoremen pleased with the sound of the drum, and a few of the thin, hungry faces that disturb our well-fed happiness.

The man beat his drum, standing erect and proud in his army uniform.

The two thin, nervous young women played on guitar and tambourine with all their force, striving to gather the crowd whom they hoped to make better men and women.

Thirty or forty people gathered—glad to accept any noise and excitement in their dull lives.

The music stopped, and a young girl stepped to the centre of the circle.

She was frightened. Her voice was weak at first. Gradually her thin, pale face grew animated.

Her blue eyes dilated. In dull, routine way, doing her best, earning respectful silence from the night crowd, she told her story:

"I was bad. I tried to be good. But I couldn't do it with my own strength. I asked God to save me. He did save me. He will save you, if you will ask Him."

She spoke with a strong German accent. With all her deep, earnest soul, with all her poor, limited mental force, she longed to help the men and women around. As she spoke she bent her head farther and farther back, until her eyes looked up to the sky. There, with perfect faith, she saw the God whose work she was humbly doing in the muddy streets and flickering gaslight of the riverside.

While she could control her voice and her deep emotion she talked on her one theme—the power of God to help the helpless. But she BELIEVED, and she FELT what she said. Soon the tears ran over from her upturned eyes, and she could speak no more.

Then a man began—thickset, earnest, with a strong Scotch accent.

He talked to the men about him in a rough way that appealed to them. ——

As the crowd stood listening many passed. A few were contemptuous; the majority were indifferent.

If you see these workers you ask perhaps:

"What good do they do?"

That is the question that may be asked of every man that ever lived, and only One can answer it.

The thin, white-faced girl, playing, singing and PREACHING in the dirty street, does this:

She touches the heart of a half-drunken man. Turning from the saloon door he goes home, and takes to his wife and children as much of his wages as is left, a feeling of repentance, good resolutions.

Her tears are answered by the tears of miserable girls and women who sink back into the shadow as they watch her pure face. Through them she helps to undo the horrible, soul-destroying work of brutal civilization. ——

Mysteriously, diversely, the work of the world is done.

The storm, endless in its power, washes down the mountain-tops to fertilize the valley.

The tiny earthworm works in darkness, crumbling up its little patch of earth to make it fit food for plants.

Each does its work.

The mighty intellect with cyclonic force gives to mankind grand, general views of cosmic grandeur, and introduces to minds prepared the "eternal silences," and the vast serene fields of divine law.

THE "CRIMINAL" CLASS DID THIS VIEW OF IT EVER OCCUR TO YOU?

Much interest just now in CRIMINALS.

Much horror aroused by depravity.

Many plans more or less appropriate for making the air pure.

Many good men, politicians, women and bishops, who spent the
Summer at the seaside willing now to spend a few days wiping
"CRIME" off the earth. ——

What is CRIME? Who are the criminals? Who makes the criminals?

Do criminals viciously and voluntarily arise among us, eager to lead hunted lives, eager to be jailed at intervals, eager to crawl in the dark, dodge policemen, work in stripes and die in shame? Hardly.

Will you kindly and patiently follow the lives, quickly sketched, of a boy and a girl?

THE GIRL

Born poor, born in hard luck, her father, or mother, or both, victims of long hours, poor fare, bad air and little leisure.

As a baby she struggles against fate and manages to live while three or four little brothers and sisters die and go back to kind earth.

She crawls around the halls of a tenement, a good deal in the way. She is hunted here and chased there.

She is cold in Winter, ill-fed in Summer, never well cared for.

She gets a little so-called education. Ill-dressed and ashamed beside the other children, she is glad to escape the education. No one at home can help her on. No one away from home cares about her.

She grows up white, sickly, like a potato sprouting in a cellar. At the corner of a fine street she sees the carriages passing with other girls in warm furs, or in fine, cool Summer dresses.

With a poor shawl around her and with heels run down she peers in at the restaurant window, to see other women leading lives very different from hers.

Steadily she has impressed upon her the fact, absolutely undeniable, that as the world is organized there is no especial place for her—certainly no comfort for her.

She finds work, perhaps. Hours as long as the daylight.

Ten minutes late—half a day's fine.

At the end of the day aching feet, aching back, system ill-fed, not enough earned to live upon honestly—and that prospect stretches ahead farther than her poor eyes can see.

"What's the charge, officer?"

"Disorderly conduct, Your Honor."

There's the criminal, good men, politicians, women and bishops, that you are hunting so ardently.

THE BOY

Same story, practically.

He plays on the tenement staircase—cuffed off the staircase.

He plays ball in the street—cuffed, if caught by the policeman.

He swings on the area railing, trying to exercise his stunted muscles—cuffed again.

In burning July, with shirt and trousers on, he goes swimming in the park fountain—caught and cuffed and handed over to "the society."

A few months in a sort of semi-decent imprisonment, treated in a fashion about equivalent to that endured by the sea turtle turned over on its back in the market.

He escapes to begin the same life once more.

He tries for work.

"What do you know?"

"I don't know anything; nobody ever taught me."

He cannot even endure the discipline of ten hours' daily shovelling—it takes education to instil discipline, if only the education of the early pick and shovel.

He has not been taught anything. He has been turned loose in a city full of temptation. He had no real start to begin with, and no effort was ever made to repair his evil beginning. ——

"What's the charge, officer?"

"Attempted burglary; pleads guilty."

"Three years in prison, since it is his first offence."

In prison he gets an education. They teach him how to be a good burglar and not get caught. Patiently the State boards him, and educates him to be a first-rate criminal.

There's your first-rate criminal, Messrs. Bishops, good men, politicians and benevolent women. ——

Dear bishops, noble women, good men and scheming politicians, listen to this story:

In the South Sea Islands they have for contagious diseases a horror as great as your horror of crime.

A man or woman stricken with a loathsome disease, such as smallpox, is seized, isolated, and the individual sores of the smallpox patient are earnestly scraped with sea shells—until the patient dies. It hurts the patient a good deal—without ever curing, of course—but it relieves the feelings of the outraged good ones who wield the sea shells.

You kind-hearted creatures, hunting "crime" in great cities, are like the South Sea Islanders in their treatment of smallpox.

You ardently wield your reforming sea shells and you scrape very earnestly at the sores so well developed. ——

No desire here to decry your earnest efforts.

But if you ever get tired of scraping with sea shells, try vaccination, or, better still, try to take such care of youth, to give such chances and education to the young, as will save them from the least profitable of all careers—CRIME. ——

Rich good men, nice bishops, comfortable, benevolent ladies—every man and woman on Blackwell's Island, every wretched creature living near a "red light," would gladly change places with any of you.

Scrape away with your sea shells, but try also to give a few more and a few better chances in youth to those whom you now hunt as criminals in their mature years.

God creates boys and girls, anxious to live decently.

YOUR SOCIAL SYSTEM makes criminals and fills jails.

THE WONDERFUL MAGNET HOW WILD SUPERSTITION SETTLES DOWN INTO SCIENTIFIC REALITY

Everybody knows something of the peculiarities of the magnet. As a boy you led tiny painted ducks around the water basin, holding a magnet in your hand, or you owned a horseshoe magnet that would pick up nails and needles.

You know now in a general kind of way that the magnet is a very useful as well as a somewhat mysterious thing.

The old Greeks and Romans simply knew that some remarkable iron ore found in Lydia, near the town of Magnesia, and hence called magnet, was capable of drawing and holding pieces of metal.

The ancients had the wildest theories concerning the magnet, just as we have wild theories about things that are new and strange to us to-day.

They thought that the magnet could be used in cases of sickness, that it could attract wood and flesh, that it influenced the human brain, causing melancholy. They believed that the power of a magnet could be destroyed by rubbing garlic on it, and that power brought back again by dipping the magnet in goat's blood. They believed that a magnet could be used to detect bad conduct in a woman; they believed that it would not attract iron in the presence of a diamond. They believed much other nonsense quite as ridiculous as the nonsense that we believe to-day. ——

It must have seemed a great waste of time in wise men in the old days to discuss the magnet or think about it at all. Please observe how the apparent nonsense of early speculation finally ripens into actual utility, and learn to respect those who deal as best they can with questions that seem beyond our comprehension.

First the magnet was made actually and wonderfully useful in the compass. Who discovered the compass nobody knows. It was probably invented by the Chinese and brought to Europe through the Arabs. Anyhow, some genius found out that a small needle brought in contact with the so-called lodestone, or magnetic ore, absorbs the qualities of the lodestone, and when placed on a pivot will always point to the north.

In the magnet there were and there still are many mysteries. A form of perpetual motion seems to be embodied in the principle of magnetism. One strange fact is this, that the weight of the metal is exactly the same before it is magnetized and after it is magnetized.

Early students thought that the magnet pointed toward some particular spot in the sky, perhaps some magnetic star. One genius felt sure that there must be huge mountains of lodestone near the North Pole. This suggestion was followed by ingenious yarns to the effect that in the extreme North ships had to be built with wooden nails, instead of iron nails, as the magnetic mountains would draw the iron nails out of the ship.

After this came the more rational conception that our own earth is a great magnet, and that the little magnet in the compass simply obeys in pointing, the greater force of the earth magnet. ——

This editorial generalizing on the magnet is brought about by an incident telegraphed from Vallejo, California. John Gettegg, apprentice in the Navy Yard, had imbedded in his cheek a flying piece of steel. To get it out would apparently have demanded a painful and difficult surgical operation, as the piece of steel had entered the bone. But the head electrician, Petrio, simply placed near the wounded boy's face an electro-magnet capable of lifting five hundred pounds, and the sharp piece of steel instantly flew out of the cheek and attached itself to the magnet.

So much for one proof of the value of developing what may seem at first to be a foolish set of experiments.

In thousands of ways to-day this magnetic power is utilized.

You can buy strawberries in baskets very cheap, partly because the baskets cost very little for labor. The man who tacks them together uses a magnetized tack hammer. This magnetic tack hammer picks up the tacks of its own accord, and the man drives them in the basket as fast as he can touch the magnet to the heads of the tacks and strike the basket.

In the great steel works where armor plate is made powerful magnets are used to carry the hot plates from one place to another. The magnet lifts up the hot, soft metal without denting it or damaging it and drops it down where it is wanted. The power which moves trolley cars through the streets is nothing in reality but an application of the force of the magnetic principle. ——

That the earth itself is a great magnet cannot be questioned. And there is no doubt that each of us human beings is a compound magnet on his own account, depending for his welfare on magnetic force.

The millions of red corpuscles in the blood, each with its infinitesimal particles of iron, absorb in the lungs and distribute throughout the body the electric forces on which we depend, and with which we do our work.

When you read of men and women dealing in a blundering kind of a way with abstract, abstruse speculations and problems, do not laugh at them too heartily. They are no more ridiculous than the old Greeks who thought that a magnet could be regulated by garlic or goat's blood. And their wild theories of to-day may settle down into great utility centuries from now. This applies to Christian Science, faith cures, telepathy, and the many other speculations of the present day. There is unquestionably much future fruit and value in many or all of them.

WHO IS INDEPENDENT? NOBODY

We all have our moments of imagining ourselves INDEPENDENT characters. We take pride in our independence and are never as foolish as when trying to prove how independent we are.

Every man, to begin with, is born absolutely at the mercy of his ancestry. You have not a thing in you, and you never will have a thing in you, that you did not inherit from some one of the thousands and thousands of ancestors, all of whom are dimly stored away in your complex make-up.

You may develop marvellously the faculties which they gave you.

But you ARE DEPENDENT on those who brought you into the world, and upon those back of them.

The Kaffir, sober, industrious, honest, with all the virtues rolled up within him, has not a fragment of one chance in ten thousand billions of equalling the achievements of a tenth-rate white man whose ancestral start was better. ——

After birth you start with dependence on your ancestors, and after youth you are dependent on your education.

Facts are your tools, and you can't work without them.

If your mind has the right formation, if your brain is provided with the deep convolutions, and good luck has supplied you with a good education in youth, the whole thing is dependent on your health—on your liver, your stomach, or some other part of your internal machinery.

Very often your success is dependent on your temper and tact. These depend on your digestion. Digestion, of course, depends on your cook, and the cook's attention to business may depend on the politeness of the policeman in front of the house.

You may FEEL absolutely independent and THINK you are independent, when as a matter of fact you are miserably dependent on the mood of the policeman who has snubbed the lady who cooks your food.

WHEN WE BEGIN USING LAND UNDER THE OCEANS BIG WORK AHEAD FOR MAN, KIND FRIENDS

There is a great deal of water on this earth of ours and a great deal of land underneath it.

All the treasures of these hidden plains are simply put away for our future use by bountiful nature, as prudent parents put money in the savings bank for their young ones. ——

Already in Chili they are mining coal under the bed of the Pacific Ocean, and the traveler may ride on electric cars through solid tunnels of coal beneath the waters of the greatest ocean.

The tin mines in Wales extend far out beneath the sea.

Workers in the Calumet and Hecla mines work beneath the waters of
Lake Superior.

Oil wells are worked out beyond the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
You may see the oil derricks just off Santa Barbara's surf.

In the bay of San Francisco artesian wells, going through the preliminary depths of salt water, bring the water of fresh submarine springs to the surface.

But these little enterprises are but faint beginnings of the great work that man has to do in exploiting the wealth beneath the waters covering two-thirds of the earth's surface.

This earth will be quite a romantic abode when sub-oceanic exploitation reaches full development, when the great gold mines beneath the waters are indicated simply by latitude and longitude.

Mars, with his huge canals distributing a planet's waters scientifically, will be matched perhaps by our network of tunnels under the water from here to Asia, and by our boring, with the aid of cooling mediums, toward the earth's centre and bringing up metals in a molten state.

Before he finishes with her, man will make old earth know that he is at work "in her midst." He will make the harnessing of a tiny Niagara or the boring of a poor little isthmus seem feeble efforts.

WHERE YOUR BODY CAME FROM LET IT BE SCATTERED AS IT WAS GATHERED

Did you ever think about the construction of the body which you inhabit? Did it ever occur to you that your shoulders and hands and chest and legs and lungs are made of contributions from widely different parts of the earth?

Your brain, a wonderfully complex machine, the seat of thought and of the will, is packed away in darkness in the bony skull.

The heart, working ceaselessly, pumps the blood that feeds the brain and makes possible its work.

The eyes, with the aid of the nerves that perceive light, guide you. The ears, with the nerves that interpret sound waves, tell their story.

Like a central operator with a million wires leading to him, your INDIVIDUALITY, a wonderful mystery without form, matter or name, sits in your brain guiding the body. ——

Where did the body come from?

Part of it came from potatoes grown on Long Island, and part of it from spices grown in Ceylon.

In your nerves there is the extract of tea leaves gathered by a Chinese girl on the other side of the world. Your blood is purified and made red by the wind that blew across the Rocky Mountains only a few hours ago. That current of oxygen has helped build up your strength.

A month ago an ox was eating grass in Texas.

Many millions of years ago the pollen of huge fern trees was falling to the earth in the carboniferous era and making coal.

To-day, part of the backbone of the ox from Texas with the meat attached is laid on the fire of coal made by those fern trees, and the Texas ox and the fern pollen combined help to build up your body.

That same body is three-quarters water, and of that water part was once the Pacific Ocean; part, perhaps, was drunk up by a whale before it reached you; and part floated in clouds over the Southern Sea. ——

Your imagination can carry the picture as far as it will—to the fisherman catching your sardines in the North, and the dark man gathering your oranges in the South or your dates in some oasis.

We want to suggest this idea to you.

Since the body is gathered from all parts of the world, from all corners of our little speck of the material universe, should it not be scattered, at death, as it was gathered during life?

Is not the destruction of the body by fire far better than hideous burial in the earth?

The body that fire destroys goes back to nature, instantly reduced to its original elements. Is not such disposition of the body more in accord with nature's laws and with respect for the dead than our present custom?

Would it not be pleasanter to think that one we cared for had gone back to the air, with only a handful of ashes remaining, than to think of the dark, close, lonesome grave far below the sunlight, clogging and uselessly occupying part of the earth, which should be devoted to growth and cheerfulness?

HOW MARRIAGE BEGAN HAPHAZARD REFLECTIONS ON GRAVE TOPICS.

At stated times we mortals have stated visitations.

One day it is the grippe, next day the financial problem.

Just now it is the marriage and divorce question, with much learned expounding by the good and the pure, such as bishops and members of Sorosis. ——

What is marriage? How did it begin? Whence does it come?

Why is it a feature of human life wherever that life is found.

You must begin with such questions. Always study beginnings. Nothing can be learned by taking hold of a thing in the middle and examining its imperfections.

The first priest to join man and woman together was no benign being with lawn sleeves and soul-stirring words.

Marriage was brought about on this earth by the will and wisdom of God Almighty working through primitive babyhood.

In the old days, when the world was cruder, men and women ran wild through forests and swamps. They fought nature, fought each other, as savage as other beasts around them. There was no love; there was no marriage. The instincts of self-preservation and of reproduction worked alone to keep the race here through its hard childhood. ——

But in cold stone caves or in rough nests under fallen tree trunks savage children were born and nursed by their savage mothers with savage affection.

Through those infants of the stone age, or of ages much earlier, marriage and pure affection came into the world.

It is not hard to reproduce in our minds the picture of the first marriage.

A savage woman, half human, half ape, with rough, matted locks hanging round her face, sits holding her new-born baby, protecting it from wind and cold.

It is a queer baby, covered perhaps with reddish hair, its brow no higher than a rat's. Its jaw protrudes; its tiny, grimy hands clutch with monkey power all things within reach.

Along comes the father, full of plans to kill a mammoth or a cave bear; interested in his stone-tipped club, but caring nothing for the mother, who has been for some time only a whining nuisance.

He stops for a second to look at the small creature which he has added to earth's animal life.

Its misshapen skull, ferret eyes, miniature shoulders—something about it reminds him of his royal self, as studied in the pool. He stoops to look closer. His bristly hairs are grabbed, and a weird, insane, toothless grin lights up the little monkey face.

Then the savage takes a new view of life; there the marriage institution and the marriage problem are born simultaneously.

Says the mammoth hunter, with whistling words and hoarse throat sounds half articulated:

"I like this baby. He's like me. Let me hold him. Don't you go out with him looking for food, and don't leave him alone while I'm gone. I've got a bear located. No one can beat me killing bears. I'll bring the bear's heart to you this evening. You can give this baby some of the blood. It will do him good. Don't have anything to say to that mammoth hunter in the next swamp. I want you to stick to me. I'll look after you. I have taken a fancy to that baby. He looks very much like me."

Off goes the father, and that savage mother, in a primitive way, is a wife. Hereafter she is to be cared for. Bears will be killed for her, even while she has children to keep her busy and unattractive. Society takes a new turn and the red-haired baby has done it.

To childhood, helpless and beautiful, we owe marriage and all that growth of morality which is gradually making us really civilized.

The basis of all real growth is altruism; and altruism, the inclination to think more of others than of yourself, came into the world through the cradle.

We owe such civilization as we have acquired to children.

"A softened pressure of an uncouth hand, a human gleam in an almost animal eye, an endearment in an inarticulate voice—feeble things enough. Yet in these faint awakenings lay the hope of the human race." ——

The influence of childhood has transformed mere animal attraction into unselfish affection. It has substituted family life for savage life. The interests of childhood demand that marriage and its responsibilities be held sacred.

Duty to future generations demands that divorce be made difficult and considered a misfortune.

Marriage, brought into the world through the influence of children, should be dissolved only with due regard for the interests of children. ——

An unhappy marriage is earth's worst affliction. Quite true.
But it is not affliction wasted.

Examples are needed to warn the young against the matrimonial recklessness which underlies most unhappy marriages.

Unhappy wives and husbands are human light-houses—lonely, but useful.

If a gentle little Alderney calf should marry a sleek young zebra and afterward get kicked to death for her pains, we should all sympathize with her. But we should expect other mild-eyed Alderneys after that to beware of zebras.

As a matter of fact, this present divorce talk, which sets the good to fluttering, really interests a very unimportant class.

The man who spends his life spending what he didn't earn, feeding his physical senses, who goes from rum to the races, from the races to the opera, and from the opera to roulette, wears out his nervous sensations.

He then thinks that he is unhappily married. He has possibly driven his wife to being seven kinds of a fool.

But that is not her fault.

A man who marries a woman undertakes to make her happy and keep her busy. If he keeps his contract, she will keep hers.

If he fails, he has no right to experiment on another unfortunate. The divorce class is a self-indulgent, malformed class, not worth notice. ——

Professor Cope, an earnest man and serious thinker, believed that marriages should be contracted on probation—say for five years, with the right on both sides to refuse a renewal.

Theoretically, this would be beautiful. It would make courtship permanent, abolish curl-papered wives in the morning, and tipsy, bragging husbands at night.

But it wouldn't work. It would be all right for women. They are only too willing to be faithful and permanent.

But men cannot be trusted. The animal in them, so essential long ago, when the race was struggling for a foothold, has not been obliterated. They have got to be MADE responsible and HELD responsible. ——

As a matter of fact, there really is no marriage or divorce problem which sensible beings need consider.

At present men are not good enough to be trusted with liberal marriage or divorce laws. When they are good enough the laws will not be wanted. For the man fully developed and fully moral will know what he is doing when he goes into a marriage contract.

His stability of character will insure permanency. There will be no need of laws.

At one time the English laws regulated the conditions under which a man might beat his wife. "The stick," said the law, "must not be thicker than the husband's thumb."

Some Englishmen have very thick thumbs, and the law was doubtless hard on some thin, worn-out women.

But that law is no longer needed.

Men have outgrown the need of regulations in wife-beating. In time they will outgrow the need of laws regarding infidelity and lack of self-respect.

MAN'S WILLINGNESS TO WORK

What a fortunate thing it is that men want to work and like to live! Suppose for a moment that the out-of-work, hungry, unlucky creatures, numbering one hundred thousand in New York City, should suddenly change their character.

It is a harmless supposition, as it implies that a great body of good, though unlucky, men should be suddenly metamorphosed. But suppose, for instance, that one hundred thousand men should have a meeting and say:

"The State provides food, lodging and good care for every thief. It does not provide anything for us. Let us therefore accept the situation like philosophers and become thieves."

Suppose the hundred thousand men thereupon, very quietly, without any show of violence, should each proceed to steal something and then announce the intention to accept the consequence by pleading guilty. It would embarrass the State and the reigning powers, would it not?

What could society do with a hundred thousand self-confessed thieves to take care of? It could not lock them up. It could not let them go. It could not nominally sentence them and have the Governor pardon them, because the hundred thousand would then proceed to steal something else.

What could be done? Nothing. There is no punishment save imprisonment for theft, and the wholesale thieves would ask for and demand imprisonment with the usual rations.

We think society is well balanced and that everything is ingeniously provided for.

So it is; but everything hinges on the extraordinary fact that the hungry, thin, common, shiftless, luckless man at the very bottom is still a MAN. He will not be a thief, and he will die of hunger and cold, as poor fellows do almost every winter day, rather than take the food that society guarantees to the thief.

We attribute much to our own wisdom and the wisdom of our laws. But we owe almost everything to the instinct of self-preservation and to that second, very peculiar, instinct called pride.

THE HUMAN BRAIN BEATS THE COAL MINES

For six million years, during the carboniferous period, the tree ferns dropped their pollen dust to the earth forming coal beds which now cook our dinners and incidentally make J. Pierpont Morgan so prosperous.

A good deal of useless anxiety has been devoted to the questions:

What will the human race do when the coal gives out? Shall we freeze, or begin planting huge forests of wood, or what?

In the first place, coal will not give out for a long, long time.

In the second place, its disappearance will not make the slightest difference, for in the few cubic inches of the human brain nature has stored up treasures greater than all those hidden in the depths of the earth. The creation of the human brain took more years than the creation of the coal fields, but the brain's resources are inexhaustible.

A German workman now comes along who has discovered a chemical substitute for coal, better than coal in many ways, and before this German shall have been dead many years some other will find a further substitute far better and cheaper than his.

There is endless heat power in the action of the tides, in the rush of Niagara, in the winds, and in endless chemical combinations. Heat is motion, and the Universe is motion. Men will soon cease lighting tiny bonfires to obtain crude heat in a crude way. Electricity or the sun's own rays, concentrated for heating purposes, will do the work without any digging in mines by men, or delving in ashes and clinkers by women.

The story of antiquity, more or less fictitious, of the burning of a fleet with the aid of a glass and the sunbeams, will be matter-of-fact reality long before the coal shall have been exhausted.

HOW THE OTHER PLANETS WILL TALK TO US

We talk of civilization as though it necessarily implied improvement.

Civilization means the school and the library, but it also means the prison and the poorhouse.

Two short stories illustrate different views of what we call civilization:

Aristippus was a young Greek gentleman of large means, genuine intellectual power, a sense of humor and a reputation as a philosopher.

He was on his way to Corinth with a young lady named Lais, or possibly he was coming from Corinth with her. Anyhow, he was wrecked on the voyage. If you know anything about the reputation of Lais, you know that the philosopher was badly employed, and that the Greek gods doubtless wrecked his vessel to impress upon his mind the importance of morality.

Thrown ashore on a barren stretch of sand, the philosopher was very sad at first. He observed on the sand the remains of certain geometrical drawings, and instantly exclaimed: "There is help near. Here I see signs of thinking men, of civilization." ——

Voltaire tells of wrecked individuals thrown on a lonely coast, and also much distressed and frightened.

They saw no geometrical tracings in the sand. But on a bleak moor in the twilight they saw the black beams of a gibbet, and below the cross-piece, swinging in the wind, they saw a human skeleton with bony wrists and ankles chained together.

Prayerfully the wanderers dropped on their knees and exclaimed with upturned eyes:

"Thank God, we have got back to civilization." ——

Thus, you see, there are varying signs of civilization. There is a great gulf between the signs perceived by Aristippus—signs of the mental activity which engages in geometrical demonstrations—and Voltaire's sign of civilization—the brutal execution of a brutal criminal. ——

Those accustomed to waste time in speculations that cannot bring a financial return may be interested in the following application of the sign of civilization which Aristippus immediately recognized back in the days of two thousand years ago.

We know that some day the inhabitants on Mars or some other planet will want to talk to us. They have doubtless been studying us and consider us still too barbarous and primitive to be worth talking to.

But when we become semi-civilized, in the cosmic sense of the word, the older and wiser planets will get ready to open communication with us.

How will they go about it? They are perhaps absolutely different from us, in shape, in manner of thought, in every conceivable way, including language, customs, and so on.

BUT GEOMETRICAL, MATHEMATICAL FACTS ARE THE SAME THROUGHOUT THE UNIVERSE.

Will not the wise Martian who wants to speak to us and decides to flash some message down here on our clouds, or on the surface of the water, utilize the universality of geometrical truths in order to make us understand that thinking beings are trying to talk to us?

The sum of the angles of any triangle is equal to two right angles.

That is true of every triangle, no matter what its shape, no matter whether it be drawn on this earth or on the most distant sun.

Therefore, when the Martian gentleman gets ready to talk to us he need only repeatedly place before us two right angles followed by a triangle, or a triangle followed by two right angles. Instantly, like Aristippus, we can say there is civilization in Mars, or wherever that sign comes from, or at least there is organized thought. The mind that is flashing that sign knows something about geometry.

Of course, we should also recognize "signs of civilization" if the Martians should project upon our atmosphere a skeleton hanging in chains. But it is to be hoped that the Martians have got beyond that particular evidence of civilization.

SHALL WE DO WITHOUT SLEEP SOME DAY?

A half-developed being like man, hanging midway between primitive barbarism and ultimate perfection, should study the insect tribes which appear to have realized the possibilities of development in their line.

The study of the ant and the bee, the spider and the scorpion should fill us with hope. We should say to ourselves:

"If these tiny fragments of life can develop so highly, what may not WE hope for in the way of ultimate possibilities? Our beginning is so much more full of promise than the beginnings of our tiny insect brothers." ——

This writer, taking his own advice, which is most unusual, has been trying to get acquainted with some insects in the hope of cheering himself and getting new ideas.

From the female scorpion we acquire fresh veneration for the possibilities of maternal devotion.

The mother of the Gracchi has been well advertised because she preferred her sons to jewelry. The Russian mother who feeds herself to the wolves, instead of throwing her boy over the back of the sleigh in the usual way, is also highly praised. But their devotion shrinks to nothing when compared with that of any poor mother scorpion of Mexico's sandy tracts.

As soon as her young scorpions arrive, they climb to her back, half a hundred of them or more. She moves about with them, protecting them, avoiding danger, giving them the sunlight. Meanwhile they are feeding on her body. Her movements get gradually slower and slower; finally they cease. The young scorpions depart leaving the mother scorpion simply an empty shell. We should dislike to see any such exhibition of tenderness among human beings, but we can't help admiring the scorpion.

Mr. Scorpion, placed as was Captain Dreyfus, would sting himself to death. They are a determined race. ——

Spiders who construct tiny balloons with little cars all complete are wonderful creatures. They cross chasms in their balloons, throwing out bits of trailing web which seem to act as rudders. In their little way and in a perfectly adequate fashion they have solved aerial navigation, which still puzzles us. We admire spiders and kill only those with yellow stomachs, which are "poison." ——

But up to the present we have found the ant the most interestingly suggestive creature. He has developed and understands stirpiculture—the improvement of the race by careful breeding—which with us is as yet mere theory, and as we look down at the ant, we look up to him because the strangely active creature manages to do without sleep.

We human beings drowse through thirty years of our threescore and ten, but the ant is awake and working all the time.

If the ant has managed to live without sleep, if he has acquired the faculty of lifelong wakefulness, why should we not do as much in time? We take it for granted that sleep is essential, as we take everything else for granted. We used to take it for granted that the earth was flat, but we have stopped that. Sleep was at one time forced upon man and other animals.

The earth in its rollings turned away from the sun once in every twenty-four hours. In the darkness of the beginning man said to himself: "If I go walking around, I shall fall into a hole, so I shall lie down and wait until the sun comes again."

He did as all the animals did before him for millions of years. Since that time, man has conquered darkness. Why should he not ultimately conquer sleep?

We know that thin men, nervous, highly organized, do with far less sleep than others. We know that old age requires less sleep than youth.

Can we not cultivate and develop the characteristics which make sleep less necessary? Higher races of apes have abolished tails.

Can't we abolish sleep? ——

As old age needs less sleep than babyhood, so in our maturity as a human race we shall probably demand less sleep than now in our racial babyhood. Perhaps none at all will be needed.

If that happens our lives will be doubled in value, they will be complete. The hours of sunlight will be devoted to examination and admiration of nature's beauties on this earth.

The hours of darkness, given up to sleep no longer, will be devoted to the study of space, to investigation among other worlds.

That kind of life will be worth while. Bear in mind that we shall only really begin to live on this earth when we shall have settled all the little social and material questions here and shall have begun in earnest the study of the universe in which we are a speck.

The days of the future will be given up to artistic enjoyment of the beautiful. The nights will be devoted to intellectual development and research.

Man will LIVE.

THE THREE BEST THINGS IN THE WORLD

If you had choice of all qualities which man can possess, which three would you declare most important?

This question is submitted as interesting every man. We give our answer; if yours is different, send it here. ——

SELF-CONTROL.

JUSTICE.

IMAGINATION.

Those we think the most important elements in the human character. A man fully and evenly equipped with all three would be greater than any the world has known. ——

SELF-CONTROL you must start with.

It makes life worth while. It frees you from the danger of remorse, the wasted time of self- reproach. It sees opportunities as they come; saves you from damaging temptation. It is as important to a brain as is physical equilibrium to a work of masonry.

A man without self-control, a building out of plumb, cannot endure.

JUSTICE.

It is the foundation of all reputation worth the having. It is to man as necessary as the compass to a ship. It is the compass.

Justice will give reputation for greatness though you create nothing great. It will win affectionate reverence in life and a gratifying gravestone at life's end. ——

IMAGINATION.

Greatest gift to man. It finds him grovelling here a pithecoid littleness.

The rough hair is gone from his body. His thumb has lost its monkey smallness; he walks flat on his feet.

But beyond that he has naught else to thank material nature for.

All the rest comes to him from imagination. Marvellous work she performs. She takes naked man with his low forehead, with his gruntings and whistlings through his teeth, and makes of him what man was meant to be.

Very slowly she works, but ceaselessly. Her task is not nearly ended. At her first glimmerings man's real life begins. He learns from her to add wood to a fire. No monkey ever did it. That stamps him a man.

Soon, with her help, he leaves the earth and travels off ten thousand million miles into space. He counts the suns in the Milky Way; travels in the air, under the water; harnesses lightning, controls nature. By IMAGINATION he is made CAPTAIN of this earthen ship on which he travels through space.

IMAGINATION separates Archimedes, working at his problems in the sunlight, from the vile soldier that slaughtered him.

Shakespeare rattling his ale pot and Johanna, the ape, shaking her bars at the Zoo are alike, save for difference of imagination.

SELF-CONTROL to balance you.

JUSTICE to guide you.

IMAGINATION to lend creative power.

"Equilibrium, Direction, Creation."

The TRINITY ardently to be desired. ——

Long ago Plato announced that apparent differences are deceptive; that all things existing come from one casting—the mind of God—which he names "idea."

Similarly to-day the solemn-thinking German tells you that matter and force are identical, that the interchangeable character of forces—heat light, magnetism, etc.—is part of the a, b, c of proved phenomena.

Haeckel stops digging up old bones and classifying sea microscopic organisms long enough to write "Monism," expressing his belief that God is anything and everything from Orion to a tumble- bug.

It is quite easy to show that the selected three—self-control, justice and imagination—are in reality one. Each exists as part of the others. Each is made up of the other two.

But this column is not devoted to any save simple things.

The question is this, once more:

What are man's three most useful qualities—which three would you possess?

Do not call this question idle or believe that we cannot change ourselves. We CAN.

Napoleon said: "Never believe that a man ever changed his temperament."

But Napoleon often said what was foolish.

It ought to delight you to know that you can change yourself if you want to, as you can change the arrangement of your back parlor.

Try it. It is hard work, but good exercise.

THE VALUE OF SOLITUDE

We inflict a piece of advice upon our readers. It is intended especially for the young, who have still to get their growth, whose characters and possibilities are forming.

GET AWAY FROM THE CROWD WHEN YOU CAN. KEEP YOURSELF TO YOURSELF, IF ONLY FOR A FEW HOURS DAILY. ——

Full individual growth, special development, rounded mental operations—all these demand room, separation from others, solitude, self-examination and the self-reliance which solitude gives.

The finest tree stands off by itself in the open plain. Its branches spread wide. It is a complete tree, better than the cramped tree in the crowded forest.

The animal to be admired is not that which runs in herds, the gentle browsing deer or foolish sheep thinking only as a fraction of the flock, incapable of personal independent direction. It's the lonely prowling lion or the big black leopard with the whole world for his private field that is worth looking at.

The man who grows up in a herd, deer-like, thinking with the herd, acting with the herd, rarely amounts to anything. ——

Do you want to succeed? Grow in solitude, work, develop in solitude, with books and thoughts and nature for friends. Then, if you want the crowd to see how fine you are, come back to it and boss it if it will let you.

Constant craving for indiscriminate company is a sure sign of mental weakness.

Schopenhauer—a sour genius, BUT a genius—speaks contemptuously of the negroes herded in small rooms unable to get "enough of one another's snub-nose company." ——

If you enter a village or small town and want to find the man or youth of ability, do you look for him leaning over the village pool table, sitting on the grocery store boxes, lounging in the smelly tavern with other vacant minds?

Certainly not. You find him at work, and you find him by himself.

Think how public institutions dwarf the brains and souls of unhappy children condemned to live in them. No chance there for individual, separate development. Millions of children have grown up in such places millions of sad nonentities. ——

Here is what Goethe says:

"Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, doch ein Charakter in dem Strome der Welt." (Talent is developed in solitude, character in the rush of the world.)

You wonder why so much ability comes from the country—why a Lincoln comes from the backwoods while you, flourishing in a great city, can barely keep your place as a typewriter.

The countryman has GOT to be by himself much of the time whether he wishes to or not. If he has anything in him it comes out.

Astronomy, man's grandest study, grew up among the shepherds.
You of the cities never even see the stars, much less study them.

——

Don't be a sheep or a deer. Don't devote your hours to the company and conversation of those who know as little as you do. Don't think hard only when you are trying to remember a popular song or to decide on the color of your Winter overcoat or necktie.

Remember that you are an individual, not a grain of dust or a blade of grass. Don't be a sheep; be a man. It has taken nature a hundred million years to produce you. Don't make her sorry she took the time.

Get out in the park and walk and think. Get up in your hall bedroom, read, study, write what you think. Talk more to yourself and less to others. Avoid magazines, avoid excessive newspaper reading.

There is not a man of average ability but could make a striking career if he could but WILL to do the best that is in him.

Proofs of growth due to solitude are endless. Milton's greatest
work was done when blindness, old age and the death of the
Puritan government forced him into completest seclusion.
Beethoven did his best work in the solitude of deafness.

Bacon would never have been the great leader of scientific thought had not his trial and disgrace forced him from the company of a grand retinue and stupid court to the solitude of his own brain.

"Multum insola fuit anima mea." (My spirit hath been much alone.) This he said often, and lucky it was for him. Loneliness of spirit made him.

Get a little of it for yourself.

Drop your club, your street corner, your gossipy boarding-house table. Drop your sheep life and try being a man.

It may improve you.

THERE SHOULD BE A MONUMENT TO TIME

Time has no real existence. Yet time is man's most precious possession.

Time is defined as a "succession of events." What we call an hour means certain movements in the machinery of a watch. What we call a day means one revolution of the earth upon its axis, the turning of its surface toward the light of the sun. Time is the most mysterious factor in our lives and thoughts. It never had a beginning, it cannot possibly have an end.

Time only exists for us in the actual moment in which we live. Yet our thoughts are in the time of past and future, and hardly ever on the actual reality of the moment.

With the ceasing of our own consciousness, time ceases, so far as we are concerned. If you go to sleep and sleep soundly, you cannot tell when you awake whether you have slept a minute or an hour. Time stops when YOU cease to observe the succession of events. In dying, we duplicate on a big and prolonged scale our little daily sleeps in life.

If a man were told that after death his soul would not regain consciousness for a thousand millions of years, he would worry, and complain of the "long time." But it would make no difference to him whether the time were a thousand millions of years or forty seconds—time would not exist for him; he would not know the difference.

There is little doubt that to the ephemeridae, creatures that live but for a day, that day must seem as long as our century, for in their life of incessant activity and agitation every second is a long space. And there is no doubt that to the giant turtles of the Galapagos Islands, heavy monsters that live ten centuries or longer, a week is a fraction of time far less important than an hour to us. ——

A mysterious thing is time and its divisions. Man manufactures a watch capable of registering a fraction of a second. And in the force called light we have a power that can go seven times around the world in one second.

We estimate our time by years. It takes one year for our little earth to spin round the sun. And during that year it turns three hundred and sixty-five times on its own axis. While the entire body of our earth flies through space, accompanying the sun on its journey, the northern extremity of our planet has a separate circular motion of its own. This circular motion takes twenty-seven thousand years to complete one circle, and as it moves in this inconceivably slow journey our pole selects for us and points out the various suns which in turn we call the North Star.

We have written thus much to fix the attention of readers on the question of time. Now, how does it affect you? Time represents your only chance, your only wealth, your only possibility for achieving anything.

The man who lasts fifty years lives about four hundred and thirty-eight thousand hours. Sleep takes at least one-third, or one hundred and forty-six thousand hours. The processes of eating, washing, dressing, getting up and going to bed take up at least three hours per day, or fifty-four thousand seven hundred and fifty hours.

In addition to all this TIME cut out of our lives there is the time devoted to amusement, the time devoted to idle dreaming—and yet millions of people are wondering how they can "PASS THE TIME."

In every great city and in every small town there should be a monument to time. Young children should be taken to see it, clergymen should preach at the foot of it on the sacred importance of the few hours of activity given to us here. As the sand runs through an hour glass, so you run your short race on this earth. That passing sand means the passing of your chances for making your life worth while. Instead of thinking how you WILL pass the time, cross-examine yourself and ask yourself how you HAVE passed the time thus far.

What did you do last year—what use did you make of the time as it went by? What did you do yesterday? What are you going to do to-day? You possess a mind organized for practically unlimited thinking and studying. How many of your hours do you live as a thinking, studying man? How many do you live on a par with an ox chewing his cud in the field?

The ox does not waste HIS time. It is his business to grow fat and produce beef. He uses every hour. It is your business to use your time in the development of your mind, in dealing with the duties and problems that are put before you.

Every young man can make a success if he will really look upon each hour as an OPPORTUNITY, and cease to look upon the hours as useless things, to be thrown away.

One hour will give you a knowledge of some good book, or wisely spent, with a purpose of improving your health, it will make your brain more efficient and add to the value of all future hours.

If you have a horse, a bicycle, a gun, you feel that because you
HAVE it you ought to USE it.

How much more should you feel that you ought to use your TIME, in using which you use your own brain! Surely, your brain is more important and more worthy of conscientious use than a bicycle or a gun.

Talk to children on this question of time. Teach them that respect for time means respect for their own lives and success in life.

A MOTHER'S WORK AND HER HOPES

This editorial is not written for women. It is written for MEN, and for boys; for the millions who fail to appreciate the work that mothers do, for the millions that ignore the self-sacrifice and devotion upon which society is based.

On a hot night, in the dusty streets of a dirty city, you see hundreds of women sitting in the doorways, TAKING CARE OF BABIES.

In lonesome farm houses, far out on monotonous plains, with the late sun setting on a long day of hard work, you find women, cheerful and persevering, TAKING CARE OF BABIES.

In the middle of the night, in earliest morning, when MEN sleep, all over the world, in ice huts North, in southern tents, in big houses and in dingy tenements, you find women awake, cheerfully and gladly TAKING CARE OF BABIES. ——

We respect and praise the man selfishly working for himself.

If he builds up a great industry and a great personal fortune, we praise him.

If he risks his life for personal glory and for praise, we praise him.

If he shows courage even in saving his own carcass from destruction, we praise him.

There was never a man whose courage, or devotion, could be compared with that of a woman caring for her baby.

The mother's love is unselfish, and it has no limit this side of the grave.

You will find ONE man in a thousand who will risk his life for a cause.

You will find a THOUSAND women in a thousand who will risk their lives for their babies.

Everything that a man has and is he owes to his mother. From her he gets health, brain, encouragement, moral character, and ALL his chances of success.

How poorly the mother's service is repaid by men individually, and by society as a whole!

The individual man feels that he has done much if he gives sufficient money and a LITTLE attention to her who brought him from nothingness into life and sacrificed her sleep and youth and strength for his sake.

Society, the aggregate of human beings, feels that its duty is done when a few hospitals are opened for poor mothers, and a little medicine doled out in cold-hearted fashion to the sick child.

Fortunately, it may truly be said that the great man is almost always appreciative of his greater mother.

Napoleon was cold, jealous of other men, monumentally egotistical when comparing himself with other sons of women. But he reverenced and appreciated the noble woman who bore him, lived for him, and watched over him to the end. He said:

"It is to my mother, to her good principles, that I owe my success and all I have that is worth while. I do not hesitate to say that the future of the child depends on the mother." ——

The future of the individual child depends on the individual mother, and the future of the race depends on the mothers of the race.

Think what has been done for mankind by thousands of millions of perfectly devoted mothers.

Every mother is entirely DEVOTED, entirely HOPEFUL, entirely
CONFIDENT that no future is too great for her baby's deserts.

The little head—often hopelessly ill-shaped—rolls about feebly on the thin neck devoid of muscles. The toothless gums chew whatever comes along. The wondering eyes look feebly, aimlessly about, without focus or concentration. The future human being, to the cold-blooded onlooker, is a useless little atom added to the human sea of nonentity.

But to the mother that baby is the marvel of all time. There is endless meaning in the first mumblings, endless soul in the senile, baby smile, unlimited possibilities in the knobby forehead and round, hairless head. She sees in the future of the baby responsibilities of government, and feels that one so perfectly lovely must eventually be acclaimed ruler by mankind.

As a result of perfect confidence in its future, the mother gives to every baby perfect devotion, perfect and affectionate moral education. Each child begins life inspired by the most beautiful example of altruism and self-sacrifice.

Kindness has gradually taken the place of brutality among human beings, because every baby at its birth has found itself surrounded by absolute kindness.

The mother's kindness forms moral character.

The mother's confidence and encouragement stimulate ambition and inspire courage.

The mother's patient watchfulness gives good health, and fights disease when it comes.

The mother's wrathful protection shields the child from the stern and dwarfing severity of fathers.

Truly, a man may and should be judged by his feeling toward his own mother, and toward the mothers of other men—of ALL men.

In the character of Christ, whose last earthly thought on Golgotha was for His Mother, as in the character of the hard-working, ignorant man whose earnings go to make his mother comfortable, the most beautiful trait is devotion to the mother who suffers and works for her children, from the hours that precede their birth through all the years that they spend on earth together.

Honor thy father and THY MOTHER.

And honor the mothers of other men. Make their task easier through fair payment of the men who support the children, through good public schools for their children, through respectful treatment of ALL women.

The mother is happy. For she knows "the deep joy of loving some one else more than herself."

You honor yourself, and prove yourself worthy of a good mother and of final success, when you do something for the mothers of the world.

YOUR WORK IS YOUR BRAIN'S GYMNASIUM

For "buyers" in big stores,

For clerks in little stores,

For office boys,

For typewriters, reporters, car conductors, household domestics, for all who are hired to work for others, this article is intended.

There is no greater mistake than skimping your work—BECAUSE YOU
ARE WORKING FOR ANOTHER, AND FEAR YOU MAY DO TOO MUCH.

For your own sake remember that whatever you do in the way of honest concentrated work you do FIRST OF ALL FOR YOURSELF.

Only one thing in the world can improve you and better your condition, and that thing is your own effort.

You begin life with certain mental faculties, and with certain muscular faculties. Their development or decay depends entirely on yourself.

No work that you do is worthless. It will NEVER pay you to neglect or slur the task that you have undertaken.

You may be idle, in the thought that you are indulging yourself at the expense of your employer. It is a dishonest thought, and it is a stupid thought at the same time.

You may rob your employer of the time that he pays for, but when you shirk your work you rob yourself first of all. ——

You may say that your employer pays you too little. Perhaps he does. But that is no reason for hurting your moral character through dishonesty. It is no excuse for failing to develop yourself.

The store, or factory, or office in which you work is to your mind what a gymnasium is to your muscles.

You enter a gymnasium AND PAY FOR THE PRIVILEGE OF WORKING
THERE.

You do not say to yourself: "This gymnasium belongs to another man. The profits go to him, and so I'll not work hard."

On the contrary, you realize that the owner of the gymnasium gives you the chance to develop your muscles, and you thank him, although he makes you pay for the privilege. And you do your very best, on the trapeze, rings, parallel bars, or in any other direction.

Act in your work as you do in your gymnasium hours.

There is no kind of work that can fail to make you a better and more successful man if you work at it honestly and loyally.

If you sweep an office, sweep it well. And begin punctually each day, remembering that punctuality acquired in sweeping an office may be used later in governing a city.

Train your mind through your work, whatever it is.

Study the lives of those who have succeeded. You will see that they did whatever they did as well as they could.

Edison was an ordinary telegraph operator. But he was not content with merely working as others worked. He worked very hard, devised means to make more valuable the instruments of his employers. Soon he was an employer himself, and what is far better than being an employer, he was a creator of new ideas and a benefactor of the world. ——

Intelligent readers will not misinterpret this advice to mean that they should OVERWORK themselves, or work regardless of their own physical welfare.

The right course is this:

Do as much as you can in the present, without drawing on your future reserves.

Don't work all night and then go on the next day. Such effort impairs permanently your store of vitality, and that vitality is your capital.

But never form the habit of neglecting work, of shamming and lying instead of achieving honestly.

You may deceive one employer, or ten. But 36> you can't deceive nature, and you can't deceive yourself.

You can form good habits only through regular work. You can develop your faculties only through exercising them honestly and systematically. ——

MERELY WORKING "FAIRLY WELL" IS NOT ENOUGH.

If you want to run a mile fast, you do not merely jog. You try every day to run the mile faster than you did the day before. If you want to learn to jump high, you strain your muscles and try over and over to do what you can't do. Ultimately you achieve it.

Keep that in mind when you work. Remember that you must wind yourself up. The most watchful employer may discharge you. But he cannot wind you up.

Be a self-winding machine, and keep yourself wound up.

Your hardest effort may fail to achieve greatness. But honest work will at least make it impossible for you to be a failure.

Train your brain, nerves and muscles to regular, steady, conscientious effort. Make up your mind that FOR YOUR OWN SAKE you will make every effort your best effort.

You will soon find yourself a more successful, more self-respecting, abler man or woman.

And here is an argument that should be more powerful with you than self-interest:

Remember that the world needs honest, conscientious men and women, able to do good work themselves and to people the earth with children born of honest parents.

Make up your mind to be one of the world's HONEST citizens.

To improve the world begin by improving yourself.

THE STEEPLE, MOVING LIKE THE HAND OF A CLOCK

If you live in the suburbs you devote perhaps two hours each day to travel. Two hours per day means practically one-fifth of your active life.

How many readers make any use of those two hours, and feel each day that they have been well spent? ——

Instead of being wasted, those hours should be among your best. Never mind if you are clinging to a strap because companies are licensed to exploit you. Never mind if you are tired and weary when the day is ended. The tired brain often thinks better than the fresh one. And man, so recently descended from the monkey who had to think while hanging head down, ought to have no trouble thinking as he hangs from his strap—head up. ——

Some in the cars play cards as they travel homeward. Others talk gossip, and tens of thousands waste too much time on this and other newspapers.

Try this experiment: Make up your mind to devote your hours of travel to thinking. The brain, like the muscles, needs definite and well-planned exercise. It must be methodical and regular. There is no limit to its possible results. You would be glad to spend your two travelling hours in a gymnasium on wheels. Make of your homeward car a mental gymnasium. Each night or morning, take up some one line of thought and follow it to its end—or as far as your mind can take you. Learn to observe, to study, to reflect. Don't look at your fellow passengers as calves look at each other on the way to the slaughter house.

Look, as a human being, at other human beings. There they sit or stand or hang. Some chatter, others scowl, fret, fume, complain, brag, grin or otherwise express the strange emotions that move us here.

They are all ghosts, as Carlyle tells you, imprisoned for a time in coverings of flesh, and a car packed full of real ghosts passing over the earth on their quick journey to the grave ought to stir you. ——

The giggling shopgirls whose life of misery is still a joke to them—blessed youth!—should interest you deeply. And the negro, too, with a tired black face, resting for the next day's slavery—slavery on a wage basis, but slavery all the same. Possibly you despise his thick lips. But those lips are carved on every sphinx in Egypt's sand, and if you could go back far enough you would find the ancestors of that negro, before the days of the Pharaohs, laying the foundations of your religion and locating the stars in heaven. At that time your forbears were gibbering cave savages, sharpening bones and gnawing raw flesh. When you see the negro on the opposite seat, the ill-starred one who has gone down in the human race while we have gone up, think about him, study him, speculate as to his ultimate end—and your own. Don't merely say to yourself, "That's a plain negro," and go on chewing gum. ——

The pictures that flash by your car windows should help you to think.

The train rumbles over the switches, and in the dusk a swinging lantern tells you that a man is at work, guiding you safely when your work is done. Can't you take an interest in that human atom, representing the Power that swings our tiny sun in space, lighting us on our journey toward the constellation Hercules? ——

A black steeple is outlined against the dark-blue sky of the evening. That is a finger of stone, built by man to point everlastingly toward Infinite Power. It now points "upward." In twelve hours—as the earth slowly turns—it will be pointing "downward." But there is no upward or downward in the carpentry of the universe. In the twenty-four hours, as it turns round with the earth, that steeple points toward all the corners of space, and constantly it points toward Eternal Wisdom and Justice in every corner. ——

This is tiresome? All right, then we'll stop. But whether we tire or interest you, remember:

As a man thinks, so he grows. Think, study, use all the hours that separate your croupy cradle from your gloomy grave. Those hours are few.

CULTIVATE THOUGHT—TEACH YOUR BRAIN TO WORK EARLY

Two centuries back a young man of twenty-three sat in the quiet of the evening—THINKING.

His body was quiet; his vitality, his life, all his powers, were centred in his brain.

Above, the moon shone, and around him rustled the branches of the trees in his father's orchard.

From one of the trees an apple fell.

No need to tell you that the young man was Newton; that the fall of the apple started in his READY brain the thought that led to his great discovery, giving him fame to last until this earth shall crumble.

How splendid the achievement born that moment! How fortunate for the world and for the youth Newton, that at twenty-three his brain had cultivated the HABIT OF THOUGHT! ——

Our muscles we share with everything that lives—with the oyster clinging to his rock, the whale ploughing through cold seas, and our monkey kinsman swinging from his tropical branch.

These muscles, useful only to cart us around, help us to do slave work or pound our fellows, we cultivate with care.

We run, fence, ride, walk hard, weary our poor lungs and gather pains in our backs building the muscles that we do not need.

Alone among animals, we possess a potentiality of mind development unlimited.

And for that, with few exceptions, we care nothing. ——

Most of us, sitting in Newton's place and seeing the apple fall, would merely have debated the advisability of getting the apple to eat it—just the process that any monkey mind would pass through.

A Newton, a BRAIN TRAINED TO THINK, sees the apple drop, asks himself why the moon does not drop also. And he discovers the law of gravitation which governs the existence of every material atom in the universe. ——

Young men who read this, start in NOW to use your brains. Take nothing for granted, not even the fact that the moon stays in her appointed place or that the poor starve and freeze amid plenty.

Think of the things which are wrong and of the possibilities of righting them. Study your own weaknesses and imperfections. There is power in your brain to correct them, if you will develop that power.

As surely as you can train your arm to hold fifty pounds out straight, just so surely can you train your brain to deal with problems that now would find you a gaping incompetent.

You may not be a Newton. But if you can condescend to aim at being an inferior Sandow, can't you afford to try even harder to be an inferior Newton?

Don't be a muscular monkey. Be a low-grade philosopher, if you can't be high-grade, and find how much true pleasure there is even in inferior brain gymnastics. ——

Take up some problem and study it:

There goes a woman, poor and old. She carries a heavy burden because she is too sad and weak to fight against fate, too honest to leave a world that treats her harshly.

There struts a youngster, rich and idle.

How many centuries of hell on earth will it take to put that woman's load on that other broad, fat, idle back?

Answer that one question, better still, TRANSFER THE LOAD, and your life will not have been wasted. ——

It is THOUGHT that moves the world. In Napoleon's BRAIN are born the schemes that murder millions and yet push civilization on. The mere soldier, with gold lace and sharp sword, is nothing—a mere tool.

It is the concentrated thought of the English people under Puritan influence that makes Great Britain a sham monarchy and a real republic now.

It is the thought of the men of independent MIND in this country that throws English tea and English rule overboard forever.

Don't wait until you are old. Don't wait until you are ONE DAY older. Begin NOW.

Or, later, with a dull, fuzzy, useless mind, you will realize that an unthinking man might as well have been a monkey, with fur instead of trousers, and consequent freedom from mental responsibility or self-respect.

THE WIND DOES NOT RULE YOUR DESTINY

"There be three things which are too wonderful for me; yea, four which I know not.

"The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; THE WAY OF A SHIP IN THE MIDST OF THE SEA, and the way of a man with a maid."

At sunset a long train of cars waited on a bridge as a sailing ship passed through the draw.

The ship sailed up the river toward the cold Winter sun; another ship sailed past it going in the OPPOSITE direction.

Only ONE wind was blowing. Yet, of those two ships blown by the same wind, moved by the same power, one sailed EAST and one WEST.

It may be of use to you in your career to think for a few minutes about these two ships and the lesson which they teach—especially to young men. ——

The man who has sailed, in his life's journey, toward failure and disaster looks always with envy, sometimes with hatred, and very often with an intense sensation of injustice, at the man who passes him going in exactly the opposite direction.

Yet the FORCES that move men bound toward success are exactly the same as those that move other men to failure, humiliation and defeat.

It is all a question of the way in which you use the forces within you—just as on shipboard it is all a question of the use of the common wind which blows.

IT IS A QUESTION OF THE USE OF THE RUDDER.

Two ships pass, each with its sails filled out by the same wind. The difference in direction is accounted for by the handling of the rudder and the adjustment of the sails.

What the force of the wind is to the ship, our varying emotions, passions, ambitions, appetites and aspirations are to us. All of these constitute the power which may be called HUMAN FORCE.

This power differs in different individuals, as the wind differs on different days. It may blow from the east or the west or the north or the south. However it may blow, it can be forced, by proper steering, to send the ship in any direction desired.

It is harder to beat against the wind, of course, and many men have hard struggles to steer themselves to a good port in the face of an adverse start, a hard beginning, or inclinations difficult to overcome. ——

But in all of us the force exists which can be made to move us in the right direction—the force within us can be MADE to obey our will, if the will be strong and the hand on the rudder steady. This can be proved—for instance:

There is a certain force in human beings called LOVE. This force leads sometimes, and happily it leads usually, to domesticity, morality, care of children and lifelong devotion. Then the force is used properly.

The same human passion leads to murder, suicide, theft, to almost all forms of crime.