Watson's Magazine, Vol. IV, No. 2, April, 1906

by Various

A NEW THIRD PARTY

Heretofore the essential element in questioning candidates as to people’s sovereignty has been a State Referendum League, in order that the business and professional interests shall be represented. But in January a new departure occurred in Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Referendum League changed its form of organization to the Referendum Party of Pennsylvania. The platform is as follows:

The Referendum Party urges the following legislative action as the only certain peaceable means of forever eradicating the gigantic evils that have gradually crept into our system of government:

1. The calling of a constitutional convention to revise the state constitution.

2. Granting to the people the right to veto unjust laws or ordinances by direct vote; this right to be exercised only if a vote is demanded on any law or ordinance, by petition signed by two percentum of the voters of the state or locality affected.

3. Granting to the people the right to enact, by direct majority vote, needed laws which their Legislature fails or refuses to enact.

This is known as the Referendum System. Wherever it has been in operation it has effectually stamped out bribery, graft, bossism and ring rule, and has made “government by the people and for the people” a practical reality instead of a mere theory.

The Referendum Party invites the co-operation of all who favor this action.

The members of the preliminary committee on organization are:

• Clarence V. Tiers, Chairman, Pittsburg, Pa.,
• Clement V. Horn, Wilkinsburg, Pa.,
• H. F. Lea, Bellevue, Pa.,
• H. W. Noren, Allegheny, Pa.,
• Walter Becker, Allegheny, Pa.,
• John C. Innes, Pittsburg, Pa.,
• George D. Porter, Philadelphia, Pa.,
• John E. Joos, Allegheny, Pa.,
• Nathaniel Green, Swissvale, Pa.,
• J. Ludwig Koethen, Jr., Pittsburg, Pa.,
• Hon. W. F. Hill, (Master State Grange) Chambersburg, Pa.,
• James Wm. Newlin, (Member of Constitutional Convention 1873) Philadelphia, Pa.

Reformers will watch with great interest this new experiment in third party politics. By limiting the demand to a constitutional convention and the initiative and referendum, and proposing to endorse such of the reliable candidates as pledge for the people’s sovereignty, the program is largely that of a Referendum League, plus the possibility of making an independent nomination. But a league can circulate nomination papers; in fact, every league impliedly stands ready to do so, if necessary. One thing is clear; that the Pennsylvania situation was such that the change to a Referendum Party put life and vigor into the referendum movement. Not only were hundreds of enthusiastic offers of support sent in, it is said, and from every quarter of the state, but leaders in the minority party and in the Lincoln party were brought to a point where they found it desirable to take immediate notice of the organization.

One reason for this is that the granges in the state, large in number and strong in membership, and organized labor, have not only declared for the initiative and referendum, but are systematically questioning candidates and publishing their replies. All that is needed to give great political power to these voters is an organization that stands ready to nominate referendum candidates. The mere existence of such an organization will accomplish most of its purposes. In this connection the experience of Jo A. Parker, in Kentucky, described above, should be borne in mind; also the fact that the People’s Party Conference of 1902 at Louisville almost adopted the program which Mr. Parker applied in Kentucky the following year. But in states where the minority party is under progressive leadership it is probable that a State Referendum League is the best possible instrument.

Isn’t it clear that the thing for the People’s Party to do is to complete at once the establishment of the initiative and referendum in America by going at it through the Kentucky or Pennsylvania program? Or that the workers in a state should organize an Initiative and Referendum League?

If we review the foregoing pages several things become clear:

1. That machine rule can be terminated and the people’s sovereignty re-established without waiting to change the written constitution. All that is required is a majority vote in the city council, legislature or congress. By this means an advisory-vote system can be established and then the candidates for public office can be pledged to obey the will of their constituents when expressed by referendum vote. This is merely the re-establishment of a direct vote system for instructing representatives—a system as old as representative government itself. The President of the United States is selected through an advisory vote by the people and public questions are also being determined by advisory vote; for example, municipal ownership of street railways in Chicago.

2. The basis of machine rule is an evasion of vital issues by both the leading parties. This power can be terminated at once by the systematic questioning of candidates as to vital issues, provided an organization or candidate stands ready to take the case to the people. Another way of stating the reason for questioning candidates is that the people are entitled to know how the candidates will vote if elected.

3. A third party organization can question candidates and declare that unless there is within each district a clear-cut written pledge by a reputable candidate, it will place one in nomination.

Or the program can be to place on the third-party ticket some of the old line party candidates, except in those states where fusion is prohibited by law.

4. The People’s Party during its palmy days was a leading factor in popularizing the initiative and referendum, and in securing its adoption, and today, by centering its effort on the termination of machine rule through the establishment of the initiative and referendum, it can at once complete the rehabilitation of the American system of government. Not only can the remaining states be redeemed within the next two years, but it is thoroughly practicable to exert in national affairs this year an influence that shall result in a pledged majority in the national House and Senate—the pledges to be for the advisory initiative and advisory referendum. The entire body of organized labor is centering its efforts in this direction, the referendum leagues are demanding it, and all that is needed to secure immediate victory is a political party that stands ready to put up candidates. The mere existence of such a party will win the day. How best can the desired end be attained?

A Basket And A Fortune
By Louise Forsslund
AUTHOR OF “THE STORY OF SARAH”, ETC.

The Old Men’s Home, Indian Village, Long Island. June 10, 19—

To the Matron of the Old Ladies’ Home, Shoreville, Long Island.

Dear Miss: The writer of this letter has had a windfall and he wants one of your woman-folks to have a share in it. He has lived in an old folks’ home himself for ten years, hand running, and he has a feeling for them others. My cousin Obadiah Hawkins died up to Lakeland last week. He never would so much as lend me a penny whilst he was living, but now he’s dead, he’s left me ten thousand dollars in ready money and a house and a home. There’s a pump in the kitchen. He never was no hand for investments and the money was all in an old silver water pitcher. It’s all good and the matron here has counted it over. I always wanted a home of my own and never was able to afford one. I always wanted a wife of my own and never could get up gumption enough to ask any woman to share my bad luck. Now the luck has turned. I got the home. All I need is the wife. I be going to drive over this afternoon and see if you got anybody that’s willing. I put it that way ’cause I ain’t much account if I have come into a tidy little fortune. I wear a wig and have spells of lumbago. It’s the lumbago what brought me here. There ain’t a lazy bone in my body. As for the requirements of the lady. She must be under seventy years old; she mustn’t wear a wig or dye her hair. I want one respectable suit of hair between us. She mustn’t squint or take snuff, and if she is sot on keeping chickens—some women be—she must keep them in the coop. I’ll build the coop. And she must love flowers and garden sass.

Expecting them to be on deck this afternoon at three o’clock, I am,

Yours most respectfully,

Samuel Jessup.

A moment’s intense silence followed the matron’s public reading of this letter in the large hall which served as the community room of the Old Ladies’ Home. The matron, her young gray eyes twinkling and shining, looked from one old face to the other. Some were broadly grinning under their crowns of gray hair, some were hurt and scornful, some were only puzzled and amazed—these belonging to the old ladies who had held their shriveled, shaking hands as trumpets before their ears during the reading of the letter. And some faces were marred by a shrewd, keen, calculating look as if to exclaim: “I wonder if—!” The matron looked at them all, her smile slowly growing broader, then quickly she looked down at her desk and said with business-like briskness:

“That is a very honest letter. I wish you could all give it your serious attention. There is no fraud in it, for I have telephoned to the Old Men’s Home, and Mr. Jessup is a noble, straightforward character. Now, are any of you willing to see him this afternoon? I suggest that all those who can not or who will not give Mr. Jessup a chance for their hands this afternoon, leave the hall.”

There was a curious reluctance on the part of the old ladies to move. There was much wagging of heads, much nudging of elbows, whispers and winks and murmurs from every quarter, but no one stirred. Those who really had no personal interest or legitimate right to an interest in Mr. Jessup’s quest for a wife stayed to see what the others might do. The matron repeated her request. Then old Mrs. Smith, bent and humpbacked, took up her cane and hobbled slowly toward the stairway.

“Ef he wanted me,” she declared with mock asperity, “he should oughter come twenty year ago. Ye notice,” she added, looking over her shoulder with her sharp, shrewd peaked face, “he didn’t tell how old he was.”

“He’s sixty-nine,” laughed the matron. “Most men of his age would have insisted on a wife of eighteen.”

There was a scurrying sound among the group of old ladies and suddenly there darted across the hall a younger, slimmer, straighter figure than Mrs. Smith’s.

“Miss Ellie!” protestingly called the matron, “where are you going?”

Miss Ellie paused, her face flushed with shame to think she had not fled from the hall before. She paused and looked at the matron. However old she was, Miss Ellie did not look more than fifty years. Her hair was luxuriant, half silver, half gold, faded, yet giving a curious effect of a halo of moonlight. The flush mounted higher up the spinster’s cheeks until it crept over her forehead to the edge of her hair. For a moment she stood thus, looking at the youthful matron. Then, with a world of reproach in her tones, she said simply: “Miss Jessica!” Then she went up the stairs with quick and trembling limbs, but with an air of dignity that acted as a rebuke upon those lingering the hall.

“Proud Miss Ellie!” murmured Jessica, herself feeling ashamed.

“I do think,” began Mrs. Honan in a loud, strident key, “I do think myself that the man didn’t show very fine feeling. The idea of him a-spectin’ a woman ter jump at his head. Ef he wanted a wife, why didn’t he come a-lookin’ around modest an’ quiet-like in the good, old fashioned way?”

With that she swept out of the hall. She was down on the register as having passed her seventy-third birthday, and anyway, she mused, she had always preferred a yard full of chickens to a yard full of flowers, because chickens are more lively. They keep you better company, she said. Then, with or without verbal excuse, one woman after another left the hall. There were two with the deplorable squint, several far on the shaded side of seventy, some who wore honest wigs, and some too honest to proclaim either that they did not dye their hair or that they had never sniffed at the contents of a snuffbox. Then there were the dear old ladies loyal to their dead husbands, the old ladies who did not care to give up the serene, uneventful security of the Old Ladies’ Home for a house shared only with a man afflicted with lumbago and very decided notions. However, ten remained, openly ashamed, yet not sufficiently ashamed to reject Samuel Jessup’s hand before they had seen him.

“It don’t mean that none of us promise to take him, oh no!” said Mrs. Young, a woman living in the memories of her long reign as a belle. “It only means that we’d like to get a good look at him. We’ve had plenty of chances all our lives. We ain’t none of us here because no man wanted us—neither us widders nor us maidens. We’re here from ch’ice, Miss Jessica, from ch’ice! But still if there’s another ch’ice open to us with a real, kind honest man—his letter shows he’s that, bless his heart!—we’d each of us ten like to have one tenth of a show at him.”

Then, greatly flustered at having spoken with such unmaidenly freedom on such a subject, Mrs. Young moved away from the desk across the hall and out of doors, where she could take a good long breath. After she had gone, one of the nine remaining candidates wondered aloud how Mrs. Young would look without her false front, for of course no one would deceive Samuel Jessup as to her quantity of hair.

“But the rest of it?” whispered another. “You can’t wash all that dye off in one day, can you?”

“Waal!” retorted a third, coming hotly to Mrs. Young’s rescue, “a man who wears a wig hasn’t no right ter be so particular.”

Said the first one firmly: “She shouldn’t deceive him.”

Answered a third: “Deceive him all she wants ter as long as it’s in somethin’ no man would have wit enough ter find out.”

At three o’clock to the minute, Samuel Jessup appeared, emerging from a closed coach together with a plump middle-aged woman who carried with extraordinary care a large market basket covered with a red tablecloth.

“Good gracious!” exclaimed Mrs. Young, peeking with half the household from the upper hall windows. “He’s been an’ picked up a wife on the road an’ come to offer his apologies.”

She laughed merrily at the possible joke against them all. And yet what a pity that would be, too, for Samuel was a pleasant, self-reliant looking little man with his head hanging sideways as if he had never lifted it from a one-sided attack of the mumps. Somehow this attitude made him appear younger. But the wig! That was too much in evidence and they all decided that it must be clipped at once. Samuel did not scan the house with lover-like eagerness as he came up the steps. Instead, he watched the basket with intense interest—so intense that he stumbled on the way.

“I bet he’s got a dog in it!” cried one of the candidates. “I will not stand no leetle measly pet dog around the house, a-sheddin’ hair all over the parlor sofy. I ain’t agoin’ downstairs!”

But she went with the others and met Mr. Jessup. The woman with the basket was nowhere in sight, having been relegated to the dining-room. No attempt whatever was made to explain her to the old ladies. Samuel Jessup was immediately enthroned by the matron in her private office; and one by one in alphabetical order of their names, Jessica sent the candidates to him, thinking that this would be more delicate than to have them all face him at once. Delicacy in this affair did not seem so difficult after coming face to face with little Mr. Jessup. Very modestly, and with his head more on one side than ever, he told the matron that she must convey to the ladies his doubts as to any one of them accepting him. He thought it was very kind of them to receive him anyway, and—this with a quick keen look into Jessica’s wise and bonny face—he hoped that they would not laugh at him.

The first five filed out of the room after only a few moments’ conversation, each briefly explaining in her turn why Mr. Jessup “hadn’t took” with her. One did not like the way he held his head. One never could stand that wig. She knew that it got askew every time he took a nap. One thought him too much like her dead husband. One thought him too unlike her departed John to make a happy union possible. One said she never could bear a pump dribbling water in the kitchen; and he was too stubborn and “sot” in his ways to take it out. Then went in the sixth—she who had not rebuked the deceit of Mrs. Young’s dyed hair and she who hated pet dogs. After a longer period, she came out and with customary candor bluntly declared that she would have had Samuel Jessup in a minute, but she saw that she did not take with him.

“The woman that gits him will be lucky,” she declared, “basket and all.” Nothing more would she tell. Then into the private room went the seventh old lady. She immediately demanded of Samuel an explanation of the woman and the basket; whereupon Samuel said that he refused to be questioned by any woman and he knew that they could not get along well together. She came out sniffing contemptuously, and vowed that in her opinion there was something very mysterious about this man. Number Eight went in even more eagerly, on tip-toe. She had read romances all her life. She loved mysteries and she was so sensitive about living in an Old Ladies’ Home partly on charity that she would have married any man that asked her. Almost any man—but not quite. She and Samuel Jessup talked together for a long time.

“I am sure we would git along,” said Samuel at last, his heart stirred to sympathy for one who hated a Home of this sort with the same proud hatred that he had borne. “But,” he went on, “before I let you decide, I be agoin’ to take you into the dining-room and show you the basket. What belongs in the basket belongs with me an’s agoin’ with me. I ain’t much ter git, but come an’ see the basket!”

Her romantic old heart beating high with excitement, Miss Ruby tip-toed ahead of him, across a tiny, dark back hall into the dining-room. On the very threshold she paused, her eyes popping out of her head as she looked within; then she uttered a faint scream and went scuttling into a corner among the shadows of the dim passage.

“Good-bye, Mr. Jessup!” she called tragically. “Good-bye!” and there ended Samuel Jessup’s affair with Miss Ruby.

A humorous light twinkled in the old man’s eye as he went back into Jessica’s office and waited for the ninth candidate. She was a woman famous in the Home for always managing to find some one to wait upon her, and she wanted a house of her own with several servants, an unobtrusive husband, and stained glass windows in the parlor.

“I kinder fancied stained glass winders myself,” said Samuel. “But you can’t be keepin’ a hull passel o’ servants. One servant gal—that’s all I agree to, ma’am.”

She thought that one servant might do if they put out the washing. Samuel looked dubious for a moment, seeing himself a henpecked husband, and then that twinkle came again into his wholesome eye.

“Before we decide, m’am, I want ter show you what I got in that there basket. Me an’ the basket be inseparable.”

She preceded him into the dining-room, her shoulders high and her nose uplifted. She stood for some moments staring at the contents of the basket, the basket’s owner, and the basket’s guardian staring at her. Slowly her face grew rigid. She shook her head once. She strove to speak, swallowed hard and then gasped;

“How dast you presume, Samuel Jessup!”

Samuel winked at the guardian of the basket and chuckled soft and low. But then he realized that he really wanted a wife, a companion in his old age, a mistress for the snug little home, and now there was but one candidate left. To be sure he might find some one outside the Home, but he had wanted in truth to share all that he had—the basket not excepted—with one who had tasted as he had the well buttered bread of charity in an old folks’ home. Soberly he went back to the private room, and Mrs. Young came drifting leisurely in to him. She congratulated herself on being the last. She wanted never to be twitted with having failed to give the others every possible chance, and she knew that had she entered the private room first the result would have been the same. She would be the wife selected by Mr. Jessup if she wanted him. A woman with real charm for old men, a woman who could have graced many a home in her lazy, yet pleasingly frivolous ways, she felt that Samuel could not resist her if she chose to throw her charm around him.

“This is a very ridiculous position,” she began, with a quavering little trill of laughter. “I never went a-seekin’ a man before. They always sought me.”

This was more than Samuel’s natural gallantry could withstand. He took her small lean fingers in his and drew her down beside him on the couch. Her fingers twined around his hand. She wore jewels—relics of bygone splendors—which seemed pitifully out of keeping with her present state. To Samuel they told a long, familiar story, and sent a feeling of pity out from him to her.

“Mis’ Young,” he said gently. “I am jest as much obliged to all of you folks fer seein’ me as I kin be.”

“To us all?” she asked and lifted her eyes.

They had been very fine blue eyes once and now they were bright in spite of their puffy lids. And her thin hair, parted simply in the middle, was more becoming than the false front had been. He wondered that she had no gray hairs, but was too straightforward himself to suspect the deception. What a very pretty woman she still was, and, with that not displeasing girlish attempt at flirtation, how exceedingly feminine!

“Obliged to us all?” she repeated, her eyes still uplifted, her hand still clinging to his. She remembered how eloquently hands can speak and so did Samuel, but of a sudden he felt that his horny old hand had become tongue-tied. He knew that she wanted him to say: “I be obliged to you in perticular, Mis’ Young.”

And he did stumble through some such gallant speech, but all the while he was thinking: “So I have got to take this! This frivolous old lady with a spot of red paint on either cheek and a pair of penciled eye-brows.” Why had he not mentioned rouge in his letter? Mrs. Young still looked at him, still held his hand, remembering of old the value of long looks and of silence. Of a truth many and many a man had she captivated in this way in the days of long ago and once again in her mind’s eye she could see suitor after suitor at her feet. She had refused them all, after the first one had given her his name and then gone into the unknown world. Even after coming into the Old Ladies’ Home, she had refused offers of marriage, and yet, now of a sudden, she wished to share the good fortune and the ill fortune of Samuel Jessup. She laid her free hand on his shoulder and murmured a line from her favorite Browning—Browning who was a mere name and scarcely that to Samuel:

“Grow old along with me,

The best is yet to be.”

Samuel was embarrassed. He pushed his wig back from his brow and, going opposite to the natural, sidewise slant of his head, it gave him a rakish expression, delightful to Mrs. Young’s eye. Then all of a kindle with the light of an eager hope went Samuel’s own brown orbs.

“Yes, yes,” he said glibly, “but the best ain’t ter be. It’s here, right now, in the dinin’-room. Come along with me.”

He was so mixed as to his own desires and emotions that he half hoped, half feared that she would stand the test, but when she saw the basket and its contents, first horror crossed her face, then the shadow of a deep disappointment fell among the wrinkles and the rouge and the penciled eye-brows. Sadly she faced Samuel Jessup as if certain of his answer before her questioning:

“And you insist on a-keeping it?”

“It’s mine. It belongs ter me. I had it jest half a day, but now all the women in the country couldn’t make me give it up. I don’t want ter be imperlite,” added Samuel in a milder tone, “but them’s the facts. Me an’ the basket, or ‘Good-bye, Samuel.’”

She interpreted him literally. Holding out her fragile, jeweled hand, she clasped his warmly, yet with honest sadness and compassion:

“Good-bye, Samuel. If it hadn’t been for the basket—.” She paused, slowly withdrawing her hand, and then went on again: “You’re makin’ an awful mistake. Who’d a thought it of a man o’ your age! I shall never forget you. Good-bye, Samuel.”

With one swift, half hungering, half frightened glance at the basket, she slipped out of the room. Samuel did not laugh and his eyes did not twinkle as he went up to the matron’s desk.

“Miss Jessica, they’ve all practically refused me. What shall I do?” He had a vision of an endless quest of an eligible, willing old lady from an old folks’ home.

Miss Jessica thought a long while, biting the end of her pencil, and at last she said slowly, half reluctantly:

“There is one more—who—answers your requirements, but she was too proud to enter the lists.”

Samuel’s face lit up. Proud women can be very tender and only a tender soul could accept the basket. Moreover, a woman with sufficient spirit to resent his action today was a woman after his own heart. He lifted his head from its sidewise slant and, throwing back his shoulders, looked Jessica square in the eyes:

“What’s the woman’s name?”

“Miss Ellie Smith.”

“Waal, I be goin’ ter change it!” vowed Mr. Jessup. “Whar be she?”

The matron hesitated, wondering whether she could play the part of the traitor to dignified, self-reliant Miss Ellie, but Jessica was very young. She looked down the long years that these two had traveled, and seeing how dusty and stony and hard the road had been, wondered why they should not come into a restful, fragrant garden at last. Ellie, she knew, even yet, with the help of the right man, could make the garden. And now as she looked keenly into Samuel Jessup’s eyes—eyes shaded by iron-gray brows, but deep, dark brown eyes, limpid, sparkling, full of tenderness and an appealing hunger for tenderness—she felt that Samuel could play an all-sufficient Adam to Ellie’s Eve, in the garden.

“Miss Ellie’s all alone in the kitchen, hulling strawberries for supper,” she said very low. Then bending far over her desk, as if completely absorbed in her books, she went on: “It’s the south dining-room door. Go right in, take the basket with you—no, no, not that woman, too—and ask Miss Ellie if she won’t take charge of your basket for an hour or so.”

Samuel grinned. He wagged his head back and forth until his wig shook in sympathetic anticipation. Years and years seemed to fall from him, until with his small, thick-set figure and his sparkling, youthful eyes he looked like a boy getting ready to steal apples. With short, firm, quicksteps he entered the dining-room. No one would have thought him a victim of lumbago from his gait now. Then of a sudden, Miss Jessica, no longer able to contain herself, went into her private room, where he had consulted with the ten, and danced around with glee.

“Miss Ellie, you darling!” she whispered to herself. “I know you’ll do it!”

Miss Ellie, in a prim, dainty blue gingham dress, with a great bib apron enveloping her slender figure, sat at the south kitchen window hulling berries, the basket of red fruit on the table beside her, a yellow earthen bowl in her lap. Her silver-gold hair caught sunbeam lights from the window until each single thread danced and twinkled. Little curls of silver gold nestled against the nape of her slender neck. Her face was that of an April lady’s—first the clouds chased across it, clouds of contempt, of anger and of regret; and then it took on a soft blaze of tenderness and of passionate longing.

She did not want Mr. Samuel Jessup or any other man. She scorned the woman who might take him today for his home and that little sum of money; but why—why had she with all her power of loving and of attracting love, all the unspent passion of motherhood that had been her ruling passion since the doll-baby age—why had she come to see sixty-one without finding Mr. Right? Lovers in moderate numbers she had had in the days of long ago, and old people do not forget the loves of the springtime, but all the while—all through the spring and the summer and this swiftly passing autumn—or was it really winter-time?—there had never come to her one whom she would rejoice to call her mate! Him she did not regret so much nowadays, or she regretted him with a vague, indistinct feeling. He might have liked strong drink and smoked a strong pipe indoors. But the children! Ah, the children that had never come!

She had outlived all her people. There were no nieces, no nephews, no one in all the world whom she could call her own, and there had never been and never could be a little grandchild to pull at her skirts.

“Dran-ma! I love oo, dran-ma!” Only yesterday she had heard a little child lisp this into the ears of Mrs. Young.

“Dran-ma, I love oo, dran-ma!” whispered Ellie, bending far over the berries with the hot gushing of tears coming into her eyes.

Both the ache of motherhood and the ache of grandmotherhood were upon her. Never to have felt the touch of her own babe at her breast! And, now that old age had withered the breast, never to hear the prattle of grandchildren in her ears! And her ears were still so finely attuned, unlike the average grandmother! Miss Ellie looked up from her berries at the window. Her eyes were too dim to see, and wiping the tears away she looked out of the window again, down the garden. So, young girls stare wistfully as if they would look to the very end of the world and discover what, in the very end, may come to them.

The dining-room door opened. Miss Ellie turned back to her task. She scorned to look up and ask her fellow inmate of the Home who had won Samuel Jessup. It was probably Mrs. Homan coming to help with the supper. Steps came across the kitchen. Ellie bent far over the yellow bowl and went on with her berry hulling. It needed a great many berries to supply that supper table. The sunbeam darted down from the top of Ellie’s head to seek out with its twinkling, gold-shod feet the silver-gold curls in Ellie’s neck. The steps paused close beside Ellie. Suddenly the spinster realized that they were not Mrs. Homan’s steps and she looked up. Scorn, indignation, amazement, and then something more subtle, something which one sees in faces everywhere all over the world, and something which makes the world more beautiful, crossed her face. There stood Samuel Jessup with the huge market basket in one hand. He held out the basket to Miss Ellie. He looked at her eagerly, almost with piteous appeal, as if to say:

“They would have none of it, but—you! You?”

The red table cover had been thrown off the basket. There lay the contents before Miss Ellie’s eyes. A big white pillow and resting upon it, a baby—a real, live, pink-and-white, wide-awake baby. More than this, a baby who at first sight of Miss Ellie holding poised in her hand a huge, red strawberry, struggled up into a sitting position, held out his two pudgy, dimpled little hands and cried with the softest, most ecstatic little cry imaginable: “Dranny!”

The baby’s grandmother had died last week, but neither Miss Ellie nor the baby knew that, and Samuel Jessup kept a wise silence.

Trembling, agitated, scarcely able to see or hear for the moment following the baby’s cry, Miss Ellie put down the red berry, placed the bowl on the table, and then turned to take the baby. She asked no questions. She simply took him. She knew that he was hers. Even now again—would her heart burst with joy and her ears lose their power of hearing!—even now again he was murmuring and mumbling: “Dranny! Dranny!” Now she knew that she would hear the prattle of one she called grandchild in her ears and guide with her shriveled old hands the unsteady movements of these little feet. Samuel Jessup counted not at all just then; but if he had attempted to take away that baby, she would have fought him like a mother-tigress.

Samuel had meant to say much. He said nothing, but simply put his hand against his throat and looked at her. He saw her devour with eyes and lips the tender little form—saw her seek out the baby wrinkles in the fat little dimpled neck—saw her munch hungrily at the baby’s yellow curls—saw her feel every bone of the little body through the stiff starchy white dress as if she loved each one more than the other. And then at length he watched her unfasten the shoes, pull off the tiny white socks and then adore with the pent-up passion of the lonely years the adorable little rosy heel of his baby.

Samuel cleared his throat with a loud noise and walked across the room. He noticed a red calico curtain at the cupboard door and wondered whether Miss Ellie had made it. In his mind’s eye, he saw another kitchen, smaller than this, cosier, but still with red calico curtains at the cupboard door and crisp white swiss ones—as crisp as the baby’s dress—at the windows. He knew that Miss Ellie would not want to get those curtains stained up with tobacco smoke—she looked so dainty—so he would volunteer to do his smoking on the back porch. If she left the window open, he could look through and talk to her and the little one. He came beside Miss Ellie’s chair and stood looking down at her lovely head and the baby’s cheek pressed against her own. The baby, quieted with happiness against that breast, was profoundly still.

Through the open door came a wonderful fragrance—as the fragrance of youthful love—blown in from the syringa bush beside the kitchen door. They must plant a syringa beside the kitchen door-step in the new home, thought Samuel. Out of the stillness, he spoke, his voice very husky.

“You be a woman arter my own heart—I knowed it when I see you a-settin’ here a-hullin’ berries. It’s more than I ’spected. I never dreamed it could be: I was that old. But, Miss Ellie, you be—you be—” He lost his voice entirely for a space and fearfully, reverently, he lifted in his trembling fingers one of the silver-gold curls that lay on her neck, lifted it and immediately let it fall in place again. “You be,” he whispered, “a woman arter my own heart. I never found sech a one when I was young. I know it now, fer ef I had, I wouldn’t ’a’ been afeared of no bad luck fer neither her ner me. I’d a took her an’—” another pause and then with brave, masculine assurance, “she’d ’a’ took me.”

Miss Ellie did not move, she did not speak. She felt that his voice was very far away, away off back in her youth where she had dreamed of the mate who was yet to come. Closer she pressed her cheek to the baby’s and so assured herself that baby and the man who had brought her the baby were real and belonged to today.

Samuel was speaking again, his hand now on the back of her chair, so that it brushed against the ruffle that ran across the shoulders of her apron.

“I allers wanted children, an’ when I got too old to have the hope o’ ever a-marryin’, I used ter say ter myself: ‘Oh, ef they was only leetle grand-younguns now!’ Then the fortune come. Says I fust thing: ‘I’ll have a baby. I’ll be a granddaddy yit.’ Thar wa’n’t much mean about me. I be sixty-nine, but I wanted my own home, an’ my own wife, an’ my own baby. But I wanted the baby most of all. So the fust thing I done when the money come was ter go to that thar Margaret Jane Orphan Asylum an git this here baby. He hadn’t been there but a week. Jest lost his grandma an’ his grandpa—didn’t yer, yer pore leetle cuss, yer? He’s legally adopted. His name is Samuel Biggs Jessup, Jr. Ain’t he a wallopin’ fine feller!”

Samuel exploded at the last. His bashfulness, his self-depreciation, his afraidness, were all gone. He bent over, his hands on his knees, and looked into the baby’s face. The baby’s face was very close to Ellie’s. The baby’s face was dimpled and smiling, while over Ellie’s face there was a flush of joyous young motherhood together with the proud, all-wondering delight of grandmotherhood, and blending with both, a sweet shame and shrinking such as no one but a virgin can wear. Oh, exquisite, young-old Miss Ellie! Your eyes swimming in unshed tears were so beautiful then with the inner light that Samuel blinked to see them.

“Miss Ellie,” he whispered. Very still was the kitchen. The syringa outside the door shook out its perfume just for these two. The wind murmured through the fragrant flowers—it murmured:

“Again and again and again! Even for the old, this same old story!”

“Ellie,” whispered Samuel. “I want you even more than I want the baby. Will you marry me?”

Again the silence fell, and after a long while, the voice of Ellie’s dream-swept, ideal-keeping youth came from within the curves of the baby’s cheek where her lips were hiding:

“Samuel, you been a long time comin’.” Her voice faltered and then gathering a girlish tremor went on, “But, even ef you hadn’t brought the baby, I should say you was wuth all the waitin’.”

Control or Ownership?
BY CHARLES Q. DE FRANCE

Few men who have studied the question, and who are free to make a frank statement of their views, see much hope for a “square deal” in railroad rates under private ownership. Most of those who really want a square deal, however, are giving the President their moral support, not because they expect him to solve the problem with his formula of “control,” but because they feel that the agitation he has caused and is fomenting will inure to the benefit of the public ownership and operation idea. His opponents charge as much—and they are correct. Many of their arguments against control are valid, too, if we grant that private ownership in this age of our civilization is best. Of course, we do not grant that.

It seems certain at this writing (March 4) that the Hepburn-Dolliver bill will become a law—one of those dead letters, so many of which already encumber our Federal and State statute books. That it cannot and will not be enforced, except in a few spectacular instances to fool the multitude, is as certain as anything in human affairs. The roads will continue to take all that the traffic will bear, to give rebates, and to water stock in the good old way. If any doubt this, let them read the intensely interesting letters in various newspapers sent out each week from Washington by Lincoln Steffens. Mr. Steffens has, after most thorough investigation, reached the conclusion that our people are suffering not so much because of bribery and corruption as from having abdicated in favor of the railroads and other big corporations. It is not necessary now for a railroad corporation to bribe a congressman or senator—because most of these supposed people’s representatives are actually the railroad representatives, and many of them heavy stockholders.

Mr. Steffens can lay no claim to a patent on this information by right of original discovery, for Populists said the same thing (only not so aptly, perhaps), twelve to fifteen years ago. But he is reaching an audience that the Populists did not and possibly never could reach. And he tells the story so well that we must accord him the highest meed of praise. I cannot refrain from quoting a paragraph concerning the spectacle he sees in Washington (New York World, March 4):

“We, the people of the United States, are the petitioners. (For railroad rate legislation). We are coming here asking through the President that that bill (Hepburn-Dolliver) be passed so as to relieve us from certain abuses practised everywhere by our chartered common carriers, the railroads. And the representatives of those railroads and their allied corporations sit here enthroned; and they decide upon our case. They may decide in our favor but—the intolerable fact of it all is—they decide. They rule; they may be good rulers; but they rule.”

That is the deliberate statement of a man who has gained an enviable reputation for thorough-going investigation. He is not a demagogue or a writer of penny-dreadfuls. He is on the ground and supports every one of his general statements with concrete examples.

Mr. Steffens blames the people for the present state of affairs. I heartily agree with him. But I believe we should try to reason out where the first big mistake was made and arrive at a conclusion as to the best way out of the difficulty, unless, perchance, our people really like the rule of railroad oligarchy. I believe it is a useless task to chide the people for lack of civic righteousness, for indifference, for supineness, for failure to go to the primaries, etc., unless we point out clearly how complete sovereignty may be secured. It is useless to scold a man for not filling his lungs with oxygen, if you advise him to stay in a room overcharged with carbonic acid gas.

The present state of affairs is due primarily to two great causes, or really to one cause operating through two different channels:

(a) The private ownership of railroads.

(b) The private control of the issue and circulation of money.

The latter cause, in my judgment, is immeasurably greater than the former; but public opinion is now directed toward the former, so that a discussion of it is sure of a careful hearing. I do not insist that permitting the private ownership of railroads was an irremediable mistake; in fact, there is much good argument in favor of the contention that under private ownership the roads were developed faster and better than they, in all likelihood, would have been under public ownership. And we may admit, without at all prejudicing our case, that in the evolution of railroading, private ownership was best at the start. This is not capable of demonstration—but we need not quarrel over it.

A railroad is a highway; and a highway is one of the attributes of sovereignty. Whoever owns and controls the road is to that extent a sovereign. And under our aggravated system of laissez faire, ownership and control always go together, except with the slightest modifications. Hence, with private ownership of railroads, it was inevitable that we should reach just such a state of affairs as Mr. Steffens pictures. Why shouldn’t “representatives of those railroads and their allied corporations” sit here enthroned?

The owners of those roads are absolute sovereigns over the principal avenue for the distribution of commodities; and under our highly developed methods of production, with extreme division of labor, a great distribution of commodities is absolutely essential. With power to tax at will all users of highways, their owners can control, in a great measure, all productive industry.

I am not a believer in total depravity. I can see no necessity or reason for calling railroad magnates hard names, or accusing them of unpatriotic scheming for power—except, possibly, for the purpose of arousing a lethargic people to a sense of their own wrongs. Being an actual sovereign, because owning the highways—the real, vital highways—and possessing the power to tax, I can understand how the railroads were, in a great measure, compelled to unite de jure and de facto sovereignty. With non-railroad or anti-railroad men in the legislative, administrative and judicial bodies, “sand-bagging” and hold-ups were common. In self-defense (for no man ever lived who likes to be deprived of power), the railroads bribed and corrupted. They were by no means the sole culprits. The taker of a bribe is just as despicable as the giver. But gradually the system evolved to its present state—the union of all sovereign powers. The Government persisted in its refusal to go into the railroad business—so the railroads quite naturally went into the governing business.

We cannot undo what has been done. We cannot turn back the wheels of time and begin all over again with public ownership of railroads; but we can, and I think we will, in not many years hence, take over the railroads and make them public property, operating them by Government officials. The union of sovereign powers is now complete: the owners of highways and “their allied corporations,” by their representatives, are now enthroned as the actual Government. This is as it should be, except that the ownership is too limited. It should be made to include the whole people.

Will It Come to this at Niagara?

Morris, in Spokane Spokesman Review

“What, Doctor, All of This?”

Warren, in Boston Herald

Puzzle.—Which Way Is He Going?

Handy, in Duluth News Tribune

R. R. Magnate: I cannot tell a lie. I am going to do it with my little hatchet.

Handy, in Duluth News Tribune

THE SACRIFICE
BY JACK B. NORMAN.

“Don’t think that I ain’t willin’ for you to have the home-place like pa wanted you to, Indie,” said the thin, tired voice that was fast wearing into silence, “’cause I am. It’s no more ’n right after all you’ve done for me ’n pa. The t’others has all got homes o’ their own an’ you ain’t got nobody to fall back on. But, Indie, promise me you won’t close the door agin poor Tom if he should come back. Give him shelter an’ welcome for my sake, won’t you?”

Indie promised solemnly. Her thoughts went back to one still, tranquil night years before, when the doors of that same home had been closed against the wayward son by the father who vowed never to look upon his boy’s face again. The mother—a frail, submissive, toil-worn woman—had mourned in secret, but her prayers had been unanswered.

“You’ve been dreadful good to us,” the dying voice murmured; “I hope the Lord will make it up to you somehow, Indie. Do you reckon the girls will git here ’fore I die?”

“Yes, Aunt Viney, I really b’lieve they will. But you go to sleep if you can. I’ll wake you as soon as they git here.”

By and by the sick woman fell into a gentle doze that deepened into the sleep that knows no earthly waking. The married daughters came too late, but if they were greatly grieved over their mother’s death they made little outward sign. They stayed at the home place for two days, during which the will was read. It deeded all that remained of the Pasely farm, that had been divided and subdivided to supply marriage portions for four, to Indie, in consideration of her faithful services for the old folks.

“Maybe you can ketch Lem Powers with this bait,” was Louise’s spiteful comment, after the reading was over. “Everyone knows you always wanted him bad enough.”

Mary, the eldest cousin, laughed dryly. “Indie can’t complain of the way our folks treated her,” she said with ill-concealed bitterness. “This farm is worth a thousand dollars above the mortgage money. It ain’t many poor relations that has property like this left to ’em.”

“I guess Indie knows that she didn’t come by it plum honest,” the third cousin remarked. “She knowed how to work around the old folks so’s to git ’em to leave her what they had. Well, we ain’t the kind to make trouble even if we have been wronged.”

When they had gone, Indie abandoned herself to a passion of helpless, piteous grief. She recalled one cruel hour long ago when her cousin Louise had accused her of caring, unasked, for friendly, pleasant Lem Powers, whose off-hand calls on the family stood out in Indie’s memory as the brightest events of her lonely, toilful life. Indie was twenty-three and plain, for the flower-like prettiness of her early childhood had long since succumbed to the triple blight of care and drudgery and loneliness. It had been known among her neighbors and acquaintances that Indie, at the age of eighteen, had never been “spoke for,” wherefore she had meekly accepted the stigma of spinsterhood that comes very early to the Southern country girl and had withdrawn from the mild frivolities of youth to become a household drudge in her uncle’s family in order that her cousins might have more leisure and freedom. After the death of her hard-working uncle, she had stayed with her ailing aunt while the girls married and left her.

“I wisht I’d died instid of Aunt Viney,” Indie sobbed in utter loneliness.

For two years Indie lived quietly and comfortably in the old home, paying her simple expenses by raising garden truck for the town hotel. Then a letter came from Tom’s widow imploring his people to send her enough money to defray Tom’s funeral expenses to avert his threatened burial in the potter’s field. It was a pathetic appeal, involving the brief story of Tom’s struggles, how he had worked his way with his little family from Texas to the old home state, where he had obtained employment in a factory. He had met his death through a boiler explosion the day before the letter was written. Tom had always hoped for a reconciliation in spite of his father’s unyielding hardness, the widow wrote. In conclusion, she begged his people not to allow his body to be consigned to a nameless grave.

Indie went straight to Mr. Griggs, the real estate agent, who held the four-hundred-dollar mortgage on her farm, and asked him to lend her a hundred dollars. He refused gently but firmly.

“Why, Indie, by the time you sell that farm it may not be worth five hundred dollars in all,” he said. “The interest on the mortgage is about due now and here you are wanting to borrow more!”

“It’s for a particular purpose that can’t wait a day,” Indie told him anxiously, trembling in every nerve with the fear of disappointment.

“I can’t help that. Business is business you know, and every man must look out for his own interests. There is only one way to get that money and that is to sell the place as it stands before the debts eat it up completely. I know a party that would buy, probably.”

“Oh, I couldn’t sell the only home I’ve got,” Indie said piteously.

“It’ll come to that in the end, anyhow,” Griggs answered indifferently. “My advice is to get rid of it now, while there is a few dollars in it for you. Anyway, you can’t raise that hundred you want any other way. If I was in your place I’d sell and go down to Birmingham and get work in the factory, where you’ll make something besides a mere living.”

Indie’s heart almost stopped beating at the very thought of leaving the old familiar haunts for a strange city. Yet, Tom must have a decent burial at any cost to herself.

“What could you get for the farm?” Indie asked huskily.

“Eight or nine hundred I reckon.”

“Could you let me have the hundred right now if I agree to sell the place?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll sell—because I’ve got to have that money right off.”

Indie hurried home and began to put things to rights. She packed up her personal belongings and moved all her humble furniture into one room, where it could be easily got at in case she should send for it a little later, if she were fortunate enough to secure steady work in the factory which Mr. Griggs had referred to. He had even given her a clipping from the Sunday paper containing an advertisement calling for twenty new hands, “experience not necessary.”

Indie was sweeping the back yard when some one strode up the pebbled walk with brisk, business-like steps, which she mistook for Mr. Griggs’s walk, for he had promised to stop in on his homeward way. But it was not the agent. It was Indie’s old friend Lem Powers, whom she had so timidly avoided for years. His broad-brimmed hat was turned up squarely in front, framing his dark, strong, sunny face in a sort of a rough halo.

“Evenin’, Indie,” said he, with a tug at his up-standing hat-brim. “Do you happen to have a wrench about the place? My buggy wheel’s locked an’ I ain’t got no tools with me.”

Indie shook down her sleeves hurriedly, keenly conscious of her unpleasing appearance. “Won’t you set down while I hunt up the wrench?” she asked, nodding toward the veranda bench. “I’ve done packed up everything, but I can find the wrench easy’s not.”

“Packed up!” the young man echoed in blank astonishment, with a sweeping glance at the denuded premises. “Why, you don’t aim to move, do you?”

“I expect to leave Shallow Ford to-morrer mornin’,” Indie answered solemnly.

“You don’t say so? Goin’ to live with your cousins?”

“No, oh no,” Indie answered quickly, with a dry smile. “None of them ain’t never asked me to live with ’em, and even if they had I wouldn’t go.”

“I didn’t know you had other kin.”

“I ain’t. I aim to go to Birmingham to work in the factory. I seen a advertisement callin’ for twenty new hands and I thought it would be a good chance to get started.”

“Whatever put that idee into your head, I’d like to know? I don’t b’lieve you’ll like the work one bit, Indie,” the young man said with grim conviction. “It ain’t healthy, to begin with. Don’t you rec’lect how pale an’ peekedy them Baldwins looked when they come back here on a visit after havin’ worked in the thread factory down at Birmingham? They didn’t have the sperit of a jack rabbit between ’em, an’ their ways was plum changed too—sorter forrard like. You won’t like the sort of company they keep, Indie.”

“I’ve got to go now,” said Indie, doggedly, “cause I’ve done put the place for sale. Mr Griggs thinks he can sell it without any trouble.”

“He may. Indie, is it on account of the mortgage you’re leavin’?”

Indie shook her head. She could not tell Lem her real motive.

“’Cause if it is,” said Lem, earnestly, “I’d be only too glad to stand good for the debt if you’ll let me.”

Indie’s pale face reddened painfully, and her head went back an inch or two, for she had her pride in spite of her helplessness. “I couldn’t ever raise enough truck to pay off the debt, anyhow,” she answered coldly.

“You could rent the place an’ pay off that way. I do wish you would let your old friends do a little something for you, Indie,” he pleaded, growing red and embarrassed under her increasing coldness.

“It’s too late to rent now, ’cause it’s way past corn-plantin’ time,” Indie objected, “an there ain’t nothin started but two acres o’ roastin’ ears an’ some garden truck.”

“I should think you’d hate to leave the old place,” Lem observed, letting his bright gaze wander over the green pasture strip and the narrow creek bottoms where the young corn waved idly in the evening breeze.

Indie’s thin face clouded with the shadow of regret, but she made no reply, for she would not have admitted, on pain of death, that her heart ached with the pathos of renunciation.

“Ain’t there nary thing I can do for you, Indie?” Lem asked, after an awkward pause, in what seemed to the listener a very off-hand, indifferent voice.

“No thanky. There ain’t a thing to do but to take the cow over to board with the Bankses. Seems like I can’t bear the thoughts of sellin’ her to out-an’-out strangers, so I thought I’d board her till some of the neighbors gits ready to buy her. Miss Clayton’s goin’ to keep Billy for me till I get settled, so’s I can take him.”

Billy, the big tortoise-shell cat that purred on the door step, lifted his head at the sound of his own name and blinked contentedly, whereupon Lem stooped and stroked his glossy fur. “I guess Billy’ll miss you if no one else does,” he remarked dryly.

Then he rose and held out a big brown hand. “Well, good-bye, Indie, an’ good luck to you,” said he. “If ever I can do anything for you, let me know, will you?”

“Good-bye,” said Indie gravely.

Indie went away the next morning—a morning full of balm and peace. Fresh, fragrant winds scattered the rose petals thickly over her shoulders as she hurried down the garden path to meet the stage. She did not trust herself to glance back, for some strange, dumb emotion tugged at her heart-strings and soundless voices called to her out of the sweet silence that enveloped earth and sky.

She shivered as she entered the hot, sultry, dust-laden train with its burden of dull, spiritless travelers. “It must be the air,” she murmured to herself as she sank into a seat. “These cars is awful clost with the sun beatin’ down on ’em an no air stirrin’. Now, if a body was at home they could open the doors an’ winders an’ set in the shade.”

“Home! Home! Home!” said the swiftly revolving wheels that bore her relentlessly away from the old, sweetly familiar scenes toward an unknown, lonely future. She watched the green fields and woods that whirled past the windows until they grew less and less frequent, with dingy little stations squatted between them. The landscape changed and the car grew hotter and the smoke thicker, for the train was approaching the factory district of Birmingham, the Alabama metropolis. Children, with unclean, pallid, faces, stared up at the car windows as the train pulled through their grimy quarters, and men in blackened, greasy clothes lounged along the tracks in the occasional shade of a sweltering brick wall.

Indie found the squalid home of Tom’s widow after much patient wandering about the uneven, unswept streets. Many minutes passed before her ring was answered; then a white-faced woman opened the door a very little way. Yes, she was Mrs. Pasely. Did anyone want to see her?

“I am Tom’s cousin, Indie,” the caller announced simply. “I’ve brung the money for Tom’s funeral.”

The widow cried a little at first while she told Indie of Tom’s tragic death, but her mind was too absorbingly occupied over the funeral to permit of the luxury of self-pity. She dressed hurriedly and went out to communicate with the undertaker, leaving Indie with the children, three little, frail, colorless, old-young beings, who reminded Indie of cellar-grown plants. The widow was not long away; late that afternoon the two women and their three charges followed Tom’s remains to consecrated ground.

“I never can tell you how thankful I am,” was all Mrs. Pasely said to Indie concerning her sacrifice, “for now I feel at rest about poor Tom bein’ laid away like he ought to be. If the baby was just well I’d try to start out an’ make a livin’ and do my best without Tom,” she added mournfully, “but it seems like I ain’t got no heart to do nothin’ while he’s so weak and puny. He ain’t been to say real well since we left Texas, where we lived right out in the country. I’ve tried everything I could think of but nothin’ don’t do him no good as I can see. The doctor says he won’t never git well till I take him back to the country, an maybe not then. Me’n Minnie’s got promise of work in the factory next week, but if little Tom ain’t no better I can’t leave him with jest Jim to look after him. If we only could git back to Texas agin we’d all git well an’ stout, an’ I wouldn’t care if we was poor. All I care about is for little Tom to git well.”

Oh, if she could only take them all back to the farm with her, thought Indie. A great wave of home longing surged through her heart as she thought of the peace and beauty of the deserted home. She knew just where the shadows of noontide lay darkest over the old rose-bordered yard—knew that the back veranda where she always ate her simple midday meals with Billy purring at her feet was just then in the thickest shadow of the china-berry trees, and that all was still and sweet and tranquil in that far-off haven of rest. Instead of factory walls there were green, blossomed hedges; instead of the strident clamor of motor cars and mill gongs there was a ceaseless chorus of song birds, and instead of the hot, smoke-tainted air of the city, there was the fine, earthy fragrance of the good sweet soil that lay fallow while so many weary toilers sweltered in their city prisons.

Indie made Tom’s widow understand the whole situation, then she offered herself in any capacity that could serve little Tom, who had the look that she dimly remembered in young Tom when she first went to live with his parents. Indie would take work in the factory as she had planned to do and board with Tom’s widow to help along all she could, or she would take them all back to the farm and work very hard to make a mere living while little Tom had a chance for his life.

“Why, I’d be willin’ to work day an’ night on a farm!” the widow answered earnestly. “I’m jest plum certain Tom will git well way off there in the country. Oh, do take us back with you! Me’n Minnie an’ Jim can make a real good crop between us. You’ll see!”

That was what Indie wanted. She would sacrifice the last thing that remained to her—her pride—and ask Lem to help her by standing good for the hundred-dollar note, and far the rest she would work as she had never worked before.

“We’ll go tomorrow,” Indie announced. “You git right to work packin’ up what you want to take.”

The world was aflame with the splendid fires of sunset when the little party alighted before the farm gate on the following evening. “I’m real glad it’s light enough for you to see the flowers an’ things,” said Indie, as she led the way up the rose-bordered walk that seemed to greet her with sweet familiarity. “Good thing I left the key under the porch steps right where I could find it handy. There, now walk right in an’ set down, while I kindle a fire an’ git some supper.”

She had bought a few eatables the last thing before leaving Birmingham, which she speedily converted into a tempting meal. Her guests rewarded her industry to a gratifying degree, even to little Tom, who seemed to have acquired a good appetite which delighted his frail, worried mother beyond bounds. “He ain’t et like that in I dunno when!” she exclaimed with tears of joy.

It was close upon Indie’s usual bedtime when her ministration ended. She slipped out for a quiet rest on the front door-step to enjoy the peace and loveliness of the perfect spring night, but hardly had she seated herself when the garden gate creaked rustily and someone strode up the walk with heavy strides. At the sight of the dim figure on the step the intruder stopped precipitately.

“Who’s there?” asked a familiar voice.

Indie rose tremblingly. “It’s Indie Bright,” she answered. “Did you want to see me?”

“Indie!” exclaimed a voice so thrillingly joyous that the listener felt herself quiver from head to foot with a strange, inexplicable ecstasy.

“Ain’t it Lem Powers?” she asked. “Has anything happened?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” came the surprised answer. “I thought you was gone!”

Indie told her story briefly, carefully deflecting all merit from herself. “I’m real glad it happened that way,” she finished, “for I did hate to sell the old place.”

Lem drew a deep breath. “You’re jest five hours too late, Indie,” he said in a queer voice, “for the agent sold the farm this afternoon at four o’clock.”

Indie felt the solid earth recede beneath her. “Sold it!” she echoed fearsomely. “Oh, Lem, whatever shall I do!”

“I dunno. There ain’t no use in tryin’ to buy it back, ’cause the man that bought it won’t part with it for anything, except——”

He paused and went a step nearer. “Except you’ll give him what he’s always wanted—yourself. Indie, I never did want no other girl but you, an’ never will.”

Indie shrank away, but a strong, warm hand found hers in the shadow, while the low earnest voice went on to tell her of a miracle that thrilled every fibre of her being with unspeakable happiness.

“I aimed to ask you the day you told me about leavin’,” Lem confessed, “but by the way you talked I thought it wouldn’t be no use, so I bought the place hopin’ you’d want to come back some day.”

“Lem,” said Indie, after a long, happy silence, “I never had no idee that—that you ever wanted me. I thought it was Cousin Louise you wanted.”

“Louise—after I’d seen you!” Lem cried incredulously. “Why that would be like chosin’ a bit o’ glass instid of a real diamond. It was Louise as told me how you’d took a dredful dislike to me from the very first, an’ of course I couldn’t help but believe it by the way you always acted when I was around. I tell you, Indie, that made a heap o’ difference to me. I’d a done anything in the hull world for you an’ would yit if you’d only let me.”

Indie drew a deep breath that sounded strangely like a stifled sob. “Oh, Lem, that’s just the way I’ve always felt about you,” she confessed very softly and hesitatingly.

After a long, long while, during which the years and their burden of care and loneliness and heart-ache slipped away from Indie’s heart like an wornout garment, she drew her hands away from Lem’s close clasp. “You’d better go now, Lem,” she said very gently, “’cause it’s gitting late an’ I don’t want to wake the folks up after they’ve got to sleep.”

“All right, Indie. I’ll be back tomorrow to see about putting in a late crop o’ corn for Tom’s folks to work out. We’ll jest let ’em keep the place free of rent for a while an’ see to it that they make enough to keep ’em. You can look after ’em all you want to, for it ain’t but a little piece from our place over here. Good night, Indie.”

Indie lingered in the soft, starry dusk for a few moments after Lem had gone, to gloat over her great happiness; and presently something dark and small scuttled out of the lilac hedge and bounded into her lap with a mew of welcome. It was Billy, quivering with elation and delight.

Indie caught her pet to her breast with a cry of rapture. “Oh, Billy, Billy, ain’t it lovely to be home again!”

Our Civilization
BY COUNT LYOF TOLSTOY

Men say that civilization, our civilization, is a great good. But they who have this conviction belong to the minority who live not only in this civilization but by it; who live in ease, almost idleness, in comparison to the lot of workmen.

All such men; kings, emperors, presidents, princes, ministers, functionaries, soldiers, proprietors, investors, merchants, engineers, doctors, scientists, professors, priests, writers, are so sure our civilization is a great good that they cannot bear the thought that it should disappear or that it should even be changed.

Ask, however, of the great mass of agricultural people, slave people, Chinese, Hindus, Russians—ask nine-tenths of humanity whether this civilization, which seems a superlative good to those who are not agriculturists, is really a blessing or not? Strangely enough, nine-tenths of humanity will reply in the negative.

What they need is soil, fertilizer, irrigation, sun, rain, forests, harvests, and simple farming implements that one can make without abandoning the agricultural life. As for civilization, either they know nothing of it, or it presents itself to them under the aspect of the debauchery of cities, with their prisons and their bagnios; or under the aspect of taxes and useless monuments, of museums, of palaces; or under the aspect of duties which prevent the free circulation of products; or under the aspect of cannon, of armor and of armies that ravage whole countries. And they say, if that is civilization it is of no use to them, and that, it is even hurtful to them. The men who enjoy the advantages of civilization maintain that it is good for all humanity; but in this case they cannot bear testimony because they are both judges and parties concerned.

One cannot deny that we are now far along the road of technical progress; but what is far along on that road? A little minority lives on the back of the work people; and the work people, they who serve the men that enjoy civilization in the whole Christian world, continue to live as they lived five or six centuries ago, profiting only from time to time of the leavings of civilization.

Even if they live better, the breach that separates their lot from that of the rich classes is rather wider than it was six centuries ago. I do not say, as many think, that, since civilization is not an absolute good we should throw out at one stroke the structure men have devised for the struggle against nature; but I do say that, to make sure this structure shall really serve men well, it is necessary that all and not only a small minority enjoy it. No one must be deprived of his due by others under the pretext that these benefits will return one day to his descendants.

The good and reasonable life consists in choosing, of many ways that lie open, the way that is best.

Therefore Christian humanity in the present situation should choose between two things: either to continue along the path of wickedness in which existing civilization gives the greatest number of benefits to the smallest number of people, keeping the others in poverty and slavery; or immediately, without postponing it to a future more or less remote, to renounce in part, or wholly, the advantages which this civilization has given to certain privileged ones, thereby preventing the liberation of the majority of men from poverty and serfdom.

A Coal Miner’s Story
BY CHARLES S. MOODY, M. D.

The average worthy citizen reclining beside an open coal-grate, reading the press accounts of the latest coal strike, has little interest in the matter further than his interest in the probable effect of the labor disturbance upon the price of his winter’s fuel. When he reaches that part of the narrative that tells of the troops having been ordered to the scene of action, the powerful arm of the military invoked to put down the uprising among the working-men, he heaves a sigh of relief that now the strike will be of short duration and the price of coal will not be advanced. Seldom does he consider the matter from the standpoint of the man who mines the coal.

Were that one big lump glowing warmly in the centre of the grate gifted with the power of speech, it would tell a tale that might well harrow up the feelings of the most callous. Alas! it is dumb, just as the man who dug it out of the bowels of the earth is dumb. It glows its heat away, crumbles into gray ash, and the worthy citizen retires to his rest with mind untroubled by any unpleasant thought of want or penury among those who go down into the unwholesome deeps of the mine and toil all day shut out from God’s gracious light that he and you and I may enjoy comfort and warmth.

At one time of my life the relentless wheel of Fate in its ceaseless revolving whirled me to its nadir, and spilled me into the squalid chaos of a coal-mining town, and, not content with that, hurled me into the nethermost hell of all that seething vortex of toil and poverty.

That the worthy citizen may see something of that side of the shield—the side sable—I will attempt to tell it, not with the graces of one skilled of pen, but in all its plain, naked, glaring hideousness.

At this point allow me to crave pardon for the frequent use of the personal pronoun. I am speaking as a coal-miner, and can tell it better by using the first person.

I was raised in the Far West. My life had been spent among the green mountains of the Pacific Coast, and I knew but little of the land beyond the Rockies. When ambition came, as it comes to youth everywhere, I dreamed of other lands where that ambition might find its full fruition. I left the mountain home, and set out to conquer the world of my dreams. My journey ended at the little town of Excello, in Northern Missouri. I was moneyless, and, as I soon ascertained, friendless. Disappointment glared at me from every door. Every vocation in life seemed filled, and all the avenues leading thereto were crowded with men eager to push the possessor of a job from his place and occupy it in his stead. I tried every possible chance for work, but without avail. Not even a country district school, with all its manifold possibilities of poverty, was open to the stranger.

Not far from Excello, the Kansas and Texas Coal company have opened up extensive mines at Ardmore. At last, desperate and in absolute despair, I turned to the coal mines that wait with black, widespread maws to suck in such flotsam of humanity as I was then. I set out from Excello on foot in the bleak dawn of a March morning, for the only Mecca left open to me. A donkey-engine drawing a train of coal-cars soon overtook me, and the engineer stopped his train and took me on. It was but a trivial act of kindness to a stranger, but it stands out so distinct and vivid by reason of its rarity that I must speak of it here. Motives of the most sordid meanness so completely actuate the principles of those people that the simple act of one of them giving a tramp a ride glows from out the grime of greed like a gem.

The little engine grumbled and rattled its way down the banks of a dirty yellow stream, dignified by being called a river, until it halted beside the head-house of one of the mines, and I was permitted to take my first view of Ardmore, one of the worlds that I had come so far to conquer. Ah, the irony of it all! What a contrast to the mental picture that the boy had painted upon the canvas of fancy not so many weeks before!

First the tall head-house and hoist, with the coal-screens all under one roof standing black and grimy at the mine’s mouth. Then the long incline, up which crawled the laden cars from the mine, looking for all the world like filthy serpents from some subterranean world. Off to one side towered the culm-pile, emitting its choking sulphurous smoke and polluting the muddy water of the little stream that wound about its base. Off yonder, on either side of the same stream, perched a double row of squalid grimy shacks, like gigantic carrion birds waiting to pounce upon the filth that flowed down the current of the river. These were the homes of the miners. Home! What a travesty on the sweetest word in any tongue! In the distance clustered the offices of the Company and the Company store, that most powerful tentacle of the giant octopus by which the Company holds its operatives.

I made my way down the narrow sidewalkless street, past the rows of miserable huts with their reeking front yards filled with children in no less degree reeking, past that bane of all mining towns, the low doggery, where for a few cents the miner buys the vilest of vile liquor, on to the town proper. The contrast between the two was startling. The officials must perforce reside where they collect their tithes, but they strive to make life bearable. Every house was neatly painted and every lawn set with trees and smoothly kept. I saw ill-clad women and low-browed men black with the grime of the mine entering a large building which I rightly surmised to be the Company store. The offices were on the other side, and those who entered there did so with an air of the utmost servility, as though they fully expected to be kicked into the street.

It is wonderful what an influence one’s surroundings will have upon their character. Here I had been in Ardmore, only thirty minutes and I caught myself approaching that office in the same servile manner affected by all whom I saw enter there. I stood for some minutes hesitating before the portals where sat enthroned those who held my destiny in their hands. Cold and hunger are grim and determined drivers, however, and both were flaying me with their whips. Summoning my manhood I entered, approached the employment window and begged the right to earn my bread. The clerk gave me one keen look that swept me from head to foot and tersely assigned me to servitude in Mine 33, the one I had passed in the morning. He handed me an order on the store that entitled me to a miner’s outfit to be paid for out of the first money earned. He also assigned me a number by which I was henceforth to be designated in all my dealings with the Company. I became Number 337, and if I differed in any particular from the man bearing that same number in the Jefferson City penitentiary I was unable to detect that difference. True, I was permitted to walk the streets unmolested, but the product of my toil belonged to the Kansas and Texas Coal Company. I felt relieved. I had passed from the ranks of the unemployed. Henceforth I was to be a sovereign American citizen enjoying, as such, the Constitutional right to earn my bread.

I passed into the store and purchased such things as appeared needful, using one of the miners as a model from which to deduce my needs. A coarse pair of heavy shoes, ducking overalls and shirt, a pit cap with place in front to carry the lamp, the lamp itself, a gallon of lard oil for the same, a dinner-pail called a “deck” and the necessary picks and shovel about completed the outfit.

One of the clerks rather grudgingly answered my question regarding a boarding-place by informing me that there was a house on the hill that made a practice of feeding miners. Carrying my bundle, I called at the designated house and secured board and lodging. The house was slightly better than those I had passed before and, standing upon higher ground, was rather less filthy. I soon found that the miner is expected to do without all the luxuries and generally all the necessities of life. Water seemed the only article that could be obtained in plenty and for that I soon had reason to be truly grateful. The table fare was of the coarsest and cheapest variety possible. It possessed the sole merit of sustaining life, and that to me at the time overbalanced all other considerations. The beds were arranged in rows in an upper room. Two people were expected to occupy one bed. I had assigned to be my bed-fellow a young Cornishman, and I suspect the landlady selected him for that position owing to the fact that he was slightly less dirty than her other boarders.

That evening my “buddy,” that is, the man who was to be my working companion, called to see me. He was a man of middle-age who had spent his life in the mines. He had the pronounced stoop that I noticed in all the miners and which I very soon acquired. His skin was of that sickly yellow hue characteristic of convicts and coal-miners, brought about by being shut out from the light of day. It seems that I drew a very lucky number in having this man assigned me for “buddy.” The other miners told me that he possessed a “machine.” That is, after years of toil in the mines he had been able to save enough to buy a drilling-machine that retails at the Company store for fourteen dollars. Wonderful fortune! Almost a lifetime spent in labor, and all that he had to show for it was a fourteen-dollar drilling-machine! We talked long into the evening and I found him not without ideas that were expressed in a crude way, but above all, and, what was of vastly more importance to me just then, he was a practical miner. I do not know what he might have thought about it, but he had the tact not to hint anything about objecting to a green hand as “buddy.” Indeed, I suspect that the Company would hardly tolerate any criticism of their actions in that regard.

I appeared next morning clad in the habiliments of a coal-miner. My “deck” was filled and handed me and I followed the long line of stooping figures headed for the mines. We paused at the mouth of the pit and lighted our lamps and swung them from the front of our caps. Then, stooping still lower, passed down the long incline that leads into the coal vein. Soon the gloom surrounded us, and the flickering yellow-light from the burning lamp became our only guidance. Once upon the level of the coal body, the air became oppressive and warm. Used as I had always been to the free air of the mountains, I paused and gasped for breath. I was merely one atom of the inward moving black stream and was pushed onward. I soon grew accustomed to the lack of oxygen and before many days learned to exist upon a minimum supply of that article just as I learned to exist upon a limited supply of many other articles that in my ignorance I had considered essential.

I neglected to state that I had been met at the pit mouth by my “buddy,” who escorted me through the mazes of the underground streets of the mine to the Third West, which was the field of our future efforts for some time to come. On the way in he conversed very cheerfully about the condition of one of his children who was ill with pneumonia and not expected to live the day through. I half suspect that he secretly hoped that the Death Angel would come, and not only relieve the little one of her sufferings, but relieve him of one hungry mouth to feed.

It was over a mile from the surface to where our work lay. It consisted in “turning off a room”—that is, making an entrance into the bare face of the coal at right-angles to the direction of the tunnel. This was necessarily slow work and we accomplished but little the first day. All day long I sat upon my heels and picked a narrow trench from top to bottom into the resisting body of the coal. Long ere night came my cramped limbs refused to move another inch. I was simply racked from head to foot with pain. There never was a more welcome sound than the signal at the head of the entry to begin firing. Soon the boom of shots reverberated down the entry like the sound of cannonading, and the miners began straying out past us. We gathered up our tools and, placing them in a safe place, followed them. Ah, the blessed exhilaration of that air as I reached the surface! It was like being conveyed into another and better world. I glanced at my “buddy.” He had not changed one muscle of expression. With dogged, shambling footsteps he was setting off toward one of the miserable shacks.

Curiously I watched the miners as they appeared. All nations seemed gathered there. Italians, Czechs, Russians, Finns, Hungarians, Slavs, Cornishmen, Americans, yes and negroes. While the colored man was not permitted to become a miner in that particular mine, he was employed in various other capacities. I saw children of tender years going from work, their dinner-pails upon their arms, the stoop already in their shoulders, the hectic flush already in their cheeks. “Merciful God,” I thought, “this greedy giant, not content with sucking the life-blood of men, must rob the school as well to sate its lust!” I learned afterward that there was a child-labor law on the statute books of good old Missouri, but that it was openly and flagrantly violated, and that the Commissioner of Labor was a party to the violation.

I passed on homeward. Every step seemed weighted with lead. I dragged myself up the long hill and entered the house. I was shown the wash-room and my particular washing-tub filled with steaming hot water. The room was already filled with miners taking a bath. I stripped and found that though I had been in the mine but a day my body was black with coal-dust. The next half-hour I spent in trying to remove the grime, with but poor success. The other miners finished their ablutions and departed. I was shocked at the manner in which the most of them performed that important duty. A dash of water on the head and neck, a wet towel over the body, rubbing off the most evident particles, a brisk scrubbing of the head, neck and ears, and they were ready for supper. I was so long at my bath trying to accomplish the impossible that the landlady tapped on the door and informed me that supper only waited my appearance. I overheard one of the miners designate me as “that new dude” when I entered the dining-room. To be cleanly, then, was considered among these sons of toil as being a species of foppishness. (I soon learned to perform my ablutions more scientifically, and remove a maximum amount of coal-dust in a minimum length of time.) I was too tired to eat, too weary to sleep. All night long I tossed about in that comfortless bed and sighed for the coming of morning. It came at last and dawned upon another day of labor.

Today we drilled our first hole and placed the first shot. I had the satisfaction of loading my first box of coal, affixing my leather tag to it and starting it on its journey toward the weighing office, thereby satisfying a small part of the Company’s claim against me for the clothes I wore. My “buddy” had lost his child the night before, and this afternoon the little one was to be buried in the graveyard on the hill back of the town. He asked me, as though requesting a favor, whether he might attend the funeral! Asked me, almost a stranger, whether he might attend the funeral of his own child! Heavens, what a system! My heart was so heavy that I could not work, but he seemed to take it all as a matter of course. In fact I detected a cheerful note in his voice as he informed me of the demise.

During the afternoon I had nothing to do but carry the picks out to the blacksmith-shop to be sharpened, for which service we are to pay the smith each a dollar per month. After they were prepared I returned with them to the mine and employed the time in looking into the other rooms where the miners were at work. In almost every instance I found them idle. Inquiry revealed the fact that they were waiting for coal-boxes. They had plenty of coal to load, but no boxes to load it in. The Company makes it a practice to allow no man to get ahead. Once he falls into their grasp the idea is to keep him there. Even at thirty-five cents per long ton, the price paid, the miner could make fair wages if he were furnished boxes, but the Company does not intend that he shall make fair wages.

Our room advanced rapidly now, and we always had coal ahead to load what boxes came to us, which were few enough. The most we ever got in any one day was six, that is three for each of us, and could we succeed in placing a ton in each one we would have made the munificent sum of $1.05. Out of that princely wage we were supposed to pay for board, lodging, hospital fees, blacksmith, and powder. By the way, there is the greatest steal perpetrated by the coal companies. They furnish the miner with his powder at a cost to him of $2.50 per keg. Of course they do not say in so many words that he shall not buy his powder from other dealers at 90 cents per keg, but if he does do that they see to it that his tenure in the mine is very short, and they have divers ways of disposing of him without discharging him outright.

There are two methods of mining soft coal. The method used in Mine 33 was what is known technically as “shooting off the solid,” that is, drilling a deep hole in the solid coal body and blasting it down very much as rock is blasted in railroad building operations. This method, while it procures the greatest amount of coal with the least expenditure of labor, is at the same time very expensive to the miner who must buy his powder and in addition to his regular blacksmith tax must pay for the sharpening of all the drill bits.

It is in these blasting operations that so many men in soft-coal mines lose their lives. The force of the blast loosening the coal at the same time jars the slate roof of the mine. When the workman returns and starts picking down the standing column of “shot” coal the treacherous top gives way, and, like a deadfall, buries the unfortunate man beneath tons of slate. Then there are three bells signaled to the top and down comes the padded car, if the man is not entirely dead, and he is carted away to the hut miscalled a hospital. The next day some of his friends are around with a paper and each miner is supposed to contribute a box of coal to the relief of the injured miner. Should the accident, however, result in the instant death of the man there is no such ceremony as calling the padded car. He is simply dumped into an empty coal box and hauled to the surface with the next trip going out. Once there, his very existence is forgotten in the mine and work goes on as before. The same formality regarding the gift of the box of coal is gone through with for the benefit of his widow and orphans. In all my mining experience I never knew of a miner refusing to subscribe to a fund of this kind, though they could ill afford to do so out of the scanty wage they were earning. You feel inclined to do it, for you know not what instant you will yourself require like assistance.

One method employed by the Company in getting rid of an objectionable miner is so ingenuous in its simplicity that it deserves mention. They have what is known as a sulphur bell. If a miner loads a lump of sulphur into his box that is so large that he might be supposed to detect it the men at the screens pull a rope that rings a bell in the weighing-office and the unfortunate miner has a check placed against his number. He not only has that box of coal docked about half, but he gets a demerit as well. Three of these demerits results in his dismissal from the mine. Now, let us illustrate. In the first place, there is so much of the sulphurous mineral scattered through the coal body that it is an absolute impossibility to remove all of it down there in the half light of the underground world. There is hardly a box of coal that reaches the weighing scales that does not contain several pounds of the substance. That some miners do place lumps of it in their boxes to increase the weight is perfectly true. A miner becomes objectionable to the powers that be by reason of talking too much (for some of them do think and express their thoughts to their fellows) and the powers that be decide to get rid of him. They could simply call him into the office and hand him his time, but that is not the policy. The word is passed to the man at the bottom of the screens to “bell” Number so and so out. The Argus eye of the man is upon every box of coal that comes sliding down the incline. He hears this man’s number called and detects a lump of sulphur sliding along with the descending coal. He reaches up, yanks the bell rope and that miner is one-third out of a job. It may take several days to complete the task, but Fate is no more certain than that it will be completed. Usually a miner who knows himself to be under the ban and sees a sulphur check opposite his number takes the hint and calls for his time. Wonderfully simple. Charmingly effective.

Another and equally effective method is that of slow starvation. The banned miner finds that he is not getting an equal number of boxes with his fellows. He complains to the driver and obtains but scant satisfaction. Things go on until pay-day and he finds himself behind with the company. He is questioned very closely as to the reason for this and solemnly warned not to allow it to occur again. Naturally it does occur again and he is forced to look elsewhere for work.

These instances are, however, comparatively rare. It is the policy of the octopus to hold securely every victim who falls into the slimy toils. Only when a man has the courage to assert his manhood does he become objectionable to the company. So complete is the system that there are few such.

It does not require one skilled in the economics of the labor problem to point out the glaring evils of a coal-mining system. They are so evident that even he who runs may read. They are so patent that even the dull creatures who toil under them feel in a blank way that something is wrong. Just what, they cannot say. They realize that they are always hungry, always toiling and always in debt. There are three things that the strong arm of the judiciary should suppress—child labor, peonage, and weight frauds.

I have purposely placed child labor first, for it deserves the first place. Children of very tender years are forced into the mines, where they serve in various capacities, some of them even being utilized by their parents in the actual mining operations. This is done that the parent may obtain an extra supply of coal boxes by reason of his having a “buddy,” though the coal is all loaded out under his number. Principally, however, the little fellows are employed as “trappers,” to open and close the immense valves that direct the air current down the various entries. All day long these infants stand in the noisome draft and swing back and forth those heavy doors. With the strong current of air pushing or pulling against these valves it is no light task for even a man to perform. Then the damp air, playing about the half clad figure, induces colds, pneumonia and consumption. It is a rare thing to see one of these little “trappers” who is not coughing with some form of respiratory trouble. The parents lie cheerfully regarding the child’s age, and the child itself lies just as cheerfully. Poor creatures, they are hardly to be blamed! The few pennies that are thus obtained help to keep the almost empty pot boiling at the squalid home.

The system of peonage is worse far than African slavery ever could have been. From year’s end to year’s end the miner never sees money. He is paid in coupon books good at the store for the necessities of life and that is all he is expected to have, and precious few of them. In almost every instance the Company has sold to the miner one of the miserable houses, for which he is to pay a certain sum every month. The Company proudly boast that their miners own their own homes. The miner is given a contract to be held in escrow (by the Company) whereby upon the payment of the purchase price he is to have a deed to the property. It is a very significant fact that there were only eighteen deeds on record in Macon County covering these properties. In other words, only eighteen miners actually owned their homes. It was never the intention of the Company to allow the miner to secure title to his “home.” If any considerable number of them showed symptoms of making good on the payments, the Company had many ways of causing them to default and thus violate the ironclad terms of the contract.

The contention regarding weights is one of long standing. The miner is supposed to mine a long ton of 2240 pounds. In reality he mines nearer 3000 pounds. The scales are hidden from the view of the miner and the weigh boss cheerfully deducts from the weight of the miner’s box anything that he sees fit and he usually sees fit to deduct about one fourth. This systematic robbery is carried on all the time. Could the miner obtain what his labor actually produces, his condition would be less miserable. He does not obtain it, however, and he seems powerless to bring about change. Now we will return to my own personal experiences in the mine. Our room was a good one, save that the slate top was very treacherous and we took particular care to keep it well timbered. My “buddy” was a thorough miner and fully knew the virtue of propping the top perfectly. The room had been driven up some sixty yards when the accident happened, that brought home to me the dangers of mining.

We fired a fourteen-foot hole in the evening, before leaving the mine. The next morning my “buddy” arrived before I did, and began loading the box that was standing in the room. Upon my arrival I found the box half filled, but my “buddy” nowhere in sight. A mass of slate had fallen and I knew instinctively that my “buddy” was beneath the mass. I called some of the nearby miners and, after propping the top, we fell to work removing the debris. First an arm showed; then the entire body was exposed to view. He had been instantly killed. I loaded the body into the half filled box and accompanied it to the top. It became my duty to inform the wife of the misfortune. She, poor woman, took the news stolidly, as though she had long expected it. Indeed, I think they grow to look forward to the time when the husband will be carried in, crushed out of all semblance to a human being. We buried him in the bleak graveyard on the hill and, as his “buddy,” it became my duty to carry around the paper that asked assistance for the widow. In her stolid way, I suppose, she was grateful for the charity, but she never showed it by any emotion of the face, taking the whole thing as a matter of course.

It had been a very wet Spring and the falling rain had completely saturated the ground and, soaking through, had loosened the slate and soapstone top until falls were of almost daily occurrence. As yet we had not been visited with any that were disastrous in nature. A few tons of rock in some of the rooms, a miner killed or hurt, was about all. In June, however, occurred the fall that imprisoned several hundred of the miners in the West entries for two days. Down toward the beginning of the first West an old deserted room caved in, carrying with it the top above the entry proper. For several days the miners had noted that the room was “working,” that is, the top was pressing upon the props. This was evidenced by the collection of fine flakes of slate that covered the room and the entry when we entered the mine in the morning. With characteristic negligence the matter was passed up and nothing done but to remove the iron track from the room. One day I paused at the mouth of the room, attracted by a peculiar noise. At intervals there was a sound like the snapping of an overwrought violin string. I afterward learned that the sound was produced by the bending props throwing off fine splinters. That evening when we passed out the props were snapping as they broke under the enormous pressure. A faraway rumbling was heard, like wagons passing over a covered bridge. The room was certain to fall during the night, the old miners said.

It did not, however, for it was still “working” the next morning. Sometime during the forenoon I heard a sound as of distant artillery fire. Boom, boom, boom,—the sound came up the entry, causing a current of air to flare the lights hither and yon. This continued for an hour; then the room caved. There was a crash of falling stone, a sound impossible to describe in any other words than terrible, a great gust of wind, and every lamp in the entry was extinguished. We rushed down the entry to find that all egress was shut off. The fall of the room had carried with it the entry as well, and we were prisoners behind thirty feet of solid rock. The pit boss instantly ordered every man to put out his light and lie down. Every cubic foot of air must now be conserved, for it would be hours at least before the pipe could be driven in to supply fresh. There we lay in the Stygian blackness in that foul atmosphere waiting the signal from the relief party. Hours passed, and no signal from the other side. Every minute the air became more foul until at last we were panting for breath, the sweat running from every pore. Then came the faint tap that told us the rescue party was driving the pipe. Never a sound came with such melody to my ears. It seemed an age before the steel-nosed pipe broke through and a welcome rush of oxygen was forced in by the air-pump. The pit boss signaled along the pipe that all was well. Then the work of rescue began. All day they picked out and carted away the fallen rock. All night the work went on without ceasing. Another day and another night followed before they broke through the barrier, and we streamed out of the mine, hungry, thirsty and weary from loss of sleep.

I was beginning to realize that while in time I might become an accomplished coal-miner, my chances for living a long life to enjoy that trade were exceedingly limited. I decided to sever my connection with the Kansas and Texas Coal Company, fully realizing that the Company would not mourn much at my loss, and I had no intention of falling on its neck to weep at the parting.

The incident that crystallized my half-formed ideas into immediate action took place in the room one day when I approached nearer the swift current of the Dark River than I cared to do. By accident the driver shoved a box into our room (by this time I had a new “buddy”) and we had no coal with which to load it. A box was so valuable that we could not afford to allow it to be taken out unloaded, so we cast about for sufficient coal for the purpose. Sometime since we had shot a small blast on the pillar and the pit boss, coming in, had ordered us to let it stand as we were too far to the south. This shot was still standing. The coal was loose and needed only to be mined off for us to have sufficient coal to load out the box. That duty devolved upon me, and I shoved the box back and began mining off the shot. In a short time I had it all cut round save a small portion that I could not reach with the pick. I returned to the “face” and procured a long chum drill and with it began to cut down the standing coal. I was seated tailor-like upon the floor, my legs doubled under me. When the coal mass gave way it rolled toward me and pressing the drill across my body pinioned me beneath it. I felt no danger, for my “buddy” could soon extricate me from the position. I called to him and he started in my direction. As he did so I glanced up and was horrified to see several yards of the slate top easing downward. Frantically I grasped the drill that was binding me down and gave it a wrench. It gave and another wrench broke it in twain. To flop over and crawl on my hands and knees out of the way of danger was only the work of an instant. As I did so the great slab fell, tearing off my shoe soles as though they were but paper. I owe my life to the fact that the top did not give way instantly, but broke gradually. So thoroughly frightened was I that I sat in a stupor for some time. When I had sufficiently recovered to be able to walk I made my way out of the mine, went to my boarding place, removed my pit garments and bade Ardmore a lasting and affectionate farewell.

I have torn a few soiled and tattered leaves from my book of life and have here given them to you. That the story is not well told I fully realize. That it is true in every particular must stand its only merit.

The Pessimist; His View-Point

Sermons should be practiced before they are preached.

A reformer’s idea of fun is to spoil other people’s fun.

No man can fix a clock and at the same time sing a hymn.

Sacrifices on the altar of foolishness never cease for lack of material.

I wonder why they don’t charter Polygamy under the laws of New Jersey.

There are a great many more fools in the world than they have any idea of.

Sometimes they are editorials, and the rest of the time they are idiotorials.

And, oh, if the great problems solved by the graduates would only stay solved!

The reason why I am so well is that I have always been too poor to stay long at a health resort.

There are two kinds of women who cannot be reasoned with: the one in love and the one not in love.

The best way to preserve the beauty of a finely shaped nose is to keep it out of other people’s business.

Tom P. Morgan.

THOSE THAT ARE JOINED TOGETHER
BY CHARLES FORT

You are standing on an Eighth Avenue corner, looking down a side street toward the ugly black streak made by the Ninth Avenue elevated railroad. You see peddlers, right hands curving at the sides of their mouths, left hands holding pails of potatoes; a woman with a basket of wash, which is tucked under a sheet; many fire escapes that look like a jumbling of giant gridirons, when seen from the corner. You notice the signs over doorways: a gilded boot; a carpenter’s sign projecting a little farther; glazier’s sign, of stained-glass squares trying to eclipse signs of shoemaker and carpenter; tailor’s sign almost obscuring all of them. In the tailor-shop windows are prints of the latest fashions, labeled, “Types of American Gents.” American gents, going to work, in overalls and sweaters, pause to enjoy the very latest in riding, golf, and hunting costumes, and perhaps go in to order a three-dollar pair of breeches. The tailor shop occupies the first floor of a three-story frame house—a grimy-looking house; its grimy clapboards are stained by streaks of rain dripping from the rusty fire-escape.

The McGibneys lived in the second-floor rooms. McGibney was log-shaped; he seemed as big around at his ankles as at his chest, and, though he wore collars, it was because everyone else wore collars, and not because his neck was perceptible. Close-cropped hair, a rather sharp nose, bright, alert eyes, cheeks red and all other visible parts of him pinkish. Mrs. McGibney was a plump, delicately featured little woman, who could express most amazing firmness upon her small features. When she had household cares, she worried; when she had household duties, she bustled. And it would surely please you to look at Mrs. McGibney when she worried; left forefinger beginning over the fingers of the right hand; left forefinger lodging on right little finger, Mrs. McGibney pausing to look into space, counting up to assure herself that the butcher had not cheated; forefinger beginning again and dealing with the grocer, this time; another fixed look into space to be sure the grocer had not imagined a can of tomatoes or a pound of flour. It would please you, because you would know that not one penny, worked so hard for by McGibney, would be wasted. When Mrs. McGibney bustles—ah, now that is pretty! That means a very keen sense of responsibility, nothing shirked, nothing that will make McGibney’s comfort neglected. Bustling to the oven door, opening and shutting it; fingers dabbing at under lip and sizzling on under side of a flat iron; frying-pan moved back on the stove; quick, short steps to the table to roll out breadcrumbs; dash to a window to sharpen a knife on the sill—when Mrs. McGibney bustles!

Evening! Both of them in the cheerful kitchen. Very cheerful kitchen! Three conch-shells, like big pink ears, up on the mantelpiece, and four palm leaves, painted green, stuck in a flower pot, just like a bit of Florida. The dish-pan, on the stove murmuring; a subdued rattle and good-natured growling of bubbles forming on the bottom of the pan, and dishes fluttering on them. The oil-cloth was bright and new-looking, except in the corner where heavy McGibney sat. There, chair legs had indented as if someone had beaten around at random with a hammer. And in his corner, reading the newspaper, sat McGibney, his wife sitting beside the table his elbow was on, frowning, puzzling, and counting her fingers. “Yes,” said Mrs. McGibney, “I can keep expenses down to five dollars a week, but you mustn’t charge on my book what you spend. I don’t think I ought to mark down the cent for your newspaper, do you? I’m not going to have my book any more than it’s got to be. I’ll cross off this two cents for a stamp. Now, you know you oughtn’t to charge me for that; it was for your own letter—don’t sit like that! How often have I told you you ruin the oil-cloth?”

McGibney not only continued to tilt back and dig into the oil-cloth but rocked himself on the hind legs of the chair; one is sometimes tempted to torment severe little women when they are too serious.

“Oh, I don’t care; you’re not harming me. Go ahead, if you feel like paying for new oil-cloth.” McGibney could not sit straight without some demonstration to cover his accession; he put out fingers like tongs and pinched just above her knee. If you are an old married man, you know just how far from dignified and severe that immediately made McGibney. Then McGibney sat straight, sat as if he would have sat straight anyway.

A rap on the door. Mrs. McGibney put away her account book as if it were wrong to keep account-books; McGibney sat crooked as if it were wrong to sit straight. No matter what one is doing, one feels that someone else coming makes a difference. Mrs. McGibney started toward the door, went to the stove instead, and covered the dish-pan; started again but paused to twitch a curtain; finally got to the door and opened it, but had glanced back twice and had motioned to McGibney to put away a bag of crackers.

“Oh, it’s you, Clara?” exclaimed Mrs. McGibney. “Why, come right in!”

Into the room came a stocky person, with a broad, flat, amiable face. Everything about her seemed to suggest that she was made to work hard and suffer, usually not complain, but, quite without reasoning, flash into short-lived rebellion against hardships now and then. Like your impression of peasantry more than a century ago, down-trodden, without leaders, should be your impression of Clara. In her heavy arms was a huge bundle, done up in a sheet, four corners of the sheet hanging loose at top. She appeared to be carrying a monstrous turnip, all white, loose ends like white turnip-tops.

“Why, good evening!” said Clara awkwardly, turning to the right, turning to the left, with her huge bundle, looking for a place to set it down, but still clinging to it, her chin buried in the top of it, the big bundle making her look like a pouter-pigeon.

“Mrs. McGibney,” said Clara, turning to the right, to the left, still clinging, “I don’t like to ask you, knowing you ain’t got accommodations, but could you lend me the loan of your ironing-board for the night? I’ve flew the coop on him for good and all this time, and tomorrow will get a room for myself; but, if you can let me have your ironing-board, I can sleep on it here, on the floor tonight. This is my wash, which I brought with me, not to leave him so much as a stitch that’s mine. Would it be too much to ask for your ironing-board?”

“Why, put down that heavy bundle, Clara!” cried Mrs. McGibney, having dabbed at the bundle, but missed it; “it’s sopping wet!”

“Sopping wet!” repeated Mrs. McGibney, as if pleased. And she was pleased, for here was an occasion for her to bustle around the room. Very much did Mrs. McGibney like to bustle around a room. And Clara, by the door, sat at the table at the other end of which McGibney sat.

“It’s wet because I just took it in off the line, not to leave him anything of mine,” said Clara. She moved uneasily in her chair. And she winked, as if in physical distress.

“I can’t move my line, because the rain’s made it too tight,” said Mrs. McGibney, “but we can hang up the wash here to dry. Ironing-board? Ironing-board, how are you!” She pounced upon the huge turnip, seizing turnip-tops, plucking them apart. “No, but we can make you comfortable in the front room, Clara.” Sheet spread out and wash in a mound. “And you’ve carried this with you all the way through the streets? I’ll fix up lines.” Two parallel lines, rigged up one from each end of the table to the opposite wall, sheets thrown over them; kitchen looking like Monday morning in your back yard. Room divided into three compartments: Clara in one, by the door; middle one, including the table, reserved for Mrs. McGibney; McGibney isolated in the third. Mrs. McGibney hung wash on the backs of chairs, and, forgetting how picture frames collect dust, jumped up at comers of picture frames, with more wash. Then she returned to her chair, which was in the middle compartment.

“Not bothering you too much,” began timid Clara. An expression of pain suddenly shot across her broad face. “Oh,” she breathed, “I guess that must be the tintypes! Anyway, don’t bother about me. Oh! yes, I’m sure it’s the tintypes. Tintypes has such sharp corners, even if there is pink paper frames to them. I had nowhere else to carry my belongings, which I’d not leave behind, as I have flew the coop on him.”

Clara stuck one foot out and lifted her skirt somewhat. Untied a handkerchief from somewhere, though I have heard that the material is usually more elastic—never mind; in a most matter-of-fact way, Clara untied the handkerchief. As if it were the most natural thing in the world to do, and very serious about it, she delved and drew forth an alarm clock, a comb, shoe-strings, a looking-glass, a tea-strainer, a box of matches, the tintypes——

“It was the tintypes!” cried Clara. “I knew, because they got such sharp corners and was sticking me, all the way over, most every step I took.”

Mrs. McGibney and McGibney, who drew his sheet aside, stared at the astonishing collection on the table and then laughed heartily. Clara, looking calm and unintelligent, drew forth a can of baking powder. Nothing to laugh at could she see, but the others seemed amused, so she smiled sympathetically with them.

“Yes,” said Clara, no longer timid, for it was her way to be awkward at first and then feel as much at home as anybody, “I’ve flew the coop on him forever. I’ve said I meant it before, but this time I do mean it. And he can be so nice when he wants to be. You know that yourself, Mrs. McGibney.”

“He always seemed a perfect little gentleman whenever I saw him,” declared Mrs. McGibney.

“It’s a shame you two can’t get along better!” was heard from behind McGibney’s sheet. “I’ve always found Tommy all right.”

And Clara exclaimed: “He’s the nicest little man in the world! This time I have flew the coop on him forever.” She smiled at her sheet, so that no one within hearing should be depressed, just because she had troubles.

“I don’t know!” said Clara, with her broad, slow smile, “it’s pretty hard for a woman to come home from her day’s work, and find the man stretched on the floor before her sleeping it off. Isn’t it?” she asked, as if by no means sure and wishing to hear what others thought.

From behind two sheets:

“It certainly is hard!”

Rumbling up over McGibney’s sheet:

“You hadn’t ought to put up with it! It is hard!”

“Isn’t it!” cried Clara, as if crying. “There, I was right, after all! I thought, myself, it was hard, and here’s others thinks the same. And then, when you’re getting along nice, both working and laying by a little, and going to buy the brass lamp in Mason’s window, and get a whole half-ton of coal instead of by the bag, which is robbery, and then he goes out to change the savings into one big bill which you’d never be tempted to break, and comes back in the morning without one cent—” Clara paused. She would not like to be ridiculed for regarding trifles too seriously. “I don’t think he does right by me—does he?”

Both sheets agitated. Over both sheets:

“He certainly don’t do right by you!”

“Does he!” cried Clara, almost excited, also triumphant, hearing her own suspicions verified.

“He oughter be ashamed of hisself!” rumbled McGibney.

Clara looked up, and there was a slow heavy frown, instead of the slow heavy smile.

“There’s worse than him!” she said sharply.

“I’ll never speak to him again!” declared Mrs. McGibney.

“You might speak to worse, Mrs. McGibney. I’m sure he always spoke most kind of you——”

“How could he speak otherwise of me?” demanded Mrs. McGibney in quick anger.

“Now! now! now!” rumbled McGibney, thrusting his sheet aside and looking warningly at his wife.

“Not making you a sharp answer, Mrs. McGibney,” pursued thick, slow, heavy Clara, “he never said nothing but kind words of you. There’s lots worse than him and he was always a good husband to me, excepting when he was bad, and I hope I’ll never lay my two eyes onto him again.”

And Mrs. McGibney looked at the McGibney sheet as if to say, “You’d best always keep quiet!” and her resentment was over, for she was fond of Clara and had known her many years.

“I’ll get a pint of beer,” said McGibney. “Can I leave youse two without there being a clinch? You like a little ale in it, don’t you, Clara?”

“Don’t never mind me!” said Clara restlessly. “I just remember I left the gas burning and him sleeping his buns off. Do you think the gas would go out and then start up again and not burning? I’ve heard tell of such cases. Not meaning to go back to him, maybe I’d better go back and turn the gas out.”

“Do go back, Clara!” urged Mrs. McGibney, feeling through the sheet for Clara’s hand and impulsively seizing Clara’s nose, trying again for the hand, closing fingers upon Clara’s ear, Clara leaning over, with head near her knees, “Give him another chance. A wife’s place is at home. Don’t mind what others tell you—your husband is dearer to you than all the rest of the world. Go back and make him promise to do better.”

“I don’t wish him no harm,” said Clara, hesitatingly. “This time I’ve flew the coop on him forever, even if he is the nicest little man in the world when he has a mind to be—if I thought the gas would go out on him, I might go back and turn down the gas, anyway.”

Oh, then, here was a fine chance for Mrs. McGibney to bustle. Down came everything on the lines, as if it were Monday night in the back yard. Down came everything from the backs of chairs and from picture frames. Back into a bundle with everything! Big white turnip again, loose, sprawling turnip-tops.

“I might try him again for a week, anyway,” decided Clara. Out and away and back home with her big white, turnip and its pouter-pigeon effect, too bulky for her arms to go around, her chin lost in fluttering turnip-tops; back home with bundle, alarm clock, looking-glass, box of baking-powder and tintypes taken one almost impossibly happy day at Coney Island.

An evening or two later. McGibney out for a walk. Mrs. McGibney up to her elbows in the washing that had driven him out, for if he had remained in he would have had to carry boilers of water to the stove from the sink in the hall. So McGibney had said, “Marietta, I ain’t getting fresh air enough. I don’t sleep good unless I take a little walk in the evening.” Mrs. McGibney had to fill the boiler one dishpanful at a time and that was satisfactory to McGibney.

Rap on the door. Mrs. McGibney quickly concealed socks with holes in them and turned to the door. Vain little Mrs. McGibney! She paused to rummage through the wash until she found curtains. They were very fine lace curtains. The very fine curtains were placed where a caller would surely see them and note how very fine they were. Then Mrs. McGibney’s hand did around and around on the door knob, hand slippery with soap-suds, until the slipperiness wore off and she could open the door. She exclaimed: “Why, Tommy! come right in.” The “nicest little man in the world” was an uneasy, squirming, twisting, little man; bald-headed; Hebraic nose like a number six inclining at forty-five degrees; chin with a dimple looking like a bit gouged out of it; very neat; fussy. And a very polite little man, scraping, bowing, grinning.

“Sit down, Tommy. You won’t have much room to stir. The old man is out, but will be back almost any minute. Sit down, but first I’ll trouble you to fill the boiler for me, if you don’t mind. How is Clara?”

Tommy seemed to scrape and bow to the boiler, before lifting it, seemed to scrape with his right foot and bow to the wash-tub as he passed it and went scraping and bowing down to the sink, filled the boiler, came back with it, set it on the stove and stood grinning, prepared to scrape and bow, if given half a chance to, until invited again to sit down.

“My!” said Mrs. McGibney, “the wash does gather on one so!”

Tommy opened his eyes wide and wrinkled his forehead to express profoundest sympathy. Not only with eyes and forehead, but with elbows, feet, knees and hands, it was his way to show how very attentively he listened to anyone speaking to him; ready to laugh heartily at anything he might be expected to smile at; equally ready to commiserate with anybody.

“Are you feeling pretty well?”—soap dabbed on a McGibney shirt. “How is—” laundry-brush up and down where the soap was, which was at elbows; McGibney would lean on elbows. “Clara? Is she—” up and down with the shirt on the wash-board—“feeling pretty—” wringing out and dropping shirt on pile, on a newspaper, “well?” Pile too high and toppling over, top pieces falling on the floor outside the newspaper. Not a speck on them, but rubbing over for them, anyway.

“Oh, yes, ma’am; Clara is very well. I have left her.”

“You’ve what? You’ve left her?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am!” said Tommy, head bobbing, shoulders, arms, knees, all of him bobbing. “I called to see would you keep these tintypes for me? I’m going to Maddy-gascar, where I hear there’s openings.”

“Why, Tommy, what’s the matter?”

“She don’t keep the house picked up—not saying a word against her,” answered Tommy. “These tintypes is mine, and she can have everything else; but these is mine, and it was my money paid for them down to Coney Island, me and her in them, and all I got in the world I care about, and will you keep them for me till I can send for them from Maddy-gascar?”

“Why, of course I’ll do that, Tommy; but you know you’d never do such a thing as leave Clara. That would be very wrong of you.”

“Oh, yes, indeed, ma’am, very wrong of me! Not saying one word against her, she lies in bed all day and won’t so much as do any sweeping. There’s never any cooking, and I’m tired to death of the delicatessens and rather go to Maddy-gascar and eat spiders, me going in the spider-web industry there. She don’t do no wash like you, Mrs. McGibney, but just rinses out in cold water. She’s so lazy she washes dishes by rubbing newspapers on them. That ain’t so bad as when she does wash them; she washes clothes in the dish-pan and then washes dishes after them—not that I’d say one word against her. So, will you mind the tintypes with her and me in them, ma’am? They’re all I have to care about, ma’am.”

“Oh, now Tommy—” But how could one possibly argue with Tommy? With eyes and forehead and elbows and knees, he would most emphatically agree with everything said to him.

“Your wife is a very good woman.”

Of course she was! Best in the city! Best in the whole world! But would Mrs. McGibney care for the tintypes?

“It’s very wrong of you, Tommy!”

Wrong? Shocking! Heartless! Wicked, shocking, heartless Tommy! Of course he was, and he admitted every word of it; but would Mrs. McGibney take care of the tintypes until he could send from “Maddy-gascar” for them?

Tommy left the tintypes on the mantelpiece, hoping he was disturbing nothing by so doing; imploring Mrs. McGibney not to bother with them if she thought they would take up too much room, begging her to throw them in the ashes or burn them, or jump on them if they should be the slightest annoyance to her; then he went away.

Back in five minutes. Well, after all, “Maddy-gascar” was pretty far away and he had heard stories about the Esquimaux there, so he would take the tintypes back with him; Clara might wonder where they were. Five minutes later. Back again. Perhaps Mrs. McGibney had better not say anything to anyone about the tintype matter. Bowing, bobbing, scraping.

Oh, not a word would Mrs. McGibney say! Rest assured of that! Indeed, she had quite enough to do in attending to her own affairs. Mrs. McGibney promised to say nothing, and like a busy little housewife with too much to do to waste time gossiping, breathed not a word of it till McGibney came in.

“It’s all Tommy’s fault!” said McGibney.

“I’m afraid Clara is a good deal to blame,” said Mrs. McGibney.

“Oh, yes, always stand up for the man, of course!”

“Oh, yes, take the woman’s part every time, won’t you?”

The next time the McGibneys saw Clara, there was no persuading her to go home. She had no home.

“Because,” said Clara, “when we found there wasn’t no use in our trying to get along together, we just broke up and gave away everything in the rooms and went down the stairs and down the stoop together. We didn’t so much as say good-bye nor nothing; he went up the street and I went down.”

“That’s right!” declared McGibney, “when two people can’t get along together, it’s best for them to part, I say!”

“You say!” cried indignant Mrs. McGibney. And scornful Mrs. McGibney!

“Well, I’m entitled to speak, ain’t I?” grumbled McGibney.

“No!” firmly. “Leastwise, not when you talk like that.” She looked her scorn and continued:

“No, Clara, there’s nobody dearer to any woman than her own husband.” Looked at McGibney as if he were a pile of wash just toppled over into the ash-pan. “Your husband will be with you when others are far away.” Looked at him as if he were two piles of wash toppled over into three ash-pans. “There ain’t any luck in any such advice as he’s giving you. I know how I love my own dear husband, and you know you’re the same, and you’ll find what the world is when you’re alone in it.” Glared her indignation, scorn, contempt for McGibney, who mumbled, with an air of sagacity, astonishing to himself:

“Ain’t wimmen the queer things, though!”

“I’ve flew the coop on him forever!” said Clara, with her broad, amiable, unintelligent smile. “I got a little hall room for myself, and—me go back to him? Oh, my! is that a step on the stairs? I wouldn’t wish it, not for the world, for him to find me here! I never want to see the face of him again!” Clara looked around for a place to hide; ran to the door of the front room, and, with her hand on the knob, stood listening.

“’Tain’t him! It’s someone going upstairs,” she said, smiling her relief. “I’ll never go back to him.”

A week later. Clara again. And Clara was out of breath.

“Oh, Mrs. McGibney, has the man come yet? I thought I saw him over on Ninth Avenue, and I run clear around the block for fear he’d be after me and track me here. I was just buying a bit of furniture and going to start rooms for myself, when I get a few bits together. And is it too much to ask you to store them for me till I get rooms, Mrs. McGibney?”

“We’re only too glad—” began Mrs. McGibney.

“Oh, on your life, don’t stir! It’s him! He mustn’t know where I am, or he might try to get me back! I don’t never want to see him again!” whispered Clara. “On your life, not giving no orders, don’t stir, or he’ll know you’re in and see me here.”

There was a rap on the door.

“Oh, my! Look out—would he hear us?”

Out in the hall:

“McGibney! Anyone know where McGibney lives?”

“Oh!” breathed Clara, “that’s all right. It’s the furniture men.”

And two men from a Ninth Avenue furniture store came in with a bureau. At least they set it in the hall, and turned to hasten down the stairs; paused to do little better than that, and rolled the bureau half way into the room; turned to run back to the store, but, in turning, thrust back with their heels, and pushed the bureau quite into the room, which was conscientious enough delivering of goods to suit anybody.

“I bought that!” said Clara, proudly. The bureau was rolled into the front room, and she helped, her hands caressing more than pushing. There was no back to the bureau. The varnish was worn off. Some one had broken open the top drawer, splintering the wood on each side of the keyhole.

“It’s mine!” said Clara rapturously. “It took three days of hard scrubbing on hands and knees, for me to buy that. It’ll be every bit as good as new, with a few boards nailed on the back, and a little oil rubbed over it.”

The bureau was rolled to a corner of the front room, but Clara could not leave it, hovering over it, stooping and pulling out drawers, one by one, gazing delightedly at the disgraceful old wreck.

“Yes!” said Clara. “The other day when I was scrubbing the restaurant floor, there was customers looking at me, and they says, ‘Look at that poor woman! Ain’t some got hard lots in life!’ They needn’t of pitied me! I was earning that! Just a few boards and a little oil is all it needs, and I’ll get as fine a home together as anybody’s got—what’s that?”

Clara ran to the kitchen to listen.

“I’m so afraid he’ll find me that I do be hearing sounds all the time!” she said. “Ain’t that bureau something elegant? I’ll have my own bit of a home and never see him again.” Then, as McGibney came out to the kitchen, shutting the front-room door behind him, she asked;

“Ain’t that sounds of excitement in the street? Maybe there’s a fire!” Clara ran to the front room and pretended to look out the window. She had heard nothing; it was only a pretext to get back to the disgraceful old wreck. On her own hands and knees she had earned it.

“Ain’t it nice!” said Clara, ecstatically. “I got my eye on a gilt-framed mirror I’ll buy next week. It’s nice, ain’t it?”

Clara went away. Back in five minutes.

“I guess maybe I left my rolled-up apron in the front room.” Whether she had or not, she stood looking at the bureau; turned to go; looked again; moved it to get a better light on it; stepped toward the door; paused and looked back.

“I bought that!”

And she went away, leaving McGibney standing in the front room. With an expression of deep melancholy he stood looking at the clumsy, broken bureau. He looked at his best furniture surrounding it—fragile, gilded chairs, on a big rug better than any other rug in the neighborhood—a sideboard with French plate glass in it; the very fine curtains. He was a log-shaped man, and not remarkably æsthetic, but his eye was sorely offended.

“Oh, well,” said the melancholy, log-shaped man, “if us poor folks don’t help each other, who will?” And the eye of Mrs. McGibney was equally offended; but Mrs. McGibney was not melancholy, for here was an opportunity for her to bustle. Out with the sofa and around in front of the bureau! The standing lamp placed where it would help to conceal the bureau. To hide the bureau was quite a problem, but Mrs. McGibney rejoiced in it. She bustled.

The next Saturday night Clara bought a wicker rocking-chair. Fearful-looking old rocking-chair! Interstices of it filled with white paint; all paint worn off wherever arms, legs, and backs had rested on it.

“It’s nice, ain’t it?” said Clara, dreamily, fondly.

McGibney sat straight, as if he had just dug through the oil-cloth and feared reprimanding. Then he fell back limply.

“Yes, ve-ry,” he said, without enthusiasm.

“It’ll fill out your front room nice, while I’m waiting for it, won’t it?”

“Oh, ye-es; it’ll be ve-ry nice.”

“And so comfortable!” said Clara. She sat in the chair and clumsily rocked it. “Try it, Mrs. McGibney! You ain’t got no idea how comfortable it is. You sit in it, Mr. McGibney. Just lie back and push with your feet and see what a comfort it is. My! I can just see myself in it, me with my shoes off and resting after the day. Such comfort in it! I don’t guess I ever made such a bargain before. But what do you think? That mirror I was so set on was bought! That’s mean, ain’t it? I was awful provoked when I heard it. Just the same, I got my eye on a stove that’s fine and well worth the four dollars they ask for it. It’s all nickel in front, and only one of the bricks broken, and can be fixed with five cents’ worth of fire-clay. It’ll look nice in your front room, won’t it?”

“Ve-ry nice!” answered distressed McGibney.

Clara got up to go. Had to sink back and take another rock in the chair, so comfortable after the day’s work, and one’s shoes off. It was indeed worth scrubbing for! Up to go. Well, just one more rock—away back and slowly down again, you know. And you, too, look again at it! My! but what a bargain! And Clara bought it! On her own hands and knees she had earned it. Before going away, Clara lingered at the door. Perhaps they would laugh at her if she should take another rock, but she might look at the chair for another moment.

“Ain’t this pretty oil-cloth you got!” Looking only at the chair.

“I must get a kitchen table like yours.” Looking only at her own rocking-chair. She left McGibney staring gloomily, but saying, sturdily:

“Us poor folks must help each other!”

Mrs. McGibney bustled.

It was a different Clara when seen again. Her face was flushed; the unintelligent but soft eyes were like eyes that could not see outward things, as if they were engaged in the unusual occupation of looking within at her own mind. Convince Clara that she had a grievance, and thick, obstinate brooding replaced uncomplaining stolidity.

By force of habit, Clara’s slow, amiable smile flickered, but her eyes were as if turned upon brooding within.

“Someone’s did that a-purpose!” said Clara, slowly, deliberately, staring, seeming to see neither McGibney nor Mrs. McGibney. “Me that thought I didn’t have a enemy in the world! Where would I get a enemy, me always kind to everybody? I had my heart set on that stove that only needed a little fire-clay. Someone’s bought it, just to annoy me. When the mirror went, I didn’t think nothing of it, but the stove too, is to annoy me. They won’t make nothing by that, and bad luck will come upon them for it.”

“Why, Clara, it only happened that way,” reasoned Mrs. McGibney. “Nobody would go and be as mean as that to you, specially as they’d have to spend money.”

“It’s tricks done me!” declared sullen, dogged Clara. “Oh, there’s somebody at the door. Maybe it’s him after me. Say I’m not here, Mrs. McGibney! On your life, don’t let him find me! I got to work for my living, anyway, and I’ll work for myself and not divide with no man. Never—oh, I guess it’s the kitchen table!”

“A kitchen table, Clara?” demanded McGibney. “Did you say a kitchen table?”

“Yes!” said Clara, brightening. “It’s nice! You can put it in the centre of your front room and maybe have ornaments onto it. It’s a very nice kitchen table.”

Door opened; a table thrust into the room; heels flying down the stairs.

“Don’t you think it’s nice?” Clara asked eagerly.

“Nice?” repeated honest McGibney. “Oh, is that the table?”

Scratched legs to it; two plain boards forming the top of it; heads of nails sunk in the boards, and once filled with putty; putty fallen out.

Clara shook it to show that the legs were firm. She would varnish it and cover it with a beautiful table cover she had seen in the five-and-ten-cent store, though there was one just as good in the three-and-nine-cent store.

“Next week,” said brightened Clara, “it’s going to be portcheers. They’re chenille and grand for a doorway. No room ain’t complete without portcheers.” She again shook the table to show how firm the legs were and then went away.

McGibney and Mrs. McGibney stood out on the front stoop of the rust-stained frame house, looking at the tailor, who was putting up a new sign: “Pants pressed, ten cents. Full-dress suits cleaned and pressed, one dollar.” McGibney thought of “full-dress” suits and looked down the street, at rags and dirt and ashes. It was Saturday night and they were going over to Ninth Avenue, to Paddy’s Market. Along came Clara, reaching the stoop, starting up the stoop, half up the stoop before she saw the McGibneys.

“Oh, is it you?” said Clara, with only the beginning of the slow, amiable smile.

“The portcheers is gone!” she said, without excitement. “My heart was set on them—the portcheers has gone. Would you say to me, now, that it only happens that way, Mrs. McGibney? Is there somebody playing mean, low tricks on me, or ain’t there? Does three times in succession just happen? The portcheers was bought last Monday. Was that only accident? Oh, but I came around to see would you lend me fifty cents? There’s a hat-rack I want. It’s meant for a front hall, but the mirror in it is nice and there’s a bit of marble to it, and it’ll look nice in my rooms, where, to my longest day, no man’ll ever hang his hat on it, unless you, Mr. McGibney, when you and Mrs. McGibney come and see me. I don’t like to ask you for fifty cents, Mrs. McGibney, and you just going to do your bit of marketing.”

“There’s fifty dollars in the bank that you can have any time you say so, Clara!” exclaimed McGibney.

“We’d rather have you owing it than have it in the bank, Clara,” said Mrs. McGibney, “because the bank might bust.”

Clara looked embarrassed. “Don’t you want to come look at the hat-rack?” she asked. “It’ll set your front room off fine!” The McGibneys pinched each other’s arms, as if saying, “Oh, Lord, preserve us!” All three went down the street toward Ninth Avenue, Clara preferring one side of the street; then, thinking the other side was darker, choosing the darker side so that if they should meet “him” he might not recognize them.

Torches on wagons, wagonloads of oranges, twenty for twenty-five cents; pairs of rabbits slung on headless barrels, plump rabbits hanging outside, furry rags, shot to pieces, inside the barrels; piles of soup greens and mounds of cabbages; cries of “Everything cheap! Only a few more left!” Paddy’s Market! Then the second-hand furniture store, with bed springs and pillows outside it; stoves with covers and legs in the ovens; rolls of matting; everything second-hand, even crockery and tea-kettles. Clara went into the store, Mrs. McGibney having paused to dig a thumb-nail into potatoes to see whether they were frozen, McGibney lingering with her, because he would have to carry the potatoes.

Clara came back to the sidewalk. Again her eyes were unseeing. “The hat-rack,” said Clara, staring at nothing visible, “is sold. I ain’t been gone from here ten minutes. It’s sold. Everything I got my heart on is sold. I don’t know who’s doing it, but they’ll never have a day’s luck for it.”

“But what could I do, lady?” The furniture man came cringing out to her. “You know you didn’t leave no deposit. Would you like to look at some mats for your front hall? You didn’t leave no deposit, so what could I do? I got a very heavy, rich and elegant mat here for your front hall; though the number of a house is onto it.”

“Look here, Jack,” said McGibney. “Who’s buying up all the things this lady looks at? Is it any particular party?”

“Come to think of it, it is,” answered the furniture man. “He’s the gent took the unfurnished rooms upstairs. ‘What’s he look like?’ Well, he bows most polite every time my wife waits on him and I see his head was some bald——”

“Wait for me!” said Clara. “Up on the next floor, you say? Just only wait one minute for me, Mrs. McGibney, and I’ll only go to tell him what I think of this latest meanness he’s playing me. Then I’ll be through with him forever. This is the last trick he’ll play me!” And she went to the stairs leading to the rooms over the store.

“It must be Tommy,” said McGibney.

“And I always took him for such a perfect little gentleman,” was Mrs. McGibney’s comment.

“Just wait a minute!” Clara had said; but, after several minutes, McGibney became uneasy.

“I’ll go up and see,” he said. “It maybe ain’t Tommy, and Clara may start mixing it with some stranger that’s got as much right to the furniture as her.”

But it was Tommy, for, as the McGibneys went up the stairs, Clara’s words, plainly audible, told them so.

“Never!” they heard—“Was it my dying day, I’d never forgive you. It was too cruel and I’ll never forget it.”

“Ain’t she the stubborn thing!” snapped Mrs. McGibney.

“Did I live to be as old as Mickthusalem, I’d not forgive you for it! Oh, Tommy, how could you go up the street when I went down? To treat me so! Don’t never mind nothing else; play me tricks and scold me and don’t do right nor anywheres near right, but how could you do that? Oh, Tommy, how could you go up the street when I went down? Me expecting your feet after me every second, me looking back at the corner. You going up, and me going down! Rob me of them portcheers I see you got there, and play me tricks with that mirror, and do like you want to about all the hall-racks in the world, but you never come to find me when I was hiding away! Have the red portcheers and welcome to everything my heart was set on, but you never come to me when I was hiding, and how could I tell you where I was hiding away? Oh, I been so unhappy without you, Tommy; there’s nobody got any sympathy for a deserted wife, but just a jeer at her and say, ‘No wonder he left, if you take one look at her big platter face’—but my eyes is nice and my hair is lovely, I was always told. Take away the red portcheers my heart was set on, Tommy, and I know you don’t love me, but we belong to each other, just the same, but don’t—oh, if you ain’t looking to break my heart—don’t never again go up a street when I’m going down!”

The McGibneys saw them standing in the centre of the room, arms about each other, hands patting each other’s shoulder-blades.

Tommy began to whimper. Arms mothered him. Steady tapping away on his shoulder-blades. Then Tommy blubbered outright:

“Oh, Clara, I been missable! I been missable something fierce, living alone! I ain’t ate nor slept, but been working straight along and got a good job and doing pretty good, and so much as a day’s work you’ll never have to do. No! not if it’s your longest day!” A bow and a bob and a scrape, for he had discovered the McGibneys standing irresolute in the hall. He continued to blubber and he continued to tap away at shoulder-blades.

“But why didn’t you come to find me, Tommy, when I was hiding away? I told the Finnigans and everybody, so you must of known where I was hiding away!”

Clara would not have seen a hundred McGibneys. Clara was tapping most mightily with both hands upon shoulder-blades.

“On account of the brass lamp!” blubbered Tommy. A bob and a bow and a scrape! “I done fierce bad spending our savings that was for the brass lamp, and I couldn’t go find you where you was hid till I had that here, in this new home, for you to see, and be complete, and then you’d know I was sorry and it would prove I was going to do right. But it wasn’t tricks, Clara! Honest, it wasn’t tricks! Me standing on the other side of the street, and looking in the store window at you, and no overcoat, because I needed every cent to show I was going to do right. And you look at the mirror. I say, ‘Clara likes that mirror. Then Clara must have that!’ Me standing with my toes all pinched up, as my shoes is bad, and you looking at them red portcheers. Then Clara must have red portcheers! Me jumping up and down, like I’m froze, but standing there every Saturday night to see what Clara likes and Clara’s going to have that!” Bobbing, bowing, and scraping toward the hall, from Tommy; from Clara, rather a look of resentment toward the hall.

A final tap on shoulder blades and: “Why, come in and see where we’re going to start up again!”

“Ain’t it strange!” said calm, stolid Clara. “He found me, after all!”

And from all four of them, and all four meaning every word:

“In all the world, there ain’t nobody like your own! If it ain’t but big enough to hold a trunk, there’s no place like your own!”

“And,” said supremely happy Tommy and Clara, “now we’ll celebrate!”

Will It Keep Them Off?

Carter, in New York American

The Money Power

“All things come to him that waits.” Fifteen or sixteen years ago, when the Farmers’ Alliance was flourishing throughout the West and South, it was a matter of common occurrence to hear some old horny-handed farmer, on a Saturday at the county seat, disputing with his neighbor about existing conditions. Almost invariably the Alliance man blamed the “money power” for causing things to go criss-cross. Occasionally the country merchant or small banker would butt into the discussion. “The money power,” he would say, with infinite scorn, “Humph! Why, you poor fool, there ain’t any such thing as ‘the money power.’ Might as well talk of the agricultural power, or the mercantile power. There are rich bankers and rich farmers and rich merchants—but that don’t make them a ‘power’ in the sense you use that term.”

For a number of years the “money power” has been given a much needed rest in the West and South. Most of the pioneers there have substituted the term “plutocracy.” But in the East reformers are just now beginning to sit up and take notice. One hears the term frequently. “Roosevelt,” said Jacob Riis, in a recent interview in the New York Herald, “is fighting the greatest tyrant of them all. Slavery affected only the South, but the Money Power means the enslavement of all human beings and all homes.” Many an old, long-whiskered farmer said the same thing just as well fifteen years ago—and the Herald called him an anarchist.

“The Senate,” says Ernest Crosby in the March Cosmopolitan, “is now the agent of the Money Power—the representative of Wall Street.” Absolutely true; and no one can doubt the sincerity of either Mr. Crosby or the Cosmopolitan; but when the farmers of the West and South said the same thing fifteen years ago, they were greeted with hoots and jeers from the East. I don’t say that Messrs. Riis and Crosby joined in the hooting and jeering; I am quite sure they did not; but they are accorded a respectful hearing in making statements for the making of which thousands of respectable men fifteen years ago were branded as anarchists, wild-eyed fanatics, lunatics, and so forth.

The world do move.

L. H. B.

The Russian Apostle of Populism
BY THOMAS C. HUTTON

Fifty years ago a grayheaded prisoner, neglected, gaunt, unbefriended, died in the dungeons of Schlüsselburg, and today a thousand Russian cities are ringing with the name of Mikal Bakunin, the apostle of Populism, one of the many reformers who were stoned by a contemporary public and sainted by its descendants.

Russia spurned the impassioned orator; Germany exiled him, after a few months of toleration, and now his projects are discussed by millions who seem determined to give them a fair trial.

“A pack of knout-serving flunkeys,” Bakunin called the German officials who enforced the frontier-laws in the interest of the Czar, and soon after a messenger in uniform served him with a copy of the Prussian press-laws, and a hint at the expedience of making himself invisible.

His virulent tongue hurt him a good deal, and his popularity was somewhat modified by his social radicalism; but the long neglect of his revenue plan is one of the strangest facts in the literature of political economy. One might as well reject Kepler’s solar hypothesis, because the great astronomer got a little cloudy on the question of witchcraft.

And, after all, Bakunin only whispered his matrimonial theories, but shouted his tax-protests before multitudes who ought to have known better than to class them with his chimeras.

Briefly stated, his main reform plan is this: That governments ought to earn their own revenues as they cast their own cannon and build their own battleships.

“Look at your great Government stud-farm of Trakehnen,” said he, in a speech on the old Breslau market-square. “Model stables, model granaries, fine pastures, all more than self-supporting, monthly auctions of forage and surplus horses. Oats are barreled in airy magazines, and, for greater security, the granary warden breeds cats, and hires two boys to take care of them.

“All lovely, so far. But now suppose those boys were to break in a private cottage and snatch away a poor youngster’s kitten, on the pretext that the Government might have need of it? At sight of a club, the little lad would have to let his pet go, but could you blame him for growling?—Why don’t you get oats of your own? And let my little kitten alone?—And that is exactly what I am growling about when I see tax-collectors confiscate a poor man’s last milch-cow or nanny-goat.”

The orator then described the estate of Prince Gorkas, a semi-independent land-magnate near Tiflis, in the southern Caucasus. The Prince’s tenants pay a moderate rent; freeholders keep his good will by buying his cattle and coal. Free schools, fairly good, and no tax-collectors—a pattern of what an empire ought to be on a large scale. Foreseeing the eventual need of money for the purchase of a neighboring estate, the Prince had a mountain-side planted with plum trees, to sell the dried fruit. His engineers opened a mine of cannel-coal, and soon had a large market. Their master hoarded and was thought capable of driving a sharp bargain, but gossips would have risked the lunatic-asylum if they had spread a report that Prince Gorkas had broken into the little crossroad store and helped himself to a share of the old storekeeper’s savings.

Fruit plantations are also managed by the Shah of Persia, and mines of vast values by the Russian Government. Prussia and Austria own extensive timber forests and realize a handsome profit after paying reasonable wages to thousands of wardens, rangers and woodcutters.

Saxony operates national mines and large national glass-works.

Do kings need ordnance? Let them hire foundries to cast it for them. Do they need gunpowder? Hire chemists to mix it for them.

Do they need money? Why, let them hire business-men to earn it for them. Not the faintest ghost of a doubt but it can be done.

A little more difficult than raising royal race-horses? Perhaps so. But does that give His Majesty the right to race down a peddler and take his money away from him? Now reflect, and do not let your verdict be biased by the idea that might makes right, or that a long-established absurdity becomes reasonable.

Why collect revenues by Government highway robbery, by Government hold-up methods, by harpies in Government uniform, when the test of practical experience proves that revenues can be raised by Government industries?

Would you bring the State in unfair competition with individuals? “Don’t for one moment,” says Bakunin, “believe that lie of lazybones. Secretaries of Finance find it easier to hire marauders than to hire skilled mechanics, that’s all.”

Who is hurt by the great stockfarm at Trakehnen? It could be enlarged twenty times, and still give private enterprise a chance to raise prize-horses at a considerable profit. Who complains about Government forestry? It gives bread to hundreds of thousands; it protects the fountains of fertilizing streams; it prevents droughts, but does not prevent individuals from conducting timber-plantations at a profit exceeding that of grain farms.

The Belgian Government owns coal-mines, but private mine-owners will continue to prosper till they exhaust the supply of the mineral. No glass-worker has ever objected to the Government glass-works of Saxony. They invite co-operation; the demand for artistic glass products exceeds the supply.

If Government mines and factories, why not Government commerce, and, above all, Government real estate transactions—Government landlordism to an extent that will hurt no other landlord, and benefit millions of tenants?

Found new communities on the plan of reserving a certain percentage of building lots for state purposes, and lease those reservations for five to ten years to the highest bidder. If the Government erects buildings, let them be models of their kind—fire-proof storehouses, sanitary tenements.

Government plantations ought to be drained till gnat-plagues are no more; equipped with improved machinery, with airy cottages; a blessing to all concerned, and yet an undoubted source of revenue, since experience proves that wholesale farming operations are the most profitable.

One tobacco plantation of the French Government yields a yearly net revenue of 2,000,000 francs, and the only objection is the nature of the crop; national agriculture could raise profitable harvests without catering to a stimulant habit. Government commission houses should import Jamaica bananas, rather than Jamaica rum.

On the Bakunin plan, national revenue industries should, as a rule, select their ground where the strain of competition is the least likely to be felt. After that, objectors should be referred to a chronicle of such alternatives as trust despotism.

“No governments,” he asks, “decline to dirty their hands delving for boodle? Oh, ye prayerful pirates! Lineal descendants of the bushwhacker princes who preferred clubs to spades! Below their dignity to cut wood, but did cut purses and throats. Too highborn to clean out a pig-sty, but did clean out peddlers and often whole caravans.

“And now the descendants of those beautiful buccaneers, too proud to mine or farm, but not ashamed to fall upon a poor farmer’s homestead and confiscate his last horse! Not too dignified to hold up a crippled huckster and collar two-thirds of his hard earned pennies. Too sensitive to work the windlass of a silvermine, but rough-handed enough to wring silver from a consumptive shopkeeper. Our grandiose rulers, I should say, are in small business when they break in to snatch a widow’s kettle and cot-bed.

“Yet that’s done every day in the year. Statistics claim that somewhere on earth a child is born every second. And at least every minute sees the birth of a child that will have to die of hunger, because its mother’s bread has been filched by tax-collectors.

“Have Governments a right to supply their needs at the expense of widows and orphans, while thousands of able-bodied young men stand ready to earn revenue for them?”

High tariff bullies, says the Russian reformer, are marine highway robbers. At first sight, the burden of spoliation seems shifted to the shoulders of foreigners, but, look closer, and you find natives obliged to buy imports at extortion rates.

Passengers, waiting to be examined by custom-house officers, says Bakunin, always remind him of travelers, lined up to be searched by footpads.

“How commerce revives,” he says, “wherever those shackles are partly removed! How would it flourish if they were altogether abolished? Traffic that now obliges skippers to starve their sailors could be made abundantly profitable.”

A hundred years before the birth of Henry George, a revenue system, closely resembling the “Single Tax” plan, was recommended by the father of Gabriel Mirabeau, and by the Roget School of French Communists.

“It would relieve some classes of our wage-earners,” says Bakunin, “but would burden others, and why harass them, if we can undoubtedly find ways to get along without direct taxation?”

Why make land the scapegoat of a sin that might be avoided?

In 1849 the Russian Government got its clutches on the bold reformer, and silenced him by the usual argument of despots. The voice that had entranced mass-meetings in a hundred cities of southern and western Europe was stifled in the catacombs of Schlüsselburg.

But Time, the All-Avenger, has made the martyr’s name a rallying cry of East-European reformers, and America should honor the memory of Mikal Bakunin as that of a hero and pioneer of reform—a man whose marvelous gift of intuition had recognized all the ideals of Populism, all its principles and promises, but who succumbed to the superhuman task of effecting its progress under the handicap of a monarchical government.

---

Naturally

Knicker—There goes a man who would rather fight than eat.

Bocker—Soldier?

Knicker—No, dyspeptic.

LUCIANNA’S KEEP
BY ELLIOT WALKER.

“I’ve got twenty dollars for the rent an’ fifteen more for what’s likely to come up,” observed Enos Matchett cheerfully, as he put down his teacup. “There’s nothin’ to worry about this first of month, anyhow. Eh, Martha?”

His wife fingered her napkin in a nervous way, usual to her when the appalling call of their landlord was due, not to mention others who fished from pockets soiled packages of rubber-banded slips to draw out tentatively and none too expectantly those alarming accounts marked at their tops with the discredited name of Enos Matchett.

Poor Martha. The “Oh! Yes. I’ll speak to my husband about it,” and the hundred other subterfuges were growing gaunt with repetition. She had a regular repertory of excuses to apply as conditions demanded. For a first presentation a fixed and nonchalant smile and a “come ’round next month,” caused quick riddance of the unwelcome. “Next month,” it was, “I declare, I guess Mr. Matchett overlooked that little bill. Perhaps, you’d better leave it so he’ll keep it in mind.”

From then on, rang the changes of high prices, hard times and honest intentions until at last came the sharp, bullying threat of the collection lawyer and the crawling process of paying by small installments.

Sometimes she tore up the bills, sometimes they went into the fire, never, until her last bridge had collapsed, did she worry Enos.

He worked, hopefully, from morning to night at odd jobs and occasional bits of carpentry. A fortunate month might fatten their attenuated exchequer to a bulge of sixty dollars, but the months were not all fortunate and there was seldom a penny came in that remained over a fortnight. To meet the rent was imperative. That had to be met. For the rest—wits, hopes, and a somewhat shattered faith in the Lord’s providence.

However, when the Lord endowed average femininity with a high scorn of bills and an abnormal intelligence in the evasion of payment much was done for man.

Enos, undoubtedly, would have become as flighty and irresponsible as was Lucianna, upstairs, had he been obliged to face the shafts which his worried better half so successfully foiled to the last ditch.

Now, Martha gazed across the table at him, with the smile of one temporarily relieved from anxiety.

“That’s good,” she answered. “It’s queer how we’ve kep’ along.”

“Ain’t it?” responded Mr. Matchett. “I was consid’rable pestered ten days ago as to how we’d come out this month, but Miss Joslyn paid me, an’ I had a week steady on Doctor Bullen’s fence. No one in particular a-hurryin’ us jest now, I s’pose?”

“Don’t think of any special tormentor,” returned Martha, biting her thin lips. Indeed, no obvious projection in the wall of torment occurred to her at the moment. Their creditors were “lined up,” in equal aggression. One was as bad as another.

Enos tugged at his gray mustache—a sparse adornment, getting white at the ends.

“Guess we’ll blow a dollar on something for Lucianna then,” he ventured generously.

“Guess not!” exclaimed Martha, with decision. “The child’s got toys enough. Feedin’ her is more to the point. I never see such an appetite. She’s happy. Let her alone and put your money where ’twill be appreciated.”

Lucianna, now a child supposed to have attained twenty-five years, and a very queer one at that, had employed most of her day in making faces at such of the passers who did not meet her approval, and smiling at those who did. These courtesies were accentuated by taps on the window panes.

The poor harmless creature could be allowed little liberty as she ran away and sat on doorsteps, proclaiming herself a burglar of kittens. Given a kitten, or stealing one, Lucianna would go home delighted.

The influx of kittens became too trying. Enos, a soft-hearted man, would do no murder. Martha, steeled to crime through desperation, had disposed of several, really unfit to exist, and found homes for more. Lucianna forgot them over night. Therefore, it had lately become necessary to confine her to her room, where she was allowed one kitten during the day.

This satisfied Lucianna completely. Besides, she possessed six dolls, toys galore, and when these joys palled there was the window.

Whatever possessed the Matchetts to make a home for the unfortunate girl was a mystery to their acquaintances, as she was no kin. Years before, when life was younger and brighter, with Enos at a paying job, and Martha ambitious for a servant yet unable to afford a regular domestic, Lucianna, then a pretty child of about thirteen, had appeared and asked for something to eat.

She was well grown and seemed strong, although exhausted by walking and hunger.

Martha took her in, and an idea seized the good woman, after certain questions had been put and answered.

It was their plain duty to keep this little stranger until somebody claimed her, and in the event of no one turning up for the waif, why not train her for service?

Lucianna was reticent about her past career. Enos thought she lied. Martha said she was too young to remember. It seemed a case of no mother, a father who had gone away leaving her with unkind people who did not love her.

In corroboration of this last statement Lucianna exposed a plump arm decorated with small bruises of various ages and colors.

“Pinches,” she explained, snuffling. This settled Enos, who went down cellar and split more kindlings than he had ever done at one bout.

When he came up, perspiring and still glaring, Lucianna had been fed and put to bed. Martha was washing the soiled socks, and singing thoughtfully.

“Seems nice to have a child in the house,” she remarked.

“We’ll keep her along,” returned Mr. Matchett. “Good little thing.”

“As gold,” affirmed his wife.

This was the advent of Lucianna. Beyond the fact of her surname being Crowson, her clothes plain, her eyes blue, her light hair cut short, and that she bore marks of abuse, the worthy couple knew nothing.

Neither did they go out of their way for information. Lucianna proved affectionate, willing and useful, with a passion for cats.

In a year she had become almost as their own. Enos worshiped her. Martha did, too, but made Lucianna work, as befitted her position as helper.

Another year and the girl developed peculiarities that worried them. She eyed them shyly. She grimaced at Enos most impertinently when he trod on her cat’s tail. Martha spanked her. Lucianna laughed.

A few months more and she became erratic, irresponsible and useless, but always good natured. As Enos expressed it, “Lucianna had gone back to bein’ a kid.”

Some money went for medical advice. There was but one opinion. “Weak-minded. The patient might grow worse, but hardly probable if kindly treated. With great care under expert treatment she might improve. Such cases were outside the regular practice. Would recommend a sanitarium, or an asylum. Of course, if they wished to have her remain at home, no objection could be raised; but a burden—a burden.”

“We’ll keep her along,” announced Enos. “We’ve got hands and hearts yet, hain’t we?”

“God forgive me for spankin’ her,” wept Martha. “The poor thing couldn’t help her actions, an’ she never held it against me. Jest laughed, she did, takin’ it all in good part.”

“She sha’n’t go to no asylum,” cried Mr. Matchett, rising to the occasion. “Sanitariums an’ expert doctors ain’t for our pockets. She come to us for carin’, growed to be our little girl, an’ by Josh! Lucianna will be kep’ along.”

She was; and always reported to be “about the same.”

Ten years of it—ten long, trying, down-hill years, but neither Enos Matchett nor his wife had ever wavered in loyalty or love to their charge. Indeed, the worse things got, the more they thought of Lucianna.

Her daily airing (on the wiry arm of Martha), her whims, her playthings, were all attended to, religiously.

If, as frequently happened, she made a bright remark, her devoted keepers nodded sagely, saying, “She’s gettin’ better.”

As for the expense, whatever their thoughts in secret, both kept a guarded silence. Only this evening had Martha for the first time deprecated the failing of Enos to “blow a dollar for Lucianna.”

He stared at her, curiously, and grunted.

“Pooh!” said he, recklessly. “Got fifteen ahead.”

Martha’s tongue uncurbed at this unseemly boast. Her long nose twitched.

“Ahead!” she snorted. “You stay in my place tomorrow, Enos Matchett. You mind the door for one mornin’ and see how much you’re ahead.”

“All right,” returned Enos, his placid features animating resentfully. “I can spare the time till noon. No need of snappin’ at me as I see. No sense in deprivin’ Lucianna of a little pleasure, neither. There’s nobody pressin’ us hard—said so yourself. What’s a dollar, anyway?”

Alas! to the contempt of Mr. Matchett for the single dollar was due much of their financial tribulation.

“I’m going up to visit with the girl,” he added. “She won’t be snappy.”

This parting thrust rankled in Martha’s bosom, and the supper table was cleared with rather unnecessary clatter. The improvident, easy-going Enos always let her have her own way. He turned over his earnings to her more careful hands, spending very little on himself, and trusted implicitly to wifely wisdom in all household matters. A real quarrel between them had never occurred.

Responsibility, shifted from his fat shoulders to her narrow ones, was both agreeable and natural to Enos. His make-up was that of the man who never “troubled trouble,” until cornered. Then he became actually belligerent and invited war. Up to this rare point Mr. Matchett bluffed good-humoredly.

When assailed by creditors on the street he was invariably in a hurry to perform some important and paying job—a fictitious pleasantry.

“Can’t bother about that now,” he would grin. “Drop ’round to the house an’ see Mis’ Matchett. She ’tends to the finances, an’ if she hasn’t spent all I give her lately, you’ll get something.”

This ingenious disposition of duns was not meant to be unkind.

“Martha’ll fix him,” Enos would chuckle, trotting along. “She don’t mind.”

So the brunt fell on Martha, and it was patiently borne.

But nerves grow irritable under constant pricking until they are ready to snap. Martha did mind. Of late she had felt like hiding whenever the door-bell rang. It took a long breath, a determined effort, a clutch at her quick beating heart for an appearance of unconcern, and her poor brain quivered with apprehension at its dearth of successful excuses.

“Let him have a turn,” she muttered, wiping the dishes. “The rent collector won’t be ’round ’till afternoon, but there’s a-plenty of others likely to show up. His fifteen dollars will get melted fast enough. I could sprinkle it right, but he don’t know how. The first feller will get it all, an’ then——”

Martha paused to laugh, dismally. There was another side. How about future calls from those turned down by Enos? He might lose his temper. All the worse for her.

“I’m most hopin’ nobody’ll come,” she faltered. “I ain’t so sure of gettin’ the best of this.”

However, the following morning saw her marching off smilingly, with Lucianna in high feather at the prospect of a long stroll.

Enos regarded their departure with complacence, expecting an undisturbed session. At the most, some small bill might be presented. He knew just how he would pay it; carelessly, with a jaunty, indifferent air, as if the amount was a trifle. This was his unvarying attitude of settlement—when he settled.

With newspapers and a pipe, it would be quite a holiday. He established himself comfortably, soon forgetting indebtedness in perusing the details of late murders.

Shortly after nine o’clock came a ring of the bell—a feeble peal—Enos went to the door.

The caller was a stranger to him,—a dapper, gentlemanly man whose pleasant face bore an embarrassed expression.

“I—I wish to see Mrs. Matchett,” he began.

“Out for a walk,” said Enos, a bit pompously. “Any message? I’m Mr. Matchett.”

“Well,” the man pursed his lips and hesitated. “I—I wanted to speak with your wife about an account. Something of her own, you know—er—wearing apparel. If I could get the money today it would be a great convenience.”

Enos laughed indulgently.

“Clothes, eh? You needn’t be modest about that. I don’t rec’lect her havin’ any new ones for years, but it’s all right, I guess. I’m payin’ the bills. Trot it out an’ I’ll settle right now an’ glad to.”

The man looked relieved. “If it’s perfectly convenient?” he said.

“Perfectly,” puffed Enos. “I’ve got the stuff ready for any little thing that may come up.”

He unfolded the paper and glanced at the total under a short list of items. It was just thirty-five dollars.

Matchett gazed at the figures, too appalled to change countenance beyond a drop of the jaw.

Slowly, he pulled out his precious roll, and counted the money into the other’s hands.

“Receipt that bill!” he grunted.

“I’m ever so much obliged,” said the man glibly, his eyes on the paper as he signed the long name of a well known dry goods house, “and I wish you would explain to Mrs. Matchett.”

“I will,” returned Enos shortly.

“You see, we’ve sold out recently,” pursued his caller. “We are collecting all old accounts. This, as you perceive, is very old. We have never bothered Mrs. Matchett. I hated to come, really I did, but the present conditions made it imperative. Before your wife purchased the goods, she went to Mr. Morley—head of the old firm, you know, and told him so honestly that she couldn’t tell when she would be able to pay, and her reasons for buying, that it quite tickled the old gentleman. He came to me—I have charge of the dress goods department—Parker is my name.

“Says he, ‘Parker, wait on this lady and I’ll speak to the bookkeeper as to the bill.’ He gave orders to keep it back, so it’s never been presented. Very unusual and unbusinesslike, of course, but Mr. Morley had peculiarities. Pity he died. Our new head is a very different sort. Very strict. So I felt it was my place to see Mrs. Matchett, as I sold her the goods and she would remember. Ladies are apt to forget their little bills if not reminded. I think your wife will remember.”

“I think so,” said Enos. “Well, the thing’s paid and that’s all.” His voice was steady, but deeper than usual.

“That’s all. Yes, sir. Sorry to trouble you, and very many thanks. I’m much relieved to find it was no inconvenience. So many people complain of hard times. Good day.”

Mr. Parker skipped down the steps. Mr. Matchett locked the door.

He went to the most remote room in the house and sat for two hours in a state of apathetic despair, broken only by short bursts of wrath. Oh, Martha should long recollect this day! Several times the bell rang insistently, but Enos paid no heed.

At last he settled on a plan of action and went wearily down to unlock the door.

The two women came in, shortly before noon. In the sunshine and freedom, Martha had cast care to the winds. Her eyes were bright. In her thin cheeks played a faint color. Lucianna had behaved beautifully. Now, she giggled at sight of Enos, and clamored for dinner.

“We’ll have some soon,” said Martha, stirring about. “Had a quiet morning, husband?” mischievously.

“I ain’t seen a bill against me,” replied Mr. Matchett, calmly. “I’ve set still till I’ll be glad to get into the air. Let’s eat, an’ I’ll be startin’.”

The eye-brows of his wife lifted in wonder. After all, she was glad of the news. It would have been too bad to have Enos upset.

He ate in silence while she chatted volubly of her outing, not remarking his lack of attention.

“Through?” he asked, as Martha rolled her napkin and sat back.

“All through,” she smiled.

“Well, I ain’t,” said the man, leaning forward, his eyes stern and reproachful. “Nor you, neither. We’ve a bit of dessert to chew on, Martha Matchett. I told you I hadn’t seen a bill against me. I’ve seen one against you, an’ I’ve paid it! Yes, marm. Paid it! Here!” he thrust the paper at her.

“Dear God!” moaned the woman, after a lightning glimpse. “It’s come on to me at last. Oh! Enos, husband, don’t look so at me. It was for Cousin Minna’s weddin’—four years ago;—I wanted to go. I didn’t have no dress, nor fixin’s. You was away. I went to Mr. Morley’s store an’ had ’em charged. He said I could pay when I had the money. I’ve never had it. The dress I’ve never worn since. I—I hid it away till I could pay for it, Enos—oh, dear, oh, dear.”

She sobbed, piteously, staring wildly at him through her tears.

“An’—you—paid—it,” came her horrified gasps. “Every—cent—we had.”

“You can attend to the rent, Martha,” the voice of Enos was unmoved as he arose. “I’m goin’ to rake lawns.”

He went out without another word or look, leaving her weeping and rocking to and fro.

From the outside he gazed at the house. It was a pretty cottage of a cheap kind. They had lived there for three years, and Martha’s vines had grown. Her flower bed, so carefully tended, how pretty it was! On the opposite side of the road lay a great vacant lot—a pasture on the city outskirts. Trees were there—and cows. In summer, children played among the grasses. In winter, they coasted. It was just the place for Lucianna—for Martha—for Enos, too.

“Got to leave it,” groaned the man. “No use talkin’. It’s pay or get out. Plenty wants it—and old Craddock won’t wait again. Third time we’ll have moved. Confound Minna’s weddin’ an’ a deceivin’ woman. If I’d known it—oh! if I only had—but I said I’d pay an’ I did. Now, let her do some payin’.”

Lucianna tapped on the window and beamed at him. His answering smile was a ghastly farce. Tears were on the round cheeks of Enos as he hurried away. Last night he had been so confident and happy. He stumbled, walking on.

No suspicious moisture showed on Martha’s cheeks, as she marched over her doorsill twenty minutes later. Her tears had dried. A hard determination glittered in the black eyes. Under her hastily arranged bonnet, Mrs. Matchett’s face, strained and set, was tense with resolve.

Lucianna did not witness her departure, else there would have been wailing and much pounding on the window. Fortunately the girl had fallen asleep. Only on occasions of great moment was she left alone. This was one of them.

Martha hastened along.

The old sign of “Morley, Cowperthwait, Rensellaer and Company” still remained over the entrance of the great department store—but the kindly old founder was gone.

Martha knew that—she had read of his death, and the passage of the business into new hands. But that old bill wouldn’t be a worry. She had a whole string of excuses and explanations for the lingering liquidation of her debt in the case of the resurrection of this buried but haunting ghost. Now, Enos had “gone and paid it,” to the ruin of them all.

Through the throng she pushed and elbowed. How changed everything was. How busy and big. Martha had not entered that growing emporium since the date of her reckless purchase.

For a second her heart failed at the enormity of her mission. Then she clenched her teeth and grabbed a passing bundle boy by the shoulder.

“Say!” she exclaimed, hoarsely. “I want to see the head of the firm, the man who is attendin’ to Mr. Morley’s work. Where is he?”

The startled lad pulled away, blinked and grinned.

“Guess not,” he retorted. “He’ll take yer skelp off. He won’t talk to nobody this time o’ day.”

“It’s important, I tell you,” cried the woman, fiercely. “It’s a money matter an’ I will see him.”

“Gwan ter trouble, then!” said the boy, pointing a mischievous finger at a closed door marked “No admittance.” “I’ll call de ambulance. He ain’t no Mr. Morley. I see you come out a flyin’ in jest two seconds.”

But Martha was past him, her grasp on the knob, and the door closed behind her as he stared.

“Here! Here!” ejaculated a stout, bald man, turning impatiently from his desk with a twist of his revolving chair. “You’ve made a mistake, madam. Go right out, please.”

“I won’t,” said Martha. “I’m here on important business—an’ I’ll state it before I move one step. You’ve taken Mr. Morley’s place. You’re the head of things, an’ I’ve come straight to you.”

A queer smile crossed the broad face. The man took out his watch. “I’ll give you just one minute,” he said, coolly. “What’s the trouble. Talk fast, now.”

Martha talked fast.

“I got thirty-five dollars worth of stuff here most four years ago,” she began, excitedly. “Mr. Morley said I could pay when convenient. Now you’ve sent to my house when I was out, an’ my husband paid it. I want that money back.”

Her listener laughed outright.

“Why! Why!” he coughed. “My dear woman, you have a very accommodating husband; that’s evident. Four years! What were you thinking of? Madam, the account should never have run so long. You owed it. It’s been paid. The transaction is closed. We cannot give you back the money. What a ridiculous request!”

The woman drew in her breath, shudderingly.

“People must settle their obligations, you know,” pursued the man patting his fat leg. “That is the rule of business. If I owed you anything I should pay it. If you owe me, you have to pay also. Such a demand as yours is absurd. Can’t you see that?”

“I can see me an’ Enos turned out of our little home.” Martha’s voice was stony. “The money for that bill of mine was every penny we had. The rent’s got to be met before night. My husband’s an honest man—too honest to have any credit. I can see him growin’ old an’ gray in some shanty. I can see a poor half-witted girl cryin’ for the room she loves. These are the things I can see. Yes, sir, that’s the worst of it. Lucianna won’t understand——”

“Eh!” interrupted the merchant sharply. “Who?”

“Lucianna, sir. Not our own daughter, but most the same, poor thing. We’ve been glad to have her, an’ make her a home, an’ never minded the cost. She was so little when she came to us for shelter, smart an’ bright as anybody with her blue eyes an’ yellow hair, winnin’ us like she was our born baby. ’Twasn’t her fault she got queer. We wouldn’t put the child where she’d be abused again, so we kep’ her. Now, to root her out from comfort into the Lord knows what—I can’t bear to think of it. Me an’ Enos might get along somehow, but there’s Lucianna. I want that money back!”

Martha’s tone became sharp as she remembered her errand. Tears had blinded her eyes during the rapid explanation, quite forgetful for the moment of all save the coming deprivations of her loved ones.

Now, she winked them away to glare at the man in the chair. His ruddy face had gone to a dreadful whiteness. His hands were working. A strange sound came from the thick throat before he stammered feebly:

“I—I—lost—a little girl. Her—this—one—do you know the last name?”

“I’ve most forgot—she’s had ours for so long.” Martha began to tremble. “Let’s see? Yes. Say, it can’t be, your name is Crowson? That’s hers, Lucianna Crowson.”

“My God!” the stout man sprang up. “It is! It is! Everything points to her being the same. It must be so.”

He seized Martha’s hands with such vehemence that she recoiled with a startled, backward step.

“Don’t act so crazy!” came her alarmed exclamation. “You let go an’ be careful. The blood’s clean to the top of your head. Set down an’ behave.”

“Yes! Yes!” cried Crowson, releasing her, to pace the small room with a broken laugh and a fierce curse. “Wait! I’ll be myself in a minute. She’s my girl—I tell you. They wrote me she was dead—the people I left her with—after the child was cured. I’m her father, my dear woman. Don’t mind me, I’ll pull up directly. Wait!”

Martha shrank against the wall, as he laughed wildly and growled imprecations.

Presently he steadied, tightening his muscles and breathing deep.

“I’m all right,” said he, huskily. “You must excuse this, Mrs.—Mrs.—”

“Matchett,” answered his caller. “Certainly! ’Tain’t no wonder you felt shook up, if you’re really Lucianna’s father.”

“There is no doubt about it;” the man sat heavily in his chair. “Listen! She was eleven years old when she fell off her pony and injured her head. I was a comparatively poor man then, but I got the best surgeons. For months my little one lay in a hospital. We had no settled home. My wife died long before. Business called me away. When I returned Lucianna was pronounced cured. At least it was deemed safe to place her with some family where she would have every care, and no excitement. Should the trouble recur, an operation would be necessary.

“I found a home for her. Matters were arranged. Again I went West. Letters reached me regularly for many months. All seemed to be going well, in fact so satisfactorily that I, immersed in the starting of a business, ceased to worry. Yes, it must have been two years before I stopped my remittances, although those crafty letters had grown infrequent.

“I wrote the Harpinsons that I would be East soon and intended to take the child back with me.

“Then I received the shocking news of her death. Diphtheria, they said, and very sudden. A malignant case, and—well—the burial had been at night. Everything was done as if she belonged to them. As soon as quarantine was over they were going to move and would inform me of their location.”

Martha stood with her mouth open.

“Did they?” she hissed. “We must have had Lucianna for a good while before those critters said she was dead.”

“Yes,” said Crowson, frowning. “They bled me as long as possible. I received one more letter, postmarked Boston—a few details of no importance, but I had no suspicions. Since then, my letters have come back stamped, ‘no such party at address.’”

“But—” broke in Martha.

He held up an appealing hand.

“I know, I know,” he interrupted. “I should have gone on at once. Yet what could be done? The quarantine—the detention from business—the added grief. My child was gone. All was over. Nothing seemed left to me save strenuous work and the making of money. I own three stores like this, the result of losing Lucianna. Now I have found her, I’ll not work so hard.”

“She won’t know you from Adam,” said Martha, jealously.

“Perhaps—in—time,” replied Crowson, stroking his forehead. “Thank God! I’ve the means to find out.”

“Have we got to give up Lucianna?” quavered the woman. “If—if it’s for her good, I s’pose I could stand it, but what will Enos say? She won’t want to go, neither.”

The man turned his head suddenly, and coughed.

“We will fix everything right,” he said, gently. “I’ll take no step without your consent. Let’s see! To get back to business—” he smiled, whimsically. “You mustn’t think a personal matter can influence our regulations. That bill of yours must be settled.”

Martha jumped. In her excitement she had quite forgotten the landlord, the house and the gravity of the Matchett situation.

Speechless, she drew herself up. Could this hard-headed man be so devoid of humanity, after what had happened, as to refuse her assistance?

“Still,” he went on in his matter-of-fact tone, “I’ll give you a little more time on it. Till next week, say. Here is the money, but say nothing about it. Quite against rules, you know.”

He pulled out a wallet and handed her four bank notes, three tens and a five.

“Thanks!” said Martha, counting them mechanically. “I s’pose you want this;” she held out the receipted bill.

“Oh yes—I must have that.” He put it carefully in a pigeon-hole.

“I’m ever so much obliged,” murmured the woman, “an’ I’ll try to scrape up something by next week. I s’pose you’ll be ’round to see Lucianna—an’ talk with Mr. Matchett.”

“Very soon.” Crowson’s mouth trembled at the corners. “How long have you had Lucianna?”

“Twelve years come Saturday. Enos was sayin’ so night before last. We call it her birthday, an’ most always give her something. Not this year, though. Can’t afford it.”

The merchant figured on a pad. “Twelve. Six hundred and twenty-four,” he whispered. Then aloud. “The Harpinsons charged me ten dollars a week for Lucianna’s keep. It was none too much.”

“They skinned you,” said Martha, adjusting her bonnet. She felt dazed and tired; quite bewildered at the prospect of losing Lucianna, uneasy regarding Enos, yet thankful for the temporary financial respite.

“I’ve got to hurry home,” she announced. “There’s nothing more to say except that I’ll do my best to settle my bill and I’m obliged to you. I’m mighty glad for you, sir, but the thought of what we’re losing makes me fairly sick. It ain’t right to say so, but I most wish I hadn’t come.” She turned with a choke.

“One moment,” said Crowson. “I want your address. What is your full name, Mrs. Matchett?”

“Martha.”

“Any middle name?”

“Hum! Lupkins,” returned Martha reluctantly. “We live at 462 Goodland Avenue—used to be Squash Street. You’ll find us easy enough—good day.”

“One thing more. It will take only a minute. You have arranged your old account. There’s another you seem to have overlooked.” He touched a button on his desk.

“There ain’t another!” declared Martha, defiantly. “I don’t owe a cent here besides this.”

The door opened quickly. A young man bustled in.

“Hinkley,” ordered Mr. Crowson, and his eyes twinkled, “draw a check at once to the order of Martha L. Matchett for six thousand two hundred and forty dollars.”

When Enos crawled into supper, he was a weary, conscience-smitten person. His anger had dissipated. What should come he knew not, but Martha’s feelings must be considered, first of all. He pictured her in the depths of despair—forlorn, distracted, possibly “packing.”

An appetizing odor filled the house. Enos sniffed.

“Beefsteak an’ onions an’ coffee,” he commented, gratefully. “Jest my likin’s. She wants to make up. Where did she get the meat?”

Drawing his chair to the table, Mr. Matchett gazed at his spouse with a dismayed visage.

Surely there was something wrong here. The display of luxuries, Martha’s unnaturally bright eyes, her compressed lips, the new black dress, her air of superiority.

“What’s the matter?” said Martha. “Pitch in. I’ve got a nice supper an’ dressed up to show you how smart I can be under afflictions.”

Enos took a mouthful.

“I—I guess Craddock didn’t come for the rent,” he essayed. “Never knew him to skip us before.”

“He come,” replied Martha, loftily.

“An’ you—” the man’s fork shook against his plate.

“Paid him, of course,” said Martha, airily. “You told me to attend to it.”

Her husband half rose from his seat. “You ain’t right, my dear,” he said, soothingly—“what’s affected you?”

“Set down!” commanded the woman, laughing. “We’ve found a friend, an’ our girl’s found a father. It’s all straight, Enos. In case you want a bit of spendin’ money, I’ve endorsed this over to you.”

Mr. Matchett did sit down. His countenance underwent many changes as he fingered the check. “Wh—what’s it for?” he stuttered.

“Lucianna’s keep,” said Martha.

On the pleasant days, when the roads are fine, an automobile stops before the Matchett’s door. Presently it rolls slowly away. Martha sits very erect by the side of a golden-haired companion, and an Angora kitten nestles between them. There is a good deal of laughing and talking, and sometimes passers stare, but no one in the big car minds. The stout man in front with the chauffeur turns, smiling at the women.

“Pretty distressing for us all, the removal of that lesion,” he says, “but she’s reading little books, now.”

And when Enos asks a question with his eyes, upon Martha’s return from these trips, he gets the same old words: “She’s gettin’ better.”

Who Pays the Taxes?
BY WILLIAM H. TILTON

The residents of a small New Jersey village were recently called together for the purpose of considering the advisability of incorporating the village into a borough; and the Philadelphia newspapers reported that an application for incorporation had been signed by a large number of “taxpayers and citizens.” What is meant by this dividing of the people into two distinct classes? This question becomes of more than passing importance in view of the fact that the case cited is not an isolated one. For instance, during the political campaign of 1905, in New York City, a prominent newspaper spoke editorially of the candidacy of William R. Hearst for Mayor on a municipal ownership platform as an “appeal to the untaxed and an attack upon the taxpayers.”

The Secretary of the National Reciprocity League, in an address at Chicago, is reported to have said that “Municipal ownership and operation of street railways had become a craze; that people who do not pay taxes are the most enthusiastic supporters of the craze, as those who pay taxes are opposed to the idea.”

The late Charles T. Yerkes, in reference to the election of Judge Dunne as Mayor of Chicago on a municipal ownership platform, said: “The city will run heavily in debt. Will the poor man suffer? No; because the poor man does not pay taxes. Men with property pay taxes; these will suffer.” Mr. Yerkes did not say just what kind of property was meant; but as the returns of personal property in Chicago are said to be less today than they were twenty years ago (although the city is three times as large, with six times the wealth), it is evident that the owners of that kind of property—stock-owners of that kind of property—stocks, bonds, mortgages, paintings, jewelry, silver services, etc.—are not going to suffer to any great extent if they can help it. Then it must be the real estate owner, again, who is expected to do the suffering, because of the increase of taxes, should there be any such increase.

Day after day we read in the newspapers communications in reference to public questions which are signed “Taxpayer,” or “Property Owner,” as if that fact should give more weight or influence to their opinions or suggestions. Others go still further. A Pittsburg preacher in a recent sermon denounced universal suffrage, saying, “Only property owners should vote and all others should be disfranchised.” Numerous other instances could be cited which tend to show a growing tendency to consider the real estate owner as the only person who pays taxes.

Now the great majority of our people have probably not looked upon these signs of the times with any apprehension as yet; but “great oaks from little acorns grow,” and this increasing disregard for the rights of men, as men, this creating of class distinctions with a tax-bill as a line of demarcation, on the theory that one small class pays all the taxes and is, therefore, entitled to rights and privileges that are denied to others, is dangerous and contrary to all principles of Democracy.

Owing to the inherent defects of human nature, no doubt there will always be those among us who will expect and demand more than they are entitled to, but the average American is satisfied with a square deal. When deprived of what he considers his just rights, however, he is, like most other people, inclined to become indifferent to the rights of others. Sooner or later he helps to swell the large army of the discontented; and history teaches that discontent is not only the mother of progress, but the mother of trouble. “On the contentment of the poor rests the safety of the rich.”

It is not intended to discuss in this article the justice or injustice of any particular tax, but simply to consider the question of taxes—how they are paid and who pays them—in the hope that we may thereby the more intelligently render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s.

Let us consider first the tax on real estate, one of the most important illustrations of the so-called “direct” taxation which Mill has defined as “that which is demanded from the very person who, it is intended or desired, should pay it.” Now it is, of course, true that this tax is levied against the property and the tax-bill is rendered in the name of the nominal owner, who is, naturally, expected to pay it; but whence comes the money with which he discharges this debt against his property? If the premises are rented or leased, are not the taxes, insurance, cost of repairs, interest on investment, etc., all added to the rental which is asked of and paid by the tenant? There are leases drawn today which contain a clause providing “that any increase in the taxes shall be added to the rental.” And yet, during the late struggle in Philadelphia over the attempted lease of the gas works to a private corporation for seventy-five years, a gentleman appeared before the committee of councils on behalf, as he said, of the taxpayers and rent-payers.

During the passage of the mortgage bill through the 1905 session of the New York Legislature, a member of the committee appointed by the real-estate owners to oppose the measure said: “The result, should the bill pass, will be for the real-estate owners to raise the rents. It is the public who will have to bear the burden, not the real-estate owners.” So we appear to have very relevant testimony to the effect that the man who receives the tax-bill, the man “on whom the tax is levied and who is expected to pay it” really acts as an agent, collecting the tax from his tenant and passing it on to the authorities. Is the tenant then a taxpayer or a citizen? As more than eighty per cent. of the people of the United States occupy rented houses, the sooner this question is satisfactorily answered and each of us understands his own individual responsibility, the better for all concerned.

Would not the rent-payer hesitate to cast his ballot for corrupt municipal government—with its accompanying reckless and dishonest expenditures of the public money—would he not hesitate to strike or riot, if he knew that the expenses (the teamsters’ strike in Chicago, in 1905, is said to have cost the city $100,000 a month for special policemen) and losses would eventually have to be paid by increased taxes added to his rent?

The United States Steel Company is said to have done much to eliminate strikes at its different plants by selling a portion of the capital stock of the company to its employes. Every man who owns even one share now feels that he is a part of the organization, that its interests are his interests, its losses his losses; and he is not inclined to do anything that will injuriously affect himself. When property owners understand and admit it, and rent-payers realize that they are a part of the municipal corporation, of the state and of the republic, that the public interests are their interests, the public losses their losses, that we must all rise or fall together, a great deal will have been accomplished toward the creation of better feeling and a consequent improvement in existing conditions.

Adam Smith says of taxation that “the subjects of every state ought to contribute toward the support of the Government as nearly as possible in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the states.”

Montesquieu defined taxation as “that portion of a person’s property which one contributes to the state in return for protection in the enjoyment of the balance.”

Both these eminent authorities look upon the payment of taxes as a duty which the citizen owes to the state in return for something which he receives from the state; but neither says in just what manner that duty must be performed, and there are undoubtedly numerous ways in which the obligation of the citizen may be discharged.

A very important phase of the tax question to be considered here (owing to its being the source of almost the entire income of the United States Government) is what is known as “indirect” taxation, or the tax on commodities, processes, etc. This is more easily collected than a direct tax, because the consumer hardly realizes that he is being taxed when paying for articles which he may use his own discretion about purchasing; but it bears most heavily upon the poor, as only articles in general use will yield the necessary revenue.

For instance, the tariff on imports, for the fiscal year ending 1905, produced more than $260,000,000. This enormous amount was, of course, paid at the custom house by the importer of the goods, but it was then added to the cost of the goods and finally paid by the consumer. This tax is great or small, depending entirely upon the necessities or desires of the people.

The higher the social and economic development of a people, the greater will be the burden of this tariff tax; as what were once considered luxuries eventually become necessaries of life, and a larger proportion of income is consequently expended for food, wearing apparel, household goods, etc. Under such circumstances, a man who is in receipt of a fair-sized income (even though possessing little or no taxable property), if he buys freely for the wants of himself and his family, may contribute more toward the support of the Government than his wealthy landlord, who buys sparingly, swears off his personal taxes, and collects his real estate taxes from his tenants.

The internal revenue tax on spirits, fermented liquors and tobacco produced in 1905 about $230,000,000, which, while also paid primarily by the manufacturer or distiller, is then added to the cost of production and included in the selling price, which is paid, of course, by the consumer. Not only the man who smokes or drinks, but everyone who uses spirits in the manufactures or arts, in patent medicines or drugstore prescriptions (many of which contain large quantities of liquor), is contributing a share of this tax. Oleomargarine produced during the same period over $600,000, and playing cards about $425,000.

Another very important source of income, levied in times of emergency, as during the war with Spain, is the stamp tax, which produces millions of dollars. The man with a small bank account pays as much for a stamp when issuing a check for one dollar, as does the man who issues a check for $100,000 or more; and each pays the same when purchasing an article of manufacture which is sold under a stamp.

Again, we should not overlook such items as license fees, financial, mercantile and franchise taxes, which, while levied by the city, state or national governments upon some particular person, firm or corporation, are really added to the cost of production or operation and ultimately paid by the general public. For instance, during the political campaign of 1904 in New Jersey, when equal taxation of railroad property was the burning issue, the Republican candidate for governor, in a speech at Trenton, stated: “No matter how high the tax on railroad property is made, the people who pay the freight rates and passenger fares will, in the end, pay it.” As a railroad director, he undoubtedly knew whereof he spoke. Like the salesman’s expense account—which included an overcoat, although it didn’t show—the freight and passenger rates also include the franchise taxes, which tend to increase the cost of everything we eat, everything we wear, every article of use or adornment in the home, every portion of the material required in building the house, which ultimately has its effect on the rent the tenant must pay. In the light of these facts it would seem that, instead of there being question as to “who pays the taxes,” the problem is to discover the man who does not pay taxes in some form.

Again, there are thousands of Americans who do not own one dollar’s worth of real estate, and many of them very few household goods, but who have a birthright in this free land by reason of descent from the heroes who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for the liberties we now enjoy; who fought and bled and died for the principle of equal rights, no taxation without representation, and who established upon this continent a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

And the men of ’61! Have they not as much right to a voice and vote in the affairs of the nation as those who remained at home and laid the foundations of a fortune during that critical period? Had the soldier remained at home, perhaps he too might now be a heavy taxpayer, or tax-dodger. But he answered the nation’s call in the hour of need, he sacrificed his opportunities and offered his life upon the altar of his country. And, if he escaped with his life, he returned home, after years of privation, suffering and hardship, probably ruined in health or crippled for life, compelled to make a new start. Has he not discharged his obligation to his country?

Who are the men who would rob an American of his birthright, who insist that none but property owners should vote or hold office while all others—the payers of rents, of the tariff, of the internal revenue, of franchise and stamp taxes, etc.—should be disfranchised? Can they show a better title than the men, or their descendants, who do the work in time of peace and the fighting in time of war, but who may not have been able to secure any real property—honestly or otherwise?

The Constitution of the United States provides that no man shall be deprived of his right to vote on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude. What right have we to attempt to deprive any man of that privilege because he does not own property and pay “direct” taxes?

Mettius Curtius said that “Rome’s best wealth was her patriotism.” Yet that patriotism was deadened and destroyed by privilege and class distinction, and Rome fell. Patriotism is unquestionably the best wealth of any nation; but it cannot be aroused or fostered in a republic by dividing the people into classes, the rulers and the ruled, on the basis of ownership of property.

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

Where wealth accumulates and men decay.

The success, progress and safety of this republic rests upon the contentment of the whole people, and that contentment depends upon justice and fair dealing. And every citizen, “unless he goes naked, eats grass, and lives in a hole in the ground,” is a taxpayer to a greater or less extent, according to the benefits he derives. He has the same interests in the national welfare; the same responsibilities; is entitled to equal rights and privileges before the law; and when we have fully realized the fact we will have established a higher standard of citizenship, we will each have more respect for ourselves and for one another, and a deeper, truer love and higher regard for our country and its institutions.

Their Joke on the President

Davenport, in N. Y. Evening Mail

Our Uncommon Carriers

Bart, in Minneapolis Journal

Sick ’em!

Macauley, in N. Y. World

Letters From The People

Our readers are requested to be as brief as possible in their welcome letters to the Magazine, as the great number of communications daily received makes it impossible to publish all of them or even to use more than extracts from many that are printed. Every effort, however, will be made to give the people all possible space for a direct voice in the Magazine, and this Department is freely open to them.

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J. D. Steele, Charleston, W. Va.

I have been a reader of your Magazine since its first issue, and while I partly agree with Mr. George H. Steele, Rockham, S. D., that none of us are perfect, I admire you for having the courage of your convictions, and it would be impossible to estimate the good your publication has all ready done.

As a remedy for the evils existing, as set forth by Mr. Bert H. Belford, Widners, Ark., I would suggest that our poor, ignorant, down-trodden farmers in the South get posted. There certainly is no reason for any grown up man of the present generation not being able to read, and almost every daily and weekly newspaper would put the most ignorant backwoodsman in possession of the facts which Mr. Belford states the farmers are ignorant of.

I believe I have never seen a letter from this state, but West Virginia hasn’t waked up yet. She is always behind in everything except graft.

May you live long and continue the good work you have undertaken!

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A. J. Jones, Parlier, Cal.

Tom Watson’s Magazine is one of the greatest educators of the age, stands prominent in its class, is fearless, bold and decisive, is just what the people want. Every Populist should read it and give it the widest circulation possible.

Watson’s editorials are great and to the point. The Letters from the People are very interesting. Would be pleased to hear from our workers throughout the United States every month through the columns of Tom Watson’s Magazine. In regard to the work in California, we are preparing our petition for a place on the ballot, and will have a People’s Party ticket in this State this coming election. Our slogan is: “The middle of the road now and forever!” We take no part in any other party in existence, or coming into existence. Let us profit by past experience. The people here, regardless of party, are ready to accept our principles. You may hear something drop in California in 1908. We have a press ready to join us at once. Let us get busy at once. Brothers, the fields are white for harvest.

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G. S. Floyd.

The lucid manner in which you expose the evils of our banking system should convince any one not blinded by ignorance or prejudice of the evils lurking therein, even as at present conducted, but if they secure the additional special privileges that they seek, what may we expect?

Brother Starkey of Nebraska who writes discouragingly in the December number should take heed, as the worm has turned in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and one may hope and believe that your efforts have helped to produce that result.

I was in Kansas in the early seventies when the horde of bogus Greenback editors, shipped out from New York and New England with rolls of Wall Street money, bought up the Greenback press throughout the West, pretending loyalty to the principles until secure in possession, when the hireling traitors came out in their true colors and the Greenback press vanished like mist before the noonday sun.

The President’s eulogy of the pension office is worth no more than his certificate of character to Paul Morton. To judge from observation and the star-chamber methods of that bureau one would conclude that it is run primarily as a factor in politics, and that the only criterion for the grade and tenure of a pension is the whim or discretion of an irresponsible official. Evidently the system is rotten and needs overhauling or revolutionizing. From the nature of the service it is doubtless true that irregularities are inherent therein, but certainly there is room for improvement.

Conventionality, a parent of aristocracy, is responsible for the misfortune of Midshipman Meriweather; herein we see one of the evils of militarism; the discipline they recommend so highly is the discipline of an underling, and this is mainly why they desire it.

Hurrah for Hearst!

You give Henry George, Jr., a severe prod in the current number. The single tax is sprung by the plutocrats when they wish to confuse and demoralize the reform forces.

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Nelson D. Stilwell, Yonkers, N. Y.

The non-appearance of the February number of your magazine caused me genuine concern. I stand by you, every inch, in what you advocate and teach, and wish the circle of your readers might be extended many fold. I first had my attention called to the present evil condition of things by reading Lloyd’s “Wealth vs. Commonwealth,” and that but paved the way for further reading and investigation until my present condition of freedom from the bondage of ignorance has been attained.

I have observed the trend of things for ten years last past and confess that instead of improvement and reform, I see a steady progress towards further enslavement. What will be the end of it all? I am beginning to doubt the maintenance of society and law and order if the entrenched forces attempt to maintain their control. God forbid that our country should be baptized again with blood. But upon the heads of these “fools and blind” men be it, who cannot see the handwriting on the wall.

Your articles on finance and money interest me and absorb all my attention and edify me very much. Your Magazine has a purpose back of it, and no one will give a more ready acquiescence than the writer.

To be a reformer is to align oneself with the noblemen of bygone days whose hearts throbbed for the people. No greater example could be found than Christ, whose kingdom is called “the times of Reformation.”

Permit me to bid you God-speed.

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Horace C. Keefe, Wallula, Kan.

I have somewhere said “this is the decade of the three Toms”—Tom Watson, Tom Johnson, and Tom Lawson. They are each or all likely to leave lasting footprints on the century, and I’m anxious that my Tom’s shall not be the least. I say “my” because Tom Watson stands for all that the country—if not the world—must come to, to have peace and answer the daily Christian pleadings—that “Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven”; to be His will it must embody all that the doctrine of brotherly love contemplates; that is ideal, that is Populism. The other Toms stand for that part of the whole they contemplate or are willing to concede from a more or less selfish standpoint. Your Magazine is startlingly convincing in its arguments and facts—but, my dear fellow, it lacks that dignity that a Presidential candidate for a great principle should command. I know your excuse will be that your appeal to the masses must be in such style—DON’T DO IT.

It is the aggressive intelligent few that shapes the destinies of countries, and that will be so with ours; if the reverse were true, why does not the labor class have 50 or more, the farmers 100 or more, the socialists a like number of members in Congress? Such a result would show intelligence and a hope that something would result. Cut out such queries as—Why the negro maids? Deductions and conclusions are debatable but not style. The writer is one of the martyrs for the cause and has been your ardent admirer and well wisher. There is no question as to the ultimate outcome—though you and I may not be permitted to enter in.

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W. E. Arrant, Alto, Tex.

I read and will say that your Magazine is interesting and entertaining in many respects, and I admire your ability and style in showing up the evilness and corruption of this age, which no doubt is doing good in the way of educating the readers thereof on the main cause of the present economical and industrial conditions that now confronts the whole people and oppresses the poor that labor and toil that they may share a small portion of their labor: while the rich revel in riches and the poor live in poverty.

I have been a student for several years, studying the economic conditions, the causes and effects of present conditions. The more I read and learn of the causes and effects, the more I wonder how and why the masses of the people have been so completely deceived so long.

I have been a Populist for several years. Was discouraged and disgusted with the fusion act in 1896, and since that time I began to read and study the Socialist doctrine to find out what they had to offer as a remedy for the whole people. Through this search for knowledge I found that the Populist Party was only a reform measure dealing with the effects and only a national movement, while the Socialist Party is international, and goes to the root of the cause of the unjust system of exploitation, and means the emancipation and freedom of the whole human family—a plan and system by which one can not rob another by a plan of legalized system of robbery. It means a system to be established upon earth by which one can live for all and all for one. It means that we shall establish a righteous system by which one nation shall not have its hands at another’s throat for pelf. It means a system by which it will be possible for all Christians to live a pure Christian life and practice the Golden Rule in fact and truth.

I realize the error of having more than one party representing the interest and prosperity of the whole laboring and working people; therefore, judging between the two, the Populist and the Socialist, have cast my lot with the Socialists, and expect to make the fight for justice and emancipation for wage slavery in the Socialist Party.

I appreciate your position and hope that you will accomplish much good with your valuable Magazine in the way of educating the people. I fail to see how you can ever expect to help to finally free the laboring people from economic bondage of slavery, without joining the Socialist Party. You have asked the people to give their ideas as to what they think about the existing conditions. I have given my views as I see them. I can realize no permanent hopes for relief outside of the Socialist and the co-operative commonwealth.

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Harry Partington, City.

I took the publication since the first number and today I have in the house only the December copy, as I want to get everybody to read them that will and thereby have persuaded several to buy them, and you can depend on me to continue to do so, and will try and get others to do so. I look at it that I am in the city and can get it at the news-dealers with more certainty than as a yearly subscriber.

What I think of Tom Watson’s Magazine can never be told. I would like it semi-monthly, but I know I shall have to wait possibly some time before that comes. Dear sir, believe me, I am a very sincere believer and practicer of his doctrine and have been since the Democratic party undertook to carry the 16 to 1 doctrine under the auspices of W. J. B. of Nebraska. Sorry Billy failed then and 1904.

Hurrah for W. R. Hearst, but the money power is too strong yet. But hammer at them and teach us to be steadfast.

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David Meiselas, Brooklyn, N. Y.

I have at last determined to congratulate you upon the success you have made with your Magazine. It is, beyond any doubt, good work. In reality I can hardly think to write all the praise the editorials are worth. I enjoy them as I would some classic by Shakespeare, or some scientific work by Darwin. The more I read them, the more I like them. They are digestible; and talk about brain food—it is the best.

Yes, Thomas E. Watson should be well considered as a champion for the cause of the people. Either he is a second Hearst or Hearst is a second Watson. They are so much alike in their fights for the people you can hardly tell which is which.

Over here in New York we are having a grand time, viz:

Murphy telling things about McClellan and vice versa. The big insurance grafters howling for more. Mr. Ivins telling things about the “reform grafter,” Mr. District Attorney, etc., etc.

Abraham Lincoln said we should have a “government of the people, by the people and for the people.” I must say we are living up to it, in New York—nit. We are having “a government of McCarren, by McClellan and for Murphy.” Great government, is it not?

If this is not the age of wonder, I don’t know what. But, Mr. Watson, keep up your steady work; don’t forget the Hon. Platt and Depew, the former our Chinese advocate and president of the largest express company; the latter the champion lobbyist of them all. Don’t forget our generous Senator Knox (with his generous rate bill). There are many more whom you should prey upon.

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G. White, Enloe, Tex.

Yes “I will help”; it is one of the very, very few papers and magazines that I can heartily indorse from the old Liberty Bell to the last sheet of its reading matter; the gags and brakes that are applied to other editors, or a great majority, at least, disqualify them as editors.

The things that we most need to know are suppressed and the reading public are kept in the background on the most vital questions of the day. There is a mighty storm gathering in this once glorious republic; its muttering thunders can be distinctly heard. The glaring, forked tongues of wrath can be plainly seen over the tops of the distant hills that hedge in our eighty million people.

The old ship on which we have sailed thus far is out of repair; the pilot asleep, or cares nothing for the safety of his passengers; the captain has bought most of the crew; the breakers are just ahead.

I know not how my fellow-countrymen may feel over the affair, but for your humble Texas farmer it’s a sad picture. The light that once burned so bright not only lit up North America from Alalch Mountain to the Rockies, but crossed both oceans and gave to the world an object lesson of what a free people could do.

The same light guided Prescott at Bunker Hill. It was the never-setting star at Valley Forge that led Washington to the gate of glory at Yorktown. Is it true that the territory bequeathed to us (“and it was paid in blood”) is to be betrayed into the hands of the enemy for the small pittance of thirty pieces of silver? Is the money-bag of America to rule or ruin? Or will those who think and yet have a chance to act demand a settlement? Tom Watson’s Magazine is one that is asking for a settlement. May the day soon come.

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N. M. Hollingsworth, Terry, Miss.

I see that you contemplate enlarging and improving the Magazine. I can see the place for enlarging, but not improving in the subject matter, except by enlarging and perhaps improving the material, etc. It is as good as human agency can make it. I only wish it could be read by every man, woman, boy and girl in the land. It is such an educator as we need, and it is being read by a great number.

I was at our county cotton-grower’s meeting last Saturday and was delighted to find so many reading your splendid Magazine. I secured a subscriber and have promise of several more which I will forward in a day or two. I have seen your letter to the Atlanta Journal in which there is enough exposure of Clark Howell’s perfidy, etc., to consign him to the garbage heap.

If you think it worth while in the Educational Department of the next number of your Magazine, tell us what effect bucket shops and trade exchanges have on the price of such produce as are dealt in.

Wishing you and your Magazine all the good that can come to a mortal and a great publication, I remain your devoted friend and admirer.

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S. T. Z. Champion, Sterrett, Pa.

I am a constant worker and reader of this great reform movement and have been for the past twelve years, and have voted the ticket straight till they got me to straddle W. J. B. one time and I got such a fall I fear I will never live to get over it. I am getting old. I am one of Robert E. Lee’s old web-foot boys and stacked my old Enfield rifle at Appomattox Court House on the 9th of April, 1865. It looks like a miracle to see the fingers pushing a pen that pulled the trigger 40 years ago, and yet when I think of the blood that was shed for this great nation’s freedom and to see it being stolen away from us by those money knaves it makes me feel like I am just 16 years old. I have nine boys, all Populists. Oh, how I want us to live to get at least one more vote for that grand and noble boy, Thomas E. Watson, for our next President. Don’t you all feel me rejoicing over New York’s election, but I fear they will not let Hearst have his seat as mayor of New York. I have just read Watson’s answer to Hoke Smith’s letter. It is a grand reply.

You can count on me when the last roll is called. I’ll be there. Yours for reform.

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W. H Thomas, Fairhaven, Mo.

After spending 25 years in the thickest of the fray I could hardly go back to the “wallowing in the mire.” No, my brother, I never say die, but am still pegging away. Yes, I am a Populist. I am a rampant Socialist and I think that most of my old comrades have followed my example and I can see no reason why all Populists should not do the same. You know, my brother, that the Socialists are growing as no other party ever grew and they are bound to become a dominant factor in politics in the near future. It is evolution. Reforms do not go backward. The Populists have done a grand work, but Socialism is inevitable and I would rejoice to see all old Populists get aboard the band wagon. You are doing a noble work and to show you that I appreciate it I am going to send you a dollar for the magazine and 50 cents for that fountain pen, although I can illy afford it, as I am 65 years old and dependent on my labor for the support of my family.

Don’t Teddy, the Trust-buster, make you tired? I think he is the biggest fraud that ever sat in the Presidential chair.

Wishing you long life and abundant success, I am with you till the battle is won.

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James A. Logsden, Moline, Ill.

I have read with great interest the editorial, “Tolstoi and the Land,” in the October number of Tom Watson’s Magazine, and while I cannot agree with you in the position you take upon the land question, I accredit you with sincerity and honesty of purpose. In common with many others of us, you are giving of your time, energy and substance, to bring remedial justice and economic truth to human society.

Being fair-minded and in earnest pursuit of economic truth and equity, you will, I am sure, accept honest criticisms of your opinions.

In the outset you propound three questions, which are as follows:

“Is it true that the real grievance of the masses is that the land has been taken away from them?”

“Will no reform bring them relief until the land has been given back to them?”

“Will universal happiness be the result of putting an end to private ownership of land?”

To negate these questions you call upon history to bear witness:

“As a guide to our footsteps the past must always be to some extent our light, our guide.”

With this I am heartily in accord. It has been rightly said:

“History keeps the grass green upon the graves of former civilizations, and stands as a beacon light to future ones. It is the ever-living Janus, peering both into the past and into the future.”

But history does not prove, as you assert, that civilization exists as a result of private ownership of land. These are your words:

In passing upon this and statements appearing in subsequent paragraphs, I think I shall have fully answered your three previous questions. When it “became a matter of self-interest for some individual to improve the land” was it because of his ownership or of his security of possession? When you admit that “as long as each individual felt that his parcel of land might go out of his possession at the next regular division there was no incentive to improvement,” you have admitted the latter. “Not until the individual became assured that the benefit of his labor would accrue to himself did the waste become a farm and the hovel a house.” What was his assurance—private ownership or security of possession? That it was not private ownership is proven by the tenant system in vogue in every civilized country in the world. Obviously it is not private ownership that impelled the landless tenant to go upon land owned by others, clear away the forest and “make the land a farm.” Then what is his assurance? Security of possession—the knowledge that he will be left unmolested to enjoy the “product of his labor.” This tenant enjoys his security of possession because of the tribute he has been compelled to pay to the owner to leave him unmolested in his possession and enjoyment. Could he not be as secure in his possession if the land were owned and the exaction made by all the people?

Therefore, “if the history of the world shows anything at all, it shows this,” that civilization has developed and progress has gone forward, not by reason of private ownership of land, but in spite of it.

“If, what is manifestly impossible,” says Mr. George, “a fair distribution of land were made among the whole population, giving each his equal share, and laws enacted which would impose a barrier to the tendency to concentration by forbidding the holding by any one of more than a fixed amount, what would become of the increase of population?”

Your assertion that there would be no improvement under such a condition as you mention is self-evident. But this, instead of being an argument against the Henry George philosophy, is, in fact, an argument in its favor.

What Mr. George does propose I shall endeavor to make clear in subsequent paragraphs when I touch upon your hypothesis regarding the primitive tribesmen.

Before passing to this, however, I desire to direct your attention to your observation that “the right of each citizen to hold as his own began with the laborer who claimed the product of his labor.” The convincing power of this statement is lacking, because you have failed to prove to us that without private ownership of land man can not “claim the products of his labor.” As a matter of fact, you can not furnish such proof because it is manifestly untrue. Before the savage, wandering in the primeval forest, ever dreamed of laying claim to any parcel of the soil as his own, did he not so lay claim to the fish and game he took? Did he not so lay claim to the fruits and berries he gathered? Did not the tribesman who followed his flocks and herds over the plains so lay claim to them as the product of his labor? Without ever a thought of the private ownership of the soil, he had produced them as truly as the stockman of today produces the cattle he sends to market, and he valiantly disputed the right of any person to any share of them. Most truly he who labors is entitled to labor’s product, but to say that in order to claim such product it is necessary to privately own land is to fly into the face of obvious fact. How many of the wage earners of today are land owners? How much is added to the wages of those few who are, by reason of this fact? You yourself raised the point that it is not necessary to own land in order to fleece the public, laborer, land-owner and all out of their earnings. If this be true how do you harmonize it with your former claim that it was private ownership of land that first made it possible for the laborer to claim and retain the product of his labor.

I come now to the case of the “score of tribesmen” of whom you speak. While the score were fishing, hunting, drinking or gambling, the one cleared the wild land, fenced out the rest and claimed it as his land. But, in fact, did this make it his land? By virtue of what did it become his land? You doubtless had this question in mind when you attempted to answer it in the following:

“Having put his labor into the land, having changed it from a waste into a farm, it was the most natural thing in the world that he should claim it as his own. Why shouldn’t he? He made it a farm.”

What was his ultimate purpose in putting his labor into the farm? Was it not the products which his labor, applied to the land, would bring forth? You say “he made it a farm.” He found it a farm awaiting his efforts. You will agree that he was entitled only to the result of his own labor. In fact, this is the truth for which you are contending. What were the results of his labor, the farm or the products? Manifestly the latter. These he enjoyed. Upon what possible ground, then, could he go still further and claim also the soil as belonging to himself and his heirs forever?

Moreover, you will concede that before this tribesman determined to abandon the spear and the rod and become a farmer, this piece of ground could have been taken by any of the other twenty men; in other words it was common. It must be further conceded that in casting about to find a suitable location for his farm, he chose the site which offered the best natural advantages relative to fuel, water, fertility of soil, and proximity to the tribal bartering place. At this point let us carry your illustration still further and assume that all or part of the other twenty tribesmen decided to become farmers also.

In the same manner as their forerunner, they look about for the best location, and the one offering the best advantages. But it is taken, and the others must take second, third or fourth place, according to who gets located first. But these men have equal rights. Why should some of them enjoy the exclusive ownership and possession of those sites which give them natural advantages over the others? Manifestly, they should not. But how can they equalize these advantages? Just to the extent that farmer number one holds advantage over farmer number twenty-one—just to that extent should number one compensate the little community as a whole for the privilege which he enjoys. And so with all the others. A community is forming, with its natural demand for revenue for common purposes. Here is the natural revenue. Here lies the fundamental principle which political economists call the Law of Rent. Here reposes the very essence of the law of compensation. Here also is found the basis principle of economic justice, which, traced to its last analysis, as civilization advances, is capable of developing the highest expression of human society. Here is the answer to your question,

“Will universal happiness be the result of putting an end to private ownership of land?”

It was not “just that the twenty idle tribesmen should take away from the one industrious tribesman that which his labor had created.” Neither was it just that he should rob the other twenty when they came to exercise their equal right to the use of the land, as he manifestly would if he were left to the exclusive use of the soil, or the best portion thereof, without compensating those he has excluded.

Let him retain possession of the farm and his products under these conditions, and you have, not private ownership of land, but common ownership.

Another point that you have obviously overlooked, and one that goes to the heart of the social problem, is the element of land monopoly. Your tribesman was not satisfied with selecting the best land, and fencing so much thereof as he could till by his own exertion, but he fenced in vast areas that he could not use, and also claimed that as “his own.” By so doing he not only enjoyed the fruits of his own labor, but forced the other twenty to share their products with him as a tribute for using that part of “his land” which he himself could not, or did not, care to use. You may say that they had equal opportunities with him to get first choice. Even if this were granted, it makes no difference in principle. The fact still remains that he has the power to wring unwilling tribute from them. Only one could have the best, and though his contemporaries may have been justly punished for their lack of foresight—which I do not admit—there is yet another side to the question. What is the status of future generations in relation to this proposition? Are they guilty of sleeping upon their rights when all the land has been taken before they were born, or are they born into conditions which they have had no voice in making?

If your lonely tribesman, for whose welfare you manifest such solicitation, had been content with the amount of land he could utilize to good advantage, had he been willing to contribute his just share to the common expense, and had he been sufficiently just to recognize and respect the equal rights of his compeers, the common would yet have remained after all had been supplied. What was true of the primitive state is true today in our highly organized society. Shifting conditions make no changes in universal principles.

“Society” (did not) “as a matter of self-preservation admit the principle of private ownership of land.” It admitted it because it did not know a better plan—because it did not know the Laws of Rent and of Compensation.

You deny that “great estates were the ruin of Italy.” “Before a few could buy up all the land there must have been some great cause at work, some advantage which the few held at the expense of the many.” “What was that advantage?” you ask. No better answer can be given to this query than to refer you back to your own illustration of the farmer tribesman. Did he buy the land? You say he “fenced it in and claimed it as his own.” In like manner did all land pass into private control, each individual claiming far more than he could use. After all the land of Italy had been “claimed” and enclosed, or that of any given community thereof, the power that these land claimers held over subsequent comers is obvious. The only asset of the individual without material wealth is his labor, which is only one—the active—factor in production. Under circumstances such as the foregoing, he is debarred from the passive factor—land—and can apply his labor to it only by paying tribute to those who have claimed it.

In the circle of the human family, those endowed with keen, unerring foresight are comparatively few. It cannot be gainsaid that those few, knowing that land is fixed in quantity—which cannot be expanded as population increases, and as demand for it increases—saw in the early periods, as they see today, what a powerful advantage they could wield over their fellows by “fencing in” all the available land—by fencing out, not only the cattle, as you put it, but also their fellow-men. Is it not plain that this was the source of the power of which you complain? Was it not this that furnished the advantage you name? Can you not see the stream of unearned tribute wrung from the hands of honest labor constantly flowing into the coffers of these land owners? And seeing it, can you then maintain that great estates were not the ruin of Italy?

What made the “ruling class of Rome, that had concentrated into their own hands all the tremendous powers of the State?” What gave them the power to “fix the taxes” and enact the “infernal laws” which you rightly contend ought to have been repealed? “Ah!” you say,“they controlled the money.” By what power did they come to control the money? Was it by a power inherent within themselves, or was it not the power which they derived from the corner which they held upon the natural revenue which they diverted from the public treasury into their own coffers, thus making it necessary to provide for the common expense by unjust taxes upon the products of labor?

“They controlled the money.” But what is money? Is it the means or the end? Is it not merely a labor-saving invention to facilitate trade? Is it not money only by common consent? Is it not merely a commodity converted for convenience into a medium of exchange? You make the point that by controlling the money, they controlled commodities. But if they had not controlled the land, which is the source of all commodities—even the money itself—how could they have controlled the money?

Can you not see that men divorced from the toil and permitted to produce only on the terms of some other person are forced into the labor market, to vie with each other in a competition that grows keener and more vicious as a population increases?

You say that “the power to fix taxes is the power to confiscate.” The very opposite is true. The power to confiscate is the power to tax. Give that power to one class and what more does it want? Let that class confiscate land values, which you agree are naturally common property, and you give it the power to rob its victim, not merely to the “limit of their capacity to pay,” but to literal starvation, if they choose to carry the principle of private ownership of land to its logical conclusion. For certainly to recognize the right to private property in land is to recognize the owner’s right to do with his land what he pleases. To recognize this is to recognize the land-owner’s right to deny to the landless either the use of his land, or any of its products, on any terms whatsoever. Thus, in carrying the principle of private ownership of land to its logical conclusion, and recognizing it as a just principle, is to sanction literal murder. Can a system that has this for its ultimate, be other than a vicious system, even though it may never be carried to that extent? It is by means of this vicious system that human sufferings are augmented by a thousand fold and the sum of human happiness is correspondingly diminished.

Do not the foregoing facts prove to you that your statement that “usury is the vulture that has gorged itself upon the vitals of nations since the dawn of time,” is economically untrue? Is it not clear that usury is only an effect of a deeper-seated cause inherent in land monopoly?

As proof that the universal condition of inequality is not inherent in land monopoly, you say that the Rothschilds and other “kings of high finance” do not “buy up vast domains that they may be served by a lot of tenants.” But when touching upon this phase of the question, you should always bear in mind that all land is not farm land. The power of the coal barons to exploit does not arise so much from the fact that they own large tracts of land, as from the fact that it bears large deposits of coal. Nor does their power to exploit affect merely the miners of coal. Coal is a public necessity, and the ownership by these barons of a comparatively small area of land places them in a position to place—by reason of unreasonable prices—a tax upon every user of coal.

What is the basis of the railroad’s power for unrestrained exploitation? Unquestionably it arises from its exclusive franchises, inherent in its rights of way.

Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan and others of his class do not derive their unearned revenues from their power to tax. But whence this taxing power which affects every user of their several products?—Monopoly of franchises, monopoly of mineral resources, such as mines, quarries, etc.? What is the source of the Standard Oil monopoly?—Its ownership of oil land or enough thereof to force independent owners to sell on the company’s terms, and its consequent power to force railroad discriminations in its favor? Where did the beef trust and other industrial corporations derive their monopoly power? Railroad rebates—“the big pistol”—railroads with their monopoly franchises. And the railroad monopoly and these other breeds will be extinct in an instant. End land monopoly and make railroad franchises common property and the railroad monopoly will be at an end. Had not the Amalgamated Copper Co. controlled the majority of the copper-bearing lands of the world, “The Story of Amalgamated” would never have been told.

Referring again to the railroads, was it not largely the great land grants donated to them by our Government that were the beginning of their power? These grants operated in two ways to the advantage of the railroads. First, they greatly increased the wealth of the railroads, and, second, they diminished the power of the people by diminishing the area of land open to settlement.

“Land is plentiful and it is cheap. The country is dotted with abandoned farms that can be had almost for the asking.” You say “almost for the asking.” This implies that he who takes these farms must pay something to him who has “abandoned” them. Why almost? Why not take them, as in the case of the primitive tribesman, without asking? You state that they have been abandoned because the owner could not make a decent living upon them. Then why make the condition of the next owner more hopeless by levying tribute against him for the use of a worthless farm?

Make land common property, safe-guard the interests of all by assuring to each land-holder perpetual use, providing he pay his equitable share into the common treasury—which in each case would be the increment of value. Then “abolish all other forms of taxation.” This will secure every one in the enjoyment of his labor’s product, will abolish monopoly and the individual or corporate taking power, vicious tariffs, and all. This is all you have demanded.

Your demand is a just one, but—as I trust you may be brought to see—your remedy is superficial and cannot be made effective. You must dig in deeper soil, else your laudable efforts are vain. The abrogation of offensive legislative enactments and the enactment of other statutes dealing with effects will avail nothing. Nothing save the rooting out of the mother of evils can possibly accomplish the end for which you are so courageously and manfully striving.

Your work is a noble one, and its power for good is measured only by the number of people whom you can reach. I admonish you to give the land question thorough and painstaking investigation. I trust you will bear with me for what may seem excessive frankness. But you are not looking for bouquets, but simple, unembossed truth. When I say to you that in my opinion you have not familiarized yourself with the philosophy you are attempting to refute, you will accept this criticism in the broad view of public interest.

I have gone into greater detail in my comments upon your editorial than I expected to go in the outset, but it has seemed advisable, in order to get a clear view of all the points raised by you. However, I trust I have not gone beyond the limit of the space that may be available.

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A VETERAN REFORMER HITS THE TARIFF HARD

E. S. Gilbert is close to ninety years old but uncommonly well preserved, having been interested in every Presidential campaign since he was a boy of sixteen, and has acquired a vast fund of political knowledge, of which he still has a firm grasp. He has seen and remembers nearly every President from Andy Jackson down—nineteen of them—and talks interestingly. He says as he sees things now the political situation is just as it was in the early fifties. Then two minor parties were dying, and the leading party—the Democratic—was undergoing disintegration. Today, as he sees it, Democracy and Populism are dying, and the Republican party is undergoing disintegration. The Republican Party sprang up in the fifties, and he looks for a new, strong party to come out of the present chaos in a few years. Following is a thoughtful article, from Mr. Gilbert’s pen, which recently appeared in the Lincoln Independent:

Editor Independent: Here are a few figures for men who think.

In the year 1901 there was manufactured in the United States thirteen billions of dollars’ worth of goods. Authority, Secretary Shaw.

The average rate of duties upon imported merchandise is 52 per cent. Authority, Walter Wellman.

Now, fifty-two per cent of thirteen billions of dollars is $6,770,000,000, which the present tariff of duties authorizes the manufacturers to collect of the American people each year, if they can. It actually enables them to collect a large portion of it—but not all. The probabilities are they collect about two-thirds. They collect nothing for goods exported.

There is honest competition on some classes of goods, such as flour and the cheaper cotton fabrics, and perhaps some others, that prevents them from collecting it of the people. So, in order to be fair, we will cut this sum in halves.

We then have the sum of $3,385,000,000, which is considerably less than is probably collected. In order not only to be fair, but to be absolutely safe, we will cut off the $385,000,000, and we have the sum of three billions of dollars—three thousand millions—collected by the manufacturers and paid by the people as the result of the Dingley tariff bill.

Bear in mind, that this is over and above what is collected in duties for the support of government. Bear in mind, this money is paid to the manufacturers, the capitalist and not to the laborers. Bear in mind that if this three billions of dollars were divided among the employees of the manufacturers, it would give to them something less than six millions of laborers a little over $500 apiece. Bear in mind, that this would pay the entire labor bill of all the manufacturers of the United States.

Then ask yourselves: Is this state of things the result of the intelligence or genius of the people? Or is it the result of misinformation or stultification?

E. S. Gilber.

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W. F. Short, Eurekaton, Tenn.

I am well pleased with the Magazine and think it is superior to any other magazine that I ever read. It is just what I expected our brave and noble Tom to get up. Yes, the Magazine is all right. The language is beautiful, forcible and courteous. I was a subscriber from the first issue and have sent in my renewal for this year. I have more confidence in Tom Watson than in any man who has tried to right the wrongs of the people. I believe him to be so conscientious that he would not sacrifice principles for any office in the gift of the people, and I do wish we had one thousand men like our true and honest Tom to battle for justice and rights of the people. I stand for the principles advocated by Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln.

I can make but one suggestion for the Magazine, and that is to place it in a better wrapper, so it will not be lost in the mail.

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R. Brown, Buck Knob, Ark.

I am no writer and no scholar, but I write a few lines to you in order to congratulate you on your Magazine. I think it the best magazine on earth and the Missouri World the best paper and the most patient publishers on earth. I could not have the patience to publish a paper and send it out among so many prejudiced block-headed farmers and laborers and get so little return for my labor. I live in the mountains of Arkansas and I have been lashing with my tongue and knocking at these old Mossbacks with T. E. Watson Magazines and the Missouri World for one or two years. Some of them won’t read a reform paper when it is given to them, but I give T. E. Watson’s Magazine and the Missouri World to them all the same. On some of them the moss I see is loosening. I am going to try to organize a club in our township shortly. I am for government ownership of all the railroads, coal mines, oil fields and all manufactures that take a company to run and government money, and no one man to own more than one hundred and sixty acres of land and not that unless he lives on and cultivates the same. I will fight for all this and more as long as I live and have a dollar that my family can get along without.

I am nearly sixty-four years old and have eight sons, all of whom will vote the Populist ticket and all be old enough in 1908 to vote, and will vote the Populist ticket.

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Stephen Lewis, Martin’s Ferry, O.

Your article in the January issue of your Magazine in regard to the high-handed methods of the U. S. Steal trust in obtaining property from defenceless people has been read with much interest, and I approve of your bold and fearless manner in attacking unlawful corporations and lawless promoters.

That part in your article on the Steal trust where you raise the point as to whether the men who demolished the widow’s home were union men or not was noted in particular and I venture the opinion that they were not, because Pittsburg, with all its much vaunted prosperity is and has been recognized by union workmen as the cradle from which that disreputable class of workmen known as scabs have come. Pittsburg harbors more scabs than any other city in the country, regardless of size. The man who made the Steal trust possible operated his mills at Homestead with scabs at the sacrifice of human life and forced a lower scale of wages upon the men with the state militia. Yet this man is regarded by a great many so-called respectable people as a philanthropist because he is erecting monuments to himself in the form of libraries in different parts of the country.

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M. G. Carlton, Zolfo, Fla.

I appreciate the Magazine and feel that it is one of the best. I am a Populist and took great pleasure in casting my vote for you at the last election, knowing at the time that the chances for success were bad. Yet I cast the vote with as great pride and satisfaction as if I had known you would be elected. I know how to sympathize with a defeated candidate as I myself ran on the Populist ticket for Representative against the noted Zuba King—the wealthiest man in De Soto County and one connected with one or more of the best banks of the country, and got beaten, of course, but I was not whipped but beaten by the money crowd and I believe as strongly in the principles of the Populist Party as I ever did. I am just the same today.

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W. Scott Samuel, Pawhuska, Okla.

Thinking that Tom Watson’s Magazine might like to hear from a locality where politics “rules the court, the camp, the grove,” I relate this little incident. A few weeks ago, when the town sites of the Osage reservation were to be opened for sale and an auctioneer appointed to sell the lots, the news was published that a certain man, Amos Ewing, had received the appointment of auctioneer. Now, the reputation of this man, Ewing, is a stench in the nostrils of every honest man in Oklahoma. From petty defalcations to embezzlement of trust funds, which he was forced to disgorge, comes the reputation of the versatile and oleaginous Amos. And so, when it was known that our great “square deal” bear hunter had through his secretary named Amos for this promotion of trust and emolument, it was not long before the mails were loaded with protests from different localities in Oklahoma where the seductive Amos had exercised his peculiar grafts. Did it do any good? Alas for the square deal! When the sale of lots commenced at Pawhuska this creature, Ewing was in the position that should have been filled by some one at least not a self-convicted grafter, and he’s there yet, and all the protests, charges, etc., filed against him are as though they never happened. How’s that for the “square deal”?

In conclusion, permit me to compliment Tom Watson’s Magazine for its fearless exposé of moral rottenness in high places. Hoping the good work will go on, I desire to share in the glory of the time when its principles shall prevail.

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Malcolm B. Webster, Atlantic City, N. J.

I have been an interested and delighted reader of your Magazine for some time past, and feel that I am getting from it a political, social and economic education such as I should not have known where to look for else.

While still but very young, I have long felt that I could say upon the above subjects:

“Myself, when young, did eagerly frequent

Doctor and saint, and heard great argument

About it and about—but evermore came out

By the same door wherein I went.”

Now I begin to feel that there is a back door used by the “powers behind the throne,” and that your Magazine leads one to it to observe the edifying spectacle of the manipulation of the puppets by the powers.

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James Porges, Chicago, Ill.

Keep up the good work. You have the support of thousands in your efforts to awaken the lethargic American public to the fact that they are being robbed with the aid of our corrupt laws and the special privilege Government.

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T. B. Rogers, Logansport, Ind.

I don’t know how to praise that book enough. I think it is the strongest political document we have. Surely, if we could get the voters of the nation to read it, we would have reform, for if any reasonable person reads it he can’t help but endorse those principles. I have been loaning those magazines I received to my neighbors, and they all acknowledge that the book tells the truth. I think I can get up a club in the near future, for those that read them promise me they will subscribe for it.

As for myself, I don’t need any literature on the subject, for I have been in the front ranks of the movement ever since 1872. I was a Peter Cooper man and have marched along in that line ever since. Never voted for anything else. When I cannot vote the Populist ticket, I don’t vote at all. There were a few of us that started the movement here in Cass County, Indiana, and we worked hard and spent a good deal of money. We had some of our best speakers here to help us. We had the Hon. Jesse Harper of Danville, Ill., N. H. Motsinger of Sholes, Ind., Judge S. W. Williams of Vincennes, Ind., and a number of other good speakers, and the result of our work was that we cast over 900 votes for the Populist county ticket. We felt very much encouraged, but when the next campaign came—well, you know what happened to our Party.

We are right and all we can do is to keep on fighting. I am in favor of staying in the fight until the last ditch is taken.

I will close by wishing you great success.

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Thomas Knox, Bennett, Neb.

I appreciate reading your Magazine. I also appreciate your manly and courageous way of putting the truth before your readers. My only hope is that I would like to have the pleasure of knowing that the writings of as strong a reasoner and clear thinker could enter every home of the common herd so that reason could displace prejudice or party insanity. We all regret the disconnection of that able defender of the common people, Mr. T. H. Tibbles, from the editorial columns of the Nebraska Independent. We hope for his health and his early return to Nebraska, to continue the battle for us common people. In conclusion I hope for Mr. Charles Q. De France’s health and happiness. May his labors be a power for good and light to the people. I also hope Thomas E. Watson’s health and life may be spared for many years in the good cause.

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H. L. Fagin, Kansas City, Mo.

Is it not good to feel that the present wave of civic, economic and industrial righteousness seems practically certain to sweep every thing before it? There is a quiet, studious earnestness and determination everywhere existent, that portends certain and tremendous results. The best part of it is that the masses have largely been educated to the point where they no longer expect to accomplish everything in a day, but rather realize that to get even a large share of what they insistently demand they must begin in the primaries and conduct a continuous campaign.

You are doing a great work and you have your reward and will have it. Every honest and ardent spirit everywhere communes with and strengthens every other such. No more honest, open, fearless man than you is on earth today. That might be better expressed, but the meaning is there—I will let it pass.

The universal spirit of righteousness encompasses and permeates you—you are surely a part of the divinest essence. Being a man, you must like to know that other men appreciate and approve—and to the utmost. And that they do in an ever expanding circle. The days of sophistry, of deception, of class and special privileges, of municipal, state, and national corruption are rapidly passing. The people are becoming wise. They know their friends. They know who is true, despite the tremendous efforts of a press, largely subsidized to mislead and deceive. But there are newspapers and newspapers, just as there are magazines and magazines.

I need not tell you to keep on straight ahead. You couldn’t stop if you wanted to. Tell the truth just as you are doing, and as much of it as you have space for, in allopathic doses. I cannot agree with all your conclusions, nor will any thoughtful student; but in most I do most heartily concur, and I do know that all your influence is for good.

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John McFord, Sheridan, N. Y.

I like your Magazine very well, but I would like it much better if you and your Magazine would come out flat-footed for Socialism. If public ownership or collective ownership of the railroads, telegraphs, etc. is a good thing for the people, why not have public ownership, or rather collective ownership, of the lands, the machinery, etc.? Political democracy without industrial democracy is futile and amounts to nothing. I had the pleasure of voting for you in ’92, and it is a matter of profound regret to me that you cannot see your way clear to step forward into the Socialist Party, where all true middle-of-the-roader Populists logically belong. Populism is a compromise, a half way measure. Socialism is the whole cheese.

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John P. Thorndyke, Canaan, N. H.

You publish more real stuff than any magazine I have ever read in my life. I am sixty years of age, and we take seven other magazines, and without any exaggeration it is but justice to your efforts to say that there is by far more real, good, well-seasoned, relishable food for the digestion of the average brain, than is afforded in any other magazine I have seen. Having practiced medicine for a number of years, I have sometimes volunteered my diagnosis of the disease troubling some of our great (?) men and I flatter myself that an observance of that particular case has proven the correctness of my examination at a distance. For instance, I think the main trouble with our great Senate is constipation of the brain, which invariably forbids the entertainment of honest thought. Now I hope that some one with sufficient “sand” in his gizzard will see that every member of the present Congress and Cabinet receives a copy of your very valuable Magazine. It will be worth more to them than a post-graduate course in the schools of Rockefeller and Morgan.

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John B. Bott, Grant, Pa.

To a constant and appreciative reader of Tom Watson’s Magazine (purchased monthly at the Union News Co.’s stands) it does seem strange that so great and good a man as “Tom” should, under the stimulus of praise and success or the twittering of a pert maid, really become ashamed of his familiar cognomen and his old clothes.

For two days I have been searching, here and there, high and low, for Tom Watson’s Magazine: always explaining that “Tom” has gone into “innocuous desuetude” and “Watson” has stript himself of his old clothes and donned full regulation uniform, but all to no effect.

Am hoping the new clothes won’t make Mister Watson too vain, and that at least his relations, Populist friends and host of well wishers will not fail to recognize him in his docked designation and fine regimentals.

I wish to add that it was the “Tom” that appealed to me, above all things else, when the news agent showed me No. 2 of Vol. I. and asked me if I had seen Tom Watson’s. I replied that I had not, but that “Tom” had the true flavor and I’d take a dose.

There are, I am sorry to say, Watsons big and Watsons little; Watsons wise and Watsons foolish; Watsons mediocre galore, but only one “Tom” Watson, and he seems to be, God forbid, going to the bad.

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Robert L. Cooper, Savannah, Ga.

I have been, previous to the last year, what may be termed a “Tom Watson hater.” Like a lot of other “pig-heads,” I have heard the other side all the time, declining to read or look upon with reason anything you wrote or said. I was prevailed upon to read your “Napoleon.” I followed it up with “France” and “Jefferson,” together with a number of your speeches, letters and magazines. I have arrived at the conclusion that of the very few sincere men of the day, WATSON STANDS IN THE FRONT RANK.

You have my unbounded admiration and very best wishes for the splendid fight you are making for improvement of conditions in our country—especially our beloved state, Georgia. I may add that there are a great many other young men in this community who are of the same opinion.

That your books are being read is attested by the frazzled-out copies in our public library, and the difficulty one has in securing the use of them even for the short time allowed for the use of a popular book.

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Aaron McDonald, Galveston, Ind.

I received a copy of the old guard news letter some time back, and was not in shape to respond at that time, and when I got in shape to, I took sick and was not able; but now as I am able and in shape I will send one dollar to help pay expenses of organizing. It seems that through this part of the country Populists are dead. There are lots that are sick on account of the rascality of the officers of the old parties, but speak to them about Populists and you can seldom get a grunt out of them. It may be a calm before the storm. Hope it is, for I think there are Independents enough in this neighborhood to cut things short when they do get at it. The hardest pull seems to be in giving up the old name. They seem to think that reform must come through their party. I have asked several how they expect to get reform when Wall Street owns the Cabinet and Senate. That is like putting the devil in the pulpit to preach the gospel.

Hoping you will meet success.

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H. B. Paxton, Wheatland, Mo.

I am 66 years old, and have been in the reform movement from Cooper to Watson, except once for Bryan. Everything is being quiet with us—politics as well as everything else. We had at one time 500 Populist voters in this Hickory Co., about one-fourth of the voting strength of the county. As we haven’t any organization in the county, I haven’t much idea what our strength is at this time, but there are quite a number of true blues yet.

Your Magazine is all right. Will send my renewal soon and I assure you I will try to get others to subscribe.

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T. T. Mattox, Hope, Ark.

I am still a Populist and read Watson’s Magazine. Think there are no words nor figures to enumerate or define the good effect it is having on the one big National party made up of the new parties, Democrat and Republican. There are but two National parties now—the Watson and the Swollen-tails. Good news gone to Canada and the nations of the globe.

Dear Watson, you are doing more good than if in office.

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H. E. Pomeroy, Mason, Ill.

I think you are fooling away time and money. Look at William J. Bryan in the last National convention. See Judge Parker now. This nation is too wealthy to be ruled by patriots. Wall Street is the government. You can’t do anything with Wall Street. The masses have no principle above whiskey and tobacco, and the churches are in the hands of priestcraft. If you have a copy of Æsop’s Fables read about the fox and the flies.

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J. A. Dahlgren, Bradshaw, Nebr.

I cannot let this opportunity go by without telling you what I think of your Magazine. It is undoubtedly the very best reform magazine now published. Your editorials certainly have the right tone. Your article on the situation in Georgia gives us Northerners new light on the subject. While we do not have the negro problem to contend with here in Nebraska, we nevertheless have the railroad question to fight over from year to year. We must pay tribute to Harriman and Hill, and other Wall Street kings, besides countless two-by-four politicians who apparently have no other aim in life than to serve the railroads and betray the people. I am glad to see that grand old man Tibbles writing for Watson’s Magazine. Before I close I must ask you to give us another story something like “Pole Baker.”

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George Chapman, East Cleveland, O.

I am prompted to write you from the fact that I believe you to be the right man in the right place, and I honestly think that the seed that you are now sowing will take root and bear fruit, as they are being sown in fertile soil.

No party, or parties, can long withstand your bombardments, no matter how well fortified they may be, as your guns are loaded with facts.

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W. S. Stanley, Logansville, Ga.

I feel it my duty to express that in my estimation, which I take from a national and reasonable standpoint, Tom Watson is one of the greatest Americans living and his Magazine the best I ever read.

I earnestly hope that some day not far distant, Tom Watson will be our Commander-in-Chief of our National Government.

How any honest and patriotic man can oppose the principles advocated by Tom Watson, I cannot see.

Tom Watson is a great man. Why? Because he is honest, brave, fearless and aggressive. Because he is standing for the rights of the great mass of people at large, leading them onward and upward from a Government of the privileged few to a Government of the unprivileged many.

For the last fifty years our Government has been leading more and more toward anarchy.

Tom Watson, may you live long to voice the principles of Jeffersonian Democracy!

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J. J. Hall, Hutchinson, Ark.

Tom, why don’t you knock that “intrinsic value” rot into a cocked hat? I think that policy is one of the greatest barriers to progress of the masses in studying finance. The sooner they learn that value does not exist in substance but in the mind, the better. This is the first and most important fact to be learned by the student of monetary science, and when once understood all the relative facts are easy. Take a shot at it, Tom. You can make it both instructive and readable.

Yours for success.

Of course I like the Magazine.

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Alfred French, Washington, D. C.

I look forward to the arrival of your Magazine every month with a great deal of interest. Other magazines I give away, but yours I do not care to part with.

I shall speak for it, have spoken for it, and very likely shall continue to stand by it so long as you condemn the discrimination made by officials in favor of the bankers. I have said for years that the men who own the railroads and the bankers rule the country.

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L. R. Green, Spottsville, Ky.

I am proud of being one of the “old guard,” having marched without halting in the “middle of the road,” without ever lowering our colors or ever thinking of surrender.

Am proud of our matchless leader, Tom Watson, and his Magazine, his two-edged sword. Friends of popular government, let’s give the Magazine a million subscribers and make its editor President in 1908!

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Arthur F. Mann, Brooklyn, N. Y.

The Magazine is O. K. The February number is strictly 100%. It would be cheap at 25 cents. Thank you for the sample copy received today. I’d already purchased mine of my news-dealer. However, I’ll see the sample copy is put into good hands and hope it will “work.” Mr. Watson, you are doing “us plain Americans” a world of good. Keep it up. May your life be spared to us for many years to come!

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F. F. Gordy, Richland, Ga.

Aside from the fact that both Howell’s and Smith’s friends claimed the victory at the joint debate, was the further fact that Tom Watson got the greatest ovation of any. The first half of Howell’s speech brought out your name, which caused the audience to rise en masse and the applause shook the building. While I am for Smith, still I am looking beyond him to something better.

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C. Will Shaffer, Olympia, Wash.

The Magazine is all right and is on the right track.

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M. W. Henry, Waelder, Tex.

I am a reader of your most excellent and truly demo-republican Magazine. Our adversaries assumed the garb of angels to serve the devil in. There is not a single fundamental principle contended for by our patriotic democratic-republican forefathers contained in either the democratic or republican party platforms, but both parties are thoroughly Hamiltonized and irretrievably committed to the aristocratic British Banking and Bonding System which financiers know to be absolutely incompatible with the perpetuity of democratic institutions. All of the enemies of our free institutions are in one or the other of these parties and their bosses are engaged in making dupes of the common voters. The interests of the capitalists are the same whether North or South, and as they have complete control of both the old parties the people have no reasonable hope of relief from oppression from either. Direct legislation is essentially democratic and is what the enemies of our free institutions most fear. Its triumph will be the triumph of human liberty over plutocratic despotism. It will restore the Government into the hands of our people, from whom it has been wrested by the boodlers and grafters, prompted by conscienceless greed and avarice. A victory along this line will be a greater victory for humanity than that of Yorktown or Appomattox.

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Thomas S. East, Anderson, Ind.

One of the very best magazines that I have ever read. I want to say to you that the good seed you are sowing will live long after you and I and others of the “Old Guard” have passed to the other side. And just as soon as my business matters will permit, I want to send you a large subscription list and in this way help on the good work. For I truly believe all who have the cause at heart will at this time lend their influence to the work, so that Plutocracy and all the attending evils that flow out from the corrupting influences that spread and grow like vile and obnoxious weeds in a corn field, may be rooted out.

Ever yours for the cause of humanity, I am in the fight to the finish.

I have every number of the Magazine up to date.

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Fred Diehl, New York.

I am very sorry to hear that you are not well and permit me to send you all the good health wishes I can give. We need you in our struggle for progress. You should be preserved for our work in the coming crisis that I believe will soon take place in the world, especially in this country.

This article on the Chinese question I send you contains my innermost convictions on that problem and I believe should be listened to before we create another problem almost impossible to solve. I do not want to impose upon your good nature, but if you find it possible to publish in your Magazine, would you kindly do so?

If not, then kindly send it back to me.

My mind is for what is right. I would like to work for the betterment and right adjustment of all conditions in need of improvement.

There are, to my mind, many reasons why Chinamen should be restricted from coming to the United States. The Chinese are not eligible to citizenship. It is not good policy to encourage immigrants to come here in great numbers that cannot become citizens. Every man (and let us hope every woman, in the near future) should bear his portion of responsibility to the government. Chinamen do not seem to grasp the idea of freedom as do the people of Anglo-Saxon and Latin origin, nor do they appreciate our rights and privileges for which we struggled for centuries. Chinamen would, perhaps could, not use these rights intelligently nor enthusiastically.

They bring to us peculiar oriental vices from which we are yet free, but they would contaminate us and undermine our lives.

Economically and socially they are impossible; economically, because they would undersell the American workman and destroy our standard of living; socially, because they lack the necessary elements to make a congenial race. It is not true, to my mind, that a race is superior because it can undersell another any more than a herd of rats is superior over man or tiger and lions over man because they can overcome man by numbers and ferocity. The Chinese themselves protected and preserved their civilization from invaders by building that huge wall around it thousands of years ago. It was Chin, it is said, the great reformer, as he was called, that did it and the great land today bears his name. The Huns invaded Germany and robbed the unprotected peasants. The fact that the Germans could protect themselves from endless invasions through fortifications and armed resistance showed the superiority of the Germans over the Huns.

I believe I am a friend of humanity and that is the reason I believe in the restriction of the Chinamen (our brothers) from coming here. One of the reasons (and I think it is the greatest of all) should be sufficient, that is that they are in great danger of being massacred through the economic struggles and competition and the inevitable crash is sure to come. We had already symptoms of such massacres in the West. The killing of the Jews in Russia will look mild in comparison. Chinamen coming here in great numbers would result in greater disasters than we can imagine. We would create another race problem. Have we not enough with our negro problem? There is an excuse for people coming here whose homelands are overpopulated and who can easily and naturally assimilate. China has vast unoccupied lands with unopened resources and its population, great as it is, is not actually compelled to seek foreign territory. The Chinamen should pioneer their own great land. Let them stay at home and open their unworked national wealth. We cannot blame the ignorant peasants for coming here. They do not know the possibilities of their own country and if they did it would do them no good. It is the so-called intelligent, progressive Chinese that are to blame. The people of China are hampered and restricted by their own ancient customs fatal to themselves. Chinamen are coming to the United States to reap the benefit of civilization of another race with which they have little in common. It does not seem that the Chinese come here to become actual settlers, and such immigrants are not beneficial to the land in its present state of development.

May the time be not far distant when all can go where they wish without any barrier or restriction. When that time comes we must free first ourselves and within our own countries. We must not endanger another land with our own shortcomings.

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Joel B. Fort, Adams, Tenn.

In your valuable Magazine you hit the “Rascals,” who have combined in violation of law and good morals to rob the producer and consumer, to suit me exactly.

If it should come in the way of your comments, the good people of the Dark Tobacco District of Tennessee and Kentucky would rejoice with “exceeding great joy” if you in your inimitable style would hit the infernal Tobacco trust a jolter. This, the most heartless of all, took possession of this District, composed of about twenty-two counties, and laid it off in territories and appointed an agent to buy the tobacco (the only money crop) at his own price. No one was allowed in his territory, and consequently there was no opposition or competition. They took the tobacco at two dollars less than the cost of production. The condition became pitiable and laborers who were unable to support their families left the country and went to the cities, railroads and mines. The people became angered, and on the 24th of September, 1904, organized “The Dark Tobacco Protective Association.” This association controlled 75% of the tobacco, and in six months raised the price to double the former price. Now tobacco is selling for more than twice its price under the Trust rule. We appealed to the law, but had we waited for the law to protect us we would have starved. We went after the thieves red-hot and for more than a year hell would have been a good cooling place for them. Any help you can render us in your excellent Magazine, which is largely read in this section, would be greatly appreciated.

Before I close let me pay you the tribute you richly deserve by saying that any heart breathing the gentle and ennobling sentiment found in your pieces “In the Mountains” and “A Day in the Autumn Woods” lives close to his God and fellow-man, and a man who could write the “Widow Lot” can never die, and is a national benefit. Great men have always had the misfortune to die before their works were appreciated and admired: I sincerely hope you may be spared to fight the battle of the people against Snobbery, Shams, Hypocrites, Grafters, and the Robber Barons of the Trusts.

I send you a copy of a speech against the Tobacco Trust; if you have time to read it you will see why it is that I so eagerly await the issuance of every number of your Magazine.

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James Griffith Stephens, Valdes, Alaska.

I am reading every number of your Magazine with great interest. I notice that you never touch on subjects pertaining to Alaska; have you forgot that we are on earth? Listen to this tale of woe.

Alaska cost the United States seven million five hundred thousand dollars in the year 1867. Since then Alaska has paid into the treasury the sum of one hundred and fifty million. Note the interest on the purchase. Still we have no means of representation. There are today in the District of Alaska 60,000 population who stand in the same place that our forefathers stood when the tea-party took place. It is a shame that in this land of the free we are denied ANY means of representation. There is a mistaken idea that Alaska has a territorial form of government. It has no voice from the people whatever. We are peoned. And why? Because Alaska affords one of the choicest trees in the orchard of graft. And its political plums are distributed among the carpetbag grafters who enforce their presence upon the pioneers who are fostering and fathering the country. There is not an elective office in the District. Our mining laws are obnoxious and afford the greatest chance for official graft. Did you ever stop to consider what a great country Alaska is, and how it is controlled? If I may, without taking too much of your valuable time, I will call your attention to the following facts.

Alaska is one-third as large as the United States.

It is not an iceberg, but affords future homes for millions.

Alaska is in the same latitude as England, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Russia.

Alaska has the greatest fisheries on earth. These fisheries are controlled by the beef trust. GRAFT!

Alaska has great beds of finest anthracite coal, now being gobbled up by the Pennsylvania coal barons. GRAFT!

Alaska is covered by fine forests now being taken up by means of soldiers’ fractional script. GRAFT!

Alaska has the largest stamp mill on earth. The mine has produced over $22,000,000 in gold, more than three times the cost of the District. This mine is not timbered and there is an average of one man killed a day by caving. GRAFT!

Alaska has the only fur-seal islands in the world. These islands are leased to a big corporation. GRAFT!

Alaska has a navigable river twenty-eight hundred miles in length, a reservation at the mouth controls the harbor and permits are issued for warehouses to two big corporations only, so Alaskans again have to stand for GRAFT!

I could go on giving cases of graft for a month, but time is limited. An article by a well informed writer in Appleton’s Booklovers’ Magazine, entitled “The Looting of Alaska,” is well worth reading.

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S. C. Le Baron, Smiley, Tex.

Three numbers of your Magazine received, for which I am truly thankful inasmuch as it stands for the principles which have been my political platform ever since the Greenback party was organised. It is only financial inability that kept me from becoming a subscriber at the start, for I felt very certain it would be a powerful educator, and the copies at hand prove my hopes fully realized. If it could be gotten into the hands of those who feel the need of a change in conditions but still can’t be made to understand the cause of these conditions, it would indeed be a powerful factor in the reform movement. The copies received are out doing missionary work; there is enough strong and conclusive argument in any one of them to set an unprejudiced mind to thinking seriously whether these things are so. I have been in this movement over thirty years, and having passed my eighty-first birthday, feel that I am not destined to work much longer, but when I see the circumstances which inevitably tend to an enthrallment of the masses, I feel like doing my best to avert the coming disaster. My hope lies in the integrity of an intelligent citizenship and it is through outspoken literature that intelligence can be acquired.

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E. J. Whelan, Tipton, Mich.

I like the way you write and the way you put it, but I am discouraged. It doesn’t seem as though the rank and file will ever see the point. The most of them will agree with me about the condition of the country, but when they come to vote, they vote the same old ticket. That is the way they do. Some one gets hold of them before election and they vote it straight. Only a short time ago a friend of mine said to me that he thought we as a Government were getting right where Russia is, and it would take the same internal revolution to get rid of the monopolies and trusts that are holding us down. Now I will venture anything that that same man will vote with the old G. O. P. and vote a straight ticket too. Now it makes me sick, but I think if they can stand it, I can, and have made up my mind to let the whole thing go to the devil. It looks as though the men with Hon. before their names were thieves. It is called “graft” now.

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F. A. Jeter, Alto, Tex.

I am on your side, never have been on any other way and I know that if the laboring people do not get some relief, and that soon, we are gone. Your Magazine has done good here. Has changed hot-headed Democrats to Populists.

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A. C. Shuford, Newton, N. C.

In a letter some time back you stated that you believed the “Money Question” to be infinitely more important than any other before the American people. You are undoubtedly correct in the view you take of the matter. People take the same superstitious view of money that they do of religion, and how to reach the reason of the average man through all this thick covering of superstition is quite a problem. I have thought over this problem for years and am not much nearer the solutions of it now than when I first began. I have practiced caution in my contact with men, and to look back for twenty years I can see quite a change has taken place in my own neighborhood as well as elsewhere. I have been a great admirer of Jefferson and have read everything he has written which I could get my hands upon. His boldness in attacking the church is a marvel to me. Here is the power which enslaves the minds of the people and keeps them from using their thinking machines. The result of such methods is that the average man is afraid to think for himself. No step of progress can be made until this vast machine is shattered, and yet care must be used in doing so, because man must have some foundation upon which to stand. Do not misunderstand me, please. I am a believer in Christian principles as I understand them.

The money power and other monopolies are allowed to maintain their grip through the church largely. How best to expose and open this organisation to attack is a problem I wish you or some other man would solve. The average politician knows well how to play upon this feeling which the Church creates and as long as the organisation is allowed to continue its process of enslaving the minds of our children, just so long will the crop of “Grafters” be an abundant one.

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Sallie T. Parrish, Adel, Ga.

I believe your Magazine is more eagerly awaited than any other publication extant, and I think the people read what you write first. I am sure I do. You are the only writer who has ever made politics more fascinating to me than romance.

I used to read your paper when I was a child almost as ardently as I read the Magazine now. Some of the editorials appealed to me so strongly that I preserved them in my scrap book, not because I understood them then, but because I felt intuitively that there was something sublime in them.

Not long since I showed one of those selections—The Highest Office—to a young man—a Democrat and a teacher in the same school that I was. He finished reading it just as the bell rang for the morning session. The moment the opening exercises were over he sprang upon the rostrum, shook his black hair out of his face and exclaimed: “Children, I have found a gem! Let me read it to you.”

Your Magazine is being read by many honest Democrats who a few years ago thought the Democratic party was all it claimed to be and that you were wrong. Now they frankly endorse your principles and praise your courage, honesty and brilliant intellect.

I must thank you for a clearer knowledge of political questions, public affairs and economic conditions than I ever would have had had it not been for you.

Your “Bethany” I consider one of the treasures of my modest collection of books. Not long ago one of those reasonable, broad-minded, intelligent Democrats was telling me how much he liked your Magazine. He said he read everything in it—“Pole Baker” and all the rest—that he didn’t think you had ever written an uninteresting sentence in your life and that he thought you the purest, most upright man in public life today.

I asked him if he had read “Bethany.” He had not, but when I told him about it he was anxious to do so. I sent him mine. He is a man near sixty and he read it with all the intensity and abandon that a sentimental girl of sixteen would devour one of Laura Jean Libbey’s novels. He and I were alternate day watchers at the bedside of a convalescent patient—one very dear to us both—but I had it all to myself that day until late in the afternoon, when the blessed trained nurse decided to forego a part of her nap and relieve me awhile.

I think you have done and are doing the world more good than any other man in it, and I hope that you may be granted many years of life and strength to champion the cause of humanity and labor for justice, truth and equity, and I know that some time your noble life will be rewarded.

I am very glad you have added the department of “Books” to your Magazine. I don’t think it could be improved now, unless you were to add an amateur or young writer’s department.

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Mrs. B. C. Rude, Lyons, N. Y.

I am getting Tom Watson’s Magazine from the news-stand and like it very much. It is refreshing to see one man who dares say what he believes.

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Halley Halleck.

I have read every issue of your Magazine up to and including December publication. It is certainly the greatest publication of the kind in existence. As an educator it has no equal. It expresses more opinions and views and in the most fearless manner of any paper in the world. Long may it live and reach all parts of the globe!

The question which you are so ably advocating is taking root and spreading and arousing public opinion so as to bring the monarchical money-kings to justice. May God speed the time when they will be handled as other criminals, to wear the stripes, balls and chains!

That local state government is no exception I got from that ex-representative of the Legislature, the King Lobbyist, Hamp McWhorter. He has an office in the Equitable building, and any senator he thinks he can use he simply ’phones one of his henchmen at the Capitol, telling him to send such and such a senator to his office, where he gets in his dirty work.

In another instance, when a member a few years ago introduced a resolution to have the Governor appoint a committee to investigate the merging of railroads, the vice-president of the Southern Railroad was soon in a seat beside him, making inquiries as to what would satisfy him. Well, the member was appointed local attorney at a salary of five hundred per annum for a number of years. The motion was quickly withdrawn and if this individual ever represented the road in a case I never heard of it. However, he drew the salary and rode on a free pass.

This lobbyist is for suing. He commences with his free pass on probable candidates. As I remember, at a station a man who was a country merchant, farmer and mill owner presented a pass to the agent and asked if it was valid. The agent informed him it was genuine. Sure enough, he was a candidate and elected as senator the next race.

Don’t you think the Texas law should be applied, which is that the guilty party is taken out and given a good thrashing the first time and for the second offence double the dose?

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W. D. Wattles, Winchester, Ind.

Permit me to express my appreciation of the February number of Watson’s. It is the best Magazine I have seen, and I have seen most of the good ones. I like your practice of publishing short, pointed articles, and your cartoons are of the best. Your educational and news summary departments seem to me to be especially valuable. I shall take it into my pulpit Sunday evening, and read from your editorial.

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D. C. Pryor, Uvalde, Tex.

When I was a boy I saw a carpenter place side by side three pieces of lumber which he was pleased to call “dimension timber.” These pieces were something like forty feet long and were two inches wide and eight inches deep. He took iron spikes and nailed the three pieces together until they looked to be all in one piece. He told me it was “a girder” for the “warehouse” he was constructing. I wanted to know why he did not use a solid piece of timber of the same measure. He answered by saying that the three pieces united together with the stronger part of the one fitting opposite the weaker part of the others would give the girder a greater strength in the power of resisting the immense weight that would have to be borne than if the girder had been made of just one piece of lumber.

In connection with the foregoing incident I wish to draw a pen picture of a scene which is passing before my vision: At Washington, within the shadow of the Capitol, standing side by side facing the west upon the steps of that magnificent structure, are three of the greatest men of renown the world has ever known. In the centre of the group stands the “Immortal Lincoln,” to the right of Mr. Lincoln stands the “Irreproachable Jefferson,” and to the left stands the “Irrepressible Watson”—whose mind is the very incarnation of Jeffersonian principles. Above this scene on either side, hanging toward the centre at half mast, are our national colors, beneath which is a life size portrait of “The Father of Our Country.” Above the portrait in raised letters I read “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

Now I wish to impress upon those who may care to read this article and who are tired of living under the present system of “graft and greed,” and to those of us who have always believed in party lines and are more or less prejudiced in favor of our political tendencies, that there can be no reformation ever made in either of the old parties that exist at the present time. I therefore believe we should endeavor to secure the very best “dimension timber” that can be had out of the now scattered ranks of the Republican, Democratic and Populist parties, and with the nails of iron and bands of steel bring them together and make of them a girder for our country that the gods of ancient Greece could not knock asunder! And why not at an early date advertise this new party and organize party clubs throughout the land and let the watchword be “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”?

I would suggest that we name this “new party” Demo-Re-Polican or so word the name that each member from an old party may not feel that he had lost all of his former identity. I have not the least hope of electing as the chief magistrate of the nation a Southern man for years to come, and it is useless to put one at the head of the ticket to be slaughtered just to make a Roman holiday. But Mr. Watson can be our leader, and when we win “There will be glory enough for us all.”

“Conckalochie.”

(This is an Indian word for encampment, or a bringing together of the tribes for the exchange of commodities.)

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Edwin Hyde Nutt, Dresden, N. Y.

I think you are on the right track exactly, and will do all I can to get you some new subscribers. I live in a land of Gold-bugs, and if there is a place on earth that needs a missionary it is Yates County, N. Y. We have lost our interest in Mr. Bryan. How could he stultify himself to vote for Parker, we can’t see. Think he will have a hard time to make Democrats out of old Greenbackers. He knows the greenbacks are the best money in the world. Why does he try to break up the Populist Party?

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R. N. Crowell, Rob Roy, Ind.

I am on the down-hill of life; nearly sixty-four years old. Have been a student of history for twenty-five years and would love to do something to free us from the slavery and tyranny of boss rule. When I go hence I will leave a posterity behind me and would love to know that I have done a little something to make our country a free and independent and a Christian people in deed and in truth. Have traveled in fourteen states, been through the Indian Territory and have had some opportunity of learning something of the situation that we now are in both religiously and politically.

I glory in the principles of Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and the People’s Party. I admire Thomas E. Watson because he stands square to the front for right and justice for the common people against money, greed and selfishness for place and power. Brother American, wake up and help shake off the shackles that our money lords are binding us with before it is too late!

Yours for liberty, peace and righteousness, for God and a common brotherhood of man. Let us unite and tear down the walls of sin and selfishness and bring in the millennial age of peace and righteousness that we may be called the children of God in deed and in truth.

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T. M. Barton, Butler, Ky.

You evidently have mistaken me for my deceased brother, William, who was an ardent Populist, while I am a good Republican “from away back.” I am not with you in public ownership, free silver, etc., but with you heart and soul in downing the great trusts, monopolies, etc. Now it seems to me this can be done in no better way than by standing right at President Roosevelt’s back. We can hardly hope to find an abler, more courageous and more earnest champion of the people than he. Personally, Mr. Watson, as I have measured you, mentally and morally, by your speeches and writings, I like you, just as I do many a good Democrat and Populist, without agreeing with them politically. The fact is that the late elections have given us a great lesson in free thought and free action—in placing principle and patriotism above party allegiance. As we witness the aggressive greed, the intolerable impudence, the great power of the great corporations, we may well remember “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

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Peter E. Cooper, Dover. N. J.

Like very much your arrangement of having only four numbers to a volume, as four will make a convenient size to handle when bound. Hope you will continue that feature.

In making changes, spoken of in January issue, I hope you will not change the size (you can add as many pages as you like) as present size is very convenient and, when bound, will look much nicer if of uniform size.

I am going to have mine bound in full law sheep, as I consider them a valuable addition to any library.

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William Hamilton, Cleveland, O.

I am interested in the success both of your Magazine and its ideas and would be pleased to know how you are coming on and what the prospects are.

Educational Department

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A STORY CONCERNING GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON

A correspondent, in the course of a private letter, reports a very interesting tradition which illustrates the character and bearing of The Father of his Country.

I give it in the language of the writer:

“To return to General Washington. Your picture of him makes me want to repeat to you a piece of tradition that was handed down to me by my father.

“My father’s uncle, Governor George R. Gilmer, of Georgia, told my father that his father, Thomas M. Gilmer, of Virginia, told him that General Washington was the most extreme type of the aristocrat that this country had ever produced. That he had seen him drive up in his coach and four to a country court house at election time to vote that he would alight, and with head erect and neither looking to the right nor the left, as the crowd uncovered, parted and almost prostrated themselves to the ground, would march up, deposit his ballot, and without the slightest acknowledgment to the crowd or to any individual, without even so much as a nod or turn of the head, he would march in state through the path made by obsequiousness and reverence and love back to his coach, where he would sit the picture of rigidity and indifference as he rode away.”

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Georgetown, Pa., Jan. 17, 1906.

Hon. Thomas E. Watson, Thomson, Ga.

Dear Sir: Can you direct me where I can get Alexander Stevens’ “War Between the States”? I would like to purchase this book.

Yours truly,

⸺ ⸺.

ANSWER

The book is out of print, but is easily obtained through the old book dealers.

The price ranges from $5 to $10.

Try Joseph McDonough, Albany, New York, or The Americus Book Company, Americus, Ga.

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San Saba, Tex., Feb. 5, 1906.

Hon. Thomas E. Watson, Thomson, Ga.

Dear Sir: I see in the newspapers that Mr. So and So’s seat in the New York exchange is worth nearly $100,000. What is meant by that? Why is it worth so much and what do they do? Thanking you in advance for the information, I am.

Very truly yours,

⸺ ⸺.

ANSWER

The New York Stock Exchange is simply an exclusive gambling hell where very rich gamblers bet on the rise and fall of the stock of the big corporations.

The “nearly $100,000” is the entrance fee.

The reason why the price is so great is because the operations and the opportunities are so vast.

Compared to the colossal stakes and winnings of the Stock Exchange, the gambling which goes on at Monaco, or at Tom Taggart’s place at French Lick Springs is puerile. Since the world was created, no such gigantic gaming has been known as the mad speculations in the New York Stock Exchange.

Of course, the losses are as large as the gains, but those on the inside of the Exchange have an enormous advantage over those on the outside. Those on the inside are generally the masterful fellows who shear the lambs outside.

The organized, experienced and expert players within the Exchange have the same point of advantage over the gullible, unorganized public that the cool dealers at the gaming tables have over the men and women who buck against the bank.

For the privilege of getting on the inside of the game, Mr. So and So pays nearly $100,000.

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New York, Jan. 7, 1906.

Hon. Thomas E. Watson, Thomson, Ga.

Dear Sir: Will you kindly answer the following questions in your Educational Department?

(1) What is the difference between Single Tax and Populism?

(2) Is it true that Grover Cleveland is to receive $12,000 per year from the “Big Three,” and, if so, why?

(3) Why was not the Prudential Company investigated? Their premiums are about the same as the others. In talking with their agents I find them the same as agents of the “Big Three.”

(4) Is Paul Morton treating the policy holders justly when he takes $80,000 per year as his salary?

Your Magazine is a God-send to the people at large and I trust it will be read by men and women throughout the country. Thanking you in advance, I am.

Very truly,

⸺ ⸺.

ANSWER

(1) Single Tax puts all the burden of supporting the Government on one form of wealth, viz.: the value of land.

Populism equalizes taxation, and would compel each owner of property to pay in proportion to his wealth.

The Single Taxer would put all the load on land, leaving money, stocks, bonds and personal property of every sort untaxed.

Populists cannot see any justice in taking the value out of the land of the farmer, while twelve billion dollars of railroad stocks and bonds go untaxed.

Carnegie holds about three hundred million dollars in the bonds of the Steel Trust. Those bonds are as good as gold. They pay Mr. Carnegie a regal income. Why should my land have the value taxed out of it and Carnegie’s bonds go free? There is no justice in this scheme. It does not measure up to the Populist dogma of “Equal rights to all.”

(2) Yes. To cloak insurance rascality with his respected name. The robbers who run those insurance companies simply bought the use of Mr. Cleveland’s name. He consents to play the humble but useful part of decoy duck for $1,000 per month.

Gen. Robert E. Lee, just after the Civil War, was offered $50,000 per year by one of these very companies. He refused to sell the use of his name. He was a poor man, and went to teaching school for a living. In this quiet, modest, but noble way “the greatest soldier that the Anglo-Saxon race ever produced” (see Theodore Roosevelt’s “Life of Thomas H. Benton”) was supporting his family at the time of his death. Mr. Cleveland is not a poor man. His income is $5,000 per year, over and above what silly magazines pay him for occasional articles which are valueless. Therefore Mr. Cleveland need not have sold his name to the life insurance rascals. But the $12,000 tempted him, and he sold out.

(3) Dryden’s Prudential was investigated and very rotten it was shown to be.

(4) No. He is simply stealing the money. Calling it “salary” does not keep it from being loot.

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Chicago, Feb. 7, 1906.

Hon. Thomas E. Watson, Thomson, Ga.

Dear Sir: Will you please give me the information as set forth in the following questions?

(1) How many years must an alien live in this country before he can take out his final papers?

(2) Can an alien, on declaring his intentions to become an American citizen, exercise the voting franchise before getting final papers?

(3) I have been nine years in this country and never bothered about taking out my papers as a citizen. If I were to declare my intentions of becoming a citizen now, how long would it be before I could exercise the vote franchise?

Thanking you in anticipation of an early answer, I remain,

Yours respectfully,

⸺ ⸺.

ANSWER

(1) The conditions under and the manner in which an alien may be admitted to become a citizen of the United States are prescribed by sections 2 and 165 to 174 of the revised Statutes of the United States. The alien may, immediately upon landing in this country, declare upon oath before a Circuit or District Court of the United States, or a District or a Supreme Court of the Territories, or a Court of Record of any of the states having common law jurisdiction and a seal and clerk, that it his bona fide intention to become a citizen of the United States. He cannot take out his final papers until after he has resided at least five years continuously within the United States, and within the State or Territory where such Court is at the time held, one year at least. He cannot take out his final papers until the lapse of two years after declaring his intention. Accordingly, if the alien should immediately declare his intention upon landing, it would be necessary for him to wait until the expiration of five years before taking out his final papers. However, if he had resided three years in the United States before declaring his intention, then he could secure his final papers at the end of two years.

(2) The right to vote comes from the state. Naturalization is a Federal right. In nearly one half of the states of the Union an alien who has declared his intention has the right to vote equally with fully naturalized or native born citizens. In the other half, only citizens vote.

(3) In your case, living in the State of Illinois, it would be necessary for you to declare your intentions and take out your final papers inasmuch as only citizens of the United States can vote in that state.

In Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas and Wisconsin, an alien who has declared intention is permitted to vote. In some of these states additional qualifications are added. For example, in Indiana he must have resided one year in the United States, not necessarily in Indiana. In Michigan he must have declared his intention two years and six months prior to November 8, 1904; otherwise he is barred from voting. In Missouri, if he has declared intention not less than one year, or more than five, before election. And so on. In Nebraska, if he has declared his intention thirty days before election, provided he has resided within the state six months. And so on, several of the other states having similar qualifications. In the states not mentioned the requirements are that voter must be a citizen by nativity or naturalization. In some of the states there is a provision that the citizen shall have paid a registration fee of $1, as in Delaware. That he shall have paid taxes within two years, if twenty-two years old, or more, as in Pennsylvania. If he can read and write, as in Massachusetts. If he can read or understand the Constitution, as in Mississippi. If he has paid all his taxes since 1877, as in Georgia. If he is an Indian, with several tribe relations, as in South Dakota.

As was said before, naturalization is a Federal right. The laws relating to it apply to the whole Union alike, and provide that no alien may be naturalized until after five years’ residence. Even this doesn’t give him the right to vote unless the state confers the privilege upon him. On the other hand, the right to vote comes from the state, but the state could not confer this right upon an alien who had not declared intention.

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BY Mrs. Louise H. Miller.