that they cannot keep up the pace with a towel wrapped about their heads. Recreation programmes, social settlements, institutional churches and schools, bicycles, automobiles, and shorter hours of labor in forced industries have all come to give more opportunity for relaxation under leisure conditions, the consequence being a lessened reliance on the saloon either as a club or a quick means of forgetfulness, if not of rest. In many of our large cities it is now possible to find ready acceptance and approval for regulations which a few years ago would have seemed an intolerable tyranny, and the police problem from this point of view is to be solved by continuing the things we have begun. A good substitute for a bad practice is a police measure, whether it is provided out of the police budget or not.

IV

A last illustration will be drawn from the efforts to regulate and control vice. Investigators invariably begin or conclude with the admission that the fact of prostitution cannot be prevented by police activity. Remedies are therefore all addressed to the quantity and conditions of the evil rather than to any present total suppression of vicious practices. Nobody has stated better the lines for such repressive activity than Dr. Flexner. Recognizing that prostitution has always existed and that it is very much more widespread than is currently believed, he regards as unpromising all attacks upon the problem which merely punish, as crimes, irregular sexual relations. The hopeful course, if his careful discussion can be so summarized without injustice, lies in the direction of police regulation against artificial stimulation in either demand or supply.

such a course can be drawn from the city of Cleveland. In 1901 there were in Cleveland three hundred and ninety-six known and tolerated houses of prostitution, with known inmates numbering approximately four thousand. Four years ago there were forty-four houses of prostitution, with slightly more than three hundred and fifty inmates. Quite recently the chief of police has closed the district entirely, under conditions of practically general public approval and with little fear on the part of any one that the problem of clandestine vice has been seriously complicated by his action. In the mean time Cleveland has substantially doubled in population and retains the characteristics of an industrial cosmopolitan city. This progress is full of interest and suggestion, for it is unquestionable that the abolition of the segregated district would have been as impossible in 1901 as it was easy in 1915, and equally clear that the reason in both cases was the attitude of the popular mind to the question.

At the outset it was discovered that about forty of the houses were directly associated with saloons, and Tom L. Johnson, the mayor, directed the chief of police to abolish all 'saloon fronts.' Later, by similar order, the chief prohibited, successively, commercialization by men partners in the houses, red lights and other external advertisements, street soliciting, sale of liquor in the houses, and other inducements. The orders were issued sufficiently far apart in time to arouse no comment, or feeling that the impossible was to be tried or counsels of perfection to be followed. The orders were enforced by notification to the keepers of houses that so long as they and their inmates observed the regulations they would be free from danger of arrest or raid. When any violation occurred, a uni

and day, in front of the house, who simply took and recorded the real names of all who visited the place. Invariably the house closed in a few days, and the keepers of the remaining houses redoubled their efforts to control their inmates and keep them within the bounds set by orders from headquarters. By this system of gradual police repression the contributory allurements were withdrawn, one by one, and the advertising of the district was suppressed.

Meanwhile two other factors were at work to change the conditions of the problem. With better education and improving economic conditions women were becoming less and less willing to accept the open degradation implied from residence in the district, and the Mann Act made it discouragingly dangerous to attempt to recruit the district from the outside. There was, possibly, some increase in clandestine prostitution, but it would be difficult to attribute it to the increasing rigor of regulation within the segregated district. Moreover, there was, during all this period, a very general increase of knowledge as to the danger from a hygienic point of view, a danger obviously a danger obviously greater under conditions of segregation.

The results are at once astonishing and instructive. We had at the outset an obstinate problem with which the police had struggled hopelessly for years: raids, arrests, fines, imprisonments, and spasmodic social and religious uprisings had all failed to make any impression upon the sordid business. Then we had a police administration frankly accept the community's view of the situation, recognize what it recognized, and repress the nuisance manifestations of the traffic as rapidly as public sentiment could be shown the practical possibility of each step. This police course was aided by chang

ing conditions, but it never ran sufficiently in advance of what the people believed or felt to set up a counter current; and so, when the time came to close the district entirely, it was done as the natural and expected conclusion to a long and accepted development.

V

From all this we learn a larger sympathy for the difficulties of those to whom falls the duty of enforcing police regulations in our city communities. It will not be quite so possible to take at full value the condemnation which is sometimes heaped upon the police, who after all are a fairly faithful mirror of the ethical definiteness of the community they serve. But the more significant and useful lessons are that our own conception of the function of the police arm itself must change, and accordingly our method of selecting and training the men who are to comprise the force; and, finally, we get a helpful view of the direction in which to look and work for better things. We can grow only as we substitute knowledge for force. The policing of society is best done when most done by the people themselves. Every extension of our efforts for the dissemination of information as to the foundations of effective coöperation and social welfare brings its own enforcement at the hands of people who understand and appreciate. Practical agitation, it thus appears, is neither an appeal to emotional excitability nor a setting of arbitrary restraints upon the wicked by the good, but a spreading of the sound news of the social advance, and cultivating, in neighborliness and sympathy, a public opinion which will reflect its soundness in the laws it enacts and in the approval it gives to their enforcement.

Ir at such a time as this a man of my generation finds himself on occasion revert to our ancient peace in some soreness of confusion between envy and pity, I know well how best to clear up the matter for myself at least and to recover a workable relation with the blessing in eclipse. I recover it in some degree with pity, as I say, by reason of the deep illusions and fallacies in which the great glare of the present seems to show us as then steeped; there being always, we can scarce not feel, something pathetic in the recoil from fond fatuities. When these are general enough, however, they make their own law and impose their own scheme; they go on, with their fine earnestness, to their utmost limit, and the best of course are those that go on longest. When I think that the innocent confidence cultivated over a considerable part of the earth, over all the parts most offered to my own view, was to last well-nigh my whole lifetime, I cannot deny myself a large respect for it, cannot but see that if our illusion was complete we were at least insidiously and artfully beguiled. What we had taken so actively to believing in was to bring us out at the brink of the abyss, yet as I look back I see nothing but our excuses; I cherish at any rate the image of their bright plausibility. We really, we nobly, we insanely (as it can only now strike us) held ourselves comfortably clear of the worst horror that in the past had attended the life of nations, and to the grounds of this conviction we could point with lively as

surance. They all come back, one now recognizes, to a single supporting proposition, to the question when in the world peace had so prodigiously flourished. It had been broken, and was again briefly broken, within our view, but only as if to show with what force and authority it could freshly assert itself; whereby it grew to look too increasingly big, positively too massive even in its blandness, for interruptions not to be afraid of it.

It is in the light of this memory, I confess, that I bend fondly over the age-so prolonged, I have noted, as to yield ample space for the exercise - in which any challenge to our faith fell below the sweet serenity of it. I see that by any measure I might personally have applied, the American, or at least the Northern, state of mind and of life that began to develop just after the Civil War formed the headspring of our assumption. Odd enough might it have indeed appeared that this conception should need four years of free carnage to launch it; yet what did that mean, after all, in New York and Boston, into which places remembrance reads the complacency soon to be the most established - what did that mean unless that we had exactly shed the bad possibilities, were publicly purged of the dreadful disease which had come within an inch of being fatal to us, and were by that token warranted sound forever, superlatively safe?

as we could see that during the previous existence of the country we had been but comparatively so. The

breathless campaign of Sadowa, which occurred but a year after our own sublime conclusion had been sealed by Lee's surrender, enlarged the prospect much rather than ruffled it; and though we had to confess that the siege of Paris, four years later, was a false note, it was drowned in the solidification of Germany, so true, so resounding and, for all we then suspected to the contrary, so portentously pacific a one. How could peace not flourish, more over, when wars either took only seven weeks or lasted but a summer and scarce more than a long-drawn autumn? - the siege of Paris dragging out, to our pitying sense, at the time, but raised before all the rest of us, preparing food-succor, could well turn round, and with the splendid recovery of France to follow so close on her amputation that violence fairly struck us as moving away confounded. So it was that our faith was confirmed - violence sitting down again with averted face, and the conquests we felt the truly golden ones spreading and spreading behind its back.

It was not perhaps in the purest gold of the matter that we pretended to deal in the New York and the Boston to which I have referred; but if I wish to catch again the silver tinkle at least, straining my ear for it through the sounds of to-day, I have but to recall the dawn of those associations that seemed then to promise everything, and the last declining ray of which rests, just long enough to be caught, on the benign figure of Mrs. Fields, of the latter city, recently deceased and leaving behind her much of the material out of which legend obligingly grows. She herself had the good fortune to assist, during all her later years, at an excellent case of such growth, for which nature not less than circumstance had perfectly fitted her she was so intrin

sically charming a link with the past and abounded so in the pleasure of reference and the grace of fidelity. She helped the present, that of her own actuality, to think well of her producing conditions, to think better of them than of many of those that open for our wonderment to-day: what a note of distinction they were able to contribute, she moved us to remark, what a quality of refinement they appeared to have encouraged, what a minor form of the monstrous modern noise they seemed to have been consistent with!

The truth was of course very decidedly that the seed I speak of, the seed that has flowered into legend, and with the thick growth of which her domestic scene was quite embowered, had been sown in soil peculiarly grateful and favored by pleasing accidents. The personal beauty of her younger years, long retained and not even at the end of such a stretch of life quite lost; the exquisite native tone and mode of appeal, which anciently we perhaps thought a little 'precious,' but from which the distinctive and the preservative were in time to be snatched, a greater extravagance supervening; the signal sweetness of temper and lightness of tact, in fine, were things that prepared together the easy and infallible exercise of what I have called her references. It adds greatly to one's own measure of the accumulated years to have seen her reach the age at which she could appear to the younger world about her to 'go back' wonderfully far, to be almost the only person extant who did, and to owe much of her value to this delicate aroma of antiquity.

My title for thus speaking of her is that of being myself still extant enough to have known by ocular and other observational evidence what it was she went back to and why the connection should consecrate her. Every society that amounts, as we say, to anything

has it own annals, and luckless any to which this cultivation of the sense of a golden age that has left a precious deposit happens to be closed. A local present of proper pretensions has in fact to invent a set of antecedents, something in the nature of an epoch either of giants or of fairies, when literal history may in this respect have failed it, in order to look other temporal claims of a like complexion in the face. Boston, all letterless and unashamed as she verily seems to-day, needs luckily, for recovery of self-respect, no resort to such make-believes -to legend, that is, before the fact; all her legend is well after it, absolutely upon it, the large, firm fact, and to the point of covering, and covering yet again, every discernible inch of it. I felt myself during the half-dozen years of my younger time spent thereabouts just a little late for history perhaps, though well before, or at least well abreast of, poetry; whereas now it all densely foreshortens, it positively all melts beautifully together, and I square myself in the state of mind of an authority not to be questioned. In other words, my impression of the golden age was a first-hand one, not a second or a third; and since those with whom I shared it have dropped off one by one, · I can think of but two or three of the distinguished, the intelligent and participant, that is, as left, I fear I fear there is no arrogance of authority that I am not capable of taking on.

James T. Fields must have had about him when I first knew him much of the freshness of the season, but I remember thinking him invested with a stately past; this as an effect of the spell cast from an early, or at least from my early, time by the 'Ticknor, Reed and Fields' at the bottom of every title-page of the period that conveyed, however shyly, one of the finer presumptions. I look back with wonder

to what would seem a precocious interest in title-pages, and above all into the mysterious or behind-the-scenes world suggested by publishers' names

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which, in their various collocations, had a color and a character beyond even those of authors, even those of books themselves; an anomaly that I seek not now to fathom, but which the brilliant Mr. Fields, as I aspiringly saw him, had the full benefit of, not less when I first came to know him than before. Mr. Reed, Mr. Ticknor, were never at all to materialize for me; the former was soon to forfeit any pertinence, and the latter, so far as I was concerned, never so much as peeped round the titular screen. Mr. Fields, on the other hand, planted himself well before that expanse; not only had he shone betimes with the reflected light of Longfellow and Lowell, of Emerson and Hawthorne and Whittier, but to meet him was, for an ingenuous young mind, to find that he was understood to return with interest any borrowed glory and to keep the social, or I should perhaps rather say the sentimental, account straight with each of his stars. What he truly shed back, of course, was a prompt sympathy and conversability; it was in this social and personal color that he emerged from the mere imprint, and was alone, I gather, among the American publishers of the time in emerging. He had a conception of possibilities of relation with his authors and contributors that I judge no other member of his body in all the land to have had; and one easily makes out for that matter that his firm was all but alone in improving, to this effect of amenity, on the crude relation - crude, I mean, on the part of the author. Few were our native authors, and the friendly Boston house had gathered them in almost all: the other, the New York and Philadelphia houses (practically all we had) were friendly, I make out