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energy shown in the stellar universe and the energy shown in life. Osborn first poses the questions as to the origin of life; and here again his complete freedom from the obsessions of dogma deserves allusion. He does not attempt to furnish more of an answer than the facts permit, and is careful always to indicate that the answer is partial or merely suggestive or perhaps as yet entirely non-existent. He treats of the energy concept of life, and he bases the theory of the evolution of life upon the action, reaction, and interaction of four kinds of energy, namely: (1) the inorganic environment-that is, the energy of soil, air, water, sun-heat; (2) the organism or energy shown in the living body itself, whether simple or complex; (3) the germ cells or energy shown in the sharply segregated portion of the body which has to do with reproduction; and (4) the life environment, the energy of the other living things which surround any one evolving life unit. This means that each evolution consists in reality of four simultaneous and interacting evolutions.

The bulk of the book is divided into two parts: first, the adaptation of energy; second, the evolution of animal form. This second part is presented with admirable interest and clearness, and in the principles set forth Osborn shows his usual characteristics of seizing with well-nigh unerring skill the essentials, the things that underlie and are basic, and of flatly refus ing to be led into sacrificing his grasp of the whole aspect of the matter by absorption in one minute phase thereof. In other words, he possesses the rare gift of generalizing boldly and on a large scale, but never recklessly, and never on insufficient data; so that he stands equally far from the crude generalizer whose work is worthless, and from the laborious specializer whose work has a real, but an exceedingly limited, value. His whole discussion of "character evolution" in the chapter on mammals offers a case in point.

This second part is the easier and in some ways the more interesting to read. But it is the first part which represents the greater and more original contribution to scientific thought. In this part Professor Osborn deals with the adaptation of energy to the formation of life. He is dealing with matters as to which it is, at this stage of our knowledge, imperative to feel our way tentatively; and the number of unknown factors is so large, and so many of the known factors are familiar only to experts, that it requires close attention for a layman clearly to grasp what is set forth. We have long passed the stage when men thought that Darwin had discovered a solution, at once entirely complete and entirely simple, of the origin of species and the development of life-the stage when well-read men who were in no sense thorough scientific students (men like Fiske, for instance) produced smooth offhand solutions of problems for which at present we at least know that we have discovered no solution. A half-truth is often of extreme simplicity; but the whole truth is usually of such complication that the utmost effort is necessary in order merely to state it.

This first part of his book Mr. Osborn divides into three chapters. The first chapter treats of the lifeless earth, air, and water of the primordial globe, which differed chemically from the world of to-day; and Professor Osborn shows that life has taken up and made use of almost all the chemical elements which occur frequently in the soil, the water, and the atmosphere. He shows that life doubtless originated in water, and probably in fresh water on the primitive continents.

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The second chapter is in some ways the most important in the book, for it treats of the effect of the sun on the physicochemical origin of life. Professor Osborn lays special stress on the chemical side of life energy; on the" chemical messengers which produce special and general interaction among the various parts of the organism. The light and the heat of the sun were captured by the primordial life forms, which thus transformed lifeless into living energy. This transformation meant that the properties of the chemical life elements in the lifeless world became functions of the organisms in the world of life. The electric energy of life depends on the original heat energy of the sun or earth; and apparently life at its outset thus captured heat energy, whereas the capture of the light energy by life occurred only much later, through the agency of chlorophyl, the green coloring matter of plants. Bacteria appear when only heat has been captured by life; but all higher life

energies are dependent directly or indirectly upon the capture of light also. Then as life developed the interaction of the various chemical life elements became infinitely more complex. All of this is fact. But the mode of the actual origin of life is pure speculation, and this Mr. Osborn explicitly states at the same time that he sketches five hypotheses, representing five successive physicochemical stages, of the origin and earliest stages of the evolution of the life organism out of some ten of the chief chemical life elements.

The third and concluding chapter of the first part of Mr. Osborn's book treats of the early energy evolution as seen in bacteria, algæ, and plants. Doubtless the world during uncounted æons of time was habitable only for organisms as simple as bacteria, while these were slowly making it ready for the lowest forms of plant and animal life. The lowest bacteria derive their energy and nutrition directly from the lifeless world. At the higher levels of bacterial life the protoplasm (the body form) and the chromatin (the reproductive substance) are developed; and then these become the two structural components of the living world.

Professor Osborn explicitly disclaims any attempt to interpret the phenomena of life appearance with dogmatic assertion as to whether there is or is not something that can be disassociated from the functioning of energy as we understand it. The point is far less important than it has seemed both to certain theologians and to certain scientists, for the excellent reason that there are plenty of phenomena unquestionably proceeding from natural law which nevertheless have in them an element totally incomprehensible to, and probably totally incapable of compre hension by, our intelligence. All successful scientific discoveries have been anathematized by certain pietistic theologians, and exultantly screamed over by certain materialists, as marking the end of religion. The discovery that the earth was round, the discovery that the world went round the sun, the discovery of enormous geological ages, the growth of appreciation of law in the natural world, the discovery of the law of gravitation, and recently the understanding of the law of evolution (which, incidentally, had been at least strongly suspected by thinkers as far apart as Aristotle and St. Augustine), were all in succession treated as mischievous heresies by certain champions of orthodoxy, and were also, with equal folly, accepted by certain skeptical materialists as overthrowing spiritual laws with which they had no more to do than the discovery of steam-power has to do with altruism.

The outcome of the working of purely natural law often shows some element which no explanation on our part enables us to interpret and which no speculation would explain save by the substitution of one form of verbiage for another; a line of uninterrupted and gradual causative changes may result at the end in something of which there was no vestige at the beginning; and with our brains we may show with flawless logic that something cannot occur when, as a matter of fact, it does occur. Three examples will illustrate these three statements.

Hydrogen and oxygen combine into water, which contains nothing but the total elements of the two gases and yet also contains qualities totally different from either; for example, it freezes or solidifies at a temperature which has no effect on either of them; and to explain that this probably implies some rearrangement of the speed or position of chemical atoms leaves us precisely where we were before.

The tracing of an unbroken line of descent from the protozoan to Plato does not in any way really explain Plato's consciousness, of which there is not a vestige in the protozoan. There has been a non-measurable quantity of actual creation. There is something new which did not exist in the protozoan. It has been produced in the course of evolution. But it is a play on words to say that such evolution is not creation.

Very intellectual Greek philosophers were able to prove that there could not be any such thing as movement; just as equally wise persons to-day are able to prove that there is no such thing as freedom of the will, and therefore no individual responsibility; and one statement is as flawlessly logical, and as utterly absurd, as the other. This fact is worth pointing out, because in the world of thought there are just as mischievous dogmatists among twentieth-century scientists as ever there were among mediæval theologians-exactly as, in the world of action,

the Bolsheviki of liberty, at home and abroad, are as mischievous as the Romanoffs of reaction in politics and industry. As an instance, most scientific men nowadays disbelieve in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and in consequence a British scientist and Socialist blatantly insisted that habitual drunkenness in the father had no effect on the children. Immediately afterwards experiments on guinea pigs showed that alcoholism in the parent induced physical degeneracy in the offspring. It was then explained by the scientists that this was not the inheritance of an acquired characteristic, but merely the inheritance of an acquired pathological condition which made it easy for the characteristic to be subsequently acquired. There was a certain warrant for the distinction as a matter of scientific speculation; but as a matter of practical action the value of the lesson lay in inculcating a lively distrust of dogmatism among those men of science who believe that with our limited intelligence, and after utterly insufficient investigation, we are able

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KNOLL PAPERS

BY LYMAN ABBOTT

THE CHILDREN OF THE CHURCH

What is the relation of the Sunday-school to the Church? Please give to me in a short outline the points of relationship in the light of this present age. H.

HIS is one of several similar letters which I have recently

two or three collects, and a five-minute sermon. The children attended in goodly numbers; they appreciated the service be cause the service appreciated them. In a Presbyterian church of my acquaintance the pastor preaches every Sunday morning

Truceived. They represent a problem which perplexes every two sermons-one of three minutes to the children, and one of

I share. The fact that we are perplexed is a good sign. For it indicates that we are beginning to realize that the Church is not doing its duty by the children, and that we do not know how to remedy that very serious defect in our understanding and our fulfillment of our duty.

Once some parents brought their little children to Jesus for a blessing. The disciples would have turned these children away. Why trouble the Master about little children? He had weightier things to think of. But the Master sharply rebuked the disciples. The little children, he said, belong to the kingdom of heaven. It is not easy to understand how, in the face of this incident, one large section of the Church should have taught that children cannot be saved unless they are baptized, another large section that they cannot be saved unless they are converted after they come to years of discretion, and, with few exceptions, the churches generally have done so little, and that little so inadequately, to recognize the citizenship of children in the kingdom of heaven. The State in this respect is in advance of the Church, for the State recognizes as a legal principle that children are citizens of the Republic.

In traveling about the country, when on Sunday morning I go to church, I usually meet a group of children, between six and sixteen years of age, coming away from the church. There are rarely less than twenty-five; often there are over a hundred. I conclude that not only are we not teaching the children to go to church, we are training them not to go. When I get into the church, I usually find very few children under sixteen years of age in the congregation, and very little in the service to lead them to come or to encourage their parents to bring them. Sometimes a children's hymn is sung; sometimes, though not often, they are remembered in the pastoral prayer; sometimes the minister uses some illustration or tells some anecdote which might interest them if they were present. But generally the service is, from beginning to end, for grown-ups. The only lesson the children could learn from attending it would be a lesson of patient endurance of an hour and a half of a service which they cannot be interested in or even understand.

There are notable exceptions. I have known of one Episcopal church where the rector held a children's service of perhaps twenty minutes following the afternoon Sunday-school. This service was a modified abbreviated evening prayer. There were, one short Psalm read responsively, one brief Scripture lesson of not more than ten or twelve verses, a chant or two, a hymn,

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ably more than two hundred children. But not every preacher understands children and can preach to them as Dr. Coffin does. Some of his sermons to children the readers of The Outlook have seen in our pages.

The churches have attempted to supply the lack of church service for the children by the Sunday-school. But in attempting to make something which would provide both worship and education, we have made something which provides neither. The atmosphere of worship is generally lacking. A social assembly, characterized by the cheerful noise of a vivacious and sometimes merry conversation, cannot be instantly transformed into a worshiping assembly by the tap of a bell. The atmosphere of a school is equally lacking. The lesson has rarely been looked at through the week. The teachers who have done anything more than read over the "lesson helps" are not infrequently in the minority. The lessons are frequently-would it be unjust to say generally?—expository sermonettes preached by untrained and often untaught teachers.

There lies before me, as I write, the report of the corre sponding secretary of the Board of Sunday-Schools of the Methodist Episcopal Church for 1908-16. Its figures indicate what can be accomplished by a vigorous, concerted, and efficient action to make of the Sunday-school a true Bible school. Readers of The Outlook who are interested in my correspondent's inquiry will find useful and illuminating information in this report. I have no doubt that copies can be obtained by addressing Edgar Blake, Corresponding Secretary, 58 East Washington Street, Chicago, Illinois. Here I can only hint at its significance as a chapter in Church history.

In 1908 a movement was launched to awaken the Methodist Church to its Sunday-school opportunity. "For eight years a campaign of agitation, education, and inspiration has been waged to arouse the Church to vision and to action." Institutes and schools of method were organized in various parts of the country. By a gradual process of awakening and organization fifty thousand teachers were enrolled in training classes. In 1910 the total teachers' training enrollment was a little over one thousand; in 1915 it had grown to nearly fifty thousand. The report significantly and truly says: "The nations at war will not send a soldier to the front until he has had at least nine months of drill and practice. The Church sends raw recruits into the service without the slightest training for their Master's work." This is true. A remarkably successful organizer of Sunday

schools once said to me: "I have discovered that I must be willing to take anything I can get in trousers or petticoats for a teacher in Sunday-school."

The change in the purpose and character of the Sundayschool from a children's hour to a real educational institution, accompanied as it was with a change in the equipment of the teachers for service, brought with it surprising results. The grown-ups, finding they could get something worth while, began to attend. The Bible classes increased in numbers from less than fourteen hundred to more than fifteen thousand. More than five hundred thousand men and probably more than double that number of women are regular attendants on these Bible classes. I am generally very skeptical about the value of statisties in dealing with spiritual values, but there is certainly some significance in the statement of this Report that since the institution of this campaign to mobilize the Sunday-schools there has been an increase in the membership of those schools of the Methodist Episcopal Church of over a million and a quarter and an increase in church membership double that of the corre sponding period of seven years preceding the movement.

I do not attempt to give a definite reply to the question of my correspondent, but the facts which I have here stated may indicate four principles by which we ought to be guided in seeking for an answer to that question:

1. The Church should recognize the truth that children have a birthright citizenship in the kingdom of God. This is their right, not because they have been baptized, nor because their parents are church members, but because they are the children of their Father who is in heaven. They belong to the kingdom of God as they belong to the State. The State does not assume that they will be disloyal; it does not wait until they have professed their loyalty before it recognizes their citizenship. Nor should the Church wait till they have professed their loyalty to God. We may be worse than our neighbors think us to be, worse than we think ourselves to be, but we are rarely better. Let a child grow up in the belief that he is by nature a child of the devil, and it will not be strange if he acts the part which has been assigned to him. Let him grow up in the belief that he is a child of God, and it will be strange if he does not make some endeavor to be worthy of his birthright. Mr. Chandler, in his article in The Outlook of December 19 on "Boy Culture and Agriculture," showed how much faith in boys will do for them. The first condition of child culture is the faith of the parents and the faith of the Church that the child has in him the undeveloped possibility of divine manhood. We should expect our children to grow into Christlikeness of character. The kingdom of God, said Jesus, is as a man who casts seed into the ground, and the seed should spring up, he knows not how, for the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself. Christian character should be

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a natural growth, and we should expect it in our children, as we expect roses on our bushes.

2. The Church should provide worship fitted to the nature and needs of the children. Christ's direction to Peter, “Feed my lambs," has been ignored by the Church. Of course this spiritual atmosphere should be first in the home. Religion, like charity, begins at home. But, like charity, it ought not to be confined to the home. Whenever the Church has studied the spiritual needs of the children and provided for those needs, so far as I can judge, the children have responded. What particular method the Church should adopt for this purpose must depend upon a variety of circumstances, such as the condition of the community, the character of the Church, the temperament of the pastor. The problem will often be a difficult one, but difficulty is never a reason for abandoning a task; it is only a reason for greater courage and greater diligence in accomplishing the task.

3. The Sunday-school should not be merely a children's hour. It should be a school. Its object should be a real study of the Bible. This study should be as systematic and as thorough as the study of so-called secular studies in the secular school. The graduate of the Sunday-school should know that the Bible is a library, not a book. He should know approximately what is known respecting the dates and authorship of these books. He should know what is known respecting their composition and varied character and fundamental spirit, and so much of ancient history and geography as is necessary to make their meaning clear. The school should have no fears. It should dare to meet every question ;, it should not be alarmed by the fact that different scholars reach different conclusions respecting these questions of character, composition, and authorship. It should be willing that the teacher, and the students under the guidance of the teacher, should bring their moral judgment to bear on the ethical and spiritual principles enunciated by Biblical characters and Biblical writers. Its object should be, not to supply the students with ready-made knowledge which will save them the trouble of thinking, but to inspire the students to think. The experience of the Methodist Church, which found, as we have seen, that the study of the Bible was followed by a large increase, not only in the membership of the schools, but also in the membership of the church, should inspire timid souls with a greater spirit of intellectual courage and with absolute intellectual candor.

4. If these results are to be accomplished, if anything effective is to be done for the children of the Church, the problem must not be left to the isolated action of the local churches. It must be the result of the united action of the whole Church, aroused to a sense of its neglected duty, and resolved to spare no effort to fulfill that duty to the uttermost.

The Knoll, Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York.

BILL

BY DONAL HAMILTON HAINES

ALLARD sat down on a pile of boards in a corner of the vast cantonment, bit the end from a cigar, and frowned thoughtfully at the hard-packed earth. Any one of his acquaintances seeing the great war correspondent with a cigar between his teeth would have drawn immediate conclusions, for Ballard was a queer smoker. He used tobacco solely for the sake of aiding mental concentration, and appeared to take no pleasure in the performance.

And at the moment Ballard was distinctly perplexed. He had run against an obstacle, and on his chosen ground he was not used to that experience. He had been with Buller in South Africa, Kuroki in Manchuria, and the Bulgars at Adrianople. He was on familiar terms with divisional officers in many armies, and usually when his way had been barred it had been done by nothing less than orders from headquarters. Yet now he was in difficulties, and the absurd part of it was that the thing had happened here in this huge moiling horde of young recruits who had gained the merest inkling of the art of war and should have held such creatures as famous correspondents in profound awe.

If some young officer, his judgment warped by his new-won

sense of responsibility, had made things uncomfortable for him, Ballard would simply have smiled and waited until the stripling came to his senses. But nothing of that sort had occurred. It was simply that he could make no headway with the men in the particular corner of the great wooden city where he had commenced his prowlings that were destined to result in a series of magazine articles.

This was what nettled Ballard and set him to puffing jerkily at one of the very poor cigars he carried. He flattered himself that he knew men-soldiers in particular-and that he could make them talk. One of the best stories he had ever written had been won after six hours of smoky silence from a Boer prisoner who had that day seen three sons killed by British shrapnel and his farm buildings reduced to a heap of glowing embers. And yet these boys, still new to their khaki, still full of those mixed feelings which should have made speech a relief, answered him in grudging monosyllables.

"There's nothing wrong with me this morning," mused Ballard, as he chewed the end of the cigar. “And I know when I'm fit. So it's with them. How can I find it ?"

He looked up, and saw approaching him, with a purposeful

air, a tall young chap with very fresh-looking sergeant's chevrons on his sleeve. Ballard had time to note only that the young soldier looked as though he would be more at home in tennis flannels or the moleskins of the gridiron than in his uniform. He was also aware that he had marked the tall, trim figure during his abbreviated tour of investigation.

"I hate to seem officious, and it's none of my business," the young man began abruptly, "but if I were you, sir, I wouldn't ask any more questions in D Company lines this morning." "You wouldn't, eh?" answered Ballard, pleasantly. “Do you mind telling me why?"

The sergeant, who had evidently been prepared for awkwardness, thawed at once under Ballard's geniality.

“Not in the least," he replied. "You see, we buried Bill this morning, and the fellows are pretty well cut up. It's the only thing they want to talk about; and when you tried to make 'em talk about something else it put their backs up, and they turned sulky." Ballard threw away his cigar, whose use was at an end. "I see," he said. "And I'm grateful to you for telling me. Otherwise I might have prowled about, making D Company extremely uncomfortable, and with small profit to myself. But I wonder if you'd care to tell me about Bill ?”

"Yes, I surely would."

"I take it, from what you say, that he must have been a good deal of a man," Ballard suggested.

The young infantryman sat down on the pile of lumber, took off his hat and shook his head.

"No," he said, "I can't say that he was. He was an undersized gas-fitter's helper from South Chicago, and, by all odds, the worst soldier in the regiment. But if D Company does anything particularly worth doing after we get over the other side, it'll be in a great measure thanks to Bill, and we all know it."

Ballard, who was one of those rare men who know when not to ask questions although being answered is their business in life, merely sat still and waited, and presently his companion

went on:

"Bill was just tall enough to get in. Maybe he was thick enough when he joined, but the work wore him down to about a hundred and nothing. And he was so little of a soldier in every way! A perfect square peg. Nobody had as much trouble with sore feet, nobody's rifle sling and pack straps galled him so, nobody's hip got such bumping from the bayonet. And he couldn't get drill through his head. All right alone in the awkward squad at first, but numbers seemed to confuse him.

"And Bill's rifle was to him just nine pounds of incarnate devil. It wasn't a weapon in his hands; it was just an awkward club covered with ugly sharp iron bumps on which he was always skinning his knuckles, and full of a murdering evil spirit when he tried to fire it. His score-sheets drove range officers insane and kept D Company at the foot of the regiment.

"He was like that all through too, mind and body alike. As a gas-fitter's helper he'd been drawing down nine dollars a week, and the goal of his earthly ambitions was getting fifteen a week, so he could marry some girl or other."

The sergeant paused, and Ballard looked at him curiously. "You've drawn nothing less than a caricature of a man," he remarked. "You've sketched precisely the type that an army's better off without."

"I haven't exaggerated a particle," answered the soldier. "In fact, I could have used deeper lines and still given you a faithful picture. Superficially Bill was-well, sir, he was the limit. As you say, he was exactly the sort of lumber out of which you can't possibly make a good soldier. And yet he made D Company."

"I wonder!" mused Ballard. "Death's a bit of a shock to you chaps, you know, and this poor fellow was a pathetic figure. De mortuis nil nisi bonum is a mighty powerful shibboleth!" "No," insisted the other, "it isn't that at all.” Then he hesitated for a moment and scratched a pattern in the dirt with the edge of his boot-sole.

"This sort of talk," he resumed, with some show of diffidence, isn't my line of country at all. What I'm going to say is going to be sheer nonsense, perhaps, but I'm going to say it just the same."

"Nothing that is that insistent on getting out of you can possibly be nonsense," Ballard assured him.

"That's comforting, anyhow. Well, all this huge business of war is an awful facer for most of the men here in camp. You see, we aren't like the men in the officers' training camps. For the most part, they're older. And there's a sort of noblesse oblige spirit about those places. I'm afraid we haven't got that. We're here because we have to be here, and there's no real reason why we should have it. There are a lot of us who 're here against our wills. You can't get away from that sort of thing, you know, because we aren't all built alike, by any means.

same.

"I'm afraid I'm going to make a rotten soldier, to be honest with you. I've never wanted to kill things, and don't like firearms, and I've no instincts for the tricks of the ugly trave. But I've learned some of the essential truths of the business just tlie. You see, last fall I was playing football, and the two games aren't so different. It's a question of team play; even more so in modern war, I take it, than in football. And team play doesn't consist merely in the ability to reel off your whole repertory of plays with machine-like smoothness. The thing goes a whole lot deeper than that.

"Two years ago we had a little quarter-back who weighed a hundred and eighteen pounds stripped. And at least eighteen pounds of that total wasn't physical weight at all. He had in him some sort of a thing that communicated itself to the other ten men on the team. Not this flashy thing we call ' pep;' something more vital than that, more compelling. Mechanically he wasn't as good a quarter-back as two other men. But he was worth more to the team than a dozen like them.

"Well, Bill's been to D Company what that little chap was to our team. I can't put my finger on the thing he's given us. I don't believe anybody can. I don't believe that up to the time we knew Bill was going to die any of us quite realized that as a group we owed him anything."

And now you can't pay ?" suggested the older man.

His companion had recourse again to tracing patterns with the edge of his boot.

"We'll pay, all right," he said; "but I think we'd all like to have said so to Bill. I guess you've seen troops before, haven't you?"

"A good many," admitted Ballard.

"Well, then, you must know that a company of freshly drafted men is a good deal of a mess. About all they've got in common is their dislikes and their grievances. D Company was no better than the general run. Most of us were unwilling and anxious to hide the fact, infernally homesick and ashamed of it, bitterly conscious of the jolts and wrenches with which we'd had to break off relations that meant so much-just about wreck our lives, some of us. We represented the Lord only knows how many widely separated tastes and instincts, and there was nothing to pull us together except a great deal of dismally hard work. Abstract patriotism doesn't quite answer the purpose, does it? If there'd been a German army in the next county we wouldn't have been able to exercise all our little pettinesses. But there wasn't; the grim thing was most awfully remote, too far off to pull us together.

"That's where Bill came in. He ought to have been the worst of the lot of us. Certainly the training was harder on him than it was on anybody else in the company. Right from the start it began to raise hob with him physically. And he was such a hopeless duffer at every angle of it that it must have been just as much of a torture mentally."

"Couldn't have been very sensitive on that side," Ballard put in.

"I'm not so sure of that. You find thin skins on queer people. Well, wait and see. At first Bill was conspicuous largely because of his desire to make a confidant of anybody that would listen to him. And his confidences weren't particularly worth hearing. Life for him was spelled with mighty few letters. His job and his girl, that was about the sum total of it. It was a nine-dollar job, and he showed us the picture of the girl. She looked like the sort who'd do just exactly the thing she did. We got pretty well fed up with Bill and his conversation. It was just the sort of thing you ran into just now; every one of us wanted to talk about his own troubles. Nobody else's mattered. So Bill got on our nerves until we were ready to choke him.

"After a bit, though, I think a few of us began to notice one difference between Bill and the rest of us. I know I did. That

was that Bill just talked; he didn't complain. He never once said that it was a shame he'd had to give up his job, or that it was hell for a man to have to go away and leave his girl. He talked about them as though they were the biggest things in the world, but he went no further.

"Right on the heels of that, I made another discovery. Bill was just as willing to listen, as he was to talk. I was just as full of the importance of my own troubles as anybody else, and one day I talked them out to Bill. I did it more in self-defense than anything else to head off his endless chatter. Then I found that he wasn't merely willing to hear it, he wanted to hear it. And it doesn't take long for a bunch of homesick men, full of their own natural selfishness, to discover a sympathetic ear— even though it's one like Bill's.

"It wasn't that he had any sound advice to give you, or anything like that. Bill's mental capacities weren't great. But he had a way of listening to you that made you know he was sorry and wished no end that he could help. And that's really all a man wants, because nobody can actually help him.

"At the end of a week we'd got all through laughing at his awkwardness and swearing at his talkativeness. Nobody really liked him. It was more like having a poor no-account yellow dog around to wag his tail at you when you were lonely.

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Of course it isn't possible for me to say whether any of the rest of the men in the company thought about Bill in the same way I did, but I imagine they did. At first I sort of envied him. He'd given up so much less than I had. The cantonment seemed an infinitely better place than what he'd left. No wonder he was cheerful and uncomplaining. Then I saw that was just being sorry for myself, which is poor business. The minute I began to think about it fairly it was clear enough. Bill's sacrifice was bigger than mine. That picture of the poor girl in her cheap finery meant infinitely more to him than all my sacrifices did to me.

"When a thought like that hits you all at once with the force of a club, it makes you go right on thinking. The minute I was conscious of the difference between Bill and me I wanted to know the reason for it. Was Bill Hicks so much the better man of the two? Were all my obvious points of superiority worth nothing when it came right down to weighing the real worth of the two of us?

"There was just one way I could get at the answer. I asked Bill the straight question. Why hadn't he married the girl and got out of coming? He just looked at me and blinked. Why, how could I?' he demanded.

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"That's all. There was no other word spoken between us on the subject. And if you can't hear him asking that question and see the expression of blank amazement on his face I can't make it any clearer. But I had my answer.'

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"Yes," observed Ballard, "I can see that you had."

"It was two or three days after this that Bill got his letter.

He came to me with it because I suppose I had talked to him a little more than any of the other men in the squad. I knew when I saw him that he was no better than a dead man. As I say, the work had been pulling him down frightfully, but what it had done was nothing compared to the work of that letter. He looked smaller, shriveled, and yet his face was splendidBill's peaked, pale, weak-chinned face. Because in it, you know, was death, and at the same time something that was bigger and stronger than death.

"She's gone and married Steve!' he told me.

"For an instant I didn't understand. I'd forgotten who Steve was.

"What?' I asked, foolishly.

"Gertie,' he explained. 'She's wrote me that she guessed she wouldn't wait, and so she's married Steve. He was gettin' eighteen per and a good chance of a raise.'

"What in blazes could I say? If a blow like that had crashed into me, I should have gone all to bits or else covered the thing with a Byronic sham heroism. And yet there was Bill, with the iron in his soul, never thinking of the girl's shallow heartlessness, never complaining of his own loss, just measuring Steve's sure eighteen per' against his hypothetical fifteen! God! you don't run into magnificent things like that very often!

66

Fortunately, I had the sense not to insult him with sympathy he was too big to need. I just let him talk. He didn't even say much. Just told me a little about Steve and what a straight sort of a chap he was, and how Gertie would probably be much better off than if she'd waited for him. And I sat there trying to swallow and watching that face.

"At the end of it, though, he almost did for me. He folded the letter and put it away in the pocket where he always carried her picture, and then stood there for a second looking horribly old and frail in his bagging clothes.

"Well,' he said, smiling, I won't have very much to think about now. Maybe I'll get on better with the drill and the shooting.'

"Next day-that was a week ago he went to the hospital, and, you bet, before night most of the regiment knew about Bill's letter and what he had said to me. The colonel went to see him every day, and one of D Company's officers was there most of the time. And this morning we buried him."

He stopped abruptly, stood up, and hitched up his belt with an air of finality.

"I hope you see," he said, "why I thought you'd better not ask questions in the company lines to-day.'

"I do," replied Ballard, and held out his hand, his eyes very eloquent as they traveled over the other's straight, trim figure and earnest face. "And, anyhow," he added, "there won't be any need of asking questions. You've given me all I came to learn-and more."

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GOVERNMENT OPERATION OF THE RAILWAYS

HAS IT COME TO STAY? THE LARGER VIEW

THE PROBABLE EFFECT UPON THE VALUE OF RAILWAY SECURITIES BY THEODORE H. PRICE

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EDITOR OF "COMMERCE AND FINANCE"

N his sixty-first birthday, December 28, 1917, the President, through Mr. McAdoo, took over the operation of the American railways. He did not say that he intended to signalize the occasion by making a present to the Nation; but it is not unlikely that his action will come to be so regarded.

To appreciate its importance and grasp its larger meaning an exceedingly comprehensive vision is necessary. This can only be had from an attitude that will enable us to study the transportation system of the world as a whole.

There is a close analogy between the circulatory system of the human body and the transportation machinery with which civilization has provided itself, and upon which its existence depends. Through the arteries and veins of the body the blood

circulates to nourish the tissues and carry off the waste products of our physical and mental activities. The heart provides the motive power and is actuated by the energy that is released by the combustion which takes place in the furnace of the lungs. The brain is the office of the unseen train despatcher; the nerves are his wires, and pain is the danger signal that he sets to warn us that caution or repair is necessary. Over the entire system one head, an intangible incomprehensible ego, presides and directs its operation with an equally incomprehensible efficiency.

This efficiency is the result of unification, and it is in this respect that the analogy fails in so far as it applies to our railway system as it has been.

We have only to think of the body with a separate circulatory

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