"Well, my friends?" he asked.

A burly, sweating man in shirt-sleeves stepped forward. "Ve vant," he said, "to talk vit you-you yerselves." "You have talked with me," said Craig; "your leaders, that is."

"No, ve!" returned the burly man. Suddenly he seemed to lose control of his studied calm; he swung his arms; his great face swelled and turned purple.

"You!" he roared. "You! You lif' up here in your cool house, and ve-my God!-there iss a man here whose childt died last night!"

Craig threw back his head and made a great upward and downward gesture of weariness with his arm. "The same old thing!" he complained, as if to himself. "The same old thing! The utter lack of consequence of the world in general! What have I to do with

that? There's not one of them that isn't living on the money I send them secretly."

And then the thing happened. I dare say it was Craig's gesture that snapped the cord of sanity. I saw a hand raised at the back of the crowd and sunlight glittering along the barrel of a revolver-a cheap, nickel-plated revolver. There was a spurt of flame and Craig caught at his breast, hesitated, and fell forward. The crowd turned and ran down the avenue. In the distance I saw men hurrying toward us. I lifted Craig up. Suddenly he twisted his head from side to side as a man will who has reached the extreme limits of annoyance.

"How silly of them!" he said. "How damnably silly! Oh, well"-his eyes smiled at me.-"I put it through anyway, didn't I?"

H

Something for the Affections

E still breathes, the "man with soul so dead" that he can say, not only to himself but publicly: "What was good enough for my father is good enough for me." Mercifully for human progress there are signs abroad that give us the hope of his ultimately becoming extinct. He will be survived for a time, but not indefinitely, by his mate whose marvellous prehensile tenacity leads her to believe and act accordingly-that what was good enough for her great-grandmother is good enough for her. Undoubtedly the least'violent modernist would be willing to deal the blow that should rid us of them, but there is a strange resilience in both the male and female of this species that makes them rise unscathed after the sharpest attacks on their benighted tenets. We shall have to wait the slower end that must befall them. Evolution by exclusion, or the killing off of those who persistently go the wrong way is a sure process if not a swift one. So, knowing him to be doomed, let us not waste energy in hopeless argument with him.

Yet, if this vanishing man could be brought to believe in an amendment of his doctrine, he could win a right to live. If he would proceed backwardly only so far as to say, "Some things that were good enough for my father are surely good enough for me," he might prove a valuable restraining influence on the extremists of this generation who are too apt to look upon all that our forebears held dear as of no more use to us than most vestigial remains. Such radicals are hardly less of a bar to progress than the sententious stand-patter who prates of his father's day as though it were the Golden Age. Now and again we may meet with a counsellor who, standing well between these two extremes, can say to us that, while it fares better with our intellects if we accept nothing merely because it is a legacy from the past, it may fare sadly with our humanness if we are not impelled to cling to a few relics solely on that ground. It has dawned on us only recently that there is no irreverence in challenging the manners,

morals, and belongings of our fathers. If they are sound they can bear our scrutiny. Intoxicated with this discovery, we are developing a ruthlessness in analysis that threatens to run amuck and to produce a social environment that stimulates our mental powers but wages a war of attrition upon our affections.

How can they survive the prevailing spirit of the day? We are being taught that a concrete personal affection is a small thing compared to the dawning sense of the larger brotherhood of man; that we should strive for the will to power, not the will to tender. ness; and that efficiency works miracles that love could never compass. Woman, particularly, has had this brought home to her with a swiftness that has kept pace with her emancipation. For her new freedom she has paid with many of her old untutored affections, and the Moloch of progress cries out for more. She may in the end pay with all the institutions and habits that nourished those qualities which, if they made the world no wiser, perhaps added something to the sum of "human delight." The social economist is storming woman's last outpost

the home. She is being forced to agree that she has been inefficient even in that, her own province, and that if the world's work had advanced as slowly as hers we would still be in sight of the Stone Age. She is urged to give up her personal domestic endeavors in favor of some group scheme where organization will accomplish what well-meaning blundering could never do.

As the economist demands her home, as it stands at present, so the experimental psychologist has designs upon her children. They can be developed into finer citizens if she will intrust them to trained experts. Her inept devotion is hampering. She may even, unless she loves too wisely to be demonstrative, produce in her sons a "mother complex" which is now generally understood to accord with such strange perversions as those of Edipus and Hamlet. So one by one all her old softnesses are being challenged and she is yielding them