in the manufactured article-is inherent in the Spanish-speaking nations of South America, a fact which has been ignored too long by the American industries. This is the first attempt by any State to lend concrete assistance to the exporter who has designs on the South American trade. On every hand there is plenty of evidence that the American public is to be treated to an awakened national conscience as far as the development of art in industry is concerned. At some time not far distant Minnesota plans to build a great art school, which will be founded on the idea of making art the common possession of all the people. The art commission will serve as a clearinghouse for the fine and industrial arts, standing ready to find a market for everything worth while produced by Minnesota artists, whether they be painters or brickmakers. Just now the commission is lending its assistance to the preparation of programmes for civic gatherings, an extensive educational programme being conducted with the aid of the State club-women.

A concrete illustration of how art has been put to work in Minnesota is the lacemaking industry among the foreign-born women. There are in Minnesota many

thousands of women who came from Vienna and Old World art centres as are found in Sweden, Norway, Bohemia, Russia, and central Europe. Because of inability to find a worth-while market for their fine laces, these women had allowed the industry in which their mothers and grandmothers were engaged to die out with them or to become commercialized in a cheap fashion. The women in the smaller towns had formed the habit of exchanging their laces for groceries and other supplies, receiving only meagre credit for their handiwork. The result was it soon deteriorated in quality and quantity. They saw no reason for spending their hard-earned money to buy new patterns from their old homes, and lace-making became almost a lost art among the younger women, especially those born in this country. One day Director Flagg dropped off a train at New Ulm, a quiet little town overlooking the Minnesota River, in search of latent industries into which he could inject new life with art as the medium.

To the foreign-born women of the town, once a well-known lace-making centre, he made the proposition of State aid, which aroused new aspirations and hopes. Di

rector Flagg promised the aid of the State in obtaining better grades of materials and more attractive patterns from the Old World art centres, providing the women would agree to re-engage in the lace-making business in their homes, as they did before coming to America. The commission promised to find a market for better-qualitied laces, and later collected samples of the best work of these women for a State exhibition. The department-store buyers and women fanciers of laces were surprised to find that such artistic laces were being made inside the State and became interested in the new industry. The result was that everything of merit was snapped up by department stores and well-to-do women. Cash prizes were also awarded to the makers of the best designs, and with the money received from this sale most of the women sent to their old homes for the more costly patterns and materials and began making even more beautiful laces. The women of one small colony cleared one thousand dollars in one winter season by working a few hours each evening at lace-making, and their profits have increased each year as the demand for these domestic laces has continued to grow.

Perhaps the most encouraging feature of the attempt to put an Old World industry on its feet in Minnesota is the interest being taken in their mothers' work by the young girls of New Ulm, and other centres of foreign-born people, who preferred careers as bundle-wrappers and cash-girls at precarious salaries in large department stores to following the old-fashioned business of making laces at home. These young women began to find they could make more money at home making laces and that lace-making had been a recognized instead of a despised industry. The result has been that fewer young women are leaving the small towns for the cities. The addition of hundreds of young women to the lace-making colonies has justified the faith of the art commission in believing that this home industry could be conducted quite as profitably in Minnesota as in Europe.

Minnesotans have been shown other practical ways in which art can be put to work for the public good. Four years ago the commission inaugurated a contest for the best design for a rural home to cost no more than three thousand five hundred dollars complete, hoping thereby to lay the founda

tion for a campaign to encourage the building of better homes on the farms of the State. Fifty leading architects of the State competed for the honors, and those who failed to win presented their ideas to the State free of charge. The commission, with this wealth of material, made arrangements to make it available for the use of every farmer home-builder in the State. For a fee of three and a half dollars, which barely covered the cost of blue-prints, any citizen of the State is able to obtain a complete set of any of these fifty plans.

More than one hundred thousand copies of plans of Minnesota's model farm home have been circulated around the State, and the entire world, in fact.

The Minnesota model farm home was designed chiefly for the farmer's wife, who has been the most neglected individual in the nation until recent times. Every comfort and convenience enjoyed by the city housewife has been transplanted to the country, and the farm wife no longer works in a dingy, dark, inconvenient home which makes a poor comparison indeed when set up alongside the average big red barn on the farm.

Another campaign was inaugurated to interest citizens living in villages and suburban communities in building more artistic homes, and contests were held to obtain model village and suburban homes which could be built by the average man without stretching his purse to the breaking-point. Later, similar contests resulted in the adoption of model farmyards and landscaping plans for city homes.

There is hardly an occupation or calling in Minnesota into which art cannot reach out and better conditions, in the opinion of the commission, and gradually public indifference and scepticism to the development of a common, every-day art is disappearing. Had the Minnesota farmer been told a few years ago that art could increase the value of his corn crop he would have laughed the informant to scorn. But when he began building better and more comfortable farm homes, he found his farm-hands and his own sons and daughters more content to remain on the farm, and all were more willing workers. And the discovery that two ears of corn were growing where one grew before is the surest evidence that art is coming into its own, on the farm, at least. And there is the place where it has been most needed. O. R. GEYER.

IN

Success of Our Second

N the rapidly moving panorama of the war-whose swift sequence of events, no less than the startling diversity of the events themselves, diverts public interest with great suddenness from one quarter to another-the deThe Great feat of Cadorna on the Austrian front came almost War Loan exactly at the moment of the immensely successful subscription to our second War Loan. These two occurrences might seem at first glance to be singularly unrelated. Yet at least one motive for the concentrated attack of the Central Powers on the Italian army was knowledge that the full resources of the United States would presently be engaged on the side of its allies. If the Italian disaster showed the need of the unreserved employment of those resources, so the response to the war-loan offering showed our own people's mood in regard to the providing of those resources.

The second Liberty Loan, for which only $3,000,000,000 had been expressly solicited by the Treasury, witnessed an oversubscription more remarkable, from every point of view, than that of the $2,000,000,000 loan of June. In the vigor and enthusiasm of the campaign. for the general public's subscription, as well as in the actual results, this great operation stands out already as a landmark in our financial history. It was evidence both of our people's capacity to finance the war and of their willingness to do so. It is possible that not less than 10,000,000 separate subscribers participated in this remarkable demonstration, as against the 7,000,000 of the last British war loan, the previous high record.

and after the loan subscription, declined almost continuously. At times it was extremely weak, though prices of many stocks had already Why Stocks Violently fallen to the lowest figures in Declined a decade. The Italian débâcle naturally emphasized the downward movement, but it began before Mackensen had attacked Cadorna.

As the traditional index to an economic situation the fall on the Stock Exchange excited wide discussion. Primarily, there was no doubt that the movement was occasioned by sale of stocks, by investors as well as speculators, in connection with the war taxation. The very heavy taxes on rich individuals and prosperous corporations made it on the one hand prudent for some large capitalists to convert a part of their investments into cash, and on the other hand as with the $122,000,000 set aside by the United States Steel Corporation out of six months' earnings, to provide for the "excess profits tax"-they diminished the surplus of such companies available for dividends. Neither result was in any sense disastrous, but both created pressure on the Stock Exchange.