debt, the obligation to make up the losses, is upon us all.

We cannot get away from the fact that we are all parts of one great organization, divided up into nations and races and sects; but these divisions are slight compared with the fact that we are all partners in the great firm, and that the earth and its fullness is the firm's property. The articles of copartnership are human laws and customs, but every normal one of us has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It takes some of the property to maintain this, and we should, if we have any conscience at all, contribute value for our share. But whether our contribution be great or slight, and whether our rewards be full or meagre, the one thing that we must not do is waste from the general store. In this respect, ownership is indeed stewardship; and the greater our possession, so much the greater is our responsibility.

Let us leave aside consideration of the industries with their preposterous destruction of values, and address ourselves to the incidents of daily life.

The great packing-houses urge people to buy the cheaper cuts of meat because the demand for those of higher cost is so great that the prices are out of all proportion. Why do we not take the cheaper cuts and make more savory dishes out of them? Sheer, gross ignorance of the art of cooking and a stupid uncultured taste for what your true gourmet would scorn, is the real

reason.

Suppose you build yourself a place in the country and begin to have your troubles. Your wife can't keep servants, your garden is a failure, your drainage system clogs up, 'everybody is trying to cheat me,' you say, and the expense is beyond all reason. Well, do you want to know what the trouble is? It is ignorance, your ignorance. Why did you

want to build yourself a lordly estate when you did not know how to administer it? Your grandfather knew how to run his part of the farm and your grandmother understood hers; and while they worked as you do not want to work, they did not do the evil thing that you are doing: they did not waste. Look back a generation or so at the great estates in England, Germany, France, and in America, too. Did everybody cheat the lords of the manor and their ladies? They did not, and there was fully as much cupidity afoot then as there is now. The landholders knew their business, they were to the manner born. It appears that you do not know your business, and you do not deserve a big place in the country until you know how to administer it. Of course the 'natives' and the people in the village laugh at you; but the trouble is, you are not laughed at enough; you should be laughed at so much that you would quit the business of running a landed estate and proceed to inhabit a small place where you do not commit waste. It is your wastefulness that the people are laughing at, and they are doing a useful and praiseworthy act when they do so.

The sooner we learn this palpable fact, that wastefulness is an offense against public welfare and that whoever commits waste offends, the sooner we shall drive the wastrels back into their holes and provide for a better order of living all around.

Of course we must, in private life, do as the honorable Justices of the Supreme Court do: we must use the rule of reason. It may be that in going to your business in your yacht you find opportunity to plan out your day's work more economically than if you were to come in on the train as a commuter. The point is, if it takes a dozen men and a poor man's winter-supply of coal and a day's interest on a snug competence to

bring you to town, your coming must be worth while; it must pay for itself in augmenting the general store of the world's wealth whether it belongs to you or to others. We cannot say that it is waste to maintain a yacht or any other luxury, provided that in maintaining it you contribute enough to warrant it.

Well, who is to tell whether you are committing waste or not? You may be the most modest of men and contribute much and spend little, and on the other hand you may be a bounder and magnify an hundredfold your every little service. Who is to tell? Nobody, until your profligate habits become evident. Then it may become evident that you are a proper subject for scorn or taxation or something to bring you to your

senses.

Your money, under usual conditions, is like so much wheat; you can put it out at interest, or speculate with it with a view to making much more or losing it; it is yours to hold and administer, but you must not destroy it.

You can destroy it by making it, as a whole, fail in productiveness. The idea that the milliners, jewelers, tailors, and purveyors of luxuries who minister to your vanity are each earning a living and so, by keeping money in circulation, are doing something useful, is all right so far as they are concerned, but it may not be all right as regards you. They may be making their living while you are wasting yours, and when the balance is struck, the deficit will show on your side, not theirs. They are pegging away, making what they can out of life, which is just what you may not be doing.

The real point is whether you are worth all this fuss or not. Is your contribution to the general welfare enough to warrant it? If so, well and good; go ahead and enjoy yourself. But it is just as well not to be wrong in this matter. A bank president may easily be

too conservative and cause his bank to die of dry rot by excess of caution; but the great danger is that he may err on the other side and make loans which are not good. That spells ruin. In the same way you can hoard your money and live in a mean fashion while you are affluent, without gaining merit; but to squander what you have, no matter how rich you are, beyond those needs which make for comfort and right living and efficiency, is to offend against public welfare. It is doing what Old Skinflint did when he lost his temper and burned his wheat.

Suppose you hire a hundred men to carry stones from field number one to field number two, at the current rate of wages, and it takes, let us say, a month to do it. Then suppose you hire them to take the stones back from field number two to just where they found them in field number one. That will take another month. The men will have earned their wages; they will have given so much labor for the sum received. You, however, as administrator for what you have spent, which is that part of the world's savings represented by five thousand days' work, will have wasted it. The world's store will have been depleted by five thousand days' work.

Again we must use the rule of reason. Many industries, indeed nearly all of them often employ men in just such unprofitable tasks to maintain their organization, which is of great value. And there is work done for art which is hard to measure in concrete values but which is of prime necessity if we are ever to become civilized. We cannot live for utility alone without making the world too dreary a place to live in. But the fact remains that the composite savings of the world is a store in which we all have an interest. This store is being greatly depleted by the dreadful war now raging. The world will be much poorer after the war than

it was before. The store will be less. Waste will be more quickly felt. Perhaps it would be well to trim our sails to meet the new conditions, to spend no more than we would think ourselves entitled to spend on luxuries and vain display if we were somebody else and were in the waters of tribulation.

There is neither art nor wisdom nor philosophy in prodigal waste. And it offends against the public welfare.

FEATHERED AFFECTION

THERE are a venturous few among us who presume to see among the souls that have been knit with ours and that now, perchance, await us in the flowery fields of Paradise, members of species other than our own. We dream of the wag of a feathery tail among the asphodels, the gleam of brown eyes that were faithful unto death; we hear again the purring of a furry comrade who went forth from the warmth of our hearthstone into the night. And, for me, in that complete reunion, there must be a familiar rush of wings and a clear bird hail from the branches of the tree of life.

In their capacity for affection to usward and in the affinities that exist between the human and the feathered tribes, there is an unworked field rich in possibilities. If we have hitherto failed to secure reaction here, it is because we have not acted, quite possibly because we have not attained. For our point of contact with bird life is in the region of our own most ethereal qualities. What is the bird but visible spirit? He is color, melody, rhythmic motion, pure joy objectified. Like our own transcendent moods, he flits at the approach of all that is harsh, brutal, domineering. We may not hope to approach a bird with loud voice, violent movement, or unworthy demeanor. He will have none of us. Tones light and musi

Across the shades of memory, like a beam of light, flits a gold canary, his little crest erect, his voice vibrant with joyous greeting to his friends returned. He has been long alone in a darkened room. I open the blind and let the sunlight in through the vines and the red geranium flowers, then stand silent before the burst of melody that is his instant response.

No lower passions here—whatever they may be. I have ministered to no material need of my little friend. Light, color, a loving voice- these have transformed listless silence into vocal ecstasy.

The tenderest, most ethereal caress I have ever known was that of a ringdove the author and bestower of which was, for three years, my fluttering halo; I was the sine qua non of his existence.

I was a lonely teacher in a dreary mining camp. For me, at the close of day, there was no face at the window, no fire on the hearth. But in the top of the tallest poplar tree, 'faithful through the watches long,' a little sentinel had marked the hours.

While yet afar off came his salute 'Cook coo-oo, cook coo-oo.' Then, with spread wings, on a sort of aerial toboggan, he glided down to sit upon my shoulder, to lay his silken cheek to mine, and to murmur such emotions as only the dovelike voice can adequately convey.

Sometimes, waking in the night, oppressed by the stillness, I would speak to him. There would be an instant's delay-just sufficient, I knew, to fill that wonderful wind-instrument of his. Then, from his corner, tender as a hand upon the head, would come his reassuring 'Cook coo-oo, cook coo-oo.' What matter fur or feathers, two

legs or four, brute or human? These spirit entities have been received into the heart.

When one has acquired a bird-vocabulary, many a bright greeting may be exchanged with even the wild songster. He will linger with pricked feathers and animated mien, to reply again and again to call or whistle.

And what of our humble and everpresent friend, the barnyard fowl? Is our point of contact with her that of the purse and the palate only?

Lest we transcend experience and incur a challenge, let us confine ourselves to the incubated fowl and to the white leghorn bird.

What incubator mother can regard without emotion her downy and multitudinous brood in their infantile dependence she who is to them the almighty, the author and preserver of their being?

What a joy to deal out the wholesome ration, to watch the little crops distend, and to see the downy mites steal away one by one to the sunny corner and spread themselves for an after-dinner nap of absolute content! How comforting to nest them cosily at twilight, to listen to their sleepy chirpings, and to secure them from all those night terrors of little chicks cold and wet, rats and cats, owls and vermin; to insure them that dreamless

sleep which is the condition of normal growth in universal babyhood!

How it touches one's heart when some adventurous truant, struck with sudden terror of the vast world into which he has ventured, flies shrieking into one's hands and cuddles there with gradually abating sobs for all the world like a terrified child!

And, as the days pass, and the balls of corn-colored down grow into slender, snow-white adolescents, what loving, tender-voiced little companions they are! What delight is theirs when incubator mother condescends to sit out under the tree? How they compete for the nearest branches, and cuddle about her skirts and feet, and flare themselves before her in conspicuous attitudes, hoping to be taken up! And, if she lifts one and holds it to her cheek, how it will rival the ring-dove in murmuring affection! Even to dignified cockhood and henhood the delight in the caress survives.

A wholesome chicken yard, with its cackling, cawing, crowing, red-topped population, conscious of clean and hygienic quarters and of regular and abundant rations; industriously productive, tirelessly active; always greeting your coming with tumultuous welcome, it is a little nursery of pure joy in living, an epitome of ardent existence!

I

THE Only agreeable thing to be recorded in connection with Europe's sudden and disastrous war is the fact that people stopped talking about women, and began to talk about men. For the past few years, women have persistently occupied the front of the stage, and men have seemed a negligible factor; useful in their imperfect way, but hopelessly unproblematic. Then Austria delivered her ultimatum, Germany marched her armies across a peaceful earth, and men, plain men, became supremely important, as defenders of their imperilled homes. In this swift return to primitive conditions, primitive qualities reasserted their value. France, Belgium, England called to their sons for succor, and the arms of these men were strengthened because they had women to protect.

A casual study of newspapers before and after the proclamation of war is profoundly instructive. Even the illustrated papers and periodicals tell their tale, and spare us the printed page. Pictures of recruits in place of club-women. Pictures of camps in place of convention halls. Pictures of Red Cross nurses bending over hospital beds, in place of militants raiding Buckingham Palace. Pictures of peaceful ladies sewing and

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knitting for soldiers, in place of formidable committees baiting Mr. Wilson, or pursuing the more elusive Mr. Asquith. Pictures of pitying young girls handing cups of broth and the everwelcome cigarettes to weary volunteers, in place of suffragists haranguing the mob of Hyde Park. Never was there such a noteworthy illustration of Scott's archaic line,

'O woman! in our hours of ease.'

Never did the simplicities of life so triumphantly efface its complexities.

II

As the war deepened, and the tale of its devastations and brutalities robbed even the saddened onlooker of all gladness in life, it was natural that women, while faithful to their rôle of ministering angels, should mingle blame with pity. It was also natural, though less pardonable, that their censure should be of that vague order which holds everybody responsible for what somebody has done. Perhaps it was even natural that, confident in their own unproved wisdom and untried efficiency, they should believe and say that, had woman shared the control of civilized governments, the world would now be at peace.