his ears grew mobile in those long minutes of reaching and stretching after distant sounds.

And where was poor Nicholson's body?

Six feet is short range for a gunman to miss in. Perhaps in the very instant of firing the hand of the Negro had wavered under his sudden recognition of the uniform of the State. Aimed at the heart, his bullet flew high, striking the left collarbone, shattering it to bits.

The impact had felled Nicholson like a log-crumpled him up on the floor. But before the shrewish clock on the shelf had snapped many seconds away he was up and on his feet again, plunging through the door.

For a bit McCormick's yearning ears had detected the sound of his footsteps. Then utter stillness succeeded, punctured at intervals by shots.

"One," McCormick counted. "Two-three- -four."

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Single shots," he pondered. "Now, what's the meaning of that?"

Nicholson, following the two dark figures so far ahead, counted the shots also. Meantime his running was a miracle. Someway that bitter pain in his shoulder seemed only to act as a spur. The jar of each step wrenched like red-hot pincers and yet, in spite of it, the lad was running his very best.

When the Negro, firing his fourth shot, vaulted the fence, Nicholson was already near enough to see the naneuver. And so, because he understood, it, he instantly changed his course, darting away on the hypothenuse of the triangle, to head off his man.

Calculating speed and space as he flew, he knew that he should make the finish in time. Already he was half-way across. He fixed his eye on the fugitive, now visible for the upper third of his body beyond the fence. And, so gazing and so running, he failed completely to see a ditch directly in his path.

That ditch was eight feet deep and twelve feet wide. It was faced with soft white snow. And yet, as Nicholson smashed to the bottom, it could not have hurt him worse had it been a pit of jagged stones. The splinters and sharp edges of his broken shoulder ground together under the impact of his whole weight. For a second his eyes saw purple and black in spots. A wave of ghastly sickness swept through him. Then he was up and climbing out and away again, his left arm swinging oddly as he ran.

But the interruption had cost too much. Clearly, he could no longer hope to head off the man.

Mauk, tearing down the trail from above, perceived him now the unmistakable trooper figure silhouetted against the white. And Mauk's breast, at the sight, even at that tense moment, filled quick with the fires of unspeakable wrath.

In Nicholson's head, however, one single idea was burning: "I must get that man! I must get that man! If I don't, I'll run till Easter. I'll never go back to the troop,"

I

There was only one way to get him now. Through the heart. To wing him would be to lose the trick.

But Nicholson, you see, as member of the force's revolver team, is one of the four best recorded military revolver shots in the world. He waited till the moment of greatest possible proximity had come. Then, forty yards from the fugitive, he raised his Colt and fired a single shot.

The Negro flung up his arms and plunged out of sight. As Nicholson reached the spot Mauk was already stooping over the body.

"Dead," Mauk growled. "Clean shot, I must say. Through the heart." Then he rose to his feet, straightening up stiffly, and turned on Nicholson a face of withering scorn.

"McCormick," he began, "you quitter! You rookie! If any one had told me this morning that you would disobey orders, Iwhat? Good-Lord! Nick, man, is this your ghost?"

Later that night Private McCormick, still alone, but grimly contented, conveyed the worse-than-murderer, Ofenloch, through very dangerous waters safe to jail.

In the black of the morning, Dr. McKee, of Burgettstown, extracted a 44-40 flat-nose Winchester bullet from among the débris that had been Private Nicholson's left collar-bone.

Later still, at the coroner's inquest, the identity of the dead Negro was established beyond a doubt. He was Charles Smith, of Braddock, Pennsylvania, professional bad man and pay. envelope robber.

""Twas all he did for a livin'; just skinnin' us poor devils." as one grim-visaged miner averred.

And the tone that rang through the speech found open expression in street and slope and shaft-bucket, where men slapped each other's shoulders, rejoicing, over deliverance from

a curse.

But the coroner's jury, in the matter of the verdict, took the bit in its teeth.

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Suicide. We find that Charles Smith met death by suicide,” that jury continued to insist.

"But Private Nicholson shot him-shot him through the heart!" protested Mauk. "Verdict must be rendered according to the evidence."

"Of course, of course. That's just what it is, just what we'r sayin', ain't it? The deceased attacked a Pennsylvania State policeman with a gun. Any man that attacks a Pennsylvania State policeman commits suicide," insisted the foreman in all painstaking seriousness.

Then the corporal had to argue, to reason, to expound, for he wanted the formal verdict that would clear his comrade. At last the thing came straight.

"Charles Smith," declared the jury, "while in the commission of a felony, met his death at the hands of a member of the State Police. And the said member of the State Police is hereby exonerated from all blame.”

FIRE OF LIFE

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osophic power. He would have a weak mind. Now the pacifist has a weak mind, in that he thinks he possesses a formula which will solve every situation. "Don't strike," he says; but if you put his child in peril from an assassin who is killing all children in the name of God, your pacifist will strike. Ten to one merely the philosophic machinery that is weak in him, and not his courage or his common sense. He has not imagination enough to solve the problem on a slate; but he can do so whe it arises in flesh and blood. Nothing is more remarkable than the way in which our pacifists have been seeing the light during the last twelve months. Send a pacifist to Belgium, and the nat ral tint will flash in his face, and he will fight like the next mall

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It is the same with those who clamor for free speechfree speech were a formula that solved all the problems of free government; as if free speech were a metaphysical and inde structible entity that must be guarded at every moment as the sacred, heaven-descended image of liberty. Free speech merely a tendency. The phrase embalms one attribute of liber

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government. This phrase has been discovered during ages of ivil struggle, and is preserved as a convenient summary. But no one thinks that you have a right to call meetings at which you advocate measures that society holds in horror. Even the freest democracy you cannot advocate bomb-throwing and free love. Why not? Because they are crimes? No; but because society has defined them as crimes. No one will claim the right to speak freely to enlisted men in order to get them to desert. No one will claim the right to speak freely to the German Government about the sailing of our ships. But the claim is made that during a war the same freedom to criticise ve the Government shall exist as in time of peace--if not the same You freedom, then something as nearly like it as possible. Well, there have the crux of the matter. It is true that a great deal rg more freedom of criticism can and will be allowed in a democracy during a war than in a tyranny. But there is no dogmatic or absolute right in the matter. Treason, in old English law, was the "imagining of the King's death;" and this definition of & led to such abuses that the United States Constitution got round fre the matter rather crudely by saying that treason should consist only in levying armed forces against the Government. Such is the basis of the matter in times of peace. For war time new statutes and new rules are required. But no State is going to allow the war to be lost for lack of such rules. The Government will and must rely on the common sense of the people and on their willingness to submit to a thousand unpleasant and illegal things because the people understand the emergency.

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brilliant minds of all ages as the subject of government-with the result that nothing is known about the matter except that the individual citizen must be a man of courage if freedom is to flourish. Every scrap and ounce of the world's free government has been bought by somebody's blood. Freedom from arrest, the right to choose one's own religion, the right to property, etc., have been bought by civil wars. All that is quite certainly known about government is that one man will tyrannize over the next until the sword has taught him not to try it. The history of Germany well illustrates this point. Germany herself never developed civil liberty. The example of England and France taught her people to clamor for a constitution, but when she finally received one it was of no avail. Her revolutionaries could clamor, but they could not fight. The Prussian legislature refused to vote Bismarck's war estimates, and the taxes were raised and paid without the parliamentary consent (1862-1866). Civil war should have followed. But the German people were cowed, ignorant, inexperienced. They had not the spirit of liberty, and the badges and lettering of liberty were immediately transformed into chains.

The other day I read that in Poughkeepsie a German had been rough-handled by a crowd because he said, "Damn Wilson and his war!" I rejoiced at the news. An instinct of self-preservation told me that this incident was a wholesome sign of the times. Does your theorist say I should grieve? Take him to Belgium.

It is Men that count in government-not Form. Of all the philosophic writers, of all the practical statesmen, of all the poets who have given thought to the matter, no one has ever expressed the substance of liberty so well as Sir William Jones. It is noteworthy that neither Rousseau nor Byron, neither Montesquieu nor Mazzini nor John Stuart Mill, should have stated the case so well as the old British jurist Sir Willian Jones, who was among the first Englishmen to champion the native races of India, and who lost his preferment because he sympathized with the Americans of 1776:

It is the same with the Socialists. These people, who are, on the whole, mild-mannered and estimable philanthropists, have unfortunately adopted certain phrases and formulas which they lay down as fundamental, permanent truths; whereas the phrases are really only makeshifts and shies at the truth-convenient guesses. Let us see what some of the Socialist formulas are: The living wage, old-age pensions, care by the state of the individual, the monopoly of life's necessities by the state, state railways, state food, state theaters, etc.-a benevolent and intelligent paternalism. Now all of thes: things exist to-day in Germany in the highest degree that they have ever attained on earth; and yet Germany has suppressed the spirit of man and erected a tyranny which shocks even the Socialists themselves. What is it that Germany has taken from man in the very act of perfecting a Socialistic state? Ah, that is the question which Socialism cannot answer, for all its phrases. Germany has destroyed the invis ible, inestimable spirit of liberty in the individual, which cannot be defined, and which does not depend on any one thing, but on a host of conditions, on history, on tradition, on character. The Socialist reasons from a phrase to a phrase. Even in Germany to-day there are discontented Socialists who have plans of electoral reform as if electoral reform would make men of the Germans!

"What constitutes a state?

Not high-raised battlement or labored mound,
Thick wall or moated gate;

Nor cities proud with spires and turrets crowned ;
Nor bays and broad-armed ports,

Where, laughing at the storm, rich navies ride;
Not starred and spangled courts,

Where low-browed baseness wafts perfume to pride.
No-men, high-minded men,

Men who their duties know,

But know their rights, and, knowing, dare maintain."

The present war is the summary of all the previous civil wars and of all the previous international wars in which some form of personal freedom was at stake. There is nothing new in the cause of the war. To erect an absolute monarchy is one of the things dearest to the heart of man. To conquer the world is a time-honored ambition. This desire is the strongest passion known to man. It is a historic form of madness, which is apt to break out when any nation is in such a position as to have the least chance of success. When this happens, the rest of the world defends. itself with such arms as it can lay hand to. The man who waves the lady's fan of pacificism or of Socialism in the face of this monster passion, the man who talks about free speech and habeas corpus in the presence of a danger which threatens to annihilate him, is a simple-minded person. He would save the handle no matter what becomes of the jug. He has forgotten what the very basis of liberty consists in. That basis consists in valuing some right more than life itself. It never consists in keeping out of a fight in order to preserve a right. The right itself is valuable only because it is a symbol of courage and a symbol of will. The whole language of freedom turns into a mockery unless it is daily renewed by the fire of life which created that language. We observe in this war that its value lies largely in the fact that all the isms in the world have been put into the fire by it; all the classes in the world are fused, all the interests in the world are amalgamated. The two camps, Tyranny and Democracy, glare at each other with murder between them and no shelter anywhere. Labor must drop its squabbles, Socialism its certitudes, Reform its teacups, and all must fight for their lives. You will find at the present moment that whenever an understanding of the war penetrates the brain of any man, whether he be laborer, Socialist, banker, reformer, priest, or poet, from that moment he steps, willy-nilly, out of his own rank and class and into the fighting ranks of the Republic. He has become a cog in the war machine.

The things which we really need, whether in Germany or in America, cannot be given to us by legislation, Socialism seeks an economic solution of the question of human happiness. As a tendency Socialism is valuable, as a dogma it is misleading. What, then, is the "liberty" for which the Allies are fighting? Why, so far as the thing can be formulated, liberty is expressed in the constitutions, bills of rights, laws, and customs of England, France, America, and the other free countries-all of which formulations tend to prevent men from being enslaved, but none of which will accomplish this end except for citizens who are independent, robust, and experienced. Behind the machinery there must be moral courage. Universal moral courage is the only desideratum which comes near to expressing what liberty implies. Law alone can neither express nor sustain free government. There must be force and common sense in the people themselves to hold up that part of liberty which law can never preserve. There must be a vigilance which ever shifts from the unessential to the essential in the conduct of affairs, now insisting on a right, and now subordinating it to an emergency.

No subject has received such prolonged study by the most