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Silence, uncomfortable, strange.

"I can't comprehend you," the last speaker went on. "Why, Sam Howell was your friend, your fellow union member, a man you're all fond and proud of. He's been shot, maybe murdered, almost before your eyes, and you-you seem content not to raise one finger in his name!"

The skilled laborers, Americans all, had gathered now in a close group. Around them crowded the foreigners, quiet, eagereyed-yes, and wearing the hint of a smile.

The master carpenter spoke again. His words rang hard : You think we're cowards. Well, hark then: We earn our living among men like these," and he nodded toward the listening aliens. "Knives and guns are their playthings, and when they want any one of us they'll get him, just as they got poor Sam. We have to think of our families; we can't afford to earn gunmen's ill will. There's no protection in the country districts for folks like us. Sheriffs and constables don't help us at all." And then he added, with a terrible, still bitterness: "Howell was only a workingman. In a month you'll have forgotten him."

The sheriff came. Constables came. The whole local and county machinery lumbered into action, as helpless, as harmless, as blamelessly anachronous as a red Indian's blowpipe on the bloody fields of France. After some hours, at their good leisure, the murderers left the wood patch and went their chosen way undisturbed. No real move was made either to put them under arrest or to prevent their escape. No punishment has ever since been visited upon any one of them.

Sam Howell, after three days' valiant struggle, died of his wounds. The little barefooted, mischievous boy that never did a mean thing and never took a dare, the rollicking fourteenyear-old that won athletic prizes and thought it shame to let his father support him, the youth with the friendly heart and the ready laugh and the face and spirit of a Concord Minute Man, he who had never gone back on a friend, never shirked a duty, and never learned the meaning of fear, Sam Howell, type of America's core of manhood, laid down his life for his trust. Because, quite simply, it was not in him to surrender any trust committed to his hands, no matter what the odds, while life itself remained.

66

And yet," He was only a workingman," said his mates. In a month you will have forgotten him."

As far as they had any reason to know, they were right in their terrible speech. All over the State of New York, these many long years, such things had happened again, again, and again without redress, almost without remark save the little futile gossip of an hour.

Sometimes it had been a hard-working farmer dozing on his wagon-seat on the way home from the store at dusk; sometimes it had been a country postmaster, roused at dead of night by the sound of the chisel on his safe; sometimes it was helpless old people in lonely farm-houses, who were done to death for the sake of the loot. Or sometimes it was a woman caught alone in her isolated home or a girl child waylaid on the road,

who suffered worse than death, yet had not the sheer good luck to die. Sometimes, again, there were lesser crimes, as kidnapping, arson, burglary, or the destruction and loss of stock; and so on down the category. And nine times out of ten, if the thing happened in the country, the perpetrator went his way scot-free. No restraining and preventing influence worthy of the name existed for the protection of country dwellers in their Heavengiven peace. Those only enjoyed safety who had means to garrison their homes with men or to traverse the roads attended. Those only obtained redress who could privately employ service thereto. The poor and the obscure must take their chances against the criminal rover. And the State and the social structure displayed an equal indifference as to which way those chances might fall.

So the long-tested experience of the people actually was that a man like Sam Howell could be shot down in cold blood, forty miles from the biggest city in the country, and nobody would really care. "He was only a workingman. In a month you'll have forgotten him." Good God!

At first the two women did nothing-could do nothing but wait while the grim, unequal fight in the hospital went on. Meantime the workmen kept at their tasks. But their faces were set and stricken in those days, and, though their lips spoke no more of what had been said, the words still echoed in their accusing eyes. "In a month you'll have forgotten." Then the end came. The boy died.

And now the two women arose and asked for light and help, that a great wrong might be set right.

"Have you courage to go to the root of the matter?" asked one well versed in the country's history-one familiar with its needs. "There's just one State in all this Nation that has honestly and justly shouldered its duty toward its people, to protect them each and every one under its laws. That State is Pennsylvania. Eight years ago she began to build the finest, cleanest, bravest, most effective, and most soldierly protective organization in this country-the Pennsylvania State Police. Every State in the Union should follow her. Till they do, such martyrdoms as that of Sam Howell, shameful and wicked as they are, must be expected again and again."

So the two went over to Pennsylvania to study that State Police. Would that every American might do the same!

Go to any State Department in Harrisburg and ask its chief what he thinks of the State Police. Never mind what his politics are; that doesn't matter. You will see his face changesee the mask that policy, caution, and watchful keenness wear suddenly fall, revealing the man's live heart within.

"Our State Police!" he exclaims. "Why, that force is the very pride of our lives-the finest thing in the Union. There are men for you! They'll go through hell without a sidewise glance to do the least of their duties. There isn't a single stain on the name. And there's not one good man or woman in the Commonwealth that doesn't cheer for them."

Go to the Pennsylvania county bench; go to the county officials, sheriffs, district attorneys, probation officers, and the like; go to the doctors, to the protectors of children and animals; go to the clergy, go to the grangers, go to the intelligent industrial workers; above all, go to the women all over the rural State, and you will hear the same whole-hearted tribute of pride, gratitude, and dependence.

Last, go to the State Police themselves and see what it is all about. Then, if there is an ounce of red blood in your veins, you will join the front ranks of the cheerers.

By far the greater part of the little force got its original training in the Federal service. Picked with severest care as to record, character, mentality, and physical perfection, vowed to uphold the law without fear or favor, commanded by a genius crowned with the true leader's gift, its work has been the glory and the blessing of the Commonwealth.

From the start the men have lived under a rule all of Spartan in its unbending sternness--a discipline that refuses to make any concession to "human weakness;" that superbly ignores the "frailty of flesh." To Spartan discipline has been added teaching, study-study, teaching, with everlasting work. And through the whole has shone an ideal of character, a standard of service, beyond all praise.

No Round Table Knights ever trod a straighter, harder path.

Too straight, too hard, it proved for many a man whose lapse would have passed unblamed in any other walk of life. And those who could not keep to it have quietly disappeared. Would you like to know which have held to it surest -so surely that good King Arthur himself, looking down, must clap his hands? The answer is worth noting in a time when universal military training is under debate.

As a rule the very finest of these splendid, clean, self-conquered, upright, fearless men of the Pennsylvania State Police are those who have served out terms of enlistment in the Regular Army or Navy of the United States.

From the very first their road was dark and hard. A part of their work was among a densely ignorant foreign-born populace easily excited to violence and hate, easily fleeced, easily gulled. The type of heartless, unscrupulous demagogue who shouts his unworthy living out of the purses of such as these, found a ready catch-word in "State Police."

Cossacks!" howled these betrayers of the poor. "Bloody Cossacks, borrowed by tyrants of capital from the tyrants across the seas!"

And so, in their miserable self-seeking, they labored to set enmity between the people and their best and truest friend.

It is over now. No fire remains beneath such little smoke of weary lies as still beclouds the air. Every honest man in Pennsylvania is glad and proud in the Nation's pride the Keystone State's police.

But for years the villainy seemingly succeeded. Demagogues howled loud. Timid legislators trembled before them. Men who should have felt a higher loyalty listened and held their peace. And the officers of the force through it all swerved neither to the right nor to the left let no rancor enter their hearts or turn their hands; kept their eyes fast fixed on their one high goal, and worked ahead. With malice to none, with justice to all, regardless of personal cost and hardship, they served the whole people of Pennsylvania in all their myriad needs.

Many of them quietly laid down their lives in the doing of

it-readily, quietly, without question of anything but the right laid down their bonny young lives fighting for the people's safety and peace.

But, strange to relate, the people of New York, who love high and beautiful things, had known little or nothing of these things, most beautiful, aglow in the hills just across the border. Now the truth was made plain to them-spread before then with wide and circumstantial thoroughness. They, the whole people, considered it well and carefully. Then in due time they

made known their will.

"Give us," they said to Albany, "give us for our servic another Pennsylvania State Police.

Sam Howell's sacrifice, so suddenly and cruelly asked and s freely and proudly given, seemed a dark, inexplicable mystery on the day of its rendering. The daily sacrifice, even to lit itself, demanded of the white-hot loyalty of the troopers of Pennsylvania seemed an inhuman outrage, without one saving

grace.

But it was Sam Howell's sacrifice, clean and complete, that revealed at last to a great commonwealth her own great need her own great culpability. It was the long years' sacrifice, unre warded, unacknowledged, unpraised, of the Soldiers of Law and Order in the Keystone State that showed to her Empress sister the way to honor and light.

Because Sam Howell," only a workingman," obscure, alone, and unknown, carrying his dinner pail on a country road, laid down his life for his trust; because a little brotherhood of soldiers, lofty-minded, loyal-hearted, steady of head and hand, lived straight and bravely through years of blackness and storm: because of these two things only, the State of New York has to-day ranged up once more as a leader-has cleared her scutcheon of shame. Because of these two things only the people of the State of New York, honorably recognized at last, have to-day their due-their own State-wide protectors, their State Police.

I

N the present discussion as to essential and non-essential industries in war time little has been said about the business of managing an undergraduate college for women, or whether the profession of teaching therein contributes directly to the Nation's energies for war. This is not a brief for the undergraduate woman's college in ordinary circumstances. It is a summary of those undertakings in one such college which seem to meet this test of immediate effectiveness.

War-time activities of all our colleges for women fall naturally into two groups: emotional expressions which tend to prove the absolute loyalty of the college and its hearty acceptation of the present National task as its own task; and a second group, including all activities which directly add to the resources of the Nation for war.

There is no definite dividing line between these two groups. The emotional expression of the college tends to reinforce the spirit of the Nation. It reacts at once upon all other war-time activities which are immediately useful.

Faculty and student resolutions, acts of more or less practical self-denial, messages to our allies, receptions to official visitors from other countries these things have a utilitarian value at this time. There is, for instance, an impression current in some circles that all our colleges are breeding-grounds for a certain type of disloyalty, or at least that they encourage a lukewarm attitude toward the Nation's task.

Vassar College has so clearly stated its position through trustee, faculty, and student action that it completely refutes this insinuation. Since the beginning of the war expressions of loyalty have been frequent and unmistakable. Sometimes they have taken a form that won for them an unusual degree of attention, as, for instance, the greeting sent by Vassar students

IN WAR TIME?

through Commissioner Finley to the girls of France. The responses that this evoked from groups of French students in all parts of the sister republic were so remarkable for their sin cerity, and their beauty as well, that the entire episode takes on an international importance.

But is the maintenance of such a college as Vassar at this time an essential industry? In other words, could the college buildings have a more immediately useful purpose in war time, its fuel be put to better uses, the students profitably be dis missed until the return of peace, and the staff apply their energies to some work for the Government?

First of all, bear in mind the fact that women are suddenly needed in every branch of public activity to-day, and that the number of women trained to meet this demand is most inade quate. The every-day routine business of these colleges-fitting young women for participation in the world's affairs, organizing their faculties, and making them more efficient-is a work of immediate necessity. Other forms of "war work" undertaken to meet the emergency are all subordinate in importance to this.

Our country entered the war two months before the close of the college year. Two hundred and thirty-five seniors had nearly completed the four years' course at Vassar; thousands of others were in like situation in other women's colleges throughout the land. There were added at once to the available courses of instruction certain so-called "Preparedness Courses," experi mental because hastily organized, maintained financially by student funds, and designed merely to supplement the regular class-room work. It is not to be supposed that these courses added greatly to the equipment of any number of Vassar students. But they did serve to stimulate enthusiasm and focus attention upon the question of immediate usefulness to the