is an ugly symptom of that cleavage which the President deplores. A Labour Board may be in full session over a dispute, but both sides will take no chances. The employers order out their secret armies, with weapons and without; the Unions have trained corps watching the professionals who would force the open shop upon them. A typical strike-breaker was the late James Farley, of Philadelphia, who was a rich man with a blood-stock farm at Plattsburg, N. Y., and a cheque which Wall Street would at any time honour for $100,000. Mr. August Belmont used to say that Farley was "a born soldier." Certainly he gloried in the fight; he was shot at five and twenty times, and received over five thousand threatening letters in a year. Railroads, street car corporations, mines, machineshops, and factories all employ men like Farley and Harry Bowen-who took out a special policy upon his own life for $100,000. Strike-breaking bosses are on the pay-rolls in peace time; and as the first murmurs arise, secret agents scatter among the men to ascertain their case and their financial strength. Meanwhile the "breakers" are enlisted. In a New York subway tie-up Farley was paid $5 a day for each man, and $1000 a day for himself as field-marshal of the strike army. It was a task of deadly peril, but Farley cleared $130,000 in this one campaign.

Today the strike-breaker has a gentler name. Mr. James A. Waddell is an "expert in emergency employment." This general has an armory of 1100 rifles in New York City, as well as barracks where guards are drilled and maintained. When a railway tie-up was in the air, Mr. Waddell mobilized in Chicago 13,000 trainmen and enginedrivers. For this force he drew the great sum of $65,000 a day, plus ten per cent. commission on the commissariat. How large a matter this may be is seen in a thirteen-day strike which called for $168,000 worth of provisions. In many cases, the Labour Union is beaten, the strike called

off, and mortified men ordered back to work on their employers' terms.

It is against militarism of this kind that President Wilson has set his face. "Our industries," he declared, "have been under the control of too small a body of men. Business ought to be democratized, and made to see that aristocracy is bad for it, just as it is for governments."

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CHAPTER IX

ADVENTURES IN SUCCESS

'... Men can assist Fortune, but they cannot resist her; they may weave her webs, but they cannot break them."-MACHIAVELLI.

I KNOW no stranger institution than the Lincoln Memorial College down at Cumberland Gap, in the lonely Appalachians. Here is a forlorn region of rugged spaces and wretched farms, which a negro would despise; of one-room huts where illiterate women spin, or barter hog-meat and feathers. Vendettas and feuds are the only break in a life of complete stagnation. There are no waterways in this mountain land, the railways have been careful to avoid it. Yet in these hills dwell Americans of the purest breed descended from pre-Revolution pioneers; a real peasantry, vaguely known to the outside world as the "poor whites" of Kentucky and Tennessee. They are unobtrusive, however. The poor whites are lost Americans; clannish and resigned, given over to tribal wars and a diet of " 'possum and peanuts, with occasional nips from a moonlight still."

From this unlikely stock have come some of America's greatest men. The greatest of all was Abraham Lincoln, who as a boy crouched at a "poor white's" hearth, and by the light of a blazing pine-knot pored upon the Six Books of his salvation.

When greatness came to the hero, he never forgot those days, nor the bleak abandonment of that life. The poor whites had no chance, so Lincoln asked his friend, Oliver Howard, to help, and in this way the University for Lost Americans was born. It has a farm of six hundred acres. All the practical trades of men are here taught, all the

useful chores which a woman should know both in the home and out of doors. Students at this College leave the ploughtail, the cow-byre, kitchen, and sty to take their final degree, then they walk home-fifty miles or more-to spread the new light in a darkness which is generations old.

It is not so long since Dr. Wilson took over the Lincoln hut at Hodgenville, Ky.; it is now a national memorial, enclosed in a granite temple. That occasion was peculiarly solemn. The speaker's fervour; the surroundings and historic associations all combined with the war-cloud to produce a deep impression. Gradually the speech veered to the novel demands and duties of today. "Democracy will be great," the President said, "and will lift a light for the nations only if we ourselves are great, and carry the lamp high for the guidance of our own feet. We shall not be worthy unless we be in deed and in truth real democrats and servants of mankind, ready to give our very lives for freedom and justice." The speaker has often shown himself alive to the limitations of the older Americanism, and he now appealed for a larger patriotism on the lines laid down by Aristotle: "The salvation of the State is the business of all its citizens."

Let me consider in passing the Americanism of yesteryear which rested on individualism and the square deal for all. It is best defined by the foremost of the intellectuals -Dr. Charles W. Eliot, who for a generation headed the academic world as President of Harvard University. "Americans desire for each citizen," Dr. Eliot says "whatever his birth or station-adequate opportunity to develop the best there is in him, and to win a social position consonant with his capacities and character, both innate and acquired. They are quite aware that men are not born equal in these respects; . . . but Americans insist upon the chance to rise and to do the uttermost. Moreover, they long for a mobile and fluent community, in which men and

women climb or fall quickly—as it were automatically-in accordance with their dower, whether this be strong or weak, virtuous or vicious. They have no objection to genuine leadership in politics or business-or even to distinctions of birth, provided that leadership is based upon superior mental and moral powers, and that birth means inherited force or transmitted culture. And Americans believe that society should give or maintain no privilege, save that which is founded upon capacity and achievement. This need now merges in new national consciousness, begotten by the war. What Emerson called "the sluggard intellect of this continent" is at last astir, and prepares to meet "the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill."

It is true that America has perplexity to face when we haul home the guns and open bloodless fire upon her and one another in the economic field, which is to say the whole earth. "Make no mistake about Britain," New York is warned by skilled observers, who went round our "shops" after a visit to the red litter and black cities of Northern France. "You wouldn't know her now. Britain is a new commercial and manufacturing Power-alive, alert, and plainly bent on conquest. When the crazy fight is over, Old England will have what she never had before-a race of business-breeders of the scientific sort. Such labour-saving machines as they have now! Such fresh ideas too, and enterprise that's postitively explosive! For the first time you meet high-brow professors in the factory; physicists, specialists, inventors concerned with Death today, but tomorrow with dyes, or drugs, or dolls.

"So prepare for economic war after the War. Are you ready for the coming tussle in Central and South America? Have you a clear-cut-policy for Far Eastern trade? Or was Prosperity just a pipe-dream of the war-one that vanished with the smoke of it, leaving Uncle Sam to bleat and trail