feudalism of privileged wealth. Mr. Crozier is peculiarly happy in his pen-pictures of Wall Street and the master spirits whose lawless action has only been matched by their systematic gambling.

When, however, he comes to suggesting remedies, he is far less happy than when describing conditions. His diagnosis is for the most part a masterpiece; his prescribed treatment at times is of a halting, half-way character that could not fail to prove disappointing in results. For example, few who have studied the question deeply enough to appreciate the situation, imagine that governmental control would solve the problem, knowing as they do that corporations like the great railway and other public-service companies, which offer unlimited opportunity for wealth if their masters are permitted by government to use their great monopolistic power for the oppression of America's wealthcreators and consumers, by watering stock, charging all the traffic will bear, making secret rates with confederate trusts and monopolies, and using the stock for gambling purposes, have the stake of fabulous and ever-increasing wealth as the lure and will stop at nothing to gain control of government, for that control means the acquisition of wealth that will make the privileged few allpowerful-the masters at once of government, of the nation's business, and of industry and its products. Only through popular ownership, by which the master high financiers and law-defiers will have no longer an incentive to prostitute government, can we deliver the people from one of the gravest evils that free institutions are at present battling with.

Again, Mr. Crozier's views on protection are most amazing. He represents the great master of Wall Street as strongly advocating free trade, for selfish purposes. This position is to us inexplicable in the light of facts as they exist. The late Mr. Havermeyer, long the master spirit in the sugar trust, was certainly entitled to speak as an expert on the tariff, and he never uttered a truer word than when he admitted that the tariff was the mother of the trusts. There are certain great causes of inequality and injustice in our land to-day that are basic in character. Monopoly in land, monopoly in public utilities, the special privileges granted by the tariff, and special privileges enjoyed by the banking class are all fountain-heads of taxing

power that have been used oppressively, not to say mercilessly, in building up the presentday feudalism of privileged and predatory wealth. The idea that the great master spirit of Wall Street wants free trade so as to make possible lower wages is as amazing as it is fallacious. The working man has been long overworked as a fence for the tariff barns, precisely as the "widows and orphans are always used as a fence for the stockwatering high financiers and gamblers when redress for the people's wrongs is sought from extortion and oppression. The increased wage of the worker due to the tariff is small indeed in comparison with the increased profit that the monopolists are able to wring from the people. Take the steel trust for an example. Where a comparatively few among labor's hosts receive a little benefit in the form of higher wages,-benefits, however, which were it not for the power of organized labor would doubtless be even smaller than are enjoyed, the entire American people have to pay a fearful tribute to furnish dividends on the millions upon millions of watered stock and princely salaries for a favored few. Englishmen get the trust products laid down in London at from six to eleven dollars per ton less than Americans have to pay in order that princely dividends may be paid on water and that enormous salaries may be paid to men like Schwab and Corey. Every man and woman in America is directly or indirectly robbed to pay these unjust taxes.

No; high protection,monopoly in public utilities, monopoly in land and the great storehouses of the nation's wealth, which the Common Father has provided for His common children, and monopoly in money, these are the fountain-heads of injustice and inequality against which the people must wage unceasing battle if they would be free and enjoy equality of opportunities and of rights.

In spite of these defects, which we think are greatly to be regretted in so strong, virile and able work, The Magnet is, in our judgment, the most important politico-economic novel of the present year and a book that every American voter should read before the next election. Never have Wall Street and its unholy works been more graphically and truthfully set forth than in The Magnet.

Boston, Massachusetts.

B. O. FLOWER.

IN

'N MR. HALL, Buddhism has an interpreter whose rare insight is only equalled by his charm of style, which can only be compared to the melody of Mendelssohn's music. To peruse this work is like revelling in a prose poem of rare beauty. Most writers who attempt to set forth the theological views of other peoples, especially views so essentially different from the concepts of the Western world as are those of Buddhism, weary the general reader with a maze of abstruse and metaphysical speculations which fail to give any sharp, clear, photographic idea of what the millions of the East who follow the teachings of the great Buddha really believe. Not so with our author. He is by nature a poet and a mystic; a man of interior vision and strong intellectual grasp. He evidently has been charmed by and completely won over to the teachings of the East, and to him it is a labor of love to unfold to the Western world the message that has long been the light of Asia.

In the opening chapter Mr. Hall considers "The Secret of the East" and notes what he conceives to be the radical difference between the East and the West in the presence of religion or those great problems that touch life's profoundest depths and extend into infinity.

"What," he asks, "is that great and vital principle that underlies all Eastern faiths? What is that truth that finds so varied and

SO

different an expression in Hinduism, Shintoism, Buddhism and many another religion, in the philosophies of Laotze and Confucius? What is the understanding of the world that is acceptable alike to prince and peasants, to philosopher and laborer, to soldier and recluse; that is the basis of all truth? The West has sought it always. It has recognized that from the East came light, that in the East there rose a fountain of the spirit that dried up never. The West has sought, but has not found.

*The Inward Light." By H. Fielding Hall. Cloth. Pp. 228. Price, $1.75 net. New York: The Macmillan Company.

"It has never looked deep enough. It has mistaken things, taking the non-essential for the essential, the form for that which it encloses, the temporary for the eternal. It has borrowed and then has found that what it took away was but a dead thing and that the life was left behind.

"The East has ever been and is religious, not in part of its life but in the whole of it. It has held that religion is not of one day but of all time, not of time only but of eternity, not of eternity only but of every moment. To its mind religion embraces everything, not man's soul only but his body, all of him; and not man alone but the whole universe; not some virtue but all virtues, all that is good and all that is evil. It is not therefore a theory, a teaching, a method, nor an ideal, a dogma, a thought; for these, however great, however true, must always be narrow, cannot hold but a little part of the truth. They are finite, whereas religion is infinite. It is none of these. Religion is a way of looking at life and at the universe, it is a way to see and understand.

"But to the West it is not so, and when it has gone to the East and asked for truth, it meant by truth a moral, or a virtue, or an ideal, or a dogma. It has sought the clothes in which truth shows itself and not the truth. Therefore despite all the books written of Eastern forms of faith none have been understood. The writers have explained nothing because they saw nothing, felt nothing, knew nothing. More especially is this true of Buddhism, that latest expression of an allworld view."

The general introductory chapter is followed by the elucidation of the chief religious concepts of the East, especially as they are taught by Buddhism. The volume is written as a series of sketches-we almost said storiesfor indeed there is an incident with human interest that is a starting point or is used as an objective illustration for the special subjects with which the various chapters are concerned.

The scribe of the volume is represented as being an Englishman in Burmah. He has been thrown from his horse and is found by the natives with a broken limb. He is taken to a near-by Buddhist monastery. Here he convalesces in an atmosphere so full of peace and love that he declines to be removed to the English quarters some distance beyond, even after his friends have come to take him away. And here in this monastic retreat it is that the sage explains to him the great religious concepts of Buddhism. We think it is safe to say that nowhere in literature can there be found a work at once so fascinating and lucid as this volume, which will give the general reader a clear and vivid panoramic picture of Buddhism and the reasons for its great distinguishing tenets. To appreciate the beauty of the author's style, the lucidity with which he presents his thought, and the simple sincerity that gives added charm to every page, it will only be necessary to peruse the following paragraphs from the chapter entitled "The Wind," which deals with the sphinx of sphinxes, the riddle of life-"the fate of the man-child." The discussion opens with this highly poetic little prelude:

"They sat and watched the night veiling the world in sleep. The darkness stretched into eternity and the stars wheeled upwards in a grand procession. Orion blazed above them and the Pleiad cluster hung like a pearl upon the bosom of the night. There was a deep stillness, for the winds were hushed, a stillness not of death but of a great life that slept and dreamed.

"Suddenly from the village down below there came a sound, a cry that pierced the stillness like a pain, and on the cry there came a music. It rose and fell upon the night; now keen with the shrilling of a flute, and brazen with the clang of cymbals, now sad and slow with the sound of strings. Then it failed into the throb of drums that beat-that beat-that beat a measured sadness of monotonous refrain; and the flutes cried again.

"The peacefulness of the night was broken, the dark that had been so clear became opaque, the distances closed in. The finiteness of things became more manifest. For in the music was a harshness and a discord that drove the thoughts back into the heart. They would not go abroad in such companionship. The sounds occupied shrunken night alone.

the

"A man was dead."

This discordant note, this human wail occasioned because of the death of a poor sufferer a leper-leads the Englishman to question the monk.

"Life, what is life?' he asks. 'What is man's soul, whence did it come, and whither does it go? A man is dead below there. Men pass upon the wings of every moment that fleets by us. Men are born and die. I am here, whence did I come and what am I? That man is dead. Where is his soul?'

At length the monk replies, but we can give only a fragment of this interesting and suggestive discussion which from first to last is richly suggestive.

"Life is a breath that comes from the eternal here to us. It is not a thing, a substance that lies within us, but a tide that pouring on this world builds up our bodies and is itself our souls. It builds our bodies to manifest itself. Consider. Suppose we sat not in gardens but on a barren rock, and we could only see, not feel. The wind might blow but we should know nothing. It could not stir the rock. The air might move but could not manifest its presence. Life must have proper form to manifest itself in. It has built up our bodies little by little through the ages that it may show itself, that life may live. It raises them ever to manifest itself more fully. Life is from without. It is not a prisoner held in bondage in an earthy cage from which when the bar breaks it flees.' "And the man's soul?' "Life lives forever.'

"The body goes back to earth. Can it not rise again?'

"My friend,' the monk answered, 'think. What are you? Are you the body or the life that built it up and made it live? . . . A body is a finite thing, life is infinite. Would you have the life that moved the leper, for he was a leper whom they mourn below, compelled for all the ages to manifest itself only in that poor body, or in any body however good? Life is a progress and a change. The stream of spirit ever widens and requires greater power to work in, to live in. Each body passes, and from its dust are built our new bodies greater and stronger, better able to perform the behests of the greater spirit.'

"Is there then no immortality of body? Must we go always into forgetfulness? The spirit has an immortality, the body none'?

"It is so hard,' he said, 'to speak of, to put into words, that which one sees and knows to be beyond all words. I thought that all men felt the consciousness of what life is. And yet I remember two thousand five hundred years ago, that was the difficulty. And those who saw and taught were called Mystics, splitters of words, dealers in cloud and fog because they tried to say what never can be fully said. Yet as you ask I will try. Every living thing we see is twofold, it is spirit expressed in matter. Matter is built up by brute forces which act according to fixed laws. The spirit which takes this matter and makes it into living forces is also twofold, unconscious and conscious.

"Take myself or you. Our bodies are built and kept by forces that are unconscious; we breathe, our pulses move, our food is turned to blood by no conscious effort of our own. They will work when our conscious life is asleep or absent.

"But conscious life is different. That comes not from inheritance, not from our parents. It manifests itself within the body, but is not of it. It affects it. The greater our consciousness, the greater the master, the more obedient is the servant. It is affected by the body, which is its instrument through which it manifests its life and consciousness. They are bound together; yet each is different, and each gives to other immortality. Each has its laws which it obeys or disobeys. Again there is this difference.

"The soul is immortal always, but the body, that stream of bodies which began so far back we cannot see it, and come through our parents to ourselves, may suddenly be stopped.'

"But our conscious life is different, a man's body is continued in his children, but not his soul, his conscious life. That is the wind that passes.'

"The wind passes,' said the man, 'and has no personality. And when man dies is that so too with him, his consciousness, his soul? Does that, too, merge into a formless wind?' "The monk shook his head.

"That personality continues also. It goes on with all the merit and demerit it has acquired. It goes on forever, until-until-' "Until ?'

"What is beyond the stars, beyond the utmost star? What is infinity?'

"No one can tell.'
""That is the answer.

No one can tell. Why should we wish to know? Is it not enough to see a little space before you, a day's march on in front? One idea is this, that as there was a time when unconscious life existed alone without consciousness, so in time we may grow to that perfection that Consciousness and Will and Righteousness may exist without the confining bounds of matter and unconscious life, but the truer thought is that the conscious life, the Soul, will be blended with all the forces into one great whole, infinite, universal.""

One of the most profoundly thoughtful chapters of the work is entitled "Rays of Infinite Light." It embodies the Buddhistic concept of the evolution and the advancing march of life:

"The sun is the source of light and heat, and without it we should have no life. It draws the waters of the seas into the heavens and gives them to the land. All power comes, or has come, from it. The wood we burn has gained its heat from heaven and keeps it for awhile. The protoplasm in the plant vibrates to the same energy. Life is not in it but in the sun that gives it. Sunworshippers have recognized this, and they have used him as the symbol of the science of all the life that is. It comes always from without as does the sunlight.

"The sunlight comes upon us in a flood, but that great tide is made of tiny beams, and in each beam lie all the properties of the whole; visible and invisible rays they all are there. Each little beam that filters through the leaves is a completeness in itself, an entity, a personality. Yet when incarnated in a leaf its expression differs from all the rest.

"We are such beams from the eternal sun. We come straight from the source of life and consciousness, a beam bound up with others but distinct, manifest in flesh.

"The sunshine fell upon the lamp hung low beside the window. The cut-glass crystals underneath it broke the golden stream into many colors. They passed a shining band across the shadow and fell upon the wall. He traced it with his finger, and he said: "This is the symbol of life as the East has always seen it; not as a substance, shadowy, filmy, still a substance placed within our bodies, but as a beam and a force, made up of many forces.

"This is the symbol that I sought. The

heavens have given me what I could not find This light that comes down from the sun is the allegory of the life that comes from God. It comes upon us from above, and in it are many forms, as in the light are many rays.'

"He laid his finger on the red ray. 'Here,' he said, 'is the first we see, but there are rays beyond, dark rays. These are, as it were, the blind forces that built up the earth, that made the crystals in the rocks, that hold the water drops together, that make the winds move to and fro. There is no light in them, no intelligence, only force and power. So God built the world with the dark rays before the higher life could come.'

"And when the world was builded, when the seas were made, the mountains lifted up, the earth divided from the water, He added just another tiny ray, not dark this time, but with the faintest light of life. And it made protoplasm from the materials gathered for it. So rose the humbler forms of vegetable life. Little by little the ray grew brighter and the life increased. This ray it is that is the life. That is what makes the sap to rise and fall, the leaf to spread, the bud to open. Yet not this ray alone, but this added to all that went before. For alone it could do nothing. The dark rays made and keep the world, and to them light and life is added. And so life broadens. So the invisible merges into the visible, the brute forces into the unconscious life. As the forms in which life is manifested are made more and more perfect, so the life to be shown therein is increased.

“Then came the further rays that lie beyond the visible. There came upon the world the first faint ray of consciousness, of conscious life, of will, of power to move and act, to do right and wrong. These put into the protoplasm the life that grew up into animals. The rays increased, and the increasing unconscious and conscious life built up little by little the animal form to manifest itself in. Out of animals came man, and man rises ever. His consciousness, his conscience which is his knowledge of right and wrong, his will to do that which he sees. That is the evolution of the entity of man, which is the compound of all the forces from the beginning the brute forces, the unconscious life, the conscious life. He is a compound of them all, and they are all in the beam that is his life. They are all one, and yet they fall into three parts, with three moralities,

three laws, three forms of righteousness. "First, the blind forces, gravity and heat, expansion and contraction, electricity and many another. They have their laws, which laws are their morality, their righteousness. They cannot disobey them. They never act but in one way, the way directed. Gravity cannot draw faster or slower, light cannot pass whither it would, the crystal forms ever in one fixed way. They have no life and they endure, but do not grow or change.

"Then came the unconscious life of plants who have a right and wrong, for they may live and spread or else disappear. They may grow and become a fuller manifestation or they may cease to be. As they adapt themselves to the world about them, as they fortify themselves by strength and beauty and usefulness, so they have immortality. Yet it would seem they have no conscious life, only unconscious.

"With the conscious life there came a conscience, a steady growing knowledge of right and wrong, a steady growing will to do that which is right, a steady growing control over the lower forces. That is our soul. From the first beginnings in the earliest years our souls have grown as our bodies have developed in one stream, and the life in them; and the soul that is added to the life has increased.

"The knowledge of right and wrong which we recognize in animals has become ever more clear, the will to do that which we see proportionate to our knowledge grows with it, our power to enforce our will grows also. The lesser rays have found little by little their master. The soul rules. As yet his control is slight because his knowledge still is slight. Knowledge comes first, control later. So is man now a beam of life manifested in a body it has built.

"And that is how the East sees the world.”

On the doctrine of transmigration of souls, the author has somewhat to say. Space renders it impossible, however, for us to do more than give a brief extract:

"How easy now is the belief in transmigration. The increasing life and soul has built itself up by slow degrees a form to show itself in. The imperfect beam showed in the animal, the higher in man, still the same beam only with addition. It is an evolution of the soul manifested in an evolution of the body. And evolution acts both ways.

"As the life of man has arisen from that of animals by the addition of a moral con