something to say as to the conditions on which other miners working with me should be appointed. If I were to work in a factory, I should want to have something to say as to hours of labor and the sanitary conditions of the room in which I was to spend my working hours. We read much in the daily papers of the "recognition of the union"; and sometimes of strikes maintained with great obstinacy, not for higher wages or shorter hours, but for this "recognition of the union." Such strikes are generally condemned unsparingly by the daily papers. I suppose that the phrase "recognition of the union" has different meanings at different times and in different localities. But when it means that the laborers are insisting, not merely that they shall have better wages or shorter hours, but also that they shall have some share in determining what the hours and conditions of their labor shall be, I sympathize with their demand, though I may not with their methods. The adjustment of this new and growing demand of the workingman to have some share in the control of the organized industries of the world presents many difficult problems. Certainly the direction cannot be transferred by any instantaneous process from the autocracy which has controlled the industry in the past to the democracy which will perhaps control it, at least in part, in the future. But the history of industry in the past in all civilized countries makes it equally clear that it cannot, with safety to the workingmen or to the community, be left in the unlimited control of an irresponsible autocracy. The administration of our great businesses has not been so uniformly just, humane, and public-spirited, or even so economically efficient and so beneficent to the community, that its advocates are justified in insisting that no change can be made for the better. V. There is one other condition necessary in order to make modern work carried on by organizations of workers fun to the individual worker. This it is difficult to state, because it is a condition of the spirit in which the work must be carried on, and it is always difficult to define anything so subtle as spirit of life. It is evident that the man in the shoe factory who simply puts the eyelets in the shoe cannot have the kind of pride in the finished shoe that the individual shoemaker can have who by his individual labor makes the entire shoe from start to finish. The pride of the latter in his work is an individual pride; the modern laborer's pride in his work must be a social pride; a pride in the organization to which he belongs and in the work of his fellows no less than in his own. A simple illustration of this pride in one's coöperative work is furnished by the soldier in the army. His personal contribution may seem insignificant. He believes in his commander, whether he be General Lee or General Grant, and in his cause, whether it be States' rights or Nationalism, and to that cause and to that commander he has given himself with absolute devotion. Whether he is in front as a sharpshooter, or in the rear guarding a baggage train, or in camp cleaning his gun, he is a member of a great army, devoted to a great cause, and sharer in a great service; and when the war is over, his country will rear a soldiers' monument to his memory and to the memory of all his brave comrades. The service is a common service, the achievement will be a common achievement, the honor will be a common honor. To reach the highest joy in work this consciousness of cooperation in industry is necessary. It is necessary for us to realize that we are all engaged in coöperative industry; that life is an exchange of services; that the least and humblest of us is contributing to a great achievement which is possible only as a combined achievement; that no man is more essential than another; that the least work is a great work because it is a necessary part of a great work, as the day laborer with his spade at Panama is necessary to the completion of the great world waterway between two oceans. Inspired by this sense of a great fellowship, any work may become joyful. "If," says a friend of mine, "I cannot do what I like, I like what I do." "If," says Professor Josiah Royce," I am to be loyal, my cause must from moment to moment fascinate me awaken my muscular vigor, stir me with some eagerness for work, even if this be painful work." I am an industrial democrat. I am also an optimist. And I look forward with hope to the time when, even more than now, machinery will do the world's drudgery and man will cease to be a drudge; when his hours of labor will be so limited that his life will not be exhausted, but will be enriched and developed by his labors; when the conditions of his labor will be always sanitary and generally comfortable; when he will share in the profits of his labor, and so realize the value to himself of good work; when he will have a voice, and an influential voice, in determining how the organized labor in which he takes a part shall be carried on; when commerce will be seen to be what the word imports, an interchange of services; when there will be none so rich that they will have no incentive to work, and none so poor that they can get no work to do; and when the now perilous class consciousness will grow into a social consciousness, and we shall all, employer and employed, recognize the truth that an injury to one is an injury to all, and a benefit to one is a benefit to all. Impossible ideal? No! No true ideal is ever impossible. Toward its realization society is slowly, very slowly, tending. And the great democratic movement throughout the world is one of the signs of its coming. THE AMERICAN NOVEL 1 ROBERT HERRICK [Robert Herrick (1868- ), one of the best-known of present-day American novelists, was educated at Harvard and is now Professor of English in the University of Chicago. Among his most noteworthy novels may be mentioned "The Common Lot" (1904) and “The Healer” (1911). This trenchant criticism of contemporary American literature, with special reference to the novel of to-day, followed an article in the January number of the Yale Review entitled “The Background of the American Novel."] One hears much of the romantic quality of American life, which when analyzed is found to consist for the most part of our dazzling performances in conquering wealth and the frequently bizarre conduct of the successful rich. The feeling, still widespread, that opportunities for similar individual achievements exist more abundantly here than elsewhere continues this romantic note even in the face of sobering economic facts. In harmony with the rest of the world, American literature is less flamboyantly romantic than it was a scant decade ago, but it vaunts at all times a robust optimism that verges upon the romantic. We are also told that ours is a fertile soil artistically, ripe for a creative period of selfexpression. How does it happen then, one is likely to ask, that the most significant imaginative work of the day still comes to us from the other side of the ocean the best plays from Austria and Germany, the best novels from the muchworked English field? Why is it that Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy not to mention half a dozen others almost as distinguished as these three are writing in England at the present time, while in America one would have to strain 1 From Yale Review, April, 1914. Reprinted by permission. patriotism to the point of absurdity to name any novelist of similar performance? In answering this pertinent question we shall have to consider incidentally the quality of our imaginative life to-day and thus continue the theme of my paper in the January number of this magazine. We have had a literature in America - not an American literature, to be sure, but a good sort of literature in America. The best of it came from the New England group of writers the purest, the most authentic expression we have yet had. When Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Lowell were writing, New England may have been but one province of a greater country, but it was intellectually a dominant and fairly homogeneous province. Mr. Howells has garnered admirably the last sheaves from that soil. Puritan America found its ultimate expression in "Silas Lapham," "A Modern Instance," and "The Hazard of New Fortunes." Mrs. Freeman and others have gleaned faithfully the last stalks. Some of their disciples are still trying to revive the cold ashes on the hearth. Meanwhile, following the more robust inspiration of Bret Harte and Mark Twain, a large number of writers have risen to take possession of local fields - Cable in the South, Miss Murfree in the mountain districts of Tennessee, Owen Wister and many others in the varied localities of the great West, to name but a few of these fruitful writers. Already that period of local literature is passing, and the reason for its swift passing is obvious. It was in no sense national, and was largely sentimental in its appeal - pretty and picturesque. The people, the country as a whole, was never reflected therein. It offered nothing, so to speak, to go on: it opened no new vistas for the younger generation. There is, of course, nothing incompatible with greatness in the use of purely local material. Hauptmann in his "Weavers" has shown that a great modern labor play can be written with a Silesian background of the Forties. More recently, Gustav Frenssen has written an important German novel with a |