class feeling, of prejudice, of other and sundry breaches of the faith of a good citizen; and so the misunderstanding between city and country grows once more acute.

In thus charging the city press with being the cause of much of the vocal hostility of the farmer toward the city I am not charging it with deliberate intent to do wrong. What intent there was the attitude being for the most part assumed without mental effortwas mainly to find a butt of ridicule who would not strike back either at the advertising or the circulation departments of the paper in question. Perhaps the fact that a large part of our city population hails directly from the country and is anxious to prove its urban quality by its ridicule of everything pertaining to the country has, or had, its bearing on the problem. At any rate, the editorial and reportorial attitudes of the city press toward the country had up to more recent years a quality peculiarly irritating to the man from the country, all the more exasperating because it came out of deeps of an ignorance of country life and purpose so abysmal as to make reply impossible. Badinage, to be successful, needs a very understanding touch; and the touch of the city press has not been of the understanding sort. The editors, reporters, paragraph writers, cartoonists, did not, for the most part, either know or care whose nose they were twisting; their audience laughed, and that was enough. But the farmer cared; it was his nose that was tweaked.

Yet this, of itself, is not enough to explain the evidence of "class feeling" on the part of the farmer. The city press is not taken altogether seriously out on the rural routes. Perhaps not seriously enough. Perhaps its freedom is too much questioned, its good intent not often enough admitted. The cry of "kept press" has an appealing sound to farmer ears. Whatever it has been, it has not been his press-has been quite distinctly against him, in the main, and he is ready to believe its veniality and to doubt its sense of fairness. In short, never having represented him nor his interests, its frantic appeals to him, late in the eleventh hour, arouse in him, not understanding, but hostility.

There is a further reason for the socalled "class feeling" of the farmer. He has been, right up to within recent years, a debtor, and there still are debtor areas out of which come the loudest voices of protest against the present economic and social machinery. Naturally, "Wall Street," the "Money Trust," the "Combine," the "Interests"-whatever name the passing hour may give to the creditor class with which he dealsis visible only as it reaches out from the cities to and through the country stores, elevators, banks, machinery houses, and other means of trade contact. His grain goes to the cities, his live stock goes to the cities, his mortgages are filed away

as collateral in the vaults of city banks, his groceries, clothing, machinery, lumber-all he sells, all he obligates, all he buys-somehow or other attaches itself at its farther end to the city.

Without questioning the desirability of our present social organization, I merely wish to point out the fact that a mortgage does not arouse feelings of the warmest friendship in the breast of the mortgagee, nor do retail-store prices cause the customer to fall on the neck of the storekeeper with tears of gladness; neither are the grain and livestock quotations, as a rule, matters that enlist the farmer's lively admiration for the city men, who, in his opinion, move behind the screen to manipulate these prices in their own favor.

In other words, in practically all points of contact with the city the farmer touches it on the raw edge-on his raw edge of clashing self-interest. The fact that the city represents a link in the chain to the consumers' world, that it affords him a market, that it stabilizes prices, that it puts the world at his door-all this is lost in the twinge of that raw-edge competitive contact, unsoftened by the human understanding that should, but seldom does, exist on either side.

Vocally, then, the farmer is apt to be a city baiter, just as vocally the city man badgers the farmer. Do the fundamental causes of misunderstanding run deeper or farther? I am inclined to think they do. Each envies the other his job, his freedom, his imagined independence. The city man envies the farmer and hopes some day to buy a farm, where he can rest while some husky son of the soil does the labor.

The farmer, having had his fill of labor, envies the city man and hopes for a time when he can retire, or when his son can get a "clane, aisy job," as the Irishman ptus it. And this longing, unfulfilled, breeds envy-an envy that is very general among country people. Perhaps it would not be far wrong to say that the average city man judges country life by its poorest, least successful types, while the farmer judges the city from its outstanding successes. Wrong, of course, from both faces, but all the more a reason for the "class feeling" we are talking about. When the other man possesses something we desire but cannot secure, the result is not conducive to our mutual happiness and friendship, is it?

Another cause for "class feeling" exists. I refer to the apparently inevitable drift of the country-born toward the city. It leaves the home empty and the farm at the mercy of the hired man or the tenant. All their days the father and mother have planned for the time when the son would be the successor; now he is only the heir-to be bragged about in public, to be mourned in private as lost to the farm. The belittling of one's own calling is forgotten; forgotten the fact that the boy's first mental pictures of the city were painted by his own parents. The city has reached out and stolen their boy! Illogical, and a part of an illogical situation.

In view of all this, the surprising thing is, not that the farmer is vocally radical, but that he is not a radical of action, a disturber, if you please, of the social order.

I think that I have shown you that in the general murk of his misunderstanding and of being misunderstood he has some reason for radicalism. And yet the fact is that he is not a radical, not a malcontent, not a disturber, not inclined to take the bit into his teeth and to run things his own way. I say this in the face of the admitted facts of Greenbackism, Populism, Free-Silveritis, Townleyism-all of which were, or are, farmer movements to correct very apparent abuses by means of the ballot, after other methods of securing redress had failed.

It took a lot of prodding from the economic goad to stir the farmers into the populistic revolt of the nineties, and it took a decade of further prodding to stir the North Dakota farmers of to-day into political action that has placed the State for the present in their hands. Each of these movements has been, in its turn, misjudged both as to cause and

course.

"Sockless Jerry" Simpson, Weaver, Mary Ellen Lease, Bryan, Townley, all have this in common, that the popular will sweeps on in their direction-and will just as surely leave them high and dry on the shores of political shipwreck when they do not yield wholly to it. The farmer is not concerned in the political fortunes of his so-called leaders. What he is after

is reform, and if the promised reform does not materialize, worse luck to the leaders!

The present Nation-wide unrest among the farmers is not rightly interpreted unless account is taken of the fact that, unlike earlier movements, this one is, for the most part, not a protest of the weak, but a reasonable demand of the economically strong for place and recognition in the world of business. That fact alone removes it from the company of those social revolutions which aim at breaking heads as a preliminary to breaking the nine other commandments, and puts it in with those other peaceful revolutions by which the Anglo-Saxon peoples have usually worked out their industrial and social problems.

This attitude of mind is far from that of the radical. The farmer may sign petitions, he may attend political meetings, he may kick over the idols in the very holy of holies of the political machine, but these things are done, not to secure possession of the machine as a means of control of other people and other interests, nor to confer such control upon his leaders, but simply and solely to get for himself and his fellows that margin of economic freedom which they deem necessary to their personal independence.

Ichine that will not work. Any or all of these things may happen, but one thing will not happen-he will not follow any leaders, no matter how artful or persuasive, into the paths of Bolshevism.

In other words, his radicalism in its most extreme form is for the purpose of making secure the conditions under which he lives of fixing solidly his economic position. He may blunder at the job. He may do the wrong thing, or he may do the right thing in a wrong way. He may harness up a social ma

call a halt, and if his leaders want to go farther they will travel alone!

In pointing out the causes of the socalled "class feeling" on the part of the farmer I have suggested in all but words the obvious remedy. That apt phrase of our late phrase-making President, "Open covenants openly arrived at," quite covers the case. All the farmer expects and all he asks is a square deal. If in any direction he is demanding more, it is because he does not understand the situation. He has a certain short vision for which others as well as himself are to be held responsible. Give him the facts, and he will frame from them a pretty fair treaty of peace between the business world and himself. And so long as the terms of that treaty are lived up to with any degree of fairness he can be depended

upon to carry his share of the load without whimpering.

Calling names is a poor method of establishing friendships. And just now the vital need on the part of all concerned in the future of the Republic is friendly understanding. It is high time that the city press begin to take the farmer seriously, not as a menace, but as a potential ally; high time, too, that the business world cease its patronizing attitude and welcome the farmer as an associate and an equal; high time that we put our heels under the table of friendship one with the other, for without each other we are helpless, and with each understanding and co-operating with the other the circle of our economic and social life is complete and unbreakable.

A

PILE of letters is lying before me. They range in date from the fall of 1912 to the present In nearly every case they are signed: "A. S. M. H."

time.

Recent events have deepened the interest of those letters. For they were written by the novelist whose name is now so familiar and so endeared to innumerable thousands as the author of "If Winter Comes."

On re-reading those letters my mind goes back to my first interview with A. S. M. Hutchinson. He was living then in a northern suburb of London, close to the Hampstead Heath, on which, as he told me, he took "prodigious walks." His study was an attic room with sloping walls, notable chiefly for its writing-table and several odd bookcases. "That," he said, pointing to one taller than the rest, "is my favorite bookcase." And two of his favorite authors were fully represented there: Fielding, "whom I know by heart," and Meredith, who was his next master in fiction. For the rest, he spoke most affectionately of the British essayistsAddison and Steele and the like.

In those days Mr. Hutchinson was surprisingly boyish looking for his thirty-two years. Slight of build, of average stature, but upright as a dart, as became his soldier ancestry, he had then that spirit of sympathy and that interest in humanity which the passing years have developed and deepened.

All those outward traits are much the same to-day-he is upright as ever, and more soldierly in his carriage; but the decade that has gone has left him older seeming than the ten years it represents. Although not looking more than his forty-two years, still the war plowed so deeply into his spirit that all his intimate friends note the change. I doubt, indeed, whether any other young Englishman suffered so keenly from the war as Mr. Hutchinson.

Of military ancestry and breeding, it was natural that at the first rumor of war he should have striven to take his part in the conflict. His father is a retired general, who has to his record much campaigning on the northwest frontier of India, during which he raised a new Gurkha battalion. Then he held the important post of Director of Staff Appointments at the War Office, and between whiles had written many military text-books which still remain in popular use. The elder brother of the novelist saw much hard service in West and South Africa, and died from the after-effects of his Boer War service. Mr. Hutchinson's younger brother served all through the Great War and was men

1 The Novels of A. S. M. Hutchinson: "The Happy Warrior," "Once Aboard the Lugger-." "The Clean Heart," and "If Winter Comes.' Little, Brown & Co., Boston. $2.50 each.

Keystone

tioned in despatches. Then his elder sister is the wife of a soldier. Belonging thus to a family all of whose sons naturally went into the army, Mr. Hutchinson was distraught that his defective eyesight had prevented him from adopting the army as a profession. "I think soldiering is the only career for a man," he once told me, and then added: "I would gladly change places with every smart private I see, and I curse the short sight which robbed me of a red tunic."

Three days before war was declared he, knowing that war was certain, tried to enlist in the Territorials for foreign service, but was turned down because of his defective eyesight. But towards the end of October he wrote me in great glee: "I have managed to enlist in a corps of sorts-at last. The United Arts Force has its headquarters at the Royal Academy, and consists of artists and actors and authors and useless people of that kind. It has not yet been officially recognized by the War Office; but we are about fifteen hundred strong and drill with immense zeal, so I think will do our bit before the show is overplease God. I plug at it every morning and look a wonderful ass-then to the office."

All this will be full of meaning to readers of "If Winter Comes." They will recall that Mark Sabre tried again and again to "do his bit." There is, indeed, a close relation between the experiences of Mark Sabre and the novelist. It is a significant example of the way in which Mr. Hutchinson has drawn

99 1

upon his own experience to note that his age and that of his hero correspond to a year. But the novelist has not yet committed to print any adequate description of the suffering he endured ere he was at last able to take his part in "the show."

For those friends who have an intimate knowledge of his career each of Mr. Hutchinson's novels is replete with autobiographical interest. There is much of himself and his experiences in all. Take the George of "Once Aboard the Lugger-." He, it will be recalled, was a medical student. So was Mr. Hutchinson. When his defective eyesight prevented him from entering the combatant arm of the army, his parents decided that he might still enter via the Indian Medical Service. But he was as much a failure as his own George. Not through lack of ability; but because, like Keats, his heart was more set upon literature than physic. It was during his brief days as a medical student that he began, as he has told me, "to give editors the bother of returning my manuscripts." Not all those manuscripts came back, however. "I had two poems accepted by a monthly magazine, which printed them and never smiled again-it went smash almost immediately."

But his heart was so averse from medicine and so set upon writing that, despite the faithful return of most of his manuscripts, there came a day when he made a great decision-a decision "to 'chuck' medicine and concentrate on an assault on Fleet Street."

"Then began," he confessed, "four

months of desperate grinding out of all sorts and conditions of stuff-'mugged up' articles for the penny weeklies, verses, short stories-anything to get a footing and earn a badly needed guinea. Very few stuck. A regular source of income (!) was five shillings a week for some four or five comic verses in a weekly paper. But they thrilled me to the core, those 5 shilling postal ordersit was the beginning!"

In due time all this experience was to be useful as local color for his novels. Turn to "The Clean Heart," for example, and re-read how Mr. Wriford became a part of the Gamber establishment, turning out "copy" for all kinds of ephemeral publications. Wriford is Mr. Hutchinson writing and writing and writing for the various weeklies and monthlies of the house of Pearson. And what happened to Wriford happened to him. As Wriford told the head of Gamber's, it was not more money he wanted, but more time to himself. "I'm writing a novel." And so he was, writing "Once Aboard the Lugger-."

It was "The Lugger," as Mr. Hutchinson always calls that delectable comedy, which prompted the novelist to take his second big plunge. So he left the house of Pearson for free-lance journalism and time to write fiction. Once more, as he always insists, he was "lucky, extraordinarily lucky." Two jobs came his way at once. One to write a daily leaderette for a London morning newspaper, and the other to run a funny column for a London evening newspaper. Those were indeed "busy days," as he reflects. Like Wriford, he left his lodgings at seven in the morning to do his evening newspaper column, and, like Wriford, he had to be in his morning-newspaper office at ten at night. The rest of the day was free for the writing of "The Lugger."

All through 1907, and later, these "busy days" went on. At last "The Lugger" was finished, but the first publisher to whom it was submitted sent it back with high praise and the remark that "humor is out of my line." How it was published in the fall of 1908 and its enthusiastic reception in the United States as well as in England is known. Then came the long silence which was

not to be broken until "The Happy Warrior" saw the light towards the end of 1912. That delay was due to two causes. One was journalistic, the other temperamental. The journalistic cause consisted in the fact that he had become the editor of a London daily, thus leaving him little time for fiction. "Well, good-by," he ejaculated to me one day as I left him at the door of his office; "I must get in now to be caught up in the swirl of things!" The temperamental cause is that he is, as he admits, "appallingly, vilely conscientious."

Begun in 1909, "The Happy Warrior" was virtually finished in 1911. But when he had completed the book, into which he had put "absolutely all I have in me," he was dismayed to realize that the book would not do! He decided that it must be wholly rewritten. There were times when he despaired of getting the story into a form satisfactory to himself. Many of the scenes were written a dozen times. In all, virtually four years had passed before he was able to write "The End" with any sense of satisfaction.

Why? Let him explain: "I envy authors who have the courage to snap their fingers at little improbabilities of time and place and character. Time and again when writing I find myself floored by a little unlikelihood that, if persisted in, I believe no one would notice. But I cannot make my pen do it. If needs be, whole chapters must be rewritten to remove the obstacle."

To this should be added that Mr. Hutchinson is a slow worker. He envies the authors who can go for a long walk, plan out a chapter in their minds, and then come home to rush it down onto paper. At the time when he was writing "The Happy Warrior" he was able to think only when he was actually sitting with pen in hand. Indeed, unless he had a good nib and good paper and was writing neatly he could not make any progress. But his methods have changed of late. Taking a fancy to a type-machine which I affected when I worked with him in journalism, he has now developed the typewriting habit. He found this an enormous advantage when writing "If Winter Comes."

FICTION ROMANTIC LADY (THE). By Michael Arlen. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York. $1.90. The ladies who figure in these delicately wrought and carefully written romances are somewhat short on morals, but they are compensatingly long on subtlety. Despite one's genuine admiration for the author's style and manner of writing, one is pained to note that he occasionally lapses into that form of grammatical error which belongs to F. P. A.'s " 'Whom are you,' said Cyril." TORQUIL'S SUCCESS. By Muriel Hine. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York. $2.

A study of the troubles and anxieties of an unsuccessful novelist. The analysis of poor Torquil's deficiencies is

unsympathetic though keen. The minor characters are well done and there are humorous bits and graphic writing. WAYS OF LAUGHTER (THE). By Harold Begbie. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York. $2.

The eccentric English lawyer who tries to make the world happy by making it laugh is well conceived by the author, but his humor in actual practice is heavy, the gayety is forced, and the humorous note is kept up too long.

POETRY

ANTHOLOGY OF MAGAZINE VERSE FOR 1921. By William Stanley Braithwaite. Small, Maynard & Co., Boston.

If there ever was a book which deserved the characterization "a labor of

love," it is Mr. Braithwaite's annual anthology of American verse. For nine years he has devoted much of his time to the preparation of these surveys of American poetry as it is represented in our magazines. The last decade has seen a great change in the attitude of the poetry-reading public towards magazine verse, and Mr. Braithwaite has had no little share in the work of effecting this change.

His anthologies have shown a steady improvement year by year. In the present volume he has perhaps reached a point beyond which, with the natural limitations upon his time and resources, he will be unable to go.

The general interest which has been shown in his volumes suggests that he should be given also the active support of some organization interested in poetry. We think that active co-operation and assistance in the improvement of his annual anthology would be fully as great a service to poetry as the offering of prizes to individuals.

Assistance could be extended in the shape of subscriptions to all the magazines with literary standards-Mr. Braithwaite's anthology is not as representative or as inclusive as it should be and also in the employment of editorial aid to help in the preparation of an adequate and accurate bibliography. With such help these anthologies could be made into indispensable reference books for the student of current poetry.

The thought and enthusiasm which made these review volumes possible and the credit for attempting them belong exclusively to Mr. Braithwaite. He should emphatically be helped to bring his ideas to complete fruition.

HISTORY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY ASIA AT THE CROSSROADS: JAPAN: KOREA; CHINA; PHILIPPINE ISLANDS. By E. Alexander Powell. Illustrated. The Century Company, New York. $3. This is an entertaining presentation of the political problems of the Far East rather than a book of travel. Nevertheless it is based on personal investigation of those problems in Japan, China, Korea, and.the Philippines. The author is extremely well informed, he writes in a dispassionate way on matters that are often dealt with in a spirit of partisanship, and his style is remarkably readable.

MODERN CITY AND ITS GOVERNMENT (THE). By William Parr Capes. E. P. Dutton & Co., New York. $5.

A thoroughly well informed student of city affairs here presents the latest results of his investigations in the science of municipal government. The commission plan, the commission-manager plan, city charters, and such questions as, Is city government a business? How should city officials be elected? How should city school systems be managed?-all are discussed with insight, full knowledge, and an open mind. A valuable book for all thoughtful citizens and all progressive officials.