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PLATE 9A-A FORGER

This writing would indicate perfect motor synchronization, and from appearances was written by an honest man. A case where graphology just wouldn't work

a

"But are not most criminals ignorant men of low intelligence?"

In Plate 3 one finds the same queer pieces of letters left out. The pen literally seems to jump a gap in some places. The scratchy, smeary quality of the writing seems to point again to bad motor co-ordination.

Look at Plate 4. Messy? Yes, and due to no fault of pen and ink. This was done with a new pen. It, too, has many omissions of up strokes in "l's" and "f's" and has the weak "4" cross.

"All that's very interesting," retorts the honest friend, "but look at these weak 't' crosses, as you call them (Plate 5). This is a sample of my fiancée's script, and she's no criminal."

"I should say she isn't," smiled the graphologist. "Just look at the beautifully made up strokes to her 'l's.' Why, her pen pressure is almost as even on the down stroke as on the up stroke or the horizontal. She must have a perfect motor synchronization, and there is no ragged, sputtering shading in her writing either.

"Here are two repentant fellows (6A and 6B); but they write such wild, headlong scripts that I wonder whether they will be able to stay straight. Notice the ragged edge to many of their letters. Some of the high loops are broken or so weak that they are about to break. And the reckless manner in which the pens dash ahead reveal two men with little control over their emotions or passions.

"Now here is a man (Plate 7) who is slightly more difficult to detect as a criminal. But the queerly shaded 'am' in 'amend' and the scratchy use of the pen throughout give him away."

"But, Mr. Graphologist," continues the honest man, "what you have shown me is very interesting; only there must be some crooks who don't write like the people you have shown me."

"Yes, unfortunately, there are. I have come across the writings of some criminals who give me no indication of their character. The forger in Plate 9A gives none of the usual signs for bad motor synchronization. It is a weak script, but so is many an honest man's (Continued on page 183)

T

HE Boston group of literati who in the three decades from 1840

to 1870 made the political capital of Massachusetts also a brilliant capital of the Republic of Letters are not often thought of as sportsmen. Their sharpest weapons are supposed to have been pens; their most penetrating ammunition, ink. We can picture Longfellow or Emerson seated at a mahogany writing-table surrounded by books. But can you, dear reader, imagine the author of "Hiawatha" casting a fly from a canoe in a mountain lake or the lecturer on "Representative Men" careering on horseback after the buffalo of the wild Western plains?

According to literary tradition, the liveliest hours of this famous company of men of letters were those they spent at the monthly daylight dinners of the Saturday Club of Boston. For more than thirty years the members of this famous club used to gather at the Parker House and, after a two-o'clock dinner, spend the afternoon in conversation and discussion. The Club's list of members included the names of the foremost literary lights of the time-such names as Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, Agassiz, Emerson, Motley, "Two Years Before the Mast" Dana, Prescott, Whittier, Charles Sumner, and Francis Parkman. "It was a brilliant group," says a New England critic, "that the last Saturday afternoon of the month brought together at 'Parker's' in the front room on the second floor-scholars, statesmen, men of law and science, poets, naturalists, doctors, college presidents and professors, artists and men of affairs." Another commentator, a member of the Club, has somewhere remarked that the new issue of that historic periodical the "Atlantic" was customarily distributed at the dinners and the members eagerly turned its pages, and those who were lucky enough to be contributors were soon absorbed each in his own brain child. The literary men of 1850 were not very different in this respect, I guess, from the literary men of 1927.

In this company of immortals the most silent and reserved were undoubtedly Emerson and Francis Parkman. They were alike in delicacy of physique and in loftiness of spirit, and, while they were not unsocial, their instinctive and natural method of self-expression was not oral but literary.

By LAWRENCE F. ABBOTT

Contributing Editor of The Outlook

I have been taken to task for saying elsewhere that Emerson was essentially a humorist. Not a slap-stick guffawproducing comedian-no, a thousand times no; but a philosopher who saw through the grand comedy of human nature with its puerilities and nobilities; like the great Greek playwrights or like Dante-much sweeter and saner than Dante, I think, although doubtless not so great an artist. Emerson's "English Traits" and his Journal are full of proofs of what the Greeks would have called, could they have known him, his comic spirit. Americans of New England blood have been so prone to take Emerson with abysmal seriousness that they are apt to overlook his genuine and comprehensive humanity. He was as pure a soul as ever lived, and yet at times he reacted against conventional morality. "Cannot," he writes in his Journal, "the stinging dialect of the sailors be domesticated? It is the best rhetoric, and for a hundred occasions those forbidden words are the only good ones." And he added that the famous sentence ("A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines") in his essay on "Self-Reliance” “would be better written thus: Damn consistency!"

Only the other day I came across what was to me a still more surprising revelation of Emerson's many-sidedness. He was as gentle a soul as ever lived, abhorring cruelty and sorrowful at suffering. One would suppose that hunting and fishing would have been entirely cutside of the range of his thought and experience. But he once joined a group of the Saturday Club for a hunting and camping expedition in the Adirondacks when that region was a genuine and unsophisticated wilderness. Longfellow, when invited to go on the expedition, asked, "Is it true that Emerson is going to take a gun?" On being answered in the affirmative, he exclaimed, "Then somebody will be shot!" and declined the invitation. Emerson, however, entered into the plan with genuine interest. W. J. Stillman, the painter, art critic, and journalist, who was a member of the Saturday Club and who organized the Adirondack hunt, thus describes Emerson's reactions:

His insatiability in the study of human nature was shown curiously in

our first summer's camp. . . . When we were making up the cutfit for the outing, he at first refused to take a rifle; but, as the discussion of make, caliber, and quality went on, and everybody else was provided, he at length decided, though no shot, to conform, and purchased a rifle. And when the routine of camp life brought the day of the hunt, the eagerness of the hunters and the passion of the chase, the strong return to our heredity of human primeval occupation gradually involved him, and made him desire to enter into this experience as well as the rest of the forest emotions. He must understand this passion to kill. .. He said to me later and emphatically, "I must kill a deer;" and one night we went out "jack-hunting" to enable him to realize that ambition. ... We paddled up to within twenty yards of a buck, and the guide gave the signal to shoot; but Emerson could see nothing resembling a deer, and finally the creature took fright and ran, and all we got of him was the sound of galloping hoofs as he sped away, stopping a moment, when at a safe distance, to snort at the intruders, and then off again. We kept on, and presently came upon another, toward which we drifted even nearer than to the first one, and still Emerson could see nothing to distinguish the deer from the boulders among which he stood; and we were scarcely the boat's length from him when, Emerson being still unable to see him, and not caring to run the risk of losing him, for we had no venison in camp and the luck of the morning drive was always uncertain, I shot him ... and so Emerson went home unsatisfied in this ambition-glad, no doubt, when he recalled the incident that he had failed.

The guides rude men of the woods, rough and illiterate, but with all their physical faculties at a maximum acuteness, senses on the alert and keen as no townsmen could comprehend them-were Emerson's avid study. This he had never seen-the man at his simplest terms, unsophisticated, and, to him, the nearest approach to the primitive savage he would ever be able to examine; and he studied every action.

The results of this study are embodied in these fine lines from one of the most readable of Emerson's poems:

By turns we praised the stature of our
guides,
(Continued on page 180)

gence of fads. It is practical, as its origin and history show.

Its President, founder, and dominant personality, Alfred C. Fuller, was a farm boy of the Grand Pré region of Nova Scotia. At about seventeen years of age he came to Boston-all Nova Scotians do come to Boston, I believe-and got a job as a street-car conductor. For eighteen months he held it, and then was "fired" because, when his motorman did not show up for work, he took the car out and ran it himself.

When he found himself without any way of making a living, he went down to Somerville and launched himself as a brush manufacturer. He got a room in a cellar. There, afternoons and nights, The made his brushes, twisting them with

little hand machine which he still keeps in his office, and trimming them with scissors. Mornings he went out and sold them from house to house. When he had $375 ahead, he moved to Hartford and hired a man to make brushes, so that he could himself devote most of his time to selling them. A litle later he hired a stenographer, and started devoting much of his time to training salesmen.

The business has grown in just that practical way. Every executive in it started as a house-to-house salesman. Most of them were college men who started selling Fuller brushes during vacation to help pay their way through school.

Indeed, the Fuller Brush Company claims that it is an educational instituion. Its salesmen are teachers engaged n the work of educating women in the use of brushes, and other brushes, and still other brushes. The house-to-house nethod of selling is regarded as an educational method, and no claim is made hat any institution except an educaional institution would succeed with it. And, in order to make it successful, even n educational institution may find it desirable to use the bonus and special rize method of augmenting its interest. There comes in the main reason for he fixed calendar which the Fuller Comany worked out for itself. The heads f the accounting department say that this particular part of their work one plit week of the Gregorian calendarhe regular calendar-made more work han a four-week period of the Fuller our-week-month calendar does.

worth plan has some advantages over their own, particularly in setting apart the three hundred and sixty-fifth day as "year day," not attached to any month or any week. The Fuller plan is to allow this extra day to accumulate for seven years and then, for one year, to make five weeks instead of four in the first period. They would be very glad to be rid of this irregularity.

Mr. Fuller says: "I suppose that 'six days shalt thou labor' is as much a part of the commandment as the injunction to rest on the seventh day, but I don't think that one extra Sabbath in the year would do anybody any harm. I'm sure it would not harm us."

The one real source of trouble that the Fuller Company finds with the calendar, however, is that it must employ two calendars-its own calendar for its own internal affairs and the regular calendar for all business that it transacts with other concerns. It is on a twentyeight-day-month basis with itself and on an irregular month basis with everybody else. All billing, for instance, must be done on the first day of the established month.

"Our business has been greatly simplified," says Mr. Fuller, "by the adoption of this calendar for our own purposes. It would be still further simplified, of course, if other people used the same calendar that we do. We shall be very glad when the others adopt the reform, and quite ready, of course, to make whatever changes are necessary in our own method. Meanwhile, however, we shall go right on with ours as we have gone for the past several years. We do not see now how we could run the business as successfully on the old calendar basis."