in Richmond, Virginia, and Burlington, Vermont. And in all these places some particular Smith is always moving to Chicago or Boston or New York, on his way to a sanatorium or to Bad Nauheim and a German specialist! Innumerable Smiths, not yet so prosperous as the old friend I encountered in Berlin, are abandoning their flowergardens and their cosy verandahs (sacred to neighborhood confidences on the long summer evenings) and their gusty registers, for compact and steamheated apartments with only the roofgarden overhead as a breathing-place.

There seems to be no field in which the weary Smith is not exercising a baneful influence. We have fallen into the habit of laying many of our national sins at his door, and usually with reason. His hand is hardly concealed as he thrusts it nervously through the curtains of legislative chambers, state and national. He invades city halls and corrupts municipal councils. Even the fine arts are degraded for his pleasure. Smith, it seems, is too weary from his day's work to care for dramas

That bear a weighty and a serious brow, Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe. He is one of the most loyal patrons of that type of beguilement known as the musical comedy, which in its most engaging form is a naughty situation sprinkled with cologne-water and set to waltz time. Still, if he dines at the proper hour at a Fifth Avenue restaurant and eats more and drinks more than he should (to further the hardening of his arteries for the German specialist), he may arrive late and still hear the tune every one on Broadway is whistling.

The girl behind the book-counter knows Smith a mile off, and hands him at once a novel that has a lot of 'go' to it, or one wherein 'smart' people, assembled in house-parties for

week-ends, amuse themselves by pinning pink ribbons on the Seventh Commandment. If the illustrations are tinted and the first page opens to machine-gun dialogue, the sale is effected all the more readily. Or he may overcome even this brief temptation and gather up a few of those magazines whose fiction jubilantly trumpets the least noble passions of man. And yet my Smith delighted, in those old days round the register, in Howells's clean, firm stroke; and we were always quoting dear Stockton-'black stockings for sharks'-'put your board money in the ginger-jar.'

What a lot of silly, happy, comfortable geese we were!

It seems only yesterday that the first trayful of cocktails jingled into a parlor in my town as a prelude to dinner; and I recall the scandalous reports of that innovation which passed up and down the maple-arched thoroughfares that give so sober and cloistral an air to our residential area. When that first tray appeared at our elbows, at that difficult moment when we gentlemen of the provinces, always rather conscious of our dress-coats, were wondering whether it was the right or left arm that we should offer the lady we were about to take in, we were startled, as if the devil had invaded the domestic sanctuary and perched on the upright piano. Nothing is more depressing than the thought that all these Smiths, many of whose fathers slept in the rain and munched hardtack for a principle in the sixties, are now unable to muster an honest appetite, but must pucker their stomachs with a tonic before they can swallow their daily bread. Perhaps our era's great historian will be a stomach specialist whose pages, bristling with statistics and the philosophy thereof, will illustrate the undermining and honeycombing of our institutions by gin and bitters.

The most appalling thing about us Americans is our complete sophistication. The English are children. An Englishman is at no moment so delightful as when he lifts his brows and says, 'Really!' The Frenchman at his sidewalk table watches the world go by with unwearied delight. At any moment Napoleon may appear; or he may hear great news of a new drama; or the latest lion of the salon may stroll by. Awe and wonder are still possible in the German, bred as he is upon sentiment and fairy-lore. The Italian is beautifully credulous. On my first visit to Paris, having arrived at midnight, and been established in a hotel room that hung above a courtyard, which I felt confident had witnessed the quick thrusts of Porthos, Athos, and Aramis, I awoke at an early hour to the voice of a child singing in the area below. It has always seemed to me that that artless song flung out upon the bright charmed morning came from the very heart of France. France, after hundreds of years of achievement, prodigious labor, and staggering defeat, is still a child among the nations.

Only the other day I attended a prizefight in Paris. It was a gay affair, held in a huge amphitheatre and before a great throng of spectators, of whom a third were women. The match was for twenty rounds, between a Frenchman and an Australian Negro. After ten rounds it was pretty clear that the Negro was the better man; and my lay opinion was supported by the judgment of two American journalists, sounder critics than I profess to be of the merits of such contests. The decision was, of course, in favor of the Frenchman, and the cheering was vociferous and prolonged; and it struck me as a fine thing that that crowd could cheer so lustily the wrong decision. It

was that same spirit that led France forth jauntily against Bismarck's bayonets. I respect the emotion with which a Frenchman assures me that one day French soldiers will plant the tricolor on the Brandenburg Gate. He dreams of it as a child dreams of to-morrow's games.

But we are at once the youngest and the oldest of the nations. We are drawn to none but the 'biggest' shows, and hardly cease yawning long enough to be thrilled by the consummating leap of death across the four rings where folly has already disproved all natural laws. The old prayer, 'Make me a child again just for to-night,' has vanished with the belief in Santa Claus. No American really wants to be a child again. It was with a distinct shock that I heard recently a child of five telephoning for an automobile, in a town that was threatened by hostile Indians not more than thirty years ago. Our children avail themselves with the coolest condescension of all the apparatus of our complex modern life; they are a thousand years old the day they are born.

The farmer who once welcomed the lightning-rod operator as a friend of mankind is moving to town now, and languidly supervising the tilling of his acres from an automobile. One of these vicarious husbandmen, established in an Indiana county-seat, found it difficult to employ his newly acquired leisure. The automobile had not proved itself a toy of unalloyed delight, and the feet that had followed unwearied the hay-rake and plough faltered upon the treads of the mechanical piano. He began to alternate motor flights with more deliberate drives behind a handsome team of blacks. The eyes of the town undertaker fell in mortal envy upon that team and he sought to buy it. The tired husbandman felt that here indeed was an opportunity to find

light gentlemanly occupation, while at the same time enjoying the felicities of urban life, so he consented to the use of his horses, but with the distinct understanding that he should be permitted to drive the hearse.

VI

If we are not, after all, a happy people, in the full enjoyment of life and liberty, what is this sickness that troubleth our Israel? Why huddle so many captains against the walls of the city, impotently whining beside their spears? Why seek so many for rest while this our Israel is young among the nations? "Thou hast multiplied the nation and not increased the joy: they joy before thee according to the joy in harvest, and as men rejoice when they divide the spoil.' Weariness fell upon Judah, and despite the warnings of noble and eloquent prophets she perished.

an

It is now a good many years since Mr. Arnold cited Isaiah and Plato for our benefit, to illustrate his belief that, with us, as with Judah and Athens, the majority are unsound: And yet, to read his essay on 'Numbers' essay for which Lowell's 'Democracy' is an admirable antidote is to turn with a feeling of confidence and security to that untired and unwearying majority which Arnold believed to be unsound. Many instances of the soundness of our majority have been afforded since Mr. Arnold's death, and it is a reasonable expectation that, in spite of the apparent ease with which the majority may be stampeded, it nevertheless pauses with a safe margin between it and the precipice.

Illustrations of failure abound in history, but the very rise and development of our nation has discredited history as a prophet. In the multiplication of big and little Smiths lies our only serious danger. The disposition

of the sick Smiths to deplore as unhealthy and unsound such a radical movement as began in 1896, and still sweeps merrily on in 1912, never seriously arrests the onward march of those who sincerely believe that we were meant to be a great refuge for mankind. In our very eagerness to experiment there is hope. Our impatience of the bounds of law set by men who died before the republic was born does not justify the whimpering of those Smiths who wrap themselves in the grave-clothes of old precedents, or who, if it serve them in dire extremity, become the Constitution's most valiant defenders. Tired business men, weary professional men, bored farmers, timorous statesmen, are not of the vigorous stuff of those

Who founded us and spread from sea to sea A thousand leagues the zone of liberty, And gave to man this refuge from his past, Unkinged, unchurched, unsoldiered.

Our country's only enemies are the sick men, the tired men, who have exhausted themselves in the vain pursuit of vain things; who forget that democracy like Christianity is essentially social, and who constitute a sick remnant from whom it is devoutly to be hoped the benign powers may forever protect us.

VII

It was a year ago that I met my old friend Smith, irritable, depressed, anxious, in the German capital. This morning we tramped five miles, here among the Vermont hills where he has established himself. Sound in wind and limb is my old neighbor, and his outlook on life is sane and reasonable. I have even heard him referring, with something of his old emotion, to that dark winter at Valley Forge, but with a new hopefulness, a wider vision. He does not think the American republic will perish, even as Nineveh and Tyre,

any more than I do. He has come to a realization of his own error, and he is interested in the contemplation of his own responsibilities. And it is not the German specialist he has to thank for curing his weariness half so much as Fanny.

Fanny! Fanny is the wisest, the most capable, the healthiest-minded girl in the world. Fanny is adorable! As we trudged along the road, Smith paused abruptly and lifted his eyes to a rough pasture slightly above and beyond us. I knew from the sudden light in his face that Fanny was in the landscape. She leaped up on a wall and waved to us. A cool breeze rose from the valley and swept round her. As she poised for a moment before running down to join us in the road, there was about her something of the grace and vigor of the Winged Victory as it challenges the eye at the head of the staircase in the Louvre. She lifted her hand to brush back her hair that golden crown so loved by light! And as she ran we knew she would neither stumble nor fall on that rock-strewn pasture. When she reached the brook she took it at a bound, and burst upon us radiant.

It had been Fanny's idea to come here; and poor, tired, broken, disconsolate Smith, driven desperate by the restrictions imposed upon him by the German doctors, and only harassed by his wife's fears, had yielded to Fanny's importunities. I had been so drawn into their affairs that I knew all the steps by which Fanny had effected his redemption. She had broken through the lines of the Philistine and brought

him a cup of water from that unquenchable well by the gate for which David pined, and for which we all long when the evil days come. The youth of a world that never grows old is in Fanny's heart. She is to Smith as a goddess of liberty, in short skirt and sweater, come down from her pedestal to lead the way to green pastures beside waters of comfort. She has become to him the spirit not merely of youth but of life, and his dependence upon her is complete. It was she who saved him from himself when to his tired eyes it seemed that

All one's work is vain,

And life goes stretching on, a waste gray plain, With even the short mirage of morning gone, No cool breath anywhere, no shadow nigh Where a weary man might lay him down and die.

Later, as we sat on Smith's verandah watching the silver trumpet of the young moon beyond the pine-crowned crest, with the herd a dark blur in the intervening meadows, and sweet, clean airs blowing out of the valley, it somehow occurred to me that Fanny of the adorable head, Fanny, gentle of heart, quick of wit, and ready of hand, is the fine essence of all that is worthiest and noblest in this America of ours. In such as she there is both inspiration to do and the wisdom of peace and rest. As she sits brooding with calm brows, a quiet hand against her tanned cheek, I see in her the likeness of a goddess sprung of loftier lineage than Olympus knew, for in her abides the spirit of that old and new America that labors in the sun and whose faith is in the

stars.

FOR a number of years, in my desultory novel-reading, I have found myself occasionally dropping into a particular line of speculation. As I re-read The Mill on the Floss, for instance, I fall to wondering what kind of story it would have made if George Eliot had allowed Tom to tell it. He would have done it bluntly, honestly, without condoning his own faults and mistakes, we may be sure; but also, we may be equally sure, without condoning Maggie's. We should probably have been left in the dark as to the motiving of her acts. Stephen Guest would have fared rather badly, Philip Wakem even worse, and Mrs. Tulliver and Sister Glegg and Sister Pullet would hardly have come in as characters at all, since Tom had none of the special sort of humorous sense to which they appeal. Very likely Tom would have failed as signally to do justice to his own character as to Maggie's his powers were not in the line of conscious self-portrayal.

vealed, for Beatrix would never have been what is called simply honest, even with herself. And yet, whatever she wrote, however she posed, whatever tricks of the spirit she perpetrated, I fancy we could have guessed at her story and her nature in spite of herself. The more one thinks of it, the more one longs for a chance to try, anyhow-to have at those letters or that diary. And then one remembers, to be sure! there are no letters, there is no diary; we were only supposing. What a pity! Yet could we, for their sakes, give up the story as it is?

Or, again, imagine the story told in the modern, dramatic way: not by any character acting as narrator, not by the author as author, not by anybody self-confessed, but allowed to enact itself upon the pages of the book as upon a stage a few stage-directions supplied in place of scenery and real action, each participant speaking in turn, and the reader left to orient himself as he can. Fancy the beginning: 'My name is Henry Esmond.'

'His name is Henry Esmond, sure enough,' said Mrs. Worksop.

'So this is the little priest,' said Lord Castlewood. 'Welcome, kinsman.'

'He is saying his prayers to Mamma!' said little Beatrix.

But no, don't fancy it! Let us stop right here, and go back to those leisurely and deliberate first chapters as they now stand. Already one feels a little ashamed of having allowed one's self to lay such unhallowed hands upon the tale, and one determines to cease

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