et
AT BAY.
This is the end, then, of striving; this is what comes of it all—
Darkness and foes just behind one;
‘What does it matter how staunchly one
before,
an impassable wall.
may have battled for truth,
When with his weapons all broken he its by the grave of his youth?
What did it profit in past years that one did the best that one knew
When in the glopm of the
present Virtue herself seems untrue?
Why should one fighttany longer when nothing remains but defeat?
Surely such labor were useless, and idle the stirring of feet.
‘Ah! but the soul that is faithful knows it is well to have fought,
Knows it is good to have acted, whatever the doing has brought.
This is the crown of the conflict,
this the reward of the strife—
Faith in one’s self and one’s motives, no matter how darkened the life.
Flesh may be bruised and defeated, but spirit is never disgraced—
Spirit is always triumphant,
whatever sharp pain it has faced.
Here, at ‘the end of my conflict, I counsel not yet with despair,
Though to all seeming my struggles are his who but the air.
Darkness and foes are about me, yet I stand with my back to the wall,
Facing whatever Fate sends me, and facing Fate thus I shall fall.
—Oscar Fay Adams.
668 3
IOCLES.”
An Athenian Fable by Henryk Sienkiewitz, Translated From the French.
By SIMEON
aps ieieieiaial
Sy vie}
Divine sleep has brought peace to
‘Athens and a silence so profound that
the ear might catch the faint drawn-
out breath of the dreaming city. Hill,
‘Acropolis, and temple, the olive
groves and the dark cypress masses
are drenched in moonlight. The
fountains have ceased to play; the
Scythian watchmen are asleep at the
house doors. The city, the entire
countryside, is at rest.
Young Diocles alone keeps vigil
with the night. He has pressed his
forehead against the feet of Pallas
'Athene where she rises, glorious, in
the gardens of Academus;
embraced her knees, crying, “Athena,
'Athena, who formerly appeared to
men in visible form, hear me! Take
pity! Give ear to my prayer!”
He lifts his forehead from the base
of the cold marble and raises his eyes
to the face of the virgin, which is il-
Jumined by a single beam. Only the
silence answers him, and even the
light breeze which blows from the
sea at this hour of the night dies
away. Among the trees not a leaf
stirs.
The heart of the young man is
possessed with an infinite sadness
and from his eyes, swollen with much
_weeping, tears trace a way down his
beautiful face. He continues his sup-
plication:
“You, and you alone, I adore and
long to celebrate above all’ other di-
vinities—you my protectress. But
you, too, have lighted the fires of de-
sire which consume me, and given
me over to torture. -Extinguish the
flame, Oh Divinity, or appease it!
Grant me to know the Highest Truth,
the Truth of Truths, the Soul of all
things, that I may offer up life and
its delights as a sacrifice before her!
For her sake 1 will cast off riches,
renounce youth, beauty, love, felicity,
and even that glory which mortals
hold as the highest good and the
greatest gift in the bestowal of the
gods.”
Once more he laid his head against
the marble and the prayer rose from
his soul as perfumed clouds mount
upward from holy censers. His en-
tire being became passionate en-
treaty. He lost all consciousness of
space or time or earthly circum-
stance. Swimming in estacy his soul
harbored but one aspiration, but a
single thought: that to so passionate
an invocation a reply must surely
come.
And truly. enough the response
came. The slender branches of the
olive trees began to stir, and the
cypress trees bent their heads, as
though the night wind had sprung
Into life again. Little by little, the
rustling of the olive branches and
the grating noise of cypress needles
blended to form a human voice which
Bwelled up, filling the air, filling the
garden, as if a multitude, from all
sides, and with one aceord were
shouting, “Diocles! Dioeles!”
Snatched from the depths of
ecstasy the young man shivered, as
if with eold. Thinking that his eom-
panions were seeking him, he tooked
around.
“Who calls?” he demanded.
A hand of marble weighed down
kis shoulder. “You have summoned
me,” spoke the goddess.
prayer has been heard. Behold me ”
A divine horror seized upon Dio-
cles. His hair rose in fear as he fell
upon his knees. For terror and de-
light he could only repeat, * You are
near me, you, the Incomprehensible,
the Awful, the Inexpressible One!”
The goddess, commanding him to
rise, continued: “You would know
the Highest, the Only Truth, which
is the Soul of the Universe and the
substance of all things. But I tell
Fou that hitherto none of the seed
of Deucalion has seen her without
the veils that hide her and shall hide
her eternally from human eyes. I
fear you may pay dearly for your
temerity, but since you have adjured
me at the price of life, I am ready to
aid you, if for the sake of this Truth,
you will renounce riches, honors,
Jove, and even that glory which, as
you have said, is the highest gift of
the Gods.”
“I renounce the whole world and
the very light of the sun,” eried Dio-
eles, quite beside himself.
The olive trees and cypresses stood
with bowed head, like servitors, be-
fore Jove’s omnipotent daughter, as
she pondered over the youth's vow.
“And you, too, shall not see her
all at once. Every year, on a night
dike this, I will bring her into your
presence, and on each occasion you
must tear off one of her veils and
edst it behind you. My immortal
Power shall ward off death from you
| rapid as thought,
he has |
“Your:
‘a swan,
STRUNSKY.
€_¢
etait iS
Cotte ey
till you have withdrawn the last veil.
Do you agree to the conditions, Dio-
cles?”
“This day and unto eternity thy
will be done, Oh Lady of Knowledge,”
replied the youth.
As he spoke the goddess tore her-
self free from her marble bonds,
seized Diocles in her arms, and,
launching into flight, sped through
the divine ether like one of the stars
which on summer nights furrow the
celestial vault above the sleeping
Archipelago. Cleaving the air as
they came to an
unknown land and a mountain that
attained the sky, loftier than Olym-
pus or Ida, loftier than Pelion and
Ossa. On its bald summit Diocles
perceived the vague outlines of a
female form shrouded in numerous
tightly drawn veils. A mystic efful-
gence, different from any .terrestrial
light, emanated from her, feebly.
“Behold Truth,” said Athena. “Her
rays, you see, intercepted by many
wrappings, pierce through neverthe-
less and give light. Their feeble
radiance, gathered, on earth by the
eyeball of the philosopher, is all that
saves men from stumbling about
blindly in the gloom of perpetual
night, like those who dwell in the
land of the Cimmerians.”
“Celestial guide,” asked Diocles,
“when I shall have torn off the first
veil will not Truth appear dazzling to
my eyes?”
“Tear it off,” said the goddess.
He caught at the border of the
shroud and pulled it away sharply.
The light burst forth with increased
intensity. Half blinded, Diocles failed
to perceive that the veil as it dropped
from his hands had. changed into a
white swan which winged its way into
the distant twilight. For a long
time he remained in the presence of
Truth, ravished, raised out of life,
transported into superterrestrial
spaces, ‘emancipated from mortal
thoughts, quaffing of unexperienced
existence, of an unknown force, tast-
ing the delights of inward peace.
“Oh, Luminous One,” he breathed.
“Oh, Eternal One! Oh, Soul of the
Universe!”
Diocles kept the vow he had made
before the goddess. People knew
that he was rich and as he strolled
with his companions in the gardens
of Academus, or in the road leading
to the Acropolis, or in the olive
groves that lie between the city and
the port, they did not hesitate to ex-
press their astonishment and dissat-
isfaction.
“Come now, Diocles, your father
has amassed a vast fortune of which
you have complete enjoyment. What
keeps you from bringing off a mag-
nificent feast like those our godlike
Alcibiades has tendered to the youth
of Athens? What makes you despise
the pleasures of the banquet table,
the dance, and the sweet sound ef the
phorminx and the cithara?
you cast your lot with the Cynics that
you refuse to care for your mansion
or adorn your chambers in a manner
suitable to your work? Remember
that wealth is a gift of the gods which
one has not the right to a Hh But
Diocles only replied with a question:
“Tell me, with all the treasures of
the Persian King, may one purchase
truth?”
And so he eontinued te live in pov-
erty, while men began to say that
some day he would surpass in wisdom
the divine Plato, and honored him
accordingly. In the meanwhile on
another night of moonlight, a second
| véil escaped from his hands and flew
off into the darkness in the form of
while more brilliant than
ever the Truth of Truths shone upon
him.
Diocles was a very charming youth,
and the greatest men of Athens, phil-
osophers, rhetors and Dboets, sued for
his friendship, hoping through the
contemplation of his beauty to gain
insight into the beauty of the Eternal
idea; but he rejected their gifts and
their offers of friendship. The young
girls who gather at the fountains in
the Stoa and the Ceramicus wrapped
him in their tresses and enveloped
him in the circle of their dance. The
wondrously beautiful
like so many nymphs, cast at his
feet branches of fennel dedicated to
Adonis, or whispered into his ear,
over the drooping chalices of lilies,
words as gentle and insinuating as
the tones of the Arcadian flute.
But all in vain.
Like clouds shredded by Thracian
mountain peaks wkich blustering
Boreas drives each winter over Ath-
ens out to the open sea, the years
passed over Diocles. He attained ma-
turity. And though he rarely min-
‘She laid her hand on the unhappy
Have:
Companions, |
gled in the disputes of the phirbIRS
phers cr the debates of the public
assembly, his reputation for elo-
quence and wisdom grew. More than
once his fellow-citizens proffered him
the highest political offices. Not only
friends, but mere acquaintances,
would beseech him to seize the helm
of State and guide the ship out of
the breakers and quicksands into
calm waters, but he only saw the so-
cial life, steeped in corruption, love
of country stifled by personal hatreds
and strife of parties, and his own ad-
monitions falling like seed in sterile
ground. The day finally came when
the Athenians called upon him to
place himself at their head. He re-
plied: “Men of Athens, you have no
enemies but yourselves. As a man,
my tears flow for you; but were I a
God, I could a0t govern you.” War
having broken out, Diocles went to
the front like every one else and re-
turned covered with woumds. But
when the crowns of valor were dis-
tributed on the Acropolis he did not
march with the procession of vet-
erans and he would not consent to
have his name engraved on the tablet
of bronze suspended as a memorial in
the temple.
When old age came Diocles built
himself a hut out of branches of wil-
low near the quarries of Pentelicus.
He left the city and lived far from
men. Athenians are not slow at for-
getting, and on the occasion when he
came to market to purchase bread
and olives his friends did not recog-
nize him.
Several Olympiads rolled by. His
hair had turned white, his form was
bent to the ground, his eyes were
sunk deep in their sockets. Time
had robbed him of his strength. But
one hope upheld him, nevertheless,
the hope that before leaving the light
of the sun he might see Supreme
Truth, the eternal mother of all uni-
versal fact. And he cven allowed
himself to hope that if, after the final
revelation, Atropos should refrain
from cuting the thread of his years,
he would return to the city bringing
men a greater gift than they had re-
ceived at the hands of Prometheus:
It came at length, the ultimate
mystic night, when the goddess once
more wrapped him in her arms and
brought him to the heaven-piercing
mountains, face to face with Truth.
“Behold,” she said, “what glory!
What splendor! But before you ex-
tend your hand for the last time,
listen to me. The veils which, year
after year, through so many years,
have fallen from your hands and es-
caped in the form of swans, were
your illusions. Will you spare the
last one? Or does fear cramp your
heart? Retreat before it is too late.
From these heights I will carry you
back to your native iand, where you
may end your days like other men.”
“To this single moment my whole
life has been consecrated,” cried Dio-
cles, and with beating heart he ap-
proached the radiant form whose
glory dazzled him. With trembling
hands he seized the last veil, tore it
off, and cast it behind him. In the
very same instant the old man’s eyes
were as if struck with a thunderbolt,
and he was plunged into darkness,
compared with which the densest
night of Hades were brilliant day-
light. In the midst of it the voice
of Diocles, heavy with inexpressible
terror and infinite grief, was heard,
calling: “Athena! Oh, Athena!
There is nothing behind the veil, and
I cannot even see you.”
To this cry of despair the goddess
responded, severely: “The full light
has blinded you, and your last illu-
sion—the belief that a mortal might
see Truth unveiled—has flown.”
Then silence fell.
Diocles sobbed: “Those who trust
you, you ever deceive. Me, too, you
have betrayed, cruel goddess of lies.
But since I nevermore can hope to
see Truth Supreme, send me at least
the death which liberates.”
There was more than human dolor
in his words, and Athena was moved.
head and said gently: “I will send
it, Diocles, and with it a final hope.
‘When death shall have brought you
peace, you shall see that Light which
blinded yofir eyes wHen you were
alive.”
» - * * » - Ww
The night grew pale and dawn rose
cold and melancholy gray. Thin lines
of cloud appeared in the sky, and
heavy snowflakes began to fall, cover-
ing the mortal remains of Diocles.—
New York Evening Post.
We Are All Lopsided.
A person’s eyes are out of line in
two cases out of five, and one eye is
stronger than the other in seven per-
sons out of ten. The right is also,
as a rule, higher than the left. Only
one person in fifteen has perfect eyes,
the largest percentage of defects pre-
vailing-among the fair-haired people.
The smallest vibration of sound
can be distinguished better with one
ear than with both. The nails of twa
fingers never grow with the same rap-
idity, that of the middle finger grow-
ing the fastest, while that of the
thumb grows slowest. In fifty-four
cases out of 100 the left leg is short-
er than the right.—Philadelphia Led:
ger.
Horrors of Horrors!
People have curious ideas as ta
the treatment patients receive in asy-
lums. A nurse who was on sitting-
room duty recently heard a newcom-
er asking people who had been visit-
ors for some time as to the treat-
ment of patients.
‘‘Oh,” was one reply, ‘‘they treats
the poor things cruel here. They
gives ’em a bath every week.” —
American Home Monthly.
Dissection of human bodies by
medical students has been practised
since B. C. 320.
LONDON’S OUTCASTS.
With the Men Who Have Touched
Bottom in the
Great Citys 313s
AAA
I spent two nights last week with
the homeless and the outcast, one on
the Embankment and the other in a
County Council lodging house.
At Charing Cross and Waterloo
there were 1100 men snatching eag-
. erly chunks of bread and the bowls
of soup which the army officers kind-
ly distributed. The police consta-
bles were gentle and considerate, but
it was a sad sight to see hungry men
marshalled to receive a charity.
understand them adequately and
truly I ought to have been a tramp
side by side with my fellow bank-
rupts, and not a visitor looking on
from without.
Yet a number of men talked free-
ly; one had tramped from Newcas-
tle expecting to find in London a
good job and a golden wage. In-
stead he found a piece of bread and
a sip of soup on the Embankment.
Another had a good, strong, swarthy
face, and I hazarded the remark that
he was not a Londoner and discov-
ered that he was an Australian. Un-
fortunately he is not the only Colon-
ial who has touched bottom in Lon-
don.
Over twenty-five per cent. were
young men, many of them mere-lads;
and the police officers confirmed the
opinion of the social experts who
maintain it is not misfortune that
brings this class to the doss house
and the Embankment. There was
one face knotty as a stunted oak on
some bleak hillside, which attracted
me by its black despair. Not only
did he sullenly refuse to reply, but
snappishly bade his comrades not to
answer our questions. He was per-
fectly right, and I immediately recog-
nized the higher voice, the voice of
humanity, and maybe the voice of
God, and at once desisted from feed-
ing a curiosity, howsoever well mean-
ing and innocent, upon the w retched-
ness of my fellow men.
One of the Bloomsbury Sisters who
To:
you what rn do. ‘T have got some
stuff in my locker; I'll sell you a
ha’porth of milk, and there is plenty
of boiling water.”
I expected him to be a long way
below redemption point, but was
touced by another instance of beauti-
ful kindliness in the simple annals
of the poor.
The reading room suggested a fair
workingmen’s institute; some ad-
dresseed envelopes®two men dis-
cussed the parsons, four others were
talking about Evelyn Nesbit, a few
read, and almost all smoked. There
were two men sitting on each side of
a bench, pictures of dejection and
despair. It was when I sat down in
silence between these two men and
endeavored to look out at the world
through their eyes that I knew that
I had touched the ninth circle of our
social Inferno, and felt strongly that
if there had been no Incarnation
there ought to have been one.
There were a few workingmen, one
of them toying with his spade, but
most of the artisans who live here
are said to be those whose wives are
separated, whose homes are broken.
No genuine man in work stops here,
if he is in receipt of a decent wage.
Some are suffering from physical
disabilities and some are old, ‘‘the
too old at fifty” class, eking out a
sordid existence by a a little pension
and an odd job. There were a few
men who had the cut of journalists,
and one lad of nineteen, who had
been staying there for six months,
was, I am almost sure, a student
scorning delights and living labori-
ous days, contenting himself with the
bare necessities of existence in order
to get through a curriculum or obtain
a degree.
There was the same proportion of
young lads here as on the Embank-
|
ment. It is sad, in all conscience;
to see a brother on the ground; but
it comes nigh to an unspeakable trag-
accompanied me called our attention |edy to see men touching the bottom
|
to an old man who had fainted at
one end of the long, sad line. He
lay full length on the steps of Water-
loo Bridge, his head pillowed on a
cruel ledge of stone. There was re-
finement in his face, and his white
beard was neatly trimmed. He was,
we learned, a graduate of Cambridge,
and had once been sent to the Uni-
vesity as the pride and the hope of a
cultured home. But forty years
have passed since then, and for the
past two nights he has been without
sleep and food, and has fallen on the
inhospitable stones without strength
to care to open his eves any more.
The sister speaks to him. He opens
his eyes with languid indifference,
but when he sees a kind, womanly,
Christlike face bending over him,
may=be he mistakes it for one of the
faces of long ago; anyhow he is
aroused, and comes back to tell his
sorrowful tale.
The case of these 1100 men sug-
gests a rich study in contrasts. By
our side is a dark river heaving its
bosom like a living thing. with a
light reflected here and there like a
sinister gleam of a serpent’s eye.
Close at hand is the Hotel Cecil,
where rich men fare sumptuously
every night, utterly regardless of
Lazarus on the Embankment. Low-
er down in Scotland Yard, where mil-
lions are spent in tracking criminals,
but not a penny in saving them. Be-
yond that the War Office, red with
gore and black with the waste of
money enough to solve every social
problem that troubles our land. Fur-
ther still is the House of Commons,
to which some of us look in great
nope, but whose existence has been
completely erased from the horizon
of the men of the Embankment.
The one bright spot of hope is the
self-sacrifice of the Salvationists. For
the soup is handed round by volun-
tary workers, workingmen who have
come all the way froma Bermondsey
and give their night's rest and their
kind labor in order to feed the hun-
gry and relieve the hapless. They,
too, were once, An the gutter, but they
saw something; and that vision is the
secret of their ‘sacrifice. One~of them
told me how he had become a eynic
and a ‘‘moucher.” He met a
clergyman when he was famishing
for food, who, instead of a loaf, gave
him a tract—''Thou shalt not live by
bread alone.” He cursed the clergy
from that hour, and in the light of
his experience his cursing was as holy
as a paternostre. Not long- after-
ward he stood outside a ring of open
air temperance workers he signed the
pledge, obtained a shilling, and be-
came a cadger. But he has now been
on his feet for fifteen years and is
doing magnificent work. If all the
Christians in London had the devo-
tion and the sacrifice of these hum-
ble Salvationists the New Jerusalem
would ere now have come down on
Holborn and the Strand ‘‘prepared as
a bride adorned for her husband.”
The second night I dispensed with
tie and collar and overcoat and cuffs,
and greatly enjoyed my emancipa-
tion, as I dived down into one of the
narrow streets of central London and
asked a bewildered and suspecting
constable for a doss house. I went
in and ‘‘took my kip,” and had bed
No. 88 allotted to me. I had left all
the necessaries of life behind except
a few pennies and a packet of “tabs.”
My first task was to get a light,
which a gruff neighbor kindly gave
me by holding the end of his pipe
close to my face. My second difficul-
ty was to get food, for unfortunately
the bar was closed. I told my plight
to a little red faced man, and in tell-
ing it I am afraid I stuttered rather
badiy. He replied: ‘‘Mate, I'll tell
| worker in the heart
the
ledge before they are
and old in misfortune
young in years.
I am haunted by
lad holding a conversation with a
villainous looking senior on the
hearth side in front of a biazing fire.
It was the face of a boy who knew
too much and had lived too rashly.
The place had an air of comfort,
but it utterly lacked hope. Literally
the men are without God and with-
out hope in the world. For most of
them there nothing better and
there can be nothing worse. Suffi-
cient for the day is the evil thereof.
It is embarrassing to think of the
morrow. There is the comfort that
you are buried in Central London.
You are lost to friends and acquaint-
ances. Nobody knows and nobody
cares. There is the lodging house
for to-day and the workhouse or the
Thames for to-morrow.
An Oxford graduate who has
touched the depths and found his
feet in our men’s meeting at Blooms-
bury says that the words of Kipling
came to him again and again as he
has tramped the corridors of the doss
house or the sireets of the city:
twenty-five,
while only
the figure of a
is
We have done with hope and honor; we
are lost to love and truth;
We are dropping down the ladder rung by
rung.
Gentleman rankers out on the spree,
Damned from here io fternicy,
God have mercy on sucl h as we,
Bah, Yah, Bah!
But it is some hing to have
them sheiter ard comfort; and here,
as in the case of! the trams, and
slums and parks. the London County
Council has beer inspired hy a com-
passion and huma ’ which is rare
in ecclesiasticala ible: 3, leave alone
large public bod By providing
homes that are clean, and cheap, and
wholesome they have fed the hungry,
clothed the naked and taken in the
homeless. But why cast the women
into the outermost darkness?
For on Wednesday night there
were Sisters, too, on the Embank-
ment. My wife spoke to a number
of broken down women all over fifty.
These are the despair of.every social
of L.ordon. The
men we can send to the Council lodg-
ing houses, but for the women, there
is—nowhere!
Ob, it is I itaful.
Near a whale eity=-fall,
Home they have none: :
—London Daily News.
given
How Water
Water contracts as it falls tom
normal boiling point, 212 ded
grees, until it reaches thirty-nine de-
grees. Below that degree it expands,
and at thirty-two degrees, the freez-
ing point, it will expand enough to
burst pipes and vessels holding it.
When the pressure of the air is
below normal, water boils at a lower
temperature than 212 degrees. Thid
is noticed before a rain, when the ba-
rometer shows by a falling mercury
a decreased air pressure. This also
explains why water boils away more
rapidly, quickly or at a lower temper-
ature in the mountains, where the
pressure of the air is less than on the
seacoast or in the valleys. If sugar
or salt is added to water the temper-
ature of the boiling point is raised a
few degrees. As a rule, as water Is
heated it will hold a greater amount
of substance in solution. A familiar
exception is the fact that ice water
will dissolve twice as much lime as
boiling water. At the othed extreme
boiling water will dissolve Seventeen
times as much saltpetre as will eold
watet, But water varies in its solv=
ent powers regardless of heat. Ons
pound of water will hold two pounds
of sugar in solution, but only twa
Acts.
| ounces of common salt .
HK is well,
The Submerged Individual
By JUSTICE JOHN WOODARD, of
the Appellate Division of the Su--
préeme Court of New York.
It is undeniable that the despot, if:
he be benevolent, can accomplish
more good than the divided and
myriad minded many. An unwise
and precipitate democracy can, on
the other hand, degenerate into that
worst of despotisms, an irresponsible
and selfish oligarchy which appro-
priates all of the benefits and denies
every burden.
And such, it must be confessed, is
the present attitude of many of our
overgrown corporations. They have
been intrusted with the welfare of the
people, and have abused their trust.
They have become pirates, where they
should have remained beneficators.
They have destroyed competition till
with monopolistic greed they have
robbed the public for their own en-
richment. They have desecrated the
law, which is the conscience of the
State. They have "t6t remembered
what they should never have forgot-
ten, that old admonition still to be
seen on a church in Venice: “Around
this temple let the merchant's law be
just, his weights true and his cov-
enants faithful.”
then, that they should
be controlled and regulated. It is
time to drive’ the money changers out
of the. temple® “and to substitute for
the worship of gold the worship of
character. ;
On whom, ‘then, shall our salva-
tion depend, if not upon the indi-
vidual? The many will never make
the attempt to regain their lost rights
unless they are led by a man.
And the man will come. Comes
the crisis, he will not be found Want-
ing. There is always the great per-
sonality who shall lead his pcople out
of the wilderness to the promised
land. He may not be one of the
shining intellectuals, he may not be
one of those subtle and brilliant ad-
vocates that stand arrayed in behalf
of private interests against the cause
of the people: but he will have that
quality of manliness which inspires
confidence.
Beware of those
storm that they
bow.
If, then, those corporations which
have sprung like mushrooms from
the decay of public virtue reveal such
appalling defects, can we expect that
the State, when it shall have become,
as many desire, a universal corpora-
tion, will prove otherwise? Is not
the danger in proportien to the size
of the mononoply? Will not such a
solution tend to crush that sense of
individuality and that civie conscious-
ness which is our sole refuge?
Society owes to *h his oppor-
tunity. It is the supreme duty of the
State to inspire ambition. To thwart,
to limit, or to exclude by legislation
the enterprise of the individual, is to
deaden the world's capacity for pro-
gress. To quench the spark of per-
sonality is to impoverish: the whole
social organization.
To attempt by law, therefore, to
limit all men, irrespective of skill,
endeavor or attainment, to a common
wage would be as fatuous as it is
unjust. Personality, indeed, ean be
subject only to the laws of nature.
Needless to say, the souls of men are
not amenable to statistics. You may
measure material results; you can
never calculate the aspirations of the
mind.
To bring about the readjustment
of social conditions many fastastic
remedies are proposed; but there
can be no panacea for political ills.
The law never rises higher than its
source. Our hope, then, is in the edu-
cation of the public through the in-
dividual.
It is for you and for me to decide
whether public opinion shall become
a despotism. The aim of democracy
is, I take it, equality before the law,
and to guarantee to each his personal
liberty — the liberty to be himself.
When upon this shall. be superim-
posed a burden of restrictions, hedg-
ing the individual about with “thou
shalt” and “thou shalt not,” then
rurely democracy will exist only in
name. Every law, therefore, which
encroaches upon your personal pre-
rogative as a man and as a citizen is
a usurpation of your individuality.
To submerge the identity of the per-
son in the mass is to destroy all pos-
sibility for ‘progress. This applies to
us all. The ordinary man, indeed,
may posses qualities far greater than
those of the same nature in his more
distinguished brother, yet it is to the
exceptional faculties of the few that
the world must look for its advance-
ment.
To give encouragement to person-
ality, to kindle by opportunities for
reward the incentive to labor, and to
nourish tenderly the progressive in-
tellect, this should be at least one of
the chief functions of government.
that provoke the
may reap the rein-
nl
Sevore Treatment.
The following is a quite modern
Chinese conception of the foreigners’
treatment of infectious cases: “If am
epidemic broke out two foreigners
took the sick away and put them in a
little room, washed them with lime
water and then locked them up, so
that no.one could see them, on pur-
pose that they might soon die and
not propagate the disease. Wives
and children might ery and weep, but
the foreigner would but drive them
away with sticks, for until dead no
one must see those faces again. Bet-
ter for all of us to jump into the nea
than submit to this.”—South Chi=a
Post.
In the last hundred years there
have been made in the United States,
some seven or eight score of experi-
ments in community Hie.