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folk and Western Railroads. The men and their families attached to these offices are known and liked by the general populace; but the miners are miles away in the hills.

When the head of a State institution can hold and express the theory that a State may permit the breeding of feeble-minded as a contribution to the labor situation, then is it not time for the citizens of that State to inform themselves upon labor conditions? Among other things to be observed are such questions as whether or not the miners need to be saved for the misdirection and false philosophy of certain types of union leadership. Likewise, whether or not the coal operators are too solicitous in assuming the right of guardianship over the miners in this respect, and are letting a combative spirit overcrowd their saner judgment.

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Keystone View Co.

"MINERS ARE NOT ENCOURAGED TOWARD THRIFT. COMPANY STORES ARE
PRONE TO PUSH THE SALE OF SILK SHIRTS, $15] SHOES, AND SUITS FROM $60
UP....
COMPANY MANAGERS MAY STATE... THAT THEY ARE ONLY RESPONDING
TO A DEMAND "

leaders to give the men more solid food than empty rhetoric. I can better imagine a man of Gompers's breadth of vision addressing the unions along the following lines:

Men, if you think that force alone will gain you what you are after, you are building upon a foundation of sand. To build solidly, you must build upon the confidence and good will of

"THE TEMPERATURE AND HUMIDITY WITHIN THE MINES REMAIN MORE NEARLY CONSTANT
THROUGHOUT THE YEAR THAN IN ANY OTHER FIELD OF LABOR. ... AS FAR AS THE
IMMEDIATE WORKING SURROUNDINGS OF THE MINER ARE CONCERNED, WE NEED NOT
COMMISERATE HIM "

your neighbors. You must, in fact, become good citizens. To function as a citizen you must remain in one locality long enough to earn the right of ballot. If you have convinced your neighbor of your manhood and honesty of purpose, he will back you in securing by means of the ballot legislation that will give you peacefully what you are now devoting all your life energies and goods to obtain by force. In all educational work of a worthy nature you will find the public with you heart and soul. You will not find them with you in sabotage. Education is imperative-that sort of education that means clear thinking and fair thinking on vital issues. To convince your fellow-man that you desire to take your place in the fabric of society as a producer and a co-worker, and to yield to the Government the right of governing, you must meet your neighbor as man to man, on a common ground, and not through the mouthpiece of a few paid radical leaders who may or may not represent you faithfully.

We would add here a bit of counsel to the coal operators:

Be human. Do not let your sense of humor forsake you. A sense of humor begets a liking for your fellow-man. It is a sure guaranty of a sane, unbiased judgment.

We do not consider you to be supermen, any more than we would hope that our Congressmen or our Army and Navy officers might prove to be supermen, but we would like to be proud of you as a product of democratic ideals. Almost every one of you has come by his present position of influence through the opportunities made possible by our form of government and social state.

It is within your power to lead the way toward a truce in this war of class pride now being waged.

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THE BOOK TABLE: DEVOTED TO BOOKS AND THEIR MAKERS

A PREFACE TO THE PROFESSION OF

JOURNALISM

(BEING AN ANSWER TO A LETTER FROM A COLLEGE STUDENT, ASKING ADVICE AS TO TAKING UP WRITING AS A CAREER)

BY CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

TOUR inquiry is congenial, and I feel

Y guilty of selfishness in answering it

in this way. But he must be a poor workman, whether artisan or artist, who does not welcome an excuse now and then for shutting out the fascinating and maddening complexity of this shining world to concentrate his random wits on some honest and self-stimulating expression of his purpose.

There are exceptions to every rule; but writing, if undertaken as a trade, is subject to the conditions of all other trades. The apprentice must begin with task-work; he must please his employers before he can earn the right to please himself. Not only that, he must have ingenuity and patience enough to learn how editors are pleased; but he will be startled, I think, if he studies their needs, to see how eager they are ts meet him half-way. This necessary docility is, in the long run, a wholesome physic, because, if our apprentice has any gallantry of spirit, it will arouse in him an exhilarating irritation, that indignation which is said to be the forerunner of creation. It will mean, probably, a periodperhaps short, perhaps long, perhaps permanent of rather meager and stinted acquaintance with the genial luxuries and amenities of life; but (such is the optimism of memory) a period that he will always look back upon as the happiest of all. It is well for our apprentice if, in this season, he has a taste for cheap tobacco and a tactful technique in borrowing money.

The deliberate embrace of literature as

a career involves very real dangers. I mean dangers to the spirit over and above those of the right-hand trouser pocket. For, let it be honestly stated, the business of writing is solidly founded on a monstrous and perilous egotism. Himself, his temperament, his powers of observation and comment, his emotions and sensibilities and ambitions and idiocies-these are the only monopoly the writer has. This is his only capital, and with glorious and shameless confidence he proposes to market it. Let him make the best of it. Continually stooping over the muddy flux of his racing mind, searching a momentary flash of clearness in which he can find mirrored some delicate beauty or truth, he tosses between the alternatives of selfgrandeur and self-disgust. It is a painful matter, this endless self-scrutiny. We are all familiar with the addled ego of literature-the writer whom constant selfcommunion has made vulgar, acid, querulous, and vain. And yet it is remarkable that of so many who meddle with the combustible passions of their own minds so few are blown up. The discipline of living is a fine cooling-jacket for the engine.

It is essential for our apprentice to remember that, though he begin with the vilest hack-work-writing scoffing paragraphs, or advertising pamphlets, or freelance snippets for the papers-that even in hack-work quality shows itself to those

competent to judge; and he need not always subdue his gold to the lead in. which he works. Moreover, conscience and instinct are surprisingly true and sane. If he follows the suggestions of his own inward, he will generally be right. Moreover, again, no one can help him as much as he can help himself. There is no job in the writing world that he cannot have if he really wants it. Writing about something he intimately knows is a sound principle. Hugh Walpole, that greatly gifted

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on wings and at haphazard instants. They must be caught in air. In this respect one thinks American writers ought to have an advantage over English, for American trousers are made with hip-pockets, in which a small note-book may so comfortably caress the natural curvature of

man.

Fancy is engendered in the eyes, said Shakespeare, and is with gazing fed. By fancy he meant (I suppose) love; but imagination is also so engendered. Close, constant, vivid, and compassionate gazing at the ways of mankind is the laboratory manual of literature. But for most of us, we may gaze until our eyeballs twitch with weariness; unless we seize and hold the flying picture in some steadfast memorandum, the greater part of our experience dissolves away with time.

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CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, AUTHOR OF DELIGHTFUL VOLUMES AND COLUMN-CONDUCTOR FOR THE NEW YORK "EVENING POST"

novelist, taught school after leaving Cambridge, and very sensibly began by writing about school-teaching. If you care to see how well he did it, read "The Gods and Mr. Perrin." I would propose this test to the would-be writer: Does he feel, honestly, that he could write as convincingly about his own tract of life (whatever it may be) as Walpole wrote about that boys' school? If so, he has a true vocation for literature.

The first and most necessary equipment of any writer, be he reporter, advertising copy-man, poet, or historian, is swift, lively, accurate observation. And since consciousness is a rapid, shallow.river which we can only rarely dam up deep enough to go swimming and take our ease, it is his positive need (unless he is a genius who can afford to let drift away much of his only source of gold) to keep a note-book handy for the sieving and skimming of this running stream. Samuel Butler has good advice on this topic. Of ideas, he says, you must throw salt on their tails or they fly away and you never see their bright plumage again. Poems, stories, epigrams, all the happiest freaks of the mind, flit by

If a man has thought sufficiently about the arduous and variously rewarded profession of literature to propose seriously to follow it for a living, he will already have said these things to himself, with more force and pungency. He may have satisfied himself that he has a necessary desire for "self-expression," which is a parlous state indeed, and the cause of much literary villainy. The truly great writer is more likely to write in the hope of expressing the hearts of others than his own. And there are other desires, too, most legitimate, that he may feel. An English humorist said recently in the preface to his book: "I wrote these stories to satisfy an inward craving-not for artistic expression, but for food and drink." But I cannot conscientiously advise any man to turn to writing merely as a means of earning his victual unless he should, by some cheerful casualty, stumble upon a trick of the You Know Me Alfred sort, what one might call the Attabuoyant style. If all you want is a suggestion as to some honest way of growing rich, the doughnut industry is not yet overcrowded; and people will stand in line to pay twenty-two cents for a

dab of ice-cream smeared with a trickle syrup.

of

To the man who approaches writing with some decent tincture of idealism it is well to say that he proposes to use as a trade what is, at its best and happiest, an art and a recreation. He proposes to sell his mental reactions to the helpless public, and he proposes not only to enjoy himself by so doing, but to be handsomely recompensed withal. He cannot complain that in days when both honesty and delicacy of mind are none too common we ask him to bring to his task the humility of the tradesman, the joy of the sportsman, the conscience of the artist.

And if he does so, he will be in a condition to profit by these fine words of George Santayana, said of the poet, but applicable to workers in every branch of literature:

He labors with his nameless burden of perception, and wastes himself in aimless impulses of emotion and reverie, until finally the method of some art offers a vent to his inspiration, or to such part of it as can survive the test of time and the discipline of expression.

Wealth of sensation and freedom of fancy, which make an extraordinary ferment in his ignorant heart, presently bubble over into some kind of utterance.

THE NEW BOOKS

FICTION

Mitch Miller. By Edgar Lee Masters. Illustrated. The Macmillan Company, New York. A story about two boys told by one of them, Skeeters, who plays toward Mitch the part of Horatio to Hamlet and of Huckleberry Finn to Tom Sawyer. The real appeal of the story is to elder readers rather than to boys, for there is subtlety and deep feeling in the unfolding of Mitch's poetic temperament and underlying melancholy. Skeeters tells his story in true boy fashion, with unconscious fun and quaint comment. The book is unusual and captivating.

Samuel Lyle, Criminologist. By Arthur Crabb. Illustrated. The Century Company, New York.

A collection of interesting detective stories. They are scarcely less ingenious than Sherlock Holmes, but they are much more probable. There is, indeed, not one of the inysterious incidents which might not quite naturally have occurred, and the explanation is as natural as it is surprising when it is furnished. Additional interest is lent to the stories by some curious studies in psychology illustrating the strange tricks which sometimes faulty memory and sometimes defective perception play in the minds of entirely honest witnesses.

Sleuth of St. James Square (The). By Melville Davisson Post. D. Appleton & Co., New York.

Mystery and detective tales in which a chief investigator from Scotland Yard plays the leading part, although most of the mysteries are solved outside of England. The author's method is unusual and some of the tales are remarkably good. We should give the prize for best to "The Cambered Foot." Tension. By E. M. Delafield. The Macmillan Company, New York.

Written with a lightly ironic touch, this picture of social life in an English town centers around an educational institution in the government of which the director is constantly interfered with by his scandalloving, busybody wife. This woman is sketched amusingly and cleverly; in her

way she is as good a character as Trollope's sloop Sea-Lark, which two boys rescue and "Mrs. Proudie." use as a ferry-boat.

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Tales Out of Court. By Frederick Trevor Hill. The Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York.

Many of these short stories (and decidedly the best of them) relate odd experiences of legal practice and queer and amusing adventures of lawyers with criminals and eccentric clients.

Terrible Island (The). By Beatrice Grimshaw. The Macmillan Company, New York.

In the far regions of ultimate New Guinea take place the strange happenings of this colorful romance. It is a capital tale, quite novel in its plot and incident, and with amusing character depiction as well as the thrill of adventure in a queer search for a treasure the nature of which is unknown.

West Wind Drift. By George Barr McCutcheon. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York.

A singular and imaginative conception is that of this story. A great steamship is wrecked on a far-distant island under such peculiar circumstances that its hundreds of passengers are left there for years. They simply have to work out a system of selfgovernment and plan for their own preservation and protection. The book is worth reading for itself and also because it brings saliently to mind some of the things which are essential to liberty and combined effort in civilized countries, as well as in desert islands.

BOOKS FOR YOUNG FOLKS

Boy's Book of Magic (The). Including Chapters on Hindu Magic, Handcuff Tricks, Side Show and Animal Tricks, Ventriloquism, etc., Together with Numerous Sleights, Now Published for the First Time. By Hereward Carrington, Ph.D. Illustrated. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York.

Children's Great Texts of the Bible (The). Edited by James Hastings, D.D. Vol. I-Genesis-Joshua; Vol. II-Judges-Job; Vol. IIIPsalms-Isaiah. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.

Child's Book of Modern Stories (A). Compiled by Ada M. Skinner and Eleanor M. Skinner. Illustrated. Duffield & Co., New York.

The stories are modern but the themes are the ones of all time, and are told in a way to interest all imaginative children. The pictures are by Jessie Willcox Smith and are characteristically charming. Crystal Ball (The). By Mary D. Gordon. Illustrated. Little, Brown & Co., Boston.

Curly and the Aztec Gold. By Joseph B. Ames. Illustrated. The Century Company, New York.

For the Game's Sake. By Lawrence Perry. Illustrated. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.

Green Forest Fairy Book (The). By Loretta Ellen Brady. Illustrated. Little, Brown & Co., Boston.

Italian Twins (The). By Lucy Fitch Perkins. Illustrated. Houghton Mifflin Company, Bos

ton.

Magic Whistle (The), and Other Stories.

By E. Gordon Browne. Illustrated. Dodd,
Mead & Co., New York.

Mark of the Knife (The). By Clayton H.

Ernst. Illustrated. Little, Brown & Co.,
Boston.

Master Frisky. By Clarence Hawkes. Illustrated. The Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York.

Old Granny Fox. By Thornton W. Burgess. (Green Meadow Series.) Illustrated. Little, Brown & Co., Boston.

Mystery of the Sea-Lark (The). By Ralph
Henry Barbour and H. P. Holt. Illustrated.
The Century Company, New York.
A capital story for boys with a consistent
mystery plot centering about the wrecked

Hungry Hearts. By Anzia Yezierska. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.

Peggy in Toyland. By Archibald Marshall. Illustrated. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York. Prairie-Schooner Princess. By Mary Katherine Maule. Illustrated. The Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Company, Boston.

Scoutmastership. A Handbook for Scoutmasters on the Theory of Scout Training. By Sir Robert Baden-Powell (Chief Scout). G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York.

Spartan Twins (The). By Lucy Fitch Perkins. Illustrated. Houghton Mifflin Company, Bos

Soolook: Wild Boy. By Roy J. Snell. Illus trated. Little, Brown & Co., Boston. Strange Year (The). By Eliza Orne White. Illustrated. Houghton Mifflin Company, Bos

A pleasing tale of child life written with refinement and literary skill. It should hold the attention of young readers-and many older ones.

Swiss Fairy Tales. By William Elliot Griffis. The Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York. Tales of Wonder and Magic. By Katherine

Pyle. Illustrated. Little, Brown & Co., Boston. Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings. By Joel Chandler Harris. Illustrated. D. Appleton & Co., New York.

In this gift edition Uncle Remus is presented in exactly the right companyto wit, with Thomas Nelson Page as his introducer and A. B. Frost and E. W. Kemble as his illustrators. The stories will be read and enjoyed by American children for generations yet to come. The publishers have made a handsome and fitting vol

Winning Football. By William W. Roper. Illustrated. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York. Wonder Tales of the World. Retold by Constance Armfield. Illustrated. Harcourt, Brace & Howe, New York.

John Burroughs. By Clara Barrus, M.D. Illustrated. Doubleday, Page & Co., Garden City.

If anybody ever gets into a pessimistic mood, let him spend an hour over this book; its reflection of the bright, hopeful, sane spirit of John Burroughs will cure him as quickly as a fresh breeze drives away fog. It is a good book for boys and girls as well as for older people up. to the nineties. Life of Walter Quintin Gresham, 18321895. By Matilda Gresham. Illustrated. 2 vols. Rand McNally & Co., Chicago. Judge Gresham was an early force in the Republican party. He was elected to the Indiana Legislature. In the Civil War he enlisted as a private and came out general. He was United States District Judge and later Circuit Judge in Indiana. At Washington he was a member of two Cabinets, being Postmaster-General and Secretary of the Treasury under President Arthur and Secretary of State under President Cleveland; though a Republican, Mr. Gresham found himself in sympathy with the principles of the Cleveland Democracy. This is the biographical background against which is projected the narrative of the current history of Judge Gresham's period, from the early forties to the middle nineties, covering the issues of slavery and Negro suffrage, the relations of the North and South, the Civil War and readjustment epochs, and the great labor and law developments-particularly the progress of international law. Mrs. Gresham's life of her husband is thus also a source book of history.

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