ing out only such goods as they are obliged to, cutting expenses to the last limit, and hesitating to take any forward step, because they have no idea what kind of a tariff is coming out of the Congressional caldron next winter. If they knew anything positively-even that the new tariff was going to be one that would hit them hard-they could adjust their business to that and go ahead; it's the uncertainty that kills. In the same way, no corporation manager knows whether he is keeping within the law or not. I never venture to move without a lawyer at each elbow; and then I can't be sure, though acting on the best advice I can command, that I am not making mistakes. If my mistake happens to be of a certain kind, I am not only obliged to repair it financially, but liable to be branded as a criminal. It is not a pleasant situation, and probably any remedies we tried to apply to it would prove only palliatives at best. In short, the condition of business is a good deal like a fever: we all hope, and expect, that the patient will recover by and by, but, as far as we can see, the disease will have to run its uncertain course."

"How came we, in your opinion, to reach this pass?" I inquired.

"It is due to several causes, operating in succession or in combination. A few years ago business was moving along without much disturbance of its surface. Those of us who could look underneath saw that many things were going on which ought not to; some of the big concerns were treating the law with contempt, and lesser ones took this as a justification for doing the same themselves. Of course such a state of affairs was unwholesome, and called for cutting out. President Roosevelt undertook to apply the knife. Meanwhile, the public mind had been worked up by various agitators to a sort of frenzy, and, as soon as the process of official surgery began, a clamor arose for deeper and deeper, more and more indiscriminate cutting. The Taft Administration followed, and its surgery was still more extensive; but the public thirst for blood seemed to be whetted, rather than appeased, by everything done for it.

"Don't misunderstand me as objecting to the enforcement of law; I believe in it. It is an unfortunate coincidence, however, when an effort to correct evils finds the public mind in an inflamed state, which renders calm, unsensational operations impossible, and what starts out as a proper check to law

breaking degenerates into a wild hue and cry of persecution."

"And you think this will wear itself out in time ?"

"It cannot continue indefinitely, it seems to me, without bringing about a radical change in our system of government. The advocates of the initiative and referendum and recall have recognized their opportunity, and are pressing for these and other so-called reforms on the plea that they mean the restoration of the people' to power; yet every thinking man must realize that, with a vast population like ours, such a thing as direct popular rule is out of the question. We have grown up under representative government; why change it? You know that even a Massachusetts town meeting elects officers to whom it intrusts the town's business. It doesn't attempt to do that itself; it can't. What would become of a railway like that over which I preside, if all the stockholders had to be consulted every time we spent a hundred dollars on the repair of a freighthouse? The stockholders elect to their directorate a small body of men in whose business judgment they have confidence, and these men run the road. And even in that little managing group there must be one responsible head. responsible head. If an emergency confronts me as president, I can't always wait to call my directors together before acting; I have to do what appears to me wisest under all the circumstances, and later report it to the directors and ask their approval. That is the way all large business is done, and the Government of this country is the largest business in it.

"To go back to your question, I must believe, as a good American, that our present trouble would work itself out eventually if we left it alone; but a good deal can be done meanwhile to forward that end. In view of the ever larger and larger influence popular sentiment is having in the affairs of both public and private business, the education of that sentiment, so that the mass of the people will think sanely and without prejudice, would be of immense value. Let the newspapers and other agencies of general information try to impress upon their constituencies a realization that this is a country of equal opportunity; that, in spite of those natural differences in capacity between man and man which always did and always will exist, every one who makes the most of such capacity as he has been endowed with has

plenty of avenues to success open to him; that, as long as mankind continues to inhabit the earth, there will be some who get ahead of others; but that the man who never gets anywhere has usually himself most to blame for his failure, and the poorest recreation in which he can indulge is an effort to pull down his neighbors who have used their talents to better advantage."

"Do the recent decisions of the Supreme Court in the trust cases seem to you to have cleared the air at all?"

"They were what we had every reason to expect, of course; but for any large effects from them, in the direction popularly looked for, we may have to wait a good while. It is plain, isn't it, that the mere resolution of the Standard Oil Trust into its component parts does not mean necessarily that these corporations are going to change the personnel of their management? And if the same managers remain in charge, what changes are we to look for in their policies and conduct? It is possible that in course of time, with the gradual disintegration of the shareholdings, the separate companies may undergo notable changes, even to the extent of becoming rivals in trade; but in the natural order of things this sequel is still a long way off."

"And in the meantime-"

"In the meantime we shall probably see no practical results from the dissolution of the Trust except an increase in the price of oil, which seems hardly avoidable after the former economies in administration are brought to an end. When you reflect that, since the foundation of the Standard, prices have gone down so that to-day you can buy a gallon of kerosene for one-half what you pay for a gallon of bottled table-water like Poland, for instance, you begin to realize that, from the point of view of the cost of living, a trust may not be an unmixed evil. That, however, is a consideration with which our present discussion has nothing to do. The public demand is for the dissolution of all monopolies ; and if, after the Government has complied with that demand, prices rise all along the line, it is merely a case of the people getting what they called for, and we must assume that they stand ready to pay the bill."

"How will the anti-monopoly campaign affect the railway monopolies ?"

"I do not recognize the existence to-day of such a thing as a railway monopoly. Twenty-five years ago it might have been possi

ble, but the railway rate law and the large powers conferred upon the Inter-State Commerce Commission have changed all that. What I have built up, for example, is not a monopoly, but a machine for producing transportation at a less cost than was possible before. Were it not for the enormous increase in the cost of living in the railway business-that is, the cost of the transportation we sell-our rates could have been reduced and our service promoted; as it is, advances have been avoided and a service continued that would otherwise have been out of the question. A monopoly, as I understand the term, implies the control of a business by one mind, or by a group of minds acting as one. You can't have a monopoly when the statutes regulate a business, and tribunals like the Inter-State Commerce Commission, and the public service commissions in the States, are authorized to veto and recast plans which the officers of a company, acting in the interest of the shareholders, have laid. The divided responsibility takes it out of the monopoly class. The control of rates, charges, and service is absent.

"The chief troubles of the railway world lie not in that quarter, but in another. I refer to the effort now making to bring all the roads in the United States under one general rule as to the classification of freights. You simply cannot make a rule as to classification, rates, or anything else, which will apply with equal fairness to a road in Massachusetts and to one in Idaho or California, for conditions in railroading differ as widely in different parts of the country as conditions of soil and climate. You can't do it even in neighboring States. To illustrate: The New Haven Company is required by the law of Connecticut to abolish fourteen grade crossings every year. This involves so large an expenditure that, if a like law prevailed in Maine, it would break the railways there."

"As long, though; as the public demand is for publicity and Government regulation, how would you meet it?"

By giving the Government a representation in the directorate of all inter-State companies commensurate with its interest. realize what objection would be raised to this plan-that the Pacific Railway experiment in the same line had not proved a success. Well, if a Government director fails to do his duty, does not the fault lie with him, rather than with the plan? Perhaps you will reason

that a single director, however worthy personally, is quite overslaughed in a board comprised of several representatives of the stockholders. Then give him the right to call for assistance. Let the Government put in as many directors as it needs to insure the company's doing what it ought, or being exposed if it doesn't. This power of exposure, at least, is one not to be lightly reckoned with. But no politicians are wanted for such places, or men who feel that they must shoot off skyrockets once in so often to convince the public that they are earning their salaries. Give the positions sufficient dignity, permanency, and compensation to attract competent business men with some knowledge of railroading.

"As to publicity, there is a distinct line to be drawn. Publicity in those matters which it is for the best interest of all concerned to have published is all right. But if you are going, let us say, to build a spur of road from your main line to some point at a distance, and you advertise your projected route prematurely, every hamlet along some other potential route will rise and bombard the Legislature with remonstrances, and you will have delays, and hold-ups, and all sorts of obstructions thrown in your way. That, surely, is not for the public interest, but it is what some of the critics of corporate rapacity would insist upon just as earnestly as on the publicity of your balance-sheets."

"There has been much gossip about the falling off of earnings on your New Haven road. Do you attribute it to the slump in business?"

I

"The earnings have not fallen off; they have increased. But the operating expenses have increased also, and out of all proportion to the earnings. We have to pay a great deal more to our employees than of old. can't blame the men for wanting more pay, in view of the enormous increase in the cost of living, which pinches them as it does the rest of us. Unluckily, the adverse conditions are cumulative. At the same time that it is costing the employee so much more to live, popular distrust and commercial uncertainty are reducing the number who can be given steady employment, as well as the capacity of the employer to pay them what they ought to have.

"It is a serious misfortune when those who have most to say about what shall be done for the regulation of a highly specialized business are, as a rule, persons who have

never studied that business from the inside. They assume that the only way to make a statute fair is to make it of universal application in all details, and to insist that the corporations subject to such statute must treat every community on the same footing instead of following the lines indicated by the natural laws of trade. This is a bad mistake. No Congress, no State Legislature, no political tribunal, can successfully instruct a railway company, for example, as to the wisest expenditure of its money for the development of its business. Every community is sure that it is best located for a commercial center; and when popular opinion is allowed to control, or strongly influence, such matters, there will follow a larger waste of time, energy, and money than we have seen in connection with the 'boom' towns of the West, with the wreck of fortunes in the East as one of the results.

Or, again, if we are going to distribute our carrier service on a geographic rather than a commercial basis, what is to become of those cities and towns which owe their prosperity chiefly to the railways, because, having been shrewd enough to offer the roads special hospitalities, they are now reaping the benefit of their foresight? Indeed, if this idea of theoretic equalization is carried far enough, we may yet see whole sections of the United States go into premature decline, because other sections happen to be better able to endure the conditions imposed uniformly on all railway traffic.

"All these things tend, as it seems to me, in one direction-Government ownership. There is plenty of business to-day for the common carriers to do with equal profit to themselves and the general public; but when matters shall have reached a point where the private owners of a railway can no longer make it pay under the terms forced upon it by the Government, what will be left but for the Government to take the property over and manage it itself? That is a consummation we should all deplore, because the enormous patronage which would be controlled by the dominant party would present temptations too strong for ordinary political human nature to resist, and the country would have to pass through another era of scandals and abuses and general demoralization. Still, we may have it thrust upon us, which, to my view, would mean the beginning of the end of our present form of government.

"So I return to my first assertion, that

we must attribute the existing depression to the suspicious mood into which the public mind has fallen, leading to ever greater and greater intrusions of the Government into

private affairs. There is nothing the matter with physical conditions of business in the United States. What we have to deal with is a state of mind."

W

HAT training would prepare a young woman as adequately for the work of a mother as a lawyer is expected to be trained for the court, the actor for the stage, the physician for the hospital, or the teacher for the school-room? To answer this we must first discern clearly the problems that a mother must meet. Leaving behind those problems of control of environment that every housewife must encounter, let us go on to the problems that arise only because of motherhood-that except for the children would never be confronted. It is with these that our present discussion is concerned.

The most obvious, of course, are the problems of the daily physical care, first in babyhood, then in childhood. Here is the baby, a little soft, limp bundle, with many active appendages, to bathe, to dress, to keep properly warm and properly cool, to hold in the right way, to feed at the right times and in the right amount and with the right kind of food. Every week, moreover, he is changing, and needs new adjustments of feeding, of sleeping, of garments, of tempera

tures.

By and by he spends more hours awake. He watches, listens, laughs, kicks, pulls, tries to play. He is so cunning! How much may he be fondled and played with? He is forming habits of physical activity and manner of response to his mother, his father, his furniture-to all persons and things. Is it any use trying to shape his character so early? Presently he begins to stand, to walk.

What sort of shoes should he wear? His teeth are being cut. May he have a pacifier or a rubber ring? He attempts to eat everything he can reach. How much may he partake of his father's diet? Sometimes he falls down and bumps and bruises

his fragile little body. He cuts his fingers, burns his hands. He has pains somewhere that he cannot locate, but that make him cry for hours. He wakens every one in the middle of a cold night by a fearsome coughing and whooping.

He wants everything he sees. of toys should he have, and many of them or few? He has ideas of his own that he wants above everything to execute. He begins to talk, and tries to repeat everything he hears. Must he go to bed at sundown, or may he stay up to play with father? He loves to hear little songs at bedtime and in the morning. His ideas become more definite and abstract, and he begins to ask questions, questions, questions about everything he sees and hears and imagines and wonders. "a 'tory," insatiably stant refrain becomes, now?"

He wants a 'tory." His con"What shall I do

By and by he starts to school. He learns to read, and is ready to devour everything of a narrative nature that he can lay hands on. He makes acquaintances among the school boys and girls, and receives some share of their ideas and experiences. How shall his mother retain his confidence and sympathy? What instruction should he have for his own protection? He must have games, a place to play. He develops still more will of his own, and determination to have his own way. His tastes in pictures, in music, in amusements, are being shaped. How young should he go to the theater? His ideals of mean and noble, of worthy and contemptible, of worthless and valuable, are being formed. Character is becoming fixed. Shall he be influenced to join the church? Is it better to allow him to go to work for a time, or keep him persistently in school?

Long before these obvious requirements

have come the more subtle problems of why he exists at all-of his heredity, and who shall share in that heredity; of the relations of father and mother; of the conditions for conferring life to him that will be most favorable and benign for him; of how he should be cared for, and his mother until his birth; of how both mother and father shall share in the responsibility for his life; of how all these problems shall be met with graciousness and beauty and joy, with due sense of responsibility and self-control, and in harmony with nature's laws.

No amount of poetry, of beautiful reveries, of economic ability or social position, of classic education or naïve ignorance, of solicitous mother love or parental indifference, will annihilate these problems for the mother or miraculously gift her with scientific intelligence for solving them. She may-if she is the one woman in a hundred who has the economic means after her little child is born delegate his care and training to a hireling. She may, at that point in his history, desert him to the mercies of some philanthropic society. Or she may ignore all but the most insistent physical problems, and meet even these indifferently, crudely. But, however she may slight them, these are, nevertheless, by virtue of her motherhood, her responsibilities, her problems. She may ardently long to do the very best for her child, to develop and train him most normally and completely, but what this best is, and the method of such training and care, she can know only by exercising her intelligence and actually learning the laws of science (which is nature) and the technique of the nursery.

To be sure, these many problems involve vastly more than instruction in class-room science. The growth through her own childhood and girlhood of a natural, vigorous physical life, with abundant reserve strength and resistant nerves; the development of wholesome ideas and ideals of marriage as a responsibility and motherhood as a blessing and a trust; the cultivation of habits of self· reliance and service for others; the ready sympathy with others' troubles and joys, little or great; the fine combination of gentleness and firmness; the true perception of worth in life and in mankind, and the consequent unregretted bestowal of her love-all these are foundational. It requires so much of personality, of well-trained character, of vitality, to be the artist mother! Teachers,

acquaintances, woodland and fields, books, magazines, newspapers, plays, all have their influence in shaping her personality. But the responsibility for this fundamental training rests most heavily on the girl's own home, and chiefly upon her parents, and particularly upon her own mother. It is recog

nition of such maternal responsibility that commonly deters even far-seeing teachers. from presuming to discuss many of these important questions or to impart instruction often sorely desired or needed by a young woman; they hesitate to trespass upon this right and responsibility of the home.

Such a training in character and physique is the essential prerequisite of those sciences that will give her definite instruction in the care and training of her children. What are those sciences? Chiefly biology, hygiene, psychology, and sociology. Not that all that is commonly taught under these captions will be useful to the mother. Moreover, she may have passed" in all of them with slight value to her mother work. To suggest only a few of the subjects within these sciences that are particularly important for her training, these would include, in sociology, the importance of the family in social welfare, the history of human marriage, the development of monogamy, the experiments in other forms of marriage and why they have been abandoned, the value of courtship, the fundamental causes of divorce and of infant mortality, the conditions that have produced more of comradeship between husband and wife, the wife's share of responsibility in the home. In psychology she should learn how to study the developing mind and spirit of the little child, how to observe and make the most of the characteristics that are predominant in each stage of his development—in infancy, childhood, and adolescence, how habits are formed, how appetites and emotions are trained and she and her family might be spared many a trial of spirit, perhaps even tragedy, by teaching her to appreciate the differences in the way mind and emotions work in men and in women, and how emotions are weakened or strengthened. In biology she should gain a clear understanding of the wonderful processes of reproduction and the development of the embryo, and the biological meaning of birth, what is known of heredity and congenital influences, the influence of sunlight, food, and temperature upon growth. In hygiene she should realize the close relation between physical condition and the life