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divided into single-dozen boxes; the chickens wrapped fit for carrying home; fruit and vegetables in convenient-sized hampers; and hams and bacon strips wrapped neatly enough to lay on your office desk. By snapping up the trifles of packing and shipping the country producer and big wholesaler are finding a solution to the direct-marketing problem. It is an office boy's job of an hour or two to apportion the various orders to the members, wrap them in paper and twine bought by a three per cent tax levied on members of the club for that purpose, and have them ready for each man to take home with him at night.

That the idea does really work out and pay in substantial savings is proved by the rapid growth of the movement and the immense popularity of the plan among city workers.. It is particularly interesting to note that several large Eastern clubs are fostered by the employers of the members to the extent of the firm carrying the club's bills on its own books, paying the producers itself, and debiting each member on pay-day for the amount of foodstuffs charged against his account. One large Eastern club in a suburban town maintains a delivery service to the homes of its members for approximately five cents per package, and, in spite of the added cost, has rapidly increased the amounts of its purchases. The margin of saving, even with delivery cost, is enough of an inducement; for the suburb, like many another town outside of the conventional system of foodstuffs distribution, pays unusually high prices to its retailers. Co-operation has saved the members between twenty and twenty-five per cent in their weekly provision bills.

It is, of course, out of the question to suppose that the large cities of the country will ever dispense with the present chain of middlemen to take up direct marketing via the buying club route. The examples given above are interesting and sensational in their accomplishment of lowering the cost of foodstuffs for a comparatively minute portion of our population. But practically nowhere near twenty per cent of the city folk will ever try it and continue it. Yet the buying club movement is none the less a movement of real economic importance. It has a regulative effect. Even within the last few months it has proved its capacity for hammering down the exorbitant level of prices which have been imposed upon the public in many centers of the densely populated district east of the Mississippi. Every ton of butter, eggs, meat,

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and vegetables brought into a town through the newly dredged channel of the buying club forces upon the retailer the necessity for a simplification of the distribution system where it is possible to simplify. In some cases it has resulted in the retailers themselves turning to the very supply fields drawn upon by the buying club, and thus getting their stocks direct from producers where before they had been buying from jobbers and other wholesalers. Buying club competition in the town of Nyack, New York, forced the prices of staples down nearly twenty-five per cent for an entire winter, and resulted in the carrying of fresher and more varied stocks in several retail stores.

The consumers' end of the buying club movement is profitable, both directly when club members save money and indirectly when a family profits by a regulated price level. But to the farmer and country manufacturer of food products it has been even more profitable-to many a man it has meant a brand-new sort of market with twenty to one hundred per cent better prices for his goods than he ever got before. The creation of thousands of buying club markets anxious to buy direct from country sources has developed a small class of business farmer whose function is really that of a mail-order house. And, as has been suggested, in addition to the clubs themselves, often city retailers have come direct to the country to do their buying. An egg gatherer in a small New York town, by catering specially to the buying club trade of New York and Buffalo, developed a business of $5,000 a month within six months. Through quotations on the express weekly bulletins he secured the patronage of club after club, until, as is frequently the case in industrial work, he was forced to request the transportation company to withdraw his name from the bulletin, because of too many orders received.

There are innumerable instances of the creation of wider and more profitable markets for farmers through the buying club movement. By standardizing their produce at the source—that is, by carefully grading and neatly packing their foodstuffs for shipmentlettuce-growers, apple-growers, and honeyproducers have found new channels for the disposition of their goods at much better prices than they received when marketing in the old way. Sixty thousand pounds of honey were marketed via express in small consignments during a single season for one

Michigan producer. Buying clubs and small retailers in Eastern cities took the greater part of his output. He had no transportation charges to pay, no sales overhead expense, and, besides, he got fifteen per cent higher prices than ever before. Similar cases of profit to the farmer by this "cutting across lots" to market his produce could be cited in regard to the sale of eggs, maple syrup, vegetables, and cheese. For some time the large creameries of Ohio and Indiana have been receiving orders direct from consumers' clubs and small retailers at the rate of forty thousand pounds per month—not an enormous figure, considering the immense quantities of butter eaten, but none of this business existed heretofore. It is a direct trade and has sprung up and increased quickly, due to the buying club movement. The city of

Paterson, New Jersey, with forty-odd buying clubs, "imports" butter at the rate of nine thousand pounds per month direct from the creamery. A little over two years ago no such direct market was available for the butter manufacturers.

It is of significance that the producer has found a way to market his stuff direct to consumers in the city, even if it be only a small portion of his crop. For it tends to break him away from the unfortunate notion that he is wholly dependent on the chain of middlemen which looms up between him and what he considers a fair profit. If he chooses to be a business farmer, a manufacturer of country produce with sales relations direct with consumers' clubs or retailers, he has a fair chance to "do it now" under the buying club patronage.

H

AVE you ever seen a man who had been shot dead? Or, rather, have you ever entered a house in which

a man had been murdered and the body of the victim was still warm? It is an unpleasant picture to call up, but it is the only way to give some idea of how it feels when you stealthily enter the town of X.

It used to be a flourishing little Austrian city before the war, alive and gay with a civic life and a civic pride of its own. Then came the audacious dash of the Italians for the lower Isonzo, and the Austrian soldiers were driven across the river. There they turned around under cover of their mountain fortresses and shot the little city dead. They might have stopped then, because it is just like a corpse and cannot fight back even if it would but they have riddled its body time and again, uselessly, cruelly, wickedly.

I say this because I saw it done when I went to " view the body" as a sort of neutral coroner, and these are my findings upon an actual inspection.

We had driven from Army Headquarters

past the rear lines and encampments through that zone I have heretofore described as being within reach of the long-range guns of the enemy, and where civilians still prefer to take the chance of an occasional bombardment to the severance of the old home ties.

Now we were leaving all that behind us for more exposed highways. Where there was no shelter of wall or cover of trees on the highroad the military chauffeur would put on full power and the machine covered the open stretch on racing time. It is really wonderful how fast an automobile can be made to go when it is a question of dodging shells it is a speed test which our automobile selling agents might consider.

As we drove into the square of the murdered city a strange sensation seized one; it was very, very still, with houses which were more impressive because of their look of having been absolutely and hastily untenanted than on account of their dismantled appearance.

In all this solitude a lone sentinel presented arms to our colonel as we got out of the car. He was the only fighting man visible, and.

of no military value, but he was guarding the corpse. You looked down deserted streets, with roses blooming on shattered walls; noble horse-chestnut trees with their white spring blossoms stood majestically still near roofless houses; you saw the well-laid-out little parks of the town, cool and refreshing, but with the grass of the lawns grown high and ragged. A desperate loneliness was all around the place.

Over all this stillness there gripped at your heart a strange, unexplainable feeling that you were not alone in this solitude; that somewhere, perhaps under your feet or in the shelter of those trees, some one watching.

was

You could see nothing of human life except the shell of its social expression; there were churches with their carved doors nailed up, there were public buildings with broken panes and awnings in shreds, schools and asylums with doors ajar and shutters thrown open, like corpses of dead men with their glassy, staring eyes turned towards the light. You missed the children at play, you missed the women at the thresholds of houses, you missed every kind of human life in that deserted place which was meant to be lived in. You missed the horses and the oxen, the rumble of carts, the tread of feet. Had a dog jumped out at you, it would have been like meeting a dear, beloved friend.

The cannonading was a welcome break in the silence, because it made you feel that, after all, something was going on, and that that something was war, and not some secret, impenetrable, sinister action behind your back. That furtive sense which gripped us on our arrival had been awful; it seemed so wretched to force this sort of a fate upon a trim, living town like this, a town which had comfortably housed so many peaceful people and had obviously given her citizens so many legitimate pleasures and social advantages.

As you walked stealthily by its schools and theaters, past its once busy shops and stores, and gazed at its pleasantly gardened inns, all snugly within its stout medieval walls, the wretchedness of the fate visited upon it seemed a great injustice. A new feeling came upon me, a new realization of the truth: the little town, after all, had not been shot dead; it had been wounded and then buried alive. It had, I now perceived, some signs of life, however weak, but it couldn't move; it did not have a chance to fight back.

The Italians complain that this town is an

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I

example of how the Austrians make a civic center of no military value uninhabitable when they have to give it up, merely through wantonness and the lust of destruction. cannot pass on the justice of this complaint, but apparently there was only a handful of soldiers there, doing police duty, and absolutely no artillery or defenses of any kind. The place lies on an open plain by a broad river's edge where nothing can be masked.

We walked carefully about the town, with the feeling that some terrible pest had ravaged its citizens and eaten like a gangrene at its very walls. The havoc made by the mere air suction of the Austrian three-hundredand-fives is amazing, while some of the enemy's hits have caused the most bizarre wounds in certain buildings. Half a house would be down, while the household effects of the other half, although it was close to the edge of the "smash," were perfectly all right, even the glass articles uninjured. Most of the house doors were ajar, and through them one could see the furniture thrown about in confusion; or a wall would be left standing with carefully starched curtains at the windows as a frame for the vista of blue sky through the roofless home. Alas for the loving hands which had labored to make that home bright!

From one of the houses came a few bars of music, a few cracked notes of a piano which had weathered the storm so far, touched by a passing soldier; the notes sounded like a mocking, derisive voice. Where bombs or shells had not struck, the walls bore signs of rifle shots; and you could gather handfuls of Austrian bullets along the highways. We were ordered to keep close to the left of the streets and hug the walls, so as not to be seen by the enemy on the near-by mountains; a few days before the Austrians had caught sight of a group of war correspondents and had poured shrapnel for two hours along their road of retreat, forcing the representatives of the mighty press to lie flat on their stomachs till the fire had ceased.

As we drew closer to the end of the town, nearer to the enemy's lines, the houses were battered into all sorts of strange, dead attitudes, like men you see on a battlefield after an assault on a wired intrenchment. The silence, when unpunctuated by the cannonading, added to the awful brooding feeling which seemed to hang stealthily and furtively over everything. The scene was so oppressive that in the end any sociable thing, even if smashed and in ruins, had a sort of wild

charm and mad attraction. The awkwardly painted signs on the Osterie yielded the pleasurableness of works of art; a bureau or a pitcher and basin in a dismantled house made you breathe more easily. When I climbed

through the débris of the Teatro Sociale and entered one of the few boxes left standing, I felt like clapping my hands; the stage was down, but you could see the dressing-rooms at the back and the sylvan scenery in a heap in the pit. Duse had played here and the Commedia dell' Arte had found a hospitable home. The theater-goers of this Austrian town had evidently been loyal Venetians; they had raised a marble tablet to Gallina and a bust to Goldoni, masking their allegiance to Italy under a permissible admiration for Italian comedy. Somehow, after the tenseness outside, you felt strangely joyous here; thousands had laughed and enjoyed themselves right where you stood, and not so very long ago. The sense of their pleasure was still about the place, despite the havoc. I could see the throng of fathers and mothers, of children and youths, gathered here, enjoy ing the simple, imperishable art of Carlo Goldoni. The wickedness of the Teutonic military castes in disturbing a peaceful Europe never struck me as so criminal, so unnecessary, as here in this homely playhouse as I looked over the ravaged theater of this little town whose deserted streets bore every index of a laborious, peace-loving community.

I walked back in a melancholy mood towards our starting-point, where our machine was waiting. Yet as I walked the cloud lifted very quickly. Though all was desolation about us and only immovable ghosts seemed to have been left of a past busy life, yet the spell of Italian geniality was somehow making itself felt. Even a corporal's guard on the place sufficed for the miracle. I I saw the "geniality" walking down a ravaged street in the shape of a young peasant soldier with a flask of rubyred wine in one hand and a bright rose in the other. Then I became aware that there were many, many birds singing in this desolation of man, and that flowers were blooming in profusion and in fragrant loveliness all

about us.

The tenseness seemed over, and my heart exulted with every crash of the guns on the bloody mountain slopes beyond. I felt certain that, though this poor stricken town had been "buried alive," the good wine of the country, the humble wholesome bread, and the kindly care of that handful of good guardsmen would keep its poor heart going until the glad day when its hurt body would be lifted gently out of its living tomb and the Italian tricolor run up over those ancient walls which were its historic pride and which the Venetians built against the barbarians centuries ago.

From the Italian Front, May, 1916.

A

T the period when the tides of lite rise most rapidly and the social nature of the youth unfolds, team play, at once the most exhilarating and the most developing form of play, makes its most powerful appeal. Now the personal interest sinks to its proper level, and with passionate abandon the player throws his fine young powers into the struggle, not for his own sake, but for the glory of the team. It is

1 The first article in this series appeared in The Outlook of August 23, and the second in the issue of August 30. Another article will follow.-THE EDITORS.

not the danger nor the touch of brutality that constitutes the fascination of football. It is the rhythmic soul-beat that the players feel as they fight all together as a single man; it is the absolute soul-satisfaction of a sacrifice play. It is the soul coming into its own, rising to what should be the normal plane of adult life, the plane of co-operation. This spirit of play, culminating as it does during the college period, should pass without a change into the work of life. When it does, the spirit continues to expand and the buoyancy of youth lingers. But too often the

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youth organizes his life-work about himself as the center and leaves behind that fine feeling of comradeship which was the best fruit of his school life. When his country is threatened, it awakens again in his tumultuous blood, and we call it patriotism; indeed, it is never quite dead, but is, for the most part, available only for great emergencies. Yet this feeling, of all others, is the one that was meant to sweeten toil the world over. Down in the dark under the earth, in the thronging places of trade, wherever men work shoulder to shoulder, should be the spirit of the team, the spirit of the sacrifice play.

Every one, in a measure, realizes this principle The workingman bemoans the fact that the capitalist does not practice it; the capitalist laments its absence among the workingmen. All of us in our relations with society decry the selfishness of other folks. What we ought to perceive is that, while no one alone can revolutionize institutions, each one can infuse this spirit into his own daily work. Suppose your desk is next to that of a curmudgeon; he cares for no one, and, naturally, no one cares for him. His crusty manner costs the firm something occasionally, as crusty ways always do. He makes a mistake now and then, besides. Now, if you desire to try the co-operative plan, you will, when possible, unobtrusively prevent the consequences to the firm of his mistakes and his disposition. If necessary, make a sacrifice play of a few extra minutes at your desk and a little time and thought to keep him smoothed down, for the sake of the work. There will be other opportunities, many of them, for you quietly to further the interests of the firm, if you study the people about you and try to work with them. You will not be so sensitive about being imposed upon, since you will get your mind upon the work

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itself and will not notice many trivial things except where they affect the success of the day's work. Many of the rest may be pretty poor team players, but that need not spoil your sport. In fact, if you win against odds, it will be only the more stimulating. It is true that this attitude is likely to win appreciation and recognition from employers. But if you do these things with your mind on the promotion, you may get the promotion just the same, but you will have spoiled the game. It is absolutely forgetting yourself in these larger ideas and interests that exhilarates and refreshes the spirit.

Paul

Every new study of the life of the Apostle Paul leaves us with fresh wonder at the buoyancy of his spirit. He had tasted toil under trying and discouraging conditions, he bore heavy burdens in loneliness, but nothing aged his soul. Within him something always sang. And when we read his declaration, "We are God's fellow-workers," we believe we have an echo of the song that never failed him. Nor do we think he was less conscious of working with God when he wove at his loom than when he preached on Mars Hill. loved to use the great games of his time as illustrations of spiritual things, because he felt their spiritual meaning. He would understand the view-point that identifies the great passion that fired his soul with the simple, self-forgetful joy of the child doing his best that his side may win. It was Jesus who set a little child in the midst that the grownups might learn from him. Every honest worker has a right to the same conviction that glorified life for Paul. God is doing his utmost for the well-being of this world. Whatever contributes to that end helps him to carry out his great plans, and is therefore full of interest and importance for that reason, if all other reasons should fail.