usurers. These associations borrow upon the joint and several unlimited liability of their members, and lend money to members. Sir Horace Plunkett, formerly Director of the Irish Department of Agriculture, tells us that the Irish Co-operative Movement as a whole now includes nearly a thousand farmers' organizations, with an aggregate membership of about a hundred thousand persons; what is more, these are mostly heads of families. Its business turnover amounts to between twelve and thirteen million dollars a year. Agriculturally and economically we are therefore witnessing a new Ireland. MURDER IS MURDER which There is one feature of the developments as regards the arrest of certain alleged labor men in connection with the dynamite outrage perpetrated against the Los Angeles "Times" to especial attention should be called. If the explosion was not an accident, but the deliberate act of any man or men, it was an outrage of dastardly iniquity, for it was one of those crimes in which the murderer, in order to gratify his spite against an individual, not merely wrecks that individual's property, but with callous indifference takes the lives of scores of innocent people as an incident to the achievement of his sinister and criminal purpose. The men responsible for dynamiting the Los Angeles Times" building are responsible not only for the wreck of the newspaper offices but for the loss of many lives. 66 The arrest was made in consequence of testimony secured by Mr. Burns, who has been Mr. Heney's right-hand man in bringing to justice grafters who violated the laws of the United States in Oregon and grafters who violated the laws of California in San Francisco. He has proceeded with impartial severity against the most influential politicians and the richest business men. It happens that the men whom he has now arrested are members of a labor organization; just as men whom he formerly arrested were members of the Republican or Democratic parties or of great and wealthy corporations. It would have been a wicked thing in the former cases with which Mr. Burns had to do for leading Republicans or Democrats to combine to break him down and support the accused merely because the accused belonged to their political party, and it would have been a wicked thing for big capitalists and big business men to make common cause with the capitalists against whom he proceeded merely because they were capitalists. Wherever any politician of either party or any capitalist did actually take this position, whether in the case of the men prosecuted by Mr. Burns or in any other case, The Outlook unhesitatingly and severely denounced them. In exactly the same spirit I state the convictions of The Outlook in expressing its hearty reprobation of the conduct of those labor leaders who, without waiting to know anything of the facts of the case, have at once flown publicly to the defense of the alleged dynamiters whom Mr. Burns has now arrested, and who talk about the arrest as being part of a conspiracy against labor unions. No worse service can be rendered by labor union leaders to the cause of unionism than that which they render when they seek to identify the cause of unionism with the cause of any man guilty of a murderous attack of this nature. I have no idea whether the men arrested on Mr. Burns's statements are or are not guilty; the labor leaders in question have no idea whether or not they are. They are entitled to an absolutely fair trial. absolutely fair trial. If they have no money to provide counsel for themselves, then it would be entirely proper for any body of men to furnish them the requisite funds, simply as an incident in securing them a fair trial. But it is grossly improper to try to create a public opinion in favor of the arrested men simply because the crime of which they are accused is one committed against a capitalist or a corporation, and because the men who are charged with committing it are members of a labor union. This is an iniquity as gross as it would have been if when, three years ago, the Sugar Trust was indicted for swindling operations in the New York CustomHouse, the forces of organized capital had been put behind the indicted men on the ground that the attack on capitalists guilty of crime meant an attack on all capital. Undoubtedly there have been in the past. repeated cases where representatives of THE RUSSIAN IN FICTION capital have thus endeavored to prevent successful assault on abuses committed in the interest of capital; and in every such case, no matter how wealthy or influential the offender, The Outlook believes that he should be condemned. It now takes the same attitude, when the question is one of identifying the cause of unionism with alleged murder, that it has always taken when the question was one of identifying the cause of capital with alleged corruption; and it appeals to the honest and law-abiding laboring man exactly as it appeals to the honest and law-abiding business man; for both are, first of all, American citizens, whose attitude towards the fundamental questions of morality and good citizenship must be identical. The question of organized labor or organized capital, or of the relations of either with the community at large, has nothing whatever to do with this issue. All we are now concerned with is the grave and vital question of fact whether or not the accused men have been guilty of murder, and of murder under circumstances of peculiar foulness and atrocity. Whether we do or do not approve of the policy of the Los Angeles Times"-and The Outlook very heartily disapproves of its policy on certain matters-has nothing whatever to do with the question. The stern repression of murderous violence— above all, of murderous violence under circumstances of such cowardly infamy as always accompany the use of dynamitemust, of necessity, be a prime need of any civilization calling itself such. Whether the man attacked is a capitalist or a socialist, a wage-worker or a professional man, has nothing whatever to do with the question; and whether the man attacking him does or does not belong to any organization, whether of labor or capital, whether social or religious, has nothing to do with the question. The one and only question is as to the guilt or innocence of the men accused. Any man who seeks to have them convicted if they are innocent is guilty of a crime against the State, and any man who seeks to have them acquitted if guilty is also guilty of a crime against the State. THEODORE ROOSEVELT. A book of literary information and interpretation which deals in moderate compass with a large subject and is as trustworthy and interesting as Professor William Lyon Phelps's "Essays on Russian Novelists," at a time when the Russian situation commands the attention of the whole world, is a boon to the much overladen "general reader." The Russian people have been described more than once with insight by such men as Melchior de Vogüé, Brandes, Leroy-Beaulieu, Colquhoun, and others; there are serious books dealing with Russian political history and economic conditions and the present crisis; there is a very interesting account of the Russian popular epic in Miss Hapgood's Epic Songs of Russia." Mr. Phelps's volume supplements all these various studies and contributes to the knowledge of Russia by its clear and full interpretation of the genius and the work of the writers` of Russian fiction. That fiction is nota ble, not only because it gave impulse to some of the most marked tendencies in fiction at the close of the nineteenth century, but because, in an almost magical, way, it presents the physiognomy of the Russian people, their innermost thoughts, the reaction of natural and political conditions on their temperament, their attitude of mind. Indeed, to read Russian fiction is to read Russian history written from the inside, and to see Russia portrayed in a series of types and by writers of almost unrivaled power of characterization. In such a character as Rudin, one of Turgenev's masterpieces of portraiture, one reads the history of a thousand years of Russian experience as it shapes a sensitive, emotional, mystical nature without much power of initiative. Mrs. Ritchie. once remarked on the striking resemblance of Turgenev to her father, Thackeray, and reports this interesting incident: One afternoon the Russian novelist promised to call on her the next day. He did not come. Two days later she met him at the house of a friend. He came straight to her, and said: "I was so sorry that I could not go to see you; so very sorry; but I was prevented. Look at my thumbs," he added, holding up his hands, thumbs downward, see The Macmillan Company, New York. 66 how small they are! People with such little thumbs can never do what they intended to do. They always let themselves be prevented." This is a trifling incident, but packed with significance, not only because it explains many of the most striking personages in Turgenev's novels, but because it is characteristic of a great number of gifted, restless, futile Russians. Russia has shown an enormous capacity for passive resistance, as Napoleon learned to his cost; but since the death of Peter the Great she has shown very little genius for aggressive military action. This type is now giving way to a more resolute, courageous, and effective type. It has been produced in part by the melancholy of the enormous Russian landscapes, the great forests, the almost interminable steppes on which no dividing lines appear, the vastness of the lakes, the magnitude of the rivers, the sweep of the wind over a vast country as over our own prairies, the bitterness of the winter climate, the shortness of the summer. These physical conditions have bred in the Russian, combined with his natural mysticism and tendency to fatalism, a melancholy temper, a sense of the futility of things; and when one looks at the list of Russian novels by Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Gorky, Andreev, one cannot but be struck by the somber tone which pervades them, by the depths of suffering they sound, by the sense of tragedy which envelops them. Perhaps no race except the Jews has ever suffered more than the Russians; and the Russians have lacked the stubborn fiber of the Jew which has given him an enormous capacity for enduring and surviving. In one of Gorky's novels a peasant answers the question: "What does the word Life mean to us? A feast? No. Work? No. A battle? Oh, no! For us Life is something merely tiresome, dull-a kind of heavy burden. In carrying it we sigh with weariness and complain of its weight. Do we really love Life? The Love of Life! The very words sound strange to our ears! We love only our dreams of the future-and this love is Platonic, with no hope of fruition." Suffering, Mr. Phelps reminds us, is the corner-stone of Russian life, and therefore an omnipresent element in Russian fiction. In all literature there is perhaps no more pathetic story than Dostoyevsky's "Poor Folk," certainly no more tragic figure than his Sonia; and it is not easy to imagine a more heartbreaking tale than Gorky's "Twenty-six and One." through suffering the Russian consciousness has acquired a quality which, when it finds free expression, is likely to give the world fiction, poetry, and music full of the deepest and the most beautiful things. It has already done so. Tschaikowsky's "Symphonie Pathétique" holds perhaps the very first place in the music of suffering. There is in modern fiction no greater story than Tolstoy's "Anna Karénina," nor is there any in which the tragedy of the broken law, the isolation of the offender, the marshaling of the forces of the universe against the lawbreaker, are conveyed with more vital energy of style. Nor does any convey a deeper sense of the cosmic force and order behind these things. Sixty years ago Gogol asked the question, "What is it that is most truly Russian?" and answered it: "The value of the Russian nature consists in this—that it is capable, more than any other, of receiving the noble word of the Gospel, which leads man toward perfection." "Pity for a fallen human creature," wrote Dostoyevsky, "is a strong Russian trait. There is no spectacle more touching than our people offer when they go to assist and cheer on their way those who are condemned to exile in Siberia. Every one brings what he can-provisions, money, perhaps only a few consoling words. They feel no irritation against the criminal; neither do they indulge in any exaggerated sentiment which would make a hero of him. They do not request his autograph or his likeness; neither do they go to stare at him out of curiosity, as often happens in more civilized parts of Europe. There is here something more; it the criminal, or wrest him from the hands of is not that they wish to make excuses for justice, but they would comfort him in his fallen condition; console him as a brother, as Christ has told us we should console each other." It is this vast, almost illimitable possibility of spiritual development created by centuries of suffering which gives to the Russian movement of to-day, and to its fiction, a prophetic quality, as if everything that Russia had done so far forms a prepara tory stage in a racial development of extraordinary richness and variety. From the day when Gogol wrote "The Revizor," which marked the liberation of the Russian genius in fiction and was the guidepost which indicated its future direction, to this day of Gorky and Andreev, the procession of Russian life and the varieties of Russian character have been reflected in its novels as in a great mirror. In "Taras Bulba" Gogol wrote a story of Cossack life, an epic of daring and semi-barbarous fidelity, with something of the out-of-door atmosphere and the splendid directness of Homer. In "Dead Souls" he described with searching sincerity and power the corruption which penetrated Russian society even in his time. Turgenev, the most admirable artist of them all, and possibly the finest artist who has appeared in fiction, held the mirror up to the society of his time with wonderful fidelity, and by the exercise of the faculty of selection, denied to most of the Russian novelists, put into small volumes the very substance of Russian life. 66 sins Dostoyevsky committed great against art; many of his novels are almost without form; in very few of them has the faculty of selection any play. But when one has read Crime and Punishment," "Memoirs of the House of the Dead," "The Idiot," to say nothing of such wonderful short pieces as The Chief Inquisitor," he has taken into his heart the very tragedy of the Russian. Tolstoy's "War and Peace" is a long scries of episodes, a kind of panoramic résumé of tragic years of Russian history; of colossal length, but lighted up, chapter after chapter, by the very genius of description and characterization; while his "Anna Karenina," like "Vanity Fair," holds a place by itself. Gorky has gathered up the dregs of Russian misery. Many of his stories make one feel as if the River Volga had given birth to a whole race of men and women out of whom the spiritual and moral life had been beaten by incredibly hard conditions. No other novelist has drawn so depressing a picture of the disintegration of character effected by prolonged and hopeless misery of physical and social condition. In his broad portraiture of the disclo sure of the Russian genius in the field of art in which it has made great achievements Mr. Phelps has written a book of authoritative racial interpretation. THE GREAT LEADER The story is told of Abraham Lincoln that on one occasion a delegation called on him and at the end of the conference one of the delegates said, "I hope, Mr. Lincoln, that God is on our side," to which Mr. Lincoln replied, "That does not concern me." The startled delegate responded, "What! It does not concern you to have God on our side?” "No," replied Mr. Lincoln; what concerns me is that we shall be on God's side." 66 It goes This is not a play on words. to the very heart of the difference between true and false piety. False piety says to itself, "I have something I want to accomplish in the world, and I want a sleeping partner of great ability who will help me to accomplish it and who will not interfere too much with me in my methods." True piety says to itself: "God is in this world working out some great, beneficent design. I want to understand what it is he is accomplishing, and I want to work with him, obedient to his will." False piety wants God on our side. . True piety wants to be on God's side. Evolution involves the doctrine not only that there is a creative power, a directive mind, and an ultimate purpose in nature, so that God is the Great Architect, but also that there is a creative power, a directive mind, and an ultimate purpose in history, so that God is the Great Leader. This is what Julia Ward Howe meant by the refrain in her Battle Hymn of the Republic, "Our God is marching on." This is what the Psalmist meant when he prayed, Show me thy ways, O Lord, teach me thy paths." This is what Jesus Christ meant when he said, "Not what I will, but what Thou wilt." 66 History is not a mere series of disconnected and purposeless events. To know history is not merely to know a table of unrelated dates, or the names and characters of kings, or the record of great battles or great campaigns. The human race is developing as the tree from the seed and the man from the babe. To know history is to know how that development has taken place and is taking place; to know what is its beginning, what the history of its progress, and what the hope of its future. It is to trace in that development the creative power, the directive mind, and the ultimate purpose which give to history its significance and its unity. "Evolution," says Drummond, "is the history of a process." There is and can be no process where there is not an intelligible development, and there can be no intelligible development save where the development itself is intelligent. This is the view not merely of religion but of philosophy. Says Hegel: "God governs the world; the actual working of his government-the carrying out of his plan-is the history of the world." Says Ralph Waldo Emerson: "There is one mind common to all individual men. . . . Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent. Of the works of this mind history is the record." This is the view of the historian. Different historians interpret differently the directive mind and the ultimate purpose. But whether it is Voltaire writing the histories of Charles XII and Louis XIV, or Buckle writing the history of civilization, or Hallam tracing the constitutional development of England, or John Richard Green narrating the history of the English people, they all recognize an orderly development, controlled by forces, or a force, superior to the human wills that occupy the stage in the successive scenes enacted. It is not more certain that there is a theme which the orchestra is playing, a book which the compositors are setting up, a drama which the actors on the stage are enacting, a planned campaign in which the soldiers on the battlefield are taking part, than it is that there is a directing purpose which gives significance to the seemingly individual activities which go to make up the course of human history. This vision of the poets, this conclusion of the philosophers and the historians, is abundantly confirmed by the course of human events. The recognition of this fact is the secret of all true greatness, the underlying cause of all enduring achieve ment. The really great men of the world are those who have seen what the Eternal is doing in their own age and have cooperated with him to achieve his ends. It is because Paul and his associates understood what God was doing in the first century that they comprehended the secret of their age and proved themselves more powerful than Roman philosopher or Roman emperor. It was because Elizabeth in England and William of Orange in Holland understood that liberation of the conscience and the intellect from ecclesiastical despotism which was in the divine purpose in the seventeenth century that they made England and Holland more powerful than Spain, and because Philip II of Spain and Louis XIV of France did not understand this divine design that their ignorant policies inflicted on their countries injuries from which those countries have not yet recovered. It was because George Washington and his associates comprehended that great, divinely directed democratic movement which characterized the close of the eighteenth century that the American colonies proved too powerful for the forces of the greatest empire then on the globe. The failure of the South in the Civil War was due to no lack of political sagacity, to no lack of patient persistence or self-sacrificing heroism, but to the fact that Southern leaders did not comprehend that great movement toward nationalism which at once liberated and unified Italy, converted the German provinces into a German Empire, and began the incompleted process which is yet to make of Great Britain and her colonies a Greater Britain. The stars still fight in their courses against Sisera, and it is in vain to fight against them. As this creative power, directive mind, and ultimate purpose interprets the great movements of history, so the understanding of what this animating Spirit is achieving in the world in any particular epoch is the secret of true greatness and the explanation of enduring achievement. It was this which made Paul greater than Seneca, Luther greater than Leo X, Cromwell greater than Laud and Stafford, William of Orange greater than the Duke of Alva, Washington greater than George the Third, and Abraham Lincoln greater than Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, |