buildings is so well attended that one must go early to get a seat; a free library has not only books and periodicals, but, what is more difficult to secure, readers; a Young Men's Christian Association holds weekly meetings; a Boys' Club has put up a modest gymnasium and made it available by moderate rentals for all village organizations; a Village Improvement Society has converted an old house built in Revolutionary times into a village Homestead; two Camp-Fire groups and a Girls' Club do for the girls what the Young Men's Christian Association and the Boys' Club do for the boys. Both boys and girls were without either leadership or organization forty years ago. All these changes have taken place within the last forty years, and as my travels take me about the country they all seem to be paralleled by similar moral and intellectual gains in other towns and villages. These are the springs of our National life, and are more important than many of the events described in startling type by our daily papers.

I

What of myself? I am writing these pages on the twenty-fifth day of June, 1915; on the eighteenth of next December I shall be eighty years of age. I cannot believe it. I seem to myself to be in better health than I was at eighteen. My interest in present problems and my hopes for the future of my country are as great as they ever were. take an active part in the editorial direction of The Outlook. I have given up lyceum lecturing; but I gladly share with others, by both voice and pen, in the public discussions of the questions of the day; and, save for a long summer vacation, reserved for quiet literary work, I preach at least two Sundays in the month. I should preach every Sunday were it not for the protests of my children; many years ago I reached the point at which I think it wise for the father to give to the counsels of his children something of the authority of commands.

In one respect my life has succeeded beyond the dreams of my youth. I have never cared for money; perhaps if I had cared more my wife would have had an easier time, but I doubt whether we should have been happier. Nor for reputation; therefore the attacks made upon me and the misreports and misrepresentations to which I have been subjected have never much troubled

Nor for power; I like to influence, but not to command. But I have desired friends; and it sometimes seems to me that no man ever had more friends than I have. I am often stopped on the street by a stranger who thanks me for some word of counsel or inspiration received; and scarcely a week goes by that I do not receive a letter of grateful appreciation from some unknown friend whom I never shall see, and who, perhaps, has never seen me.

I have other invisible friends who people my quiet home with their companionship. I believe that death and resurrection are synonymous, that death is the dropping of the body from the spirit, that resurrection is the upspringing of the spirit from the body; and I think of my friends and companions, not as lying in the grave waiting for a future resurrection, nor as living in some distant land singing hymns in loveless forgetfulness of those they loved on earth-I think of them as a great cloud of witnesses looking on to see how we run the race that is set before us, grieved in our failures, glad in our triumphs. I think of my mother rejoicing in the joys of the boy whom she was not permitted to care for on earth; of my father still counseling me by his unspoken wisdom in my times of perplexity; of my wife giving me rest and reinvigoration by her love. So I am never lonely when I am alone; rarely restless when I am sleepless.

I believe that I have learned one secret of happiness; it is a habit easier to describe than to adopt.

We live in the past and in the future. The present is only a threshold over which we cross in going from the past into the future. We live, therefore, in our memory and in our anticipation. He who forms the habit of forgetting the unpleasant and remembering the pleasant lives in a happy past; he who forms the habit of anticipating the pleasant and striking out from his anticipation the unpleasant lives in a happy future. I have no wish to live in a fool's paradise; but it is no better to live in a fool's purgatory. therefore allow myself to anticipate evil only that I may avoid it if it is avoidable, or, if it is unavoidable, may meet it with wisdom and courage. I recall past errors, follies, and faults in order that I may learn their lesson and avoid their repetition. Then I forget them. The prophet tells me that my Father buries my sins in the depths of the sea. I have no inclination to fish them up again

I

and take an inventory. I gladly dismiss from my memory what He no more remembers against me forever. Thus my

religion is to me, not a servitude, but an emancipation; not a self-torment because of past sins, but a divinely given joy because of present forgiveness.

It is almost impossible to write freely of the experiences of one's heart to a throng of unknown readers. It is easier to portray them to an intimate friend. For this reason I transfer to these pages a few sentences which I wrote to my wife from Terre Haute during her absence in the East in the summer of 1863:

Ought we to go alway through life condemned of ourselves and thinking and feeling that God must condemn us? Is this a necessity? Is it not possible so to live that our own conscience approves us? And we have the happiness of feeling that we have the approval of God and of our own hearts? It is possible. Is it not practicable? Was it not Paul's experience? . . . It is true that we ought never to be satisfied with ourselves that our ideal of holiness ought always to outrun our attainments; that we ought always to desire something more and better. But we may be self-approved and

not self-satisfied. We may be dissatisfied and yet not self-condemned."

It is thus at eighty years of age that I look back upon the years that have passed since I imbibed something of the spirit of faith and hope and love in my grandfather's home at Farmington. I am far from satisfied with this review; but I am not self-condemned. I say to my Father, as I say to myself: I have often been defeated, but I have fought a good fight; I have often faltered and fallen, but I have kept up the race; I have been besieged all my life with doubts, and they still sometimes hammer at the gates, but I have kept my faith.

And I look forward to the Great Adventure, which now cannot be far off, with awe, but not with apprehension. I enjoy my work, my home, my friends, my life. I shall be sorry to part with them. But all my life I have stood in the bow looking forward with hopeful anticipation to the life before me. When the time comes for my embarkation, and the ropes are cast off and I put out to sea, I think I shall still be standing in the bow and still looking forward with eager curiosity and glad hopefulness to the new world to which the unknown voyage will bring me.

visitors New York is a city of per

Tennial wonders in its amusements,

in its tireless growth of sky-scrapers, and, to a comparatively small percentage, in the even more ambitious structure of its business enterprises. These are the things with which the outsider sojourning in New York City ordinarily contents himself; but what is there for him as a citizen of his own municipality, whether he hails from another great city like Chicago or San Francisco or from a country village, to learn from the experience of New York's six million inhabitants in governing themselves?

He is

That the big city has some sort of government he takes as a matter of course. dimly conscious of reading in the newspapers that it has a Mayor who speaks at public dinners, commands a police force which is engaged in an apparently endless warfare for the suppression of gunmen, and sometimes gets himself mentioned as a possibility for nomination as Governor or President, only to be forgotten invariably at the last minute when the nominating is actually done.

But the average visitor would be only more surprised, not to say shocked, than the average citizen of New York itself to learn that the Nation's biggest city is directing its affairs under a commission form of government, and has been doing so ever since the creation of Greater New York in 1898. The general tendency is to view commission government as still in the stage of doubtful experiment. Yet, in a modified form, it has demonstrated itself in the past seventeen years to be highly practicable in the second largest city in the world.

From New York's successes as well as from its mistakes under modified commission rule the other cities of the country and the towns as well may learn much. Notably, from the experience of New York City in recent years they may learn how a civic problem, whether it be the digging of a sewer ditch or the building of a $300,000,000 rapid transit system, may be solved without graft and with a minimum amount of waste.

In a city where the "Tweed Court-House" still stands in City Hall Park as an ugly monument to graft, that is accomplishing wonders. That Court-House would have

been costly at $5,000,000. The city paid $20,000,000 for it forty years ago! The question that naturally arises is, "How has the advance which renders such a scandal impossible been effected ?"

The men at present at the head of New York City's government believe that it has been due primarily to the awakening of the civic conscience by such disclosures as those which sent Tweed to jail for his Court-House grafting. To justify the trust which this awakening has placed in them they are now laboring to prevent any increase through waste in the cost of a new New York County Court-House, estimated at $17,500,000. Next, they believe that it is to be attributed to the working out of a scheme of municipal government more nearly perfect than any previously devised and in which co-operation among the city's elective administrative heads is the keystone idea.

Perhaps it was prejudice against the name commission as suggesting an innovation that impelled New York City's Charter framers to call its principal governing body of eight members the Board of Estimate and Apportionment, but a modified commission it is in effect. While the Mayor presides over its sessions and has the power of absolute veto over certain of its actions, the powers of the seven other members are so nicely balanced against his that he cannot afford to try to rule with an iron hand.

The Board of Estimate as a whole holds absolute control over the city's purse-strings, so that if a Mayor should be overbearing his associates could thwart his administration by withholding the funds necessary for the carrying out of his plans in the twenty-nine city departments which are directed by commissioners whom he appoints. The President of the Board of Aldermen and the Comptroller, the other two principal elective officers, cast the same number of votes each as the Mayor in the Board of Estimate, and are to be reckoned with particularly by him. Five Borough Presidents, each practically a mayor himself in a city which would rank alone as a municipality of the first class, cast the seven other votes among them.

Such an organization results in a system