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HE South has furnished its quota of leaders to the country, both political and religious, both good and bad. But now she comes forward with a new kind of leadereconomic Moses; a woman preaching a gospel that must be lived up to, not only by the South, but by every section of the country that hopes to get on a permanently prosperous basis.

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This new leader is Mrs. G. H. Mathis, of Gadsden, Alabama. Mrs. Mathis, by example and by word, has quickened thousands of men and women in the South to a realization that must raise what we eat" if ever we are to plant our feet upon the solid road and go forward with the knowledge that our work will bring full returns despite wars and rumors of wars, stock market disasters, or industrial slumps. And the South, accepting and in part living up to the economic gospel preached by Mrs. Mathis, is already on that solid road, and is already enjoying such prosperity as she has not had in half a century.

To understand Mrs. Mathis's herculean task, just take a brief survey of the Cotton Belt prior to the European war. For years on years the South had been supplying the world with the bulk of its cotton. With cotton at twelve or fifteen cents a pound, the snow-white staple brought hundreds of millions of dollars into the Cotton Belt every fall. And yet with these vast sums pouring into the cities, towns, and hamlets, the South remained poor; and for the same reason that so many people continue to be poor-they buy everything they eat. Now the individual family may not spend a very large sum for food in a year, but this sum in most cases runs over that sharp economic line where profit ends and debt begins. If the family had just been able to save that ten dollars spent for potatoes, that nine dollars that went for tomatoes, that fifty dollars for butter and cream, and that other fifty for canned goods, it would have had a little surplus at the end of the year, instead of being in debt to the merchant.

All the South's money went to the Central West for foods and foodstuffs. The Central West, even with its high-priced land and rigorous winters, gradually grew rich at the expense of the South with its low-priced lands and mild climate. Figures

compiled from the car records in every county in the State show that in 1914 Alabama alone sent $106,000,000 North for food for man and beast. Other Cotton Belt States sent proportionate

sums.

Result: when the European war broke, and cotton that had cost eight cents a pound to produce went down to five cents a pound, the South was without money, without food, and with an immense debt to shoulder as well. Frantic appeals for Govern ment aid were made to Washington-appeals backed by power. ful influence. With the hope of quick results the "Buy-a-Bale" movement was started, and it spread from New Orleans to Chicago. But it brought little actual benefit because the cotton bought at ten cents a pound was such a small part of the crop. At best it was but a temporary makeshift.

It remained for Mrs. Mathias to bring the clear, true mes sage of economic salvation. "Raise what you eat and make cotton your surplus money crop," was the gospel she preached throughout the Central South. She had done this on her own farm, and she knew she was right. By living up to this gospel she had increased the value of eight-dollar-an-acre land to forty and fifty dollars an acre. She had taken shiftless tenants and made of them responsible and productive citizens.

She, had helped some of them to own their homes and to feel, for the first time, that they had responsibilities and were a part of the community. She had gone into partnership with her tenants-black and white-and had made them "feed themselves" and have a surplus besides; she had helped them start bank accounts and build up the land; and in building up the land and becoming independent they had built up in themselves latent manhood and womanhood, pride in success and ambition to progress.

Mrs. Mathis had done all these things on her farm in Alabama some time before even the faintest rumble in Europe. She had realized that soil fertility is the basis of all wealth, and that the conservation and proper use of this wealth is the foundation of all industry and all solid prosperity. And so when cotton fell to five cents, and the South was looking with terri

fied eye into the future and asking, "What shall we do to be saved?" Mrs. Mathis had ready the true message of salvation. And it had nothing in common with the late unlamented "Buy-a-Bale" movement.

She first delivered this message at Birmingham to farmers, bankers, merchants, manufacturers, professional men, and to women. And this message, so clear, so simple, so direct, aroused to action those who heard it. This woman, reared in the South and loving the South, had gone to the root of the whole vast problem the selling of cotton to buy food, absentee landlordism, and the consequent depletion of soil fertility.

"Man alive, this is the message the whole South should hear now!" declared a banker who was present. And so the bankers of Alabama got together, voted a sum of money to Mrs. Mathis, and asked her to visit every part of Alabama.

She accepted the invitation, conscious that she could help lift her native State out of its distress. She went to the cities, to the towns, and to the cross-roads. Everywhere the people flocked to hear her men and women in every walk, from the big plantation owner down to his humble Negro tenant. Never had any political orator-and there have been some noted and notorious political orators in Alabamanever had one of them in the heat of a campaign been received with such enthusiasm and earnestness as greeted Mrs. Mathis everywhere she went. "We must feed ourselves was the phrase on thousands of tongues and the resolve in thousands of hearts.

Mrs. Mathis not only gave the inspiration but she outlined the methods that must be followed by landlords and tenants. Here, there, and everywhere she induced landlords to give up the old plan of renting so much land for so much cotton, and to take personal supervision of their plantations and rent the land on the crop-sharing basis, the tenant to get two-thirds and the owner one-third. She persuaded the landlords to supervise the planting and the cultivation of forage crops as well as cotton. Her own method was that of pure Socialism in an absolute monarchy. The landowner was master of the system itself, but the system provided for complete partnership in the work and the fairest division of the results of the year's labor. She told

brought the planting of legumes, for building up the soil that constant cotton culture had drained of its fertility. Her work brought silos, fences, and increased acreage in oats and corn. She heralded the beginning of the New South-the South that will make cotton its money crop and produce the necessities of life as well; foodstuffs for its own use and for other parts of the country too.

The East sent for Mrs. Mathis. For several weeks she was in Philadelphia, New York, and other Eastern centers upon invitation to help the East meet the rising cost of living by telling how the South has met it. And to the East she has given rock-bottom truths. "You cannot continue the way you are going. The ice is thin, and it is bound to crack. Your cities and their high wages have drawn labor from your farms within two years to such an extent that the farms have ceased to produce enough to feed your cities at reasonable cost. Three or four States in the Central West cannot feed you and

the landlords that they owed it to the South, to themselves, and to their tenants to plan and supervise the work of the tenants and yet make the tenants full partners. She showed what this system had done on her farm and how it would make a new South if carried out on even half the plantations in the South. The landlords, in debt for foodstuffs already bought and consumed by tenants, were in a desperate situation. They took Mrs. Mathis at her word and went to work to "feed themselves" and help the South feed itself.

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The people of Mississippi and of Arkansas sent for Mrs. Mathis to come over into Macedonia and help us." She went. Messages for help came from other parts of the South, and this Alabama woman answered them in person. She touched the economic heart of the South and it throbbed with new life and with de termination to win through new methods-the methods of "feeding ourselves and making our cotton the surplus money crop." Mrs. Mathis brought more live stock into the South. She

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Mrs. Mathis is now urging the South to follow up its work of feeding ourselves and making cotton the surplus money crop by making live stock an even bigger "money crop" than cotton. She sees ahead for the South such production in live stock as will not only make millions for the Southern people with the coming higher prices for beef and pork, but such as will build. up soil fertility to increase production of other crops.

Mrs. Mathis's work, as revolutionary and as successful as it has been, is only starting in the South. She is the South's new agricultural and economic leader who has pointed out the sure route to travel, and the South is on this route to-day. She is telling the South and showing the South how it can really come into its own, not through politics, but through work; not by electing a President of the United States, but by believing in and working for old General Diversification and his running mate, General Prosperity.

Montgomery, Alabama.

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HOPE that in suggesting a relation between self-interest and patriotism I shall not be accused of iconoclasm in my attitude toward things spiritual. Patriotism in many of its aspects is a manifestation of spirituality that glorifies those from whom it emanates, the cause that inspires it, the sacrifices that it incites, and the enmities that it tries to justify.

This is the sort of patriotism by which Joan of Arc was animated. It is a sublimated devotion to a thing that we have idealized, by virtue of which we become willing and glad to endure hardship, distress, and even death in its defense.

It contains an element of the heroic, and has also a quantum of vanity in its composition, for it is oftenest generated by crowd contact and is unconsciously stimulated by the hope of winning popular approval.

In his book upon "The Crowd," published in 1897, Gustave Le Bon, a Frenchman, says:

It is crowds rather than isolated individuals that may be induced to run the risk of death to secure the triumph of a creed or an idea, that may be fired with enthusiasm for glory and honor, that are led on, almost without bread and without arms, as in the age of the Crusades to deliver the tomb of Christ from the infidel, or, as in '93, to defend the fatherland. Such heroism is without doubt somewhat unconscious, but it is of such heroism that history is made. Were peoples to be credited only with the great actions performed in cold blood, the annals of the world would register but few of them.

In his recent and fascinating book upon "The Crowd in Peace and War," Sir Martin Conway expresses the same idea. He traces the spirit of patriotism by which England is now animated to the Anglo-Saxon habit of public assemblage, and

says:

What any generation can accomplish in faith and growth is little compared with what has been accomplished for them by the generations that have gone before. This is evident enough in the case of material possessions and the great treasure of the world's art, but it is still more true for the world's ideals. It is these that are the most precious of all its belongings, and for the preservation of these it has, not individuals, however great, but crowds to thank. For let me declare again that it is in crowds that ideals reside. It is they that incorporate them and they that transmit them. An individual may invent an ideal, but unless he can get it incorporated in a crowd it is barren of effect and dies with him. Rail against the crowd as we may for its intolerance, its pride, its fickleness, its lack of measure, and all the other shortcomings of which we are only too easily aware, it yet remains true that upon crowds our spiritual life depends, that from them we draw our enthusiasms, and to them we owe those flames of love and passion and glory which make the life of each individual the splendid opportunity that it is. A crowd that has never come physically together gains greatly in vigor if it can be in whole or even in part embodied. If it can be seen it will bring to bear on outsiders that attractiveness which every embodied crowd possesses. If it can see itself, it will grow hot.

Our own observation and experience corroborate what these two students of psychology say. Patriotism is exceedingly difficult to sustain unless it is popular and excites the admiration of the crowd. As Sir Martin Conway says: "If the crowd can see itself, it will grow hot."

As long as the excitement caused by a new and unexpected crisis lasts, it is easy to be patriotic. None of us would dare to be otherwise. Pride, which is the satisfaction that we feel in the approval of our fellow-man, or the fear of his disapproval, is one of the most potent moral influences that we know.

But crowds are soon dispersed. Emotional excitement is exhausting and evanescent. Our associates speedily tire of expressing their admiration for our heroics. Pride soon ceases to be a positive inspiration to patriotism, though it may restrain outspoken disloyalty, and the spirit of sacrifice is likely to die unless it is reawakened by personal peril or self-interest. History shows this. The Zeppelin raids were a wonderful stimulant to enlistment in England, but conscription was finally necessary for the defense of the Empire. In our own country, the draft riots of the Civil War, the bounties that had to be paid to secure soldiers, and McClellan's nomination for the Presidency

connote a similar weariness in patriotic self-devotion; and the hope that the German troops may shortly refuse to fight is the basis of many predictions that the present war will soon be ended. If, unhappily, the United States shall be drawn into a war for the protection of our rights (and the rights that we seek to protect are chiefly commercial), it will probably be fought on the seas a long way off from the center of population.

For most of us it will be a comparative abstraction, just as the war in Europe is.

Unless the German Zeppelins or submarines can get over here we shall not hear the guns or see the fighting, and the patriotic enthusiasm which pervades the country at present may prove to be short-lived unless it is sustained by something more definite than the thrill we now feel when we see the flag or sing "America."

In saying this I do not intend to be cynical or plead guilty to a charge of materialism or selfishness for myself or my country

men.

Our Government has its defects and our citizens their faults, but, taken altogether, we have the best Government and the best citizenship that has yet been evolved.

It is my purpose to give staying power to our patriotism by showing that it is the highest expression of intelligent selfinterest in that it is necessary to the maintenance of this Government and the continued enjoyment of the opportunities and happiness that are ours under the American flag.

This may sound trite, and upon reflection it may become selfevident; but how many of us realize that our lives, our liberty, and our fortunes would have been in peril if the country had not responded as it did to the President's recent words, and that a continued manifestation of the same spirit is necessary for the preservation of everything that we hold precious?

To me the one danger of permanent peace lies in the fact that it is likely to make us unappreciative of the debt we owe to government and forgetful of the truth that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Undisturbed in the protection of our rights and accustomed to the orderly enforcement of law, we become unconscious of the man-made character of political institutions and grow to think of them as our natural endowment, like the solar system or the atmosphere.

For one hundred and five years, since 1812, our Government has been unattacked from without. In our eyes it has come to have great permanence and we have prospered amazingly under it.

For most of us, however, it is a thing apart toward which we have no duty but that of criticism. The other night at a public dinner in New York one of the speakers suggested that it would be a good thing if the business men present should try to get a little more closely in touch with their Representatives in Congress and the State Legislature. Of the ten men who sat at my table only one knew who his Congressman was and none of us could name our State Assemblyman or Senator. I felt then that we were estopped from the criticism of the National and the State Legislatures in which we were engaged, and I have since come to feel that one of the great dangers that confront this country lies in our failure to perceive that a patriotic concern for its affairs is a matter of self-interest as well as a duty.

I confess that I affront even my own sentimental regard for the patriotic spirit in attempting thus to urge its cultivation upon grounds of self-interest; but it was Herbert Spencer, I think, who said that intelligent self-interest was the basis of all morality; and we must admit that it is exceedingly difficult to maintain public interest for long in any movement that is purely altruistic.

Let us consider, then, briefly, how closely government touches us all.

The police protect our lives. The courts protect our propertyThe health officers protect us from epidemics. The fire depart. ment keeps our houses from burning down, and the water commissioners assuage our thirst. The public service commissioners shield us from the rapacity of corporations that furnish us with