is, getting all that's coming to me every month in one lump, my folks and myself spend freely, and there's nothing left to save. One point impressed me strongly while I was abroad before the war in England and on the Continent. That was the universal thrift. People over there seemed to get along with simple pleasures and few luxuries, and are certainly not under the constant pressure to spend money exerted in the United States by our high development of advertising and salesmanship, the easy credit offered by installment concerns, and the competition in standards of living. The Briton and the European live on income. If a man over there has fifty thousand put by, money saved or inherited, he touches nothing but the interest. The American, on the contrary, lives on capital. He feels that he is worth all the money he happens to have, and spends pretty much accordingly. If he fell heir to fifty thousand dollars, it would be a temptation to live at the rate of fifty thousand a year for one year, anyway-that is the American way of living on capital insteatl of income.

Coming back home, I began to study the possibilities for promoting thrift on a truly American scale, with the result that I think I have learned something and can make some practical suggestions.

There has been a good deal of thrift-preaching in this country during the past five years, and that is all very well as far as it goes-it does good, certainly, in stimulating individuals to be saving. But what we seem to need most right now is easier ways to practice thrift. I soon discovered that this job of saving money needed organizing. It had to be made available and easy for the tens of thousands of people earning salaries and wages in factories, shops, stores, and offices. To make it practical one must make it automatic, so that there would be none of this weekly struggling between desire and conscience. If thrift could be put on a ball-bearing, self-lubricating, nonvibrating basis, it ought to be natural and effective, and in time almost universal.

One common objection is that of the thrifty fellow who has already insured his life.

"That looks like a good thing for others," he says; "but I'm already carrying all the insurance I can afford. Where do I come in?"

And the answer is that probably he need not increase his insurance expense at all. Say he is drawing twenty dollars a week, and has been with the concern four years. His insurance costs him fifty dollars a year, which is five per cent of his wages. The only change for him is that the boss will now pay for ten dollars' worth of additional insurance yearly until he has served his fifth year, and then twenty dollars' worth for the next fiveyear period, and so on, steadily increasing, until the last period, from his sixtieth to his sixty-fifth year, just before he retires, the boss is paying for ninety dollars' worth of insurance for him a year, nearly double what he pays for himself, assuming that his wages in all that time have not increased. Of course he is sure to be earning more money, and the boss is paying on all

the increase too.

Another apparent difficulty that might strike one in consider ing the plan for the first time is that some employees may not want to participate. There need be no compulsion. If a man does not want to go in, he can stay out. But participation comes as soon as the plan is understood. A new employee comes to work after the plan is started, say. He is told that he can have five per cent of his wages taken out every pay day and put into a savings fund. Perhaps he is suspicious of the scheme, or doesn't care to save money, so he draws all that is coming to him. One day, after he has been there a month or two, the workers in his department hold an election for a local secretary to represent their interests in the savings fund association. He is asked to vote.

in the business elects its local secretary, who attends to clerical details, and these secretaries elect a general board of directors. All the money contributed by employees and employer goes into regular life insurance, on a special plan which is an amplification of the group insurance plan. (No physical examinations of employees are necessary.) By converting the fund into insurance it is removed from the risks of the employer's business. Each employee has his own contract with the insurance company, a policy carrying loan and surrender values and other benefits. His savings and his pension are safe, no matter what happens to the concern he works for, or how long he stays with that concern, or what happens to him.

Let's suppose that he goes to work at twenty and stays with the same employer until he is sixty-five. For the sake of convenience we will figure his wages at three dollars a day all that time. In reality, of course, he is going to be worth more with each year's experience, and will be promoted and get increased pay. Every dollar automatically adds to his savings and security. Every hour he works overtime contributes to the grand totals.

The first week he draws his wages and lets ninety cents remain with the paymaster, or five per cent of $18, his life is at once insured for $2,217. At the end of his first five years he has paid in $234 and his employer $46.80. If he falls sick then and needs money, he can borrow $168 on his insurance. If he is discharged, or quits to work elsewhere, his insurance has a cash surrender value of $126-for five years he has had insurance protection, remember. And if he prefers to convert it into paid-up insurance he need pay no more to the insurance company, and the latter will hand his family $328 whenever he dies. If he lives to the age of sixtyfive, he can have a pension of $66 a year.

By the time he has worked twenty years the plan is showing its more startling values. For now his employer is contributing more. He has paid in $936 himself, his insurance is $2,977, his loan value $1,268, or $332 more than he has put in, and the cash surrender value $1,008, or $72 more.

When he is ready to retire, at sixty-five, his life insurance is worth $7,341. He can draw in cash such money as he may need, if he wants it, or, if he prefers a pension, he will get $677 a year as long as he lives-more than two dollars a day for a three-dollar man. If he chooses the pension, as he should, for this is a pension plan, and dies before ten years, the insurance company pays this pension to his family until ten years from the time it began.

He is protected against practically every emergency during his whole working life, and until his death, and his earnings have yielded remarkable interest, growing as the plan continued. For what the employer contributes comes to twenty per cent the first year, and increases to an average of one hundred per cent for the whole period at the forty-fifth year, and to this is added $3,129 interest guaranteed by the insurance itself. No form of investment that he could make elsewhere, in a savings bank or life insurance company, would return such profits as this automatic thrift through co-operation with his employer.

If the employees of almost any industrial corporation were to follow this plan from the age of twenty to that of retirement, they would have enough cash at sixty-five to buy the business outright. This holds good of almost any business, except perhaps a bank, which has a large cash capital employed in its business.

For example, the Steel Trust. It is capitalized at a little more than $1,500,000,000, counting bonds as well as common and preferred stock, and has nearly 260,000 employees, who earn average wages and salaries of three dollars a day. That comes to a capitalization of $7,500 per employee, and each employee, on retiring, if one counted wage increases and overtime earnings, would have more than that.

"Will you retire now and take your money in cash?" the Steel Trust directors might ask. "Or would you prefer to "We'll just

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Neither," the retiring employees might say. take the business."

The average capitalization of all our manufacturing industries is about $2,500 per employee, and the average of salaries and wages perhaps fifteen dollars a week. At the retiring age these employees would have enough money to buy our whole

manufacturing business twice over; and that's what automatic thrift can become when it is planned scientifically and followed in true co-operation for the normal working life of the ordinary working man and woman.

By far the greatest benefit of this plan, as I see it, however, is the way it will promote steadiness in both the workers and the industrial organization.

Much of the cost is going to come, not out of the earnings of either employees or employer, but through the elimination of a tremendous item of waste that all American business now bears helplessly.

Everybody knows that a constant, costly shifting of men from job to job is now going on in our industrial system. I figure that the money outlay to the employer for each new worker he hires and trains is forty-five dollars at the lowest, and that in many industrial establishments the work force more than renews itself every year. The loss to the workers is just as grievous, for if a man or woman earns fifteen dollars a week, and loses three weeks each year shifting from job to job, that involves a loss of forty-five dollars.

And the money loss is as nothing beside the loss of cumulative value that might come from experience and growing skill. If these could be conserved, it would mean better and cheaper production for the employer, and higher wages for the workers. Most of our welfare work in business has been carried on in an effort to eliminate this waste of the shifting worker, and much of the labor agitation on the part of workers has been carried on for the same end-an effort, often blind and wrong in its methods, but in principle sound and right, to secure the steady job.

The steady job!

ツ

I sometimes wonder if we even begin to realize what it means for our industries. Here we have a country of abounding natural wealth, cheap materials for production of most of the necessities, compared with the resources of the great industrial countries of Europe. And in France, Germany, England, Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Italy, and other countries abroad the workers and employers have to counterbalance high cost of materials by lower wages, longer hours, greater skill, and a devotion to the steady job so grim that few men dare shift from one place or trade to another, even in the hope of bettering themselves. They must stick at one thing, very often the thing that their fathers worked at, and by skill and industry turn out products that compete with ours in the markets of the world, regardless of all our natural advantages. They do this most successfully, as any salesman in foreign trade will testify, or as one can learn in normal times by examining the merchandise sold in our own stores. That is what industrial stability has done for Europe. For my part, I prefer the restless energy, the wider opportunity, and the greater liberty to take a chance which is characteristic of American industrial affairs. But we must not think that our shifting is energy or opportunity. It is time to transform the roaming, casual, half-trained workers who go from one factory to another and to eliminate from our industrial life the heavy tax we pay for shifting. These casuals must be transformed into workers who are really skilled, trained technically, competent, home-owning, secure citizens. We have got to do it if we are to hold our own in world trade, and I believe the way to begin is through the scientific, automatic, co-operative saving of money.

T

HE increasing confidence of the peoples of the various Allied countries in each other is one of the most significant developments of the third year of the great war. From the first the Allied Governments have been closely in accord as to the ultimate ends to be striven for, and the differences of opinion as to the way in which these ends were to be compassed have never proved irreconcilable. History will reveal that the several members of the Quadruple Entente have shown the greatest readiness to exert their efforts in the common behalf to the full extent of their ability whenever a call for help has been made, but because military effort is more tangible and spectacular than the supplying of men and material, or even silent naval pressure (which has formed, and will continue to form, so large a part of Britain's contribution), these latter have not always been adequately appreciated by the people of the countries that have been the greatest beneficiaries. It is for this reason that the French people—and, indeed, the world at large-were never fully convinced of the seriousness and sincerity of England's purpose in the war until British man power was organized on a Continental basis and the British soldier fell into step with the French soldier in the great attack upon the Somme.

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In this article, as in a previous one I wrote on the attitude of the English toward their Allies, it is necessary to call attention to the fact that there is often a wide divergence between the comparatively uninformed popular opinion of a country and the thoroughly informed official opinion. The French Government has understood from the outset not only the value of England's financial and industrial efforts, but has also been able to weigh and allow for the tremendous difficulties which confronted that country before a war organization comparable to that which existed in Germany for many years before the outbreak of the present struggle could be perfected. This knowledge made the French Government extremely reluctant to call on England for any help beyond such as it had every reason to

believe could be freely and readily granted, and there is no doubt that M. Briand spoke the literal truth when he said recently that Great Britain had never yet answered nay to an appeal from France for assistance.

As typical of the French official appreciation of the difficulties that confronted England in organizing for a Continental war, I will quote the words of a distinguished officer whom I sat next to during luncheon at Staff Headquarters on the occasion of a recent visit to one of the French armies.

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"On a visit to England from which I returned a few days ago," he said, "I was taken to one of the great new munition factories just being put in operation. Here I was shown a thousand or more new machines for performing a certain operation in munition-making. Now, not only were these machines not in existence before the war, but it was even necessary to make machines to make parts of other machines that were needed for the rapid turning out of certain parts of the first one. One of these latter machines had over five hundred parts, and many thousands of separate measurements and many months of time were required before the first working model could be turned out. Knowing that practically the whole of England's vast war organization had to be created anew, those of us who understood the situation, far from being impatient of what some have characterized as that country's 'glacial slowness' in making her weight felt in the land war, have constantly marveled at what has actually been accomplished in the face of difficulties that would have dismayed a less resolute people, toward making that weight count overwhelmingly in the end."

This, as I have said, fairly characterizes the attitude of official and informed France toward Great Britain as an ally. That of educated France outside of official circles seems to me to have been well stated by the distinguished Vicomte X-, to whom I had brought a letter of introduction from America and at whose château on the upper Seine I spent a couple of days lately. "There have been times," he said, "when some of

my friends have expressed impatience at the seeming deliberation of England in coming to our aid on the western front, and to these I have always replied that a nation that had been as gallant a foe to France as England had proved herself during several centuries could not but prove a gallant ally. To me, as an old soldier of France, the pride of knowing that we were stemming the full might of Germany with French bayonets more than offset any apprehension I may ever have had as to the ultimate issue; and, in case of need, I always felt sure that England could be depended upon for any effort that was really needed, just as she finally consented to launching the joint offensive on the Somme a month or two before she was entirely ready, in order to relieve the pressure at Verdun."

England had to win the confidence of the great bulk of the French public, however, by action and achievement as a military power, and until the Somme offensive was well under way this was not done. When scarcely one Englishman in a hundred realized the gathering might of his country's war effort, it is not strange that the average Frenchman-who knows little of sea power and war economics or finance-should have felt that France was doing a disproportionate amount of fighting and bleeding in the common cause. An English lady, long resident in Paris and prominent in war relief work from the outset, told me a few days ago that the position of a British subject in France during the first two years of the war was a good deal like that of Americans in France or England to-day. "We saw France fighting for her life before our very eyes, and felt that our country somehow ought to be lending more aid than she was. We knew little of the nature of the task of creating a war machine which confronted the Government at home, and were impatient that more Englishmen were not fighting by the side of the French. We felt apologetic, and yet, in the nature of things, couldn't apologize, just as I heard an American friend here say of the attitude of the Washington Government in so many questions connected with the war. And the worst of it was having our ever-considerate French friends try to save our feelings by changing the subject whenever a conversation threatened to turn on England's part.''

Even in the first days of the Somme attack, when the British were suffering far greater losses than the French for gains far less considerable, there was a feeling in France that the former might well have taken more advantage of the lessons already learned by the latter in their fuller experience of this kind of warfare. But it has been characteristic of the Briton through the centuries that he needs must learn by his own experience, not by that of others. His present incomparable colonial system is built on an experience compact of the blunders and successes of the past. It has been largely so in the present war. Britain has followed her natural bent and continued to learn by her own experience rather than that of her Allies. What she has learned has cost heavy, but the lesson has been driven home for good and all. To-day there is probably little to choose between the admirable finesse of French and British offensive

tactics.

The growing strength of the French confidence in, and the increasing warmth of the French admiration for, the British is evident on every hand in France to-day, and, as indicative of the growing solidarity of the Allies as the grim ordeal of the third winter of the war is at hand, its continued development is of the highest significance. One sees evidence of it in the cinemas when British pictures are shown (I saw a crowd watching a Pathé "Journal come to its feet as one man in the enthusiasm of its applause for Lieutenant Robinson standing among the wreckage of the Zeppelin he had brought down), at music halls when British airs are played, and on the streets in the friendly glances which greet and follow the British soldier strolling about on leave.

The Canadians-irrespective of whether or not they are of French ancestry-appear to be especially popular in France, and an official in the Ministère des Affaires Etranger recently told me that one of the most enthusiastic and spontaneous demonstrations he had ever seen in Paris was occasioned by the appearance of a lorry load of Canadian Service Corps men in the midst of a great crowd that had assembled to greet a visiting Serbian band.

"The Canadians had nothing whatever to do with the

affair," he said. "They were only so many men going about their duty, and they chanced along just after the Serbians, who had been giving a concert, had been hurried away in their motors. No sooner did the crowd sight the khaki uniforms of the Canadians than a rush was made for the lorry, and for fully twenty minutes it was the center of cheering thousands. And hardly were they free of this section of the crowd than those in the next block closed in around them. I had never realized until that day the warmth of the affection of the French people for the fighting men of our great ally."

There is no doubt that that brave fighter and genial diplomat, "Thomas Atkins," has played a great part in cementing the Entente, not only by the blood he has shed on French soil, but also by the frank ingenuousness that is so direct an antithesis of the rather stand-offish tourist that the Frenchman has been wont in the past to consider as the typical Briton. He visits Paris just infrequently enough to make one remark his presence when he does come, and I have been much interested to note that he is nearly always seen either in the company of a poilu or two, or else in that of a bevy of French girls who are taking the occasion to act as "Thos. Cooks" to "Thos. Atkins." Yesterday, seated under a tree in the Champs Elysées, I came upon a group consisting of an outer periphery of French nurse girls and chil dren clustered around a nodal center of two bronzed warriors from the Somme in trench-stained khaki. At the moment my companion and I pushed unobtrusively in to learn what was afoot one of the "Tommies" was running his finger down the laundry list of his dog-eared phrase-book in order to explain just which one of his garments-and incidentally, by inference, just what sector of cuticle-had recently been punctured by the spent shrapnel bullet that his comrade was holding up for the inspection of all interested. His enthralled auditors laughed till they cried when he finally closed the book to tell them that it was à bas on mon chemise Boche bullet come ping!" "Those two diplomats," said the English journalist with whom I was walking, "are probably doing more to rivet down the loose corners of the Entente Cordiale than are the Cabinet Ministers of France and England who are meeting in Boulogne this afternoon."

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If there has been one place more than another where a rift might have started in the Entente lute it is in that portion of France which constitutes the area under British military control; and that serious trouble has not arisen here is due to two things-the innate docility and common sense of the French peasant and the considerate manliness of the British soldier. But even allowing for these things, the lack of serious friction between the soldiers and the civil population is astonishing. Nothing (not even the artillery bombardment on the Somme) interested me more on a recent visit to this area than the kindly attitude of the people toward the army which the Germans have tried so hard to make them believe had come to stay for good.

"An army of angels couldn't occupy England as we have France," said an officer on the British Headquarters Staff, "without rubbing the wrong way the fur of our highly inde pendent British farmer. Only the fine behavior of the Tommies' and the firm conviction of the people that we are in France to help them makes the situation possible here."

Just as generous is the view of the peasants on the other side. "How do you get on with the British soldiers?" I asked an old dame with a parchment-brown face who was hoeing sugar beets well within range of the German guns in the Arras sector. "Très bien, m'sieu," was the reply, and she went on to tell me how one Tomee" billeted in her house chopped her wood, and another brought water, and another was making a scare crow dressed in a Boche uniform for her garden, and, finally, how all three of them bought bonbons for her daughter.

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Just how well "Tommy" has behaved may be judged from the observation of a well-known Russian correspondent in whose company I motored several hundred miles behind the British lines. Every time that he saw a large flock of ducks, geese, or chickens a look of incredulity would spread over his broad Slavic countenance, the while he pursed his lips in a whistle of astonishment.

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"What's so remarkable about the poultry, X-?" I asked. 'They look to me like a very ordinary lot of barnyard fowl." "So they are," he replied. "It is not their points as show