(C) Ewing Galloway

work with cottages to live in, etc. Can't you just picture me going down to the bank each month in my car and depositing my wad?

"But just hold on a minute. I mustn't forget to charge off one or two little items against my cows: Bedding per cow; keep of bull per cow; labor per year per cow; interest on money invested in barn and cow; taxes on cow and barn; insurance on barn; depreciation on each cow, and heat, light, medicines, disinfectants, veterinary service, and ice, amounting in all to $65 on each animal. Besides this there is the feed to add-hay, silage, bran, corn-meal, gluten-meal, cottonseed-méal, and pasturage-totaling a few cents over $167.

"Of course you will say, 'Oh, but you have your own hay, corn, silage, and pasture.' Quite true; but don't forget that my corn would sell on the market just as quickly as the other fellows', so I must charge it up at market prices.

The same is true of hay. My silage I only charge for at its food value plus labor and fertilizer. My pasturage charge is only normal, for had I no pasture I should have to provide more silage and hay. So, you see, I must take $65 plus $167, a total of $232, from the gross profit of $252 on each cow, leaving $20, to which may be added the value of her calf at birth, $15. I then have a net profit on each cow of $35, or $875 from . my entire herd. Wouldn't you like to buy me out, old chap? Before you make an offer, however, let me add that in order to get this splendid income I must get up at half-past four every day, winter and summer, and when any of my cows drop their calves I am always with them, whether it's the middle of the day or night. I wash and clean the milking machines myself, for, although I have good men, I wouldn't feel safe in trusting this work to either of them.

"In the winter there's the wood to cut

and ice to get in, besides the repairs on farm implements and buildings. So you must acknowledge that, in a measure at least, I earn my princely income. You are wondering how I manage to get along on $875 a year. Well, I couldn't if Bessie hadn't turned to, like a trump, and helped by raising poultry, for she takes entire charge of a flock of 500, and so adds about $550 more to what the cows bring in," I ended, lighting a fresh cigar.

་

"Billy, you amaze me," said my cousin, "and if I didn't know you intimately and hadn't spent days on your farm I'm afraid I should be a doubting Thomas. It had never occurred to me that farming was like any other business, or that a practical farmer had to apply business principles to his work, just as I do. Somehow, I imagined he raised all his own feed and fed it out to his cows, and then counted the money received from them as profit.. What, in the name of goodness, does a man see in working hard all his life for a paltry few hundred dollars a year? Why, I often make in a month what takes you with the hardest sort of labor to pull in in a year!"

"Well, Jack," I replied, "you have overlooked the greatest factor in lifeindividuality. From my point of view, to see you grubbing every day in an artificially lighted den downtown, with money-getting occupying most of your waking hours, is a pitiful sight. To me, you have missed the very essence of life. You never see the sun rise in all its wonderful beauty, or marvel at the reawakening of life with the first flush of spring, nor would you feel any pleasure in caring for dumb animals that look to you through gentle, trusting eyes for their sustenance. The birth of a little helpless calf would to your mind only mean extra work, not the completion of one of nature's most stupendous achievements-a new life.

"Then you live in a constant uproarcars tooting, bells clanging, and doors slamming from morning until night. You are only a unit among millions of other units. Were you to be stricken in the street, a policeman would turn in a call for an ambulance and off you would go to some hospital, where you would consider yourself lucky if your wife ever received word as to your whereabouts.

"Not for me, Jack! Give me the country, where I can watch things grow, where there is plenty of elbow-room, where I'm independent and have to stand on my own feet without help, and where there are dumb beasts to care for and make much of. After all is said, money can't buy contentment, and don't forget this, although you may not believe it, it takes as much brains to make a success in farming as in any other business. Well, old man, each to his own taste, after all, and if we are going to the theater, it's about time we started, isn't it?"

From the Painting by Gérôme

M

ONSIEUR MAURICE DONNAY and Monsieur André Chevrillon. haye come three thousand miles to take part in our tribute to the genius of a man who was born three hundred . years ago. Our invitation and their crossing of the Atlantic bear witness to the fact that the fame of Molière is both enduring and world-wide. No one of the makers of French literature is more typically, more fundamentally French than he, and yet here in a city almost unknown and absolutely unimportant three centuries ago men assemble to do him honor and to acclaim him as the master of modern comedy.

He was not only a man of his own country, he was a man of his own time. In the early years of the long reign of Louis XIV he came a little later than Corneille and a little earlier than Racine; and neither of them is as representative of that glittering epoch as Molière; and yet half a dozen or half a score of his thirty plays are alive to-day in all the freshness of their eternal youth. He is not for his own country alone, but for all civilization; and he was not for his own age only, but for ours also. To say this is to say that he possesses the two indispensable qualities of a classic: his masterpieces have a large measure of permanence and a large measure of universality.

I have studied him lovingly for half a

(C) Keystone

TABLET ON THE HOUSE IN WHICH MOLIÈRE' WAS BORN, IN THE RUE ST. HONORÉ, PARIS, WITH DECORATIONS PLACED THERE AS A PART OF THE CELEBRATION OF THE TERCENTENARY OF THE PLAYWRIGHT'S BIRTH

century, and as I came to a more intimate acquaintance with his writings and to a keener appreciation of the man himself I felt more and more the modernness of his work. No doubt, it bears unmistakably the impress of his own time-all masterpieces do that of course, those of Sophocles and Shakespeare no less than those of Molière. Yet he is more modern than the great Greek tragedian, who lived two thousand years ago; and more modern even than the great Englishman, who wrote both comedies and tragedies, and who died only six years before the great Frenchman was born. The great Spanish playwright Calderon survived Molière eight years; and his pieces seem to us now almost archaic in their stagecraft and in their spirit, whereas the comedies of Molière are modern both in their form and in their content.

The modernity of his form is obvious enough, and he is master of modern comedy, not only because he realized better than any predecessor in any country what the true province of comedy was and what were its possibilities and its limitations, but also because he wrote for the modern playhouse, with its roof, with its artificial lighting, with its scenery, with its seated spectators. The pattern he devised for this modern playhouse is the pattern employed today by the playwrights of every Euro

From an old print pean language, even though they may be totally unaware of the debt they owe to him. Shakespeare's plays have to be modified to adjust themselves to our theaters; Moliere's do not demand any rearrangement, not a single transposition or a single omission. Sheridan could not have plotted the "School for Scandal" if Molière had not plotted the "Misanthrope" and the "Femmes Savantes." Ibsen could not have put together the "League of Youth" and the "Pillars of Society" if Molière had not devised "Tartuffe."

He had profited by his early study of Plautus and Terence, as they had profited by their study of Menander; but the Greek and the two Latins in their turn had progressed only to the play of intrigue, the comedy of anecdote; they not equipped to achieve the comedy of manners, the comedy of character, the social drama, the play which, while it makes us laugh, also makes us think. Their field was narrowly restricted, and the hampering conditions

were

of the social organization in Athens and in Rome did not tempt them-indeed, did not permit them-to achieve a large and liberal treatment of human nature. Shakespeare, as it happened, never undertook the comedy of manners which is also a comedy of character, perhaps because his social background and country did not supply the material for this special type of comedy. The London of the Virgin Queen lacked the urbanity of the Paris of the Grand Monarch. Elizabethan society was boister ous in speech and violent in temper; and therefore no one of Shakespeare's ever-delightful comedies, sometimes delicately romantic or sometimes robustly. farcical, is a picture of the life of his own time and of his own country. Molière in four or five or six of his amplest and deepest comedies brings before us his own contemporaries as he had observed them in the city of his birth.

It was these contemporaries that Molière had to please if he was to keep his theater open; and this is what every

great dramatist has had to do, Sophocles no less than Shakespeare. We can see that Molière took account of what was wanted by the Parisians of the second half of the seventeenth century, by the young King, by the burghers, and by the populace also. He gave them what they expected from him, and also more than they expected, sometimes even more than they were ready to receive. Leading his audiences upward, coaxing them along, skillfully stimulating their desires, he was able at last to rise to a level to which no earlier comic dramatist had aspired.

It is not widely recognized that great dramatists have almost always been popular in their own day. True it is that they may not have been adequately appreciated while they were alive, but they were successful, none the less. I doubt whether even Ben Jonson, with all his friendship for Shakespeare, was really aware of his friend's true greatness; and I fear that of all Molière's associates only Boileau and La Fontaine were keen-eyed enough to measure his superiority. But there is no denying that Shakespeare and Molière were popular favorites and that the playgoers flocked gladly to see their plays performed.

This immediate popularity of theirs was due in a measure to their skill in hitting the taste and in satisfying the likings of their contemporaries, although of course their permanent fame could be assured only by their major merits, by their power of creating characters which transcend the demands of the moment, which are deeper than the fancies of the day, which are eternally attractive because they are eternally veracious.

Molière did not hesitate to amuse his audiences with satire of passing fads and follies, with things strictly contemporary, with things, absolutely up to date. Now, it is the disadvantage of the contemporary that it is four parts temporary; as it is disadvantage of the up to date that it is swiftly out of date. It is a striking testimony to Molière's genius that his satire of the whims and oddities of his own period has its lesson for us in another century and in another country. What was fleeting and momentary is on the surface only, and beneath it we can discover a veracity as abiding as human folly is perennial. The fashion has altered and not a little, but the stuff is the same, since it is woven from the unfailing absurdity of human nature.

The affectations that Molière held up to scorn in the "Précieuses Ridicules" in France are not unlike those which we laugh at to-day in America-in the "Culture Club of Keokuk, Indiana," for example, and in other clubs not so far from Manhattan Island. The Learned Ladies, the Femmes Savantes, of Manhattan Island are not now devoting their time to Greek roots, they are digging up the roots of society; they are (Continued on page 39)'

11-1896

Your Wife and Your Estate

"My wife is a woman of more than ordinary intelligence, but she knows practically nothing of business and doesn't know a stock from a bond. I have been too busy to teach her. And I have been too engrossed in my business affairs to think of making a will. . . . Would you

advise me to name a trust company executor and trustee of my estate? Would such an arrangement effectually prevent the beneficiary of my estate from squandering her inheritance, especially in worthless promotion stocks?"

TH

HE above letter to the Financial Editor of the New York American was answered in part as follows:

"By all means have your lawyer draw a will for you and do it without delay. Then arrange with the trust company to act as executor and trustee of your estate.

"Your wife, in the event she survives you, will then be protected from vendors of spurious stocks. and bonds. She will have no responsibility of reinvesting funds, and thus there will be no danger that your money will into go speculative securities. She will have at her call always reliable counsellors in all her business problems.

"The trust companies are infinitely better equipped through experience and facilities to take care of estates than any individual.

Safeguarding Your Family's Future

Most men-probably you yourself-face a similar problem. Discuss it with

a trust company officer today. Ask him for the booklet on wills and trusts entitled "Safeguarding Your Family's Future," or write to the address below for a copy.

TRUST COMPANY DIVISION AMERICAN BANKERS ASSOCIATION FIVE NASSAU STREET, NEW YORK