behind him represents a bad element in the community. But the worst element in the community is that furnished by the men and women who ought to be good fathers and mothers of many healthy children, but who deliberately shirk their duty.

Professors of eugenics, and I may add all of the well-meaning unmarried philanthropists of both sexes who speak about education for motherhood and fatherhood, should remember that all efforts to educate the race necessarily amount to nothing if there be no race to educate. There is no use in educating a woman for motherhood unless she is educated to be a mother. No institution will take the place of a home, and all proposals for rearing and educating children outside the home and supplying the place of parents by "trained educators" indicate a morbid pathological condition in the woman making the proposala pathological condition as marked in her case as it is in the opposite case of the extremely foolish woman who, in her revolt against the vagaries of some advocates of progress, insists that we should go backward and holds up to us for admiration some such frightful system as that of Hindu family life.

I am

I am a very firm believer in the new woman, but the only new woman in whom I believe is she who adds new qualities to, and does not try to substitute them for, the primal, the fundamental, virtues of the "old" woman-she who was the wife, the mother, the sweetheart, the sister, of the past. a very firm believer in democracy. But I believe in it in order to relieve the average man of unjust burdens, not to free him from the performance of vital duties. It is just the same way with a woman. I wish to see her freed from the unjust burdens so heavily laid upon her by man in the beginning, which have been gradually lightened in the slow progress of the ages. But neither man nor woman can be excused from the performance of the most vital and intimate of all duties, those connected with the home and the household. Let professors of eugenics turn their attention to making it plain to the average college graduates of either sex, the average sane and worthy philanthropists, the average men and women who lead in any branch of the higher life of our people, that it is their prime duty to the race to leave their seed after them to inherit the earth. The old Hebrews were right when they made this their prayer; and the race is doomed which does not feel the appeal of such a

prayer. Neither material prosperity, nor cultivation of mind, nor softness of life, nor philanthropic devotion to lesser duties, atones from the race standpoint, from the standpoint of humanity, for failure to perform the prime duty. Tell both man and woman that no" career" is more than a poor substitute for the career of married lovers who bring into the world, and rear as they should be reared, children sufficiently numerous so that the race shall go forward and not back.

I am well aware that there must be exceptions to this rule. But it is the rule; and when the exceptions become numerous it shows that there is something very wrong with society. Not once in a score of times is the man or woman entitled to justification if he or she shirks the most fundamental of all duties; and this whether the excuse be cold selfishness and fear of pain and discomfort, or a love of ease, or a mistaken sense of the importance of some outside career. No career is so useful and honorable, nor needs such self-sacrifice and wisdom, as the career of a good and wise mother. The best career for the man is to be the breadwinner for his wife and children; let his career outside of this be an addition to it and not a substitute for it.

war.

Let me repeat that I am speaking of averages. Some of the men and women for whom I care most have remained single, and yet have done their duty in life well and nobly. Some of the best married couples I know have, to their great grief, no children, or but one or two. What I say cannot be taken as applying to each individual case. But it does apply to cases taken in the aggregate. A man or woman may remain single for good and adequate reason, just as in a time of mortal danger to a country some given man may for good and adequate reason not go to But whenever in any community the number of such men or women in one case, or of such men in the other case, becomes appreciable, then it is evident that the reason is neither good nor adequate. If, in a community of a thousand young and able-bodied men, eight or nine do not go to the war when the country's need is sorest, they may have an ample and just excuse. But if eight or nine hundred refuse to go, then it is evident that something is wrong, and very seriously wrong, in the community. So, if of men and women engaged in philanthropic or social work, if of men and women who are graduates of college and have had the higher edu

cational advantages, the ones who marry are relatively so few and the children they have relatively so few that their descendants represent a smaller proportion of the population in the next generation-why, it is proof positive that their ideals and training are wrong, and that they need to look sharply to their own moral and mental shortcomings instead of spending so much time in improving their minds or attempting to look after other people's morals and bodies.

What I say applies exactly as much to the man as to the woman. It is no more the woman's business to be in the home than it is the man's business to make the home, and his crime if he refuses to make it is as grave as that of the woman who refuses to do her part in keeping it up. To talk of a wife or mother as an "economic parasite" is the veriest nonsense. If she is worth her salt, she is a full partner; and the man is not worth his salt unless he acknowledges this fact and welcomes it. And the more each partner loves and respects the other, the more anxious each is to share the other's burden, the less either will feel like encouraging the other to shirk any duty that ought to be faced. The duties are mutual and reciprocal.

What is more, when we envisage things rightly, when we look facts squarely in the face, there is no reason why the performance of the primary duty should render a man or a woman incapable of performing other duties. Undoubtedly the average man will always find earning his living his chief and most exacting occupation; and the average woman will find bearing, caring for, and bringing up in infancy her babies an occupation that demands all her strength and wisdom. Moreover, thrice blessed are the man and the woman to whom come these great duties and who perform them well. They are to be envied beyond all others. But the moment the strain somewhat lets up, each of the partners can do a great deal of outside work. Each can do the outside work, anyhow, if it is to him or to her the absorbing passion which can be felt just as strongly by

the duty-performing married man as by the unmarried man. Agassiz and Longfellow, Huxley and Darwin, Julia Ward Howe and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Alexander Hamilton, Grant, Sherman, and innumerable others like them, among the men and women of thought and action, illustrate the truth of what I say.

There is a woman prominent in the Mothers' Congress, whose name I will not mention, but with whom I have always worked, who is the mother of seven children. This has not prevented her from being-on the contrary, it has aided her in being-a vital factor in helping every cause for uplifting women and children; and incidentally I have always felt that I had to do anything she asked me to do, if it were possible, just because I so emphatically believe in the way her principles and her practices square one with the other. Let any woman who says that she prefers a career to marriage understand that she is preferring the less to the greater. The prime benefactors of humanity are the man and woman who leave to the next generation boys and girls who will turn out good and useful men and women. I honor the good man, I honor the good woman still more. believe that the woman should have open to her everything that is open to man, every profession, every opportunity; and, furthermore, I believe with all my heart that no other woman and no man will ever have a career approaching in dignity, in usefulness to the whole community, in fine self-sacrifice and devotion, the career of the good mother who brings into the world and rears and trains as they should be reared and trained many healthy children.

I

This much at least is certain. If among the men and women who make up a people there is a selective elimination of the most fit, as a result of those men and women failing to marry and have children, the result must necessarily be race deterioration, unless the race is partly saved by the infusion into it of the blood of other races that have not lost the virile virtues.

T

HE little republic of Costa Rica is happier than most of her neighbors. She has had no revolutions for many years, and fears none. Hard-working and prosperous, as these terms are understood in the necessarily more leisurely tropics, she has few soldiers and many school-teachers, and pays the interest on her foreign debt. The original Spanish blood has been more successfully preserved here than in the other five republics. There is no peon or large landholder class, as these classes are understood in Mexico and Guatemala; indeed, the most desirable lands are cut into small farms and are in the hands of small proprietors. The press enjoys comparative freedom, and the President, who is elected for four years and forbidden by law to succeed himself, is chosen by votes actually cast and counted. In short, allowing for the inevitable modifications due to climate, the large infusion of Indian blood, and Spanish tradition, Costa Rica is a republic in much the sense that we understand that word.

A Presidential campaign is rather a different matter, therefore, than in Mr. Estrada Cabrera's personally conducted Guatemala― or than it seems possible, at the moment, to make it in Mexico-and it was with more than usual interest that I found myself, after landing from one of the big white fruit boats at Port Limon and taking the beautiful railway climb up from the "hot country" to the capital, stepping into the midst of it.

Although it was then but July and the election was not until December, nearly every house in San José had its colors and a “viva” for somebody at the window. There were processions and picnics and speeches, and the papers were full of blasts and counterblasts and reports of meetings and newly organized. political centers, or directivas, as they are

The

called, with endless lists of names. There were even political headquarters with automobiles chugging out in front and party scouts inside smoking their solemn cigars much as they do at home.

Of the three candidates, Don Rafael Iglesias, of the National Union party, had been President before-from 1894 to 1902-a period during which the gold standard was adopted, much done for education, and the greater part of the now completed railway from San José to the Pacific built. A man of ability and highly regarded during his term in office, although bitterly attacked afterward, Mr. Iglesias has become a sort of perennial candidate. Dr. Carlos Duran, of the Civil party, was a well-known and well-to-do surgeon, a man of old family and distinguished appearance, who has long divided his time between the practice of his profession and of politics. Don Maximo Fernandez, leader of the Republican party, was an ambitious young lawyer, of less exalted social connections than Dr. Duran, and President of the Costa Rican Chamber of Deputies.

The stranger is promptly assured, as soon as he tries to discover the difference between party programmes in Costa Rica, that there is no difference; that party is a mere matter of personality. The man makes the party, and the policies are the same. Costa Rica is about twice the size of New Jersey, or about one-third the size of Illinois, and contains only about 350.000 people, the greater part of whom are gathered on the beautiful and highly cultivated plateau on which San José is built. In a country so small and so saturated with Spanish tradition, in which family connections always count for much, where everybody knows everybody else, so to speak, government inevitably becomes more

or less a family affair, and party leadership a matter of personality rather than of clearly defined principles.

It would have been difficult, for instance, for the outsider to see much difference between the policies of Mr. Iglesias and Dr. Duran, except that one's color was red and the other green, and that they disagreed as to who would make the best President. The Republicans, or Fernandistas, on the other hand, had this distinguishing mark-they were radicals, in theory at least, and not merely devoted to conserving conservatism for conservatism's sake. Their candidate was a parvenu, in the sense that he was not one of the so-called "Olympians," like Dr. Duran, and he was supposed to be out to help the common people.

What Mr. Fernandez might actually do if he were elected was another matter, but in a part of the world where scant attention is paid to the dull brown mass beneath, except by some occasional dreamer like the ill-fated Madero, the radical wing becomes perforce, to the outsider at least, the more significant and interesting. It was interesting, for example, in a neighborhood in which editorial writers are inclined-and not infrequently forced to twang the lyre in honor of the powers that be, to find El Republicano " thus satirically commenting on the attempt of Dr. Duran's party to form workingmen's political clubs:

Shrinking from all contact with the noble class of laborers, whose jackets and blouses, stained with the honorable scars of their neverending daily work, rubbing against the silken tunics and ermine mantles of these Olympians disgust them; nauseated by that odor of flesh pounded on the anvil of life (for they are accustomed to the perfumes of Arabia), these Olympians, desirous of exploiting the proletariat, form a workingmen's club and put the unsuspecting in it as cattle are marked with the brand of their

owners.

In the clubs of the glorious Republican party, on the other hand, there are neither classes nor distinctions. All the elements are contained therein, as a ray of sunlight contains all the colors of the spectrum. The capitalist sits alongside the workingman's son, the intellectual whose pen radiates light side by side with the humble farmer who writes but with his plow on the immense page of Mother Earth the sacred hymn of life and force.

There was more of this, with references to the "promised land which Tolstoy saw from his little cottage at Yasnaia Poliana," where, the writer prophesied, "our sons shall one day arrive, across the desert in whose sands are bleaching the bones of this generation."

I showed the editorial, especially what struck me as the rather happy reference to the rays of the spectrum, to one of the Olympiansa gentleman who had served his country in high places himself.

"Well," said he, dryly, and with that acquaintance with what is in the air at home which often surprises the North American in Latin America, "sunlight is yellow, at any rate! He's the W. R. Hearst of Costa Rica that man."

The mere fact that each political group had its paper or papers and that each attacked the opposition with persistency and eloquence presupposed a variety of opinion and a freedom to express it uncommon in Central America-in Guatemala, for instance, unheard of. These little newspapers, on the other hand, have comparatively little influence as we understand editorial influence at home. They are too ephemeral, too often mere partisan leaflets, to carry the weight of newspapers whose primary function, that of giving non-partisan information, imbeds them, so to speak, in the daily lives of their readers and gives them a solid personality from which any mere political utterance comes as from some one long known and respected. They are wasps rather than thunderers, although often witty and penetrating insects of their kind, and the stranger is surprised to see how their loftiest or most venomous utterances are often dismissed by the solider sort of people, of whatever station, with a shrug and a deprecating smile.

One entertaining sidelight they cast, however, on local political conditions quite different from anything we generally get at home. It is their custom to show a party's growing popularity by printing daily notices of new centers, or directivas, formed in the provincial towns, and many little declarations of faithadhesiones-signed by the new recruit and his witnesses, or, not infrequently, by a party scout, with the added phrase, "for so and so, who cannot write "-qui no sabe firmar.

There was sometimes a whole page of these adhesions" from the capital itself, from distant mountain villages with rolling Spanish names, and as many protestas from those who had changed their minds after signing for one of the other parties, or who accused the perfidious opposition scouts of having printed "adhesions" without their consent. The local significance of these protestas was suggested by a cartoon in one of the little humorous papers in which Señor

Iglesias was pictured as a rooster whose feathers, labeled protestas, were molting into two pails labeled "Duranism" and "Fernandism." Don Rafael was flapping his wings, nevertheless, and with "his historical arrogance" declaring that, although he had not a feather left, he still had his nerves and muscles, and could crow, and many would be sorry for it.

A Costa Rican living in the United States who formerly edited one of these little papers told me that in his time he not infrequently wrote protestas designed to discredit the other side and signed them with any name that came into his head. Whatever may be the custom now-and the quaintness of phrasing often suggests complete authenticity-they would come, naturally, from the more ingenuous and easily led. Taken just as they are, however, real or faked, they give a glimpse of local conditions and of the nature of the citizen material with which such a young republic has to work.

Here, for example, is a simple " adhesion," reported from the neighboring village of Quircot de Cartago:

"With the frankness of my character," declares the recruit, one Nazario Ramirez, "and a great deal of pleasure, I embrace the holy idea of the Republican party, the basis of which, in my judgment, is the noble cause of the peoplejustice, truth, honor, and liberty-and I believe that its worthy candidate, Lic. don Maximo Fernandez, is the man who will urge Costa Rica along the same favorable path which the present government is following. Wherefore I place my signature beneath the blue banner."

And here is a protest from Concepcion de Cartago, from one who declared for Iglesias but has changed his mind :

Thoughtlessly I gave my signature for the Red party in the belief that it was that of the people, but I am convinced now by its acts that it is not and that, on the contrary, it was this party which during its fatal reign maltreated the poor farmer folks and made a jest of liberty. For I remember that it was in those times that every Thursday and Sunday, for some reason or other, people were locked up in jail so that they couldn't go to the city-something which doesn't happen now-wherefore I disavow the signature which I gave in a weak moment (mala hora) for the Civil party and adhere with all my heart to the Republican party, convinced that with it in power our beloved country will continue in the path it now treads, of honor, liberty, and work.

And another from Alajuela, a half-hour's railway ride through coffee and sugar plantations down the valley from San José :

Vilely deceived by one of the Argola crowd, I let them put me in the directiva of that place,

but, convinced of my error, that as a son of the people I ought not to help with my vote to put those bloodsuckers back into power, I protest against this consent given in a weak moment, and, conscious of the sacred duty which I owe my beloved country, adhere to the grand Republican party.

The custom of making the day laborer practically a slave by getting him in debt. and keeping him there-so common in Mexico and- Guatemala-is comparatively unknown in Costa Rica. Indeed, the Costa Rican laborer has a curious sensitiveness, and if spoken to harshly, especially in the hearing of his companions, will often simply drop his work, and, with a Well, it's plain you don't like me!" walk away. That the need of a job may be used as a political club is suggested, nevertheless, by the following:

I, Rafael Compos Bastos, living near the Pitahaya" of San Francisco de Heredia, protest against the signature which I gave to the so-called National Union party (or better, the party of tricksters) bound as I was by my work and the room in which I was living, but to-day, finding myself absolutely free, I protest energetically against that party and join the great Republican party, which is the only one which can bring happiness and progress to our country. "Vive el Lic. Fernandez!

Viva el gran Partido Republicano! Viva San Francisco Fernandista !" Then there are the protests from those who have been put in a false light by the opposition scouts. From San Nicolas de Cartago comes the following statement, "at the request of Señor don Rafael Hernandez Calderon :"

I am informed by a truthful person that my name appears among those of the Duranista party in this neighborhood, notwithstanding that I refused to give my consent. As I have absolute confidence in the honor of the person who has given me this information, I desire to protest against this abuse to prevent my name being published, and declare that I am an old Republican and convinced that I shall never change.

Three citizens of Tableon de Cartago, not insisting, like the gentleman above, on prefixing the Señor don" to their names, protest energetically against the bad action of the Reds in including our names among those of the Civil party. We never were Civiles,' and hereby state that we have been, are, and shall be unto death, Republicans, and the day of election we shall deposit our vote for the valiant and honorable citizen Lic. don Maximo Fernandez.

Pablo Astua, "of age and living near Guadaloupe de Puriscal," explains that, "having been seen one day with a Duranista commission, they involved me in one way or