Volume 1 — The Latest Viewpoints of Men Worth While

James J. Hill Warns America of Dangers that Threaten Her Future—Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Lord Avebury Deal with the Questions of the Day in England—Dr. Martin Predicts a Great Awakening in China—Governor Folk Foresees the Downfall of "Graft"—Lewis Nixon Speaks of What He Saw in Russia—Dr. Osler Explains His Philosophy of Life—Russell Sage Gives Some Practical Advice—With Other Striking Expressions of Opinion from People of National or International Reputation.

Compiled and edited for The Scrap Book.

THE COMING TEST OF AMERICAN RESOURCES.

James J. Hill, Seeing Trouble Ahead, Warns His Fellow Countrymen That There Are Dangers to Be Met.

At last James J. Hill—the silent railroad king of the Northwest, has given us his full and free opinion on the business policy of the United States. Throughout his long career it has been his plan to "say nothing and saw wood." He has been too busy to talk. The man who plunges into a dense wilderness, as he did, and transforms it into four or five prosperous States, has no time to run a public opinion factory.

But recently, while at a gathering of his friends in St. Paul, Mr. Hill unlocked his tongue and spoke out. It was a remarkable address, made by a remarkable man, and the meat of it was as follows:

The nation at large feels that it is immensely prosperous. We are cutting a wide swath; there is no doubt of it. But if we will get down closer and examine what we are doing, we will find that we are living profligately and squandering our heritage in every possible manner.

We should insist upon better cultivation of the land. For on that one item depends your future growth and prosperity, and there is no other item to which you can look; no other source of wealth than that which comes out of the cultivation of the soil.

If the soil is protected, if it is intelligently handled, if your crops are properly rotated, if the land is fertilized and rested and treated with proper care, you have a mine in the soil that will never be exhausted; quite unlike the other mine.

The millions and hundreds of millions of dollars coming into the Northwest from the annual crops, while it is large, isn't half as large as it ought to be.

Our Free Lands Are Gone.

Our public domain is exhausted. Last year over a million people came from across the Atlantic to the United States, and the natural increase certainly is a million and a half more. What is to become of these people? They are to be driven fairly into the factories and workshops and no place else.

They can leave our country and go to the Canadian Northwest, as many have gone. But that country will be populated to its extent very soon, much sooner than you think. It has not an unlimited area.

Try and cast your mind twenty or twenty-five years ahead. At that time we should have one hundred and fifty or one hundred and sixty millions of people. Where are they going? Who is going to feed them? They can manufacture. We have the raw material. We have the coal and the iron and the copper and the lead. They can manufacture. Who will buy it?

We have got to a point where we are selling our heritage; we are selling our rich deposits of iron and our coal and our rich soil, and exhausting it as well.

People of other countries are exercising the utmost, closest intelligence in everything that pertains to economy in production. Take, for instance, the German nation to-day, and they lead the world or any period in the history of the world in industrial intelligence and industrial management.

Competition Grows Fiercer.

I was in England in November, and met a sad sight—Trafalgar Square filled with idle people, large numbers of idle people asking for bread up around Hyde Park. Why? The men who carry on the work, who paid the pay-rolls, are no longer engaged in the business.

What they had they have turned into money, and have bought securities or something else, trying to save what they have got.

In the west of England, which was a great center of broadcloth manufacturing and of woolen goods, their output is less than a quarter of what it was twenty-five years ago. Germany is selling cutlery in Sheffield.

And I took pains to look around London, and to walk into the shops and find out. I couldn't buy a pair of lisle-thread gloves that were not made in Germany. Underclothing, stockings, cloth, almost everything made in Germany. They have a system of education in Germany. They educate their men.

Now I am not going to undertake to say that their way is better than ours, but I want to impress this on you, that when this country has a hundred and fifty million people they have got to do something; they have got to earn a living.

Who will buy the goods? Who will employ them? In what shape are they to meet the competition that England is meeting to-day? And a million and a half of idle men asking for bread in England, and no bread for them except such as charity doles out. They have got to be carried out of Great Britain and a new place found for them. There is no other solution.

It is all well enough to talk about what we are doing. Examine it closely and you will find that we are doing nothing except selling our natural resources and exhausting them. When you dig a ton of ore out of the ground you can't plant another ton, as you could potatoes; it is gone. And when the fertility of our fields, the fertility of the soil is gone, where are we going to replace it from?

Teach the Boys to Work.

I am not going to find fault with education; it never hurt anybody. But if, in place of spending so much time and so much money on languages and higher studies, we fitted them for the life that they are going to follow, for the sphere in which they are going to move, we would do more for them.

I know that in two or three, more or less, railroads in which I am interested, the pay-rolls cover eighty to ninety thousand people. We have tried all manner of young men—college men, high-school men, and everything else—and I will take a boy at fifteen years old who has to make a living—his chances will be better if he has to contribute to the support of a widowed mother—I will take him and make a man of him, and get him in the first place, before you would get most of the others to enter the race with him; simply because he has to work. He has to work, he has the spur of necessity; he must work.

If there be anything that you can do, I feel sure that you will all put your hands to the plow and help; but you will never build a city faster than you have a country to support it. And that is the first and the most important thing.

FREE TRADE IS VITAL TO GREAT BRITAIN.

Sir Henry Fowler Says that an Import Tax Upon Food Would Be Ruinous to the English People.

Free Trade, which has been the policy of England for sixty years, is again on trial, and the battle waxes fierce. There is a growing effort to work in the thin wedge of "a moderate tariff, not protective but defensive," but the opposition are fighting it with every weapon in their armory of protest. England to-day is not self-supporting, her rural industries have been declining for years, and the country receives from abroad the far larger quantity of its food and raw material.

Thirty per cent of the people are underfed and on the verge of hunger. Thirty per cent of forty-one millions comes to over twelve millions.

This significant statement comes from the lips of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the new English premier, in a speech against the proposal for preferential tariffs with the colonies, at Perth, on June 5, 1903. Three years has not changed the situation for the better.

Winston Churchill, M.P., puts the situation thus:

The mass of people are absolutely dependent for the food they eat and the material they employ upon supplies of food and raw material which reach them mainly from abroad. They are dependent on the condition of a crop at one end of the world and the state of a market at the other; and yet, upon this artificial foundation, through this inestimable advantage of unfettered enterprise and of unrestricted sea-communication, they have been able to build up a vast industrial fabric which it is no exaggeration to say is the economic marvel of the world.

In 1904, the amount of merchandise brought into the United Kingdom was nearly $2,740,000,000. For thirty years England's imports have been rapidly increasing, while her exports, comparatively speaking, have remained stationary. The situation can be put in a way readily appreciated by Americans if we realize that the entire British Isles are smaller than New Mexico, and yet contain about half as many people as are in the United States.

It is the foreign trade of Great Britain that is claimed to be the salvation of the nation. In 1904 this amounted to over $4,600,000,000, and last year, the figures for which have not yet been published, was the greatest in oversea trade in the history of the nation.

Sir Henry Fowler, a leader of the Liberals, said, in a recent speech:

The question of free trade is the greatest which has been before the country for the past half century. The young men of to-day are absolutely ignorant. They do not know what it means and the issues it involves. If the great system of free trade were interfered with, if the attempt were successful which is being made to reverse the policy of the past sixty years on which the overwhelming bulk of political economists were united, I foretell for this country a time of the greatest disaster. All classes would suffer, especially the working class.

Dealing with the question of exports and imports, he pointed out:

Eighty per cent of what came into Great Britain represented raw material necessary for manufactures and food necessary for the people. Therefore the prosperity of this country depends, not upon its exports, but upon its imports. We are free-traders, not for the injury it does others, but in our own interests. It is to our advantage to buy cheap. Our greatest import is food and the next raw material. We can only pay by our own manufactures.

ENGLAND'S DEFENSES, AND WHAT THEY COST.

It Is Not Military Strength That Makes a Country Great, Says Lord Avebury, but the Right Use of Power.

That the burden of armament lies heavy on Europe is well understood. It is not so commonly known that in the last ten years the cost of army and navy has increased much more rapidly in Great Britain than in any country of the Continent. The fact is brought out in the Nineteenth Century by Lord Avebury, who is better known to Americans as Sir John Lubbock. He says:

In our own case there has been on the army an increase in the past ten years of £24,800,000, and on the navy an increase of £25,000,000; or, taking the two together, in round figures an increase of no less than £50,000,000, of which, however, only £39,000,000 is shown in the ordinary estimates. In other words, while Italy has increased her naval and military expenditures by £1,500,000; Russia, £10,800,000; Germany, £8,700,000, and France, £6,000,000, we have increased ours £50,000,000. Thus these four great countries put together show an increase of £27,000,000, while ours by itself is £50,000,000, or nearly double that of Russia, Germany, France, and Italy put together. What justification have we for this enormous increase?

I do not wish to exaggerate, nor to maintain that we are going down-hill. But our progress has been checked, and if we are not wise in time worse will follow.

Lord Avebury's political opponents would argue that the British military expenditures have been exceptional because the Boer War proved the country unprepared for any great military undertaking, and necessitated elaborate efforts. However, the figures are startling, and give point to Lord Avebury's conclusion:

We sometimes hear of "Little Englanders." I hope we shall not let ourselves be stung into extravagance and war by any such taunt. There are many who have strong views as to what constitutes the true greatness of a country. It is not wealth, but the application of it; not the numbers of the people, but their character and wellbeing; not the strength, but the use made of it. We do not wish for England the dangerous power of dictation or the seductive glamour of conquest, but that our people may be happy and contented; that we may do what we can to promote the peace, progress, and prosperity of mankind, and that we may deserve, even if we do not secure, the respect, the confidence, and the good-will of other nations.

Being once more happily at peace with all the world, our financial policy should be to reduce expenditure, pay off debt, increase our reserves, and lighten the taxes which now press so heavily on the springs of industry.

THE CHEERY OPTIMISM OF LITTLE JAPAN.

A Nippon Statesman Tells How the Britain of the East Looks Hopefully to New Horizons.

The Japanese are winning fresh admiration for the cheerful optimism with which they face the perplexing financial conditions following the war. In the Forum for January, Baron Shibuzawa expresses a sentiment general among Japanese statesmen:

It would be out of tune with all things, for us, at this hour, to be looking upon financial Japan after the war with a sad eye. Nevertheless, as we are well aware of the disturbances which the war has brought to our finances, we must look to the best possible measures for restoring to health and prosperity what the war has disturbed. That is all. But the war and its conclusion have brought us one very great and precious gift, namely, it has admitted us into the household of the great economic world. In a word, it has given a wider horizon to the economic circle of Nippon, and has brought us into the very heart of the comity and exchange of the economic interests of all human kind; and has linked us, in a sense hitherto unknown to us, with the markets of the world.

THE GREAT AWAKENING OF THE CHINESE GIANT.

Are China's Four Hundred Millions Preparing Themselves to Turn Against the Western Nations?

Dr. W.A.P. Martin, who has been identified with China since 1850, and whose least statement about that country is authoritative, gives some interesting and important facts in the World's Work with reference to how the sleeping Chinese giant is awakening. Referring to the work of Chang, Viceroy of central China, Dr. Martin says:

The banks of the river in front of his capital, Wuchang, are lined for miles with cotton mills, hempworks, silk filatures, glassworks, iron foundries, and powder-mills, whose high chimneys proclaim the coming war. When China can supply her own markets, foreign steamers will cease to ascend the Yang-tse-Kiang.

In view of the fact that China's educational system was established more than twenty-five hundred years before Christ, and that up to only a few months ago the official examinations were restricted exclusively to subjects relating to China's literature and history, what Dr. Martin tells us of the rapid growth of schoolhouses is surprising and significant.

Going within the walls, we are struck by the great number of fine schoolhouses in foreign style that rise above the huts of the natives. Our clever viceroy knows that the industrial arts have their root in science and that science must be taught in schools. He thus proclaims from the housetops his gospel of the new education. He has embodied it in a book of rhymes, which are sung by his soldiers to the beat of the drum, and committed to memory by all the school children in a population of fifty millions. The following are some of his sounding periods:

We pride ourselves on our antiquity, But foreign nations ridicule our weakness. Knowledge is power. What but their newly acquired knowledge Enabled the Japanese to gain the victory over us And win for themselves a place Among the great powers of the earth? Over against their three small islands Have we not a vast territory with four hundred millions? If we of the yellow race learn to stand together Where is the nation that will dare to molest us?

The empress dowager and all her grandees have become converts to Chang's new gospel. Not merely has she reenacted the emperor's ordinance for the establishment of graded schools in all the provinces—ousting the idols and using their temples for want of houses—she has cut down the annual expenses of her theatrical troupe to one-third and devoted the other two-thirds to the erection of schoolhouses.

Teachers for these Chinese schools are being largely provided by the normal colleges in Japan, which contain over four thousand Chinese students, including both sexes. Such, at least, is the claim of another recent writer upon the Chinese awakening; this time a Japanese, Adachi Kinnosuke.

WE MUST HAVE EQUAL LAWS FOR ALL.

But Every Law Looks Blue to the Man Who Wants to Break It, Says Governor Folk, of Missouri.

Governor Joseph W. Folk, who became the most popular man in Missouri because he dared to enforce the laws without fear or favor, until lately has been too busy putting grafters in jail to talk about his work. But in a speech which he made the other day in Boston, he told pretty clearly what he is aiming at. He said:

The trust manager defies the laws of the State against combinations and monopolies, and then calls for the protection of the State for his property.

The dram-shop keeper wants the law enforced against the man who robs his cash-drawer, but thinks he has a right to break the law requiring his saloon to close on Sunday.

The burglar detests the law-breaking of the trust, but considers the statute against housebreaking as an interference with his personal liberty.

Governor Folk thinks that King Graft has just about come to the end of his reign:

Wealth is not worshiped with the same devotion it used to be. A new standard has been established; new, yet old—just honesty; that is all. The remedy for corruption has been found in the hearts of the American people.

RUSSIA WILL ADVANCE, SAYS LEWIS NIXON.

With the Birth of Democracy and Industrialism, a New Day Will Dawn For the Great Slavonic People.

Lewis Nixon, who has been suggesting plans for the reconstruction of the Russian navy, believes that democracy is the proper medicine for the Czar's distracted country. The people have been dwarfed by despotism, he says, but they are now making wonderful progress in manufacturing and opening up their enormous country. In a recent interview, Mr. Nixon says:

Russia needs two things to enable her to feed the rest of Europe—cheap money and cheap transportation.

With railroad enterprise, such as that of J.J. Hill, lower Russia and southwestern Siberia could raise wheat for the world. But I believe that with the adoption of the new idea of participation of the people in the government so sincerely determined upon by the emperor, Russia will settle down to tranquilly building up the empire and developing the arts of peace instead of the arts of war.

The great difficulty in the Russian form of government is to find great men equal to the task of carrying it on. Public life, as we know it, has not existed there.

With the institution of the Douma, the strong men are bound to make themselves felt, and the results will be that the Czar will not lack for competent advisers and administrators.

I am convinced that as soon as the Douma gets going thoroughly a new day will dawn for Russia and her people. There is bound to be wonderful commercial development, and with this will come an awakening of intelligence and exercise of limited constitutional government, which is bound to result in peace and tranquillity and the restoration of Russia to her high place among the powers of the world.

DR. OSLER IN HIS MORE CHEERFUL PHASE.

Some Pet Philosophies of the Famous Physician Whose View on the Age-Limit Is Not His Only Idea.

When Dr. William Osler admitted his belief that man is fit for creative intellectual work only up to his fortieth year he gained an undeserved reputation for grimness. The age-limit theory is but one of many that he has formed on various subjects. In his book, "Counsels and Ideals," are many genial expressions of a ripe observation. Here is his advice as to "work":

How can you take the greatest possible advantage with the least possible strain? By cultivating system. I say cultivating advisedly, since some of you will find the acquisition of systematic habits very hard. There are minds congenitally systematic; others have a life-long fight against an inherited tendency to diffusiveness and carelessness in work.

To counteract "the murmurings and whimperings of men and women over the non-essentials" he advises each of us to "consume his own smoke."

Things cannot always go your way. Learn to accept in silence the minor aggravations, cultivate the gift of taciturnity, and consume your own smoke with an extra draft of hard work, so that those about you may not be annoyed with the dust and soot of your complaints. More than any other the practitioner of medicine may illustrate the great lesson that we are here not to get all we can out of life for ourselves, but to try to make the lives of others happy.... Courage and cheerfulness will not only carry you over the rough places of life, but will enable you to bring comfort and help to the weak-hearted, and will console you in the sad hours when, like Uncle Toby, you have "to whistle that you may not weep."

Of the end of life, speaking both as a physician and as a philosopher, he says:

With what strife and pains we come into the world we know not, but it is commonly no easy matter to get out of it, Sir Thomas Browne says; and, having regard to the uncertainties of the last stage of all, the average man will be of Cæsar's opinion, who, when questioned at his last dinner-party as to the most preferable mode of death, replied, "That which is the most sudden."

I have careful records of about five hundred death-beds, studied particularly with reference to the modes of death and the sensations of the dying. The latter alone concern us here. Ninety suffered bodily pain and distress of one sort or another, eleven showed mental apprehension, two positive terror, one expressed spiritual exaltation, one bitter remorse. The great majority gave no sign one way or the other; like their birth, their death was "a sleep and a forgetting." The preacher was right: in this matter man hath no preeminence over the beast—as the one dieth, so dieth the other.

PRACTICAL TRAINING FOR NATIONAL GUARD.

Good Soldiers Must Know How to Shoot Straight and How to Handle Themselves in the Field.

A large delegation of members of the Interstate National Guard Association was received by the President on January 22d. He strongly impressed certain practical recommendations in regard to the training of both militia and regular army. Parade-ground marching and tactical maneuvers are, he said, nowhere near as important as training which will make men good soldiers in time of war, and he continued:

As war is carried on nowadays, ninety per cent of the ordinary work done either on the parade ground or in the armory, either by a militia regiment or a regular regiment, amounts to nothing whatever in the way of training except so far as the incidental effect it has in accustoming the men to act together and to obey; but they are not going to fight shoulder to shoulder when they get out into the field. It is absolutely not of the slightest consequence what their alignment is, but it is of vital consequence that they shall know how to take cover, how to shoot, and how to make themselves at home under any circumstances.

THE NEGRO'S CHANCE IN THE SOUTH.

Booker T. Washington, the Negro Educator, of Tuskegee, Pleads the Right of His Race to Work.

Speaking of the future of the people of his race, President Booker T. Washington says in the American Illustrated Magazine:

Whatever special difficulties the negro has to face, whatever obstacles race prejudice or his own history may place in his way, the negro, under freedom, has the right to work, at least in the South, and work for the best things the world offers. He has the opportunity to make himself useful and to share the benefits that his genius and his labor confer on those around him. That is, it seems to me, what emancipation means, in practise, to the negro. That is, after all, nearly all that it could mean.

THE DISADVANTAGES OF COEDUCATION.

Mrs. Craigie Declares It Makes Girls Overbearing and Converts Boys Into Dandies or Weaklings.

Mrs. Craigie, better known to the literary world as John Oliver Hobbes, is an American woman who has spent many years in England. On her recent visit to her native land she gave her impressions of English life. Her keen observation, deepened and intensified by her life on two continents, and her wide and close association with great thinkers, lend weight to any subject upon which she expresses her opinions. She finds but two objections to coeducation: one is its effect on the boys, and the other on the girls.

Coeducation, she says, is not so dangerous to the working classes as to those of higher rank. The English working classes are a very sane lot, and, besides, the sexes seem better balanced among them than in the higher classes. In the board schools it may serve well enough, but in the higher classes coeducation is impossible. It is not only the girls that are to be considered. Coeducation not only makes English girls tomboys, overbearing and feverish in the pursuit of their masculine schoolmates, but it also has a very bad effect upon the boys. The boys, being inevitably outnumbered, five to one, either become silly little dandies, ruling a feminine court, or are tyrannized over by the girls until their spirits are broken and their ambition destroyed. All they care for is comfort.

It is dreadful that young boys should be cowed in this way and become submissive to their girl schoolmates, and yet even sturdy boys must bow to superior numbers, and twenty weak and sickly girls may tyrannize over four or five boys.

Mrs. Craigie's view seems to harmonize with that of Dr. G. Stanley Hall, president of Clark University, and one of America's greatest educators. In discussing higher education in this country, he says it reduces the rate of both marriage and offspring, so that barely three-fourths of our male graduates and only about half of our female graduates marry, and those who do so, marry late and have few children. In an article contributed to Munsey's Magazine, he says:

Recent studies show that a large per cent of girls actually wish they were boys. Their ideals grow masculine, and we seem slowly to be developing a female sex without a female character. So far have the actions against the old restraint gone that feminists still regard every effort to differentiate as endangering a relapse to old conditions.

Again, the rapid feminization of our schools encourages women teachers to give their own masculine traits and ideals free rein.

Once more, girls' manners are roughened, and they do not develop pride in distinctively feminine qualities, or the grace and charm of their young womanhood, or lack a little respect for their sex. Girls have much responsibility in bestowing the stimulus of their approval aright. It is said that association with boys makes high-school girls less poetic, impulsive, romantic, their conduct more thoughtful, but I maintain, women teachers to the contrary notwithstanding, that this is unfortunate; that something is wrong with the girl in the middle teens who is not gushy or sentimental, at least at times.

So it is said that the presence of girls is humanizing for boys, but there is something wrong with the boy at this age who can truly be called a perfect gentleman. I do not like to urge that he should be a little rowdy or barbaric, but vigor must not be sacrificed to primness, and masculinity at this age does not normally take a high polish. Nature impels boys to get away, in certain respects, from girls and women, whoever they are. Some suffer subtle eviration, while others react, with coarseness toward femininity, if held in too close quarters with girls.

THE LATE PRESIDENT HARPER AND HIS WORK.

Appreciations of the Man Who Built Up Out of a Fresh-Water College the Great University of Chicago.

The proposed monument to the late President William Rainey Harper of the University of Chicago is to take the form of a library building. Thus will be fittingly suggested the practical trend of his life, in which scholarship was joined with utilitarianism. So businesslike were this educator's methods in building up a great university upon the foundation of a provincial college that he was severely criticized for the seeming incongruity between his aims and the means he used. And yet, as the New York Evening Post has said:

Whatever may be thought of his policies, his personality now appears in a fine and heroic light. No one can consider the admirable fortitude and self-forgetting equanimity he displayed in his long and hopeless fight against pain and death, without perceiving that here was a heroic soul, to which epithets borrowed from trade had no proper application.

As his administration proceeded along the golden way laid by Mr. Rockefeller, it became evident that President Harper faced all problems as new problems, and that his optimism admitted no difficulties. When it was discovered that the University of Chicago lacked college life and spirit, college life and spirit were straightway improvised, or at least encouraged, by the appointment of a famous athlete to the faculty, and later by the building of dormitories. No detail of university life escaped him. If he lacked some of the finer sympathies and perceptions that go to make the ideal university president, he was a figure instinct with vital energy, ingenious and resourceful in all matters—in its qualities and defects thoroughly American and of our time. The present, in which he lived by preference, will give him an almost unbounded admiration; sober judgment based upon the past will gradually smooth the inequalities of his work.

President Harper was a man who did things. It is doubtful whether he himself placed the highest importance upon his executive work; it is not unlikely that he would prefer to be remembered as a Hebrew scholar and the author of abstruse commentaries. But a man is not always himself the best judge of the relative values of his own work. Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, writing in the Boston Transcript, thus estimates President Harper's career:

To sum up, the great characteristic of President Harper was his unflagging and generous belief that things could be done. In his thirteen years of service he saw Chicago University rise to a place in the first rank of the world's institutions of learning. It never seemed to occur to him that a thing must be abandoned or even postponed because it was difficult. When he felt that the time had come for a law school, he created it. He found the Blaine School of Training for Teachers in existence, and absorbed it. Nothing seemed beyond his powers, yet he always had time for the visitor and the guest, kept up his teaching to the last, and was one of the chief citizens of Chicago and of Illinois. Who can doubt that President Harper's intensity of love and service for the university of which he was really the founder and always the principal force shortened his days, and yet who could wish to leave a more enduring monument than his life-work?

The presidents of several colleges have spoken of him as follows:

President Woodrow Wilson, of Princeton University: "President Harper's death deprives the country of one of the most extraordinary and attractive figures, and the last months of his life have added a touch of heroism through which he won the warm admiration of the whole country. His loss is very serious indeed."

President Schurman, of Cornell University: "President Harper was preeminent as an educational administrator, and was the greatest college president of the last fifteen years. The University of Chicago will remain for all time as a monument to his memory."

President Hadley, of Yale: "President Harper was a brilliant instructor, skilful organizer, and a man of rare business ability."

President Eliot, of Harvard: "His life, wonderfully active and energetic, was brought, by excessive work, to too early a close."

THE MEANING OF PUBLIC OWNERSHIP.

A Radical View of a Radical Policy, as Expressed by a Well-Known Radical of Chicago.

Publicists are generally agreed as to the meaning of the great changes now progressing in American political sentiment. The country, we are informed, after wrestling successfully with the problems of the accumulation of wealth, is ready to concern itself with the equitable distribution of what has been accumulated. We are growing rich almost too fast. We produce such vast quantities of everything needed by mankind that we hear of "production outrunning consumption."

In this new condition Clarence S. Darrow, the well-known Chicago lawyer and student of economics, sees the explanation of the growth of sentiment favoring public ownership. Writing in the International Quarterly, he takes advanced Radical ground as follows:

Public ownership sentiment has had a remarkable growth in the United States during the last ten years. This sentiment is one of the many manifestations of the deep conviction that the present division of wealth is at once unjust and absurd. All sorts of theories for the more equitable distribution of wealth have found ready advocates on the platform and in the press in every enlightened nation of the world. However various the plans and schemes of social change, it is beyond dispute that the tendency of all nations has been toward a wider and completer collective life. In every country in the world the people have been constantly enlarging the functions and duties of the State, and political organizations are more and more becoming industrial institutions.

In Europe, municipal and even national ownership of public utilities is no longer looked upon as radical or new, and the rapid growth of these ideas abroad has had much to do with sentiment in the United States.

The most casual student of social questions has likewise seen the enormous fortunes that have been built up by the private ownership of public utilities. The larger part of all the stocks and bonds issued by public-service corporations are based upon franchises and not on private property. By this means the public is constantly and systematically taxed upon its own property, and this vast tax, in the shape of interest on bonds and dividends on stock, is taken by a handful of exploiters and stock-jobbers—who have thus contrived to build up private fortunes from public wealth.

GOOD ADVICE, GRATIS, FROM A RICH MAN.

The Characteristic Philosophy of Russell Sage, the Most Contented Multi-Millionaire in New York.

Nearly ninety years of age and weighted with scores of millions, Russell Sage is to-day one of the most completely satisfied rich men in the world. This is true, for "he himself has said it, and 'tis greatly to his credit."

Russell Sage is now the oldest of the money-kings of New York. He was born seventeen years before Andrew Carnegie, who threw off the harness of business five years ago. The original John Jacob Astor died at eighty-four, and Commodore Vanderbilt at eighty-two. But Russell Sage still is standing at the tiller of his gold-ballasted craft, as keen and sharp-eyed as he ever was. Of all the famous figures of Wall Street, only Daniel Drew lived to greater years; and Drew lost all his millions before he ended his long career as a speculator.

Mr. Sage is as saving in his opinions as in his money, and it is seldom that he can be persuaded to make his mind an open book for the general public. But recently he consented to give the New York World the full story of life as he sees it. It is the most complete description of the Sage philosophy that he has ever given to the public. Whatever this advice may be worth to you, it has been worth about a hundred millions to Russell Sage:

I think, if I had my life to live over again, it would be as honest, as simple, as home-loving as I could make it. I would try with all my power for home-like comfort, happiness, and long life, as against show, shallow pleasure, and a short existence. Home life is best. Clubs are only a place for idle old men and wasteful young men.

Great wealth is not everything, by any means. The mere making of money is not the only criterion of success. Many men whose names are our common heritage have died in very moderate circumstances, or even in poverty. Money is not a measure of brains.

Real success is often achieved after many failures. An active man builds success upon a foundation of failure; a passive man does not. A real man is not hurt by hard knocks. Hard knocks make character.

I think, had I my life to live over again, I would make charity a life study. It is a science. It cannot be learned in a day. The older a man lives the more he gets to realize this. From my own investigations I have found that there is a large class of professional mendicants that prey upon the well-to-do and charitably inclined.

From time to time I have taken a whole month's batch of appealing letters and have had them thoroughly investigated by trained agents. Very few have been found to possess real merit. Most of the appeals were from persons who would not help themselves even with the aid of a helping hand.

Real charity is dispensed without the blare of trumpets. Notoriety and professional philanthropy, indiscriminate alms-giving in any guise, have always been repugnant to me. I have never asked for any publicity for what I have done. Silence has invariably been my rule and practise.

If I had my life to live over again I am sure I should not attempt to move in what is termed "society." I would rather be one of a few gathered together by a bond of friendship than to partake of all the glitter and hollowness of what is called the "Four Hundred." The friendship of a few outlives life itself. Friendship remembers; society forgets. In the home only is there true happiness. It is there that a man's best ideas get their birth and grow.

If I had my life to live over again I would marry even earlier than I did. The tender care of a good wife is the finest thing in the world. I am thankful, indeed, that I have had this in the fullest measure.

Thrift is the first element of successful manhood. When you have made your fortune, it is time enough to think about spending it. Two suits of clothes are enough for any young man. The only thought that a young man need spend about his clothes is to look out for bargains at the lowest price.

Let him be on the lookout for cheap hats, bargains in shoes, knockdowns in suits. He is fostering business traits that augur well for his success in years to come.

The boy who knows bargains in socks makes the man who knows bargains in stocks.

Fifty cents is enough for a straw hat; it will last two seasons. You can get for thirty-nine cents an unlaundered white shirt which is excellent. You can get a good undershirt for twenty-five cents. Silk is not for salaried men. Fine clothes bring sham pleasure. Don't try to rival the flowers of the field.

A rich man does not work for himself alone. He is really the nation's agent. He turns his wealth over constantly in a way that helps others. No one need be alarmed over the constant increase in the wealth limit. Big enterprises require big men.

There is no such thing as a money-curse. It is the man, not the money, that makes the amount of individual wealth wrong. A good man cannot have too much money.

And so let me say in conclusion, if I had my life to live over again, I would try just as hard as I knew how to turn my money over and over again, that it might do the most good to other men.

I would live no differently. I would do as hard a day's work as I knew how. I would not feel it necessary to take vacations to recuperate. I would get my pleasure simply. I would dine simply on plain food. After dinner there would be a little reading of the papers or of good books, a chat with friends that might drop in, and maybe a game of whist. I get plenty of relaxation from an exciting rubber. When the game is over, my day is done. I sleep like a top till morning.

That would be my life if I had it to live over. All my life my home has been my haven of happiness.