Florizel took the check that the editor gave him, and after dining at the most expensive restaurant in the town, he purchased a limousine and continued on his way.

In time he came to a magnificent marble palace, the home of The Goose Quill, the most cultured and discriminating literary magazine in the country. Florizel waited in the car while his chauffeur took his card inside. In a moment the editor himself came running out, and greeted him warmly.

"This is indeed a pleasure," said the editor. "We hope you have brought us something for our magazine." Being an editor he always spoke of himself as "we."

Florizel followed him into his sanctum. "I have a poem here that I'd like to read you," he said. "It goes like this:

They say that the wedding was the most gorgeous ever held. The President and his entire cabinet were there, and at the last minute the King and Queen of England cabled their regrets. After the dinner speeches were made, Florizel convulsed his hearers by the story of the Irishman on the ocean liner who was asked by one of the passengers why he was going across.

THE DROWSY SYROP OF THE REFORMERS

BY C. A. BENNETT

HIS is the story of what happened to

Richard Henderson, aetat. thirtyseven, respectable and respected citizen, when he took up with the reformers.

Richard Henderson had a comfortable house, a pleasant wife, and three quite nice children. His life, as lives go, was a fairly busy one. Every morning he left home for the office at eight o'clock and remained there, except for an hour off for lunch, until five. From five-thirty to seven he would play with the children or work in the garden or tinker with his car. In the evenings friends would come in for bridge, or he might go with his wife to the theater, to the movies, or to a concert. Sometimes, hounded by a sense of duty, he attended a meeting of one of the many

across.

This world, my lad, has no use for a quitter. The prize for him who proudly bears his load.

Remember, when the way seems hard and bitter,

The other side is reached across the road.

When Florizel finished reading the editor was in tears.

"My boy, my boy!" he sobbed, taking both of Florizel's hands in his. "That poem is a masterwork, it is genius! Take my job as editor. I resign. And I want you to marry my beautiful daughter Florabel to-morrow. She is worth twenty million dollars in her own right."

He liked best to spend the evening reading. His literature included the evening paper, two or three of the superior monthly magazines, Punch, the novels of Archibald Marshall and H. G. Wells, and Babson's reports. His favorite diversion, however, by some freak of temperament, he found in the novels of Sir Walter Scott.

On fine Saturday afternoons he played golf. Sunday morning he went to church with his family, from habit rather than conviction; in the afternoon he took them for a drive in the car. In

sum, then, he was an honest and energetic business man, a useful citizen, a

man without conspicuous vices, leading a normal and a tolerably happy existence.

Happy, that is, until one day he chanced upon an editorial in one of the liberadical weeklies. The subject of the editorial was the need for an intelligent public opinion. The writer contended that the well-to-do middle class, to whom, with a faint sneer, he attached the epithets "respectable," "genteel," "bourgeois," was the chief barrier in the way of this. They were neglecting their responsibilities. While they-an unthinking herd-attended to business, brought up families, played golf, motored, went to baseball games and movies and church, civilization was going to rack and ruin.

Richard Henderson could not, and did not, fail to see that he was a member of this ignoble class. With a shock he perceived that the writer's strictures applied to him. He began to wonder He began to wonder if his life was not, after all, both mischievous and futile. He had not seen things in this way before; but now owning a motor car began to appear sinful, and the next time he played golf he would feel like Nero fiddling.

If he had been even fifty-one per cent virile, or if he had known that the writer of the editorial was a wealthy young gentleman a few years out of college who lived in a comfortable apartment in Washington and whose sole occupation was the writing of editorials of this kind, he might have hurled the weekly into the fireplace and prayed for a chance to treat the author in the same fashion; but, since he was only a respectable and somewhat impressionable citizen, the guilty feeling persisted.

Thus, cogitating upon his newly discovered responsibilities, he decided to Take the First Step. He subscribed to three liberadical weeklies.

The first was The Exterminator. It was irritating, it was violent, it was cruel, it was harrowing. Most of the articles came back in the end to Karl Marx and the Rule of the Proletariat and the Rising Sun of the Russian

Revolution. A respectable citizen might disagree with it; he might hate it; but he could not deny its penetration and its power. He could not do other than flinch before its exposure of shams and vibrate with its sympathy for suffering and its detestation of injustice.

The second was The Weekly Challenge. It was at once more moderate and more high-brow in tone. While admitting and even emphasizing the evils enumerated by The Exterminator, it deplored violence and preached reform rather than revolution-as though one should spend one's time demonstrating to a man that a certain rock was so obdurate that clearly it must be moved, if at all, by dynamite, only to offer him at the close of your remarks a chisel and your good wishes. It persistently treated Marx and the Soviet Government as having merely an historical interest. It differed, further, from The Exterminator in preferring to deal with principles and systems rather than with particular cases. In fact, one got the impression that it was interested in the particular case primarily as illustrating some economic or political principle. Its literary style was unlovely. Sentences like this were common: "A principle of systematization which has functioned so successfully in the past reveals its inadequacy when its incorporation is attempted in the flux of a constantly changing societal context."

The third was The World Reborn. The World Reborn took itself seriously. There was something almost cosmic in the sweep of its generalizations. It concerned itself exclusively with movements international in scope. Week in and week out, it prophesied that Civilization or the World or Society was on the brink of disaster and would founder in ruin unless something or other were done. The remedies discussed were various, involving Leagues of Nations, systems of international finance, the destruction of Imperialism, A Great Religious Awakening. Common to them all was the suggestion they contained

that Civilization could not be saved bit by bit. Before any part of the world or mankind could be saved, the World as a whole or Human Nature in its entirety must be made over.

Such, in general, was the diet which Richard Henderson proposed to himself in order that he might fit himself to do his share in building up an intelligent public opinion.

He began with The Exterminator. It came on Tuesday. After reading his first number he decided that he would have to find out something about Marx and his theories. The Exterminator seemed to take it for granted that its readers would know all about him. He was moved to horror and anger by two apparently authentic narratives describing the inhuman conduct of mine guards in a recent strike. If this sort of thing were common-and it seemed to be no wonder the victims cried out for red revolution. He would make it his business to find out more about the sort of provocation these people had to suffer. Meanwhile he wanted to do something: it was impossible to sleep quiet o' nights while such deeds were being done. But what could he do?

He was fretful and disturbed until Thursday brought The Weekly Challenge, a number specially devoted to Education. The leading article took the line that the hope of a better world lay with the coming generation. And what were we doing for them? In the following articles Education in all its branches was reviewed and a multitude of reforms proposed. Through a mist of long words Richard Henderson could make out that things were in a bad way. The teachers in the public schools were utterly incompetent; the private schools existed only to impose or confirm the standards. of the wealthy and respectable classes; the universities were fashionable country clubs controlled by capital. In the face of such revelations how could he go on with his plan to send his boy to college? At least before doing so he ought to test the indictment.

In this new perturbation of mind Richard Henderson forgot all about Marx and the Revolution. The wrongs and sufferings of the exploited classes faded from his mind. Worry about the rottenness of education and what he could do about it crowded out all other thoughts.

Two days later on Saturday-came his copy of The World Reborn. The longest article in it was called The War that is Coming. It presented evidence to show that statesmen in many countries were preparing for another worldwar in five or ten years. It sketched some of the certain horrors of that catastrophe. It ended with a quotation from an article upon The Unknown Soldier in which the writer said that there were millions of unknown soldiers they were the young men of the next generation.

Richard Henderson thought of his son, and a chill struck at his heart. What was the use of bothering about the exploited classes or the education of youth if all alike were going to be flung into the hopper of the next war?

The result of his week's reading was an overwhelming sense of the world's wrongs, a confused memory of many remedies, an immense cloud of depression at his own ignorance and futility. He was utterly bewildered.

On Saturday afternoon he played golf in order to shake off his despondency; in the evening he played bridge with the same purpose. On Sunday he went mechanically through the day's routine to save himself from thinking. On Monday morning he plunged eagerly into the tasks of the office. Here at any rate was something to be done, something he could do with a fair chance of visible success.

On Tuesday the periodic bombardment by the weeklies was renewed. But the first week's experience was typical of all the rest. The Exterminator would first raise a wave of revolt which on Thursday would meet with another wave like unto it. Into the nasty chop

thus created would come marching on Saturday the wave heaved up by The World Reborn. By Saturday afternoon the three waves had neutralized one another so as to produce on Sunday a sinister and unhappy calm.

After two months of this Richard Henderson discovered that the net result upon his way of living of taking an intelligent interest in modern thought was to make him throw himself more earnestly than before into the daily routine of a respectable and respected citizen.

So he canceled his subscriptions to the three liberadical weeklies.

Moral: There is nothing like a lot of revolutionary ideas for keeping people quiet, or, if you prefer a simpler version: One thing at a time, please.

THE GRAMMAR OF INTERNATIONAL HATE

BY F. M. COLBY

PROBABLY no historian of French

literature would ever dare omit Cæsar's description of the ancient Gauls for the light it throws on the modern French character. Even M. Lanson in the closely packed pages of his excellent summary is afraid to leave it out. And like all the rest, he does not seem to notice the enormous inclusiveness of Cæsar's characterization, which applies of course to the French, but also to the Nicaraguans, the Bolshevists, the Bostonians, and in some respects to almost anybody. I myself have many personal acquaintances of rather simple natures, I admit-who are ancient Gauls all through. Cæsar redivivus would probably feel as much at home in any club in New York City, as he would in Paris. Cæsar apparently was among the first of our international impressionists, and he put a people in a nutshell just as M. Paul Bourget does to-day, summing up their character in a few bold strokes that applied quite as well to other people's characters. Why the French should be proud of their anthropological share in the thing is rather hard to see.

But at least M. Lanson is not sentimental about the Gauls or disagreeable to other persons who have no real Gauls in the family, and therein he seems wonderfully reasonable and kind as compared with our writers on the early Germans. I suppose young people have no idea what a nuisance that old German married couple used to be in the hands of American professors back from Berlin, all full of that strange dull early German madness. Civilization, they used to say, so far as there was anything decent about it, all came from that married pair who lived in the Thuringian woods about the year 1 A.D. And lucky it was for us and for the purity of our Anglo-Saxon heritage, that the husband loved liberty and the wife was chaste. Otherwise there would be no townmeetings in the State of Massachusetts (originally old hundred-gemots), no sessions of Congress (manifestly a witenagemot), no Democratic state conventions (transmitted by bands of early German warriors clanking spears in token of good citizenship), no home life worth mentioning (home, heim, early German invention, for which the French language has no word), and nobody would know how his wife might be behaving. Of course, there might be other origins for some of the more gaudy aspects of civilization such as literature, the arts, humanism, the Renaissance, and so forth, but for the solid kind of thing, and especially for anything like true political capacity, there was only that early German couple. American schools of political science were founded on this idea and a generation of American scholars lived and died with it.

Having scarcely any of this early German blood in us, we found it bard sometimes to take pride in it, but we contrived generally to do so. Blood will tell, we used to say-with an Irish city government, a President two-thirds Dutch, Hebrew signs on half the buildings, four Scandinavian state governors, Poles in possession of the Connecticut Valley, and Letts and Slovaks nurs

ing that tradition of Jonathan Edwards at his birthplace--and when it came to an issue with some low mixed Latin people we could trace ourselves all back to Hengist and Horsa by way of the Pilgrim Fathers and the barons of King John at Runnymede. To be sure, our blood claims on these occasions bore with great severity on the domestic morals of the Pilgrim Fathers, every one of whom would have had to lead a life far gayer than that of Augustus the Strong of Saxony to account for the richness of the strain. But if you want to be an Angle, a Saxon, or a Jute, you must forgive a certain carelessness in a Pilgrim Father.

Nowadays, although the Anglo-Saxon blood of a polyglot American Congress may boil at any time over an oil concession in Mexico, the early German enthusiasm of the educated public has cooled. Contemporary historians, I understand, have abandoned that scandalous attempt to fasten everybody's paternity on the Pilgrim Fathers, against whom nothing of the sort was ever proved, and when they lie for the country they do it more plausibly.

Not that I blame anybody for his nationalistic nonsense when his passions are aroused, for I know very well that in the event of a Boche invasion, I myself would have claimed descent from Romulus and Remus, if it would have served my country's cause. But while reasonableness is unattainable, there is a degree of unreason on the part of many distinguished men of letters, writing now in time of peace, that seems superfluous. I mean the hating or loving of great masses of mankind, and the cursing of some from the date of their purely imaginary origin down to the present time, such as we see every week or so in the writings of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, M. Alfred Capus, M. Paul Bourget, M. Maurice Barrès, Rudyard Kipling, and other formerly interesting authors. Or rather I mean the pretending to hate or love at all on such an enormous scale, for it is of course in

VOL. CXLV.-No. 870.-104

credible that any of these writers should have any feeling whatever toward the vast areas and populations, almost wholly unknown to him, which his language includes.

I wish I could think it was because I was virtuous or fairminded that I dislike these vast geographical expressions of love and hate on the part of my distinguished contemporaries, but I fear my sentiment is compounded exclusively of incredulity and ennui. When the nationalistic fit is on them, every one of these estimable writers falls into the language of the burlesque patriots in Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit. It is not because I love all the Germans of history that Mr. Chesterton's professed hatred of all the Germans of history bores me almost as much as Deacon Pogram on the past and future of America. Justice to all the Germans of history has very little part in my distaste. It is rather because when the language swells out as Mr. Chesterton's and Deacon Pogram's does on these occasions there is hardly anything left inside for the mind to grasp. Moreover, hate and love have nothing to feed on in these great empty verbal expanses. Hatred requires the concrete, and is fed on contacts, pictures, memories, and the man who would pass on some of his own vindictiveness to a neighbor must call up a definite image to his mind. The language of international hatred, as employed by these writers, suffers terribly from this impotence of the too inclusive term. It is impossible to shake your fist with any satisfaction at millions of unknown people over thousands of years.

Mr. Chesterton could hate his uncle splendidly. He can hate Lloyd George pretty well, and various persons named Isaacs or Samuels, and certain groups of socialists, eugenists and evolutionists, and can rise to a more inclusive hatred for large bodies of Germans, Russians, humanitarians, etc., though as his hatred expands in area it necessarily loses much of that fine personal finish which a more clearly realized