ts

and producing interests. The great merchants to whom the producers sell and who handle millions of bushels of grain and hundreds of thousands of bales of cotton could not carry on their business if they were not given the privilege of protecting themselves in the contract market. When they make forward sales. to manufacturers who have sold goods ahead, and the new crop has not yet moved, they protect themselves by purchases of new crop months. When cotton begins to move in volume, and there is no proportionate demand from spinners to take the output of the gins, merchants sell future contracts against their accumulations of actual cotton, and thus insure themselves against a decline in prices.

Thus in both instances the futurecontract system is either directly or indirectly of benefit to manufacturer and cotton grower. The manufacturer by his contract with the merchant protects himself on his raw material, while, on the other hand, the cotton grower is able to sell his production at a fair price when the spinner is practically out of the market. This latter phase was strikingly illustrated last fall when manufacturers stubbornly kept out of the market and farmers sold their cotton at high prices because speculative buyers were willing to take the hedges sold by merchants at levels averaging well above 20 cents per pound.

It is to be questioned if any of the legislation relating to future contract trading either in grain on the Chicago Board of Trade or on the Cotton Exchanges of the country has been beneficial either to producer or consumer. The basis for numerous "squeezes" and "corners" has been laid by the United States Cotton Futures Act, passed several years ago, limiting the number of grades that could be delivered on contract. The administration of the United States Grain Futures Act tends to reduce the volume of trading, thus leaving a narrower market in which the execution of hedge sales exercises an influence on prices to the detriment of the producer.

To realize fully the impossibility of the enactment during the next eighteen months of any laws that would interfere with the free operation of our financial markets, it is necessary only to remember that Mr. Coolidge is in the White House, in full possession of the veto power. Such laws are utterly repugnant to his economic credo-and this is one of the reasons why the business community groaned when it heard from the Black Hills, "I do not choose to run.”

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S

UCCESS looks so easy when it has

been achieved. To his enthusias

tic audiences Sir Harry Lauder, now on an American tour of Scotch song-singing, would seem to lead an easy and a miraculously profitable existence. But behind that sturdy bearing and boyish smile lies a lifetime of long up-hill climbing.

Oldest of seven children in a humble Scotch home, Harry can scarcely remember when he could not cook a meal, do a family washing, and act as nurse to the babies that arrived punctually, one a year, in the crowded Lauder cottage. He was only eleven when his father's sudden death left the family bewildered and penniless save for Harry's possible wage-earning and Mother's determina

Illustrated by Frank W. Peers

The Robbers on the Road

As remembered by Sir Harry Lauder

the boy found work in the flax mill as a "half-timer"-mill one day and school the next, with an equally harsh taskmaster in each. Then for four hours every evening Harry and Mother sat in the kitchen, tearing old ropes and twine and hawsers into tow, till their fingers bled and the boy was half crying with ache and weariness. But the work had earned a few more precious pennies.

Yet for all the hardships there are happy memories. Mother, superstitious Highland lassie, was a great story-teller, scaring and thrilling her brood nearly to death of evenings with her tales of witches and spooks and outlandish doings.

And there was Grandfather Henry Maclellan, for whom Harry was named, old now and frail, crouched over his Gaelic Bible in the "ingle-neuk," but

straightening up proudly to relate his adventures as a strapping young railroad engineer. What a doubting gray head that old Scotchman would have shaken had he been foretold that his namesake would win fame on two continents, and one day strangers across the ocean would read eagerly

me when I was a lad. You he see, drove the iron horse-yes, he was a railroad engineer-and many were the tales he told. One I have never forgot, though I was but a wee chap when I first heard it.

"When I was courtin' yer granny," my grandfather used to say, "I walked twelve miles every evenin' and back again, from Montrose to Arbroath, where she was livin' then."

And that after driving his engine all day! He was a great strapping fellow, my grandfather, a wonderful man.

One bright moonlight night he was walking along the road to Arbroath, with his great retriever dog trotting ahead. Grandfather always took Cæsar along for protection, and he kept a sharp watch for highway robbers, for there were plenty of them about in those days, and dangerous ones too.

Pretty soon my grandfather heard a noise in the bushes. Then a man came out and asked for a match.

"I have no matches," said Grandfather, for he wasn't going to be fooled into putting his hand in his pocket. He wanted to keep both hands free to use. "What time is it, then?"

"I don't have a watch," said my grandfather, still keeping both hands outside his pockets.

"What?" said the man. "You don't have a match and you don't have a watch? Well, then," he said, "have you any money?"

"No!" said my grandfather, and with that he took the man in his two handsand he had great powerful hands that would make the two of mine-and threw him back over his shoulder in the road. Then he started running as fast as he could, and whistling for Cæsar.

But Grandfather had run only a few hundred yards when he heard another noise in the bushes, and then another man came out.

"What were you doin' fightin' that man back there?" said the man,

"The same thing I'm doin' with you," said my grandfather, and with that he took the second robber in his two great powerful hands and threw him back over his shoulder in the road.

When he had gone a bit, he stopped and whistled for Cæsar. But Cæsar didn't come. He whistled again, but he had no answer. So then my grandfather sat down all alone in the road under the bright moonlight and waited, feeling sure poor Cæsar had been killed.

Presently he saw the dog coming, but very slowly. When he got nearer, Grandfather saw he was limping, and when Cæsar came close Grandfather saw that his great chest was all cut up with pen-knives where the robbers had stabbed him when he attacked them. The poor fellow's wounds were all matted with hair and bleeding terribly.

Cæsar was all of a hundredweight, and they were miles from Arbroath, but my

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"And," Grandfather used to say, "I walked back the same night!"

Yes, he walked the whole twelve miles to Montrose again, and up bright and early next morning too, driving his engine again! He was a wonderful fellow, my grandfather.

Maybe 'twas that evening he won Granny's heart, when she saw what a

great strong, brave man he was.

Our Own Theatre List
(See page 465)

"Coquette," Maxine Elliott.-Comedy, tragedy; youth in a small Southern town; Helen Hayes and excellent cast; first choice for tears and humor.

"Escape," Booth.-Galsworthy's melodrama; an English gentleman, escaped from prison, plays hare to the constables' hounds in many exciting situations; Leslie Howard; what would you do if he took refuge with you? "The Ivory Door," Charles Hopkins.-Fantasy; mediæval fairy tale, telling the truth about human nature; Henry Hull and good company; one of the best things in town. "Trial of Mary Dugan," National.-Mystery, murder, melodrama; circumstantial evidence turned inside out before your eye, convincingly acted; you won't move. "Porgy," Republic.-Folk-play; Negro life along Charleston water-front; real Negroes; a gorgeous thing, if simply for its pastel colors and primitive music.

"The Shannons of Broadway," Martin Beck.Comedy, melodrama; vaudeville actors running a small-town hotel; James and Lucile Gleason; good hard-boiled sentiment and some music. "The Queen's Husband," Playhouse.-Modern light comedy; royalty in a mythical kingdom; Roland Young; Sherwood's most subtle humor. "Marco Millions," Guild Theatre.-Satirical comedy; O'Neill's beautiful spectacle of Marco Polo's trip to Venice and China; the immature West meeting the wisdom of the East. "Strange Interlude," John Golden.-A psychological novel put upon the stage; a new kind of drama; Tom Powers and Lynne Fontanne in O'Neill's finest.

"Our Betters," Henry Miller's Theatre. Ina Claire in a drawing-room comedy by Somerset Maugham; entertaining, deft, and excellently acted.

picture.

"Gentlemen Prefer Blondes."-Laughs and pretty girls and pretty vague.

"A Girl in Every Port."-Victor MacLaglen gets all balled up, and so does the plot. "The Jazz Singer."-Al Jolson and the Vitaphone are thrilling; the picture isn't much. "The Last Command."-The mighty Jannings, with a good story, good direction, and good support.

"The Last Moment."-Trick shots, lap dissolves, and little else.

"The Latest from Paris."-Norma Shearer in a harmless light comedy.

"Love Me and the World is Mine."-Directed by Dupont, who should know better.

"Rose Marie."-It was a nice operetta, but it's a punk picture.

Barrymore.

"Sadie Thompson."-Gloria Swanson and Lionel Don't expect to see "Rain." "Simba."A fine wild animal picture. See it. "Soft Living."-A nice enough little drama, with Madge Bellamy.

"The Student Prince."-A Lubitsch production, and a good one. Ramón Navarro, Norma Shearer, and Jean Hersholt.

"Sunrise."-The year's best picture.

"That's My Daddy."-Reginald Denny is always likable.

"Wings."-A splendid war picture, marred by the well-meant efforts of Clara Bow.

A

N Englishman, Osbert Burdett, has now essayed to do for Gladstone1 what the Frenchman André Maurois has done for Gladstone's great contemporary and rival, Disraelinamely, to draw a pen portrait from which the observer may get a fair impression of the subject's character and inner impulses. This, of course, is the most elusive and difficult task in portraiture. On canvas only the greatest and rarest of painters have succeeded in doing it. Rembrandt, Raeburn, Velasquez, Ingres, and our own Sargent were men who had the rare gift of perceiving underlying traits of character and making them shine through the external lineaments of flesh and blood. There are few Rembrandts among the biographers. The despised Boswell is the real Rembrandt of them all. And if Don Quixote had been a living being, Cervantes might be called the Velasquez of literature. André Maurois has much of the insight of his fellow-countryman Ingres; but Osbert Burdett, in spite of the honesty and dignity of his work, can scarcely be classed with Raeburn or Sir Joshua Reynolds. Perhaps this is because Disraeli was, as the Italians say, sympatica to the Frenchman, while the Englishman, educated at Marlborough and Cambridge (where he took honors in history), and therefore doubtless of Tory predilections, finds Gladstone antipathetic.

In his preface Mr. Burdett frankly says that he has endeavored to draw "a partial portrait of a character" and quotes with approval Lord Morley's wise remark that posterity is more interested in knowing what Gladstone was than in what he did. But to say, as Mr. Burdett does, that Gladstone "never hesitated to claim almost divine sanction for whatever he proposed" and that "he disguised the changes in his attitude by a tone of unction and an art of qualification which seemed hypocritical and sophistical" is partial portraiture with a vengeance.

For forty years Gladstone's intellectual and political characteristics have been as antipathetic to me as they appear to be to Mr. Burdett, but I can at least see that the Prime Minister was something more than an unctuous hypocrite. It is a curious psychological phenomenon that an English Tory

1 W. E. Gladstone. By Osbert Burdett. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.

ཟ

By LAWRENCE F. ABBOTT

Contributing Editor of The Outlook

Churchman will calmly ignore ecclesiastical logic in an ultramontane like Cardinal Newman that makes him boil over with indignation when he finds it in an evangelical like Gladstone.

For forty years, I have just said, Gladstone's processes of reasoning have been antipathetic to me. The trouble began with the publication in 1888 of Mrs. Humphry Ward's "Robert Elsmere," a novel, now almost forgotten, which created as great a fervor in Church circles of that day as "Elmer Gantry" has in our time. "Robert Elsmere" was an attack, not on the morals, but on the intellectual despotism of the Church. Unlike "Elmer Gantry," it was a sincere and respectful endeavor to show that a man may lose his hold on the doctrines of traditional orthodoxy and yet maintain his faith in the great basic virtues of human beings and human society. I was living, a young newspaper reporter, in California at the time, and the book made a profound and stimulating impression on me. Not long after its publication Mr. Gladstone reviewed it in the "Nineteenth Century" in a long article which seemed to me full of specious reasoning, intellectual evasions, and ecclesiastical prejudice. It was a shock which I have never got over, for the man whom I had been taught to regard as the great champion of liberty had turned out to be an intellectual despot. If we had been living in the Middle Ages, he would have burned me at the stake. But I suppose I ought not to hold the memory of this article against Gladstone, since Mrs. Ward did. not. On the contrary, she maintained a warm friendship for him to the day of his death.

Since the "Robert Elsmere" episode I have made it my business to study Gladstone's life and record with some care and to find out what really are his claims to my respect.

Gladstone was of Scottish ancestry. He was brought up in an atmosphere of very pious but very sincere Scotch evangelicalism. His mind and heart were saturated with the beliefs of traditional orthodoxy. He unquestioningly believed, not only that this world is a preparatory school for the next, but that

the universe is a theocracy. When thirty
years old, he wrote book on Church
and State which is as ultramontane as if
it had come from Rome. At Eton and
Oxford he had become a classical and
theological scholar, an expert debater,
and developed into one of the greatest
and noblest orators of our times. If he
had gone into the Church, he would
have been a great preacher and a great
bishop. If he had gone to Rome, he
would have been a great cardinal. But,
instead, he became a member of Parlia-
ment and made his maiden speech in
that ancient assembly when not yet
twenty-four years old.

The Government of England is, for
tunately, a two-party Government, and
Gladstone became both by conviction
and habit a party man. Although his
basic integrity and honor led him occa-
sionally to rise superior to party, his
temperament and training impelled him
to defend both his Church and his party
by reasoning that to men of simple in-
tellectual honesty like John Bright, on
the one hand, and Thomas Huxley, on
the other, seemed specious and incon-
sistent. Huxley once said of him,
"slowly and with sorrow:"

That man has the greatest intellect
in Europe.
He was born to be a
leader of men, and he has debased
himself to be a follower of the masses.
If workingmen were today to vote by
a majority that two and two make
five, tomorrow Gladstone would be-
lieve it, and find them reasons for it
which they had never dreamed of.

Gladstone's greatest achievement in
statesmanship was his persistent and in-
domitable fight for Home Rule, the final
fruition of which he did not live to see,
but which resulted in the establishment
of the Irish Free State and, perhaps, in
saving the British Empire from disinte
gration.

The worst piece of statesmanship in Gladstone's record was his failure, for reasons both pious and partisan, to prop erly support Chinese Gordon and Khartum in 1885. His vacillation resulted in the tragic death of Gordon. Of this event Lord Cromer says in his memoirs:

Posterity has yet to decide on the services which Mr. Gladstone, during his long and brilliant career, rendered to the British nation, but it is improbable that the verdict of his contemporaries in respect to his conduct of (Please turn to continuation, page 478)

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