French and British loans; and the Boston connections of the House of Morgan, Lee, Higginson & Company, with their network of banks and trust companies; and the Lee-Higginson and Morgan control of the governing bodies of Harvard University; and Harvard's answer to "The Goose-Step,' the election of its distinguished graduate, Mr. J. P. Morgan, to its sacred band of overseers; and the Boston "Transcript,' and the Harvard 'Lampoon,' and the Laski case, and the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and the Boston police strike, and Cal Coolidge, the queer prank that fate played on Boston's aristocracy. Picture the situation in the year 1919, the days of Attorney-General Palmer; the Harvard mob smashing that police strike, and the hundred per cent patriotic plutocrats of Boston raiding the offices of the 'Reds,' and cracking the skulls of everybody they found there"

"The Harvard manner?" says Mrs. Ogi.

"Throwing them into jail, or packing them by hundreds into rooms in office buildings without toilets, and shipping them back to Europe where they came from. And right in the midst of that campaign, in that same anno mirabile of 1919, comes our Babbitt professorI mean our Professor Babbitt-with a schoolmaster's ferule in one hand and a slung-shot in the other, scolding and at the same time committing mayhem upon every artist who in the past hundred and seventy-five years of history has ever had a human feeling. It is supposed to be a work of scholarship, of literary criticism; it is written to teach 'decorum'-by such examples as this: "The humanitarian, all adrip with brotherhood, and profoundly convinced of the loveliness of his own soul.' And again: 'Both Rousseau and his disciple Robespierre were reformers in the modern sense that is they are concerned not with reforming themselves, but other men.' What is one going to do with a man like that?"

"What did they do with them in the French revolution?" asks Mrs. Ogi.

"Les aristocrats à la lanterne !" says her husband.

"I've forgotten all my French," says Mrs. Ogi, “and so will most of your readers. But I'll tell you this-the professor sounds exactly like you, except that he's on the other side!"

CHAPTER XLVI

THE POISONED RAT

While France has been moving toward its revolution, England has been moving away from hers, and we now return to the foggy island to watch the course of events through this eighteenth century. The crown has submitted, and parliament has the last word in public affairs. A parliament of the land-owning gentry, elected by corruption, we shall see it in the course of two centuries being gradually changed into a parliament of merchants and ship-owners, of steel and coal and diamond and gold magnates, of brewers and publishers of capitalist propaganda.

It was the task of eighteenth century England to create the bourgeois soul. Machinery and standardized production, which were to make over the world, had not yet appeared, but when they came, they found their psychology and culture all prepared for them by this "nation of shop-keepers." It is a world of money, all other powers deposed, all other standards a shell without life inside; honor, favor, virtue are represented by money. Religion has become an affair of "livings" and of "benefices." Politics has become an affair of party rancor, a squabble over the spoils of office. The difference between the two parties is that one is in and the other is out; the purpose of the outs being to prove rascality against the ins, and thus get a chance to do what the ins are doing.

In this bourgeois world the artist may be feeble of mind, not knowing the reality of his time, believing sincerely in its shams. Or he may be a cynic, jeering at his time, but taking what he can get. Or he may be a rebel, speaking the truth-in which case he will starve in a garret, or go insane, or be thrown into prison, or driven into exile.

The first to greet this new century with his writings. was a man who went insane. One of the great masters of English prose, his fate in life was to be brought up as a "poor relation," and to eat the bitter bread of dependence. He became a kind of educated servant to the wealthy, and finally got a small job in the church. Ill

most of his life, proud, imperious, burning up with thwarted genius, Jonathan Swift was made into a master ironist.

His first great book was "The Tale of a Tub," in which he ridiculed the squabbles of the various church parties. Having thus shocked the church, he applied to be a dean, but did not get the job, because somebody else paid a thousand pound bribe to the official having the appointment. Swift was told that he could have another deanery at the same price, but he did not have the sum handy.

The "ins" of those days were called Tories, and the "outs" were called Whigs; they fought furiously, and literary rats, hiding in garrets and cellars, wrote pamphlets of personal abuse, which were published anonymously and circulated in the face of jail penalties. Like the laureate Dryden, our would-be dean did this vile writing; he did it for the Whigs, and when he got no preferment there, he joined the Tories, and was made dean of the cathedral in Dublin. There he wrote his "Modest Proposal" for eating the children of Ireland, one of the most terrific pieces of irony in all literature. "Look," says the 'gloomy dean,' "we are letting a population starve to death, and what a waste of national resources, what a violation of our fundamental principles of business economy. Let us feed these Irish babies, and when they are nice and fat, serve them on our tables; they will be happy during their brief span of life, and we shall no longer have to import food from foreign parts."

Then came "Gulliver's Travels," which took its place along with "Pilgrim's Progress" as required reading for children and adults. It is an even more perfect allegory; you can read it as a story pure and simple, without any idea of an ulterior meaning. The author helps you by the perfect gravity with which he describes every detail of these singular adventures. First we visit the land in which the people are only six inches tall, and so we laugh at the pettiness of human affairs. Then we visit the land where they are correspondingly big, and we learn how brutal and gross and stupid we really are. So on, until we come to the land of noble and beautiful horses, in which human beings are lewd and filthy apes. So we learn the worst possible about a world which appointed a man of genius to be dean of St. Patrick's

in Dublin, when he wanted to be dean of St. Paul's in London. So we are ready to go insane, and to die, as the dean himself phrased it, "like a poisoned rat in a hole."

CHAPTER XLVII

VIRTUE REWARDED

Prose fiction up to this time had dealt for the most part with men; its most popular variety was the "picaresque," telling the adventures of vagabonds and rascals. But now in this bourgeois England the fiction writer settles down, and becomes respectable, and discovers the theme which is to occupy him for the next two hundred years the feminine heart, and what goes on in it during the mating season.

Watch the gentleman-turkey, stirred by erotic excitement; he struts up and down, swells out his comb, spreads his feathers, scrapes the ground with his stiff wings. And there stands the humble and retiring lady-turkey, observing him with modest but attentive eye; she takes a step or two away, but does not run far. What is going on in her mind? What does she think of the bloodflushed comb and the spread feathers, the heroic pose and the awe-inspiring gobble? We are not permitted to enter into the psychology of a lady-turkey; but through the magic of fiction we are permitted to watch the mind of the lady-human, and note every detail of the process. whereby she gets her mate. We share her emotions, we analyze the devices she employs-and thus, if we belong to her sex, we perfect our technique, or, if we belong to the male sex, we learn how to write novels.

In this bourgeois world, the emotions of mating are dominated by those of money. Society has become settled, property relations are fixed, and you live a routine life, without great change or adventure-except once, which is at this mating period. Here is your great chance to rise above your own class in a world of money classification. A beautiful and charming maiden may catch the eye of some wealthy man; a handsome, dashing youth may stumble upon an heiress. Such is the significance of the heavenly smiles and the coy glances of

bourgeois romance. Cupid travels about, armed with a golden arrow, and in the love-glints from the eyes of youth and beauty we see fortunes flying to and fro-diamonds and rubies, manor-houses, estates, orders and offices, titles to nobility. And always in the background sit the chaperons, keeping watch-old women, whose function it is to know the grim facts of greed, and to pass on such "worldly wisdom" to the young.

The first old woman to take up this task in English fiction was Samuel Richardson. He himself was a hero for any bourgeois novel-a printer who had married his master's daughter, and become publisher to the king. He knew what money costs, and believed in it with all his heart and soul; in his mature years he set out to warn young women of the value of their virtue, and point out to them the importance of a life contract in love. He wrote a novel called "Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded," telling the story of an innocent fifteen-year-old servant girl in the household of a great gentleman who makes love to her. In a series of letters to her parents she exposes to us the details of this love-making, and all her bewilderments, agonies and fears.

Pamela Andrews is the very soul of humility; but young as she is, she knows the business facts concerning the life contract-"with all my worldly goods I thee endow." She knows that her master is a rake and scoundrel-he gives her in the course of the story all possible evidence of that; nevertheless, she stands firm, and in the end her virtue is rewarded-by marriage with this rake and scoundrel. If that seems to you a strange reward of virtue, it will be only because you do not understand this eighteenth century world. What a man is personally counts for little compared with the class he belongs to. He is a gentleman, he owns houses and lands, and Pamela's children will be ladies and gentlemen, and will own houses and lands. This novel became the sensation of the day, not merely in England, but all over Europe. There were two large volumes, and a sequel with two more, but no one was bored; great ladies sat up half the night, weeping their eyes red over Pamela's trials, and welcoming her-in imagination-into the class of ladies. The writers learned how to make money, and a new profession, that of the love-describers, came into being.