be a competition for men, a competition not only by the exhausted Powers of Europe but by Canada, Australia, and America as well. Europe will endeavor to keep its able-bodied men at home. They will be needed for reconstruction purposes. There will be little immigration out of France, for France is a nation of home-owning peasants and France has never contributed in material numbers to our population. The same is true of Germany. Germany is the most highly socialized state in Europe. The state owns the railways, many mines, and great stretches of land. In England too the state has been socialized to a remarkable extent as a result of the war. Russia and Austria-Hungary have undergone something of the same transformation. When the war is over these countries will probably endeavor to mobilize their men and women for industry as they previously mobilized them for war. And in so far as they are able to adjust credit and assistance to their people, they will strive to keep them at home. But that is not all. Millions of men have been killed or incapacitated. Poland, Galicia, parts of Hungary and Russia have been devastated. Many nobles who owned the great estates have been killed. Many of them are bankrupt. Their land holdings may be broken up into small farms. The state can only go on, taxes can only be collected if industry and agriculture are brought back to life. And the nations of Europe are turning their attention to a consciously worked out agricultural programme for putting the returning soldiers back on the land. Not only that, but reports from steamship and railroad companies indicate that large numbers of men are planning to return to Europe after the war. The estimates, based upon investigation, run as high as a million men. Poles and Hungarians are imbued with the idea that land will be cheap in Europe and that the savings they have accumulated in this country can be used for the purchase of small holdings in their native country, through the possession of which their social and economic status will be materially improved. I have no doubt but that the years which follow the ending of the war will see an exodus from this country which may be as great as the incoming tide in the years of our highest immigration. Along with this exodus to Europe, Canada will endeavor to repeople her land. Western Canada especially is working out an agricultural and land programme. Even before the war her provinces had removed taxes from houses and improvements and were increasing the taxes upon vacant land, with the aim of breaking up land speculation. And this policy will probably be largely extended after the war is over. England, too, is developing a comprehensive land policy, and is placing returning soldiers upon the land under conditions similar to those provided in the Irish Land Purchase Act. It is not improbable that the war will be followed by a breaking up of many of the great estates in England and the settlement of many men upon the land in farm colonies, such as have been worked out in Denmark and Germany. Even prior to the war Germany had placed hundreds of thousands of persons upon the state-owned farms and on private estates which had been acquired by the government for this purpose. Over $400,000,000 has been appropriated for the purpose of encouraging home-ownership in Germany during recent years. All over the world, in fact, the necessity of a new governmental policy in regard to agriculture is being recognized. Thousands of Danish agricultural workers have been converted into home-owning farmers through the aid of the government. To-day 90 per cent of the farmers in Denmark own their own farms, while only 10 per cent are tenants. The government advances 90 per cent of the cost of a farm, the farmer being required to advance only the remaining 10 per cent. In addition, teachers and inspectors employed by the state give instruction as to farming, marketing, and the use of cooperative agencies, while the railroads are owned by the state and operated with an eye to the development of agriculture. As a result of this, Denmark has become the world's agricultural experiment-station. The immigration from Denmark has practically ceased, as it has from other countries of Europe in which peasant proprietorship prevails. In my opinion, immigration to the United States will be profoundly influenced by these big land-colonization projects of the European nations. It may be that large numbers of men with their savings will be lured away from the United States. As a result, agricultural produce in the United States may be materially reduced. Even now there is a great shortage of agricultural labor, while tenancy has been increasing at a very rapid rate. And America may be confronted with the immediate necessity of competing with Europe to keep people in this country. A measure is now before Congress looking to the development of farm colonies, in which the government will acquire large stretches of land to be sold on easy terms of payment to wouldbe farmers, who are permitted to repay the initial cost in instalments covering a long period of years. Similar measures are under discussion in California, in which State a comprehensive investigation has been made of the subject of tenancy and the possibility of farm settlement. Looking in the same direction are the declarations of many farmers' organizations throughout the West for the taxing of land as a means of ending land monopoly and land speculation. This is one of the cardinal planks in the platform of the non-partisan organization of farmers of North Dakota which swept the State in the last election. Every branch of the government was captured by the farmers, whose platform declared for the untaxing of all kinds of farm-improve ments and an increase in the tax rate on unimproved land as a means of developing the State and ending the idle-land speculation which prevails. If such a policy as this were adopted for the nation as a whole, if the idle land now held out of use were opened up to settlement; if the government were to provide ready-made farms to be paid for upon easy terms, and if, along with this, facilities for marketing, for terminals, for slaughter-houses, and for agencies for bringing the produce of the farms to the markets were provided, not only would agriculture be given a fillip which it badly needs but the congestion of our cities and the immigration problem would be open to easy solution. Then for many generations to come land would be available in abundance. For America could support many times its present population if the resources of the country were opened up to use. Germany with 67,000,000 people could be placed inside of Texas. And Texas is but one of forty-eight States. Under such a policy the government could direct immigration to places of profitable settlement; it could relieve the congestion of the cities and Americanize the immigrant under conditions similar to those which prevailed from the first landing in New England down to the enclosure of the continent in the closing days of the last century. For the immigration problem is and always has been an economic problem. And back of all other conditions of national well-being is the proper relation of the people to the land. PROMISE By Margaret Cable Brewster ALL that thou art, my Mother, I would be; And, even now, I dream that dawn shall rise When one shall, wistful, look into my eyes, And find therein a light that shines from thee. THE GOLDEN AGE OF PAINTING BY KENYON COX THE CULMINATION OF THE RENAISSANCE UST at the end of the fifteenth century, after two hundred years of delightful if incomplete creation or of strenuous study of nature and of technic, the art of the Italian Renaissance reached a sudden and brilliant maturity. For a brief period it produced a series of supreme masterpieces. Then, everywhere but in Venice, that decline began. which has continued until now. Venice maintained the supremacy of Italian art until nearly the end of the sixteenth century, but with the beginning of the seventeenth the leadership in art passed definitely to the races of the North. The suddenness of the change from an art still more or less primitive to the fullblown art of the high Renaissance, and the briefness of the period of splendor, may be best shown by a few dates. The first picture of the new and fully matured style, Leonardo's "Last Supper," was probably painted in 1497. Within fifteen years, that is, by 1512, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and the frescoes of the Camera della Segnatura had been completed, and when Raphael died, in 1520, the decline had already begun. In 1505 Raphael, then just beginning to break away from the method of Perugino and to establish his own artistic personality, had begun a fresco of "The Trinity with Saints and Monks" in San Severo at Perugia. He left it unfinished, and the lower part of it was painted, after his death, by Perugino himself, still practising with diminished power the old manner from which Raphael had so entirely freed himself. Even Correggio, the youngest and the most revolutionary of the giants of the high Renaissance, who transformed painting beyond the dreams of Michelangelo or Raphael, had completed his work and died in 1534. Yet Lorenzo da Credi, Leonardo's fellow pupil in Verrocchio's studio, younger than Leonardo by seven years, survived until 1537, a primitive to the end. Al Nothing can account for the extent and the rapidity of this change but the extraordinary genius of four men: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Correggio; and the art of this short and wonderful time of culmination is essentially their work, as the art of the long decadence that followed is deeply tinged by their influence. Without any one of them the high Renaissance would have lacked something essential to its peculiar glory. Without any one of them the art of the succeeding age must have been profoundly different from what it actually was. ways excepting the Venetians, who need separate consideration for many reasons, their contemporaries were either survivals of the past, like Perugino and Botticelli; men of talent but of little original force, like Fra Bartolommeo and Andrea del Sarto; or their own followers and imitators. Doubtless there are good historical reasons why the culmination should have come at that time, or, what is really the same thing, why the decline should have begun immediately after them. Doubtless their time moulded them and colored them, as it fostered them and gave them their opportunity. But there was no one else who could have used their opportunity as they used it, and in their turn they moulded and colored their age. The earliest of the four, Leonardo da Vinci, was, in a sense, rather a precursor of the high Renaissance than a full sharer in it. Twenty-three years older than Michelangelo and thirty-one years older than Raphael, he was already a mature and world-famed artist when they were beginning their careers, and in his later years he completed very little work of importance. Painter, sculptor, architect, engineer and man of science, as well as musician and courtier, he allowed his varied interests to distract him from artistic creation, and of the few things he actually painted most are lost or ruined. Enough remains for us to see that his task was to push all parts of the art of painting to the very verge of perfection, not to carry any one of its elements to the highest possible point. His composition has an amplitude and a dignity hitherto undreamed of, his draughtsmanship an expressiveness and precision hitherto unattainable. One could scarcely imagine anything better composed or better drawn than are his best works, had not Raphael and Michelangelo shown us what that something might be. It is so with everything else, with the noble casting of his draperies, with his treatment of light and shade, probably with his mastery of color, though it is now impossible to tell what his color may really have been. It is in the treatment of light and shade that he was most the innovator, and he has been called the inventor of chiaroscuro, but even here he did not go the whole way. So much of light and shade as is necessary to express the full roundness of objects he thoroughly mastered. He added the third dimension to the two which had hitherto almost sufficed for painting, and incurred the risk of blackness to insure the perfection of modelling. Of light and shade as a separate element of art, capable of its own range of expression-of light and shade which veils form rather than reveals it he knew nothing, or chose not to utilize such knowledge as he had. For it is necessary to distinguish between what Leonardo the scientific investigator had learned of the aspects of nature and what Leonardo the artist thought fit for artistic employment. He was a tireless student of all kinds of natural phenomena, and of many things he had learned a great deal that has been rediscovered only in our own time. Among other things, as his note-books prove, he had studied effects of transmitted and reflected light, understood the difference between diffused daylight and sunlight with its crisp-edged shadows, saw the blue shadow which has been introduced into modern painting by the Impressionists and knew the reason of it. He attempted none of these things in painting and he tells us why. These things, he says, after a long description of the effects of sunlight upon foliage of the color of the sky in the high lights, of the yellow light where the sun shines through the leaf and the interruption of this light where the shadow of one leaf falls upon another—these things should not be painted "because they confuse the form." The Florentine ideal in art was the utmost realization of form. Leonardo was a true Florentine, and he introduced into painting just so much of light and shade as should assist in this realization, no more. It is his use of modelling that is his most personal contribution to art. Much rhapsodical nonsense has been written about the "Mona Lisa" and her enigmatic smile, and there have been endless speculations as to her character and the meaning of her expression. It is all beside the mark. The truth is that the "Mona Lisa" is a study of modelling, little more. Leonardo had discovered that the expression of smiling is much more a matter of the modelling of the cheek and of the forms below the eye than of the change in the line of the lips. It interested him, with his new power of modelling, to produce a smile wholly by these delicate changes of surface; hence, the mysterious expression. Poets may find "la Gioconda" a vampire or what-not-to artists with a sense of form her portrait will always be a masterpiece because it is one of the subtlest and most exquisite pieces of modelling in existence. It is perfect as the surface of a Greek marble is perfect, beautiful with the beauty of a lilypetal, and is well worth the years of study and of labor that it is said to have cost. Another of Leonardo's innovations was less fortunate. The technic of fresco painting, with its necessity for direct and immediate attainment of the desired result, was ill suited to his temper, which loved to ponder deeply and to caress into final perfection by an infinity of retouchings. He abandoned it, and painted his "Last Supper" in another medium which is now said not to have been oils. Whatever it was it proved ill suited to mural decoration, and the painting must early have begun to scale from the walls. Today it is a wreck in which the nobility of the composition is all that is discernible of what was once a masterpiece. Whether a similar fate overtook his "Battle of the Standard," which he began to paint upon the wall of the Palazzo Vecchio in Flor |