established beyond question, then the stock may be acquired with wisdom.

There are many classes of bonds, and their relative investment value depends upon a variety of circumstances and conditions. Stock issues, too, include several classes. Some companies, notably the smaller manufacturing corporations, have no bonded obligations, but have trusted to the sale of stock for financing their operations. A number of stocks of this class form excellently safe and profitable investments. Their market, however, is a narrow one, as a rule. But most corporate organizations issue both bonds and stocks.

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Bonds are issued usually in denominations of $1,000, but there are also many bonds for $500 each, and some for $100 each. Interest is ordinarily paid semi-annually, and little detachable checks, or slips, called coupons, representing the amount of interest due each half-year, are attached to the bond. These should be cut off and presented at the office of the company for payment upon the agreed day. Such bonds are termed coupon bonds." There are also what are known as "registered bonds." These do not possess the little checks or coupons, but show instead, upon the reverse side, blank spaces for the purchaser's signature. His name and address are at the same time registered upon the books of the company, together with the number of his bond. At interest periods the company's treasurer forwards him a check for the interest due. Registered bonds may not be sold without the written consent of the holder over his signature, or that of some person holding his power of attorney.

For this reason the purchase and sale of registered bonds involve considerable detail and sometimes expense. Hence their market price is usually lower than coupon bonds of the same issue. The latter are readily negotiable by any holder, and require no form whatever. If a registered bond were stolen, it could not be disposed of by the thief, whereas the sale of a stolen coupon bond might be an easy matter. Savings banks and trust estates generally prefer registered bonds as investments because of their greater safety

and their convenience in the matter of interest. Certain bonds may be issued in either coupon or registerable form at the option of the purchaser.

Financial ingenuity has created many kinds of bonds and has tagged them with a great variety of names. In another article these different sorts of bonds will be considered individually. For the present it will suffice to enumerate the various classes. In some instances the appellations are self-explanatory. Bond issues include first, second, and third mortgage bonds (and occasionally even fourth or fifth mortgages), general, unified, consolidated, collateral trust, extension, refunding, divisional, sinking fund, convertible, equipment, and participating mortgages, and debentures. The last are not mortgage bonds, although frequently quite as desirable. A debenture is simply an unsecured promise to pay, and resembles a note. The bonds thus enumerated include the issues of all manner of stock corporations, railway, both steam and electric, gas, water, electric lighting, and industrial companies.

Stock issues are less diversified. They consist, usually, of a preferred and common stock. But there are occasionally three classes: i.e., first preferred, second preferred, and common stock. Their relative claims as regards the company's earnings, its lands, buildings, machinery, fixtures, and other material property, are specifically defined at the time of their issuance. In some cases the preferred stock is allowed so much out of surplus earnings, then the common stock so much, after which they share alike in what remains applicable, in the discretion of the company's directors, to dividends. Again, the preferred stock may be limited to a certain per annum income, after which dividends upon the common stock are to be restricted only by the amount of surplus earnings available for distribution. In other cases the income upon each class of stock may be limited by agreement to a maximum figure. A share of stock usually represents one hundred dollars, and this is called its par value. But the par value may vary with different companies. The par value of some stocks is fifty dollars, of others five dollars, and of yet others one dollar.

A very great number of mining shares, for instance, have a par value of one dollar. When an investor buys a share of stock, it is transferred to his name upon the company's books, and his name is written across the face of the certificate, upon which is printed the statement that John Doe is now the owner of one share of the capital stock of X Company. The stock may not be sold without his signed and witnessed permission, or that of his attorney. The company issues certificates representing one share, and multiples thereof up to any amount purchased. Dividends are paid semi-annually, or quarterly, by the company's check.

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The distinction between the relative investment values of bonds and stocks when productive conditions are unfavorable (and regard should always be had for such possibilities) may be simply illustrated as follows: A farmer finds it necessary to borrow money with which to sow or to harvest his crops, for fertilizers, or for other purposes. He mortgages his farm for $10,000. But the farm is actually worth $16,000. cause of adverse circumstances he fails to pay interest. The mortgage is foreclosed and the farm sold for $16,000. Out of the proceeds of the sale the mortgage debt is paid, both principal and interest. What remains is turned over to the farmer. Had times been prosperous the farmer might not only have paid his interest, but from the remaining surplus earnings he might have actually reduced the sum of his principal indebtedness. In the case of the stock corporation, the bondholders correspond to the man who has loaned the farmer money. The stockholder represents the farmer.

It is difficult to avoid the allurements of unusual income from investment, even though the eventual cost may mean the sacrifice of principal. A few years ago the stock of a great corporation was offered to the public at a price remarkably low, considering the fact that dividends were then being paid and rumors of their

permanency were being circulated. Here is the actual experience of one investor in that stock. She-for this particular person was a dressmaker in a small town, who had saved a few hundred dollars-did not know what the word stock signified. But she did see, thanks to the "tips" of well-meaning friends, that the purchase of this particular stock meant an income of about nine per cent. (Income upon a stock investment may be figured by dividing the rate per cent paid upon the par value by the market price. Thus: a stock which pays four per cent upon its par value of $100 per share, and which is being sold at $44 per share, nets the purchaser 9.09 per cent.) Therefore, this woman, attracted by an extraordinary income, invested her savings in a mere possibility. The earning capacity of the stock was practically untested. Still, she bought in small amounts as it advanced in market price. Suddenly it began to decline, for, as the wise ones knew, its rise had been due to skillful manipulation. The woman, inspired still by well-meaning friends with "tips," continued to buy as the stock went down. When it had reached a point at which the income was about twenty per cent on the investment, the directors decreed a suspension of dividends for an indefinite period. Immediately the stock fell to something less than ten per cent of its par value. The poor dressmaker's savings were wiped out. She could not even borrow money offering her comparatively worthless shares as collateral. No one wanted them.

Had this woman bought the bonds of the same company, she would have had an assured income of about five per cent per annum, and principal unimpaired. She could not watch the markets and buy and sell as speculators do, risking all for great profit or utter ruin. What she needed was safety of principal and peace of mind.

In a subsequent paper the bonds of a railway company will be considered from the point of view of the investor.

G

USTAVE Charpentier, whose opera "Louise" has held the stage for seven years in Paris and has just been produced at the Manhattan Opera-House in New York,1 is, before and above all, a lover of life. While a Prix-de-Rome student at the Villa Medicis in Italy, he produced a work consisting of five symphonic tableaux, entitled "Impressions of Italy," in which he embodied in musical form ("painter's music " some one has called it) the varied sensations and emotions of his Italian sojourn. "Sauntering through Italy," says his friend and fellowmusician, Alfred Bruneau, "he hears the serenades which, under the amorous sun, the swains give, from morning till night, to the maidens. He sees the long lines of women going to draw water at the singing fountain. He is amused by the tinkling bell of the mule trotting along the country road, and succumbs, nevertheless, to the melancholy of its persistent rhythm. On the mountaintops he waxes enthusiastic for the boundless space in which the distant church bells vibrate, in which the spirit flies away in pursuit of the great birds of one's dreams. Finally, he is intoxicated by the deafening noise of Naples en fête. He treasures up in his memory the joyous clamor of the exuberant crowds, the military music of the torchlight processions, the hissing of rockets, and the recurring theme, at once persuasive and full of abandon, of the eternal serenades which, even in the midst of the brutal follies of the pleasure-mad city, the youths still offer to the maids."

After returning to France, Charpentier established himself in Paris, at Montmartre, that bizarre quarter, in which hundreds of young and impecunious devotees of the nine muses have deliberately elected to live in the midst of a population part laboring and part semicriminal, because, forsooth, their garret windows afford ravishing views of all

Editorial comment on the production of this opera will be found on another page.-THE EDITORS.

Paris and the country round about, which inspire and sustain them in their stern strivings to realize their ideals.

There, where any person the least bit sensitive to environment might (to borrow the phrase of Charles Lamb)" weep for fullness of joy at so much life," Charpentier frequented alike the resorts of the people and the groups of his aspiring brother artists. Especially, he studied the constantly shifting spectacles and the diverse musical cries of the teeming streets with an eagerness in which love of his kind and love of his art bore each a part-interest begetting affection, and affection in turn begetting interest. The result was that this region, where what is best and what is worst in Paris meet, where the most sublimated idealism is grotesquely blended with the crassest materialism, where the lofty Socialism and Anarchism of the lettered hobnob with the brutal Socialism and Anarchism of the mob, became to him the best-loved spot in all the world.

The winning grace of the workinggirls, the honest sturdiness of the bloused draymen and laborers, the weird slyness of the rag-pickers, the whining abjectness of the beggars, the slouching insolence of the thieves and prostitutes, the piquant impudence of the pale gamins, and the merry, fantastic heroism of the long-haired, corduroy-clad poets and painters, haunted him like a passion; and all this and more he put into "Louise," which may fairly be characterized as an autobiographical opera, if the word "autobiographical" be taken broadly enough. The plot of "Louise" contains little that has been fabricated out of whole cloth, and the characters, for the most part, were drawn from real persons. "In Louise,'" Charpentier himself says, "I have translated an epoch of my own existence." He adds: "I have tried to make of Louise' the youth of all of us poets and artists; to depict the desires, the enthusiasms, of our young manhood, when we dream of conquering the immense city and the heart

of the girl who lives hard by, and who now and then draws her window-curtain to let pass a smile. Louise' is the real life of the little world of the humble, of the suffering, of the hard-working, of which most people get only the casual glimpse of the passer-by. It is the gaze of the envious riveted upon the city of joy. I love this life which surrounds me, this life of the street and of the humble. I feel it profoundly lyric. At certain moments of great emotion I behold it traversed by lightning, by a mighty current of marvelous, fairy-like beauty. I have tried to transfer this emotion to my art. I have not described (as the critics pretend); I have translated into my own language, music."

Charpentier's love of life is so insistent that it renders him impatient of the limitations of concert halls and operahouses; and to this fact, probably, quite as much as to the ill health from which he suffered for a time, is due his practical abstinence from composition since the production of " Louise." For a number of years now he has devoted most of his time and energy to arousing the people to a consciousness of their innate love of the beautiful; more specifically, to introducing a solicitude for beauty into the organization of the public fêtes which democracy seems to have vulgarized instead of having ennobled as it should have done.

Charpentier aspires to nothing less than the creation for all the people of an art which shall take the form of musical spectacles to be presented in the open air (in a great public square like the Place de la Concorde, for example), of which the interpreters shall be chosen from the people; and which shall form an integral part of splendid civic fêtes on a colossal scale, wherein all the people shall commune in beauty and joy. And he is convinced that such fêtes would not only uplift the people but would regenerate art as well. "Is it not an imperative duty," he says, "for a democracy to convoke its children to witness beautiful spectacles? Art, like science, is the property of all in common. Art would draw from a closer association with the people a new and ardent life.". Before Charpentier committed himself

thus unconditionally and irrevocably to the cause of musical spectacles "of the people, by the people, and for the people," he made a number of interesting experiments along this line. In 1896 and 1897, in connection with a local celebration of Mi-Carême by the poets and artists of Montmartre, he presented an open-air musical spectacle entitled "The Coronation of the Muse," in which a working-girl, chosen by her fellowworking-girls, was crowned Muse of Montmartre; and about the same time he organized and presented an analogous spectacle before the statue of Watteau in the Gardens of the Luxembourg. In 1898 (Place de l'Hôtel de Ville), in connection with the fêtes given by the city of Paris in honor of the centenary of Michelet, and again in 1902 (Place des Vosges), in connection with the centenary of Victor Hugo, he presented a much more elaborate musical spectacle entitled "La Muse de Paris," in which a working-girl, chosen by her working comrades, was crowned Muse of Parisa ceremony designed to symbolize the beauty of labor and the grandeur of the people and to glorify what is finest in both.

"Disabuse your minds," said one of Charpentier's fellow-composers, apropos of the crowning of the Muse at the Michelet centennial, "of the habitual cantata, the useless and odious official cantata written to order for the Government, to the formal restrictions of which the free verve of M. Charpentier would never have submitted. M. Charpentier's idea of ennobling the gayety of our official fêtes by the beauty of virile music and the grace of a young woman, of marrying in one of the largest squares of Paris the two supreme poetries of our city-the radiant and delicate poetry of art and the boisterous and magnificently brutal poetry of the crowd in quest of pleasure-was at once charming and. significant. Its realization afforded a glorious sight. The gay working-girl of the faubourg, gravely elected Muse by her working companions, patron for a few hours of a city which was fraternal for the time being, symbolic Queen of consolation, of inspiration, of hope, and of love, interrupted the clamor, the

crowding, and all the other gross and more or less selfish gambols of the populace, and proclaimed solemnly, amid rising songs and impressive symphonies, the eternal and the sovereign power of laborious and fruitful life, while in the orchestration palpitated the soul of the street."

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The election for the Hugo celebration of the Muse and her four maids of honor was as interesting and picturesque a spectacle as was the Coronation. This election was held in the immense hippodrome (Hippo-Palace) of Montmartre, and was attended by hosts of working girls, lively young dressmakers, milliners, typesetters, engravers, corset-makers, feather-workers, embroiderers, etc. fore the balloting began, Madame Sévérine (tested and tried friend of the working-girls) and J. Paul-Boncour gave appropriate talks. Charpentier also Charpentier also spoke at some length, revealing the loftiness of his conception of a Muse of Labor, and explaining why the Hugo centenary would be like Hamlet with Hamlet left out if Hugo, who was a lover and champion of the working people, were ignored by the people's Muse. There were forty-three aspirants to the principal honor. The candidates, after presenting themselves on the platform, mingled for a time with the electors on the floor, where they employed all the electioneering maneuvers known to their brothers and deployed many arts of persuasion and blandishment which their brothers do not possess. One of the candidates made a speech in support of her cause, in the course of which she exploited her platform and programme like a veritable politician and implored the favor of being selected to honor the poet who had inspired her own poems, of which last she recited a sample-conventional in ideas and halting in meter, it is true, but no whit inferior to the amateur poetry of the bluestockings of the Boulevard Saint-Germain.

The electors raised vivats for their favorites while the voting was in progress, waltzed while the ballot was being counted, and cheered shrilly when the results were announced.

By organizing fêtes, similar to these Paris fêtes, in all the provinces of France

and in Algeria, Charpentier has conferred upon his æsthetic enterprise a truly national scope and significance; and while he has not been able to give to his spectacles yet (by reason chiefly of municipal parsimony) the splendor and amplitude for which his conception calls, he is advancing steadily toward such a consummation. These qualities will be acquired in good time, no doubt, for he is laying foundations that are broad and deep. Being too much of a musician to find poetry in music badly rendered, notwithstanding his enthusiasm for "the poetry of the people," he has established (for the purpose of training interpreters of his spectacles) a "Working-Girls' Conservatory of Music," to which he gives his personal supervision. The Choral Society (Francis Casadesus, conductor) connected with this Conservatory has already attained a high degree of efficiency, and has given a number of exhibitions each winter with notable success. Charpentier has made an arrangement which enables him to provide the pupils of his Conservatory (and many other working-girls besides) with vacation board in the country in the summer, and with theater tickets in the winter; and, in a score of similar ways, he watches over their health and happiness. And the best of it all is that he does these charming things, not from the stern sense of duty of the professional charity worker and philanthropist, but because they are a joy to him, because he can satisfy in no other way the cravings of his innermost being. Thus, although the royalties of "Louise" quickly lifted him from poverty to comparative affluence, he refused steadfastly to alter his modest manner of living. He did not succumb to the flatteries and blandishments of the world of wealth and fashion, but remained loyal to his people, as faithful to his Montmartre as Mistral to his Maillane.

It is very much of a treat to hear Charpentier chat about his various enterprises in his quaint study; but to get an adequate idea of the magnetic personality and splendid spirit of the man one must see him in the midst of his working-girl pupils. There, under the glow of his enthusiasm for the popular art which