good husband and father, being a good neighbor-do not, taken together, furnish adequate reason for reposing confidence in a man as a public servant. But lack of these qualities certainly does establish a presumption against any public man. One function of any great public leader should be to exert an influence upon the community at large, especially upon the young men of the community; and therefore it is idle to say that those interested in the perpetuity of good government should not take into account the fact of a public man's example being something to follow or to avoid, even in matters not connected with his direct public services.

But of course the public services themselves furnish the real test. The first duty of a general is to win campaigns. The first duty of a statesman is efficiently to work for the betterment of his country and for its good relations with the rest of the world. He must have high ideals, and in addition he must possess the practical sagacity and force that will enable him measurably to realize them. If he does not possess the high ideals, then the greater his ability the more dangerous he is and the more essential it is to hunt him out of public life. Sagacity, courage, all that makes for efficiency-these are of use only if the man's character is such that he will use them for good and not for

zens, Washington and Lincoln, it has developed men whose ideals were lofty, not only as regards their conduct toward their fellow-citizens within the borders of their own land, but also as to the way in which their country should behave in dealing with other countries. These men were the greatest of their type, the type of Timoleon and Hampden, and it is no small honor to America that this, the highest type of statesmanship, should have here received its highest development. The fundamental difference between this type of public servant, the Washington-Lincoln type, and other types of public men as strong, as forceful, and as effective, is that the men of this type clearly recognize the fundamental principles of morality as applying among men and as applying among nations. They acknowledge moral obligations as of supreme force, and as binding them not only in their relations to their fellow-coun trymen, but in their relations to all ma kind. Both Washington and Lincoln were devoted Americans, devoted patriots. Each was willing to pour out the blood of the bravest and best in the land for a high and worthy cause, and each was a practical man, as far removed as possible from the sentimentalist and the doctrinaire. But each lived his life in accordance with a high ideal of right which forbade him to wrong his neighbor, and which when he became head of the State forbade him to inflict international wrong, as it forbade him to inflict private wrong. Each left to his countrymen as a priceless heritage the ennobling memory of a life which achieved great success through rendering far greater service, of a life lived in practical fashion for the achievement of lofty ideals, of a life lived in accordance with a standard of duty which forbade maltreatment of one man by another, which forbade maltreatment by one nation of another.

T is a little like surprising a man in his workshop to read his books where he wrote them, and it is the hardest test to which he can be put.

as

One sees the tools he worked with, and his materials are strewn about everywhere. Even the most indifferent reader of Mr. Phillpotts, if he follow him over Dartmoor, will come to recognize the pattern of his tales, for there is a singular frankness and lack of subtlety about them; they are open as the Moor itself. The flowers in the wayside hedge which one has just passed are the very flowers which he loves so well to enumerate, and the peasant who sat on the bench in the sun as one climbed the hill is sketched with delicious accuracy; one recognizes him by every inflection of his lovable dialect.

The houses in which his characters lived stand with their thatched gables to the street, and with their whitewashed or "rosy "-washed overhanging upper stories leaning out over the foot-path. He scarcely takes the trouble to change any names, and if he does they are so ill disguised that one detects them immediately. All the family names in his stories are on Dartmoor to-day; one hears them over and over again, or sees them on swinging inn signs or written up over the tiny little shops which nearly touch foreheads across the village streets. Dartmoor people will tell you that of all writers about the Moor country Mr. Phillpotts is the only one who has understood them. He only has translated their broad Devon without exaggeration and has interpreted their philosophy and quaint wisdom like a comrade. Their love for him is as wide as the Moor, and their pride in him is so personal as to

become almost a jealousy. They accept Mr. Baring-Gould reluctantly as their interpreter and they will tell you that he cannot write their dialect; as for Mr. Blackmore, he belongs to Exmoor, and every one knows that Exmoor is all very well, but it is not Dartmoor.

Much must be said for the personal charm which Mr. Phillpotts evidently possesses, and much for the fact that although he has lived in all quarters of the Moor for the known purpose of studying the people and the locality for his books, he has never wounded their self-esteem, which speaks well for his tact, as the Devonshire man is neither slow of observation nor lacking in self-respect.

In Chagford, where he lived while he was writing "The Children of the Mist," the book by which perhaps he is better known than by any other, the house in which he lodged is pointed out with as much local pride as is the view from Meldun Hill or the square tower of Chagford Church itself. The village people are quite proud to own that Billy Blee was a real Chagford man, and any driver will go out of his way to point out the road to Fernworthy, which passes by the Newtake Farm, where Will and Phoebe lived.

In out-of-the-way cottages in lonely places on the Moor, peasants will confess with shy pride that they are in one of Mr. Phillpotts's books; quite as often as not they do not know which book nor remember the character by name, but they thoroughly enjoy the pleasant glory of their literary immortality. On a windy September day, some one who walked out from Princetown to a farm-house near Two Bridges for afternoon tea and clotted cream found the original Mrs. Trout with her thirteen children. She was undaunted by the fact that the Mrs. Trout of fiction had died, overcome by the advent of the unlucky thirteenth; she was only proudly conscious that she had a distinction above

her neighbors and lived in a book, and that was enough for her. At Princetown Fair, when its gloomy streets are full of little Moor ponies and ruddled sheep, the host of "the Duchy" will point out more than one of Mr. Phillpotts's characters among the fine-looking Devonshire men, with their long, straight limbs in ridingbreeches and smart leather leggings. Any one of those men on his well-kept cob, or with big curly Devonshire rams tied meekly in his cart, might be Nicholas from Wistman's Wood or David from the farm above Lydford, for Mr. Phillpotts wrote three of his Moor tales on the western side of Dartmoor.

His characters are sure to be faithful reproductions of the men of the Moor, for the author lived among them when he wrote his books, and knew them intimately so intimately, indeed, that one might fancy that the old men one can see any day leaning over the Abbey Bridge above the Tavy are the very men from Lydford who sat upon that unforgetable committee which planned the Water Leat Pageant in "The Whirlwind." No one who was not of the Moors himself could have kept the just poise in his relations with the people which Mr. Phillpotts has shown, for their independent spirits would have scorned patronage and resented distortion. There is neither patronage nor distortion in Mr. Phillpotts's characters, there is only comprehension.

Probably the bond which unites him to them is his unquenchable love of Dartmoor and his understanding of its moods. He does not prate about it—he might be mistaken for a Cornishman if he did-but it is himself, he never gets away from it. Now one may love Dartmoor and may write reams of description of its beauties, and the Dartmoor man will never be deceived, for he knows the eyes which see into its secrets. And there is need for no long tongue to talk about them. The elect few who understand recognize each other everywhere.

Throughout all of Mr. Phillpotts's novels one never fails to see the real passion of his soul for the county he loves. He will leave his plot at any crucial period to linger tenderly along the wayside hedges and name over the flowers of the early spring or of the closing year.

Plots! Yes, I presume one must call them plots, those exaggerated and abnormal positions into which he puts his naturally well-meaning heroes and heroines; and yet even then it is not necessary to use the word in the plural, for there is but one plot in all his books. The environment changes and the method of dealing with the situation differs; sometimes the inevitable conclusion is reached by means which are frenzied and hysterical, and sometimes they are coherent and ruthless, but it is always the same story. A woman has two lovers-why only two Mr. Phillpotts does not say. There is nothing in her nature, or her scruples either, for that matter, to limit her to two. She loves them both. In the end she usually marries them both, although sometimes marriage as a form is dispensed with. The woman is the central point of the drama; her feelings, which are usually intense, if temporary, furnish the book's reason for being, and she can be counted upon with unerring accuracy to make both men miserable. Once in a while the story is pure melodrama, as in "The American Prisoner," which is equipped with a complete stage villain and the stereotyped amount of blood-shedding in order to dispose of the virtuous but superfluous lover. That is, the lover has become superfluous by the time he is disposed of; he has had his brief day and passed on. "The American Prisoner" is not one of the tales in which the two lovers exist simultaneously; that is a development which one finds brought to its most complete and inexplicable fulfillment in "The Whirlwind;" inexplicable because no sufficient or compelling cause is ever shown for the woman's downfall. Woman's elasticity of sentiment is, however, never wholly absent. Even Phoebe, in The Children of the Mist," is not unmoved by the passion of the Grimbal, who breathes out threatenings and slaughter for her sake. And Chris loves both of the men who have loved her.

Sometimes, indeed, the heroine is a neurotic absurdity like Honor Endicott, who is never off with the old love before being on with the new, and wants them both at once in order to satisfy her changing whims. She succeeds in making two ordinary English gentlemen rather ridic