manufactured note never been sent, the tragedy was inevitable, the inexorably certain result of William's hardness, lethargy, and policy of laissez faire, as well as of Kitty's hardihood, her indiscretion, and her frivolous irresponsibility. But Lady Rose's Daughter, a study in temperament, remember, and not a problem novel, is the very summit of Mrs. Ward's art. My wife once said that Julie was the finest case of transferred magnetism that she had ever known. A character so full of passionate life, of electric personality, of vivid intensity as Julie is rare in life, in fiction at most an anomaly. The astounding proof of Mrs. Ward's genius is her rigidly non-committal attitude. She relates in a wonderfully self-effacive manner the adventures of this unforgettable personality: the conclusions to be drawn must be your own. To put it in the conventional jargon of now, Mrs. Ward gives you the character, the heredity, the environment: you do the rest. We are in fine doubt about Julie, as we are about the people of this world. We cannot be final about her, just as we can never be final in life. The last word cannot be spoken about a human being, and Julie Le Breton is alive.

While Mr. James and after him Mrs. Wharton impose upon us the intolerable fatigue of thought, Mr. Barrie charms us with a combination of delicate feeling and exquisite subtlety unmatched in present-day literature. The penalty of realistic fiction is a sustained mental effort; it is Barrie's incomparable virtue that he never coldly searches into life with the glittering weapons of glazed phrasing and polished style. It is not too much to claim for Barrie what Johnson claimed for Richardson: "that he has enlarged our knowledge of human nature." We are familiar with the biographer who makes fiction of a real character: Bernard Shaw spoke of Boswell as the man who invented Johnson. On the other hand, Barrie is the human artist who transforms the fictitious per

sonage into a warm, human creature of sentiment and humor, of passion and pathos, of tenderness and tears. Like Maeterlinck, Barrie might say that he had never met any woman who had not brought him something great. And he once actually said: "It is the love of mother and son that has written everything of mine that is of any worth." He has unlocked the door to the heart of youth with the golden key of gentle sympathy and feminine intuition. He says things that all of us have thought, all of us have acutely felt; he tells us what all of us, but Barrie, have forgotten, what no one before has ever remembered to tell us. Barrie reminds us of Corot, with his soft, mystic sunrises, his gentle, gray twilights. He catches the very tints of the soul at moments of unselfconsciousness, when life speaks truly and simply from the quiet depths of the heart. He does not follow the great beaten tracks of convention; he avoids the long straight road of human experience. Instead he leads us humorously, charmingly, enticingly along little bypaths of human feeling, hallowed by associations of peculiar intimacy and confidence. His shifting shades of intuition, his nuances of insight give us that incommunicable thrill which it is vouchsafed only to the great artist to impart. Barrie is the dramatist of the eternal feminine. I can do no better than call him the supreme feminist of our time.

IV.

It is a far cry from the rich and splendid maturity of Mrs. Ward, from the tender sentimentalism of Mr. Barrie, to the playful make-believe, the wanton romanticism, the exhaustive dilettanteism of that Bohemian of letters, Robert Louis Stevenson. I feel that there was always an enormous discrepancy between his purpose and his performance. He expressed fine sentiments and a noble ideal of his art when he said, “True romantic art makes a romance of all things. It reaches into the highest ab

straction of the ideal; it does not refuse the most pedestrian realism. Robinson Crusoe is as realistic as it is romantic both qualities are pushed to an extreme, and neither suffers. Nor does Romance depend upon the material importance of the incidents. To deal with strong and deadly elements, banditti, pirates, war, and murder, is to conjure with great names, and in the event of failure double the disgrace." Stevenson was always conjuring with strong and deadly elements, banditti, pirates, war and murder; but he always seemed to carry over into mature life the playful images of a child, toying with a miniature theater, on which were assembled all the romantic properties of melodrama. Even after he was grown, Stevenson used to play with toy soldiers for hours at a time with Lloyd Osbourne, his step-son; mimic battalions marched and counter-marched, changed by measured evolutions from column formation into line, with cavalry screens in front and massed supports behind, in the most approved military fashion of to-day. This abiding spirit of the child in Stevenson, this juvenile delight in tin-soldiers and miniature warfare, never left him to the day of his death; it communicated its impulse to his books and to his plays. Pinero has said that Stevenson failed as a dramatist because he approached the great serious theater of our day as he had toyed with the tinsoldiers of his youth-in a spirit of effervescent childishness. He lacked that concentration of thought, that sustained intensity of mental effort which succeeds in producing compression of life without falsification. As someone wisely said, there was no end to his supposing: he lived in an air of joyous make-believe. As a novelist, his works always impress me as brilliant ré-chauffés; he cooked up the elements of romance, of mystery, of adventure, to suit his purpose; he followed where others had led. Who can read Prince Otto without a subconscious feeling that Stevenson had just finished the complete works of George Meredith?

Who can read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde without a sense of haunting certainty that Stevenson had recently carefully pondered The Story of William Wilson of Edgar Allan Poe? It is needless to cite many other obvious examples. As a stylist he was remarkable, finished, unique; and yet it is difficult to avoid the obsession of alien influences; he was the master-copyist of other men. When he finally achieved a well-nigh perfect, highly individual style, it even then leaves us regretting its perfection.

We are too near to Stevenson, with all his many-sidedness, his contradictoriness, his baffling complexity: we do not see him from a sufficient height and distance. When Balfour in his loving Life of Stevenson gave us a seraph in chocolate, a barley-sugar effigy of a real man, one could not help but revolt; and I have much sympathy for Henley in writing his ideal-shattering exposure of Stevenson. "At bottom Stevenson was an excellent fellow," Mr. Henley said. "But he was of his essence what the French call personnel. He was, that is, incessantly and passionately interested in Stevenson. He could not be in the same room with a mirror but he must invite its confidences every time he passed it; to him there was nothing obvious in time and eternity, and the smallest of his discoveries, his most trivial apprehensions, were all by way of being revelations, and as revelations must be thrust upon the world; he was never so much in earnest, never so well pleased, never so irresistible, as when he wrote about himself."

And yet one cannot help but feel, after all, that this is only a one-sided view of the man, in whom were combined something of Hamlet, of the Shorter Catechist, and of the wandering troubadour. The brilliant Irish dramatist, Mr. Bernard Shaw, once said: "The real disappointment about Henley's much-discussed article on Stevenson was not that he said spiteful things about his former friend, but that he said nothing at all about him

that would not have been true of any man in all the millions then alive. The world very foolishly reproached him because he did not tell the usual epitaph-monger's lies about 'Franklin, my loyal friend.' But the real tragedy of the business was that a man who had known Stevenson intimately and who was either a penetrating critic or nothing, had nothing better worth saying about him than that he was occasionally stingy about money and that when he passed a looking-glass he looked at it. Which Stevenson's parlor-maid could have told us as well as Henley if she had been silly enough to suppose that the average man is a generous sailor in a melodrama, and totally incurious and unconscious as to his personal appearance." Like Mr. Shaw, I feel that while we have learned the prosaic traits of Stevenson's character, we have never yet seen the real Stevenson. All his wonderful short stories, his stirring tales of adventure, his exquisite letters, his delicate and personal

criticism, are, it seems to me, less wonderful achievements than the splendid feat of his own life. Stevenson is his own greatest character. His was a brave heart, a bold front, a noble and a stimulating optimism. He flew bright signals of courage, of decency, of saneness, of kindness, of common sense, that brought all the young and brave and imprudent hearts of his generation rallying round him. Like Cyrano, he always wore his panache-the feather in the cap of courage. He carried his ill-health and penury bravely and wittily into far corners of the earth, through many strange adventures. "The medicine-bottles on my chimney," he once wrote to William Archer, "and the blood on my handkerchief are accidents-they do not exist in my prospect.' It is Stevenson's great glory that the influence, not so much of his books, but of his life will always remain. "His flag still flies untattered."

ARCHIBALD HENDERSON.

Chapel Hill, N. C.

"I

SHALL devote the remainder of my life to solving the labor question,' is a remark attributed to Hon. Marcus A. Hanna.

Was it possible for him or is it possible for any other person similarly situated to succeed in that attempt?

The labor problem will be solved when wage-workers get and keep all they earn. Then labor organizations will become purely social and educational, strikes will be things of the past, and class discontent will cease.

The solution of the labor question involves two steps:

First, to find the best workable plan.
Second, to carry out that plan.
That any successful business man past

the age of sixty years should originate a scheme capable of solving the labor problem would approach the miraculous. The whole current of his life has been in another direction; the thoughts and purposes which have filled his working hours, the fixed opinions which are now a part of his being, and indeed all his mental habits, combine to make a full and unbiassed investigation impossible to him. Many men, possessed of the first ability and impelled toward success by the strongest motives, have devoted the prime of life to the discovery or invention of such a plan. As the net result of the consecration of many noble lives to the one purpose, of their diverse conclusions few to-day are accepted as

true by any considerable body of supporters.

Any philanthropist, therefore, no matter how great his ability, who has given his years of strength to the acquisition of wealth, will only waste time in trying to evolve a new project for solving the labor problem. His aspiration, however, if genuine, need not be a vain one, provided he is willing to abandon the rôle of inventor and become a student of what others have done. If prepared to accept the less ambitious task of electing between plans already formulated, then it is possible for him to do a work of great usefulness, and even to reach the practical end at which he so laudably aims.

Before entering upon an investigation into the merits of the rival schemes, the rich philanthropist, in order to hope for success, must disabuse his mind of any prejudice he may hold against them. He must, indeed, assume a teachable spirit, be ready to question, and, upon sufficient proof, to abandon cherished views and long-established convictions.

With the ground thus cleared for arriving at an unbiased judgment, a single year should suffice for him to determine between the propositions which lay a reasonable claim to being a solution of the labor problem.

The schemes which need engage his attention are but two in number,-the one associated with the name of Karl Marx, the other with that of Henry George.

Either plan, in order to be accepted must stand the tests: Is it equitable? Is it speedy? Will it be effective?

Should both projects be found to possess these requisites, it must then be decided which of the two has them in the greater degree.

STATE SOCIALISM.

State Socialism means the assumption by the government of all large businesses which are now in private hands. It would make the public the owner of all

the means of production and distribution -of the land, of the mills and machinery, of the stores and goods, of the railroads and cars, and so on. It seeks to abolish the private capitalist and to substitute for him government-ownership, supervision and operation.

Socialism has one doctrine, and but one, peculiar to itself; confute that and the whole structure falls to the ground. The essence of that doctrine is: Interest belongs to the public. The argument for it is that tangible wealth, when used as capital-such as factories, stores, cars and machinery-is not the product of the individuals who now possess it, nor did it really belong to those persons from whom the present owners acquired it, but is the accumulated product of the past efforts of the human race as a whole. The logic is that without the combined efforts of practically everybody, of the many dead and the comparatively few now living, such wealth as mills and machinery could not be in existence. Therefore (it is argued) no one person has a right to claim over it a greater degree of ownership than another.

In answer to this reasoning it may be said that if a savage dug out a canoe by his own unassisted labor, the log being cut from common land, why should not he be the owner-instrument of production and transportation though it be? Just so, if several or many persons unitedly build a large sea-going vessel, do not they own it jointly? And may they not transfer the title to some one individual who then equitably becomes its owner? If these questions are answered properly in the affirmative, then no wrong is done by the private-ownership of capital. If not impossible, it certainly is difficult, to demonstrate that in order to satisfy the demand of equity, interest, which is the return to capital, must all go into the public treasury.

It does not, however, of necessity follow that the time may not come when it will be wise for the State to own and operate mills and stores, even though

by so doing private competition is rendered impossible. This would be State Socialism, but it would necessarily be arrived at very slowly, and probably only after a widespread and prolonged trial of voluntary coöperation.

And who can foretell the consequences of State Socialism, whether it will increase or lessen production, whether its effect upon the character of the people will be good or bad? These are questions which any impartial thinker will find difficult to determine definitely for himself, much more so to answer to the satisfaction of other minds.

In considering the practicability of State Socialism, it may be said that its adherents rightfully reject the term "reform" as descriptive of it, and proclaim it a revolution. Certainly it would turn topsy-turvy the statute-books of any state entering upon it to an extent which might properly be called revolutionary.

Applying the tests already enumerated, a candid examination leads to the conclusion that State Socialism would not necessarily be inequitable, that its practicability is not easy to vouch for, that under the most favorable conditions conceivable its acceptance by any American state can only take place in the very distant future. Even though circumstances should arise which would invite a violent revolution and make possible the speedy establishment of Socialism, the change in social conditions would be so radical that the effects cannot be foreseen. They might be beneficial and they might be highly detrimental to human progress. Only when society has taken some shorter step forward shall we have reached a height of civilization from whose vantage-ground we can view clearly and state definitely the consequences of So

cialism.

THE SINGLE-TAX.

We can but think that at this stage of his investigation the wealthy philanthropist will be disposed at least to hold his decision in abeyance until he has ex

amined the second plan of amelioration, which is lauded by its followers, not as anything revolutionary, but as a very simple though far-reaching reform.

It

The Single-Tax means free land. would derive all public revenue from a tax upon land values, reaching that end by the simple process of exempting from taxation all else. When fully applied all ground rental values will go into the public treasuries and land will have no selling price. The market price of a house and lot would not exceed the cost of replacing the house; the market price of a street railway would just equal the cost of replacing the tangible assets, such as track, cars and power-houses; so of every other public-service corporation; so of all mines, forests, water-courses, water-fronts and other real-estate.

The doctrine peculiar to the SingleTax is the common ownership of ground rent. Its adherents claim to demonstrate the truth of this underlying principle by the following line of argument. Since man is a land animal his natural right to life embraces and necessitates the equal right to land. If this statement be incorrect, and if an individual can own land, just as he owns a hat or a house, to use, abuse, lock up, destroy at will, or reap the revenue therefrom, then one man may ethically become the owner of all the land, and, by ordering off all others, annihilate the human race. This reductio ad absurdam can only be avoided by admitting the natural and equal right of all to the land.

Assuming, therefore, that the land was intended for all the people, it follows inevitably that land values are also theirs; for value is given to any piece of land no more by the owner than by any other member of the community. In fact the value which attaches to land, and which is measured either by its price or by its annual rental value, is created by the community and should be classed as the earnings of society, just as much as wages are reckoned to be the earnings of the individual.