flows through these years whose waters might be for the refreshing of the nation, and the cleansing of the hearts of the people, if men would but dip in their hands and hold them for us to drink. There are ferns along the banks of this stream,-delicate and beautiful. They have been picked by fastidious hands and given to us in the abundance of our finished short story, and the fresh coolness of our minor verse. But we thirst for the waters themselves. Their spring is in the depth of the nation's life,-it is the depth of the nation's life. Is there no one to find the pools on whose clear surface is mirrored the face of this people? No one to help us see where tends the main stream that is widening so rapidly; no one to warn us of its impurities; no one to make us valiant for the defence of its borders?

Such I believe there are. I think of Frank Norris with his unfinished Trilogy; of Robert Herrick in The Common Lot, of such short stories as one published in the October number of the Atlantic, "The Light-Hearted," by Will Payne. "We have never sinned, suffered, and repented?" Has Mr. McGaffey lingered on the Boulevard San Michele till he has forgotten Wall Street? Was there no day in his travels for the uplift of Dove Cottage, no week for the inspiration that thrills through the memories of Weimar, no winter for the glorious intellectual rebuke of Athens? Is he unaware of the American danger of vulgarity and snobbishness toward an art it will not bother to understand, and a culture it grudges the people time to acquire; of the American tendency to a materialism as sodden if more keen, than that of the peasant; of the American vice, a dissipation like Jadwins, as disastrous and only a little less coarse than that of the boulevards; of the American susceptibility to the temptations of personal and political corruption for the pitiful price of gold? Let these things and their like be painted out to us in their native hues, with the sincerity and directness they demand, with the breadth and moral

force they need, with the art whose framework is the ability to see life steadily and to see it whole-then shall our art become the sane and noble art of a strong republic; not only its pleasure, its child, its toy, but worthy to be its friend, its philosopher, its guide.

Were I to assume the judge's robe which has changed shoulders so often in this discussion, I should vary the key of the denunciation, I should alter the direction of the gesture. The past? The past has been true to the past. My eye detects no shade of insincerity, no twist of indirection, no stain of moral obliquity in the great American writers who have been so summarily called to the bar of medieval justice. Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson and their peers were men wise in their genneration, and good for the growth of this young people. Nor have they been without issue. It may be that we are only just coming to a national self-consciousness; that our national history and our national literature alike have been more a group of provincial stories than a singly developed large and national theme. Am I wrong in believing that the past generation has altered this; that our problems stand to-day among the problems of the nations, as individual, as quickly recognized as an American traveler Unter den Linden or on the Corso? If I am right, then our novelists, our poets, our dramatists must meet this newly-awakened self-consciousness with art grounded in the vital issues of which it begins to take cognizance or voluntarily step one side to make room for other forms of expression at once more profound in insight and more prophetic in vision.

Is any significance to be attached to the fact that such themes are being treated -as yet more frequently by the writers of our magazine articles and the editors of our great dailies than by our so-called artists? I hope not, and I believe that it is nothing more than the interval between the "passion" and the "remembering in calm." The lyric, the farce, the light romance undoubtedly have their

place. A healthy people loves laughter and it loves love. But a people great in its health, a wise and a strong people knows that epic grandeur, that deathless art have been sired always by the terrible earnestness of a Dante, the vast sanity of a Shakespere and a Homer, the vision and profundity of a Job. Our religious faith and fervor have been sung; our love of nature and our domestic happiness lightens many a page; our glorious love of life,-grown up from the dark soil of strange bigotry, superstition and mental gloom, stimulated rather than stunted by two vital wars, level-headed, humorous, fearless, splendid,-this, too, is in our literature. I believe that the morning and the evening of this first day have seemed good to the American people. I believe also that as our life deepens our literature will deepen with it. But for one, I would not hasten that day. It is not as though we stood alone on this planet, nor as if other races had not lived before us.

Does the spirit call out for the ennobling sight of bitter grandeur? Here is Dante. For the chastening touch of awful pathos? Sophocles still lives. Would it meet the eyes of sublime vision? Milton is just at hand. How can there be death for the immortals? And the cultivated man reaps where he has not sown. These spirits who came as avenging angels to gardens

despoiled of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, come to him now in gentler guise. Guelph and Ghibiline are no more; the rotting of Greece, the corrupting of Rome, the boundless assumption of a theology that dared to be literal, that stoopedhowever sublimely to be definite,— these things have passed away. They are the sowing of other ages; they are the soil for the flowers we gather to-day. Beside the years of the nations that sowed them, our years are as but a day. Who can be so blind as to fear that there shall be no second and no third day in our creation; that we shall not go on to the central, the crowning figures in our new world,-figures vital and immortal? Who would be so childish as to forget that each day in its turn seemeth good. Deep calleth unto deep, and in the call is suffering as well as song. The morning and the evening of the first day come but once. Let us love it while it is yet Let us, as is the manner of a republic, concern ourselves more with its message than with its gesture, with its character than with its raiment, with its spirit than with its form. Finally, let us remember that if our work lives at all, it will live by virtue of having sprung from our own loins. Who will not give bone of her bone, and blood of her blood walks childless among men.

ours.

TH

HE RACE-SUICIDE talk has held the center of the stage for a long time. Now let us see about the right of the child not to be born!

That sounds a bit startling, perhaps, but let us look into it and see what we think of it as a working-basis for the twentieth century.

The period in which we live differs from all other periods of history. We

have an infinitude of new problems which never presented themselves to those who lived in any other period of the world's history.

Women, for instance, have never before been bread-winners in such large numbers. Hundreds of thousands of women are now not only unfair competitors of men, but greater numbers of them are thinking; greater numbers of them are

traveling; greaters numbers of them have high ideals regarding the other self, than ever before.

And man, too, is changing. In fact he has already changed. He is growing dependent upon woman. The situation is reversed. The oak has become the vine. Man is glad to let the woman become an independent financial factor; he is looking for a woman with wealth, or a woman with a capacity for wage-earning.

It is only necessary to read the newspapers to see that men are deserting their families and leaving wife and children to struggle on and solve the economic problem as best they may.

It is a fact asserted by those who have studied the question, that the desertion of the husband is in the ratio of the responsibility. The greater the number of children, the more apt the man of the lower class to run from this unwelcome burden.

The man of to-day shrinks from permanent obligation, as well as from responsibility and physical discomfort.

If he belongs on the fashionable social plane, his income is apt to be only sufficient for his ever-increasing needs, and the requirements of a complex and luxurious age. This, of course, does not include man alone. It is fundamental. It is the curse of a period in which the measure of all things is material prosperity. It is the penalty we pay, who live in a commercial age.

Futile to say that we should have the moral courage to live simply, when all about us are living luxuriously. It is the sharp and painful contrast between vast wealth and its power to gratify nearly all human vagaries; the careless, selfish use of wealth that makes for unhappiness.

To be out of one's class, may simply mean that one has the education and the tastes to associate with the rich, but owing to the fact that one is poor, one must choose other companionship, those who have not the same sums to expend. Poor Lily Bart was out of her class in the twentieth-century sense of the term,

according to American standards. That fact was the cause of all of her troubles and of her ultimate downfall. Her income was inadequate to the requirements of the class with which she moved.

Now let us consider what this condition has to do with the child of to-day.

When the pioneer lived in the newlysettled states, there were vast spaces uninhabited. inhabited. There was plenty of room for the large number of children which blessed the home of the old-fashioned family. And not only plenty of room, but enough of simple food and of the clothing made by the thrifty mother.

There were no social requirements, no created needs. There were no painful contrasts, no me and mine, we are more elegant than thou and thine. The life was as near equality as human life with its unequal gifts is possible to be. There was a living for all who wished to earn one. And unless the child was tainted and burdened with inherited mental, physical or moral disease, he had a fair chance to lead a reasonably happy life, always barring unhappy temperament.

What are the conditions to-day? Is there the same opportunity for the child to achieve liberty, a livelihood and peace of mind?

Is it a virtue to put into the world children who will be handicapped by pinching poverty or by disease? Is it selfish or unselfish to be the progenitor of a child who will be a perpetual sufferer because of epilepsy, vitiated blood, dire poverty or insanity?

Is it noble or ignoble to produce progeny for whom we have no food, no shelter, no welcome ?

It may be true or untrue that the chances of getting reëmployment decrease all the time. That, too, has something to do with the right of the child not to be born.

Suppose there were no children born for three years. Would it not rather be a benefit than a misfortune? Suppose we devote some time to the child-problems pressing at this moment.

This is written in the full recognition

of the joy and glory of motherhood and the sweetness and light brought into the atmosphere of the home by the presence of a child.

So we will consider it a sacrifice and still ask if there is not a right of the child. The city's congested life, the small space for the up-bringing of children, the sharp contrast between wealth and poverty, the new educational standards which make college almost as much a necessity as bread, the exciting competitive struggle and many other twentieth-century conditions would seem to be reasons for the right of the child not to be born into such an unfair race.

The argument will be made that the people should desert the crushed and crowded cities and go into God's beautiful country; that this would give room

for children and remove many of the painful conditions.

Then let us wait until the people are willing to do this, until the congestion is relieved; until the inflammation goes down. There are homes where children not only bless, but are blest. In such homes the child has a fair chance of growing into manhood and womanhood without the eternal gnawing of despair and fear, that hangs like a pall over the days of those who open their eyes into a daily world of crime, sickness, poverty and drudgery, such as makes life a nightmare to those tiny child-laborers in the South. Is parenthood, under such conditions, heroism or selfishness?

What of the right of the child not to be LOUISE MARKSCHEFFEL.

born? Toledo, Ohio.

"THE

HE ARENA" during the past few years has published many articles in favor of negro education and race equality; hence it would seem time for some articles on the other side to appear.

The article by Professor Grimke on "The Heart of the Race Problem," reads like Theodore Tilton's Miscegenation published during the war and so offensive to the public that it has been practically suppressed. All these articles are based on the old idea of one race, and that all men being children of Adam were brothers and therefore equal.

The progress of science has put Adam among the allegories of the past and left us to solve the race problem by the scientific laws of natural history and zoölogy alone.

Jefferson, although an Abolitionist, believed in deportation only. He had such a horror of race equality that he considered it impossible, and lamented

that there had at that time been no scientific examination of the negro in the line of natural history.

In 1850 Professor Agassiz, after long research, said that Caucasians and Negroes never could have been descended from the same stock, and although men, could never have been brothers.

This is the new doctrine of diversity of race, and when glamor and emotional conditions produced by the one-race theory have subsided, this will prevail, and solve this and other race problems.

In 1901 Professor McGee of the Smithsonian Institute at Washington confirmed Professor Agassiz by saying that if there was any Garden of Eden there must have been many original couples, for no two of the present races could have been descended from the same stock.

The same evil English Tory influences which originated and engineered the whole negro equality movement (miscalled Anti-Slavery) even though they

succeeded so well that it is embodied in our Constitutional Amendments, have yet, ever since now almost forty years, in spite of every kind of failure of negro reedom when unsupported by white proximity, constantly suppressed and destroyed all free thought, speech and action on this subject, and the one-race theory is being burned into the public mind as one of the unchangeable results of the Civil war.

This is their object, for they know that if real race equality is a settled matter, democracy is destroyed and monarchy justified. This is the bed-rock of the whole matter.

There is now a great spirit of discontent abroad due to the great amount of graft and corruption so universal at the

present time, and when this spirit applies common-sense and the new doctrine of diversity of races to our conditions, the problem will be quickly solved. Under this new doctrine all mixed races are criminal and should be prevented by law, and the three Tory amendments to the Constitution (13, 14 and 15) should be at once repealed. Professor Grimke's assertions (unproved) about the sexual evils of negro slavery seem trifling compared to the worse conditions since, and any of our large Northern cities are far worse to-day, and when he winds up with segregation and equality, he is the antithesis of Jefferson, our best-known Democrat.

ARTHUR M. ALLEN.

New Brighton, N. Y.

I

TOOK the cars at Nuremburg, going by the way of Ansbach, for Steinach, and there changing to a small train which stood alongside the sleepy little station, I was soon being borne to Rothenburg on the Tauber. It was a delightful ride of an hour and a half, the day being bright and sunny and on both sides of the train were fields of cornflowers mixed with gorgeous poppies of scarlet hue; while far off in the distance rose the sleepy, smoke-colored hills which one so often sees when traveling through these parts of Bavaria and which, if he is something of a dreamer, may easily unlock longclosed chambers in memory's hall and call forth half-forgotten but once cherished scenes of other days.

The station at Rothenburg and its immediate surroundings are quite modern, suggesting, indeed, a western town; but after taking my seat in an omnibus belonging to the Hotel "Zum Eisenhut"

I soon found myself speeding toward a more medieval-looking place. On the way, as I was about to fix my handbag from falling off the seat, I caught a glimpse on my left of one of the prettiest little graveyards it has ever been my fortune to behold.

On we passed, through the old-fashioned so-called "Röder Tor." So low is it that really I felt myself dodging my head as I sat there. Soon the double moat was passed, with its numerous trees and flowers, its various interesting nooks full of mosses or small bushes, and carpeted with rich green, velvet-like sod, far more attractive and beautiful than in the earlier day when it was full of water; for this scene spoke of peace and security as the other suggested the storm and stress of hate-darkened strife and lust for blood. While these thoughts were in my mind we passed inside the inner set of walls, where all was quaint, ancient and strange