who has not the common useful knowledge of his day and community, is ignorant. When it is life and death that fields must be plowed and that horses must be shod, he who can plow fields and shoe horses is the wise man. It seems to me clear that the chief end of man is indeed happiness. It is what we all strive for by natural instinct, and it seems the natural adjunct to life itself. For though it may be true that no one is at all times happy and that some are seldom happy, yet it is also true that to none is happiness wholly denied and to be always happy is the ideal life. Does knowledge bring happiness to the individual? Is a man happier in ignorance? He is certainly happier in not knowing that he is to die tomorrow, or in believing that cancer of the stomach, which is killing him, is merely indigestion. Is any particular man happier in knowing the germ theory of disease and burning formaldehyde candles than he is in believing that disease and pain come from. the angry gods, to appease whom he burns the flesh of goats? Undoubtedly cleanliness, carbolic acid and formaldehyde, are better remedies than praying to the gods, and the knowledge which prevents infection and applies germicides, increases the health, and therefore the happiness of the human race, and as the whole is the sum of all its parts, the greater happiness of the whole must include the greater happiness of each individual, but this is a large view, and when individuals have learned that they are absolutely absorbed in the race and that the good of others is the good of each, the world will indeed be happier. But looked at in the close and personal view to which our individual selfishness limits us at present, it may be questioned whether the individual who leans with implicit faith upon a god or a fetich which he thinks he can move with his prayer, or bribe with his offering, is not in his own short-sighted ignorance and in his own short-sighted way, happier than he who knows he is facing an inexorable and heartless law of the universe. Is a mother happier, or not, in the belief that she will meet her dying child in a land of eternal joy? Is she happier or not in her belief that her insane bov is possessed of devils, which incantations will drive away? Knowledge increases the desire and the greater the desire, the greater the chance for happiness in having them fulfilled, and a greater happiness, but also the greater the chance for unhappiness, for the more the desires, the harder to satisfy. Knowledge widens the horizon, and the further we see, the more beautiful is the prospect and the greater our delight, but, also, more rocks and deserts and obstructions appear and the greater our discouragement. All life, the jelly-fish's and man's, is a perpetually fluctuating balance of compensation. So far as any man himself is concerned, he had better be as ignorant as a mediaeval peasant and have plenty to eat, drink and be merry with, than to know all a Von Humboldt or a Voltaire knew and die of starvation. There are men and women in Russia today and pale-faced mechanics in this country who have read much and know much, but half fed and drinking bitter draughts, they find their knowledge only a magnifier of their misery, but out of the starvation and torture of some comes the good of all. Life is ever scornful of the individual. She drops a million men through agony into the grave as recklessly as she crushes a million ants under the wheels of the grain wagons. Knowledge, true knowledge, knowledge of truth, is the ladder by which the race climbs, and the race, not the individual, is Nature's care. When man learns this, and imitates her, men will be happier, but so slow are they in learning, that they still persistently regard the individual and neglect the race. They still look at what is immediately under their noses and refuse to look towards the horizen. More than that, they still persist in making their laws to fit the exception, not the mass. For the pathos of a few poor weaklings, the pious reformers to whom pathos is greater than justice and the weaklings are more than the race, would with the tyranny of laws, made to fit the weaklings, enchain the free will powers of the whole human race. That a few drunkards, gamblers, or other degenerates may be saved from their own weakness, all men must be put between walls. This is not a kindness, except as to the short-sighted it appears so. It is a violation of a fundamental and eternally just law. Nature does not so. She says, "Pish! What are these few unfortunates to me? There have always been such; there will always be such, but what are whole nations to me, if they be unfit to continue? Let the individual, or the nation, go down and out, if unfit, and let the fittest survive," and that the fittest may survive and that we may know the fit from the unfit, all must be trained in the free struggle of a free arena. So it is with ignorance. Nature says, "I care nothing at all for the individual. He may be, and often is, personally happier in his ignorance, but it is for the race that I care and every seed of truth blossoms to the good of the race. It may be well for the ignorant man to rest his faith in bribes to an idol, or prayers to a god; it may soothe his individual mind for the moment; but it is better for the race that he know if he generates in filth the germs of disease, physical or moral, the disease will arise, inexorable and cruel, and it is better that he know that not all his prayers will save the consequences. The race is happier in the knowledge of purity and formaldehyde. Violinist By Curtis Hidden Page The wonder of your music wraps you round With melody of rich inwoven sound, Like quaint old Eastern silks of changing sheen Or waving moire, in which you walk, a Queen. "CONISTON." 100KS are like people. There must be many that are weak, ordinary and ineffectual, that the few really great ones may stand out and be appreciated. We read clever books and brilliant books, and are amused for an idle day-but we never think of them again. It is because their authors have talent instead of genius. They are incapable of creating great characters, or, in fact, any characters at all. Their stories are pleasant and entertaining, but we never think of them after we have laid the books away. "Coniston" is not one of these. Mr. Churchill is a genius, and therefore a creator. The character of Jethro Bass stands out like a rugged mountain rising from a common place vale. It is the working-out of this character that proves for all time the genius of the author. One who reads the book slowly and intelligently until the five hundred and tenth page has been reached, will find that Jethro Bass has entered his heart to stay has become one of the people he knows and thinks of every day. It is a further test of genius when an author can wring the sudden tears of sympathy from the hardened novel-reader of today; and can force him, when he has begun the book for duty, to go on reading it for love. "Coniston" has been called a book with much love and some politics in it. It might with more truth be described as a book of vivid, compelling human interest from the beginning to the end. It is a splendid achievement. fael's soul. In every picture she is coarse, dull and commonplace. For the picture of Keith Bryton-alas and alas! He has the swaggering air of a barkeeper, and his figure suggests too much beer. "FOR THE SOUL OF RAFAEL." HE illustrations in "For the Soul of Rafael" are unintentionally funny. In the story, Dona Angela is represented as a fascinating coquette, a sorceress. In the illustration she would really frighten the boldest robins out of a cherry tree; and her fatuous smile alone would surely frighten any living man. The heroine, Dona Raquel, is a nunbride, delicate, sensitive, high-minded, bound by a vow to the dead to save Ra The story itself is interesting. It is a well-told tale of love and hate and jealousy, of bandits and murder and mistaken vows, and other things, in the old Spanish-Californian days. Aside from the recurrent shock of the pictures, it holds the interest to the end-which is, by the way, that rarest of things in a novel, a surprise. THE CALL OF ALASKA. LASKA must be the home of disembodied witches," wrote a friend to me not long ago. "An old old gray-headed carpenter, illiterate and poor, told me the other day that he had spent a year in Alaska and that no other country on earth would ever do for him again. He straightened his poor old back from his work and looking at me with a glow in his sunken eyes, said: 'Madam, that is the grandest country in this world, and the people who stay away simply don't know what they miss. As for me, I'll spend the few years I've got left up there, literature! "THE GARDEN, ARBARA'S" new book, "The Garden, You and I," is almost as charming as a book can be. There are so few writers who can impart valuable information in a form that may be called "Barbara" not only makes it literature; she also makes poetry out of her prose; as this: "The sea-birds are blended tints of rock, sand, sky, and water, save the dash of coral in bill and foot of a few, just as the coral of the wild-rose hip blends with the tawny marsh-grasses." All the days of my life I have loved lilies-of-the-valley with an abiding love, but have never been able to grow them successfully. If they bloomed at all, it was in a yellow, sickly fashion, and they 'I if I have to stoke my way to get there and keep stoking my way to stay there.' "Now, tell me: wherein lies the charm of that far country which you, yourself, call 'the lavendar land of enchantment"?" But this question cannot be answered in words. The answer lies deep in the hearts of those who have been to Alaska and who hold fast forevermore memories that will make any man or woman rich. It calls as the sea calls to the sealover; and there are no words to describe the call. It drifts down the blue seamiles to those that understand; and even when one cannot arise and follow, the very call is sweeter than any other joy. YOU AND I." always seemed to be remonstrating with me for trying to keep them alive. Everyone who saw them said: "They get too much sun; put them in the shade." So they kept going, year by year, into deeper shade-until, at last, I could find no deeper shade without trying the cellar. And now comes "Barbara": "The lily-of-the-valley asks deep, very rich soil, in the open sun; if a wall or hedge protects it from the north, so much the better. I do not know why people preach dense shade for this flower; possibly because they prefer leaves to flowers, or else that they are the sheep-like followers of tradition instead of practical gardeners of personal experience. One thing grows to perfection in the garden of this commuter's wife, and that is lilies-of-thevalley, and shade knows it not between eight in the morning and five at night, and we pick and pick for two weeks." tious; but it holds an old truth that it is well to remember: "IN THE SHADOW OF THE CRAG." N the Shadow of the Crag" is a book of verse by Mabel Porter Pitts. The titlepoem is very long, and is not so successful as some of the shorter ones. A high sentiment breaths through most of these. The one quoted is not the best in the book and certainly not the most ambi "My vase is broken," she trembling said; "My vase is broken," he calmly said; Empire Building in Mexico The Awakening of the State of Sinaloa-Its Agricultural By R. P. Probasco T is a strange irony in the history of the development of new countries that many of those naturally most fertile and possessing the most resources should be the last to feel the quickening touch of modern settlement and development. How strange it is that the clay-washed hills of the James River, and the stony reluctant soils of New England should have been the scene of the first settlement of the United States, yet it was a lapse of over 180 years after the landing at Plymouth Rock and the settlement at Jamestown before the great fertile prairies and forested lands of the Mississippi Valley began to be occupied and developed. It required nearly two hundred years for the English settlements to break through the barrier of the Allegheneys and spread over the broad savannas of the Mississippi Valley. It is hardly twenty-five years since the great grain producing States of North and South Dakota were an unknown expanse of native sod with its waving acres of prairie grass bending to the summer breeze, but the settlement of the United States, even of the most fertile and desirable states, did not proceed at a uniform rate. There were periods of great emigration to new acres, and then periods of stagnation, but the sum total was a rapid and magnificent settlement and development of the great prairie empire, but with all the halts and checking in the settlement of our new lands their occupation and development have steadily advanced at an increasing ratio. Where 25 years ago it took 20 or 30 years to populate a new state of the Union, that process now takes place within a few months, as substantially evidenced by the rush that takes place to any new Indian or military reservation of value when it is thrown open for settlement. Of course railway building has had a great deal to do with the rapid settlement of new countries, in fact it often precedes settlement, and opens the avenue which unlocks the unoccupied countries to the needs and uses of man. Few people realize the profound changes in conditions of settlement, development and investment which have been brought about by the extinction of the rich public lands which for years have been opened for free settlement to home-seekers in the United States. The time when the head of a family, poor in money, but with a valuable capital of energy and industry, could raise enough money to pay railway fare for himself and family from some old Eastern state to the free homestead lands of the West, and there lay the foun |