example is none the less valuable; for if, on such conditions, the German corporation could be reconstructed on lines that have successfully interested, as proprietors, to the extent of their means, the German people at large-resulting in the fact that it is not upon her corporate industries, but upon her unjust landed proprietorship alone, that the forces of German Socialism are directed-what may not be expected in America when the work of corporation reform, in the true spirit of reform, is undertaken and accomplished.

But while I am not attempting in detail to point out the exact structure of the American corporation as it should stand when reconstructed, some of the principles on which the reconstruction should take place can be particularized. The reconstructed corporation, for instance, must have no place in it for those schemes of spoliation that, within or without, plunder the people whose capital has created it and whose patronage must support it. In the reconstructed corporation the securities issued must be related in some way to the values actually put in. In the reconstructed corporation, not only must the officers be trustees of the stockholders, held to the strict accountability to which individual trustees are now held, and denied the privilege, as individual trustees are now denied, of making profit out of their trust; but the administration of the trust, as in the case of individual trustees, must be constantly kept under the eye of some tribunal of the Government. And in the reconstructed corporation tangible inducements ought to be given to the workman, the clerk, the employee of every kind, to secure proprietorship.

I shall not attempt to point out, in detail, how existing corporations shall be brought into the new régime. Considering, however, that existing corporations depend largely on the public, from time to time, to take their securities, especially their bonded securities, the probability is that, as a matter of self-interest-in many cases of life or death-existing corporations would be compelled to conform their organization to the reconstructed organization prescribed by

government; for otherwise they would brand themselves as suspects. Then, too, within the respective powers of the Nation and States, to prescribe the kind of collateral that banks, insurance companies, and savings institutions shall not take for loans, the Nation and States could exert a leverage toward the new order of things that could not be resisted; for nearly every great corporation is a heavy borrower from these financial reservoirs of the people's wealth.

But the purpose of this article does not require that I go far into details. That is not the first task to be accomplished. The first duty and the first task is to get the thought of the country turned from the by-roads of corporate reform to the main road-from aims that lead nowhere to a determined aim that will lead to practical results. No one who has observed carefully the workings of public ownership wishes public ownership, at least to any widespread degree; in no other way could the prosperity of the country-the individual prosperity of every man and woman of the countrybe so quickly sunk. No help is in sight, as the Wisconsin Commissioner of Labor has just pointed out, from the so-called "co-operative" undertakings; the plain reason being that in this, as in public ownership, the undertakings are never conducted on business principles-never suitably manned. To be conducted on business principles-to be suitably manned-a business undertaking must start and grow in the natural order of things-manned usually by the men who build them up, or by men who, in the natural order of business selection, must come to take their places.

The corporation, indeed, is the only form of proprietorship in sight in which our great new industrial life can embody itself, and maintain its vitality. But the corporation itself, as now constructed, looked at as I have tried to point out, from the standpoint of universal human nature (and by that standard it is bound to be judged), is built upon the sands. The duty and the task of this generation of Americans is to put it on the solid ground of human interest-to so rebuild it that, as the antithesis of public ownership, it will present also a countenance

that is human-to make for our incorporated industrial life a name that, along with the other great names of American achievement, can be put on our flag in the contest that is bound some day to come between the civilization of to-day, the product of what has been best in the

exertions of mankind, and a civilization that would sink us to the level of what is the worst that mankind can endure. And some day, to some man, will be given the strength successfully to summon to this great task the good sense and the conscience of the American people.

T

HERE are more races crowding the great plains and huddling among the hills of Hindustan than one can count on the continent of Europe. The Mohammedans alone outnumber all the world's Mohammedan population besides. These peoples differ in race and voice, color and costume, occupation, literature, philosophy, and religion. Added to these racial barriers, which have some natural sources, are the social and religious barriers of caste among the Hindus.

The people say that the god created men in layers. Some came from his feet, some from his body, some from his arms, and some from his head. But, not satisfied with these four, the Hindu's imagination seems to have run riot with him till every trade is a separate caste. It is a rigid, frigid, petrified system. It compels the son always to follow the father's trade, and weds the daughter only to a man of the same caste. average Hindu probably would rather omit the worship of his gods than break caste by certain associations with a lower-caste man, such as drinking out of the same cup with him or sharing his lunch. A score of Hindus in all India could not number for us these accursed caste circles.

The

India is not a nation. It has no national life. It has no flag as an emblem of national life. For centuries together,

political differences, defended and forced by weapons, have existed among those hoary people. Internal civil strife, racial and political uprisings, cruel invasions, siege and bloodshed were common occurrences. These differences cannot be obliterated in a single century of peace enforced by a conquering neutral nation. The interests of the Indian people are still more or less divided into and confined by States-British and Native States. Great Britain's paternal colonial government has by no means yet passed the stage of governing by arms. The amalgamation of such peoples, the centralizing of their interests, the welding into one of their political ambitions, is a task the magnitude of which is ill appreciated by onlookers or casual visitors. Why will not England give India larger representation in Parliament? Because India does not yet produce large-hearted men who will look far beyond kith and kin and kind, and take into consideration disinterestedly the welfare of all India. That populous empire has had many noble reformers in the interests of religion, society, and politics, but circumstances have always limited their vision and the reach of their influence, and the effect of their best work has been confined to sections of the country and only parts of the people. India's real political interests have as yet scarcely been molded into definite shape, let alone

their being the uniform passion or pursuit of the people.

India's economic life helps on this division of interests, and emphasizes the lack of unity among the people. A man's trade determines his social and largely his religious standing. What sympathy has the higher with the lower? What ambition has the lower to rise? The man who prepares leather for shoes and sews them for the Brahmin is abhorrent in the wearer's eyes. The bearer of messages

and money from town to town, the Mahar, would never be admitted into the house of the writer or receiver of the same. He is the serf. The countless lower castes are forbidden the temple precincts in India; are forbidden to hear the sacred scriptures when read, for it would be sacrilegious, because they make ropes with which the farmer ties his cattle and draws water from his deep wells for his rich fields, because they make brooms with which the temples are swept and mattings of the date-palm or aloe on which all higher-caste people are glad to sleep at night. The man who weaves the warm goat's-hair blanket is excluded from higher circles of society, while his blankets are bought by all alike. What a hopeless task is this to bring these hearts together as common sons of a common father, as brothers in a family! The enormity of the problem is the measure of the necessity of its solution.

What of the dividing lines of the religions in India? It may be enough perhaps simply to say that all the great religious systems of Asia have first and last had their temple homes in India. A half-dozen of these religions are still there, each restless because of the others; perhaps all well-nigh resistless before the twentieth century's best Christian message. Religion is on the ground early and late, first and last and always; tenfold more elaborate religious codes than the Jews ever possessed. Building a house, digging a well, preparing for marriage, casting up accounts, beginning his spring plowing, sowing his seed, gathering the harvest, and all that one can conceive of his doing, a man does with some religious ceremony. The zeal of the people in expressing their

devotion to their gods goes to the extreme of self-abnegation and self-denial, unheard of among the most zealous of Western Christians.

Among the one-third of the human race who are the followers of Buddha must be counted India's contributions. That prophet had a great soul. Like Christ, he thought out the problems of life in the mountains alone; like him, he left no writings in prose or poetry. He lived, he thought, he died. The system which bears his name is not all contradictions and falsehoods, but it does lack the dynamic force of an everpresent and all-powerful personality.

Mohaminedanism is a force upon which India and many other lands have had to count for centuries. Mohammed fought against idolatry. He taught submission to the one personal God; he acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah, though not as divine. The Koran he believed to be the last stage of God's revelations to man. He has ninety-nine names for God. Shall we go to his followers with the hundredth and crowning one of Father? Among the Mohammedans woman is man's slave. Crime or immorality will not excommunicate a Mohammedan. Church and State are one. Sensuality and lust run in the Tartar blood. Its fatalism is fatal to its own healthy development. Mohammedanism needs to put Jesus supreme. It needs the love of righteousness. It needs the conception of God as love and of religion as a life with God, a life of love and of holiness.

The followers of Zoroaster, the Parsees from Persia, have been in India for five hundred years. Zoroaster was one of the great teachers of the East. An echo of his own moral struggles is heard in his teachings of dualism. The Parsee adores the sun, the source of so much blessing, giving life and light and having such cleansing power, being, too, the largest body symbolic of the source of all such power. The Parsees are devout. They do not proselyte. Their temples are exclusive. Sins of lust and passion are regrettably noticeable among them. Charities abound, but are promoted by mixed motives. Zoroastrianism suffered its first blow at the hands

of Mohammedans in the seventh century. It will never recover itself. It lacks a vital motive to live and to do. Then there is Hinduism, ancient and modern, the strongest, the oldest religion in India. There is a certain prestige about old age. Hinduism has gained no small share of its power by its openness, in a way, towards other faiths. Probably for this reason very few Hindus could be found in all Hindustan who could define Hinduism. This ancient, elaborate philosophy is professed by 190,000,000 people. Natureworship is its backbone, mystery its watchword. The Hindu connects all unusual phenomena with Deity. The Vedas are selections made from the ancient scriptures, and are not the daily thought of those former pastoral people. Hinduism, ancient and modern, is a conglomerate, colossal mass of philosophies and systems hopelessly interborrowed. What of truth is in it is from God. Its teachers and its writings have gripped the people as few other religious systems have ever done. Still, religions must be judged, not by their roots, but by their fruits. Hinduism is not sufficient to the task of saving men from sin, nor does it incite to unselfish service for one's fellowmen. The caste system of the Hindus is unyielding and intolerable. Preservation of life is the cult of some sects, while animal food is freely used by people of others. The custom of early marriages with all its attendant evils, the abuse of widows to limits of cruelty and sensuality inconceivable, and the opposite of this, namely, widow remarriage and postponement of weddings to maturer life, are observed together in almost any city or town. Religious opposition so easily develops fanaticism and bursts out into intoler

of the West, and makes him side with Kipling in the conclusion that the race is not for the swift. The East will simply not race. The leisurely life of the Orient is no doubt due partly to the enervating climate, partly to the general fertility of the soil, which with a little coaxing has for centuries supplied the limited material wants of millions of humanity, partly to the predominating fatalistic philosophy of the people, and possibly more than all to the semisuperstitious and religious beliefs of the people, which still have a firm grip on most of them. A single illustration will suffice. A few years ago, Ahmednagar, one hundred and fifty miles east of Bombay, with a population of thirty-eight thousand, experienced its first siege of the ravaging plague. That disease has in the last decade carried off two million people in India alone. Upon the spread of the disease Government medical authorities planned rigorous measures for the daily inspection of the city; the segregation of families where patients were found and the removal of the patients to temporary hospitals were ordered. An old priest started the story that the Queen of England was dying of old age, and that her physicians had prescribed for her a diet of human hearts, and all these plague regulations were a subterfuge on the part of the Government authorities to secure human hearts; the patients once taken to the hospital would be drugged and then the hearts removed and forwarded to the Queen. The story was widely believed, especially by those who yield to priestcraft, and the result was that people hid their sick, buried their dead secretly in wells or under their houses, or, deserting both sick and dead, locked them up in their houses and moved away. The death-rate reached seventy a day.

If it is true that religion permeates all the activities of the Hindu, it is also true that such superstitious beliefs are inseparable from his religion. The control the priesthood has of the ignorant people is probably without parallel. The priests are the interpreters of the scriptures, the revealers of the gods' wishes, and are often worshiped as gods. I have seen even the ordinary Brahmin, laying no

claims to being a priest, stop on the crowded streets of our city while some of the people poured water on his feet and then drank it as a special cup of blessing. Certain classes of priests determine the lucky days for weddings. Large parts of the year are altogether excluded from these chosen days. The farmer sows his seed in certain phases of the moon declared by his priests to be lucky, while signs of all kinds control devotees starting on pilgrimages. Will the truth appeal to such minds? Will these people who live in the past be easily reached by the Christian's message, taken to them barely a century ago? It is not easy to say yes, but not possible to say no. In a large measure all this is due to the dense ignorance of the populace. One woman in about seventy can sign her own name, and one man in about twenty. There are scores of villages in the Bombay State alone with no schools of any kind.

partments. Some of them are heads of large business firms and managers of factories. All this is but a beginning, when the country is considered as a whole, but a good beginning, and it is significant. Under Lord Curzon primary education received a great impetus. It is being encouraged under his successor. Much as one may often regret the religious neutrality of Government schools, or decry the great predominance of Hindu literature used, which makes the way easy for the teachers, almost without exception themselves strong Hindus, to refer to Hindu mythology and to the Hindu scriptures-in short, to teach Hinduism-and little as this educational system may reach the most neglected classes, since it is against the social and religious instincts and customs for a higher-caste teacher to associate with lower-caste pupils, yet the Government schools educate. They prepare for higher education. They start ambitions for

There are the great ports and centers of industry, like Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Karachee, and Colombo, among the busiest cities in the world. The first two furnished last year a commerce worth five hundred million dollars to the Western world, while the entire foreign commerce of America was worth to her only a billion dollars. The world's commercial interests are bringing India into line with better nations. This will bear fruit in more than simply economic lines.

There, too, are the men caught by the ambition of learning who are in the halfdozen universities established by the British Government, and sustained at millions of dollars of annual expenditure. Or, with a larger ambition still, they will cross over to Cambridge or Oxford, or to Germany, or to the United States, whence scores of intelligent young men are returning, with their B.A., M.A., or LL.B. and M.D. proudly attached to their names. Many such will already be found in India occupying judges' benches, practicing as lawyers and doctors, acceptably filling civil offices of legal, judicial, and financial responsibility. They may be found as officers in the standing army, in the forestry and the engineering de

too, to more knowledge. This opens the way for better influences to come into their lives. The horizon is broadened. The past and the environment of the present become unsatisfactory. The desire for better things is started.

The mingling and commingling of these diverse peoples is brought about by such agencies as railways. Travelers must sit together in the trains. If they travel all day, they must converse somewhat, and they have their lunches with them. Irrespective of caste or creed, they must become acquainted with one another. There are thousands of miles of railway in India. More are added every year. The interests of the people in other classes and places than theirs are stimulated by the newspapers, English and vernacular, now found in all cities of twenty thousand or thirty thousand and over. Disasters or developments anywhere are crowded on to the notice of all who can read. People are compelled to think about one another, and to take a slight interest at least in the welfare and the woe of others. The wider acquaintance with foreign lands, too, is increasing. The desire to travel abroad, to pursue studies in Western lands, the visits of leading men to our countries, merchants