soberness of judgment. Enthusiastic and romantic, his sympathies are quick and tender. But although a certain frank disclosure of himself awaits any friendly seeking, he is a man of reserved nature, and his confidence is difficult to reach. It may indeed be objected that some of these qualities are contradictory; be that as it may, they each and all appear and reappear in this man in quick succession. His affections are particularly deep and strong, and he holds his friends by a firm grasp, even unto death, through good and evil report. Much might be said of his friendships not only of the devotion he gives, but of that which he receives. A curiously strong magnetic power draws men to him. His friends know no bounds to their admiration, and they love him like a woman.

Mr. Kennan's peculiar buoyancy of temperament appears in his spirits, which reach both the heights and the depths. In his happy hours of a joyous temper,- almost frolicsome in those rare moments when work is forgotten,- fond of story-telling, a wit, and in particular a good talker, he is a much-sought companion for the lighter hours of life: a diligent student of men and affairs, with a quick perception and a steady grasp of a subject, based on unusual experience, he is equally ready for the more serious discussion of causes or events. At work again, he is altogether at work. Few men are so entirely and strenuously at work as he. It is laughingly said, albeit with something of truth, that he will spend hours over a statement and take a whole day to verify a fact. He produces his results with the greatest care and by the most painstaking methods. There is constant physical and mental strain, and even a temporary cessation of actual labor brings no relief from tension until the work is done, when, the pressure off, it is altogether off. At play, pleasure, or work, thoroughness and entire absorption is the note of his life. Says the friend already quoted:

When he is off duty and on a holiday, there never is a more genial, lively, quick-witted, merry fellow than he. His appreciation of fun is great, and he not only enjoys it, but is willing to bear a goodly share in the frolic. He is apt with a good story, and very responsive to wit and humor. No one ever presented two so totally different phases as he. When he is in the midst of the winter's work, when every minute is precious, he is as silent and pre-occupied as an oarsman in an inter-collegiate race. The pressure is so constant, and the breathing spells so rare, that, when they come, there is but little inclination for anything but the breathing. There is no sparkle, no liveliness, only that intense concentration and painful pre-occupation. It is mental travail of the most distressing kind.

Mr. Kennan has a deep and abiding love of Nature, a careful and affectionate regard for her beautiful things her clouds and flowers,

her mountains and sea. A lover of music, he is possessed of a quick ear and is not without a working knowledge of the art. A man of wide reading and of fine intellectual tastes, always given free rein, he has not only much acquaintance with general literature, but some particular lines of reading he has pursued with the thoroughness which characterizes all that he does. It is obvious that this is true in regard to Russian affairs, for only a constant reader of both periodical and standard literature in that language could so keep abreast of the life and thought of a foreign country. His books are well read, and the wide range of subjects they embrace is no less noticeable than the fullness of certain departments. One might almost trace his mental development in these books, but surer ground would be found in the complete card index which marks the steps of all his reading and thinking. Nothing makes greater impression of the thoroughness and accuracy of the man, and of his equipment for his work.

George Kennan's mental and physical characteristics peculiarly fit him for the task of observation, while the qualities of his charac ter give especial value to his judgment of facts. Great physical courage, partly temperamental and partly the result of character, combined with a natural confidence in his own power, break before him the most impassable barriers. A phenomenal readiness at expedients furnishes him with a device in every most desperate situation. To these he adds the peculiar facility of adaptation to strange peoples, and the great talent for languages already alluded to. Fortunately he has the scientific habit of mind to a marked degree, and, be the occasion large or small, he sees and sets down the minutest particulars of his surroundings. Details are both noted and recorded. He does not so much select salient points as put down all he sees. If for this reason he sometimes fails to give due proportion to matters and events, he believes it his business to give you the factsyou may draw your own conclusions. This is not to say that he draws no conclusions of his own. Quite the contrary. He is a man of much thought and has thought well on many things. Probably the first impression he would make upon a stranger would be that of balanced judgment, and this certainly is the expression of long acquaintance. Just and fair, a man who sees all things and who weighs well both sides of a matter, his final conclusion may safely be trusted.

Equally striking is his tremendous will power, ever pushing him on to success. To this there seems to be no limit. He has a feeling of pleasure in overcoming obstacles, he loves a difficulty, he delights to match his

powers against opposition; as he himself expresses it, he has a certain pride and pleasure in doing, by the sheer force of his own manhood, something which all nature conspires to prevent. In every direction his standards are exacting. His ideals are fine and high. Purity, sincerity, honesty, truth, and honor are dear to him. Character is the sharp test he puts to himself and other men, and on that standpoint alone he finds common ground with those about him. To him the purpose of life is an ever-heeded question, and its best use a never-forgotten aim. Life means much to him, and constantly more and more. Being asked on one occasion what end he proposed to himself when as a boy he sought so eagerly for a wider field, he answered somewhat after this fashion: "I wanted a full life, a life in which all one's self is satisfied. My idea of life was one into which were crowded as much of sensation and experience as possible. It seemed to me that if I should grow old and

66

miss any of the sensations and experiences I might have had, it would be a source of great unhappiness and regret to me." Mr. Kennan has not grown old, but he has already tasted more sensations and experiences than most men, and these experiences have wrought upon him until he wishes more than to feel them for himself he would make them factors in the world's progress. He has put his life in jeopardy every hour, and he would make that risk the price of hope for the prisoners of despair. He has come home to cry aloud, that we who think ourselves too tender to listen to the story of such suffering may feel and see the horror and the glory of it. He is no longer content to tell the traveler's tale; but to-day, and to-morrow, and until the deed is done, he must needs strive to open the blinded eyes of History, and help her to loose the chains that bind a whole people.

Anna Laurens Dawes.

WHA

An Administrative Novelty.

WHAT is the remedy for the lawlessness of law-officers? Who will keep the keepers? The fact is notorious that, all over the land, plain statutes are disregarded by those who are plainly bidden to enforce them; that sheriffs and constables and policemen stand and look on while the laws which they have sworn to execute are dishonored before their faces. This is the feature of our political administration that is most troublesome and discouraging. That evil and desperate men may be found among us, who, for selfish purposes, are ready to defy the laws, is not marvelous; that the men who are intrusted with the execution of law should, in so many instances, appear to be in league with the law-breakers, guaranteeing them immunity in their transgressions, is certainly alarming.

This is more particularly true with respect to the laws which restrain liquor selling. It has come to be the settled policy of the dealers in strong drink to resist all laws which interfere with their business. Not unfrequently, in organized bodies, they vote to disobey the laws of the State. Such action is, of course, the essence of anarchy. It would seem that the custodians of law should resent conduct of this kind as especially

insulting to them, and that they should be ready to try conclusions with those who thus defy them. But in many cases we find the police authorities ignoring this challenge, and apparently taking their orders, not from the statutes, but from the anarchical groups who have assumed the power to annul the statutes. This spectacle is more familiar than it ought to be. The complete paralysis of the police force of many cities, in presence of certain vicious classes, is a lamentable sign.

It is sometimes said that this is due to a failure of public sentiment; that if the people were determined to have the laws enforced, they would be enforced. But this is not altogether just. Often the police department is so organized that the people cannot bring the power of public opinion to bear upon it in any effective way. It is under the control of commissioners who are not elected by the people, or who are elected for such terms that it may require several years to bring in a majority of trustworthy men. And it must be admitted that it is difficult to keep the popular attention fixed on a question of this nature, and the popular indignation up to boiling-point, for three or four years at a stretch. This is one reason why municipal reform often goes forward so haltingly. If the executive departments of the city are so organized that it will take several years

to change the administration, inefficiency and rascality are pretty likely to intrench themselves, and to make themselves secure against dislodgment. The popular wrath may be hot for one campaign, but it is pretty sure to cool off before the next. This is one reason why a centralized government, like that of Brooklyn, is to be desired; it brings the people into direct and frequent communication with the sources of administrative power, and enables them summarily to remove dishonest and inefficient officers. If public opinion is the effective force of popular government, then our governmental machinery should be so contrived that public opinion can act promptly and directly upon the administration. It is a curious fact that many of our legislative devices, for the last twenty-five years, have been intended to prevent any direct and efficacious application of the popular will to the problems of government. It seems to have been supposed that those forms of administration are safest which put the offices that are the final depositories of power at the farthest possible remove from the hands of the people. It is needless to say that this practice evinces a total lack of faith in democracy. Indeed, we might almost say that the democratic principle has been ignored in our municipal systems; and might fairly apply to democ. racy what was pertinently said of Christianity,-that it could not be truthfully pronounced a failure, because it had never been tried. Thus it is often true that the failure of the police authorities to enforce a law is not due to the lack of a public sentiment demanding the enforcement of the law, but is rather due to those legislative contrivances which prevent public opinion from acting directly and efficiently upon the custodians of the law.

It must be remembered also that the courts, as well as the police, are the custodians of the law. The police authorities can do nothing unless the courts and the juries support them. In Brooklyn, during Mayor Low's term of office, a body of clergymen, headed by Mr. Beecher, called upon him to inquire why the excise laws were not more faithfully executed. The mayor drew the attention of his visitors to the fact that the courts were the ultimate enforcers of law, and that the courts utterly failed to coöperate with the police in giving vigor to the law. The police under his administration had arrested one saloon-keeper five times for selling without a license, and the total amount of fines imposed upon him by the court amounted to less than the cost of a license. A barkeeper also had been acquitted by a jury for selling without license, on the ground that he had tried to get a license, but had been refused by the excise board! It is evident that good executive officers will not be very zealous in the enforcement of laws if the courts give them this kind of backing. And it is very clear, in the words of Mayor Low, that "public sentiment to enforce law must express itself through the jury-box and from the bench just as efficiently as through the executive, or the desired result cannot be reached."

It sometimes happens, however, that public sentiment expresses itself through the judiciary more directly and efficiently than through the executive; and a curious incident of recent history shows how the courts may be used to spur to action a derelict administration. In one of the cities of Ohio, the law requiring the closing of the saloons on Sunday had been fla

grantly disobeyed for years, and the police authorities, who were commanded by the law to see to its enforcement, had never lifted a finger to restrain the transgressors. At length application was made by citizens to one of the judges of the Court of Common Pleas for a writ of mandamus, requiring the police commissioners to execute the law. The case was argued, the fact of the entire inaction of the authorities was shown could not, indeed, be disputed; and the judge promptly issued the writ, commanding these officers to perform their duty. The commissioners met and consulted. “ Suppose we refuse," they said; "what then?" "That will be contempt of court," replied the city solicitor. The jail already contained one or two inmates whom the judge had recently punished for contempt, and the prospect was not alluring. "I move,” said one of the commissioners, after a solemn pause, "that orders be issued to the men to enforce the law strictly next Sunday." The motion was unanimously carried, and on the next Sunday, for the first time in fifteen years, every saloon was closed.

The question thus raised, as to whether the courts can exercise supervisory power over executive officers in the execution of criminal laws, is certainly an interesting one. Many legal gentlemen would have said beforehand that the thing could not be done. There may be those, even now, who will insist that the thing is impossible. But the answer of the saloon-keepers to this assertion must be the same as that of Mr. Lowell's philosopher, who, while in durance vile, recited the story of his incarceration to his lawyer; and, on being told, with some confidence, "They can't put you in jail on a charge like that," calmly answered, "They hev."

To what extent the writ of mandamus can be used in compelling negligent police authorities to enforce the criminal laws is a question into which a layman may be excused from entering. But the suggestion thus presented is worth considering by all who find themselves confronted with laxity in this department of municipal government.

Modern Science in its Relations to Pain.

ONE of the most frequent criticisms of modern science and its methods is derived from its asserted indifference to the more tender and spiritual side of man; and the more embittered critics have even said or implied that this indifference has already passed beyond the materialistic into the brutal. Napoleon long ago struck the key-note for this whole line of criticism when he said that surgeons did not believe in the soul because they could not find it with lancet and probe. And in all the discussions of vivisection the specific charges of cruelty against the professors have evidently been only a phase of the general suspicion of materialistic tendencies in their profession.

The commonest answer, from scientific men and others, has been that the change in methods of inves tigation which has brought to human knowledge and use the powers of ether, chloroform, cocaine, and other agents for the suspension of pain or consciousness during surgical operations has a fair right to expect a kindly consideration for its present work. Not many changes in modern life are more striking than the contrast between the past and the present of surgery. The surgical patient of former times was strapped

down to the operating-table, that no flinching on his part might disturb the accuracy of the operator's work. His open and conscious eyes watched the preparations and the actual operation either with a nervous terror or with a bullying affectation of indifference; and his after-life carried in it always the hardened cicatrix of such a memory as no one in the present need know. Is modern science to have no credit for its removal of so vast a mass of absolute agony from the life of man? The poorest laborer of the present may face with equanimity and safety operations from which the most powerful monarch of earth, a half-century ago, could expect only exquisite torture of mind and body, with perhaps impending peril to his life. And it seems but a fair proposition that the results of scientific methods in the past should give reason for expectations of even higher good to mankind from similar investigations in the future.

All this, however, it may be said, is but an incidental and unintended benefit to individuals, and no real part in the development of humanity. An accidental discovery of utility in the past is no good ground for hope of similar accidents in the future. Scientific men are not to gain plenary permission to indulge their taste for cutting and carving flesh merely because the wit of a surgeon or the boldness of a dentist, fifty years since, found that the power of ether to suspend consciousness might be put to use in surgery. The point of the discussion is thus transferred to that wider field on which, after all, the methods of modern investigation must stand or fall. Is “accidental ” a term which is fairly descriptive of such discoveries as have been indicated? Or are the methods of modern science such as to promise the widest good for humanity in spite of incidental features which are apt to shock an unaccustomed mind? If the incidental benefit to individuals is to be stricken out of the account, ought not the incidental injury to individuals to go with it? Nor is the transfer any real misfortune to the object of the criticism; the influence of scientific investigation upon the world rather than upon the individual is its best title to existence.

One cannot study the history of his own times very far before becoming conscious that a decided point of difference between our generation and any former period, between what we call civilized peoples and the rest of the world, is in the comparative feeling in regard to pain. The modern civilized man is squeamish about pain to a degree which would have seemed ef. feminate or worse to his great-grandfather, or to the contemporary barbarian. His squeamishness is not egoistic; he does not seem to be any more afraid of being hurt than his great-grandfather was if he can see any good reason for it. The German soldier, while the mitrailleuse was still a weapon of unknown and frightful possibilities, cursed the Frenchman and charged up the hill face to face with the "hell-machines" as undauntedly as ever his forefathers faced simple bullet or bow and arrows. The nameless railway engineers, who stand to their posts into the heart of a great accident rather than desert a train-load of passengers, face and defy possibilities of pain such as the great Julius or Ney never dreamed of. Is there a finer thing in Plutarch than was seen when the English battalion, presenting arms to the helpless beings in the departing boats, went down in perfect VOL. XXXVI.- 88.

parade order on the deck of the foundering troop-ship? Modern life is rich in a supremacy over personal suffering which takes a higher character only as the finer organization of the human being comes to know more exactly in advance the nature of the pain which it is to face.

It is rather in others and for others that the modern civilized man dreads pain. He finds it harder to know that other men are suffering the pains of cold or hunger in Kansas or Ireland or India; or that "prisoners of poverty are working for pittances in the great cities; or that laboring men are driven to work sixteen hours a day; or that criminals are tortured or mistreated in the chain-gang; or that "politicals" are driven to insanity in the Russian state-prisons. He resents and punishes cruelty to animals where his greatgrandfather, perhaps, thought nothing of sending a slave to the whipping-post. He revolts even against harshness in just punishment, and desires to alleviate some of the horrors of hanging. If he ignores a case of cruelty, it is from lack of omniscience: let him know about it, and the world shall know his feelings about it. Wilberforce and Copley might go on for years telling Englishmen of the horrors of the middle passage and of all the villainies of the slave-trade: and still the slave-ships sailed out from Liverpool, and the slave-trade was represented in Parliament. Cruelty in more recent times lives by stealth and blushes to find itself famous in the newspaper pillory.

It is in its relations to this general development of humanity, and not in any alleviation of individual suffering, that modern scientific investigation may found its strongest claims to consideration. It should not be easy to deny that there are such relations. When the growing sensitiveness to suffering in others and the full admission of the methods of modern science are found in exactly the same peoples, in the same periods, and to the same degree, the connection between the two ought not to be doubtful. The modern civilized man is no longer made dull and callous by the frequent recurrence of human suffering in those forms which science can reach; and when it comes in any form, it makes a far deeper impression upon him. If Davy, by inventing the safety lamp, decreases the chances of colliery accidents, he gives all men a deeper horror when a hundred or more human beings are locked up in a burning mine or choked to death by damp. Ocean travel is made safer every year by increasingly ingenious inventions; but the diminution of wrecks serves to make the event far more startling when fire or fog succeeds in snatching its victim from among the great ocean steamers. Surgical progress, particularly in anaesthetics, by removing a vast amount of pain from the familiar acquaintance of the people, must have had a very great influence in intensifying their susceptibility to suffering in others, when it comes to their knowledge. But surgical progress, after all, is but one phase of a far larger system: every invention leading to a decrease in the amount of danger and suffering in human existence, all due to the methods of investigation introduced by modern science, has acted in the same direction and has produced similar effects.

The surgeon's knife follows unerringly the lines of muscle and tendon; and we are apt to think that its accuracy is due to a cold heart as well as to a cool head and a skillful hand. But the operator's work has direct

though unseen relations to the forces which have added Christian and Sanitary Commissions to warfare, which have mitigated the horrors of prison and asylum life, and which have sided with the weak and helpless all over the world. Money or fame or sheer love of research may seem to be the motive forces of the scientific investigation that is at work all around us; but through it all we should learn to recognize a still higher power preparing a still kindlier heart for the coming humanity.

Socialism and the "Trusts."

THE phenomenon which has most startled the country, since the sudden rise of the Knights of Labor, is the appearance of what are known as "trusts." We had known corporations, and had recognized the mode in which, by their concentrated competition with one another, they gave to the general public the results of the steady improvements in methods and amount of production, in the shape of better quality of goods and lower prices. We had even known "pools," arrangements between corporations to limit or cease competition, which was becoming destructive: many objected to them as enemies of competition; others defended them as the inevitable result of conditions under which the possibility of combination proved the impossibility of competition. The question of the guilt or innocence of "pools" must still be regarded as largely an open question; and before we have time to settle it, we are confronted by the still more serious question of the "trusts."

Corporations are the usual component units of the trust, as of the pool; and the authorized defense of the former rests on the general notion that the successive appearances of these forms of combination - corporations, pools, and trusts—are only successive steps in the evolution of new and more highly specialized modes of capital, necessary to meet new modes of production or new conditions of the market; and that legislative interference with them would be in effect an act to prevent the proper and natural development of production, to the injury of the whole people. It is claimed that such enormous masses of carefully organized capital are necessary to meet the competition of the great natural opportunities of countries which have hitherto been backward, but are now exhibiting a new energy in production; that, if the trusts limit competition at home, it is only destructive competition, whose limitation is for the good of all producers; and that the trust's natural desire to increase the number of its consumers, with the greater facilities for larger, cheaper, and better production, which its growing capital affords it, will prevent any injury to consumers. According to this view, the dividends of the trust would come from the prevention of waste, not from increase of price. And so we have attempts to form trusts in every conceivable form of human industry, even to milk and eggs, and a farmers' trust.

The process of widening its jurisdiction, which is open to all trusts, and is followed by some at least, has been described very clearly. It may be illustrated by an industry which it does not seem to have invaded yet. Suppose that the price of sewing-machines under competition is $50; that the mass of production is done by twenty corporations, each controlling the

market in an equivalent territory; and that ten of the producers, believing that prices have been forced to too low a point, form a trust, which is to control production for the general good. If the trust should undertake to put up prices within its ten markets, some neighboring producer will invade its territory as soon as the selling price has risen sufficiently to cover cost of transportation. It is necessary, then, to bring the nearest producer into the trust. An increase of price to $51 within the trust's ten markets will not be likely to decrease consumption materially, or to open the way to invasion of the trust's territory by competing products of other producers; but it will enable the trust, without changing its profits and dividends, to offer sewing-machines for sale at $40 apiece within its nearest rival's territory until he consents to enter the trust. It is then easier for the eleven members of the trust to force another rival in, and then another and another, until all the desirable market is secured. The process stops only when the remaining producers are so remote or so much hampered by difficulties of production that they are compelled to sell at or above the price which the trust desires to fix, so that they may safely be considered as hors de combat.

The trust is now ready to raise prices within its territory to a rate which will afford to the component corporations such dividends as they could not have attained under competition. Its managers have by this time learned every condition of their market so accurately that they can operate as if by instinct. If, under the new conditions, a competitor appears who is so far handicapped by natural or personal disabilities that he can only make and sell sewing-machines at the trust's prices, he may safely be disregarded. If he is skillful, acute, or so favored by natural opportunities as to show indications of becoming a dangerous competitor, a slight increase of price in the remainder of the trust's territory enables it, without any decrease of dividends, to concentrate an enormous “cut” upon the market of its would-be rival, and crush him out of the business. All that is needed is a thorough knowledge of the conditions and a careful watchfulness on the part of the trust's managers, and competition really becomes impossible. Such a description cannot be answered by references to the high character of the men who control some of the trusts; the same road is open to all trusts, and, if some of them do not follow it, competitors exist through their forbearance, not by virtue of legal rights. The trust is the pool militant, and it will take the line of least resistance to success.

All this is quite compatible with the continued existence and activity of a considerable number of produ cers outside of the trust; these are producers whose natural prices do not interfere with the trust rate. It is compatible, also, with a steady decrease of price, if the industry is one the natural tendency of which is to decrease of price as improved methods give a larger production at the same cost of effort. In these two cases the trust may continue its usual dividends, while appealing to the decrease of price and the number of outside producers as coincident proofs of the virtue of its methods and the excellence of the results. It is difficult, however, to see that the consumer gets any benefit from the competition of such rivals, or that be gains all the natural decrease of price, as free competition would give it to him.