vested in some automobile loan association; in other words, that they are being bought on the instalment plan; and, secondly, you would find that they are mostly married couples who drive them away. She comes from her business, and he from his, and they drive away together. It all sounds very delightful and is very delightful. There is no use in our butting against it. But, far too often, for every couple that drives away in a car to a restaurant dinner, a show to follow, and a radio dance later on, there is another couple, somewhere, walking home to save car-fare, and making out on resurrection pie to save the price of a dinner."

He told me many other things, reading to me cases taken from his files and patiently giving me statistics, now from this report and now from that, all designed to confirm the theory upon which we had started.

"Oh, yes," he said, at last, "I do not think there is any doubt of it. My own daughter is a case in point. She is a college girl, and, before her marriage, was a very capable teacher in the public schools. When she married, she gave up her work; but, about a year ago, the education committee asked her if she would not come back to her old school for a while, as they were short-handed and the school was getting behind. Well, she went back, and her work was so satisfactory that the committee asked her if she would not stay on permanently. She knew, however, of two or three teachers quite capable of filling the position, men and women who had to work to live; so, sharing as she does my view on the

I left my friend at the labor bureau, more than ever convinced that something very revolutionary was in progress, and that, to a very large extent, we were not aware of it. One thing puzzled me, however. If there really was in progress a drastic reapportionment of wealth, such as I imagined, under which one section of the community was able to attain unprecedented abundance by the simple process of tapping the underground waters which would otherwise have been pumped into its neighbor's irrigation ditch, why was there so little absolute want in evidence anywhere?

Long years of familiarity with real poverty, as it is to be found without much difficulty almost anywhere in Europe, convinced me that there was some cause operating here which mitigated the horrors of the tragedy of unemployment. It is true that my friend had revealed to me a state of things which was as pitiful as it was entirely unexpected. He had shown me that unemployment was a real and urgent problem in the United States, in spite of all popular conviction to the contrary. Yet, if this was so, the effects, save in rare cases, were never what they were in England, for instance, at any rate in England before the days of the dole. Something was preventing,

in almost every case, the descent to the lowest depths. What was it?

The question, I quickly found, was really not a difficult one. The experience of my jobless five during their weeks and months of workless waiting afforded the answer. All of them numbered among their friends several members of the new plutocracy, and from these they were constantly receiving aid, not only or not chiefly in the form of money, but in kind; a dress discarded months before what would have been its due date in the days when the wife was not earning; a pair of shoes; a good square meal; a motor-trip; a week or two in the summer shack down at the beach; and, every now and again, a five dollar bill, with little or no expectation of repayment. In this way, the jobless can and do often live on from hand to mouth, from week to week, not only without sinking into absolute want, but with comparatively little discomfort of the kind that is readily apparent.

Twenty or thirty years ago, it was still the self-imposed duty of the "upper classes," the old plutocracy, to aid the "poor." It was a kind of hall mark of their degree, punctiliously observed for that reason, especially by "new members." Today, the new plutocracy is rapidly taking over the obligations of the old. When Paul's wife takes Peter's job, she and Paul feel a charitable desire to give Peter a "hand out," now and again, until he can get something else to do. There is a seat in their car awaiting him, a place at their table, a partner at their radio dance and half worn clothes for him and his wife.

And it is all good for business.

Paul and his wife, with so much easy money, spend much more lavishly than Peter and Paul in receipt of an identical amount separately would have ever thought of doing, and, to a large extent, on entirely different things. And so the automobile factories work at capacity, radio sets flood the market, beauty parlors spring up on every side, dancing, feasting, joy-riding, are the order of the day. But-the host and hostess at almost every feast are Paul and his wife. Among their guests are other Pauls and their wives, but the poor relation Peter is not forgotten. He comes along, and brings his wife, and, for all that any one can see to the contrary, has a good time. The onlooker makes no distinction, is, indeed, able to discern none. "Behold," he says, "what a beautiful new car has Paul, and how well he is dressed, both he and his wife, and how happy are those two friends of theirs, Peter and his wife, who are sitting in the rear seat!"

How can the onlooker know that Peter and his wife are eating of the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table, and that a large part of this seeming luxury is made possible just in the way that the luxury of old was, so often, made possible, because Dives takes, to spend on purple and fine linen, what ought to have gone to keep Lazarus from lying at his gate full of sores?

But the world as a whole knows nothing of all this. It only knows that more and more money every year is being spent on things in the luxury class. And so, presumably, since a man does not begin to spend on luxuries until his necessities have

been provided for, prosperity must be steadily on the increase. It cannot know anything of Peter's affairs. And so, all is well. The financial papers continue to record unprecedented sales of motors and radios and orthophonics, and the florists flourish, and the beauty parlors have seen a great light, and the theaters are filled to overflowing, and the countenance of the twentieth-century Boniface in the twentiethcentury road-house is overspread with satisfaction.

Peter is forgotten, if his presence was ever realized. But how about him? Well, on the evening when there is no invitation "round to Paul's," Peter and his wife, over a dinner of herbs, discuss the situation. Peter has tried again, but cannot get a job. Everywhere he went he found that a Paul's wife had got there before him. They are just debating as to whether or not they can afford the fifteen cent movies round the corner where Peter reports a really good picture, when the insistent honk of a motor-horn in the street below sends them to the window. It is Paul's cousin and his wife trying out their new Cash Six. Paul's cousin had a "Chev" before his wife went back to work, but now they are wondering if the Cash Six is really good enough. Peter and his wife shall decide.

There may be a reaction against "luxury expenditure." Sooner or later, there may be a discovery, will indeed inevitably be a discovery, that a man's life does not consist in the multitude of the things that he possesses; sooner or later, the children let loose in the candy store will have had their fill. But nothing that any one can do will ever prevent Paul's wife from doing what she finds she can do, and has a mind to do. Societies may be formed; Home Fire Unions may be organized, Hearth and Home Clubs, Breakfast Nook Leagues, all designed to show that the bringing up of a family is a more important thing than the attainment of “independence" and a doubled income. They will have large memberships; the organization and promotion of them will give interesting and happy employment to many. But, when a survey is made of their following, it will be found that the wives enrolled are the wives of Peter and not the wives of Paul.

Paul's wife is still out in the world, working and winning harder than ever. And so, it seems to me, it must continue until the thing has been proved to the uttermost that Paul's wife is as good a man as Paul. When this has been done, a real redivision of labor can be made and will be made. But there will be no return to the old alinement. When Paul's wife feels that she can say truly, "I could if I would," she may, sometimes, decide to add, "But I won't." Though she will never decide that she won't until she is sure that she can. And she never should.

Ο

NE day in midsummer Evelyn Crowe, the murderer, left the State penitentiary. It was very simple: she slipped out by a small private door with the warden, who took her to the train in his car.

She had been sentenced to nineteen years at the age of thirty-nine, and had served six. Once she had been a prominent teacher and sociologist, and the director of a settlement-house in a large city. Consequently, in the prison, she had been made matron of the factory in which female convicts sewed overalls and later a sort of secretary to the warden. In the latter position she had enjoyed great confidence and might have been privileged to run errands in the town occasionally; but for her own peace of mind, she had preferred not to keep alive her sense of the world outside the walls.

After a time she had heard that the women's clubs had sponsored a movement for her release, making capital of the fact that her lungs were infected with tuberculosis. Petitions had already been rejected by one governor, but his successor might have a more merciful disposition or political reasons to show clemency. And Evelyn Crowe had put aside these insubstantial hopes irritably, because they undid her

stoicism. Nevertheless, in the warden's office, she had studied the candidates' faces: a pendulous, lucky face, another pulled this way and that, with a mouth like the seam left by an operation.

One day the warden had sent for her, and with as many divagations, as much shortness of breath and flushing as if he were asking for her hand in marriage, announced that she had been pardoned.

Free and out of doors, she was astonished by the mediocrity of her feelings. feelings. There was the immortal blue sunlight, the seedy trees in line against the brick walls, as vivid on the outside as they were leaden within, and beyond them the flimsy residences, the lawns rich with hammocks, washing, pigeons, children at play. The sight of these things did not quite penetrate her heart. For within herself as well as behind her in the prison all was still iron and cement, still hollow, everything in its logical cell, silent but for a buzz of machinery, immaculate as a hospital, organized as perfectly as heaven or hell. She did not shrink or weep, which also meant that she was strong in spite of her lungs.

On the way to the station the warden made a mournful face. He had been proud to have so remarkable a

woman among his charges; she had made a perfect secretary. Nevertheless he had lost all joy in his work while she had been there. He also was a prisoner, not by transgression but by vocation, a prisoner of the instincts which fitted him for the high position he held. Into this spiritual confinement she had seemed to introduce tormenting sentiments of the free world-pity, scruples, fortitude. He had a habit of saying that he meant to lighten as much as possible the tragic destinies of which he was master; and whenever, for example, he had thought of some new and ostensibly beneficent ruling in which lay hidden merely a desire to exercise power or even to cause distress, she had reminded him of his words. So she had robbed him of some of his vigor by robbing his duties of their perversity, and in other ways as well.

While he bought her ticket she stood in the waiting-room, the only one in the State, she thought, in which handcuffed travelers were common, from which the worn-out and liberated like herself departed to begin something, offense or expiation, all over again. There was a large mirror under the clock. She took off the ill-fitting hat and blue veil which her friend Martha Colvin had sent in honor of the occasion. It was an unattractive old creature she saw; the small penitentiary glasses had not given back any such woeful image, for she had been handsomer and fresher than the other convicts though by no means the youngest. Her iron-gray hair Her iron-gray hair seemed to have died there, of hasty combing and bad soap and lack of sunlight; it resembled a cheap wig.

The skin sagged at her temples and along the jaw-bones; though it was knotted up around her brilliant eyes; her thick mouth was wasted away; her nose appeared very large. Well, she was an old woman; in a way she was glad; nothing more could happen to her; life would be comparatively easy.

The train whistled. She and the warden went out on the platform. It stopped at the junction and whistled again. The warden hurried back to the waiting-room and looked inside. "Will you kindly step this way a minute, Miss Crowe?" It was second nature to obey his peremptory voice. Inside the door he pulled her about by the shoulders and kissed her. She might have laughed or cried or both if the train had not been there to hurry her

She found an empty seat in the

car and wrapped the blue veil about her face, expecting to be recognized. Once her picture had been in all the papers day after day for weeks. She remembered having happened to see, on her way to prison, the gaunt and blotted face crowned with head-lines, rolled over and over and torn by the wind in an alley. Having just looked at herself in the glass, she realized that those blurred half-tones were better likenesses now than when they had been made. But of course no one now even wondered who she was, or who she had been six years before.

So life would be comparatively easy; yet it would be due to Martha Colvin rather than to the short memory of men. They had gone to school together, and Mrs. Colvin