categorically, by yes and no, or numerically, by one to ten. He allows no counterquestions; he admits neither 'if' nor 'but.' He makes no allowance for that depends' or 'other things being equal.' But in life, if not in questionnaires, much does depend, and other things seldom are equal. Take that first question, for instance. 'How steadily have you worked at the ordinary task of the day?' How very, very largely the answer depends (1) on the task, (2) on the day! 'Do you prefer to work alone or with others?' How can one generalize? The honest answer here is 'It depends (1) on the work, (2) on the others.' 'How have your likes for things intellectual and things athletic compared?' Again, it depends. It depends upon the mood; it depends upon the weather. It depends upon the answers to other questions: 'Who's going?' and 'What's the book?' The answer cannot be three or five or seven. The answer to that question depends upon circumstances which, psychologists to the contrary notwithstanding, are very rarely equal.

Next month, when I shall have forgotten just where I put those fortyeight crosses, I shall try that test again. And I may find that I am not an introvert, after all.

DISCOVERING THE GREAT ADAIR

I MET the man who told me this story on a Great Lakes liner en route from Detroit to Buffalo. A liner called, with true Middle Western modesty, a boat. We sat on deck in the cool of an autumn evening, talking crops, animals, fertilizers, and men in relation thereto, while the shore lights faded and the moon touched the wavelets of Erie as pleasantly as she does those of Como.

I've been judging wool sheep (said he) at the Michigan State Fair; that's

why I'm so far from home. But day after to-morrow I'll be on the hills again with my pets. That's the best part of life to me. Take a clear day in April and I can get more fun out of lambing ewes than a millionaire can get out of a yacht. Trudge home at night so tired I can hardly lift my feet, yet contented with everything. It gives me what the preachers call the peace 'which passeth all understanding.'

The judge of mutton sheep out there was old William Adair; maybe you've heard of him. I've known the Adairs from boyhood on; they're from our state, and we often met up with them at fairs and stock shows. Then I roomed with Charlie Adair at agricultural college. Occasionally he'd take me home with him for a visit. A grand family, the Adairs-eight children, four of them still at home and the others settled in the neighborhood.

When Charlie and I finished college we accepted what looked like a big chance to get into farm-bureau work in adjoining counties in Ohio. Later on we switched to a farmers' coöperative at more money. Selling coöperation to the American farmer is a real job; it means talking, pleading, bullying, organizing, writing, and getting your name into the papers as often as possible. In two years I'd had enough of that, and quit to go back sheepraising, sheep being easier to handle than men and more appreciative. But Charlie hung on and made his way bit by bit to a responsible position in the coöperative movement. At thirty-five he was one of its big men, drawing twelve thousand dollars a year up in Minnesota. Then he died - burned out. When I saw Charlie in his coffin worn thin and bald - you can figure I was glad I had gone back to sheep in time.

The Adairs took his death hard. Charlie had been too busy to get home

often, but they had followed his upward march with pride every step of the way. He would have been surprised to know how frequently he was quoted and his opinions deferred to in the daily routine of the farm. 'Charlie always said this.' 'Charlie would do that this way.' 'I allow Charlie would cross these critters and send those to market.' After Charlie died - burned out, as I say-the old man and the boys seemed to fall more and more under the influence of his memory. Their regard was deep and real, all right, but a little unhealthy at that. I never went there without hearing Old Bill say, with a shake of his noble gray head, 'Well, Charlie was the man of the family. We lost the great Adair when Charlie died.' The other boys, too, harped on that string too much for their own good; it kept them thinking they never would amount to much. 'We're just plodders,' Young Bill said to me once; 'but Charlie had ideas. He was the man of our family, all right.'

Young Bill-he's always been called that, though he is nearing fifty now had his wool sheep at this fair where his father was judging muttons, so I've just been seeing a good deal of them both. Their talk was all of Charlie even yet. Old Bill, after drawing me out on my comradeship with Charlie at school and work, would end each conversation on the same melancholy note: 'Well, Charlie was a man. Even as a boy he was a man. We lost the great Adair when we lost Charlie.' And Young Bill would echo Old Bill Charlie, Charlie, Charlie.

Old Bill and I judged in relays; I'd take the wools for an hour and then he'd take the muttons. Leaving the ring one day, I stopped by Young Bill's pens, which, as usual wherever the Adairs showed, were plentifully decorated with the ribbons announcing victory in this or that class.

'Bill,' I said, 'I notice that the famous Adair merinos seem to be holding their own, in spite of the fact that I'm leaning over backward agin' you to give the other fellows a square deal. What you've won is on strict merit, for I've been downright careful to avoid criticism on the ground of old friendship. This is my first job of judging in the Middle West, and I'm taking no chances. But you've got the blood lines, and the condition is close to prime.'

Bill looked pleased for a moment; then habit conquered him. 'Why,' he replied, 'they're fair enough, but nothing to what they would be if Charlie could have lived and taken a squint at them now and then. There was a man with an eye for a sheep - for everything, in fact. Just went out and made good every minute. That was Charlie wherever you put him. He was the great Adair, all right.'

I boiled over at that. 'Bunkum,' said I. 'Your sheep could n't be in much better shape, and if Charlie had been tending 'em they would probably be in worse. Listen to me, Bill, and listen hard. You're overdoing this Charlie business. It's all right up to a certain point; but you folks have passed that point. I knew Charlie better after he left home than any of you did, and I tell you he never knew a quarter as much about sheep as you do to-day. He knew how to dictate letters, and make speeches, and solicit money, and get laws passed, and drive people hither and yon- but his sheep knowledge had pretty much oozed out of him. So why give credit to Charlie for the good points of a flock founded before he was born, all the while taking the blame yourself for its bad points, which are mighty few? You're humbling yourself out of all proportion: I don't like it and neither would Charlie.

'What's more,' I said, warming up to the subject, 'you're always setting Charlie up as the great Adair. Charlie was O. K., no doubt of that; but, if you really want to see the great Adair, come here and I'll show him to you.' With that I whisked Young Bill out of the barn door and pointed toward the show ring. There,' I said, 'right there in the centre of that ring stands the great Adair. Take a good long look at him.'

I suppose I have an aggravated case of what the sociologists call the rural mind; but to me that morning William Adair, Sr., standing in the sunshine like a patriarch of old, firm as a rock on his seventy-eight-year-old legs, seemed the exact image of what God intends a man to be toward the end of the experience we call life. There was fire in his eye and snap in his voice as he questioned the exhibitors; when he bent over to feel out a ewe you could see his heavy back-and-shoulder muscles quarrel with his shirt; his touch was as sure and tender as ever, the touch of love an animal instantly quiets under.

A practised eye could see all that; but this rural mind of mine saw a good deal more. It took in all the vast good that rugged veteran had done in his many years all the life, literally multitudes of lives, he had brought forth and nurtured, all the lambs he had tended and saved in foul weather, all the human backs he had clothed and the hungers he had fed, all the toil he had done and the glory he had won without thought of praise or expectation of great reward.

What drove him day by day-duty or love? I say love.

'There,' I said over and over to his son in as many ways as I could think of, 'there's the great Adair. There's a greater man than Charlie would have been at the same age; maybe a greater man at any age, in the sight of God and eternity, than Charlie ever was or ever could be. There's Man practically as he would have been through all history if Adam and Eve had never sinned in the Garden of Eden. And the best thing about him is that he does n't even suspect he's a great man. Now, Bill, I've done some thinking on this theme, and I tell you flat that nothing under heaven can keep you from being the great Adair in your turn if you quit writing yourself down as a loss and brace up to your opportunity. Ours is the greatest life in the world, and don't you forget it.'

The great Adair looked at his watch, dismissed the exhibitors with a lordly sweep of the hand, tugged on his coat, and strode majestically toward us. As he came he wiped the sweat from his broad brow with a gay bandanna; it crossed my mind that, saving Sundays and holidays, Old Bill had enjoyed the luxury of a hearty, life-preserving sweat every day since his babyhood.

'Your turn,' he said to me. 'I was just thinking that Charlie could have done single-handed the work it takes both of us to do. He always was the best man of our family.'

I lingered a minute, waiting for Young Bill to speak. When he did n't do so, I gave the old man a slap on the shoulder and said, 'There's two opinions about that,' and went away. After all, when you find a great man, the way to keep him great is not to put any disturbing notions into his head.

WOMEN'S colleges are nearing a crisis. They must attain equality with the colleges for men or be condemned to permanent inferiority. So serious are the facts, so pressing the situation, that the heads of the seven most famous women's colleges in the country make in the Atlantic a combined appeal to thinking men and women. James Truslow Adams is a ceaseless traveler, a student of history, and the author of a standard work on New England. He thinks his own thoughts and speaks out loud. ¶At the risk of a superlative, and in full cognizance of our partiality, we venture to say that the present story of Margaret Prescott Montague is one of her very best -a peer to her prize-winning 'England to America.' Miss Montague writes that she has been flying daily this summer, but only vicariously, and, as it were, on the wings of the morning newspaper. Williams Haynes tells us that silk is cotton, furs are cat, wool, shoddy, pearls, syntheticand, as a prominent New York chemist, he ought to know. For more than eleven years Lieutenant Commander Bruce G. Leighton has been actively engaged in flying. A member of the Bureau of Aeronautics at Washington, he has also been closely associated with aeronautical engineering development. We have not seen elsewhere so informal or so sagacious a discussion. Mark Barr, who is at present acting in an advisory capacity with the Harvard Business School, had the good fortune to take a trip with William Beebe.

***

The status of Christian Missions is under question to-day, not only in China, but in India, Persia, and Turkey. Dr. R. C. Hutchison, Dean of the American College of Teheran, faces the problem of proselytism and frankly gives us the opinion of a worker in the field. Humbert Wolfe is an English poet who has found steady satisfaction in civil service. Between poems, as

it were, he is Principal Assistant Secretary in the Ministry of Labor. Incidentally, his latest volume is reviewed in this number. ¶Those who are about to die should salute Raymond Edwards Huntington, who gives generously of his counsel as one of the leading tax experts in New England. The countryside is an open and delightful book to Henry Williamson, a young Englishman who is carrying on the tradition of Jefferies and W. H. Hudson. Joseph Husband is the author of Americans by Adoption, and a series of studies of the industries of the country.

**

Virginia Woolf, perhaps the most accomplished woman novelist of to-day, pays tribute to the genius of her countryman, E. M. Forster. Amy S. Jennings has had several years' practical experience on the Hollywood 'lots.' Morris Gray, Jr., made himself welcome with his first story, 'Off His Beat,' which appeared in the Atlantic for August 1926. ¶The Atlantic is nothing new to Roderick Morison. On a Cunard liner he crosses it every month as the editor in charge of the wireless edition of the Daily Mail. Few men living know more about the Mississippi than Arthur E. Morgan, President of Antioch College. In earlier days he made raft trips on the river (as recounted in his diaries, My World and Finding His World) and for many years he has given intensive study to the major problem of its control. The engineering company of which he is the head has planned and supervised the building of between two and three hundred miles of levees on tributaries of the Mississippi in the flooded region, all of which are still holding, and has engineered about two thousand miles of drainage canals in the same district, as well. Men think of him as the president of a pioneer college, but when Dayton was overtaken by disaster in the flood of 1913 it was to Mr. Morgan that the helm was given. In the course of his career

he has had an active hand in the planning and construction of seventy-five watercontrol projects. Here is an authority to be consulted.

***

Francis Bowes Sayre is Professor of Comparative Law at the Harvard Law School. Granted a leave of absence in 1923-24, Professor Sayre served as adviser in foreign affairs to the Siamese Government, and both there and in Europe was called on to make such a single-handed fight for Siamese sovereignty as has no counterpart in modern diplomacy. Writer and economist, Arthur Pound lived for many years in the Middle West, where his book, The Iron Man in Industry, took shape. Nora Waln, an American by birth, and the wife of an English Civil Servant, has been at her husband's side through all the late turbulence in China.

We life-insurance men are certainly indebted to the Atlantic and to Mr. Calkins for a view of ourselves as the advertising man sees us, and he sees us as a poor customer. We learn that 'no important industry is so archaic, so remote from modern life,' that we do not insure our own business against the destructive power of silence,' and that we have no right to withhold from the public the real story of insurance.' As Mr. Calkins correctly states, the advisability of advertising has been brought before the insurance companies frequently. We have had it talked to us day in and day out for twenty-five years, and I would like the privilege of shyly stating a few of the considerations which have deterred at least one insurance company from entering into a general advertising campaign.

Mr. Calkins's theory, if I correctly understand it, is that if we spent enough money on what he calls advertising we could spend less on other forms of what I call advertising, and that the result on the whole would be beneficial.

I am reminded of a story that was told me some years ago of an effort which was made in a certain city by some of the leading citizens to raise a guarantee fund which would enable them to procure the services of a high-grade orchestra. There were business men of various branches on the committee, and each man was given his own branch to canvass in any way he saw fit. When the committee met, the general reports indicated

a response in the neighborhood of five per cent of those who had been called upon to help. There was, however, one tailor who reported that out of seventy prospects he had secured sixty-seven, and they asked him if they might see the letter that he wrote. He looked at them in some surprise and stated, 'I called on every man once, and those that I did n't get the first time I called on a second time, and those that I did n't get the second time I called on a third time, and the three men I did n't get are going to receive another call from me.'

Of course that was n't advertising, because advertising, as I take it from Mr. Calkins, is only in the printed word put in the pages of a periodical, or possibly on unsightly billboards. I don't know just what to call what the tailor did, but, in spite of Mr. Calkins, I suspect it was advertising. Certainly his prospects did not suffer from 'the destructive power of silence.'

Now, without disputing the great advantages there are to some kinds of business in mass production (and a certain amount of mass production, of course, is necessary in insurance), I can hardly see that insurance companies would benefit in the same way by growth that an automobile factory might benefit.

Upon what does the cost of life insurance depend? First of all, upon the mortality table. The mortality table is the same for a hundred thousand as it is for a million lives. The same proportion are going to die this year and next year and the year after. The second thing to consider is the rate of interest to be received this year and for years to come on the funds in the possession of the insurance company. It is certainly no easier to keep a billion dollars invested safely at a remunerative rate of interest than it is to keep ten millions. In fact, it is not as easy, and, speaking generally, the smaller companies have had in the past on the whole a higher rate of interest returns than the larger ones. Thus we are brought down to the expense of selling as the only place where advertising might make a difference in the cost if we, for the purposes of the argument, assume that the home offices and the expenses thereof are being reasonably economically handled.

I do not think that any insurance man would take issue with Mr. Calkins on the theory that it would be easier for the agent to sell insurance if in some way the mind of the public could be made more receptive to the insurance idea. His article virtually admits that we could not sell insurance direct by advertising. This has been tried in the past, and I do not think I am in error in stating that it has not been found to be an inexpensive way of selling insurance, or a method by which large amounts of insurance could be sold. People stand in line to buy