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central reserve cities, as allowed by law, and amounts to something like $350,000,000.

Now the significance of these facts is this: at the moment of panic the burden of maintaining a cash reserve for the ten billions of the combined deposits of the national and state banks fell for all practical purposes on the national banks alone, and for the most part on the banks of reserve and central reserve cities. When the state banks were called on for cash by frightened depositors they called in turn on the national banks where they kept their deposits. So did the smaller national banks. The total cash holdings of all the national banks were by the middle of October well under $700,000,000 and they were liable to be called on for $350,000,000 deposits of banks of their own class, and also $480,000,000 deposits of the state banks, not to mention the $100,000,000 deposits of the savings banks. Is it to be wondered at that. when distrust spread, the burden proved too great? There were nine hundred millions of bank deposits and less than seven hundred millions in cash in the whole system of national banks. Even in the case of a great central bank, the Bank of England, which can accomplish with the same reserve far more than a large number of small banks, the cash on hand almost always equals or exceeds the deposits of the joint-stock banks.

It is to be noted that this burden of the national banks, carrying so large a proportion of the reserves of the state banks, is one that has assumed large proportions in recent years. It is also to be remembered that it is a burden never thought of by the framers of the National Bank Act, the best piece of bank legislation, all things considered, ever framed in this or any other country. As has been said earlier in this article, it was never believed that the national banks would ever have to share the field with any other class of banks. Consequently it was never thought that they would have to

carry any other burden than that of the deposits of part of the reserves of the smaller banks in the larger institutions of the reserve and central reserve cities. The amount of such deposits of national banks with one another for purposes of reserve has never exceeded the total amount of cash held by all the banks, and usually has been much less. In October, 1906, it was little over half, or $350,000,000 against $626,000,000 in cash. As has been shown, the deposits of the state banks in the national banks on that date were approximately $480,000,000. Consequently the burden of bank deposits on the national banks is considerably over twice as much as was conceived of by the framers of the Bank Act.

But

It is not for a moment to be thought that there is any intention to ascribe the panic to the condition of the national banks. So long as men are human and swayed by hopes and fears, we shall have periods of expansion, and panics with their resulting periods of depression. Nothing can prevent them. the point is here made that, when this particular panic occurred, it was intensified and prolonged by the inability of the banks to continue cash payments. And this inability on the part of the banks was caused in part at least by the increased burden on the national banks, assumed for the greater part during the last ten years, of carrying on deposit over half of the reserves of the state banks. Now it may be that the strain of future times of trouble can be lessened by reducing this burden of the national banks. If it should be deemed wise to do so, it could be accomplished simply and easily by so amending the National Bank Act as to prohibit banks, after, say, three years from the passage of the amendment, from paying interest directly or indirectly on deposits of banks other than national banks. The result would be to increase the cash reserves of the state banks, for those banks, unable to obtain interest on their deposits, would take

home that part of their deposits not required to facilitate their daily business, and keep it in their own vaults, where it would be a true reserve. The period of three years suggested would allow the change to be made without disturbance to the loan market and to business interests.

To sum up: the panic was prolonged and intensified by the suspension of cash payments by the banks. The suspension of cash payments was caused by the breaking down of the present system of bank reserves. The national bank reserves, already low, were weakened by

the banks carrying on deposit over onehalf of the reserves of the state banks. The state banks themselves were notorious for the small reserves they carried. No other country prominent commercially has two classes of banks similar to our national and state banks. That this country has both is an accident, due to its dual system of federal and state government. The change here suggested would at least make each class of banks stand squarely on its own feet, and would sever once and for all the Siamesetwin bond that now unites them.

THE POPULAR BALLAD
BY GEORGE LYMAN KITTREDGE

PROFESSOR NEILSON'S novel and wellplanned series opens auspiciously with a volume of just the right size from the practiced hand of Professor Gummere.1 It is a commonplace that the more one knows of a subject, the harder it is to write about it. But Mr. Gummere has dealt with this particular theme - the Ballad so often, and has always found it so congenial, that he is not at all embarrassed by the astonishing richness and variety of his knowledge. He has succeeded, therefore, in writing a book which, while neglecting no point of importance, and in a high degree compendious, is quite as good reading as if it were not the work of a profound scholar.

Of course the question of origins is discussed, and, equally of course, it is settled in accordance with the wellknown views of the author. Perhaps "well-known" is a rather hasty epithet. For it has been almost comical to note

1 The Popular Ballad. By FRANCIS B. GUMMERE. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1907.-The first volume of a

series entitled “The Types of English Literature ; "edited by WILLIAM ALLAN NEILSON.

how difficult Mr. Gummere's critics have found it, time and again, to understand his doctrine of "communal composition," or even to discern that there is anything in it to understand. Some of them, in reviewing his previous studies in balladry, seem to have assumed that the theory requires us to believe that "Chevy Chase," or "The Queen's Marie," or "Gil Brenton," was composed collaboratively by a tribe of neolithic, skin-clad enthusiasts dancing round a campfire to the notes of the tom-tom. Others, who have delved a little deeper, are convinced that the case is desperate unless one can imagine some stanza of some ballad in Mr. Child's thesaurus as created sua sponte by at least a score of tattooed improvisators chanting in uniThis is not the place to defend Mr. Gummere from misapprehension, for he is quite able to take care of himself; but it is not amiss to say, deliberately, that any person who will read the first chapter of the present volume with an open mind, will have little difficulty in comprehending what Mr. Gummere's theory of communal com

son.

position really is, and how it relates itself eous with their communal impromptu.

to the extant body of English and Scottish popular ballads. For my own part, I do not hesitate to avow that it explains many things not otherwise easily comprehensible, and coördinates in a reasonable way a quantity of well-attested phenomena that seem to belong together. It has its difficulties, to be sure, but they are less serious than those attaching to the rough-and-ready solutions which literary men have usually been content to offer to the riddle of the Ballad Sphinx. One thing, at all events, ought to be axiomatic: it is no answer to the riddle to deny that the riddle exists. Another thing, too, seems rather obvious, though it has been systematically ignored: the problem cannot be settled, off-hand, by any person whose acquaintance with what the French call "oral literature" is merely casual. Such a critic, if he is right, is right by chance only, for he cannot weigh testimony which he has neither heard nor read, and the very existence of which he does not suspect.

"The primitive and original ballad itself," writes Mr. Gummere, “is not to be recovered, though it can be inferred." And again, "Popular' as a definition by origins, as conveying the idea that ballads were really made by the people, does not mean a single initial process of authorship on the part of a festal throng. . . . The ballad is a conglomerate of choral, dramatic, lyric, and epic elements which are due now to some suggestive refrain, now to improvisation, now to memory, now to individual invention, and are forced into a more or less poetic unity by the pressure of tradition in long stretches of time. In this sense they represent no individual, but are the voice of the people." It taxes one's powers of divination to guess how such views can be taken as either reiterating Grimm's vague idea of a primitive mystery, or as implying the production of a narrative stanza by a pack of wolves howling like Ralph —“at Cynthia" and making night hid

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But Mr. Gummere's principal concern is with actual ballads, not with theoretical origins. He writes as historian and critic, not as anthropologist, though his store of curious learning, handled with deftness, and never ob truded, lends his treatment a peculiar fascination for those who have not forgotten what is the proper study of mankind. His survey of ballad material, in the chapter on Classification, does not depend for its interest and value on any theories whatsoever. His pages on ancient traits of myth and custom and primeval creed, in the chapter on Sources, will be read with keen pleasure by persons who neither know nor care whether the Golden Bough was made in Birmingham or grew on some bloodstained oak in the Arician grove. And so will his answers to the questions how ballads are handed down, growing and shifting and fusing in the process; what is to be thought of their migration from land to land; how they have been sung and collected and imitated and forged.

A particular merit of the volume, which distinguishes it from any previous treatment of the subject, is the clearness with which the difference is brought out between choral and epic elements. Never before have the workings of tradition been set forth so well. The point is vital, and to have it settled once for all is comfort and enlightenment unspeakable. Here it is pertinent to mention, with a word of hearty praise, a distinguishedand readable-monograph on Ballad and Epic, recently published by one of Mr. Gummere's pupils, Professor W. M. Hart,' of the University of California. As the subtitle indicates, Mr. Hart's book is "a study in the development of the narrative art." It cannot be neglected by any student of story-telling, whether his concern is with the Homeric question,

1 Ballad and Epic. A Study in the Development of the Narrative Art. By WALTER MORRIS HART. Boston: Ginn & Company.

1907.

or with Beowulf, or with the English Nobody else has given it so well, and it

novel.

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Mr. Gummere's concluding chapter"The Worth of the Ballad is appreciation pure and simple. It shows the author at his best, both as a critic and as a writer of the English language. He does not overvalue ballads, nor does he set them up as rivals to the poetry of art. They exist, they have worked potently, they still have their own power to sway men's hearts. What are they, and in what does their charming and compulsive quality consist? To learn the answer one must go to Mr. Gummere's book.

would be brutal to excerpt or dismember his compact and vivid paragraphs.

A critic is always expected to pick flaws, either at the outset or in his concluding words. Let me for once dispense with the traditional formula, even in reviewing a volume that deals with tradition. Nothing human is perfect, and all things go by comparison. For my own part, and I say it very deliberately, I never expected to see so good a book in its kind, and I am confident that the subject will never be treated so well again in my lifetime.

HESPER

BY HENRY VAN DYKE

HER eyes are like the evening air,
Her voice is like a rose,
Her lips are like a lovely song,
That ripples as it flows,
And she herself is sweeter than

The sweetest thing she knows.

A slender, haunting, twilight form
Of wonder and surprise,
She seemed a fairy or a child,
Till, deep within her eyes,

I saw the homeward-leading star
Of womanhood arise.

THE CONTRIBUTORS' CLUB

THE MAGAZINE WEST THE trouble with too many Western books is that they are written by Easterners, and if not that, they are written for Easterners, which is a great deal worse. Here on the coast, when we say West we mean, in a general way, west of the Rockies and along the Rio Grande, but being a Westerner is a state of mind. A great many excellent people born in those purlieus never attain to it. Around Los Angeles, for instance, there are large numbers of Easterners born every year who continue in that condition the whole of their natural lives; but the Fortyniners, those men of strange manners and singular achievement, were all sprung from some other where. That is why some of the best books of the West are written by people who do not live in it, and so many writers born there have nothing whatever to say about it. Herman Whitaker lives in Piedmont and writes about Mexico and the Canadian border. James Hopper, at home in the heart of Old California, spreading himself over our island possessions, writes the more delightfully the farther he is away from his source. But then Mr. Hopper wrote exactly the same sort of stories when he was on the staff of McClure's. Jack London is credited a Westerner because he was born in Oakland and owns a house in Sonoma County. But Mr. London is essentially a product of social rather than local conditions, a fleck of the ferment thrown from the underworld against our sky; but no one knows yet if he will remain a permanent light there or drop back into the mass from which he was squeezed up. It is because he exhibits possibilities of doing either that Mr. London is still worth watching; but nobody - at least nobody in the West, would consider

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his writings as representative of Western thought and manners, or regard him in any sense as an exponent of the Western spirit. Every year or so there drifts to New York on the back-water of the tide that sets forever toward the sunset, some clever young Californian who continues to write satirical verse and fatten purple cows as successfully among the chimney pots of West Twenty-third Street as ever he did on the sand lots back of the Bay. And still the West the old West the real West, is far from these, separated as far as Dan from Beersheba by that vast, familiar territory of the Magazine West.

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This is a very curious country, bounded by McClure's, Everybody's, and the Sunday Supplement. Its inhabitants are chiefly "Bad Men," "Señoritas," "Tenderfeet" who always begin very badly and end handsomely, cowboys carrying guns which are invariably represented in the illustrations as incorrectly worn, and beautiful young girls who ride amazingly. All these dress and talk as the Magazine East would like to think they do.

No one quite knows who is responsible for the speech of the Magazine West; Mr. Harte is often credited with it. When Mr. Harte wrote The Luck of Roaring Camp, he probably did not know he was doing anything unusual in fact I am

certain of it, or he would never have given it to the Overland Monthly, which perhaps paid him three dollars and a half

a page for it. It might not have occurred to him that there were large numbers of people to whom the speech of miners was picturesquely unfamiliar; he heard it all around him and wrote it as he heard. Later when he had learned what the East wanted and was out of touch with his source, he gave them the best imitation of himself that he could manage. It would be perfectly easy for the student

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