ing my son George was obliged to go out to one of the Jersey suburbs on business. It took him- by an express train-twenty minutes; the distance was fourteen miles. And as I sat at the deserted breakfast-table, coffee cup in hand, my eyes still following the irate figure of the outraged George tearing toward the subway. I fell to thinking in rather a homesick fashion of Dobbin and my old-time jogs for the nail.

I have always loved jogs, whether they were along New Hampshire roads or on the pleasant mental paths of quiet thinking and reading. I have always preferred tree-shadowed, winding ways to straight avenues lighted by electric lights at regular intervals. I would rather bump over a cartroad overgrown with grass than bowl over the asphalted miles of New York. For one must pick his way slowly along my dim up-and-down roads and sedgy cowpaths; thank goodness they are realms yet unconquered by the God of Speed! But who of my children or grandchildren would stop to pick their way anywhere? Even the tots-whose fathers used to grope slowly, candle in hand, up the dark stairs and through the hall to bed - the modern tots, I say, press a button and move rapidly bedward in a burst of electrical glory.

When I go to California each winter, George puts me on a "Limited Flyer' (I believe that is its reassuring name), and before I have settled myself to look and day-dream out of the window, behold! I am at the Pacific, with only the lurid unrealities of picture post-cards in my hand to assure me that Ute Pass and Pike's Peak do exist.

And there in California my son John - is it psychologically usual, I wonder, that a jog-loving mother should have one railroading son and another who is a motor-maniac? - John meets me with a great red thing that dashes my breath away and whisks my unfrisky gray locks all askew as we "tool" ten miles in fifteen minutes to his bungalow in the hills.

"Tool!" Oh, comfortable shade of my Dobbin!

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Just so in the winter's reading, jogging is provided for my old-fashioned, unhurrying mind. John's wife reads aloud to me, and she enjoys analyzing - oh, unjogging process! - the novels that we absorb together. And they are not, alas, the pleasant drowsy detail of Clarissa's heart and wardrobe through seven unstingy volumes, no indeed! Over a slender thing of two hundred meaty pages (meaty in the sense of beef extract) we harass our minds, watching the psychology of a nervous and usually feminine soul through a modernly-involved crisis. I say modernly-involved, because I believe that writers nowadays think that even human nature itself was in my day constructed like a childish stage-coach and is now made with the complexity of an automobile. Sometimes I smuggle up to my room one of the fat books from the dusty top shelf of the library, - Castle Rackrent, or Peregrine Pickle, or some such tale by a "pillow-soothing author." For while Heaven keeps me supplied with good eyes and a day of twelve long sunny hours, I shall not choose my Rocky Mountains on a post-card and pulverized human nature in literary capsules!

But I would not have any one think me either a loud-voiced crank or a patient victim. I realize well enough that on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Twenty-third Street Dobbin would be a terrible clog in the wheels of progress, so I never try to proselyte. As for being a victim well, I would gladly live the life of a locomotive all winter for the sake of my spring.

Every spring I go back. alone and not as an obstruction in my children's Sixth Avenues, back to my Dobbin days. On the first of May I leave California with very little of ticket, very much of illustrated railroad folder, and no timetables. On the first day of June I appear in New York. My son George meets me; no questions are asked. I may

have spent twenty-six of my thirty-one days on the road between Los Angeles and the Grand Canyon (you may see Arizona if you take the Overland, the way-train of the desert), or I may have spent three weeks with a volume of Mandeville or Marco Polo (no MotorFlights for me, thank you!) in a certain little sea-bordered garden I know in Victoria. But wherever I have been, the journey has been a jog.

Once in a while I have the good fortune to stumble upon a tiny branch road, where as one of three passengers I may sit in a semi-baggage car and traverse a distance of eleven miles in approximately one hour. This is truly jogging. It has even more of the spirit of happygo-lucky carelessness than Dobbin and the village post-office. For suddenly, out in the middle of a field, the semi-baggage car may break into a violent stop, and while the fussy little engine goes off for half an hour on some important, mysterious business of its own, I am left as rooted among the quiet yellow barley as one of the deep-hearted "copodoras" snuggled motionless by a fence post. The skeleton Time is locked away, and for thirty minutes the key of the closet lost. I am very happy on a journey like that.

my conscience before the Contributors' Club, I come as a penitent to the confessional. I do not, it is true, ask for absolution, but I hope for the inward peace that follows acknowledgment of sin.

My first mistake was in following Hamlet's advice to his mother, when I should have realized that the counsels of youth to age are frequently better as copy-book maxims than as guides for right living. If I had not assumed a virtue when I had it not, I should not now be acknowledging a fault when I unfortunately have it.

I am an old maid (though that is not my "fault" referred to above). I am supposed to be passionately devoted to children, and as I have none of my own, my friends are very kind about supplying Nature's deficiency. As a matter of fact, I have always actively disliked children. When I was in the early twenties I had a great many girl friends, and I became almost a professional bridesmaid. By a natural sequence of events my rôle gradually changed to that of godmother, and then my trials began. In looking back I can trace my decline and fall to one act.

When I was visiting my friend Kate Brown I assumed a sympathy with childhood which I did not feel, and out of friendship for an adoring mother feigned an interest in her mewling and puking offspring. I crushed my desire to pinch the baby, and instead, kissed it. I wanted to say, "What a grotesque head it has!" but, instead, murmured, "Isn't he the image of his father!" Then fearing that insincerity was written all over my hypocritical face, I capped the climax of untruth by boldly saying, "I do love children."

a child-worshiper was established. The news was flashed from fireside to fireside that a universal aunt had arisen to bless the homes of tired mothers. Thenceforward my seasons divided themselves into visits to the households or rather to the nurseries of my friends, for I really may be said to have visited the children. In fact, to speak still more truthfully, I was visited on the children as irrevocably as if I were the sins of the fathers incarnate.

The poor little victims were passive in suffering; I was active. If I had only said boldly to my married friends in the beginning, “I'm sorry, but I'm not very fond of children and I have no knack in managing them," all would have been well. I should have stood upon a definite, if eccentric, platform. But I catered to the vanity of motherhood, and incidentally to my own, by seeking parental popularity.

When I used to tell my friends that I could hardly keep my hands off their babies, I fear that I allowed them to misinterpret my meaning. The truth is, all the salient points about a child irritate me, its ubiquitousness, its egotism, its power of usurping attention, and its horrible frankness. My arms fairly ache to shake most little girls, and my palm itches to spank most little boys. (I am not sparing myself in this confession.) In my fiercer moods I have even been known to suggest wild-animal games, so that I could roar and lay violent hands on the spoiled darling of its mother, and in the guise of a tiger give it the slap it so richly deserves. The first I knew of my supposed passion for children (ominous phrase!) was when I went to visit my friend Mrs. Smith, and she greeted me thus: "Oh, Eliza dear, Kate Brown wrote me how fond you are of children, she said you played with her baby for hours at a time to keep him from crying, so I have arranged to let you have my three little girls all to yourself for a few days. I have taken the opportunity of your

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being here on a good long visit to run up to town for a friend's wedding. Of course the children are a little noisy, but you won't mind that, and they're wonderfully friendly. They think of you as Aunty already. Come in, Lily, Rose, and Daisy."

My three fates entered and glared at me. I drew back my upper lip in what Mrs. Smith thought was a smile, but the children knew was a snarl. Lily's lower jaw dropped stupidly, and her m's were all b's. She snuffled incessantly. She was the most unprepossessing child I ever saw except Rose. Rose's voice suggested a diet of slate-pencils and pickles. She had straight colorless hair, and her face was all bespattered with muddy freckles. Daisy had rudimentary teeth with fringed edges, like saws, and her eyes were like gimlets. When she looked at me she saw my real, but hidden, self as clearly as if I had been a transparency hanging in a window. She glowered her dislike at me, and I tried to do the same to her without being detected by her mother.

"This is your dear Aunty Eliza," Mrs. Smith said ingratiatingly. "She has no little girls of her own, and you must n't let her feel lonely." (How tired I have become of that introduction!) Then she turned to me.

'You are so different from Fanny!' (mentioning a common friend). "Now when she is here I keep my little girls out of her way, for she tells her friends quite honestly that she does n't care for children. Is n't it funny and frank of her?"

It may excite surprise that the hollowness of my affection has never been detected. It has always been detected by the children, who are the most clearsighted of the human family, but never by their mothers, who, having eyes, see not. Children don't like me any better than I like them, and thereby they win from me a grudging respect. Many a time have I begged parents, with tears in my eyes, not to force their little ones to stay with me against their wills. The only result of this appeal is that I have overheard subsequent curtain lectures and surreptitious admonishings, all on the text, "Poor Aunt Eliza! She has no little children of her own, and you must try to love her because she loves you so much."

"Wer darf das Kind beim rechten Namen nennen?"- GOETHE.

In the great carnal trinity of Hunger, Sex, and Hate, Hate has forever been the goad of race against race. The pages of history drip with the blood of nations. Religion, destined to calm the surge of passions, but added new incentives to destruction. From this hideous nightmare of suffering, stronger than race, stronger than creed, must come an ultimate awakening — the awakening of the moral nature in man. The gospel of righteousness, calling more insistently than ever, must finally lift the burden of bigotry and dogma weighing on the earth.

The share of the Jewish race in this suffering we do not wish to magnify in order to bolster an argument. All nations have had their martyrdom and many have succumbed. The Jewish race has survived, denationalized, heterogeneous in composition, homogeneous in fellow ship, modern in its aspirations.

Wherever scattered, it is confronted with the problem of adaptation. Its civil liberty in Europe dates from the French Revolution, but its mean average of emancipation ranges over considerably less than a century. Within that incredibly short space of time, the Jewish race has been transformed from an immured tribe of aliens into a people of cosmopolitan citizenship. It has found a safe anchorage and a definite opportunity to work out its own salvation, with its problem of assimilation largely dependent on the intelligence of the various nations within whose borders it makes its home. VOL. 101-NO. 4

In Russia, Rumania, Spain, and Portugal the struggle is carried on in the spirit of mediævalism. In the other countries of Europe, racial and religious acerbity is intensified by economic and political agitation. These factors, although impotent to alienate the civil rights of the Jew, persist in the form of social intolerance. The liberated Jew of Europe, secure from persecution by church and state, is still exposed to the game laws of the social chase. England and France probably rank highest in point of tolerance; while intellectual Germany and the restless kingdom of Austro-Hungary offer the spectacle of a clashing of classes, in which the baiting of Jews is an eruptive phenomenon. We therefore perceive that civilized Europe, although shamed into the granting of civil rights, has not yet humanized itself above social persecution.

Gauged by European standards, we have no Jewish question in the United States. There is no open revolt, no persecution in masses, no partisan propaganda. The Jews in this Republic have never, as a class, suffered from civil disabilities. Our political, economic, and religious freedom is absolute. And still our equivalence is not established. We realize, smouldering under an apparently calm surface, a general antagonism against our race. The problem is usually. regarded as a skeleton in the closet. Among the Jews it is treated strictly as a family affair; among our Christian population, either with open offensiveness, or with a show of discretion supposed to pass for delicacy. We see in this aloof