on. Thereafter we fought sympathetic battles.

There is nothing in the world like it. "Donahue dumped a Texas leaguer in the right. Dineen pushed a safe grounder in the same direction, and Schreck tried for third, but Ferris relayed Congalton's throw to Hemphill, and Donahue was out. Dougherty rapped a hot one which Hemphill was lucky to stop. Roke flied to Sullivan. Bill Sullivan drove through Bach's legs, and Dineen scored, Pat going to third. Sully stole second. Eberfield fanned. ONE RUN."

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a new one

Imagine the hot sunny field. A drift of fat cigar smoke and with it the thick smell of peanuts. No wind; perfect baseball weather. Nine men against one with a stick and a fast-chewing jaw. "Unglaub drove a long fly to the left bleachers for two bags.' Ten men on the field now no, eleven with the stick. Look! The tenth man is run - no! by Jove he Go it! He can, and did. "Sullivan laid down a fine sacrifice, Smith to Donahue, Unglaub sliding to third." The bleachers are standing now. A new man up bats left-handed. He can swing! Read: "Isbell played in close and Congalton bounced a single over his head, scoring Unglaub!" As the headline put it, it was a "timely one-sacker." The game goes to the Americans.

he

page

Friend, you who read the market with its jargon of fractions and sudden whims, you who furrow the literary twaddle of book journals, or you, gentle lady, to whose nimble tongue wool batiste, challis, and pongee bishops and berthas are emotions and volitions, think of me and my likes playing the game an hour late and twenty miles away, watching as if before us the twists and turns and sudden emprises, the raps and wallops, miscues, pickups, and swift fans of Nine against Nine on the levels of Parnassus! For, "Issy banged one on the ground which Mullins picked up and snapped to Wagner who covered the middle cushion" and

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MR. SPECTATOR, I feel like beginning in eighteenth-century fashion, for the Contributors' Club is a kind of monthly Spectator where one can air his grievances as well as his whimseys, — what are we college people to do about matrimony? I am not, as one might possibly infer, complaining of the difficulties of low finance; they have been aired to dryness, and even a married instructor can afford the less nutritive meats. It is scholarship, German scholarship, that raises the particular bogey I am afraid of, and upon due consideration I believe that either German scholarship or the wedded life must go. Time was when a servant of the muses, and even a teacher of literature, might sit in his library, pen in hand, books before him, some high criticism in his thoughts, and with his wife cosily sewing in the rocker beside the desk, contrive to accomplish that "outside work" to which his desire and the hope of promotion urged him. But all such pleasant wanderings in the meadows of literature have become no better than so many primrose paths to the bonfire of reputation. Behold your modern scholar where he sits, with the Dictionary of National Biography, a dozen German theses, two rows of source books, a typewriter, and three drawers of notes. No room for a wife, no time if room.

But this is but a mild and somewhat facetious presentation of the real danger. In our club (which is so academic that you may pass an evening without hearing Amalgamated mentioned more than once) there are a good dozen of the fine young men whom Stevenson describes as ready in the cause of toil to be driven off in a hearse with white plumes on it. They are bachelors, living in affluence and complaint upon the same salaries

which our university provides for the support of families, and snugly housed in million-dollar dormitories, where they accept three rooms and a bath from the corporation, and stuff all but the bath with Oriental rugs, books, and good pipe-tobacco. If one should stir up their quarters as Burns's coulter ripped up the mouse's cell, one wonders whether they would run to cover in domestic life. But it is German scholarship which is the real difficulty. We sit (or sat when I was a bachelor) at the round table, sipping coffee and smoking. Talk goes cheerfully. You would think us all free men. Is the day's work done? If it had been mere teaching, mere thinking, yes, all but the fine flower of it. But scholarship-Smith there is studying the modal clause in Old Norse. He has his twenty pages to analyze before bedtime, and off he slinks with that careworn expression which means work first, then fame, and then happiness. Peterkin is reading through all Old French in the search for anything unnoted to be found there, traces of Celtic or plant names by choice. So off he trots with a memorandum of where he stopped on his hat check. Jamison is in the middle of a story when the hall boy whispers, "Telephone." We hear him in the booth, his jolly after-dinner voice hardening into that "can't you understand that I must work" tone we know so well, as he refuses an invitation to meet somebody's sister. And the worst of it is that it can't be helped. Here is the terrible cul-de-sac, here is the immovable body stopping short what used to be considered an irresistible force. How can these men be famous and married? Will 100,000 lines of Old Norse, with a scant year's start of some German at the same job, permit of any other mistress? Or fifty analogues to the seventh tale of the Nugis Curialium, which cry to be made a hundred by a search through all narrative, give leisure for courting, palliate the upset nervous system which is sure to follow a marriage ceremony, or par

don a horrid blank for the two weeks which is the least one can give to a wedding trip? And there is more - for suppose she should like dining out, or going to bed early, or talking on sacred weekday evenings. Suppose, for the sake of the argument, that there were children, who cried, were ill, romped over one's card catalogue. Obviously it can't be done. For mark you, it is work that counts, hours as much as thoughts, routine more than ideas.

As I come home from late recitations I stem a vast current of grimy men and women hurrying through the early darkness toward a lodging for the night; and when some late-left preparation for an early lecture calls me up before the first dawn, I hear their footsteps, hurrying, hurrying back again to their work. They are the handlers of machines, the superintendent once told me. The cogs work just so fast, the good workman can feed their maw just so many strips of steel or brass each hour. A shorter day, a smaller output. Brains beyond the requisite amount make no odds, it is the time which counts. Well, so it is with modern scholarship, and so with all these fine young bachelor friends of mine. Sometimes I have wondered hopefully whether after all it is not a game of blind-man's-buff played with your own eyes and handkerchief; whether Hymen does not have a case against those rooms "full benely stuffit," that good club of ours with its comfortable servants, its meals that come without ordering, its deep-bottomed chairs where a man may digest without wondering whether the furnace is going out, the maid rioting with the gas-stove, or the snow deepening on the pavement.

But the reflection is needless. Scholarship is a Turk who bides no brother near the throne, though sadly unlike one in the matter of wives. If we are to labor in the German cause, where unsufficient to the day must always be the hours thereof, if we are to complete all essential and unessential knowledge,

This, I am fully aware, in view of the present renaissance of home decoration, is a confession of appalling weakness. And yet I am even prepared to go still further and assert that the quality of woods, the disposition of furniture, the arrangement of bric-a-brac, and the historical spirit of the collector, are entirely outside of my ken. I have often amused myself, in glancing over the "Home" magazines, where the "good mantelpiece" and the "bad mantelpiece" are printed side by side, by covering up the type and endeavoring to select the one I liked the better, and I have invariably hit upon the bad one.

Indeed, as long as I am confessing, I may as well make a clean sweep of the whole matter, and own up that I am for usefulness and that awful, reprehensible thing: solid comfort.

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In a spirit of reckless bravado and abandon, I once confided this to a married friend, at a moment when his wife was away and we were quite safe; and greatly to my surprise (after he had locked the door, and peeped through the blinds to see that no one was listening) he declared that he was in the same state with me. He proposed to me that we form a sort of secret organization, in which all the members should feel

free to confess their ignorance; and no doubt the thing would have been done and have led to something, had not his wife suddenly come back, and put a stop to the whole proceeding. Afterwards, when we met, neither of us had the heart to broach the matter.

I cannot but believe, however, that there is something in the idea. I plume myself on the thought that there must be others as dull and ignorant as myself, poor, tired, overworked creatures, who have no other thought of home than an easy chair, a kindly light over one's shoulder, a pipe that draws well, and a book within easy reach.

To these few I dare assert my views. in a sort of typographical whisper, telling them to take heart of hope, and that if at present our forces are scattered, at any moment a change may come and we may be able to present a determined front.

When it comes to a good and a bad mantelpiece, one is (in my humble opinion) about as bad as the other. So of color schemes and other arrangements. The truth is that any decoration is bad, and as hopeless as the word implies. The average house, indeed, is made to play the part of the fool. Built originally with but one object, as a shelter, it is now tricked out with all sorts of horrible devices. Its walls are decked with brass ornaments and blotches of color called oil paintings. Its windows are covered with filmy curtains that keep out the light and air. Glaring china closets vulgarly displaying rows of cut glass, antique sideboards ("made in Michigan"), and stiff-back chairs, all help to add to its secret sense of shame.

For there are few homes, if they could but look at themselves in the mirror of Nature, but would blush to their roofs with mortification. Indeed

But I cannot add more, as I have just received a message that it is housecleaning time, and I must hurry home, rehang pictures, beat the carpets, move all the furniture from one room into another, and oil up the Chippendales.

I

To him who takes his politics seriously, and has perhaps attained his own political belief through many an hour of anxious reflection, and many a prayer for inward light which would guide to righteous judgment, the cheerful inability of other men to know why they belong to one party rather than another is very perplexing; to him it seems incredible that any reasoning human being should be content to go through the world with his political faith resting on such shaky foundations.

Most men seem to receive their politics meekly, through inheritance or environment. (That is also, we are told, the way children become criminals.) Most of the Republicans whom we know belong to that party primarily because their fathers were Republicans before them,either fighting in the Civil War, or perhaps from a safe distance cheering on those who did; secondarily, because as youths they have " tagged on " after the quadrennial torchlight procession, cheering for Blaine, Harrison, McKinley, or Roosevelt; or thirdly, because they have absorbed the arguments advanced by their own party orators and newspapers, carefully avoiding all others. Then there is a considerable number of those who are simply turned by the tide; like some acquaintances of mine who were formerly Democrats, but who, moving into a community where the other party was fashionable and dominant, and finding that most political favors and preferment were to be gained in that camp, saw the errors of their former ways and were converted. VOL. 101 - NO. 5

I do not intend to cast reflections upon the good faith or the patriotism of these members of the other party; for the ranks of the Democrats are recruited for the most part in just the same way. Inheritance, environment, heeding the arguments of only one side, will account for most of them also. If the Democratic party is somewhat short of time-servers it is only because its success of recent years has not been so marked as to attract them. In their view, society in the Democratic party is getting to be rather like the Presbyterian elder's idea of Heaven, very select but by no means amusing; and they would naturally prefer the more numerous society of the other place.

But if the people who dislike to discuss politics or religion are irritating, what can be said of those who profess to see no real choice between parties? "Oh! I can't see any difference," laughs a genial gentleman, "they both want to get in when they're out, you know; and to keep the other fellows out when they're in." And with a chuckle the speaker dismisses the subject as though he had solved the eternal mystery of politics with an original idea; the truth being that he has got no farther in political thought than a vague remembrance of an annotated edition of Gulliver's Travels.

Considering, then, the prevalence of these two classes, it may be well, before attempting to ask a question as to the future of the Democratic party, to find out whether there is in reality any such thing as a Democratic party existing in the present. If men assume a party badge by reason of inheritance or environment,

and if there is really no difference between the two great parties, then it becomes a wholly useless thing to bother our heads about the future of either.

II

It seems a trifle fantastic perhaps, when faced by such a seemingly simple question, to suggest going back to the very dawn of history; yet the nature and place of political parties in this Republic, as well as the nature and place of this Republic in the world's affairs, are so frequently misunderstood that the suggestion is not by any means amiss. To understand the Democratic party one must understand Democracy; and to understand Democracy one must understand what produced it and developed the need of such a "great experiment " as ours,—what it was brought into the world to replace.

There are many ways of looking at history; among them is that view which sees always the struggle of the inextinguishable spirit of liberty against intrenched privilege, the ever-renewed conflict of individual freedom with organized selfishness.

This was the vision of past ages inspired Lowell:

which

Truth forever on the scaffold. Wrong forever on the throne

Yet that scaffold sways the future; and behind the dim unknown Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

In the beginning the effort to secure some concrete system of human society

a necessity for man assumes the character of a mere trial of brute strength; the stronger man wins and the weaker is enslaved. Thus the oldest political relation of mankind-of master and slavewas developed; and based upon this relation arose the first great organized system of human government, imperialism. Under various names, with much crudeness of experiment and many complications, this system was many centuries in

reaching its most brilliant and complete development in the dominion of Rome; but even as Rome attained the zenith of her power, the system, so long and painfully built up, began to fall to pieces. Rome had conquered all the material forces of the known world; but the freedom of the intellect proclaimed in Greece, the freedom of conscience proclaimed in Judæa, were forces against which the imperial legions were powerless. The Greek philosopher could be silenced, but Plato and Aristotle were immortal in their writings; the Hebrew prophet could be slain, but the Golden Rule could never again be driven from the hearts, nor silenced from the tongues of men. Imperialism the rule of the strong over the weak, of the master over the slave could not stand the test; the intellect rebelled, the soul revolted; the human relations involved in slavery were contrary to the laws of nature, which are the laws of God. And with a mighty crash which shook the whole world loose from its moorings, the first great political experiment - the first great organized system of human society-collapsed, and confusion reigned again.

Then, after more long centuries of travail, was slowly developed a second great experiment, — feudalism. Loath to give up the essence of slavery, the domination of man by man, but forced to recognize the responsibility of man to man, feudalism rested upon a new relation - that of lord and vassal. Imperialism had left God out of account; the new system should satisfy both God and man. What was regarded as man's dual nature was to be guided by two co-existent powers, the Church and the State; and each of these was an elaborate social pyramid: in one reaching from the lower ranks of the priesthood up through the higher clergy to the Pope, and in the other from the serf up through knight and baron to King and Emperor. Each highest sovereign, Pope and Emperor, should be lord paramount over half of each atom of humanity.