but all are told with a flawless economy of words and situation.

The opening story, Desire,' is frankly weird and, as the saying goes, must be read to be appreciated. 'Hunger is the painfully vivid description of an impoverished Dublin family sinking deeper and deeper into misery. It has all the sensitive objectiveness of Chekhov as well as a dramatic tension and an almost palpable sense of form that the Russian story-teller seldom achieved. 'Schoolfellows' describes in the first person a series of encounters with a downand-out childhood friend whose skill and tenacity at begging drinks nearly drive the teller mad.

'Etched in Moonlight,' the title piece, occupies about half the book. It is the purest tour de force, art for art's sake with a vengeance, -being the description of an imaginary character's dream and therefore one further move away from the material world. The opening paragraph of the speaker's narrative may help to give some idea of Mr. Stephens's prose:

'My mind was full of disquietude, impatience, anger; and as the horse stretched and cased under me I dwelt on my own thought. I did not pursue it, for I was not actively thoughtful. I hatched it. I sat on a thought and kept it warm and alive without feeling any desire to make it grow.'

The dream deals with the inward and outward relations between the dreamer and a married couple of whom he is jealous and whom he imagines for a number of years that he has killed. In an introductory conversation the speaker has already described how a dream that

flashes through one's brain like lightning may well appear to last for twenty or thirty years. Indeed, the idea of time is one of Mr. Stephens's chief concerns.

"Time ceases when emotion begins, and its mechanical spacings are then of no more account. Where is time when we sleep? Where is it when we are angry? There is no time, there is but consciousness and its experiences.'

This simple philosophizing and his still more effective descriptions of emotional and imaginative states of mind are broken by passages of purest poetry, such as the following:

Afar, apart, in lovely alternating jet and silver, the sparse trees dreamed. They seemed as turned upon themselves. As elves they brooded; green in green; whisht and inhuman and serene.' The story ends with a supremely convincing attack of the horrors.

The last three stories deal with three types an old clerk, a drunkard, and a 'boss' who comes to grips with one of his employees. This final piece illustrates Mr. Stephens's skill at condensed description. The tale is two-thirds told before we have a single word of conversation, yet we feel we know the situation perfectly, and when talk does come it flows into the narrative as naturally as if it had been going on all the time.

But no review, long or short, can begin to do justice to the qualities of these tales. Etched in Moonlight is more than one of the books of the year it is a book for all the years, and one must do more than write about it or talk about it to discover that. One must read it.

QUINCY HOWE

The Human Body, by Logan Clendening, M.D.

ALFRED A. KNOPF Illus. $5.00

JOHN DAY Co. $3.00

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How members of the General Motors Family are made partners in

GENERAL MOTORS

General Motors believes that employees in the plant, as well as executive officers, should have the opportunity to become stockholders, and thereby partners in the enterprise to the success of which they are contributing. Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., President of General Motors, has said on the subject:

"The prosperity that General Motors has enjoyed, naturally cannot be attributed to any single influence but on the contrary has resulted from the combined effort of many. The degree to which any institution permanently succeeds is tremendously influenced by the ability with which capital, labor and the management are co-ordinated in serving the public.... Broadly speaking, I firmly believe that General Motors in the execution of these policies has justified itself not only as an economic and efficient instrument for the production and sale of merchandise, but in its public and industrial relations as well."

In addition to its Annual Report and Quarterly Statement of Earnings, General Motors issues special booklets from time to time for the information of its stockholders, employees, dealers and the public generally. Many of the principles and policies outlined in these booklets apply to every other business as much as they do to that of General Motors.

A copy of the booklet, How MEMBERS OF THE GENERAL MOTORS FAMILY ARE MADE PARTNERS IN GENERAL MOTORS, together with the series of booklets to stockholders, will be mailed free upon request to Department K-2, General Motors Corporation, Broadway at 57th Street, New York, N. Y.

CHEVROLET

1

OAKLAND

FRIGIDAIRE-The Electric Refrigerator

DELCO-LIGHT-Electric Plants

THE American investor, adventuring for the first time on a large scale in the foreign bond market, is no longer a pioneer in a field of capital risks and of unknown values. He has not yet, however, advanced beyond the stage of an investing dilettante in his pursuit of safety and 7 per cent in the securities of European and South American countries.

The episodes in the chapter of American financial history that has to do with present holdings of nearly $15,000,000,000 of dollar credits of one kind or another are four in number. They cover a period of twelve years, the first dating from October 1915, when the Anglo-French 5-per-cent external loan for $500,000,000 was timidly offered in the United States. Quickly following this issue were three loans, aggregating $800,000,000, made to Great Britain and secured by collateral in the form of international investments. Within fifteen months American capital absorbed $1,300,000,000 of French and English obligations at a fair rate of interest and with prompt payment plus a small profit on the day of maturity, the last of these notes falling due in 1921.

The second of the episodes concerned Russia, in 1916 a wavering ally of France and England and in need of funds. It was brief and unpleasant. The record of it is in the files of many banks and in those of the State Department. It cost the American investor fully $100,000,000-some say much

more.

Episode number three was the strangest and most expensive of all a study in investment, or, rather, speculative psychology. The mass of quicknd-liberal-profit-requiring American Investors moved on Germany and

gorged themselves on German mark securities. The pre-war loans that had ranked with British consols and French rentes as premier investments, municipal obligations, and even German currency were purchased at a daily rate that determined the fluctuations of the foreign exchanges. In the debacle that came at the end of a three-year spree Americans found themselves with reams of paper and a loss of $500,000,000 to charge off in their incometax reports.

The fourth episode, and the one with which we are most concerned, occurred in the autumn of 1924. It was the sequel to the Dawes Plan, which had been promulgated a few weeks earlier. Its central feature was a loan of $110,000,000 at 7 per cent to the German Government for the purpose of stabilizing the German currency and placing Germany on a gold basis. This loan was an immediate success. Offered at 92, it was heavily oversubscribed and at once sold at a premium, although a few months later a French Government 7-per-cent issue at 94 was so poorly taken by the public that a banking syndicate was compelled for months to support it. It may not have been considered a risk to purchase the 7- and 8-per-cent government and municipal obligations of Switzerland and the Scandinavian nations even while they were going through their industrial and banking crises in the deflation years from 1920 to 1922. It assuredly was an adventure in investing for the American to buy a German Government bond in 1924. And when this adventure came through profitably he looked about for new fields to explore where the yield was 7 per cent or better and safety was 'reasonable."