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or even partly one of self-glorification, but the effect is precisely that. In their laudable desire for a good name, either during or after their own time, other members of society must earn it by worthy personal exertion. They have to produce evidence that their work or deeds entitle them to recognition. But the moneyed magnate or his heir simply gives an order, signs a check, and forthwith there is erected a library, university building, institute, or foundation imposing his name upon the community and sanctifying his memory with a halo. The same lucre often enables him to exercise a control over education which is repugnant to American senti

ment.

The American people have set an example for the world in their high standard of living. The purpose of the American is not mercenary but merely that of providing reasonable security for the family. Unquestionably in constructing a new social basis a place would be found for the right to make adequate provision for survivors. But this would be very different from the existing order, whereby vast fortunes with far

reaching fortified economic power are passed from sire to son, and are often virtually entailed for several generations by the ingenious devices of trust provisions in wills.

In what effectual way will such a change be made? The answer will be supplied by practical men and women. My concern is with outlining the principle and not with prescribing the method. The superior rights of the generality of the people over particular individuals is already recognized by law in multifarious ways. Specially relevant is the estate tax, which is a limited application of the right of the people, through their government, to divest rich holders of part of their inheritance. Without the protection of the state great fortunes could not exist. In all the other movements of the American people for equality of rights, the enunciation of principles came first, and their transformation into accomplished facts inevitably followed. So it will be with the American people's next great achievement, the establishment of economic equality, to which the step here indicated promises to be an introduction.

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HOT MILK

V. H. FRIEDLAENDER

LD Mr. and Mrs. Wayne lived until they were both eightyfive, and then died within a fortnight of each other.

For fifty-five of those eighty-five years ever since her birth, in facttheir only child, Honoria, had lived with them; and, during the last fifteen or so of the fifty-five, it was only natural that Honoria's thoughts should turn occasionally to the inevitable future, when she would be alone.

Honoria never went so far as to admit to herself that she disliked her parents (which was, however, very justly the case, for beneath airs of gentleness and solicitude for her, they were a thoroughly selfish pair, and had sucked her life dry). But she did take pleasure in planning her own future on lines as different as possible from her past and her present.

There was going to be impulse in that future, in place of routine; travel, for instance, and keeping open house for friends, and no reading aloud, and no fuss about flannels or servants or drafts. That sort of thing. For if duty was strong in Honoria, so also was the will to live some time or other.

And as the years passed and passed, there grew to be one special time in every day when thoughts of the future came to her invariably.

That time was half-past nine in the evening, the last half-hour before going to bed, when she was tired in body and frayed in nerves, and the hot milk came in.

Hot milk! There had been a time when Honoria had rebelled against this pick-me-up of the aged. But she had been gradually worsted. For what was the use of declining a glass of hot milk one night, if it came into the room with her parents' glasses just the same the next night and the next, and so on forever, in the hope of getting itself drunk?

And then her parents, her antiphonal parents, on the subject of hot milk.

"I told Cook always to send it in, darling, just on the chance of your drinking it sometimes."

"An excellent nightcap, Honoria. You will find it, as we do, a most excellent nightcap."

"And so nourishing, dear. You are looking a little tired. And what would father and I do if you were to break down?"

"To please your mother, Honoria. You know how she worries.'

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It was simpler, it was the line of least resistance, to drink the stuff, and to eat the two biscuits that went with it. Honoria ate and drank. Only, as she did it, she could not help envisaging always the time when

she would be free never to drink hot milk again. Never, never!

And now the time had come. The last funeral guest had gone, and the house was still; so still that the single chime of the clock at the half-hour made her start. But, after that, stillness again. No familiar detested sound of a distant door opened, approaching footsteps, a tray with hot milk and biscuits. Nothing. Honoria had given orders.

She settled down to think. What was she going to do? First, of course, the "long rest" that all the relations had advocated. Yes, but where? There were so many glorious places, and with delight she had tried them all, in imagination, during the years gone by. But now there were harassing details to consider, as well. Routes, tickets, luggage, a companion or no companion Oh, it was no use; she could settle nothing tonight. She would go to bed.

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But she could not go to bed. It was most curious. She was haunted by some faint sense of a thing forgotten or left undone, an uncomfortable nagging sense. What could it be? She walked about the room, trying to remember. She failed, yet the haunting sense grew stronger, more insistent, all but swam up into the light of remembrance.

And then the door opened, and Anna stood on the threshold; Anna the parlor-maid, who had known her parents almost as long as she had, Anna bearing a tray on which were a glass of hot milk and two biscuits. "You won't sleep, Miss Honoria, said Anna confidently, "without it. Not after being used to it all these years. So I brought it."

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Instantly a sense of peace and fulfilment descended upon Honoria. This, then, was what she had been waiting for, wanting? This hot milk? Through all the years when she had thought she was hating it, she had been growing to like it, to need it, to be unable to go to bed without it? Horrible, oh, horrible betrayal of her dreams! Her eyes filled with tears as she looked at the tray.

Anna saw the tears and spoke compassionately, authoritatively, without understanding. "There, there, Miss Honoria, don't you take on so. Drink up your hot milk, and then you'll get a good night's rest. In the morning I wouldn't wonder but what you'd feel like going down to Mrs. Oliver Wayne's at Bournemouth, or maybe to Mrs. Godfrey's at Leamington, same as you used to with the master and mistress. And after that you'll be ready to settle down again here as comfortable as you'd never think."

"Yes," said Honoria. She was sipping her hot milk, and it was appeasing and comforting her, and yet it was as if she were sipping poison.

She would never travel, she realized, except to Bournemouth or Leamington. She would never do any of the things she had planned to do. It was too late. The thought of travel, of change of any sort, was no longer an exhilaration; it had become a terror. "The world remains for us whatever it was when we were thirty-five." Some one had written that, and it was true. that, and it was true. In youth one was... one was ... well, a bus!choosing one's road, threading traffic, taking risks, and emerging victorious. But, imperceptibly, one became a

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THE AMERICAN PRESS

A Summary of the Changes in a Quarter-Century

CHARLES MERZ

TYLES change. When Wellington smashed the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte the "London Times" took the news calmly and printed it without a head-line. Down in the last column of the first page, under an advertisement headed, "Education-Ladies' School," began the first printed story of the Battle of Waterloo as quietly as an uncle writing to his niece.

"We have seen a gentleman who left Brussels on Sunday evening," the story ran, "at which time the people were manifesting the greatest joy for a decisive victory-" and so on, for a scant three hundred words.

This was the morning of June 22, 1815. Things would have been ordered differently on the morning of June 22, 1926. Of one thing we may be certain. No Wellington will smash the armies of a Bonaparte in these modern days, and do it without head-lines. A much livelier and more enterprising press than the press which greeted Wellington is ready to crown new victors with fresh laurels. With a new Waterloo to report, there would be head-lines in our own press high enough and black enough to shout their news a city block. There would be bulletins flashed from the scene of battle to accompany photographs of troop movements sent by

telegraph. There would be eye-witness stories sent by cable and eye-witness stories sent by wireless, bulletins of Napoleon's arrival in Nivelles almost before he got there and a column of speculation on the woman's page as to how Maria Louisa took the news. When Jack Dempsey met his, the "New York World" gave the battle forty-six columns.

The press has changed substantially in the century since Waterloo. It has changed substantially in a much shorter period of time than that. And because in a modern world the press is the one great fountainhead of popular information, determining in large measure what people will read about and sometimes think about, and with what degree of interest, it is useful to take stock now and then of changes that are taking place in our own times.

With 1900 as a starting-point, what has the press done for itself in the first quarter of the century?

22

No previous quarter-century since the original discovery of the art of printing has done so much as this last quarter-century to revolutionize the mechanics of newspaper publication. It is not only that new equipment such as the phototelegraph has been developed, and that enormous prog

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