and presented impeachment charges. Had Ferguson left the university alone, he probably would never have been impeached. But he began his political career by making war on higher education. It is to the credit of Texas that a majority of her voters, and most of her legislators, condemned such demagoguery.

When Neff was governor, his regents made it a rule that no infidel, agnostic, or atheist should be employed by the university. Later, this was revoked. Now infidels, atheists, and agnostics do their damnedest at Austin just as in any other intelligent community. For some political reason, a fat salary is paid a double-fisted person upon whom was solemnly conferred the fantastic title of Dean of Athletics.

Near where the Legal Tender, greatest gambling-hall in Arizona, once flourished, now stands the State University's museum of archæology and Indian relics—the most interesting west of the Mississippi.

To fleeting tourists, Arizona yields a peep at her Grand Cañon, a bus ride over the Aztec Trail, or a chance to buy beads from Yuma squaws. Seen only from tourist trails, she looks the same now as twenty years ago-an empty wilderness of sun, sand, and sage, of rabbit-tracks and far-away purple ranges. Yet in this desert State, up hidden valleys beyond the purview of observationcars, fourteen thousand farmers last year grew a thirty-five-million-dollar crop, including five thousand cars of lettuce. Trifling, compared with the billion-dollar record crop of Texas; yet significant of economic

change, when you recall that only a few years ago, from Tombstone to Yuma, there wasn't lettuce enough for a canary-bird's lunch.

From Nevada, which lost population when her mines began to fail, Arizona takes a lesson. Some day, she knows, her present hundredmillion-dollar yearly income from mines will decline. So, though still our richest mining State, slowly she builds up an agriculture, to rely on when her mines give out. Besides the great Roosevelt Dam, which turned the Salt River desert into paradise, many other irrigation works are built, or planned, in Arizona.

But for political pouting and bickering with neighboring States, Arizona's great Boulder Dam project might already be under way. Oddly enough, thousands of new Arizona settlers come now from California, migration's backwash. In ten years her population has doubled.

Two railways are spending twentysix million dollars on new tracks in Arizona. As a State she is only fourteen years old. Yet already her university has made a place for itself in the West. Its "Ag" school has drawn pupils even from Egypt, to study cotton culture. Its president, Dr. Cloyd H. Marvin, youngest university president in captivity, is putting it on a pay-as-you-go basis. He lends out his professors to industry in the State. If a mining concern, a lumber company, or an irrigation district wants expert advice, it can obtain, free, the professional services of qualified members of the faculty. In Tucson I was told that expert advice given by these faculty members to Arizona interests last year would have cost, if purchased

privately, a sum running well into six figures.

When President Marvin wearies of university work, he shoulders a highpower rifle and takes to the Mexican hills with his neighbor, Harold Bell Wright, to shoot lions and big-horn sheep.

"One factor retarding growth in the Southwest," said Director Hunsdon of the Texas State Board for Industrial Education, "is that children don't learn trades.

"Texas makes a big bid for new industries. With her lignite fields, her stupendous raw cotton, oil, and gas riches, she is in position to develop hugely as a manufacturing State. Needing skilled workers, she has set up good trade schools. Yet only about one youngster in thirteen hundred is enrolled. All through the Southwest teachers seem to lend their efforts to training pupils for whitecollar jobs or for college. Our public schools do not teach the dignity of labor. They don't even offer trade

courses.

"Nothing whatever is done to show that it's just as honorable to be a highly paid skilled worker in overalls as it is to hold a low-priced office job-with white collar and fancy socks as the chief lure. Because Texas public schools fail to prepare youngsters for the particular trade or commercial pursuit which thousands of them must finally enter, many become inefficient workers at low wages, or, still worse, they become actual delinquents.

"In the trade-school classes boys choose the printing, auto mechanics, sheet-metal, machinist, and some of the building trades, because the best opportunity for employment is offered

in these lines. The Southwest needs more boys trained in electrical work, plumbing, brick-laying, plastering, decorating, paper-hanging, painting, and masonry. There is a growing demand for such workers. Trade schools and classes have been handicapped in getting students started in these courses because parents, employers, and labor organizations have not always coöperated in requiring all apprentices to attend some class which offers instruction for more efficient service.”

More and more, hard labor is done in the Southwest by incoming Mexicans. Without them, the Southwest could not shear its sheep, herd its cattle, pick its cotton, or repair its roads.

From Texas to California nearly a million Mexicans are employed. As they get Americanized, they learn trades, join unions, and compete with natives. To a striking degree, young Mexicans trained in American high schools and business colleges are able to get and hold positions as clerks, bookkeepers, and stenographers. The nineteen-year-old girl who typed this article is a pure Mexican Indian. Yet she can take dictation in both English and Spanish, and can operate the addingmachine.

In many Southwest towns there are as many Mexicans as Americans. In border places, as El Paso, Laredo, and Brownsville, there are more. At the public schools white and brown races mingle freely. In time, no doubt, racial amalgamation will begin.

"We took a census of men in our town of 125,000 who earn over three hundred dollars a month," a leading

MYTH: This is the month when we celebrate two heroes at once. Doubtless we shall be moved to refresh our memory of their lives. For our improvement there is at hand more than one excellent volume ready to inform us about the true George Washington and the true Lincoln. The titles may be phrased one way or another, but the purpose of the book will be to remove the myth and show us the man as he was. When we come to the end of the account we shall probably feel some disappointment. If this is the truth, then truth is somewhat unpleasant; if this is the real man, then what we admired before has somewhat shrunk. Our instinctive protest may be hard for us to justify, and yet it may be sound. These true accounts of men long dead may perhaps leave out something which the intervening years had a right to add. It may be possible to make old wine taste exactly as it did when it first came from the vats, yet we may not be at fault if we prefer the mature bouquet.

This fear of a myth is after all a strange obsession; nothing is more deeply rooted in our nature than the myth-making faculty, and perhaps nothing is more wholesome. A myth begins in some strong passion, usually in a great love; and what we

love, as the philosopher told us ages ago, we change. If we love the landscape and can get our hands on it, we trim it or move the trees around, or otherwise educate the object of our affections. If we love our city, our college, our church, or our home, we immediately propose changes, and our purpose, of course, is to make the beloved object better. But when we love human beings to the point where modesty prevents us from wishing to improve them, we then improve their memory by seeing in them deeper and deeper virtues, and by mercifully forgetting those weaknesses of theirs which were their handicaps in life, and which seem irrelevant to their fame. This impulse to fashion a myth about things we love is the instinct of the artist; and since it is an instinct and not a calculated program, it can no more be attacked, than it could be formulated and guided, by reason. Perhaps this is just as well for the spiritual profit of the race. Perhaps a generous love, contemplating the object of its affections and making a myth out of it, will proceed more wisely under the inspiration of nature than all the biographies put together, guided by the historical method, and eager to bring us down again to brass tacks.

It is a poor reward for any artist, after he has enriched the world with a masterpiece, for us to go snooping into the life of which his masterpiece was the climax. Would any one of us choose to be explained hereafter by our worst side, or by our best? The artist knows, and we ought to know, that his masterpiece is the best of him. His wish corresponds to the instinct of the race at large, that the masterpiece explain his life, rather than his life the masterpiece. In any case, the masterpiece is the important thing; and if we love it, it will become splendid with the tradition of our worship. It cannot be sullied except by violent juxtaposition with those facts in the artist's life which were always incongruous, and which, with the passage of time, have become impertinent.

A great career also is a work of art. It is often widely removed from the private life of the hero. There was the Washington in Mount Vernon, the Washington of his farm, of his business interests, of his love-affairs, of his private prejudices. But this is not the part of him that the world has loved, nor even cared to notice. No myth has ever been made about it; in fact, it has been forgotten. The other George Washington, the commander of the Colonial troops, the first president, has engaged the interest and affection of the world. The silly story of the cherry-tree can well be spared, but the picture of the father of his country which most of us have is the picture we want a true expression of our gratitude and admiration. There are two Lincolns also. In his case the intimate Lincoln is easier to recover, since he is nearer to our time, and the record is

case.

more complete than in Washington's We have his own letters too, more intimate than Washington's, though perhaps a man's statements about himself are not always accurate. rate. But certainly there was a rough, and at times vulgar, Abraham Lincoln, an able and not always too scrupulous lawyer, a shrewd politician. There was also the war president, the magnanimous author of the Gettysburg address and the second inaugural, the superb statesman who wrote the letter to Horace Greeley about slavery and the Union. If we leave the whole matter to nature, we shall forget much of the private life of Lincoln, and idealize his public career. That is the way of the myth. If we are offered the "true" Lincoln, we must make up our minds whether the small moments of a man's life are the key to his greatness.

It comes down to the question whether we wish this to be a static or a creating world-whether we wish the beautiful achievements of man to remain as they first were or to improve with time. Or perhaps there is no question at all; some few of us may think there is, and may try to put back the hero into his first unidealized state, but the race memory will not be stopped. With time, anything we care to remember at all will be other than what it first was; a play of Shakspere's is now not what Shakspere wrote but what we have enjoyed, what we have thought about, what we have spent our scholarship on. Hamlet one hundred years from now will be quite different from the hero we now see dressed in antique black, or in upto-date plus-fours. Shylock will be reinterpreted-who can say how?