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ished, obliterated, annihilated, disappeared as effectually as though the earth had swallowed her up. I have no record of the time when she again ventured into the open, but I would be willing to think it was not for years.

I remember supper tables at which his conversations and brilliancy presided. I remember sharp revolutionary statements that fell from him as to Jonah and the whale, the flood; geological testimony as to the length of time consumed in the creation of the world; all given with his fine clear face lit up with a kind of righteous indignation, and his hand brought down at last so that the glass and silver and myself jumped suddenly.

No thunderbolt fell on the house those nights, though I watched for it with anxious waiting. Sometimes I think his was the beginning of my own courage; for whatever moral bravery was in me rose, I think, to honor this greater courage of his, a subaltern saluting a superior officer. When he was by I listened fascinated. In these long years since he is gone, I too have loved truth; and I could wish for him now sometimes, that the too-complacent guests and cutlery and glassware of our modern dinner-tables might be so startled and shocked by the thunder of as righteous a sincerity.

There was also -how warmly contrasted with Doctor Highway! - the young Byronic musician with the extraordinary tenor voice. He was the pride of his family, and to their dismay was resolved to go on the opera stage. He treated me as an equal and, dispensing largesse, wrote in my autograph book one day, in a fine stirring hand: 'Music my only love, the only bride I'll ever claim.' Later, it is true, he seemed to have repented his resolve and forgotten the album, for I believe that he claimed some two brides besides music; but this did not alter

his educational value; that remained unspoiled.

There was, too, that great flashing fiery star, Mrs. Rankin, at work at the time of her visit on a drama, Herod and Mariamne. She had a mannish face; she wore heavy rings on somewhat mannish hands, and was, no doubt,- it is now revealed to me,- an unclassified suffragette, born untimely, denied, cut off by the custom of those days from the delights of militancy, foredoomed to pass out of life with never the joy of smashing a single window.

She talked much of injustice. She had a big voice and a small opinion of men. This it is not unreasonable to suppose they reciprocated with a still more diminutive opinion of her.

One might think from all this that she should have been a pamphleteer. She was not. She was by all odds and incongruities a poetess, driven by the inexorable muse to daily sessions with Mariamne. Mariamne! Ah, what a subject for her, for her!

She must have absolute quiet. She must be undisturbed. During her stay we would romp in from our play to find my mother with a finger on her lips. Above stairs Mrs. Rankin might be pacing her room, declaiming to the hearing of her own judicial ear only, the speeches of Mariamne, delivered in the voice of Herod, and the speeches of Herod, in a voice that should have been that of Mariamne. I can still hear the long pace and stride overhead.

Lest her type seem too strange, perhaps, it was explained to us what Plato explained long ago, that a poet is rapt wholly out of himself and is as one possessed of the gods.

Then, too, which brought her nearer to our sympathies, my mother conveyed to us the more homely knowledge that Mrs. Rankin had had much unhappiness in her life; some Herod of her own, I believe. This secured to her

our more willing respect and laid on us more than the ordinary obligation of courtesy. This virtue on our part was obliged to be its own reward, for there was no other that I can recall.

These people, you will note, were not bound to us by ties of blood. They were rather relations, rich or poor relations, of the spirit. I am bound also to tell of other guests than these: of those who by virtue of tradition and blood we more wontedly call 'our own'; men and women of my mother's and father's families; aunts and uncles and 'relatives' as we say.

But before I pass on to these, there is need to mention one more, at least, of the relations of the spirit that one to me most memorable of them all; the young dramatist-poet, with his flying tie and his heavy hair, to whose romantic name Eugene Ashton Eugene Ashton - I would how gladly have prefixed the title 'Cousin' had I but been entitled to it; who was nevertheless cousin-german to the spirit of me, or closer still, a kind of brother-of-dreams. He had been into distant countries of the soul that was clear by a far-away look in his eyes. I used to sit wordless and well-behaved in his presence, but I slipped my soul's hand in his, very friendly, the while; I wandered far with him into realms of fancy, and counted his approval and the merest glance he gave me as very nearly the most desirable thing I could attain to.

I can see him still, and those gray eyes of his, as young as the young moon and as many centuries old; I can still hear his very noble voice, reciting from time to time, as he was wont to do, some of his own verses. Or I can see him leaning forward, his gracious body bending into the firelight, to talk over with my sympathetic mother his plans for recognition and fame.

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How little we guessed that his life was even then near to its setting. When one sees the morning star in the dawn, or Hesper in the twilight hanging limpid, golden, one does not wonder will its glory be long or short: so much it holds one with its immortal loveliness, little thought is given to the near-by day, or the night which shall quench it.

The other stars, Miss Lou Brooks, Mrs. Rankin, and the rest, shone long and high in the firmament of my childhood; but the mellow light of the gifts of Eugene Ashton, like the more splendid Hesper, hung low, already low on the horizon.

I shall not forget that morning we heard of his death. Eugene Ashton is dead!' The news was not kept from us children. Yet I remember, too, that beyond the first sorrow and shock of such news lay a pardonable pride. He had loved our home; he had found comfort and rest of spirit there. I could still see his gray eyes looking into the firelight, and the bend of his gracious body, every inch of him a poet. There with us, he had dared to be his best and had shared his gifts; his personality had lighted up those very rooms and his voice had sounded in them there where still my daily lot was cast. He had been our guest to me the most memorable of them all. And now he was gone. Where? A kind of glory followed the thought. He was gone down over the rim of the horizon of life to the land of Death, as splendid there as here. We had lost him, whereas he, you see, had only lost us. It was our lives that were darkened, not his. It was on our lives, not on his, that the night fell. So he also, having been as a morning star among the living,' now, having died, was

'as Hesperus giving New splendor to the dead.'

(The second part of 'Guests' will deal with the author's blood-kindred.)

THE PATHOS OF AMERICA

BY HENRY OSBORN TAYLOR

THE American people are unconscious of their pathetic situation. Yet to perceive it requires but a moderate knowledge of the laws of life. We are the only prosperous people in the world at present. We alone are not weighed down either by war, by mobilization, or by extreme anxiety. Nor is it clearly our fault that we are fattening while the rest of the world grows lean. It is, nevertheless, portentous.

During our Civil War, some men in the North rapidly grew rich; but sacrifice kept the people chastened. Now throughout the European world an enormous castigation and, it may be hoped, purification, is taking place in which we have no share. We are not exhausting our resources for a cause, or draining our blood. Instead, we are making huge profits.

How can we help it? Are we to blame? We did not bring on the war; nor do we clearly owe to any other country a duty to take part in it. France and England cannot reasonably reproach the United States on this ground. We have no army, and but a questionable navy; there really was no way in which we could attack a foe across the ocean. And the citizens of the United States are a mixture of many peoples, with different traditions. They are, however, what they are, living in a certain organized way, through a complicated social organization, of which they are somehow part, but for which they do not seem altogether responsible. They are equipped and fitted to do the things they do; but neither

fitted nor equipped for lofty sacrifice, unless, perhaps, in case they should be obviously driven to it. The machinery of their life enables them to fulfill some generous and unsacrificial instincts, and give, say, a tithe of a tithe of their profits to Belgium and France.

Let the imagination bestir itself: might not the American people have thrown a propitiatory sop to the fatness of their fate, by presenting five hundred million dollars to England and France, instead of loaning it at a good interest? Such a gift was impossible. There exists no machinery for making such a gift, but very ample and efficient machinery for making such a loan. Does not the exchange of commodities depend upon the expectation of profit? There literally exists no machinery for producing and shipping exports in requisite quantities-wheat or leather or munitions save in the hope of profit. That hope enters into the entire process; it is an essential part of the machinery part of our institutions, of our society, of our ineradicable motives, and of our fate. Under present conditions, the world is our oyster, and we must eat it. We must grow obese, with belly distended for some thrust of retribution, which will equalize us with humanity at large. That retribution will come in lowering of character, in loosening of sinew, perhaps in giant calamity, or perhaps not. But it will come; for we have lost our share in the strength which arises through denial and sacrifice. An Isaiah might point this out more definitely!

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Conceivably some great power of motive might save us; but only a power of motive as much beyond us at present as it is a necessary part of our salvation. Above the stomach this nation scarcely exists as a nation. One must pity the United States in this world-crisis for lacking a vital motive sufficient to lift them into something above a digestive and nutritive organism. Spiritually they are footless and formless. And that there is no visible means at hand for making us other than we are, is one element of the pitifulness and piti

lessness of our situation and our fate.

Again, it is not clear that we have been specifically culpable. We are netted in dilemmas of the flesh. They make our fate. And should we turn from 'fate' to God in upward yearning and in prayer, what could we pray, unless a prayer like this: Grant and fulfill, O God, the prayers that we should pray, were it not for our ignorance, and the impotence of our swinish natures. Praying thus, we should add a prayer to be made able and prepared to accept -the granting.

ON UNDERSTANDING THE MIND OF GERMANY

BY JOHN DEWEY

I

MANY psychologists are now saying that the wish is uniformly father to the thought. Above the surface of consciousness rise intellectual structures of which we fancy ourselves the lords. Some are more spacious, others less so; some rickety, some solid. But all, we imagine, have been built by the master-builder cold reason. But these psychologists tell us of vital instincts, obscure inclinations, imperative preferences at work below the surface of consciousness and shaping the systems of belief, seemly and unseemly, which show themselves above. As unseen forms build up islands of the seas, these hidden stirrings of hope and fear create our thoughts. These psychologists may exaggerate. But the intellectual outgivings of the present war look like a demonstration of their thesis.

Emotional perturbations are so deep and general in war that any one who keeps himself outside can behold the suborning of intelligence in process. The native partisanship of thought and belief becomes flagrant. These glory, naked and unashamed, in their simplicity of bias. Impartiality and detachment of mind are suspicious traits. A loyal and serious soul, so it seems, does not weigh evidence too closely or reach conclusions too scrupulously when his country's fate hangs in the balance. A once philosophically minded Englishman now writes 'on the peacefulness of being at war.' For an emotion which sweeps all before it, so undivided as to leave room for but one kind of thinking and one form of belief, affords a sweetly complete sense of certainty. In it the discriminations and doubts which always accompany the efforts of a critical intelligence are submerged.

It is characteristic of emotion to develop only those ideas which support and reinforce their own operation. Their subtlest work is to produce intellectual structures which effectively mask from view whatever would trouble action were it recognized. To suggest beliefs which feed desire is a simple matter. To build up beliefs which prevent perception of what is undesirable within desire is a more complicated affair. Men are profoundly moral even in their immoralities. Especially do they in their collective and persistent activities require the support of a justifying conscience. Nothing is so paralyzing to action as prolonged doubt as to the justice of one's cause. The notion that men can act enduringly and deliberately at the expense of others, in behalf of their own advantage, just because they perceive it to be their own advantage, is a mythin spite of its currency. Ideal ends and moral responsibilities are always invoked. And only uninstructed cynicism will assign conscious hypocrisy in explanation. Men must be stayed in their serious enterprises by moral justifications this is a necessity which knows no law but itself. We may learn a lesson from the prevalence of the doctrine of the divine rights of kings. As long as absolute monarchies had the sanction of contemporary events, they did not appeal for justification to supernatural sanctions. Only when their rights became humanly questionable was recourse had to superhuman buttressing.

In times of peace it is possible to idealize war. Imagination, left to its own devices, forgets the disagreeable and dwells upon glory. In times of war, suffering, misery, the agonies of destruction, are too immediate and urgent to permit this course save to the hopelessly callous or the hopelessly romantic. Hence idealization is transferred

to the cause for which the war is fought. Even the most righteous of wars involves many illusions of this sort; the less justifiable the war, the more surely do the emotions develop ideas and beliefs which may disguise the lack of justification. The vehement conviction of each warring nation of the absolute righteousness of its own cause is the whistling of children in the awful unexpectedness of a graveyard. But it is this only superficially. In its depths it represents the labor of desire to procure a moral justification which will arm action. Only the most placid or the most trivial of existences is endurable without some belief in its own moral necessity. How can the horrors of war be borne without conviction of moral justification?

Each nation naturally expresses its own moral grounds in the terms which its history has made familiar and congenial. The formulæ chosen are appealing and convincing to other nations say neutral nations in the degree in which they are uttered in a familiar and understandable tongue, The average American understands the moral defense of Great Britain readily. It is couched in the terms which we should naturally employ in our own justification. So far as distance permits us to judge, France has been the least clamorous of all the nations at war; but her justifications, also, are uttered in a language which we understand, even if it be not so naturalized among us as the moral speech of England. But it is noteworthy that Americans - except German-Americans who sympathize with Germany do not explain and justify her cause in the language which the Germans by preference employ. The former assign reasons of expediency and practical political necessity, not the broad sweeping moral reasons which the latter put forth.

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