social product, and the work of no single individual.

When Mr. Lloyd-George stated that a maternity allowance had been provided for, he was loudly cheered. Children of the working class suffer a high mortality rate that is due in the main to poverty. Their mothers are obliged to leave their beds and return to work long before any physician would permit them, were reasonable conditions of comfort present; and as a conse

quence, both mother and child suffer. The maternity allowance is to be thirty shillings, conditional upon the mother not returning to her work for four weeks after the birth of her child.

A fund to fight consumption is founded. There are in England from 400,000 to 500,000 persons suffering from this disease, and 75,000 deaths from it occur every year. It is proposed to assist local authorities to build sanitaria throughout the country, and for this purpose a capital sum of £7,500,000 is set

Just as the state undertakes to protect undertake, through the Lloyd-George bill, to

your life and property, so it will protect you against the results of being

aside, and provision made for £5,000,000 a year for maintenance.

These are among the positive features of this historic measure. There are many other things in it which are in the germ, but which must logically grow from it.

Thus, it has become a direct money gain to workman, employer and state to preserve health. With so compelling an incentive, unhealthy conditions will be rapidly abolished, and the end of the disease-breeding slum, and the overcrowded tenement is in sight. We shall have clean houses, open to the air; not dens that blacken the day and blot out the sun.

What is the cost? one will ask.

The bill is in two parts. Part One deals with sickness insurance, and other conditions calling for medical assistance. Under this head, employers will contribute annually $45,000,000 and wage-earners $55,000,ooo, while the contribution from the state will be about $10,000,000 annually.

Part Two deals with unemployment insurance. The weekly contributions will be from the employer, 5 cents per employee; from the worker, 5 cents; and from the state 25 per cent. of the cost of the scheme. The scheme is estimated, roughly, to cost $13,700,000, of which the workers contribute $5,500,000, the employers $4,500,000, and the state $3,750,000.

When asked what he thought of the measure, Lord Furness, one of England's greatest captains of industry, replied: "In the case of one of my firms alone, the employer's contribution will amount to $41,500 a year. I will not say that the bill will ruin industry in this country, but I would like to see what advantages there are to set against this large additional expenditure."

The doubt in the mind of Lord Furness is simple to dissolve. An employer of labor will know that a sick man, or a man not in good condition, is far less profitable than a man in sound normal health. As a citizen, the employer will know that a man's value deteriorates rapidly when he is surrounded by adverse conditions, and he will know, also, that if the labor market is stocked with men capable of yielding the average volume of labor, he has a far more profitable field in which to invest than he can hope for under present unregulated conditions.

This alone, and on the most general principles, assures an immediate return.

But there is another aspect to consider,

namely, the market. It matters nothing how much is produced from the factory or the workshop or the mine, if there is no effective demand-if there is no purchaser. At this moment, the world is crying aloud for a market, for we are producing more than we can consume. In the surplus product both capital and profit are locked up, and without a purchaser they must remain locked up.

If, then, we extend the market, we shall liberate imprisoned capital and increase the flow of profit.

It

This scheme of State Insurance increases the market by increasing the purchasing power of the great mass of consumers. It enables the unemployed man to spend three dollars where before he spent only one. enables the sick man to purchase food and drugs where before he could obtain practically none. And it raises the average purchasing capacity of the market.

In yet another way it is economical. In England, the annual cost of pauperism has been $85,000,000, which has come directly by rates and taxes. Since about one-third of the pauperism is due to sickness, and the insurance scheme will prevent the man from becoming a pauper, a saving of about $28,000,000 a year will be effected on this head alone.

Beyond doubt, the scheme will pay.

But let it be said here that considerations of human welfare are not to be judged by the dollar standard. The dollar is but the conventional representative of wealth, and wealth is not to be found in heaps of glittering gems or piles of yellow gold. Rather is it to be found in Nature's boundless cornucopia, in the power to labor that resides in the brain and muscle of healthy, upright men and women, in the laughter and the joys of human life, and in life's hopes and fears and dreams, unsullied by the deadening load of endless care that warps the mind and breaks the heart of millions of our kind.

Now, when we see how this bill of LloydGeorge's is destined to become a powerful engine working toward the relief of humanity in England, why should not we, in our country, take advantage of the plan which that great man has conceived, and, with your help, succeed in passing a similar measure, so that we may add this law to the Code-a law which brings the strong to the help of the weak, and inspires with a new courage the poorer classes of our land!

the funny frock coat and the stove pipe hat?"-"Who's the big hulking chap that looks as if he'd just landed from nowhere?"

"I saw the queerest looking mud-dauber of a lawyer or doctor or maybe preachersitting on the steps of Mrs. Beaver's boarding-house."-"I saw him, too. He had nice eyes gray and deep set-and they twinkled as if he were saying, 'Yes, I know I'm a joke of a greenhorn, but I'm human, and I like you, and I'd like you to like me.""

In towns, even the busiest of them, there is not any too much to talk about. Also, there is always any number of girls and ows sharply on the lookout for breadwinners; and the women easily get the men into the habit of noting and sizing up newly arrived males. No such new arrival, new arrival, whether promising as a provider or not, escapes searching attention. Certainly there was in young George Helm's appearance no grace or beauty to detain the professional glance of a husband-seeker with a fancy for romantic ornamentation of the business of matrimony. Certainly, also, there was in that appearance no suggestion of latent possibilities of luxury-providing. A plain, serious-looking young man with darkish hair and a red beard, with a big loosely jointed body whose legs and arms seemed. unduly long. A strong, rather homely face, stern to sadness in repose, flashing unexpectedly into keen appreciation of wit and fun when the chance offered. The big hands were rough from the toil of the fields -so rough that they would remain the hands of the manual laborer to the end. The cheap, smooth frock suit and the not too fresh top hat had the air of being their wearer's only costume, of having long served in that capacity, of getting the most prudent. care because they could not soon be relieved of duty.

"He lives in the room my boy Tom made out of the attic last summer," said Mrs. Beaver, who supported her husband and children by taking in boarders. “And all he brung with him was in a paper shirtbox. He wears a celluloid collar and cuffs, and he sponges off his coat and vest and pants every morning before he puts 'em on. So Tom says. He lies awake half the night reading or writing in bed-sometimes when he reads he laughs out loud, so you'd think he had company. And he sings hymns and recites poetry. And, my! how he does eat! Them long legs of his'n is hollow clear down."

"What does he wear those whiskers for?" -"How can a man with hair like that on his face expect to get clients or anything else?" Nevertheless, public opinion-which is usually wrong about everything, including its own exaggerated esteem for itself-was wrong in this case. As soon as a comet ceases to be a visitor and settles down into a fixed inhabitant with a regular orbit, it ceases to attract attention, becomes obscure, acquires the dangerous habit of obscurity. George Helm, only twenty-four years old and without money, friends, or influence, might have been driven back to the farm but for that beard.

Successful men feed their egotism with such shallow and silly old proverbial stuff as, "You can't keep a good man down," and "A husky hog will get its nose to the trough." But they reckon ill who leave circumstance out of account in human affairs. And circumstance does not mean opportunity seen and seized, but opportunity that takes man by the nape of the neck and forcibly thrusts him into responsibility and painfully compels him to acquire the education that finally leads to success. Those who arrive forget that they were not always wise and able; they forget how hardly they got wisdom and capacity, how fiercely their native human inertia and stupidity fought against learning. If some catastrophewhich God forbid!-should wipe out at a stroke all our leaders-all the geniuses who give us employment, run our affairs, write our books and newspapers, make our laws, blow the whistles for us to begin and to stop

work, tell us when to go forth and when to come in out of the rain-if some cataclysm should orphan us entirely of these our wondrous wise guardians, don't you suspect that circumstance would almost overnight create a new set for us quite as good, perhaps better? The human race is a vast reservoir of raw material for any and all human purposes. Let those who find cheer in feeling lonely in their unique, inborn, inevitable greatness enjoy themselves to their fill. It is their privilege. But it is also the privilege of plain men and twinkling stars to laugh at them.

So George Helm's beard may have had more to do with his destiny than his conventional biographers will ever concede. He ceased to be a comet. But he did not cease to attract attention. And his awkwardness, his homeliness, and his solitary "statesman's" suit would not have sufficed to keep him in the public eye. That preposterous beard was vitally necessary. It accomplished its mission. The months-the clientless months-the months of dwindling purse and hope passed. George Helm remained a figure in Harrison. Some men were noted for the toilets or the eccentricity or the beauty of their wives, some men for their fortunes or their fine houses, some men for dog or horse or high power automobile. George Helm was noted for his beard. It served as the gathering center for jokes and stories. The whole town knew all sorts of gossip about that "boy with the whiskers," for, through the carmine mask, the boyishness had finally been descried. The local papers, hard put for matter to fill the space round patent medicine advertisements and paid news of dry goods, overshoes, and canned vegetables at cut prices, often made paragraphs about the whiskers. And the heartiest laugh at these jests came from serious, studious George Helm himself.

"Why don't you shave 'em, George?" He was of those men whom everybody calls by the first name.

"You never happened to see me without 'em?" Helm would reply.

"I'd like to," was usually the retort. "Well, I've seen myself without 'em-and I guess I'm choosing the bluntest horn of the dilemma."

It never occurred to anyone in Harrison to wonder why, while George Helm's whiskers were a butt, the young man himself was not. When Rostand made a tragic

hero of a man with a comic nose, there was much outcry at the marvelous genius displayed in the feat. In fact, that particular matter required no genius at all. There is scarcely an individual of strongly marked personality who has not some characteristic, mental or physical, that is absurd, ridicu-. lous. Go over the list of great men, past and present; note the fantastic, grotesque physical peculiarities alone. Those attention-arresting peculiarities helped, you will observe, not hindered, the man in coming into his own-the pot-belly of little Napoleon, the duck legs of giant Washington, the drooling and twitching of Sam Johnson.

Try how you will, you cannot make a man ridiculous unless he is ridiculous. Lincoln could—and did-play the clown hours at a time. Yet only shallow fools of conventionality - worshipers for an instant confused the man and the clever story-actor. Harrison laughed at George Helm's whiskers; but it did not, because it could not, laugh at George Helm.

But, being a shallow-pated town, Harrison fancied it was laughing at Helm himself. It is the habit of human beings to mistake clothes and whiskers and all manner of mere externals for men. Occasionally they discover their mistake. Harrison discovered its mistake.

It nominated George Helm for circuit judge. judge. There were two parties in that district as there are everywhere elsethe Republican and the Democratic. There was also-as wherever else there is any public thing to steal-a third party that owned and controlled the other two. Sometimes this third party "fixes" the race so that Republican always wins and Democrat always loses; again, it "fixes" the race the other way; yet again-where there is what is known as an "intelligent and alert electorate"-this shrewd third party alternately puppets Republican and Democrat first under the wire-and then how the aforesaid intelligent and alert people do shout and applaud their own sagacity and independence!

They say that woman is lacking in the sense of humor. There must be something in the charge. Otherwise, would she not long ago have laughed herself to death at the political antics of man?

In Harrison and its surrounding country, the sentiment was overwhelmingly Republican-which meant that the majority of the