H

E WAS one of the most cautious and frightened men who ever wrote to this magazine for information and help. He lived in the country. He had never, he said, bought anything in the nature of an investment except a mortgage. It was in the middle of the panic of 1907; and the only reason why he had thought of bonds was that the man who owed him money on the mortgage had refused to pay the interest and had told him to go ahead and sell the land if he could. The borrower intimated at the same time that it was more than he could do himself.

So the investor turned to bonds, because of a chance remark made by a friend of his in a bank. He wanted extreme safety and 5 per cent. interest on his money. The period was one of those rare periods in the history of the bond market when the two factors he wanted were obtainable in the same security. He was advised to take his choice between Chicago, Burlington & Quincy debenture 5 per cent. bonds, then selling about 97, and Pennsylvania Railroad 3 per cent. bonds of 1915, selling at 86. He took the latter, largely because he lived on that railroad.

A few weeks ago I heard of him again. He wrote in to say that his bank had very kindly cashed the interest coupons right along. He wanted to know whether the bond was worth as much as he paid for it. The maker of the mortgage, after the trouble was over, had paid up his arrears of interest, and was paying off the principal. The question was whether or not to buy another mortgage or another bond.

When he was told that his bond is now worth about $975 against the $860 he paid for it four years ago, he thought there must be some mistake, and it took another letter to convince him it was the same bond we were talking about. When he ot that fact in mind he wrote again ask

ing for the name of another bond that would "do as well for me as this one."

That mild request is the point of this story. Some day, no doubt, there will come another panic of short duration and of sharp effect on the markets of Wall Street, so that the bargain counters will be filled again with the best bonds of the country at panic prices. But it is a long wait between panics and the uneventful years between are filled with prospects that sometimes look just as good as the best prospects of panic days but that, most unhappily, are not so good as they look.

Therefore, it is interesting to observe, in the public prints, an advertisement offering the bonds of a certain interurban trolley railroad, and recommending them as "certain to advance 25 per cent. in five years." If you are curious enough to get the literature of this concern, you will find an elaborate argument to the effect that there is no steam railroad bond that is a first mortgage on a main trunk line between two cities of two hundred thousand people in this country that is not selling "to yield less than 5 per cent." Therefore, of course, this interurban bond, on a line located between two good cities, must soon sell on that basis also, and to do that it would have to advance 25 per

cent.

The argument looks inviting; but it might be very well answered by the simple fact that the people who, a few years ago, bought the first mortgage bonds on an interurban designed to connect two cities of more than a million each would be very glad to take 25 cents on the dollar for them to-day.

It takes much more than an expert to discover, in normal times, such bargains as could be bought blindfolded in the panic of 1907. In normal times prime bonds of really safe character are not for sale 15 per cent. below what all men know to be their real value. If they ever were, the individual investor in the country

would not get them, for they would be bought up in a hurry by the great insurance companies and banks, which hire the best judges of value in the country to keep a sharp eye out always for bargains.

A WARNING FOR THE PRESENT

The present is, perhaps, a very good time to emphasize the fact that bargains in securities in normal times are not apt to be very cheap. Often they are marked down, not because of a spirit of philanthropy or even because the owner wants to get them "off the shelves," but because of very good reasons inherent in the securities themselves. You may go into Wall Street to-day and buy bonds and notes of railroad systems that look quite solvent and even prosperous, and you can get 6 per cent. or 7 per cent. if you want to take a chance, even 8 per cent.-on your money. Nobody, however, considers them very rare bargains. The only people who have a right to buy them are people who can sit tight and see them through, whatever comes, without selling the automobile.

- or,

The same remark applies to a great many very alluring and perfectly legitimate offerings of investment securities. It is just about as true to-day as it ever was that the man who tries to make $1,000 earn as much interest for him as $2,000 earned five years ago doubles his risk as well as his income. Mathematically it is not true; because any economist can tell you that interest rates are higher to-day on account of the cost of living and gold production and extravagance and a few other things; but this difference is decidedly not a good reason to suppose that a man can get 7 per cent. to-day as safely as he could get 4 per cent. a few years ago.

This article is intended to be a note of warning. The alluring search for high income, the constant pressure for higher and higher revenue- they have their own peculiar dangers. Here and there, as time goes on, undoubtedly some of the stocks and bonds that now tempt the oldfashioned investor out of the safety and, perhaps, penury, of his 4 per cent. to 5 per cent. income will go to pieces in a

hurry and drop him back again into a worse place by far than he held before.

THE COST OF HIGH INCOME

You cannot get abnormal interest rates combined with safety. If, in times like this, the pressure forces you to seek for higher rates, do so; but do not deceive yourself into believing that in doing so you are holding to the same principles of conservatism and safety that were characteristic of the old-fashioned investment. You are forced, perhaps, to look for higher revenue. Do it, then, with your eyes open, quite conscious that you increase your risk in some degree for every tenth of one per cent. that you increase your income. That will make you cautious and save you from blundering through a fool's paradise into poverty.

When you first venture into new paths, tread cautiously. Study the principles of the new form of investment quite as carefully as you ever studied the old. It is quite possible to change from 31 per cent. investments to 4 per cent. investments, these days, without giving up anything you really ought to keep; and it is equally possible to swing from 4 per cent. securities to 5 per cent. securities without getting on dangerous ground. Only you have to give up something.

For instance, it is safe to say that no security ought, nowadays, to sell on a 4 per cent. basis of fixed income unless it is absolutely safe, perfectly marketable any day, good as collateral in the bank, and known to all men as a standard investment security. Now the ordinary investor who puts money away for income does not care whether he could borrow at his bank on his investments or not, whether he could sell them any day by telephone, or whether they are well known in the markets as standard securities.

Therefore, if you want to readjust your income to meet your expenses, figure out the change on a common sense basis. Give up some convertibility, give up some of the satisfaction of owning the best there is no matter what it costs, give up all chances for an increase in the value of your security if you like - but don't give up safety.

P

ence.

EOPLE nowadays don't want to go to church," said a clergyman friend to me the other day and, when I demurred, he told me this story from his own experiA certain tradesman contributed regularly to the salary of the minister of his parish, but never set his foot inside the church. One day Deacon Jones, having collected his quarterly check, pressed him to give a reason. The man made several evasive replies, but finally blurted out: "If you will insist, I will tell you. As a member of the community, from habit because I think it is best for the people put it any way you like I support the church. Outside of that, for myself, I don't care a damn for it."

"That," said my friend, "is the attitude, and how are you going to get around it?"

I think my friend is getting around it, for the order "Forward march!" that is ringing through the land has been heard in his community too. While we are limbering up and getting ready to move, all of us, let me set down here the experience of a church in the very heart of a great city, the pews of which are never empty though it depends on no social attractions, no institutional feature, to fill them, and though it offers to the people no impressive ritual or creed other than the life of Jesus Christ and its teachings. It is true that it does not call itself a church and lays no claim to denominational fellowship; but it is also true that it gathers within its doors every Sunday night during eight months of the year one of the largest congregations to be found in the land, if indeed it has an equal in point of numbers, and that it is making

itself felt in constantly increasing measure as a distinct religious influence where that was the greatest need.

Its president and moving spirit is an ordained clergyman who, being a Christian, is also a good citizen. Properly, the story of his work should begin with him, but first a word of his field.

Every one has heard of the "Loop District" in the city of Chicago. It is the district of big hotels, big business, huge department stores the trade centre of the city, with a population distinct from that of its home section. The hotels are filled with traveling men, particularly at the end of the week when they come from the surrounding country to "Sunday over" there, or to get into touch with their firms. In the upper stories of the big business buildings live thousands of engineers, janitors, and care-takers whose very existence is scarcely suspected by the crowd.

This, too, is where the homeless army of young men and women who live in boarding houses and furnished rooms spend their days, perhaps the most forlorn class in any great city, as many a reader knows from personal experience. Of amusements, good and bad, there is never a lack. But Sunday, especially Sunday evening, brings hopeless boredom to those who either cannot afford, or do not fancy, the cheap shows. Once there were two great People's Churches with services in public halls. One has disbanded; the other, Central Church, still draws large audiences to the Auditorium in the morning. In the evening its doors are closed.

Into this situation came Clifford W. Barnes, a young theologian whom Presi

dent Harper had brought out with a group of Yale "fellows" to teach in the Chicago University. As an instructor in sociology he became the first man resident of Hull House and battled with the powers and principalities that obstructed Jane Addams's beneficent work, made speeches from cart-tails at election times; then, by and by, ran a little settlement of his own on the civic outposts. As opportunity offered here or there for a man's work, he held one or two pastorates in the city and the presidency of a minor college. During a year's residence in Paris where, in the absence of Rodman Wanamaker, he was acting President of the American Art Association, he had conducted with Mrs. Barnes a Sunday evening service for English-speaking students. They came in such crowds as to make the problem of providing houseroom always urgent. The Latin Quarter is not supposed to be especially fruitful soil for religious teaching. Here was proof that it was merely for want of tilling.

It was this experience that made Mr. Barnes consider the Loop District attentively. He saw a situation not unlike the one he had left behind in the Latin Quarter, and he believed that he had the right key to fit into it.

CHRISTIANITY BACKED BY CASH

Mr. Barnes is a man of action. Christianity to him means helping the neighbor. There resulted a series of interviews with some of Chicago's best citizens, business men like Mr. Adolphus C. Bartlett, John G. Shedd of Marshall Field & Co., Mr. Charles L. Hutchinson of the Corn Exchange National Bank, Mr. John T. Pirie, Mr. Eugene J. Buffington, President of the Illinois Steel Co., Mr. Henry P. Crowell of the Quaker Oats Co., Mr. David R. Forgan of the National City Bank, Mr. Franklin MacVeagh, Secretary of the Treasury, and Mr. William P. Sidley. The list is much longer than that, but as it stands here it is long enough to give an idea of the kind of men Mr. Barnes enlisted in the support of his Sunday Evening Club that was organized in the winter of 1908 "to maintain a service of Christian inspiration and fellow

ship in the business centre of Chicago." They guaranteed the cost of the experiment and in fact paid the first year's deficit. There has never been any since.

The question of location was soon settled. Two halls were offered, one that had room for seven hundred, the other, Orchestra Hall, which the people of Chicago built for Theodore Thomas as his musical home. When Orchestra Hall is packed to the last seat on the platform and in the top gallery it holds quite three thousand. The projectors of the Sunday Evening Club had the courage of their convictions -perhaps it would be more correct to say of Mr. Barnes's convictions — and they were not men to stop at half measures. They leased the large hall, and their faith was justified. It filled up rapidly during that first winter, and since then there has rarely been a Sunday evening, rain or shine, when it was not packed to the roof. The parallel of the Latin Quarter is complete: the puzzle of to-day is how to make more room. This last winter the great Auditorium Hall would have been leased, could permanent tenure have been guaranteed. That would have almost doubled the present membership of the "Club." REACHING THE "LONELY SUNDAY" MAN

How did they do it? Feeling sure that all that was needed was to make the meetings and their purpose known, they went to work systematically to do that. They enlisted the newspapers first. Then cards were placed in every hotel, and freely circulated, giving the hour and place of their meetings. For a while, when there was yet room to spare, every guest who had registered in the hotels of the district up to a late hour Saturday night found a personal letter in his box at noon on Sunday asking him to come. As I said, it worked from the start. They came so early, for fear of losing the chance of a seat, that the lobby of the building was crowded an hour and a half before the hall was open. The people — they were nearly all men stood around and waited patiently enough, but a lot of good time was going to waste.

Mr. Barnes considered once more and talked it over with his wife. Up in the

environment that suggests the theatre, no one would know that he was not in a church. Some citizen reads the scripture. The last time I was there it was Mr. Clarence F. Funk, General Manager of the International Harvester Company. Doctor Stuart, editor of the Northwestern Christian Advocate, prayed. There were the usual anthems and then Mr. Barnes, who is the president of the Club, made the announcements. And there cropped out a characteristic touch of commercial Chicago.

building was a large room that could hold two hundred and fifty. They hired that and invited in the crowd downstairs. Mrs. Barnes played for them, and they sang. Her husband talked to them, and they listened and brought their friends. Very soon there were more wanting to get in than the room would hold. Again they had to move, this time into the big hall where, for half an hour before the evening service, husband and wife now carry on a Bible class, would you call it? Hardly that; it is more like a neighborly gathering where they all sing together and have a good time, and Mr. Barnes tells stories of the life of Jesus in the simple language of plain men. He told me once that he shivered and shook and was afraid he couldn't do it right. If that is the way, he is like the old general who regularly before a battle went away by himself and told his limbs to shiver and get done with it, he had work to do; and then, when the fit was over, went out and won the fight. There will be, in long after years, many a Chicago business man who will remember those meetings with a glow of grateful feeling. The "Class" now numbers seventeen hundred men, regular in attendance.

A REMARKABLE MUSICAL SETTING

At 7.35 the doors of the hall are thrown open to the rush, and the evening service begins with orchestral music. The great choir that leads the worship at the Chicago Sunday Evening Club is another of its achievements. They had volunteers first, and a quartette of highly trained singers. Of their experiences with these was evolved the present choir of eighty voices from Chicago's music schools that comes twice a week for practice, glad of the chance, and gives to the service a musical setting the like of which one shall seek far to find. It lends, in its simple robes, the one touch of ritual to the meeting.

When all the hall can hold are in, the audience stands to sing the doxology and recite the Lord's Prayer. There has been no occasion in my experience when I have not had to bore my way through hundreds left outside, for whom there was no room. Within, except for the physical

"Any one," he said, "who desires to join or affiliate with the church, any church- this is not a church- will find a committee in the hall ready to do business with them."

And business booms, I am told. Naturally the churches approve. They would anyhow, having common sense.

$20,000 IN THE COLLECTION BOX

There is a collection, of course. It has never been emphasized, but, as an expression of the conscience of the meeting, it has grown steadily from forty or fifty dollars until now it averages a hundred. And Mr. Barnes tells me that, among the contributions which aggregate the large sum of $20,000 that goes to support the work, are many of five dollars or less that clearly represent the gratitude of traveling men and clerks who thus pay their club membership fees the only way they are ever collected.

"Come Thou Almighty King," they sang the last Sunday evening I worshipped with them, and then came the address, another hymn, and the benediction. It is a rare inspiration to look into those thousands of faces from the platform. A suggestive departure from the ordinary church congregation strikes one at once: three fourths of them are men, young men and old men, the grist of the business district. There are no cranks among them, or, if they are there, they are not heard of, for there is no discussion. But not infrequently does one hear an old-time "Amen, Lord!" And after the organ has ceased booming, many a gray-haired brother comes to shake the speaker by the hand and give him a hearty "God bless