an attractive place of inn-like comfort? covered with such hotels, and more than arm of European travel for a large proour tourists consists in the pleasure of n at these inns. You can't become a r or a Carnegie by carrying on a hotel of but there is a very pretty income in it an or woman that knows how and will rouble. Indeed, with our American tenbig expenditures, there is doubtless room ber of hotels of moderate size and uncharacter which, having established a repr exceptional excellence, could command her than those of the Waldorf-Astoria or gis, and whose proprietors would make a But what we are vastly more interested in of a hotel at moderate prices, with little with solid merit, which would carry on old tradition of genuine inn-keeping. traveling people. We knock around a We are all apt to need all the comfort we can get in the process. And there of us who look wistfully for the kind of ch Shenstone's famous and pathetic lines

en:

hoe'er has traveled life's dull round, Where'er his stages may have been, ay sigh to think he still has found His warmest welcome at an inn.

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE MASS

(November 16, 1907)

What has become of the doctrine that the world has got beyond the stage where single individuals count for much? Ten and twenty years ago, no notion was more frequently aired, or met with more general acceptance among people-and their name. is legion-who are ready to believe that the world can be made over in a generation or so. Time was, so the story went, when a man of remarkable powers towered so high above the general level that he filled the public eye and dominated the national landscape, or, it might be, the world-scene; but that was long ago, before the days when the railway and the trolley and the telephone had penetrated into the remotest corners of the earth, when public education had raised the standard of the common intelligence to unheard-of heights, and when the penny newspaper and the cheap magazine had converted almost into a practical reality the idea that all men are equal. No longer was was there that enormous difference which formerly existed between the big man and the average man; and such as it was, the difference was no longer magnified into awe-inspiring dimensions by the glamour that surrounds the unknown. The time when single personal figures would play a part of overshadowing importance in the world's affairs, either practical or ideal, was past.

Such was the legend of the new earth, so familiar

a few years ago. What has become of it? Who ever hears of it now? Did ever a widespread notion get so sudden and complete an eclipse? The fact is, there was never any reason to believe any such thing. The possible potency of an individual has not been affected in the least by the changes that modern science and invention have brought about. Time was when it was a great feat to be able to read; now that everybody can read, it is no feat at all, and the ability to do so does not in the slightest lessen the difference between the ordinary man and a Helmholtz or a Darwin; it is just as great as the like difference was in the days of Newton or of Aristotle. But there are always periods when highly notable personalities do not emerge into great conspicuousness; and it happened that, such a period coinciding with an enormous development of modern conveniences and improvements, those who are prone to forget the depth of the deeper things of life jumped to the conclusion. that the day of the great man, or the big man, was past. But then came a series of years in which, for one reason or other, it can almost be said that the world got to talking about individuals and nothing else; and the idea of the new earth in which the average man was everything and the exceptional man simply did a little more than the ordinary man to help things along has quietly disappeared.

How general this change has been it is almost laughable to notice. In our own country, the air has been so full of Roosevelt that one might think that there was no room for another; and yet the

it would be very difficult to match. of Hearst is a contribution to the sa is a man outside all parties-except been personally organized by himsel has to be dealt with as a formidable As for the growth of Governor Hug national figure by sheer force of ability quietly manifested in the wo his hand, the significance of Gover Minnesota or of Mayor Johnson of other things that might be mentione to say just what they will amount t scale; but certainly all these things possibilities of the power and imp individual.

And the story is the same across only has the German Emperor for n a figure of absorbing interest to the world, but the interest in Presiden the feeling of his importance have b considered, far more striking in Eu in his own country. Nor is that all did King Edward ascend the throm to be perceived that even this quiet man, with a past anything but impr

illustrated the same thesis of the possipersonal power even more strikinglyenon of Kipling. Finally, not to make tale, and to wind up with that which moral more strongly than any other ine is the story of the Dreyfus case. Had n stood out with Roman firmness for his

had not his devoted wife and her secrated themselves to the task; had not ic individuals-Scheurer-Kestner, Zola, hrown themselves with uncalculating e and undismayed ardor into what impossible undertaking;-had any one ersonal acts been wanting, the world e not gone through the most intensely isode of recent times, and the history of he Twentieth Century would have been om what it has been and is to be.