pendence of opinion, has been for them a severe industrial handicap. Economically speaking, they have been fighting a twentiethcentury fight with the industrial weapons of the early nineteenth.

It is all very well to make our fields grow two blades of grass where but one has previously grown; but when to double the crop tends to halve the pay received, the producer has certainly just cause for complaint. Because of clumsy and obsolete methods of distribution, his larger investment in skill, labor, and material, his doubled charges for transportation and for commission fees, frequently result in a smaller net return than under the oldstyle farming. Upon the hungry city dweller who reads of bumper crop and hopes for lower bills the effect is equally disappointing. The supply barrel, he finds, has grown, but not the funnel through which he has hitherto

been fed. Both farmer and consumer are heavily burdened because we have failed to discover any generally adequate or economically efficient method of putting the product of the farm into the mouth of the consumer.

The solution of this difficult problem has been further complicated by the fact that some farmers short-sightedly continue the moribund policy of caveat emptor even when they attempt to take their rightful place in the complex organism of modern industry. "Let the buyer beware!" may be a workable method of selling a horse when the bargainers stand face to face; to attempt to dispose of produce in a distant market under such a rule of procedure spells instant and utter disaster. Wherever farmers-and manufacturers-have failed to recognize the truth of this statement they have in the end paid dearly for whatever temporary advantage they may have seemed to secure.

A

Ta time when income tax proposals

are attracting so much attention, it may interest the readers of The Outlook to know the outlines of the system now in force in the United Kingdom. I am not qualified to express any opinion on its suitability to American conditions, but I have seen a good many arguments based on a very natural misunderstanding of our income tax laws, and I should like to put the actual facts before the American public. I have converted the figures into American currency, neglecting fractions less than half a cent.

The standard rate is 6 cents on the dollar, modified by various reductions and additions. Incomes under $800 a year pay no tax. Incomes between $800 and $3,500 receive a graduated abatement.

"Earned incomes" (as opposed to incomes derived from property) pay only 4 cents on the dollar (instead of 6 cents on the dollar), provided the man's total income is under $10,000.

Incomes of over $25,000 pay a supertax of 21⁄2 cents on the dollar, raising their total contribution to nearly 81⁄2 cents on the dollar.

The tax, therefore, varies from less than 1 per cent on incomes just over $800 to nearly 81⁄2 per cent for millionaires.

The tax at the standard rate of 6 cents is collected "at the source" as far as possible; that is to say, in the case of stocks it is paid by the corporation and deducted from the dividend; in the case of real estate it is paid by the occupier and deducted by him from the rent if he is not the owner; in the case of partnerships it is paid by the firm and deducted from the profits before division; and in the case of foreign bonds it is paid by the bankers who cash the interest coupons. The result is that in most cases the tax is in the first place paid to the Treasury by some third party, and not by the person on whom it ultimately falls. In the first year in which this system was adopted it about doubled the Treasury's receipts from the income tax.

Any one may be required by the Treasury to return a statement of his income, but in practice it is necessary only for three classes of persons: first, those suspected of having more than $25,000 a year; secondly, those who earn a professional or commercial income not "taxed at the source;" and, thirdly, those who wish to take advantage of the various abatements. Any person who has any income already taxed, and whose total income is small enough to deserve a reduction, can obtain a refund of the appropriate sum by applying to

the local tax officer and sending him a statement of his income from every source, with evidence of the amount of tax already deducted.

The incomes of a husband and his wife are treated as one income, to the great indignation of the suffragettes, but those of other members of a family are assessed separately, even though they live in one household; which often gives a substantial abatement of tax in the case of large families of children who may be beneficiaries of a trust fund. When the recent enactment of the supertax resulted in an application to Mr. Bernard Shaw for a statement of the joint incomes of himself and Mrs. Shaw, suspected of exceeding $25,000, he made the ingenious reply that his wife refused to disclose to him the amount of her income; but on the whole the system works smoothly and well.

Insurance corporations pay tax on their ordinary dividends, but not on surplus profits divided among policy-holders, which are regarded as an increase of capital. A policy

holder is also entitled, within certain limits, to exemption from income tax on sums paid by him in premiums on a life policy.

The above outline must not be taken as a complete account of the English income tax, but it may, I hope, supply enough material for comparison with the bill now before Congress. Beyond the natural aversion of all mankind to the payment of direct taxes, and the complaint of the Opposition (whichever party may be in power) that the rate is too high for times of peace, there is no serious criticism of the income tax nor of its method of collection. The tax has been in force since 1842, and was originally a "flat rate" on all incomes over a certain minimum. The elaborate graduations now obtaining have been built up by degrees, and are satisfactory to all classes except the payers of superOf the latter class most of us would say, in the language of a beggar who was told of a rich man suffering from loss of appetite, "I wish I'd only got an 'arf of 'is complaint."

tax.

Μ'

R. HERBERT," the central figure in Hopkinson Smith's "The ArmChair at the Inn," is really Her

bert Ward, the sculptor.

There is in Paris no more interesting character than Herbert Ward. He began his work in art with drawing and attempts at watercolor painting. At twenty-one years of age he turned up in Africa, having previously traveled in New Zealand, Australia, and Borneo. He remained in Central Africa for five years. He was there at the time of Stanley's arrival, and, knowing the country well, collected four hundred men and aided the explorer on his journey. A few years later Mr. Ward came back and established a studio in London. There he was hopelessly hampered by the stereotyped formalism then governing the Royal Academy. But in Paris a very different reception met his work in sculpture, on which he had now started; and the more sympathetic atmosphere induced Mr. Ward. to settle in the French capital, where he has accomplished his life endeavor-the depictgof primitive African life.

Mr. Ward is not only a sculptor but a writer. One of the very best books that has ever been written about the African forest is his Voice from the Congo."

In his life endeavor Mr. Ward has happily been able to accumulate about him a great collection of African trophies. Perhaps the greatest item in this collection is that of African weapons, more than seven thousand in number. The collection also includes drums, primeval implements of war and the chase, and many rare bits of ancient domestic utility. It is now announced that Mr. Ward will leave this splendid ethnological collection to the Smithsonian Institution at Washington. All Americans are to be congratulated on the chance one day to see in their own land this unique presentation of the primitive life of one of the most primitive of races.

This gift makes all Americans in a peculiar sense the debtors of Mr. Ward. It is a singular act of munificence on his part, and one for which our countrymen should be profoundly grateful.

No other modern sculptor has done anything of the kind that Mr. Ward has done, and no other modern sculptor-indeed, we can truthfully say, no sculptor of any previous age-has possessed his manysided equipment for the work. He is an explorer who has wandered far and wide over the world's waste places; he has lived for years in the steaming, danger-laden tropical forests of East Africa; he knows, as very few white men have ever known, the strange, furtive, cruel life, brute and human, of these forests. He is, without exception, the only great artist of any time who has ever had such an experience. I am saying this after the vain effort to remember any other artist of his ability who has ever had his opportunities and profited by them.

His figures, most of which are in bronze, possess a strange compound of realism and symbolism. They are emphatically individual figures, and yet they are far more their types, and they represent the brooding African spirit in its broadest and deepest significance. Those who know Mr. Ward know that, in addition to his love of art for art's sake, there is in him the determination to use his mastery of art to help the people with whom he has so long lived

and for whom he has felt and shown such genuine friendship. But because he has this serious purpose, it must not for a moment be supposed that there is any offensive didacticism in his art. It is art, genuine and unique of its kind, standing at the uttermost limit from the conventional type of ladylike sculpture one sees in most drawing-rooms and galleries. Like the professed realists, Mr. Ward has never hesitated to depict what at first sight seems to be ugly and grotesque, but, unlike the ultra-realists, he depicts it so that the onloooker does not dwell only on the ugliness and the grotesqueness; for he has put into it the soul that lies behind the painful or rugged exterior. In his figures the Negro of the Congo is seen on his native soil, childlike and cruel, friendly and brutal, age-old man who lived in Europe a hundred thousand years ago, and yet a man with eternal youth in his soul that has preserved him in his stalwart strength to the present. All the mystery and the savagery and the suffering and the ugliness and the harsh beauty of the African forest come out in Mr. Ward's works.

Only an artist could have done what he has done, and no artist could have done it had there not lain within him the soul of a great man, a man both strong and pitiful.

To the Editor of the New York “Times :"

Dear Sir- .. The present capacity at Bedford is for 320 inmates; the present number of inmates is 498, leaving 178 to sleep in cots in the hallways, the lavatories, the gymnasium; in short, wherever a bed can be placed. The appropriation of $500,000 would make provision for 325 inmates more than at present, which would care for the present excess and allow for some growth in the future. I have twice visited the Bedford Reformatory under cir

cumstances which gave me an opportunity to study somewhat carefully its principles, its method, and its spirit. Miss Davis, the Superintendent, is a graduate of Vassar College, and studied sociology both in Germany and at the Chicago University because of her interest in the practical problem what to do with vicious and criminal women. She has taken up her present work inspired by enthusiasm and equipped by special study. Her enthusiasm has communicated itself to her assistants, and the atmosphere at Bed

ford Reformatory is one of mutual helpfulness and inspiring hopefulness.

When a prostitute is brought before a New York judge, he may discharge her, with or without a fine; he may send her to the workhouse for a short term--I believe three months is the maximum-or he may send her to the Bedford Reformatory. The experience of the past indicates that the deterrent power of fear is very ineffective as a cure for crime, yet something may be said for the deterrent power of fear as a preventive, if not as a cure. But a fine or three months in the workhouse has no deterrent power. When the fine is paid or the three months have expired, the girl has no option but to take to the street and resume her vicious career. No home and no factory will or indeed well can take her in and give her a chance for a better life.

This is just what the Bedford Reformatory does. It brings her into an atmosphere not merely of cleanliness and of industry, but of hopefulness. It puts before the girl an open door. It inspires her with courage to believe that she can enter it if she chooses to do so. It inspires that wish in her, and, by training, gives her some measure of preparation for earning an honest livelihood. I am writing without the complete statistics of this Reformatory before me. It must suffice to say that while practically every girl treated by the other method goes back to prey upon the community again, the figures show that less than one-quarter of those who are discharged from the Reformatory after a two years' imprisonment resume their vicious occupation.

..

Nineteen centuries ago Jesus said that the criminal classes should be treated as though they were diseased. Not they that are well," he said, but they that are sick need a physician." For the deterrent power of fear which pagan Rome used he substituted the inspiring power of hope. Modern penologists are unanimous in accepting this view of the phenomenon of professional crime and vice. There are a few girls who deliberately and with their eyes open choose prostitution as a profession, as they might choose millinery or dressmaking, but these are very few. Some girls are seduced, betrayed, and abandoned; some are captured by wiles or by force and enslaved; some are driven into professional vice by the exceeding difficulty of earning a livelihood by honest industry; some are enticed into it by their love of pleasure and of display and by the false notion that it is an

easy way of earning money; some drop into it through ignorance and incompetent or vicious home training, and a great many through inherent mental defectiveness. When these facts are considered-and there is no doubt about them-it ought to be perfectly apparent to every thoughtful person that the first duty of society is not to punish the girl with a fine or imprisonment, but to find out the cause of her fatal choice and provide for her both a way of escape and the strength to take advantage of it. This is what the Bedford Reformatory is doing, under wise, strong, inspiring guidance and control. Those who are carrying it on are inspired by the feeling of good will and the possibility of real hope for those that have been regarded hopeless; but they are not sentimentalists; they have no false notions of life, and they do not think the remedy for wrong-doing is coddling the wrong-doer. There are no prison walls about the Bedford yard, yet attempted escapes from Bedford are rare.

But Bedford is not a playhouse. The girls are set to work and their teachers work with them." They do the gardening, put in the ice, care for the lawns, raise the pigs, and run the dairy. In the last year they have redeemed a swamp of some five acres, turning the stream which watered it into a new channel, draining the land, and putting it into vegetables. They are particularly skillful at making cement walks and stairways. They have even made a wonderful cement pig-sty. If the legislators at Albany could spend half an hour in the workhouse on Blackwell's Island and then an hour and a half in the Bedford Reformatory, I cannot doubt that the appropriation asked for would be granted without opposition.

I am sending you with this letter two pamphlets, for your further information, and I venture to express the hope that you will not merely give a place in your columns to this brief communication, but that you will yourself editorially urge upon the Governor and the Legislature of the State that they make the appropriation necessary to give to the Bedford Reformatory this equipment indispensable to its adequate continuance of its work. Yours sincerely, LYMAN ABBOTT.

Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York.
April 30, 1913.

In connection with this letter the " "Times' records its very cordial indorsement of the Bedford Reformatory.

Y

OU have asked me to write you how the forest affects the flow of streams, and I am very glad indeed to do so. First of all, it is well to understand that seven years' rainfall, more or less, is stored in the first hundred feet of the earth's surface, so that the earth itself is the greatest of all water reservoirs. The streams are supplied (except in times of flood) mainly from this great body of water which the soil and the rocks contain. It is this reservoir that feeds the springs.

To this great storehouse of water the forest holds the key. When the leaves and litter from the trees fall and decay, they keep the surface moist and permeable. Then the fallen rain sinks easily into the great reservoir of the soil, to seep out later through the flanks of the mountains into the headwaters of the streams. Thus there is less water in the brooks and rivers in flood time, and more in time of drought, than there would be if the forest were gone.

But when the forest has been cut off, when the surface has been burned over and has dried out, as it sometimes does, into a cover almost as waterproof as a roof, then the fallen rain cannot penetrate into the soil, but rushes in great volume down the slopes into the streams, and often produces terrible floods, such as cost this country more than a hundred million dollars every year.

This is one of the ways in which the forest affects streamflow, but not the only one. You may easily make proof of another way

in which the forest acts upon the fallen rain. You will need a little table, a glass of water, and a piece of blotting-paper. Tilt the table so that its surface is steep like the side of a hill. Then pour a few drops from the glass of water on the tilted surface of the table. The water has hardly touched the table before it runs off. Then lay the piece of blottingpaper on the tilted table, and let the drops of water fall on that. Instead of running off they sink in; and if the table under the blotting-paper were permeable, part of the water would sink into that, too. If you keep

on pouring long enough, the fallen water will begin to seep out slowly from the lower edge of the blotting-paper. So the forest floor absorbs the fallen rain, offers a mechanical resistance to the swift passage of the water into the streams, and lets what water the earth does not absorb work its way gradually down to the lower levels and into the watercourses.

A long controversy has raged between those who, like the army engineers and the late Chief of the Weather Bureau, hold that the forests have no influence on streamflow, and the foresters who, because they know the woods and the mountains, have long known (even if, until recently, they could prove it only by observation and not by actual figures) that the forest has a powerful effect on the distribution of the fallen rain. Now we know from definite measurements made by the Forest Service in California, and from the recent remarkable series of measurements of