and delivering the bonds. The cost of the bonds will not be heavy, since they are to be engraved by the Secretary of the Treasury.

The Federal Farm Loan Board has been given judicial as well as executive powers over the system, with the right to settle debts or claims of any of its units, in the event of dissolution. The Board may call upon the AttorneyGeneral, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Secret Service, for free advice, counsel, and assistance. Finally, by making an initial appropriation of $100,000, Congress has adopted the policy of supplying the Board with any money needed for establishing and organizing land banks and associations.

IV

Thus every source of funds, public and private, has been opened and every special privilege and other known method of extending government aid has been accorded. If there be an exception, it is that the Board has not yet the power to confiscate titles and forcibly to acquire lands for allotment and sale on credit to its beneficiaries. But agrarianism and the redistribution by law of all kinds of landed properties are not improbable outcomes of this extraordinary system, in view of the pressure which the millions of trade unionists, combined with influential colonization societies, have now resolved to exert upon Congress. The farmers did not ask for this system, nor was there any general demand for it. They were on the way toward organizing and mobilizing their own resources, when this blow was struck against private enterprise and coöperation. They would have been satisfied simply by facilities for enabling them to utilize their own abundant and substantial credit. But after a feeble attempt at doing the right

thing through a national law for bond and mortgage companies, politics seems to have prevailed and the solution of the problem fell into the hands of radicals and persons seeking to distribute immigrant aliens in rural sections at the government's risk and expense. They accomplished their ulterior motives, in disregard of the correct principles of land credit and to the detriment of the average farmer of native stock.

The result is this system, which is neither coöperative nor purely agricultural, and which must inevitably have the extension foreshadowed by the resolutions of the American Federation of Labor. It is governmental, because, aside from other reasons, no bond can be issued except through the Federal Farm Loan Board, the Farm Loan Commissioner, and the government's registrars and because no loan can be made except with the consent of the government's appraisers and examiners. The right granted to the borrowers to elect the officers of the associations and the majority of the directors of the federal land banks amounts to nothing, for the reason that they could not manage the business even if they elected every director. So the only effect of the stock subscription is to impose a liability on each borrower for all the loans in a sum equal to ten per cent of his own.

The lack of promised coöperative features might be pardonable if the act had provided only for farm-mortgaging. But such is not the case. The federal and joint-stock land banks may use United States bonds, instead of farm mortgages, as collateral for their bonds; invest all their funds in United States bonds; or deposit all their securities and current funds subject to check with member banks of the Federal Reserve system at any agreed interest. The farm mortgages that the federal land banks may take are of a very restricted

kind indeed. In brief, the act has established a tax-exempted and highly privileged government banking system for disposing of government securities and for aiding industrial and commercial enterprises. With its district banks, regional branches, and local agencies, it will place all banks and associations operating under state charters at a disadvantage; and yet, as a matter of law, it need not lend one dollar to a farmer.

Nobody can foretell what will constitute the major part of its business in the years to come; but a great proportion of its funds, on account of their withdrawable nature, can never be invested in long-term loans to individuals. The acceptance of deposits is not a proper function of a land-mortgage bank. The issuance of bonds and the pyramiding of debts against deposits or assets are dangerous rights for a savings institution. The purchase of United States bonds and the amassing of credits in the Federal Reserve system can serve no agricultural purpose. Subsidizing special interests is an injustice to the public. The mixing of government intervention with individual initiative and private enterprise is an absurdity because no private individual can compete, much less coöperate, with the United States. The system is a hodge-podge of blunders wrong from any angle of vision. The wisdom and honesty of the Board, clothed with arbitrary powers, will be no more capable of avoiding its pernicious possibilities than was the common-sense of Congress effective in preventing its establishment.

This combination of government finance and farm finance defies every construction of the Constitution save the broadest. Congress cannot exempt a corporation from the taxing powers of the states or of their political divisions, except for discharging a federal govern

ment function. Farm-mortgaging is not such a function. The framers of the system, however, declare that this will be its chief object, and they pretend that the land banks were authorized to be designated as depositaries and financial agents of the government, and that their bonds and mortgages were made the government's instrumentalities, simply with the view of getting around constitutional objections. But the Supreme Court has said in regard to subterfuges of this kind and their use for a private corporation that ‘The casual circumstance of its being employed by the government in the transaction of its fiscal affairs would no more exempt its private business from the operation of that power [of the state to tax] than it would exempt the private business of any individual employed in the same manner.' Moreover, the Court has even doubted that Congress has a right to establish or to privilege a company in any way 'having private trade and private profit for its great end and principal object,' or to delegate the power which it possesses under the Constitution, 'to borrow money on the credit of the United States.'

The system is liable to attack on all these points. The government cannot realize any pecuniary advantage from it directly. Although the government must pay all its overhead expenses and advance public funds to it at the lowest interest rates in any amounts deemed advisable by the Secretary of the Treasury, the government is expressly forbidden dividends on shares. On the other hand, the system may admit any qualified individual as a borrower or investor, and allow him to participate in all the profits, increased, as they will be, through the government's management and bounties. The bonds and mortgages are means for borrowing money. Since they are declared to be 'instrumentalities of the Government

of the United States,' they are not only morally, but legally, backed by the government's credit. Consequently Congress ought at least to have specified the total that could be made. But, contrary to sanity if not to the Constitution, Congress has delegated to a bureau in the Treasury Department and to private individuals the power, not only to make these government instrumentalities, but also to involve the government's credit thereby in unlimited amounts for long periods, without any restriction as to interest rate except five per cent per annum for the bonds and six per cent per annum for mortgages.

Furthermore, little groups of ten or more farmers, seeking cheap money for purely private purposes, may issue cer

tificates at four per cent per annum which, although they are to be neither certified nor authenticated by public officers, must upon request of the holders, be converted into instrumentalities of the Government of the United States. Joint-stock land banks will be merely profit-making companies for private investors. This may also be said of the twelve federal land banks, since their stockholders and the majority of their directors are eventually to be private individuals. So nothing justifies the use of the free services, money, and credit of the government or the other special privileges made available for the system. Congress has sowed the wind; the country must reap the whirlwind now set brewing by the American Federation of Labor.

I

IF Mr. Joseph Conrad appears at first glimpse as a romancer, - and it is certain that to many readers he does, - the explanation is simply that he is a deeper realist than is commonly perceived. There is a truth outside of truth which is romance; there is a truth within truth which is the living heart of truth. Romance is a vision; but this heart of truth, the objective of the greatest realists, of whom Mr. Conrad is one, is a patient discovery.

These matters can be made clear if we regard each living organism, from the individual life up to the mass of collective lives, as being an affair of circles within circles, spheres within spheres, from an outermost layer of superficial reality to an innermost core or principle of reality in which all that envelops it is implied, explained, and justified. The truth about life is like (shall we say?) a series of Chinese dolls, each fitting inside a larger until a largest one contains them all. The romancer looks at the outermost one and imagines still another outside that; his truth is in the similitude of life viewed in the large, but grander, more free in perspective, fitting reality as a garment fits the body, not as a glove the hand. But the realist's quest is inward. His inspection of the single life takes him beneath the outer husk of act and habit, expression and gesture, to the stratum of emotion and fancy where these have their root; and, perhaps, under that to the substratum, made up of heredity and environ

ment and pure accident, which we call character. But he has not really acquitted himself until, beneath the last wrapping of all, he has uncovered some inmost kernel of truth, some such secret dream or frozen despair as obscurely rules every life, giving to all the outward manifestations a logic and a legibility not otherwise theirs. And if he confront the medley of lives which make up the general spectacle of life, his concern is still with its hidden centre, the secret aspiration of all mankind the dream of brotherhood.

As a result of the inward bent of Mr. Conrad's mind and interest, it follows that no one else has written with so profound a sense of the awful privacy of the soul, the intense, palpitating secrecy which underlies even the most placid and composed phenomena of the everyday world. Every one of his stories, properly understood, is a story of mystery, though with hardly anything of the conventional machinery of mystery. Readers will have noticed the extraordinary number of passages in his work which involve the physical presence of somebody or something hidden: evidently the bare fact of concealment fascinates this author. But the whispering intensity of such passages is only the reflex of Mr. Conrad's general feeling that everything in the world is in thralldom to secrecy, that secrecy is almost the law of life. Every being is at bottom inexpressible and trying to express itself, every truth is in essence a paradox and struggling for consistency. The 'secret sharer' haunts the cap

tain's cabin and the captain's thoughts until he seems to have become the captain's other self; but the unearthly and dreamlike reality of the whispered consultations of those two is as nothing to the reality of secrets buried in the consciousness too deep for even whispered consultations. That young rebel stowaway is the negation of tranquillity in a stolid and respectable ship's company; it is an outrage upon all fitness that he should be there and they innocently not know. But he is only an obscure symbol of rebel man precariously living on his pin-prick of lighted dust in space, a negation of the serene immensity of the cosmos which mocks him.

It is important to understand this about Mr. Conrad, for it is the heart and marrow of his kind of irony. Even his verbal irony is only a way of reminding us of the paradox of outer and inner, the incredible gap between the appearance and the reality. In Nostromo, his account of the horrible scene of Señor Hirsch's tortured and violent end is sprinkled with reminders of the utterly commonplace character of Hirsch's previous life and occupation. The tragedy of an old man whose world has dropped to pieces round him is described in these terms: 'The enthusiastic and severe soul of Giorgio Viola, sailor, champion of oppressed humanity, enemy of kings and, by the grace of Mrs. Gould, hotel-keeper of the Sulaco harbor, had descended into the open abyss of desolation among the shattered vestiges of his past.' Thus, even as a stylist, Mr. Conrad is occupied with the ironic or tragic unfitness of things. He reminds us by a system of allusions that the strange and sinister things that people do are never so strange as what people are; and he makes the secret inner reality throw a sombre or a shimmering light outward over the plain coarse texture of the dullest lives and occupations.

This primary interest of Mr. Conrad in the inmost verity of things, and the secondary quality of his interest in their external appearances, are the prevailing notes in all that he has to say of his own art. 'Art itself,' he says, 'may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.' The artist must 'reveal the substance of its truth — disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment.' If he succeed, 'you shall find there... all you demand and, perhaps, also, that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.' The emotional side of life will not suffice for him, as it does for the sentimentalist in fiction: 'His aim is to reach the very fount of laughter and tears.'

Mr. Conrad has no lack of the modern realist-reporter's facility in transcribing minute surface aspects of life; indeed, his notation of them is singularly firm and sharp. But he transcribes them only as indices of the moral life which at once implies and transcends them; and he penetrates further into the dusky hinterland of character and motive than any other modern 'historian of hearts' - the more remarkably because quite without the apparatus of the psychological novelist.

To be a historian of hearts, in the sense of feeling the isolation and secret mysterious beauty of each individual adventure, is to be almost necessarily a historian of the lonely. Mr. Conrad speaks somewhere of 'the indestructible loneliness that surrounds, envelops, clothes every human soul from the cradle to the grave, and, perhaps, beyond.' And instinctively he chooses from the medley of lives those that are most detached from 'the community of hopes and fears,' most cut off, by some agency of race, of inheritance, of charac