it astonishes him, the more helpful to him it will be. Probably Professor Butler of Columbia University may have astonished him by his recent address at Vassar College. "The newspaper is fast losing its moral influence," said Professor Butler. The able editor will not agree with that; he does, in fact, publicly disagree, and expresses his dissent from so sweeping a judgment with characteristic energy. But Professor Butler's opinion is nevertheless a fact, of which the able editor has to take account. And there are many other such facts; they are far more numerous than the journalist, from his journalistic point of view, is inclined to believe.

Let me return for a moment to one of those practical points which I passed over. I wish, though, most briefly, to urge upon the young writer, first of all, the value of being able to write. It sounds a truism. It is, in fact, an elementary maxim seldom practised, seldom carried into full effect, seldom used as it ought to be, seldom accepted by the beginner in its true sense. The prevailing notion in journalism is that of Dogberry-"God hath blessed you with a good name; to be a well-favored man is the gift of fortune, but to write and read comes by nature." Well, Dogberry was a considerable philosopher in his way, but he was not infallible. The object of the writer is to gain access to the mind of the reader. How is he to do that? Not merely by the possession of knowledge or of ideas which he wishes to impart to others. He may know history and human nature, he may have mastered every subject on which he wishes to discourse, but if he cannot discourse, his mission as a teacher or journalist is doomed to failure.

He would not expect to gain the ear of an English audience if he addressed them in Hebrew. If he be dull or confused or pedantic, he might as well speak in Hebrew.

M. Veuillot, editor of the great Paris ultramontane journal L'Univers, one of the most effective writers of his time in the press, said: "The journalist who writes a sentence which does not convey its full meaning to the reader at first sight-a sentence which has to be read twice-does not know his business."

That need not be stretched to cover other kinds of writing, but it is true that what is read in a newspaper is read rapidly, often hurriedly-a very different thing

and always with the desire to find out in the shortest possible time what the writer has to say. If the first glance does not tell, seldom will the reader give you, another. You must bring your man down with the first barrel; he will be gone before you can explode a second cartridge. Lucidity, simplicity, directness, those are the qualities of style the young writer must try for. Others will come after it is easy to embroider or to add color-let those come first, and if he has anything to say he will gain attention and keep it.

A man very different from Veuillot, the editor of a very popular and successful English journal which circulates very largely among what in England is called the middle class, said to a friend that he was looking out for a new man for his editorial page. "I can tell you," said the friend, "of an excellent writer, and a thinker as well." The editor answered: "I do not want an excellent writer; still less a thinker. I want a man who can put commonplace ideas into pompous English." There you have the two extremes

two conceptions of journalism by two men, each in his own way successful. Which do you prefer?

The same thought, says Pascal, changes according to the words which express it. The thought derives its dignity from the words. There is in that, as in everything the admirable Frenchman has written on style, a profound meaning and a direct practical value. I do not know of a better teacher or more useful guide. There is no thinker who teaches you more surely how to think, no writer whose style is of better example. The good French writers are all worth studying-I will state it in the most utilitarian way-for the purposes of journalism. They have the qualities which the best English writers lack or have in less degree-those qualities I named above-lucidity, simplicity, directness, and others. They will supplement and correct that training in English which the writer of English must have, and can have only by deep study of the best English writers. And if I were asked for a piece of practical advice to the young writer of English, I would say to him, "Read French, and do not read German." And read Pascal above all other great French writers.

If I dared, I should like to attempt a critical review of the literature of journal

ism that is, of its literary merits and demerits-here and in England and in France. But I suppose a man might hardly do that and escape alive. It were safer, though perhaps less honest, to rest content with the accepted Jingo doctrine that whatever is American is right. But I will go so far as to ask you to reject that doctrine, whether in literature or journalism or elsewhere; to open your minds to whatever is true and just and right, no matter what its place of origin, and, as Emerson said, to keep them open. There is in the American press much excellent writing, some which is supremely excellent, and much more which is slovenly. And there are in the best American papers certain neologisms, certain solecisms, certain barbarisms, certain flippancies, the prevalence of which I think a serious menace to the American literature of the future. We permit ourselves an intolerable license of speech, intolerable freedoms with an ancient and noble tongue. These are perhaps but the diversions of the young giant trying his muscles. If he persists, they will end in permanent deformities. He will have, as Johnson said, the contortions of the sibyl without her inspiration, the nodosity of the oak without its strength. I entreat you to believe that these ravages upon the English tongue have no flavor of patriotism in them. If we nourish grudges against England, this is not the way to pay them off. We injure ourselves, not the English. We debase the language, which is as much our inheritance as theirs. What we received from the Bible and Shakespeare and Milton and Burke-are we to put it to base uses, or to treasure and reverence it?

These are some of the questions which the young American has to ask himself. Let him not believe that standards of speech consecrated by centuries of honorable observance may be violated safely, or that the caprice of to-day is a better law for his guidance than the immemorial usage of the noblest of our race. "We may put in our claim," said Burke, in one of his memorable eulogies upon England, "to as ample and as early a share in all the improvements in science, in arts, and in literature which have illuminated and adorned the modern world as any other nation in Europe. We think one main cause of this improvement was our not despising the patrimony of know

ledge which was left us by our forefathers."

That is as true for us to-day as it was for Burke and his countrymen rather more than a hundred years ago-true in all things as in literature. It is precisely that appeal to the conservative instinct which ought to be most effective with us. The press, above all other institutions, ought, I think, to ground itself upon that. Whether it does or not, every one can judge. Every one may know what the aim of American journalism is, and to what extent it yields to ambitions more or less openly avowed. There are journals which seem to conceive that society exists in order to supply them with what is called news. Publicity is their panacea for all social ills. Well, there is only too much publicity, yet the social ills grow worse and not better. If the journal is to fulfil its high mission, to recover its authority, to point the way to higher ideas of national life, it will ultimately choose other methods than these. must appeal to the best and not to the worst-or even to the second best--elements of social and political life. greater degree of reserve, an absence of self-assertion, a constant fidelity to ideas and principles, a uniform respect for the immunities of both private and public life, an appeal to conscience - these are some of the means by which it may become the real expression of that spirit which is the spirit of the best people. It is the best people, the thoughtful minority-the remnant, as Arnold said - the students, the true patriots, the men of settled views, with convictions which are not at the mercy of accidents or of majorities, who in the long-run govern this country. If they did not, there would presently be no country to govern.

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We often talk as if the majority governed. It never governs. Never in the history of the world has the majority really governed. Force, said Pascal, is queen of the world, not opinion; but it is opinion which makes use of force. And what is opinion? Mine is the unpopular view, but in my view it is the opinion of the instructed, thinking minority which presently takes possession of the minds of the majority. Minority has come to be a word to which democracy refers in a tone of contempt. But it is only the minorities of the present who are scorned. Socrates, Christ and his apostles, the Prot

estants, the Puritans, the abolitioniststhey were all minorities. When they become historical they are respected. The pulpits, the learned professions, the colleges-they are all minorities. Which is destined to leave a broader mark on the history of America-a noble university like Yale or Harvard, with its minority of three thousand students, its minority of professors and its president, in a minority of one or ten, or a hundred times that number of good, honest, well-meaning, and ill-taught Americans in any part of the country who believe in themselves because they are the majority?

The more intelligent the majority, the more susceptible it will be to intellectual influences, and the more docile to the thinking minority. It is for the American press to say whether it cares to have a part in this government by the few or not. It can choose for itself. If it continues to take for its motto that of the plutocrat of Horace-rem, quocunque modo, rem—it will continue to make money and to lose power. If it will content itself with plain living and high thinking, it may have a permanent share in that privy council of the wisest and best on whom depends the future of this republic.

ronment; they owned like potentialities of good and evil; both wrought after the lustiest Homeric fashion, and in the working earned renown as wide as the world.

One needs an inspired pen to write the chronicle of American heroes. Not in straitlaced stiff and starch historic fashion, but to show them in their habit, as they lived after the manner of Homer with his Greeks, or that dear babbler Froissart, the men of the Middle Ages. A mighty moving recital it needs must prove a story of daring, of endurance, of savage hardness, running sometimes into ruffianism, yet veined and threaded with romance, with chivalry, with the loftiest patriotism, the most honorable punctilio, as in nature the igneous rocks are veined and threaded with gold and precious stones.

Walhalla it must be, rather than Pantheon. The transplanted Anglo-Saxon has not lost his ancestor's amazing stomach for fighting. It is more than a question, indeed, if in contact with the red enemy he has not developed new capacity in that line. Certainly he has acquired a fine originality of combat, and stands confessed most picturesque of all ravagers who since time began have wrested empires from hands too weak to hold them. Never a better type of him trod shoeleather than James Bowie-a type most engaging to the natural man, though per

his time; his virtues came of nature and heredity. He was part and parcel of the rough and ready era when life or death, or fortune or honor, hung often upon the sting and ping of a bullet, the flash of a blade.

Indubitably he was well born, albeit it is only tradition which traces his descent from the famous Maryland Bowies. It is perhaps worth while to say, in the beginning, that the name is pronounced as though spelled "Boo-ee," with the accent on the first syllable. His father, Rezin Bowie, wedded Elvira Jones, his mother, down in Burke County, Georgia, a very little after the colonies had won independence. Rezin Bowie had not fought in the Continental army. He was but a boy while the fighting went on. In those primitive and parlous times men and maids came early to the holy estate of matrimony. Grooms of eighteen took brides of fifteen, or thereabout. The wedding was an all-night frolic, the infare an all-next-day one; then the young husband took his new wife up behind him and rode off to his own cabin.

Sometimes it had a puncheon floor and a door of riven boards. Then the couple belonged to the aristocracy of their time. Oftener the floor was of dirt, the doorshutter a blanket, or one of the patchwork quilts, without which no girl would have dreamed of getting married. Forks

driven into the floor, and springy poles laid across to a convenient crack between the logs, served to hold the feather bed, or the straw tick, or the leaves which made sleep a downy thing. A hearth of stone and clay took up all one end. In the gable above it there was a wide opening for the smoke to eddy through. Blocks chopped from handy logs served for seats; besides, the man had his rifle and hunting-knife, the woman her wheel and cards. If, in addition, the pair could show an iron pot, a skillet, some pewter plates, or crockery ones, their house was exceptionally well furnished. Out-o'doors, possession of a cow and calf and a pig or two marked them as persons of estate and substance.

With such an establishment moving is no great task, particularly when the willing mind of a great hunter is incited to the change by diminishing game at hand, and tales of abundance in a near newer land. Rezin Bowie all his life was a mighty hunter. In all, he moved his residence four times, and always upon the track of the vanishing wilderness. First he went from Georgia northwest into Tennessee, where he staid for seven years, killing bear and deer galore, and between whiles fighting the marauding redskins. Then the emigrant drift, as irresistible as ever was glacier drift, towards the plains and barrens between the mountains and the Great Lakes picked him up, but dropped him a long way southward of the Ohio.

His third cabin was built in what is now Logan County, Kentucky, which lies southerly in the State, barely above the Tennessee line. To-day it is a fat and fertile region of big farms and golden agriculture. In Bowie's time it was all "barrens "-that is, a land of small scrubby timber spots with wide savannas between. The open was covered with "barrens grass," which grew so rank upon the strong unctuous black soil you might ride through it upon a tall horse, and tie the heads either side of you above the good beast's neck. Deer, elk, and buffalo ranged it plentifully. Fighting varmint, such as bear and panthers, abounded more in the land of streams and cane, which lay along the Cumberland, the Tennessee, and the Mississippi. But Rezin Bowie was for a while content. He took up land, worked some of it in shambling, haphazard fashion what time he was not out with his

rifle, and found existence tolerable and to be endured, though he could not help a bit of envy when he heard the bearhunting tales of adventurous passers-by. Be

In 1796 his son James was born. fore he was big enough to hold a plough or rifle the fit had seized his father again -a family moving was on. This time it was not a matter of loading household stuff into the ox-cart, setting the mother upon an ambling brood-mare, with one child in her lap, another behind her, and the rest of her brood running and racing after live-stock mighty loath to quit its range. Instead there was but the brief passage to a flat-boat built upon the banks of Red River, which runs down to the Cumberland, as that stream in turn runs down to the Ohio. Into the square unwieldy hulk went all the Bowies and all their possessions, which by this time included a slave or so. The waters, good hap, and good boating did the rest. side six months the family was safely established in Louisiana.

In

They throve and prospered there, in Catahoula Parish, but after a mannerly, modest fashion. Land might be had for a song, the richest land in the world; but hunters born of the Bowie pattern rarely yearn to become territorial magnates. Ears ever open to the lurings of woods and waters, senses craving the tense thrill of moving accidents by flood and field, are deaf and cold to the siren-song of riches. Besides, riches came in the main through a cotton or sugar plantation. Rezin Bowie lacked equally the will and the money for setting up either. Sometimes he went afield with his few slaves and his flock of lusty lads. Oftener he left the house and the negroes to his wife's management, and took his sons with him to slay and spare not whatever ran or flew or swam in prairie, marsh, or bayou.

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Naturally the sons came early to the poise and confidence of manhood. eighteen James set up for himself. It was in the humblest honest fashion. was poor and proud-too proud to pit his smatter of education against lads of better learning. But he stood six foot three, and owned one hundred and eighty pounds of superb bone and muscle. In spite of his weight, he appeared lean and rawboned almost to lankness. It was muscle quick as lightning, informed by nerves as firm as steel, and governed by an eye unerring as death.

Of a fair, florid countenance, with deepset gray eyes, high cheek-bones, and a thatch of red-sandy hair, he had scant claim to good looks; yet so winning was his smile, so quick and hearty the twinkle of his eye, he was accounted a fine young fellow. Open-handed, open-hearted, frankly good-natured, a tiger in anger, a superb hater, a rock of steadfastness to those he called friends, he came easily to dominate the men about him, though he did no more than saw boards for a living. It was with a whip-saw-something this generation knows not. For it the log is set nearly upright. One sawyer stands upon a scaffold at one side, the other in a pit opposite the scaffold. Be tween them the saw plays, impelled by the force of massy arms. Hard workheart-breaking, even, amid languid Southern airs, under a fervid sun. Nor was the sawing all. When the boards lay fair and straight, they must needs be rafted down to the city of purchase. Rafting is slow work, something perilous, and certainly toilsome upon the creeping gliddery bayou waters or the slack and sluggish lower Mississippi. Notwithstanding, young Bowie kept a good heart for sport. As a hunter he did more than credit to his blood and training. Off hand with a rifle he could bring down a wild-goose flying high overhead, and put his bullet in the neck five times out of seven. But marksmanship bordering on the marvellous was a common attribute thereabout. What gave the young sawyer distinction was another story.

Several sorts of another story, in fact. He could not merely shoot deer running, but lasso them in fair chase over the prairie, give them a fall, and, if it pleased him so to do, fetch them in alive and unharmed. He could likewise lasso a horse from the wild herds, mount him without anybody's help, and stay upon his back, no matter what was done, until the terrified beast had run himself tame. By way of variety, sometimes the lasso was cast over a big bull alligator waddling from swamp to swamp. When it had been drawn taut, holding tail and jaws in leash, young Bowie mounted the scaly back and rode there, laughing and shouting, while the astounded saurian went bellowing with rage toward his swampy haunts.

Throughout his life James Bowie, like Lord Nelson, "never made the acquaint

ance of Mr. Fear." What so natural as that he should leave off sawing, which meant heaps of work for mighty little pay, and take up a profitable venture whose sole disadvantage was the risk of it? The United States had not long suppressed the slave trade. There were plenty, still, of lowland planters, with money in both pockets, ready to buy whatever of "black ivory" other men would fetch in. Lafitte, the Louisiana pirate, kept up the business of such fetching in. His haunts were no great ways from the Bowie habitat; moreover, young James was in the way of coming upon the pirate whenever the business of board-rafting took him to New Orleans. He was too shrewdly American not to grudge such fair profits to a pack of foreigners. In company with his brother, Rezin Bowie junior, and two others of like adventurous minds, he undertook to get a fair sharing in it.

In

Money was needed to begin. Bowie sold his land to get it. Then the four entered into treaty with Lafitte. He sold them sound and likely blacks off his slaveships at the rate of a dollar a pound. That made the average price something like a hundred and forty dollars the head. the open market the blacks would fetch from five hundred to a thousand each. But there was another and a better chance of gain, which the trading crew were quick to seize upon. Under the laws then standing, all Africans brought in in violation of the statute were confiscated and sold out of hand, one-half the price going to the authorities, the other to the informer. Bowie and his comrades made a practice of informing upon themselves; then when the slaves were seized and sold they bid them in, pocketed half the money they paid, and found themselves free to offer their purchases wheresoever they chose. For the blacks were now lawfully within United States boundaries, and a commodity as staple and as marketable as cotton or sugar or even newly sawed boards.

The profit was enormous-nobody ever bid against the partners at the forced sales, though there were a lively crying and a swift mounting of prices at the later vendings. Altogether the company realized a profit of some sixty-five thousand dollars within a couple of years. the business involved such mummery and flummery of false names, pretended disguises, and pretended seizures that the Bowies pretty soon tired of it. They dis

But