Chapter II: Part 2

But it is possible to be in too much of a hurry. Let us suppose that as yet we are not sufficiently developed to carry from one existence to another the memory of former existence. Suppose the time is to come when we shall suddenly advance as far beyond this intellectual stage as this stage of intellect is beyond that of the Bushman. Is it not conceivable that we may suddenly be enabled to recall all former existences and to remember all the various happenings of our former lives? May we not say, "There is Mrs. Jones. I was married to her six million years ago, and we quarrelled"? It seems quite hopeable.

You cannot deny that it is possible. For instance: You now lead a continuous existence. You know that you were alive three days ago and you remember what you did then. But a baby four weeks old does NOT know that he was alive three days ago and he does not know what he did then. He has not reached a stage where his mind can grasp even the fact of continuous existence. We may not have reached a stage enabling us to grasp continuous reincarnation.

Think of this, and see if you cannot get some comfort, or at least some amusing speculation out of it. ----

Science admits and thinks it proves that the inorganic atom of matter is indestructible--that it persists forever. Why should we not admit--and ultimately prove--that the atom of organic force called a soul is indestructible and exists forever?

Every atom of matter, every particle of force, existing in the visible universe will continue to exist billions of centuries after the universe shall have melted and lost its present shape. The nail on your finger will exist as separate atoms when the Milky Way shall have faded from the heavens. How does that strike you for immortality?

We predict that the mysterious force-atom called your soul will exist AND KNOW ITSELF AND ITS FRIENDS ten thousand billions of centuries from now and be as young as ever.

DISCONTENT THE MOTIVE POWER OF PROGRESS

At first the baby lies fiat on his back, eyes staring up at the ceiling.

By and by he gets tired of lying on his back. DISCONTENT with his condition makes him wriggle and wriggle. At last he succeeds in turning over.

If he were contented then, there would be no men on earth--only huge babies. But DISCONTENT again seizes him, and through discontent he learns to crawl.

Crawling--travelling on hands and knees--satisfied lower forms of animal life. It used to satisfy us, in the old days of early evolutionary stages.

But the human infant--thanks to inborn cravings--is DISCONTENTED with crawling. With much trouble and risk and many feeble totterings, he learns to walk erect. He gets up into a position that takes his eyes off the ground. He is able to look at the sun and stars and takes the position of a man. DISCONTENT is his mainspring at every stage. ----

What discontent does in the limited life of a child, it does on a much larger scale in the life of a man--and on a scale still larger in the life of a race.

You can always tell when a man has reached the limit of his possible development. He ceases to be discontented--or at least to show discontent actively.

Contentment, apathy, are signs of decadence and of a career ended in either a man or a nation.

If a baby lies still, no longer wiggling or trying to swallow his toe, you may be sure that he is seriously ill. The nation that no longer wiggles is in a condition as serious as that of the motionless infant. ----

The man or newspaper which imparts dissatisfaction--wise discontent to a nation or to individuals, gives them the motive power that brings improvement.

Ruskin as a young man declared that his one hope in life was to arouse "some dissatisfaction."

The constant aim of men in talking to each other, in writing for newspapers, even in writing novels, should be to arouse discontent.

In this column, as our readers will have noticed, the constant aim is to make the great crowd dissatisfied.

Only through discontent can changes come and are there not causes enough for discontent and need enough for changes?

A majority of the people half educated, and tens of thousands half fed.

Children run over daily because they have no playground but the gutter.

Men of noble aspirations kept down by hard work and poverty.

Children left locked up alone all day while their mothers work for a pittance.

Men, uncertain of their future and of their children's future, engage in a constant struggle for wealth that is not needed--a struggle that develops in the end a passion as useless as it is degrading.

Unless you believe that the world is perfect because YOU happen to have enough to eat and to wear, you should be discontented.

You should remember that the world's achievements and great changes have all come from discontent, and you should be, in as many ways as possible, a breeder of discontent among the human beings around you.

THE AUTOMOBILE WILL MAKE US MORE HUMAN

One of the commonest and most disagreeable sights in a big city is that of a strong, brutal human being beating a weak and overworked horse because it refuses to do what it cannot do.

Brutality inflicted upon horses is atrocious. But the bad effect of such unkind treatment of animals on HUMAN CHARACTER is far more serious than the actual physical suffering inflicted. ----

The perfection of the automobile will do much to improve human beings by taking away from their control and from brutal coercion submissive animals.

Everybody knows that the moral standard is raised immediately in a country when slavery is abolished.

In America we have abolished the slavery of human beings, but we still adhere to horse slavery, accompanied by all the worst forms of the old negro slavery. The faithful slave may be beaten and driven to death. The driver MUST BE BRUTALIZED.

Every day, on every street, you may see stupid, muscular boys and men jerking with all their might on the tender mouths of poor horses, only too willing to do their best.

This brutal indifference to the sufferings of animals makes us brutal and indifferent in other directions.

With the advent of the automobile and the disappearance of horses from our cities, horse slavery will be abolished and men, compelled to use their brains in dealing with machinery, will soon become more nearly human than they are at present. The practical abolition of the street-car horse is one great step in advance.

The abolition of the truck horse, carriage horse, cab horse, soon to come, will complete the dream of those modern and highly deserving abolitionists, the automobile inventors and manufacturers.

LET US BE THANKFUL

Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 1902.

Let us be thankful first of all for one great right:

The right, when dissatisfied, to SAY that we are dissatisfied, and to try to make things better.

Let us be thankful that every man--with few exceptions--has a holiday to-day.

However bad our national affairs may seem, let us be thankful they are no worse. And above all let us be thankful that we have the power and the constitutional right to change things, just as soon as we become wise enough to use our ballots. ----

Let us be devoutly thankful for the PUBLIC SCHOOLS, for the fact that every child is taught to read and encouraged to think. The nation now declares that a child has a right to food for the mind, as long as the child behaves properly. We are not so far from the day when human decency will declare that every child and every human being has a right to food for the BODY also, as long as they behave, and are ready for honest work. Let us be thankful for the constantly growing recognition of human rights.

The workingmen of America are better paid than they have ever been before. More of them than ever are at work, and the unions which protect them are more powerful than ever--let us be thankful for these facts. The whole nation prospers when the workers of the nation are busy and well paid.

Science has been, and is, making wonderful progress, explaining for us daily the problems of the universe. Every man must be thankful that highly specialized brains are constantly at work piling up knowledge for him.

As a nation we are too big to fear successful attack, and we are, it is to be hoped, too sensible to seek trouble with others. Let us be thankful that all things point to continued national, mental development on peaceful lines, free from the horrible wholesale murders, called war, that have bled and weakened all people through the ages. ----

Each of us individually has reason for thankfulness.

If you can feel that you are honestly trying to do your duty, that is much to be thankful for.

If you are dissatisfied with yourself, you should be thankful for the power of self-condemnation-- and thankful especially that you have long and blessed TIME ahead of you to make up for your mistakes and improve your record.

We live in a wonderful age--wonderful in the fact that life and liberty are fairly secure; wonderful in freedom of conscience.

You can believe in Heaven, Hades, Christian Science, or in nothing at all--and as long as you do not interfere with others, no one can imprison you, or question, or burn you at the stake. ----

We should all be especially thankful for the steady awakening of the national mind. We all pursue wealth--and doubtless circumstances compel us to pay too much attention to that line of effort. But we are all THINKING also. There are a thousand times more thinking, reading men and women to-day in America alone than lived on earth half a century ago. Love of knowledge is spreading, and with love of knowledge, love of justice and a sense of fairness will always be found.

Our material prosperity is great. But it is out- balanced by our mental prosperity. We are becoming a nation of THINKING men and women, and since that means real development, we have all reason to be thankful.

THE HARM THAT IS DONE BY OUR FRIENDS

Thought lives through the ages, flies about over the earth, and goes on visiting fresh minds, after the mind that gave it birth has gone back to dust and nothingness.

An Italian wrote words to this effect:

"Man is commanded to forgive his enemies. Nowhere is imposed on him the far more difficult task of forgiving his friends."

Francis Bacon, the philosopher, read in England the words of the Italian and quoted them.

Vincent W. Byars, a very able thinking man of St. Louis, read Bacon's quotation out there, and now, coming to New York, he says to this writer:

"Why don't you make an editorial on that old Italian saying quoted by Bacon?"

Italy--England--St. Louis--New York--thus the idea has hopped about, until to-day you get it in this column. A million of you read it, or at least glance at it; and so, if the idea has any value, it will go hopping on all over the earth's surface long after the steel press that prints this paper shall have crumbled away. ----

How little your ENEMIES can hurt you! How little harm they do, even when they try! You are warned against them and on your guard. The world knows they are your enemies, and discredits what they say.

It is quite easy to forgive our enemies, for they do us comparatively little harm.

But to forgive our friends would be hard indeed if we could realize how much harm they do us. ----

THE DRUNKARD'S FRIENDS

Who makes the drunkard? His enemies? No. The drunkard is made by his friends.

When it is known that he is inclined to drink no enemy is so vicious as to lead him on. No enemy slaps him on the back and begs him to take "just another drink." No enemy laughs down his poor, feeble attempts at reform. No enemy tells him that it will not hurt him "just this time," and that he really must not refuse to be a good fellow "just for once."

The drunkard is MADE a drunkard, is pushed into the last depths of drunkenness, by his friends.

And it is his friends who kick him and leave him and despise him when he has sunk into the mire.

Did ever the drunkard's enemy hurt him as much as the friend has hurt him? ----

AMBITION KILLED BY FRIENDS

A young man starts out to succeed in life. His enemy may lie about him, may call him worthless. He may think he is hurting him. If there is anything in the young man, the enemy's lies and discouraging words only spur him on to greater effort. They do him good.

It is the friend that ruins the young man by false, injudicious, unearned praise.

As artist, poet, writer, clerk, or in any other effort, the young man begins his work.

It is his friends who tell him that he is a splendid success, when he needs to be told that, at best, he has some slight chance of success, and that everything depends on desperate effort.

Look at the young, conceited fool who, instead of struggling on, rails at the world, feels that he is not appreciated. He is a failure--a sad, foolish failure. He has been made a failure, not by the attacks of his enemies, but by the more dangerous praise of his friends. ----

The lonely and friendless often succeed amazingly. "Multum incola fuit anima mea" ("My spirit hath been much alone") said the great Bacon. His mind fed on loneliness, on failure, and even on disgrace.

How much success is due to freedom from that harm which friendship does?

The reader can finish this editorial for himself with hundreds of other arguments. This is enough for a sample.

SHALL WE TAME AND CHAIN THE INVISIBLE MICROBE AS WE NOW CHAIN NIAGARA?

When Solomon was gathering his materials to build the Temple, his, large cedar trunks from Lebanon and his costly materials from everywhere, he used oxen, mules, camels.

With all his wisdom, he little dreamed that the day would come when his descendants, instead of using mules and huge beasts of burden, would heat water and with steam develop a force sufficient to tear his Temple from its foundation.

Still less did he dream that steam would eventually be superseded, as clumsy and primitive, by the invisible force of electricity.

When the thunder roared, the lightning flashed and his conscience troubled him, Solomon, turning away from his thousand wives and his numerous other doubtful associates, put his head under the richly embroidered pillow, worked, perhaps, by Sheba's own fair hands--it did not enter his mind that that lightning could be tamed and put to work.

Man has been gradually controlling and employing the various animals on the earth's surface. He taught the elephant to haul wood and water and to fight his battles. He trained the horse, the dog. He even taught falcons to bring him back birds from beyond the clouds, and otters to catch fish in the bottom of lakes and rivers.

Gradually he has made himself independent of his animal partners.

The rifle made the falcon useless; steam destroyed the importance of the horse and the ox.

But apparently we have only begun using animal life. We must run the whole gamut of the marvels of creation before conquering conditions on this earth. ----

We used to train the biggest dogs to kill wolves. The Government of the United States is now breeding darning-needles to kill mosquitoes.

A certain kind of wasp, with a black and white striped body, spends his time killing house-flies, and this creature could be bred and used to destroy the disease-spreading pests.

Even the invisible insect life can be made most useful to man and to his health.

The latest plan for disposing of city sewage involves the cultivation of microbes, to be employed as disinfectors.

Several towns in Illinois and in Wisconsin have established plants for the purification of sewage by means of microbe life. The collections of organisms invisible to the naked eye are to be kept in great antiseptic tanks, and employed in the purification of the city 's refuse.

Mosquitoes will ultimately be destroyed, undoubtedly, by breeding among them smaller creatures fatal to their existence.

Man, in his conquest and use of animal life, will run the gamut, from the biggest elephant, employed as a public executioner in India, to the invisible microbe, doing a work ten thousand times more important all over the globe.

These infinitesimal microbes, bred and controlled by science, will do regularly and methodically the work which buzzards and vultures have done on land, which sharks and dogfish have done at sea, throughout endless centuries.

To the marvellous workings of nature we cannot possibly give too much thought or too great admiration. Gardens are filled with beautiful flowers, and fields are fertile to-day because hundreds of years ago sea birds were devouring the carcasses of dead fish, acting as nature's scavengers, and building up the great guano fields of South America.

There is a Peruvian millionaire in his big yacht, and there is a rose in full bloom--the millionaire's money, the beauty of the rose, come from those birds that picked up the dead fish five hundred years ago.

It's an interesting world.

THE ELEPHANT THAT WILL NOT MOVE HAS BETTER EXCUSES THAN WE HAVE FOR FOLLY DISPLAYED

This is an editorial which we shall merely suggest, and which each reader will write out for himself.

In the Zoological Garden of New York a poor elephant has stood in chains for years. The animal was thought to be vicious, and was kept fastened tightly to one spot, that it might have no leeway to do damage.

A short time ago its keeper became convinced that the elephant would do no harm and might safely be unchained. The chains were taken off, and the keeper thought with satisfaction that the poor beast would now enjoy freedom and be made happy by the possibility of moving freely about its large inclosure.

The elephant did not move. The chains were gone, it was no longer tied, but it stood, and it still stands, in just the same spot.

The habit of slavery, of monotony, had become too strong. The elephant, though free, stands still, sadly swaying its heavy head, ignorant of the freedom that has come to it.

Men and women and children who see the elephant, and other men who write paragraphs for the newspapers, dilate on the poor animal's "stupidity."

"The elephant has been called the most intelligent of animals," says one writer, "but this elephant, that doesn't know when the chains are off, seems to prove that the elephant can be a good deal of a fool."

How easy it is for us human beings to see the faults in others, our fellows, and the animals below us.

But which one of us can truly say that he is not in exactly the same position as that poor elephant, fixed to one spot by the chains of long ago?

Are we not still standing as a race just as we stood years and centuries ago, ignorant of the freedom that has come to us?

Thousands of splendid men have worked, lived and died to free us from superstition, from credulity, from ignorance, yet still we stand in the same place, and fail to appreciate the freedom that is ours. ----

Millions of us, tied down by foolish superstition, are like that elephant--the chains are off, but we stand still.

The road to peace, happiness and universal progress has been shown us in the teachings of great leaders, but we still stand in the same old place, fighting, hating, cheating, suspecting, harming one another.

Here and there there is a little progress; gradually we begin to appreciate and enjoy the freedom that has been given to us with the striking away of old mental chains. The process is slow.

Look into your own mind. Do you take advantage of all the possibilities that are before you? Do you use your brain to control your existence, acts and habits for your own benefit and the benefit of others?

If not, you ought to sympathize with this poor elephant, and realize that as your brain exceeds his in bulk proportionately, so do you exceed him in the folly that misses opportunity.

LET US BE THANKFUL

You get tired of reading editorials in which one man, spouting from his editorial pulpit, lays down the law for you--without giving you a chance to reply or contradict.

So let us write this editorial together.

There you sit--the reader--in your street car, or perhaps clinging to a strap, and here we sit, impersonal editorial creature, thinking over thankfulness, Thanksgiving Day, and what reasons we have for feeling thankful.

Let us talk as few platitudes as possible, and try to get at a few of the inside workings of human life. ----

You look across the car and hate the fat man who lounges and spreads his feet around so boorishly.

LET US BE THANKFUL THAT WE SO READILY PERCEIVE THE SHORTCOMINGS OF OTHERS.

Much comfort is derived from others' failings. In the quiet evenings we talk of our neighbors' weaknesses and we enjoy them. By contrast we admire ourselves.

LET US BE THANKFUL THAT WE NEVER APPRECIATE OUR OWN LIMITATIONS.

Each man's children are beautiful and promising in his view.

He cannot see the hopeless construction of their foreheads, nor can he read in their eyes the sad absence of "speculation."

Let us be thankful for that. The future depends on the good care awarded to almost worthless specimens now. ----

FOR THE UNIVERSAL INSTINCT OF THANKFULNESS, LET BE DEEPLY THANKFUL.

The thick-lipped negro on the Congo finds a dead hippopotamus, half eaten by wild beasts, and in his woolly brain a dim, misty feeling of THANKFULNESS is born.

The Tartar bandit surprises mild Chinese conducting a tea caravan across the stony desert. He murders the mild Celestials and feels THANKFUL as he contemplates the booty.

A great Trust manager finds ways to add some millions to those which he already has and does not need. In THANKFUL mood he gives two millions or three to education.

As inborn, as instinctive as the beating of the heart in the human being is THANKFULNESS.

Thankfulness is the unconscious acknowledgment of a Higher Power.

It is the indestructible evidence of man's permanent belief in just government of the universe.

It is the most hopeful, the most promising feature of man's character.

For THANKFULNESS itself we should be thankful. ----

If you want to succeed, cultivate a feeling of hopeful thankfulness.

Hopefulness, thankfulness and success are as near akin as light, heat and motion--the same force underlies, makes up the first trio, as it does the second.

If you find it hard to be thankful, read a little of history, and thankfulness will come. Thousands of millions of men have lived and suffered to make your existence here at least bearable. You may not be satisfied, but you have comforts that were not dreamed of by the luckiest a few centuries back. You think the prosperous have too many privileges.

Perhaps they have. But when your great-grandfather was a young man a nobleman could order his lackeys to seize Voltaire the greatest mind in Europe--and beat him almost to death. Voltaire was locked up in the Bastile for complaining.

Thanks to the eternal row that Voltaire kicked up, you can never be treated as he was. So be thankful to Voltaire.

Be thankful to the long line of plucky men and fighters--not forgetting Christopher Columbus--who have gone before you.

Be thankful that you are alive in an interesting age with interesting events happening.

Be thankful also that with thankfulness you combine the feeling of dissatisfaction, of unrest that will push you ahead and give you cause for fresh thankfulness next year. ----

We are thankful to have you for a reader.

We are thankful for the criticisms and friendly comments that you occasionally send.

We hope that you will enjoy your dinner to-day and not regret it to-morrow.

WHAT WILL 999 YEARS MEAN TO THE HUMAN RACE

The street railroad company in the Borough of Brooklyn has just executed some leases to endure 999 years. Leases of property have also been made for the same period, though, of course, a lease of 999 years will be about as binding 999 years from now as would a lease of the great pyramid executed the day after it was finished, if such a lease should be presented at present to the Egyptian Government.

These preposterous leases are interesting because they bring vividly before the human mind the certainty of wonderful and splendid changes in human affairs.

The street railroad leases are especially fascinating to the imaginative mind.

They deal with present conditions and will seem inconceivably primitive hundreds of years before the leases will have ended.

These leases deal with miserable little electric cars crawling slowly over the face of the earth, at either end an underpaid, overworked man, and in the middle a crowd of poor, dissatisfied, ill-housed human beings.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine years from now the human race will not by any means have accomplished its destiny. It will still be struggling on toward the goal of real civilization.

But it will have grown far beyond the savage condition of life that marks the execution of these long leases.

Before these street railroad leases expire Brooklyn and all other cities as they now exist will have disappeared from the earth.

Perfect transportation, underground, overground and through the air, will enable human beings, if they choose, to live as far from their work as does the seagull or the eagle.

It will no longer be necessary to crowd together in miserable tenements, and homes will be scattered. Human beings undoubtedly will dwell in huge, splendidly managed structures, each in the centre of its own park, far from the noise and the brutality of modern city life.

Before the leases expire the combined cities of New York and Brooklyn and Yonkers and Coney Island and Montauk Point will have grown into an enormous, hideous human aggregation of fifty million or more human beings.

Even the city of a hundred millions may be seen.

But as that huge, monstrous city will have grown, so it will have died, as the monsters of former geological epochs grew and died in their turn.

The site of the vanished great city will be covered with gardens, and children in schools will be taught that human beings who once lived in the cliffs in the Far West afterward gathered together in horrible municipal ant-hills in the East, called cities, before they learned how to live comfortably. ----

Before those street railroad leases expire the present temporary mania for money will have run its course.

Once every important man felt that a certain number of slaves must be murdered at his funeral. Sometimes his favorite horse was shot. In scores of millions of cases his wife was burned alive with his corpse. We have outgrown that. Nowadays the great man who dies must leave behind him an accumulation of millions, which means that thousands of men have worked to give him what he did not need. Before these leases shall have expired that form of financial barbarism will have ceased to exist.

It is reasonable to hope that the coming thousand years will have seen the end of industrial feudalism, which has had its birth in our day, and which will run its course as did the military feudalism of the Middle Ages.

What a marvellous picture the world will present one thousand years from now!

The earth will be adequately populated.

Science will have conquered disease almost entirely. Each woman will be the mother of two children. She will not bring five or six into the world in order that two or three may live.

Competition will be replaced by emulation. The intelligent servant of government will work as loyally and enthusiastically for his government and for the people as the boy at college now works for his college football team.

The human mind will have wandered on many leagues in its search for a satisfying religion, getting always nearer to a clear conception of the grandeur of the universe, and further away from the superstition necessary to the moral control of a brutal semi-civilization.

Human beings will have learned that the noblest thing one man can do is to work for others.

Each will gladly contribute all his talent and strength to the welfare of all.

All will gladly recognize, applaud and richly reward the special ability of the individual.

There will be no poverty. Willingness to work will insure a comfortable livelihood. Education will have developed the average human intellect far beyond our conception. Nine-tenths of the human race have been able to read only within the past few years. What will a thousand years of universal education do? ----

The end of the leases of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company will find many of our problems solved.

It will find, however, the real work of man just beginning. The abstract work of the intellect, the proper organization of society as expressed in human passions, the study of the wonderful and beautiful universe outside of our own little planet, will then begin with the conquest of our material conditions.

THE AZORES--A SMALL LOST WORLD IN A UNIVERSE OF WATER

As you cross the Atlantic by the Southern route the "sighting of the Azores" is one incident of your voyage. Just before daybreak the ship is shaking and the passengers roused by the deep tones of the big steam whistle.

One by one shivering forms straggle up from below, like reluctant spirits answering a premature last call. Bare feet in slippers, and shivering forms with overcoats over nightgowns, gradually line the rails.

On the left there appears, apparently, a heavy, dark bank of clouds:

"The Azores!" shouts down from the bridge your yellow-whiskered captain, looking as cheerful and warm as though it were noon.

You watch, shiver and blink as the light grows stronger behind the pinkish clouds in the east. The dark cloud settles into solid land. You see it clearly. Sharply outlined against the sky stands, forty miles long, a mammoth saw with huge teeth, irregular, sharp. The power of old-time volcanoes made all of that land, and those sharp saw-teeth, pointing toward the sky, are the destroyers of long ago, cold and dead now, but telling ominously of the power that lies hidden below.

Between you and the brightening sunrise, suspended in the "crow's nest," half way up the mast, stands the sailor who watches the sea for you through the night. He calls out, and ahead to the left you see a small boat filled with human beings that seem scarcely as big as your finger. Your ship could plough through miles of such small boats-- but out there in the ocean, just as well as inside the biggest court-house, LAW rules, and the big ship must turn out for the small fishing boat.

You realize the power and beauty of law, as our governor and sustainer. You see that laws of little men reach out two thousand miles into the sea. You think of the laws of the universe that stretch across the immeasurable distances of time and space, protecting ALL, and insuring ultimate fulfilment of the destinies of all the worlds.

As those fishermen of the Azores work safely, under full protection, in their little lost corner of the great ocean, so we, in our little world, our little insignificant corner of space, work out our tiny problems safely under the splendid protection of Divine Law and wisdom sent to us from some far- off point of which we know nothing.

The light of the rising sun brings out from shore many other small boats, each with its load of men who wave their arms to the steamship and cheer against the sound of the waves and wind. To them that ship is like the fast express that passes the country railroad station, or the comet that whirls round our sun and off again.

Those fishermen feel that THEY are the REAL world; the steamship and outside creation are only half imagined, interesting phenomena. You look down from the deck and the fishermen seem unreal little ornaments of your European excursion. And so the two sets of human beings go their ways--to each nothing is important, save that which each is doing.

There are great planets and suns that roll past us across this cosmic ocean of ether. Our pathetic little round earth looks to them as that fishing-boat of the Azores looks to you. And WE think of those great interstellar travellers as the fisherman in his little boat thinks of the ocean liner--the great star to us is merely an interesting feature of OUR sky. And we actually wonder whether there is any thought on that big, distant sun; any intelligence on the vast ship that ploughs the ocean of limitless space. ----

The high ridge of volcanic peaks and the others near it are made fertile and green by soil gradually developed through the centuries by seeds brought across the ocean by winds and birds.

The tops of the mountains are black lava. Lakes of black water fill some of the quiet craters. Only, here and there, the rising sulphur smoke from rocky fissures tells of heat and power smouldering.

The last great eruption of the volcanoes occurred a little more than two hundred years ago--so the inhabitants laugh if you speak of danger. They forget that two hundred years in the earth's life is as two minutes in the life of a man--and that what a man did two minutes since he may do again.

Fences are built across the fields of thin soil that cover the lava. Each inch of that land thrown up by fire "belongs" to some man. White houses stand at the edges of deep lava canyons running from the mountain tops to the sea's edge canyons made by pouring lava or by the splitting of the mountains under fearful pressure.

Children play about the blocks of lava--and all their lives, no matter where they may go, those children will think of that far-off island as the only real home, and of black lava blocks as the only REAL kind of stone.

From your passing boat you cannot see these children. Their little lives, lost in the far-off sea, seem as unimportant as the lives of the fish that swim below you.

But some child playing there to-day may be like that other island child, Napoleon, and live to make the rest of the world talk about the island that bred him. Or, better still, some one of those children, with a brain made powerful by solitude and noble thought, may have the idea that shall help us all, teach us more and more to think kindly of each other and help each other, instead of passing each other coldly and indifferently as the big ship passes the little, far-off island.

NO NAPOLEONIC CHESS PLAYER ON AN AIR CUSHION ZANGWILL'S IDEA IS FALSE--WHY CHESS PLAYING STUNTS GENIUS

Mr. Zangwill's keen intellect, straining hard for striking pictures and word effects, sees falsely the great general of the future. He says:

"The Napoleon of the future will be an epileptic chess player, carried about the field of battle on an air cushion."

In this condensed, picturesque fashion Mr. Zangwill expresses sententiously a number of mistaken ideas. He thinks that the game of war is like the game of chess, and that the future world conqueror will be a great chess player, using men as pawns and the world as his chess-board.

He observes the curious and interesting historical fact that of the world's great conquerors many, including the two greatest, Napoleon and Alexander, were afflicted with that mysterious disease, epilepsy. He concludes that the great general of the future will probably be a confirmed epileptic.

The ability of a fighting man to-day resides largely, of course, in the brain. The general's MUSCLES no longer count as a fighting factor. His battles are won or lost inside of his SKULL. Mr. Zangwill concludes that the future great general will have a mind developed to an abnormal extent at the expense of the body--he sees in the future world conqueror an abnormal creature, a giant brain perched on a miserable, wasted body, so feeble and delicate that it must be carried about the field of battle on an air cushion to prevent shocks. ----

The quotation from Zangwill which we print above contains only twenty-one words. Rarely have so many errors, so many fundamental yet plausible errors, been crowded into so little space.

The Napoleon of the future, the great conqueror, will NOT be a chess player. The real Napoleon whom we know had no love for chess or any other waste of time, or any other form of self- indulgence.

Chess is no game for a Napoleon, or for any other man who wants to embody real accomplishment in the story of his life.

CHESS IS A WEAK GAME, FOR IT ADMITS ALL KINDS OF RULES AND ALL KINDS OF FOREORDAINED IMPOSSIBILITIES.

The man who makes the world's great success will not be bound by rules. The great men of the world are great because they refuse to ADMIT impossibilities.

The man who plays chess has two knights, and these knights he can only send two squares in one direction and one square in another, or one square in one direction and two squares in the other. His two bishops can only move diagonally across the board, one on the white and one on the black. His castles lumber along on straight lines. His king cannot be touched or taken, and the game ends when the king is in fatal danger. The queen, in the dull game we call chess, can do almost anything.

But Napoleon was really a great man, and the game of life that he played was very different from the chess game.

When the king was in hopeless danger, Napoleon's game had just begun. Others before him had looked upon kings on the board of life as the chess player looks upon the wooden or ivory king before him.

But to Napoleon kings were pawns, to be moved around and made ridiculous. When he felt like it, he made pawns into kings--the descendant of one of his pawn-kings reigns to-day in Sweden.

Napoleon's game deprived the queen of all power--she was less than a pawn. HIS game sent the bishops hopping back and forth, diagonally or at right angles, as he saw fit. He created knights to his heart's content, and he taught them to move as he wanted.

Napoleon was great because there was nothing of the chess player about him. He did not admit of regular, foreordained moves on the chess-board or on the board of life. HE REFUSED TO CONSIDER ANYTHING IMPOSSIBLE UNTIL HE HAD TRIED IT. He tells us himself that he deserved credit for crossing the Alps, not that he accomplished a difficult feat, but because he refused to believe those who declared the feat impossible.

If anybody said "Check" to Napoleon, he kicked over the chess-board and began a new game of his own--that was what surprised the poor, dull old Austrian generals in Italy.

No; the real great man is no chess player, he has no chess player's mind. And do you, Mr. Reader, waste no time at chess, if you have any idea of being WORTH WHILE in a big or a little way. ----

The Napoleon of the future will be no epileptic. That terrible disease has afflicted many of the noblest intellects, and it is undoubtedly a disease brought on, or at least intensified, by great intellectual activity and a lack of co-ordination between the mental and physical operations of the body. But some great men have been great, not because of that terrible disease, but in spite of it. Science will conquer that trouble, as it has conquered others, and the scientist to do this work will be, himself, one of the world's great men. ----

The Napoleon of the future will be no huge-brained dwarf, with feeble body, carried on an air cushion.

It is true that many great men of to-day are relatively small in body. The gigantic muscle, thick legs, broad shoulders and hairy chests of the successful Viking have nothing to do with modern achievement.

But it is also true that to-day, as always, the healthy mind lives in a healthy body, and lives ON a healthy body.

As well expect to find the most perfect fruit on a withered, half-dead tree, as to find the most able brain in a withered, half-dead body. The blood is the life of the brain, and unless a HEALTHY body supplies HEALTHY blood the brain's chance is small.

Napoleon, it's true, was at one time a physical wreck--BUT DON'T FORGET THAT HIS GREATNESS WAS ALSO A WRECK AT THAT TIME.

The GREAT Napoleon operated in a body tireless and powerful enough to remain thirty consecutive hours on horseback. It was a body so powerful that criminal neglect and stupid ignorance of the laws of health were powerless against it for many years.

The Napoleon that went to St. Helena dwelt in a worn-out body, a fat, degenerate perversion of the Napoleon that conquered the world.

The great conqueror of the future, ladies and gentlemen, will be a splendidly original brain, working through a perfectly developed body, AND WORKING FOR THE MASS OF THE PEOPLE, FOR THEIR FARE, NOT FOR THEIR CONQUEST AND OPPRESSION.

All of which is respectfully submitted to our readers for discussion and criticism.

A GIRL'S FACE IN THE GASLIGHT AND AN IMPORTANT PART OF THE WORLD'S WORK

On a corner of Rector street, down near the river, a loud drum was beating. A guitar and a tambourine competed shrilly with the drum's dull booming. Slowly a careless crowd gathered round the Salvation Army workers.

There were bare-headed women, little girls holding little babies in their arms, sailors drunk, and one or two sober, 'longshoremen pleased with the sound of the drum, and a few of the thin, hungry faces that disturb our well-fed happiness.

The man beat his drum, standing erect and proud in his army uniform.

The two thin, nervous young women played on guitar and tambourine with all their force, striving to gather the crowd whom they hoped to make better men and women.

Thirty or forty people gathered--glad to accept any noise and excitement in their dull lives.

The music stopped, and a young girl stepped to the centre of the circle.

She was frightened. Her voice was weak at first. Gradually her thin, pale face grew animated.

Her blue eyes dilated. In dull, routine way, doing her best, earning respectful silence from the night crowd, she told her story:

"I was bad. I tried to be good. But I couldn't do it with my own strength. I asked God to save me. He did save me. He will save you, if you will ask Him."

She spoke with a strong German accent. With all her deep, earnest soul, with all her poor, limited mental force, she longed to help the men and women around. As she spoke she bent her head farther and farther back, until her eyes looked up to the sky. There, with perfect faith, she saw the God whose work she was humbly doing in the muddy streets and flickering gaslight of the riverside.

While she could control her voice and her deep emotion she talked on her one theme--the power of God to help the helpless. But she BELIEVED, and she FELT what she said. Soon the tears ran over from her upturned eyes, and she could speak no more.

Then a man began--thickset, earnest, with a strong Scotch accent.

He talked to the men about him in a rough way that appealed to them. ----

As the crowd stood listening many passed. A few were contemptuous; the majority were indifferent.

If you see these workers you ask perhaps:

"What good do they do?"

That is the question that may be asked of every man that ever lived, and only One can answer it.

The thin, white-faced girl, playing, singing and PREACHING in the dirty street, does this:

She touches the heart of a half-drunken man. Turning from the saloon door he goes home, and takes to his wife and children as much of his wages as is left, a feeling of repentance, good resolutions.

Her tears are answered by the tears of miserable girls and women who sink back into the shadow as they watch her pure face. Through them she helps to undo the horrible, soul-destroying work of brutal civilization. ----

Mysteriously, diversely, the work of the world is done.

The storm, endless in its power, washes down the mountain-tops to fertilize the valley.

The tiny earthworm works in darkness, crumbling up its little patch of earth to make it fit food for plants.

Each does its work.

The mighty intellect with cyclonic force gives to mankind grand, general views of cosmic grandeur, and introduces to minds prepared the "eternal silences," and the vast serene fields of divine law.

THE "CRIMINAL" CLASS DID THIS VIEW OF IT EVER OCCUR TO YOU?

Much interest just now in CRIMINALS.

Much horror aroused by depravity.

Many plans more or less appropriate for making the air pure.

Many good men, politicians, women and bishops, who spent the Summer at the seaside willing now to spend a few days wiping "CRIME" off the earth. ----

What is CRIME? Who are the criminals? Who makes the criminals?

Do criminals viciously and voluntarily arise among us, eager to lead hunted lives, eager to be jailed at intervals, eager to crawl in the dark, dodge policemen, work in stripes and die in shame? Hardly.

Will you kindly and patiently follow the lives, quickly sketched, of a boy and a girl?

THE GIRL

Born poor, born in hard luck, her father, or mother, or both, victims of long hours, poor fare, bad air and little leisure.

As a baby she struggles against fate and manages to live while three or four little brothers and sisters die and go back to kind earth.

She crawls around the halls of a tenement, a good deal in the way. She is hunted here and chased there.

She is cold in Winter, ill-fed in Summer, never well cared for.

She gets a little so-called education. Ill-dressed and ashamed beside the other children, she is glad to escape the education. No one at home can help her on. No one away from home cares about her.

She grows up white, sickly, like a potato sprouting in a cellar. At the corner of a fine street she sees the carriages passing with other girls in warm furs, or in fine, cool Summer dresses.

With a poor shawl around her and with heels run down she peers in at the restaurant window, to see other women leading lives very different from hers.

Steadily she has impressed upon her the fact, absolutely undeniable, that as the world is organized there is no especial place for her--certainly no comfort for her.

She finds work, perhaps. Hours as long as the daylight.

Ten minutes late--half a day's fine.

At the end of the day aching feet, aching back, system ill-fed, not enough earned to live upon honestly--and that prospect stretches ahead farther than her poor eyes can see.

"What's the charge, officer?"

"Disorderly conduct, Your Honor."

There's the criminal, good men, politicians, women and bishops, that you are hunting so ardently.

THE BOY

Same story, practically.

He plays on the tenement staircase--cuffed off the staircase.

He plays ball in the street--cuffed, if caught by the policeman.

He swings on the area railing, trying to exercise his stunted muscles--cuffed again.

In burning July, with shirt and trousers on, he goes swimming in the park fountain--caught and cuffed and handed over to "the society."

A few months in a sort of semi-decent imprisonment, treated in a fashion about equivalent to that endured by the sea turtle turned over on its back in the market.

He escapes to begin the same life once more.

He tries for work.

"What do you know?"

"I don't know anything; nobody ever taught me."

He cannot even endure the discipline of ten hours' daily shovelling--it takes education to instil discipline, if only the education of the early pick and shovel.

He has not been taught anything. He has been turned loose in a city full of temptation. He had no real start to begin with, and no effort was ever made to repair his evil beginning. ----

"What's the charge, officer?"

"Attempted burglary; pleads guilty."

"Three years in prison, since it is his first offence."

In prison he gets an education. They teach him how to be a good burglar and not get caught. Patiently the State boards him, and educates him to be a first-rate criminal.

There's your first-rate criminal, Messrs. Bishops, good men, politicians and benevolent women. ----

Dear bishops, noble women, good men and scheming politicians, listen to this story:

In the South Sea Islands they have for contagious diseases a horror as great as your horror of crime.

A man or woman stricken with a loathsome disease, such as smallpox, is seized, isolated, and the individual sores of the smallpox patient are earnestly scraped with sea shells--until the patient dies. It hurts the patient a good deal--without ever curing, of course--but it relieves the feelings of the outraged good ones who wield the sea shells.

You kind-hearted creatures, hunting "crime" in great cities, are like the South Sea Islanders in their treatment of smallpox.

You ardently wield your reforming sea shells and you scrape very earnestly at the sores so well developed. ----

No desire here to decry your earnest efforts.

But if you ever get tired of scraping with sea shells, try vaccination, or, better still, try to take such care of youth, to give such chances and education to the young, as will save them from the least profitable of all careers--CRIME. ----

Rich good men, nice bishops, comfortable, benevolent ladies--every man and woman on Blackwell's Island, every wretched creature living near a "red light," would gladly change places with any of you.

Scrape away with your sea shells, but try also to give a few more and a few better chances in youth to those whom you now hunt as criminals in their mature years.

God creates boys and girls, anxious to live decently.

YOUR SOCIAL SYSTEM makes criminals and fills jails.

THE WONDERFUL MAGNET HOW WILD SUPERSTITION SETTLES DOWN INTO SCIENTIFIC REALITY

Everybody knows something of the peculiarities of the magnet. As a boy you led tiny painted ducks around the water basin, holding a magnet in your hand, or you owned a horseshoe magnet that would pick up nails and needles.

You know now in a general kind of way that the magnet is a very useful as well as a somewhat mysterious thing.

The old Greeks and Romans simply knew that some remarkable iron ore found in Lydia, near the town of Magnesia, and hence called magnet, was capable of drawing and holding pieces of metal.

The ancients had the wildest theories concerning the magnet, just as we have wild theories about things that are new and strange to us to-day.

They thought that the magnet could be used in cases of sickness, that it could attract wood and flesh, that it influenced the human brain, causing melancholy. They believed that the power of a magnet could be destroyed by rubbing garlic on it, and that power brought back again by dipping the magnet in goat's blood. They believed that a magnet could be used to detect bad conduct in a woman; they believed that it would not attract iron in the presence of a diamond. They believed much other nonsense quite as ridiculous as the nonsense that we believe to-day. ----

It must have seemed a great waste of time in wise men in the old days to discuss the magnet or think about it at all. Please observe how the apparent nonsense of early speculation finally ripens into actual utility, and learn to respect those who deal as best they can with questions that seem beyond our comprehension.

First the magnet was made actually and wonderfully useful in the compass. Who discovered the compass nobody knows. It was probably invented by the Chinese and brought to Europe through the Arabs. Anyhow, some genius found out that a small needle brought in contact with the so-called lodestone, or magnetic ore, absorbs the qualities of the lodestone, and when placed on a pivot will always point to the north.

In the magnet there were and there still are many mysteries. A form of perpetual motion seems to be embodied in the principle of magnetism. One strange fact is this, that the weight of the metal is exactly the same before it is magnetized and after it is magnetized.