Chapter IV: Part 4

This was no lonesome wilderness wherein we had to scuffle for our food. The milkman came right after breakfast with the morning’s milk. The morning’s milk remember, not the night before’s. Then came the iceman. I want to tell you about him. I had seen him pushing the lawn-mower on a green velvet lawn before a mansion up the beach a ways. I thought he was turning an honest penny taking care of it for some one else. Bless your heart, he lived there. He had a fine big farm behind it, but it was all seeded down in grass, because the harvest of ice from the lake before him in the winter brought him more money for less work than the rich loam behind him could raise in summer crops. Then came the grocer from the village back in the country. He always brought us kerosene, sometimes he brought us groceries, and all too seldom he brought us the flat loaves of the Italian baker in the village, flat and crusty loaves, which the grocer scornfully called “dog-bread.” There was “the bearded lady” that brought us home-made bread just once—just once. Evidently she had confused the relative proportions of the yeast and flour. Then came the old man with the broken hand, talk about which shortened the day for him and us; also, his wife, a dear old soul, who sold us from time to time bouquets picked from her garden, old-fashioned flowers made up so round and hard that if a man were clouted on the head with a nosegay you’d have to take him to the hospital. There was “the bonnet lady,” a sweet-faced Dunkard in the habit of her faith. There were several whom we came to know right well, and after they began to suspect that, like as not, we weren’t as crazy as we seemed, living in tents—Did you ever hear the beat of that?—they showed they were just folks, same as anybody else. But the one I liked the best was the man that came on Saturdays to fetch us eggs and butter. I aroused his interest by telling him that where I came from they sold eggs by quarter’s worth; so many for a quarter, more when eggs were cheap, fewer when eggs were dear. Well sir, he like to never got over that. It was like the returned missionary, telling how the poor heathens live in China. He was a very conscientious man. “I’m sorry,” he would say, “but I’ve got to charge you 21 cents for them there eggs. They ain’t worth it. No eggs is worth that much, no time o’year. They ortn’t to be more’n 18 cents at any time. But the others is sellin’ ’em for 21, and I s’pose I got to, too.”

One and all, as soon as ever they could in decency get round to it, had this one question to ask: “What do you do when it rains?” They’d ask it with such a now-I-got-you look that it was funny to see how set-back they were when we made answer: “We do the same as you, we go in out of it.” But on the rebound you could notice the doubt forming itself in their minds as to whether we knew enough to do that. I’m sure they drove away thinking we were kind of be-addled in our intellects. I’ll have to own up to having asked: “What do you do when it rains?” in the beginning; and also, “What do you do when it blows?” But now I am convinced that a canvas tent well staked is equal to any weather, and I believe that if it had a red-hot stove in it, a body might be right cozy in a tent even in zero weather. I am going to preserve that conviction unshaken by never putting it to the test.

I said that the grocer from the village inland stopped. You notice that I didn’t say the butcher. He wouldn’t. You might go out and “holler” at him: “Hay! Hay there! Hay you! I want to talk to you. Hold on a second.” He never let on he heard you. I didn’t have a revolver, or I should have held him up. I did corner him once down at the Grove, and he explained to me he really could not be bothered with our money for his meat. He and his two men had all they could attend to now, what with their regular trade and the two hotels and the boardinghouses down along the beach. If he sold to private customers, he’d have to hire more help. When I suggested that he do that very thing and make more money, he smiled at me as one smiles at the foolish prattle of a child. Nup. He was awful sorry he couldn’t accommodate me, but—. And that ended it.

So for awhile, whenever we paddled down to the Grove in the canoe for the mail we stopped at the meat-shop. The Grove was where the giddy-go-round was; the razzle-dazzle air-ship, the whistle of whose tiny engine squealed like a frightened pig; the cake-and-coffee shop, the “red-hot” stand; the high-class “vawdvill,” admission ten cents, children five; the dancing floor, patronized by youth and beauty in duck jumpers and sleeves rolled high on red and peeling arms, ragged with strips of tissue-paper hide, each mouth distorted with an “all-day sucker” whose pine stem appetizingly protruded; the combination barber-shop and post-office where they were all out of two-cent stamps for weeks together, and “Joe’s.” I’ll get round to “Joe’s” in a minute if you’ll just be patient, but now I must tell you about the meat-shop. He was a fine fellow, the first butcher, much sought after when he had got into people’s confidence. There was the landlord that rented him the shop; there was the landlady where he roomed and boarded; there was the man he bought his meat of; there was the man he bought his twine and paper of; the man he borrowed $20 of and the man he borrowed $5 of—all seeking him and not finding him. He was—and then he was not. It was one of those mysterious disappearances you read about.

After he went away, we summer folks ungratefully conspired to ruin the land that sheltered us. You know there is no quicker and surer way to do that to a country than by shipping valuables into it. The more iron and steel and wool and chinaware and diamonds—all kinds of things you pay money for—the more of them are brought into a country, the poorer it gets. If it were possible to cover the ground knee-deep with all that heart could wish but brought from another country, the inhabitants would have to give right up, and everything would go to smash. Conversely a country which imports nothing is always immensely rich and prosperous. You know how that is in private life. The man that raises everything he eats; that does his own butchering, makes his own shoes, whose wife spins all the flax and wool the family needs—such a man is always well-to-do; he’s independent. While those who have to buy everything are always poor and forlorn. We all know this, but such is the depravity of the human heart, we want to buy things without asking whether they are made in our country or not. If it wasn’t for our wicked hearts prompting us to want things, we could easily keep out the foreign goods. So as to sort of even up the injury we do our country, it is arranged that whenever we thus sinfully buy foreign wares we pay a fine for it. The fine for ruining Canada by bringing in fresh meat to eat is six cents a pound. Now I want to tell you that when we had no butcher and the village butcher wouldn’t stop for us, there were people so selfish that they not only ruined Canada by bringing over fresh meat, but they smuggled it! Yes sir! Smuggled it. And King Edward needing the money so badly, with all the expense he is under.

The United States is just as up and coming, though, as Canada. Every bit. We don’t propose that our fair land shall be devastated by a flood of cheap Canadian mutton (it is most mighty good mutton; I’ll say that for it), so there is a fine on anybody that brings it over. The Beef Trust has expensive families to send to college too.

In response to popular demand, the baker consented to run the butcher-shop. If you found the place locked up, you stamped on the stoop and yelled awhile. He would come out, rolling the dough off his fingers and cut you off some meat. Sometimes, though you’d have to wait until he got those pies out.

He was as good-hearted a man as ever lived, but he caused me many a sleepless night. I’ll tell you how it was. One day I didn’t go for the meat. The Honest Man’s Wife went. She got a roast, five pounds and a quarter it was, at 18 cents a pound. The man figured on the cost. He put it down 70 cents, but that didn’t look quite right to him, so he set down a figure 1.

“Dollar seventy,” he said.

Now the Honest Man’s Wife had taught school, and was right good at ciphering.

“Would you mind,” she asked as innocent as a cat lapping milk, “would you mind figuring that out for me?”

“Sure thing, lady,” said the baker-butcher. “Five pounds and a quarter. There’s your 5¼, at 18 cents. There’s your 18. Five tums 8 is 40. Put down the aught and carry 4. Five tums one is 5, and 4 is—is—er—er—Five times 8 is 40. Put down the aught and carry—Hold on. I guess I made a mistake. Call it 97 cents.” He smiled pleasingly.

“Seven cents,” mused she. “M—, won’t you please figure out for me how one-fourth of 18 is 7?”

Well now. I had been paying for meat without ever figuring it out. Considering that with his limited arithmetical powers he was certain to make mistakes, and considering that those mistakes were equally certain to be all in his favor, can you wonder that I have tossed and tossed for hours upon a sleepless couch trying to recall the times I bought meat of him, how much it weighed and what I paid him?

I promised to speak of “Joe’s.” Behold I show you a mystery. I saw a billhead of his. His initial was M. Try my best I couldn’t make out to spell Joe with an M. Yet everybody called him Joe. I asked the Signora, his mother-in-law. She pressed her lips strongly together and wildly shook her head. “Eena Cannodda dey gotta no sensea,” she exclaimed. “Eesa nemma notta Joe. No. Eesa nemma Mike. Michaele. Seguro. Surea tinga. Cannodda mans ee say: ‘Eh Joe? Youra nemma Joe? Eh?’ Ee know dey gotta nuss sense a eena Cannodda. Ee say: ‘Sure a-tinga.’ Eesa neema notta Joe. No. Eesa nemma Mike. Michaele. Seguro. Surea tinga.”

At Joe’s you could buy all things necessary to support life from ham to hairpins, including Canadian tobacco, which needs a protective tariff if ever anything does in this world. Not because it is a weakling though. It biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder. Funny thing about that Canadian smoking tobacco. Sometimes it puts you in mind of sauerkrout, and sometimes it puts you in mind of boneset. I don’t think it is quite as bitter as boneset, though.

Shelter, and food, and water and tobacco being thus accounted for, there remains another prime necessity of life, and that is, sleep. I don’t believe there is one person in a hundred that knows the real luxury of sleep. Consider the uncounted hordes that live in terror of “night air.” Consider the more enlightened that raise their bedroom windows just a trifle, to calk them up as soon as ever it turns a little cool. But even when wide open, a bedroom with a window in it is not by any means the same thing as a tent to sleep in, a tent by the lakeside, its front all flaring open, and its sides and top working like bellowses with the breeze. We had regular wire springs and to the wooden frames we nailed pieces of 2 × 4 for legs. On these were mattresses and bedclothes, plenty of them. For when we read of city folk dying of sunstroke and rolling off their roofs where they had gone to get a mouthful of the lifeless air, robbed of its ozone before it reached them, we were snuggling under one and sometimes two pairs of blankets. And then, I had the pleasure (a small and tepid pleasure you may think it, but very real to me) of trying to prop my eyelids open every night, as I lay stretched out upon my bed, till I could thrust my hand out between the sidewall and the baseboard, and feel the glossy leaves of the cool grapevine, and try to unkink a tendril before I lost consciousness. Sometimes I couldn’t get that far. We’d stay up till all hours, nine and even ten o’clock, fighting off sleep. It was a nightly problem with us which we’d rather do, go to bed and get that lovely sleep, or stay awake a minute or two longer staring at the “friendship fire.”

I have vainly tried to think which held the greater fascination for me: The lake as it shifted its hues before my eyes from reddish brown to vivid apple-green through leaded gray and royal purple, the farther shore now so sharp and clear that you could see the houses on it, now but a thin slice of pearl against a pearly sky, the water between us and it now a floor veined and streaked like marble, and now ridgy with billows, that practised, as it were, their scales upon the yellow beach, their hand-backs remembering what the teacher said, “no knuckles,” and their finger tips dancing in the white froth: or, the fire of evenings, fluttering its ribbons of orange taffeta against the back log, snapping its blank cartridges in sport at us, the red coals so many heaps of glowing jewels in an Indian prince’s treasure-house. The lake enthralled me in the day-time. It numbed my brain; it paralyzed my pen-hand, and left me only the still and speechless joy of living. When the darkness fell, the firelight drew me with the master-spell. From the lake I now and then could turn my eyes. The fire was jealous. Not for a full minute would it let me go. In its genial warmth and light our souls expanded, and we sang the old songs that everybody knows, the songs that lie so near the heart its strings must thrill in concord with them, but, through all, our eyes were fastened on the fire. What magic it must be that thus can charm unhaltingly through all the long, long centuries that have drifted by like mist since first men gathered about the friendly flame! The wonder of it! The wonder of it! Without the Fire there could never be the Family, with all that means to us; no Hearth, no Home, with all that means to us. The first priestess was she that kept the coals alive; an altar is but a cooking-place. Lineal descendant of the first flickering blaze fed with twigs is all our god-like industry, all that has made us lords of earth and sea. Back to nature we may go, but farther back than fire we dare not, lest we perish body and soul.

Perhaps it was the dumb fear of this, the heritage of pre-historic ancestry that made us sigh when the time came to tear the logs apart and quench them for the night.

How happy were those dear idle days! Happy, not only in the retrospect, but each moment savoring pleasant to the taste. Once I thought that Heaven must be rather bore-ous with nothing left to strive for, no ambition, no anxiety. I know better now. I could live on and on forever in that camp and never wish for anything but to live. As I write, the pictures of the sweet, calm evenings out upon the placid lake in the canoe return to me. It heaves in gentle swells, the umber water netted on its ripple-crests with soft reflections of the flushed sky fading into tints too delicate for words of color. Black against the lucent edge of heaven march the slim poplars. The stars are struggling out, and taking pattern from them, the riding-lights of yachts shine yellowly. The waves plash gently on the shell that holds us, and the water gurgles against the paddle that urges onward, or tinkles in drops like tiny bells. Something catches in the throat. It is too beautiful, too heavenly for earth-born. From far across the waters comes Caruso’s voice, by magic reproduced, sweet to suffocation.

“Un regal serto sul crin possarti
Ergerti un trono vicino al sol.
Ah! Celeste Aida! Forma divina.”

On the taffrail of the departing steamer we leaned and watched the spot until the darkness and the distance smothered the pale gleaming of the tents where our friends lingered yet a little longer. We sighed; we could not help it. A little more and tears would have flowed.

I want to go back there. I want to go back! Back to Nature—or at least part way.

A Difference

“That long-whiskered, pompous gentleman over there, who is doing most of the talking, is a prominent citizen, isn’t he?” inquired the tourist.

“Ah-nah!” pessimistically replied the landlord of the tavern at Polkville, Ark. “He’s a member of the Legislature.”

His Identity

“Does any one know this poor fellow?” asked the Good Samaritan, addressing the crowd which had quickly gathered at the scene of the accident. “His mind seems to have become an absolute blank, and——”

“Trust official! Trust official!” shouted the assemblage in one voice. “Out of his head and thinks he’s on the witness stand!”

_The Philosophy of Money_

BY J. B. MARTIN

One of our Ohio martyred Presidents, James A. Garfield, in delivering a speech in Congress, the last one, I believe, uttered this sentence: “Whoever controls the volume of money in this country will be absolute master of its industries and commerce.”

A truer sentence was never uttered in our House of Representatives. But to see clearly and forcibly its truthfulness and effects, one must have a proper idea of what money is, by what power it is created, the factors or elements of money, and its functions and use.

Briefly stated, money is the debt-paying instrument in all civilized nations, whose people are actively engaged in making contracts, buying and selling. Every contract creates a debt, hence the necessity of a debt-paying instrument.

Barbarous nations resort to barter; that is, giving one product or commodity for another, and yet with all of our boasted civilization we have men—some prominent ones too—who claim that money is a commodity.

I propose dealing in facts, as they are the stern sentinels of truth. Every nation enacts laws compelling its citizens to tender certain things, variously called “dollars,” “pounds,” “francs,” etc., as the only legal means of payment of debts and taxes. This is the vital point of the whole money question. Law, and law alone, makes money. Let us see what money is, and how it comes into existence.

Our gold, silver, and paper coins; also our nickel and copper coins, are really made up of three distinct factors or elements, each of which may, and often does, exist independently of the other two. This fact is one of the central truths concerning money.

What are these three constituents? First is the denominator or namer of the unit—Dollar. This is an ideal or abstract term given to an intangible thing. Second, some tangible or material substance to represent the dollar, or some multiple of it; and third, its life, the _legal tender_ function.

No two of these can make money; they must all three be named by sovereign power, Congress, or we have no money. Sovereignty is a unit and cannot be divided, nor can it be delegated. This is why National Bank notes are not a legal tender; they are simply the debt of the bank circulating as a substitute for money, so as to gratify the greed of the money sharks, and the “Power” that is aiming to be “master of our industries and commerce.”

But we are told that Congress, sovereign power, cannot make money out of nothing, that there must be _intrinsic value_ in our monetary tokens. Let us analyze this proposition in the light of facts and logical reasoning.

The second factor in money is the material substance used to represent the dollar, or some multiple of it. This material substance does not make the dollar. Remember this.

The important factor in the dollar is its _life_—the legal tender function—and sovereign power alone can grant this.

Under our constitution, sovereign power is placed in the hands of the American people—the whole people, not a part of them,—and their representatives in Congress exercise that power; so that whatever Congress says shall be money is money in the United States. So it can be safely affirmed that law alone creates money. The fiat or decree of law in the United States gives us our money.

But we are told that paper money, greenbacks, is all right when they are made redeemable in coin. The word “redeem” should never be used in connection with our money here in the American Republic. According to our big dictionary, redeem means “to purchase back,” “to ransom, liberate, or rescue from captivity or bondage.” Now as we have seen, Congress issues our money and puts it in circulation among the people. Is not Uncle Sam’s stamp on a piece of paper just as good as it is on a piece of silver or gold? If not, why not? Will some one please tell us? Then again I ask, wherein is there any sense or logic in Uncle Sam, the sovereign power in the United States, buying himself back? Where has our sovereign power got to, that Uncle Sam must ransom, or rescue himself from captivity or bondage?

As we have seen, sovereign power alone can issue money. That being a fact, Congress alone should issue all our money, whether coin or paper, and it should all be made a full legal tender; and no one kind “redeemable” in another kind; with no state or National note circulation as a substitute for money.

Another very important consideration is that it should be issued in sufficient volume to effect all our exchanges on a cash basis, or as nearly so as possible; for debt and usury, now called interest, is the present curse of every civilized country on earth.

This accomplished, the Government should establish Postal Savings Banks in every city having a population of two thousand or more, where the people could deposit their surplus money, until needed, in perfect safety, paying a small per cent. just as they do for insuring their buildings.

There is always a ratio existing between the total volume of money, free to flow in the channels of trade, and all things on the market for sale, including labor. This ratio is called—price. Statistics show that we had our largest volume of money at the close of the Civil War. In 1866 we had $80.00 per capita. We then had high prices and every man willing to work was employed. There were no tramps on the road begging for work or something to eat.

The accursed policy of contraction then commenced, at the instigation of the “Power” that was aiming to “be master of our industries and commerce.” Contracting the money volume continued until 1878, when we had less than $20.00 per capita. Then our roads and city streets were full of tramps, so-called. No work was to be obtained. Shops and factories were closed and farmers did their own work.

In 1866 there were but 520 failures in the United States with liabilities amounting to $8,579,000. In 1878, there were 10,478 failures with liabilities amounting to $234,383,132. Such were the effects of contracting the debt-paying instrument of our country at the dictation of Wall Street money tyrants.

The Rothschilds in Europe are the “Power” that controls the volume of money in every one of the European countries, and the result is they are the “absolute masters of the industries and commerce” of every government in Europe.

Furthermore, it can be safely said that through their agent, August Belmont, and his clique in New York, they are aiming to become the “absolute masters of our industries and commerce” here in the United States.

Can it be possible that an American President would join in this crusade against the best interests of the American people? It would really appear so, for Theodore Roosevelt in his recent message to Congress recommends retiring of the greenbacks and “redeeming” the silver dollars in gold. That means that our gold coin shall be our only perfect money, with National Bank notes (the debts of the banks, drawing double interest, once on the bonds deposited to secure the notes, and again on the notes; for no bank note passes over the counter of the bank issuing it, until interest is paid in advance), as a substitute for money; thus giving the banks the power to increase or diminish our volume of money, just as it may suit their sweet will and avaricious purposes.

At this point of the discussion we are told that we must have a standard of value, and that gold is a never-varying standard of value the world over. In reply to that I find in Sir Frederick Eden’s table of English money, from the Conquest in 1066 down to 1601, that in 1551 gold was worth only 4 shillings 7½ pence per ounce in London—a little over one dollar of our money; and in Doubleday’s “Financial History of England,” page 277, that in 1813 gold was worth 5 pounds 10 shillings an ounce in London—twenty-seven dollars and a half in our money. Does that look as though gold was a never-varying standard of value?

Besides, there is and can be no such thing as a “standard of value.” We can have a standard for quantity, gravity, and extension, but not of value. We have the gallon, the bushel, the pound and ton, the yard, rod and mile, but where is the unit for value?

Some may say; “Why the dollar is the unit of value”—not correct. The dollar is the unit in the expression of price; and, as we have seen, price is the ratio, so the word dollar is not a unit of value. Not until we can measure an idea with a quart cup, measure it with a foot rule, or put it in the scales and weigh it, can we have a measure of value; for remember, value is an idea, an action of the mind, and what has civilization invented to measure an idea with?

Value is human estimation of desirable things, which are limited in quantity, or which require sacrifice to obtain.

There we have a full, clear and scientific definition of value, “Human estimation”—clearly an action of the mind—an idea.

Whenever there is a general inability to pay debts on account of an insufficient or low volume of money, we call it a—panic. We have had five such periods in the history of the American Republic, viz: in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873 and 1893.

How much better it would have been for our Republic had our fathers, who framed our Constitution and established the Government under it, given us a safe, sound and scientific financial system; with all money, whether coin or paper, issued by the Government, and in sufficient volume to do a cash business; volume to be increased as population and business increased; all made a full legal tender for all debts public and private, and at no time to be a contraction or reduction in its volume. Then we would have had none of the periods called panics and our advancement in all branches of business and science would be far in advance of what it now is.

It may be said, and truthfully, that our fathers had no time to devote to the money question; but there were a few in those days who did study it and profited by it just as there are at the present time.

If the farmers, the mechanics and wage-workers,—the creators of wealth—in this country ever expect to get any relief from the tyranny and oppression of this octopus that is “aiming to be master of their industries and commerce,” they must go to work earnestly and systematically in their various organizations—the Grange, The Farmers’ Alliance, the Patrons of Husbandry and the various Labor Unions—to studying the money question, and if they persevere they will see clearly as President Garfield did over a quarter of a century ago, that “whoever controls the volume of money in this country will be absolute master of its industry and commerce.”

There were a few men even at the time our Government was organized who understood the money question. Tom Paine, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin concurred in the theory that “good paper money, based on the credit of the people is the best money ever invented by man.” “Equal and exact justice to all men, special privilege to none,” was their motto.

Let me quote further from Garfield. In that same speech he said: “But I admit freely that no Congress is wise enough to determine how much money the country needs. There never was a body of men wise enough to do that. The volume of currency needed depends upon laws that are higher than Congress and higher than Government. The laws of trade alone can determine its quantity.”

Demand for use is the natural law of money supply, and the Government should furnish such an amount as may be legally demanded; the idea being that the business of the country will absorb as much as it needs, and no more.

My opinion is, the volume ought not to be less than $50.00 per capita; and, as I believe, $100 per capita would be none too much to effect all our exchanges for cash, which is the proper way to do a safe business.

According to the Treasurer’s Reports for 1864, 5 and 6, and Fawcett’s, “Gold and Debt,” we had in circulation at the close of the Civil War about $80 per capita, which was none too much. Then it was that we had high prices and good times.

Our present Comptroller of the Currency reports $31 per capita in the various kinds of money and substitutes for money now in circulation. This is altogether too small an amount for the production and exchanges required in this broad land of ours. The result is debts are being made and credits are expanding at a fearful rate, preparing the way for our next great panic.

As stated above, we have never yet passed beyond twenty years without having a panic, and a moment’s thought will present to the mind the fact that we are now on the last half of the twenty years since 1893.

It is coming, for we all know that “like causes always produce like results;” and the cause is an inadequate volume of the debt-paying instrument—money—to do the business with. The result is that deferred payments—debts—must be made, and, as we have seen, a panic is a prevailing inability to pay debts. So look out for breakers in the near future.

Our present situation is no time to advocate commodity money, for the defenders of hard money ought to know that hard money and hard times always go hand in hand.

Demand for use is the natural law of money supply; and, as the demand now is far in excess of the supply, it is safe to say, that unless more money is put into the channels of trade, there will be a severe money stringency; if not a genuine old-fashioned panic.

I have often wondered why $100,000,000 in gold is kept penned up in the Treasury Building in Washington. So far as doing the people any good it might as well be in the bottom of the ocean.

Money performs precisely the same function in the social organism that blood does in the animal organism. Blood is the vitalizing force in the human body, and money is the vitalizing force in the body politic. Everybody knows that the loss of blood causes weakness in a human person, and just so the loss of money—a contraction of the money volume—causes weakness in a government; hence no “Power” should be permitted to control our volume of money.

Every voter in this Republic has a head above his shoulders supposed to contain a think-shop; and, if the “Power” now controlling our money volume, and as a result our “commerce and industries,” is to be removed and better times secured, every think-shop must get down to business, with a full determination to see that our “commerce and industries” shall not be interfered with, that the volume of money be increased enough to effect rapid exchange of products and the payment of debts.

The difficulty in accomplishing this lies in the fact that so many think-shops are never used, and again, some never read any newspaper except “my party paper,” containing nothing for think-shops to work at, and the result is—ignorance.

Thought is the mother of ideas, and ideas move the world. The reading man will naturally be an observing man, a thinking man, always looking for the cause of results which are transpiring around him, either in politics or science.

The election in several States last fall indicated very clearly that more men were using their think-shops than in previous campaigns. The good work has commenced and may it continue until our Republic be free from any organization that dare attempt to be—“Master of our industries and commerce.”

_The Little Path to Peace_

BY MARY SMALL WAGNER

Save for the pewee’s plaintive cry,
Along this way all sound doth cease.
We christened it, the breeze and I,
“The little path to peace.”

The dusty highway far behind,
The vine-clad cottage as our goal,
There lies what many strive to find—
Peace for the heart and soul.

A mother’s voice drifts down the stair,
Crooning a simple lullaby.
See Mistress Puss and Fido there,
In perfect amity;

And over all the scent of flowers,
And over all the spell of home,
Though simple, for the asking ours,
Enthralling all who come.

O comrade with the restless eyes,
And greater cares than I can name,
With weariness you ill disguise,
Plodding the road to fame—

Pause—where the trees lap overhead,
Close the wee gate, nor seek release.
And hand in hand we’ll lightly tread
The little path to peace!

A STORY OF KOREA

BY ROBERT DUNN.]

West from Ping-Yang, the old Korean capital, flows Tai-Dong River into the Yellow Sea. Where in its mouth the flood tide weakens, and junks with lumber slung over sides drop their brown mat sails; there, where the clean sharp hills most beautifully are tricked with mirage and blue mist, squats the town of Chinnampo.

Kuroki’s army landed there on the March night early in the war when the ice, as if by magic, ground out toward China. Oiled torches spiked to rafts bobbed on the chill stream, and the winches of blacker transports creaked and whistled to the snowy shore. From the holds swung aloft rice and fodder and knock-kneed, shaggy ponies. Impish guards of the Mikado in red and green, privates in long coats and spectacles, sprang forth rigidly on land. No noise, no fuss; the brown invasion of Asia was furtively begun. The long barracks were ready, and they that had watched Jap coolie sappers a-building them—beer and sweet-cake sellers from the islands, pioneers in the new westward hegira—sat proud and bland that night in their paper-slat doors. Meanwhile, from his desert of filth and thatched mud huts all about, crouched cousin Korean in the darkness, unsurprised and cynical, smoking a yard-long bamboo pipe as he dropped soft syllables of philosophy on the vanity of effort, and with disdain drew his wadded white robes closer.

Even when the red sun flag fluttered darkly up its pole, no cheers followed. But from a hill overlooking the town an oath arose.

“Damn these Japs, damn their mustard bellies,” growled Captain Cyrus Brewster, chewing a stogie on the porch of his lonely bungalow.

Isolated on his hill, the captain was just such a Yankee, thin-nosed, blue-eyed and muffin-mouthed but with an imperishable look of youth for all his curled gray hair, as you might find in a bungalow with a flag-pole in front were you wrecked, for instance, off Patagonia; which is to say he was an iconoclast, and hated the world. He shipped from Chinnampo two million dollars a year in bullion from a gold mine near the Yalu River, for which he was “agent;” passed white men’s food and chemicals through the custom-house, and swore at coolies loading them on the light-draught junks he ran to the head of navigation on the Tai-Dong, whence carts trundled to the mines.

But worse than the world he hated the Japanese, for they militantly coveted for barrack joists the only pine grove in the region, which adorned his homestead. They could not seize the land without stirring diplomatic mud, since the captain had bought his stake from the Russians, who had eked it from Seoul in ’96, when the Jap ambassador burned the old Empress in kerosene, and her son fled to the Slav legation. Therefore the Islanders had threatened eviction, with smiles and insults; dickered blandly with bows, lies, and tissue documents inkily fly-tracked, as the captain repulsed them with a fist blow on the table, and cable blanks inscribed with fiery messages to Washington, which he never sent.

“War news?” he’d exclaim to missionaries bound up river. “Don’t ask me, by crotch! I don’t bother the monkeys in their damned town, and they don’t come up here to me.”

Thus being pro-Russian and a truly brave man, Brewster felt he must vindicate his notions in action. Having heard that a Cossack captain near Wonsan on the west coast would be pleased to know how many men and rice sacks landed with Kuroki, he let a young Russian travel, dressed as a Japanese, on his junks between the lines. This fellow’s name was Davydoff, a machinist, who patriotically had quit the mine when the war broke out, but being lame could not enlist. In disguise, he traveled by the name of Ikeda. I do not know how the captain squared with his conscience in abetting a spy, but that Yankee defect is an over-worked myth, anyhow; and a world malevolent enough to land a man, aged fifty, alone in Korea, with a past like an erasure in a pirate’s log, should grant indulgence.

This very hour tonight he awaited Ikeda, erst Davydoff. Now through his night glass he searched the river, now the silent town distorted by no flickering camp-fires, the torches, dying into iridescence, revealed the black Tai-Dong as a covert serpent stealing across a world numb and indifferent in white age. “Like them yeller oriental hearts, that river,” he muttered, nodding at the stream, “reaching out acrost the world fer us white men’s sceptres, learnin’ to smile whiles they suffer. Oh, they’ll get the sceptres.” You see, the captain believed firmly in the Yellow Peril. Soon he turned toward the angled thatches of the town, and a white painted gable far from the barracks caught his eye.

His sharp features softened with recollection. “I see yer hev yer schoolhouse lit, young missy,” he murmured. “Night school. Workin’ overtime civilizin’ Koreans.” For first the invaders had built the barracks, then the school—copying the white man’s way in lifting a yellow burden—which to the captain menaced a right regeneration of Korea. The brown people thus handled the surest civilizing weapons of the white, who were sealed meanwhile further north in their fortresses of privilege and prejudice; so the bungalow on the hill and the schoolhouse among the huts symbolized the passing of Asia.

“Karin San’s there,” mused the captain, and a vision of the white clad Korean boys with long hair parted in the middle, the girls in green silk tunics, their snub noses buried in books of English and Japanese, uprose before him as he had seen them through the doorway, repeating the alphabet in unison, on a day he had passed the schoolhouse. Then Karin San had bowed low on the threshold, saying, “It is a beautiful day, You-think-yes? I am Karin-San-the-school-teacher-of-English,” and a big red pin had fallen from the shiny convolutions of her oiled hair, as she bowed so low. “Great Christopher!” the captain had gasped; the same dizziness now touched his breast as he watched.

Many times since he had visited Karin San, stealing down to the school unknown to the Japs, or even Davydoff. He would sit beside her on her platform, and she would turn to him for correction when her red lips mistrusted how an English word should sound. After lessons they would talk of Japan and America, for the captain had the reserve of age and disappointment, and to Karin the war was no more a subject for discussion than the coming of spring itself.

“Shame me for lovin’ you, Karin San,” he muttered now tonight. “One of the yeller-bellies I hates. Hypocrite!” and he turned toward a gigantic sort of dog-house under his flag-pole, where hibernated in winter and dozed in summer, the captain’s big brown Siberian bear, Kuropatkin, which he loved even more than his twisty pine trees. He tapped on the house with his bamboo stick, and wished the General “Happy New Year.”

“It’s time ye waked and brushed yer teeth,” he said. “World’s a bit livelier in these parts than when ye went to bed last year.”

The rattle of a chain told the hibernation was over, while eight hundred pounds of shagginess squeezed into the open; tested the ground for frost with a paw, waved its head as a man sounds a stiff neck, and as if to say, “My! but this is early in the summer to wake a fellow!”

But the captain had stooped quickly and snatched at a red object in Kuropatkin’s house. “Cuss them, Gen’ral!” he exclaimed, grasping a shinbone hung with flesh. “The Japs has tried to pizen ye! Peach kunnels,” he growled holding the meat to his nose. “But Mr. Jap Mustard-belly ain’t so all-fired wise, and don’t know God A’mighty can’t pizen a b’ar. He’ll learn a thing or two ’bout Rooshian b’ars some fine day, though now he’s got the nerve and numbers to do most anything.”

Kuropatkin, cocking his head on one side, raised an ankle, and, pointing like a setter dog into the pine-grove, let out an “Oof!”

“You see Mr. Mustard yonder?” drawled the captain, following the General’s gaze. “You’re sayin’ you’re pretty wise, you b’ars, ain’t you? I guess the’ ain’t no monkey law _yit_ about watch dog _or_ b’ar licenses in this country. My timber’s lyin’ pretty loose about this hill. We’ve likely got a vendetta on, General,” and having kicked away the poisoned bone, the captain unhooked Kuropatkin’s ankle chain, thus freeing him.

Quite right was the Yankee about Jap nerve and a vendetta. The Islanders’ next militant move in the feud came that very night. In his French bedstead—the only kind in Korea, with its thin iron mosquito-frame aloft—he was wakened by a rasping, cracking sound out in his grove. Now and then came a swish and a thump. Then——

“Yai! Yai! Eee! Eee! and a diabolical yeodle curdled the moonlight on the hill-side. Presently a big brown object lolled from the shadows of the pines, and stalked majestically toward the flag-pole.

“Got the fisheatin’ Japs in the act, did yer, Pat?” whispered the captain out the window, shaking with laughter.

“Oofski!” grunted Kuropatkin, crowding into his house. Next morning Brewster walked to his grove to find that three of his tallest pine trees had been chopped and carted off, while two axes hung at hasty angles in a half-felled fourth. After breakfast, Puk-Chong, his Korean “boy,” started for the Jap headquarters with the copy of a telegram, declared in a brief note to be then on its way to the American Minister at Tokio. Brewster himself walked unnoticed down the hill to the cable office, which lies far from the barracks. He actually despatched the message sent in copy to the commandant, there being yet no war correspondents, and hence no censorship in Korea. It was rather a more fire-eating complaint than any he had pretended to send to Tokio before, and some time passed before he knew the importance of his act.

After tiffin, two Jap soldiers appeared on his veranda, mutely inquisitive in their brown leggins, yellow shoulder-straps, and high crowned caps. They drew white gloves from their hands, smiled, and bowed three times till their long swords clicked on the floor. The shorter, darker soldier—he with a wispy convex mustache and eyes like a dissipated doll—handed the captain a letter bearing the long brown Korean stamp. The captain whistled as he opened it. It was addressed in a round, shaded hand suggesting steel pens and primary writing books. Reading it, he glowered; then smiled, as if he discerned something pleasant on a mountain across the river; frowned again and more deeply, coughed, and put the letter gently into his left-hand breast pocket, where his heart underneath beat faster.

“So Korean postmen ain’t good enough to carry white men’s letters no more?” demanded the captain.

“We dare no longer trust the shiftless Korean with letters to so august a person,” explained the taller soldier, and both bowed.

“They won’t let you steam them open and read them, like you have this one?” said the captain. “Hey?”

“Your bear,” said the doll-eye, after each had stared with polite blankness at the captain, “is he dangerous?” and the soldier indicated the flag-pole.

“Mebbe your pardner’s pants ken show that,” drawled the Yankee, taking the other by the shoulder and turning him around. “Um, no,” he growled, “but that b’ar knows pizen when he smells it.”

“Pizen?” said the doll-eye vacantly, “What you call pizen?”

“We feed it to b’ars regular in Americky,” replied the captain fiercely. “We put it on shin bones and shove it in their kennels. It makes them strong so they ken bust chains and plug axes inter trees.”

“Ah, so, _so_,” gasped the pair, with the Jap stare which conceals understanding.

The captain knew the soldiers could never have called on so direct a mission as to deliver a letter or complain of Kuropatkin’s attack; and that to show anger to mere privates at losing his trees would yield him only smiles of scorn and pity. What had they come for? Brewster had his suspicions, which he started to test. He thrust his hands carelessly into his pockets, observing that he guessed he wouldn’t “get no more letters at all, steamed or unsteamed.” To which the emissaries replied that he did them an injustice, that they had no desire to interfere with the honorable foreigner’s business, but sought rather to safeguard his privacy by official deliveries.

“_So deska_,” said the captain with falling inflection, which means, “Well, well, now, you don’t say.” “You mean then, any Jap can bring me mail?” he challenged.

“Yes,” said the tall one. “Indeed. Certainly. If he is in the army.”

“Then I’d like your boss’s permission,” said the captain slowly, “to detail that Jap boy Ikeda I have traveling to the mines for me to bring my mail.”

“Ah—he is expected back soon?” interrupted both at once, stepping forward eagerly at mention of the spy, confirming Brewster’s suspicion.

“No,” drawled the Yankee. “No. Ikeda’s welched—gone south to Seoul to fight for the Korean Emperor.”

“_So_,” said both with eager incredulity, “We have a great pity for you.”

“Do you think yer boss could git him back fer me?” asked the captain sadly.

No answer.

“You are telling the truth?” said the doll-eye suddenly.

“No,” said the captain, “I ain’t—not altogether. Good morning.”

The soldiers consulted one another with clever glances. The captain whistled easily, for he was quite sure now that they had come to arrest Davydoff. “Good morning,” he repeated.

The pair started down the walk to the gate, but turned to bow. As they did so, the Yankee seemed to see their stoop grow rigid. They gazed over his head to the door of the bungalow. He turned. Behind him in the doorway stood what seemed to be a Jap—a man wooden-shoed, in a gray kimono, a derby hat squashed flat over his ears—Davydoff returned.

“Your boss is pretty obligin’,” called the captain to the soldiers. “Without my askin’ he seems to have telegraphed Ikeda in Seoul to come back and carry my letters. An’ he’s come.”

But the soldiers had started back up the garden walk on a run.

“Hi! Pat,” called the captain, “Sic ’em, Pat, _sic ’em_!” he shouted.

A chain in the big dog-house rattled, and before the emissaries had paced ten yards, their twin brown gaiters were flying across the garden and swinging over the rail fence, before the galumphing Kuropatkin.

“I hev a great pity fer ye,” imitated the captain. “They expect all lies or all truth,” he observed, turning to the bewildered spy. “Mix ’em, an’ yer ken wig a yeller-belly—if ye hev an intelligent b’ar.”

The youth exclaimed, trembling; “I have heard all. The two Japanese there know me for an informer. It is danger to remain here.”

“It’s a bullet fer ye on the bund tomorrow,” said the captain, thoughtfully eying him, and “jail fer me.”

The boy limped dazedly to the wash-basin in the dining-room, and a black wig fell to the floor. In a moment a blue-eyed, yellow-haired youth sat down to tiffin opposite the captain. A whitish beard curled thinly over his chin, and except for the roundness of his head and his hair’s creeping low on the forehead—as in all exiles’ and settlers’ sons of the Siberian steppe—he would have passed in America for the second generation of a Baltic immigrant, refined and sharpened by transplantation.

“It would be but dying for my country,” he said with effort, but now calm, after the two had eaten awhile in silence. “The great work is done. Kosakin, the Cossack, has all the figure of the landing.”

“Yes, Davy, but Rooshia ain’t the captain’s country,” explained the Yankee. “We got to hide you.”

The captain lapsed again into silence, listening absently to an excited tale of suspicion, strategy, and escapes on a week’s trip from Wonsan, told in the Russian’s queer, inverted English. As they rose from the table, Brewster drew from his pocket the letter given him by the doll-eyed soldier, and handed it to Davydoff. “Suppose you read this,” he said. Davy took it, and read:

Exalted Sir? The pupils Oyama school of primary, Chinnampo,
request being you the oneman English speak, observe the
try-on of drama given bye and after Red cross aid, in the new
school house of the night you get this. Appreciation would be
subgestion and correction English spoken. Drama, Uncle Tom’s
Cabin.

Humbly to be yours,

Most Honorific Sir,

Tatso Karin.

“I guess we’ll have to take in the show,” remarked the captain, as the boy glanced up with a queer look of amazement. “We got to go somewheres.”

“Is there no place else?” asked the boy excitedly, “I would myself surrender rather than now to enter the schoolhouse.”

The captain met his glance intently. “It’s our one chance, Davy,” he said, searching the boy’s eyes. “I’ll tell ye. I know thet young school missy pretty well. Unbeknown to you, I’ve helped her hearing class. She’s the one friend I have in town. If the game’s up with us, as I believe, I’d like to say good-bye to her,” and the captain with bent head turned away.

Davydoff sprang to his feet and paced up and down the room, clenching and unclenching his hands, darting glances at the captain. “No, no,” he cried. “Not there! Not there! Never, by my honor!”

The Yankee turned to catch his eye.

“It is ye suspicion the letter’s a trap?” he asked searchingly. “It ain’t, I promise ye. Jap though she is, she’d never—never—” he stammered. “Or——”

The Russian stopped short and their eyes met. “No, no,” he answered, “I apprehend no trap, not from Karin. Only if—” he checked himself. Understanding glimmered in his blue eyes. Then—“If she is as well your friend, I will go. I will go to the schoolhouse with you.”

At dark, the captain followed by Davy, black-haired and derby-hatted, with Kuropatkin swaying comfortably between, halted suddenly as they entered the moon-lit pine grove. Looking back toward the bungalow, they saw two-brown gaitered figures patter up the garden path and steal behind the bear house, where one leaped monkey fashion on its roof. The other with prehensile feet shinned the flag-pole and hurled a stone down upon Kuropatkin’s roof. Finding he was not at home, they dashed on toward the bungalow.