and integrity of thought, such moral independence of party, such elevation of tone, and such wide culture, as to demand our great respect and secure our hearty praise.'

But if Bowles's criticism had some justice in it, so also had Garrison's. Bowles's own biographer admits that he was too ready to sacrifice friendship to what he considered duty, and that he freely found fault in his paper with those whom he loved and by whom he wished to be loved in private life. And have we not Bowles's own personal testimony on the subject, none the less forcible for being half jocose? 'I mean to be as loyal as possible, and that is n't very loyal, for you know I do love to find fault and grumble, and thank God I can afford to.' But who of us can really afford to grumble and find fault?

Yet what finer witness can there be to character than the great love that surrounded this man, in spite of his fault-finding? Those whom he attacked publicly resented it for a while, but once they met him they forgot it. He had the art of making men forget everything except his charm. All his life he fought Ben Butler. Yet whenever they met, they swapped jokes and stories. When Bowles was on his deathbed, he received from Butler a letter of sympathy and good wishes, and almost his last words were, 'Write to thank General Butler, and say that while Mr. Bowles has always differed from him in politics, he has never failed to recognize his high qualities, and to appre

ciate his many personal attractions.' Senator Dawes suffered repeatedly from the strictures of the Republican; yet he declared that he loved its editor more than any one outside of his own family. A member of the editorial staff, who had been a witness of many sharp rebuffs, confesses, 'I almost worshiped him. There was more religion in my feeling toward him than in almost anything else in me.' But most touching of all is the exclamation commonly heard among his humble neighbors in the city of Springfield, 'I am so sorry Sam Bowles is going to die.'

He was a striking and most sympathetic type of the journalist, and the journalist is interesting because he came into the world only a hundred years ago and seems likely to play an increasingly great part in it. Certainly no one who has followed our own Civil War in the newspapers can fail to feel the singular and important position they then occupied. If the war itself is to be regarded as a great tragic drama, the newspapers almost precisely perform the function of the Greek tragic chorus. They comment abstractly, yet with trembling eagerness, upon the conduct and motives of the actors; they intervene often indiscreetly and with doubly tragic consequence; they prophesy with pathetic or ludicrous incapacity of vision; above all they reflect from moment to moment, like a sensitized surface, the long, unwieldy, enormous ebb and flow of events and passions and desires of which no man can really divine the end.

WHEN that glib proverb, 'God made the country, but man made the town,' was first put into words, towns were far less menacing and imposing than they are to-day. One could live in town and still get a sufficient, though diminished, share of blue sky and oxygen. The proverb was a prophecy rather than an affirmation. We are living in the day of its fulfillment.

That modern cities have solved vast problems of sanitation, water-supply, lighting, transportation, housing, education, with skill and with something like adequacy, cannot be imputed unto them for righteousness until they have also solved the subtler, more fundamental problems of vitality and character with which they are now struggling. They still take the strong, placid, deep breathing, clear-eyed country boy, and turn him and his children into restless, excitable, shallow-lunged folk who have given up their peace and their vitality for increased nervous activity, and have exchanged their intuition of the divine for a profound spiritual indifference.

The rush of population to those hardand-fast, stifling spots that are now our cities plays a large part in producing a new type of character, a new philosophy. Other elements enter into it, of course. The most conspicuous of these, perhaps, is a negative thing the lack of a vital religion. How far the spiritual life is actively discouraged by urban conditions is too complicated a problem for offhand solution. But we may not ignore the age-long testimony of the saints and sages that one must go apart from men to find God.

Current fiction offers its own reflection of these new types of character,

this new philosophy, and it also reflects a wholesome reaction against them. The reaction is usually more or less conscious and intended, while the dessicating modern tendency itself is more frequently exhibited with great naïveté in the author's own attitude toward life.

The case for the country requires no proving to those of us past forty. When industry engaged fewer folk, and agriculture proportionately more, there was something in the world which is being lost out of it. To say that agriculture tends to make men, and industries tend to make animals, has a shocking sound. No doubt it is a statement quite open to attack, yet it looks toward truth.

If we say, instead, that work chiefly in the open air, close to the soil, and the association of men in small and not too homogeneous groups are the only conditions under which large numbers of human beings fit to possess and improve the earth can be bred and reared continuously over long periods of time, we shall come close to a statement impossible to deny. Undeniably, also, life under the latter conditions is more valuable to the individual as well as more hopeful for the race. Possessing, as it does, all the elements that give interest and develop personality, it is eternally worth while.

Now and again we find a work of fiction which is consciously explicit as to the country's case. Whenever such a book is thus definite, and adds grace to its conviction, the present reviewer is glad to give audible thanks for that book. Hillsboro People, by Dorothy

1 Hillsboro People. By DOROTHY CANFIELD. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Miss Canfield's tales of the Vermont country justify themselves first of all by being good stories; but they have body, unity, efficiency given them by the author's preliminary declaration of faith in country living. She quotes in well-justified derision the statement (from Pritchell's Hand-book of Economics) that the rush of population to the great cities is no temporary movement. 'It is roused by a final revolt against that malignant relic of the dark ages, the country village, and by a healthy craving for the deep, full life of the metropolis, for contact with the vitalizing stream of humanity.' It is doubtless well that city-dwellers should feel thus -if they can; but such statements should have small place in handbooks of economics until the professors of that inexact science have disproved what physicians have long told us, that no family can endure steady contact with 'the vitalizing stream of humanity' for three successive generations, so hard is it on blood and brawn and brain alike.

'People thrive in country villages,' says Miss Canfield, 'because they crave human life. . . . In the phantasmagoric pantomime of the city we forget that there are so many real people in all the world, so diverse, so unfathomably human, as those who meet us in the little post-office on the night of our return to Hillsboro.' City folks cannot 'feel themselves live,' she tells us. Ceaseless activity protects them from the undesired consciousness that they are themselves. "They cannot conceive the bitter-sweet, vital taste of that consciousness as we villagers have it; they cannot understand how arid their existence seems to us without this unhurried,

penetrating realization of their own existence and of the meaning of their acts. We do not blame city-dwellers for not having it; we ourselves lose it when we venture into their maelstrom... but we do not stay where we cannot feel ourselves live. We hurry back to the shadow of Hemlock Mountain, feeling that to love life one does not need to be what is usually called happy, one needs only to live.' needs only to live.' Here is an adequate philosophy in a nutshell, but it is not always acceptable to the intensely urban modern mind!

In the past, English novelists have acknowledged liberally the debt character owes to the soil. Some of them do so still. For instance, weight is given to the pleasant story-making of Mrs. Skrine, author of Billie's Mother,1 by her avowed intention to celebrate the abiding virtues of English peasant stock. The chief of these she finds to be that mass of personality which we call force of character, showing itself in stability, honesty, justice, and limitless devotion to its own.

Eden Phillpotts has long been concerned with these able-bodied virtues and their counterbalancing defects. Always he adds power and the artist's mastery of subject to his consideration of them. In Brunel's Tower, his best book since the incomparable Widecombe Fair, he deals as well, in the character of Harvey Porter, with the stimulus of environment and its power to modify natural tendency. The scene of the story is a West Country pottery, and the book is as refreshing to the spirit as a week in Devon. It is large, sane, able, and in spite of tragedy, amusing.

The author of Mrs. Martin's Man,3 St. John G. Ervine, a new British writ1 Billie's Mother. By MARY J. H. SKRINE. New York: The Century Co.

2 Brunel's Tower. By EDEN PHILLPOTTS. New York: The Macmillan Co.

3 Mrs. Martin's Man. By ST. JOHN G. ERVINE. New York: The Macmillan Co.

er of power and distinction, deals with this weight of personality as shown in Scotch-Irish stock in a North-of-Ireland village. In its simplicity and humanness, this book is almost extravagantly good. Mrs. Martin is one of those slim Irishwomen who hide under a frail exterior the force to accomplish gigantic tasks. Captivated by the boisterous, masterful James Martin, she marries him against the will of her family. At his best James is an indecent brute. When he finally deserts his wife, after an intrigue with her sister under her own roof, the reader is delighted to be rid of him. Mrs. Martin picks up the pieces and makes a life. She establishes a shop, earns money, brings up her children, supervises the erring sister, all with a balance and broad-mindedness that are actually disconcerting! What she suffers she keeps to herself, in the decent, oldfashioned way. Her life is made up of corrupt, unlovely things. She endures them steadfastly, and by grace of her endurance, they lose their hideousness. To walk through slime without disgust, to suffer wrong without anger, is somewhat of a feat, even for North-of-Ireland character. She handles with equal capacity the complications arising from her husband's return as a dirty unattractive prodigal, and from her son's discovery of the father's character. Her head is level, her hand strong. It is not fitting that she should publicly disgrace her Jamesy's father, though to her he can only be ‘a man in my house that does things around the shop, that's all.' Neither will she allow her son to show his resentment against his father and his aunt. 'I'd be the poor woman if I was to wander about thinkin' o' my troubles an' my pride, an' how I was hurt by this one an' that one. I'm too ould to be hatin' people, Jamesy, an' when you're my age, son, you'll not be hatin' people unless your

mind's a rotten mind. Your wee hates 'll drop off you just like an ould shawl that slips from your shoulders when you're not lookin', an' you'll be knowin' well your pleasure is to be goin' about with as good a heart as you can.'

Such big, broad-minded folk as Martha Martin and Phillpotts's George Easterbrook and Paul Pitts are fine representative specimens of what country living, the old religion, and the old philosophy wrought out of the raw stuff of human nature. Over against them in sharp contrast are the neurasthenic, light-weight heroes and heroines who swarm in some of the recent city-made novels, illustrating unintentionally but vividly the deterioration worked by modern life and theory. Some of these novels are English, some American. The neurasthenic, perhaps, belong chiefly to us. When the English get off the track of life, they are maniacal rather than neurasthenic, and apt to run amuck even in their fiction.

Angela's Business,' perhaps the best of these city-made stories, is a most amusing tale, written with greater dexterity and smoothness than Mr. Harrison has heretofore achieved; but it is a very one-sided presentation of that problem which confronts the young of both sexes-how, namely, to achieve a satisfactory marriage. Angela is a tremendously clinging vine; Mary Wing is a fine, up-standing, overworked schoolteacher; Donald is a young cousin whom Mary supervises and plans for with sisterly devotion; Charles King Garrott is a nice, but not over-baked, young man who tutors a little and writes a little and tries to get a line on Woman. He admires Angela until he perceives she is out for capture, when he hastily sneaks round the corner, throwing Donald in her way to pro

1 Angela's Business. By HENRY SYDNOR HARRISON. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co.

tect himself. Mary, meanwhile, is vainly throwing another girl in Donald's way, a 'new' girl with a rich father, who would be such a satisfactory match for Donald! Angela carries off-not the prize exactly, but just Donald. Donald can't be a prize: the term is inapplicable to any man who could live for years under the ægis of a Mary Wing without developing wit enough to avoid an Angela. By this time Charles King Garrott has learned to appreciate Mary Wing, whom he once suspected of being too hard and too busy to love or be loved. Fortunately Mary can earn a living for two, as the reader sees no ground for faith that Charles King will be able to do so. As to earning a living for four-!

The reader asks himself, as he closes the book, why it is any better for a man to be a clinging vine than for a woman? This is not at all the question Mr. Harrison means to raise, but it faces us none the less. Probably the author only intended his hero to seem young and uncertain about life and women, but he actually does seem rather knock-kneed and do-nothing. The stony-hearted reader reflects as follows: Angela is weak and 'feminine'; Mary Wing, strong and womanly; Angela's man has vigor enough to conquer a place in the world; Mary's has n't; the strong, womanly women usually attract the men who need protection; the weak, 'feminine' women mate with able men. This seems to be Nature's little way of keeping the balance. But if we are to pity Donald ensnared by Angela, no less must we pity Mary Wing stooping to Charles King Garrott. His intentions are much better than Angela's, - we cheerfully grant him that, but he is likely to prove an impediment to Mary, even as Angela to Donald. Mr. Harrison pities Donald tremendously and despises Angela quite viciously. Why, then, does he refuse to pity Mary

Wing and despise Charles King? The astute reader, too old to be caught with chaff, demands even-handed justice here!

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If Charles King, girlish, sentimental, enthusiastic, clinging, is the New Man, what shall we call Waldo Strong, the 'Reluctant Adam" in whom we have Shaw out-Shawed? Is he the last word of modernity in man? If so - alas for man! His romantic adventures are all due to feminine initiative. From his earliest years, the fair sex frankly hurl themselves at Waldo's head. He repulses them gently but firmly, never condescending to take a kindly interest in any of them, though he marries one and conducts a brief intrigue with another. It is not his passionless estate that worries the reader, but this inability to feel ordinary human liking. His blood-ties bore him. He seems to have no men-friends, no steady playmates; he sees even his business associates through the small end of an operaglass. All life is as remote to him as sexemotion is. Only music is intangible enough to interest him. Obviously a character so arid must be well described in order to hold the attention, and A Reluctant Adam is written with unusual delicacy, skill, and wit. It is clever, conscientious work. But if Waldo is merely a freak, he is not worth the pains, while if he is the Coming Man, the prospect is too painful to consider.

Turning momentarily from the work of young Americans to that of young Englishmen, we come upon characters and philosophy which are devastating rather than painful. Consider Gilbert Cannan's Young Earnest. It is the most flagrant example current fiction has to offer of work which is off the

1 A Reluctant Adam. By SIDNEY WILLIAMS. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co. 2 Young Earnest. By GILBERT CANNAN. New York: D. Appleton & Co.