"A new degree of intellectual power is cheap at any price.'

"The law of Nature is, Do the thing and you shall have the power, but they who do not shall not have the power."

"The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts."

"Children early catch the tone of their surroundings."

"Most people are unhappy because they have no information concerning the real sources of enjoyment."

"The guiding spirit. . . ."

"The details must be worked out with completeness to insure success. It is in this humble though all-conquering way that success is achieved."

"Forget your grievances." "Until men grow up to the level of a higher life they cannot receive it."

"Everything exists for something else of a higher order."

"In your daily intercourse with men let your guiding principle be for the good of all." "Flashes of insight require systematic thought

to unfold them."

"Our thoughts materialize in our flesh and blood."

The child was now graduated from a university. For these four years of college training the man had paid on wages of three dollars and eighty-five cents for a trip (of ninety-odd miles), and meanwhile had maintained his home.

But always here the story bears the two outlines: One of his own patient, never-robust figure faring to its toil. The other of the lady of the lanciers, of a resolution equal to his, rich in labor, sacrifice, thrift; herself individual, commanding, bearing her part in the life of the little town-and lovely. Two in a town of six thousand and the race safe in their hands.

Five years later temporary retirement became possible, became necessitated by ill health; and there were a garden, fruit-trees, unbroken leisure.

A total of forty-three years had been spent by the man on the railroad, all save the first two or three years in complete disillusion, in bondage. Out of this dissolution of the right to happy creative work there endured for him his wife, his child, and his home.

But what had been saved of the man's spirit, of his ambition to live, his love of fineness, the approaches to the social passion? Was he bitter, lethargic, in revolt? How had he himself appraised the quite unintentional tapestry of his life?

There was a record preserved in conversations, witness from the lips of the man; and he one of the men who ordinarily live and die in a community without the community divining the stupendous life which has been going on within. These comments, made in the last seven years, are more vivid than all else to yield up the man himself and the rich measure of his success in living.

It is now sixty years since, equipped with common school, a few years of farm work, and a brief apprenticeship to a wagon-maker, he fared through the snowy grove into the little frame town; seventy years since he faced the night sky drenched in the surging of the Aurora. the brilliant potentialities by whom a At seventy-nine here is the man, one of less disjointed social life than our own might be how richly served.

(1)

I've had one of the days when nothing went right. It seemed as if everything tried to go wrong. And I thought how exactly that must be an example of the way the Spirit-or God-feels in trying to deal with us. He does the best he can, and we fail and retard him. He does the best he can and then comes war. I thought how discouraged the Spirit must be. Matter is obstinate. But it is all he has to express himself through.

(2)

(Over a new drain-pipe in the basement.) It is the way so many workmen work, with no thought of the trouble and expense to which they put other people. How can we expect them to know? With no training they go to their work, pick it up as best they can, and depend on it for the necessities of life. Their conscience is not trained. If, instead of pounding faith into them, we had developed their conscience, we should have a different set of beings....

Why should there not be, as well as a municipal fire department to put out fires after the damage is done, a municipal department to inspect private electric wiring and drains and waterpipes? They are beginning to do that

for fire protection. But in all such work men should not be dependent on it for a livelihood. With these occupations on a commercial basis men do so often partake of the nature of the hog-of whose body their own body is so largely composed. All their lives they eat of the bodies of these animals, and certainly some of their nature passes over into those who consume them.

For nineteen years, the first nineteen of my life, I ate no meat-perhaps a little tenderloin after butchering. The rest of the time I ate vegetables and bread. After I came to this town I learned to eat meat a little bit. I have watched men eat tough meat, a large piece in a few mouthfuls, almost without chewing. This seems to me the business of cannibals.

(3)

Let's leave this town and go and live where sooner or later we can be more economically cremated. It is the only civilized system. Embalming is a savage practice. When I go I want at least something that will fall away around me quickly and let me out.

(4)

I've thought for years that immortality is more simple and natural than we have realized. That there is a close threefold relationship in the air and the volatile part of our being and God. We say that God is everywhere and we're not just sure what we mean. The immanence of God has been one of the puzzles; the immanence of the air in some form we take for granted. We have said that God is in all life and we haven't understood that either, but we have spoken of the breath of life always. We have made a great mystery, but it may be that this invisible substance which enters into all life as a spirit is close to the mystery. There's nothing more materialistic in that than in the admission that consciousness functions through the brain. . . . After death the volatile part of our being is released and passes into the air-goes back into that great reservoir of power, and seeks affinities for reabsorption. And hence continuity. When we confine immortality to a matter of the persistence

of the individual consciousness we limit our inheritance. I believe in such immortality because it is in harmony with that which we see taking place before our eyes every day.

(5)

I remember when that idea of immortality first came to me. I was standing by the dining-room window looking at the river. And as I saw it flowing I thought: "Men come and men go but I go on forever." I thought how the river flows to the ocean, empties, returns to its source through clouds and moisture, becomes again a river, again flows. And that is exactly the way with spirit. It goes from us, it ceases to combine with the body and without it the body cannot live; spirit is reabsorbed into the spirit without, into the whole . . . we are in it all the time-we are floating in it-and it is reabsorbed in new living things. As an individual? No-that is impossible. When individuation has once been accomplished by spirit it is never lost; but it need not persist as one individuation. It will continue in many individuals. There is no more reason for insisting that the spirit of man is one eternally than for insisting that the spirit of God is one. God is not necessarily one intelligence. He is many intelligences. So of the spirit of man. For the spirit, in man and without, is a part of God. Whenever it can find the channel it speaks to us-to that of itself which is within us. To the divine in man. But the whole body is permeated with spirit-it is everywhere in the body. The air we breathe is spirit. It is the spirit of God. Without it we are only inanimate matter. At the instant it ceases to combine with us, we cease to exist.

Compare this with the doctrine of the soul going off somewhere, to some place of heaven, and singing a psalm. Yet when they blundered into such an expression it was this immortality of spirit that they were seeking for. We are all blundering. But the whole process is so slow. It can only go on as spirit grows in the individual and is reabsorbed and grows again.

Trees have intelligence. Spirit is combined with them in some degree,

in their life and their intelligence. See how they seek out their food, find water, turn to the sun . . . there's a better explanation to this than the books make.

(6)

I don't think of God as law. I think of him as spirit. Law is his manifestation. I can conceive of his growing, but the law is static. It is simply a matter of finding out law. The law of evolution existed always, and at last the human understanding found it out, and so on. There are certain forces to which all things are subject, but they are acted upon differently by the same forces. A tree and a rock are both subject to gravitation, but the tree constantly lifts itself while a rock must remain in a fixed spot until it is destroyed. But different people are not acted upon differently by the same forces -people vary in perception and in response, that's all. The action of the forces toward them is the same.

(7)

As great a thinker as Herbert Spencer says that he can see nowhere any evidence of design in the universe. John Burroughs says the same thing. Nevertheless, there is everywhere evidence of design.

(8)

Man is the slowest animal there is, in development. And it is because he does not pay attention to his intuitions. Now and then there is one who is strong enough

to heed them, but most people let them go by, are not strong enough to take them. The intuitions must be fostered for growth. One form of these we call conscience. . . . As these intuitions grow older and are developed with each life lived they will be stronger to speak. It is this part of living which matters.

(9)

(Some one had read aloud from Tagore's "Gitanjali": "Thou settest a barrier in thine own being and then callest to thy severed selves in myriad notes. This thy self-separation has taken body in me.")

Yes. Nicolai, in "The Biology of War," believes and quotes others as believing that the universe is an organism. That is, that it consists of one really organic whole, of which every created thing is a member, as members of one organism, one being. (Comment: Then that organism would be God?)

The embodiment of God. And as I believe the "breath of life," is the divine essence of God, and constitutes the divine element entering into all life.

(10)

We are destined for the goal. And the goal is perfection. Sometimes we go on, sometimes we go back-but all the time the direction and destiny are the same: "Perfection." We reach one plane and another is above us. It is always the same. The time will come when the race will be an honor to God.

OUR mind strays from the discussion of Albania's politics, for the weekly bazaar in Tirana-Albania's capital-is breaking up, and perforce you must watch the colorful life in the square: full-trousered, broad-sashed men, in white fezes, gay socks, and up-curling pointed moccasins; two upper-class Moslem women, shrouded in black, their faces hidden by heavy black veils; peasants taking home their purchases; a man with a baa-ing sheep over his shoulders; a woman carrying on her head a red-and-green-painted cradle, the baby in it; a polka-dotted, trousered little girl, exquisitely delicate of face, a purchase of freshly-butchered unwrapped meat in her hand; donkeys concealed under burdens many times their size, only

faces and fore legs visible; a lithe youth, moved suddenly to dance in the doorway of the mosque; veiled or kerchiefed women-according as they are Mohammedan or Christian-gathering their bright-colored stuffs from the ground; a few others-one with five eggs in her lap

lingering in hope of a tardy customer; a man washing his feet in the swift-guttered little stream that runs through the street. As you gaze at these things, suggesting the old world of Turkey, you might for a moment forget that Albania is in the way of becoming a modern European state. But there are reminders: the minister of public works crossing the square with some engineers brought in by the government from Austria; here and there foreign business men, in Albania after concessions; in the distance the band practising the Peer Gynt Suite, a Mozart sonata, along with new Albanian songs;

and everywhere people talking about plans for the new Shqiprija*—which is Albania's name for Albania, the latter being used by the Shqiptari only when they speak a foreign language. A battered automobile rattles into the square, and once more you turn your attention to your companions.

"You must find us a land of strange contrasts," says one, "that man with the wooden plough; and here's this so-called auto. Before the war there wasn't one in the country, now there are about a hundred and fifty. Many of us still grind corn between stones in our own homes; and the city of Korcha has already raised money for a mail aeroplane, and has sent students to France to study aviation."

"Come back in five years," said another, "and you'll find us like European countries"-Albania doesn't regard itself as a part of Europe-"with roads, and an electric trolley running through these mountains, and electric light-"

"There's electric light in Scutari now," interrupted a youth, "and plumbing. And just wait till you see Korcha. Nearly everybody dresses in European clothes. We're not civilized yet, but we're started. We have a national parliament."

"Our trouble is," said another, "that we have so much history to recover from. It has bunched up on us, you might say. But now that we're free-" an expressive gesture indicated that everything was possible.

History has indeed "bunched up" on the Shqiptari. Aryans, descendants of the Illyrians or Pelasgians, they are probably the oldest race in southeastern Europe. Their last five centuries and more is the tale of steadfast maintenance of Albanian personality through foreign occupations. Much is not far-away history, but current trespassings, of which you may read echoes in your morning paper.

The Turkish occupation lasted five hundred years, and ceased only in 1912. To the Turks the Albanians never really submitted, but succeeded in preventing their penetration into her mountain districts. This non-submissiveness brought from the empire insecurities of life and happiness, but, cutting Albania off from outside * Pronounced Shkipréea.

contacts, did preserve her ancient customs in an uncommonly pure form.

It was Shqiprija's experience with the Young Turks which resulted in the expulsion of the empire from the Balkans. Hopefully casting her lot with them in 1908 in establishing a Constitution for the empire, and then finding that they meant. even less independence for the subject nationalities through complete assimilation, Albania resisted, and in August, 1912, in a vigorous uprising, captured Uskub and crushed the Turkish army. Then Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, and Montenegro, seeing in this defeat a long-desired chance, launched the First Balkan War, which left the Peninsula Turkless.

Even then Albania's destiny was not in her own hands. The Six Powers, Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, Great Britain, Italy, and Russia, stepped in to determine her status and frontiers, because, the Turks gone, Albania's neighbors began quarrelling for her territory. Europe almost flared into war then, with Albania the fuse, instead of a year later with a different Balkan excuse. In July, 1913, the most basic "frontier" date in Albanian history, the ambassadorial conference of these powers fixed boundaries which gave to unfriendly neighbors districts containing over a million Albanians, leaving only 900,000 in the remaining area. They made her a sovereign principality, neutralized under their guarantee, and elected William of Wied as prince. When he arrived in March, 1914, Albania, having independence, a conventional government, and neutrality, hoped for a breathing spell.

Within a month her neutrality was violated when Greece captured Korcha. Her guarantors had not yet intervened in her behalf when the European War began. Then, while the neutrality of Belgium was engaging the sentimental attention of the world, there began for Albania an avalanche of occupations, kaleidoscopic, overlapping, unprotested. The assigned prince left in September, too soon to have been of any service. Though Albania did not enter the war, she was one of its acute sufferers. The olive orchards formerly covering the hills around Durazzo, bombarded into treeless barrenness, symbolize the damage done