ony.

the night before last and I said to the anything to relieve the strain of monotwife, 'I must have a new pair of shoes.' She said: 'All right; go downtown and get a good pair, because a good pair is cheaper in the end.' And I said: 'I have only six dollars to put into shoes at the most, and I can't get a good pair that I would like short of fifteen dollars.' And the best I could do when I got downtown was this pair at $4.50 in a bargain sale. They are not what I want. They don't fit exactly, and I have to take them off once in a while until I get them worked in. I would not buy such trash if I could help it; but what can I do?"

Worry seems to be the greatest single cause of unrest and inefficiency and lack of production-worry about a man's own health or the health of his family, worry about what will happen to his family if he is disabled or dies, the haunting fear of the loss of his job. The man who solves the problem of the stabilization of employment would just now be one of the greatest benefactors of mankind.

Also the monotony of modern factory specialization contributes greatly to unrest, I believe. The vice-president here was telling me of a worker who came in recently for a job. When they inquired what he had been doing previously, he said: "Me work on nut 45 in Ford." A man performing a simple automatic operation, who has nothing to do but watch his fellows and brood upon his and their unsatisfactory condition, begins to see red after a while about the inadequacy of his wage and the pettiness of his bosses. And the result is apt to be a desire of change for change's sake, for larger and larger wages which may be unfair to the employer and the public, for violence and excitement

The man who solves the problem of monotony of operation in industry would be another exceedingly great benefactor of mankind. It is one of the chief causes of ineffective production and industrial unrest. It is an important factor in a large labor turnover. You cannot get men, especially young men without family ties, to stay long in one place, on one operation, even at a high wage. There is danger of the very high progressive methods of specialization getting rapidly to the point of diminishing returns. As one man expressed it to me, "It's too near slavery!" We have here a problem not only in industry, but of course also in citizenship.

Managers are going at this problem of monotonous specialization through training schools within the plant. There is one here where I am. A great rubber plant in Akron has a large school for apprentices between fifteen and eighteen years of age, where a general high school education is carried on side by side with a technical training in many of the operations of the particular industry. Such an apprentice is not only a better citizen, but he can perform more than

In a later issue Senator Davenport will tell of some other experiences of his as No. 4626 in a factory.

one operation, and change from one to another occasionally is a relief. The broader education of apprentices could be carried on in every large city with good results, as it is being carried on in Dayton by the National Cash Register Corporation, the industrial high schools of the city acting in unison with the plant and with the technical university at Cincinnati.

Our superintendent tells me that every week at the foremen's conference is adopted the plan of giving each man a problem to work out and report on at the next meeting. He says it doesn't make much difference whether the problem is immediately practical or not. It starts the mental activity, develops men, and helps to cut down productive hours and costs. Breadth of interest makes a better specialist. That is the reason, I suppose, that the keenest managers like their technical experts to have a good college education.

There is a fatigue period in machine industry beginning in the morning between ten and eleven and in the afternoon between three and four. It is therefore of the greatest consequence that the lunch hour in a great plant should have careful attention. If the men rush out to junk hash houses and eat hurriedly a coarse and unbalanced ration, and then stand outdoors and bake on the sidewalk in the summer or freeze in the winter, they are not prepared properly for the work of the afternoon. A great lunch floor, well lighted, with a balanced meal, well served, at cost, with opportunity for smoking and perhaps music or movies, is one of the most profitable, as well as one of the most human, of modern industrial developments. Any large factory without it is a back number.

U

'NCLE BEN, the villagers all call him, and indeed most of the folk along that pleasant New England countryside are his kin, and proud to acknowledge the relationship. He is a big man, six feet tall and two hundred pounds in weight, and when I first visited the valley fifteen years ago he was proudly seventy-five years young. Though he had done the heaviest farm work all his life, he stood as straight as a soldier, and his white hair and beard and his jovial face with its round rosy cheeks made him resemble very closely a picture-book Santa Claus.

Surely there was nothing in this man's appearance to suggest Adonoram, the well-drawn character in Mary Wilkins Freeman's story "The Revolt of Mother," nor did his home resemble in the least the dreary place in which Lizzie and Sammie had been brought up. The house was comfortable, with a goodsized pantry adjoining the cheery

THE TYRANT

BY ONE WHO KNEW HIM

kitchen, a sunny sitting-room, and a stiff little parlor where an old rosewood piano stood. Aunt Abbie graduated from a select female seminary back in the fifties, and the thin sweet voice of the instrument still tinkled bravely under the touch of her roughened fingers. The bedroom was large and airy, and there were pleasant chambers abovestairs that could accommodate a host of grandchildren at holiday time. And yet

How Adonoram would have gloried in Uncle Ben's farm buildings! They stretched in an irregular line from the back door to the edge of the home meadow: the carriage house, with slatted shelves for seed corn above the ample floor space; the large chicken-house, with row upon row of nests; the icehouse, filled each winter from the nearby river; the milk-house, equipped in the most up-to-date way; the big horse barn, an imposing structure with huge haymows above the stables; and the cow

barn, with comfortable accommodations for twenty-five cows. Two hundred acres of the choicest land in the valley lay about these well-kept buildings, and any man might well be proud of such possessions.

If days instead of years had passed since my first meeting with Uncle Ben and Aunt Abbie, his gentle little wife, my memories of it could not be more vivid. I was spending a summer with a schoolmate at the other end of the valley, and we had driven over to solicit for a Ladies' Aid supper. Aunt Abbie won my heart at once, and when she suggested that I stop and rest while my friend went on to the next house I was only too glad to comply. Presently she invited me upstairs to look at a wonderful old quilt that had been her mother's, and we were soon in the midst of an animated discussion of patchwork designs. Suddenly a thunderous voice bellowed from below, "Mother!" The

WARNING

Lest misfortune fall.

I am in love with Love and Spring And not with you at all!

little lady sprang to her feet and flew down the stairs as though some one's life depended upon her haste. I followed, expecting some awful calamity. Apparently nothing unusual was going

on.

As I reached the door the big man remarked, calmly: "Going to town. Where's my pocketbook?" As she handed it to him Aunt Abbie was looking him over carefully. "Wait a minute, father. I must brush your hair, and you need a clean collar. Come in, child, come in." And while I visited with Uncle Ben his wife put on his collar, fastened his tie, tucked a clean handkerchief into his pocket, and smoothed his thick white hair.

During the five years that followed I spent many a happy day with Aunt Abbie. The scene which I had witnessed on my first visit to the house I found to be a daily, almost an hourly, occurrence. Every time Uncle Ben entered the house that commanding cry of "Mother!" rang through the quiet rooms. No matter what Aunt Abbie was doing-cleaning the attic, shaking the furnace, rolling out cookies, or taking a nap-she hurried to his side. I have sometimes wondered what would have happened if just once she had answered with that familiar phrase, "In a minute." old man's imperious demands were those

The

of a spoiled child. It was evident that he neither knew nor cared where any of his belongings were-"mother" always laid out his clothes and supplied him with clean collars and handkerchiefs. She fastened his shoes and put on his rubbers. She kept his diary and made out his checks. She cooked the food he brought according to his direction, and at the end of the day she read aloud from his agricultural papers while he dozed on the sofa. Just how she managed to keep her home so exquisitely neat, her cookie jar filled, and her grandchildren supplied with knitted socks and mittens was a mystery. She was a wonderful manager.

Adonoram's wife was mistress within her tiny house, with its shabby walls and scant furnishings; but Uncle Ben's wife, in her more comfortable home, was merely valet, secretary, and cook. Her husband bought, not only cows, but household supplies as well, without her knowledge and consent. No great crisis came to bring the thought of revolt to Aunt Abbie's patient soul. For years no word or look betrayed the fact that she realized the slavery of her life. When, flushed with happiness, I went to her to tell of my own coming marriage, however, she said: "Husbands are what we make them, child. Don't you ever

begin the way I did. At the start a man is glad to consider his wife, and don't you let yours know any different. He'll be happier that way, and you'll live to do for him longer."

There came a time when there was dust on the old piano and the cookie jar was often empty. More and more frequently Aunt Abbie was roused from the sofa by her husband's voice, and we noticed that her hands shook when she tried to fasten collar buttons and shoestrings with the old haste. Every one except Uncle Ben knew that the little lady was wearing out. If we who loved her voiced our fears, he was indignant -he was hale and hearty at eighty, and was she not a full ten years younger? A bit tired to-day, that was all. Abbie was tired-tired out-and we could not grieve when she fell asleep one soft spring morning, though we should miss her sadly.

Aunt

Uncle Ben is ninety now. He is not as spry as he used to be, but he is still wonderfully hale and hearty; while the devoted daughter who has answered his summons since "mother" slipped away is aging fast. As in the days when Aunt Abbie met his demands with such loving, loyal patience, he is proud of his age, proud of his strength, and utterly unconscious of his tyranny.

I

WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S LAST NOVEL

is not often that the relation between reader and writer is so intimately personal in feeling as it was in the case of the author of "Joseph Vance," "Somehow Good," "It Can Never Happen Again," and the many other long, rambling, and entertaining stories that in varying degrees have given pleasure to all those English and American readers who are not afraid of being called lovers of the Victorian type of fiction. De Morgan quietly but incessantly cultivated this intimacy. It Iwas of the kind that existed between Thackeray and his admirers, but not between Dickens and his countless readers, and this although De Morgan always stoutly maintained that as a writer he owed most to Dickens. However that may be, De Morgan had a way of his own of taking the reader into his confidence, of slyly sharing a joke with him, of involving him by what he once called his "button-holey" manner in a sort of sotto voce discussion of situation and motive. The result is that one feels a personal loss now that he can no longer look forward to "the next De Morgan," and even in a measure a personal grief that so delightful and lovable a personality as William De Morgan has finished his course.

To be perfectly frank, neither "The Old Man's Youth" (no one can reasonably be expected to quote the complete cumbrous title, given in the foot-note) nor the preceding posthumous novel, "The Old Madhouse," may be ranked with the three novels named above in virility and charm. In both the manner is the same; the quality is there, the talk is clever and humorous, but the total impression is fainter, as might be expected of a man doing creative imaginative work after his seventy-fifth year.

But, if one would not select "The Old Man's Youth" as a reader's introduction to De Morgan, it should surely be read by all confirmed admirers. It has his touch and his charm, if not his full flood of vitality. It is not, moreover, a work half De Morgan's and half not, as some erroneous advance notes have stated. died since the work was completed, has stated that, with the exception of a very few brief connecting and concluding chapters (which are pointed out by being called "The Story," while the rest is "The Narrative of Eustace John"), the book is left exactly as her husband wrote it. At least nine-tenths is De Morgan verbatim. The chief structural defect of the story is the premature disclosure, dramatically speaking, of the peculiarly heartless criminal act of a self-seeking woman. This is told in one of the interpolated short chapters, and one wonders whether Mrs. De Morgan could have misunderstood the intention. 1The Old Man's Youth and the Young Man's Old Age. By William De Morgan. Henry Holt

His wife, who has also

& Co., New York.

Probably not; but it was not like De Morgan to dispel the mystery of a situation until he simply had to do so. In the main Mrs. De Morgan's chapters carry on the tale clearly.

A single passage may be quoted from "The Old Man's Youth" as an illustra

WILLIAM DE MORGAN

tion of the author's fashion of playing about in a byway of criticism:

Few of us have the hardihood to express opinions about color to real artists, but now and then a meek voice rises in protest against emerald green eyes and blackberry-juice lips, and is told that its owner is colorblind. How can he know that he isn't? And when he points out that another real artist has painted the same original with emerald green lips and blackberry-juice eyes, he does not score a single run. Because that is interpretation. It is always a case of heads, Inspiration wins; tails, you lose. Respectful silence is always open to bystanders, whose consolation it must be to reflect that the most original and powerful neosophies may pass and be forgotten.

It is odd that De Morgan's last book should have had in part the same theme as his first. "Joseph Vance" appeared in 1906-and it is a pleasure to record that The Outlook's reviewer then referred to it as "a novel that aligns itself with the best English fiction." The reviewer noted also that Joseph Vance (the narrator, not his father) is "a sweet-spirited old man who has loved much, known many friends worth knowing, and suffered in silence for love's sake." Almost these words might be used of the old man who narrates his life in this last work. The message of

the two is not the same. Mr. De Morgan himself stated that of "Joseph Vance" in these words: "The highest good is the growth of the soul, and the greatest man is he who rejoices most in great fulfillments of the will of God." It is true that Joseph Vance had a happy old age and that Eustace John Pascoe died in an institution, and that the tone of the one life is warm satisfaction and that of the other gentle depression and hopelessness, but the spirit of the two men is alike sweet and unselfish.

The passage above quoted from "Joseph Vance" was selected by Professor William Lyons Phelps as the motif of that novel, and the choice was affirmed as correct by the author. A prize had been offered to a class at Yale for the best essay on De Morgan's novels, and in corresponding with Professor Phelps De Morgan had remarked that he always tried to have a dominant motif in his book and wondered whether the contestants would detect that in "Joseph Vance," adding, "None of the reviewers did." This appears in an article by Professor Phelps in a recent issue of the New York "Times's" Book Review section. The article should be read by all who care for De Morgan, as it contains many extremely interesting and characteristic letters hitherto unpublished.

De Morgan's literary career, and his whole life for that matter, was remarkable and unusual. We will repeat here its outline as it was given in our columns when the first of the two posthumous novels appeared:

"He was sixty-four years old before he ever thought of novel-writing. Then, like Scott with 'Waverley,' he wrote a chapter of 'Joseph Vance,' laid it aside unfinished, and only at his wife's solicitation finally completed it and sent it to a publisher. Between 1905 and 1917 (when he died at the age of seventyeight) he published eight novels and romances, most of them quite unusual in length and notable also for their vivacity, optimism, and cheerful philosophy; in other words, written with the spirit of youthful vigor rather than what might be expected from a man who began his apprenticeship to fiction in late middle-age. Apart from his novelwriting, Mr. De Morgan's career was one of versatile talents; he was artist, inventor, and craftsman; he took part in William Morris's movement for household art; he designed and, we believe, manufactured tiles and stained glass; he invented a duplex bicycle, a sieve, and a smoke-consuming fire-grate; he had an intense interest in aviation; during the Great War he abandoned work on "The Old Madhouse' to study out scientific inventions for war use. In art, science, and literature his mind was active and his knowledge extensive; his ceramics and luster-ware work were said by Holman Hunt to compare well with the best Italian periods."

After her husband's death Mrs. De Mor

28

gan wrote an excellent account of some of his literary methods, part of which may also be here repeated:

"When my husband started on one of his novels, he did so without making any definite plot. He created his characters and then waited for them to act and evolve their own plot. In this way the puppets in the show became real, living personalities to him, and he waited, as he expressed it, 'to see what they would do next.' . . . As the story was always read to me while in progress, I, too, got to believe in the reality of the characters, and found myself thinking of them as real, live people, and I have frequently asked him, when he came down to lunch or had finished writing for the day, such a question, as, for instance, 'Well, have they quarreled yet?' and he would reply, as the case might be, 'No, I don't know if they will come to a quarrel; after all, I must wait and see what they will do.' However, toward the end of the book, when an intelligible winding up of the story became imperative, the plot was taken up and carefully considered, all the straggling threads gathered together and finally decided upon, though latitude was always allowed for details to shape themselves after their own fashion."

R. D. TOWNSEND.

THE NEW BOOKS

BOOKS FOR YOUNG FOLKS FAIRY TALES FROM FRANCE. Adapted by William Trowbridge Larned. Illustrated. The P. F. Volland Company, New York. DLD FRENCH FAIRY TALES. By Comtesse de Segur. Illustrated. The Penn Publishing Company, Philadelphia.

Here are two volumes of French fairy tales. One is a little book; the other is a big book. But both are exquisite in paper, print, and illustration. In the little book we find "Cinderella," "The Sleeping Beauty," and other well-known tales, told in a way not to suggest fear

or

cause fright. In the other book there are less well known legends; the book comprises "Blondine," "Good Little Henry," "Princess Rosette," "The Little Gray Mouse," and "Ourson." The language is well adapted to youngest readers and hearers.

FOR THE GAME'S SAKE. By Lawrence Perry. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.

A volume of commonplace stories for boys written according to the time-worn formula. Why a sport writer of Mr. Perry's reputation should be guilty of such an inaccuracy as to write, "It was seven-thirty precisely and one bell was striking from each of the yachts," we do not know. This is not the only error of a similar nature in this volume.

FICTION

HOUSE IN DORMER FOREST (THE). By Mrs. Mary Webb. The George H. Doran Company, New York. In this house on the forest's edge live the Darkes. The forest stands for freedom, nature, and beauty; the dull, commonplace house facing it stands for restraint and convention. Thus the novel is symbolic; it is also idyllic. The re

actions of the Darkes to house and forest contrast the longing for liberty of spirit as and against superstition slavery of thought. There is imaginative quality here.

BIOGRAPHY

LIFE AND WORK OF SIR WILLIAM VAN HORNE (THE). By Walter Vaughan. Illustrated. The Century Company, New York. There is romance in the railway world. As proof, note this well-written life of the boy telegrapher in Illinois who reported the Lincoln-Douglas debates, who rose in the Chicago and Alton system from train despatcher, telegraph superintendent, transportation superintendent, to the general superintendence of the Kansas City, St. Louis, and Western, to the presidency of the South Minnesota, and, finally, with all the expert knowledge thus acquired, who built the Canadian Pacific Railway; and he remained in Canada to play a great part in the national life of that country. Then he constructed the Cuban Railway, and for the first time the island's rich interior was opened to trade, transportation, and prosperity. He had now become an empire builder. Shortly before his death he said: "When I think of all I could do, I should like to live five hundred years." The grim fight he waged in his earlier years against poverty and the driving, dynamic force of his later acts are revealed in what he said some time ago:

...

Our whole civilization is the outgrowth of wars. Pain and distress accompany wars, and so they do childbirth. The human race continues and is the better... I hold that every nation should be prepared for war... Napoleon was a curse to the world, but armies are not.

By a curious coincidence the first President of the Canadian Pacific found out that his greatest rival in the railway world was the man who had warmly recommended him as the best person to build that road, namely, James J. Hill. The Canadian by birth and American by adoption was the rival of the American by birth and Canadian by adoption. MEMOIRS OF THE EMPRESS EUGENIE.

By

Comte Fleury. 2 vols. D. Appleton & Co., New York. EMPRESS EUGENIE IN EXILE. By Agnes Carey. Illustrated. The Century Company, New York.

Here are two accounts-one French, one English-of a singularly picturesque woman, the Empress Eugénie. She died recently, ninety-four years old. In recounting her life Count Fleury has much to say about the connection of the French Court with the three great wars which happened during her reign: the Crimean, the Italo-Austrian, and the War of 1870 between Germany and France; indeed, he devotes his second volume to these matters, leaving to the first the more personal side. In that first volume we find many an illuminating glimpse into the lives of the members of the French Court-Princess Mathilde, for instance. Because of the Empress's well-known aversion to publicity, the author's statements may not in general be directly

"inspired," though his sub-title ("Compiled from Statements, Private Documents, and Personal Letters of the Empress") would indicate the contrary. Be this as it may, his material came from intimate Court sources. The account is also valuable in its comprehensiveness. In comparison, "Empress Eugénie in Exile" offers a glimpse of less than a year of the Empress's life. The author was a member of her household and saw her subject at close range. The information in this volume is more definitely at first hand than that in Count Fleury's; the Empress's personality is revealed more vividly and more appealingly than in the larger work.

MUSIC, PAINTING, AND OTHER ARTS FAN BOOK (THE). By MacIver Percival. Illustrated. The Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York.

The art of fan-making, especially as developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is here described with the enthusiasm of a devoted collector of fans. A vast amount of information is given, accompanied with many illustrations of notable fans.

HISTORY AND METHODS OF ANCIENT AND MODERN PAINTING. By James Ward. E. P. Dutton & Co., New York.

This volume is the third of a fourvolume work on "The History and Methods of Ancient and Modern Painting." It deals with Italian painting in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including the work of the great masters of the Florentine school and of the early Venetian painters. The text is discriminating and the pictures are unusually well chosen and reproduced.

TRAVEL AND DESCRIPTION MAYFAIR TO MOSCOW: CLARE SHERIDAN'S DIARY. Boni & Liveright, New York. Mrs. Sheridan is a vivacious writer. She is of English and American descent. She is a sculptor and, as she says, in Moscow portrait work, not politics, was her concern. But she saw many outstanding figures in the queer Bolshevik menagerie Lenine and Trotsky, both of whom she "sculped," and others. tells how they looked, acted, and talked. Like most diaries, this is scrappy, but it has sharp descriptive passages. TOPEE AND TURBAN. By Lieut.-Col. H. A. Newell. The John Lane Company, New York.

She

A faithful, detailed account of motor trips in various parts of India, with a humorous slant that is often entertaining and with plenty of the author's snapshots.

EDUCATIONAL KINDERGARTEN CHILDREN'S HOUR (THE). Vol. I-STORIES FOR LITTLE CHILDREN; Vcl. II - CHILDREN'S OCCUPATIONS; Vol. III-TALKS TO CHILDREN; Vol. IVTALKS TO MOTHERS. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. These volumes are well compiled, combined, and arranged. Much of the material is original and the selected matter is admirably adapted for the general purpose. That purpose is clearly explained by the titles of the volumes. The complete set of books should be of value in home and public library.