Of all causes of accidental fatalities, automobile ‘accidents’ rank first. According to figures published last fall and widely quoted, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company estimated a total of 83,772 accidental deaths in the United States in 1923. Automobiles were responsible for 15,714, accidental falls for 15,382, railroad accidents for 8,078, and all other causes for considerably below these figures. Recent estimates put the motor fatalities of 1924 at 19,000 dead and 450,000 injured. Of the dead 5,700 were children. From the rate of increase, it is likely that 1925 will see some 20,000 persons killed by automobiles — their own or others.

Nor does the last figure include some 2,000 deaths and fatal in juries at steam-railroad crossings, for the majority of which — as the records indicate — automobile-drivers themselves will be to blame. So deeply is the habit of chance-taking ingrained that not even the menace of an approaching train can check it!

Compared to population, the motor death-rate has increased from one per 100,000 in 1910 to probably eighteen in 1925. There will be somewhere near a million accidents all told — major and minor — in the United States this year. Not less than 500,000 persons will be injured (the Hoover Conference estimated 678,000 in 1923). And the property damage is anyone’s guess: estimates range from $100,000,000 to several times that sum.

There are two bright spots in the picture. First, the death and accident ratios to number of cars (not population) have steadily decreased. Fourteen years ago, the death-rate was 3.3 per 1000 cars; but there were only 600,000 cars then in use. This year, with 18,000,000 cars and trucks registered, and with traffic congestion far worse, the death-rate will be about one per 1,000 cars.

The second bright spot is the aroused state of the public mind. Clearly, motor-drivers as a class are growing more careful, not less. But, clearly also, there are far too many deaths; and the universal cry for a remedy is more than justified.

This demand does not stop with penalties for recklessness. It observes that far too often persons injured by automobiles, through no fault of their own, are deprived of redress, because the car-owner has neither liability insurance nor property. Financial irresponsibility has become one of the major problems of the automobile.

A dozen years ago, when motorists were few, ownership implied both skill and earning power, usually with the responsibility that those qualities bring. It was not hard, then, to avoid one’s neighbors on the road.

To-day cars are priced anywhere to 50 per cent below 1913 figures. The skill they require is negligible. Used cars are a drug on the market. Any young fellow may purchase an old high-power car for a few weeks’ earnings, and ‘burn up the road.’ And the traffic congestion in and near all our large cities is almost beyond belief.

Instead of money and a taste for mechanics, the greatest need of the owner to-day is for the social feeling that accords courtesy and fair play to one’s neighbors on the road. It is the lack of this quality, among a minority of the newer class of motorists, that accounts for most of the avoidable accidents.

Before going further let us note that by no means all motor accidents are the motorists’ fault. Complete statistics on this subject are sadly lacking; but such as are available tend to show that automobilists are little more to blame for accidents than are pedestrians and horse-drivers, and many accidents to children could not be prevented by any care on the driver’s part.

Traffic density is itself an important cause of accidents. If a driver must avoid fifty vehicles or pedestrians in traveling a mile, he is fifty times as likely to hit something as if he meets only one. The ratio of car registrations to mileage of improved roads has multiplied probably at least five times in the last ten years. That is gradually being changed; and the funds that many States are raising by gasoline taxes could not be better spent than on improving more roads and thereby diluting traffic. But it will take years to ameliorate the situation very markedly. Meanwhile we must deal with things as they are.

I

The general subject of accident prevention may be approached from lour angles: —

1. Carelessness of other road-users.

2. Traffic hazards and highway engineering.

9. Policing and criminal penalties.

4. The driver’s own mind.

Doubtless the most exhaustive discussions of accident-prevention have been a three-day conference at New Haven, April 9 to 11, 1924, under the joint auspices of Yale University and the State of Connecticut, and Secretary Hoover’s National Conference on Street and Highway Safety, at Washington, December 15 and 16, 1924. These conferences delved with especial thoroughness into phases 1, 2, and 3 above. They made also some effort to deal with phase 4, — the psychological aspect, — but chiefly with the thought of educating the driver by degrees to a sense of his responsibility.

As this paper deals mainly with the reckless driver, phase 1 above-mentioned cannot be given the space it deserves. But no study of motor accidents would be complete without mention of the reckless public. A comparison of all available figures leads to the conclusion that human heedlessness is much the same, in or out of a car. Nearly one half of all pedestrian injuries are chiefly the fault of the person hit. Jaywalkers cross the street with noses buried in newspapers; impatient shoppers buck the traffic signals; children dart into the street with minds intent only on their games; factory workers and country folk amble over the roadway, oblivious of vehicles and calmly relying on their equal rights before the law.

If you ask for a remedy, I can only suggest that the custom which made the common law is likely sooner or later to change it. Vehicles have no rights on sidewalks and paths; pedestrians who are injured in the roadway should be required to show that they were not obstructing traffic, in order to have a legal claim. For children, playgrounds in cities have become imperative.

Taking now the second subject, traffic conditions, we observe that modern highway engineering aims at making the roads handle maximum traffic. This calls for speed with safety. A narrow, rough, or steeply crowned road is dangerous at all points; therefore the modern concrete road is at least eighteen feet wide, — twenty is much better, — and crowned just enough for drainage. But, in any road, intersections and turns are danger points, which cut down capacity and contribute to accidents. So the aim is to provide wide, plainly marked intersections, with clear vision across them wherever possible; and wide, easy bends, banked for the expected speed. Wide roads reduce collision risks. Roads wide enough — forty feet or more — to permit four lanes of travel are increasingly needed near large cities. Side spaces for tire changing and so forth are essential if the road’s full capacity is to be utilized. All signs should be visible by the light of head-lamps. Rural turns should be marked dead ahead — if not by fences or billboards, then by some standard danger-signal.

Danger points should be plainly marked by standard signs, and no signs liable to confuse the driver should be permitted. A uniform color-scheme for both signs and traffic signals is recommended by the Hoover Conference: red for ‘Stop,’ green for ‘Proceed,’ yellow for ‘Caution’ — with a rule that those colors should not be used for any other signs.

New England is painting warnings of railroad crossings and so forth on the concrete road surface itself, where the headlights cannot miss them, and other states are taking up the idea. Mountain roads are guarded, on the outside of turns, by strong steel cables. Posts and fences, bridges, culverts, and other objects are painted white for visibility at night.

By-pass roads, enabling through tourists to avoid the congested districts of cities, are a reality in a few places, and are planned in many others. Segregation of fast and slow traffic on certain main highways is a possibility of the near future, to be effected either by making separate inner and outer lanes, like a four-track railway, or by prohibiting slow vehicles from using certain roads. It is evident that two-lane roads on which both slow and fast vehicles travel cannot be used to anything like their capacity.

In cities, traffic congestion can be eased by zoning, improved pavements, and other devices. But there is no real cure except to limit the ‘vertical’ growth which brings thousands of shoppers and office workers into streets meant for hundreds.

Third among ‘angles of approach’ come policing and criminal penalties. As these are intended to be deterrent, they cannot really be separated from the fourth ‘angle’ — the driver’s own mind. But policing implies external compulsion to do a thing in itself unwelcome. It is sometimes wisely used; but it sometimes results in arrests and fines for merely technical infractions. Drivers on much-patrolled roads get into the habit, not of protecting other road-users, but of merely avoiding arrest. Too much policing tends to weaken, rather than increase, the motorist’s sense of responsibility.

In cities, fines for traffic-law violations are necessary. But elsewhere penalties for speeding, not blowing horns, and so forth, are liable to be merely vexatious. Most car-owners have a decent regard for other people; they will often wreck their own cars to avoid striking someone. What is needed is to inspire the thoughtless few with the same desire — if not out of regard for others, then out of regard for themselves.

This would be accomplished if every culpable accident carried with it, automatically, a suitable and sufficient penalty. And that penalty should not be one arbitrary thing — it should be suited to the owner’s condition and mental type.

The solid business or professional man is seldom a trouble-maker. As his time is valuable, he is likely to drive fast when the way is open; but his sense of responsibility keeps him from knowingly taking chances. As he has property, he can be sued; and even with liability insurance he hates the thought of appearing in court. As for jail or suspension, he tries to avoid giving even a pretext for such penalties.

The new-rich owner, made arrogant by success, and the spoiled sons and daughters of rich parents, are another matter. They have property, but without responsibility. As they are thoughtless and selfish rather than willfully criminal, it is difficult to suppose that jail terms will ever be meted out to them save for really serious offenses. The best way to treat them is to take them off the road for a sufficient term. That, by the way, cannot be done merely by revoking a pocket license-card. The car itself must be impounded, — at the owner’s expense, — the license plates removed, and the police notified to arrest the owner if he is found using another car. It may even be necessary to check up on the police, owing to local ‘pulls.’

However, these measures will not often be needed, for the owner with property is not our biggest problem. Indeed, the small home-owner with a family is considered by the insurance companies their very best risk. It is the happy-go-lucky chap with no property except his car — itself perhaps not yet paid for — who is our main problem. His car means a lot to him and his wife and children, — fresh air and sunshine and green fields, — most of the things that make life worth living. Nobody has ever taught him to feel very much obligation toward strangers. What wonder that he goes out for a good time, and lets the other fellow shift for himself!

Criminal penalties seldom bulk large in the thoughts of these owners. They have little imagination; they are not conscious of criminal intent; their minds are merely centered on themselves. The idea that they are wronging the public by driving a potentially dangerous vehicle, with no means of making good any injury they may cause, hardly enters their thoughts.

Here, then, we face the fourth aspect of our problem. How may a desire to protect the public be inspired in the minds of these irresponsible drivers?

Bear in mind that one half of all car owners have incomes of less than $2,000 a year, and that one quarter earn less than $1,500. If you have the misfortune to be hit by one of these knights of the road, what chance have you of getting him to pay even for the flowers?

The difficulty of the problem lies in its very humanness. The tonic effect of rapid motion and changing scenes is beyond dispute; and no class benefits more by it than those whose ‘ lizzies, ‘ ‘road lice,’ and battered ex-‘kings of the road ‘ swarm the boulevards every Sunday and holiday. But there are too many among them whose natural selfishness or mental limitations make them public menaces.

Such are the persons who regard the rides of the road as meant for others, not for themselves; who do the wrong thing in a crisis; who see no harm in a drink — or several drinks — before starting; who enjoy taking chances with traffic; who hold that, because their own defective headlights have ‘never bothered them,’ other drivers may do the worrying.

II

Less than 20 per cent of all car owners carry liability insurance; and even in cities of over 100,000 population, where the hazard is greatest, only about 40 per cent are insured. The majority of the uninsured urban owners are probably judgment-proof; and no insurance company wants them as risks, for they would regard insurance as an added license for recklessness.

Said a well-known educator to me recently: ‘Four of my own friends have been crippled for life by being hit by automobiles. The last fellow actually laughed when my friend told him he ought to pay for the damage he had done. “I have no money,” he said, “I am not insured. You can’t touch me!'”

Not long ago a Philadelphia architect, whose work had been of priceless value to his community, was fatally crushed in a collision with another car. The woman who drove the latter may not have been to blame; but she had no assets, and the car itself was not paid for.

Lately — also in Philadelphia — two women walking home were struck by a car running rapidly with defective headlights. One was killed, the other badly hurt. The owner, a youth, tried to get away unidentified, but was held by a passer-by. In court he said he had just bought the car for $47.

Everyone knows of similar tragedies. Not all are due to wanton recklessness, but the victim’s utter lack of recourse is far too common.

In short, it seems impossible to discuss accident-prevention and compensation separately. Even if we tried to do so, we could not ignore the present temper of the public, which has caused, as these lines are written, some sixty bills to be presented to the legislatures of twenty-seven States — all aiming to give financial recourse to victims of motor accidents.

Compulsory liability-insurance was first proposed in this country about six years ago. Certain cantons in Switzerland have required it for periods up to twelve years, and a national law is reported likely to be passed there. For Switzerland, at any rate, the system cannot be called a failure.

But it is feared in this country — with seemingly much reason — that the asset-less, selfish owner who makes most of the trouble will abuse the privilege of insurance. He will have two conflicting thoughts in the back of his mind: the law may ‘get’ him, but his insurance will protect him. And these two thoughts will subtly contend for mastery while his driving-habits are being formed. What he will do in the swift unconscious reactions of a crisis will depend on the habits already formed, and possibly on which thought is uppermost at the moment. He may — as we have seen — even be so hardened by lucky chance-taking as to race trains for crossings.

It is easy to understand the apprehension of the insurance companies that compulsory insurance will bring more accidents instead of fewer, with a consequent need for raising premiums to an unknown extent. And if it be urged that the companies will be expected to refuse to insure bad risks, thereby forcing them off the road, the reply is that, in effect, to do so would make them assume a judicial function which the public would not tolerate. Rejected applicants would raise a cry of discrimination, political attacks on the companies and on the Motor Vehicle Department would follow; and a demand for State insurance, with all its possibilities of inefficiency and waste, would be the logical result. On the other hand, accepting bad risks and charging higher premiums to make up the losses would lead to protests and the same final result State insurance. A pleasant dilemma!

Incidentally, the demand for compulsory insurance comes chiefly from the cities, and there seems a real injustice in compelling rural owners even at rural rates of premium — to contribute to relieve a situation which they have done nothing to create. It should at least be possible for a responsible owner to establish his responsibility without paying for insurance which does not benefit him.

An eminent insurance-lawyer of Boston, Edward C. Stone, has proposed to accomplish this by a law which would, in effect, say to the automobile owner: —

‘ You may take out liability insurance or not, as you please. But if you do not, and are unable to meet a judgment for any accident in which you are found at fault, your license will be immediately canceled. And, even if you do meet the judgment, the proceedings will be reported to the Motor Vehicle Commissioner, who may suspend or cancel your license if in his opinion you deserve that penalty.’

The merit of this plan lies in the assumption that there are many careful and at least morally responsible owners who do not feel the need of insurance, and whom it would be unfair to tax (in effect) for someone else’s fault. Rural and small-town motorists, especially, would come under this head. Certainly they are mostly responsible property-owners, and live where traffic hazards are least. The Stone plan is worth trying.

But even the Stone plan differs from straight compulsory insurance chiefly in the number of policyholders involved. In one form or another, it seems wholly likely that what amounts to compulsory insurance will be enacted into law, in one or several States, within a year or two. It will be done on the principles: (a) that road-users injured without their own fault should not be deprived of compensation when the car-owner has no property; and (b) that the benefits of automobiling are so great that, society will do better to bear the losses of such culpable accidents as cannot be prevented, rather than bar large classes of owners from the road because of their having no property.

So the problem becomes, not to fight compulsory insurance, but to find a way to make it work so well that there will be neither complaints from owners not benefited nor a demand for State insurance. And that, of course, means effective prevention of recklessness. The naturally thoughtless or selfish owner must have a motive for carefulness, regardless of insurance.

‘Every accident,’ it has been truly said by Motor Vehicle Commissioner Stoeckel, of Connecticut, ‘has its origin in a wrong act of mind.’ To this we might well add that most accidents for which the driver is responsible result from a wrong attitude of mind. Assuming that he is mentally competent to operate a motor vehicle in traffic, it is safe to say that a sincere desire to protect the public would eliminate very many of the so-called ‘accidents.’

As already mentioned, policing and fines have a limited value with the thoughtless owner, but chiefly to prompt him to avoid arrest. Jail sentences are more effective. But both judges and juries are still too lenient with intoxication and similar offenses, especially with drunken drivers lucky enough to be arrested before they have hit something; and the irresponsible driver usually figures that he can ‘get away with it.’

New Jersey deals with the drunken driver more effectively than most States. A minimum jail-sentence of thirty days is mandatory for the first offense, and the maximum is one year for the first offense and five years for subsequent offenses. According to Motor Vehicle Commissioner William L. Dill, of that State, there are few second offenses where the first offense is strictly dealt with; but often the first offender can persuade the magistrate to reduce the charge from intoxication to speeding or reckless driving — and those are the ones who go and sin some more.

‘Only the other day, ‘ said Mr. Dill to me, ‘I talked with a magistrate whose boy now lies in a Trenton hospital with a broken back, the victim of a drunken driver. He said to me, “I have sentenced hundreds of car-drivers for intoxication, and every time I did so I felt profoundly sorry for the man I sentenced. But I shall never feel sorry for them again!”’

When local magistrates everywhere realize their responsibility, thinks Mr. Dill, the drunken driver will cease to be a problem.

Suspension and revocation of license — together with impounding of the car — are penalties which the Motor Vehicle Department can apply, regardless of the local courts. Here again the fear of suspension is not likely to worry the wage-earning owner very much. It may even mean a chance to save money! But at any rate it will take him off the road, for a time or permanently. If he is definitely unfit to drive, — if he is addicted to liquor, if his nervous reactions are slow, if he loses his head in a crisis or runs away after an accident, — he can be banished from the road for good, once his tendencies become clear.

However, those drivers who are either vicious or mentally unfit are few compared with those who are merely thoughtless. These latter, at least, can be taught care. And the prospect of suspension, not merely for actual criminality, but for carelessness, will undoubtedly influence them if it be ‘rubbed in’ often enough.

Right here compulsory insurance opens a possibility. Most of these thoughtless owners are now untouched by any restraining influence save the sight of an occasional policeman. But if every owner becomes a policyholder, with merely nominal agency-expense to the insurance companies, the latter will be able to spend something to educate him. A monthly or quarterly leaflet on the motorist’s duty to the public, on the usefulness of keeping brakes and steering gear in order, and on the dire and certain penalties of carelessness, is bound to have effect. There is great value in repetition!

To be successful, this plan requires a close and constant check-up of the record of every owner. Every arrest, every settlement by the insurance companies, every proceeding both criminal and civil, should be reported to the Motor Vehicle Department, there to be card-indexed for inspection by the insurance companies, and for action by the Commissioner if needed. And every sentence for intoxication or other aggravated offense should be reported to the insurer. For the companies should still be free to reject or cancel policies, although looking, in most cases, to the courts and the Motor Vehicle Department to deal with offenders.

An incidental but important need is for traffic courts, handling nothing but motor-vehicle-law violations. These, especially if supervised somewhat by the State, will render much more uniform decisions than purely local courts, each a law unto itself, could do. They are strongly urged by the Hoover Conference. Judges, also, would render fairer civil verdicts than juries.

III

To sum up: fines, jail, suspension and impounding, and, finally, permanent revocation of license, are the means thus far discussed for restraining the naturally irresponsible drivers, especially the warped, selfish minds that think only of their own pleasure, and to whom the law is merely a restraint to be fought or evaded. There remains the question whether they will be effective.

The plain truth is that few students of the problem think that they will. The Hoover Conference recommended free application of those penalties, and they are urged by Motor Vehicle Administrators, but it seems to be mainly in the nature of a pious hope, for lack of something better. Long jail-terms make hardened criminals; they would do more harm than good where criminal intent was lacking. Even manslaughter, unless due to intoxication, is not likely to bring long terms. The youth above mentioned, who killed a woman with his forty-seven-dollar car, got only nine months in jail, plus revocation of license.

Are we, then, to conclude that the task of educating the thoughtless and selfish is after all hopeless? Is there no penalty that will appeal sufficiently to their imagination and self-interest to overcome the lure of chance-taking? Is nothing left save to take them off the road or to await the slow process of self-education? If so, the task of regulation is beset with difficulties. And the prospect of enforcing financial responsibility is certainly not encouraging.

An ingenious suggestion from a Connecticut insurance man deserves mention at this point. Mark the offender who has been found guilty of negligence, he proposes. Require him to turn in his license plates, and to receive a new number, with plates of a color — red — reserved for the special purpose. Brand the careless driver in the eyes of the world.

This would certainly work with some; but it would be least effective with the thick-skinned individuals who most need restraint. Moreover, paint is not hard to get. A plan of more general force is needed.

I must now talk in the first person. There is a workable plan, I am convinced. While it is here put forth on my own responsibility, it is favored by at least one well-known Motor Vehicle Administrator, who hit on it independently, and who sees in it a means whereby the thoughtless or selfish owner may be induced to prefer careful driving of his own will and choice, rather than under the threat of police power. Further, it has actually been tried on a small scale abroad, and is reported to work well.

And what is it? In essence, it is simply the common-sense plan of requiring owners whose records show a tendency to recklessness to assume a fair share of financial responsibility out of their own personal pockets.

You’ve seen boys playing ball in a vacant lot. The chance of a birching if windows are broken doesn’t scare them. Neither does the prospect of being chased off the lot. But tell those boys that they must pay for breakage, and they become careful instanter! Tanning a la birch is not permanent, and there are other vacant lots; but lost dimes mean sundry marbles and ice-cream cones gone forever.

In the canton of Vaud, Switzerland, containing the city of Lausanne, the law requires that the owner shall personally bear the first 10 per cent of any judgment up to the specified limit, and shall insure the rest. Accidents blamable on motorists are not numerous in Vaud!

Suppose that Nick Belloni, who has shown a disposition to think himself above the law, were informed that to retain his license he must deposit with the insurance company a sum equal, let us say, to three months’ pay, for 5 per cent of any judgment up to the $10,000 maximum — said deposit to be available also to other creditors if the State constitution so required.

Can’t you picture Nick’s sudden interest in the welfare of the other fellow? At one stroke we have accomplished the three things most desirable in any plan of prevention-plus-compensation: —

1. Made Nick want to avoid trouble.

2. Compensated his victim, if any.

3. Put as much of the cost as possible on Nick’s own shoulders, where it generally belongs.

Space forbids a detailed discussion here of ‘owner coinsurance.’ But psychologically — for the irresponsible chap of small means — the principle is unassailable. It is the general rule today where fire and theft are concerned, not only in regard to automobiles, but in regard to all property; the owner is never allowed to insure for the full value. I am told it applies to marine cargoes where the record of losses is unfavorable. And, in effect, it applies to workmen’s compensation insurance. Why shouldn’t it be applied to a thing so full of temptations as auto-driving?

The problem, of course, is to apply the principle to the near-asset-less class of trouble-makers. Let us see how the plan would work in the case of Nick.

On applying for a license, Nick passes an examination for physical fitness, ability to read English, and knowledge of the motor-vehicle law of his own State. He knows what the carburetor is for and how to adjust the brakes. He passes the driver’s test.

Next the financial-responsibility law is explained to him. He can either deposit $10,000, cash or collateral, with the Motor Vehicle Department, or take out insurance. Incredible sum! He protests violently. He, Nick Belloni, is a poor man, and insurance men are robbers! However, he has already heard of the law, and in the end he grudgingly pays his premium.

With the policy Nick gets a leaflet, which the insurance man is careful to see that he can read and does read. From it Nick learns that if he is arrested and fined, or even let off with a warning, the Commissioner of Motor Vehicles will know about it the very next day, and that the fact will be engraved, as on the Book of Judgment, on a record-card bearing Nick’s name. Further, if he hits anyone, awheel or afoot, he must report all the circumstances to the Commissioner forthwith, for entry on that same card. If he doesn’t, the Commissioner will learn it anyway, and Nick will pay a fine for failing to report.

Still further, the leaflet informs Nick that if the record on his card becomes too black the Commissioner will notify the insurance company to cancel Nick’s policy within ten days. Unless he takes out a new policy within that time, his license also will be canceled, and a policeman will call and take away his card and number plates. His career as an automobile owner will be ended.

But to get that new policy he must deposit $500 with the insurance company. Yes, a mortgage on his house will do, or his savings-bank pass-book if it shows $500 or more on deposit. That sum will be used to meet 5 per cent of any damage claim up to the $10,000 limit; and if any of it is paid out Nick must replace it immediately or lose both policy and license. Further, Nick must settle all claims up to $25, and the first $25 of larger claims, out of his own pocket.

‘But, blood of the saints!’ sputters Nick. ‘What if some drunken fool stumbles in front of me, and I can’t stop?’

‘The insurance companies know the best way to handle such things,’ he is told. ‘Generally it is better to settle out of court: juries have a way of awarding money to the fellow who is hit, even if he was drunk or careless. In fact, the insurance company has so much more at stake than you that the law gives us the right to decide whether to settle or defend suit, if the amount involved exceeds $50. But the best way not to lose money is to hit no one.

So this is the way it feels to have money! One is exposed to suit by every loafer in the street — by the father of every child chasing a ball! Nick’s rage cools after a time, however, and he realizes that the insurance man’s advice was sound. The best way to keep his rainy-day fund intact is to keep that card in the Commissioner’s office clean. After all, he is assured, it is most often the motorist who is at fault.

If Nick, being human, is inclined to forget, the insurance company is not. Monthly or quarterly the postman brings a bulletin, embellished with photographs of cars driven not wisely but too fast, and containing a little sermon about that $500 and how easily it can all be lost.

If Nick is a reckless young bachelor — as is most likely — that money means the wherewithal to keep his car. If he has a family, it means the rent if work should be slack. It means next winter’s coal, or shoes for the bambini. Every time he is tempted to overtake another driver on a curve, or to hog the right of way, his $500 rises before his mind. Before the dangerous lure of speed can snare his weak will, Nick has become a careful driver. And it has been done without a single arrest, and with no especial policing, simply by insisting on the principle that responsibility is personal. Nick never forms the habit of chance-taking that leads to grade-crossing wrecks. Withal, the other drivers whom Nick meets on the road are as careful as he.

It is not claimed that the insurance men favor the Swiss idea. For one thing, to them ‘insurance is protection,’ and this is decidedly something else. But, beyond that, they fear the spectre of State insurance so sincerely that it is hard for them to show enthusiasm even over a method of reducing losses, if that method involves compulsion to pay for insurance. It is such a short step further to argue that if the State compels insurance it should furnish coverage at ‘cost’!

No one can blame the insurance men for feeling thus. If the public decides, nevertheless, to compel insurance, it should be with a clear resolve to keep government and politics out of business. Nobody believes that State insurance would in reality be cheaper than private insurance, once the selling expenses were reduced by making the latter compulsory. And State insurance at a loss — to be covered by taxes — should not be tolerated.

But financial responsibility is a crying need. And owner coinsurance, replacing the endless effort to legislate people into being good by a simple, automatic incentive, might be the one thing most needed to make compulsory insurance fair to the insurance companies and a benefit to the public.

Admittedly, the formula for applying the coinsurance principle will not be simple. Questions of constitutionality will have to be settled. Details will have to be adjusted to local needs. The motor trade will not welcome the idea. But a diminishing death-roll seems certain to result; and, beside that, special interests count for little.

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

WHEN the telephone rings, I jump like a skittish horse. If I hear Jenny’s swift clip-clap across the kitchen floor, I wait, half-trembling, for her voice. Her first ‘Hello’ is courteous and non-committal. But how I hang upon her next phrase! If it comes still suave, I know my fate.

Must a moment, please, I’ll call her.’ I am hurrying to the door, but, oh, I am afraid! Somebody wants me to do something, or to be something, and I don’t want to! I don’t want to! Childishly it goes over and over in my head, even while I lift the receiver.

But if Jenny’s second ‘Hello’ follows brisk and familiar, I sink back unscathed for the moment, and let the echoes of her sociability amuse me.

‘Sure! Yes, on your life I’ll come! Did you say we’d have hot dogs or pickled pigs’ feet? Good-night! — You don’t mean he had the nerve to ask you, after those words you and he passed at the whist last night! The big boob! ’ et cetera, et cetera.

If I were Jenny, I would not be afflicted by telephone terror. I would not suffer from the horrid conviction that I am all one great bare sensitive ear. That desperate instinctive ‘I don’t want to! I don’t want to! Leave me alone; oh, please leave me alone!’ would never leap to my lips, and I would never want to bang the receiver against the wall, wailing even to the kindest and clearest voice across the wire, ‘Oh, don’t ask me! Don’t tell me! Give me time to breathe! Give me time to live!’

Unfortunately I am not Jenny. I am neither so good, nor so useful, nor so human as she. She and her friends use the telephone simply as a splendid extension of their own tongues. They joke and jibe and scrap and soothe by wire. They are not self-conscious, not afraid. They have the right courage and simplicity to deal with such a furtive tyrant as the telephone. I have not. I let it bully me. I am its slave, and so I hate it and fear it.

But it is not all a preponderance of courage that makes Jenny’s pickled-pigs’-feet conversations so much freer and gladder than mine. Jenny’s tongue enjoys itself. My tongue despises itself. It is bad to hear myself talk on any occasion. It is worse to talk into an empty black hole, without the comfort and guide of a responsive face before me. It is bad to adapt myself to new persons, to be what they expect me to be, to say what they expect me to say. It is worse to do it suddenly, unpreparedly: to jump, as it were, head-foremost, into not only one encounter of personality in an hour, but perhaps into one on top of another all day long, at the devilish telephone’s will. The sound of my voice at such times sickens me. I feel flat, strained, unreal. For I hate to talk; and the telephone has me at its mercy.

And I hate to decide quickly. It is fearful to learn, out of a clear sky, that I am asked to do something, or that somebody is suddenly in town, for whom I must devise a time and place of entertainment. The trouble is not so much that I am churlish, as that the form of attack frightens me. A letter bringing like news of an invitation or a visitor may be a delight. But the telephone in itself is ominous and confusing.

How can I tell at eleven in the morning whether I can spend the afternoon in even the most charming of motor-rides? Such a decision involves readjustments unlimited, of Jenny and myself and all the world of the day. How can I greet cheerfully at first gasp the bland announcement, ‘I’m Rachel Rollins. I’m so glad you’re at home! We’re just here for the afternoon, and I wondered how we could manage to see you.’

I may be ever so glad to see Rachel; but, oh, if she would write to me, or ring my door-bell, not my telephone! A face-to-face encounter I have learned to manage, and even to find happy and heart-warming. But voice-to-voice, sudden, threatening, compelling, strikes terror to my soul.

And these are of the mildest and kindest demands of my tyrant. It asks me, instantly, to give money, time, work, sympathy, wisdom; to rearrange my whole plan of being, as it were, a dozen times a day. It makes no preambles and it respects no privacies.

Perhaps that irreverence for privacy is the telephone’s worst crime in my sight. Voices can intrude upon me whose owners would never dream of crossing my threshold without an introduction or apology. I may be saving the baby from a kettle of scalding water, or saying a long good-bye to my best-beloved friend: the telephone does not care. If my prayers were as long as they should be, they would still offer no sanctuary against the persistent bell-burr.

It rings me out of bed, away from my meals, from adventures in dusty attic-archives and adventures in spiritual archives no less absorbing. If I ever try to write a poem, — for the moment an illusion of wings and glory, — I am well bumped to earth. ‘Indeed it would be such a help if you could give a cake to t he Men’s Club supper Thursday night! ’ Or, ‘Do you remember the recipe for that perfectly delicious piccalilly you made last, fall?’

If the poem survives three or four such onslaughts, I know at least that it is genuine, if not glorious.

If I were Jenny, I would not mind, though even she sighs at repeated attacks. But I am of those who still would like a wall about my yard and a stout gate at the entrance. Many and many might enter and be welcome; but they should give me a moment’s time to realize who they were, to adjust myself, to be what they require of me. They should not drag me, headlong and apprehensive, to unexplained encounters.

But this utopian defense is impossible. Of course I could not live without a telephone. For me it is the most beneficent but the most barren vehicle of necessity or convenience, and I must pay the penalty of its usefulness.

Perhaps the trouble is all with me. I suspect that I am sometimes almost neurasthenic in my fear of sudden attack upon my home and my being. Or, more shameful, I am a mere old fogy, born a few generations late, all out of tune with telephones and automobiles and factory-cogs, and all too distrustful of the network of intimacy that has tangled the whole world together so ominously.

Being humble (in spots), I will blame myself thus for telephone terror. While the Jennies of my acquaintance go blithely on, planning whist-parties with pickled-pigs’-feet obligatos, and scolding and jollying each other, I shall hide from all save those who may read this and cannily lay to my door the unalterable fact that I jump and quiver whenever the bell rings, and that something in me cries out, no matter how I try to choke it, —

‘Oh, please don’t! Please don’t! Leave me alone! I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to decide. I want time to breathe, and live, and be myself instead of a hundred other people’s ideas of me. Please, please, please leave — me — alone! ’

THERE is a story of Hawthorne’s which is little known, because it is too expansively dull to be read. It tells how the nations of the earth, convulsed by a mighty spasm of reform, rid themselves of the tools and symbols of all they held in abhorrence. Because they would have no more war, they destroyed the weapons of the world. Because they would have no more drunkenness, they destroyed its wines and spirits. Because they banned self-indulgence, they destroyed tobacco, tea, and coffee. Because they would have all men to be equal, they destroyed the insignia of rank, from the crown jewels of England to the medal of the Cincinnati. Wealth itself was not permitted to survive, lest the new order be as corrupt as was the old. Nothing was left but the human heart with its imperishable and inalienable qualities; and while it beats within the human breast, the world must still be moulded by its passions. ‘When Cain wished to slay his brother,’ murmured a cynic, watching the great guns, trundled to the blaze, ‘ he was at no loss for a weapon.’

If belief in the perfectibility of man — and not of man only, but of governments — is the inspiration of liberalism, of radicalism, of the spirit that calls clamorously for change, and that has requisitioned the words reform and progression, sympathy with man and with his work, with the beautiful and imperfect things he has made of the checkered centuries, is the keynote of conservatism. The temperamental conservative is a type vulnerable to ridicule, yet not more innately ridiculous than his neighbors. He has been carelessly defined as a man who is cautious because he has a good income, and content because he is well placed; who is thick-headed because he lacks vision, and close-hearted because he is deaf to the moaning wind which is the cry of unhappy humanity asking justice from a world which has never known how to be just. Lecky, who had a neat hand for analysis, characterized the great conflicting parties in an axiom which pleased neither: ‘Stupidity in all its forms is Tory; folly in all its forms is Whig.’

These things are too easily said to be quite worth the saying. Stupidity is not the prerogative of any one class or creed. It is Heaven’s free gift to men of all kinds, and conditions, and civilizations. A practical man, said Disraeli, is one who perpetuates the blunders of his predecessor instead of striking out into blunders of his own. Temperamental conservatism is the dower (not to be coveted) of men in whom delight and doubt — I had almost said delight and despair — contend for mastery; whose enjoyment of color, light, atmosphere, tradition, language and literature is balanced by chilling apprehensiveness; whose easily won pardon for the shameless revelations of an historic past brings with it no healing belief in the triumphant virtues of the future.

The conservative is not an idealist, any more than he is an optimist. Idealism has worn thin in these days of colossal violence and colossal cupidity. Perhaps it has always been a cloak for more crimes than even liberty sheltered under her holy name. The French Jacobins were pure idealists; but they translated the splendor of their aspirations, the nobility and amplitude of their great conception, into terms of commonplace official murder, which are all the more displeasing to look back upon because of the riot of sentimentalism and impiety which disfigured them. It is bad enough to be bad, but to be bad in bad taste is unpardonable. If, for the past thirteen months, we had resolutely severed the word idealism from the bloody chaos which is Russia, we should have understood more clearly, and have judged no less leniently, the seething ambitions of men who passionately desired, and desire, control. The elemental instinct of self-preservation is the first step to the equally elemental instinct of self-interest. Natural rights, about which we chatter freely, are not more equably preserved by denying them to one class of men than by denying them to another. They have been ill-protected under militarism and capitalism; and their subversion has been a sin crying out to Heaven for vengeance. They are not protected at all under any Soviet government so far known to report.

Nothing is easier than to make the world safe for democracy. Democracy is playing her own hand in the game. She has every intention and every opportunity to make the world safe for herself. But democracy may be divorced from freedom, and freedom is the breath of man’s nostrils, the strength of his sinews, the sanction of his soul. It is as painful to be tyrannized over by a proletariat as by a tsar or a corporation, and in a measure more disconcerting, because of the greater in-cohesion of the process. It is as revolting to be robbed by a reformer as by a trust. Oppressive taxation, which forced the great Revolution upon France, dishonest ‘deals,’ which have made a mockery of justice in the United States, ironic laws, framed for the convenient looting of the bourgeoisie in Russia — there is as much idealism in one device as in the others. Sonorous phrases like ‘reconstruction of the world’s psychology,’ and ‘creation of a new world-atmosphere,’ are mental sedatives, drug words, calculated to put to sleep any uneasy apprehensions. They may mean anything, and they do mean nothing, so that it is safe to go on repeating them. But a Bolshevist official was arrested in Petrograd last March, charged with embezzling fifteen million roubles. Not content with the excesses of the new regime, he must needs revert to the excesses of the old — a discouraging study in evolution.

When Lord Hugh Cecil published his analysis of conservatism eight years ago, the British reviewers devoted a great deal of time to its consideration — not so much because they cared for what the author had to say (though he said it thoughtfully and well), as because they had opinions of their own on the subject, and desired to give them utterance. Cecil’s conception of temperamental, as apart from modern British political conservatism (which he dates from Pitt and Burke), affords the most interesting part of the volume; but the line of demarcation is a wavering one. That famous sentence of Burke’s, concerning innovations that are not necessarily reforms, ‘They shake the public security, they menace private enjoyment,’ shows the alliance between temperament and valuation. It was Burke’s passionate delight in life’s expression, rather than in life’s adventure, that made him alive to its values. He was not averse to change: change is the law of the universe; but he changed in order to preserve. The constructive forces of the world persistently won his deference and support.

The intensely British desire to have a moral, and, if possible, a religious foundation for a political creed, would command our deepest respect, were the human mind capable of accommodating its convictions to morality and religion, instead of accommodating morality and religion to its convictions. Cecil, a stern individualist, weighted with a heavy sense of personal responsibility, and disposed to distrust the kindly intervention of the State, finds, naturally enough, that Christianity is essentially individualistic. ‘There is not a line of the New Testament that can be quoted in favor of the enlargement of the function of the State beyond the elementary duty of maintaining order and suppressing crime.’

The obvious retort to this would be that there is not a line in the New Testament which can be quoted in favor of the confinement of the function of the State to the elementary duty of maintaining order and suppressing crime. The counsel of Christ is a counsel of perfection, and a counsel of perfection is necessarily personal and intimate. What the world asks now are state reforms and social reforms — in other words, the reformation of our neighbors. What the Gospel asks, and has always asked, is the reformation of ourselves — a harassing and importunate demand. Mr. Chesterton spoke but the truth when he said that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult, and not tried.

Cecil’s conclusions anent the unconcern of the Gospels with forms of government were, strangely enough, the points very ardently disputed by Bible-reading England. A critic in the Contemporary Review made the interesting statement that the political economy of the New Testament is radical and sound. He illustrated his argument with the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, pointing out that the master paid the men for the hours in which they had had no work. ‘In the higher economics,’ he said, ‘the State, as representing the community, is responsible for those who, through the State’s malfeasance, or misfeasance, or nonfeasance, are unable to obtain the work for which they wait.’

But apart from the fact that the parable is meant to have a spiritual and not a material significance, there is nothing in the Gospel to indicate that the master considered that he owed the late-comers their day’s wage. His comment upon his own action disclaims this assumption: ‘Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own?’ And it is worthy of note that the protest against his liberality comes, not from the other vine-growers, objecting to a precedent, but from the laborers who cannot be brought to see that an hour’s work done by their neighbors may be worth as much as twelve hours’ work done by themselves. Human nature has not altered perceptibly in the course of two thousand years.

Great Britain’s experiment in doling out ‘unemployment pay’ is based on expediency, and on the generous hypothesis that men and women, outside of the professional pauper class, would prefer work with wages to wages without work. A cartoon in Punch representing the Minister of Labor blandly and insinuatingly presenting a housemaid’s uniform to an outraged ‘exmunitionette,’ who is the government’s contented pensioner, suggests some rift in this harmonious understanding. Progressives have branded temperamental conservatism as distrust of the unknown — a mental attitude which is the antithesis of love of adventure. But distrust of the unknown is a thin and fleeting emotion compared with distrust of human nature, which is perfectly well known. To know it is not necessarily to quarrel with it. It is merely to take it into account.

II

Economics and ethics have little in common. They meet in amity, only to part in coldness. Our preference for our own interests is essentially and vitally un-Christian. The competitive system is not a Christian system. But it lies at the root of civilization; it has its noble as well as its ignoble side; it is the mainspring of both nationalism and internationalism; it is the force which supports governments, and the force which violently disrupts them. Men have risen above self-interest for life; nations, superbly for a time. The sense of shock which was induced by Germany’s acute reversion to barbarism was deeper than the sense of danger induced by her vaulting ambitions. There is no such passionate feeling in life as that which is stirred by the right and duty of defense; and for more than four years the Allied nations defended the world from evils which the world fancied it had long outgrown. The duration of the war is the most miraculous part of the miraculous tale. A monotony of heroism, a monotony of sacrifice, transcends imagination.

Now it is over. Citizens of the United States walked knee-deep in newspapers for a joyous night to signify their satisfaction, and at once embarked on vivacious disputes over memorial arches, and statues, and monuments. The nations of Europe, with lighter pockets and heavier stakes, began to consider difficulties, and to cultivate doubts. No one can fail to understand the destructive forces of the world, because they have given object-lessons on a large and lurid scale. But the constructive forces are on trial, with imposing chances of success or failure. They are still in the wordy stage, and now, as never before, the world is sick of words. ‘This is neither the time nor the place for superfluous phrases,’ said Clemenceau (ironically, one hopes), when, on the seventh of May, he placed in the hands of Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau a peace treaty which some stony-hearted wag has informed us was precisely the length of A Tale of Two Cities. The appalling discursiveness of the Versailles Conference has added to the confusion of the world; but fitted into the ‘Preamble’ of the Covenant of the League of Nations are five little vocables, four of them monosyllabic, which embody the one arresting thought that dominates and authorizes the articles — ‘Not to resort to war.’ These five words are the crux of the whole serious and sanguine scheme. They hold the hope of the weak, and the happiness of the insecure. They deny to the strong the pleasures — and the means — of coercion.

The rapid changes wrought by the twentieth century are less disconcerting to the temperamental conservative, who is proverbially slow, than movements which take time to be persuasive. For one thing, the vast spiral along which the world spins brings him face to face with new friends before he loses sight of the old. The revolutionary of yesterday is the reactionary of to-day, and the conservative finds himself hobnobbing with men and women whom he had thought remote as the Poles.

Two interesting examples are Madame Catherine Breshkovskaya and Mr. Samuel Gompers. Time was, and not so many years ago, when both condoned violence — the violence of the Russian Nihilist, the violence of the American dynamiter — as a short road to justice. Their attitude was not unlike that of the first Southern lynchers: ‘We take the law into our own hands, because conditions are unbearable, and the state affords no adequate relief.’ But Madame Breshkovskaya has seen the forces she helped to set in motion sweeping in unanticipated and shattering currents. She has seen a new terrorism arise and wield the weapons of the old to crush man’s sacred freedom. The peasants she loved have been beyond the reach of her help. The country for which she suffered thirty years of exile repudiated her. Radicals in Europe and in the United States mocked at her. The Grandmother of the Revolution has become a conservative old lady, concerned, as good grandmothers ought to be, with the welfare of little children, and pleading pitifully for order and education.

As for Mr. Gompers, his unswerving loyalty to the cause of the Allies, his unswerving rejection of Germany and all her works, will never be forgiven by pacifists, by the men and woman who had no word of protest or of pity when Belgium was invaded, when the Lusitania was sunk, when towns were burned, civilians butchered, and girls deported; and who recovered their speech only to plead for the nation that had disregarded human sufferings and human rights. Mr. Gompers helped as much as any one man in the United States to win the war, and winning a war is very distasteful to those who do not want to fight. Therefore has he been relegated by international Socialists, who held hands for four years with Pangerman Socialists, to the ranks of the conservatives. When the Nation, speaking ex cathedra, says, ‘ The authority of the old machine-type of labor leader like Mr. Gompers is impaired beyond help or hope,’ we hear the echo of the voices which babbled about capitalism and profiteering in April, 1917. The Great War has made and unmade the friendships of the world. If the radicals propose it as a test, as a test the conservatives will accept it.

III

The successive revolutions which make the advance-guard of one movement the rear-guard of the next are as expeditious and as overwhelming in the field of art as in the fields of politics and sociology. In the spring of 1877 an exhibition of two hundred and forty pictures, the work of eighteen artists, was opened in the rue le Peletier, Paris. For some reason, never sufficiently explained, Parisians found in these canvases a source of infinite diversion. They went to the exhibition in a mood of obvious hilarity. They began to laugh while they were still in the street, they laughed as they climbed the stairs, they were convulsed with laughter when they looked at the pictures, they laughed every time they talked them over with their friends.

Now what were these mirth-provoking works of art? Not cubist diagrams, not geometrical charts of human anatomy, not reversible landscapes, not rainbow-tinted pigs. Such exhilarants lay in wait for another century and another generation. The pictures which so abundantly amused Paris in 1877 were painted by Claude Monet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Renoir — men of genius, who, having devised a new and brilliant technique, abandoned themselves with too little reserve to the veracities of impressionism. They were not doctrinaires. The peace they disturbed was only the peace of immobility. But they were drunk with new wine. Their strength lay in their courage and their candor; their weakness in the not unnatural assumption that they were expressing the finalities of art.

Defenders they had in plenty. No pioneer can escape from the hardship of vindication. Years before, Baudelaire had felt it incumbent upon himself, as a professional mutineer, to support the ‘fearless innovations’ of Manet. Zola, always on the lookout for somebody to attack or to defend, was equally enthusiastic, and equally choleric. Loud disputation rent the air, while the world sped on its way, and lesser artists discovered, to their joy, what a facile thing it was to produce nerve-racking novelties. In 1892, John La Farge, wandering disconsolately through the exhibitions of Paris, wondered if there might not still be room for something simple in art.

Ever and always the reproach cast at the conservative is that he has been blind in the beginning to the beauty he has been eventually compelled to recognize; and ever and always he replies that, in the final issue, he is the guardian of all beauty. His are the imperishable standards, his is the love for a majestic past, his is the patience to wait until the wheat has been sorted from the chaff, and gathered into the granaries of the world. If he be hostile to the problematic, which is his weakness, he is passionately loyal to the tried and proven, which is his strength. He is as necessary to human sanity as the progressive is necessary to human hope.

Civilization and culture are very old and very beautiful. They imply refinement of humor, a disciplined taste, sensitiveness to noble impressions, and a wise acceptance of the laws of evidence. These things are not less valuable for being undervalued. ‘At the present time,’ says the most acute of American critics, Mr. Brownell, ‘it is quite generally imagined that we should gain rather than lose by having Raphael without the Church, and Rembrandt without the Bible.’ The same notion, less clearly defined, is prevalent concerning Milton and Dante. We had grown weary of large and compelling backgrounds until the Great War focused our emotions. We are impatient still of large and compelling traditions. The tendency is to localization and analysis.

The new and facile experiments in verse, which have some notable exponents, are interesting and indecisive. Midway between the enthusiasm of the experimenters (which is not contagious) and the ribald jibes of the disaffected (which are not convincing) the conservative critic practises that watchful waiting, so safe in the world of art, so hazardous in the world of action. He cannot do as he has been bidden, and judge the novel product by its own standards, for that would be to exempt it from judgment. Nothing — not even a German — can be judged by his — or its — own standard. If there is to be any standard at all, it must be based on comparison. Keen thoughts and vivid words have their value, no matter in what form they are presented; but unless that form be poetical, the presentation is not poetry. There is a world of truth in Mr. Masters’s brief and bitter lines: —

Beware of the man who rises to power
From one suspender.

It has the kind of sagacity which is embodied in the old adage, ‘You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,’ and it is as remote from the requirements of prosody.

The medium employed by Walt Whitman, at times rhythmic and cadenced, at times ungirt and sagging loosely, enabled him to write passages of sustained beauty, passages grandly conceived and felicitously rendered. It also permitted him a riotous and somewhat monotonous excess. Every word misused revenges itself forever upon a writer’s reputation. The medium employed by the unshackled poets of today is capable of vivid and accurate imagery. It has aroused — or revealed — habits of observation. It paints pen-pictures cleverly. In the hands of French- and English-speaking experts, it shows sobriety, and a clear consciousness of purpose. But it is useless to deny that the inexpert find it perilously easy. The barriers which protect an ordinary four-lined stanza are not hard to scale; but they do exist, and they sometimes bring the versifier to a halt. Without them, nothing brings him to a halt, save the limits of the space allotted by grudging newspapers and periodicals.

Yet brevity is the soul of song, no less than the soul of wit. Those lovely lyrics, swift as the note of a bird on the wing, imperishable as a jewel, haunting as unforgotten melody, are the fruits of artifice no less than of inspiration. In eight short lines, Landor gave ‘Rose Aylmer ’ to an entranced and forever listening world. There is magic in the art that made those eight lines final. A writer of what has been cynically called ‘socialized poetry’ would have spent the night of ‘ memories and sighs ’ in probing and specifying his emotions.

The conservative’s inheritance from the radical’s lightly rejected yesterdays gives him ground to stand on, and a simplified point of view. In that very engaging volume, The Education of Henry Adams, the autobiographer tells us in one breath how much he desires change, and, in the next, how much he resents it. He would like to upset an already upset world, but he would also like to keep the Pope in the Vatican, and the Queen in Windsor Castle. He feels that by right he should have been a Marxist, but the last thing he wants to see is a transformed Europe. The bewildered reader might be pardoned for losing himself in this labyrinth of uncertainties, were it not for an enlightening paragraph in which the author expresses unqualified amazement at Motley’s keen enjoyment of London society.

‘ The men of whom Motley must have been thinking were such as he might meet at Lord Houghton’s breakfasts. Grote, Jowett, Milman, or Froude; Browning, Matthew Arnold, or Swinburne; Bishop Wilberforce, Venables, or Hayward; or perhaps Gladstone, Robert Lowe, or Lord Granville. . . . Within the narrow limits of this class, the American Legation was fairly at home; possibly a score of houses, all liberal and all literary, but perfect only in the eyes of a Harvard College historian. They could teach little worth knowing, for their tastes were antiquated, and their knowledge was ignorance to the next generation. What was altogether fatal for future purpose, they were only English.’

Apart from the delightful conception of the author of Culture and Anarchy, and the author of Atalanta in Calydon, as ‘only English,’ the pleasure the conservative reader takes in this peremptory estimate is the pleasure of possession. To him belongs the ignorance of Jowett and Grote, to him the obsoleteness of Browning. From every one of these discarded luminaries some light falls on his path. In fact, a flash of blinding light was vouchsafed to Mr. Adams, when he and Swinburne were guests in the house of Monckton Milnes. Swinburne was passionately praising the god of his idolatry, Victor Hugo; and the young American, who knew little and cared less about French poetry, ventured in a half-hearted fashion to assert the counter claims of Alfred de Musset. Swinburne listened impatiently, and brushed aside the comparison with a trenchant word: ‘De Musset did not sustain himself on the wing.’

If a bit of flawless criticism from an expert’s lips be not educational, then there is nothing to be taught or learned in the world. Of the making of books there is no end; but now as ever the talker strikes the light, now as ever conversation is the appointed medium of intelligence and taste.

IV

It is well that the past yields some solace to the temperamental conservative, for the present is his only on terms he cannot easily fulfil. His reasonable doubts and his unreasonable prejudices block the path of contentment. He is powerless to believe a thing because it is an eminently desirable thing to believe. He is powerless to deny the existence of facts he does not like. He is powerless to credit new systems with finality. The sanguine assurance that men and nations can be legislated into goodness, that pressure from without is equivalent to a moral change within, needs a strong backing of inexperience. ‘The will,’ says Francis Thompson, ‘is the lynch-pin of the faculties.’ We stand or fall by its strength or its infirmity. Where there is no temptation, there is no virtue. Parental legislation for the benefit of the weak leaves them as weak as ever, and denies to the strong the birthright of independence, the hard resistant manliness with which they work out their salvation. They may go to heaven in leading-strings, but they cannot conquer Apollyon on the way.

The well-meant despotism of the reformer accomplishes some glittering results, but it arrests the slow progress of civilization, which cannot afford to be despotic. Mr. Bagehot, whose cynicism held the wisdom of restraint, maintained that the ‘cake of custom’ should be stiff enough to make change of any kind difficult, but never so stiff as to make it impossible. The progress achieved under these conditions would be, he thought, both durable and endurable. ‘Without a long-accumulated and inherited tendency to discourage originality, society would never have gained the cohesion requisite for effecting common action against its external foes.’ Deference to usage is a uniting and sustaining bond. Nations which reject it are apt to get off the track, and have to get back, or be put back, with difficulty and disaster. They do not afford desirable dwelling-places for thoughtful human beings, but they give notable lessons to humanity. Innovations to which we are not committed are illuminating things.

If the principles of conservatism are based on firm supports, on a recognition of values, a sense of measure and proportion, a due regard for order — its prejudices are indefensible. The wise conservative does not attempt to defend them; he only clings to them more lovingly under attack. He recognizes triumphant science in the telephone and the talking machine, and his wish to escape these benefactions is but a humble confession of unworthiness. He would be glad if scientists, hitherto occupied with preserving and disseminating sound, would turn their attention to suppressing it, would collect noise as an ashman collects rubbish, and dump it in some lonely place, thus preserving the sanity of the world. He agrees with Mr. Edward Martin (who bears the hall-mark of the caste) that periodicals run primarily for advertisers, and secondarily for readers, are worthy of regard, and that only the tyranny of habit makes him revolt from so nice an adjustment of interests. Why, after all, should he baulk at pursuing a story, or an article on ‘Ballads and Folk-Songs of the Letts,’ between columns of well-illustrated advertisements? Why should he refuse to leap from chasm to chasm, from the intimacies of underwear to electrical substitutes for all the arts of living? There is no hardship involved in the chase, and the trail is carefully blazed. Yet the chances are that he abandons the Letts, reminding himself morosely that two years ago he was but dimly aware of their existence; and their ‘rich vein of traditional imagery,’ to say nothing of their early edition of Luther’s catechism, fades from his intellectual horizon.

If we are too stiff to adjust ourselves to changed conditions, we are bound to play a losing game. Yet the moral element in taste survives all change, and denies to us a ready acquiescence in innovations whose only merit is their practicality. Through the reeling years of war, the standard set by taste remained a test of civilization. In this formidable year of peace, racked by anxieties and shadowed by disillusions (Franklin’s ironic witticism concerning the blessedness of peace-makers was never more applicable than to-day), the austerity of taste preserves our self-respect. We are under no individual obligation to add to the wealth of nations. It is sometimes a pleasant duty to resist the pervasive pressure of the business world.

Political conservatism may be a lost cause in modern democracy; but temperamental conservatism dates from the birth of man’s reasoning powers, and will survive the clamor and chaos of revolutions. It may rechristen its political platform, but the animating spirit will be unchanged . As a matter of fact, great conservatives have always been found in the liberal ranks, and Tory Cassandras, who called themselves radicals, have prophesied with dismal exactitude. It was a clear-eyed, clear-voiced Socialist who, eight years before the war, warned British Socialists that they would do well to sound the temper of German Socialists before agitating for a reduction of the British navy. M. Paul Deschanel says of the French that they have revolutionary imaginations and conservative temperaments. An English critic has used nearly the same terms in defining the elemental principles of civilization — conservatism of technique and spiritual restlessness. It is the fate of man to do his own thinking, and thinking is subversive of content; but a sane regard for equilibrium is his inheritance from the travail of centuries. He sees far who looks both ways. He journeys far who treads a known track.

Resistance, which is the function of conservatism, is essential to orderly advance. It is a force in the social and political, as well as in the natural order. A party of progress, a party of stability, — call them by what names we please, — they will play their roles to the end. The hopefulness of the reformer (Savonarola’s bonfire of vanities is an historic precedent for Hawthorne’s allegory) is balanced by the patience of the conservative, which has survived the disappointments of time, and is not yet exhausted. He at least knows that ‘the chief parts of human doom and duty are eternal,’ and that the things which can change are not the things essential to the support of his soul. We stand at the door of a new day, and are sanguine or affrighted according to our temperaments; but this day shall be transient as the days which have preceded it, and, like its predecessors, shall plead for understanding and pardon before the bar of history.

The exposition of Mr. Mowrer is both just and fair-minded as regards Jew and Gentile; but a careful reading of his thesis leaves one with the impression that he has not got at the root of the matter. There are certainly several factors in the equation of which he has entirely failed to make mention. Mr. Mowrer has apparently convinced himself that the Jewish Problem is distinctly a political one, complicated by religious and social features. With this deduction many cannot agree. It does not satisfy either the Jew or the Gentile.

At the present time of nationalist madness, it is almost heresy to assert that, instead of its being nationalism which underlies world-antipathies, both in the past and in the present, it is the antagonism of diverse cultures. Before applying this theory to the Jewish Question, it is advisable to amplify it in order that it may be quite clear.

The sociologists and anthropologists will probably not quarrel with the general thesis that, underlying the mistrust and fear of one primitive tribe for another, was the difference of habits, customs, taboos, and totems, of which primitive culture consisted. Nor will the historians question the statement that the hatred and fear of the ancient Greeks and Persians were in a large measure due to differences in religion, government, and social customs — in fact, to differences of culture.

The present offers so many examples of this phenomenon that there is an embarrassment of choice. When these problems are not complicated by the political and commercial rivalries of governments, the underlying cultural struggle is more clearly in evidence. The growing hostility and intensity of feeling as between the East and the West are almost purely cultural. The antagonism and hatred between Christians and Moslems in the Near East are essentially cultural — differences of customs, habits, and dress; difference in fundamental moral and social conceptions; a different mode of thought; a different philosophy.

Central Europe to-day presents perhaps the most exceptional picture of the hatreds bred by differences of culture. The much-discussed Irish Question is far more cultural than religious and social.

Similarity of race has, in the past, usually implied similar customs, habits, modes of thought, moral outlook and philosophy — in fact, a similar culture. Religion, with all of its intense hatreds and aversions, is essentially only a distinctive and powerful factor in determining the culture of a race, nation, or other unit of mankind.

Americans and Englishmen have probably more in common than any other great groups into which human society is at present divided. But what many of those on both sides of the Atlantic, who have most at heart a closer association of England and America, fail to understand is that one of the strongest determining factors of the culture of a people — the social organization — is radically different in the two countries. England’s social organism is based in theory and in practice on the caste system; while in theory, and to a great extent in practice, the American social order is based on worth and achievement. Such antagonism as exists between these two countries is due fundamentally to both a conscious and an unconscious conflict of this strong cultural difference.

The foregoing appears a long way removed from the Jewish Problem; but if the reader has had the patience to follow this sketchy definition of the word culture, he will perhaps follow the application of this theory of conflicting cultures to the question why the People of Israel have not been assimilated during the long centuries; and he will be better able to draw his own conclusions as to whether the Jews will ever be assimilated by the people among whom they live.

The Jewish people have a distinct culture of their own — a culture which is more thoroughly inculcated in the individual Jew than is the Gentile culture in the individual Gentile. The Jews have a literature which is distinct from all other literatures; they have customs and habits which set them apart from any other human group; they have a mode of thought peculiarly characteristic of the Jew; their moral conceptions are different from those of the Gentiles; their philosophy is distinctly their own. At a very early age, these differences are drilled into the mind not only of the upper classes, but also, and even more intensely, of the masses. There are so many determining factors in the culture of the Jews which are different from those of all other groups, that the Jews are verily a race set apart — a race or group whose culture is antagonistic, on many counts, to the culture of all other peoples.

There are many causes which have tended to increase and to intensify these cultural differences. But two factors, which have had considerable influence on the question of assimilation have not, it is believed, previously been discussed.

Among Christian peoples women have come to be considered from a different point of view than among other peoples. The attitude toward women among the Christians has consistently through the ages been idealistic. This Christian conception of womanhood is probably due to the fact that early Christianity was based on the worship of a Virgin Mother. The conception was intensified and augmented by the advent of chivalry. Christian culture created a refinement of thought, a delicacy of feeling, and a sense of the sanctity of womanhood, which are apparently lacking in Jewish culture, as witnessed both in their literature and in the daily life of the Jewish people.

This difference between the culture of the Christian and that of the Jew has undoubtedly militated against assimilation, as it has restrained Christian men and women from intermarriage with Jews. With all of her charm, the appeal of her emotional nature, and the attractiveness of her many talents, to the Christian man the Jewish woman has lacked a nicety of thought and feeling. To the Christian woman the Jew, with his extraordinary sensitiveness of feeling, his appreciation of the beautiful in life, in art, and in literature, with the charm of his intellectual brilliance and versatility, has failed to show that delicacy of thought and refinement of manner to which she is accustomed.

On the other hand, handicapped by the lack of this factor in their culture, which to a great extent isolated them and prevented close association with their intellectual equals in the Christian groups, the Jews found themselves thrown among classes of Christians whose intellectual training and equipment were far inferior to that of the average Jew.

For it must be realized that the masses among the Jews receive a far greater intellectual training than the masses among the Christians. As a race or group, the Jews are more intelligent and better trained mentally than any other group. Denied association and intimacy with Gentiles of equal or superior intelligence, the Jews have refused assimilation, both intellectual and physical.

The Jewish Problem is, at bottom, a cultural problem. The antagonistic factors in Jewish culture have made any large assimilation impossible in the past. Jewish culture has much to offer the world, and the question of the future is, whether Jewish thinkers and leaders will endeavor to suppress such factors in the culture of their people as render assignation difficult if not impossible, or whether Jewish leaders will attempt to intensify these differences, in order to prevent assimilation and preserve Israel as the Chosen People.

And Hainan said unto King Ahasuerus, There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the people in all the provinces of thy kingdom; and their laws are diverse from all people; neither keep they the king’s law.— ESTHER, III, 8.

I

THE revival of anti-Semitism in Europe since the close of the war, and its curious repercussion even in the United States, are phenomena that can no longer be ignored. The Jews, we are warned, are a secret organization, with branches in every land, whose aim is nothing less than world-domination. To attain their bold ends, they plan, on the one hand, to undermine society by sapping its foundations with revolutionary and anti-religious propaganda, and on the other, to crush it from above by attaining control of the great banking and industrial system on which the material power of present-day civilization immediately reposes. Taking advantage of the economic and political confusion following five years of war, they are even now, it is asserted, engaged in realizing this ambitious programme, at which, indeed, they have been quietly working for a century or more. As evidence of this alarming thesis, it is pointed out that there are already Jews among the leading financiers in every country; that there are Jews among the leading international revolutionaries; and, finally, that all Jews have a tendency to solidarity.

Of course, this ingenious fantasy will not bear analysis. The Jewish agitation is as much a menace to the Jewish capitalist as to the Gentile; the Jewish employer is no less a burden of authority upon Jewish workmen than upon Christians; and from a vague feeling of solidarity to the contrivance of a vast and definite conspiracy is a far cry. Moreover, it is just at the two extremes of wealth and poverty that the racial apostasy of the emancipated Jew is most common.

But the fact that his theories fall to pieces under scrutiny is of no consequence to the true anti-Semite.

In Germany, the anti-Jewish agitation is so vigorous that the Inter-Allied High Commission in the Rhineland recently felt obliged to order the troops of occupation to seize all copies discovered of a book called From the Reign of the Hohenzollerns to the Reign of the Jews.

In England, a writer in the sober Blackwood’s protests that, if the Jews were to be given no part, either open or surreptitious, in the imperial government, the danger of revolution would be greatly diminished. Saint-Loe Strachey, writing in the Spectator, accuses the English Jews of being Jews first and English afterward. ‘Of all the governments which have accepted the power in Great Britain,’ declared Sir Lionel Rothschild, in a recent speech, ‘none has shown so much sympathy for the projects and ideals of the Jews as the present government.’ And the declaration is taken by Lloyd George’s enemies to mean that Lloyd George is ‘pro-Jewish.’ Has he not appointed Sir Herbert Samuel to rule over Palestine? Did he not send Sir Stuart Samuel to ‘investigate’ the alleged pogroms in Poland? Is not Sir Eric Drummond, General Secretary of the League of Nations, Hebraic by origin? Are not Lord Reading and Lord Montagu, respectively Viceroy of India and Secretary of State for India, both of Jewish descent? And when it comes to that, was it not Mayer Amschel, under the better known name of Rothschild, who ‘ founded the dynasty of the secret emperors of Israel’? The Poles, it appears, are so afraid of the power of the English Jews, that they have actually appointed a Polish Jew, Professor Szimon Askenazy, as Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. And in their effort to prove that even the British labor movement is under Jewish control, the British anti-Semites, nothing daunted, assert that Smillie is merely a tool of the Jew, Emanuel Shinwell, who promoted the strikes in the Clyde shipyards during the war; that Thomas is a catspaw of the Jew, Abraham; that Williams is actually married to a Jewess, and that all three are closely associated with the ‘Lansbury-Fels-Zangwill group.’

In France, the old anti-Dreyfusards of the Action Française have lately redoubled their ‘exposures’ of the ‘ Jewish peril.’ ‘Throughout Europe,’ writes Charles Maurras, ‘ the Jew is the traveling-man of the revolution.’ Yiddish is ‘the Esperanto of revolutionists.’ All Jews, we are assured, are anti-French and pro-German; they are Freemasons, and enemies of Roman Catholicism. Are not ninety-five per cent of the Soviet chieftains Jews? Is not Viennese Socialism Jewish and pro-German? Are not the Jews in Upper Silesia working exclusively for Germany? It was a telegram from the Jewish financiers of America, dated May 29, 1919, and signed by that ‘high priest of Israel,’ Jacob Schiff (born at Frankfort), which steeled Wilson to force concessions from France on five vital points, — the Saar Basin, Upper Silesia, Dantzig, Fiume, and reparations, — or, at least, so Maurras writes. This same Schiff, points out Roger Lambelin, founded the New York Jewish Theological Seminary, and the Semitic Museum at Harvard; and while he, in the interests of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., fostered proGerman sentiment during the war, his partner Otto Kahn (born at Mannheim) fostered pro-Ally sentiment; thus an iron was kept hot in both fires. As for ‘the pro-Jew, Woodrow Wilson,’ pursues Lambelin, instead of flaying the massacres instigated by Bela Kun, the threatened Russian invasion of Poland, and the eviction of innocent Moslems in Palestine, he contented himself, at the time of the Peace Conference, with writing a letter of sympathy for the Eastern European Jews to Rabbi Stephen Wise.

In Eastern Europe, the sentiment of anti-Semitism is not, as in Western Europe, confined chiefly to conservatives and chauvinists, but impregnates even the masses. The Magyar peasants are bitter against the town-dwelling ’communist ’ Jews; and in spite of all the Budapest police can do, bands of infuriated Magyars make a grim pastime of beating an occasional son of Israel whom they catch in the street after nightfall. In Poland, the Ukraine, and, to a less extent, in Roumania, the mediæval legend of the ritual murder, for which the Jews are supposed to take the blood of a Christian babe at each Passover, has been revived; and all Eastern European Jews are suspected, by their Christian neighbors, of Communism. The Ukrainian Nationalist bands have apparently been guilty of serious and repeated pogroms. The Poles are unanimous in their ardent and patriotic hostility to the four or five million Jews included within their frontiers. All Jews, they firmly believe, are born Bolsheviki. In the Polish army, ghastly stories of Jew-Bolshevist atrocities are current. I was shown a photograph, found in Kief by the Poles, of a large room, on the floor of which lay the naked and mutilated bodies of some fifty Russians, who had been executed, it was said, by the Red troops, after the mutilations had been perpetrated, with ceremonial orgies, ’by a fanatical sect of young Jewesses’!

II

I repeat this welter of fantasy, stray fact, and superstition to indicate that anti-Semitism has, indeed, once more become a true movement of opinion, which, far from succumbing at the scoff of incredulity, is making converts almost daily, and demands from the student of social phenomena that careful analysis which alone can discover both its cause and its cure.

For there is a cause. There is really a Jewish problem, and it is as old as the dispersion of the Jews. Anti-Semitism is even older than the dispersion. It is as old as the captivities. Wherever the Jews have lived among other peoples, either perforce or of their own will, and whether before or after the Christian era, it has flourished. One may therefore well conclude, with that sincere and able Jewish scholar, Bernard Lazare, that an opinion of such enduring prevalence ‘could not be the result of fancy and of a perpetual caprice,’ but that ' there must be profound and serious reasons both for its beginning and its persistence.’ The truth is that the anti-Semitism of Berlin and Paris is of one piece with the anti-Semitism of Antioch and Alexandria; the angry alarm of Henry Ford concords strangely with the grim fury of the Hetman Chmielnicki; and if the outward form assumed by popular sentiment against the Jews varies somewhat in accordance with differences of time and place, in its one essential cause it remains ever the same.

This cause is neither religious, as is often averred, nor economic, as many believe; it is political. It is based on the observation that the Jews, through innumerable transmutations of time and place, not only have kept their identity as a people, but have opposed a vigorous, if passive, resistance to most attempts at assimilation. The Jew, in short, is regarded as a foreigner, whose ‘ laws are diverse from all people ’; and as such, he is considered to be an enemy to the state.

The underlying reason for Jewish exclusiveness is, perhaps, the law of Moses. The sole object of life, according to the teachings of the rabbis, is the knowledge and the practice of the law, for ‘without the law, without Israel to practise it, the world would not be. God would resolve it into chaos. And the world will know happiness only when it submits to the universal empire of the law, that is to say, to the empire of the Jews. In consequence, the Jewish people is the people chosen by God as the depository of his will and his desires.’ This strong and narrow spirit, instead of diminishing with the lapse of time, seemed only to increase; until, with the victory of the rabbis over the more liberal Jewish schismatists, in the fourteenth century, the doctors of the synagogue, says Bernard Lazare, ‘had reached their end. They had cut off Israel from the community of peoples; they had made of it a being fierce and solitary, rebellious to all law, hostile to all fraternity, closed to all beautiful, noble or generous ideas; they had made of it a nation small and miserable, soured by isolation, stupefied by a narrow education, demoralized and corrupted by an unjustifiable pride.'

It is well to remember that, although the Jews of Western Europe and America have at present pretty well freed themselves from these heavy intellectual and spiritual shackles, the Jews of Eastern Europe still live, for the most part, in strict accordance with the letter of the Thorah and the Talmud.

The law of Moses being not only theological and moral, but agrarian, civil, and hygienic as well, no sooner did the Jews begin to live abroad than it became necessary for them, if they would avoid contamination, to draw together in intimate communities, and to beg from the authorities, in the name of their religion, certain exceptions and privileges, just as they are demanding them to-day, under the rubric of ‘minority rights,’ in Poland and Roumania. Thus, in Rome they could not be haled into court on a Saturday; in Alexandria they were not subject to the common municipal regulations, but had their own senate, courts, and mayors.

Antiquity was tolerant; but not so the Middle Ages. There came a time when, with the slow dissolution of feudalism, the various peoples of Europe, under the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, began to cohere into nationalities. All over Europe the question of nationality was identified with the question of religion, as it still is in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. If you did not belong to the Church, you were necessarily an enemy of the State. Observing among them a people who dressed, spoke, and behaved differently from themselves, who claimed privileges and exemptions, and desired to live apart, the followers of the Church vindictively decreed that the Jews henceforth should be obliged to dress differently and to live apart; and instead of having privileges granted to them, they were placed under a régime of special restrictions. The Ghetto, which the Jews had formed of their own free will, was now imposed on them by force. From the eleventh to the sixteenth century, the Jews, like all heretical sects, were persecuted, tortured, burned, killed, expelled; and in their bitter misery, drawing together more closely than ever, they gradually forged that profound sense of solidarity which is still, perhaps, their greatest source of strength.

The Protestants of the Reformation, after trying vainly to convert the Jews, turned angrily against them, ' The Jews are brutes,’ cried Luther, in a passion. ‘Their synagogues are pig-styes; they must be burned, for Moses would do so if he came back to the world. They drag the divine word in the mud; they live by rapine and evil, they are wicked beasts who ought to be driven out like mad dogs.’

But the religious wars had now fairly begun, and in the heat of the struggle between Catholic and Protestant, the Jews, greatly to their good, were well-nigh forgotten. For them, the worst was over. In the seventeenth century, though a number of onerous restrictions were put back into effect by the Church, the return of the Jews within the Christian faith, so long desired, was confidently, though vainly, expected.

The eighteenth century, like antiquity, was tolerant. In Holland and England, no less than in Turkey itself, the Jews were happy and prosperous. In 1791, the French Constituent Assembly voted full rights of citizenship to the Jews. It was the first act of the emancipation, which was now to follow rapidly in Central as well as in Western Europe. Napoleon, at the head of his armies, freed the Jews of Italy and Germany. The Jewish cult was written into the French budget in 1830. The emancipation was completed in Austria, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Greece by the Revolution of 1848; it was completed in England in 1860, and in Hungary in 1867. The last Western European Ghetto was abolished in 1870, with the fall of the Pope’s temporal power.

III

But though many Western European Jews have been more or less assimilated during the last hundred years, there are still many others who, though emancipated so far as external restrictions are concerned, have not desired, or have been unable, to shake off the clannishness, the peculiar mentality, inbred by twenty or thirty centuries of almost unbroken tradition; they may not go to synagogue, or even to the reformed tabernacle, but they would be repelled at the idea of marrying outside the race, and they preserve a special and seemingly ineradicable tenderness for their fellow Israelites, of no matter what social stratum, or what geographical subdivision. Their inner emancipation, their emancipation from the history and customs of Israel, is still to be effected. There can be no true assimilation so long as there is not free intermarriage; and until there is evidence of a rapidly increasing assimilation, the Jewish question, with its attendant fervor of anti-Semitism, will continue to occupy men’s minds.

A sharp distinction must be drawn at the present time between this question as it presents itself in Western Europe and the United States, where the Jews are externally emancipated, and as it presents itself in Eastern Europe, where the Jews still live mediævally to themselves, and where there is a tendency on the part of the prevailing governments to restrict them in various ways. The cleavage is somewhat blurred by the fact that hordes of Eastern European Jews are still pouring annually into Western Europe; nevertheless, generally speaking, the distinction can be maintained. As the arguments which are brought against the Jews in the East include and elaborate those adduced in the West, it wall simplify matters if the latter be considered first.

Of the serious arguments of Western anti-Semitism, two are political, and one — the least important, but perhaps the commonest — is economic. Briefly stated, the economic argument is that the Jew is congenitally a non-producer, a parasite, living only in the cities, trading and lending money, swelling the army of profit-devouring middlemen. Historically, this contention cannot be sustained. The tribesmen of Israel were, originally, not traders, but farmers and shepherds. As speculators and traders, they were far surpassed in antiquity, first by the Phœnicians and Carthaginians, and later by the Greeks and Romans. It was only after the dispersion that their mercantile propensities began to develop. The sudden cessation of all their former activities as husbandmen was due in the beginning to their religion, which, on the one hand, forced them to gather in communities so as to be able to escape the contamination of foreign ways and peoples, and, on the other, taught them that they must keep themselves pure for the eventual return to Jerusalem, and that in ploughing any soil save that of Palestine, a Jew would defile himself. All exiled Jews were thus constrained to become city-dwellers, and city-dwellers or town-dwellers they have since remained, until they have indeed, at last, become almost total strangers to the life of the fields.

As city-dwellers, they were naturally forced into commerce, in order to live. At a time when other peoples were less well organized, the Jewish communities established in every considerable town of the Mediterranean countries, and in constant communication and sympathy, provided an unparalleled system of commercial agencies to the Jewish traders, who, in consequence, soon began to prosper greatly. It was only in the Middle Ages that the Jews began to specialize in money-lending and the gold traffic.¹ This, again, was forced upon them rather than of their own seeking; but as in periods of recurrent wars, bad crops, and famine the need for loans and credit was very great, it was generally agreed that the necessary banking business should be turned over to the Jews. Not infrequently, the Jewish money-lender was merely the agent of some Christian merchant or noble, who did not dare lend money in person, for fear of excommunication. At the same time, the growing power of the guilds, each with its patron saint, began, on religious grounds, to force the exclusion of the Jews from most of the principal branches of trade and commerce. The second-hand trade and the banking business were about all that remained. The latter, moreover, was congenial to the Jews; for in that day of persecution and expulsion they were very glad to be able to keep their wealth in a compact, easily hidden, and easily transportable form.

If, therefore, in modern times, the Jews appear to be a people of town-dwellers, practising, at the bottom of the social scale, peddling, petty-retailing, pawn brokerage, the poorer trades, and, at the top of the scale, banking and corporate commerce, the cause, evidently, is less innate than historic. Even the remarkable success of individual Jews in modern finance can perhaps be attributed less to any special racial litness than to a business tradition, to a freedom from local prejudice, and to the spirit of co-operation clearly visible between scattered Jewish individuals and communities — a co-operation which other peoples have not as yet been able to attain in anything like the same degree. I myself am inclined to subordinate economic anti-Semitism to political anti-Semitism; for, if the latter were unsustained, the former, I feel sure, would soon cease to exist.

The political argument against the Jews is that they are an ’international nation,’ more attached to the Jewish cause, in whatever part of the world, than to the ideals and interests of the country in which they live, and from which they claim the privileges of protection without according in return their political allegiance. To this is now frequently added, as a corollary, that the Jew is a ‘born revolutionist.’ We are here, as I have already indicated, at the very heart of the Jewish question; for there is no state, there is no people, so good-natured and so confident of its own strength, that it will unprotestingly tolerate in its midst a body persistently and willfully foreign, especially when this body at the same time aspires to take a leading part in the national economic or political life. That the Jews, after their dispersion, were originally such a tenaciously foreign body, in every community where they settled, is beyond dispute. That they remained so, partly of their own will, partly under compulsion, up to the time of the emancipation, fifty or a hundred years ago, is equally incontestable. The point that remains to be determined is, to what extent, since the emancipation, a true assimilation of the Jews has been effected in the United States and in the various countries of Western Europe. To this point I shall have occasion to return presently. Meanwhile, the corollary, that the Jew is a ‘born revolutionist,’ is worthy of careful consideration.

Abstractly, there is certainly something in this assertion — something profound, which reaches to the very centre of the ancient Hebraic religious conception. The sturdy monotheism of Israel, teaching that man shall obey Jehovah alone, carries by implication the idea that all merely human authority is unjustified and therefore negligible. This independence of conscience and reason is probably developed further in Judaism than in any other religion, for it is considered as binding even on Jehovah himself. The Talmud relates how, in a dispute between rabbis over a point of doctrine, the voice of Jehovah intervened from the void; but no sooner was this divine voice heard to pronounce in favor of Rabbi Eliezir, than Rabbi Josua protested, saying: ‘It is not mysterious voices, it is the majority of the sages, who should henceforth decide questions of doctrine. Reason is no longer hidden away in heaven, the Law is no longer in heaven; it has been given to the earth, and it is for human reason to understand and explain it.'

Moreover, implicit in Judaism, is a sentiment, quite different from the resignation of Christianity and of Mohammedanism, that the joy and satisfaction which are the birthright of every man who keeps the Law should be forthcoming, not in some future existence, but here on earth. Even after they have forsworn their religion completely, a tendency has been remarked among the Jews to cling to the idea, not only that all men are entitled to be happy even in this life, but that all men are equal before God, and that none can be held responsible save to his own mind and conscience. A poor man, imbued with this spirit, and looking about him upon the present world, is inevitably exposed to the temptation of becoming a malcontent, or even an agitator. More important, however, than this vague traditional predilection for revolutionary doctrines is the fact that the Jewish people, for more than twenty centuries, has been cosmopolitan, bound to no country and to no lasting patriotism save that of Israel. It is no more than natural that the emancipation should have left a large number of them internationalists, in the literal sense of the word. If it were not for this cosmopolitan character of the people as a whole, the revolutionary proclivities of a few individuals would perhaps have passed almost unnoticed. Once more, we are brought face to face with the conclusion that the Jewish problem is, above all, a problem of assimilation.

The belief that the Jews are involved in a definite conspiracy for world-revolution arose at the time of the French Revolution, simultaneously with the emancipation of the French Jews by the Constituent Assembly. An intimate relation between the Kabbala and Freemasonry had long been suspected; and now the Catholic Royalists were able to remark that not a few Jews seemed to be active members of the various lodges— Masons, Illuminists, Rosicrucians, Martinists—in whose secret conclaves the revolution was supposed to have been planned. The influence of Jewish agitators was again remarked in the uprisings of 1830 and 1848.

But the great reproach that European conservatives hold against the sons of Israel is that Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle, the founders of modern Socialism, were both of Jewish origin. ‘This descendant of a line of rabbis and doctors,’ writes Lazare, of Marx, ‘inherited all the force of logic of his ancestors; he was a clear-headed and lucid Talmudist . . . a Talmudist who went in for sociology, and who applied his native qualities of exegesis to a critique of political economy. He was animated by the old Hebraic materialism, which dreamed perpetually of an earthly paradise ... he was also a rebel, an agitator, a bitter polemist, and he got his gift of sarcasm and invective from the same Jewish sources as Heine.’

The famous Manifesto of 1847 was drawn up jointly by Marx and Engels. The meeting of 1864, which founded the Internationale, was inspired by Marx; and in the general council, Karl Marx was secretary for Germany and Russia, and James Cohen was secretary for Denmark.

The work of Jewish agitators in the Paris Commune was the subject of much comment. Among the leaders of modern Socialism were not only Marx and Lassalle in Germany, but the Jews Adler and Libermann in Austria, and Dobrojanu Gherea in Roumania; while the role of the Russian Jews in the recent Russian Revolution is known to everyone. All these facts have tended to keep alive the old yarn of a Jewish ' world-conspiracy.'

IV

Exact statistics are, of course, unavailable; but there are supposed to be in the world, at the present time, from twelve to fourteen million Jews, of whom about a fourth are in the United States, a fourth scattered in various countries, east, west, north, and south, while the remaining half are concentrated in Eastern Europe, or, more specifically, in Poland, Bessarabia, and the Ukraine. Poland alone is believed to have four or five million Jews, and thus becomes by far the greatest Jewish state of the day. It is precisely in Eastern Europe, moreover, that the Jewish nationality is to be observed in its purest form, for here there is scarcely so much as the beginning of even a political assimilation; though indigenous for centuries, the children of Israel still form a large and entirely distinct foreign minority. The fact that, in Eastern Europe, religion and nationality — as in mediæval times throughout the whole of Europe — are still regarded as practically inseparable, is not a sufficient explanation of this phenomenon. The restrictive measures of the prevailing governments have merely served to accentuate a distinction ardently desired by the Jews themselves, whose devotion to both the civil and religious aspects of the Jewish Law is here as fervent as it is complete. The net result is that the typical Polish Jew, like the Lithuanian, Bessarabian, and Ukrainian Jew, is a being absolutely apart from his Christian neighbors. The reader should peruse, in this connection, the remarkably intimate and sympathetic studies of Jewish life recently published in Paris by Jean and Jerome Tharaud, which will unveil to his occidental vision a world undreamed of. When to these vivid distinctions are added the economic and racial differences, which have already been described in discussing the more or less assimilated Western European Jews, it is difficult to find a single remaining trait wherein the Eastern Jews may be said to resemble the Christian Pole, Lithuanian, Russian, or Roumanian. Those who have not seen this community cleavage for themselves can scarcely imagine how thorough it is, or what profound antipathy it instinctively engenders.

V

So much having been said, a specific explanation of the present revival of anti-Semitism is almost superfluous. In Russia the majority of Jews, for obvious reasons, have rallied to the Soviet government, thus exciting against themselves the always latent hatred of the anti-Bolshevist parties. The Jews of Poland and Roumania, being regarded, not altogether without reason, as foreigners inclining to sympathize with the enemy (Soviet Russia), are subjected to all the consequences that a similar situation provoked in America, during the war, between Americans and Germans. As for the half-assimilated Jews of Hungary, they earned the lasting enmity of the peasants and the administrative caste by flocking in far too considerable numbers to the disastrous red banner of Bela Kun, in the spring of 1919, In Czechoslovakia, the Jews are subjected to the hatred of the otherwise fairly liberal Czechs, because they are suspected of being pro-German and, in general, anti-Slav.

Coming now to the more prosperous and more completely assimilated Jews of Western Europe and America, one easily perceives that the feeling against the poor ones is an outgrowth of the fear of Bolshevism, while the feeling against the rich ones is a part of the general post-war clamor against profiteers — the feeling in both cases being greatly intensified by the popular nationalistic suspicion that the Jews are willfully resisting assimilation.

We are thus, in the end, brought squarely back again to the surmise from which we started, namely, that the Jewish question is, above all, political, and may indeed be reduced to this one inquiry: Is it, or is it not, possible to assimilate the Jews? If it is, time, and liberal measures, will suffice; if it is not, then, so long as nations continue to be nations, and to abhor the presence within themselves of indigestible foreign bodies, there is seemingly no solution.

Some anti-Semites have gone so far as to assert that, the Jews being essentially a race apart, assimilation is neither possible nor desirable. From this view, I differ completely. In the first place, the Jews are not essentially a race apart. Ethnology has long since established that there is no such thing as a ‘ pure race.’ Leaving aside the pertinent inquiry as to whether or not the twelve tribes were themselves racially pure, it is clear that, from the time of the dispersion down to about the sixteenth century, the Jews were exceedingly active in proselytizing, and made many converts in Europe and the Near East. There are at present white Jews in India, black Jews in Cochin-China, and yellow Jews in China proper, to say nothing of the two great disparate branches of the European Jewish family, — the Sephardic and the Ashkenazic, — the one speaking Spanish, the other Yiddish; the one black-haired, the other predominantly sandy; the one said to be dolichocephalic, the other brachycephalic. And if, on the one hand, the modern Jew is indubitably of conglomerate origin, on the other, he has sown his blood profoundly through other races, notably in Spain, where the conversions of Jews to Christianity were so numerous, that there is now said to be scarcely a family free from the Jewish strain. The assimilation of the Jews by intermarriage has made noticeable progress also in France, England, Germany, America, and even Hungary.

Obviously, therefore the possibility of assimilating at least some of the Jews is beyond challenge. Indeed, there is no reason to suppose that a mixture of the so-called Aryan and Semitic races gives a result which is other than excellent in any respect. If the Jews have not heretofore been absorbed more rapidly, the causes are rather religious, social, and political than racial.

How can it reasonably be said, moreover, that this mixture is not desirable? The Jews are one of the most remarkably gifted peoples of all time. They have, it is true, the defects of their qualities, but in this they are by no means unique. The Jews are, in fact, generally speaking, sober, adaptable, industrious, and intelligent. For centuries cut off from most forms of handicraft and manual labor, they have been exercising their minds in study and trade. Their achievements in art, letters, and particularly in science and philosophy, if not preëminent, are at least notable. Why any nation should scorn to absorb an element so endowed is difficult to understand.

There is a class of Western Jews, however, who, while approving the theory of assimilation in the abstract, give to the word a meaning quite different from that generally accepted. In the minds of these Jews, it would be a calamity if Israel, by intermarrying with other nationalities, should lose its distinctive character. They assert, therefore, that it is entirely possible for the Jews to remain Jews in every sense of the word, and at the same time become good Germans or Britons, or Frenchmen, or Americans, as the case may be. Roman Catholics, they argue, are forbidden to intermarry with Protestants; why must the Jews be expected to intermarry with peoples of other religions?

But there is in this otherwise fair-seeming comparison a slight misconception. If Israel were merely a religion, then, when a Jew ceased to observe the forms of this religion, he would cease to be a Jew. But Israel is not merely a religion, but a nationality as well. The problem of assimilation is not a religious but a political problem; and to shift it arbitrarily to the religious ground is to distort it from its true relations. If the reply be made that the orthodox Jews are absolutely forbidden to marry outside of Israel, I would rejoin merely that this fails to explain why so many unorthodox Jews also hold in horror the idea of marrying Gentiles.

In the present day of intense nationalism, when the forces of interior cohesion are engaged in a silent and bitter struggle with the forces of international dissolution, the Jews, who by their history have become a cosmopolitan race in everything except their devotion to Israel, must make a choice. They cannot give political allegiance to two banners, even though this double allegiance be defended in the name of religion. The official anti-Semitism of some Eastern European countries of course makes assimilation impossible; but in Western states, where the Jews enjoy the same privileges with everyone else, they must expect to give in return the same undivided loyalty.

This is particularly true in America, who is now being asked to accord her hospitality to thousands upon thousands of Israelites, whose emigration from Eastern Europe is being encouraged by every possible means. Overburdened already with German-Americans whose hearts are in Germany, with Irish-Americans whose hearts are in Ireland, and with numerous other varieties of half-digested foreigners, she would like to be able to count at least on the full allegiance of her Jewish citizens, whose record in the war was excellent, and to feel that, however much they may be drawn by a fellow sentiment with distant coreligionists, their hearts, nevertheless, have been definitely surrendered to the land of their election, even to the point — when no imperious religious reasons intervene — of accepting the idea of marriage with non-Jewish fellow citizens.

I myself have great faith in the loyalty of the vast majority of American Jews. To those few who sincerely scruple to give to America, or to any other Gentile state, their single allegiance, a more generous welcome would doubtless be extended in the ports of Palestine, under the flag of Israel itself, than in the gateways of the war-worn Western world.

‘EQUALITY before the law’ has been, and still is, one of the favorite battle-cries of the democracy. ‘Class legislation’ and ‘special privilege’ have been equally popular as objects of attack. But there has not been a corresponding unity of interpretation of these phrases — of understanding as to what they are to mean in terms of specific legislation and social organization.

We condemn class legislation and special privilege as severely as did our predecessors. Modern industrial and social development, however, has forced us to a new conception of what belongs under these categories. We insist as strongly as they that. men should be equal, before the law, in opportunity, and in all their relations with their fellows. But we are finding that a new technique, a new kind of legislation, and a new attitude on the part of’ the government are necessary, if that. equality is to be real and not merely theoretical.

I

In the care-free days of rampant individualism and the laissez-faire theory in industry, the government, was supposed to keep its hands off the organization and conduct of industry. Labor laws, factory laws, anti-trust laws — all such were held to be violations of the fundamental right of individuals to pursue life, liberty, and happiness in equality before the law. If some were more successful than others in securing financial or other rewards for their efforts, they were to be congratulated. And certainly it was no part of the task of the government to handicap men in the race for success. Yet to-day we have such laws in profusion: laws that put a special handicap on some individuals, or give special advantages to others. And our Supreme Court has found it possible to approve, as constitutional, such measures.

If by ‘class legislation’ we mean legislation that favors or restricts some special group in the community, then many of our more important modern laws must plead guilty to this charge. Tariff laws are designed to benefit particular groups — the manufacturers. Labor laws benefit the workers. Antitrust laws put a handicap on the organizers of business. Income and profit taxes are collected from a very small portion of the whole people. Even the woman’s suffrage amendment was class legislation, since it benefited only a part of the community. Yet we find no great difficulty in approving such measures, because we feel that, while they may apply in practice to special groups, they benefit the community as a whole. And we avoid a technical infringement of the principle of equality by stating the special privileges, or the special prohibitions, in terms of ways of acting rather than of persons, even though we are well aware that in practice certain specific persons, or groups of persons, will be directly affected.

It is little more than soothing self-delusion to say that in this respect there is any essential difference between the stipulation in the Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914, which exempted labor organizations from the prohibitions of the Sherman Act, and the provisions of the old English law, by which the nobility could plead exemption from certain penalties of the law for the common people. Nor is there, from this point of view, any essential difference between a tariff to ‘protect’ an ‘infant industry’ and the feudal law that gave the king administration of the estates of minor heirs. In each case special groups are given special advantages.

The difference, of course, is in the social results. We approve the modern regulations in each case, — it we do approve them, — and condemn the ancient, because, as I have suggested, we think the community as a whole is benefited, or injured, as the case may be. But we need to keep clearly in mind, in discussing these matters of special privilege and equality before the law, that most of the ‘progressive’ measures on which we are inclined to pride ourselves are in reality class legislation; and while we may not approve much of the Socialist programme, we need to be careful about throwing stones while we have so much glass in the walls of our own house.

We condemn, for example, the seizure of socially usable property by the government of the Bolsheviki on the ground that it is class legislation. Yet we approve an excess-profits tax, — at least, the majority of us do, as represented by our lawmakers and our Supreme Court, — which is a seizure, in essentially the same way, of socially usable property. We deny the claim of a monarch that his kingdom is his private property, to do with as he may choose. Of late, like the Bolsheviki, we have begun to deny the similar claim of a manufacturer as to his factory. But wo grant the claim to private control of private property in most other cases. Yet there is no essential difference between these claims. The difference — as in the cases cited above — is not one of kind, but of degree. The question is not whether a person or a group shall be given special privileges or be favored or handicapped by class legislation; rather it is, how far the principle of favoring one group is to be carried, and of the relative size of the group favored.

In other words, we are learning that it is impossible to obtain real equality between men on an individualistic, laissez-faire basis. And in actual practice we are seeking that equality by various sorts of special legislation, which favor one group as against another. But our interpretation of the doctrine of equality has lagged behind our practice.

II

This inconsistency between the older conception of equality and much of our recent legislation has not escaped the notice of able students of politics. Nor have some of them failed to point out the growth of a tendency to stratification of the American people into classes delimited, if not actually created, by legislation which definitely grants, or does not positively deny, special privileges to special groups. This, for example, is the point of Mr. George W. Alger’s article on ‘The Menace of New Privilege,’ in a recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly.

Many see in this tendency a grave danger to American social organization as we know it, and a fundamental challenge to democracy, just because it runs counter to the older, and even now more generally accepted, interpretation of the doctrine of equality. Mr. Alger expresses this point of view most effectively in his concluding paragraph: —

‘In the final analysis, the question resolves itself into whether we desire the development in America of class-war by recognizing class-distinctions, class-rights, and class-privileges, which make, not for peace, but for inevitable conflict. The time has arrived when this great question must receive a far more thorough and consistent study by the American people, not as classes, but as citizens; not as petitioners for special privileges, which the nobles of feudalism surrendered, but as the willing participators in a system of law whose basis is equality, a system which can have no other basis than equality, if democracy is not to perish from the earth.’

But in this ‘thorough and consistent study’ it will appear, I think, that, crude and in many ways undesirable as this recent class legislation is, it is, after all, the product of a real though somewhat blind striving to re-establish that real equality before the law, and in the relations between men, which modern industrial development has destroyed. One does not need to be a ‘Red’ to realize that in actual practice there is little more than a theoretical equality before the law in America today. The accumulation of wealth in the hands of certain individuals and certain small groups has given them a power that has made almost a mockery any talk of equality between all men in any significant sphere of life. The tale of the special advantages that wealth has brought its possessors has been told too often to need repetition here. But it is exactly this disturbance of the even balance of equality by the power of accumulated capital that has led to the whole movement for social legislation of all kinds.

Labor laws, factory laws, the exemption of labor-unions from the operation of the anti-trust laws, minimum-wage legislation— all these and the multitude of other attempts to better the conditions of living of the ‘have-nots’ are fundamentally attempts to restore the balance of equality by putting the weight of legislation into the scale against the power of capital. All these measures are class legislation, for they give special advantages to one part of the whole group as opposed to some other part. But men have felt that it was necessary to give such advantages, in order to save the large majority from complete domination by a small minority — that is, in order to preserve equality.

III

There can be no serious denial that the attempt to re-establish equality by these means has had many unfortunate results, or that certain groups have insisted on special privileges for themselves at the expense of the people as a whole. But the labor organizations, the farmers, the cotton-growers, and the rest, are by no means the only ones guilty on this score. And neither can the claim be seriously advanced that the developments in the capitalistic organization of industry, which are in large measure the cause of this attempt, have been an entirely unmixed blessing. These developments, producing the necessity for large accumulations of capital to carry on industry, and the actual accumulation of capital to meet the need, together with our conception of the rights of private property, have given a disproportionate share of power to a relatively small group in the community, and so have eliminated real equality, whether before the law, or of opportunity, or in any vital sense.

But the fight for equality will go on. And, whether we like it or not, so long as the social organization and the laws permit certain men — or certain small groups — to secure and hold more than their share of actual power and opportunity, so long will the effort be continued to right the balance by organization into groups and by legislation favoring the non-privileged groups.

Whether this attempt by the larger groups, made up of the individually less powerful, to secure equality by insisting upon ‘class-rights and class-privileges’ will mean ‘class-war’ and ‘inevitable conflict’ will depend principally on the vigor of the resistance made to the attempt by those who are favored by the present inequality. Unquestionably, the problem must be faced by ‘the American people, not as classes, but as citizens.’ But there is real danger in the present situation, not primarily because the large majority of the American people are ‘petitioners for special privileges,’ but because a small minority, who possess special privileges, are reluctant to give them up.

At present the attack on the citadel of privilege is being made more or less independently by separate groups; and each group, of defenders as well as of attackers, is, naturally enough, more keenly awake to its own immediate interest — that of securing for its members full equality with the most favored individuals, or of protecting what privileges they possess — than to the interests of other groups. Hence the tendency to stratification into classes. But the fundamental cause of this stratification is not a lack of desire for equality on the part of those who are seeking advantages, but a failure to unite into a single army the different bands fighting in this cause. Men, however, are realizing that this lack of unity delays the final victory — or weakens the defense; for there is a similar lack of unity among the privileged groups. Consequently, we are hearing more and more about the necessity for presenting a united front on both sides, and are witnessing, not only in the United States, but throughout the whole world, the steady growth of the tendency toward a merging of separate classes into the two great groups of the ‘haves’ and the ‘ have-nots.’

IV

The fight for equality is not new; but the recent attempts to secure equality have been along a somewhat new line. Instead of taking the negative course of denying special privileges, as our predecessors did, we more and more are positively asserting the rights of special groups.

When men first tried actually to build a society on the principle of equality, the most pressing problem was to clear away the special privileges of certain classes. Magna Carta, for example, represented an attempt on the part of the nobles, not primarily to secure powers for themselves, but rather to take powers away from the king. Similarly, the long history of the development of democratic control, until quite recently, is a record of progressively successful efforts on the part of the representatives of the people to wrest power from the king or the aristocracy. When the rights of the people were positively asserted, it was not so much from lust for power as such, — as the rights of the kings and the aristocracy had been asserted against the people, — as from a desire to secure protection from the abuse of power in the hands of the aristocracy. Equality was to be achieved, as it were, by taking away the jewels and rich clothing from the favored few rather than by giving jewels and rich clothing to the many.

Utilitarian individualism and the laissez-faire doctrine were the natural results of this conception of how the equality of men was to be realized. To carry on the figure: business practice and social legislation generally, for a large part of the nineteenth century, were based on the assumption that everyone started out with a full suit of clothes, while, if anyone was clever enough to get another man’s coat away from him, or to find jewels to wear, that was none of society’s business. But toward the end of the century, it became obvious that a few people had virtually cornered the supply of clothes and jewels, so that in reality there no longer was even a suit for everyone, except at the pleasure of these few.

To drop the figure: with the accumulation of capital in the hands of a few, the emphasis in democratic legislation shifted. Such legislation sought less and less to take privileges from a small group and more and more to assert them for larger groups. The difference between the Sherman and the Clayton Anti-Trust acts is a case in point. The first specifically denies the right to form certain kinds of combinations — which affected, as was intended, a group numerically small but financially powerful. The latter specifically asserts the right of other groups — the laborers, the farmers, and so forth — to form combinations of a sort which, in certain respects, would otherwise be in violation of the Sherman Act.

As I have suggested, from the older point of view the exemptions in the Clayton Act are clearly contrary to the doctrine of equality before the law. Yet, as will be generally admitted, the Clayton Act gives special advantages to labor organizations for the definite purpose of helping the workers to secure real equality in their relations with their employers — an equality that had been destroyed by the power which the employers possessed through their control of capital. In reality, therefore, this act is the product of an attempt to make actual this theoretical equality, rather than to destroy a real equality.

This newer tendency, through legislation, to give special advantages in order to maintain a balance of equality has had some unfortunate results. But the solution of the problem of class-conflict will not come through returning to the older attitude, even if that were possible. A continuation of the laissez-faire individualism of the nineteenth century would have resulted in the creation of a new aristocracy based on wealth rather than on birth, — in the beginning, at least, — which, if unrestrained, would have developed all the objectionable features of feudalism. A return to this older attitude, the reincorporation into our legal and political practice of the older interpretation of equality before the law, would mean, not the saving of democracy, but its destruction.

Democracy will be saved, real equality, not only before the law, but in all men’s relations, will be secured, by making sure, through legislation or otherwise, that a balance is maintained, in spite of the weight on one side that comes through t he possession of capital. Clearly, the balance is not even now. Equally clearly, we should not overweight it on the other side. But neither should we forget that we must take active steps to achieve a balance. Negative effort toward taking away advantages from the few will no longer suffice. Such efforts cleared the ground for the growth of the present inequalities; and men will always find means to circumvent merely negative prohibitions. Our task therefore is, with due consideration for the interests and rights of all, to go forward along the positive line of giving advantages to the many, so that they may achieve a real equality with those who have secured special advantages for themselves.