a code of strictly-formulated precepts. What constitutes its essence is the sincere and strong wish to form within ourselves a powerful idea of justice and love which always rises above that formed by the clearest and most generous portions of our intelligence. One could mention a thousand examples: I will take one only,

- that which is at the centre of all our anxieties, and beside which all the rest has no importance; that which,when we thus speak of lofty and noble morality and perfect virtues, cross-examines us as culprits, and asks us, bluntly, "And when do you intend to put a stop to the injustice in which you live?"

Yes, we all who possess more than the others, we who are more or less rich, as against those who are quite poor, we live in the midst of an injustice deeper than that which arises from the abuse of brute strength, because we abuse a strength which is not even real. Our reason deplores this injustice, but explains it, excuses it, and declares it to be inevitable. It shows us that it is impossible to apply to it the swift and efficacious remedy which our equity seeks; that any too radical remedy would carry with it evils more cruel and more desperate than those which it pretended to cure; it proves to us, in short, that this injustice is organic, essential, and in conformity with all the laws of nature. Our reason is perhaps right; but what is much more deeply, much more surely right, is our ideal of justice, which proclaims that our reason is Even when it is not acting, it is well, if not for the present, at least for the future, that this ideal should have a quick sense of iniquity; and, if it no longer involves renunciations or heroic sacrifices, this is not because it is less noble or less sure than the ideal of the best religions, but because it promises no other rewards than those of duty accomplished, and because these rewards are just those which hitherto only a few heroes have understood, and which the great presentiments that hover beyond our intelligence are seeking to make us understand.

wrong.

XIX

In reality, we need so few precepts! Perhaps three or four, at the utmost five or six, which a child could give us. We must, before all, understand them; and "to understand," as we take it, is scarcely, as a rule, the beginning of the life of an ideal. If that were enough, all our intelligences and all our characters would be equal; for every man of even a very mean intelligence is apt to understand, at this first stage, all that is explained to him with sufficient clearness. There are as many manners and as many stages in the manners of understanding a truth as there are minds that think that they understand it. If I prove, for instance, to an intelligent vain man how childish is his vanity, to an egoist capable of comprehension how unreasonable and hateful is his egoism, they will readily agree, they will even amplify what I have said. There is, therefore, no doubt that they have understood; but it is very nearly certain that they will continue to act as though not so much as the extremity of one of the truths which they have just admitted had grazed their brain. Whereas, in another man, these truths, covered with the same words, will one evening suddenly enter and penetrate, through his thoughts, to the very bottom of his heart, upsetting his existence, displacing every axis, every lever, every joy, every sorrow, every object of his activity. He has understood the sense of the word "to understand;" for we cannot flatter ourselves that we have understood a truth until it is impossible for us not to shape our life in accordance with it.

XX

To return to and sum up the central idea of all of this, let us recognize that it is necessary to maintain the equilibrium between what we have called good sense and the other faculties and sentiments of our life. Contrary to what we used to do formerly, we are nowadays too much inclined to shatter this equilibrium in

favor of good sense. Certainly, good sense has the right to control more strictly than ever all that other forces bring to it, all that goes beyond the practical conclusions of its reasoning; but it cannot prevent them from acting until it has acquired the certainty that they are deceiving it; and it owes to itself, to the respect of its own laws, the duty of being more and more circumspect in asserting that certainty. Now, if it can have acquired the conviction that those forces have committed a mistake in ascribing to a will, to divine and precise injunctions, the majority of the phenomena manifested within themselves; if it has the duty to redress the accessory errors that proceed from this central error, by eliminating, for instance, from our moral ideal a host of sterile and dangerous virtues, it could not deny that the same phenomena subsist, whether they come from a superior instinct, from the life of the species, infinitely more powerful within us than the life of the individual, or from any other unintelligible source. In any case, it could not treat them as illusions, for, at that rate, we might ask ourselves whether that supreme judge, outflanked and contradicted on every side by the genius of nature and the inconceivable laws of the universe, is not more illusive than the illusions which it aspires to destroy.

XXI

For all that touches upon our moral life we still have the choice of our illusions: good sense itself, that is to say, the scientific spirit, is obliged to admit as much. Wherefore, taking one illusion with another, let us welcome those from above rather than those from below. The former, after all, have made us reach the point at which we are; and, when we look back upon our starting-point, the dreadful cave of prehistoric man, we owe them a certain gratitude. The latter illusions, those of the inferior regions, that is to say, of good sense, have given proofs of their capacity hitherto only when accompanied and supported by the former.

Al

They have not yet walked alone. They are taking their first steps in the dark. They are leading us, they say, to a regular, assured, measured, exactly weighed state of well-being, to the conquest of matter. Be it so they have charge of this kind of happiness. But let them not pretend that, in order to attain it, it is necessary to fling into the sea, as a dangerous load, all that hitherto formed the heroic, cloud-topped, indefatigable, venturesome energy of our conscience. Leave us a few fancy virtues. Allow a little space for our fraternal sentiments. It is very possible that these virtues and these sentiments, which are not strictly indispensable to the just man of to-day, are the roots of all that will blossom when man shall have accomplished the hardest stage of "the struggle for life." Also, we must keep a few sumptuary virtues in reserve, in order to replace those which we abandon as useless; for our conscience has need of exercise and nourishment. ready we have thrown off a number of constraints which were assuredly hurtful, but which at least kept up the activity of our inner life. We are no longer chaste, since we have recognized that the work of the flesh, cursed for twenty centuries, is natural and lawful. We no longer go out in search of resignation, of mortification, of sacrifice; we are no longer lowly in heart or poor in spirit. All this is very lawful, seeing that these virtues depended on a religion which is retiring; but it is not well that their place should remain empty. Our ideal no longer asks to create saints, virgins, martyrs; but even though it take another road, the spiritual road that animated the latter must remain intact, and is still necessary to the man who wishes to go farther than simple justice. It is beyond that simple justice that the morality begins of those who hope in the future. It is in this perhaps fairy-like, but not chimerical, part of our conscience that we must acclimatize ourselves and take pleasure. It is still reasonable to persuade ourselves that in so doing we are not dupes.

XXII

The good-will of men is admirable. They are ready to renounce all the rights which they thought specific, to abandon all their dreams and all their hopes of happiness, even as many of them have already abandoned, without despairing, all their hopes beyond the tomb. They are resigned beforehand to see their generations succeeding one another without an object, a mission, an horizon, a future, if such be the certain will of life. The energy and the pride of our conscience will manifest themselves for a last time in this acceptation and this adhesion. But, before reaching this stage, before abdicating so gloomily, it is right that we should ask for proofs; and, hitherto, these seem to turn against those who bring them. In any

case, nothing is decided. We are still in suspense. Those who assure us that the old moral ideal must disappear because the religions are disappearing are strangely mistaken. It was not the religions that formed this ideal, but the ideal that gave birth to the religions. Now that these last have weakened or disappeared, their sources survive and seek another channel. When all is said, with the exception of certain factitious and parasitic virtues which we naturally abandon at the turn of the majority of religions, there is nothing as yet to be changed in our old Aryan ideal of justice, conscientiousness, courage, kindness, and honor. We have only to draw nearer to it, to clasp it more closely, to realize it more effectively; and, before going beyond it, we have still a long and noble road to travel beneath the stars.

"VEGETABLES, indeed! American, American! Such onions, such romaine, such carrots, huge, wretched, American! Potatoes, always potatoes! And other sweet yellow potatoes. Yet where is the Stecksalat, the cress, the endive, the Blätterkohl, the Kohl-rabi? How can one eat a salad? Without leeks, where is broth to come from? Jan, you grow nothing fit to eat. A year and a half, now, I have starved in America."

Jan Goroby smiled, and hung his mine coat on its nail behind the stove with his usual composure. The rapid flow of Polish and German was Ketta's habitual style of conversation, and scarcely more vehement than usual.

"But there are tomatoes," he observed. "And next year I will try the Eier Pflanzen. I see there is much sale of those. And soon there will be melons, too."

VOL. 97-NO. 1

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"Ah, ah," cried Ketta fretfully. "Some people are stupid. It is the mind, the mind does it. Some people might live in Vienna a thousand years, and still have nothing but a silly soft heart to show for it." She tossed the baby abruptly to the other shoulder. The child was weary with the long heat of an August day, and cried peevishly.

"Your uncle is quick and cunning, too. So is the aunt. I saw it while we were on the ship. Vienna had made them so, and they do very well in New York. But it is

the mind, too; there is mind in your family, Ketta."

"I wish I lived in Vienna." The girl's black brows drew together, and the sullen expression grew upon her pretty face. "Hear the baby cry. All day long he snarls, snarls, like a dog, listen! No wonder. He hates America, like his mother. My aunt and uncle were fools to give up the little restaurant; plenty of money was to be made in Vienna; but no! So I was a fool, too, and I came, and I married you, Jan, my clodhopper. Why I did it I cannot remember, - - I think you and my uncle must have persuaded me because none of the others on the ship could talk Polish, and because he saw your purse full of money. Perhaps I thought you would get money and we could go away again to Vienna. But however that was, we come away to the coal mines, and there is nothing but coal and dirt and stupid clodhoppers and selling melons to the Americans! No beautiful city, no pleasure; always the baby cries and cries, because he was not born in Vienna. Dirt and work and dreariness, Jan, I hate your America! It is time to go back."

Slowly, as he did everything, Jan lifted his bullet head from the tin basin in which he had been washing his face. Tufts of suds were in his hair, lines of sooty grime lay still about his eyes and nostrils, but his wet face smiled.

"No," said he slowly, in English. "Not go back. Me American. Stay American. Good place, God damn!" He returned to the basin.

Ketta stamped her foot as she sat. Jan's English, of which he was very proud, had several times gained him the victory in a conjugal difference such as this one. Slow of speech as he was, in Polish and in German she could outwit him and out-talk him; at times she even exulted over him in the rapid and irregular French which she had learned during her three years in the little restaurant of her beloved city. (This last weapon, however, had neither point nor edge, be

cause peasant-bred Jan understood not one word of all she said.) His English, on the contrary, was perfectly intelligible to her. A year and a half in the new country had given her quick mind and quick ear some knowledge of the language, shut herself off from it as she might; but not one word would she learn to speak. Listen she must, therefore, and answer she could not, when Jan spoke in the barbarous new tongue.

"The talk of a fool," she cried contemptuously, speaking Polish. The head of the family chuckled, and replied in the same language,

"You do not understand. At home I work and earn money, - and it goes to the Austrians. I work for my son, and he grows, and when he is grown, he is for the Austrians, too. Then he works, and makes their roads, and marches in their army, and hoes their beets, and grows their fruit, and sweats in their mines, and pays their taxes, and his sons are for the Austrians, in their turn. Whatever the debt was in the beginning, it cannot be paid. There is no end to the paying: the Austrians will never say, 'Enough.' So the wiser men just run away from the debt altogether. Here, the Austrians are nobody. I know some of them in the mine, but they are not the kind that collected taxes and did the governing. They are just peasants, and they are not so smart as the Poles."

"Oxen!" interrupted Ketta tartly. "What is the good of being a little smarter than oxen? Ah, if you had ever been in Vienna, you might not talk so big and proud, fool!"

"In America," he continued placidly, "I get good wages, so good I can rent an expensive house for my wife and my baby and me to live in. We could eat meat every day, if we chose. I load cars in the mines, but every day I watch and learn how my boss does his work. Then I belong to the Union, - yes, the Mitchell Union, - and I help say if the mine shall work or strike. One day a man says to me, 'Who shall we make governor? Who

do you want this year?' and he told me how to do it. So I went to the government, and the judge talked English to me, and I talked English to the judge, and I got a paper. And by that paper, Ketta, in a little while, about a year from All Saints' Day, it is, — I have the vote. Sometimes a man can get two dollars for the vote, and go right on to his work the same day. The next year, the vote comes back of itself, and maybe he can get two dollars again. So I help make the government in this America. And it is as if the government paid me taxes. Does Vienna do that?"

Politics were beyond Ketta's comprehension, but there was other matter in his long address that touched her nearly.

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"Yes, the Mitchell Union!" she cried. "A wonderful thing, a fine thing,for somebody. Not for Jan Goroby, though. You talk about the two dollars that you will get by a year from next All Saints' Day: will you tell me how much you will pay your union in the whole three years? You talk about taxes, but you give all that money away when you do not have to."

"Not for long," returned the husband, undismayed. "As I was saying, I can afford an expensive house, here in America. But my wife is very smart, and one day she said, 'Five rooms is too many for us three; we must take a boarder, or even two.' So we took in a Lithuish man who was a miner.”

"But he's gone. He went two weeks ago. He was lonesome, and he went to the big boarding-house. Here he talked only German, and he hated German. So it's no use to talk about him."

"Every day I watched to see how my boss worked, till I knew. One night the Lithuish miner and I sat talking, and he told me how he became a miner and how much better the pay was. I knew very well for myself how much less work there was, and how early a miner could go home and leave the laborers to finish for him. Then he and I went down to the post-office, and he took a pen and changed

my union ticket a little where it was needed. I listened to his good advice. One day I went down to a man who sells papers, and bought a writing that says Jan Goroby has worked three years and become 'ex-peri-ence min-er' and can make more money. So last week a man was hurt, and I go to the office and put my head up to their wire window and show my writing and talk. I said 'That man will dead. Give me dead man job.' They laugh inside there, and read my writing from the inspector, and read my union ticket, and talk English to me and to themselves, and soon one man said, 'Alright.' So I become miner. To-day I boss two laborers, two Dägos, who obey me in English, because they cannot understand German nor Polish. Very good; all very good. Now I am miner, and I speak English, and have plenty of friends, and I have a house and money in the bank. That is enough; that is all the union can do for me; so I shall not pay any more. I belong to the union, yes, but I do not pay; I put that money in the bank. Beside, I can work more in the field, since I come home early."

"So now you will boast, boast, boast!" cried Ketta, in a burst of nervous fury. "I tell you, I hate this country. It drives me wild. Go out to the field, quick, go!"

"I will take the Little Son." He held out his arms for the child; but as the girl sat with drooping lids, unheeding the gesture, he laid one great hand fondly on her hair. His was the huge frame of the plaindweller, toughened by centuries of labor in the fields; but the peasant mind within him came of the most restless, sanguine race in Europe. Things were going well, must go even better; and Ketta's wild words were nothing more than "the Vienna way." This girl with the bitter tongue was Ketta, his beauty, mother of the Little Son; and from that first meeting upon the pier at Bremerhaven his heart had lost the trick of being angry with her.

"Give him to me. He can lie in the