Christianity has lost its power to touch the imagination and the conscience of mankind. I am rather of that considerable company who feel that its great work remains to be done, but that it must accommodate itself to the new necessities and the changed mood of the time. People have a way of visiting markets that offer wares they need. A merchant who tries to palm off last year's goods on wideawake customers is bound to arouse their ire. Man's spiritual needs change as the years roll by. To plant my back to the wall and say that what was good enough for my grandfather is good enough for his great grandchildren "isn't the answer." The soul is a delicate instrument that cannot perform its best service under conditions that cramp and stifle it. We are walking backward with our eyes shut when we try to persuade ourselves that Eternal Truths do not march onward with the genius of the race. A truth ceases to be eternal when it loses its vitality, its power to accommodate and adjust itself to conditions that have been changing since the earth emerged from chaos.

If as to things spiritual the passing generation is handing on to the new a torch with a feeble flame, almost as grievous is the faint light of the untrimmed and smoking lamp with which I should symbolize our attitude toward politics and government. Democracy is fundamentally a product of the spirit, or at least those of us who occasionally sit in the councils of the absurd idealists are fond of imagining this to be true. But, leaving this pleasing assumption and viewing the processes of government from a purely materialistic standpoint, I shrink from attempting to impress the young men and women now approaching voting age with the idea that we, their predecessors, have displayed any zeal or gained any noteworthy victory in the elevation of political standards. We love the flag, and under proper provocation will fight for it; and certainly the young men and women of America, at a time when they

VOL. CXLIV.-No. 859.-5

were the target of a withering fire, gave their critics a pretty hard jar by their splendid response to the call of the bugle in 1917.

Just what we might have expected, of course! But I am thinking of patriotism in time of peace, of everyday politics, of the administration of the affairs of your city and mine, of the meek tolerance of incapacity and venality, of the sickly whine of the average citizen when conditions are bad in his community, that he reckons they always were so and always will be. Young men are warned to keep out of politics because it's a dirty business; a good man is bound to pay dearly for trying to make things better. I am unable to see that the generation now turning its face to the setting sun has advanced the cause of good government in any degree that can be looked upon as an inspiration to the youth of to-day to take politics seriously, to strive for the highest realizations of democracy.

The quickening of the civic spirit in youth would, I think, assist greatly in stimulating the impulse of obedience, service, and responsibility. The discussion of public questions at the familytable would at least tend to relieve the children of the constant parental ragging for their evil tendencies and the uncheering reminder that “things were not so in my day." A mild inquiry from Tommy as to just what father has done to make America a safe place for American institutions would not be bad for father, who always votes his ticket straight, one way or the other, and complains bitterly because the street he was taxed to pave a little while ago is again crying for repairs. crying for repairs. If his party is responsible for the crooked job, the inquiries of Tommy and Lucy who, in spite of their follies, do manage to get something out of the civil-government course at the high school, may shake father's confidence in the superiority of his own generation. We have witnessed many experiments with new devices within a quarter of a century, but the reports as to their efficacy are far from

satisfactory. No kind of machinery, no device, no matter how ingenious or plausible, is of the slightest value unless a preponderant number of citizens stand squarely behind it.

We complain of the breaking down of parental discipline and the general lawlessness of youth in a day when the statute books of every state are littered with laws that are not enforced, and some of them patently are not enforceable. Without expressing an opinion as to the desirability of prohibition, I shall register my belief that the constitutional amendment and the laws supported by it have wrought an even greater mischief than the evil sought to be abolished. Such laws should never have been passed until the government had perfected a machinery for their enforcement. The fact that they are not enforced has had the effect of suggesting to the young that all laws are foolish and made to be broken. Boys who were protected under the license system by ordinances against selling to minors are now free to patronize the bootlegger. I have seen more young boys intoxicated in the past year than in all the previous years of my life. I have heard more talk about drink than I ever heard before, among people of all ages. Statistics as to the increased bank savings under prohibition, the daily reports of raids by Federal officers and local police do not weigh against the fact that in every part of the country with which I am at all familiar practically every sort of alcoholic beverage is procurable by anyone who wants it.

No other laws have ever been so flagrantly violated as those passed to destroy the demon of rum. The boy who might and did in other times drink to satisfy his curiosity as to the taste and effect of beer, or who sneaked a drink from the decanter at home, now satisfies his adventurous spirit by meeting a bootlegger in an alley and buying a quart of spirits. It must be bewildering to the lad of to-day to find his father boasting of his luck in picking up just a few bottles of some rare stuff-something

usually which he didn't care greatly about before the law forbade him to have it. If it's "smart" for the father to circumvent the law, it's "smart" for the boy. If I were asked whether I should repeal the prohibitory laws and go back to the old system I should say yes, until there was some reason for believing that public sentiment had grown powerful enough to compel their enforcement. Here, I think, is one point at which the new generation may well hold a grievance against its elders, for merely giving a new and dangerous guise to an old temptation, not destroying it.

If I were writing in the farmhouse of my fathers, before a fire of logs that I had cut with my own hands and dragged over the snow, I might take up the quill and write an appeal to Youth to change its ways. But in an apartment house

that doesn't at all resemble the old homestead, with the steam radiator purring softly, I couldn't do this without the rankest hypocrisy. My typewriter would be sure to buck if I made the attempt. Rather, I feel moved to address the young generation in some such words as these:

"Don't think badly of the world because we old folks have done so precious little to make it more just, more kind, more beautiful! We're mighty sorry for our failures, but we have every confidence that you will extend and strengthen the lines that we have advanced so little and defended so feebly. We've let a lot of chances slip by; we've lacked courage, we've compromised with truth; we've realized poorly our obligations to our country and our duty to God. Clean out our accumulation of rubbish and begin all over again in your own fashion! Don't take us as an example, but as a warning. Remember all the time that we're right behind, bragging about you, calling to the tired veterans of the army to stand up and cheer for you. You're going to plant your flag on that peak yonder that we never dared attempt. 'Let's go!' be your sloganand don't you dare look back!”

I WAS reminded of Floyd Bissell in an

odd manner. We were sitting, Macclay and I, in Madame Bourgnon's café on the Champs Elysées, driven inside by the mist of the gray February afternoon. Before us, on the worn black-leather seats, there was being enacted one of those little dramas which only Paris sees.

A French cocotte with vivid red lips and rounded figure, her personality her personality fairly surcharged with passionate abandon, was alternately weeping and cajoling two men. To judge from their excited reproaches, the men were her lover and her brother. They had been away in Algiers, and the girl had taken up with a blessé-a boy with heavenly blue eyes and blond beard. She had loved him passionately, too, because he was sweet, because she could not bear to refuse him, because he had had the heart of a child...

That was enough for me. From beyond the torrent of reproaches there came to me out of the mist of seven years the image of Floyd Bissell, and with it the remembrance of that heroine of his first novel, Elaine. A coquette because she had too much heart, not too little! Easily, but deeply; passionately, but not for long; tender, but inconstant -the tragedy of the passionate heart from the beginning! Floyd Bissell's Elaine, indeed, had been Cleopatra; she had been Mary Stuart; she had been Tess. And here she was, this French girl who wept on the worn leather seat beneath the mirrors.

Curious, wasn't it, how universal a real character in literature can be?

The thought brought back things I had imagined forgotten. It brought back the name of Bissell's book, for one

thing, Tragic Conquest. Tragic Conquest had made its author a national literary figure. It had added Elaine Salmon to the world's gallery of literary portraits. No one can read that story, indeed, and not realize that she is the true tragic heroine. Her heroism, if you will, consists only in doing what she ought to have done from the beginning. But, ah, the struggle to achieve it, the endless tears of it!

For a moment Elaine lived for me again in Madame Bourgnon's café. I could even remember the words of some of the reviews, the comment on the extraordinary knowledge Bissell showed of the feminine heart, the impulse I had had to write him and tell him that he had put it over the very first time.

"You published Tragic Conquest, didn't you?" I asked Maclay.

Maclay stared with fascination at the red-lipped French girl. "Yes," he said. "I got Bissell on to New York, and into the Thespians Club, you know."

Another flash of memory came to me. "His second book was a failure, wasn't it?"

There wasn't any second book, Maclay reminded me. Three hundred thousand of the first, and never any volume to follow. "I never really understood why he lost his grip," said Maclay, "though I always thought, somehow, that it was tied up with the talk about Tragic Conquest. He began a second story, you know."

In the clatter of Madame Bourgnon's the outlines of Bissell's story recurred to me.

"I remember. He had trouble with his wife, didn't he? Wasn't that it?”

Maclay hesitated. "Why, gossip had

it," he said, "that he had suspected his wife of an affair with another man, and wrote Tragic Conquest to expose them. Remember? The character of Elaine was supposed to be his wife. He drew her straight from life and put her in the book for revenge. The character of Osborne was a man named Harkness, her lover. That was the way the talk went. But I never really knew. I could never believe it, somehow.

"They've brought a similar charge against every author, from Shakespeare to Masefield. And then Bissell impressed me as above such a thing. He was tall and a little shambling, if you recollect his pictures, with deep gray eyes, and broad shoulders-the kind of New-Englander you picture as intellectually descended from Emerson, fit to carry on the Anglo-Saxon tradition west of the Alleghenies. Not the sort of man you can easily picture exposing his wife's amours through popular publication.

"I suppose that was why I paid no particular attention to the charges. In fact, I think the only out-of-the-ordinary thing that ever took place between us was one afternoon in October when I went to see him and found him in front of his wood fire, with a most peculiar expression on his finely molded face.

"He had just burned up the first eight chapters of his second book, he told me. It didn't please him. It wasn't what he wanted. It was-it was impossible. He did give me that afternoon a most peculiar conviction that he hated what he had written. There was something inexplicable, almost tragic, in his manner. He didn't say anything to give me that impression, mind! He merely remarked that he intended beginning over, in another style, with different characters, but with the same idea. He thought he could put across his big, underlying idea better in a new setting. But the impression he gave me was unforgetable.

"That was the only time I saw him until the thing happened. If you remember, the lecture stage had got him just before Christmas, at some fabulous

sum. The women all wanted to hear him. I didn't hear from him again until he returned from a lecture tour in New England and informed me that he would never lecture again. He did not explain. He merely said it had become distasteful, and dropped the subject. All this was over the telephone, when he called me to lunch with him at the club.

"I didn't quite understand it, of course. But when I went back into my breakfast room and opened the morning paper, I did. Some one in an audience in Hartford had interrupted the lecture of Mr. Floyd Bissell, author, to inquire if it was true that he had exposed his own wife to the world under the guise of fiction. The paragraph left me gasping. It hadn't ever really occurred to me that Floyd could have been guilty of such a thing. He had always impressed me as peculiarly idealistic.

"It was the noon paper, however, which made me dread our luncheon. The Sun carried an editorial on ethics among our younger novelists. Bissell wasn't mentioned by name. But the thing was scathing. Modern Iagos, the editor named such cads, poisoning people's lives and hiding behind paper covers.

"I reached the club before Bissellor so I thought. And I knew at once, that something new had happened. Some book salesman, it seems, had come back from Clewesbury where Bissell had lived and brought a lot of new details. And they had spread all over literary and journalistic New York. The whole club was having a heated argument over the possibility of putting people in books -or, rather, the utter impossibility of it, as Dunstan Mallock insisted, his forehead flushed.

"It was the old dispute-the question of where the novelists' characters came from, the thousand odds and ends that a man gathered from the corners of the earth and wove into a character with some one dominating motive or characteristic whether anyone ever had been able to introduce a character from life, because of the changes the background

made necessary, because of all the dozen of subtle alterations the plot called for, page by page, until the original—if there ever had been one!-became like some dream figure, all stretched out of shape. That was all the argument until Gorton Cappell changed the whole aspect of the affair and Bissell's life, too, incidentally!-forever. He brought down his big hand on the leather lounge with a resounding slap as he insisted, angrily, that that wasn't his point. His point was that when a man had done it—no, hadn't drawn fiction, he cried, angrily, but had written a whole story from beginning to end, a story that was true and that was just his wife's intimate passions and faults on paper-wasn't that man a cad, and deserving of being thrown out of every club in New York?

"I don't think the club will ever forget that moment, for Floyd Bissell had come down the stairs just then, and he stood by the big lounge, and he heard the charge, clearly, distinctly. Mallock, Capell, everybody, including myself, saw him the next instant, too. And the traditional pin drop would have shattered the club into a thousand pieces.

"If it's the opinion of the club that I did such a thing,' says Bissell, calmly, 'perhaps I better resign.'

"There was a most damnable silence -more because no one knew what to say than for any other reason. No one really knew, you remember. But it struck through to Bissell's soul, I suppose. The crystal of his watch broke suddenly under the pressure of his thumb where he held the timepiece in his hand.

"Gentlemen,' he said, still calmly, 'I do resign.'

"And he turned and went down the short steps to the door. I didn't wait, of course. I ran after him, while the group still stood nonplussed. I caught him, too, as old Hermann was handing him his hat and coat.

"It's all a damn-fool mistake,' I said, 'Floyd; better wait- Don't begin to think- A fool quarrel-'

"My stick,' he says to old Hermann.

"Not now, Mac,' he said, in a perfectly ordinary tone of voice. 'Come round to the apartment in an hour.'

"He went down the steps coolly enough, too. I never saw him again, of course. He never came to his apartment. He disappeared for good.”

In the clatter of Madame Bourgnon's something of the tragedy of Bissell came to me.

"Good Heavens! what a bitter thing!" I cried.

Innocent or guilty, indeed, what a bitter thing! But if innocent, how doubly bitter! Though it was possible that the man had been guilty, of course. Character, I knew, had nothing to do with genius. with genius. Almost anything, therefore, was possible in a matter of this kind. The beautiful imagery, the fine and tender phrasing, the marvelous instinct of Tragic Conquest might have meant nothing where Bissell himself was concerned.

They might have represented merely one side of him—a side peculiarly susceptible to literary expression. It might have been another case of a literary Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Even the motive might have been inextricably intertwined with unconscious revenge in Bissell's mind. He might have been guilty and not known it, the tide of motive being hidden from his ordinary consciousness.

The whole subject might be involved in a metaphysical mist-that is, in case he was not merely the specimen extraordinary of cad, who had simply done the rotten thing.

I confess I was of two minds, for an instant. . . . And then above me, and above the passionate French Elaine who ate now, holding the hand of the artist. beside her, Madame Bourgnon, on her high perch, smiled.