As the future of our republic is rooted in the average intelligence of the people, it is difficult to watch with patience the turning over of the mental training of our children to a sex profoundly dominated by the emotions.

Even a young and daring nation cannot fight the laws of nature, and " Nature cannot be dodged." She makes always for differentiation of function, not for empty repetitions of potentiality among species. The man has his, the woman hers, and our faulty system of education calls aloud for man's reinstated attention, his profoundest thought.

In this country, "the whole higher culture is feminized." Eighty-five per cent of the patrons of theatres are women, says our critic. Women are the readers of our books, they make up an American audience at public lectures, concerts. They control our charities and church work. In Europe at least one-half of the people present at an art exhibition are men; in this country one sees less than five per centum of men present at such an exhibition, by actual count. The germ of feminization is firmly planted in the whole national intellectuality, until now woman has the practical monopoly. The purely native resources of our nation and our politics remain in the hands of men; it is about all they have retained, and the suffragists begrudge them even that.

III

The responsibility for the present humiliating slave-trade in which rich American girls are sold to the titled decadents of England and the Continent is almost wholly the fault of the men of this country. This opinion is offered only after years of observation and consideration of our social conditions, and after a patholog

ical study of American men. Their open astonishment and chagrin at this phenomenon would be vastly amusing were it not so pathetic. Our men have a helpless inability to see themselves. Nor is the responsibility of the mother lost sight of, for the foreign suitor begins with her, as he does in Europe. She is the outer citadel which must first succumb to his studied charm.

This outer citadel is carried with astonishing ease, as he quickly discovers, and for three reasons. The mother is easily dazzled; her social foundations do not go down deep in the class to which she almost invariably belongs; her husband has made every dollar of the lure of those millions, without which there would not be this problem to solve. Second, the women who see what a given man really is, who estimate him at all justly, who begin even to understand men's social standards in this country or in Europe, are rare indeed. The American mother is clearly out of her depth at the start, as unfit as a child to counsel her daughter. She is not equipped for it. It is not her work. In the third place, that subtle relationship of sex which European men of any age always have the art of establishing with a woman of whatever age: their attention, their quick courtesy toward women, their habit of listening absorbedly when a woman speaks, -all this is so absolutely new to the American mother that she becomes hypnotized by it, and can no longer distinguish truth from falsity, or a mere national point of etiquette from a personal thoughtfulness and delicate tenderness of feeling.

She, poor soul, at the age most sensitive to flattery, is hungry for a little consideration. When it comes from this foreigner, unhappily there has been nothing in her past like it to help her to see through it to its core. On the contrary, she has been so long used to being treated as a social incumbrance, snubbed, interrupted, unconsidered by all of her daughter's domestic suitors, that to separate principles from manners, without the aid of her

husband, who "leaves it all to her," in the old, honored American way, is to demand of her impossibilities.

And he, the father? He is so used to the bees flying to and fro about his flower, he is so absolutely absorbed body and soul in his work, he has for so long shunted all such things off on his wife, that he only wakes up and "gets mad," as the saying is, when it is too late.

Then the astonishment of the thoughtless father and the selfish brother and the discarded, discourteous American suitor, are about equally divided. Any conception that they are in any way responsible for it, never enters their minds. The mother is unjustly blamed for the whole thing. Nor do they withhold the "I told you so," when the cruel ending comes, as it so often does. As if any mother, even a parvenue American, would have encouraged the suit of the foreigner, if she had not erred in her judgment of

men.

After all, though the United States may be the girl's paradise, it distinctly is not the mother's. For she must carry the load alone, all but the monetary providing, alone from the day of the child's birth to the day her boy kisses her lightly goodby, and goes on his way which she alone, not his weary, absent-minded father, helped him to select.

She carries her daughter, from babyhood, through all of her school-life (what number of American fathers know even the name of their daughters' day-schools, or had any part in the selection?) to the day when she too, unterrified through ignorance, opens the door of her own life and goes out hand-in-hand with some unknown man. More than one American mother has told the writer of her weariness in struggling alone with such responsibilities," a mother and yet husbandless."

The American masculine claim of absorption in his work does not in the least justify such a condition. Frenchmen support their wives and still find time to go shopping with them too! Englishmen do

likewise, and find energy left to place their sons in school, energy to watch keenly the love-affairs of their daughters, unhesitatingly bidding this or that man be gone; moral courage and physical vitality left after the day's work to be in fact, as well as in fancy, “the head of the house." They have the wisdom to leave hours for play, for pure boyishness of living. And all this may be observed in the same middle class that with us turns the whole issue over to the wife, expecting of her all wisdom, though knowing her sheltered youth; and all vitality, to run unceasingly and unaided the whole machinery of the family. No wonder our women have "nerves"! No wonder they are becoming more and more restless (one of the first evidences of strain), more and more discontented as time passes. Masculine kindness to our women is sometimes so tangled up with selfishness that there need be no surprise that there is some confusion regarding them.

Not that our men want the money, after which they are striving, for themselves, for their pleasures. They do not. They are almost notoriously generous. Our rich men give, give, give: to their wives, their children, to colleges, to hospitals, to churches, until the whole world is amazed at their generosity.

The habit and fury of work, unreasoning, illogical, quite unrelated to any need, is a masculine disease in this country, and the whole social system has for years paid the inevitable penalty. Here and there a man tries to stop in time, but finds himself obsessed by work so that he can no longer think of anything else. He is as much a slave to it as is any opium-taker to his drug, or drunkard to his potion. It is a grave danger, not only to the individual, but to the whole American civilization.

The young Americans too, who are so contemptuous about our girls' preference for foreigners, must look to themselves and their shortcomings for some of the cause, and must, with the older men, share the

responsibility for it. In the first place, our young men are not good lovers, however in the end they may be good husbands. And what girl of twenty has the foresight to comprehend that?

If she has that foresight she is simply not" in love," as the phrase goes, and alas! it takes so much love to carry a woman, any woman, through the tremendous strain of marriage. A very necessary and a very wise foresight is not natural in any maiden, and that is one of the solid advantages of the European system, at which we so glibly sneer.

The difference in the divorce records of Europe and the United States is not all to the credit of any church. Where the head dominates the heart, the results show in the long run in marriage as well as in any other undertaking. The over-sentimentalism in all such matters with us carries with it the gravest of dangers. We expect our girls to "fall in love" and at the same time be their own cool-headed chaperones; girls from whom we carefully hide the living truth. Is there logic in that? The opinion (which has been held for some twenty years) is ventured that the purely temperamental difference between American men and those of England and the Continent, is at the bottom of the freedom we have found it safe to accord our girls. The latter are not so intrinsically impeccable, but the former are by nature temperamentally cold, a condition perhaps due to several generations of overstraining.

No sensitive woman can be in Europe a single day without recognizing this fact beyond all caviling. No man save a trained psychologist would recognize this pathological fact, of which hundreds of average American women-travelers have spoken to the writer, from girls of seventeen to women of fifty. "We women count for so much more over there, don't we?" is very often the way it is put.

On the other hand, the leisure of our women, their coddling, their luxury of living, has developed them along exactly opposite lines. May not this growing VOL. 103 - NO. 6

temperamental difference account for some of the tendencies in our civilization that seem obscure?

Our young men lean back and complacently argue that, as their hands and hearts are clean, and as all other men are rascals, in greater or less degree, they should be of course preferred. Have they gone no deeper into the question than that? Would Thisbe have cared as ardently for Pyramis if the Wall had not been there?

Who carry flowers, jellies, books, sympathy to criminals, however hideous their crimes, but the women? The ill-regulated, unreasoning emotionality of a large number of our women is not to be overestimated in determining any question appertaining to them. Women's Rights women, -so-called, who naturally affiliate one with another, may shudder and laugh derisively to their heart's content, but the truth is unassailable, that worth has not yet succeeded in deciding the love-affairs of either sex. Men are in no greater degree attracted by the gentle, well-balanced, womanly girls, who would make excellent wives, than the latter by the honest, disinterested, temperate, clean-hearted men. If men and women did make wise selections the villains would be at hand. Other matters decide such problems. The question of brilliancy of plumage is not so far behind us humans that it no longer counts. Our college men study these matters, but fail to make the atavistic analogy when it comes to social matters in their later lives. Hence their profane rage at the girls when foreigners come fortune-hunting.

If the truth were told, most young American men are not especially interesting. They do not keep up their reading. They have a national obtundity when it comes to music, to art, to literature; nor do many of them take any of these things at all seriously. The young among them are not good conversationalists. Our cleverest men are monologists pure and simple. They lecture admirably. They are born orators along modified

lines. They are inevitable story-tellers. None of this is conversation; and women like conversation, like its courtesies, which at least pretend a little interest when their turn comes in the game. Knowledge of people and affairs outside our own country pricks more than one bubble about our young men.

Tired men fill our vaudeville theatres, -for there at least the audience is largely masculine, even in the daytime. They are too near exhaustion to do more than listen to wit quite easy of comprehension. Our girls are accustomed to amusing these tired men. That joy of being amused, of being interested by a man of the world, is not to be omitted in any just weighing

of the question why they find foreigners attractive; and as time passes, in spite of all the bitter disillusionments of the past, our rich girls will make more and more unflattering selections from among suitors from across the seas. And it is full time our young men awakened to their own share in the causes which lead to such a condition. The whole social system of England and of Europe generally spares a girl such shameful sales. The mothers, the fathers, the men about her, are equipped to protect her, and they take the time and spare the energy to do so. Justly considered, it is a social, psychic question, quite apart from man's commercial value in the world.

LABOR is a commodity just as is cotton, coal, or any other material making up the cost of production, but there is added to it the human element, and out of this fact arises the labor problem. This problem includes every question at issue between employer and employee, whether it concerns wages, hours of labor, or sanitary conditions; and, rightly analyzed, is a matter of bargain between the man who buys and the man who sells labor. To understand the labor problem, we must first know something of the factory system which has contributed so largely to our present social unrest.

In the beginning the factory was the creation, not of capital, but of labor; not of the employer, but of the workingman. It was a natural growth out of the home system of manufacture, under which raw material, bought either by the workman himself or given out to him by a second party, was manufactured into the finished product in the home. The transition from the home to the factory system may be studied at first hand in some countries to-day. In Japan, for instance, practically all the spinning of yarn is done in factories, while the larger part of the cloth is made on hand-looms in the homes of the weavers. The first spinning mill was undoubtedly built by some thrifty spinner who, obtaining more work than he could well do with his own hands, hired a few less capable workmen to assist him; afterwards he hired others, until the rooms of his house were too small to contain them and the machinery; then he built a shed devoted to his business, and this shed became the first cotton factory of Japan. Our own industrial development has been similar, and the conditions which we may observe

to-day in Japan once existed in America.

In the early days of the nineteenth century a machinist's apprentice became a journeyman and received from his master, as was the custom in those days, a new suit of clothes and fifty dollars in money. He left the town in which he lived and sought employment in a neighboring village, where several cotton mills had been built. The mill in which he found work would be of interest to one familiar with the great plants of to-day; the owners, the superintendent, the workers, were all New England folk, among whom there was no social distinction. Tradition says that the weavers sat in rocking-chairs beside the newly-invented power-looms, and that some brought knitting to the mill to occupy their spare time, while others cultivated flowers in windowboxes; but rocking-chairs or no, employer and employee began work at the same hour each morning, returned home at the same hour in the evening, and after they had "washed up" and the supper dishes were put away, spent their evenings together.

The 'power-loom seemed a marvel of ingenuity to the young machinist; he watched the machines turning out their useful products, and repaired them when they failed to work. Then the thought occurred to him that some day he might build looms and sell them to the cotton factories. He became acquainted with another machinist, who had already made a start in this direction, and the two young men formed a partnership, built a small shop, and commenced business. They associated with them a few other machinists, and from bell-hour to bellhour, employers and employees worked side by side at the bench and lathe. The