The hero receives a cablegram while absent in Europe, to the effect that his wealthy grandfather has died leaving him his property on certain specific conditions. These he finds to embrace his remaining for one year in the old gentleman's palatial but partially-finished home just outside an Indiana village. If he leaves he forfeits the property. If he marries a certain lady within five years, he also loses the estate. A rascally lawyer who is entrusted with the will plots to undo the hero and is successful in luring him away from the home in time to destroy his claim to the property. The lawyer with a sheriff and a posse of deputies tries to eject the hero and his friends, only to provoke a savage battle in which blood flows on both sides. Then occur some most surprising developments which it is safe to say have been little surmised by the reader and which change the entire situation.

Persons who enjoy well-written mysterytales will not be disappointed in The House of a Thousand Candles.

Curly. A Tale of the Arizona Desert. By Roger Pocock. Illustrated. Cloth. Pp. 320. Price, $1.50. Boston: Little, Brown & Company.

IN THIS story every prominent character figures conspicuously in some part of the narration as either a highwayman, robber, murderer, cattle-thief, or a drunkard and gambler. The story, which is told by one Chalk-Eye, a partially-reformed cattle-lifter, is as rich in the slang and peculiar vernacular of the frontier as it is in hair-breadth escapes for the highwaymen, murderers and thieves with whom it deals. The only thing that can possibly be said in its favor is that it presents a vivid and doubtless truthful picture of one of the most shameful phases of our frontier life—a phase which happily is rapidly disappearing. On the other hand, such books are in our judgment necessarily evil in their influence over the minds of the young and of all ill-balanced or superemotional mentalities, filling them with pictures of crime and bloodshed and lowering their respect for human life and the high ethics upon which all orderly progress depends, and at the same time fostering a taste for reading that is as alien to good literature as it is to sound morality. The fact that the story is told in a vivid and spirited manner and that it is crowded with exciting and melodramatic incidents only makes its potential influence for harm all the greater.

The Flight of Georgiana. By Robert Neilson Stephens. Illustrated. Cloth. Pp. 339. Price, $1.50. Boston: L. C. Page & Company.

THIS is a spirited and fairly-well written romantic love-story of the stirring days which followed the battle of Culloden. The hero is a Jacobite officer who is flying through England to take boat for France, believing this course to be safer than remaining in Scotland, where the followers of the Pretender were being vigorously hunted down by the English troops. Quite a number of the followers of the Pretender, however, have been recently hanged or beheaded in England, and the apprehension and conviction of well-known Jacobites brought handsome rewards. Therefore even under ordinary circumstances the trip would have been necessarily perilous. But the hero, in true melodramatic fashion, is being pursued by a villain who has been previously wounded by him in battle. He is therefore in imminent danger of apprehension, in England to court and win a beautiful young which does not, however, prevent his tarrying English girl of whom he has become enamored. There are several important characters besides the hero, heroine and villain who add to the interest and complexity of the situations. The story contains less of the mock-heroics and artificiality which are so prominent in most romances of this class, though it is by no means free from melodramatic and improbable episodes.

The Thistles of Mount Cedar. By Ursula Tannenforst. Illustrated. Cloth. Pp. 454. Price, $1.25. Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Company.

THIS is a story dealing with the lives of a bevy of girls from twelve to sixteen years of age, at a boarding-school. age, at a boarding-school. Their hopes, fears, aspirations, joys and sorrows, their numerous pranks and the punishments that overtake them as the aftermath of certain indiscretions, are all set down in a manner that will doubtless interest the class of readers for whom the book was written,-girls from twelve to sixteen years of age.

The story is not marked by any special strength and impresses us as being stilted and artificial in treatment. The moral atmosphere, however, is excellent.

In this issue, in addition to our extended Editorial survey of important events of the world from the view-point of progressive democracy, we publish a number of papers of the first importance to students of social, political and economic problems, chief among which we mention Professor FRANK PARSONS' The Railway Empire. This is one of the clearest, most compact yet comprehensive discussions of the great railway question that has appeared. It is a contribution that no student of present-day public questions can afford to overlook, dealing as it does in a most luminous manner with the question that is uppermost in our national Congress. Our readers will be pleased to know that this is the opening contribution of five papers on the railways by Professor PARSONS that will be a feature of THE ARENA during the ensuing year. No man in the English-speaking world is, we believe, so well equip ped with facts gleaned from years of careful study and from extended personal investigations throughout Europe and America as is Professor PARSONS to authoritatively discuss this question. These papers will be standard contributions cited as authorities for many years to come.

The splendid work being carried on by the national government in reclaiming waste-lands and making the desert blossom as the rose, is vividly presented in this issue by our special correspondent Mr. FRANK VROOMAN, in the second paper of his series on Uncle Sam's Romance With Science and the Soil. The paper is further illuminated by the reproduction of a number of fine photographs taken by the government and presented through the courtesy of the Reclamation Department of the United States Geological Survey.

President GEORGE MCA. MILLER continues in this issue his deeply thoughtful discussion of the Economics of Moses. These papers will be followed by two contributions on the Economics of Jesus, the whole forming one of the most valuable contributions to the present-day social and political ferment. No thoughtful friend of the Christian religion should fail to read these papers.

The Initiative a Safeguard Against Class-Government, by ELTWEED POMEROY, A.M., is a paper which all friends of democracy should carefully read. It

THE 1906 dealing with the fundamental and overshadowing demand of the hour-the demand for the people to reassert themselves and overthrow the most insidious and pernicious form of despotism-the despotism of corporate wealth operating through political bosses and party-machines.

We regret to state that Hon. J. WARNER MILLS' paper on The Smelter-Trust and The Railways of Colorado was not received in time to appear in this issue.

Our series of papers on Art, Education and the Drama is represented in this issue by two notable contributions, one by the talented and scholarly Mrs. F. EDWIN ELWELL, who opens the art papers with an exceptionally thoughtful and informing Spirit of Japan in Comparison With Those of Westdiscussion of The Principles of the Decorative Art

ern Countries. Mr. KENYON WEST, the well-known critic, essayist and novelist, opens our series of critical dramatic papers with a delightful appreciation of RICHARD MANSFIELD and his work. Since the death of HENRY IRVING, Mr. MANSFIELD is unquestionably the greatest histrionic artist in the English-speaking world; and Mr. WEST, by his long, intimate and critical study of the actor's work is admirably qualified to pay a merited tribute to the actor and his work.

We invite special attention to the contribution by ARCHIBALD GRIMKE, A.M., on The Heart of the Race Question. It is the first part of a discussion which will be continued in the February and March issues. Mr. GRIMKE is one of the ablest thinkers of his race, a graduate of Lincoln University and of the Harvard Law School. He has held with credit several important public posts and is the author of two admirable biographies, one dealing with the life of GARRISON and the other with that of SUMNER.

We regret to say that a number of important articles, some of which we had announced have been unavoidably crowded out of this issue, but will appear in the February ARENA. Prominent among these is a very fine sketch of the life and work of the late Hon. SAMUEL M. JONES, of Toledo. This paper we were compelled to carry over in order to make room for Professor PARSON'S contribution on The Railway Empire, that being the question uppermost in the minds of the people at the present time when Congress is considering the question. A fine portrait of Mayor JONES will accompany this paper, and all friends of civic righteousness will appreciate the beautiful tribute that has been prepared for THE ARENA by one of the most gifted writers of Ohio.

VOL. 35

ous and immutable fixations in the sphere of consciousness; like all the other epochs, it has been a period of flux and reflux, of ebb and flow, of mutation and transmutation. Any well-marked devolution in the forms of literary art, in the ethical and philosophical expressions of human consciousness, has been ckecked by counter currents, setting contrariwise, towards light, freedom, spirituality, truth.

The keen psychologist, with his subtile analysis of the mind, the intellect, and the human heart in all its intricate and devious workings, first held the world's gaze for a space: his day is not yet done. He was succeeded by the Naturalist, the bestial image-breaker intent upon the uglification of humanity-bare of arm, merciless knife in hand, waiting to dissect with surgical precision his human victim. Then came the dilettante poco-curantists, the Japanese-like Impressionists, reproducing with pastel effects of elusive significance the outermost and salient details of life, with their suggestions of depths and abysms of thought and feeling. Here was change in literary art ideals; but was it a progression or a retrogression? Realism was followed by its bastard progeny, Naturalism, to be followed in its turn by Realism's remotest of artistic relations,

tography; there is devolution here, and the devolution is from the actual to the artificial-mind, body, integument.

Just as, in the physical world, to every action corresponds a reaction, so may we seek the law of tidal ebb and flow in the sphere of literary phenomena. Edmond Rostand arose in France with romance as his watchword. Forthwith the French world forsook Ibsenism and crowned him with the laurels of genius. Stephen Phillips in England, a shining apparition in a gray world of naturalism, only accentuated the swing of the pendulum away from the pseudo-social and fundamentally prevaricative drama of Pinero. A generation sated with honeyed sentiment, flabby opinions and pointless pruriency, sits up with renewed vigor to listen to the provocative quips, the merciless wit, the sovereign satire, of Bernard Shaw. Maurice Maeterlinck, at the very crest of the wave of reaction, marks the return from the coarse and the artificial to the spiritual and the true. He turns from the realism of Hauptmann and Sudermann to the mysticism of Marcus Aurelius, Ruysbroeck, Novalis, and Thomas à Kempis; from the naturalism of Zola and D'Annunzio to the supernaturalism of Guy de Maupassant and Edgar Allan Poe.