Now this old-time Republican father, who believed in free thought, free speech and just action, took his son into his ample library while David was still quite young. "Here are many books, my boy-books that you should read. Here are histories of the great events of civilization, and especially I commend to you the story of your own country-the struggles, privations and heroism that marked the found

ing and maintenance of the republic. No true American youth should be ignorant of any of these details. Read much, and then think for yourself."

Thus the wise father led the boy into the world of thought and stimulated his reason. The youth became an omnivorous reader.

His home influence was the best, being fundamentally democratic in character and atmosphere and permeated with moral virility and broad culture. His early schooling was equally fortunate, being gained in the public schools of Madison. Now the public-schools of Indiana, for more than a generation at least, have been justly famous for efficiency, thoroughness and a high standard of ethical conduct. We believe that to this more than to any other single influence is due the fact that Indiana has in recent years taken such a preeminent place in the world of letters and has not inaptly been termed the Massachusetts of the Middle West. In early times the general intelligence of the people and their schools left much to be desired, and the term Hoosier conveyed anything but the idea of intellectual brilliancy. In the seventies, however, the schools were greatly strengthened in many cities. New England teachers, thoroughly equipped to instruct and inspire the young, entered the work with an enthusiasm that became contagious. We remember very distinctly the marked degree in which the teachers in Evansville, Indiana, when we were attending the public-schools of that city, succeeded in imbuing a large proportion of the scholars with mental and moral enthusiasm.

Now it was in the public-schools, which

are at once the cradle and the bulwark of democracy, that David Graham Phillips received his early education. Thus in home and school, during the formative period, he had a thoroughly wholesome and truly democratic environment. In answer to our question as to his early schooling, Mr. Phillips recently said:

"Yes, I went to the public-schools in Madison, and I do not know of anything I am more thankful for. If I had my way, there should not be any other kind of schools, high or low. It is not fair to

the child to handicap it in this country with a training at ‘exclusive' schools and colleges."

From the public-schools he went to DePauw University, then known as Asbury College, and from this well-known western institution he went to Princeton, where he was graduated in 1887. Selecting journalism as a profession, he secured a position, first in Cincinnati. Later for several years he was on the staff of the New York World and New York Sun.

If

Now, journalism may easily be the making or unmaking of a young man. he is well grounded in intellectual integrity; if he has learned to think broadly and fundamentally; if he has been taught to be honest with himself and to understand and prize at their true worth the moral verities, then there are few professions so rich in educational value or which better tend to broaden and enrich the alert and receptive mind than journalism. But for youths whose characters have never been properly strengthened and developed, for superficial thinkers and those who have not learned to appreciate moral values, journalism is one of the most perilous of professions, leading to cynicism and contempt for the high things of life and oftentimes deadening the finer and higher sensibilities, because the spirit of our materialistic commercialism has come to exert so tremendous an influence over the press that its blight not unfrequently extends to all departments of the paper. Moreover, the journalist sees life

as it is; his eyes are constantly being opened; he has many rude awakenings. Here, for example, he sees men who have stood high in the councils of state, men who have been regarded as ultra-respectable and the pillars of society; yet their lives, both public and private, underneath the highly-polished surface are loathsome and corrupt. So on every hand the young journalist constantly finds his idols shattered. Then, too, he sees crime in all its multitudinous phases, vice and degradation, and the falling away of that idealism that is the vital breath of true civilization, before the soul-withering influence of modern business life. He sees on every hand in society confusion in regard to things fundamentally or conventionally right and proper, and varying standards of justice and right applied to the different classes in the community.

With the foundation which the home environment and public-school education had given Mr. Phillips, and with a keen appreciation for the rugged Americanism or democracy that made our nation the moral leader of the world, journalism proved a great help instead of a handicap to the young writer. It was a supplementary education which broadened his mental vision and enriched his knowledge of the fundamental movements and the significant events of the ages.

Journalism alone, however, did not satisfy him. He soon began to write novels and essays. His style is always bright, epigrammatic and fascinating; on occasions it is bold and trenchant. He possesses the rare power of instantly arresting the attention and holding the interest of the reader. This is as true of his essays as of his novels. His latest work, The Reign of Gilt, is made up of a series of chapters dealing with plutocracy and democracy. In the hands of many writers these essays, however important in their facts, would be dry reading. Under Mr. Phillips' treatment each chapter is as absorbingly interesting as a wellwritten short story. Indeed, we believe that for the intelligent readers, even

among those who delight in stories, most of these chapters will prove more compelling in interest than nine out of ten of the short stories that are appearing in our leading literary magazines.

It is, however, through his long stories that our author is best known. Here he is doing his greatest work for the cause of democracy and here also he is, we believe, destined to do some work that will place him among the greatest of our novelists and give him a permanent place in the literature of the world. His early novels, A Woman Ventures and The Great God Success, were promising but immature. They showed the pen of a man of imagination with brain trained to alertness, and here also was the human quality and the ethical impulse; but though they promised much they lacked the finished touch of the master. All his later books, Golden Fleece, The Cost, The Plum-Tree, The Social Secretary and The Deluge, have, however, showed a steady advance in many respects; and what is still more significant of greater things in the future, each evinces in a marked degree some special excellence which illustrates the versatility of the author and his capacity to do great work.

Should you enter the studio of a young artist and see a canvas on which were displayed wonderful effectiveness in light and shade or striking results in foreshortening, such as marked the paintings of Correggio, while beside this canvas were others, some revealing a master's knowledge in color effect, genius in depicting human qualities and an imagination suggesting colossal concepts such as were found in Angelo's work, you would say at once: "If all these canvases are the unaided creative work of the young artist, he will some day do some distinctly great work; some day he will paint a canvas which will reflect the varied excellencies in such a degree that he will take rank among the master-artists of the world."

Now the work of David Graham Phillips impresses the critic in a similar manner. All his best writings reveal the

requisites of a great novelist. First, he possesses the imagination that enables him to project his consciousness so as to see, feel and understand precisely what his typical creations are cognizant of, in all the varied walks of life. This seeing eye, this hearing ear, this feeling heart, constitute the first and supreme requisite for the novelist of the first rank. In the second place, our author possesses idealism, a sense of moral proportion and the rationalistic intellect that enables him to see great problems in a fundamental way. Furthermore, he possesses the human quality; he knows how to touch the heartchord, to give to fiction that interest that appeals compellingly to the popular imagination. His style is plain, direct, attractive. Often his sentences are as epigrammatic as were Hugo's. He throws out thoughts that stick like burrs in the mind. He is versatile very versatile. In Golden Fleece we have the finest satire that has appeared on the craze of the newly-rich and the American snobs in general to marry into the broken-down aristocratic families of the Old World, while incidentally with a master-hand he hits off the peculiar characteristics, and especially the weaknesses, of the rich and fashionable in such leading cities as New York, Boston, Washington and Chicago. In The Social Secretary he gives a vivid picture of the undemocratic trend of life in our national capital under the imperialistic administration of the present incumbent, with a striking picture of the morally enervating and anti-democratic general conditions that are transforming the republic into a class-ruled government. All this is presented with charming realism through the vehicle of a pleasing story.

In The Cost we find the human and love interest very strong. This story displays the development of powers essential to great novels and which have only been foreshadowed in his previous romances. It also gives some splendid examples of character drawing in which colossal typical figures are introduced. Dumont and Scarborough represent the incarnation of

the forces that are struggling for supremacy in the republic to-day. On the one hand is a powerful individuality overmastered by a sordid egoism, by a craze for gold and for the ease, comfort, gratification and power which it will give the individual, unattended by any recognition of moral responsibility or the dignity and duty of life. Here is the typical modern money magnate, crazed by the materialism of the market, insane with the gambbler's frenzy. And in juxtaposition to this great typical character we have in Scarborough the type of the clean-souled, high-minded nature, touched, illuminated and glorified by the highest idealism—a man dominated by the spirit of freedom, democracy and human enlightenment, as were Jefferson and Lincoln; incorruptible and true, yet withal very human.

In The Plum-Tree a startling and compellingly realistic picture is presented of the overthrow of democracy and the enthronement of plutocracy or privileged wealth, and the degradation of the political life of the nation through the corrupt party-boss and the money-controlled machine. It is a powerful story of contemporaneous conditions, almost as compelling in its influence as the later novels of Zola, such as Truth, Labor and Fecundity.

The Deluge is a companion romance quite as strong as The Plum-Tree. It tears away the mask from our American Monte Carlo, the gambling hell of Wall street, and introduces the reader to the money-mad princes of privilege who pose as the pillars of society while playing with stacked cards and loaded dice and oppressing the masses of the nation and debauching the business and political life of America.

Now each of these works reveals some special excellence, some element of strength, power and popularity less marked in the others, and shows the power of the author to handle life in all its phases and in such varied manner as to make a distinctly great novel when the hour arrives in which the author will be able or wise enough to retire into some secluded

fastness of nature and there amid solitude and natural grandeur permit his imagination to create a rich background for a cast that shall be as full of great living, typical figures as Les Miserables, Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, or any other of the supreme works in the world of fiction.

Mr. Phillips possesses all the elements essential to the creation of great and immortal fiction. All that is necessary is time and patience in the composition of some great work. B. O. FLOWER.

Boston, Mass.

W

E WERE seated at a window in the Manhattan Club. Below us the tide of metropolitan life was surging up and down Madison and Fifth avenues and Broadway. Here were the carriages and automobiles of the very rich mingling with the cabs, herdics and streetcars in the most cosmopolitan center of the nation. That magnificent equipage in which were seated two richly-robed ladies, that passed down Madison avenue, contrasted strangely, and to the democratic eye unpleasantly, with the poor women and men-human derelictsseated on the benches of the square beyond the avenue. These latter were fractions of the great army of the defeated among the struggling human beings, merely typical of tens of thousands who, hampered by heredity and unfortunate environments, have battled, oftentimes bravely and sometimes long, for a footing among the struggling army on the precipitous heights of present-day business life, for independent, self-respecting manhood and womanhood, only in the end to fall into the abyss. As our eye wandered from the wealth in the magnificent equipage to the flotsam and jetsam of human life in the square, we found ourselves asking whether or not this was the republic of Jefferson and Lincoln, the republic which had been founded on the idea of equality of opportunity and of rights, and

which, until privileged interests and monopoly rights had gained ascendency in government, rendered success and happiness possible to all industrious, struggling and ambitious sons and daughters of the land, while furnishing the environment favorable to human development instead of inimical to the normal expansion of the best in man. These scenes without the window, so thoroughly typical, impressed us with the tremendous significance of the present battle against the multitudinous agencies which are transforming our republic into a class-dominated and practically a class-ruled nation, being waged by the friends of democracy who hold firmly to the ideals of Jefferson, Lincoln and the great men of their stamp; and with this thought in mind we turned to Mr. Phillips with the question:

"Is it not true that the march of privileged interests has been steady and uninterrupted for the last quarter of a century?"

"For a much longer time than that," replied the novelist. "You see, before the Civil war the privileged class that exercised undemocratic influence in government and society was the slave-holding oligarchy of the South. A large number of the citizens of the Southern States were opposed to slavery long before the war, many of these holding the views of the great Southern statesman, Thomas Jef

ferson. Some opposed the 'institution' because of the ethical influence it exerted; but a still larger number, a body that was rapidly increasing as trade increased and cities grew, opposed slavery because of the autocratic and intolerant attitude of the privileged class toward all white men within their borders who labored for a living. The tradesmen were increasing all over the South, but on every hand they were treated as inferiors by the planters and the large slave-owners who looked down on manual labor, precisely as the privileged aristocracies of the old monarchal régimes regard trades-people and toilers.

"How widespread was this sentiment against slavery, largely because of the growing democratic protest against the arrogance of a privileged class, was strikingly illustrated in an election in the fifties, when Jefferson Davis ran for governor of Mississippi on a pro-slavery platform. His antagonist advocated the gradual abolition of slavery, and Jefferson Davis was defeated in Mississippi-the heart of the slave-power. When, ten or twelve years ago, I ran across this tremendously significant fact, I sat up straight and began to do some thinking. Here was a fact little noticed by historians, and yet it was one of the most significant happenings of the period. I at once began to study the situation, and I soon found that everywhere in the South the sentiment against the privileged class and in favor of a democracy, that cannot exist where privileged classes are separated from the people by wealth, power or social distinction, was rapidly growing prior to the spread of the radical abolition sentiment in the North. Of course when the passions and prejudices of the North and the South were aroused and the issue became one of sections, the South stood on the whole solidly in opposition to the North.

"But the Civil war, while it destroyed one privileged class, gave birth to a modern commercial feudalism of wealth more potential for evil and more general in its

enslaving power than chattel slavery, because it permeates all sections of the nation and has its ramifications in every opinion-forming center of society. When the war was raging, the harpies gathered at Washington and began laying the foundation for privileged fortunes, often by the most infamous conceivable methods methods that entailed the loss of the lives of numbers of the true-hearted men who had hastened to the front to save the Union. Paper-soled shoes, substitution in clothing, substitution of the gravest character in medicine, and so on through the whole line of governmental war supplies. The soldiers were victimized, wronged and often killed through criminal substitutions.

"Then, too, when the nation was absorbed with the great question of saving the Union, we behold the crafty commercial corruptionists, the promoters of great corporations such as the railways, with eyes riveted on the vast stretches of rich public land and the nation's wealth, and, with graft and greed blinding them to sentiments of honor, justice and integrity, beginning their systematic and colossal schemes of plunder and the exploitation of the public for the enrichment of the few, for the building up of enormous fortunes at the expense of the government and the masses.

"When the war was over chattel slavery was destroyed. One form of privilege had been overthrown, but other forms had arisen, and the pioneers and promoters had gained a firm footing in the republic. Their advance has been steady, uninterrupted and accelerated."

"Is it not true," we asked, "that this onward march has been characterized by the introduction into government throughout all its ramifications of ideals that are reactionary, imperialistic and anti-democratic-innovations which are in alignment with monarchal government and entirely inimical to the fundamental principles upon which popular rule or democracy rests?

"Undoubtedly," replied Mr. Phillips.