MONG the pictures by prominent Ameri

AMONG

can artists which were greatly admired at the recent annual exhibition at the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh, was Childe Hassam's painting entitled "June." This large canvas was awarded the third prize, five hundred dollars in gold and a bronze medal, Above we reproduce this painting through the courtesy of the Carnegie Institute.

Mr. Hassam was born in Boston and educated in the public schools of that city. He studied art, first in Boston and later in Paris, and for some time has been a resident of New York City. His paintings have won numerous medals and prizes in the representative art exhibitions both in the New World and the Old.

tempt to center the public mind on a certain so-called "dangerous class" as a menace to society, government, business interests, property, law and order by another element indicates a wish to divert the attention of the masses from those who are posing as the representatives and the embodiment of law, order, national honor and business integrity, and a fear on the part of this element that a day may come when its own acts will call forth the righteous wrath of the people.

Some years ago a bank-thief in a populous American city, at the noon hour when the streets were thronged with people, boldly seized a large package of bills from the cashier's desk in a well-known bank. The cry of "Stop thief!" was instantly taken up by the real thief, who with the bills concealed under his coat rushed down the street crying "Stop thief! stop thief!" and finally disappeared in the throng.

Now the action and voicings of the great Wall-street financiers, the master-spirits of the trusts and corporate wealth, through their army of defenders, emissaries and apologists, have created an increasing conviction that they may have adopted the bank-thief's tactics, and their increasing alarmist cries against the peril of the masses may have been stimulated by the guilty knowledge of their own infidelity to sacred trusts and all sentiments of honor, integrity and probity, and their consciousness of their secret but morally criminal and lawless actions. Recent investigations have more than verified this suspicion on the part of the more conscientious and thoughtful of our people.

Concrete Illustrations of Methods Employed to Discredit High-Minded

and Incorruptible Statesmen. MANY of the methods employed by the possessors of privilege and the great financial gamblers to cast discredit upon and to drive into private life all incorruptible and able. statesmen and others whose influence they dread, are now well known; but a few typical illustrations may be helpful in emphasizing one of the most ominous facts of recent years. No source of danger to predatory wealth has been left unassailed by its retinue of paid servants. The maxim attributed to Cardinal Richelieu "First all means to conciliate, and failing in that, all means to crush and ruin" has been the unvarying rule of privileged interests. In politics and political econ

omy, every leader known to be not only absolutely incorruptible but aggressively honest, conscientious and sincere, every great thinker recognized to be under the compulsion of lofty moral idealism, and especially every fundamental thinker who has been loyal to the basic demands of democracy, has been mercilessly assailed as an anarchist, a demagogue and a dangerous character.

Take, for example, the treatment accorded Mr. Henry George in the eighties of the last century. No unprejudiced thinker can read Progress and Poverty, Social Problems and other distinctly great works of this social economist without recognizing the transparent sincerity and noble moral idealism of the author, or the further fact that he was a fundamental thinker, a philosopher of keen penetration, of relentless logic, and possessed of a simple yet luminous literary style. The individual may not agree with all Mr. George's conclusions; he may oppose his theory; but if he is broad-minded enough to rise above selfish considerations and prejudices, so as to treat the writer with the degree of fairness that he demands for his own thought, and if he has read the works, so as to be competent to judge, he will frankly admit that Mr. George was sincere, consistent and intelligent; that he was, moreover, the reverse of an anarchist, a demagogue or a person who sought to set class against class. Yet during the eighties no man in America came in for more ignorant and indiscriminate abuse or was the victim of more systematic misrepresentation than he. The most studied attempts were made to discredit and destroy his influence by the possessors of privilege and their army of hirelings. And why? Simply because since the days of Thomas Jefferson no man in the New World had sounded the message of fundamental democracy so clearly as did he; no man had shown so unmistakably how economic injustice had destroyed that equality of opportunities and of rights that had been the crowning purpose of democracy; no man had demonstrated more convincingly that free institutions, the happiness, prosperity and uplift of all the people, demanded that political freedom and justice be complemented by economic freedom and justice; that so long as the land, the great and (with air and water) vital gift of the Common Father to His common children, was monopolized by the few, and so long as special privileges were given to the few in other ways, which placed the

multitude in their power, there could be no such thing as economic independence. In his great works Mr. George carried forward the teachings of Thomas Jefferson and the fathers of political democracy into the domain of economics, along the line insisted on by Mr. Jefferson himself, who, it will be remembered, was no less than Mr. George the foe of special privilege; and even on the land question, with prophet's vision the sage of Monticello had caught a glimpse of the great economic verity that Mr. George so luminously amplified, for in writing to James Madison in 1789 he declared that "the earth belongs in usufruct to the living; the dead have neither powers nor rights over it." And to the father of James Madison in 1785 he wrote as follows:

"Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for men to labor and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry, we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be provided for those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not, the fundamental right to labor the earth returns to the unemployed." The treatment accorded Mr. George has been meted out to all social philosophers who

Sullivant, in New York American. (Reproduced by special permission of W. R. Hearst.)

HOW HENDRICKS INVESTIGATED.

have demanded fundamental reforms that have menaced privilege and the new feudalism of wealth that is the fruit of privilege, in precise proportion as the thinkers' work has been basic in character and its influence has threatened to check the rapid growth of plutocracy in the business and political world.

When Mr. Bryan was nominated for the presidency, it was not his views on the silver question that alarmed and called forth the united opposition of corporate wealth, leading the great trusts and Wall-street gamblers to contribute millions of dollars to overcome the overwhelming popular sentiment in favor of him. No, the silver issue was seized upon as the most effective thing to secure the concerted aid of the banking interests throughout the land and as an alarmist cry that could be used as a cudgel to frighten the business interests. The truth of this is shown, among other evidences, in the fact that equally vicious attacks have been made on other political leaders who were never believers in free silver, when the privileged interests felt that the leader was incorruptible, aggressively honest and democratic in character. The fact that Mr.

permission of W. R. Hearst.)

AT OUR NATIONAL AUTO SHOW.

One of the Prominent Exhibits.

if not equally as outspoken in favor of silver as Mr. Bryan did not in the least prejudice him in the eyes of the great trust magnates