My dear X. (The) lines I now send you are forwarded by the kindness

of the (bearer) who is a friend. (Is not) the message delivered yet

(to) my brother? (Be) quick about it, for I have all along (trusted)

that you would act with discretion and despatch. Yours ever, Z.

There were other and very complicated systems based on arithmetical

calculations for the transposition of letters of the alphabet,

illustrations of which would be very prolix and possibly not

interesting.

At the close of the sixteenth century, when the Spaniards were

endeavoring to establish relations between the scattered branches of

their vast monarchy, which at that period embraced a large portion of

Italy, the Lower Countries, the Philippines, and enormous districts

in the New World, they needed some method to correspond with their

agents. They accordingly invented a cipher, which they varied from

time to time, in order to disconcert those who might attempt to pry

into the mysteries of their correspondence. The cipher, composed

of fifty signs, was of great value to them through all the troubles

of the “League” and the wars then desolating Europe. Some of their

despatches having been intercepted, Henry IV handed them over to a

clever mathematician, Vieta, with the request that he would find the

clue. He did so, and was able also to follow it as it varied, and

France profited for two years by his discovery. The court of Spain,

disconcerted at this, accused Vieta before the Roman court as a

sorcerer and in league with the devil. This proceeding only gave rise

to laughter and ridicule.

The manner in which the French took possession of the republic of

Strasburg, during the reign of Louis XIV, while peace prevailed, is

very interesting. At that time the city had acquired great privileges,

it being a free town, and was governed as a republic.

In 1680, when M. de Louvois was the French Minister of War, he

summoned before him one day a gentleman named De Chamilly, and gave

him the following instructions: “Start this evening for Basel, in

Switzerland; you will reach it in three days; on the fourth, punctually

at two o’clock, station yourself on the bridge over the Rhine, with

a portfolio, ink, and a pen. Watch all that takes place, and make a

memorandum of everything in particular. Continue doing so for two

hours; have a carriage and post-horses awaiting you; and at four

precisely, mount and travel night and day till you reach Paris. On the

instant of your arrival, hasten to me with your notes.”

De Chamilly obeyed; he reached Basel, and on the day and at the hour

appointed stationed himself, pen in hand, on the bridge. Presently a

market-cart drove by, then an old woman with a basket of fruit passed;

anon a little urchin trundled his hoop by; next an old gentleman in

blue top-coat jogged past on his gray mare. Three o’clock chimed

from the cathedral tower. Just at the last stroke, a tall fellow in

yellow waistcoat and breeches sauntered up, went to the middle of the

bridge, lounged over, and looked at the water; then he took a step

back and struck three hearty blows on the footway with his staff. Down

went every detail in De Chamilly’s book. At last the hour of release

sounded, and he jumped into his carriage. Shortly before midnight,

after two days of ceaseless traveling, De Chamilly presented himself

before the minister, feeling rather ashamed at having such trifles to

report. M. de Louvois took the portfolio with eagerness and glanced

over the notes. As his eye caught the mention of the yellow-breeched

man, a gleam of joy flashed across his countenance. He rushed to the

king, roused him from sleep, spoke in private with him for a few

moments, and then hastily despatched four couriers who had been in

readiness since five o’clock on the preceding evening. Eight days

after, the town of Strasburg was entirely surrounded by French troops,

and summoned to surrender; it capitulated and threw open its gates on

the thirtieth of September, 1681. Evidently the three strokes of the

stick given by the fellow in yellow costume, at an appointed hour,

were the signals of the success of an intrigue concerted between M.

de Louvois and the magistrates of Strasburg, and the man who executed

this mission was as ignorant of the motive as was M. de Chamilly of

the motive of his. This unjustifiable action of France received formal

recognition at the Peace of Ryswick in 1697, and she continued to hold

the place until it was wrested from her by the Germans during the late

Franco-German War.

The mysterious cards employed by the Count de Vergennes, who was

Minister for Foreign Affairs under Louis XVI, in his relations with

the diplomatic agents of France, exhibit great ingenuity in their

arrangement and show what the political condition of Europe must have

been at that time to require such precautions. The count was a great

friend of America, and it was largely through his influence that the

treaties of amity and commerce and alliance of 1778 were concluded.

These cards were used in letters of recommendation or passports which

were given to strangers about to enter or depart from France; they were

intended to furnish information without the knowledge of the bearers.

This was the system. The cards given to a man contained only a few

words, such as,

_Alphonse D’Angeha_

_Recommendé à M. le Comte de Vergennes, par le Marquis de Puységur,

Ambassadeur de France à la Cour de Lisbonne._

The card told more tales than the words written on it. Its color

indicated the nation of the stranger. Yellow showed him to be English;

red, Spanish; white, Portuguese; green, Dutch; red and white, Italian;

red and green, Swiss; green and white, Russian, etc. The person’s

age was expressed by the shape of the card. If it was circular, he

was under 25; oval, between 25 and 30; octagonal, between 30 and 45;

hexagonal, between 45 and 50; square, between 50 and 60; an oblong

showed that he was over 60. Two lines placed below the name of the

bearer indicated his build. If he was tall and lean, the lines were

waving and parallel; tall and stout, they converged; and so on. The

expression of his face was shown by a flower on the border. A rose

designated an open and amiable countenance, while a tulip marked

a pensive and aristocratic appearance. A fillet round the border,

according to its length, told whether the man was bachelor, married,

or widower. Dots gave information as to his position and fortune. A

full stop after his name showed that he was a Catholic; a semicolon

that he was a Lutheran; a comma that he was a Calvinist; a dash that

he was a Jew; no stop indicated him as an atheist. So also his morals

and character were pointed out by a pattern in the angles of the card.

So at one glance the minister could tell all about his man, whether

he was a gamester or a duelist; what was his purpose in visiting

France; whether in search of a wife or to claim a legacy; what was his

profession--that of a physician, lawyer, or man of letters; whether he

was to be put under surveillance or allowed to go his way unmolested.

When the Chevalier de Rohan was in the Bastille in 1674, his friends

wanted to convey to him the intelligence that his accomplice was dead

without having confessed. They did so by passing the following words

into his dungeon, written on a shirt: “mg dulhxcclgu ghj yxuj; lm ct

ulgc alj.” In vain did he puzzle over the cipher, to which he had not

the clue. It was too short; for the shorter a cipher letter, the more

difficult it is to make out. The light faded, and he tossed on his hard

bed, sleeplessly revolving the mystic letters in his brain, but he

could make nothing out of them. Day dawned, and with the first gleam he

was poring over them; still in vain. He pleaded guilty, for he could

not decipher “Le prisonnier est mort; il n’a rien dit.”

The following mystic message is very difficult to decipher: “Tig C f p

w y w e. i t ao eovhvygnvrxr mbiddutl.”

Take the first word, Tig, and under the second letter place that which

precedes it in the alphabet, namely, h; then under the third letter, in

succession backward, the two preceding letters, thus:

T i g

h f

e

In like manner arrange the second word and the connecting letters, and

we obtain the following:

C f p w y w e

e o v x v d

n u w u c

t v t b

u s a

r z

y

By following the oblique line of letters, we get the words “~The

Century~.” When all the words are so adjusted, we read, “~The

Century~ is an entertaining magazine.”

I cannot refrain from adding one more method which has been proposed

for the transmission of secret messages. Let a man, says the ingenious

author, breathe his words slowly in a long hollow cane hermetically

sealed at the farthest end, then let him suddenly and closely seal the

end into which he breathed. The voice will continue in the tube till

it has some vent. When the seal is removed at the end which was first

sealed, the words will come but distinctly and in order, but if the

seal at the other end be removed, their inverted series will create

confusion. This happy conception seems to have been proposed in all

good faith by its author.

The first attempt at secret writing by the United States was made by

Silas Deane, who was the first agent sent abroad by the Continental

Congress. He was despatched to France for the purpose of purchasing

arms and ammunition and to sound that country as to the probabilities

of her recognizing the colonies if they should be forced to form

themselves into an independent state; and whether their ambassadors

would be received; and would France be disposed to enter into any

treaty or alliance with them, for commerce or defense, or both; and

if so, upon what principal condition. His instructions stated: “It

is scarce necessary to pretend any other business at Paris than the

gratifying of that curiosity which draws numbers thither yearly, merely

to see so famous a city.” His mission being confidential, it was

necessary to have great secrecy attached to his correspondence. For

this purpose he was furnished by John Jay with an invisible ink and

a chemical preparation for rendering the writing legible. As letters

apparently blank might excite suspicion and lead to experiments that

might expose the contrivance, the communications were written on large

sheets of paper, beginning with a short letter written with common ink,

respecting some fictitious person or business and under a feigned name,

and the balance of the paper was used for the real or intended letter

written in the invisible ink. Mr. Jay was the only one intrusted with

the secret, and the letters were consequently addressed to him as “John

Jay, Esq., Attorney at Law.” When a single sheet was insufficient to

contain the secret despatch, Mr. Timothy Jones, or some other imaginary

gentleman, requested the favor of Mr. Jay to forward the inclosed

letter according to its directions; and the inclosed letter, with the

exception of a short note on some fictitious business, was filled with

the residue of the despatch in invisible ink.

Robert Morris, a member of the Committee of Secret Correspondence,

writing to Mr. Jay, from Philadelphia, says:

Although your express delivered me your favor last Wednesday or

Thursday, yet I did not receive the letter from Mr. Deane until this

day, and shall now send after the express, that he may convey this

safe to your hands; should he be gone I must find some other safe

conveyance. You will find inclosed both of Mr. Deane’s letters, as

you desired, and I shall thank you for the copy of the invisible

part. He had communicated so much of this secret to me before his

departure, as to let me know he had fixed with you a mode of writing

that would be invisible to the rest of the world; he also promised

to ask you to make a full communication to me, but in this use your

pleasure; the secret, so far as I do or shall know it, will remain so

to all other persons.

The letter of Mr. Deane written in common ink and at the top of the

page was as follows:

Dear Sir: I have now to inform you of my safe arrival at this

place, after a passage of thirty-two days from Martinico, and am so

extremely weak that I am scarcely able to hold my pen, yet could not

let this opportunity slip of letting you know where I am, and that I

have a prospect of recovering; for though weak, my fever and cough

have left me almost entirely. There is not much news here, and if

there was, I should not dare to write it, as that might intercept the

letter if taken. My compliments to all friends.

Yours

~Timothy Jones~.

John Jay, Esqr., Attorney at Law,

New York.

Under this apparently innocent letter was written in invisible ink the

following public and important letter to Robert Morris:

Dear Sir: I shall send you, in October clothing for twenty thousand

men, thirty thousand fusils, one hundred tons of powder, two hundred

brass cannon, twenty four brass mortars, with shells, shot, lead,

etc., in proportion. I am to advise you that if, in future, you will

give commissions to seize Portuguese ships, you may depend on the

friendship and alliance of Spain. Let me urge this measure; much may

be got, nothing can be lost by it. Increase, at all events, your

navy. I will procure, if commissioned, any quantity of sail-cloth

and cordage. A general war is undoubtedly at hand in Europe, and

consequently America will be safe, if you baffle the arts and arms of

the two Howes through the summer. Every one here is in your favor.

Adieu. I will write you again next week.

~Silas Deane.~

The letter with its secret companion was received by Mr. Jay, who,

having applied the necessary chemicals, brought out the hidden intent

of the writer, transcribed both letters, and sent them to Robert

Morris, in order that the information conveyed might be presented to

Congress for the consideration of that body. Mr. Morris acknowledged

the receipt of Mr. Jay’s letter as follows:

Your favor of the 7th ultimo came safe to hand. Timothy Jones

is certainly a very entertaining agreeable man; one would not

judge so from anything contained in his cold insipid letter of

the 17th September, unless you take pains to find the concealed

beauties therein; the cursory observations of a sea captain would

never _discover_ them, but transferred from his hand to the

penetrating eye of a _Jay_, the diamonds stand confessed at

once. It puts me in mind of a search after the philosopher’s stone,

but I believed not one of the followers of that phantom has come

so near the mark as you, my good friend. I handed a copy of your

discoveries to the Committee, which now consists of Harrison, R.

H. Lee, Hooper, Dr. Witherspoon, Johnson, you, and myself; and

honestly told them who it was from, because measures are necessary in

consequence of it; but I have not received any directions yet.

Congress responded, however, by giving orders for a supply of blankets,

clothing, flints, and lead to be shipped in armed vessels, and these

were to enter the service of the United States.

Shortly after this another cipher was adopted by the Government, which

continued to be used by the Department of State after the inauguration

of the Government under the Constitution, down to as recent a date as

1867. It was very seldom used, however, after the War of 1812. It was

constructed upon the principle of a combination of numbers ranging

from 1 to 1600, each number representing either punctuation-marks,

letters, syllables, or in some few instances complete words. It

was a cumbersome, laborious cipher, suited, perhaps, to ordinary

correspondence, with the merit of being easily deciphered by an expert.

It was found not only very inconvenient for corresponding by means of

the cable, but exceedingly expensive. A similar cipher, however, is now

being used by at least one of the principal powers of Europe.

In 1864 the French government under the Emperor Napoleon III, taking

advantage of the Civil War in the United States, occupied Mexico

and placed Maximilian on the throne as emperor. As soon as the war

was over, Mr. Seward took steps to force the French to retire from

that country, and by that means enabled the people to choose between

Maximilian as emperor and Juarez as president, without being influenced

by the presence of the French military forces. A cabinet meeting was

called, at which General Grant was present by invitation. The result of

the conference was that an instruction was prepared by Secretary Seward

to our minister at Paris that plainly stated the sentiments of the

United States, which was to the effect that the French must evacuate

Mexico at once, or the United States would send her troops into that

country and help the forces of the republic. The Atlantic cable had

only just been completed, and the president of the company wanted the

patronage of the Government to aid the enterprise. He called upon Mr.

Seward and requested him to use the cable, promising that the rates

should be entirely satisfactory to the Government, notwithstanding

those to the public were ten dollars per word. In addition to the

ordinary charge, the cable company imposed double rates upon all

messages in which a cipher code was used. The instruction was given to

the writer to put it in cipher, when he called the attention of the

secretary to the great expense that would attend its transmission by

cable, as each syllable in the instruction would be represented by four

figures, and the cable company considered each figure as an equivalent

for a word, and charged double rates accordingly. Having in view the

assurances of the president of the company that the charges would not

be excessive, Mr. Seward gave directions to have the instruction put

in cipher and sent by cable, which was done. The instruction would

occupy in print about a page and a quarter of an ordinary congressional

document. The bill of the cable company was afterward submitted, and

it amounted to over $23,000, which Mr. Seward, not considering it

reasonable, refused to pay. The rates were soon reduced to the public

one half, and several other reductions followed, but the bill which

Mr. Seward refused to pay was never paid.

During the occupation of Mexico by the French, cipher telegrams were

sent to General Bazaine, commander of the French forces. Some of these

coming into the possession of the authorities of the United States

were deciphered by an army officer and much valuable information was

obtained.

The value and importance of secret writing is of course obvious, but

the advantages which have accrued from it, while easily surmised, have

become known only in a vague and general way. A specific illustration

of a particular benefit derived from it by the United States in a very

important matter and at a very critical time relates to the treaty of

1871 between this country and Great Britain, whereby the so-called

“Alabama Claims” were to be adjusted by a Tribunal of Arbitration at

Geneva, and which came very near being nullified in consequence of our

presentation to that tribunal of what was known as “indirect claims,”

namely, claims not for actual losses, but for the deprivation of

prospective profits, etc. Great Britain sought to use the presentation

of these claims as a ground for setting aside the jurisdiction of

the tribunal, and consequently subverting it. Our agent before the

tribunal, Judge J. C. Bancroft Davis, devised a plan for saving the

case of the United States and preserving the tribunal. The nature of

this plan was such as to require the approval of the President before

it could be put into operation, and had to be communicated to him

quickly as well as secretly. In anticipation of some such emergency,

the writer, at Mr. Davis’s request, had prepared for him, just before

his departure for Geneva, a cipher which, while perfectly secret,

could be easily managed and the key of which could be memorized. Mr.

Davis and Secretary Fish had recourse to this cipher for the purpose

of the important correspondence above referred to, which could not

have been conducted openly and which resulted in the maintenance of

the Geneva Tribunal. An amusing feature of this correspondence was the

perturbation it caused our minister at London, General Schenck. The

messages were relayed through his office, and he, not being in the

secret of the cipher, insisted upon having them repeated, because, as

he said, he found them to be only “a jargon of unmeaning words.”

The Government, as such, has no distinct cipher, but each of the three

departments, State, War, and Navy, the only departments really needing

methods for secrecy of correspondence, is provided with a cipher of its

own.

During the Civil War the Navy Department devised a cipher which was

simply a substitution of one letter of the alphabet for another, and

this was operated by a mechanical contrivance consisting of disks,

one of which was stationary and the other movable. The stationary

disk contained the letters of the “true reading,” and the movable

disk the cipher substitutes. The process of its operation was tedious

and awkward, but it was continued in use until the middle of the

eighties, when several naval officers were designated to prepare a more

convenient code. The new system is a combination of numerals and cipher

words to represent words and phrases, following the general principle

of most commercial codes. While not as full as it might be, it answers

its purpose very well. Through overcaution, however, its operation has

been made unnecessarily complicated, two translations being required to

decipher a message, while one should be sufficient. Words have to be

translated into figures and the figures then translated into the true

meaning.

The code-book of this cipher is always kept in a canvas bag lined with

zinc and heavily weighted. The bag is in the personal custody of the

commanding officer, whose orders are, that in the event of danger of

capture by the enemy, it is to be thrown overboard. Hence there is

little likelihood of the code ever falling into improper hands.

The cipher of the War Department is very simple in its nature, and by

virtue of its simplicity, easiness of operation, its inscrutability,

and above all the readiness with which, in the event of its capture, a

new and entirely different key can be substituted, commends itself as

possessing a superiority over all others for military purposes. It may

in a general way be described as an ingenious method of distorting the

order of the words in a message, and further obscuring the sense by the

systematic interpolation of irrelevant words and the introduction of

meaning and meaningless names. The variety of distortions is great, and

whenever a copy of the cipher is captured, another can be supplied and

communicated to all parties interested in a very short space of time.

This cipher is an elaboration of one that was designed for the governor

of Ohio, at the beginning of our Civil War, to facilitate secret

correspondence between him and the governors of Indiana and Illinois.

Its effectiveness soon became recognized, and it was generally used

during the war for the direction of military operations and the

correspondence between our generals and the War Department.

In this connection it may be stated that during our Civil War the

telegraph and the cipher system for the first time in history became

important factors in the matter of tactics and strategy. The telegraph

was first utilized as a military aid during the Crimean War (1854-55),

but its use was confined to being merely a means of communication

between the headquarters of the allied forces. But in our Civil War

the telegraph and cipher were the principal channels for the direction

of military operations, embodying, as they did, all the elements of

celerity and secrecy, and rendering the signal corps picturesque but

very ancient fire or flag system, in general, of very little practical

value. By way of illustration, the fact may here be stated that during

the siege of Petersburg, General Meade received and sent in five hours

over three hundred telegrams, being more than one in every three

minutes. Such a feat is readily seen to be far beyond the capacity of

any system of wigwagging, fire, or flag signals, no matter how ancient

or modern. It must be admitted, however, that these signal systems are

at times of great and essential value, especially when telegraph lines

cannot be established. The victory of the Federal troops at Lookout

Mountain was mainly due to the skill of our signal corps in deciphering

the signals of the Confederates and advising our generals accordingly.

For military purposes, telegraph operators were looked upon as

possessing the best qualifications for enciphering and deciphering

secret communications, but the sense of self-importance or esteem

which seemed to attach to the person intrusted with these operations

caused the staff-officers eagerly to seek such employment. As the war

progressed, however, the work gradually devolved entirely upon the

telegraphers, but not until after some discomfiting experiences on

the part of some distinguished officers. General Grant undertook to

send from La Grange, Tennessee, a cipher message to General Hamilton,

who was at the front. Hamilton could not understand it, and had it

repeated, but all to no purpose. Grant insisted that the message was

correctly enciphered, but very soon afterward he gladly abandoned the

cipher business to his operators. On another occasion General Grant,

upon leaving his headquarters at Chattanooga to go to Knoxville, failed

to take his telegraph operator with him. While at Knoxville he received

several telegrams from Washington which he could not understand, and

being consequently much annoyed, he directed his operator to turn

over the cipher-key to his chief of staff, so that he would not be

troubled with unintelligible telegrams in the future. For doing this he

was reprimanded by General-in-Chief Halleck, who, in a letter, dated

January 22, 1864, said:

A new and very complicated cipher was prepared for communications

between you and the War Department which, by direction of the

Secretary of War was to be communicated to only two individuals--one

at your headquarters and one in the War Department. It was to be

communicated to no one else--not even to me or any member of my

staff.... On account of this cipher having been communicated to Col.

Comstock, the Secretary has directed another to be prepared in its

place, which is to be communicated _to no one, no matter what his

rank_, without his special authority.

General Grant replied that he had regarded the whole matter of the

cipher management as merely an exhibition of departmental bureaucracy,

and that he had considered himself as capable as the director of the

bureau of telegraph matters in Washington to select a proper person

to intrust with the cipher, but he was no stickler for forms and was

always ready to obey any order or even wish of the Secretary of War,

or any of his superiors, no matter how conveyed, if he only knew or

thought it came from him. This ended the episode, and in a few hours

the new cipher was ready for use.

Copies of our military cipher messages frequently got into the hands

of the Confederates by means of tapping the wires, but they never

succeeded in deciphering them, although they went to the extent of

advertising them in their newspapers for decipherment, and it may be

added, to the credit of our corps of military telegraph operators, that

no operator ever proved recreant to his trust.

As compared with the simplicity of complexity and celerity of operation

of the Government’s military cipher, that of the Confederates was

very crude and clumsy. All their methods of secret communication were

unraveled by our signal corps and telegraph operators. In addition

to their signal system, the Confederates had a cipher for use in

telegraphing and one for sending secret information through the mail.

The first telegraph cipher message captured by our forces was the

following:

Vicksburg, Dec. 26, 1862.

Gen. J. E. Johnston, Jackson.

I prefer oaavyr, it has reference to xhvkjqchffabpzelreqpzwnyk

to prevent anuzeyxswstpjw at that point, raeelpsghvelvtzfautl

ilasltlhifnaigtsmmlfgcca jd.

~J. C. Pemberton~,

_Lt. Gen. Comdg._

After translation it read:

I prefer _Canton_. It has reference to _fortifications at

Yazoo City_ to prevent _passage of river_ at that point.

_Force landed about three thousand, above mouth of river._

This code was merely a system of transposition or substitution of

letters, which was effected by the use of either one of the three

following keys, “Manchester Bluff,” “Complete victory,” or “Come

retribution,” in connection with a square formed by twenty-six

alphabets, the letters of each being written horizontally, one alphabet

under the other, the first beginning with “a,” the second with “b,”

the third with “c,” and so on, following the regular sequence of the

letters. In the foregoing despatch the key “Manchester Bluff” was

used, and by placing those letters over the enciphered letters of the

message and applying the squared alphabets and beginning with the

letters _oaavvr_, we look for “o” under the letter m in the top

alphabet and find it in the alphabet which begins with c, and translate

it c. Then we look for “a” under the letter a (the second letter of

Manchester), and find that it means a; then we look for “a” under n

(the third letter of Manchester) in the top alphabet, and find it in

the alphabet which begins with n, and we translate it n, and so on.

This system has no special merit except its age. The ancients used it,

and it is generally the plan adopted by tyros in cryptography. The

tediousness of its process makes it impractical.

The mail cipher consisted of substituted letters; telegraphic

characters; parts of geometric figures, like the inscription on one of

the tombs in Trinity churchyard

[Illustration]

(meaning “Remember death”); and a few hieroglyphics. A letter from

a Confederate agent which was intercepted in 1863 by the postmaster

at New York was written in this cipher. Notwithstanding its puzzling

appearance, it was deciphered readily, and the information obtained

enabled the Government to seize a large quantity of bank-notes and the

machinery for printing them which had been prepared for the Confederacy

in that city. The lack of ingenuity and skill and the great crudity and

cumbersomeness displayed by the Confederates in their ciphers must be

regarded as surprising.

The cipher of the Department of State is the most modern of all in

the service of the Government. It embraces the valuable features of

its predecessors and the merits of the latest inventions. Being used

for every species of diplomatic correspondence, it is necessarily

copious and unrestricted in its capabilities, but at the same time

it is economic in its terms of expression. It is simple and speedy

in its operation, but so ingenious as to secure absolute secrecy.

The construction of this cipher, like many ingenious devices whose

operations appear simple to the eye but are difficult to explain in

writing, would actually require the key to be furnished for the purpose

of an intelligible description of it.

Ciphers are now more generally used than at any other period of the

world’s history. Introduced for the first time by the United States

in connection with the telegraph as a war factor, telegraphic ciphers

have now become incorporated in the military systems of all nations.

But it is in peaceful pursuits that the largest field for their

operations has been found. They are now an essential element of all

financial, commercial, and industrial enterprises. In former times they

were employed for purposes of evil and cruelty, and were consequently

looked upon with horror and aversion. Their functions now, however, are

chiefly to benefit humanity by facilitating commerce and industry, and

hence they merit public interest and favor.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

THE GRAPES OF ESHCOL

BY EMILY HUNTINGTON MILLER

WITH DECORATIONS BY FRANK VINCENT DU MOND

I have not entered in: across my way,

Shining and deep, a silent river lies;

But sometimes, in the dawning of the day,

I see the vision of its vineyards rise.

And once, when Joy and I walked hand in hand,

One passed, his staff with purple clusters bent;

The winey juices dripped along the sand,

And all the air throbbed fragrance as he went.

He spake no word, but in his eyes there shone

The steady radiance of the evening star,

And wooing breath of music, lightly blown

By fitful winds, came stealing from afar.

And still I wait till, on some raptured morn,

Astir with wings, and tremulous with light,

The grapes of Eschol, through the desert borne,

May gleam again upon my eager sight.

Tranquil and cool, a little path will run

Through smiling meadows downward to the sea.

Through fruitful vineyards shining in the sun,

And Joy, that fled, will walk again with me.

[Illustration]

THE FRATERNITY IDEA AMONG COLLEGE WOMEN

WHAT DOES IT STAND FOR?

BY EDITH RICKERT

The wide attention that lately has been attracted to the influence

of the fraternities in men’s colleges and universities, from the

social and democratic points of view, has suggested the treatment

of the somewhat similar societies in colleges for women. At our

request, Miss Rickert has made a comprehensive and impartial

investigation, the results of which are embodied in the present paper

and in one to follow, entitled, “What Can We Do About It?” Parents,

college authorities, fraternity members, and other students will be

interested in the facts and conclusions here presented.--~The

Editor.~

A trifling device of Greek letters in gold and enamel is a potent

badge of social distinction in our democratic country, a hallmark of a

certain sort of aristocracy.

[Illustration]

The college fraternities are aristocratic in that they are

self-perpetuating. Their privileges are not to be won through the

conquest of adverse conditions and opposing forces; they are handed

down by the older generations. Theoretically, admittance depends upon

congeniality of spirit; virtually, clanship of race is coming to count

more than kinship of soul. The chapters to-day show an increasing

proportion of brothers, daughters, cousins, and friends. “If we build

a chapter-house, Mrs. Vangoelet will allow her two sisters to come in

with us; otherwise not,” expresses this attitude.

The Pan Hellenic Society is an organization of nearly fifty thousand

college women, which is spreading enormously. Sixty chapters were

established between 1890 and 1900, and two hundred between 1900 and

1910. It has a foothold in seventy-five of our leading coeducational

institutions (that is, in all but about three), and several of the

large women’s colleges. It is elaborately inspected and regulated by

Pan-Hellenics, national and local.

The fraternities are aristocratic in that they are destructive to

freedom of intercourse. The fraternal spirit is the great modern

separator. It builds first a high wall between the Greeks and the

barbarians, and then a maze of social distinctions between fraternity

and fraternity. Are there not Attic Greeks and Doric, and Greeks from

the far Ionian Isles?

The women’s fraternities began as sororities, and the change of name

is significant. It means, they claim, that women as human beings

have as much right to be included in the word “fraternity” as in the

phrase “the brotherhood of man.” It means more than that. Consciously

or unconsciously they have been moved by the aristocratic impulse to

attach the early traditions, to create the social atmosphere, of the

men’s fraternities; in other words, to lengthen the pedigree of their

organization.

Is this unjust? The fraternity women have responded most generously to

my inquiries; they have heaped upon me a small mountain of manuscript

in explanation and defense of their theories and their practice. How

shall I get at the truth? It is almost impossible to say anything that

is not true of one fraternity or one chapter and at the same time

untrue of others; but I have tried to understand their ideals and to

follow up and judge the tendencies of their practice.

With college men the fraternity is frankly a social privilege which

may become an invaluable business asset in after life. With women

it is theoretically a means of completing individual development:

“The university endeavors to graduate a student; the fraternity a

significant, unselfish, gracious woman.”

The fraternity idea, however, reaches about one student in ten!

But forget for a time the nine tenths, the heterogeneous mass of the

“barbarians,” and look at the system as it develops the elect few;

and, to be just, consider it in its ideal form, toward which all the

chapters are striving. Here is a group of between fifteen and thirty

girls living in a dignified, well-appointed chapter-house near the

campus, with a “house mother,” or chaperon. They are good-looking,

well-dressed, all-round girls; athletic, dramatic, social-minded,

rarely given to overstudy, almost always popular with men. They are

not all rich, and not all of patrician family. One is a governor’s

daughter, one a milliner’s; one spends all her summers abroad, one

earns next year’s fees by teaching in a vacation school; one has always

helped with the housework at home, another has never touched a duster

or a broom until she takes her turn in polishing the chapter-house

floors. If they have one common quality, it is this, as an observant

college officer says, that they “do not have to be explained; they are

so instantaneously attractive as to make the reason for their selection

immediately evident.”

These girls make a happy family of elder and younger sisters, the

elder feeling strongly responsible for the physical, intellectual,

and spiritual welfare of the younger, the younger bound to heed the

precepts and to follow the examples of the elder. They are closely

linked by observance of a ritual which is said to be beautiful and

uplifting. One enthusiast writes me: “That mere girls could have

written our rituals, given expression and symbol to our creeds and

initiation ceremonies, seems almost impossible, yet a proof of the

divinity of clear-eyed womanhood.”

They are said to be outspoken in criticizing one another in the light

of their ideals, meek in accepting criticism. One chapter even went to

the length of establishing after its service a special meeting in which

members were subjected to the fire of anonymous criticisms from their

fellows, and so set to cure dominant faults. They manage their own

household and business affairs with a precision and technic alarming to

read about. They learn independence and self-reliance, on the one hand;

self-control and a graceful yielding to the will of the majority on the

other.

Their friendships are more loyal than the outsider can well imagine.

Pushed to extremes, this loyalty even led, in one instance, to a

concealment of theft and a levying of contributions to make up the

loss; in two other cases cited, to expulsion from a chapter for “loose

morals,” with, however, a rigid silence in the presence of outsiders as

to the cause.

Indeed, life in the chapter-house seems to call out most of the

virtues--unselfishness, neatness, tidiness, promptness, and general

efficiency. In this college home, which to the fraternity girls is far

more the vital center of their college experience than the classroom or

the laboratory, there is much exchange of hospitality between chapters

and individuals. Members of the faculty and distinguished guests are

entertained. The girls are at the opposite pole from the poor student

who cooks her own breakfast in her room, from the unfortunate “barb”

who is left to the promiscuous friendships of the cheap boarding-house.

They learn to plan a successful dinner, to pacify an enraged cook,

to distinguish between porterhouse and sirloin, to lay out money to

the best advantage in entertainment, to undertake without a quiver

a reception for a thousand guests with only an afternoon of actual

preparation. They learn to preside and to receive with grace and charm,

to deal tactfully with many temperaments, to shuffle guests. Briefly,

they become skilled in the complete art of the social game.

To sum up, according to the claims made for the fraternity girl in

the handbook of her organization; she develops individuality and the

power to lead; she acquires invaluable business training and womanly

charm. She is given a wider outlook over the field of collegiate

education than her less fortunate sisters; she is blessed with

congenial friendships that amount almost to a continuance of family

relationships, and “whatever the line of service to which she may

consecrate herself,” she “will always be a success.”

This is a composite picture, made up from scores of glowing accounts of

the benefits of the system. Is it true?

Certainly the shield has a reverse side. Over against the select

fraternity of the pillared porch, let us place that which, during a

severe winter, had to go outside the pale and take in new members in

order to pay the coal bill. Let us also remember the chaperon who is

also the cook, and does not appear at functions.

“Good-looking?” Yes, I have heard of a would-be chapter that was almost

excluded from the national organization because the photograph sent

on showed that they did not do their hair becomingly; and they were

solemnly admonished to this effect in a type-written letter!

“Well-dressed?” One would scarcely believe the difference it makes to a

“rushee” whether she is wearing a smart fall hat or a summer left-over;

and if her belt pin should one day fail to do its duty, her cause might

as well be lost. One method of choosing likely members is to send

delegates to the station to observe the new girls as they arrive. There

is witnessed the triumph of the tailored suit over the dowdy frills

of the country dressmaker, of the suitcase that has lived abroad over

the bulging valise that is packed with home-grown apples and home-made

cookies.

“All-round?” Yes, with possibly a slight depression on the side of

scholarship. I have heard of a good many cases in which girls were

dragged out of the mire of conditions and hauled through their college

course by the zeal of fraternity sisters pulling all together for the

glory of the chapter. They have ideals of scholarship, indeed they are

trying to establish a standard for admission, and they even carry off

a share of the honors; but, on the whole, their social mind interferes

with the scholastic attitude, and prevents over-application to mental

effort.

“Rich?” Not necessarily; yet would not the girl who drives her own

automobile have some advantage over the one who works her way through

college, and the girl whose parents have a delightful home most

suitable for “rushing” purposes near the campus be preferred to any

sweet madonna-of-the-boarding-house? I heard only the other day how

an initiation fee was raised to five times its original amount on the

plea, “The girls will appreciate it _so_ much more if they have to

pay a _lot_!”

“Family?” Not at all, yet I know of a girl who was rushed hard and as

suddenly dropped because it was discovered that her father had been a

butcher; of another, who was regarded as eligible until it was found

out, what neither her name nor her features suggested, that her really

distinguished family was of Jewish strain.

These instances must be set over against the ideal picture of the

governor’s daughter and the milliner’s child, the mother’s helper and

the patrician of the South, scrubbing floors together.

Family jars, I am told, are beneath the dignity of the fraternities.

It is difficult not to be skeptical as to the power of the ritual or

of the pin to keep twenty healthy girls from splitting into factions

over nothing at all; but even if outer harmony is maintained, is

it conceivable that there should not very often be discomfort and

even actual suffering among the minority? Suppose a chapter one year

includes twelve students and eight butterflies, and the next year

changes to three students and seventeen butterflies? What of the

occasional “mistake”? I know a Theta girl whose mother was a Beta,

but this fact was not discovered by the Betas until she was pledged.

“What a pity!” they lamented; but “What an escape!” said she. As it

happened, she felt entirely at home with the Thetas and could not bear

the Betas; but suppose the situation had been reversed! She would have

had no remedy except to withdraw, which would have made her painfully

conspicuous and set everybody to wondering about the reason, or to

change her college. But a girl out of harmony with a crowd and obliged

to live with them in intimate association, is greatly to be pitied,

whether she conforms or holds her own. What is to be said of the

ethics of forcing an Episcopalian to dance in Lent against her strong

religious scruples? Can it be doubted that such a minority often yields

its own convictions to keep pace with the others, or, not yielding, is

painfully out of step?

As to the wonderful ritual devised by “clear-eyed womanhood,” I have

heard it also described as “childish,” “poppycock,” “bunk.” The ideals

are necessarily those of immaturity, and have all the vagueness and

some of the wrong-headedness of youth. “They are not harmful,” writes a

dean, a fraternity woman who is familiar also with a college where no

fraternities exist, “except that they are sentimental.” I take this to

mean that they are more suited to discourses at fraternity banquets, as

a kind of leaven to reminiscences of good old times, than to practical

application outside the fraternity world.[3] That they may “have a

dynamic force upon character” is doubtless true of the persons who do

not develop beyond the stage at which they are propounded; that they

lead to much real kindness among fraternity sisters in time of illness

and trouble need not be doubted. But a loyalty which hides a thief and

turns her loose in the world without warning may be a dangerous thing,

and when it expels a girl for “loose morals,” and gives no further

explanation, it is cruel, if the term means cigarettes or slight

indiscretions with men, and dangerous if her character is such that she

ought not to be allowed to remain on the campus.

“Manage their own households and business affairs?” Yes, but a peep

behind the scenes reveals a case of cutting out breakfast to save up

for a tea, of giving a formal dinner and living on bread and potatoes

for a week to make up the expense. An inspector’s story hints that this

business management is not unlike the average amateur performance. A

dean, herself a fraternity woman of many years’ experience, writes:

“Usually ... the accounts of such an organization are not so well

looked after as those of the more general women’s organizations in

which less of the ‘family’ idea prevails,” and “the business training

of these undergraduates” ... is “probably inferior to that gained

by officers in such bodies as the Women’s League, the Young Women’s

Christian Association, the Student Government Association, or the

boards of college publications.”

Then are the conclusions quoted by the handbook as to the influence

of the fraternities on their members warranted by the facts? Do they

cultivate individuality? How is it possible? In the first place, the

fraternity girl is essentially “clubable”; and by the statute of

limitations in personality she is bound to be more conventional, yes,

even more superficial in her attractions, than the girl who is strongly

individual. The fraternities are admitted to be groups in which like

seeks like, and the whole flock aims to induce still greater likeness

to the pattern of the group. The girl with a streak of genius cannot

easily find her like, so she flocks not at all; the poor, proud girl

fears patronage, and will not; the awkward, ill-bred country girl

can’t; the dig dare not for fear of missing some intellectual good

thing. All these must develop more or less as individuals; but the

fraternity girl, unless she enters as an individual strong enough to

dominate her companions, must herself be dominated by them.

“Cultivate leadership?” Probably, in that they give to all their

members in some measure the poise that comes only from an assured

social position; and poise is the first requisite for leadership.

Again, the fraternity girl who takes a leading part in outside college

activities has always an advantage in that she does this with the

backing of her group, who are all prepared to do team-work when

occasion demands.

In the same way, it is only the few that from the first show executive

and business ability who get much training in these directions through

fraternity membership.

As to the wide outlook over the field of collegiate education, it is

limited in two ways: first, in that the fraternity women are more or

less segregated from the other students, and second, in that they do

not come into contact at all with the great women’s colleges, Vassar,

Wellesley, Smith, Radcliffe, and Bryn Mawr.[4]

[Illustration:

GAMMA PHI BETA DELTA GAMMA

ALPHA PHI KAPPA KAPPA GAMMA

ALPHA CHI OMEGA CHI OMEGA

A GROUP OF WOMEN’S FRATERNITY HOUSES (UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN)]

Then is the fraternity woman bound to be a success? Few of them, even

while they claim inestimable benefits inexplicable to the outsider, say

this. Some of them think that when the admitted defects in the system

are removed, when rushing is prohibited, when pledge-day is postponed

until the new students have had time to find themselves intellectually

and socially and to make their friends, when a uniform scholarship

standard and uniform house-rules are enforced, it will make for the

finest type of womanhood.

[Illustration: Drawn by J. Norman Lynd

“ONE METHOD OF CHOOSING LIKELY MEMBERS IS TO SEND DELEGATES TO THE

STATION TO OBSERVE THE NEW GIRLS AS THEY ARRIVE”]

Doubtless there is need of these things. When rushing reaches the point

of tying a girl in the rooms of a fraternity house until she puts on

the fraternity-badge, it is time to take measures. When of two girls

who are intimate friends, one is pledged because she knows better how

to make use of her good points, while, with the breaking up of their

friendship, the other, made of equally fine stuff, is left forlorn

because she lacks an intangible something that attracts all the girls

in a chapter, or has an intangible something that repels one member of

it, a remedy should be found. When a popular girl has an engagement for

five nights in a single week, or averages from sixty to eighty “dates”

in a year, it almost looks as though scholarship needs attention. When

the chaperon exerts her influence from the kitchen, and social events

are untrammeled as to numbers and hours and expense, it is almost time

for a reform. In other words, while there are chapters that are almost

wholly admirable in their constituency and conduct, there are also

others that reflect in the miniature college world the pace of the

civilization about them.

But if all these reforms were accomplished,--and it is difficult to see

how enough pressure can be brought by the National Pan-Hellenic to do

this except sporadically,--the evils of the system remain as before,

inherent and ineradicable. As regards those within, the fraternity idea

means _type_; as regards those outside, it means _caste_.

“You’d never think Caroline was a Chi Chi, would you? She ought to have

been a Tau Tau!” is overheard on the campus. What does this mean but

type?

“The girl who sits next to me is an Alpha; I knew it before I saw her

pin.” What does this mean but type?

[Illustration: Drawn by J. Norman Lynd

A NOVEL METHOD OF EXTRACTING A PROMISE TO WEAR A FRATERNITY-BADGE]

“I knew a chapter that was made up of three distinct types, digs,

butterflies, and Y. W. C. A.’s.... To be sure, it rather _slumped_

for a time.” Why?

When a shrewd member of the faculty can forecast that certain freshmen

will make Gamma Gamma, and certain others Omicron Omega, it must be

admitted that not only is there a general fraternity type, but there is

a tendency to type for each combination of Greek letters that is worn

on a pin.

[Illustration: A TYPICAL SITTING-ROOM IN A GIRL’S WELL-APPOINTED

FRATERNITY HOUSE]

No doubt in the leveling up to type, many individual faults, such as

selfishness, self-distrust, laziness, frivolity, lack of initiative,

lack of self-control, bad temper, bad manners, and so on, are

corrected; but in so far as the system is artificial, it is bound

to develop conventionality. It is artificial because it chooses and

restricts friendships. Close intimacy with outsiders is almost always

made impracticable by circumstances and the mutual attitude of the

elect and the non-elect; and in some cases it is held to be disloyal to

the chapter. It is artificial because it strives to eliminate from a

girl’s experience all incongruous and hostile elements, and these are

often conducive to growth. The fraternity girl’s position is comparable

to that of the child who is fed on soft foods.

That is, the trouble is that she _is cultivated_ instead of being

allowed to grow freely. She is rushed, pledged, initiated; she is

studied, counseled, criticized, disciplined, drawn out, molded. Her

power of initiative is developed only in that she “_is made_ to go

out and do things.” Even as an upper classman, when it is her turn to

uphold the fraternity ideals and to mold her younger sisters, she still

lives in the rarefied atmosphere of an artificially selected community,

where there is no chance for the free play of the individual. The

fraternity girl, with all her initiative, her poise, her charm, her

efficiency, is crippled by the fact that she is not allowed to come to

grips with all sort of conditions and people, by which alone is gained

the personal, as opposed to the group, attitude toward life.

Does the fraternity idea mean caste? Are fraternity girls snobbish?

This question brought an emphatic denial from fraternity women on all

sides. The existence of snobbery here and there, in chapters and in

individuals, is admitted; but the attitude of the organization, I am

told, is to root it out, and by all means to encourage democracy. The

only difficulty here is that snobbery is the foundation-stone of the

system, and when it goes, the system topples. This is the way of it.

If you and I have a secret, and we talk together in the presence of a

third person who does not know it, by no means in our human power can

we avoid a snobbish attitude toward that third person. We ourselves

may forget the secret; but the person outside, by the very fact that

he is shut out from it, magnifies its importance, and no equality of

dealing is possible between him and ourselves. Extend the picture to

a houseful of girls, linked together by a common knowledge, a common

family, and a common social life, and give these girls the right to say

who shall be privileged to join them, what chance for equal dealing

has the outsider, or even a less closely organized group of outsiders,

against their united social attitude? The fraternity girl may not feel

_snobbish_, but if the barbarian is _snubbed_, the result is

much the same. What though the “frat” girl claims that the “barb” will

not meet her half-way? As long as there is consciousness of effort to

bridge the gap, the gap is plainly there.

[Illustration: Drawn by J. Norman Lynd

MEETING DISTINGUISHED GUESTS AT A FRATERNITY HOUSE, AND--]

Where there is a gap, there is caste, and where caste is recognized,

snobbery is inevitable. When the fraternity woman disclaims snobbery,

she means that she is careful not to emphasize the distinctions between

herself and others. She is like the teacher who, in order to preserve

strict impartiality, takes off her fraternity-pin when she goes to

class. No, the fraternity woman, aware as she is of the “greater

blessings of her lot,” does not snub those less fortunate than herself;

she either ignores them or is kind to them. Sometimes she manages

both attitudes at the same time, as in the case of a party given to

all the students, in which the programs of the fraternity members are

filled weeks ahead. And if the outsiders who go feel like parasites,

it is surely their own fault. Admit, on the one hand, a fund of common

knowledge and common acquaintance, extensive social experience, and

the assurance of social standing, and, on the other, instead of

these things, the ever-present sense of having been passed over as

negligible, or, what is yet worse, of having been tried and found

wanting. Can the gap be bridged?

[Illustration: PREPARING HER OWN DINNER]

Nor do the attempts of the fraternities to bridge the gap bear out

their claims of democracy. In a recent report on social customs made

by a committee of the Pan-Hellenic, only three chapters mentioned any

effort to be “nice” to the whole student body. One spoke of a spring

picnic; two, of attempts at occasional “open houses,” in one case

dubbed a failure by some members; and the third, “prospects of a party

for all college women and a freshman scholarship”! I am afraid it is

impossible to deny that the fraternities live in a world by themselves,

shut off by an insuperable barrier from those who are not “their sort.”

And if this is not caste, what is?

The system, however, does create a sort of noblesse oblige, which in

some cases makes the fraternity girls leaders in the class and student

organizations, Young Women’s Christian Association, and various other

college activities, although in this they are sometimes thwarted

by inter-fraternal rivalries and jealousies, and by the combined

hostilities of the barbarians. Further, they are said to coöperate

earnestly and efficiently with deans and presidents in coercing

refractory members of their own body, and in helping put through

reforms and other measures for the good of the whole student body. They

are the most loyal part of the alumnæ, and through their permanent

connection with their chapters, continue to come back and show interest

in their alma mater long after other students have broken the tie.

[Illustration: Drawn by J. Norman Lynd

“THE UNFORTUNATE ‘BARB’ WHO IS LEFT TO THE PROMISCUOUS FRIENDSHIPS OF

THE CHEAP BOARDING-HOUSE”]

So far I have said little about the girl who is left out. To many of

the fraternity women she seems the most deplorable feature of the

system. Except in the college where the societies contain all but a

very few of the students, her case does not seem to me serious. To be

sure, she misses a great deal of fun and social training; but if she

is worth saving, she saves herself in the end; and if she gives up in

despair and goes home because she does not “make a frat,” she is not

of the stuff that the college needs. Probably some sensitive girls are

embittered for a long time by the slight, but the finer ones conquer,

even though the sting lingers throughout their course. A large number

in the great mass of the students are unaffected by the fraternity

problems. They do not expect or wish to get in, and they have virtually

very little to do with the fraternity girls except as they work in the

same student organizations. They have their own sets, their own social

life, averaging more good times, perhaps, than they are credited with

by their pitying superior sisters. What the university fails to do to

counteract the effects of poverty, ill breeding, bad preparation, and

inexperience is another thing altogether. Individual tragedies settle

themselves, and those who win come out stronger, finer women for their

victory over adverse conditions than any fraternity girl for whom the

way has been made smooth.

But the fraternity idea must be judged not so much by those whom it

shuts out from special privilege as by the results that it produces in

those whom it fosters.

The Pan Hellenic Society believes itself specially chosen and trained

for service. And what has it done? Aside from a vague and general

interest in alumnæ activities, this service is reduced to scholarships,

some isolated attempts in education and philanthropy, a certain

“dynamic force” upon the character of its members, scarcely apparent

to outsiders, and continued perfection of organization, thus far for no

more evident purpose than the reform of its own body.

[Illustration: “‘WORSHIPING AT THEIR OWN LITTLE SHRINE’”]

In other words, the fraternity system seems grotesquely out of

proportion in the general scheme of things. Why should this one feature

of undergraduate life be magnified by means of publications, council

meetings, and conventions, if it is to fulfil no other purpose than

the perpetuation of itself? How does it stand in relation to the many

needs of the world? Is it not rather like a crystallization of an

immature stage of development? Why should a fraternity woman go about

the world seeking only her own kind, like the missionary to China who

wrote to her fraternity paper of the various social advantages that

came to her through her encounters there with Greek sisters? It looks

to me very much like an actual limitation of growth. Take the case of

the country girl whom college has unfitted for her home environment.

It was cited as one of the inestimable blessings of the system that her

sole interest now lies in her fraternity literature and friends. To my

mind this relationship is rather a handicap that retards the shifting

of focus that must take place in her before she can make her life a

success.

For these reasons I believe that the fraternities, notwithstanding

individual benefits, are hastening on our “French Revolution”; they are

creating a type that rules by habit rather than by individual power and

wisdom; and by their inflexible system of caste they are emphasizing

the gap, already more than sufficient for women as for men, between

privilege and the working world.

A college president recently said to me in substance: “I always think

of the fraternity men as in a circle, hand in hand, facing outward; but

of the women as turned the other way, worshiping at their own little

shrine, with their backs to the winds of the world.”

[Illustration: “‘WITH THEIR BACKS TO THE WINDS OF THE WORLD’”]

[3] And yet I read in a belated answer from a broadminded fraternity

woman: “The vows of these childish secret societies are regarded

as just as binding as marriage-vows.”

[4] In Wellesley the societies are local, and in Smith they are not

properly fraternities at all.

[Illustration]

DAVY

BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY

Davy, her knight, her dear, was dead:

Low in dust was the silken head.

“Isn’t there heaven,”

(She was but seven)

“Isn’t there” (sobbing) “for dogs?” she said.

“Man is immortal, sage or fool:

Animals end, by different rule.”

So had they prated

Of things created,

An hour before, in her Sunday-school.

Trusty and glad and true, who could

Match her hero of hardihood,

Rancorless, selfless,

Prideless, pelfless?--

How I should like to be half so good!

Firebrand eye and icicle nose;

Ear inwrought like a guelder-rose;

All the sweet wavy

Beauty of Davy;--

Sad, not to answer whither it goes!

“Isn’t there heaven for dogs that’s dead?

God made Davy, out of His head:

If He unmake him,

Doesn’t He take him?

Why should He throw him away?” she said.

The birds were busy, the brook was gay,

But the little hand was in mine all day.

Nothing could bury

That infinite query:

“Davy,--_would_ God throw him away?”

[Illustration: Copyright by Amy Otis

HORACE HOWARD FURNESS

FROM A PENCIL PORTRAIT BY AMY OTIS]

[Illustration]

OUR GREAT SHAKSPERE CRITIC

THE LATE HORACE HOWARD FURNESS

~November 2, 1833--August 13, 1912~

BY TALCOTT WILLIAMS

Only a great man can accomplish a great task. For fifteen of

Shakspere’s most familiar plays, Horace Howard Furness condensed the

criticism of three centuries for each play in a single volume, save

“Hamlet,” which has two.[5] From 6000 to 8000 works have been published

on Shakspere. All on each play is brought within the compass of its

volume. Who holds this volume holds the fruits of all past criticism

and comment on the play.

Mere industry can do much, but mere industry could never build the

monument of these volumes. I confess I never look at the impressive row

without amazement at the labor for which they stand. It would be much,

if this were all. Long labor of this order grinds like a glacier over a

writer’s style and individuality. Textual criticism saps men. There is

a certain form of stupidity never found except in “notes.”

Small have continual plodders ever won

Save bare authority, from others’ books.

Nothing saves a man from this but personality. The first great tonic

is humor. Dr. Furness, man and work together, brim with it. Who else

would have made a merry mark of the one word in Shakspere--in “The

Tempest,” “young _scamels_ from the rock”--for which no one has

even suggested a convincing or even plausible meaning? The humor

needed to salt these barrels and barrels of Shaksperian pemmican is

much more than the capacity to see a joke. This is to humor what a

pocket-dictionary is to an encyclopedia. What is needed for adequate

comment on Shakspere, the most English of all figures in the world

of letters, is that numberless capacity to see the broad laugh in

all things which lies so near to tears that when the coin of fate is

flipped no man knows which is to be uppermost. This gives sanity. It

enables the editor of a variorum to know from time to time what a fool

a German scholar can make of himself and his author. I suppose no man

could see Horace Howard Furness, that solid figure, that sturdy step,

that firm face of roomy planes and liberal modeling, those twinkling

eyes, that air of benignant wisdom and general good-nature, without

seeing that the worst joke of all, life itself, could not daunt this

resolution or dull this humor.

There is a look we all know on the face of the judge--a detached

habit of thought. It comes on the bench, and it comes, too, let me

assure you, if a man has had before his bar for forty years all the

culprits who for two centuries have been writing about Shakspere. His

beam will stand sure and he will “poise the cause in justice’s equal

scales.” There are scholars whose lives are given to the great in

letters who become surfeited with honey and “in the taste confound the

appetite.” Nothing saves from this but the incommunicable capacity for

the perception of the best. This capacity grows by what it feeds upon.

Through these volumes there has grown certainty of touch and serenity

of judgment, but from the first issue there was apparent, as in the

man, the norm which is not to be corrupted even by the Elizabethan

extravagance of the greatest of Elizabethans.

Dr. Furness came to his life task through the Kemble tradition. The

Kembles, who succeeded Garrick, first gave dignity to Shakspere. Three

critics of the contemporary stage, dramatic critics all, Coleridge,

Lamb, and Hazlitt, two of them working journalists, began the present

attitude. It has since been impossible for any scholar to say, as

Samuel Johnson did, that a passage in a third-rate play, Congreve’s

“Mourning Bride,” was better than anything in Shakspere.

The stage was dear to him, and he believed that no play could be

adequately understood unless it was heard. The foremost players of his

day he knew, and each had counseled with him, and he had gladly learned

from them. With Fanny Kemble and her light touch and perspicuous,

penetrating interpretation as a model, he read the familiar plays

himself to many audiences, interspersing comment. To all who read or

act he was a living proof that lines are “read” by the mind and that he

or she who fully understands will fully express, and he or she alone.

Deaf as he was, stress, cadence, emphasis, intonation, and expression

were as manifold, accurate, and illuminating as his comment. All was

suffused with the cheer and glow of strength, and had behind that

incomparable organ of interpretation, a mind that knew, loved, and

voiced the inner meaning of the uttered word.

It is now sixty-five years since Dr. Furness, a boy of fourteen,

received from Fanny Kemble a season ticket for her readings. In her

readings she sat at a green baize-covered table still cherished in his

library. She made him a Shaksperian for life. He was living in a city

which, until Boston took its place a little over twenty years ago,

as Chicago is doing to-day, gave the stage a more serious, steady,

intelligent, and consistent support than any other.

To a local stage possessing this tradition the Philadelphia of

threescore years ago added through his father, William Henry Furness,

for fifty years head of the Unitarian Church founded by Joseph

Priestley, a more intimate contact with the romantic movement in

England than fell to other young Americans of the period. It was in

Philadelphia that Wordsworth was first appreciated at his full value by

an American. It was there that Coleridge was first printed. There, in a

commonwealth for two centuries nearer Germany than any other American

State, German translation began. William Henry Furness early addressed

himself to this field. His daughter, Mrs. Annis Lee Wister, continued

the task through thirty years, her last work appearing in a volume of

her brother’s variorum series. Where other commentators in our tongue,

in either home of our race, have looked to English comment, Dr. Furness

from the first significant dedication of his “Hamlet” (1877), written

in personal exultation over German triumph as proving Germany no longer

the “Hamlet of Nations,” has seen Shakspere as a world poet, has come

close to German authority and research, and equaled its thorough and

exact character without falling into its pedantry or its far-fetched

gloss.

From many causes he knew all it is to be a gentleman, and when every

year he rose as dean of the Shakspere Society on St. George’s day

to give the solitary toast, “William Shakspere, gentleman,” it was

on the last word that his sturdy accent fell. Beyond all the other

great voices of our tongue, Shakspere was “gentle.” The author of

“Coriolanus” loathed the general mass. He scarce mentions it without

touching on its evil smell. Its sweaty nightcap ever stank in his

nostrils. Certain sympathies are needed for full critical appreciation

of the poet who was the last word of the feudalism of the past to the

democracy of the future, and these sympathies Dr. Furness had.

The Shakspere Society first began his study. For sixty-one years

its fortnightly meetings have gathered a group of men foremost in

Philadelphia. One has read Shakspere there with a cabinet-minister, a

chancellor of the bar association, a judge of the first rank, a great

physician as well known in the art of letters as in the letters of his

art, and a novelist whose best seller has not had its total exceeded.

It was in a like practical atmosphere that, a young man not yet thirty,

Dr. Furness was stirred half a century ago to try to compare texts by

the aid of a scrap-book. Out of this grew the Variorum, first with the

first folio for a basis and later the Cambridge text. He had leisure,

a perilous gift. He early collected, until 7000 volumes were at hand

in a building for their use; but most collectors are swamped by their

apparatus. “A Concordance of Shaksperian Poems,” 1874, by Mrs. Furness,

bespoke a common bond in a perfect union. In 1883 she was taken. After

a generation, those who then saw his grief from without will not

adventure to speak of it. A sense of loss was never absent from him.

It drove him to arduous labors, which the years made a habit of life.

Save a single volume of his father’s intimate friendship with Emerson,

he wrote nothing but the Variorum. His prefaces, his addresses, and his

letters should, now that he is gone, make a volume. He preserved the

epistolary gift, lost in our day. His simplest note had style, charm,

and weight.

In his research he was to the end a firm believer in the study of the

plays and the plays alone. The order in which the plays were written

did not interest him. For “weak endings,” “incomplete lines,” and

all the newer apparatus of Shakspere study, he had an unconcealed

disregard. It was not for him. He would have questioned his personal

identity as soon as question the personal authorship of Shakspere’s

plays.

The happy fortune befell me once at his side and over his ear-trumpet

to say of him that which greatly pleased. It was at the luncheon

when the New Theatre gave him a gold medal and he monopolized the

affectionate attention of every woman in the room. His appreciation

gave whatever value there was to my words, in which I said that it was

not as a scholar unrivaled and a critical authority unequaled that

he would be most loved and remembered, but because his work had made

accurate study possible to the wandering player, given the solitary

teacher on the frontier the best of past criticism, and armed the

smallest village club with a library of learning, making the best of

Shakspere the general possession of all. It was for this he labored.

It was this American ideal that inspired him. It was in the service of

this ideal that he renounced all royalties.

It is only as a friend I write of Horace Howard Furness, as one of

those that loved and knew. It is ever ill writing of one’s friends

when they are gone, but his going changed the very horizon of life for

us all, robbed of its landmark the landscape of the years, and left a

gap where once we all looked up and learned and had new sense of the

fashion in which long purpose, fulfilled and never forgotten, shapes

character and carves cliffs from which men see afar.

For forty years he sat at a desk and worked to make books from books

on a book. In all our American life there is no other, few in any

land, who so encysted himself in a task wholly of letters. There goes

with this for most, as all know, the bent figure, the absent-minded

or the self-conscious gaze, aloofness from the actual. Not he. To

the last there was the sturdy, erect figure, the ruddy, full face,

shaped and blocked as of a man of many tasks, the resolute mustache,

the solid chin, the stiff, short, aggressive hair, early whitened by

tears and tasks--“your white-haired son,” as he wrote in an inimitable

acknowledgment to his father in one of his volumes. Even a year from

eighty his very step was decision. He bore down Chestnut Street in his

weekly visit from his country home like “a royal, good, and gallant

ship, freshly beheld in all her trim.”

There is in Philadelphia a little group which has dined together just

short of four decades every three weeks for eight months of each year.

He was of the first that met, and the last of the first to go. To one

who began thirty years ago as the youngest of those who sat at this

board, and now, alas! finds himself among the elder at a table peopled

with the past, nothing so bulks in all the round of a manifold social

contact as this dominant figure, alert, awake, clear-visioned, felt

through all this gathered group of men. Each of them was himself felt

in all the various walks of life, on the bench, in law, in medicine,

in letters, in art, in journalism, and in affairs; yet he the center,

stone-deaf. How did he do it? I do not know. I only saw. He alone had

the secret. Gay, responsive, indomitable, flashing sheer personality,

and with a big silver ear-trumpet moving here and there, into which

some one at his side poured a reversion of the passing talk, who is

there whom you know, or whom you have known, who could have done it?

None other that I know. Yet he so did it that one felt that the best

recipe and assurance of unflagging talk, of explosive, masculine

laughter, of a perpetual source of the dearest and most precious thing

on earth, the easy interchange, conflict, and contact of friends

with friends--the best recipe for all this was to have there a great

scholar, unable to hear a word until it was dropped into the silver

trumpet, yet giving edge, guidance, direction, and inspiration to all

the flow of mutual utterance that has run in this well-worn channel for

twoscore years.

To do this was more like his very self than all his throned volumes;

and I am not sure but that, in the great chancery of existence, it is

better worth while to have made friends gay, high-spirited, and ready

to give a frolic welcome to all the years as they came than to be known

ever after, as he will be, as foremost in his great field. It was like

him to concentrate all his social life on this one group. Elsewhere he

was always sought and scarcely seen, though his house was graced by an

open hospitality the loss of which in time he made up by night work.

How wise to know your friends in your forties, and to gather them and

to be with them to the very threshold of the eighties! How far wiser

than the wandering way in which, like children, we fill our hands so

full that we can neither use, nor give, nor leave, nor enjoy! It was

like him resolutely to keep this dinner of high talk and plain fare,

with men who dined much and well elsewhere, to a dollar apiece, as a

constant protest against a lavish age which kills all by gilding it, as

with the luckless boy in the Medicean festival.

Life was compounded by him of simples; but they were “collected from

all simples that have virtue under the moon.” He lived in one city and

loved it. Two homes housed all his years.

He sprang of a goodly ancestry and was justly and openly proud of it.

He held high the long descent of men given to the works of the mind.

His father was known before him, and his sons were known with him and

will be known after him.

His heart visibly and frankly warmed, though without word or bruit,

when in a narrow span of years he and his son Horace Howard Furness,

Jr., published each his volume which garner the comment of all the

years on a play of Shakspere. Another son, Dr. W. H. Furness, in the

same span, wrote an authoritative volume on the Dyaks of Borneo,

placing in the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania the best

existing monographic collection on the region he studied. A daughter,

Mrs. Horace Jayne (Caroline Furness Jayne), issued the one most

important book ever published on the perplexing, fascinating, and

almost unknown field of cat’s-cradles, a mine of patient research

and accurate, skilful description. His sister, Mrs. Caspar Wister,

published the long series of translations from German novels the

success of which, among a score of failures in this field, was wholly

due to the skill with which the “translator” adapted this fiction “made

in Germany” to the English-speaking world. Five years ago this brother

and sister were at work side by side, Mrs. Wister on the proof-sheets

of her fortieth German translation, “The Lonely House,” by Adolph

Streckfuss, and he on the proof-sheets of “Antony and Cleopatra,”

the twelfth in his monumental march. Her first translation, “Seaside

and Fireside Fairies,” from George Blum and Louis Wahl, had appeared

forty-three years, and his “Romeo and Juliet” thirty-six years, before.

His brother, Frank Furness, whose death preceded his by so short a

span, was, when a mere lad, in Rush’s Lancers, and all his life looked

the cavalryman, with his drooping, yellow mustache and his seamed face.

He retained to the end the walk of a man who, for years together in

his youth, has felt the saddle-leathers between his legs. Like Lever’s

hero, he once escaped capture by taking a barn-yard fence no other man

would have dared or persuaded his cavalry mount to venture. By carrying

powder to a battery not only under fire, but through burning woods,

he won a medal of honor. At Cold Harbor he risked life openly and

flagrantly by walking out between two firing-lines a few rods apart to

give a wounded Confederate a drink of water. Years later, when there

came to this dauntless soul heartbreaking grief, he solaced himself by

finding through a newspaper friend, who sowed the strange and moving

tale broadcast in Southern papers, the man whose life he had saved,

bringing him to Philadelphia and filling a month with mutual memories

for both. To the world Frank Furness was known as an architect, a pupil

of Richard Morris Hunt.

It could be only in such a family that, as a family lark at a family

dinner, a novel was written, the first chapter by Horace Howard

Furness, the others in turn by the rest, three sons, a daughter, a

son-in-law, and a daughter-in-law, no author to kill a character

without the consent of its creator, and all printed in seven copies

as “Grace Auchester.” I foresee a pretty penny for this volume in

catalogues of Shaksperiana a century hence.

It is the odd blunder of a dull world that social buoyancy and the

notable mind seldom march together; but, as an acute thinker has said,

a man with a strong pair of legs can walk east as easily as he walks

west, and our great Shaksperian had all the mirth that rang under the

rafters of the Mermaid. He made the Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard.

He was the dancer of his year and led in the play of more than sixty

years ago. I like it that after his death there were found, preserved

through all the half century, the pink tights and the spangled skirt

which the toil-worn commentator had worn in glad youth as _Mlle.

Furnessina_. In the world of silence in which he lived so long

he seemed to know laughter by instinct. His speech on the “Miseries

of Old Age” at a Harvard dinner four years ago swept the tables. He

presided over a dinner or a meeting marvelously. His instinct, his

attention, his capacity to interpret a look as easily as a word,

carried him through all. Nor was humor ever far from the ceremonial

surface of things. For example, at the lunch given at the opening of

the Bryn Mawr College library--it was on the hottest of June days, and

he was sweltering under the crimson trappings and beef-eater hat of

his Cambridge degree of Litt.Doc. (1899), when a young friend spoke a

consoling word to him. He replied, “Ah, Mademoiselle, il faut souffrir

pour être _swell_.”

The world narrowly missed in him a great Arabic scholar. His trip

abroad after his graduation at Harvard carried him far afield. He was

in Damascus when the Crimean War set the East ablaze. He saw Richard

Burton, imperious-souled, a vision of masterful will, holding his

consular court; and to the vision he recurred again and again. He had a

week or two in the desert. He became enamoured of Arabic and its study,

of which relics exist in a grammar and reader that he owned. But his

brief days over Semitics had this strange by-product. In the polychrome

Bible, projected by Professor Haupt of Johns Hopkins, and halted midway

for lack of support, Dr. Furness, perhaps the only man alive so versed

in Elizabethan English that it was as the tongue to which he was born,

and knowing enough of Hebrew, furnished the translation of the revised

text. In the Hebrew lyrics and psalms translated for this edition of

the Old Testament he reached the summit of his style, an incomparable

mingling of nice scholarship and exalted utterance. How fit it was that

the Bible and Shakspere should attract the same critical capacity!

If I were to sum by a single inanimate object the temper and tradition

of Dr. Furness, I would turn to the gloves, in his unrivaled

collection, which one is glad to believe were Shakspere’s. They are

manifestly the gloves of an Elizabethan gentleman not too large in

build, gold-embroidered, and shapely. They were treasured as genuine by

the descendants of Shakspere’s son-in-law, the physician who attended

him in his last illness, and were handed down in that family. They

passed to Garrick, who gave them to Philip Kemble, and so by descent

again they passed from Fanny Kemble to their recent owner. There again

is the double line of grace, the descent both of line and of genius,

to make precious the gloves that rested on Shakspere’s hand, took its

shape and knew its strength and beauty.

[5] The plays edited by Dr. Furness are “Romeo and Juliet,” 1871;

“Macbeth,” 1873; “Hamlet,” two volumes, 1877; “King Lear,”

1880; “Othello,” 1886; “The Merchant of Venice,” 1888; “As You

Like It,” 1890; “The Tempest,” 1892; “Midsummer-Night’s Dream,”

1895; “The Winter’s Tale,” 1898; “Much Ado about Nothing,” 1899;

“Twelfth Night,” 1901; “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” 1904; “Antony

and Cleopatra,” 1909, and “Cymbeline,” completed and to appear.

His son Horace Howard Furness, Jr., will complete his father’s

task, and has already published “Richard III,” 1911, and revised

“Macbeth.”

THE HUNGRY SHEEP

BY WILLIAM LYON PHELPS

Lampson Professor of English Literature at Yale University

“_The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,

But swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw,

Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread._”

~Milton~, “_Lycidas_.”

One of to-day’s favorite questions, both in private speculation and in

public debate, is this, “Why do not more men go regularly to church?”

Like all questions of real interest, it is much easier to ask than

to answer. The pews undoubtedly contain more women than men, though

this fact by itself need occasion no alarm. It does not prove that

the church has “lost its hold” or that the habit of going to church

is relatively unimportant. Women have always taken more interest in

religious organizations than men, both because they have more leisure

for contemplation, and because public worship appeals more to a woman’s

nature than it does to a man’s. If the mere fact that the minister sees

in front of him more brilliant hats than bald heads be a sign that the

church does not appeal to the solid intelligence of humanity, then

the symphony concert and the art museum fail even more signally. The

masculine proportion of listeners at a high-class musical entertainment

or among the visitors at an art gallery is even less than it is at

church. Indeed, it is rather interesting to observe that at almost

any public spectacle the number of men is in inverse ratio to the

intellectual value of the performance. At a vaudeville the men vastly

outnumber the women, and amid the enormous throng at a prize-fight

there are hardly any women at all. Thus the fact that the seats at a

prize-fight are crowded with men, while the pews are filled with women,

does not in itself indicate that the church is on the down-grade.

Still, it is unfortunate that more men do not attend church, and it is

more unfortunate for the men than it is for the church. Men need the

church more than the church needs men. The real difficulty is not a

fundamental one; it does not lie in the nature of religion or in the

nature of man. Next to questions of sex and means of subsistence, the

average man is at heart more interested in religion than in any other

one thing. The ordinary man is a natural theologian. He takes keen

interest in constructing his God, his scheme of the universe, and the

problem of life after death has always had, and probably always will

have, an irresistible fascination.

The main trouble with the church to-day is not in the pews; it is in

the pulpit. There is more Christian faith in the average congregation

than there is in the average preacher. During the short period of

Emerson’s pastorate, he was obliged to call on an old man who was

dying. The young minister murmured apologetically a number of confused

and clumsy commonplaces, and finally his aged client cried sharply,

“Young man, if you don’t know your business, you had better go home.”

Emerson, who came to give advice, took it, like the honest and sincere

man that he was; and he had no peace until he left the church for good

and all. He was totally unfitted to be a minister because he had no

Christian faith, and as soon as he realized his unfitness, he sought

another occupation, and became enormously useful to humanity in other

ways.

A United States senator met three clergymen in three different parts

of the country, and each complained that he could not get a large

audience. The senator asked the first man if he believed that the Bible

was the word of God; the cleric smiled pityingly, and said that of

course he did not in the crude and ordinary sense, and then he launched

a mass of vague metaphysical phrases. The senator asked the second

man if he believed in the future life, and the reverend gentleman said

that he did not believe in personal immortality, but that the essence

of life was indestructible, or some such notion. The senator asked the

third man, a pastor of an orthodox evangelical church, if he believed

in the divinity of Jesus Christ; the shepherd of souls replied that all

men were divine. The three clergymen had themselves supplied abundant

reasons why their audiences were small. They had nothing to offer them

but wind. The hungry sheep looked up, and were not fed.

A vital Christian faith is the prime essential for a man who wishes to

succeed in the ministry. It is worth more to him than all the learning

in the world. If an honest man cannot believe, we surely ought not to

blame him or quarrel with him; but he has no business in the pulpit.

Christian faith is just as necessary a prerequisite for a clergyman

as a knowledge of mathematics is for a civil engineer. Without it, he

is not merely ineffective; he is futile and absurd. I remember being

present once in a vast audience where Mr. Moody was talking, and at

the end of his remarks he said that he would be glad to answer any

questions. Some one asked, “What, in your judgment, is the best work

a modern minister can do?” Before Mr. Moody had time to reply, there

was a voice from the throng, which cried out, “This is the work of

God, that ye believe on him whom He hath sent.” The great evangelist

hesitated a moment, and then said that he had nothing to add.

The Protestant clergy of to-day are sadly weakened by a spirit of

compromise. They are afraid to preach Christianity, partly because

they do not believe in it, and partly because they are afraid it won’t

“draw.” They attempt to beguile men into the church by announcing

secular themes, by the discussion of timely political and literary

topics. As a matter of fact, the ungodly respect heartily a Christian

minister who is absolutely sincere and who confines his sermons to

religion, and they despise a vacillating and worldly minded pastor,

who seems to apologize for his religion, and who substitutes lectures

on politics and socialism for the preaching of the gospel. No mistake

is greater than the mistake of the minister who conceives it to be his

duty to preach politics from the pulpit. To an audience who have read

the daily papers all the week, and the Sunday paper that very morning,

nothing is more superfluous than a political discourse in church.

I remember the case of a prominent clergyman who, during a whole

Presidential campaign, preached Sunday after Sunday against one of the

candidates, to a constantly diminishing audience. On the night when the

returns came in, the object of his attacks was apparently successful,

and he cried out in despair, “What can be done now?” He was effectively

answered by one of the ungodly who happened to be present. “I don’t see

that there is anything left for you now, Doctor, except to preach the

gospel.”

The tremendous strength of the Roman Catholic Church lies in its

fidelity to principle, in its religious vitality, and in its hatred

of compromise. It should be an object-lesson to all Protestant

ministers. They may not believe its dogmas, they may not accept any

theological dogmas at all; but they ought to learn that the chief duty

of a preacher is to hold forth Christianity, and not to discourse on

sanitation, political economy, or literature. People everywhere are

eager for the gospel, and always respond to it when it is convincingly

set forth, whether by men like Phillips Brooks or men like Billy

Sunday. The great Boston bishop never had any trouble in getting

an audience; and although he was a man of the highest and broadest

cultivation, interested in every modern movement in literature,

politics, and art, he never preached anything but the Christian

religion. He used all his remarkable gifts in that one direction.

The result was that his congregations were enormous, and that he was

beloved and respected by all classes of men.

The pastor should be a leader, not a follower. If he has less

conviction than his audience, how can he lead them? What would be

thought of the general of an army who had no definite ideas as to where

he ought to take his men, and no conviction that his cause was good?

If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself for

battle? The main difficulty with the church to-day is that the people

in the pews do not have the gospel preached to them. The hungry sheep

look up, and are not fed.

[Illustration]

THE FEMINIST OF FRANCE

BY ETHEL DEAN ROCKWELL

I

Feminists include as many different kinds of women in France as

elsewhere. The term can be applied equally to a George Sand or a

Marguérite Audoux. We find the movement as marked, too, in France

as in other countries. But the interesting thing about it is that

though similar to all the others in basic principles, the French

feminist is instinctively individual, always French. Compare her, for

instance, with her sister across the channel. In England she bends all

her energies to winning the suffrage, to carrying reforms by act of

Parliament; in France she takes no part in political campaigns, cares

not at all for the vote. In England the ladies of the aristocracy

are the prime movers; in France, with few exceptions, the women of

the upper classes look on the movement with indifference, and the

leaders come from a small group of intelligent and ambitious women of

the bourgeoisie. In England women are working for the cause of all

women rather than for individual advantage; in France they impress

one as working for their own benefit, not for humanity. In England,

throwing off their feminine garb, they often become blatant, clamorous,

unwomanly; in France, believing that woman’s deadliest weapon is her

womanliness, they never withdraw the battery of their feminine charms.

In England the feminist is still a conformist to moral law; in France,

unfortunately, she is too often a rebel against moral as well as social

restrictions.

The tendency has existed in many brilliant women since French history

began. We naturally think of the women of the salons, for instance.

But they were only sporadic examples of cleverness. A general “woman

movement” was not known till the French Revolution.

“Since when have women occupied themselves with politics?” asked

Napoleon of Mme. de Staël.

“Since they have been guillotined,” was her reply.

But the Revolution brought them no recognition, for upon its heels

came Napoleon, who took from them even that which they had. Two other

movements also came to naught: followers of St. Simon, the Socialist,

who believed in the complete emancipation of woman and in her entire

equality with man, owed their failure to the extravagance of some

of their doctrines, and to lack of organization. The other attempt

was snuffed out in 1851 with the _coup d’état_ of Napoleon III.

Through the twenty years of political reaction succeeding that event,

there were always women, often famous, who fought valiantly, if not

always wisely, for emancipation; and since the establishment of the

republic, their efforts have made uninterrupted headway.

II

We speak of steady advance. Yet measured by American standards, or

those of other Northern countries, Frenchwomen must yet travel far to

reach the point where these were fifty years ago. Americans accept as a

matter of course liberty of thought and action, equal opportunities for

study and work, and the respect of men. Frenchwomen are not generally

possessed of these blessings. Why this difference? Among many causes,

three stand out preëminent--social, civil, and religious reasons.

Socially, France belongs with the Latin races. In these countries man

has generally treated woman with gallantry, but not respect, and has

received her attempts at higher life in a spirit of mockery which it

has been almost impossible to overcome. Because her happiness depended

on his good will, her one aim in life has been to please him. As

Pierre de Coulevain expresses it, “She is entirely absorbed by man and

maternity.” The moral standard of both men and women has been low, and

the well-known bargaining about the dowry has added sordidness. The

case of the _jeune fille_ serves as an example. Her carefully

guarded, restricted life, her interests, and her education, not fitting

her to think or to be of service to her community, are too well known

to need amplification. It well illustrates how, in Southern countries,

their Latin heritage has been a strong social factor in the retarded

awakening of women.

In France these conditions were fixed still more immutably by

Napoleon’s civil code, which thus becomes the second, or civil, reason.

Napoleon’s only use for women was as producers of more men for his

wars. “Make them believers, not thinkers,” was his command. In legal

status he classed them with children, imbeciles, and criminals. A

married woman could possess no property; her husband owned what she

brought him in marriage and what she inherited or earned thereafter.

The pitiful plight of Balzac’s _Eugénie Grandet_ and her mother

was not an exceptional case, but the rule. Furthermore, she could not

testify in civil suits, or be a witness to any legal document, or have

any part in the family council for the government of her children.

Yet this Frenchwoman, a nullity in the eyes of the law, is respected

by all the world for her marvelous common sense and managing ability.

So marked is this that virtually all the petty retail business in the

country is in her hands, and she manages her business, her children,

and her husband as a matter of course.

This principle of the subjection of woman to the higher authority

of man, installed by immemorial custom, fast bound in civil law by

Napoleon’s code, has in general also been emphasized by the church.

It has consistently developed the passive virtue of sacrifice and

the cheerful acceptance of things as they are. Therefore, although

conditions have changed, to-day, and there are many noble Catholic

feminists, it has in the past been the exception rather than the rule;

and Frenchwomen of the upper classes have been led by their convent

training to accept without question the position assigned them by

social custom and the Napoleonic code. Two of these three conditions

are aptly summed up by Pierre de Coulevain when she says, “France

is the land of femininity, not of feminism: femininity is Latin and

Catholic; feminism is Anglo-Saxon and Protestant.”

Against these germs of arrested development have sprung up other germs

which have almost killed the first and have produced the present

epidemic of feminism. World forces which affect even China are of

course felt in France. One of these is economic pressure. By the

introduction of machinery and the constantly increasing cost of living,

women of the lower classes have been forced into industry in France

as everywhere else, until it has been stated that sixty per cent. of

the women of France are now wage-earners. Naturally, then, industrial

conditions have compelled them to demand recognition on the same basis

as men. In the middle classes this same pressure postpones the age of

marriage for the man, thus throwing the burden of support for a longer

time on the girl’s father; at the same time it makes it increasingly

difficult for the father to provide the necessary dot. It therefore

sends girls into professions to ease the family burden, instead of

into the convent. “To ease the family burden,” I say, for she seldom

works, as do so many American young women, for her own enrichment. Her

earnings go to her parents.

[Illustration:

Photograph by T. T.

MME. MARGUÉRITE DURAND

Editor and journalist.

Photograph by Chéri-Rousseau

MME. DIEULAFOY

Lecturer and archæologist.

Photograph by Henri Manuel

MME. CURIE

The joint discoverer of radium,

who succeeded her husband

in a chair of physics and

chemistry at the Sorbonne.

From the portrait by Gandara

COUNTESS MATHIEU DE NOAILLES

Novelist and poet.

Photograph by Touranchet

MME. BLANC (~Th. Bentzon~)

Novelist and journalist.

]

Then, too, the tradition that every girl must marry or retire to

a convent has left too many women unaccounted for in the social

scheme. Four and a half million women in France have no home or

children--unmarried women, widows, divorcées, or mothers whose children

are grown. Olive Schreiner says that the woman movement is the endeavor

on the part of women to find new fields of labor as the old slip from

them--a demand for a continued share in the work of the world. And

these millions of Frenchwomen with no home ties are clamoring for their

share. They claim the privilege of employing their hitherto ingrowing

energy in useful work, and in whatever field they wish.

To these economic and social stimuli a third factor should be

added--the result of the separation of church and state in 1905; and

with time this change will be increasingly felt. Since the convents

exerted a conservative influence, their dissolution minimizes that

tendency. The convents had been almost exclusively the schools of the

girls of the higher classes; they had been the refuge of unmarried

and unfortunate women; the sisters had had charge of the hospitals,

nursing, and nearly all other charities. But since girls must now

follow the nuns to the border countries for their education, not so

many go; and those who stay at home receive a more modern and less

conservative training. Since the unsought in marriage must leave France

in order to take refuge in a convent, more stay in the world. And since

the hungry and sick were left without caretakers, other women had to

take up the works of charity discontinued by the nuns. Thus perforce,

since the separation, new fields of activity, new occupations, new

responsibilities have been thrust upon the women of France. The

withdrawal of the nuns created a vacuum into which others have rushed.

They are ready for these fresh fields and pastures new. They see

women of other nations so engaged, and example is contagious. A gain

for feminism in Sweden gives impetus in France; a rebellion against

long-established custom in Constantinople gives courage for one in

Paris. Above all, the several international women’s conferences that

have met in Chicago, Berlin, London, and Paris in the last fifteen

years have been great educators, great awakeners. Then, too, Parisians

never lack for foreign examples, for Paris is cosmopolitan, and

Americans especially she has always with her. The Frenchwoman, who,

when her children are grown, is inclined to lose all interest in life,

and settle down to old age, sees American grandmothers making a tour of

the world, and tries to find the secret of their eternal youth. Thus it

may be that as French diplomats have won half Africa by the skilful use

of American inventions and institutions, so Frenchwomen may yet win all

France by clever adaptation of the American type of woman.

Englishwomen also furnish examples in their interest in sport. “Sport”

is fashionable. Bicycling was once a fad; tennis, riding, and swimming

are popular. The girls’ schools are now advertising swimming-pools and

tennis-courts. For one woman that you met skating thirty years ago, you

now meet five hundred. We long ago learned, if we ever had to learn,

the moral and intellectual value of exercise. The French, both men

and women, are only now discovering it. We find, therefore, that the

hothouse products are vanishing, and with them, morbidity, unhealthy

thoughts, overstimulated emotions, sluggish brains. In their stead we

find healthy bodies, healthy minds, initiative, organizing ability,

development of the dormant will power, and last, but not least, natural

and unrestrained meeting with men in all sorts of games.

Certain classes of men have been strong and active supporters of the

feminist cause. Indeed, this is one of the most characteristic features

of the movement in France. It seems sometimes as though the men were

more ardent and intelligent feminists than the women themselves. The

little band of French Protestants is naturally in the forefront of

sympathy for the movement. There are fewer Protestants in all France

than there are Jews in New York City, but they exercise an influence

for progress far out of proportion to their small number. Almost all

literary men, no matter what their creed, and lawyers, teachers,

professional men in general, as well as a few deputies and senators,

are on the side of the feminists. The constant pounding away on the

question by playwrights and poets such as Brieux, Lavédan, Mirbeau,

and Jules Bois, has done much to break down prejudice and widen the

point of view. The Odéon and Comédie Française have struck sounding

blows against the old order of “The Doll’s House,” and novelists like

Victor Margueritte, and Marcel Prévost have done their part in arousing

sympathy for the _Noras_ of France. Socialists, too, espouse the

women’s cause.

III

In the combination of all these causes, then, economic, industrial,

cosmopolitan, social, religious, and literary, the awakening has

come to the women--and men--of France. The successive steps, seeming

slow as they were laboriously gained, become rapid in retrospect. In

professional studies, since 1868, when the first woman was admitted to

a medical school, one after another all barriers have come down, till

to-day all doors are wide open, and in the University of Paris alone

there are over two thousand women students. After permission to study

and take a degree was obtained, came the more arduous struggle to be

allowed to practise their profession, for prejudice acted as a complete

boycott. The prejudice was of two sorts. One was that of friends and

family, who considered a woman utterly disgraced if she worked. This

attitude is still general, and is the cause of untold unhappiness

and estrangement. The other prejudice, and a strong one, was from

her competitors, the men. Women medical students could obtain their

degree, but had no opportunity to attend clinics or to be internes in

hospitals. Law students, likewise, could not take the bar examinations

or practise. It is owing to the unflagging efforts of two or three able

women that this competitive struggle is also now a thing of the past.

Mlle. Jeanne Chauvin was the test case in law practice. She won after

a long and bitter struggle only ten years ago. In the profession of

university teaching women have been on a par with men since Mme. Curie,

having twice won the Nobel prize for her benefits to mankind through

her chemical discoveries, was appointed to succeed her deceased

husband in the chair of physics and chemistry in the Sorbonne. Three

years ago she became the test case in yet another contest--a contest

over the right of women to public recognition of their attainments

by admission to the Academy. In this first engagement, like most

pioneers, she lost; but the decision raised such a storm of protest and

discussion that there is scarcely a question of the ultimate victory in

this also. We shall yet see women taking their honored place among the

seats of the famous Forty.

The struggle to change woman’s legal status has been particularly long

and hard, and is still in progress. This cause owes much to Mlle. Maria

Chéliga, a Pole, who has lived most of her life in Paris, and by her

essays, lectures, stories, and plays has awakened public sympathy; and

to Mlle. Jeanne Schmahl, editor of “L’Avant Courrière,” who succeeded

after many years of effort in getting a bill through the Chamber of

Deputies giving to married women the control of their own earnings. At

first it failed in the Senate. Undaunted, she worked for eleven years

more until, in 1907, she wrested from an unwilling Senate the vote

in favor of the bill. For the last five years, therefore, a married

woman has been able to spend what she earns, and to have her own

bank-account. Within the last four years women at the head of large

business houses have been able to vote for the judges of the tribunals

of commerce, and thus see that their business interests are not

unfairly dealt with by this powerful body. Women teachers have for some

time been allowed to vote for the members of the board of education,

though women are not eligible for office in either of these bodies. A

married woman can now testify, and act as a witness in legal documents.

She still has no voice in the family council, a vital institution in

France; and if she invests her earnings in furniture or other portable

property, these possessions belong to the husband.

[Illustration:

Photograph by Henri Manuel JEAN BERTHEROY (~Mme. Le

Barillier~) Poet and historical novelist.

Photograph by Henri Manuel MME. HENRI DE REGNIER (~Gérard

D’Houville~) Poet and novelist.

Photograph by Ogerau MME. SÉVÉRINE A fervent and eloquent public

speaker, whose conférences at the Odéon are a feature of Parisian

life.

Photograph by Nadar JUDITH GAUTIER Daughter of Théophile Gautier.

Photograph by Boisonnas and Tapouler MARCELLE TINAYRE Author of “La

Maison du Péché.”

]

Another sign of the times is the ever-present discussion over the

education and training of the _jeune fille_. Thirty years ago

there was not a public school for girls in the country. To-day there

are many, though five for the whole of Paris seems insufficient. The

inadequate curriculum is a constant bone of contention, and has

already been much widened and strengthened in both state and Catholic

schools to meet the demand for vocational training. The _jeune

fille_ is gaining slowly in independence, and we find her in novels,

spoken of as looking forward quite naturally to activities and spheres

of usefulness outside of, as well as within the home. “A whole woman is

too much for a man,” one heroine declares.

Owing to the gap left by the nuns’ departure, we find one important

movement of humanitarian interest in the attempts to reorganize and

strengthen the profession of nursing. It had been left either to the

sisters, who were not always as modern in their methods as could be

desired, or to an outside class of _Sairey Gamps_, lower in

intelligence and decency than domestic servants. Now they are trying

to interest girls of the better classes in the profession, founding

training-schools and studying American methods.

The fact that the international professional-women’s club of London,

the Lyceum, has now a branch in Paris, and that there are many other

women’s clubs, is significant. Till recently the club movement has

found no response in France. The woman has been too much occupied

in her own household, too much claimed by an army of relatives, to

be drawn outside by clubs or anything else for the sake of her own

development. Then, again, the Frenchwoman of leisure and ability has

been content with her own lot and oblivious of her duty to her less

fortunate sisters. She has therefore not felt the need of united

effort through club organization for a common humanitarian cause.

And even when she has felt this call of duty, she has always shown

an astonishing lack of appreciation of the value of system and

organization for attaining the desired results. Sixty years ago the

feminist pioneers might have succeeded if their efforts had not been

scattered and individual. Indeed, even now French feminism gives one

an impression of ununified restlessness. That there is now a “club

movement,” therefore, shows that at last there is in France desire

for individual development, a sense of duty to one’s neighbor, and an

appreciation of the value of organization. There are still countless

activities that American women are habitually engaged in--municipal

improvement, efforts to improve labor conditions, child-labor laws,

social settlements, etc.--that have not yet reached France to a

noticeable extent. But now that a beginning has been made, we shall

look for all these and more.

Marked as is this general leavening of the lump, art and literature

show the most complete conquest. The art prizes are all open to women,

and at one time or another most of them have been won by women. To say

nothing of their success in painting, sculpture, and architecture,

women absolutely own the field in illustrating, arts-and-crafts

work and in making innumerable small art objects. They also nearly

monopolize literature: in essays, poetry, novels, journalism, their

name is legion, their influence unbounded.

Journalism in France is an influential literary profession, with strong

leaders that no other country can surpass. Women hold responsible

positions on the staff of most of the leading French reviews, and

contribute an astonishing number of articles, generally under men’s

names. Beginning with Mme. Juliette Adam, the line is unbroken. She

was the last of the old school, the first of the new, wielding high

political influence at first through her salon, then through the

pages of the “Nouvelle Révue,” which she founded in 1879. She also

wrote novels, essays, and reminiscences. Mme. Sévérine, a fervent and

eloquent public speaker, with rather a permanent instinct for revolt,

shouts her war-cry in the “Echo de Paris.” The “Révue des Deux-Mondes”

and the “Journal des Débats” include on their staff, among other

women, Mme. Arvède Barine. Three times has the Academy crowned a work

of hers, and she wears the cross of the Legion of Honor, as did Mme.

Thérèse Bentzon, who died five years ago. Mme. Blanc, as she was better

known, was on the staff of these two periodicals. This estimable

woman also wrote novels and essays, some crowned by the Academy. She

was especially loved in America, to which she made several visits,

because she was the most faithful interpreter to the French of American

literature, social customs, and educational methods. She was an ardent

Roman Catholic. Mlle. Maria Martin edits the “Journal des Femmes,” and

Marguérite Durand, “Les Nouvelles.” The latter is perhaps the most

popular woman in France, and charmingly and essentially feminine.

[Illustration:

Photograph by Eug. Pirou

MME. PEYREBRUNE

Novelist and poet.

Photograph by Chéri-Rousseau

YVONNE SARCEY

Writer and feminist.

Photograph by Ogerau

MME. ADAM (~Juliette Lamber~)

Founder of the “Nouvelle Révue.”

One of the most influential of

modern Frenchwomen.

Photograph by Henri Manuel

MME. LUCIE DELARUS-MARDRUS

Dramatist and poet.

Photograph by Chéri-Rousseau

MME. LUCIE FÉLIX-FAURE GOYAU

Daughter of Félix Faure.

]

Novelists and poets have much in common. They are rather too apt to

be feminists of most advanced type, drowned in a noxious wave of

free-thinking, swinging too far in their revolt, and disregarding moral

laws.

[Illustration: GEORGETTE LEBLANC MAETERLINCK, ACTRESS, SINGER, AND

WRITER; THE WIFE OF MAURICE MAETERLINCK]

This epidemic of free-thinking seems to be most evident in the

upper classes, leaving the women of the bourgeoisie untouched. But

perhaps all this is only the fledgling trying its wings, a phase of

development, an ugly stage of self-consciousness, which the French

temperament, essentially one of harmony, will sooner or later adjust.

In poets this characteristic manifests itself in a tendency to reveal

without restraint the inmost secrets of their woman’s soul. Mme. de

Noailles, though admitted by men critics to be in the first rank,

is no exception. She is also a novelist and is on the staff of the

“Révue des Deux-Mondes.” Gérard d’Houville is another poet as well as

novelist; and Lucie Delarus-Mardrus another, seeking unusual and exotic

effects by travels in Eastern lands. The novelists confine their plots

for the most part to studies of feminists. Thus, Marcelle Tinayre’s “La

Rebelle” is a beautiful young journalist; her heroine in “Hellé” is a

charming example of the noblest type of emancipated young womanhood;

Colette Yver’s “Les Dames du Palais” deals with women lawyers and the

divorce question; her “Princesses de Science” takes up scientific

women. Gabriel Réval’s “Ruban de Venus” shows us artists; and women

interested in sociological questions are the heroines of Renée and

Tony d’Ulmès. But the inevitable underlying theme of them all is the

irresistibility of passion, “the impossibility of woman’s escaping the

brutal laws of her own temperament,” as one commentator expresses it.

Moreover, the heroines are all selfish in their feminism; they are in

search of their individual happiness.

Of the novelists and essayists, more than a passing word should be

given to Marcelle Tinayre, conceded by men critics to be the most

vigorous and virile of women writers, and even classed by one above

George Sand. Her works have been crowned by the Academy, and she

has won the cross of the Legion of Honor. Daniel Lesueur and Mme.

Peyrebrune are both important, and have been distinguished with many

honors. Mme. Maeterlinck is opera-singer, essayist, and lecturer, as

well as novelist. Jeanne Bertheroy and Judith Gautier, daughter of

Théophile Gautier, are famous, as are also Mme. Dieulafoy and Mme.

Félix-Faure Goyau, daughter of the former president of the republic.

Colette Yver, with her “Princesses de Science,” was the first to win

the prize offered by the woman’s paper, “La Vie Heureuse.” (This is the

prize that was awarded to the seamstress Marguérite Audoux for “Marie

Claire.”) Pierre de Coulevain, remarkably cosmopolitan, and with a

wonderfully wide point of view, is read more by foreigners than by the

French. Mme. Yvonne Sarcey is exceptional in appealing to a sense of

duty as the controlling force in life.

Much as we should like to linger over this long literary list, we must

pass on to other topics. In the matter of the suffrage, progress is

not so marked. Small suffrage societies here and there have existed

for twenty-five years, but the National French Woman’s Suffrage

Association was formed only three years ago. It has converted many

teachers and employees of the post, telegraph, and telephone service,

but has not made any impression on the women of the working-classes.

In 1911 it had a membership of 3000 out of a total female population

of 20,000,000. So it can be seen that the suffrage movement in France

is still in its swaddling-clothes. The most encouraging thing for the

suffrage supporters is the number of “_hommes-femmes_”; that is,

influential men who give devoted service to the suffrage cause. We have

already spoken of the broad-minded men who have done much to educate

public opinion to more enlightened views on women. They generally go

further still, and are suffragists. About three years ago they formed

a men’s association, called “The Voters’ League for Woman Suffrage,”

which counts among its members two senators and nine deputies. This

league holds itself in readiness to push forward whatever legislative

measures it considers worth while. It has been working on a bill for

women’s vote in municipal elections, and it is stated as a possibility

that it may be passed. Socialists also favor the suffrage, both because

from the anti-reactionary nature of their doctrines they must, to be

consistent, and because they want the women’s vote. But their help is

of little practical value, for the labor party and the unions control

the socialist party, and these two powerful organizations are bitter

and formidable enemies of women’s entrance into the economic and

political field. Opposition is strong from the politicians in power.

Having brought about the separation of church and state seven years

ago, they fear that all the old clerical question, which has been the

cause of many years of most bitter wrangling, would be reopened by the

women at the first opportunity, under the instigation of the priests.

It is asserted, moreover, that there is no decided Catholic opposition,

as such, to woman suffrage.

It must have become evident from the foregoing pages, however, that

feminism in France is not a matter of the suffrage. There have been

other conquests to make, in the realm of thought rather than action;

old prejudices, old traditions to be removed, rights of moral and

intellectual equality to be established. Indeed, French feminism

can well be defined as “a state of mind, not yet crystallized into

aggressive agitation for reform.” After all, in the last analysis, we

see that for the realization of the feminist ideals must come, and

is coming, a change in man--in his moral standards, in his attitude

toward women, in his whole Latin conception of the social basis of

society. Olive Schreiner says that the new woman is accompanied by the

new man, or there would be no new woman. We see this development in

France to-day. Says Marcel Prévost: “The new college youth cares more

for sport, is more robust physically and is more healthy-minded. He is

less sentimental, more athletic; he does not think of woman.” In this

one statement lies more hope for the ultimate complete emancipation of

woman than in all her literary and professional achievements.

The newer type of Frenchwoman, breaking away from tradition,

strong-willed, earnest, Maeterlinck is striving to depict in his later

heroines, like _Aglavaine_ and _Ariane_. His talented wife

thus interprets them for us:

Apparently vainglorious, almost brazen, free, and unsubjected,

marching in the light of day, without faith or principle, we are

in reality the submissive slaves of to-morrow. Beneath our songs

of gladness rises a sorrowful prayer, which no one hears. No one

understands our obscure duty. Sprung from the present, we are

daughters of the future, and it is but natural that the moment which

created us should distinguish us but imperfectly. To hasten our work,

would that men might understand us better, fear us less. Let them

learn that for centuries and throughout the ages, there has been but

one divine woman, lover, mother, sister. If at the present moment we

appear different, rebellious, it is only that we may one day offer

them stronger companions and nearer to perfection. For centuries

men hailed in us a beauty that was all effacement. The women who

charm the most in the past appear like those frescoes that old

walls still offer to our eyes half-discolored, pale, ideal, frozen

in contemplative attitude, with lilies in their hands. An abyss

seems to separate these _Griseldas_ from the _Aglavaines_

and _Arianes_. And yet these two are loving handmaids of

the future.... It is customary to say that woman, influenced by

man, perfects herself according to his ideal. But to-day, grown

clearer-sighted, she seems to look over the shoulder of her mate, and

perceive what he does not yet descry on the horizon.

[Illustration]

THE SCARBOROUGH SPOONS

A STORY FOR ENGLISH AND AMERICANS

(DOINGS ON PERILOUS)