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Executive in a hundred towns and cities, at a time of partisan quiet, will bring home to the people the strength and the glory of the Republic-a strength and glory that are more than imperial, for they touch and lift the manhood of all our active millions.

Fresh from his western journey the President will be in a happy mood to receive the honors that our most important academic community will pay him, and he will return invigorated and mellowed by the most instructive experience that man could get from two months' travel. If every citizen of the United States could take this same journey, there would be none left to despair of republican institutions. The Old World dyspepsia of pessimism is always lost in Texas or in California or in Oregon or in the Yellowstone Park or on the Great Lakes, where there is health for all the ills of the sedentary mind.

STILL AN ASYLUM FOR DEFEATED POLITICIANS

F President McKinley rises to some oc

pointments to responsible positions in our island-government, for instance, have been admirable. But his appointment of Mr. Rodenberg, of Illinois, a member of the last Congress who is now out of a job, as one of the National Civil Service Commissioners is a discreditable performance. Mr. Rodenberg while in Congress voted to "starve out" the Commission. To administer a law by the hand of its enemy is not even a decent treatment of the law. Peculiarly unfortunate was this appointment because it is an act of contempt to the purity of the classified service. It strikes at the very root of the merit system.

TWO INTERESTING INCIDENTS REVIEWED

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HE rush of events does not abate the popular interest in the historical study of our recent history. Mr. Cleveland took occasion in a lecture at Princeton University late in March to review the "Venezuela incident" of his last administration. Mr. Olney, it will be recalled, was Secretary of State, and the vigorous, almost threatening, tone of our Government toward the Government of Great Britain regarding the boundary dispute with Venezuela, caused a shock to the ultraconservative. Looking back to it, after these years of reflection, Mr. Cleveland earnestly said:

"I hope there are but few of our fellow-citizens who, in their retrospects, do not now acknowledge the good that has come to our nation through this episode in our history. It has established the Monroe Doctrine on lasting foundations before the eyes of the world; it has given us a better place in the respect and consideration of the people of all nations, and especially of Great Britain; it has again confirmed our confidence in the overwhelming prevalence among our citizens of disinterested devotion to American honor."

Another historical review of a disputed matter this by a group of disinterested instigators-touches the beginning of hostilities in the Philippines on February 4, 1899. The Philippine Information Society of Boston has published a pamphlet setting forth all the evidence bearing on the beginning of the war. The conclusion reached by the editors is that the attack was made on our soldiers by the Filipinos on territory admitted by the Filipino leaders to be in the jurisdiction of the United States. The attack was probably not ordered on that particular day (or night) but there is proof that it was contemplated by the leaders at an early time, the editors of the pamphlet declare. There is no evidence that our forces

instigated the attack to secure votes to ratify the treaty of peace which was then pending in the Senate.

The public opinion of the country had long ago accepted these conclusions both about the Venezuelan episode and the Filipino war.

THE UPWARD MOVEMENT OF FARM LABORERS

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HE new census figures of farm tenantry indicate several interesting tendencies. The total number of farms has increased in the decade from 4,500,000 to 5,700,000, or twenty-six and two-thirds per cent. The increase in the number of farms, therefore has more than kept pace with the increase of population; and the great farm is not swallowing up the small one. The number of farms worked by their owners is 500,000 more than it was ten years ago.

Yet the number of farms worked by tenants has increased still more rapidly. Tenantfarms increased more than forty per cent. during the decade, whereas the number of those worked by their owners increased less than eighteen per cent.; and both have increased faster than the farming population. But an analysis of the statistics shows that the increase in the number of tenant-farmers

does not prove the degradation of the farm laborer. It proves rather his rise in fortune. The greatest increase in tenant farms has been in the Eastern and Middle Western States where the owners have been able to move to towns and villages; and the men who formerly where farm-laborers are now becoming tenants. Thus there is a movement upward of every class toward the class above it-a movement that shows, not a fixity of classes but a general economic improvement.

MR. CARNEGIE'S FAR-REACHING PLAN

CARNEGIE has already

democratic, peculiarly American institution. It is as different from the library that is a reference-house for scholars as the House of Lords is different from a town meeting, with a difference that is even more significant. The very word "library" has come to have a new meaning in the United States. For centuries it has meant an institution for the collection and for the preservation of books for the use of the learned. Of libraries, in this sense, we have nothing to compare with the great libraries of Europe.

But while the great collections of the Old World are of priceless value-are worth

MR. ANDREW CARMg philanthropists, all the other treasures of the Old World_the

outdone all preceding

and his giving is yet, he says, only fairly begun. On the day after he sailed from New York in March it was announced that he had given $4,000,000 as a pension fund for men who have served in his mills, an additional $1,000,000 to Carnegie Institute at Pittsburg, $1,000,000 for a library in St. Louis, and $5,200,000 to erect sixty-five free branch library buildings in connection with the New York Public Library, on the condition that the city provide sites for them and maintain them. These great gifts bring the total of Mr. Carnegie's public benefactions to more than $25,000,000, and they have nearly all been made on condition that they be supplemented by the communities which have received them. The sum of money, therefore, that he has spent and caused to be spent, in public education in its broadest sense and chiefly for libraries and technical schools, must be nearly or quite $50,000,000.

The results of these gifts will become greater as time goes on, and they will become so great that it is difficult now to measure them. The free library is just beginning to play its great part in the life of the American community, and the part that it can play in public education is just being discovered. It does a very much greater and more direct service than it did even ten years ago. A free circulating library is not only a place where anybody may consult a book, but it is an institution that will deliver a book almost at everybody's home. It has become one of the principal tools of the teacher; it is a guide to current discussions, not less than to classic literature; and it is a practical help to the artisan in his craft. The full measure of its utility has yet been by no means developed.

The free circulating library is a modern,

library as it is developed in the United States is a wholly different thing. It is an aid to popular education, hardly secondary in its complete development to the public school itself. From this point of view it is not by its size nor by its value as a repository of rare editions that it serves the world, but by the extent to which it permeates the whole community, by the ease with which its books find their way to every home. It is with libraries of this kind that Mr. Carnegie is dotting the map, and the development of this kind of a library is so recent that the far-reaching wisdom of his benefactions is not yet apparent.

He has already given free-library buildings to towns and cities in thirty-two states, in three territories and in the District of Columbia, besides his similar gifts in Canada and the United Kingdom. Of our population of 72,000,000, about 10,000,000 may enjoy library facilities from benefactions that he has already made-or nearly one person in seven.

DEMOCRACY AS A SOLVENT OF GREAT
FORTUNES

THE value of Car greater than the

HE value of Mr. Carnegie's public bene

value of his example. He follows and outstrips a long line of American men of great fortune who have given their riches for the public good, each in his own way-Peabody, Cooper, Slater-the list would fill half the pages of this magazine. A rich man in England, as Mr. Frederic Harrison said the other day, is ennobled, and then he must buy a great country-seat and found a family. In the United States he may both buy a countryseat and found a family, but he is seldom ennobled in American opinion unless he use his wealth for the public good.

It is easy to breed alarm in the mind when we think of the irresponsible waste of wealth in every great city almost within earshot of starving women and children; and when we see the huge brute strength of money in some of its unsocial uses, it is easy to feel a fear for our political institutions and for our theory of simple living. It is easy, too, to feel at least a distant fear of peril to our civilization when we see the increasing concentration of financial power. But, when the richest man in the world, who is also one of the most democratic men in the world, retires from active life to "make his soul" and cheerfully proceeds to give away his fortune while he lives this is an offset to theoretical fears strong enough to refashion even a pessimistic philosophy. Mr. Carnegie's example is making the accumulation of great wealth for one's own spending or for one's own children almost a contemptible thing. A man that is rich. unto himself is an unsocial man, and he is so regarded. In spite of the waste and the abuse of riches and the demoralization caused by display, the general principle seems yet to hold good that a democracy is a solvent of great fortunes.

But there is an amusing aspect also of the general discussion of the uses of wealth that Mr. Carnegie is provoking. How many men there are who could more wisely give away a fortune than by building libraries and technical schools, and how many seriously inform Mr. Carnegie of their ability to do better than he can do with his own fortune! A less philosophical and less merry man than Mr. Carnegie might well be discouraged by so much impertinent advice. But he is as resolute and as good-humored as he is rich (three qualities that have much to do with each other), and he smiles and gives-as he pleases. The joy that he gets from his benefactions is not the least noteworthy evidence of his healthful character.

That there is a class of persons who make it their business to advise rich men how to spend their fortunes is itself an evidence of the generosity of the rich. But if you feel that you are "called" to "manage a millionaire, it is well first to remember that he is a stronger personality than you are, else he would not be the millionaire and you would not be the adviser; in the second place, that he knows that he is a stronger personality than you are, for you have made a measure of

yourself by your impertinence. The best way to "manage" him is to let him once get a taste of the joy of giving and then to leave him alone. An old gentlemen, to whom a fortune came late in life a few years ago, gave $100,000 to an institution whose work pleased him. "I have got so much more pleasure," he said, a year later, "from the $100,000 that I gave away than from all I have left, that I am going to give the rest of it."

Any man who will take the trouble to ascertain the enormous sum that is every year given for public purposes by the rich men in the United States, and who will compare this sum with the public benefactions of any preceding time and of any other country, will have brought home to him a result of democracy that is one of the most remarkable facts in all human history

A

A SHORT STUDY OF RICHES

STUDY of individual wealth, as the number of colossal fortunes increases, yields many curious and interesting conclusions, according to the student's temperament and the range of his wisdom.

The most discouraging fact that he meets is the power of misused money in politics. Here is a problem for the very stoutest practical reformer.

Another hard task is to devise any method whereby the rich may directly help the poor without undermining character and self-reliance. All helpful philanthropy is attacking this problem, and we are learning wisdom by experience. But to help the helpless is not the easy undertaking that it was for ages thought to be. Preventive philanthropy is the only ultimate or scientific form of help.

Another interesting fact that one encounters is that strong men care less and less for wealth. Most strong men of this generation in our country have accumulated enough wealth no longer to be impressed by it, and they do not think enough about either its power or its dangers. It becomes a mere counter in the game that they play for power or for sport, and oftenest of all from sheer habit. Having once begun the game they suffer ennui if they stop. It is here that our highest educational problem is-to train strong men to "cultivate their souls" without losing their vigor. Benevolence is a common quality, but a true culture is rare among the strong men of the United States.

And the truly cultivated man, the strong man who has both benevolence and the higher resources of mind and character-such a man soon discovers that it is no longer necessary to be rich. The city is his landscape gardener, his librarian, the keeper of his gallery of paintings, the provider of his museumnearly all the things that rich men once spent fortunes for are his without cost. To such a man the accumulation of great wealth for his personal enjoyment is a sheer waste of energy.

A right and well-balanced philosophy will

the literature of good conduct was either so excellent or so widely diffused. The broad abyss between the Christian church and "the world" is being bridged, and increased strength and efficiency to both is the result. Meanwhile the stronger religious papers emancipate themselves from sectarianism and attain a general interest, while the weaker decline into the news-papers of church organizations, reporting conventions, dedications, and the like.

THE SPANISH LOSS OF TRADE BY THE WAR HE loss of her colonies has greatly re

TH

emerge in due time from our boundless duced the trade of Spain. Spanish

activity, and we shall see a sound culture give balance to our stronger personalities as it now sweetens chiefly those that are less strong.

THE DECLINE OF THE RELIGIOUS PRESS. OMMENT has been provoked about the Idecline in influence and in circulation of the religious press in the United States during the last decade or two-a decline that has shown itself in two ways. Such of the journals of the several Protestant sects as have not suffered a positive falling off have failed to grow in proportion to the growth of population, and several important journals that were once distinctly religious have become secular. Most of them indeed have become more secular than they once were. The change is an interesting one, but it is not a change that

exports to Cuba have fallen from $136,000,000 to $66,000,000 a year; to Porto Rico from $44,000,000 to $13,000,000; to the Philippines from $49,000,000 to $27,000,000. The results are almost disastrous to Spanish industry. There is an annual loss of trade representing a sum larger than the whole direct cost of the war, including the value of the fleet.

This trade, after the Spanish fashion, was, in a large degree, forced. The colonies were not permitted to trade where they pleased. A good share of it was, therefore, in the nature of a tax on the colonies-wherein there is a lesson for us.

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THE PAN-AMERICAN EXPOSITION

shows any important facts except the liberat THE Exposition that will be opened at Buf

ization of religious thought and a great advance in the development of periodical literature in general. The secular journals now report and interpret more religious news than the church papers did in the time of their greatest influence. On the other hand, there is a strong and necessary tendency in the conduct of the church papers to make and to keep them organs of their particular sects. This is a necessary and useful service, but the general liberalization of thought has made it impossible for a journal that is the organ of anything, religious or secular, to exert a strong or general influence. The decline of strictly religious journalism, as far as it has declined, measures the advance of reverent secular journalism in its treatment of religious subjects.

Such decline as has taken place may easily be exaggerated, and easily misinterpreted. There has been a falling away of popular interest in ecclesiastical doctrines, but there surely was never a time in our history when

falo on May I will be the most worthy object-lesson in American progress since the World's Fair at Chicago, and especial attention will of course be paid to an adequate representation of the opportunities afforded by the Central and South American States as markets for our wares.

The very rapid extension of American commerce and the corresponding growth of manufactures give a chance for an exposition that will be of very great educational valuea chance that the management of the Fair have from the beginning understood and intelligently worked for.

Such a showing of American progress falls directly in line with the work of this magazine. The magazine, therefore, will naturally give one number to an accurate description and interpretation of the Fair. The illustrations will be from photographs taken during the first month of the Exposition, exclusively for use in THE WORLD'S WORK. The aim will be to make it, both in its artistic and in its interpretative work, worthy of the subject.

THE MAKING OF PLAYS FROM NOVELS

AT

T one time last winter six plays made from popular novels were on the stage in New York, and the theatrical managers had contracts for four times as many more. Since "Trilby" and "The Prisoner of Zenda" were profitably dramatized, most popular novels have been staged, many with pecuniary success, but very few with artistic success.

The making of plays out of books has become a profitable industry; for it is an industry rather than an art. A shrewd old man who has read all the best novels and seen all the best plays for fifty years asked the other day, when somebody spoke to him in praise of a new story, "Is it to be put on the stage?"

"Yes."

"Well, then, it's a poor novel. I'll read Thackeray again, I thank you.'

"Yes, but didn't you know that Becky Sharp had a long run on the stage?"

"Well-but-things change when things change, don't they?"

But there is a radical difference between the art of the novelist and the art of the playwright. A few stories lend themselves to successful treatment by both arts; but such stories are not likely to make either the best novels or the best plays. The explanation of the fashion of making plays from books is not the artistic fitness of the material, but the commercial shrewdness of managers. To the purely financial mind a play consists of two things the play itself and the publicity that can be given to it. Any popular novel has one of these elements. A versatile playwright can be found who will make the other, more or less badly.

So strong has the fashion become that one manager who wished to procure a play first had the play-carpenter write the story as a novel. It is the worst novel, as a piece of literature, that ever was patched together; but the theatrical manager by theatrical methods contrived to sell it. Thus he has secured his advertisement. The play will now come forward. Of course both book and play will last only a season. We shall all be mildly amused, and the manager and the author will profit by the slumber of our judgment. They prey on our easy-going good nature.

Meantime the profit of the industry has

sharpened the commercial wits of the novelists. The old-fashioned publisher's contract with an author stipulated that "any compensation received from dramatization shall be equally divided between the author and the publisher." Such a contract was in fashion in those simple days when novels were never dramatized and before novelists became shrewder bargainers than publishers. "Why," a novelist lately asked his publisher, "should you have a share in the dramatic rights of my story-why more than in my income from lectures or from my practice of the law?"

Since by far the larger part of life is industry and not art, the making of novels from which plays may be made and the making of plays from successful novels will go on as legitimate trades, till another fashion come. But neither art will get the highest satisfaction from the combination; and neither the best novelists nor the best playwrights take more than a pecuniary interest in it.

con

Consider the difference between this fashion of ours the sheer manufacture of plays out of popular tales and the fashion whereby the stage in Paris, in Berlin, and in Copenhagen is supplied with plays, where Rostand, Sudermann and Hauptmann and Ibsen are at work. The comparison is not comforting nor hopeful. But if we have not yet got far enough away from the "amusement" ception of the stage to couple it closely in our thought with art, it is fair to remember that the plays manufactured out of novels are, as a rule, a great improvement over the plays that used to be adapted from the French. We are getting in the habit of using home material. We shall soon learn that the proper way to use home material on the stage is not to take it out of successful novels, but to take it directly from life. We are simply repeating the English experience of a former time. There was once an effort to put many of Dickens's stories on the stage, most of which failed, and of all men that ever wrote for a charmed world, Dickens himself knew least about stagecraft. In this respect he was like practically all other good storytellers. The proper methods of work are for the novelist to stick to his novels, and the playwright to his plays, each getting his material wherever he can get it best, without reference to the other.

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