cede or go without the services of its members. Unreasonable demands would thwart their own purpose, for the public would arrange to do without services for which a wage not warranted by trade conditions was insisted upon. In other words, complete combination of labor secured and maintained would do away with the present epoch of strife, with its attendant bitterness and legal questions. It would bring an era of "collective bargaining" when the different questions at issue between labor and capital would be settled more than ever before by the

L

laws of trade and not by the laws of the courts.

It is the belief of the writer, and his justification for introducing economic considerations into a legal article, that the courts are more and more recognizing the above fact; that they look upon complete combination of labor as a good and not as an evil; and that within the limitations already set they will put no unnecessary obstacle in the way, but that their attitude toward labor in combination will be broad and liberal.

Quantities of thinking people try to go through life thinking as little as possible. When they do occasionally think they are forced to acknowledge that life is considerable of a puzzle. They notice

Of

for instance that some accomplish a great deal when they even commence life with no resources of their own, and receive no help from anybody. They see others that with but very little help do fairly well. They come across a number who remain always at the bottom no matter how much help they may receive. course life is a mass of contradictions as long as we insist upon splitting it into fragments and consider each one as independent of all the rest. Life is a grand conglomeration or federation of facts, they all radiating from a center of gravitation. That gravitation center will be right if it accepts and follows divine ideals. It will be wrong as long as it only accepts and follows human ideals. "In the world you shall have tribulations, but I have overcome the world." Christ's teachings then give men the power to overcome the world, to cancel and suppress all tribulations. The world is civilization, the social status, the nation. What else can it be? But who is willing to apprehend human life in that way?

Before we go any deeper into the subject please notice the vapid way with

which we conceive the word "success." That generally means the attainment of a certain social position through the accumulation of a certain amount of wealth. We thus assume that our material order is already in peace with the moral order, or else we imagine that our present material order, however crooked, shall carry us into the brilliant and healthy realm of the moral and ethical order. And what do we require for that success we tell everybody to try to attain, although we know that only a few can attain it? We require shrewdness enough in business processes for some of us to be the first fellows in capturing the only few high positions our civilization ordains we shall have. And do we try to see that business, production, transportation and exchange should rest on equity or honesty towards each other? That has never yet formed part of the political or economic order of any important or powerful nation.

All the same we stick to that social dogma of ours, that many can accomplish in wealth accumulation what Mr. So-and-So has done without any help from anybody.

Take, now, any of those heroes of ours who has accumulated a lot of millions of dollars in any few years, isolate him and his family, with all his millions, for any ten years, away from the workers of nations. Go and see him

in his solitude a few years after he was sent there and you will find that, with all his business abilities and the millions he took with him to the wilderness, all he has been able to accomplish is to keep his family alive through hard work of the honest kind in wealth production. Evidently then he got on top of somebody, received or took away from somebody what belonged to them, while flourishing in the bosom of the social group. There you have the folly and fallacy of asserting that some can become rapidly wealthy without the help of anybody, or without getting what belongs to others.

Please notice again that the kind of business shrewdness we require and reward with success does not belong to the moral or natural order of the universe. It simply belongs to the selfish, unnatural industrial order that Cain initiated 6,000 years ago after his quarrel with Abel. And the worst is that we all have the right to accumulate a certain amount of wealth with which to live a decent sensible life, and thus see our wife and children enjoy a healthy existence, body, mind, and soul; but our own beloved civilization forces us to do that through the curtailment of the sanitary needs of life among millions of our brethren, sisters and children, all of them dropped on earth by a rich eternal Father, who has given us a magnificent and rich planet, rich for abundance and plenty to all with ten times the population on on earth today.

Of course we have tribulations, every one of us, rich, poor or on any level between. We have them because we don't want to overcome the world through the simple application of divine teachings to our own civilized status. We prefer any kind of compromise with the prince of darkness and the father of all lies, with our collective and citizenship selfishness, by which we antagonize not only the whole code of morality and ethics preached by Christ, but also all the natural instincts of men not yet vitiated by wrong social conditions, and even the animal instincts in the cosmical order. Not even a big dog, unless he is very hungry, tries to interfere with the bone

captured by the labor of the small dog. The former is perfectly willing that the latter should have his own banquet with the bone he has earned and belongs to the small fellow. The same general process of universal equity prevails among all animal specials, unless some transient departure of the general order is required to check over-production tending to disturb the equilibrium of supply and demand or preventing the perpetual refreshing of new life through the amplitude of time and space.

There is not a single law in the order of the universe tending to proclaim that the majority of men shall have to go through life on low levels of physical or spiritual development. That is simply the product of civilizations which prolong the old clash between the laws of nature and the laws of men, the former resting on altruistic principles of growth, the latter on selfish, egotistic principles, principles of favoritism, giving to some opportunities to rise above the rest in mental attitudes and through them in the selfish potentialities for the rapid acquisition of earthly goods. The order of nature gives to all men taste and power to make themselves useful and thus have a full seat in the banquet of life.

Before we close up this little essay, let us meditate for a few seconds on that human aberration which assumes that some of us have entered into the realm of eternal salvation, and the rest shall be lost forever, lost to all future joys and development if we don't give them a spiritual lift, while failing to let them rise up to a sensible, material development, because we wish to have laws of monopoly and favoritism crushing the many into poverty and hard work, and the few into unhealthy wealth and useless lives.

We thus presuppose that a God of righteousness shall not be able to discriminate in His judgment of each one of us, or shall be unwilling to consider the abnormality of physical conditions which a merciless civilization imposed upon many of his children and prevented them attaining a correct spiritual altitude. Besides, why should any of us

prejudge God's judgments by assuming that we have already purchased, acquired, the sublimities of life eternal? Also, why to imagine that it is only through our petty personal efforts that the mass of humanity can enter into a peaceful beyond? Let us give to all men what God means all men should have, viz.: a full opportunity to live a

full life on earth. Then alone shall we have done our duty torwards securing for them all, and our own precious selves, the full life somewhere else. Suppress collective selfishness, the prince of darkness, through unselfish laws, and all tribulations shall vanish, because Christ's teachings shall be duly applied to human life.

Flirtation was as natural as breathing to Alta Thorp. It was in her code that to meet an unattached man and leave him entirely heart and fancy free was almost criminal.

Generally speaking, she did much less harm than one might suspect, for the modern man of the society which Alta most affected is not the material of which novelists who write of broken hearts and death therefrom may spin their romances. Most of the young men of these old Virginia families were rather adept themselves in the pleasant, if dangerous, game, and it was in this fact that Alta Thorp found excuse for the lightness with which she treated the many victims of her undeniable physical and mental charms.

The first man who made love to her and found his attentions welcome enough up to a certain point and tabooed thereafter swore by all the saints in the calendar that she, with a most fiend-like cruelty, had wrecked his whole life, crushed all his faith in womanhood, and condemned him to die of a broken heart, if, indeed-and here he threw out dark hints about suicide and a lot of other tommyrot.

This frightened Alta dreadfully, the while she felt a delicious sense of her own importance in the scheme of the world. She argued the whole matter over with herself and inherited Puritan conscience, coming at length to the decision that, although she did not love him, it was clearly her moral duty to

marry him, since she had certainly encouraged him somewhat in the earlier stages of their acquaintanceship. Unfortunately, before she could communicate this decision to her rejected and supposedly desperate suitor, his engagement to her very dearest rival and enemy was duly announced, and Alta was duly bidden to be a bridesmaid.

After a few experiences, more or less of a similar character, Alta decided that as to broken hearts she need not fear, and began to live up to her privileges as a much-sought beauty.

Through all the gaieties of the most aristocratic and exclusive summer and winter resorts, she had gone without the quickening of a heart beat, and she now played the game as scientifically as she did a game of bridge, which is saying a great deal, since the possible combinations of an affair between a man and a maid are infinitely more numerous than the possible hands to be obtained from several packs of cards.

In meeting Arthur Allison, she recognized a type of suitor new in her experience, and resolved at once, with the enthusiasm of a true scientist, to dissect him, in order to add something to the awe-inspiring amount of knowledge in regard to the habits and modes of thought of these young southern aristocrats of the genus homo already in her possession.

He was not, as she ascertained at first acquaintance, a butterfly sort of young man, nor a misunderstood young man

-seeking anxiously for soul sympathy, nor yet a fortune-hunting young man. In short, he did not belong to any of the great varieties under which she had heretofore been wont to classify all men.

Fired with the excitement of having discovered something out of the range of her previous experience, she approached the battleground with a confident and joyous heart.

"Perhaps he will be original enough not to fall in love with me at all," she thought, half pleased at the prospect. "And perhaps I shall really fall in love with him at last," she added to herself, with a smiling incredulity.

He met her fairly on neutral groundthe hotel plaza-and the battle began. Sometimes they met on the beach of the beautiful silver lake, sometimes they met in the deserted music room, and she played for him some of Chopin's glorious, if dreamy, plaintive songs of love longing, sometimes they rowed by moonlight on the silver lake. All this was, she reflected, quite as it had been with several other men. But there was one great difference. He never grew in the very least sentimental.

Chopin he could discuss intelligently, and he was not ignorant of the poets, but these he discussed in the same calm, unemotional manner with which he might have carried on a discussion over the mistakes of Schopenhauer with some bespectacled German professor.

Even a stroll on the beach in the moonlight failed-and Alta Thorp had never known such a supreme test to leave the result for one moment in the balance.

Thus it stood on the day Alta was to return to the city. They were to rendezvous near by, and to take a stroll before dinner! For this Alta was dressing in her most becoming costume. Strange to say, the more she was confirmed in her original opinion that Arthur Allison was very different from all the men she had known and was not likely to fall a victim to her charms, the less she was pleased with the idea.

When she had quite finished her dressing, she glanced at her jeweled watch, and noted that it was just the hour she had promised to meet Allison. There

upon she at once sat down, as it was no part of her scheme to be too prompt in keeping appointments.

"I wonder is it pique I feel," she said to herself, "or is it something else— come to me at last? I know it is-that something else. Oh, why couldn't I have felt that for some one who might have loved me?" And then she cried a little, bringing herself to a sudden stop at the horrible thought that crying inevitably brings on a most unbecoming redness of eyes and nose.

Arthur Allison, as she expected, was awaiting her in the summer house. Το her intense annoyance, but to her surprise, he was calmly smoking a cigar, in seeming ignorance of the flight of time. They talked a while of things impersonal, but finally it drifted around to goodbyes. It was nearly dusk, and neither could read very well the expression on the face of the other. And when the talk drifted to goodbyes, a silence fell between them. Then suddenly, without preface, Allison began to speak, standing erect:

"Yes, I may as well confess, Miss Thorp. It is a poor game for you to bag, but they say you never despise a scalp. I take it for granted that you know mine is to be added to your collection."

There was a laugh in his voice, but there was also an underlying bitterness of sincerity, which Alta recognized and welcomed with a glad, quickening of thrilling heartbeats.

"Do you mean—” she said, not daring to put the question.

“Oh, yes, I mean quite that," said Allison, with a nervous laugh. "I don't suppose it will be necessary for me to formally ask you to marry me-we will just suppose the question put and answered in the negative. You see, there are dozens of your good friends who were only too willing to tell me of the collection of hearts you have been making, and the numbers of proposals which you have led different men on to make, helplessly. I can't claim ignorance as my I knew, and resolved that I would never become one of your victims,

excuse.

but I have fallen in a fair fight, and can claim no quarter."

Perfect mistress of herself once more she said, lightly:

"But you have not yet given me the opportunity to reject you, Mr. Allison. I certainly cannot count my conquest complete until I have had a formal proposal from you."

He looked at her in the darkness, his lips curling in contempt of such cruelty as she displayed, the while his eyes still told love. But he answered, in some successful badinage:

"Miss Thorp, will you marry me?" She turned, and faced him full, before she answered:

"Of course I will, dear heart."

PART SECOND.

THE WOMAN WHO WAS DIFFERENT.

Kathryn Barrington went to White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, for her Christmas, and New Year's vacation almost entirely because Arthur Allison was there, with his uncle, General Vanalstyne, who was taking the waters for a touch of the gout. She was the general's private secretary and stenographer in the offices of the great railway system of West Virginia, and a niece of the general's wife, highly educated, proficient in French, German and Spanish languages, and music. To her friends in the offices she said that she felt the quiet of the place to be what she needed. In point of fact, however, what she most needed was the love of this handsome railroad conductor. The ordinary sensible woman of twenty-four, which was the exact age of Miss Barrington, probably would not have sympathized with her much concerning this requirement. Arthur Allison was twenty-eight, and his gray matter was not gray because of maturity or over-exertion. He was exceedingly good-looking, exceedingly tall and broad and debonair, and these virtues had appealed at once to Kathryn, whose eyes were accustomed to grayness of mind and other things.

Allison liked Miss Barrington, too, in a patronizing sort of fashion, his regard having been deepened considerably by the discovery that she was mistress of a

nice little fortune in her own right, and not at all averse to his company whenever he chose to pay her attention. His affection never melted into words, and it was sufficiently adjustible to permit of being put quite out of the way when its possessor met so fluffy and alluring a person as Alta Thorp.

"Arthur Allison's gone with your girl again," Miss Barrington heard an idler remark banteringly to another, as she climbed the steps of the hotel. She stopped to fumble a handkerchief out of her bag.

"Who? Alta Thorp?" inquired the youth addressed. "Looks as if I was cut out, doesn't it?"

That he was not the only individual "cut out" Miss Barrington learned almost immediately upon the return of the pair. Fluttering about the piazza, she discerned them at the end, and Allison hanging on the words of his companion as no amount of mere appreciation of wisdom ever made man hang on the words of woman. Allison was greatly embarrassed, too, when he saw Miss Barrington, although she tried to seem uninterested alike in his presence and in his attention to the blue-frocked girl to whom he presented her.

Allison was acting quite within his rights, she said to herself later, obeying the impulse that bade her justify him, even to herself. He had made no pact with her, at least no verbal pact, and she knew that few men recognized the validity of unspoken contracts. Why should a fine, handsome, strong fellow, whose life was before him, be tied to a neutraltinted woman who already recognized that her future was to be only her past, stripped of its illusions? If Arthur Allison wanted to marry Alta Thorp, it wasn't any of her business.

Nevertheless, while presenting an imperturbable front to that part of the world located at White Sulphur Springs, she suffered keenly the next few days. Miss Thorp and her wealthy widowed mother occupied a cottage near Silver Lake, and between walking, riding and boating she and her new admirer were together almost constantly. Allison glanced at Miss Barrington once or