structive unity, the American Federation of Labor could publish a peace book for American labor that would give a breadth of outlook and a confidence in policy and action to the forces of labor that cannot otherwise be attained.

The Chamber of Commerce of the United States might take the leadership in working out a comprehensive system of reconstruction commissions for American business.

The numerous agricultural organizations under the leadership of our colleges of agriculture might do a similar thing for the agricultural interests of the country.

Unfortunately, we in America have never acquired the habit of group thinking and collective research on public problems as they have in Europe. In England, to choose a notable example, there can always be found going on a vast amount of sustained study of public problems by voluntary groups. The English Government rarely faces the necessity for acting upon any fundamental domestic problem without finding at hand the highly valuable results of a most scientific and careful study of the problem made by some voluntary association. When, for instance, a minister of reconstruction was appointed, he found at hand the admirable publications of the Fabian Society, the Garton Foundation, the Rowntree investigations, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the Round Table group, to mention only a few. Had he found nothing but the little pamphlet on "Great Britain After the War," by Sidney Webb and Arnold Freeman, he would have found that much of the preliminary charting of his problem had already been ably done.

But with regard to the conduct of American reconstruction studies by nonofficial groups, especially labor and business, it should be kept in mind that a peace book written by the class most interested in the issues would run the grave risk of being marked by special pleading and ex parte recommendations. The clear need is for an imaginative and scientific system of study and preparation to be instituted

by our Government at once, if we are not at the end of the war to take a leap in the dark, only to find the dark occupied by determined nations equipped with a sure. knowledge of the situation and a wellthought-out plan of action. We, too, must work out our peace book now.

Reconstruction studies and reconstruction programs made by classes such as business, labor, and agriculture, contain dangers even more serious than those of special pleading and ex parte recommendations. The real danger is that we would come to the end of the war with a series of reconstruction programs, a labor program, a business program, and an agricultural program, and at the very time when we would most need unity of national policy and national effort we would be obliged to spend a great deal of our energy in an internal conflict of policies, and while vital problems were crying for solution, we would be compelled to stand still until the slow process of compromise could be effected.

Too much emphasis cannot be placed upon the need of a governmental commission on reconstruction, including adequate representation of all of the fundamental classes of American society.

The working out of an American peace book would create a sound fact basis from which our political, business, labor, and educational leadership can operate after the war. It would go far toward preventing a capture of the public mind by the special pleader and the demagogue. It would give a sweep and grasp to the legislative thought of the country beyond anything that can be hoped if each legislator must himself attempt to visualize the entire problem. It would be invaluable in helping every business man, labor leader, and educator to orient his problem and policy to the whole situation. It would be the biggest single stroke that could be made toward inducing among us the habit of thinking nationally; and that we must do if we are to meet in an adequate manIner the new demands of the new world that this war, with all of its tragedy, is creating.

IT

T was in the Tien-shan Mountains, called "Celestial," that I sought out a Chinese temple, one of the oldest, built half-way up a peak that reared its snowcapped head twenty thousand feet above sea-level. I had come there in search of an old painting on woven silk of which I had heard when I was in Lan-chau-fu. The difficulties of the journey, of which I had also heard, had not kept me from climbing, with my Chinese secretary and servants, along a deserted road where for want of inns or taverns we had for several days been forced to camp. We met no travelers; for only now and then do a few of the art-loving Chinese make the journey up this twisting, rocky road for sight of the painting, the extreme age of which is even yet undetermined.

I am not a scholar; it was not on any scientific research that I came here. I had lived ten years in China, and had come to feel myself less strange than some Europeans who had lived there longer, perhaps because I went upon pilgrimages like this into the less well-known provinces.

At one point along the mountain road on which I had been lured by the recounted beauty of this old painting we could catch a glimpse of the Chinese Wall, built here in the third century before Christ to keep out the Tartars. But how modern it seemed in comparison with these hoary-headed mountains that looked to me like the ruins of some gigantic prehistoric temple! Upon these ruins the verdure was like moss; and we, moving in and out through the forest, clinging to its side, were but so many insects, moving, however, with a human purpose

When we reached the gray old temple I did not wait for the sun to set before sleeping. So it was that at dawn, before my companions had awakened, I entered the inclosure and found the caretaker, a Chinese priest, old and wrinkled. I spoke to him in mandarin and told him that now, in this quiet hour before I had eaten, I wanted to see the painting.

He understood, and took me into a room through the eastern window of which came the soft glow of a rising sun. But

before he unrolled the painting he brought to me in a white jade cup tea such as I had never tasted. The perfume rising from the cup seemed to have in it the same exquisite subtlety as did the gentle light from the east. I asked its name, for in China teas are known by their names as roses elsewhere. It was the "Tea from the Tower of P'an-ku."

I sat and watched the bent old man take from its resting-place the roll of silk. He laid it before me and left me, for I had brought to him a letter which promised that I would hold this old painting as sacred as he did. I unrolled it.

The colors were still clear and deep. Not far from a mountain-top was a city. Upon the many-hued roofs and upon the snow-covered peak there was no shadow and no mist. The air seemed vibrant. The radiant sunlight streaming down from above was full of color until lost in the abyss of the gorge that lay below.

In the streets and the squares of the city were moving a people who seemed happy and bird-like. Their flowing garments might have been wings. And they, like their houses, were bathing themselves in radiance, recalling to me that mystical phrase of the Taoist poet Chuang-tse, "drowning oneself in light."

Above the city was a tower, but not of any period of Chinese architecture that I could recognize. It had a look of age despite its brilliant colors. Under the hoodshaped roof there hung a bell so faintly drawn, so evanescent, that it seemed some ethereal symbol.

Part of the joy that I felt in looking at this painted city hanging there in mid-air I ascribed to the beauty of the hour in which I was seeing it and to the contents of the little jade cup. But that joy gave way, as the painting unrolled itself before me, to sadness and then to horror. The Tiger of the Earth had leaped upon the Dragon of the Air and torn it with claws, so that the very essence of joy flowed out and left me in a fright which, as I look back upon it now, could not have been due entirely to what I saw in the painting. Some hidden bond between me and that

seen.

Many who had seen that painting, he said, had gone away without question. By that he knew that they had not really He appeared to marvel that I, who was not Chinese, had had no veil before my eyes, but had been given the vision, for so he claimed it was. And then without a word he brought me another silken roll of age-old writing and again left me.

I could not read the ancient Chinese characters painted so beautifully by some old temple priest. But there went with it a translation into the modern written language. I read the story more than once. And although the day was a day of fasting in the presence of beauty, I did not sleep that night until I had written down, as well as I could remember, what I had read.

At that time when the memory of P'an-ku, the first man, was still green, there was in the kingdom of Hai-fu a great city perched aloft upon a mountainside whose peaks reached into celestial heights. The people of this kingdom were very brave and very strong and very happy. The king was of the Sun. He had brought to the city where he lived wise men and rich merchants. He had no need of going to war, for his neighbors all knew him as just. They would not have dared to invade his kingdom or cheat his merchants who went out among them. The only conflicts were among the wise men as to what was the chief virtue of mankind, and among the artists as to which was most beautiful, the blossom of the apricot, the petals of the peony, or the sturdy growth of the pine-tree. These conflicts only served to make the people happier, since every wise man had to utter words of wisdom to prove his point, and

dom, but the

most prized was a bronze bell that had been cast by him who was called the "greatest of the Kaushih." This bell hung higher than all the rest of the city in the tower which had stood there, so it was believed, from the

time of P'an-ku. The sun lighted it up from the moment it rose above the plain in the east until it sank in the west. It rang out the hours and the quarters.

And

whenever it was heard, joy seemed to descend upon the people of the kingdom, and they lifted their heads to listen, and their eyes would be upon the far blue spaces where dwells the Dragon of the Air, he who makes bless

ed the lives of all the people of earth.

But one day the king, in a moment of weariness, desired that there should be a contest among the bell-makers, that he might discover one whose bell should be

even more musical than this one of the Kau-shih. Word went forth. It brought to the heart of Yen-huan, the youngest bell-maker in the king

leaped down the sides of the mountain. In his sleep at night he had heard the booming of the waves upon distant shores. And out of all these sounds he had conceived

the

note of a bell which, he believed, was the most beautiful

that had ever been heard.

When the day came for the contest, he saw his bell hung, and waited with rapture to be called

the greatest bellmaker of the kingdom. But it was not to be. His ears alone, it seemed, caught the beauty of the tones that rang forth. All the

others and the

king, too, found them too gentle or too loud, too high or too low. For they were

not like the tones to which the people of the kingdom had grown used.

Then Yen-huan went forth alone from the city, leaving his bell to the mercy of the people, who gave it no thought whatever. As he went down the side of the mountain, a cold wind went with him and drove him along into the kingdom of a neighbor. Through this, too, he

passed, and after him flew bats and evil. birds, for he had breathed curses as he passed out into an unknown world. The curses were against the king and the kingdom and the unhearing people.

Years after, when the king had. grown old, he wished to have a still greater bell to hang in the tower of P'an-ku. He sent out his messengers into all the neighboring kingdoms to proclaim that to him who should make the great bell would be given the hand of his daughter and a palace upon the mountain-side.

All the bell-makers of the world came to Hai-fu. For four days the birds flew to cover and the winds kept quiet and the waterfalls hushed their music while the

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dom on the east would be to offend the ruler of the country on the west; and to choose the bell from among those who came from the north kingdom would be to make an enemy of the king whose land lay on the south. But, worst of all, to choose the bell of the Kau-shih would be to anger all the neighboring kingdoms. By his desire for a new thing, the wise men pointed out, the king had made it impossible to keep on peaceful terms with his neighbors. There was gloom in the council-room and in the hearts of the wise.

Suddenly a shout went up from the street outside. A peasant had come into the city with news of a great procession on its way up the mountain-side. The

king, gladdened, went to greet the new-comer, who was preceded by a guard of soldiers dressed more gorgeously than any who had ever come into the city. They accompanied a chariot bearing the bell. Its shape could be discerned under the cloth of moon-colored velvet. White elephants dragging the chariot were harnessed with silver. Upon a camel, the trappings of which had in them all the colors of the night, rode the bell-maker himself. His face was hidden in the hood of a white cloak of a kind that no one in the city had ever seen before.

When the camel had knelt and he had alighted, the stranger bowed low to the king, who gave the command that the bell should be hung at once. At sunset all the people of the city

bell-makers rang their bells and those who were to judge sat silent, fanning themselves and listening.

On the fifth day there was consternation, for no one dared to say which bell was most beautiful. The wise men came to the king to warn him that to give honor to the bell-maker who came from the king

that led toward the tower of P'an-ku. There was no merriment. Although the sun had not yet set, the dusk was creeping stealthily up from the valley, carried along by a chill wind. The crowd shivered and waited impatiently.

As the first note of the bell rang out, it seemed to lift the hearts of all who listened in an appeal that they could not