has no right to, and, lest the honor of our country and the ideals we fight for be lost, we shall pay it. It may be that the reckoning will come later; or it may be that we are so sunk in materialism that skilled labor will continue to rule the earth. Just so long as we feel our greatest need to be of the things it furnishes us with, and its greatest need is for the things we cannot furnish it with, our necks will be bowed under labor's yoke. Our only chance of emancipation lies in finding some of our greatest goods in fields not under labor's control. In other words, to live at all, in any peace, in any equanimity and longanimity, we must be as little materialistic in temper and desire as possible. We must teach our children that the greatest goods are not the things that skilled labor produces. That is not only truth; it is self-preservation. Labor will have the motorcars and the delicacies of the table, the jewels and the joy-rides; we must see to it that we keep something else, and learn to feel the importance of our treasure. If we can maintain a prestige value for the things of our choice (frankly, I doubt if we can) "the lords of their hands" may come to desire the things we have chosen, and help to make them accessible. But we must be careful to make no concessions; we must not take one step, ourselves, in the materialistic direction.

This is not snobbishness; it is a matter of

life and death. No one is going to have leisure, any more, to be a snob or any such nonessential thing. At least, if any one has the time, it will not be the educated classes. We shall have to work as we have never worked before, physically as well as mentally. We shall have to learn to co-operate with one another, too; to make an almost religious brotherhood. For it is our children who matter, and we cannot begin too soon to prepare them for a world which has nothing in common with the world we knew. Only by joining in utmost effort with the like-minded can we hope to protect them.

I know there are Utopians who see in the socialization of Anglo-Saxon governments hope, along Marxian lines, for Anglo-Saxondom. They foresee, I suppose, the kind of Paradise that the Admirable Crichton (in Barrie's immoral and delightful play) must have experienced on the desert island. There is going to be only one party in England, Mr. Arthur Henderson has recently said-the Labor party. It may be. Let us hope that some of the "unattached leaders" will at least preserve logic if they do not preserve majorities. Mr. Henderson's own argument is about as convincing as though one should say: in certain abnormal conditions martial law is the only régime that will work; therefore, since civil law has been found inadequate to conditions of riot and pestilence and famine, we must give it up altogether, and make martial law perpetual.

The real arguments against private, and for public, ownership are, of course, quite other than those Mr. Henderson offers. The point is that Mr. Henderson evidently does not know bad logic when he sees it. Let Mr. Henderson and his followers keep the motor-cars, one is inclined to say, and we will keep the logic he discards. Private perception of the laws of logic is something we shall not be taxed for; though-let us not deceive ourselves-we shall have to make sacrifices to keep it. If we can acquire logic, we may have it. It may be increasingly difficult to maintain the methods of acquiring it: the best education, moral and intellectual, was becoming endangered before the war, and there is no telling what may become of it afterward.

I seem to have wandered far afield from plumbing; and yet plumbing (as a symbol of materialistic comfort) is more than germane to the question. The group whose problem I am concerned with is a very large one, though always, anywhere, a minority: the professional man, the man in the smaller business position, the man on a salary, who has been decently. bred, and who can never look forward to, any, real financial fortune. I do not include every one who has to economize strictly, for a large proportion of the people who have to economize strictly are totally uneducated as to real. values. But distinctly I include any of the last mentioned who are alive to something besides

materialistic needs. I do not include the people who want intellectual and æsthetic goods only for social and snobbish reasons or out of blind jealousy. That group, in any case, will cease to exist if intellectual and æsthetic goods cease to have a social value-as is more and more definitely coming to be the case. They were never anything but paid mercenaries in the struggle.

How are we going to save, for our children and our children's children, the real amenities of life? Hitherto the new millionaires, for reasons of social prestige, have tended to link themselves to the group of the civilized. But the new millionaire has always been an individual case, and has, therefore, had to make concessions to the group already established. What we have never had before is the proletariat suddenly becoming, overnight, in its vast numbers, at once richer and more powerful politically than the little "educated" aristocracy. We all know what happens when that happens; if we have forgotten the French Revolution (and since 1914 a good many of us have) we have the Russian Revolution to remind us. In this morning's newspaper I saw that the daily bread ration in Petrograd was one-half a pound for the proletariat, one-eighth of a pound for the bourgeoisie. That may or may not be true, but there is nothing in known facts to make it incredible. Even granting that

skilled labor is not going to Bolshevize itself completely, there is no doubt that the minority of which I speak is going to be virtually, if not theoretically, discriminated against. Labor is not going to draw distinctions between employers of labor; the college professor is going to have to pay the plumber, the carpenter, at as exorbitant rates as the great manufacturer. Any one who employs labor at all—even if it is only to repair a leak—is going to be gouged. All along the line, the producers of every necessary element in civilized physical existence are going to rob the ultimate consumer. It is labor that is responsible for the high cost of living. Labor may say that the high cost of living is responsible for its increased demands. In point of fact, there is every evidence that labor at present is demanding money, not for the necessities of life, but for the luxuriesjust like the capitalists they have so inveighed against. One would have to be a professional reformer to be shocked. Any knowledge of human nature leaves one perfectly unsurprised by this phenomenon. Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism. That is what labor has always said about the employers of labor; and the employers can say it quite as truly of the employed. So long as you make the basis of life materialistic, this law will prevail.