who dealt in abstract ideas more exclusively than any other religious teacher the world has had.

We must, then, seriously facing the moral, political, and physical conditions of our time, be frankly ascetic. We must make our children healthy, first of all-if only because specialists will be beyond our pocketbooks. I have implied that the combination of plain living and high thinking is a difficult one; I fancy it is the most difficult in the world. "The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense." We shall obliterate the coarser contacts, as far as possible, not by engaging other people to take the burden of those coarser contacts, but by buying, as we can, the machinery that will suffice to them impersonally. We shall "co-operate" to the limit of our incomes, losing thereby, I repeat, many of the amenities which tend to civilize. We shall not sleep soft, we shall not live high, and we shall do without external beauty to a painful extent. We shall exist in cramped quarters, and if we achieve the dignity of one spacious room, that will be a great deal. We cannot hope to furnish it fittingly. But if we have a dollar to spend on some wild excess, we shall spend it on a book, not on asparagus out of season. If we have a holiday, we shall not go to Europe or Asia, which would be beyond our means; but we shall find some quiet spot where there will at least be

trees and sky and no motor-cars or aeroplanes. We shall, I hope, ameliorate our lack of space and privacy by a very perfectly developed courtesy and by the capacity for silence. It sounds monastic, and, at its best, monastic it will be. Certain things we shall have given up at the start; certain ambitions will have been erased from our tablets. We shall not compete with, or interfere with, the lords of this world. We shall do our modest work, and receive our modest pay, and by a corresponding modesty of life and temper we shall disarm, we hope, the unsympathetic and uncomprehending. Our kingdom cannot be of this world; and instead of complaining and criticizing, we must apply ourselves to realizing that our compensations can be made greater than our losses. We shall be passionately concerned with humanity; the more so, that we shall endeavor to be aware of the voice of God as well as of the voice of the people. We shall not be snobs in any sense; for we shall have the same charity for other people's choices that we beg them to have for ours. Besides, snobbishness dies out quickly— in America, at least among the impoverished.

Even those who find all this an intolerable idea will dub it Utopian. A counsel of perfection it certainly is. But the higher the standard we set for ourselves the less likely we are to put up with a low one. And if we merely drift, I fear we shall find ourselves getting nothing—

wearing ourselves out in the unequal, familiar race for physical privileges, and leaving to one side the intangible goods. We can guarantee our children nothing except that they shall be armored against certain kinds of suffering; the lust of non-essentials, for example. I do not say that we shall not lose much that our best interest would suggest our having; but we shall not lose everything. And with the new simplicity will come some of the compensations of earlier simplicity. The man who has three things gets more pleasure out of one than does the man who has a hundred. Perhaps we shall capture the "joy in widest commonalty spread." A rose will always be cheaper than an alligator pear, and it is quite possible to enjoy it as much and as vividly. We shall be very grateful, I have no doubt, to Thomas Edison and the other genii of democracy. In some ways we shall fare better than folk of our clan in Europe. We must thank our stars for plumbing -itself a "joy in widest commonalty spread.' But we shall value it chiefly as it releases time for better things, and those better things not physical pleasures.

Not only shall we not glorify our plumbing with marble; we shall see that there is really no sense in marble when porcelain will do as well-that marble has better uses and should be kept for them. Not only shall we have no ermine to shield us from the cold; we shall see

that ermine was more beautiful when rarely and ritually worn. We shall learn to take pleasure in beautiful things that do not and never can belong to us; and we shall purge ourselves of the ignoble passion of envy. But the power to discriminate between the truth and a liewhich is the foundation of all moral and intellectual enjoyment-we shall cling to with greed. For in keeping that we rob no one, and insult no law. I am far from believing that any group of people can achieve all this with completeness. But I believe we shall do well to set it before us as a goal.

TH

DRESS AND THE WOMAN

HE creed and the fallacy of fashion, it seems to me, have seldom been better

expressed than in the retort once made to a friend of mine, in one of our more conservative New England towns. Sojourning there for a time, she had reason to order a hat from a local milliner. When she tried it on, it did not resemble in the least the headgear of the metropolis. "They are wearing hats very low, this year, you know," she protested. "Ah," was the unperturbed reply, "they are wearing them high in Newburyport." I do not remember the fate of the hat-which is unimportant; but the statement has remained with me for years as one of the most significant imaginable. It was at once the glorification and the reductio ad absurdum of modishness. My friend and the milliner spoke in the same spirit. For provincialism in dress consists merely in adhering rigidly to the avant-dernier cri. The object of allegiance may be, in the provinces, a little tardily come up with; but the rigidity is precisely the rigidity of the rue de la Paix. Fashion is not simply a question of longitude.

The sense of mode might be considered, as so many other things have been, the possession