command of Ibrahim, O my Heart." "And that is the rider who will take me from thee?" "The command," said Musa, "contains nothing of that." to the edge of all deserts, he will follow and find." "O my beloved," answered Musa, "we shall have that same running on these horses. That is not a little thing. The air was a dark sea. The stars Life is sweet, and we shall have this appeared. "Lord, and then?" whispered Arissa. "This horse," answered Musa, "will grow tired, carrying two, and Ibrahim mounts his messengers well." Under stars that marched half-way to their zenith Musa drew up the red horse by a white dome and a dark lace of acacia-leaves, very still. And one who had been sitting in his saddle beneath the trees all the hours of the dew-falling paced his black horse forward, saying: "In the service of God. "And of Ibrahim, the sheik." Horse was alongside horse, knee all but touching knee. They made to embrace. Musa said: "You have the sheik's orders, Brother?" "I have them. And thou?” "I have fulfilled them," said Musa through his teeth, "and am now free." And at the word he smote out and up. With neither word nor cry the man fell. Musa leaned over his horse's shoulder and looked down. He saw a pale huddle of garments, and a dark blot spreading. Since the man was no enemy, he remained to repeat the Fatha for him. Then, leaving Arissa to ride the red horse, which was growing tired, he himself mounted the black. He hurled them suddenly to speed. Under the large light of stars they whirled away south. "Hast thou thought?" cried Arissa, leaning from the red. "Life is sweet to such as thou, O my beloved, and Ibrahim will follow. Though we run night." At midnight they came to a high, red cliff, barring their way. They rode along it. Presently they saw that there was a temple hewn in the rock, having before it great pillars, carved with the stories of a forgotten race. "Here," said Musa, "you will be safe from the dews, and here these princes of horses may rest." "It is a place of devils," said Arissa. "Nay," answered Musa, lover, poet, killer, and free man. "See, these on the pillars are but men and women, as we are man and woman. And here-see, little dove, in the star-shine—are two who love. By Allah! there is no evil here." In the Gate of Horus he stabled the horses, giving them fine barley from the saddle-bags, which he spread for them in his burnoose. Returning, he found Arissa seated under the column that told of the life of a dead queen. She was sifting from palm to palm the red dust that is dust of a vanished race. Trembling, Musa came to her and said, "I love thee." "I love thee." Through her veils her eyes seemed to shine on him, stars through a thin cloud. Child of space and sun, of scant growth and burning dust, he caught up the ecstasy of the dark. "When shall I see thy face? When?" She was silent a little, and whether she smiled or wept behind her veils he could not know. "Arissa?" She lifted a handful of the red desert dust. It ran through her fingers, a thin whispering thread. There was no sound but the beating of Musa's fierce heart, the whispering of the sand. & 3 The small old man at the table in the comfortable room with the neatly screened windows watched the last grain of sand drain from one little bulb of the hour-glass into the other. When it was all gone, he smiled. Covering his face with his hands, he laid his head on the table and seemed to rest. he lets all the sand run through. He'll wake right up when we go in." "Think of being old and having nothing to do but play with an hourglass and sleep! There are better things than that in the world." The young man caught the girl to him swiftly, hungrily. Within the curve of his arm she hesitated in the doorway, feeling a sort of shame of compassion. "It seems unkind," she said, "to tell him we 're going to be married and flaunt our happiness in his face. He has never had anything. I've heard that he wanted all his life to go to the East, he was a great Arabic student, you know, but he could n't ever afford it. He just studied and studied. What can he know of life and ro"Your mance?" The young man in the other room closed his hand gently around the girl's fingers, nodding his head toward the door. "Look!" he whispered. grandfather's asleep now." The girl turned compassionate eyes on the sagging old figure and stood up. "He's just dozed off," she said; "but he hates being interrupted when he's playing with his hour-glass before The Organized Farmer Steps forth By GUSTAVUS MYERS ITHERTO in the contest of social movement passed out of militant being H forces only two great divisions by a process of absorption, chiefly in have been recognized, those representing capital and the organized masses of labor. So fixed in the public mind has this alinement become that the entrance of another great force has hardly been considered, much less thought an imminent reality. That we had a large farming population city-dwellers of course knew, but as it lacked coherence and obtrusive expression, it was given scant attention. Moreover, the belief had become fixed that temperamentally and otherwise farmers were disinclined to submit long to organization, and too detached to effect it successfully on a national scale. Isolated and individualistic, the farmer emphasized his distinctiveness until it was not surprising that the urban inhabitant accepted it as characteristic. The apparently ephemeral nature of various farmers' uprisings solidified the conviction on the part of urban people that a comprehensive, enduring agrarian organization was next to an impossibility. The Farmers' Alliance, springing into activity in 1875, was strong and influential for a few years in some parts of the United States; then its energies waned and its power declined, until it was finally merged in the People's party, which was a composite affair only partly voicing farmers' demands. After a powerful, but brief agitational, career, the Populist the Democratic party. With the submergence of these movements, the farmer seemed to relapse into a disorganized, unprotected state, faced by the two great growing and aggressive organizations of capital and labor, and impotent to rank or cope with either. The Grange maintained a considerable membership, but this, like some other minor farmer associations, has been mainly social and fraternal. Even the advent of the NonPartizan League a few years ago made no wide-spread impression upon the farmer, for its activities were chiefly centered in the Northwest, and its directing was criticized by farmers' organs as proceeding from men who were not farmers. Now a great agrarian movement of a wholly different character is asserting itself with enthusiastic vigor. To those unfamiliar with antecedent factors this latest movement may seem a sudden emergence suspiciously like a mushroom growth, though it is by no means to be so classed. Its principles and policy are rooted in prior movements, which, although apparent failures, left lessons guiding the leaders of the present movement. Both the Farmers' Alliance and the People's party were essentially protesting and political. They declared against such abuses as public-land spoliation and railroad jobbery, they favored nationalization of railroads and telegraphs, and they expected, by electing a sufficient number of representatives in Congress and legislatures, to attain their demands. In brief they looked to the law-making bodies as the sole source of relief. And notwithstanding its economic background, the National Non-Partizan League has had the same dominating political aims, hoping, by securing control of legislative functions, to establish stateowned facilities for farmers. The new movement is of a different kind. Its purposes are preeminently economic; instead of relying upon political agencies, it is depending upon its own creative powers. From the experience of defunct farmers' movements its leaders learned that statute laws cannot change economic laws, and that, to obtain economic advantages, it is indispensable to organize on economic lines. Although not a new principle in organizations of capital and labor, this applied nationally is a new and significant development in farmers' movements. It is singular that labor organizations should have so long underestimated the capacity of farmers to organize because of past agrarian errors and incapacities. Did not labor go through its own severe schooling? Powerful as the Knights of Labor were for years, they finally disintegrated by reason of the impracticability of their plan of massing men of all vocations into one assembly and their not allowing autonomy for the different trades. It was the wisdom gathered from this disaster that enabled the American Federation of Labor to organize along craft lines with signal success. Worshipers of formulæ are also skeptically declaring that periods of low prices for farm products are always provocative of agrarian agitations, which subside or vanish when prices rise. True as this was of merely protesting movements, the application to an economic movement may be altogether different. High wages or low wages have not disbanded labor organizations, and there seems no logical reason why varying prices should seriously affect the continuity of a farmers' economic organization. Until now farmers, with few exceptions compared with the whole number, have been content with producing, giving little thought to the business side of marketing their products. In an age of keen economic struggle they saw themselves relegated to be passive instruments, relatively voiceless, while industrial organizations were easily able to disseminate their views and enforce their demands. Consequently, the first requisite taught by the new agrarian movement is that the farmer's salvation must come from himself and that he must have a mighty mouthpiece able at all times to command respect. The activity of the farmer movement is thus moving along two coördinate lines. One is that of establishing a great, strong national organization serving the farmers' interests in general. The other is the creation of special farmers' organizations to solve marketing problems. States. Its leaders are confident that they will get large numbers of more members, and the indications are that they will. For very wisely they have avoided the mistakes that wrecked other farmers' organizations. From the outset they insisted that the federation would not participate in partizan politics, nor would it endeavor to obtain control of the government in any State or in the nation. This policy disarmed fears that the American Farm Bureau Federation might degenerate, as some other farmers' movements had, into a thing of mere political expediency, manipulated by self-seekers. It left every member free to vote as he pleased. By effacing emphasis upon the political feature, it left full latitude for concentrating attention upon the federation's animating principles. The program of the American Farm Bureau Federation comprises a series of purposes. Realizing that the other social and economic elements have not been properly educated to a sense of the farmer's importance as a producing factor, it seeks to instil in the urban mind a better conception of the farmer's relationship. Inasmuch as for many decades industrial problems have preoccupied the public mind largely to the exclusion of agricultural, it aims to make the fact clear that agriculture is the fundamental industry upon which the other industries depend. Food is the first need of mankind, and the federation seeks to direct attention to the condition and problems of those producing the food. It also purposes to safeguard the interests and promote the legislative needs of the farmer upon all occasions. From this point its program differs widely from that of any other organi zation. It ceases to be purely educational and representative and ventures boldly into the realms of economic reconstruction. It aims at nothing less than a recasting of the whole system of distributing agricultural products. This transformation may well signify the beginning of a new epoch; it is, at any rate, a phenomenon of the first magnitude. Since industrial units were organized into trusts, have they not been able to regulate production, distribution, and prices? Has not organized labor successively increased wages and shortened hours of work? This is what farmers' leaders are asking. Why, they inquire, should not the farmer organize so as to control the distribution of his products? Heretofore, they point out, the farmer is the only producer who has clung to antiquated methods. Lacking proper organization, he has had to throw his products upon the market irrespective of conditions, and this swamping has forced him to take whatever prices were offered. In general he has had no warehouses of his own in which to store his products and no means of financing himself. On the other hand, he has had to contend with powerful, centralized organizations of speculative buyers controlling warehouses and other facilities and adequately financed for their undertakings. Grain is instanced as an example. Farmers complain that they have been forced to market grain in a haphazard way, holding them down to the minimum of market value. According to C. H. Gustavson, one of the best informed of the farmers' leaders, about seventy-five per cent. of the wheat of American farmers has been marketed within four months after harvest. |