tains most of her brains, but sends multitudes of the common and the sub-common. There is little sign of an intellectual element among the Magyars, Russians, southern Slavs, Italians, Greeks, or Portuguese. This does not hold, however, for currents created by race discrimination or oppression. The Armenian, Syrian, Finnish, and Russo-Hebrew streams seem representative, and the first wave of Hebrews out of Russia in the eighties was superior. The Slovaks, German Poles, Lithuanians, Esthonians, and other restive subject groups probably send us a fair sample of their quality. RACE SUICIDE THE fewer brains they have to contribute, the lower the place immigrants take among us, and the lower the place they take, the faster they multiply. In 1890, in our cities, a thousand foreign-born women could show 565 children under five years of age to 309 children shown by a thousand native women. By 1900 the contribution of the foreign women had risen to 612, and that of the American women had declined to 296. From such figures. some argue that the "sterile" Americans need the immigrants in order to supply population. It would be nearer the truth to argue that the competition of low-standard immigrants is the root cause of the mysterious "sterility" of Americans. Certainly their record down to 1830 proved the Americans to be as fertile a race as ever lived, and the decline in their fertility coincides in time and in locality with the advent of the immigrant flood. In the words of General Francis A. Walker, "Not only did the decline in the native element, as a whole, take place in singular correspondence with the excess of foreign arrivals, but it occurred chiefly in just those regions"-"in those States and in the very counties," he says elsewhere-"to which those new-comers most frequently resorted." "Our immigrants," says a superintendent of charities, "often come here with no standards whatever. In their homes you find no sheets on the bed, no slips on the pillows, no cloth on the table, and no towels save old rags. Even in the mudfloor cabins of the poorest negroes of the South you find sheets, pillow-slips, and towels, for by serving and associating with the whites the blacks have gained standards. But many of the foreigners have no means of getting our home standards after they are here. No one shows them. They can't see into American homes, and no Americans associate with them." The Americans or Americanized immigrants who are obliged to live on wages fixed by the competition of such people must cut somewhere. If they do not choose to "live in a pig-pen and bring up one's children like pigs," they will save their standards. by keeping down the size of the family. Because he keeps them clean, neatly dressed, and in school, children are a burden to the American. Because he lets them run wild and puts them to work early, children are an asset to the lowstandard foreigner. When a more developed element is obliged to compete on the same economic plane with a less-developed element, the standards of cleanliness or decency or education cherished by the advanced element act on it like a slow poison. William does not leave as many children as 'Tonio, because he will not huddle his family into one room, eat macaroni off a bare board, work his wife barefoot in the field, and keep his children weeding onions instead of at school. Even moral standards may act as poison. Once the women raisinpackers at Fresno, California, were American born. Now the American women are leaving because of the low moral tone that prevails in the working force by reason of the coming in of foreigners with lax notions of propriety. The coarseness of speech and behavior among the packers is giving raisin-packing a bad name, so that American women are quitting the work and taking the next best job. Thus the very decency of the native is a handicap to success and to fecundity. As they feel the difficulty of keeping up their standards on a Slav wage, the older immigrant stocks are becoming sterile, even as the old Americans became sterile. In a generation complaint will be heard that the Slavs, too, are shirking big families, and that we must admit prolific Persians, Uzbegs, and Bokhariots, in order to offset the fatal sterility that attacks every race after it has become Americanized. Very truly says Professor Wilcox, in praise of immigration: "The cost of rearing chil dren in the United States is rapidly rising. In many, perhaps in most cases, it is simpler, speedier, and cheaper to import labor than to breed it." In like vein it is said that "a healthy immigrant lad of eighteen is a clear $1000 added to the national wealth of the United States." Just so. "The Roman world was laughing when it died." Any couple or any people that does not feel it has anything to transmit to its children may well reason in such fashion. A couple may reflect, "It is simpler, speedier, and cheaper for us to adopt orphans than to produce children of our own." A nation may reason, “Why burden ourselves with the rearing of children? Let them perish unborn in the womb of time. The immigrants will keep up the population." A people that has no more respect for its ancestors and no more pride of race than this deserves the extinction that surely awaits it. THE BY W. T. LARNED HE best of it is that Mother Goose has always ministered to our imaginations. There is a reticence in her recitals that suggests the drawn curtain. Behind it, in the land of the unknown, live the little old men and women, the beggars and witches, princes and pretty ladies, who are conjured for a moment before the silken folds, only to be whisked away when our curiosity is most aroused. Mother Goose, like all world poets, never told half she knew. Poetess laureate of the English-speaking nursery, her most complete achievements in rhyme are yet of an incompleteness that insure us against satiety. In those shreds and patches of verse, those isolated couplets and quatrains suggesting so much and saying so little, we perceive the promise of that perfected art foreshadowed in the unfinished tales of a Dickens and a Stevenson. Rudyard Kipling, deliberately fashioning metrical fragments for preludes to his Indian tales, struck a note seldom sustained in his completed compositions. Who was Daffy-down-dilly, and what did she do when she came to town? Was Jumping Joan flesh, fairy, or symbol? Would we laugh or cry did we understand the fantastic apparition of Banbury Cross? Why did Margery Daw sell her bed to lie upon straw, and was there not something behind the appearance of her purely eccentric depravity? We never expected an answer to these riddles, nor cared, perhaps, to get it, as it was pretty sure to be political, or historic, or psychological; something scholarly, of course, but none the less destructive to poetry and its purposes. The folly of supposing that we must wholly understand things would rob us of our two greatest literary possessions, the Bible and Shakspere. We really need neither theologian nor glossary to thrill with the message of the prophets or bow before the majesty of the blank verse in "Macbeth." Reduce poetry to perfectly intelligible terms, and you get a kind of rhymed prose. Always we return to the things we never wholly understand-the things and the people. Mother Goose and her progeny we never quite outgrow. Even her assonance is not an unpleasant offset to the sometimes too cloying consonance of our faultless rhymes. Yet it has remained for an American poet whose very name is known only to a few Americans to penetrate behind the mysterious curtain, and, gaining the confidence of Mother Goose herself, disclose to our duller ears and imperfect vision the true and unrelated adventures of her immortal brood. The man who did thisand in doing it produced poetry unique in contemporary literature-was in life a dilettante, who must have dreamed many dreams that died with him. Yet Daniel Henry Holmes, desultory practitioner of the law, musical composer, linguist, poet, who was and was not New Yorker, Kentuckian, expatriate, has left behind him a memorial wrought in affection for his fellows. The unobtrusiveness of a life lived without struggle, apart from the main currents of intercourse, yields little to would-be biographers; an apparent indifference to literary fame suggests the self-effacement of modesty. At a time when originality, coupled with a rare note in metrical expression, is not a loud cry in our market-place, his continuous obscurity seems almost astonishing. First disclosed, under a pseudonym, in England, and now, with the lapse of thirty years, finding a limited, though joyful, audience in the United States, we must seek excuse for our oversight in the welter of books and the modest medium of his initial appearance. Mr. Thomas B. Mosher, American re-discoverer of verses printed by a London publisher in 1884, in a volume limited to five hundred copies, holds the copyright to "Under a Fool's Cap," and has put in circulation a second edition. It is the age of the superlative, and mediocrity, adroitly advertised and even critically extolled, has too often assailed the porches of our ears with its insistent tomtoms. But listen to Holmes: Daffy-down-dilly has come up to town, In her green petticoat and yellow gown. With this cryptic jingle for a text, Holmes retires behind the curtain, and emerges triumphantly with that all-toomysterious maiden, From the far-away South, Where endless Summer sleeps endless dreams, With her eyes and hair full of loose sunbeams, And a kiss on her mouth, she stands amidst the broil and babble of the market-place. It is a dead, dreary, smoke-laden town, with cheerless people living somehow through a dragging day, Till Daffy-down-dilly suddenly trips Her tambourine over her finger-tips And begins to dance. A poet's dream of the bayadere, with her naked arms, and slender legs bare up to the knees. The dance of the fauns! Gradually the tired and timid people gather about her "as the spell of her spreads,' Till a sunbeam strikes like a sabre-flash, And then her witchery reigns supreme: The streets flash white, the houses gleam While in maddening whirl, From end to end of the market-place A frenzied chorus of dance keeps pace With the dancing-girl. And it seems as though Almighty Pan But this is the flash from just one facet. It is not easy to classify the man who wrote these lines. What, indeed, is “light” verse, and in what category will the labelmaker place certain of the songs in this little volume? Surely, for sheer lyric quality, for tenderness, feeling, humanity, and the grace that disguises strength, the metri cal art of Holmes reveals a singer who belongs in the most distinguished company. There is great variety in the twenty-four sets of verses. The suggestion of Pantaloon is mere pretense; for when did Pantaloon learn to strike the lyre of the true lyric poet? In all simplicity and unaffectedness, Holmes sings his song with the Mother Goose motive, and, lo! you are listening to the sort of tragic recital with which a supernormal Trilby thrilled her audience, the metamorphosis of a Marlborough into a hero of Valhalla. Or it is Pierrot, with the brave gaiety that hides a sad heart. At times it is Béranger, with a touch of the American Bunner. Smiling lips and grave eyes belong to the man who embroiders the old catch: Violet's blue-Diddle, diddle! When I am king-Diddle, diddle! But, he asks lightly, pretending all the time that he is not terribly in earnest : Can our hearts beat-Diddle, diddle! Prisoned in pomp,-Diddle, diddle! Ah, no, for, Love thrives alone-Diddle, diddle! In open air; Where pageants are-Diddle, diddle! Love is not there. Memories of Mother Goose come with cloudy wings to us grown-ups, as the recollections of his childhood came to Renan, "like the bells of a lost city rung under water." When this unpretentious singer sets the chimes a-going, it is sometimes a silvery peal and sometimes a knell. You will recall the pleasant jingle of "Banbury Cross"-of the fine lady With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes. Whence and whither rode she? To greet her lover, to be sure, "home from his quest to the Holy Shrine." Observe her cavaliers-squires in scarlet and helmeted knights, pages and heralds and clowns. In her cap, cock-feathers of crimson, herself "red-rose with the joy to come," she comes to Banbury town, and there lies the corpse of her lover, "like a dog that is let to die in the street." And that is why (Mother Goose this time supplies the final stanza): Thro' the wax and wane of the changing years, A lady rides with wailing and tears, "Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross, To see a fine Lady ride on a gray horse, Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, And she shall have music wherever she goes." There is one poem that might well have been addressed to Americans of to-day. It celebrates that idle urchin "Little Boy Blue," who could not even discharge his easy task of tending the sheep, but must fall asleep under a hay-cock, while the hard-wrung fruit of the farmer's toil is trodden under foot by the wandering herds. Plague on all idlers and dreamers of dreams! And yet: How often his horn's silver melody came, Staying your courage, when courage had flagg'd, Lighting the dead heavy burden you dragg'd: Where do you think he has found them grow, These wonderful songs which have cheer'd you so? Toil as you may, in the sweat of your brow, You will find none such, where you delve and plough. Would you know why Margery Daw sold her bed to live in dirt? It is not a tale for children, so how could Mother Goose tell it? "Daniel Henry, Jun." (the name that buried Holmes's identity in the original edition), takes up the song where the nursery-rhyme leaves off, departing for once from the meter of his text. Margery is Victor Hugo's Fantine, the Gretchen of Goethe. With her baby to provide for, and the door closed to repentance, she sells her bed, gown, shawl, Till her all lay piled on the pawner's shelf; Then she clench'd her teeth and sold herself. Shame, sickness, hunger, cold, fever, madness, a loaf snatched in a moment of despair, the gaol Not a sparrow falls, they say-Oh well! God was not looking when Margery fell. It is not a pleasant story, but even unpleasant stories have an ending: See-saw! Margery Daw! What a wise and bountiful thing, the Law! It makes all smooth-for she 's out of her head, And her brat is provided for. It's dead. It is impossible of course to convey in extracts the cumulative force and beauty of a brief poem. Around the suggestion, and cockle-shells, and pretty girls all in a in "My Lady's Garden," of "silver bells, row," Holmes has woven a garland of verses that exhales the perfume of roses, and enshrines the sanctity of pure womanhood. By day the pretty girls, with wonderful wings and silver crowns, sway and swing with the nodding of the flowers. Only with night begins their magic toil, when, decked with their bells and shells, and "chaunting Runic hymns and spells," They spread their faint green wings abroad, Who gives them crystal dreams to hold, Then, when their chaliced hands can hold no more, Through space and night they take their flight To where my Lady lies asleep. Under their ministrations she grows in loveliness, In sorcery such, that at her touch, Given the suggestion, Holmes embroiders the bare idea with the magic of his own errant fancy. That enigmatic ancient, |