self only when he stands for those standards and attempts to carry them further and to have them go deeper. This can come about only by the man at the top standing aside while he is still mentally alert to watch and counsel, if need be, and letting another and younger man feel the full responsibility of the standards as his own. That act alone is service in the best

sense.

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As the editor of THE CENTURY warms up to his subject he becomes militant. He would have me not lauded for retiring from business, but actually court-martialed for "deserting" my post "in the midst of the battle."

I wonder if Mr. Frank will be quite so insistent upon his court-martial idea when he has been editor of THE CENTURY for thirty years, as I was editor of "The Ladies' Home Journal." Thirty years is a long time, a very long time, for one set of readers to listen, month in and month out, to one man; it means his monthly visitation upon them over a period of three hundred and sixty months! They may survive the ordeal. In my case they seem to have done so; but is it ever wise to strain the quality of mercy?

Then, too, I wonder if Mr. Frank has ever noticed how in the life of a home a new voice will sometimes be listened to by the child more intently and sometimes carry more weight than will the accustomed voice of the father or even that of the mother. And does not the time come, in the case of a magazine as well, when the reader is entitled to a new voice, particularly after a pitiless dose of three hundred and sixty repetitions of the old voice?

A further point, and I say it to Mr. Frank in confidence: is it not better for the man to say good-by to a public before the public has a chance to say that good-by to him, or before it indicates that it wants to say it? The going is always so much better while the going is good!

I cannot quite see why a man should have a court martial meted out to him for doing his public a service, particularly when that public did not seem to resent the action so deeply, if we may judge from the fact that the same magazine has a present circulation of a quarter of a million more copies every month than under my editorship! I should hardly call that an indication of a public's opinion of the desertion of a post! In fact, I can imagine some folks who might view it more as a definite and rather wide expression of relief.

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Still militant, although more picturesque, Mr. Frank continues, "I cannot but feel that in the struggle for a better America Mr. Bok threw away a repeating-rifle and armed himself with a tin sword."

Of course the editor here becomes so personal that he shackles the pen. I can hardly present here a comparative list of what I tried to do as an editor and what I have tried to do since. I stopped editing, and thus try to prove whether the one resembled a rifle and the other a tin sword. That must be for others to determine. One point baffles me somewhat, however, when farther in the article I become "a pillar of fire." Just what becomes of the tin sword in that case is what puzzles me!

Perhaps I shall be pardoned if I rest

for a moment on one of my accomplishments since my retirement, the success of which is so unquestioned that I cannot certainly be accused of any self-advertisement in this reference to it. I mean my book, "The Americanization of Edward Bok." I have received since the publication of that book, now nearly three years ago, conservatively speaking, some four thousand letters. I should say that of these fully twenty-five hundred were from young people under twenty-one. Now, of course, it is possible that all these letters were written simply as an appeal to personal vanity, yet young people are hardly as sophisticated, even in these days. These young men and girls have liked to feel and say that they have found something in this book that has helped them. Fully fifteen hundred of these writers were foreign-born children who felt that their foreign birth was a handicap to success in America, but who, after reading the story of this Dutch boy, had taken new heart and felt that if he could do it, they could do it. In other words, a piece of concrete Americanization in each case. Now, I cannot feel somehow that this is working with a "tin sword." And yet to my own mind the writing of this book has been the least important of my interests since my retirement.

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But Mr. Frank may answer to this, as he has already said, that he is not quarreling with my retirement so much as he is with my "gospel of retirement." But I think he is quarreling squarely and directly with my retirement, for what else does his title mean "Why Edward Bok should not have Retired"? Nor do I think that

he can divide me from my "gospel of retirement." If I am right, then my gospel is right. There is nothing that I have done which warrants me in being placed apart from other men. If that "gospel of retirement" has been proved wise in my case, it can be proved of equal wisdom in the case of other men. In fact, it has been so proved. During these three years, I have heard directly from eight men of large affairs who have voluntarily written to me that they were influenced to retire from business because of my action. In each one of these eight instances the results have been exactly as happy as in my own case. You cannot apply a doctrine so fundamentally true to one man, and say it is dangerous for another, not if he has the same aspirations that the material side of him should lie a bit dormant and the spiritual side become awakened. The danger in such a doctrine lies not in its acceptance, but in its avoidance or rejection.

$9

But suppose we grant Mr. Frank's elimination of myself, for the sake of argument, and look at one or two cases where really great work has been accomplished by men who have retired from business, and it seems to me that THE CENTURY editor's fences stand even less erect.

Let us take just two or three instances, that of Cyrus W. Field for one. He left business and conceived and created the Atlantic cable. Did he change a repeating-rifle for a tin sword?

Did Charles Lamb, when he left his dusty desk in the Indian House and wrote some of his loveliest essays, drop a repeating-rifle for a tin sword?

When George W. Perkins, of more modern days, left the banking-house of the Morgans and devoted himself to his marvelous piece of work along the Palisades on the Hudson and later to his effective piece of intensive war work with the Y. M. C. A., which really cost him his life, did he lay down a repeating-rifle and do what he did with a tin sword?

When Herbert Hoover stopped business and took up the work of feeding Belgium, and later the starving Russians and central European peoples, doing a work which ranks him close to being the first American of his time, and still doing what we shall soon come to see as a great outstanding piece of good executive work in Washington, did he become the great leader of men, respected throughout the world by men, women, and children, with a tin sword?

When Mr. Couzens stopped making automobiles, and became mayor of Detroit, and now United States senator, did he exchange a repeating-rifle for a tin sword?

I cannot believe that former Justice Clarke picked up a tin sword when he resigned from the United

States Supreme Court to give his time to the advocacy of the League of Nations.

It seems to make a formidable weapon, this Glenn Frank tin sword!

§ 10

No, I do not think that my doctrine is wrong. The way of public service does not lead, as Mr. Frank says, to "only a loving cup." That may come. But that is merely the tinsel of the world. To a deeper and more satisfying reward leads the way of the man who, with aspirations which cannot be satisfied by business, gives true service, fully and freely, without regard for self, without thought of award, without the hope that he will reap what he has sown-the reward of an inner satisfaction that comes from the spirit of selfless service, undivided and untrammeled. But no man can feel what this is or means until he has experienced its full expression.

And I wonder if therein does not lie the difference between Mr. Frank and myself in this discussion: he speaks from theory; I speak from experience. "I have drunken of the waters, and they are good."

Chesterton-Caine

SCENDING the gradual hill from

greet me with a smile like that of a

at the top to a fork in the road. To the right lay the new town, the twentieth-century development, reeking of fresh mortar and bearing the unmistakable stamp of the modern lumber-mill. To the left, under ancient trees, wound a more alluring thoroughfare, its unhurried objective being the Old Town. This I gladly chose, casting my eye about, as I proceeded, for some one of whom to make inquiry.

Seated on a rustic bench beneath a large tree by the roadside I espied a picturesque figure. His hands were clasped before him on the top of a stout stick, and he seemed to be looking miles farther than any visible thing, so profound was his reverie. He wore a broad, soft hat, from under which his long, blond hair, shot with gray, ran riot over the collar of his Inverness cape. I hesitated before disturbing the thoughts that gripped this man; but perhaps he was waiting for me, as this was the hour agreed upon for our meeting. I approached, and called him by name: "Mr. Chesterton?”

He started as violently as if an explosion had occurred in his immediate neighborhood, and rose suddenly to his great height. He came forward to

soft and boyish. On his face was at least two day's growth of blond beard. A red nose and the frequent plying of his handkerchief proclaimed that he was a victim of the current epidemic of colds.

"I fear it is a bad time for you to make a portrait of me," he said. “I have been so miserable I have not even bothered to shave. Will my beard show in the sketch?"

As he talked he drew a design in the soil with his stick, looking up occasionally with his flashing small-boy smile. I was greatly surprised at the altitude of the man and at his coloring. I expected to find him short, dark, and very fat. He is far from thin, but his huge frame carries the unusual weight quite easily. In harmony with his hair, his skin is blond and full of rosy color.

Mr. Chesterton's house, Overroads, is a quaint conglomeration of structures ranging along in an irregular line parallel to the road, from which it is divided by flower gardens. The interior is attractive, and has many little structural surprises in the unexpected shapes of rooms and varying levels of floors. The tiniest room of all is his study.

A cup of tea was, as usual, the prelude to our endeavor, and as we settled to our task, my host motioned to a pair of electioneering posters that he had attached to the mantelpiece. Each bore the portrait of a candidate for some office, and legends exhorting all electors to vote for the man depicted.

"The present general election has not filled me with so much enthusiasm that I surround myself with pictures of my favorite candidates. These men, as it happens, are contestants for the same office. As 'leaders of the people' they are so funny! Look at them! I put them up there because they make me laugh. Imagine having to choose between those two!"

It was not difficult to catch with my pencil the smile of this "laughing philosopher." The smile was nearly always there. He talked so constantly and so entertainingly that I thought him even more diverting than his writings. His laugh was most infectious, and I found my face constantly reflecting the happy expressions of the one I was striving to delineate. His great mane of long hair fell into interesting lines that I was eager to catch, and his odd pince-nez, with a straight bar across the top, insisted upon an oblique angle instead of paralleling the brows.

"I can never keep them straight,' he said. "It has always been a great cross for my oculist to bear."

Mr. Chesterton spoke admiringly of Shaw, and laughed at the consternation he must feel that his products, so daring and revolutionary in their time, are so no more. "Man and Superman," "Getting Married," "The Philanderer," even "Mrs. Warren's Profession," are pale in the audacity of their subject matter compared with what has been written since. The

wit and brilliancy are there, but in other ways they are tame in contrast with the startling stuff that is constantly stealing their thunder.

There followed some amusing anecdotes of another colorful contemporary, Mr. George Moore. Mr. Chesterton has more admiration for Mr. Moore's skill as a writer than for what he has had to say. The affectation of his early "Confessions" is almost insupportable to normal, straightforward minds, and strikes a discordant note that has never quite disappeared from his work.

"In the time of Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas, when decadence was glorified and adored, Moore swanked as a moral desperado. He seemed always to be eagerly assuring the world at large that he was a terrible person, and fearing nothing so much as being thought respectable. If he were by any chance convicted of the latter offense, his house of cards would have been reduced upon him. Perhaps he would have been more implicitly believed if he had not protested so much. Over-anxiety in the making of a point is likely to engender doubt.

"In his younger days Moore had a penchant for attaching himself to prominent men and deluging them with his adoration. These friendships were usually of short duration, and almost invariably ended in quarrels. It is said that Whistler challenged him to a duel to free himself from this unpalatable hero-worship. Yeats had his turn next, and a long line of others succeeded until Moore had quarreled with nearly every prominent figure in the artistic and literary life of the time. He undoubtedly cherished the qualities in his writings that are annoying to most of us. I was amused at a rep