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uality than the American people, who are notoriously indifferent to law. But individuality, the reader exclaims, is a quality which must be antagonistic to any organized thing, such as law. The American individuality is so strongly marked that it cannot be controlled by regulations. ... I do not purpose to enter into any deep disquisition on Law or Anarchy. It is sufficient for my purpose if I say here that law is the condition of freedom. The rule of the road does not prevent the fast vehicle from making greater progress than the slow vehicle: it enables them both to get along. If there was no rule of the road, if each driver could go how he pleased in whatever direction he thought fit, traffic would be impossible. The accumulated experience of mankind has proved that certain rules must be observed if we are to get through the maze of existence with any sort of comfort, and the efforts of most of us are devoted to conserving those laws which enable us to develop our characters freely, and to scrapping those laws which prevent us from doing so. That is the explanation, among other things, of the War of Independence.

Now, an old-established people has accumulated a greater amount of experience on which to draw for guidance than a newly established people. The English people have been practising free government for a longer time than the American people, and they understand the conditions of freedom better than the American people do. They have greater respect for law than Americans have, but they are not so tied up in laws as Americans are! A country is misgoverned when its people are acutely aware of its laws, just as a man is suffering from ill health when he is acutely aware of his heart or his stomach. If that be true, and it is true, then America is less well-governed than England, because Americans are more aware of the laws of their land in an unpleasant sense than the British people are. There are probably fewer laws in England than there are in America, but there is more law. Americans, indeed, have so many laws, most of which contradict one another, that they resemble the old woman who lived in a shoe.

They do not know what to do, and the result is government not by the fruits of experience, but by panic. One gets the feeling that when a legislative body in the United States is at a loss for employment, it passes a new law, chiefly of an interfering character, not because the new law is needed, but because people might think it was not fulfilling its function if it were not busily engaged in passing measures. The inevitable outcome of this tendency to make laws needlessly is that no one pays any more heed to law in America than he is obliged to pay. An American obeys the law when he cannot conveniently break it, and so it is that the thoroughly wicked man in the United States is not the man who infringes the law, but the man who exploits it. Concurrently with this bewilderment of law, this difficulty of knowing just where you are, there is the tendency, natural enough in the circumstances, for the people in power either to disregard the law altogether, as in the case of the legislature of Albany and the five Socialist members or to twist it to their purpose.

When you have a people who are governed in such a way that law falls into disrepute, then inevitably freedom of thought and movement become contracted. The mass of the people will accept things that they ought not to accept up to the point at which endurance breaks, and then they fly to violent remedies, and we get lynch-law, which is not law at all, but the denial of it. And when people cannot depend upon the laws of their country for protection, they develop timidity of spirit, the majority of them, or violence of spirit, the minority of them. The majority suppress their individuality, and the minority exaggerate it. On the one hand, we have the majority seeking for protection by doing exactly what every one else is doing; and on the other hand, a minority, seeking through violence, eccentricity, and destructiveness to obtain an outlet for its energy.

America suffers enormously from standardized thought. On the voyage out to New York from England I used to talk to American business men, of whom there were a great many on board, about the probable effects of

prohibition. Each one of them was strongly in favor of prohibition for working-men, and very often, in the bar, they would tell me how much the industrial efficiency of their employees had increased in consequence of prohibition. Each one of them said that the rate of increase in efficiency 'was fifteen per cent. In America itself, wherever I went, I was told that industrial efficiency as a result of prohibition had increased by fifteen per cent. I was puzzled by the unanimity with which the figure of fifteen per cent. was chosen, and I am afraid I incurred a reputation for flippancy by asking on several occasions whether the increase was always fifteen per cent., whether it had not on some occasions reached twenty per cent. or only ten per cent. No one would admit that there had been any decrease in efficiency as a result of prohibition, not even among winedrinking people, such as the Italians. The testimony was unanimous. Industrial efficiency in America, these business men declared, had risen by fifteen per cent. as a direct consequence of prohibition. This unanimity, however, did not impress me. It was too

unanimous to be true. I felt certain that my friends had not made any investigations into the matter for themselves, but had accepted statements and assertions made by propagandists without any scrutiny whatever. That is one of the flaws of democracy, that political statements which have an agreeable sound are greedily accepted and seldom challenged.

It is an old charge against America that the standardization of things has been carried to excess, and probably Americans, aware of the very considerable advantages of a high degree of standardization in material things, are tired of listening to the charge; but it is not one which they should lightly dismiss. What is taste? It is the expression of individual preferences. Standardization means the destruction of individual preferences. There are many things in life where this does not matter much, if at all; and if standardization is treated merely as a means of devising convenience for the generality of people in order to reduce the drudgery of existence,

it is a highly laudable thing. But when it has the effect of destroying taste, of taking the local color out of life, of imposing one vast, neat, spiritless conception of things upon mankind, then it is obviously a grave calamity; and when the standardization reaches from material things to thought, it is not difficult to prophesy that the outcome of it will be sterility of the soul.

I remember reading a very popular magazine in America, and being struck with the uniformity of the stories which were printed in it. They were written with very great technical skill, but they might all have been written by the same author. They seemed to have been constructed according to formula. I was divided between my admiration for their technical excellence and my astonishment at their artistic nullity. I could not understand how it was that so much ability went with so little knowledge. A friend explained the matter to me. The editor of this very ably conducted magazine will return a manuscript to an author with suggestions for changes in it. He may return a manuscript many times to its author, with a proposal of change on each occasion, until it has been altered and shaped to his liking. Then he publishes the story. By the time it has received his approval, it has ceased to be the story of its original author and has become his story. This is the explanation of the curious similarity in all the tales printed in that magazine. Now, this editor clearly knows his business, and no one can complain of him for transacting it in the way that has proved to be profitable to him; but when the reader considers the calamitous effect his method of editing has upon the individuality of the writers in his magazine, they will observe at once that the popularity of it is purchased at the price of any artistic merit these writers possess. They become in time storymanufacturers, working according to a definite plan, and in a little while they lose all literary sensibility and become mere machines for producing sanctioned words.

One finds this effort to reduce individuality to a piece of well-oiled machinery all over America. Young men in the

street seem ambitious to wear exactly the same sort of overcoat that other young men are wearing. The dominant desire is not to differentiate oneself from other people, but to make oneself as like the crowd as possible.

Now, a great literature cannot flourish in an atmosphere of imitation and suppressed personality, and unless America can somehow solve this problem, of making a man's individuality grow and become vivid, there is slight likelihood of her making credit for herself with an art or a literature to which the world will yield respect. She may become a homogeneous country, fusing the diverse elements that make up her people into a vigorous and united race, but unless she can so order her estate that each person in that race can offer something to the community that is totally different from anything that is offered by any other person in it, she will have to remain content with the work of Europeans or, at best, skilful imitations of that work by her own people.

As I sailed out of New York Harbor on a Saturday afternoon in April, my pleasure at going home dashed by my regret at leaving that gay and happy city, I leaned against the side of the ship so that I might look at the skyscrapers as we sailed past them. Very beautiful they looked in the evening light. They had a dignity and a shapeliness that I had not imagined them to possess. Dull people had told me that I should hate them, that I should think of them as detestably ugly. But I did not think they were ugly. I thought they were supremely beautiful, and, gazing back at them as we went out to sea, I remembered how much pleasure they had given me that week, soon after my arrival in America, when I had lain in bed ill with influenza. Every evening at five o'clock I had looked out of the window to see the sky-scrapers light up, and had never failed to be moved by

their beauty in the blue dusk. I had thought the sky-scrapers were beautiful then, and now, leaving America, they seemed to me more beautiful still. I saw them for a long while after we had left the wharf, and it seemed to me that in them I saw the best expression of the American spirit that I had seen in the country. Here was something essentially native, owing nothing to Europe, something beautiful and national. And here in England, writing this article, recalling that picture of New York as I left it, I feel that there is a restless spirit demanding a means of expression in America. Presently, it will burst its bonds and declare itself. These skyscrapers are a warning, a portent of what is to come. After all, people desire to be homogeneous and to be in unity, and although it is possible to obscure and divert the individuality of men for a time, it is hardly possible to do so for eternity. America will grow old, as Europe has grown old, and with the experience of her own life and the experience she has learned from the older Continent, she will surely produce a great art.

Already the rebellious poets, always the first to declare the right of the individual man to express himself without hindrance, are uttering their shouts of defiance against cramping authority. There is Amy Lowell in Boston shaking her fist at the pundits, and Vachel Lindsay in Springfield, Illinois, pushing professors off their pontificial perches, and Carl Sandburg in Chicago swinging his arms very lustily and sometimes indiscriminately. And, more importantly than all, perhaps, there is Mr. Mencken letting off earthquakes of criticism in Baltimore. They are violent in their assertions, these rebellious ones, and often they talk and write foolishness; but they have the right matter within them, and they are making the way straight.

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"I had no sooner poked my head through the door of the saloon than the conversation stopped dead""

A Cask of Ale for Columban

By JOSEPH ANTHONY
Illustration by Hanson Booth

HAVE worked at strange tasks in my day," said Lubomirski. "A man has to live, and when he has no trade, he takes what his wits will bring him. But there is one position I have held that I never in my life want to hold again."

"What is it?" asked two or three of us in unison, hoping that the old rascal, with a glass of a forbidden, but cheering, beverage in his hand, could be led on to reminiscences of some of his colorful enterprises of the past.

Lubomirski sipped, smacked his lips, and then, placing the glass carefully on the arm of his chair, arose to warm his hands over a crackling log in the fireplace. Though the night was not particularly cold, the Pole's relish of the pleasant blaze showed in every line of his much-seamed, thin-bearded face, and it showed, too, in the deliberation with which he rubbed his hands, then brought his chair and glass nearer to the fire. He seemed to settle back in meditation behind his frowzy gray beard, then said, still gazing into the fire:

"For a while a little while I was a government agent. I was a deputy sheriff of Harley County, and the duty to which I was detailed"-he spoke slowly, lingering over each word "was the enforcement of the prohibition law."

"What?" All of us had been interested when it seemed likely that Lubomirski was going to tell a story. There was alarm mingled with our interest now. Half a dozen glasses were resting on the broad arms of the chairs ranged about the fireplace of the Oakdale Club, and not one of them but contained a mixture that would have been highly interesting to an agent of the department of internal revenue. And Lubomirski, for all of the fact that his wise face and his strange tales were familiar at the club, was not a member, nor had he chosen to tell us some of the highly essential details of his background.

Lubomirski smiled, and as though to set to rights an unspoken question, raised his glass to his lips.

"I got out of that profession long ago," he said. The smile disappeared from his thin lips as he added, "And for good." Once more Lubomirski sought the warmth of the fire for his small, manyveined hands. Then he said in a low voice that was startling for the solemnity of its dignified, even tone, "I am not likely ever to match myself against Saint Columban again."

The little disquietude of a moment before was forgotten as we joined Lubomirski in drawing our chairs closer to the fire. But somehow no one except Lubomirski thought of reaching for his glass.

"Saint Columban," said Lubomirski, gravely, as though in explanation of what had gone before, "is not a Polish saint. He lived in Ireland a good many centuries ago." Again he paused, drawing the threads of his narrative together in silence.

"It was in the days before federal prohibition that I had my experience with the liquor laws and with Columban. I was retained because of my knowledge of Polish to help enforce the state law in the big Polish settlements throughout Harley County." He spoke slowly, with the bitter deliberateness of a man who does penance by confession for some despicable sin.

"Well, because I spoke their language, I was able to get into the confidence of some of the Harley saloon-keepers who were n't obeying the law during one of those periodic waves of enforcement, and some of them paid dearly for having served me a drink. But somewhere along Harley Bay, where there is a cluster of dirty little factory towns all stuck on filled-in land in the meadow, there was an active bootlegging center that seemed to supply a good part of the State. Just as many drunken men as ever were seen on the streets. The sheriff was being

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