duced. Human energy must compensate for the destruction of war. Would the clothing-makers, in the hour of their triumph, hear also these appeals of public need?

Deliberately the leaders brought up the question. They courted the expression of opposition. Sidney Hillman, president of this organization of more than 175,000 workers, is a boyish-looking man in the early thirties. Fifteen years ago he was a student of chemistry in Russia. To-day ninety per cent. of the clothing-makers of the industry look to him for leadership. He risked the chance of alienating his great following when he pressed the question of production, for clothing-makers remember the old task system with such hatred that to propose standards of production seemed to savor of the condition they call "slavery." Courage was required to confront that instinctive opposition; yet Hillman did not hesitate. He is sensitive to the need of lightening the load which the consuming public of every land in Christendom is now bearing. Even more keenly, perhaps, he feels the need to establish right relationships in the industry. Consequently, he forced forward the question of production. He minced no words when he said:

I believe that what is understood by week work is the privilege of the individual to lay down on the job if he so desires. I am here to face facts as they are-the privilege of one individual to invite a struggle against the organization.

The organization cannot check the individual unless there is a record and a standard. If you say to the individual worker, "Why do you lay down?" while there is no recognized standard, he says: "Brother President, what is a fair day's work? I believe making two pockets a day is a fair day's work." And then a brother jumps up and says, "Brother Chairman, how about the revolution, are n't we a progressive organization?"

Naturally, if you will come to our members and ask, “Do you want week work with a standard or week work without a standard? they will accept the morale that is prevailing in society to-day to do as little as possible for as much as they can get. That is the morale prevailing to-day. But if you come to them and say this: "Do you want the

organization to make further progress?" the answer will be different.

We do not want an organization to protect a few individuals. No organization is strong enough to fight and ruin an industry. If power to organize labor means the power to abuse the industry, I say to you no organization can last. These are problems we have not created. They are here, and we must solve them. I appeal to you for the sake of the organization as a whole, for the sake of the organized and the unorganized, for the sake of the labor movement, to say to the employers and to say to the public that we want standards for our people, standards of health, standards of living, standards of working conditions, and we are ready to establish standards of production.

Hillman was not alone. Other trusted leaders of the union stood firmly on the same ground. Joseph Schlossberg, the general secretary, an older man and long famous among trade-unionists as a philosophical socialist, threw the weight of his influence into the struggle for production standards. He said:

We have abolished absolutism. It is now our responsibility to establish order. The industry is ours. It yields us our livelihood. We can have no chaos in it except to our own injury. We have now reached a point where we must regulate and rationalize the methods of work. We are all agreed that piece work is injurious to health and shortens our lives. We are unanimous regarding the desirability of week work. We ask a given amount of money-say fifty dollars a week

for the normal worker. On what basis? What constitutes a normal worker? How much work must one do in order to be entitled to the normal wage? You cannot have a sound week-work system without a clear and definite answer to these questions. We have the power and the intelligence; let us also have the courage to solve this problem right.

The convention did solve it right. Without dissent a resolution calling upon the general officers to negotiate with employers for the establishment of reasonable standards of production was passed. In doing that, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America established a precedent for all trade-unionists. In the hour of their triumph, at the time when a supposed shortage of labor provided a

bulwark for a strong organization, behind which it might with temporary safety have pursued almost any course, right or wrong, the clothing-makers deliberately elected to use their own strength to discipline their members. The union refused to shield loafers. It counted slacking as sabotage against the industry. Like journeymen artisans in the simpler days of handicraft production, these modern workers became the guardians of excellence and efficiency. This pioneering, novel as it is in the annals of modern industry, was none the less but the natural product of a remarkable development which has taken place in the manufacture of men's clothing. For ten years events have been leading up to such a dénouement. That decade records an actual change in the lives of hundreds of thousands not less basic than the social revolution so much a matter of conversation and of fear during these latter years.

In these years of change, this union of newer immigrants, for the clothingmakers are still predominantly Jewish and Italian, have achieved great things. They have lifted the level of life for all who engaged in the trade. All workers on the average got far less in 1914 than the lowest sum which the New York Factory Commission estimated to be necessary for the support of a family. Last year, on the other hand, about eighty per cent. of the New York workers earned between thirty-five and fifty dollars a week, while in Baltimore and in Chicago about eighty per cent. earned between fifteen and forty-five dollars a week. In 1914 less than fifteen per cent. of the workers earned over twenty dollars a week in any of the cities for which facts are obtainable. Socially that is a great gain. It means that the children of men who in former years could not escape hunger and squalor will have a better chance at healthy life. Simultaneously with the increase in earnings has come a shortening of hours, so that the eighthour day, with the Saturday half-holiday, is the normal working period in the men's and boys' clothing industry.

the union is that of unemployment. During all the years since the manufacture of clothing has been an important industry, seasons of work have been followed by periods of idleness. It used to be said that this was inevitable. The leaders of the clothing-workers are now applying their minds to that issue.

They think that unemployment may be found to be like work accidents. As long as injury and death in industrial employment were the hazards to be faced personally by individual workers, progress in the reduction of accidents was slight. But when, with workmen's compensation, industry began paying for the damage it did to human beings, safety first became a national slogan. Similarly, when unemployment is seen to be a tax to be paid by an entire industry and not by the workers alone, methods of preventing recurrent periods of intense production and of idleness may be discovered. The union is now parleying with the associations of manufacturers on this matter. Insurance against unemployment is the immediate object in sight. The bigger goal is the attainment of regular work. That promises enormous benefits to workers, to manufacturers, and to the great public. For so long as industry asks for enough workers to meet its heaviest demands, there must at other times be idle machinery and idle men and, consequently, expensive production. The public pays for that, in the end, in many direct and indirect ways. The prevention of irregular production is the prevention of unemployment. It is an object of enormous importance, as much to consumers as it is to workers. The clothing-makers are seeking its solution because they have assumed an obligation to their industry. Enfranchised economically now to a degree almost unprecedented, they acknowledge their responsibility to serve the public as well as to better their own conditions. They are willing even to think, and as a start they have begun with production. They are spokesmen thus of the new

IN the seaward shoulders of the Cascades, looking down upon Puget Sound, there are yet reaches of virgin forest which have never been logged or touched by fires. For all the centuries the sea-winds have loaded them with moisture, the long days of the Northern summers have filled their dim recesses with a tropic growth of fern, vine, maple, and brier. There are within them mountain torrents and quiet pools where rainbow trout play undisturbed. There are vistas from some fold in the hills that end with distant sea-shine to the south and west, and the snows that never melt to the north and east. There are dim forest paths between impenetrable jungles of crisscrossed, fallen tree-boles, matted with vines-paths that follow the contours of the land and end in water, paths as old as the great firs which have made their silent carpets of needles, their green twilight.

The woods people, two-footed and four, who shared these silent forest aisles have almost vanished. The mystery, the enchantment remain. For those who can endure, those whom its vastness, its lonely grandeur do not terrify, it remains the roof-tree of a race whose childhood, never to be fulfilled, reaches pathetically down the ages to our own time. It remains for those bred from the loins of a hardier race.

Lars Selzjiord was a poet, although a dumb one. That he was also a timber-cruiser for the Northwestern Lumber Company was not accident. Almost from the moment of his landing in Seattle, whither he had come from Norway by the Suez, the mighty ramparts of the Cascade Mountains shining far back of the city had called to him with a voice not to be denied.

Labor was scarce then; we had gone to war and needed masts and spars of

Douglas fir. The red Norseman could wield an ax like his forbears, and because his six feet four of brawn was quickened by that nervous energy which flowered into imagination within him he cut two masts to one of the plodders. As logger he soon could select with unerring instinct the sound spar timber.

With every swing of his ax Selzjiord loved this land more, and when he came down to Seattle to bank his first pay he filed his first naturalization papers. He was twenty-one then. His dream had taken form: in the fastnesses of those hills only a little below the everlasting snows he would build his roof-tree and rear his race.

He passed by the Scandinavian banks and deposited what seemed to him a small fortune in the American Trust Company. English he had been taught in the schools of his district in Norway, and it was American grammar, history, and biography he bought now. He had taken our land to his Norse heart and Norse imagination. He went back to the mountains as timber-cruiser. It was an advance, and it gave him the freedom of the forests, the chance to select at his leisure the savage and untamed estate that his youth craved. He was in no hurry; the woman's face and the urge of love were nothing yet but a dim glory in the background of his mind.

Selzjiord had cruised two years before he saw the woman. She was waiting in a restaurant in Seattle, down on Pike Street, the Golden Potlatch. He knew her before he had taken the second step inside the door. She was standing with her back toward him, giving an order to the cook in the open kitchen, and the two braids of her hair, each as thick as his wrist, hung down her straight back below the waist and ended in a curl. Her hair shone under the skylight of the kitchen like redly burnished brass. His quick apprehension made him hold his

breath as she turned, with a filled tray uplifted; but it was all right. Her face went with those braids, he thought. It called him by every instinct rooted in his blood, that fair, ruddy Norse face, with wide eyes, as clear and blue as a fiord, shadowed by lashes and brows as fair as the braids. The brows held a trick of drawing with intent interest in what she did.

He watched her place the order before a customer, take another, standing back, her neck arched to catch the speech he knew must still be a little strange to her. He decided she must be from the city, Christiania probably; there was an air about her, the way she wore her white uniform and enveloping apron. She looked to be about seventeen, was tall and as well-grown as a fir-tree, he thought. Then he made his way to her table.

It is useless to say that love knows no boundaries of climate or of speech. No American girl would have stood for that wooing, or so the other waitresses, with their varied accents, averred. Elsa Svendsen liked it. He took his seat and gave his order, looking directly at her without seeming to see her; yet she knew that he had looked at her before or he could not have done it. She was used to startle men. Only the one-armed doughboy dared shield his eyes and make light of her dazzling fairness, and he did not count except as a diversion. She knew that Selzjiord had watched her from the door and selected her table deliberately, and she liked that. She liked everything about him from his well-laced ankles, in their hobbed logger's boots, to his blueand-gray plaid mackinaw, his apricotcolored tie showing a trifle underneath his coat. His hands, broadened by the ax, were well-kept, for men may not handle Douglas fir without gloves. Its splinters are dangerous, and the bark stings like nettles. She was pleased that his nails were neat, but not manicured and pink, like some of the small-waisted clerks that came to eat sandwiches and pudding and to ogle.

His eyes were lighter than hers, more intensely blue, with dark rims about the iris. They were hard to face sometimes, she later found; but what really startled her, recurred oftenest to her and drew

her eyes again and again despite herself, was the whiteness of his forehead. The rest of his face was ruddy and windblown. That he kept his beard cleanshaven was evident by an even sunburn, but his forehead above the line of his hat threw her into a panic. It glistened below the moist, crinkly hair that edged it at the corners with little flat spiralshair warmer-toned than hers, almost an orange in the light.

"You got the red Norseman," one of the waitresses taunted her as they stood at the kitchen counter.

"He's a tightwad," another volunteered.

"No, he ain't, Mame," the first denied, "give him a chanct. Maybe 'is new 'finity 'll catch him with the coils and he 'll loosen up. They say he splashed a whole buck that time he fed a bunch of doughboys."

"A whole buck! And him with ten a day, if he gets a bean!"

She took her tray. Elsa took hers,the fair lashes drawn over eyes suddenly grown black, and carried Selzjiord his order. A man at the table remarked as she turned away:

"And her name is Elsa."

Selzjiord seemed to ignore this; the man was one-armed and in khaki.

"Just a little face-paint, burnt cork, and we'd have Elsa of Brabant waiting on us," the man went on below his breath as she returned with his meat carefully cut. It was then, with him, that she first saw the eyes that were difficult to face. Before the blaze in them the doughboy got up from his seat as though to leave, his good left arm half derisively on guard; but the girl went on about her business, and Selzjiord smiled. jiord smiled. The man sat down again. To atone, Selzjiord made him talk, and the upshot was a job at which a onearmed man might make good in the company mills up at Robe, in the foothills of the Cascades.

It was Elsa Svendsen's evening to stay till ten. She was tired, and the girls had teased her meanly; there had been. no tip from the red Norseman. When she came upon him waiting for her at the corner she was inclined to ignore him. There was nothing like that in Selzjiord's vocabulary. He took her arm and laid

hold of her wrist. She let him, dumbly, take her home to her aunt's house on the hill, a mansion fallen into the uses of a rooming-house. In its dim, gas-lit hall Elsa Svendsen glowed like a visiting seraph. She wished him to stay, yet she was afraid of the purpose in his face. Besides, there was no room except the hall, and no chair in the hall. The parlor was audibly occupied by her two little cousins and her aunt, all sound asleep beyond the folding-door.

Selzjiord understood this. He had expected something like it; so he was brief. From his pocket he drew a parcel of tissue-paper, and out of it took what she thought was a silver chain, as delicate as threadwork, with a wine-colored stone caught at long intervals in its meshes. When he fastened it about her neck, she stood without motion other than the vibrations of her heart, which shook her from head to foot.

The chain slipped down inside the thick, white blouse of her uniform and rolled back from the splendid curves of her neck till it was hidden. He smiled at her with quick satisfaction that it was so, and then he took her in his arms, slowly, inexorably, while she faced bravely, but with dilated eyes, the young radiance in his that almost blinded her.

Twice more Selzjiord saw her at intervals of a month; then, when the vine maples that creep and twine themselves with the firs had set the forests aflame, he came to tell her he had laid the foundations of their house. He had found a wedge of virgin forest, four hundred acres or thereabout, that had escaped the big companies. He was clearing it next the little stream that would be theirs.

Elsa listened. She was under a spell. What did she know of forests! Twice in Norway she had been out with a party of young people, up the hills to the seters when the cheese was all made in the autumn, and there was dancing. When Lars Selzjiord told her that he and the doughboy were building the great log-house he had planned, she assented with resignation. The poor child was desperately lonely between his visits, and miserably restless when she was with him. Yet nothing could have made her give him up; she loved him with all the desperate fatality of her youth and her

race.

The spring, when he would come for her, would never be. The months were eternities, the days lead-footed and full of small irritations that were tortures. Her aunt's old-fashioned insistence on a great dower-chest, and her own fingers that would not sew because they fluttered on the thought of him, drove her almost mad.

In June they were married, and he took her up the mountain to their home, by train to Robe, and thence over a skid road, four miles on foot, to the generous log-house, the roof-tree Selzjiord.

ELSA watched her husband adjust his stride to the rhythmic swaying of the saw over his shoulder. Down with the downward bend of the long, shining band he set his feet; up with the rebound of it he lifted them. The fifteen-foot saw was a load for two men, but Lars Selzjiord did not notice that. At the turn of the skid road he broke step to look back at Elsa, standing before the door of their house, the light of early morning upon her, the tall firs behind her. When he had gone a few rods down his way, Elsa could no longer see his face clearly; it was as dark as a cave where he stood. His stalwart presence was dwarfed. It merged into the purple shadows, though she saw the gleam of his saw. The shine of his skyblue eyes laid heavy longing upon her.

"Lars!" she called, her full voice resonant of loneliness, affection, appeal, and longing. She was unaware of anything but that he was leaving her again for hours that held intolerable emptiness and dread-the dread of the endless silence of the fir forest, its sinister noises, dread of her own revolt.

Lars waved his free hand, but she could not see. Her eyes were blurred with tears of angry, terrified disappointment.

"Dees marrying," she thought in her broken English, "he iss no goot for me. I hate heem!"

She entered the house and closed the massive door, with its strap hinges of hammered brass. She locked and barred it with the bar of polished wood, shot home the pin, and then laid her face against the bar. She was terrified at the storm that threatened the very decencies of life: she had almost run after him,