After appearing in the air, the young man timidly buttoned his vest, and having whispered to himself as a consolation: "Well-failures develop character!" he fell downward.

He had not yet reached the next story, the fifth, in his downward flight, when from his breast there burst a heavy sigh. The recollection of the woman whom he had just deserted, in its bitterness spoiled for him the charm he might have experienced in his sensation of flight.

"Heavens!" thought the young man bitterly, "how I loved her! And yet she did not have grit enough to confess everything to her husband! God be with her! I feel now that she is far from me and indifferent to me!"

At this last thought he had already arrived at the fifth story, and as he flew by the window he looked into it with some curiosity.

At a rickety table, his head supported on his hands, a young student sat reading a book. The flying gentleman, catching sight of him, recalled his own life, recalled that thus far he had spent it in foolish social pleasures, forgetful of learning, of his books, and he felt a longing for the light of knowledge, for the revelation of the secrets of nature to his eager mind, for the transports of delight before the genius of the great masters of the world.

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"Dear, dear student," he wished to shout to the reading man, you have reawakened my latent longings and have cured me of my empty dallying with the vanity of this life, which has just brought me so sad a disappointment in the sixth story."

Yet, not wishing to take the student from his work, the young man did not shout this, but flew to the fourth story, and here his thoughts took a different turn. His heart contracted with a sweet and ominous pain, and his head was seized with rapture and reverence.

By the window of the fourth story there sat a young girl who, having a sewing-machine before her, was sewing something. Yet her fair white arms for a moment had forgotten their labor, and her eyes, whose blue was that of the cornflowers, dreamily and sadly looked at some far-off thing.

The young man could hardly tear away his glance from this sight, and in his heart there grew and spread a feeling that was new and great and strong. And he understood that all his former affairs with women were naught but empty infatuations, and that he was only now learning the meaning of that strange, mysterious word love. And he felt a longing for quiet family life, for a tender, devotedly loving creature, for the smiles of a joyous and peaceful existence.

The following floor, which he was passing at this moment, strengthened him even further in this determination.

In the window he saw a laughing mother, who, bouncing on her knees her chubby smiling youngster, was singing a quiet little song for him, and in her eyes there shone love and a sweet motherly pride.

"How I would love to marry the girl in the fourth story, and to have such lovely rosy kiddies as in the third story," thought the man. "And I should devote myself entirely to my family, and in this self-sacrifice I should find true happiness."

But he had already reached the second story. And the picture he saw in the window of this story caused his heart to shudder.

At a handsome writing-table a gentleman was sitting with wild and wandering eyes and hair disordered. He was looking fixedly at a photograph that stood before him. Simultaneously his right hand was writing a note, and his left was holding a revolver, the muzzle of which was pressed firmly to his temple.

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Madman, stop!" the young man in the air wished to shout to him. "Life is so beautiful!" But an instinctive feeling prevented him from doing so. The handsome furnishings of the apartment, its wealth and comfort, recalled to the young man's mind that there is something else in life, something that can dispel this comfort and this satisfaction and family life, something much more powerful and elemental and terrible.

"What is this thing?" thought the young man with a heavy heart, and as if intentionally, life gave him a harsh and unceremonious reply in the window of the first story, which he had now reached.

In the window, almost entirely concealed by the hangings, sat a young man coatless and vestless, and on his knees there sat a half-clad lady, encircling lovingly with her round pink arms the neck of her beloved, and warmly pressing her swelling breast against him.

The young man remembered that he had seen this lady, in all her finery, taking a walk with her husband, but this man was not her husband. The latter was older, with black locks half turned gray, while this man had fair blond hair.

respective spheres of industrial and commercial action in time of war?

Again, we had to improvise a censorship and a press bureau during the first days of the war. We did so badly enough, though we have somewhat reformed them since. In what department and acting under what legal powers could a censorship and a press bureau exist in the United States? Either it should be decided that no such offices will be required, or the necessary documents should be drawn up, and if possible the persons who will do the work actually chosen.

During the American Civil War the federal government used compulsion (not without very serious friction) to obtain recruits. We are now facing the possibility of compulsion, and find that little of the necessary intellectual preparation seems to have been made either for it or for doing without it. Has the United States government decided whether compulsion in America is a possible necessity? If such a necessity is believed to be possible, is there any plan in existence by which compulsion can be used under American conditions with the minimum of friction and industrial loss?

On the outbreak of a great war a modern state can obtain the services of many, perhaps most, of the very ablest men who in times of peace are engaged in civil pursuits. The difficulty is to bring their brains to bear upon the work. We can now see in England that it would have been wise to prepare beforehand in connection with each department a list of volunteers, and perhaps to have had a few private meetings in which the probable nature of each man's duties could have been indicated. The fact that we have succeeded in using volunteer intellectual work to the extent which has been done has been largely due to the existence of our permanent " class one officials, trained from the beginning for varied administrative duties. These men have been seconded" freely from department to department, and any one of them often finds himself providing the single nucleus of trained official experience in a department committee of business men and scientists. If I were an American citizen, that fact would constitute for me a serious argument in favor of the creation in the federal government of a corresponding permanent official type.

It will be noticed that as soon as we attacked the munitions problem we had to make a new department. This fact suggests that one of the most important points in the intellectual preparation for war should be a general consideration whether the existing government departments cover the whole ground of necessary action without either omission or overlapping. On this point I have held for the last ten years an opinion which I should despair of getting a less quick-minded people than the Amer

icans to adopt. I believe that the present separation between the War Office and the Admiralty in all great states is a serious cause of possible weakness. The coöperation of our War Office and Admiralty in this war has, I believe, not caused much difficulty, largely perhaps because of the sharp warning that was given by the deadlock between the two departments which is said to have arisen in the crisis of 1911. But the distinction between sea and land fighting is becoming more and more artificial. Mr. Balfour, for instance, the other day stated that it had been a surprise to him to find that as First Lord of the Admiralty he was responsible for the airdefense of London. All British war operations, and still more all future war operations undertaken by the United States, must depend on the closest possible coöperation of military and naval forces. Both need guns and shells and men and flying machines and hospitals and pay and pensions; and the supplies available should be distributed as economically as possible among them. But effective coöperation cannot exist unless there are men whose training has been neither exclusively naval nor exclusively military. A flight-officer who cannot recognize the wave made by a submarine and twenty minutes later estimate the numbers of a marching column is less than half trained for his work; and on the higher questions of strategy both services need to learn from each other's experience, and to understand each other's arguments and objections to any combined war plan. Obviously therefore a maritime nation which desires to succeed in a modern war should have a genuine war staff trained to plan and direct operations alike below the sea surface, on the sea surface, on the land surface and in the air; and the first nation that does so will have an immense advantage in the next war.

Unfortunately one cannot improvise such a war staff by asking a couple of military and a couple of naval officers to sit at a table and advise a "Committee of Imperial Defense" composed of politicians. One must train in time of peace men who can really think and invent in terms of both arms. A man so trained will know less of land fighting than a specialized soldier, and less of sea fighting than a specialized sailor. But he will know infinitely more of combined action than either of them. As it is, either no really combined plans are formed, or they are formed by soldiers ignorant of the sea, or by sailors ignorant of land, or by civilians ignorant of both. Perhaps the greatest master of war that the English nation has ever produced was the seventeenth-century admiral and general Robert Blake. Blake was trained to fight and think both on land and at sea, and he was as successful in the Gulf of Tunis as we ought to have been at the Dardanelles.

If I were President Wilson I should at once put some of the ablest of my younger naval captains through the army staff course, to be followed by actual experience of command at least in manœuvers, and send some of the ablest of my colonels and majors to be trained in naval tactics. There would be friction, but the creation of material for a warstaff under a single Secretary for War, having undersecretaries for the Admiralty and the Army Office, would be at any rate begun.

I have written nothing, because I not qualified to write anything, on the most difficult of all American

war problems, the relation in time of war between the federal and state governments. But that problem will have to be faced, and it is better that it should be faced in peace than in war. I indeed have sometimes thought that if I were an American citizen I should concentrate all my own political efforts on a proposal for a constitutional amendment having the single purpose of making more easy the carrying within a reasonable time of other constitutional amendments desired by a substantial majority of the people.

GRAHAM WALLAS.

(Economics of American Shipping: VI)

I

N the course of its evolution, the policy of our government toward ocean shipping has passed through two phases. In its first phase a merchant marine was considered a national adjunct, an extended arm of American sovereignty, and it was on account of the allegiance which a vessel owed to the sovereign whose flag it bore that special protection was conferred and special duties and burdens were imposed. In its second phase, on which we are now embarked, all the shipping which plies to and from our shores, regardless of special allegiance by reason of nationality, is looked upon as a servant of American commercial needs and a potential employer of American labor. To make the service effective and the conditions of employment consistent with American standards has become the aim of our legislative policy. This phase was ushered in by the free ship legislation of the last Congress, its principles are embodied in the Seamen's law, and it should attain its fruition in the passage of a law establishing the much needed American maritime commission, with regulatory power over ocean traffic.

If we may hazard a glance into the future, it must become apparent that this second phase cannot be final. Any attempt to govern by national standards an international traffic has its inherent limitations. A vessel plying between Liverpool and New York must obey two masters. If their orders conflict, there is no court of appeal in which they can be harmonized. National regulation will always be the expression of national interests and ideals, and in so far as they differ from the ideals and interests of other nations conflict is inevitable. Moreover, any attempt on our part to make rigid requirements of vessels clearing and entering our ports may defeat its own end. Carriers can always turn to other routes where they will meet with a reception more

to their liking. Especially is this true of the tramp steamer, the jitney of ocean traffic, plying where for the moment it is most profitable, without fixed rates, fixed route or sailing date, defying regulation by any instrument yet devised. Even if shipowners do not go so far as to boycott American ports, there is always the danger that they may gain the ear of some foreign government, and inspire retaliation against American shipping and commerce. These are a few of the obstacles which a policy of national regulation must encounter. The task which confronts the builders of the maritime policy of the future is world-wide in its scope. The political tools which they have inherited are inadequate because they are merely national.

To gain a conception of the ultimate futility of relying on antiquated political tools one has only to imagine what would have been the result if each state, rather than the federal government, had been given regulatory power over the vehicles of interstate commerce. The New York-Chicago express would have to conform to five independent administrative policies, publish and observe five separate rate schedules, obey five bodies of safety and liability law. As long as each state jealously guarded its own sovereignty, the most that it could do would be to work for the adoption of uniform legislation. But legislative regulation as an instrument of control has long been discarded. Short of complete public ownership, only centralized administrative control as exercised by the Interstate Commerce Commission can even hope to cope with the railroad system of the country. National regulation of ocean traffic is as ineffective as state regulation of interstate rail traffic. Something approaching legislative uniformity among nations is indeed possible. Such international conferences as the Brussels Conference on Maritime Law in 1910, and the London Conference on Safety at Sea in 1912, or the conferences prevented by the war, which were scheduled to

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discuss uniform load lines and uniformity in the laws relating to limitation of liability at London and Brussels in 1914, illustrate recent activity in this respect. But shipping can no more be regulated by legislation than can railroads.

The urgent demand of the future must be for a permanent international commission, with certain plenary powers over ocean shipping, a commission of a calibre and breadth of view which will enable it to formulate a policy grounded on international needs and shaped by an international ideal. The logic of such a program is compelling. Competition in ocean traffic is wasteful and demoralizing, and leads inevitably to combination and monopoly. Private monopoly of an essential transportation system must be subject to public control. Public control, to be effectively administered, must be international. Yet there is a glowing promise for the future in the dry logic of this concrete problem. Where peace congresses and sentiments of international brotherhood have failed, the exigencies of a practical problem of administration may succeed in laying the groundwork of international federation. It was just such a plain business problem, the need of national control of interstate commerce, which was so potent a factor in inducing the thirteen emancipated colonies to surrender a large part of their jealously guarded sovereignty to a central government. Ocean shipping has burst through the restraints and confines of nationalism. In politics they still bind and hamper us. Yet economic necessity has so often been the mother of political invention that it is more than a vain hope that it may here point the way to international political union.

It is unfortunately true that neither in Europe nor in the far East would we find at the present time much encouragement for any program involving a measure of national sacrifice for a higher international purpose. There is, however, nearer at home a field for the development of such a program which has immediate and practical possibilities. Many factors, some connected with the war and others independent of it, have served during the past few years to bring us into closer political and commercial relations with South American republics. Secretary Root's epoch-making tour through South America, the establishment of the Pan-American Union, the South American trip of the Boston Chamber of Commerce, the recent Pan-American Financial Conference in Washington, are some of the signs of this closer commercial union. On the political side there is the new development of the Monroe Doctrine under President Wilson's guidance, with its emphasis on Pan-American coöperation rather than on North American domination. It is generally recog nized that the greatest barrier standing in the way of a closer commercial union is the need of im

proved means of communication. The special subcommittee on transportation and communication of the Pan-American Financial Conference last summer, composed of delegates from Argentine, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, recommended that the United States and the leading South American republics coöperate in establishing two fast lines of passenger and mail steamers, one to serve the ports of Brazil, Uruguay and Argentine, the other to serve Ecuador, Peru and Chile. The Chilean representative expressly recommended that the governments of the respective nations join in subscribing to the capital stock of a corporation formed for these purposes. In reporting to the President on the proceedings and conclusions of the Conference, Secretary McAdoo laid especial stress on the advantage to the United States of government-owned steamship lines running to South America. With their routes definitely laid out in advance, and filling a need which private capital has failed to fill, these lines would be open to none of the criticism which has been directed against the vague and ill-thought-out Democratic ship purchase program. Moreover, the United States has in the Panama Steamship Company an organization and personnel of proved experience and efficiency, ready to take over its share of the work as soon as its resources can be increased and its corporate powers extended. This government-owned and operated line of steamships has been eminently successful both as a commercial venture and as an instrument of public service. It has valuable terminal facilities and equipment, and with the opening of the canal its present sphere of usefulness is past. A Pan-American governmentowned fleet must, however, be supplemented by a Pan-American shipping commission, with jurisdiction over all shipping between the northern and southern continents. Such a commission would be necessary to prevent the continued use of methods which have hitherto been successful in nipping in the bud any attempt to establish an independent line of steamships to South America. It would be an achievement immensely significant for the future of the two Americas, an experiment fraught with the promise of closer union among all nations, if PanAmerican statesmanship could carry such a program to a successful conclusion.

Such, then, must be the third phase of evolution in our maritime economy. Our merchant marine can no longer be treated as a romantic national ideal. Ocean shipping must not be regarded as a selfish instrument of purely national interests. It must be transformed into an instrument of international service. If it can be so transformed, it may well develop into a forerunner of international federation.

GERARD HENDERSON.