as he had been the last man in Great Britain to acknowledge the independence of his former dominions, he would also be the last to infringe that independence.

I have just visited for the first time scenes memorable in the events to which I have been referring. I have looked upon the coast to which the Mayflower brought the Pilgrim Fathers; I have seen the mighty city which stands upon the soil of what was once a Dutch colony; I have stood bareheaded beside a stone which by a gracious American courtesy marks a grave of some of my countrymen slain in the revolutionary war. And these things have seemed to me to represent and to suggest that reconciling and healing power of time which renders it possible to combine a knowledge of the past with an assurance of hope for the future. Kings have been the nursing-fathers of the American Republic. It is the consoling paradox of History.

REALITY

VIRGINIA STAIT

I did not know that death would come this way
I thought it would be after waiting long;
With prayer for this and that, with love's delay,
With all forgiveness . . . . with forgetting wrong!

....

I thought I would be new before I went,

Something so shriven angels would make room; And I would scarcely need, for my ascent, The bitter stepping-stones of my own tomb.

But now the end, the end, comes unaware,
One day far-broken from the rest of time;
And with life's sin and captive to despair,
I go the utmost height there is to climb.

I carry with me hate and heart-break loss,
My eyes salt-wet unto what promised rest,
I drag along the way each earthly cross,

Each torment, to the wide, receiving west.

A SURE CURE FOR TEETERS

"Willy, do you want peanut butter, or jam in your sandwiches?"

"Aw, I don' know-gimme peanut butter-I don't caregimme jam-aw, I don' know."

Willy's mind teeters. It behaves like that of the hypothetical donkey between the two bales of (hypothetical) hay-but in real life I have encountered it more often in humans. It is a dangerous disease in this age; in a very high percentage of cases (statistics will not be read unless called for) it is fatal-to a "career." You see, there is only one "career" which is, to be an "executive." The function of an executive is to make great big reverberating decisions with hair-trigger quickness of reaction. A secretary comes in with a message; somebody says something (probably a whole mouthful) in a conference, and-BANG!-goes a great big decision, just like that. If you can do that, no salary or remuneration is too big for you. If you can't, you are good and lucky if you get so far as to be secretary to one who can. Willy is in serious danger of being condemned to ride behind a rusty radiator with a tin lunch-box and a thermos bottle on the back seat.

My message is one of hope for Willy. At his age, I can cure him in a week. Later in life it will take longer. I have not discovered the dead-line of age, but you will see when I tell you how I made the discovery that there is hope for most of us.

My classmate Ptolemy Jellicorse was a complete teeterer when we were in college. It was painful to go into a restaurant with him. If I ordered first, he would order the same. If I didn't, he would agonize over the bill of fare till the waiter put him out of his misery. Then he would call the waiter back again and again, and order successively everything he saw set before anybody else. The only way he could get a meal at a cafeteria was to walk down the food

line with his eyes shut and grab something off the shelf every ten steps. It was an agony to shake hands with him because he could never decide whether to let go or not, and kept clinching and slacking off till he reduced me to idiocy, as he did again whenever he came into the office because he could never decide when it was time to go. So I, as Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Galvanic Spasmodic Activities of the Student Body of the University of Main Street, found much difficulty in dealing with him when he was an undergraduate. For some years afterward, whenever I saw a case of teeters I used to think of him and wonder what he was doing. The other day I found out.

Circumstances led me into the base of a topless tower, up which I was rocketed in an express car and emitted at the thirtyseventh floor. I had a pass-word which let me by outposts and entanglements into a rosewood chapel where, before a Sahara of plate-glass bordered with push-buttons sat-who but Ptolemy Jellicorse! Shaded areas on the map under the plate-glass of his desk showed spasms of intense activity in the movements of Jellicorse Swiss Cheese Underwear, and he was shooting detonating decisions at these areas along the red lines. Well, naturally I— what shall I say?-I alluded as allusively as possible to college days, and hinted how come? He peremptorily dismissed his secretary, and told me.

Through a number of years during which as an underling in business he was blown hither and thither by the shock of highpower decisions spontaneously combusting all about him, the retreating chin of his youth grew, from the habit of smoking an over-sized pipe, into a veritable bull-dog jaw. For a time this had no effect whatever on his character until he overheard a shop-girl in the subway remark on it. "There goes big business," she had said, "pipe the iron jaw!" There was no other man within range. He rolled his eyes to the mirror in the slot-machine on the pillar beside him. No manner of doubt, they were talking of him. His train went by unheeded while he inspected the said jaw. It looked good to him. He went to the office and delivered snappy orders to the office-boy. He bought at the news stand a book that had a great many streaks of lightning on the jacket. It exhorted him to be himself by using the words "dynamic" and "dominate" three times each on every page. With the aid of this remarkable document, he worked out the first principle, that it makes no difference what one has to decide. It is just as easy to decide

whether to declare war on Great Britain as whether Eddy needs a new pair of pants, or whether to take hamburger on rye. Second, it makes no difference which way you decide because there is just as much to say for and against either side. Hence the method, which is simplicity itself. When a decision is put up to you, register thought for a moment, but don't think about the decision; think how a man ought to look when he is deciding a weighty matter-just register decision. Then come out with the first thing that comes to your lips as if it were a weighty pronouncement, and the thing is done. Of course, someone objects; a decision brings an objection just like pressing a button. To the objection, do not go beyond the formal rejoinder. Suppose, for example, someone asks for your most exquisite reason for deciding in favor of Initiative Measure No. 999 on the November ballot under which the City will take over the Lip-Stick Industry for the benefit of the people. Your objector will say that if carried it will create graft and ruinous taxes. You have only to reply that the basic industries should be operated for and by the people. If by chance you have decided against the measure, your opponent will ask you whether you have considered the fact that the people ought to have control of vital industries? Your rejoinder is that to put a basic industry into the hands of politicians is a crime against the people. What conceivable difference can it make whether you say x and he says y, or you say y and he says x? If you can master this simple technique, you will never teeter again.

You can teach this to Willy as easily as you can teach a dog to "speak." Accustom him to obey two sharp commands, “Register decision!" "Snap it out!" and "Yip!" out it comes. Take a card with two words boldly printed, "Yes," "No"; "For," "Against." Teach him when you flash the card before him to pronounce one or the other word instantly; if he teeters at first, jab a pin into him behind, and in a few lessons you will get the requisite hair-trigger reactions. An hour or two of the work and the thing is done; Willy is a "born executive," and you need have no further anxiety for him.

It is interesting to note in passing that this disease was fatal to the elder Hamlet. Shakespeare names it, "a most instant tetter," in I, v. 71, and it is amusing to observe how his spelling has misled the commentators, in spite of their insistence that Hamlet suffered from the same disease-obviously congenital.

R. P. U.