"I often picture to myself a man brought up in revolutionary circles, and at first a revolutionist, then a populist, then a socialist, then orthodox, then a monk at Afone, then an atheist, a good paterfamilias, and finally a Doukhobar. He takes up everything, and is always forsaking everything; men deride him, for he has performed nothing; and dies, forgotten, in a hospital. Dying he thinks he has wasted his life. And yet he is a saint." And this, in a way, is an allegory of Tolstoi's own life and its essential futility.

There is one word more that would fain be said. His doctrine of non-resistance to evil is based upon an inspiration and an essential fallacy. It was meant not only for nations but even for individuals in courts of law. But evil is an active and malignant thing that at times takes joy in the tortures of its victims, and it has a fatal habit of propagating itself a thousandfold. And for such manifestations of its power there seems no remedy save the sword of a Saint George. Besides, so long as there are differences of opinion, there must be some means of settling them. Those of property rights are of least importance. There are religious, political, social, literary, and heaven only knows how many other opinions on which we are liable to come into conflict. Indeed, did not Tolstoi himself wage a long conflict with society, none the less deadly though in the end it affected nothing but his own reason?

Finally it ought not to be so very difficult to give a broad definition to what has been attempted by these prophets. Life is so big, so monstrous, so utterly irrelevant, that our reason quails before it. The average man takes it as he finds it, with an easy optimism. But these

It did not wait for "the end." We recall a passage written somewhere about his middle life, where, in one paragraph, he proclaims it essential to social salvation that money be done away with; and in the next paragraph he proclaimed as essential to social salvation some arrangements which could not be carried out without money being in circulation.-ED.

greater men are at first stunned by its meaningless clamor, then roused to inspired effort to make reason and the will of God prevail. The demands of the inner life ring clear as a bell, and from its music they catch the melody that they would hear reëchoed from the chaos about them; and they set their imaginations to work.

They will simplify according to the inner pattern. But straightway a host of difficulties appear and the problem becomes more complex and the unknowns begin to multiply, until in desperation they wipe from the slate all the distracting inconsistencies, leaving only what is fair and reasonable and fit for the divine taskmaster's eye.

And yet from the beginning, wherever we see fit to place it, man has been evolved into an intellectual and moral being by recognizing the facts, especially those in his own nature, and working and enduring in the effort to shape them to the ideal.

We cannot solve the problem by simply rubbing it off the slate. Perhaps the will of God they seek to have prevail, is a far more complex thing than they thought it. The solution lies through the approximation of reason and fact. Because these great men refused to look at the outer fact, instead of solely at the inner vision, they were prophets that led astray.

"YOU CAN DO IT"

N the advertising section of a widely read magazine appears the picture of a well-dressed, rather repulsively virile-looking man, evidently a lieutenant if not a captain of industry, advising his twin brother in overalls to "sign the coupon" that accompanies a correspondence school advertisement. Illustrating a correspondence school advertisement himself, the successful. fellow holds in one hand a similar advertisement, stares with hypnotic intensity at his overalled subordinate, and points an earnest finger at the miniature coupon.

"Jim," says he in large type, "you're just an ordinary workman now, but you have ability, and I'm going to give you some good advice. See that coupon? Well, it wasn't so many years ago that I signed one just like it. At the time I was in the same position you are - holding down a little job at low wages. I was losing ambition every day had almost concluded I'd never be anything but an underpaid shop hand, when I happened to notice one of these ads. I signed the coupon, and the job I hold today I owe to this school."

The direct suggestion is that if Jim signs the coupon he, too, will discard those overalls.

As I have never signed a coupon myself, or known anybody who has, I cannot absolutely deny either the sincerity or the value of this advice. Jim looks skeptical. Perhaps he is in doubt whether he really wants to be an electrical engineer, an architect, a lawyer, a moving picture operator, a private secretary; or, on second thought, whether it wouldn't be better to take the College Preparatory course and go to Yale or Harvard or perhaps both.

It is doubtful if at any earlier time has the call to ambi

bition been so insistently shouted as now at the race of
Jim. Printing presses were necessary, magazines and
newspapers, correspondence schools, and the vociferous
genius of modern advertising. To me the correspondence
school in its dress of printer's ink is hauntingly reminis-
cent of the late Lydia E. Pinkham. Lydia signed herself
"yours for health;" the correspondence school changes
a letter, and in effect signs itself "yours for wealth;
and both present testimonials from grateful patients.
Whereas we wondered in the days of Lydia that any
woman was ill, we marvel now that any man is poor.
As the New England Primer used to say -

He that ne'er learns his A, B, C,
For ever will a Blockhead be;

But he that learns these letters fair

Shall have a Coach to take the Air.

Alas and alas! how many of us have learned those letters fair, and haven't even a little Ford car.

Milton called ambition "the last infirmity of noble minds," but it must also have been one of the first incentives that lifted some prehistoric strugglers above others, and so established the foundation of all later civilizations. Strongarm the first, I imagine, got to the top without much ambition; he had the punch, as we say nowadays, and arrived at eminence by the blind operation of natural forces. But once at the top he became willynilly an object of envy and a source of dark and sinister ambition in others. It needed no correspondence school to whisper the thought: "Be a Ruler of Men and hold down one of the Big-Paying Jobs! You, yes, you can do it." Thus was born ambition, from the spectacle of somebody better placed than oneself, with more cattle and wives, and the proud privilege of standup on his bow legs when everybody else in sight groveled on stomach. It was not the kind of ambition that Emerson had in mind when he wrote: "I hope America will come to

have its pride in being a nation of servants, and not of the served. How can man have any other ambition when the reason has not suffered a disastrous eclipse?" But it was the kind that has so far most generally influenced men. If you doubt it, examine with cold honesty your own ambitions, and see how far Emerson might grieve that your reason had suffered a disastrous eclipse.

To drive a donkey one must needs have a stick; and as the young mind, when turned into the educational path, often develops a donkeyish disinclination to travel, the adult mind has long used ambition for this stirring purpose. Sometimes, indeed, it may have drifted across the adult mind that ambition is not altogether a desirable quality; that it is directly opposed to the first and unsophisticated teachings of Christianity; and that if all children became actively ambitious there would be the dickens to pay in a world where there is always room at the top only because so few are natively endowed with the ability to get there. But the idea is still potent that education, valuable as it is for raising the average of intelligence, will of itself provide a "Coach to take the Air," with all that such a coach stands for; and the siren song of the correspondence school-"You can do it" simply applies to education by mail, a delusive notion that has been long associated with education by schoolma'am. Educated men of the time distrusted the invention of printing, which they thought would commonize and debase learning. Plato distrusted the invention of alphabetical writing, and feared a deterioration of the mind when men took notes instead of memorizing. But the learning of the few remains as distinct as ever from the learning of the many; and as for Plato - did I not recently receive in my mail a little folder entitled "Stop Forgetting!" which settles that question? For only $2.50, it appears, I can buy me a memory system that "fits any type of mind from the ripe scholar to the young student" — or, in other words, from Plato to Jim.