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unbroken. For the hundredth time, the faithful watch-dog convinced himself of this. In a few hours his new master must arrive to take possession; perhaps, even now, the short journey was more than half accomplished; there might be signs of his approach upon the Paduan road, which the upper western window commanded for a mile or more. To that outlook the old man climbed in nervous expectation. The clustered houses of the town were just below him; and beyond them shone the narrow ribbon of the highway, white and still, without a speck upon it. But, while he looked, the quiet town itself woke from calmness to commotion. He heard the sound of hurrying feet, and saw the little square before the church rapidly fill up with a curious crowd, drawn together by some rumor of a startling nature. All eyes were fixed upon the master's tomb with looks of mingled wonder and dismay. Old Vitale rushed down among the curious faces, to make, in his turn, an incredible discovery. The tomb had been forced open in the night; one broken slab of marble lay on the ground where it had fallen. Yet the town had slept quietly, without the slightest hint of such disturbance. What ruffian could have wrought, secretly and silently, this act of infamous irreverence? For what unholy purpose was the sacred dust within thus violated? These were questions that each one asked, that none dared answer. All dreaded to pursue them further, to define the extent of the theft, to lay bare the effect that should explain the cause.

The wonder grew when the task of investigation was undertaken by the parishpriest, and the opening in the tomb proved too small to admit him. The theft, if theft it was, must, then, have been committed either by a child or by a dwarf. Under the priest's guidance a boy of the inn, solemnly charged to speak the truth, crawled into the sarcophagus, and furnished evidence to be publicly announced with due formality. The master's face was still serene, undisturbed and undisfigured.

His only ornaments-the jewelled clasp of his robe and the ring upon his left hand, remained intact. But the right hand, that master hand to which the world acknowledged an inestimable debt, was wanting. It had been cut off adroitly at

the wrist, and secreted, or carried away. A thorough search revealed no trace of it. For this mutilation alone had the impious offender performed his deed of darkness. Thus were the cause and effect of his unaccountable desecration explained and verified.

Following hard upon this announcement, the Lord of Padua rode into the square with all his retinue. Immediately every door was closed and every house ransacked at his command. He proclaimed the theft a capital offence, promising rewards and honors to any, high or low, whose testimony should convict the criminal; all without avail. A week passed, and neither the severed hand nor any clew to the place of its concealment came to light. Then he restored the tomb, consecrating it anew with fitting rites and ceremonies, leaving the mystery of the crime and its solution to after ages; still without avail. Centuries have elapsed; the threats and promises bequeathed to the world by Francesco di Carrara are all forgotten. He, himself, is remembered only as the false patron, who, dispersing the master's library, betrayed his sacred trust. But the marble monument remains at Arquà, an object of veneration. And to-day, the humble villager, deciphering its worn inscription, pauses to repeat one line significantly, and to dispute it. "Hic tegit ossa Petrarce! Nay, not so!" he insists. "For the right hand is wanting." Ask him the why and wherefore, and he shakes his head. He has inherited the mystery, but not the means to answer you.

The ancient church of Santa Maria Maggiore, at Bergamo, is the city's pride and glory. Great artists have enriched it ; priest and patron and valiant captain sleep within its walls, under vast canopies of sculptured marble. The pavement-stones protect the humbler dead; but many a name, once graven there, is gone forever, obliterated by the feet of passing generations. And among these lies Messer Enrico Capra, the famous goldsmith, thus effaced from memory, lost until the judgment-day. In that obscure grave, unknown, unimagined, is a wondrous treasure, richer than any that the church displays. The disciple survived his master by more than half a decade. On his death

bed, to the devoted serving-man, Marcello, he gave his last instructions: These were to enter the closed chamber in his house, to take therefrom a certain golden casket and place it in his coffin; to do this alone, secretly; and, on his life, to let none know. When the hour came, the man discharged the letter of his duty, if not the spirit. For, amazed at the beauty of the goldsmith's masterpiece, he began to speculate upon its purpose, to wonder why this marvel had been wrought, what is was designed to hold; till, yielding to his curiosity, he

forced the lock, and was startled to find within only what seemed a human hand. He mistook this for some saintly relic; but while he looked, it crumbled, lost its shape, and fell into a heap of ashes. Then, with averted eyes, fearing to look upon his master's face, he hid the precious casket and its contents under the dead man's robe, and closed the coffin-lid. None knew, none suspected; all knowledge of the wonder died with him; this world will never share it. The treasures of a nameless grave are guarded well.

THE CRICKET

By Harriet Chalmers Bliss

WALKING, a shadow and alone,
Where men pile endless stone on stone,

And all my days a-hunger go
Like weary beggars to and fro,

Sudden beside the shuffling feet
I hear a cricket in the street.

And oh! the fields so fair and wide,
Soft meadows and the water-side,

And bird-calls in the trees at even, The low hills that lie close to heaven.

And all the dear green things that grow For joy, where upland breezes blow,

Where brooks tell more than poets can, Where nights dream out a silver span,

And days lie open to the skies,
And suns set into paradise-

Oh! all the enraptured mystery
Of that loved country lost to me!

Hark! In the evening cadence, still
I hear a far-off whip-poor-will,

And through the sweet dusk, as I pass, My little singers of the grass.

THE POINT OF VIEW

T

HE notion that the eyes of foreign observers are those of "contemporary posterity" is, possibly, a little overworked in these days. Communication is easy; publication, by one channel or another, is almost as easy; really seeing is Young America not easy at all, and the press of nearly every modern country teems with the reports of eyes inquisitive rather than genuinely curious and brains more prompt than penetrating in comment. But there is substance in the well-worn aphorism, and if the percentage of helpful observers is small, the actual number is, probably, larger than ever and their work well worth considering. Given the eyes really keen and patient and the brain tempered to investigation and tested generalization, your foreign student has for us the immense advantage that the vision is not dulled by familiarity and reflection is served by fresh and novel standards. You get from him the aloofness of posterity; the alertness, interest, sympathy-the actualité-of the contemporary. To read the sincere and serious work of such an observer is like consultation with a friend who is a physician: he has special knowledge you may not hope to attain and may candidly disclose to you sources of weakness and of strength you would not of yourself perceive.

I was strongly impressed by this in reading the latest volume of M. Pierre LeroyBeaulieu, Les États Unis dans le Vingtième Siècle. The specialty of the author is, if I may say so, new countries. He has written with authority on the new Orient-Japan, Siberia, China-and on the new state created by the federation of the Australian colonies and New Zealand. It is as a new country that America -let us be thankful for the somewhat bumptious assumption of that title by our Department of State-is approached by him. He has set himself to compulser the latest census and innumerable like documents, with the aid of a considerable residence among us. Primarily he is an economist-de race, as his countrymen would say of a family eminent in that line for two generations-but in his hands political economy is far from a gloomy

science; it is the ordered study of the forces that guide the development of organized human life over large areas for considerable periods. Now in our country we have been for many years a good deal exercised over our fiscal system, and of late we have been greatly excited-that is not too strong a word-over industrial "trusts." These two elements in our situation have been the subject of a vast amount and variety of writing in other lands. Among ourselves they are regarded with intense feeling; we get angry or gloomy or cynical over them. They furnish the fuel for our most heated political contests. Our publicists are puzzled by them; our politicians shy at them or openly play the demagogue over them.

They appeal to the clergymen

in need of "human" topics; girl graduates of our women's colleges investigate them, and they strew the field of settlement debates with the broken weapons of impassioned rhetorical battle. With the approach of the quadrennial national election they "burn" as no other questions can.

He

M. Leroy-Beaulieu, in his four hundred closely printed pages, devoted to a careful and complete examination of the actual condition and probable future of the United States, gives to the tariff but a parenthetical sentence or two, and to "trusts" but a few pages. remarks that the unfettered trade between all parts of our vast territory, with its incalculable variety of resources and requirements, is one of the most solid bases of our present prosperity and of that assured to us, and that this is recognized by our own intelligent publicists. The "trusts" he subjects to an acute analysis and reaches the general conclusion that their evils are self-limiting, their advantages considerable and likely to be lasting. In other words, the two things which most excite, exalt, or depress us he treats as incidents of youth. Other things impress him mightily. The continent practically secured from hostile neighbors by the happy accident of Napoleon's cession of Louisiana; the scope of our soil and our climate; our mineral resources in metals and fuel; our natural or acquired lines of transport; above all, our composite

population, drawn at first from the chosen couches of England and Europe, and then disciplined, nourished, developed, by the needs and the opportunities of a new land—all these engage his thoughtful and intensely interested study. They are of the essence of the national being, gradually, but not slowly, unfolding and making itself felt in the crowded centres of the Occident and in the remotest regions of the awakening Orient. Compared with these, neither the devices of our legislation as to taxation of competition nor the devices of our captains of industry as to combination or monopoly are important. They are, in his sight, devices only, with which the steady forces of national evolution, acting constantly through great spaces of time and over great areas, will have their sure way. That is a view of our strenuous existence on which it is wholesome to dwell. Nations have in their youth the "long, long thought" proper-inevitable-to that stage of their secular existence, and they have their "gleams and glooms" which we, caught in the growth of the great organism, cannot accurately understand, cannot take at their just value. It is a substantial service that is rendered to us by the foreign observer of the type of M. Leroy-Beaulieu, seeing us under a broader angle, measuring us by more comprehensive standards, seizing the larger meaning, tracing the lines of the enduring movement. From such a one we may indeed get at least a glimpse, now in the zest and fever of our young life, of the destiny posterity will realize.

T

HAT unionism can claim ethical justification for the "closed shop"-a shop from which non-union men are excluded by union dictation-seems surprising to those who have only casual acquaintance with current discussion of the labor problem. Yet that claim is put forth seriously and in good faith, and is significant for its marked break from American traditions. Perhaps no recent official statement of it is ‚more comprehensive than that embodied in the resolutions of protest against making the Government Printing office an "open shop"-a shop admitting union and non-union workmen on an equality-passed by the International Brotherhood of Bookbinders at the convention held in St. Paul. The contention of these resolutions is

The Ethics of the "Closed Shop".

that the labor movement is "unselfish," in that it seeks "the abolition of all conditions that do not operate for the general weal,” and hence represents "the greatest good to the greatest number." The conclusion is that the open shop, in weakening organized labor, weakens its "reforming influence," and hence "is not in the interest of the public welfare." This somewhat sensational "proposition," that unionism is an essentially altruistic movement in its relation to labor as a whole and to the community, is not without indorsement by economists. Thus Prof. E. R. A. Seligman of Columbia, in a recent discussion of the open shop, declares that "the purpose and actual tendency of unionism are to help in establishing the average minimum payment for labor that will be adjusted for the general good of all working men, and indirectly, therefore, for the whole community, since the working men form politically the mass of the voters and economically the mass of the consumers"—an indorsement, it is to be noted, that would not seem to apply if the working men did not form the "mass," politically and economically, in the community.

Perhaps the most interesting phase of this contention is the process of reasoning by which good American citizens have thus come, as unionists, to reject the cardinal American doctrine of individual independence. For the gist of the union position, of which the closed shop is typical, rests on the representative character of unionism, including a right, if it can, to impose its peculiar policies on labor outside the unions and on the community. The assertion of this right, as a matter of ethics, is again based on the conviction that only through aggressive organization can labor hope to secure and maintain in the industrial struggle those wages, hours, and conditions of service which it is justified in demanding. This conviction rejects absolutely the pleasant optimistic theory that betterment in status often results from natural adjustments. It emphasizes the fact that even in the days preceding a general organization of labor, an advance, like the change from a working day of twelve to one of ten hours, was reached only through a policy of compulsion, and not from recognition of the great increase in production wrought by improved machinery and methods which made a day of twelve hours an unnecessary hardship. The change to a day of ten hours, it

may be interesting to note, in passing, was first formally demanded in 1806 by the shipbuilding industry. The general agitation for it grew aggressively persistent by 1828, and was marked by numerous strikes for some ten years following. In 1840 the proclamation of President Van Buren established the day of ten hours in the Government navy yards. The logic of a situation, of which this little historical episode is illustrative, to many thoughtful unionists seems conclusive of the necessity for compelling acquiescence in organized labor policies by non-union labor and by the community, because only thus can be secured that improvement in status in which eventually both non-union labor and the community have a share—a significant instance of what the socialists call realizing "class consciousness."

How far-reaching would be the readjust ment of rights and relations upon acceptation of this doctrine by society is probably as little appreciated by its unionist advocates as by that easy-going tolerance of American public opinion, always ready to acquiesce "up to a point, you know"-to quote the voluble Mr, Brooke of fiddlemarch." Rather curiously, that the ethics of this claim of organized labor to representative authority has passed unchallenged "up to a point"-is to be attributed in part to current misapplication of certain terms, as when a strike is called “a war measure,” and the non-unionist who takes the striker's place "a traitor." The inference from this "subtle error of popular usage," as Prof. T. N. Carver of Harvard points out, is that a union can properly be compared with a state, "rather than with some other organization under the state." Representative authority belongs alone to the state as All-of-Us, and makes it alone an "irresponsible power." What part of All-of-Us is the labor organization? Or, on what basis of representation does it assume representative power? On a "liberal estimate," unionists number 2,000,000, says Professor Carver, in a population recently estimated by the Census Bureau as barely short of 80,000,000. The proportion of unionists, then, to the total citizenship is I to every 40 citizens. Again, the proportion of unionists to the total of those "engaged in gainful occupations" the technical description of what is popularly called "labor"-is, Professor Carver says, "about 1 to every 14%." To concede, then, the ethics of the claim of organized labor to

representative or irresponsible authority is, from the standpoint of the community, to confer that authority on I in every 40 citizens; and, from the standpoint of labor as a whole, to confer it on 1 in every 141⁄2 laborers.

But, after all, the mathematics of the unionist contention are rather interesting than determinative. Such figures are chiefly of value to measure the distance that must be bridged, while the American tradition of decision by majority still stands, before there will be a surrender of the individual's right to independence-for example, to keep a certain inferior status voluntarily rather than to be raised to an improved status involuntarily. These figures, however, do point the way to the only method by which unionism can hope permanently to gain representative authority, the method of "fair persuasion" of the majority—that is, persuasion without coercion. Fair persuasion as a conceded limit of right may not improbably come to be recognized by the unions themselves as good policy no less than good ethics, as evolution produces a more ideal type. Such a type would be a union in which leaders were chosen for wisdom rather than for aggressiveness; in which acts of violence and lawlessness once proved were subjected to union discipline; and in which unwise leadership would not escape opposition within the union through fear of its disruption-in short, a union that could be trusted with representative authority because it could be trusted to govern itself.

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