he quoted.

""The time has come,' the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things;

Of shoes-of ships-of sealing-wax-
Of cabbages-and kings!'

"If we look out for the shoes and the ships, the kings will be taken care of in due course," smiled Morris. "But there's one final factor that you will have to deal with, John. You will find that all the manufacturers of luxuries and unnecessaries-and the unessentials far outnumber the luxuries-will agree with you up to a certain point, will often, in fact-like the automobile-manufacturers-go more than half way in their co-operation, but-nobody wants to be put out of business. The jewellers, for instance, have pretty consistently declined to take orders for things made of platinum in view of the government's need of it. But they want to go on making jewelry! Now, jewelry won't help win the war. On the other hand, those jewellers-the workmen I mean, of course-could be utilized by the government in making the more delicate parts of aeroplanes. Every dressmaker, perfumer, graphophone manufacturer, jeweller, every maker of things not absolutely essential to the efficiency and health of the people-or at any rate to the extent that his output is not needed for national efficiency-should be obliged by the fact that the people deny themselves

his particular luxury to reduce the number of his employees. These will gradually find other employment. The lace-maker, fitter, gem-cutter, turner will shift about into other sorts of work; everybody will 'move along one' until at the end of the line there will be one more riveter in the shipyard. We must not wait for the men themselves to do it. It wouldn't be human nature. They wouldn't know how, or they'd think they didn't. It must be accomplished by the law of supply and demand-and we control the demand. Go to it, John, old boy! Your work is cut out for you!"

"Yes," I assented, "my work is cut out for me! But what shall I say if one of these jewellers or perfumers asks me how he is going to live?"

Morris's face grew stern.

"Plenty of men are going into the trenches to die," he thundered. "The war must be fought here as well as at the front. One man in the shipyards today is worth three in the trenches!"*

*“We are at war; and for some reason the business interests have not yet chosen to realize it. Nine-tenths of the business men of the country are either preaching 'business as usual' or are urging the people to spend freely and extravagantly, because they think the circulation of money will win the war. The chief reason for the terrible railroad congestion has been the effort to carry on the normal traffic of peace, which before the war began was overtaxing the railroad facilities, and to add to it the tremendous new war traffic without increasing the facilities. And it could not and cannot be done.

"When Germany entered the war the whole industrial system of the empire was changed. Even the railroad system was com

Yet in the face of the present exigency people continue to waste fuel and labor for their mere pleasure. Only this morning I received this letter:

BURLINGTON, N. C., Dec. 13, 1917. This morning a party of hunters from the North reached Greensboro, N. C., too late to catch the morning train going east, due to arrive here about nine o'clock. As no other train is operated until the afternoon, which reaches here at 5 P. M., a special train was chartered consisting of one large locomotive and two cars.

This appears to me a most outrageous misuse of railroad equipment and fuel. All of the cotton-mills in this vicinity have had coal confiscated from them in wholesale quantities "for the operation of Government troop-trains, etc.," our mill having lost in this manner about thirty car-loads, or sufficient to run us for over three months.

It is absolutely useless to protest, as the Southern Railway has the legal right to seize this coal, but when they use a portion

pletely reorganized, a fact that few people seem to know. The dozens of small railway systems existing in and operated by the separate German states were taken over by the imperial government, and welded together into a single great unified system under the control of a single administrative authority. Passenger traffic was cut ruthlessly, and the production of the unnecessary and the less necessary articles of ordinary consumption was immediately restricted, or stopped altogether. There has scarcely been a piece of furniture made in Germany since the war began. England tried 'business as usual,' but soon discovered the mistake.

"What have we done? Our only effort to curb the 'businessas-usual' doctrine has been confined to the solitary preaching of a few far-seeing and thoughtful men such as Frank Vanderlip. They have urged voluntary economy as a means of cutting down the production of less essential articles.

"How have the newspapers treated the campaign for voluntary economy? There is not a newspaper in New York which has, on its editorial pages, whole-heartedly and earnestly, day after day, supported this movement. The Hearst papers, at the rate of about one huge editorial a week, have even encouraged ex

of it to cater to the luxurious demand of wealthy sportsmen in a community which is about to freeze to death it is enough to turn the people into raving Bolsheviki. Will you not please give this fact publicity, withholding, of course, the name of your informant but mentioning the railroad and the points of origin and destination of the special.

I think this gives a fine opportunity for some constructive criticism of the so-called Fuel Administration.

As I walked up-town that afternoon, pondering on the importance of the task in which I was to take a part, I thought of the privations undergone for the sake of victory during the Civil War, of which I had often heard my father speak.

"My wife and I," said Asa Gray in 1862, "have scraped up five hundred and fifty dollars, all we can scrape, and lent it to the United States."

Lowell wrote in a private letter: "I had a little

travagance and foolish expenditure, and they have endeavored to prejudice the public against Mr. Vanderlip's teaching by asserting that his doctrine of economy, if followed out, would increase the earnings of the banks. An advertisement appearing in the Philadelphia Public Ledger stated that the campaign to encourage economy was a part of the German propaganda in this country! The advertiser was a jeweler.

"Business as usual' is having its result in choked terminals, car shortages, and coal famines. The public press, which has openly or tacitly supported this infamous and injurious doctrine, is as much responsible for Garfield's order as any other agency. "Until we can go directly to the cause of all our troubles, the stupid and senseless production of goods which can be dispensed with during the war, we shall never be able to end railroad congestion, and we shall not be able to do our proper share in the war. Until the editors of a few newspapers realize this fact and begin to say so, the present extravagance and hopeless waste and confusion will go on."-T. W. VAN METRE in The New Republic, Feb. 2, 1918.

Italian bluster of brushwood-fire yesterday morning; but the times are too hard with me to allow of such an extravagance except on the brink of gelation."

...

"The first of January," wrote Emerson in 1862, "has found me in quite as poor a plight as the rest of the Americans. Not a penny from my books since last June, which usually yield five or six hundred a year; no dividends from the banks or from Lidia's Plymouth property. Then almost all income from lectures has quite ceased; so that your letter found me in a study how to pay three or four hundred dollars with fifty.. I have been trying to sell a wood-lot at or near its appraisal, which would give me something more than three hundred, but the purchaser does not appear. Meantime we are trying to be as unconsuming as candles under an extinguisher; and 'tis frightful to think how many rivals we have in distress and in economy. But far better that this grinding should go on bad and worse than we be driven by any impatience into a hasty peace, or any peace restoring the old rottenness."

Later that evening, happening to pass a famous Broadway hotel, I entered the foyer to observe what change, if any, the war had brought about there. It was crowded with men and women in evening dress coming to supper after the theatre. Down in the grill-room the dancing-floor was packed with couples who were turkey and fox trotting to the crash of a