inspiriting just to glance at some of the buildings enriching the long list.

The Congressional Library at Washington was made a veritable museum of American mural painting. The State Capitol of Minnesota at St. Paul was made another. John W. Alexander commemorated the steel industry on the staircase walls of the Carnegie Institute at Pittsburgh. Edwin Abbey and Violet Oakley plunged into Pennsylvanian history for the subjects they painted for the State Capitol at Harrisburg. On a wave of ardor that swept across the country, domes, pendentives, lunettes, and panels were raised to a kind of colorful efflorescence, and happily we learned through all this

H. Siddons Mowbray, in the Morgan Library and in the library of the University Club in New York, revived the tradition of Pintoricchio in singular brilliance. The reader will recall here that Mr. Mowbray first won his repute as a painter of easel pictures. His adaptability has been characteristic of the school. Practically all of our mural decorators have been expert on a smaller scale. La Farge was and so have been the younger men. They have simply been good workmen quick to meet the conditions of a new task. Just the same, their versatility has sometimes been amazing.

I shall never forget the excitement of my friend Robert Blum in the days when

certain Broadway hotel. The truth is that endless incidents recur as one dwells upon the subject, and I pause, confronted by the absurdity of even beginning to commence to prepare, as R. L. S. has it somewhere, to sketch the history of American mural painting in these few pages. I have only scratched the surface of the subject. There are any number of decorations of artists, of problems on which it would be entertaining to linger.

The problems especially have a strong appeal. Why is it that John Sargent, the greatest of living painters, whose whole soul has been wreaked upon his Boston decorations, at the Museum and at the Library, has nevertheless failed to demonstrate that he is as good a decorator as he is a painter of portraits and pictures? What would Whistler have made of the mural decoration in the Boston Public Library that McKim is said to have wanted him to do? What of Eugene Savage? His paintings have marked him out as a born decorator, and it is interesting to speculate as to what he would do if the gods were to give him some stately walls to cover. And what, apropos of men like Savage and Winter, is the ultimate influence of the Roman Academy to

be? Will it steady others as it has steadied them and correct those baroque, modernistic, and other deleterious influences which occasionally creep in? I have myself a lively belief that it will do just this thing. To drink at the fount of pure tradition is wonderfully clarifying and fortifying. Thinking of it, I am reminded of still another question, one which was raised again for me by the Brooklyn show, the question of the status of that decoration which is produced for no particular space and yet has decorative quality. It abounded in Brooklyn, the panel which was undeniably handsome and yet was either essentially pictorial or was decorative only in the sense in which a screen is decorative. Looking at it, I felt that some things at all events were detached indeed from the world heedful of that admonition of Titian's to which I referred at the outset. In fact, the critical observer discriminates more even than the practitioner between two categories, decoration and mural decoration. At present they tend to be confused. In the long run the distinction must come to be more decisively recognized. It must be if we are to maintain the standard erected by the leaders in our school of mural decoration.

on the Markets

tance has already been presented during the few months since the beginning of 1925. It concerns the question of the shape which trade revival is likely hereafter to take in the changed Unexpected conditions left by the Great Movements War. Even more intimately, it has to do with the probable course of prices in the longer sequel to the war. We have had one month of violently rising prices, based on prediction of a spectacular "boom" in trade, followed almost immediately by a fall in prices even more violent than the preceding rise. Wheat has risen 30 cents a bushel in January, and fallen 60 cents in March. Average prices on the Stock Exchange have advanced nearly 6 per cent after New Year's Day only to decline 10 per cent a few weeks later, and all this has occurred with no change whatever in the financial, industrial, or agricultural situation.

This season in American finance has, in certain respects, been one of the most curious since the war. Its peculiarity has been the obstinate refusal of events to move on the lines which seemed to be indicated by economic logic. Every one is familiar with the argument which prevailed a year or two ago, alike in economic lecture-halls, in bank directors' meeting-rooms, and in Wall Street brokers' offices, that the accumulation of the whole world's gold in our Federal Reserve on a scale unimaginable in previous history was certain to force up American prices to an "inflation basis." The argu

express the relation between the quantity of goods and the quantity of money, here was a case in which the business done in the United States had not greatly increased during the past few years, whereas the country's gold holdings had risen from $3,785,000,000 in the middle of 1922 to $4,490,000,000 in the middle of 1924 and the total stock of money from $8,178,o00,000 to $8,746,000,000. But the inflation did not come when every one was predicting it. The average of commodity prices at the beginning of 1924 was almost the same as at the beginning of 1923, and in the middle of 1924 it was lower than at any time in the preceding year.

The "Gold

DURING 1923 and 1924 Wall Street, the bankers, and the economists produced various explanations of this failure of the principle to work. Our people had not recovered from the hardships caused by the deflation of 1921. The agricultural West was poor Inflation" because of the load of debt Theory carried over from unlucky investment in land at the inflated prices of 1920, the market for their crops being confronted with the huge harvests of 1923 in competitive wheat-growing States, and forced down to pre-war prices. The agricultural South was poor because of a series of cotton crops half-ruined by insect pests. Europe was poor because of slow recovery from the war-time exhaustion, and our export trade was accordingly curtailed.

Certain foreign economists, who held

obstinately to theories of their own about currencies and prices-theories which guaranteed "inflation" as a result of our accumulating gold, whether our people were poor or rich-went farther. They accused the Federal Reserve of deliberately preventing the new gold from exerting its normal effect on prices. Although they never made it entirely clear what they supposed the Reserve Board had done or had refused to do, it appeared that in a general way the Reserve banks were arraigned for refusing to lend on the scale which their increased gold reserve made possible, or perhaps for refusing to reduce their official discount rate in proportion to their enlarged capacity for extending credit.

THIS

and

HIS theory, it is true, was ridiculed by every one actually familiar enough with the machinery of the Federal Reserve to know that the Reserve bank rate had been kept consistently below the money rate on the open marPrediction ket, and that a Reserve bank Fulfilment accepts all applications for rediscounting commercial loans held by member banks. Nevertheless, the authors of the theory stuck to it. Presently, however, in August of last year, the New York Reserve bank discount rate was reduced to 3 per cent, the lowest figure in its history, and comparing with a 32 to 334 per cent rate for merchants' paper, even on the open market. This removed one of the market's theories for the absence of a "gold inflation movement."

Events soon removed the others. The agricultural West raised a great crop of wheat while the harvests in the rest of the world, including those of our principal competitors in the export trade, ran short. The agricultural South raised the largest cotton crop since the huge yield of 1914, and found the foreign textile trade increasing its purchases in proportion to the increased yield. Our export trade rose to a magnitude not witnessed since 1920. If there was anything in the theory that our huge gold reserve must force up prices, the stage certainly seemed now to be set

for that result.

THE speculative markets moved in ex

pectation of it. Average prices of commodities, measured by the bestknown "index numbers," had by the end of last January risen 114 per cent since the previous June, and stood at the highest point since The It is true, the greater Rise of January 1920. part of this advance had been Prices caused by the period's 30-percent rise in grain prices, reflecting the exceptional decrease in the world's supply of cereal products. But all other products showed at least a tendency in the same direction. Prices on the Stock dency; along with the wheat market's Exchange shared in the upward tenadvance above $2 a bushel in January,

the stock market rushed into an excited speculation for the rise which carried prices even of typical investment shares to the highest average in a dozen years. On the face of the markets, the "inflated prices" and the "trade boom" were in sight.

But this rise of prices halted as suddenly as it had begun. Even wheat, which had risen on the Chicago market, from a few cents over one dollar per bushel in April of last year to $1.81 in December and $2.057% last January, declined suddenly to $1.40% in March. Speculators who had been buying wheat for the expected rise to two dollars and a half were forced to sell out their holdings. at an enormous loss. One monthly "index number" of all commodity prices, which had shown a rise in the average from 1837% last June to 198 last December and 2041⁄2 at the end of January, fell to 1942 at the opening of April. Prices of metals such as copper, lead, and tin sold in March something like 15 per cent below the high January figures. Stock Exchange prices moved similarly. Average prices of the stocks selected as representative had advanced in January nearly 6 per cent from the final values of 1924, on top of a prolonged advance in the autumn; they declined 9 per cent in March.

SON