vice which we have been pouring into your unwilling ears for the past few weeks, that you should have neglected to provide appropriate Christmas gifts for all your family and friends. If you find, however, at this late date, that you have

neglected our admonitions, and have failed to make the necessary selections, we offer below a few additional suggestions which may be helpful.

The key penknife, for instance. This is a gold-plated knife with two blades, and a key blank which can be filed to fit the owner's front door-or his cellar door, if he is that kind of person.

There is a table tray which is a very useful gift. This is of red lacquer. You carry it in as a tray, touch a lever, and the legs, which are folded up underneath, spring into action and it becomes a very personable table.

A red tray that holds two glasses holds them firmly, too-and can be attached to a card-table strikes us as a very useful device. The glasses are below the level of the table and leave the top free for the cards and the chips and the players' elbows. None of those wet rings on the table and consequent stickinesses on cards and fingers.

Then there are several refreshment cases or tables which make very good gifts. They are simply square boxes, on legs. You open the cover, and up come

bottles and glasses and shaker and sandwich and cigarette boxes. These come in a variety of woods, and in some the glasses and bottles are of crystal.

Speaking of refreshments, we have seen a cocktail shaker which starts to play a tune as soon as you lift it up and begin to pour. Also musical pitchers and cigarette boxes. We see no limit to the application of this principle. Why not musical dishpans to take away the drudgery of housework, or musical lawnmowers, or why doesn't some one invent a musical alarm clock?

For the golfer there is a golf-ball marker that looks something like a very superior nutcracker. You put the ball in, and a very moderate hand pressure prints your full name.

There are two new applications of the electric flashlight. For the man who goes out a good deal evenings there is the walking-stick with a light in the handle, and for the man who stays in and goes to bed early there is the combination pencil and flashlight, by means of which he can write in the dark. This would be an excellent device for the doctor's bedside table.

For any one who is fond of flowers there is an adjustable window flowershelf which fits any window, and on which plants can be put to get the sun.

about that, you say. Quite so. When we got to the end of our journey and found ourself alone in our bedroom with our traveling bag, we discovered, to our horror, that we had either lost the key or left it behind. There was no communication possible between ourself and the contents of the bag, and no locksmith within many miles. Nothing unusual about that, either. It has happened to all of us. But last summer we did things differently. We didn't think about the key at all, and there wasn't any frantic search for it when we reached our destination. We carried the key in our head. We had bought a bag equipped with one of those new combination locks,1 and we had no trouble at all. You can get luggage of all kinds and sizes, from a brief-case up to a wardrobe trunk, fitted with these locks. And you can also get combination padlocks in several sizes-one of them with a long hasp for a golf bag. Of course it is possible that a very absent-minded man might forget the combination, but if he does he deserves to have trouble. There are some numbers and dates that even the most absent-minded man has no excuse for forgetting. The date of his wife's birthday, for instance.

FOR

OR ILLUMINATING Christmas trees you can get lighting outfits, consisting of eight small Mazda bulbs of different colors, strung on a wire and equipped with a plug to fit a lamp socket. You can have as many lamps as you like, as the sets of eight can be attached one to another.

The doll-houses are fascinating, and complete. One three-story five-room house is furnished complete, with electric lights. Another house has an elevator. If you want to buy the house empty and furnish it yourself, there is doll furniture of every kind, and there are dishes and umbrella-stands and clocks and pictures and bird-cages and vacuum-cleaners and carpets-everything, in fact, that a household would need, even a crib for the doll baby.

When we were a child, we would probably have gone mad with joy if any one had given us a toy theatre. These are from sixteen inches to two feet high and have backdrops, scenery, and figures for a number of different plays. We, personally, like these things better than the highly specialized mechanical toys. which seem to us to give little scope to the child's imagination. The Punch and Judy Show, too, is good in this respect. This comes in two sizes and has ten marionettes. W. R. B.

1 Sesamee locks.

spiritual growth, happiness, usefulnesshe might have made, at least, some potential converts.

Possibly parents might be induced to put before their children in their plastic years two concrete facts: their duty to God and nature is to have children; their duty to themselves and state is self-realization. They should be taught all that is known about these duties and the best way of discharging them. So long as children are brought up in crass ignorance of the fundamental principles of physical and spiritual growth, as they now are, we shall continue to be as uncertain of our marital footing. Should that ignorance be dispelled, we might confidently look for safer and better matrimony.

THE

HERE is no doubt that much of matrimony's success depends upon sexual sympathy and adaptation. Companionate marriage aims to determine that before children are born. But the very means that it employs, and that it suggests should be made legal, tend to defeat that end.) Its advocates may deny it, but my conviction is based upon what has been told me by those who have essayed it. I fancy that most physicians who have had large experience will agree.

It is to be presumed that all who contemplate or contract companionate marriage hope to have and intend to have children. They should be informed that the longer they delay, the less the likelihood that they will have them. This is not the weightiest objection to this form of marriage, but it is a serious one. It will be said that many who contract the ordinary marriage postpone the advent of children. They too pay. Nature stands just so much swatting; then it swats back with sterilty. A pertinent question is, How long should it take companionates to find out whether they are adjustable? Some discerning ones can find out in a few weeks, others require several years. Surely the latter should not be denied the most enduring satisfaction of life-paternityall that time.

variety of marriage that he advocates does not develop mutual interests. The partners go their respective ways, have their individual interests and engrossments, and the only thing they have in common is eating and sleeping. The feature of companionate marriage that many who do not see eye to eye with the Church find most repugnant is the one that seeks to establish that the female partner is not damaged by the companionship that she has experienced. From the physician's point of view, she may or may not be. It depends. To claim that sex experience per se injures woman is to claim an absurdity. But the strength of tradition is measureless, and there is no better established tradition than that a woman who has sex relations beyond sacramental or civil matrimony is "damaged goods." The companionate advocate will say that she has been married and that her assets as wife and mother have not been depleted by her experience. Her status is the same as that of one widowed by fate or law.

However one looks upon marriage, he must admit that it is an important discipline. If it can be dissolved for the asking, our characters are sure to suf

fer.

Companionate marriage has merit, but it has one tremendous demerit. By separating sex relations and parenthood it razes the strongest pillar of matrimony. Many a man puts up with a wife who has borne him children and many a woman tolerates her spouse because he has been the means by which she has fulfilled her physiological destiny and permitted her the kind of love that surpasses all others.

One has to adjust one's self to life after middle age as well as before. Children are the medium that accomplishes it. The parental urge can be substituted only in youth. Delays are proverbially dangerous; never more so than in parenthood. Youth is selfish. When age brings altruism, it is oftentimes accompanied by incapacity.

being good; men, that women may consent to bear them children.

There is not the smallest likelihood that companionate marriage will become "good form." The tyrant custom or convention rules with great ease in this Our National infirmity is country. spiritual indolence. We have profound aversion to change and the devil's alleged hatred of holy water is mild compared to our hatred of heresy. We have rules of conduct and are determined that our fellows shall hold fast to them. We have standards of morality to which they must conform, otherwise they will be visited by our special variety of dervish, who will punish them in his own special way. We are avid of praise and intolerant of criticism, and there is one thing we cannot stand-growing pains of the soul.

W

HERE is the great-grandson of that American who had a Bible, political liberty, freedom of opportunity, and a squirrel rifle to defend his passionate belief in each of them?

Why, if we are to believe current criticism, he is the fellow who screws the valve cap on the left rear wheel of the goods that are made in Henry Ford's big plant at Dearborn. He is no longer jealous of his suffrage; except as he is roused by a friend who knows a man whose cousin in the State Legislature has indisputable proof that Al Smith's election will bring the Pope, in person, to Washington. He still believes in the Bible. Sure! Especially the story of creation.

"But listen, brother. Don't tell me Jesus Christ looked like that sick-looking fellow we used to have a picture of at home when I was a kid. You can take it from me, he didn't. Say, he was a Booster. He was a real go-getting heman."

I wrong M. Siegfried a little by drawing this vulgar inference from his dignified and penetrating study of American life. He is an economist who can also write intelligibly; and with the logic that is characteristic of his race he gets quickly beyond the things that are manifest to the underlying influences. He is fair. He pays tribute to our efficiency, our prosperity, our amazing capacity for practical matters. He is aware that we are creating a new kind of civilization.

Yet in the exclamation marks that leap up at the end of so many of his observations I seem to see the Gaul, of his own cultural values, smiling iron

sure

1 America Comes of Age. By André Siegfried. Harcourt, Brace & Co.

Show Window. By Elmer Davis. The John Day Company.

Land of the Pilgrim's Pride. By George Jean Nathan. Alfred A. Knopf.

Our Times. Vol. II-America Finding Herself. By Mark Sullivan. Scribner's.

Give Us Time1

By PARKHURST WHITNEY

ically at the figure of an American such as I have described. The title of his book has a malicious implication. So we have come of age, have we? Then the degradation of democracy that troubled Henry Adams has been accomplished. The great adventure ends with mass production enshrined and the ideal of liberty transmuted into the ideal of prosperity.

The descendant of freemen has become a machine tender, and the squirrel rifle has been exchanged for the whip and nightshirt of the Kleagle. He buys Elbert Hubbard's "Scrap Book" for complete information on the cosmos, and enriches the publishers who promise to teach French in twenty-four lessons. In a word, M. Siegfried knows his Sinclair Lewis and his Mencken.

Now, I think that Sinclair Lewis is a not unworthy successor to such prophylactic agents as Cervantes and Rabelais. Mr. Mencken has said forcibly and pungently many things that needed saying; and a younger generation has been encouraged by him to tackle the cant and the stuffed shirts of the day.

But the game of spanking America begins to grow tiresome. It begins to follow a formula.

The Americans are very rich. Rather curious, isn't it, that a people who profess Puritan principles should have so many automobiles and bathrooms? Well, the Puritans happened to settle a rich and virgin country. They didn't know how rich at the time; and they certainly showed their good intentions by landing on the rockiest and least fertile strip of coast-line between the St. Lawrence and the Gulf of Mexico.

The melting-pot. It doesn't melt and harmonize all of the ingredients that compose the American citizenry. There are signs of racial animosity. Hah! Europe, I suppose, is just one big happy family.

There is a Negro problem. That's right.

There is a prohibition question. Yeah?

Mass production. It lowers the cost of production but stultifies the creative instinct of the workman. It is accompanied by increasingly shorter hours and higher wages. American labor is in the rare position of being able to buy all, or nearly all, that American capital can produce. Nevertheless the poor workman! He can never be a craftsman like his French prototype.

Perhaps he doesn't want to be a craftsman; just as it is possible that he doesn't want to be a Frenchman.

Personal liberty isn't what it used to be. No, it isn't. There was a time when a free and independent American, suspecting that his rights were invaded or about to be invaded, could pick up his goods and move a little deeper into the wilderness, where none but the catamounts could dispute his cantankerous notions. But I have heard grandmother's tales of pioneer days, and I am willing to trade a little freedom of action for central heating, electric lights, and a shower-bath.

So it goes.

Have we a culture comparable to that of France? No. Have we a form of government as elastic and as responsive as England? No. Have we a literature equal to that of either country? No. But give us time.

We have been pretty busy these last hundred years, especially the last fifty. A good many things occupied our working days. If you want to know what we have been through open "America Finding Herself," the second volume of Mark Sullivan's history of our times. We had to make the country habitable first. We had to dig mines, clear forests, lay rails, string wires. We had to (Continued on page 509)

TH

Everybody Is Reading

HE books in greatest demand are usually those most discussed. We have arranged to have eight book-shops wire us each week the names of the ten

best

we

selling volumes, which follow. These particular book-shops were chosen because think that they reflect the tastes of the more representative readers. These shops are as follows:

New York-Brentano's.
Boston-Old Corner Book Store.
Rochester-Scrantoms Inc.
Cleveland-Korner & Wood.
St. Louis-Scruggs, Vandevoort
& Barney

Denver-Kendrick Bellamy Co.
Houston-Teolin Pillot Company.
San Francisco-Paul Elder & Co.

the

Fiction

"Jalna," by Mazo de la Roche. Little, Brown & Co. A clannish family in Canada survives potentially disrupting love affairs of several members. If you like a good story, peopled by startling and brilliant caricatures, you will enjoy it. Reviewed November 2. "Kitty," by Warwick Deeping. A. A. Knopf. Reviewed below.

"Adam and Eve: Though He Knew Better," by John Erskine. The Bobbs-Merrill Company. You will find this an entertaining satirical tale dealing with the first companionate and the first Mr. and Mrs. marriages. Reviewed last week.

"Death Comes for the Archbishop," by Willa Cather. A. A. Knopf. This imaginative biography of a French missionary bishop to the Southwest is fine in spiritual concept, rich in beautiful description and moving characterization. Reviewed October 26. "Dusty Answer," by Rosamond Lehmann. Henry Holt & Co. Here you will find a poetic exposition of the feelings and doings of a constantly emotional set of young English people. Reviewed December 7.

Non-Fiction

"Trader Horn," by Alfred Aloysius Horn and Ethelreda Lewis. Simon & Schuster. The romantic story of an ancient adventurer, full of poetry, guileless wisdom, action, information, and color. Reviewed November 16. "Bismarck," by Emil Ludwig. Little, Brown & Co. This splendid biography by a master craftsman is unhesitatingly recommended to any one with a taste for solid reading. Reviewed November 9.

"Our Times: America Finding Herself," by Mark Sullivan. Charles Scribner's' Sons. Reviewed in this issue by Parkhurst Whitney. "Napoleon," by Emil Ludwig. Boni & Liveright. You will find this engrossing biography a fine foot-note to the Napoleonic period. Reviewed November 9.

"Mother India," by Katherine Mayo. Harcourt, Brace & Co. This highly gifted reporter's account of some aspects of Indian society is not calculated to endear us to India, but is providing lively reading to lots of Americans. Reviewed June 22.

W

Kitty

ARWICK DEEPING seems to have slipped into the place once occupied by the author of "If Winter Comes." He is the popular novelist of that very large public which wants in its fiction sentiment of the variety known as wholesome, and which is too discriminating to find the mawkish trash that is offered by most of the sentimental writers readable. "Kitty," his current book, deals with post-war England and the problems, especially the struggles between classes and generations, which distinguish it. The story is simply the account, with elaborations, of the battle between the hero

ine, charming, clever, and "modern" tobacconist de luxe to Mayfair, and the determined old Tory mother of her somewhat flabby but aristocratic husband for the possession of that husband. The story has an agreeable ending. Deeping's people live. He knows what they are likely to think, say, and do. It is in the naturalness of his characterizations that his success lies. The actual developments of the plot are somewhat tortuous and strain the probabilities considerably. But the people remain knowable and likable. To a reviewer who does not find the book interesting Deeping's easy and assured manner of writing and his nice sense of humor are its pleasantest features. Its great appeal, as in the case of Deeping's other recent successes, must be to those who like their

THE OUTLOOK RECOMMENDS TEACHERS' AGENCY

reliable and not eccentric pattern, who are not concerned with literary values, and and here many of us raise our right hands who are slightly fed up with the school of writing which, brilliantly opened here by Sherwood Anderson, has become the exercising ground for so many tiresome little talents.

Have You Seen These ?

More Wild West

JINGLEBOB. By Philip Ashton Rollins.

Charles Scribner's Sons.

Cowboys again; this time for boys. It is extraordinary the fascination this subject has for some people. There is, for example, a very famous French illustrator-so famous that it is difficult to enter a Fifth Avenue bus without seeing examples of his work-who speaks scarcely a word of English and who has never been to America. He owns, and wears upon the least provocation, a complete Western outfit, flamboyant enough to make Tom Mix bite his nails, and to accompany this he has taught himself to spin a rope as well as Fred Stone. He is a Breton and a watercolorist of great delicacy, but we are solemnly assured that the man is an authority on cowboys and the West, and so, indeed, is the author of this book.

"Jinglebob" is the story of two boys who spend a summer vacation on their uncle's ranch in Montana, taking part in a drive of three thousand head of cattle from Kansas to Montana on the way. It is all true-which should endear it to

70 Fifth Avenue, New York Recommends teachers to colleges, public and private schools. EXPERT SERVICE

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invariably a safe rule to follow. For over a half century this House has continuously and successfully served investors and points with pride to its record of never a day's delay in over 54 years in the payment of principal and interest on any security it has offered. This is why Smith Investments have a World-wide reputation for safety. Ask for our current list of offerings and for Booklet "6-59" giving the History of this House.

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The Thousandfold
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lawless soldier with a light-o'-love in every port, a cattle keeper on shipboard, an engineer amidst his oily engines, are put before us in Kipling's stories and poemssays the editor of The Warner Library-so that we recognize them as lovable fellowcreatures responsive to the thousandfold thrill of life.

An electric cable, a steam-engine, a banjo, or a mess-room toast offer occasion for song; and lo! they are converted by the alchemy of the imagination until they become a type and an illumination of the red-blooded life of mankind. The ability to achieve this is a crowning characteristic and merit of Rudyard Kipling's work.

Had Kipling stopped with his rollicking ballads of the barrack-100m he would have won his place in the hall of famous poets, but he went further and higher as the uncrowned laureate of the English-speaking people.

Kipling

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The publication of this authorized edition of Kipling's works in a new form and at a new low price within the reach of every book lover and student, is a notable event in the history of book-making.

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most boy's immediately. We are assured in the preface that Jinglebob, the trail boss and hero, is a real person, and so was Jackson, the horse thief; that the cattle drive was real, and occurred in the summer of 1880; and there is little attempt to deny that Bill King, the younger of the two Eastern boys, is Philip Ashton Rollins himself. A boy who reads this book will know what a trail drive was really like, and a roundup, and a stampede, and a Montana blizzard; he will learn about remudas, and conchos, tally sticks, and a great many other fascinating things. But he will probably be the least bit disappointed, for this book, being the true story of real cowboys on a real ranch, is not particularly bloody. It seems to lack gun-play and the sheriff's beautiful daughter.

Mr. Rollins was fortunate in seeing the cattle ranges at the height of their greatness, when the cowboys and the longhorns should have been at their wildest and woolliest. Still, we get an impression of bad smells and bad food; work, endless back-breaking work, in an ugly treeless country, principally dust and alkali; but there is, there must be, a fascination to it that is hard to resist and impossible to forget. Of course, there are few old trail drivers who belong to as many New York clubs as the Social Register credits Mr. Rollins, and it is always possible that these things are the least bit more romantic from the leather seat of a Union Club armchair than from the leather seat of a Mexican saddle. Be that as it may, "Jinglebob" is a good book for your boy; but let him read "The Cowboy," Mr. Rollins's other book, first, if he hasn't already done so. FRANCIS DE N. SCHROEDER.

Three American Novels

are uniformly bound in green fabrikoid, and beautifully printed on good paper and have a very clear type page.

Send No Money Now Just send the coupon by early mail and receive your set without a penny of cost to you and without obligation of any kind. Spend five days under Kipling's magic spell. Then make your own decision. Act now, lest you forget and so miss this really great opportunity.

Ornitz (Boni & Liveright), is a mediæval mystery play as modernized and produced by the contemporary central European Jewish theatrical group. On a stage set in the expressionistic fashion, a press of characters surges about a central figure-behold this dreamer-personifications, after the

manner of the mysteries, of the cunningly varied bludgeonings which life, always the enemy of dreamers, administers. The color of the scene is blinding. The plot of the play, vague and chaotic, sometimes lost in the tumult of shouting mobs, sometimes emerging in soliloquy and dialogue.

The dreamer is Dan Matthews, Maine backwoods mystic, product of Puritan dipsomaniac and Celtic Bible-worshiping

parentage and of monistic education. In his youth he meets at once the lusts of the flesh and of the spirit. A tent-show medicine man's wife shows him the way of love and at the same time inspires him to that renunciation of her whereby he learns the way of salvation. He becomes a Holy Man, and his career carries him to the New York of the nineties. There in that period of fantastic faith in oncoming millenniums, political corruption, scholastic sympathies, deification of the masses, he moves from one idealistic enterprise-destroyed by the misunderstanding, opportunism, and cynicism of the world-to another, until he finds his martyrdom, his final gift to Catholicism, at the hands of white-hooded fanaticism in the Maine woods where his life began.

In the New York scenes, where Irish and Jews, ward-heelers, street-corner philosophers, proprietors of dubious hygiene magazines, opium smokers, Irish revolutionists, jostle one another for the center of the stage, and occupy it for a few moments, meeting, speaking, going their way, the author is at his best. His characterizations are broad, his characters picturesque, but lacking in differen tiating detail. They are actors guided by one hand. Their speeches spring

from one brain. But the effect is telling. And the outrages perpetrated by the author upon the English language, although they sometimes call forth the protest that he should be working in a more brutal medium, are, after all, a part of his accomplishment. He has committed a fierce and successful assault upon the emotions of his readers, has written distinguished spiritual melodrama.

I

N "The Place Called Dagon," by Herbert Gorman (the George H. Doran Company), we enter a place of mystery and terror.

Leave the world behind you when you enter it. The author has made one of his own, and has put into it things and people. He has conjured up a phantas magoria, and so strong is the spell that his world does not vanish when the last page of the book is turned.

The devil worshipers of old Salem exiled or fleeing from persecution, have carried with them the relics of their faith, the charred bones of burned witches. Across the hills, they have borne them to a strangled valley, and there have buried them in a place called Dagon. Communities have sprung from these strange seekers for religious liberty and from the children of escaped con victs settled near by. Stoutly, the her tage is dismissed, half forgotten. The