thing for a politician to tamper with is the saloon vote," which has suddenly won over to State prohibition legislatures full of men who never before gave any help to the temperance cause. And it is the dislike of such methods, however moral the cause, which must inspire in thoughtful, unexcited minds a grave distrust of the permanence of the good results of the movement. The depth and sincerity of the present feeling against the saloon are beyond question. There is in it a moral and religious fervor which reminds one of the way the Piagnoni-the white-ribboners of Savonarola's time in Florence-drove vice and even vanity out of the city by the Arno; of the Puritan revolution in England; of countless lesser social purifications. But one cannot recall the achievement of the Piagnoni, as George Eliot has portrayed it in "Romola," without recalling also the reaction that followed-Dolfo Spini and his brutal Compagnacci, Savonarola in the flames, the Medici returned. One cannot think of Puritan England without remembering also the England of the Restoration the profligate King and brazen court, the playhouses, which had been closed to Shakspere, reopened to the indecencies of Wycherley and Etherege, the shameful tribute to France, the persecuted Milton. One is moved to question whether any moral cause is ever permanently advanced otherwise than by fair appeals to a deliberate public opinion and an uninflamed public conscience. But to admit that reactions always follow violent gains, that a penalty is always paid for bigotry and intemperate zeal is not this merely to admit that moral progress is wave-like? As civilization advances, the reactions may well be less and less in proportion to the gains. Moreover, unless long study of Southern history has utterly misled me, it has always been a mistake to infer fickleness, instability of purpose, from the Southern people's almost Latin responsiveness to emotional appeals. On the contrary, they have often displayed an extraordinary steadfastness in courses hastily entered upon. No doubt it is too much to expect that prohibition will hold all the ground it has won and may yet win in the South, or that prohibition laws will not, there as elsewhere, often fail of enforcement. But the saloon can never be again in the South what it has been in the past. That the politicians will ever again serve it as they once did is not believable. They have been too thoroughly, too ludicrously frightened. One may even hope that in the long run the open saloon is bound to go entirely; that with the opening up of the South to all kinds of educating and softening and refining influences, the indefensible drinking customs of most Southerners-as of most Americans, indeed-will gradually be changed; and that thus, without any countervailing sacrifice of moral independence or personal liberty, drunkenness will grow enough to be well-nigh negligible. rare But That is a great deal to hope. there is one feature of this temperance movement peculiarly conducive to hopefulness for Southern civilization. I cannot better indicate what that feature is than by pointing out that I have hardly mentioned the negro at all. It is quite probable that his presence in the South has influenced some white voters. It has doubtless been remembered that in race riots whisky usually plays a part. But this argument has not in fact been generally employed. On the temperance question, no race line has been drawn. Whites and blacks have divided on it with little or no reference to its bearing on their racial relations. For once, it would seem as if the South had actually been able to put aside the race issue altogether. One is tempted to declare that, if it can do that, it can do anything. THE WESTERN SPIRIT OF RESTLESSNESS BY RAY STANNARD BAKER most fascinating charac ONE of the most, fa feast from a pic- odor of his sage-brush fire. turesque point of view, is the Floater. Somehow he always affords unbounded satisfaction to the Eastern visitor, for he is one of the Western types the stranger fully expects to see. His picture was in the old school geography. I can see him now perched in front of his doming white-topped wagon, flourishing his long snake whip. His six-horse team was creeping across what seemed an endless, desolate plain toward faint and distant mountains. A herd of buffalo and an Indian, if I am not mistaken, were charging across the corner of the picture. And the title, "Westward Ho!" carried its own thrill of adventure. But the buffalo are gone now, and most of the Indians have followed them; the driver and his six-horse team have crossed at last the distant mountains. A hundred years he has been on his way westward, always toward the setting sun, always hopeful, even though hungry-and you will find him to-day beyond the mountains, the same stoop in his shoulders, and the same creaky axles. The same dusty children peer from the puckered canvas hole at the wagon-back. Towns have sprung up by magic, valleys once desert have grown green with fields, railroads have everywhere penetrated the land; the Floater might now, if he chose, make his destination in a week, but somehow he prefers the long, dry months of the gipsytrail. In parts of the Northwest to-day you will hear him called a Sage-Brusher, sometimes a Sage-Brush tourist. For at night he camps anywhere at the side of the road where water can be obtained, hobbles his horses, and turns them out on the hills, and later, if you pass that way, you will smell the never-to-be-forgotten He and his family presently take on the likeness of the desert-all gray like the sage and the sand, and lean and silent. One sees them everywhere along the trails in Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, eastern Washington, and Oregon, the men dusty, slow-moving, dried out, the women limp-skirted, gray-hued, weary, and always accompanied by an extraordinary number of children with sun-yellowed hair, bare red legs, and the merest excuse for clothing. Sometimes they camp for weeks in the outskirts of a desert town, sometimes for months and even years, living always in their tents or wagons, but always expecting to move on again. Talk with them, and you will find that in most cases they have been on the road for years. They tell you that they are emigrants; but rarely have they any definite objective point. It is "over there," generally west. For they are the genuine Floaters, a type now peculiar to the West, and very different from the business-like farmer-emigrant whom you sometimes see-a smug Mormon, perhaps, with a train of wagons, a blood bull, and several cows, and a score of horses trekking north or east from the parent Utah to settle new valleys for the glory of the Faith. But the real emigrant, nowadays, usually takes the railroad, while the Floater remains true to the open road. I recall one family in particular camped in the outskirts of a desert town in Idaho. I found the "old man" sprawling languidly in front of the home tent—a large double tent, much weather-worn. From inside came the pounding noises of a loom; a gray, worked-out, indescribably limp-looking woman was weaving rag carpet. Near the tent door a girl some sixteen years old was ironing a shirtwaist and chewing gum vigorously; she was going to a dance, she said. Three or four children were playing in the covered wagon which stood near at hand. The man told of his ill luck with singular placidity, as though he were talking of some one else. He had been "raised" in Illinois, and migrated to Kansas, where he had been "dried out," as he said; then to South Dakota, where he had succumbed to a mortgage; then to Wyoming, where he had "rheumatiz"; and now he was in Idaho, getting old. Somewhere on the road he had picked up a wife, who, by good fortune, could weave rag carpet; and here he was with five children, and the eldest going to dances! I wish I could convey the inimitable resignation and philosophy with which he drawled out his story, and the joy which he showed when a neighbor appeared who could lend him a "chaw." "Paw always wants to be movin'," explained the gum-chewing girl; "he 's terrible fond of the road." "We 're goin' to take up land some'ers out in the Palouse country," said the wife. "I s'pose most everything good '11 be gone when we get there," volunteered the man. "I s'pose," responded the wife. Several Floaters whom I met had already reached the far West, and were traveling back again, strangely undisheartened in not finding what they sought, and sure that their fortune lay somewhere at the end of the road- a pot of fairy gold. For the West has been a seductive beckoner to the dreamer and the idealist. Hard realities at home, toil for low wages, long hours, no future: over there opportunity lies golden, all the stream bottoms are rich with treasure, all the land is fertile and free, in every town there is a chance of quick wealth. And so they fly to escape realities, and find only rougher, harder realities, a more strenuous struggle. To-morrow, they say, perhaps we shall be better off; a few miles more and we shall find the treasure. So they keep to the road, and one day death overtakes them. On a bare, sandy knoll once in Arizona I saw two wooden headboards surrounded by a rude board fence. They bore the names of two men, with the simple inscription: DIED ON THE TRAIL The Sage-Brusher is the extreme manifestation of the Western spirit of restlessness, the love of moving about, the conviction that more money is to be made more easily somewhere else. For years, indeed, the West, with its opening opportunities, has been the lodestone for the restless spirits of the entire country. The Kansas and Nebraska boom of the eighties, which crowded the semi-arid lands of those States with hopeful settlers and built up mushroom towns soon to succumb to a few disastrous crop failures, was one of the great incentives to far Western immigration. A large proportion of the settlers in many irrigated valleys have their memories of Kansas failures, rainless summers, and consuming mortgages, and weaklings often become Floaters. The prospector of the mountains and the cow-boy of the plains are each a sort of Bedouin, with no permanent abidingplace, here to-day, there to-morrow,usually with a long story of experiences in different places- going to Alaska and coming back, rushing to new miningcamps, trying new ranches, but always moving. Indeed, the laboring class of the West, as a whole, is as unstable as water, with the very microbe of travel in its blood. I talked with a carpenter in Tacoma, a man of family, too, who had worked in every important city on the Pacific Coast, and was then planning to go to Butte City, where he had heard that wages were specially high. The blanket-roll is the sign of the Western workman. In the East the employer, be he farmer or logger, expects to furnish bedclothes for his hired men; but the typical Western worker carries his bed on his back. Where he drops his blanket-roll, there is his home. This unstability of population, of course, is a passing phase incident to the new life. In the farming communities, especially, the settlers have struck their roots deep in the soil, have come to make permanent homes. And sometimes one wonders, on stopping at the little, lonely back-country ranches, planted in the wilderness, miles from railroad or town, how the women especially are contented to remain; for here are all the hardships and trials of real pioneering, and it requires grit and determination to meet them. I recall one woman I met in a little gravel-roof log-house in the dry hills of Idaho, eighty miles from the railroad. She had a singularly attractive face, and her home, though poor, was as neat as a pin. She probably did not see a visitor once a week, and during the day, while the men were at work, she was entirely alone except for her two small children. I asked her if she did not grow lonely. "Oh, no," she replied; "there are the Peterses over there". a speck on the sage-covered hills-"and the Warrens over there," and she shaded her eyes, and looked off across the sun-blinding plain to another speck on the horizon"and nearly every day some team passes on the way to the Basin." The nearest school was twenty-six miles away, so she had to teach her own children; the nearest doctor was eighty miles. She told me with a catch in her voice how one of her children, a little girl, had been down with scarlet fever the winter before. The snow lay deep on the hills, so that even the mail-carrier, who usually came through twice a week, could not break a road. Her husband, however, saddled his horse and started, leaving her alone with the child. He was gone four days, and when he came back, half-dead with fatigue, having walked the last twenty-five miles, for his horse was utterly worn out, he brought only the word that the doctor would not come. And so they watched at the baby's bed until the little thing was out of danger. It is difficult for people in an old, settled country to realize what pioneering in the West, even to-day, really means. For though the country is rapidly settling up, the distances are enormous, the roads often rough, and communication with the outside world is uncertain. Some of the counties of the Northwest are as large as the smaller Eastern States. From a place where I once stopped in Wyoming it required five days' hard traveling to reach the county-seat, a distance, by the only road, of over one hundred and fifty miles. I was told of a sheriff in Harney County, Oregon, who traveled one hundred and seventy miles to summon juror. One can imagine the cost of litigation under such conditions, and the temptation to resort to the easy and speedy court of the six-shooter. a But it is by these hardships of the trail and of the pioneer home that the West is coming to greatness and power. The Floater is one of the most evident signs, himself somewhat a failure, of the invading army of civilization. He is the spume which the inundating wave of humanity throws up; the wave itself will soon lie deep and lasting over all the West. EMPLOYMENT FOR THE UNEMPLOYED BY EDMOND KELLY JEW YORK contributes more to private charity than any other city in the Union. Its sympathy for distress, therefore, cannot be questioned. And yet it has allowed the normal 30,000 unemployables, increased by an abnormal 200,000 unemployed, to suffer and to burden. the community all the winter without virtually doing anything by way of exceptional relief. Such a condition of things is not due to inhumanity, but to two currents of opinion that are equally false: one that wants to do too much for the unemployed, and the other that does not want to do anything at all for them. The last of these two theories is based upon the undoubted danger lest by offering work in New York, the metropolis should become at once the Mecca of every tramp and jail-bird in the country. Those who know history will bolster this argument against giving work to the unemployed by reference to the Ateliers Nationaux of 1848, or, as they have been erroneously called, "Louis Blanc Workshops." It may be well, therefore, at once to remove this lion from the path. THE SO-CALLED LOUIS BLANC WORKSHOPS IT was an unknown and an unnamed unemployed who was the author of the words which are inseparably connected in the mind of every Frenchman with the revolution of 1848. Clothed in rags, he stopped a delegate to the conference that was being held at the Luxembourg on the organization of labor, and asked what was being done there. The delegate entered upon a long explanation, but the unemployed stopped him, and said: "Say to your provisional government that we have three months more of misery to put at the disposal of the republic if it will only do something for us." Such was the confidence of the French citizen in his young republic at that time! The provisional government of 1848 did try to do something for them; but the unwisdom of its efforts not only contributed to restore a reactionary government at that time, but has been quoted as a reason for not doing anything for them ever since. No committee has met this winter to discuss the subject, but the Ateliers Nationaux have been cited as a reason why relief for unemployment was impossible. The idea entertained by some extreme Socialists that the remedy for every evil is to put it at once in the hands of the government, is just as false as the objection that because the government of 1848 was guilty of folly in its treatment of this question, therefore no government must ever again be intrusted with the task. The true story of the Ateliers Nationaux has often been told, and the errors that surrounded them dispersed. Nevertheless, these errors are regularly resurrected and marshaled out every time the question of unemployment is forced upon us. It seems impossible to slay error in political philosophy. As in the days of Macbeth: |