And turning from the ovens' glare,
He looked into her dreaming face,
And saw green, sunlit woodlands there,
With waters flashing in between
Low-drooping boughs of Summer green.

And, as he looked, still in a dream

She murmured: Michael would, she knew.
Though she'd been foolish . . . he was true,
As true as steel and fond of her . . .
And then she sat with eyes agleam
In dreaming silence, till the stir
Of cold dawn shivered through the air:
When, twisting up her tumbled hair,
She rose; and said she must be gone.
Though she'd still far to go, the day
Would see her well upon her way
And she had best be jogging on,

While she'd the strength . . . and so, Good-bye.

And as, beneath the paling sky,

He trudged again the cinder-track

That stretched before him, dead and black,

He muttered: "It's a chance the light

Has found me living still . . . and she

She, too. and Michael . . . and through me!

God knows whom I may wake to-night."

I SING THE BATTLE

HARRY KEMP

I

SING the song of the great clean guns that belch forth death at will.

Ah, but the wailing mothers, the lifeless forms and still!"

I sing the song of the billowing flags, the bugles that cry before. Ah, but the skeletons flapping rags, the lips that speak no more!"

I sing the clash of bayonets, of sabres that flash and cleave. "And wilt thou sing the maimed ones, too, that go with pinnedup sleeve?"

I sing acclaimèd generals that bring the victory home.
"Ah, but the broken bodies that drip like honey-comb!"

I sing of hosts triumphant, long ranks of marching men. And wilt thou sing the shadowy hosts that never march again?"

E

CONSERVATISM AND REFORM

MOWRY SABEN

VERY man is both a Conservative and a Radical. There

is no one who wishes to destroy everything that is; there

is no one who desires to retain all things that are. The Conservative is simply a person who is, upon the whole, satisfied with present conditions; the Radical is simply a person who is very largely dissatisfied with them, and desirous of change. There are persons who reveal a large mixture of Radical and Conservative elements; Conservative in politics, it may be, and Radical in their religious views, or vice versa; there are others who are generally Radical, or generally Conservative, but who hold fast to some Radical idea, or to some Conservative one.

The average individual is not a logician; he is not logical in his usual ways of thinking. A majority of men could give no very lucid reason why they hold this article or that of the creeds. which they profess. They have acquired their ideas from their parents, or their teachers, or the prevailing sentiment of their respective communities. The Marxians insist that one is governed by his material self-interests, but experience reveals that this is less true than might be supposed. There are times when self-interest is almost a negligible quantity. A person intoxicated with an idea will cast every shred of self-interest to the winds, and surrender himself, a willing martyr, to a cause which he is barely able to understand, or is even quite unable to comprehend. Persons are loyal to a church whose theological tenets have never penetrated their understandings, to kings whom they have never seen, and of whom they know nothing, to political leaders who are to them but little more than gilded names. There is much that is sublime, much that is humiliating, in this loyalty of men. But it reveals that feeling, rather than thought, turns the wheels of human life, although the feeling had its source in a thought of some human soul.

The human race has never progressed spontaneously, and as a unit; only the individual succeeds in raising himself above himself. The masses are like the ocean, which is at rest until the

wind plays over its surface, or the moon exerts her gravitating power. In spite of all that is credited to evolution, there is not, so far as one can see, any progress on the part of the race, save as the race comes under the influence of a master-mind, a genius, a hero, who lifts it to his own level by dint of some mystery, which will never find an explanation outside of metaphysics. The Johannine Christ says: "If I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto me "; and all progress recorded by history has consisted in following a leader, who was lifted up by the power of an idea, that germinated, apparently spontaneously, in his mind. No doubt the seeds of progress lie within the hearts and minds of all individuals, but they will not germinate spontaneously in the majority; some human light and warmth must penetrate to them before that miracle will be witnessed. Democracy itself is a plant whose seeds matured first in aristocratic hearts.

Now the majority of human beings, be it remembered, are always fairly well satisfied with things as they are. Men may try to improve their personal condition a little here, or a little there, but most of them bear no ill-will toward the society into which they were born, no matter how despitefully this society may have used them. The African torn from his sunny home, and brought to America to serve in bondage, may have nourished for a time some slight spirit of rebellion, but his sons and daughters did not. On the contrary, these young blacks were very well contented with the conditions of servile toil which inured to the economic benefit of their masters and mistresses, and it is certain that the owners were no more firmly convinced that slavery was a divine institution than were the slaves themselves. The horror of slavery was born in the souls of men like Garrison and Phillips, not in the souls of those to whom slavery was the daily reality of realities. A few superior negroes, like Frederick Douglass, did feel the horror of it, but the impulse to freedom on their part was usually born out of abnormal conditions. The Frederick Douglasses of slavery were certainly few in number, comparatively speaking; for when freedom was already in sight, a majority of the slaves still clung with pathetic loyalty to their masters and mistresses.

Socialists, and many who are not Socialists, see in the average man of our time what they call a wage-slave," and, in truth, a "wage-slave" is all that the average man can rightfully be called. For the average man does not own himself; he is owned by another, or by a corporation. Nevertheless, the wage-slave is no more conscious of the degradation of his condition than the African slave was. He is chained and fettered, but he does not feel the chains and fetters galling to his limbs. His master does not need, as a rule, to put a padlock upon his lips; he is as dumb as a sheep before the shearer. The average man takes it for granted that he was born into the world to be a hireling; to hew wood and draw water, to labor in shop, in factory and field, which others own, and to receive a scanty pittance in return for his toil from those who grow rich out of the profits. And as the horror of African slavery was born, not in the souls of the slaves themselves, but in the souls of free men and women, so the horror of wage-slavery was born, not in the souls of the wage-slaves, but in the souls of men who were born outside of the class of wage-slaves, or, at least, succeeded in rising out of it. The intellectuals are the great anti-wage-slave propagandists of to-day. Most of our ablest littérateurs are either Socialists, or Anarchists, outright, or they sympathize with those who are. These men, one might suppose, should be reasonably well satisfied with things as they are, but they are not satisfied. And if Capitalism ever receives its death-blow, the impetus will come from persons who have as good reason to be satisfied with present conditions as the bitterest enemies of Socialism have. What made William Morris a Socialist? or John Ruskin? or Robert Owen? or Oscar Wilde? or William Dean Howells? What made Elisée Reclus, the world's greatest geographer, an Anarchist? or Prince Kropotkin? or Henrik Ibsen? or Count Tolstoy? These men were successful enough. What produced in them their feeling of discontent, and sympathy for the workers?

To ask these questions is easy; to answer them is more difficult; nay, in the last analysis, impossible, if we seek an answer that shall satisfy the Rationalist. Any one could understand a rebellion of the slaves and the down-trodden; any one could