of laws and of lawmakers. It is said in monarchies that the king is the fountain of honor; but the American king has abdicated, so we have no fountain of honor. If asked to put a finger upon the precise spot of American defect and political disease, the answer would be the simple fact that in the cities there are no places of neighborhood gathering and discussion. Every polling district should have a free one under charge of the commissioners of elections. There, upon every subject of public interest, the citizens could easily assemble and inform one another and make known their will. The party caucus should be managed by the officers of the law, as the primary now is, and all citizens should be compelled to go there and cast a ballot under penalty of disfranchisement, or worse.

But this voluntary government won't do, any more than would a voluntary payment of taxes or jury and military duty or volunteer fire department. The power and safety of a government are measured only by its conscription. Draft a man for military service and place him upon the line, then he will shoot, if only to prevent being shot. If he be compelled to go to a caucus he will vote for whatever little conscience is in him, and then between the two parties we shall get the voice of the whole people, which is always right.

"When peopie undertake to do their own kingship they enter upon responsibilities as well as privileges."-James Russell Lowell.

Taking all the literary tomes of reformers, they do not come up to this natural system of a great people-the caucus, primary and convention. Direct nominations might do as an entering wedge-point to break the machines, but they would not last; they might at first show whether nominations should be made by dollars or votes, but they would finally lead to personal ambition, dark-lantern methods and back "deals" with the machine, and then we would return to the boss. They would be only voluntary and

sporadic and not bring out all the people. They are the first, but not final, step which would be in a universal draft under the authority of law. The system is all right, but the people will not adopt it, while the bosses and their followers line up like the regular army and are as effective against the mob. The political apathy of our people amounts to a stupefaction. Borough President Bird S. Coler said at a recent notable gathering, "The politicians have chained the people down long enough." So did the Lilliputs tie down Gulliver with threads. The people are like a giant booby lying upon his back and crying under the whips of street urchins. The politicians have neither divine legitimacy, constitutional authority nor hypnotic power. They rule only through the caucus, which is open to everybody. Until the people do this, politicians will rule, legislatures will be corrupt, money will dominate the national senate, taxes will be high and local governments crude. But in politics as in other spheres the natural instinct replies, that what is everybody's business is nobody's business. When a good man is asked to go to a caucus, he asks, "What is there in it for me?" If an honest reformer spends his money, time and energy he is asked what he is after. Even reformers are envious of one another and carefully patent their ideas. Come now, Messrs. Cutting and Parkhurst and Abbott and Schurman and Peters and Slicer and Deming and Quincy Adams, etc., go to your home caucus and try your hand or shut up. This is the meaning and corollary of your boasted popular government. Not until the whole community can be seized with a religious revival will it be seized with a universal sense of civic duty, or until some great calamity shall penetrate their civic conscience, now besodden with luxury.

Then, "I will laugh at your calamity and mock when your fear cometh."

Down to this time the American elec

toral system has been only voluntary. All other public functions are compulsory. We must begin back to constitutional bottom. In every polling district must be a political temple, free to all. A leading reformer said, “I own up, I will not build a hall; anyway, there is none in my neighborhood; neither will I go to war if I am certain of being killed, although I am willing to take chances. When I want to go to a convention, or want an office, I will get a few fellows in a back-bar and they will do the work. I had them once in my parlor and next morning found five tobacco cuds under the sofas." It is this first caucus before the caucus where the fate of politics is now made. There the "heelers" augment their bank account and say, "The devil take the hindmost." This has bred and organized bureaucracy with sealed books and technique that the public cannot handle. So the politicians rule us as an audacious oligarchy instead of a democracy. But the ruffled and slippered reform patriots will go on decade after decade buzzing and fanning the public with their protests and theories while the politicians go to the caucus and win.

To come to the concrete, Stop writing and howling, oh patriots, and go either to your present home-caucus or get the legislature to erect a new compulsory caucus system and control it, throwing it open to all and counting every ballot. Such caucuses would magically solve all problems and bring about all re

forms, like a vernal sun over a winterlocked land or like the Alpheus through the Augean stables, for the people, not hoping for bribes, honors or emoluments, would choose disinterestedly and the office would seek the man. But our government is now upon the sands of volition and not founded upon the rock of law and responsibility. We have capitols and court houses, but no forums to uphold them. They are but idle play or experiment and not upon direct authority. The whole people must get together or there will be anarchy. Mr. Carnegie might build a caucus house to every three thousand population, instead of libraries that will never reach a tithe. Then this land would become a political paradise and "Democracy triumphant." The people must assemble voluntarily or be compelled to. "Uneasy rests the head that wears a crown." Look to your crown, O American sovereign. Our glory has come less from our political virtue than from our acres. By and by there will be no more acres; then the deluge.

In this proposition of an official caucus there is neither innovation nor complexity; it would bind only what the people are already familiar with. It is an old tried system which is open and aboveboard, that cannot be improved upon, and the only way to get a nomination and a majority government, wherein only lies the strength of a republic.

M

OTHER GOOSE rhymes live for more reasons than one. The fables of Aesop owe their immortality to the kernels of true sayings they contain, rather than to their entertaining quality or their often flippant dress. And so it is with the nursery rhymes. Their jingle attracts the ear of childhood. Memory of their pleasing recalls the mature attention. To the grownup, browsing among the once treasured rhymes, comes the aptness, the significance of the hitherto apparently meaningless jingles, and it comes in the guise of a revelation. The rhymes have much in common with the sort of hardheaded observations upon human life usually classified as proverbial philosophy. A few examples will illustrate the force of this similarity.

Many realize that clothes do not make the man. One law for the rich and the poor alike is a vote-getting platform. The man who steals a loaf of bread and the man who uses trust funds to obtain personal control of a railroad in an open stock market have a mutual basis of fellowship, even though they do not know it. The disinterested detect the resemblance easily. Physical conditions do not alter moral states of being. Mother Goose expressed it in her own way:

"Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark,
The beggars have come to town;
Some in rags and some in tags,
And some in velvet gowns.'

**

Some men rise above the level of their abilities or their deserts. If they do not die young, they ultimately lose

their balance, and the law of gravitation completes the exhibit. Simian ancestors are at home in trees, but the branches of those trees are an unsafe depository for the cradle of a human.

"Hush-a-bye baby upon the treetop, When the wind blows the cradle will rock;

When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,

And down will come cradle, baby and all."

Samuel Christian Friedrich Hahnemann founded homoeopathy upon his doctrine that the cure for a disease is the very drug that would in a healthy person produce the symptoms of such disease-the "similia similibus curantur" of Paracelsus. Mother Goose had her own version of the principles of Paracelsus and Hahnemann. Witness:

"There was a man in our town,
And he was wondrous wise;
He jumped into a bramble bush
And scratched out both his eyes.

"And when he saw his eyes were out,
With all his might and main
He jumped into another bush
And scratched them in again."

A man, who goes up to the city from the modest town of his residence and dines at the most select restaurant of world-wide reputation, returns to his admiring and, mayhap, jealous neighbors with the air of one who has fared on canvasback and burgundy. Careful inquiry might entrap him into the confession that in the famous restaurant he only knew how to order beefsteak, and so had dined on what he might have had at home. Why did he go to London?

"Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been?

I've been to London to see the queen. Pussy cat, pussy cat, what did you there? I frightened a mouse under a chair."

* ** *

Whether it was Grover Cleveland or Thomas Jefferson or some other and more obscure person who first enunciated the doctrine that "honesty is the best policy" is not beyond controversy. But merchants know the value of a reputation for reliability. Upon that quality rests the success of the Chinese in many trades in many lands. Reliable houses, known to be such, are often able to weather commercial squalls because of their manner of dealing.

"There was an old woman who lived under a hill,

And if she's not gone she lives there still. Baked apples she sold and cranberry pies,

And she's the old woman who never told lies."

Carlyle introduced his essay on "Boswell's Life of Johnson" with the following paragraph:

"Aesop's fly, sitting on the axle of the chariot, has been much laughed at for exclaiming: What a dust I do raise!' Yet which of us, in his way, has not sometimes been guilty of the like? Nay, so foolish are men, they often, standing at ease and as spectators on the highway, will volunteer to exclaim of the fly (not being tempted to it, as he was) exactly to the same purport: 'What a dust thou dost raise!' Smallest of mortals, when mounted aloft by circumstances, come to seem great; smallest of phenomena connected with them are treated as important, and must be sedulously scanned and commented upon with loud emphasis."

Mother Goose was more concise:

"Little Jack Horner sat in a corner Eating a Christmas pie.

He put in his thumb and pulled out a plum,

And said, 'Oh! What a big boy am I!' "'

* 串 *

Most men are loyal to their employ

ment, even though it may exhaust their vital energy in their best years for the sake of sometimes scarce a livelihood. Demos loves his first tyrant, idolizes him. The negro slaves of the South furnished many examples of personal devotion to the masters, whose very ownership of them was their degradation. Gladiators were proud to please the Roman thousands who were ready to make their death an incident of a holiday. So did Mother Goose recite how the blackbirds sang for the king, whose feast they were to be:

"Sing a song of sixpence, a bag full of rye,

Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.

When the pie was opened the birds began to sing,

And wasn't this a dainty dish to set before the king!"

*

An easy way to deal with the difficulties of life is to evade them, but when did that method win respect for its devotee?

"There was an old woman who lived in a

shoe,

She had so many children she didn't know what to do.

She gave them some broth without any bread,

She whipped them all soundly, and put them to bed."

It is easily demonstrable that in algebra the product of the extremes is equal to the product of the means. But the truths of algebra are not always catholic. Grant that proverbs are to men as nursery rhymes are to children. It does not follow that the influence of nursery rhymes upon men argues in children a taste for proverbs. A single appeal is that of proverbs and it is an appeal to the intelligence of the mature. Nursery rhymes of the living sort have often a double appeal-a superficial pleasure for the juvenile and an underlying significance for the adult who is patient in reflection. It might be urged that Mother Goose was one of the earlier transcendentalists.