in a car, but in America it is a frequent sight. Of course in Russia, in the country, an automobile is still a rarity. I passed last summer in a populous part of the Urals and did not see a single car. I did not even see an ordinary bicycle. The farther west you go the more you find the inventions of the day taken advantage of. It is an important phenomenon in America; it shows that there is a readiness to adopt and utilise any new thing right off, directly it is discovered.

This readiness, however, results in a lack of seriousness. Inexpert driving is no crime; accidents are nothing to weep over; badly constructed cars are driven along loose springy roads with blood-curdling speed and recklessness. The pedestrian is vexed to see a car come towards him, leaping, bounding, dodging, dribbling, like some tricky centre-forward in a game of football. The nervous pedestrian has to climb trees or walls upon occasion to be sure he won't be killed. And then the cars themselves go frequently into ditches, or overturn and take fire. The car has become a toy, but it's dangerous for the children to play with.

Then the dust! Carlyle said there was nothing but Justice in this world, and he used the law of gravity as his metaphor, but he didn't consider the wind alas, that the dust does not fly in front of the car and get into the motorist's eyes, but only drifts away over the poor tramp who never did him any harm.

The only horse vehicle I remarked on the road was the buggy, a gig with disproportionately large wheels, the direct descendant of the home-made cart. The buggy is still popular.

"Where've you been?" asks one American of another. "Oh, just buggying around," he replies.

But the buggy is staid and conventional. It belongs to the old censorious religious America. It is supremely the vehicle of the consciously virtuous. It is also a specially rural vehicle. I think those who ride in buggies despise motorists from the bottom of their hearts; they think them vulgar townspeople, and consider motoring a form of trespass. But the automobilists are not prevented, and they bear no rancour. They haven't time to consider the countryThe man in the buggy belongs to the past. In the future there will not be time to be condemnatory, and the man who stands still to feel self-virtuous will go to the wall.

man.

The people who will continue to feel superior to the motorists will be tramps sitting on palings, grinning at them as they pass by. They also will remain the only people the motorists, rushing abreast of Time, will ever envy. However much progress progresses there will always remain those who sit on the palings and grin.

VI

THE REFLECTION OF THE MACHINE

As I tramped from village to village I was surprised to see so much stained glass in the churches of the Methodists, the Congregationalists, and other Puritans. Until quite modern times stained glass belonged exclusively to the ritualistic denominations. The Puritan, believing in simplicity of service, and in spirit rather than in form, put stained glass in the same category as the burning of incense, singing in a minor key, and praying in Latin. It partook of the glamour of idolatry; it had a sensuous appeal; it blurred the pure light of understanding. The true Puritan meeting-place is one of clear glass windows, hard seats, and a big Bible. It seems a pity that a very clear profession of faith should be blurred by picture windows

and, let me add by way of parenthesis, cushioned seats and revivalist preachers.

I examined in detail the coloured glass of a fine "Reform Church" that I passed on the road. The windows were rather impressive. They were not representations of scenes in Holy Writ, they contained no pictures of saints or angels, of the Saviour, or of the Virgin. So they escaped the imputation of idolatry.

They were just pictures of symbolical objects or of significant letters. Thus, one window was the bird and symbolised Freedom, another was an anchor and symbolised Hope, another was a crown and symbolised Eternal Life. In one window the letters C.E. were illuminated meaning Christian Endeavour, I presume; on another window was the open Bible, symbolising the foundation of belief. In every case the whole window was stained, and the little symbolical picture was set against a brilliant background.

It was all in good taste, and was a pleasant ornament, which made the church look very attractive exteriorly. But it was a compromise with a spirit not its own. My explanation is, some one must have wanted chapels to put in stained glass. Some one now has a great interest in making them put in stained glass. He is the manufacturer of that commodity. He has put stained glass on the market in such a way that every church is bound to have it. And he has devised a way of not offending the rigorous Puritans. "What is wrong in coloured light?" said he. "Nothing. It is only what you use it for. We can use it to show the things in which we believe." If incense could be manufactured in such a way as to make millions of dollars it would find its way somehow into the chapels. I was walking one day with an itinerant preacher, a man who called himself "a creed smasher." He wanted to weld all creeds into one and unify the Church

of Christ. "Think of commerce," said he, "already it has stopped the wars of the nations; in time it will calm the wars of the sects. If only the churches were corporations, and Methodists could hold shares in Roman Catholicism, and Roman Catholics in Methodism !"

Commerce is exerting an influence that cannot be withstood. To take another instance, it has provided America with rocking-chairs and porch-swings. Although the Americans are an extremely active people, much more so than the British, yet their houses are all full of rocking-chairs, and on their verandahs they have porch-swings and hammocks. The British have straight-backs.

The Americans did not all cry out with one voice for rocking-chairs and swings. The Pilgrim Fathers did not bring them over. The reason they have them. lies in the fact that some manufacturer started making them for the few. Then ambition took possession of him and he said, "There's something in rocking-chairs. I'm going to turn them out on a large scale."

"But there aren't the customers to buy them," some one objected.

"Never mind, we'll make the customers. We'll put them to the people in such a way that they gotta buy. We'll make 'em feel there's going to be such an opportunity for buyin' 'em as never was and never will be again."