home, without giving away all the secrets of his personality or forfeiting the right to startle you by a wholly unexpected action. "I might have known it!" But you didn't.

In the advertising world it's a moot question whether your advertisement should be an illustration of your goods or only a good illustration of anything whatever. I recently saw a picture of an airship, advertising a collar button. To be sure, under the picture it said "Don't fly high!" but that could hardly have been an exhortation not to roll under the bureau. It was a good illustration, but not an illustration of the goods. The value of relevancy is not duly appreciated in personal advertising either. The actress who too confidently expects to derive a dramatic reputation from a domestic lack of one, is frequently doomed to disappointment. So too, fine clothes and spacious houses, irreproachable grammar and manners, do not unduly influence you if in search of the one man who can save your life by a dextrous use of the knife, or the supreme handling of a jury. There is, of course, a sociology as well as a psychology of clothes; and your wife's display of diamonds, and your own display of automobiles, are legitimate ways of saying to the world "I'm a success!" But neither the one nor the other is an inevitable guarantee in the eyes of mankind. Indeed, there's something superb in the way of a man who edges to the front in spite of rundown heels and frayed neckties. The shabby orator who succeeds in keeping your attention off his garments, has won his laurels by no trick of the trade. He who can with impunity defy convention and fashion has come to stay. Which is not equivalent to saying that there's any necessary connection between musical genius and long hair, nor indeed between bad manners and good surgery.

It's our fear of the Cartoonist with his eye for the salient, his ability to strip our personalities of the irrelevant and superficial, that keeps many of us from floating our per

sonal stock too vain-gloriously. We are aware that, stripped of our borrowed hair, our borrowed reputations, our borrowed ideals, we might cut as poor a figure as Thackeray's King when deprived of his wig and robes of state. None the less, it remains true, on the whole, that a man is known by the company he keeps and the clothes he wears. This mergence of a man's reputation with that of his companions and tailors exemplifies what in psychological jargon is called fusion. Your son may borrow your reputation, your wife may dress for you, and your grandfather do your thinking. Your present self can even borrow a character from your own past self, sometimes, of course, against your will. It is to get rid of the boy he once was, that the wise man moves away from his home-town. Sometimes, for a similar but sadder reason, the man moves back.

There's danger of your reputation running away with you, getting beyond your control, as Captains of Finance and energetic Politicians have discovered. Newspaper personalizing is indeed precarious advertising. In the secret domains of your Castle in Spain you may picture yourself on terms of intimacy with the King of England, or addressing a learned assemblage of scholars in Heidelberg, or playing havoc in your laboratory with the old theories of Life and Matter; but when your home paper features you as entertained by the President, when as a matter of fact you but touched his hand at a public reception; or lauds you as great among the great, when your only claim to such distinction is your desire to be such; or exploits your manufacture of Babies in a retort, before you have succeeded in creating a dollar, you feel like a brass button accidentally mislaid in a museum collection of crown-jewels.

Some of us, however, find it difficult even to get into a newspaper or an unpopular review. It may be our ultimate success. The undertaker who decorated his shop gaily with holly and mistletoe, and advertised for a

brisk Christmas trade, was no grim humorist. He knew that there's a right time for dying, and that there's such a thing as doing it too late. Dying at the right moment is in fact the most effective bit of self-advertising. Death, indeed, as the little maid perceived, is the only act of distinction that many of us can hope to achieve.

Yet to take much comfort in post-mortem advertising betokens a highly ingenuous spirit. For whatever biographer or monument-maker may reap the profits of Fame-After-Death, the real manufacturer of the article reaps little. Such, however, is the tenacity of the instinct for Self-Advertising, that Fame - the long obsession of the Memory of the World by a name, has seemed to some worth even the sacrifice of the present. All of which goes to show that, as we have said, the psychology of selfadvertising merits consideration.

SOME FUNDAMENTALS IN PRISON

REFORM

RISON reform is now having its place in the sun.

PR

There is a nation-wide willingness to give to prisoners a liberal chance to make good, inside and outside the prisons. The employment secretary of the Prison Association of New York assisted directly and indirectly in placing more than half a thousand released prisoners during the twelve months ending September 30, 1916. Released prisoners themselves are joining in the movement, and in New York City there is a group of some two hundred graduates of Elmira Reformatory, banded together in the Rodgers Loyal Club for mutual improvement and for the coöperative hunting and securing of jobs for their fellow-members. This club was an object of suspicion to the earliest members, until they discovered that the proposers of the club, the Reformatory's parole officers, were after all "human beings, instead of being just officers." Then the lads took hold and "pushed." In short, they were discovering the same elements of human-ness in their officers that the prison reformers have been diligently proclaiming as existing in the prisoners, under the new penology.

Prisons, under modern wardens, are now under diligent observation, and are standing sympathetic trial. Formerly, anything called a prison was tolerated until something particularly atrocious was dragged out into the light of day by an enterprising newspaper or a "reformer." Today, prisoners have to make good, or the public is irritated because of the failure of the investment it has made in devoting to prison reform its special attention. That is why Sing Sing prison, above all others, is being watched. That is also a fine assurance that, in the main, prisons will make good. But if, on the one

hand, the public insists that prisoners make good, it is only just on the other hand, that the prisoners claim that the public shall make good - shall provide modern prisons. The most frequent statement in prison reform today a truth as old as Christianity—is that prisoners are, after all, only human beings. Christ proclaimed that of his associates on the cross. The message is none the less true for having been so barbarously forgotten through the centuries. The converse is also true that prisoners are not greater, or more important to society, than the millions of human beings that never went to prison. The present swing toward an apotheosis of the prisoner, just because he is suddenly found to react like a human in all essentials, has led not a few enthusiasts to extol him and lime-light him, until there is not a little force in Governor Whitman's recent statement to the American Prison Association at Buffalo in October, that an excess of mollycoddling is no less dangerous than an excess of punish

ment.

It is also true that prisoners within the walls respond with remarkable rapidity to decent or optimistic treatment. That is nothing new either, but a general belief in the fact is new. Back in the sixties of the nineteenth century a warden in the State prison in Missouri gave his prisoners the privileges of the yard, and free conversation on Sundays and holidays, with a chance also on holidays to have "big feeds" and athletic events, and to invite friends in. This will be sad news to a number of wardens who still firmly believe that they are the original "freedom-of-the-yard" wardens. Nevertheless, to undertake today an innovation without immediate precedents requires extraordinary courage, and so Tynan in Colorado, Gilmour in Ontario, Whittaker at the Farm Workhouse of the District of Columbia, Homer at Great Meadow in New York, and Osborne and Kirchwey at Sing Sing have been pioneers to whom the country owes much - and the prisoners more.