with his chronic willingness to grasp at straws. They will deal with a situation by theory or not at all. They have passed beyond the piece-meal ways of ordinary ingenuity; they settle what they are going to do, once for all, on a firm philosophic basis.

They say and this is their fundamental hypothesis that the domestic sphere is life. This is a practical conclusion, arrived at empirically, though they would die rather than admit it. They have felt that they are cut off from life-in-the-large. They have seen that their parenthood localizes their experiences. They have realized that they cannot rush out and seek experiences en masse. They cannot free-lance with life, and they know it. Therefore they have come to the conclusion that life must free-lance with them. In fact, that is what life has been doing, they say, right along, only they have been too blind to see it. They conclude that their children are not hindrances at all, but experiences to be lived. In short, they are life's representatives, trailing in their wakes all the phases of which life is capable.

One can only realize the ingenuity of this point of view by seeing how it fits in with all the prevailing tendencies. It capitalizes the uppishness of childhood, for instance, for all that is worth. Instead of trying to compel the child into the way that he should go, it asks only that the child should have a way to go, and then that he should go it. Parents request nothing more of the child, except permission to follow in his trail.

According to this theory, a child is not a failure unless he does not furnish his parents variety and shock. The successful child is the one who is unique in the eyes of his parents; and to be unique is, often, but to be naughty in the old tried ways. The old ways of being naughty may not always thrill parents, however, especially if they have had long and varied pasts. Then, to be naughty in a fresh way is all that is required of the child.

Occasionally this is too heavy a burden for the shoulders

of the young. But not often does a child go under; only in those few sad cases where parents are extremists in variety, and the child defective in distinctiveness.

I recall a case in point, where a younger brother was frightened out of what hope he might have had for special development, by a too insistent father. The boy showed every sign of going the way of his older brother, who was, I suppose, a failure, from the point of view of experience, insomuch as he was the copy of his mother in submissiveness and docility. "Be something! Be yourself!" Thus the father rudely gave vent to his growing irritation, when the only hope the boy had for personality lay in the application of kindergarten methods: he must be coaxed and caressed to it.

This instance is, of course, the exception; it is only the congenital copy-cat who cannot throw off the fetters of heredity and example in the heat of his individual emancipation.

This philosophy of which I have been speaking deals the death-blow to the parents' efforts after peace, and in so doing it again shows itself wise to the times. It was a losing fight anyway, it says, so why not lose it with a theoretic sanction. Harmony in the home was always a bit stuffy, so let in the drafts and wind. Of course, if harmony exists in the outside world, well and good, let the home mirror what is there that and no more. Nothing is ever out of order in these philosophic homes except, perhaps, monotony.

The parents that hold to this philosophy reduce themselves, by doing so, to a mere cipher of what they once were. The fall from absolute monarch to benevolent demagogue was great enough, but the fall to the place of spectator is greater; it almost does away with parental identity.

I think I suggested awhile back that philosophizing parents had ceased to be opportunists. Let me re-state myself and say that they are the very kings among op

portunists: for they have carried opportunism up into the high planes of theory. They have invented a philosophy to match the way things are going. And now they have argued themselves out of place because they have seen that their recall is pending. With a philosophic flourish they have made out their own papers of dismissal. Need one look farther for unfaltering ingenuity? Surely, I think not.

THE ECONOMIC HYMN OF HATE

AR breeds war. In no other respect has the present

WA

struggle been more war-breeding than in the new-old ideas of trade to which it has given rise. The world over, men have begun again to think in terms of seventeenth-century mercantilism, and seventeenth-century thought means seventeenth-century action. Are we, then, once more to enter on a period of devastating wars, such as marked the turbulent centuries of nation-making from 1500 to 1800? That depends in good part on the direction taken by the world's thinking, and just at present that is pointing back toward international struggle based on trade rivalry.

Mercantilism was the system of thought and practice. that governed the European powers during the years when modern Europe was coming into being. As the central idea of statesmen was that of relative national power, economic and social activities were subordinate to the political end. National power was to be attained only through military struggle, which filled these bloody centuries and reached its culmination in the grim carnage of the Napoleonic wars.

The economic basis of these conflicts lay largely in the struggle for the rich commerce of America and the east, bringing to a poverty-stricken Europe undreamed wealth. American silver poured into Spain and Portugal; the loot of India and the Indies filled the coffers of London and Liverpool and Amsterdam. Foreign trade, as in all centuries of the world's history before the nineteenth, was in no small measure plunder, and the sword determined as between Spain and Portugal, Holland and France and Britain, which should be chief plunderer, and by consequence chief beneficiary. Relative national power was of primary importance in such conditions. "Can a nation

be safe without Strength?" wrote Charles D'Avenant in 1696; "and is power to be compass'd and secur'd but by riches? And can a country become rich any way, but by the help of a well managed and extended Traffick?"

Small wonder that the state was central in the thoughts of rulers and ruled alike. Small wonder that the "condition-of-the-people question" was scarcely broached. Machinery hardly yet existed, the world's power of coal lay in the ground untouched, the internal productive powers of the nations were small; they were poor to a degree hard to realize in this richer age. The apparent avenue to wealth was trade, but athwart the trade routes stood the jealous figures of other nations eager to seize the same golden opportunities. And the nations that would be great and powerful built navies and raised armies, and settled on the battlefield and gun-deck the question who should have the trade. Trade followed the flag without questioning, for the trader flying the foreign flag was unceremoniously driven out of the tradewith violence if need be.

Such were the conditions of the mercantilist era, such the sanctions of international rivalry, and such was the justification for seeking to advance your own nation by injuring your neighbors. It was a poverty-ridden world, with not enough to go round, and relative military and naval power decided who should enjoy the small riches that did exist. There was a real basis for national hatreds. One nation raised itself on the ruins of another. Portugal, Spain, Holland and France successively yielded the hegemony and the final struggle left it with England. It would require a bold man to deny that the mercantilists were right in declaring national power the proper aim of the statesman's efforts.

To-day these ideas are coming back. For a century men had been learning to think in other terms. The multiplied productive power of steam-driven machinery had been teaching us to look for the increase of wealth to