indirect, and devious aid to his boom, frequently declares that the labor record of Secretary Taft injures his Presidential chances. In its issue of June 14, it says: LABOR FOR FAIRBANKS FAVORS HIM ABOVE OTHERS Vice-President Popular, while Taft and Cannon are Disliked, New Yorkers Say

"WASHINGTON, June 13 "Vice-President Fairbanks has a strong following in the laboring men of the country, according to W. M. Atkins of New York. The Washington 'Herald' to-day printed an interview with Atkins as follows:

"You can take my word for it, that organized labor will take a very active part in national politics next year. As matters now stand, the man who is best liked by the labor people, and who has the strongest chance of securing their support in the Presidential race is VicePresident Fairbanks. The most unpopular candidate with wage-earners is Secretary Taft, because of his anti-labor decisions when he was on the bench.

"Should Taft be the Republican nominee, his record will be dug up and word will be passed along the line to beat him at the polls. Neither is 'Uncle Joe' Cannon a warm favorite with union voters, for somehow the notion prevails that he has not been very friendly to their cause, either before or after his election to the Speakership."

Whether "W. M. Atkins of New York" be a myth or not, it is perfectly true that Taft, sitting on the bench, decided · certain labor cases brought before him; and, interpreting the law as it stood, ruled against the labor litigants. With Mr. Fairbanks the case was slightly different. He, as a railroad lawyer, took the initiative. Seventeen years before the Debs case in Chicago made "government by injunction' a red rag to labor, he used the process of the equity court to jail union workmen. It was in 1879.

Strikers Jailed

A GREAT strike had tied

up railroads all over the country. The Indianapolis, Bloomington & Western which was still in the hands of a receiver for whom Mr. Fairbanks was counsel - had its share of the general disturbance. In this crisis, the receivership had its advantages. The road was in the custody of the equity court; to strike against the court was contempt. The records of this receivership contain copies of the complaints, signed by the receiver and Mr. Fairbanks, alleging that the road was annoyed and embarrassed by the striking workingmen. Employees of the road were arrested, brought into court, tried, and disposed of without the embarrassing intervention of a jury. Between June 23 and August 3, 1877, Mr. Fairbanks secured convictions in the cases of Strikers Crawford, Dean, Buckley, Githen, Outcault, and Smith. Each of these men was sentenced to three months. Strikers Crawford, Dean, Buckley, and Githen served their terms in

the Bartholomew County jail;

contest the Presidential nomination with Harrison at the National Convention. It was only natural that Mr. Fairbanks should strongly favor Judge Gresham, in whose court he did most of his business. Harrison won. Fairbanks came home to work for the winning candidate. In 1890 he was defeated for the empty honor of the minor Republican nomination for the Senate; in 1892 he received it by default.

In 1896-97 (the McKinley-Hanna year) the real value of these minority endorsements became apparent. There had been an overturning of the parties, the Indiana Legislature was Republican, and Charles Warren Fairbanks was to the front with the seal of his party's endorsement two years old, a genuine candidate for a seat in the Senate.

Negotiations carried on by Perry Heath resulted in an agreement with Hanna, by which the latter promised to make Fairbanks temporary chairman of the

Decatur & Western. This purpose was not communicated to the public. In fact, the bill attracted little attention at the time, and its origin and objects were involved in mystery. But it made quiet progress in committee, and finally found a place on the Senate calendar with a favorable report.

But the bill came to the attention of ex-President Harrison and other Indiana lawyers, who had been retained as counsel by the State to forfeit the charters of certain railways on account of violation of charter provisions. They feared the effect of this bill on their suit, and they pointed out its real and important effect and hinted at its concealed purpose.

Most of the Indiana railway charters contain provisions directed against mergers and consolidations, and provide that violations shall be followed by forfeiture to the State. It was the purpose of the Fairbanks measure to repeal these provisions. There was an

Outcault and Smith went to the Jefferson County jail. "Labor must be free," says the official biography, Chapter XIV, page 186.

"On all matters concerning labor," it adds, "Mr. Fairbanks has always been open, frank, and clear in his statements. Senator Fairbanks is and always has been a friend of labor, and an advocate of their just rights. . . for he knows by hard experience what it is to toil; and from the very first his heart and his feelings have ever gone out to those who are compelled to work for their daily bread." What lover of his kind but regrets that Strikers Buckley, Dean, Crawford, Githen, Outcault, and Smith had not the "Life and Speeches of Charles Warren Fairbanks' to while away their three months of enforced leisure.

It does not appear that Mr. Fairbanks took any interest in politics until 1888. He was not a member of his ward club; he took no large part in primaries; he was not identified with the cause of government, good or bad. Hs was back and forth between Judge Gresham's court in Indianapolis, and the offices of his Wall Street principals in New York. Although he maintained an office in Indianapolis, he left all but the dress parade of law to an able partner. Then came the climax of the Republican factional feud between Benjamin Harrison and Walter Q. Gresham. Indiana sent a Gresham delegation, headed by Mr. Fairbanks, to

Republican National Convention at St. Louis, in return for which Fairbanks was to do what he could to deliver the Republican strength for McKinley.

In telling of Mr. Fairbanks's services to his party (see Chapter V, "Life and Speeches"), Mr. Smith declares that his "integrity of character" and his "lofty conception of the duties of a public servant and of the exalted dignity and responsibilities of a member of the highest legislative body in the world,' fitted him "to take a place among the law-makers of a nation." And then, for nine successive chapters, he tells what Fairbanks said repeats innocuous extracts from old speeches. The truth is that while Fairbanks was in the Senate of the United States, he was still working for the interests of his railroad and Wall Street clients, using his position as a party boss, which went with his office as Senator in Indiana, to promote railroad legislation in the Indiana Legislature.

During the session of 1897 there appeared in the Indiana Legislature a bill designed to permit the consolidation of certain Indiana railways with roads outside of the State. The specific purpose of this bill, as explained by Mr. Fairbanks to the State Senator who introduced it for him, was to permit the merger of the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton Railway-in which Mr. Fairbanks was interested as bondholder, shareholder, and general counsel-with the Indianapolis,

other aspect of the bill which, General Harrison pointed out, was even more obnoxious. It was designed to confer a foreign citizenship on Indiana railways, enabling them to transfer all their damage suits from the State to the Federal courts on the grounds of diverse citizenship. As the Republican Governor, W. T. Durbin, said later in a veto message dealing with this piece of legislation: "To citizens in the remote parts of the State, it is a matter of great hardship, inconvenience, and expense to be compelled to assert their rights against railroad companies at a court one hundred miles or more from their residence and the residences of witnesses."

The Joss Bill

THIS point was not lost on Indiana people, and soon the State was in a mild uproar. Mr. Fairbanks was advised by the State Senator who introduced the bill that it would be unwise to press the measure just then. So it was dropped in a manner which suggested that comic opera line: "Now is the time for disappearing."

By 1901 the skies had cleared. The old bill had passed from mind, and the time seemed ripe to pluck a legislative plum.

The second merger bill was drawn-and probably the first one also-in the office of Francis Lynde Stetson, general counsel for J. Pierpont Morgan, in New York. It was then committed to a well-known Republican politician of Indiana, who will appear in this article as "the lobbyist." This gentleman was summoned to New York for the purpose. He was given a retaining fee of $15,000, with an additional promise of $25,000 contingent upon the bill becoming a law. They gave the lobbyist more money for expenses; he had carte blanche to offer contingent fees. He promised to pass the bill through the Legislature, but he expressed some doubt concerning the probable attitude of Governor Durbin. Mr. Morgan assured him that Fairbanks had promised to look after Durbin, who owed his nomination to the organization in Indiana.

The lobby went to work immediately. Senator Fred A. Joss of Indianapolis was chosen to introduce the bill, which thereby became embalmed in history as the "Joss bill." The lobby scattered retainers and promises of contingent fees. The Legislature was flush with railroad passes. The bill became an offense in Indiana. The whole State denounced it; the local bar associ tions passed resolutions against it; the citizens of Logansport sent a committee to reason with the Governor about it. But it went through with whip and spur and came to the Governor for his signature. Joseph B. Kealing, now manager of the Fairbanks Presidential boom, called on the Governor and asked him what he intended to do about it. "I intend to veto it," said the Governor. Kealing begged him to reconsider, and other railroad attorneys joined him. Two railroad attorneys tried in vain to trick the Governor into delaying his veto until the bill became a law by limitation. What led the astute Senator from Indiana into the error of promising on paper to deliver a Governor whom he did not in fact control, is not a very deep mystery to one who understands practical politics. By all the rules of the game, Governor Durbin should have been delivered. The clog in the wheels was unforeseen moral stamina in the Governor's make-up. He had been supported for nomination and election by the machine; he owed his election to the machine managers. It was natural for these managers to suppose-and Fairbanks unquestionably did so suppose when he promised-that Durbin would be "all right."

NE of the worst cases of misapplied devotion and misspent energy that I ever ran across was that of Bareface Higgins and his depilitator. It was down at Corbey ville, Iowa, and Bareface Higgins was the most serious-minded man I ever knew. He was

a thorough believer in the power of the personal appeal, and was a pedler by occupation. He was strong on steady, insistent, everlasting personal appeal, and he was one of those men who, when they believe they are right, go right ahead and appeal. So whenever we saw Bareface coming with a parcel

under his arm we went away until he had blown over. Unless he caught us first.

Bareface was one of the kind of men who take a mortal interest in "Send ten cents if you want a big mail," and that sort of thing, and he always had a copy of the "Agents' Gazette," or some other twenty-five-cents-a-year paper, in his pocket, and when he wasn't busy personally appealing to us to buy one hundred calling cards with our names neatly concealed under a hand holding a bunch of flowers that lifted up to show the name-twenty-five cents for twenty-five-or something equally valuable and attractive, he was reading in the "Agents' Gazette" to find something else to personally appeal for. He was called Bareface because he had more red whiskers, and worse tangled, than any other man in the place-and that town rather ran to whiskers, too. It was easier to wear them than to shave.

The "

"Pedilitator," he said. "Mosby's Celebrated Pedilitator, recommended by the physicians in all parts of the world-"

'Pedilitator, hey?" I said. "Well, I guess I ain't got any disease that needs pedilitating to-day. Mebby I will have to-morrow; a man can't tell what a day will bring forth, but I don't feel like taking anything for it to-day. I want to let the symptoms develop first:" "It ain't to take," said Bareface. "It's to rub on." "All right,” I said, "if it ain't to take I guess I won't take any, and I guess I can rub on without any Pedil- What did you say that name

Half the time Bareface sat with his face stuck within an inch of that "Agents' Gazette,' for he was so nearsighted that he could hardly see at all; and the other half of the time he was droning away in his mournful voice to some unlucky creature he had cornered, telling him the marvelous virtues of the Royal Bengal Perfume Tablets, or the Little Wizard Combination CanOpener and Cigar-Clipper. That voice of his was enough to set a piece of tissue paper on edge, and as for continuity and sustained effort!-there was never another such persistent pedler held a poor suffering mortal by the coat-lapel and talked him blind! He wasn't satisfied with telling the good points of a thing once. Bareface had upward of forty thousand different useless things to choose from that were advertised in the "Agents' Gazette," and he didn't decide to choose any one of them until he had given it more thought than any other man would give to buying a forty-acre farm, and so he knew that when he did choose an article it must be just right. Then he would go out to appeal for it, and if in the first few hours of appeal he didn't make a sale, he would begin all over again, feeling that he must have missed some important point, or that the unfortunate victim had misunderstood him. It was one of the most painful things in the world to hear him trying to sell Uncle Billy Gubb, who was aged seventy and a deacon in the church, a scarf-pin that was composed of a celluloid rose that would squirt water in the eye of any one that bent down to look at it. This little gem was called the "Unequaled LaughMaker, or Surpriser of the Inquisitive," and Bareface never called it anything else. He believed in sticking to facts, and calling things by their right names, as they were printed in the catalogue. Any man who would go up to Uncle Billy Gubb, who had a permanent grouch of fifty-two years' standing, and try to sell him an "Unequaled Laugh-Maker, or Surpriser of the Inquisitive" didn't have a correct idea of Uncle Billy Gubb.

near.

One day Bareface came down Main Street, nosing his way, looking for somebody to attach himself to, and I happened to be asleep in front of Biggs's Livery, in a chair that I generally slept in mornings and afternoons, and he had me before I knew he was anywhere He took hold of me with one hand and reached into his pocket with his other, and as soon as I saw him reach for his side pocket I knew he had something new, but whether he was going to give me a lecture on "True Lovers' Sympathetic Ink," or a dissertation on the "Little Economy Potato-Parer and Stove-LidLifter," I didn't know. Bareface's articles of commerce never went above ten cents in price. He knew the reckless spending habits of that town too well to go above that, as a general thing, but I was away out of reckoning when I figured I was to be orated to about a dime wonder that time. He had broke loose and got a dollar article, and what he pulled out of his pocket was a bottle.

"I don't want none," I said as quick as I could, that being as safe a way as any other for beginning with. Bareface, although it never did any good.

"Uriah," he whined through his nose, "I have here an article that you had ought to buy. Mosby's Pedilitator is an article that I can recommend hearty-"

"What's that, Bareface?" I asked. "What's that name? Do you mind saying that name again?"

was?"

"Pedilitator," repeated Bareface. "Well," I said, "you won't catch me rubbing on or taking anything with a name like that, not by no means! When a man is as well as I am he don't want to fool with no medicines with a name likeWhat did you say that name was?"

"Pedilitator," said Bareface, patiently. "It ain't for the sick, but for the well. This marvelous remedy-"

"There you go, now!" I said, reproachful. "Just when begin to want to help you out, and start to get ready to get a disease, so that by to-morrow I will feel like rubbing something on, you step in and tell me it is for the well! And now my disease is so far along that I ain't well any more! If that ain't just like you, Bareface! Now, I certainly can't buy any of thatWhat is the name of it?”

"Pedilitator," Bareface said. "But sick. can use it as well as the well, so far as I know. I don't see anything in the directions that says it makes any difference whether a person is sick or well when they use it."

He put his nose up against the bottle and made as if to read what it said, but the type was pretty small, and he didn't make very good work of it.

"Hold on!" I said. "Don't strain the bottle that way. Let me read it," and I took it from him and did so.

Bareface looked on as if I was a neighbor woman examining a young mother's first baby, and he was the young mother.

"Why, you old deceiver!" I said. "I can have you up for false pretenses. This ain't no Pedilitator at all. Here I was, just going to put my hand in my pocket and pull out my purse and buy a bottle of Pedilitator, and it ain't a Pedilitator at all. Somebody has been taking you in, Bareface. This ain't no Pedilitator; it's a Depilitator."

Not that I knew the difference between one and the other, but it was a good excuse to pass the bottle back to Bareface. He stuck his nose against the label again and read the name, which he could do, as it was in big type.

"So 'tis; so 'tis!" he said, wagging his head. "I read it wrong. It's a Pedilitator. I'm obliged to you,

Uriah, for putting me right." "There you go!" I shouted at him. "I say Depilitator, and you go right off and say Pedilitator again. It's Depilitator."

"Hey?" he said, with his hand behind his ear. "Depilitator!" I shouted, as loud as I could. "Depilitator!"

"Yes," he agreed. "Just as you say-Pedilitator. That's what I said, ain't it?"

"No!" I shouted. "No, you didn't! You say Pedilitator, but it's Depilitator! Depilitator! Depilitator! Mosby's Depilitator!"

I don't often raise my voice like that, not thinking that such exertion is good for a man whose principal

SPECIAL FEDLING

"The Unequaled Laugh-Maker, or Surpriser of the Inquisitive"

job is keeping off from exertion, but when I want to I can holler as loud as the next man, and I was so provoked at the old man that I was bound I would make him hear. And what do you think he said?

"Oh!" he said. "I didn't hear you at first, Uriah. Yes, it is Mosby's, just as you say. Mosby's Pedilitator, one dollar a bottle."

Now, that would make most anybody mad, and I felt like taking that bottle and throwing it against a rock. To think that right in the heat of the day a man should wake me up, and stir me up so that I should shout out at the top of my voice, getting all excited over it, and disturbing my perfect calm, at a time when everybody else was asleep, did make me mad, but I had some satisfaction, for the way I yelled that name out woke up everybody in town, and they began coming out of the shade and down the street to where me and Bareface was furthering the commerce of the nation. Almost every able-bodied man in the place was right on hand in about five minutes, them in the back row standing on tiptoe to see what was up. That was the best advertising that was ever done in Corbeyville; that shouting of that word that I did for Bareface. I never saw people so interested to know the meaning of a strange word before. And the meanness of it was that they expected me to tell them what it was and what it meant, and to do it with the joy that I would have recounted a dog fight that they had missed seeing. They appointed me deputy puffer of Mosby's Depilitator, but I resigned. When I set out to tell all about a thing I want to have a glimmering of what the thing is first, and I hadn't been educated in Depilitator yet. But I was before Bareface got through. We all was.

"Uriah," they said, "what's up? Whyfor were you screeching like a small spotted pig with its foot caught fast in a balloon rope and the balloon rapidly going heavenward?"-or words to that effect.

"I was whispering to Bareface, here, if you want to know," I said, "and he has got a new thinggumjig he is selling by the bottle at one dollar a bottle."

As fast as the populace could crowd up to where it could hear me say this, it remarked: “Oh, fudge!" and oozed off into the shade again and went to sleep, until only me and Bareface was left, and I would have oozed off too, but he had a firm grip on my garments.

"Uriah," he said, "this here Pedilitator is just what a man with whiskers like yours needs. This here Mosby's Pedilitator, I figure, was got up for just such whiskers as them you have got. I sort of had you in mind, Uriah, when I took the agency for this Pedilitator."

"Much obliged, Bareface," I said, ironical, "but I don't feel the need of no hair restorer for my whiskers to-day, thank you. My whiskers is restored too much already. I feel like I had about all I needed in that line, right now.'

"Hey?" he asked, putting his hand up to his ear. What say? Did you say you'd take a bottle, Uriah?"

"No, I didn't!" I remarked, good and loud. “I said I have too many whiskers already. Too many-" I explained, running my hand through my face-fringe, as a sort of sign language. Bareface understood that all right. He brightened up at it.

"That's what I say," he said. "Too many whiskers. Near everybody in town has got too many. I thought that over before I took up the agency for this here Pedilitator-"

“Al right,” I said, “go ahead and call it that if you want to. You own, it, and you can call it what you want to," but Bareface did not hear me. He was proceeding right along with his lecture.

"That's what a Pedilitator is for," he went on. "It removes the super-fluous hair, according to directions as given on the bottle, and I guess this town has more super-fluous whiskers than any other town in the United States. I didn't take hold of this here Pedilitator rashly, Uriah, by no means. No, sir. I thunk it all out first, and I saw that a real good Pedilitator like this was what this town needed more than anything. This town is all growing to whiskers, and that is what is the matter with it. All its energy is used up growing whiskers, and it don't have any energy left for anything else. Now, you feel tired all the time, don't you, Uriah?”

I reckoned I did, for it wouldn't have done to be anything else but tired in that town. It would have been too conspicuous.

"That's because all your energy goes to growing whiskers," Bareface explained. "Now, this here Pedilitator, I take it, was got up for just such towns as this is. I don't say I saw that right off at first, Uriah. No, sir. I don't make no such claim. I read over the literachoor about this here Pedilitator for days before I could make head or tail of it. I couldn't see but what a man would get along with a pair of shears or a razor, and do all the pedilitating he wanted to do, and it looked to me as if a Pedilitator in a bottle at one dollar a bottle would be about the most useless thing in the world for a man to have. I couldn't seem to see what any man would want to be pedilitated for. I says to myself: 'Well, of all the foolish, loony inventions that ever was, this is the worst. Here is thousands of young fellers all over the country coaxing and begging

their mustaches to grow, and rubbing things on them, and willing to give most anything to get them to grow, and now here comes a man with a stuff in bottles to remove them. This stuff won't sell. What this country needs ain't hair removers; it is hair growers.' And right there I happened to think of this town, and the way it is overrun with whiskers, and I saw the value of this Pedilitator.

I got up close to Bareface's ear and shouted: "Why don't you try it on yourself?"

He looked at me with reproach in his eyes, as if I had hurt his feelings.

"Uriah," he said, "if I was able

to afford to use stuff at a dollar a bottle, I wouldn't be peddling it. It ain't that I lack faith in this Pedilitator; I can't afford to use it. I ain't a rich man."

Neither was I, and I told Bareface so. I tried to make him understand that it would be a long time before I would be rich enough to pay out one dollar for Depilitator, and that if the whole of my house was piled full of dollars the last thing I would buy would be Depilitator. I told him that I didn't wear whiskers because they were forced on me, but because I liked to wear them, because I had the kind of face that the more of it didn't show the better it looked. If my whiskers had been up in court for murder, and I was the lawyer defending them, I couldn't have argued more in their favor, and when Bareface left me and went at the other citizens he found them feeling the same way. The unanimous love of that town for its whiskers was something beautiful to behold. You would have thought, to hear the voters talk, that whiskers was the foundation of their liberties, and that the Revolution, and the Civil War, and the War with Spain, had all been fought to preserve the right to grow whiskers of any shape, size, or color. It sounded as if the motto of the State of Iowa should be changed to "Our Liberties we prize and our Whiskers we will maintain." But the actions of old R. S. Spear spoke louder than words. Old R. S. had a beard that he had been growing since Abraham Lincoln's day, on a bet. He had bet that if Douglas was de

feated he would never cut his beard again, and from merely living up to his bet he had come to love and cherish his beard as if it was precious jewels. He had about three yards of it, and he kept it coiled up under his vest, only taking it out to show strangers that wanted to see the principal objects of interest in town. Old R. S. Spear's beard was one of these, and there wasn't any other.

Old R. S. sat on the bench in front of his harness shop, along with some other citizens that wasn't working just then, and he listened to Bareface until Bareface came to the part where he told what the Depilitator was good for, and then old R. S. gave one whoop and dashed off up the street, and he didn't come back until Bareface was thoroughly absent. Old R. S., for one, didn't have any doubts about Mosby's Depilitator doing its work, or if he did have any he wasn't going to take any chances. He acted as if his beard was gunpowder and that Depilitator was a match, and he didn't want them to come together. When a man has spent thirty odd years growing a beard he don't want any Depilitator spilled on it by accident, and whenever Bareface came in sight old R. S. would let out his little whoop and disappear. We got in the habit of sitting in front of old R. S.'s shop for the protection he afforded. He was like those little birds I have heard tell of that sit on the backs of hippopotamuses or something and fly off when danger approaches, warning the hippopotamus. Whenever we heard old R. S. whoop and saw him disappear we knew Bareface was coming. We didn't have to keep awake—old R. S. kept awake for us, and kept his eyes out for the approach of Bareface. That was away back in ninety-five, and if you go out to Corbeyville to-day you will still see the fellers sitting in front of old R. S. Spear's store in preference to any other spot, and they don't know why, but that is the reason. It's wonderful how old habits cling to one that way.

Bareface kept trying to talk some one into buying a bottle of Mosby's Depilitator for about three weeks, and the conversation he used up in that time would have made a book, there was so much of it, but no one would try the Depilitator. No one wanted to remove their whiskers permanently, it seemed. And no one but R. S. Spear seemed to have any idea that the Depilitator would do what Bareface and the label claimed for it, anyway. It was a sort of deadlock. We wouldn't buy because we didn't want to lose our whiskers, and we wouldn't buy because we had no faith that the Depilitator would remove them, and Bareface lost either way. He had laid in a stock of ten bottles as a starter, and the starter wouldn't start. He had a hard proposition, but he did his best. He went in for a campaign against whiskers that was wordier and more continuous than any the world has ever knownbut he kept his own face-hair just the same! Nothing we could say about consistency-thou-art-a-jewel could budge him. He took the ground that he was agent for Mosby's Depilitator, and as such he was outside of the rules. It was our business to use it, and his business to sell it, and those were two distinct and different

things. He mentioned that a man might be in the business of making wooden legs, and might believe he was making the best wooden legs in the world, and might use every argument in the world to sell them, but he couldn't be expected to have his own leg cut off in order to be consistent. There was some sense in that, too.

So nobody would give the Depilitator a fair trial, and nobody knew whether it would do what Bareface claimed, and it began to look as if Bareface would be out what he had paid for the ten bottles, and that the

investment he had made would have to be charged off to profit and loss, when Sam Wiggins had an idea, and informed Bareface of it. The idea was Mexican hairless dogs, and Sam Wiggins didn't tell Bareface what the idea was until Bareface had agreed to take him in as half partner on the deal, and then they went at it in good earnest.

The idea was to supply Mexican hairless dogs for the market, and to supply not only the little skinny hairless dogs that were all the market afforded then, but to furnish Mexican hairless dogs of any size and shape to suit the taste. Sam and Bareface were going to supply any kind of Mexican hairless hound that the market demanded. By their system you could get a Mexican hairless Saint Bernard, or a Mexican hairless dachshund as easily as any other kind. All you had to do was to place your order far enough ahead, so as to allow Sam and Bareface to get a sample of the kind of dog you wanted and to give the Depilitator time to work, and the dog would be delivered according to order. Sam had the faith in the scheme, and Bareface had the faith in the Depilitator, and two such faiths are all that are needed in a business, Sam said. He saw a great future for the business, and looked to be overrun with orders as soon as they got the Depilitatory running in good shape, and he said he proposed to do the right thing by the town where he had been born, and meant to call the dogs by the name of the town. The name he picked out was 'Corbeyville Depilitated Mexican Hairless Dogs, "and Bareface agreed, only stipulating that whenever the name was printed there should be added the words: "Specially depilitated for the fine trade with Mosby's Depilitator, for sale by F. N. Higgins, one dollar a bottle." He said that when folks once got the anti-whisker idea they would be wild to buy the Depilitator, and that he would continue to look on that as his real business, and only consider the depilitating of dogs a side issue. Sam looked at it a different way, holding that when the Corbeyville Mexican Hairless Depilitated Dog got noised abroad they wouldn't either of them have time to do anything but attend to the depilitating factory, and that likely the craze for depilitated animals would grow, so that they would have to take in other animals, such as cows and sheep and cats. I could see how a cow might be improved, maybe, by being depilitated-just as they are by being dehorned-but I didn't see what any one would want with a depilitated cat. It looked to me as if a depilitated cat would be about the worst looking thing! An ordinary full-haired cat that has been soused in the water looks pretty thin and skinny and miserable, but a depilitated cat would look worse. I told Sam so, but he said that was nothing. He said to cast my mind on a Mexican hairless dog, and to think how thin and

skinny and miserable that looked, and that while he wouldn't care to have a depilitated cat for a pet, any body that had a Mexican hairless dog in the house would want a depilitated cat to harmonize.

So Bareface and Sam started in to do business, and seeing as how the business was going to make the town famous, and was a sort of public affair in that way, they decided to have what you might call the laying of the corner-stone, or house-warming, or flag-raising, and depilitate the first dog in public. It wasn't necessary to issue printed invitations. All you had to do to draw a crowd in that town was to have whatever you were having, and to let one or two know, and all the rest

came.

Well, I don't know Mr. Mosby, the man that makes the Depilitator, and he may be a nice man, and good to his family, but I don't think he thought of dogs when he invented the Depilitator, or he would have invented it some other way. It may be good for dogs, but it don't give them pleasure. I might lay awake all night imagining, and I couldn't imagine a dog that had had one dose of Depilitator coming back for another dose. I never knew a dog that had had one dose come back for anything at all. A dog that had had a real good application of Mosby's Depilitator, and could get away, stayed away.

Bareface and Sam had the flagraising in the public square, and as a special honor Sam allowed his own dog to be the first dog ever depilitated by the Corbeyville Depilitating Company. There wasn't much to Corbeyville but the public square, so that was the natural place to have a blow-out, and there was already considerable hair off Sam's dog, so it was natural to pick on it for the first trial of the Depilitator. There was some difference of opinion as to how long it would take the Depilitator to work. Bareface seemed to think all you had to do was to rub it on and the hair would fall off the next minute, but Sam thought it would work more gradual; that you would rub the Depilitator on to-day and probably the hair would be off about to-morrow evening at sundown. So the crowd congregated, and Bareface held the dog, and Sam pulled out the cork with his teeth. I guess that Depilitator was next to middling warm, for the minute some of it touched his lips Sam howled and dropped the bottle, and it fell and spilled on the dog. There wasn't any doubt about what the dog thought of it. If you ever doubled up a piece of whalebone until the ends met, and then suddenly let go of it, you will have some idea of how that dog acted, and the last we saw of him he was still doubling up and letting out, and howling, until he faded into the horizon. We heard his howl for some minutes after that, but never again. That dog never came back.

I suppose he wanted to get to Mexico, where depilitated dogs naturally belong.

That settled the Corbeyville Depilitating Company. The Corbeyville Humane Society stepped in and laid down the law to Sam and Bareface, and the best they would allow was that Sam could go ahead provided he diluted the Depilitator with water so that it wouldn't hurt the dogs. They said it was all right to take hair off, but, that a Depilitator that took off hide and all was a lawless institution. But the trouble was that if the Depilitator was thinned it wouldn't depilitate.

Sam and Bareface used to shampoo dogs every morning and evening with, the diluted Depilitator, and the dogs didn't mind-in fact, they seemed to like it-and it made them smell like a barber shop, but it wouldn't depilitate them. The only effect it had was to use up the Depilitator, and supply Corbeyville with a cleaner lot of dogs than the town ever had before.

Naturally, Sam and Bareface soon got tired of that, and they dissolved partnership. They used up all the stock that Bareface had, and then they quit. Bareface talked for a while about going to sue Sam for wasting the Depilitator, and Sam talked a bit about going to sue Bareface for wasting his time, but that all ended in talk.

We none of us ever found out any usefulness that Depilitator could be to any one. There certainly wasn't a man in Corbeyville that would ever have used it, and we come to the general conclusion that it was just like the rest of the truck that Bareface peddled around-no use at all, and not intended to be-just got up to peddle. Or maybe, Mr. Mosby figgered that if ever anybody did want to have their whiskers permanently removed, his Depilitator would come in handy, like the feller that invented a landing stage for air ships. It was no use then, but it might be if air-ships ever come into general use, so he invented it, and had it ready for the time when there should be a demand. But, as I said before, old Bareface trying to sell Depilitator to men that preferred whiskers to smooth faces was about the worst case of misapplied energy that I ever ran across. Trying to sell phonographs in a deaf and dumb asylum wouldn't be more downright hopeless as a job.

THE

HE Government, of the United States began its career in 1789 with five executive departments -State, Treasury, War, Post-Office, and Jus

tice: Nine years later the control of the navy was taken out of the hands of the Secretary of War and put under an independent department. Matters remained in this state for half a century. In 1849 the creation of the Department of the Interior added a seventh member to the Cabinet. The Department of Agriculture began business in 1889 and the Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903. But there is no reason to suppose that with nine members the Cabinet has reached its limit. There are nineteen members of the British Cabinet beside. seven Ministers outside. France has twelve Cabinet Ministers and Italy eleven.

In this country four important interests are now demanding the creation of Federal departments for their benefit. As our manufacturing output is twice the value of all the products of our farms, it is said that we should have a Department of Manufactures. The extraction from the ground of over eighty minerals worth enumerating, reaching a total value of a billion and three-quarters of dollars, calls audibly for a Department of Mining. Steam railroads almost equal to those of all other countries. combined, electric railroads far exceeding those of all the rest of the world, coast, lake, and river shipping, and telegraph and telephone lines surpassing anything known anywhere else, would seem to justify a Department of Transportation and Communications. Finally, a movement is on foot for the creation of a Department of Fine Arts.

Fine arts can not show such imposing figures as those of manufactures, mining, and transportation. Nevertheless, the committee appointed by the Fine Arts Federation, the Society of Beaux Arts, and the American Institute of Architects to agitate the matter is not destitute of material. It is proposed to give the new department control over all Government work, such as the construction of public buildings, laying out national parks, establishing museums and galleries in various cities, and creating a National Art Gallery at an initial expense of $5,000,000. The need for some intelligent supervising authority in these matters is painfully obvious. The construction of public buildings throughout the country is under the control of the Supervising Architect of the Treasury, whose office is certainly run on more civilized lines than under the sainted Mullett, but is still far from being what it ought to be. In Washington there is no such thing as any general control at all. Each department puts up its own buildings in its own way, although, thanks to the educational work of the Burnham Commission, the results are not now as bad as they used to be.

Sooner or later we shall have a full-grown Department of Fine Arts, but it is not likely that it will come all at once. The various departments that have been added to the original five did not start in that way. They began modestly as bureaus under subordinate Commissioners. As the work of a bureau grew it was expanded into a department, and its Commissioner promoted to a secretaryship, or several bureaus were grouped together, and a new Secretary put over them. If the artists can secure the creation of a Bureau of Fine Arts, either in or out of a department, they can feel that they have made a good start. The main thing in Washington is to plant a seed and get it thoroughly sprouted. It will grow of itself after that.

IN

'N the fiscal year ending June 30, 1907, all records of immigration into the United States were broken for the third time in succession. In 1904 the volume of immigration, closely following the state of business, sagged a little as compared with 1903, but even then it was greater than in any year before that. Since then the tide has swelled without an ebb. In 1904 the number of immigrants was 812,870, in 1905 it rose to 1,027,421, in 1906 it reached 1,100,735, and in 1907 it has exceeded 1,200,000. That is equivalent to dumping the entire population of a State like Nebraska upon us in a single year. Incidentally it illustrates the absurdity of the Census Bureau's method of computing our growth since 1900. That method is based on the assumption that in each year since the last census we have gained just one-tenth as much as we gained in the ten years between 1890 and 1900-that is to say, 1,331,748 inhabitants. Since we received over 1,200,000 immigrants last year, it followed on this theory that our natural increase was only about 130,000, or less than half a million even after allowing for all the immigrants who went home.

We have probably seen the crest of the present wave of immigration. These inflows are always closely related to the state of national prosperity. Immigration fell off one-half after the panic of 1837, and again after the panic of 1857. After breaking all previous records in 1873 it declined after the panic of that year, until in 1878 it stood at less than one-third of the figures reached before the hard times. The check to business in 1884 was reflected in a shrinkage of immigration from 603,000 in 1883 to 334,000 in 1886. The depression after 1893 reduced the immigration to a smaller volume in 1897 than we had seen half a century earlier. Some recession in business is probable now, and that will mean a shrinkage in immigration.

PACIFIC IRRITATIONS

T is a pity that when great national issues are

I quivering in the balance there can not be some

way of suppressing officious local mischiefmakers. Despite the real good feeling between the masses of the Japanese and American peoples, as well as between their governments, it can not be denied that the relations of the two countries are delicate. This is not because Japan wants the Philippines or is ambitious to dominate the Pacific, or because we are ready to fight for the trade of Manchuria, or of Korea: It is because there is always danger of a clash between Japanese pride and the instinct of American self-preservation on the Pacific Coast. The question whether Japanese immigration shall be excluded or not is for us simply a question of its volume. Labor union fanatics in the West may protest against the admission of any Japanese at all; sentimental fanatics in the East may denounce any measure of exclusion in any circumstances, but for the great bulk of sensible, level-headed Americans the question is simply whether the Asiatic influx is great enough to create a race problem in our Pacific States. We have had race problems enough, and we do not want any more. For Japanese coming as individuals we have a welcome as warm as their engaging national characteristics deserve. If they should come in hordes we should have to let sentiment give way to self-protection.

ever

It seems impossible to make the Japanese understand our position in this matter. Although they would never tolerate an incursion of fifty or a hundred thousand Americans in their territory, they do not appear to be able to put themselves in our place, and it seems clear that any measures of restriction we may be compelled to take will be regarded as national affronts and bitterly resented. It is all the more important, therefore, for us to avoid any cause of offense as far as we can. Whatmeasures we may be compelled to take in dealing with future immigration, the Japanese who are here now ought to be treated with the most scrupulous courtesy and justice. Of course, it is impossible to convince every juvenile hoodlum in California that a convenient brick ought not to be thrown at a Japanese window, but the local authorities can refrain from irritating pin-pricks. As if there were not already enough causes of friction the San Francisco Police Commissioners refused on June 27 to renew the permits of five Japanese keepers of intelligence offices, and to grant permits. to two new applicants, on the ground that the policy of the board was to confine such privileges to citizens of the United States. This action aroused immediate echoes in Japan, where the seven Chambers of Commerce at Tokyo united in addresses to the principal Chambers in America and to President Roosevelt protesting against such incidents and hinting that their repetition might have "an unhappy effect upon the development of the commercial relations between the two nations" -in other words, might lead to a boycott.

There is some reassurance in the attitude of Ambassador Aoki, who has talked with much frankness on the situation, expressing the opinion that any excitement that may have been caused in Japan by the San Francisco incidents is over, and that it was "never of any particular significance." The Ambassador says that the Japanese have great respect for their Government, and that when it makes known its position on any matter the people are accustomed to acquiesce. A rather unfortunate,