resources should be held by the Government as trustee for the labor and capital involved. They concede that the actual development should be done by private parties, but insist that they shall work under lease and licence by which not only sovereignty but domination of procedure is retained by the Federal Government.

President Roosevelt was the author of this theory and justified it by his assertion that the proper development and conservation of such resources required large capital. He was disposed to encourage large capital but believed that the powers of government should be employed to hold its charges and practices within reason. It was, incidentally, the operation of this very plan one might almost say the perfect exemplification of it which led to the oil scandal of last winter. When this method of controlling our natural resources is proposed, one can imagine how intense becomes the debate.

The third school of thought embraces those who hold what are called the more extreme views. Their belief is that natural resources are the common possession of all the people; that they should be owned by the Government, and developed only by the Government in the interest of all of the owners. It is, I believe, no longer a secret that those who attacked the oil leases did so, primarily, for the purpose of demonstrating to the public the correctness of their view that only public operation should be permitted in future.

When we thus have, seemingly, three great beliefs supported by three great groups of partisans, no possible useful purpose can be served here by espousing any one cause. Instead of trying it, I prefer to confine my endeavors to such a clarification of the real issues as will allow an approach to the truth. The logic of everything that has here been said reduces the whole

discussion to two beliefs not three. First: The greatest good of all springs naturally only from keeping open the door of opportunity to the individual. The parable of the talents condenses the whole of this philosophy into a few words. Possession and development of property is a means by which the individual expresses himself. Property is local. Government is local. If the essential character of both is recognized, the simplest method is found when the individual is allowed the greatest opportunity and when the nation is content to reflect the massed wealth and power of its citizens.

Second: Natural resources are the common endowment of all. Their monopolization by individuals, states, or nations, subverts the essential purpose of creation. They should be held in trust by those nearest to them, for the benefit of the entire race, and should be so administered.

Thus we are confronted by a need to choose only between private control and ultimate internationalization. That emphasizes Mr. Wilson's contention that our natural resources should be considered as a primary cause of war and should be so administered as to remove the likelihood of war. Opposing his theory are those who contend stoutly that our natural resources should be used to promote the power and the glory of the nation which possesses them, through the indirect channel of the assured welfare of its individual citizen.

While this battle is raging between the extremists, a third group suggests that we modify the international point of view down to national supervision, and modify private control by introducing Federal regulation. Their suggestion is purely a compromise and leaves the big question open. big question open. The real battle is between private ownership and ultimate internationalization.

'THE HARDSHIP OF ANTICLIMAX'

JEAN KENYON MACKENZIE, in a paper, 'Of Luxuries and Hardships,' tells graphically of the tangible difficulties for which young missionaries are assiduously prepared by those who have preceded them, and those who have not. 'But,' says the writer, 'the last thing such a one looks to see is a reed shaken by the wind. And yet there you are the woods are full of them - reeds shaken by the wind! And this is the hardship of anticlimax!'

"The hardship of anticlimax' is a phrase to conjure with. Or, rather, it does the conjuring, and will not quite let one go. The words seem widely applicable. They may describe most poignantly a problem faced by young missionaries in foreign fields shut off largely from their own kind. Certainly the words are also to be applied to most of us wherever we be.

Of all the explanations, from the war to 'jazz,' of the younger generation and its apparently erratic behavior, what could be more smoothly said than that it can't stand 'the hardship of anticlimax?' It simply must be leaping from climax to climax like the traditional mountain goat. Unlike the mountain goat, it does not choose its peaks with unerring discretion. It seldom measures the distance between them. Dancing becomes anticlimactic. Youth adds an after-dance supper, the much-talked-of after-supper automobile ride, and then perhaps a country-club breakfast at six-thirty, before it 'calls the night off.'

generation at play for anticlimaxes any more than young missionaries are prepared. The climaxes - oh, yes! these have been talked bare, worn smooth by many tongues. They have been explained and discussed. They have been proscribed and prescribed, diagnosed, and analyzed. Take scientifically dissected 'love, the original thriller.' Anyone who has his second teeth knows all about it, how it attacks and gets in its work even as the 'flu' germ. But we are not so well instructed in regard to the time when it seems banished by the antitoxin of poverty or worry, of temporary boredom or the 'desire to snap into something different' - the anticlimax, when all the best one can do is to 'sit tight' and hang on. One wonders if any of us know much about how to manage that, even the all-knowing youth.

There is teaching. Most earnest teachers do have dreams of accomplishing something real. They leave normal schools keen for the children who are their responsibility. Then, one Friday night, they are very apt to find that children cease to be children. They have become, for the time being, papers to mark, tests to prepare, attendance records to make out. The human rapport is not. The high purpose on Friday night has become anticlimax. Methods, subject-matter, theory and practice, they know in varying degrees, but this insidious hiatus between them and accomplishment is not accounted for in any normal-school curriculum. Like engines, these teachers on this Friday night have reached the dead centre, all

an

There is also the boy home from the front the World Climax. Training camps made him ready for it. Governments equipped him for it. Continents cleared their tracks, and oceans were swept free, that he might reach it. He did. Then he returned. There is waiting for him a wire cage in a bank, a job in a garage, a field to plough. After the home-coming is over, he is forgotten in the round of daily living. Over there they are lighting the fuse of the Ruhr, and putting Greece and Italy in the ring like a couple of gamecocks without him. Over here they are canning peaches in the kitchen and putting new gutters on the porch roof — without him. He is nothing—who was the Hope of the World. He does not face an anticlimax. He is one. No one ever drilled him for this. 'Strange that young men are so restless these days!'

There are young women at work, yes, millions of them. Youth and hope and coquetry, loyalty and instability, behind counters, operating typewriters, doing an endless number of things. They are in differing measure trained for their work, or they could not hold positions. But the end of a clamorous day, the night in a small room, boarding-house meals, an endless number of nights in a small room, of boardinghouse meals, no one has nerved them for these. "The temptations they lead to' what we don't know of them! Literature is infested with them, with directions for and against. But the quality of anticlimax which these things are is a factor little known. The young women meet it in the dark.

Even motherhood and fatherhood do not seem exempt. 'Holt' will tell just how to feed a baby and will answer all known questions; but one is told that even Holt cannot always maintain the morale of parenthood. Life's immortal fulfillment does, at

times, seem such a full schedule of bottles, such a scant schedule of sleep. Rapture becomes daily care, close to the round of other daily cares. At times it is even an anticlimax. This, in spite of the fact that what old maids know about infants to-day mothers never knew in the world before. Maiden ladies read of the latest Yalelock safety-pin in the newspaper advertisements at breakfast. Bachelors, smoking late into the night, learn all about 'buttonless undershirts for the newcomer' from the same source. What a mother must know is encyclopædic; but that a baby can descend to the daily norm of existence, and even pull on her nerves like a telephone bell that won't stop ringing, seems to be a fact for which she is totally unarmored.

There is no one who welcomes these periods of anticlimax unless it be he who has been battered and shaken and bruised out of his senses by some real tragedy. For a time he may lie gasping in relief at any cessation of necessary reactions. But just let him stagger to his feet, and his taut nerves will clamor for a new experience, different in character, but above all one that is big enough to fill his enlarged capacity for living.

Of all the anticlimaxes, old age seems the most cruel and complete. Millions of recipes have been given for winning the battles of maturity, but very few for enduring the long bivouac that follows. Preparation, college and professional training, is planned for work in the world, none for the time when that work is no longer possible. I have known one or two people, and these earth's wisest, who have so consistently schooled themselves in vital introspective possibilities that, when physical limitations inevitably set in, they could fill the vacuum with richness. On the whole, man shrinks like a whipped dog from the lessening of his powers.

The hardships of many an anticlimax lie before everyone, a long gray road. Like most roads, you can walk it better if you know it is there. Doughboys say they have walked roads they could not feel beneath their feetso gone were they for sleep. They stumbled over every rut. Awake, they could have swung along jauntily. Perhaps a sign for youth, for all, 'The Road is There- Wake Up!' might help. And if that long straight pull were stressed more and the climactic hills given less publicity, the results would, at least, be interesting.

Crises one meets with the sum total of one's fibre, nerved and, to a degree, exhilarated by the newness of the experience. The daily lack of crises wears out that fibre unless one is geared for the pull. One wonders where the mechanician in human adjustments is, who can help with the gearing. Probably that goes back primarily to one's self. Not one's job, one's friends, one's room or country- or boardinghouse one's self. Possibly it consists in the cultivation of one's own personal interests, so that they can be spread out, however thinly, along the monotonous places of living. This cultivation could hardly be for cultivation's sake or art's sake, or society's, but simply toward the definite end of making it possible for the individual consciously to see that he is ready for a clearly realized difficulty — 'the hardship of anticlimax.'

CARLYLE, CINEMATOGRAPHER 'Or all the innocent diversions known to cultured humankind,' remarked a Wise Person once to me, 'the most dangerous is a discussion of Carlyle's style.'

'Why?' I asked.

'Because,' replied the Wise Person, 'there are so many of them.'

'Styles or discussions?' said I.

'Both,' said the Wise Person, and left me to mull over the matter at my leisure.

But I believe I have made a discovery in regard to Carlyle's style: and oh, the difference to me! Until I made it, I found the French Revolution very uphill reading, mountain-climbing reading. But since, being able now to adjust my mind to what I conceive to be Carlyle's purpose, I progress rapidly and with some enjoyment.

Here is the secret: Carlyle is a cinematographer. What I mean is that his method is the moving-picture method. The French Revolution is a glorified scenario.

I find him, and it, cinematographic in four respects. First, in form; second, in treatment of related incidents; third, in treatment of character; and fourth, in re/titling.

Philosophers have puzzled over Carlyle's form. Explained cinematographically, it is quite simple. There are a quantity of minute pictures following one another in such logical order that the whole thing, run off rapidly, gives the effect of motion, smoothness, and unity. Would it be stretching the simile too far or seem a case of lèse majesté — to say that each book is a reel? At any rate one may safely say that each chapter, each paragraph, each sentence almost, is an individual picture. And the pictures are interspersed with appropriate comment; but of that more later.

What masterpieces of picture-making art are the scenes of Louis XV's death, the procession of the elected of France, the attack on Versailles, and the King's going to Paris! What stirring drama in the trial scenes!

I remarked that these incidents were arranged in logical order. That does not necessarily mean chronological order. No! Carlyle is too great an

artist to follow slavishly the exact historical sequence of events. Being a cinematographer, he understands and uses to advantage the device known as the 'flash' or 'cut-back.' At the time of the taking of the National Oath, he flashes back suddenly to the Oath of the Tennis Court. In the trial of Marie Antoinette, he cuts-back to her departure from Vienna.

Another device for depicting character, and for heightening and vivifying the picture is that known technically as the 'close-up.' In this Carlyle excels. See how skillfully he brings the individual out from the group, describes him, characterizes him, forecasts and recapitulates, and then sinks him back into his group all in a moment. Thus we meet and know, not once but often, where opportunity best offers

as in the Procession and in the National Assembly- the features of Necker, of Mirabeau, of Danton, Desmoulins, Robespierre, Cazales, Lafayette, Bailly, and Dr. Guillotin.

And now I come to that which I consider the summit of Carlyle's excellence his mastery of the fine art of titling. His pictures stand alone, are comprehensible in and by themselves; but it is the author's comment, the titles, which unites them into a work of art. Titles should illumine, not explain; and this distinction is admirably achieved by Carlyle. His titles which I separate into two varieties: philosophic comment and chapter headings are brief, to the point, and packed with meaning.

As an example of the first, here is hist comment on the King's going to Paris: -'Poor Monarchy! But what save foulest defeat can await that man who wills, and yet wills not!'

All Hamlet in one sentence.

As examples of the second type, I list a few of the chapter headings: 'Astrea Redux without Cash'; 'Burial

with Bonfire'; 'Arrears and Aristocrats'; 'The Day of Poniards'; 'The Night of Spurs'; 'The Gods Are Athirst'; 'Lion Sprawling Its Last'— what moving-picture artist of the present day, titling thrillers, could do better?

There are advantages in this cinematographic method of writing. It is, I think, the best way that has yet been invented for saying a variety of things in a variety of ways. But there are also disadvantages. Suppose the reader is a patient, plodding, and somewhat dull animal, and not an imaginative, responsive creature like me. What then, Carlyle? Ah, then your fine words go all for naught: which is a shame.

So I am passing on my discovery to whom it may concern. For I like Carlyle and his picture-play, and I should hate to see him neglected.

THE PERSONALITY OF A PAIN

It was an elusive creature enough, winged rather than possessed of ordinary feet, the first time that it came. It flirted lightly by once or twice and brought hardly the consciousness of a presence. It was even pleasant to realize it; comfort is more comfortable when it is flecked with pain.

The second time it had achieved substance: it was cloud instead of vapor. But still it was impossible to think that an actual enemy, and an enemy vigorous enough to be formidable, could be embodied in the owner of such brushing footsteps.

After that it gained personality with every visit. It was as moody as a woman, and as cruel. I grew to watch for it, to anticipate its whim of the day by the feel of the air that whisked about it as it drew near. I waited for it with dread ridiculously tinged by interest; the fact that it was endowed with the always redeeming virtue of incon