However, there was one thing so obvious that no living man could miss it. Of all the furniture on Earth there was one kind most dangerous to life. Armament of every sort had become overnight unspeakably antiquated. The word sounded as faint and faraway as stagecoaches. Government officials could at least begin with that; and besides it was their most familiar material. They certainly showed no hesitation here. With a joyful alacrity, in fact, as of persons long awaiting permission to do so, they took immediate steps to destroy it. Within nine days it has been computed-after the issuance of the Recommendation, the stores of explosives and poisonous chemicals accumulated by every civilized government since the L.C.W. had been treated with Antint1 and buried in lime and salt. There at last lay safely buried the means of poison

ing every living fish; of sterilizing every field; shattering every city and town upon the globe; withering every forest; destroying every seed; eating out the heart of every root. There under lime lay the blight for enemy cows and the paralyzer for enemy chickens; the rot for enemy vegetables; the parasites for enemy cotton and corn; the ready-to-broadcast infections of diphtheria, croup, and infant paralysis for enemy children; the United States leprosy bombs; the English smallpox shells; and the triumph of the French army chemists- the revival of the putrid plague.

(EDITOR'S NOTE. - The Interpretation had to be cut here. The rest of it was less

valuable. It dealt chiefly with the gradual consolidation of all political parties on Earth into the international Workerscult and Ownerscult parties, which, as we all know, maintained their opposition for a long time. With all this we are familiar from our school histories; nor did our author present any of it in any new light. Nothing he could say of either Cult could show it otherwise, presumably, than as we all realize both these extinct parties were the product, body and soul, of the Strenuous, or Ruction, Ages.)

1 So named from a combination of the prefix anti, and the popularized chemical name of the violent early explosive TNT.

Of course the present concert of human relations can't be interpreted by itself, as a thing unconnected with previous history. History is all one piece; and whatever has been the prime cause of this great change and brightening of the life of man must bear some likeness to the causes of other great waves of

human achievement. Any interpretation I might make would have to be related to some general scheme that fits Earth history as a whole.

Now my own interpretation of history as a whole is that from time to time a tide of brotherly love has swelled, mounted, and carried human

in the last one. This is a dramatized version of what really happened. The facts were that she read in the Macon Telegraph, at breakfast one morning, an account of a Black boy's being lynched. It was n't the first time she had heard of lynchings. As I said, she was a Georgian. She had felt shamed and sorrowful about them a great many times before. But this time she left her breakfast untasted and went to the telephone and called a meeting of the Helping Hand.

When she had us all in her parlor that afternoon, she told us that she would have to resign as president, because she would have to give all her time to another society she was going to start. She would start it, she said, even if no one else joined; but she knew that others would join. She thought it ought to be called the 'Sharers,' or some such name, because the idea she had in starting it was just to share trouble voluntarily with those who had it. The kinds of trouble she meant she said were the kinds that human beings let loose on each other; not the kinds we all together try to prevent, such as drought and fire and flood. She did n't mention race hatred, or the Black race, by name.

Alosha Ban was there. She was a member of the Helping Hand and, of course, the most picturesque person in it, wearing, as she did, a modified Oriental dress, and remaining, as she did to the day of her death, a devout Mohammedan. She had married a Macon business man, Henry G. Telemark. It was said that he had met her on a trip to the Philippines. She was generally known as Mrs. Telemark, though she was something of a feminist and usually signed her maiden name. She had thick black hair, and very black eyes, that you might call gazing, or dwelling, eyes: eyes that never darted about from one thing to another, but

seemed to dwell on everything, even as she passed it by. I remember that she looked at Kate with intense concentration that afternoon. She was the only one of us, I thought, that Kate seemed individually conscious of.

It was she, I think, who asked Kate to tell us exactly what she meant by 'sharing.'

Kate said that she believed in the bottom of her heart that such troubles as she had spoken of ought to be shared in full, and to the bitter end. But so far as she herself was concerned, she had n't the courage to do that. She thought there might be people who might join the Sharers, who would be pluckier than she was. Such people, she thought, might be called Sharers to the Death, or Last Degree Sharers. Alosha Ban then, in a composed, even voice, asked:

'Do you mean that if a Black man, then, is lynched, a woman - of another race should commit sui

cide?'

Kate, almost in a whisper, said 'Yes.'

Voices instantly rose all round the room; scarcely one of us but was saying in varying ways, the same thing: 'How could anyone possibly bring such horror and misery on her family?'

Kate did n't speak. She was very pale.

Alosha Ban composedly said: 'It would be just about like a soldier going away to fight. He brings horror and misery on his family.'

So much I remember as if it had happened yesterday. I don't know why I've never written it down before. Since the death two years ago of Kate Cotton, no one else is left, I think, who was present at that meeting.

But the rest of it I don't remember quite so well. I know that Kate must have sketched the Sharers of the Middle Degree, afterward called the Life

Sharers, who would go to live — not for a little while, to see what it was like, but permanently in the forlornest houses in their respective communities, in the dirtiest streets, with the worst drains. And I remember that whereas we had all been willing to consider, after an instant's protest, the remote possibility that somebody, somewhere, might sometime die as a rebel against the custom of lynching, several of us now rose out of our chairs from the mere shock of such a thought as this of living in Negro streets; and most of us speaking at once as before, but louder, in a confusion of dissent, said that it would be harder than death itself to go and live in those places.

Kate laughed at that, and said oh no, it could n't be worse than dying, because any Community could take its Sharers out at any moment, simply by cleaning up those streets and making them wholesome and pleasant.

'We should be martyrs,' she said, 'only until our community decided that it did n't want any martyrs.'

'But you all can see from that,' I remember her saying, 'what a coward I am. For I have n't got even the courage to do that. All I've got the courage to do is to go and live in poor people's streets for three months or so of every year. And I declare I don't believe I've got the courage to take those three months in the summer.'

Even three cool months looked much too hard to the rest of us, and we all said so, except Alosha Ban. Two or three other women and I began trying to think of a still more moderate degree in which we could be sharers. For somehow none of us seemed to want to lay Kate's challenge on the table, and go home and leave it there. Two or three said they would try to do what Kate did. And several of us worked out, that day, before we left the meet

ing, what came to be the Third or Associate Degree. Everyone knows, I suppose, what the Associate Sharers were: women who agreed to enter into the lives of the poor by symbol only. And we honestly felt that we were really sharing just by doing that.

We agreed that we would go into definite mourning for a short time every year for the hardships that survived in our community. For every increase in hardship that fell upon any class in our community, we would extend our time of mourning; and for every pleasantness added to the least pleasant lives among us, we would shorten the time.

I have told thus in detail about the meeting that epoch-making afternoon, partly because my recollections are so much more concrete than the usual accounts, but more because I think the multitudes of women who responded to us in the outside world divided just about as we did that afternoon into the various degrees of Sharers. For every Death Degree, or Life Degree, Sharer, there were perhaps two of the Season Sharers and half a dozen of the Associates. But of course these distinctions were anything but formal or fixed. Season Sharers blended into Life Sharers, and Life and Death Sharers often merged together, and there was about the history of the Institute from its foundation the informal spontaneous growth of things in nature, rather than of those that are manufactured.

So far as I can remember, nothing about all this appeared in the papers until, in the course of six weeks or so, Kate Cotton moved out of her pleasant Vineville Avenue house into one of the little streets where the working race lived. She left her children in charge of their grandmother, just as she had done when she went to Serbia. How homely and simple a movement the Sharers' was arranged to suit house

keeping women, and managed from hand to mouth by common-sense. Kate was only two blocks away from her family, after all. She moved into a small tenement her husband owned, with a peach tree on each side of the door. It had two rooms. I went to see her there, and she was doing her washing in a kettle in the sandy backyard, just as Black women had done it for her for thirty years.

But now, within twenty-four hours, what she had done was in the Atlanta papers. From them it was copied into papers all over the State. For a few weeks she was overwhelmed with reporters and with visitors. But even in those earliest limelight days there was always somebody among the visitors who had come really wanting to join her 'order.' And though a few curiosity-seekers came to see us Associates too, many more came who were interested: surprisingly many. There were not a few who really wanted to find some expression for their own sisterly sense of unrest about the poor, who thought our way might prove theirs.

I believe it's almost impossible to overestimate the amount of talk that was going on by this time about Kate's little movement. Of course at first the principal interest was among the Southern women. It seemed to be a White woman's undertaking at first, but very soon Negro teachers and authors living in the North began asking to be enrolled, and came back to the South, giving up their positions and careers and losing themselves in Sharing. Almost without exception, these Black Sharers took the Life Degree.

Sharers appeared in Europe almost as soon as they did in New York, where at first the Sharing principle was understood to be a variation of the Settlement idea. It was the New York Sharers who amalgamated with that

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young people's exodus, which had begun years before, out from the Ownerscult into the more adventurous kinds of work. As early as the teens of the twentieth century there had begun to be such an exodus, at first in vacations chiefly, when the sons and daughters of the Owners went into the factories or mines, or as stewards and stewardesses on lake and ocean vessels, from June until October. This was probably the reason why the Sharers attained to such a comparatively enormous growth in the colleges.

Before the end of the winter the American newspapers published accounts of Sharers forming in China. I am not sure whether those first Chinese Sharers were the same reckless and ingenious women who locked themselves into their cellars in order to share the lot of malefactors in the Chinese prisons or whether the Prison Sharers' movement came later. This variety of Sharer soon spread, for as early as the spring of 1930 I heard of Prison Sharers in Ireland. Ireland, indeed, was where the Prison Sharers carried their campaign to the greatest heights of devotion, imprisoning themselves in area-enclosures on the streets, and hungerstriking with the hungerstrikers.

But this was after Alosha Ban's death. No historian of the Sharers could ever estimate the course the movement would have taken without that most grisly and effective use to which Alosha Ban decided to put her body. Many critics of the movement think it would have been vastly more effective if it had been less ‘theatrical.' In the opinion of these judges, the selfmartyrdom of Alosha Ban was the match that touched off the movement into what they call a 'bonfire.' It is impossible for me to form any judgment. I was myself, and still am, too much under the dreadful glamour of