work than men who are able and willing to think and plan and execute.

At least we can do much better than now, when vocational guidance is a mixture of casual reports of some friends about their jobs, irrational prejudices and fantastic expectations derived from storybooks, all operating on ignorance both of the world's work and of one's own powers and temperament. Employers can at least realize that a job is never really filled until the employee is found who fits that job in the sense of being able to do it reasonably well and get reasonable satisfaction from it. Anything short of that is a makeshift.

So far the gains illustrated have been such as required action by employers and

the public rather than by the laborers as such. It seemed more convenient to present the facts in this way, but there is no implication that these psychological studies of labor as a total fact, including all its evils and all its rewards, for all sorts of individuals, should be made chiefly by employers and by the public. On the contrary, it seems highly desirable that workers themselves should provide for the scientific study of work, and for hopeful enterprises to improve efficiency and enjoyment in work as well as to attain and maintain fair hours and wages. Many of the best friends of organized labor are hoping that it may increasingly become the source of impartial knowledge of labor in all its aspects.

TH

You have probably forgotten him. It must be a great relief to have forgotten Armitage; for he is the man who believes that the realities of life are to be found in movements, tendencies, waves, rising tides, swinging pendulums, and so forth. As for the mere individual-he no longer counts. As one who loathes these swamping generalizations, I have been trying for months to avoid Armitage. Successfully, too, until the other night when I met him at dinner. The swing of the pendulum, I suppose.

After the table had been cleared I found myself wedged between Armitage and my host. The latter is a man after Armitage's own heart. He is a distinguished member of the Chamber of Commerce, and once, in answer to some question of mine about the causes of unemployment, he uttered, like an impatient oracle, the mystic words, "Action and reaction!" So you can imagine what a glorious time he and Armitage had when they fell to talking about international affairs. I resigned myself to the role of a tormented no-man's land while the big guns of assertion and counter-assertion roared over my head, interspersed now and then by the rattle of corroborative detail. One does not try to read a meaning into the voice of artillery unless one happens to be a big gun oneself, so I will merely try to record some impression of the noise.

Our host would say something like this:

"An economic conference! That's the next thing. We've got to come to

that speech of Sonnenschein's to the Confederate Bankers' Club the other day?"

"No," Armitage would reply, in the surprised tone of one who never missed anything that Sonnenschein said. (Sonnenschein, by the way, is the man who bought up most of Siberia the other day while he was passing through.)

"Well, Sonnenschein says that at least five European countries will repudiate their currencies within three months if the terms of the Treaty are not revised. Poland, Rumania, Bessarabia, and-I've forgotten the other two."

"Latmia and Ansonia," put in Armi

tage.

"Yes, that's it. . . . Well, suppose they are driven to that-" Then, turning to me.

"Of course you realize what it will mean to business in this country if that happens?"

I didn't. I never shall. At the moment I was preoccupied with amazement at Armitage's apparently easy knowledge of the financial condition of unheard-of European states. But if I had known the meaning of repudiating currency I should have been even more amazed at the calm way in which this was spoken of. I have since found out what it means. For the sake of the multitudes who even now sit in an ignorance as dark as mine once was, I will explain. I give you a note for five dollars. A few weeks later you discover that I have given a number of other people notes for different amounts.

Becoming restless, you come to me to collect. "Sorry, old man," I say; "I'm in a bad hole. Call it two-fifty and come to me in a month for it." You return after a month to discover that in six months' time my note may be good for fifty cents. Meanwhile I have been assailed by other persons bearing notes. At the end of five months and twenty-nine days I weary of this turbulent financial life. The solution is simple. Not suicide-something much simpler. I merely announce that I have decided to change my terminology: wherever I have written five dollars, intending to pay, I now mean one cent, and so on in proportion. Just like that! That, as far as I have been able to learn, is what is called repudiating the currency. Apparently you can do this sort of thing if you are a small nation. It makes one envy the small nations sometimes!

At the time, however, I knew nothing about the repudiation of the currency. I suppose I must have looked as I felt -both stupid and frightened, for Armitage pounced on me at once. I realized with horror that he was going to enlighten me; yes, with missionary patience and determination he was going to "Explain It All."

"Have you any idea," he began, "of the present bonded indebtedness of this country?"

"Of course the only way out is a cancellation of debt all round."

To me there was something unnatural in the quiet assent given to this monstrous proposal. It was as though a woman should greet her husband in the evening with, "I could not get anyone to clean the cellar, so I've ordered an earthquake for to-morrow morning," and he should reply, "I think you did quite right, my dear.”

And then my irreverent mind conceived a quaint fancy. We have all heard of books on National Sports; Fox Hunting, Tossing the Caber, Bull Fighting, Spinning the Trencher, and so on. It seemed to me there was room for another volume in this series. It would treat of such games as Realizing the Destiny and Calling the Conference, and it would certainly contain chapters on Repudiating the Currency and Can

When I returned to the conversation it had shifted to another topic. I learned that an entity called Japan had to expand and that another entity called the United States had to go

ferred to as "controlling the Pacific." Incidentally I was adding to my collection of national sports, but as I heard that "Germany" wanted to do this and "France" was angry about that, I began to perceive the mental predicament of these talkers. Just as it seemed petty to them to take account of any sum smaller than a billion dollars, so, to their fevered judgment, it was the

mark of a puny mind to consider the fortunes of anything smaller than an entire nation. A billion dollars, forty million souls, a million square milesthese were their units of discourse. They were gods, and whole peoples their puppets-but I can assure you that for a mere mortal it was a most exhausting evening.

But it was not utterly wasted. I learned at least one thing from my experience. You know how every year every college president tells the graduating class that they are standing on the threshold of a new life, that what the world needs is men who will be leaders, men of broad vision, and that the need was never so great as now. I have often wondered what a man of broad vision was really like, half fearing to meet one in the flesh because of a presentiment that I should not take to him. Now I know. Armitage is a man of broad vision, that's what he is. All such men should be shot at dawn. But, of course, the desire to shoot Armitage at dawn or at any other time is otiose and ineffectual. I must try to counteract his influence in less drastic and less conspicuous ways.

When I got home that night I made several resolutions. First, to stop at the drug store the next day and pay a long-standing account (perhaps I should say my bonded indebtedness) of thirtynine cents. Second, to tender a nickel in payment for four penny stamps at the post office and to count the change. Third, to take out citizenship papers in the state of Monaco (I think that is the one I mean), which has no foreign policy, no national debt, and a total population of about one hundred and thirteen. Fourth, pending this consummation, to adopt the philosophical theory known as solipsism. According to this doctrine I am the only existing reality; everything else exists only as my idea. After all, one must do something to restore the normal scale of life, and solipsism has the advantage of disposing quite neatly of Armitage.

VOL. CXLIV.-No. 864.-102

In that universe which is my mind I shall assign him a humble place: he will be one of my literary fictions.

No

PARTNERS IN POVERTY

BY RUTH LAMBERT JONES

OT everyone can be a Partner in Poverty. Fewer still can occupy that position and enjoy it. Yet the recipe is exceedingly simple.

In the first place, one must be possessed of yery little sense, even less money, and an aspiration to live in America's largest city. In the second place, find a friend endowed with the same qualifications, minus a husband (he may be deceased, divorced, or dispatched on a business trip), plus two husky children aged about eight and ten, respectively. respectively. (The children are absolutely essential since they provide numbers, a joie de vivre, and a stimulus which might otherwise be lacking.) Then choose your environment, preferably the garret of a rooming house run by Schwab's, or any other potentate's, excook, and bordering, say, the Ransonia, that hostelry honored by the presence of America's baseball wizard.

Let the approach to your garret be through a dank hall illuminated by a debilitated, red-globed gas jet, and up innumerable steep stairs, bathed in Stygian gloom and perfumed by the diverse aromas arising from sundry gas plates. Let your quarters themselves be two rooms, formerly one, but now divided by a beaver-board partition into a living room and an extremely narrow hall bedroom. Neither should you overlook the one closet outside in the hall, in which you will be forced to select garments entirely by sense of touch, since no ray of light ever penetrates its depths; nor the draughty bath, which is a day's journey distant; nor the "kitchenette," which is an aperture off the living room about the size of a wardrobe trunk, containing two gas burners, three shelves, and four hooks.

Such conditions will almost automatically result in other conditions. The furnishings of your living room, for instance, will probably consist of one ponderous, black-walnut, marble-topped "buffet," with blear-eyed mirror and frosted-glass doors; one massive baizecovered table of the same vintage; four variegated chairs; one cot; one couch; one fireplace very much occupied by a gas heater; one very weather-beaten rug; and one electric-light fixture. Your bedroom will contain with great difficulty two beds, one bureau, and one chair.

These furnishings will have their limitations. The drawers of the buffet, which perforce you will use for a bureau, will stick; one drawer will be negotiable only by opening the door below it and poking from beneath. The table, although rooted to the spot whenever you desire to move it, will have legs so arranged that he who does not sit down to a meal gingerly will be the means of joggling over all the liquid upon it; also its casters will have the disconcerting faculty of coming off suddenly and uptilting one end. The chairs, all save one whose upholstering sags untidily floorward, will be models of straight-backed discomfort, gilded and tapestried relics of former splendor with large humps in the middle which create the illusion of toppling air cushions. The cot will be very fair as cots go, but the couch, as the children tell you, will be a bit sparse for sleeping purposes. Although a worthy and highly necessary supplement to the lone register which is supposed to heat the apartment, the gas heater will keep the atmosphere charged with its own peculiar odor. And the lights, always a little out of reach, always accessible only after much stretching and straining, will have a hard, unescapable brilliance which will render reading dangerous.

Your menu will be governed by your facilities for cooking and eating, and your facilities will be governed both by your lack of space and by your lack of finances. You will wash your dishes in the same bowl in which you wash your

hands, and your refrigerator, since the window ledge is taboo, will be the bureau in your bedroom.

You will become inured to many small hardships, such as telephone messages that are never delivered, call bells that are never rung the correct number of times to summon you to friends who are waiting below, hot water that is never hot when you most emphatically need it, cockroaches surveying you coolly from the pipes when you are in the midst of a bath, and the complications that attend the presence of milk and butter on your bureau, and the doing of laundry when the only place to hang it is over the brasses of your beds.

Under pressure of such circumstances you will constantly be forming and unforming habits. What you lose in fastidiousness you will gain in adaptability. It requires ingenuity to finish a bit of prose in the midst of roller skates, kewpie dolls, lollipops, darning baskets, shoe trees, and art catalogues, to the tune of a geography lesson being dinned into two unheeding pairs of ears. requires ingenuity of a different sort to transplant without disturbance two buxom young sleepers back from your bedroom into theirs, which is your sitting room by day and which has just served as such for your evening's guests.

It

But what of the things for which you and your Poverty Partner will leave comfortable, roomy houses in the suburbs and expose yourselves to the rigors of chaos and cockroaches? What of the concerts, the exhibitions, and the plays? Will there be any wherewithal left, however meagerly you live, to pay for them, asks the skeptic? His cynicism can be the most conclusively answered by the program that will be yours.

You will revel in the galleries. Your education will range from the etchings of Whistler, Pennell, Bellows, Bruet, and Roth to the ethereal pastels and the exquisite silverpoints of Dewing; from the miniature water colors of Williams