critics nearer home. He is the undoubted authority on co-operative finance in America, and his services to humanity were recognized by the Pope in 1914, who awarded him the title of Commandeur of the Order of St. Gregory.

As impressive as the story of the La Caisse is the tale of the spread of the idea throughout Quebec. A demand for a provincial law succeeded in 1906. In 1907 and 1910 a Federal law was proposed but failed of passage. Nevertheless, into every province from Nova Scotia to the Pacific the popular plan extended. plan extended. Every month the mail brings a sheaf of reports to Levis, for the Caisse there literally fathers every other credit union in Canada. Although permitted under the Quebec law, no federation has yet been formed. In a system showing assets of $10,000,000 and recording a general turnover of about $25,000,000 the Levis bank began some time ago informally to function as a central bank, col· lecting statistics, giving advice and of fering information about investments and where money might be secured in case of seasonal demand.

At least a dozen banks in the system have assets over $100,000, some of them banks now eight years old. La Caisse itself had an early period of slow growth. Profiting by its experience, new banks have more than once shown assets of $30,000 in less than two years. In Montreal, Three Rivers, and Quebec their business is with an industrial population; all the rest do an agricultural business. The homogeneous character of the population must be remarked; the social solidarity which results cannot be missed by the dullest observer.

The new service given to people who never before enjoyed credit was responsible for the fact that Pierre Jay, then bank commissioner of Massachusetts, called M. Desjardins to the United States in 1908 to help to start "credit unions" in the United States. Massachusetts immediately passed a bill under which sixty credit societies, most of them sturdy, are now operating. They

spread to New Hampshire and Connecticut even before Congress and the several states despatched an enormous commission to Europe in 1913 to study co-operation.

Since then eleven states have passed laws which more or less successfully— most of them less-aim to encourage cooperative banking. The bank commissioner of Massachusetts advises taxing the credit unions, although in every country they are exempt from such burdens; according to Henry W. Wolff, of England, perhaps the greatest of living authorities on co-operation, many of the restrictions placed upon such institutions in our several state laws are absurd. A wise Federal law will perhaps remove our disabilities. Among Jewish farmers credit unions are progressing. North Carolina reports a thriving start.

The chief obstacle they meet is the financial-minded attitude which fails to perceive the difference between cooperative and joint-stock company principles. The joint-stock company is designed and usually competent to make money rapidly for a limited group of individuals who may live anywhere. The credit union is planned to make money slowly for a larger collective group in the home community, but at the same time to give each member a chance to develop his initiative and responsibility according to his vision. The joint stock company has no object but making money, whereas the credit union considers itself to have a social duty to the community and succeeds in modifying the character of men as well as strengthening the tendency to the best sort of democracy.

The Farm Loans Act, authorizing long-time mortgage credit on the amortization principle, is not at all designed to meet the multitudinous demands for short-period loans for small amounts. Besides, it applies only to farmers, whereas we have hundreds of small towns and numerous cities with comparatively stable and homogeneous population where the chief industry is not farming. Only one system of remedial

loans offers to any extent in the United States such petty cash as does La Caisse, unless one takes into accoun: the precarious, often illegitimate, immigrant banks. The Morris Plan, started by philanthropists who rightly discerned the immense sterile field yearning for credit to make it fertile, offers timely amelioration which has put many pawnbrokers out of business. But whereas La Caisse induces members to count the cost, to save and to invest the idle penny in order that they themselves may use their own money to forward all productive and provident enterprise in their community, the Plan offers remedial rather than constructive loans, at a per cent. much higher than co-operative banks usually find necessary, and stockholders profit in lieu of pawnbrokers or the public. No amount of charitable enterprise could produce the effect on the morale that results from the increase in independence and confidence derived from self-help. Government aid to such enterprises has been found generally inadvisable, sometimes fatal.

Secretary Lane strongly urges the use of co-operative banking by the United States.

M. Desjardins believes that a renewed and developed America would result. Sixty thousand caisses populaires might, he believes, wax prosperous in appropriate small areas, while another form, perhaps like the great People's Bank in Milan, which this year declared a dividend of 32 per cent. on shares, might permit credit to find new channels down to the lowly of large cities. Wolff believes that America must welcome and adopt several varieties of co-operative finance besides La Caisse, all of them notable for the old trick of the co-operative, eliminating unnecessary middle

men.

America cannot fail to note the progress of this powerful idea among practically all the other nations of the world. To cite several: Great Britain somewhat indifferently entertains in Ireland some hundreds of these banks, a few in her South American colonies, and five thou

sand which, in order to help the ryots find their economic feet, she actively encouraged in India; Japan, not to be outdone, began her system ten years ago, and to-day proudly exhibits eight thousand banks. Italy has two immensely prosperous systems.

Russia reports more banks than any other nation, not excepting Germany with her twenty-nine thousand, and, to quote Luzzatti, "even the destructive fury of the present rulers of Russia was arrested before this temple of co-operation (the Moscow Narodny Bank). `Not only was the central bank left intact, but it was permitted to take deposits from private banks." Germany's chain leads all others in the amount of deposits. She has nine million members. The government was actually able to borrow more money from co-operative banks during the war than from any system of private banks. Not that the co-operatives were rich, but they were owned by the deceived patriotic rank and file, more willing to support the country than privately owned institutions. Now, on the old, well-tried principles of mutual aid, they endeavor by painful work to accumulate again the money urgently needed to reward their best industrialists and farmers with credit for their enterprises.

By the best available estimates, about seven billions of dollars are controlled by co-operative banks the world over. Usually they work in fields supplementary to ordinary banks. Nations are demonstrably stronger by the distribution of control of the moneys belonging to all the people. The most powerful leverage in the world is money. In the United States perhaps two-thirds of our people, to gauge conservatively, need the vitalizing effect of credit, not remedial credit, but a "hired man of finance," to start more business going, which will benefit the millions instead of the few, and give natural vent to the spirit of enterprise now discouraged. Such banks as La Caisse are hopeful signs of a true economic democracy.

is one on

grammarian, from many sides. If what

holds open hearings. He passes, for example, the bulletin-board where he has posted the next assignment for "Sophomore English." The victims are copying the list of poems, one calling off the titles, the others scribbling in their notebooks.

"The Grammarian's Funeral,'" calls the announcer. Every one responds.

"Listens good to me." "I'll say she do." "When are they going to pull it off?" "Ought to run it in the movies; it'd draw like a chimney."

Again, as Acting-Critic-in-General to his friends, the professor gets a letter from a popular writer asking for "unsparing criticism" of his latest work. The writer suffers, as a friend should, in chastened silence, till the professor touches on a point of grammar, then the galled jade winces. "What good is grammar, anyway?" he writes, and in pungent terms condemns the whole body of its lore to the everlasting bonfire. He quotes with glee the impassioned sage who said, "When the English language gets in my way, so much the worse for the English language." The letter closes with a postscript, "Kindly tell me to settle a bet whether both verbs in the following sentence should be plural. . . .

He might, then, have admitted that grammar has one use, to settle betsif there had really been any bet to settle; but there was not. The writer asked the question because he wanted to know. The tirade against grammar was nervous bravado, as a dog barks to cover a strategic retreat. The noise of such barking as his reaches the professor, the modern representative of the medieval

walls be typical, nine persons out of ten shy at the word grammar like nervous colts, or prance round the subject as does a puppy round a snapping-turtle, threatening it with ghastly retribution for its sins without so much as knowing what its sins may be, unable either to conquer it once for all or let it alone.

Prob

The grievance is an ancient one; the feeling which would make the grammarian's funeral a joyful occasion to most of mankind is so old that it might almost be an inherited instinct. ably no one knows just when the trouble began, but we know that there was a grammar-school in Rome about two thousand years ago, and that by the time we get to the Middle Ages grammar is invested with all its terrors. By that time the word represented to the popular mind all the mystery of learning; learning which the people denounced as useless and feared at the same time, because they knew not what advantage over them it might give to its possessors. They could conceive of no advantage save the material one, and no mystery save magic. Virgil, whose name they heard on the lips of cleric and scholar, became to their minds the arch necromancer, not, as a tribute to the magic of his poetry, for that they could not read. All learning was in Latin, and grammar was the key to it. Just as Virgil becomes the magician in the thought of the people, so "gramarye' comes to mean magic, the one mystery of which the unlettered folk know more than do any others, but which they constantly attribute to the learned who know nothing more of it than what they

learn from the people. Among medieval grammarians, as among the modern, sound scholars were in the minority; the others did what they could to inflate their mystery and to make the most of popular misconception of their learning. As time went on and learning slowly spread, increasing numbers of boys learned grammar only to hate it. To them it represented only years of torture, the agonizing process of attempted mental effort under the lash. Dogs have terrified cats for unnumbered centuries; small wonder if blind new kittens bristle at a whiff of the hereditary enemy. Are not nineteen or twenty centuries of pedagogical terrorizing almost enough to make a new-born child howl at a musty whiff of grammar, or double its fists at the sight of a grammarian?

Grammar is to most of us an elusive mystery, maddening as a mosquito, real when it stings, but nothing to grasp. The beginner is apt to get the impression from his teacher that its rules are unwavering, and that whoso breaks the smallest of its laws is cast into the outer darkness. Then he notices that the minister in the pulpit says "don't" where he should say "doesn't," and no consuming wrath either from above or below comes to destroy him. He catches "the best people" tripping in their speech, and even Teacher herself one memorable day spoke in class of the best of two exercises! He begins to defy the gods. "You can't say, 'It is me,' says Teacher. "Can't I?" he retorts, "just you watch me." He decides that Teacher's gods are only a set of little grinning clay images on a shelf in the school-room. With a sweeping gesture he sends them crashing from their perch and walks out a free man. Free he remains until he perceives that his stenographer is disdainfully correcting his lapses in grammar, that some of his customers set him down a notch or two on account of his manners of speech, that he needs grammar in his business. Then he feels about it as Silas Lapham did about the white gloves. He feels that its etiquette is slight, trivial, contempti

ble; he hates is and himself that he is baffled by it. He would gladly wrestle with it and throw it, but when he seeks to grasp it it vanishes. He knows that there are limits beyond which he does not wish to go in his freedom in language, but he cannot find them. They shift and recede like the shore in a fog, which you bump when you try to avoid it and seek in vain when you wish to land. It is at about this point in his experience that he becomes the linguistic Bolshevik; driven frantic by the high cost of grammatical experience and the impossibility of acquiring wherewithal to meet its demands, he wishes he could destroy grammar, and after it is gone enjoy in peace all its benefits.

If the layman turns to the grammarian for help, he is not likely to get it. Any grammarian will give reasons that look sound for preferring this construction to that, but they do not wear well; you soon find them unsatisfactory. In the first place, you discover that what you want is facts, not reasons. The real question is not, "Why should we say this rather than that?" but, "Do we say this, or do we say that?" In the second place, the reason you get from one grammarian is promptly discredited by another. Professor A tells you to use construction X because it has been in continuous good use for five hundred years. B prefers Y because it is analogous to another construction. C votes for Z because "a majority of our best writers and speakers use it. Each argument is good so far as it but it is not final, nor are goes, all three together necessarily so. The historical argument has weight; if we know that a construction has been in use for centuries, we know at least that it has proved useful, and we may think twice before we discard it at the word of the purist. But we do not cling to all we have once had; if we did we should still speak Anglo-Saxon. The argument from analogy is good in so far as uniformity is desirable, but it is not a law; we do not reject all constructions for which other constructions do not give us precedent.

If this be grammar, the layman is justified in rejecting it, but it is not; only half of it is grammar, the rest is etiquette.

The rebel who condemns grammar to the flames is justly called a Bolshevik, because democracy is not democratic enough for him. He is like the cat-thatwalks-by-himself in that he wishes all benefits without any restraints or duties. His party is smaller but more noisy than that of the Agnostics, who do not know enough about grammar to hold any opinions of their own, but accept with dyspeptic grace such crumbs of fact and doctrine as they can gather from others. There are the Democrats, who hold that majority rules in Grammarland, therefore all that is is right. There are the Puritans who hold that almost everything that is is wrong; that the only good grammar is dead grammar, the kind no one uses (like the "best room of our grandmothers, which was good for nothing but a funeral); that we should seek to accord our wills with that of the grammar-book; that none have attained grace but themselves and their wives, and sometimes they have doubt about their wives. There are the Royalists who believe in the divine right of the grammarians to make the rules as they should be and enforce them with thunder and guns on the lesser folk who walk

VOL. CXL.-No, 837,-52

in darkness. Perhaps not all of us belong to these parties. Perhaps only half of us are barking at grammar and most of us are barking at one another. The parties represent only in the crudest way the main divisions of opinion; there are countless shades of thought and feeling. The main point is that nearly every one has a grievance, either against grammar or against those who hold some heretical view of grammar.

For one of the fundamental difficulties of the situation there is no possible remedy; it is that grammar got so long a start of the grammarians. Its origin goes back beyond all records, but it is easy to see that it was invented by an anthropoid who used one kind of grunt to mean peace and another to mean war, and the only survivors were those who understood him. Naturally they copied his system, and it soon became bad form to talk any other. We do not know just when this inventor lived, but it might have been about three hundred thousand years ago. His system was practised and developed for perhaps two hundred and ninety-four thousand years before we have the slightest trace of it on record. By that time, some six or seven thousand years ago, languages were so numerous and so well developed that users of them resorted to such images as the Tower of Babel to express the state of linguistic chaos in which they found themselves. And still it was three or four thousand years before anybody paid any attention to it (worth mentioning), or tried to train it in the way it should go. Even then they spent nearly five hundred years quarreling as to the proper method. So we must infer that grammar led a wild, untutored life for approximately two hundred hundred and ninety-eight thousand years; how could its trainers expect to reform it in a paltry two thousand, especially since they have never fully agreed on the way to go about it? The controversy flared up almost as soon as there were any grammarians, between the Democrats and the Royalists, the Anomalists and the Analogists, as they were