bosses, looking to a government not by and for the people, but by corporations in their own selfish interest. At this same dinner other speakers showed that in New York and elsewhere in the Union the common sense of the American people had not yet prevented the seizure by private corporations of public franchises, or the abuse by officials of the functions of government and its powers of taxation in the corrupt interest of individuals.

There is a truly "imperial" field for the application of American common sense in the conduct of the affairs of the tropical islands which, for good or evil, for a limited or for a perpetual period, are on our hands. In this number of THE CENTURY Mr.James Bryce shows, in a highly interesting way, what British common sense has accomplished in the solution of similar problems. President John R. Procter of the United States Civil-service Commission said recently that we had made a good beginning in sending men like General Wood to Santiago and General Ludlow to Havana; at the same time, he held up the example of Great Britain in the successful management of distant dependencies through the application of the merit system, to which the government was driven by the very necessity of the case. In India only one soldier is now required for every thirty-eight hundred inhabitants, and Mr. Procter declared that under the English system the same ratio in the Philippines would call for an army of only twenty-one hundred men. He added: "Whether we will be able to govern the Philippines with this relatively small force, as the English have Ceylon and India, will depend upon whether we apply the English system of colonial government, or a modified form of the old Spanish spoils system." The English system so much praised is, indeed, merely a system of common honesty and common sense, and ought not to be impossible of emulation by a people which prides itself on its skill in meeting emergencies and on its common, sometimes called horse, sense.

American common sense has certainly been of great service to the American people in many past crises. We have rushed at times apparently to the brink of disaster, and common sense has swerved us away from the precipice. But common sense has not prevented the long existence of many evils which it has at last cured. It was only the other day that American common sense put to work an American of uncommon sense really to clean the streets of the American metropolis. Common sense permits to-day many evils which it ought to bring to an immediate end. In fact, American common sense needs to be saved from old-fashioned American complaisance; it needs to be quickened by American conscience, and to be pushed forward by American energy, and to be kept going by American "drive."

No American has a right to bring American common sense into his argument if he does so in a light and over-ge spirit. He has no right to fall back on the common sense of his country

men unless in fact his own common sense and patriotic fervor are leading him to do his full share in abating the evils and averting the dangers which he, with all good citizens, sincerely deplores. Things never go right of themselves. According to the best teachers of ethics, Providence has always shown a preference for being "assisted."

A Lesson from Alexander.

IF Alexander the Great had not by his magical career given a new impetus to civilization, future generations would still have remained under lasting obligations to him for the manner in which he taught posterity the value of discipline and skill. For of all the lessons which every generation must learn anew for itself, that is the one which is most slighted by impatient humanity and is the most difficult to realize in practice.

At the battle of Issus, which Professor Wheeler describes on another page, the youthful king with his thirty thousand men rushed at Darius's host of six hundred thousand, with the temerity of a pygmy fastening on the legs of a giant. He knew that if it were merely a matter of butchering six hundred thousand men, his thirty thousand, though they were invulnerable, would fall from exhaustion be fore the field would be strewn with their lifeless foes. But with panic for an ally the enemy might be left mainly to destroy themselves. He need not dread that panic, the prime dissolvent of armies, would join his own ranks: discipline tempered by experience had made the companion cavalry and the phalanx impenetrable to fear. Yet panic might be ineffective as an ally unless set loose at the very core of the dense Persian array. That was where Darius sat in his chariot, walled about by an unwieldy horde. Alexander himself led the thrust which, with genius-like skill, first parted the Persian flank and then drove at the startled monarch. The moment Darius sought safety at the rear, panic, the infection of mind and heart, spread with the quickness of thought, and six hundred thousand Persians became a fear-stricken mob.

Thus discipline and skill gained on the narrow plain of Issus, between the walled mountains and the deep sea, the greatest victory of the ages. Every feature of the situation would have acted as a disadvantage to a less resolute commander: but Alexander, with sheer intellect, which is the essence of discipline and skill, made of his critical position a supreme opportunity and triumph. The narrow field rendered the Persian mass unwieldy and a ready victim to Alexander's plan of battle; but on the level plain of Gaugamela, where Darius had plenty of room and a million men, and Alexander under fifty thousand, the mighty Persian host was overthrown by the same general plan adapted to the differing conditions. Though Gaugamela was in the sense of bigness and conclusiveness a larger victory than Issus, the latter was the supreme test of Alexander's greatness as a soldier.

"The Century's" American Artists Series. "THE GOLDEN GALLEON," BY ROSS TURNER.

DOSS TURNER was twenty-nine before he seriously began the study of art; then, in 1876, he left America, and after some drifting settled down in Munich. There he had little or no regular academic study, the schools being not greatly to his taste, and as an artist he is in the main self-educated, if one can be said to be self-educated who has had the benefit of a residence in the great Bavarian art center and of intimacy with its host of artists and art students, and the help and guidance of Chase and Duveneck, to whom Turner affectionately confesses his indebtedness. Later he spent some years in Italy in study of the great masters, and from them, I suspect, he drew many of their secrets of composition and color. While in Munich he won the friendship of the Greek artist Constance Bolouachi, whom he describes as "a wonderful marine-painter and a generous friend." In 1883 he returned to America, and settled in Boston. Since then he has made many trips abroad, and has sketched much in Bermuda and Mexico.

I am told that, while yet a boy in his father's printing-office, Turner qualified himself for a position as mechanical draftsman, and later, in 1875, he became an adjunct of the Patent Office in that capacity. It is difficult, however, to believe that the mechanical can have any part in his composition, for means, formula, the academy, are never obtrusive in his work. He seems to paint as the birds sing. To be sure, his note is not the nightingale's, full, resonant, voluptuous, but rather the sweet, low, gentle cadences of the English linnet, heard while the hawthorn in the hedges is in bloom. One thing, however, is certain: it has none of the sophistication of the caged canary. Above and beyond any other qualities he possesses, and they are many, Ross Turner is a colorist. His is the rare sense which discriminates between "colors" and "color." I remember a little canvas of his, exhibited perhaps

ten years ago at the Boston Art Club, of a few white chrysanthemums on a white cloth-white only upon white; and yet the little bit of canvas glowed and scintillated with color, pearly and waxy grays, subtle suggestions of pinky and violet tones, of yellows and greens, the thousand and one broken tones which lay hidden in the semi-transparent petals of the flowers, contrasted with the dead, cold white of the woven cloth upon which they rested.

But even were he not so good a colorist, his pictures would win by their quality of distinction. There comes to my mind in this connection a picture of his of a white tramp steamship with red funnel floating in the Venetian lagoon, weatherbeaten and battered, the white paint of her hull stained and marred; but the old tramp sat the water as gracefully as a swan, and seemed to protest with a languid, well-bred air against her inglorious ease in the mud of the Venetian lagoon.

Ross Turner's inspiration for "The Golden Galleon," reproduced in tint as the frontispiece of this number of THE CENTURY, was in the main derived from one of Lockhart's Spanish ballads, "Count Arnaldo's Galley":

Sail of satin, mast of cedar,

Burnished poop of beaten gold,-
Many a morn you'll hood your falcon
Ere you such a bark behold.

Sails of satin, masts of cedar,

Golden poops, may come again, But mortal ear no more shall listen To yon gray-haired sailor's strain.

Stately galley! glorious galley!

God hath poured his grace on thee!
Thou alone mayst scorn the perils

Of the dread devouring sea!

Ross Turner is vice-president of the Boston Art Club and a member of the American Watercolor Society, New York.

W. Lewis Fraser.

A Calculating Bore.

My friend Bings is one of those habitual calculators-one of the kind that says if all the teeth that have been extracted since the first dentist began business were to be used for paving purposes in Hades, the good-resolutions contractor would be out of a job for ten thousand years. He thinks in numbers, and if he were a minister he would get all his texts from the same source.

The other day he saw me first on a ferry-boat, and immediately buttonholed me. Said he: "How sad it is to think that so much labor goes for naught!"

I knew that I was in for one of his calculations; but I also knew that it would be useless to try to head him off.

He stroked his beard, and said, with an imitation of thoughtfulness:

"Every day in this Empire State one million human beings go to bed tired because you and I and the rest leave butter on our plates and don't eat our crusts."

I told him that I was astonished, but that he I would have to elucidate.

"The farmers sow 8,000,000 bushels of useless grain,-grain that eventually goes out to sea on the refuse-scows, --they milk 50,000 cows to no other purpose than to produce sour or spilled milk, they allow their valuable hens to lay 1,654,800,001 eggs that will serve no better purpose than to spatter some would-be Booth or lie neglected in some out-of-the-way corner, while their wives are making 1,008,983 pounds of butter that will be left on the edges of plates and thrown into the refuse-pail. If they did n't sow the useless grain, or fuss over the hens that lay the unused eggs, or draw the milk that is destined to sour, or make the butter that is to ornament the edges of the china disks, they would be able to go to bed merely healthily tired instead of overworked, and fewer farmers would commit suicide, and fewer farmers' wives would go insane." His eyes gleamed, and I knew that, as he would put it, his pulse was going so fast that if it were revolutions of a locomotivewheel it would take only so long to go somewhere. "And what is your remedy for all this?" asked I, with becoming, if mock, interest.

"Let us help ourselves to no more than we want at table, buy our eggs a week earlier, drink our milk the day before, eat our bread before it is too dry, and in six months' time there will be a reduced State death-rate, more vacancies in the insane asylums, 1,456,608 rosy cheeks where to-day there are that many pale ones-"

Just then the ferry-boat's gates were lifted, and as we went our several ways, in the hurry that is characteristic of 7,098,111 Americans out of eight millions, I thought that, if all the brains of all the arithmetical cranks were used in place of wood-pulp to make into paper, we writers would get our pads for nothing.

Charles Battell Loomis.

But I gaed and better gaed-for what use in standing still?

Until I saw a farmsteading betwixt me and the hill;

There was neither beast nor body I could see upon the muir,

But up the brae I tuik the way, and chappit at the door.

I chappit at the door, and out there cam' a lass; Swift and sudden through my heart I felt her beauty pass.

"Your hair 's sae bonny-black," thocht I, “sae There 's fowk aneuch in Sutherland as lang 's bonny-gray your e'ethere's you and me."

Henry Johnstone.

The Dream-God.

ADOWN the winding thoroughfare

The rosy dream-god came. "Here's dreams for sale!" rang on the air"Ho! dreams of wealth and fame!" The throngs they wavered round him there Like eddies on a stream;

The old and sear, the young and fair,

All strove to buy a dream.

"Ho! dreams for sale, for one and all!
Old maid, here's youth again;
Here 's beauty, for a pittance small,
That made you loved of men!
Old man, here is a dream for you,

A brimming cup of joy;
Lift to your lips the magic brew,
And be once more a boy!"
Youth bought "To-morrow" dreams, Old Age
Bought dreams of "Yesterday";
The fool was there, so was the sage,
Each took a dream away.
And, Sweetheart, prithee let me add
That, ere he passed from view,
I gave him all the gold I had,
And bought a dream—of you!

Harold MacGrath.