selfishness; but, How can we fulfill our obligations to peoples weaker than ourselves and dependent on us for that which is the foundation of community life-law, order, justice, and liberty?

The South and Pensions

The suggestion made in some quarters that ex-Confederate soldiers should be added to the pension list is grateful as a sign of the final passing of ancient animosities and the final triumph of the feeling of nationality; but the Southern press is showing great wisdom in putting aside, almost without exception, the suggestion as improper. All that remains of the lost cause is a splendid tradition of heroism. That tradition is of priceless value to the South; it enriches the life of the Southern people by the sentiment and poetry which come with it; and to put the Confederate veterans upon the pension list would go a long way toward destroying that sentiment and blurring the memory of heroism which the South now sacredly preserves. The indiscriminate extension of the pension system in the North has cost the country an enormous amount of money; but it has cost the North still more in the sacrifice of a noble sentiment. It has gone far to blur the fair memory of the heroisms of thirty-five years ago.

That there ought to have been a generous provision for those who were in any way disabled in that tremendous struggle may be taken for granted-this country is never otherwise than generous-but the mechanical and unscrupulous way in which the pension business has been handled, the vast commercial element which has entered into it, the condition of semi-pauperism which in too many cases it has introduced, have wounded the country at a very sensitive point. We may be rich enough to pay $145,000,000 a year on the pension account; we are not rich enough to capitalize in money that heroism and sacrifice which are the expression of the spiritual life of a people. We have done a host of men irreparable injury, as those know who know anything about the practical working of the pension system; and we have lacked the courage to deal honestly and frankly with the whole matter. Leading public men have all along said privately about the system what they have not dared to say publicly. When Sena

tor Hawley declared that the pension system would make wars so expensive as to end them, he held out a gleam of hope which, unhappily, has not been realized. The same wholesale business methods which have degraded the idea of the pension and have gone far to vulgarize the position of the pensioner will undoubtedly be applied in the case of the men who have served in Cuba and Manila. It is not too early to raise a voice of protest, and to call for a sound, wise, honorable pension system which shall make, by its discrimination, every bestowal of a pension a badge of honor.

Character and Fate

There has always been a passionate protest in the heart of the race against that element in life which men call fate; the play upon unprotected natures of those events, accidents, calamities, which are beyond human control. These arbitrary happenings are often tragic in their consequences; they often seem wholly irrational; they have at times a touch of brutal irony. In many cases one is tempted to personify fate as a malignant spirit, studiously and with malicious cunning seeking ways of wounding, stinging, bruising, and poisoning the most sensitive souls. There have been human careers so completely distorted and thwarted that it has seemed as if the gods were jealous of men, and anxious to rob the great rewards of their sweetness and the noblest achievements of their fruit. So often are the prizes snatched from the strong hand that had grasped them that the Greek poets could not withdraw their gaze from that irony which at times appears to make human life the mere sport of the higher powers. The gods seemed to be mocking men by holding out glittering gifts and then suddenly snatching them away. And this play of what appears to be blind force still has its way in the world. The noblest cathedral is at the mercy of the earthquake; the divinest picture or poem may be turned to ashes in a brief quarter of an hour; the misplacing of a switch may wreck the most commanding intellect; a moment's inattention may break the happiest circle and cloud the fairest sky.

The conditions under which men live have remained unchanged except as human fore. sight and skill have changed them; but in

that simple statement lies an immense change of point of view. There are still mysteries in the ordering of the world which have not been solved and probably are insoluble in this stage of development; but we have discovered that nature is our friend and teacher in the exact degree in which we learn her ways and co-operate with her. The area of what once appeared to be mere blind interferences with human activity and happiness steadily contracts; the area of beneficent and helpful relationship steadily widens. Men are now safe where they were once in peril; they are now masters where they were once servants. Through what seemed the play of mere physical force there now shines the light of that great movement upward which we call development; that sublime conception which, as one of the most spiritual thinkers of our generation has said, has come to light just in time to save some of the finest and most sensitive spirits from despair. For that conception not only involves a progress ive order working in the place of what seemed to be blind force; it involves also a progressive inclusion of all human interests in a system vast as the universe and old as eternity, and yet mindful of each soul's welfare and growth. A vision of order slowly becoming clearer as all things work together for the good of those who obey, throws new light on what appeared to be the waste and sheer brutality of the past; and where we do not understand, we can wait; since we may rest in the assurance that we are not the victims of a merciless physical order nor the sport of those who have power but not righteousness, the willingness to hurt but not the wish to heal.

We are learning, also, that a very large part of the happenings and experiences which once seemed to come to men unsought are really invited, and are only the outward and visible fruits of inward dispositions and tendencies. Human responsibility is very much more in clusive than it appears to be at the first glance; and men are far more completely the masters of their fate than they are prone to believe or confess. In fact, in any searching analysis the power of what we call fate shrinks to very small proportions. It is our habit to relieve ourselves of our own responsibility in small matters by invoking the bogy of bad luck, and in large matters by charging upon fate the ill fortune which we have brought upon ourselves. Many men and

women suffer themselves to be comforted and deceived all their lives by these illusive agencies or specters of their own making. The results of their own blindness, carelessness, lack of judgment, neglect of opportunities, misleading egotism, are quietly and persistently put to the charge of luck or fate; and the self-fashioned sufferer takes another step in self-deception by drugging himself with that most enervating of all forms of consolation, self-pity. Hosts of men and women go through their lives without once looking their deeds in the face or seeing themselves with clear eyes. They comfort themselves with lies until they lose the power of sight; they disown the fruits of their own sowing.

No words have pierced this demoralizing illusion with more searching force than Emerson's great phrase, “Character is destiny." When a man perceives that he is living in a world of absolute moral order, witnessed alike in the obediences and disobediences of men; that what he reaps he has sown, and that he can and will reap nothing else; that his career is shaped and framed by his own will; that the great experiences which come to him for good or ill, for misery or blessedness, do not pursue him, but are invited by him; that a man's spirit attracts the things which are congenial to it and rejects those which are alien-when a man perceives these things, he is in the way of honest living and of spiritual growth. Until he does see these facts and accept them, he deludes himself, and his judgment of life is worthless.

Few things are more significant than the slow and often unconscious building of a home for his spirit which every man carries to completion. When the birds build their nests, they have access to the same materials, but what different selections they make and how far apart their methods are! Every one who comes into life has access to substantially the same material; but each selects that which belongs to him. By instinct or by intelligence he builds his home with unerring adaptation to the needs and quality of his nature. To the pure all things are pure; to the impure all things are impure. The unselfish construct a beautiful order of service and helpfulness about them; the selfish make their own places. Honor and confidence and rectitude are in the air when the man of sensitive integrity appears; suspicion, mistrust, and doubt pervade the place where the man with

out character abides. Clean and comforting thoughts fly to the pure in heart; debasing fancies gather like foul birds around the man whose imagination is a home of corruption. If we look deeply, a wonderful fitness reveals itself between those we know well and their several fortunes. Calamity may bear heavily upon them, but the moral world they construct for themselves out of the substance of their own natures is indestructible. Life is august and beautiful or squalid and mean as we interpret and use it; the materials are in all men's hands, and the selection and structure inevitably and infallibly disclose the character of the builder. As a beautiful woman furnishes her home until it becomes an externalization of her own ideals and qualities, and then fills it with the charm and sweetness of her own personality until it becomes a material expression of her own nature, so do we all silently, and for the most part unconsciously, form spiritual environments and fashion the world in which we live.

There are few sublimer promises in the Bible than that which the words, "Light is sown for the righteous," convey but cannot contain. This sublime phrase points the way to that complete freedom which the human spirit craves; that final emancipation from the forces which it does not choose and cannot control, which marks the full maturity of spiritual development. It promises the gradual supremacy of the soul over all accidents, happenings, forces, and materials; its final emancipation from all servitude. As life goes on, fate grows less and less, character grows more and more; the fields become more completely our own, and yield nothing which we have not sown; the correspondence between our spirits and our fortunes becomes more complete, until fate is conquered by and merged into character. In the long run a man becomes what he purposes, and gains for himself what he really desires. We not only fashion our own lives, but, in a very true sense, as Omar Khayyám intimates, we make heaven or hell for ourselves. It is idle to talk about luck, fortune, or fate; these words survive from the childhood of the race; they have historical interest, but they have no moral value to-day. No one can hide behind them or bring them into court as competent witnesses on his behalf. It is wise to face the ultimate truth which must sooner or later confront us: we make or mar ourselves, and are the masters of our own fates and fortunes.

An Overrated Virtue Submission appears to us to be a greatly overrated virtue. To submit is, etymologically, to be sent under; and, by inference, to allow one's self to be sent under, or put under the will or authority of another. When an enemy had been conquered by a Roman army, the conquered foe was compelled to pass under a yoke formed by two spears stuck in the ground, with another fastened transversely over their tops. This passing under the yoke was a submission to the will or power of the Roman Emperor. If one has been fighting against God, and comes reluctantly to the conclusion that it is useless to fight longer, and accedes to the divine will because it cannot be resisted, he submits—that is, he consents to pass under the authority or the power of God; and certainly it is wiser and in every way better to do this cheerfully than grudgingly and whiningly. If one has been all his life fighting God, and late learns of God's love, and yields, not to his power, but to his goodness and his gentleness, this is a better submission.

But surely the Christian, who knows himself God's child, should be able to do something better than submit to a will that he cannot resist, or even to a victorious love. If he trusts his Father's judgment, if he believes in the wisdom of his Father's love, and the love in his Father's wisdom, he will not merely consent to come under his Father, but he will not be willing to live except in subjection to that will. Christ did not submit when in Gethsemane he prayed, Thy will, not mine, be done: it was his will that his Father's will should be done; this was the burden of his prayer; his will was not under his Father's will, it was one with his Father's will. It is a mistake to suppose that Christ was in agony unspeakable because he dreaded the shame and the pains of the morrow. He feared lest, in this critical and culminating hour of his life, he might fail to fulfill the mission with which he deemed himself charged; the cup which he besought might pass from him was the cup of failure; yet even this he was willing to drink, if in his failure his Father's success might be won; and his prayer was not, My will be done-nevertheless, I submit to thine; but, Thy will, not mine, be done. So in the prayer which he has given to the world, its culmination is, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." So Paul, proud and self-reliant and strong of will

though he was, did not merely submit to tribulation; he gloried in tribulation.

When Hobson wished men to join him in his desperate undertaking, his companions did not submit to the will, authority, or power of the commander. They were but seven chosen out of over three hundred eager to hazard all in a forlorn hope for their country. No one waited to be ordered; there was no room for submission. This should be the spirit of the child of God, and will be if he is truly one with his Father, if he believes in his Father's love and trusts his Father's wis dom. He will never find occasion to submit. He will be eager to do and to endure whatever his Father's wise love appoints. The larger the service, the greater the task, the heavier the burden, the more exhilaration will he feel in the confidence which the Father shows by reposing so great a trust in him.

A Poet's Centenary

The three hundredth anniversary of the death of Edmund Spenser will not pass unnoticed here or in England; for, however deeply engaged in practical affairs the English race may be, it is never wholly forgetful of that still small voice of the human spirit which, like the song of the almost invisible lark, is heard far and wide over the fields in which men toil. It gives art its highest significance that its noblest works are born in the travail of great experiences, and that without contact with life the creative imagination is the prey of idle dreams, and misses its splendid vision of the tragedy and beauty of life. It is not surprising, therefore, that the race which has given the world Drake, Frobisher, Nelson, and Wellington has also given it Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, and Tennyson; that the race which, in power of organization and in genius for government, is the successor of

George Kennan, whose "Story of the War" published during the summer in The Outlook attracted wide attention for its thoroughness of investigation and brilliancy of description, sailed for Santiago recently, having fully recovered from the attack of fever which prostrated him last August. Mr. Kennan is undertaking, as Special Commissioner for The Outlook, a thorough inspection of the island of Cuba, and a study of its present condition and its possibilities, social, political, and industria, He will be occupied for several months in the work, and the record of his investigations will be published in successive issues of The Outlook, beginning about the first of February.

Readers of Mr. Kennan's "Story of the War" cannot have failed to note that the evidence taken before the Army Investigating Commission has confirmed fully Mr. Kennan's criticisms on the failure to provide suitable transports, adequate means of landing the troops, and sufficient ambulance and medical equipment. In short, the very points upon which our correspondent laid greatest stress in his articles have been shown to be the really vital defects of the campaign.

This first series of articles written for The Outlook, revised and expanded, will before long be issued in book form by the Century Company, under the title "Campaigning in Cuba."

world, the Greek tradition of the free imagination, the creative spirit, the passion for beauty. It is this range of spiritual life which gives the English race its vitality; the springs of its immense practical activity are in its latent idealism, and its heroes of action are never without affinity with its poets.

It is significant that the earliest English poet sang because he was commanded to sing by a higher power; it was in response to a vision that Cædmon struck the first resounding note; and from that day English poetry, although sinking at times perilously near mere verse-making, has never wholly lost that vision. If at times the English people have seemed indifferent to it and it has hung like a mirage on the far horizon, it has never wholly vanished, and it has found in their hearts that home which their hands have for the moment seemed to deny it. When the storm of the Civil War was approaching in this country, the voices of the poets were heard above the turmoil in tones as clear and penetrating as the moving convictions which rose to music in them; and when, not long ago, the greatest of modern empires gathered in its ancient capital the representatives of the peoples who acknowledge its authority, in all the splendid pageantry, aside from the spectacle of the aged and lonely Queen, nothing moved the heart of the English people as did Mr. Kipling's lines. The poet as the voice of the spirit was never more

potential than in the fierce commercialism of an age which has heard the voice of Tennyson freighted with the deepest truth, the ringing tones of Browning affirming the sovereignty of the spirit over fate and evil, and the elegiac notes of Arnold touched with the pathos of ebbing faith. If the time ever comes when life divorces itself from art, the activities of the race will bring neither peace nor joy, and its pleasures will turn to ashes in its hand.

There are no signs of that day, so long predicted by the pessimists; on the contrary, there are many evidences that the English race, on both sides of the sea, becomes more dissatisfied with merely material achievement, and craves more passionately than ever the satisfactions of spiritual achieve ment. In such a time-the power of the race felt at the ends of the earth and its responsibilities matching its power-the vision of life must grow clearer, and the sovereignty of the spirit over all its activities must be more distinctly affirmed. The "Faerie Queene" was not written amid the lovely surroundings of Penshurst, in the gracious society of a time prodigal of great men; it was written in the ungenial air of Ireland, amid the turbulence of an angry and oppressed people. Its music was like the song of birds heard on the edge of a tempest. Before it was completed the tempest broke and the poet was flying for his life, as a writer in another column reminds us. So out of the stress and strife the most poetic of English poems was born! The fact is significant; and so is the genius of the poet. There is none other in the long history of our literature so remote from the every-day work of the English race, so completely detached from its ordinary occupations, so apparently removed from its sympathies. In the "Faerie Queene" one moves in enchanted forests, in sunny meadows, in fragrant gardens. Since the leaves fell from the trees in the Garden of Hesperides there have been no such gardens as those which have sent their fragrance, these three centuries, from Spenser's imagination. The garden of Proserpina and that of Adonis, the isle of Phædria and Acacia's bower-these are among those homes of the imagination to which the spirit, weary with the strife of the time and the ugliness of so much contemporary materialism, retreats and restores itself. Airs from these sweet and fragrant places are blown across all English poetry, and are breathed again through many a later flute.

It was in a happy moment that Charles Lamb called Spenser the poet's poet, He has not spoken and does not speak directly to the great mass of English readers; he is not a voice for the multitude; he is a voice for those who reach and inspire the multitude. It is safe to say that very few, even among those who are richly endowed with imagination, read the "Faerie Queene" in its entirety. The reading of the poem as a whole belongs to the adolescence of the young imagination. It came to Keats on a memorable afternoon, and was the opening of a door into the fairyland of dreams and beauty and delight; it came to Tennyson also, and the impress of its influence is found again and again in the verse of our latest master of the mighty line. So Spenser serves his race by making a home for the spirits which need a retreat from tumult and turmoil, and by inspiring and enriching the poets who are to stand nearer their time and their fellows. The "Faerie Queene" is overweighted with allegory, but it is rich in the elements of the greatest poetry: a world built by a poet, full of beautiful figures, breathing fragrance and music; a place for our poets when they are learning to sing, and for our own spirits in moments of weariness and loneliness—this is the work which Spenser has done for us.