my side of the argument, none the less. If you remember, the architect was also the decorator. It is the triumph of his imagination. He designed it as a background for a woman of opulent beauty and domestic tastes. He ransacked Europe for the furnishings, tapestries, all sorts of exquisite ancient things. He was a great artist and he created a work of art. The family fit into the picture more or less awkwardly. It is his house, not theirs at all. And I truly believe that the ultimate purpose of our houses excludes our going up and down another's stairs.

'Yet I believe in all the beauty one can vitalize. It is essentially wholesome. It does not lend itself to morbid demands. The collector's passion looks like greed, and doubtless for a time it is greed. But, sooner or later, Too-Much sickens them. Their adorable possessions teach them there is profanation in having more wonderful things than they can enter into personal relation with. Therefore the inevitable end of all overgrown collections is the museum or the auction-room. I have seen it too often not to know it is true! If you want a perfect illustration of this in literature read Mrs. Wharton's The Daunt Diana. It cuts down like a knife to the essential fact that our relations with beauty must be limited enough to have the personal quality. And-don't you see?-this automatic destruction of greed that beauty finally teaches to the collector, is the same automatic destruction of it that I dare think intensive living in our homes might bring to all greed. It is a proof of the theory on another plane.'

'I think one might own a Mountly House without greed,' persisted Grace wistfully. 'Having no house at all, I naturally refuse to think of myself as ending my days in any less perfect domicile. What do you mean by the "ultimate purpose" of our houses?'

'Ah! that,' said Honoria, with a quick indrawing of her breath, 'is the very core of all my thought, and I don't know how to make you see it!'

She rose abruptly and walked to the end of the verandah. She stood there a while, looking across at the spreading gables of her own brown bungalow, with the yearning on her face that only house-mothers know. Yonder was her home. Set on a mighty shoulder of the earth, facing the sunset and the sea, it clung to the soil as the brown rocks cling. Behind it were the mighty Sierras with their crests of snow; before it, the sweetest land God ever smiled upon; within it, all the treasures of her eyes, her mind, her heart. Just as it stood there in the February sun, it was an abode compact of love, of aspiration, of desire. The ancient love of man for his shelter had gone into it, and the love of woman for the place of her appointed suffering. Desire for beauty and hope of peace were in its making. Its walls had heard the birth-cries; her children had played about its doors; out from it had been borne her dead. Inconsiderable speck on the vast hillshoulder that it was, it could defy time and the elements, even as she defied them, for she had given it of her own immortality.

'I have not yet said it all,' she said a little thickly. 'It is hard to say, even to you. I have found an attitude of mind, a path, a way of life I call intensive, for lack of a better name, and I believe in it, not only because it increases my sane satisfaction in living, but also because it finally leads out out of all this tangle of our material lives, into the eternal spaces.

'I see the world of men's business activities chiefly as a place of wrath and greed, and yet even the most grasping must be blindly seeking through their greed an ultimate satisfaction not more houses or more automobiles,

or railroads, or mines, or even power, but something dimly apprehended as beyond all these and more than they --something that is good and that endures. For we all want the Enduring Thing. One man sees it here, another there. As for me, I see it in my house. I tell you, the Greeks and Romans did not make a religion of the hearthstone; they merely recognized the religion that the hearthstone is. Under that quiet roof I have learned that it is a woman's business to take stones and make them bread. Only she can make our surroundings live and nourish us.

'Beyond the need for bread, a woman's needs are two; deeper than all cravings save the mother's passion, firm-rooted in our endless past, is the hearth-hunger. The trees that sweep my chimney have their roots at the world's core! The flowers in my dooryard have grown there for a thousand years! What milleniums have done, shall decades undo? We are not so shallow, so plastic as that! We will go into the mills, the shops, the offices, if we must, but we know we are off the track of life. Neither our desire nor our power is there.

'I have talked glibly enough about restricting superfluous possessions for the sake of developing a finer quality in those we have; I have said only personality gives that quality to our surroundings- but I have not said the final thing. It is this: I believe that in the humble business of loving the material things that are given to us to own and love, in shaping our homes around them, in making them vital and therefore beautiful, so that they serve our spirits in their turn, we are not only making the most of our resources in this life, but are doing more than that. Somehow, I cannot tell you how, I know that we are getting them across

- into the timeless places! In making them vital we are making them enduring.

'Christ tells us to lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven. What did that mean to you when you were young? I thought it meant a procession of selfdenials and charities, more or less lifeless because the offering was made slightly against the grain! I had no idea that when I loved somebody very much or pitied somebody very much, when I shared my heart or shared my roof eagerly, that I was doing the commanded thing. Still less did I realize, when I worked hard to make my home more comfortable or more beautiful, that I was sending vibrations from my everyday world right into the eternal

one

every deed an actual hammerstroke on my house not made with hands. But so sure as that our mortal shall put on immortality, I now hold it that what we first find in the eternal world will be the things into which we have unstintingly flung our vitality, our feeling, while we are briefly here.

'Here we have no continuing city. But when I am making my house live, I and no other, putting into it as I best may something of the serenity of Athens and the sacredness of Jerusalem and the beauty of Siena, then it is taking its place beside my greater loves. Then I am creating a home, not only in this world, but in the next. I have put something over into the eternal world that fire cannot burn, nor floods destroy, nor moth and rust corrupt. It is safe, even from myself, forever! No Heaven can be holy to me if I have not made this spot holy. I shall not ask, even from the mercy of the Merciful, a heavenly mansion if I have failed to make this earthly dwelling live. Eternity begins beside my hearth, shaped by my will. A woman knows!'

THE hardest and most important railway problem in the United States is that of accidents. There were 10,585 persons killed and 169,538 injured on our railways in the year ending June 30, 1912. The problem of railway discrimination is important. But unfair discrimination has been very greatly reduced in recent years. The problem of reasonable rates is important. On the whole, however, railway rates in the United States are the lowest in the world. But our railway-accident record is worse than those of most other leading countries; and while relatively to the traffic handled it is getting better, it is not improving fast enough. Compared with the problem of accidents, the problems of rates and discrimination have become unimportant.

The main force for good or ill in this country is public opinion. Public opinion regarding any matter is a composite of the sentiment of the relatively few who are most directly concerned with it and of the relatively many who are more indirectly concerned with it. To get many great public evils abolished it is necessary to unify, enlighten, and vitalize this composite opinion. Public opinion can helpfully and effectively attack the railway-accident problem. It can demand of those directly connected with railways that they adopt needed measures, and it can cause the passage of legislation to remedy conditions which those measures cannot or do not remedy. But every day adds to the evidence that the public and the press, from which the public gets its informa

tion, know very little about the causes of accidents. The public's increasing indignation about them is disposing it to adopt many measures; but its lack of knowledge leads to the adoption of measures which are unwise and futile.

Wisdom and humanity dictate that the first things done, or required to be done, shall be those which are adapted to stop the most fatalities and injuries. Those which will prevent relatively few should come later. This is especially true if the latter will cost a great deal of money, and thereby interfere with the subsequent raising of the funds necessary to stop larger numbers of accidents. This principle is being disregarded. For example, numerous legislatures have passed laws to increase the number of men employed in train crews; and a bill for this purpose is before Congress. The passage of the bill before Congress would increase the operating expenses of the railways of the United States $12,000,000 a year. This amount at five per cent is the annual interest on $240,000,000. For an investment of $240,000,000 block systems could be installed on practically our entire railway mileage. It is doubtful if the full-crew legislation will ever save a single life. Its promoters are the representatives of the railway employees' brotherhoods, and it seems a fair inference that their main object is to increase the number of railway employees. While there are few or no records of accidents caused by too small train crews, every expert knows that, in the interest of safety, block signals should

be installed on all our railways. They furnish the best means of preventing collisions; and collision accidents cause many deaths and injuries each year. This is but one of many illustrations of the fact that public indignation and misinformation are being played on to secure regulation that will cause a maximum of increase in expense and a minimum of increase in safety.

Statistics are seldom interesting and are not always instructive. But when statistics covering a long period all point to the same conclusions, it is usually safe to draw those conclusions and act on them. The statistics of railway accidents compiled by the Interstate Commerce Commission since its creation clearly indicate the existence of certain conditions, and that those conditions are the main causes of railway accidents. The official reports of the investigations of specific accidents corroborate the statistics. It would seem either that railway officers and employees and the public should make the inferences that the statistics and reports suggest and act accordingly, or that the whole subject of railway accidents should be investigated de novo by some competent and impartial body representing the public, as a basis of comprehensive action. Neither of these things is being done.

Let us briefly examine the statistics and find out what they, as a whole, suggest as to causes and remedies. They are seldom studied and discussed as a whole. The classes selected for discussion often depend on what the person using them wishes to prove. When they are considered as a whole and in their proper proportions, the conditions disclosed, or indicated, are apt to cause surprise to most people.

The popular notion is that most of the fatalities and injuries are caused by plant failures. The kinds of plant failures they are attributed to are accidents

to trains, such as collisions, derailments and boiler explosions. But if there had not been a single accident to a train in the United States in the year ended June 30, 1912,192 per cent of the persons who were killed, and 90 per cent of those who were injured, on railways would have been killed and injured none the less. Most people think that most of the fatalities and injuries occur in collisions. If there had not been a single collision in 1912, 96.5 per cent of all who were killed and 95.3 per cent of all who were injured would have suffered none the less.2

Furthermore, all of the accidents occurring to trains are not due to plant failures. The Interstate Commerce Commission says in its annual report for 1912: The most disquieting and perplexing feature in the problem of accident prevention is the large proportion of train accidents caused by dereliction of duty by the employees involved. By far the greatest number of our serious train accidents are due to the failure of some responsible employee to perform an essential duty at a critical moment. The gravity of this problem is indicated by the fact that, of the 81 accidents investigated (by the Commission) up to September 1, 52, or more than 63 per cent of the whole number, were caused by mistakes on the part of employees. These 52 accidents comprise 48 of the 49 collisions investigated, and 4 of the 31 derailments.'

Even the block system does not stop these man-failure accidents. 'Of the 48 collisions caused by errors of employees,' the Commission adds, ‘33 occurred on trains operated under the train-order system, and 15 occurred

1 For convenience I have used only the statistics for the year ended on June 30, 1912, because

they are typical of those for all recent years.

2 See Interstate Commerce Commission Bulletin, No. 44, p. 14.

under the block system. The most numerous failures were by trainmen and enginemen. These were disobedience of orders, disobedience of signals, failure to keep clear of superior trains, improper flagging, and failure to control speed at dangerous points.'

When a train is derailed or is struck by an engine or another train, it is technically a 'train accident.' When a train, or a car, or an engine, runs over a man on the track, it is an accident to the man, but not a 'train accident.' Let us turn from the statistics regarding 'train accidents' to those regarding other accidents.

Some of these are partly or mainly due to plant failures. The killing of almost 900 non-trespassers at highway grade-crossings doubtless was partly due to the fault of those killed; but it was mainly due to a defect in the railway plant. An entirely satisfactory plant would not have grade-crossings. The killing of 86 passengers and employees who came in contact with overhead and lateral structures was partly due to carelessness by those killed, partly to failure of the railways to provide wide enough clearances between engines and cars, and objects over and beside the track. The killing of 192 employees while coupling and uncoupling was partly due to defective couplers, but mainly to carelessness by employees; for over 99 per cent of all locomotives and cars, in compliance with federal law, are fitted with automatic couplers. The killing of 470 passengers, employees, and other non-trespassers, by falling from cars and engines was due partly to carelessness, partly to defects of safety appliances. In accordance with laws passed by Congress the Interstate Commerce Commission has prescribed, and the railways are now adopting, appliances for engines and cars, to remedy these defects.

The fatalities and injuries due to

causes other than those mentioned are but slightly or not at all attributable to plant failures. Such are 'industrial' accidents at freight houses, on boats and wharves, in and around shops, and the like, occurring on railroad premises but no more connected with railway operation than similar casualties in private plants that make or repair railway equipment by contract; accidents caused by people stepping in front of moving engines and cars; accidents to trespassers, and so forth. These other accidents in 1912 included 8,075 fatalities and 120,652 injuries, or 76 per cent of the total fatalities and 71 per cent of the total injuries. Of the fatalities coming under these heads, 1,596 resulted from employees and passengers being struck or run over as a result of getting in the way of moving cars and engines. There is no improvement in plant that can stop such accidents. These fatalities included also 5,343 accidents to trespassers; and the total number of trespassers killed was 5,434. The average total number of persons killed daily was 29; and out of that number, 15 were trespassers.

This brief analysis indicates that accidents are due (1) to plant failures; (2) to combined plant failures and man failures; (3) to man failures; (4) to trespassing. Deeper analysis indicates that while these are the immediate causes, there is an underlying one out of which they all grow. This cause of the causes of accidents appears to be a spirit of carelessness or recklessness on the part of many who are directly or indirectly concerned with railway operation. It is a spirit that is not manifested in railway operation alone in this country. A striking illustration of it is that the number of people killed by automobiles in the streets of New York City in 1912 was 146; while the number of railway passengers killed in train accidents in the entire coun