There is more than one reason why you are a favorite with me, but the chief reason is that you make me think. The February number proved especially stimulating. I had had a sudden bereavement which made immediately acute my questioning in search of something to believe. Joseph Wood Krutch's 'The Modern Temper' may seem a queer source of comfort for one seeking light on the subject of personal immortality. On the first reading it was heavily depressing. Then succeeded a feeling of relief to find how much there was with which I could disagree, how much even my inchoate creeds still held to enrich my life compared to the bleak outlook there pictured. Perhaps my reading has been too largely orthodox. If I read more of the modernists I might achieve almost a conservative faith. A lucid statement of a definite position which one can either accept or argue crystallizes one's own ideas from out the vague and muddy uncertainty in which they were dissolved. For this I am grateful to Mr. Krutch.

Mr. Krutch tells us man is instinctively and emotionally an ethical animal, that man loved an anthropomorphic God made in man's own image, but that this God has retreated and surrendered control of the universe, that nature's purpose is not understandable in man's terms (if indeed she has any purpose), that the realm of ethics has no place in the pattern of nature, that man has developed sensibilities and established values beyond the nature which gave him birth, and must probably remain an ethical animal in a universe which contains no ethical element.

To begin at the conclusion and work backward: if man is, as Mr. Krutch says, a part of the universe of nature, and man is instinctively and emotionally an ethical animal, then ipso facto there is an ethical element in nature. Man is it. Not all of nature's qualities need be exemplified in every one of her productions. If man is the unimportant creature he is pictured he could not establish values beyond the nature which gave him birth. The more surely he is merely one part of a great universe which spreads beyond him, the more surely he can create and develop nothing alien to that universe.

Man is young. He is learning to talk. It is the

first glimpse of a vaster perspective that frightens him in the dawn of his adolescence. That nature is not understandable in man's terms should not be taken by Mr. Krutch as proof that nature is nonethical. Man may yet learn new terms and a larger understanding of nature than merely the working of the physical phenomena he has recently learned to see. The predicament in which we find ourselves is that of the youth who acquires a little knowledge and becomes self-conscious before he gains wisdom.

Now out of this conception of mankind growing from infancy to maturity I have gained the answer to my own problem. I shall not say to my children that my code is right and any deviation wrong; I shall try instead to instill the feeling of need for some code which shall seem high and noble to them, and trust they may go further than I can in the evolution of man's understanding of God and the ethics of nature.

ELIZABETH DINWIDDIE HOLLADAY

Further evidence of the interdependence of widely different trades reached us too late to be included in E. E. Calkins's paper, 'Business Has Wings,' which appeared in the March Atlantic. We quote from an editorial of the New York Times. It is to be expected that 'very short skirts should cause a rise in stocking profits; that huge fur collars on women's coats set the milliners to making skull caps, and that corsets... should leap into display advertising when Paris says that frocks will be fitted. But who would think that because women are wearing no high shoes the cost of building would be affected?' Such is the case, according to a recent builders' report. Goat hair was a favorite supply of plasterers some years ago. They still prefer it to the substitutes they have been compelled to use since women have taken to wearing low shoes. When more kid leather was used, there was an ample supply of hair for mixing with plaster, but now, due in part to the absence of high shoes, in part to the fact that many slippers have no leather about them except the sole, goat hair has become a rare product — and the cost of building is affected!

If mathematicians are to be believed, at least a score of them are losing sleep over Carl Christian Jensen's problem of the Spider and the Fly in his contribution to the

January Atlantic. Here is one who speaks for the fraternity.

KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI

MY DEAR MR. JENSEN: Your reference in your recent article to the defenseless fly and the hungry spider has started a seemingly endless discussion. I puzzled over the matter for several days-consumed reams of paper, wandered aimlessly about, muttered meaningless phrases; my friends looked askance and sadly shook their heads. At last, in desperation, I took the problem to several mathematicians of local repute, engineers, 'math' instructors, a college president, and so on, ad infinitum, — saying that my education had been rudely interrupted while in the throes of calculus, and that the problem undoubtedly called for a solution by some method in that part of the text I had not covered. Without exception they report that the correct answer is forty-two feet. Frankly, I am in a dilemma my sanity is being questioned - and I am asking you to get me out of this impossible situation for which I feel that you are responsible. Pray enlighten me as to the method of your solution.

I have just finished reading "The Missing Rooms' by John Carter in the February number.

'Even if we make a lot of money, what can we do with it? Buy a home? Where? . . . Our young men can no longer go West or South. . . .'

Buy a home? Where? Try-but, on second thought, I won't tell you! For, as Abraham Cowley remarked nearly three hundred years ago,

I should have then this only fear:
Lest men, when they my pleasures see,
Should hither throng to live like me,

And so make a city here.

I have no doubt that they would 'hither throng to live like me,' if what I know, and what Mr. Carter says, are true. Mr. Carter says that 'a very ordinary sort of city wedding can run to $10,000 without the slightest difficulty'; my house, I know, cost that amount, and is provided with nursery as well as guest chamber; and one of my neighbors has just built a house similarly equipped for $9000.

I will, however, venture to suggest that if young men can no longer go West or South, there is still the North.

And if 'five thousand dollars a year does not begin to provide the simplest and most ordinary amenities of life,' and if 'less than a tenth of the heads of families submitting income-tax returns in New York City have incomes over $5000 a year,' then I am certain that if I should disclose my residence men would 'hither throng to live like me.'

For I have far more than the simplest and most ordinary amenities of life on less than five thousand. Why not conclude that perhaps Mr. Carter's statement that 'our opportunities lie in the city' is an error?

As I write this, my house is so quiet that I can hear the clock tick in the next room. Both my children are out playing on a snow-locked street free of automobiles. There is no factory smoke to darken the sky. We have good schools close at hand, playgrounds and athletic fields, a good public library, a private school and a college, three or four factories well situated, and well-lighted streets. We can see the same movies that Mr. Carter can see in the new Paramount Building, we can be bored by the same Abie's Irish Rose, and we can listen to the singers and players and preachers of New York without spending two hours in the subway.

There is more real culture on some of our farms here in but I really must refrain from telling you where than there used to be in many of those old-fashioned homes with quiet evenings around a dim dining-room-table lamp. If, as Mr. Carter says, 'one can see that this old-fashioned home was poised on the fact of cheap labor,' the old-fashioned home need not go out of business; for labor is cheaper and more intelligent and quieter than ever before. It slides quietly into my house over a wire. It brings in no muddy shoes, it leaves no sweaty odor behind, and it is never in the bathtub when I want to use it.

I have no smoke-house, no scullery, no sewingroom, no servants' hall, no drawing-room, no dressing-room, and no dairy, in my house; but in spite of these Missing Rooms, it is still a home. CARL J. WEBER

'Home, Sweet Home.'

DEAR ATLANTIC, ·

SOUTH ORANGE, N. J.

Mr. Carter's article on 'Missing Rooms' strikes at the root of many of our domestic difficulties. 'Home, Sweet Home' may be doggerel verse, but it expresses a longing which most people feel.

As a friend of mine, himself a cliff dweller in New York, recently expressed it, 'What can you expect of the children to-day? They are born in a hospital, they live in an apartment, and they will probably be buried from a "funeral parlor." Oh! for 'a lodge in a garden of cucumbers.' C. R. B.

In view of the numerous letters of inquiry which I have received, and in order that I may not seem unnecessarily cryptic about the prophets mentioned in my letter to the Reverend Mr. Swisher, I tender the following information.

I had reference to the Bahai Movement, which as a religious and social body claims the solution of certain world problems. It started in Persia in 1844 when the Bab, or gate, announced the imminence of a great world teacher and exhorted the people to prepare for his coming. The response of the bigoted and fanatical Shi'ahs was prompt; they imprisoned the youth, applied the bastinado, slaughtered many of his followers. The Bab carried on the leadership of his flock by such devices as dropping instructions concealed in walnut shells from his prison window into the hands of a follower waiting below. His influence spread alarmingly, with the result that six years after his Declaration the Bab was shot in the public square at Shiraz by a squad of soldiers. He was then thirty-one. At the time foretold by the Bab a prophet appeared who proclaimed Himself the promised Messiah for whom the people of all religions were watching. He was given the title of Baha'u'llah, 'the Glory of God.' After many vicissitudes He was permanently imprisoned in the deplorable fortress at Acca, Syria — in the words of the Bible, 'the Valley of Achor.' He was accompanied by a large following of His believers and His family, including the son who was to be known many years later in America as Abdul Baha.

The Baha'is believe that Baha'u'llah voices the spirit of the age in His plea for universality. By such unifying and welding agencies as a belief in the oneness of humanity, the common Source of all religions, the abolition of economic extremes, an international tribunal, and the harmony of science and religion, He says that Universal Peace can be attained in this century. The adherents of this religion constitute a fraternity of all races, colors, and creeds, and furnish a sample of that brotherhood which we hope will spread throughout the world. Yours sincerely,

DORIS H. MCKAY