mystic and a realist. He commands a perfectly clear vision of the world of matter and custom, and, at the same time, of the world of spiritual life and growth.

That Tolstoy is a mystic cannot be doubted, although he would repudiate the term. He teaches us that love is the regenerative power in the world. He relates how, when he made this discovery and at last gave himself up as best he might to the new sensations of love for God and neighbor, he felt lifted above the plane of time and space, and became conscious for the first time of the immortal soul within him. His book on "Life," which gives his innermost thought, is a mystical book from cover to cover. But unlike other mystics he does not stop there. There is usually something invertebrate in the thoughts of the man who devotes himself to the task of delving in his own consciousness. We would hardly look to Whitman or Blake for a workable drama, nor to Ibsen or Sudermann for revelations from the subconscious world. We may be tempted to take Maeterlinck as an example of the dramatizing mystic, but his plays are mystical rhapsodies after all, and as unlike the compact handiwork of "Ghosts" or the "Doll's House" as a jelly-fish is unlike a life-boat. Tolstoy, however, is a born dramatist. "Resurrection," of course, is not an example of his dramatic skill, although there are many dramatic passages in it; but Tolstoy has written two plays, "The Powers of Darkness" and the "Fruits of Science," and not long ago I read a newspaper interview with Sir Henry Irving in which he spoke with enthusiasm of these plays as among the greatest of recent times. It is not upon them, however, that I base my belief in Tolstoy's dramatic instinct, but rather upon the whole story of his life. He has always seen the world dramatically. Books, sermons, arguments, have never appealed to him as strongly as the enacted event. He has seen the problems of the age in the neglected episodes of the street, and has learned the lessons of his life from life itself. Thus they say that his first acquaintance with the labor question came from the freezing of a

coachman who was waiting for him to come out from a ball on a cold, winter night while he was attending the University of Kazan. The man's life was saved, but that dramatic event fixed itself upon his mind and formed a lasting picture of the condition of a society in which the gentleman feasts and makes merry in a luxurious house, while the representative of the class that built the house and produced the luxuries is shut out to suffer in the cold. An execution by the guillotine at Paris stamped itself upon his soul as the reductio ad absurdum of criminal law, and urged him on to complete non-resistance. It was only when, while walking in Moscow with a wood-sawyer, they each cast a penny together into a beggar's hat, that this simple act set his mind to work at the great problem of charity, and gave the impulse which brought him to the conviction that the only true alms-giving is the giving of a man's own labor or of its products. It was the great drama of the Crimean War which, treasured in Tolstoy's memory, revealed to him the iniquity of licensed manslaughter, and it was in the village school at Yasnaia Poliana, where for many months he played the part of schoolmaster, that he learned to his own satisfaction that love of neighbor is the keystone of education, as it is of life. That a man who saw dramas great and small on every hand should have written books full of dramatic scenes was but natural. No man has ever been a greater realist than this mystic.

There is a certain degree of fitness in the fact that this most dramatic (but least theatrical) of men should have become in his own person a dramatic incarnation of the social problem of his time. I have had the privilege of seeing him at his country home. There he stood, the nobleman, the landlord, the great novelist, dressed in the rough canvas blouse of a peasant, with a strap round his waist. His face, too, seemed to have adapted itself to his garb; there was the long hair and beard and the patient face of the moujik. A single look into his eyes is enough to convince the veriest Philistine that this

is no pose, no play to the galleries, but that Tolstoy has felt himself irresistibly impelled, even against all his natural tastes and instincts, to make himself a living protest against the divisions of society, against caste and exploitation and unbrotherliness in all its forms. His is a rough figure, for he is a pioneer on a steep and stony road, but it sums up in itself the whole stress and storm of our social unrest. He is, in a sense, the protagonist of mankind in the tragedy of the day, and the most conspicuous searcher for the solution of its problem-the tragedy of the chasm between man and man, and the problem of closing it forever.

UNREALIZED ideals, deliberately or carelessly unrealized, work corruption of the blood, work spiritual degeneration and decay. If you listen with serene approval to praise of virtue, and go hence, and do not try and strive to build what you have heard into the structure of your daily lives, into your buying and selling and voting and domestic care, you are worse men and women than if you stayed at home or went off somewhere into the free.-J. W. Chadwick.

In order to gather birds' feathers, and especially egrets, to deck women's hats in what is called civilization, great cruelty is necessary. The most skilful collectors catch the birds alive and kill them by slitting the roof of the mouth with a sharp penknife, so that they may bleed to death without soiling the feathers. Another method of exquisite cruelty is to skin the captured birds alive, on the theory that this method preserves the gloss of the feathers better than any other. Paul Fountain, the African explorer, describes finding a great heap of putrefying bodies of birds, the work of a feather hunter who took only the egrets, leaving the rest to rot. Near the sad spectacle was a dark patch upon the ground, marking where the lives of thousands of miserable, fluttering, agonized birds ran out. Of course, those feathered hats are pretty-if the beholder has no imagination to see what is behind. them.-New York World.

ERNEST HOWARD CROSBY: A BIOGRAPHIC

SKETCH.

BY CHARLES BRODIE PATTERSON.

Our subject for this month's sketch is interesting in the extreme in that it shows the evolution of a man's thought concerning many of the problems of life, wherein at one stage he takes the commonly accepted view of the world, and, later on, through his activities in the world, comes at last to understand the great wrongs perpetrated in the name of civilization, and then through the spoken and written word seeks to present to the world a higher ideal, a truer conception of life. Only the man who thinks and lays aside race traditions and prejudice, and who keeps his mind unbiased and studies life as it is can reach such conclusions.

Ernest Howard Crosby, son of the Rev. Dr. Howard Crosby, was born in New York, November 4, 1856. As a boy he attended the Mohegan Lake School, and later entered the University of New York, from which institution he was graduated in 1876 as the valedictorian of his class. After leaving the university he studied law for two years at Columbia, and again graduated with the highest honors.

In 1879 he began the practice of law in New York City, and became prominently identified with the Republican party. serving in the New York Legislature during 1887, 1888 and 1889. During his service in the Legislature he was Chairman of the Committee on Cities, perhaps the most important of the legislative committees. Mr. Crosby was also prominently identified with temperance legislation, introducing in the Legislature the Crosby High License Bill which was three times vetoed by Governor David B. Hill. From 1874 to 1882 the subject of our sketch was a member of the Seventh Regi

ment of the New York National Guard, and retired as Major and Inspector of Rifle Practice. He became a life member of the Seventh Regiment Veteran Association, from which organization he resigned in 1895 on account of the action of that body during the Brooklyn trolley strike.

In 1889 President Harrison nominated Mr. Crosby as Judge of the International Tribunal of Egypt, and to this post he was appointed by the Khedive. He served on this Tribunal for five years resigning in 1894. On leaving Alexandria he received the order of Medjedieh, third class, from the Khedive in recognition of his distinguished services with the International Tribunal.

During his sojourn in Alexandria Mr. Crosby read some of Tolstoy's works, and, being much impressed by them, made a pilgrimage to Yasnaia Poliana to visit the great Russian before returning to America.

When he reached New York Mr. Crosby decided to retire from politics, nor did he take up his law practice again, but settled down on his farm at Rhinebeck, Dutchess Co., N. Y.

Mr. Crosby's interests in New York City are many, however. Among others he was the organizer and first President of the New York Social Reform Club; he is actively interested in the labor movement; he is a strong anti-imperalist and opponent of war, and has been the President of the New York Anti-Imperialists' League since its formation; he is President of the New York Vegetarian Society, and also of the Civic Council.

Mr. Crosby is the author of some well known works dealing with social problems and satirizing the military spirit of modern Christianity. Among them are "Plain Talk in Psalm and Parable,"* published in 1898; "Captain Jinks, Hero,"† 1902, and "Swords and Plowshares," 1902. Mr. Crosby is also the editor of Whim, a magazine devoted to the discussion

*Published by Small, Maynard & Co., Boston.

Published by Funk & Wagnalls Co., New York.