nuts at the reduced rates and let Elam and his anarchywhackers climb the trees themselves or starve at their own pleasure. There was some dissension over the proposed union, and a number of fault-finders suggested that if young Mr. Ham were in Elam's place he would require even more cocoanut-rent than the latter did. Notwithstanding this natural habit of finding fault with the wrong side of human nature, the union was finally perfected by the laborers, and all who joined it agreed that on sufficient provocation they would refuse to gather any more cocoanuts. The organizer of the union wanted a few cocoanuts now and then for his trouble in pulling it together, and this feature of the organization was not very popular. Some of the men who only gathered cocoanuts occasionally refused to join the association on account of the cocoanuts they had to put up from their share in order to keep up the organization, and these low-spirited fellows were regarded with much contempt by the members of the cocoanut union.

"Finally there occurred a hard season in Noahme. Cocoanuts were scarce. Paying over six from ten for rent meant hard work and not much in it, so the laborers said, and they demanded a better rate. Elam listened to their protests, but he declared that his own revenues were greatly depleted by hard times, and that he was not receiving enough from his estate to maintain his club brigade or to keep his grounds in order, so he declined to make better terms. He addressed a meeting of the laborers at some length and showed 'very conclusively that the interests of capital and labor are identical; that when one suffers, both suffer; and that the greatest blessing that laborers can have is a great number of cocoanut-trees in the possession of somebody else, with a large crop of nuts ready to be gathered, and to thus afford them employment. He proved clearly that he was not to blame for the fact that there were few cocoanuts to be gathered during this particular season. He regretted sincerely that labor was not able to earn an adequate reward, but capital itself was suffering, and his own profits were greatly reduced by the universal depression in the cocoanut business.

"Strange to say these clear and convincing arguments

produced no effect on the discontented climbers, and they immediately struck. They slid down from the cocoanut trees and held an indignation meeting. The older men were in favor of disturbing nothing that was owned by Elam, but the young radicals declared that he was a greedy monopolist and that every cocoanut tree on his plantation ought to be cut down. A compromise resulted between these extreme views, and the strikers smeared the trunk of every palm that bore nuts at the top with a thick coat of pitch, so that climbing was temporarily impossible, and stuck on it a notice that any disreputable scab who attempted to climb the trees under any pretext would be sunk, like McGinty, to the bottom of the sea. Elam marched his anarchy brigade upon the cocoanut grounds, but the laborers were committing no overt acts, and their greatest crime was apparently refusing to do anything. They had undoubtedly exceeded their legal rights in smearing pitch on his trees, and the captains of his club-soldiers wanted to punish them severely for this infraction of law and order, but Elam was long-headed, like some of his capitalistic descendants, and mentally sizing up the numbers of those who had organized under the grip-andpassword system of human effort, he decided that in the excited condition of public sentiment, violent measures were reactionary. Therefore his soldiers camped and the laborers camped under the cocoanut trees to watch one another starve to death. While this evolutionary process embodying the survival of the fittest and not of the fightist was going on, the riff-raff and scum of the earth, comprising all the degenerate descendants of Noah, who perhaps inherited an undue proportion of the evil instincts which among their ancestors had led to the flood, seized the opportunity afforded by the preoccupied mental condition of the more respectable inhabitants to do a little business on their own account and after their own tastes.

"They broke into Elam's stores of cocoanuts and destroyed them; they drove all the cattle they could find belonging to either the strikers or their employer over a high cliff into the sea; they knocked the top off of Lud's monument; and, finally, they held a great meeting and,

marching under red and black flags, they took to the woods, leaving the interests of capital and labor in Noahme to adjust themselves without any further assistance on their part."

The remainder of this sequel to the interesting legend of the flood, if any more of it was ever recorded, has been entirely lost-probably it was destroyed in the disturbed condition of the country while it was under the alternate domination of the warring factions. At any rate we have now no means of ascertaining what final adjustment was made between the supposed interests of the man who inherited the earth and of his distant relatives who inherited nothing. Common sense, however, without much display of erudition, ought to indicate to any person living in the nineteenth century, that if the descendants of Ham and Japheth had turned their attention more toward the origin of ownership in the land and cocoanut trees, and less towards the mere division of the cocoanuts, they would have more readily reached a solution of the problems they were discussing. There is no real difference between the principles which established Elam's control of the earth and those which still give men the privilege of control and dictation. If any man has a right to control the use of one coat produced by his own efforts, it is very difficult to determine why he should not control one thousand coats or one million coats if they be acquired in the same way. There is always the element of a dangerous power, and if men now lived like Methuselah to the age of nine hundred and sixty-nine years, we might have to check their efforts in order to prevent the despotic domination of the Fairs, the Goulds, and the Huntingtons, and thus avoid placing the whole earth under their control; but nature having limited their existence to a briefer period, that period furnishes a convenient method of avoiding those extremes which in

all things become evils. Benevolence is in moderation a blessing, but immoderately exercised it becomes a curse. Wealth accumulation and transfer within reasonable and just limits are beneficial to society; but carried to the insane degree of our present institutions and pushed still farther, they will convert human beings into maddened brutes.

The inhabitants of Noahme ought to have objected more strenuously to the disposition of Noah's estate, and they should have contested the wills of Shem and Lud, thus preventing the establishment of Elam's iron-clad monopoly over possessions that he evidently had no better right to control than other men had. They ought to have taken a sensible view of social conditions instead of calling Mrs. Ham an anarchist and then quarreling among themselves over the questions of employment and wages. One of Mrs. Ham's distant relatives of the present century has been heard to remark, with the vixenish accents of contempt which characterized her ill-tempered ancestor, that the laborers might as well try to exhaust the waters of the ocean with a rye-straw as to attempt to cure the ills and right the wrongs of society by means of strikes. She thinks that looking at the mere rate of wages alone is a very narrow, selfish, and inadequate conception of the social problem, not at all more intelligent than the ancient position of the cocoanut strikers. Mrs. Ham's descendant also says that the laborers ought to have long ears attached to them because they are perpetually fighting one of the effects of a bad system instead of the real causes. She compares their efforts to an attempt to move a loaded wheelbarrow by lifting at the wrong end, and insists that if they will grasp the handles, it will become easily manageable.

These assertions are repeated here for what they may be worth, without positive approval, for the lady, though

frequently correct in her ideas, is somewhat hasty in her conclusions. It would seem, however, that if the laboring classes will repress and discourage lawlessness in their own ranks, and strive by careful study to obtain an intelligent comprehension, sadly lacking among all classes, of the real evils and dangers by which they are surrounded, to the end that those evils shall be corrected peaceably by the ballot and not aggravated by a blind and ignorant appeal to brute force, their prospects for securing real justice and better social conditions will be vastly greater than they can obtain by the mere continuance of strikes and boycotts, which never reach the cause of the evil, and which can never result in permanent good. If laborers can win in their struggle by striking, they can win more easily by voting. They need to substitute for the family contests now continually going on in our probate courts the intelligent control of estates by the whole people.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE LINK BETWEEN TWO GENERATIONS.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept views which Cicero, Locke, Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, Bacon, were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books. . I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attractions clear out of my own orbit and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world of value is the active soul. Man thinking must not be subdued by his instruments.-R. W. EMERSON.

THE privileges of the deathbed have been the source of much discussion and dispute ever since enough wealth was developed to make it worth while for men to quarrel over its possession and disposition. The proper disposal of wealth in the possession of a dying man involves a