accept that crowning lesson against "the pitiful weighing of fate" and the sad discussion of ills which some of our own poets have found in it?

When the bee community arrives at the height of its riches and prosperity it promptly abandons its wealth and its home to the next generation, and "this act," we are told, "be it conscious or unconscious, undoubtedly passes the limit of human morality." But why? Do not all the generations of men toil and vanish and another enter into their labors? It must be because of the "heroic" and unquestioning spirit with which the bee submits itself to its destiny.

It does not, as Walt Whitman expresses it, "sweat or whine about its condition" or rend the skies with the eternal repetitions of the vain question why. It takes the September sacrifice of its "thrice happy home" or city as cheerily as the summer rearing of it amid the flowers and running waters. Perchance it perceives the same law of life and good running through both of them, but, at any rate, it loses no joy in the summer sun for fear of the September wandering.

And this, indeed, is the worst misfortune of the persistent human struggle with unfathomable fate, that it loses the joy of the sunshine in the consuming endeavor to penetrate the shadows. Nay, even to get at the heart of the rose, it will heedlessly scatter its fair petals to the breeze. Like Carlyle's small brandishers of the torch of science, it wastes its time studying how the apple got in the dumpling, while the unquestioning banqueter eats dumpling, apple, crust and all, and finds it good—which, indeed, is the only way to know anything about it. Life, says Emerson, is a succession of riddles or lessons, which must be lived to be understood. All the speculations of the philosophers are vain and idle. The only key to the riddle is the key of experience, and each one must apply it to the successive chambers of being for

himself. It may be that the good Anselm has solved the problem of the soul by this time, and again it may be that he is still at work on it. But, at any rate, it is eternally true,

That of the myriads who

Before us passed the door of darkness through,

Not one returns to tell us of the road,

Which to discover we must travel, too.

CONCERNING SLANDER

T is one of the most curious things in human history that people who can not get at the real motive in a single act of their fellow-beings should set themselves up in judgment upon them, even in the most secret and sacred affairs of their lives and unquestionably the love of scandal, the desire to stir a sensation, lies at the root of a great deal of it. If sensationalism and slander were to be wiped out of all decent life and journalism, the result would be almost incalculable in the uplifting of society. And this not half so much through any redemption wrought for the victim as for the perpetrator of the sensational story or gossip. Indeed, it is to this latter subject of the evil that the new psychology directs its first attention. It is the slanderer and not the slandered who is the patient for its treatment. Nor is it true, scientifically speaking, that any creature at any time was ever "done to death by slanderous tongues." It was some lack of sustaining strength or poise in his own rectitude that let in the "poisoned darts." "The mind, conscious of rectitude, laughs to scorn the falsehood of report," said Ovid, and it was a very wise as well as good man who said when told of a vile calumny concerning him, “I will act so that nobody will believe it."

Nothing really is more absurd than for an innocent man to worry over any slander. It is the poor slanderer who needs to worry and to move all the philanthropists of the earth to rush after and help him, for by every law of truth and being he has turned the currents of his life into the

narrows of the pit, and secured for himself a future, a karma, that either philosopher or theologian must shudder to look upon. No sinful act of man more surely than this breaks that ladder of love on which he climbs to the light in drawing his brother after him. It is significant to note how even time itself brings the sequence of his deed to bear in its very colors upon the head of the slanderer. In a little town of the West, not long since, a very epidemic of scandal broke out among the respected citizens. Reputations withered at a breath and character was no safeguard against the backyard gossip. But the wave passed, and the assailed parties managed to pull through alive. Curiously enough, however, in the homes of the slanderers developed shortly the very evils they had sought to fasten upon others, and mothers and sisters found through the fierce obloquy cast upon their own dear ones, how fearfully in seeking to condemn others they had condemned themselves.

It is not always that retribution follows so closely on the steps of wrong, nor can any one yet say what subtle influences in the mental atmosphere may set a suggested evil to developing itself in susceptible quarters. But that the deed somehow returns upon the head of the doer is an inevitable law of life and a dart hurled at the soul and character of a fellow being is the worst arrow of destruction that one can let loose to cross his path at any stage of the way. Whether it is aimed in malice or in idle gossip, he must meet it at Phillipi and pay the full price of it. It is for him therefore and not the innocent victim, whose cause is safe with heaven, that the safeguards of restraint and fair speaking should be set up, and when the better thought and psychology of the day succeed in convincing men of this cardinal truth, slanders and yellow journalism will no doubt die a natural death.

Of course, it may be said that to tell the truth about a man is not to slander him; yet when one considers that it is little more than the dangerous half truth that can be known to the outside party it is safest, perhaps, to let unpleasant truths take care of themselves and work out their own dark penalty or sequence in its due place, as they always do. Besides, it is much, as one of the great ones gone has intimated in the case, "If you take temptation into account who is to say that he is better than his neighbor?" "I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself," says Montaigne, and while that remains true of a man whose moral precepts and lofty philosophy have gone into every corner of the earth, and been translated into all tongues, would it not be well for common mortals to consider what monster is within themselves?

Really, too, if the spice of the matter is the thing desired, nothing in any outside sinner could begin to equal the bubbling of the witches' cauldron of mischief and temptation in man's own soul, nor give a hint of the moral crises he goes through in the secret places of his life. If he does not find it well therefore to make a sensation out of his own coquetry with the devil, why should he call his neighbor in for the Mepistophelian drama? The very fact that man aims so neatly to conceal his own shortcomings is reason enough why he should be slow to uncover his neighbor's. Let him that is without sin cast the first stone is, of course, the divine principle that probes to the heart of the whole matter, and it leaves little margin for trading upon human weaknesses, either for sensation or example. To resolve man's virtues into something worth exploiting is really the principle for true journalism and ethics, and we ought to be far enough along in the moral graces to find some attraction in goodness without an army of stage villains to set it off.