to remain in love with his wife if he had only married some one else," is one of the clever comments of a clever journal, which verily does throw a "side light" on the situation. Save with the brother and sister who grow into a sweet fellowship from childhood, the strain of living eternally under one roof through all the moods and commonplaces of domestic existence, is almost more than human nature can be found to stand for in effecting any happy relation between man and woman. Even the good bishops of England begin to tell us that “Every husband and wife would be better if they had a fortnight's holiday away from each other every year.” And this, of course, is but a confirmation of the saying of the older teachers that "the secret of two people living happily together lies in their not living too much together.”

Of course, it is in the very nature of the love that perchance brings them together that the mischief lies. For the philosopher is right who says that, "like other violent excitements, love throws up not only what is best, but what is worst and smallest in men's character." "Some," he says, "are moody, jealous and exacting when they are in love, who are honest, downright good-hearted fellows enough in the everyday affairs and humors of the world." This verily does explain, on truly psychological grounds, where everything in these days is required to rest, why a brother may be more desirable than a husband for the bright "humors" and enjoyment of life. It would certainly explain why many a wife, who has grown weary of struggling with the jealousies, moods and exactions of the husband who, perhaps in his own way does truly love her, might feel like crying with the little child in its loneliness and grief:

Oh, call my brother back to me,
I cannot play alone.

It is verily, too, when "the summer comes with flower and bee" that the cry grows strongest, and they are happy, indeed, whether men or women, who can answer to the childhood's call and gather as a company of brothers and sisters about some sunny playground of youth.

THE ETHICS AND MORALS OF THE LAUGHING

HABIT

WHA

'HAT rational creature should be content to laugh without understanding the science of laughter? And when he does understand it, why should he laugh at all? From Aristotle to Bergson in his essay on the comic, the analytical work of the scientists and philosophers is to reduce laughter to little more than Byron's bitter scorn of it, and life together, when he said: "And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'tis that I may not weep." It is the defects, the awkwardness, the "rigidity" of body, mind and character of poor faulty humanity that science finds provokes laughter, and there is no very pious, just or kind note to be traced in the laughter which builds itself on such exhibitions. Incidentally it may act to correct them, but this is no thanks to the "laugher," for it is through no conscious purpose that he falls into his corrective outburst, but by "some mechanism set up within him by nature that goes off on its own account." Thus, when he laughs vociferously at sight of some poor wretch slipping up on a banana peel, or chasing his hat down street in a windstorm, he is neither to blame for the heartless explosion, nor to be commended for the incentive to more prudence or elasticity in the human subject, but simply to be taken as an exposition of that principle and machinery of laughter whereby nature proposes to keep her children from making themselves ridiculous in each other's eyes by losing that fawnlike grace and agility which should belong to them.

This shows the deep insight of Watts when he put into his "Hymns and Spiritual Songs" the admonition, "Fly like a youthful hart or roe over the hills where spices grow," and perhaps suggests the reason why, when you take your lithe thoroughbred to a jaunt over the hills with you, you long for the free grace with which he leaps over rock and gully as a part of the redemption from the fall, or falls, which no Christian grace has yet furnished. There is no question that we are all poor sinners in our stumbling ways, but whether we can be laughed out of them is so doubtful a matter that to stake the whole ethical value of laughter upon that chance seems to give it less force in the moral field than it ought to have. The effort of the psychic cults to find the ethical value of laughter more directly in its relation to the man who laughs than any man who provokes the laugh, would promise better results no doubt if only the moving impulse to laughter could be somewhat redeemed from this scientific location of it in the foibles of our fellowmen. The introaction of these two ethical principles, if they may be so called, of laughter, is curious enough and must be somewhat bewildering to students of the whole problem. For, while laughing at the awkward man may tend to cure him of his awkwardness, the wholesome effect of laughter in the human being would be lost if the awkward man in all the phases of his rigidity and grotesqueness were effectually cured of his defects. That his failings have a definite ethical value in keeping the helpful note of laughter, if it is such, in the ranks of men is a legitimate conclusion from Prof. Bergson's claim that the comic does not exist outside the pale of the human and the "mechanical inelasticity” in the stumbling mortal is the only cause and occasion for laughter on earth.

To be perfectly consistent, of course, Prof. Bergson does

not hold laughter up as one of the cardinal virtues. Rather, he gives it over to a decidedly low place in the scale of justice, kindness, or really Christian behavior, and it is up to the laughing philosophers and cheering-up men to do what they can with what he has left of it. That they themselves have turned it to uses not altogether to be commended, is a point declaring itself somewhat too strongly in the life of to-day. "A generation of spurious laughers," one writer declares, as the result of the teacher's efforts to make the glad hand and smiling countenance the sign by which to conquer in every field of life and activity. Laughter, as a business asset, the broad presidential smile, figure in Success magazines and records of political campaigns till nothing short of a "smile like the Mediterranean Sea" seems due to spread over the face of the whole nation if its welfare is to be assured. Meantime, however, a crop of cheerful hypocrites lurking in the background, or dashing across the stage, engage the attention of a few discerning souls who threaten to go to the opposite extreme of declaring the death of laughter and the return of the serious countenance, the only chance for the regeneration of mankind. Thus is it that the pendulum swings back and forth in every line of human thought or endeavor, and whether we laugh or whether we cry we are sure to be wrong some way. It really seems as though Bernard Shaw must be right when he submits that the unconscious self is the real and only power to be trusted and that our very breathing goes wrong the moment the conscious self meddles with it. When Rabelais declared that "to laugh is proper to the man" and did his brilliant best to encourage it he probably contributed as much to the best use and understanding of laughter as the case allows.

Granted that man was made a laughing animal something