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FOR JUNE.

Extremes, William James Baker.

The Railer, John Jerome Rooney. The railer forgives no one! he is one of the things America does not need.

Shadows, Faith Bigelow Savage.

Lines, Stephen Crane.

As to Bores, Annie L. Mearkle. Have patience with the bore, you are often one yourself.

To My Ladye Love, Ronsard. Written quite a while ago but still timely.

Side Talks with the Philistines. A chronicle of opinion conducted by the East Aurora School of Philosophy.

NOTICE TO

Collectors of Artistic Posters.

On receipt of 10 cents we will send to any address, a copy of our largely illustrated catalogue of 500 posters exhibited by "The Echo" and "The Century."

Each issue of "The Echo" bears a poster design, in two or more colors, on its cover. During the past year seven of these covers were by Will H. Bradley.

"The Echo" is .00 a year, 10 cents a number. NEW YORK, 130 Fulton Street.

LOOK OUT for the second and popular edition of "Cape of Storms," price 25 cents. One sent free with every year's subscription to "The Echo."

Each bi-weekly visit brings a charming surprise.--EVERYBODY.

THE LOTUS, Kansas City, Mo.

The Roycroft Quarterly:

Being a Goodly collection of Literary Curiosities obtained from Sources not easily accessible to the average Book-Lover. Offered to the Discerning every three months for 25c. per number or one dollar per year.

Contents for May:

THE ROYCROFT PRINTING SHOP, East Aurora, New York.

THE PHILISTINE.

NO. 1. June, 1896. VOL. 3.

EXTREMES.

When our day's competitive course is run, And its gross triumphs, that crude wealth increase, Are trumpeted from ramparts of fat peace-- As fine achievements duly wondered on-- What of the unfed squalors 'neath the sun? What of the purient crimes night hours release, And woes that from nor day nor night draw ease, That unquenched greed may gold gold heap upon?

The rich man, gazing on his winged wealth, Calls church and state to underwrite his claim; The poor protest that law works bane by stealth; Nor rich nor poor know God but as a name. O, far off Christ, thy text to rear and van Shows forth God's law is--brotherhood of man.

WILLIAM JAMES BAKER.

SOME THINGS AMERICA NEEDS.

What you call a Discerning Person has told me that THE PHILISTINE is read by all the really thoughtful people in America. This surely is not a large class, as I hear you print only twenty thousand copies a month. Now I do not exactly admire your brown paper cover, but I do like your wholesome spirit, and although you have a touch of Yankee flippancy, yet I will help you all I can in clearing the ground, that we may sow a crop worth harvesting. And before I begin my little preachment let me say I like the word Roycroft. "Roy" means king, and "croft" means a home or rest--hence Roycroft means the King's Rest. But best of all Master Roycroft was really the first man in England to do artistic printing.

Observe the two opposite kinds of labor. The first, just mentioned by me, lavishly supported by Capital, and producing Nothing. The second, tramping from place to place, asking for bread, and you giving it a stone pile--and thirty days.

Observe further. These two kinds of labor, producing no useful result, are demoralizing. All such labor is.

And the first condition of education, the thing General Coxey and all of his cohorts are crying out for, is being put to wholesome and useful work. And it is nearly the last condition of it, too; you need very little more; but, as things go, there will yet be difficulty in getting that. As things have hitherto gone, the difficulty has been to get the reverse of that.

During the last eight hundred years, the upper classes of Europe have been one large Picnic Party. Most of them have been religious also; and in sitting down, by companies, upon the green grass, in parks, gardens, and the like, have considered themselves commanded into that position by Divine authority, and fed with bread from Heaven: of which they considered it proper to bestow the fragments in support, and the tithes in tuition, of the poor.

But, without even such small cost, they might have taught the poor many beneficial things. In some places they have taught them manners, which is already much. They might have cheaply taught them merriment also--dancing and singing, for instance. The young English ladies who sit nightly to be instructed themselves, at some cost, in melodies illustrative of the consumption of Camille, and the decline of La Traviata, and the damnation of Don Juan, might have taught every girl peasant in England to join in costless choirs of innocent song. Here and there, perhaps, a gentleman might have been found able to teach his peasantry some science and art. Science and fine art don't pay; but they cost little. Tithes--not of the income of the country, but of the income, say, of its brewers--nay, probably the sum devoted annually by England to provide drugs for the adulteration of its own beer--would have founded choice little museums, and perfect libraries, in every village. And if here and there an English churchman had been found willing to explain to peasants the sculpture of his and their own cathedral, and to read its black letter inscriptions for them; and, on warm Sundays, when they were too sleepy to attend to anything more proper--to tell them a story about some of the people who had built it, or lay buried in it--we perhaps might have been quite as religious as we are, and yet need not now have been offering prizes for competition in art schools, nor lecturing with tender sentiment on the inimitableness of the works of Fra Angelico.

These things the great Picnic Party might have taught without cost, and with amusement to themselves. One thing, at least, they were bound to teach, whether it amused them or not--how, day by day, the daily bread they expected their village children to pray to God for, might be earned in accordance with the laws of God. This they might have taught, not only without cost, but with gain.

Of all attainable liberties, then, be sure the first to strive for is leave to be useful. Independence you had better cease to talk of , for you are dependent on every act of what has been dust for a thousand years, so also, does the course of a thousand years to come, depend upon the little perishing strength that is in you. Now what is your American Picnic Party going to do with its leisure? On that your fate as a Nation hangs.

Understand this: Virtue does not consist in doing what will be presently paid, or even paid at all, to you, the virtuous person. It may so chance; or may not. It will be paid, some day; but the vital condition of it, as virtue, is that it shall be content in its own deed, and desirous rather that the pay of it, if any, should be for others; just as it is also the vital condition of vice to be content in its own deed, and desirous that the pay thereof, if any, should be to others.

You have, it seems, now set your little hearts much on Education. You will have education for all men and women now, and for all boys and girls that are to be. Nothing, indeed, can be more desirable, if only we determine also what kind of education they are to have. It is taken for granted that any education must be good; that the more of it we get, the better; that bad education only means little education; and that the worst thing we have to fear is getting none. Alas, that is not at all so. Getting no education is by no means the worst thing that can happen to us. One of the pleasantest friends I ever had in my life was a Savoyard guide, who could only read with difficulty, and write, scarcely intelligibly, and by great effort. He knew no language but his own--no science, except as much practical agriculture as served him to till his fields. But he was, without exception, one of the happiest persons, and, on the whole, one of the best I have ever known; and after lunch, he would often as we walked up some quiet valley in the afternoon light, give me a little lecture on philosophy; and after I had fatigued and provoked him with less cheerful views of the world than his own, he would fall back to my servant behind me, and console himself with a shrug of the shoulders, and a whispered "The poor child, he doesn't know how to live."

No, my friends, believe me, it is not the going without education at all that we have most to dread. The real thing to be feared is getting a bad one. There are all sorts--good, and very good; bad, and very bad. The children of rich people often get the worst education that is to be had for money; the children of the poor often get the best for nothing. And you have really these two things now to decide for yourselves before you can take one quite safe practical step in the matter, namely, first: What a good education is; and, secondly, who is likely to give it you.

What it is? "Everybody knows that," I suppose you would most of you answer. "Of course--to be taught to read, and write, and cast accounts; and to learn geography, and geology, and astronomy, and chemistry, and German, and French, and Italian, and Latin, and Greek, and the aboriginal Aryan language."

Well, when you have learned all that, what would you do next? "Next? Why then we should be perfectly happy, and make as much money as ever we liked, and we would turn out our toes before any company." I am not sure myself, and I don't think you can be, of any one of these three things. At least, as to making you very happy, I know something, myself, of nearly all these matters--not much, but still quite as much as most men under the ordinary chances of life, with a fair education, are likely to get together--and I assure you the knowledge does not make me happy at all. When I was a boy I used to like seeing the sunrise. I didn't know then, there were any spots on the sun; now I do, and am always frightened lest any more should come. When I was a boy, I used to care about pretty stones. I got some Bristol diamonds at Bristol and some dog-tooth spar in Derbyshire; my whole collection had cost, perhaps, three half-crowns, and was worth considerably less; and I knew nothing whatever, rightly, about any single stone in it--could not even spell their names; but words cannot tell the joy they used to give me. Now, I have a collection of minerals worth, perhaps, three thousand pounds; and I know more about some of them than most other people. But I am not a whit happier, either for my knowledge, or possessions, for other geologists dispute my theories, to my grievous indignation and discontentment; and I am miserable about all my best specimens, because there are better in the British Museum.

And as to your wonderful inventions, why talk at a distance, when you have nothing to say? Or go fast from this place to that, with nothing to do at either? These are powers certainly! Much more, power of increased Production, if you, indeed, had got it, would be something to boast of.

Now just cast your Cathode ray this way and observe this fact: A man and a woman, with their children, properly trained, are able easily to cultivate as much ground as will feed them; to build as much wall and roof as will lodge them, and to spin and weave as much cloth as will clothe them. They can all be perfectly happy and healthy in doing this. Supposing that they invent machinery which will build, plough, thresh, cook, and weave, and that they have none of these things any more to do, but may read, or play croquet, or cricket, all day long, I believe myself that they will neither be so good nor so happy as without the machines.

But I waive my belief in this matter for the time. I will assume that they become more refined and moral persons, and that idleness is in future to be the mother of all good. But observe, I repeat, the power of your machine is only in enabling them to be idle. It will not enable them to live better than they did before, nor to live in greater numbers. Get your heads quite clear on this matter. Out of so much ground, only so much living is to be got, with or without machinery. You may set a million of steam-ploughs to work on an acre, if you like--out of that acre only a given number of grains of corn will grow, scratch or score it as you will. So that the question is not at all whether, by having more machines, more of you can live. No machine will increase the possibilities of life. It only increases the possibilities of idleness. Suppose, for instance, you could get the oxen on your plough driven by a goblin, who would ask for no pay, not even his beer,--well, your furrow will take no more seeds than if you had held the stilts yourself. But, instead of holding them, you sit, I presume, on a bank beside the field, under an eglantine--watch the goblin at his work, and read poetry. Meantime, your wife in the house has also got a goblin to weave and wash for her; and she is lying on the sofa, revelling in Stephen Crane's lines.

Now, as I said, I don't believe you would be happier so, but I am willing to believe it; only, since you are already such brave machinists, show me at least one or two places where you are happier. Let me see one small example of approach to this seraphic condition. I can show you examples, millions of them, of happy people made happy by their own industry. Farm after farm I can show you in Bavaria, Switzerland, the Tyrol, and such other places, where men and women are perfectly happy and good, without any iron servants. Show me, therefore, some Kansas or Ohio family happier than these. Or bring me--for I am not inconvincible by any kind of evidence--bring me the testimony of an Illinois family or two to their increased felicity. Or if you cannot do so much as that, can you convince even themselves of it? They are perhaps happy, if only they knew how happy they were. Virgil thought so, long ago, of simple rustics; but at present your steam-propelled rustics are crying out that they are anything else than happy, and that they regard their boasted progress "in the light of a monstrous Sham."

There are three Material things, not only useful, but essential to Life. No one knows how to live till he has got them.

These are, Pure Air, Water and Earth.

There are three Immaterial things, not only useful, but essential to Life. No one knows how to live till he has got them also.

These are, Admiration, Hope and Love.

Admiration--the power of discerning and taking delight in what is beautiful in visible Form, and lovely in human Character; and, necessarily, striving to produce what is beautiful in form, and to become what is lovely in character.

Hope--the recognition, by true Foresight, of better things to be reached hereafter, whether by ourselves or others; necessarily issuing in the straightforward and undisappointable effort to advance, according to our proper power, the gaining of them.

Love, both of family and neighbor, faithful, and satisfied.

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