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Ainger's fancy as chiming in with his own taste in novelists, and I remember his quoting them with gusto one day at a dinner party at which there had been previously some talk about recent and unnecessary editions of Charles Lamb. It was irresistible to tell him that their writer was one of the "unnecessary" editors in question. Mr. Lucas will perhaps forgive me if I record Ainger's reply to this unexpected piece of information: "Well, I should be glad to make his acquaintance; we must have much in common beside friends; whether I think his edition of Lamb necessary or not he always speaks of me in it like a gentleman." Ainger's verse epigrams, the taste for which he imbibed in youth from the study of Elegant Extracts, are certainly spoilt for modern taste by his fondness for puns. His standard epigram was the famous one on a predecessor of his at the Temple:

As Sherlock at Temple was taking a boat

The waterman ask'd him which way he would float;

"Which way?" says the doctor; "why, fool, with the stream." The Speaker.

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LEGISLATION AND "COMBINES" IN THE UNITED STATES.

We doubt if the general public, and even some financiers in the United States, fully recognize how deeply rooted is the distrust in this country not of the general honesty of the American people, but of the business methods of many of the great industrial undertakings, and, more especially, of the tactics of the great financial groups which so largely control the financial destiny of the United States. We do not pretend to say that financial morality in London is necessarily on a much higher plane than in New York, for in this country also we have our specula

tive rings and company-promoting tactics, whereby the public's millions are ensnared just as surely-though, perhaps, on a smaller scale-as by any "frenzied finance" schemes in America. For the most part, however, our losses usually fall upon our own heads, whereas, on the other side of the Atlantic, they have a way of managing these things so that-whether it is a matter of canned beef or blocks of depreciated securities-the indigestion usually falls to the experience of peoples of other countries than their own. We have been led to make the fore

going remarks through perusing an account in the New York Commercial Chronicle of an address recently delivered before the Iowa Bankers' Association by Mr. Robert B. Armstrong, president of the Casualty Company of America, and at one time an AssistantSecretary to the Treasury at Washington. The subject of his address was "Assaults on Corporate Management," and the Chronicle considers that it deserves wide attention, by reason of the fact that "these assaults on corporate affairs and aggregated wealth are very popular just now." The fear is, indeed, expressed by our contemporary that it may be carried to a point absolutely detrimental to the best financial interests of the country. Now, we quite admit that after a disclosure of scandals affecting a few particular groups of companies there may easily be a tendency to exaggerate the matter; to imagine that the general commercial and financial morality is much worse than it is; and, as a result, to be over-zealous for legislation, which the real facts of the situation do not merit. Against such hasty clamor for State interference we should be the first to raise a protest, and, of course, we frankly confess that at this distance it is less possible to form an intelligent opinion of the real merits of the position than it is by the man on the spot. At the same time, we think that we shall fairly express the feelings of the public and the financial community here if we say that we are impressed even less by the occasional revelations of financial scandals in America than by the fact that it seems well-nigh impossible to move the legislative powers in the States to take effective steps to prevent their recurrence. If, by an overpaternal system of control, the authorities at Washington had been constantly imposing restrictions upon financial and commercial enterprise, we could understand a strong note of pro

seems

test being raised, but at a moment when trusts and combines in the United States would seem to have attained dimensions undreamed of years ago, and following so soon after the disclosure of a state of things in the meat-packing industry which has shocked the civilized community, it rather strange to find that President Roosevelt's moderate protest against the of growing power these combines should be regarded as antagonistic to the best interests of the nation. Armstrong,in his address to the Iowa bankers, after speaking very glibly of the danger of supposing that because a few corporations are mismanaged all other corporations must also be mismaaged, went on to express the

Mr.

fear that one of these days we will miss Prosperity. There will be many excuses for her absence from her usual place. One will say "bad crops," another will say "over-production," still another will say "abnormal extension of credits." But none of these will be the real reason, though they may be contributory. The real reason will be an epidemic of fear, of timidity, of distrust produced by unwarranted, continuous attacks upon every instrument of progress and development which has made and is making the country great.

We write, of course, without a full report of Mr. Armstrong's speech, but from the abbreviated account given in the New York Commercial Chronicle, there seems something rather humorous about this notion of "missing prosperity" by reason of any attempt to legislate wisely, not for the suppression, or even the fettering of the power, of corporate bodies, but simply for preventing them-by reason of their excessive strength-being rendered in any way harmful to the general community.

Nor, in our judgment, was the lecturer any happier when, in referring to the subject of railroad rate legislation, he attempted to draw a parallel be

tween the railroad and banking interests. Referring to the proposals which have been made for regulating rates, he asked the Iowa bankers how they would receive a proposition to control the rates of interest for the various localities by a Government Commission. He said:

What is the essential difference between the regulation of rates of interest and railroad freights? You say you are better able to judge of local conditions, of competition, of special considerations. Well, so does the railroad man. You say, it is not your money. The railway man can equally well say the same thing. You say he is a common carrier, and you are not. Technically that is true, but your responsibility to the business community is the same. Why, then, may it not be expected that those in favor of Government paternalism will next advocate the regulation of interest rates throughout the United States by a Federal Commission?

With all due respect to Mr. Armstrong, we think that the parallel selected, though apt enough, considering the audience he was addressing, was unfortunate. After all, while there has been of late a certain amount of consolidation, even in banking interests in the United States, it is one of the features of that country that the number of competing banks is extraordinarily great, so that the variation in money rates throughout the country is, on the whole, regulated by entirely natural conditions. It is quite true that in no other city are there such violent money "squeezes" as in New York, and, to some extent, this is due to the immense wealth owned by a few individuals, but other causes-such as the imperfect financial system and the daily settlement in stocks-also play an important part. Moreover, it is also due to banking in America to say that, hitherto, scandals in that direction have

been relatively few and unimportant; so that the desire for any special legislation has not arisen.

It is not, however, so much with the details of Mr. Armstrong's argument that we are concerned as with the general tenor of his remarks, whereby the protest aroused by recent disclosures is described as a wholesale attack upon capital, and bankers are urged "to set their faces against the wholesale preaching of anarchy and the nationwide encouragement of Socialism, envy, and malice." We are quite at one with Mr. Armstrong when he remarks that "financial depression often comes from timidity of capital and its failure to cooperate," but between that statement and his previous characterization of the feelings engendered by recent financial disclosures in the United States as being expressive of anarchy, Socialism, envy, and malice, there is, surely, a wide gulf. In the perfecting of relations between capital and labor is to be found the truest essential of the prosperity of a nation, and when either the one or the other becomes of too exacting a character something other than financial prosperity usually results. Unfortunately, however, these relations in the United States, thanks to the combined forces of trusts and protective tariffs, are immensely complicated by the power on the part of the capitalists to raise the cost of living, and if anything is more certain than another, it is that the social problems in the United States are being greatly aggravated by the ever-increasing tendency for wealth to become concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and corporate bodies. Such a position may not-and probably does not-call for the immediate application of drastic remedies, which might only react unfavorably upon the country as a whole; but it does demand the attention of true American patriots to see to it that the forces which have in

many respects added to the wealth

of the nation are not allowed to be mismanaged, or carried to a point which shall prove disadvantageous to the community. In a sentence, the forces must not be allowed to get beyond control. Doubtless the exercise of such control is a matter in which the highest skill and the least possible interference with natural conditions are required, but what strikes us as rather

The Economist.

noteworthy is that, after a prolonged period of prosperity in the States, accompanied by an enormous speculation in stocks, the slightest attempt to impose any curb upon the power of some of the great "combines" of the United States, even at the initial stages of inquiry, should be magnified into a wholesale attack upon financial interests in the States, by reason of which the country is to "miss prosperity."

SUSPENDED ANIMATION.

One of the most fascinating problems in speculation as to the future of the race under the influence of science is suggested by a class of news paragraph which appears from time to time in the newspapers. The Daily Mail of last week published an account of the exhibition at a local field-club of a living and lively toad which had been found embedded some feet deep in solid clay and which had apparently existed for an indefinite time in this position. The usual attitude to items of news of this kind is one of reserve or scepticism. But there is no necessity for entire disbelief in the possibilities which are often suggested; for there are undoubted cases on record in which, in carefully conducted experiments, toads and other animals have survived, long incarceration deprived of food and almost of air. The vital functions must have been practically suspended in the conditions which have been imposed.

The interesting question which such experiments tend to suggest is as to how far science may in the future be able to control the conditions of animal metabolism. The prevailing view at present is that the cycle of our lives resembles the wound-up mechanism of a clock. The cells in which our bodies originate are endowed with the possi

bility of a certain number of proliferations, and we therefore with a certain limited stock of energy expressed in terms of longevity. When this is exhausted we grow old and die. But what if we could suspend at will the stages in this cycle, to resume them again later? What if science should enable us by submitting to certain rigorous conditions to spend our stock of vitality and our little term of sensation as we pleased, to put off consciousness at a crisis and to take it up again later without in the meantime having drawn on our original capital of threescore years and ten? Will the day come, that is to say, when the philosopher who wishes to verify his prophecies and to see the world fifty or a hundred years hence will be able to do so by taking out his life as it were in instalments?

There is justification for thinking that such a result is not outside the vision of science as a possibility. Even in present conditions it is roughly true that the more energetic and wearing the life we live the soooner is our stock of vitality exhausted. The longest lived occupations, as every insurance office knows, are those which conduce to ease of mind and a vegetative existence. Nature, where it has suited her

purpose, has found no insuperable obstacle in suspending the life of the individual at one stage, and after an indefinite period of quiescence taking it up again practically at the point at which it left off. The simplest example of all is in the case of seeds. The young plant is developed in the seed up to a certain point, and development is usually continuous when the seed begins to grow immediately. Yet some seeds in normal conditions remain dormant six or seven years, and seeds of certain plants of the pea family will retain their vitality for twenty or thirty years; although the tale of the germination of the mummy wheat is held to be without foundation. In cases of trance all the bodily functions are much slowed down, so much so that even death itself is sometimes simulated. There is no inherent impossibility in the acts recorded of Indian fakirs, who are said in some instances to be able to produce at will the appearance of death and to undergo burial, while of course making arrangements for subsequent disinterment, as in the case described in Stevenson's Master of Ballantrae. The cases which are described of living toads being dug out from solid clay, and even from porous rock or from the wood of trees which have overgrown and entombed them, have always the same general features. The particulars are generally so astounding that disbelief is general. Yet it is easy enough for almost any one to test the fact that a remarkable suspension of the vital functions does take place in the case of the toad in certain conditions. The present writer, in experiments which he conducted, found that a toad survived for over a year firmly packed in the ground under a depth of two feet of solid London clay. So impervious did the clay appear when dug through a year after, that it seemed impossible to imagine a bird or a mouse surviving

in the situation for more than a few minutes. Yet the toad when released, after being for this interval deprived of food and apparently, though of course it is necessary to assume not really, deprived of air, was in good condition. After a short exposure to the air he became quite lively, his large eye showing particularly bright and clear. On being kept for a few days under a flower-pot he grew thin for want of food, but crawled actively away when he was released to find it. Buckland once experimented with a dozen toads which he placed in separate holes in a block of porous limestone, covering them up lightly with a glass plate and burying the whole a yard deep in the soil. After a year and two weeks most of them were still alive with their eyes open. He experimented with a second dozen, which were put into a block of dense sandstone. These were treated in the same way, but at the end of the period they were all found dead and decomposed. Some air was a necessity, although a surprisingly small allowance seems to be sufficient in conditions of suspended animation. Fish will survive when frozen solid in blocks of ice, and will resume activity when released. In the hibernation of the higher animals we have the same fact of life being continued while little or no food and very little air is consumed. Many of such cases are scarcely less remarkable as examples of suspended animation. In hibernation there are all the gradations from ordinary sleep to a torpor or trance outwardly resembling death. Nature here again seems, when it is required, to find no physiological difficulty in almost completely suspending the vital functions for prolonged intervals. Excretions disappear; even respiration is apparently suspended. The air of a closed jar containing a hibernating dormouse will remain unaltered for a long time. Severe tests tend to show how

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