and the effects of political parties, be they never so honestly conducted? It would be possible to enter into a cross-examination of these same reformers as to what part, if any, they had taken in the artistic, dramatic, or musical side of the national life. It seems to me that it would not be difficult to compose a formidable list of the obligations of the citizen, and to show that political obligations cut relatively a rather small figure in the numerous obligations composing the whole duty of man toward his fellows.

Political reform has been instanced merely because it is that with which most are familiar. But the same narrow absorption that makes a bore of the political reformer is only too likely to be found in the advocates of woman's rights, the single tax, vegetarianism, occultism, the simple life, spelling reform, and all the other isms used as goads to prod poor mankind out of its comfortable jog-trot. Reformers are so very one-sided.

It is impossible for some of us, at least, either to answer or to abide the arguments of the S. P. C. A. One reads with properly humane shudders of the tortures of poor dogs, cats, or horses, and is on the point of sending in his very small contribution and enrolling himself for the crusade, when his eye lights in his daily paper upon an item concerning some absurdly luxurious home for destitute cats, and he immediately draws back from the awful gulf of bathos into which he had almost precipitated himself. It is so impossible to draw the line; and the drawing of lines is such a nuisance!

We should to-day be well on toward the millennium if it were not that the reformers drive away all those whom the reform attracts. It is not very many years ago that woman's suffrage overcame like a summer dream not only the rest of the community, but a corporation in which I had many friends. It is a company in which there are a large number of women employed, and every woman, to a man, became a fierce advocate of immediately admitting women to the suffrage. Each devoted male victim was looked upon as an advancepost to be captured at any expenditure of talk. It is fair to say that the resistance was vigorous, and after a prolonged campaign it was found that, although the body of the enemy had escaped, five names had been added to the roll. When the petitions had been forwarded to the legislatures, there was a certain curiosity

among the survivors to ascertain just which arguments had been effective in the bringing to book those who had fallen in the fray. A few of my friends, without attracting the attention of the Amazons, sequestered the five signers and forced from their unwilling lips an account of their fall. The catalogue, with annotations, was about as follows:

Number One was a mild-mannered widower of a nervous disposition, and absolutely without convictions on the subject one way or another. He explained that his principle in life was, "Oh, give 'em anything they ask for; what difference does it make?" He added, however, in an agitated tone, that he was "mighty sorry he did it if anybody objected." Number Two blushed deeply and finally confessed that he had signed the petition with the object of pleasing his wife, but had discovered shortly afterward that nothing was less to her taste than woman suffrage. He also eagerly inquired whether there was any way of withdrawing his name. Number Three admitted his signature unblushingly, said that it was given voluntarily, and boasted in a barefaced manner that he'd "rather sign it twenty times than hear them talk." Number Four likewise admitted his crime, but claimed in extenuation that he had subsequently repented and scratched it out. Number Five was the sort of man who saves time by signing every petition that is presented to him, without reading it.

The trouble with reforms is invariably the reformers; and I wish respectfully to suggest to all those whose mission it is to better mankind that they commit their thoughts to writing, and forward them in due course of mail to such organs as will put the arguments into cold type. The advantage of type is that it never wears reform costumes; is always habited in a decent suit of black; never goes on talking when the object of the reform wishes to drop the subject; and is by its very nature confessedly devoted to a single topic; whereas, the human reformer, by his nature as a human being, invariably presents himself in a narrowed and stunted guise when he appears solely as a living mouthpiece of the reform.

It is all very well in the pages of history to know the Gracchi; but, reading between the lines, one may suspect that both of the Gracchi made themselves in real life egregious bores. This is not to say that they were in the wrong: it is only to recognize that they were men of one

idea; and there is sufficient moral obliquity in all mankind to resent the assumption of moral superiority, no matter how well founded, and to rejoice to read that the reformer has been dropped in the horse-pond, or has disappeared over the horizon with no better steed than a wooden rail. I would give much to consult Xantippe's diary, it being understood, of course, that she kept a diary and confided to it her impressions of Socrates.

Imagine, if you can, your own sensations upon being stopped on a beautiful summer day under the blue skies of Athens by a bald-headed, snub-nosed, stout, and persistent individual, having a cold gray eye, and gifted with the power of asking apparently innocent questions which led you on step by step into a mass of

contradictory absurdities from which there was no escape save by bodily flight; and imagine being jeered by the smug followers of your ingenious and heartless tormentor. Would you not rejoice when you learned later that the overwhelming power of the people, acting through its duly constituted authorities, had presented the cup of hemlock to this egregious and accomplished bore? The occasional implanting of ennui by hearing of the "Just Aristides" was a trifle to the seeds of hatred which the Socratic method must have sown broadcast throughout the Athenian populace.

There is only one thing which would possibly convert me to a belief in the many reforms of the day, and that is the apostasy and opposition of the active reformers.

A

STATUE in
in bronze of John W.

Mackay, by Mr. Gutzon Borglum, was shown privately at the sculptor's studio in New York for some days in October before being sent on to Reno, Nevada. It will be placed immediately in front of the new School of Mines of the State University of Nevada, which was erected by the joint contribution of the widow and son of Mr. Mackay. To this commemorative foundation the Mackay statue is appropriately added by the same contributors.

The statue is surely a spirited likeness of the man caught at a happy moment of expression. In the closing years of his life, John Mackay had ceased to be a great moving figure in mining. He had other and varied interests, and he was particularly absorbed in the direction and extension of a great telegraph system of which he was president. He would not be ranked or remembered as one of the foremost pioneers in telegraphy. In this field he was simply one of the chief executives in the expansion of attainments already achieved. It

is as a miner, as the man who above all others was the prime mover in the development of deep underground mining in America, that he was chiefly distinguished. This was rightly recognized by his widow and son in their choice of portrayal. The sculptor, Mr. Gutzon Borglum, has shaped in clay and cast in bronze John Mackay as I knew him best, standing strong and sturdy in the simple miner's dress, which he had put on so many thousand times when he was going down the shaft into his mines and tramping through their drifts and cross-cuts. His blue flannel shirt is open at the throat; his clay-stained trousers are tucked into his heavy boots; in one hand he grips the handle of a pick, and in the other clutches a fragment of ore. His bare head is thrown back a little, with chin up-tilted, poised freely on the supple column of his neck. So he looks as I have seen him over and over again, when the world was hailing him as the chief of the "bonanza kings."

Mackay, by the way, never fancied that title.

It was too flamboyant to suit him-a parade in the world's eye of his vast fortune and nothing else. Otherwise there was no offense in it. Bonanza is simply the Spanish-Mexican word for good luck or good fortune. It found, naturally enough, a ready attachment to a dazzling chunk of luck, the uncovering of a rich ore body in a mine, and soon to the ore itself. No such mammoth of its kind had ever been mined as "The Big Bonanza of the Big Four"-Mackay, Fair, Flood, and O'Brienin their Comstock Lode mines, the Consolidated Virginia, and the California, in the heart of the Virginia Range in western Nevada. Hence the title of king was slapped on with rollicking Western humor, and the Big Four wore it with more or less indifference.

What distinction, if any, did John Mackay really seek? I may tell now for the first time what he himself told me, when we were tramping through one of the hot and dripping drifts in his Big Bonanza.

"That 'Bonanza King' is stuff," he said. "It makes nothing of me but a millionaire with a swelled head. When General Grant made his trip around the world, you remember, he took a day off to look over our mines on the Comstock. I took him through myself, and he told me that it was the most wonderful sight that he had seen in any part of the world, and that I might be proud to be the master and director of the greatest mining enterprise on earth. That did touch me. Any man might be proud of that, coming as it did from Grant's mouth, which never slopped over."

Is something of this conscious pride and power shown in the sculptured face? I think so, but not arrogantly, or it would not be a likeness of John Mackay. In all the years I knew him and for two years on the Comstock Lode I was with him almost every day I never heard him recall Grant's appreciation again or say a word in glorification of his own work. He was content to let it speak for him. In the history of the world's work it fills a splendid chapter, more lasting than the bronze from which his commemorative statue is

cast.

There is a prevailing gravity in the face, too, approaching even to sadness. This may seem odd, but it is surely lifelike. There is no gloom in it-no affectation of dignity or reserve. John Mackay had a rooted contempt for pretence or posing of any kind. He was at all times, and in every company, one of the

most thoroughly natural men whom I ever knew. I never saw him sullen or even sulky for a moment. But he was a sober-faced man habitually. He had a good sense of humor and relished a good story or comical. scene, but I cannot remember when he ever laughed loudly. There was often a swift, pleasant gleam in his eyes, when he was off duty, and the corner of his mouth had at times a jolly or quizzical twist; but it was rare to see the whole of his face relax into a broad smile. There was reason enough and to spare for this soberness, when he was the paraded "bonanza king.' I have heard him say that he was more than willing to turn over his job to any fault-finder who could and would do what he was doing every day and night of his life on the great Lode. I have no doubt that he meant what he said, for he had then reached and passed the zenith of his success. The big bonanza was nearly scooped out, and he knew it. The yield already in hand had been enormous, even though it fell short of preposterous forecasts. Mackay never professed to know what was out of sight in his mines, and was never carried away by the visions of speculators. But he could point to a pile which, as he once remarked, would have rebuilt Trinity Church in New York from basement to spire top in solid silver. Thus his fortune and achievement were secure. Why then should he labor on, in ceaseless discomfort at best, and with deadly peril hanging over him and his fellow miners in the depths of his vast

mines?

For the Big Bonanza was then a chasm, hundreds of feet in width and many hundreds of feet in length, blasted out of the mammoth lode to a depth of more than 2,000 feet from the surface. It reeked with intolerable heat in mid-winter in spite of the continual inrush of chilling air driven down the shafts by machine blowers of the largest type. Scalding water lay in pools at the bottom of the shafts and dripped from the rocks and clay of the mine levels. The air in the deep levels was so scorching that the miners worked almost stark naked in shifts of eight hours, wearing only a small breech-cloth and shoes. In cutting "a virze," once, where a machine drill could not be used, I saw the men working "thirteen to a pick." That means four minutes an hour for each man in the eight-hour shift. After two minutes work at the face of the cutting, every man staggered back to stand under the

cold water spout of a pipe from the surface, and half an hour later took his turn again for two minutes only. In those depths water boiled at 188° Fahr., and the air, in spite of the blowers, would run up to 135° Fahr., and much higher in the stagnant places. In one year of exact record, thirteen men were scalded to death, and thirty-four were stifled..

But this was of slight account to the ardent miners. "Damn the heat!" said Mackay. "Give me the ore and we'll run our shafts down as far as it goes." So, I believe, he would, for the passion of the keenest hunt I know of was in his blood. But an image of the most ghastly peril of all was ever haunting him. The slopes of the nearest Sierras had been stripped of trees to fill up the stupendous chasm from which the big bonanza had been torn. In the rock-furnace heat, the monstrous mass of timber piled in cribs soon turned to tinder. A spark of fire might, at any moment, turn the deep levels into an earthly hell, with no escape for the mass of miners, and with certain ruin of the mine. So it had done in the awful fire at the Crown Point Mine on the same lode.

John Mackay knew this well. Yet he went down, day and night, into his mines, risking his life as coolly as any of his fellow miners, and as fully. He spoke to me only once of his risk and responsibility, and then very briefly; but I think that they were never out of his mind in his working hours, at least, and that they grizzled his hair if they could not shake his

nerve.

Why should he stand fast then so long in his exhausting labor of oversight, and in defiance of peril? Because he was a master miner who had climbed the mining ladder from the bottom rung, and knew how to make and run a great mine as did few men, because he could not pick out a man in whom he could put implicit confidence to take his place.

"The only sure way to make a success in mining is to keep your own nose in the ground," he said to me. I think his experience up to the end of his life clinched this conviction. Moreover, his Comstock Lode mines were extraordinarily difficult to operate, and had led to the perfection of a remarkable mechanism to handle their output and combat the heat and flooding of the lower levels. A master miner and director of men was surely needed as overseer. Mackay was slow, too, to change a work which he knew he did masterfully for

untried undertakings-for he could never have been contented as an idler, and was a working man to the day of his death.

There was, moreover, a never-ending temptation to prolong his stay at the mine. When I first saw him, the big bonanza was petering out, it is true, but who could say that another might not be uncovered by probing deeper in the great lode.

"'Tis a poor man's pudding just now," he said, "but there may be more plums in it than we know of to-day."

Hunting for these plums at such depth is fascinating gambling. So Mackay found it. He didn't care then for any other kind, and I think he never did. "Why should I bother to put a little stake on the turn of a card," he said, "when I have a chance to watch the deals in rock cutting that any hour may turn up a bonanza?" So he lingered along on the lode and kept on working his mines when the mass of speculators had lost heart and quit.

I have written this to recall in part what John Mackay's greatest work in life was, and what should be shown in a lifelike statue of him as a miner. I am sure that Mr. Borglum has brought to view the real John Mackay far better than I can hope to do in words. Everybody who knew him at all, knew that he was manly, unaffected, and kind-hearted. Few could possibly know, even in part, of the depth and strength of his feeling for his family, his birthplace, and the country of his adoption; and only a few knew the pains that he took to help those in need who had even the faintest claim to appeal to him: In the later years of his life he was slow to confide in any one, for his confidence had too often been abused. With all the apparent simplicity of his character to one whom he met casually, he was not simple minded, and he certainly did not wear his heart on his sleeve. He was always reserved in speaking of himself, and there were ore reserves in him which he never cared to expose. One who knew him much better and longer than I, told me that he was more difficult to sound than any other man he ever met. "Beyond a certain depth, he remains inscrutable," he said.

It is surely a speaking face that the sculptor has produced, and there is much in it that may challenge certain deciphering. But it is unquestionably a capital reproduction in bronze of John Mackay, and the figure is worthy to stand as the representative miner of America.

TH

HERE are now in use 200,000 automobiles of one kind or another, though it was only twelve years ago that the first convincing type was produced. Since 1889 inventors had struggled to induce the marine gasoline engine to turn two wheels of a road vehicle instead of a screw-propeller. It did not seem difficult, in theory, but eight years elapsed before the first motor-driven vehicle proved its worth by running from Bordeaux to Paris at a speed of fourteen miles an hour, steadily. "It's brutal, but it goes," said its designer, Levassor, when he saw it returning. Its mechanism was within easy reach a matter of the first importance at the

time and not negligible yet. It was the forerunner of the 100,000 automobiles of 1906; and the majority of 100,000 other motor vehicles are modeled on it to some extent, though more directly patterned after other types of machine.

The 200,000 machines, including 60,000 motor-bicycles worth not more than $200 on an average, will scarcely amount to more than $200,000,000 in value. With a production increasing about 25 per cent. every year, they represent the output of three years of manufacture. The invested capital in automobile building may therefore be estimated at about $67,000,000 on the assumption, which holds