use of the loose-leaf system. For instance, it makes possible typewritten accounts, as the entries may be made on the machine before the leaves are filed. These accounts are neater, more legible, and more compact than those written by hand. Another advantage of the system is that its speed makes possible monthly statements of the business instead of the dangerously slow and infrequent annual statements that were formerly made out. another advantage is the ability to distribute the records among the bookkeepers so that all may be at work at once, if necessary, on the current accounts—an impossibility with bound volumes. Still So widely various are the uses to which the general principle of the loose-leaf system has been adapted that a complete list of them is impossible. But their variety may be suggested by the following examples: sales-book, ledger, cash-book, journal, household accountbook, price-book, scrap-book, memorandumbook, physicians' record, dentists' record, timebook, collections account, inventory, library index, stock account, etc., etc. Its applications are as general as the old-fashioned bound books, and its advantages in increased speed, reduced labor, and greater compactness seem to recommend it to a much wider general use. AMONG THE WORLD'S WORKERS HOME T A CONVERSATION WITH JOHN MUIR OME is the most dangerous place I go to," remarked Mr. John Muir, the famous geologist and naturalist. He was on the train returning from Arizona to his home in Martinez, Cal., after the earthquake. "As long as I camp out in the mountains, without tent or blankets, I get along very well; but the minute I get into a house and have a warm bed and begin to live on fine food, I get into a draft and the first thing I know I am coughing and, sneezing and threatened with pneumonia, and altogether miserable. place for a man." Outdoors is the natural The train was passing through the San Francisco Mountains in northwestern Arizona. The conversation was left to Mr Muir, in acknowledgment of his superior powers of entertainment and instruction. It drifted naturally on to mountain tramping, and Mr. Muir told of a walk he took around Mt. Shasta several years ago. "I was stopping at Sisson's," he said, "and one morning I thought I'd take a walk, so I put on my hat and started. As I went down the path to the gate, Mrs. Sisson called after me to ask how long it would be before I would be back. 'O, I don't know,' I said, 'not very long, I guess.' 'Will you be back to luncheon?' she asked. 'I expect so,' I said, and went on. After I had got along a bit I concluded to walk up to the timber line and back again. So I started off up the mountain side. I soon found that I could not go up directly, as I had expected, as there were long gulches full of snow ahead, around which I had to make detours before I could proceed. I kept repeating this performance, intent on getting up, until it was growing dusk before I realized what time it was. But I was used to being caught out so I simply got on the lee side of a big log, made a fire, and went to sleep on a pile of leaves. In the morning I soon reached the timber-line. Then I noticed some new snow formations near the summit, and I concluded to go on up. I made the ascent and got back to the timber-line again by about nightfall of the second day. It was snowing, so I made a bigger fire and lay up closer to my log shelter. When I awoke in the morning I was covered with snow, but I wasn't uncomfortably cold. But I concluded I would work down to a little lower level and continue on around the mountain. By this time I began to feel a little 'gone' from lack of food. I've often spent two days without anything to eat and even felt better for it; but the third day is getting toward the point of being too much. As I tramped along I thought I saw smoke. I stopped and watched it for a long time to make sure that it wasn't a ribbon of cloud. When I was sure it was smoke, I worked toward it, and in about an hour I came on a Mexican sheep-herders' camp. After a lot of signaling and gesticulating, I made them understand that I was very hungry, and at last they got me up a meal. I spent the night with them, and the next day continued my march around the mountain, taking some bread and coffee from the camp. For three days I went on without seeing anybody. On the seventh day I completed the circuit of the mountain, and about noon I sauntered up the walk to Sisson's, as if I had just come in from a half-hour's stroll. Mrs. Sisson saw me and called out, 'Well, Mr. Muir, do you call this a short walk? Where have you been? I've had a guide out searching for you.' 'O, I just took a little walk: I went around the base of the mountain. But I got back in time for lunch, didn't I?' I had been gone seven days and had walked a hundred and twenty miles. "But that is the way to enjoy the mountains. Walk where you please, when you like, and take your time. The mountains won't hurt you, nor the exposure. Why, I can live out for $50 a year, for bread and tea and occasionally a little tobacco. All I need is a sack for the bread and a pot to boil water in, and an axe. The rest is easy." quarantine at Joppa. To fill in the time I Some one mentioned the " Boole," reputed cluded a 2,600-mile excursion into the interior to be the biggest "big tree." "Yes," remarked Mr. Muir, "I measured it. I'd been fooled so often with yarns about these biggest trees that I wouldn't go until the engineer who had measured it told me himself that he had used a steel tape. Then I made a three days' journey to the tree. When I measured it, though, the most I could make its girth was fifty feet less than the engineer's figures. But I learned afterward that a lumberman who had helped him had held out that much slack of the tape as a joke. Later, when looking over some of my old note-books, I found memoranda on this very tree, which I had made years before. 66 But," ," added Mr. Muir, "I would go three times around the world to see a tree as big as they said that was." Then the subject branched off. Later Mr. Muir told of a trip which he and Professor Sargent of Brookline, Mass., took together to study trees in Siberia. "We went out there and saw them all right, and then I wanted to see the Cedars of Lebanon that old Solomon used to build the temple. So while Professor Sargent went back to Petersburg I ran down that way, but was headed off by the smallpox by rail, boat, stage, and afoot, solely to see the great eucalyptus forests. "And," concluded Mr. Muir, "I'd have gone on from there to Chile, to see the Araucaria imbricata, if I hadn't found out that the nearest way was to go back home to San Francisco and start over again." The reference to the Araucaria imbricata was to an earlier part of the conversation, about the petrified forests of Arizona. For twenty years the Santa Fé has advertised these forests as a side-trip to be made from either Holbrook or Adamana. "And do you know," said Mr. Muir, "those fellows had waited all that time for me to come down there to find three more forests that not even the people in that country knew about-and one of them is the biggest one there. But what strikes me most about these forests is that there is not a solitary one of their species of trees in the North American continent. These petrified trees were carbon millions of years ago and yet in Chile to-day there are magnificent forests of this identical species, the Araucaria imbricata. And if I live long enough I'm going to make a trip to Chile just to see them." WALTER H. PAGE, EDITOR CONTENTS FOR DECEMBER, 1906 Frontis piece 8253 FULL-PAGE PORTRAIT OF HON. OSCAR S. STRAUS A WORD FOR CHRISTMAS THE TASKS BEFORE CONGRESS MEANING OF THE NOVEMBER ELECTIONS OUR REAL TASK IN CUBA THE WORLD-WIDE RACE QUESTION LANDMARKS IN CORPORATION RESTRAINT THE NEW WONDERS OF COMMUNICATION McIVER, A LEADER OF THE PEOPLE ABOUT BUYING BONDS ARE THEY NOW CHEAP? (Illustrated) EXPERIENCES IN BALLOONS (Illustrated) WALTER H. PAGE 8265 RUDYARD KIPLING 8268 8270 DR. JULIAN P. THOMAS 8275 BERNARD MEIKLEJOHN 8283 AN AMERICAN PORTRAIT PAINTER OF THREE HISTORICAL A TEMPLE OF PREVENTIVE MEDICINE THE ADVANTAGE OF PULLING TOGETHER 8360 A LESSON IN ADVERTISING AMONG THE WORLD'S WRITERS TWENTY NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR-F. W. HALSEY TERMS: $3.00 a year; single copies, 25 cents. Published monthly. Copyright, 1906, by Doubleday, Page & Company Country Life in America Farming The Garden Magazine NEW YORK 1515 Heyworth Building DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY, 133 East Sixteenth Street From stereograph, copyright 1906, by Underwood & Underwood, New York HON. OSCAR S. STRAUS, OF NEW YORK, THE NEW SECRETARY OF COMMERCE AND LABOR "HE KNOWS BOTH HIS COMMERCE AND HIS LABOR-BY CLOSE STUDY, BY PERSONAL EX- [See page 8261] THE DECEMBER, 1906 VOLUME XIII NUMBER 2 The March of Events E DO not live on any Utopian planet, WR nor has our own world yet swung into the millennium. There is much our prosto be done, therefore, before even perous and pleasant part of the earth becomes a perfect home, and before we ourselves become an ideal society. Still, as Christmas comes, we have as many reasons to be content, to take good cheer, to feel kindly toward all men and all nations, as any people under the sun-perhaps more such reasons than any other people; and it is a good exercise to think of these reasons now instead of the misfortunes and struggles that engage us overmuch during the rest of the year. We have had bountiful crops; we have such a volume of traffic as was never dreamed of before, an era of good dividends, of plenty of work, of high wages, and (in spite of our masters, the trusts and corporations,) abundant opportunity yet for initiative and ambition. Let us pray to be delivered from all class hatred and uncharitableness and to be at peace with ourselves and our neighbors, bearing good will to all. THE TASKS BEFORE CONGRESS Senate deposited it while its wrath was yet hot over the informal way in which the Administration had negotiated the preliminaries. The wrath has had time to cool, and the delay has perhaps sufficiently vindicated the Senate's dignity to permit the treaty to be made, if President and Senate can agree on terms. The Philippine tariff is due to come up again to meet once more the determined opposition of the "Interests." For our domestic comfort, Congress will consider the setting off of great forest reserves in the Appalachian and the White Mountains, and the reduction of tariff duties on works of art. These are two proposals that deserve to be carried out. An effort will be made to have authorized a system of swamp reclamation similar to the admirable irrigation service. The moot question of restricting immigration is also in a fair way to be settled by the imposition of more rigid qualifications for entrance. The session is more likely to go down in history, however, as the one in which an American "corrupt practices act" was passed than for any other reason that can be foreseen. The laws prohibiting political contributions from corporations and requiring publicity about campaign funds are in a way to be passed. The recent Cuban revolution may have some effect on the chances of the bill to give citizenship to the Porto Ricans. Prospects are less bright for its passage then they were a year ago. year ago. It still remains for Congress to decide whether we shall build a battleship even larger than the new British leviathan, the Dreadnought. But the most ticklish problem |