arguments and improving their attacks and defences as the season progressed. But at the close of every debate they staged, in the few remarks made in return for the applause, each stated that while they found themselves of opposing sides in this fundamental question, there was another issue on which they were unanimous, and that was prohibition. That was all; yet that sort of crack of the whip at the very end did more for that cause than any prepared set of season lectures could have accomplished. And as one director explained, aside from the desires of the bureaus and the wishes of the people who attended, the very calibre of the people attracted to the tent platform is such that no other attitude on moral issues is possible.

An unusual instance of programme preparation is to be found in a recent exploit of the Coit-Alber Bureau. Incidentally, it throws a light on the modern tendencies of the Chautauqua-the going out after the material which is judged to be of greatest interest to the patrons on the circuits. Tom Skeyhill is an Australian soldier who enlisted at eighteen, fought at Gallipoli, and was blinded. He came to this country to help in the Liberty Loan campaign, but soon after that work his sight was restored. He continued his lecturing, going from war work into Chautauqua. Then about a year ago, his health well recovered, he was despatched by his bureau to Russia, with instructions to get in, if possible, find what it's all about, and then tell the people at the Chautauquas about it. He has accomplished his mission, having returned only a few weeks

ago from Riga, and this summer anywhere from a quarter to a half million Middle Westerners will hear more about Russia that they will remember than from all the millions of words. published in the press.

Before the war the Chautauquas preached the gospel of peace and disarmament. When America entered the struggle, the mobilization of none of the resources of the nation was more complete or quickly effected than the Chautauquas. This quick means of reaching the people and not only reaching them but also converting them-was made use of by the authorities in Washington, and at a memorable conference of all the directors of the various bureaus and systems of the country with War Department and other government officials the entire machinery for relaying the spoken word direct to the public was placed at the disposal of the Administration. There followed intensive campaigning, by the revision

THOMAS R. MARSHALL The genial former vice-president appears on the Chautauqua platform and immediately his audience feels something in common with the country's leaders. The personal touch is the greatest aid to democracy

Pach Bros.

S

O LONG as people take an interest that is perhaps both inartistic and illogical in the "best selling" books, lists will be compiled, figures cited or suggested, and comparisons drawn. Also other people, of fastidious ideals, or who aspire to be credited with fastidious ideals, will continue to find the "best seller," its author, and its readers, objects for flippant jest. Shafts of sarcasm for the subject have always been easy to find and easy to launch. But as yet they have never been known to have moved an author to the point of urging his publishers to curtail ingenuity and expenditure in advertising where his book was concerned.

But, lest we forget, a word of common justice about the whole matter of the "best seller" of to-day and of yesterday. A hundred years ago or thereabouts the "best selling" novelist in England was a certain Sir Walter Scott, and the two Americans who had to bear the corresponding stigma in this country were Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. Had any one thought to compile a "best selling" list for the England of 1847, for example, it would probably have contained two or three titles now utterly forgotten. But "Vanity Fair," by W. M. Thackeray would have been there, and also the then latest book of Charles Dickens. A French list of approximately the same period would unquestionably have shown M. Eugène Sue's "The Mysteries of Paris" and "The Wandering Jew" as strong contenders, while the more enduring works of M. de Balzac would have

had to be content with places rather far down the column. But very near the top would have been the "Three Musketeers," and "The Count of Monte Cristo" of the elder Dumas. Fifteen years later Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" was conspicuously the "best seller" of its day. Nor were the giants of literature the shrinking and sensitive souls of popular fancy when it came to the question of the material return for their labor. It was Byron's expressed ambition to ruin a publisher. Tennyson very nearly realized that ambition in several directions. Dickens was such a good business man that he left an estate of approximately half a million dollars. Even the Jove-like Hugo, supposed to be ever communing with Mount Olympus and far removed in thought from the sordid details of worldly finance, knew how to drive a hard bargain, binding his Belgian publishers to pay 125,000 francs upon delivery of the manuscript of "Les Miserables," and that without permitting them to read a line. These were the men who were the "best sellers" of the past. Do not forget for an instant that in the first rank of "best sellers" of to-day-two million copies was the figure of the Kipling sales last year, and of the Kipling "Inclusive Verse," despite its high price, 26,500 copies have been sold-is a man by the name of Rudyard Kipling; that in 1920 the sales of the books of Joseph Conrad amounted to thirty-six times what they did in 1911; that the books of Maurice Maeterlinck are widely circulated throughout the civilized world; that Robert Louis Stevenson, twenty

seven years after his death, goes on selling tremendously; that the English novelists finding steady favor in the book markets of the United States are such men as H. G. Wells, and Leonard Merrick, and John Galsworthy, and Arnold Bennett, and W. J. Locke, and octogenarian Thomas Hardy; that among our own countrymen of to-day or recent yesterday Mark Twain still retains his hold, and the names of Jack London and Booth Tarkington and Stewart Edward White recur in the lists from year to year; and that a good many persons who long ago read and reread O. Henry in book form are again finding amusement or diversion in rereading the stories as they appear piecemeal in newspapers. A year ago the sales of the O. Henry books totalled 4,000,000 copies, and now that total has passed the 4,500,000 mark.

Twenty years ago the literary air was full of "prithees," "od's bloods," "sirrahs," and stately phrases such as "he hath

the bel air," and so his Grace was pleased to say." Incidentally it was a form of diction particularly exasperating to one of Mr. Tarkington's youthful heroes, Hedrick Madison of "The Flirt," who associated it with his sister Cora's vampish (and there's an anachronism for you) designs on what he called in sweeping and scathing alliteration, "the person in pants on the premises." The era was the buoyant era of the historical novel-in those days every native of Indiana was popularly supposed to have the manuscript of such a romance concealed somewhere about his person-an era that was playing irresponsibly about "the glory that was Greece," or "the grandeur that was Rome," or Tudor England, or "the redheeled days of seigneurial France," or Revolutionary taverns that were filled with the roistering red-coated officers of King George -somehow we never met any roisterers wearing the Continental blue and buff-of an era that was letting loose an occasional novel of