He went away, leaving amazement and vitalized consternation over the household. But when he returned they were ready, with their necessary belongings packed in two pitiably small gray telescopes. The son and brother carried a fish-pole, a reel, a net, and a set of aluminum dishes.

Locking the flat and going down to the river near Forty-ninth Street, the three caught a north-bound coasting steamer upon which they rode all night.

In the morning Malbone was at the port rail, straining his near-sighted eyes among the maze of small islands which skirted that part of the coast. The second officer was near him, and presently Malbone asked him a question.

"That elliptical island with the one house on it and the trees over there, how big would you say it was?"

The mariner, who had been reared on a Connecticut farm, scanned it and replied, "Eighty acres."

A half-hour later when the steamer touched at its first port-Fishhead-Mal

cents," finally said the captain. Then as they settled themselves and the two gray telescopes on the deck of his small craft, "I suppose you are some kin to Jeb Hartley or his wife, mebbe; they're the only folks living there now." Malbone answered with one of those grunts which supply a polite but indeterminate yes or no.

It was a beautiful Sunday morning, so wonderfully still and sunny after the twenty-year roar of Harlem that the mother and sister were more convinced than ever that they were proceeding in a dream. In very stiff church clothes and an accompanying Sabbath expression, the lobster fisherman and his wife were preparing to put off in a dory to the mainland. Malbone stepped onto the homemade dock.

"I want to get a job here for my board and my mother's and sister's. My name is Byron Malbone."

"Eh, mine's Jeb Hartley," answered the fisherman. "Be you a fisherman? You don't look it."

"I've never caught lobsters, but I have

hooked hundreds of bass and haddock. I am good at raising garden truck, too, and I am an expert shipping authority; I know the quickest way to get any produce into New York."

"Well, well," hesitated the fisherman. "It's most remarkable, you coming here this way for a job."

"Let them stay," decided the fisherman's wife, quickly. "You know how lonesome it gets here, Jeb, and there's no one to take care of things and we can't get to the village for weeks."

"Well, there is stranger things has happened and turned out tolerable well.

VOL. CXXVI.-No. 753.-58

We'll come back after church and talk it over," Hartley announced. There was a settled, pleasant calm on his brown features that spelled decision and welcome.

"Thank you," exclaimed Malbone, eagerly reaching out his thin, white hand into the grasp of Mr. Hartley's capacious one. "Just one thing, what do you call this island?"

"Why, Balsam Island."

"Would you mind "-Malbone's eyes roved over the sand and the shining sea and the vast blue vigorous openness "I say, would you mind if occasionally for my own use I called it Sunset Island?"

[T is our American boast that our government is one of laws and not of men, of policies rather than of personalities. The object of our vast educational system, we say, is principally the development of an intelligent citizenship; our perennial political campaigns

are pleased to call campaigns of education; the justification of our muck-, raking investigations, of our scandalmongering public hearings, whether municipal, State, or national, is always their alleged educational value. The

tumultuousness of our educational activities has bred in us a myopic confidence in our civic enlightenment, our mastery of governmental principles, our capacity for self-government.

But how we have been betrayed by our self-complacency! Before January, 1912, no one, not even the President himself, knew, or had any means of knowing, precisely what the Federal government was. Up to that time not so much as a study had ever been made of the vast Federal agglomeration as a whole. Its properties and multifarious activities had never so much as been listed; no description had ever been made of the agencies through which these activities were hypothetically performed. In January, 1912, Congress published a survey of the Federal government-the first fruit of the voyage of discovery made by the Commission on Economy and Efficiency into the hitherto uncharted seas of the Federal administrative domain. The facts of this survey would be incredible from any but the highest authority.

"Never before," said the President, in transmitting the survey to Congress, "have the foundations been laid for a thorough consideration of the relation of all the government's parts. No comprehensive effort has hitherto been made to list its multifarious activities or to group them in such a way as to present a clear picture of what the government

is doing. Never has a complete description been given of the agencies through which these activities are performed. At no time has the attempt been made to study all these activities and agencies with a view to the assignment of each activity to the agency best fitted for its performance, to the avoidance of duplication of work and plant, to the integration of all administrative agencies of the government into a unified organization for the most effective and economical despatch of public business. Administrative officials have been called upon to discharge their duties without that full knowledge of the machinery under their direction which is so necessary to effective control, much less have they had information regarding agencies in other services that might be made use of. Under such circumstances, each service has been compelled to rely upon itself, to build up its own organization, and to provide its own facilities regardless of those in existence elsewhere."

After a hundred years of self-government, it required a special investigation of a special commission to reveal even to the officers of government precisely what the Federal government was! While our schools and colleges learnedly expounded the Declaration of Independence and the tripartite division of Federal authority under the Constitution, while our newspapers entertained their readers with cockpit gossip of inter-departmental scandals and the personal foibles of candidates and bosses, the complacent voter went to the polls and took merit to himself for dropping a scratched paper into the slit of a box, that for all he knew might just as well have been the lid of a furnace. If our government is in confusion, our public business shot through and overgrown with inefficiency, corruption, and graft, who is responsible but the complacent. self-satisfied citizen and his public-school system and his newspaper and magazine

We are a business people. We glory in our commercial triumphs. We make no secret of the fact that we regard ourselves as resourceful at a business transaction as the Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court. The phrase "a billion-dollar Congress" we like to roll upon our tongues, and our complacency purrs when foreign observers declare that such lavishness in public expenditure would bankrupt a less opulent nation. We are a business people; but how far do we apply our business intelligence to that most vast of all our business establishments, the Federal government? In May, 1912, the sub-committee of the House Committee on Appropriations held public hearings to ascertain the wisdom of continuing public support to the President's Commission on Economy and Efficiency. What follows is a characteristic fragment of the evidence:

Mr. Cleveland (chairman of the Commission on Economy and Efficiency): "The only information that can be obtained about the current liabilities of the United States government is the amount of Treasury drafts and checks on depositories outstanding, and shortterm loans and the matured debt. There are millions of dollars of obligations outstanding that nobody knows anything about, and as to whether the amount is $100,000,000 or $50,000,000 no one can even guess. With this situation in mind, we claim it is impossible for the Secretary of the Treasury to inform himself, or the President, or Congress, or anybody else about what is the current financial condition of the government of the United States. . . .

...

Mr. Fitzgerald (chairman of House sub-committee): "How does it happen that these are not rendered in the Treasury?"

Mr. Cleveland: "The account in the Treasury is for money advanced. These accounts do not show what obligations are paid until after vouchers are audited; that is, the record of payments is from three months to a year and a half behind. There are from $300,000,000 to $700,000,000 of unaudited payments not on the books. That is as close as you can get

What a commentary upon the civic purblindness of the American people! In May, 1912, not even the Secretary of the Treasury could come within fifty millions of guessing the actual financial condition of the Federal government.

And as for business methods, the Federal government still remains an almost unexplored kitchen-midden of obsolete practices. In a vague way we have known that the government employed in the neighborhood of four hundred thousand men and women, that it transacted a business as varied as that of the entire commercial world, and that it spent more than a billion dollars annually; and yet an investigation shows that the government is neither coherent as a business organization nor efficient as an instrument of public welfare. On a magnified scale, it possesses all the characteristics of a sprawling mushroom town. Through lack of co-ordination and planning, its services are in a perennial state of partial demoralization; departments, divisions, bureaus, that should be bound together by a common purpose and a conscious spirit of co-operation in the public interest, are scattered, mutually ignorant of one another's activities and equipment, often hostile therefore and at cross-purposes. And because of this vast planlessness, millions of public money run to waste.

Let the Treasury Department again serve as an illustration. There, of all places, the Commission on Economy and Efficiency found eighteen distinct bookkeeping bureaus, operating eighteen distinct systems of accounting, running all the way from casual memoranda in pencil on loose slips of paper to a bewilderingly complicated scheme of records grown like a coral reef by planless grafting of process on process. The same incoherence riddles the entire administrative agglomeration. No attempt is made to relate Federal expenditure to income, or income to proposed expenditure; no means is provided for testing the efficiency of expenditures by a tally of work accomplished. What wonder that during the past eighty years Congress has found it necessary to con

duct more than a hundred special investigations to discover facts concerning service activities which, under any reasonable system of record and reporting, should have been currently available. And unhappily even these investigations have, practically without exception, been piecemeal and flash - in - the- pan affairs. They have never been undertaken with fa view to a carefully considered plan of administrative reorganization. Too often, as in the recent poking about into the affairs of the Bureau of Chemistry in the Department of Agriculture, they have grown out of internal dissensions and scandals, and have been abandoned when spectacular publicity had exhausted public interest. Their general effect has been to muddle the public mind with irrelevancies and to overcast the darkness of an already benighted citizenship. How in a nation of individuals priding themselves on their business acumen and their capacity for self-government could such a state of affairs come about? For the answer one must look into the history of our business development.

Since our great "Revolution" against the authority of kings, we have held all centralized government in contempt. For upward of a century our Federal government has been valued only in so far as it fostered private enterprise; it has been regarded in part as the crowd regards the umpire at a baseball game, but principally as a medium for making public property available for private use. The theory has been that what advantaged the individual was, by that fact, of public advantage. Individual success has been the inspiration of our national life, and to what better use might the public wealth be put than the encourage ment of individual enterprise? So we threw open our public lands that the hardy might scramble for their possession; we held out the gold and coal of our mines as a bait to the adventurous; and as with lands and mines, so with franchises and all manner of special privileges. The national domain became a grab-bag at a country fair, and each man's worth was measured by what he could snatch for himself. "The country must be developed!" we cried, and naïvely saw no distinction between development and exploitation.

Did we not need railroads, for example? Then why not stimulate individual initiative to build and possess them? Had we not the lands of a continent with which to encourage hustling entrepreneurs? So, through Federal aid, we dispensed more than a hundred and fifty-eight million acres, of which, up to June, 1907, the railroads had established title to a hundred and eight million. More than one railroad, it is true, justified the observation of a prospecting English capitalist who in 1856 examined the Illinois Central. "This is not a railway company," he wrote home; "it is a land company." But what of that? Were we not contriving the greatest and most costly railroad system in the world?

And so the pork-barrel philosophy of government got itself established as a first aid to American civilization. The dignity and power of the central government were recklessly subordinated to the promotion of business. And once the public had acquiesced in the theory that a principal function of government was to stimulate individual enterprise by the dispensation of public property, it be came the part of simple wisdom to compete for public grants, whether of land or franchises or other special privileges, in an organized and systematic way. Out of this wisdom grew the lobby, patronage, and the spoils system, and the organized control of elections. Governmental places of all kinds-as, conspicuously, in the postal service-came to be assigned not for technical fitness, but for ability to line up the local vote behind the representative of a particular faction or lobby. The lobbies assumed the reins of government, and since the strength of each lobby in particular and of all lobbies in common depended upon the number of places available for distribution, the Federal pay-roll grew even as the morning-glory. The annual Rivers and Harbors bill is a perfect monument to the efficiency of the pork-barrel philosophy of government. In a sprightly essay, now unhappily out of print, Professor Albert Bushnell Hart has celebrated the wonder of it.

"Was the bill of general utility?" Professor Hart asks. "If not, it was from no lack of effort to cover the whole area