tly public and common of all concerns, and as such conducted
by the nation, was abandoned to the hap-hazard efforts of individuals.
This original mistake necessitated endless exchanges to bring about
any sort of general distribution of products. These exchanges money
effected--how equitably, might be seen in a walk from the tenement
house districts to the Back Bay--at the cost of an army of men taken
from productive labor to manage it, with constant ruinous breakdowns
of its machinery, and a generally debauching influence on mankind
which had justified its description, from ancient time, as the "root
of all evil."

Alas for the poor old bank director with his poem! He had mistaken the
throbbing of an abscess for the beating of the heart. What he called
"a wonderful piece of mechanism" was an imperfect device to remedy an
unnecessary defect, the clumsy crutch of a self-made cripple.

After the banks had closed I wandered aimlessly about the business
quarter for an hour or two, and later sat a while on one of the
benches of the Common, finding an interest merely in watching the
throngs that passed, such as one has in studying the populace of a
foreign city, so strange since yesterday had my fellow citizens and
their ways become to me. For thirty years I had lived among them, and
yet I seemed to have never noted before how drawn and anxious were
their faces, of the rich as of the poor, the refined, acute faces of
the educated as well as the dull masks of the ignorant. And well it
might be so, for I saw now, as never before I had seen so plainly,
that each as he walked constantly turned to catch the whispers of a
spectre at his ear, the spectre of Uncertainty. "Do your work never so
well," the spectre was whispering,--"rise early and toil till late,
rob cunningly or serve faithfully, you shall never know security. Rich
you may be now and still come to poverty at last. Leave never so much
wealth to your children, you cannot buy the assurance that your son
may not be the servant of your servant, or that your daughter will not
have to sell herself for bread."

A man passing by thrust an advertising card in my hand, which set
forth the merits of some new scheme of life insurance. The incident
reminded me of the only device, pathetic in its admission of the
universal need it so poorly supplied, which offered these tired and
hunted men and women even a partial protection from uncertainty. By
this means, those already well-to-d