to be exceedingly great at this time, and as the tendency of prices in all markets is downward, the exclusion of foreign wool from American markets will naturally make prices elsewhere go to a lower level than would otherwise be the case. Then what would happen? Why, probably we should have to impose a second embargo, namely, an embargo on wool manufactures.

For that tyrant, economic law, will certainly arrange things so that the wool excluded from this country, after having dropped to a much lower price than the present, will be extensively manufactured into cloth (a good deal of which will be manufactured into clothes), both cloth and clothes coming over here to be sold at lower prices than our manufacturers can make. Suppose we put on a second embargo and keep out the cloth and the clothes. What would then happen? Quite a number of things, but we will mention only one.

This country is trying hard to increase its trade in foreign markets, or at least to retain the greatly increased trade which it has acquired since the war began. But it cannot sell in foreign markets unless it takes something in payment. For example, Great Britain is one of our best customers. If our exports to her should suddenly cease, our whole economic situation would become desperate. She cannot, however, go on year after year buying of us without at the same time selling to us. How long can we succeed in keeping up prices in this country by shutting foreign goods out of our markets? Not very long. There are three ways of making payment in foreign trade by gold, by credits, and by goods. Gold has grown so scarce (strictly speaking, has been so carefully hoarded) that the world has been obliged to employ the other two devices relatively to a much greater extent than before. But now credits are harder to secure, so that whereas a few years ago we could sell a foreign country a great amount of goods and then lend it the money to pay us for the goods, we have today no more money than we need at home. It looks, therefore, as if for some years to come we shall have to take a larger proportion of our pay in goods than ever before. But if we are going to clap on embargoes in order to keep foreign goods out of the country, how can we take our pay? Anyway we look at it, economic law seems, in this particular, bent on playing the tyrant.

Let us turn to something different. Nature has made some soils on which it is not expedient to build one's house. There is, of course, the Scriptural parable of the two men, one of whom

built his house upon a rock and the other upon the sand. Every year we read of large numbers of persons being destroyed because they live in the vicinity of volcanoes. A volcano is doubtless a very useful thing — nature never made anything that was not useful in some way. A volcano is not, however, an agreeable neighbor; it imposes a sort of tyranny on all who come near it, and certainly on all who evince a determination to stay near it. Every once in a while it asserts itself in no uncertain terms. All that can be said of the sufferers is that they have made their choice between tyranny and inefficiency, and have chosen the latter. They certainly have had the pleasure of "chaos and dark night."

This has been a very rambling talk. Our aim has been to provide glimpses of the way the universe sometimes acts. The universe is unquestionably a tyrant. But we need not think any the worse of it for that. Tyrants are not bad things. Indeed all of us are better for a little tyranny. Our correspondent does not think so. He prefers inefficiency; that is, he says he does, but we rate him more highly than he does himself. We do not for a moment believe that he prefers inefficiency to tyranny.

While one who has not read our editorial of last month may not grasp what our correspondent is driving at, we think we know. We said:

"The average man must submit to guidance in increasing measure, or find himself increasingly at the mercy of forces that will grind him to dust. Let us not deceive ourselves. In developing so enormously the mechanism of our social and industrial life we have created an alternative from which we cannot hope to escape it will either make or break the world. The mechanism will not run itself. It must be run by rule with the most perfect safeguards. It has not been run as well as possible in the past, but on the other hand the danger was not so great.

But now the man in the street — untrained, lacking imagination, with the audacity of ignorance, the unwitting tool of self-seeking trouble makers (men who aim to flourish on the disorders of society) thinks himself competent to exercise a dominant voice in the management of the vast economic machine which we call life. The part he wants to play calls for powers which most of us do not possess, for experience which most of us have neither time nor opportunity to acquire, for single-mindedness that is rare in a world so full of distractions as this. The most the average man is, or probably ever will be, able to do is to thread his way under guidance amid the complicated and dangerous machinery of life without being destroyed by it."

This we admit is a hard doctrine, but we did not make the facts. And we cannot change them, nor can our correspondent.

Creative intelligence made distinctions in mental capacity, giving to one individual more and to another less. The world has for centuries been trying to equalize human intelligence by means of educational facilities. But the distinctions remain. As we have many times quoted, "No man is the wiser for his learning; wit and wisdom are born with a man." Why it is so we do not know, but so it is. Every one of us has to be guided by somebody else in some particulars, and many of us have to be guided in innumerable particulars. Those who do the guiding are, if we catch our correspondent's meaning, our tyrants. Of course, we can all rebel and run amuck. But what shall we gain? Our correspondent would say "chaos and dark night." And he seems to think there is a certain amount of pleasure to be derived from "chaos and dark night." We shall have to admit that there is no accounting for tastes. Personally, we prefer a quiet life, even if it is a little humdrum. Our correspondent has perhaps chosen for his motto, "Hurrah for the dead and dying. Three cheers for the next to die." (We are not sure that we have quoted this quite correctly, but it is near enough.)

As previously intimated, we accept Lucretia Mott's dictum-"Truth for authority; not authority for truth." Such truth as man can arrive at is reached in only one way. The greatest of all teachers, speaking of the Creator of the universe, said, "If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine." The whole law of life is contained in that sentence. The final and only real test of our beliefs is in conduct. Everything has to be tested by action in order to have any validity. The Beatitudes, for example, are meaningless except for those who rule their lives by them. On the other hand, no scientific observations are of value until tested by experience. We have got to live a thing before we can know a thing. You cannot know truth until you have exemplified it. If you talk about it without having exemplified it you are merely prating, which we are afraid is what much of the discussion of truth amounts to.

Much that is put forth as truth merely represents the preconceptions or the primitive and untested instincts of the persons uttering it. Truth is fact, and most important of all it is tested fact. Truth, in short, is nothing but the explication of the universe. When you employ truth as a basis for authority you must be careful that your truth conforms to experience, and is

not in the least expressive of your personal desires. Personal desire has nothing to do with truth. Truth is truth, whether we like it or not. So far as we are concerned, the universe is made up of things, not of ideas. If there are any ideas in connection with it they are in the mind of the Creator. We are dealing with observed things and with such things alone. What we call ideas regarding the universe are merely our explanations of how things work under observation.

Life on this planet cannot go on comfortably without authority. A great deal of authority has been exercised in the past that was not based on truth, and that is one reason why things go wrong. What we are pleading for is authority that is based on truth. But we want it to be eternal truth, and not what some persons with untrained instincts and lack of experience fondly believe to be truth.

INSURING AMERICA'S BUSINESS PROSPERITY*

BY W. IRVING BULLARD

Vice-President of The Merchants National Bank of Boston

As a climax to this great convention let us jointly consider tonight the placing of a tremendous insurance policy. In every sense of the word it will be a mutual proposition. The subject matter is the wealth of the world's richest nation. Our problem is how shall we best insure "America's Business Prosperity"? We cannot measure each of the myriad items making up that prosperity. But we can take perhaps the four largest and most significant - transportation, finance, agriculture and industrial relations.

I shall give you not merely my personal opinions, but shall read to you in connection with each of these subjects the authoritative views of some of the leaders of America's business. Their words, as thus quoted from their personal replies to my inquiry, you can accept as direct messages from them to this convention.

You deal in insurance. You do so on the mutual plan. With that plan I am personally familiar as a director of such a mutual company and as an executive and investor in mill properties, as well as in a banker capacity. I know of your service and progress, and congratulate you on both. Can we not extend the mutual thought over a wider horizon — that of a great nation's material prosperity?

Seldom have economic times been so disturbed, so confused, so insecure. There is needed an insuring policy. Its title, in a word, would be good sense. Its premium, if restricted to one word, I would call cooperation.

We won the war, in large part, by the superb effort of a sudden, splendid, self-submerging unity. That fine spirit has largely evaporated. The common observation today is that country and world are full of economic friction and contention -the surf after the tempest.

What is the surest protecting and restoring agent? It is the refinding of cooperation, in the economic sense. We need an economic "normalcy." I borrow a campaign slogan - but with no political purpose. In fact, I do not dare to talk politics; even if my conscience allowed, my courage would falter

*An address before the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies at the Copley Plaza, Boston, September 17, 1920.