But instead of this, the strain of anxiety was universal and heart-rending.  So much depended upon swelling the figures.  The tension would have been relieved if our faces were all set towards extinction, and the speedy evacuation of this unsatisfactory globe.  The writer met recently, in the Colorado desert of Arizona, a forlorn census-taker who had been six weeks in the saddle, roaming over the alkali plains in order to gratify the vanity of Uncle Sam.  He had lost his reckoning, and did not know the day of the week or of the month.  In all the vast territory, away up to the Utah line, over which he had wandered, he met human beings (excluding “Indians and others not taxed “) so rarely that he was in danger of being locoed.  He was almost in despair when, two days before, he had a windfall, which raised his general average in the form of a woman with twenty-six children, and he was rejoicing that he should be able to turn in one hundred and fifty people.  Alas, the revenue the government will derive from these half-nomads will never pay the cost of enumerating them.

And, alas again, whatever good showing we may make, we shall wish it were larger; the more people we have the more we shall want.  In this direction there is no end, any more than there is to life.  If extinction, and not life and growth, is the better rule, what a costly mistake we have been making!

AS WE GO

By Charles Dudley Warner

CONTENTS:  (28 short studies)

OUR PRESIDENT THE NEWSPAPER-MADE MAN INTERESTING GIRLS GIVE THE MEN A CHANCE THE ADVENT OF CANDOR THE AMERICAN MAN THE ELECTRIC WAY CAN A HUSBAND OPEN HIS WIFE’S LETTERS?  A LEISURE CLASS WEATHER AND CHARACTER BORN WITH AN “EGO” JUVENTUS MUNDI A BEAUTIFUL OLD AGE THE ATTRACTION OF THE REPULSIVE GIVING AS A LUXURY CLIMATE AND HAPPINESS THE NEW FEMININE RESERVE REPOSE IN ACTIVITY WOMEN—­IDEAL AND REAL THE ART OF IDLENESS IS THERE ANY CONVERSATION THE TALL GIRL THE DEADLY DIARY THE WHISTLING GIRL BORN OLD AND RICH THE “OLD SOLDIER” THE ISLAND OF BIMINI JUNE

OUR PRESIDENT

We are so much accustomed to kings and queens and other privileged persons of that sort in this world that it is only on reflection that we wonder how they became so.  The mystery is not their continuance, but how did they get a start?  We take little help from studying the bees —­originally no one could have been born a queen.  There must have been not only a selection, but an election, not by ballot, but by consent some way expressed, and the privileged persons got their positions because they were the strongest, or the wisest, or the most cunning.  But the descendants of these privileged persons hold the same positions when they are neither strong, nor wise, nor very cunning.  This also is a mystery.  The persistence of privilege is