play you adopt the theatrical convention: you know that that is not a real gun that the villain is brandishing and that the heroine is not necessarily the childlike and saintly young woman she makes out she is; but you say to yourself, "Let's make believe.'

An occasional evening of makebelieve is all right for a grown man, but it had better not be overdone. Children ought to go to school; but for a man to go to school, day after day and month in and month out, is hurtful to him.

Americans who do not know history do not realize how precious is the right of contract. People read the constitution's first article, section 10,

where it says, "No state shall... pass any . . . law impairing the obligations of contracts," and they wonder what that provision means and why it was put there. There is a long and contentious history behind that provision. Respect for his contract once distinguished the American from foreigners. Foreigners had legal means of escaping their obligations; Americans contracted carefully, performed rigorously and prospered handsomely in con-

sequence.

It is a crime that men between 15 and 21 are not given more chances to engage in the making and performing of contracts. This is a way of isolating them from the facts of commercial and industrial life comparable to their insulation from the facts of biology. Any contract one of them may make is bound to be terminated when he becomes 21; and any plan that he makes is subject to rupture if he goes into the military service. Legally he is badly maimed. Life set in abeyance for seven years is much the same as life extinguished altogether.

THE FRIENDS OF ONE

ONE's friends are, in a way, the nation's best citizens, and they have, as salesmen and missionaries say, a

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talking point. All men eat, ultimately, from nature's bounty; and despite man's every artifice (marshes' reclamation, better husbandry, the seas' wealth's harvest, irrigation and all such), nature's bounty has limits. Every increase in population adds a burden upon that ever-precarious bountyand ONE's readers are characterized, one may safely presume, by their comparative refrainance from the population's undue increase.

Study world history and you'll note that there has never been a time when the human race was free from famine. Remember how in the Old Testament, in the first book, Genesis, Abraham and Lot parted because there was not today an official, a noted Rationalist, grass enough for all their herds. And

Prof. P. M. Blackett, tells us, "The rich countries of Europe, America and Australia number some 500,000,000

people with an income of about $1,000 per head per year. The under-developed countries . . number some 2,000,000,000 people with an income level of $60 per head per year, or onesixteenth of that of the rich countries."

If world statistics bore you, look at the same problem from another angle. How bad our case is, how fearfully demonstrated when a man undertakes nature's bounty has been strained, is to make a legitimate living. (No wonder men flock to the army, the navy and the civil service.) Add up all the property of any going concern and divide the dollars' total by the number of employees and you'll find that the average job represents a capital investment of between $40,000 and $80,000.

When I ask the state department functionary to quit his job and start making an honest living I'm asking a lot.

Deuteronomy will take time, work and patient study. The sooner we get at it, though, and the harder we work at it, the better for everybody.