Behind Christianity there is Christ. A fourth: If Washington had not liberated the American Republic, Lincoln would have had no Union to save. A fifth: Some people say that a revolution is coming on in our own age and country. It is possible. A sixth: God made us all. A seventh: It is a well-known fact that men can lie, and that very frequently they do. An eighth: To be foolish is an infirmity. To fool others is a trick. A ninth: The Bible was not given to teach science, but religion. A tenth: A whole life spent with God is better than half a life. An eleventh: Drunkenness ruins more homes and wrecks more lives than war. A twelfth: Anything out of the ordinary line will attract notice. Tupper _est mort_! _Hoch_ Tupper! _Hoch, hoch! Dreimal hoch!_ IX. THE FRINGES OF LOVELY LETTERS 1 _Authorship as a Trade_ It is my observation as an editor that most beginning authors are attracted to the trade of letters, not because they have anything apposite and exigent to say, but simply, because it seems easy. Let us imagine an ambitious and somewhat gassy young gal, turned out of the public high-school down the street with good marks in English--that is, in the sort of literary composition practiced by schoolma’ms. Having read “Ulysses,” “Jurgen” and “Babbitt,” she is disinclined to follow her mother too precipitately into the jaws of holy monogamy--or, at all events, she shrinks from marrying such a clod as her father is, and as her brothers and male classmates will be to-morrow. What to do? The professions demand technical equipment. Commerce is sordid. The secretary, even of a rich and handsome man, must get up at 7.30 A. M. Most of the fine arts are regarded, by her family, as immoral. So she pays $3 down on a second-hand typewriter, lays in a stock of copy paper, and proceeds to enrich the national literature. It is such aspirants, I suppose, who keep the pot boiling for the schools of short-story writing and scenario writing that now swarm in the land. Certainly these schools, in so far as I have any acquaintance with them, offer nothing of value to the beginner of genuine talent. They seem to be run, in the main, by persons as completely devoid of critical sense as so many Congressmen, street railway curve-greasers or Methodist revivalists. Their text-books are masses of unmitigated rubbish. But no doubt that rubbish seems impressive enough to the customers I have mentioned, for it is both very vague and very cocksure--an almost irresistible combination. So a hundred thousand second-hand Coronas rattle and jingle in ten thousand remote and lonely towns, and the mail of every magazine editor in America is as heavy as the mail of a get-rich-quick stockbroker.