He returns again and again to this same theme and in one of his latest novels, the _Crossed Paths_, he unites this theme with the same lesson which could be drawn from the _Nobleman’s Pranks_. The scene is in Galicia of the present day and the young lawyer Dr. Rafalovich is surprised to learn that the great landowners are as hopelessly in debt to the Jewish money lenders as are the peasants to their tavern keepers. This lawyer has decided to devote himself to the cause of the people and so has developed a laborious practice among the Ukrainians instead of seeking a more lucrative one among the Poles. In that region one of the big estates was being sold at auction and Dr. Rafalovich realizes how easy it would be for the villagers to secure their own land. Yet not one peasant is willing to trust another to cooperate in the transaction. One and all want the land, they realize that they cannot be prosperous without it but they will not work together or trust one another, in order to secure it. They much prefer to grumble rather than to show a modicum of common sense and win. On the other hand the romantic part of the story is equally sad. Rafalovich has loved a girl in Lviv. Now he finds her married to a drunken sadist who is insanely jealous of her and does everything to make her life unbearable. Both she and her husband die. Rafalovich is arrested, and though he is cleared of all charges and released, something has gone out of him and he is tormented by doubts as to the sense of the course which he has followed. Franko realized that the new conditions after the abolition of serfdom were not ideal and in one of his early stories the _Boa Constrictor_ he pictured the evils of the growing industrialization of the neighborhood of Borislav and the consequent fate of the workers who are kept in an economic serfdom which was as bad as that of the enslaved villagers. This was another theme that he treated again and again throughout his life. Another subject that interested him was the inhumanity of one man to another especially as regards family life. Thus in _For the Home Hearth_ the hero Captain Anharovich returns from Bosnia to Galicia only to learn that his wife has been trapped into recruiting girls for the purposes of prostitution. When she is finally unmasked, she commits suicide and her husband is thus allowed to continue his career and maintain his honor as an army officer, although the rumors of his wife’s disgrace have led him into a duel with his best friend and broken his own heart.