This last week has been replete with Interesting events, some of them of more than passing importance; but among them were two especially which summon up remembrance of things past and apparently forgotten. These items were accounts of the Dillon frauds and of the suspicious action of an American shippers' organization which seems to have stacked systematically the personnel of the Government board which handed out the contracts and subsidies to domestic lines. Both stories were inconspicuously set up, and we can safely assume that the city editor correctly estimated their news value. And that fact cannot help but carry the observer's mind back to days when two such juicy morsels would have found their way quickly and glowingly to the fat pages of the muckraking magazines.

In that epoch preceding and overlapping the Roosevelt regime, the eyes of a million Americans would have been straining impatiently for the week's issue of McClure's or Munsey's to soak up eagerly the revelations of Lincoln Steffens on this latest evidence of the decay of the 'System,' as he had named it. Following his hurried, jumpy, journalistic style through its thorough-going exploration of the intricacies and brazen sin of municipal graft. Steffens's audience would read avidly to the last word, throw up its hands in horror at the wickedness of the Big City, make up its mind to eject these bad men from office and place good men in their places, and in short, wholly misinterpret the arch-muckraker's meaning.

And now these are gone, and their ghosts exist only in critiques of the period. Ida Tarboll is remembered chiefly for her popular inanity, 'Lincoln.' Baker is linked solely with his book on Wilson. Lawson, Lloyd, Phillips, Russell--they are resurrected as local color for an historical novel and then return to comfortable obscurity. Lincoln Steffens, more virile than the others, survived two revolutions and awaits a third. But to survive he has had to cut himself loose from the mentality of the epoch in which he made his name known; his companion passed civilly away in the dull garb of progressivism; he outlived them to become a communist. CASTOR.