name will be synonymous with injustice
as theirs are. Nations no more than individuals can thrive, expand and
develop their best faculties unless their lives are based upon freedom
and justice. Not freedom to exploit a weaker person or people, not
justice before the law which is a mockery and a sham, but freedom for
each to live his own life in his own way, and justice to all in the
shape of equal opportunity to the earth and all it may contain.

This lesson applies equally to America, and if any of my countrymen are
so blind as not to see it, they deserve pity rather than censure, and it
is to be hoped their awakening will not long be delayed.

GERHART HAUPTMANN WITH THE WEAVERS OF SILESIA.

By MAX BAGINSKI.

WHEN I look at the last engraving in the illustrated edition of
"Hannele," at the Angel of Death with the impenetrable brow, over whom
Hannele passes into the region of beauty, I have the consciousness, that
that is Gerhart Hauptmann, such is the inexhaustible wealth of his inner
world.

The stress of the life effort and the certainty of death, groping forth
from delicate intimacies, ripened the fineness and sweetness of this
man's soul. The picture contains transitoriness, finiteness, yet also a
vista of new formation, new land.

Of Gerhart Hauptmann one can say, his art has given meaning to the idea
of human love, which in this period is looked upon with suspicious eyes
as a bad coin, a new impetus, the reality and symbolic depth of which
grips the heart. Out of his books one can draw life more than
literature. A strong soul-similarity with Tolstoi might be observed, I
think, if Hauptmann were a fighting spirit.

I met the poet among the weavers of the Eulengebirge, Silesia, in the
districts of greatest human misery, February, 1891, in Langenbielau, the
large Silesian weaving village. One evening, on my return from a
journey, I was informed that a tall gentleman in black had inquired for
me. The name of the stranger was Gerhart Hauptmann, who came to study
the conditions of the weaving districts. The visitor had taken lodgings
in the "Preussischen Hof," where I called on him the same evening, with
joyous expectation. The name of Gerhart Hauptmann in those days seemed
to contain a watchword, a battle call: not only against the unimportant
thrones of literature at that time but also against social oppression,
prejudices and moral crippling. Hauptmann's first drama, "Vor
Sonnenaufgang," had just app