note in fables.

The practical, self-made men of the world, who have done things and
inspired others to do them, have always placed great emphasis upon
common-sense ideals. Benjamin Franklin, by his _Poor Richard's Almanac_,
kept the incentives to industry and thrift before a people who needed to
practice these everyday rules if they were to conquer an unwilling
wilderness. So well did he do his work that after nearly two hundred
years we are still quoting his pithy sayings. It may be that his
proverbs were all borrowed, but the rules of the road are not matters
for constant experiment. Again, no account of Abraham Lincoln can omit
his use of AEsop or of AEsop-like stories to enforce his ideas. His homely
stories were so "pat" that there was nothing left for the opposition to
say. Only one who grasps the heart of a problem can use concrete
illustrations with such effect.

No one really questions the truths enforced by the more familiar fables.
But since these teachings are so commonplace and obvious, they cannot be
impressed upon us by mere repetition of the teachings as such. To secure
the emphasis needed the world gradually evolved a body of striking
stories and proverbs by which the standing rules of everyday life are
displayed in terms that cling like burrs. "The peculiar value of the
fable," says Dr. Adler, "is that they are instantaneous photographs,
which reproduce, as it were, in a single flash of light, some one aspect
of human nature, and which, excluding everything else, permit the entire
attention to be fixed on that one."

_AEsop and Bidpai._ The type of fable in mind in the above account is
that known as the AEsopic, a brief beast-story in which the characters
are, as a rule, conventionalized animals, and which points out some
practical moral. The fox may represent crafty people, the ass may
represent stupid people, the wind may represent boisterous people, the
tortoise may represent plodding people who "keep everlastingly at it."
When human beings are introduced, such as the Shepherd Boy, or
Androcles, or the Travelers, or the Milkmaid, they are as wholly
conventionalized as the animals and there is never any doubt as to their
motives. AEsop, if he ever existed at all, is said to have been a Greek
slave of the sixth century B.C., very ugly and clever, who used fables
orally for political purposes and succeeded in gaining his freedom and a
high position. Later writers, among them Demetrius of Phalerum a