Y

OU MAY SEARCH in vain through the most complete and authentic works on astronomy for the mention of two stars in the firmament that were at one time the eyes of a god. Astronomers will dispute the statement and call it a "poetic legend," but if you will go to one of the Acomites for authority, he will tell you it is true. Then, too, if you search over the pages of the latest geologies, you will find that the large plains east of Acoma were covered thus by a lava flow from two volcanic craters near by. The Acomite will dispute that also. He will say that it was through Alaka's revenge that it became so. I am inclined to think he ought to know, for

did not his family live here long before any white man came to this country with his astronomic and geologic ideas?

In many respects, these Acomites, or Pueblo Indians, must be regarded as the most peculiar and remarkable of existing people. Never in historic times have they been savages or barbarians. Gentle, happy, contented people, they live most successfully on the communistic plan. They are true pagans, serving the gods of their fathers, worshipping the sun and the forces of nature, and clinging fast to old rites and ceremonies. Wrapped in clouds of superstition, which are rich in fanciful legend, he dwells upon a height that is as populous with gods as was the Mount

Olympus of the ancient Greeks. There are gods of the chase, of peace and of war, of harvest and of famine, thunder and lightning, and sun and rain and snow. They are innumerable, one for every occasion.

Chief among their deities was Alaka, the gambling god. He was young and

handsome, straight and tall. The women and girls adored him for his beauty and fine manners; the men admired his skill and physical strength. But he would gamble! Many times the Great Spirit warned him, saying: "Gamble not. It will ruin you, and then bitter punishment will be upon you." But Alaka paid no heed to

the monition. For the passion was strong within him. Wherever he went he met men who asked him to gamble, and he was not strong enough to refuse. "No," he would say, "I like not to gamble." When the men would laugh and say: "Ho! ho! you like to gamble, but you are afraid. You are not a god, or you would have no fear." There was not fear in Alaka's heart, but there was a false pride. Their twittings and scoffings were more than he could endure. Anger and recklessness and a determination whatever the consequence, aroused him, and he replied, "Come on; I will show you if I am afraid. I will make babies of you." And so Alaka, forgetting the warning of the Great Spirit, played. Before much time had elapsed, he lost his precious turquoises, which were so blue that they were believed to be bits of the sky. This loss did not daunt him, and he continued playing until all of his highlyvalued shells were gone. Because these shells came, as they did, from the Great Waters, many days' journey toward the setting sun, so far away that none of their tribe had ever been there, they were regarded by the inland desert people as great treasures. And yet Alaka would not stop.

Next he gambled away his sacred meal. When Coronado and his men sought for the Seven Cities of Cibola, their object of search was gold and precious gems, but more precious than these the natives regarded corn meal, for it was to them the staff of life. When they wished to seek special favor of the gods, they offered the meal. As Alaka placed his portion of it before the men, they laughed and said: "Ho! ho! you wished to make babies of us. You had better go and take lessons." Then Alaka became very enraged. For a long time he sat in meditation. At last he

returned, crying out in his anger and recklessness, he said: "I will put up my eyes against anything!"

So they gambled again. Alaka lost. He took out his left eye and placed it on the table. Then they continued the game. Once more he lost, and he placed his right eye beside the left one, the sacred meal, the shells and the turquoises.

No longer could the Great Spirit endure it. Becoming very angry, he snatched up the eyes, saying, "I will place them up among the stars as a warning to men forever and ever, never to gamble." And so you can see Alaka's eyes in the night-sky as a terrible example.

At first it grieved Alaka that he had lost his eyes. Then his anger rose in terrible fury, and shouting out in his rage, said: "I will have my revenge. I will burn up the world and all men in it." So revenged would he be that he gathered all the pitch in the world, and placing it in one great pile, set fire to it. The blaze reached the sky, and so heavy and black was the smoke that the day was as the darkest night. The hearts of men were filled with fear. Alaka would be revenged.

But the Great Spirit would not have it So. He began a rain, and for days the water came in floods until the flames were extinguished.

If you will pause in your travels to-day, fifteen miles west of Acoma, New Mexico, you will see where Alaka attempted his revenge, for at that place are miles and miles of ground covered with a black substance resembling pitch, unlike anything in the neighborhood. And there, from the edge of the three hundred foot cliff, may be seen the stars that were once the eyes of the gambling god.

I

·N THE PHILIPPINES, the Chinaman is looked upon as a shrewd business man, and many a Chinaman has married a Filipino WOman, but the Filipino men very rarely marry with Chinese women. In the Philippines it takes a long time for the colored man to establish a footing, and he must indeed be a great genius who manages to finally acquire social and business equality. In China, the Korean and the Japanese are scorned and scoffed at the Korean publicly and the Japanese privately.

Yet time cures all things, and in the South of the United States the irreconcilable white who believed that the black was born as the bondman to the Caucasian has finally come to accept conditions, and while social equality is not dreamed of as a possibility, even in the remotest future, yet the Southerner of to-day has an ethical code in his treatment of the negro that allows the Afro-American a happier existence than he can possibly enjoy in the Northern States, where intolerance is growing as a noxious and dangerous weed.

Just a few weeks ago the citizens of the little hamlet near old Ticonderoga formulated an indignant protest against the quartering in their midst of the "fighting

sixth," a crack colored regiment of the United States Army. This protest was, of course, unheeded by the War Department. It was a very mild manifestation of the anti-African sentiment in the North.

In certain cities of the East the sentiment against the Slav and the Italian is quite as strong as it is against the black in other places. Everywhere there is race

ready to leap into flame and show itself by riot and bloodshed, brutal attacks, murders and lynchings.

Presumably, we are not different from any other people, and in Europe the lower and middle classes are only held in leash through the fact that for centuries authority has held sway, through a powerful financial aristocracy, and the ruling mass is so strongly entrenched that to struggle against any dictum. were futile. The civilization of China is certainly as old as any, and yet we see that race hatred flames up at "the drop of the hat," so to speak. So, then, we see that civilization has little or nothing to do with the case except that it may be that it is the remains of an ancient, an ineradicable and irremovable barbarism, showing forth whenever the situation becomes so tense that it can no longer be held in the background.

Nearly every war that has ever been fought was brought about by business aggression or by a desire to over-reach industrially. Every revolution has been the result of intolerant wage conditions and class tyranny.

Racial intolerance is the direct result of industrial rivalry. It is true that the negro had little or nothing to see in the oratorical fire-works that preceded the War of Secession. It is also true that the negro's social condition has been ameliorated only in some directions, while in others it has been made many times worse. It is not my intention to point a moral or to launch into a long story regarding a subject that is tiresome, and that may only be discussed with profit by gray-beards around the evening board. Suffice it to

say that behind Harriet Beecher Stowe there glowered on the Southland the evil eye of the New England manufacturer, who saw in the early development of steel mills and cotton factories in the South the ultimate destruction of the big industries of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and the other States of the far Northern business and manufacturing coterie. Sentiment, as personified by Mrs. Stowe, could never have brought on a war against the will of Abraham Lincoln, but business waited until the psychological moment was at hand, and then it struck! Abraham Lincoln was crumpled as a sheet of tinsel paper.

And, so it has been with every other war in the history of man. Sentiment mounts a prancing steed and goes to the court house steps and raises the banner of righteous indignation and voices in inspired oratory the cry to arms for the defense of suffering or pillaged humanity, and when the mob is crying aloud for enrollment, along comes Business, and Business knocks Sentiment in the head with a stuffed club and steals her clothes, and marches and blows the trumpet, equips the troops and sells the powder and the uniforms, the cannon, the transport wagons, the clothing and shoes, the food and the thousand and one other necessities that go to put a modern army on a war footing.

It is a safe bet to make that the men who have been most interested in scaring John Bull into a blue funk about the invasion by Germany are those who will profit by a continuance of the ship building and by the equipping of a standing army. One can easily imagine a meeting of the British barons of industry in rehearsal of the farce, "The Germans are coming!"

There will be a day when racial intolerance will cease, but that day is far away. Its coming cannot be hastened, and it cannot be retarded. In order to appreciate the fact, all that it is necessary to do is to study the map or diagram of the origin of races. Scientists presume that all races are descended from one root, and they have gone so far as to mark the track of the tribes of earth as they swarmed from the original fount. That was thousands upon thousands of years

ago, and as time went on, climate and occupation developed the pigments in the skins and changed the conformation of the skull.

These men of wisdom have painted lines on their little diagrams, and from these lines branch out the races from one central fount. From this same fountain of life has come the Aryan, as well as other races. Back into the fountain is the trend of the races. Back to the original color and the original homogeneousness is the trend, and in a million years all but one race of one color, speaking a volapuk no one of to-day can possibly understand, will have disappeared.

That time is too far away to be of profit in discussion, but that this leveling process is going on, no one can successfully deny.

We see it in the assimilation of words by one nation from another; we see it going on through the process of inter-marriage of races, and here, in the United States, we see it in the marriage of white women with negroes to such an extent. that it was the boast recently that in a hundred years it would be impossible to find a man who could say that his was pure Caucasian blood. This boast was made by an educated negro. Of course he made the time too short by many hundred years, but what he prophesied is likely to come to be true. We see the leveling process going on, in the delimitation of frontiers and in the gradual decay of romanticism and national pride and in the advance of commercialism.

It is not this theory which confronts us, but it is a deplorable condition. We know that in some sections of this country the prejudice is exceedingly strong against any and all foreigners. We, of California, know that in our large industrial centers the laboring element has transferred its former fierce hatred for the Chinese race to the Japanese, and with much less cause. We must, if we are students and truthful, admit the white Californian of the farm hand class, is a lazy, easy come, easy go, thriftless, unreading, unthinking, easily prejudiced, extravagant individual.

We have been given the most gloriously productive piece of land on the globe. We have been given the best climate of the whole world, and, probably because of