Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/865

Rh with pictures of specimens and of Indians at work. Dr. Matthews gives us also some description of the Navaho religion and its ceremonies. The religion is an elaborate pagan cult, and as the tribe inclines to be democratic so does the pantheon: they have no highest chief, so they have no supreme god. There are also evil spirits whom men dread. Many of the ceremonies are of nine days' duration, while others last but a single day or a few hours. Elaborate costumes and other paraphernalia are employed in them, specimens of which are here figured. To learn one of the great rites so as to become its chanter, or priest, is the work of many years. Dr. Matthews has a good word for the medicine men that he has come in contact with among this people. Among the notes are given the words of several songs with interlinear translations, and the music of eleven melodies, the latter having been recorded on the phonograph by Dr. Matthews and noted from the cylinders by John C. Fillmore. In addition to its forty-two cuts in the text the volume contains four plates, of which two are colored.

Mr. Bellamy's Equality takes up the story and the discussion of social questions from where Looking Backward ended, and continues them. It is in the year 2000, and in the conversation in the garden where Looking Backward left the pair, Edith asks Julian West about the old times of the nineteenth century, and is astonished that such things as he tells of could have been. Some of the details of the revolution that changed conditions are explained to him. He opens his account in the National Bank and learns about the new financial system, in which private estates are extinguished, the nation owns all the property, and every citizen is allowed each year an equal credit, in lieu of estate, wages, or profit. Every one is expected to choose some occupation and follow it, and all are expected to do by turns their shares of the unpleasant work which no one chooses. A remedy is described for those who refuse to take their privilege or burden. In all those things, and in dress, women are as men, and changes of fashion are no longer known. A discussion of right of property introduces an elucidation of the theory of the social fund and the doctrine that private capital is stolen from it, and the astonishing declaration that under the system prevailing in the nineteenth century, if one monopolist could have acquired title deeds to all of the earth, he might have ordered the human race off of it. The right of title by inheritance is attacked, but it is argued that the equalization of human interests achieved does not destroy the right of property. It is simply merged in the title of the state. And it is held that by this system of equalization women are delivered from a bondage incomparably more complete and abject than any to which men have been subjected by their fellow-men—the bondage of personal subjection to the husband, and to the tyranny of conventional rules. The profit system is held up as one of economic suicide. Stinkers of the nineteenth century are honored in statuary as the leaders in the revolt against capitalism and the pioneers in the new movement. Julian finds that what he had formerly thought evil has become good, and what has seemed wisdom has become foolishness. The iniquity of foreign commerce for profit and the hostility to improvement of a system of vested interests are enlarged upon. While under the old system the continued acquisition of knowledge after