If the present market value of National Roads is above our investor's cost, he considers his problem greatly simplified, unless the profit is so large as to be complicated by a prospective loss through taxes, and unless he has held National Roads long enough to have a sentimental attachment for it. But if the profit is small, he usually can be persuaded with little difficulty to convert it from 'paper' to pocket. If losses are evil, profits are good. But his reasoning in this case is no more justified than before.

The careful investor buys a bond or a stock because he believes it is sound and attractive. He owns his bond or stock because he believes it is sound and attractive. Not was sound and attractive when he bought it is sound and attractive now, to-day, and every day he holds it. Whether or not it should be sold to-day is a question, therefore, that depends solely on the individual security's present merits. What it may have cost on one nonsignificant day in the past when the present owner happened to acquire it has practically nothing to do with its worth to-day. But the present relative merits of other sound securities do have a bearing on its worth to-day.

The investor turning over in his mind whether to hold or to sell a stock, the market value of which is below the price he paid, should ask himself just one question: 'If instead of this security I owned its present market value in cash, would I invest in another security or reinvest in this?' Or, stated differently, 'Can I recover my loss more quickly and surely by continuing to hold this security or by exchanging it for another?' The feat is to regard the present amount of capital represented by the security rather than the past gain or loss it has produced.

The problem of the investor with a large profit in his security is more

whether another security equally sound, let us assume is more attractive, but he must estimate how much more attractive. Specifically, he must determine his prospective tax (maximum to-day one eighth of his profit) and then decide whether another security within a reasonable time is likely to appreciate enough more than his own to pay the tax and more; whether such other security in case of market recession is likely to depreciate enough less than his own to save the tax and more; and finally, whether the insurance afforded by possible increased diversification is not well worth the tax premium required.

Though meaning many things to many investors, gains and losses should not occasion serious difficulty to the investor with proper perspective. It may be of help to remind ourselves that unsound securities as a rule are those which depreciate in value and show losses, that sound securities as a rule are those which appreciate in value and show profits, and that investors as a rule should own sound securities.

Therefore, if a proverb can be helpful, let it be 'Take your losses and let your profits run.'

Sound investment principles supplemented by adequate records and standards for measuring results are greatly needed by most investors. When authorities do not agree on principles, records are all the more important. The careful investor should see a quarterly balance sheet and income statement of his investment enterprise just as of his commercial or industrial enterprise. He should seek not merely to do well, but to know how well he is doing, whether he might not do better, and how. He should compare his policies and results with those of other investors. Adequate records give a definite meaning to 'profit' and 'loss' and enable the investor to weigh facts instead of feelings.

MECHANICAL biography accumulates materials. The biographer of this sort gathers, often with patience and immense industry, facts and documents from everywhere, piles them together in loose chronological arrangement, and then leaves the subject to emerge from the mass by the grace of God and the sympathetic intelligence of the reader.

The supreme art of the biographer is to create character, as it is the art of the novelist or the dramatist. The artist has to use the material of his mechanical fellow: there is no other. But the artist selects, discriminates, arranges, pulls out of the shapeless collection the letter, the passage, the touch, that informs and vivifics, and throws the useless remainder into his wastebasket to be forgotten. If he is creating Disraeli, he takes from the huge volumes of Monypenny and Buckle the thousandth part that is significant and leaves the rest where it lies.

There is the question of background. A char-. acter, however great, does not live by himself, perhaps the less so, the greater he is. With Disraeli there are hundreds of minor figures, cach of whom must live, yet each must give his own life to the protagonist, instead of drawing from him. And we have Gladstone in magnificent contrast, and we have Peel, and we have Derby, and above all we have her whom Disraeli inimitably called 'The Faery,' that minute, insufferable mite of grandeur, whose chubby mortality has been immortalized by Mr. Strachey. Or we have accessories, great or trifling ones. What would Disraeli be without the country estate that made him an English gentleman? Even the peacocks set him off as they would in a Whistler picture.

And the artist biographer will seize the great, distinguishing traits and, without overemphasizing them, will make them stand out in lasting relief and fit proportion. Disraeli was a Jew. Ile never forgot it, M. Maurois does not, and we do not. It was the supreme triumph of the Jew to make the English aristocracy cat out of his hand. Disracli loved women, and gave his heart and his life to them. How charmingly does he unveil his soul, or just what he chooses of it, to his wife, to Lady Chesterfield, to Lady Bradford. And deeper than even Judaism and sentimentalism was ambition, the undying determination to be great, in spite of all weakness and all failure and all difficulty. Was there ever a more characteristic phrase than Disracli's answer, when asked,

'What is the most desirable life?' 'A continued grand procession from manhood to the tomb.

But as I read this story of the self-absorbed, successful artist I am reminded of an even greater character who played an almost contemporary rôle. M. Maurois tells us that the biographer should write only of those with whom he is in sympathy and in whom he finds something of himself. I wonder what he would do with Abraham Lincoln. How all Disraeli's subterfuges, his subtle sleights and conjurer's tricks and insinuating graces, shrivel and fade away before that gaunt, meagre, rugged, solitary figure, who had to deal with one of the great crises of the world, and dealt with it, the figure who was beaten and torn and battered by the storms and the turbulence of life, yet sadly, serenely, eternally triumphed over all of them.

GAMALIEL BRADFORD

Red Rust, by Cornelia James Cannon. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1928. (An Atlantic Monthly Press Publication.) 12mo. x+320 pp. $2.50.

IN Charlotte Brontë's preface to a later edition of her sister Emily's Wuthering Heights, which Stevenson calls that powerful, miserable novel, she replies somewhat conclusively to the hundreds of skeptical readers who have questioned the likelihood of such a novel's arising from the provincial experience of Emily Brontë. The possessor of a creative gift, she asserts, owns something of which he himself is not master, something which at times will work for itself. Mr. E. M. Forster in an article called 'Anonymity An Inquiry, most happily published some two years and a half ago in the Atlantic Monthly, makes more fully the same contention.

One recalls rather wistfully such statements and such faith as one reads Mrs. Cannon's new and interesting novel, Red Rust. Mrs. Cannon is too much mistress of the situation. One wishes she would not hold her characters by such tight reins, not drive them with such curbed bits. If they could just once get away from her - Matts Swenson, Mrs. Jensen, the children, Olga, the Minnesota cold, the early Christmas service in the little Swedish church, the wheat fields in July - if they could move more freely and act for themselves, we should close the book with a more satisfied feeling. As it is, we take up cudgels in their behalf. Matts, we say, is not allowed to show his enthusiasm sufficiently; little Jens, the solace of his mother in the last pages, should not have been so kept in the background throughout the preceding chapters; Lena's sufferings would