The Stratford Evening Port WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. MONDAY, MAY 29, 1911. ONE WAY OUT.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXIX, Issue 84, 29 May 1911, Page 4

The Stratford Evening Port WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. MONDAY, MAY 29, 1911. ONE WAY OUT.

How a conventional man became a real one, is told in William Carhjton’s now book—“ One Way Out”—which is just now having a great sale in America, It purports to be the story oi a young man who finds himself without a position, with a wife and a soh Ao support, and, most difficult of all, with a middle-class social standing to maintain, says “Current Literature.” “For twenty years,” he complains, “I had been a cog in the machinery ol the .United Woollen I was known as a United Woollen mail. But just what else had this experience made of me? 1 was not a bookkeeper. I knew no more about keeping a full set of books than my boy. .1 had handled only strings of United Woollen figures; those meant notlyng outside that particular office. I 'was not a stenographer, or an accountant, or a secretary. 1. had been called a clerk in the directory. But what did that meah,? What the devil was 1, after twenty years of hard work?” But, struggle* as he would, there was nothing for him to do, and the hardest task of all was to hold up his head among his neighbours. Of them he says: “In these last dozen years I had come to know the details of their lives as intimately as my own. . . On the surface we were just, about as intimate as it’s possible for a community to lie. And yet what did it amount to? There, wasn’t a mother’s son of them to whom 1 would have dared go and confess the, fnpt I’d lost my job. They’d know it soon' enough, be sure of that;'but it mustn’t come from me. There wasn’t one of them to whom I felt free to p:o and ask their help to interest their own firms to secure another position for me. Their respect for me depended upon my ability to maintain my social position; They were like, steamer friends. On the voyage they clung to one another closer than bark to a tree, but once the gang plank was lowered the intimacy vanished. If,l wished to keep them as friends 1 must stick to the boat.” Ho then looks for another clerical job, hut his age is against him. Suddenly an inspiration comes to him. “If we were living in England or Ireland or Franco or Germany and found life as hard as this and someone left us live hundred dollars, what would you advise doing?” he asks Murphy, a wealthy contractor. And ■he himself finds the ananswer: “Emigrate to America. . . All we need to do is to pack up, go down to the dock, and start from there. We must join the emigrants and follow them into the city. These are the only people who are finding America to-day. We must take up life among them; work as they work; live as they live. Why, I feel my back muscles straining even now;-I feel the tingle of coming down the gang plank with our fortunes yet to make in this land of opportunity. Pasqualo has., done it; Murphy has done *it. Don’t yon think I can do it?” He thereupon moves, with his wife and hoy into an Italian tenement, lives on nine dollars a week, avails himself of free libraries, public baths, and all the institutions shunned by the lower middle-class, but utilised effectively by the labourer. The rest of the book relates with much realism ami with a sprinkling of convincing statistical data Ins upward climb to prosperity. He finally emerges as a contractor, bis own master, dependent on none but himself for his livelihood. In the meantime bis wife finds vent for her surplus instinct for motherhood in helping other 'mothers roar their children,’ and her own boy grows self-reliant and ambitious.