"What advantages will he secure, for an insurance career, if instead of going from the high school into an insurance office, he first goes through college? His introduction to the languages, dead and living, his own and foreign, will ripen into a familiar acquaintance with their literatures, enriching his mind, storing his memory, refining his taste, increasing his facility of oral and written expression.

"He will become capable of reducing a problem to its lowest terms, its last analysis, by reason of the added years spent in the difficulties and intricacies of advanced mathematical studies. His knowledge of natural science, while not yet that of the postgraduate specialist, will be reasonably complete.

"Of what use are these things in the insurance business? 'Again reminding you that I speak of my own branch casualty insurance - I reply, of the greatest practical use, of real working value, of themselves. Perhaps of even greater service is so fixing the habit and maturing the power of steady, intelligent application, that he who has had those added years of college training will, because of them, bring to the service of his employer a capability of dealing with the questions of underwriting that must compel recognition and reward.

"But what of his age? That may be, and often is, a disadvantage at the start. The college graduate must begin, like all other beginners, at the beginning, usually. And he is no longer a boy. He a man of twenty-two or more. It is disagreeable after the manliness of college athletics, the atmosphere of college society, the free-andequal mingling with congenial spirits in the intellectual life of the upper school, to be 'an office boy,' to take orders from other clerks who may be younger in years and inferior in education, or from an employer who may be very

slow to believe that much business utility can be had of a college man!

"Besides, there is always the possibility of over-education, or intellectual snobbishness. The objections first urged will be only temporary. If there be common sense, and a manly, cheerful, teachable doing of the lowly routine duties of the first round of the business ladder, and if the young man has really profited by his college education, he will force recognition and promotion by sheer merit, and that right soon. The four years' advantage in the start, possessed by the high-school boy, will be more than overcome by the better training and equipment of the college man."

Similar testimony from not a few of the other presidents of the one hundred great insurance companies of the United States could be easily produced. Sufficient has been said, however, to prove that insurance, as now conducted, represents a vast and complex undertaking. It is among the greatest and most important of all business endeavors. The prospect is that it will become yet vaster and more complex. It, therefore, demands intellectual and other personal qualities of a high order for its direction and carrying on. To men of such fortes, it offers a wide and high field of service. For the making of men of such fortes, it may outdo the American college as a helpful condition and force.'

A GREAT HOTEL1

BY JESSE LYNCH WILLIAMS

HEN one goes to a hotel he tells his name and where he comes from, and apartments are given him for his private occupancy, and also the use of considerable space in common with other guests. He is supplied with what food he requires and the attention of a number of servants. When he has finished his sojourn he pays his bill and departs. The number of persons concerned and the variety of interests involved in that history are extensive.

There was a room clerk who dipped a pen in ink and handed it to the new arrival to register with, and a key clerk rang a bell and gave a key to a bell boy, who conducted the new arrival to one of the elevators, while a head porter ordered a trunk porter to take the heavy baggage up by the baggage elevator in the rear. Two elevator boys were told at what floor to stop, and the guest and his belongings were established in a room which had been put in readiness for him early in the day by a chamber maid, who did one part of the work, and a hall maid who did another part; and the results of their efforts had been inspected and approved, or disapproved of, by a housekeeper who had received a long list containing the number of his room as one of those that had been vacated, or "changed," as it was probably called by the room clerk, who made out the list.

And when the guests had dressed and had come downstairs again, he ordered a dinner from a menu composed

1

By kind permission of the Author and Charles Scribner's Sons.

by the chef and edited by the steward and printed by the hotel printer on the top floor the day before. The dinner ordered, though perhaps not a large one, was prepared by twenty pairs of hands.

The man that opened the oysters had been doing nothing but open oysters from twelve o'clock that day, and he would keep on opening other oysters until twelve o'clock that evening. One chef superintended the broiling of the meat and another chef prepared the sauce for it, and still another pair of hands made the toast it was served And before the portion reached the kitchen it had been cut and weighed by the hotel butcher and then dressed and inspected and weighed again at the garde manger.

on.

While waiting for his order to be filled there were scores of other human beings active in scores of other ways in the business of making him comfortable - from far up on the top floor, where bare-armed laundresses were singing as they folded the tablecloth that was to be spread for his breakfast in the morning, down to the coal-blackened stokers, forty feet below him, who were perspiring and shoveling from one to two tons of fine anthracite an hour under the boilers that supplied the power for making the ice in his glass as well as the light at his side and the warmth in the room.

Just outside the swinging doors, where the waiters disappear, sat the "checkers" at a high desk taking note of every order that went out to the kitchen and taking equally careful note of every portion that went into the dining room. Downstairs a squad of men were plunging big steel cages filled with soiled plates into patent whirlpools of boiling water and lifting them out again with a small-sized derrick.

Nearby the night force of silver cleaners, a dozen or more, were polishing knives and forks and making con

siderable din as they tossed each piece into its proper compartment.

Out in the refrigerator the head butcher with an ulster under his white apron was cutting off single-portion steaks and weighing each one to see that it was exactly thirteen ounces, while in the hot bakeshop the roll baker was reaching into his oven with a long-handled paddle and pulling out pans of Vienna rolls and tumbling them into a huge basket for to-morrow's breakfast.

Upstairs, along the corridors, three or four watchmen with noses keen for the smell of fire, and eyes sharp for suspicious-looking persons, were patrolling their floors. In and out among the guests, dressed like one of them and apparently as mildly interested in everybody, strolled the hotel detective.

There were painters revarnishing chairs in the basement, and musicians were playing something from "Carmen" in the main-hall landing; the tinsmith was making ash cans, and the decorator was ordering flowers; the comptrollers were looking for discrepancies between the checker's stubs and the cashier's bills, and the plumbers were looking for leaks in the seventh floor water-main.

There were detachments of men that moved furniture, and women that made pillowcases; a force that did nothing but clean window panes, and a still larger force that did nothing but scrub the main floor, only these were just now asleep because they were to be called by the second assistant housekeeper as soon as the last late theater party had left the supper room and take the only chance they ever have to make things bright and clean and smooth, for the running of another twentyfour hours of this business, whose doors are never locked, and whose engines never stop from the day the house is opened up until it is burned or torn down.