UNDER THE MAPLES 



nature. But it may be questioned if the compari- 

 son is a happy one. Life is not a game in this sense, 

 a diversion, an aside, or a contest for victory over 

 an opponent, except in isolated episodes now and 

 then. Mastery of chess will not help in the mastery 

 of life. Life is a day's work, a struggle where the 

 forces to be used and the forces to be overcome are 

 much more vague and varied and intangible than 

 are those of the chessboard. Life is cooperation 

 with other lives. We win when we help others to 

 win. I suppose business is more often like a game 

 than is life — ^your gain is often the other man's 

 loss, and you deliberately aim to outwit your 

 rivals and competitors. But in a sane, normal 

 life there is little that suggests a game of any kind. 



We must all have money, or its equivalent. 

 There are the three things — money, goods, labor 

 — and the greatest of these is labor. Labor is the 

 sum of all values. The value of things is the labor 

 it requires to produce or to obtain them. Were 

 gold plentiful and silver scarce, the latter would be 

 the more precious. The men at the plough and 

 the hoe and in the mines of coal and iron stand 

 first. These men win from nature what we all must 

 have, and these things are none of them in the hands 

 or under the guardianship of some one who is 

 trying to keep us from obtaining them, or is aiming 

 to take our aids and resources from us. 



The chess simile has only a rhetorical value. 



26 



