me as precedent the fact that Great Britain at the close of the Napoleonic wars made purchases on a large scale of her foreign chancelleries. Mr. Davis believes that we could find suitable houses needing few alterations in most European countries, and therefore we would not have to build embassies. It is an act of economy for America to buy legations now.

Though the main reason in favor of owned residences for ambassadors and ministers is to save such gentlemen the expenses of maintaining homes themselves, it is by no means the only reason. David Jayne Hill, ex-Ambassador to Germany, relates an anecdote of always knowing where to find embassies of Europe in foreign countries as a contrast to the difficulty of finding ours in foreign countries. He says the visitor cannot even depend on the latest city directory, but has to go to the taxi stand and ask to be driven about from embassy to embassy until some one is found who knows where the American Embassy is located. This is a fact which I have experienced myself.

Finally, owned embassies would remove the disparity between different ambassadors and between the present incumbent of a post and his predecessor, for it is a patent fact that a rich man now rents a "palace" and a poor man struggles to find a humble "lodging within the Government's salary. It is puzzling to foreigners just why "rich" America should be represented among them first by a "palace" and a year or two later by a "lodging."

The absurdity of our present system is shown by a comparison with the French and British. In Berlin both France and England own splendid Government buildings and pay their representatives $33,938 and $40,932 respectively, while we own nothing and pay our representative $17,500 a year. In London France owns a splendid mansion and the French Ambassador receives a salary of $45,000 a year. We give our Ambassador no residence, and pay him the usual $17,500. John W. Davis, generally considered the ablest diplomat we have had in recent years in our service and a poor man, borrowed $70,000 to accept the post. I have heard men of every shade of political belief testify to his exceptional ability and prestige in diplomatic circles. Mr. Root, among others, gave me this view; but how can a diplomat be expected to mortgage his future, even at the President's repeated request?

Underpay does not characterize the post at the top alone; it honeycombs the whole surface. One starts in the foreign service at $1,500. If he makes a success for ten years, he may expect $3,000. During the war Congress appropriated for the secretaries of embassy a so-called post allowance to meet the increased cost of living, but this is of a temporary nature. This situation

depresses the whole service. I have yet to talk with a man in the lower ranks of our service who is intending to remain in it. In other words, the merit system of promotion is wholly lacking. These men after a year or two seek These men after a year or two seek other jobs.

A con

We stand out in contrast to other nations in not applying the merit rule to our diplomatic service. trary impression seems to prevail in the minds of most Americans, who allege that the custom of Great Britain is to appoint distinguished citizens outside the service. But, as a matter of fact, there are few such instances. Lord Reading was a special war envoy, with a term of service of short duration, and had been in public life. Ambassador Bryce was one of those rare men born for the job. The present British Ambassador to Washington, Sir Auckland Geddes, to Washington, Sir Auckland Geddes, is another exception, but even he had previously held public office as head of the Board of Trade. An examination of the diplomatic experience of the representatives of France, Great Britain, and the United States at the important European posts when the war broke out shows that in ten of the world capitals we appointed only one man with previous experience, whereas the previous experience of ambassadors of other countries ranged from ten to thirty-nine years.

It is hard to dispute the charge which Europeans have against our system by mentioning the Choates, Hawthornes, Howellses, and Hays who have occasionally held foreign posts. To offset such men we have our Camerons of Pennsylvania and Sullivans, as the

Minister to Santo Domingo, and a whole list of men who have obtained their office by the size of their campaign contributions rather than by their ability. The failure of America to send continuously men of caliber equal to those of other countries not only prejudices our country in the eyes of other nations, but reflects on our foreign policy as well. Mark Twain's famous dictum, "A country which cannot afford ambassador's wages should be ashamed to have ambassadors," is an oft-repeated comment on our service in Europe.

Our present system of appointment is criticised in Europe for its wasted effort. A compilation of statistics shows that intervening between the date on which President Wilson's diplomatic representatives received their credentials in 1913 and the date on which they took over their posts there was a delay varying from seven twenty-six months.

to

Second only to a definite formulation of America's new world relationship is the interest of Europe in the best minds we have to handle it. I write no secrets of the Foreign Offices of two countries I had occasion to visit regularly for different periods during the last few months when I state this as the question uppermost in the minds of these Offices. Give us men who can sit down and talk and decide, men with power and the ability to use it. Mr. Harding has a big job just beyond the promised formulation and negotiation of America's new world policy in finding the best men to " carry on" in our embassies throughout the civilized world.

66

"CH

HARACTER and Opinion in the United States" is a compelling, stimulating, and essentially a significant book. In a period when undisciplined feeling and incomplete thought are fashionable, when the spring of what we may define as literature stalely drips, like a neglected kitchen faucet, a trivial, noisy, and mediocre stream, the clear intelligence which penetrates Mr. Santayana's pages is in itself a sufficient earnest of their importance. A gifted writer has lately phrased for us the method of the critic's interpretative art. Scholarship, he tells us, will make us contemporary with the picture or the poem which we wish to make our own. But, having become contemporary, the central problem of interpretation remains, and for this the critic requires not a record but a theory of life. The definition of method is useful; it makes explicit the high excellence of Mr. Santayana's book. The book itself is a unique essay in interpretation, an attempt to evaluate American character under the play of the ideas which it has projected and by which, in turn, it has been influenced. What is the equipment prerequisite to this enterprise? Principally what the writer quoted above has emphasized a theory of life. A philosophy, especially if it be both honest and consistent, is the means whereby we may exercise control over ideas. The dominant quality which lies at the heart of Mr. Santayana's book, and which perhaps more than any other is responsible for its brilliant achievement, is its philosophic insight. Here is a critic with an intellectually coherent philosophy as an instrument by which to define his reading of life. Whether or not we share his philosophic beliefs is of little importance. His posses

sion of them indicates the exercise of standards in discrimination having their roots firmly grounded in the discourse of

reason.

Mr. Santayana first considers the moral background of our intellectual life, the "Indian summer of the mind which occurred in New England toward the middle of the last century. "There were," he tells us, "poets, historians, orators, preachers, most of whom had studied foreign literatures and had traveled; they were universal humanists. . . . These cultivated writers lacked native roots and fresh sap because the American intellect itself lacked them. Their culture was half a pious survival, half an intentional acquirement; it was not the inevitable flowering of a fresh experience." Belles-lettres in the United States have had two points of contact with its life oratory and the poetry of oratorical function, and reflection. Americans, believing that action is the end of thought, have found themselves most intensively active in moments of reflection when "action became incandescent in thought." The passion for metaphysics is a National characteristic. "The moral world always contains undiscovered or thinly peopled continents open to those who are more attached

1 Character and Opinion in the United States. By George Santayana. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.

to what might be or should be than to what already is. Americans are eminently prophets; they apply morals to public affairs; they are impatient and enthusiastic. Their judgments have highly speculative implications, which they often make explicit; they are men with principles, and fond of stating them. Moreover, they have an intense self-reliance; to exercise private judgment is not only a habit with them but a conscious duty."

Native shrewdness, accompanied by a certain speculative insight, might have flowered in a philosophy built upon known facts had it not been for the intervention of the National respect for traditional sys

tems.

66

GEORGE SANTAYANA

"To be on speaking terms with these fine things," observed Mr. Santayana, was a part of social respectability, like having family silver. High thoughts must be at hand, like those candlesticks, probably candleless, sometimes displayed as a seemly ornament in a room blazing with electric light." Thus comes the curious divergence between official beliefs and actual ways of life which Mr. Santayana finds characteristic of the American intellectual scene. Attachment of philosophy to tradition is not in itself a disadvantage, provided that the tradition is " in the highway of truth." But in the America of the last ceutury the ruling tradition was not in this highway, and of the penalties paid by philosophy as a consequence not the least was the indifference of a succeeding generation. "One of the peculiarities of recent speculation," remarks Mr. Santayana with characteristic insight, "especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors; we pleasantly bid them good-by. Even if all our principles are unwittingly traditional we do not like to bow openly to authority. Hence masters like Calvin, Hume, or Fichte rose before their American admirers like formidable ghosts, foreign and unseizable. People refused to be encumbered with any system, even with one of their own; they were content to imbibe more or less of the spirit of phi

losophy and to let it play on such facts as happened to attract their attention. The originality even of Emerson and of William James was of this incidental character; they found new approaches to old beliefs. or new expedients in old dilemmas. They were not, in a scholastic sense, pupils of anybody or masters in anything. They hated the scholastic way of saying what they meant, if they had heard of it; they insisted on a personal freshness of style, refusing to make their thought more precise than it happened to be spontaneously; and they lisped their logic when the logic came."

Because orthodoxy has prejudged the conclusions of speculative inquiry, philosophy has been occupied either with conventional solutions or independent solutions, according to the conservative or the liberal temper of the prevailing school, but the problems have been those set by tradition. The recession of orthodoxy and its partial reintegration in America produced transcendentalism, a method "which enables a man to renovate all his beliefs, scientific and religious, from the inside, giving them a new status and interpretation as phases of his own experience or imagination; so that he does not seem to himself to reject anything, and yet is bound to nothing, except to his creative self." The central orthodoxy of the transcendental school was the belief that the universe exists for the sake of the human spirit. The empirical school, on the other hand, touched by the new orthodoxy, transformed psychology into metaphysics and found themselves "idealists about substance, but naturalists about the order and relations of existences." This was the moral background of intellectual life in the United States when James, Royce, and Santayana taught at Harvard; a life somewhat complicated by the fact that it bore little or no relation to the current of National opinion or activity, and further obscured by the picturesque irrelevance which Santayana found to be characteristic of academic education.

A chapter on William James is a sensitive interpretation of temperament and a closely reasoned criticism of pragmatism. James stemmed from the transcendentalists. "His father was one of those somewhat obscure sages whom early America produced; mystics of independent mind. hermits in the desert of business, and heretics in the churches. They were intense individualists, full of veneration for the free souls of their children, and convinced that every one should paddle his own canoe, especially on the high seas." William James was fundamentally an agnostic, a romanticist in his theory of experience in spite of the implications of his later method of radical empiricism, intellectually an eclectic, imaginative, somewhat illogical, immensely tolerant. "He was much less skeptical in morals than in science. He seems to have felt sure that certain thoughts and hopes-those familiar to a liberal Protestantism-were every man's true friends in life. This assumption would have been hard to defend if he or those he habitually addressed had ever questioned it; yet his whole argument for voluntarily cultivating those beliefs rests on this assumption, that they are beneficent. Since, whether we will or no, we cannot escape

the risk of error, and must succumb to some human or pathological bias, at least we might do so gracefully, and in the form that would profit us most, by clinging to those prejudices which help us to lead what we all feel is a good life." And of this attitude Santayana remarks: "To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth; it is not nearly so safe, not nearly so sweet, and not nearly so fruitful. These refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind. Believe, certainly; we cannot help believing; but believe rationally, holding what seems certain for certain, what seems probable for probable, what seems desirable for desirable, and what seems false for false."

Santayana's criticism of pragmatism as a method is just the criticism we might expect of expediency as a moral sanction by one who places his faith so firmly in reason -in intelligence as the Greeks conceived it-and who is therefore committed to a delicate discrimination in the things of the spirit. It prepares the way for a searchingly acute analysis of the idealism of Josiah Royce, which proved the existence of God by postulating the antecedent existence of evil. Good, for Royce, was the ceaseless struggle with evil; without evil, good is impossible, and in the measure that the struggle is successful, good, rather than evil, is defeated, life therefore being a constant defeat of the victor. Further to discredit intelligence Royce adopted both the subjective theory of knowledge and Hegelian moralism; evil thus became the shadow against which the high light of good shines by contrast; both the contrast and the shadow were necessary for the perfect harmony of the Absolute, and individual unhappiness became for him an element in the serene joy of his curiously barbaric God. "His reward," says Santayana, that he became a prophet to a whole class of earnest, troubled people who, having discarded doctrinal religion, wished to think their life worth living when, to look at what it contained, it might not have seemed so; it reassured them to learn that a strained and joyless existence was not their unlucky lot, or a consequence of their solemn folly, but was the necessary fate of all good men and angels." For Santayana, at least, the failure of both Royce and James may be traced to their disbelief in the validity of reason as a criterion, their predisposition to meliorism, and their preoccupation with ultimate validity in a realm in which only relativity has been encompassed by intelligence.

66

was

Of later speculation in America Mr. Santayana has much that is amusing and a great deal that is penetratingly critical to say. Depending upon the genteel tradition which, together with the original austere principles of American life, has been relegated to a comfortable oblivion, it is out of touch with the mind of the period. The new realists have eliminated consciousness, and thereby restored the obvious. "The young American is thus reassured; his joy in living and learning is no longer chilled by the contempt which idealism used to cast on nature for being imaginary and on science for being intellectual. All fictions and all abstractions are now declared to be parcels of the objective world; it will suffice to live on, to live forward, in order to see everything as it really is."

It is in two chapters on "Materialism and Idealism in America "and on "English Liberty in America" that Mr. Santayana's fundamental reading of our National character and intellectual temper finds its clearest expression. He finds us without a sense of the past, individualists, kindly, a little doting on the sacredness of many things, cheerfully experimental, pragmatic, imaginative; a nation of idealists working on matter, materialists in the realm of morals. The most striking expression of our materialism is our singular preoccupation with quantity and, by inference, our neglect of quality, especially in the realm of the spirit and the mind. English liberty, which he defines as a method, the theory of co-operative effort and individual sacrifice, as opposed to absolute liberty, the individual's privilege to fulfill his own personality to the exclusion of society, Mr. Santayana believes has flowered more fully in America than in England. But Mr. Santayana's defense of English liberty as advantageous because of its harmony with the "nature of things" and his dictum that" when living beings have managed to adapt their habits to the nature of things, they have entered the path of health and wisdom," both betray him into the fundamental error of the pragmatists. It is worth noting, finally, that so conscious a lover of beauty recognizes the necessity of making a brave choice between absolute liberty and English liberty, and admits, with fine honesty, that "the necessity of rejecting and destroying some things that are beautiful is the deepest curse of existence." That statement, indeed, is the moral implication of Mr. Santayana's theory of life.

BOOKS RECEIVED

FICTION

Alaska Man's Luck. A Romance of Fact. By
Hjalmar Rutzebeck. Boni & Liveright, New
York.

Black Bartlemy's Treasure. By Jeffery
Fernol. Little, Brown & Co., Boston.
Captives (The). By Hugh Walpole. The George
H. Doran Company, New York.
Dark Mother (The). By Waldo Frank. Boni &
Liveright, New York.

Development. A Novel. By W. Bryher. Pref

ace by Amy Lowell. The Macmillan Company, New York.

Geste of Duke Jocelyn (The). By Jeffery Farnol. Illustrated. Little, Brown & Co., Boston.

Glory of Going On (The), and Other Life Stories. By Elwin Lincoln House, D.D. The Fleming H. Revell Company, New York. Goshen Street. By Wayland Wells Williams. The Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York.

Inevitable (The). By Louis Couperus. Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York.

Mollie's Substitute Husband. By Max McConn. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York. North Door (The). A Romance. By Greville Macdonald, M.D. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.

Palmetto. The Romance of a Louisiana Girl. By Stella G. S. Perry. The Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York.

People of the Ruins (The). A Story of the English Revolution and After. By Edward Shanks. The Frederick A. Stokes Company. New York.

Sirdar's Sabre (The). The Adventures of Sirdar Bahadur Mohammed Khan. By Louis Tracy. Edward J. Clode, New York.

Tales of Mystery and Horror. By Maurice Level. Robert M. McBride & Co., New York.

Way of the Wild (The). By F. St. Mars. Illustrated. The Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York.

BOOKS FOR YOUNG FOLKS Bengal Fairy Tales. By F. B. Bradley-Birt. Illustrated by Abanindranath Tagore. The John Lane Company, New York.

Old French Fairy Tales. By Comtesse de Segur. Illustrated. The Penn Publishing Company, Philadelphia.

Three Little Kittens. By Katharine Pyle. Illustrated. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York.

BIOGRAPHY

Adventures of a Modern Occultist (The). By Oliver Bland. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York. Correspondence of Jean-Baptiste Carrier (People's Representative to the Convention) During His Mission in Brittany, 1793-1794. Collected, Translated, and Annotated by E. H. Carrier, M.A., M.Sc., F.R.Hist.S. The John Lane Company, New York.

Cycle of Adams Letters (A), 1861-1865. Edited by Worthington Chauncey Ford. Illustrated. 2 vols. Houghton, Mifflin Company, Boston. Humours of a Parish and Other Quaintnesses. By the Rev. W. B. Money. The John Lane Company, New York.

Lincoln, the World Emancipator. By John Drink water. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.

Mazzini's Letters. Edited with Introduction by E. F. Richards. Illustrated. The John Lane Company, New York.

Old Naval Days. Sketches from the Life of Rear-Admiral William Radford, U.S.N. By His Daughter Sophie Radford de Meissner. Henry Holt & Co., New York.

With Grenfell on the Labrador. By Fullerton L. Waldo. Illustrated. The Fleming H. Revell Company, New York.

HISTORY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY

Complex Vision (The). By John Cowper Powys. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York.

Course of Empire (The). An Official Record by Senator R. F. Pettigrew. Introduction by Scott Nearing. Boni & Liveright, New York. Evolution of Sinn Fein (The). By R. M. Henry, M.A. B. W. Huebsch, Inc., New York. Henry V. By R. B. Mowat, M.A. Illustrated. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.

Irish Labor Movement (The), from the "Twenties to Our Own Day. By W. P. Ryan. B. W. Huebsch, Inc., New York. Labor and Revolt. By Stanley Frost. E. P. Dutton & Co., New York.

Last Days of the Romanovs (The). By George Gustav Talberg and Robert Wilton. Illustrated. The George H. Doran Company, New York.

Making of the Reparation and Economic Sections of the Treaty (The). By Bernard M. Baruch. Harper & Brothers, New York. Modern Europe. By Charles Downer Hazen. Henry Holt & Co., New York.

Outline of History (The). By H. G. Wells. Illustrated. 2 vols. The Macmillan Company, New York.

Passing of the Old Order in Europe (The).
By Gregory Zilboorg. Thomas Seltzer, New
York.

Political Thought in England: From
Locke to Bentham. By Harold J. Laski.
(Home University Library of Modern Knowl-
edge.) Henry Holt & Co., New York.
Problems of To-Day. By Moorfield Storey.
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.
Profits, Wages and Prices. By David Friday.
Harcourt, Brace & Howe, New York.
Publications of the Champlain Society.
Select British Documents of the Canadian
War of 1812. 2 vols. The Champlain Society,
Toronto.

Social Scandinavia in the Viking Age.
By Mary Wilhelmine Williams, Ph.D. The
Macmillan Company, New York.

United States in Our Own Times (The). 1865-1920. By Paul L. Haworth, Ph.D. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.

TO WHICH WE REPLY THAT THE FOOTBALL NUMBER REACHED ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY SOULS WHO WOULD OTHERWISE HAVE LIVED ON IN DARKNESS AND IGNORANCE

PER

ERHAPS you do not know what a tremendous power The Outlook wields in the matter of shaping the opinions of thousands of school boys and girls. I am taking this opportunity of letting you know the place that your magazine holds in the high schools of New York. The Outlook is used in much the same way as any text-book, and is referred to as an authority on any subject which it treats. Its articles are discussed, its cartoons laughed at, its stories appreciated, and, all in all, The Outlook is held as the model of up-to-date journalism.

Why, then, am I writing this letter? It is because I have a criticism to make. There was prevalent in New York not so very long ago a general epidemic of "Footballitis." Newspapers published the results of games in large letters on their front pages. Now the athlete never did rank with the scholar and a front page was never meant for football scores. I thought that The Outlook would not succumb to the disease. I was mistaken.

However, permit me to go a bit further and tell you of the psychological effect that the putting of a football picture on the front cover had. The issue before the one I have in mind was one of the best ever published. The sale was thirty copies below the normal. But what about the issue with the football picture on the front coverthe demand was for one hundred and fifty copies above the normal.

If The Outlook is published for purely business reasons, then let Mr. Lyman Abbott continue to put football pictures on the front cover of The Outlook; but if it is published with the purpose of shaping the opinion of future America, then continue in the policy which you have pursued hithA STUDENT.

erto.

1121 Woodycrest Avenue, Bronx, New York.

AN UNEASY CHAIR FOR

N'

NEWT

EWTON A. FUESSLE, who wrote "A Challenge from the Easy Chair," is an arrant fraud. He poses as a friend of the easy chair; but in reality he never rests. The Fuessle version of the truth about the easy chair is nothing but one of his repressions breaking through the dikes. He has the vitality of an ox and the drive of an engine. His typewriter keeps going after every other one within seven miles has gone to sleep. He has never learned when to stop.

His wife tells a story which bears out my contention. Once, when the Fuessles were living in Detroit, she went to Cleveland for a fortnight to visit friends. When she returned, she found that Newt had worked himself half to death. She took him to a

sanitarium; but even there he couldn't be forced to rest. He managed to smuggle a typewriter into his cottage, and at the end of a six months' stay he had two-thirds of a long novel on paper. That novel, too, as I recall it, was no mere decorative effect-no mere pretty diversion with which to while away hours. It was rough stufftooth-and-nail realism. I can imagine

Fuessle grinding his molars and wiping his mouth after that siege-like some giant who has just eaten an Englishman during the closed season.

The only easy chair I ever saw him in was on board a Pullman chair car. I have seen him start out on rapid constitutionals at two in the morning. He owns a couple of lounging robes, luxurious and clinging; I have always coveted them on the few occasions when they were in sight; but usually they are at the bottom of a trunk.

Fuessle is one of those who believe that truth, if used at all, should be used sparingly; and this is one of the times when he is handling the verities with fine economy. In setting himself up as a defender of the easy chair he may get away with his pretense among strangers. But I solemnly assure you that his room hasn't an easy chair in it. JOHN NICHOLAS BEFFEL. Hotel Amsterdam, New York City.

PROPOS of James G. Blaine in connec

Ation with the very readable article upon him by Mr. Harlan in your issue for December 8, let me repeat a conversation as to him with one of his prized acquaintances, the late St. Clair McKelway, Chancellor of the University of the State of New York and long editor-in-chief of the Brooklyn "Daily Eagle." This the latter repeated to me shortly before his lamented death. Let me add that the editor had a remarkably retentive memory, schooled by his long experience.

Dr. McKelway said he had gone over the Burchard incident with Mr. Blaine. The latter said that he had paid no attention to what the clergyman was saying when the reverend gentleman was making his speech, as he was running over in his mind what he was going to say in reply. That he therefore did not notice anything particular in what was said. That it was only when the explosion came in the newspapers the next day that his attention was drawn to the address. That he found by that experience "that it might be well to notice what the other fellow said."

SIDNEY V. LOWELL.

Brooklyn, New York City.

A NEWSPAPER PLANT IN A

BAGGAGE CAR

COMPLETE newspaper plant in a railA way baggage car was one of the unique features of a special train which bore Cincinnati business men to a San Francisco convention last summer. They decided that they must have a daily newspaper on the five days' journey, hence the newspaper printed en route.

and

This was an afternoon paper. The reporter gathered the news of the coaches during the morning hours, then rushed back to his paper and wrote it up. The city editor handled it in the usual way sent it out to the composing-room to be set up. From the composing-room it went to the and in less than an hour the press, news of the train (all scoops) was in the "Herald" and being read throughout the speeding special.

It is thought that this is the first time that a newspaper was ever issued, from the gathering of the news to the printing of the paper, on board a speeding train. And there was telegraph news too. Parties at home interested in the venture sent paid telegrams of home events which intercepted the train at stations; hence the edition carried vital home news, besides a complete story of what happened on the special, composed of seven passenger coaches, diner, baggage cars, and a special refreshment car. J. R. SCHMIDT.

A

HOW $5 GREW MASSACHUSETTS paper states that on July 31, 1833, Horace Smith deposited $5 in the Dedham Institution for Savings, and in a long period of years this lone five-dollar bill went on accumulating interest. November 12, 1912, the holder of the bank book withdrew from the bank the sum of $112.47, and June 8, 1920, closed his account with the bank, taking out the balance of $134.46.

The only money ever deposited in the bank was the original $5. Had no money been withdrawn until the account was finally closed, the sum that would have been taken out would have totaled $281.93.