When the majority of those who have really studied the phenomena of the sensitives, starting with absolute skepticism, have come to a new form of the old belief; and when, of the remaining minority, the weight of respectable opinion goes so far as suspense of judgment, how does the argument look? Isn't it at least one of those cases of new phenomena where it is well to be on guard against old mental habits, not to say prejudices?

Is it not now vastly more reasonable to believe in a future life than it was a century ago, or half a century, or quarter of a century? Is it not already more reasonable to believe in it than not to believe in it? Is it not already appreciably harder not to believe in it than it was a generation ago?

* * * * *

So far as I can see, the dream life, from mine up to Mrs. Piper's, vague as it is, is an argument for immortality based on evidence.

The sensitives are not among the world's leading thinkers or moralists—are not more aristocratic founders for a new faith than were a certain carpenter's son and certain fishermen; and only by implication do the sensitives suggest any moral truths, but they do offer more facts to the modern demand for facts.

Spiritism has a bad name, and it has been in company where it richly deserved one; but it has been coming into court lately with some very important-looking testimony from very distinguished witnesses; and some rather comprehensive minds consider its issues supreme—the principal issues now upon the horizon, between the gross, luxurious, unthinking, unaspiring, uncreating life of today, and everything that has, in happier ages, given us the heritage of the soul—the issues between increasing comforts and withering ideals—between water-power and Niagara.

The doubt of immortality is not over the innate reasonableness of it: the universe is immeasurably more reasonable with it than without it; but over its practicability after the body is gone. We, in our immeasurable wisdom, don't see how it can work—we don't see how a universe that we don't begin to know, which already has given us genius and beauty and love, and which seems to like to give us all it can—birds, flowers, sunsets, stars, Vermont, the Himalayas, and the Grand Canyon; which, most of all, has given us the insatiable soul, can manage to give us immortality. Well! Perhaps we ought not to be grasping—ought to call all we know and have, enough, and be thankful—thankful above all, perhaps, that as far as we can see, the hope of immortality cannot be disappointed—that the worst answer to it must be oblivion. But on whatever grounds we despair of more (if we are weak enough to despair), surely the least reasonable ground is that we cannot see more: the mole might as well swear that there is no Orion.



THE MUSES ON THE HEARTH

"How to be efficient though incompetent" is the title suggested by a distinguished psychologist for the vocational appeals of the moment. Among these raucous calls none is more annoying to the ear of experience than the one which summons the college girl away from the bounty of the sciences and the humanities to the grudging concreteness of a domestic science, a household economy, from which stars and sonnets must perforce be excluded. We have, indeed, no quarrel with the conspicuous place now given to the word "home" in all discussions of women's vocations. Suffragists and anti-suffragists, feminists and anti-feminists have united to clear a noble term from the mists of sentimentality and to reinstate it in the vocabulary of sincere and candid speakers. More frankly than a quarter of a century ago, educated women may now glory in the work allotted to their sex. The most radical feminist writer of the day has given perfect expression to the home's demand. Husband and children, she says, have been able to count on a woman "as they could count on the fire on the hearth, the cool shade under the tree, the water in the well, the bread in the sacrament." We may go farther and say that our high emprise does not depend upon husband and children. Married or unmarried, fruitful or barren, with a vocation or without, we must make of the world a home for the race. So far from quarrelling with the hypothesis of the domestic scientists, we turn it into a confession of faith. It is their conclusions that will not bear the test of experience. Because women students can anticipate no more important career than home-making, it is argued that within their four undergraduate years training should be given in the practical details of house-keeping. Any woman who has been both a student and a housekeeper knows that this argument is fallacious.

Before examining it, however, we must clear away possible misunderstandings. Our discussion concerns colleges and not elementary schools. Those who are loudest in denouncing the aristocratic theory of a college education must admit that colleges contain, even today, incredible as it sometimes seems, a selected group of young women. It is also true that the High Schools contain selected groups. Below them are the people's schools. The girls who do not go beyond these are to be the wives of working men, in many cases can learn nothing from their mothers, and before marriage may themselves be caught in the treadmill of daily labor. It is probable that to these children of impoverished future we should give the chance to learn in school facts which may make directly for national health and well-being. But the girls in the most democratic state university in this country are selected by their own ambition, if by nothing else, for a higher level of life. Their power and their opportunities to learn do not end on Commencement Day. The higher we go in the scale of education, until we reach the graduate professional schools, the less are we able and the less need we be concerned to anticipate the specific activities of the future.

Furthermore, we are discussing colleges of "liberal" studies, not technical schools. Into the former have strayed many students who belong in the latter. The tragic thing about their errantry is that presidents and faculties, instead of setting them in the right path, try to make the college over to suit them. The rightful heirs to the knowledge of the ages are despoiled. The most down-trodden students are those who cherish a passion for the intellectual life. Among these are as many women as men. If domestic science were confined to separate schools, as all applied sciences ought to be, we should have nothing but praise for a subject admirably conceived, and often admirably taught. In these schools it may be studied by such High School graduates as prefer to deal with practical rather than with pure science, and, in a larger way, by such college graduates as wish to supplement theory with practice for professional purposes. But in liberal colleges domestic science is but dross handed out to seekers after gold. Against its intrusion into the curriculum no protest can be too stern.

Faith in this study seems to rest upon the belief that the actual experiences of life can be anticipated. This is a fallacy. There is no dress rehearsal for the role of "wife and mother." It is a question of experience piled on experience, life piled on life. The only way to perform the tasks, understand the duties, accept the joys and sorrows of any given stage of existence is to have performed the tasks, learned the duties, fought out the joys and sorrows of earlier stages. In so far as "housekeeping" means the application of principles of nutrition and sanitation, these principles can be acquired at the proper time by an active, well-trained mind. The preparation needed is not to have learned facts three or five or ten years in advance, when theories and appliances may have been very different, but to have taken up one subject after another, finding how to master principles and details. This new subject is not recondite nor are we unconquerably stupid. To learn as we go—discere ambulando—need not turn the home into an experiment station.

But "every woman knows" that housekeeping, when it is a labor of love and not a paid profession, goes far deeper than ordering meals or keeping refrigerators clean, or making an invalid's bed with hospital precision. We are more than cooks. We furnish power for the day's work of men, and for the growth of children's souls. We are more than parlor maids. We are artists, informing material objects with a living spirit. We are more even than trained nurses. We are companions along the roads of pain, comrades, it may be, at the gates of death. Back of our willingness to do our full work must lie something profounder than lectures on bacteria, or interior decoration, or an invalid's diet or a baby's bath. Specific knowledge can be obtained in a hurry by a trained student. What cannot be obtained by any sudden action of the mind is the habit of projecting a task against the background of human experience as that experience has been revealed in history and literature, and of throwing into details the enthusiasm born of this larger vision. She is fortunate who comes to the task of making a home with this habit already formed. Her student life may have cast no shadow of the future. When she was reading AEschylus or Berkeley, or writing reports on the Italian despots, or counting the segments of a beetle's antennae, she may not have foreseen the hours when the manner of life and the manner of death of human beings would depend upon her. She was merely sanely absorbed in the tasks of her present. But in later life she comes to see that in performing them, she learned to disentangle the momentary from the permanent, to prefer courage to cowardice, to pay the price of hard work for values received. Age may bring what youth withholds, a sense of humor, a mellow sympathy. But only youth can begin that habitual discipline of mind and will which is the root, if not of all success, at least of that which blooms in the comfort of other people. Carry the logic of the vocation-mongers to its extreme. Grant that every girl in college ought someday to marry, and that we must train her, while we have her, for this profession. Then let the college insist on honest work, clear thinking and bright imagination in those great fields in which successive generations reap their intellectual harvest. Captain Rostron of the Carpathia once spoke to a body of college students who were on fire with enthusiasm for the rescuer of the Titanic's survivors. He ended with some such words as these: "Go back to your classes and work hard. I scarcely knew that night what orders were coming out when I opened my mouth to speak, but I can tell you that I had been preparing to give those orders ever since I was a boy in school." Many a home may be saved from shipwreck in the future because today girls are doing their duty in their Greek class rooms and Physics laboratories.

But this fallacy of domesticity probes deeper than we have yet indicated. It is, in the last analysis, superficial to ticket ourselves off as house-keepers or even as women. What are these unplumbed wastes between housekeepers and teachers, mothers and scholars, civil engineers and professors of Greek, senators and journalists, bankers and poets, men and women? A philosopher has pointed out that what we share is vastly greater than what separates us. We walk upon and must know the same earth. We live under the same sun and stars. In our bodies we are subject to the same laws of physics, biology and chemistry. We speak the same language, and must shape it to our use. We are products of the same past, and must understand it in order to understand the present. We are vexed by the same questions about Good and Evil, Will and Destiny. We all bury our dead. We shall all die ourselves. Back of our vocations lies human life. Back of the streams in which we dabble is that immortal sea which brought us hither. To sport upon its shore and hear the roll of its mighty waters is the divine privilege of youth.

If any difference is to be made in the education of boys and girls, it must be with the purpose of giving to future women more that is "unvocational," "unapplied," "unpractical." As it happens, such studies as these are the ones which the mother of a family, as well as a teacher or writer, is most sure to apply practically in her vocation. The last word on this aspect of the subject was said by a woman in a small Maine town. Her father had been a day laborer, her husband was a mechanic. She had five children, and, of course, did all the house-work. She also belonged to a club which studied French history. To a foolish expression of surprise that with all her little children she could find time to write a paper on Louis XVI she retorted angrily: "With all my children! It is for my children that I do it. I do not mean that they shall have to go out of their home, as I have had to, for everything interesting." But the larger truth is that the value of a woman as a mother depends precisely upon her value as a human being. And it is for that reason that in her youth we must lead one who is truly thirsty only to fountains pouring from the heaven's brink. It might seem cruel if it did not merely illustrate the law of risk involved in any creative process, that the more generously women fulfil the "function of their sex" the more they are in danger of losing their souls to furnish a mess of pottage. The risk of life for life at a child's birth is more dramatic but no truer than the risk of soul for body as the child grows. In the midst of petty household cares the nervous system may become a master instead of a servant, a breeder of distempers rather than a feeder of the imagination. The unhappiness of homes, the failure of marriage, are due as often to the poverty-stricken minds, the narrowed vision of women as to the vice of men.

Their sense is with their senses all mix'd in, Destroyed by subtleties these women are.

George Meredith's prayer for us, "more brain, O Lord, more brain!" we shall still need when "votes for women" has become an outworn slogan.

No one claims that character is produced only by college training or any other form of education. There are illiterate women whose wills are so steady, whose hearts are so generous, and whose spirits seem to be so continuously refreshed that we look up to them with reverence. They have their own fountains. It would be a mistake to suppose that because they are "open at the outlet" they are "closed at the reservoir." But there is a class of women who are impelled toward knowledge (as still others are impelled toward music or art) and whose success in anything they do will depend upon their state of mind. We ought to assume that the girls who go to college belong to this class, however far from the springs of Helicon they mean to march in the future. It is a terrible thing that we should think of taking one hour of their time while they are in college for any course that does not enrich the intellect and add to the treasury of thoughts and ideas upon which the woman with a mind will always be drawing. Spirit is greater than intellect, and may survive it in the course of a long life. But in the active years, for this kind of woman, the mental life becomes one with the spiritual. A lusty serviceableness will issue from their union. If mental interests seem sterile, the cure, as far as the college is concerned with it, is to deepen, not to lessen the love of learning. The renewal of sincerity, humility and enthusiasm in the age-old search for truth is more necessary than the introduction of new courses, which must be applied to be of value, and which at this time in a girl's experience, and under these conditions, can give only partial and superficial data.

Our lives are subject to a thousand changes. In the home as well as out of it, we shall meet, face to face, fruition and disappointment, rapture and pain, hope and despair. In these tests of the soul's health what good will domestic science do us? Not by sanitation is sanity brought forth. Women do not gather courage from calories, nor faith from refrigerators. But every added milestone along the road from youth to age shows us the truth of Cicero's claim, made after he had borne public care and known private grief, for the faithful, homely companionship of intellectual studies: "For other things belong neither to all times and ages nor all places; but these pursuits feed our growing years, bring charm to ripened age, adorn prosperity, offer a refuge and solace to adversity, delight us at home, do not handicap us abroad, abide with us through the watches of the night, go with us on our travels, make holiday with us in the country."

Upon women, in crucial hours, may depend the peace of the old, the fortune of the middle-aged, the hopefulness of the young. In such an hour we do not wish to be dismissed as were the women of Socrates's family, who had had no part in the bright life of the Athens of which he was taking leave. Shall we become the bread in the sacrament of life, ourselves unfed? the fire on the hearth, ourselves unkindled?



THE LAND OF THE SLEEPLESS WATCHDOG

If from almost any given point in the United States you start out towards the Southwest, you will reach in time the Land of the Sleepless Watchdog. On each of the scattered farms, defending it against all intruders, you will find a band of eager and vociferous dogs—dogs who magnify their calling because they have no other, and who, by the same token lose all sense of proportion in life. It is "theirs not to reason why," but to put up warnings and threats, and to be ready for the fight that never comes.

If you enter a domain without previous understanding with them, you are powerless for mischief, for you are in the center of a publicity beside which any other publicity is that of a hermit's cell. The whole farm knows where you are, and all are suspicious of your predatory intentions. You can have none under these conditions. Meanwhile the whole pack voices its opinion of you and your unworthiness.

This is supposing that you are actually there. If you are not, it amounts to the same thing. Every dog knows that you meant to be there, or at any rate, that to be there was the scheme of someone equally bad. The slightest rustle of the wind, the call of a bird, the ejaculation responsive to a flea—any of these, anything to set the pack going.

And one pack starts the next. And the cries of the two start the third and the fourth, and each of these reacts on the first. The cry passes along the line, "We have him at last, the mad invader." There being no other enemy, they cry out against each other. And of late years, since the barbed wire choked the cattle ranges, and gave pause to the coyote, there has been no enemy. But the dogs are there, though their function has passed away. It is but a tradition—a remembrance. Only to the dogs themselves does any reality exist.

Yet, such is the nature of dogs and men, the watchdog was never more numerous nor more alert than today. He was never in better voice, and having nothing whatever to do, he does it to the highest artistic perfection. At least one justification remains. Civilization has not done away with the moon. In the stillness of night, its great white face peeps over the hills at intervals no dog has yet determined. Under this weird light, strange shadowy forms trip across the fields. The watchdogs of each farm have given warning, and the whole countryside is eager with vociferation.

Men say the Sleepless Watchdog's bark is worse than his bite. This may be, but it is certain that his feed is worse than both bark and bite together. In the language of economics, the Sleepless Watchdog is an unremunerative investment. He has "eaten his master out of house and home," and by the same token, he imagines that he himself is now the master.

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By this time, the gentle but astute reader has observed that this is no common "Dog Story," but a parable of the times we live in; and that the real name of the Land of the Sleepless (but unremunerative) Watchdog is indeed Europe.

And because of the noisy and costly futility of the whole system in his own and other countries, Professor Ottfried Nippold of Frankfort-on-the-Main, has made a special study of the Watchdogs of Germany.

The good people of the Fatherland some forty years ago were drawn into a great struggle with their neighbors beyond the Rhine. To divert his subjects' attention from their ills at home, the Emperor of France wagered his Rhine provinces against those of Prussia, in the game of War. The Emperor lost, and the King of Prussia took the stakes: for in those days it was a divine right of Kings to deal in flesh and blood.

The play is finished, the board is cleared, Alsace and Lorraine were added to Germany, and the mistake is irretrievable. A fact accomplished cannot be blotted out. But hopeless as it all is, there are watchdogs who, on moonlight nights, call across the Vosges for revenge—for honor, for War, War, War. And the German watchdogs cry War, War, War. The word sounds the same in all languages. The watchdogs bark, but the battle will never begin.

It is Professor Nippold's purpose, in his little book Der Deutsche Chauvinismus, to show that the clamor is not all on one side. The watchdogs of the Paris Boulevards are noisy enough, but those of Berlin are just the same. And as these are not all of Germany, so the others are not all of France. A great, thrifty, honest, earnest, cultured nation does not find its voice in the noises of the street. On the other hand, Germany, industrious, learned, profound and brave, is busy with her own affairs. She would harm no one, but mind her own business. But she is entangled in mediaeval fashions. She has her own band of watchdogs, as noisy, as futile, as unthinkingly clamorous as ever were those of France. The "Sleepless Watchdog" in France is known as a Chauvinist, in England as a Jingo, in Prussia as a Pangermanist. They all bay at the same moon, are excited over the same fancies; they hear nothing, see nothing but one another. All alike live in an unreal world, in its essentials a world of their own creation. With all of them the bark is worse than the bite, and their "Keep" is more disastrous than both together.

And as each nation should look after its own, Dr. Nippold lists—blacklists if you choose—the Chauvinists of Germany.

At first glance, they make an imposing showing. A long series of newspapers, dozens of pamphlets, categories of bold and impressive warnings against the schemes of England and France, a set of appeals in the name of patriotism, of religion, of force, of violence. A long-drawn call to hate, to hate whatever is not of our own race or class; and above all the banding together of the "noblest" profession as against the encroachments of mere civilians, of men whose hands are soiled with other stains than blood.

We have, first and foremost, General Keim, Keim the invincible, Keim the insatiable, Keim of the Army-League, Keim the arch hater of England and of Russia and of France, Keim the jewel of the fighting Junker aristocracy of Prussia—the band of warriors who despise all common soldiers—"white slave" conscripts, and with them all civilians, who at the best are only potential common soldiers. "War, war, on both frontiers," is Keim's obsessing vision. War being inevitable and salutary, it cannot come too soon. The duty of hate, he urges on all the youth of Germany, maidens as well as men. It is said that Keim is the only man of the day who can maintain before an audience of Christians such a proposition as this: "We must learn to hate, and to hate with method. A man counts little who cannot hate to a purpose. Bismarck was hate."

From Gaston Choisy's clever character sketch of General Keim, we learn that as a soldier or tactician, he was a man of no note. He has no ability as a thinker or as a speaker, but this he has: "the courage of his vulgarity." "At the age of 68, suffering from Bright's Disease, he travelled all Germany, his great head always in ebullition, gathering everywhere for the war-fire all the news, all the stories and all the lies susceptible of aiding the Cause." "Without Bismarck's authority, he had his manner—a mixture of baseness, of atrocious joviality, a studied cynicism and a lack of conscience." "How generous are circumstances! The spirit of Von Moltke the silent, with the speech of an enfant terrible, an endless flow of language, an endless course of words."

To the Chauvinists of France, Keim is indeed Germany. As to his own country, Von Ferlach sagely remarks: "Keims and Keimlings unfortunately are all about us. But they are a vanishing minority." The great culture peoples do not hate one another. ("Die grossen Kultur-volker hassen einander nicht.")

Next on the black list, comes General Frederick von Bernhardi, with his Germany and the Next War, the need to obliterate France, while giving the needed chastisement to England. A retired officer of cavalry, said to be disgruntled through failure of promotion, a tall, spare, serious, prosy figure, a writer without inspiration, a speaker without force. Germany has never taken him seriously; for he lacks even the clown-charm of his rival Keim, but the mediaeval absurdities and serious extravagances in his defense of war are well tempered to stir the eager watchdogs in the rival lands. In spite of his pleas, "historical, biological and philosophical," for war, he is a man of peace, for which, in the words of General Eichhorn, "one's own sword is the best and strongest pledge."

Doubtless other retired officers hold views of the same sort, as do doubtless many who could not be retired too soon for the welfare of Germany. Into the nature of their patriotism, the Zabern incident has thrown a great light. "Other lands may possess an army," a Prussian officer is quoted as saying, "the army possesses Germany."

The vanities and follies of Prussian militarism are concentrated in the movement called Pangermanism. Behind this, there seem to be two moving forces, the Prussian Junker aristocracy, and the financial interests which center about the house of Krupp. The purposes of Pangermanism seem to be, on the one hand, to prevent parliamentary government in Germany; and on the other, to take part in whatever goes on in the world outside. Just now, the control of Constantinople is the richest prize in sight, and that fateful city is fast replacing Alsace in the passive role of "the nightmare of Europe." The journalists called Conservative find that "Germany needs a vigorous diplomacy as a supplement to her power on land and sea, if she is to exercise the influence she deserves." And a vigorous foreign policy is but another name for the use of the War System as a means of pushing business. From the daily press of Germany may be culled many choice examples of idle Jingo talk, but analysis of the papers containing it shows their affiliation with the "extreme right," a small minority in German politics, potent only through the indiscretions of the Crown Prince, and through the fact that the Constitution of Germany gives its people no control over administrative affairs. The journals of this sort—the Taegliche Rundschau, the Berliner Post, the Deutsche Tageszeitung, and the Berliner Neueste Nachrichten are the property of Junker reactionists, or else, like the Lokal Anzeiger, the Rheinisch-Westphalische Zeitung, the organs merely of the War trade House of Krupp. Out from the ruck of hack writers, there stands a single imposing figure, Maximilian Harden, the "poet of German politics," who "casts forth heroic gestures and thinks of politics in terms of aesthetics, the prophet of a great, strong and saber-rattling nation," whose force shall be felt everywhere under the sun.

Bloodthirsty pamphlets in numbers, are listed by Nippold. But the anonymous writers ("Divinator," "Rhenanus," "Lookout," "Deutscher," "Politiker," "Activer General" and "Deutscher Officier") count for less than nothing in personal influence. They do little more than bay at the moon.

Impressive as Nippold's list seems at first, and dangerous to the peace of the world, after all one's final thought is this: How few they are, and how scant their influence, as compared with the wise, sane, commonsense of sixty millions of German people. The two great papers that stand for peace and sanity, the Berliner Tageblatt and the Frankfurter Zeitung, with the Muenchener Neueste Nachrichten, are read daily by more Germans than all the reactionary sheets combined. The Socialist organ Vorwaerts, avowedly opposed to monarchy as well as to militarism, carries farther than all the organs of Pangermanism of whatever kind.

We may justly conclude that the war spirit is not the spirit of Germany, a nation perforce military because the people cannot help themselves. So far as it goes, it is the spirit of a narrow clique of "sleepless watchdogs" whose influence is waning, and would be non-existent were it not for the military organization which holds Germany by the throat, but which has pushed the German people just as far as it dares.

A second lesson is that while forms of government, and social traditions, may differ, the relation of public opinion towards war is practically the same in all the countries of Western Europe. It is in its way the test of European civilization. Each nation has its "sleepless watchdogs," and those of one nation fire the others, when the proper war scares are set in motion by the great unscrupulous group of those who profit by them. The war promoters, the apostles of hate, form a brotherhood among themselves, and their success in frightening one nation reacts to make it easier to scare another.

This the reader may remember, as a final lesson. There is no civilized nation which longs for war. There is nowhere a reckless populace clamoring for blood. The schools have done away with all that. The spread of commerce has brought a new Earth with new sympathies and new relations, in which international war has no place.

If you are sure that your own nation has no design to use violence on any other, you may be equally sure that no other has evil designs on you. The German fleet is not built as a menace to England; whether it be large or small should concern England very little. Just as little does the size of the British fleet bear any concern to Germany. The German fleet is built against the German people. The growth of the British army and navy has in part the same motive. Armies and navies hold back the waves of populism and democracy. They seem a bulwark against Socialism. But in the great manufacturing and commercial nations, they will not be used for war, because they cannot be. The sacrifice appalls: the wreck of society would be beyond computation.

But still the sleepless watchdogs bark. It is all that they can do, and we should get used to them. In our own country, whatever country it may be, we have our own share of them, and some of them bear distinguished names. No other nation has any more, and no nation takes them really seriously, any more than we do. And one and all, their bark is worse than their bite, and the cost of feeding them is doubtless worse than either.



EN CASSEROLE

Special to our Readers

Those of you who have not received your REVIEWS on time will probably now find a double interest in the article in the last number, on Our Government Subvention to Literature. In conveying periodicals so cheaply, not only is Uncle Sam engaged in a bad job, but he is doing it cheaply, and consequently badly, and he has more of it than he can well handle. He is at length carrying them as freight, and most of you know what that means. We are receiving complaints of delay on all sides, and an appreciable part of the unwelcome subvention Uncle Sam is giving us, goes in sending duplicates of lost copies. We don't acknowledge any obligation, legal or moral, to do this; but we love our subscribers—more or less disinterestedly—and try to do them all the kinds of good we can. Partly to enable us to do that, as long as the subvention is given, we follow the example of the excellent Pooh Bah, and put our pride (and the subvention) into our pockets. Even if we did not love our subscribers so, we should have to do the pocketing all the same, because our competitors do. Competitors are always a very shameless sort of people.

We wish, however, that Uncle Sam would keep his subvention in his own pocket, and so lead to a higher plane all competitors in the magazine business, including some of those who don't want to rise to a higher plane. The best of such a proceeding on his part would be that he would also, through the complicated influences described in the article referred to encourage up to a higher plane those who write for popular magazines. Those who write for THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW are, of course, on the highest possible plane already. This remark is made solely for the benefit of readers taking up the REVIEW for the first time. To others it is superfluous, and if there is anything we try to avoid, it is, as we have so many times to tell volunteer contributors, superfluities. Even popularity we do not try to avoid, but—!

The foregoing paragraph was written with little thought of what was coming to be added to it. You and we have something to be proud of. Our REVIEW has been doing its part in saving all Europe from the waste of hundreds of millions of money, and the literatures of all Europe from a degradation like that through which our own is passing. Read the following letter:

Dear Mr. [Editor]:

I have already sent a line through —— thanking you for the copy of THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW, which you were good enough to send me, but I should like to repeat my thanks to you again direct, and at the same time, tell you how the REVIEW has been of service to European publishers.

The article in the last number entitled Our Government Subvention to Literature naturally interested me very much from a personal point of view, but the statistics you give showing the effect of second class matter rate on book sales was very valuable to me as the representative of the English Publishers on the Executive Committee of the International Publishers Congress.

At the Congress held at Budapest last June, a resolution was adopted instructing the Congress to press for a reduced rate of postage on periodicals, and an international stamp. The steps to be taken in order to carry out this resolution were discussed at the meeting of the Committee last week held at Leipzig, when I produced the copy of your article, and gave the Committee a summary of the statistics. The result was the unanimous decision to take no further steps in the matter.

I tremble to think of what might have happened if I had not had your article before me, for the point of view which you have put forward was one that had not occurred to anyone else connected with the Congress, and if the resolution had not been cut out at this last meeting of the Executive Committee, it would have gone before the Postal Conference which is to be held in Madrid this autumn, backed by practically every European country.

I feel we all owe you a debt of gratitude for bringing out the facts so clearly, and believe that you will like to know what has taken place.

While we are not slow to take all the credit that our supporters and ourselves are entitled to in this matter, we should be very slow tacitly to accept the lion's share of it, which is due to Colonel C.W. Burrows of Cleveland, who supplied all of the facts and nearly all of the expression of the article in question, and who has for years, lately as President of the One Cent Letter Postage League, been devoting himself with unsparing energy and self-sacrifice to stopping the waste of money and capacity that the mistaken outbreak of paternalism we are discussing has brought upon the country.

Demos is a good fellow—when he behaves himself, and that generally means when he is not abused or flattered; but how supremely ridiculous, not to say destructive, he is when he gets to masquerading in the robes of the scholar or the judge; and how criminal is the demagogue who seeks personal aggrandisement by dangling those robes before him.

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Our modesty has been so anesthetized by the preceding letter, that it permits us to show you, in strict confidence of course, a paragraph from another. A new subscriber, apparently going it blind on the recommendation of a friend, writes:

"I am told it is the best gentleman's magazine in the United States."

Now, somehow, "gentleman" is a word that we are very chary of using. We couldn't put that remark on an advertising page, but perhaps there is no inconsistency in putting it here, and confessing that we like it—and that we even suspect that we have always had a subconscious idea that it was just what we were after—that it includes, or ought to include, about everything that we are trying to accomplish. In any interpretation, it is certainly an encouragement to keep pegging away.

* * * * *

Most of our readers probably remember a letter on pp. 432-3 of the Casserole of the April-June number, from an individual who thought we were trying to humbug the wage-receiving world into a false and dangerous contentment with existing conditions. This inference was probably drawn from our insistent promulgation of the belief that a man's fortune depends more upon himself than upon his conditions.

As a contrast to that remarkable letter, it is a great pleasure to call attention to the following still more remarkable one. It is from a printer—not one in our employ.

I wish to congratulate you on the excellence of the REVIEW, both from a literary and mechanical standpoint. As a "worker," "a member of the Union," it might be inferred that I endorse the views of the critics given on page 432 of the second number. Not so. It is such views as his that harm the unthinking—those who think capital is the emblem of wickedness.

I believe that individual merit and worth are the only things worth while. The workman who puts his best efforts into his labor, and takes a personal pride in making his productions as nearly perfect as possible, will be recognized, and his individual worth to his employer will raise him above the "common level." All this rot about a "ruling oligarchy" "grinding down the poorer class" is dangerous. The man who has no ambition above ditch digging, and who endeavors to throw out as little dirt in a day as he possibly can, will always be one of "the submerged." It lies with each one—outside of unavoidable physical or mental infirmities—whether he shall rise or sink.

Again I must congratulate you on the stand you are taking in THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW. I "take" and read twenty to twenty-five magazines and for over forty years have been trying to educate myself to a right way of thinking, and the result is I believe as above briefly outlined.

Especially good is The Greeks on Religion and Morals, also The Soul of Capitalism, Trust-Busting as a National Pastime, and Our Government Subvention to Literature.

* * * * *

Possibly some of you are disappointed at not finding this number as full as the daily papers of wisdom on War and the Mexican situation. In one sense we are disappointed ourselves: for we had made arrangements for at least one article of that general nature from one of our best qualified contributors; but when it came time to write it (speaking by the calendar), he showed the excellence of his qualifications by saying that, considering the situation and the function of this REVIEW, it was not time—that the situation had not yet become mature enough or broad enough for any general conclusions—for any treatment beyond that already well given by the newspapers and other organs of frequent publication, and that they were giving all the details called for. We will wait, then, and try to philosophize when the time comes.

We find, however, that with little deliberate intention on our part, this number has turned out "seasonable" in another sense, and hope you will find it so. Witness the articles on Chautauqua, and Railway Junctions, and Tips (entitled A Stubborn Relic of Feudalism) and several others.

Philosophy in Fly Time

In the old days, before the destruction of the white pines removed the chief source of American inventiveness—the universal habit of whittling—every boy had a jackknife, and also had boxes, sometimes of wood, sometimes of writing paper, in which he kept flies. Now he has neither flies nor jackknife.

Then, when he wanted a fly, nine times out of ten he could catch one with a sweep of the hand. That was before the fly was charged with an amount of bad deeds, if they really were as bad as represented, which would have destroyed the human race long before the plagues of Egypt; or if not before the fly plague, would have caused that plague to leave no Egyptians alive to enjoy the later ones. With these new opinions of the fly, began a crusade against him; and now the boys can't have any more fun with him—that is, only good boys can—the kind that catch him with illusive traps, for a cent a hundred. The other kind of boys may occasionally be sports enough to hunt him with the swatter; but it's pretty poor hunting: for the game is so shy that generally before you get within reach of him, he is off: so swatting him is difficult, while catching him by hand, as we boys used to, is virtually impossible.

Now for some questions profound enough to befit our pages. (I) Have only a select group of very alert and quick flies survived? or (II) Have the flies told each other that that big clumsy brute with only two legs to walk on, and two aborted ones which do all sorts of foolish things—the brute with only one lens to an eye (though he sometimes puts a glass one over it) and a pitifully aborted proboscis—the brute that has no wings, and can't get ahead more than about once his own length in a second—that this clumsy brute had at last got so jealous of the six legs, hundred-lensed eyes, proboscis, wings and speed of the fly, that he had started a new crusade against him, and must be specially avoided?

Then, after it is ascertained whether the timidity of the flies is because this story has been passed around among them, or only because men have already killed off all but the specially quick and timid ones; we hope our investigators may find an answer to the farther question: (III) How, if a tenth of what some folks say against flies is true, the human race has so long survived?

To avoid misapprehension, it should be added that despite the availability, in our boyhood, of flies as playmates, we don't like 'em, especially when they light on our hands to help us write articles for this REVIEW.

Setting Bounds to Laughter

That there is even a measure of personal liberty on the earth, is one of our most pointed proofs that the universe is governed by design. For liberty is loved neither by the many nor by the few; its defense has always been unpopular in the extreme, and can be manfully undertaken only in an age of moral heroism. The present is no heroic age, and hence our personal rights fall one by one, without defense, and apparently without regret. The losses thus incurred must be left to future historians to weigh and to lament. There is, however, one of our natural rights, now cruelly beset by its enemies, that is too precious to surrender to the threnodies of the future historians. This is the right to laugh.

It is scarcely a quarter of a century since the first appearance of organized efforts to curb the spirit of laughter. All good men and women were hectored into believing that one should weep, not laugh, over the absurdities of men in their cups. Next, we were warned that it is unseemly and unChristian to laugh at a fellow-man's discomfiture—an awkward social situation, a sermon or a political oration wrecked by stage fright, or a poem spoilt by a printer's stupidity. Under shelter of the dogma that to laugh at the ridiculous is unlawful, there have recently grown into vigor multitudinous anti-laughter alliances, racial, national and professional. Not many years ago a censorship of Irish jokes was established, and this was soon followed by an index expurgatorious of Teutonic jokes. Our colored fellow citizens promptly advanced the claim that jokes at the expense of their race are "in bad taste"; and country life enthusiasts solemnly affirmed that the rural and suburban jokes are nothing short of national disasters. A recent press report informs us that the suffragette joke has been excluded from the vaudeville circuits throughout the country. And the movement grows apace. Domestic servants, stenographers, politicians, college professors, and clergymen are organizing to establish the right of being ridiculous without exciting laughter.

But what does it all matter? What is laughter but an old-fashioned aid to digestion, more or less discredited by current medical authority? It is time we learned that laughter has a social significance: it is the first stage in the process of understanding one's fellow man. Professor Bergson to the contrary notwithstanding, you can not laugh with your intellect alone. An essential element of your laughter is sympathy. You can not laugh at an idiot, nor at a superman. You can not laugh at a Hindoo or a Korean; you can hardly force a smile to your lips over the conduct of a Bulgar, a Serb, or a Slovak. You are beginning to find something comic in the Italian, because you are beginning to know him. And all the world laughs at the Irishman, because all the world knows him and loves him.

When Benjamin Franklin walked down the streets of Philadelphia, carrying a book under his arm, and munching a crust of bread, just one person observed him, a rosy maiden, who laughed merrily at him. As our old school readers narrated, with naive surprise, this maiden was destined to become Franklin's faithful wife. And yet psychology should have led us to expect such a result. The stupidest small boy making faces or turning somersaults before the eyes of his pig-tailed inamorata, evidences his appreciation of the sentimental value of the ridiculous. When did we first grant some small corner in our hearts to the Chinese? It was when we were introduced to Bret Harte's gambler:

For ways that are dark and tricks that are vain, The heathen Chinee is peculiar.

The natural history of the racial or professional joke is easily written. At the outset it is crude and cruel, wholly at the expense of the group represented. In time the world wearies of an unequal contest, and we have a new order of jokes, in which the intended victim acquits himself well. This, too, gives way to a higher order, in which race, nationality or profession is employed merely as a cloak for common humanity. The successive stages mark the progress in assimilation, induced, in large measure, by laughter. There is no other social force so potent in creating mutual understanding and practical fraternity of spirit; in establishing the essential unity of mankind underneath its phenomenal diversity. Setting bounds to laughter: why, this is to indenture the angel of charity to the father of lies and the lord of hate.

A Post Graduate School for Academic Donors

At a recent meeting of an University Montessori Club the case of donors to colleges and universities was reported on by a special committee. The majority report drew a pretty heavy indictment. It was shown that the givers to colleges and universities seldom considered the real needs of their beneficiaries. Donors liked to give expensive buildings without endowment for upkeep, liked to give vast athletic fields, rejoiced in stadiums, affected memorial statuary and stained glass windows, dabbled in landscape gardening, but seldom were known either to give anything unconditionally or, specifically, to destine a gift for such uninspiring needs as more books or professors' pay. The result of giving without first considering the needs of the benefited college or university, was that every gift made the beneficiary more lopsided. Certain universities were almost capsized by their incidental architecture. Others were subsidizing graduate students to whom the conditions of successful research were denied. Still others were calling great specialists to the teaching force without providing the apparatus for the pursuit of these specialties. Others preferred to offer financial aid to students who were poor—in every sense. Donors apparently without exception had single-track minds. They saw plainly enough what they wanted to give, but never took the pains to see the donation in its relation to the institution as a whole. The majority report, which was drawn by our famous Latinist, Professor Claudius Senex, concluded with the despairing note Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. The minority report was delivered orally by young Simpson Smith of the department of banking and finance. He "allowed" that everything alleged by the majority report was true, but saw no use in dwelling on such truths, since donors always had done and always would do just as they darned pleased.

The Club took a more hopeful view of the case, and it was voted that our Club should resolve itself into the trustees and faculty of a Post Graduate School for Academic Donors. Our committee recommended that we qualify our advanced students by conferring the lower degree of Heedless Donor (H.D.) every year upon all givers who can be shown to have given at random. No method of instruction seemed more appropriate than the seminar plan of practical exercises based on concrete instances. The first laboratory experiment was performed in the presence of a Seminar of seven H.D.'s. in a specially called meeting of married professors attired only in bath gowns borrowed from the crews and base ball teams. Into this assembly the class of H.D.'s was suddenly introduced. They naturally inquired into the meaning of the spectacle, and were informed that in no case did the mere salary of these professors enable them to wear clothes at all. "But you do usually wear clothes?" inquired a student of a favorite professor. "How do you get them?" "By University extension lecturing at ten dollars a lecture" was the quiet answer. Another professor explained that he got his clothes by tutoring dull students, another by book reviewing. One somewhat shamefacedly said the clothes came from his wife's money. One declined to answer, and, as a matter of fact, his clothes are habitually first worn by a more fortunate elder brother.

On the whole the results of our first seminary exercise were satisfactory. One student immediately drew a considerable check for the salary fund, another, who had been planning to give a hockey rink, said he would think things over. Still a third deposited forty pairs of slightly worn trousers with the university treasurer, "for whom it might concern." Only one accepted the demonstration contentedly. He admitted that low pay and extra work were hard on the Professors, but he also felt that these outside activities advertised the university and were good business. Of course you wore out some professors in the process, but you could always get others.

Our second seminary exercise was of a less spectacular sort. The post graduate donors were each provided with a bibliography. This in every instance contained the titles of books that a particular professor or graduate student in the university would need to consult for his studies of the ensuing week. It was briefly explained by Professor Senex that original research could not be successfully accomplished without reference to all the original sources and to the writings of other scholars. The bibliographies ran from ten titles or so to nearly a hundred, according to the nature of the particular research involved. The exercise consisted in going to the university library and matching these titles of desiderata with the books actually in the catalogue. After varying intervals, the post graduate donors returned with their report. Nobody had found more than half the books sought for: many had found less.

The effect of this demonstration was interesting. The donor who had tended towards the hockey rink, instead transferred his $100,000 to the book purchase fund. He said he guessed the old place needed real books more than it needed artificial ice. Others followed his example according to their ability.

The student who was satisfied with our bath robe faculty meeting, came back from the library equally pleased. He had not compared his bibliography with the catalogue, but a brief general inspection had convinced him that there were already more books in the library than anybody could read. His intention held firm to give his Alma Mater a tower higher than any university tower on record and containing a chime of bells that periodically played the college song. The tower was naturally to bear his name, which was also his dear mother's.

A Suggestion Regarding Vacations

Why wouldn't it be well for the country colleges to shorten their summer vacations, and lengthen their winter ones? Then urban students would not, for so long a period in summer, be put to their trumps to find out what to do with themselves; and, what is more important, in winter both faculty and students would have increased opportunity for metropolitan experience. In the summer vacations, the cities are empty of music, drama, and most else of what makes them distinctively worth while. Intellectually, the country needs the city at least as much as, morally, the city needs the country.

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A few hundred persons of the kind whose help is sought by this advertisement would have the salvation of the republic in their hands. But somehow those who have the leisure generally lack the desire; and those who have the desire generally lack the leisure.

Simplified Spelling

After receiving, in answer to the invitation in our first number, a few bitter objections to simplified spelling, we have felt like apologizing each time we approached the subject. Perhaps the best apology we can make is that apparently the majority of our readers are interested in it. Therefore we hope that the others will tolerate as equably as they can, the devotion of a little space to it in the interest of the majority. Perhaps the objectors may ultimately be able to settle the difficulty as we and our house have settled another unconquerable nuisance—the dandelions on our lawns—: we have concluded to like them.

Our recent correspondence regarding Simplified Spelling has developed a few points which we submit to those who abominate it, those who favor it, and those who, like the eminent school-superintendent we have already quoted, and like ourselves for that matter, do both:

To a leading Professor of Greek:

I am more hopeful than you that the repetition of a consonant beginning the second syllable of a dissyllable, to close the preceding syllable, as in "differ", "fiddle", "gobble", etc., wil "be generally accepted", especially in view of the fact that it is alreddy "generally accepted", and needs only to be extended to a minority of words.

"Annutther" is not "a fair illustration". On the contrary, it is an exception that I probably was very injudicious to call any attention to; and the trouble with you scholars, I find all the way thru, is that you permit those little exceptions to influence you too much. If a good simplification is ever effected, it will be by cutting Gordian knots, and you all of you seem absolutely incapable of anything of the kind. I don't expect anyhow to make much out of a man who will spell "peepl" "peopl". Imagine all this said with a grin, not a frown!!

You wil never get back to "the old sounds" of the vowels, in God's world.

As to the long sounds, I am going in for all I am worth on the double vowels. I alreddy agree with the English Society on "faather", "feel" and "scuul", and am going to do all I can for niit, and for spredding the oo in floor and door into snore, more, hole, poke, etc. "Awl", "cow" and "go" are spelt wel, and their spelling shoud be spred. These seem to be the lines of least resistance. I find that they work first-rate in my own riting.

You make enuf serious objections to diacritical marks, but my serious objection to them is that they ar obstacles to lerners, especially forreners.

From his answer:

All right; I catch the grin, and cheerfully grin back. The business of a scholar (Emerson's "man thinking", Plato's [Greek: philosophos]) is to take as long views as he can; in this case, to look far beyond the possibilities of my life-time. The more you people with the shorter views, as I venture to think them, agitate for and practise each little partial solution, the more you help on the threshing out which must go on for many years before we can arrive at any general solution. So, more power to your elbow!

Meantime my own spelling will continue to be—like the conventional spelling of the printers of today—a hodge-podge of inconsistencies, quite indefensible on rational grounds, and varying with circumstances. Of course the rational way to spell people is piipl, or pipl.

Which we think is an attempt to bolster up a lost cause.

From another reader:

Your closing sentence in the first number of THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW states with a most distressing combination of vowels and outlandish collocation of consonants that you would like to hear from your readers on the subject.... Z is not a pretty letter, and to see it so frequently usurping the place so long held by s is far from gratifying to the eye....

Suppose you establish to your own satisfaction a method for assigning sound values; how will you reach the differences in vowel sounds that prevail in the United States? The New Englander's mouthing of a differs from that of the Northern New Yorker, and both differ greatly from that of the Southerner—indeed, in the different Southern States there is variation.... At first I was interested in simplified spelling, but the eccentricities developed by its advocates alienated me long since, so I beg of you, drop it.

From our answer:

I delayed thanking you for your letter of the 29th until there should be time for you to see the April-June number.

I hope you are feeling better now.

If you are not, I do not think I can do much to console you, because when a man has been irritated into that position where the alleged beauty of a letter counts in so serious a question, he is probably beyond mortal help.

I have no desire "to reach the differences in vowel sounds that prevail in the United States". There is not much difference among cultivated people. Probably a fair standard would be the conversation at the Century Club, where there are visitors from Maine to California, and hardly any noticeable difference in pronunciation.

There seems to be no disagreement among authorities that a simplified spelling would save a great deal of time among children....

Of course I have not been able to answer most of the letters I have received on the subject. I single yours out because you have had a fall from grace, and I feel guilty of having had something to do with it, by presenting stronger meat than was necessary, in our January number. I have fought on the Executive Committee of the Spelling Board against publishing anything of the English S.S.S.'s proposed improvements, for fear of arousing such prejudice as yours; and yet in our first number, I was insensibly led into, myself, publishing things that looked just as outlandish.

As I said at the outset, I hope you feel better since seeing the April-June number, and should be glad to know how you do feel.

From his reply:

Thank you very much for the courtesy of your letter of 9th April. I was surprised to receive it, as I did not suppose that your multifarious duties would permit you to notice my rather feeble protest. I was somewhat amused that you should think my irritation so extreme as to call for an effort to console me. I am sure I appreciate your attempt to do so. But really, I was not so hard hit as you thought, because I do not expect in my day (I am no longer a young man) to see the champions of "simplified spelling" (some of it seems to me the reverse of "simplified") gain such headway as to materially mar my pleasure in the printed page, for I do not believe you will allow the atrocities of the last few pages of your first number to creep into the delightful essays which render THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW such pleasant and profitable reading....

I do not think any great respect is due the opinion of those who think that a simplified spelling would save a great deal of time among children, for it also seems to have its rules which will present as much difficulty to memorize as do the peculiarities of our present system....

Why thru? U does not always have the sound of double o—very rarely in fact. Why not throo—if the aim is to make the written sign correspond to the sound. Thru suggests huh.

From our answer:

Regarding "thru", you justly say that u does not always have the sound of oo. The only sound of oo worthy of respect, with which I have an acquaintance, is in "door" and "floor". The idea of using it to represent a u sound is perhaps the culminating absurdity of our spelling.

Your statement that simplified spelling "seems to have its rules which will present as much difficulty to memorize as do the peculiarities of our present system" overlooks the advantage that writing with a phonetic alphabet, like those of Europe, has over writing with purely conventional characters, as in China. Now English writing is probably the least phonetic in Europe. Simplifying it in any of the well-known proposed methods would be making it more phonetic, and consequently easier. At present it is a mass of contradictions, and the rules that can be extracted from it are overburdened with exceptions. Simplification will decrease both the exceptions and the rules themselves. There are now several ways of representing each of many sounds, and therefore several "rules" to be learned for each of such sounds. Simplification will tend to reduce those rules to one for each sound, and so far as it succeeds, will not "present as much difficulty to memorize as do the peculiarities of our present system."

All the degrees of reformed spelling now in use are professedly but transitional. They may gradually advance into a respectable degree of consistency, but we expect that to be reached quicker by a coherent survival among the warring elements proposed by the S.S.S., the S.S.B. and the better individual reformers. Probably there is already more agreement than disagreement among these elements.

While the others are fighting it out, the various transition styles will do something to prepare parents to accept a more nearly perfect style for their children, and perhaps take an interest in seeing the various counsels of perfection fight each other.

A few words have already found their way into advertisements—tho, thru, thoro (a damnable way of spelling thurro), and the shortened terminal gram(me)s, og(ue)s and et(te)s; and these and a few more have found their way into correspondence on commonplace subjects; and the interest in the topic, especially among educators, is spreading. But most of the inconsistencies will probably bother and delay children and forreners until they are given something with some approach to consistency.

* * * * *

After we fight to something like agreement on a system, how are we to get it going?

It does not seem extravagant to expect that as soon as the weight of scholarly opinion endorses a vocabulary from our present alphabet consistent enough to afford a base for a reasonable spelling book, spelling books and readers will be prepared for the schools, and adopted by advanced teachers. Many are clamoring for such now. When the youngsters have mastered these, which they will do in a small fraction of the time wasted on their present books, they will of their own accord pick up without troubling their teachers a knowledge of the present forms. This they have always done when their teaching has been by the various phonetic methods with special letters, and have done both in much less time than they have needed for learning in the ordinary way. But they will prefer the reasonable forms, and this demand the publishers will probably not be slow to supply.

THE END