Little
Journeys

To the Homes of Great Teachers

Elbert Hubbard

Memorial Edition

Printed and made into a Book by
The Roycrofters, who are in East
Huron, Erie County, New York
Wm. H. Wise & Co.
New York
Copyright, 1916,
By The Roycrofters

CONTENTS

Little Journeys

To the Homes
of
Great Teachers

MOSES

And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you. And God said, moreover, unto Moses: Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, The Lord God of your Fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is my name forever, and this is my memorial unto all generations.

—Exodus iii: 14, 15

MOSES

oses was the world's first great teacher. He is still one of the world's great teachers. Seven million people yet look to his laws for special daily guidance, and more than two hundred millions read his books and regard them as Holy Writ. And these people as a class are of the best and most enlightened who live now or who have ever lived.

Moses did not teach of a life after this—he gives no hint of immortality—all of his rewards and punishments refer to the present. If there is a heaven for the good and a hell for the bad, he did not know of them.

The laws of Moses were designed for the Now and the Here. Many of them ring true and correct even today, after all this interval of more than three thousand years. Moses had a good knowledge of physiology, hygiene, sanitation. He knew the advantages of cleanliness, order, harmony, industry and good habits. He also knew psychology, or the science of the mind: he knew the things that influence humanity, the limits of the average intellect, the plans and methods of government that will work and those which will not.

He was practical. He did what was expedient. He considered the material with which he had to deal, and he did what he could and taught that which his people would and could believe. The Book of Genesis was plainly written for the child-mind.

The problem that confronted Moses was one of practical politics, not a question of philosophy or of absolute or final truth. The laws he put forth were for the guidance of the people to whom he gave them, and his precepts were such as they could assimilate.

It were easy to take the writings of Moses as they have come down to us, translated, re-translated, colored and tinted with the innocence, ignorance and superstition of the nations who have kept them alive for thirty-three centuries, and then compile a list of the mistakes of the original writer. The writer of these records of dreams and hopes and guesses, all cemented with stern commonsense, has our profound reverence and regard. The "mistakes" lie in the minds of the people who, in the face of the accumulated knowledge of the centuries, have persisted that things once written were eternally sufficient.

In point of time there is no teacher within many hundred years following him who can be compared with him in originality and insight.

Moses lived fourteen hundred years before Christ.

The next man after him to devise a complete code of conduct was Solon, who lived seven hundred years after. A little later came Zoroaster, then Confucius, Buddha, Lao-tsze, Pericles, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle—contemporaries, or closely following each other, their philosophy woven and interwoven by all and each and each by all.

Moses, however, stands out alone. That he did not know natural history as did Aristotle, who lived a thousand years later, is not to his discredit, and to emphasize the fact were irrelevant.

Back of it all lies the undisputed fact that Moses led a barbaric people out of captivity and so impressed his ideals and personality upon them that they endure as a distinct and peculiar people, even unto this day. He founded a nation. And chronologically he is the civilized world's first author.

Moses was a soldier, a diplomat, an executive, a writer, a teacher, a leader, a prophet, a stonecutter. Beside all these he was a farmer—a workingman, one who when forty years of age tended flocks and herds for a livelihood. Every phase of the outdoor life of the range was familiar to him. And the greatness of the man is revealed in the fact that his plans and aspirations were so far beyond his achievements that at last he thought he had failed. Exultant success seems to go with that which is cheap and transient. All great teachers have, in their own minds, been failures—they saw so much further than they were able to travel.

ll ancient chronology falls easily into three general divisions: the fabulous, the legendary, and the probable or natural.

In the understanding of history, psychology is quite as necessary as philology.

To reject anything that has a flaw in it is quite as bad as to have that excess of credulity which swallows everything presented.

It is not necessary to throw away the fabulous nor deny the legendary. But it is certainly not wise to construe the fabulous as the actual and maintain the legendary as literally true. Things may be true allegorically and false literally, and to be able to distinguish the one from the other, and prize each in its proper place, is the mark of wisdom.

If, however, we were asked to describe the man Moses to a jury of sane, sensible, intelligent and unprejudiced men and women, and show why he is worthy of the remembrance of mankind, we would have to eliminate the fabulous, carefully weigh the traditional, and rest our argument upon records that are fair, sensible and reasonably free from dispute.

The conclusions of professional retainers, committed before they begin their so-called investigations to a literal belief in the fabulous, should be accepted with great caution. For them to come to conclusions outside of that which they have been taught, is not only to forfeit their social position, but to lose their actual means of livelihood. Perhaps the truth in the final summing up can best be gotten from those who have made no vows that they will not change their opinions, and have nothing to lose if they fail occasionally to gibe with the popular.

On a certain occasion after Colonel Ingersoll had delivered his famous lecture entitled, "Some Mistakes of Moses," he was entertained by a local club. At the meeting, which was of the usual informal kind known as "A Dutch Feed," a young lawyer made bold to address the great orator thus: "Colonel Ingersoll, you are a lover of freedom—with you the word liberty looms large. All great men love liberty, and no man lives in history, respected and revered, save as he has sought to make men free. Moses was a lover of liberty. Now, wouldn't it be gracious and generous in you to give Moses, who in some ways was in the same business as yourself, due credit as a liberator and law-giver and not emphasize his mistakes to the total exclusion of his virtues?"

Colonel Ingersoll listened—he was impressed by the fairness of the question. He listened, paused and replied: "Young man, you have asked a reasonable question, and all you suggest about the greatness of Moses, in spite of his mistakes, is well taken. The trouble in your logic lies in the fact that you do not understand my status in this case. You seem to forget that I am not the attorney for Moses. He has more than two million men looking after his interests. I am retained on the other side!"

Like unto Colonel Ingersoll, I am not an attorney for Moses. I desire, however, to give a fair, clear and judicial account of the man. I will attempt to present a brief for the people, and neither prosecute nor defend. I will simply try to picture the man as he once existed, nothing extenuating, nor setting down aught in malice. As the original office of the State's Attorney was rather to protect the person at the bar than to indict him, so will I try to bring out the best in Moses, rather than hold up his mistakes and raise a laugh by revealing his ignorance. Modesty, which is often egotism turned wrong side out, might here say, "Oh, Moses requires no defense at this late day!" But Moses, like all great men, has suffered at the hands of his friends. To this man has been attributed powers which no human being ever possessed.

Moses lived thirty-three hundred years ago. In one sense thirty-three centuries is a very long time. All is comparative—children regard a man of fifty as "awful old." I have seen several persons who have lived a hundred years, and they didn't consider a century long, "and thirty-five isn't anything," said one of them to me.

Geologically, thirty-three centuries is only an hour ago. It does not nearly take us back to the time when men of the Stone Age hunted the hairy mammoth in what is now Nebraska, nor does thirty-three centuries give us any glimpse of the time when tropical animals, plants and probably men lived and flourished at the North Pole.

Egyptian civilization, at the time of Moses, was more than three thousand years old. Egypt was then in the first stage of senility, entering upon her decline, for her best people had settled in the cities, and this completes the cycle and spells deterioration. She had passed through the savage, barbaric, nomadic and agricultural stages and was living on her unearned increment, a part of which was Israelitish labor. Moses looked at the Pyramids, which were built more than a thousand years before his birth, and asked in wonder about who built them, very much as we do today. He listened for the Sphinx to answer, but she was silent, then as now. The date of the exodus has been fixed as having probably occurred during the reign of the Great Pharaoh, Mineptah, or the nineteenth Egyptian Dynasty. The date is, say, fourteen hundred years before Christ. An inscription has recently been found which seems to show that Joseph settled in Egypt during the reign of Mineptah, but the best scholars now have gone back to the conclusions I have stated.

At the time of the Pharaohs, Egypt was the highest civilized country on earth. It had a vast system of canals, an organized army, a goodly degree of art, and there were engineers and builders of much ability. Philosophy, poetry and ethics were recognized, prized and discussed.

The storage of grain by the government to bank against famine had been practised for several hundred years. There were also treasure-cities built to guard against fire, thieves or destruction by the elements. It will thus be seen that foresight, thrift, caution, wisdom, played their parts. The Egyptians were not savages.

bout five hundred years before the birth of Moses there lived in Arabia a powerful Sheik or Chief, known as Abraham. This man had a familiar spirit, or guide, or guardian-angel known as Yaveh or Jehovah. All of the desert tribes had such tutelary gods; and all of these gods were once men of power who lived on earth. The belief in special gods has often been held by very great men: Socrates looked to his "demon" for guidance; Themistocles consulted his oracle; a President of the United States visited a clairvoyant, who consented to act as a medium and interpret the supernatural. This idea, which is a variant of ancestor worship, still survives, and very many good people do not take journeys or make investments until they believe they are being dictated to by Shakespeare, Emerson, Beecher or Phillips Brooks. These people also believe that there are bad spirits to which we must not harken.

Abraham was led by Jehovah; what Jehovah told him to do he did; when Jehovah told him to desist or change his plans, he obeyed. Jehovah promised him many things, and some of these promises were fulfilled.

Whether these tutelary gods or controlling spirits had any actual existence outside of the imagination of the people who believed in them—whether they were merely pictures thrown upon the screen by a subconscious spiritual stereopticon—is not the question now under discussion. Something must be left for a later time: the fact remains that special providences are yet relied upon by sincere and intelligent people.

Abraham had a son named Isaac. And Isaac was the father of Jacob, or Israel, "the Soldier of God," so called on account of his successful wrestling with the angel. And Jacob was the father of twelve sons. All of these people believed in Jehovah, the god of their tribe; and while they did not disbelieve in the gods of the neighboring tribes, they yet doubted their power and had grave misgivings as to their honesty. Therefore, they had nothing to do with them, praying to their own god only and looking to him for support. They were the chosen people of Jehovah, just as the Babylonians were the chosen people of Baal; the Canaanites the chosen people of Ishitar; the Moabites the chosen people of Chemos; the Ammonites the chosen people of Rimmon.

Now Joseph was the favorite son of Jacob, and his brethren were naturally jealous of him. So one day out on the range they sold him into slavery to a passing caravan, and went home and told their father the boy was dead, having been killed by a wild beast. To make the matter plausible they took the coat of Joseph and smeared it with the blood of a goat which they had killed. Nowadays, the coat would have been sent to a chemist's laboratory and the blood-spots tested to see whether it was the blood of beast or human. But Jacob believed the story and mourned his son as dead.

Now Joseph was taken to Egypt and there arose to a position of influence and power through his intelligence and diligence. How eventually his brethren, starving, came to him for food, there being a famine in their own land, is one of the most natural and beautiful stories in all literature. It is a folklore legend, free from the fabulous, and has all the corroborating marks of the actual.

For us it is history undisputed, unrefuted, because it is so natural. It could all easily happen in various parts of the world even now. It shows the identical traits of human nature that are alive and pulsing today.

Joseph having made himself known to his brethren induced some of them and their neighbors to come down into Egypt, where the pasturage was better and the water more sure, and settle there. The Bible tells us that there were seventy of these settlers and gives us their names.

These emigrants, called Israelites, or Children of Israel, account for the presence of the enslaved people whom Moses led out of captivity three hundred years later.

One thing seems quite sure, and that is that they were a peculiar people then, with the pride of the desert in their veins, for they stood socially aloof and did not mix with the Egyptians. They still had their own god and clung to their own ways and customs.

That very naive account in the first chapter of Exodus of how they had two midwives, "and the name of one was Shiphrah and the other Puah," is as fine in its elusive exactitude as an Uncle Remus story. Children always want to know the names of people. These two Hebrew midwives were bribed by the King of Egypt—ruler over twenty million people—in person, to kill all the Hebrew boy babies. Then the account states that Jehovah was pleased with these Hebrew women who proved false to their master, and Jehovah rewarded them by giving them houses.

This order to kill the Hebrew children must have gone into execution, if at all, about the time of the birth of Moses, because Aaron, the brother of Moses, and three years older, certainly was not killed.

Whether Moses was the son of Pharaoh's daughter, his father an Israelite, or both of his parents were Israelites, is problematic. Royal families are not apt to adopt an unknown waif into the royal household and bring him up as their royal own, especially if this waif belongs to what is regarded as an inferior race. The tie of motherhood is the only one that could over-rule caste and override prejudice. If the daughter of Pharaoh, or more properly "the Pharaoh," were the mother of Moses, she had a better reason for hiding him in the bulrushes than did the daughter of a Levite, for the order to kill these profitable workers is extremely doubtful. The strength, skill and ability of the Israelites formed a valuable acquisition to the Egyptians, and what they wanted was more Israelites, not fewer.

Judging from the statement that there were only two midwives, there were only a few hundred Israelites—perhaps between one and two thousand, at most.

So leaving the legend of the childhood of Moses with just enough mystery mixed in it to give it a perpetual piquancy, we learn that he was brought up an Egyptian, as the son of Pharaoh's daughter, and that it was she who gave him his name.

Philo and Josephus give various sidelights on the life and character of Moses. The Midrash or Commentaries on the History of the Jews, composed, added to or modified by many men, extending over a period of twenty centuries, also add their weight, even though the value of these Commentaries is conjectural.

Egyptian accounts of Moses and the Israelites come to us through Hellenic sources, and very naturally are not complimentary. These picture Moses, or Osarsiph, as they call him, as an agitator, an undesirable citizen, who sought to overturn the government, and failing in this, fled to the desert with a few hundred outlaws. They managed to hold out against the forces sent to capture them, were gradually added to by other refugees, and through the organizing genius of Moses were rounded into a strong tribe.

That Moses was their supreme ruler, and that to better hold his people in check he devised a religious ritual for them, and impressed his god, Jehovah, upon them, almost to the exclusion of all other gods, and thus formed them into a religious whole, is beyond question. No matter what the cause of the uprising, or who was to blame for it, the fact is undisputed that Moses led a revolt in Egypt, and the people he carried with him in this exodus formed the nucleus of the Hebrew Nation. And further, the fact is beyond dispute that the personality of Moses was the prime cementing factor in the making of the nation. The power, poise, patience and unwavering self-reliance of the man, through his faith in the god Jehovah, are all beyond dispute. Things happen because the man makes them happen.

he position of the Israelites in Egypt was one of voluntary vassalage. The government was a feudal monarchy. The Israelites had come into Egypt of their own accord, but had never been admitted into the full rights of citizenship. This exclusion by the Egyptians had no doubt tended to fix the Children of Israel in their religious beliefs, and on the other hand, their proud and exclusive nature had tended to keep them from a full fellowship with the actual owners of the land.

The Egyptians never attempted to traffic in them as they did in slaves of war, being quite content to use them as clerks, laborers and servants, paying them a certain wage, and also demanding an excess of labor in lieu of taxation. In other words, they worked out their "road-tax," which no doubt was excessive. Many years later, Athens and also Rome had similar "slaves," some of whom were men of great intellect and worth. If one reads the works of modern economic prophets, it will be seen that wage-workers in America are often referred to as "slaves" or "bondmen," terms which will probably give rise to confusion among historians to come.

Moses was brought up in the court of the king, and became versed in all the lore of the Egyptians. We are led to suppose that he also looked like an Egyptian, as we are told that people seeing him for the first time, he being a stranger to them, went away and referred to him as "that Egyptian." He was handsome, commanding, silent by habit and slow of speech, strong as a counselor, a safe man. That he was a most valuable man in the conduct of Egyptian official affairs, there is no doubt. And although he was nominally an Egyptian, living with the Egyptians, adopting their manners and customs, yet his heart was with "his brethren," the Israelites, who he saw were sore oppressed through governmental exploitation.

Moses knew that a government which does not exist for the purpose of adding to human happiness has no excuse for being. And once when he was down among his own people he saw an Egyptian taskmaster or foreman striking an Israelitish workman, and in wrath he arose and killed the oppressor. The only persons who were witnesses to this affair were two Hebrews. The second day after the fight, when Moses was attempting to separate two Hebrews who had gotten into an altercation with each other, they taunted him by saying, "Who gavest thee to be a ruler over us?—wilt thou also kill us as thou didst the Egyptian?"

This gives us a little light upon the quality and character of the people with whom Moses had to deal. It also shows that the ways of the reformer and peacemaker are not flower-strewn. The worst enemies of a reformer are not the Egyptians—he has also to deal with the Israelites.

I once heard Terence V. Powderly, who organized the Knights of Labor—the most successful labor organization ever formed—say, "Any man who devotes his life to helping laboring men will be destroyed by them." And then he added, "But this should not deter us from the effort to benefit."

As the Hebrew account plainly states that the killing of all the male Hebrew children was carried out with the connivance of Hebrew women who pretended to be ministering to the Hebrew mothers, so was the flight of Moses from Egypt caused by the Hebrews, who turned informants and brought him into disgrace with Pharaoh, who sought his life.

Very naturally, the Egyptians deny and have always denied that the order to kill children was ever issued by a Pharaoh. They also point to the fact that the Israelites were a source of profit—a valuable asset to the Egyptians. And moreover, the proposition that the Egyptians killed the children to avoid trouble is preposterous, since no possible act that man can commit would so arouse sudden rebellion and fan into flame the embers of hate as the murder of the young. If the Egyptians had attempted to carry out any such savage cruelty, they would not only have had to fight the Israelitish men, but the outraged mothers as well. The Egyptians were far too wise to invite the fury of frenzied motherhood. To have done this would have destroyed the efficiency of the entire Hebrew population. An outraged and heartbroken people do not work.

When one person becomes angry with another, his mental processes work overtime making up a list of the other's faults and failings.

When a people arise in revolt they straightway prepare an indictment against the government against which they revolted, giving a schedule of outrages, insults, plunderings and oppressions. This is what is politely called partisan history. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was a literary indictment of the South by featuring its supposed brutalities. And the attitude of the South is mirrored in a pretty parable concerning a Southern girl who came North on a visit, and seeing in print the words "damned Yankee," innocently remarked that she always thought they were one word. A description of the enemy, made by a person or a people, must be taken cum grano Syracuse.

hen Moses fled, after killing the Egyptian, he went northward and east into the land of the Midianites, who were also descendants of Abraham. At this time he was forty years of age, and still unmarried, his work in the Egyptian Court having evidently fully absorbed his time.

It is a pretty little romance, all too brief in its details, of how the tired man stopped at a well, and the seven daughters of Jethro came to draw water for their flocks. Certain shepherds came also and drove the girls away, when Moses, true to his nature, took the part of the young ladies, to the chagrin and embarrassment of the male rustics who had left their manners at home. The story forms a melodramatic stage-setting which the mummers have not been slow to use, representing the seven daughters as a ballet, the shepherds as a male chorus, and Moses as basso-profundo and hero. We are told that the girls went home and told their father of the chivalrous stranger they had met, and he, with all the deference of the desert, sent for him "that he might eat bread."

Very naturally Moses married one of the girls.

And Moses tended the flocks of Jethro, his father-in-law, taking the herds a long distance, living with them and sleeping out under the stars.

Now Jethro was the chief of his tribe. Moses calls him a "priest," but he was a priest only incidentally, as all the Arab chiefs were.

The clergy originated in Egypt. Before the Israelites were in Goshen, the "sacra," or sacred utensils, belonged to the family; and the head of the tribe performed the religious rites, propitiating the family deity, or else delegated some one else to do so. This head of the tribe, or chief, was called a "Cohen"; and the man who assisted him, or whom he delegated, was called a "Levi." The plan of making a business of being a "Levi" was borrowed from the Egyptians, who had men set apart, exclusively, to deal in the mysterious. Moses calls himself a Levi, or Levite.

After the busy life he had led, Moses could not settle down to the monotonous existence of a shepherd. It is probable that then he wrote the Book of Job, the world's first drama and the oldest book of the Bible. Moses was full of plans. Very naturally he prayed to the Israelitish god, and the god harkened unto his prayer and talked to him.

The silence, the loneliness, the majesty of the mountains, the great stretches of shining sand, the long peaceful nights, all tend to hallucinations. Sheepmen are in constant danger of mental aberration. Society is needed quite as much as solitude.

From talking with God, Moses desired to see Him. One day, from the burning red of an acacia-tree, the Lord called to him, "Moses, Moses!"

And Moses answered, "Here am I!"

Moses was a man born to rule—he was a leader of men—and here at middle life the habits of twenty-five years were suddenly snapped and his occupation gone. He yearned for his people, and knowing their unhappy lot, his desire was to lead them out of captivity. He knew the wrongs the Egyptian government was visiting upon the Israelites. Rameses the Second was a ruler with the builder's eczema: always and forever he made gardens, dug canals, paved roadways, constructed model tenements, planned palaces, erected colossi. He was a worker, and he made everybody else work. It was in this management of infinite detail that Moses had been engaged; and while he entered into it with zest, he knew that the hustling habit can be overdone and its votaries may become its victims—not only that, but this strenuous life may turn freemen into serfs, and serfs into slaves.

And now Rameses was dead, and the proud, vain, fretful and selfish Mineptah ruled in his place. It was worse with the Israelites than ever!

The more Moses thought of it the more he was convinced that it was his duty to go back to Egypt and lead his people out of bondage. He himself, having been driven out, made the matter a burning one with him: he had lost his place in the Egyptian Court, but he would get it back and hold it under better conditions than ever before!

He heard the "Voice"! All strong people hear the Voice calling them. And harkening to the Inner Voice is simply doing what you want to do.

"Moses, Moses!"

And Moses answered, "Lord, here am I."

The laws of Moses still influence the world, but not even the orthodox Jews follow them literally. We bring our reason to bear upon the precepts of Moses, and those which are not for us we gently pass over. In fact, the civil laws of most countries prohibit many of the things which Moses commanded. For instance, the eighteenth verse of the twenty-second chapter of Exodus says, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Certainly no Jewish lawyer nor Rabbi, in any part of the world, advocates the killing of persons supposed to be witches. We explain that in this instance the inspired writer lapsed and merely mirrored the ignorance of his time. Or else we fall back upon the undoubted fact that various writers and translators have tampered with the original text—this must be so, since the book written by Moses makes record of his death.

But when we find passages in Moses requiring us to benefit our enemies, we say with truth that this was the first literature to express for us the brotherhood of man.

"Thou shalt take no gift: for the gift blindeth the wise and perverteth the words of the righteous." Here we get Twentieth-Century Wisdom. And very many passages as fine and true can be found, which prove for us beyond cavil that Moses was right a part of the time, and to say this of any man, living or dead, is a very great compliment.

In times of doubt the Jewish people turn to the Torah, or Book of the Law. This book has been interpreted by the Rabbis, or the learned men, and to meet the exigencies of living under many conditions, it has been changed, enlarged and augmented. In these changes the people were not consulted. Very naturally it was done secretly, for inspired men must be well dead before the many accept their edict. To be alive is always more or less of an offense, especially if you be a person and not a personage.

The murmurings against Moses during his lifetime often broke into a rumble and a roar. The mob accused him of taking them out into the wilderness to perish. To get away from the constant bickering and criticisms of the little minds, Moses used to go up into the mountains alone to find rest, and there he communicated with his god. It was surely a great step in advance when all the Elohims were combined into one Supreme Elohim that was everywhere present and ruled the world. Instead of dozens of little gods, jealous, jangling, fearful, fretful, fussy, boastful, changing walking-sticks to serpents, or doing other things quite as useless, it was a great advance to have one Supreme Being, dispassionate, a God of Love and Justice, "with whom can be no variation, neither shadow that is cast by turning." This gradual ennobling of the conception of Divinity reveals the extent to which man is ennobling his own nature.

Up to within a very few years God had a rival in the Devil, but now the Devil lives only as a pleasantry. Until the time of Moses, the God of Sinai was only the God of the Hebrew people, and this accounts for His violence, wrath, jealousy, and all of those qualities which went to make up a barbaric chief, including the tendency of His sons and servants to make love to the daughters of earth.

It is probable that the idea of God—in opposition to a god, one of many gods—was a thought that grew up very gradually in the mind of Moses. The ideal grew, and Moses grew with the ideal.

Then from God being a Spirit, to being Spirit, is a natural, easy and beautiful evolution.

The thought of angels, devils, heavenly messengers, like Gabriel and the Holy Ghost, constantly surrounding the Throne, is a suggestion that comes from the court of the absolute monarch. The Trinity is the oligarchy refined, and the one son who gives himself as a sacrifice for all the people who have offended the monarch is the retreating vision of that night of ignorance when all nations sought to appease the wrath of their god by the death of human beings.

God to us is Spirit, realized everywhere in unfolding Nature. We are a part of Nature—we, too, are Spirit. When Moses commands his people that they must return the stray animal of their enemy to its rightful owner, we behold a great man struggling to benefit humanity by making them recognize the laws of Spirit. We are all one family—we can not afford to wrong or harm even an enemy.

Instead of thousands of warring, jarring families or tribes, we have now a few strong federations of States, or countries, which, if they would make war on one another, would today quickly face a larger foe. Already the idea of one government for all the world is taking form—there must be one Supreme Arbiter, and all this monstrous expense of money and flesh and blood and throbbing hearts for purposes of war, must go, just as we have sent to limbo the jangling, jarring, jealous gods. Also, the better sentiment of the world will send the czars, emperors, kings, grand dukes, and the greedy grafters of so-called democracy, into the dust-heap of oblivion, with all the priestly phantoms that have obscured the sun and blackened the sky. The gods have gone, but MAN IS HERE.

he plagues that befell the Egyptians were the natural ones to which Egypt was liable: drought, flood, flies, lice, frogs, disease. The Israelites very naturally declared that these things were sent as a punishment by the Israelitish god. I remember a farmer, in my childhood days, who was accounted by his neighbors as an infidel. He was struck by lightning and instantly killed, while standing in his doorway. The Sunday before, this man had worked in the fields, and just before he was killed he had said, "dammit," or something quite as bad. Our preacher explained at length that this man's death was a "judgment." Afterward, when our church was struck by lightning, it was regarded as an accident.

Ignorant and superstitious people always attribute special things to special causes. When the grasshoppers overran Kansas in Eighteen Hundred Eighty-five, I heard a good man from the South say it was a punishment on the Kansans for encouraging Old John Brown. The next year the boll-weevil ruined the cotton crop, and certain preachers in the North, who thought they knew, declared it was the lingering wrath of God on account of slavery.

Three nations unite to form our present civilization. These are the Greek, the Roman and the Judaic. The lives of Perseus, Romulus and Moses all teem with the miraculous, but if we accept the supernatural in one we must in all. Which of these three great nations has contributed most to our well-being is a question largely decided by temperament; but just now the star of Greece seems to be in the ascendant. We look to art for solace. Greece stands for art; Rome for conquest; Judea for religion.

And yet Moses was a lover of beauty, and the hold he had upon his people was quite as much through training them to work as through his moral teaching. Indeed, his morality was expediency—which is reason enough according to modern science. When he wants them to work, he says, "Thus saith the Lord," just the same as when he wishes to impress upon them a thought.

No one can read the twenty-sixth, twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth chapters of Exodus without being impressed with the fact that the man who wrote them had in him the spirit of the Master Workman—a King's Craftsman. His carving the ten commandments on tablets of stone also shows his skill with mallet and chisel, a talent he had acquired in Egypt, where Rameses the Second had thousands of men engaged in sculpture and in making inscriptions in stone.

Several chapters in Exodus might have been penned by Albrecht Durer or William Morris. The commandment, "Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image," was unmistakably made merely to correct a local evil: the tendency to worship the image instead of the thing it symbolized. People who do not contribute to the creation of an object fall easy victims to this error. With all the stern good sense that Moses revealed, it is but fair to assume that he did not mean the command to be perpetual. It was only through so much moving about that the Jews seemed to lose their art spirit.

And certainly the flame of art in the Jewish heart has never died out, even though at times it has smoldered, for wherever there has been peace and security for the Jews, they have not been slow to evolve the talent which creates. History teems with the names of Jews who, in music, painting, poetry and sculpture, have devoted their days to beauty. And the germ of genius is seen in many of the Jewish children who attend the manual-training and art schools of America.

Art has its rise in the sense of sublimity. It seems at times to be a fulfilment of the religious impulse. The religion which balks at work, stopping at prayer and contemplation, is a form of arrested development.

The number of people in the exodus was probably two or three thousand. Renan says that one century only elapsed between the advent of Joseph into Egypt and the revolt. Very certain it was not a great number that went forth into the desert. A half-million women could not have borrowed jewelry of their neighbors—the secret could not have been kept. And in the negotiations between Moses and the King, it will be remembered that Moses asked only for the privilege of going three days' journey into the wilderness to make sacrifices. It was a kind of picnic or religious campmeeting. A vast multitude could not have taken part in any such exercise. We also hear of their singing their gratitude on account of reaching Elim, where there were "twelve springs and seventy palm-trees." Had there been several million people, as we have been told, the insignificant shade of seventy trees would have meant nothing to them.

The distance from Goshen in Egypt to Canaan in Palestine was about one hundred seventy-five miles. But by the circuitous route they traveled it was nearly a thousand miles. It took forty years to make the passage, for the way had to be fought through the country of foes who very naturally sought to block the way. Quick transportation was out of the question. The rate of speed was about twenty-five miles a year.

Here was a people without homes, or fixed habitation, beset on every side with the natural dangers of the desert, and compelled to face the fury of the inhabitants whose lands they overran, fearful, superstitious, haunted by hunger, danger and doubt. By night a man sent ahead with a lantern on a pole led the way; by day a cavalcade that raised a cloud of dust. One was later sung by the poets as a pillar of fire, and the other a cloud. Chance flocks of quail blown by a storm into their midst were regarded as a miracle; the white exuding wax of the manna-plant was told of as "bread"—or more literally food.

Those who had taken part in the original exodus were nearly all dead—their children and grandchildren survived, desert born and savage bred. Canaan was not the land flowing with milk and honey that had been described. Milk and honey are the results of labor applied to land. Moses knew this and tried to teach this great truth. He was true to his divine trust. Through doubt, hardship, poverty, misunderstanding, he held high the ideal—they were going to a better place.

At last, worn by his constant struggle, aged one hundred twenty, "his eye not dim nor his natural force abated"—for only those live long who live well—Moses went up into the mountain to find solace in solitude as was his custom. His people waited for him in vain—he did not return. Alone there with his God he slept and forgot to awaken. His pilgrimage was done. "And no man knoweth his grave even unto this day."

History is very seldom recorded on the spot—certainly it was not then. Centuries followed before fact, tradition, song, legend and folklore were fused into the form we call Scripture. But out of the fog and mist of that far-off past there looms in heroic outline the form and features of a man—a man of will, untiring activity, great hope, deep love, a faith which at times faltered, but which never died. Moses was the first man in history who fought for human rights and sought to make men free, even from their own limitations. "And there arose not a prophet since Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face."

CONFUCIUS

The highest study of all is that which teaches us to develop those principles of purity and perfect virtue which Heaven bestowed upon us at our birth, in order that we may acquire the power of influencing for good those amongst whom we are placed, by our precepts and example; a study without an end—for our labors cease only when we have become perfect—an unattainable goal, but one that we must not the less set before us from the very first. It is true that we shall not be able to reach it, but in our struggle toward it we shall strengthen our characters and give stability to our ideas, so that, whilst ever advancing calmly in the same direction, we shall be rendered capable of applying the faculties with which we have been gifted to the best possible account.

—"The Annals" of Confucius

CONFUCIUS

he Chinese comprise one-fourth of the inhabitants of the earth. There are four hundred millions of them.

They can do many things which we can not do, and we can do a few things which they have not yet been able to do; but they are learning from us, and possibly we would do well to learn from them. In China there are now trolley-cars, telephone-lines, typewriters, cash-registers and American plumbing. China is a giant awaking from sleep. He who thinks that China is a country crumbling into ruins has failed to leave a call at the office and has overslept.

The West can not longer afford to ignore China. And not being able to waive her, perhaps the next best thing is to try to understand her.

The one name that looms large above any other name in China is Confucius. He of all men has influenced China most. One-third of the human race love and cherish his memory, and repeat his words as sacred writ.

Confucius was born at a time when one of those tidal waves of reason swept the world—when the nations were full of unrest, and the mountains of thought were shaken with discontent.

It was just previous to the blossoming of Greece.

Pericles was seventeen years old when Confucius died. Themistocles was preparing the way for Pericles; for then was being collected the treasure of Delos, which made Phidias and the Parthenon possible. During the life of Confucius lived Leonidas, Miltiades, Cyrus the Great, Cambyses, Darius, Xerxes. And then quite naturally occurred the battles of Marathon, Salamis and Thermopylæ. Then lived Buddha-Gautama, Lao-tsze, Ezekiel, Daniel, Haggai, Zechariah, Pythagoras, Pindar, Æschylus and Anacreon.

The Chinese are linked to the past by ties of language and custom beyond all other nations. They are a peculiar people, a chosen people, a people set apart. Just when they withdrew from the rest of mankind and abandoned their nomadic habits, making themselves secure against invasion by building a wall one hundred feet high, and settled down to lay the foundations of a vast empire, we do not know. Some historians have fixed the date about ten thousand years before Christ—let it go at that. There is a reasonably well-authenticated history of China that runs back twenty-five hundred years before Christ, while our history merges into mist seven hundred fifty years before the Christian era.

The Israelites wandered; the Chinese remained at home. Walls have this disadvantage: they keep people in as well as shut the barbarians out. But now there are vast breaches in the wall, through which the inhabitants ooze, causing men from thousands of miles away to cry in alarm, "the Yellow Peril!" And also through these breaches, Israelites, Englishmen and Yankees enter fearlessly, settle down in heathen China, and do business.

It surely is an epoch, and what the end will be few there are who dare forecast.

his then is from the pen of Edward Carpenter, the Church of England curate who was so great a friend and admirer of our own Walt Whitman that he made a trip across the sea to join hands with him in preaching the doctrine of democracy and the religion of humanity.

In the interior of China, along low-lying plains and great river-valleys, and by lake-sides, and far away up into hilly and even mountainous regions,

Behold! an immense population, rooted in the land, rooted in the clan and the family,

The most productive and stable on the whole Earth. A garden one might say—a land of rich and recherche crops, of rice and tea and silk and sugar and cotton and oranges;

Do you see it?—stretching away endlessly over river-lines and lakes, and the gentle undulations of the low-lands, and up the escarpments of the higher hills;

The innumerable patchwork of civilization—the poignant verdure of the young rice; the somber green of orange-groves; the lines of tea-shrubs, well hoed, and showing the bare earth beneath; the pollard mulberries; the plots of cotton and maize and wheat and yam and clover; the little brown and green tiled cottages with spreading recurbed eaves, the clumps of feathery bamboo, or of sugar-canes;

The endless silver threads of irrigation canals and ditches, skirting the hills for scores and hundreds of miles, tier above tier, and serpentining down to the lower slopes and plains—

The accumulated result, these, of centuries upon centuries of ingenious industry, and innumerable public and private benefactions, continued from age to age;

The grand canal of the Delta plain extending, a thronged waterway, for seven hundred miles, with sails of junks and bankside villages innumerable;

The chain-pumps, worked by buffaloes or men, for throwing the water up slopes and hillsides, from tier to tier, from channel to channel;

The endless rills and cascades flowing down again into pockets and hollows of verdure, and on fields of steep and plain;

The bits of rock and wildwood left here and there, with the angles of Buddhist or Jain temples projecting from among the trees;

The azalea and rhododendron bushes, and the wild deer and pheasants unharmed;

The sounds of music and the gong—the Sin-fa sung at eventide—and the air of contentment and peace pervading;

A garden you might call the land, for its wealth of crops and flowers,

A town almost for its population.

A population denser, on a large scale, than anywhere else on earth—

Five or six acre holdings, elbowing each other, with lesser and larger, continuously over immense tracts, and running to plentiful market centers;

A country of few roads, but of innumerable footpaths and waterways.

Here, rooted in the land, and rooted in the family, each family clinging to its portion of ancestral earth, each offshoot of the family desiring nothing so much as to secure its own patrimonial field,

Each member of the family answerable primarily to the family assembly for his misdeeds or defalcations,

All bound together in the common worship of ancestors, and in reverence for the past and its sanctioned beliefs and accumulated prejudices and superstitions;

With many ancient, wise, simple customs and ordinances, coming down from remote centuries, and the time of Confucius,

This vast population abides—the most stable and the most productive in the world.

And Government touches it but lightly—can touch it but lightly.

With its few officials (only some twenty-five thousand for the whole of its four hundred millions), and its scanty taxation (about one dollar per head), and with the extensive administration of justice and affairs by the clan and the family—little scope is left for government.

The great equalized mass population pursues its even and accustomed way, nor pays attention to edicts and foreign treaties, unless these commend themselves independently;

Pays readier respect, in such matters, to the edicts and utterances of its literary men, and the deliberations of the Academy.

And religious theorizing touches it but lightly—can touch it but lightly.

Established on the bedrock of actual life, and on the living unity and community of present, past and future generations.

Each man stands bound already, and by the most powerful ties, to the social body—nor needs the dreams and promises of Heaven to reassure him.

And all are bound to the Earth.

Rendering back to it as a sacred duty every atom that the Earth supplies to them (not insensately sending it in sewers to the sea),

By the way of abject commonsense they have sought the gates of Paradise—and to found on human soil their City Celestial!

The first general knowledge of Confucius came to the Western world in the latter part of the Sixteenth Century from Jesuit missionaries. Indeed, it was they who gave him the Latinized name of "Confucius," the Chinese name being Kung-Fu-tsze.

So impressed were these missionaries by the greatness of Confucius that they urged upon the Vatican the expediency of placing his name upon the calendar of Saints. They began by combating his teachings, but this they soon ceased to do, and the modicum of success which they obtained was through beginning each Christian service by the hymn which may properly be called the National Anthem of China. Its opening stanza is as follows:

Confucius! Confucius!
Great was our Confucius!
Before him there was no Confucius,
Since him there was no other.
Confucius! Confucius!
Great was our Confucius!

The praise given by these early Jesuits to Confucius was at first regarded at Rome as apology for the meager success of their ministrations. But later scientific study of Chinese literature corroborated all that the Jesuit Fathers proclaimed for Confucius, and he stands today in a class with Socrates and the scant half-dozen whom we call the saviors of the world.

Yet Confucius claimed no "divine revelation," nor did he seek to found a religion. He was simply a teacher, and what he taught was the science of living—living in the present, with the plain and simple men and women who make up the world, and bettering our condition by bettering theirs. Of a future life he said he knew nothing, and concerning the supernatural he was silent, even rebuking his disciples for trying to pry into the secrets of Heaven. The word "God" he does not use, but his recognition of a Supreme Intelligence is limited to the use of a word which can best be translated "Heaven," since it tokens a place more than it does a person. Constantly he speaks of "doing the will of Heaven." And then he goes on to say that "Heaven is speaking through you," "Duty lies in mirroring Heaven in our acts," and many other such New-Thought aphorisms or epigrams.

That the man was a consummate literary stylist is beyond doubt. He spoke in parables and maxims, short, brief and musical. He wrote for his ear, and always his desire, it seems, was to convey the greatest truth in the fewest words. The Chinese, even the lowly and uneducated, know hundreds of Confucian epigrams, and still repeat them in their daily conversation or in writing, just as educated Englishmen use the Bible and Shakespeare for symbol.

Minister Wu, in a lecture delivered in various American cities, compared Confucius with Emerson, showing how in many ways these two great prophets paralleled each other. Emerson, of all Americans, seems the only man worthy of being so compared.

The writer who lives is the man who supplies the world with portable wisdom—short, sharp, pithy maxims which it can remember, or, better still, which it can not forget.

Confucius said, "Every truth has four corners: as a teacher I give you one corner, and it is for you to find the other three."

The true artist in words or things is always more or less impressionistic—he talks in parables, and it is for the hearer to discover the meaning for himself.

An epigram is truth in a capsule. The disadvantage of the epigram is the temptation it affords to good people to explain it to the others who are assumed to be too obtuse to comprehend it alone. And since explanations seldom explain, the result is a mixture or compound that has to be spewed utterly or taken on faith. Confucius is simple enough until he is explained. Then we evolve sects, denominations and men who make it their profession to render moral calculi opaque. China, being peopled by human beings, has suffered from this tendency to make truth concrete, just as all the rest of the world has suffered. Truth is fluid and should be allowed to flow. Ankylosis of a fact is superstition. Confucius was a free-trader.

hina has always been essentially feudal in her form of government. China is made up of a large number of States, each presided over by a prince or governor, and these States are held together by a rather loose federal government, the Emperor being the supreme ruler. State rights prevail. State may fight with State, or States may secede—it isn't of much moment. They are glad enough, after a few years, to get back, like boys who run away from home, or farmhands who quit work in a tantrum. The Chinese are very patient—they know that time cures all things, a truth the West has not yet learned. States that rebel, like individuals who place themselves beyond the protection of all, assume grave responsibilities.

The local prince usually realizes the bearing of the Social Contract—that he holds his office only during good behavior, and that his welfare and the welfare of his people are one.

Heih, the father of Confucius, was governor of one of these little States, and had impoverished himself in an effort to help his people. Heih was a man of seventy, wedded to a girl of seventeen, when their gifted son was born. When the boy was three years old the father died, and the lad's care and education depended entirely on the mother. This mother seems to have been a woman of rare mental and spiritual worth. She deliberately chose a life of poverty and honest toil for herself and child, rather than allow herself to be cared for by rich kinsmen. The boy was brought up in a village, and he was not allowed to think himself any better than the other village children, save as he proved himself so. He worked in the garden, tended the cattle and goats, mended the pathways, brought wood and water, and waited on his elders. Every evening his mother used to tell him of the feats of strength of his father, of his heroic qualities in friendship, of deeds of valor, of fidelity to trusts, of his absolute truthfulness, and his desire for knowledge in order that he might better serve his people.

The coarse, plain fare, the long walks across the fields, the climbing of trees, the stooping to pull the weeds in the garden, the daily bath in the brook, all combined to develop the boy's body to a splendid degree. He went to bed at sundown, and at the first flush of dawn was up that he might see the sunrise. There were devotional rites performed by the mother and son, morning and evening, which consisted in the playing upon a lute and singing or chanting the beauty and beneficence of creation.

Confucius, at fifteen, was regarded as a phenomenal musician, and the neighbors used to gather to hear him perform. At nineteen he was larger, stronger, comelier, more skilled, than any other youth of his age in all the country round.

The simple quality of his duties as a prince can be guessed when we are told that his work as keeper of the herds required him to ride long distances on horseback to settle difficulties between rival herders. The range belonged to the State, and the owners of goats, sheep and cattle were in continual controversies. Montana and Colorado will understand this matter. Confucius summoned the disputants and talked to them long about the absurdity of quarreling and the necessity of getting together in complete understanding. Then it was that he first put forth his best-known maxim: "You should not do to others that which you would not have others do to you."

This negative statement of the Golden Rule is found expressed in various ways in the writings of Confucius. A literal interpretation of the Chinese language is quite impossible, as the Chinese have single signs or symbols that express a complete idea. To state the same matter, we often use a whole page.

Confucius had a single word which expressed the Golden Rule in such a poetic way that it is almost useless to try to convey it to people of the West. This word, which has been written into English as "Shu," means: My heart responds to yours, or my heart's desire is to meet your heart's desire, or I wish to do to you even as I would be done by. This sign, symbol or word Confucius used to carve in the bark of trees by the roadside. The French were filled with a like impulse when they cut the words Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, over the entrances to all public buildings.

Confucius had his symbol of love and friendship painted on a board, which he stuck into the ground before the tent where he lodged; and finally it was worked upon a flag by some friends and presented to him, and became his flag of peace.

His success in keeping down strife among the herders, and making peace among his people, soon gave him a fame beyond the borders of his own State. As a judge he had the power to show both parties where they were wrong, and arranged for them a common meeting-ground.

His qualifications as an arbiter were not, however, limited to his powers of persuasion—he could shoot an arrow farther and hurl a spear with more accuracy than any man he ever met. Very naturally there are a great number of folklore stories concerning his prowess, some of which make him out a sort of combination Saint George and William Tell, with the added kingly graces of Alfred the Great. Omitting the incredible, we are willing to believe that this man had a giant's strength, but was great enough not to use it like a giant.

We are willing to believe that when attacked by robbers, he engaged them in conversation and that, seated on the grass, he convinced them they were in a bad business. Also, he did not later hang them, as did our old friend Julius Cæsar under like conditions.

When twenty-seven he ceased going abroad to hold court and settle quarrels, but sending for the disputants, they came, and he gave them a course of lectures in ethics. In a week, by a daily lesson of an hour's length, they were usually convinced that to quarrel is very foolish, since it reduces bodily vigor, scatters the mind, and disturbs the secretions, so the man is the loser in many ways.

This seems to us like a very queer way to hold court, but Confucius maintained that men should learn to govern their tempers, do equity, and thus be able to settle their own disputes, and this without violence. "To fight decides who is the stronger, the younger and the more skilful in the use of arms, but it does not decide who is right. That is to be settled by the Heaven in your own heart."

To let the Heaven into your heart, to cultivate a conscience so sensitive that it can conceive the rights of the other man, is to know wisdom.

To decide specific cases for others he thought was to cause them to lose the power of deciding for themselves. When asked what a just man should do when he was dealing with one absolutely unjust, he said, "He who wrongs himself sows in his own heart nettles."

And when some of his disciples, after the Socratic method, asked him how this helped the injured man, he replied, "To be robbed or wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it." When pushed still further, he said, "A man should fight, only when he does so to protect himself or his family from bodily harm."

Here a questioner asked, "If we are to protect our persons, must we not learn to fight?"

And the answer comes, "The just man, he who partakes moderately of all good things, is the only man to fear in a quarrel, for he is without fear."

Over and over is the injunction in varying phrase, "Abolish fear—abolish fear!" When pressed to give in one word the secret of a happy life, he gives a word which we translate, "Equanimity."

The mother of Confucius died during his early manhood. For her he ever retained the most devout memories.

Before going on a journey he always visited her grave, and on returning, before he spoke to any one, he did the same. On each anniversary of her death he ate no food and was not to be seen by his pupils. This filial piety, which is sometimes crudely and coarsely called "ancestor worship," is something which for the Western world is rather difficult to appreciate. But in it there is a subtle, spiritual significance, suggesting that it is only through our parents that we are able to realize consciousness or personal contact with Heaven. These parents loved us into being, cared for us with infinite patience in infancy, taught us in youth, watched with high hope our budding manhood; and as reward and recognition for the service rendered us, the least we can do is to remember them in all our prayers and devotions. The will of Heaven used these parents for us, therefore parenthood is divine.

That this ancestor worship is beautiful and beneficial is quite apparent, and rightly understood no one could think of it as "heathendom." Confucius used to chant the praises of his mother, who brought him up in poverty, thus giving a close and intimate knowledge of a thousand things from which princes, used to ease and luxury, are barred.

So close was he to nature and the plain people that he ordered that all skilful charioteers in his employ should belong to the nobility. This giving a title or degree to men of skill—men who can do things—we regard as essentially a modern idea.

China, I believe, is the first country in the world to use the threads of a moth or worm for fabrics. The patience and care and inventive skill required in first making silk were very great. But it gives us an index to invention when we hear that Confucius regarded the making of linen, using the fiber of a plant, as a greater feat than utilizing the strands made by the silkworm. Confucius had a sort of tender sentiment toward the moth, similar to the sentiments which our vegetarian friends have toward killing animals for food. Confucius wore linen in preference to silk, for sentimental reasons. The silkworm dies at his task of making himself a cocoon, so to evolve in a winged joy, but falls a victim of man's cupidity. Likewise, Confucius would not drink milk from a cow until her calf was weaned, because to do so were taking an unfair advantage of the maternal instincts of the cow. It will thus be seen that Confucius had a very fair hold on the modern idea which we call "Monism," or "The One." He, too, said, "All is one." In his attitude toward all living things he was ever gentle and considerate.

No other prophet so much resembles Confucius in doctrine as Socrates. But Confucius does not suffer from the comparison. He had a beauty, dignity and grace of person which the great Athenian did not possess. Socrates was more or less of a buffoon, and to many in Athens he was a huge joke—a town fool. Confucius combined the learning and graces of Plato with the sturdy, practical commonsense of Socrates. No one ever affronted or insulted him; many did not understand him, but he met prince or pauper on terms of equality.

In his travels Confucius used often to meet recluses or monks—men who had fled the world in order to become saints. For these men Confucius had more pity than respect. "The world's work is difficult, and to live in a world of living, striving and dying men and women requires great courage and great love. Now we can not all run away, and for some to flee from humanity and to find solace in solitude is only another name for weakness."

This sounds singularly like our Ralph Waldo who says, "It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the Great Man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

Confucius is the first man in point of time to proclaim the divinity of service, the brotherhood of man, and the truth that in useful work there is no high nor low degree. In talking to a group of young men he says:

"When I was keeper of the herds I always saw to it that all of my cattle were strong, healthy and growing, that there was water in abundance and plenty of feed. When I had charge of the public granaries I never slept until I knew that all was secure and cared for against the weather, and my accounts as true and correct as if I were going on my long journey to return no more. My advice is to slight nothing, forget nothing, never leave things to chance, nor say, 'Nobody will know—this is good enough.'"

In all of his injunctions Confucius never has anything in mind beyond the present life. Of a future existence he knows nothing, and he seems to regard it as a waste of energy and a sign of weakness to live in two worlds at a time. "Heaven provides us means of knowing all about what is best here, and supplies us in abundance every material thing for present happiness, and it is our business to realize, to know, to enjoy."

He taught rhetoric, mathematics, economics, the science of government and natural history. And always and forever running through the fabric of his teaching was the silken thread of ethics—man's duty to man, man's duty to Heaven. Music was to him a necessity, since "it brings the mind in right accord with the will of Heaven." Before he began to speak he played softly on a stringed instrument which perhaps would compare best with our guitar, but it was much smaller, and this instrument he always carried with him, suspended from his shoulder by a silken sash. Yet with all of his passion for music, he cautioned his disciples against using it as an end. It was merely valuable as an introduction to be used in attuning the mind and heart to an understanding of great truth.

Confucius was seventy-two years old at his death. During his life his popularity was not great. When he passed away his followers numbered only about three thousand persons, and his "disciples," or the teachers who taught his philosophy, were seventy in number.

There is no reason to suppose that Confucius assumed that a vast number of people would ever ponder his words or regard him as a prophet.

At the time that Confucius lived, also lived Lao-tsze. As a youth Confucius visited Lao-tsze, who was then an old man. Confucius often quotes his great contemporary and calls himself a follower of Lao-tsze. The difference, however, between the men is marked. Lao-tsze's teachings are full of metaphysics and strange and mystical curiosities, while Confucius is always simple, lucid and practical.

onfucius has been revered for twenty centuries, revered simply as a man, not as a god or as a divinely appointed savior. He offered no reward of heaven, nor did he threaten non-believers with hell. He claimed no special influence nor relationship to the Unseen. In all his teachings he was singularly open, frank and free from all mystery or concealment. In reference to the supernatural he was an agnostic. He often said, "I do not know." He was always an inquirer, always a student, always open to conviction. History affords no instance of another individual who has been so well and so long loved, who still holds his place, and who, so far as his reasoning went, is unassailed and unassailable. Even the two other great religions in China that rival Confucianism—Buddhism and Taoism (the religion of Lao-tsze)—do not renounce Confucius: they merely seek to amend and augment him.

During his lifetime Confucius made many enemies by his habit of frankly pointing out the foibles of society and the wrongs visited upon the people by officials who pretended to serve them. Of hypocrisy, selfishness, vanity, pretense, he was severe in his denunciation.

Politicians at that time had the very modern habit of securing the office and then leaving all the details of the work to menials, they themselves pocketing the perquisites. As Minister of State, Confucius made himself both feared and detested on account of his habit of summoning the head of the office before him and questioning him concerning his duties. In fact, this insistence that those paid by the State should work for the State caused a combination to be formed against him, which finally brought about his deposition and exile, two things which troubled him but little, since one gave him leisure and the other opportunity for travel.

The personal followers of Confucius did not belong to the best society; but immediately after his death, many who during his life had scorned the man made haste to profess his philosophy and decorate their houses with his maxims. Humanity is about the same, whether white or yellow, the round world over, and time modifies it but little. It will be recalled how John P. Altgeld was feared and hated by both press and pulpit, especially in the State and city he served. But rigor mortis had scarcely seized upon that slight and tired body before the newspapers that had disparaged the man worst were vying with one another in glowing eulogies and warm testimonials to his honesty, sincerity, purity of motive and deep insight. A personality which can neither be bribed, bought, coerced, flattered nor cajoled is always regarded by the many—especially by the party in power—as "dangerous." Vice, masked as virtue, breathes easier when the honest man is safely under the sod.

The plain and simple style of Confucius' teaching can be gathered by the following sayings, selected at random from the canonical books of Confucianism, consisting of the teachings of the great master which were gathered together and grouped by his disciples and followers after his death:

The men of old spoke little. It would be well to imitate them, for those who talk much are sure to say something it would be better to have left unsaid.

Let a man's labor be proportioned to his needs. For he who works beyond his strength does but add to his cares and disappointments. A man should be moderate even in his efforts.

Be not over-anxious to obtain relaxation or repose. For he who is so, will get neither.

Beware of ever doing that which you are likely, sooner or later, to repent of having done.

Do not neglect to rectify an evil because it may seem small, for, though small at first, it may continue to grow until it overwhelms you.

As riches adorn a house, so does an expanded mind adorn and tranquillize the body. Hence it is that the superior man will seek to establish his motives on correct principles.

The cultivator of the soil may have his fill of good things, but the cultivator of the mind will enjoy a continual feast.

It is because men are prone to be partial toward those they love, unjust toward those they hate, servile toward those above them, arrogant to those below them, and either harsh or over-indulgent to those in poverty and distress, that it is so difficult to find any one capable of exercising a sound judgment with respect to the qualities of others.

He who is incapable of regulating his own family can not be capable of ruling a nation. The superior man will find within the limits of his own home, a sufficient sphere for the exercise of all those principles upon which good government depends. How, indeed, can it be otherwise, when filial piety is that which should regulate the conduct of a people toward their prince; fraternal affection, that which should regulate the relations which should exist between equals, and the conduct of inferiors toward those above them; and paternal kindness, that which should regulate the bearing of those in authority toward those over whom they are placed?

Be slow in speech, but prompt in action.

He whose principles are thoroughly established will not be easily led from the right path.

The cautious are generally to be found on the right side.

By speaking when we ought to keep silence, we waste our words.

If you would escape vexation, reprove yourself liberally and others sparingly.

There is no use attempting to help those who can not help themselves.

Make friends with the upright, intelligent and wise; avoid the licentious, talkative and vain.

Disputation often breeds hatred.

Nourish good principles with the same care that a mother would bestow on her newborn babe. You may not be able to bring them to maturity, but you will nevertheless be not far from doing so.

The decrees of Heaven are not immutable, for though a throne may be gained by virtue, it may be lost by vice.

There are five good principles of action to be adopted: To benefit others without being lavish; to encourage labor without being harsh; to add to your resources without being covetous; to be dignified without being supercilious; and to inspire awe without being austere. Also, we should not search for love or demand it, but so live that it will flow to us.

Personal character can only be established on fixed principles, for if the mind be allowed to be agitated by violent emotions, to be excited by fear, or unduly moved by the love of pleasure, it will be impossible for it to be made perfect. A man must reason calmly, for without reason he would look and not see, listen and not hear.

When a man has been helped around one corner of a square, and can not manage by himself to get around the other three, he is unworthy of further assistance.

PYTHAGORAS

Consult and deliberate before you act, that thou mayest not commit foolish actions. For 't is the part of a miserable man to speak and to act without reflection. But do that which will not afflict thee afterwards, nor oblige thee to repentance.

—Pythagoras

PYTHAGORAS

ith no desire to deprive Mr. Bok of his bread, I wish to call attention to Pythagoras, who lived a little more than five hundred years before Christ.

Even at that time the world was old. Memphis, which was built four thousand years ago, had begun to crumble into ruins. Troy was buried deep in the dust which an American citizen of German birth was to remove. Nineveh and Babylon were dying the death that success always brings, and the star of empire was preparing to westward wend its way.

Pythagoras ushered in the Golden Age of Greece. All the great writers whom he immediately preceded, quote him and refer to him. Some admire him; others are loftily critical; most of them are a little jealous; and a few use him as a horrible example, calling him a poseur, a pedant, a learned sleight-of-hand man, a bag of books.

Trial by newspaper was not invented in the time of Pythagoras; but personal vilification has been popular since Balaam talked gossip with his vis-a-vis.

Anaxagoras, who gave up his wealth to the State that he might be free, and who was the teacher of Pericles, was a pupil of Pythagoras, and used often to mention him.

In this way Pericles was impressed by the Pythagorean philosophy, and very often quotes it in his speeches. Socrates gave Pythagoras as an authority on the simple life, and stated that he was willing to follow him in anything save his injunction to keep silence. Socrates wanted silence optional; whereas Pythagoras required each of his pupils to live for a year without once asking a question or making an explanation. In aggravated cases he made the limit five years.

In many ways Pythagoras reminds us of our friend Muldoon, both being beneficent autocrats, and both proving their sincerity by taking their own medicine. Pythagoras said, "I will never ask another to do what I have not done, and am not willing to do myself."

To this end he was once challenged by his three hundred pupils to remain silent for a year. He accepted the defi, not once defending himself from the criticisms and accusations that were rained upon him, not once complaining, nor issuing an order. Tradition has it, however, that he made averages good later on, when the year of expiation was ended.

There are two reasonably complete lives of Pythagoras, one by Diogenes Laertius, and another by Iamblichus. Personally, I prefer the latter, as Iamblichus, as might be inferred from his name, makes Pythagoras a descendant of Æneas, who was a son of Neptune. This is surely better than the abrupt and somewhat sensational statement to the effect that his father was Apollo.

he birthplace of Pythagoras was Samos, an isle of Greece. He was born of wealthy but honest parents, who were much in love with each other—a requisite, says Pythagoras, for parentage on its highest plane. It is probable that Pythagoras was absolutely correct in his hypothesis.

That he was a very noble specimen of manhood—physically and mentally—there is no doubt. He was tall, lithe, dignified, commanding and silent by nature, realizing fully that a handsome man can never talk as well as he looks.

He was quite aware of his physical graces, and in following up the facts of his early life, he makes the statement that his father was a sea-captain and trader. He then incidentally adds that the best results are obtained for posterity where a man is absent from his family eleven months in the year. This is an axiom agreed upon by many modern philosophers, few of whom, however, live up to their ideals. Aristophanes, who was on friendly terms with some of the disciples of Pythagoras, suggested in one of his plays that the Pythagorean domestic time-limit should be increased at least a month for the good of all concerned.

Plato, Xenophon and Aristotle make frequent references to Pythagoras. In order to impress men like these, the man must have taught a very exalted philosophy. In truth, Pythagoras was a teacher of teachers. And like all men who make a business of wisdom he sometimes came tardy off, and indulged in a welter of words that wrecked the original idea—if there were one.

There are these three: Knowledge, Learning, Wisdom. And the world has until very recent times assumed that they were practically one and the same thing.

Knowledge consists of the things we know, not the things we believe or the things we assume. Knowledge is a personal matter of intuition, confirmed by experience. Learning consists largely of the things we memorize and are told by persons or books. Tomlinson of Berkeley Square was a learned man. When we think of a learned man, we picture him as one seated in a library surrounded by tomes that top the shelves.

Wisdom is the distilled essence of what we have learned from experience. It is that which helps us to live, work, love and make life worth living for all we meet. Men may be very learned, and still be far from wise.

Pythagoras was one of those strange beings who are born with a desire to know, and who finally comprehending the secret of the Sphinx, that there is really nothing to say, insist on saying it. That is, vast learning is augmented by a structure of words, and on this is built a theogony. Practically he was a priest.

Worked into all priestly philosophies are nuggets of wisdom that shine like stars in the darkness and lead men on and on.

All great religions have these periods of sanity, otherwise they would have no followers at all. The followers, understanding little bits of this and that, hope finally to understand it all. Inwardly the initiates at the shrine of their own conscience know that they know nothing. When they teach others they are obliged to pretend that they, themselves, fully comprehend the import of what they are saying. The novitiate attributes his lack of perception to his own stupidity, and many great teachers encourage this view.

"Be patient, and you shall some day know," they say, and smile frigidly.

And when credulity threatens to balk and go no further, magic comes to the rescue and the domain of Hermann and Kellar is poached upon.

Mystery and miracle were born in Egypt. It was there that a system was evolved, backed up by the ruler, of religious fraud so colossal that modern deception looks like the bungling efforts of an amateur. The government, the army, the taxing power of the State, were sworn to protect gigantic safes in which was hoarded—nothing. That is to say, nothing but the pretense upon which cupidity and self-hypnotized credulity battened and fattened.

All institutions which through mummery, strange acts, dress and ritual, affect to know and impart the inmost secrets of creation and ultimate destiny, had their rise in Egypt. In Egypt now are only graves, tombs, necropolises and silence. The priests there need no soldiery to keep their secrets safe. Ammon-Ra, who once ruled the universe, being finally exorcised by Yaveh, is now as dead as the mummies who once were men and upheld his undisputed sway.

The Egyptians guarded their mysteries with jealous dread.

We know their secret now. It is this—there are no mysteries.

hat is the only secret upon which any secret society holds a caveat. Wisdom can not be corraled with gibberish and fettered in jargon. Knowledge is one thing—palaver another. The Greek-letter societies of our callow days still survive in bird's-eye, and next to these come the Elks, who take theirs with seltzer and a smile, as a rare good joke, save that brotherhood and good-fellowship are actually a saving salt which excuses much that would otherwise be simply silly.

All this mystery and mysticism was once official, and later, on being discarded by the authorities, was continued by the students as a kind of prank.

Greek-letter societies are the rudimentary survivals of what was once an integral part of every college. Making dead languages optional was the last convulsive kick of the cadaver.

And now a good many colleges are placing the seal of their disapproval on secret societies among the students; and the day is near when the secret society will not be tolerated, either directly or indirectly, as a part of the education of youth. All this because the sophomoric mind is prone to take its Greek-letter mysteries seriously, and regard the college curriculum as a joke of the faculty.

If knowledge were to be gained by riding a goat, any petty crossroads, with its lodge-room over the grocery, would contain a Herbert Spencer; and the agrarian mossbacks would have wisdom by the scruff and detain knowledge with a tail-hold.

There can be no secrets in life and morals, because Nature has so provided that every beautiful thought you know and every precious sentiment you feel, shall shine out of your face so that all who are great enough may see, know, understand, appreciate and appropriate. You can keep things only by giving them away.

When Pythagoras was only four or five years old, his mother taught him to take his morning bath in the cold stream, and dry his baby skin by running in the wind. As he ran, she ran with him, and together they sang a hymn to the rising sun, that for them represented the god Apollo.

This mother taught him to be indifferent to cold, heat, hunger, to exult in endurance, and to take a joy in the glow of the body.

So the boy grew strong and handsome, and proud; and perhaps it was in those early years, from the mother herself, that he gathered the idea, afterward developed, that Apollo had appeared to his mother, and so great was the beauty of the god that the woman was actually overcome, it being the first god at which she had ever had a good look.

The ambition of a great mother centers on her son. Pythagoras was filled with the thought that he was different, peculiar, set apart to teach the human race.

Having compassed all there was to learn in his native place, and, as he thought, being ill appreciated, he started for Egypt, the land of learning. The fallacy that knowledge was a secret to be gained by word of mouth and to be gotten from books existed then as now. The mother of Pythagoras wanted her son to comprehend the innermost secrets of the Egyptian mysteries. He would then know all. To this end she sold her jewels, in order that her son might have the advantages of an Egyptian education.

Women were not allowed to know the divine secrets—only just a few little ones. This woman wanted to know, and she said her son would learn, and tell her.

The family had become fairly rich by this time, and influential. Letters were gotten from the great ones of Samos to the Secretary of State in Egypt. And so Pythagoras, aged twenty, "the youth with the beautiful hair," went on his journey to Egypt and knocked boldly at the doors of the temples at Memphis, where knowledge was supposed to be in stock. Religion then monopolized all schools and continued to do so for quite some time after Pythagoras was dead.

He was turned away with the explanation that no foreigner could enter the sacred portals—that the initiates must be those born in the shadows of the temples and nurtured in the faith from infancy by holy virgins.

Pythagoras still insisted, and it was probably then that he found a sponsor who made for him the claim that he was a son of Apollo. And the holy men peeped out of their peep-holes in holy admiration for any one who could concoct as big a lie as they themselves had ever invented.

The boy surely looked the part. Perhaps, at last, here was one who was what they pretended to be! Frauds believe in frauds, and rogues are more easily captured by roguery than are honest men.

His admittance to the university became a matter of international diplomacy. At last, being too hard-pressed, the wise ones who ran the mystery monopoly gave in, and Pythagoras was informed that at midnight of a certain night, he should present himself, naked, at the door of a certain temple and he would be admitted.

On the stroke of the hour, at the appointed time, Pythagoras, the youth with the beautiful hair, was there, clothed only in his beautiful hair. He knocked on the great, bronze doors, but the only answer was a faint, hollow echo.

Then he got a stone and pounded, but still no answer.

The wind sprang up fresh and cold. The young man was chilled to the bone, but still he pounded and then called aloud demanding admittance. His answer now was the growling and barking of dogs, within. Still he pounded! After an interval a hoarse voice called out through a little slide, ordering him to be gone or the dogs would be turned loose upon him.

He demanded admittance.

"Fool, do you not know that the law says these doors shall admit no one except at sunrise?"

"I only know that I was told to be here at midnight and I would be admitted."

"All that may be true, but you were not told when you would be admitted—wait, it is the will of the gods." So Pythagoras waited, numbed and nearly dead.

The dogs which he had heard had, in some way, gotten out, and came tearing around the corner of the great stone building. He fought them with desperate strength. The effort seemed to warm his blood, and whereas before he was about to retreat to his lodgings he now remained.

The day broke in the east, and gangs of slaves went by to work. They jeered at him and pelted him with pebbles.

Suddenly across the desert sands he saw the faint pink rim of the rising sun. On the instant the big bronze doors against which he was leaning swung suddenly in. He fell with them, and coarse, rough hands seized his hair and pulled him into the hall.

The doors swung to and closed with a clang. Pythagoras was in dense darkness, lying on the stone floor.

A voice, seemingly coming from afar, demanded, "Do you still wish to go on?"

And his answer was, "I desire to go on."

A black-robed figure, wearing a mask, then appeared with a flickering light, and Pythagoras was led into a stone cell.

His head was shaved, and he was given a coarse robe and then left alone. Toward the end of the day he was given a piece of black bread and a bowl of water. This he was told was to fortify him for the ordeal to come.

What that ordeal was we can only guess, save that it consisted partially in running over hot sands where he sank to his waist. At a point where he seemed about to perish a voice called loudly, "Do you yet desire to go on?"

And his answer was, "I desire to go on."

Returning to the inmost temple he was told to enter a certain door and wait therein. He was then blindfolded and when he opened the door to enter, he walked off into space and fell into a pool of ice-cold water.

While floundering there the voice again called, "Do you yet desire to go on?"

And his answer was, "I desire to go on."

At another time he was tied upon the back of a donkey and the donkey was led along a rocky precipice, where lights danced and flickered a thousand feet below.

"Do you yet want to go on?" called the voice.

And Pythagoras answered, "I desire to go on."

The priests here pushed the donkey off the precipice, which proved to be only about two feet high, the gulf below being an illusion arranged with the aid of lights that shone through apertures in the wall.

These pleasing little diversions Pythagoras afterward introduced into the college which he founded, so to teach the merry freshmen that nothing, at the last, was as bad as it seemed, and that most dangers are simply illusions.

The Egyptians grew to have such regard for Pythagoras that he was given every opportunity to know the inmost secrets of the mysteries. He said he encompassed them all, save those alone which were incomprehensible.

This was probably true.

The years spent in Egypt were not wasted—he learned astronomy, mathematics, and psychology, a thing then not named, but pretty well understood—the management of men.

It was twenty years before Pythagoras returned to Samos. His mother was dead, so she passed away in ignorance of the secrets of the gods—which perhaps was just as well.

Samos now treated Pythagoras with great honor.

Crowds flocked to his lectures, presents were given him, royalty paid him profound obeisance.

But Samos soon tired of Pythagoras. He was too austere, too severe; and when he began to rebuke the officials for their sloth and indifference, he was invited to go elsewhere and teach his science of life. And so he journeyed into Southern Italy, and at Crotona built his Temple to the Muses and founded the Pythagorean School. He was the wisest as well as the most learned man of his time.

ome unkind person has said that Pythagoras was the original charter member of the Jesuits Society. The maxim that the end justifies the means was the cornerstone of Egyptian theology. When Pythagoras left Egypt he took with him this cornerstone as a souvenir. That the priests could hold their power over the masses only through magic and miracle was fully believed, and as a good police system the value of organized religion was highly appreciated. In fact, no ruler could hold his place, unsupported by the priest. Both were divine propositions. One searches in vain for simple truth among the sages, solons, philosophers, poets and prophets that existed down to the time of Socrates. Truth for truth's sake was absolutely unimagined; freethought was unguessed.

Expediency was always placed before truth.

Truth was furnished with frills—the people otherwise would not be impressed. Chants, robes, ritual, processions, banging of bells, burning of incense, strange sounds, sights and smells: these were considered necessary factors in teaching divine truth.

To worship with a noise seems to us a little like making love with a brass band.

Pythagoras was a very great man, but for him to eliminate theological chaff entirely was impossible. So we find that when he was about to speak, red fire filled the building as soon as he arose. It was all a little like the alleged plan of the late Reverend T. DeWitt Talmage, who used to have an Irishman let loose a white pigeon from the organ-loft at an opportune time.

When Pythagoras burned the red fire, of course the audience thought a miracle was taking place, unable to understand a simple stage-trick which all the boys in the gallery who delight in "Faust" now understand.

However, the Pythagorean School had much virtue on its side, and made a sincere and earnest effort to solve certain problems that yet are vexing us.

The Temple of the Muses, built by Pythagoras at Crotona, is described by Iamblichus as a stone structure with walls twenty feet thick, the light being admitted only from the top. It was evidently constructed after the Egyptian pattern, and the intent was to teach there the esoteric doctrine. But Pythagoras improved upon the Egyptian methods and opened his temple on certain days to all and any who desired to come. Then at times he gave lectures to women only, and then to men only, and also to children, thus showing that modern revival methods are not wholly modern.

These lectures contain the very essence of Pythagorean philosophy, and include so much practical commonsense that they are still quoted. These are some of the sayings that impressed Socrates, Pericles, Aristotle and Pliny. What the Egyptians actually taught we really do not know—it was too gaseous to last. Only the good endures. Says Pythagoras:

Cut not into the grape. Exaltation coming from wine is not good. You hope too much in this condition, so are afterwards depressed. Wise men are neither cast down in defeat nor exalted by success. Eat moderately, bathe plentifully, exercise much in the open air, walk far, and climb the hills alone.

Above all things, learn to keep silence—hear all and speak little. If you are defamed, answer not back. Talk convinces no one. Your life and character proclaim you more than any argument you can put forth. Lies return to plague those who repeat them.

The secret of power is to keep an even temper, and remember that no one thing that can happen is of much moment. The course of justice, industry, courage, moderation, silence, means that you shall receive your due of every good thing. The gods may be slow, but they never forget.

It is not for us to punish men nor avenge ourselves for slights, wrongs and insults—wait, and you will see that Nemesis unhorses the man intent on calumny.

A woman's ornaments should be modesty, simplicity, truth, obedience. If a woman would hold a man captive she can only do it by obeying him. Violent women are even more displeasing to the gods than violent men—both are destroying themselves. Strife is always defeat.

Debauchery, riot, splendor, luxury, are attempts to get a pleasure out of life that is not our due, and so Nemesis provides her penalty for the idle and gluttonous.

Fear and honor the gods. They guide our ways and watch over us in our sleep. After the gods, a man's first thought should be of his father and mother. Next to these his wife, then his children.

So great was this power of Pythagoras over the people that many of the women who came, hearing his discourse on the folly of pride and splendor, threw off their cloaks, and left them with their rings, anklets and necklaces on the altar.

With these and other offerings Pythagoras built another temple, this time to Apollo, and the Temple to the Muses was left open all the time for the people.

His power over the multitude alarmed the magistrates, so they sent for him to examine him as to his influence and intents. He explained to them that as the Muses were never at variance among themselves, always living in subjection to Apollo, so should magistrates agree among themselves and think only of being loyal to the king. All royal edicts and laws are reflections of divine law, and therefore must be obeyed without question. And as the Muses never interrupt the harmony of Heaven, but in fact add to it, so should men ever keep harmony among themselves.

All officers of the government should consider themselves as runners in the Olympian games, and never seek to trip, jostle, harass or annoy a rival, but run the race squarely and fairly, satisfied to be beaten if the other is the stronger and better man. An unfair victory gains only the anger of the gods.

All disorders in the State come from ill education of the young. Children not brought up to be patient, to endure, to work, to be considerate of their elders and respectful to all, grow diseased minds that find relief at last in anarchy and rebellion. So to take great care of children in their infancy, and then leave them at puberty to follow their own inclinations, is to sow disorder. Children well loved and kept close to their parents grow up into men and women who are an ornament to the State and a joy to the gods. Lawless, complaining, restless, idle children grieve the gods and bring trouble upon their parents and society.

The magistrates were here so pleased, and satisfied in their own minds that Pythagoras meant the State no harm, that they issued an order that all citizens should attend upon his lectures at least once a week, and take their wives and children with them.

They also offered to pay Pythagoras—that is, put him on the payroll as a public teacher—but he declined to accept money for his services. In this, Iamblichus says, he was very wise, since by declining a fixed fee, ten times as much was laid upon the altar of the Temple of the Muses, and not knowing to whom to return it, Pythagoras was obliged to keep it for himself and the poor.

hurchmen of the Middle Ages worked the memory of Pythagoras great injustice by quoting him literally in order to prove how much they were beyond him. Symbols and epigrams require a sympathetic hearer, otherwise they are as naught.

For instance, Pythagoras remarks, "Sit thou not down upon a bushel measure." What he probably meant was, get busy and fill the measure with grain rather than use it for a seat.

"Eat not the heart"—do not act so as to harrow the feelings of your friends, and do not be morbid.

"Never stir the fire with a sword"—do not inflame people who are wrathful.

"Wear not the image of God upon your jewelry"—do not make religion a proud or boastful thing.

"Help men to a burden, but never unburden them." This saying was used by Saint Francis to prove that the pagan philosophers had no tenderness, and that the humanities came at a later date. We can now easily understand that to relieve men of responsibilities is no help; rather do we grow strong by carrying burdens.

"Leave not the mark of the pot upon the ashes"—wipe out the past, forget it, look to the future.

"Feed no animal that has crooked claws"—do not encourage rogues by supplying them a living.

"Eat no fish whose fins are black"—have nothing to do with men whose deeds are dark.

"Always have salt upon your table"—this seems the original of "cum grano salis" of the Romans.

"Leave the vinegar at a distance"—keep sweet.

"Speak not in the face of the sun"—even Erasmus thought this referred to magic. To us it is quite reasonable to suppose that it meant, "do not talk too much in public places."

"Pick not up what falls from the table"—Plutarch calls this superstition, but we can just as easily suppose it was out of consideration for cats, dogs or hungry men. The Bible has a command against gleaning too closely, and leaving nothing for the traveler.

"When making sacrifice, never pare your nails"—that is to say, do one thing at a time: wind not the clock at an inopportune time.

"Eat not in the chariot"—when you travel, travel.

"Feed not yourself with your left hand"—get your living openly and avoid all left-handed dealings.

And so there are hundreds of these Pythagorean sayings that have vexed our classic friends for over two thousand years. All Greek scholars who really pride themselves on their scholarship have taken a hand at them, and agitated the ether just as the members of the Kokomo Woman's Club discuss obscure passages in Bliss Carman or Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Learned people are apt to comprehend anything but the obvious.

he School of Pythagoras grew until it became the chief attraction of Crotona. The size of the town was doubled through the pilgrims who came to study music, mathematics, medicine, ethics and the science of government.

The Pythagorean plan of treating the sick by music was long considered as mere incantation, but there is a suspicion now that it was actual science. Once there was a man who rode a hobby all his life; and long after he was dead, folks discovered it was a real live horse and had carried the man long miles.

Pythagoras reduced the musical scale to a mathematical science. In astronomy he anticipated Copernicus, and indeed, it was cited as the chief offense of Copernicus that he had borrowed from a pagan. Copernicus, it seems, set the merry churchmen digging into Greek literature to find out just how bad Pythagoras was. This did the churchmen good, but did not help the cause of Copernicus.

Pythagoras for a time sought to popularize his work, but he soon found to his dismay that he was attracting cheap and unworthy people, who came not so much out of a love of learning as to satisfy a morbid curiosity and gain a short cut to wisdom. They wanted secrets, and knowing that Pythagoras had spent twenty years in Egypt, they came to him, hoping to get them.

Said Pythagoras, "He who digs, always finds." At another time, he put the same idea reversely, thus, "He who digs not, never finds."

Pythagoras was well past forty when he married a daughter of one of the chief citizens of Crotona. It seems that, inspired by his wife, who was first one of his pupils and then a disciple, he conceived a new mode of life, which he thought would soon overthrow the old manner of living.

Pythagoras himself wrote nothing, but all his pupils kept tablets, and Athens in the century following Pythagoras was full of these Pythagorean notebooks, and these supply us the scattered data from which his life was written.

Pythagoras, like so many other great men, had his dream of Utopia: it was a college or, literally, "a collection of people," where all were on an equality. Everybody worked, everybody studied, everybody helped everybody, and all refrained from disturbing or distressing any one. It was the Oneida Community taken over by Brook Farm and fused into a religious and scientific New Harmony by the Shakers.

One smiles to see the minute rules that were made for the guidance of the members. They look like a transcript from a sermon by John Alexander Dowie, revised by the shade of Robert Owen.

This Pythagorean Community was organized out of a necessity in order to escape the blow-ins who sailed across from Greece intent on some new thing, but principally to get knowledge and a living without work.

And so Pythagoras and his wife formed a close corporation. For each member there was an initiation, strict and severe, the intent of which was absolutely to bar the transient triflers. Each member was to turn over to the Common Treasury all the money and goods he had of every kind and quality. They started naked, just as did Pythagoras when he stood at the door of the temple in Egypt.

Simplicity, truth, honesty and mutual service were to govern. It was an outcrop of the monastic impulse, save that women were admitted, also. Unlike the Egyptians, Pythagoras believed now in the equality of the sexes, and his wife daily led the women's chorus, and she also gave lectures. The children were especially cared for by women set apart as nurses and teachers. By rearing perfect children, it was hoped and expected to produce in turn a perfect race.

The whole idea was a phase of totemism and tabu.

That it flourished for about thirty years is very certain. Two sons and a daughter of Pythagoras grew to maturity in the college, and this daughter was tried by the Order on the criminal charge of selling the secret doctrines of her father to outsiders.

One of the sons it seems made trouble, also, in an attempt to usurp his father's place and take charge of affairs, as "next friend." One generation is about the limit of a Utopian Community. When those who have organized the community weaken and one by one pass away, and the young assume authority, the old ideas of austerity are forgotten and dissipation and disintegration enter. So do we move in circles.

The final blow to the Pythagorean College came through jealousy and misunderstanding of the citizens outside. It was the old question of Town versus Gown. The Pythagoreans numbered nearly three hundred people. They held themselves aloof, and no doubt had an exasperating pride. No strangers were ever allowed inside the walls—they were a law unto themselves.

Internal strife and tales told by dissenters excited the curiosity, and then the prejudice, of the townspeople.

Then the report got abroad that the Pythagoreans were collecting arms and were about to overthrow the local government and enslave the officials.

On a certain night, led by a band of drunken soldiers, a mob made an assault upon the college. The buildings were fired, and the members were either destroyed in the flames or killed as they rushed forth to escape. Tradition has it that Pythagoras was later seen by a shepherd on the mountains, but the probabilities are that he perished with his people. But you can not dispose of a great man by killing him. Here we are reading, writing and talking yet of Pythagoras.

PLATO

How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to the question, "How does love suit with age, Sophocles—are you still the man you were?"

"Peace," he replied; "most gladly have I escaped that, and I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master."

That saying of his has often come into my mind since, and seems to me still as good as at the time when I heard him. For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, you have escaped from the control not of one master only, but of many. And of these regrets, as well as of the complaint about relations, Socrates, the cause is to be sought, not in men's ages, but in their characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but he who is of an opposite disposition will find youth and age equally a burden.

—The Republic

PLATO

thinking man is one of the most recent productions evolved from Nature's laboratory. The first man of brains to express himself about the world in an honest, simple and natural way, just as if nothing had been said about it before, was Socrates.

Twenty-four centuries have passed since Socrates was put to death on the charge of speaking disrespectfully of the gods and polluting the minds of the youths of Athens. During ten of these centuries that have passed since then, the race lost the capacity to think, through the successful combination of the priest and the soldier. These men blocked human evolution. The penalty for making slaves is that you become one.

To suppress humanity is to suppress yourself.

The race is one. So the priests and the soldiers who in the Third Century had a modicum of worth themselves, sank and were submerged in the general slough of superstition and ignorance. It was a panic that continued for a thousand years, all through the endeavor of faulty men to make people good by force. At all times, up to within our own decade, frank expression on religious, economic and social topics has been fraught with great peril. Even yet any man who hopes for popularity as a writer, orator, merchant or politician, would do well to conceal studiously his inmost beliefs. On such simple themes as the taxation of real estate, regardless of the business of the owner, and a payment of a like wage for a like service without consideration of sex, the statesman who has the temerity to speak out will be quickly relegated to private life. Successful merchants depending on a local constituency find it expedient to cater to popular superstitions by heading subscription-lists for the support of things in which they do not believe. No avowed independent thinker would be tolerated as chief ruler of any of the so-called civilized countries.

The fact, however, that the penalty for frank expression is limited now to social and commercial ostracism is very hopeful—a few years ago it meant the scaffold.

We have been heirs to a leaden legacy of fear that has well-nigh banished joy and made of life a long nightmare.

In very truth, the race has been insane.

Hallucinations, fallacies, fears, have gnawed at our hearts, and men have fought men with deadly frenzy. The people who interfered, trying to save us, we have killed. Truly did we say, "There is no health in us," which repetition did not tend to mend the malady.

We are now getting convalescent. We are hobbling out into the sunshine on crutches. We have discharged most of our old advisers, heaved the dulling and deadly bottles out of the windows, and are intent on studying and understanding our own case. Our motto is twenty-four centuries old—it is simply this: KNOW THYSELF.

ocrates was a street preacher, with a beautiful indifference as to whether people liked him or not. To most Athenians he was the town fool. Athens was a little city (only about one hundred fifty thousand), and everybody knew Socrates. The popular plays caricatured him; the topical songs misquoted him; the funny artists on the street-corners who modeled things in clay, while you waited, made figures of him.

Everybody knew Socrates—I guess so!

Plato, the handsome youth of nineteen, wearing a purple robe, which marked him as one of the nobility, paused to listen to this uncouth man who gave everything and wanted nothing.

Ye gods! But it is no wonder they caricatured him—he was a temptation too great to resist.

Plato smiled—he never laughed, being too well-bred for that. Then he sighed, and moved a little nearer in.

"Individuals are nothing. The State is all. To offend the State is to die. The State is an organization and we are members of it. The State is only as rich as its poorest citizen. We are all given a little sample of divinity to study, model and marvel at. To understand the State you must KNOW THYSELF."

Plato lingered until the little crowd had dispersed, and when the old man with the goggle-eyes and full-moon face went shuffling slowly down the street, he approached and asked him a question.

This man Socrates was no fool—the populace was wrong—he was a man so natural and free from cant that he appeared to the triflers and pretenders like a pretender, and they asked, "Is he sincere?"

What Plato was by birth, breeding and inheritance, Socrates was by nature—a noble man.

Up to this time the ambition of Plato had been for place and power—to make the right impression on the people in order to gain political preferment. He had been educated in the school of the Sophists, and his principal studies were poetry, rhetoric and deportment.

And now straightway he destroyed the manuscript of his poems, for in their writing he had suddenly discovered that he had not written what he inwardly believed was true, but simply that which he thought was proper and nice to say. In other words, his literature had been a form of pretense.

Daily thereafter, where went Socrates there went Plato. Side by side they sat on the curb—Socrates talking, questioning the bystanders, accosting the passers-by; Plato talking little, but listening much.

Socrates was short, stout and miles around. Plato was tall, athletic and broad-shouldered. In fact, the word, "plato," or "platon," means broad, and it was given him as a nickname by his comrades. His correct name was Aristocles, but "Plato" suited him better, since it symbols that he was not only broad of shoulder, but likewise in mind. He was not only noble by birth, but noble in appearance.

Emerson calls him the universal man. He absorbed all the science, all the art, all the philosophy of his day. He was handsome, kindly, graceful, gracious, generous, and lived and died a bachelor. He never collided with either poverty or matrimony.

lato was twenty-eight years old when Socrates died. For eight years they had been together daily. After the death of Socrates, Plato lived for forty-six years, just to keep alive the name and fame of the great philosopher.

Socrates comes to us through Plato. Various other contemporaries mention Socrates and quote him, some to his disadvantage, but it was left for Plato to give us the heart of his philosophy, and limn his character for all time in unforgetable outline.

Plato is called the "Pride of Greece." His contribution to the wealth of the world consists in the fact that he taught the joys of the intellect—the supreme satisfaction that comes through thinking. This is the pure Platonic philosophy: to find our gratifications in exalted thought and not in bodily indulgence. Plato's theory that five years should be given in early manhood to abstract thought, abstaining from all practical affairs, so as to acquire a love for learning, has been grafted upon a theological stalk and comes down to our present time. It has, however, now been discarded by the world's best thinkers as a fallacy. The unit of man's life is the day, not the month or year, much less a period of five years. Each day we must exercise the mind, just as each day we must exercise the body. We can not store up health and draw upon it at will over long-deferred periods. The account must be kept active. To keep physical energy we must expend physical energy every day. The opinion of Herbert Spencer that thought is a physical function—a vibration set up in a certain area of brain-cells—is an idea never preached by Plato. The brain, being an organ, must be used, not merely in one part for five years to the exclusion of all other parts, but all parts should be used daily. To this end the practical things of life should daily engage our attention, no less than the contemplation of beauty as manifest in music, poetry, art or dialectics. The thought that every day we should look upon a beautiful picture, read a beautiful poem, or listen for a little while to beautiful music, is highly scientific, for this contemplation and appreciation of harmony is a physical exercise as well as a spiritual one, and through it we grow, develop, evolve.

That we could not devote five years of our time to purely esthetic exercises, to the exclusion of practical things, without very great risk, is now well known. And when I refer to practical affairs, I mean the effort which Nature demands we should put forth to get a living. Every man should live like a poor man, regardless of the fact that he may have money. Nature knows nothing of bank-balances. In order to have an appetite for dinner, you must first earn your dinner. If you would sleep at night, you must first pay for sweet sleep by physical labor.

lato was born on the Island of Ægina, where his father owned an estate. His mother was a direct descendant of Solon, and his father, not to be outdone, traced to Codrus.

The father of Socrates was a stonecutter and his mother a midwife, so very naturally the son had a beautiful contempt for pedigree. Socrates once said to Plato, "Anybody can trace to Codrus—by paying enough to the man who makes the family-tree." This seems to show that genealogy was a matter of business then as now, and that nothing is new under the sun. Yet with all his contempt for heredity, we find Socrates often expressing pride in the fact that he was a "native son," whereas Plato, Aspasia, the mother of Themistocles, and various other fairly good people, were Athenian importations.

Socrates belonged to the leisure class and had plenty of time for extended conversazione, so just how much seriousness we should mix in his dialogues is still a problem. Each palate has to season to suit. Also, we can never know how much is Socrates and how much essence of Plato. Socrates wrote nothing, and Plato ascribes all of his wisdom to his master. Whether this was simple prudence or magnanimity is still a question.

The death of Socrates must have been a severe blow to Plato. He at once left Athens. It was his first intention never to return. He traveled through the cities of Greece, Southern Italy and down to Egypt, and everywhere was treated with royal courtesies.

After many solicitations from Dionysius, Tyrant of Syracuse, he went to visit that worthy, who had a case of philosophic and literary scabies. Dionysius prided himself on being a Beneficent Autocrat, with a literary and artistic attachment. He ruled his people, educated them, cared for them, disciplined them.

Some people call this slavery; others term it applied socialism. Dionysius wanted Syracuse to be the philosophic center of the world, and to this end Plato was importuned to make Syracuse his home and dispense his specialty—truth.

This he consented to do.

It was all very much like the arrangement between Mæcenas and Horace, or Voltaire and Frederick the Great. The patron is a man who patronizes—he wants something, and the particular thing that Dionysius wanted was to have Plato hold a colored light upon the performances of His Altruistic, Beneficent, Royal Jackanapes. But Plato was a simple, honest and direct man: he had caught the habit from Socrates.

Charles Ferguson says that the simple life does not consist in living in the woods and wearing overalls and sandals, but in getting the cant out of one's cosmos and eliminating the hypocrisy from one's soul.

Plato lived the simple life. When he spoke he stated what he thought. He discussed exploitation, war, taxation, and the Divine Right of Kings. Kings are very unfortunate—they are shut off and shielded from truth on every side. They get their facts at second hand and are lied to all day long. Consequently they become in time incapable of digesting truth. A court, being an artificial fabric, requires constant bracing. Next to capital, nothing is so timid as a king. Heine says that kings have to draw their nightcaps on over their crowns when they go to bed, in order to keep them from being stolen, and that they are subject to insomnia.

Walt Whitman, with nothing to lose—not even a reputation or a hat—was much more kingly walking bareheaded past the White House than Nicholas of Russia or Alfonso of Spain can ever possibly be.

Dionysius thought that he wanted a philosophic court, but all he wanted was to make folks think he had a philosophic court. Plato supplied him the genuine article, and very naturally Plato was soon invited to vacate.

After he had gone, Dionysius, fearful that Plato would give him a bad reputation in Athens—somewhat after the manner and habit of the "escaped nun"—sent a fast-rowing galley after him. Plato was arrested and sold into slavery on his own isle of Ægina.

This all sounds very tragic, but the real fact is it was a sort of comedy of errors—as a king's doings are when viewed from a safe and convenient distance. De Wolf Hopper's kings are the real thing. Dionysius claimed that Plato owed him money, and so he got out a body-attachment, and sold the philosopher to the highest bidder.

This was a perfectly legal proceeding, being simply peonage, a thing which exists in some parts of the United States today. I state the fact without prejudice, merely to show how hard custom dies.

Plato was too big a man conveniently either to secrete or kill. Certain people in Athens plagiarized Doctor Johnson who, on hearing that Goldsmith had debts of several thousand pounds, in admiration exclaimed, "Was ever poet so trusted before!" Other good friends ascertained the amount of the claim and paid it, just as Colonel H. H. Rogers graciously cleared up the liabilities of Mark Twain, after the author of "Huckleberry Finn" had landed his business craft on a sandbar.

And so Plato went free, arriving back in Athens, aged forty, a wiser and a better man than when he left.

othing absolves a reputation like silence and absence, or what the village editors call "the grim reaper." To live is always more or less of an offense, especially if you have thoughts and express them. Athens exists, in degree, because she killed Socrates, just as Jerusalem is unforgetable for a similar reason. The South did not realize that Lincoln was her best friend until the assassin's bullet had found his brain. Many good men in Chicago did not cease to revile their chiefest citizen, until the ears of Altgeld were stopped and his hands stiffened by death. The lips of the dead are eloquent.

Plato's ten years of absence had given him prestige. He was honored because he had been the near and dear friend of Socrates, a great and good man who was killed through mistake.

Most murders and killings of men, judicial and otherwise, are matters of misunderstandings.

Plato had been driven out of Syracuse for the very reasons that Socrates had been killed at Athens. And now behold, when Dionysius saw how Athens was honoring Plato, he discovered that it was all a mistake of his bookkeeper, so he wrote to Plato to come back and all would be forgiven.

hose who set out to live the Ideal Life have a hard trail to travel. The road to Jericho is a rocky one—especially if we are a little in doubt as to whether it really is the road to Jericho or not. Perhaps if we ever find the man who lives the Ideal Life he will be quite unaware of it, so occupied will he be in his work—so forgetful of self.

Time had taught Plato diplomacy. He now saw that to teach people who did not want to be taught was an error in judgment for which one might forfeit his head.

Socrates was the first Democrat: he stood for the demos—the people. Plato would have done the same, but he saw that the business was extra hazardous, to use the phrase of our insurance friends. He who works for the people will be destroyed by the people. Hemlock is such a rare and precious commodity that few can afford it; the cross is a privilege so costly that few care to pay the price.

The genius is a man who first states truths; and all truths are unpleasant on their first presentation. That which is uncommon is offensive. "Who ever heard anything like that before?" ask the literary and philosophic hill tribes in fierce indignation. Says James Russell Lowell, "I blab unpleasant truths, you see, that none may need to state them after me."

Plato was a teacher by nature: this was his business, his pastime, and the only thing in life that gave him joy. But he dropped back to the good old ways of making truth esoteric as did the priests of Egypt, instead of exoteric as did Socrates. He founded his college in the grove of his old friend Academus, a mile out of Athens on the road to Eleusis. In honor of Academus the school was called "The Academy." It was secluded, safe, beautiful for situation. In time Plato bought a tract of land adjoining that of Academus, and this was set apart as the permanent school. All the teaching was done out of doors, master and pupils seated on the marble benches, by the fountain-side, or strolling through the grounds, rich with shrubs and flowers and enlivened by the song of birds. The climate of Athens was about like that of Southern California, where the sun shines three hundred days in the year.

Plato emphasized the value of the spoken word over the written, a thing he could well afford to do, since he was a remarkably good writer. This for the same reason that the only man who can afford to go ragged is the man with a goodly bank-balance. The shibboleth of the modern schools of oratory is, "We grow through expression." And Plato was the man who first said it. Plato's teaching was all in the form of the "quiz," because he believed that truth was not a thing to be acquired from another—it is self-discovery.

Indeed, we can imagine it was very delightful—this walking, strolling, lying on the grass, or seated in semicircles, indulging in endless talk, easy banter, with now and then a formal essay read to start the vibrations.

Here it was that Aristotle came from his wild home in the mountains of Macedonia, to remain for twenty years and to evolve into a rival of the master.

We can well imagine how Aristotle, the mountain-climber and horseman, at times grew heartily tired of the faultily faultless garden with its high wall and graveled walks and delicate shrubbery, and shouted aloud in protest, "The whole world of mountain, valley and plain should be our Academy, not this pent-up Utica that contracts our powers."

Then followed an argument as to the relative value of talking about things or doing them, or Poetry versus Science.

Poetry, philosophy and religion are very old themes, and they were old even in Plato's day; but natural science came in with Aristotle. And science is only the classification of the common knowledge of the common people. It was Aristotle who named things, not Adam. He contended that the classification and naming of plants, rocks and animals was quite as important as to classify ideas about human happiness and make guesses at the state of the soul after death.

Of course he got himself beautifully misunderstood, because he was advocating something which had never been advocated before. In this lay his virtue, that he outran human sympathy, even the sympathy of the great Plato.

Yet for a while the unfolding genius of this young barbarian was a great joy to Plato, as the earnest, eager intellect of an ambitious pupil always is to his teacher. Plato was great in speculation; Aristotle was great in observation. Well has it been said that it was Aristotle who discovered the world. And Aristotle in his old age said, "My attempts to classify the objects of Nature all came through Plato's teaching me first how to classify ideas." And forty years before this Plato had said, "It was Socrates who taught me this game of the correlation and classification of thoughts."

he writings of Plato consist of thirty-five dialogues, and one essay which is not cast in the dramatic form—"The Apology." These dialogues vary in length from twenty pages, of, say, four hundred words each, to three hundred pages. In addition to these books are many quotations from Plato and references to him by contemporary writers. Plato's work is as impersonal as that of Shakespeare. All human ideas, shades of belief, emotions and desires pass through the colander of his mind. He allows everybody to have his say.

What Plato himself thought can only be inferred, and this each reader does for himself. We construct our man Plato in our own image. A critic's highest conception of Plato's philosophy is the highest conception of the critic's own. We, however, are reasonably safe in assuming that Plato's own ideas were put into the mouth of Socrates, for the one intent of Plato's life was to redeem Socrates from the charges that had been made against him. The characters Shakespeare loved are the ones that represent the master, not the hated and handmade rogues.

Plato's position in life was that of a spectator rather than that of an actor. He stood and saw the procession pass by, and as it passed, commented on it. He charged his pupils no tuition and accepted no fees, claiming that to sell one's influence or ideas was immoral.

It will be remembered that Byron held a similar position at the beginning of his literary career, and declared i' faith, he "would not prostitute his genius for hire." He gave his poems to the world. Later, when his income was pinched, he began to make bargains with Barabbas and became an artist in per centum, collecting close, refusing to rhyme without collateral.

Byron's humanity is not seriously disputed. Plato also was human. He had a fixed income and so knew the worthlessness of riches. He issued no tariff, but the goodly honorarium left mysteriously on a marble bench by a rich pupil he accepted, and for it gave thanks to the gods. He said many great things, but he never said this: "I would have every man poor that he might know the value of money."

"The Republic" is the best known and best read of any of Plato's dialogues. It outlines an ideal form of government where everybody would be healthy, happy and prosperous. It has served as inspiration to Sir Thomas More, Erasmus, Jean Jacques Rousseau, William Morris, Edward Bellamy, Brigham Young, John Humphrey Noyes and Eugene Debs. The sub-division of labor, by setting apart certain persons to do certain things—for instance, to care for the children—has made its appeal to Upton Sinclair, who jumped from his Utopian woodshed into a rubber-plant and bounced off into oblivion.

Plato's plan was intended to relieve marriage from the danger of becoming a form of slavery. The rulers, teachers and artists especially were to be free, and the State was to assume all responsibilities. The reason is plain: he wanted them to reproduce themselves. But whether genius is an acquirement or a natural endowment he touches on but lightly. Also, he seemingly did not realize "that no hovel is safe from it."

If all marriage-laws were done away with, Plato thought that the men and women who were mated would still be true to each other, and that the less the police interfered in love-relations, the better.

In one respect at least, Plato was certainly right: he advocated the equality of the sexes, and declared that no woman should be owned by a man nor forced into a mode of life, either by economic exigency or marriage, that was repulsive to her. Also, that her right to bear children or not should be strictly her own affair, and to dictate to a mother as to who should father her children tended to the production of a slavish race.

The eugenics of "The Republic" were tried for thirty years by the Oneida Community with really good results, but one generation of communal marriages was proved to be the limit, a thing Plato now knows from his heights in Elysium, but which he in his bachelor dreams on earth did not realize.

In his division of labor each was to do the thing he was best fitted to do, and which he liked to do. It was assumed that each person had a gift, and that to use this gift all that was necessary was to give him an opportunity. That very modern cry of "equality of opportunity" harks back to Plato.

The monastic impulse was a very old thing, even in the time of Plato. The monastic impulse is simply cutting for sanctuary when the pressure of society gets intense—a getting rid of the world by running away from it. This usually occurs when the novitiate has exhausted his capacity for sin, and so tries saintship in the hope of getting a new thrill.

Plato had been much impressed by the experiments of Pythagoras, who had actually done the thing of which Plato only talked. Plato now picked the weak points in the Pythagorean philosophy and sought, in imagination, to construct a fabric that would stand the test of time.

However, all Utopias, like all monasteries and penitentiaries, are made up of picked people. The Oneida Community was not composed of average individuals, but of people who were selected with great care, and only admitted after severe tests. And great as was Plato, he could not outline an ideal plan of life except for an ideal people.

To remain in the world of work and share the burdens of all—to ask for nothing which other people can not have on like terms—not to consider yourself peculiar, unique and therefore immune and exempt—is now the ideal of the best minds. We have small faith in monasticism or monotheism, but we do have great faith in monism. We believe in the Solidarity of the Race. We must all progress together. Whether Pythagoras, John Humphrey Noyes and Brigham Young were ahead of the world or behind it is really not to the point—the many would not tolerate them. So their idealism was diluted with danger until it became as somber, sober and slaty-gray as the average existence, and fades as well as shrinks in the wash.

A private good is no more possible for a community than it is for an individual. We help ourselves only as we advance the race—we are happy only as we minister to the whole. The race is one, and this is monism.

And here Socrates and Plato seemingly separate, for Socrates in his life wanted nothing, not even joy, and Plato's desire was for peace and happiness. Yet the ideal of justice in Plato's philosophy is very exalted.

No writer in that flowering time of beauty and reason which we call "The Age of Pericles" exerted so profound an influence as Plato. All the philosophers that follow him were largely inspired by him. Those who berated him most were, very naturally, the ones he had most benefited. Teach a boy to write, and the probabilities are that his first essay, when he has cut loose from his teacher's apron-strings and starts a brownie bibliomag, will be in denunciation of the man who taught him to push the pen and wield the Faber.

Xenophon was more indebted, intellectually, to Plato than to any other living man, yet he speaks scathingly of his master. Plutarch, Cicero, Iamblichus, Pliny, Horace and all the other Roman writers read Plato religiously. The Christian Fathers kept his work alive, and passed it on to Dante, Petrarch and the early writers of the Renaissance, so all of their thought is well flavored with essence of Plato. Well does Addison put into the mouth of Cato those well-known words:

It must be so—Plato, thou reasonest well!—
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?
Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror,
Of falling into nought? Why shrinks the soul
Back on herself, and startles at destruction?
'T is the divinity that stirs within us;
'T is heaven itself, that points out an hereafter,
And intimates eternity to man.

All of that English group of writers in Addison's day knew their Plato, exactly as did Cato and the other great Romans of near two thousand years before. From Plato you can prove that there is a life after this for each individual soul, as Francis of Assisi proved, or you can take your Plato, as did Hume, and show that man lives only in his influence, his individual life returning to the mass and becoming a part of all the great pulsing existence that ebbs and flows through plant and tree and flower and flying bird. And today we turn to Plato and find the corroboration of our thought that to live now and here, up to our highest and best, is the acme of wisdom. We prepare to live by living. If there is another world we better be getting ready for it. If heaven is an Ideal Republic it is founded on unselfishness, truth, reciprocity, equanimity and co-operation, and only those will be at home there who have practised these virtues here. Man was made for mutual service. This way lies Elysium.

Plato was a teacher of teachers, and like every other great teacher who has ever lived, his soul goes marching on, for to teach is to influence, and influence never dies. Hail, Plato!

KING ALFRED

A saint without superstition, a scholar without ostentation, a warrior who fought only in defense of his country, a conqueror whose laurels were never stained with cruelty, a prince never cast down by adversity, nor lifted up to insolence in the hour of triumph—there is no other name in English history to compare with his.

—Freeman

KING ALFRED

ulius Cæsar, the greatest man of initiative the world has ever seen, had a nephew known as Cæsar Augustus.

The grandeur that was Rome occurred in the reign of Augustus. It was Augustus who said, "I found your city mud and I left it marble!" The impetus given to the times by Julius Cæsar was conserved by Augustus. He continued the work his uncle had planned, but before he had completed it, he grew very weary, and the weariness he expressed was also the old age of the nation. There was lime in the bones of the boss.

When Cæsar Augustus said, "Rome is great enough—here we rest," he merely meant that he had reached his limit, and had had enough of road-building. At the boundaries of the Empire and the end of each Roman road he set up a statue of the god Terminus. This god gave his blessing to those going beyond, and a welcome to those returning, just as the Stars and Stripes welcome the traveler coming to America from across the sea. This god Terminus also supplied the world, especially the railroad world, a word.

Julius Cæsar reached his terminus and died, aged fifty-six, from compulsory vaccination. Augustus, aged seventy-seven, died peacefully in bed.

The reign of Augustus marks the crest of the power of Rome, and a crest is a place where no man nor nation stays—when you reach it, you go over and down on the other side.

When Augustus set up his Termini, announcing to all mankind that this was the limit, the enemies of Rome took courage and became active. The Goths and Vandals, hanging on the skirts of Rome, had learned many things, and one of the things was that, for getting rich quick, conquest is better than production. The barbarians, some of whom evidently had a sense of humor, had a way of picking up the Termini and carrying them inward, and finally they smashed them entirely, somewhat as country boys, out hunting, shoot railroad-signs full of holes.

n the Middle Ages the soldier was supreme, and in the name of protecting the people he robbed the people, a tradition much respected, but not in the breach.

To escape the scourge of war, certain families and tribes moved northward. It was fight and turmoil in Southern Europe that settled Norway, Sweden and Denmark, and produced the Norsemen. And in making for themselves a home in the wilderness, battling with the climate and unkind conditions, there was evolved a very strong and sturdy type of man.

On the north shore of the Baltic dwelt the Norsemen. Along the southern shore were scattered several small tribes or families who were not strong enough in numbers to fight the Goths, and so sought peace with them, and were taxed—or pillaged—often to the point of starvation. They were so poor and insignificant that the Romans really never heard of them, and they never heard of the Romans, save in myth and legend. They lived in caves and rude stone huts. They fished, hunted, raised goats and farmed, and finally, about the year Three Hundred, they secured horses, which they bought from the Goths, who stole them from the Romans.

Their Government was the Folkmoot, the germ of the New England Town Meeting. All the laws were passed by all the people, and in the making of these laws, the women had an equal voice with the men.

When important steps were to be taken where the interests of the whole tribe were at stake, great deference was paid to the opinions of the mothers. For the mother spoke not only for herself, but for her children. The mother was the home-maker. The word "wife" means weaver; and this deference to the one member of the family who invented, created, preparing both the food and the clothing, is a marked Teutonic instinct. Its survival is seen yet in the sturdy German of the middle class, who takes his wife and children with him when he goes to the concert or to the beer-garden. So has he always taken his family with him on his migrations; whereas the Greeks and the Romans left their women behind.

South America was colonized by Spanish men. And the Indians and the Negroes absorbed the haughty grandee, yet preserved the faults and failings of both.

The German who moves to America comes to stay—his family is a part of himself. The Italian comes alone, and his intent is to make what he can and return. This is a modified form of conquest.

The Romans who came to Brittany in Cæsar's time were men. Those who remained "took to themselves wives among the daughters of Philistia," as strong men ever are wont to do when they seek to govern savage tribes. And note this—instead of raising the savages or barbarians to their level, they sink to theirs. The child takes the status of the mother. The white man who marries an Indian woman becomes an Indian and their children are Indians. With the Negro race the same law holds.

The Teutonic races have conquered the world because they took their women with them on their migrations, mental and physical. And the moral seems to be this, that the men who progress financially, morally and spiritually are those who do not leave their women-folk behind.

hen we think of the English, we usually have in mind the British Isles. But the original England was situated along the southern shore of the Baltic Sea. This was the true Eng-Land, the land of the Engles or Angles. To one side lay Jute-Land, the home of the Jutes. On the other was Saxony, where dwelt the Saxons.

Jute-Land still lives in Jutland; the land of the Saxons is yet so indicated on the map; but Eng-Land was transported bodily a thousand miles, and her original territory became an abandoned farm where barbarians battled.

And now behold how England has diffused herself all over the world, with the British Isles as a base of supplies, or a radiating center. Behind this twenty miles of water that separates Calais and Dover she found safety and security, and there her brain and brawn evolved and expanded. So there are now Anglo-Americans, Anglo-Africans, Anglo-Indians, Anglo-Australians, and Anglo-New-Zealanders. As the native Indians of America and the Maoris of New Zealand have given way before the onward push and persistence of the English, so likewise did the ancient Britons give way and were absorbed by the Anglo-Saxons; and then the Saxons, being a little too fine for the stern competitor, allowed the Engles to take charge. And as Dutch, Germans, Slavs and Swedes are transformed with the second generation into English-Americans when they come to America, so did the people from Eng-Land fuse Saxons, Norsemen, Jutes, Celts and Britons into one people and fix upon them the indelible stamp of Eng-Land.

Yet it is obvious that the characters of the people of England have been strengthened, modified and refined by contact with the various races she has met, mixed with and absorbed. To influence others is to grow. Had England been satisfied to people and hold the British Isles, she would ere this have been outrun and absorbed by Spain or France. To stand still is to retreat. It is the same with men as it is with races. England's Colonies have been her strength. They have given her poise, reserve, ballast—and enough trouble to prevent either revolution, stagnation or introspection.

Nations have their periods of youth, manhood and old age. Whether England is now passing into decline, living her life in her children, the Colonies, might be indelicate to ask. Perhaps as Briton, Celt, Jute and Saxon were fused to make that hardy, courageous, restless and sinewy man known as the Englishman, so are the English, the Dutch, the Swede, the German, the Slav, transplanted into America, being fused into a composite man who shall surpass any type that the world has ever seen. In the British Isles, just as in the great cities, mankind gets pot-bound. In the newer lands, the roots strike deep into the soil, and find the sustenance the human plant requires.

Walls keep folks in as well as shut other folks out. The British Isles, rock-faced and sea-girted, shut out the enemies of England without shutting the English in. A country surrounded by the sea produces sailors, and England's position bred a type of man that made her mistress of the seas. As her drum-taps, greeting the rising sun, girdle the world, so do her lighthouses flash protection to the mariner wherever the hungry sea lies in wait along rocky coasts, the round world over. England has sounded the shallows, marked the rocks and reefs, and mapped the coasts.

The first settlement of Saxons in Britain occurred in the year Four Hundred Forty-nine. They did not come as invaders, as did the Romans five hundred years before; their numbers were too few, and their arms too crude to mean menace to the swarthy, black-haired Britons. These fair stranger-folk were welcomed as curiosities and were allowed to settle and make themselves homes. Word was sent back to Saxony and Jute-Land and more settlers came. In a few years came a shipload of Engles, with their women and children, red-haired, freckled, tawny. They tilled the soil with a faith and an intelligence such as the Britons never brought to bear: very much as the German settlers follow the pioneers and grow rich where the Mudsock fails. Naturally the fair-haired girls found favor in the sight of the swarthy Britons. Marriages occurred, and a new type of man-child appeared as the months went by. More Engles came. A century passed, and the coast, from Kent to the Firth of Forth, was dotted with the farms and homes of the people from the Baltic. There were now occasional protests from the original holders, and fights followed, when the Britons retreated before the strangers, or else were very glad to make terms. Victory is a matter of staying-power. The Engles had come to stay.

But a new enemy had appeared—the Norsemen or Danes. These were sea-nomads who acknowledged no man as master. Rough, bold, laughing at disaster, with no patience to build or dig or plow, they landed but to ravish, steal and lay waste, and then boarded their craft, sailing away, joying in the ruin they had wrought.

The next year they came back. The industry and the thrift of the Engles made Britain a land of promise, a storehouse where the good things of life could be secured much more easily than by creating or producing them. And so now, before this common foe, the Britons, Jutes, Celts, Saxons and Engles united to punish and expel the invaders.

The calamity was a blessing—as most calamities are. From being a dozen little kingdoms, Britain now became one. A "Cyng," or captain, was chosen—an Engle, strong of arm, clear of brain, blue of eye, with long yellow hair. He was a man who commanded respect by his person and by his deeds. His name was Egbert.

King Alfred, or Elfred, was born at Wantage, Berkshire, in the year Eight Hundred Forty-nine. He was the grandson of Egbert, a great man, and the son of Ethelwulf, a man of mediocre qualities. Alfred was shrewd enough to inherit the courage and persistence of his grandfather. Our D. A. R. friends are right and Mark Twain is wrong—it is really more necessary to have a grandfather than a father.

English civilization begins with Alfred. If you will refer to the dictionary you will find that the word "civilization" simply means to be civil. That is, if you are civilized you are gentle instead of violent—gaining your ends by kindly and persuasive means, instead of through coercion, intimidation and force.

Alfred was the first English gentleman, and let no joker add "and the last." Yet it is needless and quite irrelevant to say that civilized people are not always civil; nor are gentlemen always gentle—so little do words count. Many gentlemen are only gents.

Alfred was civil and gentle. He had been sent to Rome in his boyhood, and this transplantation had done him a world of good. Superior men are always transplanted men: people who do not travel have no perspective. To stay at home means getting pot-bound. You neither search down in the soil for color and perfume nor reach out strong toward the sunshine.

It was only a few years before the time of Alfred that a Christian monk appeared at Edin-Borough, and told the astonished Engles and Saxons of the gentle Jesus, who had been sent to earth by the All-Father to tell men they should love their enemies and be gentle and civil and not violent, and should do unto others as they would be done by. The natural religion of the Great Spirit which the ancient Teutonic people held had much in it that was good, but now they were prepared for something better—they had the hope of a heaven of rest and happiness after death.

Christianity flourishes best among a downtrodden, poor, subdued and persecuted people. Renan says it is a religion of sorrow. And primitive Christianity—the religion of conduct—is a beautiful and pure doctrine that no sane person ever flouted or scoffed.

The parents of Alfred, filled with holy zeal, allowed one of the missionary monks to take the boy to Rome. The idea was that he should become a bishop in the Church.

Ethelred, the elder brother of Alfred, had succeeded Ethelwulf, his father, as King. The Danes had overrun and ravished the country. For many years these marauding usurpers had fed their armies on the products of the land. And now they had more than two-thirds of the country under their control, and the fear that they would absolutely subjugate the Anglo-Saxons was imminent. Ethelwulf gave up the struggle in despair and died. Ethelred fell in battle. And as the Greeks of old in their terror cast around for the strongest man they could find to repel the Persian invaders, and picked on the boy Alexander, so did the Anglo-Saxons turn to Alfred, the gentle and silent. He was only twenty-three years old. In build he was slight and slender, but he had given token of his courage for four years, fighting with his brother. He had qualities that were closely akin to those of both Alexander and Cæsar. He had a cool, clear and vivid intellect and he had invincible courage. But he surpassed both of the men just named in that he had a tender, sympathetic heart.

The Danes were overconfident, and had allowed their discipline to relax. Alfred had at first evidently encouraged them in their idea that they had won, for he struck feebly and then withdrew his army to the marshes, where the Danish horsemen could not follow.

The Danes went into winter quarters, fat and feasting. Alfred made a definite plan for a campaign, drilled his men, prayed with them, and filled their hearts with the one idea that they were going forth to certain victory. And to victory they went. They fell upon the Danes with an impetuosity as unexpected as it was invincible, and before they could get into their armor, or secure their horses, they were in a rout. Every timid Engle and Saxon now took heart—it was the Lord's victory—they were fighting for home—the Danes gave way. This was not all accomplished quite as easily as I am writing it, but difficulties, deprivations and disaster only brought out new resources in Alfred. He was as serenely hopeful as was Washington at Valley Forge, and his soldiers were just as ragged. He, too, like Thomas Paine, cried, "These are the times that try men's souls—be grateful for this crisis, for it will give us opportunity to show that we are men." He had aroused his people to a pitch where the Danes would have had to kill them all, or else give way. As they could not kill them they gave way. Napoleon at twenty-six was master of France and had Italy under his heel, and so was Alfred at the same age supreme in Southern Britain—including Wessex and Mercia. He rounded up the enemy, took away their weapons, and then held a revival-meeting, asking everybody to come forward to the mourners'-bench. There is no proof that he coerced them into Christianity. They were glad to accept it. Alfred seemed to have the persuasive power of the Reverend Doctor Torrey. Guthrum, the Danish King, who had come over to take a personal hand in the looting, was captured, baptized, and then Alfred stood sponsor for him and gave him the name of Ethelstan. He was made a bishop.

This acceptance of Christianity by the leaders of the Danes broke their fierce spirit, and peace followed. Alfred told the soldiers to use their horses to plow the fields. The two armies that had fought each other now worked together at road-making and draining the marshes. Some of the Danes fled in their ships, but very many remained and became citizens of the country. The Danish names are still recognizable. Names beginning with the aspirate, say Herbert, Hulett, Hubbard, Hubbs, Harold, Hancock, are Danish, and are the cause of that beautiful muddling of the "H" that still perplexes the British tongue, the rule governing which is to put it on where it is not needed and leave it off where it is. The Danes called the Engles, "Hengles," and the Engles called a man by the name of Henry, "Enry."

In saving Wessex, Alfred saved England for the English people; for it was from Wessex, as a center, that his successors began the task of reconquering England from the Danes.

ith the rule of Alfred begins the England that we know. As we call Herodotus the father of history, so could we, with equal propriety, call Asser, who wrote in the time of Alfred, the father of English history. The oldest English book is the "Life of Alfred" by Asser the monk.

That Asser was a dependent on his subject and very much in love with him, doubtless gave a very strong bias to the book. That it is right in the main, although occasionally wrong as to details, is proved by various corroborating records.

The king's word in Alfred's time was law, and Alfred proved his modesty by publicly proclaiming that a king was not divine, but only a man, and therefore a king's edicts should be endorsed by the people in Folkmoot. Here we get the genesis of popular government, and about the only instance that I can recall where a very strong man acting as chief ruler renounced a part of his power to the people, of his own accord. Kings usually have to be trimmed, and it is revolution that does the shearing. It is the rule that men do not relinquish power of their own accord—they have to be disannexed from it.

Alfred, however, knew the popular heart—he was very close to the common people. He had slept on the ground with his soldiers, fared at table with the swineherd's family, tilled the soil with the farmer folk. His heart went out to humanity. He did not overrate the average mind, nor did he underrate it. He had faith in mankind, and knew that at the last power was with the people. He did not say, "Vox populi, vox Dei," but he thought it. Therefore he set himself to educating the plain people. He prophesied a day when all grown men would be able to read and write, and when all would have an intelligent, personal interest in the government.

There have been periods in English history when Britain lagged woefully behind, for England has had kings who forgot the rights of mankind, and instead of seeking to serve their people, have battened and fattened upon them. They governed. George the Third thought that Alfred was a barbarian, and spoke of him with patronizing pity.

Alfred introduced the system of trial by jury, although the fact has been pointed out that he did not originate it. It goes back to the hardy Norseman who acknowledged no man as master, harking back to a time when there was no law, and to a people whose collective desire was supreme. In fact, it has its origin in "Lynch Law," or the rule of the Vigilantes. From a village turning loose on an offender and pulling him limb from limb, a degree of deliberation comes in and a committee of twelve are selected to investigate the deed and report their verdict.

The jury system began with pirates and robbers, but it is no less excellent on that account, and we might add that freedom also began with pirates and robbers, for they were the people who cried, "We acknowledge no man as master."

The early Greeks had trials by jury—Socrates was tried by a jury of five hundred citizens.

But let the fact stand that Alfred was the man who first introduced the jury system into England. He had absolute power. He was the sole judge and ruler, but on various occasions he abdicated the throne and said: "I do not feel able to try this man, for as I look into my heart I see that I am prejudiced. Neither will I name men to try him, for in their selection I might also be prejudiced. Therefore let one hundred men be called, and from these let twelve be selected by lot, and they shall listen to the charges and weigh the defense, and their verdict shall be mine."

We sometimes say that English Common Law is built on the Roman Law, but I can not find that Alfred ever studied the Roman Law, or ever heard of the Justinian Code, or thought it worth while to establish a system of jurisprudence. His government was of the simplest sort. He respected the habits, ways and customs of the common people, and these were the Common Law. If the people had a footpath that was used by their children and their parents and their grandparents, then this path belonged to the people, and Alfred said that even the King could not take it from them.

This deference to the innocent ways, habits and natural rights of the people mark Alfred as supremely great, because a great man is one great in his sympathies. Alfred had the imagination to put himself in the place of the lowly and obscure.

The English love of law, system and order dates from Alfred. The patience, kindliness, good-cheer and desire for fair play were his, plus. He had poise, equanimity, unfaltering faith and a courage that never grew faint. He was as religious as Cromwell, as firm as Washington, as stubborn as Gladstone. In him were combined the virtues of the scholar and patriot, the efficiency of the man of affairs with the wisdom of the philosopher. His character, both public and private, is stainless, and his whole life was one of enlightened and magnanimous service to his country.

n the age of Augustus there was one study that was regarded as more important than all others, and this was rhetoric, or the art of the rhetor. The rhetor was a man whose business it was to persuade or convince.

The public forum has its use in the very natural town-meeting, or the powwow of savages. But in Rome it had developed and been refined to a point where the public had no voice, although the boasted forum still existed. The forum was monopolized by the professional orators hired by this political clique or that.

It was about like the political "forum" in America today.

The greatest man in Rome was the man who could put up the greatest talk. So all Roman mammas and matrons had their boys study rhetoric. The father of Seneca had a school of oratory where rich Roman youths were taught to mouth in orotund and gesticulate in curves. He must have been a pretty good teacher, for he had two extraordinary sons, one of whom is mentioned in the Bible, and a most exemplary daughter.

Oratory as an end we now regard as an unworthy art. The first requisite is to feel deeply—to have a message—and then if you are a person of fair intelligence and in good health, you'll impress your hearers. But to hire out to impress people with another's theme is to be a pettifogger, and the genus pettifogger has nearly had his day.

History moves in circles. The Chicago Common Council, weary of rhetoric, has recently declined to listen to paid attorneys; but any citizen who speaks for himself and his neighbors can come before the Council and state his case.

Chief Justice Fuller has given it as his opinion that there will come a day in America when damage-cases will be taken care of by an automatic tribunal, without the help of lawyers. And as a man fills out a request for a money-order at the Post-Office, so will he file his claim for damages, and it will have attention. The contingent fee will yet be a misdemeanor. Also, it will be possible for plain citizens to be able to go before a Court of Equity and be heard without regard to law and precedent and attorney's quillets and quibbles, which so often hamper justice. Justice should be cheap and easy, instead of costly and complex.

Evidently the Chief Justice had in mind the usages in the time of King Alfred, when the barrister was an employee of the court, and his business was to get the facts and then explain them to the King in the fewest possible words.

Alfred considered a paid advocate, or even a counselor, as without the pale, and such men were never allowed at court. If the barrister accepted a fee from a man suing for justice, he was disbarred.

Finally, however, the practise of feeing in order to renew the zeal of a barrister grew so that it had to be tolerated, because things we can't suppress we license, and a pocket was placed on each barrister's back between his shoulders where he could not reach it without taking off his gown, and into this pocket clients were allowed slyly to slip such gratuities as they could afford.

But the general practise of the client paying the barrister, instead of the court, was not adopted for several hundred years later, and then it was regarded as an expeditious move to keep down litigation and punish the client for being fool enough not to settle his own troubles.

In England the rudimentary pocket still survives, like the buttons on the back of a coat, which were once used to support the sword-belt.

In America we have done away with wigs and gowns for attorneys, but attorneys are still regarded as attaches of the court, even though one-half of them, according to Judge DeCourcy of Boston, are engaged most of the time in attempts to bamboozle and befog the judge and jury and defeat the ends of justice. Likewise, we still use the word "Court," signifying the place where lives royalty, even for the dingy office of a country J. P., where sawdust spittoons are the bric-a-brac and patent-office reports loom large, and justice is dispensed with. We now also commonly call the man "the Court."

lfred was filled with a desire to educate, and to this end organized a school at the Ox Ford, where his friend Asser taught. This school was the germ of the University of Oxford. Attached to this school was a farm, where the boys were taught how to sow and plant and reap to the best advantage. Here they also bred and raised horses and cattle, and the care of livestock was a part of the curriculum. It was the first College of Agriculture.

It comes to us as somewhat of a surprise to see how we are now going back to simplicity, and the agricultural college is being given the due and thoughtful consideration which it deserves. Twenty years ago our agricultural college was considered more or less of a joke, but now that which adds greatly to the wealth of the nation, and the happiness and well-being of the people, is looked upon as worthy of our support and highest respect.

Up to the time of Alfred, England had no navy. For the government to own ships seemed quite preposterous, since the people had come to England to stay, and were not marauders intent on exploitation and conquest, like the Norsemen.

But after Alfred had vanquished the Danes and they had settled down as citizens, he took their ships, refitted them, built more and said: "No more marauders shall land on these shores. If we are threatened we will meet the enemy on the sea."

In a few years along came a fleet of marauding Norse. The English ships on the lookout gave the alarm, and England's navy put out to meet them. The enemy were taken by surprise, and the fate that five hundred years later was to overtake the Spanish Armada, was theirs.

From that time to this, England has had a navy that has gradually grown in power.

Let no one imagine that peace and rest came to Alfred. His life was a battle, for not only did he have to fight the Danes, but he had to struggle with ignorance, stupidity and superstition at home. To lead men out of captivity is a thankless task. They always ask when you take away their superstition, "What are you going to give us in return?" They do not realize that superstition is a disease, and that to give another disease in return is not nice, necessary or polite.

Alfred died, at the age of fifty-two, worn out with his ceaseless labors of teaching, building, planning, inventing and devising methods and means for the betterment and benefit of his people.

After his death, the Danes were successful, and Canute became King of England. But he was proud to be called an Englishman, and declared he was no longer a Dane.

And so England captured him.

Then came the Norman William, claiming the throne by right of succession, and successfully battling for it; but the English people reckoned the Conqueror as of their own blood—their kith and kin—and so he was. He issued an edict forbidding any one to call him or his followers "Norman," "Norse" or "Norsemen," and declared there was a United England. And so he lived and died an Englishman; and after him no ruler, these nine hundred years, has ever sat on the throne of the Engles by right of conquest.

Both Canute and William recognized and prized the worth of Alfred's rule. The virtues of Alfred are the virtues that have made it possible for the Teutonic tribes to girdle the globe. It was Alfred who taught the nobility of industry, service, education, patience, loyalty, persistence, and the faith and hope that abide. By pen, tongue, and best of all by his life, Alfred taught the truths which we yet hold dear. And by this sign shall ye conquer!

ERASMUS

We see not a few mortals who, striving to emulate this divine virtue with more zeal than success, fall into a feeble and disjointed loquacity, obscuring the subject and burdening the wretched ears of their hearers with a vacant mass of words and sentences crowded together beyond all possibility of enjoyment. And writers who have tried to lay down the principles of this art have gained no other result than to display their own poverty while expounding abundance.

—Erasmus on "Preaching"

ERASMUS

rasmus was born in Fourteen Hundred Sixty-six, and died in Fifteen Hundred Thirty-six. No thinker of his time influenced the world more. He stood at a pivotal point, and some say he himself was the intellectual pivot of the Renaissance.

The critics of the times were unanimous in denouncing him—which fact recommends him to us.

Several Churchmen, high in power, live in letters for no other reason than because they coupled their names with that of Erasmus by reviling him. Let the critics take courage—they may outwit oblivion yet, even though they do nothing but carp. Only let them be wise, and carp, croak, cough, cat-call and sneeze at some one who is hitching his wagon to a star. This way immortality lies. Erasmus was a monk who flocked by himself, and found diversion in ridiculing monkery. Also, he was the wisest man of his day. Wisdom is the distilled essence of intuition, corroborated by experience. Learning is something else. Usually, the learned man is he who has delved deep and soared high. But few there be who dive, that fish the murex up. Among those who soar, the ones who come back and tell us of what they have seen, are few. Like Lazarus, they say nothing.

Erasmus had a sense of humor. Humor is a life-preserver and saves you from drowning when you jump off into a sea of sermons. A theologian who can not laugh is apt to explode—he is very dangerous. Erasmus, Luther, Beecher, Theodore Parker, Roger Williams, Joseph Parker—all could laugh. Calvin, Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards never gurgled in glee, nor chortled softly at their own witticisms—or those of others.

Erasmus smiled. He has been called the Voltaire of his day. What Rousseau was to Voltaire, Luther was to Erasmus. Well did Diderot say that Erasmus laid the egg which Luther hatched. Erasmus wrote for the educated, the refined, the learned—Luther made his appeal to the plain and common mind.

Luther split the power of the Pope. Erasmus thought it a calamity to do so, because he believed that strife of sects tended to make men lose sight of the one essential in religion—harmony—and cause them simply to struggle for victory. Erasmus wanted to trim the wings of the papal office and file its claws—Luther would have destroyed it. Erasmus considered the Church a very useful and needful organization—for social reasons. It tended to regulate life and conduct and made men "decentable." It should be a school of ethics, and take a leading part in every human betterment. Man being a gregarious animal, the congregation is in the line of natural desire. The excuse for gathering together is religion—let them gather. The Catholic Church is not two thousand years old—it is ten thousand years old and goes back to Egypt. The birth of Jesus formed merely a psychosis in the Church's existence.

Here he parted company with Luther, who was a dogmatist and wanted to debate his ninety-five theses. Erasmus laughed at all religious disputations and called them mazes that led to cloudland. Very naturally, people said he was not sincere, since the mediocre mind never knows that only the paradox is true. Hence Erasmus was hated by Catholics and denounced by Protestants.

The marvel is that the men with fetters and fagots did not follow him with a purpose. Fifty years later he would have been snuffed out. But at that time Rome was so astonished to think that any one should criticize her that she lost breath. Besides, it was an age of laughter, of revolt, of contests of wit, of love-bouts and love-scrapes, and the monks who lapsed were too many to discipline. Everybody was busy with his own affairs. Happy time!

Erasmus was part and parcel of the Italian Renaissance. Over his head blazes, in letters that burn, the unforgetable date, Fourteen Hundred Ninety-two. He was a part of the great unrest, and he helped cause the great unrest. Every great awakening, every renaissance, is an age of doubt. An age of conservatism is an age of moss, of lichen, of rest, rust and ruin. We grow only as we question. As long as we are sure that the present order is perfect, we button our collars behind, a thing which Columbus, Luther, Melanchthon, Erasmus, Michelangelo, Leonardo and Gutenberg, who all lived at this one time, never did. The year of Fourteen Hundred Ninety-two, like the year Seventeen Hundred Seventy-six, was essentially "infidelic," just as the present age is constructively iconoclastic. We are tearing down our barns to build greater. The railroadman who said, "I throw an engine on the scrap-heap every morning before breakfast," expressed a great truth. We are discarding bad things for good ones, and good things for better ones.

otterdam has the honor of being the birthplace of Erasmus. A storm of calumny was directed at him during his life concerning the irregularity of his birth. "He had no business to be born at all," said a proud prelate, as he gathered his robes close around his prebendal form. But souls knock at the gates of life for admittance, and the fact that a man exists is proof of his right to live. The word "illegitimate" is not in the vocabulary of God. If you do not know that, you have not read His instructive and amusing works.

The critics variously declared the mother of Erasmus was a royal lady, a physician's only daughter, a kitchen-wench, a Mother Superior—all according to the prejudices preconceived. In one sense she was surely a Mother Superior—let the lies neutralize one another.

The fact is, we do not know who the mother of Erasmus was. All we know is that she was the mother of Erasmus. Here history halts. Her son once told Sir Thomas More that she was married to a luckless nobody a few months after the birth of her first baby, and amid the cares of raising a goodly brood of nobodies on a scant allowance of love and rye-bread, she was glad to forget her early indiscretions. Not so the father. The debated question of whether a man really has any parental love is answered here.

The father of Erasmus was Gerhard von Praet, and the child was called Gerhard Gerhards—or the son of Gerhard. The father was a man of property and held office under the State. At the time of the birth of the illustrious baby, Gerhard von Praet was not married, and it is reasonable to suppose that the reason he did not wed the mother of his child was because she belonged to a different social station. In any event the baby was given the father's name, and every care and attention was paid the tiny voyager. This father was as foolish as most fond mothers, for he dreamed out a great career for the motherless one, and made sundry prophecies.

At six years of age the child was studying Latin, when he should have been digging in a sand-pile. At eight he spoke Dutch and French, and argued with his nurse in Greek as to the value of buttermilk.

In the meantime the father had married and settled down in honorable obscurity as a respectable squire. Another account has it that he became a priest. Anyway, the little maverick was now making head alone in a private school.

When the lad was thirteen the father died, leaving a will in which he provided well for the child. The amount of property which by this will would have belonged to our hero when he became of age would have approximated forty thousand dollars.

Happily, the trustees of the fund were law-wolves. They managed to break the will, and then they showed the court that the child was a waif, and absolutely devoid of legal rights of any and every kind. He was then committed to an orphan asylum to be given "a right religious education." It's a queer old world, Terese, and what would have become of Gerhard Gerhards had he fallen heir to his father's titles and estate, no man can say. He might have accumulated girth and become an honored burgomaster. As it was he became powder-monkey to a monk, and scrubbed stone floors and rushed the growler for cowled and pious prelates.

Then he did copying for the Abbe, and proved himself a boy from Missouri Valley.

He was small, blue-eyed, fair-haired, slender, slight, with a long nose and sharp features. "With this nose," said Albrecht Durer, many years later, "he successfully hunted down everything but heresy."

At eighteen he became a monk and proudly had his flaxen poll tonsured. His superior was fond of him, and prophesied that he would become a bishop or something.

Children do not suffer much, nor long. God is good to them. They slide into an environment and accept it. This child learned to dodge the big bare feet of the monks—got his lessons, played a little, worked his wit against their stupidity, and actually won their admiration—or as much of it as men who are alternately ascetics and libertines can give.

It was about this time that the lad was taunted with having no name. "Then I'll make one for myself," was his proud answer.

Having entered now upon his novitiate, he was allowed to take a new name, and being dead to the world, the old one was forgotten.

They called him Brother Desiderius, or the Desired One. He then amended this Latin name with its Greek equivalent, Erasmus, which means literally the Well-Beloved. As to his pedigree, or lack of it, he was needlessly proud. It set him apart as different. He had half-brothers and half-sisters, and these he looked upon as strangers. When they came to see him, he said, "There is no relationship between souls save that of the spirit."

His sense of wit came in when he writes to a friend: "Two parents are the rule; no parents the exception; a mother but no father is not uncommon; but I had a father and never had a mother. I was nursed by a man, and educated by monks, all of which shows that women are more or less of a superfluity in creation. God Himself is a man. He had one son, but no daughters. The cherubim are boys. All of the angels are masculine, and so far as Holy Writ informs us, there are no women in heaven."

That it was a woman, however, to whom Erasmus wrote this, lets him out on the severity of the argument. He was a joker. And while women did not absorb much of his time, we find that on his travels he often turned aside to visit with intellectual women—no other kind interested him, at all.

o belong to a religious order is to be owned by it. You trade freedom for protection. The soul of Erasmus revolted at life in a monastery. He hated the typical monks—their food, their ways of life, their sophistry, their stupidity. To turn glutton and welcome folly as a relief from religion, he said, was the most natural thing in the world, when men had once started in to lead an unnatural life. Good food, daintily served, only goes with a co-ed mental regimen. Men eat with their hands, out of a pot, unless women are present to enforce the decencies. Women alone are a little more to be pitied than men alone, if 't were possible.

Through emulation does the race grow. Sex puts men and women on their good behavior.

Man's desire for power has caused him to enslave himself. Writes Erasmus, "In a monastery, no one is on his good behavior, except when there are visitors, but I am told that this is so in families."

The greasy, coarse cooking brought on a nice case of dyspepsia for poor Erasmus—a complaint from which he was never free as long as he lived. His system was too fine for any monastic general trough, but he found a compensation in having his say at odd times and sundry. At one time we hear of his printing on a card this legend, "If I owned hell and a monastery, I would sell the monastery and reside in hell." Thereby did Erasmus supply General Tecumseh Sherman the germ of a famous orphic. Sherman was a professor in a college at Baton Rouge before the War, and evidently had moused in the Latin classics to a purpose.

Connected with the monastery where Erasmus lived was a printing-outfit. Our versatile young monk learned the case, worked the ink-balls, manipulated the lever, and evidently dispelled, in degree, the monotony of the place by his ready pen and eloquent tongue. When he wrote, he wrote for his ear. All was tested by reading the matter aloud. At that time great authors were not so wise or so clever as printers, and it fell to the lot of Erasmus to improve upon the text of much of the copy that was presented.

Erasmus learned to write by writing; and among modern prose-writers he is the very first who had a distinct literary style. His language is easy, fluid, suggestive. His paragraphs throw a shadow, and are pregnant with meaning beyond what the lexicon supplies. This is genius—to be bigger than your words.

If Erasmus had been possessed of a bit more patience and a jigger of diplomacy, he would have been in line for a bishopric. That thing which he praised so lavishly, Folly, was his cause of failure and also his friend.

At twenty-six he was the best teacher and the most clever scholar in the place. Also, he was regarded as a thorn in the side of the monkery, since he refused to take it seriously. He protested that no man ever became a monk of his own accord—he was either thrust into a religious order by unkind kinsmen or kicked into it by Fate.

And then comes the Bishop of Cambray, with an attack of literary scabies, looking for a young religieux who could correct his manuscript. The Bishop was going to Paris after important historical facts, and must have a competent secretary. Only a proficient Latin and Greek scholar would do. The head of the monastery recommended Erasmus, very much as Artemus Ward volunteered all of his wife's relatives for purposes of war.

Andrew Carnegie once, when about to start for Europe, said to his ironmaster, Bill Jones, "I am never so happy or care-free, Bill, as when on board ship, headed for Europe, and the shores of Sandy Hook fade from sight."

And Bill solemnly replied, "Mr. Carnegie, I can truthfully say for myself and fellow-workers, that we are never so happy and care-free as when you are on board ship, headed for Europe."

Very properly Mr. Carnegie at once raised Bill's salary five thousand a year.

The Carthusian Brothers parted with Erasmus in pretended tears, but the fact was they were more relieved than bereaved.

And then began the travels of Erasmus.

The Bishop was of middle age, with a dash of the cavalier in his blood, which made him prefer a saddle to the cushions of a carriage. And so they started away on horseback, the Bishop ahead, followed at a discreet distance by Erasmus, his secretary; and ten paces behind with well-loaded panniers, rode a servant as rearguard.

To be free and face the world and on a horse! Erasmus lifted up his heart in a prayer of gratitude. He said that it was the first feeling of thankfulness he had ever experienced, and it was the first thing which had ever come to him worth gratitude.

And so they started for Paris.

Erasmus looked back and saw the monastery, where he had spent ten arduous years, fade from view.

It was the happiest moment he had ever known. The world lay beyond.

he Bishop of Cambray introduced Erasmus to a mode of life for which he was eminently fitted. It consisted in traveling, receiving honors, hospitality and all good things in a material way, and giving his gracious society in return. Doors flew open on the approach of the good Bishop. Everywhere he went a greeting was assured. He was a Churchman—that was enough. Erasmus shared in the welcomes, for he was handsome in face and figure, had a ready tongue, and could hold his own with the best.

Europe was then dotted with monasteries, nunneries and other church institutions. Their remains are seen there yet—one is really never out of sight of a steeple. But the exclusive power of the Church is gone, and in many places there are only ruins where once were cloisters, corridors, chapels, halls and gardens teeming with life and industry.

The "missions" of California were founded on the general plan of the monasteries of Europe. They afforded a lodging for the night—a resting-place for travelers—and were a radiatory center of education—at least all of the education that then existed.

In California these "missions" were forty miles apart—one day's journey. In France, Italy and Germany they were, say, ten miles apart. Between them, trudged or rode on horseback or in carriages, a picturesque array of pilgrims, young and old, male and female. To go anywhere and be at home everywhere, this was the happy lot of a church dignitary.

The parts in church institutions were interchangeable; and by a system of migration, life was made agreeable, and reasonable honesty was assured. I have noticed that certain Continental banking institutions, with branches in various cities, keep their cashiers rotating. The idea was gotten from Rome. Rome was very wise—her policies were the crystallizations of the world-wisdom of centuries. The church-militant battle-cry, "The world for Christ," simply means man's lust for ownership, with Christ as an excuse. If ever there was a man-made institution, it is the Church. To control mankind has been her desire, and the miracle is that, with a promise of heaven, a threat of hell, and a firm grip on temporal power—social and military—she was ever induced partially to loosen her grip. To such men as Savonarola, Luther and Erasmus, do we owe our freedom. These men cared more for truth than for power, and their influence was to disintegrate the ankylosis of custom and make men think. And a thought is mental dynamite. No wonder the Church has always feared and hated a thinker!

The Bishop of Cambray was not a thinker. Fenelon, who was later to occupy his office, was to make the bishopric of Cambray immortal. Conformists die, but heretics live on forever. They are men who have redeemed the cross and rendered the gallows glorious.

nd so the Bishop of Cambray and his little light-haired secretary fared forth to fame and fortune—the Bishop to be remembered because he had a secretary, and the secretary to be remembered because he grew into a great teacher.

At each stopping-place the Bishop said mass—the workers, students and novitiates quitting their tasks to hear the words of encouragement from the lips of the great man. Occasionally Erasmus was pushed forward to say a few words, by the Bishop, who had to look after his own personal devotions. The assembled friends liked the young man—he was so bright and witty and free from cant. They even laughed out loud, and so, often two smiles were made to grow where there were no smiles before.

Leisurely they rode—stopping at times for several days at places where the food and drink were at their best, and the society sulphide. At nunneries and monasteries were always guest-chambers for the great, and they were usually occupied.

Thus it was that every church-house was a sort of university, depending of course on the soul-size of the Superior or Abbe. These constant journeyings and pilgrimages served in lieu of the daily paper, the Western Union Telegraph, and the telephone. Things have slipped back, I fear me, for now Mercury merely calls up his party on the long-distance, instead of making a personal visit—the Angel Gabriel as well. We save time, but we miss the personal contact.

The monastic impulse was founded on a human need. Like most good things, it has been sadly perverted; but the idea of a sanctuary for stricken souls—a place of refuge, where simplicity, service and useful endeavor rule—will never die from out the human heart. The hospice stands for hospitality, but we have now only a hotel and a hospital.

The latter stands for iodoform, carbolic acid and formaldehyde; the former often means gold, glitter, gluttony and concrete selfishness, with gout on one end, paresis at the other and Bright's Disease between.

The hospice was a part of the monastery. It was a home for the homeless. There met men of learning—men of wit—men of brains and brawn. You entered and were at home. There was no charge—you merely left something for the poor.

Any man who has the courage, and sufficient faith in humanity to install the hospice system in America will reap a rich reward. If he has the same faith in his guests that Judge Lindsey has in his bad boys, he will succeed; but if he hesitates, defers, doubts, and begins to plot and plan, the Referee in Bankruptcy will beckon.

The early universities grew out of the monastic impulse. Students came and went, and the teachers were a part of a great itinerancy. Man is a migratory animal. His evolution has come about through change of environment. Transplantation changes weeds into roses, and the forebears of all the products of our greenhouses and gardens once grew in hedgerows or open fields, choked by unkind competition or trampled beneath the feet of the heedless.

The advantage of university life is in the transplantation. Get the boy out of his home environment; sever the cord that holds him to his "folks"; let him meet new faces, see new sights, hear new sermons, meet new teachers, and his efforts at adjustment will work for growth. Alexander Humboldt was right—one year at college is safer than four. One year inspires you—four may get you pot-bound with pedant prejudice.

The university of the future will be industrial—all may come and go. All men will be university men, and thus the pride in an imaginary proficiency will be diluted to a healthful attenuation. To work and to be useful—not merely to memorize and recite—will be the only initiation.

The professors will be interchangeable, and the rotation of intellectual crops will work for health, harmony and effectiveness.

The group, or college, will be the unit, not the family. The college was once a collection of men and women grouped for a mutual intellectual, religious or economic good.

To this group or college idea will we return.

Man is a gregarious animal, and the Christ-thought of giving all, and receiving all, some day in the near future will be found practical. The desire for exclusive ownership must be sloughed.

Universities devoted to useful work—art in its highest sense: head, hand and heart—will yet dot the civilized world. The hospice will return higher up the scale, and the present use of the word "hospitality" will be drowned in its pink tea, choked with cheese-wafers, rescued from the nervous clutch of the managing mama, and the machinations of the chaperone. A society built on the sands of silliness must give way to the universal university, and the strong, healthful, helpful, honest companionship and comradeship of men and women prevail.

he objective point of the Bishop was the University of Paris.

Here in due time, after their lingering ride from Holland, the Bishop and his secretary arrived. They settled down to literary work; and in odd hours the beauty and wonder of Paris became familiar to Erasmus. The immediate task completed, the Bishop proposed going home, and thought, of course, his secretary was a fixture and would go with him. But Erasmus had evolved ideas concerning his own worth. He had already collected quite a little circle of pupils about him, and these he held by his glowing personality. At this time the vow of poverty was looked upon lightly. And anyway, poverty is a comparative term. There were monks who always trudged afoot with staff and bag, but not so our Erasmus. He was Bishop of the Exterior.

The Bishop of Cambray, on parting with Erasmus, thought so much of him that he presented him with the horse he rode.

Erasmus used to take short excursions about Paris, taking with him a student and often two, as servants or attendants. Teaching then was mostly on an independent basis, each pupil picking his tutors and paying them direct.

Among other pupils whom Erasmus had at Paris was a young Englishman by the name of Lord Mountjoy. A great affection arose between these two, and when Lord Mountjoy returned to England he was accompanied by Erasmus.

At London, Erasmus met on absolute equality many of the learned men of England. We hear of his dining at the house of the Lord Mayor of London, and there meeting Sir Thomas More and crossing swords with that worthy in wordy debate.

Erasmus seems to have carried the "New Humanism" into England. It has been said that the world was discovered in Fourteen Hundred Ninety-two, but Man was not discovered until Seventeen Hundred Seventy-six. This is hardly literal truth, since in Fourteen Hundred Ninety-two, there was a theologico-scientific party of young men in all of the European Universities who were reviving the Greek culture, and with it arose the idea of the dignity and worth of Man. To this movement Erasmus brought the enthusiasm of his nature. Perhaps he did as much as any other to fan the embers which grew into a flame called "The Reformation."

He constantly ridiculed the austerities, pedantry, priggishness and sciolism of the old-time Churchmen, and when a new question came up, he asked, "What good is there in it?"

Everything was tested by him in the light of commonsense. What end does it serve and how is humanity to be served or benefited by it?

Thus the good of humanity, not the glory of God, was the shibboleth of this rising party.

Erasmus gave lectures and taught at Cambridge, Oxford and London.

Italy had been the objective point of his travels, but England had, for a time, turned him aside. In the year Fifteen Hundred, Erasmus landed at Calais, saddled his horse, and started southward, visiting, writing, teaching, lecturing, as he went. The stimulus of meeting new people and seeing new scenes, all tended toward intellectual growth.

The genius monk made mendicancy a fine art, and Erasmus was heir to most of the instincts of the order. His associations with the laity were mostly with the nobility or those with money. He was not slow in asking for what he wanted, whether it was a fur-lined cloak, a saddle, top riding-boots, a horse, or a prayer-book. He made no apologies—but took as his divine right all that he needed. And he justified himself in taking what he needed by the thought that he gave all he had. He supplied Sir Thomas More the germ of "Utopia," for Erasmus pictured again and again an ideal society where all would have enough, and none suffer from either want or surfeit—a society in which all would be at home wherever they went.

Had Erasmus seen fit to make England his home, his head, too, would have paid the forfeit, as did the head that wrote "Utopia." What an absurd use to make of a head—to separate it from the man's body!

Italy received Erasmus with the same royal welcome that England had supplied. Scholars who knew the Greek and Roman classics were none too common. Most monks stopped with the writings of the saints, as South Americans balk at long division.

Erasmus could illumine an initial, bind a book, give advice to printers, lecture to teachers, give lessons on rhetoric and oratory, or entertain the ladies with recitations from the Iliad and the Odyssey.

So he went riding back and forth, stopping at cities and towns, nunneries and monasteries, until his name became a familiar one to every scholar of England, Germany and Italy. Scholarly, always a learner, always a teacher, gracious, direct, witty, men began to divide on an Erasmus basis. There were two parties: those for Erasmus and those against him.

In Fifteen Hundred Seventeen, came Luther with his bombshells of defiance. This fighting attitude was far from Erasmus—his weapons were words. Between bouts with prelates, Luther sent a few thunderbolts at Erasmus, accusing him of vacillation and cowardice. Erasmus replied with dignity, and entered into a lengthy dispute with Melanchthon, Luther's friend, on the New Humanism which was finding form in revolution.

Erasmus prophesied that by an easy process of evolution, through education, the monasteries would all become schools and workshops. He would not destroy them, but convert them into something different. He fell into disfavor with the Catholics, and was invited by Henry the Eighth to come to England and join the new religious regime. But this English Catholicism was not to the liking of Erasmus. What he desired was to reform the Church, not to destroy it or divide it.

His affairs were becoming critical: monasteries where he had once been welcomed now feared to have him come near, lest they should be contaminated and entangled. It was rumored that warrants of arrest were out. He was invited to go to Rome and explain his position.

Erasmus knew better than to acknowledge receipt of the letter. He headed his horse for Switzerland, the land of liberty. At Basel he stopped at the house of Froben, the great printer and publisher. He put his horse in the barn, unsaddled him, and said, "Froben, I've come to stay."

was mousing around the other day in a book that is somewhat disjointed and disconnected, and yet interesting—"The Standard Dictionary"—when I came across the word "scamp." It is a handy word to fling, and I am not sure but that it has been gently tossed once or twice in my direction. Condemnation is usually a sort of subtle flattery, so I'm not sad. To scamp means to cut short, to be superficial, slipshod, careless, indifferent—to say, "Let 'er go, who cares—this is good enough!" If anybody ever was a stickler for honest work, I am that bucolic party. I often make things so fine that only one man out of ten thousand can buy them, and I have to keep 'em myself.

You know that, when you get an idea in your head, how everything you read contains allusions to the same thing. Knowledge is mucilaginous. Well, next day after I was looking up that pleasant word "scamp," I was reading in the Amusing Works of Erasmus, when I ran across the word again, but spelled in Dutch, thus, "schamp." Now Erasmus was a successful author, and he was also the best authority on paper, inks, bindings, and general bookmaking in Italy, Holland or Germany. Being a lover of learning, and listening to the lure of words, he never wallowed in wealth. But in his hunt for ideas he had a lot of fun. Kipling says, "There is no hunt equal to a man hunt." But Kip is wrong—to chase a thought is twice the sport. Erasmus chased ideas, and very naturally the preachers chased Erasmus—out of England, through France, down to Italy and then he found refuge at Basel with Froben, the great Printer and Publisher.

Up in Frankfort was a writer-printer, who, not being able to answer the arguments of Erasmus, called him bad names. But this gentle pen-pusher in Frankfort, who passed his vocabulary at Froben's proofreader, Erasmus in time calls a "schamp," because he used cheap paper, cheap ink and close margins. Soon after, the word was carried to England and spelled "scamp"—a man who cheats in quality, weight, size and count. But the first use merely meant a printer who scamps his margins and so cheats on paper. I am sorry to see that Erasmus imitated his enemies and at times was ambidextrous in the use of the literary stinkpot. His vocabulary was equal to that of Muldoon. Erasmus refers to one of his critics as a "scenophylax-stikken," and another he calls a "schnide enchologion-schistosomus." And perhaps they may have been—I really do not know.

But as an authority on books Erasmus can still be read. He it was who fixed the classic page margin—twice as wide at the top as on the inside; twice as wide at the outside as the top; twice as wide at the bottom as at the side. And any printer who varies from this displays his ignorance of proportion. Erasmus says, "To use poor paper marks the decline of taste, both in printer and in patron." After the death of Erasmus, Froben's firm failed because they got to making things cheap. "Compete in quality, not in price," was the working motto of Erasmus.

All of the great bookmaking centers languished when they began to scamp. That worthy wordissimus at Frankfort who called Erasmus names gave up business and then the ghost, and Erasmus wrote his epitaph, and thus supplied Benjamin Franklin an idea—"Here lies an old book, its cover gone, its leaves torn, the worms at work on its vitals."

The wisdom of doing good work still applies, just as it did in the days of Erasmus.

Erasmus proved a very valuable acquisition to Froben. He became general editor and literary adviser of this great publishing-house, which was then the most important in the world.

Besides his work as editor, Erasmus also stood sponsor for numerous volumes which we now know were written by literary nobodies, his name being placed on the title-page for commercial reasons.

At that time and for two hundred years later, the matter of attributing a book to this man or that was considered a trivial affair. Piracies were prevalent. All printers revised the work of classic authors if they saw fit, and often they were specially rewarded for it by the Church. It was about this time that some one slipped that paragraph into the works of Josephus about Jesus. The "Annals" of Tacitus were similarly doctored, if in fact they were not written entire, during the Sixteenth Century. It will be remembered that the only two references in contemporary literature to Jesus are those in Josephus and Tacitus, and these the Church proudly points to yet.

During the last few years of his life Erasmus accumulated considerable property. By his will he devised that this money should go to educate certain young men and women, grandchildren and nephews and nieces of his old friend, Johann Froben. He left no money for masses, after the usual custom of Churchmen, and during his last illness was not attended by a priest. For several years before his death he made no confessions and very seldom attended church service. He said, "I am much more proud of being a printer than a priest."

A statue of Erasmus in bronze adorns one of the public squares in Rotterdam, and Basel and Freiburg have honored themselves, and him also, in like manner.

As a sample of the subtle and keen literary style of Erasmus, I append the following from "In Praise of Folly:"

The happiest times of life are youth and old age, and this for no reason but that they are the times most completely under the rule of folly, and least controlled by wisdom. It is the child's freedom from wisdom that makes it so charming to us; we hate a precocious child. So women owe their charm, and hence their power, to their "folley," that is, to their obedience to the impulse. But if, perchance, a woman wants to be thought wise, she only succeeds in being doubly a fool, as if one should train a cow for the prize-ring, a thing wholly against Nature. A woman will be a woman, no matter what mask she wear, and she ought to be proud of her folly and make the most of it.

Is not Cupid, that first father of all religion, is not he stark blind, that he can not himself distinguish of colors, so he would make us as mope-eyed in judging falsely of all love concerns, and wheedle us into a thinking that we are always in the right? Thus every Jack sticks to his own Jill; every tinker esteems his own trull; and the hobnailed suitor prefers Joan the milkmaid before any of milady's daughters. These things are true, and are ordinarily laughed at, and yet, however ridiculous they seem, it is hence only that all societies receive their cement and consolidation.

Fortune we still find favoring the blunt, and flushing the forward; strokes smooth up fools, crowning all their undertakings with success; but wisdom makes her followers bashful, sneaking and timorous, and therefore you commonly see that they are reduced to hard shifts; must grapple with poverty, cold and hunger; must lie recluse, despised, and unregarded; while fools roll in money, are advanced to dignities and offices, and in a word have the whole world at command. If any one thinks it happy to be a favorite at court, and to manage the disposal of places and preferments, alas, this happiness is so far from being attainable by wisdom, that the very suspicion of it would put a stop to advancement. Has any man a mind to raise himself a good estate? Alas, what dealer in the world would ever get a farthing, if he be so wise as to scruple at perjury, blush at a lie, or stick at a fraud and overreaching?

It is the public charter of all divines, to mold and bend the sacred oracles till they comply with their own fancy, spreading them (as Heaven by its Creator) like a curtain, closing together, or drawing them back, as they please. Thus, indeed, Saint Paul himself minces and mangles some citations he makes use of, and seems to wrest them to a different sense from what they were first intended for, as is confessed by the great linguist, Saint Hieron. Thus when that apostle saw at Athens the inscription of the altar, he draws from it an argument for the proof of the Christian religion; but leaving out great parts of the sentence, which perhaps if fully recited might have prejudiced his cause, he mentions only the last two words, namely, "To the Unknown God"; and this, too, not without alteration, for the whole inscription runs thus: "To the Gods of Asia, Europe, and Africa, to all Foreign and Unknown Gods."

'T is an imitation of the same pattern, I will warrant you, that our young divines, by leaving out four or five words in a place and putting a false construction on the rest, can make any passage serviceable to their own purpose; though from the coherence of what went before, or follows after, the genuine meaning appears to be either wide enough, or perhaps quite contradictory to what they would thrust and impose upon it. In which knack the divines are grown now so expert that the lawyers themselves begin to be jealous of an encroachment on what was formerly their sole privilege and practise. And indeed what can they despair of proving, since the forementioned commentator did upon a text of Saint Luke put an interpretation no more agreeable to the meaning or the place than one contrary quality is to another.

But because it seemed expedient that man, who was born for the transaction of business, should have so much wisdom as should fit and capacitate him for the discharge of his duty herein, and yet lest such a measure as is requisite for this purpose might prove too dangerous and fatal, I was advised with for an antidote, and prescribed this infallible receipt of taking a wife, a creature so harmless and silly, and yet so useful and convenient, as might mollify and make pliable the stiffness and morose humor of man. Now that which made Plato doubt under what genus to rank woman, whether among brutes or rational creatures, was only meant to denote the extreme stupidness and Folly of that sex, a sex so unalterably simple that for any one of them to thrust forward and reach at the name of wise, is but to make themselves the more remarkable fools, such an endeavor being but a swimming against the stream, nay, the turning the course of Nature, the bare attempting whereof is as extravagant as the effecting of it is impossible: for as it is a trite proverb, that an ape will be an ape, though clad in purple, so a woman will be a woman, that is, a fool, whatever disguise she takes up. And yet there is no reason women should take it amiss to be thus charged, for if they do but rightly consider, they will find to Folly they are beholden for those endowments wherein they so far surpass and excel Man; as first for their unparalleled beauty, by the charm whereof they tyrannize over the greatest of tyrants; for what is it but too great a smatch of wisdom that makes men so tawny and thick-skinned, so rough and prickly-bearded, like an emblem of winter or old age, while women have such dainty, smooth cheeks, such a low, gentle voice, and so pure a complexion, as if Nature had drawn them for a standing pattern of all symmetry and comeliness? Besides, what greater or juster aim and ambition have they than to please their husbands? In order whereunto they garnish themselves with paint, washes, curls, perfumes, and all other mysteries of ornament; yet, after all, they become acceptable to them only for their Folly. Wives are always allowed their humor, yet it is only in exchange for titillation and pleasure, which indeed are but other names for Folly; as none can deny, who consider how a man must dandle, and kittle, and play a hundred little tricks for his helpmate.

But now some blood-chilled old men, that are more for wine than wenching, will pretend that in their opinion the greatest happiness consists in feasting and drinking. Grant it be so; yet certainly in the most luxurious entertainments it is Folly must give the sauce and relish to the daintiest delicacies; so that if there be no one of the guests naturally fool enough to be played upon by the rest, they must procure some comical buffoon, that by his jokes and flouts and blunders shall make the whole company split themselves with laughing; for to what purpose were it to be stuffed and crammed with so many dainty bits, savory dishes, and toothsome rarities, if after all this epicurism, the eyes, the ears, and the whole mind of man, were not so well foisted and relieved with laughing, jesting, and such like divertisements, which, like second courses, serve for the promoting of digestion? And as to all those shoeing-horns of drunkenness, the keeping every one his man, the throwing high jinks, the filling of bumpers, the drinking two in a hand, the beginning of mistresses' healths; and then the roaring out of drunken catches, the calling in a fiddler, the leading out every one his lady to dance, and such like riotous pastimes—these were not taught or dictated by any of the wise men of Greece, but of Gotham rather, being my invention, and by me prescribed as the best preservative of health: each of which, the more ridiculous it is, the more welcome it finds. And indeed, to jog sleepingly through the world, in a dumpish, melancholy posture, can not properly be said to live.

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

There is something in human nature which always makes people reward merit, no matter under what color of skin merit is found. I have found, too, that it is the visible, the tangible, that goes a long way in softening prejudices. The actual sight of a good house that a Negro has built is ten times more potent than pages of discussion about a house that he ought to build, or perhaps could build. The individual who can do something that the world wants done will, in the end, make his way regardless of his race.

—Booker T. Washington

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

his is a story about a Negro. The story has the peculiarity of being true. The man was born a slave in Virginia. His mother was a slave, and was thrice sold in the market-place. This man is Booker T. Washington.

The name Booker was a fanciful one given to the lad by playmates on account of his love for a certain chance dog-eared spelling-book. Before this he was only Mammy's Pet. The T. stood for nothing, but later a happy thought made it Taliaferro.

Most Negroes, fresh from slavery, stood sponsor to themselves, and chose the name Washington; if not this, then Lincoln, Clay or Webster.

This lad when but a child, being suddenly asked for his name, exclaimed, "Washington," and stuck to it.

The father of this boy was a white man; but children always take the status of the mother, so Booker T. Washington is a Negro, and proud of it, as he should be, for he is standard by performance, even if not by pedigree.

This Negro's father is represented by the sign x. By remaining in obscurity the fond father threw away his one chance for immortality. We do not even know his name, his social position, or his previous condition of turpitude. We assume he was happily married and respectable. Concerning him legend is silent and fable dumb. As for the child, we are not certain whether he was born in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-eight or Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, and we know not the day or the month. There were no signs in the East.

The mother lived in a log cabin of one room, say ten by twelve. This room was also a kitchen, for the mother was cook to the farmhands of her owner. There were no windows and no floor in the cabin save the hard-trodden clay. There were a table, a bench and a big fireplace. There were no beds, and the children at night simply huddled and cuddled in a pile of straw and rags in the corner. Doubtless they had enough food, for they ate the crumbs that fell from the rich man's table—who, by the way, wasn't so very rich.

One of the earliest recollections of Black Baby Booker was of being awakened in the middle of the night by his mother to eat fried chicken. Imagine the picture—it is past midnight. No light in the room save the long, flickering streaks that dance on the rafters. Outside the wind makes mournful, sighing melody. In the corner huddled the children, creeping close together with intertwining arms to get the warmth of each little half-naked body.

The dusky mother moves swiftly, deftly, half-frightened at her task.

She has come in from the night with a chicken! Where did she get it? Hush! Where do you suppose oppressed colored people get chickens?

She picks the bird—prepares it for the skillet—fries it over the coals. And then when it is done just right, Maryland style, this mother full of mother-love, an ingredient which God never omits, shakes each little piccaninny into wakefulness, and gives him the forbidden dainty—drumstick, wishbone, gizzard, white meat, or the part that went through the fence last—anything but the neck.

Feathers, bones, waste are thrown into the fireplace, and what the village editor calls the "devouring element" hides all trace of the crime. Then all lie down to sleep, until the faint flush of pink comes into the East, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the mountain-tops.

This ex-slave remembers a strange and trying time, when all of the colored folk on the plantation were notified to assemble at the "big house." They arrived and stood around in groups, waiting and wondering, talking in whispers. The master came out, and standing on the veranda read from a paper in a tremulous voice. Then he told them that they were all free, and shook hands with each. Everybody cried. However, they were very happy in spite of the tears, for freedom to them meant heaven—a heaven of rest. Yet they bore only love towards their former owners.

Most of them began to wander—they thought they had to leave their old quarters. In a few days the wisest came back and went to work just as usual. Booker T.'s mother quit work for just half a day.

But in a little while her husband arrived—a colored man to whom she had been married years before, and who had been sold and sent away. Now he came and took her and the little monochrome brood, and they all started away for West Virginia, where they heard that colored men were hired to work in coalmines and were paid wages in real money.

It took months and months to make the journey. They carried all their belongings in bundles. They had no horses—no cows—no wagon—they walked. If the weather was pleasant they slept out of doors; if it rained they sought a tobacco-shed, a barn, or the friendly side of a straw-stack. For food they depended on a little cornmeal they carried, with which the mother made pone-cakes in the ashes of a campfire. Kind colored people on the way replenished the meal-bag, for colored people are always generous to the hungry and needy if they have anything to be generous with. Then Providence sent stray, ownerless chickens their way, at times, just as the Children of Israel were fed on quails in the wilderness. Once they caught a 'possum—and there was a genuine banquet, where the children ate until they were as tight as drums.

Finally they reached the promised land of West Virginia, and at the little village of Maiden, near Charleston, they stopped, for here were the coal mine and the salt-works where colored men were hired and paid in real money.

Booker's stepfather found a job, and he also found a job for little Booker. They had nothing to live on until pay-day, so the kind man who owned the mine allowed them to get things at the store on credit. This was a brand-new experience—and no doubt they bought a few things they did not need, for prices and values were absolutely out of their realm. Besides, they did not know how much wages they were to get, neither could they figure the prices of the things they bought. At any rate, when pay-day came they were still in debt, so they saw no real money—certainly little Booker at this time of his life never did.

eneral Lewis Ruffner owned the salt-works and the coalmine where little Booker worked. He was stern, severe, strict. But he believed Negroes were human beings, and there were those then who disputed the proposition.

Ruffner organized a night-school for his helpers, and let a couple of his bookkeepers teach it. At this time there was not a colored person in the neighborhood who could spell cat, much less write his name. A few could count five. Booker must have been about ten years old when one day he boasted a bit of his skill in mathematics. The foreman told him to count the loads of coal as they came out of the mine. The boy started in bravely, "One—two—three—four—dere goes one, dere goes anoder, anoder, anoder, anoder, anoder!"

The foreman laughed.

The boy was abashed, then chagrined. "Send me to the night-school and in a month I'll show you how to count!"

The foreman wrote the lad an order which admitted him to the night-school.

But now there was another difficulty—the boy worked until nine o'clock at night, the last hour's work being to sweep out the office. The night-school began at nine o'clock and it was two miles away.

The lad scratched his head and thought and thought. A great idea came to him—he would turn the office clock ahead half an hour. He could then leave at nine o'clock, and by running part of the way could get to school at exactly nine o'clock.

The scheme worked for two days, when one of the clerks in the office said that a spook was monkeying with the clock. They tried the plan of locking the case, and all was well.

Booker must have been about twelve years old, goin' on thirteen, when one day as he lay on his back in the coalmine, pushing out the broken coal with his feet, he overheard two men telling of a very wonderful school where colored people were taught to read, write and cipher—also, how to speak in public. The scholars were allowed to work part of the time to pay for their board.

The lad crawled close in the darkness and listened to the conversation. He caught the names "Hampton" and "Armstrong." Whether Armstrong was the place and Hampton was the name of the man, he could not make out, but he clung to the names.

Here was a school for colored people—he would go there! That night he told his mother about it. She laughed, patted his kinky head, and indulged him in his dream.

She was only a poor black woman; she could not spell ab, nor count to ten, but she had a plan for her boy—he would some day be a preacher.

This was the very height of her imagination—a preacher! Beyond this there was nothing in human achievement. The night-school came after a day of fourteen hours' work. Little Booker sat on a bench, his feet dangling about a foot from the floor. As he sat there one night trying hard to drink in knowledge, he went to sleep. He nodded, braced up, nodded again, and then pitched over in a heap on the floor, to the great amusement of the class, and his own eternal shame.

The next day, however, as he was feeling very sorrowful over his sad experience, he heard that Mrs. Ruffner wanted a boy for general work at the big house.

Here was a chance. Mrs. Ruffner was a Vermont Yankee, which meant that she had a great nose for dirt, and would not stand for a "sassy nigger." Her reputation had gone abroad, and of how she pinched the ears of her "help," and got them up at exactly a certain hour, and made them use soap and water at least once a day, and even compelled them to use a toothbrush; all this was history, well defined.

Booker said he could please her, even if she was a Yankee. He applied for the job and got it, with wages fixed at a dollar a week, with a promise of twenty-five cents extra every week, if he did his work without talking back and breaking a tray of dishes.

enius! No hovel is safe from it!" says Whistler.

Genius consists in doing the right thing without being told more than three times.

Booker silently studied the awful Yankee woman to see what she really wanted. He finally decided that she desired her servants to have clean skins, fairly neat clothing, do things promptly, finish the job and keep still when they had nothing to say.

He set himself to please her—and he did.

She loaned him books, gave him a lead-pencil, and showed him how to write with a pen without smearing his hands and face with ink.

He told her of his dream and asked about Armstrong and Hampton. She told him that Armstrong was the man and Hampton the place.

At last he got her consent to leave and go to Hampton.

When he started she gave him a comb, a toothbrush, two handkerchiefs and a pair of shoes. He had been working for her for a year, and she thought, of course, he saved his wages. He never told her that his money had gone to keep the family, because his stepfather had been on a strike and therefore out of work.

So the boy started away for Hampton. It was five hundred miles away. He didn't know how far five hundred miles is—nobody does unless he has walked it.

He had three dollars, so he gaily paid for a seat in the stage. At the end of the first day he was forty miles from home and out of money. He slept in a barn, and a colored woman handed him a ham-bone and a chunk of bread out of the kitchen-window, and looked the other way.

He trudged on east—always and forever east—towards the rising sun.

He walked weeks—months—years, he thought. He kept no track of the days. He carried his shoes as a matter of economy.

Finally he sold the shoes for four dollars to a man who paid him ten cents cash down, and promised to pay the rest when they should meet at Hampton. Nearly forty years have passed and they have never met.

On he walked—on and on—east, and always forever east.

He reached the city of Richmond, the first big city he had ever seen. The wide streets—the sidewalks—the street-lamps entranced him. It was just like heaven. But he was hungry and penniless, and when he looked wistfully at a pile of cold fried chicken on a street-stand and asked the price of a drumstick, at the same time telling he had no money, he discovered he was not in heaven at all. He was called a lazy nigger and told to move on.

Later he made the discovery that a "nigger" is a colored person who has no money.

He pulled the piece of rope that served him for a belt a little tighter, and when no one was looking, crawled under a sidewalk and went to sleep, disturbed only by the trampling overhead.

When he awoke he saw he was near the dock, where a big ship pushed its bowsprit out over the street. Men were unloading bags and boxes from the boat. He ran down and asked the mate if he could help. "Yes!" was the gruff answer.

He got in line and went staggering under the heavy loads.

He was little, but strong, and best of all, willing, yet he reeled at the work.

"Have you had any breakfast? Yes, you liver-colored boy—you, I say, have you had your breakfast?"

"No, sir," said the boy; "and no supper last night nor dinner yesterday!"

"Well, I reckoned as much. Now you take this quarter and go over to that stand and buy you a drumstick, a cup of coffee and two fried cakes!"

The lad didn't need urging. He took the money in his palm, went over to the man who the night before had called him a lazy nigger, and showing the silver, picked out his piece of chicken.

The man hastened to wait on him, and said it was a fine day and hoped he was well.

Arriving at Hampton, this colored boy, who had tramped the long, weary miles, stood abashed before the big brick building which he knew was Hampton Institute.

e was so little—the place was so big—by what right could he ask to be admitted?

Finally he boldly entered, and in a voice meant to be firm, but which was very shaky, said, "I am here!" and pointed to the bosom of his hickory shirt.

The Yankee woman motioned him to a chair. Negroes coming there were plentiful. Usually they wanted to live the Ideal Life. They had a call to preach—and the girls wanted to be music-teachers.

The test was simple and severe: would they and could they do one useful piece of work well?

Booker sat and waited, not knowing that his patience was being put to the test.

Then Miss Priscilla, in a hard, Neill Burgess voice, "guessed" that the adjoining recitation-room needed sweeping and dusting. She handed Booker a broom and dust-cloth, motioned to the room, and went away.

Oho! Little did she know her lad. The colored boy smiled to himself—sweeping and dusting were his specialties—he had learned the trade from a Yankee woman from Vermont! He smiled.

Then he swept that room—moved every chair, the table, the desk. He dusted each piece of furniture four times. He polished each rung and followed around the baseboard on hands and knees.

Miss Priscilla came back—pushed the table around and saw at once that the dirt had not been concealed beneath it. She took out her handkerchief and wiped the table top, then the desk.

She turned, looked at the boy, and her smile met his half-suppressed triumphant grin.

"You'll do," she said.

eneral Samuel C. Armstrong, the founder of Hampton Institute, and the grandfather of Tuskegee, was a white man who fought the South valiantly and well.

He seems about the only man in the North who, at the close of the war, clearly realized that the war had just begun—that the real enemies were not subdued, and that these enemies were ignorance, superstition and incompetence.

The pitiable condition of four million human beings, flung from slavery into freedom, thrown upon their own resources, with no thought of responsibility, and with no preparation for the change, meant for them only another kind of slavery.

General Armstrong's heart went out to them—he desired to show them how to be useful, helpful, self-reliant, healthy. For the whites of the South he had only high regard and friendship. He, of all men, knew how they had suffered from the war—and he realized also that they had fought for what they believed was right. In his heart there was no hate. He resolved to give himself—his life—his fortune—his intellect—his love—his all, for the upbuilding of the South. He saw with the vision of a prophet that indolence and pride were the actual enemies of white and black alike. The blacks must be taught to work—to know the dignity of human labor—to serve society—to help themselves by helping others. He realized that there are no menial tasks—that all which serves is sacred.

And this is the man who sowed the seeds of truth in the heart of the nameless black boy—Booker Washington. Armstrong's shibboleth, too, was, "With malice toward none, but with charity for all, let us finish the work God has given us to do."

do not know very much about this subject of education, yet I believe I know as much about what others know about it as most people. I have visited the principal colleges of America and Europe, and the methods of Preparatory and High Schools are to me familiar. I know the night-schools of the cities, the "Ungraded Rooms," the Schools for Defectives, the educational schemes in prisons, the Manual-Training Schools, the New Education (first suggested by Socrates) as carried out by G. Stanley Hall, John Dewey, and dozens of other good men and women in America. I am familiar with the School for the Deaf at Malone, New York, and the School for the Blind at Batavia, where even the sorely stricken are taught to be self-sufficient, self-supporting and happy. I have tumbled down the circular fire-escape at Lapeer with the inmates of the Home of Epileptics, and heard the shouts of laughter from lips that never laughed before. I have seen the Jewish Manual Training School of Chicago transform Russian refugees into useful citizens—capable, earnest and excellent. I know a little about Swarthmore, Wellesley, Vassar, Radcliffe, and have put my head into West Point and Annapolis, and had nobody cry, "Genius!"

Of Harvard, Yale and Princeton I know something, having done time in each. I have also given jobs to graduates of Oxford, Cambridge and Heidelberg, to my sorrow and their chagrin. This does not prove that graduates of the great universities are, as a rule, out of work, or that they are incompetent. It simply means that it is possible for a man to graduate at these institutions and secure his diploma and yet be a man who has nothing the world really wants, either in way of ideas or services.

The reason that my "cum laude" friends did not like me, and the cause of my having to part with them—getting them a little free transportation from your Uncle George—was not because they lacked intelligence, but because they wanted to secure a position, while I simply offered them a job.

They were like Cave-of-the-Winds of Oshkosh, who is an ice-cutter in August, and in winter is an out-of-door horticulturist—a hired man is something else.

As a general proposition, I believe this will not now be disputed: the object of education is that a man may benefit himself by serving society.

To benefit others, you must be reasonably happy: there must be animation through useful activity, good-cheer, kindness and health—health of mind and health of body. And to benefit society you must also have patience, persistency, and a firm determination to do the right thing, and to mind your own business so that others, too, may mind theirs. Then all should be tinctured with a dash of discontent with past achievements, so you will constantly put forth an effort to do more and better work.

When what you have done in the past looks large to you, you haven't done much today.

So there you get the formula of Education: health and happiness through useful activity—animation, kindness, good-cheer, patience, persistency, willingness to give and take, seasoned with enough discontent to prevent smugness, which is the scum that grows over every stagnant pond.

Of course no college can fill this prescription—no institution can supply the ingredients—all that the college can do is to supply the conditions so that these things can spring into being. Plants need the sunlight—mushrooms are different.

The question is, then, what teaching concern in America supplies the best quality of actinic ray?

And I answer, Tuskegee is the place, and Booker Washington is the man.

"What!" you exclaim. "The Ideal School a school for Negroes, instituted by a Negro, where only Negroes teach, and only Negroes are allowed to enter as students?"

And the answer is, "Exactly so."

At Tuskegee there are nearly two thousand students, and over one hundred fifty teachers. There are two classes of students—"day-school" and "night-school" students. The night-school students work all day at any kind of task they are called upon to do. They receive their board, clothing and a home—they pay no tuition, but are paid for their labor, the amount being placed to their credit, so when fifty dollars is accumulated they can enter as "day students."

The "day students" make up the bulk of the scholars. Each pays fifty dollars a year. These all work every other day at manual labor or some useful trade.

Tuskegee has fully twice as many applicants as it can accommodate; but there is one kind of applicant who never receives any favor. This is the man who says he has the money to pay his way, and wishes to take the academic course only. The answer always is: "Please go elsewhere—there are plenty of schools that want your money. The fact that you have money will not exempt you here from useful labor."

This is exactly what every college in the world should say.

The Tuskegee farm consists of about three thousand acres. There are four hundred head of cattle, about five hundred hogs, two hundred horses, great flocks of chickens, geese, ducks and turkeys, and many swarms of bees. It is the intention to raise all the food that is consumed on the place, and to manufacture all supplies. There are wagon-shops, a sawmill, a harness-shop, a shoe-shop, a tailor-shop, a printing-plant, a model laundry, a canning establishment. Finer fruit and vegetables I have never seen, and the thousands of peach, plum and apple trees, and the vast acreage of berries that have been planted, will surely some day be a goodly source of revenue.

The place is religious, but not dogmatically so—the religion being merely the natural safety-valve for emotion. At Tuskegee there is no lacrimose appeal to confess your sins—they do better—they forget them.

I never heard more inspiring congregational singing, and the use of the piano, organ, orchestra and brass band are important factors in the curriculum. In the chapel I spoke to an audience so attentive, so alert, so receptive, so filled with animation, that the whole place looked like a vast advertisement for Sozodont.

No prohibitive signs are seen at Tuskegee. All is affirmative, yet it is understood that some things are tabu—tobacco, for instance, and strong drink, of course.

We have all heard of Harvard Beer and Yale Mixture, but be it said in sober justice, Harvard runs no brewery, and Yale has no official brand of tobacco. Yet Harvard men consume much beer, and many men at Yale smoke. And if you want to see the cigarette-fiend on his native heath, you'll find him like the locust on the campus at Cambridge and New Haven. But if you want to see the acme of all cigarette-bazaars, just ride out of Boylston Street, Boston, any day at noon, and watch the boys coming out of the Institute of Technology.

I once asked a Tech Professor if cigarette-smoking was compulsory in his institution. "Yes," he replied; "but the rule is not strictly enforced, as I know three students who do not smoke."

Tuskegee stands for order, system, cleanliness, industry, courtesy and usefulness. There are no sink-holes around the place, no "back yards." Everything is beautiful, wholesome and sanitary. All trades are represented. The day is crammed so full of work from sunrise to sunset that there is no time for complaining, misery or faultfinding—three things that are usually born of idleness. At Tuskegee there are no servants. All of the work is done by the students and teachers—everybody works—everybody is a student, and all are teachers.

We are all teachers, whether we will it or not—we teach by example, and all students who do good work are good teachers.

When the Negro is able to do skilled work, he ceases to be a problem—he is a man. The fact that Alexandre Dumas was a Negro does not count against him in the world's assize.

The old-time academic college, that cultivated the cerebrum and gave a man his exercise in an indoor gymnasium, or not at all, has ruined its tens of thousands. To have top—head and no lungs—is not wholly desirable. The student was made exempt from every useful thing, just as the freshly freed slave hoped and expected to be, and after four years it was often impossible for him to take up the practical lessons of life. He had gotten used to the idea of one set of men doing all the work and another set of men having the culture. To a large degree he came to regard culture as the aim of life. And when a man begins to pride himself upon his culture, he hasn't any to speak of. Culture must be merely incidental, and to clutch it is like capturing a butterfly: you do not secure the butterfly at all—you get only a grub.

Let us say right here that there is only one way in which a Negro, or a white man, can ever make himself respected. Statute law will not do it; rights voted him by the State are of small avail; making demands will not secure the desired sesame. If we ever gain the paradise of freedom it will be because we have earned it—because we deserve it. A make-believe education may suffice for a white man—especially if he has a rich father, but a Negro who has to carve out his own destiny must be taught order, system, and quiet, persistent, useful effort.

A college that has its students devote one-half their time to actual, useful work is so in line with commonsense that we are amazed that the idea had to be put into execution by the ex-slave as a life-saver for his disenfranchised race. Our great discoveries are always accidents: we work for one thing and get another. I expect that the day will come, and erelong, when the great universities of the world will have to put the Tuskegee Idea into execution in order to save themselves from being distanced by the Colored Race.

If life were one thing and education another, it might be all right to separate them. Culture of the head over a desk, and indoor gymnastics for the body, are not the ideal, and that many succeed in spite of the handicap is no proof of the excellence of the plan. Ships that go around the world accumulate many barnacles, but barnacles as a help to the navigator are an iridescent dream.

A little regular manual labor, rightly mixed with the mental, eliminates draw-poker, highballs, brawls, broils, Harvard Beer, Yale Mixture, Princeton Pinochle, Chippee dances, hazing, roistering, rowdyism and the bulldog propensity. The Heidelberg article of cocked hat and insolent ways is not produced at Tuskegee. At Tuskegee there is no place for those who lie in wait for insults and regard scrapping as a fine art. As for college athletics at the Orthodox Universities, only one man out of ten ever does anything at it anyway—the college man who needs the gymnasium most is practically debarred from everything in it and serves as a laughing-stock whenever he strips. Coffee, cocaine, bromide, tobacco and strong drink often serve in lieu of exercise and ozone, and Princeton winks her woozy eye in innocency.

Freedom can not be bestowed—it must be achieved. Education can not be given—it must be earned. Lincoln did not free the slaves—he only freed himself. The Negroes did not know they were slaves, and so they had no idea of what freedom meant. Until a man wants to be free, each kind of freedom is only another form of slavery. Booker Washington is showing the colored man how to secure a genuine freedom through useful activity. To get freedom you must shoulder responsibility.

If college education were made compulsory by the State, and one-half of the curriculum consisted of actual, useful manual labor, most of our social ills would be solved, and we would be well out on the highway towards the Ideal City.

Without animation, man is naught—nothing is accomplished, nothing done. People who inspire other people have animation plus.

And animation plus is ecstasy. In ecstasy the spirit rushes out, runs over and saturates all. Oratory is an ecstasy that inundates the hearer and makes him ride upon the crest of another's ideas.

Art is born of ecstasy—art is ecstasy in the concrete. Beautiful music is ecstasy expressed in sound, regulated into rhythm, cadence and form. "Statuary is frozen music," said Heine.

A man who is not moved into ecstasy by ecstasy is hopeless. A people that has not the surging, uplifting, onward power that ecstasy gives, is decadent—dead.

The Negro is easily moved to ecstasy. Very little musical training makes him a power in song. At Tuskegee the congregational singing is a feature that, once heard, is never to be forgotten. Fifteen hundred people lifting up their hearts in an outburst of emotion—song! Fifteen hundred people of one mind, doing anything in unison—do you know what it means? Ecstasy is essentially a matter of sex. In art and religion sex can not be left out of the equation. The simple fact that in forty years the Negro race in America has increased from four million to ten million tells of their ecstasy as a people. "Only happy beings reproduce themselves," says Darwin. Depress your animal and it ceases to breed; so there are a whole round of animals that do not reproduce in captivity. But in slavery or freedom the Negro sings, and reproduces—he is not doomed nor depressed—his soul arises superior to circumstance.

Without animation, education is impossible. And the problem of the educator is to direct this singing, flowing, moving spirit of the hive into useful channels.

Education is simply the encouragement of right habits—the fixing of good habits until they become a part of one's nature, and are exercised automatically.

The man who is industrious by habit is the only man who wins. The man who is not industrious except when driven to it, or when it occurs to him, accomplishes little.

Man gets his happiness by doing: and work to a slave is always distasteful. The power of mimicry and imitation is omitted—the owner does not work—the strong man does not work. Ergo—to grow strong means to cease work. To be strong means to be free—to be free means no work!

It has been a frightfully bad education that the Negro has had—work distasteful, and work disgraceful! And the slave-owner suffered most of all, for he came to regard work as debasing.

And now a Negro is teaching the Negro that work is beautiful—that work is a privilege—that only through willing service can he ever win his freedom. Architecture is fixed ecstasy, inspired always by a strong man who gives a feeling of security. Athens was an ecstasy in marble.

Tuskegee is an ecstasy in brick and mortar.

Don't talk about the education of the Negro! The experiment has really never been tried, except spasmodically, of educating either the whites or the blacks in the South—or elsewhere.

A Negro is laying hold upon the natural ecstasy of the Negro, and directing it into channels of usefulness and excellence. Can you foretell where this will end—this formation of habits of industry, sobriety and continued, persistent effort towards the right?

Booker Washington, child of a despised race, has done and is doing what the combined pedagogic and priestly wisdom of ages has failed to do. He is the Moses who by his example is leading the children of his former oppressors out into the light of social, mental, moral and economic freedom.

I am familiar in detail with every criticism brought against Tuskegee. On examination these criticisms all reduce themselves down to three:

1. A vast sum of money has been collected by Booker Washington for his own aggrandizement and benefit.

2. Tuskegee is a show-place where all the really good work is done by picked men from the North.

3. Booker Washington is a tyrant, a dictator and an egotist.

If I were counsel for Tuskegee—as I am not—I would follow the example of the worthy accusers, and submit the matter without argument. Booker Washington can afford to plead guilty to every charge; and he has never belittled himself by answering his accusers.

But let the facts be known, that this man has collected upward of six million dollars, mostly from the people of the North, and has built up the nearest perfect educational institution in the world.

It is probably true that many of his teachers and best workers are picked people—but they are Negroes, and were selected by a Negro. The great general reveals his greatness in the selection of his generals: it was the marshals whom Napoleon appointed who won for him his victories; but his spirit animated theirs, and he chose them for this one reason—he could dominate them. He infused into their souls a goodly dash of his own enthusiasm.

Booker Washington is a greater general than Napoleon. For the Tuskegee idea no Waterloo awaits. And as near as I can judge, Booker Washington's most noisy critics are merely camp-followers.

That the man is a tyrant and a dictator there is no doubt. He is a beneficent tyrant, but a tyrant still, for he always, invariably, has his own way in weighty matters—in trivialities others can have theirs. And as for dictatorship, the man who advances on chaos and transforms it into cosmos is perforce a dictator and an egotist.

Booker Washington believes he is in the right, and he makes no effort to conceal the fact that he is on earth. In him there is no disposition to run and peep about, and find himself a dishonorable grave. All live men are egotists, and they are egotists just in proportion as they have life. Dead men are not egotists. Booker Washington has life in abundance, and through him I truly believe runs the spirit of Divinity, if ever a living man had it. A man like this is the instrument of Deity.

Tuskegee Institute has applications ahead all the time, from all over America, for competent colored men and women who can take charge of important work and do it. Dressmakers, housekeepers, cooks, farmers, stockmen, builders, gardeners, are in demand. The world has never yet had enough people to bear its burdens.

Recently we have heard much of the unemployed, but a very little search will show that the people out of work are those of bad habits, which make them unreliable and untrustworthy. The South, especially, needs the willing worker and the practical man. And best of all the South knows it, and stands ready to pay for the service.

A few years ago there was a fine storm of protest from Northern Negroes to the effect that Booker Washington was endeavoring to limit the Negro to menial service—that is, thrust him back into servility. The first ambition of the Negro was to get an education so that he might become a Baptist preacher. To him, education meant freedom from toil, and of course we do not have to look far to see where he got the idea. Then when Tuskegee came forward and wanted to make blacksmiths, carpenters and brick-masons out of black men, there was a cry, "If this means education, we will none of it—treason, treason!" It was assumed that the Negro who set other Negroes to work was not their friend. This phase of the matter requires neither denial nor apology. We smile and pass on.

In Eighteen Hundred Seventy-seven, the Negro was practically disenfranchised throughout the South, by being excluded from the primaries. He had no recognized ticket in the field. For both the blacks and the whites this has been well. To most of the blacks freedom meant simply exemption from work. So there quickly grew up a roistering, turbulent, idle and dangerous class of black men who were used by the most ambitious of their kind for political ends. To preserve the peace of the community, the whites were forced to adopt heroic measures, with the result that we now have the disenfranchised Negro.

Early in the Eighties, Booker Washington realized that, politically, there was no hope for his race. He saw, however, that commerce recognized no color line. We would buy, sell and trade with the black man on absolute equality. Life-insurance companies would insure him, banks would receive his deposits, and if honest and competent, would loan him money. If he could shoe a horse, we waived his complexion; and in every sort and kind of craftsmanship he stood on absolute equality with the whites. The only question ever asked was, "Can you do the work?"

And Booker Washington set out to help the Negro win success for himself by serving society through becoming skilled in doing useful things. And so it became Head, Hand and Heart. The manual was played off against the intellectual.

But over and beyond the great achievement of Booker Washington in founding and carrying to a successful issue the most complete educational scheme of this age, or any other, stands the man himself. He is one without hate, heat or prejudice. No one can write on the lintels of his doorpost the word, "Whim." He is half-white, but calls himself a Negro. He sides with the disgraced and outcast black woman who gave him birth, rather than with the respectable white man who was his sire.

He rides in the Jim Crow cars, and on long trips, if it is deemed expedient to use a sleeping-car, he hires the stateroom, so that he may not trespass or presume upon those who would be troubled by the presence of a colored man. Often in traveling he goes for food and shelter to the humble home of one of his own people. At hotels he receives and accepts, without protest or resentment, the occasional contumely of the inferior whites—whites too ignorant to appreciate that one of God's noblemen stands before them. For the whites of the South he has only words of kindness and respect; the worst he says about them is that they do not understand. His modesty, his patience, his forbearance, are sublime. He is a true Fabian—he does what he can, like the royal Roycroft opportunist that he is. Every petty annoyance is passed over; the gibes and jeers and the ingratitude of his own race are forgotten. "They do not understand," he calmly says. He does his work. He is respected by the best people of North and South. He has the confidence of the men of affairs—he is a safe man.

THOMAS ARNOLD

Let me mind my own personal work; keep myself pure and zealous and believing; laboring to do God's will in this fruitful vineyard of young lives committed to my charge, as my allotted field, until my work be done.

—Thomas Arnold

THOMAS ARNOLD

homas Arnold was born in Seventeen Hundred Ninety-five, and died in Eighteen Hundred Forty-two. His life was short, as men count time, but he lived long enough to make for himself a name and a fame that are both lasting and luminous. Though he was neither a great writer nor a great preacher, yet there were times when he thought he was both. He was only a schoolteacher. However, he was an artist in schoolteaching, and art is not a thing—it is a way. It is the beautiful way—the effective way.

Schoolteachers have no means of proving their prowess by conspicuous waste, and no time to convince the world of their excellence through conspicuous leisure; consequently, for histrionic purposes, a schoolteacher's cosmos is a plain, slaty gray. Schoolteachers do not wallow in wealth nor feed fat at the public trough. No one ever accuses them of belonging to the class known as the predatory rich, nor of being millionaire malefactors. They have to do their work every day at certain hours and dedicate its results to time.

For many years Thomas Arnold has been known as the father of his son. Several great men have been thus overshadowed. The father of Disraeli, for instance, was favored by fame and fortune, until his gifted son moved into the limelight, and after that Pater shone mostly in a reflected glory. Jacopo Bellini was the greatest painter in Venice until his two sons, Gian and Gentile, surpassed him, and history writes him down as the father of the Bellinis. Lyman Beecher was regarded as America's greatest preacher until Henry Ward moved the mark up a few notches. The elder Pitt was looked upon as a genuine statesman until his son graduated into the Cabinet, and then "the terrible cornet of horse" became known as the father of Pitt. Now that both are dust, and we are getting the proper perspective, we see that "the great commoner" was indeed a great man, and so they move down the corridors of time together, arm in arm, this father and son. That excellent person who carried the gripsacks of greatness so long that he thought the luggage was his own, Major James B. Pond, launched at least one good thing. It was this: "Matthew Arnold gave fifty lectures in America, and nobody ever heard one of them; those in his audience who could no longer endure the silence slipped quietly out."

Matthew Arnold was a critic and writer who, having secured a tuppence worth of success through being the son of his father, and thus securing the speaker's eye, finally got an oratorical bee in his bonnet and went a-barnstorming. He cultivated reserve and indifference, both of which he was told were necessary factors of success in a public speaker.

And this is true. But they will not make an orator, any more than long hair, a peculiar necktie, and a queer hat will float a poet on the tide of time safely into the Hall of Fame.

Matthew Arnold cultivated repose, but instead of convincing the audience that he had power, he only made them think he was sleepy. Major Pond, having lived much with orators, and thinking the trick easy, tried oratory on his own account, and succeeded as well as did Matthew Arnold. No one ever heard Major Pond: his voice fell over the footlights, dead, into the orchestra; only those with opera-glasses knew he was talking.

But to be unintelligible is not a special recommendation. Men may be moderate for two reasons—through excess of feeling and because they are actually dull.

Matthew Arnold has slipped back into his true position—that of a man of letters. The genius is a man of affairs. Humanity is the theme, not books. Books are usually written about the thoughts of men who wrote books. Books die and disintegrate, but humanity is an endless procession, and the souls that go marching on are those who fought for freedom, not those who speculate on abstrusities.

The credential of Thomas Arnold to immortality is not that he was the father of Matthew and eight other little Arnolds, but it lies in the fact that he fought for a wider horizon in life through education. He lifted his voice for liberty. He believed in the divinity of the child, not in its depravity. Arnold of Rugby was a teacher of teachers, as every great teacher is. The pedagogic world is now going back to his philosophy, just as in statesmanship we are reverting to Thomas Jefferson. These men who spoke classic truth, not transient—truth that fits in spite of fashion, time and place—are the true prophets of mankind. Such was Thomas Arnold!

f Thomas Arnold had been just a little bigger, the world probably would never have heard of him, for an interdict would have been placed upon his work. The miracle is that, as it was, the Church and the State did not snuff him out.

He stood for sweet reasonableness, but unintentionally created much opposition. His life was a warfare. Yet he managed to make himself acceptable to a few; so for fourteen years this head master of a preparatory school for boys lived his life and did his work. He sent out his radiating gleams, and grew straight in the strength of his spirit, and lived out his life in the light.

His sudden death sanctified and sealed his work before he was subdued and ironed out by the conventions.

Happy Arnold! If he had lived, he might have met the fate of Arnold of Brescia, who was also a great teacher. Arnold of Brescia was a pupil of Abelard, and was condemned by the Church as a disturber of the peace for speaking in eulogy of his master. Later, he attacked the profligacy of the idle prelates, as did Luther, Savonarola and all the other great church-reformers. When ordered into exile and silence, he still protested his right to speak. He was strangled on order of the Pope, his body burned, and the ashes thrown into the Tiber. The Baptists, I believe, claim Arnold of Brescia as the forerunner of their sect, and certain it is that he was of the true Roger Williams type.

Thomas Arnold, too, was filled with a passion for righteousness. His zeal for the upright, manly life constituted his strength. Of course he would not have been executed, as was Arnold of Brescia—the times had changed—he would simply have been shelved, pooh-poohed, deprived of his living and socially Crapseyized. Death saved him—aged forty-seven—and his soul goes marching on!

he parents of Thomas Arnold belonged to the great Middle Class—that class which Disraeli said never did any thinking on its own account, but to the best of its ability deferred to and imitated the idle rich in matters of religion, education and politics.

Doctor Johnson maintained that if members of the Middle Class worked hard and economized, it was in the hope that they might leave money and name for their children and make them exempt from all useful effort.

"To indict a class," said Burke, "is neither reasonable nor right." But certain it is that a vast number of fairly intelligent people in England and elsewhere regard the life of the "aristocracy" as very desirable and beautiful.

To this end they want their boys to become clergymen, lawyers, doctors or army officers.

"Only two avenues of honor are open to aspiring youth in England," said Gladstone—"the Army and the Church."

The father of Thomas Arnold was Collector of Customs at Cowes, Isle of Wight. Holding this petty office under the Government, with a half-dozen men at his command, we can easily guess his caliber, habits, belief and mode of life. He was respectable; and to be respectable, a Collector of Customs must be punctilious in Church matters, in order to be acceptable to Church people, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. The parents of Thomas Arnold very naturally centered their ambitions for him on the Church, as he was not very strong.

When the child was only six years old, the father died from "spasm of the heart." At this time the boy had begun to take Latin, and his education was being looked after by a worthy governess, who daily drilled his mental processes and took him walking, leading him by the hand. On Sundays he wore a wide, white collar, shiny boots and a stiff hat. The governess cautioned him not to soil his collar, nor to get mud on his boots.

In later years he told how he looked covetously at the boys who wore neither hats nor boots, and who did not have a governess.

His mother had a fair income, and so this prim, precise, exact and crystallized mode of education was continued. Out of her great love for her child, the mother sent him away from home when he was eight years old. Of course there were tears on both sides; but now a male man must educate him, and women were to be dropped out of the equation—this that the evil in the child should be curbed, his spirit chastened, and his mind disciplined.

The fact that a child rather liked to be fondled by his mother, or that his mother cared to fondle him, was proof of total depravity on the part of both.

The Reverend Doctor Griffiths, who took charge of the boy for two years, was certainly not cruel, but at the same time he was not exactly human. In Nature we never hear of a she-lion sending her cubs away to be looked after by a denatured lion. It is really doubtful whether you could ever raise a lion to lionhood by this method. Some goat would come along and butt the life out of him, even after he had evolved whiskers and a mane.

After two years with Doctor Griffiths, young Arnold was sent to Manchester, where he remained in a boys' boarding-house from his tenth to his fourteenth year. To the teachers here—all men—he often paid tribute, but uttered a few heretical doubts as to whether discipline as a substitute for mother-love was not an error of pious but overzealous educators.

At sixteen years of age he was transferred to Corpus Christi College at Oxford. In Eighteen Hundred Fifteen, being then twenty years of age, he was elected a Fellow of Oriel College, and there he resided until he was twenty-four.

He was a prizeman in Latin, Greek and English, and was considered a star scholar—both by himself and by others. Ten years afterwards he took a backward glance, and said: "At twenty-two I was proud, precise, stiff, formal, uncomfortable, unhappy, and unintentionally made everybody else unhappy with whom I came in contact. The only people I really mixed with were those whose lives were dedicated to the ablative."

When twenty-four he was made a deacon and used to read prayers at neighboring chapels, for which service he was paid five shillings. Being now thrown on his own resources, he did the thing a prizeman always does: he showed others how. As a tutor he was a success: more scholars came to him than he could really take care of. But he did not like the work, since all the pupil desired, and all the parents desired, was that he should help the backward one get his marks, and glide through the eye of a needle into pedagogic paradise.

At twenty-six he was preaching, teaching and writing learned essays about things he did not understand.

From this brief sketch it will be seen that the early education of Thomas Arnold was of the kind and type that any fond parent of the well-to-do Middle Class would most desire. He had been shielded from all temptations of the world; he could do no useful thing with his hands; his knowledge of economics—ways and means—was that of a child; of the living present he knew little, but of the dead past he assumed and believed he knew much.

It was purely priestly, institutional education. It was the kind of education that every well-to-do Briton would like to have his sons receive. It was, in short, England's Ideal.

ugby Grammar School was endowed in Sixteen Hundred Fifty-three by one Laurence Sherif, a worthy grocer. The original gift was comparatively small, but the investment being in London real estate, has increased in value until it yields now an income of about thirty-five thousand dollars a year.

In the time of Arnold there were about three hundred pupils. It is not a large school now; there are high schools in a hundred cities of America that surpass it in many ways.

Rugby's claim to special notice lies in its traditions—the great men who were once Rugby boys, and the great men who were Rugby teachers. Also, in the fact that Thomas Hughes wrote a famous story called, "Tom Brown at Rugby."

Rugby Grammar School was one hundred twenty-five years old when Sir Joshua Reynolds commissioned Lord Cornwallis to go to America and fetch George Washington to England, that Sir Joshua might paint his portrait.

For a hundred years prior to the time of Arnold, there had not been a perceptible change in the methods of teaching. The boys were herded together. They fought, quarreled, divided into cliques; the big boys bullied the little ones. Fagging was the law; so the upper forms enslaved the lower ones. There was no home life, and the studies were made irksome and severe, purposely, as it was thought that pleasant things were sinful.

If any better plan could have been devised to make study absolutely repulsive, so the student would shun it as soon as he was out of school, we can not guess it.

The system was probably born of inertia on the part of the teachers. The pastor who pushes through his prescribed services, with mind on other things, and thus absolves his conscience for letting his congregation go drifting straight to Gehenna, was duplicated in the teacher. He did his duty—and nothing more.

Selfishness, heartlessness and brutality manipulated the birch. Head was all; heart and hand nothing. This was schoolteaching. As a punishment for failure to memorize lessons, there were various plans to disgrace and discourage the luckless ones. Standing in the corner with face to the wall, and the dunce-cap, had given place to a system of fines, whereby "ten lines of Vergil for failure to attend prayers," and ten more for failure to get the first, often placed the boy in hopeless bankruptcy. If he was a fag, or slave of a higher-form boy, cleaning the other's boots, scrubbing stairs, running on foolish and needless errands, getting cuffs and kicks by way of encouragement, he saw his fines piling up and no way ever to clear them off and gain freedom by promotion.

Viewed from our standpoint, the thing has a ludicrous bouffe air that makes us smile. But to the boy caught in the toils it was tragic. To work and evolve in an environment of such brutality was impossible to certain temperaments. Success lay in becoming calloused and indifferent. If the boy of gentle habits and slight physical force did not sink into mental nothingness, he was in danger of being bowled over by disease and death.

Indeed, the physical condition of the pupils was very bad: smallpox, fevers, consumption, and breaking out with sores and boils, were common.

Thomas Arnold was thirty-three years old when he was called as head master to Rugby. He was married, and babies were coming along with astonishing regularity. He had taken priestly orders and was passing rich on one hundred pounds a year. Poverty and responsibility had given him ballast, and love for his own little brood had softened his heart and vitalized his soul.

As a writer and speaker he had made his presence felt at various college commencements and clergymen's meetings. He had challenged the brutal, indifferent, lazy and so-called disciplinary methods of teaching.

And so far as we know, he is the first man in England to declare that the teacher should be the foster-parent of the child, and that all successful teaching must be born of love.

The well-upholstered conservatives twiddled their thumbs, coughed, and asked: "How about the doctrine of total depravity? Do you mean to say that the child should not be disciplined? What does Solomon say about the use of the rod? Does the Bible say that the child is good by nature?"

But Thomas Arnold could not explain all he knew. Moreover, he did not wish to fight the Church—he believed in the Church—to him it was a divine institution. But there were methods and practises in the Church that he would have liked to forget.

"My sympathies go out to inferiority," he said. The weakling often needed encouragement, not discipline. The bad boy must be won, not suppressed.

In one of these conferences of clergymen, Arnold said:

"I once chided a pupil, a little, pale, stupid boy—undersized and seemingly half-sick—for not being able to recite his very simple lesson. He looked up at me and said with a touch of spirit: 'Sir, why do you get angry with me? Do you not know I am doing the best I can?'"

One of the clergymen present asked Arnold how he punished the boy for his impudence.

And Arnold replied: "I did not punish him—he had properly punished me. I begged his pardon."

The idea of a teacher begging the pardon of a pupil was a brand-new thing.

Several clergymen present laughed—one scowled—two sneezed. But a Bishop, shortly after this, urged the name of Thomas Arnold as master of Rugby, and added to his recommendation this line: "If elected to the office he will change the methods of schoolteaching in every public school in England."

The ayes had it, and Arnold was called to Rugby. The salary was so-so, the pupils between two and three hundred in number—many were home on sick-leave—the Sixth Form was in charge.

The genius of Arnold was made manifest, almost as soon as he went to Rugby, by the way in which he managed the boys who bullied the whole school, and what is worse, did it legally.

Fagging was official.

The Sixth Form was composed of thirty boys who stood at the top, and these boys ran the school. They were boys who, by reason of their size, strength, aggressiveness and mental ability, got the markings that gave them this autocratic power. They were now immune from authority—they were free. In a year they would gravitate to the University.

We can hardly understand now how a bully could get markings through his bullying propensities; but a rudimentary survival of the idea may yet be seen in big football-players, who are given good marks, and very gentle mental massage in class. If the same scholars were small and skinny, they would certainly be plucked.

The faculty found freedom in shifting responsibility for discipline to the Sixth Form.

Read the diary of Arnold, and you will be amazed on seeing how he fought against taking from the Sixth Form the right to bodily chastise any scholar in the school that the king of the Sixth Form declared deserved it.

If a teacher thought a pupil needed punishment, he turned the luckless one over to the Sixth Form. Can we now conceive of a system where the duty of certain scholars was to whip other scholars? Not only to whip them, but to beat them into insensibility if they fought back?

Such was schoolteaching in the public schools of England in Eighteen Hundred Thirty.

Against this brutality there was now a growing sentiment—a piping voice bidding the tide to stay!

But now that Arnold was in charge of Rugby, he got the ill-will of his directors by declaring that he did not intend to curtail the powers of the Sixth Form—he proposed to civilize it. To try out the new master, the Sixth Form, proud in their prowess, sent him word that if he interfered with them in any way, they would first "bust up the school," and then resign in a body. Moreover, they gave it out that if any pupil complained to the master concerning the Sixth Form, the one so complaining would be taken out by night and drowned in the classic Avon.

There were legends among the younger boys of strange disappearances, and these were attributed to the swift vengeance of "The Bloody Sixth."

Above the Sixth Form there was no law.

Every scholar took off his hat to a "Sixth." A Sixth uncovered to nobody, and touched his cap only to a teacher.

And custom had become so rooted that the Sixth Form was regarded as a sort of police necessity—a caste which served the school just as the Army served the Church. To reach the Sixth Form were paradise—it meant liberty and power—liberty to do as you pleased, and power to punish all who questioned your authority.

To uproot the power of the Sixth Form was the intent of a few reformers in pedagogics.

There were two ways to deal with the boys of the Sixth—fight them or educate them.

Arnold called the Rugby Sixth together and assured them that he could not do without their help. He needed them: he wanted to make Rugby a model school, a school that would influence all England—would they help him?

The dogged faces before him showed signs of interest. He continued, without waiting for their reply, to set before them his ideal of an English Gentleman. He persuaded them, melted them by his glowing personality, shook hands with each, and sent them away.

The next day he again met them in the same intimate way, and one of the boys made bold to assure him that if he wanted anybody licked—pupils or teachers—they stood ready to do his bidding.

He thanked the boy, but assured him that he was of the opinion that it would not be necessary to do violence to any one; he was going to unfold to them another way—a new way, which was very old, but which as yet England had not tried.

he great teacher is not the one who imparts the most facts—he is the one who inspires by supplying a nobler ideal.

Men are superior or inferior just in the ratio that they possess certain qualities. Truth, honor, frankness, health, system, industry, kindliness, good-cheer and a spirit of helpfulness are so far beyond any mental acquisition that comparisons are not only odious, but absurd.

Arnold inspired qualities, and in this respect his work at Rugby forms a white milestone on the path of progress in pedagogy.

To an applicant for a position as teacher, Arnold wrote:

What I want is a man who is a Christian and a gentleman, an active man, and one who has commonsense, and understands boys. I do not so much care about scholarship, as he will have immediately under him the lowest forms in the school, but yet, on second thought, I do care about it very much, because his pupils may be in the highest forms; and besides, I think that even the elements are best taught by a man who has a thorough knowledge of the matter. However, if one must give way, I prefer activity of mind and an interest in his work to high scholarship; for the one may be acquired far more easily than the other. I should wish it also to be understood that the new master may be called upon to take boarders in his house, it being my intention for the future to require this of all masters as I see occasion, that so in time the school-barracks may die a natural death. With this to offer, I think I have a right to look rather high for the man whom I fix upon, and it is my great object to get here a society of intelligent, gentlemanly and active men, who may permanently keep up the character of the school, and if I were to break my neck tomorrow, carry it on.

Ideas are in the air, and great inventions are worked out in different parts of the world at the same time. Rousseau had written his "Emile," but we are not aware that Arnold ever read it.

And if he had, he probably would have been shocked, not inspired, by its almost brutal frankness. The French might read it—the English could not.

Pestalozzi was working out his ideas in Switzerland, and Froebel, an awkward farmer lad in Germany, was dreaming dreams that were to come true. But Thomas Arnold caught up the threads of feeling in England and expressed them in the fabric of his life.

His plans were scientific, but his reasons, unlike those of Pestalozzi, will not always stand the test of close analysis. Arnold was true to the Church, but he found it convenient to forget much for which the Church stood. He went back to a source nearer the fountainhead. All reforms in organized religion lie in returning to the primitive type. The religion of Jesus was very simple; that of a modern church dignitary is very complex. One can be understood; the other has to be explained and expounded, and usually several languages are required.

Arnold would have his boys evolve into Christian gentlemen. And his type of English gentleman he did not get out of books on theology—it was his own composite idea. But having once evolved it, he cast around to justify it by passages of Scripture. This was beautiful, too, but from our standpoint it wasn't necessary.

From his it was.

A gentleman to him was a man who looked for the best in other people, and not for their faults; who overlooked slights; who forgot the good he had done; who was courteous, kind, cheerful, industrious and clean inside and out; who was slow to wrath, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord. And the "Lord" to Arnold was embodied in Church and State.

Arnold used to say that schoolteaching should not be based upon religion, but it should be religion. And to him religion and conduct were one.

That he reformed Rugby through the Sixth Form is a fact. He infused into the big boys the thought that they must help the little ones; that for a first offense a lad must never be punished; that he should have the matter fully explained to him, and be shown that he should do right because it is right, and not for fear of punishment.

The Sixth Form was taught to unbend its dignity and enter into fellowship with its so-called inferiors. To this end Arnold set the example of playing cricket with the "scrubs."

He never laughed at a poor player nor at a poor scholar. He took dull pupils into his own house, and insisted that his helpers, the other teachers, should do the same. He showed the Sixth Form how much better it was to take the part of the weak, and stop bullying the lower forms, than to set the example of it in the highest. Before Arnold had been at Rugby a year, the Sixth Form had resolved itself into a Reception Committee that greeted all newcomers, got them located, introduced them to the other boys, showed them the sights, and looked after their wants like big brothers or foster-fathers.

Christianity to Arnold was human service. In his zeal to serve, to benefit, to bless, to inspire, he never tired.

Such a disposition as this is contagious. In every big business or school, there is one man's mental attitude that animates the whole institution. Everybody partakes of it. When the leader gets melancholia, the shop has it—the whole place becomes tinted with ultra-marine. The best helpers begin to get out, and the honeycombing process of dissolution is on.

A school must have a soul, just as surely as a shop, a bank, a hotel, a store, a home, or a church has to have. When an institution grows so great that it has no soul—simply a financial head and a board of directors—dry-rot sets in and disintegration in a loose wrapper is at the door.

This explains why the small colleges are the best, when they are: there is a personality about them, an animating spirit that is pervasive and preservative.

Thomas Arnold was not a man of vast learning, nor could one truthfully say he had a surplus of intellect; but he had soul, plus. He never sought to save himself. He gave himself to the boys of Rugby. His heart went out to them, he believed in them—and he believed them even when they lied, and he knew they lied. He knew that humanity was sound at heart; he believed in the divinity of mankind, and tried hard to forget the foolish theology that taught otherwise.

Like Thomas Jefferson, who installed the honor system in the University of Virginia, he trusted young men. He made his appeal to that germ of goodness which is in every human soul. In some ways he anticipated Ben Lindsey in his love for the boy, and might have conjured forth from his teeming brain the Juvenile Court, and thus stopped the creation of criminals, had his life not been consumed in a struggle with stupidity and pedantry gone to seed that cried to him, "Oh, who ever heard of such a thing as that!"

The Kindergarten utilizes the propensity to play; and Arnold utilizes the thirst for authority. Altruism is flavored with a desire for approbation.

The plan of self-government by means of utilizing the Sixth Form was quite on the order of our own "George Junior Republic." "A school," he said, "should be self-governing and cleanse itself from that which is harmful." And again he says: "If a pupil can gratify his natural desire for approbation by doing that which is right, proper and best, he will work to this end instead of being a hero by playing the rowdy. It is for the scholars to set the seal of their approval on character, and they will do so if we as teachers speak the word. If I find a room in a tumult, I blame myself, not the scholars. It is I who have failed, not they. Were I what I should be, every one of my pupils would reflect my worth. I key the situation, I set the pace, and if my soul is in disorder, the school will be in confusion."

Nothing is done without enthusiasm. It is heart that wins, not head, the round world over. And yet head must systematize the promptings of the heart. Arnold had a way of putting soul into a hand-clasp. His pupils never forgot him. Wherever they went, no matter how long they lived, they proclaimed the praises of Arnold of Rugby. How much this earnest, enthusiastic, loving and sincere teacher has influenced civilization, no man can say. But this we know, that since his day there has come about a new science of teaching. The birch has gone with the dunce-cap. The particular cat-o'-nine-tails that was burned in the house of Thomas Arnold as a solemn ceremony, when the declaration was made, "Henceforth I know my children will do right!" has found its example in every home of Christendom.

We no longer whip children. Schools are no longer places of dread, pain and suffering, and we as teachers are repeating with Friedrich Froebel the words of the Nazarene, "Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven."

Also, we say with Thomas Arnold: "The boy is father to the man. A race of gentlemen can only be produced by fostering in the boy the qualities that make for health, strength and a manly desire to bless, benefit and serve the race."

FRIEDRICH FROEBEL

The purpose of the Kindergarten is to provide the necessary and natural help which poor mothers require who have to be about their work all day, and must leave their children to themselves. The occupations pursued in the Kindergarten are the following: free play of a child by itself; free play of several children by themselves; associated play under the guidance of a teacher; gymnastic exercises; several sorts of handiwork suited to little children; going for walks; learning music, both instrumental and vocal; learning the repetition of poetry; story-telling; looking at really good pictures; aiding in domestic occupations; gardening.

—Froebel