play, or whistle, can find entertainment, can live in the dark and dreary intervals that come into every life. To me, often, music is the only solace the world can give."

"By music, minds an equal temper know,

Nor swell too high, nor sink too low;
If in the breast tumultuous joys arise,
Music her soft persuasive voice applies."

IN

AMONG DISTRICT SCHOOL LIBRARIES.

BY CHARLES HOWARD SHINN,

Of the Overland Monthly, San Francisco.

'N THE first schoolhouse in which I taught, a log cabin, beside a mountain stream in the wilderness that then stretched almost without a farm from Paso Robles to the Pacific Ocean, there was a "school library" of perhaps fifty volumes. They had been chosen by the previous teacher, who was fond of horses. He had put twelve or fifteen books such as "Youatt on the Horse" in the library, and half a dozen English racing novels. Then there was Bancroft's "Native Races," five large volumes, a lot of perfectly worthless subscription books, such as the "Album of the World," and some theological works contributed by a very relig ious trustee. During a year in this district I never knew anybody to take out a book!

In another California school that I knew of a few years later, the teacher's hobby was "grammar," and he spent most of the library funds for the books in this line, from Goold Brown's massive volume to Whitney and Max Muller. This teacher walked and slept in an atmosphere of grammar, and knew very little of any other literature. At the county institute in Monterey, years ago, he read a paper on English Grammar," in the course of which he said that he had read "every important book on the subject." A young teacher had the audacity to ask him whether he had studied Cardinal Newman's great "Grammar of Assent."

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"Well, no, really he must confess he had overlooked that work. He would send for it immediately." It came before the close of the Institute, and he was with difficulty restrained from a public denunciation of the "wretched levity of that unprincipled young rascal."

These are the lightest of illustrations, but perhaps they will help to outline my subject. Almost every school district in America has some sort of a library, and hardly any force of the public school is more often wasted or misapplied. My own personal knowledge of the condition of school libraries is chiefly confined to the Pacific states and territories. I have examined a few in Maryland and Texas, a few in Connecticut and Massachusetts, but nearly all the libraries I have looked over are in California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. I have not examined them with any official authority; I was first a teacher, then an ex-teacher, still interested in the public schools.

The conditions under which the school library is accumulated differ greatly in different states. Here in California, a certain percentage of the school fund is set apart, and a list of books is furnished by the State Board, from which books are supposed to be selected. The list is well enough, if the right person selects from it. But it is not always followed, even now, and if a complete catalogue of the school libraries of the state were to be issued, I am afraid that it would contain many surprises. I was once principal of a grammar school in a large town, and I had the pleasure of burning a copy of one of G. M. Reynold's novels, and a well-thumbed edition of the "Pirate's Own" that had been in the library since time immemorial. There had been no catalogue, and no register of books taken out, and none of the trustees knew how the books got into the library. Twenty years ago a Tehama County friend of mine found a stack of dime novels that "had been presented to the library" by a farm laborer who had lived near the schoolhouse, a few years before!

One of the troubles about the school libraries of the Pacific coast is that the lists of books contain a number of expensive subscription books which pay agents to make a thorough canvass of the trustees, and to endeavor to secure all or nearly all of the annual library fund. Books are published with especial reference to this end, and it often happens that a school library contains only a few expensive works, entirely unsuitable for the children's reading, and of little value for the teacher.

I have seen a great deal of generosity towards school libraries on the part of private persons. In one case, a gentleman sent more than two hundred well-selected books from his own library to the schoolhouse, as soon as he felt certain that it was well man

aged, and likely to remain so. In another case, the book-reviewer on a San Francisco newspaper sent all the suitable juveniles he obtained to a district school in the Redwoods. But it is a necessary factor of such an outside interest in the school library, that the collection is made to hold a place in the social life of the district. Its books must supply a constantly increasing attraction. They must be read and talked over by the elder members of the family; they must be literature and not textbooks. The well- . chosen school library is an instrument of power in the hands of a skillful teacher. It should contain some of the best works on science, and some of the most complete books of reference. But its great mission is to carry into bookless homes the joy and worth of litera

ture.

Nothing better could be done for the public schools of America than the formation of library associations, first by counties, then by states, then by able and educated delegates to a national convention to formulate a plan for the adoption, by the states, of a uniform law relating to school libraries. This ought to be the work of the school teachers. The system, so common in many states, of allowing the trustees to have the sole power of selecting and buying the library books has nothing to recommend it. As a teacher said to me once: "It is perfectly true that I usually choose the books. But I have to write out my list and then go and see the leading trustee and tell him just exactly why I want them, and sometimes I find that an agent for Men of our Times' 'Heroes of the West,' or Blank's thirty-volume history, is ahead of me, and I have to fight for the children's magazine or the volume of Hans Christian Andersen that I want. I do not think that I ought to have to work so hard to keep the library fund from being wasted. If I should leave, and the next teacher should not use the library, as I do, every day and hour, the trustees would certainly be inveigled into some hundred dollar contract that would keep the district from having a single new book of interest to children for at least two years."

or

This young lady, a university graduate, and one of the most capable and broad-minded teachers I ever knew, suggested further that the school superintendent should have veto power on lists of books, and that purchases should be made by him so as to obtain the largest possible discount. She wanted to have subscription books of every sort, manuals, histories, lives, compendiums, cyclopedias, ruled out of libraries of less than a thousand volumes.

"Let us make an exception in favor of the encyclopedia," I said, "it is certain that country schools need a good cyclopedia.” "Of course they do," she replied. "All the orders for cyclopedias from every school in the state ought to be filled once a year by the publishers at the same price that their wholesale agents pay for them. United action on the part of the teachers is all that is needed to put down the middle men in this case."

"Now there is Shakespeare," she continued. "The favorite edition that gets into school libraries is one with almost unreadable type, published at about seventy-five cents. Suppose that the public schools were well organized in the matter of libraries, a good annotated edition, with the plays in separate volumes, would soon displace the cheap and worthless ones.

"And, to take the stories for children-such stories as those of Miss Alcott, Mrs. Dodge, Helen Campbell, Mrs. Ewing, Mrs. Burnett, Kate Smith Wiggin, Noah Brooks, J. T. Trowbridge, and a dozen others - the trustees are apt to object to them. They want solid books, they say, and I had a world of trouble to get 'Little Lord Fauntleroy' in the library. Sometimes, too, I want a book for a year or two before it gets into the state list."

Then we talked over the library association idea, and we agreed that the deplorable condition of a large percentage of the school libraries ought to arouse teachers to a sense of the need of organization. Not that all libraries should be alike, not that a cast iron list of books should be made, but that a broad discussion of the principles upon which a working library can be built up, may be secured. The problem is, to increase the efficiency of the libraries in each school district, and make them a source of good to the community at large. Is not this a subject well worth the discussion of American teachers?

UR four anchors, holding us fast from behind, are the examples and teachings of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. The first represents virtue in politics; the second, good sense in politics; the third, democracy in politics; the fourth, humanity in politics. Let us reverence these great examples, holding us firm to a noble past, and so saving us for a better future. With four such illustrious lives as these to reverence, to study, and to follow, we may feel that in the most stormy hours, and the darkest nights, we may hold safe by these anchors "and wish for day." -JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LEIBNITZ.

BY CHARLES E. LOWREY, PH. D., BOULDER, COLO.

ALMOST two centuries since the oracular utterances of Leib

nitz. Mathematician, physicist, biologist, and philosopher have vied with one another in proclaiming the distinguished scholar and diplomat the most suggestive thinker of the modern world.

In Leibnitz alone have the great leaders of English thought acknowledged a foeman worthy of their steel. But Leibnitz proclaimed no system,-taught no philosophy. He was a man of affairs. His every act, however, was so permeated with eternal truth as to bestir thinkers with his own inspiration.

From the isolated fragments of a miscellaneous correspondence to supply a philosophic harmony of his life and writings presupposed the patience, the liberal scholarship, and the Catholic insight of the master. In fact, the difficulty of the task accounts for the long hesitation of scholars in undertaking it.

It is, consequently, no small commendation of American scholarship that it be credited with the first critical and comprehensive explanation of the philosophy of Leibnitz in the English language, an exposition so lucid and exact as to make it of real value to every man of culture, to every student of philosophy.

With this introduction of Leibnitz to the English speaking public, comes the propriety of noting how wonderfully pregnant his thought, with suggestions looking to a proper solution of the social and educational questions of the day.

THE SPIRIT OF CATHOLICITY.

That Leibnitz was born and nurtured in the atmosphere of the University of Leipsic, may have made him a scholar after the model of his contemporaries. But that it was his privilege from his sixth year to his fifteenth to live in the classic library of the city and to drink in at pleasure some conception of the thought already bequeathed to us by the past, rendered him in addition a

'Leibnitz's New Essays on the Human Understanding. A critical exposition by John Dewey, Ph. D., Professor of Philosophy in the University of Minnesota. S. C. Griggs & Company, Chicago, 1888. 16mo. 289 pages. $1.25.