to feed is back of Germany's insistence on a "place in the sun." The fallacy of Germany's aggression is obvious—there will not always be room to expand, by war or otherwise-and in this matter we can learn from France. Wherever there is a high standard of living, we find the birth rate falling, as the upper classes of all countries illustrate. But France is the only large, highly civilized, healthy nation in which small families are the rule in all classes, and in which the birth and death rates have been approximately equal for a long period. This fact causes many to sneer at France's alleged decadence, but her conduct in the war should convince all those who ignored her great and continued contributions to the progress of civilization, that such a judgment was an absurd libel. She has demonstrated the fact that where quality and not number is the ideal, it is possible to limit the birth rate artificially, without sinking into decadence.

Our upper classes, who wish to give their children education and other advantages, do not have large families as a rule. Unfortunately, the large family is common among the very people with whom an extra child is often a grievous burden, a cause of sorrow. This condition should be looked squarely in the face, all hypocrisy put aside, and a campaign of education in harmless prevention of conception inaugurated, so that the necessity for foresight may be brought to the attention of the most thoughtless. Public opinion should be influenced to remove from prevention of conception the moral stigma, which is influential with the simple and lowly, but is secretly derided by the educated and prosperous.

It has been urged that this would cause an increase in illicit sex relations, and a decrease in the number of marriages. When this objection, usually greatly exaggerated by its supporters, is weighed against the present indiscriminate bringing into the world of undesired children, to be a burden to themselves, their parents and society generally, it seems to sink into insignificance. The vast majority are always normal and wholesome, glad to sacrifice themselves within reason for the sake of having children to love and cherish. Unquestionably the race would improve rapidly, if all children were the offspring of such parents, and the latter did not have so many children as to be handicapped

in bringing them up. Of course, exceptions occur, cases where hardships not merely intensify the family affection and stimulate effort, but also develop sterling personalities. As a general rule, however, the child with reasonable advantages-not the spoiled child will undeniably outstrip the one who suffers privations and gets a bad start. Finally, if overcrowding means wars at recurrent intervals, that fact alone should be argument enough for a change in our public and acknowledged attitude to prevention of conception. We must not only build soundly for the immediate future, but must consider our children's children; and not lay up menaces against their welfare.

CONCLUSION

No nation can feel sure of peace with honor, no matter how peaceful her own attitude. Hence, national integrity must have as a defence adequate military strength. Foreign policy must be consistent with national ideas and military power. America has material resources capable of maintaining ample military defences, but lacks national spirit necessary to develop potential into actual strength. Economic causes underlie our lack of national spirit, and political purging, with reorganization on a more centralized basis, must precede economic reforms. Public opinion must be aroused and educated to the need of constructive reforms essential to a sound and secure national future.

With our economic and political house in order, we should be free from the debasing materialism of dollar-worship on the one hand and soul-destroying force-worship on the other. Our workmen, business men, and statesmen inspired by a spirit of service, our artists, scientists, and philosophers devoted to the advancement of beauty and truth, all would be bound together by the common desire to produce an ever finer and richer life, so that our nation might be in the lead in the great evolutionary development of a nobler humanity.

WILMER T. STONE.

New York City.

AVARICIOUS OF DUTY

One hears of many people in this world who profess themselves weary of the eternal iteration and reduplication of things. They say they are sometimes almost sickened at the unvarying prospect of eating three meals at the same intervals every day and electing one president inalterably every four years. Politics turns in cycles and religion moves by the same fits and the same starts which history has already shown. They can't even achieve novelty by proclaiming lack of novelty, for the Preacher did that while the world was still comparatively new.

To one thus irked and harassed by this revolving mimeograph of creation, there is still one resource, perhaps by him yet unobserved. In the world of modern education, if he turns to it, he will find that variety and ceaseless novelty which he has looked for in vain elsewhere. For that is one place where they never cease either to think of or to do some new thing. To look closely at the spectacle is to be dizzied, bewildered. To look away from it awhile is to be startled and puzzled by changes on renewing one's gaze. Theory follows upon theory, experiment upon experiment, until the alive and alert educator hardly dares to sleep, lest he be passed in the night.

The wearied one will be awed into interest by the mere comprehensiveness of the educational structure, and most of all by the keenness to discover duties, the wit to recognize them as its own, and the all-accepting readiness to lift them and away with them, to be found in the active educational body. No sooner does a need or even a desideratum of youth appear or draw new attention to itself in any way, than ardent and omnivorous educators clap it into the public schools, and with it new duties for teachers.

Nothing is too hard or too comprehensive for the pedagogic conscience. Other once-recognized forces are rapidly being stripped bare of duties and functions. One stands amazed at such dauntless and avaricious conscientiousness. The most of us are likely, when we see needs or duties lying about us, to say public-spiritedly, "Somebody ought to do that.” But the

aroused educator says instead, "I ought to do that," and straightway hastens to the attempt. Nor does he even stop at willingness to take complete charge of the mental and physical and moral and social development of the child, but goes on into what might be regarded as intimate and private relations, and lays hands on his very soul. For the final business of every teacher, we learn from many eager essays in educational journals and many sententious lectures, is the development of personality-individuality. "Don't teach the subject, teach the child," is the beginning of their cry. "Anybody can learn a subject—anybody can teach a subject. But real pedagogy teaches the child —and develops his personality." One wonders, a little agape, how they dare. Could you venture, with an ordinary conscience, to tell even an eight-year-old that you were going to develop his personality? Might he not seek you out in later years and tell you that he intended to have a gentleman's satisfaction from you? And what if, in addition to that, he discovered that you were keeping a day-book of him, a double-entry record of his personal affairs and your suspicions and deductions regarding them and his personality, with the intention of passing it on to the next teacher, still a stranger to him, and eventually to a Superintendent of Research and Efficiency? What are the rights of personality in a case like that?

But the pedagogic conscience dareth all things. If a new human function, entirely private and domestic, were discovered to-morrow, by the next day some duty regarding it would be laid upon the teachers of the public schools. One might suppose that we were a parentless race, from the combined devotion and avidity with which the school seizes upon function after function of parenthood. "The home no longer functions," says one, “in relating the individual unit to the great social entity." It will not be the fault of the school if it continues to function in any degree. Talk of feminism! There will soon be no other possibility open to a mother but desuetude or feministic pursuits. After the public school has taught her children to brush their teeth and admire nature and love their country and speak the truth and raise their hats and use soap and eat with a fork, and has examined their tonsils and their eyes and discovered their

adenoids, and has given them credit in school units for being kind to their parents and little brothers and getting up to breakfast and hanging up their hats and for every other slightest evidence of a rudimentary sense of duty shown at home; after they have been led to some library hall to hear a professional story-teller tell professionally the very stories that mothers used to tell with divine amateurishness; after they have been haled off to a public playground where some briefly trained specialist will herd them together with the unassorted children of the neighborhood and teach them to play (the italics are my own); -after all this, what is there for the lonely and idle mother to do but to read to her children the ready-made bed-time story which a hundred thousand other mothers are reading to their children, and go out into the world, a feminist-errant? One almost suspects the Creator must have been an amateur Himself instead of a professional, or He would not have made the mistake of giving children to parents, instead of handing them over at once to a school of education.

This steady and ingenious increase in the variety and complexity of the curriculum is not the only addition to the teacher's duties. Constantly—if practice corresponds to the theories before us always-the teacher is made more completely responsible for the whole result of education. All the geniality and sweet-mindedness and balminess that has gone into education lately, is for the pupil, not for the teacher. The whole study seems to be to ease the burden of the pupil-only a normal human burden after all-and let him walk lightly along a roseate path of inclination. We hear of happy schools where the word "Don't" is never uttered. Require nothing of the child, everything of the teacher, is the cry. Nothing is too hard for the teacher; but ask of the pupil only that he remain his simple, natural self. Let the teacher, though, at any expense of effort, turn this naturalness somehow or other into an instructed and developed result. One can't help wondering where the next generation of teachers is to come from. Will one who has been Montessoried effortlessly into perfection and maturity have the patience and will and self-sternness to lead anyone else into the same path?