public schools, have very little intimate knowledge as to their administration. It is a common and just complaint of public school teachers and principals that the parents of their pupils show so little interest in the operations of the public school. There has existed in the city of New York for a number of years a voluntary association called the Public Education Association, the purpose of which is "to study the problems of public education, investigate the condition of the common and corporate schools, stimulate public interest in the schools, and to propose from time to time such changes in their organization, management, or educational method as may seem necessary or desirable." This excellent Association has recently been reorganized for the purpose of making its work more effective. On a money basis alone such an organization is highly desirable, for the city of New York spends on its public schools the enormous sum of $35,000,000 a year. The Association in its reorganized form hopes to become a sort of clearing-house for current educational ideas. Its general object will be:

To obtain the ideas and suggestions of the teachers and school administrators themselves, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, of citizens and organizations outside of, but interested in, the schools.

To make available the results of the experience of other cities.

To provide for the numerous citizen organizations interested in education a means of cooperation by which their efforts will be economized and made more effective.

To provide a simple and direct channel by which the Department of Education may utilize the suggestions and data furnished by the other agencies.

In carrying out this programme the Association will do systematic work with the aid of a competent staff of experts. It will classify the facts which it obtains, and will supply the information in its possession to all those who are interested in the problems of the public school. It is estimated that the annual expenditure of the Association will be about $45,000.. We call attention to its purposes and programme for two reasons: first, to bespeak for it the financial and moral support of those who recognize the fact that the public school is the corner-stone of American education; and, second, to advise those who are dealing with similar problems in other parts of the country to co-operate with it. Inquiries for further information may be addressed to the Executive Secretary of

the Association, Mr. Arthur W. Dunn, 281 Fourth Avenue, New York City.

The Use of Intoxicants by Railway Employees

The management of the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western system has issued a general order which deserves chronicling. It will be appreciated, we think, by all railway travelers. Its most discussed clause refers to the use of liquor by employees. One of the American Railway Association's rules, adopted by most of the railways of the country, reads as follows:

The use of intoxicants by employees while on duty is prohibited. Their habitual use, or the frequenting of places where they are sold, is sufficient cause for dismissal.

The

It is a good rule that prohibits the use of intoxicants altogether while employees are on duty. And it is also a good rule that prohibits their habitual use, or the frequenting of places where they are sold, at any time. But we are glad that the Lackawanna Company at least is now going a step further and will prohibit the use of intoxicating liquors to employees directly connected with the movements of trains at all times. principle of action on American railways generally is still that, so long as men avoid the habitual use of liquors when off duty, and abstain entirely when on duty, they are reasonably safe. There is, however, but one absolutely safe course to be followed by these classes of men; and that is the extreme course which the Lackawanna Company has now wisely ordered. The Company may be criticised for interfering with personal liberty, but, in view of the great risks involved in railway transportation, public sentiment will, we believe, support its position. Its new general order reads as follows:

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In furtherance of the objects of the several Federal and State "hours of service" laws, employees in engine, train, yard, and station service are prohibited from using their time while off duty in a manner that may unfit them for the safe, prompt, and efficient performance of their respective duties for the Company. They are strictly enjoined and required to use their time while off duty primarily for obtaining ample rest. The use of intoxicants while on or off duty, or the visiting of saloons or places where liquor is sold, incapacitates men for railroad service, and is absolutely prohibited. Any violation of this rule by employees in engine, train, yard, or station service will be sufficient cause for dismissal.

Though it has not attracted nearly as much public attention, the first part of the new rule is, we are convinced, quite as important

as the second. There are many other forms of dissipation besides drinking which tend to unfit men for their duties. Where the safety of hundreds of passengers is absolutely dependent upon an engineer's alertness, it is certainly essential that he should come to his work refreshed by abundant sleep and in full possession of all his physical and mental faculties. While Federal and State laws require railway companies to give their men sufficient time for rest at stated intervals, something further is requisite if the opportunity those laws afford is to be rightly used. The public welfare, as well as the welfare of the men, requires that the time allowed by law for rest should be reasonably well spent, and to this end moral pressure exerted by the companies and, better yet, by the men themselves, is in the public interest.

THE INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT AT WORK

Mr. Archbold, of the Standard Oil Company, and Mr. Penrose, Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, with the aid of Democratic Senators, including Messrs. Stone and Bailey, have rendered a service of signal value to the American people. They have been giving to the people a glimpse of the "Invisible Government at work.

This is the Invisible Government-it was described in Mr. Beveridge's speech at the Progressive Convention :

The special interests which suck the people's substance are bipartisan. They use both parties. They are the invisible government behind our visible government. Democratic and Republican bosses alike are brother officers of this hidden power. No matter how fiercely they pretend to fight one another before election, they work together after election. And, acting so, this political conspiracy is able to delay, mutilate, or defeat sound and needed laws for the people's welfare and the prosperity of honest business, and even to enact bad laws, hurtful to the people's welfare and oppressive to honest business.

Such is the Invisible Government as described in general terms; but what evidence is there that it exists? It is a "hidden power." How can it be revealed? This is where Messrs. Archbold, Penrose, Stone, and their allies enter and give their testimony. They are benefactors of the Nation; for at the very moment when the people are most ready to listen they have given an answer.

Mr. Archbold represents a special interest whose methods have been described by the United States Supreme Court in terms severer than any we should care to use. Mr. Penrose is the head of a political machine whose power has been unsurpassed in the history of any boss-ruled State. These two men have acknowledged that they were participants-one as giver, the other as receiver, of money-in a transaction the object of which was to protect this special interest from molestation by the Government; and they both acknowledge that Mr. Archbold's special interest was at the time of this transaction under investigation by a commission of which Mr. Penrose was a member !

Why have they made such a confession? Because they did not realize it was a confession until they had made it. They thought it was an attack upon a common enemy. And running to their assistance in this attack have come Messrs. Stone and Bailey and other Democratic Senators. It is a strange and instructive spectacle to see these members of the tripartite Invisible Government grouping themselves naturally against the Progressives.

They seem to have forgotten for the moment that the strength of the Invisible Government depends upon its remaining invisible.

This "hidden power" will cease to be a power when it ceases to be hidden.

Messrs. Archbold, Penrose, Bailey, and Company, with their supporters among the subsidized press, have been public benefactors in bringing the operations of the Invisible Government, if only for a moment, into the public view.

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THE USES OF REPARTEE

Mr. Brander Matthews's happy definition and illustration of "The Art of Repartee in the August number of the "Century Magazine" admit of almost indefinite expansion. It is not beside the mark to say that Mr. Matthews himself has often furnished admirable examples of the retort courteous which is also the retort entertaining. The repartee is not always the kind of answer that turneth away wrath, but it is generally the kind of answer that makes conversation interesting. Talleyrand, from whom Mr. Matthews draws some fetching examples of this art of verbal fencing, was one of its greatest practitioners, but he was not a solitary master of the verbal rapier; he was surrounded by

experts. For the repartee is an art fostered by a highly organized or highly artificial social life. The French, who have developed with exceptional success what Matthew Arnold called the power of social life, have made conversation one of the great resources of that life. They have not been content simply to talk; they have learned to converse, which is talk raised to the rank of a fine art.

Any person of average quickness of mind can talk, and many are able to talk without any intellectual qualification; but conversation involves restraint, fair play in the matter of time, the courtesy of attention, and skill in the use of words. Many talkers use the bludgeon; the conversationists use the rapier. The talker may be, and often is, a barbarian surviving from the age of brute force; a conversationist is the product of a high degree of civilization, a person whose mind has been ripened by contact with other minds, and who has responded to the touch of that happy genius of respect for one another which is the source of good manners. The repartee often has the edge of a Damascus blade; it never has the mass or shape of an Indian club. When Dumas, who was a master of wit as well as of the art of writing the romance of adventure, was asked by a lady how he grew old so gracefully, he made the inimitable answer: "Madame, I give all my time to it !" This has a very different quality from the remark of a Member of Congress whom Speaker Reed had finally forced into his seat: "I thank Heaven I don't look like a gigantic rubber baby blown up by a cyclone !" The provocatión was great and the retort had an elementary effectiveness, but it was war, not art. Mr. Reed was a czar in speech as well as in parliamentary methods, and had a natural gift for putting things. When a recalcitrant Member was forced, after a fierce struggle, to yield the floor, he tried to take the edge off defeat by repeating sotto voce the well-worn phrase, "I would rather be right than be President." The Speaker promptly retorted, "The gentleman need not trouble himself; he will never be either," and went on with the business before the House.

The campaign orator is sometimes sorely discomfited by a really insignificant foe who happens to put an embarrassing question to which a quick and convincing reply is not at hand. Such questions are, however, the happy opportunities of men of rapid mental

"Are there forty thousand coffins ready at the undertakers' this evening?"

In this case the repartee required a little clearing of the way, but when it came it ended the discussion. The wife of a wellknown public man was once presented to Mr. Blaine at a reception. She had only a few words with him and passed on, and did not meet him again for several years. She is a woman of charming personality and of unusual height. At the second interview Mr. Blaine held out his hand with great cordiality and promptly called her by name. possible that you remember me, Mr. Blaine ?" "There are people whom one never forgets," was the reply.

"Yes," responded the lady; height makes me conspicuous.”

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"Is it

"my unusual

There are other altitudes than physical height," retorted the gallant statesman.

There have been not only witty statesmen but witty kings; Charles the Second was one of them. When some one praised Lord Godolphin, a very successful courtier and politician, he promptly replied, "Godolphin is never in the way and never out of it ;" a description of the time-serving politician as complete as it is brief. And when, in a time of great popular excitement, he was riding home from a review with his brother the Duke of York, afterwards James the Second,

ably I have been exposed; I have been long in London." She probably did not understand, but the thrust must have given the primitive man in Lowell the satisfaction of having given a neat rapier stroke. And the American girl who met the remark of a lady in the same city that she could see no reason why you Americans seem to think so much of your own country," with the retort, "I suppose it must be because we have seen some of the other countries," deserves the place Mr. Matthews makes for her well-put answer. He might well have added the repartee of another American who, in answer to the remark, "It must be very disagreeable to live in a country whose rulers you are not willing to invite to dine with you," promptly replied: "It is; but it's less disagreeable than living in a country whose rulers are not willing to ask you to dine with them." The international uses of the repartee are many, and happy examples of the art are found everywhere. One of the neatest was the retort of the Englishman to the Viennese who commented on the awkwardness with which many English people speak foreign languages: "You see, we have not had half the armies of Europe here to teach us."

CAPITALISM, PROGRESSIVISM,

SOCIALISM

Any one who is inclined to imagine that Socialism and Progressivism are akin is recommended to read two new books, one by a Socialist, "Socialism As It Is," by W. E. Walling, the other, "The New Democracy," by Walter E. Weyl.

" 2

There is one opinion, and only one, which Progressivism and Socialism hold in common. They believe that social conditions to-day are not right; that there are too many excessively rich men and far too many poor men in the community; that we have not solved, and hardly have begun to study, the problem how to distribute wealth; that the rising discontent is not due to demagogues, nor is it a discontent with conditions which must in the nature of the case exist; that it is real and well grounded, and is due to conditions which ought to be corrected; that

'Socialism'As It Is: A Survey of the World-Wide Revolutionary Movement. By William English Walling. The Macmillan Company, New York.

2 The New Democracy: An Essay on Certain Political and Economic Tendencies in the United States. By Walter E. Weyl, Ph.D. The Macmillan Company, New York.

there are real evils, and that they can be remedied.

But the remedy proposed by Progressives and the remedy proposed by Socialists are not the same; they are not merely inconsistent, they are directly and emphatically antagonistic. The greatest foe to Socialism is not Conservatism, it is Progressivism.

Mr. Walling points out with great clearness, in his chapter on "Socialism and the Class Struggle," the essential spirit of Socialism : "The Socialist view of the evolution of society is that the central fact of history is this struggle of classes for political and economic power." This class struggle becomes more bitter the longer it lasts. It is "not a mere theory, but a widely recognized reality." "No indorsement of any so-called Socialist theory of reform is of practical moment unless it includes that theory, which has survived out of the struggles of the movement and has been tested by hard experience—a theory in which ways and means are not the last but the first consideration—namely, the class struggle." Because Theodore Roosevelt and Lyman Abbott do not believe that this class struggle is to go on and that peace is to come only by the victory of one class over the other, they are taken by Mr. Walling as types of the men whose teaching Socialism most emphatically resists. "Without this militant attitude Socialists believe that even the most radical reforms, not excepting those that sincerely propose equal opportunity or the abolition of social classes as their ultimate aim, must fail to carry society forward a single step in that direction. Take as an example Dr. Lyman Abbott. . . . Notwithstanding his advocacy of industrial democracy, his attack on the autocracy of capitalism and the wages system, and his insistence that the distinction between nonpossessing and possessing classes must be abolished, Dr. Abbott opposes a class struggle." So again : "Said Mr. Roosevelt in his Sorbonne lecture: '. Ruin looks us in the face if we judge a man by his position instead of judging him by his conduct in that position." " To this Mr. Walling replies: "Ruin looks us in the face if, in politics, we judge the men who occupy a certain position (the members of a certain class) by their conduct as individuals, instead of judging them by the fact that they occupy a certain position and are members of a certain class."

...

In brief, Socialists hold that there is a

certain amount of wealth in the world. It is now largely in the control of one class. They desire to league together the other of the two classes to get possession of that wealth for themselves. The two classes are like two gamblers at the gaming-tabe, each trying to get the stakes away from the other.

"In

Mr. Weyl approaches the same problem from the point of view of the Progressive. He repudiates emphatically the notion that peace can come only through a class war carried on to its consummation. It will come through the recognition of the fact that modern industry creates a social surplus; that the prosperous community creates more than it consumes; and that, to remain prosperous and peaceful, it must learn how this surplus wealth can be justly, equably, honestly administered. It is because in America this social surplus has increased so rapidly, and because in America the distribution of this social surplus has, in spite of the creation of multimillionaires, been carried further than in the Old World, that Socialism makes little headway here, and would make none at all if it were not increased by immigration. America the old doctrine of a class war between two classes must of absolute necessity be given up by the Socialist party, and must fail of adoption by other parties." "Democratic civilization will progress even more through adjustment and education than through the war which aids one class and injures another. Political power in the State will not change from one class to its opponent, like a reversible top or an overweighted balance, for the State is not and will not be absolutely the representative of a single class." In the early centuries of Christianity slavery was abolished, not as the result of war, but as the result of education. The slaves grew into too large a manhood to be kept in slavery. The slave-owners grew into too large a manhood to be willing to keep them in slavery. Both capitalist and laborer are going, in America, through a similar process of education. "Capitalism develops elasticity. Instead of dying of its own excesses, it shows wonderful recuperative and self-reforming power. Class hatred softens as the working classes strengthen, and the impending clash between the classes is always delayed. The absolute Socialist cries, War, War!' when there is no war." Mr. Weyl believes, and his book gives abundant justification for his belief, that the remedy for the present unrest is neither, on the