class that was making a special study of bluings, and I learned how much waste there was in block and ball bluings, and that the proper thing to use was a specially prepared aniline dye of the proper shade. I was shown how my intelligent demand for clean clothes could be satisfied, how the thing I wanted could be produced. As part of this education, the girls at Teachers College also test out washing-machines and mangles, irons, and soaps, bought in the open market, with reference to their effect on the things washed, their cost to buy and operate, and the skill, time, and strength their use involves. The College does not, however, lay down any fiat on bluing, nor on washing-machines, nor on any other laundry appliance; for may not far better things be invented in the future? It teaches the points in the production of clean clothes. as it might teach the points in judging foxterriers-not whether any specific flat-iron or small dog is good or bad.

Inextricably mixed up with learning how to get produced the things one wants is learning how to secure them after they are produced. The consumer must be trained to remove the obstacles between himself and the thing he needs. These obstacles are usually matters of cost-cost and its contributing causes, transportation, the exploitation of public utilities, the smothering of useful patents, and the arbitrary limiting of useful manufacture. From all over the country come letters full of the same things that are in the contributors' columns of the papers and magazines. 'Eggs cost sixty cents a dozen, so we use rice instead." "Electric current for heating is so expensive that we still burn coal." "I would like to send Harold to college, but it costs so much that I cannot afford to." "Do not use butter in making pastry, for, though the flavor is better, the cost is very much more.

66

The consumer and those who advise him take prices as final things, as representing the true cost plus a fair profit, whereas in reality

Now the trained consumer knows that there is no fuel like electricity, so clean, so reliable, so easily controlled; but the better trained she is, the more certainly she knows that she is as much cut off from using it as though it were ambergris. Why? Because it varies in price from ten to nineteen cents a kilowatt-hour. I have just called up the contract department of the Common

wealth Edison Company, of Chicago, and found that the net rate for family use is ten cents, exactly the same as in New York City. But the people of the region have taxed themselves to build a drainage canal, a property now belonging to the people, which has developed 125,000 horse-power, about 100,000 horse-power of which is available. This, in the form of electric current, at the very lowest estimate, is worth about $2,000,000 a year. Some experts reckon it to be worth ten times that. A small thing, but their own, and what could it not do if turned into the kitchens of Chicago at cost? Does that ten cent a kilowatt-hour rate have to stand? Is it wise to teach the consumers that it is a Heaven-fixed obstacle to good housekeeping? They broke down the $1 per 1,000 feet gas limit in New York City, the car-fare rate in Cleveland, and the freightrate limits in Wisconsin!

I was talking with a woman from Sun Prairie, a small Wisconsin town in the midst of a dairy district.

"Oh, yes, I cook with electricity," she said. "It does cost a good deal now, because, you see, the plant is just new and we haven't paid for it yet."

"Paid for it ?"

She looked at me for a moment in uncomprehending surprise, then smiled her amuse

ment.

"Oh, it belongs to the town, you know. We pay a good price for the current now-almost as much as they do in the city; but as soon as we have paid for our plant we shall get it at cost, and then it'll be the cheapest thing we could use."

This, of course, is on the basis of a municipally owned plant-a small one, that is supposed to be more costly to run than a larger one.

The University of Illinois, in a pamphlet written by Mrs. E. Davenport, has worked out the cost of equipping a single country house-one that can be sufficiently lit by thirty tungsten burners-with an electric plant of its own. The cost of buying and installing this plant is approximately $600, the cost of maintenance from eight to ten dollars a year, and the cost of the electricity so produced is five cents a kilowatt-hour. This is on a scale so small that it is theoretically very expensive to run! Now of course Mrs. Davenport's plan involves electricity at a low voltage to be used for lighting only; but the country consumer who has refused to

from how to make muffins, and a sewing course from how to make buttonholes, and all the other courses in a Home Economic department sprangle away from the ostensible starting-points. It takes not only a big underlying idea but a forceful personality to do the new work of correlating these things and feeding them predigested to the consumer in training. Both the idea and the personalities they have at the University of Wisconsin. As Mr. Hatch, head of the extension work of the Wisconsin Agricultural College, told me: "You Eastern people who are used to endowed institutions may not understand it, but the object of this university that the people have made is to be serviceable to the people."

And Professor Abby L. Marlatt, head of the Wisconsin Department of Home Economics, has had the force to draw all these diverse activities into a course in what she has called "Humanics," planned to link the theories of the class-room to the realities of life. I heard one lecture in this course. subject was "The Child in Industry: Its Effect upon State Laws and Necessary Legislation."

Its

It was a talk backed by Government documents and State investigations, by the reports of charitable societies, tariff schedules, and the rate regulation of railways, and not a conclusion did it draw! Quite unemotionally it showed that there is child labor in quantity, and how much and where, according to the Census; showed the cost of this in health and intelligence, quoting from Government investigations in the South and New England; in the death rate, quoting from the report of the Association for the Prevention of Infant Mortality; showed that it is absolute necessity that forces children to go to work, quoting from the Massachusetts report on why children go to work; showed the wages of fathers and mothers in the woolen mills of Lawrence before the last strike, and correlated these with the claims that the high tariff on wool is to protect the standard of wages of the American workingman, and with the number of children actually working in these same mills because their parents cannot support them; and all these things with the price of woolen cloth and the profit on itMiss Marlatt didn't have to draw conclusions. The brain of a twenty-year-old college student, after it has been tabulating chemical and physical experiments in three columns-first, the process, as laid down in the book; second, the result, as observed by the eye; third, the

inference as made by the brain-draws conclusions quite automatically from such a lecture as this of Miss Marlatt.

quite as directly upon a memorial statue at Washington as upon a can of beans.

Consumption is our one universal function, and through it we have power and happiness and progress, or retrogression and spiritual and bodily death. Some of us already know what we want to consume and how to get it, but it takes an educated social vision to see

keeping, even the larger housekeeping which is not production, is but a small part of this science of consumption which can operate

Is there any bigger work for the universities, the colleges, and the public schools than to train consumers to this end?

I

N the course of what may be called the golden age of Irish literature, between the eighth and twelfth centuries, the Irish Celts reduced their system of meters and alliteratives to a minute and scientific condition. So far from spontaneity receiving any encouragement, no aspiring poet was permitted to hold poetic rank until he had completed twenty years of continuous and successful study. But once he had acquired the robe and status of a true poet, he simultaneously acquired an honor and emolument that the less qualified writers of to-day might envy. The Irish laureate was placed immediately beyond the bounds of criticism or competition. He ranked next to the blood royal. At feast or assembly he sat in the place of honor. His person was as sacred as that of a bishop, and the most truculent warrior was obliged to give him precedence. When he traveled, he was followed by the equipage of a prince; and by the law of the land no king, could refuse him whatever gift he cared to exact in return for an elegy of mourning or praise. It was only natural that such a privileged class should develop symptoms of heads swollen beyond the reasonable inflatus of the Muse; and again and again the arrogance and covetousness of bards is noted in Irish prose. At one time

their actual banishment en masse from the country was averted only by the personal intervention of Saint Columcille. To this day

it is worthy of note that Lough Derg (the Lake of the Red Eye) owes its name to the preposterous demands of a bard who, having

exhausted every conceivable form of remuneration, asked the local king to reward the poem which he had composed by the gift of his single eye, which painful payment the king, to his everlasting credit, performed rather than incur the disgrace of being a half-hearted patron of literature.

As regards the literary tradition which the Irish race made such extraordinary efforts to dignify and maintain, it is not too much to say that it eventually had more effect in the molding of the vernacular poetry of Europe than any of the tongues of the ancient world. It was fated that the Celts should show themselves not only geographical pioneers from the day that they set out on the westward journeying that brought them to final settlement in the isle of their destiny, but explorers in the domains of literature as well. Unbiased by any classical tradition borrowed from Greek or Latin, they set out and traversed by themselves entirely new paths. They extended the power of song over a wider conquest than the Romans had ever carried the power of the sword. They entered into realms of literature untouched by the legions of Latin writers. Into" regions Cæsar never knew" they bore the eagles of their song. They evolved forms and devices of poetry which never occurred to the poets on Parnassus or at Tibur. They built up harmonies of word-music which we are seldom able to translate into English meter, even when we have learned sufficiently to admire them. they never walked upon the sunlit heights which were touched by the Greek philosophers,

If

Fianna, unhappily popularized in modern days under the much bruited and degraded name of Ossian. It is this saga which has continued to hold the greatest position in the oral tradition of the Scotch and Irish Celts, and out of which James Macpherson built up the ingenious but lying fabric upon which the poetical fame of the hapless Ossian has been made to rest. The Cuchulain saga has come to us in manuscript rather than in oral custody. It has had to be pieced together out of many separate stories compressed in all the wealth of cues and runes into which the mediæval bards loved to stereotype their traditional legends. On the other hand, the Ossianic poets have been resinging and resetting the Fenian tales until recent times in the way that skillful musicians build up new harmonies out of ancient and familiar themes.

But rather than sketch the trackless latitudes of Celtic poetry, it would be preferable to give an idea of some characteristics which it shares with few, if any, other world literatures, and which have enabled it to sound so distinct and so vibrating a chord in the "concert of Europe."

First, we may notice a peculiar and wonderful sense of nature, almost amounting to a pantheism at times, a spirit which fills Irish poetry with so many quaint and personifying expressions, which speaks of the robin's cry as "the music of the red-breasted men and the bees and chafers as "the little musicians of the world," which trembles with the horror and dreariness and silences of winter scenes, and. yet rises to a wild frenzy of joy over the coming of summer when "the talk of the rushes" is heard and all nature finds

so many voices that even "the stuttering quagmire prattles." Here is a winter song dating from the ninth century:

"These are my tidings for you-that the forest stags bell,

And that summer has gone and left snow upon flood and on fell,

That the winds leap up cold and the sun sinketh low in the sky,

And shorter of course are the tides of the sea running high.

"Blood-red is the bracken, the flower of its beauty is gone,

And the wild geese are raising their so weary and wan,

cry, oh,

For the fingers of winter have clutched the bright wings of the bird,

And the season of ice is at hand-such tidings I heard."

Secondly, we may distinguish a richer sense of color than is usual with any but the

Oriental mind. Ethnologists often ask whether the Celts did not bring their love of brilliant hues as well as many other racial characteristics out of the radiant East. Colors, which in Latin poetry are merely named for conventional and epithetical purposes, are dwelt upon in Irish verse for the sheer love of color and the intoxication of reader and bard. Every color is lavishly poured into the lines until it becomes as visible to the eye as to the imagination. The Celts possessed this sense in common with Pindar, alone classical writers, who knew among well how to weave the delicate woof of his Nemean and Olympian odes with a gold and a scarlet that ran through them like molten ore or running blood. As one instance of the fascination that color had over the Celtic mind we subjoin a translation of a dirge written for King Niall of the Nine Hostages, who died in the early fifth century. It is interesting as being composed in the dialogue, which, as far as we know, was the nearest approach the Irish ever made to the dramatic form:

Tuirn, son of Torna

When we hied to the hosting with Niall of the Nine,

His hair like a primrose would glimmer and shine.

Torna

Well spoken! a slave would give to be thine,

For that hair like a primrose agleam in thy line

And his lashes so darkly and delicate lay,
With eyes like the woad or the hyacinth

spray.

Tuirn, son of Torna

All blood-red and changeless his color would stay,

Like the foxglove, or crown of the forest in
May.
Torna

White teeth and red lips that no anger could feel,

As high over all burst the flame of his steel. Like the moon, like the sun, like a beacon, burnt Niall,

Like a dragon-ship, flawless from bulwark to keel.

Tuirn, son of Torna

All the Kingdom of Kerry makes musical woe, But my grief for his death must all grieving outgrow.

The East will be ravaged with blow upon blow,

Since Niall is dead let all bitterness flow.

Torna

The Saxons are baying, the Lombards are sped,

And falls the bright Gael with his King who lies dead.

Tuirn, son of Torna

Once Tara was bright with the hair of his head,

Like iris for yellow, like gold for its red.

Nothing could be more typical than the color which illumines this dirge of death. Even when terror is uppermost, and the enemies of Ireland threaten to harry her coasts, the poet broods not on past victories or coming disaster, but on the sheen of the dead King's hair.

Thirdly, there is a constantly recurring sense of the weird, the magical, and the mystic, which reveals itself in a thousand similes and hyperboles, loaded with a cloying taste for the marvelous or the grotesque, without a keen appreciation of which the classical student is likely to find Irish poetry more productive of rhyme than of reason. It was this power of exaggeration in expression which Tennyson summed up in a phrase as the "blind hysterics of the Celt," though he made a fair effort to indulge in some such hysteria himself when he wrote the " Voyage of Maeldune" and described how

"We wallowed in beds of lilies, and chanted the triumph of Finn,

Till each, like a golden image, was pollened from head to feet."

Like the poetry of Robert Browning, that of the Celt relied on a finely educated as well as a strainingly attentive audience. Though the knowledge of Browning's allusions was so recondite as to be often shared by the poet with the poet's Creator alone, the allusions or symbols employed by the Celtic poet were based on a set coinage of phrases carrying a literary weight and value that no bard or reciter, however weird or far-reaching his flight, might dare to change or falsify. The hazel tree, for instance, is always allusive of the tree of knowledge, without further explanation. The hushing of women in travail and warriors in pain invariably connotes the presence of the most exquisite music.

The love of allusion and the practice of artistic hints which occupied the mind of the Irish poet is akin to the genius of Japanese painting, wherein the artist works not to surfeit the vulgar so much as to win the gentle wonder of the initiated. The obvious and the commonplace in diction or description was as detestable to the Celtic pen as the gaudy realism of European painting to-day is