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pire. That there are those in these border provinces ready to throw themselves in the arms of the French is an illusion." It must be true-Dr. Lentsch affirms it!

Gothein, also a Radical in the Reichstag, unconsciously declared a principle which if applied inversely would work in direct contradiction with German policy. "We Germans can consider ourselves very well satisfied that French pacifists, in event of victory, would not let the Alsatians have a right to vote and dispose of their own existence. They must indeed have little hope in the result of such a vote. What concerns the French are not the rights of man but only their revenge and the increase in their power." Would Gothein turn this the other way and say that, unless Germany recognizes the rights of the Alsatians to express an opinion concerning their future, the Empire as much as confesses that there is no kindred feeling between them?

What have the Alsatians to expect from a victorious Germany? From the discourses of Government leaders, there is no indication of any intention to open the Alsatian question. Even in the most liberal circles, despite a certain inclination to talk of freedom of peoples, it seldom goes to the point of concrete application in so far as Alsace is concerned. During the last half-century the people of these border provinces have enjoyed few concessions from the Empire. From a victorious Germany they would have scant reason to expect more.

The attitude in France is that the return of Alsace-Lorraine to the Mère Patrie is the sine qua non of any peace. More than this is an idea which has become current that these provinces are an integral part of France, only cruelly separated for a time, but now to be taken back into the fold. "For us to consult the population of Alsace-Lorraine as to their wishes would be as superfluous as to consult the people in the invaded departments of the north of France whether or not they want to come back." This seems to be the official view, and is certainly that approved in most influential circles-the universities, commercial and industrial centers. More than this is the support given it by the so-called Alsatian Nationalists (the former Catholic Alsatian Center), represented in France by Preiss and the Abbé Wetterlé. have talked with Wetterlé over this very question, and am convinced that his desire to see Germany punished and his hatred of all

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pro-Germans in Alsace make him lose sight of some of the primary rights of his people. This idea of a reintegration and not annexation is as if these past forty-five years could be arbitrarily stricken off the calendar, and as if, for example, the three hundred thousand Germans who live there did not exist. Its simplicity is only in abstraction.

To deny the peoples of Alsace-Lorraine a voice in their future would be to disregard one of the fundamental principles of the French Republic-freedom for small peoples. Were a vote taken in Alsace, I am convinced that a majority of the people would choose to return to France. But this is another question, and one apart from the political principle involved. Freedom for the oppressed, a reawakening of the old Revolutionary tradition, is the inspiration of many French liberals in this war. The Socialists use the expression daily in their press. Jean Longuet, grandson of Marx and editor of “L'Humanité," declared vigorously:

"I am in accord with the recent Socialist convention in London for the consultation of those interested-that is to say, the people of Alsace-Lorraine. If the desire to be French did not exist, we would have absolutely no right to dispose of them against their will."

Looking at the plebiscite as a practical issue, its necessity is obvious. In 1871 Germany denied the people of Alsace a voice in their lot. Since then the sympathies of the world have been with this unhappy people. To-day, were the vote disregarded, there would be a repetition of history. Germany would say," See the poor Alsatians tied to France against their will," and there would be sufficient opposition in these provinces to give color to the reproach. Grumbach, an Alsatian Socialist, makes an eloquent appeal, first to Germany, then to France. In the first, that heed be paid to the wishes of the people, he confesses that he has not great hopes; but in the second he says: If they are republicans who respect the political liberty of the individual, they are under obligation to demand a consultation of the people of Alsace-Lorraine. Not with fear nor with unhappy hesitation will they do this, but frankly and with an enthusiasm inspired by the firm conviction of accomplishing an act of political wisdom, an act which will give to Alsace, to France, to Germany, and to all of Europe a rare example destined to be a stepping-stone to a higher democracy."

Paris, France.

T

HE" New Poetry Series" is largely experimental its hospitality to adventurers in verse commends it to lovers of the art which more adequately than any other save music expresses the human spirit in the whole range of its experience and endeavor. The decline and disappearance of poetry as a literary form has been a standard article of faith in some literary creeds for two generations. Fifty years ago, when the scientific movement was in its early and enthusiastic stage, there were many predictions that literature itself had run its course and that henceforth men were to live by knowledge and dismiss the dreams of the imagination; that the age of reason had at last arrived and the fairy tales of the poets would henceforth go to the back shelves. The only novel future generations would tolerate would be the novel of fact. The drama, it was pointed out, had already had its day and become as extinct as the prehistoric monsters.

But the prophets of evil have suffered a disastrous eclipse. Literature survives in all its forms, and the works of the old masters, instead of going to the rubbish sales, are printed and reprinted in innumerable editions and distributed in every conceivable form; it is true that the novels of fact are read if they do not sacrifice reality to realism, but the later romanticists practice the old art and command the old success; the drama has had a new birth in the interest of writers and readers as well as of lovers of the theater, and the present generation of prophets has raised the cry that it will soon expel the novel; while the making of verse threatens to become a popular industry. The " New Poetry Series" is not a desperate device to attract attention; it is a recognition of a widespread interest as well as a growing activity. Published in a form which suggests the magazine, these well-made, low-priced books evidence a vital impulse, a popular demand, and a feeling that poetry is not the recreation of the highbrow, but of the man who must run as he reads.

Rawness and crudity, not so much of technique as of taste, stamp a good deal of this current verse; some of its practitioners are mistaking lawlessness for liberty, formless

ness for originality, and the new freedom which they vociferously claim turns out to be a mere assertion of the mob spirit. Discordant cries and uncouth tones are as empty as the most mechanical mid-Victorian jingles and more offensive to the ear. But these "battle cries of freedom" do not drown the voices of a new springtime; there are fresh voices and tones of deep and vital sweetness in the air. The qualities which give this new poetic activity its charm and its significance are fresh feeling for the beauty in familiar things, intimate joy in nature and in human relations, sensitiveness to the image and the meaning of the symbol. "Mothers and Men is a first venture in verse, and its notes are struck in the title. Mr. Pulsifer has opened a vein of deeper love than young poets often find, in his celebration of the love that waits and serves at the threshold and blesses life with the serene devotion, unselfish in its selfishness, which is deeper than passion. In the eyes that are celebrated in these verses there is that which brings men to their knees and sends them on the voyages of honor and duty and service rather than on the adventures of passion. There is passion here, but it is the passion of one in whom stirs the sense of loyalty to the one woman who brings each to the gate of life, and makes him aware that love and pain are akin, because love is not fulfilled unless it is sacrificial. In this love the divine love is imaged:

"IN THE MANTLE OF GOD

"I pray to a God with a woman's face.
(My mother's face is wondrous fair!)
The wide world is an altar-place,

And love-in-life the only prayer.

I work for a God with a woman's hands.
(My mother's hands are cool and strong!)

I sing for a God who understands
The worker's work and the singer's song.

I live for a God with a woman's eyes.
(My mother's eyes have made me whole!)
The very walls of paradise

Are compassed in a single soul!"

In this celebration of woman, the creator, virgin in her purity and divine in her mother

Mothers and Men. By Harold Trowbridge Pulsifer. The New Poetry Series. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. 50c.

hood, the song flows on into a celebration of the manhood that courts no ease and knows The no fear. · Conquest of the Air," a prize poem at Harvard, has a daring as bold as the magnificent achievement which it celebrates :

is not dead in the American heart, and young men still hear and answer that bugle call, as Mr. Pulsifer's college mates have Such answered it in the sky of France. poems as The Lusitania" and "Clarion" need no foot-notes: they breathe the spirit which the Nation, bidden to deny the impulse which is its very soul, has made eloquent on fields where our battles are being fought by others.

Mothers and Men" shows little of immaturity in substance or in form; its unabashed tenderness and its enthusiasm are not blurred by unfinished workmanship. It is a heartening book for those to whom the earliest and oldest form of love and the patriotism that does not take count of the cost are dear.

Mr. Shivell is fortunate in the friends he has made; Mr. Norton and Mr. Gilder were keenly interested in his verse, and Mr. Bliss Perry cared so much for it that he asked permission to make a selection from it to bring to the attention of a wider circle of readers. The widest circle of readers would find delight in "Stillwater Pastorals and Other Poems." Its author, Mr. Perry tells us, is a real farmer who has made excursions in other fields, and Stillwater lies east of "Spoon River" and southwest of" North of Boston." There are reminders of both these localities in the volume, but there is no imitation. The

Stillwater Pastorals, and Other Poems. By Paul Shivell. The New Poetry Series. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. 75c.

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poems are almost autobiographic in the distinctness of the individuality they disclose. Mr. Shivell's sonnets, of which there are many, do not read like sixteenth-century devices to enable a man to pour out his heart while keeping its secrets inviolate; they are obviously sincere and candid in their naïve assertion of the right to speak and the certain expectation of being heard in due time. This assertion is too frank to suggest egotism; it is the proud simplicity of the man who believes that the human voice is the voice of God:

"Bear thyself nobly and feel free to speak!" If this is egotism, it rests not on belief in individual gifts but on faith in racial greatness. It reminds one of Emerson's superb confidence in the authority of the human spirit. Such a confession of ambition as this sonnet is taken from the unpublished liturgy of great souls :

"IF I COULD TELL

"If I could tell what beauty I behold

In this wild world so wonderful to me,
The pale moon brightening o'er the twilight

sea,

Where ages heave and sigh-could I unfold How ships give up their sunset white and gold, Blending themselves in blue immensity, The sweet stars how come forth, how fair they be,

What secrets to my heart the deep hath
told,-

Could I instruct one backward human being
In the Love lore that in my soul I feel,
My inmost spirit yearnings could impart,
Could but half utter what so many seeing
See not, because to them Heaven is not
real,-

My God, could I but bless one human heart!"

The reader looks in vain in this book of verse for the egotism, the straining for novel effects, the self-conscious defiance of moral and literary conventions, which disfigure some of the newest poetry. He finds harsh lines, crude rhymes, unpoetic phrases; but he is consoled by passages of pure poetic quality, by the reserve of perfect simplicity, by that confidence in the undying interest of common things, of the experiences which furnish the universal language, but whose inner and secondary meaning only the pure in heart understand, for they alone see God. Mr. Shivell says that "poetry bothers most people," but this verse will bother no one who loves the poetry that is born, not of other poetry, but of nature and life.

What

could be more authentic than "Winter Morning"? The simplicity has the touching pathos of life; it has the quality of "The Cotter's Saturday Night."

"WINTER MORNING

"I rise and look out at the window, Love,
And all the stars are shining. While I dress
Lie thou and take thy needful morning sleep;
And I will tiptoe downstairs with the lamp,
And build the kitchen fire, the table set
For breakfast, and our patient creatures greet
With lantern in the stable where they chew
Meekly their fodder. Frosty are the nights,
Wholesome and stinging cold. When the
room's warm,

Or when thou wilt, come down and dress thyself

By jealous lamplight, yellow in the dawn,
Leaving the wee ones to surprise us late,
When from their natural rest, bewilder'd half,
They wake and rub their sleepy eyes, looking
For us.
Then they'll grope down, and smile
'Good-morning,'

And dress before the kitchen fire, and eat
Their porridge from their little porringers.
So we'll begin another busy day,
With thankful hearts lifting our prayer to
Heaven:

That thus may we ever be honest people,
And bring our children up to work and play
Contentedly and in the sight of God."

THE STONEMEN, THE THIRD DEGREE, AND CHURCH ORDINATION

In the statements in The Outlook of September 27 about "The Stonemen" it seems that a vital point was overlooked, namely, that members of other communions than the Protestant Episcopal, by submitting to the "laying on of hands ” by a Protestant Episcopal bishop, surrender to a rite that is at the very center of the controversy between the Episcopal Church and other churches. The Episcopal Church claims that to have a properly constituted Church there must be bishops in the line of Apostolic succession, and that no minister is properly ordained unless ordained by bishops, and that no layman is properly received into the church as a member unless confirmed by a bishop. The Protestant churches in general deny this as an unproved theory.

When an Episcopalian is initiated into the third degree of the Stonemen, he does not need the "laying on of hands," since he has already been confirmed by a bishop. If he is a member of another church, the bishop's hands are laid on him, as in confirmation, and he is by this act given the privilege, not only of communion in his order, but of partaking of the Lord's Supper as administered in the Episcopal Church. The inevitable implication of this act, in spite of softened phraseology in accompanying statements, is that as a member of the Methodist Church, for instance, this man had not been rightfully and fully prepared to partake of the holy communion. Also, a corollary is that the Methodist minister who had first received this man into the church was not rightfully authorized and equipped to do so and to administer the Lord's Supper. This is the heart of the matter. If it were not, there would not be insistence upon the "laying on of hands"

by those in charge of the Stonemen's move

ment.

All self-respecting members of other churches, all who believe their own churches to be true churches and their ministers true ministers, ordained and duly authorized to administer the sacraments of the Christian Church, should look at this matter clearly. They should honor their own churches and their own ministers by remaining loyally in their own communions, and they should decline to have any part in the third degree of the Stonemen, which, in effect, makes them members of the Episcopal Church.

Certain groups of people in the Greek Church have come under the Roman Catholic rule in the following way: The Roman Church has allowed them to retain their own liturgy and language in their services, their married clergy, and practically all their own ways and customs, on one condition-namely, that they acknowledge the Pope as the head of Christendom. These Uniates are now Roman Catholics, although they are as they were before save on one point. They are Roman Catholics because they have acknowledged the Pope as the Vicar of Christ.

The Stoneman who takes the third degree of his order, being confirmed by the laying on of hands of an Episcopal bishop, actually becomes an Episcopalian, no matter what he calls himself or what church he attends. Every Episcopal bishop and every rector in America knows this. Apparently this knowledge is not in the minds of some of the Stonemen themselves.

The Congregational clergyman quoted in your article states: "If it were a prerequisite that I should be confirmed [in order to join the Stonemen], I see no reason why I should not make this concession to the peculiarity of ritual in that body, thus accomplishing church unity in a

practical way." Since the Episcopal Church makes this rite the vitally necessary one for church membership, and since the Congregational Church for ages has contended against such mechanical theory of the Church, there is every reason why a Congregational minister should decline to surrender to Episcopal claims.

Assume that the founder of the Stonemen had been a Roman Catholic priest. Assume that the third degree of the order involved the acknowledgment of the Pope as the Vicar of Christ. Would this clergyman "see no reason why he should not make this concession to the peculiarity of the ritual in the Roman Church, thus accomplishing unity in a practical way"? If he were so initiated, he would be practically a Roman Catholic even if nominally a member of the Congregational Church.

Every member of another communion who becomes a third-degree Stoneman strengthens in so far the unproved and unprovable claims of the Episcopal Church that the rite of confirmation by a bishop is vital. No man should do this unless he is ready to go as far as this theory leads-that is, to acknowledged and open membership in the Episcopal Church.

A point on which many persons would like to have light in this controversy is whether or not Stonemen confirmed by an Episcopal bishop are reported in the records of the Episcopal Church. It should be definitely ascertained if the third-degree Stonemen are counted in the list of gains by the Episcopal Chuṛch. What makes a Roman Catholic? Acknowledgment of the Pope. What makes an Episcopalian? Confirmation by an Episcopal bishop. Are third-degree Stonemen unconsciously Episcopalians? If so, are they so rated? Glendale, Ohio.

CALVIN DILL WILSON.

[In one respect-and that vital-the writer of this letter is in error. Admission to communion in the Episcopal Church is not confined to those who have been confirmed by a bishop. The Congregational clergyman quoted in this letter has himself, as we know, not infrequently partaken of communion in an Episcopal church, and that without confirmation. There is, moreover, a fundamental distinction between acknowledging the Pope and participating in a rite. In the one case there is a specific acknowledgment of a principle; in the other case there is simply the participation in a common act, which may be, and as a matter of fact is, variously interpreted, and does not commit the participant to a principle in which he does not believe.

The same thing might be said in regard to the matter of immersion. If there were real unity and comradeship within the churches to be obtained by the joining of an order which called for immersion, participation in the rite of

885

immersion as admission to that organization would not be of itself a reflection upon the validity of any other form of baptism.-THE EDITORS.]

HOW ARE THE WELL-TO-DO TO EDUCATE THEIR CHILDREN EFFICIENTLY?

Here is a man brought up on a New England farm where industry, efficiency, and economy were the daily drill, with the accompaniment of abundant physical exercise and plain food. This man, as is typical among a great majority of present leaders in the community, finds himself with abundant means to buy everything that can be purchased with money for his children, yet they are in a household where no work is required of them and their disorder and litter is put instantly in order by unobtrusive, efficient servants who act, so far as the children's observation goes, like the sun and wind in bringing the recurring seasons.

The public schools, which, we are told, are the best in the country, teach the children principally Chinese memorizing to the accompaniment of rounded shoulders and bad air. The physical exercises of the ball team are reserved for the dozen or twenty out of a thousand who need it least. The others sit on the benches and cramp their lungs watching.

These children are just as active and eager to build things as their forebears, provided they had the opportunity and encouragement that their forebears had, but all the neighbors' children are from the same class, and their fathers and mothers cannot work with them all day long building things; and without some example or leadership of this sort they cannot be made to do useful things that will demonstrate to them that somebody has to work for everything that is produced.

As to the private schools, investigation proves on the average that the teachers are less efficient than in the public schools, and the opportunities for acquiring dexterity of hand and brain are no greater.

There is every force working to carry out the old New England traditions of three generations from overalls to overalls, and with the elimination of unfair privilege, for which every right-minded progressive is working, this transition should be more certain than heretofore. A classmate of the writer at the Polytechnic School, having this matter very much at heart, moved to a wilderness on the Pacific coast to re-enact the experience of his forefathers. He cleared the land and built his cabin; but his wife, a cultivated woman, died in the process, and his three sons ran away from home, about one hundred miles through the woods, to get to the city at the first opportunity.

West Newton, Massachusetts.

N. MARSHALL.