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tricity was plentifully used by every enterprise which desired to attract the attention of the people, the Labor Temple's electric sign stood out with letters two feet square. In addition, four large bulletin-boards, two on each street, were studded with electric lights and announced in big letters what was going on in the Temple.

Just beyond Broadway, within a few minutes' walking distance, were the great stores and factories which employed hundreds of thousands of young girls and men and women, shirt-waist makers and operators in the clothing industry. The problem above every other was the industrial situation, the question of getting a living. That was why Socialism was so strong in the district. Every summer night open-air meetings were conducted on the street corners by its advocates, and during the winter season they held mass-meetings in near-by halls.

This was admittedly "the most difficult field in America." For that reason it was selected. My desire was to make a demonstration of what the Church might do in such a community. Obviously, the methods must be different from those employed in the "family" church. I made no attempt to organize a regular church. I have always felt that those who later took hold of the Labor Temple and formed a church organization made a fatal mistake, because, in the first place, it gave the enterprise at least the suggestion of sectarianism, and it actually put officers in charge of important work who were incompetent to conduct it.

This does not mean that the religious

In the next installment Mr. Stelzle tells

Labor Temple choir, composed of working people
element was neglected. That guest-
preacher who afterward declared that he
was cautioned not to use the name of
Jesus in his Labor Temple address
simply did not tell the truth-or perhaps
he did not understand. It would have
been felt that we were untrue to our-
selves and to the people and to God him-
self were we to evade or neglect in our
presentation the distinctly spiritual as-
pect of life. We discussed religious
questions without apology. Still, the
men and women who attended the dis-
tinctively religious meetings got a new
conception of the significance of the old
Gospel. But I am anticipating.

TH

HE opening meeting, on a Sunday afternoon, was exclusively for men. To the amazement of everybody, three hundred and fifty turned out. hundred and fifty turned out. They were all men of the neighborhood who had been especially invited by letter. We had secured their names and addresses from the polling list at the county clerk's office. With them the entire proposal was frankly talked out, and we urged upon them the importance of backing it if it were to be a success. They responded enthusiastically.

I recall that one of the men in the audience half challengingly asked me: "Will you let us talk about Socialism in these open forum meetings that you are going to have?"

"Sure," I replied. "You can talk about anything that you can get away with. But, remember this: There will always be somebody else here who is going to have the chance to take the other side of the question."

Following that meeting, the attendance on practically every occasion consisted ninety-five per cent of men, of whom seventy-five per cent were Socialists and other radicals and about fifty per cent Jews.

Meetings were held every night of the week, and practically every address was followed by an open forum discussion. For a month I listened to the severest arraignment of the Church that I had ever heard-and I had been listening to criticisms of the Church for many years in practically every industrial center in this country. When I felt that the criticisms were just, I frankly admitted it, but pointed out that the opening of this Labor Temple was an attempt to get at the actual facts, and that we were going to talk about the thing as friends, and altogether we were going to right as many wrongs as we could and that the whole thing was to be done in a thoroughly democratic fashion, without any patronage on either side.

It was interesting that the Labor Temple audience wore itself out in making criticisms of the Church, and the speakers never repeated their accusations. After every person had once delivered himself of the speech against the Church which lay somewhere in his system he never repeated it. When a stranger wandered in and began to berate the Church, the audience promptly came to the defense of the Church, because all that was old stuff; we had admitted it, and there was no need of our talking further about it. After the atmosphere was thus cleared, we got down to real business.

how he ended the invasion of the churches, and how he got Theodore Roosevelt to

Ο

N the morning of May 2, 1863, when Stonewall Jackson set his successful turning column in motion across the front and towards the right flank of the Federal Army at Chancellorsville, he swung round in his saddle, bareheaded, and addressed his staff:

"The Virginia Military Institute," said he, "will be heard from to-day."

These words are engraved on the pedestal of General Jackson's statue before the sally-port of "V. M. I." Historically they came true on that May morning in 1863, as they had come true two years before on the July afternoon at Manassas when, standing "like a stone wall" by the guns of his Institute battery, Professor Jackson turned the Confederate rout south of Bull Run into overwhelming victory.

Two West Point cadets still silently command the mountain town of Lexington, Virginia. Both were educated in the North, but, more loyal in life to Virginia, lie buried here in their native soil. Robert Edward Lee became in 1865, when his military career was ended, the President of Washington College, renamed after his death "The Washington and Lee University." Thomas Jonathan Jackson became in 1851 Professor of Artillery Tactics and Natural Philosophy at the Virginia Military Institute, ten years before the brilliant military career the world now recognizes began. Lee, recumbent in white marble in the chapel of his University, holds in death, as he did in life, the higher command. His resting-place is a shrine reverently acknowledged by the cadets of V. M. I., who invariably salute as they pass by. Stonewall Jackson, erect in bronze before the Institute, flanked, two on either side, by the same six-pounder guns of the cadet battery that were baptized with the "Stonewall Brigade" at Manassas, still commands his old parade-ground and, beyond that, the Valley of Virginia, the field of his world-famous maneuvers.

The biographies of the two great Confederates have many associations converging here at Lexington. Both owed the beginning of their soldier's training to the Military Academy at West Point, and both effectively united the severe discipline gained there to the élan of the less-disciplined South. Each had the same early opportunity of reducing military doctrine to practice in the campaigns of the Mexican War. This simi

The West Point of the South

By GEORGE MARVIN

lar experience, combined with native
genius, made of them in the highest com-
genius, made of them in the highest com-
mands the two most brilliant strategists
and tacticians in the lost cause of the
Confederacy. Each rose to the pinnacle
of military fame. Jackson before, and
Lee after, the war that made them fa-
mous came with equal humility to the
high calling of teaching in the Valley of
Virginia. Each gave his life in patriotic
service: Jackson in the zenith of his
military glory mortally wounded at
Chancellorsville; the war-worn Lee suc-
cumbing at Lexington in the less dra-
matic campaign of reconstruction. In
their years of peace as well as through
the tests of war both, in an exceedingly
literal sense, were soldiers of the Cross.
Their militant Christian spirits now
march on side by side at the head of
two distinctive institutions of the South.

Together the campus of the University
and the parade-ground of the Institute
compose one highland park without visi-
ble barriers, yet it would be hard to
find two institutions more mutually ex-
clusive than Washington and Lee and
the V. M. I. Beyond contiguity no
present relationship exists. The terrain
at Lexington resembles, though less
boldly, the site of the United States Mili-
tary Academy. The northeast portion of
the old town extends in a plateau
through the campus of the University
and the turreted buildings of the Insti-
tute seem to fortify a promontory jutting
into the valley much as the granite cita-
del at West Point dominates the reach
of the Hudson from Garrison up to
Newburgh. Noble mountains make the
outer battlements of both positions, but
those around Lexington are more far
away and blue than the rugged peaks
that loom over "the Point."

With this small and rarely beautiful locality so intimately shared and so much of common heritage, the segregation of each institution is nevertheless surprising. The University is nearly a hundred years older, and looks it. But the Institute has grown away further than the years. Both are of the South, Southern. But, though both happen to be planted in the same Virginia limestone, they are not by any means equally Virginian. No university in the South is more thoroughly inter-State in constituency and spirit than the institution adopted by the father of his entire country and inspired by the canonized saint of the entire Con

federacy. No educational institution in Virginia is quite so entirely Virginian as "V. M. I." When in March, 1839, an act of the Legislature established an independent school at the Lexington Arsenal, the name suggested, at the request of the Governor, by Colonel Prestonwho was chiefly responsible for bringing the school to his native town-was adopted: "Virginia-a State institution, neither sectional nor denominational; Military-its characteristic feature; Institute-something different from either college or university."

Nearly a century younger than the contiguous college endowed by Washington, and only twenty years less old than the University built by Jefferson fifty miles away as the crow flies over the Blue Ridge, the Institute is more thoroughly ingrained Virginian than either of the earlier foundations. On the Washington and Lee football team last year one substitute came from the State; only one man on the V. M. I. team was not a Virginian. Between the two bodies of students in the same town no athletic or academic associations exist. Oil and water mix more readily. Their academic buildings on the heights might well be two adjoining expressions of the same broad educational impulse. But, mutually unheard and unseen, they play in separate valleys. Besides the tie that binds them both in a common tribute to the general who led the young men of the South back to the ways of united peace, one other distinction they ruggedly bear in common: both Lexington schools, in these days of top-heavy endowments, are comparatively and very becomingly poor. Their plants are not bigger than their personalities.

Thus differentiated from its own Southern neighborhood, several associations and attributes support the likeness of V. M. I. to West Point in the North. The uniform of the cadets is nearly identical, the well-known gray that adds distinctive smartness to individual appearance and emphasizes the military circumstances of close-order formations. The cadets fill the uniforms, too, the insistence on military bearing anywhere in public is as uncompromising in the State as in the Federal code of deportment. Only the Corps of Cadets at West Point exceeds in the extra-human precision of its infantry drill the Corps of V. M. I. Often the moving gray platoons and

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A picture showing in profile the statue of Stonewall Jackson standing commandingly before the main archway of the V. M. I. barracks. The field guns at his right are from his own battery; the tricolored posts are the goal-posts of the polo field

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At Commencement in June, after the last parade, the graduating first class men gather in a group in the courtyard of the barracks and there, with bared heads, sing the Corps song, "The Red, White, and Yellow," and then the Doxology. During the singing the remainder of the Corps stand uncovered at attention. The group of small boys are gathered to pounce on the abandoned shakos of the graduates, who throw them away as they pass from four years of military discipline out into civil life

companies, as they swing along in cadence, with or without music, might be interchangeably mistaken the one for the other, although en masse the larger Corps of the Academy, sometimes more than a thousand strong, makes a more imposing show than the maximum strength of less than seven hundred mustered by the Institute.

In its origins also the Virginia Military Institute owes much, particularly in the "Military" part of Colonel Preston's definition, to the older Northern Academy. In temper and type West Point was its foster-mother. When the Treaty of Ghent terminated the War of 1812, the State of Virginia, having to provide for a large accumulation of arms and munitions, established in different strategic counties three arsenals, one of which was located at Lexington, on the site of the present Institute. The garrison of this arsenal, detailed from State troops, with too much leisure time on their hands, soon became an incubus on a small Scotch-Presbyterian village, whose leading citizens made representations at Richmond.

The president of the Board of Visitors, appointed by the Legislature of Virginia to establish at Lexington a profitably occupied military school in place of the idle garrison, was Colonel Claude Crozet, a graduate of the École Polytechnique in France and an officer in the

armies of Napoleon, who had been for several years Professor of Engineering in the United States Military Academy and at the time of his appointment was serv

Academy produced no more brilliant warrior than the Brevet-Major T. J. Jackson, who resigned his commission in the Army of the United States to teach

at the Virginia Military Institute and ten years later was promoted a lieutenantgeneral in the army of the seceding States.

The associations, therefore, with West Point are sufficient to justify the comparison, but more fundamental points of difference clearly distinguish the two military schools. West Point has exactly, one purpose in view, and one only: the preparation of candidates for the profession of arms. It is the professional school of the Army, as Annapolis is the professional school of the Navy. No other comparison is exactly possible because no other similar institutions exist in the United States. Candidates for the Military Academy must be appointed equally from the Congressional districts or by the President at large, and thus the constituency of the corps is necessarily evenly distributed through the fortyeight States, Hawaii, Porto Rico, and Alaska. Every cadet during his four years at West Point is a charge on the taxpayers of the Nation. Each one of them receives from the War Department a yearly salary of about $800, intended to cover his uniform and his living expenses in the line of duty.

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ing as State Engineer of Virginia. He built the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad tunnel under the Blue Ridge by which you go now from Charlottesville in the Piedmont to Lexington in the Valleyand under his presidency the first V. M. I. Board of Visitors adopted regulations patterned as closely as possible after those at West Point. Further to insure the establishment of West Point standards, Colonel Crozet's Board thereupon appointed a distinguished recent graduate of the Military Academy, Francis H. Smith, as the first superintendent of the newly founded Institute, which he organized in 1839 and continued ably to superintend for fifty years. To quote from a historian of V. M. I., Colonel Jennings C. Wise:

With Crozet, Cocke, and Dimmock on the Board, and General Smith, Major Gilham, and Captain Williamson on the Faculty, all from West Point, the influence which the National Academy bore in the affairs of the Institute can hardly be exaggerated.

In 1852 another West Pointer, an artillery officer who had taken part in the assault upon Chapultepec, joined the Faculty. The United States Military

The objective of the Virginia Institute, on the other hand, is non-military. Although every diploma carries with it a

commission in the R. O. T. C., a negligible proportion of its graduates enter the Army in time of peace as a profession. Instead of receiving compensation from the Government, every V. M. I. cadet-except the Virginia contingent, who are furnished their annual tuition. ($200) free-pays, in addition to his initial outlay for uniform and equipment, nearly the equivalent amount of a West Pointer's salary per annum for an extra-military education. Candidates are admitted, not by appointment through the political machinery of the Nation or State, but by certificate or examination, as in other civil institutions of the socalled "higher learning." The only differences are in physical qualifications and in limits of age prescribed by State law. Any physically, mentally, and morally fit youth, so far as the usual entrance tests are competent to assay him, may become a cadet at V. M. I. and a jointheir of its traditions. As the natural cleavage works out, however, nearly half of the Corps come from Virginia.

In other words, while "Military" is the emphatic word in the name of the Academy at West Point, it might be omitted between "Virginia" and "Institute" with

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out serious injury. Fundamentally this Fundamentally this is the Institute of Virginia. As Colonel Preston defined the school at its birth, eighty-seven years ago, "military" was to be its "characteristic feature.' But in its administration then, as now, "military duties are so arranged as not to conflict with or trench upon time set apart for study and academic work. The regulations and supervision, while exacting as to formal matters, do not neglect more serious interests." In the judgment of the founders, backed up by the consensus of one of the most loyal bodies of alumni in the country, the "characteristic feature" in the régime at V. M. I. is one of the soundest and most enduring of the ingredients in education for the militant. thing that life is, in or out of uniform. They believe in it because it has proved an asset in many different kinds of civil career, developing a sense of personal obligation and responsibility, cultivating tact and judgment, and out of selfcontrol begetting the power to control others.

Nevertheless the most cherished traditions, the high lights, the glory of V. M. I. are military. Individually and collectively, but invariably, it has gone out "to greet the Unseen with a cheer." Its cadets, its graduates, and its instructors side by side have marched away to four wars. The boy sentries on their lonely beats at night in the courtyard of the barracks have many honored ghosts in blue and gray and olive drab to keep them company. Four years after the first class had graduated twenty-five sons of V. M. I. volunteered for the war in Mexico, of whom nineteen were commissioned. On that "to-day" in May, 1863, when "the Virginia Military Institute" was emphatically "heard from," two of "Old Jack's" divisions, all four of his cavalry regiments, several of his stonewall brigades, and many of his infantry

regiments were commanded by men he had been associated with as instructors or by boys whom he had taught at V. M. I. Counting in the several hundred other Lexington cadets who took a commissioned or non-commissioned commanding part in that battle, it would not be much of an exaggeration to say that Chancellorsville, the high-water mark in the fortunes of the Confederacy, and an engagement since studied in European military schools as a model of brilliant strategy fought out by equally brilliant tactics, was won by V. M. I. In Jackson Memorial Hall Clinedinst's stormy mural painting in breathing life size recreates the charge of the cadets in the Battle of Newmarket in May, 1864, when the whole Corps, brigaded in General Breckenridge's command, helped to roll Sigel's invading column back down the Shenandoah; mustered in the middle of the night to leave the Institute at daybreak, 250 eager boys organized in an infantry battalion of four companies with their artillery section, drawn by impressed Lexington farm horses, rumbling on behind; marching in rain and May sunshine, the breath of apple blossoms in the air, down the muddy Valley pike; dancing with the hero-thrilled girls of Staunton; cheered by veteran regiments whose bands played "Rock-a-by, Baby;" holding the center of the deployed battleline, taking a Federal battery, and leaving fifty-two dead and wounded on the field.

Clinedinst, the battle painter, was himself a V. M. I. boy, as was Sir Moses Ezekiel, who carved the Stonewall Jack son statue at Rome and gave it with its base of Italian tufa to his Alma Mater. The war painting makes a kind of terrific back-drop to the stage where, with the incongruity of peace, a variety of contrasting tableaux are enacted: the cadet saxophone orchestra, that played itself to

Europe and home again aboard the Berengaria, spellbinds the Corps with jazz; an irreconcilable Charleston lady gently lectures on the Magnolia Gardens; and the Rev. Mr. Gibson, of the Lee Memorial, leads his Bible classes in the straight and narrow way.

During the brief months of the summary war with Spain volunteers from the Virginia Institute were again characteristically "heard from," and in the last and greatest war nearly eighty-three per cent of all V. M. I. men were in the military service, and of these seventy-eight per cent belonged to the commissioned personnel! It is doubtful if any other educational institution in the United States, besides the two National Academies whose raison d'être is war, can muster in proportion so long a roll of martial honor.

Its valorous exploits in time of war more than justify the fame of V. M. I. But the "characteristic feature" on which the Institute justly prides itself finds expression, day by peaceful day, in less dramatic ways that are as distinctive. Even more pervadingly than in war the "Military" finds its rightful place between "Virginia" and "Institute" in the fine courtesy and invariable good manners of V. M. I. cadets. Ruskin includes, besides "courage," in his definition of a gentleman the strange qualities of "gravity and consideration for the feelings of others." These are brave days for youth, but those other qualities, characteristic of chivalric soldiers in many lean centuries, have gone glimmering in fat times of speed and salesmanship. Manner has taken the place of manners. Qld "Virginia" has helped the "Military" in its most distinctive "Institute" to cultivate the good manners that are a "characteristic feature" of the cadets of V. M. I. The Virginia Military Institute keeps right on being heard from to-day.

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