they be likely to become public charges. With this money we could, if necessary, pay for their keep or build large homes and schools to take care of these people. They would be under our direction and we would know that the potential citizens there raised would be fully qualified for the privilege of citizenship which they seek.

Another very important feature of the enrollment of aliens is in the administration of the naturalization laws. Under the present law, when a declarant proves up on his petition, he must produce two witnesses who have known him for five years and can testify as to his character and fitness. That is a provision which is exceedingly difficult for many aliens to comply with. Often the alien's employment carries him from one jurisdiction to another, or perhaps the moving of those about him makes it impossible to secure a satisfactory witness for many, many years. When he can, in many cases it is at great expense. Under the enrollment plan, a

certificate of enrollment with notation upon its face could be used as a substitute for the two witnesses and would certainly facilitate final action on citizenship petitions.

When the petitioner receives his final certificate of citizenship, he will come into court and demonstrate his knowledge of the country and our Government. He will speak English, and understand those about him. The court session will be impressive, and turned into what we term in fraternal societies a testimonial meeting, and each one will give a testimonial of what citizenship will mean to him, and what he will do to further the good of the cause. These meetings will be highly inspirational, and will do much to place citizenship upon a higher plane.

In the old days of the Roman civilization no greater honor could be conferred upon a man than to make him a citizen of Rome. Is our own country any less great than Rome or should it be any less an honor for a foreign-born person to be

granted the privilege of American citi. zenship than was the privilege of Roman citizenship centuries ago? Let every safeguard be put upon it.

I have heard some opposition to the enrollment features provided for in the Naturalization Law which is now pending in Congress. The radical papers and radical leaders oppose it. Other foreignlanguage papers and foreign leaders have heartily indorsed the plan, which goes to show that this new method of Americanization and naturalization will do more for the country than merely confer citizenship upon foreign-born people. The immigrant who comes here with a purpose of becoming one of us, abiding by our laws and contributing to our welfare as well as his own, will find the new law of vast benefit to him. The Red leader and the Anarchist will find in it only Governmental protective machinery to thwart his plans for alienizing America. Our whole purpose must be to Americanize the alien before the alien alienizes America.

T

HIS is the day of the flapper and the period of after the war; more particularly and significantly, after the Great War. It is a strongly marked period, like and radically different from other after-the-war times, just as the recent war, the Great War, was like yet frightfully different from other wars. It is natural that social manners and ways should undergo an upheaval, that society itself, its men and women, but more particularly its boys and girls, should react in astonishing if not alarming forms of outlook and conduct. It was their only slightly older brothers and sisters that played the chief part in the war; it was their impressionable young souls that were shocked with the spectacle of the ruin of order, decency, the apparent insignificance of human life, the wholesale destruction of beauty, use, genius. It is natural that they should be thrown off their base, and should develop a recklessness, a worldliness, a disregard for custom and convention, that amazes and disturbs their elders.

For the elders too have been changed by the Great War. Them too it has given a new scale of values, and it is well that, on the whole, it is a better scale. If it had not deepened and spiritualized the elders, the youngsters might justify their defiance. It has deepened the meaning of life for the elders, but without disturbing for them the importance of certain outward codes or conventions. They do not always recognize that the youngsters too have caught a glimpse of life so clear, so terrifying, that they shut it from their eyes with gayer dress and from their

BY ANGELA M. KEYES

ears with louder jazz. So the two groups repel and misunderstand each other. The more rabid of the youngsters turn themselves into flappers and pronounce as out and out frumps the more hopeless of their elders.

Some of the flappers are attracted by the profession of teaching and are entering the city's training schools for teachers. History repeats itself. The training school and the flapper will modify each other. Will it be for good or for ill?

The training schools are receiving the flapper cordially. They are wisely shutting their eyes to her extravagances and crudities. For the Great War has taught the schools and the experienced teacher perhaps more than it has taught the mother or father. The school, which has developed from its work a more reflective habit, accounts more easily for the present "hectic" state of society than does the home and is less alarmed at it. So it does not make too much of the wild bob, the short skirt, even the ugly flesh-colored stockings.

The flapper has brought into the serious, often over-weary, sometimes all but discouraged, training schools of our crowded cities vigor, daring, directness, and withal unmistakable braininess, fine practical ability. She has brought back hope itself. Why look too curiously at her outer aspect? Why listen too critically to her dialogue? Why lift the eyebrows or draw down the lips at her manners? No, the wily training schools are biding their time, but for the present they are engaged chiefly in sunning themselves in her care-free gayety and relaxing their tension in her zestful teachableness.

TEACHER

The flapper will make a good teacher. She is abler than her predecessor of a decade ago. She has been startled into a more alert and vigorous mentality. She is stronger and more active physically. She is less given to hysteria. Suffrage and war need have emancipated her. She has gone to excess in some directions; but in the history of this very imperfect world who has used new freedom with entire wisdom?

The student of teaching to-day is better educated and trained than was her more ladylike elder sister of a decade ago. She knows more history, geog raphy, literature, social science. She is, in fact, a return to the classics, though this change she would repudiate hotly, her idea of being well educated, whether she hails from England or America, being to be well grounded in the great English tongue and well steeped in the great English literature rather than befuddled with a smattering of Greek and Latin.

I mean a return to the classics in another sense. In the days of Esop, the pedagogue was the learned man of the community. The day is not far distant when every teacher of even the smallest children will be a college graduate; Virginia already requires that her teachers shall be full-fledged bachelors. This will mean, not only a fuller and more accurate scholarship, but a greater maturity in the inexperienced teacher.

To-day's graduate of the training school will know more, too, about children and teaching them. The flapper is doing more scientifically than ever what old Plato hundreds of years ago suggested should be done before laying

down courses of study and dogmatizing about methods of teaching. She is studying the pupil at first hand. And she is really getting together a lot of sound first-hand information and making intelligent use of it in her practice teaching. She is taking heartily to the scientific doctrine that a teacher must constantly watch the reactions of her pupils and must keep abreast of the best pedagogical thought. She reads more of the pedagogical literature, direct and indirect, than did her amiable predecessor. She belongs to teacher clubs; she identifies herself more openly with her profession. This is all the fruit of her expanding outlook on life; she learns that to be constructively useful is at least as desirable as to be ornamental.

In my opinion, the anxious parent and the thrifty taxpayer, looking to the provident outlay of his money in terms of the flapper's coming salary, may sleep o' nights.

"But," say the indignant taxpayers in chorus, "what about her rôle of model to the child? Let her remember that as a teacher she will not be a free agent."

There's the rub. This D'Artagnan, Joe Brooksy, swaggering young person knocking, or rather merely walking in without the ceremony, is but making a gesture of protest before toning down her liberty.

Do not fear; she will tone down. A very few years in New York City's crowded class-rooms will dull her bright plumage. And that she will still remain of her period, O taxpayer, is all to the good for Young Hopeful. She will sympathize with him all the more.

Flapper or not, the modern student of education is really making a good job of learning to teach. If Sammy Bernstein should go to pieces in her spelling class when writing a letter, after he has netted a hundred per cent in a column of words test, she doesn't stay in after school to see that Sammy spells each word a hundred times, each time more incorrectly than the preceding. Nor does Sammy. Oh, no! She intends that both shall go out into the sunshine on schedule time. She may breeze into the class-room like a boy, but she understands what is meant by functional standards of teaching and she tries to live up to them by training her pupils to spell in the process of composing a letter, to talk on their feet, to speak distinctly and healthfully, to practice community civics. Her pupils hailing from crowded tenements do keep the fireescape free from left-over food that should be in the ice-box, and they do. come to school with shining morning faces from a liberal application of soap. She may wear red earrings for a week after the "long vake," but she knows how to arouse the purposeful selfactivity of the learner, how to form and use the apperceptive mass when teaching seventh-year boys to thrill deeply to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

And for all the taxpayer's anxiety about it, the flapper teachers are every

bit as strong on the Ten Commandments as their predecessors. Honor thy father and thy mother? Well, I should say so. Listen to Miss Teacher-To-Be Flapper Student practicing opening school in the year of grace 1922:

"I hope that every boy in this class helped his mother before coming to school this morning. You need not tell me whether you did or not." Here the pious one of twenty years ago would have instituted an orgy of fibbing. "John Patullo, I shall be ashamed of you if you did not carry up coal enough to keep your poor sick mother warm this cold day. Give her my love and tell her I am coming to see her Wednesday afternoon."

Yes, I think the main chance will be as safe in the hands of the flapper of

to-day at whose feet your adoring children will sit, dear taxpayer, as it was before the war. The flapper teacher-tobe is young, she is breezy, she is even risky in attire; but she has scrapped hysterics and the vapors and, believe me who live with her, she is sound at the

core.

As for my contention that she is a better practitioner of the art of teaching, "I trust," said a recent writer, "now that teaching is becoming a science, they will take it out of the hands of giggling girls of eighteen." They have. The flappers of 1922 have. They have taken it into their own capable hands. And they are not giggling. But how would you describe them? Are they boyish? mannish? No; they are simply flapperish.

I

T is always a pleasure to recognize distinction of manner in writing, and when the writer is new to the field of fiction the reader's feeling is one of gratified surprise also; for it is a quality rarely found in the hurly-burly or machine-gun fire of current fiction. Mr. Jay William Hudson, the author of "Abbé Pierre," is, like his Abbé, a professor of philosophy. Evidently also he is a kindly observer and quiet lover of human nature again like his Abbé. Indeed, one of the noteworthy things about this romance is that author and imaginary narrator are inseparable in the reader's mind; as one reads along he becomes unconscious of the artifice of fiction and for the time feels that he is listening to a real Abbé Pierre. With him as guide and through his friendly comment and description, we see the little Gascon village where the modest, gentle abbé lives in his childhood home; we enjoy with him the charming gardens and the picturesque beauty of southern France; we join in his love of quaint old customs and legends; we spend a happy hour with him among his ancient books; we listen with him to "the clatter of wooden shoes on the hard, white road outside, or a peasant rattling by with his ox cart, or children driving by. their cows and geese;" we appreciate his wise optimism and his keen-witted comment; we follow with him the simple, happy romance of the charming village girl and the young American poet, whose cheerful brusqueness first startles the professor, but whose manliness soon gains his respect. The little story is as perfect a piece of workmanship as we have had for many a long day. It gains our affection by its honest simplicity, its ever-present but restrained humor, and its unobtrusive sentiment-not sentimentalism. It shows once more that romance and reality are no more opposed in fiction than they are in life; or, as Don Marquis said the other day in his column, "What we currently term realism is an effort to get into touch with a deeper or more fundamental romance; a romance acceptable to minds that have progressed beyond the age of twelve-it is that or Too often, as you were

it is nothing. about to say. . When in Mr. Wells's new story, "The Secret Places of the Heart," Sir Richmond Hardy enters the office of Dr. Martineau and is told that his trouble is that the current of his thoughts is fermenting, not mere fatigue, and when we learn that Dr. Martineau aspires to be the psychologist of the New Age and is an adept at psychoanalyzing the psychoanalysts, the reader is a bit ap

1 Abbé Pierre. By Jay William Hudson. D. Appleton & Co., New York. The Secret Places of the Heart. By H. G. Wells. The Macmillan Company, New York.

$1.75.

as

prehensive. But he cheers up when the doctor prescribes "peripatetic treatment," a simple motor-car tour through English byways with the doctor guide, philosopher, and friend. Mr. Wells out of doors is always a delight. "We could talk on the road, in the eve nings by the wayside." And they do talk of the new philosophy, of individual responsibility, of collective action for the world's future, and (much the best) of what they see. The talk is good talk-not an open attempt to convert one to social theories, but with much human give and take. They go to places bound up with early British history-Avebury, Sudbury, Stonehenge -all mystically suggestive of progress from the prehistoric to the present and of questions as to the New Age. All this is enjoyable in movement and description. It reminds one of the days when Mr. Wells wrote "Wheels of Chance" and other stories redolent of English country charm.

But when Sir Richmond meets most unconventionally a beautiful young American woman as much interested for the moment as he is in the significance of ancient British archæology, he forgets his proposed "treatment," lets the indignant doctor return to his patients, and becomes more interested in the girl than in his deep-set conviction of the world's need of a Permanent Fuel Commission, or in his wife, or in his mistress and her child. For as regards personal conduct Sir Richmond is apparently quite devoid of any drive of conscience or any sense of his cruelty to those whom he should protect. His sudden death ends but does not solve his problems.

Is Sir Richmond meant to represent a modern type of forceful man? Rather, perhaps, Mr. Wells has been captivated with the idea of showing what contra

Sir

dictory strands of nature can easily and consistently coexist in one man. Richmond is tremendously earnest in his wrath at his fellow-men because they will not see that they must work and plan for mankind's future, yet he cares nothing whatever for the unhappiness of those dependent on him. He knows his inconsistency, he rages and fumes about life as "a tangle of accumulations," and attributes his own indecision to "tangled heredity." He almost beats the doctor at philosophizing. But his temper is beyond control, his power of work blazes and fags alternately, and when the American lady meets his vision at Stonehenge, work, world's future, and plain human duty cease to exist. One strongly suspects that in this story Mr. Wells's heart is more in the dramatic depiction of this one inconsistent but tremendously real and vital person than it is in any theory whatsoeverpsychic, social, or moral.

Mrs. Seymour's "Intrusion" 3 has added to the reputation earned by her last year's book, "Invisible Tides." It is not a happy book, but even as the reader resents the ruin wrought by one brainless girl, vulgar, ignorant, sexually cold but avidly eager for men's admiration, he admits that "Bobbie" is painted with exactness and searching realism. We hate her and understand her perfectly. Equal care is taken with Allan, the man she hypnotizes and marries, something in the way, as we used to be told, the snake hypnotizes the birdonly in this case the bird knows what is happening to him and hates himself for yielding to the charm. The reader balks at the idea that just sexual attraction can avail against the knowledge, taste, and culture of a man like Allan; it doesn't blind him at all; he knows his utter folly; he is infected as with a disease germ. But the reader, balk as he may, admits that Allan also is made consistent. Bobbie's "intrusion" into the circle of Allan's intellectual family cuts a deep gash (worse than most war losses), for three of its members fall victims in one way or another. She dashes in for shelter in a rainstorm with a casual young officer who promptly disappears from the tale, and in the end the "intrusion" becomes a deadly invasion. Apart from Bobbie and Allan, the characters are a little sketchy, as if they had walked in a while from one of Rose Macaulay's novels to talk cleverly and vanish. The book is decidedly well written and it is the reverse of being tedious, but perhaps one gets a little too much of sex attraction as an unavoidable contagion.

Mr. Dodd's "Lilia Chenoworth" is an advance on his "Book of Susan" in that

3 Intrusion. By Beatrice Kean Seymour. Thomas Seltzer, New York. $2.

4 Lilia Chenoworth. By Lee Wilson Dodd. E. P. Dutton & Co., New York.

$2.