HE lesson of Maeterlinck's "Blue Bird" is one that appears to have a wide application. There are many things besides happiness that are waiting for us at home, quietly, unobtrusively waiting, while we vainly seek for them in the big world at great cost and with great labor. One of these is education-higher education, if we define that term as the education that comes first in productiveness instead of last in time.

That the highest education of all-the education that makes all things possiblemust be given to children by parents and in the home has been my conviction for several years. It came to me gradually, not as a theory, but as a fact developing from my own experiments with my own child and the children of friends. It took hold of me overwhelmingly as I watched and compared the effects of home and school training upon the children who had been intrusted to my care. It seems to me to have been conclusively proved by the remarkable little Sidis boy and others scarcely less remarkable whose stories have appeared in the magazines.

Believing that in the right sort of home intelligent parents who begin early and proceed wisely can do almost anything with their children, I feel it to be supremely important that intelligent parents generally should be cognizant of the fact, and that they should become thoroughly posted as to what it is wise to do and how best to do it. For this reason I wish to plead the cause of the Home and School Association, which is to me the most hopeful indication of modern educational progress, being the only organized effort to introduce the great unsolved educational problem to the only people who can possibly solve it.

My first experience with an organization of parents and teachers was a peculiarly fortunate one. After leaving college I spent one year as student assistant in a public kindergarten in which mothers and teachers met at regular intervals to discuss educational problems. The subject of the first meeting that I attended was "Teaching Obedience," and it was discussed freely by the mothers. As an inexperienced girl, engaged to be married and knowing absolutely nothing about bringing up children, I was fascinated. When Mrs.

L-expressed her opinions, I took them with several grains of salt. Her Joseph was one of my daily responsibilities. That very morning I had been obliged to seize with both hands his fast disappearing little feet, and extract him forcibly and most undignifiedly from the deep recesses of the supply cupboard, so I knew just how obedient he was not. But when Mrs. M spoke, I believed every word, because of the co-operative teachableness of her children, who were the admiration of the school. The subject of the second meeting was "How to Develop Self-Control;" and so on through the year I listened to the discussion of such vitally important questions by people who spoke from personal experience, and so knew.

A few years later, when I found myself with a baby in my arms, I realized that the most valuable part of my education had undoubtedly been received from those kindergarten mothers' meetings. They had given me something to live by and work by, something that brought results. I had learned from those mothers, first, how much it is possible for a mother to do; second, that, to do anything at all, a mother must begin at the very beginning. There is nothing new about those ideas. They are both proverbial, not to say trite; but they had come to me as living facts straight out of the world of real things, and I shaped my life and the life of my child accordingly.

It does not take a physician to make for a child a healthy physical environment, nor a clergyman to provide a wholesome moral one. Neither does it require a psychologist nor even a teacher to give the right trend to mental development. Any mother with a little educated good sense and plenty of enthusiasm can work these things out for herself, and to suit the peculiarities of her own children. The first thing to do is to have a definite purpose. I put the physical development first as being fundamental, then the moral, and last I determined that my Suzanne should love learning for its own sake; I wanted her to be a student, a lover of books. These were the points that I kept uppermost in my mind during the first few years of her life, the things that I chose to "begin from the very beginning." I worked somewhat after the manner of Dr. Sidis, though with less

system; and the results were quite as startling as they were unexpected. The child learned to read as naturally as she learned to talk, and with no more effort. She accumulated all sorts of knowledge in a perfectly unconscious way, just for the fun of it. I would have been alarmed at my superlative success if it had not seemed so perfectly natural.

When Suzanne was six, I put her into the public school with children of her own age. Realizing how much I owed to the mothers' meetings of old, I had hoped that there would be something of the sort in connection with her school, but there was not; the mothers of the community seemed indifferent to all educational matters, and very few ever visited the schools except with some complaint or grievance. Disappointed, but not discouraged, I set aside a morning of each week for the purpose of visiting the school and studying the educational machine. This was not a simple matter, for at that time I kept no servant and was very busy with domestic affairs; but I felt that I must know exactly what was done in the school, and how it was done, else how could I make the home supplement the school? And so I became intimate with the teachers, and gained the immense advantage of seeing things educational from their standpoint; I studied the children and gained the further advantage of understanding childhood in general; I became acquainted with the course of study in the various grades, and found that often I could teach Suzanne in ten minutes what took weeks for a large class to master in the school-room.

After Suzanne had been in the first grade for about two months her teacher said to me one day:

"Mrs. Childe, it breaks my heart to think of giving Suzanne up, but I must tell you that the first grade is not where she belongs. She really ought to be in third or fourth."

"Are you sure?" I asked. "She is hardly more than a baby. Is there nothing in the first grade that she needs?"

"Absolutely nothing," was the positive assurance. "Her development seems perfectly symmetrical; I can't find a single weak spot."

I allowed Suzanne to go for two months in the second grade, and became convinced on my own account that there was nothing there that she needed. Then I took her out of school entirely, feeling that since home life had done so much for her it could be trusted further. For several years I kept putting

her back into school for short periods to give her a taste of school life and test her home training in order to be sure that we were making no mistake; but there has never been a time when she could be classed mentally with children near her own age. Altogether she spent in the grades less than twelve months.

Last year, when she was thirteen years old, Suzanne was made to feel somewhat inferior by some of her acquaintances, who told her that she was getting way behind by staying out of school. So I put her into an eighth-grade class with a teacher who was an entire stranger, making the request that if she seemed fully prepared she be passed on into the high school. After a week I visited the school to see how she was getting on. The teacher came to me at once.

"Mrs. Childe," she said with great earnestness, "I want you to tell me how you have trained that child; I would be the happiest woman in the city if I could accomplish half as much with my class."

So after six weeks in the eighth grade Suzanne was admitted to the high school, though her teacher protested :

Really, if I were you, I would not bother her with high school and college. She is already educated; she has the taste, the power, the appreciation, that we send children to high school and college to get."

So much for what the mothers' meetings and my intimacy with things pedagogical have helped me to do for my own child; but I found it impossible to stop there. For one who has felt the fascination of bringing to light and developing in the best way the wonderful possibilities that are common to childhood an only child is altogether insufficient; and the spectacle presented in every public school of children whose lives could be transformed and whose futures could be infinitely blessed by a little educational mothering made me borrow and beg from friends and neighbors in order to keep my home school from becoming extinct. have taken nervous, high-strung little girls whose health was being seriously injured by the pressure of the school-room, have watched them grow rosy and plump in the wholesome atmosphere of the home educational where there is nobody to get ahead of one and nobody for one to get ahead of. After a year

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or a year and a half I have put them back with their classes, and had the satisfaction of realizing that they had not only kept pace, but had so gained in mental grasp and

independence that they could do the school work comfortably and without strain. There are at present two children, utter misfits in the school-room, who are doing their lessons at my dining-room table. At school they were doing nothing-worse than nothing, for they were contracting habits of inefficient, careless work; in the home educational they are acquiring, in addition to grammar, arithmetic, and the like, a tremendously important accomplishment, the work habit.

In all this work I have but two regrets: First, that I have time and opportunity to help so few children when I know that the education of ninety per cent of all schoolchildren could be doubled in value by the right sort of home co-operation. Second, that those I do work with come to me so late, after so much mischief has been done. If I could only begin at the beginning, I could accomplish so much more! The only solution of these two difficulties lies in the awakening of parents to the realization of their part in education. Strange to say, this is all but impossible, so powerful an anaesthetic is the prevailing blind confidence in the educational machine.

"I believe in the public school. Children need the discipline, and they need the contact of their own kind." This is the conclusive argument advanced by thousands of the best fathers and mothers, most of whom have scarcely been inside a school-room since their own childhood. It is mischievous because it is the truth, but not the whole truth. Every sane person must believe in the public schools; we could not do without them. All children unquestionably need discipline as well as contact with their kind; but a great many of them seem to dodge most of the discipline of the school, and the vast majority get far more of the contact with their kind than is good for them. The point is that there are innumerable influences that children as individuals need, influences that the school cannot possibly supply; and the only way to learn what they are and how to supply them is to get into intimate touch with parents who are accomplishing things, with teachers who know the limitations of the school, and with the children themselves actually engaged in class-room work; to become, in short, thoroughly conversant with the general problem of elementary education. Any mother who does this will see endless opportunities to make herself an invaluable factor in the education of her children.

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And so I assert emphatically that the Home and School Association is the most hopeful indication of modern educational progress. The most discouraging feature is the apathy and indifference of fathers and mothers. When the Nation-wide movement to organize parents and teachers, and so to secure co-opcration between home and school, came to our city, I was very enthusiastic about it. I felt that my dreams, some of them at least, were about to be realized; that the organization would be not only well supported but welcomed as a long-felt want; that parents would be the first to recognize its necessity, and would take the initiative in the work. was mistaken. It is the teacher, daily struggling with the educational problem, who realizes the failure of the home; it is the teacher who is taking the initiative in the attempt to organize for the enlightenment of the home. The home is so utterly ignorant of the whole subject that it does not even know that it ought to be enlightened. Parents are so indifferent in the matter that they do not even attend the meetings. In one large downtown school in our city only thirteen parents attended, and in many other schools the outlook is hardly more encouraging. In our own school we have what is considered a very flourishing organization, but we are able to interest only about thirty of the mothers to the point where they remember to come to the meetings; there ought to be two hundred.

"I have been so busy! I simply can't find time to visit the school and attend these meetings," is the usual excuse of the absentees. And it is perfectly true. In this age

of hurry and rush we cannot find time for anything; we have to make it. And make it we certainly will when we fully realize that the success, mediocrity, or failure of our children is the responsibility, not of the school, but of the home. Other interests, even important ones, will appear trivial in comparison.

And so I would say with all earnestness to every father and every mother: Join and actively support the Home and School Association of your community; if you have nothing to gain from it, then you have very much to give to it. And if there happens to be no such association in your school, organize one; not the kind that gathers to listen to an entertaining lecture, partakes of lemonade and wafers, and goes gayly home, but one that meets seriously and earnestly for the definite purpose of discovering the place of the home in the education of the child.

This is not a quiet time, and its agitation, unrest, and tumult make themselves heard and felt in serious fiction. The reader does not find himself on "flowery beds of ease in the current novel of ability; he finds himself within the circle of the world-wide struggle. Or, if social problems and industrial conditions are escaped, he finds himself dealing with personal problems hardly less disturbing.

Mr. Ernest Poole is one of a group of young men deeply interested in social questions, and students at first hand of social conditions. Whether one agrees with men of this type and habit of investigation or not, he cannot fail to respect both their knowledge and their sincerity. "The Harbor (Macmillan) has a far greater claim on the attention of readers than most novels. It is rooted and grounded, so to speak, in actual human conditions. Taking the harbor of New York, both geographically and sympathetically, as a background, Mr. Poole tells the story of the life of a young man from childhood to the hour when he becomes converted to the need of radical reorganization of society so as to secure social justice.

The story is intensely realistic in its record of details. Indeed, in the first chapter there is a bit of realism which might well have been omitted. It is a concession, not to realism, which gives us life as it is, but to naturalism, which feels that it is essential to fiction to recite facts which belong to the physical laboratory or to the expert report on vice conditions. But behind the realism of the story one is aware of a large movement of the imagination. Mr. Poole fuses the recitation of fact with the interpretation of the imagination. He sees the harbor of New York in its large relations; he looks at it as a commercial possibility that has been so far very unintelligently treated; he foresees its immense significance in the future intercourse of the world; and in one of the characters-an engineer of great ability who has the gift of vision and who is admirably drawn he opens up the resources of the harbor as they will develop when it is treated with both efficiency and imagination. In the same character, too, he brings out clearly the services which great combinations of

capital can render to the community through their power of foresight and their resources.

There is a charming love story running through the book, which humanizes its hardness and incidentally gives us a picture of a very human and lovely type of woman.

The novel is a dramatization of the unrest of labor under present conditions. The story of a strike is told with graphic power; and the treatment of the ignorant and unhappy men and women who share the tidal movement of antagonism has a kind of epical breadth and energy.

In spite of the violence which is described and the disturbance which is predicted, the story makes one realize the possibilities of growth in intelligence, self-command, and efficiency of the working class blindly striving to better themselves, and striving with as much purity of motive as the other classes in society.

"The Harbor" will awaken protest, cause irritation, and will be regarded as an essentially revolutionary story; but its underlying motive is constructive. It aims to reveal the social consciousness which is behind the unrest, and to suggest the power of organization for legitimate ends which resides in the untrained masses who constitute the majority of the people of the world.

Mr. Poole, as we have said, puts behind his story the harbor of New York, using it both as a physical background and as a symbol. Mr. Tarkington, on the other hand, puts a modern city of the Central West behind the drama which he elaborates in The Turmoil (Harpers).

Heretofore the stories of this delightful novelist have been idealistic. No American has touched a light theme with a lighter hand than did Mr. Tarkington in " Monsieur Beaucaire ;" and his two stories of Indiana life were suffused with sentiment, with a glow of homely idealism, and with a delightful atmospheric friendliness.

The Turmoil" is in another vein. A pleasant, neighborly city of years ago, in which everybody knew everybody else and life went on without much tumult or overstrain, has given place to a modern city, with its countless chimneys and great smokestacks covering it with a murky pall; its streets roaring with traffic and crowded with anxious people; its sky-line broken by ambitious sky-scrapers; the creation of an unlimited passion, not for greatness, but for big

ness. The tumult in this city, in which nobody rests and nothing is quiescent, is a symbol of the tumult in the lives of the great man of affairs who is the head of the family which Mr. Tarkington describes; a masterful person, absorbed in making big things bigger; without imagination except along practical lines; consumed with a passion for business, looking upon everything else as merely incidental. The rise of this family of three sons and a daughter, the moving into the big house, the attempt to get into society, the accumulation of things without beauty and without taste, and some of them without use; the brutal externality of the life of all the members of the family, except the younger boy, Bibbs, who is a semi-invalid-all this turmoil matches the roar of the city, and is a picture of the spiritual devastation wrought by gigantic materialism and efficiency without a soul.

The life of these people is worked out on this plane with a realistic vigor which Mr. Tarkington has shown in none of his earlier stories; and the novel would be extremely harsh, and as murky as the atmosphere of the city, if it were not for Bibbs and for the fine-spirited and devoted girl who comes to understand him. Their love-making is out of the common and wholly admirable. The grime does not touch this redeeming passion, which rises like a lily out of the foul waters of a pool into which great factories discharge their acids.

This story and "The Harbor" curiously complement each other; for while Mr. Tar

World War (The). How It Looks to the Nations Involved and What It Means to Us. By Elbert F. Baldwin. The Macmillan Company, New York. $1.25.

Mr. Baldwin, who has long been a member of the editorial staff of The Outlook, was in Germany at the outbreak of the war. He was in a position, therefore, to know at first hand all the countries which cast their fortunes into the crucible.

The sixteen chapters which make up this book were. written between the 28th of July, when the first rumors of war were beginning to be circulated, and the 30th of October, when three months of active campaigning had passed. The first chapter was written at Bad Nauheim; the sixteenth chapter on the steamer Cedric.

Unlike most books that have been written on the subject, this volume presents impressions and comments evoked from day to day as events progressed; and these comments and impressions were received and expressed under the immediate influence of foreign opinion and for

kington does not specifically touch on the unrest of the working classes, he dramatizes graphically the unrest of the period, due to the attempt to put activity into the place of living, and to satisfy the soul with things instead of with ideals and affections.

Another novel of unusual quality is "Mrs. Martin's Man" by S. G. Irvine (Macmillan) ; a convincing story, full of quiet power, told with singular directness and a kind of suppressed energy which seems to charge all the details. The plot turns on the love of a man for his sister-in-law, and is therefore distinctly unsavory. While it is treated with frankness, it is entirely free from pruriency or from any attempt to make it other than it was.

It is not a pleasant theme, and it is not easy to understand why the novelists of to-day are so attracted by themes of this character; but it is only fair to say of this story that, while it errs in its frankness, it is free from any suggestion of corruption of taste or lowering of standards. It is a plain tale of Irish life, and its power lies in its curiously definite definition of outlines; its power to convince the reader that he has seen real things. Although realistic, it does not miss. reality, and there are passages of great beauty in it. A description of Belfast one re-reads for the restrained charm, the fine artistic selection, and the definiteness of the picture presented.

Such a story as this reminds one that fiction is opposed, not to truth, but to fact; for no one can read this story and not recognize the fundamental truth which underlies it.

eign surroundings. The book is therefore a kind of concurrent history of the first and critical stages of the war. It is a survey of the immediate antecedent history. It fills in the background of motive and event out of which each country emerged, either to take part in the great conflict or to preserve an anxious neutrality. It tells the story from the standpoint of Austria and Servia as well as that of Russia. It describes the attitude of the Government, reports the feeling of the people, and recounts the adventures of foreigners in Germany. sums up the situation in France, Belgium, Holland. In England it reports the condition of the army, the attitude of the Government, and the spirit of the people. It devotes a chapter to Rumania and Italy, one to Turkey, and one to America. In the last-named chapter it answers the question, "What does the war mean to us?" There is a concluding chapter, "After the War," in which the writer expresses his conviction of the responsibility of the different countries,

It