among the forbidden articles of popular consumption. While wine was the tipple of the rich and great, soup was "poor folks' food." "Soup-eaters" they contemptuously termed the thrifty German farm-hands-who, in time, owned most of the farms of those who so despised them.

Beer was in the same class with soup. It was a foreign article, and therefore to be rejected; it was also popular with the poor Germans, and therefore continued

to be the poor man's refreshment and did much to keep him poor. The beershops persistently picked his pockets. In recent years, by pushing it as a "tonic" and a "food," the brewers gave their product some social standing. It was a mean sort of swill, however, compared with the real German article. Only one brewer, Lemp, of Cincinnati, succeeded in coming anywhere near the old country output.

From the standpoint of thrift and we fare, the pushing of beer to the front ă a mitigant is absurd, and probably owe its origin to the brewers who still ha great investments tied up in plants, ic which "near beer" brings too small return. Beer was bad for the kidneys overloaded the stomach, and provoked much more thirst than it soothed. Surely no one will welcome the shops on every corner, smelling sourly of suds.

HE teachers who have taken the trouble to write to The Outlook do not agree with Don C. Seitz as to what should or, more strictly speaking, as to what should not-be taught in the public schools. That was to be expected. If they did agree with him, they would not be teaching the subjects that they are teaching. A single teacher, however, does agree with him, and that is more than can be said of the pupils who have been heard from. Not a single one of them agrees with him. That, too, was to be expected. Many pupils believe that whatever teacher does is right. Most of the others quite earnestly desire to "stand in" with teacher.

But, when these allowances have been made, the fact remains that enough ooze has been poured upon Mr. Seitz to tan any hide less thick than his own. And, to cap the climax, the letters have been turned over for digesting to a member of the staff who believes that Mr. Seitz is dead wrong in his conception of what the public schools should do for boys and girls.

"One thing at a time, and that done well," runs the old couplet from which Mr. Seitz took his title. In practice as in proverb the first clause amounts to little without the second. Applied to the teaching of reading, the second clause is the whole thing. For the fact is that children, instead of being taught reading mainly, as Mr. Seitz contends, should never be taught to read at all. That is, they never should know that they are being taught to read, or-but let us leave that on one side until the letters have been digested.

says, "then children in their earliest years would necessarily become little. morons, but, on the contrary, any normal child of five years has already gained an almost incredible number of ideas. . . . He has investigated for himself." She thinks that "no scheme could be better devised for causing children to loathe the sight of a book" than that of holding them down to printed symbols for several hours a day five days in a week.

The next letter comes from Galveston, Texas. The writer says that Mr. Seitz is deluding himself into the belief that he and others of his age are readers because they learned to be so at school. They became readers, she says, not because they were forced to learn "McGuffey's Readers" almost by heart, but "because outside distractions were few, because reading was the one diversion.” She points out the fact that every child to-day has half a dozen reading books available to him in each grade. And she intimates, without saying so directly, that $7.50 a year was a high price to pay for the sort of education that Mr.

Seitz got.

A principal in Sioux City, Iowa, thinks that Mr. Seitz's opinion is based on meager and inaccurate data. "No very valid conclusions," she says, "can be drawn from statistics gathered in a town where only fifteen pupils have been added to the school population in the past seventy-five years.' "Does Mr. Seitz seriously think," she asks, "that return to a course of training modeled on that of 1850 would keep children absorbed in even the choicest of literature while father manipulates the radio and mother plays bridge?" She can see no justification for harking back to primitive simplicity for the training of children who must spend their adult lives in surroundings many times over more complex. And she does not believe that children handle their text-books less carefully because they are free.

W

ELL, it is not my job to argue with the teachers whose letters I digest, and the less so seeing that I am opposed to Mr. Seitz's theory of education, anyhow, I being an educational heretic and he an educational reactionary. But I do remember the picture cards, bearing advertisements of Hoyte's German Cologne and a liberal scent (too liberal on a hot day) of the stuff itself that we used to keep in our books as we studied to prevent finger-marking them --thumb cards, we called them in Tennessee. I do not think we did it because of our own tenderness for the books. There was a measure of parental compulsion about it. Those books were to be handed down to Polly and Tom and Jane, and any others who might come along later. For, though my first-reader days were only as far back as the middle eighties, there was not a new set of books adopted every year or so.

And we did love our text-books well enough to be careful of them in those days-some of us and some of them. I remember my little sister's crying herself sick because her "Fourth Reader," with which she had finished, had been turned in as part payment on some new book. And I remember going to town with a fifty-cent piece in my pocket, and rummaging under the counter in the bookstore until I found her book. Most of our lead-pencils were rather hard in those days, and she had scratched the paper when she wrote her name, so that the bookseller's eraser could not rub it out. Otherwise, I could not have known the book-it was practically unsoiledand she would have been still brokenhearted when I brought home the wrong

one.

I think children were more careful of books when they regarded them as their own personal and permanent property. But, so long as the number of books used in the public schools is as great as now, they must be free books, I suppose. If

they were to be paid for, many children could not go to school.

THE

HE one teacher thus far heard from who agrees with Mr. Seitz lives, and presumably teaches, at Fort Plain, New York. She thinks that he "hit the nail on the head" and exclaims, "If we only had more men like him!" She offers to wager a thing not encouraged in the precept, however it may be in the practice of teachers-that "he never read such silly readers as are used to-day in our schools." She has used her own methods of teaching reading for twentythree years, and "would not change even to suit the school district superintendent, whose hobby is phonetic reading." "He has done all in his power to discredit my work," she continues, "even calling me an old-fashioned teacher." She thinks that the people have almost completely lost control of their schools and that what is taught is not what parents would like to have taught. "If more women would stay home and tend to their duties there, instead of roaming over the country trying to tend to other people's business, thereby getting their names in the newspapers," she asserts, "all would be better." She does not directly propose a prohibition law against flivvers.

The only male teacher heard from, an instructor at East Orange, New Jersey, thinks that Mr. Seitz would have American education stand still while American democracy moves forward. He thinks Mr. Seitz does not understand that, because of the development of our civilization, "the center of gravity has been shifted from subject-matter to the child to be taught, and the school, in consequence, has largely changed from a place where children prepare for life to a place where children live life and thus prepare for civic and social efficiency in the National life of to-morrow." He gives the reasons for the faith that is in him concerning the teaching in the public schools of nature and agriculture, health and physical development, vocational and manual arts, home economics, music. And he informs Mr. Seitz that, despite all these things, sixty per cent of the time of the elementary school pupil is given to the study of the seven subjects approved in "One Thing at a Time."

N that same of East Orange

tion of music could have come into my experience, for my people are too poor to pay for this sort of training. And I have a longing to go on in music." Mr. Seitz is partly right, this student concludes, but "misses appreciation of the better and more helpful side of education."

A boy thinks that Mr. Seitz would

ing-as the East Orange girl said clearly and as some of the others intimated-is and always will be the important thing. Little Willie's digestion is capable of taking care of all that can be fed to him, provided only that it is properly prepared and properly served.

'DUCATIONALLY speaking, I am a great

turn boys out into the world as citizens ED

without any knowledge of government, and another one asks, “Is not education supposed to fit the child to understand the world into which he is born?"

A girl, after roundly condemning what

Mr. Seitz said, regrets what he left unsaid. "If he criticised our schools," she says, "on the basis of how subjects are taught rather than on what is taught, he would be offering a more constructive suggestion."

My personal opinion is that this high school girl gets more nearly at the heart of the thing than did either Mr. Seitz or the teachers who criticise him.

Another girl says that Mr. Seitz is "correct in what he says about pupil inefficiency in reading." But, she continues, "this does not mean that I should care to have my little six-year-old sister taught reading only, for I know that it would become extremely monotonous and unendurable for her."

Still another girl emphasizes the importance of teaching cooking, sewing, art work, and the like, and says: "I should be glad to see The Outlook print an editorial in which it would express its belief on the vital question that Mr. Seitz has raised."

A girl says: "I would hate to enter a school as a student under the control of Mr. Seitz. It would be too monotonous, too uninteresting, without mental diversion or relaxation. I venture he would flunk out as an educator."

But, of course, he would not. His theory of education is right-for him. It would be right for the schools if all teachers were like him. If he had been a teacher, he would have had kinship with that divinely inspired little group of the elder day who could impart a liberal education to boys and girls with no textbook except Webster's Blue-Backed Speller. Put Seitz in a schoolroom, limit the curriculum to the three R's, and still the pupils will be instructed in and will think constructively about more subjects than are taught in the public schools to

Mr. Seitz's article and criticised himnot merely cats looking at a king or kittens at a prince, but kittens actually presuming to look at a king. One of them says: "The trouble with Mr. Seitz is that he is too narrow in his view of education, and too extreme. Had it not been for the public schools, no apprecia

deal more old-fashioned than Mr. Seitz. He is only about as old-fashioned as the "old field school" teacher of our pioneer days. I am as old-fashioned as

Comenius, almost as old-fashioned as

Aristotle. He would limit the number of subjects taught in the public schools to seven. I would limit it to one-the interest of the child in the things about him.

And I am an experienced teacher. I taught one little girl to read. She never knew that she was learning to read. She was interested in picture books, and she thought that she was simply learning to see the pictures more completely-as completely as I saw them.

After the schools had had her for seven or eight years, I took her back and carried her through the equivalent of a college course. We were not Mark Hopkins and a boy, and we had no log to sit on, but we were a sort of university just the same. When her interest extended to the stars and to the intricacies of statecraft and other obscure or faraway things, the staff of the Naval Observatory and the State Department and other learned specialists became my assistants. They did not drill their learning into her bright little head. She grabbed it from them in chunks. I could no longer keep up with her interests, but I could continue to direct them where they might be satisfied. And her mental digestion was equal to anything. It was not possible to feed her more than she could hold. She might just as well have had years earlier most of what she got then.

Henry Adams says something to the effect that after he had spent four years at Harvard he found that he could have learned just as much in four months. Much the same thing is true of most boys and girls in the public schools. We are not teaching too many subjects. The trouble is that we have not learned how to teach any of them right. But maybe we have made progress toward it.

Now, if The Outlook prints these views of the second most incorrigible member of its staff, it will practically be forced to publish an editorial setting forth its own views of education. DIXON MERRITT.

of that kind. There never were. It would take more of an optimist than I am to believe that there ever will be. Still, we must go on trying to approximate that kind of teaching, and the THAT is enough for the present. We nearer we approach it, the less important does prescribed subject-matter become. The how rather than the what of teach

may continue this later. School is dismissed.

ERNEST HAMLIN ABBOTT.

EATTLE again takes the National spotlight with the election of Mrs. Bertha K. Landes over Mayor win J. Brown. There is nothing new in the Northwestern metropolis arousing periodical National interest in its mayoralty elections and recalls.

When Hiram C. Gill, openly backed by the most vicious vice ring in Seattle and widely advertised by his famous corn-cob pipe, became candidate for Mayor of Seattle, fifteen years ago, he easily won in the city election. His political actions, however, became too. flagrant. The referendum and recall were brought into play, and Hi Gill was ignominiously voted out of office.

His successors fared fairly well for two terms, when Gill again appeared before the electorate with his famous plea: "I know every vice haunt in Seattle; I know every vice leader; I want to wipe off the stain on my family name; I want the men and women of Seattle to give my wife and children another chance.

I

By SHERMAN ROGERS

boss at the City Hall. Mayor Brown seldom sought advice from his friends and never gave quarter to his enemies. But vice still remained. Charges flew thick and fast. Despite the criticism, Mayor Brown seemed to be solidly intrenched so far as Washingtonian Democracy was concerned, and it was freely predicted that he was headed for the United States Senate.

So far as the men of Seattle were concerned, Brown was boss. Politically, he had whipped soundly the best men Seattle could put forth.

However, the best of planners sometimes overlook small things that later result in big upheavals. Mayor Brown was elected as "Queen City" delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Madison Square Garden. This was a golden opportunity for the Mayor's poHe hurried to New litical ambition. York with the Washington delegation, and then the fireworks started.

The Mayor, securely seated in the

band became a professor in the Univer sity of Washington. Mrs. Landes, a mother, and a very proud one, became active in civic affairs. She became interested in women's clubs and quickly became a recognized leader of women's activities in the "Queen City" of Puget Sound. She is fifty-eight years old.

She became very popular in the University district. The University district wanted an upstanding Councilman to represent them at the City Hall. They didn't get the Councilman, but they did elect a Councilwoman. Mrs. Landes secured the office by a fair margin. She was re-elected two years later by the largest majority ever given a Councilmanic candidate in Seattle. Not only was she on the Council securely, but she became President of that body, and as President she had the power of taking the Mayor's office to wield the Mayor's ax in his Honor's absence-which she did vigorously.

and byways of Seattle as it has never been done before." The good women of Seattle reached for their handkerchiefs with their left hand and with their right they voted Mr. Gill back into office. For two years Seattle boiled politically, charging the "corn-cob" Mayor with having failed to prosecute vice or attempting to do so.

All elements of Seattle desiring a clean

Square Garden, was handed a telegram. He couldn't have displayed more instantaneous action if he had grasped hold of a bolt of lightning. The Mayor moved, and moved rapidly. Safely outside the building, the cause of Mayor Brown's anxiety became manifest when he displayed a telegram from Seattle. A woman had dared to defy him!

with favorable results. Mayor Hanson a short time later became a National figure by his militant stand against the radical element during the Seattle general strike. Four years of peace and progress ensued during the single terms of Mayor Hanson and Hugh C. Caldwell, upstanding Seattle citizens. .

I

r the people of Seattle desired excitement, they got it in the next two elections. Dr. Edwin J. Brown, a Nationally advertised dentist, sought the highest position Seattle could give a citizen. He was opposed in both appeals to the polls by prominent Seattleites. In his first attempt no one gave him an outside chance. Every Seattle newspaper was against him. Despite this fact, he walked off with the election. He became a storm center in Northwestern politics. There was no question about who was

of the Seattle Council, and Acting Mayor during the Executive's absence outside the State, had peremptorily discharged Mayor Brown's police head, Chief Severyns, and placed Claude Bannick at the head of Seattle's police force. Political treason, certainly. So far as the Mayor was concerned, it was treason. But what could he do three thousand miles away? He did the first thing possible. He sought the fastest train traveling toward the Pacific coast, and boarded it in high dudgeon.

In the meantime Seattle was boiling. The open-town advocates were highly excited. Those who desired a clean town were exultant.

The Eastern press immediately desired a line-up on the woman who had started the trouble. They found that Mrs. Landes was a native of New England. She had moved West in 1895, where her hus

LAUDE BANNICK's reign was shortlived. The Mayor returned as fast as steam could carry him, and returned wrathfully, and his first act on reaching the City Hall was to reappoint his former Chief of Police. When he did so. he signed his political death warrant. From that moment all opposing elements of Seattle combined solidly to place Mrs. Landes in the City Hall. Mayor Brown fought strenuously. He felt certain of success. His political machine was well constructed and well oiled. Mrs. Landes espoused a commission form of government, and Mayor Brown opposed it. When the ballots were counted, Mrs. Landes was elected with the largest plurality ever given a Seattle Mayor. By that same plurality the commission form of government, espoused by Mrs. Landes, was defeated, demonstrating her persona! popularity beyond a question.

Seattle is jubilant. It discounts the experiences of other sections of the country with women in high public office. pointing out that Mrs. Landes has had years of civic experience, is well schooled in political affairs, and is a natural born leader. She is thoroughly familiar with every phase of Seattle's political government. Seattle expects vigorous law enforcement from the City Hall; and there seems little doubt at this writing that it will get it.

M

ORRIS K. MORRIS, not so long ago holder of the Dia

mond Sculls, one of the world's great rowing trophies, stepped from the gangplank of a ship to make his home. in this country. The Englishman is one of the greatest of all single scullers. He was met by a group of prominent American oarsmen, who welcomed him as a contender for single sculling honors with our best Americans-Hoover, Costello, and Garrett-Gilmore.

"Oh, no," said the Britisher, "I can't say that I shall do much sculling. You see, I want to get into a good club crew. You see, at home the greatest honor a man can have is to row in a good eight." There it is. The fundamental desire of this great oarsman was to get on the water "with the team."

"Now I understand," said one of the American oarsmen, "the origin of 'Jolly Boating Weather.' A single sculler proceeding down-stream piping his lay would be something of a fiasco. It's a crew song."

All of which is true. The single sculler, great though he be, is the loneliest soul on the face of the waters, while an eight-any eight, good, bad, or indifferent is a real house party, without any of the dissensions incident to many house parties. There is in an eight-oared crew a community of interest, a rhythm, a precision, an actual musical beat, to be found in no other sport. It lasts a lifetime. And the next thing to rowing in a crew is the making of one. That is why the wonderful old-timers like Jim Ten Eyck, Joe Wright, Jim Rice, the elder Glendon, Bill Haines, and the rest of them, and the younger men like Ed Stevens at Harvard, Charley Logg at Princeton, Ed Leader at Yale, and Rusty Callow at Washington are now glorying in the teaching of eight-oared crews, the building of the greatest team effort in sport.

This year will mark a continuation of the building of eight-oared crews in this country, the effort reaching a peak never before attained. Few perhaps realize that at such institutions as Yale, Harvard, Washington, Pennsylvania, Cornell, Syracuse, and others where the boating tradition is well established and the coaching is good the squads turned out for fall rowing and continued for a large part of the spring are far larger than the football squads, despite all the prestige that other famous team sport enjoys. And the year 1926 will see new heights

of rowing was in the air. I refer now to the victory of the eight of the Penn A. C. in the Hanlan Memorial Cup race at St. Catherines, Ontario, beating the famous Argonauts and the University of Toronto. And the Canadians think no more of the Hanlan Memorial, a trophy that had remained across the border for twenty years, than they do of their two eyes. In that wonderful Penn A. C. crew, coached by Joe Wright, himself a famous Argonaut, sat the greatest collection of American single scullers ever boated over one keel.

I know of no other sport in which such a degree of team effort could have been obtained through the gathering together of eight individual stars, all with practically priceless reputations. If one adds that all present were of Irish descent, the marvel is all the more accented. It was no private war, this attack on Canadian rowing prestige.

That attack will be resumed this year, for the Canadians have promised to send to Philadelphia the winners of all their ráces in all classes at the Royal Canadian Henley. In the meantime there is a rapidly growing accession of college oarsmen to the club crews. The New York Athletic Club is putting together, as last season, an eight collegiate from bow to stern, stroked by Dow Walling, one of the best of the series of fine stroke oars turned out by the University of Washington at Seattle, and drawing for material on Yale, the Navy, and Cornell.

For many seasons the Schuylkill has been the chief gathering place of former college oarsmen, while the Union Boat Club of Boston has kept the New England collegians together. In Philadelphia the new Penn A. C. has naturally drawn upon the wealth of Pennsylvania men who were taught by Joe Wright, while other Pennsylvania graduates hook up with the Bachelors' Barge Club.

Yale men have sat from time to time in the shells of the Detroit Rowing Club, held to be the oldest in the United States, while men of Syracuse have been bulwarks of some of the great eights turned out at Duluth, where the Ten Eyck influence is strong indeed. Buffalo, Baltimore, Washington, and other cities are also picking up collegians, and it is safe to say that there are more college men rowing after graduation to-day than at any previous period in the history of the sport.

There are new problems confronting

the college crews this year, for there has been a general shake-up in the various coaching systems-something that affects crew rowing even more than it does football. These problems do not appear particularly pressing when the men are on the machines, or even in the rowing tank, but they are instantly recognizable once the eights are on the water with a boat of their own to manage. Columbia is in charge of the two Glendons, father and son, this year; Fred Spuhn and Max Lufft, both from the University of Washington, have taken hold of the University of Pennsylvania eights; Bob Butler, also of Washington, is in charge at Annapolis; while Ed Stevens, from Oregon, continues at Harvard; Ed Leader, from Washington, at Yale; and Princeton is trying a new experiment with Charley Logg, of Washington, who was assistant to Dr. J. Duncan Spaeth last

season.

The Glendons have always maintained that their stroke did not necessarily re

quire the huge material usually found at Annapolis, and to some extent they have proved this through turning out some good medium-weight eights, but they have never been successful so far in building a good 150-pound eight. This has frequently been laid to lack of facilities, but the new venture at Columbia will throw light on this question. The Glendons use long oars and wide blades, and because of conditions at Annapolis are somewhat partial to rough water. They will find that commodity in the Hudson in the early season, and now and then later at Poughkeepsie. Columbia's early-season rowing is conducted under difficulties because of water conditions. It is rough on the Hudson, and the Harlem is full of driftwood. So it is difficult. to get in the amount of mileage necessary to a four-mile race.

Washington is superbly situated for rowing, and has been taught the same style for many years. The men of Seattle are out on the water literally months ahead of any other crews, and it is on water that one learns how to row and packs away the mileage. So Washington is the favorite even at this writing, through natural advantages, veteran material, and continuity in coaching, shell building, and rigging. Next to be favored is Annapolis. But here there is a change in systems, not perhaps fundamental. Nevertheless there is something for oarsmen to forget as well as learn in the course of changing a system, and in a race the forgetting is difficult. That is one reason why a new coach is seldom asked to show a string of victories in his first season.

Philadelphia provides open water early, and here the Red and Blue has an advantage, offset to some extent by the shortness of the course, where it is difficult to pile up the mileage without taking numerous turns. Again there is the problem of forgetting this time the forgetting of what is, in my opinion, one of

Wide World

Ed Leader

the best strokes taught in America. Last fall in a purely friendly race the Quakers beat Princeton (also learning a new stroke) some five lengths. The Red and Blue rowed about half the distance the first half-in the Washington style, and finished in the Joe Wright style. Which means that they had not yet learned to forget when under fire.

In hardest case are the Northern and Eastern crews. Yale is out a little ahead of Harvard, as a rule, even though only on New Haven Harbor, and here, owing to the continued instruction of Leader, the problem is one of material only. Harvard has made steady progress under Stevens, and the brief session on Carnegie Lake as the guests of Princeton ought to make a world of difference in the preparation. It is a journey from live water to dead water and back again. On lake water it is possible for a coach to know almost exactly how fast his crew is, and the feeling of confidence when the eight returns to tidewater, with the con