Your article in The Outlook for December 6 last upon the German philosophy excites the appetite for The Outlook's philosophy of the state, which is only partially given in said article. So I presume on your patience to beg for it in full. S. A. F.

NR

TEITHER the state nor the church is a divine organization in other sense than this, that the Creator of any man has endowed him with a social nature which causes him to seek the fellowship and co-operation of his fellow-men in any enterprises which he may undertake. The result is industrial organizations, religious organizations, artistic and musical organizations, and, with all the rest, a political organization.

There is, therefore, no outward form of government which is divinely appointed. That form of government is best which governs best; and that governs best which best promotes in its citizens a noble manhood and womanhood. Therefore that form which governs best in one period of human development may not govern best in another period of human develop

ment.

I know of no better definition of the true objects of the state than that furnished by the preamble to the Constitution of the United States:

We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

It is the object of the state to form a more perfect union. It unites the citizens in a common endeavor for the common welfare. The existence of such a union and of the spirit which brings it about tends to greater peace, order, and safety. The Government of England has conserved this object by its union of England, Wales, and Scotland. It has failed to conserve this object in its dealing with Ireland. Its statesmen are endeavoring to undo the mischief of the past by bringing about a real union with Ireland by some form of Home Rule. The Sinn Feiners, in resisting this endeavor and fomenting hostility in Ireland to union with England, are doing what they can to prevent the accomplishment of one of the objects of good government in their own country.

It is the object of the state to establish justice.

For this purpose it organizes courts to determine what is just, and constables, sheriffs, and police to enforce the decision of these courts, and, specifically, to protect the fundamental rights of the individual to his person, to his property, to his reputation, and to his family, against the aggressions of the unscrupulous, the lawless, and the criminal.

It is the object of the state to insure domestic tranquillity. It does this by forming a more perfect union, establishing and maintaining justice, removing by its judicial system just causes for complaint, and by promoting those educational and philanthropic enterprises which tend to make the members of the community better acquainted with each other, and to inspire in them a greater regard for each other's interests and a greater tolerance and respect for each other's opinions.

It is the object of the state to provide for the common defense. As it provides by courts and by police for the protection of the individual from unscrupulous and lawless individuals within the community, so it provides by military forces for the protec

tion of the community from unscrupulous, lawless, and hostile communities without. It is the duty of the state to equip itself with force sufficient to furnish this protection to its citizens at home and abroad, on the land and on the sea. If it fails to do this, it fails in one of its primary duties. If it uses this force, not to defend the lives and property of its citizens, but to make aggression on the lives and property of other citizens, it is an unjust and lawless state. How far it ought to go in uniting with other nations to enforce international law and to protect the rights of nations unable to protect themselves is a question the determination of which must depend upon the circumstances of each particular case.

It is the object of the state to promote the general welfare.

There is what has been satirically called the "night watchman theory of the state-that its only function is to protect persons and property, and that if under this protection each man takes care of number one all the numbers will be well taken care of. The framers of the American Constitution entertained one hundred and thirty years ago a larger conception of government than this. They said that it is a function of the state to promote the general welfare. What may it do for this purpose? Our answer is: The people may do by the state whatever they find they can do for themselves better and cheaper than they can hire done for them by private enterprise. There is no other test to be applied to such questions as: Shall the state carry letters and not parcels, or small parcels and not large freight, or freight and not passengers? Shall it own post-offices and not the telegraph, or the telegraph and not the railways, or postoffices, the telegraph, and the railways, all three? There is no limitation on the power of the state to do anything which the citizens deem to be for the public welfare, and which is not inconsistent. with personal liberty.

It is the object of the state to secure the blessings of liberty for its citizens.

This is the climax in the preamble to our Constitution. It is also the climax in the American ideal. The ideal state is " conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Justice is established, domestic tranquillity insured, the common defense provided for, the general welfare promoted, in order to secure the blessings of individual liberty.

Every man, whatever his race, color, intelligence, condition, or past history, has a right to become all that under adequate protection and with reasonable opportunity he can become. This is not merely a political opinion in America. It is a religious faith. It is not true that the state exists for the individual; but it is true that the state exists for the community. It is not an end; it is the means to an end. And that end is a human brotherhood, governed justly, defended adequately, and living peacefully in happiness and freedom.

America is still in the making. Its hopes are vague; its ideal is still but dimly perceived. But this ideal of political organization for individual freedom and the common well-being is the luminous cloud that leads America toward its promised land. Because Americans believe both in personal liberty and in the common welfare, they believe in local self-government, municipal home rule, and a federal system; in opening all doors of service equally to all the people; in the duty of the state to provide by public education all the people with equality of equipment to take advantage of opportunity; in the right of workingmen to combine and promote their common interests by collective bargaining rather than in state ownership and state

direction and control of all organized industries; in a homestead law, giving land to any man who will live upon it and cultivate it, and in conserving for the public welfare all public lands, such as mines, forests, and water powers, which cannot be developed by individual industry; in the ownership and administration of the great railways by private enterprise, but under a Governmental regulation which insures their administration in the interest of the public; in a protective system rather than in a pension system, believing that a protective system, properly regulated, will enable each individual to provide his own pension. The

guiding spirit of America seeks to combine individual enterprise and individual liberty with organized effort for the common good. I answer, then, my correspondent's question with the following definition of the true state:

The state is a political organization, the divine intent of which is to provide for the defense both of the individual and of the community, to insure peace and order, to promote the general welfare, and to preserve inviolate the blessings of individual liberty.

The Knoll, Cornwall-on-Hudson.

I

T is an illumination of the needs of modern New England to drop in upon an evening session in the old and famous Boston Latin School. Still the tablet on the wall in memory of Ezekiel Cheever, the early great head master; still the Latin and Greek training, broadened since Cheever's day-the Boston Latin School is even now the nearest thing to the genuine classical high school in New England. But over yonder, under the same roof, is a class of foreign-born under instruction in English that they may take out their naturalization papers. And across the hall there is another big room full of adult mutes being taught to read by the movement of the lips.

A short time ago the Superintendent of Schools in Boston resigned to accept the leadership of education in Oklahoma, where he might build anew with freedom in a frontier State. His successor in Boston in his inaugural address referred to New England as now the real educational frontier of the country. The frontier of the children of the lowly foreign-born it is, like New York and other parts of the great East, a frontier of struggle for economic livelihood and a place in the sunlight of the world, but without the clear and inspiring reactions of democracy and Nationalism which marked the earlier recession of the frontier of the West.

Boston is yet the chief brain center of New England. And the mind of Boston is seething with portents of educational revolution. The original home in this country of formal discipline and traditional culture is welcoming willingly the attempted overthrow of the theory and the practice which lie at the root of the old ideas about discipline and culture. Greek has gone except for those who like or need it. And Latin is going except for those who like or especially need it. And there is a further programme of revolution openly advocated by compelling leaders. No formal grammar so also, for the great body of students, no portions of mathematics which cannot be made practically useful in the every-day life of the world. Algebra, said one of the greatest educators in New England to me, has for the most part no more educational value than counting the spots on the sun. New England is thinking no longer of the training of a ministerial or professional aristocracy, but is planning for the practical culture of the great unwashed and undisciplined democracy within her gates.

How to make the first six years of elementary education more efficient in time and knowledge and inspiration, how to hold the boys and girls of fourteen in school a little longer until they learn better what it is to be Americans and what working niche in the world they are best fitted to fill that is the problem. Reading, writing, figuring, and spelling, of course, in a more effective and practical way; and physical training beyond the

dream of Athens. But something also about stars, and birds, and flowers, and trees, and real things of many sorts in science and literature and language and art and music; and the history of the institutions and the economic and social happenings of common men. But, of the old discipline, only that is to remain which will freely and fully energize the mind for the service of the present age and give it practical vision and enthusiasm and power.

Much of this impending revolution has not yet been put into action. But some of it has. Massachusetts has her mechanics' arts high schools for boys, and practical arts high schools for girls, her high schools of commerce, and her English high schools in addition to the Latin schools. And a vast system of State-aided vocational training is growing up. At Fall River and at Lowell boys are fitted to become master weavers. Instead of a thesis upon the ethical dative, the graduate plans a piece of cloth, weaves it, and dyes it, and out of it his graduation suit is made. Or the student spends the forenoon in the agricultural school and the afternoon in the forestry work of the city, pruning and doctoring trees, or with the greenhouse man or the dener or the city park department. The girls are headed in the direction of practical home-makers or intelligent business and industrial workers. In the Boston schools the eighth-grade teachers hold individual conferences with their pupils to aid in leading them towards the particular high school for which they seem to be fitted and towards the right way out into the battle and the service of life.

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Both boys and girls in Massachusetts are beginning to be guided toward a broader and more useful community citizenship. At Chatham in groups together they hunt and destroy the larvæ of the brown-tailed moth. At Dorchester the teacher, as judge of a circuit court, conducts his pupils through all the naturalization proceedings, and when the time of the final oath of citizenship comes they stand up and take it together, while the teacher-judge reads from Hale's" Man Without a Country or from President Wilson's speech to the new Americans in Philadelphia. Dorchester is through with teaching citizenship from a text-book and of having it written back to the instructor. Government is objectified. When the senior class elects its officers, it is done in a regulation polling-booth under the system of the preferential ballot. There was consternation the other day when the choice for the class presidency fell, in one of these elections near Boston, upon a boy bound for the commercial high school, the son of plain parents, and not upon a boy bound for the classical high school for entrance to college. "There," said one teacher, "I can see how democracy is going to work, and I am opposed to it. The best choice of the lot was passed

by, a boy of fine New England family, whose father keeps two or three automobiles." "Yes," said the civics instructor; "but what we are trying to do here is to energize democracy, to allow it to proceed by trial and error, so that by and by it will learn to choose with a higher wisdom.'

In Massachusetts some of the most successful teachers are trying to make the school-city a model for the municipality, The pupils under such instructors elect their own mayor and common council at the time when the city's mayor and common council are elected. They follow with ordinance and discussion the policies and activities of the city government. There are very few important factors of the real city's life with which these community experimenters do not become in a measure practically acquainted. "There goes fifty cents of my money," said one boy to another as the fire-engine swept by the window. It is the serious, practical side of the duty of citizenship which is brought home to them. And when the time is ripe for it, these native New England scions and the offspring of the foreign stock together take the young Athenian's oath :

We will never bring disgrace to this our city by any act of dishonesty or cowardice or ever desert our suffering comrades in the ranks. We will fight unceasingly to quicken a public sense of civic duty. We will revere and obey the city's laws, and do our best to incite a like respect and reverence in those about us who are prone to annul them or set them at naught. Thus in all these ways we will transmit this our city, not only not less, but greater, better, and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us. But what is stirring Boston and other parts of New England is, in fact, stirring the educational deeps of the country. And the strength of it has been increased by the lessons of the great war. The real power of Germany is not in the submarine or in Prussian militarism. It is in the fact that Germany before the war made good on her boast that she would not have an untrained boy or girl in the Empire. The average German citizen is an intelligent and expert asset in the great conflict. The wakening of England and her preparation in thirty months against Germany's preparation of thirty years will some day be the theme of universal admiration. But England now knows how narrow was her escape from disaster. She now realizes how lax and loose and undisciplined and careless she had grown. The recent Sir George Newman report, with its revelation that a million children are so physically or mentally defective or diseased as to be unable to derive reasonable benefit from the education which the country provides, has aroused England like a fire-bell in the night. The malnutrition of an imperfectly regulated and blood-exploiting industrial and housing system! Nothing of that character before the war in the Empire of her great foe!

But something more is stirring England with respect to the welfare and efficiency of her youth. England has not lacked the sacrifice of her young men. Out of the public schools and colleges and universities they have poured loyally and silently and grimly into the death trenches. But England sees now how her system of education lacks in anything like universal physical and vocational expertness. The census of vocational or industrial misfits has never been taken, but if it were taken in England or America the conclusion could not fail to be appalling. And we should have accounted at once for much of the social unrest in England and America. Certainly never again in England will there be satisfaction with an educational system which has produced results so perilous to the national safety. And the physical and vocational elements of a genuine culture will not again be allowed to lapse while the English people

endure.

How about America? Underneath the surface there is with us vast educational discontent. Our system of the training of youth cannot be called a failure. The common people have put their trust in it because at least it has granted to every child equality of access to knowledge. And it is producing within itself profound variations in the direction of progress. But nevertheless a great number of elder as well as younger men and women in the United States are waking up to a realization of the manner in which their careers and training have been victimized by the curriculum of their education. They have been fed too much on the chaff and sawdust of a merely formal discipline. To appreciate the inner meaning of the world of nature

and the activities and happenings of common men and common things; to possess the joy of learning and knowing what is really worth while in order to do it ; to experience the energizing of mind and the happiness which flow from having early been guided into one's natural place in the work and service of the world, with a clear road to livelihood and freedom-nobody in his senses would maintain that the system of American education has fulfilled or is now fulfilling for the great majority these native aspirations of human beings.

The rural schools of a considerable portion of the South-› and parts of the North-are a formal and inert travesty upon real physical, mental, and moral training for livelihood, liberty, and happiness. The General Education Board has given us pictures and descriptions of large numbers of these rural schools:

...

Small, one-roomed structures set on pegs, weather-blackened, window-smashed, often with wrecked entrance stoops and lockless door; for chimney a length of stove-pipe thrust through side or back; for furniture a perpendicular combination of bench and desk, well fitted to be an engine of torture. . . . The original picturesqueness of... nature defaced and belittered. From November onward, for three to seven months, somewhat less than half of the school population of the district may be found there, usually taught by a young girl, a last year's older pupil of this or a neighboring school. Enter and shall see her painfully teaching her class to read sentences of English, quite likely as one would pronounce the successive words in the perpendicular columns of a spelling-book.

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One finds little done to alleviate the miseries or discomforts ing or shelter, or much of anything else which these children of country life, few lessons of health or industry or food or clothneed to know. The pupils are penned in a room, chained to a bench, and subjected to traditionally irksome and for the most part useless methods and unskillfully taught disciplines of a day that is gone. That is the picture which the General Education Board brings to us. This is no method for the making of the Nation.

1

And in most of our cities the shortcomings of American education are manifest. The millions of the children of the foreign-born have already greatly weakened the existing system so far as its being the support and inspiration of the Nation is concerned. Two-thirds of all the pupils leave school at fourteen years of age, either wearied of it or urged by their parents into the economic struggle for which the teaching of the schools seems to give no overt sign of preparation. Trained neither for citizenship nor for economic efficiency, there results a great undisciplined mass of a kind of citizens by which America is in danger of being flooded. And the blame is upon the vastness of the problem and upon the generation-long incompetence and lack of insight of American government and public opinion, and the upon mass. A land dedicated to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is becoming more thoroughly permeated every year with vocational misfits and misanthropes and multitudes in blind alleys with no hope of the way out. Here is certainly one great source of growing National discontent.

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Speaking of Americanism, did you ever look over the eligible civil service list of teachers in New York or Boston? In New Slavic names; in Boston, at the great number of Irish and JewYork you will be surprised at the great number of Jewish and ish names. And they are mostly women. It is greatly to the credit of these children of the foreign-born. But of course it means that much of the work of Americanism under our city public school system is being done by those who have no ances tral background and who are themselves taking the first steps in the culture and inspiration of a genuine Americanism.

When we get our true bearings in this country, after the menace of the great war is past, it is not the army, not the navy, not diplomacy, not even a more earnest attention to the human welfare of workers, that should have our first concern. Impor tant these are. But every one of them is of no final avail unless there is behind all a sound and efficient system for the early training and discipline of the youth of the United States. Physical and military, yes, and immediate ; but, above all, vocational and civic discipline. In that system of education in which there is neither National vision nor National efficiency the people doubly perish!

1 Gates, "The Country School of To-Morrow."

or worked the levers of the giant steam-hammers, while here and there bars of iron, new, glowing from the furnace, winked and twinkled in the gloom where those wild, half-naked men-shapes flitted to and fro unheard amid the thunderous din. Awed and half stunned. I stood viewing that never-to-be-forgotten scene until I grew aware that the captain was roaring in my ear. "Forge-rifle-barrels--come and see, and mind where you

tread."

Treading as seemingly silent as those wild human shapes that straightened brawny backs to view me as I passed, that grinned in the fire-glow and spoke one to another words lost to my stunned hearing ere they bent to their labor again, obediently I followed the captain's dim form until I had come where, barearmed, leathern-aproned, and bespectacled, stood one who seemed of some account among these salamanders, who, nodding to certain words addressed to him by the captain, seized a pair of tongs, swung open a furnace door, and, plucking thence a glowing brand, whirled it with practiced ease and set it upon the dies beneath a huge steam-hammer, nodding his head. Instantly that mighty engine fell to work, thumping and bang ing with mighty strokes, and with each stroke that glowing steel bar changed and changed-grew round, grew thin, hunched a shoulder here, showed a flat there, until, lo! before my eyes was the shape of a rifle minus the stock. Hereupon the bespectacled salamander nodded again; the giant hammer became immediately immobile, the glowing forging was set among hundreds of others, and a voice roared in my ear:

"Two minutes-this way.'

A door opens, closes, and we are in sunshine again, and the captain is smilingly reminiscent of books.

"This is greater than books," said I.

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Why, that depends," says he; "there are books and books.. This way."

Up a flight of stairs, through a doorway, and I am in a shop where huge machines grow small in perspective. And here I see the rough forging pass through the many stages of trimming, milling, turning, boring, rifling, until comes the assembling, and I take up the finished rifle ready for its final process -testing. So downstairs we go to the testing-sheds, wherefrom, as we approach, comes the sound of dire battle-continuous reports, now in volleys, now in single sniping shots, or in rapid succession.

Inside I breathe an air charged with burned powder, and behold in a long row many rifles mounted upon crutches, their muzzles leveled at so many targets. Beside each rifle stand two men, one to sight and correct, and one to fire and watch the effect of the shot by means of a telescope fixed to hand.

With the nearest of these men I incontinently fell into talk -a chatty fellow this, who, busied with pliers adjusting the back-sight of a rifle, talked to me of lines of sight and angles of deflection, his remarks sharply punctuated by rifle-shots that came, now clearly, now in twos and threes, and now in rapid volleys.

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Yes, sir," said he, busy pliers never still," guns and rifles very like us you and me, say. Some is just naturally good, and some is worse than bad. Load up, George! A new rifle's like a kid-pretty sure to fire a bit wide at first-not being used to it; we was all kids once, sir, remember. But a bit of correc tion here an' there'll put that right, as a rule. On the other hand, there's rifles as Old Nick himself nor nobody else could make shoot straight. Ready, George? And it's just the same with kids. Now, if you'll stick your eyes to that glass and watch the target, you'll see how near she'll come this time. All right, George!" As he speaks the rifle speaks also, and, observing the hit on the target, I sing out:

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Three o'clock!"

Here the patient captain suggests we had better go, and unwillingly I follow him out into the open, and the sounds of battle die away behind us.

And now as we walked I learned some particulars of that terrible device, the Lewis gun: how it could spout bullets at the rate of six hundred per minute; how, by varying pressures of the trigger, it could be fired by single rounds or pour forth its entire magazine in a continuous, shattering volley; and how it weighed no more than twenty-six pounds.

"And here," said the captain, opening a door and speaking in his pleasant voice, much as though he were showing me some rare flowers, "here is where they grow by the hundred every week." And truly in hundreds they were, long rows of them, standing very neatly in racks, their walnut stocks heel by heel, their grim blue muzzles in long, serried ranks, very orderly and precise. And something in their very orderliness endowed them with a certain individuality, as it were; it almost seemed to me that they were waiting, mustered and ready, for that hour of ferocious roar and tumult when their voice should be the voice of swift and terrible death. Now as I gazed upon them, filled with these scarcely definable thoughts, I was startled by a sudden, shattering crash near by, a sound made up of many individual reports, and, swinging about, I espied a man seated upon a stool; a plump, middle-aged, family sort of man, who sat upon his low stool, his aproned knees set wide, as plump, middle-aged family men often do. As I watched, Paterfamilias squinted along the sights of one of these guns, and once again came that shivering crash that is like nothing else I ever heard. Him I approached and humbly ventured an awed question or so, whereupon he graciously beckoned me nearer, vacated his stool, and, motioning me to sit there, suggested that I might try a shot at the target, a far disc lighted by shaded electric bulbs.

"She's fixed dead on," he said, "and she's true-you can't miss. A quick pull for single shots, and a steady pressure for a volley.

Hereupon I pressed the trigger, the gun stirred gently in its clamps, the air throbbed, and a stream of ten bullets (the testing number) plunged into the bull's-eye, and all in the space of

a moment.

"There ain't a un'oly 'Un of 'em all could say, 'Hoch the Kaiser!' with them in his stomach," said Paterfamilias, thoughtfully, laying a hand upon the respectable stomach beneath his apron. "It's a gun that is!" And a gun it most assuredly is.

I would have tarried longer with Paterfamilias, for in his own way he was as arresting as this terrible weapon-or nearly sobut the captain, gentle-voiced and serene as ever, suggested that my companions had a train to catch, wherefore I reluctantly turned away. But as I went I glanced back to Paterfamilias, as comfortable as ever where he sat, but with podgy fingers on trigger grimly at work again, and from him to the long, orderly rows of guns mustered in their orderly ranks, awaiting their hour.

We walked through shops where belts and pulleys and wheels and cogs flapped and whirled and ground in ceaseless concert, shops where files rasped and hammers rang, shops again where all seemed riot and confusion at the first glance, but at a second showed itself ordered confusion, as it were. And as we went my captain spoke of the hospital bay, of wards and dispensary (lately enlarged), of Sister and nurses and the grand work they were doing among the employees other than attending to their bodily ills; and talking thus he brought me to the place, a place of exquisite order and tidiness, yet where nurses, blue-uniformed, in their white caps, cuffs, and aprons, seemed to me the neatest of all. And here I was introduced to a Sister, capable, strong, gentle-eyed, who told me something of her work-how many came to her with wounds of soul as well as body; of griefs endured and wrongs suffered by reason of pitiful lack of knowledge; of how she was teaching them care and cleanliness of minds as well as bodies, which is surely the most blessed heritage the unborn generations may inherit. She told me of the patient bravery of the women, the chivalry of grimy men whose hurts may wait that others may be treated first. So she talked and I listened until, perceiving the captain somewhat ostentatiously consulting his watch, I presently left that quiet haven, with its soft-treading ministering attendants.

So we had tea and cigarettes, and when I eventually shook