they may profit by demonstrations and lectures. So much for reaching the adults.

In order to reach the children, teachers must be trained. Several agricultural colleges are conducted in connection with the provincial normal colleges, and will tend to change the country school from the city type. Gradually the teachers trained in these places will change nature study to elementary agriculture. In time, possibly, the school garden and the school farm will be regarded as necessary as any other laboratory.

Canada is beginning to do systematically what we in the United States have been doing spasmodically and fragmentarily. Some day rural art, rural architecture, rural society and social customs will have dignity and distinction. But first we shall have to build as foundation, with educated minds as material, a sound rural economic system.

A DEMOCRATIC ARISTO

CRAT

During the last two weeks of this month the International Council of Women is holding at Toronto its fourth quinquennial meeting. The Council is a federation of a score of National Councils formed in various countries for the promotion of unity and mutual understanding between all associations of women working for the common welfare of the community. It seeks the highest good of the family and the State by furthering the application of the Golden Rule to society, custom, and law." It provides a means of communication among the organized women of different countries; it secures an interchange of information, suggestion, and thought, and encourages mutual sympathy and co-operation among women everywhere who are working for a common end.

The Council has been fortunate in having for its President for the past five years, and before that from 1893 to 1899, the Countess of Aberdeen. Lady Aberdeen is unassuming and possessed of the sense

of humor to which her Irish blood entitles her. She is a representative of the best that the English anstocracy produces, or perhaps we should say British, for her Irish blood is mixed only with Scotch. During more than a quarter of a century Lady Aberdeen has been in public life because she is the wife of the Earl of Aberdeen, who has been twice Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and for five years was GovernorGeneral of Canada. It is hard to speak of Lady Aberdeen without her husband, or of Lord Aberdeen without his wife, for they have carried out in their lifework the ideal which Lady Aberdeen expressed several years ago at the University of Chicago. She deplored the tendency of men and women to organize on separate lines to accomplish common ends. The home, she said, is the world's safeguard, and men and women can protect it and develop its influence by working, not apart, but together, progress depends on the closeness of their relation to each other, morally and intellectually. this spirit Lord and Lady Aberdeen have administered the great public offices which they have held. Coming into Ireland for the first time at a critical moment in the history of its relation to England, their influence perhaps more than any other has softened the inborn antagonism of the Irishman toward his rulers. The tact and skill of Lord Aberdeen and the graciousness and broad human sympathy of Lady Aberdeen won the hearts of the Irish people. In Canada the same generous qualities met with the same personal and official success. At their home in Scotland, where broad acres and hundreds of tenants have afforded them a more intimate but no less vital opportunity, they have shown that even the feudal system as it survives to-day need not be incompatible with the democratic spirit. By an irony of birth, Lord and Lady Aberdeen belong to what is called England's leisure class; but if there are two harder workers in the United Kingdom, they would be difficult to discover. They work without regard to any eight-hour rule or attempt at limitation of output; but they work for their fellow-men.