arboreal ideals. The majority lumbering interest of the entire Northwest goes with him and backs him in his related job.

Reed College, therefore, small as it is in material size, is in another dimension as big as the big Northwest. And it is exceedingly different. We have become so accustomed to the standardized institution of learning, with its social life subdivided into fraternities and clubs, its recreation commercialized into the preparation for and the occasional presentation of mammoth spectacles for the general public, and its academic function either a series of unrelated vocational specializations or a scramble of elective superficialities we have become so used to the quantity-production, heavily endowed, big-business idea of the university that Reed seems an educational anomaly. Like a woman with the courage to wear her own hair and her own figure irrespective of what the Joneses or "they" are wearing and being, Reed College has the courage to be an independent community devoted to good will, original thought, and responsible citizenship. Rather a mouthful of a phrase that is, but, reduced to its simplest terms, it means merely a liberal education. Non-sec tarian by its deed of gift in 1904 from the estate of Mr. and Mrs. Simeon G. Reed, of Portland, it is founded on the undenominational rock of the New Testament and built primarily so that the youth of the Northwest may have life more abundantly. It mistakes not bigness for greatness. In its philosophy of the abundant life it believes not in the manufacture of specialists, but in the

making of men and women. And, in the words of its first President, it believes in the pursuance of its mission "without fear or favor of politicians, or religious sects, or benefactors, or public cries, or its own administrative machinery."

First of all, then, in its cardinal aim Reed is different. Splendidly free from harassing traditions, yet profiting by the richer experiences of older institutions, it sets out to study the peculiar needs of Portland and the Northwest--as the dead millionaire and his widow, who had found in this region that they loved so well both life and fortune abundantly, expressly intended it should do-and to serve those needs to its uttermost. The Northwest, so full of vigorous physical life, needs life in other respects more abundantly. In some ways they are barking up the wrong tree of progress in this neck of the magnificent woods. Institutions of the Reed sort, thought and intentions of the kind that founded and now support Reed College, are needed in the Northwest. In the College "Bullethe Northwest. In the College "Bulletin" it is recorded that, although Reed looks to the future oftener than to the past, the general aims of the institution "were well formulated nearly a century ago by Thomas Jefferson in stating the purposes of the University of Virginia." The quoted passages are a comforting reassurance of the latent unity and integrity of American institutions over a century of unexampled growth:

(1) To form the statesmen, legislators, and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend;

(2) To expound the principles and

structure of government, the laws which regulate the intercourse of nations,... and a sound spirit of legislation which, banishing all unnecessary restraint on individual action, shall leave us free to do whatever does not violate the equal rights of another;

(4) To develop the reasoning faculties of our youth; . . .

(6) And, generally, to form them to habits of reflection, and correct action, rendering them examples of virtue [Jefferson used the word in the older sense of integrity] to others, and of happiness within themselves.

Radically following out the central idea in the aims of the College, Reed is organized on the antithesis of the shredded-wheat principle. Its small community of 350 members affords intimate daily contacts between students and their instructors. The "product" is emphatically "touched by human hands." In civilian terms, its marching orders are remindful of the régime at West Point"Every cadet every day." Every Reed student receives the personal attention of the best instructors on the staff-a relationship which is the very educational antipodes of the mob psychology in a quantity-producing California university where the exhausted lecturer leaves the platform after addressing seven hundred indistinguishable and restless youths saying: "I have not taught anything; I cannot reach them this way." Three hundred students and thirty members of the Faculty make up the Reed community, one Faculty member for every ten students. No fraternities or sororities break up this community into little centripetal groups of mutually exclusive

households. The College is one big family fraternity, working together, playing together, living together. Instead of campaigning in two camps, divided physically and academically from each other, students and professors here find the usual and traditional barriers broken down, and the freer relationship helps a freer flow of ideas; the educational process goes on all the time by association in and out of classrooms.

A natural, indeed a necessary, corollary of this communal theory and practice is a teaching force of the very highest character and ability obtainable. Sir Richard Lovelace was right about a prison, but neither do stone walls a college make. Reed invests more than twothirds of the income from its $3,000,000 endowment in brains rather than in bricks. It pays the highest price for brains of the teaching kind-high enough to hold them safe from the bribing emissaries of the shredded-wheat institutions that make a bigger noise in the world. Compared with such collections of colleges, the administrative overhead is the lowest in the country. Highly endowed opportunities for research are not a factor in the employment of the teaching staff. The College expressly desires only teachers who are primarily teachers; such independent investigations as they

choose to make in their favorite fields are

understood to be "chiefly for the invigoration of their teaching." Research work of this constantly available character, together with the opportunities for high service in what the General Education Board regarded fifteen years ago as "the best unoccupied spot in the United States for a College of Liberal Arts and

Sciences," helps to define, in the eyes of the trustees, a Faculty worthy of the highest grade of salaries in the teaching profession. If their tribe increases-and there are signs unmistakable of its increase here and there over the country a profession coming at last into its rightful rating may change the famous Shavian diatribe against it in some such just paraphrase as this:

He who can, teaches;

He who cannot, sells something.1 Such leaders of thought are first men, and then scholars; they teach, not negatively, but for the love of teaching, with a pride in it which is made up alike of professional and human elements. Reed College proposes and intends never to permit a growth beyond the possibility of daily vital contacts between each student and inspiring teachers of this type.

1 "He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches."-Bernard Shaw.

An outgrowth of this relationship, made possible by the community life and interests of the teaching staff and the students, is found in the character of the instruction which aims to corelate and interrelate all subjects into an understood whole. History and English, for example, do not pull on opposite ends of the curricular rope; they dovetail into each other in the making of an educational structure the primary force of which shall be its daily usefulness. Examinations are almost entirely oral tests. of the condition of a student's mind;

they are not written inventories of ware

housed information. One of President Coleman's former colleagues in another institution, enthralled by the song of a hidden bird, asked a passing student what manner of bird it might be. The reply was characteristic of capsule-form, quantity-distributed educational method. in an injured tone, as though the ques"I took biology last year," said the boy tion was unsportsmanlike. English as Coleman, the lumberman, found it in big institutions of learning was a Sabbatical thing, not for daily colloquial use nor for the careless enrichment of daily experi

ence.

At a well-known and heavily endowed education factory visited earlier in this itinerary the investigations of The Outlook's representative lasted over the nooning hour. A hospitable President very kindly provided nourishment without interrupting his monologue. His method of doing so was more characteristic of the institution and his own state of

mind regarding it than, possibly, he dreamed. He did not invite the visitor to luncheon. To use his own phrase, he put him through lunch! The phraseology was proved exact. In a burnished cafeteria, hospitalized to the last degree, the scientific ingredients of a balanced ration were assembled by trained nurses and orderlies, much as a Ford car is assembled by Henry's mechanics, and delivered into the visitor in record time. At other burnished tables several hundred students of the education factory were at the same time putting themselves through lunch. The roar and clatter incident to the assembling of the rations on and off of trays and the expeditious rounding up of the débris compelled the President to shift his monologue into high gear in order to be heard across the antiseptic table. This he did the more gladly because of his pride in the obvious efficiency with which his personnel was being "put through" their filling station in a minimum of time and with a modicum of expense.

Reed perpetuates the old-fashioned custom of dining. The commons hall at meal-time is an inviting interior of welllaid tables where groups of students forget for a time their preoccupations in the enjoyment of one of the most time-honored amenities of life. Vases of white trillium-"wake-robins," one girl called them-laughed in the center of each table; Oregon sunshine streamed through high latticed windows; the breath of fir and spruce forests drifted through the

room. And the visitor, realizing another difference at Reed, humbly thanked God. In this same high-raftered hall the College social gatherings are held: concerts, lectures, teas, banquets, and regularly recurring dances. And here on Friday nights round an open log-fire meets the Forum, composed voluntarily of all the fraternity who care to come for informal discussion among themselves or to listen with equal informality to spellbinders or bringers of good tidings from outside.

A Student Council of nine members, elected annually by the suffrages of the entire community, presides over the common weal much in the same manner, though less drastically, as the Honor Committee functions at Virginia. The daily chapel exercises at noon are conducted by the students themselves, mem

T

bers of the Faculty, or invited guests. Their radical character may be judged by a recent occasion when a girl chose as the basis for her service the reading of passages from Anatole France's "Revolt of the Angels," her sincerity enabling her to express her own sense of revolt without irreverence. Athletics are carried on joyously for their own abundant sakes without grand stands or stadiums, without a "gate," without business managers or business of any kind. Incredible as it may seem, sport and business are held to be incompatible terms, representing inconsistent states of mind. Reed playsno publicity, no professionalism, no paid coaches, no keeping-up-with-the-Joneses, which fill many thousands of the seats at the great intercollegiate spectacles East and West. And, by the same token, no intercollegiate athletics.

Football,

baseball, basket-ball, tennis, golf, hockey, and track sports are entirely intramural games and contests. Reed, the whole community of Faculty and students, by classes and by "houses," gets a lot of perennial fun out of them. If the academic college régime is like that at West Point, in sport Reed has a common ground with the Naval Academy in insisting upon "athletics for all." In June this year an eight-oared crew beat the Washington freshmen in an informal race, paying all their own insignificant expenses and regarding the occasion as a picnic rather than a precedent.

Pine trees stand up lone and high on the new-cut grass of Reed's young campus, and the wind in their tops sings true of sincerity-the character of the place, the object of its existence.

"Only God can make a tree."

HE tourist along the Riviera between Nice and Genoa is likely to be so captivated by the loveliness of land and sea which lies before his face that he may be unaware of the extraordinary picturesqueness hidden away among the precipitous hills which protect this favored coast. He whirls along the shore in his snorting car, snatching a hasty glimpse of headlands and bays, and reckoning contentment by kilometers; or he lounges on the terrace of a vast hotel, saturated with sunshine and reading with self-indulgent satisfaction of wintry storms in the north. If he be tempted to further reflections on this environment, it is enough for him to recall the prolonged and tragic history of these shores. Ligurian tribes and Greek colonists, Roman armies and Saracen pirates, have passed to and fro and left the marks of their migrations. Here ran the great Roman road, defying in its course the heights and gorges and giving to the legions of Cæsar unhindered passage across the rugged hills to the smiling fields of Provence. Here, when Roman power failed, barbaric marauders from the north and audacious Saracens from the south swept like plagues over the sunny shores and desolated the prosperous towns. The softness of climate and gentleness of nature which have made the region a modern paradise for idlers and invalids tempted

these armed invaders from less-favored regions; and along the shore, where now a continuous chain of hotels stands guard and demands ample ransom from invaders, in earlier centuries the townsfolk were at the mercy of corsairs and despots and trembled before the march of armies and the demands of brigands.

SUCH

UCH were the tragic vicissitudes which once made this coast as perilous for occupation as it is now beneficent, and which drove the inhabitants back from the shore to the more easily defended heights which lay hidden in the hinterland. Here are the astonishing rock villages, which hurried or indolent tourists may fail to see, but which add another feature of dramatic interest to this romantic region. The highlands, which rise precipitously from the shore and give it the shelter which has made it so famous a resort, are in themselves of the most extraordinary character. A series of deep-cut canyons has been made by mountain torrents, and where the resisting rock intervenes the foothills rise in detached and towering pyramids, accessible only by winding muletracks and impenetrable as fastnesses. On these arid summits the refugees from marauders watched like eagles from their eyrie for the coming of their foes, and the bare rocks which were their only possession became at once their

houses and their weapons. With infinite pains they burrowed into them or piled them up for dwellings, and the boulders were ready to be dashed on an approaching enemy. Indeed, as one comes in sight of one of these rock pinnacles, towering above a smiling valley, it seems not unlikely that the entire town may topple from its perch and crush the traveler a thousand feet below.

Many aspects of these rock villages invite the traveler to exploration: the sheer surprise with which their picturesqueness breaks upon the view; the vestiges of Roman remains and early Christian worship; the sturdy cheerfulness which prevails where life might seem unendurable, as though chestnuts and olives were sufficient nourishment for workingmen and the daily trudge up the precipitous slope from the single well only made the daughters of the village more erect and gay. Here also survive the poetic traditions of Catholic piety, which may shrivel into myths when touched by the modern spirit, but which thrive among childlike peasants in an environment unchanged for a thousand years. Nowhere but among such conditions of secluded mediævalism could the traveler still be reverently told how the Madonna's picture, being set up in a village, became possessed by the mountaineering instinct and moved of

itself to a more commanding point of view, where at last another church had to be built on a solitary summit to detain the nomadic painting in its chosen shrine.

One expects, therefore, to find in these unspoiled fastnesses the simplicity of an earlier faith, and even if one come upon a work which has some suggestion of modern philanthropy in it, it is likely to be quite detached from the modern spirit, lacking everything which science might dictate, but beautiful as poetry and piety. This sympathy with romantic medievalism must possess one's mind as he climbs the steep track to the little hamlet of Verrezzo, above which, as if poised in air, hangs a white chapel, and by its side, as its modest daughter, the "Little House of the Divine Providence" (La piccola casa della Divina Providenzza).

by the example of earlier saints, especially of St. Francis. There is the same absolute surrender, the same defiance of discretion, the same glad undertaking of discretion, the same glad undertaking of the impossible. The fact is, however, that Don Albino's call came, not from St. Francis, but from their common Lord. Precisely as it is told of St. Francis that he opened his missal and read: "Take nothing for your journey, neither staff nor scrip, nor bread, nor money;" and as again he said to his Brothers: "I command all of you who are here assembled, by virtue of obedience that none of you have care or solicitude for anything to eat or anything necessary for the body; attend only to praying and praising God, and all solicitude for the body leave to Him, inasmuch as He has a special care for you;" so this guileless soul in the twentieth century, with no equipment for social service except a passion for souls, burned to sacrifice everything for his vocation, and, being transferred to a convent at San Remo, took to be his ward one neglected boy, who has now become his chief assistant and caretaker.

call to human service seemed at first to dictate a foreign-mission field, but soon directed his attention to the special needs of boys, and, after a brief pastorate in Lucca, he procured an assignment at an asylum for abandoned boys in Como, and later at a small home in Switzerland. Institutional work, however, failed to satisfy his eager mind. The commercial complications concerning residence, payment of fees, and calculation of profits repelled him, and the normal product of such work seemed to him dehumanized, and even despiritualized. Don Albino has probably never heard of Jacob Riis, of New York, but he would welcome the classic saying of that reformer: "Institution boys make the worst apprentices. They are saved from becoming toughs by becoming automatons." The dream of Don Albino was of a wholly unworldly, unremunerated, and uncalculating service; trusting not to human wisdom but to the Divine Providence for direction and support. He would accept all boys who might be committed to him; he would ask no pledge or terms from them or their parents; they should depart as freely as they came. There should be no compensation, no endowment, no provision for the next day. He would be shown the way if he followed the gleam.

It might be inferred that this unmeasured prodigality of service was suggested

The straggling hamlet of Verrezzo lies at the head of a long and lovely valley, clinging like an outstretched lizard to the precipitous hill. No road reaches it, and the rugged climb of a half-hour is steep enough to satisfy the most patient mule. Huts of loose stones shelter the scattered families, and the men toil on their scanty terraces, while the women and children gather fagots and grasses, and mount the hill with huge burdens, but with heads erect and a friendly smile on their ruddy faces. Above the village is the white chapel, large enough to hold three times the population, and rising like a tall lighthouse from the huge promontory of green. To this lonely town Albino was at first despatched each Sunday to say mass, and presently was appointed village priest. Here his visionary design might be realized. The position was too modest to tempt ambition and too remote to become conspicuous in the world. In the modest precincts of his solitary church Don Albino prepared for his colony of children, clearing away the rubbish from a few bare cells and stone hovels and making them with his own hands white and clean. Fear of institutionalism forbade him to call this meager provision an asylum, or even a "Home." It should be simply a place where God's grace might work unhindered, and where God's minister had simply to hear and

obey-a Little House of the Divine Providence. What kind of boy should be welcome there? Any kind. When might he come? Any day. How long must he stay? Only so long as God directed. How should he be fed or clothed? "If God so clothe the grass of the field, . . . shall he not much more clothe you?" Means of support, hostile criticism, worldly ridicule, meant as little to Don Albino as the cold winds which blew across his hilltop from the snowy Alps. He looked about him at the circling birds, and repeated the great words: "Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?" Without resources, without pledges of aid, he began, in 1915, to gather round him a few abandoned or homeless boys, committed to him by destitute parents or friendly priests; and through many experiences of mishap averted and wants supplied he became fortified in his daily dependence on the Divine Providence. "How many times," he says, "has the pot been put on the fire with only water in it, there being nothing else-neither food nor money! Then I pray with the boys; and always, when it is time to eat, we eat." It is not, he insists, that he walks by faith, for it is in fact by sight that he is led. Faith is the evidence of things not seen; but he is permitted to see each day the wonderful grace which sustains him. What could it be but this help of the Immaculate Mother of God which in 1918, when the influenza attacked every boy and the priest himself, prevented any one of the little company from dying? What sign of the Divine Providence could be more convincing than this miracle of the pot daily filled and the purses of the prosperous daily opened? From time to time the priest, in his ragged cassock, but with refined and gracious manner and the searching eyes of the exalted mystic, trudges down with one of his boys to San Remo-not to beg, but to report; and it is a chastening spectacle to observe his manner of accepting aid. Whatever is handed to him he takes with a kindly smile, but without glancing at it, and hands behind to the boy, who again, without a glance, stows it in his bag. It may be one lira or a thousand, a crust or a month's provision; all is equally providential, and the giver and receiver are alike cooperators in transmitting the grace of God. There is neither mendicancy in asking nor pride in receiving.

According to the loving record known as "The Little Flowers of St. Francis of

Assisi," when that thriftless saint would call his brethren to take no thought for the morrow, St. Dominic, "who was present during all these things, marveled greatly at the counsel of St. Francis, and counted it indiscreet, not being able to think how so great a multitude should be able to govern itself without any care or solicitude for the things necessary to the body. But the Chief Shepherd,

sentiment should be curbed; soft-heartedness must be matched by hard-headedness; the heart and head must cooperate in guiding the hand. The fundamental distinction between mediaval and modern philanthropy is in the new accession of wisdom, the prudential way of kindness, the creation of a science of humanity and a discipline of emotion.

He has cared for His sheep and singular love for His poor, immediately inspired the people of Perugia and Spoleto, of Foligno, of Spello and Assisi, and the other surrounding districts, so that they carried what was needful to eat to the holy congregation." This is precisely what has happened among the villas and hotels along the neighboring coast. This "care of Christ's lambs and singular love for the poor" has inspired people to provide "what was needed to eat to this holy little congregation," which has now grown to a colony of twenty-five boys; and the spectacle of these homeless urchins, rescued from the evil conditions which threatened them and singing their praises on the steps of the altar with their careworn but happy priest, who is at once their nurse, physician, and confessor, is as though one were permitted to hear St. Francis say again: "This is what I call a great treasure, that everything here is provided by Divine Providence, and therefore I desire that we should pray to God that he would cause holy poverty to be loved by us with all our hearts."

HE first impression made on the

THE

modern mind by this surviving fragment of the mediæval spirit may well be one of a benevolent but condescending compassion. Where are all the first principles of child-saving charity which through much experimentation have at last been established as essential? Where are discrimination, classification, case analysis, child hygiene, psychiatric tests? May not this undiscriminating affection do more harm than good? May not the contagion of the defective and vicious poison the bodies and minds of the innocent? Is not the heart, even if pure, a mischievous organ of social science, unless it be controlled by the head? What might not Don Albino do for these neglected and wayward boys if he could have a year of training in some school for social work! All these reflections seem amply justified under the accepted rules of efficiency in modern relief. Sympathy should, we say, be scientific if it would accomplish what the Apostle Paul described as a reasonable service;

The

ONFRONTED by such principles of social science, Don Albino would be speechless, if not completely ignorant of the very language used. He could not qualify even for admission to a school for social work, much less for graduation from it. He speaks the dialect of an earlier world, where science, sociology, and efficiency were as yet unborn. In other words, the unsophisticated Italian lives habitually in a world, not of human effort and scientific achievement, but of submissive expectancy and supernatural surprise. The daily miracle of the mass. prepares him for further miracles. The personal concern of the Immaculate Mother of God is any day as probable as the breaking of sunshine through morning clouds. Such a man may be glad to learn from human wisdom, but he expects to learn much more from habitual prayer. Thus the order of obligations becomes completely reversed. First comes, not reflection, prudence, computation of consequences, estimate of risks, but the call from above, the unreflecting obedience, the way shown. while the end is hid. The whole history of mysticism, asceticism, toleration of mendicancy, reckless child-bearing, and happy improvidence which mark each country where Catholic piety is the controlling force is but the record of a faith which does not need to reason, or provide for the future, or lead a life of one's own; but which, if it be a living faith, will be daily sustained and shown the way. To such a habit of mind this world is not an abiding-place to be reconstructed or reformed, but a temporary lodging on a longer journey, to be taken as God gives it, as a Little House of the Divine Providence.

Between such a spiritual passion and the not less devoted energy of the modern social worker there would seem to be no common ground. Mediævalism and modernism, waiting on God and working for man, seem to lead to different ends. It would be as futile to propose scientific discrimination to Don Albino as it would be for a modern Children's Aid Society to launch a great campaign without counting the cost. And yet, while the medieval mystic is so far from the modern spirit, and his

Little House lacks almost everything which would commend it to a State inspector scrutinizing its budget and dietary, there remains one aspect of this romantic scene which it may be not unprofitable for the most modern of administrators to observe. It is the perennial and undiminished effect of a chastened and consecrated character, the redemptive power of the life of grace. Institutionalism, organization, mechanism, regulations-all these, which have become the essential safeguards of modern relief, have become not less an obvious peril. To reduce a human being to a "case;" to administer benevolence in so wooden a fashion that the result may be fitly called a "Bureau;" to operate on so grand a scale that the human agent, like a worker in a great factory, becomes a cog in the great machine—all this, as every conscientious social worker recognizes, is what must be daily struggled against in the vast and complicated mechanism of modern philanthropy. How to humanize social science; how to keep the touch of persons with persons; how to be satisfied with individualized results, and maintain patience and expectancy amid incompleteness and reversions this is the perennial problem which puts the severest strain on many a conscience and will. May it not be reassuring to discover an obscure and modest work where nothing but this spiritual power exists, where the machinery of service is as unknown as if one passed from the days of the electric light to that of the tallow dip, and yet to find that one genuinely self-effacing servant of the humblest needs, without a single wheel or bulb, can weave character and illuminate lives, just as Jesus Christ inspired fishermen and St. Francis won pleasure-loving noblemen to the vow of poverty? Don Albino's appealing venture would no doubt be safer, wiser, more free from risks of imposture and mishap, if it could be modernized, endowed, supervised; but, taken as it is and as it must be, it has this touching lesson for the modern mind. To see these children lifted out of the deepest pits of poverty and set in the way of honesty, justice, and hope by no other lifting power than that of pure affection and consecrated common sense is to be made freshly aware that no redemptive agency is likely to supplant human love, and that with this human love completely offered almost any agency may be redemptive. Many a great enterprise of modern relief, with its elaborate and prudent methods, may learn at least this lesson from the Little House of the Divine Providence.