the States or communities, and the burdens of it are not borne equally. Here is a great field for economics. There is an amazing under-appreciation of the amount of money necessary for the training of the citizenship of a great State. Virginia now spends,-I talk about Virginia because I know it, two and three-quarter millions annually, nearly three millions annually, and with this it maintains a six months' public school all over the State for 575,000 children; it maintains one normal school for each race; eight summer normal schools, one university, one technical college for each race, one technical institute, and one college, and is preparing to stimulate secondary education by a bonus of $50,000 a year. Now Virginia must eventually spend $6,750,000 in order to get a nine months' public school, three normal schools or more, one hundred high schools, with a great increase in appropriation for higher education. In other words, the American state of 2,000,000 inhabitants that expects to do the right thing by its children must spend nearly $7,000,000 a year. We might as well know this, for in the end we must reach this sum. Our tax rate is large in proportion to assessed valuation of property, being nearly sixty cents on the hundred dollars, thus comparing favorably with any other American State. We are doing just as well in proportion to our wealth as the States so often held up to us for emulation. Our first problem, therefore, is to increase the wealth to be taxed, rather than the rate of taxation. Our next problem is to decrease the waste and leakage in our present system by unification of educational effort. Our third problem is to democratize and practicalize our education so that it will count more to productivity and increase the values of life. Our fourth problem is to develop every raw resource, every wasted field, to build every factory, to invent every machine, that will increase the assessed value of property taxable for school support.

While I have emphasized the enrichment of the school through the expenditure of money, let no man or woman understand that the main thing is lost sight of, and that main thing is the establishment of moral persistence, of intellectual sturdiness, of unblemished character, of skill in its application to life, of an increasing elevation of the stand

ards of life, and the steadfast reliance upon the ancient virtues that exalt a nation's character. Neither do I want any one to think that I am trying to strike the heart out of this movement, because I have claimed that we have reached a period of construction instead of emotion and appeal. Heart means love, and love means God, and the power to do things as God would have them done, not counting the costs, but gladly. When that earnest woman, on fire with love, spoke to you last night,-and that no less earnest man, my friend and colleague,-I am sure we all felt as if there were nothing else but love and service in all this wide world. I wish we could put these two "spiritual dynamos," as the President has called them, upon the same platform and assemble all the doubters and the hard-hearted and recalcitrant and submit them to their influence. The few that would not be converted could be safely left to the grand jury. When Miss Berry pictured for us, as she did with such dramatic power, the face of that young, yet old, toil-worn woman in the Georgia mountains, watching with the infinite patience of love that knows no weariness the man-child that she had brought into the world as he won the prizes of the school, I believe every soul here knew that it was a beautiful face, for the light upon it was God's light shining straight out of His holy face upon her heavy-laden soul, revealing to her a glimpse of the dear heaven of her dreams, and of her hopes. There were tears in my eyes, and there were tears in your eyes, I know. Let us be proud of these tears, for they were tears of gladness and of pride in this dauntless human life of ours that will not stay in the dark; that will struggle upward to the light; that will give service and help to its fellow strugglers, through difficulties, to the stars. No, my friends, I would not strike the heart out of this movement, I would put more heart into it; I would even cry out to the young men and maidens here, "Annex yourselves to such work." It is your task, it is your chance to do something great in the world. Your grandfathers could fight for theories of human rights, and your fathers for theories of local self-government. It is your privilege to take a hand in this great struggle for the perfection of civilization and the ennobling of democracy.

Not the least significant feature of contemporary fiction is its increasingly engrossing preoccupation with the aspects of American social life from the ethical and moral point of view. America is now entering into the main current of modern thought. Morality has breathed into art the breath of a new life. In the drama, Dumas fils pre-empted the prerogative of the preacher; and Ibsen, beginning as romanticist, ended as the supreme polemist of our time. Gerhart Hauptmann and Hermann Sudermann in Germany; Francois de Curel, Eugene Brieux and Paul Hervieu in France; Maxim Gorki in Russia, Hermann Bahr in Austria, José Echegaray in Spain; and Pinero, Shaw, and Jones in England have definitively announced the conjunction of morality and art. In modern fiction, the voice of cosmic consciousness first became powerfully articulate in "Les Miserables;" and after Hugo came Balzac with his grandiose boast that he held the whole of a society within his brain. From a contemplation of the vast frescoes of the "Comédie Humaine," Zola, like James, caught his supreme inspiration; but with Zola, the novelist was swallowed up in the reformer. Then came that exquisite realist Bourget to inaugurate the transition from the romance of observation to the romance of philosophic and social study. George Eliot learned from Comte that the principal function of art is to construct types on the basis furnished by science, and gave to the world social documents of impeccable ethical cogency. The lesson of all great modern art is everywhere to be read: modern life has become informed with purpose. It is the shape of the age.

Two recent novels of American social life betray the grow

*"The Wheel of Life." By Ellen Glasgow. Doubleday, Page & Co. New York, 1906.

"The House of Mirth." By Edith Wharton. Chas. Scribner's Sons. New York, 1905.

ing sensitiveness of our native artists to the impulse of the age. And yet it is difficult to restrain a feeling of impatience, not to say disappointment, over this new departure in the case of Miss Glasgow, ungrateful though such an attitude may seem. By tradition and social antecedents, Miss Glasgow is closely linked with the life of the ancien régime in the South; in spirit and in temperament, she is distinctively modern. While her associations cluster about the aristocratic and spacious social phases of a past era in the South, her intellectual detachment and large sanity peculiarly fit her for writing social documents unwarped by sectional passion or local prejudice. Her first notable book, "The Voice of the People," was a strong and subtle portrayal of the contrasts, distinctions, and incongruities between the old and the new régime in the South. And yet the unconvincing, almost unmotived ending was doubtless the penalty Miss Glasgow paid to a realism which means life pictured as it is, yet not necessarily consistently motived or definitely directed toward an end. To say that the book lacked motive is not to say that it lacked a reason. But much of its significance was lost because of its failure to distil the dramatic essence of life, to show the consequences incident upon every human act. The book revealed little more than strong clash of ideals the ideals of the old aristocracy and the new democracy. Pride of blood, racial aloofness, and high-bred disdain are put in striking contrast with pride of achievement, unashamed frankness, and avowed democracy. The highstrung, delicately nurtured daughter of the Old South cannot condescend to the coarseness and lowly heritage of the son of the New South, although these qualities in him are redeemed by sincerity, devotion, and steadfast strength. To her who sacrificed her love to racial instinct and aristocratic pride come success, gratification, but all-pervading disillusionment. To him who has offered manliness, power, truth and devotion to the woman of his heart come defeat and death.

In "The Battleground," a story of the Civil War, Miss Glasgow again demonstrated her ability as a candid and unprejudiced historian. Into its fabric she wove not only the

ample facts she had gleaned from a minute study of the literature and documentary records of the period, but also many of the stories, traditions, and legends told her in her childhood of the good old Virginia days. In "The Deliverance" the struggle of "The Voice of the People" is again played out before our eyes, although this, it is true, is not the crucial significance of the book. The rôles are now reversed the hero is the aristocrat, the heroine the daughter of the overseer of the hero's father. The struggle is not so much the clash of ranks of society, as a more personal conflict-the conflict of a de-classed aristocrat with the ambitious overseer who has most villainously ousted him from his inheritance. The book focuses the interest upon that crucial moment in the life of the individual and of the race when "blood" and "soil" come fiercely to the grapple. In "The Voice of the People," we behold the racial struggle which ensues when the upper and lower strata impinge upon each other, to fall back rudely shaken, broken, shattered. In "The Deliverance" the struggle is an individual, a personal one, yet nerved and enforced by racial animosity and aristocratic disdain. The old aristocratic régime is lowered, the new democratic order is elevated, and the two ultimately meet and unite on the broad and common ground of a great, self-forgetting, human love.

In a review of "The Deliverance," written at the time of its appearance, I expressed the opinion that what makes this book so notable in the literature not only of today, but of the decade, is that it is a marvellous composite of the Southern instinct for feeling and the Northern passion for ethics. It has become almost a banality of criticism to say that the literature of the South reveals remarkable sensitiveness to feeling and sentiment, but not to thought; that it instinctively passes, when dealing with fundamental aspects of life or of nature, out of the realm of thought into that of feeling. the North, we are only too frequently assured, are to be found the great thinkers, the great moralists, the great ethical teachers, who "see life steadily and see it whole," not through the prismatic and irradiant images of passionate feeling and deep sympathy with nature, but rather with the large,

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