ment in this country. Within a year the "Anti-Spoils League" has attained a membership of 10,000, representing every State and Territory, and including many prominent men of every political faith. In New York city the platform of the non-partizan Committee of Seventy, which headed the revolt against government by the criminal and semi-criminal classes, contained a specific and downright indorsement of the system. Very significant also was the nomination for Congress in the Louisville district of Mr. Edward J. McDermott, an avowed civil-service reformer. The platform of the Massachusetts Democratic Convention, and the

speech of the presiding officer, ex-Governor William E. Russell, were most pronounced in favor of the reform. As a new evidence that business men are alive to the necessity of abolishing the spoils system may be cited the reference to the subject by Mr. Herman Justi of Nashville at the recent convention of bankers at Baltimore. Indeed, there has never been more certainty that the people are in advance of their representatives on this subject, and would willingly support a radical policy which would substitute demonstrated merit for the wish of the spoilsman as a test in the selection of all government employees of the non-political grades.

ΤΗ

About Children.

A FURTHER WORD ON IMITATION, 1 HERE are one or two considerations of such practical importance to all those who wish to observe cases of imitation by children, that I venture to throw them together, only saying by way of introduction that they all follow from the general statement that nothing less than the child's personality is at stake in the method and matter of its imitations; for the "self" is but the form or process in which the personal influences surrounding the child take on their new individuality.

First. No observations are of much importance which are not accompanied by a detailed statement of the personal influences which have affected the child. This is the more important since the child sees few persons, and sees them constantly. It is not only likely it is inevitable that he make up his personality, under limitations of heredity, by imitation out of the "copy' set in the actions, temper, emotions, of the persons who build around him the social inclosure of his childhood. It is only necessary to watch a two-year-old closely to see what members of the family are giving him his personal "copy"— to find out whether he sees his mother constantly and his father seldom; whether he plays much with other children, and what their dispositions are, to a degree; whether he is growing to be a person of subjection, equality, or tyranny; whether he is assimilating the elements of some low unorganized social content from his foreign nurse. For, in Leibnitz's phrase, the boy or girl is a social monad, a little world, which reflects the whole system of influences coming to stir his sensibility. And just in as far as his sensibilities are stirred, he imitates, and forms habits of imitating. And habits?-they are character! Second. A point akin to the first is this: every observation should describe with great accuracy the child's relation to other children. Has he brothers or sisters; how many of each, and of what age? Does he sleep in the same bed or room with them? Do they play much with one another alone? The reason is very evident. An only child has only adult "copy." He cannot interpret his father's actions, or his mother's, oftentimes. He imitates very blindly. He lacks the mere childish example of a brother or sister near himself in age. And 1 Suggested by Professor Royce's interesting paper on "The Imitative Functions," in THE CENTURY for May, 1894.

this difference is of very great importance to his development. He lacks the stimulus, for example, of games in which personification is a direct tutor to selfhood, as I shall remark farther on. And while he becomes precocious in some lines of instruction, he fails in imagination, in brilliancy of fancy. The dramatic, in his sense of social situations, is largely hidden. It is a very great mistake to isolate children, especially to isolate one or two children. One alone is perhaps the worse, but two alone are subject to the other element of social danger which I may mention next.

Third. Observers should report with special care all cases of unusually close relationship between chil dren in youth, such as childish favoritism, "platonic friendships," "chumming," in school or home, etc. We have in these facts — and there is a very great variety of them - an exaggeration of the social or imitative tendency, a narrowing down of the personal suggestive sensibility to a peculiar line of well-formed influences. It has never been studied -never even to my knowledge been mentioned by writers either on the genesis of social emotion or on the practice of education. To be sure, teachers are alive to the pros and cons of allowing children and students to room together; but it is with a view to the possibility of direct immoral or unwholesome contagion. This danger is certainly real; but we, as psychological observers, and above all as teachers and leaders, of our children, must go even deeper than that. Consider, for example, the possible influence of a school chum and room-mate upon a girl in her teens; for this is only an evident case of what all isolated children are subject to. A sensitive nature, a girl whose very life is a branch of a social tree, is placed in a new environment, to ingraft upon the members of her mutilated self-her very personality (it is nothing less than that) — utterly new channels of supply. The only safety possible, the only way to conserve the lessons of her past, apart from the veriest chance, and to add to the structure of her present character, lies in securing for her the greatest possible variety of social influences. Instead of this, she meets, eats, walks, talks, lies down at night, and rises in the morning, with one other person, a “copy” set before her, as immature, in all likelihood, as herself, or, if not so, yet a single personality, put there to wrap around her growing self the confining cords of unassimilated and foreign habit. Above all things, fathers, mothers,

teachers, elders, give the children room! They need all that they can get, and their personalities will grow to fill it. Give them plenty of companions, fill their lives with variety,— variety is the soul of originality, and its only source of supply. The ethical life itself, the boy's, the girl's, conscience, is born in the stress of the conflicts of suggestion-born right out of his imitative hesitations; and just this is the analogy which he must assimilate and depend upon in his own conflicts for self-control and social continence. For himself, later, so impressively true is this from the human point of view, that it is my opinion - formed, it is true, from the very few data accessible on such points, still a positive opinion-children should never be allowed, after infancy, to room regularly together; special friendships of a close exclusive kind should be discouraged or broken up, except when under the immediate eye of the wise parent or guardian; and even when allowed, these relationships should, in all cases, be used to entrain the sympathetic and moral sentiments into a wider field of social exercise.

Fourth. The remainder of my space must be devoted to the further emphasis of the need of close observation of children's games, especially those which may be best described as "society games." All those who have given even casual observation to the doings of the nursery have been impressed with the extraordinary fertility of the child mind, from the second year onward, in imagining and plotting social and dramatic situations. It has not been as evident, however, to these casual observers, or to many really more skilled, that they were observing in these fancy-plays the putting together anew of fragments, or larger pieces, of their own mental his tory. But here, in these games, we see the actual use which our children make of the personal “copy” material which they have got from you and me. If a man study these games patiently in his own children, and analyze them, he gradually sees emerge from the child's inner consciousness its picture of the boy's own father, whom he aspires to be like, and whose actions he seeks to generalize and apply anew. The picture is poor, for the child takes only what he is sensible to. And it does seem often, as Sighele pathetically notices on a large social scale, and as the Westminster divines have urged without due sense of the pathetic and home-coming point of it, that he takes more of the bad in us for reproduction than of the good. But be this as it may, what we give him is all he gets. Heredity does not stop with birth: it is then only beginning. And the pity of it is that this element of heredity, this reproduction of the fathers in the children, which might be used to redeem the new-forming personality from the heritage of past commonness or impurity, is simply left to take its course for the further establishing and confirmation of it. Was there ever a group of school children who did not leave the real school to make a play school, erecting a throne for one of their number to sit on and "take off" the teacher? Was there ever a child who did not play "church," and force her father, if possible, into the pulpit? Were there ever children who did not "buy" things from fancied stalls in every corner of the nursery, when they had ence seen an elder drive a trade in the market? The point is this: the child's personality grows; growth is always by action; he clothes upon himself the scenes of his life, and acts them out; so he grows in what

he is, what he understands, and what he is able to perform.

In order to be of direct service to observers of games of this character, I shall now give a short account of an observation of the kind made a few weeks ago - -one of the simplest of many actual situations which my two little girls, Helen and Elizabeth, have acted out together. It is a very commonplace case, a game the elements of which are evident in their origin; but I choose this rather than one more complex, since observers are usually not psychologists, and they find the elementary the more instructive.

"You have been asleep, baby; now it is time to get up," said mama. Baby rose from the floor,- first fall. ing down in order to rise,— was seized upon by “mama,” taken to the railing to an imaginary wash-stand, and her face washed by rubbing. Her articles of clothing were then named in imagination, and put on, one by one, in the most detailed and interesting fashion. During all this, mama kept up a stream of baby talk to her infant: "Now your stockings, my darling; now your skirt, sweetness - oh, no— not yet - your shoes first," etc. etc. Baby acceded to all the detail with more than the docility which real infants usually show. When this was done: "Now we must go tell papa good morning, dearie," said mama. "Yes, mama," came the reply; and hand in hand they started to find papa. I, the spectator, carefully read my newspaper, thinking, however, that the reality of papa, seeing that he was so much in evidence, would break in upon the imagined situation. But not so. Mama led her baby directly past me to the end of the piazza, to a column in the corner. "There's papa," said mama; "now tell him good morning." "Good morning, papa; I am very well," said baby, bowing low to the column. 'That 's good," said mama, in a gruff, low voice, which caused in the real papa a thrill of amused self-consciousness most difficult to contain. "Now you must have your breakfast,” said mama. The seat of a chair was made a breakfast-table, the baby's feigned bib put on, and her porridge carefully administered, with all the manner of the nurse who usually directs their breakfast. "Now" (after the meal, which suddenly became dinner instead of breakfast) "you must take your nap," said mama. "No, mama; I don't want to," said baby. But you must." "No; you be baby, and take the nap." "But all the other children have gone to sleep, dearest, and the doctor says you must,” said mama. This convinced baby, and she lay down on the floor. "But I have n't undressed yet." So then came all the detail of undressing, and mama carefully covered her up on the floor with a light shawl, saying, "Spring is coming now; that 'll be enough. Now shut your eyes, and go to sleep." "But you have n't kissed me, mama," said the little one. "Oh, of course, my darling! -SO a long siege of kissing. Then baby closed her eyes very tight, while mama went on tiptoe away to the end of the porch. "Don't go away, mama," said baby. “No; mama would n't leave her darling," came the reply. So this went on. The nap over, a walk was pro.

66

posed, hats were put on, etc., the mama exercising great care and solicitude for her baby. One further incident to show this: when the baby's hat was put on - - the real hat-mama tied the strings rather tight. "Oh! you hurt, mama," said baby. "No; mama would n't draw the strings too tight. Let mama kiss it. There, is that better, my darling?"—all comically true to a certain sweet maternal tenderness which I had no difficulty in tracing.

Now, in such a case, what is to be reported, of course, is the facts. Yet knowledge of more than the facts is necessary, as I have said above, in order to get the full psychological lesson. We need just the information which concerns the rest of the family, and the social influences of the children's lives. I recognized at once every phrase which the children used in this play, where they got it, what it meant in its original context, and how far its meaning had been modified in this process which I have called "social heredity." But as that story is reported to strangers who have no knowledge of the children's social antecedents, how much beyond the mere facts of imitation and personification do they get from it? And how much the more is this true when we examine those complex games of the nursery which show the brilliant fancy for situation and drama of the wide-awake four-year-old?

Yet we psychologists are free to interpret; and how rich the lessons even from such a simple scene as this! As for Helen, what could be a more direct lesson,— a lived-out exercise in sympathy, in altruistic self-denial, in the healthy elevation of her sense of self to the dignity of kindly offices, in the sense of responsibility and agency, in the stimulus to original effort and the designing of means to ends, and all of it with the best sense of the objectivity which is quite lost in wretched self-consciousness in us adults when we personate other characters; what could further all this highest mental growth better than the game by which the lessons of her mother's daily life are read into the child's little self? And then, in the case of Elizabeth certain things appear. She obeys without command or sanction, she takes in from her sister the elements of personal suggestion in their simpler childish forms; and certainly such scenes, repeated every day with such variation of detail, must give something of the sense of variety and social equality which real life afterward confirms and proceeds upon. And lessons of the opposite character are learned by the same process.

All this exercise of fancy must strengthen the imaginative faculty. The prolonged situations, maintained sometimes whole days, or possibly weeks, give strength to the imagination and train the attention. I think, also, that the sense of essential reality, and its distinction from the unreal, the merely imagined, is helped by this sort of symbolic representation. But it has its dangers also- very serious ones. And possibly the best service of observation just now is to gather the facts with a view to the proper recognition and avoidance of the dangers.

In closing, I may be allowed a word to interested parents. You can be of no use whatever to psychologists

to say nothing of the actual damage you may be to the children — unless you know your babies through and through. Especially the fathers. They are willing to study everything else. They know every corner of the house familiarly, and what is done in it,

except the nursery. A man labors for his children ten hours a day, gets his life insured for their support after his death, and yet he lets their mental growth, the formation of their character, the evolution of their personality, go on by absorption-if no worse-from common, vulgar, imported and changing, often immoral, attendants! Plato said the state should train the children; and added that the wisest man should rule the state. This is to say that the wisest man should tend his children! Hugo gives us, in Jean Valjean and Cosette, a picture of the true paternal relationship. We hear a certain group of studies called the humanities, and it is right. But the best school in the humanities for every man is in his own house. J. Mark Baldwin.

Our Christmas Pictures.

SOME of us of an older generation are familiar with the Christmas pictures of a John Gilbert, a Kenney Meadows, a Hoppin, those queer conventional contributions to the magazines and annuals of some forty years ago, the bringing in of the boar's head, the kissing under the mistletoe, the Yule log, and the singing of carols, without which no Christmas publication was complete. The boar's head and Yule log had virtually passed out of existence even at that time, but the mistletoe still claimed its osculatory rights. To-day we have changed all this. Coal fires have taken the place of Yule logs; canvasback, that of the boar's head; Chopin and Grieg, the carols; and the mistletoewell, that still hangs from the chandelier, but in a perfunctory way, as a memento of the rough and boisterous fun of former times.

One wonders whether Mr. A. B. Wenzell's excellent drawings are as true to the times in which we live as were the designs of forty years ago. He introduces us into more fashionable if not better company; for Mr. Wenzell is the cleverest of the clever. His art is chic and knowing, and although his types are a little too much of the earth, earthy, they are the people whom one finds in the majority at ball and opera. His two designs show us the outside of a New York florist's, with smart and rich buyers, connoisseur-like, picking out the genuine English mistletoe from its native, smaller-berried American rival, and an interior where these same smart people at a Christmas gathering promenade in fashionable weariness under the mysterious plant. Mr. Wenzell is a native of Detroit, Michigan, and is thirty years of age. He spent seven years in art study in Munich and Paris - under Professors Löfftz and Gysis in the former place, and under Boulanger and Lefebvre in the latter.

F. S. Church's experience of Christmas cookery is, I fear, on a par with the last generation's experience of boars' heads and Yule logs. His cold sauce is very cold sauce indeed, and the effect of Christmas pudding thus served surely is to be dreaded. But who besides Church would have thought of such diverting grotesquery as this? He draws and paints what he must draw and paint, and no less an authority than "L'Art," the great French journal, has thought him worthy of a two-page article. Is Mr. Church more painter or illustrator? His quality of color is always agreeable and always pleasant. He is American through and through, unique, indebted to no man living or dead for his quaint con

ceits and queer fancies. Mr. Church was born at Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1842. He was a student of the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and the National Acad. emy of Design, and was elected an associate of the latter in 1888. He is also a member of the Society of American Artists.

The remainder of these Christmas pictures deal with religious aspects of the festival. Von Uhde's work in this field usually presents as his central figure, not the Christ, the Messiah enthroned in eternal glory, but the poor and lowly man born on Christmas day, the friend of publican and sinner; in one picture he enters the cottage of a Bavarian peasant at meal-time, and the children shrink from him; in another, on the first Christmas eve, the peasant carpenter knocks at the door of a peasant house, while the tired woman, on the eve of maternity, leans wearily against a fence, wondering if they will gain admittance. Von Uhde paints Jesus, not the Christ, because Jesus is the human, the comprehensible, and because his life as man touches the life of his fellow-men. His angels, too, as the one in the composition we engrave, have a human aspect, in contrast with the conventional loveliness of a cloistered monk's dream of womanly beauty. Fritz Von Uhde was born in Volkenburg, Saxony, in 1848. He was a pupil of Munkacsy, and received a medal of the third class in the Paris Salon of 1885. His picture "The Appearing to the Shepherds" is a good representative of his work.

Joseph Scheurenberg was a student of the school of Düsseldorf when Karl Sohn was its director. He was born in Düsseldorf in 1846. He was professor at the Cassel Academy from 1879 to 1881. He afterward settled in Berlin. He is one of that large class of German artists who, correct in drawing and true in composition, seem in their painting always to bear the market in view, and to paint religious pictures or profane, according to the public demand. His ideas are good, his pictures from an academic standpoint almost faultless, but somehow in German painting of this school, notwithstanding its great skill, one cannot help feeling a certain left-handedness.

The Dagnan-Bouveret composition (here printed by the kind permission of the artist) is little more than a sketch, a clever, graceful ébauche from the hand of a man of genius. It was made on lithographic paper and transferred to stone, as an accompaniment to a poem written by one of his friends-Charles Grandmougin. Slight as it is, it shows the power of this extraordinary painter, and (although M. Dagnan says that had he had the stone at hand he would have made several alterations and corrections) is quite worthy of the author of "La Marchande des Cierges" of the last Champ de Mars salon. THE CENTURY for May, 1894, contains an article on this artist.

Mrs. Lamb's composition, "The Christ Child," is purely decorative, in the sense that it might serve for a mural painting or a stained-glass window. It is sweet and pretty, well drawn, and conventional only in that

quality which is akin to originality— the conventionality of the decorator. This talented artist was the subject of an "Open Letter" in THE CENTURY for December, 1893.

Joseph Leon Guipon's work shows frankly the influence of Dagnan-Bouveret. He has a light touch and a graceful fancy. He is already a good draftsman, and if not spoiled by too early a success may be expected to develop into a strong illustrator. Guipon was born in Paris in 1872, and was brought to this country by his parents when about twelve years of age. He is a pupil of the Art Students' League of New York, under George de Forest Brush and Frank Vincent Du Mond. W. Lewis Fraser.

The Tramp and the Reform School.

IN the September number of THE CENTURY Josiah Flynt, in the course of an article entitled "What to do with the Tramp," has this to say:

There is a crying need for an institution which shall take the place of the reform school - a kind of industrial home and manual-training school, in which the least contaminated may be separated from the viciously trained and criminally inclined boy, and taught useful employment and obedience to authority.

I can assure Mr. Flynt that just the sort of school he proposes "shall take the place of the reform school" is to be found in the reform school itself. With a few exceptions, the various reform schools throughout the country are veritable industrial homes and manualtraining schools. In fact, they are so patterned that in some States the name "reform " has been changed to that of "industrial."

The last decade has seen a wondrous change in the conducting and management of these schools. It may almost be called a revolution. They are now run on what is called the "open," or "cottage," system. Where children ranging from eight to eighteen years of age, and in some cases even younger than eight years, were formerly penned up behind bars and stone walls, and held subject to the stern discipline common to our penitentiaries, they are now housed in pleasant and comfortable homes, with neither bars nor stone walls to hold them, and are surrounded by every influence calculated to make good and honest citizens of them. In the matter of discipline humane methods now prevail; and where unfortunate or erring boys and girls were once treated like confirmed criminals, an earnest and effective effort is now being made to reform them. The introduction of trade-teaching into these schools has been a move in the right direction; and so successful has been the experiment that even the youngest schools are prepared to, and do, teach most of the common trades, while many of the older schools embrace in their work the teaching of all the way from twenty to twenty-five. Thus it will be seen that our reform school of to-day does not fall far short of the school Mr. Flynt would establish.

W. M. Hutt.