The study of previous and of contemporaneous masters will convince many would-be writers that there is no need for them to write at all; all that they have to say has been already said, and said much better than they can hope to say it. The intellectual problems, which are new to them and their village, and with which they are wrestling for the first time, have been fought out, or are being fought out, by combatants much better equipped for the struggle. There is no mistake more commonly committed, by men of little culture, than that of supposing that what is new to them is new to the world; they are continually re-discovering things known long ago, and imagining themselves intellectual pioneers, and men of singular originality. Thus political ideas familiar to Plato, ethical ideas thoroughly thrashed out by Aristotle, spring up ever-fresh and ever-new, and it is hard to persuade the man upon whom they have just come as a revelation, that they are of a positively hoary antiquity.

Mr. Garland lays much stress upon the proposition that the present and the future are not the past. True, but the past affords us the only means we have of understanding the present and forecasting the future. We have not only no reason for believing that the future will be unlike the past, but rather every reason for believing the contrary. And, even were it not so, if the future is to be entirely unlike the past, we must wait to see what form this unlikeness will take. Prophesying after the event is the only sure kind of prophesying. And the past undoubtedly tells us that, while works abounding in local color, and depending for their appreciation upon minute local knowledge, may have a vogue, and bring much profit to their authors, they lack the chief element of immortality - universality. Frequently, too, they lack beautiful form, without which no literary work, however it may have won contemporaneous suffrages, has long survived the age that produced it. It is not the mere grandeur and depth of the thoughts that rescue a book from oblivion, but also the beauty of the language in which they are expressed. Literature is expression, and, unless the expression be highly artistic and calculated to give pleasure to the reader, the book may be full of useful information and quite true, both to fact and to the writer's impressions, but it will not rise above the place accorded to a guide book or an encyclopædia. If a book describes, however, minutely and accurately, a passing and unimportant phase of life, it will have a hard struggle to exist when the circumstances that gave it birth have been forgotten. Then nothing but supreme felicity of expression can preserve it.

THE TYPEWRITER A COMING NECESSITY IN SCHOOLS.

FRANK H. KASSON, BOSTON.

The American people demand rapidity of action. They eat rapidly, walk rapidly, think rapidly, act rapidly. Life moves at a pace unknown to our ancestors. We can all sympathize with Madame De Stael's request of Sir James Mackintosh: "And now tell me all about the British Constitution in ten minutes." We have but little time for any matter. We must reach the center at a bound. Ours is a money-making age. Men make fortunes swiftly and often lose them in a day. This high pressure speed exhausts the life forces. Young men grow prematurely old. In such an age every device to save labor and thought is hailed with delight. No wonder it is the age of invention. The age imperiously demands new inventions. And the demand is met. With what marvellous strides the world swings forward into light. Like a lusty young giant as it is, it cannot walk, but runs and leaps, exulting in its strength.

Could Benjamin Franklin walk again the streets of Boston or Philadelphia, what strange sensations would be his comparing old things with new, The age of steam and electricity would cause astonishment or even alarm at every turn. Would he not exclaim as he surveyed man's works: "All things are new and wonderful!" How eagerly would he examine the steamship, the the railway engine, the electric car, the telegraph, the newspaper, the incandescent light, the repeating rifle, the torpedo, the phonograph, the elevator in some lofty building, the stove, the lamp, the furnace, the sewing machine, the piano and the thousand things which add to the beauty, convenience and utility of modern life. Certainly life is very different now from what it was a century ago.

In such an age of material advancement and mental alertness, men will not follow the slow methods which satisfied their fathers. If machinery must be invented to save the labor of the hand much more should it be brought into use to save the exhaustion of what is far more valuable - the brain. To economize time and brawn is of great importance, and means increase

of wealth; but to economize brain power means increase of health and length of life. Our generation has felt keenly this necessity for mechanical help in the expression of thought. The pen could not fly fast enough in its nervous grasp. The demand arose for a machine to save the wear and tear of nerves and expedite their work. And this demand was met by the invention of the typewriter.

At first, various crude attempts ended in failure. But, in time, success crowned the persistent effort of inventors Sholes and Soulé, and the result was the Remington Standard Typewriter. Not the almost perfect No. 6 machine, but one which could work successfully, and out of which this latest achievement of typewriting ingenuity has grown.

It was in the year 1873 that the manufacture of the machine for the market first began at Ilion, N. Y., in the works of E. Remington & Sons, then famous for their splended rifles; but it was 1874 before the first machine was ready for the market. It was a feeble industry at first. It took time to create a demand. No man could then foresee the wonderful growth of this industry. It is very easy to look backward. Only genius can look forward into the unknown. When a path is made any fool can walk in it. Six years had passed, and only 1000 machines, in all, had been sold. In 1882, the number had increased to 2300, proportionally a great gain, but still the business gave little promise of success. In 1884, the business received a new impetus. A new industry was created. Since then the growth of the business has been rapid. By 1890, the sales had reached 20,000 per annum. In 1892 they had risen to 35,000 per annum, and the demand is steadily increasing year by year. Altogether, about 160,000 strictly new Remington machines have been sold, and nearly all of them are in use to-day. This is somewhat more than fifty per cent. of all the typewriters that have been made.

The coming of the typewriter has been welcomed by a vast army of busy men. The writing of letters is no longer drudgery. Ten times as many can be produced with less mental strain or physical fatigue. A vast army of young women are finding in this work, constant and remunerative employment. The records of the Employment Bureau conducted by Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict, manufacturers of the Remington Typewriter, at their sole expense, as a department of their extensive business, are

remarkable. Between nine and ten thousand persons of both sexes were placed in positions where they could find profitable employment, as operators, during the years 1891-1894.

The typewriter is here to stay. It is fast becoming a necessity. Business and newspaper offices cannot do without them. It is only a question of time when they will be in common and constant use in our schools. It was not a wild prediction which Dr. Wm. A. Mowry made four years ago, when he said: "It is tolerably certain that not many years will pass by before the typewriter will be found in as common use in families as the sewing machine is now."

Ought the typewriter to be used widely in the public schools? We answer, yes. It is evident to every one that, as competition becomes severer (and this process is going on all the time) more will be demanded of young manhood and womanhood entering into the various forms of business life. Our boys and girls cannot be too well equipped for the battle of life. And any business man, passing through the recent experiences, knows that the expression, "battle of life," is anything but a figure of speech. The great majority of the boys and girls of this land are born into a workaday world in which they (many of them at too immature an age, alas!) must bear a part. To them, on leaving the schoolroom, life becomes real and earnest and a continuous battle: Well for them, if their equipment has been thorough and practical. If they are to succeed, every particle of mental as well as physical fibre will be called into play. With such a future before our young men, and before an ever increasing company of young women, it is not well to look too much to the past, the distant past, for words of "light and leading." We must be thoroughly alive in the present, with an eye to the future. It is because this thought has found lodgment in the public consciousness that manual training schools are springing up for boys and cooking schools for girls. This thought will make its way more and more. It is irresistible, for the bread and butter necessity walks close behind it. And thus the demand for thorough and practical training for the stern necessities of business life will call upon our youth to fit themselves to do certain things well. The use of the typewriter comes into play at this point.

A rapidly increasing number of teachers are coming to realize this. But when they introduce the typewriter into the schoolroom, they find that much more can be accomplished than simply to fit boys and girls to go out into the world and earn a living. No boy can use a machine long without becoming a far better speller. If he makes a mistake, it stares him in the face, as it never does from the written page. There it stands boldly forth in amazing distinctness. There is no way to obscure or blur it. It is wrong, and must be squarely corrected.

Then the use of the typewriter leads to more original and better composition work. All task work in composition is inferior work. The mind does its best only when thoroughly aroused. Splended passages in poetry or literature, and bursts of eloquence which live for ages are struck off at white heat. Every orator and great writer fully understands this. But the awkward lad or callow girl does not. It is often very difficult to arouse such a one to any enthusiasm in writing. More than likely, they will yawn and almost go to sleep over the irksome task.

But who goes to sleep over a typewriter? Here is action. The blood circulates more rapidly. The words emerge clear and cleancut, as the grass in the swath of the mower. And in that alert and roused state of mind, the thought long stagnant begins to flow. To his surprise often, the boy finds that he has thoughts of his own. Having produced his copy, our young writer feels an added interest in having it as perfect in every way as that which he reads in the printed page of his book. To all intents and purposes, it is a printed page which he himself is producing. This adds as much zest to his work as cold spring water gives to a mountain climber.

Each sentence must not only be spelled right, but punctuated right. Every comma, dash or period must be in place. The sentence must express his exact thought. This leads him to study carefully what he has written. Adjectives are cut out, adverbs placed in new relations, prepositions and even whole clauses transposed. And many words are replaced by others, which add beauty, clearness or strength to the diction. The eye plays an important part in one's acquirement of a wide, choice, accurate vocabulary. The boy or girl who has had five years' experience with a typewriter, other things being equal, will be far