"Sand strewn caverns, cool and deep, There dwells a mortal. But cruel is she: She left lonely forever The kings of the sea." In a hot laundry, where the girls stood ironing collars by the thousand through the August days, one girl, chanting Wordsworth's dew pure poems on Lucy to a little tune of her own, set all her mates to follow. "It makes it seem cooler in there," was the comment of one among them. And it is often said that you cannot interest working people in poetry! Doubtless race counts for something. The primary instinct of the Hebrews, for instance, leads rather to metaphysics. But the Celts among us, at all events, have full imaginative sensitiveness, as anyone could see who turned from a critical class of college students, languidly analyzing, let us say, The Ancient Mariner, to the dreaming eyes and eager if stumbling tongues of young Irish people, under the mystic spell of the same poem. In music, Germans and Hebrews alike can often not only follow, but lead. The teacher of music in an east side settlement assures us that nine out of ten of her little pupils in the neighborhood possess positive talent, while the proportion is reversed among her pupils uptown. As regards art, the puzzle of sharing our delights is especially great, because so few of us in America have any delights to share. Few enterprises are more interesting, however, than the annotated picture exhibitions with personal guides, now sometimes held in poor quarters; while loan art collections are at least useful as showing us what not to do. Such collections also prove one positive thing; that for a Roman Catholic population the devotional art of Italy furnishes a large section of the common ground we seek. A taste for modern Pre-Raphaelites, it may be added, cannot be cultivated among them. Is the misfortune great? One curious blank spot exists in the eye of the city wage earner. Landscape, which one sentimentally presents to him as a sub stitute for the refreshment of nature, arouses no emotions in his breast. His first and last enthusiasm, whether in art or life, is for persons. Large ideals grow from small endeavors; it is not too much to say that new conceptions of our national destiny shape themselves in the mind of him who enters into loving fellowship with one and another of our poor. He sees in vision the race slowly forming on our shores, composite of the races of the western world. For, whether we will or no, the Anglo Saxon is not the American; nor will he, as the centuries advance, remain on our soil in racial isolation. Too strong is that mighty impulse toward unity with which we may cooperate if we will; instincts of Celt, of Slav, of Hebrew, of Latin, as well as of Anglo Saxon and of Dutch, will throb in the veins of the Americans to be. All is process as yet; they throng to our coasts, these seeming alien peoples, bearing, unconsciously to themselves, rare gifts, for lack of which our nation suffers; we press them into exclusive ministry to our material needs. If the word Irish or Jew carries with it a suggestion from which our Anglo Saxon instinct shrinks, not wholly without reason, where lies the fault? Assuredly in the civilization that develops and emphasizes in each case the lower racial characteristics, instead of giving wise nurture to those higher faculties which might, under happier conditions, enrich the Anglo Saxon type. Have we no use, in the formation of our people, for the poetic and emotional sensibility of the Celt? For the religious passion and metaphysical ardor of the Hebrew? For that instinct toward the plastic arts yet strong in the Italian? The strength and persistence of these elements history makes plain; intelligent personal fellowship corroborates the witness of history. We, the Americans first in possession, have escaped, it may be, in a measure, the racial antagonisms and prejudices so marked in the old world; we have advanced to a negative hospitality and a reluctant toleration; but we have done no more. The nobler powers of our guests and fellow citizens we allow to atrophy and degenerate, while we profit by their mere labor force. We lose an opportunity, we make a great mistake. It is a mistake that springs largely from ignorance; from our indolent refusal to create, by loving effort, a spiritual democracy corresponding to our outward forms. Two conclusions press themselves upon the mind. The first is sad; we realize that industrial conditions at present absolutely forbid the manual workers from entering on any large scale or in any general sense into the intellectual inheritance of the race. The second is joyful; we become aware that these same workers possess faculties even now ready to yield quick response to a wise culture, and only awaiting a wider freedom to help in enlarging and uplifting our national life. Not the laboring classes alone, but all of us, suffer in class isolation. Neither by improved educational systems, nor by personal contact on formal lines, can this isolation be overcome, but only by a genuine living of the common life, and by the social and industrial changes that must follow. Our scattered thoughts on democracy and education lead us straight to the more searching theme of democracy and society. EDUCATION AND RELIGION. BY ARTHUR T. HADLEY [Arthur Twining Hadley, president of Yale university; born April 23, 1856, at New Haven, Conn., was graduated from Yale in 1876 and studied later in the University of Berlin; in 1879 he became tutor at Yale and 1883-86, lecturer there; he was appointed commissioner of statistics of Connecticut in 1885, and in 1886 he became professor of political science at Yale, resigning in 1889 on his election to the presidency of the university; he is the author of Railroad Transportation, Its History and Laws, Connecticut Labor Reports, Economics, An Account of the Relations between Private Property and Public Welfare, The Education of the American Citizen, Report on the System of Weekly Payments; he is the American editor of the tenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The following is an address delivered at the 100th anniversary of the Independent Presbyterian church of Philadelphia.] There are two extreme views concerning the effects of education upon public morality. One is held by the advocates of secular schools; the other is held by the advocates of church schools. This sharp division of opinion is not peculiar to America. It is felt in every country where modern education and modern thought prevail. It takes one form in England, another form in France, and another in Germany; but the underlying issue is the same in all. The advocate of secular schools believes that good teaching will itself make good citizens. He holds that a large part of our vice is the result of ignorance; and that if you remove the ignorance you will do away with the vice. He thinks that a large part of our errors and our crimes are due to people's failure to recognize the consequences of their acts; and that if you can inform them of those consequences you can check the tendency to crime in its beginnings. He believes poverty and shiftlessness to be so largely due to want of knowledge that if you provide the knowledge you will do away with most of the shiftlessness and the poverty. Up to a certain point all this is true. There is a vast quantity of shiftlessness and vice due to ignorance; a large quantity of error and crime which would be prevented if the source of error could be rendered harmless at the outset. But though you can thus remove some of the moral evils under which we suffer, you cannot by so simple a means remove them all, nor even the major part of them. The root of lawlessness lies deeper than mere ignorance of consequences. The chief source of crime is moral perverseness rather than mental deficiency. If you improve a man's intellectual capacity without correspondingly educating his moral nature, you are likely to change the direction in which his criminal or vicious instincts seek their outlet, rather than to destroy those instincts themselves. When you teach a man to write you make him less liable to commit larceny, but you make him much more liable to commit forgery. When you teach a man political economy and law you lessen the temptations and opportunities for acts of violence, but you do not lessen those for acts of fraud. Few of us who have looked into the statistics of education and crime are optimistic enough to deny that they are quite disappointing. The improvement due to the removal of illiteracy amounts to something; but it does not amount to so much as we should like to see, or as was promised by the early advocates of our public school system. The opponents of that system often point to these statistical results with ill concealed satisfaction. They say that such consequences are just what you might expect from any system of purely secular education. They would have the training of the intellect supplemented by a special system of religious training, which should teach the pupil to use his knowledge for the service of God and the benefit of his fellowmen. If they had to choose between the two, they would regard the religious training as more important than the intellectual, and would prefer schools where the knowledge of the teachers was defective or inaccurate but the religious principles good, to those where the knowledge of the staff was better but their orthodoxy less sound. They look with grave apprehension upon the spectacle of free citizens trained in the knowledge of many things which may prove of use to them individually, but not trained in those ideas of religion and morality which have been rightly regarded as essential to the safety of civilized communities. I confess that I share some of the apprehensions of these advocates of church schools; but I am very far from agreeing with them as to the proper remedy. I do not believe that |