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fathers of this republic, did not go to all that trouble for the disproportionate privilege of achieving a pure style in Gothic.

For myself, I hold with Whitman rather than with Emerson. Whitman was always more conservative, though his manner was less polite. Or perhaps conservative isn't the word; he was more discriminating. He was the one American writer neither dominated by the past nor on his guard against it. He took it as he took the present, prizing what seemed good and rejecting the rest. If he did his rejecting so easily, it must have been because he was fearless, a free man without an inferiority complex. Toward the end of his life he wrote the characteristic words which Emory Holloway has put at the beginning of his fine interpretation of the poet: "The sum total of my view of life has always been to humbly accept and thank God for whatever inspiration toward good may come in this rough world of ours, and, as far as may be, to cut loose from and put the bad behind, always and always." Not all the past was to be rejected; it was not all sepulchers of the fathers. When we realize the tendency in so many of us to reject the past wholesale, we make our own personal resolution in Whitman's formula, to accept and be thankful for the good, and to cut loose from and put behind the bad, always and always.

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TURNING OVER A NEW LEAF:Writing these words, I was moved to set down a list of my own New Year resolutions, and I am startled to see how emotional they are, and,

on the whole, how personal. Is it so with us all? Of course, there would be in any such table of vows the will to be more agreeable to one's friends, for example, less irritable with the family at breakfast, and so on. But my resolutions in the field of public citizenship ought perhaps to be more rational and more grandiose. I find, however, that the recent election has left some wrath still working in me; I resolve to give my vote in future, as I did this time, to whichever candidate insults the other fellow least. Of course a man might be well fitted for office in spite of bad manners in the campaign. Perhaps he was only ill advised, as we say. But my resolve is to be true, if I can, and if other things permit (I leave myself this loophole), to my present feeling, that we ought to be done with the vile tradition in politics which tries to prove your opponent is unfit for any office, even unfit for society. Of course the campaign is more exciting when the issue seems to be, shall we elect the rascal or put him in jail, but justice rarely lies in such extreme alternatives. My resolve is to do my little bit toward urging in upon us that millennium in which the opponents will represent genuine differences of opinion as to theories of government, or as to important questions of the moment; so that when I cast a vote I shall be supporting a policy, not vindicating the personal reputation of a candidate. Our way of conducting a political campaign is altogether out of keeping with anything we should like to call American; it derives from the worst of the Old World, from customs which the Old World has largely outgrown; it is not intelli

gent, nor economical, nor sportsmanlike. It makes no proper use of modern facilities for communicating with the vast public. The candidates tour the country as they did before newspapers, illustrated supplements, and radio were common; and in most cases they talk so much and get so tired that they fail to do themselves justice. In all this I don't know what to accept and be thankful for; my resolve is rather to cut loose from and put it behind, always and always.

I resolve also to give my patronage to no newspaper during the political campaign which similarly represents the rival candidate as altogether bad. This resolution, faithfully adhered to, would almost cut me off from the ministrations of the press. This year, in particular, we had a bad reversion to the old mood of American politics; many an otherwise honest paper fed its readers with sappy praise for the man it supported, and withheld the important good which could have been said of his rival. When I was a boy I sat one summer evening on the veranda of a house which was a citadel of Republicanism. The local minister was making a pastoral call, and I heard him say that in his judgment the chief instrument the devil was now employing in the world was the Democratic party. At the time I was astonished to notice that his hearers seemed to agree with him, not because he was the minister, but because the truth was axiomatic. For many years I have thought the episode belonged to the fossil age, but apparently the old minister was with us in the last campaign, editing several metropolitan dailies in each camp.

I might mention in passing that I resolve not to be irritated when the telephone rings. Also I resolve to find out some principle of art in the movies. These resolutions do not illustrate my main point, since they refer to modern inventions, hardly involving the long dead past. So I merely mention them. I am not brave enough to cut loose from the telephone altogether, but I do wish it wouldn't ring so much, and particularly I resolve to be very firm, even austere, with those who ring me up without any previous claim on my attention. "You don't know who I am," says the voice, "but I am making bold to ask-" Is it true that the feeling of social delicacy dies in us when we pick up the telephone? I reserve my curses for the friend who tells his secretary to get me on the wire, and then keeps me waiting till he has a mind to converse. As to the movies, I don't doubt there is a great deal of art in them; but having had it explained to me by movie producers, I think it must be there by accident. If there is a principle in it, I ought to learn it during 1927, while my aging mind is still pliable enough to adjust itself to a strange idea.

My next resolution is of larger scope. scope. I resolve to work for the peace of the world by understanding my fellows. Not all of my fellows exactly; I shan't try to understand visiting British authors or European journalists when they point out the faults of these United States. I shall simply remember how often we have said similar asinine things about Europe. But I'll try to understand the view of other nations and peoples, and for once I'll begin at home.

We ought not to have much patience with the sort of pacifist who wants to cut down armies and navies, who distrusts international bankers, who gets worried on the Fourth of July when some love of country does leak through opaque oratory, but who fails to understand the neighbor at his very door. I'd like to cut loose from him forever. If my neighbors and I differ in race, in religion, or in the amount of our wealth, and if the difference is a barrier between free and complete sympathy, then there is war in the world even though no armies are mobilized. The pacifist who still feels a color prejudice, or a race prejudice, or a religious prejudice, is a contradiction in terms. The one-hundred-per-cent American who advises Europe to give up its armaments, but who is on his guard against the Jew in New York, against the Japanese in California, or against the negro everywhere, is a travesty of intelligence and moralshatred preaching brotherly love. If I still have a lingering and unnoticed prejudice of this sort, I resolve to hunt for it and root it out.

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FURTHER DOWN THE PAGE:-I should like also to make some personal resolutions as a teacher. I resolve, for example, to teach nothing that I do not believe-a fairly easy ideal to reach; and also to teach only what I love a much more difficult goal. In scholarship so much emphasis is usually placed on those aspects of truth which have reference to reason that we are liable to forget the other aspects which are bound up with the heart. To teach the truth is not enough. Many a

young soul finds itself strangely deadened in the presence of undeniable truth, when the teacher has no enthusiasm to share, no way of suggesting that this undeniable truth is in itself a kindling flame. Plato said that truth for any of us is something remembered from a previous and more luminous existence, that even a proposition in mathematics could be recalled to us by adroit questions. If he is right, then teaching ought to be such a cry of gratitude as the woman gave who after long search recovered the lost piece of silver, and called in the neighbors to rejoice with her. Teaching ought to be that enthusiastic calling in of the neighbors. If we stand at a little distance from the educational system, and think of this human life of ours in the large, doesn't it seem inevitable that any one who knows anything in particular should want to tell others about it? Provided, that is, he is in love with what he knows. It is more important that teachers should be lovers of the truth than that they should know it. Of course, they must know it; but to be teachers at all, the essential thing is to love it. I'll admit, for my own part, that the teacher is sometimes tempted by the routine of his work to approach the class as listlessly as the students themselves. A good New Year resolution would be to stay away from any young minds unless one has something kindling to impart. If we carried out this resolution we should, of course, soon lose our jobs; but on the other hand the students would not lose their ideal of the scholarly life.

I resolve also to assume always, even when it isn't so, that the student

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is as great a lover and a seeker of truth as I am. Teaching is a very subtle business. I am not at all sure that when it is successful it consists of imparting any information. I am not at all sure that it consists in bringing out of the students, as we are often told the word implies, something deep-planted which can be lifted like water from a well. More often it seems to me a process of companionship and of silent encouragement. The value of words in a lecture seems often to consist in the attitude of confidence they may imply in the hearers. What waits to come out of youth is somewhat like the seeds which respond only to a kindly light and warmth. Many a boy, I suspect, never intended to use his mind, nor realized he had one, until some wise teacher assumed that he was thinking hard. It was so much easier to try to think than to disappoint the courteous teacher!

In other words, I resolve not to try to save the student's soul, but to assume it is already safe. Many years of teaching and of association with teachers have left me a little impatient with that moral attitude toward education which supposes that the world is in need of rescue. Youth is singularly safe, in spite of its many accidents and mistakes. The only great danger which we can be sure the young people run is the

danger of meeting a teacher. Think how awful the contact may be, if the student, knowing himself to be no scholar, assumes that the teacher is an ardent seeker after truth, and finds after all that the teacher is interested in truth only as a means to improve him! When I was a schoolboy myself I got the impression that my teachers were not necessarily great scholars; I thought the scholars must be the men who wrote the textbooks out of which we studied. When I moved up to college I assumed that the teachers there were not necessarily great scholars; the great scholars must be the professors engaged in research in the graduate school. By the time I had made my way through the graduate school I came to the conclusion that the really great teachers and scholars were scattered all along the line, here and there, at too rare intervals, from the elementary school up to the frontiers of the mind. But wherever they were, they all had one characteristic which I should like to imitate: they seemed to be functioning quite naturally in their pursuit of truth, and they assumed, when I came near them, that there was nothing the matter with me, nothing needing spiritual cure. spiritual cure. To such an attitude a boy's instinctive response is admiration for them, and for the high things they love.

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BACK TO NATURE:-Let no son of Jefferson fool himself. The sons of Hamilton have always dominated and governed this country, and they continue to do so. Jefferson and his circle were in power only a few years, after all, and there has never since been another thoroughgoing Jeffersonian in the White House. The interests of stability and of property have prevailed over the interests of flexibility and of labor. Even in the midst of the present restlessness those dominant interests are SO strong that the Democrats who boast that they are the sons of Jefferson can hardly be distinguished, as to their political principles, from the Republicans who boast that they are the sons of Hamilton. It is left for the scrupulous, insistent, legitimate Jeffersonians to play the part of critics to administration after administration, with no more actual power than critics ordinarily have.

But the Jeffersonians do have their revenge and triumph. They write much better than the Hamiltonians. The two best books on Jefferson which have been brought out by the sesquicentennial year side emphatically with him against Hamilton. This might have been expected. But likewise the best book of the year on Washington inclines to

the side of Jefferson, when it has occasion to do anything of the sort at all.

It is of course not quite just to class W. E. Woodward's "George Washington: The Image and the Man" (Boni & Liveright) with the documents in this old American political duel, for the reason that it goes at so many points beyond the controversy and that it stands squarely on very modern feet. Still, the Jeffersonians will take comfort from its analysis of Washington's character and of the circumstances through which he moved. They will do this in spite of the fact that Washington is shown, more clearly than ever before, to belong to the opposite party. Strangely enough, the Hamiltonians, to whose party Washington is freshly assigned, will many of them be vexed, not because of the assignment itself, but because of the terms which are used.

Mr. Woodward, far from regarding Washington as an elusive or mysterious person, finds in him something reasonably familiar.

"Washington's mind was the business mind. He was not a business man, in the modern sense; he did not live in a business age. But the problems which he understood, and knew how to solve, were executive

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