We have thus, somewhat roughly in outline, sketched a state system for the treatment of the criminal. The copestone of the edifice is secured when we are able to release on parole prisoners who we have reason to believe are reformed. These would remain under official surveillance for a prescribed period after discharge from close custody, but it would be possible in this manner to shorten their period of incarceration.

It is easier to see what should be done than it is to put theories into practice. Old prejudices have to be overcome, a false economy which seeks to perpetuate vested interests to be discouraged, political opposition to be met, always averse to a reduction in the number of county offices which may furnish rewards for the henchmen of a party. The chief opponents of these reforms at the late Conference of Charities and Correction at Toronto, singularly enough, were two judges, one representing the Canadian bench and the other the Supreme Court of Ohio. They could not conceive of punishment except by imprisonment.

House Bill No. 163, introduced in the last session of the Pennsylvania Legislature, would, if enacted, have been a long step forward, but it was unfortunately lost. It provides chiefly for a state board of prison commissioners having control over all the prisons of the state. Time, however, will surely bring the needed relief. Truth will ultimately triumph, for "the eternal years of God are hers." We would fain see it triumph in our time.

PHILIP C. GARRETT.

English Literature in Secondary
Schools.*

As a subject for study in schools, literature has a threefold advantage-moral, æsthetic, intellectual.

The moral advantage consists in the fact that, like all high art, literature makes the moral ideal alluring. It follows that literature should. be left to produce its own moral effect. When used as a text for preaching, it is robbed of its peculiar moral power and brought under the yoke of didacticism, from which perfect art has happily escaped.

The value of the æsthetic side of literature can hardly be exaggerated, especially in a crude and materialistic nation. The only question is how appreciation of literary form can best be cultivated. Two means of proved effectiveness are right reading aloud to the class and right study of literary form.

This article is the substance of a talk given at a Round-Table Conference during the last session of the Philadelphia Summer Meeting of the American Society for the Extension of University Teaching.

The young pupil needs to have literature interpreted for him by the voice. Nothing else will so quicken his imagination and develop his feeling for literary beauty. To analyze a poem in class without reading it aloud is about as sensible as to close the piano and sit down to pick the bones of a musical score. It is not the verse only that needs vocal expression. Style, thought, passion, the soul of the whole, all catch fire and become more vital through right reading. While this is pre-eminently true of poetry, in a less degree it is true also of prose.

This reading, until late in the course, cannot be done by the class. The average pupil will read in a way to reduce the most imaginative or impassioned poetry to the level of an almanac. If the teacher himself cannot do much better, he lacks one of the first qualifications of a teacher of literature to young pupils. But the kind of reading needed can be attained without great difficulty by a teacher who understands and loves the literature he reads. Intelligent, sympathetic, musical reading, not finished elocutionary skill, is what is essential. The teacher who can so read will easily lead his pupils for a few minutes each day into "the realms of gold" and make them forget the class-room for a time.

The study of literary form should be elementary, and incidental to the reading of some piece of literature. It should also be vital, not mechanical. Many students who come up to college are strong on "amphibrachs" but have no sense of melody and rhythm, no clear ideas of the adaptation of verse to thought. They can sort similes from metaphors, but cannot tell why a particular simile or metaphor is better than a litera! expression. They know the difference between a loose sentence and a periodic, but are quite ignorant of the peculiar advantages of each. In brief, they have been taught dead elements and empty definitions, but not the life and use of the literary facts before them.

Above all, the study of literary form should be definite. It should therefore be restricted to the more tangible literary effects. The commonplace that the finest literary effects elude analy sis is true enough. Words that are splendors, words that are perfumes, phrases of a nameless felicity, the haunting magic of verse, these things must merely be felt. But it is often for gotten that there are literary effects which are more tangible and can be analyzed; and it does the student good to analyze them. Such analy sis may lessen immediate enjoyment, but it makes literary appreciation keener and more intelligent in the end.

The effect of spondees, run-on lines, variation in placing caesuras, etc., is usually a perfectly tangible matter. Even young pupils can be led to see the difference between catalogue description and suggestive description,

and the uses of each. Certain elements of good narrative-rapidity, suspense, surprise, climax can be definitely pointed out and their effect in creating or sustaining interest be explained. Simple matters of plot-structure -variety, contrast, unity-can be studied concretely in connection with a play of Shakspere. In all this work the greatest emphasis should be laid upon definiteness. The student should not be allowed to say merely, "The verse runs along very smoothly and is well adapted to the sense, "This description is so vivid you can almost see the scene," "The threads of the plot are nicely interwoven." He should be compelled to lay his finger upon definite points. Such study develops the eye for the observation of literary effects. Vague statements develop mental laziness and mental fog.

وو

The intellectual advantage of literature as a school-study comes from the fact that literature expresses thought by words. The habit of thoughtful, accurate reading brings mental discipline of a high order, and as a tool it is indispensable in the study of any subject. In the study of literature itself, an understanding of the thought is necessary to intelligent literary appreciation. The intellectual side of literature also furnishes a needed basis for exact work and exact grading a matter of no small consequence in schoolroom routine.

Yet the amazing fact is that most students when they enter college not only cannot write English, but cannot read English, i. e., they do not get thought accurately from the printed page. Some of them get the most ludicrous misconceptions of what they read, and the majority get only a vague approximation to the thought or a dull misunderstanding of it. Most of these blundering readers are not brainless; they simply have not been trained to read.

This defect has not received the attention it demands, partly because it does not often appear on the surface. Students frequently seem to enjoy literature, they may even be enthusiastic over it, and at the same time they may be making blunders like the following: "Fairy Mab' was a nickname; 'junkets' are griddlecakes." "Harpy-footed furies' are furies with feet like harps, that make music as they walk."

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold' means that Keats had been in California." Bacchus and his pards' means Bacchus and his companions."""Committed linnets' are linnets sitting on a bough, as if in committee." "Realms of upland, prodigal in oil' refers to a painting of the Prodigal Son." "In this sonnet [The world is too much with us'] the main thought is that a pagan is happier than a mercenary Christian, because the pagan does not expect future punishment." "The sonnet [the same one] expresses Wordsworth's grief at the

loss of a friend by drowning" [suggested by 'Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea']. As a friend of the writer remarks, students who read after this fashion may be "enjoying" poetry, but it is poetry of their own manufacture.

The state of things represented by such blunders is shameful and intolerable. In the teaching of literature more emphasis must be laid upon a study of the thought. Such work need not be dull. It should not concern itself chiefly with definitions of words or explanation of allusions. It should not take the form of verbose paraphrases, saying over again ill what the author has already said well. The greater share of time should be given to a study of the development and articulation of the thought in the essay or poem as a whole, in the paragraph or stanza, in the sentence. Such study, in the hands of a competent teacher, is not only disciplinary, but stimulating, besides having the practical advantages referred to above.

The possibilities for both culture and discipline in the study of English literature, are not yet half developed in most secondary schools. They never will be fully developed until more time is allotted to the subject, and the salaries of teachers of English are high enough to induce men and women of talent to fit themselves thoroughly for their work. Not even a school board can get a quart out of a pint pot.

Brown University.

WALTER C. BRONSON.

that it is the lot of every literary masterpiece to become with age first the cloistered delight of the student, and finally the defenceless victim of the specialist. How far this has been true in the case of the 'Wealth of Nations' I venture to submit to your candid judgment.

The early verdicts passed upon your illustrious work were, I believe, almost uniformly favorable. The eminent Mr. Buckle so late as 1869 pronounced it "in its ultimate results probably the most important book that has ever been written," and declared it had "done more toward the happiness of man than has been effected by the united abilities of all the statesmen and legislators of whom history has preserved an authentic account." That this is tolerably high praise you will probably be disposed yourself to admit. Unfortunately, more than one of that historian's literary and scientific judgments have been latterly reversed. "If the rod be bent too much one way," says the proverb, "in order to make it straight you must bend it as much the other." When Mr. Buckle penned his eulogistic sentence he was probably unaware that Du Pont de Nemours had long previously declared "everything that is true in this respectable but tedious work, in two fat quarto volumes, is to be found in Turgot's 'Reflexions on the Formation and Distribution of Riches."" Such an unjust and indiscriminate criticism was certainly "a brutal and an odious business," but I cite the remark merely to indicate the extremes to which "the levity and inconstancy of human nature" may proceed.

Midway between this excessive laudation and this indiscriminate abuse, the more careful study of recent economists is tending to settle down to a more rational conclusion. Apart from the Germans who have weighed your immortal work like the fine dust of the balances. the most discriminating study of your services to political philosophy has been made in this generation by Mr. Bagehot, Mr. Woodrow Wilson, and Mr. John Rae. Mr. James Bonar has recently collected the titles of many of the books formerly in your library, and that very ingenious and profound author, Mr. Edwin Cannan, has recently unearthed a copy of one of your former students notes made of your early lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms. This latter work especially, edited with lynx-eyed acumen by the excellent Mr. Cannan, promises to put us in possession of many of the secrets of your literary activity which perhaps you had thought would descend to the grave with your ashes. Mr. Cannan's conclusions go far to discredit the contentions of Continental writers as to your alleged plagiarism, and console one in "those anxious and desponding moments" when, in matters speculative as well as practical, we think of "changing masters."

He begins by observing that a somewhat unimportant and obscure chapter "Concerning the Values or Prices of Goods" in the lecture of your teacher, "the never-to-be-forgotten Dr. Hutcheson," upon natural jurisprudence was the germ out of which grew your renowned Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. In support of this conjecture Mr. Cannan points out that in your own lectures on Jurisprudence (of which the recently discov ered notes give us a fairly adequate notion) you treat, in Part II, under Police, "of the prices of commodities, of money, of the division of labor, and of the progress of opulence,"-in short, of those very topics which comprise so large a part of your later treatise, which Mr. Bagehot has wittily dubbed an account of how "from being a savage, man rose to be a Scotchman." A somewhat detailed comparison of various sections of your lectures on jurisprudence and of the 'Wealth of Nations' makes it obvious that a great part of the substance of this famous work was embodied in your earlier lectures. It is not alone the correspondences between your earlier lectures and your later volume, however, which have revealed to us the secrets of your literary labors. Inasmuch as your lectures on jurisprudence were composed long before you had made the acquaintance of the economists (or physiocrats, as we now call them), it is obvious that you could have incorporated in the earlier lectures nothing that had been bor rowed from those Frenchmen "of great learning and ingenuity." And similarly, as your earlier disquisitions show no trace of any extended treatment of Capital Stock or of Distribution, we might reasonably conjecture with Mr. Cannan that your indebtedness to the physiocrats is limited to dissertations your subjects a conjecture that is amply confirmed by several significant facts. One of these facts, to wit, the subordinate position accorded by you to the theory of distribution, had already suggested to Mr. Cannan long before the recent discovery of your early lectures, that the very idea of Distribution was an after-thought with you, and that you had borrowed the term as a convenient label for your own sagacious remarks upon prices, rent, wages, and profits.

upon

these

Your inclusion of this foreign material in your great work reflects, I feel bound to say, more credit upon your generosity than upon your judgment. Like that of all innovators, your labors have proved "partly solid and partly sophistical"; but, barring your treatment of Rent and its relation to Price, no part of your treatise has been more "barren and unproductive" than your treatment, or more strictly your version of the physiocratic treatment, of capital

and distribution.

There are, to be sure,