such education as they get in a school garden or garden school? The humanizing effect of such association with beautiful living things would be of untold value. And where will one learn patience, foresight, thrift, cleanliness, economy, and altruism so well? It is an unwritten law that in a garden one works "that he may have to give to him that needeth." In a village the school garden might well become a center for a good deal of social intercourse. Boys and girls have their own plots to cultivate; fathers and mothers should be quite free to come and help out of school hours. There would be much more of sympathy between the school and the home if parents and teachers met casually on common ground with some common interest. Moreover, it is worth a good deal to get teachers associated with their scholars in this social and informal manner. The farmer might quite reasonably look to the school to do his seed-testing for him, nor need there be any great reluctance for help to be given to him in any time of emergency. The other month a certain small farmer was almost in despair about getting up his potatoes. In desperation he wrote to two large elementary schools near by, asking if they could help in any way. Now why should not the schoolmasters have taken a dozen boys each and given a day-Saturday perhaps to help with those potatoes? The school time usually given to physical exercises might well have been omitted that week, and, perhaps, also the time given to nature study. The boys would have had a lesson in patriotic altruism. But no; neither of the schoolmasters sent any reply to the man's appeal. That small-holder is not likely to feel very enthusiastic about the education rate. We dare not take the children off the school premises, to the farmer's field or the neighbor's garden wall. Yet would certainly be the way to people to believe in the schools and some interest in them. Arithmetic, Geography, Botany, ture Study, Drawing, Elementa Science-these are all subjects in whi much of the work could be made arise naturally out of the garden an be done in it. Other things, too, coul be studied there. Sitting accommodation and shelter would make needlework and reading possible there; whilst a very large amount of literature could be, and ought to be, connected with the life of the garden and field. In every case the possession of a garden opens the way for new and better methods of teaching, and for more humane ways of handling a class. And what an opportunity these gardens would give for the holiday months! Of course, garden-schools would not be closed. There will be, in the new time, streams of children going out to them for holidays-real holidays, when happy and instructive hours are spent among bees and flowers, vegetables and fruit. There will be fruit-picking and jammaking, sleep and play, work and liberty. The girl who comes home from the great boarding-school loves and enjoys her home garden. For the dwellers in the congested areas, the school garden must take the place of the home garden till the latter is provided. In the coming days we shall make all country schools garden-schools. We shall cease to build barrack schools in the congested areas of towns. Instead, a ring of large school gardens and garden schools will encircle the towns, and to these children will be carried by tram and train each day. Then, perhaps, a new spirit will arise in our country. A generation will come that will not be denied its right of access to the soil, a generation that knows Nature and loves her; an edu original, and it would still be able to captivate the foolish by offering to obtain more progress in a decade than wisdom would try to get in fifty years. And cant-mongers could put some humor into their propaganda, which at present they decline to do wittingly. They could say to the millionaires: "Men with your gifts will continue to gather wealth, just as authors will continue to write books; but in future no collector of success, however rich, shall be saved by tips and rates and charity subscriptions from becoming a practical democrat. He shall feel at first-hand the utmost swelter of base toil. On board ship he shall do spells of work with the black gang, and ashore he shall test on certain days some of the meanest labor that failures have to bear all the year round. Though equality is unattainable, success shall labor at times among those who in fifty-five years of toil-from fifteen to seventy-will not earn six thousand pounds all told." Cant might be an ironist in many moods, and yet produce infinite discomfort and annoyance. So there's no need for it to dishonor the big human brain by being a slave to complete silliness. When men who earn many thousands a year offer impossible hopes to needy voters, accompanied by a minimum wage of five-and-twenty magic shillings a week, silly cant from one social atmosphere emigrates into another at variance with it, and political high explosives are slowly compounded. The rich would not put into circulation any false hope if they knew what it is to rear an illnourished family in a tenement of one room. They would wish to bring fresh air and comfort into all the housing problems before they asked the poor to think of anything else. For the difference between progress and change has to be considered, true national progress being a citizen in doors with an improving family life, while change is an adventurer outside the home. Change will turn prospering farms into crowded factories, while employing King Jerry to degrade a birth-rate that increases. A rational ground plan of thought to transform bad houses into good homes would be to practical statesmanship what correct figures are to arithmetic. Yet the poor are asked to prattle with joy over the bubbles blown by the silliest cant. They are to find fresh air and health and ease in boastful talk about perpetual peace, for instance, not perpetual peace in the struggle for daily bread, but between peoples who are rivals in trade and in age and growth. That peace must begin her work in civil life is a truism that cant never for a moment notices. After this war nations must embrace one another till doomsday while retaining in their civil life the primitive war between individuals a bitter war, unceasing, protean, and relentless. If war between nations is to be abolished by democracy, as canting statesmen declare, why not private war between trade and trade, men and men, family and family. Why should finance remain pitiless at home if nations are to orchestrate their rivalries into harmony? Fluent orators and financial magnates turn away from these questions; but let me venture to ask them another. Since it was infamous for Germany to invade Belgium, why should it be fair and good business for a vast trading company to devour the little trades and shops in its neighborhood? Are we to have two moral standards-the better one to be used in the abnormal strife called armed warfare and the inferior one in the. normal strife called peace? If so, for what good and necessary reason? It is odd that pacifists fail to see that militancy would grow feeble were it not nourished and sustained by excessive contests for bread and money. German dumping and financial annexations were to the strife of peace what German submarine campaigns have been to armed warfare. Yet Britain welcomed as free trade the dumping that undercut her own fair market prices and permitted many of her industries to pass under German control. Cant told her to sell her birthright to imported cheapness and cunning. Note, too, that it is usually in armed warfare that trading communities are alarmed and horrified by the sufferings of women and children from unnecessary strife or from causes which ought not to be present in a civilized period. Why talk almost with composure about the dreadful hardships imposed on women and children by ignorance, carelessness, penury, failure, and bankruptcy? Why imply that it is only in criminal acts of armed warfare that horrible tolls are taken from child-life and from girlhood and womanhood? If all evils in daily life could be seen at work day after day through a year of business competition, would any statesman have the effrontery to praise the ravages of normal times as peace? Our new Minister of Education has told us that our national physique is much below the standard of a great people. Why has it degenerated? Partly because British agriculture was sacrificed by cant to the slovenly The Saturday Review. overgrowth of industrialism, partly because a free trade in venereal disease was sanctioned for many years by another phase of cant, and partly because the housing problems became so intricate that they could not be disentangled by the fierce rivalries in party politics. Many things in daily strife are dangerous, many are disgusting, and many others unjust and cruel, yet the untruth that glorifies "peace" continues to circulate from humbugs. Armed warfare should be left to the material peacemaking imposed upon nations by the present known costs of fighting with modernized weapons. Material deterrents are always more effective than moral precepts. What nation in the future is at all likely to seek an armed conflict, which would devour lives by the million and money by the thousand million in pounds sterling? The warfare to be feared most by our descendants will be commercial and industrial strife between citizens and between whole nations, for large populations will be brought to ruin if they fall behind in productive skill and zeal or if they find too much disunion in strikes and trusts. Swift and clever Eastern hands will fight for supremacy over the West in all markets undefended by tariffs, and armed warfare may issue from Western tariffs if they do much harm over a period of years to the industrialized East. Walter Shaw Sparrow. ZERO. ("Zero-hour"-commonly known as "Zero"-is the hour fixed for the opening of an Infantry attack.) I woke at dawn and flung the window wide. Behind the hedge the lazy river ran; The dusky barges idled down the tide; In the laburnum-tree the birds began; And it was May and half the world in flower; I saw the sun creep over an Eastward brow, |