arithmetic, grammar, and geography as the bread of life. These kindergartens did not teach a letter.

The value of the power to read depends upon the thing read. The ability to read obscene literature has hastened many a boy into vice. It is absolutely essential to the selfpreservation of the state that the taste for good literature be cultivated simultaneously with the power to read. Not one word should be taught except that with it be given the desire to use that word helpfully, not destructively. Practice in use of it must immediately follow its acquisition, and examples should be given in the form of verse, story, and history of its right and beautiful usage. From this point of view the study of literature becomes important to the state. Who could claim that "Is the cat on the mat?" and lists of such words as bat, rat, hat, sat, fat, etc., had any such value?

The new education recognizes that a thing apart from its meaning is valueless and potentially dangerous. Dirt is confessedly matter out of place; disease is misdirected energy in the human organs and tissues; similarly, ignorance is thought undeveloped, and viciousness mental and moral energy misdirected. The new education recognizes this, and seeks to develop thought, and so overcome ignorance; and to direct mental and moral energies aright, and so overcome evil.

The moral training in the Cook County Normal School, and the methods employed to secure it, may be illustrated by the following touching story. A boy who had attended the school some years was stricken down with scarlet fever. After his recovery, his mind was found to be clouded. The father came to Colonel Parker in great distress to ask about some asylum to which he could send the child.

"Never!" cried "the noble colonel," as his friends affectionately call him. "Send him right back here. We will take care of him. It will do every child in his room good. And, if anything will roll the cloud away from his mind, association with familiar scenes of mental activity will do so."

The child came; he was received by his mates as if nothing had happened. His recitations were nonsense, but nobody laughed at them; his writing was piteously vague, but no one reproached him. He taught every child in his room, more powerfully than a dozen books, the duty of the strong toward the weak. Tenderness, forbearance, and a chivalry more beautiful than any mere chivalry of sex,

bloomed in his path; and that which might have been a curse proved a blessing. To-day the boy is in the highest grade, sound of mind and body.

So little was this beautiful thing appreciated by the adherents of the old system that a member of the county board of education, now a member of the city board, although the child's condition was explained to him, insisted on giving him a written examination, and pulled down the reported average of the whole room thereby. He did not think the divine lessons taught worth noting.

As an illustration of the scientific study of children which is carried on at this school, the following instance is of interest. Two boys, twins, were brought there from a neighboring public school. Despite the identity in their ages, one boy was in the eighth grade, the other in the third. No one could tell why this boy did not get on. In action he had never shown any lack of thought-power, but in school he was simply stupid, and scarcely progressed at all, although he evidently tried. As soon as Colonel Parker saw him, he said to the mother:

"Madam, your son is deaf."

"Impossible!" cried the startled woman. "I should have found it out in all these twelve years."

"I am sure of it," said the colonel, "from the way in which he watches my lips when I am talking. However, we will test him."

Sure enough, the boy was deaf; not stone deaf, but so deaf that he had probably heard only about one-tenth of the things said to him. The colonel put him in a schoolroom. He had not been there fifteen minutes before the teacher discovered that he had astigmatism so badly that he could not see a thing written upon the blackboard. No wonder the poor lad had been "stupid" at school! One's heart aches to think of the unjust markings and reproaches he must have had to endure, and the strange, inexplicable mess the world must have seemed to him; for, of course, he was perfectly unaware of his own defects, having been born with them. Now the boy is happy, and rapidly catching up with his more fortunate twin.

In short, the new education aims to build character, to send forth well-rounded men and women, fitted to grapple with life. It looks facts in the face, and argues from them, not from theories or prejudices. It respects tradition only as tradition preserves truth. It is, above all things, democratic. It sees in the association of human beings upon a plane of absolute equality, the greatest educational power

in the world. "It is my aim," says Colonel Parker, "to have every child in my school as free as I am myself." And the colonel is uncommonly free-free from prejudice, and free from fear.

The new education recognizes that use not only exalts knowledge into wisdom, but that without use, even bare facts fail from the mind. It recognizes that the noble use of knowledge is even more essential to the well-being of the state than knowledge itself, and that habit and example are the two great agencies by which the child may become accustomed to use knowledge nobly. It recognizes that the legitimate function of the school is not to teach certain prescribed studies, but to increase the power to think wisely, to act forcibly, and to be righteous.

The new education stands ready to fit the children of this republic for the new era which is beginning to dawn. Chicago has been called upon first to face the issue practically. As she is nearly the centre of this continent, her example will count much, East and West, and, when she has proved that this education, at once more practical and more spiritual than the old, can be made a great factor in the regeneration of a city, other struggling communities will follow her example and rise up and call her blessed.

THE HUMAN PROBLEM ACCORDING TO LAW.

BY ABBY MORTON DIAZ.

Justice is the application of truth to affairs.-Emerson.
Give them truth to build upon.-Dante.

In any bookkeeping if the accounts do not balance, the only way out of the confusion is to find the mis-take and rectify it. By the miss in taking, error has been made the basis instead of truth. Those interested waste no time in devising a remedy, still less in trying to so adjust affairs as to suit the outcome of error. They know that in regard to numbers exist fixed laws which if applied will themselves establish order.

Were the accounts of a community kept in great measure regardless of these laws-say two and two called other than four-and the results or "answers" applied in affairs generally, the consequence would be a widespread confusion, requiring corresponding effort in the way of adjustment. Though performed with all the zeal of self-consecration, such labor would still be adjustment-that and nothing more; something less for the adjustment could never be accomplished. It would become permanent, yet not, observe, as a legitimate work in and of itself, but as created by unlawful conditions which the people themselves had established. Even were those erroneous accounts carved in marble in letters of gold, and made the standard; were the consequent disorder supposed to be the natural state of things and therefore unchangeable; were it declared that under certain conditions two and two are not four, and that it is expected of figures to go wrong, still the "answers" so brilliantly wrought out would have in them nothing-no thing-because truth would not be therein; and the disorderly conditions would go on interminably, breaking out at intervals in contentions more or less violent.

Note, here, that as the unlawful figuring thus applied in affairs would work disaster in a countless variety of ways, there would seem to be required as many different kinds of remedy; but in reality, as the cause of all would be but onebreaking law, so the remedy would be but one-keeping law; and this only remedy would have to be applied, no matter how great the consequent changes.

Now as to our Human Problem, that there is fundamental

error somewhere becomes evident in two ways: First, by the prevalence of strifes, strikes, crime, pauperism, official corruption, private dishonor, the terrorism of trusts, the absolutism of money-power, and general distrust and inharmony; second, by our numerous proposed remedies, in the shape of reforms, charities, philanthropies, missions, rescue works, tenement-house leagues, pauper institutions, watch and ward societies, good government societies, prison associations, prohibition schemes, and our innumerable legal and penal enactments.

The need of all these attempts at setting things right is sure proof of error in the foundation. Rightness needs no righting. In the real as in the supposed case, each different manifestation of error seems to require its special remedy,we will say its special kind of adjustment. Hence all these various schemes devised with so much of thought and effort. A useless trouble! The remedy exists independently of human wisdom and human endeavor. It is-applied Law, according to the Creative Plan; Order through Law. Whoever would solve our now complicated human problem should first recognize the fact that being a part of the universe, the human world must come into line with the laws of the universe.

These laws are, first, Life. Everywhere life; no vacuity, no stagnation. To live is to fulfil-fill out fully-the inborn purposes of individual existence, as these are indicated by capacities. And the human "necessities of life" are whatever, an all, this fulness of living may require.

The second law is Oneness. By this law any case of undeveloped abilities for good or for use not only brings disaster to the individual, but the whole, as a whole, and as several, loses what the individual should have furnished. Oneness would so equalize opportunities that every possible career should be open to each, limited only by individual capacity, and by the same law the consequent gain would advantage all. Also, by the same law, none would seek profit through others' deprivation. This, indeed, would bring penalty. In a plant, for instance, were any single part to secure for itself more than its due share of light, heat, moisture, chemicals, thus making the mis-take of substituting the selfhood rule for the Oneness rule, the penalty of broken law would affect the organism as a whole and also every individual member, the self-appropriating one included. This basic law, visible throughout Nature, holds with any organism, or organization; with a tree, with a human body, with a planetary system, with a country.