advocated, rather a degrading rever sion to a social state where there is no distinction between manual drudgery and intellectual leadership. Well, to what extent should the distinction exist? Drudging there on the farm, too weary to read when night came, too exhausted to feel a thrill of fine emotion, how clearly did it appear at times, that just a throw of the switch of circumstance in my boyhood, and lo! I, too, might have been as 'The man with the hoe.' It is not fair; it is not fair that to a part of mankind falls all the physical drudgery, to the rest all choice social, æsthetic, and intellectual delights. It is not fair and it ought not to be. Specialization has been woefully overdone. That is one of the clearest convictions to which we have been led by our farm experience. With the calmest judgment that I can command, I stand ready to maintain, that if I had, from my early years on to these latter days of mature manhood, given one half my time to labor with my hands and the other half to intellectual pursuits, I should now be a far stronger man than I am, and I should have effected far more for the good of the world. My intellectual labors have been both curtailed and warped by the one-sided life which society has forced upon me. This paper has been written in vain if the reasons for this curtailment and warping have not been clearly recognized. To be lacking in the qualities of robustness, hardihood, courage, promptness, resoluteness, masterfulness, fellowship, initiative, and the many other qualities of intellect and character which received such marked enhancement there on the farm, is, beyond any doubt, to fall short of one's highest possible powers of achievement. And it is also to fall short of one's soundest powers of achievement. If one of the surest tests of an author's weightiness is that he shall see his subject 'whole,' then it is clear that he must be whole. Lopsided capacities will inevitably end in lopsided productions. As the ways of the world have gone, all this excessive specialization upward has been accompanied by excessive specialization downward. We have had authors in abundance who have been so far dissevered from the life of the toiling millions that their writings were sadly lacking in homespun solidity. And here were these millions so widely dissevered, by their excessive toil, from training for literature that so far as its benefit to them goes it might as well not have been. Is it not, then, high time that when men discuss specialization they bethink themselves carefully of its push downward; and that, even if compelled to admit, as probably we shall be, that there is no discernible escape from the necessity for this push in case of genius and exceptional talent, we should remember that for ordinary men and women of culture there is no estate which they can attain of so high a value as an all-round, poised, sturdy manhood and womanhood that is at home among all types of men and women, and masterful in all the elemental resources and activities. Let the exceptional few, whom talent or genius has elected for extraordinary achievement, go their appointed way. They are not types of the race; nor is the training which may be permissible for them permissible for cultivated men and women generally. These latter are to be the comrades, the helpers and inspirers, of the common people; they are to live with them and for them as well as by them or upon them. And to live thus as they ought to live, they must educate themselves or be educated in the common tasks. 'Back to the country' is a good cry to be uttered to city people; but to the educated there is a better: it is, Back to your share of the tasks you are learning to shun or to stig matize; back to the toils which harden the muscles, quiet the nerves, make firm the will, beget courage and hardihood, and develop a common life between you and the plain people. Thus, and I might perhaps say, thus only, can you escape the false pretentions, the artificial restrictions, which prevent the educated classes from being true elder brothers to the toiling millions. Do a share of the fundamental work of these millions, and so shall you find a home in their hearts and they in yours. In the quiet joy of talking our experiences over, to this conclusion my wife and I constantly recur. We realize how vain an expectation it is to dream of a society in which all would share in the wholesome labors we delight in. And yet, in our moments of deeper reflection, we perceive that there is a profound under-push in the direction of this very impossibility. Self-preservation is pushing the wealthier and more idle classes thitherward; self-realization drawing thitherward the poorer classes. Shortened hours of labor, it is true, have not brought the working classes to intellectual pastimes, but these shortened hours will bring their children more and more to such pastimes. Once the muscles of these people have been sufficiently released from excess of physical drudgery, the consequently heightened nervous powers will urge a larger and larger share of the younger generation on to general culture- certainly as large a share, proportionately, as has been brought to such culture among the moneyed classes. At least in this possibility lies one of our chief hopes of advancing democracy to fuller sway without revolutionary violence. Much as I have pleaded for education through work, I believe thoroughly in education through the use of books, and I would strive for the day when every hand-worker should have such education in larger and larger measure. Much, for instance, as our farmer classes need vocational training, they need, far more, cultural training - the ability to draw breath in the enchanted air of the groves of Academe. It is this diviner air carried to the farm, which has in large measure lent to its tasks the enchantment my wife and I have found in them. But a legitimate enchantment it is one to which all toiling farmers are destined by the push toward selfrealization which will not cease till the drudgery of the farm is reduced by half and its intellectual and social delights are doubled. For, mark you, in sheer necessity of self-preservation the over-educated in books, the over-supplied with luxuries, the over-driven with society,-who are so largely nervous wrecks, - will be driven to take up a share of the excessive physical toil as the farmers and other hand-workers push themselves partly out of it. As a race we began by means of our methods of education, our laws of property, and our systems of industry to put asunder those things which God hath joined together never to be permanently parted-hand and head. But everywhere in the sociological, the religious and educational fields is a stir, a low-murmuring on-coming movement which he who reads it aright discerns will bring the restoration of the perfect life of man the blended life of thought and labor; labor trained to think, thought trained by laborthe whole life. WHAT MR. GREY SAID BY MARGARET PRESCOTT MONTAGUE He was the smallest blind child at Lomax, the State school for deaf and blind children. Even Jimmie Little, who looked like a small gray mouse, and who had always been regarded by the teachers as not much bigger than a minute, appeared large beside Stanislaus. He was so small, in fact, that Mr. Lincoln, the Superintendent, had declined at first to admit him. 'I'll be five years old on my birf-day!' (Both legs in ecstatic conjunction.) Stanislaus's father, a sad-eyed man, who, though he spoke with no accent, was evidently of emigrant extraction, looked troubled. 'My wife's dead,' he said; ‘an' I'm workin' in the coal-mines, an' you know that ain't no place for a little blind child. Every one told me sure you'd take him here.' 'We don't take children under six,' he had said to Stanislaus's father when the latter had brought him to Lomax, 'and your little boy does n't look five yet.' 'He'll be five the twenty-second of I'll make no objection.' March,' the father said. Mr. Lincoln hesitated. 'Well,' he said at length, 'I'll send for Miss Lyman,-she's the matron for the blind boys, and if she consents to take him 'I'll be five ve twenty-second of March,' Stanislaus echoed. He was sitting holding his cap politely between his knees, swinging his fat legs with a gay serenity, while his blind eyes stared away into the dark. He had not been paying much attention to the conversation, being occupied with the working out of a little silent bit of rhythm by an elaborate system of leg-swings: twice out with the right foot; twice with the left; then twice together. He had found that swinging his legs helped to pass the time when grown-ups were talking. The mention of his birthday, however, brought him at once to the surface. That was because Mr. Grey had told him of a wonderful thing which would happen the day he was five. Thereafter his legs swung to the accompaniment of a happy unheard chant: 'I'll be five years old' (right leg out), 'I'll be five years old' (left leg out), Miss Lyman appeared presently, and Mr. Lincoln explained the situation. 'But he is such a little chap,' he concluded, 'it seems hardly possible for us to take him.' Here, however, Stanislaus gave over his leg-swinging and took it upon himself to remonstrate. 'I ain't little,' he said firmly. Slipping off his chair, he drew himself up very straight, and began patting himself all over. 'Feel me,' he urged, 'dest feel me, I'm weally big. Feel my arms,' he held these chubby members out to Miss Lyman. 'An' my legs —' he patted them - 'why vere aw-ful big!' His serious little mouth rounded itself to amazement at the bigness of his legs. It was beyond human nature, or at least beyond Miss Lyman's nature, to resist the appeal of his eager voice and patting baby hands. Obediently she ran an inquiring touch over his soft body, which was still plump babyhood, not having as yet thinned to boyhood. 'Why,' she said, turning gravely to Mr. Lincoln, 'he does look rather small, but when you feel him, you find he is really quite big.' 'Does he feel big enough for us to take?' Mr. Lincoln demanded. 'Oh, I think so!' she answered quickly, one arm slipping about the little boy's shoulders. 'An' I'll be five ve twenty-second of March,' Stanislaus threw in to overbalance the argument in his favor. He snuggled himself confidingly against Miss Lyman, and fell to playing with the many jingling attachments of her chatelaine. 'I heard vese tinkly fings when you was comin' 'w-a-y a-w-a-y outside, 'fore you o-pened ve door,' he murmured softly. 'His mother's dead,' the man explained. 'Little sister's dead, too,' Stanislaus supplemented him. 'S'e token a awful bad cold so s'e could n't b'eave. I take awful bad colds, but I don't die, do I?' he demanded. 'Yes,' said the man,' my baby's dead, too. I had a woman lookin' after both kids, but she let the baby git the pneumonia.' 'I fink I like you better van vat other lady,' Stanislaus confided to Miss Lyman. 'Of course we can take him,' Miss Lyman said hastily to Mr. Lincoln. And thus it was that Stanislaus came to Lomax. As has been said, he was the youngest child at school. This in itself was sufficient to set him apart from the thirty or so other blind boys, but there were other things that served to distinguish him as well. His thoughts, for instance, were so different; so unexpected and whimsical; so entirely off the beaten track. Witness Mr. Grey, for instance. At his best Mr. Grey was a delightful person, but as he was of a retiring disposition, he never flowered into being save in a sympathetic atmosphere. Miss Julia, for example, never met Mr. Grey. She was one of the older teachers, whose boast it was that she never stood for any foolishness. In her not doing so, however, she was apt to go with a heavy foot over other folks' most cherished feelings. For which reason, sensitive people were inclined in her presence to retreat within themselves, sailing, as it were, with their lights blanketed. This was the reason, no doubt, why she and Mr. Grey never met. Indeed Mr. Grey was of such an extremely shy nature that he had to be observed with the greatest delicacy. Looked at too closely, he was apt to go out like a blown candle. He lived apparently in an empty closet in the blind boys' clothes room. It is probable that he had taken up his abode there for the sake of being near Stanislaus, for as the latter was too small to be in school all the morning, he spent the rest of his time with Miss Lyman in the clothes room, where she sat and sewed on buttons, mended rips, and set patches, in a desperate endeavor to keep her army of blind boys mended up. When the other children were about, as they usually were on Saturdays, Mr. Grey kept discreetly to himself, and his presence in the closet would not have been suspected. On the long school mornings, however, when Miss Lyman sat quietly sewing, with Stanislaus playing about, no one could be more unbending than Mr. Grey. Stanislaus would go over to the closet and open it a crack, and then he and Mr. Grey would fall into pleasant conversation. Miss Lyman, of course, could only hear Stanislaus's side of it, but he constantly repeated his friend's remarks for her benefit. From hints which Stanislaus let fall, Miss Lyman gathered that there had once been a real Mr. Grey in the past, from which beginning the interesting personality of the closet had developed. Mr. Grey's comments upon things and people, as repeated by Stanislaus, showed a unique turn of mind. He seemed to have a poor opinion of mankind in general, coupled with an excellent one of himself in particular; for, retiring as he was before strangers, in the presence of friends he blossomed into an incorrigible braggart. If any one failed to do anything, Mr. Grey could always have done it, and never hesitated to say so. There was, for instance, that time when Mr. Beverly, one of the supervisors, was thrown from his horse and rather severely bruised. When informed of the incident by Stanislaus, who always gave his friend the news of the day, Mr. Grey was very scornful. 'Gwey says,' Stanislaus, over by the half-open closet door, turned to announce to Miss Lyman, "at he never had no horse to frow him yet · - an' he's wid all kinds of horses. Horses wif four legs, an' horses wif five legs, -' Stanislaus had been learning to count lately, 'an' horses wif six legs.' Again, when Miss Lyman sighed over a particularly disreputable pair of Edward Stone's trousers, remarking that she really did not think she could patch those, she was met by the assertion, 'Gwey says he could patch 'em. He says he ain't erfwaid to patch nobody's pants. He could patch Eddy Stone's, a-a-n' he could patch Jimmie Nickle's, a-a-a-n' Sam Black's, an' an' this last all in a hurry, and as a supreme evidence of proficiency in the art of patching 'he dest b'ieves he could patch Mr. Lincoln's pants!' But this was more than Miss Lyman could stand. 'No he could n't either, for Mrs. Lincoln would n't let him,' she declared, stung to retort by such unbridled claims on the part of Mr. Grey. It is sad to relate also that Mr. Grey was a skeptic as well as a braggart, and had had, moreover, a doubtful past. This was revealed the morning after the Sunday on which Stanislaus had first encountered the Flood, the Ark, and Noah. After giving Mr. Grey on Monday morning a graphic account of the affair,-An' Noah him went into ve ark, an' token all ve animals wif him, an' ven all ve wicked people was dwowned,'-Stanislaus appeared to listen a moment, after which he turned to Miss Lyman. 'Gwey says,' he reported, "'at he does n't b'ieve all ve wicked people was dwown-ed, 'cause he was a-livin' ven, an' he was a very wicked man, an' he did n't go into ve Ark, an' he was n't dwown-ed.' Miss Lyman might have forgiven Mr. Grey's skepticism, but he showed a tendency to incite Stanislaus to a recklessness which could not be overlooked. None of the children were allowed to leave the school grounds without permission, but time and again Stanislaus slipped out of the gate, and was caught marching straight down the middle of the road leading to the village. This was a particularly alarming proceeding because at this point in the road automobiles were apt to put on their last crazy burst of speed before having to slow down to the sober ten miles an hour of the village limits. Indeed, one day, he was returned to the school by a white and irate automobilist. 'What do you suppose this little scoundrel did?' the man stormed. 'Why, he ran out from the side of the road and barked at my car!' 'I was dest pertendin' I was a little puppy dog,' Stanislaus murmured softly. 'Pretending you were a puppy dog!' |