ALSACE-LORRAINE Prince Hohenlohe's address, which is reported on another page, is less uncompromising than most of the utterances that come out of Germany. Its apparent readiness to yield what other Germans would not think of yielding should not blind Americans to the fact that there are certain demands in it to which America and her allies can never yield except at the cost of acknowledging defeat. One of these is Prince Hohenlohe's proposal that the question of Alsace-Lorraine be submitted to a referendum. We have already stated why it would be contrary to justice to leave this world question to be decided by a local vote. We have pointed out the similarity between that proposal and Douglas's doctrine of "squatter sovereignty." Just as the squatter sovereignty." Just as the question of slavery could not be settled by any plan of leaving it to the voters in any community, so the question of Germany's aggression cannot be left to be decided upon by any community. Though it cannot be settled, however, by a referendum, it has been passed upon by a referendum already. Stéphane Lauzanne, the distinguished editor of the Paris "Matin," who is now visiting this country, points out that the people of Alsace-Lorraine themselves have made known what their wishes were. When Alsace-Lorraine was seized by Germany in 1871 in order to get for its military power the war materials that lay in the iron and coal of those regions, Germany was taking that which was clearly French and had been French for a much longer time than Louisiana has been a part of the United States. The only part of Alsace that has not been French for more than two centuries and a half belonged to Switzerland, and by referendum became French in the eighteenth century. Lorraine became French more than three and a half centuries ago. Upon the German conquest in 1871 Deputies of AlsaceLorraine, hearing that their provinces were to be taken by Germany, united in a protest in which they said, "Alsace and Lorraine cannot be alienated. To-day, before the whole world, they proclaim that they want to remain French." And when Alsace and Lorraine sent Deputies to the German Reichstag-fifteen of them, some of them Protestants, some Catholics-they signed a declaration in which the following appears: "In the name of all the people of Alsace-Lorraine, we protest against the abuse of force of which our country is a victim. The contract which annexed us to Germany is null and void." Like the Assyrians of old, however, the Germans used a method for retaining the conquered provinces which would vitiate any referendum whatever. They made it impossible for large numbers of the original inhabitants to remain in comfort and self-respect in their homes, and they sent in from Germany people who had never belonged in Alsace-Lorraine at allpeople who in this country have been called “carpetbaggers." A referendum which would deny to those who were driven out of their homes the right to vote, and which would give the right to vote to people who were sent in there for the very purpose of clinching the robbery, would be a worthless referendum, and no other referendum is possible, even if it were desirable. in the French army 20 generals, 145 superior officers, and 400 ordinary officers of Alsatian origin. At the same time how many officers of Alsatian origin were there in the German army? Just four. Of this Mr. Lauzanne has said in a public speech, "I call that a referendum." An indication of how far Germany has failed to make AlsaceLorraine really German can be found in the following figures: In 1895, when French was prohibited in the public schools, there were 160,000 in Alsace speaking French; and five years later, according to another census, the people speaking French in Alsace numbered 200,000. Herr von Jagow in 1913 gave testimony as to the French character of this conquered but unreconciled province when he said: "We Germans are obliged in Alsace to behave ourselves as if we were in an enemy's country.” And in 1914, when the present war broke out, there were What Rabbi Stephen Wise has called the Belgium of 1871 must be restored if justice is to be done. Alsace-Lorraine must belong in fact, as well as in heart, to France. THE TRUTH AND THE WHOLE TRUTH When the deputy sheriff of Mohican County called the Happy Eremite unexpectedly to jury duty, the Happy Eremite de murred. He had no valid excuse to escape this obligation of citizenship. He was not really eager to escape it, for he had never served on a jury before and the prospect had therefore all the charm of the unknown. He demurred because that seemed instinctively the thing to do. Men always demur in the matter of jury duty. To do otherwise seemed quixotic. The only people who ever serve on juries, he said to himself, are men either without influence or without brains capable of inventing convincing fictions. He reasoned thus with his conscience for the space of thirty seconds or more while the genial sheriff at the other end of the telephone wire explained that the judge would doubtless excuse a patriotic citizen so busily engaged in the service of humanity; but only for thirty seconds. For he remembered that he was living in a new age and a new world in which selfrespecting citizens did not dodge their public duties. He had himself preached the new gospel. He felt suddenly ashamed of himself, and told the sheriff that perhaps he might be able to arrange the matter, after all. He did arrange it, and took his place in the jury-box thre days later feeling solemn at the thought of his responsibility. It was a Court of Common Pleas, for civil cases only. He would have preferred a criminal court. Cases for damages, he told himself, would be hopelessly dull. He was duly sworn. "Case Number 9647," sing-songed the clerk. "Jean Pierre against the Columbia Van Company." Somehow that does not seem to promise much excitement, thought the Happy Eremite. The trial began. The lawyer for the plaintiff stated the case. It was a simple story. The Columbia Van Company had agreed to move Jean Pierre's furniture from one house to another. On the way between the two houses the furniture had been destroyed by fire. Now Jean Pierre wanted damages. All this had happened in nineteen hundred and eleven. Jean Pierre had, it seemed, been wanting damages for seven years. Mrs. Jean Pierre was called to the stand. She was a FrenchCanadian, with a thin, worn, unhappy face. She told her story. Her daughter, a girl of eighteen, shy and afraid, followed; then her husband. He was not quite sober, and he sprawled in the witness chair with his hands smugly folded over his paunch. He had bulging, fishy eyes and a red nose and a complacent, dispu tatious manner. The trial went on. The van driver was called, then his assist ant, then the driver of a coal wagon who had been the first to discover the fire, then the fire chief, then a woman who had happened to be sitting on her porch when the van-load of furniture burst into flame in the street before her house. The proceedings were as dry and matter-of-fact as the dry and commonplace dramatis persone could make them: the clerk who sing-songed; the judge with the calm, intellectual face, lit only occasionally by a cool but rather pleasant smile; the two lawyers, one a young Jew, oratorical, full of wordy buncombe, prone to call his opponents liars and thieves, the other a stocky Irishman with shallow, expressionless eyes--both tricksters, neither to be trusted. The case was sordid and utterly unimportant; and yet to the Happy Eremite there was something extraordinarily fascinat ing in sitting there in the jury-box with his eleven " peers, watching the story unfold; something romantic, something adventurous, something not altogether unlike the magic that lies in exploring unexplored continents. First, the bare, legal narrative, dull and lifeless, like a bare shore with bare, shadowless hills; then, as question and answer, question and answer, succeeded one another, slowly, mysteriously, a world opening and revealing itself. Into the gray narrative of facts shot the light now from this angle, now from that. Names became characters, living men and women, working and suffering. In the glow of that burning van a dozen lives stood suddenly revealed. A question and an answer, expunged from the record at the counsel-for-the-plaintiff's violent "I object," and the long misery of a wrecked marriage lay suddenly bare. Out of lies and evasions, out of trick questions and shifty answers, slowly emerged the truth about Jean Pierre and the Columbia Van Company, and the load of furniture which never arrived at the house that was waiting for it. It was not a very important truth for anybody, not even for Jean Pierre, who received his hundred dollars or more in damages, or the Columbia Van Company, whose driver had the expensive habit of smoking a pipe. For the judge and the majority of the jury it was a matter of cold justice conscientiously administered. For the lawyers it was a matter of business. But for the Happy Eremite it was a strange adventure in the wilderness. "AMERICA AMONG THE NATIONS" When war broke out, upsetting not only the ordinary ways of living but the ordinary modes of thinking, people of intelligence craved books telling what it was all about. There were many who found an intelligible explanation in Usher's "PanGermanism." Thousands of people read or read about one of the classics of war literature, Bernhardi's "Germany and the Next War." A good many of the more thoughtful, who were willing to use some effort in studying out what to most Americans is unfamiliar, found much illumination in Fullerton's "Problems of Power." Not a few read with some interest, and perhaps skepticism, the late Professor Cramb's "Germany and England." Among the most fortunate were those who came upon Sarolea's book "The Anglo-German Problem." Such books as these were pre-eminently the war books for 1914. There are a great many Americans who are still in the 1914 class and who still need such books as these. Indeed, there is not one of these books that will not be of permanent interest and usefulness. But much has happened since 1914. It is not the critical outbreak of the war that is causing mental confusion to-day, but it is the critical decision that lies ahead-a decision that will have to be made by war-weary nations. What are we fighting for? What should we hold out for? What is it that is driving the whole world to divide into two camps? What is the touchstone by which the spirit of the nations may be tested, and each nation thereby relegated to its true place as a force for evil or for good in this day of struggle? How can men tell when the victory for which they are fighting has been achieved or forever lost? These are the new questions that call for new interpretation. For an understanding of this new crisis that we are facing in 1918 we know of no book more useful or more searching or clearer or more readable than H. H. Powers's "America Among the Nations." It is really a biography, or, rather, a biographical study. Its hero, however, is not a man, but an imperial people. 1 As the author tells the story of the American people he assures his readers again and again that he is not issuing a propaganda or expressing disapproval; he is simply inquiring into the facts and telling what he discovers. The concluding sentences of his Introduction are worthy of quotation, because they describe the spirit which, it seems to us, ought to actuate the students of present world events: If choice could determine the greatest things, who knows what some other man's choice might do? Be this as it may, one who sees in history principally a record of cosmic forces and of subconscious human decisions has little temptation to be a Peter-the-Hermit. Poor Peter! How much he thought he was accomplishing! How little he realized that he was but a bubble borne along on the surface of a resistless America Among the Nations. By H. H. Powers, author of "The Things Meu Fight For." The Macmillan Company, New York. $1.50. cosmic current! This book is written with a paramount consciousness of this current. Upon it ride the frail craft which bear the destinies of men. It bears us we know not whither. We have no reason to believe that it threatens us with destruction. We may fairly hope that it is more spacious and more placid as it nears the great sea. Nor are we helpless or deprived of a worthy task. The navigator's task is still a man's task, though he does not make the river or determine the current. The author traces from the beginning the story of this expansive people. Americans may not be imperious or imperialistic, but they certainly have been instinctively imperial. They are naturally builders of empire. They have never set out to build an empire. They rather disavow the idea that they are interested in anything like an empire, but whenever any crisis has arisen the American people have invariably come to an imperial decision. They have created their empire by what may, as Professor Powers points out, almost be called inadvertence. The result is not merely the United States, but what might be called the American Empire, which includes within its limits not only such outlying possessions as Porto Rico and the Philippines, but such nominally and legally dependent countries as Cuba, Haiti, Santo Domingo, and Nicaragua ; and inevitably will include within itself, as truly as Egypt is in the British Empire, the Republic, so called, of Mexico. And Professor Powers regards (and gives very good reasons for regarding) a document known to comparatively few American citizens as the real Constitution of the empire, second in importance only to the Federal Constitution itself. This document is the Platt Amendment. This is a provision passed by Congress which enables the United States to assume in certain exigencies the functions of sovereignty in Cuba. It is the principle embodied in this amendment which was applied to Santo Domingo, and to Nicaragua, and to Haiti. And this imperial growth has been rendered inevitable in the future by the acquisition of the Panama Canal. In a chapter of especial distinction on "The Dependents of the Tropics" the author describes the force which makes such imperial growth for such a people inescapable. Having thus drawn a historical portrait of the American people, Professor Powers then proceeds to show how such a nation as that stands in relation to other nations of the world to-day. There is no space here to tell in detail how Professor Powers reaches his conclusions. All we can do is to state those conclusions and leave the reader to turn to the book itself to find out how they are reached. There are certain great expanding nations, the author tells us, such as Japan, Russia, France, Germany, and the Englishspeaking peoples. Japan is cribbed and confined, and Professor Powers sympathetically presents the Japanese problem as it seems to a Japanese. Something stands athwart Japan in whatever direction she looks. Russia, too, is limited, great as her territory is. She owns no Germany, too, is hampered and confined. It is not the least ... believe that Raemaekers, the most scathing critic of German autocracy that the war has produced, was nearer right when he said that if Germany were a republic to-morrow with Liebknecht or Scheidemann for president, her relation to the other Powers would not be essentially modified. A change in the form of government neither creates nor indicates a change of heart in the matter which here concerns us." What is that change of heart to which Professor Powers refers? It is the change from one ideal of empire to another. What the German ideal of empire is no one can be left in doubt about to-day. It is an ideal of domination, of mastery, exercised by every means that unprincipled men find available. Germany knows that the Power that controls the Eastern Hemisphere will control the world, and she is proceeding to force her control upon Europe, and therefore upon the world. The condemnation does not lie in the fact that she seeks expansion; it lies rather in the fact that she seeks to expand by a process that means the subjugation of others. It is natural that such a Power with such an ideal and such a doctrine should use ruthless warfare and frightfulness on land and sea in order to attain its purpose. In contrast with this German idea of empire Professor Powers presents the British, or rather the Anglo-Saxon, idea of empire. In the British Empire are included five free and independent nations-Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zea land, and South Africa. Canada, for example, deliberately and explicitly decided that if the mother country were ever involved in a war she would not pledge her aid. "Canada reserved the right to pass judgment on the war in question and to help if she felt the war to be justified." She is free, and she exercises her freedom to raise tariff barriers against the mother country. She is free to withdraw at any time from the Empire. "It is difficult to see where the independence of Canada differs in any essential respect from that of the United States." And yet in the Boer War Canada promptly sent her troops, and in the present war her promptness and efficiency have been an example to us of the United States. There is nothing tangible that binds the British Empire together, but it is bound together nevertheless by a bond that is the stronger because it is a bond essentially spiritual. It is a common idea of liberty. The people of the British Empire have justly dreaded the introduction of any documents to define their unity. The people bound together in this imperial federation have felt that the very A definition of the bond would tend to destroy it. The very power of the bond is its freedom. It would become weakened if there were introduced into it any element of coercion. That is why Germany remains confined and cribbed, and why the British Empire has expanded so that it takes in one-third of the globe's population. And that is why we are in this war. It is because our empire and the empire of Great Britain are essentially the same kind of empire, and are almost the same empire. This war has been fought for the defense of this idea of free empire as against the irreconcilable German idea. Professor Powers's argument concerning the relation of the League to Enforce Peace to the issues of the war may be paraphrased as follows: If the German idea prevails, there will be no need of a League to Enforce Peace, for Germany will enforce it; while if the other idea prevails, there will be no need for a League to Enforce Peace, as there has been no need to enforce peace among the five free nations of the British Empire, because their very idea rests upon the rule of "live and let live." "Woe to the man or nation," says Professor Powers, "that calls an untimely halt to this war so necessary for the Allies, for us, and for Germany herself! "But when this spirit is exorcised Germany will remainprostrate, it may be, like the demoniac from whom the unclean spirit had been cast out-but still there, always there, and holding, despite herself, the fate of Europe in her keeping. With such a Germany we must have an understanding. . . . Somehow this race which the world cannot endure, and which yet the world cannot spare, must learn to accept equality and not seek domination.' The task is arduous and the consummation remote. The hardest part of the doing is the getting willing to have it done. But there is no other way. "It is important to anticipate an objection which the German is sure to express with lofty scorn. . . . "The difference. is merely that you want the Englishman on top instead of the German.' No, what we want is the English principle on top instead of the German. That principle is the principle of fellowship, not of feudalism. It leaves each one free to live his own life and think his own thoughts and go his own ways, and sees the power and the greatness of the fellowship in this liberty of its members. . . . Only under this freer organization, of which Britain has given to the world the first working demonstration, can we hope to be ourselves-can Germany herself hope to find her place in the sun.” THE WAR AND INDUSTRIAL T present the American people are more concerned with the problem of how to "speed up the war," how to provide arms, ammunition, and men with which to win a decisive victory, than they are with the domestic conditions under which war material shall be provided. This is doubtless natural. But sooner or later we shall have to take up seriously and on a widely organized scale the questions of housing for workmen, hygienic factory conditions, the replacement of lost man power in agriculture, and the like. In England and France such questions have presented themselves as urgent and essential factors of the complex war problem. A correspondent calls our attention to the fact that the Secretary of State for Great Britain not long ago issued the following orders to apply to blast furnaces, copper and iron foundries, and other metal-working establishments: In every working place where there are twenty-five or more workers a First Aid box shall be provided, in the proportion of one box to each one hundred and fifty persons. Each box shall contain at least a copy of the First Aid leaflet prepared by the Home Office; three dozen small-size sterilized dressings for injured fingers; one dozen medium size for hands and feet; one dozen large size for other injured parts; one bottle of eye drops; sterilized cotton wool. Each First Aid box shall be kept stocked, in good order, and in the care of a responsible person, who shall always be on hand during working hours. Where there are five hundred or more workers, an ambulance room shall be provided, but this room must be separate from others, and used only for the purpose of treatment and rest. The floor space must not be less than one hundred square feet; walls and floors must be smooth, hard, impervious. The natural and artificial lighting must be ample. This room must be provided with a glazed sink, with hot and cold water always available; a smooth top table; appliances for sterilizing instruments; a supply of suitable dressings, bandages, and splints; a couch and a stretcher. The ambulance room shall be in charge of a qualified nurse, or other person trained in First Aid. The room shall be available during all working hours and a record kept of all cases of accidents and sickness treated at the room. When persons of both sexes are employed, arrangements shall be made at the ambulance room for their separate treatment. The same correspondent gives us some interesting informa tion about the solicitude of France for her agricultural workers. The war has shown the necessity for still further development of agriculture in France, particularly in the use of power-driven implements, which until now had not been deemed so essential on account of the small holdings. Farm labor has been called to the colors in great numbers. Now there is the necessity for making up this shortage by means of mechanical appliances. Monsieur Marc Reville, Deputy, has proposed a measure inviting the Government to prepare at once for after-war use a standard type of motor-cultivator, which can be built, immedi ately on the cessation of hostilities, up to the number of 25,000, for delivery in six months. The departmental authorities will arrange for their delivery and for payment, either at once or on the installment plan, and for the prices of the same. M. Reville points out that France has under cultivation some 55,000,000 acres, and another 35,000,000 acres are adapted to viticulture. Replacing the animal-drawn plows with tractors will save 40,000,000 work days and supplement the lack of an enormous number of traction animals; this does not take into account the transportation of the products, which can be accomplished with these same motors. Thanks to the fertility of the soil and the well-known economies of France, that country has suffered less than any other in Europe from a restriction of the food supply. But this happy condition will have its limits, because of the large numbers of young and vigorous men called to the colors and the lessened exports, all of which will compel measures of still greater thrift and prudence. Almost every French peasant has a little garden around his home, from which he draws almost all his foodstuffs. But the city dwellers do not have these opportunities. They are the ones who suffer from the scarcity of food and the high prices. For A THE their use there is a plan under consideration for utilizing the little tracts of land in the suburbs, land which has been uncultivated or partially worked. For some time the fortifications around Paris have been utilized for such little gardens. To obtain the largest measure of social and economic profit from this garden idea efforts are now being made to co-ordinate the movement. M. Lefèvre, Deputy from the Eure, has just introduced a bill authorizing the municipal authorities to requisition these holdings and then rent them to the citizens. A classification of these plots will be made on the basis of their fertility, and will be offered, first to the widows of soldiers, then to the eldest of the citizens applying, and lastly to other city dwellers who may apply. This policy of caring for factory and agricultural workers in England and France will have to be duplicated in the United · States if we are to deal successfully with abnormal war conditions. FEET OF THE CHILDREN BY NORA ARCHIBALD SMITH In far Arabia they tell the tale A wondrous tale, e'en in the home of wonders-- And hear their laughter and their frolicking. A wondrous tale indeed; and yet to-day, Oh, little feet in Flanders and in France; We may not bear the load of anguish more; KNOLL PAPERS JOHN FISKE-EVOLUTIONIST' YOUNG man once called to see me with the following account of his experience: "I was brought up to believe that the Bible is inspired. and infallible in all its statements; that the world was made out of nothing in six days of twenty-four hours each; that God made a perfect man six thousand years ago; that he fell; and that because of his fall sin, misery, and death have entered into the world. In that faith I joined the church when I was a boy. I have since learned that the world was not made in six days; that man has lived on the earth a great deal longer than six thousand years; that he was gradually developed out of a lower animal form; and that the only fall has been a fall upward. The Bible is gone; my faith is gone with it; and now I do not know whether there is a God in the universe or a soul in the body." This interprets the overthrow of the faith of thousands which characterized the last half of the nineteenth century. It was a faith founded on a book and on a false interpretation of the book; and when science undermined the foundation the superstructure fell. It was in this period that John Fiske lived. He was born in 1842, died in 1901. His father died, his mother married again; and his boyhood was spent in Middletown, Connecticut, with his grandmother, whose name he took. His mother and grandmother were devout souls whose genuine piety was mated with a mechanical though harmonious philosophy. Mr. Clark gives in twelve propositions a fairly accurate skeleton of Calvinism, but as a portrait of living Calvinism it is about as accurate as was Yorick's skull of Hamlet's friend. The reverence for God, The Life and Letters of John Fiske. By John Spencer Clark. Illustrated. 2 vols. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. $7.50. the obedience to law, the sense of human dignity and worth lost in the fall, but to be regained in redemption, are all left out. Happily they were not left out from the experience of Mrs. Stoughton and Mrs. Fiske. The boy was not only instructed in the theology of his mother and grandmother, but he imbibed something of their spirit. When he threw away their dogmas, he retained the inspiration of their lives and reconciled in himself science and religion. His broad scholarship and his literary skill enabled him later to illustrate by his pen what he experienced in his life-both the overthrow of faith and its re-establishment on a firmer foundation than before. In boyhood he was an omnivorous reader. Everything interested him in the world of things and the world of ideas. He had an extraordinarily open mind and an eager curiosity. The story of his boyhood makes the reader wonder whether our present system of education is not lamentably inefficient and wasteful, whether a better system could not accomplish for ordinary boys what this extraordinary boy accomplished for himself. At eleven years of age he wrote to his mother: "We had an examination Thursday. I was examined in Greenleaf's Arithmetic; Perkins and Loomis' Algebra; through four books Euclid; through Hedge's Logic; through four books Cæsar; eight books Virgil: four Orat. Cicero and the Græca Majora; through the Latin and Greek grammars; and last, but not least dreaded, through Greek syntax. Mr. Brewer said I passed an admirable examination. I am reading Sallust, which is so easy that I have read forty-eight chapters without looking in the dictionary." A year later he earned the money with which to buy a good GreekEnglish dictionary. His grandmother thought five dollars a fat sum for so unpractical a luxury; but when he had earned by hard work $3.60 she gave him the balance needed for the purchase. At thirteen years of age, in addition to his school studies, carried on to the satisfaction of his teachers, he was reading, among other authors, Grote, Emerson, Bayne, Shakespeare, Milton, Hugh Miller, and Humboldt's "Cosmos." He wrote his mother: "Do you not consider Humboldt the greatest man of the nineteenth century, and the most erudite that ever lived?" His leisure time he gave to music and religion: taught in the Sunday-school, assigned two evenings a week to revival meetings, led the singing, and took an active part in the speaking. He entered Harvard in preference to Yale because" the course at Harvard is very different and much harder. . . It is a bad -place for a careless scholar, but unequaled in facilities for an ambitious one. By this time (1860) his scientific studies had led him, after much questioning, to reject what our author calls "dogmatic Christianity," but I should call dogmatic Calvinism. Unfortunately, the pastor of his church was wholly unable to understand the working of his mind. This pastor called upon the grandmother to get more light on the cause of John's backsliding. The grandmother stoutly maintained that John could not be an infidel. 66 Why," said she, "he never did a bad thing in his life, and then, he is such a faithful student." "Yes," said Dr. Taylor, "that makes him all the worse. He does not believe in the inspiration of the Bible nor in the Divinity of Christ, and he has given up the church." Still she maintained he could not be an infidel, and in the innocence of her heart she took Dr. Taylor into John's library to see the fine collection of books he had got together, all of which she knew he had read. Alas, to the heresyhunter the exhibit was too conclusive! There side by side with books of sound orthodoxy were many ancient classics, and the works of Humboldt, Voltaire, Lewes, Fichte, Schlegel, Buckle, Cuvier, Laplace, Milne-Edwards, De Quincey, Theodore Parker, Strauss, Comte, Grote, Gibbon, and John Stuart Mill. Dr. Taylor had no praise to bestow upon such a collection of books in the hands of his young parishioner, and in response to the inquiry as to what he thought of them, he could only shake his head. The Harvard of 1860 was very different from the Harvard of to-day. It had its theological standard, which its students were expected to accept on the authority of their teachers. It was as dogmatic as Princeton, though the standard was different. "The College," says Senator Hoar in his autobiography. "had rejected the old Calvinistic creed of New England and substituted in its stead the strict Unitarianism of Dr. Ware and Andrews Norton, a creed in its substance hardly more tolerant or liberal than that which it supplanted." No New England college had yet learned that the object of education is to enable the pupils to do their own thinking. John Fiske, who had by this time become a convinced though an imperfectly educated evolutionist, found as little sympathy in Cambridge for his new thought as in Middletown, and scarcely any more liberty for either thought or action. In one respect the difficulties he encountered were greater. In Middletown they were wholly religious; in Cambridge they were also scholastic. For not only was the teaching hostile to the new doctrine, but Agassiz, at that time the most popular and famous teacher of natural science in America, was as strongly opposed to evolution as were the orthodox theologians. John Fiske was summoned before the Faculty and charged with disseminating infidelity among the students, and escaped a sentence of suspension only after a hot battle between the accused and the defendants of intellectual liberty. The offense of reading in chapel, which was made the occasion of the charge against him, he admitted, apologized for, and never repeated. His college studies were accompanied, as his school studies had been, with wide and continuous reading. While he was a sophomore he wrote an essay on Buckle's "History of Civilization" which was published and attracted wide attention both in England and America. Its success encouraged him to write and prepared the way for the publication of other scientific essays, and eventually for his "Cosmic Evolution." More immediately important was an essay on "University Reform," published in the "Atlantic Monthly" in April. 1867, and an editorial on the same theme in the "Nation" in 1868. Followed by two articles in the "Atlantic Monthly" in 1869 on "The New Education" by Charles W. Eliot, these articles contributed momentum to the reform movement which led to Mr. Eliot's election as President, and to the consequent reorganization of the University and to the educational and scien tific ideal which it has ever since kept before itself and before the country. Conservative influences were sufficient to prevent Mr. Fiske's appointment to a professorship, though the Presi dent recommended him; but they did not prevent his appointment to give in two successive years two courses of lectures dealing with the new thought, and a little later his appointment as assistant librarian. Here we must leave him, in the spring of 71892, at thirty years of age, the acknowledged leader of the evolution movement in the United States, and one year later welcomed as their colleague and peer by such leaders of evolutionary thought in England as Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall, Lewes, Lyell, and Darwin. His sketches in home letters of these persons as given in this biography are a charming feature of the volumes. Something like a quarter of a century ago, preaching at Yale University, Sunday morning, I announced that in the evening I would speak to the students on evolution and religion. The lecture-room of the Y. M. C. A. building was crowded and overflowed into an adjoining room and into the hallway; and when, after speaking nearly half an hour, I announced a recess in order that young men who were engaged or desirous to attend evening service in any of the churches might do so, not enough went out to leave room for outsiders waiting an opportunity to come in. To-day such an announcement would detract rather than attract. The student world is no longer perplexed by the supposed contradiction between science and religion; that is, between the recognized laws of the material world and the spir itual consciences of men. It neither rejects science as infidel nor religion as a superstition, though it has rejected much of the old theology and has reinterpreted and re-estimated the Bible. This change has been accompanied by radical changes in religious thought, but not by a loss of faith. On the contrary, any one who is familiar with college life knows that much more respect is paid to-day by our college students, not only to ethical rules, not only to the spirit of Christianity, but also to its institutions. The work of the Y. M. C. A. is far more effective; the attendance at church service where attendance is voluntary is larger; where attendance is required the attention is better and more reverent. That this change in doctrinal views has been accomplished in this country with a gain, not a loss, in religious life is largely due to the influence of three men-James McCosh, Henry Ward Beecher, and John Fiske. In England the churches met the evolutionists either with bitter hostility or with cold indifference. Dr. Martineau signified a qualified acceptance of evolution; but his qualifications involved a flat denial of an unbroken progress, and therefore of evolution, as John Fiske defines it, "God's way of doing things." The whole subject is conspicuous by its absence from the writ ings of such liberal theologians as Maurice, Stanley, and Rob ertson. In this country evolution was welcomed by Dr. McCosh, the President of its largest Presbyterian college, and by Henry Ward Beecher, the pastor of what was then its largest and most famous Puritan church. And Mr. Beecher was instrumental with others in procuring the republication in this country of the work of the leading evolutionary authors in England, he preached and lectured extensively in favor of the theory and of its appli cation to the problems of the religious life, and he joined with Mr. Fiske in a testimonial dinner to Herbert Spencer on the occasion of Mr. Spencer's last visit to this country. Mr. Fiske, approaching the problem of evolution and religion from the scientific side, separated himself from his English contemporaries by his faith in "The Everlasting Reality of Religion, and left behind him as a gift to future generations two little books, "The Idea of God" and "The Destiny of Man," which are still worthy to be commended to any thoughtful reader perplexed over the ever-perplexing problems, How shall we think of God? and How shall we think of the future life? For acquaintance with Mr. Fiske as a historian, and with Mr. Fiske as a husband, a father, a citizen, and a letter writer, we must refer the reader to the very interesting volumes on which this estimate of him as an evolutionist is based. The Knoll. Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York. |