the result of the examinations. It would not be just to say that there are no higher motives at work, or perhaps to claim any superiority for England in this respect. The fact that the English boy is too idle to think of the future does not prevent him from developing the commercial spirit very fully later on."

From education I pass to science.

While praise has been showered plentifully upon America for her industrial achievements and her inventions, it is well to ask what has she done in the way of science? What position does she occupy in the scientific world? Everything would seem to have favoured the growth of brilliant investigators-rich endowmentsbountifully equipped colleges,-and yet, where is the American equivalent for Pasteur, Lister, Kelvin, Koch, Berthelot, Lodge, Crookes, Slaby, Hertz, Helmholz, Röntgen, Rayleigh?

There are numerous examples of clever workers in applied science, but where are the great philosophers— the investigators-the Franklins and Rumfords of to-day?

In the marvellous new science of neurology, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, and Austria contribute distinguished exponents: America none.

In the domain of chemistry an American name of repute is wholly absent. Take electro-chemistry, the aluminium and calcium carbide industries are to-day worth millions of dollars to America. Yet America contributed nothing to their slow and painful evolution.

In brief, in nearly all the departments of science, which require penetrating reflection, America finds herself isolated from the rest of the world. Perhaps the most brilliant example of the fruitful union of scientific

experiment and scientific imagination is the new theory of ether, which offers to the universe the only explanation of the phenomena of light, heat, electricity, and magnetism, of the Marconi telegraph and X-ray photography. To this theory scores of great scientists, from Kelvin and Helmholz to Lorenz and Poincaré, have brought their contributions, every country in Europe can boast a representative. America contributes

nothing.

As to the causes of America's scientific inferiority, it may be that she has no institutions, such as the College of France, the Pasteur Institute, the Royal Institution.'

"I have before me," writes the American Professor Synder, "the latest volume on metallurgy, summing up twenty years of marvellous work. From almost a dictionary of names, Belgian, Netherlandish, German, English, French, Russian, I can find but two Americans, Professor Gibbs, whose contribution was most indirect, and Professor Howe. Not even a science which rests upon a billion dollar Trust seems to arouse the interest of one original inventive American mind."

It is to remedy this defect, to lessen this inferiority, that Mr. Carnegie has undertaken the establishment of an institute bearing his name.

The purpose of the founder is to secure for the United States the leadership in the domain of discovery by "an assiduous collecting of brains similar to the collecting of rare books and works of art which Americans are now carrying on in so lavish a manner." There is no organization in England which has done more for

1 It is a curious circumstance that the Royal Institution was founded by an American, Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford). He was born near Boston, and took sides with the Northern country during the Revolution.

English science and industries then the Royal Institution. The total cost of a century of scientific work in the laboratories of the Royal Institution amounts to £119,800, or an average of £1200 per annum. The Carnegie Institute in Washington will dispose in a year of as much money as the members of the Royal Institution have expended in a century.

All this may bear great fruit; but in the mean time the national unsympathetic attitude towards scientists must alter if the best men are to devote their lives to the public in a field not always the most lucrative.

England, France, and Germany honour their men of science in the most marked way, but, as Professor Newcomb is obliged to confess, it is "significant of America's inferior place in science that the idea of such celebrations in honour of science and scientific men is so foreign to our notions that it is hardly likely to present itself for generations to come.'

1 America undoubtedly boasts some eminent physicians and surgeons, and in dentistry she leads the world. As a further illustration of the tendency of the times we see the medical profession now in process of combination on the English model.

The following extract from the new constitution of the American Medical Association gives a clear idea of the purpose of the medical professsion in reorganizing its societies:

"The object of this Association shall be to federate into one compact organization, the medical profession of the United States, for the purpose of fostering the growth and diffusion of medical knowledge, of promoting friendly intercourse among American physicians, of safeguarding the material interests of the medical profession, of elevating the standard of medical education, of securing the enactment and enforcement of medical laws, of enlightening and directing public opinion in regard to the broad problems of State medicine, and of representing to the world the practical accomplishment of scientific medicine."

CHAPTER XVII

THE NEW LITERATURE

SINCE the American Copyright Act of 1892, the literature of America—at least, in the department of fiction—has taken an upward bound which is astounding. To the protection afforded by that Act to American authors must be ascribed the sudden rise of a whole flood of native talent, which, passing the literary borders of the country, has inundated Europe. Prior to that time America may be said to have been dependent on Britain for her fiction, although it is true that there existed a number of native writers whose work was esteemed, but whose following in the country was comparatively small. The universal vogue enjoyed by British authors had for a century been fostered by the system of piracy, which made it feasible to put on the market a novel often at a fifth and sometimes at a tenth of the price such a book would command in England, or that a book by an American author would sell for in America.

The result of this has been to keep America provincial as far as literature is concerned, a relationship which has not been without its advantages, in that it constantly held high ideals of thinking, conduct, and speech before people who would otherwise have lapsed

to a level more purely Boeotian than was reached by the Westerners of Jackson's day.

When this unfair condition of things became abolished, an indigenous school of fiction sprang up like a mushroom in the night. Patronized by national sentiment, and perhaps also by national vanity and prejudice, authors who had long languished for a publisher and a public now disposed of their wares by the tens and even the hundreds of thousands. But there was another reason for this vogue. Whatever their literary shortcomings, they delineated, or sought to delineate, a life familiar and attractive to Americans at large. Most of the denizens of the large cities migrated thither from the villages and the farms of the country-often at an early age-carrying with them tender recollections of the old home, and the simple rustic characters they knew in their childhood. Amidst the high pressure, moral, mental, and physical, of the workaday cities, men and women turned with delight to whatever recalled to them those homely and pathetic scenes. Americans are at heart a simple people-a nation of children-when the cunning and greed and the worldliness have been scaled away, and "Grandfather's Clock," "The Old Red Barn," "The Old Oaken Bucket" are achievements which move them strangely.

The play that enjoyed the greatest successive run of any on the American boards was The Old Homestead. It was not a drama-you could not call it a drama-it was a mere presentation of rustic character, in all its lovableness and uncouthness, surrounded by other rustic characters and rustic scenery. It ran for years; it evoked numberless imitators, who all succeeded.