upon the principle, that it is the civic and not the personal value of goodness that concerns us here. The state has no more "heart" for individual integrity than for individual skill or individual wits. It has no interest in saintliness, and will not lend itself to the work of producing or fostering it; but it is interested in morality, for the reason that morality is the only guarantee of national stability. Nations do not fall because they are poor, but because they are corrupt. It was Roman virtue that conquered Greek luxury and effeminacy. Spanish gold was no match for Dutch moral grit. The brighter a boy, the worse rascal, unless he has a conscience. Pluck from any archangel his moral sense, and you have another Satan. The trouble with the devil is that he is so astute. Integrity puts a yoke on the neck of genius and bits between its teeth. Honesty constitutes the vertebral column of a community, as of an individual, and the state must promote it, not because it loves vertebræ, but because it prizes vigor. The robustness of a community will vary largely with the mutual confidence of its members, and without integrity there is no bottom in which the anchor of confidence will hold. Honesty has to be the rule of business as much as the plumb-line has to be the rule of architecture, and for very much the same reason, because everything would go to pieces if it were not.

The prime factor in this department of training must be the personal integrity of the teacher. Young characters, like young magnets, are developed largely by induction. Next to this will be the patient reiteration of ethical rules. To some extent boys and girls will learn to behave much as they learn to recite the multiplication table. A good deal of what we are pleased to call our goodness is only another name for methods of behaving that have been wrought into habits by inculcation.

It is a question whether reading the Bible in school amounts to very much in the way of character culture. My own experience, both as a pupil and as a teacher, in public schools leads me to feel that it is a good deal of a "performance," and conspicuous for nothing so much as for its farcical features. The Bible appears in this connection to have accorded to it something of that same talismanic virtue that the Children of Israel, in their degenerate days, used to attribute to the ark of the covenant; as though

a little Scripture read at the beginning of the session, even though nobody paid any particular heed to it, would somehow exorcise evil spirits for the rest of the day. However it may be in exceptional cases, I believe that, as a rule, the reading of the Bible in schools is more a fetich than a moral agency.

At the same time we need to insist upon it that our schools should be pronouncedly theistic. Morality is not to be trusted without the support of a religious basis. Right is an impersonal abstraction, except as it is the expression of will. This is written, not in the interests of Christianity, but of citizenship. A large representative religious body in this State, containing among its members many who are warmly opposed to formal religious instruction in public schools, recently adopted unanimously this resolution:

"That, without claiming it to be the province of the State to teach religion for religion's sake, we do yet confess our belief that, in order to the State's own interest, there should be in every school maintained by the State the inculcation of such principles of dependence upon God and obligation to him as are essential to sound learning, safe character, and wholesome citizenship."

That is psychology, not propagandism; patriotism, not piety. We want to avail ourselves of the pressure of theistic motives, not for the sake of keeping the children out of hell by and by, but for the sake of keeping hell out of the children now. The state will not survive its own morality, and morality is a corpse as soon as the spiritual life and the divine fire are gone out of it.

Fourthly. Public schools ought to teach children to love their country. This obligation is particularly urgent at such a time as this, when there are so many coming among us whose prime interest in this country is a good deal like the interest with which a burglar regards the bank he is trying to crack, or that a lawyer feels in the estate he is attempting to settle. One of the most solemn questions an American can put to himself is, whether we have sufficient national vitality to assimilate, to Americanize, all the adventitious material that is now being thrown into the national man. If ever a country was in danger of dying of dyspepsia, ours is. An adult foreigner is not easily masticated, salivated, and digested. It is hard teaching an old person new loves and loyalties. Our hopes

must center in the children. As said before, the school is the national stomach. Our public schools must be the nurseries of young patriotism; they are our best Americanizing machinery.

The practical thing for us to consider is, that distinctions and schisms must be kept out of the schools, if they are to be kept out of the country. Divergencies that begin, and that make themselves felt, in the national nursery, will magnify themselves as the children age, and will destroy the oneness of the civil life and of the national consciousness.

It is to our national detriment, therefore, that rich children and poor children are not educated together. The poor children, in our cities especially, go to the public schools; their wealthier rivals attend private schools. Beginning apart, they continue apart and end apart. They never learn to understand each other. Their discrepant conditions are not bridged by playing together as boys, and it is, therefore, inevitable that young discrepancy should ripen into adult antagonism. Cleavage lines are persistent. Young differences keep growing and broadening. Boys who get rubbed against each other in sport will not when adults rub against each other in earnest.

Simple considerations of patriotism ought to preclude the study of any language but English in our common schools. The study of a foreign language perpetuates differences that it is our first business as Americans to seek to efface. It encourages among foreign residents a sense of extraneous affiliations. It makes it easy and comfortable for them to be among us without being of us. Adult Germans, for example, who settle among us will probably never be anything but German-Americans; but we want to tender to their children no facilities for perpetuating the hybridism. We want no mongrels in the second generation.

This leads me, as my last specification, to the matter of parochial schools. It is occasion for surprise and regret that some Protestants are beginning to weaken on this question, and to give ear to the Catholic demand that school moneys shall be distributed among the sects, and each be allowed to manage its own schools on a sectarian basis. It is generous, but it is unAmerican. It despoils public schools of their true Americanizing function. It lays the foundation for the division of our

body-politic into halves, a Protestant half and a Catholic half. It is a lunge at national integrity. Not only would I fight to the last against granting one dollar of school funds to Catholic schools, but I wish it were feasible to require every boy and girl, Catholic and Protestant, to attend only such common schools as are under purely government administration. Catholics complain that government schools are godless. If they are, it is primarily because Catholics have plotted to make them so.

We resist these demands of the Catholics, not because we are Protestants, but because we are Americans; and as Americans, knowing something about European history, we understand perfectly well that Catholicism is not only a matter of religion but a matter of politics; and as a matter of politics it is antiAmerican. Every true Catholic accords to the Pope absolute infallible supremacy in all matters of morals, and there is no question pertaining to man in his relation with his fellow that cannot with perfect facility be gathered in under that category. We can love Catholics, and in very many particulars admire them and their system; but when we regard their church from the standpoint of simple American patriotism, we can never forget that a thorough Catholic accords his supreme earthly loyalties to the Pope, and that an American Catholic is primarily a papal subject living on American soil. A Catholic school, though established on American ground and maintained by government funds, is an affair of Rome, and not of the United States, and the whole genius of its discipline is to enfeeble civil allegiance and chill the warm flow of American impulse.

C. H. PARKHURST.

THE PROFITABLE READING OF FICTION.

WHEN the editor of this review courteously offered me space in his pages to formulate a few general notions upon the subject of novel reading, considered with a view to mental profit, I could not help being struck with the timeliness of the theme; for in these days the demand for novels has risen so high, in proportion to that for other kinds of literature, as to attract the attention of all persons interested in education. But I was by no means persuaded that one whose own writings have largely consisted in books of this class was in a position to say anything on the matter, even if he might be supposed to have anything to say. The field, however, is so wide and varied that there is plenty of room for impersonal points of regard; and I may as well premise that the remarks which follow, where not exclusively suggested by a consideration of the works of dead authors, are mere generalizations from a cursory survey, and no detailed analysis, of those of to-day.

If we speak of deriving good from a story, we usually mean something more than the gain of pleasure during the hours of its perusal. Nevertheless, to get pleasure out of a book is a beneficial and profitable thing, if the pleasure be of a kind which, while doing no moral injury, affords relaxation and relief when the mind is overstrained or sick of itself. The prime remedy in such cases is change of scene, by which change of the material scene is not necessarily implied. A sudden shifting of the mental perspective into a fictitious world, combined with rest, is well known to be often as efficacious for renovation as a corporeal journey afar.

In such a case the shifting of scene should manifestly be as complete as if the reader had taken the hind seat on a witch's broomstick. The town man finds what he seeks in novels of the country, the countryman in novels of society, the indoor class