would bring him every night to the Civic Service House, and make a daily report in writing to the Counselor or some one else he might select as a sort of trustee, showing just how much money he had spent in the last twenty-four hours and what he had spent it for. In a little while if he did this faithfully, new interests and better habits would be formed and he would become strong enough to live rightly without a guardian. He grasped eagerly at the chance of getting out of the mire, and put the method suggested in practice at once with excellent results.

A Scotch-American boy at the second interview seemed listless and inert. On inquiry it appeared that he was troubled with constipation and drugs did not seem to give him any permanent relief. The Counselor gave him a memorandum of some simple hygienic remedies through diet, exercise, kneading, bathing, etc., and two weeks later he came back as bright as a new dollar to say that one of the simplest of the methods suggested had fixed him all right. This may seem a little aside from the functions of a Vocation Bureau, but when it is considered that health is the foundation of industrial efficiency, that constipation with the auto-poisoning that may follow, is a serious handicap, and that very few doctors will apply the simple remedies which are really most effective and beneficial, it is clear that such suggestions are not out of order in the work of helping young men to achieve efficiency and

success.

The discussion of special cases could be continued almost indefinitely, but enough has been said to give some notion of the work that is being done and its possibilities for the future. The Civic Suggestions, the library work with its analytic reading and research, and the tabulated courses of study often create an interest that brings the young man back to the Counselor again and again for brief reports or consultations.

The work is constantly growing in

extent and utility, but it must always be very inadequate as compared to the need until it becomes a public institution affiliated or incorporated with the publicschool system. This we hope will ultimately come to pass as public education is extended and perfected and industrial training is developed.

Society is very short-sighted as yet in its attitude towards the development of its human resources. It trains its horses as a rule better than its men. It spends unlimited money to perfect the inanimate machinery of production, but pays very little attention to the business of perfecting the human machinery, though it is by far the most important factor in production.

Less than 1-16 of the children in the Boston primaries go through a highschool course. In Philadelphia less than 1-30 of the children go through the high school, and in Washington less than 1-13.

Here are the data for these three cities, obtained at the opening of this year. The high-school figures include the pupils in all the schools and courses of highschool grade, commercial and manual training, as well as academic:

PUPILS IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

Nearly two-thirds of the children in Boston and Washington and five-sixths in Philadelphia drop out of school even before they finish the grammar grades. There are not seats enough in the grammar schools for much over one-third to one-fifth of the children, nor seats in the high schools for more than one-tenth to one-twentieth. Our cities evidently do not expect or intend to educate the bulk of the boys and girls beyond the primaries or lower grammar grades. The mass of children go to work to earn their living as soon as they are old enough to meet the law, and often before that.

Science declares that specialization in early years in place of all-round culture is disastrous both to the individual and to society. There is a clear relation between intelligence and variety of action and experience. A knowledge of each of the great classes of industry by practical contact is the right of every boy. This varied experience should be obtained under a thorough-going scientific plan of educational development and not by the wasteful and imperfect method of drifting from one employment to another in the effort to make a living, running an elevator in one place, marking tags in another, tending a rivet machine in another, etc., etc., spending years of time and energy in narrow specialization, and getting no adequate, comprehensive understanding of any business or indus

try.

The union of a broad general culture with an industrial education including a practical experience broad enough to form a true foundation for specialization in the proper field, possesses an economic and social value that can hardly be overestimated. Yet practically all our children are subjected to the evil of unbalanced specialization-specialization that is not founded on, nor accompanied by, the broad culture and experience that should form its basis and be continued as coördinate factors in a full development -specialization that is not only unbalanced and ill-founded but also in many cases inherently narrow, inefficient and hurtful in itself.

Most of the children who leave school early specialize on narrow industrial lines, and most of those who remain in school specialize on book learning. Book work should be balanced with industrial education; and working children should spend part time in culture classes and industrial science. Society should make it possible for every boy and girl to secure at least a high-school education and an industrial training at the same time. This can be done by the establishment of Public Half-Work High Schools, in which

boys and girls can study half of each day, and support themselves by working the other half-day for the public water works, lighting or transportation systems, street department or some other department of the public service, or for private employers. A city or town can easily make arrangements with merchants, manufacturers and other private employers, whereby the high-school pupils may have the opportunity to work half-time in many lines of industry. The Women's Educational and Industrial Union of Boston is already carrying on this sort of arrangement with some of the leading merchants of the city, so that the girls in the Union's classes in salesmanship are able to support themselves and get most valuable practical training by working half-time in the stores. Enlightened employers are glad to make such arrangements, realizing the importance to themselves and to the whole community of such advanced industrial and culture training. Some of our agriculutral colleges and state universities, especially in the West, afford opportunities for young men and women to earn their living while getting a college education. All that is necessary is to extend the methods and principles already in use to the public-school system as a whole, so that no boy or girl shall longer be debarred from the training of mind and hand, which is the rightful heritage of every child society allows to be born into this complex and difficult world.

Besides the extension of general education and the addition of vocational training, the methods of general culture should be materially modified if we are to give our boys and girls an adequate preparation for life and work instead of a preparation for passing an examination to get a degree. We should train for ability and character rather than for examinations. And the principal test should be the successful performance of things that have to be done in daily life rather than the answering of a series of questions about a book or a lecture

course. Systematic and scientific training of body and brain, of memory, reason, imagination, inventiveness, care, thoroughness, truth, promptitude, reliability, sympathy, kindliness, persistent industry, etc., etc., is what we need. Education for power; with actual performance, useful work, as the fundamental test. Power in any direction comes from exercise or activity in that direction together with sufficient development in other directions to give symmetry and balance to the whole. Even the power of sympathy and the sense of justice can be developed by daily exercise on the same principle that we develop the biceps or the bicycle muscles. Knowledge is excellent, but a man with knowledge only, without the power of original thought and the ability to put his ideas into effective execution is little better than a book-he contains a record of facts but cannot build or execute. He may not be even up to the book standard of life if he has not learned to express and impart his knowledge. That is why college graduates, even those who stood high in their classes, often fail to make good in business. They are good bookworms, sponges, absorbing machines, but they do not know how to do things and have no taste for doing things. They are really unfitted by their habits of passive absorption for the active life of the business world. We must train our students to full powers of action, not only in foot ball and other athletic sports, but in the various lines of useful work so far as possible according to their aptitudes as brought out by scientific tests and varied experience. And we must give our working boys the powers of thought and verbal expression that come with general culture. And we must do all this in the formative period before the progressive hardening of the system has taken the bloom from development and modifiability.

Youth is the period of plasticity and rapid development in which the foundations should be laid both for an all-round

culture and for special vocational power. The fluidity of youth is shown in the fact that practically 75 per cent. of the infant's body is water, while only 58.5 per cent. of the adult's body is liquid. Though some degree of plasticity may be retained to the end, the more fundamental characteristics of a man are generally fixed at 25 and the mental at 35 or 40. If you were molding a statue in plaster of Paris you would not think it wise to neglect the work or let it drag along half-done till the plastic mass had stiffened into rigidity. It is just as unwise to neglect the opportunities afforded by the plasticity of youth. A year of the period from 15 to 25 is worth more than 2 years after 35 for formative purposes and the development of power. Youth is the age of brain and heart. The body of an adult is three times as long, on the average as the infant's body, and the adult's arms are four times and his legs five times as long as the infant's, while his head is only twice the height of the infant's. The brain of the child is so large that it only increases in weight four times in the growth to maturity, while the heart increases 13 times and the body more than 20 times. The weight of the brain at birth is 12.29 per cent. of the total weight, while at 25 the weight of the brain is only 2.16 per cent. of the whole-nearly 6 times as much brain weight for the infant as for the adult in proportion to the total weight. As you leave your youth the rapidity of development diminishes as well as the proportion of brain and the plasticity or capacity for modification and acquirement of new abilities. The infant at birth is 5,000,000 times as large as the original germ cell. In the first year the growth is about 3 fold. Then the rate of development decreases till about the 11th year when a period of rapid growth begins, reaching its maximum speed as a rule somewhere between the 14th and the 19th year, and gradually tapering off to the milder movement of comparative maturity after 25.

In this plastic period of rapid growth, this age of brain and heart, society should guarantee to every child a thorough all-round development of body, mind and character, and a careful planning of and adequate preparation for some occupation, for which, in the light of scientific testing and experiment, the youth seems best adapted, or as well adapted as to any other calling which is reasonably available. If this vital period is allowed to pass without the broad development and special training that belong to it, no amount of education in after years can ever redeem the loss. Not till society wakes up to its responsibilities and its privileges in this relation

or

shall we be able to harvest more than a fraction of our human resources, develop and utilize the genius and ability that are latent in each new generation. When that time does come, education will become the leading industry, and a vocation bureau in effect will be a part of the public-school system in every community-a bureau provided with every facility that science can devise for the testing of the senses and capacities, and the whole physical, intellectual and emotional make-up of the child, and with experts trained as carefully for the work as men are trained to-day for medicine or the law. FRANK PARSONS.

Boston, Mass.

HE SKY-SCRAPER, and in genwiped out most of the landmarks dear to the generation that still clings to landmarks, and that knew good-fellowship on simpler lines than to-day tolerates. But there is yet here and there a survivor of those days, who in reminiscent moments tells the story summed up in "Pfaffs," the center for long for Bohemianism as journalists and literary New York interpreted the product imported from France and its expounders in Gautier, Murger and their followers.

"Pfaff's" was something more than mere importation. There one saw and heard not only the clink of unending schooners of beer and the clouds of smoke going up from pipe or cigar, but men who laid the foundations of New York literary life, and are to-day her priceless possession. No such meetingground and no such solid belief in the future of each and every haunter of the place now remains as promise or stimulus to even the humblest worker in such

It is Philadelphia that to-day offers a successor to the vanished Pfaff's, though New York might deny it, and Philadelphia is principally unconscious of such fact, the throng found there for lunch and dinner, brought by the fame of certain unsurpassed dishes served by cooks who know every secret of Philadelphia cookery. It is the Market Restaurant at Nineteenth and Market streets, as undecorated, bare and blank an interior as any beer-cellar on the way to the ferry: a hollow square of counters, bordered by lines of stools, a series of huge blackboards on which the menu for the day is chalked, and an eager crowd waiting its turn. At the upper end of one side,

they often wait in vain, for here from day to day, stray artists, musicians, journalists and literary workers in general take their place if may be by the side of a man whose special beliefs they might assail, but whose simple sincerity and fearlessness, his power to command attention, his many-sided view of life, and encyclopedic knowledge of all phases of art and literature, have made him an unconscious authority and referee for all. One notes first the noble head, a mass of waving hair already silvering the clear-cut aquiline features, the sensitive mouth not hidden by the short moustache, and blue eyes that soften or darken as talk goes on, but are searchers always, reading thought before it comes to spoken word, scorn in them for all shirking of issues, for all meanness tenderness for all human pain, and a great faith for the future that men are to make noble if they will.

--

This is Horace Traubel, chiefly unknown to the Philistine world till 1907 saw the first volume of With Walt Whitman in Camden, one of the most remarkable biographies America has ever produced, and recognized as such by English and foreign critics alike, a translation already desired in Germany. The second volume has lately appeared, of even more powerful interest than the first, and others are to follow. And because many are asking, "Who is this Horace Traubel, and why do n't we don't know more about him?" it is in order to answer the question fully as may be in

explosion projected the rebel toward that America for which he had longed was the Talmud, its rigid and minute ordering of every detail of life more and more deeply loathed, till the day came when he spoke his full mind.

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Hate the Talmud? Call it a fool book of antiquated fossil restrictions on life and thought? A curse on the blasphemer who scorns the faith of his fathers!" the Rabbi roared, and at this point it was that the detested volume flew from the lad's hands into the fire, and the father aghast at the sacrilege looked his last on the vanishing renegade.

America had long appeared to the boy the only point in the known world which rejected canons old or new and thought for itself, and to America he shortly made his way, landing, like Franklin, at Philadelphia, and like him wandering through the streets for a time, till a "job' showed itself, developing later into his life-long business as printer, engraver and lithographer, to which was added occasional portrait painting of no mean quality.

This was Maurice Henry Traubel, later to become father of another' rebel, his equipment for the new conditions, a passionate love of justice which went with him through life, never lessening and shaping every dealing with man, woman and child. There was other equipment -trained faculty which made him a natural student in all directions, an omnivorous reader, a lover of deep philosophy, a scientific student, an art critic of the keenest perception, and a musician of high order, the leader of the Philadelphia Mænnerchor, and later that of Camden where the family home came to be.

On the mother's side was as clearly defined an inheritance. Though born in Philadelphia her family name, Van Gründen, evidences the Dutch descent which gave to her the high courage, the loving soul and gentleness best made known to us in Motley's splendid summary of Dutch characteristics. Each