MAP SHOWING PLACES IN WHICH COMMITTEES OF THE SOCIETY HAVE BEEN FORMED IN ENGLAND. sullen brute has thus made his living out of the dying of his child. "Till that day, though no child was allowed under ten to be employed in money-making for parents in a factory, however well lighted and warmed and secured from weather, in all our great centres of population any number might be seen employed hawking, in cold and rain and fine, up to the silent hours around midnight; children, little more than skin-and-bone babies, were legally slaving and suf All this, so far as the attitude of the law to it, is now changed. The person who sends out the child and receives what it gathers, not the child, is now made punishable." STILL PURSUING. All that is to the good; but the society is still not satisfied. Mr. Waugh thinks that no child ought ever to be sent to the workhouse, and that it is little short of an inhuman infamy to separate little brothers and sisters when they are left orphaned. He is busy with bills against the abuse of child-life insurance, and against the evils of baby-farming. All blessing on the heads of those who provide homes for the destitute! says Mr. Waugh. Disaster, disease, and death, neither respects honesty, industry, nor virtue. For these let there be charity. But there are cases where he would find, "not homes for their destitute children, but tread-mills for the people who made them destitute." As a matter of fact, in the bulk of the parents where the society has prosecuted for right to feed and clothe wage has ranged from 25s. to £3 a week. Nor was the neglect because of a large family. The average children in its thousands of cases has been 2.8. The policy of the society is to keep children at home, not to take them away, and to make rightful parents properly treat them. The jail is no proper place for a child. Instead of the prison, Mr. Waugh would substitute the birch. He would totally abolish all juvenile imprisonment and prescribe the birch, under the following limitations : "That a schedule of regulations should be introduced into the law strictly defining (a) the size of the birch, (b) the place and (c) reasonable manner of its application, (d) the number of the strokes for seven years old, and for each subsequent additional two years of age, and (e) finally, that the birching ought not to be inflicted at a prison or police-station, but at the offender's house, and (3) further, that it should be the duty of the court to order legal assistance to a child charged before it, children being wholly unable to present their case themselves." But Mr. Waugh would not only emancipate children from the jail, he would also emancipate them from the police-station. There ought to be a special administration for offences of children, and a special court where, without technical limitation, their circumstances and history being fully known, they might receive such treatment as a judge in chambers would be free to give to such cases as come before him-a full treatment, and one of equity. Already this proposal as to juvenile delinquencies is adopted in South Australia. Mr. Waugh quotes in his last report from an official letter from the State's Children Department at Adelaide describing the practice in that colony: "For some years we have felt that the practice of arresting children on all charges, and locking them up at the city watch-house in company with the drunken, degraded characters usually confined in such places, and then deporting them as prisoners to the police-court to be tried as criminals was pernicious in its effects on and unjust to the children, and was, at the same time, most unwise as a question of policy. This Council, therefore, urged the Government to instruct that all charges against children should be heard in a court to be held at the offices of this department. "According to this procedure (which affects girls under eighteen and boys under sixteen years) all children arrested for or charged with any offence are dealt with entirely at this department, and do not come into contact with the police station and police-court at all. This result cannot but be looked upon as of wide-reaching importance, saving, as it does, from the hardening and contaminating effects of association with adult criminals and of public trial, the innocent child as well as the youthful first offender, the uncontrollable boy as well as the young girl just beginning a life of shame." What is needed to meet the wants of child life, Mr. Waugh argues, is a new department of Government and a responsible minister of the Crown to work with all voluntary associations for righteous. ness to children. Nor can any government be a Christian government while it nelgects the tens of thousands of young and helpless victims of selfish, base, and filthy national vices; for, above all other, subjects of the Crown, these need the force of the secular arm. Avarice in employment, apathy in education, are already controlled, but the control of these is of secondary importance compared with the control of vice at home. Men do not remember that although the nation is but slightly dependent on the children of to-day for the prosperity of to-day, it will be wholly dependent upon them for the prosperity of to-morrow. juxtaposition of the author of "Innocents Abroad " with this particular subject, rather than from any inherent absurdity in this particular subject. And that very consideration causes one to attach more importance to Mr. Clemens' dictum-when all suspicions of levity are allayed-than one might find in the words of a man who knew much more about the question than does Mark Twain. In fact, he doesn't pretend to know anything, and this again prejudices one in his favor. "REMARKABLE COINCIDENCES," OR TELEPATHY? The crossing of letters is an old, old story. Mr. Clemens has seen so much of it that, when he wishes to have a certain person write to him, he simply sits down, indites a letter to that person, tears up the missive, and waits for the cross-letter which it has induced. Much more striking than letter crossing is the following incident, which we reproduce in Mr. Clemens' words: "Two or three years ago I was lying in bed, idly musing, one morning-it was the 2d of Marchwhen suddenly a red-hot new idea came whistling down into my camp, and exploded with such comprehensive effectiveness as to sweep the vicinity clear of rubbishy reflections, and fill the air with their dust and flying fragments. This idea, stated in simple phrase, was that the time was ripe and the market ready for a certain book; a book which ought to be written at once, a book which must command attention and be of peculiar interest-to wit, a book about the Nevada silver mines. The Great Bonanza was a new wonder then, and everybody was talking about it. It seemed to me that the person best qualified to write this book was Mr. William H. Wright, a journalist of Virgina, Nevada, by whose side I had scribbled many months when I was reporter there ten or twelve years before. He might be alive still; he might be dead; I could not tell; but I would write him, anyway. I began by merely and modestly suggesting that he make such a book; but my interest grew as I went on, and I ventured to map out what I thought ought to be the plan of the work, he being an old friend, and not given to taking good intentions for ill. I even dealt with details, and suggested the order and sequence which they should follow. I was about to put the manuscript in an envelope, when the thought occurred to me that if this book should be written at my suggestion, and then no publisher happened to want it, I should feel uncomfortable; so I concluded to keep my letter back until I should have secured a publisher. I pigeon-holed my document, and dropped a note to my own publisher, asking him to name a day for a business consultation. He was out of town on a far journey. My note remained unanswered, and at the end of three or four days the whole matter had passed out of my mind. On the 9th of March the postman brought three or four letters, and among them a thick one whose superscription was in a hand which seemed dimly familiar to me. I could not 'place' it at first, but presently I succeeded. Then I said to a visiting relative who was present: 66 6 'Now I will do a miracle. I will tell you everything this letter contains-date, signature, and all— without breaking the seal. It is from a Mr. Wright, Virginia, Nevada, and is dated the 2d of Marchseven days ago. Mr. Wright proposes to make a book about the silver mines and the Great Bonanza, and asks what I, as a friend, think of the idea. says his subjects are to be so and so, their order and sequences so and so, and he will close with a history of the chief feature of the book, the Great Bonanza.' He I opened the letter and showed that I had stated the date and the contents correctly. Mr. Wright's 66 letter simply contained what my own letter, written "I on the same date, contained, and mine still lay in its pigeon-hole, where it had been lying during the seven days since it was written." THE LOCOMOTION OF IDEAS. Numerous accidents, of which the above is an example, have persuaded Mr. Clemens to become a believer in the existence of mental telegraphy, i.e., the communication, by some means far subtler than we can now imagine, between minds belonging to bodies which may be separated by thousands of miles. "I could not doubt," says he, "that Mr. Wright's mind and mine had been in close and crystal-clear communication with each other across three thousand miles of mountains and desert, on the morning of the 2d of March. I did not consider that both minds originated that succession of ideas, but that one mind originated them, and simply telegraphed them to the other." He calls to instance the many well-known cases of inventions which occurred to different men in different parts of the world at almost the same moment-the telegraph, "originated" simultaneously by Professor Henry in America, Wheatstone in England, Morse on the sea, and a German in Munich. NO MORE PLAGIARISM. The quotation marks about "originated" in the last şentence are used advisedly; for when telepathy shall be proved an accomplished fact, who will be able to say of any idea, "I am the author of this"? By far the most curious and most frequent cases of these phenomena, accidents, or whatever they be, occur in the literary world. Witness the DarwinWallace episode, and scores of less famous examples. When the courts shall take cognizance of such a science, it will plainly be impossible to produce, in a given case, any tangible evidence tracking the illusive idea to its original lair. It is hardly fair to Mr. Clemens to state his startling conclusion without the aggregate of evidence which led up to it. His paper will be interesting in many places where it is not convincing. HE Neue Militarische Blätter contains the acterious night balloon ascent from Vienna made by Lieutenants Hoernes and Eckert, of the Railway and Telegraph Regiment. The orders given to these officers were that they should leave about 9 P. M., and should remain up as long as gas and ballast could be made to last. The balloon in which the ascent was made had a capacity of 1,100 cubic metres, and carried twelve and one-half sacks of ballast, each weighing forty-four pounds. A descent was safely effected at Wojciehowo in Posen (273 miles from Vienna), after a journey of eleven and a half hours. Lieutenant Hoernes estimates that the total distance travelled was equal to the famous journey from Paris to Sweden made by two French sailors in 1870. T FREDERIC HARRISON ON EDUCATION. has long been a favorite idea of mine that many things work delightfully for good while they are spontaneous and unorganized, but when they are stereotyped into an elaborate art and evolve a special profession or trade of experts, they produce unexpected failures and end in more harm than good." In this sentence is contained the underlying FREDERIC HARRISON. thought of Mr. Frederic Harrison's remarks on education in the Forum for December. Mr. Harrison's observations have led him to believe that the less we systematize education and dogmatize about it the better. Education should be treated as if it were a special art. It cannot be taught, "like playing the violin." Minds are too various and too subtle to be prescribed for specifically. "We ask," he continues, "too much from education, we make too much of it, we monstrously over-organize it, and we cruelly overload it. Education can do for us infinitely less than we have come to expect; and what little it can do is on the condition that it be left simple, natural and free. I have known very few men who were made into anything great entirely by their education; and I have known a good many who were entirely ruined by it and were finally turned out as pedants, prigs, or idiots. Struggling to win prizes in examinations, thinking always about the style current to day, being put through the regulation mill, and poring over some little corner of knowl edge for some material object, may give a one-sided appearance of learning, with nothing behind it, will turn out mechanical eccentricities like calculatingmachines, may change an honest fellow into a selfish, dull brute or leave a weak brain softened and atrophied for life. And the more we organize education the greater is the risk of our finding this result." Education, he maintains, can at best do but little for us. "All that it can really give is this: it can supply the opportunities of self-culture; hold forth new standards and ideals to aim at; it can bring the budding mind into contact with a formed and mature mind. It can suggest, explain, correct, and guide in a very general and occasional way; but it cannot teach vigorous thinking, or thrust coherent knowl edge into a raw mind, as a ploughboy can with trouble be taught to write or to remember the multiplication table." Mr. Harrison does not deny that drill, in its place and for certain purposes, is good, but believes that in modern education it is overdone-enforced at the expense of "minds, characters, imaginations, and hearts." It can turn out troopers, but can it turn out well-developed minds? He does not believe in the examination system. Examinations are, he holds, disastrous to education. They never can test any knowledge worth having, and only debase and pervert education. He sighs for born, not made; but he asserts that when it is there, education will develop it and strengthen it, not stifle or mislead it. And we will all sympathize with his. objection to calling "practical" only those men who lay bricks or take in currency over a counter. 66 "A college training aims to develop a man's selfmaking power, that he may fashion himself and his life according to no narrow pattern, and to impart to him the faculty, as some one has well phrased it, of 'individual initiative,' which, other things being equal, is the key to success. Not every man has this power developed in him by a liberal education, because, it may be, it does not exist in him even in a latent rudimentary form and a college education cannot manufacture it to order or make bricks without straw. As to that very hackneyed subject, the college man in business life, Mr. Sheldon does not see that it is a problem at all. He inclines to the opinion that it only takes the graduate about two years to "catch up" in material advantages; the immaterial advantages that he possesses are obvious. Perhaps in the rather interesting paper-too long to be summed up in a short review-there is a tendency to completely eliminate the elective principle. One would gather that Mr. Sheldon prescribes a university course for all men. Certainly in a generation there are a few who do not need it and a multitude who are not fit for it. JOURNALISM IN CANADA. HE New England Magazine for December opens the old academies of Plato and Aristotle, to which with a vigorous article on "Canadian Journal the students came in search of knowledge. UNIVERSITY AND PRACTICAL LIFE. "ONE 'Are They Antagonistic? NE day a 'self-made' man boasted of it in the presence of Dr. Franklin. With his usual ready wit the philosopher, holding up an egg, dryly remarked, 'Yes, self-made about as much as that egg is!"" What Mr. Winthrop Dudley Sheldon would say in "Higher Education and Practical Life," in the New Englander and Yale Review for December, is that the university-made man is just as truly self-made as Max O'Rell's London Alderman. Each but uses the talents entrusted to him-the former with the advantage of a great controlling help. The "disposition to depreciate and undervalue a college education is easily accounted for. It has its genesis in an essentially narrow conception of the true nature and aims of life, and hence of education itself in the hurry and restlessness so characteristic of our country, and especially in that intensely mercenary spirit which applies the money test to everything and determines the value of everything by the degree in which it possesses the touch of Midas, the ability to turn all things into gold.” ists and Journalism," from the pen of its assistant editor, Mr. Walter Blackburn Harte. If Mr. Harte is to be criticised, it is on the score of being too exhaustive, for a less vivacious sketching of the dozens of people he introduces would be exceedingly wearisome. MISS CANADA AND UNCLE SAM. In his numerous interviews with the principal men who reflect the political thought of Canada Mr. Harte has had his ears wide open for any notes of annexation, and he has caught a few strong and meaning expressions, with tentative suggestions, in nearly every quarter. "The public opinion may be somewhat vague, it may be frequently obscured by side issues and sudden gusts of resentment (as upon the publication of the McKinley Bill), but it is undoubtedly growing in favor of a complete fusion of the two countries-or rather, of the breaking down of an imaginary barrier separating and di viding one people. Downing Street has completely lost its hold on the Dominion, but when the separation comes, it will be peacefully and without resentment. England will lose nothing, because in holding Canada she gains nothing." INDEPENDENCE IN CANADIAN JOURNALISM. If it be true that misery loves company, the "States" moralists who bewail a partisan press should find ample comfort in the picture of Canada. But |