€mMl\ ^mvmxii^ Jitavg ) THE GIFT OF AyJ^3.5-Jj,jr ^.'?.l.±(l±. Cornell University Library arW38184 The child of democracy: 3 1924 031 758 745 olin,anx The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031758745 THE CHILD OF DEMOCRACY ^ BEING THE ADVENTURES OF THE EMBRYO STATUE : BY CORYDON FORD : ^856-1594 PRICE FIFTY THE GIFT OF L .^_..::^iU^. ,.. A..aj.s:a.^.. .:..:..:..;L ^.Mf-lzt... THE CHILD OF DEMOCRACY Copyright by CORYDON FORD 1S94 Vv-4.-*^^-*-*-*-^^ — ^C'''****^ THE CHILD OF DEMOCRACY: BEING THE ADVENTURES OF THE EMBRYO STATE : : BY CORYDON FORD : : : 1856-1894 ON SALE BY ; : : • : JOHN V SHEEHAN & CO ANN ARBOR MICli A. L%5L5 NOTE . In this tale is given the concept of the School and the State; the University as or- ganic with the State; the Church as organic ■with the State; the organic Letters. ^ ^ ^ ^ 9lf 9p tP Several months delay in printing the clos- ing chapters allows account of the latest find in the Organism — the Toledo and Omaha de- cisions in recognition of the Class, THE GAME /T\H/S Re fort is addressed to the critic of the schools! I , The boy tvho " runs atvay "/ the girl -who " went home ■with the headache "/ the mother ivho 'Matches the paliug cheek of a daughter ; the father -whom something takes by the throat -when he recurs to his boy; the neurologist ivho has sfoken the hard lines in the faces of otir girls ; the oculist ■who finds that errors of refraction are alarmingly on the in- crease; the merchant -with place to besto-w -who turns azvav the young applicant on finding that he is a recent graduate of high school or academy ; the teacher in the higher insti- tutioii of learning -who complains that the same graduate comes to him. unable to think; the rank and file of teachers ■who complain of "dry rot" ; the tax-payer -who doubts thai he is getting adequate return on his school assessment ; the pulpit as seen in recent conventions called to consider the im- morality of the schools; the Church hierarchy tvho on the run discerns the impact ahead; the men of letters at the parting of the ■ways ■who more than ever are students of portentous times; and, all other members of the State -who hax'e kno-wn ought of disorder or friction in the prevailing systems of Education. THE MOVEMENT I. The Beginning of the Lie i II. Beleagured by the Spectres of Knowledge. 5 III. The Over-Weighting of Life 13 IV. Academic Contact at the Normal 21 V. The Money-Getters 35 VI. The High Priests of Pedagogy 45 VII. Barking up the Trail 70 VIII. The University of Bon 96 IX. The Teacher and the Child 109 X. The Book and the School. 120 XI. The Scientific Apartness ii|.3 XII. The University 173 XIII. The Dead Waste of Letters 183 XIV. The Region Backing Up 199 XV. The Man of Letters 206 XVI. The Turning of a Tide 221 XVII. The Psalm of Life 235 XVIII. Where a Nation Sings its Hymns 251 XIX. The Round-Up 268 XX. The Almanac 279 THE CHILD OF DEMOCRACY I. THE BEGINNING OF THE LIE T HAVE been to school some. As near as I can -•^ remember I did not follow faithfully the in- junction of my teachers to love learning and abhor ignorance. My earliest recollection of the official school was of the impatience of a Mrs. Chapman be- cause I could not recall the letter A. She vig- orously jerked my hair, and -told me again to look at it. I think the whole alphabet was beaten into me in this v\'ay. I can only recollect the circumstance of the letter A. Mrs. Chapman was not the last good soul whom I have tried through my long career of perverseness in look- ing from the book. My earliest recollection of the unofficial school that yve call life — more than the river -and the country road, the ploughed field, the grow- ing garden, the hanging fruit — was my occasional visits to the near village of Petersburg, and the opportunity which it afforded of seeing the steam cars. These ran through my brain during their months of newness until their make-up and the way of their working and the object of their action was as familiar to me as the breath I took. I drank of how the steam came from the heated boiler as from the tea-kettle ; how its force con- fined of cylinder pushed the piston and made the driver turn. I came to know that the clothes which I wore, and the sugar and rice which I ate, and the nails which built my father's house, and the hoe with which I dug potatoes in the garden, and the papers from Detroit and New York, were brought to me by the locomotive. Learning lessons of the life as it came was never the most of my trouble. My consciousness began early to draw the partition of difference between all this move- ment about me, which penetrated and marched of my thought, and the quiet place they called the school. I made the two antagonistic in as far as the one denied me the other. Through life, up to the moment in which I write, the chasm has been unbridged. To go out of the one was to enter the other, and my consciousness could never put them together as indivisible. The tragedy of my days has been this division. The story is of the coming together of what I so early knew as divergent lines of life. I am aware that by the teachers then and now they are not meant to be understood as divided. But for all that I could never see any real connection between them. Let alone my own erosion of mind in the friction of broken things, the state- ment of the teachers themselves seemed woefully conflicting to me. The burden of precept in any term would be that school was a preparation for life, and then at the close of the year when some class had finished I would hear the talk that the graduates were about to begin life ; that they had yet everything to learn, and the hope was that they would find the knowledge that had come to them in books of such aid as they could. For all the talk about preparation for life, I could never detect on any of these days when the goods were to be delivered that the contract was fulfilled. This walking of the plank blindfold, as I at last came to understand it, seemed a mighty perver- sion of this pretension to education and prepara- tion. The marvel of it to me was that one had need to begin life so old. So I went my way carrying in my young mind the warfare of these strident chords. Was this disorder to mold me after its char- acter ; and where, though not yet consciously spoken, was the lie to end? If I have been able to withstand it and finally to surmount it, it is be- cause I w^as endowed with a mental inertia not easily overcome. This passed for dulness, and as with the first letter of the alphabet I was more or less commonly on the rack of a teacher's dis- pleasure. My sensitiveness on these matters was such that throughout my school life I have uncounted times lain at night dreading the ring- ing of the school bell in the morning. The falsity about me so grew, though I did not know it in this light, blaming always my own duTness, that I carried it constantly with me, like a weight around my neck. When sometimes as a boy I ran away from the task of heavier lessons I was taken back by my well-meaning father to have the weight renewed. The remedy ever held out to me in all my turmoil of unreality was the injunction to study hard and I would learn to like my books. Though I wished to find the statement true, I never could do the study part. In later years I have reflected on what seems a very strange thing that in all my career in school, academy, and university, no teacher in authority of me has once offered information as to how I should study. I have reflected that the able teacher of the violin tells his pupil how^ to hold hand to bow and otherwise manipulate ; and the carpenter tells his apprentice how to apply his square and drop his plumb, how to mortise a joint, how to plane a board ; and through all the trades. And the wonder grew with me that I was never fortunate enough to come under a teacher who should con- sider it his business to see that I ■ got to w^ork after some method which he should discover as adapted to me. If in the course of my life I have ever become successful as a teacher, it is be- cause I remembered this. I have mind that it is the precept of the school that the child should be taught to work at his lessons. But I do not find it anywhere recog- nized in practice that the what and the how is a matter entirely dependent on the immediate con- tact of the child with life. I do not find it denied in practice that the present teaching is but a guess at the possible needs of the child when he shall enter upon the serious work of making his liveli- hood. It thus becomes this not easy narrative to depict the growth of my consciousness toward the school and life as one. This not in the unreal sense of a remote preparation for life, but with the verity of an apprenticeship to the functions in the daily movement of the State. II. BELEAGURED BY THE SPECTRES OF KNOWLEDGE T DO not know when it was that I first ac- ■'■ quired distinctive ideas referring learning to a book knowledge, but I suppose it must have been when I first heard about going to school. I suppose I put books more emphatically apart in my mind when I went there and had the door shut upon me against the life outside, and heard the caution to be quiet, and was set at the specific business of learning the lessons before me in contrast with the freedom and movement from which I had come. It was the beginning of mental lesions which in my fuller experi- ence come to me like spectres on a misty high- way. And the uncertain and unreal figures there, the spectre mile-posts, as I have since brooded over them, seem to have been all the multitu- dinous branches and divisions of learning. All these, in my progress along this way, arose in their turn ; and each, in as far as they came to me with more or less distinctness, added to the apartness of the school as a whole. Their dis- tinction grew until they peopled the four walls of a place set apart from life in which I found my- self beleagured. In my early years my impulse was constantly to flee from my prison house, into the largeness of what seemed to me the whole. I was thus from the first irritated by the disorder of a false separation in life, without being able to characterize it. It was only in later years in the fulness of experience that I came to know the separation was a false one, that it did not belong to the real needs or conditions about me, was not any part of the exactions of a busy world ; was a deficiency in the organization of life. The disorder grew in me until I saw apart book knowledge as education, and like my teach- ers, I came to speak of it and act upon it as such. Education finally shaped in my mind as a course of study covering so many distinct books, at the end of which was a diploma certifying that I had acquired or memorized the lines which they con- tained. I came to understand that without the completion of a giyen course I was uneducated, and would be classed under the terms illiterate and ignorant. My earliest recollection of being under the domination of these notions, was when I asked my teacher if I could not join a begin- ner's geography class, fearing that if I did not take up the study I would get behind some com- panions of my age. The superstition was strong upon me ; I worshiped the idol of knowledge. I do not remember that I had any other certain in- tention in engaging the study of Geography. I did not take up the book with any purpose of finding out something I wanted to know as I do now an encyclopedia or dictionary. I had no specific need for going to the book as to find out the home of the Moors, the location of the battle of Gettysburg, the isotherm of Boston, or the course of the Hennepin Canal. So that the part in which I was engaged did not come to me in any real sense of an imperative need grow- ing out of things I was doing in the whole, or the life outside the school-room. I was doing a partial thing w^ithout any connection with the whole. To lessen this unreality which I now know^ the teachers themselves felt, I was told by them that I would need many of these things and that I should acquire them all in case I did need them. But this w^as a phrase to me and no part of my experience, so that the unreality of the disconnected things vv^hich I wasdoing was not in any way lessened for me. When I tired of these and ran from them as I did, I could not know that it was the revolt of my mind against the disorderly or illogical. I believed it was my perverseness, with which they charged me. I had no consciousness or words with which to return to them their falsity. The foot and horse of experience had not yet mobilized in mind ; I was unsupported by the phalanx of method, unarmed of its cimiter ; I was helpless and they put me down. In the same unreality I pursued my Arithmetic and my Grammar, my Orthography and my Spelling, seeing them all as but painted of reality, in their growing distinctness and apartness from the life about me. Again, finding some glimpse of reality in more direct connection with moving things, the mask of an unfunctioned and meaningless apartness would need to be w^antonly riveted. I now come to a somewhat definite period in my school life, further illustrating the hold vifhich the superstition of learning had upon me, and its blighting touch. It must have been at the age of about sixteen. So slow had I been with my arithmetic, and although I was in classes where they were supposed to know much more, I had hardly gained anything like clear or certain knowledge of the fundamental things, as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Beyond this my knowledge of the study was an uncertain smattering of the four fundamental pro- cesses in fractions, though I had done what was called going over them a number of times. After the manner of my taking up geography I had asked my teacher to allow me to take up "mental" arithmetic. Two of my nearest companions, George Wheeler and Nelson Vandeventer, had been made into a class in this subject and I did not wish to be behind them. I accordingly became one in a class of three in this branch, supposed to be peculiarly mental. At the recita- tion there must be no blackboard, slate, or papers used by the class ; and vs^ith some lessons the books were to be left at the seat. We should take the problem from the teacher's lips and re- turn him the solution as out of mind ; there must be no figures made with hands. We were given to understand that this self-propelling method of husking problems was for the purpose of strengthening the memory. Our text-book was " Stoddard's Intellectual Arithmetic " and it is now an heirloom, tumbled and nicked, on a shelf before me ; for it was the gateway leading from enthrall of mind. I don't know how it all hap- pened, but I was much given to pouring over the pages farther along, thinking how full I would be if I really had all of that book in my head ; really had it. I began to have dawnings that knowledge after all meant something more than a certificate of passing a book, and I had long before been told so. It came about that in one of these days of anticipation I sat looking at one of the more difficult problems well toward the end of the arithmetic. It was something about a hare and a hound involving certain in- tricacies and winding of conditions terminating in the question of how many leaps would the hare take while the hound was catching him. I judged the problem to be very hard because it had a good many figures and was very long.' I judged it to be the hardest thing in the book. As I sat looking at it and wondering if I should ever be able to compass it when I at last should arrive there, it seemed to resolve itself before me, its intricacies unwinding like a skein of tangled yarn or the reel of a spindle, and I saw only the single straight thread leading up to the conclu- sion. Then I read the problem through accord- ing to the answer that had flashed upon me and found that it tallied. Yet I could not believe that I had got it, for there it was far along in number of pages and the measure of much wis- dom, which no one could pass without laborious climbing through the whole length of the book. I staggered like a man on a very high place, who could not recall his way as of the tedious ladder. It must be a dream for I had not come by any of the usual toil supposed to precede the ends of knowledge. I proposed the problem to George Wheeler, who was in arithmetic as in all studies quicker than myself, and told him that I had got it, I guessed. Thus encouraged, but doubt- ing, hfe wrestled with the strange thing and brought back to me mj' identical answer which he declared ^vould " prove." He read his conclu- sions through by the conditions of the problem and showed me that like my own it tallied. A rivalry presently sprung up between us to find and work a problem which should be impossible to the other. In this way I recall that we com- passed the harder problems in the book in a dozen days. I was nonplussed at the receding difficulties, but my gravity squared by another mind not far from as commonplace as my own, compelled to belief in the simplicity of what I had done. Still such was my overweening super- stition that I could not believe I had come at it in an educational way ; I felt that I had not de- veloped to it, that there were missing links. I felt that my methods had been irregular and that I justified the condemnation which I received from those older than myself who spoke against skipping around in the book in that way. As far as I can recall my consciousness now, Ifelt that in working like this I had not been to school lO at all, that the way in which I had worked was by a " cut-and-try " method, or no method, such as I had seen a blacksmith use in fitting a shoe to a horse's foot, turning a brace, or setting a tire. I felt that my method was wholly of life and not of the school, and that to be truly educated I must refrain from such unseemly practice. All this was reinforced by my teacher who, while ad- mitting that what we had done was well enough, led us to understand that there was something more in education than this, that we must be able to work the examples after certain recognized forms set down in the book or after such as he w^ould furnish us. As I analyze if now, there was abroad in all this a distrust of mind. There w^as an admission that it did not come to its con- clusions invariably by logical process and that the "cut-and-try" method of the mechanic and engineer, applying to the economies of the daily life, was not thinking in the educational sense. That there was a sort of pure thought, as I may phrase it, which did not relate to actual events, or time, or place ; but which had to do \vith the order of certain indefinite and suppo- sitious things contained in print. After this rift of sunlight the clouds settled heavy again upon me. In addition to my origi- nal perverseness in looking from the book, I felt that I had added a new factor, — that v^^hen I did look, it was in the wrong way. So that now I was either not looking at all or not looking right. But while the superstition of learning rolled up blacker than ever about me, I had by the incident suffered a change of mind. There had been sowrn the seeds of revohition and re- volt. I had thenceforth suspicion regarding the infaUibility of the book and the omnipotence of the teacher. Against the easy and objective play of my mind they had placed the bar of made systems and doctrines. I went back to the grind of the school and my revolt grew in proportion as I did not see accomplishment, in proportion as I felt the repression. The movement vyhich I attained in the in- cident I have related, bore its fruit. Though I would repress myself and turn to the class routine, my mind would as persistently go from it, making out after extraneous things to its lik- ing. Here w^as the great tragedy of the school resulting in absolute chaos of soul, that while my intelligence could not be brought to the system, thereby to find its core of order, there was noth- ing in the system that provided for direction of my mind on its own lines of advancement. Led to believe in the unreality of life through the ex- aggeration of the school, I was to suffer further lesion from the total lack of mental direction. Balked and turned in even spasmodic going out af- ter the objects of my mental trend, and ever fail- ing of directed and definite action, more than the exaggerated school became an unreality : I awoke a sceptic to everything about me, believing in no man or cause. The world went past me like the unknown figures of a procession. My own reality had been in some definite doing ;. failing in this I failed in all reality. To 'believe in all things it were first needful to believe in one thing. Looked at from this stage of my experience, I know that my doing in the school had no mo- mentum or reality because it did not involve any direct consequences. If I w^ent wrong or right it had no significance of meaning except the com- ment of my teacher. Without the contact which the organization of the school denied me, it was impossible, near or remotely, to know that mis- take in computation might involve in its disorder the condemnation of a community, as would be the case if an error were made in computing the span of an actual bridge or the material for an act- ual side-walk. What I was doing was in so far fragmentary that it was no doing at all. It in- volved the unreality of the non-related thing. I was engaged in the untruth of partial doing ; the broken contact involved the broken mind. It was the lie of the school. III. THE OVER-WEIGHTING OF LIFE MY exaggeration of life was in proportion to my exaggeration of the school. As with the school, the apart thing was the distorted thing. Brought into the world with an abounding curi- osity, it became a mental aberration. My contact was not balanced by function. I saw, touched, tasted, and handled, but did not do in any ade- 13 quate or connected sense. The experience of my power, the underlying or rational experience which comes to man in this life, I did not have. Without the experience of power all other exper- ience was without meaning. Life itself became peopled w^ith the spectres of unreality. The cir- cuit of mind is rational in so far as it returns its contact in the form of some interested and accom- plished doing in the various economies of life. Any contact short of this circuit results in the sensual or abortive mind. The sensuality of my life has been this lack of organization in my con- tact. But for my mental inertia I would have been lost. I followed the career of the sensualist, the debauchee. I rushed into this and that con- tact, stopping short of function at every point. I was beaten by all the winds that blow. Mine were the fortunes of the libertine. When about seventeen years of age I en- countered fornication with the Whore of the Nations. In company with a number of compan- ions I was led to visit the Methodist church of the village where nightly revival meetings were holding. The procuror was a preacher by the name of McClure, who afterwards went on the road for the importing house of Claflin & Co. He pictured to our senses the enticing attitudes of his mistress and the voluptuousness of her naked body. We were told of her desire, and that the fertility of her powers was greater than those of earth, that all mankind would be born again of her. We were told her unfailing breasts rose of fatness ; that her eyes melted flesh, her belly lusted, her words gave hunger pleading ; that her song was of rest and fleeting sorrow. We w^ere admonished that her anger would be the shutting out of her fertility from us ; that in place of sw^elling seed and expansive life, w^ould be wail and death. Young women, our companions at school, came to us where we stood, and solicited our abandonment to the wiles of the concubine of spirit ; whose moistened thighs stirred of invi- tation ; whose odors were of every rankness in the garden of good and savory of the heat of the untouched. They bade us choose between love and vengeance. We took the bed of passion, and fled from the wrath to come. We basked in the red of harlotry ; sank our flesh in the purple of its apparel ; drank of its vir- tueless springs; sang on its mocking moun- tains ; kissed the foliage of its sterile groves ; knew its whitened valleys. We lay through- out the night of passion, throwing ourselves upon the nude of sensuality ; wasting loin in the broken thing of life, of the unrelated mind. We strained with expenditure against the infertile w^omb of the unfunctioned soul, and returned again ; our withdrawal was exhaustion. Our re- covery was to flee from the disorder in this mon- strous apartness that had blasted the white seed of the morning of life. This was but an incident in a series of mental incontinencies which had engaged me, be- ginning with the school ; so that now I had in part acquired the habit of stopping short of the full circuit of mental movement, had in part ac- 15 quired the habit of the mental abortion. I in turn became a procurer like my teachers and others, going about tempting to precepts and rules that had no meaning in the experience of those I intruded them upon. I did not, however, insist upon their committal to memory, did not carry my practice to the point of forcible intro- duction of a foreign element into the conceiving mind, as was peculiarly the province of those in authority over me. My practice fell short of pro- fessional abortion. I continued my sensual or unfunctioned con- tact. I fell in with companions who were given to the cup and carousal. They introduced me to all the fermentations of knowledge. I became addicted to the literary habit. I was found con- tinually drunk on phrases, the alcohol of their unmeaning apartness stewing in my brain. I was induced to join a revelling club known as the Union School Lyceum. I was encouraged and abetted by my teachers. The principal of the school was made the president and leader of the club. His fitness for the office appeared to be that, of all of us, he could become most hilarious on the thinnest sack, though he had competitors who fell not far behind him in the persons of two or three professional doctors, lawyers, and preach- ers who joined us. We fumigated the room and the atmosphere in which we walked against all commo nplace ; our diet even was of the in- toxicating or exclusive kind ; we came to discard almost wholly the water and milk of every day life about us, our solid food being mainly of i6 the condiment order. I learned to look with con- tempt and disgust on everything that was not of a high aromatic and effervescent nature. My home faded in its color and became mean. My father with his chest of carpenter's tools, the music of direction in his movement and the light of function in his face, I saw as a very low order of companionship, and held him grovelling and un- taught. I came to distinguish all utility as of an ignoble part. I wondered how the farmer whoHi I heard sing to the rhyme of the reaper could sing at all. I saw the blacksmith as in durance ; his smithy was a prison and gave foetid ordors to my literary nostrils. Wandering blear-eyed of a morning down the streets after a night in oiy cups, I saw the wares in the merchant's window as the trap of a wily man who preyed on the pure of erudition. The brotherhood of interests, the commerce of man, I saw^ as common and un- clean. When my father set me to dig potatoes at the autumn and out of the soil that had fulfilled its law, or to pick apples from our few trees we called an orchard, I so little understood life that I considered this communion with earth a hardship, and resentment of my fate grew at such tithes. I nursed my rancor with potions from Poet and Prose which I took to the field with me. My spleen against life grew until every thing except my liquors took on the grossness of utility. These became apparitions to the tremens of my de- bauch. I staggered above the gutter of useful things. With distorted eye I looked upon the 17 broken life and counted myself richest in the wis- dom of the day. Sensuality could go no farther. On recovering from the experience of the dissipation of letters and finding myself in disgust at the stench of my own foulness, I turned after a space to the fortunes of the gambler. So fed on stimulants of unreality, and down-at-the-heels in function had I become, that I ever saw the broken thing as real. I shuffled the cards of chance against the stakes of opportunity. I became the prince of gamblers in the rags of learning. I played the integrity of my life on a single card without so much as recking consequence. It was on an October morning touched of warmth, w^hen I had grown excessively restless at what I now consciously regarded as the humdrum of the school, that I concluded to change my for- tunes. I was about eighteen and in the lingering distortion of my recent degradation. I had come to think that the local school had given me about all the wrisdom it had for me. Though I have since discovered that the school was half right in its relations to me, I could not then in my broken condition realize this half. A sea of bars without a pilot were the drift of doubt. On this morning I finally forswore the village school and flung away such opportunities as under other conditions it may have had for me. I went upon the deep of quest without compass and without chart. It was the venture of the chance card. What I should turn was not so much as conjectured by me ; I paused as little. My one thought was to flee from the conditions of unreality grown bur- densome, from the load of ambiguity that had settled vipon me. I went only that I might go. It was on this October morning that I sat down to the game of immediate consequences. I had met an unmeaning precept that most of us have to play this game, but I was about to learn this in my own case. I did not at this age know so much of the function of life as to be able to shovel dirt. I had only been going to school, had only been educating. The sun mellowed the vil- lage behind me as I took my way afoot toward the western octopus. Arrived at Adrian, some twenty miles on the way, I tired of walk- ing and paid my fare into Chicago, stepping from the train into the rumble of the city with fifteen cents in my pocket. I speedily realized that a man without a function is with- out a brother. I had a growing conscious- ness that there was something wrong in my hand- ling of the- cards. The smoke of the city was the black breath of my own disorder. The rattle and crash of the street traffic was the loud menace of my own confusion. I ate some meals of charity and was vomited by the monster that could not assimilate me. I turned my face toward the patrimony of my father's roof and the coun- try village ; at that distance its calm stood for the quiet of order as against the uproar of the city's engulfment. With the desperation of the hunted I grabbed the platform of the blind bag- gage car of the Michigan Central flyer, and by evading the train-men at our occasional stops I rhade Ann Arbor of a single night ; and then Dundee by the way of Detroit on two dollars which I borrowed of an old friend of the family. Walking again the quiet of the village, the memory of the busy city from which I had filed came to me as the requiem of hope. I had a faint glimpse of consciousness that the turbulence of life is the turbulence of one's own mind. Yet never having functioned, never having experi- enced order, the reality in consciousness could be no more than this glimpse. I simply knew that I had not left the discord in Chicago ; it pursued me into the poise of the meadow. For me the ground was springing of unrest. The pain of my groping was like that of the surgeon's knife, nor did I comprehend that the amputation of my dis- order must be as real as that of the mutilated limb. But under the present organization, I was to learn that it must be self-amputated. I remained restive at Dundee until the mid- dle of the winter, finding that ncithing would tempt me to enter the local school, having in my own mind, as I have said, taken orders in the full of its qualifications. I essayed to read again in the sense of literary browsing, but found that it staled upon me, adding to the flame of the disorder which consumed. In the middle of the win- ter I seized an opportunity which came to me of going as a student to the State Normal school at Ypsilanti. Its meaning to me . was the throw which it gave for a change. My expenses were to be met by a well-wishing uncle. 20 IV. ACADEMIC CONTACT AT THE NORMAL A N early morning in January found me expect- -"■ ant at the Normal School. I was asked to sign a certificate that I purposed leaching in the state of Michigan. I then turned to find my place. I was told that my time of entering the school was inopportune, the several classes being far advanced in the different subjects they were pursuing. I was thus at the outset made to feel that the school was a thing of inflexible routine and established ways. Questions put to me were made to test my familiarity with the text- books ; in reading, arithmetic, geography and grammar. Though it was admitted that my familiarity with these was enough in the ordinary academic sense, it was considered best that 1 retrace them in view of my purpose to teach. It was said that reviewing them could do no harm anyway. This seemed to bring them great relief in their apparent quandary in placing me. I turned to these subjects again like a convalescent sentenced to another course of fever. I however hoped for new things in them from the under- standing which I had of the ability of the teach- ers at the Normal and the talk which I now heard on every hand about thoroughness and methods. In fact the newness of the conditions to which I had come seemed to be mainly the latter. But for this, and the years of those about me, I might have thought from the general movement and conduct of the classes that I was back in the old school at Dundee. My expectation was thus reserved for 21 what I might find new in the presentation of time dulled subjects by abler men. In short, I recall that we were told that everything was in the presentation of the subject, and the changes were rung on this. The Why, said to be an im- portant factor in all method was a much talked of phase of this presentation of things. It appeared that the Why must always be brought out, as of teaching, more prominently than the subject matter itself. With the talk of these things on all sides, I gradually garned the idea of some necromancy as attaching to successful teaching. I found the air surcharged with a thousand pre- cepts relative to the successful or non-successful teacher. I learned that the successful teacher must be a moral man, and should abstain from many things which were the common practice of his fellows. I came to regard him as of clean vesture, of pure mouth, and of difficult art. In this atmosphere of preaching about teaching, the thing rose before me in its apartness, — became the bugbear of my days. The mysterious touch of the teacher, which I have said came to me as the magic of his office, gradually shaped itself into certain precepts and doctrines touching the need of interesting the child as factor in teaching him to think. I came to understand, however indefinitely, as ways of getting the child's attention, "making him attend", that the subject must be presented first with clearness and simplicity so that he could not fail of being aroused to a love of learning and to efforts of self-acquired knowledge. We were told that the office of the teacher was not filled until the child had learned to love knowledge and had acquired the habit of self-seeking it. I did not understand that this meant that the teacher should instil into the child the love of how to play ball, or to ride a horse, or row a boat ; of knowledge of the best places to fish along the country brook ; or interest in threshing machines, steam engines, or the cider-mill.. I understood that it meant something mainly indirect and sepa- rate from these ; that it meant the love of knowl- edge in substance and after the mannef presented in books. I did not understand that the school was to be organized for discovering the specific function of the child in life and training him to it , as for instance, organizing for the contact of the child with the various activities of the State — farming, watch-making, engineering, journal- ism — in such a way that his trend of mind might be hit upon : the skill of the teacher to find play in placing the child ; the child to report to the teacher as the master of his direction and organizer of the conditions necessary to cai-ry out his one central contact on the lines of his specific needs as apprentice ; the accuracy of the teacher to be absolute in organizing for wide contact of the child as going to find his specific contact or voca- tion. I understood in the prominence of the so-called book learning that the child w^as to be restrained in his general contact in so far as it interfered with almost constant attention to the text ; that the child was to be w^ithdrawn from contact in the life sense, and brought into famil- iarity with the books until he had in measure acquired their contents and a liking for them, and then returned to life as a sort of transformed being with a love for knowledge and in a degree for- sworn to common things. The method of the school was summed up in making this hemming-in of books so attractive that the child would take kindly to it and love it ; but if not, he was to be compelled to it and so put in the way of loving it, hoping perforce he would come to know the error of his vulgarity. If he did not coifte to one of these two things, it was clear that he was lost of perversity, and, though lamented, the devil might harvest his own. In the arithmetic class I came before the preceptress of the school. Miss Hoppin, a woman of middle age. She talked a great deal, which seemed a mark of her ability, and I understood gave her preferment as a teacher. By it she was supposed to explain well and lure attention. She gave us to understand that observation in a school like the Normal would do much for us, and that noting how she handled the rein and guided her class would enable us to direct our own class when time and diligence should have brought us a di- ploma. We were to observe methods of govern- ment in the Normal as well as methods employed in presenting the subject-matter, the task of any given day. She sat her subject like a rider w^ho knew his skill ; and while suggestion and criticism were invited, experience showed us that we were in danger of being run down. The Why of the matter was given much attention. From the cunning of our teacher's manner when she delin- eated its importance, I gained the notion of its being the chief of snares for entrapping the child to thought. It was said that at least the teacher should know the Why as being the material of a broader grounding in the profession. I saw that the Why was made entirely sepa- rate from the How, else what need to talk of them at all ? As for instance, we were required to ask ourselves why in division of fractions in- vert the terms of the divisor and proceed as in multiplication ? Now the reader may see that when the Why is finally found it is precisely the same as the question why you put a pint of coffee into a pint of milk in a half-and-half mixture, instead of putting a pint of milk into a pint of coffee. The answer in one case as in the other, is that it is more convenient — more economical, certain con- ditions considered. Just as the clear demonstra- tion of the Why in this last question would be to mix the coffee and milk in the manner indi- cated, so the Why in the case of the arithme- tic would be doing the example in such detail that the Why would be a part of the doing — the econ- omy of the method adopted would be seen. The warrant for inverting the terms of the divisor as above would be in the tracing of the work in such detail that the short-cut would be seen ; the Why would be in the How. I found in the course of the the term that there was a great deal of discussion as to whether the child should be taught the Why or orIj the How^, and in my contact since with schoolmen at large I have seen the discussion continued. The growing belief of the priests of pedagogy seems latterly to be that the Why should not be taught the child until he is old enough to understand it. I remember that I have been times cautioned by mature instructors against the too early teaching of the Why, thouofh at one time it was almost universally considered in vogue to teach this to the child whether he understood it or not, as the methods of teaching were thus held to closer system, — regardless of the law of gravity. Questions of school government came up and were discussed by Miss Hoppin at the class, and in turn by the students! This discussion was sup- posed to clear the air ; and the tolerance of opinion which it begot was considered in noble place as elevating and dignifying the profession. I re- member the question as to whether the child should be dealt with immediately and in presence of the school, on some breach of propriety looked at from the standpoint o,f conduct ; or whether the matter should be deferred until the child and teacher could more conveniently be alone, and the attention of the school be not thus brought against it. It was stated that some educators held that the correction and penalty should come under the conditions that witnessed it, as immediately and fronting the pupils, on the ground that it should pass as example of wrong-doing punished — an object-lesson in retribution as it were, and prop- erly humiliating to the subject of the disorder. On the other hand, it was held by many that this 26 position was not well taken, and, though they de- ferred to perhaps greater wisdom than their own, they must express the opinion that it was against the general polity of all government to compel the orderly members of a community to witness the punishment of the disorderly members : and aside from this general consideration, there might be children of such delicate temperament that a condition of nervous shock would result. There were others still who held that both ways were proper, that in some cases it would be advisable to deal with the child wholly apart from any notice of the school, and that again certain mis- demeanors might be such as to merit immediate and summary correction. There w^as dogmatiz- ing on a thousand and one other subjects of pedagogy than these, so that I became gradually imbued with many and divers opinions without any line of experience by which to square them. My observation led me to Miss Hoppin's method of securing interest on the part of the class. She would spring questions for solution to this and that member whose eyes were not fast upon her, and so she judged they failed of atten- tion. Of the unwary kind, I was on several occasions brought to my feet with a jump, or like others commanded with lack of unction to " face this way." I saw students reproved and admon- ished by her at other times and places than in the presence of the school, and so came to know that her methods of correction were a mixture of the various ways proposed above. On the whole, Miss Hoppin was fairly representative of her pro- 27 fessing associates. But there were degrees of them. In my grammar class I came before a Miss Rice, a woman of loquacity to some point. I dis- covered that she did not fit her surroundings and that official intrigue in and out of the Normal was busy with the tenure of her office. She was charged with too great liberality and she had rivals for popularity and place among the teachers of the school. The text-book which we used was Bullion's, being the fullest of its kind. It had the elaborateness of the Greek and Latin grammar ; and was the latest production of the day. It appeared that there were many authors on the market competing for preference in the schools and this had come out to meet the tendency toward a more exhaustive treatment of the subject after the manner of the classical text. It de- veloped that this tendency was a reaction from a time before when it had been held that the En- glish language was properly a language of no grammar at all, in the sense of a systematic change of words by endings as indicating their various uses. For instance the vs^ord boy, in the sense signified, does not differ in its spelling or form whether it occurs at the beginning or end of a sentence. In this use it could not be. said that there was any grammer at all to the word boy. Those who contended for a grammer of English held that it gave the language a dignity which it otherwise could not have, and elevated it in the eyes of classical students of every tongue. When asked for the practical utility of this word-chop- 28 ping they pointed out that language systematized after the formulary and method of grammar be- came logic ; and its study thus became a develop- ment of mind, — the aim of all teaching. Besides, it was pointed out that there were remains of a grammar in the occasional survival of end- changings in the words of the English language, and that this made for the desirability of a reju- venation of English grammar. The opponents to the rejuvenation notion having no reply to the aspersion that they wanted no grammar at all, or to the assertion that grammar was needed to develop mind, were silenced ; and the tendency to- ward complication had grown until so-called En- glish grammar had little meaning except to the classical student. I had studied a book by Pro- fessor Sill which represented the expression of the no-grammar notion, and it chanced that I was face to face for the first time with the unpruned thing in the Bullion book. Never having been able to make anything of even the grammar con- tained in Professor Sill. I was in sorry plight. And the matter became worse when I saw that we were merely to review the subject — freshen our memories, it was said. We were given long, rambling lessons covering many pages ; these I made at in my room without promise. When of a morning I was called upon to go through the hypothetical changes of " conjugation " in one of Mr. Bullion's verbs, I came to naught before my fellows. As I wandered from the path in the meaningless lines I was greeted with flood of laughter by the entire room, w^hich could not 29 be stayed by the efforts of Miss Rice to preserve decorum. I sat down alone amongst all that learning and stared before me. When the uproar my ignorance had occasioned ended in some calm, Miss Rice rebuked the class by saying that her observation in a life not so short had been that all knowledge was not found in books. It was through her kindness, I suppose, that I was not called upon again to stultify myself in terms of Bullion. Some days afterward we were putting upon the board by diagram what was called the analysis of sentence. In the hunt for phrase of sufficient variety and complication, one of Ham- let's soliloquies was proposed. To avoid the de- lay of bringing the book from the library, Miss Rice asked if anybody was sufficiently familiar with Shakespeare to repeat the thing in question. Her surprise was manifest that only two or three had ever read Hamlet, and that of all the class I w^as the only one who could produce the ex- tract as out of mind. The wheel had gone round ; the class sat staring at me. I began to think that education turned on very small mat- ters. Subsequently Miss Rice took occasion to point out that the member who knew the least about Bullion of all the class, used words with the most precision and economy. I found that the Bullion book belonged to a custom in the school which, for sake of variety as well afe what was called keeping abreast of the times, adopted the latest publications in any subject — as standing for the newest pattern of learning. 30 In our reading class, dogmatism in relation to the needs of the child was continued as in the other branches, with apparently the same uncertainty as to what the child really did need. Great virtue was manifest on the part of our reading master toward the fitting of the child for citizenship and preparing him for use and adornment in the walks of his fellow man. The child should be taught patriotism, and nothing was more con- ducive to this end than the committing of selec- tions from patriotic writers ; and in such a waj- that they could be recalled in the communion of his own quiet when with hand stained of occupa- tion he would be removed from the stimulus of the school — as it were, the song in the hovel of in- dustry. Again, he should be drilled in the vocal reproduction of these, that on times and occasions at gatherings they could be sprung of oppor- tunity with such charm that the decoy to patriot- ism would not be found wanting of effect : so that did the selection treat of the national flag, the red, white and blue could be seen streaming up the wind; or did the verse sound the battle charge, wrong could be seen on the scud and spilling ground with gore ; or did the verse relate of home, the love of which was a good thing to in- stil as conducive to patriotism, one should be able to hear the crow of the baby in cradle and see the srnoke wreathe from chimney. The method to these and many more things imperative and to be desired I came to understand as primar- ily such distinctness of enunciation, command of manner, and force of delivery, as should carry with it the most obdurate of unpatriotic minds and the fierest haters of home — that it should penetrate the least in motion. We were in- structed to certain pronunciations, differing from our kind, seemingly our teacher's brand in literary manufacture ; we were given to know that by this alone could a standard of purity in English be preserved from the vulgarity of every day use. We were cautioned against the commonplace of language — against the slang of the people. It Was time enough to use the language of the peo- ple when usage had made it a part of English, had introduced it into the dictionary or other- had given it authority. Much was made of "gems of selection" in reading, since in the com- mon schools this would be the only method of ad- ministering literature to the people, the classes there being of necessity limited in number and scope; the tendency should therefore be to make reading the study of literature. We were told that the newspapers often afforded passing oppor- tunity for good selections, although the much crudity which they contained must be guarded against. Special publications, carefuly pruned, were therefore better as removing the child from the common or vulgar stream. Much at- tention was given to orthography as in the enun- ciation of particular letters and the labelling of them according to the position of the organs in sounding them. This was called a revival of orthography which in the earlier days of the schools had been given a special text-book, but latterly had fallen from prominence. It was seen 32 that it must be hooked on to something like read- ing in order that it might have sufficient place to prevent its falling obsolete, since the daily use of the people found no necessity for keeping it alive. It was pointed out that in particular cases few of these things could be lost, when the child had come to manhood, since in a demo- cratic form of government the possibilities of public oratory were open to the humblest ; and the personal satisfaction of having elocutionary power to charm was not a small thing. At the close of our course in reading, the most select of our selections went round the class, each student rising in his place and driving at them with such climbing of enunciation that the remem- brance of the w^hole course was as the preparation for a fete-day topped out with brimstone and red lights. Our teacher in history. Miss Cutcheon, was held in great repute as a presenter. From the talk which I heard among the students I gleaned that the subject of history was more than usually dry and uninteresting. Miss Cutcheon's excel- lence seemed to lie in a multitude of devices for bringing interest to the net. It w^as declared that she aroused interest. Many that did not properly belong in the course attended the class for review, as they said, and in order to have their interest stimulated. I was thus a member of one of two large sections composing a class for the awakening of the history-interest. We were told that the arousing lay not altogether with the teacher but in part if not wholly depended on our 33 own state of mind ; that there was such a thing as susceptibility to interest which the teacher could not create. While the teacher could spread an intellectual feast, it must be expected that our appetites would do the rest. Though the teacher could tempt interest, it was not to be expected that it would not retui-n to slumber if the permanent desire was not there. It became us to be susceptible. Underlying all continued interest and effective results from presentation in any subject, must be a desire born of the needs of the mind through a sufficiently lively sense of duty in relation to the obligations of citizenship. The latter depended more or less on intelligence ; and a knowledge of the history of one's own country, if not of the race, must be ad- mitted as a very important item in all intelli- gence. The first factor in all awakening of inter- est w^as therefore an appreciation of our needs of the subject and a firm exercise of the will in at- tention upon it. The burden of the arousal thus thrown upon us, we exerted ourselves as directed. A number whose history-interest slumbered in ex- traneous attractions, as when martial band passing set the air to rhythm, were recalled to history-at- tention by peremptory 'bout face after the man- ner of Miss Hoppin. The lamentable pass of, my teachers was the assumption of conditions that did not exist They overloaded everything appertaining to the segre- gated book. It was the falsity of the distorted relation in life and the consequent exaggerations. It was the scurry of a getting without doing. The 34 half-truth which it all contained related to the in- telligent direction of a real interest. Though I saw it then it was only after years that I could phrase it to myself, that "attention" meant dis- traction. Further, the implication of our teachers that citizenship was comprehended in the ballot, fell upon me as an unreality which I could not de- fine, so much did I rest in the custom of taking things for granted on the deliverance of others. But it was thus with growing misgiving that I w^alked amongst the doctrines of the professing teachers, my consciousness of the disorder short of any phrasing. I w^as excused from geography, the remain- ing common-school study, on the ground that it was not so difficult to teach, and that I seemed sufficiently familiar with it, and that I had enough other studies to occupy my time. But it was held that all teachers could and should drill to sing. I demonstrated the fallibility of this tenet in my own case in persistently throwing a chorus out of tune. The gentlemanly conductor, Mr. Pease, finally excused me, setting down my inability to the account of an "impediment." V. THE MONEY-GETTERS WITH the close of the school year in June my feelings fought against return to Dundee, the memory of my long disquiet bulking upon me. 35 I took myself to Chicago, my hope being in an acquaintance who published the Commercial Advertiser (newspaper) and conducted a printing house. On an allowance of eight dollars per week that I made stretch over my expenses, I was put collecting ; going on errands or working in the office when there were no bills to take out. But the collections took up most of my time. My connection brought me to a strange company. I found the newspaper office a rendezvous for advertising men. My friend, the proprietor of the paper, I discovered was regarded as of a kind with the rest ; he was spoken of by them as the chief jigger, and was in ability as a schemer given precedence. He was of my town and I had known him in his youth ; further on, he was one of the older boys at school. He had taught school a term and been active in the conduct of the Lyceum or Debating Club which I have referred to as a part of my sensuous license. I remember that he left home in the fall of the second Chicago fire. He had proposed moving from town to town in the region of Dundee, and getting money by taking halls and giving rehearsals in what his posters set forth as elocution. He brought up in Chicago after a few weeks and started getting money on advertising schemes. The way of it would be to solicit cards from merchants at a round fee, for placing on the margin of a so- called souvenir picture. Again it would be a card in a " Directory of the Leading Firms of Chicago." It would be represented that these 36 would hang in numerous public places, — all the hotels or railway stations of America, for in- stance. Commonly, few more would be printed than enough to pass around to the firms advertis- ing. The Commercial Advertiser had itself been published as an advertising scheme having the money-getting touch. Advertisements were asked for the first issue on the prospectus of a large circulation ; and for succeeding issues, on rep- resentations of growing circulation. Subscribers to the number of a few hundred were obtained in the course of time ; but on the inside it was for an advertising project for money-getting, purely. Regardless of the subscribers, the number of papers printed depended entirely on the state of the proprietor's pocket on the day of publication. If he had the immediate cash to buy paper and pay the printer, the subscribers got their sheet ; otherwise no more would be printed than enough to mail to advertisers. Some of these advertising men now^ and then took advertisements as can- vassers on the regular staff of one or other of the city dailies ; but in these cases, while it was easier to take contracts, the percentage paid the canvasser was small, and the advertising man with " stuff " in him preferred to work his own invention for money-getting. From the getters of learning at the School and the Academy, I had fallen amongst the money-getters of the street. By this I continued my course in the unreality of the prevalent over-reaching, in lieu of some normal or func- tional doing. The sensuous or broken life which 37 these men led accorded with their lack of use- fulness in any office befitting them. The friction v/hich they underwent in efforts distasteful to them they set down to the strain of canvassing. From this they fled to the benumbing of alcoholic spree when the strain had been at all great, at longer or shorter intervals, and depending on the lard of their pockets. Many of them worked the races and altogether went much about the coun- try, in their poverty of rest tiring of a single spot. An advertising scheme good in one city was gen- erally considered good in another, and a railroad or a steamboat company would be brought under contribution for advertisement to be taken out in passes, so that going was easy. I remember Charlie Hinsdale who it was said had done London and Paris and played the bank at Monte Carlo. He carried the address of shrewdness, gentility, and diplomatic touch. A few years afterwards I met him by chance at the National Yachting Re- gatta in Detroit. He was moving across the country toward New York. The summer season had caught him stranded in the provinces, he said. With his partner, Fatty Barlow, these men gen- erally travelling in pairs, he was working the ad vertisers of Detroit and the races together. In the way of advertising he was making contracts for cards on the cover of a restaurant bill of fare, a fake scheme, he called it. The men about me at Chicago of the type of Mr. Hinsdale were so far conscious of the unreality of their pursuit of getting merely, that they not uncommonly, in the manner of pleasantry, referred to their place 38 of meeting as the bandit's cave. Continued in- tercourse with these men throughout the summer led me to know that they regarded the whole of life thus brokenly. When it came their way they would gibe at the finished products of the school, themselves not less, as some of them held diplomas. They found no reality in the seer, and-the merchant was to them a robber. The falsity of my contact at the schools had large reinforcement. Toward fall, being on no basis except the from-day-to-day uncertain bringing in of funds by canvassers, my connection fell away, and I was reduced to the necessity of finding some other employment or returning to my parent's home ; contemplation of the latter was depression, and I had become imbued with the idea of get- ting money as the thing standing most import- tant. Through correspondence with the i^rinci- pal, or president as is now affected, of the Nor- mal, I w^as put in communication with Mr. Morehouse, director of a district school near De- catur, in Van Buren county, my own state. He took me on the recommendation of Presi- dent Estabrook he afterwards told me. I went to my place on the opening of the school in the middle of November, arriving at Decatur of a Saturday evening, and driving to the home of Mr. Morehouse in a livery rig the next morn- ing through a light fall of snow. I was to get thirty-five dollars per month and board myself, differing from some schools where the teacher still "boarded around" among the families of the JQ district. Monday mornirg found me at the school -house with Thorndike Nourse's old school record, put into my hands by the director ; and such indefiniteness of purpose as could only come of twenty years of getting and loafing. This was all I had. My jumbled knowledge of books and my dogmas about teaching were as much use, with the actual machine before me and the lever presented to my hand, as tenets and adjurations about the steam-engine would be to a man called upon to preside in the cab of the fast mail. But the instrument I sat was more delicate of manip- ulation and the consequences might be wreck of affairs. I had heard precepts importing this all through my attendance at the Normal, and before and after, but their meaning waited on the long course of experience, and I was not even yet to know their portent. The last significance of dis- aster is not for the man who has never know^n fulfilment. My consciousness that something was wrong was however to take somewhat more of shape. At least I was to have added friction. I rung the school of about forty to their seats and took their names, much as I remembered seemg my teachers do it. Then I called up be- fore me the pupils of each subject and listed them. But in this I had about reached the limits of any- thing like experience, and felt that I must jump for it. I do not know how much certain benefit I had received from the dogmas I incurred at the Normal, but my assurance goes that through the difficulty of their application to the particular situation they gave me more of con- 40 fusion than help. We had been told that as teachers in arranging the classes, we should have as few recitations as possible in order to em- ploy ourselves more with each class and avoid the loss of time and confusion incident to the moving back and forth across the floor. This sdunded vastly true when I heard it and was all very well for the man who must have something to say when performing as the stock teacher ; but it had a sorry lack of resourceful meaning in the particular case of expectant children crowding for place in a given book and wanting a particular class. The particular absent from the fact, I was w^ithout fact at all ; my teachers had lied to me and washed their hands of. it. But I had no word for this. I only knew that confusion brought me down, and I laid my difficulty to my lack of diligence when I was with my teachers. They had told me, and I still believed, that the trouble came from that. So great was my inertia. The truth about the desirability of as few classes as possible, lay in the very conditions of my practice; it was the self-shaping of these conditions. When I found that a certain class could not read around in the time allotted, or otherwise compass the drill I designed for them, I knew that we lacked time. This was the how of it and there the reality lay. The truth con- tained in the proposition that they should have more time lay in all the conditions that went for or against it. There could be no abstract truth about this as a thing apart. The truth was in the way of this particular case. The rule, that if 41 caught on the top of a house with an insane man who is proposing to jump down with you arm in arm you are to turn his mind by proposing to go down and jump up, may need a very nice weighing of conditions into which the rule enters but to ham- per, especially if it should result that the lunatic declines your offer. And again the proposition might fail entirely on accovmt of lack of experience in handling lunatics. And I was not unlike a man who had committed rules of this kind, until a vagueness possessed me that everything had to be done by an exact and so-called scientific rule committed beforehand. So that my mind moved not upon its object, refusing to work upon or co- ordinate the immediate conditions before me. I seemed to have no power of doing just what the conditions themselves most indicated, as I would if coming to a ditch I must cross and wished to pass dry shod. I failed in every case to do the easy thing at hand and what the circumstances themselves cried out for ; I did not go to the fence and get a rail. The commonplace seemed out of accord with my rules, which in turn I was unable to apply. My mind was frozen in the static. Like the lunatic in the charge of the novice, the school knew I was un- taught of my business. I carry with me now the picture of young eyes that failed in faith of me because I returned to them no confidence. I talked much, as I remembered my teachers had done at the Normal, hoping it would pass for skill in teaching; I think my volubility must have surprised them, if it did not impress them a little. I gave out lessons that some of the children thought were long and some thought were short ; we had been told at the Normal not to give long lessons, and in this school I never knew which it was. Some of the finer questions of formulary in discipline raised at the Normal, came my way to give trouble ; it wasn't so much the question of when and where to correct a pupil as it was the question of my ability to correct him at all. Some boys that I keiDt after school I could not manage ; and two big boys who persist- ently came in late and that I spoke to in the pres- ence of the school, insultingly overrode my authority and in mien told me to help myself. The knowledge of my incapacity was as weighted mind. My extremity painted the up- heaval of the school beneath me, and at the close of a week along in December, through the mud, I caught the midnight train at Decatur for Chi- cago. After sleepless weeks, I found respite in the turn of wheels that put distance between me and the scene of my first great disaster. I had run away. It was on a Saturday morning warm as Jvine that I was back again at the bandit's clearing-house in Chicago. Whisky and disorder had been busy at the office of the Commercial Advertiser. The City National Bank, Mr. Bushnell president, had latterly been confidenced into advancing money to the concern and backing its accumulated obli- gations. The bank, already weak, had gone down, suspending payment a few clays before my return to town. I found the office in state 4-?, of siege by creditors ; assets of uncollect- able accounts and hypothecated furniture were the pay of their avidity. My friend, the leader of the getters, put a bullet through his body the day of my arrival, and lay at death. The dozen other canvassers, always on marching orders, straightway broke camp, and were busy with their several devices in many towns. I attended to my wounded friend, with my finger on the hole above his heart the night through. Surgeon Gunn told me I might stay the blood if I wished, though he would die before morning. But he didn't, and I nursed him to his feet. Thirty days -afterwards I went with him to the Home on the Hillside at Dansville, New York, where he re- mained valetudinary for some weeks. I left him there, going on by the Erie to New York, the city of my longing ; from which, as in my first visit to Chicago,! fled to return to my home at Dundee. I passed the forlorn spring and summer of the faithless man. Behind me was the chance I had foregone in my school in Van Buren county. I at last carried with me the chiding of unpaid op- portunity. And when the finger of self-convic- tion pointed me out I know that I humbled my- self. I know I thought if I could return once more to Ypsilanti that I would with greater wis- dom employ my time. There was surely some- thing there that I had failed in the getting. The opportunity came, much as before, and at the opening of the school in September I was again in my seat at the Normal, not without misgivings as to the good I hoped for. 44 THE HIGH-PRIESTS OF PEDAGOGY T WAS now to penetrate to the center of the sys- -•■ tern. I knew that in my previous attendance at the Normal my contact had not been with the so-understood higher pedagogy. My milling had been more particularly academic and without refer- ence to the special course in teaching ; though as seen, we were supposed to have undergone some seasoning through contact with specially trained teachers and their methods. I had latterly been anticipating the element of full profit in attend- ance on the special course in the so-called theory and practice of teaching. I had come back to the Normal looking for what I had missed, — for a reality I had not met in my previous term. I w^as standing at the door of the inner court of pedagogy with the consciousness of a great though undefined need. In proportion to this indefinite- ness and disorder in my mind I felt that it was by some species of legerdemain that I was to sack and bundle off the relief that should be afforded my extremity. My contact with the more professing side of the school brought me into an atmosphere wholly pedagogical in which great interest in all school matters was vowed on every hand. All-round de- velopment of mind was the burden of much talk. The text Sciences were regarded as of over- weening benefit here. With a timidity born of slight knowledge in these things, I used the scien- tific phrasing with little glibness compared to many of my companions. I was to fall into some dis- 45 favoi' with the well-meaning souls about tne owing to my apparent apathy here. Not to be far behind in matters scientific, I joined the class in Natural Philosophy conducted by a beefy and self-contained gentleman, Professor McLouth. I remember early in' the course the demonstration by the professor of the phenomena of falling bodies. I was greatly taken ■vrith the mechanism of the machine which he used, together with its operation. Beyond this some problems developed in which the class were to find the ratio of in- crease in the momentum of the descending body from second to second. My interest ran down with the machine and I gave no great attention to the accuracy of the figures proposed, being satis- fied with the principle presented that there was a regular rate of increase from moment to moment in the descent. My mind saw no utility in the memorizing of the word formulary involved and the exact employment of figures. It was a load to me to have to commit them to memory and give them back to the professor on succeeding days at the recitations. In a vein of rebellion I so remarked to some of my companions. The word was passed about the class, and many heads turned to look at me with surprise in a manner of deprecation. This forbade further frankness on my part ; and I inclined in" my subsequent expression to greater softness, feeling that other- wise I might fall upon the jagged tooth of learn- ing. When superstition grinned I found my legs. In the reference to Higher Mathematics I heard geometry singled out as of protean 46 lift in the development of mind, which I have noted was the strain of the talk about me. While it was said to have its practical uses in the business of life, this was held to be a very vul- gar matter compared to the study of the thing for learning pure and simple and the mental develop- ment w^hich it afforded as being the primary ob- ject of all school instruction. Carrying this esti- mate to the end of its tether, our professor, Mr. Bellows, had prepared a geometry in which the problems alone were stated, vmlike the pre- vailing texts in which the demonstrations were afforded. If a little difficulty and quandary put in the way of the student was conducive to mental development, more might be an improve- ment on this, the student being left to his own invention of solution. Throughout I heard much complaint from a part of the students against the rigor of the course ; where five problems under the old plan would be called a reasonable lesson, they would hold that one problem under this method was sufficient. A few found the course to their liking and held that half a dozen such problems was little enough ; they w^anted more. Driven to the last argument, the professor would defend the essential of his plan by poiht- ing out that under the method of the wrought-out problem the student in the majority of cases but committed the text and was not in any sense ben- efited of his reasoning powers. The defendants of the opposite course, and there were a number in the faculty, would hold that there was at least the development of the memory powers, which in 47 itself was not to be despised. I do not remember that any agreement was ever arrived at as to the superior benefit of these two phases of devel- opment. I believe the nearest concord of conclu- sion was the willingness to allow each teacher to use his own judgment as to the needs of his pu- pils or the schools in whatever section of the earth he might be dropped. For my part I con- tinued for a long time treading air upon these and kindred matters. It was the question of the method against the child. Some piece along in the term, in our pedagog- ical class proper, the discussion was continued as to the age at which geometry should begin, and as to whether it should be given to tender girls. The question resolved itself into the more form- idable one of whether the child should be taught all that he could learn at any period ; and here arose the question on the detail side as to whether the child could be interested in geometry. It was held by the professor that he might be in- terested in anything that he could understand ; and following out this conclusion it must be seen that it largely lay with the ability of the teacher to interest the pupil. Here was the old ques- tion of whether the teacher was sufficiently adept as an interest-arouser. In vvhatever pertained to the practical side of teaching, we continued in the main this circling of discussion, our seeming guide being wholly on the lines of the child's mental development with its predominant guessing. I linger with the geometry class because it illustrates in a very forcible .way, in the high 48 practice of the system, the imposition of the method upon the learner. As I have noted, some in the class found the lesson of five problems too easy, but more found it four or five problems too long ; and the inkling of a great reality bore in upon me when I would find in the library a young lady who had failed in her problem the morning, with tears in her eyes, saying she could not see what it was all about anyway ; she didn't see how she could ever use it, and she spent so much time on it that she was fuddled and the different subjects in the school were in a whirl of mind. For my own part, I had cold feet and a congested spine every morning fearing I should be called on for a problem I could not state. I found that I was not alone here and that sympa- thy was at large. This helped me, but I felt that I was under the ban of the so regarded more intelligent students of the class. The method thus filed and warped me. I carried my shortcoming to the dinner table after a session and it consumed my juice. In the burning of self-reproach and fear I passed my days and the goblin of the method stalked rny bed. Goaded by the dread of further failure in geom- etry, I fell in particular one night on a determin- ation to conquer all the problems for the succeed- ing day. By dint of an all-night siege I carried to the class the solution of one. Fortune stood me in and when the problems were assigned this one fell to me. Saved by a hair's breadth is the romance of life. I demonstrated my problem with a diffidence, the counterpart of my uncer- 49 tainty as to whether it was right. But I met great distinction. Mr. Bellows singled me out as the author of a demonstration unique and dif- ferent from any he had seen regarding that par- ticular problem. It was not in the books, he said. It showed thought, was the conclusion of his notice of my work. At once it became appar- ent that I had risen pegs in the estimation of those about me. Chance continued to go my way in the geometry class, and I did not after- wards meet w^ith anything I could not tolera- bly handle. But I w^alked uncertain ground, fearing that a single stumble on any one of the many problems I did not compass might precipi- tate me from the steeps of adulation to which I had sprung. The farce came home to me that my associates could stand so befooled and blind in the superstition of the school. There were others, not a few, as timorous as myself ; and fuller ex- perience has since taught me that there was in the class no sober mind that did not walk as with the feeling of scales upon his eyes. That it was the method against the student and not the method of the student, I had yet to fully realize. My direction bore towards the course in Theory and Practice proper. Before entering the class my intercourse with the students had foretold that disappointment was likely to sit upon me. Some bolder spirits spoke variously of the work according to their degree of con- tempt. With the many such it was more com- monly characterized as soup. From a few who ventured no direct word against it I heard it 50 spoken of as very difficult and especially the psychology part. Some of these would say that they did not understand it altogether, and were exceedingly glad that they had finished it and held a certificate of passing it. And finally I came to know that all had to pass it ; from it, as in some other studies, there was no escape. It was the center and trend and largeness of the system ; it was reckoned the thing which all teachers should take. I came gradually to under- stand the diffidence of some who would remain silent w^ith no more than significant look of agree- ment w^hen others spoke against it ; as well as the action of others who gave it measure of what seemed to me unintelligent praise. I came to know that the mark of condemnation rested upon those who spoke openly against the course. They were held as lacking in the qualities of the Teacher ; as scoffers at the fundamentals of the science ; they were said not to have a love for the calling. Those who made a liking for the course, w^ere held in the way of usefulness and marked for high position in the profession. Testimonials to the Almighty and a show of much love for the child, also lay in the track of favor with the professors. Any neglect or lack of interest in the Professional Course was in the last event a lack of earnestness in the w^ork and would support charge of shortcoming in other di- rections. Many students w^ho had gone out from the Normal to teach, finding they could trust me, bore testimony that it was of no use to them in 51 their work ; they confessed that they did not know what it meant. I heard the good student spoken of. The good student as it came to me in the pedagogical sense, whatever might be his deficiencies in other directions, must have show of proficiency in the professional course. I have noted the prefer- ment of these ; it was the good students who se- cured the best paying positions in the state when, through application of this or that school at the Normal, place was for bestowal. Advancement in the favor of the faculty meant advancement in position and pocket. As I looked to get on, my wish grew that I might go safely through the course with no disaster greater than the worry and waterlogging which all anticipated. The Theory and Practice class made show of unusual industry. Our Professor Putnam at the start-off informed us industry should be very pronounced in the teacher. By no other highw^ay could we hope to round-up at scholarly attain- ment and professional skill. His hope was that we came to him with such breadth of academic grounding and such love for the profession that his work would be made the lighter ; that there remained for him but to administer the sugges- tion to minds already far advanced in the acquire- ment of the resourceful teacher's stock in trade. He made no doubt that there were those before him better fitted by natural endowment than him- self to occupy the chair — excepting only some more years of experience. It was this experience in observation which he hoped would perfect us in 52 ways of which his professional efforts on our behalf might be considered, at its highest estimate, but the starting. We would all admit that this start- ing was necessary ; that we came at last to the end by virtue of having started. He hoped that having put foot forward we would not return again to ways unprofessional. At this first mile- post on the high-road of our industry, our in- structor straddled quite over the whole way of humor and hoped that some of us in after years might outrun an humble conductor and be known in halls of fame. As such his pleasure would be that he had contributed some jot and tittle ; that at all time he had the greatest hope for the humblest member of the class, for did not the lowly come up higher? He hoped that he would be able to present a manner so mollified that it would encourage criticism and discussion on the part of the most diffident. If he should succeed in arousing a spirit of inquiry but not of captious faultfinding, he would feel that he was in our presence to some purpose. The most that he could hope w^ould be to make us conscious of our shortcomings and give us view of the field of possibilities that lay our way. If he could do more than this, he w^ould be happy and it would be conceded to our gain. The method in our instructor's lighter vein had already come to me as the measure of his popu- larity. I had heard some young ladies sum him up as very nice. An air of patronage and meek- ness which dwelt ever with him had passed with some of the students who were in disgust, as 53 Aunty. He w^s by some lady members of the faculty pointed out as an example of a teacher who could be firm and yet mild and who could rebuke with the least offence. These had been urged as approaching the ideal quality in the teacher. I had heard from others that he was a very fine man but deficient in government. Through this diverse opinion and the prelim- inary of the professor, I thus fairly entered the special course of teaching, not forgetting along w^ith my companions abundant paper which I was enjoined should be fed my pencil in notes as proof of industry. These notes were to be shown the chair after some progress or at the end of the course. Those who had been ahead of me declared there was little danger in making them too vol- uminous. They were supposed to be preserved and then carried to our schools for reference when difficulties obtruded. I learned to imitate my companions in facial evidence of contempla- tion and effort to the subject in hand. Failure to bite my pencil and w^rinkle my brows in the early stages had given me a reputation for friv- olity with our instructor, which I found served me in bad stead throughout the term and w^hich I was not able wholly to overcome. This and other inequalities with my surroundings resulted later in judgments upon my head. Our mild pro- fessor came to speak in a manner of grief against me in the faculty meetings and gave loose to doubts as to my fitness for the calling I had invaded. 54 In the way of the ahle presenter, Mr. Put- nam being so accounted, we were led by easy steps on the circuit of Theory. This had in it a good deal of speculation as to the nature of mind, terminating in some few things which it was said we must all admit mind was : of these latter the import- ant was, first, that we had Sensation, because when we w^ere touched we could feel ; and likewise, second, the most simple mind must admit that all had Intellect as standing for thought, for what rational being would deny that he could think ; and, last, there could be no dispute about Will as a part of mind because the word covered phenomena which were old as recorded thought. Again, we must all admit the feeling which was prompted by some magnificent presence as of cloud-hung mountain, being the mark of no- ble quality and distinguishing man from brute — Emotion. We must, in short, admit enough to occupy our attention. Why speculate ? Though it must be agreed after all that speculation had its uses. But the essentials were before us and the practice of the school must be erected on them. As near as I could divine the and^ the demarca- tion point became the speculation or guesses of practice, the so-called application of these "known" facts about mind. This I weighed as the Practice part of Theory and Practice, though like some of my fellows I was always muddled about it. We w^ere cautioned somewhere here against regarding the elements of mind as set off in little apartments with partitions between them ; while the distinctive characteristics of the phe- 55 nomena of mind compelled us to treat these ele- ments as though they were thus set off, we were not to fall into the error of regarding it as fact ; it was only in their use that they were to be so regarded. The mental lesion involved in the putting apart in this way oifact and action is for me only equalled by that in the separation of the God-principle from life. We presently devolved, as near as could be seen, into the wide plain of Practice. We were told that it was very wide. The professor was pleased already to note complement with our pencils. Recitations occured day by day and we had to stand in our places and repeat the substance of the matter in a set proposition which the in- structor had formulated for our notes. These we committed to memory verbatim if we had not nearness in our own language for it, serving the triple purpose it was said of, first, making us fa- miliar with the subject matter ; second, strength- ening the memory ; third, helping us to the more formal language of apt expression. I found per- force, like others, that I had to memorize these propositions ; as, not coming from any direct ex- perience, they stood apart from the bent or true movement of my mind. Most of the class would stick to their notes, refreshing their memories just before entering the room or as soon after as they, could, when they anticipated being called upon. We were sometimes told to put our notes aside that a test might be made of how much we were absorbing ; when those who had not "boned" before coming in would get left, as was said. 56 In the way of the practice or application we were called to note first the distinctness of sensa- tion in the field of mind, and how it might have its special ways of cultivation. Oftentimes it needed to be restrained, sequestered, so to speak. Training the fingers to travel the keys of the piano with precision and the eye to distinguish and grade color, might be considered example of its legitimate cultivation. While the training of the palate to distinguish and crave the different brands of alcoholic liquors was an example of its illegitimate cultivation, and should be regarded as tabooed in any modern school curriculum, although the ancients and even some moderns might have considered it- the vastly appropriate practice. These problems could only be answered by the con- siderations of the moral nature of man, the ques- tion of right and wrong. And it must be ad- mitted by all that any practice which tended to injure one's fellows could not be placed in the category of right. The moral nature of man was his higher nature and could not be trifled with. The absurdity of this to me has been the truism of it on one side and the falsity on the other which leaves out in both cases the element of overweighted training. The meaning of train- ing, understood by everybody as of rational con- tact, reduced the whole talk to idiocy. For what truism there was in it, we do not need to preach the withholding of hot irons from the flesh of our fellows ; no oracle needs to tell us this. It was nauseant. The formalising and reiteration of such things under the guise of teaching has 57 become the intrenchment of a class that repre- sents so much dissipation of the energies of the State. I and my associates had fallen victims of an overreaching class interest, fortified of custom, and without warrant in an essential method of the school. Our notes waxed in fulness. There w^ere the considerations of Percept and Concept in intel- lect. From these we were to draw important practice. The concept related more particularly to the region of pure thought and was less im- perative from the teacher's standpoint than the former which related more to the experience or substance of knowledge. The method of percep- tion was that an object, as an apple,-was first pre- sented to the senses as a whole. Then the parts were distinguished ; after which, as in the full precept, we saw them — pulp, skin, seed, core — as connected, being the full percept. Hence this af- forded the method of practice when bringing the child to knowledge. We would first present a thing as a whole and afterward point out the parts to the child and then lead him to see their connections or relations. This was to lead him by rational steps to acquire a full^ knowledge of the whole. Not to go further, the separation of thought and ex- perience tended to make lesion in my brain, it having in my understanding been no part of my contact. Here was the necessity to commit the proposition and repeat it back to the instructor as foreign element and unmeaning. And why formulate a method of presenting knowledge that in the argument of the instriictor alone might 58 be seen to be self -regulating ? The very notion of part involved the consciousness of the other parts, or the whole. And how could we present an object to a child faster or different than his experience could take it? Separate and apart from all that had gone before, our instructor finally brought us to the Practice of Will. It could be educated. There was the consideration of the freedom of will. A great many denied this, yet were we not all conscious of freedom of choosing between this and that? Need further argizment be af- forded? But here our instructor fell foul of his own machinery. We were all befogged as to whether the education of Choice was the edu- cation of intelligence or something else. This was the necessity of more memorizing of propo- sitions, whose increment made the clog of our understanding. There were what were called general consid- erations, as the desirability of the experimental method and the extent to which it should be used. Viewing this in the light of the earlier pronounce- ment of our instructor, that all knowledge came from experience, I have never been able to un- derstand that it was a question for any considera- tion at all. Talk was in proportion as our in- structor violated his unity, in proportion as he severed knowledge and experience ; if he regarded them as one he would be out of a job. And how could there be any question of the desirability of experience, anyway ? To read and memorize propositions about a steam engine as a 59 / method of teaching was a lie, an imperfect thing, when you could see one ; and seeing one merely, as a method of teaching, would be a lie when it might be given to handle one. Along with all this there were a thousand and one things labelled more important or less important, propositions for memorizing and propositions for reading, which I may not dwell upon. Like the forego- ing, they are in the books. I found that my in- structor, as of his kind, but purloined and re- hashed these things. He was for me the emascu- lated pedagogue. The separation of Will and Intelligence was, like all the other separate and apart things in the psychology, so treated, the measure of his sys- tem. As with knowledge and experience and all kindred distinctions, these brought together, ad- mitted as one, discussion would fall and the sys- tem with it. There would be left no gospel of pedagogical doctrines to preach. Did an in- structor then profess to teach teaching, he would be compelled to take his apprentice in whatever department of the field he might be working. I began to discfern that back of the jargon of the pedagogue was the real school of a practice, could it be uncovered. (Appendix i.) Dreaded not less than the course in Theory and Practice, was a stated period of an hour a day in the Annex, or Training School. I think about half an ordinary year at the Normal was re- quired of this in order to secure the necessary cer- tificate as one with the other studies of the school that must be passed. It was regarded 60 by the students as an incident to be got by. The Practice School had an immediate Director who consulted in matters of method with Professor Putnam, making the connection with his chair. This was supposed to go for the laying on of the theory, and the course was enjoined to be taken up by students after they had subscribed to the gospel of doctrines. For convenience in cases there was some variation of this, but as a matter of routine they were supposed to have acquired some ripened idea of the teacher's aim and method as delivered by the mouth of the oracle. It was thus in effect of administration at the Nor- mal that the theory was separated from the prac- tice ; preceding the conditions of practice it could in no part be drawn from them, each indi- vidual student's experience considered as these conditions. Again, the question of precedence aside, theory and practice were asunder in the ad- ministrative policy of the institution in as far as considerations in the lead of the practice failed to arise from the direct and immediate experience. And, the Training and Practice course accounted as the essential policy of the Normal, the excuse for the institution being at all, there was in a class of fifty the possibil- ity of arriving at the individual experience of but one at a time, and such being the case there was no theory or consideration for the prac- tice of the other forty-nine ; in so far as remote from the personal experience and the direct theory, or w^ay, for the solution of the quandary of an actual situation, it was but disorder and dis- 6i traction. In . my encounter with Van Buren my lance had broken here. It came about that I was called to do duty in the Training School before I had gone my full course in Theory and Practice. I was assigned by the director, Miss Post, to the eighth grade, a class corresponding to the eighth year of school life ; children ranging somewhere about four- teen and sixteen years. I soon discovered one phase of the aversion which the students at the Normal had to the Training course. I had been turned into a room with a small body of rioters. It happened that I had been warned against this class in particular, by students who experienced it before me. A good-natured senior, of large and heavy figure, seemingly able to crunch a head in his hand, had told me to pray for any class but this. But in my usual luck I found myself caged with them. There was a son of Professor Mc- Louth and a daughter and son of Professor Bel- lows, and there were children of other professors, all reported to me by the students as unmanage- able. But some of them had qualities and I took to them. There were boys who sold papers about town, and who boarded passing trains with pea- nuts and fruit ; they had been labelled as the worst type of small-town street arabs and had been rated as most intractable. I had been advised not to in- cur the ill-will of these, as they combined against the teacher who offended them, and not only made a bedlam of the class-room but surrounded him on the street to hoot, or at a distance pelt him with stones, sticks and snow-balls. I was 62 told that I might better leave the Normal than put correcting hand upon one of them. Several of my advisors agreed that this state of things had grown out of the student-teacher being forbidden to use any manual force with them, the method of correction in vogue requiring them to be sent to Professor Putnam for any considerable offence. It vv^as thus, they said, that the student-instructor came to be looked upon by the class as a monkey. I was told that the professor would solicitously talk to them and point out the need of an education and what they were in the way of losing, asking them if they did not want to be good instead of bad. They would then be returned to the class- room to jeer. Their visit to Professor Putnam would be manifestly a show. This handling of the children was denominated moral suasion, being a phase of the apartness of Theory and Practice. My advent was on a Monday morning, and eyes in speaking faces began cautiously to esti- mate their fresh victim. My friend of the big hand, who had taught a good deal in the state, told me that if the class ever fell to him he would make it his business not to say anything as he thought there was too much talking. He said the rest of it might depend on circumstances ; but he thought it would be a calamity spanking and heel marks on the ceiling, though he knew he would be in danger of expulsion for the overriding of pacific rules. Acting on my friend's suggestion, I changed the deal w^ith the class and answered w^ith silence their invitation to make an ass of my- 63 self. I was soon greeted with giggle and show of resentment. By the time outbreak began I had the leader in my eye and he was all over the room three or four times before he realized that the machine had started. He landed ruffled and aghast in Miss Post's presence in the Assembly Room with the class door shut upoH him. Silence continued its lesson and I busied myself with matters on the outside and through the window. At the close of the recitation I asked the class to study anything for the morrow that they might like, though it might be nothing at all. Making home that day I discovered on the corner of the school-ground the more turbulent spirits in what I took to be council of war. As I walked down the street on the descent from the Normal the firing opened on me from behind in the shape of icy missiles some of which were well shot. At the foot of the hill was my big friend observing the bombardment. I walked on, re- ceiving the chunks in my back, and requested him as I passed to grab the ring-leader for me, when in following me they should come up to where he was. When he called me I turned to find that the boy who had been put to boot that morn- ing was the one in the trap. It was a thawing day of winter when snow-balls packed and melting snow and ice filled the ditches. Reaching the boy, I waded out with him into a foot of slush water and dipped him completely Miss Post came up as I released him gasping. She demanded what I was doing with her boy and said she would report me to Professor Putnam. 64 Nevertheless the cabal was broken and the leader of the mob was the quietest member of my class next day, though of glowering aspect. I listened to the reports of the children in the variety of their pursuits in the interim since the session before and altogether we traded a good many stories. I let this work -which I had be- gun with them shape itself a good deal as it w^ould. Our subject was arithmetic. When ap- proaching percentage as commonly laid down in the books, I thought to make no distinction what- ever and carry it on simply as fractions. The method was to deal with fractions whose denomi- nators were loo, but manipulate them just as with any fraction ; the class only saw that they had a peculiar fraction with regard to the denom- inators being all the same. After sufficient work in them I had only to consume a few minutes' time of a single recitation to point out to the class that such fractions were often spoken of as frac- tions-by-the-hundred, the other word for it and the one more commonly used being fer cent. For example, twenty per cent meant 20-100 or, always regarded by them in its lowest terms, 1-5. 'They thus traveled toward a comprehensive and working knowledge of percentage without ex- periencing any mental break in the generic or way of the thing, being the reality. I forewent the usual formulary of percentage in the way of Base, Rate, etc., as tending, at least at the mo- ment, to a disruption of their minds and conse- quent confusion. I simply avoided lesion of the brain with them. Things had gone on for some 6^ weeks to this juncture and we were looking for further sport, as my class had come to call it, when we were visited by Miss Post, to know what we were doing. She said it had come to her indirectly that we were not following the course laid down and were omitting important matters that should come to the notice of child- ren. By these matters I took her to mean the lapse in the formulary which I above refer to. She said she understood that there was more play than real work going on in the class. I ad- mitted all the good lady charged me with and told her I supposed it was my misfortune but that I couldn't do it any better, and that I would file my application with her to be relieved of my charge in case Professor Putnam was of her mind ; I hoped she would not soften the thing in report- ing it to him. The spring vacation came about this time and matters so turned that I neve'r went back to the class. Before leaving, word came to me from Professor Putnam through Miss Post that my way of instruction must be stopped as it would throw all the grades of the school out of gear ; that the eighth grade w^ould not be ready to pass the usual examinations admitting them to the next higher ; the things I had omitted to give them were essential and beloiiged to the or- der of the course and they must- be returned to and in due form. Here not only was the method counter to the child and obstruction to the teacher, but reflection long after showed me that Mr. Putnam was most flagrantly violating his 66 chief and pronounced tenets ; in shaping the work in percentage as at the outset without dis- tinction from fractions, I was but first giving the view of the whole in order that the part might be grasped in its meaning. I began, with the whole and not with the part as through pages of notes and hours of tribulation he had adjured us. Collateral wth these things there was a combination formed at the Normal by the under- year students to make one of their number presi- dent of the Lyceum. Custom had given the nomination of candidates to members of the senior class. I was invited to join the movement, the upshot of which was that I became the nomi- nee, others whom the boys would have preferred seeming to fear the wrath of the faculty. My companion as vice-president was to be Miss Beach, a young lady very popular in all the school. She was labored with by Miss Hoppin, the preceptress, and induced to resign on the showing that her course was not respectable. The withdrawal of Miss Beach and the opposi- tion of the faculty tended to throw cold water on us, and the movement fell through. It was at this time that I w^ent home on my vacation for a week in March. Arrived home, I found my younger brother the village correspondent from Dundee for the the tvfo morning papers in Detroit, the Tribune and the Free Press. As unreal as myself in the contact of life as apart from any doing, he had acquired some added falsity from the newspaper side. The most direct incident of this was the 67 divided hand which he carried in reporting the so-termed poHtical happenings of the locality. Two reports would be sent out by him of a polit- ical meeting ; the report to the Tribune would be colored as of Republican interest and the report to the Free Press as Democratic, one belieing the other. It seems thg^t there had been no disaster in the town that would give his correspondence any- thing of a sensation, as he estimated sensation. His thirst was to overturn things. I was invited into his council together with my old friend George Wheeler of the Stoddard Arithmetic class. It was agreed among us that a suicide of unusual and stirring interest might be sent over the wire. Wheeler volunteered as victim. A suicide's letter having the insane amble was de- vised, directing the disposal of his remains. A hitch came at the last moment ; Wheeler would not go on with the project unless I would also suicide. I consented and the whole thing was tumbled off to the newspapers in a dis- patch that afternoon, appearing the next morning. The falsity of the three of us was so great, our schooling in the reality of the function of life had been so limited, that we could not then know that the truth is the highest sensation ; we did not dis- tinguish sensation from shock. I believe that it had not even come to us as a precept among all the doctrines which had engaged our ears. And in the lie of the "imaginative literature" of the schools we outran our teachers. (Appendix ii.) When I got back to the Normal I was after some days called before the faculty and told that 68 I might withdraw from the institution. I was in- formed that I had been a disturber most of the time since coming there, and I was taxed with many things, being however confronted with no proofs. When I asked for some witness of specific errors as charged, I was told none was needed, that where there was the smoke of rumor there mvist be some fire. I was finally given to understand that in any event what the faculty had seen of me convinced them I was not of such timber as should be put into teachers. I re- ceived some advice about turning my attention to matters that I was better fitted for. I was dis- missed. I had fouled on the method of the school as against the child, to the entanglement of the teacher. If there w^as the school anvwhere it must be the method of the child. Told that I was in want of a keeper I had not the resource of position to reply in kind ; I was in a minority of one with usage and speech against me. If a new custom was not to shape, I would be forever out. Striking at what disordered me I could not help. That I was searching for the school I did not know ; it was a great way off. I had first to beat up the bush of life. Sore and blind I turned from the Normal unknowing of my quest. 69 VII. BARKING UP THE TRAIL I WAS to consciously find that reality grows in proportion to contact. I returned to Dun- dee as to the soil. There was at first the relief, by heights of academic contrast, that I couldn't be thrown off anywhere. The earth invited my foot and from the bosom eye of our cow I drank surcease of precept. The odors of the stable were perfume to me. The bake of my mother's kitchen appeared the last of touch. Contact again with my peasant father was the rejuvena- tion of reality ; the mystery of his contentment broke with hardly dawn to me as the simplicity in ever doing what he found of hand. But the reaction of change gone, I was without direction. In the absence of the supreme reality, doing, all reality w^as as nothing and vanished. The sun was warming the year. A few days, and I paced the tether of the village. I was in the plague of fevered ease. The claw of unreajity was in the flesh of my companions of the bogus telegram. We concerted together for going somewhere, any- where. The project shaped as a flat-boat down the Little Miami to Ohio and then afloat to the Gulf. We purposed living off the country. I had a few dollars left from my last remittance at the Normal and this was to go for rations in extreme cases but nothing for transportation. I started out to be joined by my companions at Yellow Springs, Ohio, where the boat was to be 70 got. We had an aunt there and designed to stay with her while building it. We arrived at Yellow Springs on separate days though near together, having made our routes oil freight and passenger trains, avoid- ing brakemen when they were belligerent and making up to them when they could be treated with. We took pine from a neighboring lumber yard and nails were cheap. In a week we were over country for Dayton with our boat - on an old colored uncle's wagon, having changed our route to the Miami, this river being larger, with fewer dams. We passed the Ohio Soldier's Home and saw Grant's headquarters hut as brought from Vicksburg. We got on the river at the edge of evening and made down. A frosty night and a leaky boat gave us our fill and w^e took foot at Miamisburg. George Wheeler had unaccountably disap- peared one afternoon and made his way north from^Yellow Springs about the time the boat was ready to move. My brother and I kept our course unevenly towards Cincinnati over country roads, passing through Franklin and coming to the great Hamilton and Cincinnati turnpike on which, look- ing either way, we could frequently count a dozen tramps bound north or south. We spent one night in a straw-stack, displacing a herd of swine from their, nest. The wrhite frost outside was a surprise to us in the morning ; our quarters had been warm. We made up to an occasional farm house and secured food. Passing through a small town we were arrested for a boot-and-shoe burglary that had been cqinmitted iii one of the retail shops. As after converse we appeared harm- less, they soon let us go. We did not have the fortune to be incarcerated long enough to know a meal. At the end of another day we arrived at the city of Hamilton. We grabbed one of the Short Line express trains, appointing that if sepa- rated we would meet in front of the Burnett House in Cincinnati the next day. I v^^as chased from the train, but followed on another express in a few minutes ; the trains were thick. I reached the Burnett House about ten o'clock in a rain-storm the next morning. After some weeks in much curiosity of this city, we made up the river in a boat, deck passage, working the cook for food. I remem- ber the sensation of passing Blennerhasset's Island as in so far making a reality of a single point in book-history. We scanned the island and heard the story of its more than domestic tragedy from the captain's lips as the boat labored up the shore. Points were located and I gulped them as a thirsty man. The reality of geography beat upon me as we threaded the turns of the Ohio ; and there were the engineering feats of the Balti- more and Ohio bridge at Parkersburg, where the trains run above a town. Then we discovered Wheeling, the one-street city under the bluffs. Our stay here was some hours duration, and for the first time I set foot in a State House. It was the cure for eyes that had wasted over unreal years looking at the picture capitols of books. r- We climbed the upper Ohio through lines of jetties, reaching Pittsburg on a midnight. Two pennies which we had between us paid our toll across the Alleghany. That night we dowered our bones with the cobble-stones of the levee to find them soft. We spent some days at Pitts- burg, saw the junction of the three rivers from the Incline, and walked among the insatiable furnaces of Bessemer. I left my brother, who had a ticket, to take his way to Philadelphia, the gate closing on him at the Pennsylvania station. I returned by devious ways to Detroit and Dundee, making Cleveland and treading its Euclid Avenue and snifting the movement of a great commerce in the oil refineries. I spent the fall and winter at home knowing only the reality of the man who waits. I helped nay father in such broken sort as I might, my uncertainty of direction being anguish. Springtime again upon me, I could wait no longer. The change shaped in a project to herd cattle on the South- Western plains. There was little resource back of this, being the notch of my unreality. I got together some fifty dollars by borrowing, and Nelson Vandeventer, my companion at school and a young man of some industry and function at the stave-mill, joined me with about one hundred dollars, making a pool of a hundred and fifty. My younger brother came on from Philadelphia and, with George Wheeler at the last moment, made our party four. The pool served for all. We designed to 73 reach Memphis by boat, making west across the country through Little Rock. A day or two found us in Cincinnati taking deck passage on the steamer Charles Morgan, Harry Stein master. My brother and Vandeventer tired of the deck and took the cabin. Reality in the actual, of which books by themselves are the suggestion and denial, grew w^ith me once more. There was again the swish of the Ohio ; Kentucky, the rapids, Louisville, and then Cairo and the confluence of the Missis- sippi. Corn from the Indiana soil in gunny sacks, stacked as by the cord one day after pass- ing Evansville, completed our load for New Orleans. I watched the process of this freight- ing. The jamming, bows-on, at the shore ; the throwing of the line for an easy tree ; the run- ning of the double planks and their creak of pulley ; the file of roustabouts, black and white, driven to the jump ; the dropping of the loaded gunny sacks on back ; the mate with lynch-pin threatening some nigger who lagged ; five hours of this, the water lapping the guard ; doubt as to whether all the pile could be taken ; the captain chipper, ordering up the last bag and damn the difference ; the line thrown off and the drawing of the planks ; roustabouts dropping w^herever they tipped their last gunny and snoring in the minute ; the poem of symmetry, laden of function to the heel, step- ping to the cries of the mate ; the groaning to headway in the stream. Then in the Mississippi and a day the fretting eddy ; the momentary slack of the steersman's hand and the trouble of a 74 loaded boat; the bell tapping for the lead, tne mark seven and danger line ; the continued shal- lowing, the mark three and the quarter-less-three with the bells clanging ; the captain roUing^n deck to fume the mate and devil the pilot 5 the Continued heaving of the lead, the in-throw and mark twain ; the bell clanging reversal of the paddles, the cap- tain gone white ; the steamer tediously answer- ing ; the uncertain motion that lis but standing still ; the mark five; the pilot giving her the spokes; the mark seven and no-bottom ; the steadying of the wheel in the hands of the pilot who gets his breath ; back in the current and gathering head ; the boat settling to her motion ; the captain dis- appearing for a drink as having succored the ship ; the serene of the deep channel ; the banks on the run ; the pilot giving up the wheel and mopping his face. / We arrived at Memphis of a forenoon. The money vv^hich had'' been in the keeping of companions in the cabin was stolen the same morn- ing from under the mattress before the boat touched the levee. We afterward charged it to our friend of nimble wrist from Philadelphia and he never proved an alibi. But the money was gone. On the streets of the town, the sun baking, we wandered to Court Street Park, where mov- ing about I missed my companions. I sat on the benches under the magnolias, the white blos- soms as big as my fist and the perfume thick like cream. The gray squirrels played about my legs and dived into my pockets for nuts and 75 crackers. Colored nurses trundled caj'riages on the g-ravel paths ; mules with negro drivers trucked tram-cars up the street. I slept under a freight house that night. Some time the next day I got deck passage on a St. Louis steamer of the Anchor Line hound north. When the Grand Tower threw her shore line at New Madrid a farmer came aboard and made up to me. He said his name was Cross. He was looking for a hand to help "make" his corn crop. I went with him for thirty dollars a month and "eating." He said he "eat" hands as good as anybody. I inclined to see the country thereabouts. The wooing air of early summer made me restless in the thought of returning to my Michigan distemper. The offer was large and seduced me. We looked about the place some. I found New Madrid a sample of the small river towns backed by farming country. The buildings, ris- ing on posts out of the black clay, reminded one, for crudity and neglect, of the pictures of squat- ter's mining camps. Lumber thrown together, mostly one story, made the houses, shops, and groggeries, of which last there were many in pro- portion. The irregular mail came by boat, some- times daily, sometimes days intervened. There was the weekly paper with patent guts. A lonesome teleo'raph line crept away into the country up the difficult road. The hot air glimmered. Flies droned lazily and lit about pools in which swine wallowed and scaveaged. Old mammy negroes came to draw at the corner pump. A bar-keep 76 volunteered that the houses were built of wood and light so that they could be drawn back if the river began to cut ; the water was then eating the bank, he said, and the nearest stores would soon have to be "pulled." The streets were deserted as we walked. It was the middle of the day. We went home across the river in my em- ployer's john-boat. I was scared at the crossing. The boat, with its straight sides and square, box ends, seemed built for a coffin. The river was impatient and resented mastery at our hands with an artless thing like that : it muttered and showed its fangs. Our "John" struck the Tennessee shore a mile below the direct line of crossing — two shouts, Cross reckoned it. VVe swept in, an hour from starting, whirled a few minutes in the eddies and caught a root. Ashore and making up the bank, the water mocked us. It came to me that a moving, purposeful thing is what is "wicked." We had come athwart the monster's trail ; its vision ran to the southern sea where the palmettos are and fulfil- ment. I saw that rivers fight to the sea like men to the open, striking at what balks them. Then we find that it is neither man nor river ; it is law. It was the neighborhood of the Federal oper- ations around Island No. lo. Cross said he bed stood behind that tree an' that thar an' that, pickin blue-bellies off' n ther boats. He hed the gun in the house thar. They come over smart one sun-goin' and done burned his shanty. He warn't stayin close ter shore no more after that fer long. 77 The house, on stilts, with no attempt at filling between the logs that made its uprights and floor, rose rods back through the bush — a throw ter the shore. Cross had told me. The afternoon was far along. The "old woman" crooned, and "put something on " by orders. This was, as usual I found, corn-pone, bacon, black coffee that would float an egg, molasses, sour milk and salt. Any of these might be hot and they might be cold-. We ate and without word. The sounds around us came from the mosquito in face and the grunt and rub of the hogs underneath the floor. Supper, night and bed-time arrived to- gether. The house hadn't any light when the sun was out. We undressed, one by one, and got to the two beds in the back corners behind their throw of netting raised above on hoops like the cover of the prairie wagon. The mosquitoes purred and charged the barricade till morning. My fight for sleep was between the chorus snore on one side and the stab of the mosquitoes that worked their way through the netting, on the other. Before Cross went off, he said I was to wake him by sun-up and build a fire for the Gal, the sixteen-year step-daughter, Laura. And if I heard three whistles and repeated, it was a boat wantin' wood. I was to go down to the yard and let her load. This was a good ways ahead for me. The ten-year son, Stonewall Jackson Cross, lank and white, was my near bed -fellow. His ailment was ague and, abed, he groaned and clawed when not making up his part in the 78 chorus. Quinine, ten pounds of wheat flour — a dainty — and some packages of tobacco had been the items of purchase at New Madrid that day. Part was bought with the sick boy in mind ; Cross was going to cure him, he said. Stone- wall's shaking, clammy chill was on that night and for the nights to come in which I knew him. Cross w^as a renter. The semi-clearing of a few square rods, called the patch, and the spot covered by the house among the gum trees, were his by courtesy and occupation. The first corn crop, of some acres, which we were to make was three miles away up path through the woods. Cross' sister owned it. She was the widow of a Con- federate private who had died at Chickamauga. After this crop, we were to begin another for a landlord owning stretch of farms along the river. By eight o'clock we were in the path, riding double on General Forest. Cross said his horse was named after the fighter who buried 'em alive at Pillow. Nine, found me in the field behind the sister's mule and plow, the sun hot to blister. Cross, when not resting, followed me with Forest. He was a silent man by custom as were the people I met about. All had the quiet and watchfulness of the cat, uttering little even when spoken to. Sometimes when looking my way on that and other days Cross' face would wear a cloud. He would note the little done and observe that we must come earlier to field. This we never did. Either the Gal was lazy, or For- est had not been fed and cleaned, or the call had not been made at sun. Later than our arrival of 79 any day came the Woman, the Gal and the Boy, to "drop." They followed us along the furrow with corn in apron and we plowed back, turning six inches of " ground " on the hills they made ; this was "starting" the crop. Forest was often stood in the shade as precaution against sw^eat. There his proprietor rubbed him w^ith grass and, gave him nibbles. The while, I "jerked" and cried the mule up the rows. Sometimes Stonewall from his outlook in the shade helped " Paw " learn that the mule and I went too slow. With Stonewall, opinion went for fact. That night Laura saved "get" in a glass for me. Milk had one classification with the Crosses — milk. The " get " went into one re- ceptacle night and morning, day and day. Any other was not " cured " and in so far was short of milk. This receptacle stood in a corner, the hogs recovering the " spill " from the post and ground below. It was a jar of churn size and shape. From this, milk and butter were taken as it afforded ; for the latter, the milk was agitated with a stick on occasion. Sunday morning came and I had been a week a crop-hand. I was all over stiff and had lacerated hands. Laura made some " white bis- cuits " with milk and salaratus that Sunday morn- ing, serving them after, like cake. The bake was, from need, out of doors in a skillet with iron cover, over which I piled coals. The cover was lifted in fifteen minutes on as brown and pretty sodas as I ever saw my mother take from her oven in Michigan. I stirred the jar and we So laid some butter for treat. While we ate, the " razor-backs " fought and rooted around the corner post. Laura said they mought'n be in the brush eatin' roots ; they hadn't gone done it ter- day. I had agreed to eat buffalo at "sun-high" with. Dan Abbott. He had a boat shanty, though he lived on shore. He told me that fathers, and their sons after them, live in boats making down the river. They would be years " floaters " to the Gulf. They'd tie in for seasons, w^inter and summer, sell fish and work for " croppers " along the banks. Sometimes they " cropped " of them- selves. Part of the time, like him, they might live ashore if the house was handy, and to be got for the taking. He w^as " putting in " for Cross on tKe river crop. Abbott said he liked me. I might watch Cross ; he never paid. He wasn't looking to Cross for his. The man who owned the land went good for what he worked and he'd take it back on the crop. Nobody anywhere about there would work for Cross any other how. The owner wanted the crop a-getting in. Cross paid big, but nobody ever got anything, as he knowed. He 'lowed thirty dollars and grub was regular good, too good ; Cross could give sixty and presents and have just as much left. He said I wasn't to ' low anything to Cross in the way of his telling. He stopped short and spoke iii monosyllables as was more his way. We had got to the shanty. The wife w^as short and seamed of face like him. She watched at the corners of her eyes and spoke little, as I have remarked was the cus- tom alsQut there. The buffalo, broad and thick f orw3.rd like that scarcer beast, was yellow-baked and flaky on the slab table. I had first seen this fish, habitat of these muddy rivers, on the Cin- cinnati markets. My eyes used to stick at the way oi skinning them there. The artist was that deft and quick that he seemed all the time to be dropping one and reaching for the next. In years recent, Abbott had been much up and down the rivers, tent-setter for Dan Rice's circus which kept the river towns, transporting by boat. Abbott showed me how to tie the hangman's noose ; he had done that once for busi- ness on a day in Texas, ' way up the Red. . The ragged scar in his scalp was got one afternoon from a tent-stick in a river town, on the Arkansas, I think he said. The fighting cry, " Hi Rube," of the circus men against all comers was on. Bullets were buried in the door, window posts and logs of the shanty, and in the rail fence. Abbott explained that when he was a comer there some months by, he was too free saying. A squad came over to gun 'im. He lay close behind the logs and let back through chinks. " She " loaded in turn the two carbines and his pistol, while he laid for it. His callers straggled off in some hours the way they carne. He'd got on pretty quiet since, saying nothing and hearing as little. He had traveled alone for twenty years and minded what was his ; if anybody done him in front he w^antetj to be invited to the funeral. By his ad- vice, a rnan in that jungle would carry his der- 82 ringer in an easy pocket. He was going to let somebody else talk mostly now, but his address wasn't changed. That afternoon Laura sat in the door at Cross', short, light of skin and dumpy. She was spplling at rhymes in a past-date almanac, fingered and much worn. Among some things which had chanced upon its leaves w^as, " Rock Me to Sleep, Mother." I took the book from her hand as she put her thumb on that, meaning me to read. Her voice had a tremor in it and her color went and came. There w^as soiled pink ribbon at her throat and she had combed her blonde hair, wetting it into submission and t)ang back its stubby rebellion with a cotton string. I could never get it straight that Sunday alone was back of all this adornment. She inclined to talk to me. She said that she hadn't ever seen her own " Paw " and wondered if she ever mought. She thought that mought be a smart time. Whar war the North and warn't it a smart jump? They done right smart thar. Did they ride that fast by the steam that it mixed yer head ? Did they send letters by 'graph on the streak in a minute ? How did they git them over the sticks? She had been to Tiptonville onct, most, with corn ter mill. She hadn't done gone farther than that ; that war right smart ter go. It tuk likely mule ter git back by sun. Thar v.'arn't any school 'round by, that war right smart short ter git ter. One done been short, right smart time gone. She done went -smart some. Nobody done paid and the teacher 'lowed he couldn't keep. And thar war 83 them as done tuk agin him. He done 'lowed sayin' too much 'bouttakin' ter be like the North. The play of interest came to me in a new light. Late nights, when coming from my rest by the smoke-fire, safeguard against mosquitoes, I would find Laura dreaming on the slab door-step. Once, sitting so, she asked me if I mought reckon thar be any way fer her ter come ter them big sights? I had told her of the moving life in town. You ain't like we-uns, she'd say ; you won't stay fer long. And wouldn't she learn a heap no more w^hen I done gone thar fer all? War thar any rivers 'long o' thar a-comin'? Could them be gone by fer sich as foot? Along o' whar war Michigan, war it in Tennessee? War it done harder nor Tiptonville ter find in? The river lot lay front to shore. We had been drawing to the " heaps " with the mule such fallen limbs and other portions of dead trees as blocked the way to planting. This was the an- nual circumstance to " cropping " on lands that had not seen decades of cultivation. The ground seemed never to have been cleared. Originally, the underbrush had been beaten down or cut at burning, and the trees girdled. Then the plow was struck in and the crop worked as might be. The annual picking up would go on in course un- til the trees had all succumbed to time and weather. On the river lot few were standing and the clearing was short. By noon of the first day the light, one- mule plow was turning the red-yellow loam, working 84 around the heaps when met. A crop of "sweets" was the first to be in. These went as potatoes, any others going as " Irishes " or " garden mess ". These were planted much the same as corn, the plow going deeper if it would. "Maw" and the Gal dropped from apron. Stonewall did picket or what else his mind came to. The sun beat wicked before the shadows grew. General Forest was " like to sweat " often that afternoon. The mule and I toiled for the most part in the- furrows alone. Abbott was fixing fences, drag- ging off the remaining part of limbs and soldier- ing. If I stopped long from the unbearable heat. Cross would reckon that we warn't mindin' ter git 'long with the crop. Then he'd settle back on the fence or log as the case might be, though sometimes taking a bout with the horse. " I'd let you drive Forest most like, only he ain't easy on drivers," he'd say. When Abbott stopped, and it was often, Cross didn't seem to know it. But I took my rest. Abbott smirked and nodded approval. One such time we all chanced at the fence where it bowed over the bank and down till lapped by the water. The vaulting current seemed to fan us. Abbott leading, we helped the conversation into forgetfulness of the crop. Below, hardly discernable beyond the bayou, was the line of second-growths marking Pope's cut-off. Cross said that was where the blue-bellies dug up mud fever. Above,- a good rifle-shot, was Island No. lo, wasting in the hungry water, scarce half an acre left. Abbott drew his face down solemn and 85 tipiped thy e^6 at; the side, rfemkrkihg to Cross that hfe'd bfeeh North and giifess^d thfey krio^ed wben breakfast was f eady to coilie to ; leastwise, he wbuldn't mind a-fetchin' to liVei there for attiy- thing he khowe'd. Cross thought he knowed better nor that thar. He 'lowed the North hadn't no sense, lea;stwise it didn't git out ter any good. They worked fer traders. " Traders hain't no good," he continued. "Leastwise, they take all they kin git an' it ain't no good workiii' fer 'em. Now, how much do they pay fer harnis, like whot yer hook ter plow with? An' wagin, an' carriage whot yer ride in when it ain't no good o' ridin'? Horses is fer ridin'. An' they make roads fer therri wagins as ain't no good ter need ter hev. Paths is good. 'Bout how rnuch money, now ? 'Pears like hundreds of dollars is good in you-uns pockets. We-uns hain't wofkin' all the year fer no traders. Three mortths makes crop, and then it takes ter rest some. That plow thar an' collar aii' that rope hook-up art' that jerk- line done cost no mOr'n ten dollars, at big. That was too much ter give ter traders. Don't give 'em no mor'n you have ter." I screwed ihy face hard to reply. I'd been thiiiking that too, though I'd never got it vvorked out sti clear. I'd given good money away to traders in my time. Abbott said he'd beeri tryin' to figger that out, but he wasn't deep. He savV it shaifp, now. He knowed tradesrhen as paid fif- teeft hundred dollars fer coaches an' had drivers an' bought silks an' all. He knowed farihers vip North 86 as livfed in likely houses they'd paid tradets big fer, five thousand dollars as like. One fidiise b' that kind 'ud buy all o' us and all that torn lot arid there'd be more left to have. He'd seett totti- mon trash lip there iri smart places all mafble and stone. They had houses, stories high, with bbbks arid " loafs " and music and, like aJS not, lots to eat. They gin away for this. They oughtn't a-done gin that money to traders. Cross offered that there mought be laws as 'ud fix it fer 'em as didn't know to keep thar own. It occurred to me that Cross' Political Econ- omy reflected his surroundings. Through the woods home on an evening the dark had fallen. The fire-flies were out. The flash, seen through the under-groV^rth, vvas as thick as wire in a sieve. Up behind Cross, I watched the fire-works. He reckoned I mought not know what that be, comin' from the North. I needn't be scart o' them ; they was " flash-bugs." No folks comin' with lanterns ner nothin' like it. I expressed my relief. Cross returned that leastwise he'd stay by an' I mought depend ter it. Had I counted him as paternal aS this toward my pocket, I'd have slept bettfer that night. I had a two-dollar bill sewed in the watch- fob of my trousers, left hanging in the hotise. By agreement at the boat, I was wearing an old pair of Cross' overalls, short by inches, blue, and worn white at the knees! Getting home arid wanting something or other, I found the pockets turned, and everything gone except my pistol, a double bull-dog of thumb calibre. 87 Next morning, early at the field, I talked it over with Abbott. The upshot was an agree- ment to ask Cross then and there for money enough to buy a pair of working shoes, the ex- cuse being good : the light ones I wore were fast going.. This would test him. "Where is Cross.'"' asked Abbott, looking up the path into the woods. " He ought to be here by this time," I said, growing nervous and following Abbott's eyes. Cross was coming on Forest. "Got your pistol?" said Abbott, "bring it out." I brought it from the hip, my only pocket. " Here, swop," he said, " mine always goes, and it'll trim a hair on the pole-star. No, hold on ; he's a coward and 's like to get it in on you mud. I'll stand by the fence and wing him if he goes to play smart with a young 'un." He put up his gun, a big one, made for business as he had said. My hand trembled on my pistol. I suppose I looked scared. "Keep yourself together," Abbott said, " may be he won't sneak ; may be he'll give you the dollars up square," Abbott motioned me to a stump and put my back to it. "He'll ride up here," he said. "Pull the hammer and keep your hand on it behind you. That's right. Jerk quick on him if he wants fight." Abbott was, moving off toward the fence. 88 Cross rode up and I preferred, as gentle- manly as I knew, my request for three dollars to get the shoes. He went white and turned upon me, swearing that fast and wicked that my hair started. He made like to get his pistol. He wasn't quick and didn't get farther than looking into the eyes of the bull-dog. He got down off the horse on orders, and there he stood. The law of the lion had come in. Action on, I found my nerve. "Hands up," I gave him and he obeyed. Abbott came up, reached for Cross' pistol and said to him, "You're eatin' roots and bark to- day." When he got the pistol, we tied Cross and took him to a deserted shanty by the water. Ab- bott and I held council what to do. Cross was owing me 'most two-weeks. "Anyway it's fifteen dollars," Abbott said, " and ten more for trouble. Cross hain't anything but that horse and saddle and a pair of rubber boots and his wood-yard lantern and that john- boat ; that's all he's got that's movable. I'll go in and scare him stiff ; I can make him that fear'd he'll sweat blood. You lively back from the house with your things and we'll look what's to do." Abbott was in the hut swearing straight on as I dove into the woods. Before I w^as half way, some steamer, miles down around the bend, was bellowing for wood. It must be the Mary Houston ; we weren't looking for any other boat. Laura and the old woman watched me through the door. They hadn't 89 gone to the field that day, and Stonewall had his fehake on". I met Laura as I Was hurrying oUt. "This be a hard worlds bein't it?" she said. I pushed jjast and hfer eyfes fastened to me ; I touchfed my hatj with good-bye. Turnihg far down the path, her head was on the rail at the fence. Abbott met me and said that the Mary was in shore and had run her plank. CrOss was ter- rorized. Abbott had threatened him everything ; would shoot him to see hirh squirm. The fallen cropper signed an order to pay bearer for wood. When we reached the boat the roustabouts were running up the plank with the last sticks of fif- teen cOrds. The captain was swearing at our " gait " and sure delay. Abbott slipped me all the money, thirty dollars, saying it was for north- ern traders. I followed the clerk aboard, throwing my hands back. Before we touched deck the plank was swinging above shore and the water was boiling under the wheels. Sitting oh a cotton bale, the shore walking past, the mate told me that it was something of a tough section. In handy distance to four States, it Was infested with refugee^ from justice Who jumped the borders. And he thought the people there didn't do much better, though they did about the best they knew. They all mostly watched each other and the officers he guessed. They gerierally tried their own cases and it didn't take long to convene cOurt. As far as he'd seen in this world, if there wasn't one law there was always another. (Appendix iir.) 90 I got off the boat at St. Louis on a June ddy, when a soft shower had w6t the streets and the steam w^as rising from the pavement. After some dftys, my money gOne, I took a brick-car from East St. Louis on the Alton, being stowed by a brakeman who said he'd been caught out himself. As the train was drawing from the yards I was joined by two companions, small boot-blacks w^ith their kits, who were migrating to Chicago. The train dropped our car at Springfield and my associates were soon doing business on the steps of the State House. They counted me their partner and divided their takings. We had bolognas and beer, which they recommended. We visited Lincoln's monument together and took the pilot of the midday express north. At the junction outside I was driven off, while my companions, able to stick anywhere, swung their hats and piped me good bye for Chicago!. I later made Lincoln on a blind bag- gage car ; there a brakeman blocked me and I found myself on the ground at the Lincoln junc- tion on the edge of the evening. I fell in conver- sation w^ith some young men at the station and they went to their homes and brought me my supper of green gooseberry pie and cold baked meat, and bread. They said they'd been up in Canada once when they'd have given a calico shirt for a hand-out like that. Advised by them as to the movement of the road, I was soon able to catch a through stock train at the junction, my Sleeper being the second deck of a hog car. The wheels pounded below me all night and I was 91 not discoverecl until daylight broke ; when at a longer stop than usual, proving to be Joliet, and making to get out of the car, I was halted by a policeman and taken to the county bridewell. Here were prisoners of degrees, one in con- tempt being a preacher who had failed to live ac- cording to his pretensions. Everyone gath- ered for a song, " The Brooklyn Theater Fire," around a boy named Charlie who had been the tool of burglars for looting houses through small openings. They asked for my story, which I gave them ; and by breakfast time we had tales round and were in some way of being acquainted. I had arrived so late that there was a breakfast short ; the prisoners offered me the preacher's portion saying he could pray for his. I was to be early in police court ; an old hand among the prisoners gave me that the judge was a Yankee and that if I told him my story up straight and that I was from Michigan and was working home, I might count on getting off. In court, by the side of the officer, who had become my friend, I told my excuses to the judge, who ordered me a ticket to Chicagis, and directed the officer to see me away. I however mourned my bull-dog, which they kept. At the station before leaving, the officer smoothed the treatment Joliet had ac- corded me in my tour across the country by say- ing that his chiefs were complaining of his inac- tion ; he had to arrest somebody. In a few hours I was on the pavements of Chicago. Meeting an old acquaintance I bor- rowed the price of a ticket to Dundee, and in 92 some days was back at the asylum of my home. For a while I was glad to get enough to eat, and some small doing about the place which had be- fore been a hardship became a pastime. I was driven to attempt some occupation and most naturally turned to secure a school to teach for the winter. Two or three in the country districts about that I thought I w^as in the way of getting were given to more experienced teachers, or to those who had influence, or to some one who would cut my price. Latterly, a growing desperation for the poise of mind, which I began in ever shallow sounding to realize as the negation of inaction, as of the line of some steady pursuit, drove me to think of the regular army as the last of my resources. I got to the recruiting station at Columbus, Ohio, by my usual means of transportation, and climbing High street went out to the barracks and pre- sented myself for examination. I was accepted and was about to pass the formal oath and papers w^hich would make me a soldier of the regular army ; I was to come back in an hour when the proper officer would be present. Along with me there had been examined a young man of thirty who had been wounded in the calf by an Indian arrow and had other marks of army service upon him. The doctor looking him over had divined that he was a deserter and warned him against the consequence of discovery. He was told that he'd better get out. Away from the examining room, he told me his story of army life. Aversion gripped me, and I made my way from the barracks 93 and from the town in company with mj' compan- ion. We came to a farmer who, it being the fall of the year, w^as running his sorghum house. The light of the furnace drew us in. After helping him about his mill, he took us to supper and gave us his hay-mow to sleep on. My com- panion disappeared on some passing train in the middle of the night while I slept. I was unable to progress much on trains the next day or two. But a tired muscle was sweet ; I invited it. Sunday I was thus walking the track north- ward and was accosted by a farmer to help him cut corn. It was Mr. Paddock, the overseer of a thousand acre stock farm above Marion. He was to furnish me with overalls and blouse and I was to get two dollars a day if I would do as much as he could. This was the bargain. I was hungry since morning and night was coming. It was the prospect of bed and something in my pocket. Money had begun to have meaning to me. I filled my belly and lay heavy with digestion and dro\yse upon the sofa. The eighteen year comely daughter, Louie, of my employer was at the window on the other side of the room. A girl friend came in, short of breath and in trepi- dation ; she commenced to tell that she had seen a tramp. She was hushed by Louie whom I knew was motioning toward me. At daylight I was out in the field with Mr. Paddock and his son. I was set to my square of standing corn and be dint of running I had it in shock before they in good pace had together cornpleted theirs. Having demonstrated my ability, I was 94 invited to work along with them, but the strain of holding my end continued and by noon I was almost done in the heat of effort. I dragged my- self to dinner, and Louie noting my battered hands waited outside with a pair of gloves when I went back to the field. My' reputation gained, I slowed to my gait, continuing ten days or more until the crop was in harvest and I counted some twenty dollars. It was the first money my own power had squarely earned and squarely got. I held it as real and its possession was like the calm of storm. I bade the family good bye, and Louie last who had come to the gate. Arriving home, I walked with the strength of having done one thing. I rriade effort hoping yet to secure a school. An acquaintance introduced me to the director of a district in Oakland County, Mr. Daniel Johnson, of Wixom. I found him back in his potato field. He was an old soldier who had starved twelve months in rebel prisons ; captured in the furnace covering the retreat at Chica- mauga, he was a leader in tunnelling the sugar houses at Libby and the stockade at Anderson- ville. A man of few words, he looked me over and told me that if I would bring a certificate that afternoon from the township superintendent, David Gage, who lived near by, he would go with me to the other officers in the evening and thought I might count on being hired. I secured my certificate from Mr. Gage, and contracted with the school-board for a winter term of four months at twenty-five dollars a month and board round. 95 I went back home with the anxiety that comes from the consciousness of again entering a field in which I had met failure, wondering how it all would end. I waited at home in something of a fever for the opening day. I took the train for Oakland county on a Saturday morning with the mid-November rains pelting. My father was at the gate with tears in his eyes bidding me get a dollar in my pocket. This was his conscious- ness that my peace would be in some accomplish- ment. VIII. THE UNIVERSITY OF BON WHEN I was examined by Mr. Gage I was struck by his apparent uncertainty as to whether he should give me a certificate or not. His hesitation and remarks at the time made me feel that he regarded my qualities of teacher a gamble. He was unable to determine w^hether or not I was ^ schoolman. I suppose the difficulty was about the same as that of determining a musician without hearing him play ; he might be asked about technique, and composers, and thorough- bass, and counter-point, and the history of music, just as I was questioned about teaching. I was asked regarding the instruments of teaching, about grammar, history, arithmetic, reading, writing. No matter what my answers might have been in these, and I know I failed in them 96 at points, there was the last doubt which was the very core of the whole thing — whether I could teach. I had been pronounced no teacher at the Normal, though I felt I had been fairly success- ful with my class. And here was one of the state ofhcers giving me. a certificate on grounds that I knew he did not feel sure were within warrant. The force of the thing went that the State was a long time determining whether I was a teacher or something else. Even the teachers at the Normal had disagreed in faculty meeting over my discharge ; Professor McLouth had told them that I had the qualities of the .teacher and was all right. Last of all myself, the individual whose life was up, had no criterion. I thus went to the school feeling that I had no measure of principle in me that I could answer to. I had never undergone any test that should lead me to know that I w^as in the line of my function. I was wholly without self-center or pivot. I had the further consciousness that there was no cer- tain accounting to be had of me in the State ; the child was at my mercy and could have no voice ; the judgment of the parent would be on super- ficial lines ; and the district director, as I have noted, was without resource except to hand me over to an official who had virtually turned the question on the toss of a penny. Here was the lack of organization to right- endedness which in miy own case as child had been criminal in its results. The solu- tion of all this must be one with the finding of 97 the school itself when I should come upon it. For the present I had only my consciousness of a disorder. I approached my work with little more notion of order than that I must steer among unpleasant things as best i could ; I mvist avoid what I felt were rocks as I might. The uncertainty of myself and everybody as to what school and learning are came to be empha- sized among the farmers of Oakland county. And I was to know more of the superstition of letters and the exaggeration which the inarticulate breeds. My school-house was on the Detroit and Lansing turnpike, two miles from Wixom. We •developed about thirty or forty children as the term progressed, the older boys coming in when their fall work was done on the farm. The as- sumption was that teaching was contact with the books, and though I had acquired a distaste for the book and knew there was something wrong about it, I could not define it in any sense that warranted corrective action. The child benched be- fore me with the book and it was expected on the part of those around me that I would bring him against each page, provoking for him some mean- ing out of it more than he would of his own motion ; and compel him to answer back to me as a matter of routine. To do all this I was sup- posed to enforce quiet among the children as con- ducive to "study." In these things as of keep- ing I had the sum of the notion of the school by the good people who employed me ; I was answerable to them in this regard and, finally, my difficulties lay in meeting the variety of 98 detail that was in this demand ; all these wen as uncertain as the notion of learning itself, which even with teachers was an indeterminatf stufKng by word. Following out the necessi- ties of the case as in Van Buren, I put the children into classes mostly where they said they belonged and which their book called for, and commenced the rub of them against the text ; and by the first da}' my school was going after the usual exactions. The notion of the Good Explainer had gol abroad in the district ; a few of my patrons had in one or more terms been students at the Normal and had taught some. I found the question ol my ability here was being discussed and that my reputation would turn a good deal upon this, and so I exerted myself in the harness. The cer- titude of my success with my class at the Normal had given me some confidence. This confidence was the measure of my apprenticeship in what- ever school contact I had met and did not come from any listening to pedagogical doctrine, or pre- cepts, about teaching. In proportion as I real- ized this my disgust grew with the lie of the professing pedagogue. I was in a community that might be counted of the more intelligent farming class. As litera- ture went I would find the Harper periodicals or many tables instead of a Bertha Clay. And ir the way of their own business the farmers wen advanced in inquiry. They sought informa tion to enable them to handle more advantage ously varieties of soil ; and the practice of th( 99 crossing of bi-eed with the running to the blooded and more profitable stock-raising, was quite large, I have sat by the hour with Mr. Johnson or Mr. Kimmis or Mr. Dunham, and to jump a county, with Mr. K of Washtenaw, and hung upon their knowledge of a farming practice : in one case, of the breed of cow that is fitted for the dairy of Oakland county and the feed that should be grown for milk and the soil adapting it ; and, again, the best cow for the general farmer that is a beefer as well as a milker when the need is to turn her off ; of the stallion that is the best roadster and the best farm horse, and at the same time the most economical feeder. I've stood before a very poem of a Berkshire and a Poland China, composed by some farmer, and been told why one was more desirable than another on a given farm ; I have visited the fowls that had been demonstrated the most thrifty for the husbandman in the way of meat and eggs ; I've got points about the growing of hops and been told why the Michigan were not up to the German and have learned deficiencies of Michi- gan climate ; and in another case I've been intro- duced to the rotation of the wheat and the oats and the handling of the clover and timothy crop for seed ; the bee fanner lias told me of the food and climate of his insect, and of his Italian im- ports and why they were better than the domes- tic ; in still another case I sat at the feet of the vintage maker and learned why the wines of dif- ferent years were of different qualities, and heard answered the question of how much sugar I GO should be added to the juice in any given year in the ratio of its acidity and how to determine all this. Then these men at whose feet I was and whose minds had the order of function in their contact, who moved to exhaust the stores of their own business, would wish that like me they might have had an education — I, the broken of mind, a stumbler in function, insanfe of the method of life, was counted by them as in the way of all wisdom. I had gormandized of books and my mental surfeit was the measure of my knowledge. I felt how well the professing pedagogue, as belonging to the exclusive class of learning, had played his game of place and how well my farmers had learned their lesson of apartness. My Oakland friends were stirring to be in the way of knowledge and not be counted wrholly ignorant. After the manner which some of them had learned at the Normal Lyceum, they held debating clubs. It was considered, as at that in- stitution, a giving flock to ideas and in the way of making orators ; and in some way and some how most indefinite, as prompting to endeavor in edu- cation. These meetings were not called because people had anything to say, but in the degradation of following a superstition to try to make them say. About the first thing, after I had turned round, Mr. Johnson asked me to join his side in the debating club. At the close of the first week of school, I think it was, I went in the wagon with him to Wixom, where the debate was set. I re- call the question. It was whether America or Eng- land had done more for civilization. I remem- ber that the combatants, so-called, pressed to the front, some with diffidence but determined that they would not be downed because they had nothing to say. At last I was introduced as something Mr. Johnson had found. A falling off in the sentiment of support on Mr. Johnson's side I thought was in proportion as his adher- ents failed of volubility. I was the last speaker and the issue must rest with me. I pressed the assumption that we had won our case and ex- pressed myself as seeing little need that we should go further. However, I offered that it would be ill-advised taking the floor without se- lecting a few of the many reasons of Ameri'ca's predominance which in the procession of fact moulted by us ; they must all see that the diffi- culty would not be in finding reasons but in prop- erly discarding the unimportant, which went to weary ; to minds already convinced, some things might be passed as of no moment ; we wanted not merel V victory but burial. I asked their atten- tion. Now I was put to great straits to give even a single argument, as it was termed ; but with this preliminary I got my breath, and having learned nay lesson in the schools of giving word and say- ing nothing, I laid about me in what I afterwards heard seriously called heavy slugging. The in- cident which came to me and which made the day was the story of Captain Ericson the Swede. I recounted how he had met discouragement in England and how when the night hung dark in the naval crisis of America, the Monitor was the Moses of a people. And this country being in the ad- vance of civilization, who would say what Amer- ica had not done in the encouragement of inven- tion to the saving of herself? At some point here the opposition seeing that their feet were slipping on the pretension of this the last speech, arose and objected to the judges admitting my arguments, as I was not a regular member of the organization. The force and validity of my talk being by this granted, the only question was whether it should be counted when the judges took stock. Quite a wrangle ensued which Mr> Johnson's side took care to depreciate as dis- courteous to visitors. The discord was finally disposed by giving the question to the audience, who overwhelmingly voted for America. There was the return debate in which the Wixom Brass Band figured, coming as the escort of their party to our district school-house, blaring the Conquering Hero as they drew on. The question was prohibition and the liquor trafiic. Our side lost in this contest, the weak part being that many of our number who spoke in favor of the liquor traffic felt it incumbent to explain that it was not their real sentiment as they favored pro- hibition, and what they presented was to be con- sidered merely as argumentative and in the way of reasons and not their real mind. After a night of this lesion of the brain, the Wixom party re- turned triumphant, their band waking up the dis- tance. These meetings were given out as very entertaining and people came from many miles. 103 I welcomed March and the close of the school. The friction of no principle of direction in my work had sorely tried me and often brought me near disaster as at Van Buren. Yet when the children disappeared up the road on the last day I would have called them back. Al- together mv experience in Oakland county had given me increased cause of revulsion with the school as the embodiment of the exclusive- ness of learning, and with the pedagogue as the sodden of method. And I was in such de- gree a stage nearer the real school, for negation is of progress. Of my hundred dollars wage, I took home eighty. I had put the dollar in my pocket, not because my father had given me the injunction but because on the highroad of life I had learned how much eighty dollars meant. Again at home, my well-thinking mother proposed that I commit moral turpitude. The eighty dollars which I had in my pocket and which I was able to show my father, she urged me to spend for clothes and other accouterments of respectability" that I might come within the grace of the chancel. The money was to me the measure of my mental reinforcement. I held it in my mind as the elimination of a part of the disorder I had kno\vn. It was the meas- ure of some completed thing. I became moral in the manner of self-protection. My morality was that of the honev-bee whose instinct is of its own conditions. I had much difference with my mother and others over this, who dubbed me miser. But their conditions Avere not mine. I 104 kept my eighty dollars. In measure of this I gained strength. Though I disliked work, I had come to dislike lack-thrift more. I soon found a job of a dollar a day with a wheel-barrow at the stave mill. I was thus in, the traces of organization with machinery at my back. I con- tinued to submit to the ordering environment. I grew in morals. This for me, as with all my con- tact, was the University of Bon. It was the Good to me. The summer and fall going, I found a school for the winter. I succeeded my friend George Wheeler in a little district west of town where he had given much promise. His offices brought me the school. The favoring conditions were the small attendance, numbering hardly fifteen. Untorn of distraction, I was to be able to look long enough at a single spot to see one thing. My class in beginning-reading was one pupil, a boy of about six or seven years, Artie Kent. He had been reckoned by some teachers before me as dull. He was short some letters of the alpha- bet, though I believe he had been at it off and on something like two years. I did not distinguish whether the boy was very dull or very bright. I only found that his want was to read and I had so much time that I let him. I took him away from the fragmentary thing of no meaning, the letter, and gave him the word and sentence as the label of something that he knew. I threw him against things that he might have more labels ; I gave him of eye and ear and hand. Words that were difficult and un- usual were chalked up on the board and he worked at them with pencil and fingers. My stay at the Kent School, as it was known, was two winters of five months each. During the summer my boy had gpne to school, as the word is ; but forgetting more than he learned, his people told me. Long before I left the school he was read- ing in the National Fifth Reader, the common advanced reader of the time. I do not mean that he was catching and spelling at syllables ; he was tumbling words and skimming lines with the shift of an acrobat that made it difficult for an ordinary reader to follow him. He was so small that his big book wobbled in his hands. I hadn't taught him anything ; I had organized his movement, helped him make his distinctions and put them together again, and there he was in all evidence as facile a reader as myself. Our chart in reading had been the thousand and one things that swarmed the neighborhood. For everything that went we found a name That was all there was of it. It was in the bunting up against life. Any analysis, as the seeing of the parts that I helped him to, was but a closer contact. I however recognized this hardly more than in the doing. This was at once the simplicity and reality of all the irrelevant matter which had been delivered to us as in the pretension of wisdom at the Normal. I have since become conscious of what I did. The great gen- eric or controlling principle of which the professing pedagogue had talked so much and so befooled us, was but the way of my doing. It was contact. io6 The two summers succeeding my winters at the Kent, I continued my beat in the stave-mill, starting with my dinner pail when the sun was coming up mornings. I was impatient of the occa- sional days on which the mill did not run, feeling the constraint of nothing to do. I thus extended my course at the University of Bon. I came latterly to assist at firing the boiler and running the en- gine. There were two of us required when the heavy machinery was hooked on ; my partner was Henry Coldwell. He would deplore that he had never had an education ; yet he was a better rhetorician than I have often met, for he could tell me all about his own business and its tech- niqvie in such a way that I would rather hear him than drink old wine. He used the moving language. When some neighboring boiler blew up, as at the Wyandotte Rolling Mills, he would give me the science of it, which was the ivay of it ; he would tell me how it must have happened. He would explain the foaming of the boiler which deceives the unpracticed eye, the water forced into the gauge giving the lie as to the amount of water on the flues. All this time the flames are combing the iron to white heat. Finally the foaming subsides through lack of water at all to foam and the gauge tells the truth ; the boiler is run dry. If the engineer knows his business he will draw his fire. If he is green or has lost his head he will spring to correct the water feeder, knowing that it is inoperative. In his fever of uncertainty he will tinker it until of a sudden it again throws its jet ; cold water striking the white flues gives a 107 vapor as expansive as exploding gunpowder. The boiler is a muzzled cannon which the trepida- tion or ignorance of the engineer with one stroke of his wrench has loaded and touched off. Then there was the secret of feeding the boilers for the heavy runs when the steam was wasting from a pipe as big as your thigh, and the foreman ringing for the wide throttle. I was shown about this and set nursing the fire, which was a rhetoric and philosophy finer than word. On days I would be called to handle the boiler and engine alone. There was the preserve of responsibility in a function which I had dem- onstrated my strength to fill. The uncertainty then was of the incidental. I was sure of my main line. If the untoward happened it did not break me ; I knew it was within compass. I would grapple a thing, certain of my general direction and often score my triumph over difficulty. I once tasted the romance of losing my water, but old engineers do that ; I kept my head and pulled my fire. Then some day when Coldwell was ab- sent the two of us would be imexpectedly needed, as with heavier logs at the saw. The foreman would send me a hand and together we would fight for steam. And so I walked among con- quests, the measure of their greatness for me be- ing the conditions of the man. As I remembered disaster, I weighed my contact and endeavored not to get left ; which is at once the measure of order and the morality of human kind. Standing one day with my hand upon the throttle and watching the driving belt and hear- io8 ing the machinery beyond, I believed in the :tio- tion that was traversing my arm. Outside I saw the stock go by to the loading car ; I knew that it was destined to the great barrel works at Yonkers and then to the i»efineries in New York ; then I saw the sugar in the barrel at the village grocery and knew the sweet in the loaf at home. I had made the circuit and had read commerce in terms of its revolution. Standing so, I dreamed that there was a language of motion for mind. It was in the tale of common things. IX. THE TEACHER AND THE CHILD MY next school was a country district in the township of Milan, nine miles north from Dundee. I had saved my money and by this time was reckoning interest on at least five hundred dollars. This reserve had given me some security and I was able to look about for a better place and some little advance in wages. I was at Milan two winter terms of four months. The second winter I received two hundred dollars for the term, this being nearly double the usual pay in this and other schools about. I still boarded around, with the advantage that I stored all I got. I began to be told that I was a miser and that money was for use. I precisely agreed to this for its use to me was the freedom of mind and movement which its possession gave me. Again the lie .of 109 the precept forced itself upon me. There was the doctrine in favor of hoarding and the doctrine against ; both in mind, there was the unreality of contradiction. In the end the solution, to me was of no thought of either. I simply breasted life in the from-day-to-day item as my experience and wit stood me. I sought to preserve my in- tegrity from under the wheel of circumstance. My building was a tall and roomy brick — a model of its kind as a country school -house. It had its cupola and bell, its patent seats, good blackboard and light. The people regarded it as their distinction among the districts round. They were said to employ good teachers. George Wheeler had preceded me as at Kent, and having the respect of the officers he spoke the successful word. I was now^ to try on larger numbers my notion of devising contact for the child. My classes commonl}' numbered a dozen or fifteen. In the Kent school, through freedom of move- ment, I had found the reality of the teacher as the organizer of contact. It began to come home to me. In the Milan school I was in the ensem- ble of numbers to find the child. In the first flush of my discovery of the teacher I exaggerated his office. I drew the lines of my organization so taut that the danger was of breaking. Some of my patrons were in revolt, dubbing my school the penitentiary. It was through this collision of forces that I found the second factor of the school. I discovered the child was an interest. My first realization was in the relationships of the children, being the question I lo of the contact of numbers. The interest of the child was to subserve the whole, else he would have no school. The way of the child here w^as the way by which he could know this. And it must be in terms of the results of what he did in its aggregate sense — in relation to the whole. He was not called to account for whisperitig, but for disturbing forty people ; or, on the ppsitive side, he must show how his action benefited forty peo- ple. He was not asked to face frcTnt in his seat but he was taken to account for disturbing the boy back of him. So, if he shuffled his feet or stampeded up the floor he was called to an ac- counting in such terms as he could understand. If the child wanted to go out he might be put to demonstrate the necessity to the individual, which was the part side of the whole interest, by offering to stay in at recess or given minutes at noon ; the offer would be accepted or not as the interest of the whole seem to warrant. The or- ganization stood for those who could see these things ; as in any community, the rational number predominated. The irrational member, as judged by the sense of the whole, had to feel the iron of exclusion, had to be deprived of the whole until through loss he could undertand its value. If this last consideration went to the rod it was owing to certain deficiencies of organization, but it 'was still deprivation and exclusion, for this was not the treatment of the whole. On the side of the organization of numbers, the contact of the child with his fellows, I had come at the method of an automatic working in lieu of the arbitrary method of the precept of control as against the child. I had the way for every condi- tion and the conditions would take care of them- selves. It was for the teacher to learn the prac- tice of the thing and this was an apprenticeship and could never be the committing of formula, no matter how detailed. I began to serve my ap- prenticeship here and in chief to the master of necessity. But I found those to advise me among my fellow tochers with whom I counseled, my school and theirs together being the workshop. Mr. George Babcock and Mr. Lute Smith, old teachers of country schools at Dundee, were of- ten able to suggest some rational plan for measur- ably meeting cases where the present conditions of the State, exemplified in my community, made organization inadequate. At this point I could but recognize that I too was the child and that his method of learning was mine. The method of the teacher was to be learned through respon- sible contact with the school — it was an appren- ticeship. It was a question of contact in respon- sibility and not barren phrase and counterfeit action. I was to further find the child an interest. When I called up a subject I saw there were as many distinct classes before me as children. And the distinctness would be in proportion to the movement or force of the child's mind ; each class was in the language of a particular child's interest. Suppose, in the sense of remoteness, we characterized any given bit of information that was going as history ; then in the sense of the classification of the day I had a history class- Belle Fournier, whose father owned a threshing machine, hardly knew other language, and would show her interest in the Roman peoples in the tongue, or way, of her ascendent contact. She was curious about how they handled their grain ; for her the Romans were a people who flailed their wheat. Thus really introduced to the Romans,, they having entered her experience, she sought for more of them in proportion to her further contact, but always in terms of her commingled and chief interest. Another girl whose mother was a dressmaker, saw^ the Romans as women who wore togas. Rightly considered, this was not rigidly Past ; was not rightly classified as inr flexibly remote. All of fact in the threshing machine or a woman's cloak is all of his- tory. The present comprehends the past, — is the past. Hand a class a newspaper, and a boy, distinct from all the others, would- light on the item giving the arrival of a car-, load of Texas ponies at Dundee, which were selling on pick at fifteen dollars the head- I remember such a boy who wanted to start at once for Dundee. He said he'd saved ten dollars and could borrow five more, he- thought. Now this was just as much history as the other, and in the sense of the child's method the distinction fell ; it was an immediate interest- Further considered, in the case of the Romans for instance, we had an arithmetic class when such items as the saving of time and waste be- tween the old and new methods of economy were reckoned, or when the time factor in the sense of the remoteness was estimated. In the case of the car-load of horses, we had arithmetic and history when in this piece of -information w^e reckoned the conditions which would per- mit the boy to buy the horse, or more remotely the factors of crossing and growing- horses thus cheaply ; including the element of the cost of transportation, and near or far a multitude of other factors which might enter. In the latter case the boy's present interest might take him across the plains of Texas to Mexico and Cor- tez as the probable advent of horses in Amer- ica ; and then the question of their further de- scent might touch Caesar and Alexander. But the language in every case was in the terms of a newness and it was neither history nor arithme- tic ; it was the way of the immediate interest. To switch the boy off this method of the mind and insist in any given case upon this or that interest " as a mere guess, was to introduce the element of brain lesion which had given rise to the exagger- ation of memorizing as the development of mind. At last I had found it. Here was the method, the way of the child. I was criminal and the re- sults were upon the State and the child if I vio- lated it. With my attempt to organize on the lines of this consciousness, at first but dim, I found my material obstruction was the book. I fought against this but my superstition was such that I could not see. The most that I could know was that the book hadn't sufficient variety. I at- ■144 tempted to supplement by drawing from a num- ber of books and in part pieced out with what might be called my own book ; as in arithmetic, for instance, I would extend a given list of exam- ples with some sirnilar ones that I would manu- facture. I afterwards found that this was being recommended by some of the schoolmen ; they too were evidently feeling the shortcomings of the text. My patrons were of course as super- stitious about the book as myself. Complaint reached the officers that I was tomfooling around the school with stuff of my own and neglecting the proper and routine work. The complaint had grown, when Mr. Jerome Allen, the spokesman of the board, came in to ask nie what I was do- ing. He had been a student at the Normal and was a farmer and surveyor. Contact of the latter had given him a good deal of mental freedom and I had the fortune of being able to get to him. I made him a class of one in grammar and then arithmetic and history, and showed hith in terms of his own business the principle as above exem- plified. He sat until he was satisfied, then told me if that was what I was doing to keep on ; he thought we could hold the district down. I was to explain to this and that man and he would do the same. In most cases they were able to un- derstand us ; they saw that we had something afoot which they summed up in the word practi- cal, and things settled to aq easy tolerance of me. This was in the first year, and in the second nearly everybody wanted me to come back ; I had reached them. I stumbled on through the two years in my struggle with the book, feeling at the end that I hadn't got it yet. But I had found the teacher and the child, and these would help me find the book. Here was the conflict with the all-round development notion conceived as the jumping between extremes of idea. This was an all-round method but it was the way of the child, not arbitrary or adventitious ; it was the reality which I was tracking. In the winter of the first year at Milan a Mr. Vose came to my school to introduce the Harper books. He was a reader of men. With all his shrewdness he found my district very difficult to handle. He brought the board down to the school-house and they had deference to me, list- ening to some of the advantages I was able to point out in the books which he talked. Once while I was in conversation with the board I no- ticed that Mr. Vose strolled off to the other end of the room and left them to me. The books went in. 'Later, proposing that I take up the schools with him, Mr. Vose told me I had the simplicity which won as a canvasser ; and that in my favoring words to my own school-board re- garding his books I revealed another element, — I matured my thought before I spoke to men. En- couraged here and urged by Mr. Vose, the pay being large, I engaged to go with him when my school should be out. Mr. Vose had been of position in the schools of New York state. In addition to considerable teaching, he had held for several years the place of school commissioner for a county. He gave me 1 16 much suggestion in the practical ways. And the force of the real and only way of learning to teach grew upon me as in my work I counseled with him, raising the problems that came to me in my practice; I became his apprentice. I found Mr. Vose was in revolt with the schools, saying that he left them because they were dead. I took the road early in the spring, doing the southern part of Monroe county, my pay be- ing a commission of sixty per cent on the value of the books "introduced." The best work I did was a week among the French districts along Lake Erie, where five schools which I sacked netted me nearly two hundred dollars. Mr. Vose was afterwards transferred to Nebraska and I went with him on a salary of fifty dollars a month and expenses. This movement of the Harpers was begun against the combination of text-book firms formed to freeze the opposition out. This organization, counting most of the prominent firms, was distin- guished by the Harper agents as the school-book ring. In canvassing a board they would run the changes on this, speaking against the combine as bleeding the people with high prices and inferior goods. South-east Michigan, and latterly Ne- braska, had some elements which particularly favored the introduction of the books, being the reason for the turning loose of the Harper agents in these states. The growing dissatisfaction with the book on the part of the schoolmen had taken the shape of preaching improved and livelier sort and a uniformity of text, or author, on any given 117 subject. This last was said to reduce the number of classes and economize the teacher's time. The iron-clad uniformity as compelling all the child- ren to the same lines is the further growth of the method of the school against the child. The more recent direction of the school organization has been on these lines. The doctrine began more particularly to be preached about the time I was at the Milan school. The Harpers seized upon this and their agents raised the cry of the uniformity of books as the important reason for a change ; it was offered to take the old and mixed texts even-exchange for the new and uniform. We would get the attention of the school officers by going to them with a letter from the county board, recommending a uniformity of text. At- tention enforced by this, we would present the advantage of the Harpers' over other books ; and being able to show a cheaper price, a hundred to one we would get them if there was no disturbing element about in the wav of rival agents. The latter coming in would generally re- sult in doing nothing, as it was easier for the board to take no action than to do the disturbing thing. We would be hunted out by the agents of the combine. We covered our movements as best we could ; we would turn up in unexpected places, work for a little time and then move, to re- turn again when the sleuths had disappeared. Thus was burned over a good deal of south-eastern Michigan and the Ring woke up at last to find it almost solid for Harpers'. Finally, after months, they threw in their agents to drive us from Mich- ii8 igan and we transferred our operations to Ne- braska. In this movement the Harpers more than gave their books arway, but the probable lease of the schools for years made the invest- ment good. Harpers' finally getting sufficient foothold compelled the Ring to treat with them and they were invited to come inside ; and the con- ditions of the combine being that one firm should not actively work against the books of another that were already in use, the fight ceased. The American Book Company, lately capitalized for five million dollars, is the latest phase of this cen- tralization of the text-book interest. Their agents and circulars have been active in aiding the schoolmen to fasten the superstition of the book upon the people. I returned in the fall to the second winter of my Milan school, as to my interest. The life of the canvasser, unpleasant from the start, had worn itself irksome to me. It was not the line of my direction. I had begun to function in the way of teaching. Realizing this in my increased like for the school, as the ratio of my success, I was not to be easily drawn aside. My two winters closed at Milan, I for the first time took a summer school, teaching in Cap- tain Ingersoll's district two or three miles west- erly from my home, on the Little Raisin creek. I made such elements of advance toward the real book as variety of contact gave me, though noth- ing pronounced. I simply underwent added fric- tion, getting to the point of trying to negative the old. An incident of the school was my 119 trouble with the jealousy of a former teacher, a ■woman who had held sway in the district for •some terms. I obtained the position to her dis- comfiture, she having worked to retain the place. I knew nothing of this until she began to canvass the neighborhood against me. I early made sev- ■eral staunch friends and they withstood the at- tack while I went on with the school. A term of three months, it closed in the middle of July. X. THE BOOK AND THE SCHOOL TT must have been early in August succeeding the -*■ close of my summer school, that I learned that Flat Rock, a town in Wayne county twenty Miiles on the road to Detroit, was wanting a teacher. I went up to apply. It was a hot morn- ing and I got there about ten o'clock. I had often gone through the town on the train and had been ■impressed with the people about the station. So in one sense the place- did not seem new to me. I found Mr. C. G'. Munger, keeper of a mixed store, was director. Through contact with the schools on the road I had come instinctively to nose out the influential members of a board. A few minutes' talk showed me that Dr. Lobdell was the man on this board. Mr. Munger in a manner deferred to him. He wanted me to go up and see Dr. Lobdell at his office and drug-store on the corner at the center of the village. I found he was visiting patients in the country. I was later in the day introduced to the doctor by the methodist minister, Mr. Clack, whom I knew as formerly of Dundee and who had been stationed at Flat Rock by the bishop as a diplomat among ministers, hoping that he would be able to patch up a peace between the factions of his congrega- tion who had been sometime in a split. Chief in council of the church was another member of the school-board. Dr. Near. The other members ■were Seward Vreeland, a farmer ; John Shove, in charge of Mr. Chamberlain's hardware store ; and Freeland Garretson, justice of the peace. I went with Dr. Lobdell to his office and he held me in some talk aimed at sounding me more as a man than a teacher ; in regard to the latter, he asked me if I had taught any and I told him a number of years. I detected a reserve in him and saw that we did not jump together. I finally left the town on the afternoon train with- out coming to any understanding, very much doubting that I would get the school. Dr. Lob- dell had told me that the board would write me in case they concluded to hire me. I construed this as his way of putting me by and decided that he did not like me or that he had some other teacher in view. Getting home, I had two or three letters written him by acquaintances in Chicago and elsewhere. From one of these he learned that I had moved about and had met some attrition in affairs. I received word from the director asking me to come down again. When I went he said he'd sent for me because 121 Lobdell wished to see me. He gave me the pointer, as he said, that Lobdell, finding me in the company of a preacher, had concluded that I was religious ; and getting from one of the letters that I had been on the road some he had changed his. mind, to conclude that my contact had been less narrow. He said that I could have the school if I wanted it, provided I could handle Lobdell. I found the doctor in his office and he unbent to me, offering that he had been afraid I was a Sun- day-school man and he said they'd had a belly- ful in that town of that kind of stock. He thought that might be all right on the abandoned pneumatic to " heaven " but Flat Rock was on the earth and he wanted some attention in the school to every-day cnatters ; this' would dry tap any ordinary man's attention. I told him that I had no wings and that I should expect to find my bus- iness with common folk, as they were good enough for me ; that I did not take to the exclu- sive. He might find that I had not made my vows and that my sectary was belief in law^. He informed me that I could have the school and that I would get sixty dollars a month; He said the contract would be sent down to me signed by the board, and notified me that a clause would be in- serted permitting my dismissal on five days' no- tice. I asked the privilege of having a reciprocal clause to the contract, whereby I could discharge the board on an equal notice. He bade me good bye, saying he guessed we'd get on. I was on the ground Saturday night early in September. ' I found my boarding place with a 122 Mrs. Cook, a staunch methodist, and where all the teachers had boarded before me. The house with trimmed hedges was on the hill in the eastern edge of the village and looked inviting. Mr. Munger expostulated at my turn, saying he had thought they were going to have one teacher who would sail outside the religous wake. I told him that I was under contract with Dr. Lobdell to swear not by anything, and that he must ex-_ cuse me if I declined to subscribe to the tenets of n'o-sectary. With Monday morning, the board came down to the opening. Following a custom, I as- sembled the school in the large upper room, that it might all go off at once. Eyes took stock of me. The board sat around on chairs and the steps of the platform. Dr Near was made their spokesman and stood before us to say that they had been having a good deal of trouble, especially of late, and that he didn't know whether it was the fault of the teacher or the fault of the school. He thought it was both. Anyway, they were going to test it, as the board this year had been careful in their selection of a teacher. He told the school that the teacher represented the board and that they might lay to that. The board seemed to ex- pect something from me and I could find nothing to the point as I rose but that I hoped all the factors of the school present would know each other better when they knew each other longer; with these dozen words I v/as done. I invited our guests to stay until we got up steam but they dfeclined on the ground of business ; and Dr. 133 Lobdell, speaking for the board, said that he and Dr. Near had patients to kill and as I'd got my sentence they'd leave me to saw my way out. Mr. Irish, the teacher who preceded me, had gone into a law office in Detroit. I found him making occasional visits to our village. He told me that he'd had a full Normal course in New York state. Flat Rock was the first school he had taken. He said he had not heretofore met any responsibility of this or any kind and that he broke up. With the greatest good nature in the world, he said that he did not blame the children for erecting the madhouse with him as he felt he was not an organizer. Until he came to the school, he was entirely untouched of what teaching meant ; though he'd been drilled in the Normal courses laid down for the teacher and had handled some classes after their formulas and di- rections. He said he felt that if he should ever .make a teacher he must grow into it as displacing injection by rules. He agreed with me that the .drill he lacked to determine whether or not he was fitted, was to be apprenticed to the practice of pedagogy and have responsibility gradually thrown upon him as his mastfer should discover he was able to handle it. Mr. Irish deplored ihat the school had lost so much in its contact with him, through his ignorance of the fact that he was not a teacher. He said that in turning to the law he had simply run away from the school. He didn't quite know that he should study law and doubted whether that fitted him. His ribboned diploma hung in my bed-room at Mrs. Cook's 124 for many months ; he did not seem to care for it after Flat Rock. In my organization of the school for the con- tact of numbers, I had early to put the fetter of exclusion on some of my older girls. Miss Belle Hall was one of these. I came to the extremity of marking her for suspension. Of her own right she was immensely reasonable and admitted the force of the necessities of the whole when I brought her mind against the reality. As she went home of an evening after bowing to her own reason, I would know that she was in the w^ay of her interests, as subserving the whole ; but on her return to the school in the morning, I would discover that disturbing element had been introduced. It appeared that her mother and others of her family had been busy during the night and she was in rebellion. The board sus- pended her after deliberation ; and a fight began, in which the district divided. Her mother, in the spirit of the haughty Custer, whose sweetheart she declared she once had been, and who never laid down arm, clamored the town against me. One or two other suspensions for short periods were necessary and the district succeeded to "what my lack-admirers called the Ford Reign, which it was said began A. D. 1883. Everybody was soon attending to their own interests in the school. The most that I did after that in the way of what is called governing, was to keep little accounts in my vest pocket notes with the occasional child. These jottings would run over a week or a month before an accounting 125 would be made with the boy or the girl, the whole being presented as accumulated action. The boy would make his case and tell me what he proposed to do in the matter ; such times I would simply exact that he attend to his own bus- iness. I would seldom call for an immediate ac- counting of an act in itself. Rather I raised in effect a balance-sheet,- thus averaging the child". In time the individual came to watch himself more than me ; and I would find him using intel- ligent guard as to his action affecting the whole. The school jogged along and my liberty was se- cured. The township superintendent, Mr. Thomas Cook, visited the school well on in the year. He intimated that I didn't do much to keep order. I replied that I did it all at the beginning of the term. He said he had never seen the like before. I came simply to mix with my pupils about the building above and below. On mornings in win- ter the girls with cold feet would find bricks at their desks, which was a part of my fun. We brought in plants and song birds, and hung our windows. Our children worked in arborvitte some mottoes for the walls, the last remnant of my precepts. (Appendix iv.) The parts of the day given to intermission, barring some neces- sary movement, were as quiet as the rest, for some might be wanting to work. Permission for necessary communication on the part of the pupil was had through agreed signals indicating specific wants ; a child might raise one or more fingers or post a particular card at his desk indicating some desire and would get permission by a nod, 126 thus reducing interference with others to the mini- mum. Or if the pupil pursued his own Hcense he might post particular card with a note as to more detail of his action, publicity controlling him. I buttressed of earth and grew ever con- scious of facility as of the apprenticeship of a long practice, responsibility upon me at every turn. My revolt against the methods of the pedagogue as applied to my own case now grew so pronounced that I questioned the very book itself ; I was able to look at it with a free- dom from superstition that led me to treat it as I would anything in life. Thus freed, I began to wonder what the book might sometime be. It was clear that I was to give the child con- tact after the method of his interest. The question became, how much did the old book-notion promote or retard this. I proceeded according to the law of interest, but was compelled to recognize my limits ; I could organize but for superficial contact on the part of the child while the school was set off by itself and apart from the everyday doing around me. I could not give him the great contact — doing in the functions or economies of life. Anything short of the contact of the child with his own power in the full realities of doing, must partake of the falsity of "playing school." In giving a class some drill in geography, and following out the law, way, of the child's interest, I would have occasion to require from them a bill of shipment showing the routes by water and rail which the dates and bananas we had seen in the shop window, or were eating at the 127 class, would take to arrive at Flat Rock from their place of shipment. This would compel an amount of research on the part of the pupil which went beyond the geography text. We would frequently have to call in a shipper's guide and other transportation books. Additional, a coupon ticket might be desired, of the route the child as agent would take in going to buy Or sell the above, increasing the research. A given class might in this run foul of a problem in arithmetic which they were unable to handle. In such case they would have to get their information from some more advanced class, riiaking a direct division of labor with their fellows. Then in the course of the necessary research some informa- tion in so-called history might arise quite remote from any book at all in the school other than the encyclopoedia. It was after this manner that I dis- covered that there is no such thing as a text-book in the sense of present usage, except as obstruct- ing the child's interest. It came about that we needed to call up De- troit for information, as a center in the state. Here the delay would be so great that it was not operative. I found we had no universal counter to which we could send for facts ; there was no company, or News Office, in Detroit that made it a business for a small fee, else we could have used the telephone which had about that time come to the town. There were ways of the child's interest where information could not be a day old without obstructing him. Hence the last thing, read by the moving interest, would be 128 the stereotyped page embalmed of fixity and labelled Text. Its touch was the death of stasis to the child. The lie in our Geography be- ing a description of the earth came up so- cogently to me that I was unable to keep my con- science of any order without telling the class about it ; they agreed that if it could not trace one banana around the world it was short shrift of discription and far on in the immorality of disorder thus put forward. We forswore the limits of Text and concerted of device against permitting ourselves to be hampered with the notions of the makers of books. In our methods we quit constraint ; and with other obsequies, text uniformity became absurd. We began to put off the bonds in many di- rections. I was constantly at my wits to meet the emergency. Under the conditions of our limitations, how was I to give the child the free- dom of his interest in the direction called arith- metic and yet have an arithmetic class.? I had seen that my geography class, following the method of the child, covered every class. Under this method there was only one class ; but custom compelled me to the nominal arithme- tic. We must meet our limitations here. The rationale of an arithmetic class in our system would be the stopping for special drill in numbers as the need of the child arose and was made clear to himself. But how could I handle the class so that the individual and waking interest should not be stopped? Under this head there were some plain considerations : JPirsi, a 129 child's mind must not be switched in its movement by the inflexible routine of specific things in de- tail. For instance a problem in numbers, %[ x 2 }^ , must not be given out ; the-v drill should not be in proposing particular figures for the child to stump on. The detail in the way of the exact numbers as here proposed would be a bar to a certain child's mental movement. His interest might not lie in the particular combinations given, and in consequence he would in effect have to "mem- orize" them. It was in the principle, or way, in- volved in the fractional process proposed that the child needed drill, not in particular figures to his confounding. It was the particular way that was first ; his interest would self-move him to the variety of detail. Second, the detail might be entirely impossible for one member of the class and so simple for another that his interest would not seize upon it. In short, under this and other heads, the children were in no way equal, though near enough in point of economy to be classified in the exercise together. Third, there was the denominate side to this ; . a dozen children out of fifteen might not be at all interested in a problem concerning apples at so much a bushel and other questions of their exchange. Fourth, there w^as the question of time and place ; one in- terest might be of to-morrow at Rome and an- other of yesterday at Detroit. There were other considerations. These were enough to control me. They were primary and I must meet them. I could not give out problems in this way with- 130 out violating my concept ; it would be disjunction for me as well as my children. When the solution came it was like all things when you get them, very simple. I would work out with the class a problem in terms of their contact as some need had arisen, and in specific form wherebj' all their interests were present. Then I would anticipate the probable complica- tions or forms of detail that would arise along this particular principle, or waj' ; that is, the va- riety of such combinations, all in the sphere of their interests and clearly seen by the class. The first would be marked Model I., as basic from the standpoint of the principle ; and the variations would be marked a, d, c, — according to their ex- tent. These were put upon the board, posted, as for suggestive lead to the invention of replication. Then estimates might be made of the require- ments and capabilities of the class and the as- signment of their work for a given day would be intimation of the time needed and afforded, and not necessarily a specific number of these prob- lems ; the pupil proceeded to make his own les- son, under each head after the whole method, including the economy of solution, which latter was a part of the working model. The child was answerable in results as of the mode, or prin- ciple, not in the grind of rigid limits in lesson ; he strove only to the way, which was of his intelligence. Care would be taken that the method, or way, of the thing had escaped no one. It became a question of so many minutes or hours at their papers, according as they judged 131 their own need ; these were brought up for in- spection the following day, as by demand for the economy of the whole. Largess of contact in the variety of detail could then be had, if their interests so shaped, by exchange of papers to be' given attention at the class or made an as- signment to be reported on the next day. There would be nothing against such assign- ment since the criticism would only involve the way, or such detail as might be at the desire of the pupil, the former only being exacted. Here was the automatic method that allowed the utmost flexibility ; there was no arrest by stone- wall im- possibilities for any boy anywhere as inherent in the method itself. It may be seen that the arith- metic interest would carry the boy around the world just as with the geography. The limita- tions of information noted curtailed us in that degree. Aside from the practice of handling words in the foregoing processes, which was the real grammar, we were under the necessity of meet- ing the superstition calling for the nominal class in this branch. Arriving at some point in the in- terest of the child it would be discovered that there was the necessity of knowing the subject or object of a verb, as in the case of change of form in a pronoun. Then some drill, in principle precisely like that in arithmetic, would be had. In punctuation there would be no Rules com- mitted; and the subject of Composition, which was another superstition of title, could be made entirely a working practice, giving the utmost 132 elasticity to the training of the child after the manner of the working models. I do not dwell. The last book to be displaced, and the difficult one, was the reader. That held me throughout my whole three years at Flat Rock, so slow was I. Going up to Detroit one day toward the close of my last year I ran upon the type-writer, the first time I had stopped to look at it : like all my fellows, I was going so fast chasing matters that had better been left to themselves. It suggested to me the movable types in such economy that they could be given to the child. Its meaning to me was a further organization of contact that would free the child from the nominal reader. I saw^ disappear the last obstruction to the real book ; which book I had become conscious was the machinery of organization to contact. On its typical side, the real book was seen to be the pregnant or daily intelligence flowing through the movable letters to the child. But of what was the connection with this stream that in endless tale of action should afford the New ? A few rods away it was articulate in the electric current that passed up the village street. The need of things in the way of my supreme want as lifting the last drag from the child would bring the circuit through the school-house. I reached up to get the wire and it was cut. I saw that the organization of the Embryo State for contact must extend clear through to function. Anything short of doing was to falsify life and deny the lesson of self-power ; consider- ations less than this went to belie my own ex- 133 perieiice : the child must be organized for an ap- prenticeship to the daily avocations of the State. It was the promised land of the wandering spirit. This would make the organic connection with life, and in the fulness of his function the child would be born into independence of affairs. Through the placenta of an organized contact with industry, through practice in responsibility, the child would be fed of his need. Torn no longer of the unreal and apart thing, he would rather be distributed to such doing as he could and the paths of employment organized as open to his progress : the foundry, the loom, the plough, chemistry, journalism. The child would come to such a place as that in which I worked, for purposes of specific drill as the requirements of of his daily avocation made the need. The only parallel to life was life itself. This was the school. I had found the reality of the grand factors of the school : the Teacher, the Child, and the Book. And the all-round development was the organization for freedom of mind in an all-round contact — was the trust of mind as of its own law in the organized and ordering environment. It was to have done with the monstrosity of an apart preaching of methods and deliverance as by sounding brass of knowledge. I now came clearly to recognize the thousand aids to method of contact which had come up the long road from the Concrete of Pestalozzi to the Quincy Methods of Francis Parker by which the child has mainly to look and see. These were in- ventions , to contact. And then there were all other inventions in the machinery of contingence through to the disappearance of distance, latterly from Watt to Morse. The realities which I had come upon were, on the side of the Embryo State, the control and direction of these ; that which failed of the organic was by them dislimbed. There filed by me as of portent the long line of fellow-workers who had not been rocked and dandled into teachers but in the trenches had dug their way to light. Dr. Lobdell died before Christmas of my first year. The meeting of the board called to consider the suspension of Belle Hall was the last one of any importance w^hich he attended. The parting w^ords he gave me on the night of that meeting, after the board had broken up, were that he supposed I would read the dismissal in the morning. He said I trust you to do it straight ; T have not noticed that you scramble with your mouth. I visited him once in his sick- ness to give some friction that had occurred with one of my associate teachers who at first had her own notion of no head to a school. He clutched the clothes that covered him and wished he could be up. As he lay he summoned individuals of the board and addressed a letter to my sub- ordinates that tended to put our wheels in cog. Dr. Brodie, as an expert from Detroit, was unable to find any specific ailment in Dr. Lobdell's sick- ness. He thought it was a case of " let go " by a man whose nerve had not been off tension for 135 fifty years. Supreme in the direction of the life of the village he went, leaving no successor. It should be seen that the new methods ma- terially modified the curriculum of the school. In time I put forward an Announcement which was as revolutionary as my board would allow me. In addition to such reasons as that we must talk in terms of other people, they held that many of my pupils were proposing to become teachers in the schools about and it must be expected that they would conduct them after the custom of the day. They said that the county examining board would not know how to test them. They feared that my pupils would fail of a teacher's certificate. The superstition about debating clubs was at Plat Rock as everywhere, and I inserted in the Announcement some notice of this though we never did any debating in the formal sense outside of our inquiries as noted. Any hot-house work, we succeeded in confining to the methods of inquiry and reports of our classes as described. My teachers, Mrs. Frain in the Intermediate Department and Miss Hooper in the Primary, were alive to any new things I brought them. Mrs. Prain in a great way caught the spirit of it. She had been in rebellion against the rigmarole of the schools, as she called it, and was on strike when I met her. Miss Hooper, younger in the worry, welcomed what we gave her as an easy way out of the difficulties she began to experi- ence. I worked to her through Mi's. Train, the school thus connecting in its departments. My teachers agreed with me in the apprenticeship 136 notion of the education of teachers and eagerly sought suggestions on their practice as the total of the teacher's learning. While I had my doubts as to Miss Hooper's fitness for teaching at all, I saw that, merely as a perfinictory thing and routine, she had less difficulty in handling the school under the organic method than under the old apartness. Mrs. Frain's pleasure in helping Miss Hooper conveyed to me the satisfaction the master knows in bestowing service on the inquiring journeyman. And she pointed out to me the opportunity that existed in her own department for advancing boy or girl teacher under fostering direction. The thought of companionship with some bright ap- prentice captivated her. I too was cognizant of the promised delights of associating with myself some apprentice to the school. It should not only have lifted burdens of repetition from my hands to bestow upon the want of another, but I felt the longing of fellowship in some growing mind that should drain me for. the last suggestion in vs^ays kindred to my own. Here were three depart- ments affording wide range of the school in which was wasting opportunity for the fledging teacher indentured of need. Succeeding the death of Dr. Lobdell, ni}- board lost its unity and it was with difficulty that thev kept to the straight line we had started upon. Vacillation resulted. Toward the middle of the second year the board tired of holding the school up to certain regulations as to prompt- ness of attendance. We had been going on the 137 method that the child should bring reasons from home for his absence, not a mere line asking that he be excused for past or future absence. We made our course on the ground that the parent had his obligations to the State and was bound to justify his action in obstructing the whole. For- getting the principle, Dr. Near let go and carried other members of the board with him. They held a meeting and sent me correcting command, as menial and having no voice in the matter. They ignored me, an ex-officio member of the board. The whole conduct of the school was at stake. I could see no end to the matter. I de- cided to go to the district on the question, who had gradually, in part through personal seeking of them, been won over to the way we were do- ing things. As at Milan, they called our plan practical. I resigned, giving the board a week to consider the matter or get another teacher. My message to the district through the children at the end of the week was that I must leave them on account of extraordinary differences with the board. I bade my room good bye and left them sobbing in their seats. I went home, to remain two or three weeks. At the end of that time I received a communication from friends saying that the board had had enough of it and that the easy way to let them down would be for me to come back and offer negotiation with them. The end was that I went back to the school. The board called it re-hiring me. I learned that in my absence they had gone to the Normal for a teacher and engaged a woman who was recom- 138 mended to them by the president. She had been a student at the Normal. She came into the school and proceeded to give out lessons from the books after the manner of the day. The children could not understand her. Her method was jar- gon ; they sat to laugh her in the face. Toward the close of her first week she came to the board and placed her resignation, saying she could get no eritering wedge in the school and that the town was against her. She would do anything in the w^orld rather than stay another week. Early in the third year Mrs. Frain left, re- signing to take a school in New Mexico where better wage was offered her. Mr. Shove of the board, the brother-in-law of Miss Hooper of the Primary Classes, endeavored to advance his kin to the Intermediate Department. The board ob- jected to this without my endorsement of her fitness for the change. Mr. Shove was thus driven to come to me to ask my support. I de- clined, giving as my reasons that Miss Hooper had through a year and a half of apprenticeship partially come to her function in the place where she was, and that she was only just becoming useful there. He persisted, and I covered the board per- sonally against the change as unjustifiable. Thej saw it and Mr. Shove was stayed in his wire- pulling. I became the mark of his spite when action was up in the board, he giving me franklj once by ourselves that I hadn't backed him and he wouldn't back me. I had told Mr. Shove that if the object in Miss Hooper's case was more pay that they should raise her wages where she 139 was. I held that her advancement should be an improvement of her art, that there was no such thmg as higher place in the sense he meant ; that higher place was the highest adaptivity to condi- tions that best fitted one. When my final class came up for graduation at the end of the third year, Mr. Shove disfavored the board against my purpose, taking ground that some of the pupils had only been in the course three years and that the full course laid down was four years. I again went to the district on the hold that it wasn't years but attainments that fitted for graduation. The people took this mind and attacked the board, in some cases threat- ening personal violence. The board fetched their own course to compromise the matter, saying they would call in the Wayne County School Examiners to test the class as teachers, and if they were granted certificates the graduation would be allowed and the diplomas put. If not, the dis- trict would see that the board was justified as against the teacher. The county officials coming, the examinations were held and the certificates granted ; they also filed letters with the board saying that the examination of the class gave the best results of any body of applicants that had come before them for lower grade certificates ; that they were organic and knew what they were doing, judging from an absence of guessing around on the memorizing basis. The exami- ners asked the privilege of signing the diplomas. In the last year at Flat Rock I went up to the Normal looking for some sympathy and help 140 in my plans. Mr. Willets, the then president, stared me down. My enthusiasm meant something erratic to him. He seemed to regard me as an intruder. I asked him to investigate me and determine if I were a teacher. I told him that I had heard they gave so-called honorary diplomas to those who had proved their ability to teach ; thus helping one to the prestige of the Normal without the tediousness and spoil of time involved in an extended course. He told me the diploma I asked for was unusual and that they were not proposing to discover teachers outside the in- stitution. Professor Bellows gave me his atten- tion and declared I had the principle that made for the school of the future, but his faith put it a long way off. Dr. George of the training school was on the rvuT with his own affairs and could not stop. He caught something from me, but said that I was mistaking the personal factor of the teacher for something new. Phrases like this rolled from his tongue as by authority. He left me to trot about among his classes. Pro- fessor McLouth told me with great complacency that I was not far wrong, but advised me to go to the University at Ann Arbor, saying that I needed some contact with young men of ability of my own age in order to blunt the edge of my conceit. I left these men of intellectual riches and went back to the byways and the hedges. At the close of my year I applied for the school at the village of Wayne, in the same county. The board told me that they preferred a teacher from the Normal and that they thought they 141 would select one of several such who had applied. 1 dispaired of securing a school that would give me a wider field than Flat Rock ; I turned from beating around the circle again in this village. The outlook had no newness for me. Judging for myself, I had clearly found my function in the State but it was obstructed. My savings by this time were quite four thousand dollars, inclusive of some bad invest- ments with kinsfolk who hunted the money-shark, this being the term they now applied to me. I had notes and mortgages out. My money was the opportunity of moving. I decided to take Professor McLouth's advice and mix with brains at Ann Arbor. In the way of some direction there, I started in a course of medicine. I had looked with liking upon this science and felt that it was perhaps the thing most closely related to some advance in the schools. Physicians like Weir Mitchell of Philadelphia h'ad lately been speaking against the system. I took up study with Dr. G. W. Richardson at Dundee during the summer. He found me purposeful and intro- duced me to his patients. When the University opened in October I was on the seat assigned me for the first lecture to the Freshmen in the am- phitheater of the Medical Building. XI. THE SCIENTIFIC APARTNESS T TOOK to Ann Arbor very definite notions of ■'■ learning as a practice. It was not a precept with me, it was my experience. It was my mind redeemed and shaped of responsibility and grown into the consciousness of the needs of the learner. My curiosity whetted to find in what extent my ex- perience would be violated by the instructors upon the Campus. I w^as curious to know what they thought teaching was. My presiding hope was that they might be able to speak some advance to me. Until I came to contact with the Campus I could not know how far the organic principle was controlling them. My expectations were raised for some marked advance in this direction at the Scientific Center of Michigan. The night I arrived had the last mellowness of autumn and a niuggy shower was falling. I went upon the streets of this entrepot of learning. Everything spoke of the opening of the Univer- sity. It fell colder than the rain upon me that a universal thing should be so chopped as to require an annual opening. I began to have the con- sciousness of something that was not organic and of law. I progressed to discover that the book- selling shops and those of sporting-goods- men were prominent in the occupation of the tow^n. I wondered how much the professors made of the book and how far theywould gag me with it. I wondered how far foot-ball was an adjunct of the institution or a means of relief from systematic unreality, vsrhether the man who em- H3 ployed it had strayed in through lack of an organ- ism. I saw the churches on every hand with forbidding front and closed doors, on their portals the blood of labor robbed ; I w^ondered what Science upon the Campus had to say of these. I noticed a hundred signs to give board at low^ prices; I was told that the cooking in town was dyspep^y and bred starvation of nerve. There were a dozen boot-and-shoe houses, the people support- ing these twelve organizations for distributing footwear ; the keeping up of prices in order that all the members of this complicated diversity might continue was called competition. The dis- order in the diversity of the merchants and the boarding-houses rose to me ; as well have a hundred Post Offices that stamps might be cheap. I looked towards the Campus thinking to know what Science was doing in ordering the State. In short, was I to find that the Scientific Center connected with the people and so with movement, or was it but the preserve of the mummery of ideas belated of disuse.'' Was it dumb to the im- minent and momentous life that, wounded of mis- direction, travailed at its gates for the deliverance of the organic fact? As I walked, my eyes had evidence of what I already knew ; the wires from all the ducts of commerce which meshed upon the streets of the town stopped short of this they called the Scientific Center. How far was the institutien intrenched and barricaded of super- stition against the invasion of the life of which these were the reality? The view of the Univer- sity as presenting the basic disorder of an apart- 144 ness from life, was a preparation against surprise at the disorder of a broken condition within. I was again to prove for myself by: change of field that the apprenticeship is the method of the learner ; that practice is the law, or way, of the mental acquirement. I was to be introduced to the apartness of the lecture system pure and simple. We were to be told what we needed in practice, instead of getting it in its reality as experience in practice itself. Of a morning hour, our first lecturer ap- peared before us wth a tray of bones. He began to point out the roughened attachments of muscles and the openings for the passage of nerves and blood vessels in the long phrase of the technique of medicine with a voice pitchfed to " lecture " volume ; taught of custom, he aiijtied to avoid a break in the sound of his speech. If the word did not come readily the voice would be prolonged until the next word could be caught, presuming thereby his audience would glean that he was too full of learning to stop. I accent what' came to me as an aberration because it met me in the lecture system at every turn upon the Campus. I discovered that in this they w^ere do- ing a good deal of what I'd got a little at the Xormal. When I arrived at the University ■ ' my movement was precisely my contact. I had been assisting Dr. Richardson a few days before in raising the strength of a patient and otherwise preparing for an operation on a decaying shin- bone. We discovered that the rotten part of the M5 bone lay deep, and the doctor told me that it was in the neighborhood of the blood and nerve track of the leg. He had no preparation whereby he could demonstrate to me that portion of the anat- omy of the body which my contact had made an interest. What I wanted that morning w^hen I sat in the first freshman lecture was to find out about that particular operation and not any hypo- thetical thing, as I was hoping to go down and help the doctor at it. But by the methods of the lecture my interest was violently swerved from its movement and things w^ere thrust in front of me for memorizing which, had my mind been allowed to move, there would have been no need of memorizing in the sense of the scholastic. I saw that their methods were about to separate me^ for at least six months from my interest. Worse, thus broken, they were to assassinate my wit. The certainty of the brutalizing I was to undergo rose before me. We were to have all of bones and then all of muscles and all of blood vessels and then all of nerves, it was an- nounced. My intelligence in its revolt sought relief by going over to the first clinic, where Dr. McLean was operating. I found a good many of my freshman companions there. On the follow- ing day at the lectures in the medical building it seemed to be a concerted action with the speakers to warn us of the clinic, and against giving rein to our interest,^ — that was the word ; they warned that it would take us ^way from the fundamental things of anatomy, physiology, etc. : that we should 146 not expect practice until these had becorne familiar to us. I saw the set and pronounced policy of the institution was to violate the funda- mental method of mind and compel our interest to an errant and starvation course; We were brought to the leash. The hours of our sittings and work were arranged by de- sign so that they cut us from the clinics. Our non-attendance at any hour was marked against us by Secretary Campbell. We were thus driven to the lectures and our powers ravished. I took up with the custom of my fellows of sitting through the sessions and withholding my mind from its natural bent as best I might and taking notes for "boning" up against the occasional recitation or quiz, so that I should escape the charge of being a bad student to the untoward of suffering ridicule and banishment. I thus came to know that my differences with the Cam- pus were in its separation of me from my interests by the fiction of a getting ready to practice. I came against the views of the students as to what teaching was. I found that most of them divided the medical faculty into lectur- ers and teachers ; yet it was a school we were at. The students did not distinguish between the eloquence of contact and a wobbling tongue. Dr. Ford helped them see things, they told me. They marked him of excellent teaching. It was of him that Oliver Wendell Holmes said that he wrould occasionally sit at his demonstrations if he had to cross ocean to come to them." I found him a master of English'speech ; he conveyed his •47 meaning and with no obtruding word. He would take up the eye. with a skull in his hand, pointing to the empty socket which sight had traversed in a life now still. With his French model he would track the nerves to the visual centers of the brain ; then window the blood channels and the routes they furrowed. He would pause here, unmind- ful of connection in his speech, for the impress of relationship which he had raised before the student was the eloquent pass. Taking a fresh bullock's eye, his knife would insinuate the hard outer coat of its protection ; and then the middle coat as the netted weave of artery and vein ; then the inner coat, or retina, as the flare of the optic nerve to its million points of contact with the arrows of light. Finally, could craft reveal the intimate covering of the globe which the anatomists assert ? Of slower hand, as weighing surety, simjalicity would transfix with pin point the forward lens and frdm the dissected coverings lift it, strung to its bulkier mate by membrane fragile as air ; dependent so, the aligned humors of the eye were floated in their capsule of transparency before the class. It was the completion of the story of a unity of which all the parts were had in play. Our teacher's deftness spoke the actual. Turning with a patience that knows of lack, he would with another eye traverse the dissection anew, pausing at the im- jDortant junctures that reality might speak again. At "last, with the picture of the cords of day and the warning of pulsing main, I have heard this goodman venture so"me remark that should 1 48 clinch relationship home ; and moved of defer- ence, he would hope that though we forgot names we would not forget things — anybody can cut, he was wont to say, but it is a wise man who knows where not to cut. I have heard multi- plied throats as men rose in their places, burst by an emotion they could not contain. It was thus I knew his secret. He adjusted the contact of the student ; seeing relations he would have others see them with him ; the effect was of order. So little consciousness had my companions and so much did I find them phrase-making, that thev would say in remembrance of these things that Dr. Ford was a great teacher, he put them to the fact, though he lacked in facundity compared with some members of the instructor body whom they judged as of continuous speech. He was not a lecturer, they said. I was brought to note the effect of the system in the work of the various teachers of the institu- tion. The student not coming to the professor as to a counter for some specific information which, as in my case with Dr. Richardson, would be discovered in the progress of his apprenticeship, was handed about among the various departments of the medical college after some guess as to what he wanted. A given teacher having no ob- jective but to exhaust the information more par- ticularly relating to his department, tended to ex- aggeration of his office. There was not the re- ality of external correction. The unity here might be that each department would seek to be in such relations with all other departments that a student 149 could readily get the information he had a conscious want of, being directed to the branch that should supply it. This was to connect w^ith life. Instead of such simple dealing out of in- formation, on demand, according to specific wants, every professor was engaged in crying up the importance of his department, and the exaggera- tion would be fui'ther increased by the rounding- out of a given branch to show its ramifications and the dependence of the whole of medicine upon it. Our minds were torn of the conflict of chairs. It would sometimes reach overt personal antag- onisms. Dr. Dunster of the Chair of Women's Diseases would hear that Dr. McLean, the gen- eral surgeon, had in some talk to the students got too far below the belt and that he had not stopped here but had made insinuations as to the putter- ing of specialists in this branch. Dr. Dunster would then offer before us that it was no slight service to walk in the shoes of Marion Sims. He would draw such heightened picture of the difficulties attending his own operations in the hidden pockets of the body that our flesh would needle. He would raise to terror an operation where he said blood obscured the track of the knife and the spouting jets could not be caught of forcep. At other times he would draw a pict- ure of a horrible and unnatural child-birth w^hich we might meet, until it would seem to us that there was no other thing to be feared so much in medicine. I have seen the students sitting about me white at his language here. Unnerved at the possible disaster which he raised, students have '5° expressed to me their' fear that they never should be able to cope with his branch of the profession. They came to regard it as severe and full of ab- normal straits ; they vi^ould put it from them. Others would be impressed only so far as to speak of the overshadowing importance of Dr. Dunster's chair ; and, finally, I have heard some make question whose chair was the most important in the medical curriculum. There would be differ- ences of opinion here according as students would be more or less swayed by the piling-up of the different professors. The tendency to over- w^eight and barricade department against depart- ment would take other forms. A given teacher would stop short in his demonstration, saying that he found if he proceeded he would encroach upon other chairs in the institution. I gained from the secretary that it was not an uncommon thing at a faculty meeting for one professor to call another to account for over-stepping the reserves of his lectures, saying that the tendency was to belittle other chairs. As the result of past recriminations the faculty had its factions and leaders of factions. As I came to be more familiar with the Campus, I found the various schools in similar antagonisms. My attention was first hooked here by the cat-calling of the students in the dif- ferent departments. The literary students held the so-called practical departments, as the medical, in a species of contempt, affecting tolerance of what they considered uncultured prowling. The medics and laws were not allowed in the councils of students. I gleaned that there \vas a short- ness somewhere in their education that did not permit of this. The medics were curtailed of any voice in the management of the lecture associa- tion. I thus had the spectacle of the Academic Departmexit as of an exclusive class guarding the jewel of literature against the uncultured herd. In the growth of more intimate knowledge of the Academic Department I discovered the same tendency to internal disorder of exaggeration among its teachers that had met me in the Medi- cal Department. The professors were at war as much, though on the whole they were less outspoken. The various classes of each institu- tion had their contentions. The Freshmen and Juniors of the Medical, the Literary and the Law, each severally had their physical contests, carried on in loud bitterness. Continuing the great licentiousness of the apartness of an institution as a whole cut off from life, which I had met at the gates, was the frag- mentary thing of this internal method. Deprived of the correcting unit of the specific demand, which as in the needs of my own case I have outlined, it tended to fall a broken thing of excess in whole and in part. The correction coidd not be other than some natural division of labor which the life demand would enforce. Science had its place in the State and its exaggera- tions must disappear could the key to its order, or contact, be had. Science had its function in' its distribution to the people. In other walks of the State the clothing-men did not hold their function apart as of its importance and bicker with the food-men as to who was chiefest ; they at- tended to their business of supplying the people what they wanted on specific demand. Consid- ered as of themselves, the clothing-man had to do with the food-man, and vice versa, as far as one wanted something of the other. This bound them together. Their unity was in the dependence upon each other for qualified wants. We were admitted to the Clinics in the last two years of the course. Here was further illus- tration of the apartness. This was said to be the application of what we had learned at the lectures. It was in such measure the practical part of the course. It was the equivalent of Theory and Practice at the Normal. We would sit on the seats and watch the professor handle his scalpel, having largely to take his word for what and how he was doing. But it was thus much reality and I welcomed such part of contact. A given case passing before us in the amphithea- ter of the clinic, we- would be told to go home and read it up as the method of our learning ; but in this reading up we traversed the bulk of the matter we had already gone over at the lectures. We were further advised to go into the wards and anticipate a given operation and read up for it. I was enough acquainted with the professors to know that the latter was their way ; when they found a case of any strange- ness they got down the book on it and consulted as well with some member in their specialty or otherwise able to advise. I thus knew that the method by which my teachers themselves learned accorded with the apprenticeship notion where responsibility should be thrown upon the learner to impel the quest of conscious needs. Our reading carried no doing ; the teachers in the organization of the Campus were daily enact- ing the lie of violating the methods of their own minds. They were the thieves of our oppor- tunity, not gi\'ing us ways that in their own needs they seized upon ; they didn't do by us as they did by themselves. The falsity at the clinic by which we sat back on the seats plundered of re- sponsibility, gave the further outcome of the exag- gerations in all the apartness about me. Denied the sphere of action, our hands idle and our minds dazed, the difficulties of the operation grew beyond reality. It was seen as a thing we could not come to, and the mistakes which we might make were overstated to us and difficul- ties that appeared insurmountable v^ere raised. The result was illustrated in the instance of doc- tors who brought to the clinic some case of fatty tumor or simple abscess that a man ignorant in the profession might have safely operated upon, did he know it. As is the exaggeration of such a man, who knows nothing at all of an oper- ation and is afraid of the sight of blood, so in de- gree did the overweighting of the clinician take shape in the fear of the more sensitive and finer balanced of the students to touch the scalpel at all. The fear was upon every student in proportion to the fineness of his grain and the distance he was put from responsibility in the practice. The 154 result, on the other hand, went to bolster a class narrowness which brought the run of surgical cases into the hands of professing specialists whose skill was towered ; as against men who belittled their skill from lack of opportunity in their nominal days of schooling. The noted sur- geon, James Wood, granted on a day to his stu- dents at Bellevue that if they once came closer than the seats and got their hands in the opera- tion they would not send so often up road for Jimmy Wood. Other exaggerations in my immediate eye were the two branches of Medicine which I found at war upon the Campus. My contact had laid my course in the dominating or regular school, dubbed allopathic by the Hahnemann or Homeo- pathic school of science, which was a few rods away. The same contention as to the importance of these two schools existed as in the case of the several branches in my own department. As near as I could get it, our side of the house claimed that they represented the scientific method, and the thrust w^as made that the other side were empiricists and the embodiment of quackery. The latter — while reminding that everything new was empiric — made their case, as I thought, by the return that if the regular school was scientific it was bound to investigate the claim Homeopathy made as to what it would do. That on such a scientific investigation it must stand or fall. The merits of the position of ihe Homeopaths coming home to me, I presented the simple plan of such investigation to members of the regular profes- sion in Ann Arbor, Detroit and elsewhere. It was that the specific methods of Homeopathy, wherein the advantage of material results was claimed, should be made selective curriculum in the regular school. In short that the Homeopathic materia medica, as having pretension to some- thing new in science, shovild be made a chair to the one course in Medicine on the Campus ; it would then stand or fall on its merits as practice, the true science. The extravagance of the cry- ing up of special claims being then stopped, there would be no Homeopathic college. Made of one tongue in practice, what was good would merge into the single science of Medicine. It was the holding apart that heaped up, that made the Homeopathic college. There could be no Homeo- pathic anatomy, or physiology, or surgery ; equally absurd was a Homeopathic materia medica could it be once reduced to unity in the mill of practice, the counter of direct demand in the economies of life. I found that many of the doctors agreed with me, but they yielded opinion that the narrow class interests of professors who wanted jobs in chairs where they might be exalted, stood in the way. The ghastly tragedy of this war of science reacted here upon the people, as one phase of the disorder, in direct taxation for the support of du- plicate laboratories, hospitals and lecture rooms. It could not be corrected to its unity until centralization should be enforced through di- rect and specific demands from the daily life for all the moving facts, and as of a practice in this department. Compelled to supply all of sci- entific medicine, no fact "Could be left out of the accounting on the whim of a narrowed clique. I began to wonder about the man who fathered all this deformity. I had heard him spoken of as diplomatic. A "literary student" in a skull cap and bat that I ran down on the edge of the ten- nis-court of the Campus, told me that the Presi- dent could steer between Scylla and Charybdis. lie had a reputation as a ready talker ; nearly everybody I heard speak of him gave him this name. Some earnest souls whom I met, with the dust of the highway whence I had come upon them, told me I should hear him talk. A dental student named Watson, I think it was, said that his smoothness was a curiosity and I would en- joy as a show his ability at handling people ; he could please the factions of a public gathering, and was able to discuss most questions without marked offence to anybody ; and where decisive action had to be taken he could commonly do it in such way that were acrimony afoot, it would lay at the door of somebody else, — though he had found him fail in this. I was told that I would be pleased to study President Angell as the master- trimmer. I early met him. It was in the middle of my first year at Ann Arbor. I was with my brother Franklin from New York, who in an ex- tended newspaper connection at the East had dis- covered the necessity of a closer organization of the reporter class in the way of news gathering, and looking more to the basic fact as in the physi- ology of life that should supplant the pathology of 157 rumor, or accident, then'^d now so crowding the columns of our papers, «He w^as going over the country hoping to interest the leading organic men and of affairs. Thinking to get the atten- tion of Dr. Angell as an envoy of the peo- ple, he engaged him in words of explana- tion about his purpose in the West and told him in brief that he was carrying to the investi- gators of the country the proposition of the need and opportunity which he had discovered of the organization of intelligence. I think my brother was somewhat enthusiastic but I am sure that his words were sober and bore no wantonness ; he spoke from practice. Dr. Angell drew me aside and off some distance, by sign that he wished my private ear ; facing me with his back to my brother, he tapped significantly his forehead and asked if our friend was "quite right? " My curi- osity as to the facility of Dr. Angell was some- what satisfied. I questioned how far he was of the scramble to be great ; whether the riches of lore had denied him truth. I was helped to the belief that there were some basic things upon the Campus which the diplomacy of makeshift could not trim. Time went and I sought to know more of Dr. Angell. He was the representative of his tribe. The letters tailing his name brought up at L. L. D. He was for me the Titled Knight of Learning. The glamour that was on all the field of letters was most prominent in him ; he was savant, orator, diplomat. The reality of many things that were difficult to me was found fo- cussed in him. He came into our anatomy class one day. At the close of the lecture he stood and spoke some words of compliment to what he had heard. The simple man who on his cane limped to his chair had been detailing the parts and ordered working of the body and there was for me nothing mysterious about him. He w^as a workman plying his trade of mechanics in the region of a most complicated machine. He him- self told us this. Yet President Angell put him afar off and spoke to us who loved him of his exalted mind and pure life and high pur- pose in phrase called elegant but such that I won- dered what it w^as all about. Our lame anatomist w^ho knew it was a lie, sat coloring like a school- girl. He knew that he w^as but common and that all of life is common when you get it. The Presi- dent closed by some reminiscence of the Campus. One was about a letter he had received from a parent asking after a son. He said he often re- plied to such letters, and he received many, that he did not know their boy and this was the for- tunate side of it for d'd a student come promi- nentlv to notice it might have unwelcome mean- ing ; if a boy did not come before the President it was a pretty sure sign that he was not in mis- chief. Here I had illustration of his happy turn in conveying to us his purpose of correction in such make that it was devoid of rancor ; it was happily got home and we laughed round. The President hoped he should be able to pay us fre- quent visits though his time forbade many, and spoke in such way as to convey the meaning 159 that the harmony of the working of the institu- tion was in a sort of companionship amongst the teachers and students on the Campus and in the cultivation of what he called good feeling and the repression of any distaste that might arise. I watched our President to the close in vain for spark of reality that should make gravitation toward a central unity for the apartness which I had discovered about me. The factions of disorder in the various departments, which I knew' had come to his ears, evidently had no more meaning for him than that of little ambitions of this and that professor which had resulted in passing quarrel, more or less prolonged. Dr. Jones of the itomeopathic Department had lately been la- bored with for quiet and finally asked to resign as the lesser element of a quarrel. He had stood for some question of principle in the way of more liberal policy for his sect of medicine and less harhpering of individuals. Among other offences, Dr. Jones had openly gone to a public bar and had received delivery of demijohn by his fi'ont door in the day time. His quarrel with his faculty was, his contention that everything was not of Homeopathy ; that enlargement was needed in the way of closer connection with regular medicine. Our President relied in every direction on pacification by word, and if this failed there was the remedy of treating either student or warring professor as obstreper- ous and working dismissal. If he could not incorporate he coidd exclude. It was the charity concept. 1 60 The friction in the working of the medical department came in one way and another to the consciousness of most of the teachers. Some contended for longer time, allowing more attention to w^hat were called the practical courses of chem- istry, anatomy, dissection, histology, etc. Others found the most evident fault in the meagerness of the clinic, being a lameness on the practical side, that of the direct application of medicine, as it w^as understood. Those having directly to do with the larger side of the clinics were pro- nounced in advocacy of further extension here as the cure of inefficiency in aggregate results. It was claimed on the latter count by men like doctors McLean and Frothinghain that students before qualifying to take up promiscuous practice should handle score of cases in obstetrics that might be called selective or typical. That is, these twenty cases would be supposed to cover the comftion variations from the ordinary natural labor, which latter a novice might wait upon. But this for me meant the long apprenticeship to a practice. It could not be supplied in one spot ; all practice must be utilized. Iri like manner it was held by surgeon McLean that students should be familiar with the various anomalies of fracture and other wounds. And by Dr. Frothingham, the oculist, it was shown that the contact with eye cases should be enlarged, — people were; going blind through the ignorance of sheepskin doctors. My attention was more forcefully drawn to the whole matter by Dr. Ford declaring to me one day that the least he could say about the propo- i6i sitioi) to extend the clinic was that he felt himself criminal each time he was called upon to sign the diplomas of the students ; it was let- ting loose upon the public in dump cargo what he believed were incompetent practitioners. He regarded the dipolma as false pretence before the public ; carrying it from the institution, the situdent had yet to come in contact with the real thipg in medicine — practice. He had met incidents ithat convinced him graveyards were fattened by these fledglings. He thought some extens-ion of the clinic might work part correction. Dr. Ford did not speak to the public ; he was bought by the bribe of peace. I found that the advocates of a larger clinic were proposing' to make connection with De- troit's hospitals as in the way of supply. There, was a long saying, dating from the oldest imanagement, that any such connection would be a division of the institution. It was upon this maxim that the opponents to the ex- tension .aiiainly relied for sentimental support although the claim was put forward, with some show of reason, that the student did not ex- haust the opportunity of his present clinic. The idea of aaere quantity seemed to carry. As my course progressed and more especially toward the last year, the clinic discussion was raised w^ith great fierceness on a proposition before the legislature of 1888-9 ^° build expensive hos- pitals at Ann Arbor, thus forcing upon the University, at least for a long period, the policy of no extension of clinic. President Angell 163 WAS ill the lists. The discussion could not be ig- nored and had forced public utterance from him, though his peace policy had for a long time marked him a straddler by some. This radical halting at the bayonets of a principle was called conservatism. It was understood that the President had investigated the merits of the question and he was finally on record as influ- encing the action of the regents against dismem- berment, as the cry went. Dr. Vaughn was at one time a pronounced advocate of clinic exten- sion but had latterly been found on the side of Dr. Angell and the regents. Those accounting for his reversal of action pointed to an imder- current of rumor that made him the near re- cipient of some comforts from the regents in the way of improvement in his laboratories and advance of salary. It was said that regent Charles Whitman, Dr. Vaughn's old companion in jobbing state primaries, was shaping the doubled track. It was given out in the mat- ter of Dr. Vaughn's advancement that Mr. Whitman played no small part. He was also Dr. Vaughn's mouthpiece in certain proposi- tions to the regents affecting material matters of policy in the way of appointments and other- wise. It was said that by these and his influ- ence in the politics of the state. Dr. Vaughn was looking to the ultimate control of the presidency when Dr. Angell should step down ; it was a long distance walking. It was noted that Dr. Vaughn's growing power and ag- gressiveness were compelling Dr. Angell to 163 the weak part where certain conflict was in the way. I found the students were in the spirit of the need of extension. They had consciousness enough to feel that they were not getting what they ought to have. They so expressed them- selves to me ; there were exceptions. Few of the students spoke openly for the advance. A good many in possession of the humor of the thing told me that they wanted a clinic but that they wanted their diplomas more, and observed that Dr. Vaughn had the reputation of following those who opposed him. Latterly, those active in thwarting clinic extension pointed to the fact that the students were saying nothing and were evidently satisfied with what they were get- ting, — they had clinic enough. As I did not wish to be registered this way I thought to raise my hand publicly. And I was glad to have a voice for the organic princi- ple, as I believed the clinic movement to be in that direction, though I was far from regarding it as a cure-all for the disorder of the medical depart- ment. That was wider than some questions of halt and blind which the students might manipu- late. My sympathies were with Dr. Angell as I regarded him the sickest man in sight. His disease was deeper than the surfeit of words that was bandying. He had been smitten of the vio- lation of principle and I had a hope that the obscurest voice might help hiin to some light. It was certain that he ar\d his following had their sight so goggled and their fingers so in their ears 164 that nothing but a blow between the eyes could stop them. The dispair was that they were so bound about that they could not pursue the straight line. It was worth the trial. I went to Detroit and gathered some figures, putting out a circular severe enough on its face to fix attention. (Appendix v.) I also wrote an article which was published in the Detroit Evening News. The Free Press of the same city re- fused the article on the claim that they had al- ready said enough in favor of clinic extension ; that the burden of publicity had fallen upon them, and they did not like to be thought as going too far in opposing President Angell and the regents. I then stuck some feathers in the article and took it over to the Evening Journal. The proprietor fondled it but at the last declined it on the ground of its "clinic feature," saying that his son was about taking a course at the University and he should not like to make his path thorny by angering the officials there. Michael Dee of the Evening News accepted it and asked me if I had any more like it ; he said he was look- ing for things that had feet. (Appendix vi.) On my return to Ann Arbor I was brought before the faculty and charged with insubordina- tion as an undergraduate. The meeting was called in great hurry and the secretary told me it was at the instigation of Dr. Vaughn. I was informed that it v^ras a sprung meeting. I knew what this meant when I found that its purpose was appar- ently to force the absence of the supporters of clinic extension who might be supposed mjf de- 165 fenders. Dr. Lyster and Dr. Ford were at re- mote points in the country and Dr. McLean was only got to the meeting by telegram of one of my friends. I understood he was not officially notified. I admitted uttering the circular and ac- knowledged my signature to the News letter. Dr. Vaughn moved my expulsion without hearing me further. But there was enough fairness in the faculty to give me a voice. I made my defence and withdrew. (Appendix vii.) I learned after- ward that Dr. Vaughn persisted in his motion of expulsion but could not carry with him the neces- sary majority of two-thirds. The vote, in the ab- sence of my nominal supporters, was however against me, four to three, seven being the total present out of about a dozen members. The venom of the local press amounted to a singeing. They directed their invectives against me as an understrapper who was attempting to boycott Ann Arbor ; arguments were presented as show- ing that it would diminish the number of boarders and lessen the trade of merchants. I was quar- tered and drawn by the full boarding-house in- terest. The town shut me out. (Appendix viii.) A few weeks after this, being the close of my course, I went through the form of taking my examinations with the rest of my class and after the usual^ manner my name was brought up by the secretary along with the others to be voted on in faculty for diploma. Dr. Vaughn and those who had voted against me at the jumped meeting, formed their opposTiion again and refused to cast any votes at all to my name, saying that I had 1 66 violated the privileges of a student. A somewhat bitter fight ensued by the torn faculty, which finally ended in the compronnise of handing my name to the regents with a resolution sayjng that they could not agree on granting me a dStplbma owing to questions of conduct. The resolution carried the idea that I had been guilty of action unbecoming a gentleman. The matter being lodged with the regents _my case was with Dr. Angell. He had early sent the message to me by one of my acquaintance that had he possessed the power the appearance of the circular would have been the signal for my dismissal ; I under- stood that he gave his preference to the faculty regarding this disposal of me. The implication w^as that I had made myself a pest. It was with this encouragement that I sought President Angell in his office. He spoke against the violence of my conduct and said that none of the professors would be safe. I had called Dr. Vaughn a mountebank and unless such a thing could be punished it might be repeated by any student on any member of the faculties any morn- ing. He thought that unless I could take the whole matter back in a public acknowledgement of my mistakes he did not see how any adjust- ment could be arrived at. I pointed out the difficulty of this, telling him that I couldn't take back the figures w^hich I had employed and that these proved Dr. Vaughn a mountebank, the word itself being of small moment. He said with af- front that he cared nothing about my .figures ; and I could but give him his license, telling him that 167 he need not concern himself as the figures would take care of themselves. He made some point as to the division the institution w^as being thrown into and said that we could not have clinics and portions of departments trotted off up to Detroit. I essayed to show him that he was treading water ; as the real University was the vortex of life at Detroit where the wires of commerce verged. I offered that the real division of the University was older than the clinic question ; that it began with the policy of sequestering science ; that the thing of buildings which surrounded us upon the Campus was a fragment torn from the mas- tering good, which he and his coadjutors, affect- ing to belittle, had looked upon with irreverent intent. I ended by telling the President that they had exaggerated me ; that I thought at most I had been but unparliamentary. He admitted half of this and suggested that if it was entirely my own mind I might try what a personal letter or interview would do to soften the offended par- ties. I called on Dr. Vaughn and Dr. Herdman but with adverse result. (Appendix ix.) I afterwards addressed a communication to the regents making regret for the extremity of the words I had used and attempting some explana- tion of my position. (Appendix x.) The matter came up when the diplomas were considered and Mr. Whitman endeavored my expulsion. He had his following and a row was on in the regents. No action was the easiest way out ; my case was tabled. It was months after referred back to the medical faculty on motion of Mr. 1 68 Whitman and was thus put again in Dr. Vaughn's hands. My active justice whom the regents de- clared disturbers had by this time been asked to resign from the faculty. (Appendix xi.) My friend Myron Ellis afterwards saw Mr. Whitman to ask his status in the matter. He replied that I could have my diploma when I would vulgar mj- knees to Dr. Vaughn. I took a course the following winter at the University of Minnesota and secured the neces- sary diploma permitting me to practice. It was a young institution but of advancement on the medi- cal side. I found myself among some masters in the profession, like Dr. Alexander Stone of the Chair of Woman's Diseases, St. Paul. His con- tact of near a hundred patients a day had given him a contempt for empty phrase. There were other men of action, like the surgeon Dr. Perry Millard who as dean was leading the policy of the institution toward more of contact for the student. Simulating the custom at Vienna, we were brought down to the operations and part responsi- bility given us. I handled the scalpel in a few minor amputations and in some operations on the eye. But closer connection with the Campus showed me the engulfing divisions as at Ann Arbor. I detected the absence of the basic screw somewhere. In the spring I took the position of assistant to Dr. Flavins Downer at the Quincy copper mine on Keewenaw Point, northern Michigan. My real study of medicine in the sense of the apprenticeship had but now fairly begun. Dr. F. 169 H. Spalding of my class at Ann Arbor had the place the year preceding me. It was the purpose of Dr. Downer to find help in young graduates who felt they needed experience and would work for such little money as should keep them. Dr. Spalding had seen the need of the actual of respon- sibility before attempting an independent practice. He said his year at the mine with Dr. Downer had showed him how little he brought from the heaping-up by lectures. He pointed out some cases that but for Dr. Downer's ward of him would have resulted disastrously. He said that the full year's experience made him feel that he was only just touching bottom. Dr. Spalding had words of poignant regret for the narrowness at Ann Arbor. I was brought against numerous patients. The average was a score or two daily. The whole Quincy mining population of some three thousand souls was directly cared for by our office, under the monthly rate bill. I early met an epidemic of diphtheria. I had gone over this disease many times in the books, but in the ab- sence of any contact it was wholly a strange thing. I made at all the writings about me upon the sub- ject and Dr. Downer lent his own experience, as did other doctors in the cities of Houghton and Hancock. We lost three patients in the first family, dying of the peculiarity of the disease, sudden heart failure. Dr. Spalding told me of his experience here and how he had to read up on everything. I agreed with him and Dr. Downer that we wasted load of time at Ann Arbor and 170 that in the end we must pursue the method that should have been started upon. Knowledge of medicine had to be gained by collateral read- ing and consultation with experience, under the conditions of responsibility that compelled the learner to pursue reality as for his life. The books were but the suggestion in time of spe- cific need. The illustrations of this as with the diphtheria were along the whole of my exper- ience at the mine. I only pause with one or two. I had charge of the first leg amputation that occurred after coming to the Quincy. The flaps didn't heal well, . their lips in part finally turning out, sluggish and threatening. I laid it to this thing and that in the way of irritation ; it might be impaired nutrition in injury to the nerve centers through shock. I did swift read- ing and made my consultation with Dr. Downer and others on the point and I hit upon improv- ing my drainage by mbre dependent position of the leg. I had given this attention but not ef- fectively ; I didn't know the full meaning of it. The thing turned immediately for the better and in a few days was completely healed. All it needed was drainage. This had been talked to us and I had read about it multiple times yet it never fixed itself upon me until the necessity of a practice. In the jumble of precept and a mass of knowledge which was confusion, its force had escaped me. I got along very well in my obstetrics until I met the unusual thing. I had read of all the possible irregularities and how to handle them, but when I struck the first 171 footling presentation I was in a whirl of no definiteness. Through my slow:iess of action I murdered the child. I was rebuked by Dr. Downer who told me the simple way. I knew my error and felt that I should not make that par- ticular mistake again ; but a dead child was on my side of the account. Dr. Downer had the graciousness to charge this blood to my teachers ; I was not to delay in calling him in on future anomalies and get the early suggestion. I knew that I was not alone in the errors of our class. One of the brightest students who was practicing at a neighboring mine confided to me the loss of a child in one case and a mother in another. A student in the class that had pre- ceded me told me how he had lost two mothers through anomalies in the way of internal hemor- rhage before and after birth ; yet he had lis- tened to lectures as of precept on the very sub- ject. With the knowledge born of severe ap- prenticeship, he has since been on the lookout and successfully handled these cases. Searching for my shelf in medicine, which I could not feel that I had found, I gave up my place after some months to take a position at the Kalamazoo Insane Asylum, hoping that contact would show me I was adapted to this branch of the profession. I did not find it to my purpose to continue there. I had the inkling of consci* ousness that perhaps my business was for a time with the confusion outside the wards. I went back to Dundee and then to Ann Arbor, ulti- mately renewing work with my brother Frank 173 lin in his purpose of some advance in the organi- zation of letters. I had need of the University library. The trimming of my conceit, as recommended by Professor McLouth, was effected once more b}' Dr. Angell in person. I made my application for access to certain privileges behind the railing, granted to ministers of the gospel, editors of newspapers, and investigators. My application was carried by the librarian to Dr. Angell. He referred it to Dr. Vaughn, and it fell of no answer, while I cooled my feet in the lobby of recrimination. XII. THE UNIVERSITY T HAD not yet separated the reality of the ^ Campus from its confusion. It was measurably certain to me that the institution as an existence stood for some fact in the moving life. While I was at last able to discard its weight of doctrine, I was thrown up against its laboratories as the actual of science.. I knew I was among some masters whose inquiries in certain directions had turned confusion to order. Professor Winchell had reported to simplicity some obscurities in ge- ology ; Dr; Prescott had made strides in the re- duction of organic chemistry ; Dr. Vaughn had recovered the crystals of tyrotoxicon to make ra- tional the treatment of cholera infantum ; the ob- 173 servatory on the hill had written some newness among the racing stars ; Judge Cooley had planed a jurisprudence ; Professor Dewey, of Philosophy, sawed with me on the schools and welcooied the proposition of a new economy in the State through the organization of intelligence — he was searching for the State when my brother and I found him, and his consciousness seized upon di- vision of labor as key to the organic social. In Pro- fessor Dewey we found the sympathy of an in- telligent co-operation with the ideas of an advance in letters which we had brought from the field of a practice — the laboratory of the moving fact in the region of the school and the newspaper. The reality of our waiting at the gatesof the University was to find the last fact bearing on the advance of our practice. He pointed us to the construc- tion of the books in what bore upon it. Through his condensations of an exhaustive read- ing in penetration of newness he brought up for us the past in such economy that our move- ment was little checked. He gave us the books as of surviving things in his spent research of the old ideas. He stood for us as the great central archive in the State, had in such order that it could be connected with the advance or moving fact. He made for the mobile science on the side of the State, being for us the scientist of the Whole, the philosopher. But denied any direct demand from the State, he could not put the new ideas on life. He could not give the Supreme Court at Lansing the revolution of its concepts, or Detroit the remedy for the disorder of its city 174 government ; he could not put the cross upon President Angell who stood against progress upon the Campus ; neither might he denounce as a Judas his earnest pastor falsifying Christ. Clogged of the dead institution, he could not move ; his salary meant that he was to keep quiet as to the overturning concepts. He must either forego his bribe and become the tramp upon the highway that he might have voice ; or he could remain to take . the sop of convention and upstew the old idqas with the new as the made-dish of apart theor}^ There were others, like Professor Scott, who waked to the breaking chains, but com- passed with the bribe of position they purloined our notions to exalt their chairs and returned us the congealed of sympathetic word. In my later passes with the Campus I was to find more there than I had seen. Obscured by the "clamor of knowledge and the stress of faction, the re- ality had been in hiding. The necessities aris- ing from my further contact were, bearing me upon it. Good came with being bruised anew by the unreality. The sign in the University Catalogue of the "Department of Literature, Science and the Arts" had stared at me. I had supposed that there was some science over in the medical department ; they had showed me there the rythmic law of the human body. I was seized with more particular wonder as to what science was. Tn some felici- tous speech of Dr. Angell's I had heard him refer to the time when his student hearers would " go from these halls to the treadmill of life." I had 175 heard him speak of "exalted ideals" which their sojourn there should have given them. He had said that without this, mere learning was vain and of dross. I was not averse to having some good stick to me, and I went about among the departments. My brother and I in attempting to devise the machine for advancing the organization of letters, found that intelligence reduced to news. All in- formation was news to somebody, for anything that was old would not be information. Old or non-information to one person would be news to another who was in want of it. In classi- fying news we found it triangled in the ratio of its movement. Facts provoking the widest cir- culation were most news in the sense of being wanted by more people. This general fact as the base of the triangle, might be illustrated by such comprehensive knowledge of transportation that it could be shown passenger rates were to put at a cent a mile. It was only news in its prescience. When railroad tickets were selling for that price everybody would know it, in which case it ceased to be information. Intelligence, or news, thus depended on the interest, or de- mand, which made it wholly a question of the hour. It was measured by direct function in the State. Things dead to people's interest were not news, or intelligence. Nothing was intelligence as of itself, but in respect of demand as making the relationships of the Intelligence Triangle. The second degree of this demand, as creating intelligence, was the next possible limitation in the 176 numbers interested. It reduced the fact in mean- ing, narrowing the intelligence. Locomotive en- gineers, already in the press of over time,. would want to know the import of this cheapen- ing of fares to them — whether it meant longer- hours and less pay. This would represent the class interest, or the class side of the Intelligence Triangle. The further limitations of the intelligence would be its possible meaning to only one man. This was the last reduction. Some lover in San Francisco earnest of his sweetheart in New York would say that he might now have money enough to join her. He would ask informa- tion as to the price of tickets. Here was the lowest intelligence considered from the standpoint of a particular demand. It was reduced to the private intelligence. Its limit was the individual- This made the third, or individual, side of the In- telligence Triangle. (Appendix xii.) Here was a classified intelligence which cov- ered all possible phases of information. Read from the highest to the lowest, or vice-versa, its meaning was always in terms of the way in which it affected life. Apart from the direct ap- plication of facts to life, there was no meaning,, no intelligence. Intelligence was figment with- out it had direction, or function. In the manu- facture .of intelligence, as with any other commod- ity, it was confusion to make things there was no demand for, that were of no use, whose direct utility was not accounted for in the thing itself. People do not build sewers skyward or no-ward. '77 It is the function, or the earthward side, of the «ewer business that makes it rational and so intel- ligence. There was no such thing as Ancient Literature, or Ancient History, or Classical Learn- ing, except as fact bearing on some immediate economy of life which made it the news of the hour. In any other sense it was dead. It thus be- came apparent that it was the way in which so- called literature was handled that made it intelli- gence, or news. Intelligence must have its object- ive ; its demand in life was the measure of it. To make it merely subjective, to remove it from this direct demand, made it in so far the dragging thing. Those who specialized of this abnormality were doing more than work self induration as feeding upon the noisome glut ; they were ob- structing free movement in the economies of the State, and not alone as of false position. A great light came to me. The University had its contact only by indirection ; it sucked the State but did not give back. Here was the explanation of the working at odds upon the Campus. It was organized only for absorbing the energies of the State, and not for distribution or directness of product as of immediate demand. Its movement was abnormal, one-sided ; it did not universalize. The bringing up of this reality was the approach of heavy ordnance against what had heretofore defeated me. I tried the siege- guns of the triple movement I have outlined. It was to place the Triangle upon the Campus. It became apparent that through myself the State had come up to the University in two 178 directions. I had first come from the school proper, representing the Instructor Class in the State. I was virtually there, had been driven there, by the friction in my Class function. My progress in the school had been interrupted. On my last trip from the byways up to the Normal for help, I had really had in view the scientific cen- ter of the State. 1 saw now that owing to the con- fusion as to what the University reallv was, they had set this fragment down at Ypsilanti under the cry of a town interest. It had as much right to be there as the Medical or Law De- partments at Ann Arbor. They each be- longed at some point of central trade in the State. It was a question of economy. The wires could not center at two points in Michigan, and commerce controlled the one point, Detroit. This w^as to say that life controlled. And remember- ing the reality of the school, which I had. dis- covered to be an apprenticeship, I saw that they had mixed some advance drill of its service, the local academy, with the scientific or university center of the State. The university was not an enclosure : — It was the ?novement of life in a given region to and from a center. The uni- versity of Michigan was the region of Michigan or as much more or less as could conveniently organize about a center. The converging of the life movement in a particular region was the uni- versity center, in this case nominally at Ann Arbor. My second coming up to the Univer- sity, from the apprenticeship of Dr. Richardson, had been through the misconception which made 179 the local school and its academy incorporate with the university center. I would better have found the simple demonstration which I needed in the local archive, and along with the book and the experience of Dr. Richardson as master, and adjunct of the local academy, have gone on with "my apprenticeship, from which nothing but the disorder in the present organization of the State had torn ■ me. I should only have left my local apprenticeship when I had exhausted Dr. Richardson and the local archive, and was in need of the greater movement of the center. In the proper organization of the university, the central- ized movement of given region, I would pro- gress to find all of contact in medicine which I might be in need of. I would have gone to the university center as to the great bulletin board ; and the university I was in, being tangent to the other universities, or organized regions, the medi- cal facts of all practice would pass through our center as a bulletin board on the circuit of the medical world. The efficient doctors at the cen- ter would of course have their clinics as of the laboratory. A given operation that had some features of newness in it at Vienna would go on the wire at that center and be taken off at Detroit. The highest thinking among medical men of the universities would be found at the centers, and here also would be a great contact with the con- fluence of medical men of the region who would be up for purposes similar to my own ; for things that they knew they wanted and for a wide touch with moving medical facts. The organ- izatioii of the medical side, a class fact, at the cen- ter would be controlled bv the demand coming in over the wires from the state. Dr. Richardson in view of a given operation he was contemplating, would telegraph or 'phone to the center for a brief summing up of the recent points in the operation that might transcend his experience or the record of the local archive ; he would wire up to find if there was anything new on the subject. The or- ganization and handling of these moving facts would be the Practice at the center. Here might be continued the further apprenticeship in medicine, and a drill as of the central academy. I now saw the connection of the Flat Rock school and its advance local drill, or local acad- emy, with the university center. This was the reality of the wire that would widen the child's contact in the locality and make the school a thing of life, — as of the world's circuit through connec- tion with the center. The difficulty which we had met in knowing of no place in Detroit which we could call up for a small fee, was clearly to be overcome in the growth of things. Were it pos- sible, through the above movement at the center, for a firm to organize for supplying all facts, men would probably be forward enough to start such a concern. With the scientific fact obtainable on demand instead of being held for salted lectures and books it would be possible to set up a News Office. The business would classify on the triangle ; it would of time be a stupendous enterprise and the culmination of the romance of life ; the wires of the world would unload at its offices. The classification on the triangle would compel a News Office with a counter for satisfying a single individual who would come there for news that didn't interest anybody else, the Individual Fact; there would be the counter for the (ylass Fact ; and the counter for the General Fact, which latter must be more in the nature of a continuous movement over the wires, newspapers and others, detail aside, taking off under time contracts, paying for what they got. In this way the Flat Rock school could have such string of facts as it cared to pay for. In tRe way of its special needs that were not at hand in the locality, it could use the wires or mails according to the bulk of the information or its urgency. The organization for handling intelligence would extend itself, ultimately becoming universal like the Post Office. In the fuller News Office or- ganization. Dr. Richardson as above would prob- ably fill out a stamped application at the nearest counter for Individual News ; a convention of doctors wanting something more embracing, would apply at the nearest counter for Class News. Thus ultimately the distributive side of the university would be a business connection with the News Office in the State. In the lesser organization the wire might be of the present development. The basic interest that would compel this movement of news w^ould be reciprocal as of freed conditions. If Dr. Richardson found anything new in his practice at Dundee, or if he thought he had, he would communicate it instantly to the Michigan university center : first, because utterance of new things is instinctive ; and, second, because he would not expect the new^ fact from Vienna unless he was willing to give his own. The principle outlined would control in all the occupa- tions of the State. * * The Child of Democracy is of the cavalcade of Kingdom Come. The step is of just men . made perfect — invention, through to the machine of State The olding century stands in its stirrups. From troop begrimed of distance, on the hills of Washtenaw, there turns courier to speak a wait- ing foot that the skirmish column is in sight of the spires of the city of Is. XIII. THE DEAD WASTE OF LETTERS T" LINGERED among the high of titles, who -*■ had gone about to cry down the commonplace of life. I found myself uncovering some curiosi- ties. I beat up the Campus. I went into room twenty-three of the halls in the " Department of Literature, Science and the Arts." It was the chair of Philosophy. The talk was of the meaning of life. The principles enunci- ated by the seers from beyond the Nazarene to Hegel and Caird, was the retrospect. These men had recorded the meaning of life up to the loco- motive and the telegraph. What was taught was in the books. The new reading of these was the elimination of distance, with its contact of inter- ests. This was the new life. Under the uni- 183 ■versity organization it meant objective for tlie man of science. It was the distribution of inquiry as of the practice of letters. The old was of the closet, — the hoar of letters. The predominant of the new was that the philosopher, as of the type of science, was cajled to measure his notions in the . solution of the exacting problems of the State. This was the resurrection and the life. , Death was in the retrospective circling that held him from the open course. The connecting of this department with earth meant its application to the governing questions. When I made my first visit to this room, the legislature of Michigan, standing for the fist of democracy, w^as seeking some ordered regulation of that ■class, or division of labor in the State, having the function of transportation. The proposition was to reduce mileage to two cents. The rail- road chiefs brought in their devised balance- sheets to assuage legislation. The footing of their figures showed that a mileage of three cents gave scant margin. But out of this count against the people should have been stricken the mil- iions.'in watered shares and the rake-off by officials through the rolling-stock and terminal conibines. The leaders of the Railroad Class made the further defence that they and not the State owned this property. I listened at room twenty-three, whose function was of life, for the message of an ordered fact that should loose the people's hands. No basic word went upon the wire making intel- ligent the notion that function not possession is ownership ; that the locomotive is an idea ; that 184 this idea was not given by Watt and Stephen- son to any class, — it belonged to democracy. There was the question of the menace of amassing capi- tal. Its disposal w^as one with the treatment of the money exaggeration itself. The demand is for the reduction of the meaning of money to its relations, to function simply. Gold and silver, as standing for intrinsic value, disappear as money w^ith the incoming of the notion of the relative or functional value. The call is for the simplest medium of exchange based on the need of the per capita as the reality of all values. Money is di- verted from the channels of its usefulness because the State recognizes a value in it apart from its function. If the fiction of Interest, as standing for the apart or intrinsic value, were not defended by the State, a Gould would only take from the stream of exchange what his functional needs required ; his energies would find unity of direc- tion in perfecting a vast organiztion, not in rob- bing it and indirectly himself. But this reality had not gone out as of the compelling fact wrought to its news bearing at the center. Opposite the Campus in a mausoleum of stone was drumming the changes of hollow word on the message of Christ in the idea of good will to men. This was idle ; the lineage of the Nazarene was of the moving life and had been born anew. The mauso- leum did not action the New Birth, which was the adjustment of interests under the new environ- ment. The reality of the Church is of the organ- ization of democracy ; its apartness is a fiction ; it is of the organization of the peoples into the 185 brotherhood of interests. The particular of the Church as institution in the State is the rendez- vous in life — the Meet. The reality of this the local gathering-place is the bulletin board of the organized intelligence. The meaning of Christ is not to preach life but to do life. In opposition, to this, the charity concept must be reported as in- herent in the waste of democracy. I found the Philosopher paying pew rent in support of the dead concepts. When. I took my last visit to this department discord was louding at Home- stead. Wider than this, the divisions of labor marking the classes of democracy were every- where at each other's throats. What had Philos- ophy, as the eminent of statecraft, to propose for the new right of trial by jury of class peers ?■ What of the new Runny mede.'' Short handed of a cut wire, Arbitration knocks at Dr. Dewey's door. At another hour I found Professor Adams. His was the eddy of a little piece of the uncon- nected. It was Mr. Cross of Tennessee. He was embowered of book and formula. His chair was Political Science. I stayed long enough ta see that he was a fragment in an off-shoot of apartness from the chair of Philosophy and that he spoke without respect of his master, the organic people body. My attendance was prompt at the Psychology Class. It was the frigid zone of science ; such mobility as it had was of massing floes. The pieces were chasmed and labelled as at Ypsilanti. The problem was how to melt the chunks by 1 86 some warming unity. In my earliest contact with the chair I suggested the breath of motion upon them. The science of astronomy was the bring- ing to consciousness of the relations of the heavenly bodies ; it could not be expressed save ir terms of motion — the moving language as unify ing principle, or way, touched to measured whole the rigid phenomena of the skies. The raising ta consciousness the notion of a mental movement as controlling principle must be the unity of the new psychology. As with astronomy this was the system ; all present and future discoveries would place in it. Could not the way be cleared to call the entire mental circuit Will, as in terms of its accomplishment.'' Its stable or type phe- nomena could mark the phases of this revolution ; the unstable or disturbed element could mark Emotion. This would cover all possible phenom- ena and in related or unified language. Mental manifestation would thus prefigure in its end — in terms of what it does — making the system. I lent the suggestion of my years since the University of Bon ; I entreated to liak their distant parts in terms of absolute motion. Time went and they told me that they had. Of a morning frozen like the w^hited drift of men- tal doctrine, I was early at the "recitation." I found the students repeating back to the in- structor. Dr. Lloyd, some formula relating to the- process- of ideation. The Steps of this process were held to be (i) Activity, (2) Idea, (3) Ideal,. (4) Action. The hour over, I sought to plead the case with the instructor. I endeavored to show 1 87 that what he did was to belie the mental move- ment ; that it was mental lesion in failure to .unify process and end — subject and object. That the end was not less the process or way, but more the way — it was all of the way. Ideation was not activity and idea ; it was activity as idea. I urged that his terms, covering progressive phe- jiomena, be made phases not entities; that the way in which he got at it, the language he used, should in itself convey the phenomena as of progression or movement ; that his terms should be self-explanatory at every step as of a moving whole. Judged by what he was -doing his apprehension of mind was short of -absolute motion. The method he was using was to palm meagre activity into phenomena that were denied the moving language and still held -apart. It was injecting the pepper of a little motion here and there to up-liven the made-dish. He was separating morphology and function. The ■outcome of all was seen in the reply to a question which I put to one of the seemingly more intelli- gent students. He said that he could not regard idea as activity but as the result of activity ; this was as, in the reduction of the universe, whether the lever causes motion or motion causes the lever? The lever is the form of motion, its way. The phenomenon of mind as wholeness of mani- festation is likewise form of motion, — one is the ■other. The student wanted to "argue" his point with me. His was the disconnected phrase. I could not discover that his belief in motion was deeper of surface than the mere words which he 1 88 moved about like buttons. He licked his chops- at the notion that he had got in my king-row ; I crowned him and left him at his ease. So they fall a-discussing, as this student was doing, whether activity causes pain or pain causes activity ? Here- was the circling of no demand everywhere abounding in the congested falsity of the schodl.. Psychology is simply the mental movement come to consciousness — realized. Dr. Lloyd agreed that the people would get the moving language in the region of mind when in answer to some daily demand the simple science should erect it as of environment, like astronomy and steam ; that the unity of psychology would arrive when the psychologist became a psychologer and set up shop. I offered that all we needed was to have some connected language like mechanics that the- people could understand. He replied that this was all if nothing further was considered. jSIv return was that life was left. I was reminded of the preaching about "intellectual beliefs." Pro- fessor Meade, associate in the department, asked- a convert to the moving language if he was "much stuck on the mental movement ;" my representa- tive returned the faith that he v/as not more sO' than on the lever movement. It was some time later that Professor Meade voted for the side-bar. The wedge was not easy, though fn the principal of the department the edge v\ras upon a man who- had the grace and possibilities of the wind-hung sail ; one day when I had pressed too hard. Dr.. Dewey rebuffed me with " It don't move," though five minutes after his wealth of belief would have- 189 taken it back. Regarding the need of a counter, I told Professor Lloyd that our townsman, Mr. Jack Sheehan, was looking for a r^-agent to test Dr. Angell for brain-corns and color-blindness, as he had heard he preached in the chapel that de- mocracy was the spawn of " Christianity." Mr. Sheehan wanted to know \vhere the locomotive •came in and if the anaconda of "literurgy" would be presently slain. As I left Professor Lloyd our case was as to when the lightning would strike the chair of Psychology. On a midwinter afternoon as the lights of the town were showing, my ears were invited of a great clatter and my eye was caught of a leaping herd ; their itch was " English History." With the change of the last hour there was the final drive of the day to be counted in seats. I went in and "took sixteen pages" with them, One young woman at my hand told me her "inclina- tion" was music; that history was prickle to her but she must take it to "complete," — and she might sometime need to teach. Adding to the offence of compulsion in subject, was the offence of a whipped pace. She had spent three hours on it and wouldn't know a bit about it the next day, she said. Like others whose " memories " were away, she shrunk in her seat to escape har- poon. To meet the complainl of some members of the class who thought the lesson too long, it was given out that the book could not otherwise be compassed within the allotted time ; the chair extended sympathy. I watched the orgy. The conning was of the fall of feudalism. Yet our 190 Professor in History held his place under the feudal organization of the Campus. He was there by appointment and not because it had been shown that he was the best man for the place. He might give service of lip in things of custom that should please his master, or like others before him he could find the gate. A good cobbler could not be ■waived from town by " authority" : but did his function fail, the social organization of no de- mand might drive him forth. There was within the University as of the present misconceived academy, no freedom for the student; he must submit to inanity of teaching because he had no choice, — there was no opportunity in the organi- zation for abler men to come upon the ground and seek preferment of the student body. When the Campus should be raised into an organism permitting free competition under the demand by student and all commerce, there would be surcease of cavil and clown. The chair emitted that Edward did up Warwick ; his eyes so hugged the page that he could not see the rise of trade which smote the older baronial apartness. Nor did he help the class to see that the closer brother- hood is the further growth of the commerce of men. In the haste of getting he denied them the loaf. I heard that America was "a form of gov- ernment ;" I had supposed its reality was the advance of the organism in the social. Our "teacher" did not distinguish between word- feudal and fact- feudal ; he fed of the books. Feudalism will be less with the growth of a unity as of the adjusted working of the divisions of 191 labor in the State ; the end will be when the Part ceases to obstruct the Whole. I followed an armful of books into the Me- chanical Department. They had there some apart- ness from the lathes that fashion the iron of com- merce. Separated from the responsibilities and exactions of an apprenticeship in the great shops, that lined the wharves forty miles away, they were the toys of function. It was playing school. I went into the room most typical of the golden calf. I was with the worshiper of the dross of an apart phrase-making. It was the chair of Literature. The keeper of the idols stood at the four corners of the wnds of custom and gave ceaseless voice that the end of life was to fashion his symbols. As of store were pinned the curious insects of all phrase, labelled "good" and "not so good." It was the busi- ness of hoarding intellectual riches that perished of the corruption of stasis. The scurrying of little activities was the fly -sticking of no object- ive. When Homer and Shakespeare and Ten- nyson attempted the poem of life, they left it the fleeting thing of no relation. Of the foundations of modern life, of its practical scheme, which is framing of order after the ways of an organic in- telligence, they knew nothing. At most it was the man of letters doing the surface of all things, and doing nothing. They wrote of the individual as of an unconnected fragment, and not of the social.. The individual man not having taken on the meaning of the social unity, the organiza- 192 tion into the function of the whole, they could not invade the dream of fulfilment ; they wrote the homeless coming. If Christ saw the whole individual, the individual in his relations, he was of philosophy. The record that is less than this is figment. It was to the weird tracing of this lie, attracting of flame and odor, that I found a lack-faith kneeling. They were raising of emotion the monument of a passing. Litera- ture was not conceived as of a practice ; it was made the exalting of disused tools and the miser of obsolete tracings. Shakespeare and Poe un- der the later environment could have reported the connected life. Our blind idolaters builded to a Shortcoming. I turned from the worship of image made with hands. It was getting gone to seed. I went to see them turn the sentence. I learned that I was with the doctor of the difficult art. But the Chair of Rhetoric could not yield its principle. The warrant for most things of the practice was that custom disfavored or approved. It was the absence of a working concept. The habits of men do not interfere with the physicist ; he trims by the law of gravitation. I came to know that language had no adequate way, that it was not an exact science. Phrase puts the chain on mind when it does not deliver the fact. Its principle is conveyance and must be interpreted in the functional, or moving, sense. The test of the sentence turns on the mental movement — whether mind is stopped of word. Rhetoric is the language of action. It is the question of the 193 moving mind. When Addison says, " This is a consideration that conies home to our interest" he makes "interest" static in mind, as of the bur- den of the sentence. The meaning, or movement, is further hampered by excess of word. The sen- tence is weighted. We have to "think" through it with effort ; we turn to fight off obstruction. To scale the sentence by motion and make pro- jectile the idea it may read, " Our interest homes" supposing that the consideration is already before us. Yet custom as of dictionary gives no w^arrant for the momentum in this particular sentence. We are denied the practice of reading the thing in terms of what it does. The new Rhetoric is the delivery of the moving language come to con- sciousness. It compels the transforming of the language in correspondence with the notion of the mental movement. The new Rhetoric, or Dictionary, will not be by "definition" but by use •of word. That is, there will be put into sentence as of relation all that a word does — its total em^ ployment. The Dictionary does this now in part, but haphazard and with no measure. Shakespeare and the rest are rich in the moving phrase. This has to be utilized, pruning or extending where necessary under the guiding law. Where expres- sion does not exist it will have to be made. The tool is of the moving language, being the logic of style. We recover the science of language. In parting the vesture there was a piece they had called morality. I went in to see what the trick was. The Chair of Ethics as the depart- ment of sorcery worked in bated breath and I got 194 the idea that they were afraid something would go off. Uncertainty sat about me on the insula- tion of precept. All drew back from the subject, seeming to fear shock ; they were not even warm. I tapped on some of the coverings with the hoof of fact. Insects swarmed to blink at day. These had been saved from life. Saying I would like a few signs myself, I found there hadn't been any since God was put off the earth. The last good piece of business was the Fiery Furnace. I stepped up and took hold of this quietism by asking if they didn't think that must have sur- prised the king, he having never seen anvthing of the kind before. Everybody recoiled ; these things could not be touched with hands. I questioned why they didn't bring God back and they fixed their eyes a-distance. When I told them I was looking for the blasphemer who invented the hell of apartness, they called me the Foe of Hope. Having myself been in the fiery furnace of no function without fend of position, I had believed that God was still on earth. I took the student to the window and tried to show him the spirit in the multiform of life. I bade him look upon mo- tion. Being possessed of riches in tenets he had propounded and books he had written, it was hard for him to enter the kingdom of earth. He held the movement in some static phrase and received the reward of the unbeliever. The moral or ethical man has regard to the order of the whole that he may keep his own order. His is the grace of adjusted action. The grocer who crapes his door to shut it against his customers disrupts his 195 mind in disrupting his fellows. He yields to the static of emotion and his reaction is of the dis- order around him. Function belies not ethic; its step is to . the order of its fellows, though it gulfs a tear. We give the skirts or the burden the path in the snow to avoid breaking our mind. The captain on the bridge in a storm is fighting for his mental balance. Morality is the instinct of conditions. It takes "sand" to ethic. The ethic of the moving life is denied the hermit of the cut- wire. If there be morality and order, that were more than order. If there be morality and life, that were more than life. Ethic and psychol- ogy is of polytheism. What these folks mean is the practice of the mental wholiness. Morality is the order of the whole in the individual. To ethic is to live. There was a fencing-off upon the Campus called the Department of Art. I had supposed that each industry of the State had come to its perfect doing down this road, — that the deft finger was not least in the hand that rocked the cradle. Such distribution of art as there might be within the confines of the Campus had not yet reached the half dozen water-closets which reeked of neglect. Three thousand stomachs about me had their attention distracted from Art Preaching by the inartistic of half-cooked oat- meal. The Sahara in this department is the lack of a master who shall gather brush, chisel, and design into the whole — Architecture. The art of the brush and chisel is great but the art of the machinery that shall distribute them to the en- 196 vironmentis their final exaltation. The exclusive- ■ iiess of "art" is dependent here. An hunger of life is for such a reporting that in separating the one good building, canvas, statue, carpet, frdm the mass the remaining rubbish will be handed to oblivion. Mr. Scott has thought so little of his function as to forget to bulletiii the fact of the "art" disorder ; to the confusion of the State, he retains the word "art" in lieu of the wider Architecture. He so far forgets the mean- ing of his salary as to fail to put the label of static upon a dozen chisels from the Rogers and Powers studios, called the Art Gallery of the University of Michigan. Blind of his place he does not see that it is not a question of loading- distinctions between the Beautiful and the Attract- ive, of wading dead centuries and denying the pres- ent ; but rather the Country-side and Town, — and the moving Home of which the elevation and appointments are one with the picture on the wall and the rose-bush at the corner. It is not a question of the Old Masters, but of the master who shall help disfigurement from earth. Mr. Scott will be disturbed in the fetich of his circling by repetition of other men's ideas when with his companions in larceny he is fried at the end of a wire. I arrayed myself to a Public Debate, Law against Lit. I looked at the Academy in its war- paint and feathers and listened to the bubble in the potted mess of science. The purpose of one side was to misstate the other. Did the head of 197 tlie institution know it and had he taught these boys to lie? It was of the hippodrome of cult. Latterly, in the Law Department there had been a movement toward freedom among the students. Tired of listening to the dropping of lectures written out by professors and repeated year by year on the turning of the pile, they had employed stenographers who delivered to their rooms each morning prints in type-writ- ten mimeograph of the lectures of the pre- ceding day. Instead of being stalled to sit their hour in the class-room, they could go down to the local courts or elsewhere, or read up the reports of the living cases in the newspapers. It resulted that only lecturers of such newness and power as attracted could escape empty seats. The new machinery was knocking them out. A Professors' Trade Union under lead of Dr. Angell resulted, to cut off the students in this movement ; and life has been in measure so far hedged out, though the fight is still on. The real organization of the university begun, and the separation of the academy effected and sent to its apprenticeship, obstruction would be down and the student let in to the bulletin board as at the end of a wire, where the newness of the courts of the world would be on shuffle. There tailed my eye upon the Campus other exaggerations in the mummery of apartness ; there was every strangeness begotten of the fetich of letters. I but give the central hieroglyphics on this pillar of salt by the sea of ashes. Manifestly, until the wire of commerce as of the Region can 198 tap the laboratory as of the Center, university- organization must continue its looped and win- dowed raggedness. As I left the University in its growing beauty of exterior there was in the stir of an aimless unrest the tread of hostile feet. I stayed to get its meaning. It was the invasion of the new machinery. The advance column was champing bit at the inner gate. XIV. THE REGION BACKING UP MIDWAY of my experience in teaching, when the earliest definite light of the needs of the school was coming to me, developments were taking place in the adjoining county of Lenawee. Not twenty miles off, leading out from Tecumseh, the farmers and villagers were getting the wire. It came more prominently to my notice in my later intimacy with the university center. The imminency of this connection with the soil was the nearness of the organization of the Region and the erection of the Center. I later paid a visit to Lenawee county and Tecumseh. I learned the romance of the local wire as the capillaries of the circulation of intelli- gence in democracy. Back of the years I have mentioned, a farmer's boy, R. J. W. Bowen, getting distaste of the slowness of the country, wandered to town and came in the way of learning 199 telegraphy. He worked the key in Western Union offices till confinement bred him lassi- tude. He went back to the farm looking for mend of body. Nourished again by air and sun and tax of muscle, he felt the degradation of the moveless life. Tilling one day in the field with a young neighbor farmer, Atwater Mangus, he spoke his perdition at being hindered the key and the contact of life which it gave. He told his like for farming if its prejudice by isolation • could be over-met. Might he get up connection with a neighbor his social would be that much unsunk. The talk led Bowen to propose a wire between the two houses, about a quarter of a mile. Mangus objected that it would be use- less, that he couldn't learn the key ; through Bowen's persistency the wire went up, both families turning in to cut and set the poles got from the wood-lots on the two farms. Mangus had the alphabet within a month and was able to put words to message, so that he and Bowen went to live together, they say ; for purposes of communication they were in adjoining rooms. They had read about the bringing together of farmers into social communities, and here it was ; distance had been touched of the spirit-fingfer of machinery. Another neighbor, Wesley Keyser, was hawked through the heat of Mr. Bowen to turn in on a line to his house. His objection was the same as that of Mr. Mangus, he could never learn the alphabet ; Bowen asked to put the thing in and take it out again on his own 200 right. But the Keyser farm rolled up its sleeves and did its part of the work. It was the old story of the sewing machine, the reaper and the cottage organ ; after the thing is once put over the farmer's fence and become a part of his house- holding the agent can get his price. Keyser says Bowen gave him the world and he did the rest — he kept it. The key had been in place ten days and Keyser could give and take most of the letters, with long stops and a breath between. Bowen w^anted to take down a flock of sheep he was fattening and weigh them on Keyser's scales. The farmers know that if you scare sheep that are fatting they lose flesh and rest of gain for a week or two. Bowen was appre- hensive of panic at the scales. He made Keyser understand over the wire, letter by letter, spelling out " sheep " and " weigh " and " careful " and " coming right down ;" Keyser wired back, "O. K." When they got the sheep fenced on the scales, Keyser overwent telling how the wire had called him and dropped its word ; and how he saw its certain and great utility. He declared they could leave the miracle and take his house ; he could not have guessed what it meant. The proposal was to run the line up the road and con- nect with town. Bowen, Mangus and Kejser during the winter canvassed the countrymen on the turnpike and storekeepers in Tecumseh. ' In the spring the farmers held bees for skinning and setting poles and the business men in town bought the wire. The lines have gone up in a number of directions until there are more than a 20I hundred miles in the neighborhood of Tecumseh and something over two hundred Morse instru- ments. They have incorporated under an " edu- cational" clause which exempts them from taxa- tion. The organization now has its officers and rules for economy in the conduct of its affairs. When I went to Tecumseh on a morning in spring I saw the wire stretching from different directions up the gravel roads to center at the vil- lage. It was the countryman come to town. I inquired for Mr. Bowen, and Dr. Hause told me that I might get trace of him at the hardware shop of Satterthwaite Brothers, where he headed up. Bowen had been made general manager of the Local Telegraph Company. Going to the store, Mr. Satterthwaite told me that Bowen had a few minutes before stepped out, but that he would try to find him ; he reached for the lever on his desk and put Bowen's personal call on the immediate circuit, and in a moment turned to tell me that my man was a mile off down at the C. J. &. M. station and that he had asked me to wait a minute. I had little more than turned round when Bowen rode up on his bicycle and asked my business. Like the reaper and sewing machine, the telegraph had passed out of newness to the people I met. My dance of ebullition found no answer in them except that they thought it " conven- ient." The boys and girls on the farm and in the village pick up the Morse alphabet as they learn to talk and write. The farmers' wives are quicker at the key than their husbands. The house of the Tecumseh local paper, the News, is 202 made the central office ; they answer the farmer's requests for information in town and run er- rands for him and in return get the happenings and news of the country districts. In this way the News gets its scoop on the other local papers ; they stopped their press and unlocked their form one afternoon for the report of a country school- house that was burning. The circular of informa- tion says that business messages are given prece- dence and may break into communications not of an urgent character ; parents are requested to see that children under ten years of age d(J not use the wire. Physicians have the instrument at their bedside ; Dr. North is not awakened by the call for Dr. Frost, and vice versa. A broken line one day compelled Milburn Keyser to call up Clinton for a horse doctor, the Tecumseh veter- inary losing the job. Self-interest moves to pro- mote the wire. While I was at the central office a farmer's daughter asked for the price of eggs ; a huckster had driven up to the farm. Mrs. North telegraphed her husband to bring home a lemon and told him of some friends in another part of the county who where going to have pork and beans for din- ner. Bowen won his wife over in Raisin by tele- graph. Dr. North transfers messages for S. L. Lester in Detroit to his brother in Raisin as they come in on the Western Union, or arterial wire. The operator of the latter transfers messages both ways to and from the local wire, a regular fee being established which is now in the Western Union rate book. The arterial operator also - 203 transfers important general news passing on his line, giving to all the sounders on the open circuit of the county the gossip of the world. This is the economy of the telegraph over the telephone, that a single wire may be tapped by any number of instruments. A farmer told me that his little girl came running to meet him in the field with the news of the nomination of Har- rison at Minneapolis which she had heard in the sounder; he "guessed" he wasn't so anxious to move to town now. So far as touched by the Jocal telegraph, Lenawee county is a whispering gallery. (Appendix xiii.) Dr. North wants to put the wire in the ■district school-houses and says that the children should be getting something useful ; he thinks that learning the key is now as important as learning to write. When I told him that the wire meant the new book and the new school he seemed hardly surprised, and agreed that it would be easier for the child to learn of Boston through the moving incident than through the cerement of the conventional text. He thought that it might be geography and grammar and reading and writing all in one up-dish when the detail could be organized. I left Dr. North under the trees with the perfume of swelling buds watching for the day of the undivided child. The limits of the local unit in the circulation of intelligence is the experiment of Lenawee county. Bowen thinks that each township must organize within itself, and extend to all parts of a county by some system of larger circuit, each county 204 by townships being linked within itself. He is measurably clear that the next county must be reached by a semi-arterial wire connecting with the circuits of the state. In this way Len- aw^ee county will reach Wayne or Washtenaw over district wires. These connecting lines would demand convergence which must be one with the commercial entrepot of the state and so the university center. The development in Len- awee county has brought the organization of the region so far along that it is reaching for the extended wire to call up Detroit. Dr. North wants to be in touch with the medical specialists, Mr. Bowen and his neighbors with the agricultural scientists, and the Tecumseh teachers with the education experts. These are now at distant points in the region, having ultimately to follow the wire to the center. Room twenty-three, the headquarters of Philosophy, standing for the order of the whole as merging from the center, may now be tapped by this part of the organizing region. Philosophy, the science of the State, will then have its laboratory — its practice. Agriculture, the schools, chemistry, medicine, and the law will likewise come into their practice as of the region. The apprentice at the center will connect. The call is for the wire between Tecumseh on the Rim and the University Center. Meeting this, the real university is devolved. Its growth takes in the re- maining portion of the region, and the University of Michigan is on the earth. 205 XV. THE MAN OF LETTERS IN one of my trips up to Detroit I met Colonel William Ludlow of the United States Engi- neers, in charge of reorganization and improve- ments on the light-house system of the Lakes. He told me there was more of commerce passed the feet of this city than docked the Mersey. The Colonel had in recent years surveyed the Black Hills, a stiff bit of engineering, and more recently his station was the city of Washington and he had been loaned for a year by the Government to the city of Philadelphia, which had asked for an engineer who could lay the permanent plans for the growth of the Delaware water front. There is on record in the latter city the story of the en- gineer's encounter with the jobbing contractor. At a time when certain bids were to open Colonel Ludlow was waited upon by a man who chatted long enough to convey his identity and by indirec- tion his wish to be one of the successful bid- ders. Standing to go, he threw upon the table a crisp fifty-dollar bank-note. The Colonel delayed while his mind deployed of quandary ; he could not hand the money back as the solution of the question because, out of the usual, it would be sup- posed he was in affront at the smallness of the bribe ; he did not like the short grace of telling the man that he had no use for money ; nor could he invite the brutality of handing him to an officer. He took the easy way. He queried what the bill was for and received the reply that it was any- thing for the boys. Taking down his box of 206 cigars, he asked his contractor to have one with Reaching for the note the Colonel twisted it and touched the gas jet at his hand with, "You will have a light ? " He set off the contractor's cigar, and then blazed his own. As the smoke began to draw he dropped the last ash of fifty dollars through his fingers. Money is moat of bigness to a man who employs it as a bribe. The contractor took the blind-staggers and the door. The Colonel called after him the hope that he would like that cigar. In a week the story got into the papers, being too new for the contractor to keep. Like the other places. Colonel Ludlow was at the Lakes because in engineering he could do un- usual things. When I met him I had in my hand an early attempt at connected reading of mind. I was able to satisfy him by my illustrations that the principal, or way, must be in terms of motion. He warmed and said the broken terminology had been a forbidding field to him. Finding that I once had to do with the schools, the Colonel asked me what the matter was. He said there was an apparent unreality in them which gnawed him ; that all the talk about them did not satisfy him. I attempted the situation by setting the organic method over against the prevailing notion. He cut me short to tell me that he saw it, declaring that I was a reporter. He said I would permit him to recall a reminiscence of the time when on a Government cruiser they came up from the sea off the Charleston coast. They had not yet 207 sighted land and the mists banked. Their glasses caught a skiff and they drew towards it with the thought of succor. In speaking distance, they roused an old colored man on the bottom of his boat to ask him what he wanted. He sat up to reply : " I'se done want nuthin', Cap'n, sah ; I'se jes' beatin' up hyar 'spectin' some of you gemmen done want a pilot in." The officer of the deck made apology for the interruption. As the white wake ran out, the darkie looked to his oars tied astern as floating anchor and invited again the sun and sleep. I asked the Colonel who the reporter was. He told me that for him he was the man who looked at his contact and saw the way of it and was able to tell it so that other men could see it. He was the up-beater of life ; and against the mists of form off Charleston or wherever shore- bound he would know his business. He was the pilot into port. Particular curiosity seized me. I wondered whence the man of letters had come, — what his history was. I went to the central archive at Ann Arbor. There had been some bringing up of connected compilation — the man of letters had been at work. There were the coverings of John Morley and Edward Caird and the storied science of Arabella Buckley. Having found my present self as of my function, my search was short. In relation to me, Professor Dewey and others placed as the teachers at the central academy. They helped me know my function by giving favorable trial as to whether I could report the region of 208 my contact — the school. The great test was that my report of the organic method as against the apartness held them, — gained their acknowledg- ment in attempts which I saw on the part of some to get away from the dead book and connect their classes with life, of course within bounds similar to my own experience. These men helped me to the records, as of my conserving ; they directed my interest to the proper reductions, facil- itating my research in removal of unnecessary lumber. In fine they advised with my wants, observed my trend, and helped me to such sugges- tion as they could. It was a conference with me as from the side of external conditions, so that their work had the newness of movement in it as is ever of life ; their plum was the less of the with- ered round of repetition. I had found my teachers as at the central academy. I saw that history for me was not " general " but particular ; it was the going out of my lines of life. As with the boy at the Milan school, it was the pursuit of my interests. I was able to put my finger on the man of insight who had scored the way. For the method of him I picked my own types in the progression of life. Added to all, I read my history in the language of self-experience. The lie in the practice of calling a lot of people up and obtruding somebody else's interest upon them as history, fretted me while I read. I began to track the man of letters, not from " memory " as of the conceit of learning but from the records. I struck the trail at Miletus on the Island Sea. Handles to their names these men 209 in the young letters had. Thales measured as a sev- enth of the Wise Men of Greece. Our bohemian had his Hmitations ; he thought the earth was flat and floated on the water, but yet he carried the torch. He marked the seasons after the process of the sun. The summer and winter sun-stand- ings he called our solstices ; and the spring and autumn even-nights he marked as equinoxes. And a partner of this wise Thales told off the hours in the daily movement of the sun in the sweep of the shadow of the style; in the sun- dial he gave the Greeks the time of day. Soon Pythagoras, the first of Geology, read the changes at our feet. And Hippocrates began to show the Greeks the way of the body ; he was the first of the science of medicine. Afterward there was Aristotle who made rough linkings of the ani- mals from the lowest to the highest, the first of Zoology ; he said the lowest was very near the vegetable. Theophrastus traced the plants. About this time the world began to patronize the man of letters — began to look with charity upon him who was recording life. The general, Alexander, started in a great way the fad of learning. The city of his name became a heading-up place for the men of science. The line of Alexander in the Ptolemys continued the endowment of the man of letters and the center by the sea waxed in learning. I found Euclid here, the man who read some ways of earth in terms of the mathematics ; and in hand with him, Arch- imides, who read the ways of the essential ele- ment of movement in terms of the lever. Bringing 2IO up here was Eratosthenes the first geographer. He gave the way of mapping his mother in the newness of latitude and longitude. He saw the first of latitude in a line stringing some places whose days were of equal length : he put his stilus on Gibraltar and drew it through the Issus, across the Peloponnesus, the Euphrates, out to the mountains of India, — it is the 36th north and passes through the front yard of Mr. Cross of Tennessee ; the first of longitude was the perpen- dicular to this and cuts the poles through Alex- andria. He measured the earth, using the tools of Euclid. After some hundreds of years the records became heavy, and the scientific center having no external correction — not being saved of life, but hedged in by the charity concept — ceased to regard earth and foimd in the writings all that was of moment. Knowledge went by the mouth and from books and the men of learning deliv- ered themselves to divers followings as of the doctrines of Aristotle, Galen and the rest. The reign of argument vs^as on. The sealed word took the place of the ways of things and science was stricken of congestion to fawn upon the great. At length the trail is marked with blood. Men like Socrates and Christ began to look at the social body to see that the way of man was to subserve the whole, that he was not of himself but of his function or place in kinship to his neigh- bor. They went about asking this man and that what he did. In declaring the true way of life they countered the interest of the sect, which 211 turned and rent them because they were few and without defence even by crooked speech. These men of the social cried out against emptiness of belief and forsaken action ; the class that made store by talking of the unknown god stirred the people, giving false witness. The man of letters took to the woods. We are in the "dark ages." The man of science turned to the sutler busi- ness in these middle centuries and began to adul- terate the goods. He gave out that he was close to the central or " god " truth and told the people that if they wanted any favors from On High to get their wares at the sutler's camp ; he would see that "god" treated them right. Travesty asserted that the way of life was of the moveless precepts instead of salvation by conditions ; that it was free. It has cost a world the travail of falsity. Men were threatened of plague in the issues of life if tithe of meat and all of praise was not put into the " sacrificial " fist. These adulter- ous goods went under the brand of the Holy Altar. The defunct man of letters took to him- self the name Vice-regent de Truth and worked the records to tit his claims. This sacking of life to the uprearing of vain worship has served the cleric. A great fellow this man of letters in his eccentricities. I had lost trace of the army among the strag- glers' camps. Beating up the records I struck it again in Geber, the Arab alchemist. He found nitric and sulphuric acids and began the turning of .the phials. He hatched chemistry, and Ben Musa portioned us algebra, and Al Hasan optics. A century or two before Columbus the trail grows distinct in Roger Bacon who compounded gun- powder after the Arab formula ; and Flavio Gioja w^ho brought the mariner's compass. The trail grows hot a little while before America, at Stras- bourg where the German set up as printer. Co- pernicus endeavoring the way of the whole, found the center of the solar system and read the way of the baffling phenomena in terms of motion. The earth has since chased its orbit for the school-boy. Columbus faced the sea to give the new pace, and it has nothing slackened. Looking from the trail I found the stragglers of progress had multiplied and overrun the land. They had grown wanton in the dwale of their caves which indented the vastnesses waking to the route of the army. Their rites were of the chant- ings in cathedrals ; their warriors Diets whose fangs tore the new in perpetuation of the old. Their interest was of the apart and ravenous. The Inquisition swarmed the advance. When Galileo gave the telescope as enforcing the language of motion, the newness was upheaving. The pace of the army threatened to undo the sutler. Science had appeared to lead the people from double tale in the contribution of their tithes. The spurious letters quaked in vision of the quickening world. The less abandoned of the stragglers found feathered conscience by pocket-opinion that the world was not yet ready for the New, — time was not yet opportune for the stars to move. The lie was kept to ease the front of truth. Galileo was thumbed for violent disturbance. Keppler wrote added fulness in the ways of the solar system and Harvey contributed to the reading of the body his mobile channels. Two stage-sluggers in Bacon and Descartes took up defence of the method of inquiry in Science as against authority — they opened the paunch of surfeit with whetted sentence, declaring that it was not what Galen or Aristotle said of error, but what the thing itself said. But small thanks to them of precept, science kept its head ; it came ever to the thing. The advance continued in long stretch. Newton gave the engineer the calculus and gravitation. The step up-started with Watt and Stephen- son who wrote in iron the way of steam. Com- merce began to catch its cog in earth. The contact of man and the social body loomed through the evanishment bf distance. Fragmentary sciences merged into systems and in terms of motion be- came projectile. The priestly stragglers of the rotting letters up the long march got closer to the army that they might reflect the movement ; the people had like to discover they were dead. The blood-suckers began to deny that they had crucified the known God whom science had de- clared and with flare of symbol quacked of progress. Ever along the way of skulls, up-tak- ing from the fattened monasteries, was the occa- sional master whose sight had lined to truth. And when he broke from barred portals to join the army, misdirection would say it had recruited him. Judas still snares his following, — who continue the sweat of tithe and titles blown of adulation. 214 With the converging lines the men of letters began to discern the social. But the State was yet a great way up the path, so that they could not see its action. Not having the fact they argued about it, spending themselves in words. This was the war of the philosophers. The final word of Hegel takes the man of letters from life to put him in closure. Renan at the last turned back his front. Caird has reasserted Christ as far as the brotherhood of interests could be known short of the locomotive and the telegraph. Un- touched of America he could not see the State. Some time ago individuals got tired of fight- ing and came to arbitrate on the fact ; the trial by jury is the process. The rule is that the fact arbitrates though obstructed by the dead thing of the "law" precedent, the statute partaking. The direction is toward adjustment of differences as of the immediate conditions. In the growth of the social a great many people have come to follow the same occupation. Such lines of interest as that of the iron men, the farmers, the mail service, mark this division of the State into classes. Through organization, the individual is adjusting in these classes. The street car employes of Detroit now make their own rules by vote based on their knowledge of the needs of the city ; the obstruction is that the "ownership" interest in the person of the man- ager, Mr. Hawks, is not recognized as of their class and as having one vote with the other work- ers ; though his employment might still be the intelligent or guiding head, — the captain of in- dustry. Representing the obstructive ownership notion, he now controls to degree of interference, and offsets any intelligent following of the inter- ests of the whole. When ownership exercises control purely by efficient service the State will ap- proach its mechanism in the free working of the classes. This is the change in the notion of prop- erty from Possession to Function — the moving concept. Organization of the classes is growing ; when one half of the people organize, the other half must. Uncle Luther Beecher who handed up a thousand dollar cheque when labor was on a winning strike in Detroit, told me he had watched the growing order. Manufacturers used to post notices directing employes how to vote ; later the proprietor dared only prefer by indirec- tion his own ticket ; now, organized labor would call to account a hint at coercive ballot. Uncle Luther was blind of double cataract, but a great footfall was on his ear. The lines being drawn around the class, it his to get into relations with all other classes as the whole. This control works down through to the individual. The latter is finally ordered in relation to the necessities of the integrate democracy, being the order of the whole in the individual. The regulation of the class is the trial by jury of its peers ; this may find pro- cess in representatives drawn from all classes, that the interests of none may be left. The method is the arbitration on the fact. This is the organic State. Social Unity is not in the precept of interests, but in their organization. The reality is the de- 216 gree of the attained unity as of the adjusted di- visions of labor. The meaning of America is the approximation of the organism. It is the American Idea. Its way is the adjustment of the Part in the Hght of the interests of the Whole. The brotherhood of man is tlie dependence of the varied interests, making the Unity. We love a man because he grows celery for us ; we eat him. We love him because he makes our shoes ; we wear him. In the tailor he puts his coat around us ; he is our warmth against the wind. The engine-driver brings our sweetheart ; we kiss him in the lips we love. In the florist he is color and perfume. To see this in the social is to realize its way ; we know that we can have none of these save through the service of interests in the di- vision of labor. It is not the sentimentalism of word-making ; it is the machinery of State. We defend our neighbor in his function in order that we may have our own. The foot may not say to the hand, I have no need. With this the insight of the Nazarene is fulfilled, that we love our neighbor as ourselves. This Jew was of the social science. The shortness has been that the Science of the State was not attained. Its reporting is the interests of the Whole, or the placing of the sub- ordinate interests. The State could not be seen until the man of letters had come to consciousness. He must needs find himself in the organism. The State in its way of the Whole could not be divined with this important part left out. In the remote- ness of yesterday, his field was plowed and salted. 217 The man of letters has been falsified in the en- dowment notion. His substance altogether did not go beyond charity. He has represented the sop thrown to truth that falsity might grow lech- erous. A magnate of a Detroit street railway gave fifty thousand dollars to the "Art Museum," distracting attention from his mixing accounts with the people in a million of watered stock. For this sop he is questioned less when he asserts that he cannot reduce fares to three cents. The man of letters has not dealt in his commodity, the WAY. He has been the fad. The reporter, handling an ordered intelligence, reduces as the simple man of business who has his wares ; at his counter we get our pound. When we can get the fact instead of partial opinion we will pay for it in order that we may be robbed less. Of the past, the man of letters has no direct commerce with the people. He must wait with his hat for a job at a penny a day and be sent to violate his interests, finally to have his copy blue-cut by the kept-editor and lie to the people. To change this he may organize his class for bringing together the phases of labor within his own occupation. The scalper of letters in the nominal newspaper spears everything in sight single-handed. He prints with equal crudity opinion on the Brooklyn Bridge with suggestions to a Roebling, an edi- torial on the money question with outcries against the banker, or he turns and writes on yellow fever with rules to the doctor. Through lack of an organization whereby each phase of interest in the State can be reported of special knowledge 218 in the wide reach of the whole interest, the man of letters is so attenuated that he is not discernible. He has the ridiculous falsity of no position. Possessing the State, the man of letters puts the full value in"his commodity and may organize his tribe. Two or more practical reporters may open an office at any center and begin to handle such goods as are in sight. They will protect their stamp ; it is the News Triangle. It is straight goods or no sale. The fascination of life is the unfailing brand. The rise of the News Office as with the Standard Oil Company is in the growth of its business. The science of let- ters will report away the false prophet, who dis- cerns not the times. The present type of these babblers is the political economist of the schools. The remedy is always seen in the way, which is the full reporting. The gruesome editorial and the monkish essay exist in its absence. A me- chanic does not report a hot box by saying that it smokes, — that is not the reality ; he points out that the box has run dry, or that the bearings im- pinge, or that it is leaking sand. There is the way, [which is] the truth and the life. The monasteries, as standing for all the apartness of letters, are rich in word which may be taken over to life ; King Henry sacked them of their gold, — the organic letters will bag the phrase. The immediate demand on the organized in- telligence is for the interpretations of the State to the proper organization of the classes. Instead of talk, the man of letters has to show the way of adjustment whenever the clash arises. In his 219 surgery of the State he may no longer multiply word about cutting off legs or taking up arteries ; he has to do it. With the real concept of the State as of no exclusive class in "owner" or " priest," this is as direct and sure as the exhibi- tion of. the locomotive by the mechanic. The dealing with the whole State, or class fact, makes the standard of the business of letters. The man whose specialty is of the General Fact is the type reporter. The conveyance of the lesser fact cov- ers all the ramifications of life and is of the di- visions of labor within the class of letters. Dr. Gaylord Thomas who writes of the diseases of women is the man of letters in the more limited sense. Such a man will of his day go down to the locality where it is rumored a doctor has mur- dered his patient. If the physician was unskillful, the people will know it of surety, not hearsay ; if his hand was true he will not be crucified of error. So of another phase of letters, a teacher charged with the practice of mental abortion will have his reward. The final interests of the Child of De- mocracy are with the master reporter. The present lack of integrity in the region of letters can only be met by organizing the re- porter into his class with such efficiency that the individual will be corrected by the integrity of the whole. He cannot have his oversight except through an organization of men whose combined intelligence will know in any given case whether one of their number is adulterating the goods. It is the integrity of the whole in modern life that is coming to control the individual. The Govern- ment engineers quickly discover incompetency or malfeasance on the part of one of their number. I am given by Colonel Ludlow that malfeasance has occurred but twice in the U. S. Engineering service in over half a century. It is true that the integrity of the whole orders the individual. The Judiciary has its dishonest practice ; but the up- right judge is so much the rule that we think of corruption as the extreme exception. A closer and more independent organization of the judi- ciary as of a free working class would even go to correct this. The engineer of the State, the re- porter works in mechanics though he frames of word. He may only get his leverage through in- tegration. He is of the machine of letters. XVI. THE TURNING OF A TIDE T HAD read Victor Hugo's story of Waterloo. A Before meeting this thing I had tried at- tempts at the battle. They were without pith. I had taken aversion to history through having thrust upon me the commonplace of war. These book-battles were the sameness of formalism, leaving in my mind the mirage of contention. Hugo was the lifting of some confusion. He was the reporter who helped to the way. He gave me the figure of war and upon it I have hung detail, picked with delight from description that had tired. Sherman liked to say that the 221 Waterloo of this Frenchman had the fascination of the real. When he visited the battlefield with the scars of America upon him, he was able to place the movement after the A of Hugo. He stood at the apex where Wellington's square held the Allied center. He saw the sunken road, as the cross of the A, fill with the foremost ranks of Napoleon's rearing horse; he took the shock of the tail of the column when it had passed over the bridge of flesh. He walked the slope to the position of the French at the bottom of the A. Here among Napoleon's foot he rested the final wager ; he saw the Old Guard move out and up the rise,-strike the squares at the top and recede into the night of rout. Hugo does not forget the romance of war. The rain pre- vented Napoleon's artillery from engaging at dawn, giving the German time to come up. Marshal Ney was lost in the mire and failed to reach Napoleon ; he took the impassable road at the forks. Waterloo hung on a hair. I had found a battle. My interest moved on the reality and of my own mind I looked at Alexander and Caesar, reading them in terms of Waterloo. And in the same quest I stuck a stake at Hastings where the Norman crossed breed with the Saxon ; I was beguiled of the story of Greene, — Harold and the battle-axe got me. I found Bulwer's "Last of the Barons," and was brought to America. Driven by the school to the routine detail in the home wars, American history was canker. After escaping the clutches of the pedagogue, I could not for a long time together so much as open the book.' My early teaghing of history was the perfunctory thing. Yielding to the reality of Hugo, I turned to find the Waterloo of America in Gettysburg. My interest was fed on the stories I got from old soldiers in Michigan. But I did not find the battle. It was this I wanted ■ that I might give body to the incident. The op- portunity of the years did not deny me. It was the fall of '92 when the Grand Army was meeting in Washington. I was standing at the Martius square in Detroit one evening with my hands in my pockets, the crowd elbowing by. I was accosted by a young man who wanted to sell me "a return ticket to the reunion." He said he had paid theup-and-up excursion price of twelve dollars ; was stuck for money and couldn't use it, and would sell it for five. I looked at the ticket and saw that it read Washington by Philadelphia and Baltimore, — cities of my burning. The start limit was nine o'clock. I had an hour to turn in ; I made it and was coming through the gate of the Michigan Central station as the con- ductor raised his lantern. I slept on my over- coat and was peeling a banana on Exchange street at Buffalo in the morning. The Lehigh missed connection at Waverly and a local train threw us into Wilkesbarre in the late night. I had struck up with a young man from southern New York who was going to Philadelphia to work in his uncle's oyster bar, it being the opening of the season. The heavy coal shipments of the fall and the Grand Army excursions were delaying trains. We went upon the streets of Wilkesbarre to find- a considerable city with pavements of asphalt. Squads of miners caroused the streets in the last of the wak- ing hours. Our train came only with the morning and we got off at Philadelphia in a rain. I had heard of the Royal Blue and a mile a minute. These trains passed down from New York every hour. I had wanted to teeter on them. I got a dinner on Arch street and after two hours' of heel restored shrink with a ten cent fry in an oyster cellar. I brought my bag through the mud and, bespattered, was at the B. & O. sta- tion when the Royal Blue drew down the track. The great drivers wer^ as high as my head. " Baltimore and Washington and no stops," was the call at the gate. It was late day when I saw the dome of the Capitol from the swaying car. Trains blocked the yards ; I read on them the names of the Grand Army posts from California and Texas. Washington was stirred of. martial memory. The air had the softness of wooing. A few rods and I was at the Capitol. I walked round the building, eating it. I went on the steps looking up Pennsylvania avenue. A griz- zled soldier told me he had limped along there in the big review at the close of the war. [ climbed down the steps and chased my eyes up the avenue past the great Bureaus. In front of the White House there was a pond of water- hyacinths, from white to purple and all climes. I went over to see the theatre where Lincohi was shot, and walked back in the alley. I stopped for supper when my legs refused. I bought a dozen street car tickets and with the Child of Democ- racy did the town on wheels. The third day I pulled my eyes off Washington and took one of the trains that was loaded with soldiers for Get- tysburg. We went by Hagerstown, crossirtg the trail of Lee, and were dumped in the- middle of the afternoon. I had made companions of half a dozen old soldiers on my car. I simmered with questions and they wanted to know if my father waS in the war. One of them was from Vermont and belonged to Stannard's men. As the train wound the Bkie Ridge past Hagerstown up from the Potomac one of them showed me the road his corps had marched at the summons to battle. As in the July days of '63 the streets of Gettys- burg were filled with soldiers. At excursion times the town is a boarding-house. A tall darkie in a shiny, tail coat approached us with the attrac- tions of his table. My soldiers held back but I turned in with the negro and we towed them to an old-time house and a big-faced Pennsylvania Dutch-woman. We were at the street that was Lee's picket line. The darkie lived in a log house peppered with bullets on the opposite corner. He was a Methodist pastor with a flock that didn't overpay him and he worked the trains to help the lady, he told us. None of us could wait to eat. We put in the rest of the afternoon with the pastor. We 225 went east by the street of the picket line and in two blocks struck the Baltimore pike which comes in from the south to center at the town. Turning to our right on the pike and going half a dozen squares south we were at the bend of the road on the edge of the village ; a few rods farther, up a little rise, brought us to the top of rock-ribbed Cemetery Hill where Gettysburg has its burying ground. We were where Meade of the Army of the Whole made his stand and threw out his permanent line. It was at the crook of a fish-hook. Cemetery Hill run- ning out either way in a stony ridge of the same name to make the two arms. As we faced south from the town, the long-arm ridge was to the right and terminated in the Round Tops, as the eye of the fish-hook ; the short-arm ridge was to the left and terminated in Gulp's Hill, as the point and barb. Lee of the Army of the Part faced this fish-hook about half a mile off all the way around, his long arm being to the west on Seminary Ridge, his crook to the north running down through the town, and his short arm to the east in a valley. The Wholist center was on the long arm of the fish-hook opposite the barb. On the third day at mid-afternoon Lee threw Pickett with a wedge of fifteen thousand against this center. This blunder was Gettysburg. I had found the battle. The first and sec- ond days was the way of it. The first day was on the hills north of the town opposite the crook. This skirmish determined the fish-hook, 236 the Army of the Whole retreating at the close of the day to take this stand. The second day was the attempt of the Army of the Part to get flank- ing position : first, at the Round Tops, the eye of the fish-hook ; second, in the other direction it was their attempt on Gulp's Hill as the barb or point of the fish-hook. Failing to get these, Lee drove his men to slaughter at the center. I went back to supper. The rest was any tracing of the story to place it on th& hook. Ten years ago in a house in Staunton, Vir- ginia, there was a frayed map of southern Penn- sylvania nailed on the wall. Its minutiae gave the farms along certain principal roads. Sitting be- fore this map, Jed Hotchkiss, engineer of the Partist army, narrated to my brother that he made it in the spring of '63. Lee sent for him one day to say : " Well, Hotchkiss, we are going up North ; they are bringing through the lines for you the township maps of southern Pennsyl- vania." Riding with the staff, Hotchkiss would accost a farmer by name and ask after a neighbor, saying, " Is Mr. Brown at home?" The engineer had studied his roads. This was the piloting of an army. Finding on the 30th of June that the Wholists were near and marching upon them, the Partists turned their faces toward a memorable field. We doubled aswath on our landlady's table and went into the streets of the village. A cab-driver who was aboy during these days of battle lived nine miles north of the town on the Carlisle road which is the straight extension of the Baltimore pike. 237 Throughout the first day the Partists were march- ing down this road ; they cHmbed after the ripe cherries in his father's yard. Another body of the Partists came from the w^est on the Chambers- burg road, which makes cross with the other pikes at the center of the village. A horsekeeper relates that a squad of men in gray, accoutered and stained of march, rode into the village one day at the close of June. Their horses stood in the central square while an officer in slouch hat made demand of the mayor in sixty thousand dol- lars ransom of the town. The day of payment had been fixed when they rode off. The demand was cashed by the Wholist advance which swung up from the south and struck the Partist front on the Chambersburg road. Looking up this road onto the hills at the edge of the village, the horse- keeper told me they came up there on the run and in less time than the telling had unlim- bered and the battle was on. At the close of the day the Wholists troops came down through the town in disorder and got their guns in position on the rise at the crook of the fish- hook. The Partists followed in a few minutes in regular column on the double-quick. When they got to the bend of the road that faces the crook, the batteries on the hill began to talk. The Partists stopped and took time to think. It took them so long to think that the night was on. This was the beginning of Pickett's charge. I saw what the "inside line" means. The Wholists had it in their closed position. Their reserve lay back of the ridges between the two 228 arms of the fish-hook. Reinforcements could be thrown to either flank or to the center. The length of the line was three miles ; but in the sense of the-easy-BTovement across from arm to arm of the fish-hook, it was a good deal shorter. Lee's line was attenuated to five miles ; but it was longer in the sense of the disadvantage of movement. He could not throw aid from one flank to the other except by detour ; and the great distance made it impossible for his generals to co-operate with knowledge of each other's posi- tion. The Partists had the "outside line." It was late in the afternoon of the second of July when Lee was ready to renew the fight of the first. It began with a hurling attempt to get flanking position on the Round Tops at the eye of the fish-hook. This was the fierce fight in the wheat-field and peach orchard, where Sickles drove back the Partists in the "valley of death" at the foot of these hills. This was followed by a like attempt on the other flank at Gulp's Hill, the barb of the fish-hook. The Louisiana Tigers charged this point and were undone. Lee kept the whole line busy but it was to draw attention from the real fight at the two ends. This was the second day. The loss in men had been against the Wholists, but they held their import- ant positions. Lee's lookout was at a point opposite the crook of the fish-hook where his glass swept both arms. The tower of the Seminary is here. Failing to turn the flanks of Meade, Lee came from this toWer on the night of the 323 second to hold council with his generals. Long- street was his chief of staff. In planning the campaign before leaving Virginia, these two' generals had talked together that arriving in the North they would give battle only under cover of position that they themselves would choose and intrench ; they had agreed that their battles would be defensive while in the enemy's country. They had talked that in the face of the enemy they would remember the plans of their calmer moments. From the hour of the second of July on the coming up of Longstreet, when he and Lee stood together at their point of observation and saw with their glasses the Army of the Whole gathering on the fish-hook, the former general had endeavored to remember their orig- inal plans. Longstreet wanted to make recog- nizance around the long arm in the direction of Washington, find a position, and withdraw to it that night, thus interposing between Meade and the National Capital. If they were not attacked on the following day, they would the same night move to another position which they would choose nearer Washington. This menace of the Capital would compel Meade to fight them on their own conditions, when they might expect to beat him off with hurt. At the conference of July second, Longstreet continued to urge de- flecting movement for defensive position as the hope of the Partist cause. Lee replied, " No ; I am going to take them where they are on Ceme- tery Hill." He said, " I want you to take Pickett with his five thousand Virginians and ten thou- sand support and make the attack." The objective point which Lee gave to his general was a small clump of trees well down on the long arm. Behind the clump of trees there is now a granite tablet bearing this inscription, " High- water mark of the Southern Confederacy." Back of this tablet and extending either side are batteries of unserviced guns mark- ing the position of the Wholist artillery at the center. Two or three rods in front of the clump of trees are stone posts marking the line of foot which is continuous with the whole length of the fish-hook, being determined at this point by a stone fence making an obtuse bend, — the "bloody angle." A rod or two back of the clump of trees and the batteries of the center is a tablet marking a body of New York horse. The inscription tells you they had orders from General Meade that if the Partists .broke the line of foot they were to fall upon them and give breathing spell. Either side of the horse there was heavy reserve of foot, which at the moment of a charge was to be thrown forward. This was the preparation at the center. At precisely one o'clock on the day of the third, the Partist batteries of one hundred and fifty guns opened from the opposite heights. They were answered by about as many more, making the artillery combat of time. It was the growling of the two monsters. This frightful cannonading had been in progress thirty minutes when General Warren, Meade's engineer, rode 231 out on Little Round Top at the eye of the fish- hook. From the apparent movement on the op- posite heights he concluded that a charge on his center was in preparation. The Wholists artil- lery ceased fire, to reserve ammunition and prepare fpr the assault. Disabled guns were replaced and canister piled up. The guns at the center were drawn back over the ridge to substitute and refit. Then the Army of the Whole waited. General Alexander, Lee's chief of cannon, was to determine the opportune moment for the charge. He had intended to give Pickett the early notice, fifteen or twenty minutes at most, after the firing began. But when he looked at the development of the enemy's artillery, he could not bring himself to the word. It looked madness to launch foot into this fire with nearly three quarters of a mile to go in the July sun. He let the fifteen minutes pass, and twenty, and twenty-five, hoping for sonjething to turn up. Then he wrote to Pickett : " If you are coming at all you must come at once, or my ammunition will not give you the proper support." When the Wholist fire slackened and their batteries were drawn back from the center, he hurried the sec- ond message to Pickett : " For God's sake, come quick !" Longstreet's heart was sunk. When Pickett rode to him to receive his final command for the charge, he could not speak the order, but turned away. Pickett saluted and said, " I shall go for- ward. Sir," and galloped off to his division and im- mediately put it in motion. It swept from the -AApv BACON ^ORO. DCI wood showing the full length of its gray ranks ; the support stretched out in echelon. The men were confident of their leaders. They passed Longstreet and Alexander with elastic step. The march was down through the valley and up a gentle slope. The batteries from Round Top and every point on the long arm of the fish- hook belched at the advancing wedge. The progress of Pickett became carnage. From the rail fence where Longstreet had dismounted to watch the charge, a single shell would be seen to knock down four or five men like nine-pins. Old soldiers who were at the stone wall told me that peering close to the ground under the lifting smoke, they could see the legs of the advancing Partists kicking out with regularity of shuttle. The discharge of the guns at the center would open a lane in the column and they would be seen to close up in swinging step. It was the magnificent charge of history. From Long- street's position Pickett was seen to reach a point between the two lines and with a pause mass for the final plunge. The point of the wedge struck the stone wall in front of the clump of trees. Their flags were planted within the line ; they put their hands on the cannon at the tablet. The Wholist line swung in towards the sides of the wedge to give the cross-fire. The gray column melted into rout. Two thousand Partists lay upon the ground. The receding wave was a struggle back to Seminary Ridge. Pickett of all his Gen- erals alone returned. Lee rode up to receive the 233 troops, uttering these words, " It was all my fault ; let us get together." Photographer Tipton, of Gettysburg, was at this time a boy living*in the center of the village behind the Partist pickets. His family like the rest of the town covered themselves by keeping below the windows. In the lifting of the morn- ing after Lee's retreat, the boy woke and no longer heard the snoring of the Partists outside. He raised his eye above the window line where he lay upon the floor to see through the begin- ning rain a blue cap peering over a dry-goods box which had been used as obstruction in the streets. The head was followed by a blue cape and a soldier. It was the advancing pickets of the Wholist army. The withdrawal of Lee had been while the town slept. There are incidents which I have hung upon the battle. Since the realities of the redoubt I have not tired of stringing stories upon the fish-hook. I have at times fought over the lines in the grass- ing trenches where with the Child of Democracy I nosed in the touch of autumn. Vicksburg and Chickamauga, The Wilderness and Appomattox, are for me the charge of Pickett. Other w^ars get their meaning in the actual of the field. I read Waterloo in terms of Gettysburg. With my visit to the type of battle ground, the lie in the military history of the world passed away. I turned to put the fish-hook upon the wire for Michigan, as my nearness to the schools. We would recall that it was here determined Democ- 234 racy had a head. I would realize for them, stand- ing on the symbol of the scarred earth. XVII. THE PSALM OF LIFE I HAD meant to stay at Gettysburg the part of a day ; it was the best of a week. In my last visit to Seminary Ridge I came on a farmer who was trying to raise a buried bowlder of the black rock that tooths the soil of these hills. He told me the stone had done him some plow points in twenty years. He had dug round it and put in a pry ; but he " reckoned " the stone was there to stay and he wouldn't be able to turn it out with the lever. Asking him where his lever was, he waived me the pry. I told him I couldn't see it. I went over from the fence where we stood and helped adjust the beam for a shorter arm. With surety the stone moved an inch. We held it while his boy champed stones and dirt underneath it. We got another hold, and continued. When the long arm had labored down for the last time, I caught him with : " The lever movesP Gulfed of reality, the farmer "reckoned" he was the blind man. W hen he "guessed" our stone was the rock of ages, I told him I was strange on my eye again ; there was a toss for it that the to-and-f ro of the lever was the rock of ages, — life an eternal adjustment. The man looked round upon the hills with me to see 235 that the lever is the last reduction of motion ; the finality of expression ; the charm of form. Standing where Pickett debouched upon the slope, the farmer's face followed mine across the valley to the clump of trees. I raised the doubt as to whether that was the " high-water mark " of anything. Whether this was not the static phrase for a new adjustment in democracy. We saw the pickaninnies tune to commerce. It was movement. The South had its century of rooted conditions, making it relatively static against the stalking commerce of the North. It took the heritage of the short arm of the lever and when the long arm of a major interest moved in its sweep, something had to give. By the never- ceasing wonder of compensation, making us of one flesh, the long arm had its strain. The level of the organism in democracy was deflected by an apart class which prevailed against the common interest. The slave-holding sect as exclusive in the State had become of such proportions as to obstruct the Whole ; they denied the movement whose method is the intelligence of the majority as to their needs. They owned something as of old conditions which the movement could no longer recognize. The organism was obstructed by the notion of property in human flesh. The de- mand was for a new concept of ownership that should permit the organization of the slaveholder into the State. The slaver had to be freed of a dead idea. The present concept of property does not permit Pulitzer or Vanderbilt to become mem- bers of the classes representing their respective 236 occupations. They cannot be organized into de- mocracy. Like the older slave-holding class they stand obstructive. The claim of the "capital" Partists, like the older Partists, is the sacredness of institutions ; their right to obstruct the organism is held of custom. But in democracy the sacred is of movement ; in the organism there is no ex- clusive or feudal class. The pathos of the charge of Pickett is the throes with which idea moves. The song is that idea does move. The farmer gave me his surprise at never meeting the lever before ; he declared that all things about him began to move. He could not see anything that was not in adjustment. Looking at the direction in which things were shap- ing, everything was motion. He asked me who I was, and I told him I had taught school some ; I had found teaching was not catajDulting, but the raising to consciousness points of relation in the commonplace of everybody's work. I had not found that it could be done apart from the work, as a "preparation;" that it went with the work as of its adjustment, — or movement, as he would say. As with his stone ttiat would not un- lock, the highest teaching was the suggestion to the last blending of action whenever deflection was found, — at once the softness, the grace, and the art of life. When I took up my march from Gettysburg it was on a morning bright like the steel of war. It was leaving behind me something I had known. My cloud- fleck was that I would not be able to sit in the schools of Michigan and call up the boys of 237 Gettysburg in some memory of the field, Tiie way lay across the Blue Ridge by Pen Mar. Over- ripe peach orchards were dropping their last fruit upon the hills, and the baskets loaded at the sta- tions. In the approach to Hagerstown the Cum- berland vallej' opened toward the north farther than the eye. It was up this way Lee had gone to battle, impressing the wagons and store of the Dutch farmers, his plunder train grown to twenty miles. Along this way Hotchkiss had saluted the farmers and called them neighbor. I saw the in- vitation of this laden valley as the Partist army went into it from the hills. I remembered that my seeing w^as of machinery. The song was that men had labored, that Watt and Stephenson as representative had lived. Through them we have come in some part closer to life and may see. We may cease conning overmuch the lie of a shortness in the mongering book. I lingered in Baltimore and ate oyster fries. The town had become storied to me in the life of Frederic Douglas. I got off at the old Camden street station which he connects with his escape. I went down to the Light street wharf where he . used to hire himself out as a calker and carry his full wage to his master who owned something. The boats from the Bay were unloading ■' sweets " and oysters. It smelled of farm and ocean. Up on Charles street I got my shoes blacked, being my good-bye to the red clay of Gettys- burg. On one side of the street was a colored man of fifty. He was doing business with the customary elevated chair and foot-rest under an 238 inviting umbrella canopy. The step-box for the chair was painted cherry and figured with brass nails. It had the spangle of prosperity. On the opposite side of the street was a colored boy of ten. He had a common all-wood house chair, its black paint once renewed, and the box of the street bootblack's kit for a foot-rest. I took the boy. He blacked away with unease, the sweat beading out on a speaking face. He presently tapped my foot with borrowed professional air. The man came across and I knew he was the boy's father. His eye caught vestige of the red mud in my seams and under the instep. He swelled with store of experience and lesson : " Look hyar, sonny, yo's done mis' dem seams. I'se gwine make yo' 'member dat. Look yer, now," and the teacher peered under, "wat's de gemmen done gwine do wid dat mus' 'step when he cross his leg whar de folks is settin' roun' in de hotel? Don't I done say fix dem place, fust, so's yo' 'member not to f o'git ? Yo's gwine to 'member dat, chile. Now yo's gwine shine dat fust-class and please de gemmen. Tink I's gwine git de slashin' chair wid de nails and all paint up, till yo' git yo' hand in on de bottom ob de business?" The boy again traveled my extent of leather, beginning with the seams and lingering with the instep. He had his ethic in a shoe that gave the sun. I had taken my apprenticeship with the boot- black. It was the reality of the Child of Democ- racy. The lesson was the all of teaching in this simple thing. The song was of the moving child. 239 I went to see Johns Hopkins, the type of the endowed university and the static school. They were in the grind of lesson-giving. Men were preaching dead concepts from the unconnected chair, holding themselves aloof from the direct function of life. They got their bread from the diverted earnings of the Baltimore and Ohio road. The President was complaining of the manipula- tion of the bonds by the bourse. Wall street wanted some, too. When the people discovered that the Barons did not own the lands as in the freer movement of America, the feudalism built upon the soil passed away. If the baron might continue separ- ate from the organism, he must cover his holdings with something the people had not seen. The attempt was to found a new feudalism on the secret of the steam. The locomotive is bonded for nine billions in America. This fiction of the bourse is the type obstruction of commerce. When the final word is spoken to the baron, the people will say we do not confiscate you ; we ex- plain and organize you. The people will say we now see ; you of the exclusive classes must be organized into democracy. The Part will not of itself move ; we of the Whole must move it. Like the older slaver you are to be made over into democracy. You will be born again. In the light of the new concepts we will pass accounts with you. Democracy will take its balance sheet. You of the obstructive ownership, where did you get your calculus which your engineer used in staking the New York Central line? Newton did 240 not give it to any class ; it is the dower of democ- racy. And your locomotive, where did you get that? It was given to the social body. And where did you get your electric wire that makes possible the organization and conduct of your line ? And Bessemer gave the steel retort. And the arm that dug the iron and spiked the rails is of the functions of democracy. You can claim no more than a place among the organic workers. We give you your place not as owner, but as organizer and director of a section of the great transporta- tion body in the State. You have to subject yourself to your class that you may be amenable to the Whole. You may finiction but not usurp. We do not degrade you ; we raise you into your class. The fiction of ownership at an end as the diversion of function in skinning the road, the interest of this class becomes your interest. We free you in freeing your function. My question for Johns Hopkins was what the institution would do when the B. & O. was shorn of its fiction, to pass into its simple utility of two steel bands. I told the students that the endowed chair might be expected to lose its wind the self-same hour. The song is in the rustle and hustle of the boys who build the State. In the heart of Philadelphia there is a graveyard looked upon by tall buildings. Some of the memorials were old a hundred years ago. In one corner there is a windowed opening stopped by iron bars. Standing there the noise of traffic pounded my ear. Within reach of my hand on the stone cover of a mossing sepulcher,. 241 was " Benjamin Franklin." A few squares and I came upon his figure in front of Independence Hall. Standing before these symbols of a day they sank into the pathos of a barren negative. Above was a thousand strand of wire that hummed of life. I tugged at the refusing nega- tive. I saw ill the purring circuit the hand of " Poor Richard " touched of spark holding the string of his kite. I remembered '76 and a State in labor. The resulting movement was of crowded Chest- nut street. Franklin was in every face that passed me. Looking longer I saw Gettysburg and Lincoln. It was the composite of the co- ordinate State, the song of a redeemed. In other visits to the East I had wandered on the wharves at New York. I had gone its miles of shipping. I stopped at the great spice box of the West Indies wharf ; the air was heavy for blocks with the odors of the tropics. Once there was a great four-master from the Orient passing tinder the bridge of Roebling, the traffic of two cities above her. Further up, just coming into view, was a Sound steamer, her walking-beam rocking, a bone in her mouth. Abreast of the Battery was the black hulk of a belated ocean liner. I walked a mile up the docks to meet her at the slip. I saw her led up to her pier. About me, and from the deck as from the top of a very great house, handkerchiefs fluttered. Whelmed of joy a face near me under auburn hair turned and sobbed against the pier house. The gang- way was run ; the captain left his bridge. I watched the descending mail bags in the chute. 242 They tumbled down to the vans. There was the tag : "Detroit via Queenstown ;" " Galveston via New York ;" " Italia,via Havre ;" " Montreal via New York ;" " Honolulu via New York and San Francisco." It was the intelligence of the peo- ples. Love and business sing their song. The day was grown. I went up into the streets and met an idolater. He asked me if I had been to the opening of the Academy of De- sign. When I told him I was afraidl hadn't, he said I had missed something; that New York hadn't seen such an " art exhibit " lately. I told him that I lacked somewhat appreciation ; that I had been spoiled for his shows through going so much to look at the pictures in the Marine Gal- lery. I asked him if he knew that they hung masterpieces and if he had been down to the re- cent opening. He grew excited at the thought of more paint, saying he hadn't heard about it — hadn't seen the notice in the papers. He asked in a breath where it was and how long it would remain open. I replied : " It never closes ; it is in the Bay." From the time I was a boy I had heard the preachers talk about the "slums." They had a cure-all they called the " holy spirit." I had heard all hands pray that the spirit might purify and make white the slums. I went to Five Points to see how far along they had prayed them. A type of these people was a man with a pick and shovel who dug all day with his face very close to the ground. If he saw the light it was for a few minutes morning and evening, and then as if he 243 looked through a dark tube ; the sun appeared a little spot of light through the opening of high buildings. When he got out of his hole in the dark and tried to look around he was dazed. Lack of expansion froze him. When a little coal of liquid fire appeared he drank it, seeing nothing else. The coal burned in him. He counted it warmth. He had not moved to know any other. He brushed his eyes and thought the blur was brightness. He staggered at what he thought was a great light. He told a slave who had dug all day in the hole with him — his class in the dark — to go and get some. They times drank together, counting it a great double light. He went "home ;" it was a little square box. His companion had been in the dark so long that her face had ceased to give back. It was the darkness of the im- mobile. There had been no contact ; her face was set. She did not even move to the window and look out ; there was no window. She was bur- dened of toil and constant exertion and a walled future ; she was held very close to the ground, not looking up. Her face was so close to the groimd that she did not so much as reflect dis- tance ; in it there was not even the expanse of a green meadow. The preacher prayed ; all hands prayed. The black hole did not lighten, the black box did not relent. There was no movement. The preacher " delegated " a missionary. This timer told them to " look np and be good." But the rope around their necks had the shortness of no leisure and so no consciousness ; they could not " look up," and " good " was jargon. They 244 stared at tlie timer ; it was confusion. Tlie preacher had lied to me. He was following his trade. I "considered and went where there was a lit- tle more light to learn how it came. I remembered Monroe county, Michigan. I had watched expan- sion there for twenty years. I had known its moveless existence. In the early days of its slum- ming it was a wet country. The people were web-footed. The tides of Lake Erie once rode upon it. The streams wei-e sluggish and gave alluvial deposit and odor. During the season of labor the slummers were stricken of the plague. Blue malaria looked out of sallow faces de- graded of no movement. Commerce turned its phials in the laboratory and brought mercury and quinine. The ax got its arm and the light at the end of a little hole in the damp woods expanded to summer. Still the faces of the people were held close to the ground. It was a handicap for bare subsistence. Thev had no portion of the day in which to turn their faces toward the light. Minds do not revolve of sameness ; idea adjusts only in unceasing variety. Adjustment is revolu- tion. The wet soil did not yield them opportunity of change. Commerce brought them the drain tile. The wheat and corn ripened above these and the granaries fattened. Neighbors spent after- noons together and they went much to town. But though they moved a little it was yet very hard work. Their ideas did not revolve of change. Their faces were still much on the ground. Farmer's wives worked all day in pent rooms 245 cooking for harvest hands, and were broken for a summer. Winter cooped them in a little kitchen. Commerce sent its agent who broke into the farmer's yard and left him the mower, the sewing machine, the Percheron and Berkshire, Standard oil, the spring wagon. The horses that feed in the stall and the self-binder are the harvest hands that once held a face in the shadows. The people of Monroe county move about more now. Ma- chinery has so lightened the day's work that the deadness is in part off. But disorganic democracy robs the farmer class ; they now^ get barely cost for their wheat. The drag is still on. A great many people do not work and somebody has to feed thenfi ; it reacts upon the farmer, as upon all the classes. But the drag in Monroe county is less. The light is expanded greatly. The im- mobile life is passing from this part of earth. There are places in the county that machinery has little touched ; these are the dark places. The light places have music, clubs, dancing, mails, telegraph, telephone, theaters ; they have whirl of contact and their ideas go round. The people move. In proportion as they move they look through other people's eyes, multiplying their own. It is the social. Movement is the com- merce of man ; the people are beginning to see the lie of the preacher. When they get their eyes they will tell him to quit passing the hat. The preacher will then stop throwing sand, and scaring our mothers. This will help expansion. When the preacher has to hunt his rations, he will join the kingdom of workers. He will get a "hump 246 on himself " and find his class. He will become our brother. All the slummers will slum less. The song is the gathering of the clans. In my native village the houses are of one sameness. This is a "main" and a projection at one side, the "L." Mind is not filled of modula- ted change. The town does not move. If you look at one of these houses it stares you. The reason is apparent ; there is no ease in its lines, — they stab like a hard face. It is the troubled eye. These lines meet in obtrusive angles. There is no modulation which is the softness of suggestion. There is no demureness which is seclusion. When you look at the front it is sheer upright. There is nothing to break this straightness as of the building itself. There is a stoop with harsh -lines and ornament, but it looks like something brought and spiked on ; it is no part of the house. As you look you feel that the two stories are two square boxes, one upon the other. It is the hollow. The roof rides insecure. There is no long, gentle drop enfolding the house as though it were warmed of earth ; it is coldness. As you look toward the back there is the precipitate straight again in un- yielding line and angle. The windows ai-e holes sawed in thin walls ; they are not sunk in the house. You do not feel that the sunlight is fall- ing subdued and checkered on rug and chair. The paint is white, which glares ; or if color, it is mud or sand — and not a trim quaintness that robes the town of melody. The building does not seem to have grown and blossomed where it stands. It does not adjust of mind. It moves not. 247 You go inside. There is paper on the wiill a tumble of brown and gray and white, "picked out" with gold. It is set of harshness. There is the border to " match." The wood is moveless slate or other color in the fixed notion of the house painter. On the floor is a carpet of "gray-that-don't-show- the-dirt" ground, with bunches of leaves and red flowers, in the break of interval, jumping up from your feet. The furniture crowds proportion. The chairs sprawl, or are unyielding, high and pitch, you forward. There is a settee that refuses your body, with pronounced color of red or green that grins. The shades and curtains are of forbidding stiffness with thrusting fiber and border in league with the common disagreement of the room. The mantel is a bristling shelf of accumulation, such that you think of a garret. The lamp is a white or green glare. Qn thie walls are some monstrous cartoons called pictures. Tidies that pundh your eyes are on everything except the floor, ahd that has tidy mats. A gaudy rug with figures bats you at the door." The rooms are so cluttered and overdone that it frets repose ; or they are so bare that you feel lonesome. You are in the constraint of a contradiction with the natural harmony of mind. It is a prison. The rooms are shut from each other by narrowed doors. It is a cell. At the same price the walls are an ingrain of soft expansive buff. In agreement, the carpet is an unfigured tan or soft green with the charm of the unobtrusive. The two form a breathing background. The doors are a sh'ade -lighter than the wall ; the rugs are of simple dyes. You 248 enter a harmony. This will not be marred by any rawness of color or bulk of form. A divan in a receeding nook is of such openness of com- pass that a mother and child may tumble upon it ; it has such depth that heavy limbs are hung in air. The chairs are low and may be of rattan. A desk invites you. Buff shades stay the sun while letting it filter through them ; touch of sash-curtain excludes intrusion ; the draper- ies fall straight and soft of warmth half drawn. The mantel is imbedded in books. All is simple, a home make-up, inexpensive. The lamp is a crimson spot; it is a jewel. The picture on the wall is some moving reality. There is a relief-profile of Lincoln, and the beautiful hand of a woman. A portrait of Tom Edison, the magician, follows you. Massed in a corner are some picture cuttings representing the movement of the world. These bits of life picked from the prints of the day make the bulletin. They are stuck up with brass-headed nails. The back- ground, or bulletin-board, is a rough brushing of bronze on the wall, with no outline. You stick on it anything you want. You take it down when you get tired of it. You keep it going : in a half-tone of a luscious muscatelle you are in touch with California ; a Tokio scene puts you in the Orient ; Melba, Ingersoll, Mrs. Bramwell Booth, Tom Johnson ; Directum is speeding up the track. A tinkling is your neighbor's hand at the phone. In some recess the electric sounder is dropping message of a sensitive earth. It is the seclusion of the mellowed pulse of life. 249 There are a dozen painters and sculptors in a century. They are born. They are not taught of "teachers;" but of earth. You cannot sup- press them ; they teach teachers. The most that can be done is to discover them and let them alone. They rejuvenate some part of architecture. They make a picture to fit a house and a house to fit a picture. The hand in the Venice Etchings had regard to the beautiful whole. This is coming the more to be. The ranks are copyists who again are copied ; and these advance. Whistler made a house and frames to fit his pictures ; then Menpes did it after his master. The fetich of "art" undressed, the skillful Menpes may turn himself to the con- s»i»H>i*«^i»s-iK .> '■. structive harm o n y of life. He is of com- merce to decorate the home, — put the last wall. He will promote the tradesman. Harmony the more will be on sale. Through false appli- cation the lesser Brush is now a travesty of "art." He will recognize his limitations and turn to w^hat he can do. He will become truthful. This is to take his place in the great architecture class. He will help the joy of his day. The per- fected machinery has to distribute architecture to the people^ It is the moving home. The song is a lullaby. A BLOSSOM. touch on floor and 250 XVIII. WHERE A NATION SINGS ITS HYMNS THE World's Fair drew me to Chicago. Re- duced rates and spare time helped me towards the Pacific coast. I chose the upper route. It was the edge of autumn. Mr. Hill of the Great Northern Road was showing the Foreign Com- missioners the wheat fields of the Dakotas. The wires had given me of this country, the dry air and early frost. Its hard wheat is the standard of the grain of commerce. The Child of De- mocracy is of the romance of a hungry mouth. I stayed to see the wheat unmilk and move to market. On a hot afternoon I quit the coast train at Fargo. The air shimmered* on the streets, which opened into limitless prairie. An ice-cart w^ith two-foot cubes gave back the rainbow as it trucked across the tracks under sign of the Red River Company. Down the river is north. We w^ere in the water-shed of Hudson's Bay. Mr. Angell of the Dacotah Block on Broadway has seen the ice men take three crops. In Syracuse where he came from they wait as long as they can to let the ice get thick ; here they begin early so that it wont get too thick. They com- mence gathering a first crop soon after Thanks- giving, at which time the papers announce weekly races on the river. The track is made by clearing off the snovy with the steel street- scrapers on wheels. The foreign in the ten or twelve thou- sand people of the twin cities, Fargo and Moor- head, whose streets join, is Scandinavian. Olson and Johnson appear on the signs. They have kept their latitude in their migration west. " Pro- fessor" Gordon in his barber's tent after the fire which swept half of Fargo, shaved two Swedes who were looking around from the World's Fair. He addressed them in good Scandinavian and their surprise asked how one of their country men came to be so black. The Professor laid it to the breeze that mounts in Manitoba to ride the Red River of the North. This barber gets a bushel of wheat for a hair-cut and shave. Charles Calmer, the Swedish grocer, struck the open prairie at Fargo twenty years ago in the iron gang of the Northern Pacific Railroad, a little ahead of the Professor. His hand strokes the sure brands ; his customers come back for them. He knows his own people ; he imports the " stock " fish in dry bales, Swedish cheese and bush cran- berries. His father out by the door showed the face of a worn child under gray hair. Calmer holds if the old man had got away with the home-brew instead of the home-brew getting away with hini, it would mean a fat farm in Sweden and his son the less doing time far from the sea. When the wind shaves the prairie at forty zero, Fargo hangs to its breath and runs to shelter. When some days of winter soften and the people rest from the strain, the sun glinting and the dry air cajoling, it is offered that North Dakota is a country. In the rare rain of summer, depth of black clay melts and puddles for three or four inches. The footing is greased. It is tar. As the sun grows great it stiffens. Your rubbers stay on the crossing and the horses free 252 hoof with loud smack. With a few houi's of sun the tar has hardened to macadam ; the wagons rattle and the hoofs ring. Fargo will say the " pavement " has been washed and dried. The air after the rain has the grossness of wet reeds. It is the overloading of a perfume in a rank- ness that cries for the seminal. From the prairies it is wafted. There is mingled the spice of boxaldei% the tree that stands the drouth and winter. The wooden image of the tobac- conist shades his eyes against the lessening noon, his people gone in the wake of a cloud of bison. The remnant of the passing is a hundred buffalo coats. The Southern mold of beauty is in lace fanning upon the veranda. The flower of movement upon the streets of Fargo is in a beaver hat with neck and ear drop, and a beaver jacket trimming to breast and hip ; her skirts press to outline of fighting thighs ; the frost whitens her eyebrows and tips her fur. The shoe stores carry buck-skin moccasins ; the dry snow makes them the foot-cover of the boys. Crossing the tracks on a November morning, two engines were starting the west-bound coast train against the snow. Frank Thompson, an encom- passing face, wondered if it took two to start her what she would do when she got in the cuts. The answer was in a mogul behind a plow as big as a cottage that was side-tracking out of the west. Her tender and cab were canvas shielded ; over all and packed in crevice was the white blood of the snow-drift whose throat she took. Knute Alfstad, of the Hotel Elliott, one day we 253 had lamb for dinner, made note on the bill of fare that the best mutton grows in a dry cold climate. Men who have eaten Dakota mutton swear that it passes the Southdown. Mr. Armour estimates the Dakota cattle dressed the best meat brought to his Chicago yards last fall. Mr. Angell's horse passes the cultivated grasses for the sweet of the upland prairie. In coming to the Normal School on the outskirts of Moorhead, the carpet on a corner of the school ground is of native buffalo grass. It has not yet been whipped by plow. Two or three inches long, it curls under and cushions the foot like Persian rug. Its look at snow-fall, when turned brown, is not unrelated to the buffalo coats that go by up the street. A little way beyond the Normal building, over- looked by the windows at the south, touched of restful day in September, were farther acres ; the prairie rose-bush crept unshorn of wind. The daisy, married to the rose in every land, was as the stars. Mr. Porter's greenhouse in Fargo has of roses the Niel and the Tea, the white Cooke and the pink France. They grew from the black earth under the glass. It was soil that had not been turned ; it was broken first for these flowers. At the south where the glass met the ground had crept in the native. Max Conway of the Piano company, who limps of a paralyzed side, lays the Deering crowd did 'em down at Larimore in the show before the foreign commissioners ; they gave machines away to get them in the exhibition. A square mile of wheat melted into sheaves, forty-five binders 254 starting. The Deering people are around the corner on N. P. Avenue, their big warehouse backing their side-track from the Northern Pacific Road. Up the avenue you pass the ware- house of McCormick, the Buffalo-Pitts threshers, and Woods, backing their own tracks. Over to the left is a whipped-out flag with the print of a tattered chicken, said to have fattened on an Ault- man-Taylor straw stack. The machine men reposit their counting-rooms with the notes of the farmers. Max, who does not limp in idea as plain men go, counts the winters tough for a game side. We should see No. i Hard, patting it in his hand ; it is the wheat that leads the world by two cents. He talked a minute, and deplored the burning of the Columbia Hotel. It was the cheer of a com- ing ; warm in winter, cool in summer. After the day he went to the lobby, finding his friends ; he read the news. There was a band that played on the balcony above the stairway. It was crowded. He hadn't stayed away ; he would pick a seat on the edge of a window. " There ain't any place to go to ; the churches are the preachers." I bade Max listen. He heard only the carts outside and the jostle of men. I told him that his ears were stopped. That above these things I heard a bell. He asked on what coast it might be. I gave him that it was the bells of the twenty churches of Fargo melted into one ; it rang at the Meet. I bade him listen to a great instrument that was the twenty pipe organs blown into one. He demanded the import of all. I replied 255 they were taking a special wire ; it was going on the Bulletin-board in lobbies wider than the Columbia ; there were palms and flowers, niches and pictures, form and color ; the musicians of the town were of the band hired by the people. It was a comfort coming, day and day — the game that never stops. We steered to the Meet on a late-November night, the snow under foot. We went through massy portals and colonnades and had gained the lobby. At the entrance were lions, sym- bol of repose. Bronze doors of curious pattern swung. There were seats in nooks cut from stone and carved. A MacMonnies fountain played in the great space. We found a seat on fashioned wood in sight of wires where the earth gave throbbing. The Bulletin rolled lines into view. The words posted were that the cabinet of the News Office was summoned at New York. The intelligence circuits of the globe crossed at this world's capital. The throated bell had the people for sorne outgiving of the organic fact. It had come to the center that the farmer in Dakota paid his summer at the plow, but so taxed by the carrier class that the return hardly found him fuel for a win- ter. The scouts of the organized reporting had been up the trail of the robber chiefs. Vil- lard had diverted seven millions from the North- ern Pacific, the farmers of Dakota paying their sweat in excessive rates,^in tax of wheat to the seaboard, in fuel and manufactures back. The cabinet of the News Office was drawn to session 256 MARY BACow FORO . DEI-. THE MEET on matter of wider polity, a question of state- craft to stay the cloven of disorder. The bells had tapped at the Meets of the world, the circuits were open. While we waited for news we turned the file ; it was the portion of the roll that had passed from the Bulletin, been cut into sections and clamped as a book. It made the story of the wire. As the file grew at one end it was taken off at the other. The electric gong minded us that the roll had advanced. The Presi- dent of the News Office was passing up the steps of the Cabinet Building at Union Square ; officials were present suppljing the Major Di- visions of labor in the State. The chiefs of the Agriculture Bureau and for Transportation were in company with the President. There had pre- ceded them up the steps the chiefs of bureaus for Mines, for Fabrics, for the Fisheries, and others. We read that the Cabinet was in session. Shortly we learned that as near as appearances went from signals at the center, the farmers of the world were at the wires. The next bulletin indicated that it might be an hour before the Cabinet made outgiving. The crowds fell into relaxation. The band played the Marseillaise. The anthem of the peo- ple came up through the corridors of the Meet. The Bulletin-board that faced the musicians had suggested this song of armies. We found hundreds at table in the oyster-bar and coffee room. There were more in the smoking-galleries. Max made guess that Fargo was out ; they were interested in No. I Plard at forty-nine cents that cost fifty cents 257 to grow. We went down into the swimming- bath. It was full. The gong rang while we were in the dressing-rooms after a swim. I found Max outside getting into his coat. He was keep- ing connection with New York. We went back into the lobby as the bulletin was going up. The facts had decided a point for the Cabinet : All men are dependent and of equal interests ; Democracy is a scheme of the liberty of the whole ; the way to fix Villard is to play him at his own game. It is a question of fact, not prece- dent. It is plain. There is the same justification in the country being bled by the carrier class as by the mails class ; the question of the farmer's wheat has to be met in the same way as the question of his mail. Dakota is not to blame because hard wheat grows within her borders ; she is not to blame because man has need of it. The farmer of Dakota is not growing wheat for himself, but for the world ; it is manifest anarchy that he should be enslaved in a division of labor for supplying the people food because Dakota wheat will only grow fifteen hundred miles from the sea. The facts order that a bushel of grain be received at all carriers' offices in every part of the world at one rate, distance not figured ; on the generic that it is the food of the whole people, — not on the partial that it is from one man. Eyes moistened. Max said he better understood how organization lets us in. The boys agreed that it meant the principles of life were settling to the practice of the State. The band was playing "Nearer to Thee," and the Meet took it up. 258 Francis Acklin, the printer, remarked they had been using the wrong font on these songs ; all you have to do is to read them the other way. (Ap- pendix XIV.) The newsboys were running to the mouth of the pneumatic. There was pouring in a special edition of the Fargo Newsbook, the local daily. It was the l»cal hourly more often. We brought out our tickets as subscribers of the Newsbook ; each got his leaflet. Max jerked his hat to show^ his ticket ; he had it pasted inside. He said he'd left it in his other vest two or three times and got tired of paying for extras. The leaflet was given to the late news, "by Central News Office wire." It was the meaning of the output by the Cabinet. It devolved that the carrier class under the new ordering of rates would be compelled to form one connected body after the manner of the mail organization ; that everybody, including the Vanderbilts, would have to go on a salary as in the Post-Office ; rates would reduce to dimes where now it was dollars. Carrying stamps would come in, the one rate to any part of the world beijig the actual cost of service. Passengers would go as high-class service. A telegraph operator w^e called "Milwaukee," said he could pull for home twice a year now, and Max thought to get home to St. Paul oftener than once in three years. Acklin offered that the boys in the Cabinet crowd drawing ten thousand a year were cheap. Villard would be in odor when he went on a salary and was protected by a taut organization. " He 259 is worth five "thousand a year," Max proffered, "and no swipe. That might be such a man's size, maybe more, maybe less ; he needs what he needs to bring out his capacity for the people, like a race horse." It is a question ot keep. The bell rang another Bulletin and Thompson, who had dropped in, called my at- tention to the item that the President of the News Office was receiving notice in Union Square. He was walking the street by custom ; the ardor of the new ideas crowded people about him. The police were making way to a tram-car. Acklin uncovered his head ; there was murmur of emo- tion by those in sight of the board, spreading to the rest. The band was playing, " There's a Way for Pickaninny Round the World," when we left the lobby. We had appointed to cover at the Meet the week-end. The local play company was on the boards at the auditorium. It was a variety bill. Porter told us he was coming early and to look for him in the Archive. We ran him down among the portfolios of semi-tropical plants. Stepping to th& mechanical section, I lighted on a display of bridge drawings. The Brooklyn Bridge was there in detail, including the caisson scheme for the foundations. It was a bridge for working suggestion. I met some light-house and boat portfolios in the navigation part. Dr. Himter, who was along, pulled us into the zoological archive ; it had the ordinary preparations of the anatomy and physiology of the human. We came upon an apprentice of the doctor's who was look- 260 ing up some operation they had in view on the thorax. We left the doctor handling this partic- ular preparation. There were portfolios of pho- tographs and drawings of the architecture of Home and Town ; and models and plaster copies of the half-dozen masters at the Louvre, Flor- ence, Athens. In the geological archive there was a core bore of the earth for several hun- dred feet at Fargo. It was in sections under glass. In the geography archive I was held by a relief globe ten feet in diameter on which was marked the isotherm belt of North Da- kota. There were relief maps of the world as a whole and of the various states. The relief map of Dakota was elaborate. In this work the surface character of the soil, rock and vegetation were reproduced in color with entrancing reality. These productions are multiplied by pa-pier niache casting. The less elaborate kind are everywhere coming to the homes of the people. This art was formerly neglected by the men who thought themselves painters or sculptors. The type painter or sculptor catches the more difficult movement, — the inclusive expression of a face or landscape. Having given over the ridiculous of misinterpreting nature in its evasive types, the lesser brush and chisel as the designer and copy- ist has blossomed a barren field. We went into the auditorium about eight o'clock ; the entertainment was going. Five cents was punched from our quarterly show ticket. Acklin fell a-nodding, too sleepy to sit. He explained that he had been down to the Meet the 261 previous night. His house wire had rung un- usual bulletin. He had strolled in, thinking that it might be something more about the Cabinet meeting. A Mr. Stover and I had missed notice of this, having no wire. Acklin advised cutting off a few on oysters and beer. The bulletin was the brevity of what we had read in the Newsbook of the morning. It reported a waste in the methods of the sugar growers of Cuba. The trouble was laid at the door of the iron men, through inef- ficient machinery. The doctor, who had joined us, saw the sugar growers get around the bulletin boards next. Acklin changed his mind about going ; he came back from the door- Alfred Nugent, man- ager of the local printing company, was giving arf imitation in costume of the old-time preacher working the people in a collection for the "lord." Max laughed imtil he fell into our arms. Mr. Nugent continued with a character monologue into which he built the severe " touch-me-off " dignity. It was a lecture by the once Normal Professor on psychology and methods. He told - us that mind was "composed of parts." Some might deny this, or affirm that it was decomposed of parts ; yet how could w^e have a whole without parts.' Mind had first and fundamentally a "feeler," for who could remember a time when he did not feel. Second, there was the mental " sleeper ;" probably as fundamental as " feeler," since we cannot long survive without sleep. Whether " fiddler " was an attribute of all minds, lying dormant in some, was a mooted question ; 262 still, as in the case of Ole Bull, some are known to possess it. The " spitter " was a more com- mon attribute, about which there could be no question ; it was more marked in some than in others, — it could be developed. And what fool would deny the later very common development of mind, the "eater.?" The Professor, preserving his profundity to the last, held that mind should not in any case be trusted of itself ; we should interfere with it in all possible ways, — it should be "developed." Ballad singing followed with piano accompaniment by the daughter of the dis- trict judge. Some character sketches, introduced by a young lawyer and a dentist, impersonated two relics with their tops distended on the flat in imitation of the one-time college student' and editorial writer. ,The dialogue was in the static mind called "culture." Percy told Harold that a policeman saw him taking a degree and made him put it back. A thing that got Acklin was Percy ordering his valet to go and get him an education and saying to Harold, "Have one with me." They compressed the swell of their heads a little and barricading the door proceeded to "shape the public mind." An order came up from the composing room for "five inches." Percy, as head molder, dictated an editorial on the " financial crisis." He claimed that w^hat " we " needed was more money or less crisis. The full orchestra played selections from Lohengrin. There was sparring by the Fargo Athletic Club, and Indian club swinging to music. Serpentine stepping by the full ballet corps 263 was led by the daughter of a physician, the pop- ular dancer of the town and the teacher of dancing. Mr. Broughton and his wife, the pho- tographers, gave a half-dozen clogs. Miss Shep- ard and her brother, of the local shoe company, performed Negro and Irish melodies with the banjo. Mr. Brill of the bank afforded a dance solo that was of a kind with Mr. Dixie in "Adonis." His tights were white and silver ; it was the grace of form and movement. A dozen men and women of the ballet followed with a dance imder color lights. The orchestra was play- ing "I Dreamt that I Dwelt" when we came out into the lobby. Thompson left vis to go into the street for home ; I went with Acklin and the doctor into a room furnished with low chairs, lounges and deep rugs. We found " Milwaukee " and Porter there. They were listening to some talk by the Gossip, like the musician an attache of the Meet. " Mil- wfaukee " said explanation had been going touch- ing the idea of the automatic government. It appeared that specific legislation in any case was necessarily static as it could not fit the shuffle of life, no two cases of warring interest being the same ; the arbitration which the classes were ask- ing was manifestly the one way in which a free working comity could enter. Conflict of interest within the class would adjust by jury drawn from itself ; if a man got out with his class, he was out of a job. Finally, the classes would be adjusted to each other where their interest con- flicted ; it would be a body representative of 264 each class who would let the facts control, as near as they could get them. If the oil men claimed they were hampered in their business by certain methods of the iron men, the facts would be ob- tained from the News Office, and the prejudice arbitrated. Legislation would in this way reduce in main to simple plan for carrying on these ad- justments between individuals and between classes. The wiping out of the complicated statutes in the region of the specific legislation would drive the lawyers to some function. "Milwaukee" said the thought was not so new to him, but the exchange by mouth had enforced a clearness. On another day the Gossip had spoken to some question of " higher education " which had raised. When a man arrived at a perfection of •doing in his business, he would realize it in its law, or way. He would then begin to read all the doing of the universe in terms of a method. This was to know the universe as order, or in its science. When the florist became intimate with the economy of his flowers, he would see them accommodate themselves to an environment and find a centralization or objective in their method, as of fruitage. He had then come to any higher education there might be. It was to come to consciousness of order. A stationary engineer the other day entered the hotel, hurrying in the fear that he might miss his dinner. In course of his eating he overturned his salad upon the floor. There was a flush on his face as he looked up. He stooped for the leaves of the let- tuce and was in that respect of the cost of 265 the thing and the trouble he might put upon the waiters, that he ate it as he had recovered it from the floor. His entreating vex would have us minded that he was not a diner-out. The florist had this striving spirit as the flower moving to ad- just itself lamely as it might in its surroundings. He would see in it the ethic of life. A chemist would have it of his symbols, the way of the universe in the language of his business. "There is the one God," said the Gossip. Acklin made sure the world would always hang on the elo- quent tongue. In the movement of the rendezvous as the organization around the Bulletin-board in life, the little factors of gathering places like the church, saloon, public reading-rooms, skating rinks, secret societies, exhibitions, theaters, dancing clubs, balls, are rendered into one central place. The twenty- five churches in Moorhead and Fargo claim fifty thousand dollars for salaried pastors. The keep- ers of the saloon tills control another stream of blood money. The waste in either case is of misdirection. The first cost of the churches would well put the Meet on its bottom, and the people would be let into their own. There would be the last coming from behind barricades of "good" to help the "bad." The people help themselves, still with the drag of pulpit and saloon upon, them. The doctor asked us to know that he was done with the fetich of a false church ; he had the answer for the preacher. The Meet is of the day of action. This is of the reduction to brotherhood, the great 266 central principle of Science. The present sal- aried pulpit is the clog to the advance. The saloon as exaggeration hides in the sensualism of this monster disorder ; through the large dis- traction of energy by the churches there can be no central movement to compete against a loose- ness. The main apartness as of the church helps on the others and is their warrant. To drive out the preacher and the exaggerated saloon is to put the lash to the money-changers again and open the real temple to the people. An earnest element is of the present sects which is to be reclaimed by new direction. The preachers wishing to come into the vineyard of the Lord, the Organ- ized Democracy, make the efficient reporter, mer- chant, doctor, ditch digger ; some will get near to God on a farm. Impelled of the correcting life, men and women will "save " their own souls. The Meet of Fargo is more elaborate than that of the adjoining village of Casselton, though it has the same parts. The central Meet at Chi- cago, of proportions like the World's Fair, has the character of the National. People in a con- tributary area go up there as they can. In pro- portion to the population at any point are the branch Meets, connecting with the imposing cen- tral one of the town. The great National Meet is at the Commercial Center by the sea, where the wires of a globe like homing pigeons hub. 367 XIX. THE ROUND-UP I HAVE been asked by parents if I were gokig to let the child run. My reply was, "Yes; against organization." I pointed out that he runs now, but against disorder. It early clears that the child needs to communicate with his fellows ; that he demands some " reading and writing " and rudimentary drill in " numbers," which latter is reading and writing. As soon as the particular need shapes, send the child where he can get a straight drill. Go where you can get your pound. It will become apparent that the child needs to do something, — that he would better tire his muscle with reality than imreality. Unless you can see that he is made for something else, take him into vour own work-place ; he will there do what he can do. Say to the teacher who is taking your money, and "professing" return, that you want your boy — or girl — to enter apprenticeship ; you expect with his aid to be able to place your child in some doing ; you want him to forward the thing, that being his business. Your boy may have to change roimd some before you can find him ; your practi- cal teacher will be sure that he should change. While finding the child and continuing, tell the teacher that he is to have whatever drill is needed to do the thing at hand, and no guess. Say that 30U expect him to find out what the child wants for work that is going ; you will help. You expect him to organize the boy's time and place so that he can get whatever he needs, not 268 what some other or possible boy needs. The child won't be in the "school drill" all the time, nor in the "apprentice practice " all . the time. These things have got to be organized. It is all the school of practice. If some "authority" asks you how these things are to be done, you will say you don't know ; you only know one thing at a time. What you know now is that the boy needs to do something. You wish to organize yourself and the boy for this, and then you will see what next. You are going to try to stop lying to the boy. You will stick to the reality that the child must be set to work. You will organize on the suggestions of his work, which will be what it is. You will stick to the principle of a practice and do what you can see. A principle is the only in- fallible thing that walks the earth ; it is the way of earth. You only know that it must be the school of a doing. I have a friend five years old. He has a better vocabulary of the locomotive and the sta- tionary engine than most men you meet upon the street. I did not " teach" it to him. I took him to the " chu-chu," the locomotive he now calls it, w^hen he asked me and mj^ time afforded. He questioned about the parts he saw. He tells me what they are for and how they work ; this is relation, or reality. I did not "teach" him; I answered his questions. He makes things at home corresponding to the ways of things that he has seen. I did not "leach" him; T was careful iiof to obstruct hi?n. I helped him do these things when he asked me and I saw where I could 269 suggest something. He told what he saw and made what he saw, his way of doing it the best he could. The tendency of mind is to do. He asks to go to the stationary engine when the locomotive may not be seen. But his interest is of the latter; he tells you "it goes." In our trips I used to carry him a good mile down and a mile back. He made his trips easy. He did not know that I carried him ; he had never carried anybody himself, not his own body. I became conscious that I was a slave to the child and that I was enslaving him to a false condition in life. People do not go around carrying others to any great extent. It is not the practice. I made a strike for liberty ; but in free- ing myself I had to free the child. I arranged to run him against organization. I organized my- self and let him bump. To bring him against his fellow's personality, in addition to the locomotive was to bring him against a good deal of life. I made up an introduction party to the patient earth. I threw him naked upon the ground. I stayed by with the ambulance ; but not to use it unless the child fell. He must know that life does not relent ; that God is fearfully and wonderfully made. This was to clothe him on with truth. I could not meet him that he did not importune me to take him to the " cars." He was enslaved to a false experience that I could take him, regardless. I asked him if he would walk. He had never walked. He answered right up that he would. He kept the easy part of the contract all right. It was down hill and the loco- 270 motive pulled him. The engineer overheard the boy's intelligence of the machine his hand fondled. It got him. He came down from his cab to have shake with us. He asked me to "let the boy run in the shops." The "chu-chu" pulled out. We began the big half of the con- tract. The boy's "memory" was short. This is the difference between "memory" and experi- ence. We had gone a little way when he asked me to carry him. I did not thrust the con- tract in the boy's face. I left that to the grace of earth. I kept right on walking and kept my mouth. He asked me again to carry him, plead- ing that he was tired. I asked him to carry me. I didn't give the boy any precepts about always keeping his contracts ; / kept my contract. I did not assault him of brutality with unmeaning word, detracting from the reality that was enacting of a truth. My boy cried the rest of the way. I did not know it. I kept my part of the contract. I aimed that he should not catch me in the lie. It was hard to keep truth with my friend. When we got home the boy had known the earth in some particular. More particulars and he would know more. I have never seen any "general" somewhere off by itself. The organization kept its part of the contract and the boy kept his. When one party keeps his writing the other fel- low has to. We quit yelling to the other man and look after our end. Truth enters for the child when men do according to the conditions of earth. The latter keeps its agreement ; gravitation an- swers always. The next time the boy met 271 me he did not ask to go to the train ; he was thinking. Time passed a little and he piped up on his interest. When he did, I asked him if he would walk. He didn't answer so quick as at first. He was thinking. He finally signed the contract with me. I kept my part of it and he kept his. He knew again the truth of the kind earth. Organization kept its contract as of con- ditions that do not chide ; they hit you in the face. It is left for us, as fast as we can see, to organize the child's contact that the lie may be put out of his life. False conditions have to be eliminated. This is to organize ourselves. With the " Little- Red-Riding-Hood" feature we may call a halt. The rank and file of the teacher body have no answer other than redeeming action. In the light of the organic concepts I have wondered how they will take their medicine. As I reduce this thing to print I hold in my hand a text in language for the common school. The book is much praised, being called wide awake. It is Reed and Kellogg, so common in the schools of America. The preface tells that it is indorsed by the "distinguished philologist. Professor Francis A. March, of Lafayette College." I turn the opening lessons, telling what language is. I find it a strange garble. We have been on our bellies to authority ; we have not questioned. As the essence of the opening chapter, I read that expression of mind through the muscles of the face and through the earlier development of the muscles of larynx, tongue and lips, is Natural language ; while language in the more developed 272 muscles of the larynx, tongue and lips, is Arti- ficial. In the wider distinction of the author,, carrying his method to its limit, the working of the muscles of the face is " natural," while the working of the muscles of the larynx is " arti- ficial." As 1 turn the pages to the end, I discover- nowhere any utility of these distinctions in the practice. The author does not use them. It is his chance to talk ; to make a book. They are purely subjective distinctions, — that is, without objective, or function. It is that shortness in the mental circuit which is abortion. This is the sub- jective lie in life, abounding in the schools to sur- feit. The argument of the author tells us that early in life we learn to think, " and then we feel the need of a better language." The untruth in this is that " natural " language is conceived as having no connection with thought and that " feelings and desires" are not expressed as words. The author would lead us to understand that the idea of "disgust," as of the method of mind,, is different from the idea of "a day." Having in this separated some phases or phenomena of language by the falsity of overwrought dis- tinctions, the author devotes the remainder of the chapter and much succeeding talk in attempt to bring his separations together again. He "pro- ceeds to multiply w^ords in essay to eradicate his lesion. He tells us : " Yet Natural language may be used, and always should be, to assist in strengthening word language The happy union of the two kinds of language is the chartn of all good reading and speaking." Then follow 273 .the formal definitions, offsetting his attempted un- ity and enforcing the lie. On page twenty of these ■*» Higher Lessons in English," the author asks us sto emphasize certain of his industry, taking the last paragraph of chapter three to urge that mind is not real. This whole jumble not appealing to •the experience of the child, but creating the .mental static, he has, like ourselves, to "memorize" it. This is torment. When the child runs from •our falsity, refusing a blind idolatry, we charge it to his perversity or his dullness. If military rule were in force, w^e would be taken out on the ■field and shot. These "grammar lessons" are (typical of our whole fleeting show of culture. The meaning of the sheepskin we have wor- :shipped is that youth has succumbed to this en- forced gibberish. We have mental symbols ; they are not "pic- tures," but mind. They are what mind does. Two is such a doing of mind. It is the accom- plished mental, the completed revolution or end >of a process. Two has its manifold of process. It is as numerous as the leaves, differing in 'essential as little. This essential is the one way, •or generic. We think the particulars or various forms of this way under the limitations, or equiv- alent symbols, of two. The distinction-mongering •of arithmetic is that we have not used a language .that would in all this multiform indicate the one way. One-plus-one is how many times we use, •^or "add," one to make two. Five-minus-three is how much we use, or " add," with three to make .five. One-multiplied-by-two is how many times we 274 use, or " add," one to make two. Six-divided-by- three is how many times we use^ or " add," three- to make six. Six-thirds is equivalent symbol, or process, of two. One-divided-by-three, or one- third, is not an equivalent symbol, or process,, of two; ( two-thirds )-divided-by-( one-third) is- What is the way out that the child may have the- reality, the process only ? Simply give him the- process as a way of making two. Present for- drill, as the need is, all the processes as the several forms of the one way of making two. The- 6 : 3 :: 8 : 4\ /''—^ / I + I 5 + (-3) } £ m \..--('A + O) X 4 4A2 -:- 2A2 f • 9 \ 42 X Ve 2 + \ ^ ( 2 H- I XC -^ XLV \ ^ V / 2 X I 5 ¥ct.of 40 / \ 3 - THE POEM OF 2. language will be in terms of the "addition" way, — as how much do we add to three to make five, how many threes in six, etc. This will avoid the lie of ■ leading the child to regard "subtraction" and the other variations as something, as the opposite of " addition." Give the " fractional " process of two. after the reality of the " addition " way ; avoid, forcing the child to think of the distinctive "frac- tion." We have been told some of this, but with- out its principle — as the curious thing about num- bers to talk over. We are asked to see it as a practice ; asked to believe it. We will quit lying in our action, the only way one can lie.. 275 But this cuts us off from our insistent defini- tions. We can no longer talk about " addition," and "subtraction," and "multiplication," and "di- vision," and "fractions," and "percentage" as 4:hough they were something, as entities. The Jie is that we put the simple distinction of a func- tion, or process, into a formal definition, treating it as of itself. This is over-working distinction to the point of falsity. The lie all about us is ■this emphasis which separates form from function. It is the blasphemy of separating form and move- ment in the lever. The boy will get the casual name for his process as the need is ; he will pick it up. If we stop lying in these things it means that we have got to throw away our formal book ; there isn't any book in the present sense if we quit this formalizing — if we stop form-mak- ing as apart from the process. The book carpen- ters as of the exaggeration go out of business. We may come to think that the apart and un- real phrasings no longer serve us ; that the need is for a modification of terms to fit the negative, or process, as in our arithmetic. We tell the child there is such a place as Philadelphia. Our " Geography " is built on this plan. It is one of our lesions, our over- stress. It is as though in the process of two, (Seven-fifths)-plus-(three-fifths), for instance, we stated there is such a thing as seven-fifths ; it is part, or of something, not something. There is the mental result, or positive ; and the mental .process, or negative. Equivalent symbols get their meaning necessarily in terms of these, — in 376 terms of each other. As in Arithmetic, we may not anywhere state the positive in terms of its denial without endless involvement and confusion. We may not set up a portion of the process of two as something, — as the opposite or denial of the positive. The latter has to be realized in the language that indicates its process — in terms of its negation, or equivalency, that we may get its revolution ; that mind may move. We read in the Newsbook or the Bulletin that the sugar refineries are short of their raw material. Our interest determines our mental make-up, or men- tal positive. The man who wants bon-bons thinks " more-expensive-candy " or " less-candy." Philadelphia is of the process or negative of this result, of fhis positive. Philadelphia in the pro- cess, or negative, is of the sugar refineries, and Cuba is of the sugar growing. Philadelphia and Cuba are of the mental movement, or interest. They have to be stated here in their relations of process, which is of the sugar interest. We may not assert that there is such a place as Philadel- phia or Cuba without danger of the insistent dis- tinction-making. We can help the boy's inter- est, we may process his mind or movement by supplying evident inquiry. We shall supply his negative, or adjustment. We shall not go bej-ond this wthout danger of the over-emphasis. We may not attempt to drive a positive into the mind ; this is the barbarism of the unmeaning. We may be careful that we do not set up the lie of Geog- raphy. 277 What is left if we may not go on with this distinction-making? Life is left. There is the practice of supplying the mental process, or in- terest. People who see this w^ill stop talking. They will be afraid to make loose distinctions, setting them up in the erriphatic phrase, as though they were entity. They will be afraid to do any- thing but give the child some clear processes when the need is very evident. They will avoid doing anything that is not clearly of the child's next step as they watch his movement. They will be afraid to set up as something every phrase and distinction that is abroad in the over-weighted book. They will see that formal definition is not of the practice of aiding the mental process. There is the way of all practice when the need arises ; there is the truth and the life. We have naught left but to apprentice the child that the need may be known. This is everything. Life is all. I met on the street car last night a young man with a " geometry " text in his hand. It was nine o'clock. He was getting home. He had been two hours at lessons. He told me he was an apprentice in an electrical engineering office. In the progress of his practice he had discovered, with the help of his master, that he needed geometry. He had been to the Y. M. C. A. Night School to get it. The Boys were giving him what he asked for. This is the Child of Democracy struggling to realize itself all about us. The In- dustrial Schools are another phase, but are wit- less that they are obstructive so far as they retard 278 the advance to the real shop. Everywhere the school is in fragments trying to get its unity and organization. Purblind, we pursue our withered formulas of " culture " and the criminality of mental abortion. The teaching conventions, of the apart involvement, are trying to find out what the school wants. Away from the child's func- tion, the tendency must be toward greater falsity of the over- weighting. (Appendix xv.) The people are liable to get on to the teacher before long, drive a live wire up his spine and connect him with earth. As the last form of this Report is making on the stone, there comes the word from an adjoining school building that a class undergoing "examina- tions" has developed cases of nervous prostration, and two of hysteria in young girls. The un- reality of the questions is of the common apart- ness everywhere in the system. There comes in the dispatches of the year that the schools in two instances have combined and struck against the static formulary of the pedagogue. The Child of Democracy may have its organization and be heard in the State. XX. THE ALMANAC WALL Street is on its uppers. Ten years ago active investment began to leave the Street. The movement was toward the industrial shares. 279 Investment went to the flouring mills of the Northwest, the breweries of the great cities, western irrigation companies, legitimate mining. The London Barings, the type of the locomotive bankers, went down for one hundred millions. Their brethren in the Morgans and others of the fictitious bonds, got under them with accommoda- tion paper. This is one bankrupt giving his note of hand to continue the stealings of another. In- stead of the inflated bourse falling out one at a time in the inevitable course, they will by the method of the hypothecated paper die together. The thud will come when Wall and Lombard Streets can find no more victims walking. The transcontinental lines of America are with one exception in the hands of the receiver. The latter are now visiting upon the puplic as a whole and the Transportation Class the disorder of Wall Street. They are bolstering rates and reducing wages to meet the " interest " on vicious stock. This means they are compelling the employe and the farmer to return money which was stolen irom the man who bought the bonds. The farmer in Nebraska is asked to yield a third of his crop and the employe a third or a fifth of his wage to restore money some man in New York stole from some other man. And there was the direct steal from the gross revenues through the rolling-stock and terminal rentals that in the case of the New York Central has returned to the Vanderbilts ten times the original outlay of construction. The people own the roads because they have paid for them. The question they are beginning to ask is 280 how many times Vanderbilt and the forty thieves want to be paid for the roads. The Transportation Class and the whole public continue to submit be- cause they are not suffici'ently cognizant and not well enough organized to combat conditions as of the old notions. Wall Street continues to hide because the Reporter Class, the News Office, is not yet advanced in its function. The Partist of the ownership notion is on the rack. The Wholists, represented in the organiz- ing classes, are driving him to the open. The ad- vance of the organism is bearing in upon him. The class is getting the ear of the courts. The Judges begin to see that the way out of the dis- order is some hearing on the facts. In the natural outcome of the judicious mind they have seen that the adjudication of differences among the growing ■organizations must be in the direction of the inter- est of the Whole. Within the year Judge Ricks, of the Fedej'al Court at Toledo, sent the Ann Arbor Road strikers back to their jobs, delivering that the public could not be interfered with by the ■class, in this case the organized Locomotive Engi- neers, under lead of their chief, Mr. Arthur. With this writing there appears in the dispatches the further outcome of the growing reality of the Organism. The Toledo and Kansas City Rail- road employes have petitioned Judge Ricks •against their employers, asking that they be re- strained from reducing wages. The Judge grants the right of the employes as a body to have petition. This recognizes the class in the State. He heard the case on its merits as he understood the facts, 281 or on such facts as he had at hand. He did nott sustain the petition of the employes, because he held the conditions warranted a reduction of wage. Could the Judge have an accounting on the void shares and the rolling-stock and terminal steals, the facts must have controlled his decision, as against the reduction of wage. Parallel with this comes the decision in Judge Caldwell's Fed- eral Court at Omaha, sustaining the employes who petitioned against reduction of wage in the Union Pacific Cases. (Appendix xvi.) The employes through their representatives were asked to pro- duce their case in evidence, as against the indi- vidualistic owner. The proceeding was in effect a hearing of the Transportation Class as to their needs in order to function. The Judge stood for the Social Body and gave issue as to how much this class should be allowed to draw from the Whole. The court cannot carry out the last in- terest of the Whole until it can fix the rate of transportation at the actual cost of service, throw- ing over the individual ownership. The Jvidges have gone as far as they can see. The progress in the organization of the classes will help them see more. They have in time to ask the Capi- talist why he don't stop his obstruction and join his class. Along with the attempt of the National Government to equalize rates, comes the attempt of the legislatures of the several states to settle a legitimate tariff. The worry to the individual capital is presently becoming so great that his re- quest will be for admission to democracy ; he will ask for one vote within his class and his salary,, 282 that he may sleep o' nights. With the progress of organization and the consequent growth of consciousness in the judiciary, Capital is not un- likely soon to be the striker. It will devolve- upon the class and the courts, or other machinery,, to direct him to order. 283 APPENDIX Apfendix I. "THE SYNTHESIS OF MIND; THE METHOI> OF A WORKING PSYCHOLOGY, by CORYDON FORD. (John V. Sheehan & Co., University Booksel- lers, Ann Arbor, Mich., Price 50 cents.) In one of his latest writings, Professor William James, of Harvard University, says : ' We live surrounded by an enormous- body of persons who are most definitely interested in. the control of states of mind, and incessantly craving for a sort of psychological science which will teach them how to act.' The working psychology, as set forth in. THE SYNTHESIS OF MIND, goes to meet this de- mand. So far as the several branches of science have advanced to practical prediction and control, it has been through translation, after the manner of their several tongues into terms of motion. In one science after an- other, in physics, chemistry, astronomy, physiology, the- idea of motion has been accepted as the principle of a working synthesis; has come to be the working fact. The new psychology is the synthesis of the mental char- acteristics in terms of motion. Through heightened consciousness of this unifying principle of mind, the- distinctions which have been worked out by the psy- chologists of all time become available in the daily walk,' of life. It is the missing tool for those having to do with the interaction of mind. The usefulness of the new concept is carried into the field of literature and. 'art,' where it becomes the effective tool qi criticism. The measure is the moving principle; false and over- wrought systems recede before the reality of the re- volving mind. It is conceived as the instrument of the man of letters, teacher, doctor, preacher, lawyer,- mer- chant, parent, lover." Affendix II. DUNDEE. SUICIDE AND UNSUCCESSFUL ATTEMPT AT IT. Special Dispatch to the Detroit Free Press {iSyy). Dundee, March 3. — C. L. Ford ^hot himself this morning through the heart with a. Remington-Deringer pistol of large calibre. The news of the affair set our unusually quiet village in a blaze of excitement. Mr. Ford was about nineteen years of age, a student at the State Normal School and a young man of bright talent and extraordinary ability. No cause is assigned for the rash act. Geo. C. Wheeler, a studious young man of seden- tary habits, followed Mr. Ford by a few hours in a desperate, though it is hoped unsuccessful, attempt to end his life. He thought to consummate the act by a curiously arranged machine with a lever and knife which indicated that the act was long contemplated. Friends have for some time suspected insanity. A REMARKABLE SUICIDE. TRAGICAL RESULT OF AN HALLUCINATION — A YOUNG MAN INVENTS A MACHINE TO CUT HIMSELF IN PIECES — IN THE INTEREST OF THE THEORY OF HIS DISORDERED BRAIN HE SACRIFICES HIMSELF A LETTER WHICH HE LEFT FOR BENIGHTED FRIENDS. Special Correspondence to the Detroit Free Press. Dundee, March 5. — The tragical suicide of young Wheeler on Saturday was one of the most remarkable in same respects ever recorded. For some months past the joung man has attracted not a little attention and fully revealed to his friends the unbalanced state of his mind by his schemes and freaks various and wild. He talked racingly of his theory and discovery of a new system of laws controlling the solar world, and lastly his terri- ble hallucination which resulted so fatally on Saturday. He labored under the strange belief that he had discov- ered a means whereby the dead might be brought to life, and claimed to have received mystic revelation pro- nouncing some fiendish death on all persons who would not support him in advocating this idea peculiar to his demented brain. The following letter, sealed and di- rected to " Benighted Friends," was found lying on the floor, together with a small bottle containing a thick, black liquid, giving out a sickening odor when uncorked: "It is now twenty minutes past two a. m. of Saturday, March 3d, A. D. 1S77. My mind is fully made up to pass the ordeal of which I am to be a sacrifice. The mysteries that lie enfolded in the physical part of man will in a short time be given to the world. Having^ failed in my effort to satisfy scientific men of the soundness and utility of this grand discovery by experiments in the animal world, and knowing that such an invaluable secret is held only by myself, I shall, before six hours have passed, give the world sumcient proof of my reasonings . The Almighty Being gave man faculties and placed before him powers, leaving: him to penetrate their apparent mysteries. But to one who has brought to light these hidden powers, everything is plain and we notice our actions to harmonize with its occult qualities; we have no fear of a change in our constituent elements. When this mighty agent con- trols and guards the course of our atomizing body, we advance one step higher in our change, nearing concatenation at each successive stage, and at last enter perfection. All is life for him who has life! Allis hop^ for him who has hope! All is death for him who has death! My physic-atomic state after the ordeal I desire shall be taken in charge by Prof. Louis McLouth, who by taking a portion of my Creative All Assistant Material, will scatter a few particles over the dissectory re- mains and then place them in the receptacle of my galvanic allotropic power, where the elements will resolve themselves into a new combi- nation, and I will appear a living evidence of the collateral discovery,'* The shocking means employed by Wheeler in ac- complishing his end are blood-curdling and sickening in detail. During the past four years he has been prose- cuting geological researches in the northern portion of the state — as he claimed — and was wont to wander at frequent intervals to the wildest parts wherever fancy seemed to dictate, claiming to commune with nature and mystic beings in these lonely wanderings. For a few weeks he has confined himself closely to his room, busily constructing the machine used in his own tragedy. The thing consists of a strong frame work, which sup- ports a ponderous iron balance-wheel, besides numerous pulleys, wheels, steel springs, wire ropes and belts, most of the m without any apparent utility to an unsophis- ticated eye. The wheel is strongly bound with numer- ous old knives, sharpened irons and in one case a savage looking broad-ax. When set in motion by a stout steel spring, arranged on scientific principles it will run fully ten minutes with frightful velocity. In its ponder- ous revolutions it has the appearance of working sad havoc in contact with anything of the consistency of flesh and bones, and in the case of the unfortunate in- ventor it did frightful execution. The head of the vic- tim was hacked and torn from the trunk and sliced and cut into a thousand minute pieces. The walls of the room and every inch of exposed surface were bespat- tered with the brains, clotted blood and torn flesh of the unfortunate man. The method by which he brought himself under the action of the machine was unique though natural enough. His intent seemingly was to place his body in such a manner, that it would work slowly under the wheel, thus pulverizing it inch by inch. The end was to be brought about by a three sided trough inclined to the machine. The thing was neatly planed smoothe and was large enough to contain his body but no more. He probably set the hellish arrangement in motion, then placed himself in the trough head down- ward and slid under the revolving knives One arm was in shreds, torn from the body. This arm was probably thrown upward in the agony of the first mo- ment. The misery of the man must have been of short duration, for nothing could long retain form under the action of this frightful executioner. A^pfendix III. (Chicago Tribune, i8g2.) GREAT LEVEE GONE. A MORGANZA CREVASSE WILL CAUSE MUCH LOSS — IT IS THE MOST EXPENSIVE BREAK yET MADE AND HUN- DREDS OF MILES OF TERRITORY WILL BE INUNDATED AND MILLIONS LOST — DESTRUCTION OF LIFE AND PROPERTY IN SEVERAL STATES BY THE FLOODS — OTHER BREAKS — LOWER MISSISSIPPI LEVEES SEEPING. New Orleans, La., May 9. — [Special.] — A private message was received tonight from Capt. de Lahous- saye of the steamboat St. John, to the effect that the grand levee of Morganza, Pointe Coupee Parish, had broken and to prepare for the consequences. This is the largest and most expensive levee on the Mississippi and has been regarded as in danger for some time. The damage a brealc will involve is incalculable. The result will be the inundation of hundreds of square miles of land and the loss of millions of dollars. Greenville, Miss., May 9. — At about 6 o'clock this morning the levee at Brooks Mill on the Arkansas side of the river, twentj-five miles south of Greenville, gave way after strenuous efforts to hold it had proved futile. The break was therefore not unexpected. At 2 p. m. the crevasse was 35° fset in width with the water rushing thVough at a depth of six feet. The levee was eight feet high. The water flows directly into Otter Bayou and thence into Bayou Maria. Seven thousand acres of Ar- kansas land already planted in corn and cotton are inun- dated, while that section of Louisiana near Bayou Maria embraces a vast amount of lands in cultivation that will be flooded. Arkansas City, Ark., May 9. — The river has been stationary since 7 o'clock yesterday morning. The levee in front of the city is in a somewhat critical condition and seeping badly in places. It is thought, however, that with constant and diligent attention it will be made to hold. Reports from various points above and below here show levees for the most part to be in good condition, and a diligent watch is being kept that no breaks occur. Brunswick, Mo., May 9. — For several days the waters of the Grand and Missouri rivers have been rising so rapidly it was feared the bar south of this place, which has lately become valuable farming land, would be flooded. The fears have now been realized, the crisis coming yesterday. AH day was spent in rescu- ing the inhabitants and their stock. Last evening at 7 o'clock the ferry boat was broken. Its cable was cut by drift while loaded with people and horses and it went floating down the river. It has not been heard from. One woman fell into the river while jumping from the ferryboat into a skiff. She was saved from drowning by Capt. Strutman, who had to go to the rescue of the frightened passengers. Dozens of homes are destroyed and hundreds of acres of good land covered by the floods. There is danger of the Missouri current changing to its old channel, which will en- tirely destroy the bar which was formed about twenty years ago by the channel changing. (Philadelphia Record, i8()2.) , THREE DEAD ON THE FIELD. A PRISONER AND HIS BROTHER OPEN FIRE ON A CROWD. New Orleans, La., May 3. — A shooting affray in West Feliciana Parish, at Julius Freyhan's store tonight, resulted in the killing of three persons and the danger- ous, if not fatal wounding of three others. The trouble was all caused by a negro, George Rucker. Constable George Tonni arrested him, when he drew two revolvers and began firing right and left. Willie Rucker, the brother of the prisoner, came to his assistance and fired with fatal effect. W. E. Harrison, a prominent young man of the parish, was shot and instantly killed, and Willie Stewart and B. Haralson and Mack Lawson, a negro, were dangerously wounded. A number of citi- zens opened fire on the two Ruckers, both of whom were killed. Affendix IV. PRINCIPLES TRIFLED WITH RETURN TO VEX. HELPING ON. FOR JUSTICE ALL PLACE A TEMPLE AND ALL SEASON SUMMER. Affendix V. THE DEADLY PARALLEL COLUkN. MOUNTEBANKS SHOULD NOT FOOL WITH FIGURES FOR THEY ARE SOMETIMES LOADED — HOW VAUGHN, OBETZ AND HERDMAN DID IT. Dr. Vaughn's and Dr. Herdmah's figures as given before the legislative committee deal only vsrith in-door departments of hospitals, whereas the clinical import- ance and numerical strength of the average city hospital lies mainly in its out-patient department. With the further effect of deceiving the public they figure daily average, thus increasing the totals to their side since, as is known, the large majority of U. of M. pa- tients are chronic cases. The University hospital has nominally no out-door department, but it should be so figured since a large quota of its patients properly belong there — fully nine-tenths, we however place it at two- thirds, far below that of most hospitals. All the figures given are official and represent an average year. Boston is taken to offset Dr. Herdman's foreign fig- ures on a class of hospitals wholly non-representative, as Roosevelt of New York and the Presbyterian of Phila- delphia; and to show the possibilities of Detroit should its clinical advantages be further developed, the popu- lation of Detroit being now reckoned at about two-thirds that of Boston. DETROIT. Harper Hospital, In-door, 865 '• Out-door, 6,000 " In-door, 7S7 *' Out -door, 21,900 '* In-door, 512 " Out-door, 3,000 St. Mary's Marine Total, .33.06+ ANN ARBOR. University Hospital, In - door, 311 " *' Out-door, 622 Total, Boston. — City Hospital, In-door, 4,298; Out-dodr, 34,010. Mass. Gen. Hospital, In-door, 1,971 ; Out-door, 18,960. New England Hospital for Women and Children, In-door, 263; Out-door, 5,212 — prescriptions 22,680. Mass. Infant Asylum, In-door, 226. Boston Dispensary, 34,684. Mass. Homoeopathic Hospital, 836. Homoeo- pathic Medical Dispensary, 11,826— -prescriptions 30,096. Total, 145,182. John F. Abbott, CoRYDON L. Ford, William F. Metcalf, Investigating Committee. Appendix VI. ( The Detroit Evening IVews, Tuesday, May 2i, iS8g.) THE UNIVERSITY. THE PROGRESS OF YEARS AND ITS PRESENT OPPOR- TUNITY — FACTS ABOUT CLINICAL EXTENSION TO DETROIT — POINTS OS THE DISCUSSION — THE CON- TROLLING PRINCIPLES — A PRACTICAL QUESTION. The money question at Lansing brings to the front .again, in a practical way, the future of the umversity. It is the customary thing for each state of the Union to maintain a college where young men and women are taught and where academic degrees are conferred. But it has fallen to Michigan, through fortuitous circum- stances, and some foresight, to gain a great head- way in the growth of its state college, so that the attainment of a really great university is within easy vision. To dwell upon the early conserving of the grants of money or upon the good fortune of a great man's accession to the presi- dency in the person of Dr. Tappan, is not now necessary. The problem then was how to start wisely — the later problem looks to the fruition of the work so wisely be- gun. It is not easy to realize the full meaning of the fact, as asserted, that the university of Michigan is in the way of becoming one of the very greatest of the future educational institutions. It is the one truly in- terstate college of the 'west. Take a single illustration. Some years ago the university at Ann Arbor was organ- ically united with the leading high schools of the state, so that the students of the latter might be admitted to the university on their graduation certificates without examination. Wonderful to relate, the principle has been so far extended to schools outside of Michigan that today a large proportion of the high schools connected with the university are in other of the western states, igoing as far as the Mississippi. The university has today n^rly 2,000 students. The high school at Ann Arbor has •come to be a preparatory college for the university; its non-resident students now number 298, about half the total attendance. But details need not be dwelt upon to justify the assertion that the university has not alone become a leading interstate college, but that it contains within its- elf a promise of greatness. It may now pass to the posi- tion that awaits it. Favoring conditions are doing much. It is based upon the principle of taxation, and is, there- fore, in every sense the university of the people. With respect to university advance it is believed that the fu- ture is with the taxing principle instead of "the endow- ment idea — the former is a living, moving thing, the latter but the shifting favor of the great. The institu- tion has a freedom of development secured to it through the working of the democratic principle by which it is governed. Having regard to all the favoring conditions and given no radical mistakes in management, there is reason to anticipate that at no distant day fully 5,000 students will receive instruction from its professors and lecturers. It would not be possible to recite in brief compass the facts making for the bright future of the young institution at Ann Arbor. It must suffice now to say that if no serious errors be made the future states- men of Europe will send their sons to study the philoso- phy of politics at the university of Michigan. THE university's DANGER. It has become plain that the future of the university is only threatened by the inertia which always comes with the growth of institutions. As with individual ca- reers, so with college growth; the danger point occurs when the inertia has gathered — the crown just within reach. The secret of enterprise lies in not allowing present achievement to dim the vision. Failure to grasp the whole compels return to the commonplace. These reflections lend an increased interest to the present con- troversy over the question Of extending to Detroit the clinical work of the medical school. Through factional strife, and the disposition to be content with present good, the real question involved in the proposed exten- sion is obscured. On the one side weighted by the local opinion, it is charged that the friends of extension are attempting to dismember the institution ; while on the other the advocates of the movement bring the charge of fussy short-sightedness and an attempt at persecution. In view of the former, one is led to ask what dismember- ment really means. Sherman's march to the sea was not dismemberment of the national forces, although the physical severance was complete. It might have meant dismemberment, however, had he not gone. In view of the latter, one is reminded of the difficulty usually met in attempting to turn people from beaten paths, no mat- ter how just the cause or how able the advocacy. The discussion as to the clinic question began with the very foundation of the college when it was proposed by some to place the medical school at Detroit instead of Ann Arbor. The population of Detroit was then about i6,ooo, and Ann Arbor about 4,000, while the population of the state was hardly as large as Detroit and her suburbs now taken together. At that time the clinical advantages of one place as against the other were of so little moment that the friends of the university finally united in locat- ing the whole at Ann Arbor. With the growth of De- troit and the advance in medical instruction, it came to be widely recognized that a mistake had been made, and that Ann Arbor, by reason of its clinical deficiencies, fell short of the needs of a complete medical college. In time this came home with greater force, as it was found that year by year increasing numbers of the senior medical class were leaving for eastern colleges, in large cities. In 1858 the question was at the fore, and the arguments then formulated against its removal by Dr. Tappan have ever since constituted the stock in trade of those fighting extension. Since 1858 the discussion has been renewed from time to time, and with greater frequency of late by the friends of the movement, who see growing cause for apprehension touching the future of the whole insti- tution in thus hampering advance in one of its most im- portant departments. The present demand from the legislature for an appropriation to add to the hospital at Ann Arbor Ijas renewed the discussion with increased vigor, and this even to bandying epithets and handing about of catch phrases. THE POINTS IN THE CASE. It is objected, by those who oppose the movement, that the administration of the department would be more complicated and involve increased expenditure, both to the state and the individual student; thatquestions not easy to answer relative to the authority of resident and non-resident professors would arise; that the stu- dents would be deprived of the university library for the time they are in Detroit, and would to that extent fail to catch the "breadth and spirit of a true university train- ing;" that there would be no guarantee that the third year students would not continue to leave the university and pass by Detroit, as now; that ultimately pressure might be brought to bear to transfer the whole medical department to Detroit; that ultimately the homoeopathic and dental departments would ask for clinical advant- ages in Detroit; that it would not be easy for the pro- fessors of one department to assist other departments by brief courses of lectures as at present; that the med- ical department would receive a less hearty support from the state, saying that as Detroit had asked for it let De- troit support it; that difficulties might arise between the local hospital boards and the university boards, the De- troit hospitals being under a charter that does not permit lease or transference; that the examination of the blood and urine of patients, a necessary factor in diagnosis, can only be done in great laboratories, such as are found on the Campus at Ann Arbor, and that as a consequence, if the clinic were removed the laboratories in question must also be removed; and, lastly, it is claimed that the university clinic is adequate and has more patients than some city hospitals, to prove which a comparison with official figures is made. By the other side the general point is made that these objections to the extension principle are for the most part exceedingly puerile and unworthy of manly men. It is claimed that we now have resident and non-resident professors whose differences, if any exist, are not traced to the fact that they live in different lo- calities; and, again, that differences of opinion al- ways exist between the members of any intelligent body of men, of which instances are found amongst resident professors in other departments of the university. It is pointed out that the medical students in their technical reading go but little beyond some twenty books; and that so far as the need may be felt, the city library of Detroit would be abundantly equal to all demands, with the additional advantage of access to the profes- sional library of the Detroit medical association, which is abreast of every need. The point is made that if academic training is wanting in the applicants for med- •ical degrees, it should be exacted from theili, but that it is not to be had by talking looselj about the "breadth and spirit of a true university training," as such phras- ing suggests the superstition of letters more than any- thing else. It is said that the students now pass by Detroit only becavise its growing clinical advantages are not utilized, the trouble being that its colleges have not now sufficient prestige to make their diplomas de- :sirable and so attract students. Those who favor the clinical extension as strongly oppose the transference ■of the whole medical department as do the opposition, •claiming that such transference is wholly out of the 'question, since the great laboratory of the university .and the rural quiet of the town make Ann Arbor a -most desirable point for the first two or three years of -a graded course. It is shown that the -dental depart- ment will continue over-crowded, as at present, with •far more work than it can ever grow to, both in kind and amount; it is known that they have recently doubled the price of gold sheets used for fillings in order to diminish somewhat the rush of patients; further, that to the same end the applications of patients from adjoin- ing towns are discouraged. Touching the question of mutual assistance by departments, it is urged that the point is over stated, the real fact being that very little of "this is done by professors who properly come before the senior medical class; at present no such instance exists. To the objection that the department would receive less hearty support from the state, it is argued that this is dis^ ■proved by the liberal support which the agricultural col- lege has received since its transfer from Ann Arbor to Lansing; and at most, the clinic in Detroit would have few favors to ask in a monetary way for, as now, it would in the main be self supporting. Relative to the possible dififerences between the local authorities at Detroit and the regents, it is answered that the fear is unfounded, as it would be to the interest of the hospital boards to avoid such differences, and that in any event the state is not a mendicant and could as well erect and run its own Tiospital in Detroit as at Ann Arbor. The examination -of urine and blood is such as may be done in any doc- tor's office, a microscope, three or four reagents, a spirit 3amp and a glass tube constitute the necessary apparatus; for practical purposes in hospital work, no examinationi of urine or blood is ordinarily made outside of the- ward surgeon's ofRce. THE REAL ISSUE. Regarding comparative hospital strength, it is ans- wered that the opponents of the scheme entirely escaped the issue with the effect of deceiving the public, the com- parative figures in question reading absolutely false, as recently shown before the legislative committee at Lansing; in making comparison between Ann Arbor and Detroit, only one hospital was considered in the lat- ter place, and that then no account was taken of the out- door departments and free dispensaries, whose patients number several times more than the indoor departments- Thus, at New York, whilfe Bellevue hospital has 10,000 indoor, it has 30,000 out-door patients yearly. Had the university hospital at Ann Arbor been dealt with under the circumstances of an out-door department, only a. fraction of its patients would belong to the hospital proper. Again, that they entirely escape the real issue in refusing to consider the needs of the clinic in the- way of acute cases. Thus a child in convulsions, a city waif crushed by a truck, or a man whose life is running out at his femoral artery cannot be transported to Ann Arbor. In fact the student does not see at Ann Arbor cases of fracture, dislocations, convulsions of childhood,, cholera infantum, skin diseases — in variety; in fact, he sees little that is commonly met, and that will try his nerve and skill, in every day practice. It is further held that changing conditions will soon compel a four years' course to keep pace with the advances in medical teach- ing, and that this additional year cannot be consistently used except in clinical work in the largest city of the state. Finally, the fact is brought out that with the state hospital in Detroit it would add its present patients to those Detroit could furnish, thus making up a remark- ably complete clinic, including the range of chronic cases that now come to Ann Arbor and the acute cases peculiar to a large city. A PRACTICAL QUESTION. One thing is clear. The discussion that has been- going on for the last few months reveals that the ques- tion is now a practical one and must be dealt with. De- troit has come to be so large a city and gives such cer- tain promise of future growth that its clinical ad- vantages are beyond dispute. When discussed in pre- vious years the question at issue vfas more a matter of mild debate than as now a thing compelling action. The lines, therefore, are sharply drawn and considerable feel- ing has resulted. At Ann Arbor, outside of the students, it is scarcely possible to elicit any opinion that does not proceed from local prejudice. The word has been passed that clinical extension means dismemberment of the university, and on this the changes are rung. The spoken and printed words are so freighted with the local opinion that the few authorized to speak who feel com- pelled to urge the necessity of the movement are harshly treated. It is a bit ludicrous having to refute opinions proceeding from the notion that the university is an Ann Arbor institution. Detroit, at least, cannot be charged with having village interests. One is reminded of Sir Henry Maine's dictum, "An opinion is the theory of an interest." The difficulty is that the locality view rarely gets above the stomach nerve. Under such conditions it is fortunate that cour- ageous men have not been wanting to assert the oppo- site side. The recent action of the state medical society in electing to its presidency by an unanimous vote an eminent professor who has been the subject of much abuse from some of the Ann Arbor papers on account of his advocacy of the clinical extension, may be taken as evidence that the medical men of the state are prac- tically united in favor of the proposed advance. The history of the institution presents more than one strik- ing example of the persecution of good men for advocat- ing unpopular views looking to the promotion of its welfare. Dr. Tappan himself is a well known example. His review of his connection with the university, written in Berlin, after being driven from the state through persecution, reads like the cry of a man who has been stabbed by the friend he loved and whom he was trying to help. The current talk of dismemberment suggests the question, what is a university? It was the fear of Dr. Tappan that education "would become superficial in pro- portion as it became pretentious." He used to say, " How simple the idea of the university! An association of scholars in every department of human knowledge, to- gether with books embodying the results of human in- vestigation and thinking, and all the means of advanc- ing and illustrating knowledge. How simple the law that is to govern this association! That each member, as a thinker, investigator and teacher, shall be a law unto himself in his own department. * * * Gov- ernments cannot make universities by enactments of law, nor corporations by the erection of edifices. The flattering eulogies of orators cannot adorn them with learning; newspapers cannot puff them into being. Scholars are the only workmen who can build up uni- versities. Provide charters and endowments, * * * then seek out the sufficient scholars and leave them to the work, as the intellectual engineers who are alone competent to do it." The value of this is to suggest that the organization of the university is a spiritual rather than a physical thing, and that whatever may be the merits of the ques- tion in detail, the proposed extension to Detroit could not detract from the spiritual integrity — the real touch stone. President Tappan represented an ideal; Presi- dent Angell represents the inertia of a great organiza- tion. The advocates of extension believe that the need of the hour is for the friends of the university to dis- cover the direction in which the controlling forces are moving, and to conform thereto; that they must not be caught in the net of custom. The inertia that gathers from within should constantly find correction from exter- ior conditions. Unbiased inquiry may show that it is indeed fortunate for the university and for the state that a large and growing city is within easy reach at a time when a clear advance in the medical department is im- perative, CoRYDON L. Ford. Appendix VII. To the Dean of the Medical Faculty:— Regarding the responsibility of the publication in question, and speaking for my associates and myself. I have this to say: i. As to the matter of form or the use of the word mountebank. The word was used only in its general meaning as suggesting the vain boaster whose work has the effect of deceiving the public. There was no intention to attach to the word the more specific meaning which may be given it. The inten- tional meaning was that anything short of full and exact inquiry should avoid using figures as they may return to vex. We disclaim any intention or desire to fix upon Drs. Vaughn and Herdman the charge of quackery. On the contrary we yield to none in respect and loyalty to them as professional gentlemen. As to the figures, we can but reaffirm them. 2. The responsibility for the circular or poster rests with myself, Dr. Abbott, and Dr. Metcalf of Detroit. Dr. Metcalf was asked to join the investigation and he consented. We were prompted to the act by a conviction that the hospital statistics as given out by Drs. Vaughn and Herdman were imper- fect and in effect grossly unfair — and further, that as in our belief Drs. Maclean and Frothingham had been un- justly dealt with, especially by the local press and the talk of the town, there was need of bringing out all the facts in the case that the ends of light and justice might be served. We were obliged to resort to the method of bill distribution as the ordinary local avenues of publicity were practically closed to us. In illustra- tion of the tone of unfairness of most of the local papers. I have brought in and herewith present the Courier of yesterday with an article marked. Speaking for myself personally, I am inforrhed that 1 have violated one of the rules of the institution with which I am connected as an undergraduate, in discuss- ing its affairs as in my article in the Evening News. If such a rule exists I have only been able to learn of it through violations thereof. I cite two illustrations. I have with me here a copy of the Palladium of last year from which I beg leave to read (Extracts here read in which certain professors are spoken of as bunco, steerers and in which the President of the University is referred tO' in a most disrespectful way.) Again X submit the last Argonaut in which it is expressly asserted that Dr. Mac- lean is "unfriendly to the general welfare of the Uni- versity." I have acted in this matter as a citizen dealing with a public question — a question of state politics. I have not considered the matter as a question between instructor and student. I have not thought it in keep- ing with the spirit of a great institution that I should forego my rights as a citizen in becoming attached thereto. If, however, it shall appear to be the fixed rule that the undergraduate shall not speak I can only bow in submission and regret that I have in ignorance violated it. CoRYDON L. Ford. Ann Arbor, May 24, 1889. Affendix VIII. (The Detroit Evening Ne^vs, 1889.) THE CLINIC ROW. CORYDON L. FORD ANSWERS THE ANN ARBOR PAPERS. Ann Arbor, May 25. — "There is no vehicle in Ann Arbor," said Corydon L. Ford, today, "for the public ut- terance of a word on the subject of the clinic except it be on the side which favors petty local interests. Those who desire to see the clinic removed to Detroit, where it would have proper facilities, are practically muzzled. This is the reason why we had to employ the job-press. The term 'mountebank' used in the recent circular, of which I was one of the signers, was not intended in its pro- fessional significance, nor designed to refiect upon the gen- tlemen so characterized as physicians or professors. Their appearance and arguments before the legislature were made as politicians, to influence legislation, and it was in that character they were called 'mountebanks.' The term, however, was unfortunate, and I regret its use, not so much on account of the consequences it may bring to myself, as because it has dragged the controversy into a side issue. This I explained to the faculty when I was cited before them, while vindicating my right as a citizen to discuss a question of public policy and legis- lation, even though my teachers should be my op- ponents. "The Ann Arbor papers also abuse me for signing my name Corjdon L. Ford, Instead of C. L. Ford, jr. The former is my name. The latter is not. My father's name was neither. The fact that they use so trifling a circumstance as the identity of my name with that of Dr. Ford shows simply to what lengths they will go in abuse of all who do not make the local inter- ests of Ann Arbor the first consideration in matters affecting the university. "But this is mere personality, having nothing to do with the main question. It is to the main question that the circular was addressed; and its facts and figures, separated from the unfortunate term at which the faculty have caught, speak for themselves. It is these which gave most serious offense. The other side have commenced to call names and persecute. The inquisition does not inquire." {Dundee (Mich.,) Reporter, Aug. 9, i88g.) UNIVERSITY VERSUS FORD. OUR TOWNSMAN, CORYDON FORD, TALKS TO THE HOME PAPER — THE OTHER SIDE OF A GREAT QUESTION. "Mr. Ford, The Dundee Reporter would like to publish anything you may desire to say further regard- ing the clinic question and your own relations to the controversy." " I had thought to say nothing more regarding the matter and would not do so now but for the treatment I received at the hands of the Ann Arbor papers. It would seem that in three of the local journals, those who think Ann Arbor a hospital center have a mouthpiece to malign and libel any man. In the first plaqe the question I have been dealing with goes far beyond the technical matter of the relationship between instructor and stu- dent. Instead, it is a question of state politics — a matter of public policy and not merely of college government. In seeking to throw light on it I did nothing more than to exercise my rights as a citizen of Michigan. I saw that the legislature was in danger of acting beyond the facts; further, the point came home to me that those who had the courage to antagonize the prevaling opin- ion were the subject of abuse by these same local jour- nals and in the talk of the town. I conceived it to be my duty to set about looking into the matter in all its bearings and this on my own responsibility. I have had some experience in teaching and am not unfamiliar with educational questions in general. During my three years at the University I have been es- pecially interested in the methods of teaching medi- cine and surgery. The drift more decidedly than ever before is from words to things — from empiricism to sci- ence. As the particular facts came together it seemed to me a monstrous thing that the legislature should be asked to grant a large sum of money with the view to building an extended hospital system in Ann Arbor, and worse still that Ann Arbor should be led to bor- row $25,000 in aid thereof — thus imbedding the princi- ple. To make matters worse, defective and misleading statistics had beer^ sent over the state. Seeing all this, what could I do but publish? Not to have done so would have been cowardly. There was great provoca- tlQIl JP ip Sj! !p ^ Sp ^ " I was astonished at the stress laid upon the word mountebank. Drs. Vaughn and Herdman undertook to be doctors of politics and were dealt with accordingly, whereupon they sought protection under the profes- sional shield. I applied no epithets to them as members of the medical profession. In dealing with this political question they mounted a bench, so to speak, and unfortu- nately proved themselves bunglers in handling figures. There are mouritebanks and mountebanks. The mounte- bank of Robert Louis Stevenson in his charming story, "The Treasure of Franchard," was a tumbler. I once saw a study of the successive English prime ministers, to determine the mountebank element in each. Disraeli was something of a mountebank, wasn't he, though he may never have "cooked" statistics? However, the word has more application than I at first believed as Dr. Vaughn has been severely criticised for his vindictive following of me; and especially have I heard his action in the Faculty meeting censured. He presented the case, pettifogged and roistered, then voted for my ex- pulsion. ****** "The whole progress of the University has been through conflict. Through conflict light comes. Its only danger lies in a lack of faithful reporting of its af- fairs. The real difficulty in relation to Dr. Tappan's presidency, vi^as that the facts were not adequately re- ported. Publicity was a halting thing in those days. The reports in the newspapers were often furnished by interested parties. One difficulty now is that the atmos- phere of the University does not at all times sufficiently encourage freedom of discussion. This will find cor- rection in time." ***** Affendix IX, Dr. W. J. Herdman, Huron Street, City. — Dear Sir; Of my own motion and also under the advice of President Angell I called on you Monday evening to proffer a personal apology for my use of the word mountebank in a publication concerning the clinical question with which I had to do; also to learn what reparation I could make satisfactory to you. I did this with the simple desire to get at the right more clearly. I should not need to tell you that I waited upon you in all sincerity, yet during the interview you charged me with insincerity. You informed. me that the use of the word mountebank was but an incident in the publication referred to and that for yourself personally you cared nothing about it; that the real offense was my act as a whole in presuming to discuss publicly such a matter as the clinical question while still an undergraduate of the University and especially with men who, as you pointed out, are so much better fitted than myself to deal with the question. I send this note to give you further and more formal assurance of my desire to make reparation for the use of the word mountebank in the publication referred to. Very respectfully, CoRYDoN L. Ford. Ann Arbor, June 21, 1889. Dr. Victor C. Vaughn, State Street, City. — Dear Sir: Of my own motion and also under the advice of President Angell I called at your ofBce Tuesday morn- ing to proffer a personal apology for the use of the word mountebank in a publication concerning the clinical question with which I had to do; also to learn what rep- aration I could make satisfactory to you. I went to you in all sincerity and with the simple desire to get at the right more clearly. You received me discourteously and ordered me to leave your premises. You refused to hear me. I send you this note to assure you of my desire to learn what reparation will be satisfactory to you for the use of an objectionable word in the publication referred to. Very respectfully, CoRYDON L. Ford. Ann Arbor, June 21, 1889. Appendix X. To the Honorable, the Board of Regents, University of Michigan : Some weeks ago I came to believe that there was need of a more comprehensive treatment of the clinic question in its relations to the development of the Uni- versity as a whole. To this end in the brief time at command I set about drawing together the leading facts. The initiative was my own. I went at the work without consultation with professors and I was especially careful not to draw my fellow students into any responsiblility with me. My aim was to throw light on the whole prob- lem while especially making clearer, if possible, the need of better clinic material in medical instruction. There- suits of my study were published in the Detroit Evening News of May 21. A copy of this- article is appended. Its value is to illustrate the spirit in which I sought to deal with the question. In the course of my investigation I was impressed with the sharp contrasts between the statistics of patients at the University Hospital, of which so much had been made here and at Lansing, and the returns of cases in the Detroit hospitals which I had myself gathered. The contrast was so great that I felt impelled to adopt the quickest and surest means of making the facts public. To this end I associated with myself Dr. Abbott, together with Dr. Metcalf of Detroit, as a committee of investiga- tion. A circular exhibiting the contrast in parallel col- umns was prepared and circulated. A copy of this cir- cular is appended. By reason of my part in its publica- tion the question of certifying to my attainments as a student of medicine is before your Honorable Body. When cited before the Medical Faculty I submitted a statement in explanation of my action, a copy of which is herewith given. lalsoappend a cutting from the Evening News of May 25 being a statement that I made to a reporter of that journal. Submitting myself with the utmost respect to the judgment of your Honorable Body I have this further to say; For my act as a whole I have been unable to make retraction and apology for the reason that I acted from the single motive of furthering right action with respect to the question at issue. My motive was not a dishonor- able one. As a citizen of Michigan my interest in the development of the University has been keen and ab- sorbing. I am well aware that an undergradnate should be extremely loath to discuss questions of policy relating to the institution with which he is connected. I did not hasten to such action. It was only when at a late date as it seemed to me most important facts and considerations had not found their way to the public that I felt compelled to publish. I have found further dif- ficulty in making retraction for the reason that the details given in the circular have not been successfully controverted and I have no power to withdraw facts. In the form of.the circular I committed a grievous error. Prompted by my desire to compel attention I used a word in relation to doctors Vaughn and Herd- man which I should not have used and whose use I deeply regret While it is true as pointed out in my statement to the Medical Faculty, that I did not intend to apply the word to them in their professional capacity or to them as my teachers /e>- se I have realized that this is not sufficient; that to them personally and as my teachers apologies and reparation are due. Succeeding my statement to the Medical Faculty, on receiving as- surance that apologies and an offer of reparation would be kindly received* I called on Drs. Vaughn and Herd- man. The resvilt is told in letters which I subsequently wrote to the gentlemen named, copies of which are annexed. By reason of the treatment I received at the hands of Dr. Vaughn when before the Medical Faculty I was deterred from going to the gentlemen with apologies and offers of reparation. At the faculty meeting Dr. Vaughn went so far as to shake his fist angrily in my face and otherwise led me to believe that no punishment short of decapitation would avail. Last week I first re- ceived assurance from those in authority that offers of apology would be kindly received. As indicated I at. once went to them and in a submissive spirit. Dr. Herd- man informed me that he attached no importance to the use of the word mountebank — my apology therefore had no meaning to him. Dr. Vaughn ordered me off his premises, not permitting me to speak. I would state further to your Honorable Body that I have spent three years in conscientious study. I am not aware that my proficiency as a student of medicine is questioned. In my relations with my teachers I have tried to be most respectful. The error into which I was drawn in discussing a matter outside of those relations, in a strict sense, was not prompted by a desire to cast odium upon them. The results of my three years' pro- fessional study are of great value to me. It is the office of your Honorable Body to certify to them. I trust that my record for three years will be some offset against the single error for which, as indicated, I have sought, and still desire, to make amends. Corydon L. Ford Ann Arbor, June 24, 1889. To the Honorable, the Board of Regents, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich.: Dear Sirs: — I address you this communication in the hope that you may find the prayer herein contained in harmony with your purpose to accord me entire jus- tice in the matter of my diploma. It is my understand- ing that your action in the matter last June was not to be considered final. The existing uncertainty with the possible final denial of my diploma at your hands is disastrous to my plans for gaining a livlihood.. To- ward the fulfilment of these plans I have expended the time and money involved in three years of study at the University of Michigan in. qualifying myself for the practice of medicine. From such practice I now find myself debarred by reason of your late action. I hope that you will feel that I have been sufficiently punished for censurable acts committed in the heat of a discussion that has now passed from prominence well nigh into forgetfulness, and for which acts I have been willing to make all reparation within my power. Under these circumstances and at this distance of time I am encour- aged to petition your honorable body for further and final action in a matter of so vital importance to me. Yours very respectfully, CoRYDON L. Ford. Minneapolis, Minn., Oct. 9, 1889. Affendix XI. (The Detroit Free Press, July 77, i88q.) DR. MACLEAN'S RESIGNATION. To the Hon. James B. Angell, M. A., L.L. D., President of the University of Michigan: Dear Sir: — I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 26th ultimo, in which you informed me that the honorable Board of Regents had adopted a resolution in which it is declared that" I had placed myself in such antagonism to the policy adopted by the board, both by my language and conduct, that my usefulness as a professor in the medical department of the university had been so far impaired that it is not de- sirable I should longer continue my connection with the university', and that you, sir, had been requested to com- municate to me the willingness of the Board of Regents to accept my resignation. Recognizing, as I have always done, the supreme power of the honorable Board of Regents in all matters pertaining to the government of the university, I have no hesitation in complying with its wish as stated in your letter and I hereby resign the chair of surgery and clinical surgery in the university. In taking this step, I hope that I may be permitted to say on my own behalf that I leave the university with the consciousness of having done my whole duty to the best of my ability during the seventeen years of my con- nection therewith, and that the language and conduct complained of by the board, have been simply the ex- pression of my sincere and zealous determination to rescue, if possible, the medical department from most momentous dangers which, in my judgment (and that of all unprejudiced friends of medical education, and of the university, within or without the bounds of the State of Michigan), menace its progress and prosperity as well as its very existence in the near future. That those fears may prove unfounded, or that some more excellent way than any hitherto suggested of avoiding the dangers referred to may be devised and followed by the honorable Board of Regents, and that the most perfect success may crown their, and your, efforts for the welfare of the medical department, and of the university as a whole, is, and will ever be, the most sincere and heartfelt wish of. Dear sir. Yours most respectfully, Donald Maclean. *,* * ( The Detroit Free Press, iSSg). DR. FROTHINGHAM'S RESIGNATION. Detroit, Aug. 6. — The resignations of Professors Maclean and Frothingham have never been made public by the Board of Regents, though the Free Press was enabled to lay the former before its readers at the time of its presentation to and acceptance by the board. As a matter of general interest. Dr. Frothingham's resigna- tion is now laid before our readers, completing the record. To the Honorable the Board of Regents of the Univer- sity of Michigan : Gentlemen: — I am in receipt of the following reso- lutions, passed by you on the 26th inst., and communi- cated to me by your presiding officer: Resolved^ That in the opinion of tliis board Professors Maclean and Frothingham have placed themselves in such antagonism to the policy adopted by the board, both by their language and conduct, that their usefulness as professors in the medical department of the uni- versity has been so far impaired that it is not desirable that they should longer continue their connection with the university. Therefore, the president is requested to communicate to Professors Maclean and Frothingham the willingness of the board to accept their resignations. In compliance with tills desire on tlie part of jour board I liereby tender my resignation as professor of materia medica, opiithalmic and aural surgery and clinical ophthalmology. It has been twenty-two years since I began my labors in the medical department of the university, and during all that time I have aimed to do as much as I could to keep the department advancing in clinical in- struction, and so far as possible to furnish its students with opportunities to acquire such practical knowledge as would enable them to fairly perform the responsible duties that will devolve upon them as medical prac- titioners. When I entered the department I found the treat- ment of diseases of the eye almost entirely neglected, and in this respect so far behind most other colleges as to be discreditable to it and the university as well. I ■agitated the necessity of reform in this branch, and find- ing the then existing Board of Regents without means at their disposal to pay for any improvement in that direction, I undertook the work with no increase of my salary. For more than ten years I did it with no addi- tion to my salary on that account, or lessening of my labor in the department in which I was originally em- ployed. After that my work was changed to the de- partment of therapeutics and materia medica, in which for some years I did full work and have until the last two years been relieved of but very little work in that department on account of the extensive labor I have performed in ophthalmology and otology. I think I may justly claim that, by self-sacrificing devotion to the in- terests of the medical department, I have added some- what to its efficiency and brought it more nearly in accord with the demands of the medical profession and the requirements for modern medical instruction. Dur- ing all this time, though suffering in health from exces- sive labor, I have been denied proper assistance by the medical faculty and by the Regents, though I have asked them for it. During the past few years I have felt constrained, in the interests of humanity and by an honest regard of my duty as an instructor of those who are to take into their custody human life and health, to urge a still further development of the efficiency of the clinical de- partment. In advocating these measures I have not only been urged by my own convictions as to their necessity, but I have also been impelled by the belief that it is wise to comply with the demands of the medical profession, and especially with the suggestions of the Michigan State Medical Society made to the Board of Regents in 1873, through a committee appointed to con- fer with them upon the subject of medical education. The action and recommendations of this committee were fully considered and indorsed by the society at its next meeting. The medical faculty, also, after full consider- ation of the matter for a period of three years, in full meeting, unanimously indorsed the views I had advo- cated by passing the following resolutions on the 8th of October, 1887: To the Honorable Board of Reffents: Gentlemen: — Believing- tliat the science and art of medicine in its present and prospective expansion, with the many specialties into which it tends to be divided, requires a much longer period of study and of college and hospital instruction than is provided for in the ordinary medical schools of this country, that even the extended course in the college of medicine and surgery of this imiversity would, if practicable, be improved by its extension to four years of nine months each, instead of three years as now, thus bringing^ it near the standard of the most advanced medical schools of Hurope, we respectfully re- quest the Board of Regents to inquire into the possibility and expedi- ency of providing for a course of instruction of an additional year, to be devoted chiefly to clinical specialties after the full three years' course, as now established, with its work and honors is completed . In this connection we respectfully call attention to an inquiry into the facilities which may be made available for this purpose in the Har- per Hospital and other institutions in the neighboring City of Detroit, with a view of utilizing those facilities at an early date if it is deemed advisable. These resolutions were passed without a dissenting voice, and there was at that time "peace and harmony" in the faculty. Any discord that has since arisen has been brought about not by myself but by those who have privately acted with certain interested business men of Ann Arbor to defeat the object of these resolu- tions. In deference to the action of your board I had ceased all public expressions of my views upon this matter until called upon by the Governor of the State to appear before the committee of the Legislature, when, in answer to direct inquiries from therri,! fully stated my views of the clinic question, and the grounds upon which they were founded. Since then, when publicly assailed, I have twice done the same thing. I. regret that there is any policy adopted by your honorable board that would restrain a man when in the employ of the university from speaking and acting upon such occasions in accordance with his honest convictions of right, and the hope that, when out of the university, I may enjoy more liberty of conscience, and labor with- out restraint for the promotion of sound medical educa- tion, renders me as willing to tender this resignation under these circumstances as you can be to accept it. My best wishes are for the success of the medical de- partment, and I shall seek to antagonize only that policy which I, together with a majority of intelligent phy- sicians, think may do it harm, and shall oppose the acts of only those persons whom I think would sacrifice so important interests to gratify selfish or other unworthy desires. I shall watch the development and outcome of your policy with anxious solicitude for the welfare of the de- partment in which I have labored so long and with so great desire to benefit.' Begging, for its sake, that you will wisely seek counsel from those who have no per- sonal objects in view and are competent to instruct you as to its needs, and that in the administration of its affairs you will aim to be guided by "That nice sense of right that makes one abhorrent of the least dalliance with wrong," I leave the responsibility for its welfare with you. Respectfully submitted, G. E. Frothingham. Newport, R. I., June 29, 1889. Affemlix XII. Affendix XIII. Corydon Ford, Dundee, Michigan: Dear Sir : — You have the story of the beginning of the line in very nice shape and correct.' The first half mile was erected in June, i88i; built to Tecumseh September, 1882. Raisin Valley Seminary is the only school in the circuit. I still live in the country. By the click of the sounder I often hear important nev^s ahead of those in town ; in fact am often asked for news after getting in town by persons who know we hear of it as soon as anything e_4«^i. happens. Yours very truly, R. J. W. BOWKN. Tecumseh, Mich, Jan. 20, 1894. Appendix XIV. NEARER. Nearer, O Earth, to thee! Nearer to thee, E'en though it be a child That leadeth me; Still all my steps shall be, Nearer, O Faith, to thee, Nearer to thee! Though like the wanderer, The sun gone down, Darkness be over me, My rest a stone; Still in my dreams I'd be Nearer, O'Life, to thee, Nearer to thee! There let the way appear, Steps unto doing; All that my hand can find. In that pursuing; The people to beckon me Nearer, O Love, to thee. Nearer to thee! Then, with my waking thoughts Bright with the ways, Out of my common cares. Strongholds I'll raise; So by my wants to be Nearer, O Truth, to thee, Nearer to thee! Or if on joyful day Seeing the why. Sun, moon, and stars in mind. Onward I fly; Still all my song shall be. Nearer,. O Earth, to thee; Nearer to thee! SWEET HOUR OF CARE. Sweet hour of care, sweet hour of care. That calls us from a world of prayer — Where living with the latest known We daily find our interests grown: In times of doubt or passing grief Mj hands have often found relief, And often gone beyond all prayer In thy return, sweet hour of care. Sweet hour of care, sweet hour of care. Thy feet shall here a message bear To those, whose truth-adaptiveness Have made all work the sure caress: And since earth bids me raise my face. Believe in life, and find my place, I'll go athwart this world of prayer. And sing of thee, sweet hour of care. Appendix A'I^ 'IMPORTANT EDUCATIONAL CONFERENCE." The teachers of America have, in '93, through their Committee of Ten, formulated this ghastly thing as the needs of the schools to-day: "i. Ill the school course of study, extending approximately from the age of six years to the age of eighteen years — a course including th^ periods of both elementary and secondary instruction — at what age should the study which is the subject of the conference be first intro- duced? 2. After it is introduced, ho^v many hours a week for how many years should be devoted to it? 3. How many hours a week for how many years should be de- voted to it during the last four years of the complete course, that is, during the ordinary high-school period? 4. What topics, or parts, of the subject may reasonably be covered during the whole course? 5. What topics, or parts, of the subject may best be reserved for the last four years? 6. In what form, and to what extent, should the subject enter into college requirements for admission? Such questions as the suf- ficiency of translation at sight as a test of knowledge of a Jang'-uage, or the superiority of a laboratory examination in a scientific subject to a written examination on a text-book, are intended to be suggested under this head by the phrase "in what form." 7. Should the subject be treated differently for pupils who are going to college, for those who are going to a scientific school, and for those who, presumably, are going to neither? 8. At what stage should this differentiation begin, if any be recommended? 9. Can any description be ffiven of the best method of teacliing^ tliis subject throiig^hout the scliool conrse? 10. Can any description be given of the best mode of testing at- tainments in this subject at college admission examinations ? 11. For those cases in which colleges and universities permit a division of the admission examination into a. preliminary and a final ex- amination, separated by at least a year, can the best limit between the preliminary and the final examination be approximately defined?" The framers are President James B. Angell, Presi- dent Chas. W. Elliott and United States Commissioner of Education Dr. Wm. T. Harris, with seven other "prominent educators." " The exhaustive and far-reaching character of these questions is apparent at a glance." Nicholas Murray Butler," Harfer's Weekly, Nov. i8, '9J. Affendix XVI. RATTLED THE RECEIVERS. JUDGE CALDWELL SAYS THE U. P. RECEIVERS MUST I'ROVE THAT WAGES ARE TOO HIGH. Omaha,. March 29, '94. — ^Judge Caldwell's action in the Union Pacific case this afternoon rather took the breath of the receivers. It came in the form of a ruling that the burden of proof must rest on the receivers. In the proceedings that follow it will be necessary for«the receivers to show that the schedule of wages now in force is too high. Pleas for a continuance were made by the attorneys for the receivers, but Judge Caldwell thought now was the time to proceed. Twenty thousand men were directly interested and the matter ought to be settled at once. At the coming into court tomorrow morning the receivers will present a copy of the old rules with the portions to which they object marked, and state their reasons for the changes desired and the men will present their reasons why they should remain in force. PREVIOUS DISPATCH. The judges (Caldwell and Sanborn) also told Gen. Thurston (attorney for the road) that time wouldbe fixed for a hearing on the receivers' petition. Ample notice- of the time and place of such hearing would have to be given to the officers of all the labor organizations repre- senting the employes of the system. The receivers will be required to grant leave of absence to all such repre- sentatives who desire to attend such hearing and provide transportation and subsistence for them from the time of leaving their homes until their return. THE DECISION. Omaha, Neb., April 5, 1894. — Judge Caldwell's de- cision in the Union Pacific wage schedule case was rend- ered to-day. It was a complete victory for the employes. The court room was thronged with railroad men who listened intently to the reading of the opinion,, which was very lengthy, comprising over 4,000 words- After stating the facts of the road coming into the hands of the receivers. Judge Caldwell says: " Two of the ablest railway managers ever in the service of this system and probably as able as any this country has ever produced, S. H. H. Clark, and Ed- ward Dickinson now general manager of the road, testify that these labor organizations on this system had improved the morals and efficiency of the men and had rendered valuable aid to the company in perfecting and putting into force and promoting the rules and regula- tions governing the operation of the Union Pacific rail- way, which, confessedly, have made it one of the best managed and conducted roads in the country The wages of the men must not be reduced below a reasonable and just compensation for their services- They must be paid fair wages, though no dividends are paid on the stock and no interest paid on the bonds" In conclusion Judge Caldwell says : "We may be in- dulged in giving expression to the hope that in future differences about wages between courts and their em- ployes at least, and, we would fain hope, between all em- ployers and employes, resort may be had to reason and not to passion; to the law and not to violence; to the- courts and not to a strike." ^ >- < o > < Z zhH CO z < O w H o ;z) H z PJ > Q < O CO H UJ Q 5 ■ ■ Qo , 1 , ,UJ' "HO .. K (v| ..HO q 71 fl w i- H PS rt Oho Q M H 3^2 uog H g « s w S H « W O « K O Oi H K o ^« ■" < 2 a K « 3 w D S W fc u S tn MB? > ^ ^ K tn a O (!! g ""^ W >. J jSj w S « < o< <" o ►, p "S < ZK . — H Z c/ >- o ^ ^ > o C/5 U oo UJ Q d: w X H H iti^ O UJ UJ X <; a oo t-r- M hI J ml lie !-a, ?; < S - o> H S >: ago HO O £0 m "<« ft *t w y Jw a. OH « W H 0< ?^^^Mllkit=^/#Mf4 2:! .J