 Modern Educational Reform. Questions of genuine importance to large masses of people are not posed by a single questioner, nor even by a limited number. They are put with more or less precision, with more or less consciousness of their scope and demand, by all classes involved. This is a fair test of its being a genuine question, rather than a temporary fad. Such is the test we are to apply to the present inquiry. What is wrong with our present method of child education? What is to be done in the way of altering or abolishing it? The posing of the question acquired a sudden prominence through the world-shocking execution of a great educator for alleged complicity in the revolutionary events of Spain during the Moroccan War. People were not satisfied with the Spanish government's declarations as to this official murder. They were not convinced that they were being told the truth. They inquired why the government should be so anxious for that man's death. And they learned that as a teacher he had founded schools wherein ideas, hostiles, or governmental programs for learning were put in practice. And they have gone on asking to know what these ideas were, how they were taught, and how can those same ideas be applied to the practical questions of education confronting them in the persons of their own children? But it would be a very great mistake to suppose that the question was raised out of nothingness or out of the brilliancy of his own mind by Francisco Ferrer. If it were, if he was a creator of the question instead of the response to it, his martyr's death could have given it but an ephemeral prominence which would speedily have subsided. On the contrary, the inquiry stimulated by that tragic death was but the first loud articulation of what has been asked in thousands of schoolrooms, millions of homes, all over the civilised world. It has been put by each of the three classes concerned, each in its own particular way, from its own particular viewpoint, by the educator, by the parent, and by the child itself. There is a fourth personage who has had a great deal to say, and still has, but to my mind he is a pseudo-factor, to be eliminated as speedily as possible. I mean the statesman. He considers himself profoundly important as representing the interests of society in general. He is anxious for the formation of good citizens to support the state, and directs education in such channels as he thinks will produce these. I prefer to leave the discussion of his peculiar functions for a later part of this address, here observing only that if he is a legitimate factor, if by chance he is a genuine educator strayed into statesmanship, as a statesman he is interested only from a secondary motive, i.e. he is not interested in the actual work of schools, in the children as persons, but in the producing of a certain type of character, to serve certain subsequent ends. The criticism offered by the child itself upon the prevailing system of instruction is the most simple, direct, and at the same time the critic is utterly unconscious of its force. Who has not heard a child say, in that fretted wine characteristic of a creature who knows its protest will be ineffective? But what do I have to learn that for? Oh, I don't see what I have to know that for. I can't remember it anyway. I hate to go to school. I just as leave take a whipping. My teacher's a mean old thing. She expects you to sit quiet the whole morning, and if you just make the least little noise she keeps you in at recess. Why do we have to keep still so long? What good does it do? I remember well the remark made to me once by one of my teachers, and a very good teacher too, who nevertheless did not see what her own observation ought to have suggested. School children, she said, regard teachers as their natural enemies. The thought which it would have been logical to suppose would have followed this observation is that if children in general are possessed of that notion, it is because there is a great deal in the teacher's treatment of them which runs counter to the child's nature, that possibly this is so not because of natural cussedness on the part of the child, but because of inapplicability of the knowledge taught, or the manner of teaching it, or both, to the mental and physical needs of the child. I am quite sure no such thought entered my teacher's mind, at least regarding the system of knowledge to be imposed. Being a sensible woman, she perhaps occasionally admitted to herself that she might make mistakes in applying the rules, but that the body of knowledge to be taught was indispensable, and must somehow be injected into children's heads under threat of punishment if necessary, I am sure she never questioned. It did not occur to her, any more than to most teachers, that the first business of an educator should be to find out what other needs, aptitudes and tendencies of children, before he or she attempts to outline a body of knowledge to be taught, or rules for teaching it. It does not occur to them that the child's question, what do I have to learn that for, is a perfectly legitimate question, and if the teacher cannot answer it to the child's satisfaction, something is wrong, either with the thing taught, or with the teaching. Either the thing taught is out of rapport with the child's age, or his natural tendencies, or his condition of development, or the method by which it is taught repels him, disgusts him, or at best fails to interest him. When a child says, I don't see why I have to know that, I can't remember it anyway. He is voicing a very reasonable protest. Of course there are plenty of instances of willful shirking, where a little effort can overcome the slackness of memory. But every teacher who is honest enough to reckon with himself knows he cannot give a sensible reason why things are to be taught which have so little to do with the child's life that tomorrow, or the day after examination, they will be forgotten. Things which he himself could not remember, or he not repeating them year in and year out as a matter of his trade. And every teacher who has thought at all for himself about the essential nature of the young humanity he is dealing with, knows that six hours of daily herding and impenning of young, active bodies and limbs, accompanied by the additional injunction that no feeder to be shuffled, no whispers exchanged, and no paper wads thrown, is a frightful violation of all the laws of young life. Any gardener who should attempt to raise healthy, beautiful and fruitful plants, by outraging all those plants instinctive wants and searchings, would meet as his reward, sickly plants, ugly plants, sterile plants, dead plants. He will not do it. He will watch very carefully to see whether they like much sunlight or considerable shade, whether they thrive in much water or get drowned in it, whether they like sandy soil or fat mucky soil. The plant itself will indicate to him when he is doing the right thing. And every gardener will watch for indications with great anxiety. If he finds the plant revolts against his experiments, he will desist at once and try something else. If he finds it thrives, he will emphasise the particular treatment so long as it seems beneficial. But what he will surely not do, will be to prepare a certain area of ground all just alike, with equal chances of sun and amount of moisture in every part, and then plant everything together without discrimination, mighty close together, saying beforehand, if plants don't want to thrive like this, they ought to want to, and if they are stubborn about it, they must be made to. Or if a razor of animals were to start in feeding them on a regimen adapted not to their tastes, but to his, if he were to insist on stuffing the young ones with food only fitted for the older ones, if he were to shut them up and compel them somehow to be silent, stiff and motionless for hours together, he would—well, he would very likely be arrested for cruelty to animals. Of course there is this difference between the grower of plants or animals and the grower of children. The former is dealing with his subject as a superior power, with a force which will always remain subject to his, while the latter is dealing with a force which is bound to become his equal, and taking it in the long and large sense, bound ultimately to supersede him. The fear of the footfalls of the young generation is in his ears, whether he is aware of it or not, and he instinctively does what every living thing seeks to do, vis to preserve his power. Since he cannot remain forever the superior, the dictator, he endeavours to put a definite mould upon that power which he must share, to have the child learn what he has learned as he has learned it, and to the same end that he has learned it. The grower of flowers or fruits or vegetables, or the razor of animals, secure in his forever indisputable superiority, has nothing to fear when he inquires into the ways of his subjects. He will never think, but if I heed such and such manifestation of the flowers, or the animals' desire or repulsion, it will develop certain tendencies as a result, which will eventually overturn me and mine and all that I believe in and labour to preserve. The grower of children is perpetually beset by this fear. He must not listen to a child's complaint against the school. It breaks down the mutual relation of authority and obedience. It destroys the faith of the child that his old is no better than he. It sets up little centres of future rebellion in the brain of every child affected by the example. No, complaint as to the wisdom of the system must be discouraged, ignored, frowned down, crushed by superior dignity, if necessary, punished. The very best answer a child ever gets to its legitimate inquiry, Why do I have to learn such and such a thing? Is—wait till you get older, and you will understand it all. Just now you are a little too young to understand the reasons." In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the answerer got the same reply to his own question twenty years before, and he has never found out since, either. Do, as we tell you to now, say the teachers, and be sure that we are instructing you for your good. The explanations will become clear to you some time. As the child smothers his complaint, cramps his poor little body to the best of his ability, and continues to repeat definitions which mean nothing to him but strings of long words, and rules which to him are simply torture, apparatus invented by his natural enemies to plague children. I recall quite distinctly the bitter resentment I felt toward the inverted divisor. The formula was easy enough to remember—invert the terms of the divisor and proceed as in multiplication of fractions. I memorised it in less than a minute, and followed the prescription, and got my examples correct. But oh! how was the miracle accomplished? Why should a fraction be made to stand on its head? And how did that change a division suddenly into a multiplication? And I never found out, till I undertook to teach someone else years afterward. Yet the thing could have been made plain then—perhaps would have been—but for the fact that as a respectful pupil I was so trained to think that my teacher's methods must not be questioned, or their explanations reflected upon, that I sat mute, mystified, puzzled, and silently indignant. In the end I swallowed it, as I did a lot of other pre-digested knowledge, and consented to use its miraculous nature, very much as my Christian friends used the body and blood of Christ to wash their sins away, without very well understanding the modus operandi. Another advantage which the botanical or zoological cultivator has over the child-grower, by which incidentally the plants and animals profit, is that since he is not seeking to produce a universal type, but rather to develop as many new and interesting types as he can, he is very studious to notice the inclinations of his subjects, observing possible beginnings of differentiation, and adapting his treatment to the development of such beginnings. Of course he also does what no child cultivator could possibly do—he ruthlessly destroys weaklings—and as the superior intermeddling divinity he fosters those special types which are more serviceable to himself, irrespective of whether they are normal, serviceable to plant or animal life apart from man. But is the fact that children are of the same race as ourselves, the fact that their development should be regarded from the point of how best shall they serve themselves, their own race and generation, not that of a discriminating overlord assuming the power of life and death over them, a reason for us to disregard their tendencies, aptitudes, likes and dislikes altogether—a reason for us to treat their natural manifestations of non-adaptation to our methods of treatment with less consideration than we give to a fern or a hare. I should, on the contrary, suppose it was a reason to consider them all the more. I think the difficulty lies in the immeasurable vanity of the human adult, particularly the pedagogical adult—I presume I may say it with less offence since I am a teacher myself—which does not permit him to recognize as good any tendency in children to fly in the face of his conceptions of a correct human being, to recognize that maybe here is something highly desirable to be encouraged rather than destroyed as pernicious. A flower gardener doesn't expect to make another voter or householder out of his fern, so he lets it show what it wants to be, without being at all horrified at anything it does. But your teacher has usually well-defined conceptions of what men and women have to be. And if a boy is too lively, too noisy, too restless, too curious to suit the concept, he must be trimmed and subdued, and if he is lazy he has to be spurred with all sorts of whips, which are offensive both to the handler and the handled. The weapons of shaming and arousing the spirit of rivalry are two which are much used, the former would sometimes fatal results, as in the case of the nine-year-old boy who recently committed suicide because his teacher drew attention to his torn coat, or young girls who have worried themselves into fevers from a scornful word respecting their failures in scholarship, and arousing rivalry brings an evil train behind it of spikes and jealousies. I do not say, as some enthusiasts do, there are no bad children, or there are no lazy children. But I am quite sure that both badness and laziness often result from lack of understanding and lack of adaptation, and that these can only be attained by teachers comprehending that they must seek to understand as well as to be understood. Badness is sometimes only damned up energy, which can no more help flooding over than damned up water. Laziness is often the result of forcing a child to a task for which it has no natural liking, while it would be energetic enough given the thing it liked to do. At any rate it is worthwhile to try to find out what is the matter in the spirit of a searcher after truth, which is the first point I want to establish, that the general complaints of children are true criticisms of the school system, and superintendents of public instruction, boards of education, and teachers have as their first duty to heed and consider these complaints. Let us now consider the complaints of parents. It must be admitted that the parents of young children, particularly their mothers, and especially these latter when they are the wives of working men with good-sized families, regard the school rather as a convenience for getting rid of the children during a certain period of the day than anything else. They are not to be blamed for this. They have obeyed the imperative mandate of nature in having families with no very adequate conception of what they were doing. They find themselves burdened with responsibilities often greatly beyond their capacity. They have all they can do—sometimes more than they can do—to manage the financial end of things, to see to their children's material wants, and to get through the work of a house. Very often they are themselves deficient in even the elementary knowledge of the schools. They feel that their children need to know a great deal that they have never known. But they are utterly without the ability to say whether what they learn is useful and important or not. With the helplessness of ignorance towards wisdom, they receive the system provided by the state on trust, presuming it is good, and with the pardonable relief of busy and overburdened people, they look at the clock as school hour approaches, and breathe the sigh of relief when the last child is out of the house. They would be shocked at the idea that they regard their children as nuisances, they would vigorously defend themselves by saying that they feel that the children are in better hands than their own, safe and well-treated. But before long even these ignorant ones observe that their children have learned a number of things which are not good. They have mixed with a crowd of others, and somewhere among them they have learned bad language, bad ideas, and bad habits. These are complaints which may be heard from intelligent, educated, and conservative parents also—parents who may be presumed to be satisfied with the spirit and general purpose of the knowledge imparted in the classroom. Also, the children suffer in health through their schools, and later on, when the cramming and crowding of their brains goes on in earnest, as it does in the higher grades, and particularly the high schools, all then springs up a terrible crop of headache, nervous prostration, hysterics, over-delicacy, anemia, heart palpitation, especially among the girls, and a harvest of other physical disorders which were very probably planted back in the primary departments and fostered in the higher rooms. The students are so overtrained that they often become good for nothing in the house, the parents say, and too late the mothers discover that they themselves become servants to the whimsical little ladies and gentlemen they have raised up who are more interested in textbooks than in practical household matters. Such are the ordinary complaints heard on every side, uttered by those who really have no fault to find with the substance of the instruction itself, some because they do not know, and some because it fairly represents their own ideas. The complaint becomes much more vital and definite when it proceeds from a parent who is an informed person with a conception of life at variance with that commonly accepted. I will instance that of a Philadelphia physician, who recently said to me, In my opinion, many of the most horrid effects of malformations which I have to deal with are the results of the long hours of sitting imposed on children in the schools. It is impossible for a healthy active creature to sit stiffly straight so many hours, no one can do it. They will inevitably twist and squirm themselves down into one position or another which throws the internal organs out of position, and which by iteration and reiteration results in a continuously accentuating deformity. Motherhood often becomes extremely painful and dangerous through the narrowing of the pelvis produced in early years of so much uncomfortable sitting. I believe that the sort of schooling which necessitates it should not begin till a child is fourteen years of age. He added also that the substance of our education should be such as would fit the person for the conditions and responsibilities he or she may reasonably be expected to encounter in life. Since the majority of boys and girls will most likely become fathers and mothers in the future, why does not our system of education take account of it, and instruct the children not in the Latin names of bones and muscles so much as in the practical functioning and hygiene of the body? Every teacher knows, and most of our parents know, that no subject is more carefully ignored by our textbooks on physiology than the reproductive system. A like book on zoology has far more to say about the reproduction of animals than is thought fit to be said by human beings to human beings about themselves, and yet upon such ignorance often depends the ruin of lives. Such is the criticism of an intelligent physician, himself the father of five children. It is a typical complaint of those who have to deal with the physical results of our school system. A still more forcible complaint is rising up from a class of parents who object, not only negatively but positively, to the instruction of the schools. These are saying, I do not want to have my children taught things which are positively untrue, nor truths which have been distorted to fit some one's political or religious conception. I do not want any sort of religion or politics to be put into his head. I want the accepted facts of natural science and discovery to be taught to him, insofar as they are within the grasp of his intellect. I do not want them coloured with the prejudice of any system. I want a school system which will be suited to his physical well-being. I want what he learns to become his by virtue of its appealing to his taste, his aptitude for experiment and proof. I do not want it to be a foreign stream pouring over his lips, like a brook over its bed, leaving nothing behind. I do not want him to be tortured with formal examinations, nor worried by credit marks with averages and percents and tenths of percents, which haunt him waking and sleeping as if they were the object of his efforts. And more than that and above all, I do not want him made an automaton. I do not want him to become abjectly obedient. I do not want his free initiative destroyed. I want him, by virtue of his education, to be well-equipped bodily and mentally to face life and its problems. This is my second point. That parents, conservatives and radicals criticise the school first, as the producer of unhealthy bodies, second as teaching matter inappropriate to life, or rather perhaps as not teaching what is appropriate to life, third as perverting truth to serve a political and religious system, and as putting an iron mould upon the will of youth, destroying all spontaneity and freedom of expression. The third critic is the teacher. Owing to his peculiarly dependent position, it is very, very seldom that any really vital criticism comes out of the mouth of an ordinary employee in the public school service. First, if he has any subversive ideas, he dares not voice them for fear of his job. Second, it is extremely unlikely that anyone with subversive ideas either will apply for the job, or having applied will get it. And third, if through some fortuitous combination of circumstances, a rebellious personage has smuggled himself into the camp, with the naive notion that he is going to work reforms in the system, he finds before long that the system is rather remoulding him. He falls into the routine prescribed, and before long ceases to struggle against it. Still, however conservative and system-logged teachers may be, they will all agree upon one criticism, viz that they have too much to do. That it is utterly impossible for them to do justice to every pupil. That with from thirty to fifty pupils, all depending upon one teacher for instruction, it is out of the question to give any single one sufficient attention, to say nothing of any special attention which his peculiar backwardness might require. He could do so only at the expense of injustice to the rest. And indeed the best teacher in the world could not attend properly to the mental needs of fifty children, nor even of thirty. Furthermore this overcrowding makes necessary the stiff regulation, the formal discipline, in the maintenance of which so much of the teacher's energy is wasted. The everlasting roll-call, the record of tardiness and absence, the eye for ever on the watch to see who is whispering, the ear for ever on the alert to catch the scraper of feet, the mischievous disturber, the irrepressible noise-maker. With such a divided and subdivided attention, how is it possible to teach? Here and there we find a teacher with original ideas, not of subjects to be taught, but of the means of teaching. Sometimes there is one who inwardly revolts at what he has to teach, and takes such means as he can to counteract the glorifications of political aggrandizement with which our geographies and histories are resilient. In general, however, public school teachers, like government clerks, believe very much in the system whereby they live. What they do find fault with, and what they have very much reason to find fault with, is not the school system, but the counteracting influences of bad homes. Teachers are often heard to say that they think they could do far better with the children if they had entire control of them, or, as they more commonly express themselves, if only their parents had some common sense. Lessons of order, neatness, cleanliness, and hygiene are often entirely thrown away, because the children regard them as statements to be memorised, not things to be practised. Those children whose mothers know nothing of ventilation, the necessity for exercise, the chemistry of food, and the functioning of the organs of the body, will forget instructions, because they are never made part of their lives. Which criticism is a sort of confirmation of that sage observation, if you want to reform a man, begin with his grandmother. So much for criticism. What now can we offer in the way of suggestions for reform? Speaking abstractly, I should say that the purpose of education should be to furnish a child with such fundamental knowledge and habits, as will preserve and strengthen his body, and make him a self-reliant social being, having an all-around acquaintance with the life which is to surround him, and an adaptability to circumstances which will render him able to meet varying conditions. But we are immediately confronted by certain practical queries, when we attempt to conceive such a school system. The fact is that the training of the body should be begun in very early childhood, and can never be rightly done in a city. No other animal than man ever conceives such a frightful apparatus for depriving its young of the primary rights of physical existence as the human city. The mass of our city children know very little of nature. What they have learned of it, through occasional picnics, excursions, visits in the country, etc., they have learned as a foreign thing, having little relation to themselves. Their natural habitat is one of lifeless brick and mortar, wire and iron, poles, pavements, and noise. Yet all this ought to be utterly foreign to children. This ought to be the thing visited once in a while, not lived in. There is no pure air in a city. It is all poisoned. Yet the first necessity of lunged animals, especially little ones, is pure air. Moreover, every child ought to know the names and ways of life of the things it eats, how to grow them, etc., how are gardens possible in a city? Every child should know trees, not as things he has read about, but as familiar presences in his life, which he recognises as quick as his eye greets them. He should know his oneness with nature, not through the medium of a theory, but through feeling it daily and hourly. He should know the birds by their songs and by the quick glimpse of them among the foliage, the insect in its home, the wildflower on its stalk, the fruit where it hangs. Can this be done in a city? It is the city that is wrong, and its creations can never be right. They may be improved. They can never be what they should. Let me quote Luther Burbank here. He expressed so well, and just in the tumultuous disorder and uncoordination dear to a child's soul, the early rites of children. Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, waterbugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb, brooks to wade in, water lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hayfields, pine cones, rocks to roll, sands, snakes, huckleberries, and hornets. And any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of his education. He is of opinion that until ten years of age these things should be the real educators of children, not books. I agree with him. But neither city homes nor city schools can give children these things. Furthermore, I believe that education should be integral, that the true school must combine physical and intellectual education from the beginning to the end. But I am confronted by the fact that this is impossible to the mass of the people, because of the economic condition in which we are all floundering. What is possible can be only a compromise. Physical education will go on in the home principally and intellectual education in the school. Something might be done to organize the teaching of parents, lectures and demonstrations at the public schools might be given weekly, in the evenings for parents by competent nurses or hygienists. But they would remain largely ineffective. Until the whole atrocious system of herding working people in close built cities by way of making them serviceable cog wheels in the capitalistic machine for grinding out rent and profit comes to an end, the physical education of children will remain at best a pathetic compromise. We have left to consider what may be done in the way of improving intellectual education. What is really necessary for a child to know which he has not taught now? And what is taught that is unnecessary? As to reading and writing there is no dispute, though there is much dispute about the way of doing it. But beyond that children should know things. From their earlier school days they should know the geography of their own locality, not rehearsing it from a book, but by going over the ground, having the relations of places explained to them, and by being shown how to model relief maps themselves. They should know the indications of the weather, being taught the use of instruments for measuring air pressures, temperatures, amount of sunshine, etc. They should know the special geology of their own locality, the nature of the soil and its products, to practical exhibition. They should be allowed to construct from clay, stone or brick such little buildings as they usually like to make, and from them the simple principles of geometry taught. You see every school needs a big yard and playrooms with tools in them, the use of which tools they should be taught. Arithmetic to be sure they need to know, but arithmetic connected with things. Let them learn fractions by cutting up things and putting them together, and not be bothered by abstractions running into the hundreds of thousands, the millions, which never in time will they use. And drop all that tiresome years work in interest and percent. If decimals are understood, everyone who has need will be amply able to work out systems of interest when necessary. Children should know the industrial life through which they live, into which they are probably going. They should see how cloth is woven, thread is spun, shoes are made, iron forged and wrought. Again not alone by written description, but by eyewitness. They should, as they grow older, learn the history of the arts of peace. What they do not need to know is so much of the details of the history of destruction. The general facts and results of wars are sufficient. They do not need to be impressed with the details of killings, which they sensibly forget and inevitably also. Moreover the revolting patriotism which is being inculcated, whereby children learn to be proud of their country, not for its contributions to the general enlightenment of humanity, but for its crimes against humanity, whereby they are taught to consider themselves, their country, their flag, their institutions, as things to be upheld and maintained, right or wrong, whereby the stupid and criminal life of the soldier is exalted as honourable, should be wholly omitted from the educational system. However, it is utterly impossible to expect that it will be, by anything short of general public sentiment against it, and at present such sentiment is for it. I have alluded before to the function of the statesmen in directing education. So long as schools are maintained by governments, the statesmen, not the true educator, will determine what sort of history is to be taught, and it will be what it is now, only continually growing worse. Political institutions must justify themselves to the young generation. They begin by training childish minds to believe that what they do is to be accepted, not criticised. A history becomes little better than a cataclysm of patriotic formulas in glorification of the state. Now there is no way of escaping this, for those who disapprove it, short of eliminating the statesmen, establishing voluntarily supported schools, wherein wholly different notions shall be taught, in which the spirit of teaching history shall be one of honest statement and fearless criticism, wherein the true image of war and the army, and all that it means, shall be honestly given. The really ideal school, which would not be a compromise, would be a boarding school built in the country, having a farm attached, and workshops where useful crafts might be learned, in daily connection with intellectual training. It presupposes teachers able to train little children to habits of health, order, and neatness, in the utmost detail, and yet not tyrants or rigid disciplinarians. In free contact with nature, the children would learn to use their limbs as nature meant, feel their intimate relationship with the growing life of other sorts, form a profound respect for work, and an estimate of the value of it, wish to become real doers in the world, and not mere gatherers in of other men's products, and with the respect for work, the appreciation of work, and the desire to work, will come the pride of the true workman, who will know how to maintain his dignity, and the dignity of what he does. At present the major portion of our working people are sorry they are working people, as they have good reason to be. They take little joy or pride in what they do. They consider themselves as less gifted and less valuable persons in society, than those who have amassed wealth, and by virtue of that amassment live upon their employees, or those who, by attaining book knowledge, have gotten out of the field of manual production, and lead an easier life. They educate their children in the hope that these, at least, may attain that easier existence without work, which has been beyond them. Even when such parents themselves have dreams of a reorganization of society, wherein all shall labour and all have leisure due, they impress upon the children that no one should be a common working man if he can help it. Working men are slaves, and it is not well to be a slave. Our radicals fail to realize that to accomplish the reorganization of work, it is necessary to have workers, and workers with the free spirit, the rebellious spirit, which will consider its own worth, and refuse to accept the slavish conditions of capitalism. These must be bred in schools where work is done, and done proudly, and in full consciousness of its value, where the dubious services of the capitalist will likewise be rated at their true worth, and no man reckons above another, unless he has done a greater social service. Where political institutions, and the politicians who operate them, judges, lawmakers, or executives, will be candidly criticized, and repudiated when justice dictates so, whether in the teaching of their past history or their present actions in current events. Whether the workers, upon whom so many drains are already made, will be able to establish and maintain such schools, is a question to be solved upon trial through their organizations. The question is, will you breed men for the service of the cannon, to be aimed at you in the hour of strikes and revolts, meant to uphold the machine which is crushing you? Or will you train them in the knowledge of the true worth of labour, and a determination to reorganize it, as it should be? End of Modern Educational Reform. Org. Sex Slavery by Voltaireen DeClaire. Night in a prison cell. A chair, a bed, a small wash stand, four blank walls, ghastly in the dim light from the corridor without, a narrow window barred and sunken in the stone, a grated door. Beyond its hideous iron latticework within the ghastly walls, a man. An old man, gray-haired and wrinkled, lame and suffering. There he sits, in his great loneliness, shut in front all the earth. There he walks, to and fro, within his measured space, apart from all he loves. There, for every night and five long years to come, he will walk alone, while the white age flakes drop upon his head, while the last years of the winter of life gather and pass, and his body draws near the ashes. Every night, for five long years to come, he will sit alone, this chattel slave, whose hard toll is taken by the state, and without recompense, save that the southern planter gave his negroes. Every night, he will sit there, so within those four white walls. Every night, for five long years to come, a suffering woman will be upon her bed. Longing, longing for the end of those three thousand days, longing for the kind face, the patient hand, that in so many years has never failed her. Every night, for five long years to come, the proud spirit must rebel, the loving heart must bleed, the broken home must be desecrated. As I am speaking now, as you are listening, there, within the cell of that accursed penitentiary, whose stones have soaked up the sufferings of so many victims, murdered as truly as any outside their walls, by that slow rot which eats away existence, inchmeal. As I am speaking now, as you are listening, there sits Moses Harman. Why? Why, when murder now is snocking in your streets, when dens of infamy are so thick within your city, that competition has forced down the price of prostitution to the level of the wages of your starving shirt makers? When robbers sit in state and national senate and house, when the boasted bulwark of our liberties, the elective franchise, has become a U.S. dice box, wherewith great gamblers play away your liberties? When debauchers of the worst type hold all your public offices and dine off the food of fools who support them, why then sits Moses Harman there within his prison cell? If he is so great a criminal, why is he not with the rest of the spawn of crime dining at Delmonico's or enjoying a trip to Europe? If he is so bad a man, why in the name of wonder did he ever get into the penitentiary? Oh, no, it is not because he has done any evil thing, but because he, a pure enthusiast, searching, searching always for the cause of misery of the kind which he loved with that broad love of which only the pure soul is capable, searched for the data of evil. And searching so, he found the vestibule of life to be a prison cell, the holiest and purest part of the temple of the body, if indeed one part can be holier or purer than another. The altar where the most devotional love in truth should be laid, he found this altar ravished, despoiled, trampled upon. He found little babies, helpless, voiceless little things, generated in lust, cursed with impure moral natures, cursed prenatally with the germs of disease, forced into the world to struggle and to suffer, to hate themselves, to hate their mothers for bearing them, to hate society and to be hated by it in return, a bane upon self and race, draining the leaves of crime. And he said, this felon with the stripes upon his body, let the mothers of the race go free, let the little children be pure love children, born of the mutual desire for parentage, let the manacles be broken from the shackled slave, that no more slaves be born, no more tyrants conceived. He looked, this obscenist, looked with clear eyes into this ill-got thing you call morality, sealed with the seal of marriage, and sought in it the consummation of immorality, impurity, and injustice. He beheld every married woman what she is, a bonded slave who takes her master's name, her master's bread, her master's commands, and serves her master's passion, who passes through the ordeal of pregnancy and the throes of travail at his dictation, not at her desire, who can control no property, not even her own body, without his consent, and from whose straining arms the children she bears may be torn at his pleasure or willed away while they are yet unborn. It is said the English language has a sweeter word than any other, home. But Moses Harmon looked beneath the word and saw the fact, a prison more horrible than that where he is sitting now, whose corridors radiate over all the earth and with so many cells that none may count them. Yes, our masters, the earth is a prison, the marriage-bed is a cell, women are the prisoners, and you are the keepers. He saw, this corruptionist, how in those cells are perpetrated such outrages as are enough to make the cold sweat stand upon the forehead, and the nails clench, and the teeth set, and the lips grow white in agony and hatred. And he saw, too, how from those cells might none come forth to break her fetters, how no slave dare cry out, how all these murders are done quietly beneath the shelter-shadow of home, and sanctified by the angelic benediction of a piece of paper, within the silent shade of a marriage certificate, adultery and rape, stalk freely and at case. Yes, for that is adultery, where a woman submits herself sexually to man without desire on her part for the sake of keeping him virtuous, keeping him at home, the women say. Well, if a man did not love me and respect himself enough to be virtuous without prostituting me, he might go and welcome, he has no virtue to keep. And that is rape, where a man forces himself sexually upon a woman, whether he is licensed by the marriage law to do it or not. And that is the vilest of all tyranny, where a man compels the woman he says he loves to endure the agony of bearing child that she does not want, and for whom, as is the rule rather than the exception, they cannot properly provide. It is worse than any other human oppression, it is fairly godlike. To the sexual tyrant there is no parallel upon earth, one must go to the skies to find a fiend who thrusts life upon his children, only to starve and curse and outcast and damn them. And only through the marriage law is such tyranny possible. The man who deceives a woman outside of marriage, and mind you, such a man will deceive in marriage too. May deny his own child if he is mean enough. He cannot tear it from her arms, he cannot touch it. The girl he wronged, thanks to your very pure and tender morality standard, may die in the street for want of food. He cannot force his hated presence upon her again. But his wife, gentlemen, his wife, the woman he respects so much that he consents to let her merge her individuality into his, lose her identity and become his chattel. His wife he may not only force unwelcome children upon, outrage at his own good pleasure, and keep as a general cheap and convenient piece of furniture. But if she does not get a divorce, and she cannot for such cause, he can follow her wherever she goes, come into her house, eat her food, force her into the cell, kill her by virtue of his sexual authority. And she has no redress, unless he is indiscreet enough to abuse her in some less brutal but unlicensed manner. I know a case in your city where a woman was followed so for ten years by her husband. I believe he finally developed grace enough to die. Please applaud him for the only decent thing he ever did. Oh, and it's not rare all this talk about the preservation of morality by marriage law. Oh, splendid carefulness to preserve that which you have not got. Oh, height and depth of purity which fears so much that the children will not know who their fathers are, because for sooth they must rely upon their mother's word instead of the hired certification of some priest of the church or the law. I wonder if the children would be improved to know what their fathers have done. I would rather, much rather not know who my father was than know he had been a tyrant to my mother. I would rather, much rather, be illegitimate according to the statutes of men, than illegitimate according to the unchanging law of nature. For what is it to be legitimate, born according to law? It is to be nine cases out of ten, the child of a man who acknowledges his fatherhood simply because he is forced to do so, and whose conception of virtue is realized by the statement that a woman's duty is to keep her husband at home, to be the child of a woman who cares more for the benediction of Mrs. Grundy than the simple honor of her lover's word, and conceives prostitution to be purity and duty when exacted of her by her husband. It is to have tyranny as your progenitor, and slavery as your prenatal cradle. It is to run the risk of unwelcome birth, legal constitutional weakness, morals corrupted before birth, possibly a murder instinct, the inheritance of excessive sexuality or no sexuality, either of which is disease. It is to have the value of a piece of paper, a rag from the tattered garments of the social contract, said above health, beauty, talent, or goodness. For I never yet had difficulty in obtaining the admission that illegitimate children are nearly always prettier and brighter than others, even from conservative women. And how supremely disgusting it is to see them look from their own puny, sickly, lust-born children upon whom he, the chain-traces of their own terrible servitude, look from these to some healthy, beautiful natural child and say, What a pity its mother wasn't virtuous. Never a word about their children's father's virtue. They know too much. Virtue, disease, stupidity, criminality, what an obscene thing virtue is. What is it to be illegitimate? To be despised or pitied by those whose spite or whose pity isn't worth the breath it takes to return it? To be possibly the child of some man contemptible enough to deceive a woman? The child of some woman whose chief crime was belief in the man she loved. To be free from the prenatal curse of a stave mother? To come into the world without the permission of any law-making set of tyrants who assumed a corner of the earth, and say what terms the unborn must make for the privilege of coming into existence? This is legitimacy and illegitimacy. Choose. The man who walks to and fro in his cell and lancing penitentiary tonight, this vicious man, said, The mothers of the race are lifting their dumb eyes to me, their scaled lips to me, their agonizing hearts to me. They are seeking, seeking for a voice. The unborn in their helplessness are pleading from their prisons, pleading for a voice. The criminals with the unseen ban upon their souls that has pushed them, pushed them to the vortex, out of their whirling hells are looking waiting for a voice. I will be their voice. I will unmask the outrages of the marriage bed. I will make known how criminals are born. I will make one outcry that shall be heard and let what will be be. He cried out through the letter of Dr. Markland that a young mother lacerated by unskillful surgery in the birth of her babe, but recovering from a subsequent successful operation, had been stabbed, remorselessly, cruelly, brutally stabbed, not with a knife, but with the procreative organ of her husband, stabbed to the doors of death, and yet there was no redress. And because he called a spade a spade, because he named that organ by its own name, so given in Webster's dictionary and in every medical journal in the country, because of this Moses Harmon walks to and fro in his cell tonight. He gave a concrete example of the effect of sex slavery, and for it he is imprisoned. It remains for us now to carry on the battle and lift the standard where they struck him down, to scatter, broadcast the knowledge of this crime of society against a man and the reason for it, to inquire into this vast system of licensed crime, its cause and its effect, broadly upon the race. The cause? Let woman ask herself, why am I the slave of man? Why is my brain said not to be the equal of his brain? Why is my work not paid equally with his? Why must my body be controlled by my husband? Why may he take my labor in the household, giving me in exchange what he deems fit? Why may he take my children from me? Will them away while yet unborn? Let every woman ask. There are two reasons why, and these ultimately reducible to a single principle, the authoritarian supreme power, God-idea, and its two instruments, the church that is the priest, and the state that is the legislators. From the birth of the church, out of the womb of fear and the fatherhood of ignorance, it is taught the inferiority of women. In one form or another, through the various mythical legends of the various mythical creeds, runs the undercurrent of the belief in the fall of man through the persuasion of woman, her subjective condition as punishment, her natural vileness, total depravity, etc. And from the days of Adam until now, the Christian church with which we live especially to deal has made woman the excuse, the scapegoat for the evil deeds of man. So thoroughly has this idea permeated society, that a number of those who have utterly repudiated the church are nevertheless soaked in this stupefying narcotic to true morality. So pickled is the male creation with the vinegar of authoritarianism, that even those who have gone further and repudiated tired state, still cling to the God, society as it is, still hug the old theological idea that they are to be heads of family, to that wonderful formula of simple proportion that man is the head of the woman, even as Christ is the head of the church. No longer than a week since, an anarchist said to me, I will be boss in my own house. A communist anarchist, if you please, who doesn't believe in my house. About a year ago a noted libertarian speaker said in my presence, that his sister, who possessed a fine voice and had joined a concert troupe, should stay at home with her children, that is her place. The old church idea. This man was a socialist, and since an anarchist, yet his highest idea for a woman was surf-hood to husband and children, in the present mockery called home. Stay at ironic-y malcontents, be patient, obedient, submissive, darn our socks, mend our shirts, wash our dishes, get our meals, wait on us and mind the children. Your fine voices are not to delight the public nor yourselves. Your inventive genius is not to work. Your fine art taste is not to be cultivated. Your business facilities are not to be developed. You made the great mistake of being born with them. Suffer for your folly. You are women, therefore, housekeepers, servants, waiters and child's nurses. At Mason in the sixth century, says August Babel, the father of the church met, and proposed the decision of the question, has woman a soul. Having ascertained that the permission to own a non-entity wasn't going to injure any of their parsnips, a small majority vote decided the momentous question in our favor. Now, holy fathers, it was a tolerably good scheme on your part to offer the reward of your pitiable salvation or damnation, odds in favor of the latter, as a bait for the hook of earthly submission. It wasn't a bad sop in those days of faith and ignorance, but fortunately four hundred years have made it stale. You tyrant radicals have no heaven to offer. You have no delightful chimeras in the form of merit cards. You have, save the mark, the respect, the good offices, the smiles of a slaveholder. This, in return for our chains. Thanks. The question of souls is old. We demand our bodies now. We are tired of promises. God is deaf and his church is our worst enemy. Against it we bring the charge of being the moral or immoral force which lies behind the tyranny of the state. And the state has divided the loaves and fishes with the church, the magistrates, like the priests taking marriage fees. The two fetters of authorities have gone into partnership in the business of granting patent rights to parents for the privilege of reproducing themselves. And the state cries as the church cried of old and cries now, See how we protect women. The state has done more. It has often been said to me by women with decent masters who had no idea of the outrageous practice on their less fortunate sisters. Why don't the wives leave? Why don't you run when your feet are chained together? Why don't you cry out when a gag is on your lips? Why don't you raise your hands above your head when they are pinned fast to your sides? Why don't you spend thousands of dollars when you have a dissent in your pocket? Why don't you go to the seashore or the mountains, you fools, scorching with city heat? If there is one thing more than another in this whole accursed tissue of false society which makes me angry, it is the asinine stupidity which with the true flam of impenetrable dullness says, Why don't the women leave? Will you tell me where they will go and what they shall do? When the state, the legislators, has given to itself the politicians the utter and absolute control of the opportunity to live? When through this precious monopoly already the market of labor is so overstocked that workmen and workwomen are cutting each other's throats for the dear privilege of serving their lords? When girls are shipped from Boston to the south and north, shipped in carloads like cattle to fill the dives of New Orleans or the lumber camped hells of my own state, Michigan? When seeing and hearing these things reported every day, the proper prudes exclaim, Why don't the women leave? They simply beggar the language of contempt. When America passed the fugitive slave law compelling men to catch their fellows more brutally than runaway dogs, Canada, aristocratic, unrepublican Canada, still stretched her arms to those who might reach her. But there is no refuge upon earth for the enslaved sex. Right where we are, there we must dig our trenches, and win or die. This, then, is the tyranny of the state. It denies to both woman and man the right to earn a living, and grants it as a privilege to a favoured few who for that favour must pay ninety percent toll to the grantors of it. These two things, the mind domination of the church and the body domination of the state, are the causes of sex slavery. First of all it is introduced into the world the constructed crime of obscenity. It has set up such a peculiar standard of morals that to speak the names of the sexual organs is to commit the most brutal outrage. It reminds me that in your city you have a street called Callow Hill. Once it was called Gallows Hill for the elevation to which it leads, now known as Cherry Hill. Has been the last touching place on earth for the feet of many a victim murdered by the law. But the sound of the word became too harsh, so they softened it, though the murders are still done, and the black shadow of the gallows still hangs on the city of brotherly love. Obscenity has done the same. It has placed virtue in the shell of an idea, and labelled all good which dwells within the sanction of law and respectable custom, and all bad which contravenes the usage of the shell. It has lowered the dignity of the human body below the level of all other animals. Who thinks a dog is impure or obscene because its body is not covered with suffocating and annoying clothes? What would you think of the meanness of a man who would put a skirt upon his horse and compel it to walk or run with such a thing impeding its limbs? Why, the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals would arrest him, take the beast from him, and he would be sent to a lunatic asylum for treatment on the score of an impure mind. And yet, gentlemen, you expect your wives, the creatures you say you love and respect, to wear the longest skirts and the highest-necked clothing in order to conceal the obscene human body. There is no society for the prevention of cruelty to women, and you yourselves, though a little better, look at the heat you wear in this roasting weather. How you curse your poor body with the wool you steal from the sheep. How you punish yourselves to sit in a crowded house with coats and vests on, because dead Madame Grindy is shocked at the vulgarity of shirt-sleeves or the naked arm. Look how the ideal of beauty has been marred by this obscenity notion. Divest yourselves of prejudice for once. Look at some fashion-slave woman, her waist surrounded by a high-bored fence called a corset, her shoulders and hips angular from the pressure above and below, her feet narrowest where they should be the widest, the body fettered by her everlasting prison skirt, her hair fastened tight enough to make her head ache and surmounted by a thing of neither sense nor beauty called a hat. Ten to one a hump upon her back like a dromedary. Look at her. And then imagine such a thing as that carved in marble. Fancy a statue in Fairmont Park with a corset and bustle on it. Picture to yourselves the image of the Equestrian. We are permitted to ride, providing we sit in a position ruinous to the horse, providing we wear a riding-habit long enough to hide the obscene human foot, weighed down by ten pounds of gravel to cheat the wind in its free blowing, so running the risk of disabling ourselves completely should accident throw us from the saddle. Think how we swim. We must even wear clothing in the water and run the gauntlet of derision if we dare battle in the surf minus stockings. Imagine a fish trying to make headway with the water-soaked flannel garment upon it. Nor are you yet content. The vile standard of obscenity even kills the little baby with clothes. The human race is murdered horribly in the name of dress. And in the name of purity what lies are told, what queer morality it has engendered. For fear of it you dare not tell your own children the truth about their birth. The most sacred of all functions, the creation of a human being, is a subject for the most miserable falsehood. When they come to you with a simple straightforward question, which they have a right to ask, you say, Don't ask such questions, or tell some silly hollow log story, or you explain the incomprehensibility by another, God, you say, God made you. You know you are lying when you say it. You know, or you ought to know, that the source of inquiry will not be damned up so. You know that what you could explain purely, reverently, rightly, if you have any purity in you, will be learned through many blind gropings, and that around it will be the cast the shadow thought of wrong, embryoed by your denial, and nurtured by this social opinion everywhere prevalent. If you do not know this, then you are blind to facts and deaf to experience. Think of the double social standard the enslavement of our sex has evolved. Women considering themselves pure and very moral will sneer at the street walker, yet admit to their homes the very men who victimized the street walker. Men at their best will pity the prostitute, while they themselves are the worst kind of prostitutes. Pity yourselves, gentlemen, you need it. How many times do you see where a man or woman has shot another through jealousy? The standard of purity has decided that it is right. It shows spirit. It is justifiable to murder a human being for doing exactly what you did yourself, love the same woman or same man, morality, honor, virtue, passing from the moral to the physical phase, take the statistics of any insane asylum, and you will find that out of the different classes unmarried women furnished the largest one. To preserve your cruel, vicious, indecent standard of purity, you drive your daughters insane while your wives are killed with excess, such as marriage. Don't take my word for it. Go through the report of any asylum or the annals of any graveyard. Look how your children grow up, taught from their earliest infancy to curb their love-natures, restrained at every turn. Your blasting lies would even blacken a child's kiss. Little girls must not be tomboyish, must not go barefoot, must not climb trees, must not learn to swim, must not do anything they desire to do, which Madame Grundy has decreed improper. Little boys are laughed at as effeminate, silly girl-boys if they want to make a patchwork or play with a doll. Then when they grow up, oh, men don't care for home or children as women do. Why should they when the deliberate effort of your life has been to crush that nature out of them? Women can't rough it like men. Train any animal or any plant as you train your girls, and it won't be able to rough it either. Now will somebody tell me why either sex should hold a corner on athletic sports, why any child should not have free use of its limbs? These are the effects of your purity standard, your marriage law. This is your work, look at it. Have your children dying under five years of age, your girls insane, your married women walking corpses, your men so bad that they themselves often admit that prostitution holds against purity a bond of indebtedness. This is the beautiful effect of your god, marriage, before which natural desire must abase and belie itself. Be proud of it. Now, for the remedy. It is in one word, the only word that ever brought equity anywhere, liberty. Centuries upon centuries of liberty is the only thing that will cause the disintegration and decay of these pastiferous ideas. Liberty was all that calmed the blood waves of religious persecution. You cannot cure a surf hood by any other substitution. Not for you to say, in this way shall the race love. Let the race alone. Will there not be atrocious crimes? Certainly. He is a fool who says there will not be. But you can't stop them by committing the arch crime and setting a block between the spokes of progress wheels. You will never get right until you start right. As for the final outcome, it matters not one iota. I have my ideal and it is very pure and very sacred to me. But yours, equally sacred, may be different, and we may both be wrong. But certain am I that with free contract, that form of sexual association will survive which is best adapted to time and place, thus producing the highest evolution of the type. Whether that shall be monogamy, variety, or promiscuity matters not to us. It is the business of the future, to which we dare not dictate. For freedom spoke Moses Harman, and for this he received the felons brand. For this he sits in his cell tonight. Whether it is possible that his sentence be shortened, we do not know. We can only try. Those who would help us try, let me ask you to put your signatures to this simple request for pardon addressed to Benjamin Harrison. To those who desire more fully to inform themselves before signing, I say, your conscientiousness is praiseworthy. Come to me at the close of the meeting and I will quote the exact language of the Marklin letter. To those extreme anarchists who cannot bend their dignity to ask pardon for an offense not committed and of an authority they cannot recognize, let me say, Moses Harman's back is bent, low bent by the brute force of the law, and though I would never ask anyone to bow for himself, I can ask it and easily ask it for him who fights the slaves battle. Your dignity is criminal. Every hour behind the bars is a seal to your partnership with Comstock. No one can hate petitions worse than I and no one has less faith in them than I, but for my champion I am willing to try any means that invades no other's rights, even though I have little hope in it. If beyond these there are those here tonight who have ever forced sexual servitude from a wife, those who have prostituted themselves in the name of virtue, those who have brought diseased, immoral, or own welcome children to the light without the means of provision for them, and yet will go from this hall and say, Moses Harman is an unclean man, or man rewarded by just punishment. Then to you, I say, and may the words ring deep within your ears until you die. Go on, drive your sheep to the shambles, crush that old, sick, crippled man beneath your juggernaut in the name of virtue, purity, and morality, do it. In the names of God, home, and heaven, do it. In the name of the Nazarene, who preach the golden rule, do it. In the names of justice, principle, and honor, do it. In the names of bravery and magnanimity, put yourself on the side of the robbers in the government halls, the murderer in the political convention, the libertine in public places, the whole brute force of the police, the constabulary, the court, and the penitentiary to persecute one poor old man who stood alone against your licensed crime. Do it. And if Moses Harman dies within your Kansas hell, be satisfied when you have murdered him. Kill him, and you hasten the day when the future shall bury you ten thousand fathoms deep beneath its curses. Kill him, and the stripes upon his prison clothes shall lash you like the knout. Kill him, and the insane shall glitter hate at you with their wild eyes, the unborn babes shall cry their blood upon you, and the graves that you have filled in the name of marriage shall yield food for a race that will pillory you until the memory of your atrocity has become a nameless ghost, flitting with the shades of Torquemada, Calvin and Jehovah over the horizon of the world. Would you smile to see him dead? Would you say, we are rid of this obscenist? Fools! The corpse would laugh at you from its cold eyelids, the motionless lips would mock, and the solemn hands, the pulseless, folded hands in their quietness would write the last indictment which neither time nor you can efface. Kill him, and you write his glory and your shame. Moses Harmon in his felon stripe stands far above you now, and Moses Harmon dead will live on immortal in the race he died to free. Kill him, end of sex slavery. The mirror reflection, the reflection of all that he has been, and is, the hinting foreflashing of something of what he may become. In so considering it, let it be understood that I speak of no particular form of literature, but the entire body of a people's expressed thought preserved either traditionally in writing or in print. The majority of lightly thinking, fairly red people who make use of the word literature rather easily, do so with a very indistinct idea of its content. To them, it usually means a certain limited form of human expression, chiefly works of the imagination, poetry, drama, the various forms of the novel, history, philosophy, science, or rather frowning names, stern second cousins, as it were, to the beguiling companions of their pleasant leisure hours, not legitimately literature. Biography, well, depends on who writes it. If it can be made so much like a work of fiction that the subject sketched serves as purposes of a fictive hero, why then maybe. To such talkers about literature, evidence of familiarity with it, and little to have one's opinions, thereon asked, and respected, are witnessed by the ability to run glibly off the names of the personages in the dramas of Ibsen, Bjornsson, Materlink, Hopman, or Shaw. In the novels of Gorky, Andréve, Tolstoy, Zola, Mopassant, Hardy, and the dozen or so of lesser lights who revolve these through the cycle of the magazine issues, not only do these same people thus limit the field of literature, at least in their ordinary conversation if you press them they will dubiously admit that the field may be extended, but they are also possessed of the notion that only one particular mode, even of fiction, is in fact the genuine thing, that this mode has not always been in the vogue, they are aware, and they allow other modes to have been literature in the past, as a sort of kindly concession to the past, a blanket indulgence to its unevolved state. At present, however, no indulgences are allowed. Whatever is not the mode is anthem. It is not literature at all. When confronted by the very great names of the past, which they neither consign to oblivion, nor patronized by toleration for their undeveloped condition, names which are names for all ages, names such as Shakespeare or Hugo, they complacently close their eyes to confrontations and swear that fundamentally, these men's works are in the modern mode, the accepted mode, the one and only enduring mode, the mode that they approve. Which is, I hear you ask, which is what they are pleased to call realism? If you wish to know how far they are obsessed by this notion, go pick yourself a quiet corner in some caffeine where light literature readers meet to make comparisons, and listen to the comments. Before very long voices will be getting loud about some character at present stalking across the pages of the magazines, or besturing itself among the latest ton of novel, and the dispute will be, does such a type exist? Of course he exists. He does not exist. He must exist. He cannot exist. Under such conditions, there are no such conditions. But be reasonable. You have not been in all places, and you cannot say there may not be such conditions. Supposing, all right, I will give you the conditions. All the same, no man would act so under any conditions. I swear I have seen such men. Impossible. What is there impossible about it? And the voices get louder and louder as the disputants proceed to pick the character to pieces, speech by speech, and action by action. Till nothing being left, each finally subsides somehow, each confirmed in his own opinion, each convinced that the main purpose of literature, realism, has either been served or not served by the author under discussion. To such disputants, literature, the mirror of man, means that only such literature as gives so-called absolutely faithful representations of life as it is demonstratively lived, is a genuine mirror. No author is to be considered worthy of a place, unless his works can be at least twisted to fit this conception. With some slight refinement of idea, in so far as it recognizes the obscure recesses of the mind, as entitled to representation as well as the externals, it corresponds to the one-time development of portrait painting, which esteemed it necessary to paint the exact number of pairs in other words, on all of whom Cromwells knows, in order to have a true likeness of him. As before I suggested, I do not, when I speak of literature as the mirror of man, have any such 12 by 18 mirror in view, nor the limitation of literature to any one form of it, to any one age of it, to any set of standard names, nor the limitation of man, to any preconceived notion of just what he may logically be allowed to do. The composite image we are seeking to find is an image wrought as much of his dreams of what he would like to be, as of his actual being. This is no true picture of man, which does not include his cravings for the impossible, as well as his daily performance of the possible. Indeed, the logical and calculable man, the man who under certain circumstances may be figured out to turn murder, and under others, saint, is hardly so interesting as the illogical being who upsets the calculation might be coming either, but something not at all predictable. The objects of my lecture then are these. To insist on a wider view of literature itself, then that generally accepted. To suggest to readers a more satisfactory way of considering what they read that that actually received, to point to certain phases of the human appearance reflected in the mirror, which are not generally noticed, but which I find interesting and suggested. You would think it very unreasonable, which not for anyone to insist, that because your highly polished glass, backed by a quick silver, gives back so clear and excellent an image, therefore the watery vision you catch of yourself in the shifting glancing ripples of a clear stream is not an image at all, with all the curious elongating and drifting and shortening back and breaking up into wavering circles, done by that unresting image. You know very certainly that is you, and if you look into the still waters of some summer pool or mountain rain cup, the image there almost as sharp-blind as that in your polished glass. Except for the vague tremor that seems to move under the water rather than on a surface, and suggest an ethereal something missing in the drawing of shadow. Yet that vision conjured in the water depth is you, surely you, nay, even more. That first image of you, you presumed wept as a child, you danced in the firelight and saw a mishap in darkness rising and falling along the wall and teasing mockery. That too was surely an image of you, an image of interception, not of reflection, a blur if they could see a horror from which you fled, streaking to your mother's arms, and yet it was the distorted outline of you. You grew familiar with it later, amused yourself with it, twisted your hands into strange positions to see what curious shapes they would form upon the wall, and made whole stories of the shadows. Long afterward you went back to them with deliberate and careful curiosity to see how the figures stumbled on by accident could be definitely produced at will according to the laws of interception. Even so, the first man images cast back from the blank wall of language are uncouth, ungraspable, vague, banked, menacing, to the man who saw them, frightful. Mankind produced this paradox. The early lights of literature were darkness. Later, these darknesses grew less fearsome. The child man began to jest with them, to multiply figures and send them chasing past each other over down the wall, with fresh glee at each newly created shadow sport. The wall at least became luminous, the shadow shining, and out of the old monosyllabilic horror of the primitive legend, out of man's fright and the rejection of his own soul, out of his wide stare at those terrific giants on the wall who suddenly, like shadow-like, shifting, became grotesque dwarfs, and mocking little beasts that danced and floated, ever most fearful because of their elusive emptiness. Out of this, bit by bit, grew the steady contemplation. The gradual effacement of fright, the feeling of power and amusement, and the sense of creative mastery, which, understanding the shadows, began to command them, till there arose all the beauty of fairy tales, and shining myths and singing legends. Now, anyone who desires to see in literature the most that there is in it, who desires to read not merely for the absorption of the moment, but for the sake of permanent impression, who wishes to have an idea of man, not only as he is now, but through the whole articulate record of his existence, who would know the thoughts of his infancy and the connected course of his development, and not one has any adequate conception of the glory of literature, unless he includes this much thought of his infancy and the connected course of his development. And no one has any adequate conception of the glory of literature unless he includes this much in it. Any such a reader, I say, must find among its most attractive pages the stories of early superstitions, the fictions of fear, the struggles of the race child's intelligence with overwhelming problems. Think of the ages that men saw the demon electricity riding the air. Think that even now they do not know what he is, and yet he played mightily with their daily lives for all those ages. Think how this staring savage was put face to face with world games which were spun and tossed around him, and compelled by the nature of his own activity to try to find an explanation to them. Think that most of us, if we were not the heritors of the ages that had passed since then, should be staggered and outbreathed, even now by all these lights and forms through which we move. And then turn to the record to those pathetic strivings of the frightened child with some tenderness and sympathy. Some saw him curiosity to know what men were able to think and feel when they let their lives as in a threatening wonderhouse where everything was an unknown, investing in crouching hostility. And never to be sure you know just how men will act or try to act under any conditions. If you have not read the record of what they have thought and fancied and done, and after you have read it, oh, then you will never be sure you know. For then you will realize that every man is a burial house, full of dead man's ghosts, and the ghosts of very, very ancient days are there, forever whispering in an ancient, ancient tongue of ancient passions and sires, and prompting many actions with the doer thereof can give himself no accounting for. There are two ways of reading these old stories, and as one who has gotten pleasure and profit, two from both. I would recommend them both to be used. The first way is to read yourself backwards into it as much as possible. Do not be a critic. On first reading, put the critic asleep. Let yourself seem to believe it, as did the people who wrote it. Read it aloud. If you are aware you will not annoy anybody, let the words sing themselves over your lips, and let they sung themselves over the lips of people who were dead so long ago. In their strange, far away homes with their vanished surroundings, sung themselves just as the wind sung through the echoing forests, and murmured back from the rocks, just as the songs slipped out of the birds' throats. You will find that half the beauty and the farce of the old-time legend lies in the bare sound of it. Far, far more is a dependent on the voice than any modern writings are, and surely the reason is simple enough. For it was not writing in its creation. Ancient literature addressed itself to the ear. Always, while modern literature speaks to the eye. If once you can get your ears washing with the sounds of the old language, as with the washing of the seas when you sit on the beach, or the lapping of the rivers when the bank of grass caresses you some final summer afternoon. It will be much easier for you to forget that you are the child of another age and thought. You will begin to luxuriate in fancies and prefigure in possibilities. Then you will know how it feels to be fancy-free, loosed from the chain of the possible. And once having felt, you will also understand better when you re-read with other intents. When you are ready for such re-reading, then be as critical as you please, which does not necessarily mean be condemnatory. It means rather take notice of all the generals in particulars, and question them. You will naturally pose yourself to the question, why is it that the bare sounds of these old stories are so much more vibrating, drum-like, shrilling at times, than any modern song of home? You will find that the mitigating influence of civilization, knowledge, moderation, creeping into expression, reducing flat, neutral, diluted sounds, watery words, so to speak, long drawn out, and glidingly inoffensive, and any modern writing remarkable for its strength. Will be found in free ponderance of barbaric yop, as Whitman called it. Fear creates sharp cries. The rebound of fear, which is bravado, produces drum-tones, roars, and growls. Unrestrained, passionate, howl, and wind notes, irregular, breaking shorts off. God carries a hammer, and love a spear. The hymn claims the love song clashes. Through those fear sounds, one feels again hot hearts. Those who precede colors accompanying sounds sense clean, cut lights streaking the night ground of these early morning pictures, sharp, hard, red, and yellows. It is our later world, which has produced green tintings not to be told from gray, nor gray from blue, nor anything from anything. In our fondness for smoothness and graduation, we have attained practical colorlessness. If it appears to you that I am talking nonsense, permit me to tell you it is because you have dulled your own powers of perception in seeking to become too intellectually appreciative. You have lost the power to fuel primitive things, try to recover it. Another source of interesting observation, especially in English literature of early writings, this time the I. It is emitted by everybody that has serviceable instrument for expressing definite sounds and expedience and comprehensive manner. English written language is a woeful failure. If any inventor of a theory of symbols should, would, or could have devised such ridiculous conception of spelling, such a hodgepodge of contradictory jumbles, he would have properly have been a judge to an insane asylum. And that every man who ever contrived an English spelling book, and every teacher who was obliged to worry this incongruous mess through the steadily revolting reason and memory process of children, his ability contrived. But man, English speaking man, has actually executed such conception. He probably executed it first and conceived it afterward, as most of our poor victims do when they start on that terrible blind road through the spelling book. Whether or no, the thing is here, and we have all too accepted and deal with it as best we may, sadly hoping that possibly the tenth generation from now may at least be rid of a few unnecessary ease. And since the thing is here, and is a mighty creation, and very indicative of how the human brain and large sections work, since we've got to put up with it anyway, we may as well, in revenge for its many inconveniences, get what little satisfaction we can out of it. And I find it one of the most delightful little sight of these mints of wandering through the field of old literature, while in the critical vein to stray around among the old stumps and crooked co-paths of English spelling. Much pleasure is to be derived from seeing what old words grew together and made new ones, what syllables or letters got lopped off or twisted, how silent letters became silent and why, from what older languages planted, and what its relatives are. It is much the same pleasure that one gets from trailing around through the narrow crooked streets and senseless meandering of London City. Everybody knows it's a foolish way to build a city, that all streets should be straight and wide and well-distributed. But since they are not, and London is too big for one's individual exertion to reform, one can sense is to take interest in explaining the crookedness. In mentally dissolving the great city into the hundred little villages which coalesced to make it, is marking the point as the place where Saint somebody or other Nelson prayed once and therefore had to be across the street here, and this other point as the place where the road swept round because martyrs were wanted to be burnt there, etc. etc. The trouble is that after a while one gets to love all that coin in a logical tangle, seeing always the thousand years of history in it, and so one senses actually become officiated enough to permit him to love the outrageous English spelling because of the features of men's souls that are imagined therein. When I look at the word laugh, I fancy I hear the joyous deep guttural ga ga ga of the old Saxon who died long before the foreign gaffed on the English stock softened the gun to a really one must become more patient with the unsystem, knowing how it grew and feeling that this is the way of man, the way he always grows, not as he ought, but as he can. I have spoken of forms, word sounds, word symbols, as to the spirit of those early writings, full of inarticulate religious sentiment, emotions so strong they burst from the outer rear's throat, one might almost say in barks, gloomy and foreboding, these gradually changing to more lightsome fancies, beauty, delicacy, airiness taking their place, as in the fairy tales and folk songs of the people, wherein the deeds of supernatural are sported with, and it becomes evident that love and winsomeness are usurping the kingdom of power and fear. Through all we are compelled to observe one constant tendency of a human mind, the desire to free itself from some conditions, to be what it is not, to represent itself as something beyond its powers of accomplishment. In their minds men have wings and breathe and swam on land, and ate air, and thrived in deserts, and walked through seas, and gathered roses off icebergs, and collected frozen dew off the trails of sunbeams, dispersed mountains with mustard seeds of faith, and climbed into solid caves under the rainbow, did everything which was impossible for them to do. It is in fact this imaginative faculty which has forrun the accomplishments of science while under the influence of practical experiment and the extension of knowledge such dreams have passed away. This much remains and will long, long remain in human kind, covered over and shamefacely concealed as much as may be, that men perpetually conceive themselves as chrysalid heroes and wonder-worders, and under strained vocation, this element crops out in their actions, making them do all manner of curious things which the standard setters of realism will declare ugly, illogical, and impossible. Often it is a commonest man who do them. I have a fondness for realism myself, at least I have a very wicked feeling towards what is called symbolism in various other things which I don't understand, but as the unrealists, the exaggeratists, the whatever you call them express what I believe to be a very permanent characteristic of humankind. As evidenced in all the traces of its work, I think they probably give quite as true reflections of man's soul as the present favorites. These early literatures, most of which have, of course, been lost, were the embryos of our more imposing creations, and it is a pleasant and instructive thing to follow the unfolding and monster tales of two great religious literatures. To compare them and see how the same few simple figures, either transplanted or spontaneously produced at different points, evolved into all manner of creators, redeemers, and miracles in the various altered habits. No one can so thoroughly appreciate what is in the face of a man turned up on the prayer, as who has followed the evolution of the black monster up to that personal conception of God, prettily called by Quakers, the inner light. Fairy tales, on the other hand, have evolved into allegories and dramas. First the dramas of the sky, now the dramas of the earth. Tales of sexual exploits have become novels, novelettes, short stories, sketches, a many expression and countenance of man. The old heroic legend and the hero is always the next born after the monster in the far back drawn days is the linear progenitor of history. History which was first the glorification of a warrior and his eight, then the story of kings, courts, and intrigues, now mostly the report of the deeds of nations, in their ugly ways, and to become the record of what people have done in their more amiable moments. The record of the conquests of peace, how men have lived and labored, dug and built, hewn and cleared, garden and reforest, organized and cooperated, manufactured and used, educated and amused themselves. Those of us who aspire to become more or less the suggesters of social chance are greatly at a loss. If we do not know the face of man as reflected in history, and I mean as much the reflection of the minds of historians, as seen in their histories as the reflection of the minds of others they sought to give, not so much in the direct expression of their opinions either, as in the choice of what they thought it worth while to try to stamp the perpetuity upon. When we read in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, these items which are characteristic of the 80, 611. This year, Syginals succeeded to the government in West 6, and held in 13 winters. Syginals was the son of Seol, Seol of Kutha, Kutha of Sivrik. And then, 614. This year, Syginals and Keohom fought at Bamton and slew 2046 of the Welsh. And then, 678. This year appeared the common star in August, and shown every morning during three months like a sunbeam. Bishop Wilfred, being driven from his bishophood by Keam Evereth, two bishops were consecrated in his stead. When we read these, we have not any very adequate conception of what the Anglo-Saxon people were doing. But we have a very striking and lasting impression of what the only man who tried to write history at all in that period of English existence thought it was worthwhile to see. Syginals was the son of Seol, and he of Kutha, and Kutha, a Sivrik. It reads considerably like a Stockraiser's pedigree book. The trouble is, we have no particular notion of Sivrik. Probably, if we went back, we should find he was the son of somebody. But at any rate, he had a grandson, and the grandson was a king. And the chronicler therefore recorded him. Nothing happened for three years. And then the chronicler records that two kings fought and slew 2046 men. Then comes the momentous year 678, when a comet appeared and a bishop lost his job. No doubt the comet foretold for loss. There are no records of when shoemakers lost their jobs, that I know, nor how many shoemakers were put in their places. And I imagine it would have been at least as interesting for us to know as little matter of Bishop Wilfred. But the chronicler did not think so. He preserved the bishop's troubles. No doubt he did just what the shoemakers at the time would also have done, providing they had also been chroniclers. It is a fair sample of what was in man's minds as important. If anyone fancies that this disposition was quite vanished, let him pick up any ordinary history, and see how many pages, relatively, are devoted to the doings of person's intent on slaying, and those intent on peaceful occupation, and how many times we are told that certain politicians lost their jobs, and how we are not told anything about the ordinary people losing their jobs. And then reflect whether the old face of man in the history is quite another face yet. Biography as a sort of second offspring of the hero legend is another revelation. When we read it, not only to know it's subject, but to know it's writer, the standpoint from which he values another man's life. Ordinarily, there's a great deal of synagogues, the son of Kuta, the son of Simerik in it, and a great deal of emphasis upon the man as an individual phenomenon, when really he would be more interesting and more comprehensible left in connection with the series of phenomena of which he was part. As an example of what, to me, is a perfect biography, I instanced Conway's life of Thomas Paine, itself a valuable history, but it is not so correct a mirror of the general attitude of biographers and readers of biography as Bosworth's life of Johnson, except insofar as it indicates that the great face in the glass is changing. It is rather the type of what biography is becoming than what it has been or is. There are two divisions of literature which are generally named in one breath, and are certainly closely connected, and yet the one came to highly perfect forms long, long ago, while the other is properly speaking very young. And for all that, the older is the handmaid of the younger. I mean the literatures of philosophy and science. Philosophy is simply the coordination of the sciences, the formulation of the general, and related principles deduced from the collection on orderly arrangement of the facts existence. Yet man had rich literatures and philosophy, while his knowledge of facts was yet so extreme limited as hardly to be worth writing a book about. None of the appearances of the man's soul is more interesting than that reflected in the continuous succession of philosophies he has poured out. Let him who meets them read them always twice. First simply to know and grasp what is said to become familiar with the idea as it has formed itself in the minds of those who conceived it. Second, for the sake of figuring out restless activity of brain, the positive need of the mind under all conditions to formulate what knowledge it has or thinks it has into some sort of connected whole. This is one of the most pronounced and permanent features seen in the mirror. The positive refusal of the mind to accept the isolation of existences. Don't matter how far apart they lag, man proceeds to spin connecting threads about. The woven texture is often comical enough, but the weaver is just as positively revealed in the cobwebs of ancient philosophy as in the reasoning Herbert Spencer. Concerning the literature of science itself in strict terms, I should be very presumptuous to speak of it, because I know extremely little about it, but of those general popularizations of it, which we have seen in some of the works of Hegel, Darwin, and their similars, I should say that beyond the important information they contain in themselves, which surely no one can afford to be in ignorance of, they present the most transformed reflection of man which any literature gives. Their words are cold, colorless, burdened with the labor of exactness, machine-like, sustained, uncompromising, careless, of effect. The spirit they embody is like unto them. They offer the image of man's soul in the time, while imagination is an abyss, reason and ascendant. This coldness and quietness sound the doom of poetry. A people which shall be fully permeated with the spirit and word of science will never conceive great poems. They will never be overcome long enough at a time, by their wonder and admiration, by their primitive impulses, by their power of simple impression. To think or to speak poetically, they will never see trees as impaled giants any more. They will see them as evolved descendants of vital plasm. Dew-drops are no more than the jewels of the fairies. They are the produce of condensation under given atmospheric conditions. Singing stones are not the prisons of honest spirits, but problems in the acoustics. The basins of forts are not the track of the anger of thorns, but the pathways of glaciation. The roar and blaze and vomit of edna are not the rebellion of titan, but the explosion of so and so many million cubic feet of gas. The comet shall no more be the herald of the wrath of heaven. It is an emulous body revolving in the elliptical orbit of great elongation. Love, love, love will not be the wound of cupid, but the manifestation of the universal reproductive instincts. No, the great poems of the world have been produced. They have sung their song and gone their way. Imagination remains to us, but we can be mixed and tamed and calmed, verses we shall have, and many fragments, fragments of beauty and power. But never again the thunder-roll of the mighty early song. We have the benefits of word. Science is still bulking here, but not far along. We shall soon have madmen turned inside out, and their madness painstakingly reduced to so and so many, excessive or deficient nerve vibrations per second, then no more, of pose raven and ipsons brand. I have said that I intend to indicate a wider concept of literature than that generally allowed. So far I have not done it. At least all that I have dealt with is usually mentioned in works on literature, but I wish now to maintain, and some very lowly forms of written expression must be included in literature, always remembering that I am seeking the complete composite of man's soul. Here, then, I include in literature, beside what I have spoken on, not only in standard novels, stories, sketches, travels, and magazine essays of all sorts, but the poorest paltry is to dime novel, detective story, daily newspaper report, baseball game account, and splash advertisement. Oh, what a charming picture of ourselves we see therein. And a faithful one, mind you. Think what a speaking likeness of ourselves was the report of national, international, racial importance, the Jeffries-Johnson fight. Nay, I am not laughing. The people of the future are going to look back at the record a thousand years from now and say, this is what interested men in the year 1910. I wonder which will appear in most ludicrous then. Bishop Wilfred injects a position with a common star, or the destiny of the white race put in jeopardy by a pugilistic contest between one white and one black man. Oh, the bated breath, the expected eyes, the inbitten lip, the taut muscles, the riveted attention of hundreds of thousands of people watching the great scientific combat. I wonder whether the year 3000 will admire it more or less than the song of Beowulf and the battle of Bruna Berth. Consider the soul reflected on the sporting page. Oh, how mercilessly and correct it is. Consider the soul reflected on the advertising page. Oh, the consumer liar that strides across it. Oh, the gull, the civilton. The would-be-getter of something from nothing that was existence in urges. Yay, commercial man has set his image therein. Let him regard himself when he gets time. And the body of our reformed literature, which really reflects the very best social aspirations of men. How prodigal in the words it is. How indefinite in ideas. How generous of brotherhood and sisterhood. In the large. How cherry in the practice. Do we not appear therein as curious little dwarves who have somehow gotten big heads? Mites gesticulating at the stars and imagining they are afraid because they too. I would not discourage any comrade in line in the social struggle, but sometimes it is a wholesome thing to reconsider our sight. A word in defense of the silly story. Let us not forget that lowly minds have lowly needs. And the mass of minds are lowly. And have a right to such gratification as is not beyond their comprehension. So long as I do not have to read those stories, I feel quite glad for the sake of those who are not able to want better that such gratification is not denied them. I would not wish to frown the silly story out of existence so long as it is a veritable expression of many people's need. There are those who have only learned the art of reading at all because of the foolish story. And quite in the sideway, I learned the other day through the grave assertion of a physician that the ability to read even these, whereby some little refinement of conception is introduced into the idea of love, is one of the restraining influences upon sexual degradation common among poor and ignorant young women. The face of man revealed in them is therefore not altogether without charm. Though it may look foolish to us, I said there were some appearances in the mirror not generally remarked. But which to me are suggested. One of these is the evident delight of the human soul in smut. In the older literature, these things are either badly set down as law and cursing as occasionally in the Bible, or they are clothed and mixed with sprightly imaginations, as in the tales of Bocacio and Chaucer, or they are thinly veiled with a possible modest meaning, as in the puns of the Shakespearean period. But in our day, they compose the subterranean literature of themselves. Like segregated harlots among books, should I say that I blush for the face of man, I ought to perhaps, but I do not. All I say is, the thing is there, a very real, a very persistent image in the glass. No one who looks straight into it can avoid seeing it. Mixed with the humerus, as it often rather usually is, it seems to be one of the normal expressions of normal men. We deceive ourselves greatly if we fancy that man has become purified of such imaginations because they are not used openly in modern dramas and stories. As they were in older ones. It may be dangerous to say it, but I believe from evidence of literature as a whole, that a moderate amount of amusement in smut is a saving balance in the psychology of nearly every man and woman. A sign of anchorage and robust desanity, which takes things as they are and laughs at them. I believe it is a much more wholesome appearance than that betrayed in our fever bed stories and sketches which deal with the abnormalities of men, which are growing more and more in vogue in spite of our cry about realism. Personally, I am more interested in the abnormalities, which I find very fascinating. And I am very eager to know whether they will prove to be the result of the abnormal conditions of life which modern man has created for himself in his tampering with the forces of nature, his strenuous industrial existence, his turning of night and today, his whirling himself over the world at a pace not at all in conformity with his native powers of locomotion and other matters in accordance. Or will they prove to be the revenge of the damped up, crypt, capped and confined imagination, which can no longer exert itself upon externals? Since the investigating man has explained and mastered these, or is doing so, it now turns in to wreak frightful wreck upon the mind itself. At any rate, the fact is that we have some very curious appearances in the mirror just now. Mad men explaining their own matters, diseased men picking apart their own diseases, perverted men analyzing their own perversions, anything, everything, but sane and normal men. Does it mean that in our day there is nothing interesting in good health, in well-ordered lives? Or does it mean that the rarest thing in the world is the so-called normal man whom tacit consent assumes to be the commonest? That everybody, while outwardly wearing a mask of reputable common sense, is within a raging conglomeration of psychic elements that hurl themselves on one another like hissing flames? Or does it mean simply that the most powerful raiders are themselves diseased and can only paint disease? I put these questions and do not presume to answer them. I point to the mirror, the Ibsen drama, the Andrei of the story, the Maeter Link poem, the art side badge novel, and I say the image is there. Explain it as you can. For the rest, let me recall to you what I told you was my intent. First, to insist on a more inclusive view of literature, you see I would have it extended both up and down, down even to the advertisements, the sporting page, and the surreptitious anecdote, up to the fullest and most comprehensive statements of the works of reason. Second, to suggest that readers acquire the habit of reading twice, or at least with a double intent. When serious literature is to be considered, I would insist actually reading twice. But of course, it would be both impractical and undesirable to apply such a method to most of the print we look at. Those who are confirmed in the habits of would-be critics will have the greatest trouble in learning to read a book from the simple man's standpoint. And yet no one can ever form a genuine appreciation of a work who has not first forgotten that he is a critic and allowed himself to be carried away into the events of personalities depicted therein. In that first reading, also, one should train himself to feel and hear the music of language, this great instrument which men have jointly built and out of which come great organ tones and trumpet calls and thin flute notes, sweeping and wailing and articulate storm, a conjuring key whereby all the passions of the dead, the millions of the dead, have given to the living the power to call their ghosts out of the grave and make them walk. Yay, every word is the mystic embodiment of a thousand years of vanished passion, hope, desire, and thought. All that battled through the living figures turned to dust ashes long ago. Train your ears to hear the song. It helps to feel what the writer felt. And after that, read critically, with one eye on the page, so to speak, and the other on the reflection in the mirror, looking for the mind behind the work, the things which interested the author and those who wrote for them. Third, to suggest inquiry into the curious paradox, the people of the most highly evolved scientific and mechanical age, taking a special delight in psychic abnormalities and morbidities, whereby the most utterly unreasonable fictive creation becomes the greatest center of curiosity and attraction to the children of reason. A mirror means is literature, wherein man sees all faces of himself, lengthened here, wide into there, distorted in another place, restored again to due proportion, with every possible expression on his face, from abjectness to heroic daring, from starting terrors, icy courage, from love to hate, and back again to worship, from the almost sublime down to the altogether grotesque, now giant, now dwarf, but always with one persistent character. His super curiosity to see himself. End of literature, The Mirror of Man.