three or four in common, with the accompanying and inevitable weariness of each other's constant society, for those whose income is so limited as to shut them out from most comforts, physical and intellectual, these warmed, well-lighted, and well-furnished rooms offer an opening into the world which they see around them. The pecuniary resources of these patient workers are in many cases pitifully small. It has been proposed to open soon at Twilight Park, in the Catskills, a boarding-house for these students, with rates adapted to their slender purses; and, in this city, it is even hoped by some of those most interested in the training of women in industrial design to erect a large apartment-house, with a restaurant attached, near the building in which the Art Students' League is established, for the accommodation of women students. Various methods have been adopted to lighten this burden of poverty, both by the young aspirants themselves and by their friends, both at home and abroad, in crowded cities and in small summer settlements, and to these the young woman lends herself with that general cheerfulness, that lively interest in details and ability to make the most of small things, which give her in many cases an advantage over the man. The little club in Grace House, for her benefit exclusively, is similar in some respects to that of the Art Students' Association in Paris, organized five years ago, for students of both sexes, with reading-rooms, periodicals, entertainments, etc.; the social life of the school" of the Chicago Art Institute is fostered by the organization among the pupils of scientific, artistic, and literary clubs. It is believed that such organizations among the students themselves are important adjuncts to the symmetrical development of the scientist, the artist, and the scholar." The young women of Mr. Chase's famous Shinnecock summer school early came into the enjoyment of a large house on the hills provided for their special amusement as an Art Club in which to hold fancy-dress balls, witch parties, and other diversions; and various manifestations of this feminine capacity for relaxation will be recalled by innumerable visitors to picturesque summer-resorts in the land where these disciples have gathered, generally under the lead of some masculine preceptor.. In one very paintable Connecticut village a real Japanese princeling, who was studying Western art methods, furnished for two or three sum mers deep and abiding joy to all the summer maids. The bedazzled scorn of the native rustics for these “purple girls " (as they have been called when led by a distinguished impressionistic landscape-painter) has only served to contribute to this holiday hilarity. The delights of small afternoon teas in very small housekeeping apartments are not monopolized by the women students, at home and abroad, but they are usually more cheerful and appropriate when not under masculine dispensation. Loftier flights are furnished by the issuing of small illustrated periodicals, dealing with art topics-a favorite enterprise with a few of the larger schools, one of the latest of these being a quarterly, The Quarto, by the pupils of the Slade School in England. The workers in Paris have until very recently enjoyed the great advantage over those in London of finding all the galleries and museums open on Sunday. The object of the Art Students' League of this city, as set forth in its first circular in June, 1875, was declared to be, not only “the attainment on the part of its members of a higher development in art culture," but also "the encouragement of a spirit of unselfishness and true friendship, mutual help in study, and sympathy and practical assistance (if need be) in time of sickness and trouble." Unhappily, the burden of intelligent testimony, from those having the widest experience as instructors, seems to demonstrate the unwelcome fact that in very many cases it is but a mistaken kindness to encourage the study of art by educated young girls, as, indeed, it is but too often with their masculine fellow-students. Against this, of course, are to be set off the benefits that the community, or, at least, her community, may derive from the well-directed training of even an unsuecessful art student. Whether triumphant or disappointed, each would-be artist returns home sooner or later as a missionary of better culture, and, as Mr. Van Dyke has said, "they are all jesuitical in their advocacy of art." In this missionary work, the pupils from the industrial art schools are possibly even more valuable; it is Mr. Grant Allen's opinion, apropos of the Home Arts and Industries Association, that “in order to arouse artistic feeling in the people at large, they must all make something with their own hands themselves." Dürer's advice to certain young artists, to take counsel only of a man who can explain his meaning with his hand," is applicable also to the artistic industries. The necessary encouragement of a due sense of the dignity and value of the latter branches need not, however, always be carried as far as the directors of the School of Industrial Art of the Pennsylvania Museum did recently when they declined to accept a free scholarship from the Academy of Fine Arts. It is but natural that in the exercise of some of the many branches of applied art, openings will be found for many more of these workers with little talent than in the more restricted professions of the painters, sculptors, and illustrators. The oft-quoted impossibility of really teaching art adds to the difficulties of the student who brings to his tasks nothing more valuable than a strong desire. Even in the imparting of technical methods of expression, in the recognition of the danger that the preceptor may smother the pupil's struggling individuality under his own, there are the widest divergings. (Possibly one of the young woman's special disadvantages may be found in her greater proneness to accept masculine leads.) The most highly valued principles have been set aside in course of time as valueless, and the educational institutes vary as much as those of any other profession. The long course of assaults from outside which those of the Beaux-Arts and of the Royal Academy have sustained is matter of history, and that bulwark of British Art, the South Kensington, has lately been discovered to be so completely under the management of the "officers and ex-officers of the Royal Engineers" that its administration and its productions have been declared, on very good authority, to be "a very by-word in centres of artistic learning on the Continent." Two of these fountains of instruction which are accepted as embodying the latest and most valuable principles, have been concerned with this great question of the female student. The school of Professor Herkomer, R.A., which enjoys a high reputation in Great Britain as one in which the “course of training is wholly opposed to the idea of forcing the neophyte into a groove in the way of a particular line of thought or action," as one in which" the learner should find his own identity,'" was by no means conducted on these high principles in the first few years after its founding in 1883. So strongly was the individuality of the Bavarian - British master impressed upon everything that some of the more intelligent and better equipped of the female scholars revolted. All visits to the art galleries of the metropolis, fifteen miles away, were discouraged on the grounds that "it would do them no good." On the oak panellings of the walls of the school-house was a singular absence of reproductions of works of art of any kind; in the "gallery" were some of the master's pictures and a cast of Thornycroft's "Teucer." Strict discipline was maintained, and attendance was expected at all the classes from life and in painting, morning, afternoon, and evening. Mr. Cobden-Sanderson, the English bookbinder, is a convert to the Socialistic doctrines of William Morris and Walter Crane, and believes that the salvation of humanity is to be found in handicraft. Led by these principles, he abandoned his profession of barrister, and took up with that of a maker of books, in the treatment of the covers of which especially he has endeavored to demonstrate a new artistic individuality. If we may believe Mr. Brander Matthews, he is "one of the most characteristic personalities in the strange struggle for artistic freedom now going on in England." His theory of ornament is defined as designs" composed of a few simple tools, arranged upon a geometrical plan of equal simplicity, the figured tools being directly copied from natural forms," and the general effect sought being one of great richness and elaboration." His methods and principles, somewhat modified, have been brought to this country by his only American pupil, Miss Nordhoff, who, with a strong feeling for decorative beauty, has found in this, with us, little worked field success in conveying by skilful handicraft artistic aspirations suggested as much as possible by the book itself. The joy of working with your own hands is indeed very sincere-as so many of the explorers of the lofty and windswept regions of pure intellect have testified when they came down; and it is this joy of material creation, of making something out of nothing like a very little god, that holds steadily to their work through poverty and great discouragement so many hundreds of men and women. 64 VOL. XXII-12 ABOUT THE WORLD T O THE RESCUE OF THE FUR SEALS Paris arbitration ☞ had been absolutely nil for any effective relief; the pelagic sealers, Russian, English, and American, have continued to slaughter the helpless beasts, and pelagic sealing has accounted for the death of some 1,100,000 animals-for with the 400,000 females killed at sea perished not only their unborn young, but 400,000 nursing pups that were left without food by the death of their mothers. Last year President Jordan, of Leland Stanford University, was appointed by President Cleveland to make a thorough and scientific investigation of the habits of the herds, and the causes of their rapid decline, and the results of the study are unusually interesting, especially in the charmingly simple and effective remedy which President Jordan proposes. After spending last summer in the northwest waters in a minute investigation of the animals, he has made an official report which places the entire responsibility for the decline of the herds on the pelagic hunters. Not only does land-killing fail to account for the decrease, but President Jordan thinks that it would actually operate to the advantage of the herds in reducing the natural mortality, provided only the bachelor seals were killed. To insure immunity for the mothers, President Jordan proposes the striking plan of branding the females so thoroughly that they will be practically unavailable for skinhunters' purposes. He and his staff made a careful practical test of this method, and found that heavy and ineffaceable brands could be burned across the back of the mother seal, in the parts where the skin is most valuable, without hurting or seriously incommoding the animal. One is accustomed to think of seals as wary animals inhabiting the Arctic fastnesses of the northern waters, and anyone who has tried his hand at making pot shots with a rifle among the casual phoca of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland waters may suspect the seriousness of a proposal to catch, brand, and turn loose practically every female seal in Alaskan waters. But President Jordan knows exactly what he is talking about. He and his aids branded more than three hundred and fifty animals in their experiments, and he calls into evidence the practice of giving the Aleutian Indians five thousand seals each year for food-a measure which involved the herding of about ten thousand animals in order that the quota of bachelors might be separated and killed. So much for the mothers and the more important sect; but President Jordan is not inclined to turn the noble army of bachelors over to the tender mercies of the sea-hunters. He thinks that it would be feasible to herd up, say 50,000 bachelors in July, on St. Paul's or St. George's Islands, and keep them ienced in during August. Since the climatic conditions of Behring Sea confine active operations in the open waters to these months, the poachers would be at a loss for game sufficient to justify their rather costly paraphernalia, with such a number of animals subtracted from the field, and with the females unmarketable, and the industry must die. President McKinley has appointed ex-Secretary Foster and Hon. Charles S. Hamlin to do what can be THE done this year, and this plan of President Jordan's should furnish the basis of such active precautions as actually to give the seal species a chance. It is thought that the two specific measures which we have outlined will not only stop the radical decrease in the herds, but will actually lead them to increase steadily to something like their former abundance. Τ QUEENS JUBILEE HACKERAY ventured to say that the celebration of the Princess Alexandra's marriage was the greatest and most impressive fète ever planned in honor of a woman. If so, it is very safe to claim a superlative distinction for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, which is being cheered, preached, spoken, burnt, marched, and cannonaded as this magazine leaves the presses. The proposals for brilliant ideas of glorification which have agitated the epistolary friends of the Times during the past six months have run through all phases of human interest from a monster petition for the oblivion of the chimney-pot hat, to the total abolition of slavery in her Majesty's dominions. Another plan energetically put forward, founded an academy of philologists in honor of this sixtieth year of the Queen's reign, and composed of the most eminent scientists, whose devoir should be to look after the Queen's English, to see that its essential purity is preserved, and to weed out corrupting influences-in short, to preserve the English tongue, which, according to the London and Parisian essayists, is in danger of extinction along with the fur seals. The imaginary picture of such a body dealing with Walt Whitman is not without elements of humor. A fourth and very pretty scheme, emanating from some more poetic quality of loyalty, suggested that on the great Jubilee Day all rural and suburban England should repair to its fields, its trees, its mountains, its vales, its lakes, and its rivers, to choose the most beautiful of these works of nature, whether they be Exmoor Heath or only a lonely yew-tree, and bestow on them the Queen's name, to hold forever. These are samples of the running fire of commemorative plans, which are suggestions not of irresponsible blatherskites and confirmed "Constant Readers," but of the most notable men in the kingdom. Back of them is a steady volley of local charitable efforts, headed by the plan of the Prince of Wales to raise a permanent endowment fund of £150,000 a year for the London Hospitals. With this suggestion as a fillip, there is surely not a benevolent society in England which has neglected this occasion to get itself out of debt or add to its income. If this department were given over entirely to a mere enumeration of their names, without a word of comment, there would be too little space to print the list, especially as many of the titles read like the “Queen Victoria Jubilee Nursing Institute Commemoration Fund," which had, months before the event, some hundreds of thousands of dollars to its credit. Innumerable towns are preparing to celebrate the occasion by clearing away slums, by erecting statues, by having art and artisan exhibitions, by erecting public buildings, endowing technical schools, renewing churches, establishing libraries, museums, public gardens, gymnasiums, coffee taverns, and drinking-fountains without end. And the addresses to Her Majesty! One London paper which has unsuspiciously begun the task of printing a note of national festivities suggests wearily that a wing of Buckingham Palace will have to be set aside for the warehousing of these addresses. T HE Senate has now finally disposed of THE FATE OF THE TREATY eased the minds of fully occupied with the exacting and important duties of their court. Finally, the most important, indeed the only greatly important, amendment provided that when a particular question arose for arbitration it should not be placed in the hands of the tribunal until the formal assent of the Senate were given. If there are many other Senates with the relative temper of the present body, one can imagine that this possible limitation would have become very real. But having thus provided that only such specific cases as they approved of should be arbitrated, our legislators came to an opinion, by a vote of 42 to 26, that no arbitration at all was even better. The vote was phenomenally outside of party lines or sectional prejudices, but it requires no especially keen analysis to find arrayed against the treaty all those names which have been impatient or sceptical of reform in other shapes. The popular mood toward the matter of arbitration was strikingly shown by a device of the National Arbitration Commission, the results of which have just been made public. The Commission wrote to a great number of citizens, who might fairly be termed representative," of the most diverse occupations with total disregard of the known or suspected sentiments of the persons approached, asking, "May we quote you as standing with ourselves in favor of the ratification of the Arbitration Treaty without amendment?" It is true that such a question would bring answers from a larger proportion of those who favored arbitration than of those who - opposed it; but even thus the result shows that a vast majority of the intelligent people of the land wished the Senate to show far more hospitality to the original treaty than the measure received. Out of a total of one thousand and two answers, nine hundred and thirty-two assented without qualification; only twelve expressed opposition to the treaty; twenty-two thought it ought to be amended, while the rest, thirty-six, did not explain their position in refusing their support. Three years ago some gentlemen formed a syndicate to investigate the adaptability of the turbine engine for the propulsion of steamships. Last winter the Turbinia was built, and her successive trials, after various improvements and alterations, have shown this marvellous little vessel to have, even in her present state, a maximum speed of 324 knots, or 37 miles per hour. There are some new torpedo boats which run just a trifling fraction of a mile more per hour, but they are vessels five or more times as large as the Turbinia. She is but 100 feet long and 9 feet beam, and it is almost incomprehensible to think of so slight a craft flying through the water at the rate of 37 miles per hour. But even if there were not this extraordinary exhibition of speed, the trial of the Turbinia in England would have an unusual interest for marine engineers, and a glimmer, at least, of hope for all the sea-going public, in the totally new conditions of her methods of propulsion. The piston-rod jerking up and down for each revolution of the screw has absolutely disappeared. In its place there is practically a second screw on the shaft, inside the vessel. This is turned by the expansive power of the steam, and forces the shaft to revolve and the exterior propeller with it. The turbine weighs scarcely a fourth as much per horse-power as the engines and auxiliary machinery of the great express steamers of to-day. But most important of all, since the turbine is a perfect rotary engine, there is scarcely any increase of vibration with increase of speed, whereas with ordinary marine engines one finds a fearful addition of jar and wrack with every knot gained. If the Turbinia means that we are to get to Europe in three days at 374 knots—it would take three days and a-half-without any vibration to speak of in the hull, she will be welcome indeed. But even without this benefaction there is more radical importance in her feats than in any departure in marine construction that has been seen for many days, and the public will look forward to the trial trips yet to come with vivid interest. |