of either side. Hence my interest in the lynching article. The other reason is that I have been mixed up in political life here for over thirty years, during ten of which I was a member of the Legislature, and cannot understand why America-as far as I know-is the only English-speaking country that throws law and order to the winds as in Chicago last year, when I happened to be in Canada. This accounts for my interest in Chicago democracy.

The thing that is both odd and interesting is that in lynching the encounter was between black and white; in the other case between white and white. What attractive material for a psychological study!

The methods of American democracy are fortunately both peculiar and local and require the vantage-ground of a foreigner to see them in their true light. Your article makes mention of the British West Indies, and rightly so. Here we are all British-meaning we are equal politically. But socially every man has a right to choose his friends and associates. Social distinctions there are, and always will be. But the jet black lawyer defends to the best of his ability his white client and the black magistrate administers justice with even hand to white and black alike. Public conveyances are free to all-since a man's money has no relation to his color. Fancy a white man in his Ford car feeling his dignity hurt because passed on the road by a black man in his Willys.

I must check my pen's course, for the subject interests me very deeply. I trust efforts like THE CENTURY'S will help to open the eyes of the American people to the blots which disfigure and lower their national life and reputation. The mills of the gods grind slowly. Retribution comes even to nations.

Thanking you for the pleasure given me by your magazine, and wishing you increased power of service to your nation.

Nathaniel Hawthorne maintained there. I went, prompted more, I fear, by the desire to see Hawthorne's daughter than interest in the charity. I found a little, old house, pin-neat, crowded from roof to basement with beds in each of which lay a cancer patient who was "absolutely incurable and absolutely penniless."

In nun's garb, caring for the poor creatures, was Rose Hawthorne Lathrop who, with one assistant made up the corps of nurses. Now thirty years ago cancer was thought to be a contagious and disgraceful disease, and this frail, exquisite woman was doing something not far removed from Father Damien's work for the lepers when she dwelt here and with her own hands dressed the dreadful sores and tended all the needs of the guests in this sad House of Pain. I recall her more like a lovely spirit than human as we walked from bed to bed where face after face, riven with anguish, brightened to a welcoming smile for her.

How she gained the strength to do what she did I learned when she led me into a tiny oratory she had fashioned out of a dark, otherwise unusable, corner of the upper hall. The hinges of my heretic knees bent easily enough to prayer when our journey of inspection ended at the foot of the little cross. She strove to comfort me, weakly overcome as I was by what I had seen; she slipped her slim, work-worn hand in mine and whispered, "If they bear patiently their suffering here below, they will not be left long in Purgatory."

So gentle and pure she was I thought she might have been sweet Hilda who, stepping from between the leaves of "The Marble Faun," had shut those furiously threatening ancestors within its covers and harkened after all to the tender pleading of the Catholic Church.

She burns in my memory like the flame of a holy altar candle.

Very truly yours,
MATHILDE CHENAULT NASH

New York City.

My dear Editor,

We are giving a year's subscription to THE CENTURY MAGAZINE to our daughter who has married and has gone to live in New York City. There may be a news-stand in New York but it is nice to get the magazine by mail, fresh and crisp, untouched by human hands, unbreathed upon by the vendors of snappy stories, etc.

For more than thirty-seven years we have been reading THE CENTURY and it gets better and better. The December number is a peach. A list of the best things in it would simply be a copy of

the index. “Lady Isobel's Husband” might have been written by John Erskine himself, only the touch is lighter, the satire even more satisfactory. No man could have done it so right.

"Twilight Among the Authors"-"In Search of Sunshine"-"The American Scene and Character," how I would like to shake the hand of John Cowper Powys and thank him for understanding us so well and defending us so nobly! John Erskine, delightful in all his phases-Oh, all of it! "Gentleman, Gentleman"-how revealing!

Only one thing ails THE CENTURY. We are still torn between Camels and Chesterfields and obliged to recommend Fatimas to our younger set. Of course they pay well. There is the "heaping tablespoon of compromise absolutely necessary," as Professor Bollis said.

I was afraid our daughter might get to reading Mencken in New York. THE CENTURY is to be the antidote.

Elkhorn, Wisconsin.

My dear Editor,

Yours truly,
HELEN M. TUBBS

I have just finished reading the engaging article, "The Rustic Goes to School." With the conclusions I draw from the paper, I agree in the main; but a doubt or two exist in my mind. For instance, I am unwilling to believe that the education that the nieces had received was largely to blame for their crudity or that the higher standards of the aunt's taste could be attributed to her lack of schooling.

I wonder if the aunt had been exposed to the smattering of education, slightly absorbed by the nieces, whether she, too, would have turned out vulgar. I doubt it. Mass education, the only possible kind at the present time, has defects, as pointed out by the author, but its success or failure is determined in no small measure by the character of the subject on whom it is tried. For some time, moreover, we have realized in this country that an academic education is not intended for everybody; consequently, the form of education now prescribed in our secondary schools depends upon the natural gifts of the boy or girl to be educated. The system of mass education in America is hardly at fault if a student, through his own stupidity, follows an academic course when, as frequently happens, a vocational course has been recommended. Furthermore, these young English

nieces, presumably with slight possibilities, educationally, had come inevitably under the influence of powerful forces outside the school, forces that the school cannot combat, certainly in a day. (There is such a thing, too, as a crude, vulgar rustic.) Nor can we base our conclusions concerning mass education, or any other, upon one aunt and her three nieces. Natural endowment, I repeat, is a powerful factor and environment hardly less important in determining the human product, before education takes a hand in it.

My experience of twenty-five years as a teacher of English reveals serious defects in our American school system, but defects by no means incurable. If I were the doctor, I should apply the remedy first to the college requirements. I should order that they be made more simple and more sane. Thus secondary school work would record a gain in thoroughness; it would be less superficial, less pretentious. In that happy event, there would be more real teaching, thus awakening higher incentive in pupils. In other words, the solution of the problem of mass education, as I see it, consists mainly in less ground to be covered, hence less rush, in more simplicity, and in more definite and higher spiritual aims. Perhaps (I say it with all modesty and all kindliness) a Yankee, and a teacher at that, is as capable of understanding our American school system as an Englishwoman or an H. G. Wells.

Newark, New Jersey.

My dear Editor,

Educationally yours, LUCY E. SWETT

Since George Witten's story, "Guns for Ireland" appeared in the September number, I have anxiously awaited another story by him, so it was with a great deal of pleasure that I opened the January number and found his story, "The Open Road."

I feel that it would be an injustice, both to the author and the publisher, not to tell them how much I have enjoyed these two stories.

In your notes on your contributors, I notice that Mr. Witten was a participant in the Boer War. Can you not prevail upon him for some stories of this engagement?

With the hope that I may find another tale from Mr. Witten's pen in an early issue, I remain,

Buffalo, N. Y.

Cordially and sincerely, R. E. COREY

was the first case in the entire history of the Supreme Court where that tribunal disposed of a question involving the original construction of a provision of the Constitution without giving any exposition whatever of the reasoning by which it reached its conclusions. By a juBy a judicial wave of the hand, as though it were a magistrate's court, it ignored the arguments and briefs of counsel, the interest and expectancy of the citizenship of the country, the revolutionary effects on the habits of the people, the vast amount of property involved, and the important consideration of the powers and duties of the National and State Governments, and merely announced the ultimate conclusion that, as it had been adopted in accordance with the provisions of Article V of the Constitution prescribing the procedure for necessary amendments, "the amendment, by lawful proposal and ratification, has become a part of the Constitution, and must be respected and given effect the same as other provisions of that instrument."

That decision was not only wrong in principle and legally unsustainable, but it constitutes the most dangerous and far-reaching attack against representative government in America since the Stamp Act of 1765. It not only violates the fundamental principle of representative government which is the keystone of the Republic, but it also violates the express guarantee embodied in the Constitution explicitly in Article IV, Section 4, that "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union, a republican form of government." This is a guarantee

running to each and every State in this Union. It is a guarantee which cannot be waived for any State by the combined action of all the other States in the Union. It is a guarantee which runs to the States of Connecticut and Rhode Island as specifically as if they had been mentioned by name; and only they themselves may waive that guarantee so far as it affects their sovereign rights. It is of the essence of the compactotherwise the people of Rhode Island or Connecticut might by the action of three fourths of the States, have thrust upon them a monarchial form of government or a dictatorship or some other form hostile to the republican theory. Such a thing can be accomplished only by revolution. It cannot be done by Constitutional amendment.

Rhode Island and Connecticut have not ratified the amendment, although attempts have been made at each session of their legislatures to persuade them to do so. Whether or not their ratification would amount to a waiver of their guarantee is a question which it is not now necessary to discuss. Certainly, until they shall have ratified the amendment they stand among all the other States in the enviable position of having refused to sell their birthright, and of having the legal status of plaintiffs who have had their guaranteed constitutional rights invaded by Congress and the legislatures of the other States. This point was not raised in the case of Rhode Island versus Palmer and, up to the present time, has not been raised either in the Supreme Court or in any of the numerous discussions which have taken place regarding

prohibition. The subject has been so beclouded by fanaticism, loose thinking and a general confusion in the people's minds regarding the political and the moral aspects of the question, that there is perhaps some excuse for the failure to penetrate this mass of extraneous matter and to get at the one and only vital issue involved. That issue is representative government, and the drinking of alcohol has no more to do with the case than the drinking of tea had to do with the controversy raised by the Stamp Act of 1765. The issue of representative government would be as surely involved if the amendment had forbidden gambling, child labor, divorce, cigarette smoking or the teaching of evolution in the public schools. Whether or not these things are evils which should be prohibited do not enter into the discussion at all. The point is that any amendment which deprives the people of a State of the right to a representative form of government concerning the particular subject matter involved, is a violation of the one and only constitutional guarantee which was made to the people of the several States when the original instrument was presented to them for their ratification. The Eighteenth Amendment does this, and is therefore void as to Connecticut and Rhode Island. And thus being incapable of national application is void in its inception.

I summon you then from the contemplation of the dram-shop, the drunkard and the gutter to a consideration of the Constitution and the fundamental ideals of this Republic.

23

The two most distinguishing characteristics of the Constitution are,

first, that the government so created is one of delegated powers; and second, that its basic theory is representative democracy, a retention of the principle of self-government, but exercised, for convenience, through representatives chosen directly or indirectly by the people, the powers of government residing always in the people as the ultimate

source.

The Government thus formed by the original thirteen sovereign States lying along the Atlantic seaboard. has, in the intervening one hundred and forty years, vindicated the sagacity and political foresight of its framers and proved itself adequate for an extended union of forty-eight States embracing half the continent, with territories and possessions in the four quarters of the globe. "No constitution," said Jefferson, "was ever before so calculated as ours for extensive empire and selfgovernment.”

To quote Jefferson again: "It seems not to have occurred to the ancients that where the citizens cannot meet to transact their business in person, they alone have the right to choose the people who shall transact it, and that in this way a representative or popular government may be exercised over any extent of territory. The full experiment of a government democratical but representative is reserved for us." This is from a letter to Isaac R. Tiffany, August 26, 1816.

The memory of the tyrannies which resulted from the denial by England of the Colonists' right to representation was fresh in the minds of the patriots who formed this government and they were determined