even exclusive of its main business, study, is, to the young, strenuous and exciting. It demands even from the healthy a considerable effort of adjustment. In these new and stimulating surroundings the lad who is nervously or physically below par will feel his handicap far more seriously, often with grave consequences. Girls' colleges often demand from their applicants a careful physical examination and medical history, by a competent physician. I believe this is an excellent plan, for, in addition to excluding temporarily a few applicants who should never be subjected to the strain, it provides valuable information to university departments of health and hygiene in case they are called upon to treat this student later. I believe that men's colleges, although they will never be as rigorous as West Point and Annapolis, will come more and more to demand certificates of good health. One of the difficulties in this regard, however, is that the medical examination is not made by an impartial body like the College Entrance Board. The family physician is often more interested in obliging the parents than in giving a strictly accurate medical history or prognosis. Parents, however, should recognize the serious danger of sending to college the physically and especially the nervously disqualified. In a few cases the boy should not come at all. In a great many cases he should be given a year, not of idleness, but of healthy outof-door work, to build him up and develop self-reliance before he comes to the college.

If a boy, then, is temperamentally disqualified by his dislike of study, or is disqualified by reasons of health, he should not come. There is another consideration which should weigh far more heavily than it does. If a boy otherwise qualified does not wish to come, that should end it. There is no better reason why he should remain away. He will almost never be a success, and college may do him harm.

V

THE fact, however, that a son wishes to come to college, that he has the necessary intellectual and physical qualifications, should not end the discussion.

There is one further highly important consideration. Parents should be sure that he wishes to come for the proper reasons. A boy will "get out of college" only what he comes for. If he comes to learn "to call forty men by their first names," he will learn to do this glibly, but that is about all he will bring home, even if, after four years of skimping his work, he comes back with a degree. If he comes for opportunities in athletics only, he will develop only physically. If he comes to have a good time, that is about all he will have to show for it, except a number of unfortunate habits which it will take years to eradicate and which may help to disqualify him in the world's later, fiercer competition for success.

I believe there is one point which the public has failed signally to understand in the present "rush to the colleges." Many have told us that this rush results from a deeper realization of the value of college education which was demonstrated during the war. It may be so in part. There is, however, another and a far simpler reason. Young men and young women prefer the society of other young men and women to the society of their elders. With the general obscuring of the colleges' original purpose and function, it has unfortunately become a kind of glorified playground. It has become the paradise of the young.

If, nowadays, you give a boy of eighteen the option of going into his father's office or of going to college, on the assumption that in every case they are equally good things to do, he will therefore in almost every case choose college. It is almost never true, however, that they are equally good things to do. We have tried to explain that it depends upon him. In many cases a continuation of education in college is certainly preferable, often necessary. If he is to be a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer, a scholar, it is absolutely essential. In a good many other cases it is, however, far preferable, if you are thinking of your son's later success in life, that he should immediately put himself into harness and develop his sense of responsibility and begin his climb up the world's long ladder. This is what we have forgotten to-day. It is this simple psychological fact that is resulting in an unfortunate rush for admission. It is

quite generally assumed not only that college is just as good for every boy of eighteen, but that it is better in all cases, if he can manage, or you can manage, to pay his way. Of the six hundred thousand young men now in college, it would possibly have been better in nearly a hundred thousand cases, had they not come. Had the money which each of these boys will spend been invested for him and had he immediately entered the ranks of the economically productive, he and the world would have been far better for it. There is, of course, no reason in the world why a boy who plans to enter the world of business should not go to college, even if he has no intention whatever of being a professional scholar or teacher. It will enhance the value of his later leisure and give him something to think about "when the long winter evenings come." Some of these men make our best undergraduates. But no father should urge his son to go to college for the social prestige it will give, or for any other reason than that for which the college exists, which is to train the mind by exercising it in study. If a boy does not care to study, a college course will not educate him and will give him nothing worth while.

But let us look at it as the candidate sees it. In most cases, to his mind a degree is a highly valuable social and business asset. As college and business. are generally presented as equally valuable, and indeed as college is often represented by parents and the public as always preferable, the only question for the boy to decide is where he will have the better time. Let us look into his father's office. The youngest man there, besides the office boy, is probably twenty-five. There are ten men ranging in age from twenty-five to sixty. None of them is of his own age. Then let us look at what college offers. He will for four years more be one of a group of four hundred or two thousand or four thousand young men, or young men and women; nearly all the friends of his own age will be there. He will, of course, decide to throw in his lot with them, especially now when there is less understanding between the generations. Youth goes toward youth and all youth drifts to the colleges.

We should be sure, therefore, that a boy

not only wishes to go to college, for he almost invariably wishes to do so, but that he wishes to do so for wise reasons. In case he desires to prepare himself for a profession, he should, of course, continue. In case he loves to study and desires a further general education, he should also go. But if he has been dazzled by the glamour of college life or merely sucked in by the almost irresistible drift of our time, it is far better that he go to work.

Granted, then, that the boy has the qualifications and the proper desire to develop himself along university lines, there is the still further problem as to which college he shall choose. The boy's college is more important than his clothes, but in both cases there should be a perfect fit. There are more than seven hundred colleges in this country and all of them different, just as your boy is different from every one of seven hundred other boys. Choose that one to which he is best adapted, but do so fairly early, a year or two in advance of his coming. If possible, go to visit the college you have in mind, before he matriculates. If you are his mother, do not go with him when he enters in September. He should then fight it out and begin to hunt his way by himself with his freshman classmates.

When Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton a solicitous mother came in to see him on the busy opening day. She had probably not thought much about the problems involved and was worried as to whether it would be safe to trust her son to this new life, and whether he would have a good time. "Madam," said President Wilson, "we guarantee satisfaction or we return the boy." This is, or should be, true of all colleges. Remember, however, that it is the boy who should and must provide the satisfaction. Be fairly sure that he will do this before you send him. Then the college itself, even more than his classmates, will give him a "good time." You can then also rest assured that it will profit him. Where, therefore, you have been able to answer these questions of the candidate's fitness in the affirmative, cease worrying about him-send him with your fullest confidence and with your blessing.

UNT MARIA DEMAREST was a pacifist. She lived with her daughter's little boy in the big stone house standing alone across the river. Aunt Maria had always been fond of peace. She spoke well of it every chance she had. Every week a few ladies from the village would come up to the Demarest house and talk over methods to prevent war. The society had a main office somewhere down south and Aunt Maria was continually giving cake sales and card parties to raise money, sent later to headquarters.

One day I called and Aunt Maria took me into the front parlor. On a table at one side was a big bible with little china knobs on the corners. There were five sprays of pampas grass lying in state beneath their oval glass case on the mantelpiece.

After discussing local news for a while, the name of a village character was mentioned and Aunt Maria reached underneath the parlor table and brought out the old family album. There in their curious, plush frames were baby pictures of most of the older people around our section. George MacNomee the butcher, Hen Fuller the blacksmith, and the Reverend Mrs. Darlington all dressed up in starched white baby clothes. "How quickly life runs on past us," said Aunt Maria. "They are all old folks now."

Toward the back of the album we came to the war pictures of sixty-five years ago. There was one of Aunt Maria's oldest brother who was killed at Antietam, and her cousin George who never came home. Under each picture was a description in the angular handwriting of the girl who saw them all go away in those days of VOL. LXXXII.-27

long ago. The last in this war group was the faded picture of a tall, square-jawed young man in uniform. At his side was a big sword, and two black eyes looked out from the old daguerreotype, flashing as bravely as they probably did on that other morning long ago when he went off with his regiment. Beneath the picture was written "Alonzo Williams, killed in action at Gettysburg, July 3d,- 1863." When we came to these war pictures Aunt Maria took occasion to do a little preaching about her work for peace. Every peace was good and every war bad, she told me. She and her little group were doing all they could to make any recurrence of war impossible.

Further on in the album was the picture of Aunt Maria's husband and under it in his own bold signature "Joshua R. Demarest." He was a stout, goodnatured looking man, I thought, and then Aunt Maria closed the book. We talked of something else, then I went back to my cabin up in the hills.

Later on that day down at Martin's store, when George was giving out the mail, I asked old lady Jackson who Alonzo Williams was. In no time at all she told me. Just before the war broke out back in the spring of 1859, Aunt Maria was going out with two young men. The whole village was interested in the outcome. Alonzo Williams, son of Squire Williams, seemed to have the inside track and Grandma Jackson thinks to this day that Maria cared more for him, but young Josh Demarest's suit was helped along by all her folks and every one in the community who was interested in seeing young people "get on in the world."

For some of the Demarest family have lived in the big house on the hill ever since the Indians used to come down from

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the mountains on raids. There were 4,000 acres in the original grant. Josh's grandfather had founded the local Baptist church which still stands. Josh, too, was a steadier, more practical sort of a boy. He sang in the choir, was steady and respectable, and had money in the bank. Aunt Maria finally capitulated to village opinion and married him. Folks came from all the villages nearby to the wedding. Old lady Jackson remembers it well. When the war came, Alonzo Williams left among the first. Josh Demarest's father hired a substitute for his son. Alonzo was killed at Gettysburg in the big charge, as many old folks of the village still remember. Josh stayed at home and his substitute died of fever in Libby Prison. But he had always been a good, steady husband, and finally he passed away quietly, full of local honor and with

money still in the bank, eighteen years ago last summer.

It has always been my theory that a person's view-point changes entirely every ten years or so as creeping age comes on. Environment, age, and work for a cause always alter people, I thought in my ignorance. But my opinion was revised to-day. Last night Aunt Maria Demarest died in the big stone house across the river. The doctor had been there for some time when I arrived, and all the household spoke in low, hushed tones. It was quiet and still there among the trees. Aunt Maria died quietly in the old rocker in the front parlor as a tired child turns quietly to sleep. On the floor beside her, as I walked in, I noticed the faded daguerreotype of a tall, square-jawed young man in uniform, with a sword at his side.

There have always been styles in ethics which have varied as widely as in women's clothes. Positive morality has in all ages consisted of prohibitions. The Jews prohibited murder, theft, the eating of pork, and seething the kid in its mother's milk. In the Marquesas the natives could imagine nothing so wicked as eating from a vessel reserved for the use of a chief. On the banks of the Ganges the remarriage of a widow is something too horrible to contemplate. Mr. Westermarck, in his "History of Human Marriage," produces much additional evidence to prove that moral rules are by no means eternal ordinances. Long before the modern writers, other men who had Utopias up their sleeves have labelled morality, especially sex morality, as an invention of the weak to neutralize the strength of the strong. All of them delegated some responsibility for the individual's moral standards to the State. Thus Plato: "Like man like State; governments vary as the characters of men vary . . . states are made out of the human natures which are in them."

The State always seemed dragged into discussions about morals, and I thought Plato was all wrong until I met Joe Burnside and "her."

They live in an old gray house facing the road, clapboards nailed over the logs,

and a new porch which Joe built last summer overlooking the brook. Every evening when the weather is good Joe and she sit on the porch, and what they talk about no one knows, for nothing ever happens. Every morning Joe walks down the hill with the thirty-two waterbreaks, his lunch in a tin box, and works until five at the Davis's place in the valley. I always thought that the lady who shared his home with Joe was Mrs. Burnside until, in the matter of some land I was buying from him, the deed described him as "Joe Burnside, bachelor" just above his mark.

For nine and twenty years she had lived in the gray house on a footing which formed a subject of painful reflection to the righteous folk in the valley. She was in fact unwedded and for a reason which confused the moralists. No one knew by what magic Joe had triumphed in his unconventional courtship of years ago; but some sort of magic they thought it must have been. For Annie Renshaw was reputed to be a lady of high Christian principle, when, a woman of thirty-five she came up into the hills. Everybody overlooked, I suppose, the magic of a widow woman's heart in an empty world. A woman who had always helped other women in their households wanted a home of her own. Everybody also overlooked the

jolly twinkle in Joe's eye and one other fact.

Every day, just after Joe went to work, she would start off with a shawl over her head, a package in her hand, a little white dog behind her, and walk down the lane past my cabin. The first trip was at eight in the morning, sure as a clock. She would pass going back at ten. Then there was another trip at two and a last one somewhere near eight in the evening. In early spring, in midwinter when the snow

lay deep, on hot summer days this schedule never varied. One day I followed her. She went down the lane, over the big brook, then turned off on a small trail which was carried across a small stream by an old log. Across that she went on, arriving finally at a tiny cabin almost. hidden in the woods. Soon after she entered I saw smoke coming from the chimney. Every day she made the same journey, never failing.

And so eventually she grew to be old,