ladies of the court like a pasha in his harem. It needed only this shame to alienate from the dynasty its last propthe proud landholding nobles, whose interests had always been tenderly cared for by the Government, and who were counted its supporters to the last ditch. High society agreed the scandal was unendurable, but who should "bell the cat"? Finally Prince Usupoff, with some friends, lured the "monk" to a midnight supper, invited him to eliminate himself from the situation, and on his refusal shot him to death. It is said that it took an uncanny deal of shooting to kill him, and some of the party nearly lost their nerve at the thought that perhaps, after all, he was "holy." They drove the dead man to a Neva bridge and thrust him into a hole in the ice near one of the piers. Next day one of his galoshes drew the attention of working-men, and they found his body caught by the clothing on a bit of ice, whereas it should have disappeared down the river. The infatuated czarina had the body brought to her palace garden, and caused to be built over it a mausoleum, where she could mourn the "saint." One thinks of the Diamond Necklace Scandal, which so greatly compromised Queen Marie Antoinette; but the Rasputin case was as much worse than the affair of the Diamond Necklace as the rule of Nicholas II was worse than the rule of Louis XVI. It was Protopopoff who was destined to deal the monarchy its finishing stroke. He was one of the leaders of the Cadet party in the Duma, and in the summer of 1916 he, with Miliukoff, had attended an Allies' conference in London. On the way home he stopped in Stockholm and had a conversation with the secretary of the German embassy, which excited suspicion. Protopopoff went to Tsarskoe Selo to report on his mission, pleased the czar, afterward became acquainted with Rasputin, and through him with the czarina. In September, to the general amazement, he was made minister of the interior. The Cadets, of course, regarded him as a renegade, and would not speak to him. This preyed on him, and he seemed to lose his mental balance. Certainly his policy of deliberately provoking an uprising was insane. He gathered a huge police force in Petrograd, set up on roofs and in garrets eight hundred machine-guns the British had sent to help repel the Germans, and then, when the Duma opened at the end of February, he arrested all the working-men's representatives in the Central Munition Factories' Committee on the charge of fomenting sedition, the fact being that they had been holding their fellows back. Miliukoff warned the working-men of the trap set for them, and they bided their time. It was, in fact, food shortage that fired the train that blew up the old order. The people were tired of spending most of the day shivering in a bread-line, and on March 8 they began to demonstrate in meetings and processions. Protopopoff, with his police and thirty thousand soldiers, hoped for an uprising which he might drown in blood, so as to give the Government some years' lease of life. But he overlooked the fact that the old army, which had never failed the throne, was under the sod or in German prison camps. The new soldiers, fresh from the people, had some idea of the rôle the army had always played in the system that oppressed their fathers and brothers. The new officers were not, like the old officers, scions of a privileged caste, bred in military schools to despise the people, but young men drawn from the middle class and from the universities and technical schools. Moreover, the army remembered it was the czar's servants who had stolen and "grafted" off their supplies, while it was the organizations of the people who had sent them nurses, clothing, medicines, and munitions. Although some guard regiments obeyed orders and repeatedly cleared the streets with volleys, bad blood did not develop between the people and the soldiers. The crowd would shout, "We're sorry for you Pavlovskys; you had to do your duty." The break of the military seems to have come late on March 11. A Cossack patrol was quietly watching a procession of manifestants when the latter were brutally attacked by a raging detachment of police. All at once a young officer ordered his men to draw sabers and led them in a charge on the police. Then began the fraternizing between soldiers and people. Regiment after regiment wavered, and then sent a delegation to offer its services to the Duma. Some officers were shot by their own men, but there were instances in which the former took the initiative. Led by their officers, the famous Prevbrazhensky Guards, all of giant stature, marched to the Winter Palace, stood at arms, and sent in a deputation with certain demands; but they found no Government. A few hours later they were guarding the Duma in its palace. Troops were brought in from the suburbs, but they were won over. The Semonesky regiment made a show of fight, but was quickly surrounded. As soon as the arsenal was stormed the revolutionists armed themselves and joined the soldiers in fighting the police, who from roofs, garrets, and church towers worked their machine-guns on the people. The inThe insurgents dashed about in armored cars and automobiles, searched buildings for police snipers, and put under arrest the principal functionaries of the old régime. In the meanwhile was forming a new government, which gained control so quickly as to make the Russian Revolution. one of the shortest and least bloody in history. On March 11 the president of the Duma, Rodzianko, telegraphed to the czar, who was at army headquarters, the facts of the situation, and warned him that some one enjoying the country's confidence must be intrusted with the forming of a new government. To this and to his later telegrams to the czar there was no reply. On the morrow the Government prorogued the Duma, but rumors of the falling away of its troops were in the air, and the members hesitated. Should they leave the promising young revolutionary movement without direction or should they risk Siberia by disobeying the decree? They stayed and left it to their officers and party leaders to decide their course of action. By noon the Duma was called together, and a few hours later was appointed a provisional government to restore order in Petrograd and "to have communications with all persons and institutions," a cautious, non-committal phrase. The next day all Petrograd, realizing that the Revolution was won, thronged the streets rejoicing, although the rat-tat-tat of machine-guns was in the air, and in fact more people were killed on the thirteenth and fourteenth of March than in the decisive days of March 11 and 12. In a word, the Revolution had triumphed in the minds of the people before it was accomplished in the streets. Many police were killed fighting, but no one was murdered after he had been made prisoner. Arrested persons were continually arriving at the Duma, and none of those taken under its authority lost his life. There was some demand among the soldiers who brought Soukhomlinoff that he be executed at once, but the eloquence of Kerensky saved him. Thanks to previous removal of vodka from the scene, not one bloodthirsty outbreak, not one massacre, stains the pages of the Russian Revolution. While perhaps in all a thousand persons lost their lives in Petrograd, elsewhere the action of the capital was accepted as decisive. There was no La Vendée for royalists to take refuge in. Moral forces had undermined and eaten into the czardom until it had become a mere shell. Outside of the Government's own personnel, virtually no one believed in it or wanted it to continue. Never has an absolute government been so effete at the end. It was due to fall a generation ago, but machine-guns and secret police, agents provocateurs and pogroms had held it up until, when it finally came down, it floated away in dust. The Imperial Plan in German Schooling By WINTHROP TALBOT Author of "Illiteracy," etc. INTRODUCTION THERE are many angles from which history may be written. Its military and dynastic interpretation was followed by political, and this by economic. But there is also an intellectual interpretation of history in terms of the ideas that men collectively cherish. It is doubtful if there were ever a war, unless that of the French Revolution, which so much needed to have its political and economic interpretation supplemented by an intellectual interpretation as the present struggle in Europe. Philosophies are perhaps not sufficiently powerful to cause wars or to account for their origin, but they may account for the spirit in which a war is waged, for the meaning which is imputed to it. And this, from the side of Germany, is peculiarly the case with the present war. This is what Germans mean when they tell us that they are waging war for Kultur; namely, for a certain conception of life, a certain conception of the best way of doing things, and of the proper organization of the world. A philosophy of life which animates a whole people cannot be an abstract metaphysical scheme. Such a theory is capable of influencing only a few. It must be simple, of broad outlines; there must be agencies for bringing it home to the people collectively. Education, as Dr. Talbot so clearly brings out, has been the means by which a distinctively German philosophy of life has been systematically instilled. Never, I think, has an educational system been so deliberately utilized, so efficiently and intelligently utilized, for a definite result as for the last one hundred years in Germany. Prussia has given Germany something more than a military system and political unity; it has furnished educational ideals and methods. The pervasiveness of nationalistic and ulterior aims in the educational system of Germany is explained by historical reasons. They go back, as Dr. Talbot says, to Frederick the Great in Prussia. But the Napoleonic conflict, with Germany's defeat, is the nearer cause. Prussia's statesmen then set out consciously and purposefully to achieve the regeneration of Germany through educational means of which the compulsory training of youth in arms became an integral part. For the Germans are quite correct when they say that for them universal military training has not had exclusively military ends in view, that it was an integral part of the educational apparatus for shaping character and mind. Of course something of the same spirit and atmosphere had to characterize the other part of the educational system, the school. Hence that passivity, that docility, that discipline of obedience that Dr. Talbot has clearly depicted. Because our ideas of the German educational system have been mainly derived from the scientific specialization of its universities, an idea had conventionally grown up that German education is permeated by a spirit of research and intellectual freedom. But in the lower schools collateral text-books and supplementary readings are virtually forbidden; studying at home is discouraged. The youth must be habituated to a single and definite authority. After this fundamental lesson is learned, freedom of inquiry was encouraged. For there was assurance that it would be confined to technical matters and would not encroach upon questions of fundamental control. In Germany alone of modern nations critics of its established political institutions have been treated as disloyal, as traitors in the making, despite the fact that no nation has developed greater freedom of criticism in matters of specialized scholarship. This unique combination is the fruit of its educational system. Whoever bears these facts in mind will have no difficulty in detecting a fallacy in the common saying that reform in Germany must come from within, that democratic institutions cannot be forced upon it from without. There is a sense, of course, in which this is a mere truism. But Germany can learn by pressure exercised from without that its philosophy of life is not borne out by events, that it does not bring the fruits which it promised, and which in the past it had offered in its self-justification. Just as the German people became attached to their philosophy of obedience and drilled efficiency because under it they grew strong and extended their territory and power, so when it brings suffering and failure they will question it and throw it off. For only success justifies the philosophy of authority, force, and disciplined obedience.. When the free forces of Germany are released, a new type of education will spring from a saner and kindlier philosophy of life, and other peoples will be able to learn. educational lessons from a Germany which has entered into the mutual give and take of modern international life. JOHN DEWEY. TH HE world has been impressed with Germany's preparedness for war and with the precision and unity which have enabled the German war-machine to attain its present gigantic output. This preparedness is largely the result of German ways of schooling, which long have been accepted as models for the pedagogic world, exerting a compelling influence on the training of American youth in American schools. Since the public elementary schools of a country are the main criterion by which to judge of the civilization of its people, and because our public-school methods have been increasingly copied from the German model, it seems worth while to analyze the results of the rule of the Prussian pedagogue as shown in the elementary schools of Germany, so as to select the good and reject the bad, and not swallow indiscriminately a Gargantuan pedagogic meal which may result in serious harm to us. The German school system is essentially directive in type. It is authoritative and rigid, systematic and repressive, disciplinary and exacting. These adjectives seem to describe fairly the reaction upon the school world of a national militaristic habit. The German schools are divided into two kinds, Volksschulen, or elementary public schools for the people, and middle and higher schools for that small percentage of the population who are of noble birth or who will become officials, military officers, or professional and technical men. It should be made plain to Americans that German method implies inevitable. class distinction between the leader and the led. Few German children whose parents can afford other instruction attend the Volksschulen. The Volksschule is planned for a subject class to be drilled. in obedient industry, patience, persistence, and thoroughness. American admirers and imitators of German educational method, apparently forgetful of the need in democratic America of developing individual initiative, self-reliance, and courage, have closed their eyes to the imperatively autocratic trend in German educational plans. American educators have focused their attention upon the excellent secondary and technical schools of Germany, and have praised their efficiency, apparently oblivious of the fact that these are intended to develop a distinct attitude of mind in those selected to become the administrators and rulers of a comparatively unschooled population, a people the majority of whom a bare hundred years ago were subjected to conditions scarcely raised above actual slavery. It was only in 1807 that five million German serfs were officially emancipated from serfdom, and in certain parts of Germany even now the authority of Junker aristocracy is scarcely impaired. The main body of the population retains an attitude of subservience to inherited authority. The German school system was formed by Frederick the Great to train an effective army from illiterate peasants. He was the first great general to appreciate that soldiers who could read and write made better armies. His decree of 1763 provides that all children shall be kept at school "until they have not only obtained the essentials of Christianity and know how to read and write readily, but can also make satisfactory answer with regard to those matters which are taught them in reading books ordained and approved by our consistories"-not enough schooling to permit independent thinking, but sufficient to enable them to comprehend military requirements. The end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth were characterized in Germany by a fervent belief in the brighter future of humanity, and it was in a spirit of broad humanism that the beginnings of general primary education were laid by Schiller in his letters on "Esthetic Education" and by Fichte in his "Addresses to the German Nation." Stein and Humboldt advocated the widest education of the people, and so did Pestalozzi, Herbart, and Schleiermacher. Theirs was a broad conception of socialized education, but for a hundred years the educational ideals of these nineteenth-century thinkers have been overshadowed by the narrowing traditions of feudalism. It is true that centuries before the Christian era Plato had written in the "Republic," "Only that state is healthy and can thrive which unceasingly endeavors to improve the individuals who constitute it." But Plato conceived of the state as constituted of a ruling class, for the whole world of his time was founded on slavery. German educators, philosophers, and law-makers have conceived the state as comprising the schooled shouldering the burden and pos sessing the responsibilities of governme with the unschooled directed and cared for as children and dependents. To the ruling class of Germany there came a sense of security and contentment after the provision of a minimum compulsory attendance at schools that would teach the barest rudiments. When the rights of suffrage had been granted, together with freedom of habitation, trade, and marriage, it was deemed that all had been provided that the people reasonably could require. Therefore it is not strange that during the last thirty years, while technical and professional education has been fostered to an unlimited extent for the benefit of the few who were destined to represent the Government, the education of the vast multitude of the people has been unprogressive. So long as peasants were trained in industry and obedience, so long was the ideal of autocracy and militarism best subserved, and it was felt that only in towns was it necessary to provide technical instruction, continuation classes, and opportunity for the study of civic relations. For a hundred years the German nation has depended upon the overcrowded Volksschulen to provide civic instruction and schooling for the masses of the people, and these schools are almost the sole educational means provided for agricultural Germany. Every five years Germany publishes a statistical review of the schools of the empire. In 1911 the elementary schools, or Volksschulen, were attended by 10,309,949 pupils. In sharp contrast with the Volksschulen are the middle schools, which enrolled only 273,394 children, and the higher schools, which had 711,795 in attendance. In elementary private schools. there were 26,151, and in middle private schools 80,666, a total of 106,711. In other words, out of 11,401,849 pupils in all the schools of the empire, 10,309,949 attended the Volksschulen. Thus over ninety per cent. of German children of school age go to these public elementary schools. In the largest cities of Prussia, where |