fested. This being done, they should feel it their privilege as well as their duty to work out the details of the project within constitutional limitations. That way, for them and the country, honor lies.

It must not be forgotten that in recent years the international opinion which creates international law has made great progress. In a series of distinguished and authoritative addresses on this subject delivered at Columbia University in March and April of this year, Dr. David J. Hill, American Ambassador to Germany, said:

A sovereign State has no right to take up arins against another, unless a right has been denied or an injury inflicted by it for which reparation cannot otherwise be obtained; and it has no "right," which any modern State could consistently recognize, in any case, to impose such arbitrary conditions of peace as the victor pleases.

Again, he says:

There has been in the past few decades a gradual recognition of the fact that it is no derogation to the sovereignty of a constitutional State to submit the question of its rights and duties to impartial judicial decision.

And in his peroration he admirably summed up the new conception of international duty-at once Christian and economic-in these words:

. . . if we may estimate the future by the transformations of the last three hundred years, we may reasonably entertain the hope that the energies of mankind may be more and more diverted from plans and preparations for mutual destruction, and devoted to united helpfulness in overcoming vice, misery, disease, and ignorance, the common enemies of man.

In this movement the question of an "alliance" or even of an entente between the countries is preposterous. It is not to be inferred from an agreement of two nations to arbitrate prospective difficulties that they shall agree to fight each other's battles. The permanent peace we desire with England we desire also with France and Germany and other countries. The problems of the world have much in com

LXXXII-38

THE LESSON OF SIMPLICITY

T every turn of the wheel which

A adjusts the focus of modern understanding to the follies and extravagances of ancient Rome,-as so clearly and pertinently set forth by Professor Ferrero in his CENTURY papers on "The Women of the Cæsars,"-no truth is more obvious than the close relation of simple tastes to the efficiency of a nation.

In the last hundred years of the republic, when wealth was becoming general among the influential families, it was esteemed more as an aid to family prestige than as a means of personal indulgence. No matron was so high in the social scale as to be independent of the practical cares of her household. No man could enjoy the esteem of his fellows, and much less place himself in the way of social or political influence, without a certain austerity of ideas and manners. Robust tastes prevailed among all classes of men, and simplicity in dress was almost an unchanging fashion, as is attested by the statues and basreliefs of the Julian period.

Though Rome had been sacked by the Gauls more than three hundred years before Cæsar brought them under the yoke, the steadily advancing culture of the an

cient capital suffered no further injury from the barbarous hordes of the north, until four centuries of decay had followed

"MUNICIPAL NON-PARTIZANSHIP IN OPERATION": A CORRECTION article by James Creelman, pub

line of profligate emperors derived from the family of Augustus.

Modern life appears to be so much more complex than ancient society, mainly owing to devices for extending the horizon of easy intercourse and multiplying the means of physical convenience, and also owing to greater public security, which invites wider social and intellectual interests, that a comparison with the old, as to degrees of luxury and profligacy, is difficult, and liable to be misleading. Unpleasant resemblances to the worst Roman tendencies are noticeable to-day. The dominating note, in the expression of the longings of rich and poor, alike, is certainly not that of simplicity. But the world never will, because it never can, change in the requisites of human happiness and human security: the first depends on wise occupation, temperate enjoyment, and spiritual thinking, just as the second rests on general honesty, filial devotion, and patriotic duty. Here, as in ancient Rome, these desirable things are all a part of the lesson of simplicity.

THE CENTURY under the above title, occurs an error which Mr. Creelman desires the editor to correct. Speaking of reforms which were among the early acts of Mayor Gaynor, the article says on page 670:

There were discrepancies discovered in the accounts of the Water Registrar in Brooklyn and he was dismissed from office. The whole system of collecting water taxes was completely reorganized.

Mr. William R. McGuire is and has been since January 1, 1904, the Water Registrar of the Borough of Brooklyn, he not having been removed from office, as stated in the article. THE CENTURY takes pleasure in making this correction, and in justice to Mr. McGuire we wish to state without reservation that the writer of the article was misinformed, that the reflection on him and his administration as Water Registrar was erroneous, and that an injustice was done to an honest public official. EDITOR OF THE CENTURY MAGAZINE.

bouquet, fancy being slapped in the face, generically speaking, that way! As you say, it must have quite taken away your appetite had you not already been dieting for incipient fat. And your French being restricted to polite expressions, you were powerless to denounce him! I suppose he judged you by your frock, the Parisian origin of which of course he recognized. But whenever did a woman's evening clothes measure up, even approximately, to her real self? Really I think it ground for a great, impersonal, international libel suit, only that would upset the entente cordiale, besides jeopardizing Freddie's chances as ambassador. So get up your defense, using the dictionary freely. Then when the creature pays his dinner call, you can overwhelm him with a spontaneous burst of eloquence. It will be all the easier to confound since, as luck has it, truth is on your side.

No, my dear; we can place our hands upon our hearts and truthfully affirm that the young American matron, taken at her best, is anything but frivolous in her relation to hearth and home, or, more technically, furnace and flat. True, superficially, she has her faults. Mentally, below her accomplished crust, she often is only a halfbaked affair, because life's New-World fires burn too perfervidly. In her youth, too, she cultivates an over-smart, challenging tone, based on epigrammatic fiction, toward masculinity, the habit of which besets maturer days; but beneath this effervescence is a structural ideal of domestic duty, of wifehood and motherhood, as solid as Plymouth Rock, well-intentioned as the Constitution, and good as daily bread.

Frivolous? Why, take your own case, which typifies that of thousands upon thousands. Since the advent of your first-born, what has your boudoir been but a laboratory, your art an exhibit of Charts of Weight Requirements, your literature Dr. Holt on "The Care and Feeding of Children," your conversation an inquisition into the merits of nurses and governesses, your recreation a Child-Welfare Educational Campaign, your very life one long sterilizing process? And little Frederic, while still a pultaceous mass of protoplasm, with no appreciable chronology behind him, did he not represent an economic proposition, a problem in pædeutics, of the highest order?

Recall that sacred moment when for the first time the nurse permitted you to gaze upon your child. While endeavoring to trace in its amorphous features some resemblance to Freddie or yourself, how heroically you struggled with your prehistoric longing to clasp the tiny bundle to your breast and cover it with obsolescent kisses.

But sternly waving it aside, you said you wished to be so perfect with your son and never let him have to reproach his mother with giving him a germ! Beautiful! The Spartan mother with all the modern improvements! As for the nurse, far be it from me to impugn her certificated character, or I should have said she used a wad of absorbent cotton to wipe away a furtive tear.

Then there was that lunch where a woman-the kind that tries to prove a sense of humor by relating anecdotes-told how a young Boston matron, a Radcliffe graduate, snatched her baby from a burning building and pressed it to her anguished brain. Do you think one of her female hearers was so frivolous as to crack a smile? Dropping their forks in outraged concert, as a single mother they exclaimed, "Oh, did n't she know that no infant ought ever to be snatched from anything in any circumstances, or pressed to any part of any one whatever!" Again beautiful, not to say sublime! The Spartan mother plus the Puritan; Boadicea and Cornelia of the Gracchi rolled into one!

How foolish this makes the old poets seem, does n't it? Fancy that benighted Wordsworth with these unhygienic lines

Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!

Nor has your noble vigilance for one instant been relaxed. Never has our precious problem in pædeutics escaped from under the microscope of enlightened parental observation. How anxiously you watched lest the one tuft of hair on the otherwise bald crown should indicate abnormal musical proclivities! How freely you encouraged the child while still in petticoats to express his own preference for Yale or Harvard! How bravely you have guarded him from the sentimental influences of old friends from the country and mid-Victorian blood-relatives!

And, speaking of the sentiment-microbe, you have been greatly helped by the Passing of the Grandmother as such. Since elderly women have discarded the lace cap in favor of the combings of Chinamen, they have ceased to invade the nursery and play havoc with its regulations on the score of grandmotherhood. As a matter of fact, I think you told me the two ladies who stand in that relation to little Frederic did not set eyes on him till he had cut his first tooth, Freddie's mother having a bridge club at the only hour the nurse allowed her charge to be exhibited, while your own mother was at rehearsals, posing as a flower-girl in a pageant for some charity.

Yes, the traditional grandmother will soon have to be explained in foot-notes, while the Hand that Rocks the Cradle is already

a reproach hurled by suffragettes at archaic antis (I don't intend a pun). With the cradle an antique, the grave naturally becomes merely a literary allusion. "From incubator to urn" will probably replace the present phrase. Baby-talk, too, is fast becoming a dead language. Centuries hence there may be revivals of it, as with Gaelic, from records preserved in monasteries.

I think, dear Gertie, you may regard the case as settled out of court, the charge of frivolity against you, the typical young New York matron, as dismissed. And now for one word in your private ear. In your laudable passion for eugenics, don't forget that mystic something that is not to be learned from works on pedagogy or any treatise written by the hand of man-no, or woman either. Recently I attended a lecture on the "Art of Telling Stories to Children" by a woman who had made a life-study of the subject. There was an indescribable pathos

Dear Sir:

in watching the audience of mothers and teachers, mentally alert, sentimentally atrophied, imaginatively deplete, pencils and note-books in hand, taking down a cut-anddried formula for "Once Upon a Time!" Remember that it was a motherly hearted wolf with no views whatever on asepsis that suckled a pair of historic twins. And Romulus lived to build Rome (though not in a day, which our darling could do perfectly now that steel construction has come in), and finally was taken up to heaven in a fiery chariot, though of course we should n't like little Frederic to do that! Hang your walls if you will with tables of dietetics, but give space there also to the "Annunciation" with its lilies. Love and respect you always will merit from your son. But let him also associate the word mother with that indefinable exquisiteness a Frenchman breathes into "Ma Mère!" Your loving cousin,

Grace Durham.

To spoil a boy at college is not so easy a problem as you may at first be inclined to think. Nature is quick and resolute in the defense of her works, and it is only by a systematic and persistent course of folly and neglect that the average college

freshman can be turned into a young man capable of making his father regret the money he has spent upon his son's education.

The first principle to be kept in mind-and in fact the only principle, from which every other rule of parental conduct may be deduced-may be formulated in a few words: start with the assumption that as soon as your boy's matriculation fees have been paid, all responsibility for his future, on your part, lapses. Henceforth, to fall into what I generally regard as a deplorable vulgarism, it is "up to us" whether your son shall return to his father's house, after four years, a modest, well-equipped, industrious youth, eager for the responsibilities of manhood, or whether he shall return to you in the guise which makes angry parents write letters to the newspapers asking, "What is the Matter with Our Colleges?" Even as I write, it occurs to me that the principle I have enunciated may not be unfamiliar to you. You

were probably acting up to its implications when you sent your boy to a preparatory school, and, before that, when he went from kindergarten into the elementary classes. If there is anything more striking than the unanimity with which our democracy shifts the responsibilities of parenthood to the shoulders of governesses, school-teachers, and college-professors, it is the indignant surprise that is usually exhibited by parents when they contemplate the result.

Once your boy has been installed in the most expensive suite of rooms in the most select dormitory or fraternity house in town, and has exhausted his ingenuity in furnishing his quarters so as to suggest the combined atmosphere of a boudoir, a beer-hall, and a Turkish bath, you must lose no time in buying him an automobile. I speak with more than ordinary feeling on this point because it is a matter that does not affect your boy alone. Every time your son runs into a trolley-car or a ditch, he not only reflects credit on himself, but brings an enviable notoriety to his college. A sixty-horse-power motor-car in the hands of a freshman is, to me, the most efficient instrument for imbuing him with the disrespect for sobriety of living, the

disregard of authority, and the lack of consideration for others' feelings, which are the most common gifts that a university bestows upon its sons. Short of setting a tradesman's house on fire, I can think of no better means for bringing an undergraduate's name into the newspapers. And what that will do to turn a charming boy into a disagreeable young man, I need not call to your attention.

Once you have shipped your son off to college, never take time from your business to drop in on him for a day's visit. I recognize that such time as you can spare from the daily grind of affairs must be devoted to Masonic meetings, the annual G. A. R. Reunion at Denver, the annual Knights of Pythias Convention at Memphis, Tennessee, the annual Bankers' Convention at Atlantic City, the annual Foreign Missions Convention at San Francisco, and the biennial gathering of the State political clubs at Cincinnati. Give your son every chance for growing out of sympathy with his home and its ideals, so that, if by accident you do make your appearance at his dormitory quarters, he will feel ashamed to introduce you to his classmates. Once a month write him a letter, dictated to your stenographer, in some such terms as these:

Dear James: Yours of the eighteenth at hand and contents, including bill for refurnishing rooms and repairing automobile, duly noted. Glad to hear you are having a good time and hope to hear the same from you in subsequent letter.

Your loving

Father.

After eight months of this, when your son comes home for his long vacation and you observe in him a state of complete indifference toward everybody about him, you will know the reason why. And if you find the boy's mother crying in her room over the boy's apparent estrangement from the family, you will undoubtedly be able to describe to her how it all came about.

I have mentioned your son's bills. I am bound to confess that such financial memoranda as you receive will be those calling for some extraordinary outlay which cannot be met from his regular monthly allowance. As to the manner in which that monthly allowance is spent, you must never ask the young man for an accounting. There is something mean and plebeian about the process of keeping expenditure down to the level of income that cannot but prove revolting to high-spirited youth. But if the habit of business impels you to ask him for some form of budgetary statement, be content with some such monthly analysis as this:

No young man can go on submitting detailed vouchers like the one I have cited without losing all sense of responsibility and proportion. For the purpose of undermining a young man's thrift, I am not sure but that this method of monthly accounting is better than no accounting at all. In every way, I repeat, you must proceed on the supposition that your son, as soon as he leaves college, will not only find somebody to pay all his bills, but somebody who will save him the trouble of looking over his bills or the necessity of recalling dim memories of the multiplication-table.

As to the young man's studies, you must so regulate your conduct as to avoid rousing in him the slightest suspicion that your plans in sending him to college were in any way connected with the subject of books. A kindly word of congratulation when the boy has made the base-ball team or won his 'varsity letter will of course make him very happy. But you cannot venture to quiz him upon what progress he is making in his classes without conveying to him a painful sense of your provincial outlook. In other words, you must learn to acquiesce cheerfully in the doctrine which now holds almost universal sway, that, for whatever purpose a young man goes to college nowadays, it is not for the purpose of learning anything. Pin your faith to the truth so eloquently expounded in contemporary magazine literature, that the boys who hate books worst turn out to be the true leaders of men, conquerors of women's hearts, and beloved favorites of Success. You need not depend on magazine fiction alone. There has grown up of late a cheerful and convenient school of statisticians who love to prove that it is precisely the undergraduate who spells "catch" without a "t" and thinks that Joseph was one of the three young men in the fiery furnace, who makes the best lawyer, doctor, or clergyman. It is true that the official statistics published by college secretaries contradict this gratifying contention; but you must leave the latter fact out of your consideration.

After four years of some such policy on your part as I have outlined, I have not the slightest doubt that you will find your son as thoroughly disappointing an example of manhood as the most careful neglect and the most conscientious ignorance can make him. Sincerely yours,

Theophilus Bickersteth.