up by his parents until their mother married again-this time happily.

A friend of mine whose boy is in one of the leading preparatory schools said, "His associates are nearly all of them boys who have been placed there by divorced parents who did not know what else to do with them."

Still, we should not be too hasty in our conclusions. There are, unhappily, among us too many infantile intelligences who feed on the literary outpourings of sensationmongers. It is quite easy to draw up an indictment against any society and show that it is rotten to the core. Denunciation is one of the greatest indoor sports among fanatics and reformers. At the same time, it does not take either microscope or binoculars for any unprejudiced observer to see that there is something radically wrong with us. This domestic hiatus may be a passing phase. It may be a gap in the national consciousness which foreshadows a millennium. Each one of us knows that in his own life a reckless hell-raising spell has often ushered in a much deeper understanding and a higher level of character, although this is not recommended here as a general course of conduct. The obvious condition facing us, however, is certainly worth looking into calmly and philosophically and sympathetically. Even now, in spite of the new woman freedom going on so raucously in the main tent and the revolt of the male, men do have more compensations than women. A man can thus "walk out" on his wife and sublimate his urges to a more various degree.

In the case of so many immature marriages, we may say, quite cordially and sincerely, that the parents are to blame, that the young people are themselves too lax, that petting parties, scanty clothes, bobbed hair, sport cars and lack of home control, are all responsible. All that is true enough, but only in part. Educators, and by this I mean headmasters and school principals who come into intimate contact with large bodies of young people, will bear me out when I say that there is among these young people a finer spirit to-day than there has been since our Civil War. When young people break, as they so often do, it is because the conditions are too much for them. They get bewildered and the break comes with dramatic swiftness. Many have tried hard to save themselves. The atmosphere of cynical unbelief in which we are at present so enveloped, breeds despair. If a fellow with nothing but the best intentions marries a girl who afterwards “lays down" on her job, or if the reverse happens, then, when the affair gets too thick, there is no supporting vision. No help comes from the common thought, the World-Soul. "Everybody is doing it." There is no intrinsic harm in jazz, sex, speed, freedom in expression and the like, except that they parade as substitutes for joy. This sound and fury drowns out the true joy. The road-house is open every night and the church mostly on Sundays. Is it too sweeping to say that the majority of people use the church as a gas station, in the hope that they will last from one week-end to the other? And if, in between, they get stalled

on the road, too many expect the minister to carry them the spiritual gas to get them through.

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For remedies, we depend too much upon paraphernalia to settle our difficulties. Laws multiply. We are all for facts, statistics, conferences, and the abnormality called data. Our moral consciousness is a matter of charts and diagrams. It will be good for us to learn, however painful the process and it is certain to be that, that domestic difficulties cannot be settled in courts and laboratories. Ceremony in human relationship is so important, groups of facts are so unimportant. Husbands and wives cannot get on together through the attempts of educational experts, sociologists or psychologists to overcome a widespread condition from the outside. The cure lies in our souls.

And the trouble is not altogether due to a spiritual lack as so many of our religious leaders declare, as to a lack of common sense, concentration and courage. It is actually due to this appalling ignorance of what Love is.

The only place where any human being can learn just what this Love is and how to practise it, is at home. There is no just-as-good-as substitute. The training begins in the nursery. Notice how often it is that a man who cannot get on with one wife cannot get on with a succession of them. The subject changes but not the weakness that is the cause of the change.

I am occasionally diverted by the remarks of some kind judge, who, in his effort to reconcile some reluctant matrimonial misfits, lays down

rules for their future guidance. It goes without saying that these rules are good ones. But the cure for bankrupt marriage cannot come from the outside but only from the inside. The value of ceremony in married life can scarcely be overestimated, but it must be the result of real Love and not an artificial thing. Nothing is more beautiful than the polite gestures of old people who love one another. The consciousness of the reality of true Love must be universal and this can come to pass only through the home discipline of our young people—a discipline which very early initiates them into right Love. In the case of too many of the immature marriages of the present, each is trying to get what can be got from the other. These tricky partnerships, like paper tents, blow down before the first squall. The reason why the continental marriage of convenience is more successful is because the best of married life cannot be built on lust, invariably destructive, but on that sort of compatibility which, over a lifetime, reduces the social friction between two people to a minimum. We can live under the same roof more permanently with those whose social habits conform to ours; for if we have to fight, we understand one another so much better than in the case of so many misalliances of the present; where neither husband nor wife has the remotest idea, apparently, of what has happened to part them. Each accuses the other of faithlessness. Neither is individually to blame, but the deep sense of injustice felt by both is due to their subconscious revolt at the unfairness of the present

artificial system. The initial combination of selfishness, ignorance and passion which led them into this trap was due to a lack of understanding and the discipline to which they were entitled.

If you have never been taught the way of Love at home, you cannot then select one individual to practise upon. You must begin early and practise on many. Thus, our young people are not taught how to love. Almost from the cradle, parents leave the training to outsiders. It is only because Love is so natural and spontaneous, that the victims get through at all. Witness how boys become pals. When Love ceases to be Love, it becomes hatred. "Hatred," writes Crabb, "is not contented with merely wishing ill to others, but derives its whole happiness from their misery or destruction." And so we often hear our young men say of the wives they walk out on: "I hope she gets what's coming to her."

Too many seek a predigested Love. And this is true not only of Love, but of every other "good and perfect gift," that the brother of our Lord refers to.

There has, doubtless, never been a time in any country, when so much real intelligence and so much moronic

stupidity dwelt side by side. Men in cloisters, of whom we seldom hear

if at all-spend years in writing books which nobody reads because this requires effort. We prefer best sellers and tabloids. The mental and spiritual labor involved in doing anything more than to keep up with the installments is too much for us. We do not see that true romance is not an affair of cosmetics but of the heart; it is not a matter of dishes left unwashed until the pantry shelves are empty and one has to do something about it. All these things and more, are not however, the cause of separations, divorces and cynical infant derelicts: they are only the results. We must go back to the sources; and the human consciousness must be corrected.

Count

One thing is certain: you must want to know how to love. The base coin which at present circulates under this name has no golden treasury in the common heart. Keyserling's matrimonial authorities agree that the prepared marriage is the most lasting. Married life must be more deeply rooted than friendship. Indeed, few friendships could stand it. Lovers are not only born, but made. Perhaps, after all, the secret of our weakness lies under the hand of her who no longer cares to rock the cradle-and how about father?

D

OWN in the less modernized Chelsea quarter of New York stands a long row of houses across whose dignified, old-fashioned façades runs a continuous key-design such as may be seen on Greek robes and in Greek architecture. In the floating dimness of a foggy afternoon one can visualize that long line of house-fronts as the Greek portico of a columned temple in whose shadow students might gather to listen to the exposition of some master and cross with him in discussion. A far leap of the fancy. These are only dwellings of modern, everyday New-Yorkers retaining, it is true, with their gnarled trees and discolored garden statuary, a touch of old-world stateliness. Yet, as one walks by the one walks by the grilled iron fences one sees near the door-post of one of these faded houses a modest sign bearing the inscription, "The New School for Social Research." Out of the long line of fancied Attic temples a school has been conjured. And its avowed object of "providing persons of mature intelligence with facilities for instruction and research in the vital problems of contemporary life" is worthy of the best of both ancient and modern times.

This object was based upon the recognition by the founders of the

New School, seven years ago, that there is a great and growing body of men and women engaged for the most part in the professions, business and industry, who feel the need of continuous and systematic study chiefly as a means of keeping mentally alert. Many of them, it was believed, might contribute materially, either through discussion or research, to the current of valid ideas on matters of contemporary concern. The province which the institution thus marked out for itself by observation, experiment and accomplishment, lies within the field which has since come to be known popularly as adult education. And in keeping with the best definition of that expression the New School aims, not merely to help its students to make up defects in early education and to attain given standards, but to organize their interest and abilities for continuous intellectual effort. Education becomes thereby a process, never completed, but continued through life if mental health and vigor are to be maintained.

Unhampered intellectually or academically, without social, political or religious bias, the New School is an educational laboratory to which the factory or the clerical worker is as welcome as the lawyer, the physician,

the teacher, the engineer and the social worker, if he but bring the one necessary contribution-intellectual interest. This institution fixes no entrance requirements, confers no degrees or credits toward degrees, and sets no examinations. As a result, the students come by the process of self-selection which draws minds of a high level of attainment. In proof of this statement out of nearly ten thousand students in the first seven years of the school twentyfive hundred held bachelor's degrees, seven hundred held master's degrees, two hundred doctor's degrees, two hundred and seventy professional degrees and seven hundred and thirty training-school degrees or certificates. The fact that these students are distributed over a range of employments including executives, doctors, lawyers, writers, editors, social workers, nurses, teachers, librarians, research workers, accountants, statisticians, engineers, draftsmen and ministers makes it necessary for the instructor to effect various adaptations in his method. He cannot make the familiar academic assumption that every student has covered a specific preliminary course; nor can he assume the merely fugitive interest on which the popular lecturer must draw. The most successful technic is worked out on the plan of inter-communication between the subject matter of the lecturer and the experience of the students.

That this different approach to education is intriguing to lecturers and professors of high scholarly standards is shown by the fact that the New School attracts to its faculty celebrated authorities from this country and abroad, such as John Dewey,

Graham Wallis, James Harvey Robinson, John Masefield, John B. Watson, Harold Laski, Sandor Ferenczi, Morris Cohen, Edwin G. Conklin, Julian Huxley, Bernard Gleuck, Frankwood Williams, Franz Boas, Alfred Adler and Stark Young. The magnet which draws them more powerfully than any other force is no doubt the atmosphere created by the students they face in the lectureroom-persons who come in increasing numbers every year to the New School because they find there, as they did not or do not in the same measure find at college, the sense of an on-going changing world, a fearlessness of inquiry, an appraisal of ideas and a fine spirit of comradeship in the great adult adventure of becoming intelligent about life.

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The present plan of the New School-"a coöperative venture in non-authoritarian, informal learning, the chief purpose of which is to discover the meaning of experience”— did not spring full panoplied into being. On the contrary it is the outcome of seven years of changes, experiments and growth. In the period immediately following the war the idea in the top of everybody's mind was economic reconstruction in the interest of the masses. flict had impressed thinkers with the immense waste of effort that goes on. The fact that one could take 4,000,000 men out of industry, supply them with munitions and equipment and yet carry on our economic system almost as before, was a scathing commentary on the enormous leakages in our scheme of living. James Harvey Robinson, Charles A. Beard and Thorstein Veblin—the academic

The con