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personal motives either of interest or friendship, yet the safety of the state requires that this should not go too far." If a preacher's forecast made such a warning necessary then, how much more must be added now from our bitter experience? How necessary such words of solemn and prophetic admonition as those spoken by Bishop Potter at St. Paul's on the chief day of the centennial celebration-in the presence of one President and two ex-Presidents.

We saw, thirteen years ago, the scene of enthusiasm when the dawning of Independence Day commemorated the origin of the festival just a hundred years before. We may easily imagine the intense excitement which would characterize it this year if armed and alien enemies stood in military array within the boundaries of the Republic. And yet there has never been a time in our country's history when the elements of reverence for the past and anxiety for the present and the future were more necessary than in the celebration of this first Independence Day of the Constitution's second century. There are many subjects which deserve the most serious reflection of any American who aspires to good citizenship. It is high time for him to awake out of slumber and disappoint the hopes of the intestine foes of all good citizens. He can no longer afford to believe that all the voters of the opposite party are rogues; that he is serving his country when he uses his citizenship for the mere purpose of circumventing them; that he is under any obligation to transfer to local elections the issues and passions which are appropriate only to national elections; or that in general every man whom he finds labeled with his party title becomes thereby a Heaven-ordained leader, to be trusted implicitly and followed unshrinkingly these are the familiar tricks and devices by which self-seeking politicians of all parties have kept the good people of these States divided and neutralized, taking to themselves the objects of their own desire. To repudiate such influences may seem an easy task, but human nature makes it one of the most difficult of human experience. To meet it with success, there is need of all the resources to be drawn from the training of the past and the feeling of responsibility for the future; and for such considerations there have been few Independence Days more appropriate than that of 1889, when the political passions of the past have cooled and the strong winds of coming struggles are yet at a distance. The thoughts appropriate to the day may be less exciting than usual this year, but it cannot be said that they are less important.

The Summer Exodus, and what it Testifies.

THE contrast between the past and the present of American life will hardly find a more striking embodiment than in the changes in the mode of passing the summer. Within the memory of many of us, a complete change of residence during the hot months was a luxury confined to comparatively few. Country people never thought of it; and it was believed that in the cities the first subterfuge of an ambitious family was to close the front of the house and to live in the back rooms, if so be that they could thus persuade the world of their neighborhood that they too had taken part in the annual flitting. If city children were sent for the summer to the grand-paternal farm, they were fortunate

beyond their fellows. Now the case is changed past recognition. Social conditions seem to be ordered to meet a general summer exodus. Summer hotels are everywhere. They form an almost continuous line along the coast of New England and the Middle States; one mountain region after another has succumbed to their invasion; the lakes of the interior have begun to prove most attractive watering-places; and the rising tide of summer travel has begun to cut new channels for itself-along the Pacific coast, on the Gulf of Mexico, and in the great pine woods and the hill territory of the South. The summer cottage has been elastic enough to meet the needs of purses of every grade: it ranges from that which is almost a palace in its extent and equipment or the wide-stretching club-park, with its reserved rights of shooting or fishing, to the economical boarding-place or the Adirondack cabin. Poor indeed is the family that cannot contrive by the exercise of forethought and thrift to secure some brief summer's outing, for the bread-winners or for all the members of the family; and when the inability seems to exist, it is more often a certain incompatibility between the family resources and the family desires. The develop. ment has even gone further, and many who cannot afford such a relaxation contrive a substitute by transferring their scene of work to summer resorts, or have it furnished for them by "fresh-air funds."

Much of this change in the habits of the people has undoubtedly been due to the increasing tendency to a city life. However great the attractions of the city may be, man retains something of the nature of Antæus, and needs an occasional renewal of direct contact with mother earth to keep him in full vigor. When the proportion of those who are habitually confined to an urban life has increased from one-thirtieth to one-third it is natural that there should be a correspondingly increased pressure for summer relaxation and for accommodations to supply it. Even this explanation, however, is by no means adequate. It would account for the increased stream of Americans who wish to leave the cities during the summer, but not for their ability to indulge the desire. The fact that schoolteachers, who naturally long for a summer outing, are many times more numerous than they were fifty years ago, will not tell us why that sorely underpaid class of workers, for whom there was no provision then, has now a store of vacation resorts from which to choose.

The subject may have much more than a merely curious interest. Mr. Henry George and his disciples have strenuously asserted that the rewards of labor are both actually and comparatively less than they were fifty years ago, and others have as strenuously contradicted them. It is impossible, unfortunately, to array any undoubted or fairly indubitable testimony on either side. Those who labored and were paid for their labor fifty years ago are most of them dead, and can tell us nothing about the matter. Those who are still alive are by no means the same persons that they were fifty years ago; they cannot compare the two periods fairly and tell us whether the intervening time has given them more or less for their work. Figures are incorrigible liars. They leave out of view all sorts of conditions, which materially change their size and weight. A table of comparative wages may tell us in plain figures the workman's different rates of wages at two different periods, while it tells nothing of the varia

tions in the price of flour or meat, or in rent or clothing, all of which the workman would find to be very serious limitations on the real purchasing power of his money wages. Even when we get figures for these latter elements they profit us little. The average price of flour for a particular year may be a high one, but this may be due either to continuous high prices throughout the year, or to an abnormally high price for some months, in which the workman has felt it very little by reason of his ability to provide substitutes for flour at that time. No mere wage statistics, moreover, will tell us whether the workman, under the wages current for either point of time, had work enough for all the year around, or for but a part of the year. Again, the price of board or the total cost of living may have remained the same, while improvements in transportation have added to the table beef and mutton from the West, fish from the Pacific coast, and canned goods from all parts of the country or of the world, thus enabling the same money, or the same wages, to furnish that prime necessity for man, a varied diet. Countless parallel reasons have led men to impeach the validity of almost every collocation of figures, and fair-minded men, while admitting the figures as conclusive upon their own judgment, have often shrunk from any attempt to impose them upon the judgment of others. The figures do seem to show that Mr. George is utterly wrong, and that the condition of the workingman has improved greatly during the past half-century. Every new collocation of figures which brings out the same result strengthens the mathematical probability of that conclusion, and yet we can hardly say that the inherent weakness of figures has so far been overcome that the case is decided.

Under such circumstances, the summer exodus may contain indications which are more trustworthy and of more real weight than any mere figures can be. A column of wage statistics may, out of willfulness, inattention, or pure ignorance in the compiler, omit elements which are essential to any complete or just conclusion; but no such imperfection can be attributed to such a social fact as that which we are considering. The summer exodus is the mathematical result of a composition of all the forces which bear on the question: it omits no consideration which is essential to the conclusion; it assigns to each its comparative importance with an accuracy which no human compilation of figures can hope to reach; and its summing-up may be of the greatest service in showing us whether the progress of the past fifty years has really been accompanied by any relative increase of poverty. If the summer exodus has grown only as the country has grown; if it is confined to the same social classes to which it was confined in 1839; if the numbers who take part in it have increased only in proportion to the increase of those classes; still more, if there has been any relative falling-off in number - then we may as well admit that there is the strongest of indications that our progress has not done much for pov. erty. If, on the other hand, we find that the numbers of those who can now indulge in the summer's outing have grown far beyond the mere numerical increase of population; that the annual movement has penetrated further downward to social strata which could not have thought of it a half-century ago - then we may surely take the whole development as a fair indication that progress has done something to take the edge from

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poverty, unless we are to take it that the people are obstinately bent nowadays on taking vacations which they cannot really afford. It is from this point of view that such social phenomena are most worthy of study, as well as most easy of apprehension. There are not many who cannot make some contribution to the discussion; and the greater the amount of light which is poured upon it the greater is the likelihood of a just and permanent decision.

Outdoor Sports.

THERE comes to the American people, with the hot weather, the season in which outdoor sports seem to reign supreme. Boat-races and baseball matches follow one another in bewildering succession. The newspapers reek with championships and gossip about champions and would-be champions. You shall find the spectators at a single game of baseball outnumbering the entire population of such a city as Boston a hundred years ago. Schoolboys are no longer the only ones who are thought to suffer such amusements to come between them and their work; an equal interest in outdoor sports is attributed to judges and lawyers, editors and reporters, merchants and clerks; and it is even said that our Saturday half-holidays are in many cases due less to interest in the health of subordinates than to the desire of principals to witness some outdoor athletic contest. At any rate, it should be understood that lack of interest in open-air amusements is no longer to be included among the faults of the American people.

We may grant at once all that is claimed for the new development by its professed admirers. It will doubt. less exert a strong influence against the intrusion of weak lungs, hearts, and livers into our pulpits, editorial and court rooms, and other scenes of professional work. It will make those who take active part in it more prompt to think and decide in emergencies. It will check the feverish eagerness of Americans in their pursuit of work for the sake of work. And the increasing number of those who are able to take part in it is merely another fact in evidence of the greater comfort of modern life and of our people's stronger leaning towards healthy amusements as a break in the monotony of unvarying work.

All this and more might be granted without making out an impregnable case for the modern development of athletics. It is not enough to prove the objects good, even with a likelihood of attaining them; it is often more important to attend to the correctness of the methods employed, for they may be such as to bring with them new evils which more than counterbalance all the good that has been attained. The amusements of a people are not at all beneath the attention of a sound social philosophy; they are often symptomatic of tendencies which cannot yet be seen in any other way, as the real nature of men comes out most clearly in their moments of relaxation. When the Roman noble went into the barracks of the gladiators and bet his sesterces upon their chances in the morrow's contest, the evil omen of the scene was not in the mere brutality of the sport, but in the disappearance of all that had once made up the Roman idea. No matter whether the sport in question was cruel or refined, the men and women whose souls were

absorbed in it were no longer of that breed which had brought the civilized earth under control of the Roman Peace. When the Byzantine mob went into ecstasies of excitement over the alternate victories of the blue or the green drivers in the circus there were none of the cruelties which marked the outdoor sports of Rome; but the pettiness of mind which found satisfaction in such relaxations was echoed in the bombast and conceit of Byzantine historians, and in the cowardice of the Byzantine emperors, who trembled behind their strong walls as successive deluges of barbarians, crusaders, and Mohammedans swept around them.

The relaxation of mind and body which is found in outdoor sports is by no means the most important circumstance connected with them: they are much more important as representatives of, or centers of influence in, the growth of the people. Viewed from this standpoint it is a serious question how far the modern athletic régime is a social benefit or a social injury. The development of a people is seen nowhere more clearly than in their ability to distinguish means from ends, and this is nowhere more true than in this matter of amusements. One may be glad to see a people turn work into play from time to time, from a conscious longing for relaxation, and yet see nothing admirable in an interest which makes the amusement an end in itself, and not a means to something better. Our newspapers give columns of expensive dispatches detailing the foreign "triumphs" of two American baseball nines, while they have no longer space or

readers for more than a meager summary of the debates in Congress. Crowds surround the bulletinboards to watch the reflected glories of a boat-race, while the demands of business are so imperative that they cannot spend an hour twice in a twelvemonth in keeping alive their membership and influence in their party's primary association. If we are to gauge the popular interest in outdoor sports and in any more serious occupation by their respective shares of the Sunday newspapers, what is to be thought of the mental and moral standards of our people?

The whole question is one on which no appeal is possible except to the individual consciousness and conscience. A man should be able to tell, in his own case, whether his interest in outdoor sports is for their own sake or as a means to a higher and better end; whether he is a grown-up child, "pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw," or a hard-working man, who feels the need of decreasing the strain upon his energies from time to time in order to keep them in full efficiency. His ability to consider his own case impartially will test his ability to estimate the general influence of outdoor amusements as we have them. These amusements are of no importance whatever in themselves; they are of the greatest importance as indications of a general drift, and it is a most serious question, on which every man ought to have an opinion, whether they are now indicative of greater comfort or of popular degeneracy, of higher standards of living or of lower standards of work.

M

Indians, and Indians.

OPEN LETTERS.

R. REMINGTON'S descriptions of the Apaches and Comanches in this number of THE CENTURY have all the vividness of an impressionist, and are undoubtedly faithful as impressions. There is a tendency, however, among the people at large to accept a brief impression for a complete portraiture, and so to form general ideas out of a few details entirely inadequate for such a purpose. There are Indians and Indians, and he who should form his general impression of the Indian from a glimpse of the savagery of individual Apaches would find it necessary to discard his work and begin anew in the presence of the peaceful and skillful Zuni. It is true that the determination of methods of practical dealing with the Indians must depend somewhat on their character, but if the whole mass of Indians were as bad as individuals are sometimes represented to be the duty of dealing justly with them in all relations would still remain untouched. Whether or no the Indian of to-day is an attractive person to us is a small matter; the supreme matter is that he shall have no ground for a charge of injustice against us. No characterization of the Indian can be in any measure adequate which does not exhibit the various types found among the different tribes, the degrees of civilization reached, and the varying grades of material advancement represented by individuals and communities. Those who have studied the question on the

ground are agreed that while the army view, the view of the frontiersman, and the view of the philanthropist are each true in individual cases, none of them contains the whole truth. The Indian character is as varied as the character of the white man who sits in judgment upon him. Reversing the usual process, the Indian might base his impression of the whites on the indifference and somewhat scornful protection which the army man offers him, or the undisguised greed and unscrupulousness of the frontiersman who covets his lands, or the sometimes unpractical temper of the philanthropist whose whole desire is to serve him. All these types exist, and yet neither of them represents the great body of whites.

What is known as the Indian Question has made great and substantial progress during the last ten yearsprogress not only in the development of public opinion favorable to an award of an exact justice, but in knowledge of the real character and capacity of the Indian himself. No one who has any real knowledge of the matter ever thinks of the Indian to-day as controlled by any single passion or as represented by any single type of character. He recognizes that in dealing with them we are dealing with a body of people who differ among themselves as widely as the people of any other race. Moreover, what can be done with the Indian is no longer a matter of speculation. Much has been done in education, in agriculture, in social organization, and in diffusion of the spirit, occupations, and

habits of civilized men. The present stage is no longer experimental. So much has already been done, and, in the main, done successfully, that what still remains to be done is to complete and expand the operation of methods, instrumentalities, and laws already in operation.

The results at Hampton and Carlisle have settled the question of the capacity of the Indian for education. During the last decade Hampton alone has trained with more or less thoroughness more than three hundred students, who have been under its culture from a few months to five or six years. The record of these students has been carefully preserved, and that record shows that the great majority, in the face of almost insurmountable obstacles, are exercising a wide and beneficent influence on the communities through which they are scattered, and are doing faithfully and successfully the work of pioneers in the civilization of their people. As teachers, farmers, clerks, interpreters, scouts, and cattle-raisers they have attained, all things considered, an average success quite as high as that which would have attended the labors of an equal number of whites. The record of Carlisle's school would undoubtedly make as favorable a showing as the record of Hampton.

But the great and substantial gain which has been made in the discussion of the Indian question is the clear perception that the doing of justice does not depend on the character of those to whom it is awarded; that it is an absolute obligation independent of all such considerations. The long and terrible story of injustice to the Indians has at last borne its fruits in an awakened public conscience. The appealing pathos of such a story as " Ramona " has undoubtedly reached many who would have turned away indifferent from a bare recital of facts, but if the typical Indian were Geronimo rather than Ramona our duty to him would not be the less evident or the less imperative. It is the perception of this long-neglected duty which has not only banded together individuals to secure the redress of the wrongs inflicted upon the Indian, but which has at last produced something like a coherent system of measures looking to a permanent adjustment of the relations of the two races. The breaking up of the reservation system, the allotment of land in severalty, the conferring of the privileges and protection of citizenship, the extension of the civil and military laws over the reservations, the organization of an educational commission looking to the establishment of public school education, are all consistent features of a general movement which shall incorporate into the law of the land the aroused sentiment of its citizens.

Hamilton Wright Mabie.

Industrial Education for the Negro: Is it a "Craze"?

MOST friends of the negro in the North as well as in the South agree that industrial training should go hand in hand with his moral and mental culture. That is, they think that there should be for men such a drill at least in the elementary principles and processes of farming and the most common handicrafts, and for women in cooking, sewing, domestic economy, nursing and the care of children, that they may be better able both to earn and to save money, to secure homes of their own, and to make them worthy of that sacred name.

But while there is this nearly universal agreement as to the need of training of this sort, and disagreement merely as to matters of detail and method, there are a few earnest friends of the colored man whose long, arduous, and efficient labors in his behalf entitle their opinions to great weight - who are afraid of this movement, and speak of it as a "craze." They think that the outcome of it is almost certain to be a less extended and thorough mental and moral culture. And as some of them are in positions where their opinions must have great power to shape or modify some of the most important of the organizations and institutions whose special object is negro education, it seems as if a statement of the reasons for their opinion, and the considerations which lead many of the benevolent to disagree with them, would be timely.

One of these reasons is that it is very hard to get enough money to give the ordinary scholastic education, the equipment for which is not so costly as that for industrial training. Will not the effort to give this more expensive culture diminish the amount available for the other ?

It is urged, further, that the proposed change implies too great a concession to the widely prevailing opinion that the negro is, and in the nature of the case must be, better fitted for manual than for mental labor.

They argue also that the new departure tends to foster materialistic notions of the value of education, the main object of which should be the ennoblement of the worker rather than the production of more cotton, rice, sugar, coal, iron, or lumber. It is a materialistic age at best, and the tendencies in that direction are especially strong in the South at present; and even were the object no higher than the increase of the negro's value as a factor in the production and distribution of commodities, a widely known writer contends that, since dexterity is largely a result of mental rather than muscular training, any scheme that contemplates less of the higher education for the sake of increased production will in the end defeat itself.

Then again, the surprising success in some schools, and notably in one, in mastering the more advanced branches is profoundly affecting the opinions of many of the most influential people in the South as to the capacity of the negro; and to do anything which would make the work in these high-grade schools less extensive or less thorough will push him and his friends off this hard-won vantage-ground.

Still further, we are exhorted to remember that leaders qualified to hold their own in the sharp competitions of professional life are a great, if not the greatest, need of the colored race in this country. Over wide areas most of their clergy are illiterate, immoral, self-seeking, bitter sectarians, and the most determined opponents of every kind of improvement. So, too, the lack of lawyers, editors, and physicians of suffi ciently broad and thorough training to be able to defend their weaker brethren against designing or incapable advisers is a very discouraging feature of the situation. The negroes do not as a rule seek the leadership or counsel of competent and honest whites in matters of religion or of business; hence the greater need of well-qualified men of their own race.

These are strong points. What can be said against them without aiding those who disbelieve in advanced education for colored people? Some of these are warm

friends of the negro, and some, it is to be feared, are not anxious that he should have more education than just enough to keep him from voting on the side of anarchy and to make him more efficient as a hewer of wood and a drawer of water. But is it not possible to unite industrial training with thorough and wide mental and moral culture? In advocating it need we strengthen the hands of the excellent people who oppose the highschool and college work, on the ground that it is better to give some book learning to the many rather than a good deal to only a few? There are a considerable number of those who believe in providing the most advanced scholastic education for those colored people who will push on to gain it who are firmly convinced that the movement for industrial education may be a help rather than a hindrance to the higher school work. What can be said in support of their position?

First. Only a small number graduate in the thorough college courses of the institutions that provide such advantages, and most leave them before they are qualified to pass the examinations for first-grade certificates as teachers. Hence they cannot hope for positions in the graded schools, which are kept open eight or nine months in a year. They must take those which afford them employment for only two or three months. What are they to do during the remaining nine or ten months? If they had the industrial education now given in some schools they might support themselves in the same communities where they teach, acquiring decent homes of their own, which would be a much needed example and incentive to all about them. The lack of anything worthy to be called home is the most appalling obstacle to the elevation of the negro. If these higher schools should furnish this industrial training, as some of them are beginning to do, nine-tenths, or, in many cases nineteen-twentieths, of the pupils who never finish even the grammar-school course might be put in the way of living for the rest of their lives like human beings instead of like beasts.

Second. The industrial training need not diminish, but may be made rather to increase the funds available for school work. Many will give to schools that afford this training who will not give to the schools that do not afford it. Many will give for this who will give nothing for school work. Besides, a large item of the expense of most of the existing schools is for "student's aid." In an institution which gives industrial training the students can earn much if not all of this aid. This saves their self-respect, avoids the danger of pauperizing them, and enables a thousand dollars given for such aid to be used over and over.

Third. In many cases students could stay and get a more thorough mental training if such work were furnished. There need not be such a small percentage of graduates from the normal, scientific, and collegiate courses as the catalogues show.

Fourth. Such work gives an entirely new idea of the dignity of labor. It was one of the greatest evils of slavery that manual labor was considered degrading. This was especially mischievous in its effects on the poor whites. The South is only slowly coming to believe that one who works for a living can be qualified for good society. In many of the industrial schools already established students are beginning to take pride in their command of tools, in their well planned and executed mechanical work, and in the thorough, clean VOL. XXXVIII.— 62.

tillage, the enlarged and varied products, and the improved stock and buildings of the farms attached to these schools.

Fifth. Two or three hours a day of manual labor leave abundant time for all the study which is consistent with mental alertness and vigor. Quality is of far higher importance in mental work than quantity. It is of comparatively little moment that a certain number of facts and rules find lodgment in the mind for a time usually a short time. The main thing is that the student acquires the power and the habit of incisive, sustained, and honest thinking. Six or eight hours of sharp attention is as much as should be required of any young person in one day. Some public schools require all lessons to be learned at home; but it is hard to see how such schools can produce anything but a lax and flabby habit of mind, or else injure the health. Just as much severe, intense study—and no other should be tolerated — can be done in a day by one who works two or three hours as by one who does not. Work that demands care and skill is really more of a relaxation than that which calls for nothing but brute force, because it is more interesting.

Sixth. The ability to plan or build a church, a school-house, or a dwelling, or to carry on a farm as it should be carried on, gives a man's opinion about purely professional matters greater weight in all struggling communities. A teacher, minister, or physician could hardly have, aside from his mental and moral qualities, a more effective passport to the confidence and respect of colored people.

Industrial education is in the air, and is sure to be tried extensively. Ought not those who have so long and so successfully fought the battle for purely school work to take a leading place in shaping policy under the new departure? Who can keep it from becoming too materialistic so well or so surely as they?

S. W. Powell.

Charles Thomson, Secretary of Continental Congress.

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IN THE CENTURY MAGAZINE for April is a very interesting article by Clarence Winthrop Bowen on The Inauguration of Washington." On page 813 Mr. Bowen says: "In 1774, when he [Charles Thomson] was elected Secretary of the Continental Congress, which office he held for fifteen consecutive years,— he had just married a young woman of fortune, who was the aunt of President William Henry Harrison, and the great-great-aunt of President Benjamin Harrison." The marriage referred to took place September 4, 1774, at “Harriton,” in Merion Township, then in Philadelphia, but now in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. The lady whom he married was Hannah Harrison, daughter of Richard Harrison, a Friend who originally came from Maryland and married Hannah Norris, a daughter of Isaac Norris and granddaughter of Governor Thomas Lloyd. Richard Harrison died March 2, 1747, and left to survive him his widow and four children, namely, Thomas Harrison, Mary, who died unmarried, Samuel, and Hannah, who married Charles Thomson. As neither of Mr. Harrison's sons was named Benjamin, it is very apparent that Mr. Bowen has made a mistake. John Adams, in his diary of the occurrences of a few days previous to the meeting of Congress,

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