impossible for the teacher who is true blue; because at the same time we have made her blue over the chilling officialdom which insists upon adapting the child to the Procrustean bed of the System.

It isn't hard to teach children to think, if they are not mentally deficient. It is harder to keep them from thinking, which is the reason why discipline is such a terror to some. Even the average

stupid child will instal a self-starter, if he finds he can use it. There must be a teacher behind the desk who thinks, however, and such a one always finds that discipline takes care of itself. She gets the reputation of being a "cracker-jack disciplinarian", to quote the oddly incongruous description I once heard, without realizing herself just why or how. But the children know. They probably call her by some disrespectful nickname, the infant equivalent of "dead game sport," and adore her.

What is teaching children to think? What is the thoughtprocess anyway? Roughly, it is the ability to observe, to analyze and synthesize, and to draw conclusions, as a basis of judgment and action. The popular and long-tried method is trial and error. Children inherit an aptitude for thinking, due to the fairly many generations since the human animal first distinguished himself by the process. But like many other aptitudes, it may be nurtured or suppressed by the environment. The ceasless questioning of the child is proof that the thinking-process is alive and functioning. The person who has ceased to question is dying at the top.

I sometimes think of the child mind as a jungle, a luxuriant growth of tangled woods and vines. Beautiful things may come out of it, or noxious. It is pathless, disorderly, and the teacher's function is to find the way in, clear away the rank growths, and let the rare and lovely plants have an opportunity to thrive under the vivifying light of the sun. But the blooms to be found are often very delicate, and need gentle handling. Alas, that there are those who ruthlessly enter to destroy, on the specious plea that so is the child better fitted for life! The contrary is in fact true, for then the child faces life with his one precious gift, his touchstone of beauty, his shield of truth, gone.

How find the road thither? I cannot pretend to tell. It

must be sought, patiently, lovingly, eagerly. For a group of young hoodlums it was the Lays of Ancient Rome. For freckled, stubby George, son of a city laborer, it was architecture. For Fred, over-running with energy, getting into a fight a day, and hence in perpetual really undeserved hot water, it was a study of birds. For Ben, rapidly developing into a lounge lizard from unwise parental affection and indulgence, it was the tale of English chivalry and valor, from the days of the Round Table on. (I saw, the other day, the memorial erected to his memory, by the town that once prophesied his downfall, for he gave his young life defending those Anglo-Saxon liberties we studied that eventful year.) And all of these were in a class assigned to English History, but under a wise and far-sighted superintendent, really devoted to teaching children. It does not matter what the subject may be, it is the object which counts.

We Americans want to do things in the mass. But that is the way of the mob. It is the unthinking way, it stupefies intelligence, it places the premium upon sheer force and weight, not delicacy and finesse. We are big and rather unwieldy, and we push forward by the momentum of inertia too often. That is why we have not assimilated our later foreign-born as we should. Our immigration troubles are due to this very flair for bigness, to the tendency to submerge the individual in the type or race. So we breed hurts, and discontents, and injustices. Divide et impera is still the way to conquer our difficulties. The undigested masses in the body politic must be broken up, that they may pass on their way into the blood and fibre of the nation. The teaching of each new generation is of course the business of the schools. But we must realize that men's souls are not cut from the same patterns.

We must simplify our total scheme, keep it as free as local conditions demand. We must realize that the true democracy is not contained in mass education, which provides opportunity only for the few whom it happens to fit, but in class education, which is adaptable, flexible, and able to give opportunity to each phase of human intelligence. John was up in police court, one day. I telephoned to the judge to see what could be done about it, for John was a bright enough lad, and not inclined to make mis

chief. To tell the truth, the school work was too easy for him. He had too much time out of doors, and no one to guide it. His parents were well-meaning, hard-working people, nothing versed in the kind of life surrounding John. He was paroled in my custody, and I began to look into the matter of what the town had to offer a boy like him. Absolutely nothing. He would have liked to study chemistry and mechanical drawing, but those subjects were the property of boys who were going to college. The only course offering a livelihood at the end was the commercial course; and John's fingers were already several sizes too big for the keys of a typewriter! I didn't wonder that he felt the whole thing was piffling folly. I committed the educational heresy of deciding that more schooling was not to John's advantage, and found him an apprenticeship. Not that John could not have used more schooling, but the town had decided that all its children who must earn their own living should do so as stenographers and clerks. What utter folly, and what a wild disorganization of the labor market if something had not intervened! But did the public school give John the fair, equal chance that was his right as a citizen of a democracy? Did it give him a chance to develop what intelligence he had? No; it said, Take this or nothing. If it doesn't suit the kind of a brain the Lord gave you, that is not our fault.

We boast of being an educated people, but it is a foolish and an idle word, for which we need much mercy. The real need is a wholesale pruning and weeding of our school systems, beginning at the top, and a complete recasting in a truly democratic fashion,, to meet real and not theoretic needs. And coördinate with such a reform is letting teachers teach. If they can not teach, they should go elsewhere, but they should be given every chance, and be the real backbone of the schools, instead of as at present the hirelings of the Board of Education. And as such a programme is too stupendous for even such a wealthy country as ours, let us have the good sense to welcome all private aid, for whatever class or craft it comes. There is no need to fear snobbishness or undue exclusiveness. If there seems to be a trace, life takes it out of most adults, with neatness and dispatch. The women who once cherished and practiced it are forgetting it in the new

fascination of cöoperating with their sisters in municipal housekeeping, and its doom will soon be sealed. It can only subsist by ignorance.

Prospecting for intelligence is great fun, and there are many more claims than we sometimes pessimistically guess. But a

lot of them are passed over, because the searcher does not know how to uncover them, and a lot more never come to anything because there is no capital or skill for their proper development. That is why so many private schools exist, to meet the need we see but hardly understand. That is why too they have so much the superior teachers and hence teaching, for in them a capable teacher can actually teach, without fear of let or favor. The text-book teacher, bound by rule and rote, is a product of an ironclad régime, and can rise no higher than her source. The true pedagogue is a child leader, not a child driver. To such a one the classroom is an adventure, a thrilling quest for gold, in company with those yet clear eyed and unspoiled of earth.

The pity of it is that every child cannot be one of a like goodly company. If evolution be indeed the passage from homogeneity to heterogeneity, the public school as we have it is a retrogression, for it aims at taking minds biologically and spiritually variant as the stars in heaven, and turning them out as near a uniform product as is humanly possible. Free education is not to be interpreted in a financial sense only, it must be free to create, to vivify, to guide, and last of all, to inform, that precious entity, the mind of the child. Only thus indeed can we make our civilization safe for democracy, for an unthinking democracy forms an easy prey to the unscrupulous demagague, and the cruelty of the mob. Variety, dietetic experts tell us, is not only the spice of life; it is absolutely necessary to physical health. It is quite as necessary to mental health, and hence to national well-being. We must uncoil this monster of mediocrity and unintelligence which is fastening itself with ever more ponderous ineptitude upon the most vital spring of the life and promise of our civilization.

CAROLINE E. MACGILL.

"THE ODD WOMEN" AND "THE GIRLS"

BY MARGARET PINCKNEY ALLEN

TWENTY-FIVE years ago, George Gissing found material for one of his sombre, reflective novels in the spectacle of the unmarried women of his time. "Odd women" he called them; and faced with stern reality the problem they constituted in the social order. Other novelists of that late Victorian day of course denied the existence of the tribe. Their stories were still concerned with the female who caught a man and therefore ceased to be odd. An occasional spinster aunt might fill in a corner of the picture, to be taken when needed, as a corrective to the studied sweetness of the love-making of the time. She sat there, wistful and unfulfilled, an effective foil to the triumphant, man-protected heroine. And always dependent on the bounty of others.

We accept, even now in this rebellious day, strangling conditions under which we live, as if they were inflexible, unchangeable. Such was the attitude toward women's industrial and political relations. Up to a later date than one cares to mention these vital matters were not subjects for polite conversation or entertaining literature. Woman's chief importance was as an emotional stimulus, or quietus, as the case might be. But George Gissing, being troubled about many things, found time to be troubled about this also, and The Odd Women was the result.

At the time of its issue I was not reading such novels. Something like Louisa Alcott and Tennyson was gradually driving out the doll-complex, and so I have no means of judging whether his courageous handling of the problem aroused any interest. Probably not. The only "problem" which even now really carries a play or a novel is an erotic problem. Yet this old copy is wellworn and much-repaired.

It reads with an air of unreality today. Is there anywhere a Dr. Madden who could bring six daughters into the world with no provision for their future, yet feel all the while that "the thought