(INIV.QF
— ;,.,.;.
Diversity of Pennsylvania
University Lectures
Delivered by
Members of the Faculty
in the
Free Public Lecture Course
1915-1916
PHILADELPHIA, PA.
PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY
1916
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE 7
THE ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE OF THE UNITED STATES. By Edward
S. Mead, Professor of Finance 9
PAST ACHIEVEMENTS AND FUTURE PROMISE IN ASTRONOMY OF POSITION. By Eric Doolittle, Flower Professor of Astronomy, and Director of the Flower Observatory 25
JERUSALEM, THE HOLY CITY. By James A. Montgomery, Professor
of Hebrew and Aramaic 38
THE LAWYERS OF GEORGE MEREDITH. By William H. Loyd, Assistant
Professor of Law 57
SANITY AND DEFINITENESS IN EDUCATION. By A. Duncan Yocum,
Professor of Educational Research and Practice 70
USEFUL USELESS EXPERIMENTING. By Owen L. Shinn, Professor of
Applied Chemistry 99
THE HISTORY AND PROGRESS OF MEDICAL EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES. By William Pepper, Assistant Professor of Clinical Pathology, and Dean of the Faculty of Medicine 112
SOME BIOLOGICAL AND PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF GROWTH. By Merkel
Henry Jacobs, Assistant Professor of Zoology 131
LAW AND SOCIETY. By Francis H. Bohlen, Algernon Sydney Biddle
Professor of Law 148
THE DRAMA, THE PHOTO-PLAY AND EDUCATION. By Thomas D.
O'Bolger, Assistant Professor of English 156
THE IMPORTANCE OF TUBERCULOSIS IN ITS RELATION TO PUBLIC HEALTH. By Henry R. M. Landis, Assistant Professor of Medi- cine, and Director of the Clinical and Sociological Department of the Phipps Institute 175
THE SEA AND THE SAILOR IN FICTION. By Edward C. Wesselhoeft,
Professor of German 192
ALESSANDRO BOTTICELLI. By Herbert E. Everett, Professor of His- tory of Art 226
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Contents
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FOLK-TALES OF INDIA. By Roland G. Kent, Professor of Com- parative Philology 237
UNPROVED PROPOSITIONS AND UNDEFINED RELATIONS. By George
H. Hallett, Professor of Mathematics 262
LIFE INSURANCE AS AN ECONOMIC FORCE IN THE COMMUNITY. By
Solomon S. Huebner, Professor of Insurance and Commerce 277
THE RETURN TO NATURE. By Frederick Ehrenfeld, Assistant Pro- fessor of Geology and Mineralogy 295
PROPERTY RIGHTS OF MARRIED WOMEN IN PENNSYLVANIA. By Ward
W. Pierson, Professor of Business Law in the Wharton School. . 339
THE HINDU BEAST FABLE AND THE STORY OF ITS TRAVELS: By
Franklin Edgerton, Assistant Professor of Sanscrit 359
THE ORIGIN OF THE GREEK ALPHABET. By William N. Bafrjs,
Professor of Greek , 380
ANDREAS VESALIUS AND His TIMES. By George A. Piersol, Professor
of Anatomy 397
PUBLIC OPINION AS VIEWED BY EMINENT POLITICAL THEORISTS. By Clyde Lyndon King, Assistant Professor of Political Science «.i 7
Music. By Hugh A. Clarke, Professor of the Science of Music 4.4
PARACELSUS. By Thomas P. McCutcheon, Jr., Assistant Professor of Chemistry 45'.
CARICATURE AND MORAL CRITICISM. By Louis William Flaccus,
Assistant Professor of Philosophy 489
RECENT PROGRESS IN ROENTGEN RAYS. By Thomas D. Cope, Assist- ant Professor of Physics 512
THE ROMAN EMPEROR WORSHIP. By George Depue Hadzsits,
Assistant Professor of Latin 524
How THE TWENTIETH CENTURY is INDEBTED TO PURE MATHEMATICS.
By George E. Fisher, Professor of Mathematics. . . 548
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PREFACE
Public lectures, by members of the University faculties, have been held for three years, and the present volume contains the subjects discussed in the third year of the course. It is assumed, from the continued attendance on the part of the general public, that these efforts of the University in the direction of public service are appreciated; hence it is a genuine pleasure to place, in this permanent form, the products of the thought and endeavor of the men who are quietly advancing the borders of human knowledge within the halls of the University, that a still larger audience may come to know them.
THE ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE OF THE UNITED STATES
BY EDWARD SHERWOOD MEAD Professor of Finance
The European war, both in its immediate consequences and its remote results, must exert a profound influence upon the policies of the United States. It is now reasonably certain that our military and naval expenditures will increase not merely to the point of providing the means of national defense, but also to the provision of an equipment which shall enable us to protect our interests in whatever part of the world they may be threatened. To such a policy opposition is not likely to be effective. We are living in a world where responsible statesmen plot the ruin of weak and peaceable neighbors and carry out their plots to the conclusion of wholesale murder and national extermination; a world where it is no longer con- sidered necessary to offer the specious excuses of diplomacy for acts of violence, where even declarations of war are dispensed with, where all the so-called laws of war are set at naught by the nations which originated them; a world in which nations offer themselves on the auction block, sell their so-called honor to the highest bidder, and will find, when too late, that the purchase price is paid in counterfeit money. In such a world it is folly to remain undefended by little else than the conscious- ness of virtue. To this conclusion, I think I am safe in saying, the public sentiment of the United States has arrived. Even our pacific President, who six months ago was too proud to fight but who is not too proud to learn, is pushing a program of naval and military expenditure which leaves his critics impotent and mute.
While we may be in general agreement with the policy of military preparedness, it is not so easy to agree with some
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University of Pennsylvania Public Lectures
of the arguments by which this policy is justified, and the implications which it contains. We are told that the United States is now a world power, that a large part of our economic future lies over the sea, that we must have a huge merchant marine to carry our surplus products abroad, that our manu- facturers must learn to adapt their wares to the diversified needs of the buyers of many nations; that we must enter the contest for international trade, and that we must win in that contest. Our foreign policy, it is urged, must, to a large extent, be molded by considerations of export trade.
For example, we were urged to strong protest against the recent aggressions of Japan upon her defenseless neighbor on the ground that the door into China should be kept open for American products and American financiers and investors. The retention of the Philippine Islands, an expensive and otherwise useless undertaking, is justified mainly by trade considerations. Our growing influence in Latin America, which has already taken the form of a virtual protectorate over Cuba, Hayti, San Domingo and Nicaragua, and which seems likely to develop into a protectorate over Mexico, is justified by consideration of export trade and its direct consequence, foreign investment. The recent loan to two of the belligerent powers was justified exclusively by the argument that if this credit was not given, our export trade would seriously decline. And when the representatives of the Allied Powers return in the spring, as they have said that they may return, for another loan of larger size, the same argument will be heard. If we may judge from the tone of newspapers of many shades of opinion on other matters, and from the utterances of public men of all parties, large export trade is of supreme importance in order to get rid of our surplus products, which, unless quickly disposed of, would decay in our midst, a decomposition attended by the gravest consequences to our national well being, certain to result in prolonged business depression with its attendant ills.
The Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. William C. McAdoo, in his recent Indianapolis address in advocacy of a government
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The Economic Independence of the United States
owned merchant marine, has expressed this view as though it were an accepted axiom of economics. "I believe," said the Secretary, "that there can be no difference of opinion as to the desirability of increasing our foreign trade. I believe that we shall all agree that the prosperity of this country depends upon the maintenance and expansion of our foreign commerce," and in another place, "We are one of the greatest industrial and producing nations on earth. We must have foreign markets to absorb our surplus products. Without them we shall have stagnation and depression and want." These statements are supported by a reference to the prostration of American industry at the beginning of the war due to the sudden interruption of our export trade, and to the recovery due to large orders from foreign nations. I think that we are safe in saying that the administration believes that the future prosperity of the United States is closely bound up with a large foreign trade.
It is worth while to subject this theory to critical examina- tion if for no other reason than that its acceptance is likely to lead us into trouble. It is one thing to prepare for war, but quite a different matter to adopt a policy which increases the chances of war. Where a nation oversteps its boundaries it steps into trouble. When it places its capital in foreign lands it assumes the responsibility of protecting that capital. Within its own boundaries it is safe from disturbance; without, how- ever, are serious possibilities of danger. The consequences of foreign trade and the desire for more foreign trade, are among the most fruitful causes of international dissensions. Take the present conflict. In part it originated in a desire to accomplish union of severed nationalities, in part from plain fear of aggres- sion, but its main motive is the trade conflict between Germany and Great Britain. From the peculiar limitations of the natural resources of these great powers, they have been forced into foreign trade. Germany was late in entering the contest, but she has far outdistanced her rival who had two hundred years the start of her. In the endeavor to challenge the sea power upon which the trade supremacy of England rests, and to gain
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still further advantages, Germany embarked upon a program of naval construction. Immediately England took offense, made friends with her traditional enemies, Russia and France, drew Italy into the circle of her influence, and built up a wall of hostility around Germany. Germany refused to desist from naval preparations, her export trade continued to swell, her designs upon the Turkish Empire as a fruitful field for trade expansion prompted her, in co-operation with Austria, whose interests were in this respect identical, to intervene in the Balkans, and suddenly Europe was at war, a war which is primarily a trade war financed by England for business reasons to cripple, and, if possible, to ruin her most dangerous com- mercial rival, to insure for another century the world supremacy in trade which she won in the Napoleonic Wars. . . . Now that the United States has loaned England a half billion dollars to assist her in her difficult task of crushing Germany, may we not be permitted a quiet smile at the extraordinary pretense that England is engaged in a contest for civilization against the modern Attila, that she is spending or lending $25,000,000 per day for sentimental reasons, that her sympathy with Belgium is inspired by anything less substantial than a fear of Belgium in German hands, that she is holding her lines in France from motives more disinterested than a fear of the Channel ports in the possession of Germany or that, in all her doings, she is not working for the advancement of the permanent business inter- ests of the British Empire. The American people have little sympathy for Germany, because of her policy in waging war. We shall not soon forget the Lusitania, nor the invasion of Belgium. We know who threw the match into the magazine, and we believe that the aggression of Germany was the imme- diate cause of the conflict. Our sympathies, for these reasons, incline, if not to England, at any rate away from Germany, but the indulgence of the pleasurable emotion of sympathy with ruined Belgium and hard pressed France, that love of justice which is, at bottom, the fear of suffering injustice, should not blind us to the fact that this war is a trade war, financed on
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the side of the Allies by England for trade reasons, and continued by England as long as there shall be any prospect of permanent trade advantages commensurate with the expense.
We cannot predict the result of this war. It may cease from general exhaustion. Already some of the participants are on the brink of ruin. The chances of another year of war seem increasingly remote. We can be sure, however, that peace will not bring disarmament; that the preparation for the next war will begin the day that peace is declared, and that the struggle for markets, the warfare of tariffs, preferential trade agreements, discriminatory patent and corporation laws, will be waged with increasing energy. The United States has remained neutral in the warfare of killing. What shall be our policy in the warfare of commerce? Shall we take an active part in the contest for export trade ? Shall we send our capital abroad to develop the resources of foreign countries, molding our national policy to conform to the necessities of trade and investment, or shall we continue, as in the past, to concentrate our energies on the development of our domestic resources?
A brief consideration of the objects and methods of foreign trade may furnish us with an answer to these questions. A nation in foreign trade should be looked upon as an individual. An individual spends his money for these purposes: first, to purchase commodities or services; second, to pay debts; third, to make investments. In international trade, exports to other nations and services performed for them correspond to the outlays of the individual. The United States has little shipping, insurance or financing business as yet, so our expenditures are represented by our exports of commodities. These exports pay for our imports, they pay our shipping and insurance bills, they pay the expenses of foreign trade, interest and dividends on foreign investments in the United States, maturing loans, and the cost of American securities resold to this country. Exports are not presents to foreigners, they are payments. They are not the objects of foreign trade, any more than indi- vidual expenditure is the object of individual effort; they are
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the means by which the objects of international trade are achieved.
This fact is thoroughly understood abroad. European statesmen and business men are under no illusions on the sub- ject of foreign commerce. They push the export trade because of the necessities of importation, or in order to find investments for their surplus capital. They are not guilty of the absurdity of supposing, as some Americans seem to suppose, that a nation can sell without buying.
The recent financial situation of the United States has fur- nished spectacular demonstration of the truth of a proposition which should be axiomatic. During the current year our export trade grew to gigantic size, while our imports dwindled. Under normal conditions debts due citizens of the United States are balanced by current obligations of residents of this country. The American exporter draws on his foreign buyer, and sells the bill to an American bank, to be sent abroad and the pro- ceeds deposited to the bankers' credit. The American debtor at the same time buys from the banker who has purchased the exporter's right to receive money in England, the bankers' own check, drawn against the deposit in English banks of the proceeds of the exporter's bill, and sends it abroad to pay his, the American debtor's bills. Occasionally the debts owing one way exceed the payments coming from that direction. Americans, for example, owe more on current accounts than they have to receive. The demand for bankers' checks on Eng- lish banks exceeds the supply of American bills drawn on English importers, by whose collection the deposits of the American bankers in the English bank, against which American bankers' checks are drawn. The American banker, in order to supply the demands of his customers for the means of foreign payment, negotiates a short loan known as a finance bill with his English correspondent and checks against the proceeds, repaying the loan when the supply of American bills again increases. Some- times also, the American balances are kept up by gold exports to England. When the situation is reversed and bills offered
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for sale here are in greater amount than the demand for bankers' checks, the American banker brings in gold to keep himself in funds on this side.
This normal balance and equation of foreign trade was vio- lently disturbed at the outbreak of the war. At first England and France drew gold from this country by the expedient of refusing to pay their own debts and demanding the payment of ours. Since no money could be borrowed in the English market, American bankers were forced to send over gold.
At a later time, the movement was reversed. Europe bought heavily of American products, especially, at the outset, of food and raw materials, European exports to this country dwindled away. At once the ideal situation, from the standpoint of the extreme advocates of large exports and restricted imports, developed. We were selling them more than we bought. The road to unlimited prosperity stood open. The publications of the Bureau of Foreign Commerce fairly cackled with exultation. An enormous balance of trade, the crown and flower of success- ful commercial development, stood revealed. As Secretary McAdoo said, we entered "A period of gradual loosening up, of restoration, of confidence and credit, until now the orders from foreign nations have so stimulated our foreign trade that there is a demand for all our surplus products, particularly the products of the farms."
But difficulties arose.' How was Europe to pay for these exports? The usual methods proved unavailing. American exchange on London fell from $4.86, the normal price of a pound sterling in New York, to $4.52. The price of things purchased from America advanced with the increase in the cost of realizing the proceeds of sales. Immense quantities of gold and securities were sent to America from England, but still exchange did not advance. A serious curtailment of exports seemed inevitable when the situation was met, as American bankers in happier days were accustomed to meet similar situations, by the negotiation of a loan in this country suf-
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ficient in amount to make up the difference between the value of American exports and the money owing by Americans to Europe on current accounts. In short, we have agreed, up to $480,000,000, to accept the short term notes of France and England in payment for our exports.
Incidentally, we have loaned England and France $480,000,- 000 with which to carry on their own war and to finance Russia and Italy, and by this amount we have lessened the strain upon their own money markets. We have, directly and indi- rectly delivered to England and France one-half billion dollars worth of war munitions which will all be used to continue the struggle against Germany. If the credit is drawn upon by agents of the borrowing powers on this side, it will be directly used to pay for shells, powder, rifles, cannon, machine guns, submarines, uniforms, shoes, automobiles, barbed wire, mate- rial for bridges, and all the varied paraphernalia of destruction and death whose manufacture is spreading prosperity over the United States. In so far as the credit is used to furnish Eng- lish importers with the means of payment in New York for commodities not intended for war use, the proceeds will be placed to the credit of the British Government to be paid out on the order of Kitchener and Lloyd George.
Let us now return tq the main highway of our discussion. Foreign trade, we see, is an exchange whose purpose is to export in order to purchase, to pay, and to invest. Is the situation of the United States such that it is to the national interest to encourage a large export trade? Does the future of the United States, like the future of Germany and England, lie upon that great domain which the midshipmen of England in one of their sea songs, for a hundred years and never more truthfully than today, describe as the King's highway.
Observing our export trade from the three standpoints, pur- chasing, paying and investing, we can arrive immediately at certain obvious conclusions concerning the future policy of the United States in reference to the encouragement of export trade. First, if large exports are desired, the present tariff
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duties which represent a considerable decline from previous schedules, must either be continued or preferably still further reduced. Second, the United States must use her large exports to repurchase American securities now held abroad, or, third, we must make large investments in foreign countries.
To continue and still further develop the policy of a low tariff, looking at the question solely from its bearing upon export trade, must either result in large importations, in part at the expense of American industries producing similar articles, or, if American manufacturers are able to maintain themselves, a low tariff policy will be ineffective in obtaining an adequate return for our large exports. Imports into the United States are broadly divided into two classes: manufactured articles which are sold in competition with the products of American factories and raw materials. The latter consist mainly of the products of the tropics, sugar, rubber, coffee, fibres, together with certain raw materials such as iron ore, nitrate of soda, etc., articles which we do not produce or which can be imported at lower cost than they can be delivered from domestic sources. The former cover throughout the entire range of production. In the last fiscal year, under normal conditions, that ending June 30, 1914, the division between these two classes was as follows (in millions) :
1,199.9 raw materials and half -finished products. . 694.0 manufactured products.
Materials used in furthering production or imported food stuffs represents nearly twice the value of manufactured com- modities other than food. The manufactured imports are sold in competition with American manufactures — cotton, woolen and silk goods, drugs, chemicals and dye stuffs, iron and steel manufactures, crockery and glass ware, knit goods, rugs and carpets, and a thousand other commodities all duplicating the results of American industry.
It is impossible to greatly accelerate the importation of raw materials and food stuffs. That must keep pace with the
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growing requirements of our population and industry. A con- tinuation of a low tariff policy may, however, largely increase the importation of manufactured articles which can either be produced more cheaply abroad or which represent the surplus output of foreign mills sold in this market at any price, above cost, which can be obtained.
I use the words, may increase, in reference to the effect of a low tariff policy upon imports of manufactures, because of a desire to avoid a controversy. The Secretary of Commerce and Labor, Mr. Redfield, for example, does not agree with the view that foreign manufacturers can undersell Americans. He attributes any success they have achieved in this regard to what he described as the lax and careless business methods of Amer- ican producers and to the failure to improve their machinery and processes. Without taking sides on this question, we can, however, safely conclude, that if a low tariff policy does not increase imports, it will be impossible, without a resort to some other expedient, to maintain exports at their present level, since the foreign buyer of American goods would, in that event, just as he is today, be unable to pay for his purchases without borrowing.
I may be permitted, also, to say a word upon an aspect of the tariff questions which transcends the ordinary considera- tions of comparative international costs. It may be that, in a world of peaceful competitors, the United States should rely upon the processes of international exchange to supply her needs. For example, dye stuffs, potash, salts, and carbolic acid, can probably for many years be purchased more cheaply from Germany than they can be manufactured in the United States. But recent experience has shown that in time of war, national self-sufficiency is of supreme importance. The con- trast between Germany and England is illuminating. At the most, it is true, the United States could never suffer more than trivial inconvenience from the interruption of its foreign trade. This country will naturally grow more economically inde- pendent. The consideration is, however, of sufficient impor-
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tance to set against the argument that a nation should always buy in the cheapest market.
We come, now, to the aspect of the problem of large exports which is of dominating present importance. A large balance of trade in favor of the United States can be obtained by an increase of importations at the expense of American industries producing the goods imported through the international security market. Exports demand corresponding imports, but the imports need not be of material things. We can repurchase, as we have recently been doing, and will continue to do, the securities of American corporations which represent the invest- ments of European capital in this country and whose amount has been estimated at as high a figure as $5,000,000,000. This process will, however, have the ultimate effect of reducing that part of our export trade which now goes to the payment of interest and dividends on these securities. Assume, for example, that the United States owes $250,000,000 a year to foreign investors. This annually accruing debt is paid by exports of wheat, cotton, lumber, meat products and manu- factures. To that extent, at least, our exports would exceed our imports. Suppose, now, so long as these American securities are held abroad, that within ten years, as a result of the forcing of our export trade, with conditions of international exchange, resulting in higher security prices in the United States, this $5,000,000,000 of American stocks and bonds is repurchased. Evidently the $250,000,000 of American products which formerly went to Europe to increase the working capital and income of foreigners, would then remain at home to be saved and spent in this country. During the period while the securities are being returned, exports would exceed imports. When the process was completed, the balance of exports would be reduced, not merely by the $5,000,000,000 assumed as the annual repur- chase, but by the $250,000,000 of interest and dividends.
We are left, therefore, if we refuse to countenance the replac- ing of American made goods by foreign importation and if we concede that the repurchase of American securities is merely
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a temporary expedient, with one resource to attain the desired object of that large export trade which we have been so often and so vehemently assured is necessary to keep our economic system from being clogged with waste products, and to avoid the baneful results of auto-intoxication. That resource is foreign investment. Shall the United States rival England and Germany as world powers in finance? Shall American capital be sent abroad by the billions of dollars to refund the war debts and rebuild the ruined industries of Europe? Beyond this, shall American capital be sent abroad to go into the development of new countries, China, Asia Minor, Russia and, as it has gone in the past, but in increasing volume, into the Latin-American states ? To answer this question intelligently demands a brief pre- liminary statement of the nature of foreign investment which has, it is true, been suggested throughout this discussion. Capital is of two kinds, fixed and fluid. A railroad is fixed capital. The commodities consumed in the running of the railroad, including not only the operating supplies, the coal, oil and lumber which are used up in the operation of the prop- erty, but also the food, clothing, etc., consumed by the employees, represent the fluid capital. A large part of the fluid or working capital of the country is utilized in operating its industries. A smaller portion is employed in extending old enterprises and developing new ones. Continuing our railroad illustration, Mr. James J. Hill, who has just been instrumental in sending $480,000,000 of American capital, that is, American commodities, abroad, has frequently stated that at least $1,000,000,000 a year should be invested for years to come in new railroad construction. This means that $1,000,000,000 a year of wheat, cotton, lumber, meat and iron and steel, and the manufactures thereof, should be placed at the disposal of railway companies for new construction. To the extent that these commodities are sent abroad to be used either in slaugh- tering and devastating now, or in rebuilding and developing later, to that extent, these commodities will not be available for the development of American resources.
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We have, therefore, still continuing our examination of the desirability of a large export trade, to choose between foreign investment and domestic investment, between keeping our capital, that is our products, at home, to give employment to our own people in developing the resources of our own country, or of sending this capital abroad to employ foreign labor and to develop the resources of foreign lands. If this policy is adopted and vigorously pushed we can, for many years to come, sell more goods than we buy, taking our pay for exported com- modities in the stocks and bonds of foreign companies and governments, and either investing our interest in further foreign loans or drawing it back, as England has done, in imported goods. Opinions differ as to the expediency of one policy or another. There are men in this country who are in a position to make large profits from the exploitation of foreign resources for sale to the American public in the form of securities of foreign companies. These men, and the considerable body of public opinion which they influence, are outspoken in their advocacy of a vigorous foreign policy as a means of opening new channels for export trade, new opportunities for American investment. They wish the United States to assume larger control over Latin-America, and here their views meet, but little opposition, to assert ourselves in China, in a general way, to take a prominent place in the great world which lies without our boundaries. It is fair to presume that they will urge, then, participation in foreign loans at the conclusion of peace.
On the other hand, are those who believe in the doctrine of America first, not merely first in patriotic song and speech, but first in practical interest as well; those who place before their minds the great problems of American internal develop- ment, the highways and the railroads which must be improved and newly constructed, the great projects of canalization, river improvement and water power development, the tasks of irri- gation and drainage, the work of soil improvement, upon whose undertaking depends so directly the reduction of the cost of living, the problem of housing in our large cities, and its corre-
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lated problem, improved transportation, the full development of the partially utilized resources of the United States. Those who place these considerations first believe that, for many years, the development of America will require all the savings of the American people, especially since foreign accumulations will no longer be so available as in the past. They believe that our national policy should be one of internal development rather than of the encouragement of export trade and foreign investment. Our normal trade relations are with the countries immediately adjoining. They supply the raw materials which we cannot produce for ourselves. They will purchase what we have for sale. Our interests and theirs are closely united in opposition to the interests of Europe. We are drawing them each year more closely into our circle of political influence. Beyond the development of these countries, the West Indies, Mexico and Central America, which for economic purposes are practically a part of the United States, our economic interests do not extend and our foreign policies should not attempt to go. We come now to the final conclusion of the argument and I shall base this upon the assumption that our foreign policy should be based upon the imperative needs of American indus- try for new capital. These needs are great. The supply is limited to the surplus over the cost of supplying the current necessities of an extravagant expenditure. Already, and indeed for several years, sound corporations have had great difficulty in financing their requirements. Other causes, such as an unsettled policy of regulation, may have contributed to this result, but the underlying cause has been a scarcity of capital. We have just depleted our slender store by the enormous loan to England and France. This loan, let it be remembered, is not made in money, but in materials, in food and clothing as well as in the more lethal munitions of war. The proceeds of this loan could have been used in a variety of ways for the development of our domestic resources. At $50,000 per mile, for example, they would have built and equipped 10,000 miles of railroad, the most productive of all forms of expenditure,
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an expenditure which permanently returns to the nation several times the interest on its cost. As it is, in place of financing 10,000 miles of railroad we have financed twenty days of war. In place of enriching America we have assisted to destroy Europe.
The current loan is over. It was floated with great difficulty and only because it offered an escape from a desperate situa- tion. It may not be repeated.
War loans, however, are exceptional and small. It is the loans when peace is declared that should engage our earnest attention. I have already suggested that the bonds of these loans, looked at from the standpoint of the individual, will be very desirable investments. They will be offered in this market on most attractive terms. Should the American people be encouraged to accept them?
It is at this time that the real crisis arising out of the war will confront the American people. If these attractive offers by European governments and corporations are accepted, and American capital for the next decade turned into foreign loans, it is difficult to overstate the extent of the damage which will be inflicted upon the interests of this country. Some appre- hensions have been expressed in administrative circles and elsewhere over the probable consequences of a flood of Euro- pean imports. It is feared that the prosperity of the textile industry, for example, may be seriously affected, and, very properly, measures are being considered by which the danger may be averted.
Far more serious, however, is the danger which will threaten American industries by the "flood" of European government bonds which will be pushed into this market. America needs every dollar of capital which can be accumulated for the development of her own industries. She must depend on her own savings: Europe will be a borrower, not a lender. Any money invested in European loans is that much subtracted from our supply. We shall be faced with the necessity of repur- chasing a portion of our own securities. These repurchases, at best, will place a heavy strain upon our resources, and by
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this I mean that the prices of American securities may be seriously depressed by the increased supply from abroad. But if, to these offerings, which cannot be kept out, are added the unlimited supplies of European bonds, sold at bargain prices, the probable effect upon American values and American indus- tries can be described by no milder words than disastrous.
It is unreasonable to expect that the government will inter- fere in a matter of this kind. Political interest in corporation matters is limited to schemes for reducing corporation profits by taxation and regulation.
The protection of American interests, in a matter of such vital importance, must be left to the good sense and intelli- gence of the American bankers. They went into the recent war loan flotation with great and evident reluctance. Is it too much to anticipate at the conclusion of peace they will shut the doors of America to any foreign securities not now listed on our exchanges; that they will refuse to lend upon such securities; that they will discriminate in every possible way against their sale in this country? If this course is followed by American bankers, this country may be spared the worst consequences of the European war.
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PAST ACHIEVEMENTS AND FUTURE PROMISE IN ASTRONOMY OF POSITION
BY ERIC DOOLITTLE Professor of Astronomy
The science of astronomy is, — or at least seems to be to those who devote their lives to it, — one of the broadest and most uplifting of all the sciences. As with our modern instru- ments we penetrate and examine ever more deeply the great cloud of stars which surrounds us, we are led on and on, where we are confronted with new regions of such utterly inconceiv- able vastness that it seems to our finite little minds as if we are approaching the antechambers of infinity itself.
Beginning with our very little earth, it is by astronomy that its exact form, size, and density are determined. From this, the next step is to ascertain the distances, sizes and weights of our sun and the seven other worlds which, like our own, revolve about this, our nearest star. And lastly, there comes the exploration and study of the whole universe of suns of which our own sun is one; of their natures and their motions, of their origin and future destiny, of the shape and extent of this vast cloud of suns, in which, beside the bright stars themselves,, there are found dark suns and nebulas and meteoric matter, all of which have their testimony to give, if we can only read it, upon the true structure and development of our universe.
It is clear that a science dealing with so wide a field must be divided and sub-divided into many parts, and that, as with the other natural sciences, no man in the short space of life allotted to him here can become a master of all the parts at once. We might first separate the study into the two great divisions of Observational and Theoretical Astronomy, the latter utilizing all the resources of higher mathematics, and even demanding a higher development of that science than is yet forthcoming. But this division is in many respects an unsatisfactory one.
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It is only when the innumerable observations at the telescope have been analyzed by and placed upon the solid basis of mathematics that we can hope to extract from them their whole value and to discover what they have the power to reveal to us. On the other hand, it is only by prolonged and accurate tele- scopic measurement that we can secure the material for mathe- matical investigation. And it is the observer himself, especially if he is devoted to the Older or Fundamental astronomy, who after making his measures subjects them later to a prolonged mathematical computation.
A perhaps more natural division of the entire science is into the two parts now usually known as Astrophysics and the Astronomy of Position. Astrophysics includes the study of the physical conditions of the heavenly bodies; their luminosities, temperatures, constitutions, and in general everything which may be revealed by a study of the lines in the spectra formed by their light. Astronomy of Position, as might be inferred from its name, has to do with a very exact determination of the positions which the heavenly bodies occupy at various times upon the great Celestial Sphere. Both branches make full use of the very recent wonderful developments of astro- nomical photography, but while in the former the photographs are often objects of great beauty which may tell their story at a glance, in the latter the plates only give up their secrets as they are accurately measured under the microscope.
As the spectroscope did not come into use until about 1860, the former department of astronomy is a very new one; it is, in fact called by many of its votaries "The New Astronomy," whereas, on the contrary, Astronomy of Position may be con- sidered to have begun with the first rude drawing or other location of the relative positions of any of the stars in the heavens. Fifty years ago the science of astrophysics was just beginning to exist. It had its way all to win. The late Pro- fessor Langley in the introduction to his delightful little book, "The New Astronomy," which is largely a plea for the recog- nition of this new science, wrote as follows :
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"We are all glad to know that Urania, who in the beginning was but a poor Chaldean shepherdess, has long since become well-to-do, and dwells now in state. It is far less known than it should be that she has a younger sister now among us, bear- ing every mark of her celestial birth, but all unendowed and portionless."
But this was written thirty years ago. Astrophysics has now won, and rests in, a highly honored place, and the danger today is rather that the fundamental value and interest of the older astronomy may fail to be justly recognized. From the great astrophysical observatory at Potsdam to the enormous Solar Observatory founded by Carnegie, on Mount Wilson, there are many astrophysical stations whose endowments aggre- gate many millions of dollars: there is some danger that the true character and importance of such excellent fundamental work as is done, for example, at our own Lick Observatory, or which has been consistently followed for so long a time at our Naval Observatory at Washington may not receive the appreciation which is justly its due.
That the appeal of astrophysics was so instant and success- ful was not surprising. Its fundamental principle, — the prin- ciple of the spectroscope, — can be very readily explained to the man on the street. Its photographs tell their story clearly, and almost at a glance, and its revelations are easily grasped and appeal to the imaginations strongly, even of those who are not astronomers.
But with the Older, or Fundamental Astronomy, it is far otherwise. Dr. Furness, of Vassar, writes entertainingly of the disappointment felt by one, who, fired by a love of astronomy, visits an observatory for the first time, and watches an astro- nomer at his work. He is not found sitting at the end of a great telescope, looking at a Lunar landscape or a planet, and uttering from time to time an irrepressible exclamation of delight at what he sees, nor is he ever hunting in the sky for something new. Instead, he is probably passing hour after hour placing a fine spider's thread most carefully upon the exact centers of
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successive stars, or determining to the hundred ths part of a second the instants when other stars are crossing his meridian — occupations which to the uninitiated seem utterly uninspiring and devoid of interest.
But the interest and inspiration are there in soul-satisfying measure. What at first sight seems less interesting than this long continued, painstaking, hyper-accurate determination of the exact longitudes and latitudes of the centers of thousands of star discs upon the celestial sphere, and what book can be dryer than one containing the hundreds of thousands of figures in which such results are written down? But it is from these figures, and from them only, that the structure of our stellar universe can be determined, that the weights and distances and the streaming of its host of suns is made known to us, and that we are given a solid basis for the grandest generaliza- tions as to its extensions into the depths of space and its slow, but never ending, transformation into that new universe which shall exist in ages inconceivably remote from the present.
The continual striving for a higher accuracy in all work connected with astronomy of position is indeed a partial source of its absorbing interest. The apparent displacement of a star by an amount equal to the thickness of the finest spider thread may lead the astronomer to an unexpected discovery of the highest importance. To indicate a little of the work which has been and which will be done in astronomy of position, and to point out the fundamental importance of such work in practically every department of astronomy is the object of the present paper.
Evidently to form a just conception of the universe around us, the very first step must be to obtain some idea of the dis- tances of the stars. As is well known, however, the measure- ment of these is exceedingly difficult, and in fact affords perhaps the best of all illustrations of the extreme accuracy of modern methods. It is only when a star is so near that it is slightly displaced in its position upon the sky owing to our own motion around the sun that we can directly measure its distance
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from us. And the distances of even the nearest stars are so enormous that when our earth alters its own position by 180,000,000 miles (which it does every six months), the change in the apparent direction of the star is excessively minute.
So early as the second century B.C., Hipparchus, the Father of Astronomy, began the first systematic observations in astron- omy of position. He discovered the precession of the equinoxes, and also that the sun is nearer the earth at some times of the year than at others. He also made the very first catalogue of the stars, recording from his observations the positions of 1,080 of these, but neither he nor the Greeks of the following centuries had any but speculative theories about the true size of our stellar universe.
Upon the announcement of the Copernican Theory in the sixteenth century, it was at once recognized that if the earth is really moving about the sun the nearer stars should be, at least slightly, displaced in the sky. The long-continued, syste- matic observations of Tycho Brahe, though they were made with instruments which were by far the most accurate ones -constructed up to that time, and though they enabled Kepler to prove that the paths of the planets about the sun are ellipses, and not circles, and thus laid the foundations upon which New- ton's great Law of Gravitation afterward rested, yet failed to show any displacement of any of the stars. Hence Tycho Brahe rejected the Copernican theory and assumed that the earth is at rest.
The telescope had not yet been invented. If we assume that the smallest displacement observable in Tycho Brahe's naked- eye instruments was 100 seconds of arc, — a liberal supposition, — it will follow that he could not have detected a displacement in any star unless this star should have been so near the earth that its light occupied but eleven days in coming from the star to us. But actually the nearest of all the stars is so far away that the light with which we view it has been four and one-third years upon its journey.
After the time of Tycho Brahe, the first great step forward
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was made by Halley, when, in 1718, he announced the definite discovery that at least three of the brightest stars, Aldebaran, Arctunis, and Sirius, had, since the times of Hipparchus and Ptolemy, changed their positions upon the celestial sphere. This was the first proof ever given that the so-called Fixed Stars are not actually fixed, and that therefore they are not infinitely distant.
It was but seven years later that Bradley began his classic observations upon the single star Gamma Draconis. He found that the distance of this star from the celestial equator did indeed regularly and progressively change, but not at all as it should have done if the displacement of the star's position was due to our own motion about the sun. In short, it was from Bradley's observations that two other causes were first revealed which affect the apparent place of every object in the heavens. The first of these was the so-called Aberration of Light, and the second was the Nutation, or trembling, of the axis about which the earth is turning, and whose position at any instant fixes the position of the equator at that instant upon the sky.
Each of these remarkable and very important effects causes far greater displacements in the position of a star than our own motion about the sun could do; we now know that until they should both have been discovered and their influence allowed for it must ever have been hopeless to attempt to find the distances of the stars. Bradley's most accurate observations showed, however, that Gamma Draconis must be at least three light years away, and so gave men for the first time some definite conception of the immense scale upon which the uni- verse of stars is planned.
It was in 1838 that the great problem of directly measuring the distance of a star was solved for the first time. In this year three observers secured definite results simultaneously: Henderson found that Alpha Centauri is 3^ light years away, Bessel discovered the distance of 61 Cygni to be 10 light years and Struve found that the light from our brilliant northern star Vega occupies 16 years in making the journey to us.
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The direct measurement of the excessively minute stellar displacements is, however, a work of extreme difficulty, and to determine the distance of a single star by the older methods is a very long process. Every minute influence,— -unequal refraction, precession, nutation and aberration, — must be com- puted and eliminated, and hence up to 1880, of the host of stars about us there were but twenty whose distances were known. Gill and Elkin, observing at the Cape of Good Hope with a very accurate instrument called a heliometer, steadily increased this number, and the latter astronomer, by twenty years continuous work at the Yale Observatory, added about ninety more.
It was in 1887 that Pritchard, of Oxford, suggested the use in this work of the delicate photographic plate. By taking successive photographs of a selected region of the sky at dif- ferent times of the year and afterward carefully measuring the relative positions of the star images under a microscope, the displacements of such stars on the plates as happen to be nearest us will readily become apparent. This is a far more rapid method than any previously employed and it is a method of wonderful precision. The first notable result announced by its use was the accurate determination of the distances of twenty-five stars by Schlessinger at the Yerkes Observatory in 1910, and this was quickly followed by the determination for forty stars at Cambridge, while now, at Cambridge, Oxford, the Yerkes Observatory, the Allegheny Observatory, the Sproul Observatory of Swarthmore College, and in several others, this high grade of truly fundamental work is being vigorously carried on. At present we know the distances of some three hundred stars, and it cannot be doubted that in the course of a few years this number will be increased to many thousands. So accurate is the new method that if a star is no farther than 163 light years away its distance can be thus directly measttred.
But the great cloud of suns around us contains millions upon millions of objects. The latest estimate from Cambridge is that the number of visible suns in our universe is no less than
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1,600,000,000. Though we can directly measure the distances away of but a few thousands of these, we can reach no reason- able conclusions in regard to the true distances, sizes and dis- tribution of the others. We can indeed acquire much reliable information on these points, but it must be obtained indirectly. And our greatest source of information comes from the so-called Proper Motions of the stars.
By the proper motion of a star is meant its drift over the face of the sky, owing to its own inherent motion through the great star cloud. The stars are all in motion in every imagi- nable direction, some of them with velocities so high as 100 miles a second, and hence every star must have some proper motion. For the determination of this it is of extreme import- ance that the positions on the heavens of many stars should be determined with the highest possible accuracy. The results are published as a so-called Star Catalogue, and these cata- logues, beside revealing much of interest themselves, also serve as a fundamental basis to which observations are referred in the most diverse fields of astronomy.
Perhaps on the whole the most important single astronomical publication of recent years is the late Professor Lewis Boss's fundamental "Catalogue of 6,188 Stars." The position of each star of this great catalogue is determined with all possible accuracy from every modern observation made upon it and the proper motions are also stated in every case as exactly as is at present possible. This work was published in 1910. To extend it to the stars of the Southern Hemisphere, Professor Boss, in 1909, perfected the establishment of a meridian obser- vatory at San Louis, Argentine Republic, under a grant from the Department of Meridian Astrometry of the Carnegie Institution. Here, between April 8, 1909, and January, 1911, 87,000 single observations were secured upon 15,000 stars, the places of 1,600 of which are so accurate as to be regarded as fundamental.
Catalogues of this kind contain comparatively few stars, whose positions are, however, determined with the utmost
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accuracy. Another great work, not yet quite completed, is the catalogue of the Astronomische Gesellschaft. In this the whole sky is divided into some twenty-four zones, each zone being assigned to a different observatory for observation. Twenty-two volumes have already appeared, the last being from Cordoba, Argentine Republic, where the stars in the zone from twenty-two to twenty-seven degrees south of the celestial equator were observed. The whole work contains thus far the accurate positions for some 125,000 stars. Our own Naval Observatory has been for two years engaged in the continuous observation of the so-called Intermediary Stars, a work which will probably be entirely completed in the course of about ten years. And lastly, under the head of catalogues which, unlike Boss's, are wholly formed from observations made for the purpose of the catalogue itself, there should be mentioned the great Astrographic Catalogue which is to cover the entire heavens with a series of photographic plates. No less than 70,000 separate plates must be secured in the course of this work, the sky being, as with the Astronomische Gesell- schaft Catalogue, divided among many observatories. When all these plates are taken and measured there will be secured the positions of millions of stars, extending in faintness down to the eleventh and even the twelfth magnitudes. This very extensive piece of work was begun in 1887. Thus far, only the Royal Observatory of Greenwich and the observatory at Oxford have finished the shares allotted to them; it has been variously estimated that from thirty to seventy-one years will elapse before the whole shall be completed.
It may be of interest to point out a few of the less obvious directions in which star catalogues are essential for the solution of, apparently only distantly, related problems in astronomy.
The shape of our earth, for example, may be determined by direct geodetic measurements and also by pendulum observa- tions, both of which methods, as is well known, rest immediately upon the accurate determination of the positions of certain stars. In these ways the reciprocal of the values for the flat- OS)
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tening are found to be 297.0=*= 1.2 and 298.3=*= 1.1, respectively. But this flattening of the earth causes a decided disturbance in the motions of the perigee and node of our moon's path, and from this source the value is found to be 293. 5 =±=0.5. Indeed, unless we assume that our moon is more dense at its surface than at its center — a very improbable supposition — it can be shown by this method of investigation that the number cannot exceed 296.0. The much smaller probable error of the result determined from the moon than of that from geodetic measures is very noticeable. But the last result depends upon the value assumed for the mass of the moon itself, and to determine this the so-called lunar inequality and the distance of the sun must be accurately known. Our knowledge of these, and indeed of all of the elements of the solar system, will be much improved when suitable observations have been made upon the little minor planet, Eros, when this again draws near the earth in 1931. And to determine accurately the motion of this little body as it apparently moves among the stars, a knowledge of the exact positions of these reference stars will be absolutely essential.
Again, recent searching inquiries into the exactness of Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, upon which all of our science of celestial mechanics rests, will be found upon examination to depend wholly upon the exactness of observa- tions in astronomy of position. Bellinger and de Sitter, for example, examine into the question whether there is not some evidence that the pull of the sun upon the moon is decreased when, at the time of a lunar eclipse, the earth is placed between these bodies. Such a possible slight disturbance will be found, if it exists, from the positions of the moon with reference to stars whose places are accurately known. And, finally, the proposal to test the new theory of relativity by the apparent displacement of a star when this is seen near the edge of the sun rests entirely upon the accurate determination of a stellar position.
In fact, there are very few problems in modern astronomy
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whose solution could even be approximated were it not for the measures made in astronomy of position. The approxi- mate structure of the stellar universe would, of course, be wholly unknown; the temperatures, luminosities and weights of none of the stars could be found, since we would not know their distances away. The physical constitutions of the stars and their motions in the line of sight would be about all that would remain of our astronomical knowledge.
Faithful and continued observations in astronomy of posi- tion are thus seen to be absolutely essential for the development of practically every part of our science. But, aside from this, its fundamental importance, its pursuit, has high rewards of its own, wholly irrespective of its value to other branches of astronomy.
In the year 1905 Kapteyn brought to a close a prolonged study of the proper motions of 2,400 stars of the Auwers- Bradley catalogue. He discovered from this that there is a remarkable streaming of the stars of our universe. He grouped the stars from the Pole to thirty degrees south latitude into twenty-eight regions, and found that while the motions of innumerable stars are apparently in a haphazard direction, and while there is necessarily an apparent backward drift of all of the stars owing to our sun's own motion through the depths of the great star cloud, yet when this is allowed for there remained a great and steady streaming of the stars in parallel lines along two streams, the one motion being directed toward the star Xi Orionis, and the other toward a point in Sagittarius, on the opposite side of the heavens.
As to the cause of this universal motion on so grand a scale of the stars about us, we can only speculate. Eddington, Beljawsky, Schwarzchild and Dyson have extended and con- firmed Kapteyn's investigation and have, in some cases, attempted to give a rational explanation of the phenomenon.
Thus, Eddington, supposing that the cloud was formerly much elongated, shows that the contrary motions may have been caused by the falling in toward the center of the out- OS)
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lying stars. This is, perhaps, the simplest possible explana- tion. If it is a true one, we are here led to a contemplation of the surging and changing of our universe as a whole during a time so infinitely long that even the vast intervals which we have hitherto considered in astronomy shrink to nothing in comparison.
From a study of the figures of his own catalogue, Boss dis- covered the remarkable Taurian cluster of stars. In this constellation there are from forty to fifty rather bright stars which look to us quite widely scattered, but which are actually gathered into an isolated group, moving through the depths of space. The center of this little cloud is now 140 light years from us, but it is drawing away from us with a speed of 28.7 miles a second, and 67,000,000 years from the present time, these widely scattered stars will be seen as a condensed little cluster, which, on account of its great distance from us, will then appear but twenty minutes in diameter.
Another most interesting group of related stars which are moving together in parallel paths through space was discovered by Lindendorf. This is composed of five of the bright stars of Ursa Major; and Hertzsprung has shown that the bright Dog Star, Sirius, though from where we now are it appears in so widely a different part of the sky, is also a member of this group. The center of this cluster is about 100 light years from us; Sirius, only 8.6 light years away, is thus far out of the center. The stars, oddly enough, lie almost exactly in one plane, and they are all far more luminous than our sun.
It has even been suggested that many of the thirty stars which are nearest our sun belong to an isolated Solar cluster whose diameter is about twice that of the cluster in Taurus. But the evidence on this point is not yet complete.
I particularly wish that the time today would permit me to tell you of the analysis of the proper motions of the fainter stars. To show you why, although we are certain that many, and perhaps most, of them are great suns which only appear faint because they are so far away, yet that many others of
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them are small or dull suns immersed in the cloud of their brighter neighbors. And to show you the evidence, which is perhaps the most interesting of all, that there is a definite thinning out of the stars as we penetrate to vast distances into the star cloud; evidence which has convinced us, con- trary to our former belief, that we are reaching or have reached in some directions, the true limit or boundary of our immense universe.
Almost infinitely extended though our wonderful universe is, when we have reached its boundaries it is impossible for our minds to stop there. Whether beyond is infinite but empty space, or whether one universe succeeds another, absolutely without end, one conception is as utterly beyond the powers of our little minds as the other. But if, having seen that our Milky Way universe is limited, we shall ever discover that there is another, almost infinitely distant one, its existence, so far as we can now see, can only be revealed to us by its disturbing pull upon our own vast cloud of suns. And this slight but continuous disturbance of our system as a whole will, if ever, only be revealed to us by the exceedingly accurate measures belonging to the science of astronomy of position.
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JERUSALEM, THE HOLY CITY
BY JAMES A. MONTGOMERY Professor of Hebrew and Aramaic
As Director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, I was due in the Holy City by October 1st of last year (1914). On September 28th my family and I entered it with dramatic pomp. As we drove up from the railroad station, which lies almost a mile away from the Jaffa Gate, we came abreast of the Turkish garrison, some 3,000 strong, returning from a day's trial march. We passed along under the walls of Mount Zion at the side of the khaki-covered, weary-looking troops, the air laden with their dust and lurid with the light of the setting sun. It was an impression never to be forgotten, for the Holy City was practically at war, a forepost of Moham- medanism and of one of the two parties to the great struggle in Europe. Insignificant strategically, it was a prize of that war, and the atmosphere not only of nature but of men's hearts was full of apocalyptic hopes and fears, for in that oriental land war means the strife of religions. It seemed as if the age- long cruel and kaleidoscopic history of the Holy City was to repeat itself. No such year as this had come upon her since Saladin restored her to Islam or Godfrey de Boulogne was crowned her Christian king. Bereft of her glory, the Virgin Daughter of Zion sat expectant, conscious of her dignity as object of the world's ideals of holiness, with fluttering bosom as to the outcome of the world's crisis, but certain of her eternity in men's hearts. To whom are her everlasting gates to open their doors, — so ask her sons, Jew and Christian and Moham- medan, with bated breath, and none dare answer, for although the object of all prophecy, there is no prophesying of her fates. Her history is inscrutable like that of humanity. But therefor men love her, for her tragedy is theirs.
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On that same morning we had reached Jaffa by boat from Beirut. There we met a number of friends, missionaries whose acquaintance we had made in the Lebanon, and they strongly advised us against proceeding with our journey to Jerusalem. They painted the conditions as most unsafe for Christians. But unlike Jonah, we did not flee from Joppa, for I was deter- mined to reach my destination, if only for a day. But so uncer- tain were we that we left our luggage behind, thinking that the chances were against a sojourn. We arrived and decided to remain for a few days : the days became weeks, and in the sum three months.
These few months marked notable history for the "Immov- able East." On October 1st the Ottoman Empire reasserted its rights against the foreigner by the Revocation of the Capitulations, the ancient treaty rights which reserved to the Christian nations extra-territorial dominion over their citizens in the land. This involved not only the abrogation of the excel- lent foreign post offices, but also the subjection of the foreigner to the Turkish Kadi and tax collector, and the imperial control of every foreign school and church. Our great American Protestant College at Beirut is now suffering from vexatious restraints on its religion and education and from demands for taxes; in the case of one German charitable institution near Jerusalem taxes have been claimed for twenty years back. Ancient compacts no longer hold. In consequence of cowardly construction of the rights of American citizens abroad, America has no standing in the Orient except for its gold.
The political crisis came with Turkey entering the lists against the Allies. In the Orient one gets no exact news, and we never learned when war was specifically declared. But on October 3 1 st the fact was significantly indicated. The American flag was flying over the British Consulate, the Italian and Spanish over those of Russia and France, and soon the church buildings and schools of the hostile nations were commandeered for military use as barracks and hospitals. Thus the Turkish commandant found grim satisfaction in establishing his head- quarters in the Russian hospital. The consuls of the hostile
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powers were made prisoners, an innovation in international usage that is not native even to Turkey, and all hostile aliens were put under military arrest, not only the laymen but also the clergy and monks and nuns, a treatment unknown in Islam's history, for Mohammed enjoined kindly treatment for the Christian religious. But the empire is following the beck of a new and alien statecraft. For weeks there hung over these people the doom of confinement at Urfa, the ancient Edessa, a distant inland point east of Aleppo, but with the opera bouffe characteristic of the empire, exaggerated by its endeavor to keep pace with the latest innovations in military and diplo- matic practice, these orders were changed from day to day, until some of our good French and English friends were dis- tracted with packing and unpacking. Through the efforts of the American consul the English consul got away via Jaffa much earlier than his colleagues; half an hour after his embark- ing orders came to hold him. Finally it was decided to expel all the religious, including the nuns and teachers, and so they at last safely departed. The Frenchmen, including the noble staff of scholars at the Dominican convent, famous the world over for its biblical studies, actually were started on the journey northward to remote Urfa, but at Damascus they were switched off to Beirut and so escaped by sea. The laity were treated worse. There are Englishmen, some of whom I know, still confined as military prisoners for no other offence than that they were born English. The prisoners at Damascus, one of them a notable physician, were threatened with death and the time of execution was several times announced to them. But the admiral of the English fleet sent notice to the Turkish governors in Syria that his government had a complete list of those worthies and these would be held personally responsible for every murder — a threat which had its salutary effect.
Among these perplexities the one man who distinguished himself was our American consul, Dr. Glazebrook, who did much to alleviate the lot of the hostile aliens. He was the only bright star in the American firmament that we could see, except
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the inevitable American gold that poured in for the relief of the famine-stricken Jews. For two months after the Great War began no American warship appeared in the Syrian waters to take up the duty of policing the Turkish coast and protecting American interests. Our Government was waiting and watch- ing at the respectful distance of 6,000 miles.
In the beginning of November broke the Jihad, the Muslim Holy War. I know of the Jihad only through books, but the native Christians knew what it meant by blood tradition. Our servants, two excellent German women, shivered and believed we should all be massacred. They knew, as they heard it in the streets, that the Jihad to the popular mind has no distinction of race and politics, only that of religion. They knew, as do all intelligent people, that a Holy War means something different from a political war, and that it was meant in this case to mean something different, to fan religious hate in a fanatical people. They knew that it meant, legally, death without quarter to men, slavery for women and children. But the fear of all Christians was not realized in Palestine; the intended consummation has been reserved for Armenia. But in Jerusalem Muslims and Christians live on too good terms to wish to cut one another's throats. And so we could witness rather as comedies than tragedies the several attempts to fan the spirit of the Holy War, countenanced by the local repre- sentatives of Christian Powers. One of these occasions was the triumphal entry of a sacred banner from the Prophet's tomb at Medina. It was a gala day when everybody turned out to see the sight. At last, with a great cavalcade the sacred emblem made its entry, but alas, a very modern tawdry banner, said by scoffers to have been made in Jerusalem. However, as sufficient substitute, the flagpole was very old! In the Orient the antiquity of relics is of minor importance. The Mufti who had accompanied the relic from Weissnichtwo died the next day; according to one story he was poisoned by the Germans, which was unkindly, malicious we may suppose; according to another view it was an evil omen from Allah. In either case we observe the easy oriental sense as to cause and effect. Then
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we all went home and forgot about the Jihad, for as the com- fortable Muslims said: This is a war of the Unbelievers and not of the Faithful.
Meanwhile the troops came pouring in on their way south to Hebron and Beersheba for the far-famed expedition against Egypt. Jerusalem became more and more a military center. Its streets were full of camel lines laden with grain, with ammu- nition, with light guns. One day we saw by the Damascus Gate the great zinc boats by which the expedition should cross the Canal. We saw these boats later in Egypt, riddled with grape shot, the spoil of war. The Canal which connects Europe with India separated Africa and Asia. German officers were billeted in the French convent of Notre Dame, Turkish soldiers in the church buildings of St. Anne. Our expected Thanks- giving turkey was commandeered by the military commis- sariat.
However, these weeks of suspense were not without their compensation in humor. The Turk was fired with the idea that he must imitate his bigger brothers, and no fancies were too large for his fertile brain. One day there came an order for all citizens, dutifully or compulsorily, to deliver their empty oil cans, those universal vestiges of the Standard Oil Company, the most striking symbol of American influence in the Orient. And for what purpose those mountains of tin cans ? Forsooth, they were to be packed with sand and dumped into the Canal to form a causeway for the expedition. Or what mean these long strings of lean and ill-fed camels? No doubt they are to be driven thirsty to the Canal, into which they will plunge to slake their thirst, and with the great stream gurgitating into their bellies the soldiers of Allah would walk over dryshod into the Promised Land. Most humorous of all was the report which brought upon the English cathedral a visitation of a military force. Canon Hichens was routed out and ordered to reveal hidden arms, for they had learned on good authority that the English there made cannons at the altar. Despite the clergyman's protestations they explored about the church, and finally dug up a side-altar, laying it bare to the earth.
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Jerusalem, the Holy City
It turned out that the rumor was based on a misunderstanding of an English word. Mr. Hichens* title under which he served at the altar had been translated into big guns.
But the end came for us. In the midst of all these excite- ments our Consul ordered us to leave. We spent Christmas Day at Jaffa and the next day sailed for Egypt. Here we stayed for three months, hoping against hope that we might have the chance to return to Palestine. We were there when the Turkish expedition was repulsed from the Canal. No idea was entertained on that side of its possible success, but all knew that its success would have meant a general massacre of Christians. A German acquaintance in Jerusalem said to me before leaving: You will be safer here than in Egypt.
I have given you not of egotism a few pages out of a personal diary for a memorable year in Jerusalem's history. I failed in my purpose of archaeological study; I did not see what I expected, but I saw something far rarer in the unexpected. Jerusalem was stripped of its monotonous aspect as a tourists' city. It was no longer under the protection of the Christian Powers, but under the aegis of the Holy War. This was, indeed, an impotent attempt, and I learned there that Islam is politically dead. But this was the atmosphere in which to see that Holy City. For since the time of Nebuchadnezzar and Antiochus Epiphanes and Pompey and Titus, of the Saracens and the Crusaders, it is the city whose religion is writ in blood. The temple hill with its sacred altar-rock running with the blood of holocausts or of the myriads slain by Titus' soldiery in the last awful days of the Jewish state; or the little knob of rock in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre where Jesus was crucified; or the nearby Valley of Jehoshaphat where, accord- ing to the Prophets, the Lord would give his sacrificial feast on the bodies of the slain — every point and tradition is redolent with blood, of the greatest and best, as of the worst and most fanatical. How difficult it is to associate with this actuality the ideals that Holy City has given birth to, but never realized, within her borders:
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"Many peoples shall come and say: Come and let us go up to the Mountain of the Lord To the House of the God of Jacob; And he will teach us of his ways And we shall walk in his paths.
"And he will judge between the nations And give decision to many peoples; And they shall beat their swords into plowshares And their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, Neither shall they learn war any more."
Or there is the Apostle's thought that here Jesus "reconciled all things unto God, having made peace through the blood of the cross." But it is just this reeking history of the past that has riveted men's minds on that city, and the things fought for there and the deaths of martyrs have transformed a city of naturally crude religion and barbarous aspects into a visionary home of ideals. Thither the Christian pilgrims came to be buried in its soil, thither the Jewish colonists are coming to revive their City of God on earth, while the faithful over the world who have never seen it elevate it to a seat in heaven, the everlasting abode of peace. And none can understand Jerusalem who does not view it from this high point of idealism or sympathetically read himself into it. Jerusalem is like Rome. You can explain neither the one nor the other, -with their fascination upon men, from historical geography or ethnological origins, nor can you blot them out of the page of history. In each the spirit of man has risen to its heights and its depths, in each has been born the will to world-empire, and from these roots of his history man cannot detach himself. He may sublimate his inherited memories into ideals, but these are the visions seen by Jerusalem and Rome; or these holy cities may still grip men with their concrete demands and you have the institution of the Catholic Church and the powerful movement of Zionism.
Such is the political condition of the Holy City in this Year of Grace. And what is Jerusalem like? you may ask. In
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replying I have to apologize to you as I did to the Provost when he asked me to give this lecture. It should properly be illus- trated, should be all pictures with few words. But my pictures which I took in Jerusalem, especially illustrating the walls and the recent excavations, and the slides I had made there, I was forced to leave behind, for all photographs, I was warned, were contraband. And as I subsequently learned I should have had great trouble in getting them through the police examinations at almost every port in the Mediterranean. And so I must give you pictures in words.
Jerusalem within the walls is disappointing, rather a mean- looking city. Its life is provincial, its bazaars, unlike those of Cairo and Damascus, uninteresting, with little for sale apart from produce and the necessities of life. The streets are narrow and in large part steeply stepped because of the hilly nature of the ground; no vehicles pass through the city, only at two points may they enter the city and then only for a short dis- tance. The ancient gates are too narrow and in some cases too low, so choked up are they, to admit such traffic. Only man and the old-world donkey and camel traverse these alleys. In the inhabited quarters there are no prospects, no plazas and broad streets. One threads a narrow crooked lane to reach the Holy Sepulchre, and comes upon it well below the city level, or passes through long tunnels in approaching the Haram, the area of the ancient Temple. You can live your life in those narrow quarters and remain a provincial despite the city's traditions. Even the Temple hill does not dominate the city, for it stands lower than the western hill. One must climb the Mount of Olives to the east or the highland to the north to get that sacred territory in the center o£ the focus. In the poet's words, "Unto the hills lift I up my eyes;" one must of purpose raise his glance and thought from the sordidness of the city's life in order that he be not lost in its religious vanity.
Apart from the Haram it is peculiarly from without the walls that one obtains the best impression of the ancient city. The grim walls encircle the city for its full circuit and satisfy the imagination as representing the walls of Herod or of the
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Judaean monarchy, though the present structures are for the most part modern, built or rebuilt in the seventeenth century, and do not follow the lines of any one of the classic cities. Except for the hill to the northwest where the fine modern quarter has grown up, Jerusalem without the walls is in the state of nature, almost deserted of human habitation, and here one can wander at his will, clambering over the rocky soil, trying to make out the ancient lines of circumvallation, with the hills and valleys about him, looking as they looked when David made the city of the Jebusites his capital. From the Jaffa Gate, in the center of the western wall, the valley to the west of the city falls very rapidly toward the south; then it makes a sharp turn to the east, becoming a rockbound gorge, the Valley of Gehinnom, the Gehenna of religious fancy, still crowded with ancient tombs and containing still, as I believe I have discovered, the altars where the rites of Molech were practised. The southern wall of the city does not follow its ancient line upon the ridge surmounting this deep valley, but has been pushed far back, running northeast to strike the southwest angle of the Haram, which continues the fortification on the eastern side. This now almost deserted area, except for some religious buildings, is for history's sake as interesting as anything within the present city. Within it on the western hill good tradition finds the site of the earliest conventicle of the Christian Church, the "Upper Room," where Jesus instituted the love-sacrament of his Church and where the disciples met for fear of the Jews, persisting there in the "teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and the prayers." This site, the so-called Coenaculum, is, unfortunately, part of the pile known to Muslim tradition as David's Tomb. And that long spur of sloping hill to the east which runs down from the Temple area, we cannot ignore, for despite the forgetfulness and inventions of tradition, that is none other than the site of David's City, the fortress he took from the Jebusites. Follow- ing the weight of tradition's authority, the city itself has for- gotten its past, has ruled that territory out, and transferred its associations to the western hill. It is strange that the birth-
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place of the Holy City and that of the Christian Church today lie outside the walls. On that old Jebusite hill only the Virgin's Spring below its eastern edge, the rock-hewn water tunnel millenniums old connecting the spring with the Pool of Siloam on the southeast side, and recent excavations testify to its rare antiquity as a city site. But now, in the Prophet Micah's words, this oldest part of Jerusalem stands "plowed as a field." The Valley of Gehinnom empties in the Kedron valley to the south of this eastern hill. We ascend up this latter dirt- choked gorge, with the village of Siloam perched high up on its eastern bank, its unmannerly inhabitants perhaps the children of the ancient Canaanites. We keep on under the ridge of the hill of David's City, past the Virgin's Spring, now a deep cavity in a mass of ddbris. Here, as at the Pool of Siloam, women draw their water and wash their clothes and soldiers are taking their baths, the bath being taken at the higher level. Despite all the hygienic canons the race persists. Still farther on we come abreast of the southeast corner of the Haram enclosure, the lofty walls perched far above the deep valley. Here some of the most ancient wall construction exists, and excavations prove that at this point the wall was 120 feet high, justifying Josephus's remark on the dizzy precipice below the Temple's battlements. Farther on one passes, looming far above, the Golden Gate of the Temple, perhaps the Beautiful Gate of the New Testament, with its great double-arched doorways, closed according to Muslim tradition until the day that a strange king shall come and overthrow the True Religion. It is over this valley, too, the valley of Jehoshaphat, of God's Judgment, that fancy places the line of thin rope over which Believers must walk to gain Paradise, while the Infidels tumble into the chasm beneath. Indeed, the whole region outside the wall to the south and east of Jerusalem is so rugged and dreary that we can understand how it became the stage of every kind of myth and apocalyptic fancy. It is from these uncanny surroundings of Jerusalem that one imbibes some of the breath of the local nature which inspired the religious imagination and the desert- born fanaticism that have marked those who have possessed the
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Holy City. Only on one quarter, as I have said, to the north- west, does the city join with the inhabited world. The two valleys that embrace it are dry wadies which drain, if ever waters flow in them, into the Dead Sea. Like Mecca, symbol of the desert faith Mohammed gave the world, Jerusalem stands facing the wild desert, with only her back door open to the peoples of the world, symbol of her worldly and other worldly associations. Yet we must remind ourselves that the modern visitor does not see the noble city that once was, when the southern slopes were covered with palaces and mansions and the streets thronged with a lively populace. Theirs was a living faith, although very much of this world, that made that city noble and great, and we of today possess only the dregs of ancient reminiscence, for its shorn memories only the more insistently demand the New Jerusalem which comes from above. Within its walls Jerusalem, like Rome, is a city of many hills, like Rome with its history starting on one of the hills, creeping on to enclose one after another as the city grew and strategic lines demanded. The city's area consists of two ridges, running north and south, each of which has several eminences; between them lies a deep descending valley, the greater part of which is a dump heap overgrown with cactus, choking the gate at its outlet so that one can hardly walk upright through it. In fact, one of the surprises in visiting Jerusalem is to observe how much of the modern city within the present walls, much more circumscribed than they were in the days of Herod or the monarchy, lies unoccupied. This valley is deserted, the Temple area is, of course, void of inhabi- tants, there is a large section in the northeast by the Moham- medan quarter which is waste, while a considerable part of the southern half of the western hill is occupied by convents and gardens. Perhaps a third of the city is destitute of inhabitants, and Josephus may not have been wrong when he gave the population of his day as half a million, while today there are hardly 70,000 within the walls. Yet these vacant stretches are most grateful to the student; he can roam over them undisturbed by the drab modern life and visualize the
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past as one may still do on Rome's ancient hills, the Palatine and Aventine. The historical geography of both cities has many identities, even as their ideals of world-empire challenge comparison.
Is there much of antiquity left in Jerusalem? so I am often asked. It is a hard question to answer with yea or nay. I have in sum to reply: It is the same ancient city of Melchizedek and David and Herod and Omar and the Crusaders, the glorious sky and atmosphere above, the gaunt surroundings about, just the same, only with the city's proportions changed, and its ancient glories crumbled in the dust and buried under fathoms of debris. Despite easy-going tradition it is hard to make sure of any one spot invested with sacred history. Every point is contested, first by rival faiths and sects, then by ortho- doxy and radicalism. Your sacred geography is Greek or Latin or Protestant or skeptical, as the case may be. The courses of the ancient walls are all in dispute, despite the lively and accurate accounts of Nehemiah and Josephus. It is still argued whether the eastern or western hill was the site of the original city, and it must be said of the clues of ecclesiastical tradition that while they run back well to the fourth and fifth centuries, a leap is made to the first which imperils assent. Just one spot there is which is sure, to the mind of almost all: the holy rock on the Temple hill, the site of the bloody sacri- fices of the Jews, perhaps one of the hoariest sanctuaries of the world. It is covered now with the glorious Arabic-domed structure, wrongly called the Mosque of Omar, after the Arab conqueror of the city. But where the Temple stood is disputed, although hardly without doubt just to the west of the rock. The rest of the area has been so much changed that we cannot identify its historic points. It is only in its subterranean structures that we come upon the actual remains of antiquity, but then archaeologists wrangle over Herod and Solomon, so indefinite are Jerusalem's datings. On the west side of the Haram and without, approached by narrow lanes, one comes to cyclopean stones which may well be Solomon's own work, and which, the Jews resorting thither to wail, feel are all that
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is left to them of the fabric of the Temple. At the north of the area is a higher ridge of rock, from which the Roman police guarded the Jewish assemblies on their holy days as now the Turkish soldiers keep order among the Christians at the Holy Sepulchre, and here a centurion snatched away Paul from an irate mob. However, whatever the exact identifications may be, just here and about here was the sanctuary of Israel of which the exiled poet bethinks himself, ''How I went with the throng and led them to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise, a multitude keeping holiday." Here is rich satisfaction enough to the historical mind despite all the riddles for the archasologist.
To the south of the Temple area runs the long rump of a ridge which is, as I have said, the site of the original city, although now lying without the walls. On the east of this lies the Virgin's Spring, the Gihon of the Old Testament, feeding the Pool of Siloam on the west side by a subterranean conduit 586 yards in length. The entrances at either end of this tunnel can be easily seen, but in that troublous year no permit for exploring it could be obtained. These waterworks go back to 700 B. C. On this hill, commonly given the biblical name of Ophel, some remarkably interesting excavations have been made by a committee of English Jews under the leadership of a Captain Weil. The results have not been published, but the excavations carried over a large area down to the solid rock show the remains of a very ancient settlement.
Passing to the western, the so-called Zion Hill, we come upon some remarkable excavations which have been made at its southern extremity, outside the walls, facing the east. Here in their own grounds the French Assumptionists have uncovered the remains of the city in Roman times before the destruction of Jerusalem, and perhaps of the later city Aelia Capitolina, Hadrian's foundation. Here alone in all the city can we gain an idea how it looked at the beginning of the era. The streets, the mansions with their rock-cut cellars, the bases of Roman temples, baths, and the inevitable accompaniment of far more primitive tombs, — this ensemble although little advertised as
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yet in the West, is one of the most interesting points in the city, second only to the Temple and the Holy Sepulchre. This region is the Pompeii of Jerusalem. And Church tradition invests it with peculiar interest, for that tradition places here the palace of Caiaphas, the scene of the Jewish trial of Jesus and of the denial of Peter, and if the belief of the learned archaeologists at work there that in a remarkable stone mansion with its dungeons we have the actual palace of Caiaphas, can never be demonstrated, we have at all events the dwelling of one of Jerusalem's old-time magnates. . Two stone-paved streets have been laid bare, one of fine Roman workmanship, the other older, of Jewish origin. On this I looked with sacred sentiment, for it would be one of the few spots in Jerusalem, encumbered as its ancient surface is with the debris of the ages, on which the steps of the Saviour must have trod.
The walls of the city are a source of fascination to the new- comer, and one can loiter about them, inside and out, without interruption, for a large part of their course is through deserted tracts. The lines of the original walls, of David and Solomon, of the later monarchy, of Nehemiah, the crucial details of whose account of his heroic rebuilding cannot be identified, of Herod and Agrippa, of Hadrian and of the Christian patroness the empress Eudoxia, are all a matter of dispute. But qn the southwest, on the Zion Hill, and along the southern limit of the ancient city, one can trace the bold rock-scarpings which in very early times marked the course of circumvallation. And most fascinating were the visits into the shafts and tunnels left by the American explorer Bliss, into which one may descend and in one case pursue the strata of ancient wall now buried fifteen feet or more. Is the lowest stratum the remains of the pre-exilic wall which Nehemiah found, and that rougher built construction on top of it Nehemiah's and his colleagues' work in their hasty rebuilding? And that stratum at the top is probably Eudoxia's, of the sixth century A. D. Here is an archaeological stratification of possibly 1,200 years and more. On the west side of the city loom up by the Jaffa Gate three great antique towers, one of them still bearing David's name,
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towers which Josephus describes in glowing terms, of which their structure is worthy. Other pieces of ancient fortification there are, all enticing to historical combination, all problematic. My three months' stay was quite too short for clinching final results and weighing justly the archaeological data.
So far I have dealt with the salient points of the biblical topography of Jerusalem. And many who go there desire only the Jerusalem of the Bible. For these the city will prove dis- appointing, even as Rome is to the traveler who seeks the remains of the Republican or even the Augustan age and ignores the subsequent history. But there is no reason why the student should terminate his interest in the Holy City with the first century, when the Jewish state came to an end and the Chris- tian Church went forth a colonist of the world. At least down to Saladin's time, when Jerusalem fell under the ban of Muslim inertia, the romantic history of the city continued, and for the student of Christian origins and history, it has a compelling interest, just as the history of Rome has never stopped and her catacombs and ancient churches prove to us her eternity. It is true that with regard to the points hallowed by Christian association the arrant credulity of oriental and ecclesiastical superstition arouses its skeptical antithesis. That strange and wonderful Church of the Holy Sepulchre, or as the Greeks better call it, of the Resurrection, a bewildering pile of buildings, extend- ing from ancient rock-hewn tombs through Constantine's won- derful basilica and all ages of reconstruction down to the present fabric, rebuilt from fire in 1808, does not at first sight invite belief in its traditions. Yet I must confess a closer study of the place and the data made me more open to the conviction that here Golgotha and the Saviour's tomb may have stood. For Jerusalem just as for earJy Christian Rome there has been a decided reaction on the part of archaeologists toward an open- minded study of ecclesiastical traditions, in fact, it has been forced upon them. No student of Jerusalem now approaches this question of Golgotha with the Protestant dogmatism of our great Edward Robinson, who records that he began his explora- tions of the Holy Land with the firm purpose to ignore all
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monkish superstitions. I believe that the local traditions as to this site and also as some other localities connected with the birth of Christianity, for example the Coenaculum, the Mother House of the Church, must be seriously weighed.
But apart from these identifications, whose uncertainties must haunt the historical if not the entirely devoted mind, there is one aspect of early Christian Jerusalem which none but those of limited interest dare ignore. These are the sites which Christian affection has consecrated for at least sixteen centuries, since for many of them we can carry the tradition back to the fourth and fifth centuries. Just as the bare stones of the Jews' wailing place are sacred for the tears shed there by countless of the dispossessed nation, so these Christian sites are con- secrated by the aspiration of the Christian world, which through the ages has counted pilgrimage thither as not only the most meritorious, but also the most soul-satisfying endeavor, and which to this day brings the pious Russian pilgrims in tens of thousands in pursuance of the Church's ancient devotion. And hardly of less interest must be the remains of the brief century in which the Crusaders triumphed over the Crescent, especially the glorious churches they built, transported product in large part from western Europe. There is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Constantine's foundation, contemporary and rival of his noble basilicas in Bethlehem and Constantinople and Rome, for which the Christians of the West shed their blood and that of the Saracens. Or there is the Mosque el-Aksa, at the south of the Temple area, going back to a foundation of Justinian's, becoming then a mosque, and again the home of the Christian Hospitallers, and once more a Muslim prayer- house. Or St. Anne's Church, built over the reputed site of the birthplace of the Mother of the Lord, some ancient rock- hewn habitation; here the Crusaders reared their Gothic Church, which Saladin replaced with a school for Muslim girls; fallen to ruins the Turks gave it as a reward for Crimea to Napoleon III, and the White Fathers have built here a glorious church on the ancient lines. And now within this last year the Turks have seized it again for use by the soldiers, but those
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superstitious people dread the desecration and say they have bad dreams in that holy place. In such places there is a kaleidoscope of history that challenges attention. And if you ever visit Jerusalem, I would bid you take along not only your Bible, but also the records of the fierce and loving piety of the Christian Church.
The modern Jerusalem has also its attractions. The devotion of the faithful and the political ambitions of the Great Powers have conspired to rear great and handsome buildings, churches, convents, schools, hospitals, hospices, which stand for modern Christendom's ideas of religion, philanthropy and art, and as well for political claims upon the Holy City. Most of these stand outside the walls, to the northwest and north. The Russians have an immense area, with a stately church and great buildings for the accommodation of pilgrims. The Germans have marked their recent advent into eastern politics with several sumptuous and admirable religious structures; the splendid Benedictine convent on the Zion Hill, with its lofty tower dominating the city — the traditional site of the Dormitio — the Passing-away of the Virgin Mother; the Evangelical Church, a handsome building upon the site of and incorporating some remains of a Templar church; a too pon- derous convent for the Lazarists on the north; and a splendid hospice on the Mount of Olives. The French, continuing directly the ancient Prankish rights and traditions, have several notable churches and convents, distinguished by characteristic fineness of taste, among which should be named St. Anne's and St. Stephen's, on very ancient sites. The English have a fine cathedral church with schools and hospitals; the Italians are completing a splendid hospital. And in this tale of religious benevolences should be included the remarkable list of Jewish philanthropies, showing less in architectural display, but built for myriads of needy co-religionists. There are hospitals, day and trade schools, hospices, and vast areas of tenements, all built and subsidized by foreign funds, the account of which deserves a special chapter in the history of philanthropy.
The interest of this ancient city is eternally religious, that
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interest remains, marked not only by this stately tale of houses of religion and of charity, religion's handmaid, but by the people who live there and throng the streets. It is a people that lives for religion and, I may add, on religion. In St. Paul's words, addressed to a very different city, they are a little too religious. From all over the world they come, bringing their outlandish robes with them and mingling with the bright variety of the local oriental life. Christian priests and students are there, each order with its own costume, hats and gowns and footgear all different. There are the dignified Muslim sheicks, least demonstrative of all. And then the dominant element of Judaism, which makes two-thirds of the population, incessantly on the way to and from the prayer-house, those from eastern Europe, the Ashkenazim, dressed in long robes of wonderful hues and fur-tipped beavers. These live in the ancient Ghetto in the southern part of the city or in the colonies which swarm to the northwest. Then there are the bodies of Protestant origin, mostly of communistic origin and eschato- logical hopes connected with the Holy Land. The so-called American Colony is of this order, most useful members of Jerusalem society. There is a large and flourishing German colony in the suburbs to the southwest. In addition all kinds of eccentrics are drawn hither from every part of the world, typical of whom is, or was, the old English lady who had a cup of afternoon tea ready every day to give to the Lord upon his return. Even our very own indigenous American religion I found represented, that of Mormon. Indeed Syria, the mother of sects, finds her brood returned hundredfold into her bosom. All these bodies live alongside of each other, as a rule respectful of one another's rights, but entirely strange to one another, with hardly speaking acquaintance. Now and again there is a flare-up of ancient fanatical spirit, as at the ceremony of the Holy Fire, when Greeks and Catholics fight, or in the tussels of Zionists and old-school Jews, when the political instincts of the former drive them to crack their brethren's heads.
This picture of the motley population turns my thought to the present social condition of the Holy City, and that is the
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saddest phase of my subject. Jerusalem is socially a pauper city; the Mohammedans, a minor element, alone seem to take care of themselves. The Christians are subsidized by the great convents, especially of the Franciscans and the Greek patriarchate. At one of these I was told that they baked and gave out 1,600 loaves of bread weekly. The Greek Church largely pays the house rent of its clients. But most distressing is the condition of the Jews. They have settled here in hordes with the pious intent of acting as the vicarious representatives of their brethren throughout the world and claiming the right to live upon the alms of the faithful, the Halukka, as the benevolence is called. Thousands of these people would literally have starved last winter if it were not for the enormous sums poured in by American Jews; in the three months I was there at least $75,000 in gold was thus contributed. The English Rothschild School for girls gave dinner every day to its 600 pupils.
The city is without natural industries, it has no manu- factures; religion is its only business. Far more important than the political problem, Is Jerusalem to be Muslim, Jew or Christian? is the social one: What is to be done with these myriads of non-producing devotees? The Christian population has been for long pauperized out of the ample endowments of the convents, but the problem is acute for the fast-growing Jewish population, brought hither by sentiment but without industrial reason. The leaders of Judaism must take cognizance of this problem lest Jerusalem become a social plague spot on the earth, with a people incapable of autonomy because not self-supporting. That eternal city keeps its face toward the past for* its ideals and for its claim upon the benevolence of the world; but the eternal future before it imperatively demands of it as of all religion that its religious life, stagnant, antiquated, still unre- freshed, be translated into social and moral terms. The New Jerusalem on earth cannot arise there out of the present elements.
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THE LAWYERS OF GEORGE MEREDITH
BY WILLIAM H. LOYD Assistant Professor of Law
When a playwright or a novelist, be he great or small, holds up the mirror to society, it is curious to see how all crowd to get a peep at their own faces in the glass, sometimes astonished and charmed at the reflected image; sometimes, let us hope through a flaw in the polished surface, disconcerted by a comic squint or a rueful twist of countenance. But greater would be their disappointment if their gaze was unrewarded, if no friendly face should nod to approving nod. The group photograph as we know has no charm for the man who moved.
When friend Jones relaxes from the cares of business by reading the latest novel on commercial depravity, it is with the pleasure of superior knowledge rather than the anger of one maligned that he points out the mistakes of the wicked promoter and the author's ignorance of the refinements of rascality. So we lawyers scan our fiction for crumbs of law, delighted when the popular authoress fails to appreciate the difficult questions of domicile in divorce or when, in melo- drama, the heroine visits the judge at his home at the "witching hour," so to say, and reveals to him the duplicity of the villain in an extrajudicial conference that in real life would produce a scandal of the first magnitude. We are glad that our activities are appreciated, even if misunderstood, and are blended with those of the merry throng that fills life's stage. A play all law would empty the house, a novel based solely on the Rule in Shelley's Case would not be likely to appear among the "six best sellers."
Nevertheless, many of the glimpses of the courts and the legal profession in literature are based on personal knowledge or recollection, since the bar has long been one of the recognized
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gateways to literature. For one thing — it has afforded ample leisure for reflection: a chrysalis state, as it were, in an empty chamber from which the author finally takes flight with the dust of parchment still on his wings. Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson were Scotch advocates; Fielding, Sheridan and Thackeray were Templars. Of our contem- poraries who have deserted law for letters, one need only refer to Henry James, Maurice H. Hewlett, Owen Wister and John Luther Long.
If in offering a few words on George Meredith and the law the juristic contribution is but slight, it may, nevertheless, serve as an excuse for recalling to memory some episodes in the career of the great Victorian, poet and novelist, whose robust philosophy has so often put to flight those blue devils that haunt the victims of a sedentary life. If references to the legal profession in his pages seem few, it was not for want of opportunities for observation — distinguished barristers, such as Sir Frederick Pollock and Lord Haldane, were among his friends; but because Meredith was primarily a poet and philosopher, a connoisseur of life and conduct, rather than a portrayer of incident. Hence the treatment of his characters is largely subjective, so that while his soldiers, sailors, mer- chants, musicians, lords, ladies, gypsies, tinkers and tramps are drawn with rare insight, the portrait is generally of the mind — the personality — of the man or woman; rank and occupation serving often as a mere background, vivid but subdued.
Meredith's introduction to the world was as a law student, but this episode in his career was brief and disappointing. His father, a tailor of Portsmouth, son of the "Great Mel" of "Evan Harrington," was continuously unsuccessful and proved of no help to him. His mother died while he was a child, leaving him a little money which rapidly disappeared, either through the bad management of the trustees or in Chancery. Returning at the age of sixteen from the Moravian school at Neuwied, on the Rhine, near Cologne, he was, in 1844, articled as a clerk to Richard S. Char nock, F.S.A., a solicitor
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with chambers at No. 10 Godliman Street, a dingy thorough- fare, leading from St. Paul's churchyard to Doctor's Com- mons, the quaint home of the ecclesiastical courts, where Dickens, a few years before, had sat as a reporter, gathering those impressions of the sleepy procedure immortalized in "David Copperfield" and " Sketches by Boz." Charnock was an antiquary of literary and bohemian tastes who is believed to have combined certain traits of the two uncles in "Richard Feverel." He was the means of introducing his pupil to some of his earliest literary friends, but his own interest in the law was at this time probably slight, too slight certainly to inspire the clever youth in his office with any enthusiasm for the intricacies of special pleading and land tenures. The lonely boy was thus inauspiciously launched in an uncongenial pursuit. For the law he appears to have had no taste, and, destined as he was for the lower rank in the profession, excluded from the historic atmosphere of the Inns of Court, there was little to fire his ambition. His income, too, at this time was small and irregular. It is said that he frequently lived on a bowl of porridge a day, a diet approved by great Scotchmen as well suited to lay the foundations of a philosopher, but repellent to the epicurism of the modern man of affairs. In "Diana of the Crossways" there is, no doubt, an autobio- graphical touch in his description of Arthur Rhodes, the clerk articled to Mr. Braddock— "a nice lad of about two and twenty, mad for literature," whose volume of verse was an introduction to the mercurial heroine. A poet fascinated by a witty woman but untroubled by hope; poor, yet rich in his capacity for the enjoyment of 'out-of-door life, he is pictured descanting to the invalid Lady Dunstane "on the rapture of a walk out of London in the youngest light of day, and on the common objects he had noticed along the roadside, and through the woods, more sustaining, closer with nature than her compulsory feeding on the cream of things."
Meredith at this time read widely in classical and German literature, took long walks into the country and turned instinctively to belles-lettres as a career. As he grew older,
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Charnock brought him into his circle of literary friends, a somewhat amateurish set that edited a manuscript magazine to which Meredith contributed "Chillianwalla," his first published poem. In the group were Edward Peacock, son of Thomas Love Peacock, the novelist, and his sister, Mrs. Nichols, a young widow of literary tastes and brilliant wit. At the age of twenty-one Meredith married her, although she was seven years his senior, and cut adrift from the law.
So ended Meredith's career as a law student. But in desert- ing Themis for the Muses, he entered no garden of Epicurus. For years he drudged at journalism, literally snatching the time for higher creative work. An Egyptian bondage, he called it. The reading public ignored him, steeped as it was in mid- Victorian sentimentality, without wit to master his philosophy, without taste to appreciate his style. Noble indeed was the battle he fought for his art, and in the end he compelled recognition. But with the courts he had no more to do, except on one occasion to appear as a witness. It was a good thing for the law — into which too many young men temperamentally unfit are thrust by parents or guardians infatuated by the notion that, as General Ople would have put it, the law is a gentlemanly profession; it was a good thing for English literature that this gifted intellect was not wasted in the gloom of Doctor's Commons and Chancery Lane. Indeed, it is one of the ironies of life that in the ranks of every profession there should march to success no less than to failure, men whose true instincts call them to other fields of endeavor. The tragedy in this instance was happily averted.
The case referred to in which Meredith appeared on the witness stand occurred many years later and had a literary setting. Sir Alfred Burdon Ellis, son by a second marriage of Sir Samuel Burdon Ellis, whose first wife was Meredith's aunt, and who was the original — the much maligned original his family insist — of Captain Strike of the marines in Evan Harrington, offered to Chapman and Hall, the publishers, the manuscript of a volume entitled, "West African Stories." Meredith, who was their reader, recommended its acceptance
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and the book was published. One of the stories was an account of a villainous West Coast trader styled James Peacock. Unfor- tunately a retired trader, James Pinnock by name, became convinced that the story was intended as a sketch of him- self and brought an action for libel against Chapman and Hall. The case, tried January 8, 1891, before Mr. Justice Denman, Sir Charles Russel, afterwards Lord Chief Justice, appearing for the plaintiff and Mr. Asquith, now Prime Minister, for the defendant, resulted in a verdict for the plaintiff for £200 damages. From the legal point of view, the case presented no unusual features, and Meredith's appear- ance as a witness was its most striking incident. The dis- tinguished author's testimony was parodied in Punch, where there also appeared a portrait cartoon entitled "By George!"
It is curious to note, in the light of his personal history, although too much must not be made of it, that most of Meredith's lawyers are solicitors — the office lawyers we would say, who are, in England, a group distinct from the barristers, the trial lawyers. To be sure, there is Seymour Austin in "Beauchamp's Career," "the working barrister who is also a working member of Parliament;" who is "occasionally reminded that this mortal machine cannot adapt itself in perpetuity to the long hours of labor by night in the House of Commons as well as by day in the courts, which would seem to have been arranged by a compliant country for the purpose of aiding his particular, and most honorable ambition to climb, while continuing to fill his purse." But he is not shown in action — he runs down at odd times to Mount Laurels for a holiday and rest. Cecilia Halket, the heiress, would have married him, had he said the word, as a refuge from the con- tentions for her hand. But he bore the scars of an old love affair and "the frost had settled on the hair about his temples" — his advice decides the day for the successful suitor.
The solicitors Meredith pictures at work are the wheel horses of the Bar who, without right of audience in the Supreme Court of Judicature, assume some of the gravest responsibilities of the profession. Theirs is to plan, to advise,
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to keep dread secrets, "lawyers and doctors being the rats who know best the merits of a house and on what sort of a foundation it may be standing." Corporation law, the growth of estates, and the enlargement of county court jurisdiction have decidedly increased the prestige of the solicitors since Meredith lived among them, and his is a somewhat old- fashioned picture. Mr. Thompson, Sir Austin Feverel's solicitor, is "a thin stately man of law, garbed as one who gave audience to acred bishops, and carrying on his counte- nance the stamp of paternity to the parchment-skins, and of a virtuous attachment to port wine sufficient to increase his respectability in the eyes of moral Britain." In "Evan Harrington" there is the country solicitor, "Lawyer Perkins," of Lymport, officiating as mourner and family friend at the funeral of the "Great Mel." He it is who marshals his fellow townsmen, creditors of the tailor "above buttons" at the funeral banquet, advises them to pocket their black gloves and bands as perquisites of office, and sees that the head of the table is kept for the unfortunate Evan, heir to unpaid debts. In smoky London there is that nice, comfortable old solicitor, Mr. Bannerbridge, "with eyebrows like a rook's nest in a tree," who picks up little Harry Richmond, lost in the streets, while his mountebank father is incarcerated in the Fleet, and takes him to his eosy home. The Fleet, that grim debtors' prison which gave its name to a medieval law book and contributed for centuries scenes of misery, vice, and horror to the pencil of art and the pen of romance. It is to this mysterious Fleet that schoolboy Harry runs away from Riversley, searching for his father, in company with his friend young Temple, a lawyer's son destined for the bar, and midst fog and fire is lured to the adventures that form the prologue to his career.
Boys are favorites of Meredith. He pictures them with a certain dog-like fidelity in the comradeship of adventure. The friendship of Temple and Harry Richmond has its counter- part in the headlong loyalty of Master Ripton Thompson to Richard Feverel, the spoiled heir of Raynham, a devotion
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that nearly brings him within the toils of the law through the rick-burning episode at Belthorpe Farm. Even his haughty leader admitted, when all was over, that "getting among policemen and magistrates makes you ashamed of yourself."
The unmasking of Ripton, the law student, on the occasion of Sir Austin Feverel's visit to the solicitor's office is a delicious bit of comedy. The proud father leads his distinguished client into the clerk's room where the son is supposed to be devoting himself to the study of Blackstone. "A tome of the classic legal commentator lay extended outside his desk under the partially lifted lid of which nestled the assiduous student's head — law being thus brought into direct contact with his brain pan." Ripton, surprised, closes his desk in dismay. Asked to inform the baronet what particular part of Black- stone he was absorbed in mastering at that moment, he blurts out "the law of Gravelkind." Now "gavelkind" is the name for the custom by which lands in the County of Kent were commonly held, a good old Saxon custom (gaful-gecynd) not to be frivolously mispronounced by one aspiring to a profession in which manner is so often preferred to matter. The offender is commanded to show his notes. Alas, papers, not legal nor the fruits of study, were found, as well as a book which "set forth in attractive characters besides a colored frontispiece, which embodied the promise displayed there, the entrancing adventures of Miss Random, a strange young lady." A picture of the back eddies of the student mind; for the culprit was sturdily for the law and proves himself a good fellow and staunch friend before the story is brought to its harrowing close.
Young Temple, Harry Richmond's friend, after a few years in the navy, returns to the Inns of Court and is duly called to the bar; but in one of his first cases, in which he is junior to his father, he has an experience with that excellent but truly wearisome person, the too conscientious client. The barque "Priscilla," belonging to their old friend the very religious Captain Welsh, had run foul of a merchant brig near the mouth of the Thames. In the admiralty suit that
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results, Temple is victorious, but in the moment of triumph warns the captain to keep an eye on his men. The hint is enough to cause the captain to question his men closely and, arriving at the conclusion that some of them had sworn falsely, he insists on paying the damages. Temple, disgusted at this turn of affairs, tries to persuade the old seaman to let well enough alone. "Toss common sense overboard, there's no end to your fine-drawings; that's why its always safest to swear by the judge." But Captain Welsh is immovable. "Is a verdict built on lies one that my Maker approves of? If I keep possession of that money, my young friends, will it clothe me? Ay, with stings! Will it feed me? Ay, with poison. And they that should be having it shiver and want!" Old acquaintance may be the excuse for the breach of etiquette involved in these consultations between barrister and client without the intervention of a solicitor — a point seemingly overlooked.
In "Diana of the Crossways," which, by the way, is inscribed to Sir Frederick Pollock, a famous legal battle is fought to a conclusion. Characteristically, the prelude to the engagement is given and the reader is allowed to hear the distant rumble of the guns, but the occurrences in court are indicated rather than described. Meredith's method of condensation and repression led him to avoid the description of scenes likely to involve an elaboration of detail, in marked contrast with his minute analysis of motive. And this is one of the reasons for his unpopularity, for the modern dramatic appeal is increasingly to the eye. The torments of a sensitive woman, forced for her reputation's sake to face the ordeal of a public trial when she would have preferred to hide herself in exile, are sympathetically described. "Her visits of curiosity to the Law Courts where she stood spying and listening behind a veil, gave her a great deal of tough substance to digest. There she watched the process of the tortures to be applied to herself, and hardened her senses for the ordeal. She saw there the ribbed and shanked old skeleton world on which our fair fleshly is moulded. After all your Fools' Paradise is not a
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garden to grow in." Eventually the "Bull's Head or British Jury of Twelve, with the wig on it, was faced . . . and the plaintiff in the suit involving her name was adjudged not to have proved his charge."
The trial, a prelude to the novel's true plot, was in an action brought by the heroine's unamiable husband against the elderly cabinet minister, Lord Dannisburgh, who had made a political confidante of the lovely Diana. Although warned expressly to read the story as fiction, there is no difficulty in identifying the occurrences from which Meredith drew his inspiration. The lady from whom Diana was "partially modeled," as he told Robert Louis Stevenson in a letter, was an old acquaint- ance. He had met her years before as one of the literary and artistic set that were frequent visitors at the country residence of Sir Alexander Duff-Gordon and his talented wife, the daughter of John Austin, the jurist, neighbors of Meredith's at Esher, who appear in "Evan Harrington" as Sir Franks and Lady Jocelyn.
Diana, in fact, is drawn from Caroline Sheridan Norton, granddaughter of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, a popular poetess and novelist of the Victorian period. Her husband, the Hon. George Chappie Norton, a barrister, brother of Lord Grantley, was, through Lord Melbourne's influence, appointed to a city magistracy, but becoming unjustly suspicious of the friendship of the Prime Minister for his wife, brought an action for damages for the alienation of her affections against the states- man. The trial, which took place June 23, 1836, resulted in the triumphant acquittal of the accused parties who were not called upon to produce their witnesses, the evidence being merely the tattle of dismissed servants and some harmless notes from Lord Melbourne to which counsel sought to attach a sinister meaning. Charles Greville states in his memoirs that politics was at the bottom of the suit, and that the plaintiff was urged on by some of the lesser Tory politicians with a view to discrediting the Whig leader. The result caused great exultation on the part of Melbourne's adherents and corre- sponding disappointment to his enemies.
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Lord Campbell, then attorney general, who, with Sergeant Talfourd and Mr. Thesiger, appeared for the defendant, states in his autobiography that this retainer caused him more pro- fessional anxiety than he had ever experienced; for if the action had succeeded the Premier's private character would have been ruined and there would have been an end to his administration, and, to make things worse, the morals of the noble defendant were not supposed to be very strict. The attorney general, indeed, lay awake the greater part of the night before the trial and then overslept himself, so that he was obliged to hurry to court without his breakfast. On his arrival at the Court of Common Pleas he found the doors sur- rounded by such an immense crowd that the police could scarcely procure his admittance. In his own words: "I was in a state of great tremor till Sir William Follett, counsel for the plaintiff, read the much-talked-of letters, of the Prime Minister when I could breathe, for they were ludicrously immaterial like the parody of them by Dickens about 'chops and tomato sauce' in the trial of Pickwick. My confidence increased when the first witness, the clergyman, who per- formed the marriage ceremony, stated to me in cross-examina- tion that in visiting Mrs. Norton he entered the house by the same private door which was to establish the clandestinity of the visits of Lord Melbourne, and that 'he did so without any improper views upon the wife of his friend.' Here there was a loud laugh, in which judge and jury joined, and I felt that the verdict was in my pocket. Nevertheless a large body of evidence was brought forward which, if believed, would have been fatal, and the plaintiff's case did not finish till past six in the evening. Being somewhat exhausted, and afraid that the jury might be so too, I applied for an adjournment, which was luckily refused, for I then made a far better speech for effect than I could have made the next day. When the jury gave their verdict for the defendant there were shouts of applause in court and in Westminster Hall, which were heard in the House of Commons, then sitting, and caused a great sensation during the debate."
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The incident in the novel which finally brings the plot to a crisis, Diana's revelation to the editor of a leading news- paper of the political secret confided to her by her lover, the Hon. Percy Dacier, had its foundation in the political gossip of that day. On December 4, 1845, London was electrified by an article in the Times stating that Sir Robert Peel would, on the assembling of Parliament in January, recommend the repeal of the Corn Laws. The story was denied, but, in the end proved true. The Tory party was rent in twain and free trade became the economic policy of Great Britain. "The general conclusion," says Justin McCarthy in his History of Our Own Times, "was that the blandishments of a gifted and beautiful lady with a dash of political intrigue had some- how extorted the secret from a young and handsome member of the cabinet." The rumor did Mrs. Norton and Sidney Herbert, the suspected parties, a cruel injustice. As a matter of fact, Lord Aberdeen, the Foreign Secretary, had sent for Delane, the editor of the Times, and had told him the sub- stance of what appeared in the article. Although he did not tell him to publish the story, it was obviously his intention that it should be published in time to go in the American mail, which left on the day that the Times article appeared, for there was no cable then; news traveled slowly, according to the standards of today. It was hoped that the prospect of a market for American grain would have a favorable influence on the Oregon boundary dispute. Aberdeen was over-con- fident; the ministry broke up in dissension, and it was only the inability of Lord John Russell to form a ministry that compelled Sir Robert Peel to resume office and carry the repeal of the Corn Laws with the aid of the Whigs and the free trade Tories like Graham, Gladstone and Aberdeen.
While by no means the best of Meredith's novels, "Diana of the Crossways" is one of the best known. It is, therefore, unfortunate that its dramatic climax should be artistically imperfect. Meredith, after drawing Diana as an impulsive but true-hearted and courageous woman, fastens upon her an act of treason of which a woman of that type would be
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incapable. Taking the legend as he found it — the facts did not come to light until the publication of Greville's Memoirs — Meredith seems to have set himself the task of laying bare the mental processes by which such a moral somersault might be possible, but the chapter dealing with the incident is no more than a brilliant and unconvincing example of literary virtuosity. Like Browning, Meredith loved the solution of intricate problems of character. In this instance the material proved most refractory. But into what a labyrinth would he have been drawn had he known the truth !
Brief reference must be made to a lawyer of a different type and country, Sigismund Alvan, the civilian, socialist, orator arid pamphleteer, favorite of society, feared by the old aristocracy. A doctor of law too proud to win the high- born Clotilde by stealth, he seeks her honorably of her family to be met with scorn and to die in a duel with his rival for her hand. It is but a thinly disguised picture of the romance of Ferdinand Lassalle, founder of the socialist-labor party in Germany, and Helene von Donniges, the daughter of a Bavarian diplomat, a distinguished actress, followed by Las- salle's death in a duel near Geneva, fought in 1864 with the Roumanian nobleman, Yanko von Racowitza, thus bringing to an untimely close the career of one who, in spite of a tempestuous youth, seemed destined for a brilliant political future. "Tragic Comedian," Meredith calls him, but not unkindly. "The characters of the hosts of men are of the simple order of the comic. Not many are of a stature and a complexity calling for a junction of the two Muses."
Little enough of law, one might say. And yet those who hug the profession may have reason to be glad there is no more. Scribes, ancient and modern, have seldom spared the pettifogger, who, like any other charlatan, gets his deserts. But the lawyer at his best is frequently compelled to play an unpopular part in upholding "the principle" amidst loud clamor for "the exception." "Justice, in such a case," says Dr. Kohler, "lies in the real result (dinglicher Erfolg) for which the legal order strives; it does not lie in the result in
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values (Werterfolg) that is connected with the real result, and which, on the contrary, is unjust." Nevertheless there is a distinction between bravely facing and rashly courting the scalpel. Our foibles, benign as well as malign, are easily exposed. There are courts of other lands as well as our own, that would have proved excellent targets for the merciless shafts that Meredith hurled at egoism. Thankful we may be that he never attended a bar meeting. One can picture the Comic Spirit and its attendant imps rapturously attentive to the turgid rhetoric. There lie, too, under our institutions, in spite of all that enlightened jurists have done and are doing to remove them, explosive materials for poet and philosopher not possessed of foresight, patience, and an abiding faith in the future. Grateful we may be for the sane, if critically humorous, outlook on life recommended in his novels, the hallmark of comedy that rings true.
The flavor of that humor, with a touch of irony added, he has given to his Old Chartist, participant in that forlorn rising of the 1840's, returning home from transportation, as he recalls his wife's loyalty on the day of his trial — and while the old rebel's feminist conceptions may sound antiquated to this audience, at least we have a court scene that may fittingly serve as a conclusion.
"She suffered for me: — women, you'll observe, Don't suffer for a Cause, but for a man.
When I was in the dock she show'd her nerve: I saw beneath her shawl my old tea-can.
Trembling . . . she brought it
To screw me for my work: she loath'd my plan
And therefore doubly kind I thought it.
"I've never lost the taste of that same tea:
That liquor on my logic floats like oil, When I state facts, and fellows disagree.
For human creatures all are in a coil; All may want pardon.
I see a day when every pot will boil Harmonious in one great Tea-garden!
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SANITY AND DEFINITENESS IN EDUCATION
BY A. DUNCAN YOCUM Professor of Educational Research and Practice
Is MODERN EDUCATION EFFICIENT?
I. Two almost opposite points of view are conspicuously present in current educational discussion, especially in the part of it that has its inspiration outside the teaching body itself. The one is the general lament, sometimes expressed in a business man's letters to a son in college or through the con- fessions of the undergraduate himself, that the educational system in its entirety is inefficient on account of a few con- spicuous defects. The other is the equally sincere belief of many successful men that some branch of knowledge or form of professional training or experience is effective and essential as a systematic whole on account of some important contribu- tions it has made to their success. In seeking an adequate judgment of the collegiate curriculum, for example, there is not much to choose between the thumbs down of the boy who finds a general education inefficient because it fails to prepare him for certain specific social needs and the thumbs up of the man who believes a course in engineering is the best possible pre- paration for the manufacture of household utensils because it taught him never to conceal a blunder.
Both viewpoints deserve respect because they are the sincere judgment of men who have put some fraction of the educational product to practical test. But the fact that the public school system or a college training fails to contribute some of the fac- tors essential to efficiency in some field of work, or even to efficiency in general, no more necessarily demonstrates that it is inefficient than insistence that a particular branch of knowl- edge or form of training contributed essential factors, demon- strates the necessity for its mastery as a systematic whole. The
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educational problem is so complex, the educational aim so many-sided, that no one institution, form of training or branch of knowledge can contribute all the elements essential to ade- quate preparation for life.
II. Concerning the public school system, the college, or any other educational institution; it is necessary to inquire: What parts of the educational aim does it serve ? What parts does it serve uniquely or more effectively than other institutions? What are its limitations? Has it ill effects — avoidable or unavoidable? What other institutions must supplement its work? Should its work precede, be preceded by or accom- pany that of other institutions?
It is quite possible that an analysis such as this may demonstrate that if the highest educational efficiency is to be realized, all forms of academic training and educational instruc- tion, even after they have realized their fullest efficiency, must not only be supplemented but paralleled by some form of non- academic training. The gradual working down of the pro- fessional school into the college, the requirement of part time for school work now made by law for children working in factories and mills, the introduction of vocational training into the elementary school grades, all tend to make such a paralleling possible. The success of the boy who works his way through college is probably due quite as much to habits of industry that carry over to academic work as to his proverbial seriousness of purpose, while much of the lack of application which college presidents are apt to blame upon the doctrine of interest and individualism as applied in elementary education, can be traced to an absence of the old industrial routine that used to be characteristic of every American home. In an age when the kindling comes already chopped, when the groceries are ordered by telephone and delivered by wagon and motor car, when the pump has given place to the hydrant, and the postman delivers the mail, some of the ill effects attributed to high school and college may be traced to changing economic conditions which prevent the boy of today from doing what the boys a generation or so ago did outside the school.
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Is it not possible that this phase of education must still be gained in part outside the school? If education is to include the things that cannot be learned in the school; if it is to carry over habits of application and industry from outside routine to school work and to apply the knowledge and activities of the school in work outside; in short, if through an early start and continuity of development, it is to build up and interrelate the efficiency systems essential to school education and indus- trial occupation, it may be proven that school work should at the earliest possible point be paralleled by some wage-earning occupation or specific preparation for it. The early employ- ment of every individual in some non-academic field of work, with educational intent, may be found to be as essential a part of compulsory education as the continuation of academic education through continuation school and part time work, after wage earning has become an economic necessity.
It is not for a moment assumed that the larger part of aca- demic training must be subordinated or even related to indis- trial work. The paralleling of the academic with the industrial is perhaps no more necessary than the paralleling of the aca- demic with the social and the political. The point to be con- stantly held in mind is that education is specific as well as general and that much that is essential to specific training must be realized outside of school or through the co-operation of the school with other institutions.
III. The efficiency of the school or college within the aca- demic field itself must be measured with a view to determining the details of the educational aim as a whole, which it can further more effectively than outside agencies. The object of this measurement is not the fullest possible educational contri- bution for each branch as a whole, but the fullest possible reali- zation of the educational aim as a whole. To show that each branch of knowledge contributes something that practical men of affairs have found useful is no more adequate a defence of its educational worth than the old saying that it is "good for your mind." Every branch of knowledge has something in it that is good for the mind. Everything is useful some time or other,
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in some way or other, to some one or other. The true point of view is not that everything that is taught must be educa- tionally useful, but that every form of educational usefulness must be adequately taught. Somewhat opposed to this is the growing tendency on the part of specialists and teachers of the various school subjects to show all the possible uses to which they can be put. Notable examples of this are the work of the International Committee on the Teaching of Mathematics and the recent exhibit in impressive concrete form of the various applications of the Latin language in modern life.
The inadequacy of this sort of investigation lies in the fact that it is apologetic rather than scientific. It is a step toward complete analysis, but is misused to justify the emphasis of certain subjects as wholes. The true question that must be asked of each branch of knowledge is not : Is it useful ? Does it train the mind? But, What sorts of usefulness does it further and what kinds of training? What does it contribute that is unique, and what more economically or more usefully than other subjects? What is the relative worth of these contribu- tions as compared with those of other subjects to the same or different ends ? What parts of its subject matter and how much of it are essential to them? What parts must be built up into certain and permanent system? What method is essential to develop these particular kinds of usefulness to the highest efficiency?
The lover of each branch of study must find other justifica- tion for its educational existence than a multitude of uses. Every subject contains a vast number of useful things that cannot figure in an efficient course of study. Educational use- fulness is determined by relative worth. Educational subject matter must not only be useful, but have the greatest possibility of usefulness as compared with the great mass of experience which does not figure in the course of study. It must not only have the greatest possibility of usefulness, but a greater proba- bility of usefulness. This greatest possibility is dependent on relative educational worth, greater probability upon definiteness of presentation.
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IV. What does it matter whether an idea is high in its possible educational appeal, many-sided in its possible useful associations, and frequent in its recurrence if it is presented to the learner merely as an interesting fact that may be retained in a relationship that is non-emotional, that limits or prevents many-sidedness, and that recurs without educational signifi- cance? Possible educational usefulness becomes actual only as a matter of chance, if definiteness of presentation fails to point out the association or relationship on which the greatest possibility of usefulness depends.
To illustrate: The discovery of coal in Pennsylvania is included in most elementary text-books in United States history because its many-sided industrial effect gives it a great possibility of usefulness. This effect is often so obvious to the text-book writer that he fails to add it to the mere fact of discovery. If he happens to associate the two in the text, he fails to do so in his chronological summaries, and as a result the teacher is far more likely to dwell upon the discovery as occurring in Washington's administration or the year 1791 than to ensure its greater probability of usefulness by definitely associating it with rapid industrial development in Pennsyl- vania, and hence with the Reading Railroad, the growth of Philadelphia, and the effect of coal deposits and discoveries in other regions.
The obviousness and seeming accuracy of chronological loca- tion make history especially liable to the omission of the definite associations on which greater probability of usefulness depends. The introduction of the steamboat into the Ohio and Mississippi rivers is more likely to be taught as occurring in 1811 and Madison's administration — a fact which opens the way to few or no associations — than to be definitely associated with the consequent shortening of time for travel and commerce, and hence not only with the opening up of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys to settlement and industry and the struggle for the possession of New Orleans, but with the early roadway from Cumberland to Pittsburgh, Pacific and Trans-Siberian railroads,
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and Suez and Panama canals, with their almost limitless train of accompaniments and consequences.
In ancient history where chains of causes and effects run through the whole course of civilization, lack of the definiteness essential to probability of usefulness is even more serious. Think, for example, of associating the fall of Syracuse with Alcibiades or a date soon forgotten, and failing to connect it through the resulting introduction of Greek luxury, with the resistance of Cato to Greek rhetoricians, the Germania of Tacitus, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and the effect of luxury on civilization.
It is not mere definiteness as definiteness that counts, but the definiteness that presents the things which have the greater possibility of educational usefulness in relation to the ideas on which their greatest probability of such usefulness depends. The definite association of a manuscript or obelisk with a par- ticular Egyptian dynasty, or of some paltry event with Peter the Simple or Charles the Bald may have a genuine usefulness to the historical specialist, merely because it is a fact or because of its relationship to other facts, but it is educationally useless to the ordinary learner. He does not know enough or is unlikely to know enough of Pharaohs and Carlovingians for the idea to make any contribution to his development. It may be many- sided, recurring and strong in its emotional appeal for the trained historian or for the specialist who for the sake of knowl- edge is living again the life of some dead reign or epoch, but from any other angle than that of specialization— specialization in work or specialization in leisure — no definiteness is educa- tionally useful that does not connect what is taught with the experiences common to those with which the learner is to think and live. Without recurrence in everyday life no definiteness can be permanent; without centering many-sidedness or emo- tional appeal on the present, no definiteness can be controlling.
Nothing, whatever its logical definiteness or academic use- fulness, is educationally useful which does not result in definite- ness which is retained by the learner and which continues to control his future experience.
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V. Every form of control depends upon definiteness for its usefulness and efficiency, and definiteness that is educational must lead to some form of control. Here is the fundamental interrelation and interdependence between knowledge and power. Knowledge is power when it is definitely retained in the relationships that secure the various forms of control. Hence, the usefulness of the various branches cannot be deter- mined without analyzing usefulness and efficiency into their various forms of retention and control. In what forms is knowledge retained? Through what forms does power control?
1. Now any intelligent mind is capable of the analysis necessary to determine the forms in which past experience is retained. Most of it is forgotten. Much of it is retained in a haphazard, accidental relationship or so, varying with the immediate interests and past experience of each individual. Part of it becomes increasingly many-sided through the addition of association after association which, like those responsible for bare retention, vary with individual interests and experience. A little of it is made definite and certain through repetition in unvarying relationships. Still less of it takes on a general enough form for it to be identified in other fields or situations than the one through which it is retained. Past experience, then, is retained as forgotten knowledge, barely retained knowledge, many-sided and varying knowledge, definite and certain knowledge, and general knowledge.
2. For each form of retention there is a corresponding form of control. Forgotten knowledge, especially when it has been emotional in its form, controls through a cumulative impression which results in interests, opinions, attitudes of mind, points of view, tastes and ideals. Barely retained knowledge controls mainly through vocabulary; that is, the number and kind of words largely determine what knowledge shall be retained and the kind of relationships which it shall form. Many-sided and varying knowledge controls through mental interconnection which either brings the right kind of idea into association with others, makes many-sided ideas continually reach out after new experience, or incidentally provides the network of
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tions which may relate any idea to any other idea. Definite and certain knowledge controls through habit and the cumula- tive systems of habits which constitute specific discipline. General knowledge controls through the transfer or general discipline or application which carries over an idea, an activity or a habit to some instance or field of experience other than the one through which it is acquired.
VI. Each of these forms of control depends for its educational usefulness and efficiency upon a different sort of definiteness. As the definiteness essential to each is made increasingly clear through successively specifying and illustrating the particular kinds of knowledge or associations which give the highest probability for each, (1) failure to ensure these kinds of knowl- edge or associations in the subjects that can best develop them becomes glaringly apparent, and (2) the question that must be asked of each branch of study becomes definitely concrete for each form of control.
VII. Impression control depends upon the definite and cumulative centering of highly emotional material about the thing that is to be made controlling. In place of depending upon the incidental appeal of some fact or incident impressive in itself, but often counterbalanced by an opposing one or not cumulatively associated with those that are similar, instruction must carefully select the idea that will be most usefully con- trolling if strongly enough emotionalized, transform it to an emotional center by certainly associating with it two or three exceptionally impressive incidents in their most emotional form, and then at the most effective intervals adding the most emo- tional impressions possible until control is ensured. For example, if in place of a vague emotionalizing of temperance or the giving of total abstinence a coldly scientific sanction from temperance hygiene, the fact that it is unsafe to take the chance involved in occasional drinking is selected as most controlling, has strong enough facts or incidents associated with it to make the chance of personal immunity seem, for the time at least, pitifully small, and then is again and again re-enforced by a variety of strong emotional instances which are related by
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allusion to the initial impression, the temptation to be jolly or sociable will be counteracted by a more impressive realization of personal risk.
Failure to make impression thus definite and cumulative is one of the most serious weaknesses of present-day education. Think of the almost inconceivable inefficiency of a course of study and methods of instruction which rest satisfied with the incidental formation of such ideals as obedience to law or equal rights; which present the lessons of history unemotionally and expect to develop a love of literature by analyzing masterpieces into details of technique; which rest satisfied with a vague interest in a branch of study as a whole without creating the specific ideals upon which even its own efficiency depends; which fail to counteract the erronous feelings and opinions that result from the conflicting repetitions of incidental experience, with the ideas made controlling by the greater definiteness, emotional appeal and cumulativeness which instruction can ensure. To ask of a particular school study, does it develop ideals, is to ask whether it definitely, cumulatively and ade- quately centers highly emotional material upon the most fundamental ideas that are to be emotionalized.
VIII. Vocabulary control depends not only upon the broad- ening of all phases of experience rich in words, and the emphasis of words in all phases of experience, but upon the memorizing of words many-sided in their suggestion of others, in definite association first with the three or four ideas that make them suggestive along particular lines and, second, with the locations that are likely to bring them into contact with the greatest number of other words. Without definite association of the vocabulary centers which should reach out after new words with vocabulary makers and vocabulary locations, upon which their greater probability of suggesting and retaining other words depends, even the most many-sided general terms will be used to merely identify new experiences under an old and familiar term, in place of conjuring up new words with each new recurrence.
Stone, or flower, for example, in place of throwing emphasis
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upon what makes for the variation and individuality which demands a new name, merely result in recalling continually recurring experiences that are really different and new by the name that denotes their common qualities. All stones are stones and flowers but flowers appear. But if stone is definitely memorized in association with such vocabulary makers as color, hardness, fracture and luster, which will mechanically come to mind whenever attention is called to a new stone and point out the variation and individuality which demand a name, quartz, chalcedony, sandstone, granite, and a multitude of other new terms are soon fixed in the memory.
Even so effective a vocabulary center as the word clothing with its constant suggestion through style and variation of large groups of words can be made more controlling through definitely associating it with such vocabulary makers as protec- tion, ornamentation, etc., and then further associating the vocabulary center and makers with such vocabulary locations as occupation, nationality, historical period, etc. Clothing associated with protection and located in the field of occupation soon adds to the familiar coats and gowns, the fisherman's oilskins, the blacksmith's leather apron and the electrician's and the surgeon's rubber glove; while, located in the middle ages, it suggests armor, breastplate, coat of mail, shield, and a host of other new terms for details otherwise likely to be over- looked or forgotten.
In place of ensuring this definiteness that suggests and multiplies words, academic training teaches dictionary defini- tions and scientific concepts that merely identify; in place of distributing Latin roots through the school grades, where they will be effective vocabulary centers, and eliminating useless or rare derivatives, it has abolished etymology from the course of study; in place of making sure that each branch of knowl- edge is contributing all the new words which it alone can present or which it furnishes earlier than they will otherwise be gained, it is juvenilizing children's literature and guarding popular books and lectures from difficult and scientific terms. To ask whether a school subject or form of training develops vocabu-
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lary is not enough. It must be determined whether it is furnishing its proper quota of vocabulary centers in definite association with the vocabulary makers that help them to sug- gest and retain the greatest number and the most useful kinds of words, and whether words are made conspicuous in its subject matter with a view not only to their greater usefulness but to their greater probability of retention.
It is not that the experience of the ordinary individual in school and out has not been vastly broadened — moving picture shows, phonograph records, and the multiplication of books and periodicals have attended to that — but that instruction has not seized upon definiteness as a means to ensuring greater and more useful vocabulary development than incidental experience affords. And this is as true in the field of mental interconnection as in that of mere vocabulary.
IX. Interconnection control depends for its likelihood of usefulness and efficiency upon a definiteness of association of the most useful and many-sided ideas with interconnection makers and locations similar to vocabulary makers and loca- tions, but not identical with them. Just as there is a difference between the possibly useful general term which merely identi- fies new experience with the old and the definitely suggestive vocabulary center which emphasizes variation and individuality, is there a difference between the mere vocabulary center and the possibly many-sided idea definitely associated with the few terms or notions that compel it to reach out not merely after new words but after new thought and experience.
1. The definite association with stone of color, hardness, fracture and luster goes no further than to make more probable the identification of a particular stone with its specific name. But if stone is further associated with use, locality, stratum and origin it serves a larger purpose. The great boulder balanced on the hill may be identified and named as granite without a further thought or question. But use connects it with quarry, building, monument, durability, polish; locality, with New England, Quincy, Westerly, Tennessee, and if it is found .on a Pennsylvania or New Jersey hill, with rocking-stone,
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glacier, terminal moraine and glacial epoch; stratum, with fossil, stratification, and geological age; and origin, with aqueous or igneous formation and with other rocks similarly formed.
There is no limit to the chain of interconnections made more probable through definitely associating a many-sided idea with its interconnection makers. One of the most fundamental educational questions is what three or four terms definitely and surely associated with the most useful ideas will give them the greatest suggestiveness for mental interconnection. If instruction is to be effective at this point, pedagogical definition must take the place of logical, popular, or technical definition and ensure the memorizing of interconnection makers for the most useful ideas, and the presentation of relatively less useful ideas in connection with the interconnection makers that will be most suggestive, if they happen to be remembered, and that are therefore most likely to be remembered because they are most suggestive.
2. In determining the form of usefulness for a word or idea, definiteness of location serves a similar purpose to definiteness of association with other ideas. The one is determining through what is associated with an idea, the other through what an idea is associated with. Exact location in some time or place with which little else is associated, like partial or dictionary defini- tion, increases the probability of an idea being remembered and nothing more. But the location of an idea in some period, place, field of experience or branch of knowledge with which many other ideas are associated not only increases its chance of being barely remembered through a possible association with ideas as well as with the locality, but makes it highly probable that its consequent mental nearness to other ideas will bring out similarities, contrasts, and other relationships which otherwise might have remained undiscovered. The educational value of exactness of location is proportionate to the amount of knowledge which the learner has associated with the location or is likely to associate with it. Usually one does not know enough about an exact date, such as April 14, 1511, or even
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1511 with all of its thirties and thirty-firsts, for location to add a single association. To fix an event there, merely gives an additional fact to be remembered. But locate an experience in the Elizabethan Age, and royal progresses, religious dissen- sions, Mary Queen of Scots, Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, Westward Ho, and a hundred other associations may be intimately associated with it.
3. If it is an interconnection center that is thus located — in the age of Elizabeth — such as clothing associated with fabrics, manufacture, and importations, its increased definiteness of suggestion leads to spinning wheels and weavers' guilds, Genoese silks and velvets, Italian sailors and Italian bankers, wool raising and its interference with agriculture and tenant farmers both in the time of Henry VIII and in the development of our own southwestern States. So a manufacturing city associated with accessible raw materials, cheap power, and ready market, has a different but no less definite suggestiveness as it happens to be located in Massachusetts, Germany and Japan.
4. Still further interconnection is made probable through the association of fundamental interconnection locations in definite sequence. With Germany next to France, or the Roman Empire following the Age of Pericles and Greek colonization in Sicily, ideas leap over time and space to find associations that otherwise would be remote. The unique contribution of history and geography to mental training and efficiency lies in the great network of related locations and sequences which not only form a great mnemonic system for the retention of words, but an essential basis for completeness of interconnection for all ideas that have to do with remote regions and past ages. Similarly each branch of knowledge and field of experience has its interconnecting outline which definitely associates together the more general divisions and subdivisions, which are suffi- ciently related to the experience of the ordinary individual to accumulate many details which otherwise would have no academic or scientific explanation or bearing.
5. In short, it is overwhelmingly obvious that a vague many-sidedness of experience is ineffective for interconnection
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control, and that efficiency through the interrelating of ideas cannot result when undirected individual apperception is emphasized at the expense of definite association that will multiply variation and individuality for all, when the thorough- ness of exhaustive detail in two or three subjects prevents the memorizing of what is definitely essential to all, when dictionary definition is substituted for the definition which definitely retains new words and suggests new experience, when a par- ticular period in history is exhaustively studied to the exclusion of the definite system of periods and sequences which con- stitutes the more favorable condition to the interrelating of all ideas belonging to the remoter past, when for a similar location system in geography is substituted petty political and physio- graphical locations too empty of associations to be suggestive, and, to crown all, when the Herbartian five formal steps to complete apperception stop short at "generalization" without certainly and definitely associating with the most many-sided ideas the three or four terms or notions that will definitely suggest a variety of things with each new application.
From the standpoint of instruction, then, as distinct from incidental experience, it is not sufficient to ask, does a subject or form of training further mental interconnection, but does it furnish few or many interconnection centers firmly associated with the interconnection makers which compel them to reach out after new knowledge and experience, and does it ensure the memorizing of interconnection locations and sequences full of the details with which new ideas may be brought into contact ?
X. All this definiteness essential to the forms of control already discussed but serves to emphasize the necessity for habit and system control, both in the familiar sense of specific activities and in that of those whose usefulness can be made general. Permanent definiteness is habit and system. But there is a distinction between the definiteness that is necessary to ideals, vocabulary, and interconnection in general and the definiteness which is specific in its own usefulness.
1. Specific usefulness is definite in the kind of activity it certainly furthers. The definiteness that results in morality,
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health, industrial efficiency, social service, good citizenship and preparation for social intercourse or individual leisure, is not only specific, but certain, because it is direct and specific. The usefulness is certain because the habit is certain, and the habit is useful in itself. The habits of truthfulness, of obedi- ence to law, of discounting bills, of sleeping in fresh air, are all specific and certain. Efficiency in the specific sense is due to certainty. The man who invariably follows a useful routine adds to the world's knowledge and does most of the world's work. He alone would not leave the world different from what he found it, except that through him every useful thing is repeated and multiplied. His relative efficiency depends upon the certainty and number of his useful habits and the extent to which they are interrelated into system. Many a captain of industry has risen to power and dominion through the habitual use of the originality and invention of others without ever thinking an original thought or doing an original act.
2. The definiteness that results in general usefulness is in itself no less certain than specific usefulness. In fact, it most frequently is specific before it is made general. But its general usefulness does not lie within itself, but in a multiplied useful- ness to which its certainty is but a means. For example, the fact that a particular river has beautiful scenery, fertilizes the soil, is navigable, and furnishes water-power, is certainly and specifically useful. But while the association of the idea of river in general with scenery, fertilization, navigation and power can be made equally certain, the application of these interconnection makers to each new river and the usefulness of each application remain uncertain. If the general idea is to be carried over in such a way as to multiply associations and suggest new knowledge, it must be under favorable conditions which may or may not be present. If each application is to be useful, many-sidedness and variation must be controlled by specifically and certainly useful ideals and habits. Otherwise, in the absence of a firmly established aesthetic point of view, the thought of scenery in connection with each new river may sug- gest an effective location for advertising signs; the idea of
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naturally fertile land, without right economic conceptions, may result in the rapid exhaustion of a rich soil; the thought of navigation and commerce in a dishonest and adventurous mind may lead to piracy and plunder; while realization of the presence of water-power is useless if not supplemented by ability to recognize or to put to use all other factors essential to a manufacturing center. That is, many-sidedness and varia- tion are not certain to result; and if they result, are not certain to be useful. They are dependent for their extent upon habits in the form of vocabulary and association makers and locations, that may or may not have specific usefulness in themselves. They are dependent for their usefulness upon specifically and certainly useful ideals and habits, which may or may not carry over to them, and which are partly dependent upon them for making their usefulness general.
XI. In short, all forms of control find their completion in transfer control, which is dependent for its efficiency upon an idea or activity general enough to be carried over to new instances and fields of experience in the presence of favorable conditions which include the definiteness essential to all other forms of control and must add other kinds of definiteness to them. Transfer is the multiplication table for efficiency. It brings together in one individual the interconnection control exercised through the man who is always thinking new thoughts, associating remote ideas, seeing witty connections, having flashes of imagination and invention; and the habit and system control built up in the man in whom one idea or activity naturally leads to another with increasing certainty and com- plexity. It takes a familiar and useful habit or system of habits and applies it to a multitude of new instances in the remotest fields of thought and experience. It takes the idea newly discovered through some kaleidoscopic turn of the mental content and multiplies its usefulness by associating it with a system which in turn passes it on from a general idea it transforms, to individual groups and sequences until it modifies and makes more useful a thousand and one particulars. It is hard to tell which is more absurd — the assumption that because,
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a formal subject, such as mathematics, or a language, certainly develops some general ideas and activities, they will carry over to other fields as a matter of course, or that because Mr. Thorndike's and Mr. Bagley's experiments show that certain general ideas and activities have not carried over, they cannot carry over at all.
1. No idea or activity is likely to be very generally applied just because it is put in general form, and the more systematic a group of ideas from the standpont of specific usefulness, the less likely they are to be generally applied. On the other hand, any idea or idea group that has a possibility of general usefulness may have its usefulness greatly multiplied, if it is definitely and certainly associated with the conditions essential to transfer.
Take, for instance, so common an ideal and habit as honesty. Almost everybody is honest in some fashion or other, and few, if any, are honest in all things. Starting with whatever honest habit the individual has formed, with its limited, specific and certain usefulness, there must be associated with it the general idea of not taking or retaining what is not one's own. In turn, this general idea of honesty must be associated not only with concrete things, but with payment for any sort of thing, the use of ideas, social relationships and other fields of experience; with the typical cases of honesty in each field most likely to suggest a variety of others, and with the habit of seeking out new applications. With the general idea of honesty and each typical case must be definitely associated the emotional incidents and material that will idealize them and make them incentives to action; the words and, where necessary, the vocabulary makers and locations that will lead to the acquisition of new words concerning honesty in all of its phases; and the inter- connection makers and locations that will make them suggest new experience. With each general idea the relative impor- tance of these definite associations may vary and additional habits may become essential — such as the habit of analysis and synthesis in the most probable fields of application, as in the case of arithmetical problems; or the habit of recalling all
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of a series of connected ideas or conditions when one is identi- fied, such as all of the factors essential to a manufacturing city when some one of them has become apparent. When every other fundamental idea or habit of morality has been added to honesty, and health, industrial efficiency, social service, good citizenship, social intercourse and individual leisure have been similarly analyzed into their essential factors; when with each one of them has been definitely and permanently associated all conditions essentially favorable to general application, theft- control of the most varied and many-sided experience will be given the highest probability.
2. When generally useful ideas that are not specific, such as vocabulary and interconnection centers, are definitely and certainly associated with their makers and locations, the great- est possible retention of experience through words and of the interconnection of ideas with each other, will be assured and the highest probability given to originality and variation.
3. Taken together, all that is definitely essential to useful certainty and to variation constitutes a great system of ideas, vocabulary, associations and habits, which usefulness and efficiency demand and instruction must cumulatively ensure. It must be sharply distinguished from merely logical system, logical outlines in the various branches of study, and the system peculiar to branches as wholes, though it will in part include them. It is not an academic system that is to be remembered for a little time for the sake of a few general ideas or some useful habits and then forgotten, but a dynamic sys- tem that must be cumulatively developed from all branches of knowledge and phases of experience, and certainly retained through a greater continuity of instruction, and continual recurrence in the every-day experience which it must in turn retain and control. It is not merely something that is to be remembered, but something to remember by and think with — knowledge that is power because it is definitely related to the ideas and activities upon which its power depends.
4. Since efficiency is thus dependent upon definiteness, memorizing and mechanical drill regain the fundamental
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importance that they have lost through their misapplication to petty details and non-essential associations. Verbatim memorizing of text-books, drill upon empty names and dates and facts have gone forever. But no amount of individuality, interest or many-sidedness can take the place of the definiteness upon which all educational usefulness and efficiency depend.
Every minute of the little time that can be economically and effectively devoted to memorizing and drill should be utilized, but only for the mastery of what is most useful in the definite relationships that make it most useful, and for the memorizing of what is to be permanently retained. Deter- mination of the relative educational worth of the subject matter in the various school subjects and of the experience involved in various educational institutions and forms of training, com- bined with continuity of retention for the resulting efficiency system, is basal for maximum retention of useful past experience and maximum control over future experience.
XII. Now each step of this progressive analysis has given increasing definiteness to the usefulness, the relative worth of which is to be measured. Usefulness rests (1) in contribution to the five forms of control, (2) in the definite kinds of knowl- edge and associations which give greater probability to each, and (3) in either the specific usefulness of these kinds of knowl- edge and associations to such phases of the educational aim as industrial efficiency and good citizenship, or their general use- fulness in various fields of knowledge and experience.
In the light of these successive degrees of definiteness and probability of usefulness it is not only easier to see that the question which must be asked of each branch of study is no longer, is it useful or does it train the mind, or not merely,
(1) does it develop impressions, add to vocabulary, multiply interconnection, ensure habits, and result in transfer, but
(2) what has it to offer that is specifically useful — useful to morality, health, citizenship, etc. — as emotional centers and the emotional material which it will definitely and cumulatively add to them; as vocabulary and interconnection centers, makers, locations, and sequences which extend their control;
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and as habit, which makes them certain, and system, which extends their certainty? (3) And what has it to offer among these kinds of knowledge and associations, that is generally enough useful to be transferred to other fields, or that definitely ensures conditions favorable to transfer?
More than this — when the definite usefulness of details within the various branches of knowledge has been thus fixed, and each detail put into the definite asssociation upon which its highest educational usefulness depends, it will not serve as justification or apology for the exhaustive mastery of the subjects as wholes.
XIII. The need of material which definitely furthers each of the specific phases of the educational aim, as distinct from that which is generally useful, in itself demonstrates both the neces- sity for selection from a great variety of branches as opposed to the detailed study of a few branches as wholes, and the inadequacy of any academic institution or scheme of education which is not paralleled or supplemented by outside activities to which its own are definitely related.
1. It is not only that no two or three subjects contain enough material useful to the teaching of all forms of morality, health, industrial efficiency, social service, good citizenship and adapta- tion to the varying needs of individual leisure, but that even if they did, selection from a greater variety of branches and from experience outside the academic field is demanded by the greater relative worth of some of their details for most of the purposes peculiarly furthered by the two or three subjects. Hygiene may furnish most of the material essential to health and sociology to social service, but material of the highest usefulness to each may be found in some subordinate phase of history or natural science.
2. Selection from a great variety of branches is also com- pelled by the fact that each specific phase of the aim requires the material most useful for each of the five forms of control. Civil government or history might contain all the subject matter essential to the vocabulary and interconnection side of citizen- ship, but literature, biography, music and art must be drawn
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upon to emotionalize civic ideals, while habits and transfer must be assured through co-operation between the school and numerous non-academic or outside activities.
3. When definiteness is still further carried into such details as are necessary to specific emotional centers, specifically emotional material, vocabulary and interconnection centers, makers and locations for specific aims of life, the words useful to each that are most likely to be retained, habits specifically useful in themselves and the numerous conditions favorable to their transfer and general application, there is little room for details not definitely and highly useful which are included to make the study of one or two branches exhaustive and thorough.
In short, even the definiteness of a partial analysis finally and surely demonstrates that efficiency in the sense of specific preparation for life lies not in the exhaustive study of a few branches, but in the partial study of many.
XIV. More than this — it is equally obvious that a purely academic study or a particular type of educational institution utterly fails to meet the demands of most forms of specific training. Hence the need for a paralleling of the academic with the practical — the Gary system, Miss Lewis' open-air school at Buffalo, William McAndrew's Washington Irving High School and Dr. Lewis' William Penn, manual training and domestic science, the school playground, the Home and School League, continuation schools, vocational guidance, college and university social centers, and the host of social activities which President Wilson once called the side-shows that interfere with the main college tent.
Educational definiteness and efficiency demand these side- shows. They are not the causes of the college's inefficiency, but means to a higher efficiency than the college has yet attained. Without them its contribution is incomplete. To make social activities effective, however, their definite contributions to each form of control and for each kind of specific usefulness must be pointed out, their relative value to each scientifically deter- mined, and their essential or most highly useful parts related through course of study and methods of instruction both to
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the academic work and to what must supplement it on the outside.
And yet there is apparent justification for the simile of side- show and main tent. It is false in so far as it relieves the college from a responsibility for social training which it assumes can be safely left to everyday life undirected by instruction and unrelated to academic education. It holds true in emphasizing the relative importance, of general education as distinct from specific training. Each is essential to the other.
However broad the culture and thorough the discipline of an academic course of study, it must not be mastered to the exclusion of what is essential to its domination by the speci- fically useful. The world is already full enough of lawyers or physicians without ethical or civic ideals, and college graduates who are industrially inefficient or socially weak. The tradi- tional education would be condemned for its over-emphasis of the formal, even were its over-emphasis partly justified through a resulting general efficiency. Every academic institution and form of training must definitely insure the kinds of knowledge and relationships that give higher probability to each phase of specific training. But while the formal or the generally use- ful must not be given over-emphasis, it is as useful through its variation and extent of application as the specifically useful through its certainty. More than this, it is equally independent of the sort of thoroughness that demands the mastery of branches as wholes.
XV. Just now, to be sure, the main tent is seeking general efficiency through excessive specialization. It is assumed that if its tumblers and its acrobats are drilled in a few academic activities until they attain superlative skill, their tight-rope and sawdust specialties become the open gateways to every form of achievement outside the magic ring; in short, that the thoroughness of exhaustive detail is the only means to all-round ability.
If there is anything that has been demonstrated by the foregoing analysis in its application to general as well as to specific training, it is that thoroughness of selection based on
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relative contribution to definite forms of control must displace the thoroughness of exhaustive detail.
General training, like specific, is analyzable into impression, vocabulary, interconnection, habit and transfer controls. There is no potency in indefiniteness, no general power that does not express itself in one of these five forms. But the impression control is exerted through ideals that, like those of persistence and analysis, can serve as incentives in every field of experience; the vocabulary and interconnection control is exercised through vocabulary and interconnection centers, makers and locations, that further the multiplication of words in general rather than of the kind that serve a specific utili- tarian or even academic end; while the habit control must be exercised through transfer to a variety of fields of experience, if it is not to be as narrowly academic as the specifically useful habit is narrowly utilitarian.
1. The ideas, and especially the habits, which are general enough to be carried over to most subjects and fields of experi- ence, may be found in two or three branches, and the most generally useful may even be found in one. The very fact that they are found in most makes it inevitable that they shall occur in almost any one or two. The champions of formal discipline make the mistake of assuming, however, that their occurrence must be in some one or two rather than in parts of all. From struggling over whether they do not all occur in one and whether that one should be an ancient language or mathematics, they have gradually united on mathematics, a language and science as essential to a thorough general training, and are tending toward a more thorough study of some one branch of mathe- matics, a single language, ancient or modern, and one or two natural sciences. The advantage in this concentration lies in the fact that the subjects in question through their necessary organization or method compel the continual recurrence of the generally useful activities and so insure habit formation, while other subjects which can insure the same habits are dependent upon a pedagogical organization and method with which the teacher may or may not be familiar. Once train specialists in effective pedagogical organization and method, and it will not
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be so difficult for them to take the further step of developing the generally useful activities through selecting those parts of all subjects that most certainly insure the conditions favorable to transfer and general application. For after all, the continual recurrence compelled by the organization and method peculiar to a particular branch merely ensures the certain retention of the idea or activity which has possible general usefulness.
2. But the habit thus formed is dependent for its greater probability of usefulness upon the certain association with it of conditions favorable to transfer and general application, without which they are not only uncertain but even improbable. Obviously, aside from the presence of these conditions, the more the habits are exclusively associated with some one branch as a whole, the less likely they are to be transferred. The one exception to this is the fact that thoroughness of exhaustive detail furnishes through many-sidedness within a single subject a favorable condition to general application within that special field. That is, academic concentration gives at least one condi- tion favorable to the limited transfer which is essential to the efficiency of the academic specialist. But the more general many-sidedness of knowledge and experience which can be gained only by the partial study of many subjects, is indispensable to the widest possible extent of usefulness, while a still greater probability of usefulness is gained by definitely associating the generally useful thing with a variety of the most useful fields for its application, with typical and impressive examples of applica- tion in each field, with the vocabulary and information in each field most closely related to application, and the habits of analysis and synthesis in each field necessary to the identifica- tion of the generally useful thing when it occurs there.
For example, literature and original composition are pecu- liarly adapted to the development of the habit of preparedness for a variety of alternations. Mathematics develops it more certainly though more abstractly, in the stage of solution where one makes quick choice of a variety of ways of proving two angles equal or a variety of consequences from inter-related lines being parallel. But it is less likely to be associated with
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everyday life than if it is taught through phases of science, history or literature which are more similar to actual experience. Its only advantage lies in a certainty which, even in mathe- matics, is partly conditioned by pedagogic method.
In literature or composition every sort of alternation which the efficient man must be prepared to meet can be emotionally presented. The Moonstone, for example, bafflingly suggests a number of solutions for its mystery. But even though the habit of anticipating the plot in literature, or suggesting alter- native results for some action occurring in original composition, is repeated often enough to result in habit, similarity to impor- tant situations in ordinary experience is, of itself, neither likely to suggest them nor to result in transfer. First, the gen- eral idea of preparedness for alternations must be emotionalized by highly impressive instances, such as Germany's invasion of England or indirect attack through the Balkans, the resource- fulness of some industrial leader, or even the humorous farce where Lew Fields prepares his boon companion to keep the barkeeper from knowing they have but a single nickel by successively coaching him to refuse a drink, a cigar and finally something to eat.
Then, it must be associated with the boy's own experience, through such typical occurrences as going to buy something which the store does not happen to have, without being pre- pared for the alternative of a satisfactory substitute purchase, finding out when the necessary article will again be in stock or going to another store; or calling upon an important busi- ness errand, when the other person involved is not at home, without being prepared with the alternatives of finding out where he is, making another appointment, waiting until he returns, leaving a message, asking to be called up on the 'phone, or finding some one else who will serve the purpose about as well. Here special vocabulary or information may not be needed, but the habit of looking for other possible alternatives will unite with the other favorable conditions suggested to make transfer more probable. Without conditions such as these, certainty of habit will not result in probability of general
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application, while even certainty of habit formation itself— the sole condition favorable to general training that is asso- ciated with the exhaustive study of two or three branches as wholes — frequently fails to outlast a high school or college course because subjects mastered as complex wholes are soon forgotten because they are complex.
3. But generally useful habits and transfer are not the only forms of general training. The traditionally formal subjects are formal in very minor degree when it comes to general impression, vocabulary in general, and the general system of mental interconnection which is essential to associating any idea with any other idea, as distinct from the carrying over of a useful habit to new instances of application. A general training that does not mean these forms of control is incom- plete and inefficient. But general ideals that are not emotional in themselves must, like those specifically useful, be emo- tionalized from literature, music and art, while each branch of knowledge must contribute its portion of words more readily retainable, ideas more readily put into connection with others, vocabulary and interconnection centers which multiply the number of words and ideas in general, and the many-sided locations and sequences which will be cumulatively filled with the words and ideas most likely to be interrelated.
XVI. The thoroughness of exhaustive detail is an end in itself rather than the means to all ends. It is essential to general efficiency that here and there in every subject the learner shall be compelled to perform pieces of intensive work to which he must stick until the last task is done. Somewhere he must form the ideal and the habit of cheerful persistence in the face of complex difficulties. But it is destructive to general efficiency that the exhaustive study of any branch as a whole shall take the place of the partial study of all branches con- taining material essential to the five forms of control or more highly useful to them than material similarly useful in other branches. The purely academic system essential to a highly organized branch of knowledge omits essential pedagogical definiteness and contains a great surplus of academic definite-
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ness, the mastery of which is unnecessary to its more useful contributions to mental development through the five forms of control. While the subjects rich in subject matter, as distinct from the formal or abstract branches, are not thus fixed in their definiteness, each may be organized into a variety of logical systems, some one of which will be familiar to the teacher. Unfortunately, the efficiency system resulting from the selection of the most useful material from all branches of study and fields of experience, and its organization in the definite relation- ships upon which its highest usefulness depends is neither essential to a logical mastery of the academic subjects nor familiar to the teacher.
XVII. If education is to be efficient, the first step is to lessen the confidence of academic specialists in the adequacy of academic system and method for general training, by trans- forming them into teachers familiar not only with efficiency system and the definite distinctions and standards for deter- mining relative educational worth, but with the relative effi- ciency of the methods by which efficiency system is to be cumulatively built up and retained in the mind of the learner.
For if probability of usefulness is dependent upon definiteness of association for the useful idea with the things upon which its highest usefulness depends, efficiency or the highest proba- bility of usefulness is dependent upon the method which insures the mastery by each individual of the largest part of that definiteness which his native retentiveness makes possible. Efficiency is quantitative. It is the method by which the five forms of control are developed in the highest degree, with the greatest permanency and to the furthest extent. It is its successful effort to point out the definiteness necessary to use- fulness, to analytically determine relative worth, and to experi- mentally discover relative efficiency in method, that is, trans- forming the philosophy of education into a science. From a subject grudgingly admitted as a college elective because it seemed too technical to be counted for the arts degree and too non-essential to be compelled of students being equipped to teach through their more or less exhaustive mastery of an
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academic specialty, it is certain to become a subject required of every student because no other single branch can take the place of one that inexorably conditions the highest usefulness of all. As teachers in general become as familiar with relative educational values and efficiency system, as with the French Revolution or the technique of a foreign literature, a general education will be as effective a preparation for life as academic training now is for specialization, and each educational institu- tion, form of training, and field of experience will perform its unique or relatively more useful service to the making of the man and the citizen.
XVIII. This more efficient general education will mean not only adequate preparation for life, but more effective specializa- tion. The specialization which has been creeping down into the college and the high school, with a view to the thoroughness of exhaustive detail falsely assumed to be necessary to thorough- ness of mental training, will be begun in the earliest years of the elementary school itself. Like the non-academic training that must parallel the education of the school, specialization must parallel it both in order that individuality shall have the earliest opportunity of expressing itself and that the efficiency system essential to specialization shall have the same opportunity for cumulative development and continuity of application as those essential to general education and non- academic abilities. While no learner will be required to master branches of mathematics, languages or natural sciences as wholes for the sake of general training, more learners will be so effec- tively educated that they can successfully elect them as wholes for the sake of specialization. Even a limited specialization, with its concentration through thoroughness of detail, is not an essential condition to general training, but general training with its assurance of greater efficiency is an indispensable condition and accompaniment to specialization.
XIX. Meanwhile, successful men in every field of activity will proudly proclaim the educational worth of the forms of training and branches of knowledge which they know have contributed to their own efficiency. Trained in them as aca-
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demic wholes, they naturally enough are as unanalytic in their treatment of a successful education as they were in their busi- ness methods until efficiency experts showed them greater economies and larger gains. How can they analyze long- forgotten studies and discriminate between the parts that really contributed to their efficiency and the parts that were relatively useless? How can they be made to see that others equally successful have gained the same general efficiency through various forms of training? Their faith in traditional educa- tional institutions, strengthened by a love of alma mater, is one of the finer phases of their idealism and largely contributes to the public sentiment and individual philanthropy that make the advancement of learning possible.
On the other hand, the precocious undergraduate, or the alumnus whose graduation is too recent for him to assume that his education as a whole has won him success, sees branches of learning and forms of training in details and in parts. His realization of academic omissions and failures, sharpened by his competition with men who have been engaged in practical activities while he has been in school, makes his judgment analytic but incomplete. Notwithstanding the fact that, looking from too close an angle, he sees in each partial failure a defective whole, his personal contact with a college course undergoing readjustment and the growing likelihood of his having some training in education as a science, tend to make him the controlling factor in safeguarding public opinion from two serious obstacles to the popularizing of educational efficiency and the science which must bring it about.
The one is the confusion of loyalty to traditional forms of education with a conservatism that is sincerely opposing all amendments to constitutions and social solutions for economic and industrial problems. The other rests in a still more threat- ening menace to educational betterment through scientific research and experimentation — the danger of confusing it with other and more fundamental social readjustments that can be brought about only through economic revolution and industrial reform.
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USEFUL USELESS EXPERIMENTING
BY OWEN L. SHINN Professor of Applied Chemistry
An eminent mathematician some years ago who was asked what practical value his researches had, answered, "None, thank God." This was the attitude of a large number of scien- tific men for many years. If a problem had any practical value it was of a lower order and was considered beneath the notice of the experimenters in pure science. Indeed, the workers in one field of science looked with contempt upon the workers in other fields, which they were pleased to call "Bread and butter sciences," and the workers technologists. Not only was there a dividing line between different sciences, but even in the same science the distinction was drawn, and it has been but a com- paratively few years that the distinction between pure and applied chemistry has been made less conspicuous — even now it has not been entirely abolished. On the other hand, the industrial workers looked upon the investigator who worked only for the purpose of ascertaining the truth and adding to the sum of human knowledge, as one who was not spending time to the best advantage, and the money expended upon apparatus and materials was considered wasted. This con- dition of affairs went on for years and the term research was restricted to work along the lines of pure science, if I may use the term, as done in the laboratories of colleges and universities. At the present time the term research is one of the most badly overworked words in the language and all kinds of work, other than the routine testing, in industrial plants, goes on under that name.
What I wish to show this afternoon is that much of the work done under the old heading of pure science has met with indus-
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trial application, and that much of the modern industrial pro- gress is due to taking advantage of the results of the experi- menting of the abstract seekers after truth. In order to show this I must bring to your attention some concrete example, and therefore make this paper more or less disconnected. The technical application has in some cases been an afterthought by the experimenter, and in other cases the principle laid down by one has been developed by others.
Sir Humphrey Davy, in the year 1816, in experimenting with flame, found that upon holding a piece of wire gauze in a flame that the flame would not go through, and also that by holding a gauze over a gas supply the gas could be burned over the gauze without the gas underneath becoming ignited. This was an interesting experiment and gave rise to speculation as to the cause, but it was generally conceded that the cooling effect of the metal gave the striking result. Thus the experimenter and the philosopher had ample opportunity to solve a problem in pure science. To Davy, however, came a second thought. Numerous mine explosions had wrought great loss of life in the coal mines of England, due to ignition of the firedamp from the lamps of the miners. If a flame would not penetrate a wire gauze, why could not the flame of a lamp be enclosed within a wire net and thus prevent the ignition of the mine gas ? Davy constructed such a lamp and placed it inside of a jar filled with a mixture of gas and air, and to his delight found the whole interior of the wire cage filled with flame, but the outside mix- ture was not ignited. As a result we have the Davy Safety Lamp, and that the results of the abstract experimenting were appreciated, was shown by the demonstration of the miners at the home and at the tomb of Davy some years ago.
A young man, Carl Auer, working in the laboratory of Bunsen, was making a study of the rare earths, paying particular attention to lanthanum, studying the preparation and properties of its compounds, methods of separation from other members of the group, etc. This group of chemical elements was as far removed from practical utility as anything that could be
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imagined. The very name "Rare Earths" indicates that they occur in small quantities and in but few minerals and few localities. Many who have studied chemistry have never heard of the elements, Lanthanum, Cereum, Thorium and the other members of the group. Those who have come in contact with them know that their chemistry is of the most difficult kind. Yet here was a man making a study of those useless substances, devoting much time and energy to the work. Surely, accord- ing to the man of practical mind this energy might be used to better advantage. In the course of the experimentation some pieces of filter paper and some pieces of cloth were saturated with the solution of a lanthanum salt, and were allowed to dry. For some reason or other these were afterward heated in the colorless flame of the Bunsen burner. The result was striking — an intensely bright light resulted, and what was more sur- prising, the resulting ash retained its original physical form and could be handled. Here a new thought was suggested. Could this substance be gotten into a form which would enable it to be used for lighting rooms and buildings? Upon trial it was found that lanthanum compounds were unsuitable, as the resulting oxids would absorb moisture and slake, crumbling to a fine dust. Other members of this same group were then tried, and as a result we have the present commonly used Welsbach Light, which consists of the oxides of thorium and cereum. No one would have thought of experimenting with thorium and cereum with any utilitarian idea. They have been studied in the abstract with the sole intention of adding to the sum of human knowledge without any thought of usefulness, yet as the result of this useless experimentation we have the great blessing of brilliant and satisfactory gas illumination.
It is a far cry from noting the action of a heated platinum wire upon a mixture of air and an inflammable gas, contained in a beaker glass, to the manufacture of sulphuric acid; yet the early experiments along the one line have made the other possible. In the year 1817 Davy found that if a freshly heated platinum wire was introduced into an atmosphere consisting of
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air mixed with some carbon monoxide methane, cyanogen, or other inflammable gas, that the oxygen of the air and the gas would combine and the wire would glow. The temperature of the wire at the outstart was far below the temperature of the ignition point of the gas. Later, in 1820, Edmund Davy found that when precipitated platinum was moistened with alcohol, oxidation took place. In 1823 Doebreiner studied these actions and found that if a jet of hydrogen or other inflammable gas be caused to impinge upon finely divided platinum, the gas would be ignited without any heat being used. This experi- ment gave rise to a toy known as Doebreiner's Lamp, but was without any application. Since that time innumerable gas- lighting devices have been patented and used.
In 1836 Berzelius published the results of investigations which he made upon the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide by platinum black; the change of starch into sugar; the fer- mentation of sugar, and gave the name to the agent which caused the change a catalytic agent, and the action catalysis. He gave the same explanation to all of these changes, the plat- inum black producing the first, the diastase the second and yeast the third. This claim has been proven to be incorrect, and that it is only in the first case that true catalysis takes place, the other changes are brought about by different causes. Various other substances were studied as to their action upon spongy platinum, and it was found that combinations and decompositions resulted without the platinum being affected. Many other experimenters then investigated the question as to whether platinum was the only substance which would act in this way, and other substances were found to react, although not to the same extent as platinum.
For many years this problem has been before the minds of chemists. Why is it that a substance like spongy platinum will cause two gases, on neither of which it has any action, to com- bine, and at the end of the reaction it will be just the same as it was at the outstart. The study of catalytic agents has led to many valuable commercial processes, notably the manu-
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facture of sulphuric acid. The old method of making sulphuric acid consists in burning brimstone or some sulphide, passing the resulting gas into large rooms made of lead, where it is brought in contact with nitric acid and water. These cham- bers are expensive to construct; very heavy, they take up much floor space, need frequent repairing, and the nitric acid is an expensive substance and an elaborate plant must be constructed for its recovery. In addition the resulting acid is not concen- trated, and expensive platinum concentrating fans must be used.
The practical experimenter heard of this catalytic action and the thought came, why can we not cause the product of burning sulphur to combine with the extra oxygen required to make sulphuric acid through the agency of spongy platinum? Sul- phur dioxide is the end of the reaction in burning of sulphur in the air. This started a new line of investigation, and it was soon found that as far as the chemistry was concerned, it would work. It required a number of years to overcome the mechan- ical and engineering difficulties and to learn to control the method; but now a very large percentage of the oil of vitriol of commerce is manufactured by the direct combination of sulphur dioxide and the oxygen of the air through the agency of platinum black, which remains in the apparatus unchanged.
Not only were the experiments of those studying catalytic action taken advantage of here, but also the results of the experimenters along other lines. For many years it was known that the combination would take place, but only a small per- centage of the gases would react. Certain experimenters, studying the action of temperature upon gases, found that reactions took place better under definite conditions and that too high a temperature would bring about decomposition of compounds which would be formed at but a slightly lower temperature. The study was also carried on into solutions. Chemical equilibrium was studied; that is, to determine under various conditions how nearly complete a reaction would
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progress, and from this determined under what condition the reaction would reach its maximum. The studies of chemical equilibrium and the gas laws are some of the most abstract that are carried out; but it was just such studies that served to solve the problem in the manufacture of sulphuric acid. In this particular case it was temperature. Years of technical experimenting, numerous plants erected, but all characterized as failures, thus much money was lost and in fact wasted. The problem was solved by "pure science" — by a scientific study in the realm of physical chemistry, and what was formerly looked upon as a dream is now a reality.
The manufacture of sulphuric acid is only one of many prac- tical applications which has been made of the action of cata- lyzers. Let us glance for a moment at one of the most recent developments.
We know that some of the fats are solid, such as tallow, lard, etc., and some are liquid, such as cottonseed oil, olive oil and the fish oils. The fats have two large uses — foods and soap stock. Many of the liquid fats are of little value. They are used in making some kinds of soap, as lubricants, and have some other use, but they are produced in greater quantities than the higher grade fats. Chemically the soft fats belong to what are known as unsaturated compounds, and the difference between a soft fat, say, olein, and a hard fat like stearine, is merely that it does not contain as much hydrogen as the latter. Now hydrogen and olein will not combine directly, but if they are brought together at a favorable temperature in presence of some catalytic agent, their combination takes place and we have high grade soap stock prepared from what was of little or no value. We have a high grade lard substitute produced from a fish oil which, before treatment, was not edible, was in fact revolting. Much, in fact most, of the experimenting along these lines was done with the utilitarian idea in view, but these experiments were suggested by the seemingly valueless experi- ments made in the early part of the nineteenth century.
In seeking for a method for the production of hydrogen on a
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large scale, a great many methods were tried, but the one that has proven to be satisfactory is the old lecture table experi- ment, passing an electric current through water containing some electrolyte, a by-product being oxygen. This latter gas is of value now, particularly as it is used in a piece of apparatus devised by one of the early professors of chemistry in this University, Robert Hare. It had long been known that if a combustible body be burned and a jet of air blown into the flame, that the heating would be concentrated and that a high temperature could be obtained at the point desired. Hare, experimenting with gases, conceived the idea of using this prin- ciple with hydrogen and oxygen, and produced the compound blowpipe. This has been used in a small way for years, but it has only been since the introduction of the oxyacetylene flame that this has reached large industrial application. Today we see huge sheets of steel being cut into any desired shape by the application of this toy, if you please, of Robert Hare.
In connection with the hydrogenation of oils, another class of experimenting is suggested. It is enough for the average person to know the percentage composition of a compound, but if you will look over the files of any of the journals devoted to chemistry, you will find that a vast amount of work has been done in proving in what way the atoms are arranged in the molecule; in what way the carbon, oxygen and hydrogen are linked together.
On looking over the mass of literature devoted to this sub- ject, one is apt to say, "What is the use of all this?" But by means of this study it has been shown that the way in which the elements are combined will influence the properties as much as the percentage composition, and in fact even more. Were it not for the study of the composition of organic com- pounds, and methods of determining the internal structure of compounds that were worked out by the investigators in pure science, the chemistry of the coal tar dyes would not have advanced to the place it now occupies, and the synthesis of the large number of dyes would not be possible.
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While it is not practical to take up the discussion of the methods of manufacture of the coal tar dyes, we should men- tion some of them. Indigo, which has been until recently derived entirely from the indigo plant, is now largely made synthetically. While the actual method used has been devel- oped by industrial research, the methods of preparing the inter- mediate products have been suggested by the results of researches in pure organic chemistry, involving the molecular structure. The same thing is true of other dyes — the azo-dyes, rosaniline derivatives and many others. Frequently we find more than one dye with the same percentage composition, but with greatly different properties. The methods of determining the molecular arrangement will explain what is the difference and tell us what raw materials are needed in the production of each.
Two German investigators, studying the composition of a certain class of organic bodies, found that it was possible to prepare alizerine, the basis of turkey red (one of the