growth of young pines. I was glad to get back. The month I had passed at Gettysburg, however, was very interesting, and has left many memories, most of them dear to me. But after a battle is over and the army gone, you see the obverse side of glory so plainly that you long to get away from the blood-stained fields, and back from the loneliness of the shallow graves, to the cheering camp-fires and your young, light-hearted friends around them.

A few days after my return an incident took place which I think I should have laughed over whether we had gained a victory at Gettysburg or not. It was this. The tent I occupied was nearly opposite that of Colonel Shriver, inspector-general on the staff. The old Colonel, one of the cool officers of the army, was rather spare, very stern, and always neatly arrayed. About church time, one very sunshiny Sabbath morning, I noticed him walking back and forth before his tent in high and brilliantly polished cavalry boots, with prayer-book in hand, reading his prayers. I thought what a splendid example of a follower of Jesus he was, and wished that I had the courage to perform my devotions so openly, and acknowledge my religion. Suddenly I heard him call out, "James! James! James was his vigorous young colored boy, and had a very nappy head. I looked up. The Colonel had halted, and his eyes were glaring across his well-defined nose toward James, who, sprawled out and bareheaded, was sunning himself with several other headquarter darkies behind the tent, and had probably gone dead asleep. "What are you up to there, you damned black rascal!" roared the Colonel. "Lift those tent-walls!" James was on his feet with startling rapidity, and dived for the tent-ropes. Up came the prayer-book, out went the Colonel's left foot, and when I saw his lips begin moving again reverently, boylike, I tumbled down on my bed and nearly died laughing. Even now a smile ripples as I recall the scene. Surely, our inconsistencies are a blessing, for they are one

of the perpetual fountains of amusement.

The army was occupying the north bank of the Rappahannock from Kelly's Ford, a few miles below where the Orange and Alexandria Railroad crosses the river, up to Warrenton. It had almost recovered from its severe engagement, and was beginning to realize the magnitude and significance of the victory it had won. That mild and deep joy which a soldier always feels when he has met danger and done his duty was in the hearts of all. Camp was bound to camp, corps to corps, and officer to private, by the ties of a new sense of high fellowship which proved to be abiding. This inspiring relation, the most valuable in an army's life, had been smelted, so to speak, in those three trying days at Gettysburg when cavalry, infantry, and artillery, line officers, staff officers, and privates in the ranks, had witnessed each other's steady, heroic conduct. And the result of this supreme test of courage was that officers and privates of the Army of the Potomac felt that respect for one another and that pride in one another that only a battlefield can create. Whoever will read Colonel Haskell's account of that day, far and away the best of all that has been written, will gain a notion how and why these ties were formed. Every living veteran who was there will recall Webb, Cushing, Woodruff, and Hall, who carried as mild a face as graced the West Point battalion while I was there. I saw Haskell frequently, and I have no doubt that Duty and Courage visit often, and linger fondly, around the spot where he fell at Cold Harbor. Allow me to add what I know to be true, that no matter how high or how low may be an officer's rank, no matter where he was educated, what name he bears, what blood may be in his veins, or what wealth at his command, if, when he is going up under fire, mounted or dismounted, a private or noncommissioned officer near him advances beside him with undaunted face, — more than once it was a lad from a farm or humble walk in life, all the claims of

PERHAPS it might be more definitive to speak of the shortcomings of American men, of their negative faults. These are, after all, the specifically national ones. The positive faults belong to the sex irrespective of nationality, and form too large a subject for such small handling as this. Furthermore, ever since Moses selected a negative phrasing when he hammered out the ten great moral laws, the world, with unconscious humor, has gone on listing a man's virtues negatively. We say: he does not drink; he does not gamble; he is nothing of a Lovelace. But his faults remain positive: " he is a thief," we say, rather than "he is not honest," which somehow sounds euphemistic, and breeds instant doubt of the entire truth of the statement. Perhaps, too, because of their less complex make-up, their tendency to fall by themselves, as it were, into classified types, one really gets a rough picture of the men thus negatively described. One likes or dislikes them on even such slight hearsay.

And yet what number of negations will ever convey the slightest idea of a woman? What availeth it to learn of her that she does not drink, is not given to habitual profanity? Even when the praise goes to excess, and we learn that she is not a gadabout, nor does she throw anything large or hard at her husband's head, we are still left in doubt concerning her attractiveness as a companion for either an hour or a lifetime. That a woman's virtues are still summed up positively, in face of much internal opposition to sex

differentiation of any sort, is a tribute to a difference of standard, which she should be the last to quarrel with, had she wisdom, instead of only a little learning. It also stands for the woman's greater complexity, in which lies half of her power in the world. It requires finer lines to limn her as an individual.

So we will keep (prayerfully!) to the sins of American masculine omission.

To begin with a caution bred of some experience with American complacency, it were as well to recognize at once that geographic isolation is largely responsible for the picture of supreme contentment with themselves which the men of this country present to the humbled beholder. We doubtless have inherited some of it with our British blood, but there still remains much that is stamped in clear lettering, “made in America." From a purely artistic point of view, it is a pity to try to disturb, even for an instant, a national pose so full of boyish optimism in a world largely given over to unsightly regret, humiliation, and despair. But as it is not yet universally admitted that the foremost ship of the millennium has already reached our golden shores, and as a whole nation's self-illusions have been known to vanish in one day and one night; and upon the bare chance that this may again happen, either in smoke literal or smoke metaphorical, may not a little of our own Yankee farsightedness be suggested — and pardoned — once in a way?

This American complacency embraces that citizen himself, as he sees himself; his wife (especially his wife) as he sees her; his children, if perchance he takes time to remember that he has any; his system of government, unless the ogre

known as the Other Party is in power, when the citizen is more critical; his country at large and all that therein is, from finance to watermelons. Like a Turk, he is particularly enamored of size in the harem of his affections.

“The great quality of Dulness is to be unalterably contented with itself," quoth Thackeray; but he was not writing of American human nature, nor are our men in the least dull. They have only been too long geographically removed from any just comparison with other civilized nations; and, what is more to the point, too absorbed mentally with domestic issues to bridge the seas with their minds, if not with their bodily senses, to learn that there are other points of view than our own, equally civilized, if not always more "advanced."

What the busy American citizen sees of those least worthy specimens of other nations who are so rashly welcomed to our shores, only serves further to enhance his own self-satisfaction. But is not that a little like judging one's host by spending the evening in his kitchen?

To offset in a measure this mental provincialism, would it not be possible to introduce in our more advanced grades, in all of our schools, the serious study of the criticisms of the United States written by the enlightened and just foreigners who have not always flattered us? We are surely in no further exigent need of flattery, much as our appetite remains childishly keen for such sweet relish. The habit instilled early of standing back from one's nation, and judging coolly between right and wrong, wisdom and fallacy, can hurt no patriotism worthy the name. "The strength of criticism lies only in the weakness of the thing criticised," said one of our own great men.

If we wish to be treated as a nation of grown men among the world's opposed armies of men, there is no better strategy than to find out exactly how our enemy (commercial, political, military) estimates us. There has been more than one great general who has found success along

that line, and laid his plans of offense or defense accordingly. Surely the time for "baby talk" has passed, young as we still obviously are. There are many valuable books written by clear-sighted aliens, criticising, not abusing, us as a people, socially, politically, economically, which might serve to shake this dangerous selfsatisfaction, and open young American eyes to the fact that perfection itself has not yet quite been attained; there remains much to be done before we are what we think, or pretend to think, that we are. There is left a lot of plain, old-fashioned, everlasting human blundering going on here in the United States, as well as elsewhere in the world, now as from the beginning.

The just, temperate criticisms of our want of ideality, of beauty, of repose, by the great English critic Matthew Arnold (equally severe with his own people) would serve to clear the atmosphere of mirage, to give one or two illustrations of what is meant. The careful reading of Hugo Münsterberg's estimate of us is doubly valuable: first, because much of it was not primarily written for our eyes; second, because it is distinctly sympathetic, and the Sun succeeded in doing what the Wind failed to do in the shrewd old fable. One of the wisest Americans of the last half-century, whom the writer had the honor of knowing, once was heard to reply to a query: No, never read antagonistic biography - it is a pure waste of time! An estimate to be absolutely just, must be in greater part sympathetic." He went on to compare the value of the first part of Bourrienne's Life of Napoleon, when he was in favor with his master, with the last part, when Napoleon no longer playfully pinched his quondam secretary's cheeks.

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As our average men are admittedly not readers of books, however many newspapers and magazines they may devour, the writer proposes to quote and to paraphrase, for the sake of brevity, from Münsterberg's American Traits, especially from the chapter on "Education."

II

There was never before a nation that gave the education of the young into the hands of the lowest bidder. - HUGO MÜNSTERBERG.

This trenchant sentence was written of our educational system within ten years. It is based upon the fact that threefourths of American education is in the hands of women, who are able to underbid the men by the very conditions of their being. Few of them are what the average man is when he has reached the when he is fitted to teach age the sole supporters of growing families; and hence they are willing to work for smaller salaries, thereby slowly driving the men from teaching as a paying profession. It was the business of male teachers to remain in the ranks and keep there their dominance, as in other nations which have grown great. If there were nothing more vital to the commonwealth than the distribution of the $200,000,000 yearly spent in education in this country, then perhaps we might readily comprehend and sympathize with the present attitude toward this serious matter. But to make that very secondary question the prime consideration is to lose sight altogether of the object of this vast expenditure.

Surely it is not to furnish honest support to a given number of needy women (worthy as that plea may be), women who have their full share of American snobbishness about working with their hands as a means of support. Is not the real object to get the best, broadest, sanest teachers for the children of the nation?

A civilization is indeed crude that is all eyes for the salary, with only a sideglance for the work to be performed in

return.

Our distribution of the salaries of teachers in this country simply places a premium on the celibate spirit, exactly as Rome has for centuries. As a result, Italy to-day has difficulty in finding men to do her work. Some day we may be in equal need of men to be what men ought to be the social backbone of the nation

in all the ramifications of what is called civilization.

It is into the female celibate hands that our men have suffered the greater part of the education of their children to drift. It is a note of warning to our civilization, that cannot be too often repeated, this rapid "womanizing," as Münsterberg calls it, of almost the entire education of the American youth.

Is this complete bouleversement of sexconditions so very much nearer the wise economic balance kept by the older nations of civilized Europe than the Eastern conditions where the men draw the curtains of the harem across all such vexing questions? Are our own men, after all, driven by overwork rather than by their senses, slowly reverting to that convenient condition of home affairs: "I have n't time, go ask your mother?" If that sentence was overheard anywhere on earth, would the speaker's nationality remain long in doubt, however free from colloquialism his accent?

That young American women stand abreast of men, even very often ahead of them, in college work, represents nothing important save to the most superficial vision. It simply stamps the nature of that work in American colleges. Nor does the fact that women make apparently good teachers settle the question satisfactorily. As our German critic gently puts it: "The work, which in all other civilized countries is done by men, cannot in the United States be slipped into the hands of women without being profoundly altered in character." And again: "If the entire culture of the nation is womanized, it will be in the end weak and without decisive influence on the progress of the world."

No poetical claim of idealizing their women, of having the utmost confidence in their judgment, will remove from American men the plain stigma of shirking the burdens borne by the men of all other civilized peoples; shirking them for what, up to the present time, have seemed to them of more importance-questions