of warfare does not furnish anything approach- | the grave. The inscription neatly traced upon ing it in magnitude. it ran thus: "Here reposes in God, fallen for King and Fatherland, in the battle of Gravelotte, my dearly beloved and never to be forgotten husband, FRITZ DENBARD, Captain Twenty-ninth Infantry Regiment. We shall see each other again." I found the people were watching a laborer digging up bones, skulls, and bits of shoes and clothing, and throwing them pell-mell into a long wooden box. The box was already nearly full, and yet he had not gone more than a foot below the surface. I was told that hundreds had been thrown into a pit here, and they were transferring the remains to another point. The spectacle was not a very pleasant one, and I soon turned away. On a warm August day I rode out over the battle-field of the 18th. The dusty road leads out through the suburbs, crosses the Moselle at Devant les Ponts, and gradually ascends to the plateau along which the French army lay, through what were then woods, but are now, for military reasons, cut away. Riding through the little village of Amanvillers, we came to the village of St. Privat, and, a little farther on, to the hamlet of Carriers de Jaumont. Around St. Privat and this last named hamlet was the right wing of the French, and where they were finally driven back by the Saxons. Naturally the fighting was hot, and the houses and walls still bear evidence of the rough storm of iron and lead that played around them. It must be recollected that a French village is not at all A little way out of Gravelotte toward Metz, like one of ours. It is a collection of stone about where was the center of the French left, houses with tile roofs, crowded together, side I rode over a piece of road, bounded on one by side, along one or two narrow streets, and side by a ravine and on the other by a bluff the walls which surround the little gardens and bank, up which four hundred German cavalry inclosures around it are compact stone struct-charged to take a battery of mitrailleuse on the ures, laid in mortar and covered with a coat of plateau on the top, and every man and horse plaster. was killed or wounded. All about this point the fighting was terrific, and all around are the monuments and crosses over the burial places of the fallen. My way back into Metz led through Ronzevilles, where the extreme left of the French was posted. It is not difficult on the ground for even an unmilitary person to see that the French had the advantage of position, and that the Germans, in order to attack all along the line with vigor, had to have many more men than their opponents, and in order to turn the right wing had to march a long distance over an open country, where there was no cover from the sweeping fire of batteries and infantry with long-range arms. One can, therefore, understand why the Germans lost so many men, and also can appreciate the obstinate nature of their onslaught. These wall are usually about five feet in hight, so that a village is like a little fortification to the troops in possession of it. The French troops had their lines for miles along the plateau, the center and left along and in front of the woods already mentioned. In front the open country falls away in a slight declination. One can look for miles across fields, which just now were being harvested, and were coated with the yellow stubble. Here and there are the huddled-together villages and hamlets, with their red-tiled roofs. I then turned, and rode along a narrow road which ran along the rear of the German line, to Gravelotte, where I stopped for lunch at the little inn with the magniloquent name of the Horse of Gold. Scattered all over this stretch of miles over which the armies fought are monuments erected to the fallen, the more pretentious by the different German regiments to their perished members. Here and there are mounds with a simple cross, where perhaps a hundred or two bodies were collected and hastily buried. After lunch, I took a walk about the village of Gravelotte, and, seeing a collection of persons in a graveyard, walked in. In this little inclosure, I was told, about two thousand men had been buried. There were a few head-stones and monuments, but the mass were left without mementoes. One little head-stone attracted my attention from the little wreath of oak leaves which had evidently been recently placed on My driver was an intelligent man, a native of Metz, and was there during the battles and siege. He expressed what the French universally assert, that Bazaine was grossly incompetent in the management of the campaign, and a traitor in surrendering his army. I inquired of him as to the feelings of the people toward their conquerors, and he did not hesitate to tell me, probably because I was a foreigner, that they were much embittered, and that their preferences were all for France. One great ground of complaint is the steady increase of the taxes, which seem, as he said, to be always mounting higher and will shortly become unbearable, and also the rigidity of the German conscription. W. W. CRANE, JR. THE BEST USE OF WEALTH.* If a man has a great fortune, what is the best | tribute the entire sum in small portions to variuse he can make of it? Or, as one perhaps likes ous scattered benevolent uses, or to concentrate best to put the question, "If I had a great fort-it on some single object. It is, no doubt, a cerune, what would I do with it !" Of course many different answers might be given, according to the place and time, the surrounding opportunities, the personal possibilities of the possessor, the claims of private duties, and so on. But an answer may be suggested which will at least mark out some general principles involved in any satisfactory reply. And, to make the inquiry as definite as possible, let us suppose it put by a man of our own time, in California (for example), who has by honest means accumulated a large fortune, through energy and prudence; and whose life has not been so narrow as to make him love money for its own sake, but has given him a genuine desire to see his wealth become the greatest possible power for good to his fellowmen. Such a man, looking about him, finds plenty of ways to give passing pleasure with his money, and perhaps would have little difficulty in making some part of it a means of happiness, so far as happiness depends on external circumstances, to this or that individual. But how to use the whole of it wisely for permanent good to the community and to mankind? For certainly nothing less than this aspiration will content a man of sufficient breadth and reach of mind to have gathered and successfully managed a vast property. He will not make the mistake of leaving that which might have been a blessing to the community to be a curse to his own children; if daughters, to make them the shining mark for designing villainy; and if sons, to ruin their careers and characters by an unlimited income unaccompanied by the energy and self-command that in his own case were gained by its very acquisition. History, or indeed any man's life-experience, is too full of examples that point the paralyzing and corrupting effect of the gift to a young man of unearned wealth. Plainly, a great fortune must either be wasted, or worse than wasted, or go to serve some high public purpose. But where, and how? To begin with, two wholly different general plans at once suggest themselves: either to dis *By special request, and in order to give this article a wider circulation than in its original form, it is here reprinted, with slight alterations by the author, from the last number of The Berkeley Quarterly.-EDITOR. tain advantage in the former method, that in this way one can easily direct the details of every expenditure, suiting it to a given need, and avoiding all risk of misappropriation. But, on the other hand, all such scattered use of wealth is in one sense itself a misappropriation, since it wholly loses that peculiar power residing in any great sum of money employed as a unit. The successful business man, of all others, knows the almost magical increase of force that belongs to the very magnitude of large total sums. To throw away this enormous power of the aggregate amount is to make a single vast fortune of no more avail than ten insignifi cant ones. If, then, a fortune is to be used as a single sum, there are again two possible plans: either to add it as a contribution to some already existing enterprise or institution, or to found with it a wholly new one. Let us first consider the former plan, of contribution to some enterprise already existing. Looking about over the world of manifold activities, we discover, after all, but few lines of deliberate effort for the generous service of humanity. These may be in the main divided into three groups, according to their proximate object: those which aim to increase men's comfort (as, most of what goes under the name of public charity), those which aim to increase men's morality (as, the churches), and those which aim to increase men's intelligence (as, the high schools, colleges and universities; these, rather than the lower schools in general, since the latter are largely the outgrowth of the aim to bring youth up to the average intelligence, only, in order to enable them to "get on in the world"). In other words, looking at the matter from the obverse side, the three groups of benevolent activities are those aiming to decrease human suffering, those aiming to decrease human wickedness, and those aiming to decrease human ignorance. The question then arises, which of these three groups of enterprises is it most necessary to society to foster: the charitable institutions so-called, the churches, or the higher educational institutions? Or, granting the importance of all of them, is there either one of them, which at the present moment, and in our particular stage of civilization, is the | from Rome, and the sole relic of the Roman most urgent need of society? Or, again, is there organism in an epoch of utter disorganization either one of them which is inclusive of the and decay; and secondly, the accident of havothers, and by its attainment would accomplishing in its clergy the only profession or occupatheir ultimate aim also? One must admit, in the first place, that it would be a good use for wealth if in any way it could be employed to make the generality of men more comfortable. Whatever opinion one may hold as to the ill effects of too luxurious or easy a life, he cannot but see that a certain degree of even merely physical comfort is a necessary condition of progress in civilization. Only a superstitious asceticism could fail to desire that the mass of men might be relieved of some part of their benumbing miseries. The world of ordinary human beings is a hard, hostile world. So that there is no question that if man is to "live upward, working out the brute," | he must escape from brutish misery. For this end, however, the first need is that we should understand the fundamental causes of his troubles. Mere short-sighted charity is useless. To feed the pauper is to produce the pauper. It is of little use to treat the symptom; we must try to cure the disease. But how? Many persons, especially those who are themselves engaged in church work, would answer, "The cause of human suffering is human sin." They would say, "Decrease vice, and you decrease misery. Moral amelioration is the great want of the race. Let the money be given to that great organization which has all these centuries been fighting against human wickednessthe church." tion that necessitated the mastery of literature. The church, as the sole repository of organization and of letters, did nobly a two-fold service, religious and intellectual. But the time came when there was other organized intellectual activity and other literature than that of the church. The universities established secular learning: the old literature of classic paganism was rediscovered, and the new literature of modern thought appeared. And from that time the church, as an organization, took up its permanent position in two camps; the one as an ally, more or less hearty, of intellectual progress, the other absolutely against it. When Wiclif put the English Bible in every English household, he builded better than he knew, for the English mind learned to read and to think, each mind as a separate individual force, and the era of intellectual liberty commenced-commenced, as it has gone on increasing, through literature; that is to say, through the free appropriation by the individual mind of free human thought, feeling, aspiration, and every spiritual power. So far as the church has increased human intelligence, it has done a great service for humanity. But so far as it leaves out of view the need of higher intelligence, it ignores the chief source of human misery, for that is mental degradation, brutish stupidity, ignorance. If, therefore, one great need of society is to be relieved from its miseries, the only sure path to that relief is through higher intelligence. If one of its great needs is to be converted from its wickedness, the only way is through higher intelligence. If, in fine, the urgent need of all telligence, for better living as to material comfort, for higher living as to morality, and for its own sake, that men may be thinking men instead of mere dumb animals, then can any one doubt that the best use of a princely fortune is to provide with it for the education of the race? No doubt there is a truth in this answer, but not the whole truth. No doubt the church has done much good, and will continue to do good. Wickedness is, no doubt, the cause of much human misery, but we have come in these mod-humanity is for every reason just this higher inern times to see that ignorance is the cause of more. It is human ignorance that has kept man down and kept civilization back. It is progress in intelligence that has lifted him up, and that will urge civilization onward. Besides, to go to the bottom of it, what is the cause of wickedness itself? In the deepest and broadest sense, ignorance. "We needs must love the highest when we see it." It is truer sight that is needed, and the truer choice must follow. Who can doubt that to make men wiser is to make them better? Moreover, the greatest service of the church itself has been in those times and countries where it has been most conspicuously an educating force. There was a time in history when the church was the center of intellectual, as well as of religious life. And this depended on two causes: first, its perfect organization inherited But if the whole world is too wide to be considered easily, let us but look at any small segment of it immediately about us. In California, for instance, what is the great, pressing need of our time? Material prosperity, no doubt, for one thing, and greater public and private virtue, for another; but most pressing of all, partly because its attainment would surely bring these others in its train, is the need of higher intelligence in the mass of the people. The process of evolution in society is precisely a progress in intelligence; not the mere "smartness" or sharpness of mind, which is but little more than the keen sense of the brute applied to slightly more complex surroundings, but that broad power of sight and insight into both material and spiritual things, such as education alone can bring. There is the brute stage and the human stage of development, with all grades between; and the human is higher than the brute by nothing else than higher intelligence. In our society, as elsewhere in the world, there are types of every grade. What it needs is to have the highest carried higher, and the lowest brought up to the grade already reached by the highest. At least, the average must be lifted higher, or our civilization must come to a standstill or go backward. The great danger to California is that her new population, her own native-born youth (for on them, after all, must depend her future), will fail to keep abreast of the times. All the wisdom that is in the world at any given epoch is needed to save society, or any segment of it, at that epoch. The resources of the eighteenth century are not sufficient for the nineteenth; for with its enlightenment—not the results of it, but the results of the same myriad causeshave come dangers. With the taste of divine liberty has come the craving for devilish license. With the sense of personal freedom has come the impatience of all restraint, even of that of one's own reason and will. With the gain of personal power has come the claim of equal right to power by the brutish mob. The nineteenth century must save itself, if at all, by the full possession of all the resources of the past not only, but of all its own resources, and by their possession by all men. And these resources can be given to the ordinary mind only by the best and most liberal education. Are there, then, any existing organizations among us ready to receive from wealth the contribution of its accumulated power, that are devoted to this most needed service of society? The world over, the institutions that most nearly approach this character are the colleges and universities. It is now some four hundred years since they began their work among Englishspeaking people, and it is not too much to say that whatever is valuable in modern civilization is owing to them more than to all other organized efforts put together. They have alternately furnished the radical element when radicalism was needed, and the conservative element when conservatism was needed. They have been the rallying point for all the forces of enlightenment and progress. From them has come, directly or indirectly, nearly all that the world counts precious in thought and investigation. It is through them, and almost through them alone, that each successive generation has been made possessor of the intellectual accumulations of all preceding generations. There have been in all times, no doubt, an exceptional few who, by dint of remarkable natural endowment, have risen to the full stature of intellectual men without their aid. But civilization never could have been preserved, much less kept on its upward career, by those few anomalous exceptions. The great service of the colleges has been that they have enabled the many ordinary minds to attain what otherwise could have been attained only by the few extraordinary minds. Leaving out of account the scattered prodigies, the self-made men whose enormous vigor of mind and character has enabled them to make the world their college, it is plain enough that it is the colleges that have bred the men who have guided civilization forward through the latter centuries. And the reason, too, is plain. It is because in the complex modern life, in the midst of the rush and swirl of its forces, no untrained, halfdeveloped man is anything-no trained and developed man, even, by himself, is anything. The only mind that can cope with modern life is the one that has taken advantage of whatever has yet been learned as to means of high development, and that stands not by the feeble strength of what one life-time can teach a single individual, but by the whole force of whatever wisdom has been gained through all the ages, a heritage whose possession it is the untiring effort of the colleges to bestow. Plainly enough, then, he who would do the greatest possible service to society, if he is to do it through any existing institution, can do nothing better than to bestow his fortune on a college or university. And the same principle which dictates that he should use his wealth as a total sum, instead of wasting its force by scattering it, dictates also that he should choose for his endowment an institution that is already a power, and that has already received, and is likely to receive in future, other such endowments. In this way will his means, reinforced by that of others, continually gain in power of service. The force which would keep in motion or accelerate a body already moving, might be utterly powerless to initiate its motion. Many a handsome sum has been thrown away on some small and helpless institution, which would have been of immense value if joined with the momentum of a vigorous university. In any such university, where there is a solid foundation and active energy of growth, one may find abundant opportunities for rich investments. There are new buildings that need to be erected for the service of science or art. When men build granite monuments on which to inscribe their names, morals with creeds, it is certainly deplorable that any great institution should go on from year to year sending out men to be leaders in modern thought and society without offering to them instruction from commanding intellects on the great subjects of ethics, of rights and wrongs and duties, of the history of the human intellect in its wrestlings with the great underlying problems of existence. Certainly a grand why do they not build them in such wise as this, | culties may be involved in the connection of that so their memories, instead of being left to the forgotten solitudes of the graveyard, may be treasured by successive generations of grateful students and scholars? There are costly laboratories to be founded; there are libraries to be collected, bringing to our young men and women, isolated in our remote regions, the intellectual harvest of the whole world; there are scholarships and fellowships to be established, giving to poor and talented youth the opportu-er nities for which they hunger and thirst. Every county in the State has wealth that might easily maintain at the University a score of its brightest youth. And every county has private fort-corner-stones. unes that might endow a free academy or high school within its borders, so that its youth should go to college finely prepared. Above all, there are chairs in the University to be endowed-a hundred fields of science and art and philosophy that should be filled by the foremost men in the world, and that now are silent and empty. college could be conceived than has ever yet been builded. The best possible use of a vast fortune, if vast enough, would be to build such a one, or even, perhaps, to lay fitly its prophetic But, practically, the chances are enormously against the attainment of any such perfect institution as might be conceived or dreamed of, if it were attempted. Unless a man were at the same time the wealthiest and the wisest man in the world, and should begin to build his college in his own middle life, at furthest, so that he himself might attend to every detail of its establishment, the chances of success would be doubtful. If the money were left to a single individual to control, we should probably have a tottering edifice built on the back of his particular educational or religious hobby. If it were put into the hands of a body of many-minded trustees, their dissensions might easily frustrate any judicious plan. After all, is it not true that valuable organisms must be the result of gradual growth rather than of sudden construction? Is there not more hope in helping on toward perfection a well established organization, the slow product of countless converging forces, by needed additions and by gradual modifications, than in trying to replace it by some brand-new experiment? And if, finally, one is to select some existing But, one may ask, would it not be better to build up a new college altogether? Are there not grave defects in all those existing at present-defects which we can see well enough, but which can hardly be corrected except by leaving them behind and beginning anew? This, indeed, is a serious question. Great as is the power for good in our best colleges, it is visible to some of us that they are far from being the ideal. Some of them are too closely bound to the past, by tradition, by precedent, by inherited tendency, for the needs of this present time. They seem, indeed, to move, as the waves of modern forces go by them, but they are anchored in the past, and only rock upon the waves. Others, on the contrary, are adrift at the mercy of the unstable gusts of politics, and the shifting notions of the time. They are afloat, it is true, but they are all afloat, having no bold pol-institution on which to bestow his wealth, where icy, no settled plan, no steady onward progress. Some, in their courses of study, are slow to recognize that there is anything more to be learned in this present century than there was three hundred years ago. They would still make Latin, Greek, and mathematics (the college "three R's") almost the sole mental furnishing of the youth preparing for modern life. Others, carried away by the reaction from this extreme, would count hardly anything as valuable knowledge except what the present generation has discovered. "Science" is to them like a new toy, engrossing and delighting the child's every waking moment; or, like the dyspeptic's latest medicine, certain to prove the universal panacea. Again, the church is partly right in its complaint that moral teaching is neglected in some of the existing colleges. Whatever diffi could it better be found than here in our own community? At first thought it might seem more profitable to cast in one's help with the great universities of the Old World—of Germany or England-or, short of that, of the Atlantic border. But that is the old civilization, with growth in it, doubtless, but not the unfettered, vigorous growth of the new. The branching vine of civilization has gone spreading from its ancient roots in Asia, on through Greece and Rome and England and the New England, and now the first green shoots are budding into leaf, if not yet into blossom and fruitage, on our farther shore. It is here that the latest hopes of men are centered, and reaching forward toward a possible fulfillment. But, be it remembered, we are far from the root-sources of growth and power. It would be easy for this budding |