ledge in the possession of the race? Davidson tells us that Aristotle probably knew all that was worth knowing in his day! Socrates turned his attention first to natural science, or rather to nature; but he found nothing worth knowing there, all was uncertainty, guesswork, disorder, contradiction. Consider the brevity and simplicity of the history possessed by the Greeks; they knew less of their own race and of their predecessors than we know, and the great part of what we know as history was not yet enacted, let alone recorded. Their literature, priceless in quality, was beautifully small in quantity, so that one man might easily be familiarly acquainted with all of it.

As for Natural Science, since its birth in the seventeenth century, it seems to increase in a sort of geometrical ratio, without any sign of pause or retardation. Moreover, as has been implied on a previous page, modern man has created a new and vast field of knowledge in the form of his own achievements in art, industry, and especially in social and political life.

It would seem that from the earliest times men have hoped that the progress of knowledge would render easy the task of comprehending the universe, but the opposite is the fact; the world was never so hard to understand. Science has banished, not mysteries, but many illusions and superstitions that served for easy solutions; it rarely solves one problem without laying bare two harder ones. We are confronted with a sort of Frankenstein monster of intellectual complexity, so that one almost wonders whether the spirit of man shall prove equal to the task set before it by its own ceaseless and cumulative creation.

But this sort of catalogue of contrasts is tiresome to the reader, and not complimentary to his intelligence; let him rather survey for himself the field of

human knowledge and see how in every part the older world possessed a mere fragment of what we possess to-day. Intellectually, we drag an ever-lengthening chain; and these accessions to our knowledge, indispensable though they are to the upward movement of the race, are yet a veritable load upon our backs.

Now, the school is the special organ of society for the intellectual part of education. Not that the school is to neglect the moral aim, but its work is peculiarly on the side of intellect, and it is to accomplish its moral ends largely through thought and knowledge. Hence the school has been driven to the front in the task of mastering the intellectual content of modern times, and has unconsciously become engrossed and absorbed in this intellectual task. As the task has grown with the years, and as the demands upon the school have become heavier and more insistent, the school has been forced to drop other lines of effort one by one, and bend every energy upon this. To bring the matter down to actual school-room work, how many a teacher is so put to it to cover the ground' of the course of study that she has little time or strength for any attention to the bearing which knowledge has upon life, or to the inculcation of righteousness and judgment!

But not only has the moral training been crowded out, as it were by indirection, through the pressure of the intellectual burden of the school: it has also suffered more direct attacks. The chief of these may be summed up as a reaction against the pietism and the strictness of earlier periods, and an emphasis upon the right of the child to grow up in accordance with the springs and impulses of his own nature. It is true that this very movement must be credited with some of the best elements in modern education: it forms

the essence of the message of Pestalozzi, Froebel, and many lesser leaders in educational reform, all dating back, it hardly need be said, to Rousseau himself. But it is a commonplace that movements of progress swing, pendulum-like, to extremes, and the 'childcentric' movement in education is no exception. The fact is that we are stricken with a plague of Rousseauism. Rousseau did not know how to tell 'nothing but the truth'; he dealt habitually in hyperbole of an extreme kind. As an example, take the famous dictum: 'Do not command the pupils; never, on any conceivable subject!' This extraordinary injunction is but one grain of the kind of seed found abundantly in the most widely read book on education the modern world possesses, written by one who knew how to make the ears of his readers tingle. Rousseau was of course merely the eloquent and powerful voice in which the Spirit of the Age spoke; thousands of fathers and mothers and teachers who have never read a line in the Emile are influenced by its ideas in their attitude toward their children and pupils.

There is a terrible harmony between Rousseau's absurd Never command a child' and the suggestive gibe that there is just as much family government to-day as ever, but that it has passed from the hands of the parents into the hands of the children. In our recoil from the harshness and pietism of the days of our great-grandfathers, and our enthusiasm for the rights of the child, have we not drifted into a policy of laissez-faire in moral training? Young people nowadays must not be preached to; even the sermon for children is so completely sugar-coated with humor and entertainment that our ancestors would never have called it a sermon at all. Morally, we expect our young people to grow, like Topsy; strange indeed, when we consider how

much care and attention we devote to their intellectual development, and how much deliberate and methodical instruction is spent upon the culture of their powers of thought!

In the home the laissez-faire policy has been encouraged wonderfully by the absorption of the time and attention of parents by other things than the training of the children. This is especially true of fathers in the business and professional classes. The intensity of competition and the growing complexity of modern occupations have gradually encroached upon the time and available powers of the man until he almost ceases to figure in the education of his children. Every high-school principal is familiar with the case of the lad who has outgrown the control of the mother and is going to the bad because his father is too busy even to know what is happening. Few indeed are the fathers who seem to understand that in order to keep control of their sons they must actually spend time with them and maintain genuine intimacy. Teachers constantly observe that the boy whose father keeps in close touch with him has little trouble in school, and gives bright promise for the future. The serious cases of discipline, leading finally to suspension and expulsion, almost invariably arise where the father is too busy to do his part.

The emergency in moral education is rendered the more serious by the situation of religion. Especially is this true in our own country. So far as we know, history has no instance of a national character built up without the aid of religious instruction, or of such character long surviving the decay of religion. Without for a moment desiring the introduction into American schools of a religious instruction such as is common in Europe, we do urge upon the consideration of every thoughtful American the suggestive fact that we

have the only great school system the world has ever seen which does not include a definite and formal instruction in religion, with the single exception, France, which relinquished it in 1882; and France has put in place of its religious instruction, the most systematic and thorough moral and civic instruction the world has ever seen, and is to-day working with unflagging zeal to make the moral instruction the most efficient and vital part of its whole curriculum. Deeper than the mere absence of religious instruction from our own public schools is the world-wide unrest and uncertainty in religious matters; a topic too familiar to need treatment here, further than by emphasizing the peril to moral education which results from the unsettling of religious sanctions. When the mature man finds himself slipping away from moorings he had thought secure, is it any wonder that the growing youth looks with scant success for a firm attachment for his life principles?

This then is the emergency as we see it: increased demand upon character, and diminished care for the cultivation of character. As M. Marion, French Minister of Education, has said: "The

truth is that we have not yet seriously comprehended that the whole political and social problem is one of education. Henceforth education alone, absolutely that alone, can rescue our modern societies from the perils that threaten them. I do not know anybody who is not convinced of that. But those who know it best too seldom reflect upon it, and we act almost as if we knew it not.'

Fortunately signs are not wanting of a widespread awakening to the seriousness of the situation. We are beginning to realize that what has been merely an article in our educational creed must become a working principle in our educational practice; that the final question regarding education is whether it avails to produce the type of character required by the republic and the race. To accomplish this we need, not less clearness and accuracy of thought, nor any sacrifice of the true interests of the intellectual life, but more warmth of genuine and appropriate feeling and more stimulation and guidance of the will. In brief, we must fit our practice to Herbart's great formula, that the chief business of education is the ethical revelation of the Uni

verse.

ALTHOUGH the world's gold output began to increase in 1891, and in three years had reached figures never before recorded, it was not till the first years of the present decade that discussion became general as to the effect of this very great production of gold upon prices of commodities, wages, and interest rates. That the first would rise, followed more slowly by the second, seemed to be the consensus of opinion, though reached by different lines of reasoning, the quantity theory being perhaps the favorite argument. The effect on interest rates was widely disputed. Some authorities said rates would decline because there would be more money to lend; others thought rates would rise because, money being a commodity like any staple article, its price would rise in common with other prices; while still others whose judgment was entitled to consideration expressed the opinion that the rates of interest could not be affected one way or the other.

These questions are of very great interest to the holders of investment securities, a class to which, in this part of the country at least, a considerable part of the people belongs. It is of importance to them to know if the mortgages, bonds, and stocks, which represent their own savings, or savings of which they have come into possession, are increasing or decreasing in value because of some great general cause absolutely beyond their control. Or, if the value of some is thus increasing and the value of others decreasing,

to know what securities belong to the first class and what to the second.

Precedent will be of very little assistance to us in our attempts to solve these questions. There have been only three periods of great increase in gold production in modern history: in the sixteenth century directly following the discovery of America; the period of 1849-57 when gold was found in California and Australia; and the present time. The first period is too remote to be of value for comparison, and our knowledge of the economic conditions that then prevailed is too slight. The second period is of more interest. In 1852 the world's gold output was $132,000,000, or three times as much as the production of 1850 and about 8 per cent of the estimated world's visible supply at that time. To-day the production is over $400,000,000, or three and one-half times that of 1890, about 11 per cent of the stock estimated to exist in 1890 and about 6 per cent of the stock of to-day.

On the face of it there is a striking resemblance between the two periods, and since then, as now, prices of commodities rose, it is not unlikely that in each case it was in large part due to the increased gold production. But statistics are apt to be misleading, and especially in a case like this. Though the two periods are only fifty or sixty years apart, they are widely separated by the extraordinary commercial development that has taken place in that time. In the fifties, active business men could remember the in

troduction of machinery; railroads and the telegraph were new, the ocean cable and the telephone unknown; and, last but not least, banking by check was in its infancy. So great has been the progress in methods of production, distribution, banking, and the dissemination of news, that it would be very rash to say that because the effect of a cause was such fifty years ago, it would be the same to-day.

As precedent is therefore not of much value in helping us to understand the situation, we must rely upon plain reasoning and clear thinking. First, what are the facts? Gold production has very much increased; prices of commodities have risen very considerably; interest rates have advanced; and prices of stocks have risen, while bonds have declined. The question is, Is the first fact the cause of the others? and if it be, will it continue to produce the same results in the future?

Before trying to answer the question, one word of explanation may not be unnecessary. The following is not an analysis of the financial situation, but only an attempt to discover some of the effects of one of the factors in the situation. Therefore, for the sake of simplicity, and in order that the question under discussion may not be befogged, no consideration will be paid to other factors. When mention is made of the probable movements of securities, it is fully realized that the movements may be obscured or temporarily checked or emphasized by the influence of one or more factors other than the one under discussion.

Credit is perhaps the chief factor in the expansion of trade. The invention of each new instrument of credit, such as bank-notes, bills of exchange, and checks, has made possible greater and greater developments of commerce. These credit instruments form the chief parts of the machinery of banking,

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the business of manufacturing credits. Bank credits depend upon the bank reserves of cash. The greater the foundation of bank reserves, the greater the superstructure of credit that can be built upon it. An increase in the world's supply of gold renders possible an increase of bank reserves and an increase of credits. As credits increase, trade expands; and with expanding trade, prices rise. Human energy thus stimulated, the appetite grows with what it feeds upon, and more than keeps pace with the supply of credits. The use of stimulants is apt to lead to their abuse. The desire increases to do more and more business, and demands more and more capital with which to do business. This growing demand for capital, increasing faster than the supply of credits, advances the rates of interest. The increased stock of gold thus seems to have been a factor in raising prices and interest rates.

At this stage the effect on securities is obvious. Those companies producing commodities do a larger and larger business, and because wages respond more slowly, at an increasing profit; their shares therefore advance in price. In the case of railroads, though it is more difficult for them to advance the price of their product, they also prosper because of the increased business they do; and their shares advance. On the other hand, the advance in interest rates causes a decline in the price of bonds; and, for the same reason, a decline in the price of preferred or guaranteed stocks whose dividends are limited and cannot be increased. Such have been the broad features of the security market for the past ten years, and they would seem to be in logical harmony with our argument so far as we have gone. At this point it may not be out of place, though anticipating a bit, to note the effect on earning power if this onward march of business, and up