the generation of personality, take for its sign the watchword, play? The need of the hour is education by execution, by creation, by modes of self-realization-controlled always by the motive of helpfulness. By such modes alone the personality is extended and the individual rounded full-circle.

The beginnings of such education have been made in the kindergarten; this being the latest, the most modern in spirit and most democratic section of our educational system. This is the children's age, and a little child is leading us away from formalism and traditionalism, and compelling a more sincere study of the actual field. In the kindergarten the principle of play is frankly adopted. The application of the principle in the upper grades, where traditional ideas are entrenched, has yet to be accomplished. By the introduction of manual training, which is only a name for the educational principle of self-activity, a means of self-expression is afforded the older pupils. In the more progressive schools there is taking place a reconstruction of the school program with the various art studies as the coordinating center. Vacation schools in the larger cities are experimenting with the new ideas, and it is not unlikely that the success of their freer methods will bring about extensive modifications of the traditional curricula. All these are signs of the evolution of play; of the effort made by modern man to adopt social forms to current idea.

That this adjustment of man to his immediate environment will continue in all the fields of human endeavor, there is not the slightest doubt. The evolutionary forces are always at work. Nature creates today, as in the

early ages of the world. Man's creative power is deepening and widening. There are many evidences of increase in personality, most notably, perhaps, in the arts which still afford the field of purest play. I refer particularly to the instance of music, the art at present in most rapid process of development, the one most capable of bearing the high emotionalism and the complex idealism of the modern world. The history of music shows that an enormous distance has been passed from Mozart to Brahms. Once the former was thought to have reached the perfection of composition. Then came Beethoven with newer modes. Then followed Wagner and Brahms and Richard Strauss, each adding something to the expressiveness of music. Today, Mozart is simple, hardly interesting, apprehensible to a child. Wagner is now at the point of full reception. But few have the capacity to follow the complexities of the latest composers. But will not Brahms be as simple to the ordinary ear, as Mozart is now to the critical musician? What does this growth in apprehension signify, if not that the race is advancing farther and farther into the interior region, where harmonies are realized and ideals formed?

In conclusion, the matter may be summed up by saying that, at every stage of his being, man has possessed an ideal self-determined life, existing side by side with but apart from his life as conditioned by material needs. The origin of this freedom is lost in the dim evolutionary regions; the poets and scientists postulate a certain degree of sentient life in the material atom. Certainly, the higher animals experience a degree of freedom. In such moments, they engage in play. In the lower grades of

life, this activity is merely play; in the higher grades, it takes the rational and significant form of artistic creation.

In some future golden age, foretold by poets and prophets, it may be that all work will be play, all speech will be song, and joy will be universal.

DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION.

I.

The life of an organism is preserved and fulfilled through its right adjustment to environment. If the organism fail to accommodate itself to its conditions it is doomed to a life of tragic conflict, a weakness increasing to decay, and to final extinction. The school is an agency devised by the social intelligence or instinct to prepare the young organism for more effective existence. Its function is two-fold: First, to enable the young to appropriate the inheritance which the past bequeaths; and, second, to hasten and facilitate their adjustment to present conditions and future growths. The first service, being fairly constant, tends to maintain in all educational institutions that conservatism which so irritates the progressive educator whose attention is given to the work of readjustment. From the conditions of the problem it must be seen that the stability of institutionalism is overcome at the fulfillment of the first function. After that everything is subject to change according to the variation of the social environment. It is at this point that institutionalism may become pernicious and subversive. A given system becomes conventionalized, loses vitality, ceases to move with the times, educates for conditions long outgrown, retards progress, and enslaves the very life that created it. Then the Promethean soul is bound to the rocks and tyrannized over by the Jupiter of custom.

But evermore, wise through its pains, it destroys the order of routine and shapes its life anew. Meanwhile, the accredited institution is upheld at an enormous waste of energy. Individual organisms have been subverted and destroyed. The so-called "graduates" of schools, in order to be effective in their environment, are required not infrequently to overcome the disability of their education. If the individual is weak it drags out a wretched life, querulous, dyspeptic, and finally perishes. I think the life that goes out on battle fields is a small measure of the energy wasted in schools. The tragedy of the "educated man" is perhaps the most pathetic under the sun; a tragedy not less grievous because of its frequency. And of these tragic misfits the schools of today, by reason of peculiar conditions of transition, are furnishing an unending line. Our traditions, as those bearing upon "school discipline" and "school studies," have reference to military, priestly, scholastic, or other special ideals of times long past; whereas the necessity of the day is for a genuine social being, with varied practical and industrial capacities, generous democratic sympathies, and inclusive as light. "Where does the great city stand?" asks Whitman.

"Where no monuments exist to heroes, but in the common words and deeds,

Where the men and women think lightly of the laws,

Where the slave ceases and the master of slaves ceases,

Where outside authority enters always after the precedence of

inside authority,

There the great city stands."

The question thus viewed is an important one, not to be