industrial system. This system is purely materialistic, taking its rise in the general skepticism and rationalism of the eighteenth century. Labor lost its stigma; it rose to the position of a commodity. Economic considerations determined its value. The nexus between master and man ceased to be personal, feudal, religious, or political, and came to be impersonal, economic, and mathematical. Work was undertaken from necessity-the degree of necessity being measured by the wage. The present industrial order is therefore based upon material goods and properties. There is no spiritual principle present anywhere in it. Labor, viewed as a commodity, as something for which a price is paid, is simply an incident in an exchange which is formal, brutal, without sentiment, without the spirit of service, and with no cultural attachments or rewards of any sort. The struggle in the industrial world is between those who have and those who have not. The ordinary laborer accepts the materialistic valuation of his services and strikes for the only thing which has worth in his eyes-a higher wage, a reward, that is, in terms of property. His demand is quantitative, and is, of course, of the same kind as the quantitative civilization he helps to maintain.

The word civilization has been employed here, but the term is quite inappropriate. Civilization refers to a certain quality of life and not to an accumulation of goods. It would seem that if the industrial system is to endure it must change its character to harmonize with the ideas of those humanistic philosophers who have conceived of a culture suitable for an aspiring and spiritual race. To accomplish this change it will be necessary to promulgate a new doctrine of labor, and to effect a revolution in the

character of labor itself. Must labor always be measured materially by alien standards? May it not have spiritual rewards? May it not find its value in itself? May not life become expressive-may not labor, that is, be conducted in the line of one's own life? Why should education be always leisuristic? Is it not possible for work to be cultural? May it not even be religious? Might it not gather to itself the sentiments which humanize and civilize?

The new doctrine of labor was enunciated first of all in England by Carlyle. In its simplest form it stands on his pages thus: "It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is able to do in this universe." Work, as to its import, is character, knowledge, power, life. "He that has done nothing has known nothing." Thus understood, when regarded as having cultural rewards, work becomes perverted the moment it demands a wage and falls under bondage to Mammon. "The wages of every noble work," said Carlyle, “do yet lie in Heaven, or else nowhere."

These statements of Carlyle were elaborated by his pupil Ruskin and realized in practice by Ruskin's pupil Morris. But apart from a relatively small number of workshops here and there, it must be confessed the doctrine of "labor as a pleasure in itself" is practically inoperative in the modern world. Yet it is the ideal which must inform the world if advance is to be made in the direction of a rational industrial civilization. By its application alone, by the changes wrought in the character and substance of labor itself, will it be possible to escape the materialism of present day commerce and its souldestroying wage-slavery.

If a change in our attitude toward work and a change in the nature of the work itself—if these changes can at once be effected, the two claims now made by employees of employers for a higher wage and a shorter day will be rendered nugatory. If the rewards of labor can be attached to labor itself, if it should not be necessary on the one hand to search for a culture outside of one's employments, and on the other hand to consider an equivalent for labor in another medium, the main objects for which labor unions exist and on account of which strikes are entered upon would become secondary and unimportant. In accepting a wage as the measure of efficiency, in demanding rewards in forms of property, the labor unions are in truth subjecting themselves to the bondage of economic materialism and are losing such advantages as might come from a spiritual interpretation of life. The struggle for higher wages is one thing-the motive being purely materialistic and selfish; the struggle to be freed from wage slavery altogether is quite another thing and must involve a certain idealistic perception. If the struggle for property continues as insistent as it now is there is nothing but strife and eventually revolution to look forward to. If an evolutionary advance is to be expected, improvement must arise from a change in direction and an acceptance of a new point of view. For again real improvement is qualitative and not quantitative. Will Chicago teachers, who joined the Federation of Labor. materialize their own function and motives by accepting the economic doctrine of labor, or will they help to educate and spiritualize this body by upholding a new doctrine of labor and disclosing the play of a social motive?

THE SOCIOLOGICAL VIEWPOINT IN ART.

"I feel that in this class I have been given a key to something rightfully belonging to me, but which somehow or other I have been cheated out of up to this time. I have been compelled to spend time over 'the dainty figures' of Collins and the 'sentimentality' of Gray, but always under protest. A serious and rational human being can have little interest in these things. You have let me see the real significance of great literature."

Such was the note of commendation I received not long ago from one of my pupils. I may be pardoned for placing it at the head of this paper since in answering the letter I was led to formulate more definitely than I had done before the few principles which had governed my study and interpretation of literature.

"Been given a key to something rightfully belonging to me, but which somehow or other I have been cheated out of up to this time." This sentence, it will be observed, is the record of a revelation; it is at the same time a statement of a claim and of an arraignment. A reader has a right to the whole truth of literature, a right to appropriate for his own enrichment whatever has entered into the composition of a work of art. In the case of great literature which embodies not only a great personality, but also the essential life of a whole people, or it may be the vital forces of a complete epoch, it is not to be expected that everyone will have the capacity to assimilate its entire substance. But it has been my experience that

success in the study of literature is due largely to one's ability to bring himself into right relationship to a given subject. It is mainly a question of attitude. If a given literature be approached from the right point of view, and in the right spirit, the appropriation is dependent then solely upon the capacity of the reader to receive; but if through the ignorance or carelessness or actual incompetency of the teacher, the student is turned away from the true path to the "mountain of vision," he has a right to bring a charge of deception and fraud against the teacher or critic. Personally I feel the responsibility of a teacher in perhaps an excessive degree; I should hate to have it said of me that I was a blind guide to the blind. It is the function of teachers to provide pupils with keysto use the figure of my correspondent—and in literature there is the key philogical, the key philosophical and ethical, the key psychological, the key historical, the key æsthetical, and, I will add as something relatively new, the key sociological. It was the last of these keys, I may mention, which had been placed in the hands of the class referred to, and this key did in truth appear to unlock unsuspected stores of material which other keys, least of all the æsthetical, had failed to uncover. I call this key the sociological for the reason that I first learned its use from a sociologist. It was another sociologist who most clearly defined for me the true nature of literature. However, as a matter of fact, the application of social principles has been a marked feature of recent criticism, even that of professional critics. It is seen that only when literature is considered as one of the arts, and when art is considered as one of the processes of idealization by which all psychic forms and social institutions are shaped,