indignation against them. It found expression in some extraordinary propositions, such as that of the Democratic party of this State that the National Government take possession of the coalmines, under the right of eminent domain, and operate them for the benefit of the public. It found expression in It found expression in other forms, perhaps more sane, although more passionate. The small body of men who had the legal ownership of the mines, and legal authority to close them and leave the public to suffer, were not willing to face this public opinion; they were not willing to be held responsible by the public for all the suffering which would be entailed if the mines were not reopened. When at length the conditions of reopening were agreed upon between the operators and Mr. Mitchell, the threatened opposition to continuance of work upon those conditions, emanating from a few of the wilder spirits among the miners, disappeared before this same public opinion. The President, by his action, focused that public opinion. He did what a burning-glass does when it concentrates the rays of the sun on a pile of leaves and starts them into flame. Behind the verdict of the Commission is this same public opinion. So far as we know, no miners' union and no operator, either corporate or individual, proposes to disregard the Commission's decision. This is because the public have accepted that decision and have made it their own. The power of concentrated public opinion has perhaps never had a more striking illustration than that which is furnished by the forcefulness of this wholly extra-constitutional and extra-legal proceeding for the adjustment of a great industrial controversy. It is this which gives to the decision its greatest significance. This, too, indicates to the public the method by which they may avoid future controversies of this description or solve them if they arise. For this purpose it is only necessary to give to the President the power which the Canadian law gives to the Minister of Labor, to appoint at any time a commission to inquire into conditions which threaten seriously the National well-being. The power of a President to appoint such a commission would be simply power to turn on the light, to ascertain the facts, to determine the responsibility, and to con centrate public opinion, making it effective by making it intelligent. The present conditions do not demonstrate, but they indicate, that a recognized body, impartial in its character and judicial in its spirit, with power simply to inquire into and report upon the facts, would possess all the power necessary for the adjustment of great industrial difficulties in which the interests of the third party, that is, the general public, are seriously concerned. With all that is said from time to time concerning the power of public opinion in America, we have not yet learned how to concentrate and so to utilize it. The Coal Commission's report, and its universal acceptance, indicate one way in which this dormant power can be used in the public interest and for the promotion of public justice. A Preacher's Story of Twenty years ago there was a dying church on the East Side of New York. Families that had lived in the vicinity were moving away. Their houses were being transformed into flats. The incoming population was to all appearance indifferent to what the church had to offer. The emptying houses were being refilled with more people than they contained before. The emptying church became each year emptier and emptier. The church was offered for sale. Nobody would buy it. To-day that church is one of the greatest powers for good in that great city. Its services are thronged. Working men and women sit and kneel beside people of wealth and power. A Parish House joined to it affords recreation for those who have no other places of recreation than the saloons, the dance-halls, and the street, as well as for those who choose to go there from homes of refinement for the social life it affords. A trade school is maintained by the church to supply industrial training for the boys of the parish. Active organizations thrive-religious because ministering to needs that are fundamentally human. The church which two decades ago was itself in the grasp of death is to-day living in that community that the community itself may have life and have it more abundantly. Humanly speaking, this change has been wrought by one man. In 1882 he was acting as rector of St. James's Cathedral Church, Toronto, Canada. When he was called to this despondent church in New York, he went with a clear idea of what a city parish ought to be and what ends it ought to serve. That idea, by persistent, active, courageous faith, he has translated into a living, visible reality. That man is Dr. W. S. Rainsford, and his achievement is the great parish of St. George's. The narrative of this achievement suggests the true solution of two kinds of perplexity. There is the perplexity of those who believe in Christianity, but, repelled by theories and dogmas, are distrustful of the Church; there is also the perplexity of those who are in the Church but do not see how to bring Christianity, which is the power of the Church, to bear upon the life of men outside. The story of this man's work, besides being full of sheer human interest, brings to those troubled by the one perplexity information as to what the Church at least in one place is doing, and to those troubled by the other perplexity encouragement as to what the Church can do. The story of human achievement is first of all the story of man. The story of every human achievement is the story of some human life back of the achievement. So the record of what has been done near Stuyvesant Square in New York is ultimately the record of the experiences and activities of the man who has done it. It is because The Outlook believes this that it has asked Dr. Rainsford to tell the story of his work. And Dr. Rainsford has consented. He has told it. He has not written it. "A Preacher's Story of His Work," which begins in this number of The Outlook, is literally his story as he related it in his study at St. George's Rectory. It is what he has talked of to those who listened. And the readers of this story, if they would get the story as it was given, must place themselves in imagination in that room, where books and antlers covering the walls, bearskins on couch or floor, and papers on desk betoken a life of combined thought and activity; and then settle themselves, not to read, but to hear. Lenten Meditations Why Need Christ Suffer? Should we not rather ask, How was it possible that he should not suffer? Can one come to the suffering, the ignorant, the willfully sinful, seeking to deliver them from their suffering, their ignorance, and their sin, and not suffer for them and with them? Could he deliver them and not have But what is comcompassion on them? passion but suffering with another? Could he deliver them if he had not sympathy for them? But what is sympathy but suffering with another? Could we accept deliverance from an indifferent or unfeeling deliverer? Must he not feel our sorrows, if he is to succor us in them? Is not this in truth the nature of all deliverance that the strong deliverer enters into our sorrow and our weakness, and so identifies himself with us, and then lifts us out of our sorrow and our weakness, and so identifies us with him? If he would have us share his experience, he must first share our experience with us. And how this his participation in our suffering must have been intensified by his consciousness that most of human suf fering is wholly needless! He knew the remedy, and he knew we would not accept the remedy. It is hard to stand beside the sick-bed and see the one we love suffer; how immeasurably more hard if we know how the suffering might be stopped, and yet are not permitted to apply the remedy! To see a young man walking carelessly, singing as he goes, down the road to death, to know what the end must be to him as it has been him and turn him back, and to be utterly to so many before him, to long to halt unable To long to call out the word of warning to him, and be unable to speak; or to call it out, and hear his laughing rejection of the call; or to see him stop long enough to toss back a careless resolution to be broken as carelessly to-morrow! Oh! the unutterable pain of such an experience; who that has ever tried to be a deliverer to his fellow-men has not known this suffering? What must it have been for Christ to look down the ages, to see with prophetic vision all the misery at most drumards and nat ots of an epoch given here the over to drakenness and hariotry. And yet Buss fler og of sympathy, of almost hopeless codeavor, and of social participation could not have been comparable to the suffering involved in entering to the experience of the sin which he had come to cure, "God made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin." docs this mean? The minister may have What Det Gerstand wo, to fed feed And this The tire great tempor mbition. A. three are Ziness cystical spatch: when appetite saying. Use your marvelous tempted him, saying. Win the admiration yourselt; and vanity spectators who croad Jerusalem, by casting yourself down unhurt from the pinnacle of the Temple: and ambition spirit that rules the world, that you may tempted him, saying. Do obeisance to the tions to evil surge up to the very citadel conquer the world. Could such solicitaof his heart and he not feel a horror imagine? Thrice they came upon him. which we in our best estate can but dimly Once in that temptation in the wilderness, vanquished by his memory of the Bible teaching of his childhood; once in that hour when he prayed that the cup of his Ought not Christ to have suffered these her chief difficulty was not with students things and to enter into his glory? Why ought Christ to have suffered? Because he could not take away sin from the world without entering into the sin of the world; and he could not enter into the sin of the world without a suffering in spirit, of which the scourge, the crown of thorns, the nails, are but feeble and imperfect symbols. The whole life of Christ was a Passion; the whole life of Christ was a Crucifixion. English in the Home It is not often that a book written largely for teachers deals with a vital subject in so fresh and practical a way as to make it of even more importance to parents. This may be said, however, of Mr. Percival Chubb's "Teaching of English," which bears the imprint of the Macmillan Company, and is the work of an experienced teacher saturated with the literary spirit and an exponent of the most genuine kind of culture. The value of Mr. Chubb's discussion is twofold: it makes clear the prime importance of familiarizing children from their earliest years with the best literature, and it furnishes for each stage of development suggestions with regard to the kind of books which ought to be put in the hands of a child. There are many fathers and mothers who are entirely unaware of the immense educational importance of the home. They do not understand that it is not only the first school in point of time which the child attends, but it is to the very end, in certain respects, the most important school. The best teacher a boy of imagination and gifts can have is a wise, sympathetic, and open-hearted mother who understands his nature, knows how to appeal to the best in him, and but with parents. Many parents are obstacles in the way of the true education of their children. Instead of co-operating with teachers, they antagonize them; instead of assisting in the difficult work, they throw obstacles in the way of that work. They are always questioning the wisdom of the discipline, asking special favors which involve interruption of study, and, consciously and unconsciously, in many small ways hindering the work which the school is trying to do for the child. The chief injury, however, which many parents do to the school is in sending their children without that general training, that steady discipline, that influence for refinement, which the school cannot give, but upon which it must build. The rawness and crudity of many children who come out of well-to-do homes is amazing. These children know almost nothing of the things which in intelligent homes are in the very atmosphere. They have no fund of general intelligence; they are untrained in manners, in speech, in voice, and in mind; and the school has to do for them, in a very limited time and under very difficult conditions, the work that the home ought to have done under the best possible circumstances and with the fullest possible time. Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, in an introduction to this volume, brings out the relation of the child to the home and of the school to the home in a single sentence-"The one ruling maxim of English teaching ought to be: The child will speak and write the sort of English that he hears and reads." It is in the home that children acquire their use of language; it is in the home that proper facilities for reading must be supplied them. Mr. Chubb does not exaggerate when he says that on no other subject do the forces of the social environment, against which the school has to strive, make themselves so continually felt as they do in English; and if there be a single test of education which may be applied to all men and women, it is, as President Eliot some time ago pointed out, the free, correct, and individual use of one's own language. The difficulty with which the school has to contend lies in the fact that this language is not properly taught in the great majority of homes, and that it is often grossly, not to say brutally, abused outside the home and the school in those general associations which all children form. It is quite impossible to convey a sound feeling for language and a right conscience about its use to a child who never hears the language properly spoken in his own home, and who hears it constantly misused by his associates and playmates outside. ought to be understood, as Mr. Chubb points out, that good speech is not merely a matter of education; it is a point of social manners. "Why is it," he asks, "that the average English, German, or French child speaks and writes his native tongue more correctly and pleasantly than the average American child? The principal, though not the only, reason is to be found, not in a better and more laborious teaching of the school, but in a higher standard of social manners. We lack ⚫ linguistic conscience and linguistic pride in this country. We do not attach to illiteracy the stigma that attaches to it abroad-a stigma that money, dress, ostentation, cannot atone for." It This is a new country of immense extent, and its people have been compelled to do an enormous amount of work in a very short period of time. It would have been very unjust, up to this time, to hold this country to the standards of physical order and neatness which rule in smaller countries like England and Belgium; but there is danger that slovenliness may become a national habit. Slovenliness is something more than a violation of good taste; it is indifference to the best way of doing things; it is a kind of easy-going morality in matters of method; it involves a low standard, and its influence upon children is in the last degree disastrous. Now, in nothing are Americans, as a whole, more slovenly than in their use of their own language. It is humiliating to notice how limited are the vocabularies of many children of good material surroundings, and how constantly slang, which is the evidence of poverty of speech, is substituted for the right and telling phrase or word. Everywhere-on railroad trains, in city street-cars, on ferryboats-wherever men and women talk, one hears careless, inaccurate, and slovenly speech; speech which not only lacks shading, refinement, individuality, but which betrays the most limited knowledge, an uneducated ear, and a wholly untrained social sense. This vocal slovenliness the schools are doing what they can to correct; but it can never be thoroughly corrected until American fathers and mothers understand that they, and not the teachers in the schools, give children the language they speak. The home in which good English is spoken, by people whose voices are modulated, imparts the habit of good English speech without any didactic methods or any pedantic consciousness. To this familiarity with good spoken English in the home must be added familiarity with the best written English; that is to say, with the best literature. Fathers and mothers of a good deal of intelligence are often at a loss to know what books to place in the hands of their children at different stages in their development. It is a matter of prime importance that that development should not be unduly hastened by the reading of books which at one period of life develop morbid emotions, and at another period foster and give expression to the most wholesome feelings. Mr. Chubb intelligently discriminates between the kinds of literature which are adapted to successive periods, and lays down principles that any intelligent father or mother can apply. He has rendered an important service, not only to the teachers of the country, but to the homes in which the Americans of the future are being trained. By the courtesy of Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons, the publishers of "The Blue Flower," and with the cordial consent of Dr. van Dyke, The Outlook is able this week to present its readers with the charming poem, "Who will Walk a Mile with Me?" which prefaces the limited edition of "The Blue Flower," and which is too tender and beautiful to be confined to the readers of a single volume, |