THE other day I was asked some questions on the cost of stained glass, as it was proposed to put a stainedglass window as a memorial in a village Wesleyan chapel. Another memorial has been mentioned to me: 'the form decided on is the replica of some old village cross'; and yet another was to be a 'runic cross.' The spirit of the inquiries was entirely wholesome and sweet, but it raised (as it will in the minds of crotchety people, 'who never agree with what they don't propose themselves') a whole flight of preliminary questions and doubts as to the ultimate possibilities. There are thousands of other cases where like questions are being asked without our being ready with considered replies. As usual it will be muddle. Again the generous people are untaught; again they are to sacrifice before an idol, or a whole row of idols.

Is it necessary, is it what the fallen themselves would have wished, that four and a half years of war and destruction shall be followed by a great outpouring of unproductive, and indeed futile, labor? Must a sort of murder be followed by a sort of suicide?

The problem as a whole in its great mass needs thinking over and out, and it would be well if the intelligent people of the universities, churches, and councils would consider it and take the responsibility of giving some teaching. Have the universities no national functions? It seems that millions of pounds are again to be wasted, and at such a time, in doing what we at most can least well do. Sometimes, indeed and

alas! it may be spent in further vulgarizing our ancient churches. Meanwhile Englishmen and heroes have too few houses to live in, and too little vital and reproductive work to do. Why should it be unmonumental to provide some of these? Billiard-marking and diamond-cutting will not be enough to employ all who come back. Would it not be possible to direct some of the memorial streams to irrigating truly productive work? The best of all memorials would be those which helped speedily to organize the drifting masses of men who are returning to promises, and the unproductive monuments will not do that.

There is a feeling in the air that we ought to offer pure sacrifice for the fallen, and that there is some meanness in making memorials serve a useful purpose that we must advertise our regret and compassion in lavish oblations of marble, brass, and glass. Then there are artists and firms all ready to provide the expected right things; but we must remember that these are the priests who live by the sacrifices, 'thrusting their forks into the cauldron.' It is in the nature of things that artists should be chiefly interested in their own matters, and we can hardly expect a general theory from them unless they were called together in consultation, when they would be quite equal to giving disinterested advice. What we most need is some such calling together for discussion. If we could hold a meeting of the fallen and put some suggestions before them, is it the brass and glass

that they would choose? We might readily find out with a high degree of probability by holding a meeting of the maimed and injured and asking them what their fallen comrades would have liked this or that?

This idea of a stone sacrifice is very largely a modern development. Of course there have 'always' been monumental memorials, but they were generally direct records, a writing on a wall, or they were tombs. Now, tombs in antiquity were not simply monuments to the dead; they were eternal houses for those who were in some ghostly way living another kind of life. They were not mere memory memorials.

More self-conscious memorial monuments and pompous tombs came in with the Hellenistic decline. The great ‘mausoleum' of the semi-oriental satrap was soon followed by huge trophy monuments, triumphal arches, and sculptured memorial pillars. All these are heathen, imperial, and part of the apparatus of hypnotism by pomp. On the other hand, great and serious works of service have generally been associated with the thought of memorial purpose. It was known that only life can insure further life; only living grain can fructify.

Pericles rebuilt the sacred high city of Athens as a memorial of the Persian War. Alexander founded Alexandria as a memorial to himself. S. Sophia, Constantinople, was in some degree a memorial of the putting down of the Nika riots. So our own wise Alfred refounded London after withstanding the Danes. Most of the great works of men have been memorials, and all the greatest memorials have been aids to life. The earliest churches were martyr memorials.

In the Middle Ages the favorite memorial was abbey founding, and abbeys were experiments in community life.

At the Renaissance time colleges, schools, and almshouses were built. 'Almshouses'- the very word is memorially beautiful if we had not starved the meaning, so thin, bony, and grim cold as charity. Of modern time works Waterloo Bridge is very far the finest memorial we have; indeed, it is in a different category from 'memorials proper,' and is in its way perfect. Again, the Albert Hall is as much better than the Albert Memorial as it is more serviceable. Trafalgar Square is at least superior to the Nelson Column. Only reality can give the true monumental note.

If we think again of our need and purpose, there is an enormous volume of noble constructive work which is necessary to the life of the people, works from those of a national scale down to those suitable for our villages. The nation might consider some such schemes as the following:

1. Town and village rebuilding and reënlivening. A general effort after health, joy, and beauty; a policy of weal in place of 'wealth,' festivals, folk schools, eisteddfods, stadiums.

2. The establishment of a dozen new universities of experimental types, recognizing crafts, art, and all kinds of research, production, making, and doing.

3. National old-age hospitals in place of the feared and hateful workhouse infirmaries.

4. Country redemption and general tidying up, burying old tins, burning old paper, and tearing down insulting advertisements.

5. Making the railway system rational, efficient, and orderly: our stations and station yards must be nearly the worst in the world.

6. An Irish Channel tunnel and finely constructed railway to a port on the Atlantic. A really worthy gateway to the West, a British Appian Way.

7. The setting up of a Ministry for Civilization, which would recognize the need for national story, music, drama, and art, and give some attention to our wretched coins, stamps, public heraldry, and 'brilliant ceremonies.'

8. The rebuilding of the greater part of London.

9. The embanking and guiding our over-flooding rivers, and planting the wasteful hedges with fruit trees.

10. The organizing of summer camps attached to all large towns, where some of the experience gained during the war might be maintained.

Every county might experiment in building a new town. Every town might throw out a garden suburb. Every village might build at least one stout and neat little house which might be let to someone who has suffered. It would be perfectly easy to put a worthy commemorative inscription and list of names on such a building. Organized labor could make use of the memorial motive in founding a town for craft teaching and industrial research, also for experiments in well living in small houses. The ideal is certainly the house which could be worked without slavery and without the greasy waste and hidden squalor of rich houses. How best to live with the least consumption is an aim which might safely be put before all people when a time comes for considering possible ideals in civilization. Here, indeed, would be a fair field for the play of our competitive energies. We need a practice of economic experiment and research, health laboratories, group living, community hospitality, better cooking, and some human amusements which don't pay dividends. The material appliances of our civilization are altogether inadequate. We badly need Wisdom in her works. as well as in her words. We have to think of civilization as a whole, as an

ambition, as experiment. If we could establish a wisdom council on this one object of making worthy memorials, the precedent might widen, and it might at last be remembered that even government must recognize that it has to be more than an ‘administration.' Some day when we have learned not to slay ideals with our 'sense of humor' we may find it desirable to have a Minister for Civilization.

The ever accelerating momentum of modern life- or existence- has passed into eccentric orbits, and we seem to prefer to patch wreckage rather than to make a plain way. A special effort is necessary to find the bare data for rational production. It is hardly possible to get it understood that a 'work of art' is not a design thrown off by a genius, but it is a piece of honest work consecrated to a noble purpose. At least a work of art implies workmanship. Labor of course must be cast into appropriate forms, but the craftsmen saw to that before 'design' became the tastes and whims of middlemen. We have to wake to the understanding that nobody really cares for 'art' sterilities, and we are not even able to do them speciously well. After the mayor's speech at the unveiling function we turn our backs on our monuments, and never speak of them again; except of some which we make into whetstones to sharpen our wits, or rather our tongues.

Those strange peoples, the ancients, made memorials simply and directly, building their hearts into them. We have heart, too, but not frankness; we seek manner, not speech; and we spend our strength in preliminary anxieties, so that the works themselves are born tired.

The very names we call the 'styles' confess all. Designs in Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Gothic, Elizabethan, and

a chamber of horrors.

Ornamental design is dealing with signs and symbols, the saying of something in another mode of language. Our hope in some abstract beauty which shall say nothing, being without natural affection, meaning, feeling, heart, or head, is altogether vain. These designs in the grand manner' are pompous nullities, which only advertise that dulling of the spirit we call education. In seeking the beautiful nothing we seek a ghost which is not there. May we not sometime learn from our failures, and so make these, too, of worth? Must hope be always the bud of disappointment? A designer takes infinite pains to be quite safe and non-committal, and then committees sit on the 'design' till it has been finally made dull and dead.

The Hibbert Journal

torture of anxious committees. work of art courage is needed and an untired mind in the worker. Every fine. work is the embodied enthusiasm of maker poets-we cannot take fire from the cold ashes of committee compromises or the reflected flames of stylists.

We are not ready to produce works of art consciously poetic - wherefore again let us do things obviously useful for life's sake. Above all things the returned soldiers, or their widows and mothers when they return no more, need houses. Would not a pleasant, tidy little house in every village bearing on a panel,

MEMORIAL COTTAGE

and other words and names, be the most touching, significant, and beautiful of all possible monuments?

IRELAND is happy in her harbors. Anyone who has left on a summer evening the flat and forlorn shores of Lancashire, to arrive on a summer morning in Dublin Bay or Belfast Lough, will not need to be told this. As the boat enters Dublin Bay you see on the north the ould Hill of Howth' rising steeply out of the sea, and on the south Killiney Hill, 'with the spike on the top of it,' and the noble piers of Kingstown at the bottom of it; while in front of you the long sea walls of the Liffey run into the shallow water as the sea walls of the Porto di Lido run

into the sandy Adriatic. In the same way, on reaching the entrance of Belfast Lough, you have on your left hand the Copeland Islands with their lighthouses, and behind them the soft heavily-wooded hills of Down; and on the right hand the black cliffs and stern bare mountains of Antrim, with the castle of Carrickfergus standing in the sea like an Irish Château de Chillon. In both Bay and Lough you have a pearly sky above you and a pearly sea below you and a transparent haze all around you, through which you see on each side the little square thickly

hedged evergreen fields, and away in the distance the faint outlines shimmering in the early sun of the domes and spires of a great city. Travelers will always differ as to which of these scenes is the more fair; but travelers will always agree that both of them are superbly beautiful.

Both, too, have a close family likeness: they are true offspring of the Irish land, light, and air. Once, however, your boat glides out of the Bay and between the sea walls of the Liffey and out of the Lough and into the artificial channel of the Lagan, all family likeness ends. The cities about you are as different as cities in different lands could be. From between the Liffey walls you see a town which seems asleep, from the Lagan channel you see one which is obviously very wide awake.

As your boat creeps up to the North Wall, the object which is sure to attract your attention first is the Custom House. It is as big as I should think it is bigger than the Custom House of London; and it is ten times as magnificent. It always seems to be vacant, which is not strange, since it is ten times too big for its job: the customs duties collected in it are but a trifle as compared not with those collected in London, but with those collected in the little square house in Belfast. A few ships are lying about the quays, mostly small coasting craft; but there is little or no sign of the hurry and bustle of commerce. The cabs which come to meet the passengers from England are all antiquated jauntingcars or four-wheelers, drawn by even more antiquated horses. As you drive through the city to your hotel, most of the people you see seem to have nothing in particular to do, and those who may have (if there are any such) are certainly in no particular hurry to do it. Crowds of little unwashed shoe

less children play about the streets, watched from windows in high houses which were once the residences of the wealthiest in the land, by fat, unwashed, black-haired, blue-eyed mothers: the latter's favorite way of looking out is not by opening the window, but by putting their often comely heads through the paneless sashes. When you reach your hotel you are sure to be received with French politeness and effusiveness; and if you are patient, a porter will ultimately appear to carry your luggage to your room; and in time you will have breakfast served to you in a leisurely manner by a waiter who, if a native,- too frequently the waiters are not natives, but persons with a pronounced German accent who say they come from Switzerland,— will enter into a friendly and familiar chat with you as to the business or want of business which has brought you to Dublin: if it is nothing more than a quest for rest and change, then you will find all you want in the Irish capital. For just as the visitor from a busy land will find Dublin's population the most easy-going, so he will find Dublin's aspect the most marvelous of any great city in Western Europe-north, at any rate, of Venice.

As the visitor rambles about the city he will look in vain for the industries necessary to support its population. As a matter of fact, it has no industries of any consequence except the manufacture of whiskey, beer, and biscuits, and the proportion of the population these support is very small; but it has any number of military barracks, public offices, schools of learning, and charitable institutions, and it is on or through them that its people live. How so many people can live in such a way will puzzle you until you take a walk through its slums. Then you will see it is to a large extent by starv