stolen. One of the stretcher-bearers from the City Hospital company was detected trying to carry off the marble tops of the furniture. Just think, the marble tops of the furniture! All the rooms of the administration building are empty. Men are going from one room to another. Baby-carriages are constantly passing out without being inspected, under the pretext of taking away cabbages.

Thursday evening, under the glow of a magnesium light, our special train lumbered slowly out of the station. We traveled all day long. We were nearly frozen. Three hogs and two goats were to be killed to feed our passengers. We might have been abundantly provided. What happened to them finally? We spent a day at the freight station at Würzburg. I took a walk through the street. A red flag was flying over the palace. A red flag in broad daylight! Posters were pasted on the columns signed, "The Republican City Commander.' What sort of a world are we entering? For several days no

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papers have been received except the local Würzburg paper, which bears the motto, 'Away from Berlin.' The Clericals are speculating upon Bavarian national pride and employing the Berlin Terror to gain their ends.

Wednesday we reached Berlin. I went to the ceremonies in honor of those who fell during the, revolution in Potsdam Place. On the way a Social Democrat procession passed me. There was a red flag in front. Respectably clad, peaceful men and women followed, singing the 'Marseillaise.' I got the impression of a little local society outing. The crowd in Potsdam Place was not as large as usual on such occasions. The procession marched through the whole city to Friedrich's Grove. The long column carried wreaths with red ribbons and red flags and proletarian mottoes. These are the only evidences of a revolution. It is merely an oldfashioned bourgeois celebration on a gigantic scale.

I must have time to adjust myself to all this.

ABOUT two years ago Miss Mason, at Ambleside, told me of the new method of education which had been started in a Yorkshire school. She was keenly interested in the experiment, believing that it had very great possibilities, and she asked me, when I could, to visit the school. The method, she told me, was to teach children by the humanities' - that is, by giving them really good English literature and by getting them to read this in considerable quantity, taking a whole book, or a whole period of history, or a whole play or long poem, a plan which was recommended by Matthew Arnold when a School Inspector nearly fifty years ago. Further, no snippets or selections were to be allowed, and no memorizing of lessons. The child was to form its own mental picture of the scenes read, and thus to keep them in its mind.

Accordingly, I visited Drighlington School, Bradford. Here I found that from the lowest forms upward- and in the lowest form of all not all the children are able to read the teaching was being done in all literary subjects by the teachers reading with clear enunciation and in an interested manner, at first about half a page, increasing in quantity as the child advanced in capability, until some five pages or so would be read, of a book of sufficient interest to arrest. This must only be read once that is the great point and then a child is called on to stand

up and say back again what it has just heard; in one lesson or another each child in turn is called on to take up its parable, and it is most amusing to see how eager they all are to be selected for narration; and as they all know that it will only be read to them once, they can't afford not to attend and so lose their only chance. Hence, a habit of close attention, which soon gives each child the power of fixing and retaining in its mind anything it hears. 'Moreover, as in their narrative they use the very words of the book, with occasional breaks into their own natural home language, they soon form their sentences on the style of the book, and so, since only good literature is supplied, they begin to speak and write in a cultivated and excellent manner.

Miss Mason started with the assumption the truth of which the new method has proved to be wellgrounded that the mind of every normal child is of much the same quality, though of different calibre, and capable of receiving the same training and producing very similar results, quite irrespective of the social class to which the child belongs. In short, that mental powers have no reference to class, the only difference being in individuals.

Then it was laid down that each child is a person, and to be treated as such, and looked upon as able to assimlate any good mind-food presented

to it and to feel delight in so doing. Every child's natural curiosity makes it eager for new knowledge, and fresh knowledge brings fresh joy and fresh power, and Bacon's dictum is seen to hold good, that 'Studies are for delight'

a theory which becomes an admitted fact when you see, as I have often done, the keen looks of happy expectancy on the faces of the whole class.

The usual elementary-school teaching doubtless imparts some knowledge and gives some sort of pleasure to a minority both of the teachers and the taught, but it brings with it also, to the majority of the children, a sense of weariness and a feeling of 'What is the use of all this?' The idea that you must by constant repetition of the facts hammer them into the unwilling as well as into the willing mind is one which must be got rid of entirely if learning is to advance and to give delight; but if once you bring yourself to believe that the child's mind, when fed with the proper mind-food, is able to form its own judgments and to make its own comparisons, the teacher is relieved of a vast amount of labor and the child begins to inform itself. As Miss Gardner puts it, 'Parents and teachers must stand a hand-breadth off and give the children room to develop.' Of course it still remains the teacher's business to see that the child knows; but instead of hammering it into him or spoon-feeding him with such little snippets and mincemeat of various subjects as it is thought that the child can most easily digest, the principle of the new method is to see that the child reads and so teaches himself. And the child does read; and experience shows that there need be no limits set to his power of reading, and the pleasure and knowledge that he gets from it, provided he gets the right sort of books. The children in the

elementary schools I have visited, in order to study the new method, actually read to themselves in school over two thousand pages of good literature and well-written books in one term; and they read them with pure delight and know what they have read. This is tested by a week's examination at the end of the term, the examination being not used for marks or placing, but simply as a test to see if the child has assimilated what it has read and kept it in mind. Of course, much depends on the selection of the books. At present Miss Mason has undertaken to set out a schedule of books to be read each term, and from the list it will be seen that there is no fear entertained of overburdening the child's mind. Quantity is required as well as quality, to satisfy the urgent and ever-increasing call of the child for more mind-food of many kinds. The Bible, Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, the English Poets, Classical Mythology; Fairy Tales, History (English, French, and General), Travel, Citizenship, Natural History, Botany, all are studied with eagerness, for the children are keen to gather knowledge, and delight (this is fact, not fancy) in feeling daily that they have learned something fresh. All these subjects are taught from books, and all but the youngest children read the books for themselves. The only subjects taught orally are Mathematics, Languages, and English Grammar. When I first visited one of these schools I was struck at once with the quiet way in which the girls were working. I passed from one class to another, and in one room I heard a teacher read to the class in a clear and interested voice a few pages of a book by Andrew Lang, which was then narrated by one or two of the girls in an almost faultless manner. They not only gave the sense and substance, but in the main the very words which they had just heard, and

they spoke clearly and in a cultivated manner. Personally, I always regret the disappearance of dialect, but the people in the North, where dialect is strongest, have a great respect for the cultivated form of speaking. Mr. Smith, the able head teacher of the Wyke boys' school in Bradford, gives instances of the dialect peeping out when a child wishes to be very graphic in its description: e.g., from the Frog Prince, 'wherivver she went she allus fun the frog anent her,' and again a child having interrupted a reading to ask what was the meaning of 'vanished,' another excited child said 'Shut up, tha't spoiling t' story; "vanished," of course,

"mizzled." All were eager to do some narrating, and keen to make any correction or supply any link which the narrator missed. I never saw a class so universally eager and brightlooking. Long classical or geographical names seem to have no terror for these girls. In the lowest forms a long difficult word is written for them on the blackboard, but in the upper classes they read to themselves, and when they have looked at and visualized the word they can see it with their eyes shut. The teacher, when reading to the class, often says, 'Now shut your eyes,' and she reads a description to which they listen, and make a mental picture of it far more real and satisfying to each child than the picture in a book, which is, after all, somebody else's idea and not their own. It is thus mainly, that is, by mental pictures of the words which they have looked at and visualized, that they learn to spell; and in the examination papers, of which I have seen a great many, there is little fault to be found with the spelling. The children don't forget either what they read or what they hear read. On one occasion they asked me to read something from the play As You Like It. I said, 'Choose your own bit,' and they did

not hesitate a moment, and seemed to enjoy thoroughly the scene they listened to. On revisiting the school about two months later, four of the girls, at their own request, repeated the scene to me, and spoke it very well. In another school I have heard boys of ten go through a scene from Shakespeare, not without dramatic action, one singing the song which came in his part, and all being word-perfect in their parts; and this, the teacher told me, was not part of the school work, but they had learned and acted it of themselves at home. Here, too, a scene recited by the girls of the top class was done with animation and with particularly good enunciation and pleasant voices. This is one of the results of dwelling with good literature and hearing it well read, for, as Solomon says, "The sweetness of the lips increaseth learning.'

Children who are feeble-minded pick up under this method, and become able to take their place in class and enjoy it. I saw one little girl who used to go about with mouth open and sad eyes; but nine months at Drighlington had made her as bright a little creature as the rest, and able to narrate as well as another. Several other instances have been given me of remarkable improvement in these backward children under this method in different West Riding schools. Indeed, one of the good points of the method is that it is not rigid; slow children are not worried; at first they progress slowly by listening, but always, without exception, they show improvement during the second term. And it is recognized that a little knowledge absorbed by a backward child of itself is worth much oral instruction mechanically received.

The schedule of the year's work, made out last August by a head teacher in one of the Bradford schools, shows that between August of 1916