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POLEMOMETER For History Texts. Many are the times you have heard speaker in convention declare our school histories to be too warlike. How warlike are they? Along comes the Association for Peace Education (William B. Owen, President; Lydia M. Schmidt, Secretary; 5733 Blackstone Avenue, Chicago) and puts a measuring scale on school histories. Professors John Munroe and Ralph Henry, Carleton College, Minnesota, and Professor J. M. McElhannon, Baylor College, Texas, were employed to conduct the scoring. They were admonished to go at it scientifically and statistically without any propaganda complex and to keep pacifists away from the scorers. The Association offers access to all the details of the study. The analysis is furnished at twelve cents a copy. Twenty-four history texts and twenty-four supplementary readers were measured for quantity and quality of war stuff, words, and pictures. How many words and how many square inches of war pictures, how much of peace praise does each book contain? The report tells you. You see it also blocked out in graphs. You are told what percentage of the contents of your McMaster, your Guitteau, your Montgomery, Mace, Beard, Bagley, Gordy, and Hart is war provocative and what percentage promotive of peace. The readers common in schools run from no per cent to 100 per cent war provocative. Peace propaganda compared with belligerency in the graphs is almost microscopic. After all the tremendous waste of life and labor through the barbaric stupidity of war,

War Suggestion in Schools. In 1870 there was on the walls of schools north of Mason and Dixon's line, a noticeable number of pictures of battle scenes and generals. General Robert E. Lee was represented in most southern schools. Later the famous Spirit of '76, with the drums and fifes and bloody bandage was a favorite. I haven't seen it in a schoolroom for over ten years. Chicago schools have the most numerous framed-picture display of any city in the country. It is extremely rare to find a battle or a general. But in the yard of the high school of Suffern, New York, there is an amazing cannon pointed at you as you walk from the street to the front door. I asked the county school superintendent what the idea was and he said: "It's a fool idea!" That's that.

You may be sure that the instinctive desire to perpetuate the war spirit is strong among us when so many congressmen negotiate the sending of discarded ordnance from the arsenals to their home towns and get them set up in the public parks. If one

were to examine the park concept in the average human mind he would find it composed pretty much of the ideas of peace, beauty, rest, and enjoyment free from strife. By what course of reasoning a municipality persuades itself to put in such a place an instrument of violent death, is hard to come at. There are thousands of statues in the United States accompanied by a gun or a sword. They satisfy the same sort of appetite that leads men and boys to pay an admission fee to chambers of horrors where may be seen, among other things, the actual sledge with clotted blood and hair, a souvenir of the famous murder.

Old man Weston, in the town I used to live in, had his life saved by the removal of his gangrened leg. He bought of the surgeon the knife and bone-saw used in the operation. They are displayed in a glass case in Weston's parlor. A cannon is about as handsome. It saved the nation, maybe. But, O, Christian, who in your church on Sunday read with fervor: "and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more," why don't you melt these war mementos and cast ornamental lamp-posts or stop-lights to prevent slaughter by automobiles?

The Use of Intelligence is not Cowardice. Ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine teachers are opposed to any influence which by suggestion tends to undo their laborious service:-the mission that was Christ's-"to bring life and to bring it abundantly." Carnage and its symbols are abhorrent to education. Not by blood and iron but by the votes of majorities is the future of mankind to be glorified. As the settlement of disagreement between men by means of knife or ball is an outrage upon what schools teach, education takes as its mission the urge toward international agreement to outlaw warfare except in self defense. To join with the nations of the world in maintaining peace, to grant the need of an armed police, of an international

league, to preserve order, to accept as necessary for such police, effective munitions, the average American teacher agrees. But to believe that such preparedness requires an adumbration of glory or that past barbaric necessities must be attractively drilled into the minds of school children, is not a part of the equipment of the present-day schoolmaster. Owen's association, in showing that twentieth-century school books haven't outgrown the instincts of barbarism, is putting scientific measurement to a good purpose. Here is commendation for it-and with no sympathy toward any feminization of our school boys, either. We're with the virile gentlemen in Washington who believe we can abrogate fool practices between nations without any loss of manliness or courage.

A Beauty Contest for School Buildings would find Denver giving other contestants much concern. Look at the pictures at the opening of the magazine. You will see the East High School, the new home of the oldest high school in Colorado. George H. Williamson designed it. Its style, English Jacobean, is reminiscent of Oxford and especially adapted for a school because of the expansive window spacing possible. The warm red tints of the brick and the light gray of the terra cotta harmonize exquisitely. Robert Speer, Denver's apostle of beauty, conceived the esplanade and induced two citizens to erect the memorials with Lentelli's pioneer groups, and to give the fountain surmounted by Lorado Taft's beautiful representation of Colorado. The clock tower is one of the most beautiful achievements of our time. It rises at the end of an avenue and dominates the scene.

Dorus Hatch of the faculty of this school who has known Colorado education nearly from its beginning wrote this lyrical description for the dedication exercises when the school was completed a short time ago:

"East' is on high ground. From this building we may see from the Wyoming Laramies well nigh to the Spanish Peaks

a hundred miles of the unbroken front of a

mighty mountain range.

"To the east-the arc of this mountain chord is the graceful curve of the horizon. "Following the streams are broad bands of fertile fields.

"Nearer are the temples man has builded; many to the gods of his business activities; some to the invisible God and for the betterment of men.

"Closer still are the softer beauties of the park and esplanade.

"Thus set about with the wonders of God's handiwork and encircled by the fruits of man's toil, stands the new 'East' an enduring monument to the civic aspirations of this community.

"What is it that is now so nobly housed? A spiritual edifice, a house not made with hands, a structure of ideas and ideals, ideals of conduct, of scholarship, of beauty, of culture, of sacrifice, of service; an institution whose office it is to beat back the blight of ignorance and push far the frontiers of knowledge. Truly, 'East' is on high ground. "Whence came the elements of this spiritual structure? Of an institution it is sometimes said that it is but the lengthened shadow of one man. Not so, of 'East.' Among the units of this complex, we needs must count the community urge, which has sought for itself better things; the efforts of

hundreds of teachers, who have given unstinted service.

"Four men have contributed most: Baker, Smiley, Barrett, Hill are names which should hereabouts be graven in stone. Denver has not stinted the measure with which she built the material structure neither did they stint in expenditure of learning, of love, of sympathy, of energy; these have made 'East' a mighty force in the upbuilding of character. Each brought his generous share to the erection of the spiritual edifice which is the real habitant of this building. Each has given and given generously of the best that God gave him.

"From all directions and from many lands come the tributes of praise for the services these men have rendered.

"Of a truth, 'East' is on high ground."

Jesse Newlon, the Superintendent of Schools, put me in charge of Denver's favorite schoolmaster, William Smiley, for a tour around and through this last word in school houses. Both men hold to this doctrine: the beautification of cities by royal edict whereby the ruler shows his magnificence may well be equaled in a democracy in glorification of a sovereign people. Let a school teach beauty to all the people and by its admirable exterior, as well as by its inside service, awaken honest civic pride.