of handwriting. The method of diagnosing them and of cure are so simple and efficacious that I noticed a real improvement in my own hand merely from reading the book. But when I undertook a specific study of my defects, using the scales, I was amazed at my deficiencies and in the rapidity of my self-correction. My style was pretty sick. It is doing better, thank you. The practice exercises, the compendium of business forms, the lessons on figures, the patterns for penlettering are given extended attention; but, as I said in the beginning, the book is especially notable in that it is a manual for the correction of writing in the higher grades where, alas, much that has been industriously gained is neglectfully lost."

The Public Asking Where School Money Goes. "Speaking of forms and figures," said Carolina, "the gentle Factotum has made an odd selection for me. I have been given a volume on bookkeeping for school officers.

It is intended for superintendents. But do you know, I think this bibliologoiI hope I pronounced it right-club of ours is a good preparation for a superintendency. So listen to me while I tell you what Mr. Peel says all good school people should do to be saved. You must know that school accounting is very easy to understand if you appreciate what it is for. It is to show at all times the condition of the finances, the sources and amount of revenue accrued and expected, expense incurred and anticipated. It must be complete and simple. Now things have come to a pass in this country that the school man and woman have to think of revenue and costs. Instead of being a missionary preaching that salvation is free, the manager of educational service is a trustee of the people's money. Education for him is and must be a matter of what can be given for a dollar and how the dollar can be secured to pay for education. Mr. Peel takes up the records of school money and avoids technical terms. He shows how the accounts may be of most use

Simplified School Accounting By ARTHUR J. PEEL. The Bruce Publishing Company, Milwaukee. 118 pp. $1.35.

in advising the public what it is spending for English, for mathematics, for music, etc.; how the taxes are becoming a threatening problem, the urgent need of cost-accounting in educational matters, and other things you and I should know. By a simple scheme of code-numbers and a monthly voucher register, Mr. Peel keeps out of school management the commonest kinds of poor business practice. He makes 'overhead distribution' plain even to me, an English teacher, and he certainly does show that cost accounting in school business is greatly in need of the accurate treatment he illustrates in intelligible detail. I read the book through. It did not bore me. I lent it to my principal. He says it's a tip-top treatise. He ought to know, for he is actively willing to be made an assistant superintendent in our system."

How North America Happened.-"I lost my turn when you were reporting on Europe," ventured John Falk, the mathematics professor, with the accent on the "the." "I have a charming book1 appertaining to geography. It is by one of the most entertaining talkers in the world, David Starr Jordan, assisted by Miss Cather, a spirited classroom teacher. I heard Doctor Jordan once talk as he does here. It was up in New Hampshire when I was a Dartmouth student. I was working for a summer hotel company. We took about twenty guests on an excursion up a mountain valley. After we had eaten a picnic luncheon the company got the distinguished savant to preach a little scientific sermon on how things around us happened to be as they are. With the mountains, and chasms, and streams as texts he gave one of the most fascinating talks I ever heard. This book started from a conversation on the publisher's porch overlooking the lordly Hudson and the purple Palisades. Doctor Jordan told the Hodgson children how the landscape was formed. The publisher asked for a book on the formation

'High Lights on Geography. by DAVID STARR JORDAN and KATHERINE DUNLAP CATHER. World Book Company, Yonkers, New York. 358 pp.

of other portions of the globe. Here you have it: The Yellowstone, Shasta, the Great Lakes, our different rivers, bad lands, the Grand Canyon, Cape Cod, Sandy Hook, and scores of other picturesque places. It's a dynamic geography with life and motion. The stories of the plant and animal and human life on our continent and the changes through the ages are fascinating. Doctor Jordan says the book is for young folks of the age of ten to fourteen when their curiosity is keen. I am four times fourteen but the book charms me."

What Are These "Dangers from Within" We Hear so Much About?-The Factotum asked permission to participate. "We seem to be a pretty positive party," he said, "in that none of us has had much but praise for any of the volumes we have talked about. This may be owing to the fact that the crop of professional books is running to a high grade this year. Also the publishers of the EDUCATIONAL REVIEW send to our club only selected volumes. Furthermore, I do look the books over with some care before I dole them out to you. Lastly, and most important, all of you have been hand-picked for this flower garden because you haven't gone to seed.

"You are the sort that radiates the perfume of your minds for the pleasure of the inhalers. Each of you has confessed that plus legendum applies. Legendum et loquendum is directly in accord with modern experimental psychology. If you want your reading to stick, talk about it. Talk of books must be encouraged. Loquendum tends to faciendum.'

"But not to end 'em," broke in Carolina, which being designed to amuse, and she being a lady, brought a laugh.

"I have here," continued Papa Rose, "what I regard as one of the most-needed books of the year. It is by a scholar of national repute, a Chicagoan personally known to all of you. Harry Pratt Judson addresses himself to the future of our republic. You noticed on the way here.

Our Federal Republic.-By HARRY PRATT JUDSON. The Macmillan Company, New York, 277 pages. $3.00.

tonight a hanging scaffold in front of the ten-story building on this side of the street. Experts are examining the steel beams and the brick and stone of the construction. There is no immediate danger confronting that building. The company which owns it has regular inspections of it made from time to time to ascertain what, if any, dangers threaten it. If you are like the average teacher of my acquaintance you regard the United States as so firmly built upon the rock that no one needs to have any concern about the perpetuity of the American nation. Maybe not. And then, again, maybe not but so. Dr. Judson offers here a remarkable survey of the national framework, the Constitution. He takes up the essential principles of it. He discusses the attempts of a hundred and thirty-eight years to patch and tinker it. How many propositions to amend the Constitution do you think have been introduced into Congress? Twenty-five hundred! Would you have believed it? Thirteen hundred belong to our first hundred years. Twelve hundred have been introduced in our last thirty-eight years. Seven of the 2500 have been adopted. The main thought running through the narrative of these years is the idea of the Constitution as a union of States not a centralized government concerned directly with citizens. Its equilibrium between state and national governments runs the risk of being disregarded. Additional power seized by Congress, attacks upon the Supreme Court, threaten to undermine the structure, and to substitute a centralized management from Washington, degrading the states into something of the position of French outlying districts to Paris.

"It is a remarkably readable volume. It has those old fashioned, very convenient, marginal analyses of paragraphs. This makes the recapitulation of your reading easy and not likely to be neglected. Large questions, involving our living together as a nation, are illuminated by references to precedents and principles. About forty pages are devoted to the Alcohol question.

Child labor is considered at length. The efforts to establish a Federal department of education with a secretary in the President's cabinet comes out of Dr. Judson's treatment looking sadly in need of repair. The weighty question by which all these proposals should be tested is this: The powers are reserved to the states. In our haste to benefit an unwilling multitude of our fellow citizens are we justified in abandoning state responsibility, substituting for it congressional powers over citizens of unwilling states? Is is not our duty patiently to labor to educate public opinion in each state to institute the improvements within its own borders? The situation is complicated by the influence of events in our own history: the unsuccessful effort to induce states to abolish negro slavery; violations of the American principle and subsequent benefits from them; indisputably high motives of earnest reformers so impatient as to be willing to destroy the Government. The Constitution was enacted as an escape from tyranny. It guarded the usurpation of power by the chief executive. Present tendencies are toward a tyranny by Congress.

"This book considers so fully what every citizen should know, it reads so easily, that I would not hesitate to require it as a theme for discussions by every high-school faculty reading club in America."

him; but the tragic thing is that the hired man has to teach the master what civic morality is. The book' the Factotum handed me fits my mood like one of Mrs. Rose's wonderful chairs, outside and cheese sandwiches, inside. It's Dudley Foulke's reminiscences of Theodore Roosevelt and civil service reform. This could have been made a very dignified and respectable narration. It fairly hollers with good American enthusiasm. It quickens your blood with its manly courage, and tickles your ribs with its humor. I haven't had any trouble from our suburban conservatives for three weeks, so I'm going to introduce this book as supplementary reading just to hear the Democrats howl. I'm a Democrat myself and like all the real ones I cheer every time Roosevelt's name is mentioned. Listen to this: 'The Evening Post informed him that it intended to stop criticising him and give him more support. Roosevelt wrote: 'I'm glad of that on account of the Post; for myself I don't care a rap whether the Post supports me or not.'

"If I had my way I'd have all the publicschool superintendents study this book and practise it. The reforms Roosevelt got into the Post Office, the Customs House, the other business departments of the Government, haven't gone far enough into the schools. Superintendents are dreaming of engagement and promotion of teachers for merit while thousands of schoolboard members are working night and day to put in friends and favorites by pull. Read the delicious passages in which Roosevelt describes the wobbling of Harrison, Wanamaker, and McKinley. Senator Gorman quotes a question in one of Roosevelt's examinations as an evidence of the absurdity of the whole system. Slap, bang, Roosevelt comes back at him with a demand that he name the examination, or find the question or any man who ever saw such a question in any civil-service examination paper. Foulke, who served with him on the national commission, says Roosevelt had a most elevated

1Roosevelt and the Spoilsmen.-By WILLIAM DUDLEY FOULKE. National Civil Service Reform League, 8 W. 40th St.,

sense of fair play. He would follow the suggestions of his colleagues to the extent of reversing his decisions when shown that individual injustice was resulting. But when urged to soft-pedal by politicians in the highest places he was gloriously mulish. He made Mat Quay withdraw, under threat of prosecution, a circular inviting contribution for political campaigns from civil service employees. Many a time he had to play a lone hand against the bigwigs. 'I wish,' he wrote, regarding Harrison, 'the President would give me a little, even verbal, encouragement.' 'I am willing to be turned out, but while in, I mean business.' That's the spirit for a school superintendent with a political board. That's the kind of superintendent I have. But they'll get him yet. They mostly do. We've got to have a lot of martyrs before we can make a national campaign for that in school circles which Roosevelt secured in other government business. Foulke was dining with him when a messenger from Wanamaker came with an improper demand. Roosevelt said: 'You may tell the Postmaster General from me that I don't like him for two reasons. In the first place he has a very sloppy mind. In the next place he doesn't tell the truth.' Looking back on his experience in getting employment free from political pull he wrote: 'At any rate I did all I could to stop collection of political assessments and I have the profound gratification of knowing that there is no man

more bitterly disliked by many of the men of my own party.' At another time he said: 'Many of the spoilsmen are efficient and fearless, able to strike hard blows. In consequence supporters of decency must have brains and grit. It's fortunate we do not lack this kind.' It's fortunate for the school that we have Finegans, Wests, Van Sickles, Ettingers, and others. They take their jobs in their hands and fight for the integrity of an American school system. When they are kicked out the shrivel-souled worshippers of diplomacy and job-holding say: "They were obstinate'; 'They stood so straight they fell over backwards.' Every one that falls hastens the day of honest school administration. Foulke's book is a good nerve tonic. I recommend it to all school superintendents."

After much interested questioning of the reviewers by one another and by unassigned bibliologoi, there was brought in a shining samovar under which William the Stevedore, cunning artificer of handy things, had adjusted a many-wicked alcohol lamp. Soon the more beautiful of the Roses, even the Lady Alice, was dealing sandwiches, while Carolina and Anne of Norway dispensed tea or chocolate, as you willed. Outside, the moon silvered the ice in the harbor; a distant blare told us to drink somebody's tea, and a bright eye on the pier at the river mouth winked at us cheerily until we went home.

it.

-PAUL KLAPPER