should wish each year at a designated time to have this Holy Grail enacted until it became accepted as a traditional ceremonial of the institution.

The Speaker Entreats the Courtesy of Occupied Front Seats. Once I saw a teachers' convention in McKeesports and once one in Sioux City, assemble so that those entering the hall proceeded directly to the front seats. At no time during the arrival of the audience were there any empty chairs in front of anybody. Did you ever see that done? How do you account for it? It is an exhibition of coöperative courtesy that affects speakers on the program with a cheering sense of welcome. I should like to think it spontaneous, but these two cities offer so striking a contrast to general usage that I think they must illustrate foresight on the part of some good-hearted manager solicitous for the reputation of his listeners. So often have I heard educational meetings opened with the dismal exhortation: "Will those in the rear please come forward," that I have come to expect this dampener before beginning, as one looks for an apology before the remarks of a speaker who is so poor a talker that his discourse is its own sufficient belittlement. History is full of anecdotes of calls for volunteers to exploits of great danger, followed by such an oversupply of offers that commanding officers have had to fight their own men back and to face unpopularity by picking the few. I have seen a number of pictures of prizefights and never once with empty seats in front. In Scranton, Pennsylvania, I was once invited to address high school teachers on the teaching of current history. The publishers of World's Work, those of the Outlook, and those of the Literary Digest, supplied me with copies of their magazines to illustrate my talk. The convention was in a large study hall with desks. I went to it before the hour of meeting and distributed upon the empty forms my "literature." In each magazine on each of the ten front desks I slipped a clean, crisp dollar bill. In the course of my choice remarks upon the desirability of interest in

one's profession and on the woeful backwardness of us professors, I gathered up the ten untouched magazines and showed the participants, who as usual had avoided the front seats, the treasure untrove between the leaves. I had two more talks in Scranton and not an empty premier tier.

There was a delightfully eccentric man in Pittsburgh, Barshear. You've heard of him, able, different, alert, intensely public-spirited. Henry Phipps gave him money to advance public schooling in that hustling city. Barshear, by circular, informed the teachers that a patriotic citizen had given a generous fund the earnings of which were to be devoted to the advancement of the public schools. Barshear invited teachers to make suggestions. A handful replied. With delicate humor Barshear divided the first year's interest among the few respondents. Then letters of apology and explanation began to pour in upon him. "If," said Barshear, "the teachers of Pittsburgh would apply as much ingenuity to devising effective teaching as they have devoted to making excuses, Pittsburgh would be the educational Mecca of the universe." That is the way the story was told to me. I can't verify it. Barshear is dead. But it fits so truly into what I do know of having to exhort those in the rear to come forward that there is no invidious condemnation of Pittsburgh teachers in it; they're like me, and, maybe, you and the general run of us-never educated up to the voluntary spirit of the group at ChâteauThierry, or of Mr. Craig's staff when that comptroller of New York was billed to deliver public addresses.

Did you ever attend a ward meeting in a large city? I never saw the members of the party settling in the back seats. Once I saw a fight for the front row. Oh, yes, I know the motive is different. What strikes me regarding the front seats at educational meetings is that there isn't any motive at all. I complimented a lone man at South Bend for his front-seat cordiality. He said "I'm almost stone deaf." In the large hall in Boston, where the surrounding counties hold their conventions, the noise of the chatting in

the rear is so conspicuous that I have seen the chairman stop the speaker until the manager could abate the nuisance. In a Wisconsin State association meeting I once attended, the executive committee had to arrange ingenious coupon devices to get a considerable number into the hall as against the moving picture shows. The school board of New Bedford for some years withdrew its approval from teachers' conventions on the ground that too many people used the time for going to shows. William Maxwell, when Superintendent of New York schools, sometimes opposed sending principals and supervisors to conventions, the reason being that they spent the time loafing in the corridors of hotels. William Ray, an enthusiastic advocate of school conferences, secured from treasurer Purdy of the Rock Island Railroad the gift of tickets to an educational meeting at Elgin. Ray's teachers visited the condensed-milk plant and the watch factory and kept away from the sessions. Those incidents are not typical of present-day conventions. The attendance is better. Quartettes, glee clubs, professional entertainers are still used as lures. Imagine a medical congress opening with a sleight-of-hand show! The V. A. Q. (voluntary attendance quotient) is larger than in 1882. But the majority of meetings start with the urge to come forward. How about Chicago? We choose a smaller hall, issue more tickets than it holds, and fill all the seats by what the physicists know as convection.

What difference does it make where you sit? It affects the program. If you put a speaker up with a barrier of empty benches between him and his audience it chills him to the marrow. It is as if you invited him to be your guest and, when he rang the front doorbell, all the family remained in the back of the house. You, as chairman; you, as executive committee; ask here and there who are good lively speakers for your convention. You play them up in your program and in

your local papers. Then you blunder year after year into the same stupid error of wetblanketing your meeting at the start. The whole thing is lack of breeding, lack of planning, lack of hospitality, lack of management, lack of ordinary gumption. You stop too soon. The choice of a speaker, the booming of him in print, is a woefully truncated effort if you let a considerable part of your audience sit back under a gallery so that your speaker must tear his vocal chords to tatters yelling across a barren waste to a twilight zone where he can't see to whom he is talking. Often have I observed Brainard Kellogg, after calling out, "Mahomet is coming to the mountain," leave the platform and talk from the aisles rather than endure the depressing effect of empty seats.

The whole thing is so easily cured that no superintendent has any excuse for permitting it.

Let your notice read: "The speakers are our guests. We desire to show them the courtesy of hearty hospitality. Few things signify this better than front seats filled with fine people like you. Empty benches between a speaker and his audience discourage even the most hardened orator. Will you be polite enough to observe this rule: No one will take another seat while there is an empty one in front?"

row.

The Washington Irving teachers, New York, used to observe that usage. William Felter used to have fancy ropes fencing off all aisles from back to front except the front When that was filled the ushers released the next row and so on from front to back. Mary Bergen, at meetings in her school auditorium, had an abundance of teacher ushers with smiles so sweet that they mesmerized the worst grouch in town clear down to the bald-headed row.

It doesn't matter much how you do it so long as you do it. Get your educational meetings cleansed of that dreadful blight: "Will those in the rear please come forward?"

Just now the real and the pseudo cultured of this country are reveling in the charm of line, the beauty of wood and the interesting cabinet work of early American furniture.

Whether the present interest in antiques be real or assumed, the demand has led to a revival of enthusiasm and wholesale reading and investigation, which has revealed the advantages of the old over the new.

Now it may be that some of the old fashioned educational methods are good enough to become the mode today.

It might be found, upon close scrutiny, that the real wood was much more profitable even though a bit battered, than the more flashy veneer, with its tendency to chip.

We confess to a lively curiosity as to the feelings of the majority of Meriden's teachers, regarding the ever increasing features of the curriculum.

Is it mentally and physically possible for either children or teachers to masticate all the pabulum that the ultra new curricula carry?

Is it worth while to spread culture so thinly that the fundamentals are lost and the frills only partially functioning?

Does the smattering of knowledge on so many subjects; the touching of the surface, instead of digging beneath, accomplish much of lasting worth?

Is there not possibility of cultivating a "movie mind," a see it-now-and-gone-forever effect, which precludes thoroughness and stability?

The fact will intrude that there are signs indicating that there is a lot of lost motion and little character building in a scheme of things which spreads knowledge over such wide territory that it can be only surface deep.

Would not the child mind be stronger if it were not compelled to take so many impressions in so short a time?

Can a teacher do her best when every hour is dovetailed with hosts of different things which admit of no concentration on any one?

Might it not be wise to take stock and see if Connecticut as well as California could not afford to give up some of its courses in the effort to master fundamentals?

Two Fool Questions Often Up This will please you if you are still confronted with these medieval problems. It It will delight you if you are in a happy community which has solved them. It is the

meditation of the editor of the Boston Herald:

If any sensational newspaper in this city wants an issue to talk about, it can certainly attract attention by agitating two questions: the employment of married women as school teachers, and the employment of non-residents, either married or single, in that capacity. We have been overwhelmed with letters on these two points because we ventured to admit one. We shall print no more of them after today's instalment, because we have little sympathy with the cause; but hundreds of people are deeply concerned over it, particularly other teachers in the schools.

Listen to this letter, the author of which offers to furnish his name for publication: "A greater penalty should be provided by law for school teachers who keep trained people from positions by not disclosing their marriage."

A good man in Codman square furnishes the names and addresses of four teachers in the Boston schools who come from one family in Quincy; four from a family in Natick—all living there— and corresponding lists from families in Cambridge and Holliston. Such complaints have many variants. Sometimes the teacher has, according to these writers, a good income from other sources and is only teaching in order to get a little more money to spend; she may go back and forth in a limousine. Sometimes she keeps a place by the power and pull of her relatives in other parts of the educational system. At least, so the letters run. There are allegations of actual marriage where none is disclosed.

We are convinced that a great deal of feeling exists on these issues within the school service, and that if one were to open the lid the pot would boil furiously. Fundamentally, two theories of public service are at stake. One is, that public positions are semi-gratuities to be passed around, and that it is wrong for too many to have them in one family. The other theory is that service rendered is the test, and that it is relatively inconsequential how many persons come from one family or where they see fit to live. The latter would be the policy of any private business enterprise. The telephone company would not be shocked to learn that it was employing four members of one family in Quincy, Natick or Holliston, provided they reached their respective posts with reasonable regularity. Nor would it care whether

the women were married if they were able to give

to their business duties normal and expected attention.

In the long run we believe this theory is better for the public service, more wholesome in its effects, than the other. And so for this reason we wish to apologize to the authors of these numerous missives for not taking up with more vigor the cause which they invite us to present.

Adjusting the Payments for Teaching So long as the prices of what they eat and wear go up, so long must teachers keep an eye on salary schedules. It is a good thing for a town to have a paper like the Newark, New Jersey, Evening News which is not hesitant to present the case in a business-like

manner:

In submitting their request to the Board of Education for an increase of $1,000 a year in maximum salaries, the high school teachers hark back to 1907 to find a comparison with present day conditions in their economic lives.

This class of teachers helps to form what may be termed the cream of the teaching staff of the public schools, next only to superintendents, supervisors and principals-for which posts, incidentally, high school teachers are ineligible under the present system.

The salary range for high school teachers in Newark now is from $2,700 to $4,400 for heads of departments and from $2,100 to $3,800 for assistant heads. This represents about fifty-two per cent. more than was paid the same groups in 1907, whereas, they assert through their own spokesman, they ought to be receiving double their 1907 salaries.

In purchasing power, they feel they are receiving actually lower pay, by something like fortytwo per cent., than was paid for the same service, and in many instances to the same teachers in 1907.

When more than four fifths of the men high school teachers are engaged in some form of outside employment, the reasonable inference is that they are compelled to seek this part-time. employment in order to piece out their incomes. They do not receive sufficient from the pursuit of their regular occupations to enable them and their dependents to live as they feel they ought to live. Most of the male teachers are married.

Whether their dual occupations affect their value as school teachers might be problematical; it might be a question affecting the individual. It does, however, affect the question of dependents as the male teacher has to meet it. It does

not affect so much the unmarried female teacher. The question of equal standards of work and pay is involved. It has been suggested, tentatively, that this phase of the salary problem might be treated somewhat as the question of dependents is met in income tax payment, by a system of allowances with respect to the number thereof.

The high school groups are not the only teachers dissatisfied with the present rates of compensation. Superintendent Corson informs the Board of Education of requests from almost every group of teachers working for the board. Obviously, the best action under the circumstances is general revision.

Newark pays its teachers better than most other cities. As to maximum allowances, it is less liberal than New York, although it has to compete with that city. With regard to minimum salaries, Newark compares favorably with the best and biggest of cities. But the increases now being sought are mostly as to the maximums, and it is proposed to get such increases by stages, covering several years, which would not make too abrupt a change from the point of view of the taxpayers.

Protecting the Pupils' Play

When you make your annual appeal for playground funds it is valuable to be able to quote authority of weight. The Philadelphia Public Ledger is such. It is not a school master speaking but a good old representative of vox populorum:

Of course, their elders are not going to admit for a moment that when they were young they didn't know how to play. They, too, kicked up their heels in the sand-lot leagues with one-oldcat, and it seems only the other day that they chose up sides after first squeezing their hands round the neck of the bat to determine who should have first choice. But there used to be a lot of children, the ones who needed the exercise most, who mournfully haunted the side-lines and seldom got into any sort of game by their own volition, and overburdened teachers or homemakers had little spare energy to stand over them and see that they built up sound bodies by any rational scheme of play specially designed for their peculiar needs.

Science in the recreation field has not destroyed the fun. Coördinated and supervised team-play has meant a better discipline of self, a better citizenship, and a week of ocular evidence