do not have to cross the town or county to reach it. It is not closed on Sundays. But, in your own room, within a step or two, is this wealth ready at hand. Here is a garden all my own. I catch the perfume of flowers I learned to love in my youth. Some I had from a soft-voiced lady who loved them and me and her other children; some I knew in the old campus in New Haven, some I discovered in excursions here and there during fifty years. When I want them I know how to find them. You have done me a delightful service, Mr. Benham, I thank you heartily."

Next came Mr. Judd Post, our suburbanite, often called The Indicator, The Director, The Signpost. "I have the surprise book' of the season," he said, "a duet by Henry Ford and Samuel Crowther. The ideas are Henry's but Samuel is the expert Boswell who gathers and sorts and arranges an array of comments upon large concerns, and works them into a pleasing pattern. It is an alluring book. You can't put it down. The most fascinating personality now living talks with you about the fundamentals of life. Everything he says carries weight because he talks about the things he has tried and made memorably successful. Did you read in the papers that John Finley, scholar, educator, editor, addressing United States teachers in Philadelphia, quoted Ford as an authority upon an international question? He is quotable all right. The book abounds in short, vivid observations which will tone you up like a run in the fresh air. 'We are in a great age of transition from drudgery to enjoyment,' he says, 'Law hasn't brought it; war hasn't; business based on science and brains has done it.'

"The book is an exposition of Henry Ford's proposition that honest and generous business service is the great civilizer. His hobbies of clean shops, clean streets, clean homes, higher wages, salvage, elimination of waste, country life, sparkle through every chapter and take shape in facts and occa

Today and Tomorrow.-HENRY FORD, in collaboration with SAMUEL CROWTHER. Doubleday, Page and Co., Garden City. 481 pp. $3.50.

sions. Each wise saw has its modern instance. The plodders always attack the pioneers and holler 'whoa.' 'They say the pioneers have gobbled up all the opportunity. The plodders would have had nowhere to plod if the pioneers hadn't cleared a way for them. How about you? Did you make your place or did you find it made for you? Did you start your work or did someone else? Who says the opportunities have gone? A generation ago there were a thousand men to every opportunity. Today there are a thousand opportunities to every man.' The freshness of the book is amazing. Here is no searching of the volumes of the past to bolster up proposals. The world has been made over by science and invention. Tradition cannot furnish maxims for the guidance of 1926. The question is not, What did the sage assert? but, What does experience confirm? A multitude of slow-moving minds have wailed because of the passing of the good old times when everything was made by hand and most men had to get along without the most of what was made. They moan because machinery has killed the artisan. There is more call for human skill than ever in the world before. One hears much of the worker being ground by hard labor, efficiency wrecking all the finer things of life. 'It's true that life is out of balance; it always was. Until lately most people had no leisure and so they do not now know how to use it. We are finding some balance between work and play, sleep and food and eventually will discover why men grow ill and die. For the old, endless, exhausting drive has quit. The men at the top, who are changing things know this. They are not breaking down; the workers all along the line are not. It's easier to go along with progress than to try to hold things back. Those who get the headaches are the ones who keep on clamoring it can't be done. The only answer to them is "Come on and do it." The very word, efficiency, is hated. It ought to be hailed with delight. Efficiency is merely the doing of work in the best way you know rather than in the

worst way. It's taking a trunk up hill on a power truck instead of on your back.'

"So say Henry and Samuel. They'd make good speakers for teachers' institutes, telling us that we are right in turning our backs on what used to be and looking with eager expectancy toward what is coming, willing to scrap to-day in favor of to-morrow, instead of sitting in a library trying to fit the new world into the old moulds.

"The big thing about Henry Ford is that he is doing what he tells us we ought to do. Ask the laborer. He will tell you that a few years ago he came home so late and so tired he had no time to change his clothes. Just got his supper and went to bed. Now he takes a shower and changes his clothes at the shop, goes home by daylight, has an early supper, and takes his family out for a ride. He will tell you that he now uses his brains and is glad of it. In the teaching business I see the same idea. The banishment of unscientific method, the use of discoveries of the pioneers in their laboratories, have awakened the wails of the plodders but the progressive souls urged by the appetite for demonstrable success are so generally busy doing things that the soreheads among us are fast becoming a joke. No one will enjoy and profit by the Ford-Crowther epic more than the school people.

"All men,' says Henry Ford, 'are not voluntarily intelligent; they must be taught. All men do not see the escape from drudgery in work by putting intelligence into work; they must be taught. Industry must have generalship.' Doesn't that strike you as paralleled by the American school situation? The voltage of brain power used by teachers to-day certainly is immensely superior to that exercised a generation ago and every summer the number who go to professional schools is amazing. Thinking men know,' says Henry, 'that intelligent work is salvation, morally, physically, socially. The idea used to be that work was the curse of existence. Now we know that work does more than get us our living; it gets us our life.' "Ford's distrust of tradition is pictur

When he wants a process improved,

as, for instance, the making of glass for windshields, he does not employ a glass-maker. Why not? 'Because,' says Henry, 'he'll decide from what he has done, what he can do.' Rather, there will be chosen an adventurer with a fresh view. He will be set, to study glass making and to speed up production, eliminate hand work and reduce costs.

"Over and over again you read here the belief and proof that business is service. It gives the buyer more for his money; it pays the laborer more for his work. Everybody gains; 'cutting wages does not reduce costs; it increases them. The better wages you pay the more customers you create. It's customers that make business.'

"This, either Ford or Crowther calls the 'wage motive.' It crops out here and there like a repeated phrase in a Wagner opera. 'Business isn't money making; business is giving the world what it needs. Money making has starved business. Capitalists reduce the laborer's production by keeping from him enough wages. If labor hasn't money it can't buy goods. So production stops. Labor agitators urge labor to produce less, so prices go up, which is the same thing as reducing wages. Education, unless it increases productivity, doesn't conduce to life, liberty, or happiness. Most education is words. The first thing education should do is to equip a man to earn his living. There's too much soft teaching. Children are helped too much. They should be helped to help themselves.'

"The book gives an interesting account of the Henry Ford School. The program is based on work. Nearly every social theory when stripped of its emotional trimmings gets down to a formula for getting along without work. It can't operate. It isn't productive. It can bring only poverty.' Then he swings into wage theory again. An underpaid man is a customer reduced in purchasing power. The cure of hard times is through purchasing power; the source of purchasing power is wages. The theory that there is only so much work in the world and if workers work more they or their fellows will run out of work,

is nonsense. The professional agitators preach this. The fallacy of it has been proved over and over again. It has kept the English workman from getting a home. They won't let the bricklayers work fast enough to build houses. So it costs so much to hire bricklayers that no houses are built.' "What Henry Ford thinks about war is especially interesting on account of what we heard of him in the great struggle. 'Pacifism is an excellent doctrine if preached to those parts of the world where the war spirit is rampant. But to arm the bandits of the world and disarm its producers is not the way to stop international holdups. Militarists won't bring peace; they are specialists in force. Pacifists are specialists in sentimentality.'

"This is a tip-top book for the schoolmaster; so is My Life and Work, an earlier Henry Ford book by the same publisher issued in 1923. They handle problems of life with such freshness, illustrated by such captivating incident that they enliven the mind as if by drinks of sparkling mental apollinaris."

Martin, the Draughtsman, next spoke. "Professor Horn, the California one, gives us 'an introduction to the field of taxsupported education in the United States." For ten successive terms the author has given courses to college students so as to acquaint them with the most important civic activity in their world. I am startled to find how long it took the American policy of Education to get the work. As early as 1559 advocacy of universal schooling was well known. By 1776 it was so common that Washington, Franklin, Madison, Monroe, and especially Jefferson, considered it essential to the maintenance of our popular government. But even in Jefferson's State a common school system was not established until 1870, almost a hundred years after that great democrat had said: 'We must have a system of schools, which shall reach every description of citizen

The American Public School.-JOHN LOUIS HORN, Professor of Education, Mills College, California. The Century Co., N. Y. 404 pp. $2.00

from the richest to the poorest.' For generations in America after the promulgation of the equality and the general-welfare doctrines in our two fundamental legal instruments, the opposition to taxing Jones for the education of Smith's children was insurmountable. Professor Horn delineates vividly the illogical development of our schools to what they are to-day, how eight years as the typical length of an elementary school course has nothing to justify it. We borrowed a scheme well suited to an aristocracy. We are trying to get a system adapted to equality of opportunity and to a democracy for all. There are two chapters in this book which ought to be taught as American civics in all the upper classes of the common schools of the country. I refer to 'How Public Education is organized,' and 'How it might be.' I have been intimate with some public school or other for twentyfive years. I have heard the slogan, ‘Education is a State function,' over and over. But never until I read these two vivid chapters did I realize what a hotchpotch our school systems are. We never organized education on a logical scheme. Town meetings built some schoolhouses and hired some masters in Massachusetts hundreds of years ago. Other places imitated the scheme. When we organized the United States, local authorities resisted any large and logical organization of education. Some state legislature under the influence of a man like Father Pierce in Michigan jumped in and made a few large moves. Wisconsin, Minnesota, and others, coming later, imitated Michigan. Some bold legislator in Iowa gets a bill through. It's all patchwork. The original local control of education making it a Kalamazoo proposition or an Otumwa project persists. The state is the second factor, the nation no factor at all. There was the same local opposition to the navy, the army, the post office, the lighthouse system. Somebody wanted to be boss at home. In the matter of schools that somebody is duplicated by hundreds of thousands. Professor Horn discusses and illustrates the breakdown here and there

of the small unit and the advantages of the county unit and larger areas consolidated. We have been saddled with an illogical, hierarchal type of school organization abandoned by industry and commerce. In a world of 1926 we are attempting the biggest civic problem with a machine of 1647. I was deeply interested by Professor Horn's chapter on "The Limitations of Democracy.' He ascribes to Rousseau an attempt to make all men free, participants in all that the race has created. In accordance with Rousseau's ideas we in America established our great political experiment."

"What's that?" interrupted our Signpost, "Now wait a minute! Who started that idea? What did Jefferson know of Rousseau? My son, you're off the track. Revolutionary Americans didn't read French books, but English ones, mostly Locke's and Filmer's and Hooker's."

"I am greatful to our Suburban Guide for these points," continued Martin, “but whether Rousseau did or did not eventuate in the American Declaration, my Professor Horn goes on to say that the battle of free public schools has been won. We must now frankly inquire what we may expect to result from it. The followers of Rousseau believed that education universally applied would bring about the world of their dreams. But it has run against the fact of variability. Binet has shown us we can't deal with groups of individuals as with units. Each child has a different rate of progress and a different capacity of ultimate attainment. The intelligence quotient in the large majority of cases does not increase, at least not between the ages of three and fifteen. In almost all the great countries there is a double system of schools, one for the classes, one for the masses. Special opportunities are given a small group which is likely to affect many if not all of the highly endowed. They maintain the traditions of culture, keep alive an interest in the arts. We in America are facing in the wrong direction. Here, trained to think that every man is as good as every other, the diffusion of a modicum of education to all, the exaltation of the

popular standard, represents in social terms a positive danger.

66

Say Martin," inquired the Signpost, "are you giving your own idea or quoting from the book?"

"I am reviewing-not discussing, nor cussing, any one. I am telling you what Professor Horn says: 'An undifferentiated, single, democratic school is, for the most highly endowed, an inferior educating means. Mediocrity on a large scale, such as is now overwhelming our society, can hardly be regarded with equanimity. It is a problem of saving the social heritage. The application of a political theory of equality to an institution which is governed by laws not susceptible of modification by statute, is a dangerous experiment.'

sumption based

"Let me get that," again interrupted the Post. "I understand Professor Horn to speak of an institution governed by laws not changeable by statute. Education is of course what he means. Is this not an assumption based upon assumption? By statute our people have set up and maintain the public schools. By statute we tax every one who spends a cent in order that the public schools shall exist. Now tell me by what other laws than these statutes this institution, the public school, is governed. To assume as the professor seems to, that by our statutes we have adopted an institution governed by the laws of some Binet or Simon or follower of theirs is an awful stretch. Maybe Binet found that intelligence can be developed only so far. Maybe Professor Horn has discovered that in our art museums, our civic opera, our present architecture, our other art, we have more mediocrity than Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece, with their double system of schools giving special opportunities to the highly endowed. And a great blessing it has been to them with their dictatorships! Mediocrity is it? Neglect of art? Figures, professor, figures! How about Walter Page's opinion of the mediocrity of those great nations of Europe? Sure! Let's change the public schools, especially the high schools into nurseries