and sick, where they hold simple services of prayer and song. They mend the cabins of the poor in the neighborhood. They care for their yards, mend their fences, make their gardens, and thus get the idea of service. They are taught in their classrooms how to prevent the spread of tuberculosis and other diseases among their people and how to improve conditions in the homes which they visit. The homes of some of the graduates in the neighborhood of the school are used as demonstration stations and centers of social settlement work. In one of them classes in cooking, sewing, and gardening have been started. Night schools are carried on and boys' clubs, which the students of the school help to sustain.

Together with this intellectual, manual, and Christian instruction, both boys and girls have a careful physical training. The Commandant of Cadets, a graduate of the school, has charge of the dormitories. The school battalion has regular drills with setting-up exercises. Careful physical measurements are made of each student who enters the school and records are kept during their stay and after they leave. A graduate of the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics has charge of the physical training of the girls. A resident woman physician looks carefully after their health, and gives them instruction in hygiene and sanitary laws. Much emphasis is laid upon the habits of the students in the care of their persons, rooms, and clothes.

The religious training of Hampton students is an important part of the school's work. The idea of service, as already explained, is made the central thought. Small credit is given to any form of religious life that does not result in doing faithfully the day's duties. The common work of every day is made a means of intellectual and spirital development. To help its students to do the common duties of life in an uncommon way is the aim of the institution. Emphasis is laid upon the necessity of kindly relations between the students and those around them. General Armstrong said in his "Memoranda," found after his death, "Cantankerousness is worse than heterodoxy." No teacher or student is allowed to remain long at Hampton who is not able to co-operate with others. The corps of instructors is made up largely of white men and women from both North and South. The students are taught that the Southern white people

are their friends, and that they have only to show themselves friendly and make themselves of service to the community to which they go to discover this fact.

Much emphasis is laid also upon the cultivation of race pride and self-respect. The plantation songs are frequently sung. While the students are taught to sustain pleasant relations with the whites, they are also encouraged to believe that their greatest success is to come through life and work among their own people. They are advised to stay in the South rather than go to the North, to stay in the country rather than go to the city. They are led to choose the occupations in which they can be of the greatest service to their people. As a result of the very busy life that they live and the encouragement given them, the Hampton School is one of the happiest places in the world. Visitors are impressed with the cheerful atmosphere that pervades workshops and schoolrooms. An Englishman who visited Hampton and spent a month in one of the dormitories for the purpose of studying methods and conditions, reported an entire absence of low talk. Around the school has grown up a circle of comfortable, refined Negro homes owned in many cases by the graduates of the institution. A pleasant social life has been established among these people, who neither desire nor seek social relations with the whites.

In an article in one of our magazines, Mr. Thomas Nelson Page earnestly advocated a black constabulary in the South, declaring that only as the Southern people used the better element of the blacks to control the lower element of the race could they secure freedom from crime. Professor Royce, after a visit to Jamaica, declared that the trouble with the South was lack of organization. Dr. McKenzie, of Hartford, has recently called attention to the increase of crime among the blacks in South Africa since the tribal system has been broken down and no corresponding control of the blacks by members of their own race has taken its place. In slavery days the best element of the blacks were trained and installed as leaders, and were often given much power and authority. One result of the Atlanta riots has been the placing of some of the best men of the white South alongside the best Negroes with a view to the control of the lower Negro element.

This is a most hopeful sign. Millions of dollars have been contributed by the South for the education of the Negro, but as a rule the South has taken but little interest in his education. Immoral and unintelligent Negroes have been allowed to remain in charge of schools and little attention has been given to the course of study. If the Southern whites will interest themselves in the proper education of the Negroes, and will give them authority to control the lower element of their own race, they may do on a large scale what Hampton and its outgrowths have shown is possible.

On Teaching Poetry in American Schools

BY JEANNETTE Marks,

Associate Professor of English Literature in Mount Holyoke College

Is there any word which expresses the national dilemma and temper so well as the word culture or the national admission that there is something necessary besides those privileges which most Americans enjoy? Awkwardly aware of our shortcomings, we even attempt to buy culture, which, fortunately, with all that is best in life, politely and persistently refuses to be bought. Culture, the arts, the art of living, do not flourish upon dollars and bustle. Americans admire themselves because they have no leisure; it is the eighth deadly sin to be caught unoccupied in assertively "getting along." Even our ideal culture is tainted with a commercial quality, a utilitarian end. But this discontent with ourselves because of something we lack is good; it signifies progress. And what is still better it means progress for all, for our democratic sense of responsibility creates among us an unselfishness of no mean merit, a strong desire to make opportunities equal for everybody, a desire best shown through the "schoolhouse door."

Ambition for the young people of our country results in a continual building up of new life, new possibilities, new opportunities. Although few of us believe in our national axiom, "all men are born free and equal," yet it remains the basis for an ideal standard of democracy. We wish it might be true that men are born free to the same opportunities; intellectually, however, we know that men are not born equal. Opportunity, environment, endowment, count for nearly as much in heredity as in the individual. In general, not believing in it, we relegate our national axiom to the schoolroom for proof, and it is the poor teacher who alone in our civilization must seek to establish its truth. With our admirable reverence for the power of the individual, the teacher free to act, strong in personal influence, is as equal to this anomalous situation as anyone in society. Upon him and not upon the politician, the statesman, the philanthropist, falls the

chief weight of the national problems. And above all it is the instructor of some so-called "culture study," of poetry for example, not the teacher of mathematics or political economy, who has the most difficult end of the problem. His classes are composed in part of pupils from foreign and uneducated families, and in part from homes offering considerable intellectual advantages. It is only a spark of something unusual which can make the son of a shoemaker the equal, in his attitude of sympathetic understanding towards books, of the son of a gentleman. There is not only this disparity in social organization, but in the same class there are also disparities in preference, the boys preferring, it may be, stirring narrative poetry, the girls poetry of a somewhat more sentimental type. In addition their self-consciousness is a barrier to the expression of any love for poetry. Young people are very reserved about their feelings; it is their manner of selfpreservation, their manner of surrounding themselves. If they did not have this sheath there would be danger to them emotionally in many ways. Also the majority of them have been influenced to think that poetry presents an impractical view of life, a silly view of living for which only dreamy sentimental people could care. Then, too, they are immature; because it is strange to them and because they do not appreciate its meaning they find something funny in a really beautiful poem; they are frivolous,-blissfully frivolous; they are-happily!-more interested in an out-of-door world than in books. And their final summary of any such study as poetry is that of their age, that which crops out too often in the teacher's halting apologetic reading, that it is a rather notional study anyway, something that will not help very much in "getting along in the world." Besides, the age influences a student to think that there is not time to read slowly and thoughtfully, that he must hurry through everything, choosing the literature of which the meaning is most apparent.

The majority of students are not much inclined to study, certainly not to take up a study which is classed among the "finishings," not the fundamentals. Often, too, students are unable through lack of training to concentrate their minds sufficiently to grasp the substance of a poem. And there must always remain certain limitations in the capacity of the inexperienced person for comprehending the meaning of poetry. All pupils, however,