Democrats plan to shirk the costs of preparedness by issuing bonds. Next to an ignorance of the policy which armament supports, there can be nothing more dangerous to a democracy than military expenditure which is not paid for directly. Only by basing preparedness on taxes can we be sure that there will be a constant popular check upon it. Nor does the President say one word about reducing the waste in our present military establish ments. This is another evasion. If he faced the necessity he would of course arouse political opposition. But face it he must if he is honestly laying out plans for the future.

There is a passing reference in the speech to the third great factor of preparedness. Mr. Wilson speaks of "the mobilization of the resources of the nation," but that is all he has to say on a question which this war has demonstrated to be of such overwhelming importance. It would be interesting to know what the administration has in mind, what it has learned from England's experience, what it is planning for the financial, commercial, and industrial elements of real preparedness. No hint but this one phrase of the President's has come from a responsible member of the administration.

A list of subjects which the President failed to deal with will almost supply a program of action for those who wish to see this country in a position to assume its international task. We can imagine the slogans under which those critics of Mr. Wilson who are not Bryan pacifists can argue their case: "Define American policy; pay as you go; make expenditure efficient; centralize and coördinate administration; control industry; face the problem of labor organization."

The President must lead. It is his task to educate opinion, and to crystallize it on all these points. To do anything less is to make the insecurity of the United States greater than it is at present. For on top of our actual physical unpreparedness we shall have developed the illusion that because we have a few more ships and a few more soldiers we are ready to carry out our purposes. Never was there a time when shopworn abstractions had greater potentiality for evil.

ground. Already many of them are held within encircling lines of Bulgars and Teutons, to the east of the Morava; other small groups are defending themselves in the hills, with all avenues of escape closed by the Bulgar columns; the advance of the Austrians into Novibazar threatens to cut off the main army from the recesses of the Black Mountains, where even the most powerful invader would shrink from further pursuit. Far to the south an Anglo-French force is endeavoring to bring relief, but so far without material results. What we seem to see is the utter subjugation of a little nation. A temporary subjugation at worst, according to the spokesmen of the Allies, for one of the first articles in any conceivable treaty of peace will be the restoration of the Serbian independence, with boundaries extended at the cost of Austria and Bulgaria, and indemnification for the damages inflicted by the war. Let the Serbs fight on valiantly, and all will be well with them in the end.

There might be a meaning in the promise of compensation if Balkan warfare meant merely the crushing of armed resistance and the incidental destruction of property. But to anyone familiar with the history of Balkan wars the talk of compensation sounds like brutal farce. It is not three years since Bulgars and Serbs fought over the same territory that the Bulgars are now invading. The whole world knows how the Bulgars conducted themselves in this war. Wounded Serbians, abandoned on the field of battle, were ruthlessly dispatched; prisoners were tortured and killed; the dead and dying were hideously mutilated. And the Serbians employed methods of equal barbarity. There appears to have been a distinct purpose on the part of the Serbians to terrorize the Bulgarian civil population of the disputed territory, as a means of impelling emigration en masse to Bulgaria and the abandonment of lands and villages to the conquerors. Hence the massacre of unoffending men, the almost universal outraging of women, the more than occasional brutal murder of little children. We Americans still shudder over the traditions of Indian massacres. But in all the history of Indian warfare there never was an incident to compare in barbarity with the Serbian and Bulgarian atrocities of three years ago.

In the Bulgarian armies now invading Serbia there are men who bear fresh scars of Serbian mistreatment, men whose homes were burned, whose fathers and brothers were massacred, whose sisters and wives were violated before their eyes. Let us then ask ourselves what is happening in the lonely valleys of Macedonia, where little bands of Serbians are being hunted down by detached companies of Bulgarians. What is happening to the women and children dragged from their homes or hiding-places in forest and mountain? It is well that the official despatches draw a thick veil over the realities of Serbian warfare: so and so many kilometers of advance; such and such villages taken; these are items we can note without shuddering.

But are not the Bulgars operating in conjunction with the Germans, and would the latter tolerate the practices that have always characterized Balkan warfare? We need not doubt that the Germans refuse to countenance atrocities in their presence. But we may be sure that the Germans will confine their own efforts to breaking the main strength of the Serbian opposition. The hunting down of fugitives will fall to the Bulgars. The German attitude toward the Armenian policy of their Turkish allies is sufficient indication that they will leave free rein to Bulgarian revenge in the hills of Macedonia. The Serbian nation may be restored at the end of the war. But for innumerable survivors this can be no compensation for the ghastly terrors they have experienced, the tragic losses they have endured. The whole world would be mourning for Serbia if the world could realize Serbia's present plight.

I

Post Mortem

NSUFFICIENT attention is being paid to the difficult and disagreeable job of reading into the overwhelming unpopularity of the revised constitution for the state of New York its proper lesson. That instrument was condemned by a majority so large that the adverse decision would ordinarily be considered final; and the inference of finality would be confirmed by the treatment which proposals for administrative reorganization and the short ballot have always received at the hands of American popular opinion: they have almost always been emphatically rejected. Under the circumstances the extraordinary fact is not that the attempt to strengthen the administrative branch of the government has made so little headway, but that it has become a political issue at all, that it has so frequently been recognized by the politicians and has been expressly approved in party platforms. A reform is accepted by the better politicians without the benefit of popularity, but is rejected by the people in whose interest it is devised. A project of administrative reorganization which students of American politics agree to consider indispensable, not merely to governmental efficiency but to the conversion of the state governments into instruments of the popular will, is unceremoniously and even contemptuously repudiated by the voters.

Ordinarily so emphatic a condemnation would have to be considered decisive and irrevocable; but in the present instance it cannot be so considered, precisely because students of American government realize that the voters as a consequence of their ac

tion are jeopardizing the future prosperity and even the future safety of democracy itself. The attempt to secure the acceptance of these reforms will be continued because it must be continued, because its abandonment would be tantamount to a renunciation of leadership and of conviction upon the part of their supporters. The question is not whether the attempt to reorganize American state government shall be given up, but how it can be renewed with a better chance of success.

We believe that it can be renewed with a better chance of success. The gentlemen who were responsible for the framing of the rejected constitution misconceived the nature of their task. From the beginning their attention was fastened not upon public opinion and the voters, but upon their fellow delegates. Their assumption was that if they could secure for their reforms the support of their party associates in the convention without incurring too much hostility from their party opponents, they would have little difficulty in carrying along with them a sufficient majority of the voters. They made consequently every necessary concession to the reluctant members of their own party, and succeeded thereby in getting their proposals accepted by a large majority of the convention; but they paid heavily for their success. Their compromises made administrative and social reformers lukewarm in support of their plan, without, as it turned out, securing the loyal support of the interests with which they compromised. The size of the majority against the revised constitution and its even distribution throughout the state proves that among the other adverse influences that of the political machine of both parties was enormously influential. The local bosses, whether Republican or Democratic, were almost unanimously against a constitution which their representatives in the convention had for the most part accepted; and shrewd observers of American politics, such as the leaders of the Republican majority in the convention, should have known they would be against it. The party machines would have been committing suicide in case they had loyally supported the revised and rejected constitution. They are the creators and the beneficiaries of the Venezuelan representative system, so candidly portrayed and so eloquently condemned by Mr. Root. The attempt to secure any but insincere and hypocritical support from them was hopeless from the start. They will always either openly or covertly oppose plans of administrative reorganization which seek to substitute a responsible official leadership for their own irresponsible and lucrative domination of state politics.

If a more efficient, responsive and responsible government is ever obtained for the state of New York, it will be obtained not with the consent of the machines of either party or of both, but in spite of their opposition. The two party organizations have always lived upon their ability to convert the state and municipal administrations into pastures for party war-horses and hacks; and they will continue to live upon this kind of forage until the voters finally shake off the spell of the old party allegiances. People who believe in the necessity of state administrative reorganization would do well to realize that the new system cannot be grafted on the old. Before it can be accepted there must be a hard fight, the result of which will be the substitution of a modern democratic organization for the existing misrepresentative pseudo-democracy. The local party machines have been adapted to take advantage of the deficiencies and the abuses of our Venezuelan state governments. If you do away with the abuses you do away with the party machines. Reformers will never be able to extort a really acceptable modern constitution from a convention elected on party lines, or from an electorate which allows its votes on such matters to be dictated by local party bosses. The leaders who will finally frame such a constitution for the state and bring about its acceptance will be men who have from the start addressed themselves directly to the voters, who have managed to make the voters understand that the state political organization is the only safe and effective instrument of popular purposes, and that it needs and deserves their primary allegiance. A modern constitution must rest upon a much more alert, well-informed and public-spirited body of opinion than that which is now applied to state politics. When such a constitution is adopted, it will be a sufficient indication that the needed body of public opinion has come into existence. But the first effort must be to bring about the change in public opinion; and this can be done only by men who are thoroughgoing democrats in their methods of propaganda, in their sympathies and in their convictions. The voters must be made to feel that the new government is their government, in a sense and to an extent that the present government is not. They are being asked to sanction a huge increase in positive governmental efficiency and power-an increase that implies an equally emphatic access on their part of confidence in their official leadership. But if you want to win popular confidence you must pay for it by interest and confidence in popular impulses and movements. You cannot exhibit lively suspicion of the participation by the people in government and retain all the old safeguards against democratic errors, and then expect the voters to become enthusiastic over governmental activity and efficiency. The men who framed the rejected constitution tried to do something of this kind. They sought to make a constitution for the

people of the state without taking the people into their confidence, and the people answered by piling up a vote of no confidence in them. They did not deserve so severe a rebuke and so complete a failure, and the government which they framed would have been much more completely controlled by public opinion than is the present government. But the lesson of their failure should not be misinterpreted. The lesson is not that the attempt is impossible, but that better state government must be attained not by taking popular interest and consent for granted, but by planning and organizing chiefly for the purpose of arousing them in abundant measure.

Opportunity of a Law School I

F the people of this country fastened their attention upon the wielders of real influence rather than upon those who merely wear the clothes of authority, they would take more interest in the election of a dean to the Harvard Law School than in the election of their local legislators or judges. In legal theory the dean of the Harvard Law School is a hired servant of a private corporation; but in fact he holds a national office that can be one of the most influential in the country. Legislatures may, under popular pressure, pass, amend or repeal various statutes, and judges may, from time to time, modify the law through judicial decision; but the hard and tough framework of the law remains that which is taught in law schools. Indeed, so long as human beings remain creatures of habit, the general ideas or intellectual routine which lawyers acquire in the law school must remain the most potent single influence in making the law what it is.

That the distinctive features of any legal system are due to the conditions under which it is taught can readily be seen by comparing the legal system of this country with the system of England and those of the Continental countries. In Continental Europe law has always been taught by the universities. This has frequently led to the triumph of theoretical or scientific over practical interests. Thus the reception and perpetuation of the Roman law in modern Europe is largely due to its teachable qualities. But technical, theoretical elaboration justifies itself by the increased certainty of the law, and the European lawyer serves the community all the better because he is in fact a member of a scientifically trained profession. In England certain privileged guilds, the Inns of Court, very early acquired a monopoly of legal education which, while at some periods thorough, was conspicuously unsystematic and uninfluenced by the progress of other studies. The combination of the shrewd insight and atrociously chaotic pedantry which fill the pages of Coke have left a deep mark on English law. Nevertheless, the separation of barristers from solicitors, the former being almost exclusively university trained men, makes the bar of England much more of a genuinely liberal profession than is the case in this country. Legal training in this country has until recently been entirely a matter of apprentice or trade-school training. It is true that some of our law schools have for a long time been connected with colleges, but the connection is still somewhat nominal. Only in our own day are a few people beginning to realize that law teaching ought to be a special calling based on special aptitude and training -the hitherto prevailing idea being that any successful lawyer can take off an hour or two from his practice to teach others how to do it. Even in our very best law schools the same men may be expected to teach such diverse branches as criminal law, and common carriers, property and international law, a condition in no wise different from that which prevailed in the early days of the American college, when the same man taught Latin, Greek, mathematics, and the evidences of Christianity.

The Harvard Law School under Dean Langdell was the first to entertain the idea that law is a science to be taught like other sciences. The progress of this idea has made the Harvard Law School the intellectual center of American legal life. With

in the past decade, however, a new light has appeared on the legal horizon. The Harvard conception of a scientific knowledge of the law was completely subordinated to the narrow professional idea that the law school was to train lawyers who, on the basis of sound knowledge of what is the law, could give good advice to their clients and win cases in court.

The perception of the fact that law is a part of social life and depends for its efficiency on modern social science and philosophy, coupled with the correlative idea that a juristic profession is necessary, not only to serve the needs of clients but the direct needs of the community for a legal system in harmony with modern needs, is something which only a few Western law professors, men like Wigmore, Freund and Pound, have asserted within the last decade. While Harvard seems to have responded to this idea by the appointment of Professor Pound, the response has been only partial, and a great deal depends on the character of the new dean soon to be elected.

Will Harvard choose a man competent to take the leadership in this movement, a man fit to be the successor of Ezra Thayer? Under Langdell and Ames the Harvard Law School became a national institution attracting the brightest minds of every state in the Union. But the men who made that school national institution Langdell, Ames, Thayer and Gray-have now passed away, and

a

there is no guaranty that Harvard's supremacy will last forever. The spirit of the Brahmin caste is not unknown at Cambridge, and more than one department in the university has had its life stifled by it. Will Harvard realize its national obligation and appoint as Dean of its Law School a man capable of leading in this new national movement?

Religion in Public Schools

E play

NTHUSIASTS for the "work, study and school on the lines of the Gary plan have not hitherto had a reputation for religious obscurantism. The views of most of Mr. Wirt's supporters have been opposed to any system that would involve any kind of sectarian domination or religious discrimination. It is therefore a surprise that there has arisen in New York City, where the plan is being gradually introduced, considerable controversy over the provision of the Gary scheme which permits outside institutions, including churches, to coöperate with the school and take children for a few hours a week for special work or instruction. The fear is expressed that this provision will mean the entering wedge of religion into the public school, and some prejudice has been aroused against the Gary plan as an agent of sinister religious reaction."

These fears we believe are based on a natural but unfortunate misapprehension of the real spirit of the Gary plan. As outlined by Mr. Wirt it holds no brief for religious instruction. It has no concern with any church activity as such. What it tries to do is to coördinate the community child-welfare agencies with the school. The lengthening of the school day absorbs an hour which would otherwise be spent by the city child in the street, at home, in church, or in the settlement. All the Gary plan does is to organize and systematize this hour. It may be spent by the child either in play, or auditorium at the school, or in any institution which provides wholesome activities for children. The object is to coördinate community opportunities so that they may function regularly and vitally instead of spasmodically. The plan gives to all the agencies which pretend to be interested in the child's welfare a chance to spend themselves effectively. It brings up to the level of vital public discussion, for the first time, the question of what sort of home, church and neighborhood activities may be good for children anyway.

Into this scheme the church enters merely as a community institution. As long as any considerable number of parents believe that religious instruction is of world-shaking importance to the child's spiritual welfare, no public school which is really public can do anything but release children for this purpose, just as it releases them for playgrounds, settlements, libraries, home music or other instruction. The Gary plan does not release them from regular school hours. The outside time is taken from the extra hour of play or auditorium. Neither is it true that they are turned out into the street for this hour, to be taken care of by the churches or other institutions. No child is excused for church or home unless the parents make formal application. If the parents do not do this, the child stays at the school for his full seven or eight hours of work, study and play. The burden and responsibility are entirely upon the parents and the churches. The teachers have nothing to do with the matter, either in segregating the children or seeing where they go.

There need be little fear that the practice will not conform to the theory. Mr. Wirt tells us that his work, study and play school had been functioning for twelve years in Bluffton and Gary before any religious organization took advantage of this provision. The idea that the opportunity would make for an encouragement of religious instruction seems to be groundless. In the Jefferson School in Gary, which has been longest in operation under this plan, and where the fullest efforts had been made by all the sects and religions of the town to provide this supplementary instruction, scarcely half of the children in the spring of 1915 were going out to any sort of religious training. And in the Gary school in New York, where unusual efforts seem to have been made by certain churches to meet the new plan, not even half of the children leave school for this purpose.

What the critics fear is not so much that a few more children will get religious instruction as that the ecclesiastical power will be strengthened, that " creed consciousness" will be revived, and religious feeling, banished by tradition from our American school, will be brought back in perilous form. But this fear assumes that divorce between religion and the school is now complete. Actually the situation is far from satisfactory. Everyone will agree that public schools in a democracy should be public, that the children of a community should either be in attendance upon them, or receiving an equivalent education or a better one. In reality between one-fifth and one-third of the school children in a city like New York are not in the public schools at all, but in special church schools, maintained by private bodies at great expense in an effort to fuse religious and secular education. And however far from ideal the public schools may be, no one pretends that they are not far superior to these special schools. Everyone will agree that from a social point of view it is highly undesirable that even a quarter of a city's children should be relegated to an education far in

ferior to one which the city itself is ready to give them. The danger that the public school system will thus be gradually more encroached upon is real and pressing. As long as the public school is in any sort of competition with the church school, religion will not be entirely divorced from the schools. Any plan which gives the churches opportunity to provide religious instruction outside of the schools will lessen the urgency of the special church school. It will bring back the preponderance of the public school, make it more "public," and the special school less necessary for those who wish religious instruction for their children.

The If the

What the Gary plan seems to do is not to bring religion into the schools, but for the first time to take it out of the schools. The relations now between church and school are hidden. Gary plan brings them into the open. school boards are in the habit of lending supplies to church schools, that fact becomes known, and the whole question is for the first time posed whether the public desires the continuance of such a policy. If there are attempts at proselytizing through the influence of over-zealous teachers, that fact becomes known, and the interested public which desires the absolute divorce of church and school is in a position to exercise vigilance. Not religious instruction outside the schools is the real peril, but religious influence in the schools, and this peril the Gary plan scotches in a way that is fair and acceptable to every element concerned. The establishment of a fair, free and open relation between the school and all other community institutions is of utmost importance to society. No institution which has anything valuable to offer the child will lose by such a relation. No outside power can dominate or even partially control a public school which has established it.