Francis Thompson's 'New Poems-R. Harding Davis's 'Soldiers of Fortune'-George Brydges Rodney's 'The Buff and Blue"-F. Marion Crawford's 'A Rose of Yesterday'Oscar Kuhns's 'Nature in Dante's Divina Commedia-Zola's 'Nouvelle Campagne'William John Courthope's 'History of English Poetry,' II.-C. H. Herford's The Age of Wordsworth'-Bonnal de Ganges's 'Le Génie de Napoléon '-Albert Bushnell Hart's 'American History Told by Contemporaries,' I.-John W. Burgess's 'The Middle Period,' -Lindley Miller Keasbey's 'Nicaragua Canal and the Monroe Doctrine'-A. H. Sayce's 'Origin and Growth of Religion '—Edwin Hatch's 'Influence of Greek Ideas upon the Christian Church'-James Martineau's 'Faith and Self-Surrender '-Thomas G. Gentry's Life and Immortality'

NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS.

Life and Education.

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THE question of the resignation of Dr. Andrews from the presidency of Brown University is complicated at so many points that a

sound judgment is not easy to pronounce. The question is complicated by a university ideal, liberty of teaching. It is further complicated by the success that has attended the presidency of Dr. Andrews, a success, as attested by the trustees, to be seen in the growth and diversifying of the facilities and efficiency of the university and in the increase in the number of students. As the trustees regard the matter the main issue in their difference with the president is that his views have diverted important benefactions, and would continue to divert pecuniary support, from the university. It is not our duty to reconcile the trustees' own statements of the increasing efficiency of Brown under President Andrews and the prospective inefficiency of Brown under the same direction; it may be said, however, that the faculty of Brown does not share the gloomy view of the future affected by the trustees. They seem, rather, to believe, as appears by their letter, that his resignation, even though they regard his views on the silver question as erroneous, will be seriously detrimental to the interests of the university, and to the freedom of teaching which the university professor by his profession and office is in duty bound to maintain. It is this last aspect of the question that Dr. Andrews himself makes the precise issue of the case, possibly accepting as indisputable the view of the trustees relating to the revenues of the university. In response to the wish of the committee of conference that he should forbear to promulgate his views on the silver question "out of regard for the interests of the university, especially when to promulgate them will appeal most strongly to the passions and prejudices of the public," Dr. Andrews replies that that would mean "surrendering that reasonable liberty of utterance which my predecessors, my college colleagues, and myself have hitherto enjoyed, and in the absence of which the most ample endowment for an educational institution would have little worth." To our mind, freedom of teaching in America is at present an impossible ideal. Our universities are either state institutions, and as such immediately exposed to political influences and current public opinion, which is not always clearly recognizable as the voice of God; or, if not state institutions, they are private foundations the benefactors of which are often still living and tenderly sensitive to any criticisms of the social conditions that enabled them to accumulate their prodigious wealth. It is futile, moreover, to endeavor to introduce the intel

lectual conditions of Germany, as signified by Lehrfreiheit, in our conduct of educational affairs in America, if for no other reason than that the method of college and university education in America requires a regular attendance at fixed lectures from particular professors, while in Germany the student body is a floating mass moving to and fro under the attraction of the most famous teach

In Germany the professor is amenable to the tribunal of a powerful and critical society of the learned. In America a professor must, until educated opinion is as large a factor in our national life as in Germany, be held responsible to the trustees of his university. Teaching in America therefore must at present be prosecuted under conditions that imply a certain degree of restraint, forbearance, and, above all, tact in dealing with questions that involve political controversy and that tend to bring the professor and his college into the arena of partisan strife. We do not consider the exercise of tact and restraint in treating political questions incompatible with a keen sense of the position in which the sincere professor stands toward truth and of his responsibility to the less instructed. All things, even if true, are not expedient to be said. Truth may be served even by those who merely stand and wait. Dr. Andrews's acquiescence in the calm and reasonable request of the trustees could not, we feel, have been regarded among gentlemen as a price paid, it could not have been felt as a bond by one for whom the trustees in every personal and in every other academic relation have the warmest regard. On the whole, therefore, Dr. Andrews's resignation is to be regretted, but the attitude of the trustees toward him seems to us to have been moderate, reasonable, and fair.

THE unique candidacy of President Seth Low for the mayoralty of New York City is an object-lesson in good government and at the same time a test of the extent to which the voters of that city are ready to accept the logical consequences of their constitutional amendment separating municipal from state and national elections. Considerably over one hundred thousand of those voters have asked Mr. Low over their signatures to accept a nomination not yet formally tendered. The Citizens' Union is pledged to complete the formality as soon as there is a probability that Mr. Low will accept it; and he has indicated his willingness to accept it whenever he is convinced that his nomination will prove a unifying force among the various agencies favorable to good government, or in other words-since in politics there is not room for

over-nice distinctions among the parties, organizations, and factions that stand ready to fight Tammany.

Although it is a very sweeping statement, it is hardly too much to say that the election of the President of Columbia University would mean the very best possible organization of the government of the greater New York. President Low has had administrative experience as Mayor of Brooklyn, as a successful business man, and as the head of a great and rapidly expanding university. He is abreast with the most aggressive sentiment for good local government, and in sympathy with the idea that it should not be thwarted by complications with national issues. or machine organizations. At the same time, he has not unduly aroused the antagonism of party leaders, and if he is finally refused the regular Republican nomination, it will be because of resentment at the attitude of his original supporters rather than because of personal enmity. Under Mayor Strong's administration of what will soon be the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx, wide-sweeping reforms have been inaugurated, especially in the public schools and in the police, charities, and streetcleaning departments. They are, however, only inaugurated, and in all of the departments named except the last, more than half the task of renovation still remains to be accomplished. To perpetuate the improvements already made, while at the same time launching the entirely new features involved in consolidation, will require great executive ability and, still more, common honesty. It is reasonably certain that President Low would appreciate, for example, the very elementary facts that, where appointments are made on other grounds than for fitness in the department of charities, the poor in the almshouse suffer; that, when such appointments occur in the department of education, children are physically and mentally injured; when in the street-cleaning department, the death-rate increases. The present popular movement, which has even reached the "Low button" stage, is to be explained by the readiness with which citizens are convinced that President Low would bring both integrity and ability to the unparalleled opportunity confronting the first mayor of the new city.

THE student of politics finds an agreeable pleasure-ground in the comparative study of national character. Among the aptest occasions for the revelation of distinctive traits of nationality are those special fête-days that celebrate great crises of national history. Such, for example, are the Fourth and the Fourteenth of

Harold Frederic. Prefaces, as Harold Frederic observes, are purely matters of fashion, which directs both their manner and measure, now encouraging, now frowning upon them from time to time, and it is to their vogue at the present moment that his readers owe the pleasant introductory pages prefixed to the latest edition of his novels. These have an autobiographical flavor, an ingenious statement of what he considers best worth having done in his own work, and above all an insistence upon his Americanism the more surprising when his long residence in England is considered together with the fact that in "The Damnation of Theron Ware,' which has had so marked a success as to call general attention to his earlier books, the first symptoms are evident of the influences of a cosmopolitan atmosphere. Many astute reviewers have already pitched upon Mr. Frederic as likely in the course of his career to achieve the long-expected novel which shall do for the United States in a significant social study what the novels of Balzac and Tolstoi and Thackeray have already done for France and Russia and England; and it must be owned that his ventures in fiction have displayed qualities that give these prophets some foundation for their confidence. The same hopes, however, were built not long since upon Howells with much the same ground. 'A Modern Instance' and "The Rise of Silas Lapham' were as full of promise as 'Seth's Brother's Wife' and "Theron Ware;' they afforded views of life under circumstances peculiarly and essentially American, yet limited by the fact that these were sectional, almost local. Such people, such natures, such situations could hardly exist outside the confines of New England, and New England is not America. The Hubbards and the Laphams are as real as the Crawleys and the Vincys, but they are types of individuals, not of classes, like the latter, and the same fault must be found with the vital figures that crowd Mr. Frederic's canvas. The beautiful valley of the Mohawk, in which his boyhood was passed, is in its way as characteristic a corner as New England, affording opportunities for the observer of men and manners, rich in historical interest, its towns and cities absurdly dressed in classical names, like a statue of a modern politician in a toga, its population of farmers, small shop-keepers, manufacturing magnates, and a sprinkling of the professional element, generally self-made, no less picturesque in speech and mental attitude than the downest of Down-Easters. To the lad of vivid imagination and sympathy living among such associations the first impulse to write came from a sense of the dramatic possibilities of those stirring Revolutionary times. He conceived the plan of a romantic narrative

with the battle of Oriskany for a climax, and for years he went on gathering material-maps, dates, biographical facts-in enthusiastic ardor, while he was serving an apprenticeship to literature in the production of another book less admirable in many ways than 'In the Valley' proved upon completion, but received with more applause because it opened up a new vein of interest. This was 'Seth's Brother's Wife.' The first chapter struck the keynote, and when it was offered to a London editor he refused to consider its publication, on the ground that it was "too American for any English paper, though it would doubtless succeed in America" -a prediction promptly verified by the warm welcome afforded by the author's compatriots; whereupon Saul also was reckoned among the prophets.

Now, Mr. Howells is nothing if not photographic in his methods. He depicts his people and their background with the dogged realism that delights in the weariness of minutiæ, and gives, as it is a true, a faithful picture, with every hard feature and rigid line insisted upon relentlessly as by the camera of the strolling wayside artist. Harold Frederic, on the contrary, is more a worker with the brush, sketching one telling scene after another of the human comedy as they play it in Central New York, animated, often invested with genuine humor. There is never the glut of detail at which one rebels among the New England chroniclers: his style is marked by rare virtues of directness and simplicity, disclosing no superfluous or wasted word, and moreover he succeeds, where Howells frequently fails, in creating atmosphere which is altogether a different thing from local color. His best work is undoubtedly to be found in the stories of the Civil War. It seems unlikely that he will ever excel "The Copperhead,' which is quite worthy of Erckmann-Chatrian, who were his models, with its sturdily drawn central figure of the farmer Abner standing like a rock to his wrong opinions, while a storm of partisan feeling and excitement swept about him no less violent than at the front of battle. We have heard much lately of the actual hand-to-hand fighting in that dramatic contest between North and South, and with Stephen Crane's lurid descriptions still fresh in the mind, these reverse glimpses of the effect of war upon the stay-athomes are most tellingly effective.

But, like Howells, Mr. Frederic has his limitations. He understands women less thoroughly than men, and the feminine presence is too apt to be vague and shadowy. Sister Soulsby, in Theron Ware,' has a distinct personality; Jessica Lawton becomes real at times, and then fades away elusively; and Celia, above all a Celia in Thessaly, approaches the impos

sible. In "Theron Ware,' too, that very subtle and delicate flavor of Americanism seems for the first time to have escaped him. It is American still beyond question, yet America tempered by alien influences, and the America of memory, not of present reality. Has he stayed too long in London? This latest performance shows the taint of cynicism, the tendency to epigram, the fatalism that never flourished in the simple wind-swept valley of the Mohawk. Perhaps a succession of yellow fogs has driven out of his mind the recollection of the bright and bracing air in which we Americans live. He should come back to his native soil if he wishes to fulfill the promise of his youth in one direction. An American novel he may write in Piccadilly or among the green lanes of Devon, but the American novel, never!

M. E. WARDWELL.

The School System of Ontario.

I. THE PIONEER PERIOD.

The foundations of public education in Ontario were laid in 1797 (the province then being five years old), when, on the recommendation of Governor Simcoe, legislative provision was made for the endowment with 500,000 acres of land of a provincial university and eight district grammar schools.

The university (now known as Toronto University) was not chartered till 1827, and was not opened till 1842. In 1807 eight grammar schools were opened (one in York, now Toronto), and a legislative grant of £800 a year was voted for the salaries of the eight headmasters. In 1812 there appeared on the scene, as headmaster of the York (Toronto) Grammar School, a man who was destined to play an important part in the early educational history of the province. This was the Rev. Dr. Strachan, afterward first Anglican Bishop of Ontario. He was a Scotchman who in 1799 had been brought out to take charge of the projected university, but who, on the postponement of the scheme, had to content himself with the duties of a parish minister and schoolmaster. Dr. Strachan was a man of rare abilities as a teacher, original and even eccentric, but always enthusiastic and kindly. He was a born leader among men, and soon established himself not only as the foremost educationist of the day, but as the mainstay and champion of certain exclusive privileges which the established Church of England had acquired in the new colony. To his untiring zeal Ontario owes the founding of her system of higher education. In 1827 he obtained. the royal charter for King's College, now called Toronto University, which in 1843 he opened as its first president. During the greater part

of these years he was chairman of the Provincial Board of Education, and in that capacity was the means of fostering the secondary schools founded as feeders to the university. The cause of popular elementary education, however, owes little to Dr. Strachan. For years the common schools of the people at large were neglected, left unorganized, unaided by public money, and unregulated. True, in 1816 an act of the legislature had been passed establishing in theory a system of common schools, and a vote of $24,000 was made annually for five years toward the support of the same. The experiment was not viewed with entire satisfaction. The schools were in the hands of any stray passer-by who could be induced to loiter around for a few weeks, "common idlers," or "transient persons," as one public man termed them. Moreover, the youth of the land were in constant danger of being instructed in disloyalty, as many of these straggling schoolmasters came from the neighboring republic. Commonschool education must not be supposed to have been without advocates and friends among politicians and intelligent citizens. Many efforts were made to place these schools on a better footing, to secure for them organization, government aid, supervision, and general recognition as an important feature of public economy. In fact, the fight on behalf of more extensive popular education indirectly became merged into a broader and fiercer contest-namely, that over class privileges monopolized by the aristocratic and wealthy and over church control in matters of education. Early in the twenties developed the fight against the locking up for the benefit of the ministers of the established Church of thousands of acres of public land, called Clergy Reserves. Connected with this was the agitation for responsible government by an elective parliament, as opposed to the oligarchic rule of a few influential families, who, under the name of the Family Compact, given them by their opponents, controlled all executive offices and balked popular legislation by their predominating influence in the upper or appointive chamber of the legislature. The battle, so far as church privileges were concerned, was carried on under two distinguished leaders, the Rev. Dr. Strachan and the Rev. Egerton Ryerson, a Methodist minister destined to succeed his antagonist as head of the educational interests of the province and to create and develop the common school system of which the people were so sorely in need. Dr. Ryerson in pamphlet and on the platform waged incessant warfare against the exclusive privileges of the Anglican clergy. He was followed by the great bulk of the British colonial element of the population, who, as United Empire Loyalists from the seceding