there are fewer trade schools than in the little kingdom of Bavaria, and the United States is one of the few large nations that do not provide by legislation for the continued education of children who become wage earners at fourteen years of age.

While these facts are of interest to all teachers, they have or should have special significance for teachers of English. It is in the English classroom that the greatest opportunity exists for dovetailing education with life. To base oral and written composition exclusively upon the literary classic is simply to miseducate, to misfit the pupil for easy adjustment to those interests in the world to which he will be called immediately upon leaving school. But to have pupils speak and write upon subjects related to their present and their future life is to prepare them for life work. They must leave, school with living and working apperceptions and with the dialectic of commerce and industry already created and usable. Adjustment to the world after leaving school will accordingly be facilitated; and the discontinuance of school will not mean a change from one sort of work to another, but merely a transition in work of the same kind.

More than this, oral and written composition that centers in life and work and human experience makes expression purposive: it induces pupils to express themselves, not for the mere sake of expression, but because they really have something to say, because they have convictions, young as they may be, about the subjects they are asked to discuss. All pupils are naturally interested in some things and uninterested in others. They have strong feelings, as a rule, about this or that human activity. They have a store of imagination and wonder and curiosity that needs to be kept alive. Composition subjects that are intimate to their experience will perpetuate these precious natural qualities. Composition subjects that are taken from remote, artificial, unusual sources that are foreign to adolescent experience will deaden them.

An explanatory word as to the present volume its aim,

its method, its content, its place as a text may be helpful. Its aim is to connect composition work with life and work and human experience. It attempts at the same time to link literature with labor, to humanize the one and to ennoble the other, to establish the natural dependent relations between the two, to unite the cultural with the practical. The subject of work is, of course, too far-reaching, too far-touching, to be summarily dealt with in any single volume, but if the author has succeeded in indicating new or hitherto neglected connections between the English classroom and the larger classroom of the world, he will in large measure have accomplished his purpose. The exercises or problems have been made practically independent of the textual matter itself. They are intended to provoke and stimulate thought, not necessarily to follow and summarize it. Exposition, the type of composition that workers are most largely called upon to use, is treated more prominently in this text than are the other types. There should be less noisy jargon in English classrooms about narration, description, argument, exposition, as types of expression,-less instruction about how to say and more, much more, about what to say. Throughout the book there is insistence, both in the text and in the problems, that there can be no profitable separation of oral from written English, at least so far as elementary and high schools are concerned. Differentiation of the two and specialization in either one should be left for the higher or special school. Work calls for ready and versatile expression in both oral and written form and for quick transitions from the one to the other. To stress either form separately in training the adolescent is simply to disestablish their natural unity and to hinder facility in using both in fluent alternation. Even such serious shortcomings as nasality or throatiness in the human voice are of minor importance in comparison with the need of intelligence and fluency when the problem is the reading of official correspondence to an employer.

It is not only difficult, it is likewise hazardous, to say exactly

where any textbook belongs in a school course. A good text should be used exactly where the teaching point demands its content. The present book does not by any means belong exclusively to commercial and vocational schools, or to schools having commercial and vocational courses. Pupils in even the strictest college preparatory schools should be taught about work, should be able to use the language of work, should regard their training, as far as fundamentals are concerned, as in nowise different from that of their brothers and sisters who are not going to college. Much of the material here presented has been used, in typewritten form, in the first and second years of high school; some of it has been used in the last year of elementary school; practically all of it has been found valuable in the three years of the junior high school. From the last elementary school year, therefore, to the third high school year, the contents of the book have been used with success, and it is this gamut in the school curriculum that was kept in view in the preparation of the manuscript.

Acknowledgments. The author wishes to acknowledge his indebtedness to Miss Mabel F. Brooks for many helpful suggestions and for painstaking revision of proofs; to Miss Genevieve Dougine, Miss Caroline Solis, and Miss Emily Howes for the plans on pages 8, 19, and 32 respectively; to Mr. Charles R. Toothacker, Curator of the Philadelphia Commercial Museum, for valuable assistance with the illustrations; to Dr. F. H. Vizetelly of Funk and Wagnalls Company for valuable assistance with the chapter on "Speech About Work"; to Miss Clare Bunce of the May Manton Pattern Company for valuable assistance with those sections of the book that have to do with patterns; to Mr. James E. West, Chief Scout Executive, for permission to quote the Boy Scout Law; to Mr. Edgar A. Guest for permission to quote his poem, "The Whiners"; to Mr. Edward H. Schulze for permission to quote one of his advertising letters in full; to the editors of the following publications for permission to quote: The American Magazine, Popular

Mechanics, Good Housekeeping, Home Needlework Magazine, Obiter Dicta, New York Times, The Fra, Something to Do, The Electrical Experimenter, The Illustrated Milliner, The Outlook, The Woman's World, Advertising and Selling, and the Detroit Free Press; and to the following business and publishing firms for the privilege of quoting from their various house forms: Home Savings Bank of Boston, Liberty Storage and Warehouse Company of New York, Doubleday Page Company, Curtis Publishing Company, American Book Company, Funk and Wagnalls Company, Chalmers Motor Company, Jackson Automobile Company, The Roycrofters, May Manton Pattern Company, United Fruit Company, American Express Company, Sears-Roebuck Company, Stein-Bloch Company, John David Clothing House of New York, and R. R. Donnelly and Sons Company of the Lakeside Press, Chicago.