their purposes. They must follow a similar course in the rearing of children. There must be considerable unity of ideals and of practice before individuals can live a common life as citizens of the same state and country. We must not destroy individualism, but there should not be two opinions in fundamental matters of morals. All children should receive the same training in matters of truth, honesty, integrity, industry, perseverance, sympathy, and civic spirit. To bring this about there must be complete understanding and agreement as well as the fullest co-operation among the homes. The place for these conferences in child-training should be the school house. There, parents should meet often, formally and informally, to talk over their common work, the making of men and women out of boys and girls. The school is their school and should be so conducted as to give them most help in the work of rearing and training their children.

The world today is in a state of ferment, of unrest and disorder. Everywhere men are searching for a plan of reconstruction, for some panacea that will cure social and political evils. The cure will be found only in the home and its teaching. Let us have homes founded on mutual affection and sympathy; in these homes,

let us train children in those virtues on which good citizenship must always rest. We cannot cure any serious social evils by the mere passage of laws; they can only be cured by making right the hearts of men; and the hearts of men will be made right only to the extent that the home and the influences auxilliary to the home succeed.

CHAPTER VIII.

IDEALS OF ART AND BEAUTY.

THIS is called an age of materialism. The last century has witnessed a material progress unparalleled in history. No thousand years before had seen man make such progress in reducing the forces of nature to his control. Every school boy is familiar with this progress. Electricity and steam have given us the telephone, the telegraph, electric motor, and the steam engine with all its manifold uses for power. We have seen the steamboat, the locomotive, and various machines such as the reaper, the threshing machine, the sewing machine, the cctton gin, the cream separator, the linotype, the automobile, one after another, take their indispensible places in our industries. In every

town there is a factory. We have gone down into the earth for coal and metals, oil and gas; we have torn down the very mountains themselves. We have made nature give up her secrets. We know of the X-rays, the Hertzian waves and radium. We have weighed the atom, and measured the velocity of light. We sail

under the sea or in the air above at will. The railroads thread their endless ways through the country hauling the coal and minerals from the mines, produce and grain from the farms, and distributing the factory products of the cities far and wide throughout the land. Everywhere is the ceaseless hum of industry. But what of art? Has it made such progress? The energy of man is limited. During the last hundred years, that energy in America has been expended in reducing the forces of nature to the uses of man. The genius of our country has been building railroads and mills instead of writing poems and painting pictures. We boast of this great material progress, but we may weil ask whether it profits man to harness all the forces of nature and remain the same man he was before. Have we reduced human misery? Have we increased human happiness? Have we gained in kindness and sympathy? Do we use our immense power to make the environment of man more beautiful? What does it profit us to ride over country roads at the rate of thirty miles an hour and over the railroads at the rate of sixty miles an hour if our homes are no happier than they used to be?

The great poems were written long ago, also the dramas, the epics, the novels. The great

paintings were painted years ago. We speak of Plato, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Dante, Angelo, and Phidias. These men lived centuries ago. They never talked over a telephone or rode in a car, never received a wireless, although they seemed to receive spiritual messages from the gods. The plain and simple fact is that the happiness and higher spiritual life of man are largely independent of material things. It sometimes seems as if material success actually blunts the higher nature of man and makes him less sympathetic, less sensitive to the finer influences that surround him.

The knowledge, skill, and power that man now has, make it possible for him to beautify the face of the earth. We should begin with the home. Every family should live in a beautiful home. Society should not allow any family to live in an ugly, ill-constructed house. The house should have a yard with trees, shrubs, and flowers. Human life cannot flourish in the crowded tenements, and unspeakable hovels of the large cities. Inside, the house should be a cozy and pretty nest for happy people to live in. Everything in its should be good, substantial, beautiful -the rugs, the furniture, the pictures. We should train a race of people who will not be satisfied with anything cheap and poor and ugly.