in a conspicuous position in the room and the children encouraged to make daily comparisons between their own work and that on the chart. Later in the year they may make a similar chart of their own work. If an intense interest can be aroused in this the pupils will practise at home of their own volition, desiring to compete with their classmates in obtaining a higher rank. Allowing them to mark their own papers according to this chart as frequently as seems desirable for that particular class of pupils, will give the work a greater individual motive and therefore interest. Children who show desire to practise outside of school should be encouraged as much as possible, receiving personal criticism from the teacher for all the papers they submit to her, including helpful suggestions to aid them in the next lesson. The children who have already received their final certificates may also give individual aid outside of school. To avoid wrong instruction of new subject matter the teacher should insist that the pupils practise only those letters which have been taught recently enough to enable the children to recall the more minute details. This would seem to apply to primary classes rather than older children, but the fact remains that pupils in grammar grades have been found to form letters wrongly and have experienced great difficulty and required infinite patience to correct the defects.

To encourage pupils doing fair work after having been ranked unsatisfactory in penmanship, reports of those showing greatest improvement as well as those of exceptionally high rank should be noted on the bulletin board, in the hall for the benefit of other classes and in each issue of the weekly or monthly school paper. The weekly, monthly, quarterly and semi-annual comparisons of their own papers will encourage those who have shown much improvement and goad those slipping in their work to fresh endeavors. Comparing papers with those of other schools either in the same town or even in a distant locality will tend to stimulate the children to greater effort. The preparation of these papers may take the form of friendly letters, thus providing language lessons mo

tivated naturally to the highest degree. The more the writing lessons are supplied with interesting devices and purposeful incentives the higher standard in writing will the children achieve. When they attain the goal of writing with the desired legibility, uniformity and speed they may disregard rules sufficiently to obtain a free grace and individual style. But the greater the comprehension of the guiding rules, the more likelihood of their attaining a style which is clear, distinctive, strong and graceful, a valuable asset in the school, social and business world.

Gift

Give me to see
Bright eyes

O'erflow with wonder

And surprise.

Give me to hear

Sweet thought

With jeweled words
Enwrought

Give me to hold

Youth's hand

Awander through

Each land

Where Beauty's couriers

Stand in wait.—

All pain will lie

Annihilate.

LINDA RIDER,

Dubuque, Iowa.

Is There a Cure for War?

JOHN H. BUTLER, STATE TEACHERS COLLEGE,
SAN FRANCISCO, CAL.

There is

AR? A cure for War? What folly.
no cure for War. The thousands of "cures" in-
spired by the vision of Mr. Bok's one hundred
thousand dollar prize can be but so much wasted
effort, as futile as poor Henry's peace ship that
sailed across and turned around and sailed right
back again.

When we say "cure" we presuppose a malady, a sickness. Now in the human organism there are but two maladies that doctors can cure. Practically all that a physician does is to treat symptoms. When the patient has fever he treats the symptoms of fever: he tries to regulate intestinal disruption; he prescribes a diet; he tries to reduce the temperature of the blood; he makes the patient rest and sleep; he does all he can with the symptoms of fever but he cannot say, "Here is the location of this fever. I will cut it out. Or I will apply a medicine to it that will kill it." What he does is to so treat the symptoms that the body is enabled to throw off the fever itself. It is a sound medical fact that there are but two or three diseases that doctors can actually cure as such.

War is a disease. Moreover, it is a disease with such deeprooted sources that it can hardly be likened to one of the few diseases of man that doctors can cure. Its tendrils reach down into the very original nature of mankind; it is fed by the primitive instincts that are as old as the race. Were it possible to treat its symptoms as a physician treats the symptoms of a human patient there might be some hope, just as there is some hope in the most desperate case of ailment known to man.

But it seems impossible to treat the symptoms of war with

the least hope of success. We have been trying it for thousands of years and there is absolutely no indication that we are much nearer the solution now than we ever were. There seems to be no great physician that can administer to the warsick world; no physician that can put it to bed, assuage its fever, physic it of the poisonous racial hatreds that ferment in its tortured entrails and feed it on the strengthening and purifying diet of brotherly love and human understanding. In this sense, then, the world cannot be cured.

Is there no hope? Must this most terrible of all plagues continue to exact its enormous toll in human anguish and staggering economic loss on down through the distant march of the future? It is said that in certain nations, war, which always takes the finest and best of the land, has gone so far in its deadly work of selection that the peoples of these nations have lost inches in stature, much of the physical vigor that once was their glory and are now actually looking forward to the time when physical degeneration will threaten their very existence.

Selection is an established fact. If the finest men of the nation are sacrificed on the battlefield it is imbecility to expect the weaklings left behind to breed anything but weaklings. That would be a flat denial of evolution.

Let us go back to the physician and his patient. Today it is recognized that the best way to fight disease is to begin at birth to build a body so strong that disease can hardly find a foothold. The best cure, then, is not a cure but is prevention, if the play on words can be pardoned. If a child is born of a tubercular mother, doomed to die, we do not frantically try to save the mother and disregard the child. The mother would die anyway and the child, uncared for, would catch the infection and follow her. No, we treat the mother and do our best to prolong her life but since it has been proven that it is merely the bodily weakness and not the germ that is inherited -we also see that the child does not catch the infection; we build up a strong physique in that child that will resist the attack of the germ. And thus the child is saved.

War, we have said, has its roots in the basic human passions, in the instinctive inheritance of the race. Great psychologists tell us that pugnacity and aggressiveness are original tendencies and that hate and fear are as old as mankind. Is there then any hope? In the ages that have passed it was also instinctive for the male to mate with many females. There was no such thing as marriage any more than there today exists among the animals a condition where the male always cleaves to the same female.

But in the thousands of years that have passed since those early days marriage has somehow come into being. There are cynics who will cheaply remark that today one male does not cleave to one female, but we know that when we take the world as a whole there is no more universal thing than the holy institution of marriage. This means, then, that instincts may be controlled and directed, even slowly changed. The American psychologist, Thorndyke, says that the instincts of man are far from being all good. They fitted him for a primitive existence and not for the civilized existence of today. He moreover says that these instincts can be changed by training and only as we change them to fit our present existence are we going in the right direction.

Thus there is hope for the future even if there is no cure for war in this generation. The world of tomorrow lies in the children of today. The world today is sick unto death with the malady of war. Rooted in the instinctive beings of the men and women of every nation the disease of war is being fed more gluttonously in Europe today by hatreds than at any time in the history of the world. To abolish war while the present generation still lives is beyond reason and only an imbecile would suggest such a possibility. It is not for us to say that the world court is useless. In establishing a world court we would be treating a symptom and even if the disease is incurable, surely we owe it to the patient to do all

we can.

But world courts, leagues of nations, treaties and all the other things that seek to deal with nations cannot cure war.