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PRIZE

HAVE to announce that in response to the appeal for essays on the best 100 books for an ordinary man's library, I have received about 470 essays. 470 voting papers, each of which contains 100 votes, represent a mass of work which cannot be thoroughly gone through in the brief space between the receipt of the essays and going to press. I must therefore hold over the announcement of the prize-winner until January.

The competition that was limited to school teachers as to the formation of a library, has only elicited from thirty to forty essays, the result of which will also be announced next January.

I have this month only time to deal with the essays sent in by competitors who have entered for the prizes announced for the best essay in cach of four classes as to "How I came to like reading." There have been one hundred and fifteen essays sent in, but they are very unequally divided according to categories.

No definite sum was offered for this competition. All that was stated was that a small prize would be offered. I have therefore thought it would be best to allot £10 for this competition, and to divide it between the different classes according to the number of competitors in each. As the adult male class contains nearly one-half, I have allotted £5 for them, and divided the other £5 among the other three classes, which together only make up about an equal number of competitors. I have read all the essays myself, which was no light task, considering the variety of handwriting, and I must honestly say I am cxtremely pleased with the result of the competition. The writers have, almost without cxception, confined themselves to the subject in hand, have said what they have to say, and then left off. The result is I have more than one hundred human documents, or fragments of autobiography, many of which are of extreme interest, and I have been much puzzled in deciding, when so many were so good, as to which was the best. After reading and re-reading to see which were among the first from the point of view of excellence, and consulting friends whose judgment I value, I have decided to make the following awards :

CLASS 1.-Men over 18 years of age. (55 competitors.) (T. C. PHILLIPS, 3 Bangor Road, Roath, Cardiff. Equal (EDW. WILLMORE, 55 Chestnut Avenue, Forest Gate, E. CLASS 2.-Males under 18. (14 competitors.) G. D. ALLEN (174), 21 Denmark Road, Barnsbury, N. CLASS 3.-Ladies over 18. (38 competitors.) Terrace, Edinburgh. (6 competitors.)

H. M. DAVIDSON, 18 Mercheston

CLASS 4.-Girls under 18.

CHARLOTTE EMILY MANN (17), 15 Glebe Road, Bedford.

I must confess that the task of deciding which essayist is to receive the prize is a very unpleasant one for myself. I remember so often having competed for prizes when I was a juvenile essayist and being disappointed, that I picture to myself only too vividly the sadness which my decision must occasion to many persons, over whose life I regret to cast even a passing shadow. I can only console those who have not succeeded by assuring them that I only once won a prize essay myself, and was a defeated candidate in an indefinite number of competitions. I commend to them the consolation which I then took to myself, viz, that it was quite an even chance that the

ESSAYS.

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judge had made a mistake, that my essay was as good as that of the fellow who got the prize, and that anyhow the stimulus to write the essay was worth more than the value of the prize. There is also an excellent quatrain of Lord Houghton's, which I quote, not because I consider the small prize I offer as anything great, but because it embodies the true principle which we should take with us when we enter upon any of the struggles or competitions of life :

If what shone afar so grand Turns to nothing in thy hand, On again, the virtue lies

In the struggle, not the prize.

I had originally intended printing the prize essay and giving some extracts from the unsuccessful competitors, but I find that space this month is too crowded, and, besides, the essays are too good to be dismissed in this fashion, therefore, out of this humble beginning there has evolved, in my mind, the project of publishing a whole book devoted to the subject. The title is not yet fixed upon, but the gist of the book is to be: "What Looks to read, and how to read them," and I shall draw freely upon the life histories of my 100 odd competitors. When I shall get this book to press I cannot exactly say --that depends upon many things, chiefly upon the available time I have at my disposal-but I think that the result of this competition, together with the plébiscite of the 471 for the best 100 books, and the school teacher's (ssays, will enable me, with the aid of other books that have been published, to construct a volume, which will be palpitating with actuality, to use a familiar phrase, full of living interest, and calculated to be of real use to those who want some help as to what they should read, and how.

One word more as to the net result of the impression left upon my mind by the autobiographical confessions of my hundred competitors. First and foremost, most people learn to love reading by being read aloud to when they were children; it is the spoken voice (which attracts to the printed page. Secondly, that those who have not been taught to like reading from their childhood, seldom learn to like reading unless they are hungered to it. That is to say, that quite an astonishing proportion of those who have written their experiences attribute their love of reading to the time when they had either a long illness or were for some reason or other, cut off from the ordinary dissipations of every-day life. If you want to make a man appreciate reading, you should set him up on a desolate island with nothing at all to do except to master the contents of a library. The third point that is brought out very clearly by a great number of the essayists is that penny dreadfuls, no matter how “bluggy they may be, do their readers no harm. At any rate quite a large proportion of those who describe how they learnt to like reading, give a well-defined position to the penny dreadful, which they declare they devoured voraciously but without feeling any ill-effects. But I must adjourn what I have to say about this until my book comes out. Meantime I will express my sincere thanks to the essayists who have contributed, out of the wealth of their own personal experience, to the help and guidance of the readers that are to come.

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INCE the publication of the now notorious Report of

Condition of the Metropolitan Pauper Children, a great deal has been said and written on the subject generally. It will not be forgotten that the Committee, which included statesmen like Mr. Mundella and Sir John Gorst, experts like Mr. Wm. Vallance and Mrs. S. A. Barnett, and professional inspectors and examiners such as Sir Joshua Fitch and Dr. Edward Nettleship, were unanimous in condemning Barrack Schools-or indeed any system by which children were brought up in large numbers together. They formed the opinion, based on the cross-examination of seventy-three witnesses, that the family life was best for children, and that the artificial system by which children of the same sex and the same class, often with similar antecedents and undesirable memories, were reared together, apart from the natural joys and wholesome stimulus of a family, had resulted in making them stunted and undeveloped in body, dull, sullen and mechanical in mind, and often listless in spirit. These qualities joined, as they not unfrequently are, to a temper which some witnesses describe as "quite demoniacal," a very inadequate education, and a technical training that is "practically useless," makes it difficult for State-supported children to take their places in the labour markets of the world or to hold their own as skilled and useful citizens.

The Departmental Committee also found that each child in a barrack school cost £29 5s. 6d. a year, or 11s. Od. a week, and that the immense sum of £1,284,374 had been sunk in the buildings which they rightly describe as "palatial." But although at this rate each bed has cost £104 5s. 6d., it was yet found that the schools were crowded beyond what was hygienically desirable. Ophthalmia, a disease which among normal children of the same class attacks under two per cent., infects children when in these large aggregated schools to something like fifteen or twenty per cent. Scarlet fever, whooping cough, measles, and typhoid find under these conditions excellent soil in which to grow or spread, while expert medical evidence proves the painful fact that the maladies of malnutrition and lowered vitality are frequent among children who are in no sense starved or under-fed, but whose dull lives and want of natural daily interests deprives them of the nervous vitality necessary for the wholesome nourishment of the body. If the Committee's advice were followed the amount of cubic feet now insisted on by the Government would be considerably enlarged, with the result that instead of each bed costing £104 it would probably stand at £150, while the annual cost per child would be proportionally increased a matter which is of financial importance to many a ratepayer who is not able to spend 14s. or 15s. per week on each of his own children, as he would be then called on to do for every pauper child.

The Committee recognised and emphatically stated their appreciation of the excellent work done by some of the Boards of Guardians, and especially by some of the Managers; but in spite of these efforts the State-appointed Committee unanimously condemned the system as a method of rearing the State-supported children, and like a practical body set themselves to discover a method by which it could be abandoned without undue injury to the ratepayers. The method they suggested was that a Central Metropolitan Board should be formed-perhaps

as a separate body, perhaps as a Committee of the London County Council-under whose care all the London pauper children should be placed, and who should have possession and control of all the buildings at present used for them. By this change it was hoped three objects would be accomplished:

1. More children would be boarded out in families or placed in charitable homes small enough to allow their characters to be studied, tastes formed, and natures developed.

2. Certain of the large barrack schools could be sold or otherwise disposed of, while others could be used for certain classes of children who need either strict discipline, special trade instruction, or peculiar hygienic conditions.

3. The children could be classified. At present the widow's child, carefully protected from evil, has to associate with the little street rebel whose knowledge of wrong is only equalled by his capacity for imparting it. Each Union only has one school, and, therefore, all children, healthy, sickly, clever, stupid, innocent or corrupted, have to go to that school-to join not only in the same lessons for periods when they are under observation and control-but to spend together all the many uncounted hours which are passed in play-rooms, enclosed yards or long dormitories, where it is impossible for supervision to exist, and which too often (as recent trials have shown) are the seed-grounds of corruption and the practising fields of cruelty and deceit.

It would not be fair to blame the Guardians or Managers for these evils; they cannot help them as things are at present organised. It would never do, either on grounds of economy or practicability, for every separate Board to establish and manage the numerous and varied institutions which would be required to meet the needs of the many different sorts and kinds of children, were adequate classification aimed at or insisted on. But if the Central Board had all the existing institutions, they could use them for different purposes-this one for a trade training school; that one for an ophthalmic hospital; another for a discipline home; a fourth for an "in and out" asylum. Each child could be sent to the school which would be most suited to his requirements, and-and perhaps this is the point which specially commends the scheme to us-such a Central Body would be able to advance boarding-out, and stimulate the public conscience concerning its duty to the State-dependent child, in a way that no individual Board of Guardians finds it possible now to do.

It may be well to consider a little more closely this boarding-out matter, and how it would be affected by being removed from the twenty-nine Boards who are now left to do the negotiations, and placed into the hands of one body with whom only all the country boarding-out committees would communicate. are now 157 boarding-out committees dotted all over England and Wales. They have the care of 1,802 children, 968 of whom are London children, the remainder being country and provincial paupers.

There

When a London Board of Guardians decide that they wish to board out a child, the clerk has to write, not to one central body who would know where there was a vacancy and what were the local conditions, sanitary, industrial, ethical or otherwise, but to such or several of the 157 committees of which he has happened to hear.

Too often he gets refusals from various and perfectly legitimate causes. He then, perhaps, continues to write letters to other committees, until in weariness of resultless effort the Board decides to send the child to the barrack school. From the country the confusion is also to be regretted: it adds unnecessary work, uses more money, and involves useless waste of time for the honorary secretary to have to answer many letters politely explaining that there are no vacancies in that village, or that other circumstances prevent the boarding-out committee taking more children.

Again, while some country committees get too many applications, others get too few, and, to quote the Departmental Committee's report, "there can be little doubt that the committees not unfrequently dwindle in size or flag in zeal" from the absence of suitable children as well as other causes. It will be easily seen that these particular drawbacks to the development of this system of rearing the young, which has been declared not only by the English Departmental Committee but by the experience of every other civilised nation, to be the "best system," would be almost entirely abolished by placing all the boarding-out under one Central Metropolitan Body. It would then be the duty of this Board to communicate with the boarding-out committees; to know whether the various country organisations were working well and harmoniously; to demand and maintain the standard of life to be observed for "nobody's child"; to become acquainted with the industrial conditions of the neighbourhoods or the chances of children being absorbed into the respectable working population; to uphold the actions of efficient committees, and to upbraid and reform those who have been tempted to exercise patronage, or to assist village favourites by means of the State children and the State money. All this a central and public body would be able to do; and as a result the conscience of the people would be quickened with regard to their duty to pauper children.

On many occasions we have urged those who are members of our Helpers' Guild, or readers of the reports of our Civic Church, to consider more closely the needs of the unwanted children of our land. We have felt, and, indeed, often expressed, that a nation has no right to claim for itself the term "Christian" who has yet to point to a column of its State papers in which is printed the figure 242,000, representing that number of (not degraded and often brutalised adults), but young and, in many cases, unformed and untainted children who are supported by the State in workhouses, in barrack schools, in isolated pauper villages, in giant industrial institutions, because-because why? Not for want of money, but because no English homes could be found for them, no English hearths at which they could have a seat, no English hearts into which they might creep and find a place.

Is this our Christian boast? Is this disgrace to cling still to us? And it is a disgrace not shared by all countries. In an exceedingly interesting paper issued by Miss F. Davenport Hill, it is shown that Scotland finds enough working-class families in which to place eighty-four per cent. of its dependent children. In Switzerland, where much thought and care bestowed on the State children, seventy-four per cent. are boarded out. In Germany the same system is made compulsory. In the Colonies it is all but universal; and even Russia, so far behind in much which we call civilised, has recognised that a home life is the best soil in which to grow a child, and from its vast asylums in

are

St. Petersburg and Moscow it boards out some ninety per cent. of the ever-changing inmates.

These figures are all the more striking when we compare them with those of London, which boards out under six per cent. of the children chargeable to it; while for all England-taken as a whole and omitting Scotland-the percentage is far lower.

Undoubtedly a Central Metropolitan Board with the care of all London pauper children, would be able to do much to stimulate boarding-out; but the bulk of the work would have to be done by country people, or those living in the suburbs of provincial towns, and this is where our readers could help. "It is useless to hope to extend boarding-out," say the opponents of the scheme; "not only are there not sufficient poor families respectable enough to be trusted with another person's child, but the ladies who are interested are too few to supervise the foster-parents or befriend the children.” This is a grave accusation against the ladies of England, and one which we trust our readers will do something to make untrue. The method of proceeding is very simple: it is put out quite plainly in the Report of the Departmental Committee, which can be bought at Messrs. Eyre and Spottiswoode's for 1s. 6d.; or if any one should need more detailed help, Mrs. S. A. Barnett or Miss Davenport Hill, or our Helpers' Guild Secretary, will doubtless communicate their experience. All that is needed is for a few ladies to band themselves together as a committee, and then to apply to the Local Government Board to be certified. This, after (we fear) considerable delay, will be granted; and the next duty will be for the ladies to enlist the working women of the village in their plans. This is essential if real lasting good is to be done; for it is only by every one feeling that the work is done for the child as a Christian duty that it can be satisfactorily accomplished. When the village homes are found, the village foster-parents talked to, and the village teachers prepared, then the next duty is to get the children. We have already shown how much better this could be done by a Central Board than now; but until public opinion demands and gets that Central Board, application must be made to the twenty-nine different Metropolitan Boards, and patience must be exercised; but if success is achieved the object will be worth the waiting. Instead of the child being one among hundreds, unknown, though fed, clothed, disciplined, und drilled, it will be established in a home, able to take its place and share, not only the family's joys, but its hopes and hardships, which do so much to create individuality.

"The child brought up under the ordinary conditions of family and village life is in a position to see the results which follow conduct. He realises that drunkenness is succeeded by poverty, and that indigence is the offspring of thriftlessness."

We have not spoken of small certified homes, where six or eight children could be housed-admirable substitutes, and in many instances necessary substitutes, for the workman's cottages. All who know unite to hope that more of these will shortly be established, not in clusters or groups, miles away from other habitations, and costing £60,000, as was the effort so unfortunately praised by Mr. Balfour at Etyal the other day. Such pauper organisations are not good; but little homes managed by ladies are very helpful, and all who have tried this way of helping either girls, boys, deficient, halt, maimed, or lamed children, are unanimous in recording the rich harvest the children reap.

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THE BOOK OF THE MONTH.

IN

MR. RUDYARD KIPLING'S "SEVEN SEAS AND OTHER POEMS."*

EACH for the joy of the working, and each in his separate star
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It, for the God of Things as They Are.

N the last lines of the last verses in L'Envoi of his latest verse, our latest poet defines the aspiration of his muse. Mr. Rudyard Kipling is the inspired Bard of the God of Things as They Are. It is a somewhat curious deity. The Positivists worship Humanity apparently for no more intelligible reason than that the huge entity is perpetually doing everything the Positivists most dislike. But no Positivist would bow down and worship the God of Things as They Are. Like all other children of men but Mr. Rudyard Kipling, the Positivists worship the God of Things as They Are Becoming-or going to be. Mr. Kipling is content with Things as They Are, and the God who made them. Children and fools, says the old adage, should never see things in the making. Mr. Kipling is neither a child nor a fool, but he rests content with "the Thing as he sees Itwith a capital I, if you please. Like Walt Whitman's cattle, which do not lie awake in the dark to weep for their sins and make him sick by discussing their duty to Gol, Rudyard Kipling is troubled by no visions of any far-off Divine event to which the whole Creation moves. Sufficient for him is the day and the travail thereof, the joy of it and also the sorrow. Between Bernard of Clugny and the Vates Sacer of Things as They Are yawns the abyss of the Infinite. Yot as the God of the Things that Are, and the God of the Things that are to Come, is one God, there is room in His T mple Choir for both the saintly chant of the medieval cloister and the roystering ditty of the modern barrack-room.

Rudyard Kipling is not merely the poet of the Things That Are. He is in a special manner Poet Laureate of the Empire. How long it will be before "the Widow of Windsor" recognises the Laureateship of the Empire no one can say. But King Demos has already accorded to Mr. Kipling the wreath intertwined of all the laurels of all the countries and of all the seas over which the British flag floats supreme, and hailed him as Laureate of the Empire and its Seven Seas. It is possible that his very limitations may have gained him more speedy recognition. Had he been more of an idealist he would have soared too high above the heads of the multitude. As it is, there is in him just that note of materialistic realism charged with humour and touched with pathos that appeals directliest to the everyday sentiments of the average man. His verse does not exactly roll with the full note of the great drum, but it pulses and throbs with the intense pursuing note of the barbaric tom-tom. Only now and then does he make us breathe a diviner air; but on these stray excursions his note is true, clear and limpid as the silvery note of the flute piercing through the brazen clangour of the band.

Mr. Kipling's genius--for his is a genius distinct and unique, which sets him apart from all the poets of our time-is various indeed. No writer of the present day can compare with him for range and versatility. The e

"The Seven Seas," by Rudyard Kipling. Methuen and Co, 1896. Pp. 230. Barrack Room Ballads and other Verses," by Rudyard Kipling. Methuen and Co., 1895. Pp. 208.

-RUDYARD KIPLING.

is about him somewhat of the re lundancy of growth
significant of the excessive vitality characterising a
tropical forest. His writings are like his own Fuzzy
Wuzzy's "'ayrick 'ead of 'air," so copious are they, so
free and unconfined, so altogether uncommon and unlike
the smooth brushel thatch of ordinary mortals. But
ro blatant ostentation of vulgarity can conceal the
fact that in this "big, black boundin' beggar'
" who
broke the British square of conventional propriety
we have a genuine poet-one who sees, and who makes
others see his seeings. Unlike other singers of our day,
Rudyard Kipling has seen the world of which he sings.
Born in India, reared in the borderland of Afghanistan,
he lives in the United States and publishes his verse in
London. He is a product of an age where steam and the
electric cable have bridged the seas and made the con-
tinents but as wards in this planetary parish. We do not
say in Lowell's phrase:-

This, this is he, for whom the world is waiting,
To sing the beatings of its mighty heart,

but no one save him has yet arisen who can sing of the Empire as a whole with the knowledge of the seer who has traversed its ocean highways and actually dwelt among its peoples. He is not

A poet who was sent

For a bad world's punishment,

By compelling it to see
Golden glimpses of To Be,
By compelling it to hear

Songs that prove the angels near,"

for he is the Poet of Things as They Are. Nevertheless, in the very insolent sauciness of his fleering verse he strikes out sparks that light up the gloom, and make whole strata of human experience comprehensible. But a truce to saying what Mr. Kipling is and what he is not; and now to our book.

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I.-AS LAUREATE OF THE EMPIRE.

"The Seven Seas" opens with a song of the English, 'a song of broken interludes," in the introductory stanzas of which we have from Rudyard Kipling-I really must drop the Mr., it sounds as absurd as Mr. Walt Whitman or Mr. Percy Shelley-a definition of the great law which the Lord our God Most High laid upon the people of His choice. It is no inapt summary of the work of the English-speaking man among the nations of the earth:

Keep ye the law-be swift in all obedience,

Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford.
Make ye sure to each his own

That he reap where he hath sown,

By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve the Lord!

Having thus laid down the Law, Rudyard Kipling sings of the Coastwise Lights, the Song of the Dead, the Deep Sea Cables, the Song of the Sons, and the Song of the Cities. After which we have "England's Answer," in which the poet expresses the unwritten pact that

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