bodies and hence of new souls, and hence (if our new guesses are right) of the wider and permanent happiness for the sake of which the universe seems to have been evolved: While its matter and motion seem to have limits, souls and happiness seem open to constant increase.

If the pragmatic argument is good for anything, it can seldom be good for as much as for the genuineness of the communications given in this book. They have lifted an exceptionally important and meritorious family from distress into happiness, and will undoubtedly do the same for many others in these awful times. Yet it must be admitted that communications as open to question as these still are have their dangers, but the record of disaster is trifling compared with that on the happier side.

CORRESPONDENCE

Pedagogy-Even Once More

We had given to the subject all the attention that we thought our readers would care for, when we received the first of the following letters. We trust the correspondence speaks for itself:

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

The School of Education

OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR.

November 22, 1916.

Editor and Publisher of THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW,

34 West 33d St., New York.

Sir: May I impose on you to ask that you give personal attention to the short article which appears on pages 428-29 of the current issue of the REVIEW? I have never investigated teachers' grades, as is there stated. I have never been active in the movement to standardize grading systems. The president of Harvard University has. The University of Missouri has. A number of eminent educators not in any wise connected with departments of education have seen that it is essential to remove the irregularities and ambiguities in teachers' grades and have taken a strong hand in standardizing them. What I cannot understand is the reason for printing this illnatured letter without verifying at least a part of its statements, especially when the author's name is not allowed to come to the surface.

I do not write for the purpose of asking that this be published. I do ask that you look in person into the editorial situation which permits the appearance of so unjustified an attack. Does not your relation to your readers dictate that you ask someone who is informed to tell them about the standardizing of teachers' marks?

Very truly yours, (Signed) CHARLES H. JUDD.

The answer was:

November 25, 1916.

My dear Sir: I am shocked to receive your letter of November 22nd. I feel perfectly confident that the author of "An Advance

in Pedagogy" had no idea whatever of quoting you that he took a name "out of his head," so to speak, without looking over the catalogues to find if he happened to hit anybody. The intention of the article, I know, was entirely humorous.

It is very natural that in your sensitiveness to the use of your own name, you should not have realized the facts I have stated; but I have no idea that anybody but yourself will consider the joke as an attack on your personally, or that many will even think of you in connection with it. Still, if you wish, we will take peculiar pleasure in printing this correspondence, but we advise against it. It will in any event be too late to get it in the forthcoming January-March number.

To this came response:

Very truly yours, (Signed) by the Editor.

December 5, 1916.

Sir: I shall take advantage of your proposal to publish my letter of November 22 together with your reply of November 25. It is my judgment that the editorial attitude which you set forth in your letter of November 25 throws so much light on the value of comments by THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW on the science of education that I owe it to the professional interests which I represent to bring the whole matter to the attention of your readers.

In general I should not think of going into print to answer a personal attack and did not have in mind asking for a publication of my letters until I read your reply. I shall ask you, therefore, to include this letter when you print the others.

Mania Editorum

THE following is from a leading university:

Years ago I was struck with the plain fact that everyone whom fate or duty or poverty compels to read editorially masses of other people's manuscript becomes crazy loses the normal sense of relative values in minor matters of literary form; trivial things come to seem immense. I admit the effect is not so great in the inverse direction; I have no evidence that weightier matters come to seem trivial; but the ratio comes out wrong whether one term is unduly magnified or the other unduly lessened.

Let me hasten to add that this outbreak is not the effect of editorial rejection of good manuscripts; a fair proportion of my manuscripts, never numerous, have been printed and paid for at current rates. The phenomena have simply interested me as an observer of my kind. And this ink was set flowing by your paragraphs, "A Word to Contributors" and "More Fads in Writing," because they suggested an editor who is not yet quite crazy. As he is now past middle life and long practised in reading other people's manuscripts, there is even hope that he will not become so-at least, not in just the ways that have caught my attention.

My first "case" was editor of a series of books. After settling the details in which uniformity of framework was a needed economy of effort, he read critically every page. In a little while he became unable to distinguish between those matters that belonged to the framework of the series, where uniformity was clear gain, and those details where individuality was desirable, and another's fads and aversions might be quite as good as his own. His own acquired the force of natural laws.

Another was editor of a technical journal, where clarity was all-important and other literary merits of little consequence. For him there was more excuse, and it cost little to accept his demands, even where they were absurd; one sacrificed little by submitting.

It is in the literary periodicals that the situation becomes more painful or comical according to one's mood. In some journals a certain measure of simplification of spelling is de rigueur; in others any simplification not yet accepted by the most conservative in both England and New England is anathema. In some a compound centuries old like today is painfully hyphenated as if it were a new-comer; in others tonight and tomorrow must be divided in like manner. No one yet insists on to-gether, but no doubt some one will. And why not add al-to-gether and here-to-fore and yester-day and for-ever and be-fore and a-part and be-cause and never-the-less? Why print any compound with-out a hyphen? The language has inadvertently accepted a lot of them which need reforming backward as much as today. In some of our best magazines towards is tabu; in others, just as well edited, toward is never allowed except in verse. Everybody knows or can easily learn that both forms are equally old and in equally good usage in both prose and verseas are adverbial forward and forwards and backward and backwards. If uniformity in such matters is so important

for a journal why isn't it just as important for an individual author, who is forced to appear inconsistent if he contributes to different editors? I have been repeatedly corrected for using farther as the comparative of far, and made to accept further, comparative of dialectic and vulgar fur.

By virtue of this mania the editor relates himself to the schoolmaster on his less agreeable side, and to the pedant. It's a great pity. The editorial craze for particular types of uniformity is incidentally as great a hindrance to reform in spelling, for example, as the "experts" whom you lambast, who would like to see our alphabet sufficiently enlarged to be capable of reasonable accuracy in writing English, or who would like to see diphthongal i written as a diphthong.

This particular editor is not at all particular. While he sometimes states a modest preference, he thinks that an author good enough to be welcomed into this review is good enough to be his own judge. The editor is even hoping for the time when readers will be satisfied to let them choose their own spelling.

A Correction

DR. HYSLOP has sent us the following:

After making a statement about some work of Patience Worth, the January-March number of THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW makes the following remarks:

"Some students would say that the answer to that is plain everyday telepathy, such as, forty years ago nobody believed in, and now is believed in by nearly all investigators but Dr. Hyslop. He thinks it inconsistent with spiritism (which we don't): so as he believes in spiritism he disbelieves in telepathy. It is an established dogma of Myers and Company that telepathy takes place only between subconscious and 'subliminal' minds.

The writer of that note is quite mistaken in his statement about my attitude regarding "telepathy." I have accepted it for 25 years, and have said so in everything that I have written about it. So far from regarding it as inconsistent with spiritism I have always maintained that it might be the means of proving that theory. It is the public that conceives them as rival explanations of facts.