ministration and party who surrounded him, he in reality led and shaped his own executive course, dis. closing in advance to his familiar cabinet such part as he thought best to make known, while concealing the rest. Both Bancroft and Buchanan, of his official advisors, have left on record, since his death, incidental tributes to his greatness as an administrator and unifier of executive action, both admitting in effect his superior force of will and comprehension of the best practical methods for attaining his far-reaching ends. On the other hand, while the diary shows that Mr. Polk held the one secretary in high esteem, it is plain that he appreciated the many weaknesses of the other, with whom he had frequent differences of opinion, which in these secret pages elicit his own sharp comment. In fact, the Secretary of State, whom he repeatedly overruled, felt for the first sixteen months, at least, of this executive term, so much dissatisfied with various features of Polk's policy, and in particular, like others of Pennsylvania, so discontented with the famous low tariff measure which Polk was bent upon carrying, that in the summer of 1846 he arranged definitely to retire from the cabinet, to accept a middle state vacancy on the supreme bench, which the President promised him, though with an overruling discretion, deferring the appointment until the new tariff act was out of jeopardy at the capitol, when Buchanan himself at last concluded to remain where he was. Buchanan's presidential aspirations, notwithstanding a condition exacted by the President from all who entered the administration that they should cease to aspire so long as they sat at his council board, annoyed him much as time went on. He is selfish,' says the diary in March, 1848, and controlled so much by wishes for his own advancement that I cannot trust his advice on a public question; yet it is hazardous to dismiss, and I have borne with him.' And on another occasion Polk records, after repeatedly finding his secretary timid, over-anxious and disposed too much to forestall overtures from others which the administration knew were due and were sure to come, Mr. Buchanan is an able man, but is in small matters without judgment and sometimes acts like an old maid.'"

A RECIPE FOR HANDSHAKING.

President Polk thought it worth while to write out in his diary a recipe for presidential hand shaking: "If a man surrendered his arm to be shaken by one horizontally, by another perpendicularly, and by another with a strong grip, he could not fail to suffer severely from it; but if he would shake and not be shaken, grip and not be gripped, taking care always to squeeze the hand of his adversary as hard as the adversary squeezed him, he would suffer no inconvenience from it. I can generally anticipate a strong grip from a strong man; and I then take advantage of him by being quicker than he, and seizing him by the tip of his fingers." "I stated this playfully," he adds, "but it is all true."

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THE WEST IN AMERICAN HISTORY. CHE Proper Perspective of American History is the title of an article by Prof. Woodrow Wilson in the Forum. Professor Wilson takes the ground that neither New England nor the South contains the proper view-point of our national development. Our history has been very largely written by New England men who have seen in it simply the expansion of New England. Southern writers, on the other hand, find in it little more than the record of the South's abasement. The Westward movement of population has not been accurately described. The great migration across the Alleghanies that set in after the War of 1812 was a distinctively national movement. "It was then," says Professor

"The East slowly accustomed itself to the change; caught the movement, though it grumbled and even trembled at the pace; and managed most of the time to keep in the running. But it was always henceforth to be the West that set the pace. There is no mistaking the questions that have ruled our spirits as a nation during the present century. The public land question, the tariff question, and the question of slavery-these dominate from first to last. It was the West that made each one of these the question that it was. Without the free lands to which every man who chose might go, there would not have been that easy prosperity of life and that high standard of abunance which seemed to render it necessary that, if we were to have manufactures and a diversified industry at all, we should foster new undertakings by a system of protection which would make the profits of the factory as certain and as abundant as the profits of the farm. It was the constant movement of the population, the constant march of wagon trains into the West, that made it so cardinal a matter of policy whether the great national domain should be free land or not; and that was the land question. It was the settlement of the West that transformed slavery from an accepted institution into passionate matter of controversy."

LINCOLN THE TYPE.

Professor Wilson takes Lincoln as the typical Western man, but he finds in him the type, not merely of the West as a section, but of the nation as a whole.

His eyes, as they looked more and more abroad, beheld the national life, and comprehended it; and the lad who had been so rough-cut a provincial became, when grown to manhood, the one leader in all the nation who held the whole people singly in his heart-held even the Southern people there, and would have won them back. And so we have in him what we must call the perfect development of native strength, the rounding out and nationalization of the provincial.

"We have here a national man presiding over sectional men. Lincoln understood the East better than the East understood him or the people from whom he sprung; and this is every way a very noteworthy circumstance. For my part, I read a lesson in the singular career of this great man. Is it possible the East remains sectional while the West broadens to a wider view?

AN

?"

THE CHINESE DRAMA.

N entertaining description of modern Chinese plays and the manner of their presentation is contained in a Chautauquan article by the Rev. Frederic J. Masters. It seems that the salaries of leading Chinese actors in this country, before the restriction of immigration was enforced, were relatively large. Mr. Masters mentions one who commanded $10,000 a year in San Francisco. Another was paid $1,600 for a three months' engagement at Portland a few years ago. A celebrated tragedian nicknamed "Pock-marked Hoh" received $8,000 a year at the same theatre.

“These salaries were paid ten or fifteen years ago, when merchants were making fortunes, and Chinatown had not begun to feel the pinch of exclusion laws and hard times. The proprietor formerly hired the players at fixed salaries. He takes no chances now, and simply rents the house, furniture and wardrobes to a company, who, after defraying rent and current expenses, divide the proceeds among themselves pro rata."

HOW THE PLAY IS "PUT ON."

The Chinese play is not "put on " in a way calculated to please the American gallery gods.

To the nervous American a Chinese play at its best possesses few charms. A few minutes will satisfy him for a lifetime. He wonders how anything human can live through such an excruciating din. The doors open at five, and the play goes on till midnight, to be continued next day if not completed by twelve o'clock. Some of the great historical plays performed in China have been known to occupy a whole week, at least so the writer has been informed by those who have survived.

When the doors open there is no delay. The band strikes up with ear splitting accompaniments of cymbals and gongs, amid which the actors scream forth their parts in a high falsetto key wholly unintelligible to an untrained ear. The orchestra sits in the rear of the stage, scraping fiddles and giving extraordinary emphasis to the more stirring passages of the actors' recitative by terrific crashes of gongs and cymbals. The wonder is how, in this hullabaloo, anybody can tell what is going on. There is no division of the acts, no falling of the curtain, and the play rushes along without intermission.

"As in Shakespeare's day, the performance usually opens with a prologue, in which the principal actor enunciates the plot and relates incidents which throw historic light upon the drama to be presented. The actors tell what part they perform and guide their

audience, if need be, through the intricacies of the plot. Theatre going people have no difficulty in following the play and distinguishing the different acts. Their animated faces are evidence of a thorough interest in what is going on. A burst of laughter greets some local hit or new joke, but there is no hand clapping or stamping of the feet and young China is not yet initiated into the art of whistling and caterwauling.

"The average theatre goer shows a wonderful familiarity with the librettos of the more popular dramas, as the following incident will illustrate. An actor one night stammered and broke down in the middle of his piece. Instantly a man rose in the body of the pit, uttered a coarse epithet, and savagely gave the cue word, accompanied by a piece of sugar cane hurled at the blundering actor's head.

MAKESHIFTS FOR SCENERY.

A great drawback to the Chinese theatre is the absence of artificial scenery, movable pieces, painted canvas, and other accessories to stage illusions. To supply this deficiency the stage manager resorts to some very ludicrous expedients implying a faculty for imagination largely in excess of that with which a Chinaman is usually credited. Chairs, benches and tables are made to serve conventional uses never contemplated by the manufacturer. For instance, two tables three or four feet apart, with a board laid across, represent a bridge. When the spectator sees benches and chairs piled up eight or ten feet high he must imagine himself at the base of one of China's classic mountains. When he sees a dirty piece of canvas spread upon the floor he is standing on the shore of some historic lake. When he sees men seated upon chairs with paddles and poles in their hands, he must, by a violent effort of the imagination, behold a passing barge or a regatta of dragon boats on the Pearl River. A courier plays riding horseback by striding a bamboo pole with a tuft of hair tied to the end. When he reaches the other side of the stage he announces his arrival at Peking. diers fall in battle, lie still a few moments, then coolly get up, walk across the stage to a seat and sit down to fan themselves in full view of everybody.

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"The audience, like little children, do not appear to feel the incongruity and absurdity of such performances. They cackle and grin out of pure delight. If the critical American feels no joy, or if he must stop his ears to the shrill pipes and clashing cymbals, so much the worse for him. He is to be pitied. The poor foreign devil has no æsthetic tastes, that is all."

MISS ELIZABETH BANKS has an interesting article in Cassell's Family Magazine, on "The Cost of Living in New York and London." She maintains that it is quite as easy to live in New York as cheaply as one can in London, but a family will spend more in New York than in London, because an American will not do without things which a Londoner does not yet regard as necessities of life.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CHAUTAUQUA SYSTEM.

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VERY ONE who has set foot within the inclosure known as Chautauqua will remember the miniature Land of Palestine which rises and falls in hills and valleys to the left of the entrance. It is in keeping with the spirit and the methods of the Chautauqua system that it should thus bring the book to the student, but it is peculiarly appropriate that a model of Palestine should be given a place on the shores of Lake Chautauqua, for, according to Miss Ida M. Tarbell's sketch of Bishop Vincent's life and work in McClure's Magazine for August, the system itself had its origin in the "Palestine class,' which in 1855 Bishop Vincent, then a young minister, organized for the study of Biblical history. One of the first things which attracted the attention of young Vincent on entering the ministry was the Bible instruction then given in his church. He saw that it dealt largely with dogma and rules, and that the Bible as history and literature was a closed volume, and it was with the view of improving the methods of study that he started in the New Jersey church where he was stationed the "Palestine Class," as he called it. Here young and old studied the Bible purely as a work of art and of record. To secure thoroughness from his pupils the teacher prepared a series of graded examinations, and it was only as one of the " passed " that he was permitted to go on with more advanced work. "This class,'

says Miss Tarbell, "opened Dr. Vincent's eyes to the great need of the Sunday-school-intelligent teachers, and he set about devising a means to prepare them for their work. A Church Normal Class' was the form he proposed, and in 1857 he organized in Joliet, Illinois, whither he had been transferred from New Jersey, the first class for training Sunday-school teachers. Several denominations were represented in it. The idea proved catching. It appealed to the intelligent everywhere. They saw in it the germ of a system which they all had long felt was essential to the future of this department of the church. There were calls made on all sides for Dr. Vincent's methods and opinions, and he saw the need of making his work broader than his parish. In 1861 he attempted this by holding the first Sunday-school Institute in America. The Palestine Class and the Normal Class were, of course, features of the Institute, and here the idea, now so generally accepted, that the Sunday-school teacher should be prepared for his work as well as the secular teacher, was advanced. In fact, at this gathering the modern Sunday-school began to take form.

"But there was no literature on the subject, and Dr. Vincent saw himself obliged to prepare handbooks and manuals, one after another, which embodied his methods and plans. The first of these was issued in 1861, 'Little Footprints in Bible Lands. In 1865 he became a Sunday-school editor, establishing the Sunday-school Quarterly, and a year later the Sunday-school Teacher. Into the latter he

incorporated an idea which has since revolutionized the Sunday schools of the world. That idea was the germ of the present lesson system with lesson-leaves. "This lesson system, begun in the Sunday-school Times in 1866, was soon afterward turned into the Berean system by Dr. Vincent. The practical good sense, the convenience, and the stimulus of the plan caused it to spread widely through the denomination with which Dr. Vincent was affiliated-the Methodist Episcopal-and to be adopted by many others. It was not long before, through the influence of the Sunday-school layman Mr. Jacobs, the Berean system became national. Later, through Dr. Vincent's influence, it was made international.

"This revolution in Sunday-school methods drew the young pastor prominently before his church, and in 1868 he was made secretary of the Sunday-school Union of the Methodist Episcopal Church, a position he held for twenty years. His activity in this new position was intense, and his fertility endless. Sunday-schools all over the country were stimulated to adopt normal methods; the lesson-leaves were placed in the hands of the ablest scholars of the denomination for annotation; the best talent was called in to contribute to the Sunday-school journals; indeed, this department of church work was revived the country over in all denominations. At the same time, Dr. Vincent continued to pour forth books designed to explain and develop the system. The complete series of books forms in reality an encyclopedia of the modern Sunday-school. It includes, among others, the well-known Berean question books from 1871 to 1882, a series of handbooks for normal work, a volume on the Modern Sunday-school,' another on the Church School.'

ORIGIN OF THE CHAUTAUQUA SUNDAY-SCHOOL
ASSEMBLY.

"In carrying out his work, Dr. Vincent used fully the Sunday-school Institute, inaugurated in 1861. But it had never become as broad as it was capable of being made, in the judgment of at least one prominent Sunday-school leader of the day, Mr. Lewis Miller of Akron, Ohio. Mr. Miller was one of the most intelligent and active of the new race of superintendents. He had appreciated and used to the best advantage all the new devices introduced by Dr. Vincent, and he saw in him the man with whom to unite to carry out a pet idea of his own-an annual summer Sunday-school assembly, to be held at some spot devoted to the purpose, where the methods of the Institute might be carried to perfection, new devices introduced, and a permanency and unity given to the whole, which so far it had not attained. Dr. Vincent united gladly with Mr. Miller in this work, and the result was the opening, in 1874, of the Chautauqua Sunday-school Assembly, on Chautauqua Lake, in New York State."

The first ambition of the new institution was to stimulate to intelligent Bible study and methods of teaching, but both Mr. Miller and Dr. Vincent believed it wise to unite with this instruction more or

won.

"To understand this peculiar feature we must turn to Dr. Vincent's plan of self-culture. The labor he had given to self-education grew out of his keen realization of the limitations, undeveloped reasoning faculties and untrained taste put on life, and he had a keen appreciation of the value of what he had Endowed with a fervid imagination and a large sympathy with, and comprehension of, the limitations of humanity, he saw that most of the lives about him were poor and narrow simply because of their stunted intellectual growth; that almost invariably men and women accepted the idea that education is an affair of teachers and text-books and lessons, and that, if it is not secured in the early years of life, they must resign themselves apathetically never to know. For many years he brooded over this sad side of life. From being one of the woes of others which he could not forget, it became one of those which he felt he must try to relieve. As he pondered the subject he saw clearly that what was needed was some plan simple and practical enough to seem feasible to even the most ignorant and hard-pressed, inviting enough to awaken their imaginations, interesting enough to lead them on when they had once begun it. Unconsciously this plan developed, until suddenly it became what its author felt was a reasonable scheme.

"This plan the public now is pretty well acquainted with. It proposes a four-years' course of reading, entirely in English, along the lines of the subjects taken up in college. These readings are selected by a board of counselors, and for the most part are prepared especially to suit the needs of the organization. About an hour a day for nine months of the year is required to do the work, and, to aid the student, the reading is divided up by the week. Each year the reader fills out a memorandum on this work and is given a certificate of what he has accomplished. Arrangements are made by which readers can unite, if they will, into local circles, for mutual help in their readings.

"As soon as Dr. Vincent had developed his scheme sufficiently he submitted it to various prominent men of the country, among them William Cullen Bryant, and from everybody he received encouraging responses. The want he proposed to fill was undeniable. It looked as if his plan was practical, and so in August, 1878, the Chautauqua Literary

and Scientific Circle, as the new organization was named, was made public at the Chautauqua Assembly.

RAPID GROWTH OF THE CHAUTAUQUA CIRCLE.

"It was soon evident that the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle was not to be confined to the constituency of the Chautauqua Assembly. It spread with amazing rapidity all over the country. Before the end of the first four years sixty thousand students from all over North and South America, from Europe, Japan, and the islands of the sea, were enrolled. Up to the present year some two hundred and seventeen thousand readers have joined. Take

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a single class, and you have a fair representation of the extent of the work-that formed in 1892, and called the class of '96.' Within a year of its organization at Chautauqua it numbered more than ten thousand, and nearly five hundred local circles. About one thousand of the members came from the South, an equal number from New England, some four thousand from New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois, two hundred from Canada, six hundred from California and Oregon, four hundred from Washington, seventy from foreign lands."

THE ATLANTA EXPOSITION.

IN the August Chautauquan, Mr. J. K. Ohl gives an interesting account of the preparations for the Cotton States and International Exposition to be opened at Atlanta next month. (It will be remembered that a full description of the enterprise, by Mr. Clark Howell, of the Atlanta Constitution, appeared in the REVIEW OF REVIEWs for February.) Mr. Ohl mentions several peculiar features that may be expected in the exposition, and also makes a report of the progress made in material equipment.

"The main purposes in this exposition-which is essentially Southern in its idea-are: to show the world the unlimited resources of the South; to show to the people of the South what they themselves possess and what is being accomplished in the rest of the world; and to bring the Central, Southern and Latin American countries, about which we are all of us so ignorant and which unquestionably promise a vast field of commerce to this country-to bring those countries in closer contact commercially with the United States, especially through the Southern ports. Perhaps the name 'Cotton States and PanAmerican' would have better expressed the idea of the exposition proposed, but 'Pan-American' had been so generally used that it was deemed best to employ another word-even broader in its scope'International.' .

"Just a word about the progress of the work at the grounds, and then I am through. The contracts call for the completion of most of the main buildings by July 1. During the spring months there have been on an average about 2,000 men at work on the grounds each day, and the present condition of

the buildings indicates that most of them, if not all, will be completed at the time stated. This means that there will be no delay in the opening. There will have been spent on the grounds by the time the gates are open about $2,000,000; and although the quantity will not equal that of the World's Fair and perhaps the Centennial Exposition, the quality will be all that could possibly be desired; the salient features of Southern life will be there to please as well as to attract the interest. There will, of course, be all manner of amusements. Pleasure Heights has taken the place of the Midway Plaisance, and in addition to some of the most notable of the amusements of that famous pleasure-way there will be others that are new and equally unique. So that he who spends his half dollar at the main gate will have ample opportunity not only to study that which will be of interest to him from an industrial and a commercial standpoint, but will have ample opportunity of enjoyment.

"It will be an exposition worth coming a great many miles to see."

ΟΝ

FREE KINDERGARTENS.

N the topic of "Child Life and the Kindergarten," in the Arena, Mr. Frank Buffington Vrooman thus sums up the argument for the foundation of kindergartens as a part of the public school system:

"The usefulness of the kindergarten having been demonstrated wherever it has been introduced, the primary importance of its thorough and immediate extension in connection with the common schools is the phase of the question which concerns us as citizens. The right and duty of state interference in the direction of public instruction has never been questioned since once it was fairly tried. There is no enlargement of state activity which will excite less criticism and cause less friction than that one proposed in offering a free kindergarten system. It is by no means an innovation to suggest that a state which was the first in history to place within the reach of every child free instruction meeting the requirements for admission to college should also give free instruction to every child at as early an age as that child may be taken from his mother. In other words, free intermediate schools should be supplemented by free kindergartens. Surely it is stupid to elaborately and carefully devote the whole attention to the superstructure without giving a thought to the foundation! If indeed, as all the great educators from Plato to Froebel teach us, the child's first instruction is the most vitally important, and the formation of his whole character is dependent upon it, so that no subsequent care can make amends for wrong beginnings, how can the state afford to discount its own work by failure to prepare the way for it? It leaves it to a chance hand, or to no hand at all, or to one that will play havoc, to form the mold into which it will pour its fine gold.”

He says: "Reason as we may, blink facts as much as we like, the Pope, in the silence of his austerely furnished room, with his simple fare of pasta and cold water, is a power in shaping the destinies of the world greater than the Czar, greater than Emperor William, greater than all the Foreign Secretaries who fret and fume on the political stage in the length and breadth of Europe. And why? Because he embodies the idea of a persistent, unwavering policy, with one distinct aim, an aim that will outlive him; that will be followed with the relentlessness of a sleuthhound by his successors.'

IMPROVED BY LOSS OF TEMPORAL POWER.

Captain Gambier, looking at the question from an independent point of view, has no hesitation in saying that the destruction of the temporal power benefited the Roman Church. "To the student of history it seems indisputable that a great boon and blessing has befallen the Church of Rome through the loss of its temporalities." It is largely owing to the destruction of the temporal power and its consequences that "round the person of Leo XIII a strength has accumulated unknown to modern Papacy, while, personally, no Pope for centuries has been more implicitly obeyed or more devoutly reverenced. Nevertheless, it is also clearly his own remarkable personality which has greatly contributed to this state of affairs, coupled with the fact that the loss of the temporal power, and, with it, relief from the trumperies which take up the time of ordinary royalties, has left him at leisure to devote his great intellect to what may be properly called the legitimate business of his position."

THE TYRANNY OF A FIXED IDEA.

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But although Captain Gambier sees this, the Pope does not, and notwithstanding the enormously improved position which has accrued to him as the result of the formation of the kingdom of Italy, Leo XIII never surrenders for one moment his favorite day dream of winning back again the temporal sovereignty of Rome. The aim of this policy is the restoration of the temporal power. That this is the leading idea of the Vatican, the pivot on which everything turns, can be said without fear of contradiction. The precise form that this restoration will assume may not have taken definite shape even in Leo XIII's mind; but, as far as is known to one who stands near His Holiness and knows, or thinks he knows, the views the Pope holds on this subject, there is never a moment's wavering in the belief of the Holy Father that it will come about. It may