villages, and not too many towns, had anything worthy to be called a bookstore. Mr. Carnegie has planted the library by the side of the school-house, and done much to make the opportunity to read commensurate with the awakened desire for reading. The nations of the earth had responded to an appeal coming up from the common people for some method by which an appeal to reason could be substituted for the appeal to force in the settlement of controversies between nations, as it has long since been substituted in the settlement of controversies between individuals. Mr. Carnegie stepped in to give the Supreme Court of Christendom a habitat worthy of its office, a habitat that should help to give it an international dignity and respect which would not be accorded to a houseless tribunal. The Old World had ways of honoring heroes in war, with titles and insignia, which were also, though more rarely, employed to honor heroism in the perils of peace. America had no such system. It could give honorary degrees to learning, but none to courageous achievement. Mr. Carnegie saw and provided for such needed recognition and appreciation. The barely living wage generally given

universities, and those who endow them, to recognize the fact that original research is as true a college function as is teaching; the Carnegie libraries will create a library habit throughout the country, and the less intellectual or less enterprising village will find itself spurred on to provide itself with the reading advantages which its neighbor possesses; and State and sectarian colleges will find themselves compelled to add a pension fund to their equipment or see the best teachers drawn away from them by the colleges which possess a pension fund.

Mr. Carnegie, not only by the largeness of his benefactions, but still more by the foresight, the comprehensiveness, and the enterprise which he has brought to bear on the problems of modern society which only the men of large wealth can apparently solve, has set a standard for millionaires by which American society will increasingly judge them, though it is to be feared that few possess either the breadth of human sympathy, the largeness of generosity, or the enterprising intelligence to come up to the standard which he has set.

ing in our institutions of learning left them without any means for their old age, or for their families in case of their death. Mr. Carnegie has had the sympathetic imagination to conceive the cruel burden that presses on this "poorest paid and yet one of the highest of all professions;" and in providing a pension fund for professors has at once added greatly to the efficiency of those who are now engaged in teaching and to the removal of one of the chief obstacles which have operated to hinder men from making teaching their profession. And this has been done in such a way as to afford not the least incentive to men of a lazy habit and a sordid ambition to enter the ranks of the teachers. And in at least three of these instances the direct effect of Mr. Carnegie's gift will be followed by indirect effects perhaps as great and certainly quite as lasting. The Carnegie Institution will eventually lead colleges and

Few German cities are more attractive to the eye, and none makes a deeper appeal to the imagination, than Weimar, the home of Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Wieland, and other thinkers, poets, and dramatists. The atmosphere of an older and quieter age seems to envelop the place, while the silent flow of the River Ilm through the town, either shore transformed into a park, brings to the city the freshness of remote hills and the quiet of fields and woods. In that park are the memories of the great spirits who have bequeathed the highest traditions of culture, of intellectual freedom, and of artistic power to Germany. There is the Serpent-Goethe's genus loci; there is the Garden House in which he found refuge from the cares of the court and the distractions of society; there is the bench on which Schiller was in the habit of meditating, and there also are the paths along which he walked

in silent and fruitful hours. As the two poets in their later life were united in one of the most disinterested and fruitful friendships in the history of literature, so in a striking memorial they stand together in the square of the old city one the man of the court, opulent in resources, many-sided in interest, touching life at every point, dealing with philosophy, poetry, science, art, and religion, and touching nothing which he did not fertilize; the other born in poverty, spending his boyhood in narrow condi tions, breaking away from the tyranny which threatened to throttle his genius, passing through the vicissitudes of rebellion, continually overworking, consumed by the ardor of his spirit and the activity of his mind, dying at the early age of forty-six in a little room almost bare of furniture and expressive of the most austere conditions. Goethe's home is a museum, in which one feels the range of the poet's interests, his world-wide connections and associations; Schiller's home, by its bareness and simplicity, suggests his arduous life, his long fight against obstacles, the supremacy of his spirit over his body.

Carlyle defined Schiller's spirit in its most striking attitude when he characterized him as a priest always ministering at the altar of truth. It is Goethe whom all Germans recognize as the first of their poets, but it is Schiller whom all Germans love as the finest of their singers. The children of Germany know "The Glove," "The Diver," The Ring of Polycrates," and "The Song of the Bell," as American children know "The Village Blacksmith," "The Children's Hour," and "The Psalm of Life." Young Germany still reads "The Robbers" with something of the thrill with which it was read by young men and women more than a century ago. "William Tell" is perhaps the most popular poetic drama on the German stage, and has done more than any other literary form of the great Swiss tradition to call the hero of Switzerland out of the mists and uncertainties of the world of legends into the world of actual heroism; while "Wallenstein" is read by serious students of the drama everywhere as one of the masterpieces of dramatic compo

sition. No one places Schiller in the front rank of poets. He belongs, not with Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, and Goethe, but with Eschylus, Corneille, Milton, and Victor Hugo, poets of the second rank.

Schiller brought to his work something more than a genius for poetic expression and a genius for industry which made him not only one of the foremost singers of his time, but one of the pioneers of the modern historical movement; he brought also an ardor of enthusiasm and power of devotion which made his whole life luminous. Among all the men who have sung the songs which live, none stand more purely or consistently for the sovereignty of the ideal than Schiller. He is a noble example of the identification of the highest ethical ideals with the passion of the artistic temperament. To him art was not only the highest expression of the human spirit, but it was also the greatest of realities. In art alone, according to Schiller's view, the human spirit finds real freedom. It is in the free activity of the artist spirit that the ideal of the beautiful soul to which Schiller dedicated himself is attainable. It is not easy for the man of the twentieth century fully to comprehend what art meant to Schiller; how through it he touched the immortality in man, and in it he realized the free development of his own soul, and through it he foresaw the passage of the race into its final stage of emancipation and fruitfulness. It was no unreal, fantastic, or individualistic world into which he entered and which he called all men to enter; it was a world of ordered freedom, of natural joy, of perfect fertility.

As the gospel of individuality in its ultimate form it was subject to limitation; but it is a gospel which needs to be preached with compelling power in an age which has gone so far in an opposite direction. Society may never be lifted into the free, æsthetic community of which Schiller dreamed; the ideal will never be realized in the way in which he thought he saw it coming; the Germany of 1905 is a very different Germany from that of the age of Schiller and Goethe, of Herder, Kant, Lessing, and Winkelmann, The country of great thinkers and

dreamers has become, like the rest of the modern world, a resounding workshop; its energies are dedicated chiefly to-day to dealing with the material needs of man. But though the times have changed and for the moment or for the century the emphasis of interest lies elsewhere, nevertheless Schiller, like all the other idealists, will have the final word to say. Society will not achieve the idealism of which he dreamed by the paths which he marked out. The course is to be more arduous than he foresaw; for society must achieve its ideal organization, not by escaping from the real, but by mastering it. The hope and inspiration of the idealist of to-day is his belief that in dealing on a great scale with material realities men are testing to the full the capacity of those realities to satisfy the human soul, and, having mastered them, will ultimately put them under foot and find, as Schiller found and taught, that the only real joy in life is the joy of the spirit.

The Great Adventure

There is an old saying which declares that it is the unexpected that always happens. This phrase not only bears the inscription of long experience, as do all those proverbs which form a universal currency of popular wisdom; it is also the expression of an instinct deep in the hearts of men. The revolt of the aspiring against low and near aims, of the imaginative and creative against accepted forms, of the free-hearted and free-minded against the pressure of conventions that cut into the soul, are the perpetual protest of the spirit of the race against the limitations of condition and circumstance, the perpetual affirmation of its illimitable possibilities of growth. The vague unrest which pervades society in its most comfortable conditions is significant, not of sterile restlessness, but of the inability of men with capacity for the infinite to rest content with the best the finite can offer them. In all the range of experience nothing quite touches the height of anticipation, quite fulfills the ultimate hope; there is always something left in the heart and mind which

is not met by the largest and happiest success. To the skeptic like Renan and to the believer like Browning the world in its most enchanting hours is only a hospitable inn, from which the traveler goes with the morning.

The biography of man which we call history is a great story of adventure; in unforeseen happenings, in the sudden gathering of perils, in the glorious chances of fortune, the "Thousand and One Nights," "Monte Cristo," and "The Three Musketeers" are faint transcriptions of the pages in which the manifold adventures of the race are written.

Neither in their own natures nor in their conditions is there any hope of inaction for men; the inward impulse and the outward necessity alike compel the taking of risks, the facing of danger, the setting of the face toward the undiscovered country. Over the drowsiest age a sudden stir of hope or fear passes like a breath from the sea, and once more the burdens are lifted and the traveler fares on in the great quest; in the seclusion of gardens of delight, on the silence of the golden summer afternoon, a sudden trumpet peals, and there is a swift buckling on of armor and a pathetic clamor of farewells.

The thirst for adventure is no idle revolt against work and routine and the duties of the hour; it is the impulse of the free spirit spreading its wings for a flight which is its ultimate destiny. For the soul was not made for drudgery, nor were the hands shaped for mere toil; men work that they may attain that mastery in which there is freedom. The reaction against the hard fact is not the distaste of the sluggish for a task that must be performed; it is the refusal of the imagination to arrest its glance at the very point where the actual predicts and affirms the ideal. The rigidity and hardness of life are part of the method of a great education, or they are part of a system of brutal and unintelligent tyranny; suffering is either a noble discipline or a willful torture of the helpless. Those who believe in the best hopes of the soul revolt against the "tyranny of the fact" by the very vitality of their faith. The old stories of romance and adventure which the earliest men and

women told one another in the far beginnings of history were not idle tales; they are part of the spiritual biography of the race; the record of its perpetual excursions beyond the narrow world of the day into the larger world of which it is so marvelous a gateway.

seen.

At heart all men and women are romantic and adventurous; in the most commonplace minds there is some thrill of expectation, some hope of the unfore In the most monotonous conditions there sleep and wake at times the feeling of environing mystery, the sense of unreality which often touches what we call the real, and in an instant it becomes the mere setting of a scene soon to be shifted; mere paint and pasteboard and unsubstantial appearance in contrast with the imperishable soul which acts its part against that fragile and shifting background. In the dullest age of what is miscalled realism the unextinguishable passion for romance sleeps only to open its eyes on new wonders; for the possibilities of the great adventure which we call life are illimitable.

In these later years science itself, the searching study of the facts of the world, has become a more marvelous fortuneteller than the most imaginative of the myth-makers. In its vision there is no more an arid stretch of dead matter, but a living universe, through which incalculable forces play more swiftly than thought, and wait to match man's subtlest imagination with an energy to do its bidding more elusive than thought; forces which bind the continents by invisible currents in the flowing streams of air and make speech audible across half a world. The great adventurer has dreamed no dream more marvelous than what he calls the reality of his existence.

On such a journey through such a world, where all visible things are perishable while the invisible are eternal, the dream of love is the divinest reality. The first glamour, the magic of the golden hour of discovery, is but the prophetic beginning of the romance which gathers sweetness as it unrolls itself in the unwritten story of the heart. From the far beginning of life in its lowest forms all things have slowly moved toward it; for it is out of the deepest depths of the life

of the race that love has risen like a star out of the abysses of the night. In blind unconsciousness life in its lowest forms slowly lifted itself toward that light in which alone it finds the explanation of itself, the justification of its terrible sufferings, the fulfillments of its hopes. Its long career has been a quest of love; and in love alone does it find that rest which is the fulfillment of its being. Through a thousand centuries it groped and climbed; it has stumbled and fallen a thousand thousand times ; but out of the earth it emerged at the beginning, and above the earth it has lifted itself a thousand times in response to the indestructible instinct of the divine in it; and now, at last, in the light of clear consciousness, though of very imperfect knowledge, and with other thousands of years of climbing still before it, it lifts its eyes level with its destiny, and knows that in self-surrender it finds itself, and in losing itself for love's sake it finds itself for love's service. For the romance of the first stirring of passion is not a brief joy, a little prelude of song before the dreary prose of toil and care; it is a sudden flash of the beauty which lies in the heart of life, a touching of the keys, brief but sufficient to sound the master motive.

The Real Issue in France

M. Combes, the ex-Premier of France, contributes to a recent number of the "National Review" an explanation of the Republican policy in relation to the Catholic Church as defined and applied during his ministry, which is the strongest statement of the Republican position yet made. To make certain things clear to Liberal opinion in England, M. Combes states the fundamental principles involved. He calls attention to the fact that there is a great difference between the Catholic Church in France and in England. In England the Church is a religious organization pure and simple; it does not challenge the national institutions and could not destroy them even if it desired to do so. France, on the other hand, the Premier declares, the Church is in open revolt

In