complacent idiocy among all classes of the population. Persons who fall under the influence of this pest become so triumphantly ignorant that they cannot distinguish between news and knowledge. They develop a morbid thirst for printed matter, and the more they read the less they learn. They are fit soil for the bacteria of folly and fanaticism.

Now the men of thought, of cultivation, of reason in the community ought to be an antidote to these dangerous influences. Having been instructed in the lessons of history and science and philosophy they are bound to contribute their knowledge to the service of society. As a rule they are willing enough to do this for pay, in the professions of law and medicine and teaching and divinity. What I plead for is the wider, nobler, unpaid service which an educated man renders to society simply by being thoughtful and by helping other men to think.

II. Think, in the second place, of the duty which men of moral principle owe to society in regard to the evils which corrupt and degrade it. Of the existence of these evils we need to be reminded again and again, just because we are comparatively clean and decent and upright people. Men who live an orderly life are in great danger of doing nothing else. We wrap our virtue up in little bags of respectability and keep it in the storehouse of a safe reputation. But if it is genuine virtue it is worthy of a better use than that. It is fit, and it is designed and demanded, to be used as salt, for the purifying of human life.

What the world needs to-day is not a new system of ethics. It is simply a larger number of people who will make a steady effort to live up to the system that they have already. There is plenty of room for heroism in the plainest kind of duty. The greatest of all wars has been going on for centuries. It is the ceaseless, glorious conflict against the evil that is in the world. Every warrior

who will enter that age-long battle may find a place in the army, and win his spurs, and achieve honor, and obtain favor with the great Captain of the Host, if he will but do his best to make his life purer and finer for every one that lives.

It is one of the burning questions of to-day whether university life and training really fit men for taking their share in this supreme conflict. There is no abstract answer; but every college class that graduates is a part of the concrete answer. Therein lies your responsibility, Gentlemen. It lies with you to illustrate the meanness of an education which produces learned shirks and refined skulkers; or to illuminate the perfection of unselfish culture with the light of devotion to humanity. It lies with you to confess that you have not been strong enough to assimilate your privileges; or to prove that you are able to use all that you have learned for the end for which it was intended.

III. It remains only to speak briefly, in the third place, of the part which religion ought to play in the purifying, preserving, and sweetening of society. Hitherto I have spoken to you simply as men of intelligence and men of principle. But the loftiest reach of reason and the strongest inspiration of morality is religious faith.

I believe that we are even now in the beginning of a renaissance of religion. I believe that there is a rising tide of desire to find the true meaning of Christ's teaching, to feel the true power of Christ's life, to interpret the true significance of Christ's sacrifice for the redemption of mankind. I believe that never before were there so many young men of culture, of intelligence, of character, passionately in earnest to find the way of making their religion speak, not in word only, but in power. I call you to-day, my brethren, to take your part, not with the idle, the frivolous, the faithless, the selfish, the gilded youth, but with the earnest, the manly, the devout, the devoted, the

golden youth. I summon you to do your share in the renaissance of religion for your own sake, for your fellowmen's sake, for your country's sake.

16. Barrett Wendell (1855- ) has been for many years professor of English at Harvard. He has written novels and poems and has made noteworthy contributions to the field of criticism. His Literary History of America is his best-known work.

THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY

(From A Literary History of America, Book VI, Chapter V)

Though newspapers are incalculably the most popular vehicles of modern American expression, there are other such vehicles generally familiar to our educated classes. The principal of these are the illustrated monthly magazines published in New York. These, which circulate by hundreds of thousands, and go from one end of the country to the other, provide the ordinary American citizen of to-day with his nearest approach to literature. A glance through any volume of any of them will show that the literary form which most luxuriantly flourishes in their pages is the short story. This development of short stories is partly a question of business. Short stories have usually been more profitable to writers and more convenient to editors than long novels; and at this moment poetry seems not to appeal to any considerable public taste. Partly, however, this prevalence of short stories seems nationally characteristic of American as distinguished from English men of letters. Of late, no doubt, England has produced one or two writers who do this kind of work extraordinarily well; there is no living American, for example, whose stories equal those of Mr. Kipling; but Mr. Kipling, a remarkable master of this difficult literary form, is a comparatively new phenomenon in English literature. From the days of Washington Irving, on the other hand, Americans have shown themselves able to write short stories rather better than anything else. The older short stories of America-Irving's and Poe's and even Hawthorne's

were generally romantic in both impulse and manner. Accordingly, however local their sentiment may have been, and however local in certain cases their descriptive passages, they were not precisely documents from which local conditions might be inferred. The short stories of modern Americans differ from these by being generally realistic in impulse and local in detail. We have stories of decaying New England, stories of the Middle West, stories of the Ohio region and Chicago stories, stories of the Southwest, stories of the Rocky Mountains and of California, of Virginia and of Georgia. In plot these generally seem conventionally insignificant. Their characters, too, have hardly reached such development as to become recognized national types. These characters, however, are often typical of the regions which have suggested them; and the description of these regions is frequently rendered in elaborate detail with workmanlike effectiveness. On the whole, like all the literature of the moment, in England and in America alike, these short stories lack distinction. The people who write them, one is apt to feel, are not Olympian in temper, but Bohemian. Our American Bohemia, however, is not quite like that of the old world; at least it is free from the kind of recklessness which one so often associates with such regions; and the writing of our Bohemians preserves something of that artistic conscience which always makes the form of careful American work finer than that of prevalent work in the old country. In the short stories of American magazines, then, so familiar throughout the United States, we have a second type of popular literature not at present developed into masterly form, but ready to afford both a vehicle and a public to any writer of masterly power who may arise.

17. Woodrow Wilson (1856- ), an eminent scholar and writer on political theory, was elected President of the United States in 1912. He is a graduate of Princeton University, where he served as president from 1902 until 1910, when he resigned to become Governor of New Jersey. His book The State made him known in two continents. One of his more recent publications is Mere Literature and Other Essays.

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

(From President Wilson's Independence Day address delivered in Philadelphia, July 4, 1914)

Mr. Chairman and Fellow-Citizens-We are assembled to-day to celebrate the one-hundred-and-thirty-eighth anniversary of the birth of the United States. I suppose we can more vividly realize the circumstances of that birth, standing on this historic spot, than it would be possible to realize it anywhere else.

The Declaration of Independence was written in Philadelphia. It was adopted in this historic building. I have just had the privilege of sitting in the chair of the great man who presided over those whose deliberations resulted in its adoption. Here, my hand rests on the table upon which the declaration was signed. We can almost feel we are in the visible and tangible presence of a great historic transaction.

But have you ever read the Declaration of Independence? When you have heard it read, have you attended to its sentences? The Declaration of Independence is not a Fourth of July oration. The Declaration of Independence was a document preliminary to war. It involved a vital piece of business, not a piece of rhetoric. And if you will get further down in the reading than its preliminary passages, where it quotes about the rights of men, you will see that it is a very specific body of declarations concerning the business of the day, not the business of our day, for the matter with which it deals is past-the business of revolution, the business of 1776. The Declaration of Independence does not mean anything to us merely in its general statements, unless we can append to it a similarly specific body of particulars as to what we consider our liberty to consist of.

Liberty does not consist in mere general declarations as to the rights of man. It consists in the translation of those declarations into definite action. Therefore, standing here where the declaration was adopted, reading its businesslike