and a man might languish in jail a life-time because he could not pay a few shillings he had borrowed. Women had very few rights in law or in fact. A woman belonged to her husband, and all she earned was his. He owned her clothes, her jewelry, her mirror, her complexion, and even her false teeth, and might chastise her like a child if she did not behave to suit him.

Slavery and serfdom have been abolished. Piracy is dead. The press-gang has vanished and thievery is trying to hide itself. Our principal robbers do not club their victims on the highways, but carry them in street-cars and railway trains, or capture their money politely with stocks and trusts. Nothing has improved more than robbery. Instead of a dangerous encounter with pistols, to get the goods and cash that two or three travelers may have with them, the modern highwayman builds a railroad system with other people's money, or a gas or electric plant, or a street railway, or secures a telegraph or telephone franchise, or waters some stock, or gets a rebate on oil, beef, or wheat, or forms a giant trust and robs the population of a continent at a stroke. Then the robber buys a newspaper or caresses it with greenbacks, and has himself entitled a "Napoleon of Finance," while the rudimentary, undeveloped aggressor or peculative survival of more primitive times who steals a bag of flour instead of a grain crop, or takes a few hundreds instead of a million, has to put up with the old-time, uncivilized name of "thief." Imprisonment for debt has been abolished, and also imprisonment for theft-if it is committed according to the law and by methods approved by the particular variety of "Napoleon" having control of the government. Capital punishment is administered under our law for only two offenses-murder and treason, though the death penalty is still incurred, outside of the law sometimes, in punishment for slander, violence, or offenses against the family.

Some attempt is made at the reformation of criminals; personal liberty and trial by jury are guaranteed, and on the whole are well enforced. Women have made much progress

toward equality-economic, social, and political. They are no longer regarded as personal property, as in days of yore; but under most governments they are still classed politically with infants, idiots, and criminals, and even their economic and social rights are not quite equal to their brothers'. As compared with the past, however, the nineteenth century has been the age of emancipation for women. Upon the whole, in spite of the new development of theft under the forms of monopoly taxation and fraudulent contract, justice has made enormous gains in the last one hundred years.

Boston, Mass.

FRANK PARSONS.

то

A COLLEGE FOR THE PEOPLE.

O be free a people must be enlightened. He who would rob them of their liberties can pursue no more effective course than to darken their minds, befog their thinking, and poison the springs whence flow the streams of enlightenment. "Give me the youth till he has reached the age of ten," a distinguished ecclesiastic is said to have exclaimed, "and you may have him thereafter."

The children of this world are wise in their generation. That the economic bonds which they for years have been forging may never be broken from the limbs of the people, the “owners of the United States" have deliberately set themselves to subvert our educational system. In both number and character the facts are startling. The recent Stanford case but serves to advertise more widely a situation of which the observant have for years been aware.

How may this condition be met? First, by publishing the facts; second, by redeeming the State educational institutions, the people's own schools which they have in so many cases heedlessly permitted to be muzzled or turned against them: and third-the practical thing now for the friends of progress too widely scattered to rescue a State college or university from monopolistic control-by uniting upon an institution that does stand for intellectual freedom and the coming day and making of it a power in the land.

What characteristics should mark such an institution? It should, if possible, be central; its course should represent not the dead past but the living present; the widest freedom of choice among studies should be accorded students of reasonable maturity that each may develop his special talents; stress should be laid upon education for citizenship; hand training should accompany mental training, that the student may be fitted for the world of work; provision should be made whereby the privileges of the college may be enjoyed by students of

scant means, and the faculty should consist of men and women abreast of the times, facing the morning and fully prepared to instruct, rouse, and inspire. From such a college, unless freedom be already dead, may be expected to come forth leaders of the people, statesmen, prophets, apostles-if need be, martyrs to the cause of human progress and the coming kingdom. But to find the college and enlist it! Is such a feat possible?

One hundred miles northeast of Kansas City, at Trenton, Missouri, on the Rock Island Railroad, stands an institution known till recently as Avalon College. Adversity had almost closed its doors until the spring of 1900 when Dr. George McA. Miller assumed its control under a ten-years contract, opened its class-rooms, called back its students, and began in it again the work of a college. A little later Mr. Walter Vrooman, founder of Ruskin Hall, Oxford, England, and recently returned to America to establish here the Oxford or Ruskin Hall movement, heard of Avalon College, visited it, and effected a combination with President Miller whereby the institution, to be known thereafter as "Ruskin College," became the center of the Oxford movement in America. Mr. Vrooman purchased a fifteen-hundred-acre tract of land lying near the College, contributed directly to the College treasury and teaching force, and then entered the field to work for the promotion of the institution and the movement of which it is the center.

It is not my purpose to publish here a catalogue of Ruskin College. The friends of progressive education are, however, entitled to know something of the leading facts regarding the opportunities here afforded for realizing their ideals.

In addition to the land is the college building, almost new, handsome, commodious, and worth with its grounds fully $40,000. Here the executive offices are located, the classes and literary societies meet, the public exercises including church services of liberal type are held. Here also the college book and supplies store is going on and two of the college industries, the carpenter shop and the sewing department, are located; for Ruskin College seeks to train hand as well as brain. Near by is the college laundry, just instituted. A few blocks distant,

on a sightly hillside, is the site of the Trenton-Ruskin factory. This enterprise, recently incorporated and uniting local and college interests, begins with a capital of $13,500 fully subscribed and largely paid up. In it will be carried on, under the direction of the best business men of Trenton and the college president, broom-making, handle-making, and various forms of wood-novelty manufacturing. Canning is also to be one of the important industries to be begun this summer, and extensive farming for this purpose will doubtless become a leading activity of the College and neighborhood. On the farm the beginnings of a dairy department have already been made, and a friend who will put into this industry his capital, labor, and skill will shortly arrive. Other industries are in prospect.

These industries-sewing, laundry, shop, dairy, garden, farm, and factory-are designed to serve a double purpose: viz., to train the student for the practical duties of life and to enable him to earn his way through college. A student entering on the "industrial plan" contributes to the "equipment fund" such sum as he may be able, receiving therefor, for each $25 paid in, a transferable scholarship guaranteeing opportunity to work in the college industries one hour a day at ten cents an hour during a stay of four years at college. The student advancing $125 works thus thirty hours a week for four years, and earns an amount that will cover board, lodging, and tuition. Additional opportunity for remunerative labor is afforded during the summer vacation.

The College departments cover preparatory, college, art, commerce, music, oratory, and physical culture, and normal. A beginning is soon to be made with a kindergarten as an adjunct to the Model School in which normal students will be trained as practical teachers.

The College courses of study have recently been reconstructed throughout, wide opportunities for modern culture studies being afforded, and the course, like that of Harvard, being made almost entirely elective and leading to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. The advantages of such a course over the old-fashioned, medieval iron-clad curriculum are inestimable.