Fagging may be undesirable and whipping certainly is, but the lesson of the place of authority is vital. The somewhat smug conviction which the Briton has that, because these schools are great and the best for him, that therefore they are the best for every one, impresses an American as a non sequitur. Great they are, and suggestive they must be, but importation is impossible, imitation undesirable. The English ideal cannot become the American because of the radical difference in ideas. The public school of England is hard and to an American seems somewhat harsh, although the latter freely admits the excellence of results. But are the two necessarily related as cause and effect? "Methods," like trees and men, are to be known by their fruits. Is a boy improved by requiring lessons before breakfast? What virtue goes out of a cane?

5. The intense and loyal devotion of the student body as well as of the graduates is marvellously inspiring. Why are there so few schools in America to which a similar loyalty is given? An Englishman may be an Oxonian or a Cantabrian, but he never forgets that he is an Etonian or a Wyckamite.

The weak spot to-day in American educational life is the lack which, in England, Rugby, Eton, Winchester, and Harrow supply. We have too many colleges and too few schools. Our educational pyramid has been stood upon its apex and we have been endeavoring to adorn the attic before the foundations were firmly laid. The law of supply and demand has been applied to the college and ignored in the school. The missing link is the school which shall do for America what the public school is doing for England.

VOL. XLV-57

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HERMAN, in his "Memoirs," tells of the summer of comparative rest which, for him, followed the taking of Vicksburg. We find him established on the bank of the Big Black River, about twenty miles from the captured city, and sending for his wife and four children to spend the summer in his camp. The oldest son, a boy of nine, bore his father's name, and was the object of a peculiar devotion and pride. The pathos of his brief illness and death from typhoid fever at this time, a pathos the more poignant for Sherman's self-reproach at having subjected his boy to the very risk which was his doom, shows itself clearly in the pages

of the "Memoirs." It was at Memphis on October 3, 1863, that the boy died. Sherman was hurrying his troops to the support of Rosecrans after his defeat by Bragg at Chickamauga, and at the same time was starting his family on its journey back to Lancaster, Ohio. A letter preserved in the "Memoirs," expressing Sherman's gratitude for the sympathy of the officers and men immediately near him, may well be supplemented by passages from three letters which followed Mrs. Sherman on her northward way. They illustrate memorably the essential tenderness of Sherman's nature.

On October 6 he wrote at 7 A. M. from the Gayoso Hotel in Memphis where his son died: "I have got up early this morning

to steal a short period in which to write to you, but I can hardly trust myself. Sleeping, waking, everywhere I see poor little Willy. His face and form are as deeply imprinted on my memory as were deep-seated the hopes I had in his future. Why, oh why, should that child be taken from us, leaving us full of trembling and reproaches? Though I know we did all human beings could do to arrest the ebbing tide of life, still I will always deplore my want of judgment in taking my family to so fatal a climate at so critical a period of the year. . . . To it must be traced the loss of that child on whose future I had based all the ambition I ever had. . . . I follow you in my mind and almost estimated the hour when all Lancaster would be shrouded in gloom to think that Willy Sherman was coming back a corpse. Dear as may be to you the Valley of Hocking,* no purer, nobler boy ever will again gladden it. .. My command will be much smaller than the world thinks, but I do not even name the fact to those about me. Our country should blush to allow our thinned regiments to go on till nothing is left. But I will go on to the end, but feel the chief stay to my faltering heart is now gone.

"But I must not dwell so much on it. I will try and make poor Willy's memory the cure for the defects which have sullied my character."

At the end of a letter written two days later (October 8) Sherman exclaimed: "Oh! that poor Willy could have lived to take all that was good of me in name, character and standing, and learn to avoid all that is captious, eccentric or wrong. But I do not forget that we have other children worthy of my deepest love. I would not have one different from what they are."

Again on October 10: "I still feel out of heart to write. The moment I begin to think of you and the children, poor Willy appears before me as plain as life. I can see him now stumbling over the sand hills on Harrison Street, San Francisco, at the table in Leavenworth, running to meet me with open arms at Black River, and last, moaning in death at this hotel. . . . I see ladies and children playing in the room where Willy died, and it seems sacrilege. I know you are now at home, and I pray that Min

nie * has gradually recovered her health and strength, and I hope all our children will regain their full health. Why should I ever have taken them to that dread climate! It nearly kills me when I think of it. Why was not I killed at Vicksburg, and left Willy to grow up to care for you? God knows I exhausted human foresight and human love for that boy, and will pardon any error of judgment that carried him to death."

Less than two years before the death of Sherman's boy Lincoln had lost his elevenyear-old son Willie, also through typhoid fever, and had put aside the private grief to bear with all his strength the burdens of his country. To Sherman's lot fell the same hard necessity. The battle of Chattanooga (November 23-25) was to be fought and won that the North might receive a Thanksgiving day message of rejoicing such as had come from Vicksburg on the previous Fourth of July; and Sherman, leaving Memphis on October 11, had to march his command over three hundred and fifty miles of hostile country in order to contribute, in the very nick of time, to the Union victory. Letters from Chattanooga itself are lacking, but passages from two letters written on the way thither illustrate yet again the depth of Sherman's bereavement and that loyalty to Grant which has already been shown:

CORINTH, MISS., October 14, 1863.

I was much relieved at the receipt of your two letters from Cairo and Cincinnati, both of which came out last night. I shew your message to Dr. Roler, who was affected to tears. Poor Doctor, although I have poured out my feelings of gratitude to him, he seems to fear we may have a lingering thought that he failed somehow in saving poor Willy. Your loving message may have dispelled the thought, and I shall never fail to manifest to him my heartfelt thanks for the unsleeping care he took of the boy. I believe hundreds would have freely died could they have saved his life. I know I would, and occasionally indulged the wish that some of those bullets that searched for my life at Vicksburg had been successful, that it might have removed the necessity for that fatal visit..

Everybody in Memphis manifested for me a respect and affection that I never experienced North. I am told that when the * Sherman's oldest daughter.