all our people need the open air and the out-of-doors. This is probably truer for Americans than for others. A matron of a large boarding school for girls told me recently that many of the pupils come to her so thinly clad that she is obliged to keep her houses too warm for health in order to make the girls comfortable. This school is an expensive one and the girls come from well-to-do families; it is not a question of expense: the matron said that by many mothers it is not considered "good form" for girls to dress warm. The girls are clad in gauzy shivery stuff, and they therefore become hothouse subjects, withdrawing from the cold and discomforted by every change of temperature.

We magnify the comfort of living indoors. We have made the inside of the house so attractive and so suggestive of ease that the temptation is to go outside

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as little as possible, as if the out-of-doors is to be avoided. The abundance of books may keep us indoors. We have so many books even about the out-of-doors that we do not need to go out-of-doors to learn about it. Americans are fond of saying that the Europeans are far behind. us in developing the physical comforts of the home. I also am proud of this; but I sometimes wonder whether this is not due in part to our dread of the out-ofdoors, and whether this very physical perfection of the house may not still further emphasize the breach that has grown up between ourselves and nature. Most of the interest in nature is more or less sentimental and theoretical and long-range, and ceases when we are in danger of getting our shoes muddy. There is, to be sure, a tendency in American house-building toward an outdoor feeling, but this usually does not extend beyond the ve

randa, which is really built for protection. We have not yet proceeded so far as the usable garden-room,—in this respect the Europeans lead us. The sedentary indoor life has its sure effects, and we try to correct these effects by means of drugs; and the American is known by his nostrums.

We must constantly return to the native and the indigenous in order to correct our civilization and to direct it. We are in danger of over-refining: we need to go to the primitive for strength and renewal. A new and strong kind of nativeness is no doubt developing in the cities; but we also need the kind of nativeness and essentialness that develops in the country. I am always conscious that there is no soil in the city, but only dirt; the ground must be covered until it is blotted out. When we get away from the soil we begin to get away from simplicity and

directness. We all perceive a growing tendency countryward, coming in response to a universal soul-hunger that the strenuous and complex life does not fully satisfy. Sooner or later, most men come to feel as did the city schoolboy who declared that some day he would live in the real country and would build his house out-of-doors.

III

The School of the Future

HE pupils in a certain school were

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asked whether they could define or distinguish an educated man. After a long pause, one little girl raised her hand and said that she surely could tell. “An educated man," the child said, "is one that does not work." This homely reply admirably illustrates a popular conception of education,-that it does not put one into direct relation with the affairs of life, as if education and occupation are incompatible.

Most of us will not accept the child's opinion; yet there seems to be a deeprooted feeling that a person cannot be really educated by means of subjects that have a direct application to the