has had bad results, and now the need to check it is generally recognized by intelligent persons. The obvious evils have not been removed, and will never be lessened by discussion."

WE

JE will give but one quotation from the article by Professor Münsterberg, and we regret that our space does not permit us to quote more. Following Father Tierney, he shows that instruction may not be a deterrent but an incentive to sin.

"The sex information may also have as one of its results a certain theoretical willingness to avoid social dangers. But the far stronger immediate effect is the psycho-physiological reverberation in the whole youthful organism, with strong reactions on its blood vessels and on its nerves.

"The cleanest boy and girl cannot give theoretical attention to the thoughts concerning sexuality, without the whole mechanism for reënforcement automatically entering into action. We may instruct with the best intention to suppress, and yet our instruction itself must become a source of stimulation, which unnecessarily creates the desire for improper conduct. The policy of silence showed an instinctive understanding of this fundamental situation. Even if that traditional policy had had no positive purpose, its negative function, its leaving at rest the explosive sexual system of the youth, must be acknowledged as one of those wonderful instinctive procedures by which society protects itself."

A

ND while we are on the subject, we wish to mention another happy evidence of healthier public opinion on the matter, a strong and definite championing of fundamental Christian truth in the current Nineteenth Century, by Canon Lyttelton. At the close of his article he writes:

"Nature tells us in tones now of menace and heart-rending appeal, now of gentlest persuasion, that truths planted in the earliest years of life are the truths that live and bear fruit, and that the planter is the parent, whose responsibility cannot be given to another without loss. It may be, in short, the truest eugenics to revive in every class of society the meaning of home, as the place where the seeds of physical, moral, and spiritual life are sown."

How

OW The Field Afar, the organ of the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, can sustain its great spirit of cheerfulness and hope is a mystery to the faint-hearted and the pessimistic. Surely Father Walsh must have unusually heavy burdens on his hands, and ample reason to complain of the indifference and the parsimony of many who ought to assist him, and who do not, but never once, in the pages of his journal, does he weep over the terrible conditions of the day or mourn in sorrow the failure of men.

He has brought to perfection the personal touch of an attractive editor bound to win with his readers. His voice is gentle and em

phatic enough. His smile is always pleasant, a Christian smile that tells of a soul that believes strongly in the next world, and does not by any means despair of this one. A leader who fights in this spirit will surely give to his followers the same spirit, and rally many to his standards. If he who fights in the heat of the sun can be cheerful, hopeful, confident, we surely can afford to be so. We recommend Father Walsh's example to editors, and even to editors who need not solicit funds for extraneous work.

When Father Walsh asks for a cow, he fills the reader with a desire to go out and buy one, and ship it to Maryknoll, that it may support those who give through The Field Afar that other milk. of kindness and of hope of which there is so little in the world.

CORRESPONDENCE.

WESTCHESTER, NEW YORK, August 7, 1913.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

DEAR SIR: Will you permit me to reply to some criticisms of my lately published Life and Letters of John Paul Jones, which appeared in a recent number of your valued publication? Your critic, while admitting that I have written the best life of Jones; that I have contributed much "independent investigation to the subject;" that I am "honest" and do not garble facts; bases his somewhat contradictory opinion of my inability to write biography on the advisability of the introduction of certain “doubtful" material in my history of Jones' career, more particularly that contained in the narrative of one of Jones' seamen, a certain Thomas Chase. In June, 1773, Paul Jones having killed a mutinous sailor at Tobago, in the absence of a proper tribunal, was compelled to abandon his ship and take to flight. From this date until the autumn of 1775, there is no information vouchsafed in any of the biographies written before mine, or any documentary evidence in official archives, to indicate his whereabouts or occupation. The narrative of Thomas Chase contains information regarding these lost months in Jones' life; orally dictated to his grandson, and privately printed. It was transcribed by his greatgranddaughter, a writer of considerable distinction, and of perfectly reliable character, and offered to me. It contained several errors, and in the portion which related to the Ranger cruise was inaccurate, as I have stated, because the writer was at that time locked up in Mill prison in England, and was not an eyewitness of the events. The narrative of Jones' descent upon Martha's Vineyard in 1773 was, however, a part of his own personal recollections; as was also his account of the engagement between the Bon Homme Richard and the Serapis, and contained no material which seemed to falsify his veracity or cast doubt upon the general truth of his extraordinary story. His narrative contained in fact so invaluable a body of truth, and was SO unique and illuminating a document, that I considered myself not only privileged but obligated to present the portions above referred to. Your critic asks me to explain why Thomas Chase is stated in my text to have fought in the battle on the Alliance, when the narrative would indicate that

he was on the Bon Homme Richard. As a witness of the engagement in which the Alliance took part, as one of the ships which belonged to Jones' squadron, Chase was in a position to comment upon the battle. Mrs. Akers drew the not unnatural conclusion that he was on the Bon Homme Richard itself. I stated that he was on the Alliance, for the reason that his name is found on the roster of that vessel; but as records were lost when the Bon Homme Richard went down, it is not impossible that he was first on the former ship, and transferred to the Alliance after the battle. I did not think it possible for me to alter Mrs. Akers' transcription of the narrative of Chase to suit my wider knowledge of the subject. Your critic presumes to doubt the credibility of Colonel Wharton Green, who wrote me a letter in which he quoted Major Knox, who has known Jones personally, in the latter's repetition of a remark which he had heard from the lips of Jones himself. The remark was made by Jones in the house of his benefactors, to whom he confessed the fact that he had in truth served for a time in the sort of ship which Thomas Chase described. This remark, so strongly corroborative of Chase's narrative, was not only repeated through but one sole intermediary, but contained certain details, incomprehensible to Colonel Green, which proved incontestably the verbal accuracy of the remark as it came from Jones. Colonel Green, although an old man when he wrote to me, was in perfect possession of his faculties, a historical writer in regard to the war of the rebellion in which he was an officer, and a member of Congress. His credibility as a witness is further attested by the Honorable Junius Davis, a well-known lawyer in Wilmington, North Carolina, and son of George Davis, Secretary of War for Jefferson Davis. I make no apologies for introducing Colonel Green's testimony. Official corroboration that Jones did visit Martha's Vineyard is found in the fact that the widow of one of the sailors who first visited the island on the ship in question, a resident and native of the place, received her share of her husband's prize money from his subsequent service with Chase, under Jones, as is recorded at Washington. An eight years' search in the libraries, private collections, and archives of Europe and America has possibly rendered me a better judge of the historicity of the material I have presented than your critic, who has only perceived that there was some alloy in the gold of the material that I was fortunate enough to discover.

The government of our country has been pleased to order my book upon the ships, and that within a month of its publication.

While not a "naval expert," careful study of the battles of Paul Jones has enabled me to write a book which has as yet received nothing but praise from the naval journals, as well as from officials in the Navy Department and the Congressional Library, who, with a full knowledge of its aims, have been pleased to consider those aims successfully accomplished.

Your critic, I fear, is not as honest as he admits me to be, when he claims that I am responsible for the statement that Paul Jones was the son of George Paul, as I definitely stated that this, while a possible hypothesis, was not one susceptible of positive proof.

Very sincerely yours,

ANNA F. DE KOVEN.

The question is whether Mrs. de Koven was justified in saying Jones was a pirate, when her only evidence was Chase's narrative coming to her third-hand, and Major Knox's indefinite statement coming to her second-hand. Knox is hardly worth considering, I think, and Chase is so palpably incorrect

in several particulars that his whole narrative must stand discredited. (Note, for example, his remarks about Jones' "clipper-built" ship in 1773, at least fifty years before clippers were built!) I do not say that Jones was not a pirate; I say that Mrs. de Koven has given as proof that he was, evidence which is worthless.

I wish I could apologize for fastening upon her the responsibility for the discovery that George Paul, the putative uncle of Paul Jones, was really Jones' father, but I will be judged by this, her statement:

"The statement of Jones' fellow-lodger......that Jones had told him he was the son of Lord Selkirk's gardener, coupled with the knowledge of George Paul's descendants, that although of doubtful parentage Jones was a Paul would point to the identification of George Paul, gardener of Lord Selkirk, as the actual father of Paul Jones."

In my review I gave these two examples of Mrs. de Koven's methods. Let me add another:

Among Jones' female correspondents in France were two sisters. Mrs. de Koven says he intended to marry one of them, so as to legitimatize the child she had had. Her reasons for saying this are found in two passages of a letter Jones wrote to the sister. One passage reads:

"She [the mother of his correspondent] was a tried friend, and more than a mother to you. She would have been a mother to me also had she lived."

The other:

"Present my best respects to your sister. You did not mention her in your letter, but I persuade myself she will continue her share of her sweet godson, and that you will cover him all over with kisses from me. They come warm to you both from my heart."

"It is impossible," says Mrs. de Koven, "to come to any other conclusion than that the 'sweet godson' whom Jones wished Madame T. to 'cover all over with kisses from him' was his son."

Now, no one can read far in Jones' letters without seeing that he was, especially when he wrote to women, a very sentimental letter-writer, who nearly always wrote in an exaggerated vein; and I say it is monstrous to base such an accusation as Mrs. de Koven has made upon this letter alone. If she be correct she has shirked her duty towards Jones, for she tells us nothing more of this episode. She leaves us free to believe that Jones abandoned his son. He never spoke of him; he did not marry the mother; although he left some property, he left none to this child.

I wish I could say more for this book than that it is the best of the lives of Jones, for that is saying very little. Sherburne's life is an incomplete compilation; there are several boys' biographies which have little merit, and several old, prejudiced books and pamphlets on Jones, written when the material was scant, and when biography and truth-telling had very slight relationship to each other. Besides these there is Buell's two-volume work published in 1906— a false book, full of reckless fiction, capping the climax of its crimes by putting forth as Jones' a manufactured spurious letter. I recall with pleasure reading Mrs. de Koven's able exposure of the fraud printed in the New York Times several years ago.

THE REVIEWER.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

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