he realized as never before how alleged justice might appear to the poor and defenseless in this land of the free. Some of the Hopkins students, through interest in the labor problem, joined the Knights of Labor. Many more subscribed for labor papers. Andrew D. White advises students of political science, as soon as old enough, to attend political caucusses, and have themselves appointed on petit juries.

But in the main, our study of facts must be a study of recorded facts. Statistics is a word that we nearly all are afraid of. Wright speaks of it as an "unlovely" science. It has been said that figures always lie, and there is truth enough in the statement to make us handle them with extreme caution. Edward Atkinson applies to statistics Sam Weller's remark about veal pie. Sam says that "weal pie is a wery good thing if you only know who makes it." Certainly the statistics contained in our state and government reports are unlovely, and for the most part useless enough. Prof. James asserts that it is all the president and his cabinet can do to make head or tail of even the department reports. We have produced the bulkiest census report on earth, and yet we have not very much reason to boast about its scientific value.

In Germany there is the closest possible connection between the university of Berlin and the Prussian statistical bureau. The work is under the direction of Engel, the professor of political economy at Berlin, and permission to join his statistical seminary and to be employed in the work of the government comes as a prize for faithful and successful work in the department of political science. As one result of this employment of trained experts upon the bureau it may be said that the census of 1875 was completed on noon of the day appointed and within the estimated cost. This is a marked contrast with our own experience. Some branches of the tenth census are not yet finished, and it has required appropriation after appropriation to carry through the work. The proposition for a civil service academy at Washington to train men for expert work in this and other lines as Annapolis and West Point train men for military service has already been made by Dr. Adams, of Baltimore, and has been received with some favor by the secretary of the interior. There is said to be hardly a professor of political economy in Germany that is not engaged in government work of some sort. Is it too much to

think that the state governments may at last find it advisable to draw on men trained in the state universities for the really expert work in statistical and administrative science, of which an ever increasing amount is waiting to be done?

Gideon Wells and Dr. Ely have done excellent service on state and city tax commissions, and anyone who knows the condition of the systemless system of taxation in Nebraska can understand that similar work ought to be done here. Prof. James of the university of Pennsylvania undoubtedly saved several millions to the city of Philadelphia by his study of the relation of the modern municipality to the gas supply. At a critical period of our financial history Andrew D. White of Ann Arbor and Cornell was able to give a congressional committee facts of immense significance regarding the history of paper money in France.

At least if the state universities are not allowed to supply experts, they can supply good critics of the work of other men. I do not use the word "critic" as standing for a faultfinder, but rather in the sense of one able to appreciate all the facts that are contained in the state and national reports. Contrary to the general opinion, this country greatly needs a race of small politicians; men small in their political aspirations, but who intellectually and morally have reached the full stature of manhood. As we do not find great artists except where there is a public that knows what good art is, so we shall hardly find the highest type of politician except where there is a large and intelligent public taking an unselfish interest in politics. A state university will inevitably train many political leaders, but it would be worth its cost if it did nothing more than scatter through the state, in the offices and editorial rooms, in the pulpits and on the farms, citizens trained to see political facts with clearness and disposed to hold our public servants to strict accountability.

First, then, a professor of political economy in a state university is a teacher of method. Secondly, he is a gatherer and a student of facts regarding industrial society. He does not say to the student "go," but "come. He ought to be able to show how to investigate by investigating.

The third function of such a professor and the last of which I shall speak tonight is to be an interpreter between class and class. In the autumn of '85 I was going through a fair sized rolling mill in

Akron, O., and stopped to talk with one of the puddlers. In the pause of his exhausting work he was communicative enough and I inquired about the labor unions, etc., in the place. At first I had spoken of myself as a western farm hand, and gave desired information about the condition of agricultural labor in the west. All went well until the fact came out that I was the son of the one who owned the farm upon which I worked and then the other fellow shut up like a clam. I belonged to a class that he did not trust. I have been with a company of men who were planning nothing more incendiary than a co-operative store, and yet they convened with all the caution of conspirators; they talked about the "competitive system" as about some tangible and tyrannous power against which they were darkly plotting. A labor paper in reviewing one of Dr. Ely's books said that it was glad to have such ideas as some the books contained advanced by one "in a position to reach the upper classes." We have heard a good deal about reaching the lower classes; here is indicated another side to the problem. It is possible for two classes to occupy the same country, speak the same language and yet not understand each other. Who shall mediate between them? The press should, but for the most part it declines to do so. It prefers to be partisan on one side or the other. In a great measure people have ceased to trust it. This is not mainly through the influence of notoriously venal papers-papers where a sordid counting room buys its editors in the cheapest market and sells them in the dearest, but rather through the pervasive but often unrecognized influence of class prejudice. The pulpit should mediate between class and class and in some cases it does, but its influence is not adequate.

It is said that a man ought to be honest without receiving pay for it. It is true. How much more then ought he to be honest if he is paid for it? That is the case with a teacher in the state university. He is the representative of no class, no party, but of the people. In a denominational college he may have to avoid collision with dogma; in a college whose funds are invested in railroad stocks, he may be advised to treat the railroad question gingerly; in others he may be obliged to think one way or the other on free trade-in a state university he should owe allegiance to truth alone. We talk glibly

about a constant search for truth and forget what it implies.

It im

plies, among other things, that a man shall be constantly searching for what is false in his own opinions and for what is true in the opinions of other men. A teacher of political science in a state university owes it to all classes to keep up that search intelligently and assidiously so long as he holds the position. So may he mediate between classes by understanding not only the real interests, but even the feelings and prejudices of them all.

These, then, are the three chief functions of the state university worker in political science—to teach, to investigate, to be an interpreter between classes. In this work he needs intelligence, industry and honesty, but the greatest of these is honesty.

Prof. Seeley spoke of present history as a Socrates continually propounding questions. There are times when present history is not a Socrates, but a Sphinx, when we must answer its political and industrial riddles or be destroyed. Guess work will not always do. Washington was right in thinking that in educational institutions supported by the government training should be given in the science of government.

HISTORY AND ART

BY SARAH WOOL MOORE.

[Read before a meeting of the Society, January 10, 1888.]

Some score of years ago Thomas Bryan of New York City, a man of refined tastes, and of wealth sufficient to gratify those tastes, placed his valuable collection of pictures, in the accumulation of which he had passed many years, upon the walls of the New York Historical Society rooms.

Like most American collectors he felt the force of that fatality by which, in our country, what one generation amasses the next as industriously disperses; and, anxious that his labor should not be altogether futile, that his treasures should be safely and permanently housed in an atmosphere congenial to their spirit, where appreciative eyes might in quiet pauses rest upon the suggestive creations of the artist, where those creations could bring to the study of the great past, not merely vivid illustrations, but an actual survival of the freshest and most joyous part of its life, he turned—and in fact he had no other choice-to the New York Historical society. Those glowing canvasses still remain where his hand placed them, though the great city has long since provided costly, fire-proof buildings where such collections are eagerly received and magnificently lodged, and much dispute has arisen as to the propriety of removing Mr. Bryan's trust. But the society will never consent to part from a guest which has added such grace to the place of its long occupancy. There is certainly no very strained connection between the provinces of fine art and the history of nations and of states.

The Muse Clio, like her sisters, acknowledges the inspired leadership of the patron god of the higher æsthetics. Amid the recital of the multitudinous struggle, the disaster, the oppression, the slow dragging progress of the races, her pen must willingly linger over the story of the arts as if in them the fable of the golden age was stirring into life, and mingling itself with the thread of authentic history.

In the ordinary course of human events the infant years of nations and of states have been absorbed in the individual struggle for exist