THE DIAL (founded in 1880) is published on the 1st and 16th of each month. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION, $2.00 a year in advance, postage prepaid in the United States, Canada, and Mexico; in other countries comprised in the Postal Union, 50 cents a year for extra postage must be added. Unless otherwise ordered, subscriptions will begin with the current number. REMITTANCES should be by draft, or by express or postal order, payable to THE DIAL. SPECIAL RATES TO CLUBS and for subscriptions with other publications will be sent on application; and SAMPLE COPY on receipt of 10 cents. ADVERtising Rates furnished on application. All communications should be addressed to

THE DIAL, Fine Arts Building, Chicago.

PRESCIENT PHILANTHROPY.

Philanthropy in the form of charity, in the form of immediate succor for the suffering and relief for the needy, is doubtless as old as human pity itself. When all due credit is given to the benevolence of the motives that have inspired this sort of philanthropy, all the way from individual almsgiving to the estab lishment of great eleemosynary institutions, the sorrowful fact remains that the history of such endeavor is in large measure a history of misplaced sympathy, of injudicious sacrifice, of the application of remedies that do not reach the root of the evil sought to be combated. The scientific study of such matters as poor-law relief, the endowment of hospitals and asylums, and the collective efforts of communities to deal with the conditions of temporary distress, brings clearly into prominence the fact that the best of intentions in these directions are likely to do an amount of indirect harm sufficient to counteract all the direct good resulting from them. What these well-meant philanthropies do in the way of pauperizing their objects, in the way of undermining individual resolution and sapping the sturdiness of individual character, must be taken into account no less than the temporary alleviations with which they are to be credited. The sum of immediate human suffering is so great at all times, and its evidences so apparent, that it is difficult for the tender-hearted observer to remain philosophical in its presence, yet we are morally bound to hesitate in coming to its relief, if by so doing we are helping to perpetuate the conditions which give it birth. That this danger is a real one is a conclusion now so well-established by sociological investigation as to be beyond the reach of controversy.

It is, then, with feelings of mingled satisfaction and disapproval that the sociologist must view the strengthening of old charities and the multiplication of new ones by the donations and the bequests of which we read from day to day. It is hard to look such gift horses in the mouth, for the benefactors by whom they are offered are actuated by the most generous of motives, and a vital human

sympathy, even if misdirected or injudiciously applied, deserves generous responsive recognition. But the clear-sighted lover of his fellows will, on the whole, welcome a new educational foundation, or any other new endowment that tends to minister to the spiritual rather than the physical needs of men, with a gratitude more unreserved than that with which he can welcome the more common manifestations of the philanthropic spirit. The one is sure to remain a blessing for all time to come; the other may quite possibly, and in the long run, accentuate the very sort of distress which it seeks to relieve. However admirable may be the philanthropy that vents itself upon hunger, and nakedness, and disease, it is a still more admirable philanthropy that concerns itself with the future of the race, and that has for its aim the intellectual and ethical advancement of the coming generations.

This prescient form of philanthropy is com. ing to be far more characteristic of large givers than it has been in the past, and the fact is a cause for congratulation. It seems as though wealthy men were just beginning to realize the possibilities for good in the endowment of education and scientific research, of literature and art. In the field of education alone, the opportunities offered for the wise use of wealth are practically unlimited. The resources of public taxation can never be really adequate for the work of public education. Speaking in Chicago a year or two ago, President Eliot referred to the public schools of the city, with their two hundred and fifty thousand pupils, and said that they should have a teacher for every ten children, or fifty thousand teachers in place of the five thousand that they actually do have. The suggestion was a startling one, yet not unreasonable. Obviously, this amount of teaching can never be provided by the taxpayers, and thus there is almost unlimited scope for private philanthropic activity in connection with the public schools alone. The endowment of technical and university education has been unprecedently generous during the past score of years, yet all that has been done in this direction should be considered but an earnest of what may and must be done in the future. There is no other form of investment that pays such dividends as an educational institution or system social dividends of intelligence and civic usefulness and heightened public morality.

A form of educational philanthropy that is coming more and more into vogue of late is that which stimulates reluctant givers to co

operate in the work of educating the youth of the growing generation. The gifts of such men as Mr. Carnegie, Mr. Rockefeller, and Mr. Pearsons are wisely conditioned upon the raising of large additional sums from other sources. Dollar for dollar is the rule with these men, or, as in the case of Mr. Carnegie's library benefactions, public provision of ten per cent annually upon the original gift. This is an admirable plan, for it doubles, or more than doubles, the power of the giver for good, while it also attaches to the acceptance of an endowment a certain measure of responsibility which cannot fail to bring forth fruit in careful administration and widespread interest in the institutions concerned. This responsibility sometimes assumes such proportions—as in the case of Mr. Carnegie's munificent endowment of the Scotch universities that the gift is viewed askance, and accepted with a grudging sort of gratitude. It is very amusing to read some of the English and Scotch comment upon this superb benefaction. We e are told that university tuition without the means of subsistence is a mockery, and the influx of large numbers of students will compel the Scotch universities to enlarge their teaching facilities at the public charge. It does not seem to be realized that the very purpose of the gift is to stimulate private endeavor in sending young men to the universities, and public endeavor in enlarging the universities in accordance with the highest conception of national duty. To carp at such a gift on the ground of the responsibilities which it entails is an act unworthy of a high-spirited people. Such protestants should remain silent for very shame, and seek rather, by every means in their power, to encourage the nation to rise to the height of this great occasion.

THE Historical Manuscript Commission, appointed a few years since by the American Historical Association, has called fresh attention to its labors of love in its fourth report, being a collection of some five hundred letters written by John C. Calhoun, and over two hundred letters written to him. These letters were collected by the Commission from all parts of the Union, the search occupying several years. They embrace both public and private correspondence, showing the great Carolinian both as a statesman and as a family man. The volume, issued by the Smithsonian Institution as a government publication, at last makes Calhoun as well known as Franklin, Washington, John Adams, and John Quincy Adams, and others have been known by their collected correspondence. No attempt has been made to conceal anything, or to emendate or edit, and very wisely, the editor has refrained from comments.

The New Books.

THE POETRY OF MR. MOODY.*

Every two or three years, from some quarter of the critical horizon, there issue trumpetings of praise which herald the advent of a new singer of songs. A bright star has swum into the ken of some watcher upon the battlements, and the discovery is proclaimed to the world with much pomp of rhetorical eulogy. The number of new poets who have thus been discovered during the past quarter-century is considerable, but most of them have shared the fate of the nove known to astronomers, and their magnitude has rapidly become dimmed. We have often envied the enthusiasm that could find so much to praise in these new interpreters of nature and human life, but have felt ourselves sorrowfully compelled to stand outside the chorus, and to mar its harmonies by the injection of certain discordant notes of caution and temperate restraint. A book of poetry must exhibit very great qualities indeed to constitute an event in literature, or to set its writer among the enduring poets of his age. In the memory of men now in their middle or advancing years there have been only two such events in English poetry- the appearance of

Mr. Swinburne's "Poems and Ballads" in 1866 and of the "Poems" of Rossetti in 1870. Tested by these touchstones, "The Love Sonnets of Proteus" and "The City of Dreadful Night," the books of Mr. Watson and Mr. Kipling and Mr. Phillips, have been phenomena of only secondary significance. Yet the writers of all these books, and other writers as well, have been hailed as new luminaries of the first rank, have been praised in terms that one would hesitate to apply to Arnold or Tennyson, and have been made, as far as indiscriminate eulogy could make them, the literary fashion of their respective hours. Praiseworthy they doubtless are, but not worthy of the sort of praise that has been injudiciously bestowed upon them to the confusion of all absolute

values.

In making the following somewhat extended comment upon the poetical work of Mr. William Vaughn Moody, we are not going to say that he is a poet of the highest kind of

*THE MASQUE OF JUDGMENT. A Masque-Drama in Five Acts and a Prelude. By William Vaughn Moody. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co.

POEMS. By William Vaughn Moody. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

accomplishment, or apply to him the language that must properly be reserved for poets whose work has stood the test of time and remained uncorroded by it. But we are going to sayand by our exhibits seek to prove that no other new poet of the past score of years, either in America or in England, has displayed a finer promise upon the occasion of his first appearance, or has been deserving of more respectful consideration. There is no reason, for example, why his work should attract less attention than has been given of late to the work of Mr. Stephen Phillips, and we make not the slightest doubt that, had his work been the product of an Englishman, its author would have been accorded the resounding praise that has been accorded to the author of "Marpessa" and "Paolo and Francesca." We wish to say, furthermore, that we have not for many years been so strongly tempted to cast aside critical restraints and indulge in "the noble pleasure of praising," after the fashion, let us say, of the late Mr. Hutton when dealing with the poetry of Mr. William Watson. Nor do we hesitate to add that, with the possible exception of what has been done by Professor Woodberry, no such note of high and serious song

has been sounded in our recent American poetry as is now sounded in "The Masque of Judgment" and the "Poems" of Mr. Moody.

"The Masque of Judgment" is a work that labors under extraordinary difficulties. The form itself is one that a writer must be greatly daring to attempt, and the substance is of a sort that heightens the difficulties of the form. Like the epics of Dante and Milton, it is concerned with no less a theme than the cosmogony; like "Faust," it sets speech upon the lips of archangels; like the "Prometheus Unbound," it personifies the creations of mythology. It might more fittingly be styled a Mystery than a Masque, but it cannot take an easy refuge in the naivetés of mediævalism, for it is no imitative exercise in archaism, but a poem conceived in the spirit of modern philosophy. So true is this that we are impelled to provide it with texts from the writings of the philosophers. Professor Royce says: "It is the fate of life to be restless, capricious, and therefore tragic. Happiness comes, indeed, but by all sorts of accidents; and it flies as it comes. One thing only that is greater than this fate endures in us if we are wise of heart; and this one thing endures forever in the heart of the great World-Spirit of whose wisdom ours is but a fragmentary reflection.