VICTORY ALONG ALL FRONTS. The war news of the week

may be briefly summed up in these four words: Victory along

all fronts. In Flanders the Allies have extended their great wedge eastward all along the front of attack, and have driven the Germans out of numerous villages and have taken thousands of prisoners and many additional guns. In the Champagne region the French and Americans are driving their way northward. The Americans have captured Grand Pre, at the apex of the Argonne forest salient. In Serbia the Allied troops have penetrated a considerable distance beyond Nish; and in Albania they have occupied the important port of Durazzo, and are driving the Austrian and German contingents before them to the north. In the Palestine theatre the British cavalry has driven the Turks far to the north and northwest of Damascus, and has reached Tripoli, near the Mediterranean coast, fortyfive miles north of Beirut, and Homs, eighty

five miles north of Damascus. Here the Turks are in a fair way to being caught between General Allenby's armies and crushed.

THE GREATEST DAY YET.

Thursday was the greatest day in its record of advances on the western front. On that day the British entered Lille. The Germans fled precipitately from Ostend and that section. of the Belgian coast, and British naval forces landed at Ostend. British and American forces

made great progress in storming the Valenciennes-Le Cateau line, took many prisoners, and released thousands of civilians. Belgian patrols entered Bruges. It was a joyous day for Belgians who witnessed the hasty withdrawal of German troops who had long been in possession of the chief cities of Belgium and had perpetrated nameless atrocities on the civilian population. King Albert and Elizabeth accompanied the victorious troops and entered Ostend with them.

SCUTTLING OUT OF BELGIUM.

Queen Belgian

The Germans are scuttling out of Belgium in precipitate haste. On Friday they evacuated Zeebrugge, the remaining submarine base on the North Sea, and in so doing abandoned their long-cherished hope of dominating Flanders coast. All the way from Verdun to the Dutch border the German armies are in retreat, and French and Belgian cities which have been in the hands of the enemy from the first months of the war have been liberated; and there have been many touching scenes in Lille, Bruges and other cities, when the oppressed populations have flocked into the streets, half-dazed, to welcome their deliverers, The retreating Germans are carrying out their practice of savagery, and when they left Lille they carried away 15,000 of the civilian popu

lation. As events are now moving it cannot be long before the Germans will have to choose between unconditional surrender and the carry

ing of the fighting over to German soil, with the accompanying devastation of German towns and cities.

ous.

PRESIDENT WILSON'S SECOND LETTER. President Wilson's second letter in reply to the German peace overtures was not ambiguIt declared plainly that the process of evacuation and the conditions of an armistice. are matters which must be left to the judgment and advice of the military advisers of the government of the United States and the Allied governments, but that arrangement could be accepted by the United States "which does not provide absolutely satisfactory safeguards and guarantees of the maintenance of the present military supremacy of the United States and the Allies in the field." That is

no

something quite different from the settlement by "a mixed commission" suggested in the German note. To place the contemplated adjustment in the hands of General Foch and his assistants is precisely the right thing to do.

ANOTHER INFLEXIBLE CONDITION.

to

The President added another inflexible condition which will not promote the peace of mind of the Kaiser and the Prussian militarists. He told the German government that neither the United States nor, he was quite sure, the governments with which the United States was associated as a belligerent, would consent consider an armistice so long as the armies of Germany continued the illegal and inhumane. practices which they still persist in. He pointed to the fact that, at the very time when the German government is approaching the United States with proposals of peace, its submarines "are engaged in sinking passenger ships at sea, and not the ships alone, but the very boats in which their passengers and crews seek to make their way to safety; and in their present enforced withdrawal from Flanders and France, the German armies are pursuing a course of wanton destruction which has always been regarded as in direct violation of the rules and practices of civilized warfare." That is an indictment which Germany cannot pass lightly by. The President's final paragraph foreshadowed a necessary reconstruction of the form and powers of the German government. NO NEGOTIATIONS WITH AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

President Wilson's reply to the peace overtures of Austria-Hungary was a flat refusal to enter into negotiations. The President based his refusal on changes in the international situation which have come to pass since he formulated his fourteen terms of peace last

Continued on page 418.

demands that the masses be trained in the elements of these things, for from the many the great leaders must be drawn. This involves not only good instruction in the universities and secondary schools for those possessing special aptitudes, but general instruction in the elementary schools that the many may have any latent possibilities awakened, and may also be brought into sympathetic appreciation with the new turn it is desired that our national life should take.

Science instruction, or the awakening during childhood of an intelligent interest in the world. of nature which lies all about us, has an important educational, as well as a practical value. To become trained to observe plant and animal life and the phenomena of the universe accurately and appreciatively is a great educational asset. How to give such instruction to

children has long been one of the perplexing: problems faced by those charged with the responsibilities of school administration. One of the chief difficulties met with, especially in rural and village schools, has been that the teachersthemselves, untrained along scientific lines, have not known what to do, how to do it, or where to get materials. The abundance of possibilities for instruction in scientific observation, the ease with which simple scientific experiments may be performed in the classroom, and the constant application of scientific truths to the daily life of all have been lost sight of in the feeling that only the most important things should be taught and that expensive apparatus and equipment are necessary to teach them.-Introduction to "The Teaching of Science in Elementary Schools."

To learn what grammatical errors should receive most attention in our school the teachers were asked to keep a record for two weeks of all the errors they heard their children make in the schoolroom or in the yard.

The results seemed to indicate that the children above the kindergarten must use almost perfect English or that they were given very little opportunity for free conversation.

upon rire

Investigation convinced us that, occasions, we were expecting the children to talk fluently, naturally and grammatically, without any definite and systematic training for such talking. Further investigation and consideration of the matter of written composition showed that its thought work was extremely poor, and suggested that its technique had received more attention than its substance.

Believing that the substance of written composition is more important than its technique, that it is more essential that children talk well than that they write well, and that oral composition will help written composition, our teachers have been given the following list of subjects suggestive for oral composition work. They have been asked to converse with the children about some of the subjects, to let the children talk about some of them from outline guides, and to assign some of them to individuals for outside preparation for short talks before the class.

SOME SUBJECTS SUITABLE FOR ORAL
COMPOSITION.

1. Baby brother.

2. Pets, dolls, playthings.

3. Animals of this vicinity; their food, homes, protection from enemies, habits. Intelligence of animals. Kindness to animals.

4. Birds. Nests, food, eyes and ears, feet, wings, songs, colors, migration, enemies. Winter birds, helpful birds, harmful birds, protection by law.

In the kingdom of pedagogy a good English teacher is the pearl of great price. He must lead the boys, as the word pedagogy implies, and the girls as well, to the most sacred shrines of all the ages, the hearts and minds of those whose recorded thoughts have enriched the blood of the world. With his pupils he must worship, too, in those hallowed temples whose music is the symphony of the winds and whose roof is the blue vault fretted with golden fire.

He must teach them to hear voices in the winds, to love the flower in the crannied wall and to gaze with fond eyes on the restless sea.

He must create in them a yearning after truth, a vital longing for immortality. He must reveal for them that inward light that never was on land or sea. He must show them and himself lead the way, the steep and thorny path that slopes through darkness up to God and the immeasurable reward of it all. Nor must they for-get how boundless might their souls' horizon be.

He must teach them to follow where airy voices lead, to dream with those who dream among the stars, to walk side by side with those who thread the mazes of purgatario, to send their souls through the invisible some letter of the after world to spell, to invent fairylands, to plan Utopias.

He must tune their hearts to catch the music of the spheres in order that they may the more easily appre-ciate the deeper musings of the human heart. He must -develop sympathy that understands the murmur of a -child, the sweetness of a stranger's tongue and the mellowing voice of age.

He must love even the unlovely and unthinking into loving sunsets and truth, mountains and clear-winding streams and especially the old proud pageant of man. He must inspire them with the idea that,

"We are not here to play, to dream, to drift, We have hard work to do and loads to lift." And lastly, in way of climax, that he who most serves shall be crowned of Heaven as king of men.

ONE OF OUR IMMORTALS

Hamlin Garland, for so many years identified with the uplift of literature in Chicago, has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters an organization which, as has frequently been said, "corresponds to the French Academy." This may be an overstatement, but the American Academy is, nevertheless, a distinguished group, which means that Mr. Garland is where he belongs.

For in spite of many literary performances that only the friendliest critics could praise Mr. Garland was once, and now is again, a distinguished man. "MainTraveled Roads," published first in 1890, when Mr. Garland was not quite thirty, had the definiteness, the vividness and the comprehension of genius; its stories were little masterpieces. "A Little Norsk" in 1891, "A Member of the Third House" in 1892 (one of the earliest of our long series of "political" novels) and "The Rose of Dutchers Coolly" in 1895 established Mr. Garland as second only to William Dean Howells as an interpreter of common American life.

Then something happened. Perhaps some day Mr. Garland will tell us what it was. At any rate, for more than twenty years the succession of stories that flowed from Mr. Garland's pen was uninterrupted by one of significance. Eagles' hearts, and mountain lovers, and long trails were alike saddening to those who had burnt in the heat and frozen in the cold and shared in the strength of the earlier tales. Mr. Garland became a civic institution, he founded the Cliff Dwellers (which with characteristic modesty he named after the suggestion of a fellow author, Henry B. Fuller), but he wrote nothing that the Saturday Evening Post or the Youth's Companion were not glad to publish.

Then came the moving pictures and his "long trails" found their destined end. He became a favorite of the ten-cent circuit everywhere. His honest, vigorous sentimentalism found an almost rapturous acceptance by the lovers of the films. He brushed our smoke from his garments and went to New York, where scenario writers love to dwell.

And then last year from New York he sent forth his "Son of the Middle Border," an autobiography which in charm and power is comparable to nothing except his own productions of a quarter of a century ago. Mr. Howells, who calls it one of the best autobiographies in the English language, might be regarded as prejudiced, for Mr. Garland has returned to the fold of realism after many years' sojourn on the mountains wild and bare; but if there is a better American autobiography whose is it? And if such a recovery of pristine power is not a mark of real distinction the city of Mr. Garland's long adoption would like to know why. Chicago congratulates Mr. Gariand on his recall to life, and it congratulates the American Academy on Mr. Garland's accession.Chicago Herald,

NOTABLE PROFESSIONAL

CO-OPERATION

Denver, Colorado.

My dear Dr. Winship: During the last summer I had charge of the final work on the Denver course of study. This consisted of assembling reports on the course of study made by the teachers, re-arrangement of the material in some cases, elimination of duplications, and enlargement of some important topics. The results of the teachers' work were so excellent and the spirit of cooperation throughout the corps so fine that you may be interested in knowing more about it.

It has long been the policy of the Denver schools to allow its teachers large latitude in the teaching content as well as in method. This would seem to be the best course, but in following it, aims must be very carefully defined. It leaves with the teacher the responsibility of investigating basic valuations before exercising judgment. It had been a long time since Denver had an adequate course of study, and rapidly changing educational ideals made it imperative that we put the content of our subjects into more permanent form. Indeed our teachers had been requesting for some time that such help be furnished.

One of the lessons of the Denver survey was that while there may be in the system many teachers who need the very definite syllabus for their work, there are always those who have the whole plan well in mind; who work upon a basis of well defined aims and who are doing superior work. It is the teacher with these big qualifications who has the first right, by virtue of her close relations with her children, to say what the course of study shall be.

In the fall of 1917 Superintendent C. M. Cole asked the Grade Teachers Association to help in formulating a new course of study. Immediately they turned their association into an organization for this work. The plan was to have a central committee of three for each grade, for the kindergarten and for the special schools. These committees were named in grade meetings. Other committees on each subject taught in their grade, including the special subjects of drawing, music, penmanship, physical training and industrial arts, were appointed. In this way more than three hundred elementary teachers were organized into committees for the work. They worked faithfully, did much research work and met often in conference. They occasionally held meetings to which all of the teachers of the same grade were invited and made reports and recommendations back to the central committee.

In May the completed reports of all sub-committees were turned over to the central committees, who made their recommendations and filed them with the superintendent. Principals and directors of special subjects were then given an opportunity to go over the files and add the benefit of their professional knowledge and experience to this composite piece of work. The directors rewrote their courses with the recommendations of the elementary teachers in mind. By the middle of August the copy was in the hands of the printer.

All agencies lent their co-operation to make the work a success. The Denver Public Library filed courses of study from other cities; reports of the National Bureau of Education and of the National Education Association and other helps for the teachers in the most convenient way, near the "teachers' reading table" of its reference

room.

The principal of the Trade School helped by drawing up the specifications for the printers and by giving us the benefit of his knowledge about paper, type and the like.

A cut showing the pointers for the mountain peaks to

be seen from Cheesman Park was made from a plate drawn by the play director at that park.

The director of art education designed a new seal I which had its first use on the covers of the Denver course of study. The seal shows the sun shining above our mountain peaks over the mint, the State Capitol, the campanile of the Daniels and Fisher Building, a church, a home and a school building; representative of national and state government, of industry and of the things which touch the early life of the child. In the foreground is the group of central interest of everything which has to do with the schools, a boy and a girl receiving instruction from the living teacher through the medium of the book. The fine spirit of co-operation exemplified by these instances and others which might be mentioned, as well as the finished course, is a source of satisfaction to the superintendent and to all concerned.

The course finds its final form in nine booklets: Mathematics, English, History and Civics, Geography and Nature Study, Music, Fine and Industrial Arts, Physical Education and Hygiene, Kindergarten and Special Schools. There is no thought that the course is a finality. Issuing it in this form allows for more ready change in any one of the courses when growth in our educational thinking leads us to something better. Very truly yours,

Ella Switzer.

ONE AVERAGE COW EQUAL TO FORTY SCRUB COWS

BY P. G. HOLDEN

International Harvester Company

Here is a striking example of the conditions which prevail on many farms in all sections of the country:One average cow gave an annual profit of about $31.25, while the profit from forty poor cows, in one whole year, was only $31-about the same as the profit received on the one cow. The one cow is the average of the one-fourth best of 554 cows in thirty-six Illinois dairy herds, while the forty cows are the average of the one-fourth poorest of the same 554 cows in thirty-six Illinois dairy herds. The poor cows each gave a profit of one-fourth of a cent every four days, or about 77 cents per cow profit for the whole year after deducting $30 a year for feed. Each one of the poor cows required on an average just as much feed and care as the average good cow which gave the owner, after deducting $38 per year for feed, a net profit of $31 a year; or, in other words, the forty poor cows took forty times as much feed and care as the one average cow. These calculations allow the skim milk, calf and manure to pay for the labor and interest on the investment.

The lowest 139 cows (one-fourth of all) yielded an average of 1331⁄2 pounds of butter fat during the year, and the highest 139 cows produced an average of 301 pounds butter fat.

The profit from the whole 139 poor cows was only $107, but the clear money from the best 139 cows amounted to more than $4,000. Herds of these two kinds would have to be kept in the following comparative numbers to produce exactly the same profit for the owner:—