The study of psychology is a basis for every employment or activity which has to deal with enlightenment or persuasion of the public. The person who would like to become a speaker or writer needs to begin with it rather than with the study of elocution or rhetoric. The first thing essential for him to know is himself; the second, his hearers or readers--what is the order of progress in their enlightenment. Even logical development of a subject is subsidiary to the practical psychological order. Formal logic, the analysis of the process of reasoning, is a cultural study rather than a practical one, save in criticism both of one's own work and another's. More cultural, and at the same time more practical, is the study of exact reasoning in the form of some branch of mathematics. Abraham Lincoln, when he "rode the circuit" as a lawyer, carried with him a geometry, which he studied at every opportunity. To the mental training which it gave him was due his success not only as a lawyer, but also as a political orator. Every one of his speeches was as complete a demonstration of its theme as a proposition in Euclid is of its theorem. Lincoln once said that "demonstration" was the greatest word in the language. Delineation of character is the chief element of fiction, and herein literary aspirants are particularly weak, especially the women, far more of whom than men try their hand at short stories and novels, and who are generally without that preliminary experience in journalism which most of the male writers have undergone. It is not enough for a novelist to "know life"; he must also know the literary aspect of life, must have the imaginative power to select and adapt actual experiences artistically. Young women who write are prone to record things "just as they happened." This is a mistake. Aristotle laid down the fundamental principle of creative work in his statement that the purpose of art is to fulfil the incomplete designs of nature--that is, aid nature by using her speech, yet telling her story the way she ought to have told it but did not. This is his great doctrine of "poetic justice." The writing of children's stories is peculiarly the province of the woman author, and here, because of her knowledge of the mind of the child, she is apt to be most successful. The best of stories about children and for children have been written by school-teachers. Of these authors a notable instance was the late Myra Kelly, whose adaptations in story form of her experiences as a teacher to the foreign population of the "East Side" of New York will long remain as models of their kind.