I present Dr. Pendleton’s laborious work as overwhelming proof of a thesis that I have maintained for years, perhaps sometimes with undue heat: that pedagogy in the United States is fast descending to the estate of a childish necromancy, and that the worst idiots, even among pedagogues, are the teachers of English. It is positively dreadful to think that the young American species are exposed day in and day out to the contamination of such dark minds. What can be expected of education that is carried on in the very sewers of the intellect? How can morons teach anything that is worth knowing? Here and there, true enough, a competent teacher of English is encountered. I could name at least twenty in the whole country. But it does not appear that Dr. Pendleton, among his eighty, found even one. There is not the lightest glimmer of intelligence in all the appalling tables of statistics and black, zig-zag graphs that he has so painfully amassed. Nor any apparent capacity for learning. The sound thing, the sane thing and the humane thing to do with his pathetic herd of A. B.’s would be to take them out in the alley and knock them in the head. 5 _The Heroic Age_ JEFFERSON AND HAMILTON, by Claude G. Bowers. Boston: _The Houghton Mifflin Company_. JEFFERSON AND MONTICELLO, by Paul Wilstach. Garden City, L. I.: _Doubleday, Page & Company_. CORRESPONDENCE OF JOHN ADAMS AND THOMAS JEFFERSON, 1812-1826, selected by Paul Wilstach. Indianapolis: _The Bobbs-Merrill Company_. [The American Mercury, March, 1926.]