ARMAND J. GERSON, Editor. THE JAY TREATY. A TYPE LESSON. Since treaties, unlike explorers and land-claims, are not peculiar to any one period of our history, the selection of a particular treaty for our type-lesson presents more difficulty than we met in the case of our earlier lessons on Columbus and the Spanish claim. At first glance the mere matter of priority in time might seem to decide the question for us. Why not take the first treaty that comes into our story and use it as the topic of our treaty lesson? To this basis of selection there are two serious objections. In the first place, treaties find their way into our history narrative at an early stage of the child’s mental development, at a time, that is to say, when he is neither best fitted for, nor most interested in, the constitutional points involved in a real understanding of the making of a treaty. The study of the treaties that closed the inter-colonial wars, for example, would constitute an unwarranted interruption of the narrative which at that time should be occupying the pupil’s whole attention. A still graver objection, however, to the use of any of these early treaties for our type-lesson lies in the fact that they are in no sense typical. While they, of course, concerned the colonists very directly, they were nevertheless treaties between foreign nations; our country was not a party to them. Neither can we consider as typical the early treaties into which we entered in the first days of our national existence,--that with France in 1778, and that with England in 1783. Both of these were negotiated under authority of a constitution widely different from that which prescribes the treaty-making process in our nation to-day. Our treaty with England in 1794 was the first important treaty (important, that is, from the point of view of our elementary course of study) to which the American nation in the present significance of that term was a party. It answers admirably the purpose of a type-lesson. Here are to be found all the important elements necessary for the proper grasp of later treaties. Moreover, the history work in most of our elementary schools is so graded that pupils come to the study of the post-Revolutionary period with sufficient maturity of mind to grasp and to enjoy the international and constitutional questions around which the story of the Jay Treaty develops.