building up in the land a great audience for the great poets to sing to, many energetic teachers of literature are persuading these children, if persuasion is necessary, to read only books of the day, about things of the day, and by inference to neglect as really negligible anything written yesterday or written about other times and other problems than ours. Our dream of a cosmopolitan culture has shrunk in practise to an educational discipline which will make us more insular and provincial than we are already, more selfish, more contemptuous of other times and of other peoples, and still further disinherited from great art. The movement began a few years ago in a protest against the narrow choice of books permitted by the requirements for entrance to college. Some of the schools thought they could do their best work if their teachers—and their pupils—could select the books for this arduous study; there could be some wise consulting of taste, some adaptation to special temperaments. So long as the choice was still to be made from books of recognized merit, it was unreasonable to deny this request. But the trend toward the contemporary developed quickly; if we consulted the taste and the temperament of our students, the children of many racial traditions, we found that few of the older writers were easy for them to understand; the difficulty of bridging over the gap between traditions was too great for many of our teachers to solve, or perhaps they themselves were not at home in the tradition either of the books or of the students; and the most graceful form of surrender was to study only what was easy for everybody. The process was paralleled in society outside of the schoolroom, in the change in ideals and in competence which overtook professed criticism in our reviews; but the heart of the matter was and still is in the centers of education.