If it is only a utilitarian matter of social policy, to be relinquished when that policy changes, we have done foolishly to exalt it as a moral virtue. If we must choose between tolerance and our sense of ascertainable truth in the world, our eyes should be open to the terms of that choice; if we must have a slogan, shall it be, Live and Let Live, or The Truth is Mighty and Shall Prevail? If, on the other hand, the field of tolerance is limited to cases in which we are indifferent or skeptical, much is to be gained in humility and sincerity by the frank avowal. We may cut the Gordian knot, and boldly accept the paradox. In any case, something is gained, if only that we have asked, What do we mean by tolerance? THE NEO-PARNASSIANS "... But I would implore them to abstain from wearing their knees out before the shrine of the ugly and grotesque when there is all the beauty of the world for the choosing."--SIR JOHNSTONE FORBES-ROBERTSON. Away back in the dark ages, when the kindergarten was still an experiment, a stern elderly person--doubtless a relic of the yet earlier age in which children addressed their mother as "Honoured Madam," and never sat down in their father's presence--a person of far-seeing but ruthless mind, would every now and then arise to predict that Froebel and his disciples, by making things too easy for the infant intelligence, would produce a spineless generation, with the mentality of rubber dolls. Changing the figure, with apparently an eye upon the dentist, this pessimist would point out that a pap-fed race could have occasion for, and therefore would develop, no teeth. It is far from my purpose to venture, with presumptuous foot, into the happy fields of pedagogy: it is only that certain straws, gyrating in the intellectual zephyrs of the moment, have arrested an inquiring eye, and awakened a mental question as to how far the disaffected prophet may have been right. Is the multiplication-table set to music, and gayly sung rather than acquired with labor and sorrow in the dark watches of the study-hour after school, really responsible for a contemporary mental condition which seems to demand that even the simplest short story be expounded by the editor, in type which dwarfs the title, lest the readers' brains grope vainly for its meaning? Have our early fumblings with strips of many-colored paper rendered us incapable of coping with even the most obvious canvas? Were those well-beloved blocks and cubes the true instigators of Csaky, Brancusi, Delaunay, and the rest--sculptors who last year set us gasping? Did "Birdie in the treetop" blaze the trail for the divers exponents of "interpretative dancing?" Most harrowing of all, have the "finger-plays" of babyhood, designed for the gradual awakening of the child's consciousness to his five senses and his little ego, led up to the reverberating chaos of words which we are now called upon seriously to regard as poetry?