for that tyrannical owl, the wood-peckers brought presently from another part of the grove an oak ball of the size of the aperture, and driving it tightly into the hole, withdrew to another hollow tree, leaving the bird of prey hermetically sealed up.

After several days, when we started to return to San Buenaventura, the ball was still in the hole, and the wood-peckers, settled in their new home, were going about their business as if there had never been a tecolote to disturb their peace.

They usually go in pairs and are extremely solitary in their habits, even the male and female doing their labor separately unless some disturbance such as that described necessitates their united efforts. Their powers of flight are very moderate, and the keel of the breast bone is small. The toes are in pairs, two before and two behind, with sharp, strong claws; the bill is rather long, straight and wedge-shaped, with a hard tip, the tip and sides compressed; the tail is lengthened and rigid; the vertebrae of the neck are greatly developed, and the last of the caudal vertebrae is very large, with a long ridge-like spinous process; the whole structure adapting

ON July 12th the Manufacturers and Producers Association of California, of which the OVERLAND MONTHLY PUBLISHING Co. is a member, held a mass meeting at Metropolitan Hall. United States Senator Perkins, Congressman Maguire, Henry T. Scott, and others addressed the meeting in behalf of protecting and patronizing "Home Industries." It was clearly shown by the several speakers that manufactories of all kinds in this State and on this Coast were languishing for want of home patronage, and the money of the Coast was going abroad for supplies that could be made as good and as cheaply right here in our midst, if people would only give them a trial.

Instances were cited where the Manufacturers and Producers Association had interested themselves in the giving of contracts for marble, stone, brick, iron, etc., and influenced the purchaser to buy in the home market instead of from the representatives of Eastern firms. Senator Perkins adorned a tale and pointed a moral by calling up the case of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company awarding the contract for building the steamship Peru to the Union Iron Works of this city, and the steamship China to an English firm. In the one instance the money went into the pockets of our citizens in the other into those of another nation.

The audience cheered the sentiments, and the speakers promised that the Association would favor home industries to the exclusion of Eastern and foreign, and urged the newspapers to call on all good citizens to do likewise. We left the hall determined to do our small share toward the furtherance of so good a cause. Then we began to take the campaign home to our business.

The OVERLAND MONTHLY is a "Home Industry." It is and has been published twentyeight years in this city and its pages are a veritable mine of literature booming the industries of the State. Every dollar it has made from all sources, foreign and domestic, has been spent in this city. It can show in its letter books that it has been the cause of bringing hundreds of families and thousands of dollars in investments to the State. Illustrated articles have been devoted to the canning industry, the wine industry, the raisin, the beet-root sugar, the oyster, the woolen cloth, the blooded-horse, the fruit-growing, the mining, the ship building, and half a dozen more, without charge, simply for the good of all concerned.

Patronize Home Industries.

WHAT is the result? The magazine has a larger subscription list on the Atlantic Coast than on the Pacific. It has almost as large a circulation in London as it has in San Francisco. Of all the manufactories and Producers (not agents or merchants) on this Coast it has in thirty-eight pages of advertising matter just three small advertisements, one half a page altogether. In other words, if it were not for the foreign advertisers, whose goods we are bound by our Association to practically boycott, the OVERLAND would not be able to live.

We have gone to our woolen cloth manufacturers and offered them our pages and good will. They accept the good will but refuse to pay one cent for it even in trade-"times are too hard." They are glad of our trade and we give it to them cheerfully, but when they advertise they prefer to reach out for Eastern custom and advertise in an Eastern magazine. The history of one industry is the history of nearly all; they are pleased at mass meeting and editorials booming their goods, ut when they go to the newstand they patronize New York every time in preference to San Francisco. The OVERLAND is discarded for "Munsey's," or some other ten

cent picture book. As a member of the Manufacturers and Producers Association we believe in Mr. Blaine's doctrine of reciprocity and "that deeds go farther than words."

A Theory of Christian Education. [THE fact that education is before so many minds in this summer season, when parents are making up their minds what to do with their boys and girls for the coming school year, is the OVERLAND'S reason for complying with a request that has been made to it to reprint, for wider than a Church audience, a report adopted by the Convention of the Episcopal Church of the Diocese of California, held in Los Angeles, in May, 1895. It was prepared by Doctor E. B. Spalding, chairman of the committee on Christian Education. Doubtless there will be many that will dissent from his views, but to open discussion on this important subject is in itself worth while.]

YOUR committee in their report to the last Diocesan Convention upon Christian Education claimed that our Church schools were no abnormal creations, existing in a kind of hothouse atmosphere of sectarian prejudices, but were a commodity legitimately placed upon the educational market to meet a public demand. Perhaps no more satisfactory demonstration of this fact could be desired, than the success of these institutions in California during the past two years; years which have tried the Pacific Coast financially, as never before in the memory of her people. It is a little surprising that when economy has been the order of the day, with the wealthy as well as with the poorer classes, when not only churches and charities, but all lines of trade and commerce, have suffered as they have of late, that our Church schools have held their own, and this side by side with public eleemosynary institutions. It is still more surprising that in many cases these private enterprises have had an increase of students with a corresponding increase of income. This success, then, is a suggestive fact, of which there is but one rational explanation.

--

No mere religious prejudice, or narrow spirit of social exclusiveness, will account for it. It means, if it means anything, that there is a growing public demand for private and especially for Church schools. As to the cause of this demand people will probably differ; but that the demand exists and is becoming more or less general, may not be denied. Time does not permit to enter into any extended explanation of the root causes of this growing public sentiment, but your committee ventures to suggest one or two thoughts, which certainly are worthy of consideration.

One of the gravest problems of the day (one

might almost say the problem) is, what kind of training should be given to the young, especially to boys and young men.

In emphasizing boys' education your committee would not be thought, for one moment, to undervalue in any way the necessary training of young women; but girls, thank God, are as yet more or less under home influence. Notwithstanding the advanced views of some would-be leaders of the sex, an old-time wisdom throws around the young girl's life staid and wholesome restraints, which late sad records of crime have demonstrated can only be broken over to the imminent danger of womanliness and purity. But with boys and young men the case is different. From their very nature they seek freedom from restraint, and are thrown at the earliest moment possible out into a world never more full of a feverish mental activity than now. Home restraints have never rested more lightly upon them than at the present. At a time when character is forming, when a future manhood for good or for evil is being developed, when temptations to self-gratification were never stronger; by the wretched divisions among Christian people, a sense of religious obligation is being weakened, skepticism and unbelief are in the very air, and these young lives, the hope of the future, socially, politically, religiously, are oftentimes being thrown out into this troubled atmosphere like vessels in a storm without moorings. That a kind of degeneracy should be the result is not at all surprising. While there is the manly young life all about us, while much that is manly and strong obtains by a kind of hereditary force, yet two types of a new young man are becoming painfully apparent. One has for its essential characteristic a kind of dudishness so effeminate as to be absolutely exasperating. The other is too often marked by a boasted knowledge of evil, a viciousness, veneered (it may be) by society manners and society ways, but which at once excites at fear and disgust. However indifferent the general public may be to these signs ominous for the future, parents and guardians, who have to face a responsibility for the young, are being roused to the dangers that beset those bound to them by ties of kindred and affection.

However interesting new opinions and views may be upon the subject of education as a matter of theory, fathers and mothers are beginning to demand practical results.

When a child is drifting maybe into bad companionship; when he begins to affect lines of thought and modes of life, which the commonest experience tells can lead only to a wreckage and

ruin, parents will never be satisfied with any mere theories for their children. And so, if your committee read rightly the signs of the times, fathers and mothers are beginning to turn anxiously to old paths and old ways; to methods of training that have given to the world the noblest lives of the past, that they may well believe, will reproduce such lives in the present. The prayer of nine tenths of the parents today is simply this: "That their children may be saved from the contamination of evil and vlce all about them." They tell you that they wish their boys to become manly, brave, conscientious; their daughters to be pure, gentle, womanly. This to them is necessary, far more necessary than any mere training of the mind. Parents are willing (as never before) to lay aside religious prejudices; willing to sacrifice and economize; willing to give of their means freely, if they can only see their children developing properly, not simply their minds, but growing in self-control, in selfrespect. In other words, if they can but see them "increasing in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man." This is a crying demand in the educational market today. Our public system of education, grand in its theory, munificent in its appointments, is doing all in its power to meet this demand, but it has all but insuperable difficulties to encounter. It is compelled to gather many young lives together in a mass, good, bad, and indifferent. It can make no distinctions. In the large numbers thus grouped together there is little opportunity to deal other than with the mass. It rarely can give that individual training so necessary to the proper development of character. To be just also, religious influences must be eliminated from the system, the mighty power of prayer, the grace of the Sacraments, the wisdom that comes from the reading and studying of God's Word.

Feebly Christian parents are striving to supple ment a purely secular system of education of five days in the week by the religious training of Sunday schools; to substitute a special hotbed Sunday instruction for what should be an uninterrupted Christian atmosphere of home, school, and church, in which the young life should dwell to be properly developed. Against this Sunday training the boy (more often) revolts, to followthe example of many a father who does not go to church himself, but who fondly hugs the delusion that his boy will follow the fatherly advice rather than the fatherly example. And so parents (especially mothers) are turning to private, more often Church schools, if the advantage they seek may be had for their children. Here difficulties

which beset public institutions may largely be eliminated; here the individual life may be cared for; here Christian influences necessarily denied elsewhere may strengthen the young life and keep it from evil.

Secondary schools should be established and endowed, in which the most careful and intellectual training should be given. There should be a moral and religious culture to keep the young life true and upright. There should be training of the body in gymnasium and on field by all manly sports to make it a fit habitation for a strong brave soul. And then, when the preparation for college and university is completed, when the youth, the peer of any intellectually and bodily, the superior of many, in that he is not ashamed to confess Christ before men, goes up to the higher walk of learning, what then?

In all of our great universities there should be established a hall which might be the home of the Christian student.

It is a terra incognita, to which fancy and tradition give an almost indescribable fascination. To him accustomed to the wholesome restraints of the preparatory training, the freedom the university offers becomes an almost priceless privilege. It is a recognition (so he often regards it) of his manhood, of his power and ability to take care of himself, which is flattering in the extreme. Oftentimes (a mere boy in years, with little or no knowledge of the world and its temptations) he suddenly finds himself foot-free and hand-free, with little control over him other than that of the class room. Encouraged not infrequently by an ill-judged mental stimulus to regard an irreverent free thought as a mark of his manhood, he is tempted to deal with the most sacred mysteries of life, of mind, soul. and body, in a way which would be almost amusing were it not so pitiable. Amid new associations, in contact with currents of thought utterly unfamiliar, and yet which appeal to his pride and self-assertion, he is led all but unconsciously to regard the restraints of home as puerile; the prayers his mother taught him as childish; the faith once delivered to the saints as a medieval superstition; and his young eyes often turn to possibly skeptical teaching, from some professorial chair, as infallible, while he throws aside the Bible of his youth. Is it any wonder that young lives under such circumstances often drift into a kind of lawlessness and recklessness, with skepticism and tacit denial of the faith?

A higher education is demanded, and it is right that it should be provided. It must be accompanied by a larger liberty of thought and action.

But Christian men and women often throw lives dearer than their own under such influences, with scarcely a thought of, or an effort for, the protection so much needed.

It

There should be in every great university of our land a Hall erected, the home for those who need (never more so) the influence of the Christian family. It should not be intended for divinity students this training comes later-but for undergraduates. It should be a building suitable in all its appointments for a young man's life, with its bedrooms and adjoining studies; with its reading room provided with the best periodicals of the day; with its library stored with the choicest reference books. should have its well ordered dining-room, its gymnasium, its billiard-room, its smoking-room (if you will), for it is sometimes wise to avoid side issues. There should be suitable endowments by which expenses could be reduced to a nominal fee. Such a University Hall should be officered in the wisest manner possible; first by a Head or Father, not connected with the university; a man of wisdom, experience, and of a personal magnetism which would draw young men to him, not so much by rigid rules and regulations as by a personal respect and affection. There should be the Matron or Mother of the establishment, a lady, wise to guide the household, one who by an all but unconscious influence should teach that the highest type of manhood is a gentle manhood. There should be tutors able and ready to give that assistance in the preparation of university work often so much needed by young men to avail themselves of the full advantage of the wisdom of class room and lecture. In other words, the University Hall should be a refined and Christian home of learning, a kind of scholarly gymnasium where the young man might, amid gentlemanly surroundings, be taught to use his mental and moral equipments in the defense of what is good and pure, as the youth is taught with boxing gloves the manly art of defense of his person. One may not estimate the advantage in a day like this, when skepticism is attacking the strongholds of the faith, of such homes in the

busiest centers of the active thought of the age, in the university life. It would be something for a young man all untrained in the fence and and guard of polemics of the day, to be able to bring his religious troubles and doubts to one wise to counsel and advise, as the head of such a home should be. To have (when may be the divinity of his Master was attacked as if it were some new discovery of the immense knowledge of this 19th century) some one who could quietly step to his library, take down some volume of the past, and show that the attack is no new thing, that it is as old as Christ and Gnosticism. That the battle was fought out in the year 325, at the Council of Nice, and Christianity conquered. That Christ is God of God, light of light, very God of very God. That this marvelous discovery of the 19th century is simply the revamping of an old heresy, and its resurrection is all the more humiliating that the enemy assumes the ignorance of the Christian of today. And so of other attacks on the Bible and Christ and Christianity; that they are only modern attempts to raise old and dead issues, to thrash out again old straw. Who can tell the strength to young life thus guarded, thus trained to watch and ward in the defense of the blessed Master, in the very midst of the intense mental activity of our great universities? There will be-believe it a special blessing upon the man or the woman who devotes something of his or her wealth to such a cause as this.

Your committee has tried in a simple way thus to present before the Church in this Diocese what might be done; an ideal, towards which we might work on educational lines. The Anglican communion has ever gloried in her educational work. The great Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, her great public schools of Eton and Rugby, of Harrow and Winchester, and others, are noble monuments to her zeal. Her American daughter can not do better than to imitate the mother.

E. B. SPALDING,

A. L. BREWER,

F. W. VAN REYNEGOM.