OPERA AND ITS STARS

By MABEL WAGNALLS

Author of "Miserere," "The Rose-Bush of a Thousand Years" (from which two motion pictures entitled "Revelation" were made) etc., etc.

A new and fascinating study of the music and themes of many famous operas, revealing the skill with which the composers have blended music and word to interpret emotions and create atmosphere; intimate stories of the queens of song and their art; a mirror of the musical world. Students, teachers, and all lovers of music will find the volume of genuine value as well as out-of-the-ordinary interest. Crown 8vo, Cloth, 424 pages. illustrations. $3.00 net.

24 full-page

Crown 8vo, Cloth, 451 pages. $2.50 net

MUSICAL LAUGHS

By HENRY T. FINCK

For forty years Musical Editor of the
New York Evening Post

A charming and unique collection of jokes and personal anecdotes which throw humorous sidelights on musical life and musical celebrities. Among those about whom laughable yarns are spun are Caruso, Jeritza, Melba, Jean de Rezke, Christine Nilsson, Patti, Calvé, Nordica, Rubinstein, Liszt, Brahms, Kreisler, Maggie Teyte, etc., etc. Any book by this authority will be read with the keenest interest by all who are interested in the musical world and those who participate in it.

12mo, Cloth, 348 pages. $1.75 net

NEW YORK

TH

HE title of this paper, "International Friendship Thru Children's Books," Children's Books," I confess sounds very like the slogans which, since war years, have almost daily hit us in the eye, promising that the world will be saved, soon, if everybody will observe the special "Days" and "Weeks" offered as panaceas for the ills of mankind.

THE

I wish to make it clear, however, that, in spite of my title, I have no intention of prescribing a list of children's books with the blithe assurance that these, properly administered, will cure the world of international hatreds. I do believe, however, that those who publish and distribute children's books wisely may make no small contribution to the solution of that problem which every civilized human being, in every walk of life, must work upon if the world is ever to be made a safe and happy place for all men of good will.

The ideas which are formed by their early environment most people carry

early prejudices. Brought up on the farm of her Puritan forbears in days when Boston, eighteen miles away, was more remote in many respects than China today, she said the only Irishmen, and the only Catholics she ever saw until she was twenty were the local "hired men" who must all have come from whatever county of Ireland produced the most thick-skulled, densely ignorant and grossly superstitious specimens of the green isle.

"Uncle Tom's Cabin" gave Mother her complete picture of Southerners. She was brought up on Rebecca's geography and having an imagination very like Re

with them thru life. You are born a Catholic or a Protestant, a Northerner or a Southerner, a Chinese or a Japanese. Your family have certain ways of thinking, feeling, speaking, doing. You absorb and follow those ways.

Early prejudices some people outgrow, but tolerance is a rare attainment with most. How well I remember my dear mother laughingly telling of some of her

becca's her picture

of France, also, was of "beautiful ladies always gaily dancing around with pink sunshades and bead purses and the grand gentlemen politely dancing and drinking ginger pop."

As the years passed Mother took to her heart warm friends of the Catholic faith, of slave-holding ancestry, and a daughterin-law from old Ireland. How I wish she might have lived to know certain French people of my acquaintance. Polite they certainly are, but in deep seriousness of character they much more closely resemble the Puritan than the gay revellers of the geography picture.

One would think we might expect to find my mother's tolerant spirit among most people of our class, yet it is sadly uncommon.

When I am to be with certain friends I remind myself not to bring into conversation the name of Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick; with others I avoid speaking of the Prohibition amendment; others I do not tell that I once sat at a lunch table where a negroa very black one-was the guest of honor. I even refrain from mentioning in the hearing of some acquaintances to whom the word "Unitarian" is anathena, that I love the story of the Methodist Evangelist who said, "If Emerson went to hell there'll be a large emigration in that direction." I am not sure but that some friends would flare hotly if I told them my opinion of that most amazing sower of prejudice, hate and division, the Ku Klux Klan.

Now there is some excuse for the prejudice rooted in family heredity and environment, but how astonishing it is to think from what slight experiences huge weeds of wrong feeling spring. In Harper's Magazine for October 1920 Fleta Springer said: "I know a man and wife who were pro-German thruout the war for no greater reason than that the wife had once, years ago, spent an uncomfortable two weeks in an unheated English boardinghouse, and that her discomfort was sympathetically shared by two German officers with very correct and charming manners; and that the experience gave her a severe cold from which she did not recover until she crossed to Germany where she found a boarding house with sufficient heat. It seems incredible, but it is true."

I haven't a doubt of its truth!

I am pretty sure that many people of my age-and many younger people, too-grew up with a bitter feeling against England induced by textbooks and teachers that treated the Revolution of 1776 as a burning issue of our own times. In all my school days not a single teacher told me that the American war for independence was only one fight in the long Anglo-Saxon struggle for government by consent of the governed; that a pig-headed German king, not the mass of the English people, was chiefly responsible for the war; and that there were fine English statesmen who used all their eloquence in defence of the colonies. So superficially, indeed, have our American school children been taught that, so late as 1915, Walter Page knew, and took clever advantage of his knowledge, that a certain technically illegal act done by the country of Lafayette would not cause a ripple in America, which act, committed by England, would lead to serious complications.

How appallingly easy it is to put ideas

into youngsters' heads and how hard to eradicate them! Most effective has been the work of teachers of spread-eagle Americanism. It was in 1917 that my Miss Schwab was teaching the first questions of her church catechism to a class of young children. She asked a seven-year-old: "Who is God?"

The boy was nonplussed: for a second, then he answered confidently,

"Well, I don't know, but I know he is an American."

Recently I gave a lantern slide talk on England and Scotland to a group of children in a Jewish tenement section of Brooklyn. Because the district was so sordid, so dirty, so absolutely without a trace of beauty; because people who have little money are apt to think that beauty is possible only to the rich, and because our New York children can hardly escape from thinking of material hugeness and real greatness as synonymous, I tried to make my travel talk and pictures point several "morals" as well as give some pleasure and information. Pictures of the tiny, flowerdecked cottages of humble folk, for example. gave me a chance to show that one need not make poverty an excuse for ugliness, since tidy streets, ivy-covered walls and window boxes of flowers were possible even in Brooklyn.

When I had finished an awkward, loyalhearted fourteen-year-old said to me,

"Miss Hunt, I don't like to have you say those countries are better than America. America first, always."

And I answered,

"By all means let us try to make America first in justice, in honesty, in helpfulness to men, but never in boastfulness and in blindness to any lessons of beauty and real greatness which other countries can teach

us.

The boy looked at me, as dazedly as if I had addressed him in Choctaw.

What I have been saying illustrates things well known to you, but I wish to bring again before. us these perfectly familiar ideas in order to emphasize:

First: the importance of giving young children the right kind of prejudices.

Second: the fact that some kinds of books may be used to implant just the prejudices we mean.

Third: that certain other kinds of books may help to train young people to think, so that they will be less likely to follow blindly, later in life, the "predatory Potsdam gangs" of their respective countries.

The time to begin this prejudicing of