charities are sensible. She has never been tied up to New Thought or to fake causes. To the Emma Willard Seminary, on its fiftieth anniversary, she said: "Then to you, young ladies, I commend from my own experience of life the cultivation of manners and sound common sense. Character is a perfectly educated will."

She belongs to the strongly defined New York type of well-to-do committee-working church women. These are ladies of good presence, able to preside at a meeting gracefully and tactfully, skilled in raising money, generous in giving, deeply interested in all genuine religious movements. They are a well-preserved set; they are the mainstay of a church (Episcopal, Presbyterian, or Collegiate), they are the support of the hospitals, and interested in working girls, with theories on domestic service. But let two things be remembered: Mrs. Sage is a leader among women, and she has a sense of humor.

And no record of her personality would be adequate that, preserving all decencies of reticence, did not state that she is strongly religious. Among women of faith she finds her companionships. The Christian religion, she believes, is the fundamental cure for social evils. For many years Mr. and Mrs. Sage were familiar figures in the middle aisle of the West Presbyterian Church, where Dr. Paxton preached until a few years ago. And now, after a little spiritual peregrination, Mrs. Sage has settled down to hear the hearty good-natured message of Dr. Donald Sage Mackay, of the Collegiate Church. The church is staunch and conservative and appeals to a church woman.

When she gives, she gives herself. She has none of the tricks of the society woman for saving herself—the carefully acquired manner that dispenses smiling cordiality with no nerve. expenditure. She concentrates her whole attention on whatever person she is talking with. She does not withhold an ample fraction of herself, and so slide easily through the day. Two or three interviews on end exhaust her. She is strongly swayed by the person with whom she is dealing. She is painfully susceptible to contact with people.

Her rooms look like the city room of a newspaper. They are the abode of a workerfull of letters, pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines. There is also a filing system for letters, and drawers for newspaper clippings on

woman suffrage, Mrs. Clarence Mackay's experiments in school work at Roslyn, the will of Mrs. Emma Schley (who left a great fortune in part to faithful servitors and to hospitals), Journal editorials, and the triumphal progress of Miss Helen Gould.

All her life she has been hard at work studying the problems of practical education and of woman's amelioration. Every day has seen a round of duties: writing letters, attending committees, studying the needs of a hospital, receiving callers who had definite objects, and then giving Mr. Sage a welcome home. Situated in the rarefied stratum of women of wealth and social position, two traits give her distinction: her excellent mental endowment and her democracy. Her compelling sense of equality that is the noblest element in her make-up. She will criticize a servant for a mistake or a coachman for a delinquency in precisely the way that a city editor "calls down" one of his staff. It is masterful, com. plete, and it leaves no resentment. She has done it in a big, strong way. She hasn't been patronizing him. She has been pounding him Servants have never seemed to her “inferiors

We

they have sometimes seemed like erring and naughty children. That's why they don't leave her; they like the way she deals out rebuke. I remember a pleasantly amusing illustration of this trait. A long line of men-newspaper men and others were sitting in the front pew at the Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas one Sabbath morning, listening to the preaching of Professor van Dyke. took no obtrusively active part in the service. Through the four verses of the first hymn we were worshipful, but not vocal. We planned the same tactics for the second hymn. But Mrs. Sage was seated directly behind us. She made a collection of hymn books, and proceeded to deal them out through the first verse.

"Let me hear you sing," she said to the group at large. We did our shy best. It wasn't noisy. It did not carry far. So immediately at the close of the benediction she came around and joined the "gang."

"You men don't sing," she said, goodnaturedly but definitely; "I wish you'd sing when you come to church. Make a try at it.” The effect was exactly as if the Colonel's wife had "called down" the regiment whom she had known for years; or as if the nurse were rebuking the patients who swore by her.

The men looked shamefaced as they took their leave and scattered back to Park Row and elsewhere.

Closely allied to this is her talent as a social politician. She knows how to manipulate persons. As has been indicated, she has a passionate admiration for the memory of Emma Willard, the founder of "her school." She wished that Miss Willard's name should be added to the scroll of Immortals in the Hall of Fame. So she wrote one hundred letters a letter apiece to the honorable Board of Electors Mr. Cleveland, and President Eliot, and the rest. Emma Willard's name is in the Hall of Fame.

As soon as she sees a wrong she wants to set it right, and she goes about it in approved fashion. Two years ago Fifth Avenue for all its asphalt length was sprinkled in the morning just before the heavy crowded traffic began. As a result, horses by the scores tumbled and fell. The spectacle was too much for Mrs. Sage, who didn't write a hysterical, ineffectual letter to the papers, but instead telephoned to a young reporter friend. The Tribune ran a series of articles on the abuse and it was ended.

She leads a definite intellectual life. She is more than a reader, she is a student, of the daily paper. The faithful New York Tribune is her unfailing favorite, but she cherishes a warm admiration for the editorial sallies of Mr. Arthur Brisbane, of the Journal. I once made a newspaper call on her just as she had finished one of his slashing deliverances on American plutocrats.

do not believe that anyone is helping them unless gifts of money accompany the deed. That is such a mistake. In order properly to help the poor they must be brought to a frame of mind from which they now seem to be very far, although they are approaching it as the years pass. This frame of mind. must be a willingness to help themselves; in a word, it means that the poor must learn the meaning of responsibility."

In accordance with that doctrine, Mrs. Sage pays no attention to the begging letters that used to average ten a day and that now average three hundred a day. The immediate gift of money to the individual is, then, a method that Mrs. Sage will not practice, because it seems to her to have no sane motive.

She is a decidedly unsentimental woman. There is nothing of the Lady Bountiful about her. She is emotionally well-balanced. She is the last person to approach with a moving story of a widow and five children. But if you can show how these children can be trained later into wage-earners, and the woman made self-supporting, you will find a ready and responsive listener. But beware of laying on the "human interest" with a trowel. It is the intellectual quality that saves her from the sloppily sentimental and economically unwise thing.

we

When we approach her charity interests

come on an apparent paradox. For, though she has fought all her life for the advancement of women, it is to advance them into the home. She has gone out on the frontier line of woman's progress, but only that

Favorite novels of hers are "Cranford," "The Cloister and the Hearth," and Jane Austen's "Emma." "Emma." A book like Andrew D. White's "Reminiscences" is her kind of book, and Mr. White is a strong friend.

In the direct giving of money to the poor, her view is precisely that of Mr. Sage, who once said:

"From my own investigation I have found that there is a large class of professional mendicants that preys upon the well-to-do and charitably inclined."

And she has gone on record as saying: "Helping the poor does not mean giving them money. In the majority of cases that would be the very worst thing to do. It is an unfortunate thing that the poor people

and the return to the fundamental age-old things. The education she advocates is never education away from the family.

Wherever she is, she catches hold. She does not wait for her chosen environment or pet group. As the fruit of her short Sag Harbor stay, the public school system has started on a new and admirable building. That is one more step, in a new location, in her educational outworking.

Her charity work is always personal. It is never the giving of money. It is always the giving of money after personal contact with the work. And always the keynote is sounded of education along practical lines as the only means of salvation.

"The problem is to make the poor help themselves, and I think the very best way

in which to accomplish this is by means of manual training schools." Then hear her come back to her girls. "The trade school for girls is a grand idea." And again, "I believe," she said, "in higher education of woman when it means the moulding of her character. The moulding of a woman's character means fitting her to become a homemaker."

This is no scattered charity mongering, no unformulated emotion of good will toward all men. It is as definite as Euclid-an attitude maintained for a lifetime and now about to flower out in important action.

She has had a strong, unbroken friendship with Miss Helen Gould, who regards her in an almost filial way. Of Miss Gould she once wrote: "While much of her beautiful beneficence becomes known from time to time, what is known is not one-twentieth part of all she does."

Mrs. Sage has not escaped the penalty of great wealth. She is a lonely figure. With all her fine adequacy to the demands of life, and with the loyalty that her true, womanly qualities have called out in serving persons

and friends, $60,000,000 makes an isolating force. There is something almost wistful in the way she wishes to put aside all the distinctions that beset her and be human and chatty with the person next to her. There is an eagerness in the talk that shows a pent-up good comradeship, a clutching out after affection.

She has expressed herself very fully and continuously in life, and yet there is a sense of the unrequited-what Kipling calls a "soul unslaked, consuming." She has been a working woman all her life, and now, when she has earned quiet days, of an age when even the very poor are supported by their relatives in peace and repose, she enters on the hardest task of all. It rests with her to show forth the inmost intention of her misjudged husband, and she is seventy-seven years old. In the days that are left it is hers to bring to an honorable fruition the life purpose of herself and Mr. Sage and to make vital their ideal of the dual cause of woman and education. With all her heart she desires great things to deal wisely and sanely by the trust committed into her hands.

C

BY

ONVINCED that good government, in whatever field, will never be possible so long as "goodness" is to be the sole or even the chief qualification of its officers, it is proposed to substitute an efficiency test for the goodness test. Goodness is a false criterion for three reasons: We cannot agree upon its meaning; it does not prevent the continuance of bad government; and other tests have been proved to be more trustworthy.

To apply consistently the goodness test in our choice of officer is impracticable because we are by no means of one mind in our definition of goodness. To some, working and play

ing golf on Sunday are evils worse even than smoking cigarettes, playing cards, or using profane language. Hundreds of thousands of good people cannot believe in the goodness of others who refuse to subscribe to some particular orthodoxy, to a programme of Sunday closing, to prohibition, or to woman's suffrage. The incarnation of evil to the avenue-the ward healer-is the incarnation of good to the alley. One man deems ingratitude, selfishness, or evasiveness incompatible with goodness; but his neighbor overlooks these weaknesses if the candidate attends church regularly, supports his poor relations, organizes enjoyable picnics, erects handsome monuments, or gives liberally

and frequently to charity. In other words, the Good Man we talk about so much does not exist; or rather he exists in so many shapes and types that the composite can never be found. We never come nearer to definite agreement than this-You and I are seeking a type of public man that you and I want each other to think we are.

The goodness test fails to stop bad government. Serious as is the indictment, the facts justify it. Most of the revolting crimes and stupendous blunders of history have been committed from good motives. The Spanish Inquisition, the massacres of Dronghela and St. Bartholomew, the expulsion of the Moors, the Huguenots, and the Acadians, the murderous proselyting of Mohammed, the crucifixion of Christ are examples. Epoch-making fallacies have always found earnest supporters among good men acting only from good motives. The Hindoo mother is "good" when she throws her baby into the Ganges; the Western crusader is "good" when she takes the law into her own hands and smashes saloon property; excess of loyalty led the Continental Congress to mistrust Washington; the good men of the South turned "white-cap" when the good men of the North forced an obnoxious reconstruction policy upon them; religious zealotry too often ends in hate of men. To protect the goodness of Athens, Socrates was made to drink hemlock. In every contest our country has known, goodness has supported wrong as well as right. Loyalism in 1776 was confined to good men, the kind we now want to enter politics; Patrick Henry and James Monroe did their best to defeat the new constitution in 1787; the "Know-nothings" were preeminently "good"; the Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist churches divided over the question of slavery; Horace Greeley was Lincoln's harshest critic. At this very time, there are good men so bigoted as to believe that all who oppose trusts, protective tariff, and high license are good, while all who defend them are bad. Thus it happens that knowing a man to be good, upright, honorable, Christian, furnishes no basis whatever for judging whether he believe in free silver or gold only; whether he be Protestant, Catholic, or Jew; Republican, Democrat, or Socialist; total abstainer or moderate drinker; a help or a hindrance to his fellow man. Still less does it indicate his suitability for the office of mayor, auditor, alderman, pastor, or hospital trustee.

The goodness test, wherever tried, has been found wanting. History does not record the origin of the fallacy. It is unknown among primitive people. A merely good man had a poor chance among the American Indians or Macedonians. It was required of the Norse that he be able to fight, of the Spartan that he endure hardship and pain without flinching. For one brief period, "while mediæval Europe was sleeping off its debauch," the ideal of negative goodness was preached in spite of Christ's demand for effective goodness. The stormy reaction against self-centred religion and death-dealing filth drove asceticism into the background and put a premium on business ability and scholarship. The Quaker and his love of peace and friendliness threatened for a time to revive inactive goodness, but even Quaker ranking went according to thrift and shrewdness. Neither the mediaval despot nor his benevolent successor of the eighteenth century selected "good" men for marshals and fiscal ministers. Democracy has never in practice advanced mere goodness, which seems to be a fetich reserved for latter-day critics of representative government, and for everyday use in religious, charitable, and educational administration.

GOOD SERVICE, NOT "GOODNESS," WANTED Outside of reform politics and so called "uplift" work, we are primarily interested in goodness only as it may have a bearing on efficiency. Even in friendship we ask much more than goodness of a companion for an evening or for life. We do not forgive a blundering dentist because he is of irreproachable character. We measure the caterer's viands, not his morals. A gardener must grow beautiful plants, not good intentions. We buy a paper for its news and illustrations, not for the goodness of its editor. Whether or not a builder be good is the last question asked in letting a contract. Shopping would be impracticable if the shopper were to seek "good" dealers instead of good bargains. Politics has given numerous illustrations of unspotted leaders dooming good causes to failure because of their inefficiency. A "good" general is not chosen to command an army in time of war. Stevenson saw the truth-"I would rather see a man capably doing evil than blundering about good." Do you know any woman "good" enough to play Magda or Lady Macbeth?

The modern Diogenes does not go about

with a lantern seeking goodness; he looks for efficiency and expects "goodness" to be thrown in. He imposes a merit test and that test is based upon visible, countable results. He looks at the service rather than the server, and finds the cash register worth a dozen certificates of character. In certain positions, to be sure, fidelity and goodness have a direct bearing upon service rendered, but most fiduciary relations require not only faithfulness and secretiveness, but ability to remember and to use the knowledge entrusted. A flagman's honesty does not condone his inability to keep awake. Goodness in business matters has come to imply performance that is satisfactory, which in the world of business means efficiency. As among primitive men, inefficiency is bad, hurtful to one's fellow man, a drag that is inimical, if not immoral.

UPLIFT WORK NOW DEMANDS EFFICIENCY

In church work the goodness fallacy still persists, but is rapidly losing ground. The preacher must not only be good, he must know how to preach satisfactorily and to arouse general interest in parish work. To quote a celebrated divine-"After many painful lessons we have come to learn that when the stars spell 'G. P. C.,' they are quite as apt to mean 'Go Plow Corn' as 'Go Preach Christ.'" The complex civilization of our day, the requirements imposed upon the church by intelligence in the pew and by outside social conditions have rendered it very difficult to procure effective pastor and attractive preacher in one man. Many churches are still compelled to compromise and tolerate a poor preacher because of unusual leadership, or to overlook poor parish work because of effective preaching. But in very few parishes is a pastor now retained because of goodness only, even rural districts generally demanding more. Ability to sing is beginning to be regarded as an indispensable qualification for the choir. "Goody-goody" books circulate little farther than water runs up hill, but in selecting Sunday school teachers, city missionaries, and committee-men, goodness and the desire to do good are still extolled and permitted to hamper church progress, against the law of attendance and interest which is gradually effecting a transition to the efficiency measure. For the foreign field medical missionaries of approved training are preferred, and all must first. pass physical, educational, and personality

tests. Theological seminaries with lengthening courses, rigid examinations by men who apply the test of probable results, teachers' classes, deaconesses' training schools-everywhere is the unmistakable repudiation of the "goodness"

test.

Not long since charity work was relegated to the "good," as also was nursing. Superanuated preachers or Sunday school teachers, some recently widowed church member, and high-minded young women or young men of exceptional character," "sterling worth," and "good habits," were charged with the responsibility of redeeming the sinful or the suffering poor. We have now pretty generally gone over to the point of view that training, fitness, and capacity to perform are indispensable, and by no means coexistent with mere goodness. To make this conviction more general, three different schools of philanthropy were organized in 1905. Even volunteer workers, it is now maintained, must be trained and their work. supervised. Yet in many offices where clerks and stenographers are chosen because of some efficiency test, the executive officers and directors represent the survival of the goodness fallacy. It is still too generally assumed that good men may direct efficient and detect inefficient employees, bankers, and lawyersthus applying to themselves as trustees a test that they have found next to worthless when applied to their own employees and business

associates.

Similarly in the world of hospitals, the goodness fallacy survives in the choice of managers, and in fewer instances in the selection of matrons and superintendents. For reasons that are obvious, experience has substituted efficiency for goodness as a test of physician, nurse, and charwoman; and there is a growing tendency to apply the efficiency test to the bookkeeper and steward. But as to the managers themselves, the idea is cherished that a hospital will be run satisfactorily if its managers are "best citizens," and of "undoubted worth."

In schools, too, in almost all communities, goodness has given way to efficiency as the avowed test for teacher and janitor-but not for school trustee. Neither the last named nor those who select them realize as yet that there is just as definite a measure of a trustee's fitness to direct as of a teacher's fitness to teach. Goodness has not in the past prevented wholesale waste and error in school management.

Nor has it analyzed school experience so as