Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/385

Rh progressive teachers and advanced educational reformers that the government shall follow out the policy to its logical and consistent consequences, and assume the complete educational control of the young. From the time of weaning to graduation, the state (that is, the politicians who at any time happen to be in office) will hire the teachers and pay them, prescribe the studies, furnish the books, build the schoolhouses, and administer the discipline by which character is to be formed. This is an invasion of the domestic sphere, and an abrogation of those domestic functions by which the family was called into existence and has ever been maintained. Our school system is applauded on account of its imposing parade of statistics, its profuse expense, and the millions of children that the state has got charge of; but, when its indirect influences are taken into account, it may be found that, like most other human contrivances, it entails evil as well as good. Which shall preponderate, it remains for time to tell.



honor will be unhesitatingly accorded to Lieutenant Payer of having written the most deeply-interesting volume that has yet appeared on arctic adventure and exploration. We have rarely been so fascinated by a book of any kind, upon any subject. The experiences of the party were tragic and of thrilling intensity, and the narrative of them is in a remarkable degree vivid and graphic; so that, with the numerous and admirable illustrations, all drawn on the spot from Nature, we are made deeply to participate in the feelings of the heroic group of adventurers who were so long locked up amid the terrible desolations of Nature in the arctic region.

In a preliminary notice by the translator, the leading features of the expedition are thus summarized:

For more than two years the party were prisoners in their ship, of which they had lost all control, and, after passing two horrible winters in this distressing helplessness, it became clear that they must quit the ship or perish, and, in fact, there was small hope of saving their lives even by leaving it. Three boats were loaded with necessaries, and they started, May 20th, to dig their way through the deep snows and amid the mountainous ice-hummocks to open water. We extract from Payer's diary:

"The first day's work for twenty-three men, harnessed to boat or sledge, was the advance of one mile; and even this rate of progress, small as it was, was not constant. Many days it did not amount to half a mile. The sledges sank