been harmonized with its natural setting, and every power has been brought to restrain itself that Niagara may be preserved, when the "reservation idea" has been extended to include all the beauties of the Niagara river, that the work even will approach completion.

It is, of course, vain to forecast the future, and we shall not attempt it. It is sufficient for our purpose to point out hopeful beginnings which have been made. Preservation of the falls is assured to the extent of the provision made by the treaty with Great Britain. The work of restoring the disfiguring sites held by the manufacturing interests along the river has also been begun. All plans for further action are interesting

Let the board be spread, and let the bed be dressed for the traveler; but let not the emphasis of hospitality lie in these things. Honor to the house where they are simple to the verge of hardship, so that there the intellect is awake, and reads the laws of the universe. EMERSON.

chiefly for the eloquent testimony which they bear to virility of the Niagara preservation idea which was first effectively voiced thirty years ago in the establishment of the State reservation at Niagara. In the persistence of that idea rather than in any particular scheme, State or national, lies the hope of the future. The State reservation at Niagara will have amply justified its continued existence and total cost, in whatever terms that cost may be measured, if it contributes ever so slightly to keep alive this Niagara sentiment, and serves as an exemplar of what disinterested and efficient public service and consistent and unselfish devotion to an ideal can bring to pass.

Go back to the simple life, be contented with simple food, simple pleasures, simple clothes. Work hard, pray hard, play hard. Work, eat, recreate, and sleep. Do it all courageously. We have a victory to win.— HERBERT HOOVER.

As has been the custom, the assembly set aside a part of Lincoln's birthday for commemorative exercises, February 12. This year, perhaps the most interesting of the ceremonies was the eloquent address by Assemblyman E. A. Johnson, the first negro member of the New York State legislature. The Socialist members present refused to vote for the resolution to observe Lincoln's birthday. This caused Mr. Johnson in one part of his speech to refer to it and express surprise that anybody should object to

revering the memory of Abraham Lincoln. Assemblyman Johnson spoke as follows:

no one in this house can feel prouder of Lincoln than myself. I, as the Speaker has just told you, was born a slave in the State of North Carolina, in the town of E. A Johnson Raleigh, its capital. The emancipation proclamation emancipated me. We had eleven children in our family. Those eleven children also would have been slaves but for the emancipation proclamation. My father was a slave and my mother was a slave. They were all emancipated through the proclamation of this great manAbraham Lincoln.

So that you can readily understand I have a great deal of feeling on a day like this, and I do not know, in the last twenty years, when Lincoln's birthday has passed, without my saying something somewhere in reference to that great character.

I know that he has been criticized, and some have attempted to say that his efforts in behalf of the slaves were not sincere, but done purely as a war measure; but looking at the matter from all sides I believe that that

position is not true that Lincoln was sincere in his efforts and his success in emancipating the slaves. He did it at a time when he did not have to do it. His whole party was against him. Garrison had been mobbed in Boston; Lovejoy in Illinois; the negro orphanage in New York had been burned by a mob. Not only his own party but the other parties were against him at the time, and I believe that he did it from the consciousness of his duty.

There is a story told about him that on one occasion, when he went down on one of those boats to New Orleans, that there he witnessed the sale of a slave girl he witnessed the improprieties and the indignities that were shown her, the familiarities by the slave dealers, and he went back home and told his people that if ever it came his opportunity to strike the institution of slavery a blow that he would strike it a hard one.

That blow was struck in the emancipation proclamation of 1863. We do not credit it to Karl Marx or to any other body or personage whatsoever it was Lincoln's act and Lincoln's deed. The world has grown great on account of it, and America has become the beacon light of liberty of the whole world.

What have these people done since slavery to vindicate the justice of the emancipation proclamation? Have they made good? You have them owning in the states of this country over 276,000 farms. They have over 38,000 school teachers, thousands of professional men, both in medicine and in law and in dentistry and in other fields; one has been register of the treasury of the United States, they have been ministers to the different countries, and in no instance do I know of one that has betrayed his trust or profession

or proved recreant to the great duties that were imposed upon him. They have made a good record.

They have accumulated in dollars and cents, which cannot be the criterion of all that is good perhaps, and yet it is a measure in a certain sense of civilization and prosperity they have accumulated $800,000000 of property according to the census.

They have fought and bled in every war for America's independence and America's glory, from Chrispus Attucks, who fell in Boston in 1776, the first man to fall in the war of the revolution and also the first man to fall in the civil war, which was when the troops were passing through Baltimore en route south, was a colored man. In the war with Spain, at the harbor of Cardenas, the nephew of Mr. Josephus Daniels, the present secretary of the navy, Worth Bagley by name, was killed, but a few moments prior to his death a colored man by the name of Cannon fell on the deck of that ship.

In the revolutionary war they furnished in the neighborhood of 26,000 men. They went into that war with a promise of freedom after they should come out, and after they came out they were put back into slavery. In the war of the rebellion they furnished 180,000 troops, who marched for the freedom of themselves and the freedom of America.

In the war with Spain we all know that perhaps, if it had not been for the ninth and tenth cavalry and the twenty-fourth infantry of colored troops that the rough riders might not have survived in the capture of San Juan hill. The colored boys went up singing "There'll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight."

At Carrijal, in Mexico, when we had that little disturbance a few months ago, it was a colored trooper on whose breast leaned the officer that was at the head of the company. It was a colored trooper that risked his own life to save the body of his superior from mutilation and carried it back to his comrades.

They have been brave, they have been willing, and in this present conflict there are enlisted 735,000 brave black boys that are going to Europe or wherever they are called.

I am coming down to the political question again. Let me say that in my district there are only about 3200 colored voters out of a voting population of 10,500. I got nearly twice as many white votes as I got colored votes in that district. I have their recommendation. It was perfectly natural that the colored people should vote for me as representing them and representing their ideas, but it might not be natural for the white people to vote for me unless I represented their ideas as expounded by Lincoln, and as he had in mind, when he emancipated the slaves. So that the endorsement they gave me I bring here, and I come representing that district as a vindication of the righteousness of Lincoln's deed and of Lincoln's proclamation, not to slack away from Lincoln, not to deviate from his ideas that were real and courageous, but like the colored flag bearer in the Spanish-American war, who went at one time ahead of his companions, who, when an officer said to him “Bring the flag back, bring the flag back," answered: "I will not bring the flag back, you come up to the flag."

And that is where I stand today, asking you gentlemen here, in behalf of a race that you know as well as I do hasn't all the opportunities and all the privileges and all the advantages that some others may have in this great republic, for justice. But I believe that the heart of the republic is right, and that the best brain and the best ideas of the republic are right, and that they are going to vouchsafe to us as colored people our rights, the same as to other people, and that, as the colored flag bearer said you are going to come up to the flag of Lincoln and not have his flag or any other flag brought back to you.

Gentlemen, I thank you for hearing me this long, and I know you will pardon me if I have trespassed on your valuable time, but I can feel as you do not feel and I can know as you do not know, and I can appreciate as you do not appreciate, and I can love Lincoln and love his memory as perhaps no man in this house can, and it pains me that any man

following any doctrine, any tenet, should fail to stand up and voice his sentiments for the great embodiment of all that is good in America and all that is good in the world, so far as freedom and liberty are concerned, as can be embodied in the ideas of one man and that man Abraham Lincoln. Let it not occur again. I thank you. again. I thank you. (Great applause.)

T

HE practical utility of library training such as is given in the New York State library school was demonstrated in a rather unexpected direction this year.

When the United States war department found itself confronted last spring with the task of recruiting and equipping the enormous army which the present war made necessary, the sudden expansion of its clerical and administrative work proved almost disastrous in certain directions. Divisions which had formerly been responsible for a few battalions had suddenly thrust upon them the care of scores of thousands.

The problem was industrial as well as military. Food supplies of all kinds, munitions, small arms and artillery of all types, airplanes and seaplanes, clothing, motor trucks, tents and camp equipage, telegraph and telephone installations were only a few of the manufactured products to be provided at once with no adequate surplus in the open market on which to draw. Specifications had to be drafted, manufacturing facilities investigated, contracts drawn, articles in course of manufacture inspected at every step, priority claims for material and transportation settled, the finished products inspected and approved and delivered at the various depots and military posts throughout

the country. The increase in the amount of clerical work necessary was enormous. One administrative division which had in April a payroll of thirty-five found its needs inadequately met in November by a staff of more than six hundred. This is typical of conditions in general.

As early as 1914 the war department had recognized the necessity of a modern system of filing its correspondence and records and had adopted a special subject classification. with a decimal notation (not the scheme originated by Dr Melvil Dewey, as is often stated, for use in its various divisions. This system proved its value in caring for the unexpected increase of material which came to the files but it also showed the need of competent persons to apply it. The loss or misplacement of a paper or letter might, and sometimes did, seriously delay action on important matters or cause serious misunderstanding between the parties interested. It was soon found that the ordinary clerk, even with some experience in ordinary office. filing, could not be trusted to file material where it would be put with other material on the same subject.

At this juncture, one of the officers directly in charge of the records of the ordnance department asked several of the leading library schools and libraries to send him

persons trained in library work to aid in organizing the files.

Among those who responded were about a dozen alumni and former students of the New York State library school. Others were sent by the three other library schools of the State at Pratt institute, the New York public library and Syracuse university. These trained people proved so satisfactory that the United States civil service commission issued a special circular calling for "index and catalogue clerks clerks" in which attendance at a regular library school was one of the alternative requirements.

The number of library school students in this service has steadily increased but the supply is not yet equal to the demand. It has been demonstrated that filing in a large corporation or government department, aside from the most subordinate positions, requires many of the same qualifications needed in a successful librarian: technical training, mental alertness, adaptability and common sense. It has been further proved that, when joined with common sense, library theory is good business practice.

Early in the summer an army officer who had employed some of the first library students who entered the service wrote to the New York State library school:

As you know, this department is responsible for the supply of [certain supplies) and as the work is centralized in this office, our condition as to preparedness six months or a year from now, depends entirely upon the progress that we make from day to day in this office. Under such circumstances the methods we employ in handling and filing our correspondence, indexing and filing our various other records, become vitally important.

We cannot stop to train a green personnel. We have not a sufficient force of skilled clerks to act as instructors. We must therefore get hold of people who will need a minimum of training; who have sufficient intelligence to familiarize themselves with our work and to make themselves useful at once. For this work the library school graduate is very well equipped and from my knowledge of the work that they do and from the way the two or three people we have already at work have taken hold, I am convinced that if twenty-five or thirty of them can be put to work in the near future, it will go a long way towards solving many of our difficulties of office organization.

This army officer now has one of the best organized files in the entire department and is still taking on his staff as many library school graduates as he can induce to come to Washington.

State Engineer and Surveyor Frank M. Williams, who has been a consistent advocate of the utilization of the State's waterpower, is heartily in favor of the proposal that legislation be enacted that will make possible the leasing of the waste waterpower, which has been created as the result of the construction of the barge canal; as well as other suggested legislation permitting the State to lease its water power for industrial purposes. When serving his first term as State engineer, Mr. Williams pointed out the advisability of utilizing the power created by the construction of the barge canal. In again advocating such action, Mr. Williams says:

"Under the present law the State is prohibited from disposing of any water power created by the construction of the new canals. The intent of this law is good, but there are times when it results in a positive loss to the State. If it were possible to exchange new for old power development, in places where existing power was destroyed and new power created on the same site, or to offset damages by grants of power in some form, num

erous transactions of advantage to the State can be effected. At Vischer's Ferry and Crescent near Schenectady, for example, there are power possibilities from surplus waters amounting to six thousand horse power at each place that is going to waste. The same conditions exist at several other points where small powers have been created as the result of the canal's construction.

"It certainly would seem wise that the legislature give the canal board, or other responsible body, discretionary powers in such matters authorizing them to lease the water on terms which, while carefully safeguarding the navigation interests of the State will also permit it to derive a direct benefit. A lease for twenty-five years would, possibly, be equitable to both lessee and State and there could be the privilege of a renewal for fifteen additional years.

Certainly the matter should receive immediate consideration, in view of present conditions and the important part which power plays in relation to our growing industries."