By Carl H. Grabo.

THERE are few Miltons and Tennysons to commemorate such young men of promise as Edward King and Arthur Henry Hallam, whose names have become footnotes to literary history. Many another young man to whom a short life precluded an adequate expression of his force and genius, has passed with no greater memorial than the influence which he imposed upon the lives of his friends. Such an influence is all but incommunicable; it is felt but is beyond expression, for its essence is that peculiarity of personal charm which only the greatest artists have been able to convey through the clouded medium of words. But the influence is none the less strong and enduring in that it is intangible and its only impression to be found in the lives of other men. In this is an immortality of a subtle and gracious kind

Of those immortal dead who live again

In minds made better by their presence; live

In pulses stirred to generosity,

In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn

For miserable aims that end in self,

In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge man's search

To vaster issues.

So to live is heaven:

To make undying music in the world."

Such are one's thoughts upon reading the brief life of Arnold Toynbee which Mr. S. C. Montague, Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, contributed in 1889, to the series of Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science. University studies in political science seldom afford entertaining reading to other than specialists and one is the more surprised and delighted, therefore, to discover from such a source, a biographical sketch which endeavors to convey and does convey, some conception of the charm which a young man of great intellectual ability and rare spiritual force exercised upon all who knew him personally. Arnold

Toynbee died at the age of thirty-one, at the very beginning of what promised to be an invaluable working life. He has left his name to an institution which has become the type of University Settlement throughout England and America -Toynbee Hall, London. He has, besides, left a few inadequate literary fragments, a promise of his maturing powers as an economist, historian, and social worker.

Arnold Toynbee exhibited early that passion for truth which characterized him in later life. His interests were two-fold, theological and historical. For his theology, he evolved a simple creed that saved him from the harassing doubts and spiritual torments which are the usual lot of men of his type. He seems to have been curiously free from spiritual conflict but was none the less profoundly interested in spiritual things. It was his part to help others who could not so readily find peace. A quotation from a letter written to a friend indicates clearly and beautifully his belief-a belief freed from all superfluities-a religion in essence:

"To love God-those words gather amazing force as life gets more difficult, mysterious and unfathomable; one's soul in its loneliness at the last finds religion the only clue. And yet how weary is the search for God among the superstitions, antiquities, contradictions and grossness of popular religion; but gleams of divinity are everywhere, and slowly in the end comes divine peace. It seems to me that the primary element of all religion is the faith that the end for which the whole universe of sense and thought from the Milky Way to the lowest form of animal life, the end for which everything came into existence, is that the dim idea of perfect holiness which is found in the mind of man might be realized; that this idea is God Eternal and the only reality; that the relation between this idea which is God and each individual is religion, the consciousness of the relation creating the duty of perfect purity of inner life or being, and the duty of living for others, that they too may be perfectly pure in thought and action; and, lastly, that the world is so ordered that the triumph of righteousness is not impossible through the efforts of the individual will in relation to eternal existence. I speak of God as an idea and not as personal; I think you will understand what I mean if you ask yourself if the pure love and thoughts of a man are not all that make his personality clear to you-whether you would care that

anything else of him should be immortal; whether you do not think of all else of him as the mere expression and symbol of his eternal, invisible existence."

To this may be added the amazed exclamation of a friend -"Toynbee reads the Bible like any other book-as if he liked it."

Because of ill-health, Toynbee entered Balliol College, Oxford, at an age slightly greater than that of the average Freshman. Because of ill-health, too, he was unable to study as much as he desired. He was, perforce, driven much into college society, where his maturity, his charm of manner, and his conversational talents made him a leader. He formed many friendships, among them an enduring one with Professor Green of Balliol, a man who seems to have exerted a great influence upon the best minds of the Oxford of his day. From these friendships and from his studies, curtailed as they were, Toynbee derived great pleasure. A fragment has preserved his feeling of the value and beauty of his college years:

"The garden quadrangle at Balliol is where one walks at night, and listens to the wind in the trees, and weaves the stars into the web of one's thoughts; where one gazes from the pale inhuman moon to the ruddy light of the windows, and hears broken notes of music and laughter and the complaining murmur of the railroad in the distance. The life here is very sweet and full of joy; at Oxford, after all, one's ideal of happy life is nearer being realized than anywhere else—I mean the ideal of gentle, equable, intellectual intercourse, with something of a prophetic glow about it, glancing brightly into the future, yet always embalming itself in the memory as a resting-place for the soul in a future that may be dark and troubled after all, with little in it but disastrous failure."

Throughout his college course Toynbee interested himself, so far as his strength would permit, in the study of history, particularly in its economic and social aspects. Industrial problems were tremendously fascinating to him and his attempts at solution led him into the field of economics. In the years immediately following his graduation from college he prepared lectures upon several important topics: "Free Trade," the "Law of Wages,” “Eng

land's Industrial Supremacy," "Industry and Democracy," Henry George's "Progress and Poverty," lectures given in part at Oxford and in part as "popular" addresses in various industrial centers. Although Toynbee was a scholar, he was by no means academic. His constant effort was to make his special knowledge of service to non-university people. He preferred to lecture to wage-earners and these in conjunction with their employers. Both classes were vitally concerned in the problems discussed, and he felt that ultimate solutions involved their common welfare. His sympathies were indeed with the employed, but he was no biased partisan. His object was to reach the truth of the matter under investigation and then to suggest some practical and immediate remedy for the evils involved.

The remains are scanty from which to frame Toynbee's theory of society. Despite his idealism, he was intensely practical and devoted himself to problems for which he felt some solution might be readily attained. That he had broader theories in the background, however, is indicated by several passages in his biography.

"The problems suggested by a competitive system of society were always present to his mind. He felt as deeply as any socialist could feel the evils incidental to such a system, the suffering which it often brings upon the weak, the degradation which it often brings about in the strong. For the cure of these evils, however, he looked further than most socialists do. Owning that competition was a mighty and, in some respects, beneficent power, he wrote that of old it was hindered and controlled by custom; in the future, like the other great physical forces of society, it will be controlled by morality.'

In a lecture entitled “Are Radicals Socialists ?" he endeavored to define the line of separation between the functions which must be discharged by the state and the func tions which may be discharged by the individual.

"He proposed three tests whereby to try the wisdom of interference in any particular instance by the state; first, the matter must be one of primary social importance; next it must be proved to be practicable; thirdly, the state interference must not diminish self-reliance."

An Irish nationalist who met Toynbee on a trip through