This is the age of physical culture in all its forms. There is a tendency
from the artificial habits of life, back, or rather one should say forward,
to Nature and Nature's laws. "Athletes appreciate the value of physical
training: brain-workers appreciate the value of mental training, of
thinking before acting, and if you would become either you must follow the
methods of both."

Many of our foremost educators in all branches of development, physical,
mental and musical, are now making a bold stand for natural methods of
education. However, all vocal training and development in the past, we are
glad to say, has not been on the wrong side of the question.

There have been, at all ages and under all circumstances and conditions,
men who have been at the root or the bottom of things,--men who have
preserved the truth in spite of their surroundings. So in the vocal art,
there have been at every decade a few men who have known the truth, and who
have handed it down through the dark ages of the vocal art. The work of
these men has not been lost. Its influence has been felt, and is today more
powerful than ever. Hence the trend of the best thought of the profession
is away from the ideas of the local-effort school, away from rigidity and
artificiality, and more in the direction of naturalness and common sense. I
believe we are now, as a profession, slowly but surely awakening to truths
which will grow, and which will in time bring to pass that which must come
sooner or later, the new school of the twentieth century.

There is to-day that which is known as "The New Movement in the Vocal
Art"--a movement based upon natural laws and common sense and opposed to
the ideas of the local-effort school;--movement in the direction of freedom
of action, spontaneity and flexible strength as opposed to rigidity and
direct effort;--a movement which advocates vitalized energy instead of