LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 Class 
 
GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 AND OTHER ADDRESSES 
 
By the Same Author 
 
 THE MAKING OF OUR MIDDLE 
 SCHOOLS. An Account of the 
 Development of Secondary Edu- 
 cation in the United States. 
 
 Crown 8vo. $3.00 
 
GOVERNMENT 
 BY INFLUENCE 
 
 AND 
 
 OTHER ADDRESSES 
 
 BY 
 
 ELMER ELLSWORTH BROWN 
 
 COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION OF THE 
 UNITED STATES 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 
 
 FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK 
 
 LONDON, BOMBAY AND CALCUTTA 
 
 1910 
 
UQ8TS 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1910 
 BY LONGMANS, GEEEN, AND Co. 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PRBRS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 
 
TO 
 JAMES BURRILL ANGELL 
 
NOTE 
 
 THE addresses included in this volume 
 were delivered on various occasions dur- 
 ing the first three years of my service 
 in the Bureau of Education. Those of the 
 number which have already appeared in print 
 have been scattered through various publications, 
 some of them of limited circulation, and it is 
 safe to assume that there are not a dozen per- 
 sons any one of whom has seen more than two 
 or three of the whole collection. For permis- 
 sion to reprint in this form, acknowledgment 
 is made to the publishers of those periodicals in 
 which certain of the addresses were first pub- 
 lished. The names of publications in which any 
 of them have hitherto appeared are mentioned 
 under their several titles. Alterations have 
 been freely made in the text and considerable 
 portions have been rewritten for this volume. 
 Occasional repetitions have, however, been pur- 
 posely retained. 
 
 E. E. B. 
 
 WASHINGTON, August 26, 1909. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 1 
 
 II. THE SELF-RESPECT OF CITIES 25 
 
 III. THE DEVELOPMENT OF AGRICULTURAL EDU- 
 
 CATION 43 
 
 IV. SOME RELATIONS OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 
 
 AND SECULAR EDUCATION 61 
 
 V. THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS .... 75 
 
 VI. THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN THE MOVEMENT FOR 
 
 INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION .... 97 
 
 VII. POSSIBLE CO-OPERATION BETWEEN THE EDU- 
 CATIONAL ASSOCIATIONS OF DIFFERENT 
 COUNTRIES Ill 
 
 VIII. ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE IN THE FIELD 
 
 OF EDUCATION? 119 
 
 IX. CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES : SOME OF 
 
 THEIR NEEDS 145 
 
 X. TRAINING FOR MOTHER- WORK 167 
 
 XI. THE WORK OF WOMEN'S ORGANIZATIONS IN 
 
 EDUCATION 185 
 
 XII. THE DISTINCTIVE FUNCTIONS OF UNIVERSITY 
 AND NORMAL SCHOOL IN THE PREPARATION 
 OF TEACHERS 197 
 
 XIII. INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION AS A NATIONAL IN- 
 
 TEREST 209 
 
 XIV. THE ART OF THE TEACHER 219 
 
 INDEX 241 
 
I 
 
 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 An Address delivered at the Commencement Exercises of the 
 University of West Virginia, June 17, 1908, and at the 
 University Day Exercises of the University of North 
 Carolina, October 12, 1908. Published in part in the 
 University of North Carolina Record, October, 1908. 
 
GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 THE subject of which I am to speak is 
 suggested by a saying of George Wash- 
 ington, which may be found in one of 
 his letters to Henry Lee, written in 1786. The 
 correspondence had to do with "the present tu- 
 mults in Massachusetts," referring doubtless to 
 what is known as Shays' rebellion. Lee had 
 urged that the influence of the Congress be 
 brought to bear, with a view to ending the out- 
 break, and Washington replied, "Influence is 
 not government." 
 
 This saying went to the heart of the difficulty 
 under which the new states of that time were 
 laboring. It was the "critical period " in the 
 history of the country. Independence had been 
 won, and nationality had not yet been achieved. 
 The Congress had no power. It could exercise 
 an influence and nothing more, when the only 
 hope for peace lay in authority, with force at its 
 command. But that critical time was abnormal 
 and could not last. The saying of Washington 
 is true for all time if we take it to mean that 
 
4 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 influence where there is no authority is not gov- 
 ernment. What I shall endeavor to show is 
 that under ordinary conditions the power of 
 government, in steadily increasing measure, is 
 to be exerted in the form of influence and not 
 of force, and that government by influence is 
 one of the chief concerns of modern education. 
 A generation after Washington wrote this 
 letter, Daniel Webster was a member of the 
 constitutional convention of Massachusetts. In 
 the course of one of the debates of that body he 
 turned to the subject of taxation for the support 
 of schools, and thereupon made use of the fol- 
 lowing words : "This commonwealth, with other 
 of the New England states, early adopted, and 
 has constantly maintained the principle, that it 
 is the undoubted right, and the bounden duty of 
 government, to provide for the instruction of all 
 youth. . . . We regard it as a wise and liberal 
 system of police, by which property, and life, 
 and the peace of society are secured. . . . We 
 hope to excite a feeling of respectability, and a 
 sense of character, by enlarging the capacity, and 
 increasing the sphere of intellectual enjoyment. 
 By general instruction, we seek, as far as pos- 
 sible, to purify the whole moral atmosphere; to 
 keep good sentiments uppermost, and to turn 
 the strong current of feeling and opinion, as well 
 as the censures of the law, and the denunciations 
 of religion, against immorality and crime. We 
 
GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 5 
 
 hope for a security, beyond the law, and above 
 the law, in the prevalence of enlightened and 
 well principled moral sentiment." 
 
 We have here the doctrine stated in the clear- 
 est language and in its lowest terms. It is 
 easier, cheaper, and better to keep order by 
 making men moral and self-governing than by 
 maintaining more guardians of the peace. This 
 is the doctrine in its lowest terms, for it takes 
 account only of the police function of govern- 
 ment and of education only as forming law- 
 abiding citizens. But if influence is the better 
 part of the power of the police, then in an en- 
 lightened state, when we come into the wider 
 ranges of governmental activity, influence must 
 play a still larger part and force a relatively 
 lessening part. Government by influence, in 
 other words, is destined to be a generally pre- 
 vailing mode of government. 
 
 We are proceeding here on the assumption 
 that governments aim to further self-govern- 
 ment. A central government does its best work 
 when it does most to promote local self-govern- 
 ment of a really effective kind. Local government 
 does its best when it promotes individual self- 
 government among its citizens. This is not to 
 say that the best government is that which 
 governs least. Freedom and rule are not the 
 opposite ends of a see-saw, one going up when- 
 ever the other goes down. The more a good 
 
6 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 government does, the more freedom there is, 
 through increase of moral and intelligent self- 
 control. But it is not self-government alone 
 which is an end of government. The end is a 
 co-operative self-government. It is not enough 
 that men be made free, as regards external con- 
 straint, but that as free men they shall work 
 together for common ends. Through such free 
 co-operation the empty principle of liberty 
 acquires a moral content. To get together and 
 work together, not through compulsion from 
 without but through an inner purpose and con- 
 viction that is a consummation which men 
 are seeking in our time, and government itself 
 is one great means to that end. 
 
 We have recently seen a striking example of 
 this newer political ideal, in the conference of 
 governors at Washington. That gathering is a 
 thing to be pondered, from many points of view. 
 Just on the eve of a great political contest, a 
 President who is himself a consummate party 
 leader and who stands for the most advanced 
 federalism of our time, called into conference 
 the governors of all of the states and territories, 
 for a discussion of questions affecting the general 
 welfare. The response was as frank and un- 
 reserved as was the invitation. All who could 
 be present, nine-tenths of the whole number, 
 were there. On all hands it was understood 
 that the purpose was not to subordinate the 
 
GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 7 
 
 states but rather to quicken their activity in 
 ways in which the states could work together. 
 The representatives of the states not only carried 
 out their part of the program, but on their own 
 account went forward into new arrangements 
 for future co-operation. And so that most diffi- 
 cult thing in political history was accomplished, 
 a positive advance, in which the balance between 
 the parts and the whole, between individuals 
 and their society, was held to its true level. 
 Here is not only government by influence, but 
 the fruit of long years of government by influence. 
 
 The terms which we are using may be em- 
 ployed in different meanings, and a little more of 
 precision is desirable at this point. After I had 
 in all innocence chosen the title for this address, 
 I came upon exactly the same expression used 
 to describe some of the worst tendencies of our 
 political life. Influence is a thing not unknown 
 in the baser forms of politics, but in such use the 
 accent is often transferred to the penultimate syl- 
 lable. Government by influence finds its deadly 
 opposite in government by "in/Zwence." 
 
 What we are now considering is the organized, 
 permanent, and coherent influence embodied in 
 the institutions of education. Public libraries 
 and great academies of science and the arts have 
 their part in its exercise, but we can speak here 
 of only common schools and universities; and 
 since equal attention cannot be devoted to both 
 
8 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 in our one short hour, we must, in this university 
 gathering, consider chiefly the university side of 
 the matter. 
 
 But it is not to be forgotten that, in this coun- 
 try, schools and universities have been welded 
 into one system and their influence is one in- 
 fluence. In our striving after universal educa- 
 tion, the university and the primary school 
 represent the two poles of universality. The 
 school is for all of the people, but can teach only 
 a small part of human knowledge. The univer- 
 sity is for all of the sciences, though only a por- 
 tion of our people can come under its direct 
 influence. But the university unfolds the general 
 scheme of knowledge and investigates the prin- 
 ciples of selection by which the scope of instruc- 
 tion in the elementary schools is defined. On 
 the other hand, the training and the ideals of 
 schools of the earlier grades, elementary and 
 secondary, are the groundwork of instruction in 
 the universities; and the needs of those schools 
 have somewhat to do with the arrangement of 
 university courses, since the schools are the 
 channels through which the good things that 
 universities have to offer are chiefly spread 
 abroad. We cannot too strongly emphasize this 
 solidarity of our various teaching institutions, 
 for it is one of the surest guarantees of our es- 
 sential democracy. 
 
 There is, moreover, one aspect of elementary 
 
GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 9 
 
 education which must be noted in passing. The 
 primary school as a moral agency broadens out 
 into special schools for wayward children and 
 the new activities of the juvenile court. Through 
 the juvenile court and the public sentiment 
 which has brought that court into being, the 
 educational purpose is gradually spreading 
 through our whole criminal jurisprudence. We 
 do not give over the punishment of wrongdoers, 
 for a government that does not punish in case of 
 need is no government at all. But we are learn- 
 ing that in many instances society has more to 
 gain from the moral education of the criminal 
 than from his punishment, and we have come to 
 prefer education to vengeance wherever it can 
 be made to yield a better return. The modifica- 
 tion of our penal practice by educational aims 
 and methods is accordingly one of the no- 
 table developments of the modern system of 
 government. 
 
 It is a change in the direction of government 
 by influence. The state seeks, as rapidly as 
 possible, to replace external compulsion by 
 internal self-control on the part of its citizens. 
 Purposes consistent with the common good, sus- 
 tained by knowledge of the meaning of those 
 purposes, and brought within the sphere of hope 
 by the trained intelligence and will which make 
 them possible of attainment these are to re- 
 place the rule of force as fast as human nature 
 
10 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 shall render such a change practicable. " Final 
 causes" by little and little are to supplant 
 " efficient causes" in our political relations. No 
 one but an enthusiast or a doctrinaire could 
 expect government in its entirety to be so trans- 
 formed, short of a millennium too remote to 
 give us much concern in present-day politics. 
 But the most practical of politicians cannot 
 overlook the fact that modern states are com- 
 mitted to the program of a steady expansion of 
 government in the form of education, involving 
 as it must a relative lessening of government in 
 ilie form of force. Herein lies, more particularly, 
 the program of modern democracy. 
 
 If this brief glance at elementary education 
 has helped to a clearing-up of our terms, we 
 may get some hint of the wide range of this mode 
 of government in a consideration of the univer- 
 sity, as the most advanced and mature of its 
 organs. Here again we must limit ourselves to 
 a very few representative instances, having in 
 mind particularly the service rendered by state 
 universities. 
 
 Governors and legislatures now turn ordinarily 
 and naturally to their state universities for com- 
 petent information and opinion on a great variety 
 of subjects. Within the past decade particularly 
 we have seen this governmental habit taking 
 root. In one state during a recent session of the 
 legislature more than a score of important bills 
 
GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 11 
 
 were submitted by the governor and by legis- 
 lative committees to different departments of the 
 university of the state, for expert advice as to 
 certain of their scientific bearings. In another 
 state advice is freely taken at the university 
 with reference to the statutory form of all meas- 
 ures of special importance, and the state com- 
 missions which discharge some of the most 
 important functions of government are organized 
 in close touch with those departments of the 
 university in which the best knowledge of the 
 subjects under consideration is to be found. In 
 still another state the examination of agricul- 
 tural fertilizers, and other administrative re- 
 sponsibilities of large practical importance, are 
 devolved upon the agricultural college and the 
 university. This is but a small indication of the 
 extent which the practice has already attained, 
 a practice which largely affects institutions on a 
 private as well as those on a public foundation. 
 It is impartial publicity, especially in the form 
 of scientific information, that is especially ex- 
 pected from the universities. At their best 
 estate, in furthering such impartial publicity 
 they are lending a new character, a new and 
 peculiar dignity, to the government of our 
 states. They are working with the steadfast 
 stars that in their courses fight for righteousness. 
 Of the countless ways in which such influence 
 makes for better things, let me mention here but 
 two: 
 
12 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 In the first place, the increase of statistical 
 knowledge and of interest in statistics is having 
 one result that could hardly have been foreseen. 
 Numerical statements become significant only 
 through comparison. But when comparison is 
 made between the statistics of different munici- 
 palities or institutions or corporations, it is com- 
 monly found that they represent such diverse 
 methods of recording and reporting facts that 
 they are in reality incommensurable. The im- 
 mediate outcome of such a discovery is not in- 
 frequently irritation and a misuse of strong 
 language. An old proverb which declares the 
 truthfulness of figures and brings them into 
 patriotic association with the boyhood of George 
 Washington, comes in for its share of satirical 
 abuse. But this is all on the way to something 
 better. Those who care to know the truth have 
 more allies than those who would misrepresent 
 or conceal the truth. The steady pressure of a 
 demand for figures that can be compared be- 
 gins after a time to affect the systems of ac- 
 counting from which such figures are to be 
 drawn. Under modern business methods an 
 improved system of accounting is a key to the 
 betterment of business processes and a key also 
 to that publicity which is the ground of a good 
 understanding between a given concern and its 
 constituency. The statistical report affects the 
 accounting, improved accounting benefits the 
 
GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 13 
 
 business accounted for, and together they bring 
 the better business into better relations with the 
 people whom it serves. So a scientific report 
 becomes the mild influence through which a 
 real reform is accomplished; and if the thing 
 reformed should chance to be some branch of 
 the public or semi-public service, in which the 
 commonwealth is vitally concerned, we find 
 that a result of really governmental dimensions 
 has been accomplished. 
 
 An illustration might be drawn from the later 
 work of the Interstate Commerce Commission. 
 The services of the statistician of that body in 
 devising improved forms for accounting in the 
 transportation systems concerned, which may 
 serve as a basis for more nearly uniform and 
 comparable reports, marks an important ad- 
 vance not only in the work of the Commission 
 but also in the internal administration of all 
 American railroads. Of like significance is the 
 activity in recent years of the National Census 
 Office, in promoting greater uniformity and 
 precision in the fiscal accounts and reports of 
 American municipalities. 
 
 Let us turn now to a very different aspect 
 of government. The form in which any piece of 
 legislation is cast is oftentimes a question of 
 chief concern. A policy which has won out 
 overwhelmingly at the polls may fail at last or 
 be too long delayed because of the neglect to 
 
14 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 embody it in a measure which can stand the test 
 of constitutionality. This is a test which may 
 not be applied till the law has gone into effect, 
 and usually not until the legislature which passed 
 the law has been succeeded by another, or by 
 two or three or more. This is so in the nature 
 of things. It is not to be expected that a court 
 should pass upon a constitutional question when 
 it has no case before it and no argument of 
 counsel pro and con. Yet much more can, un- 
 doubtedly, be done than is customarily done, 
 out of court, in the way of a preliminary exami- 
 nation of given measures with reference to the 
 constitutional questions involved. 
 
 A variety of other questions may properly 
 enter into such preliminary scrutiny: the re- 
 lation of the new act to preceding acts, the 
 enumeration of acts and parts of acts which it 
 repeals, and all of those other points of finished 
 legislation which even a layman can dimly ap- 
 prehend, but which, in the presence of lawyers, 
 legislators, and jurists, it would embarrass him 
 to enumerate. There is a fair field here, it would 
 seem, for faculties of law or university depart- 
 ments of politics and jurisprudence to do a work 
 comparable with that which has been done for 
 nearly forty years by the "Parliamentary Coun- 
 sel to the Treasury" in Great Britain. And 
 courts and legislatures and the people at large 
 would benefit by such a service. 
 
GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 15 
 
 A preliminary scrutiny usurps none of the 
 proper functions of legislatures and courts. Its 
 influence, however, could hardly be limited abso- 
 lutely to the form as distinguished from the 
 substance of our laws. For such service, reg- 
 ularly organized, as it should be, and carried 
 on through a series of years, must necessarily be 
 more and more affected by studies in compara- 
 tive legislation. The men engaged therein must 
 come to see the growing need of certain practi- 
 cable uniformities in the legislation of different 
 states. Their advice in the more general ques- 
 tions of legislation, beyond the realm of partisan 
 politics, must become increasingly valuable. 
 Such procedure offers much to hope for in the 
 improvement of our annual output of new laws, 
 as regards their consistency, their constitution- 
 ality, and their workmanlike and workable 
 character. 
 
 I have merely hinted in the briefest manner 
 at two of the many ways in which organized 
 influence as represented by the university is 
 taking its place along with positive law and the 
 power that enforces law in our modern systems 
 of government. But this movement is not going 
 forward without interruption or question. We 
 must now take account of the fact that our 
 legislative bodies in particular are commonly in- 
 disposed to turn over any of their ordinary func- 
 tions to other men or bodies of men, who may 
 
16 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 be designated as "experts." It is the policy of 
 referring legislative questions to commissions 
 whose members are not members of the legis- 
 lature to which objection is made. The reluct- 
 ance of our federal Congress to commit the 
 framing of tariff schedules to a tariff commission 
 is a case in point, and many others might be 
 cited from our recent legislative history, both 
 state and national. 
 
 I would say that, in the main, this attitude 
 is clearly justified. It is the business of a 
 legislature to enact legislation. The members 
 are chosen by the people for this purpose. It 
 would be shirking responsibility for them to del- 
 egate this function to others who have not been 
 so chosen by the people. They are to interpret 
 the will of the people, in the forms of posi- 
 tive law. They have the training and experi- 
 ence, or are at least in control of the machinery, 
 which would enable them to ascertain the mind 
 of the people upon any question of public policy, 
 more accurately than it could be ascertained by 
 any scholastic or scientific body. Theirs is 
 accordingly a high calling, and it is a matter of 
 general concern that their office should be re- 
 garded with respect and confidence. 
 
 But it becomes increasingly clear that every 
 large political question has not only a side of will 
 but also a side of knowledge. It is a necessity of 
 good government that the will of the people, as- 
 
GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 17 
 
 certained by fair political processes, shall proceed 
 on a firm basis of knowledge, ascertained by 
 adequate scientific processes. A legislative body 
 does not gain in public confidence when it in- 
 sists upon employing bungling processes of its 
 own for the ascertainment of the facts of any 
 science, which a scientific body is equipped to 
 ascertain without waste of effort and with all pos- 
 sible precision. In like manner, a scientific body, 
 however competent in its own field, fails to com- 
 mand public confidence when it enters the field 
 of partisan politics, and employs in a bungling 
 way the processes of which successful politicians 
 are masters. In either case, the trespasser upon 
 another's field is only made ridiculous. But since 
 science and politics manifestly must have more 
 and more to do with each other in our modern 
 life, it is of urgent importance that each should 
 respect the functions and methods of the other, 
 and that the organs of both, in their respective 
 spheres, should command full public confidence. 
 
 It follows that, as scientific bodies which seek 
 to secure legislation must entrust their cause to 
 legislators and politicians who have won public 
 confidence, so legislative bodies which require 
 scientific information for any purpose may best 
 turn to scientists of established competence to 
 obtain such information. 
 
 This view is, I think, to be strongly empha- 
 sized ; and equal emphasis is to be laid upon its 
 
18 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 obvious corollary, that governments cannot be 
 adequately served on their scientific side by 
 sporadic and temporary commissions, constituted 
 ad hoc. Those great and permanent public in- 
 terests with which government has to do, require 
 the service of permanent scientific bodies, as 
 thoroughly grounded and tested by time and as 
 impressive in their constitution and traditions as 
 are the other organs of government. Much of 
 the objection to special commissions arises from 
 their transient and tentative character. It can- 
 not be expected that legislatures will bind them- 
 selves to the practice and custom of referring 
 scientific questions for scientific determination, 
 except as established institutions, comparable 
 with themselves in dignity and reputation, shall 
 become the bearers of such responsibilities. The 
 sciences, moreover, are so inwrought one with 
 another, that isolated institutions, representing 
 single branches of knowledge, cannot ordinarily 
 serve these great ends. It is only the institution 
 in which the various sciences are all cultivated, 
 in their various relationships, which can fill this 
 large place in our governmental system. Modern 
 governments, in other words, have imperative 
 need of the modern university. Nor is this an 
 altogether new and modern need. It might 
 easily be traced back to medieval precedents, 
 without abatement of its new urgency under 
 these modern conditions. 
 
GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 19 
 
 In the subjects to which it has given special 
 attention, a state university should be peculiarly 
 fitted to render such public service. Its libraries 
 and laboratories have grown to meet the needs of 
 passing years; its faculties contain men well 
 seasoned in their several departments of knowl- 
 edge, together with young men fresh from the 
 best world-centers of instruction ; it has its long- 
 tested method and apparatus for the selection of 
 competence and the detection of incompetence; 
 it has long concerned itself with the wider inter- 
 ests of tho state, economic, sociologic, and pro- 
 fessional, and can readily turn its investigations 
 toward new and related needs as they may arise ; 
 and its every department is reinforced in any 
 undertaking by the organized whole of the in- 
 stitution, with its traditions of scientific excel- 
 lence and of unselfish public service. Without 
 political influence of a partisan kind and with 
 little power to enforce any statutory requirements, 
 the university may render the strongest possible 
 support to other branches of government, by 
 merely ascertaining and putting forth scientific 
 information concerning things in which the state 
 is vitally concerned. 
 
 It is not to be forgotten that what has been said 
 of the scientific side of government applies 
 equally to the side of the arts. It is greatly to be 
 desired, and is, indeed, inevitable, that govern- 
 ment in America shall concern itself more seri- 
 
20 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 ously than it has hitherto with art as a public 
 good and a public necessity; and that the fine 
 arts shall find in our twentieth century univer- 
 sities as complete an academic organization and 
 equipment as that which the nineteenth century 
 has gained for the sciences of nature. 
 
 In view of the growing dependence of modern 
 states upon science and the arts for the attain- 
 ment of their political ends, it has been sug- 
 gested of late that the institutions of education, 
 with the university at their head, may fairly be 
 regarded as a fourth branch of government, co- 
 ordinate with the executive, the legislative, and 
 the judicial branches. The service which these 
 institutions have to render is so distinctive and 
 so indispensable that this characterization is 
 not wide of the mark. Education is, indeed, both 
 more and less than such a governmental power. 
 It is less, in that it commands as yet only partial 
 recognition as having any governmental charac- 
 ter whatever. It is more, in that it underlies all 
 government, and trains the citizens who are to 
 make our governments whatever they may come 
 to be. In certain particulars our American edu- 
 cational systems are more nearly analogous to 
 the ecclesiastical establishment where church and 
 state are united. Such comparisons, however, 
 can serve for only a partial characterization of 
 this most universal agency of modern civilization. 
 But public policy in America, and doubtless in 
 
GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 21 
 
 other lands, would seem to demand at least so 
 much as this, that there be secured to our schools 
 and universities an adequacy of financial support, 
 a deferential regard, and an independence of ac- 
 tion within the limits of public responsibility, 
 which shall be comparable with that accorded to 
 any one of the ordinary branches of government. 
 While the responsibility for our American edu- 
 cational systems rests primarily with the states, 
 it must be clear that the federal government can- 
 not be indifferent nor inactive as regards these 
 concerns, when education has to do with such 
 fundamental interests of our national life. Gen- 
 erally speaking, the states have now advanced 
 further than the nation in the employment of 
 educational institutions as an arm of government. 
 But the nation has gone further than the states 
 in the equipment of special offices of scientific 
 research. In state and nation alike, I am per- 
 suaded, the full value of the sciences for govern- 
 mental purposes can be gained only by some form 
 of academic organization. Scattered laboratories 
 and libraries, the special investigations insti- 
 tuted from time to time, the labors of special in- 
 quirers, no matter how competent in their several 
 fields all of these things must be brought into 
 some form of conscious and permanent cohe- 
 rence, if they are to do their proper work in our 
 governmental scheme. They are so brought 
 together here in your vigorous and rising univer- 
 
22 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 sity. They must be so brought together in the 
 capital of the nation, whether the resulting insti- 
 tution shall bear the name of university or any 
 other worthy name. When such a national in- 
 stitution shall finally come into being, it will be 
 found to have unnumbered avenues of public 
 service, for in it government by influence, so far 
 as our national life is concerned, may be expected 
 to reach its highest and most varied development. 
 
 But in a wider sense all academic and cultural 
 institutions throughout the land have their share 
 in the governmental influence of the nation. This 
 is true whether they be public or private in their 
 formal organization. The special responsibility 
 of public schools and state universities cannot 
 be overlooked. But all agencies of organized 
 and permanent influence, scientific, artistic, or, 
 in broader language, spiritual and moral, are 
 parts of our one system of essential government. 
 In this land more than in any other land, such 
 agencies are carrying the new burdens of gov- 
 ernment and blazing the way for new modes of 
 government. The more recent trend of our his- 
 tory lends double emphasis to this conviction. 
 
 We have taken a new place among the nations 
 of the earth, and it is a matter of moment in world 
 affairs that we preserve our essential character 
 under the strain of these new relationships. The 
 most obvious need that the new times have 
 brought is the need of a larger army and navy. 
 
GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 23 
 
 That need is unmistakable and will be met, if it 
 has not already been met. The most imperative 
 need that the new times have brought is the need 
 that we continue to give to influence rather than 
 force the leading place in our political program. 
 The new expenditures required to meet the need 
 of more battleships and a larger standing army 
 must be matched by new expenditures for the 
 increase of knowledge and intelligence and 
 moral power. If our expenditures for the higher 
 influence shall lag behind our expenditures for 
 force, we shall find the center of gravity of our 
 policy shifting from its former placing among 
 the finer elements of our national character to a 
 new center in our military establishment. It is 
 not necessary to exaggerate this danger. But 
 danger there is, and it should not be blinked. 
 We cannot escape it if, over a term of years, we 
 permit our expenditures for war to grow more 
 rapidly than our expenditures for education. 
 
 Our power in the world depends upon keep- 
 ing our ideas, our standards, our convictions to 
 the front. To spread abroad the love of truth 
 as the scientist loves truth, the conception of 
 justice as it prevails in our highest courts, the 
 appreciation of honor and of beauty, and that 
 freedom bounded by self-restraint which belongs 
 alike to morals and to art to spread these 
 things abroad, and through them to win the 
 admiration and confidence of the peoples of 
 
24 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 other lands that is the program for our world- 
 politics if the higher influence is still to play 
 its part in our affairs. Let all institutions of 
 science and the arts join with our governmental 
 schools and universities to magnify these things, 
 along with our provision for the national defense. 
 Their influence will double the strength of our 
 army and our fleet, and will keep us still in the 
 forefront of the world. 
 
 This new age, young men and women, as I 
 have tried to assure you, is an age in which men 
 are to be ruled more by their aims than by their 
 fears. The forces of this world are to be subject 
 to the purposes of the spirit. In a thousand ways 
 which no one can foresee, men will try to make 
 you believe that force rules and the spirit can 
 only obey. Let no man take thy crown. The 
 spirit rules, and force is only its minister. You 
 are to be of those who will make this state a 
 state in which righteousness is uppermost, the 
 righteousness which religion cherishes, the right- 
 eousness which has its firm allies in science and 
 the arts and in all liberal education. There is no 
 private learning in a public school nor in any 
 school. Science and public service are two sides 
 of the same shield. You are servants of the state 
 and the nation to-day, and we count on you and 
 your fellows throughout the land to maintain our 
 government as a government by ideas, a govern- 
 ment by truth and righteousness. 
 
II 
 
 THE SELF-RESPECT OF CITIES 
 
 An Address delivered at the Commencement Exercises of the 
 University of Cincinnati., June 1, 1907. Published in 
 the University of Cincinnati Record, June, 1907. 
 
II 
 
 THE SELF-RESPECT OF CITIES 
 
 THERE is a noticeable difference in the 
 way the men of different cities speak of 
 the cities to which they belong. Each 
 city, large or small, seems to be represented in a 
 certain prevalent tone, of pride or disparagement, 
 in which its citizens refer to their citizenship. 
 And this tone comes in time to be so deep-seated 
 and habitual that it can be altered only with the 
 greatest difficulty. 
 
 It is good for any city and good for its people 
 that it should be an object of their respect and 
 pride. When Paul asked to be heard by the 
 Chief Captain at Jerusalem, he said, "I am a 
 man which am a Jew of Tarsus, ... a citizen 
 of no mean city." The words won for him his 
 hearing, and they have reflected honor on the city 
 of Tarsus through all the Christian centuries. 
 
 We Americans are ready to speak with familiar 
 reproach of the things that lie nearest to us. On 
 the whole, it is well that this disposition should 
 take its course, for it guards us against a too easy 
 complacency. There is something wanting in any 
 
28 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 society that cannot stand a fair amount of criti- 
 cism and even ridicule from those who know it 
 best. Let criticism, even of the gargoyle-cartoon 
 variety, have its way. Let it tap along our social 
 engineries till the cracks and hollow places are 
 revealed. But if our patriotism comes near 
 enough home to touch the immediate community 
 in which we dwell, we shall make the main note 
 of our speech concerning the place of our abode 
 a note of confidence and hope and pride. 
 
 For the most part, we find our people ready 
 enough to plume themselves on the bigness of 
 their cities, and on anything, indeed, that can be 
 expressed in the superlative degree. That is our 
 "Hyperbole of praise comparative." But I 
 think we may observe among men of positive 
 strength a certain reticence in the use of adjec- 
 tives of comparison. Things can be compared 
 only by being thrown into the same class. And 
 for the more important things in the world such 
 classification is pretty sure to obscure some of 
 the characters which thoughtful men regard as 
 things of price. No, comparatives and super- 
 latives are not generally the most veracious forms 
 of speech. That self-respect of cities of which I 
 wish to speak to-night does not rest mainly on 
 comparisons. 
 
 Let us turn our attention, then, to the things 
 concerning the higher life of cities in which citi- 
 zens may be expected to take an honorable pride. 
 
THE SELF-RESPECT OF CITIES 29 
 
 We do not forget that cities have their side of 
 shame which must on occasion be exposed ; and 
 we do not deny that the grosser triumphs of 
 mere fatness and wealth in cities may have a 
 glory of their own. But for to-night we will con- 
 cern ourselves only with the things of higher worth 
 and of good report. If there be any virtue and if 
 there be any praise, let us think for a little time 
 on these things. But in making some analysis of 
 the things that confirm the self-respect of cities, 
 you will not expect me to make immediate appli- 
 cation to your own Cincinnati. The fame of your 
 city is so broadly grounded and secure that all 
 that I have to say might find notable illustration 
 here. But it would not seem altogether felicitous 
 that a stranger should undertake to assign praise 
 before an audience who knows this community 
 so much better than himself. Let the application 
 be of your making. It can hardly be doubted 
 that so it will be abundant and will be fairly 
 distributed. 
 
 The higher life of the city is not an abstract no- 
 tion, a thing apart from the city's material well- 
 being. It is grounded in economic and commer- 
 cial conditions. It is well that the citizen should 
 take pride in the variety and extent of the city's 
 commerce and manufactures, in the intelligence 
 and integrity which mark its prevalent business 
 methods, in the soundness of its banks, in the 
 abundance of opportunity for labor, in the good 
 
SO GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 understanding between employer and employee, 
 and in the general well-being of its laboring 
 people. Without such conditions as these the 
 higher interests of the city will be cramped and 
 dwarfed; and it is, moreover, exactly in the 
 maintenance of economic soundness that the 
 moral strain of its men of affairs finds some of 
 its finest testing and manifestation. 
 
 Closely connected with these things is the natu- 
 ral pride in the city's government. Such pride 
 may well be excited when the people of all sec- 
 tions and classes interest themselves in the 
 affairs of the municipality and participate in its 
 political life; when the government has long 
 been free from scandal, or when the occasional 
 misconduct of public officials is promptly dis- 
 covered and punished; when the burdens of 
 taxation are fairly distributed and cause no more 
 than a normal amount of grumble ; when police 
 and fire departments are conducted squarely and 
 efficiently; when the health department shows 
 results in a low and diminishing death rate, and 
 epidemics are few and of brief duration; when 
 water, light, and transportation may be had with 
 no large percentage of exasperation over and 
 above the ordinary cost of service. 
 
 Add to this a city's pride in its public parks, 
 its children's play-grounds, its well-paved and 
 shaded streets, in the architectural excellence of 
 its public and private buildings, including sani- 
 
THE SELF-RESPECT OF CITIES 31 
 
 tary regulation of the homes of the very poor 
 and we have a fair stock on which to grow those 
 spiritual graces which are the finest flower of the 
 city's life. 
 
 After all the rest is said, the crowning glory of 
 any city is its men, who make every other excel- 
 lence possible. Who are its eminent lawyers and 
 judges? Are they men of more than ordinary 
 learning and insight and power to carry a con- 
 vincing argument ? Have they persuasiveness of 
 speech backed by a mastery of large affairs and of 
 legal and moral principles ? Are there among its 
 physicians and surgeons men of unusual skill ? 
 Are its ministers of religion men of great devo- 
 tion and great eloquence, wise in the spiritual 
 concerns of their age and foremost in good works ? 
 Have its artists painted pictures and its authors 
 written books that are a gain to the whole wide 
 world ? Are there in it men and women of large 
 philanthropy who have skill to make their benefi- 
 cence actually help toward self-help and self- 
 respect, instead of breeding up new pauperism 
 for others to relieve ? Are its social leaders 
 women of that fine and kindly grace that strength- 
 ens and purifies while it delights and entertains ? 
 And what of the public spirit of the city's men of 
 affairs ? Have they large thought for the public 
 good, beyond their private concerns ? We have 
 had notable examples in our day of cities whose 
 business men showed the power of pulling to- 
 
32 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 gether in any great public concern, and the lack 
 of that power and spirit has been to the discredit 
 of other communities. It is bad for the self- 
 respect of a city to look upon the ruins of any 
 great public enterprise which has failed for lack 
 of wide co-operation. 
 
 The public press of a city may be one chief 
 source of the city's pride. We have seen exam- 
 ples in which a town of relatively small popula- 
 tion has for long years influenced public opinion 
 far and near through the daily issues of a news- 
 paper edited with unusual ability. And in our 
 more populous cities the influence of the news- 
 paper press is a large element in municipal great- 
 ness. So, too, a city takes pride in the influence 
 and general sagacity of its leaders in political 
 life. Under our American system, every remotest 
 district of the land shares in the government 
 of the state and in the national government 
 at Washington, in the persons of some of its 
 chosen citizens. A city may well lift up its 
 head, when from its people men are designated 
 to bear the largest responsibility in state and 
 national affairs and in representing this nation in 
 its dealings with foreign powers. The glory of 
 cities is their men of righteousness and strength, 
 and it is good for a city to do them honor so long 
 as their strength holds fast by righteousness. In 
 some communities the position of "leader of 
 the bar," accorded by common consent, is held 
 
THE SELF-RESPECT OF CITIES 38 
 
 almost as definitely as the position of mayor of 
 the city, and for a longer term. And there are 
 communities, even cities of the larger class, that 
 recognize in like manner their "foremost citi- 
 zen," and claim him as a public good, however 
 private his manner of life may be. 
 
 Finally, in this enumeration, we must mention 
 among the grounds of a city's pride those long- 
 standing organizations of men which may claim 
 the dignified title of institution. There are its 
 churches, each with a half -private history of its 
 own, but each in its own way carrying the gleam 
 of eternal aspiration through the fabric of the 
 city's life. There are its hospitals, its benevolent 
 and fraternal and industrial organizations, its 
 libraries, its music and dramatic art. Shake- 
 speare, a symphony orchestra, and a circulating 
 library are pretty shrewd tests of the civiliza- 
 tion of cities. 
 
 The most significant of institutional tests ap- 
 pears in the state of public education. Our peo- 
 ple are generally ready to declare the praise of 
 their public schools. It is well that this should 
 be so, and the schools are generally worthy of 
 their confidence. But unfortunately there are no 
 readily applicable standards by which the public 
 can discriminate between what is w T holly worthy 
 of praise in the schools and what is chiefly 
 in need of improvement. One indication, cer- 
 tainly, of excellence in a system of public educa- 
 
34 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 tion is its ability to hold the attendance of pupils 
 beyond the earliest grades; and its provision of 
 a succession of well-ordered and closely connected 
 schools, one above the other, by which the way 
 has been made clear and direct, for the poor as 
 well as for the rich, up into the highest ranges 
 of education which their natural abilities may 
 fit them to reach. In this community we have 
 the unusual example of a city system of schools 
 carried forward till it culminates in a city 
 university. 
 
 There are two influences which are working 
 side by side throughout the land for the making 
 of a higher civilization. They are the influence 
 of cities and the influence of universities. The 
 ideals of these two are not the same. Not in- 
 frequently they must antagonize each other. At 
 other times each is supplemented or even rein- 
 forced by the other. The standard of the uni- 
 versity represents the noblest things in our literary 
 inheritance and our philosophy. It stands for 
 the highest development, the continuous devel- 
 opment, of pure science; and in our American 
 educational system it has come almost equally 
 to stand for the best attainments in the applied 
 sciences. There is promise that in future it 
 will join art to science, and so greatly enlarge its 
 purpose and its influence. Already the begin- 
 ning of this movement of the fine arts toward 
 affiliation with the universities is seen, and we 
 
THE SELF-RESPECT OF CITIES 35 
 
 may confidently expect that the movement will 
 go on without interruption. In literature, in 
 philosophy, in natural science, the university 
 stands for pure devotion to truth, without a 
 thought of gain or of any extraneous advantage. 
 Its moral purpose is expressed in sheer, unself- 
 ish devotion to the public good as furthered by 
 an unswerving search for truth. 
 
 The life of the city, on the other hand, involves 
 the employment of the most concrete and power- 
 ful forces, material and economic. It makes of 
 wealth and man's ambition a kind of universal 
 instrument of its activities. But its foremost 
 characteristic is its concentration of human 
 intercourse. It sharpens the faculties of men by 
 insistent opposition of ideas ; but it also teaches 
 men urbanity, an open-minded appreciation of 
 the differing tastes and standards of many and 
 diverse minds. It sets, moreover, a standard of 
 its own in the meeting of men with men, a stand- 
 ard of social manner and common courtesy. 
 Its moral purpose is seen in the effort to find the 
 best ways of varied co-operation with one's fel- 
 low men, for the furtherance of the common 
 good. 
 
 There is nothing more vital in our modern 
 life than the interaction of these two ideals 
 the academic freedom of the university and the 
 efficient cosmopolitanism of the city. 
 
 Wherever a great university is located in a 
 
36 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 great center of population the two types of in- 
 fluence meet and mingle in ways that are full 
 of significance. But where the two are bound 
 together so intimately as in this community, 
 where the university is part of the public system 
 of education and the crowning member of that 
 system, there is opportunity for peculiarly fruit- 
 ful relations between them. The university is 
 at once an added mark of civic distinction and 
 an agency deliberately erected by the city to 
 influence and possibly to recast the ideals and 
 purposes of the city's life. What, under these 
 circumstances, have they a right to expect each 
 from the other? And in the first place, what 
 may the university expect from the city which it 
 adorns ? 
 
 I can speak only as an inquirer into general 
 educational movements and not as one having 
 any intimate knowledge of the local situation 
 here in Cincinnati. From this point of view, 
 it would seem that the university may expect the 
 city to understand its place and purpose, to hold 
 it in the foremost rank among the objects of 
 civic pride, and to give it the moral and financial 
 support that it needs for the attainment of the 
 highest academic ideals. The purpose to be a 
 full modern university is a high ambition and 
 more difficult of attainment than can be readily 
 appreciated. For the modern university reaches 
 out over many fields of knowledge. In the most 
 
THE SELF-RESPECT OF CITIES 37 
 
 of those fields the best equipment, in books and 
 apparatus, is costly and must be frequently re- 
 newed. A university, too, must have chiefly 
 men: men of such eminence in their several 
 fields that they are known in the great world of 
 scholarship; men who are growing by research 
 and becoming better known from year to year; 
 men of such devotion to science and to the public 
 good that they are an honor and an asset of 
 great worth to any community to which they 
 may belong. Such men are in demand in the 
 university world. There are not enough of 
 them to supply the need. The utmost care in 
 the selection of such men and care to hold them 
 when they have been attached to the university 
 are among the first requisites in the management 
 of such an institution. Every university rightly 
 desires to have in its faculty at least one or two 
 men, or more, who are the recognized leaders 
 of the world in their several departments. 
 
 The relation of a city university to the city 
 system of schools adds emphasis to considera- 
 tions such as these. It is to be a drawing force 
 which shall lure young people of promise up 
 into those grades of study in which their talents 
 may expand and reach their fit employment. It 
 is to set high the standard of scholarship and 
 of training for efficiency. The community should 
 understand the greatness of this service and 
 should turn the powerful forces that it has always 
 
38 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 at command to the support of the institution 
 which renders such service. 
 
 What, in turn, may the city expect from the 
 university? It may expect that every pupil in 
 every one of its primary schools and higher 
 schools will be better taught, and will receive 
 more of stimulus to higher things, for what the 
 university has to give. It may expect that the 
 hard commercialism of city life will be relieved 
 by association with pure devotion to science 
 and things of the spirit. It may expect that 
 its reputation will be enhanced and men shall 
 find it a better place to live because the univer- 
 sity is there. It may expect that the other things 
 which make for its honor and the higher life, its 
 libraries, its museums, its music and all of the 
 arts, its institutions of religion and philanthropy, 
 will all receive manifold reinforcement and bet- 
 terment, direct and indirect, from those influ- 
 ences which the university shall in time send 
 forth. 
 
 And this is not all. For the city and the uni- 
 versity must each react upon the other. The 
 industrial needs of the community will give 
 stimulus and direction to activities of the uni- 
 versity. Pure science will be brought home to 
 the processes of daily life. Your factories will 
 do better work and make profit from the saving 
 of what now goes to waste, because of better 
 machines and methods and better men that the 
 
THE SELF-RESPECT OP CITIES 39 
 
 schools will provide to meet the present need. 
 The best commercial experience will be gath- 
 ered up by the university and be organized into 
 courses of training, and from those courses of 
 training men and women will go forth to carry 
 the better methods everywhere. Teachers trained 
 in this university and in other universities will 
 carry the higher culture and the spirit of scientific 
 improvement into all of the elementary schools 
 and so into all of the city's homes. Through 
 such activities as these, the university will break 
 through the isolation which has too often 
 shrouded institutions of learning and will give 
 itself frankly and freely to a real participation in 
 the real life of the city. The outlook to such 
 reciprocal relations between these two great, 
 formative influences in modern civilization is 
 encouraging and inspiring. The modern uni- 
 versity is almost a city in itself. The modern 
 city is responding to university influences. And 
 when a great community assumes direction of a 
 great institution of learning, it cannot fail to edu- 
 cate itself in the very endeavor to understand 
 and to maintain the higher education. 
 
 One thing in particular I should like to say 
 to the men of the University of Cincinnati, and 
 one thing to the members of this graduating 
 class. As a friend and brother, let me charge 
 you, of the University, as I would charge the 
 members of any university : Hold fast to the aca- 
 demic ideal of pure devotion to truth. You are 
 
40 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 seeking to bring the university into the closest 
 touch with the city's varied needs. And that is 
 well. It is clearly the work for universities in 
 this day, and untold good is to come from that 
 work. But while doing this work, leave not 
 the other undone. Your most effective service, 
 your most practical service, depends ultimately 
 upon your steadfast devotion to pure scholarship 
 and scientific ideals. Do not lower any scientific 
 standard for the sake of popularity. Do not let 
 zeal for immediate commercial applications di- 
 minish your zeal in the pursuit of truth for its 
 own sake. Your strength and influence and your 
 ability to serve are all bound up with your essen- 
 tial loyalty to the abiding spirit of the true uni- 
 versity. Such loyalty is a thing hard to achieve 
 and desperately hard to maintain, but it is your 
 very life. 
 
 I have no reason to believe that special ex- 
 hortation is needed here; but is not the need a 
 present need and the danger of defection a 
 present danger everywhere, because of the very 
 loftiness and severity of the ideal ? 
 
 And you, young men and women of this class, 
 let me charge you that from the university you 
 carry into the life of the city a lasting devotion to 
 the things that make for the city's good name. 
 The true ideals of the university and the higher 
 ideals of the city are in harmony with each other, 
 and the city can greatly extend and enlarge the 
 education given you by the university. But 
 
THE SELF-RESPECT OP CITIES 41 
 
 there are lower ideals of city life with which the 
 true university spirit must wage incessant war- 
 fare, and I hope you will wage that warfare by 
 direct participation in the political and social 
 affairs of the city. The great enemies are indif- 
 ference and cynicism. When men try to per- 
 suade you that the improvement of the life of the 
 city and the progressive wiping-out of evils is all 
 an academic dream, be fully assured that you are 
 tempted of the devil. The merit system in the 
 public service, the attempt to improve the condi- 
 tion of the very poor, the striving after a better 
 understanding between capital and labor, and all 
 other urgent questions in the life of our munici- 
 palities the true university spirit has something 
 to offer toward the solution of these problems. 
 But if the problems were easy there would be no 
 need of the university spirit in dealing with them 
 and no need of your giving them a thought. It 
 is exactly because they are hard, and because 
 men say that nothing can be done, and because 
 university ideals are held to be quixotic and 
 powerless in the face of such real difficulties, 
 that you who have caught the university spirit 
 should enter the struggle and stay with it to the 
 end. If university graduates will fight it out 
 along that line in all the cities of our land, it will 
 appear that there is nothing better for the self- 
 respect of cities than the things that universities 
 have to give. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF AGRICUL- 
 TURAL EDUCATION 
 
 An Address delivered at the Fiftieth Anniversary Exercises 
 of the Michigan Agricultural College, at Lansing, 
 Michigan, as Part of the Proceedings of the Twenty- 
 first Annual Convention of the Association of American 
 Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations, May 
 30, 1907. Published in Bulletin 196 of the office of 
 Experiment Stations, United States Department of Agri- 
 culture, December 10, 1907. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF AGRICULTURAL 
 EDUCATION 
 
 THE pioneer farmers of America had a 
 double interest in life. First and fore- 
 most, they were pioneers, with all of 
 the dangers and excitements of that pioneer life. 
 Secondarily, they were farmers. It was hard 
 and rude and unskillful, the farming in which 
 they were engaged, but it gave them the neces- 
 saries of life. When the first dull opposition of 
 nature was overcome, when cabins had been 
 built and woodlands cleared and the plow had 
 in some way done its first work, the soil showed 
 itself responsive and fertile enough. For a time, 
 at least, life was easier. But the zest of pioneer- 
 ing was gone, and the more adventurous of our 
 people soon moved on to the West, where they 
 might feel the thin edge of civilization still cutting 
 its earliest way through raw nature and barba- 
 rism, and know that that keen edge was their 
 own life and endeavor. The farmers who re- 
 mained behind were now farmers only and no 
 longer pioneers. They saw the first rank fertil- 
 
46 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 ity of the soil fall back into more moderate 
 bounds. Their life became tame and binding. 
 New wants arose with the rise of new social 
 relations. A few in every community were 
 able, by insight and energy, to keep still in the 
 front of things in that new age, but for many 
 the occupation which made up the greater part 
 of their life had become an unpromising, unin- 
 spiring, unenlightened servitude. In this jubi- 
 lee, to-day, we are to recall the ways in which 
 new zest has been brought into the depressed 
 life of the American farmer, the ways in which 
 his farm has been made part of a new frontier 
 and he has been made once more a pioneer. 
 
 At first the improvement of our husbandry 
 was the work of a few men, and these were men 
 whose interest in farming was, in large part, a 
 public interest. George Washington was one 
 of the earliest and one of the most influential 
 of these. First in war and first in peace, he was 
 also the first American farmer of his day. His 
 outlook over the educational needs of the new 
 nation included proposals for the establishment 
 of boards of agriculture, a military academy, 
 and a national university. Other statesmen 
 with a care for agriculture and other farmers 
 who were statesmen in their view, urged that 
 practical provision be made for the collection 
 and dissemination of agricultural information. 
 In the opinion of these men it was information 
 
AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION 47 
 
 that was chiefly needed to insure the general 
 improvement of the farming industry informa- 
 tion regarding the experience and experiments 
 of those who were already most advanced in the 
 practice of husbandry. The new awakening 
 in European agriculture had great influence 
 among the leaders of American agriculture at 
 this time. 
 
 It was while we were still under the Articles 
 of Confederation that a beginning was made in 
 the formation of agricultural societies. Pennsyl- 
 vania and South Carolina had established such 
 societies before the adoption of the Constitution. 
 New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut fol- 
 lowed during Washington's administration. The 
 publications of these societies had begun to ap- 
 pear before the close of the eighteenth century, 
 and agricultural fairs came into being in the first 
 decades of the nineteenth century. Various 
 endeavors to secure the establishment of a na- 
 tional board of agriculture had led, before the 
 day that we here celebrate, to the first seed dis- 
 tributions through the national Patent Office, 
 and to the first separate agricultural appropria- 
 tion, in 1854. 
 
 Through these several movements, supple- 
 mented by a comparatively early development of 
 an agricultural periodical literature, and through 
 many later developments of agricultural organiza- 
 tion, the growth of interest in the improvement of 
 
48 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 rural conditions has long been actively fostered. 
 But our attention to-day must be centered upon 
 the development of organized agricultural educa- 
 tion, and to that subject we will turn without any 
 further delay. 
 
 Let us first note some bearings of agricultural 
 education which have often been discussed, but 
 must be considered here again in the interest of 
 true educational perspective. Historically it has 
 been found extremely difficult to bring the sub- 
 ject of agriculture into any manageable peda- 
 gogic form. The fact that everybody in the 
 country knows something about it is at first a 
 hindrance rather than a help. It is difficult to 
 treat the subject in such manner as to avoid on 
 the one hand an excess of platitude, a repetition 
 of what every one knows, or thinks he knows, and 
 on the other hand an excess of unutilized natural 
 science, deeply interesting in itself but hard to 
 apply on the farm. Certain other subjects, of 
 which education itself is one, share in this handi- 
 cap. It is a difficulty met with in European 
 schools of agriculture, and it had not been over- 
 come in Europe or America when the Michigan 
 State Agricultural College came into being. The 
 most effective training for manual occupations 
 was still some form of apprenticeship, apart 
 from schools, while the school had long held the 
 foremost place in preparation for literary pur- 
 suits. How to combine, in one educative process, 
 
AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION 49 
 
 the advantages of the school and the advantages 
 of the apprentice system, was the problem of 
 agricultural education. In one form or another 
 it has been the problem of all our education for 
 special occupations in the past half-century. 
 
 For the student of educational history, then, 
 this problem of agricultural education appears 
 as one phase, and a peculiarly difficult phase, of 
 the larger problem of training for any particular 
 vocation in life. You will not look to me to con- 
 tribute anything to the special history of this 
 institution, which others, here on the ground, 
 may be expected to treat so much more effectively 
 than I could treat it. But my theme deals rather 
 with that broader movement of which the notable 
 history of this institution forms a part. 
 
 It would be difficult to say just where and how 
 systematic instruction in the principles of agri- 
 culture took its rise in this country. Such instruc- 
 tion was given in some sort in Moor's Indian 
 School, out of which Dartmouth College arose, 
 back even in colonial days. Benjamin Franklin 
 proposed such instruction for the academy at 
 Philadelphia, the forerunner of the University of 
 Pennsylvania, but it does not appear that this 
 part of his plan was realized. In the twenties 
 and thirties of the nineteenth century great in- 
 terest was excited in the so-called manual labor 
 schools. It was proposed that a farm be attached 
 to the schools, and that those who were studying 
 
 4 
 
50 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 during a part of the day should engage in ordi- 
 nary farm labor during another part of the day. 
 The purpose, to be sure, was primarily to offer 
 students an opportunity to "pay their way" 
 through school. But there was a thought, too, 
 of instruction in the better methods of farming, 
 and at least a vague dream of something better 
 yet, the vital union of thought and manual toil. 
 Some of the old-line colleges showed at least 
 good- will toward the scientific aspects of agricul- 
 ture. Columbia even established a professorship 
 under which agriculture was ranged alongside of 
 other sciences. Then, just at the middle of the 
 century, the state of Michigan provided in its 
 constitution of 1850 for the establishment of an 
 agricultural school, and seven years later this 
 institution, the first of its kind and grade in the 
 United States, was ready to enroll its first stu- 
 dents. Pennsylvania had already incorporated 
 its Farmers' High School, but it was preceded by 
 two years in the actual opening by this State 
 Agricultural College of Michigan. A little later 
 in that same notable year, 1857, Justin S. 
 Morrill of Vermont first introduced in Congress 
 his measure for the endowment of agricultural 
 and mechanical colleges in the several states by 
 the national government. 
 
 What is especially worthy of note at this point 
 is the fact that this movement, which was pri- 
 marily a movement of the people or rather of the 
 
AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION 51 
 
 leaders of the people, found parallel embodiment 
 in both state and national legislation. At first 
 both the states and the nation moved but slowly 
 and tentatively. But within a few years large 
 beginnings had been made. In this as in other 
 public interests, within the broad limitations of 
 the national Constitution, working adjustments 
 of state and national agencies to each other have 
 been made from time to time, in view of practical 
 needs rather than of academic theories. 
 
 The great, epoch-making act of this whole 
 movement was undoubtedly the Morrill act, 
 which finally reached its passage when civil war 
 had lent new power to the spirit of nationality in 
 the national legislature. In signing this act, on 
 the second day of July, 1862, Abraham Lincoln, 
 that "new birth of our new soil," that surveyor 
 of western lands, who was to bring to an end the 
 labor of slaves on our American fields, took his 
 decisive part in the effort to make our American 
 tillage the work of men made free by knowledge 
 and enlightened skill. 
 
 By the Morrill act of 1862, the national gov- 
 ernment gave aid to the states, in the way of 
 liberal grants of lands ; it encouraged the states 
 to do in their own several ways the work of higher 
 education in the domain of agriculture and the 
 mechanic arts. While technical studies were 
 brought to the front in this act, it refused to draw 
 a line of opposition between those technical sub- 
 
52 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 jects and the training which makes for liberal 
 culture. And both technical and liberal training 
 were joined with military instruction, as prepara- 
 tion for the defence of the nation's life. 
 
 Other important acts soon followed: That 
 establishing a national department of agricul- 
 ture, in 1862, which department was raised to 
 cabinet rank in 1889; and that establishing a 
 department of education, in 1867, which depart- 
 ment was reduced to the rank of a bureau in 
 1869. In their different ways these two govern- 
 ment offices have both had to do with the ad- 
 ministration of the later acts for agricultural 
 education, and I think I may add that on their 
 effective co-operation depends the full realization 
 in the future of the high purposes for which 
 those acts were passed. 
 
 After the Civil War the establishment of agri- 
 cultural colleges went steadily forward till such 
 institutions, aided by the land grants of the gen- 
 eral government, had been erected in all of the 
 states, with eventually sixteen schools for colored 
 students added in the southern states. The 
 association of these colleges was organized, the 
 Hatch acts brought new aid from the general 
 government for the maintenance of experiment 
 stations, the second Morrill act added its large 
 federal appropriations for the furtherance of the 
 ordinary work of the colleges, the summer grad- 
 uate school was organized, the Adams act pro- 
 
AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION 53 
 
 vided for advanced research in agriculture, and 
 finally the Nelson amendment to the agricultural 
 appropriation bill of 1907 has brought still larger 
 financial support to the colleges, together with 
 permissive provision for the use of a part of the 
 federal grant in the training of teachers of agri- 
 culture. It is a record of notable advance, and 
 we can hardly doubt that the great heart of 
 Washington would have been glad to see the re- 
 sults that we may see to-day, 
 
 When we attempt to interpret the course of this 
 educational development and to plan for further 
 advance, we need the help of some general con- 
 ceptions relating to our social organization. For 
 it is evident that agricultural education cannot be 
 a thing apart and alone. Its real and lasting 
 strength is to be found in its connection with 
 general education. And the strength of general 
 education and of all of its special developments 
 is to be found in the connection of the schools 
 with the real life of our people. 
 
 Passing over all other views of our democracy, 
 however essential and interesting they may be, 
 permit me to call attention just now to the func- 
 tion of those who are called leaders in a demo- 
 cratic society; for we now commonly recognize 
 the fact that democracy does not dispense with 
 leaders, but rather makes the strongest demand 
 for positive leadership. In such a society it is not 
 for one individual or one class simply to lead 
 
54 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 while another class simply follows. The true 
 leader in a democracy is one who, while leading 
 in all reality, is capable of learning from his fol- 
 lowers. And the followers of such a leader in a 
 true democracy are not those who follow because 
 they do not think, but those who follow because 
 they think and are able to recognize their leader. 
 They follow because they are convinced. So our 
 whole social fabric is made up of leaders who 
 must learn if they would continue to lead, and 
 their peculiarly restless and skittish constitu- 
 encies. Here as everywhere the relation of lead- 
 ers to constituencies is permanent and essential, 
 but within that permanent relationship there is 
 continual interplay and shifting of parts. It is a 
 normal condition with us that those who have the 
 subordinate part should be increasingly intelli- 
 gent, critical, and ready to assume the actual 
 leadership. 
 
 This is the state of things that our system of 
 education fosters and must continue to foster. 
 It must bring forth scientific experts who shall 
 be able to teach the people the principles under- 
 lying the arts of life, and it must train up a people 
 to make for the expert an intelligent constitu- 
 ency, quick to seize on all that he may offer for 
 the betterment of their practice, and quick to 
 reject those suggestions that they cannot put to 
 use. So our public health rests upon the co- 
 operation of highly trained experts in medicine 
 
AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION 55 
 
 and sanitation and a people who can act intelli- 
 gently upon their directions and regulations. So 
 our public and domestic architecture is im- 
 proving slowly very slowly through the co- 
 operation of architects who know their art and 
 a building people who know their architects, and 
 who follow them in part and frustrate them in 
 part. So, too, our agricultural education must 
 proceed. There must be training of the highest 
 sort for our agricultural experts. More than that, 
 at the topmost reach of our agricultural education 
 there must be that which is not commonly recog- 
 nized as education at all, the pure research of the 
 pure scientist. For no education can continue 
 to be really alive unless it draw directly, from 
 some source of new and abounding knowledge, 
 a fresh supply, never yet handled and made com- 
 mon among mankind. It may be very little that 
 any year or any age may have to give that is 
 altogether new, but that little will sweeten all 
 the rest. 
 
 Then, our system of education must reach 
 down to schools of the lowest grade, the little 
 country schools, in which the capable constitu- 
 ency of the great experts is to be trained; and 
 there, too, some of the future leaders are to make 
 their first beginnings. The most of those in such 
 schools are to live by the practical art of farming. 
 But in these days they are to have the skill to 
 take the science of the scientist and transform it 
 
56 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 into the art of their lives. They are to read 
 agricultural bulletins and understand and use 
 them. They are to pick their way and keep from 
 being mired in the mass of such literature now 
 provided for their reading. They are to attend 
 institutes and conventions, where they will listen 
 with discrimination to long and learned papers, 
 and make short and pertinent speeches of their 
 own. They are to* find the farm interesting in the 
 highest degree, because of new hopes of profitable 
 production which it offers and because of its 
 connection with the great world of ideas. 
 
 When we grow more skillful, we shall make 
 elementary schools of a better-rounded type, in 
 which the book-learning that has long been the 
 distinctive province of the school shall join to 
 itself the best things in the old system of appren- 
 ticeship, and from that combination shall arise 
 something better than either one in its lonesome 
 isolation. Already we are beginning to make 
 institutions somewhat of this order, and it will be 
 done much better yet as time goes on. 
 
 This, then, is what we may see as the ideal, in 
 agricultural education and equally in education 
 of other kinds, and perhaps of every kind: A 
 system of schools complete in its sequence from 
 the lowest to the highest, in which the study of 
 books is closely joined with training for some of 
 the practical arts of life; in which all practical 
 training is kept in vital touch with general edu- 
 
AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION 57 
 
 cation; in which the ability to form sound and 
 stable judgments is sought throughout as a thing 
 of great price ; in which the higher schools send 
 into the lower schools an unbroken succession of 
 teachers who both know the truth and are able 
 to bring others to a knowledge of the truth ; and 
 in which, finally, the stream of knowledge fresh 
 and new, from some department of pure research, 
 shall never fail to keep fresh .and bright the old 
 wisdom of the ages gone before. Or, in more 
 concrete statement, our elementary schools and 
 high schools in country communities are still to 
 be primarily schools of general education, but 
 with much more of training in the arts of the 
 farm, and the sciences lying near to those arts; 
 our state colleges of agriculture and mechanic 
 arts are to prepare young men and young women 
 to read intelligently the literature of scientific 
 agriculture, to form independent judgments in 
 agricultural matters, and to bring their new 
 knowledge into connection with the real work of 
 the farm; these state colleges, moreover, are to 
 provide well-trained teachers of agriculture and 
 related subjects for the elementary and secon- 
 dary schools; the colleges of agriculture, still 
 further, are to be co-operative educational in- 
 stitutions and not merely special and local insti- 
 tutions they are to co-operate with similar 
 institutions in other states, in order that the work 
 of one may be strengthened by the work of all, 
 
58 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 and co-operate with the universities of their sev- 
 eral states for the innumerable advantages to 
 both which may come from such united effort. 
 The national Department of Agriculture is un- 
 doubtedly to continue its remarkably wide and 
 influential work, its expert investigations, the is- 
 suance of its manifold and vastly useful publi- 
 cations, and its furtherance of all manner of 
 agricultural education and research in the sev- 
 eral states. Finally, the Bureau of Education is 
 to do as thoroughly as possible the part of this 
 work assigned to it. I venture the hope that with 
 enlarged resources it may do more than it is now 
 expected to do, and all without trespassing on 
 the proper field of other institutions. 
 
 Let me speak a little more particularly of the 
 part of this program which falls to the education 
 office of the general government. It can do its 
 best work, I think, as a co-ordinating influence. 
 It can bring to the notice of the less favored in- 
 stitutions information concerning the experience 
 of more advanced institutions. It can call atten- 
 tion from time to time to the relation of agricul- 
 tural education to general education. It can 
 survey the educational field and possibly point 
 out dangers to be averted or weak places to be 
 strengthened. It can, finally, discover things 
 that need the doing and are not attended to by 
 any other agency, and can see that some part of 
 such lack is supplied. So much as this I hope the 
 
AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION 59 
 
 Bureau of Education may be able to do for our 
 agricultural education. And so much as this I 
 may say it will undertake to do as far as its re- 
 sources will permit. 
 
 In conclusion, the view cannot be too strongly 
 stressed that all of this agricultural education is a 
 contribution to the general education of the 
 American people and to the betterment of Ameri- 
 can life. You who celebrate the fiftieth anniver- 
 sary of this institution realize, as the history of 
 this college has shown, that it is not simply larger 
 crops and better breeds of stock and a more 
 profitable output of farm manufacture for which 
 you are laboring ; but through these means and 
 through all other interests of the modern farm 
 you are working for the improvement of Ameri- 
 can citizenship, and that with special reference to 
 the needs of this great state of Michigan. May 
 you long continue to serve the Commonwealth 
 and the larger Republic as faithfully and as suc- 
 cessfully as you now serve them. And may every 
 good cause in this land feel the reinforcement of a 
 wholesome and vigorous life in the homes of our 
 country communities, which have been made 
 more prosperous homes and better homes because 
 of the work that you are doing here. 
 
IV 
 
 SOME RELATIONS OF RELIGIOUS 
 
 EDUCATION AND SECULAR 
 
 EDUCATION 
 
 Read at the Conference of the Religious Education Associa- 
 tion at Los Angeles, California, July 10, 1907. Pub- 
 lished in Religious Education, October, 1907. 
 
IV 
 
 SOME RELATIONS OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 
 AND SECULAR EDUCATION 
 
 KSLIGIOUS education cannot perma- 
 nently employ methods which are out of 
 harmony with the methods of secular 
 education. Those methods may differ with the 
 different subjects to which they are applied, but 
 they cannot permanently contradict each other. 
 The one will gradually assimilate the other. 
 And the one that will assimilate the other, in any 
 age, is the one that in that age has the wider 
 hold on the convictions of men. 
 
 The relation of these two, each to each, varies 
 and must vary from age to age. In the mediaeval 
 period it was institutional religion that exercised 
 the wider sway, and secular education, if such it 
 could be called, departed only occasionally or 
 furtively from the ways of religious education. 
 Now it is natural science that commands the 
 more nearly unanimous assent of mankind. 
 Science represents the united thought of our 
 modern world, and modern education is allied 
 with modern science. It is this type of education 
 
64 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 that is dominant to-day, and we may confidently 
 expect that in this age it will in large measure 
 assimilate religious education to its standards 
 and its processes. 
 
 The march of education, having this scientific 
 and secular character, is one of the mightiest 
 spectacles of our modern world. It is the central 
 and unifying fact of modern civilization. The 
 religion of this age is cleft by innumerable differ- 
 ences of faith and polity; that is, for the time 
 being, it is normally and necessarily sectarian. 
 There are seeming exceptions, but they will not 
 disprove the rule. The science of this age is the 
 same science all over the world. And modern 
 education, overpassing partisan and sectarian 
 bounds, overpassing even local, national, and 
 racial bounds, is fast coming to be in its main 
 features the same throughout the world, and to 
 constitute one dominant, world-wide, human in- 
 terest. Der Glaube trennt die Volker, die Wissen- 
 schaft vereinigt sie. 
 
 We cannot doubt that this age of sectarianism 
 has a part of its own to play in the religious his- 
 tory of the nations. If it is a peculiarly unstable 
 and transitional stage in the life of the church, 
 it may be no less important to the rounding out 
 of that life into its fulness than any other stage 
 through which the church has passed. But so 
 long as religion is predominantly sectarian, it 
 may not expect to regain its ascendency over 
 
RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR EDUCATION 65 
 
 the institutions and the methods of education. 
 Universal education gravitates toward universal 
 knowledge and toward universally recognized 
 forms of thought. The partial and unprevailing 
 view of any party or sect is not at home in public 
 schools, even though it be a view which shall 
 eventually lead the world. Religion in its mod- 
 ern relations, sectarian religion, is a breeder of 
 disturbance in those national systems of educa- 
 tion in which it now holds a place in accordance 
 with a tradition all unconsciously outgrown. 
 Disturbance is often wholesome, but not disturb- 
 ance of this kind ; for it is full of bitterness, and 
 often it appeals to simple prejudice. Such dis- 
 turbance doubtless will continue, working some 
 little good and any amount of harm, till the 
 tradition which sustained the official teaching of 
 religion among those peoples shall be cast aside. 
 Where the tradition has already passed away or 
 where it has never become established, the teach- 
 ing of any system of religious doctrine is to 
 be steadily excluded from public and common 
 schools. Formal instruction in religion will be 
 out of place in public schools wherever and so 
 long as religion is sectarian, wherever and so 
 long as the method of religious teaching is 
 greatly at variance with the methods of secular 
 education. 
 
 And will the time ever come when these limi- 
 tations will no longer prevail? I am not a 
 
 5 
 
66 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 prophet, but I have no doubt that such a time 
 will come not in our day, but in the course 
 of generations or of centuries. The topmost 
 crest of the sectarian wave in our religious history 
 would seem already to be past. It is a wave 
 centuries long and it may be ages long, but it is 
 a receding wave. Men still emphasize their 
 religious differences ; but already there is notable 
 gain in the emphasis of religious agreement. It 
 is a change that points toward a day when secta- 
 rian distinctions shall be decisively subordinated 
 to religious affirmations as wide as undegenerate 
 mankind. The differences will not disappear, 
 and agreement will not be attained by the mere 
 cancellation of differences. But the differences 
 w 7 ill, I think, become subordinate and tributary. 
 And, by ways that none but a prophet can fore- 
 see, by revivals of religious thought and power 
 such as the world has not yet known, the spirit 
 of man will come to new convictions of religious 
 verity, and they will be wider and deeper than 
 the unities of the past. 
 
 We cannot doubt it, for we believe that religion 
 as well as science stands for a permanent need 
 of the human soul, and stands in truth for the 
 supreme need of the human soul. As long as 
 our temporal incompleteness brings its manifold 
 strain upon the life within us, so long we shall 
 find ourselves stricken with need of some eternal 
 perfectness. And the religion which answers 
 
RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR EDUCATION 67 
 
 to this need will be either the conscious and 
 dominant interest of our lives or the large back- 
 ground of our lives; unless it be indeed in 
 occasional conditions of disease, sporadic or 
 epidemic, where for a time the sense for religion 
 may seem to be altogether lost yet only for a 
 time. 
 
 But in education and religion, as in all things 
 else, no age is final and complete. Every age 
 must do its part in preparation for the next, it 
 must contribute its part to the whole of human 
 history. Yet, if the conditions of this age are 
 not permanent, they are permanent and impera- 
 tive for this age. Let us now look a little further 
 into present-day relations of education and re- 
 ligion, viewing them as a stage in the long-con- 
 tinued development of such relations a process 
 that has run through ages that have been and 
 must run through the ages to come yet as 
 having a certain immediate finality for the times 
 in which we live. 
 
 So far as modern education is concerned, we 
 see that it is allied not only with modern science 
 but with democracy. Even in monarchical lands 
 this is true, in subtle ways that are very wide 
 in their reach. In our own land the alliance 
 between education and democracy is open and 
 absolute. Our secular education, as both demo- 
 cratic and scientific, finds its greatest elevation, 
 it makes its warmest claim to the devotion of 
 
68 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 men, on the moral plane. Democratic education 
 seeks the good of every man because he is man, 
 and so reaches its high moral conception of 
 social service. Scientific education teaches men 
 to follow truth for the sake of truth, in the full 
 conviction that human interests and clear truth 
 must in the end be one. In its pure devotion to 
 truth, natural science is moral, unswervingly 
 moral. The best that education draws from the 
 scientific alliance is not even the perfected method 
 which science has to teach, but its moral eleva- 
 tion, its power to awaken a new devotion to truth. 
 In loyalty to truth and in disinterested social 
 service our public education rises to the summit 
 of its power. 
 
 What, then, is the character of religion, in this 
 age of sectarianism, which may call for special 
 consideration at this point ? 
 
 Religion is not only a permanent human fact, 
 but certain of its aspects and elements can be 
 distinguished as likewise abiding through his- 
 toric change. Consider the aspects of doctrine, 
 of ritual, of institutional organization, and of 
 ethical spirit, not to mention others at this time. 
 The student of ecclesiastical history knows how 
 indissolubly these are bound together; but he 
 knows also that in the history of the Christian 
 church now one and now another has held the 
 dominant place. Such shifting from age to age 
 of the center of gravity of religion is of the deep- 
 
RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR EDUCATION 69 
 
 est significance in the history of the higher life 
 of mankind. 
 
 In the religious thought of these present times 
 we see a turning away from the doctrinal and 
 the ecclesiastical elements that laid a strong hold 
 on the minds of men in other days. Within the 
 church the interest in these things is languid as 
 compared with that of an earlier age. And we 
 cannot forget that a great part of the religious 
 aspiration and emotion of our day arises outside 
 of the church. It will not be contained in the 
 old dogmatic and institutional forms. It has 
 not made new forms for itself, and, in truth, it 
 does not much care to make new forms. Yet 
 that is not to deny to it altogether the religious 
 character. It is an overflow religion. For the 
 most part it may be recognized as an overflow 
 Christianity. 
 
 Now, if there are no institutional forms and no 
 systematic theology that have succeeded in gath- 
 ering up and unifying this overflow of religion, 
 it does, in fact, find some internal unification, 
 which makes of it one tendency and not many 
 unrelated tendencies. And that unifying prin- 
 ciple is humanitarian and ethical. 
 
 Even in the church, and particularly in the 
 Protestant churches, it would seem that the 
 turning away from those earlier centers of reli- 
 gious conviction, the system of doctrine and ec- 
 clesiastical polity, were to work out as a definite 
 
70 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 turning to a center of moral conviction. But 
 not moral as touching mere practice according 
 to customary standards. It is rather the moral 
 as essential righteousness with which we are 
 here concerned. And again, not righteousness as 
 a term in a system of theology, but righteousness 
 as apprehended by the large human sense which 
 values the right above the wrong, and that 
 overwhelmingly. 
 
 Already the signs of such new centering of 
 religion clearly appear. For many in this present 
 age, religion is reached by way of the moral 
 sense, rather than morals by the way of religion. 
 It is not that the historic authority, the miracles, 
 the incense of religion, bring men to religious 
 convictions, which thereafter are the ground of 
 all of their moral convictions; but it is rather 
 that through the moral sense, through hunger 
 after righteousness, they find a moral universe 
 in which the all-righteous God is their Father. 
 
 It is not to be supposed that this new cen- 
 tering of the religious life is the ultimate term of 
 our religious development, any more than those 
 earlier centerings have been. It has its dangers 
 and inadequacies, as they had. Other centers, 
 perhaps those that the past has known, but in 
 new form and heightened power, must send 
 forth a corrective influence in their turn when 
 this age has done its work. But this age, I think, 
 must work out its religious advance, a great and 
 
RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR EDUCATION 71 
 
 true advance from the point at which it began, 
 by realizing the full meaning of those moral con- 
 ceptions which have taken strong hold upon it. 
 
 We have come now to a point where it will 
 appear that, for the sake of religion itself 
 in order that religion may do its proper work 
 - education must be true to its proper character 
 for the age that it serves. The most vital meet- 
 ing place for education and religion in this age is 
 on the moral plane. Through its new emphasis 
 on moral conceptions, education itself, secular 
 education if you would call it such, may help 
 religion to work its way through and overcome 
 its present-day sectarianism. Education will be 
 the best ally of religion in this age if it hold true 
 to its alliance with science and democracy. 
 
 Observe how vitally the several lines converge. 
 Democracy stands for the brotherhood of man. 
 Religion bases that brotherhood on what is 
 ultimately a more cohesive and organic concep- 
 tion, the Fatherhood of God. But where an 
 earlier age found the brotherhood of man through 
 the fatherhood of God, this age seems destined 
 to find the fatherhood of God through the broth- 
 erhood of man. Pure devotion to truth is found 
 in both religion and science. Historically, the 
 religious sense for truth appears as a very differ- 
 ent thing from the scientific sense for truth. 
 They seem, indeed, to antagonize and cancel 
 each other. Yet farther down they are at one. 
 
72 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 And from that farther depth, below the roots of 
 the everlasting hills, their unity must arise into 
 the day of human history. 
 
 If this be a true reading of the signs, the same 
 moral conceptions are coming to be the upper- 
 most convictions in science, in democracy, and 
 in religion. It may not be too much to expect 
 that this unity shall some day come to full reali- 
 zation, and may we not then find that diverse 
 religions have come to unity among themselves 
 in this very process of coming into accord with 
 democracy and science on the high ground of 
 moral conviction? I am very sure that this will 
 not be all ; but I think this may be a part of the 
 way by which religion and education shall do 
 their work together for this age, and for the ages 
 that are to follow. 
 
 For the present, then, we may be content to see 
 a large part of mankind making their way, even 
 unconsciously, toward a genuine religious faith 
 through their moral aspirations and endeavors; 
 while we still hold to that ultimate creed that our 
 moral life will never come to its best until its 
 deepest convictions are joined with hopes and 
 affections and beliefs touching some larger and 
 more enduring life, the true and eternal life of 
 the Spirit. 
 
 Finally, the relationships of modern education 
 are to be widened. A too absorbing alliance 
 with natural science is to be avoided, even if 
 
RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR EDUCATION 73 
 
 modified by the alliance with democracy. A 
 closer alliance with modern art is to be culti- 
 vated. At an earlier period, education suffered 
 from a too absorbing association with art, par- 
 ticularly with literary art. Now new relations 
 with the arts are desirable, to correct the 
 dangers of the scientific alliance, in its more 
 extreme manifestations. 
 
 And art, too, has moral implications which 
 are ineradicable. Its narrowest devotees can- 
 not isolate it altogether from the rest of life. 
 While warring against a too narrow devotion to 
 natural science, it meets both science and reli- 
 gion on the moral plane, and in some degree it 
 mediates their differences. It recognizes values 
 as well as facts ; it prizes instinct and the mass 
 play of human emotion as well as analysis and 
 geometric law ; and chiefly this it has can- 
 ons which represent the matured experience, the 
 chastened pang and rapture, of the race, and 
 are not to be disclosed or verified in any 
 moment of time by any individual fragment 
 of the race. 
 
 When modern education has fully entered 
 into this threefold alliance with natural science, 
 democracy, and art, its newer, safer, and more 
 fruitful alliance with religion will, we doubt not, 
 be near at hand and even at the door. 
 
V 
 THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 
 
 An Address delivered at V underbill University, June 15, 
 1909. Published in the Methodist Review, September, 
 1909. 
 
V 
 THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 
 
 THE subject upon which I am to speak 
 is either one of the dullest or one of the 
 most interesting in all the world. That 
 depends upon the point of view of the listener 
 and upon the speaker's own interest in what 
 he has to say. As everybody knows, the talk 
 about morals which may be designated as mor- 
 alizing is prosaic and platitudinous to the last 
 degree. This is a fact of common knowledge, 
 and it sometimes obscures our appreciation of 
 another fact, namely, that there is no set of ques- 
 tions about which men to-day speak with greater 
 warmth than questions of right and wrong. In 
 the social circle, at the club, in our public jour- 
 nals, to say nothing of courts of justice and 
 schools and churches, the thoughts and emotions 
 of men are most deeply stirred when discus- 
 sion reaches some vital question of wrong and 
 righteousness. 
 
 There is substance in questions such as these. 
 They are daily food for men and women of 
 
78 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 force and character and influence. An ancient 
 writer told of the blessedness of the man whose 
 delight is in the law of the Lord, and added that 
 "in His law doth he meditate day and night." 
 A fine picture is this of the man who draws his 
 strength from familiar converse with high and 
 moral themes. "My son," another wise man 
 said, "if thou . . . incline thine ear unto wis- 
 dom . . . then shalt thou understand the fear 
 of the Lord, . . . then shalt thou understand 
 righteousness and judgment and equity." 
 
 So, even at the risk of missing my aim and 
 being platitudinous and moralizing after all, I 
 purpose speaking directly to the subject of 
 morals to-night to this most inviting subject 
 of private and public righteousness. The theme 
 is peculiarly inviting when one is face to face 
 with a class of university students, for the finest 
 personal gains from a university course are 
 found in the heightening of one's ability to deal 
 with the highest questions of all, which in large 
 measure must always be questions of the ethical 
 realm; and a university graduate, always a 
 public beneficiary and therefore a debtor to his 
 community and state and nation, is expected to 
 render public service in the furtherance of public 
 morality. 
 
 The very bigness of the theme, however, 
 renders it obviously impossible to discuss it in 
 this hour in any systematic or comprehensive 
 
THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 79 
 
 way. I am sure you would be appalled and 
 wearied from the beginning if the speaker were 
 to attempt such a task. He is the more free, 
 accordingly, to exercise a certain caprice. He 
 may select a few topics here and there without 
 much order or rationality, merely because he 
 would like to say something about them, and 
 when he is through with these, he may come to 
 an end. With all deference, then, to those heroic 
 listeners who would prefer a discussion some 
 hours in length with logical heads and sub- 
 heads and a rhetorical beginning and end, I 
 beg you to let me follow this simpler and less 
 exacting way. 
 
 In the first place, then, let us think of the 
 moral life as a process of growing better. In 
 this view we may indeed be not far from the 
 essential character of all true morality. A tree 
 that does not grow does not live, and a stationary 
 goodness is hardly a possibility. We may go a 
 step further and say that no man can be good 
 except by being better than he is by nature. 
 But this putting of the case amounts to pretty 
 much the same thing as the other; for any sort 
 of excellence once achieved soon becomes habit 
 and second nature, and the only way one can 
 then continue to be good is to go on outgrowing 
 the virtue which he has already accomplished. 
 Among the most hopeless characters in human 
 society is a good man who does not change, 
 
80 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 whose virtues are wrought out to a finish like 
 the features of a marble statue, a man who 
 nevermore will strive and sweat and resist 
 temptation even unto blood. We may say the 
 same of communities. A highly moral and irre- 
 proachable society may, after all, be immoral 
 in its stationary complacency. There is better 
 hope for genuine righteousness in a changing 
 order which is striving after improvement. It 
 may run great risk of moral loss for the sake of 
 the greater moral gain. There is hope for such 
 a community in that its virtues are not to be 
 kept under glass but rather to be worked out 
 and lived through and then discarded for some- 
 thing better. 
 
 Then, there are two sides of morality which 
 we should consider, the side of wisdom and the 
 side of companionship. One-half of genuine 
 morality is ideas. This fact is not to be forgotten, 
 particularly when we are under the stress of 
 intense convictions or of emotional appeals from 
 without. One good half of all morality is wis- 
 dom, and therefore it is the duty of every man 
 to be wise. I have just been reading over again 
 the Imperial Rescript on education which is the 
 basis of moral instruction in the schools of Japan, 
 and I am struck by the fact that among the stand- 
 ards of virtue which it sets up, along with the 
 exhortation to "be filial to your parents, affec- 
 tionate to your brothers and sisters," and "bear 
 
THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 81 
 
 yourselves in modesty and moderation," is this 
 further exhortation to "pursue learning and cul- 
 tivate arts, and thereby develop intellectual 
 faculties and perfect moral powers." In many 
 ways our American standards are different and 
 must be different from those of the Japanese, 
 but we need no less than they to inculcate as a 
 moral duty the obligation to follow after knowl- 
 edge. Our righteousness will be a low and un- 
 stable value, it will fail us in our time of need, 
 unless it be grounded in our most coherent 
 thought as well as in our impulses and our 
 sentiments. 
 
 There are two ways in which the strain comes 
 at its worst in our moral life. One is the sudden 
 and unexpected test, the perplexity or tempta- 
 tion which arises without warning and must be 
 met on the instant. The other is the long-con- 
 tinued stress of untoward circumstance which 
 wearies out the patience and brings an emotional 
 tension to its highest pitch. In both of these 
 cases the steadying power of thought is most 
 sorely needed. In both of them our thinking in 
 the time of need must be largely determined by 
 the thinking we may have done before the need 
 arose. We cannot school ourselves to right think- 
 ing in the very hour of emergency. The schooling 
 must have gone before. The emergency is the 
 test, the final examination that tries its quality. 
 From this point of view the deliberate training 
 
82 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 of our schools and colleges comes to a higher 
 dignity. It is, all the time, preparing for some 
 far-off emergency. It is preparing for the exer- 
 cise of judgment in some crisis, when passion 
 shall claim absolute control. 
 
 I have had other occasion to make note of the 
 close connection between the judicial spirit and 
 the scientific spirit. To cultivate the scientific 
 spirit in the schools is to prepare for the exercise 
 of the judicial spirit in the affairs of life. In both 
 we have an example of the value of impersonality. 
 
 There is an aspect of human life in which we 
 must shake ourselves free from personal con- 
 siderations and look upon things objectively and 
 impartially. We shall never get the highest good 
 out of personality until we have given fair play 
 to this impersonality. The judge on the bench 
 and the scientist in the laboratory are not to 
 be swerved by immediate personal preferences. 
 They are seeking the truth which shall stand the 
 test of all time and circumstance, and which shall 
 therefore serve the personal needs of the world 
 and not the personal whims of the passing hour. 
 So our education, w r hich shakes us free for the 
 time from a thousand little desires, partialities, 
 and preferences, from prejudice and partisan- 
 ship, is building up within us that judicial spirit 
 for which we shall find sore need when we meet 
 the instant issues of life. 
 
 But if such wisdom makes one half of our 
 
THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 83 
 
 moral life, it is personality that makes the other 
 half, the warmer and more exhilarating half. It 
 is a part of man's duty to be wise, it is also a part 
 of his duty to be companionable. One of the 
 brightest of our bright men has said, "Be good 
 and you will be lonesome." It would not be so 
 bright but rather more true to say, "If you don't 
 get over being lonesome, you can't be more than 
 half good." Our ideal of public and private 
 virtue is not the ideal of the isolated moralist, who 
 would simply instruct his fellows and make of 
 the community his personally directed kinder- 
 garten. It is rather the ideal of the man who 
 joins warm hands with his fellow men to go for- 
 ward with them in a common cause. 
 
 It is not easy at this point to say exactly the 
 right thing and neither more nor less. How shall 
 a man keep step with his fellows and yet lead them 
 to better things ? How shall he lead them unless 
 he be a part of their life, a partisan with them, a 
 sectarian with them, a partner of their loves and 
 hates, whose aspirations are their own ? It seems 
 an insoluble problem, and yet it is the problem 
 that the moral leaders of our race have solved. 
 Macaulay said of Peter the Great that he civil- 
 ized his people and was himself a barbarian. A 
 moral leader of to-day will lead his people with- 
 out leaving his place in their ranks. 
 
 There are some who will tell you that you can- 
 not lead others in the way of improvement if you 
 
84 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 are too much better than they, that you must 
 have some of their vices if you would lead them 
 into virtue. And this doctrine easily runs to the 
 extreme in which the would-be leader cannot be 
 distinguished by any loftiness of his ideals from 
 those whom he would lead ; and one short step 
 beyond this, the leader falls below the level of 
 his followers and becomes indeed a hindrance to 
 their progress. It is hard enough to decide in any 
 particular case, and it is the particular cases that 
 count. I do not think that any man ever finds it 
 necessary to be less moral in order that he may 
 help his fellow men to be more moral; but the 
 truth that there is in this compromising view is 
 the truth that his companionship makes up a 
 large part of a man's moral life. Under ordinary 
 social conditions an austere separatist not only 
 forfeits the greater part of his influence through 
 his separatism : he forfeits thereby a great part of 
 his own moral life, not only in the lower moralities 
 but in the higher moralities as well. The com- 
 pany that a man keeps is and must always be a 
 great part of himself. 
 
 What I have said thus far comes to this, that the 
 moral life is found at its best only where there is 
 found a well-balanced growth in righteousness. 
 Now, there is another way of looking at the round- 
 ing out and balancing of the moral character, con- 
 cerning which something may be said. Taking 
 account once more of both the individual and the 
 
THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 85 
 
 community, what shall we say of the cultivation of 
 special virtues, what of the prosecution of special 
 reforms ? 
 
 A man makes it his particular business to rise 
 early in the morning, to be benevolent, to wage 
 war on gambling or profanity. A woman under- 
 takes to tell the literal truth in all her social in- 
 tercourse. A community organizes a campaign 
 against drunkenness or municipal corruption. 
 
 It is obvious enough that the special undertak- 
 ing distorts the perspective of our moral world. 
 The campaigner in the one Cause not only makes 
 himself a thorn and a weariness to those who are 
 not enlisted in the same campaign : he inevitably 
 exaggerates that aspect of righteousness to which 
 his attention is devoted, and so far forth he ren- 
 ders it more difficult for the world to understand 
 the main significance and worth of righteousness. 
 He glorifies reform and thereby discounts some- 
 thing better than reform, the practice of building 
 right, from the ground up, on the lines of a well- 
 wrought plan. In nine cases out of ten he lays 
 his emphasis upon some negation, and so gives 
 greater currency to that word of universal paraly- 
 sis Don't. What shall we say to things like 
 these ? 
 
 The first thing to be said, in order that there 
 may be no mistake, is that, in the world we live 
 in, the special reform is inevitable and indispen- 
 sable. With all of its drawbacks it is still a main 
 
86 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 reliance of humanity for any moral awakening. 
 Human nature is not big enough to do all things 
 at once. It must ever and again become absorbed 
 in the partial task, or else spread itself out over 
 a world of possibilities in thin, reflective, even- 
 balanced inefficiency. Better than this, a thou- 
 sand times better, are those nodes of concentrated 
 activity where practical men see the urgent need 
 of their time and fight their fight with the Enemy 
 as they find him. 
 
 But when so much has been said, we may re- 
 turn to the undoubted evils that attend any reform 
 campaign, whether it be a campaign in the spirit 
 of a man or in society at large, and may see if 
 anything can be done about them. Those evils, 
 in a word, are the evils that go with favorite vir- 
 tues. No man can devote his best energies to a 
 selected and preferred virtue without danger to 
 his moral life. The favorite virtue brings with 
 it a favorite vice or a whole company of favorite 
 vices. One of these is likely to be the vice of self- 
 righteousness. Another is that of intolerance. 
 Still another is that peculiar form of vice in which 
 the exaggerated virtue is made a substitute for 
 other, starved and neglected, virtues; the one 
 great good covering a multitude of sins, in a way 
 which scripture precedent would not warrant. 
 
 The members of a band of thieves pride them- 
 selves upon their loyalty to the gang. The high- 
 wayman who robs the rich gives generously to the. 
 
THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 87 
 
 poor. A body of young men who uphold the high- 
 est standard of truth and honesty show an easy 
 conscience as regards drink and gambling and the 
 social evil. Even women of the purest virtue, as 
 the word virtue is commonly used, are sometimes 
 sadly lacking in the sense of fair play, as men of 
 honor understand fair play, and fail to realize that 
 uncharitable words are another form of vice. 
 
 Favorite vices go with favorite virtues. This 
 fact should not deter us from cultivating chosen 
 virtues when occasion may demand, But it 
 should put us doubly on our guard. Let us have, 
 if need be, the campaign against a conspicuous 
 wrong. But let it be recognized as an emergency 
 measure. Our main business is right living, all 
 round and all through. The great reform has its 
 necessary work to do. But, as soon as possible, 
 that work is to be finished. It is to be laid aside, 
 in order that the regenerated individual or com- 
 munity may enter upon the normal course of 
 general growth. That normal course is the course 
 in which wisdom joins with tolerant fellow- 
 ship, holding men up to an ideal of everlasting 
 improvement. 
 
 It is here that we are chiefly concerned with the 
 culture of righteousness in maintaining and 
 confirming the general conception of life which 
 looks to incessant moral betterment. Here is a 
 subject for the daily meditation of wise men and 
 women, for the training of children in the schools, 
 
88 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 for consideration in every profession, institution, 
 and society which has influence in the shaping of 
 our corporate or individual life. Let us think 
 often upon these things and let us seek after the 
 better ways. 
 
 But many of you, I am sure, have felt a lack in 
 this discussion hitherto. It has had reference to 
 virtues and vices as if these, in aggregation, made 
 up our moral being. You have felt that righteous- 
 ness cannot be achieved by adding one pagan 
 excellence to another ; that we must have regard 
 instead to motives, to faith and hope, to some 
 vitalizing spirit which shall bring to every man a 
 moral strength beyond the strength of any man. 
 You look, in other words, for some recognition of 
 the religious side of morals, with the conviction 
 that the thing omitted is the really essential thing. 
 This view appeals to me so strongly, and accords, 
 in fact, so nearly with my own thought, that I 
 should be altogether unwilling to let the occasion 
 pass without some mention of this aspect of my 
 subject, though the difficulties of this part of the 
 discussion are obvious and plentiful. 
 
 Any attempt at the cultivation of righteousness 
 merely by the cultivation of enumerated virtues 
 can give us only an incoherent and machine-made 
 morality. The moral life, to reach its highest 
 efficiency, must hold with the largest wisdom and 
 the highest fellowship to which the moral agent 
 can attain that is, with his religion, or what 
 
THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 89 
 
 serves him as a religion. Only so can it come to 
 its proper coherence and vitality. 
 
 How much of vitality and coherence religion 
 may supply will appear from a mere passing 
 glance at some of the conceptions of Christianity. 
 We speak of righteousness. In the words, "Be 
 ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which 
 is in Heaven is perfect," all human excellence is 
 thrown into such comparison that it looks black, 
 as a candle flame against the brightness of the 
 sun. But while all human worth suffers this 
 deep disparagement, the value of the human soul 
 is raised to such a height that it can be calculated 
 only in terms of the death of the Son of God. 
 Hope reaches no less a pitch of confidence than 
 that this mortal life shall share in the life of God 
 Himself, and all perspectives of this earthly ex- 
 istence are readjusted to the view from the gates 
 of Heaven. Love, purified, quickened, elevated, 
 by the vision of love divine, made universal in 
 the recognition of human brotherhood, becomes 
 the ruling motive of life. The uplift of such 
 conceptions, when they are fairly apprehended 
 and appropriated, is well-nigh inconceivable. 
 Their dynamic possibilities are past all compu- 
 tation. In a world in which such ideas are at 
 work, as positive convictions in the hearts of 
 men, we cannot doubt that the greatest moral 
 elevation will be attained in lives which ac- 
 knowledge their supremacy. 
 
90 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 Yet the very loftiness of these conceptions for- 
 bids that any one human mind should actually 
 take in their full significance. To assimilate 
 them in their entirety is the work of the human 
 race in the ages upon ages. One age, one society, 
 one individual, may interpret them in part. Even 
 that is a great achievement. But the partiality 
 of the interpretations cannot be overlooked when 
 we are dealing with the moral interests of present- 
 day society. The man, the church, the people, 
 who approach the moral life by the starry way, 
 which is also the cloudy way, of the religious life, 
 cannot escape the same need that all others are 
 under, the need of cultivation of the moral senti- 
 ments, the need of daily betterment as regards 
 moral insight and the practice of righteousness. 
 
 A man's religion may indeed become for him a 
 preferred virtue with its attendant vices. I was 
 told, once on a time, of an influential man of 
 business who gave largely to the support of the 
 church and became deeply interested in its ac- 
 tivities. A friend suggested that he should join 
 its membership in his home community. He 
 asked to see the list of its communicants. This 
 list he ran through quickly, then threw it down 
 in disgust. 
 
 "Do you think I will go in with such an [ex- 
 purgated] set- he did not say expurgated; 
 the word merely represents what I have done 
 with his speech- "Do you think I will go in 
 
THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 91 
 
 with such a - - set of dead-beats ? They don't 
 pay their debts." Now, assuming that this re- 
 mark, apart from its profanity, was justified in 
 the situation to which it was applied, what was its 
 significance ? I think it showed that the man of 
 affairs made a favorite virtue of paying one's 
 debts, and let it excuse his measure of irreligion ; 
 while the church members to whom he referred 
 made their religion a favorite virtue, and let it 
 excuse their measure of laxness as regards their 
 business obligations. 
 
 Perhaps a more common case may be found in 
 the devoted adherent of some form of religion 
 whose special indulgence is in the vice of self- 
 complacency, of self -righteousness. It was this 
 that called forth the sharp rebukes of Jesus in 
 his meetings with the Scribes and Pharisees. It 
 would be hard to estimate the injury which this 
 failing has done to both morals and religion in all 
 the ages. Clear thought, again and again, has 
 lost its rightful influence among men because 
 joined with this uncompanionable vice, this 
 enemy of all goodly fellowship, intolerance 
 toward those who follow other ways. 
 
 And there are other ways, which may be 
 Christian, profoundly so, while not bearing con- 
 spicuously the name of Christ. The two poles 
 of Christianity may be found in the Fatherhood of 
 God and the Brotherhood of Man. Each of these 
 implies and involves the other. A theological age 
 
92 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 laid conscious emphasis on the doctrine of the 
 Fatherhood. A humanitarian age now lays its 
 emphasis on Brotherhood, and is often hesitant 
 and reticent as regards the language of Our 
 Father. It may be that this reserve is not irre- 
 ligion at all, but only the way in which this age 
 can most surely approach the real experience of 
 religion. 
 
 Yet the responsibility for an orderly interpre- 
 tation of Christianity, consecutive with the in- 
 terpretations of the past, rests in this age with 
 the church, as in all other ages. The church is 
 still the teacher of religion. The necessary sepa- 
 ration of religious instruction from our secular 
 schools leaves this great burden, with all of its 
 weight and all of its honor, with the church alone. 
 For my part, I believe the church will not fail to 
 carry that burden safely and well, and even to 
 larger issues than can at this time be foreseen. 
 
 But in this very separation of functions, an- 
 other moral responsibility, great and high, is laid 
 upon our secular education. I have spoken of 
 the value of impersonality, as it appears in one 
 necessary stage of the making of human charac- 
 ter the impersonality of courts and of sciences, 
 which are no respecters of persons. These things 
 ultimately are not impersonal, for they help us to 
 a purer and truer understanding of human rela- 
 tions. But they do this by first casting out human 
 prejudice, passion, and preference, casting out 
 
THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 93 
 
 all hopes and fears, and leading men into the im- 
 partial recognition of objective reality. Now, I 
 think I shall not be misunderstood if I say that 
 the teaching of morals apart from religious sanc- 
 tions has a place in our scheme of life analogous 
 to that of these impersonal disciplines. It is not 
 impersonal as regards human relations, but only 
 as regards that unseen world with which religion 
 is concerned. And here, I think, it is not ulti- 
 mately irreligious, but only, for the time, non- 
 religious. As such, it has a part to perform, a 
 part of great dignity and importance, in setting 
 forth those purely ethical conceptions, unmixed 
 with any thought of supra-natural rewards and 
 punishments, which even the ancient pagan world 
 found to be strong meat for its noblest intellects, 
 and which appear to not a few writers of this 
 modern age to be the highest themes with which 
 the mind of man can deal. 
 
 It is not that I would offer such teaching as 
 sufficient for all human need. Men need good 
 news and a Father in Heaven as much in this 
 age as in any former age. But the study of 
 ethical knowledge and the training in simple 
 morality of life is not only of value to the 
 individual doer and student : it is of value even 
 to religion itself. It brings the teachings of 
 religion ultimately before the impartial judg- 
 ment of that simple sense of difference between 
 right and wrong which the Creator has put 
 
94 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 into the spirit of man, and has trained and 
 developed through the long course of his history. 
 The strongest appeal which religion can ever 
 make is the appeal to this human sense of moral 
 difference; and the cultivation of that sense, 
 through science and literature and historical 
 studies, through conduct in the little world of the 
 school, is the noblest service which our general 
 education has to render. It is a service to re- 
 ligion and law and common intercourse and to 
 every other interest of our modern life. 
 
 This is your Commencement, members of 
 this graduating class. You commence to be bach- 
 elors of arts and various other things. You are 
 coming out from this University into more direct 
 participation in the world of affairs affairs 
 which reach their highest difficulty and highest 
 significance in questions of right and wrong. The 
 boys in a swimming pool, particularly on a chilly 
 day, are wont to call to their fellows on the shore, 
 " Come on in, the water is fine ! " And so we who 
 left school life for active life a good many years 
 ago now call to you, young men, "Come in, this 
 Twentieth Century is fine !" Science and inven- 
 tion are making readjustments a daily necessity. 
 Prosperity is making it harder every day to hold 
 up to the old moral standards. There is great 
 danger that with a better living we shall get a 
 poorer life. People are crowding now, where a 
 generation ago they were few. Yet we feel the 
 
THE CULTURE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 95 
 
 need of sharing more fairly all good things of life 
 with all of our fellow men. Faiths are changing. 
 Even while we hold them most tightly we find 
 that they are gone, leaving only their clothes or 
 their shadow behind, and we do not see clearly 
 what is to take their place. Come in ! It is a 
 world of genuine difficulties in which it is worth 
 while to live and take one's part as it comes. 
 
 Faith, Hope, and Love they are with us 
 yet; justice, truth, and the law of righteous- 
 ness they loom as large as ever. Though 
 their forms are less sharply defined, yet none 
 the less surely they dominate the scene. Lib- 
 erty and law are wrestling with each other 
 still. They clinch like deadly enemies, and 
 the sweat of their conflict now and again is 
 red with human blood. Yet they are lovers, 
 more true to each other than were even David 
 and Jonathan, and their struggle is all for the 
 good of mankind. Come, young men, and take 
 your part. Be as wise as you can with the 
 heads that have been given to you. Be as com- 
 panionable as you can without becoming less 
 wise. And do not doubt that the God of your 
 fathers will help you as He helped your fathers be- 
 fore you and that all that Heaven gave into their 
 lives, Heaven will give into your lives as well. 
 
 And you, young women, who are about to leave 
 this institution, you will find many alumnae of 
 American colleges awaiting you. And these 
 
96 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 American alumnae have already acquitted them- 
 selves so well that larger work, larger responsi- 
 bilities, larger joy of service, are sure to be yours. 
 Come, young graduates, men and women both, 
 and enter upon a new course of study, the life- 
 long study of righteousness, which, as it is a study 
 laid out for us by God Himself, when He laid the 
 courses of all human affairs, shall through its 
 various leadings lead us back to God. 
 
VI 
 
 THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN THE MOVE- 
 MENT FOR INTERNATIONAL 
 ARBITRATION 
 
 An Address before the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the 
 Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration, 
 May 23, 1907. Published in the Report of the Meeting. 
 
VI 
 
 THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN THE MOVEMENT 
 FOR INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION 
 
 B^ way of introduction, I may venture to 
 repeat the recommendation touching this 
 subject contained in my first annual re- 
 port as Commissioner of Education. It reads 
 as follows: 
 
 The second recommendation which I would respectfully 
 present is concerned with the fact, which every year makes 
 more obvious, that our public education has passed into 
 an international stage in its development. The approach of 
 the second International Peace Conference at The Hague 
 has turned public attention to the many-sided modern 
 movement toward a peaceful adjustment of international 
 relations. Governments, in striving to maintain an honor- 
 able peace, require the reinforcement of popular senti- 
 ment, and it is of the utmost importance that such public 
 sentiment should steadily demand a peace which makes 
 for righteousness, and no other peace than that which will 
 make for righteousness. A public sentiment calling for 
 such peace will be stable only when it rests upon an appre- 
 ciative understanding of other nations. In this there is a 
 great work for education the world over, that it help the 
 nations understand one another. Whatever the schools 
 may do to this great end will count for real education. 
 
100 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 Can any form of learning, in fact, be more liberalizing, 
 more expanding, more tonic, than the insight gained 
 through knowledge of other peoples, our contemporaries, 
 who with us are the makers of modern history ? 
 
 Already a considerable movement is under way looking 
 to the annual commemoration in the schools of the United 
 States of the opening of the first Hague conference, which 
 occurred on the 18th day of May, 1899. Such a celebration 
 seems eminently desirable, by way of laying due emphasis 
 in the schools upon the vital relations of modern peoples 
 one to another. I would accordingly recommend that, so 
 far as consistent with state and local conditions, the 18th 
 day of May in each year be designated as a day of special 
 observance in the schools. It is particularly desirable that 
 in the celebration of this anniversary day, and in the in- 
 struction of the schools throughout the year, the effort be 
 made to promote an insight into the true aims and aspira- 
 tions of our own nation and of the other nations with whom 
 we are to work together in the making of a higher world 
 civilization. This view calls for a more thorough teach- 
 ing of geography and history in the elementary schools, 
 that the first notions formed by the children in those schools, 
 of our relations with other lands and peoples, may be true 
 and temperate; it calls for a better teaching of modern 
 languages and literatures in our secondary schools and 
 colleges; and in the more highly specialized studies of 
 commercial and technical schools, it calls for more thor- 
 ough and accurate instruction in all subjects having to do 
 with the relations of our home land with foreign lands. 
 \/ This is not a foreign view of American education, but 
 rather an American view; for it is already clear that 
 American institutions can reach their full development 
 only by finding their rightful place in the current of the 
 world's history, and that only by so doing can they become 
 fully American. 
 
INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION 101 
 
 While no one will attach supreme importance 
 to the special observance of one day in the school 
 year, even such annual emphasis upon this 
 theme will not be without its value. I am the 
 more disposed to think that it may be of some 
 significance, from the fact that the idea of such 
 observance has arisen quite independently in 
 the minds of different persons engaged in widely 
 separate educational service. I had planned 
 to make this recommendation and had actually 
 written the first draft of it before I knew that 
 such a plan had occurred to any one else. When 
 it transpired that a well-defined movement to 
 this end was already under way, I was glad of 
 the opportunity of adding what I might to the 
 impetus of that movement. 
 
 It is clear, however, that a celebration which 
 breaks from a clear sky on one day in the year 
 and passes from thought when that day is past, 
 cannot take a deep hold on the minds of many 
 children. Nor do I think we have a right to 
 devote one day of the school year to a purpose 
 which has no connection with the ends of general 
 education. It is not with a view to propaganda 
 of an isolated reform that this day is entitled to 
 its special place in our school calendar, but 
 with a view to a neglected and essential element 
 in general education. And that element is an 
 appreciative understanding of other peoples 
 than our own. 
 
102 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 The child brought up apart from other children 
 misses his best chance of a practical education. 
 So a people that goes on in ignorance of other 
 ^/ peoples or in blind antagonism to other peoples, 
 misses its chance of adding their civilization to 
 its own. It is just this element of a liberal 
 education which should be emphasized in the 
 schools, not one day in the year but throughout 
 the year such a knowledge and appreciation 
 of the other peoples of the earth as shall help us 
 to add the good things of their civilization to our 
 own civilization and to live with them in the 
 enjoyment of civilized relationships. Even well 
 down in the elementary schools, the effort of our 
 little Americans to overcome the primitive dis- 
 trust and disparagement of the peoples of foreign 
 lands is a liberalizing influence. It is, indeed, an 
 Americanizing influence. 
 
 But this, after all, is but a small part of what 
 the schools ought to do to promote international 
 arbitration. The best that they can do, in the 
 long run, is to foster the genuine spirit of arbitra- 
 tion, and to establish those modes of thought 
 that dispose men to arbitrate their differences. 
 Let us consider here three ways of settling differ- 
 ences among men, and see what the teaching 
 of the schools may be expected to do by way of 
 furthering that type of thought which lies nearest 
 to arbitration. The primitive way of settling a 
 quarrel is an appeal , to arms, a decisive physical 
 
INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION 103 
 
 fight. This is the spontaneous method of un- 
 controlled anger. But it has in it many nobler 
 elements, and chief among these is the religious 
 faith that the God of might and right will add 
 His strength to the strength of the righteous 
 cause. Each combatant is sure that the righteous 
 cause is his own, and the strong sweep of his 
 anger and his faith is seen in his readiness to 
 risk losing all in the hope of gaining all. A second 
 way is the way of compromise. A willingness to 
 compromise shows that the parties to the quarrel 
 hold one thing as of greater value than the 
 things for which they are contending, and that 
 one thing more precious than all the rest is peace. 
 Or, at least, each of the contending parties holds 
 that a fragment of that for which it strives, 
 together with relief from strife, is better than 
 the chance of gaining all through hard and 
 dubious conflict. Compromise has, no doubt, 
 its rightful place and in the daily dealings of 
 men with men it must play an important part 
 a larger part, indeed, than we commonly realize. 
 But on the whole it represents a weaker attitude 
 than the attitude of direct antagonism backed 
 up by strong conviction. An age in which com- 
 promise takes the leading place instead of a 
 subsidiary and intercalary place, an age dis- 
 tinctly characterized by the spirit of compromise, 
 is not "an age on ages telling" when "to be 
 living is sublime." 
 
104 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 A third method of settling a dispute, a method 
 hard to practice and even hard to define, the 
 method which arbitration ultimately represents 
 and reinforces, is the method of finding some 
 ground of positive agreement higher than the 
 ground taken by either antagonist at the begin- 
 ning of the strife. In every dispute between 
 honest and intelligent disputants we find some 
 show of justice in each of the conflicting claims. 
 The method of war crushes the claim of one 
 side, with all the good and bad there is in it, 
 and gives victory to the other side with all of 
 its bad as well as its good. The method of com- 
 promise takes the course which leads to peace, 
 even though much of the good of either cause be 
 sacrificed by the way. The method of arbitration 
 would seem to be merely the method of com- 
 promise through the agency of a third party, 
 but essentially it is more than this. For every 
 well-conducted international arbitration contrib- 
 utes to the building up of a higher conception 
 of international obligations, of world relations, 
 and is accordingly in its effect a bringing of the 
 disputants together on higher and more stable 
 ground than either of them occupied when the 
 strife began. I think this view may be abun- 
 dantly justified by examples from modern history. 
 There is not time, however, for such illustration, 
 and the bare and general statement must be left 
 to stand alone. 
 
INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION 105 
 
 The immediate question is that as to the re- 
 lation of public schools to the type of thinking 
 which lies back of arbitration procedure. It 
 seems clear that this is the very type of think- 
 ing which is characteristic of modern educa- 
 tion at its best. It is the type of thinking which 
 should be promoted in schools of every grade, 
 in the interest of liberal culture, rightly under- 
 stood. It is by promoting such culture and estab- 
 lishing such modes of thought among our people 
 everywhere that the public schools can lay the 
 surest foundation for the arbitration principle. 
 
 The watchword of this movement may fairly 
 be taken as the watchword of all modern educa- 
 tion, and we may phrase it in the words, Let us 
 look for a better way. The spirit which it repre- 
 sents is at one with that of modern science 
 of that science which is undoubtedly the domi- 
 nant influence in the methods of modern edu- 
 cation. For science, with all of its strength of 
 conviction, holds its doctrines not as records of 
 final attainment nor as banners set up for a battle 
 to the end, but rather as well-laid steps of an 
 ascent. It expects something better beyond, 
 expects to rise above its present knowledge and 
 belief; and in that expectation it is able to look 
 upon any intelligent opposition as indicating the 
 need of finding some higher principle which 
 shall solve the present difference. Even in the 
 lower schools, by ways that are often intangible, 
 
106 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 this spirit is making its way. It is not too much 
 to hope that it will become broadly character- 
 istic of the teaching of all of our schools, and 
 when it has become so characteristic of that 
 teaching, the principle of arbitration will be 
 grounded in the educational consciousness of 
 our whole people. 
 
 Before we leave this discussion, there are two 
 added considerations to which attention should 
 be called. The arbitration movement looks for 
 its success to the cultivation of a decent respect 
 for the opinions of mankind. In the heat of 
 national anger it is too much to expect that any 
 people will welcome from its opponent the sug- 
 gestion that there are better grounds on which 
 they may hope to meet. If, however, our people 
 have been trained from their youth to recognize 
 in every sharp difference of opinion the pos- 
 sibility of there being some higher and better 
 ground of agreement, undiscovered as yet, there 
 cannot fail to be in time a little greater readiness 
 to appeal to an impartial world, to peoples not 
 involved in the dispute, and to respect the sug- 
 gestion from without of a better way to an hon- 
 orable peace. It is here that an increased un- 
 derstanding of other nations than our own may 
 be expected to reinforce the teaching that leads 
 men to hope for a better way. It is not simply 
 that a knowledge of other nations, well taught 
 in the schools, will lead us to consider more 
 
INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION 107 
 
 carefully the claims of an antagonist in time of 
 trouble, but that it will prepare our people, or 
 any people, to look with more favor upon an 
 appeal to the judgment of the civilized world. 
 
 In the second place, such an appeal to an 
 impartial tribunal would be strengthened in 
 the minds of any people if that people were 
 grounded in some of the fundamental principles 
 of human law. On other grounds than this, it is 
 to be desired that the elementary principles of 
 legal right should be more distinctly taught in 
 our schools along with the principles of common 
 morality. This is not the place to enlarge upon a 
 topic like this, which must be subordinate to the 
 main discussion of this occasion. But it is not 
 out of place to say that those great elementary 
 principles of right and justice which have been 
 the nourishing thought of many of the greatest 
 minds of our race, are in themselves a most 
 desirable element in the liberal culture of all our 
 people. I cannot but think that a people trained 
 to have respect for principles such as these will 
 be so much the better prepared to accept in time 
 of controversy the view that neither party to the 
 dispute is the rightful judge of the cause, but 
 that the cause should be judged by a competent 
 and regularly constituted tribunal which should 
 have no selfish interest in the question at issue. 
 
 Briefly stated, then, the contention of this paper 
 is as follows: That the schools of our whole 
 
108 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 people may properly contribute to the move- 
 ment for international arbitration only in ways 
 that contribute to the general purposes of educa- 
 tion, but that positive improvements in educa- 
 tion are called for to-day in ways that must 
 inevitably reinforce the arbitration movement. 
 Among these ways are endeavors to promote 
 among a given people, as our own, a more inti- 
 mate and appreciative knowledge of the character 
 of other modern nations with whom this people 
 has to do ; the promotion in the schools of that 
 type of thinking which readily passes beyond its 
 partial convictions, no matter how earnestly 
 held, to larger views in which opposing convic- 
 tions may find their rightful recognition and come 
 to agreement; the teaching in the schools, as a 
 part of our instruction in morals and civil gov- 
 ernment, of some of the elementary principles 
 of legal justice, which shall enable our people 
 to adjust themselves freely and consciously to 
 the reign of law in all great human affairs. The 
 argument amounts to this, that our education 
 of all the people shall be made at once more 
 scientific and more humanistic in its character, 
 and that the schools shall teach the people in all 
 their concerns to look for a better way. 
 
 Let it be added that education cannot be 
 expected to prepare the way specifically for the 
 arbitration of any particular cause. When in- 
 ternational irritation has arisen and there is 
 
INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION 109 
 
 threatening of war, the work of education for the 
 time is under arrest. Not only the laws but the 
 teachers as well are silent in the clash of arms, 
 or in the clash of temper which threatens an 
 appeal to arms. Our hope is that education may 
 exercise an influence far in advance of the crisis, 
 which shall turn men to some international 
 tribunal before the irritation has arisen to violent 
 anger from which there is no appeal but to arms. 
 Education can do very little to allay the wrath 
 of nations, but it can do much to hold the na- 
 tions back from uncontrollable wrath while the 
 question is still new and in the balance. The 
 schools cannot prepare to-day for the crisis of 
 this year. They are to prepare to-day for the 
 crisis of ten years hence or a generation hence. 
 But this of itself may be a work of inconceivable 
 significance. And the way in which so great a 
 result may be compassed is the way of making 
 familiar and natural to a whole people, and to 
 possibly antagonistic peoples, a mode and habit 
 of thought, a moral devotion to conceptions of 
 justice and righteousness, which shall give to 
 the advocates of arbitration their chance to be 
 heard and understood. 
 
VII 
 
 POSSIBLE CO-OPERATION BETWEEN 
 
 THE EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATIONS 
 
 OF DIFFERENT COUNTRIES 
 
 Contributed to a Discussion in the National Council of 
 Education, at its Meeting at Cleveland, Ohio, July 1, 
 1908. Published in the Proceedings of the National 
 Education Association for the year 1908, and in The 
 Independent of August 6, 1908. 
 
VII 
 
 POSSIBLE CO-OPERATION BETWEEN THE 
 
 EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATIONS OF 
 
 DIFFERENT COUNTRIES 
 
 THE suggestion which was made to this 
 Council one year ago, that steps be 
 taken to bring the National Education 
 Association into closer co-operation with similar 
 bodies in other lands, was offered in the con- 
 viction that the greater part of the work of 
 education in all lands is one work, and that all 
 teachers among civilized peoples have a common 
 cause. There is abundant ground for this belief. 
 The legislative bodies of many nations have 
 found enough of common interest to make 
 possible an Interparliamentary Union, and that 
 international body has profoundly influenced the 
 course of recent history. Yet parliaments are 
 the centers of positive nationalism. We may 
 fairly expect to find more elements of unity in 
 the schools of different nations than in their 
 legislatures. And such undoubtedly is now the 
 case. 
 
 The world relationships of universities have 
 been recognized, with varying clearness, for 
 
114 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 seven or eight centuries. The earlier develop- 
 ment of schools for the people was more closely 
 connected with the rise of modern nationalism. 
 This gave us higher schools which emphasized 
 unity, alongside of lower schools which empha- 
 sized difference. Such a distinction of course 
 goes down to the fundamental constitution of 
 society. It cannot be maintained, as a principle 
 of sharp separation, where the distinctions be- 
 tween social classes have been smoothed out or 
 are in the way of disappearing. Nations which 
 have a traditional enmity to keep alive toward 
 some of their neighbors a memory of ancient 
 quarrels which colors all their history are at 
 a disadvantage in this regard. In so far as class 
 distinctions persist in such societies, with some- 
 thing of the finality of caste distinctions, a lower 
 class will be taught to hate another people while 
 the highest class is learning to understand other 
 peoples. 
 
 But this condition can hardly continue, un- 
 modified, in our modern world. The many care 
 to learn what the few have known. The scientific 
 spirit forbids us to teach in the lower schools 
 what is untrue from the standpoint of the higher 
 schools. Then, there is a New Humanism in the 
 world, which is surely spreading abroad. This 
 new humanism recognizes the fact that to know 
 and understand living men, both individuals and 
 nations, is a great part of any complete educa- 
 
INTERNATIONAL CO-OPERATION 115 
 
 tion. This humanism tinges all of the social 
 and the international striving of our time. It 
 tinges our education. I have had occasion before 
 to speak of one little symptom of it a straw on 
 the waters of our primary schools in the wide 
 popularity of that children's book, the " Seven 
 Little Sisters," by Miss Andrews. And for more 
 pretentious indications of the same current you 
 would not have far to seek. 
 
 We live already in a world in which men are 
 trying to understand one another. Men are 
 trying to understand their neighbors, and that 
 is the better part of democracy. Men are trying 
 to understand other peoples and nations, and 
 that is the foundation of our new world-politics. 
 The reason why we may hope to understand the 
 rest of the world, the reason why we even care 
 to understand the rest of the world, is that our 
 differences stand out from a background of 
 agreement, a substratum of ultimate unity. The 
 differences are picturesque and interesting, and 
 at times they command the whole field of atten- 
 tion. Without national peculiarities and even 
 oppositions, our world-unity would be a poor 
 thing, a dull and insipid uniformity. But we 
 must not forget that, after all, the differences get 
 their life and worth from that underlying unity. 
 The time has come when men can give attention 
 to the common human purposes of all the tribes 
 of men without suspicion of treason against 
 
116 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 their own government. In our own land this 
 is pre-eminently true. As Mr. Stead has said 
 of us, "America is the one great international 
 country of the world." 
 
 When Professor Payne of the University of 
 Virginia a few years ago made his comparative 
 study of the public elementary school curricula 
 of the leading culture nations, he found an ap- 
 proximate agreement in the subjects of instruc- 
 tion and in the relative amount of time devoted 
 to different subjects in the schools of representa- 
 tive cities. Aside from differences as to the 
 inclusion or exclusion of religious doctrine, the 
 most important variations were those relating 
 to the language employed and studied and the 
 content of instruction in the national history and 
 literature. Even here the instruction in the 
 schools under consideration might readily be 
 compared with reference to its form and the 
 principles guiding the choice of materials in 
 those subjects. So striking, indeed, was the 
 agreement which his study revealed that Pro- 
 fessor Payne was led to make the following 
 remarks : 
 
 It is to be feared that our educational theorists have 
 sometimes excused themselves from making a compara- 
 tive study of these different curricula by an exaggeration 
 of the supposed disparity of aim and the consequent im- 
 probability of gaining suggestions of worth. The tables 
 . . . show such a slight difference of curricula in the ele- 
 
INTERNATIONAL CO-OPERATION 117 
 
 mentary schools of the several countries, that it makes one 
 suspect either that the aim of education does not determine 
 what shall be studied, or that the aims of the several 
 countries do not differ as much as has been supposed. 1 
 
 And again, 
 
 No one can fail to be impressed with the fact that the 
 general principles which govern the selection and arrange- 
 ment of the subject matter of the elementary curriculum 
 are practically the same in the four educational systems 
 here studied. 2 
 
 Without doubt, national differences must still 
 be more influential in determining the teaching 
 of the lower schools than that of the univer- 
 sities. In some degree this difference must, I 
 think, be regarded as permanent. A strong 
 nationalism and even a certain wholesome pro- 
 vincialism are to be cherished in those schools. 
 But it is quite as important, and is in truth 
 essential, in this modern age, that the lower 
 schools preserve their continuity with the teach- 
 ing of the universities and their loyalty to as- 
 pirations which all civilized nations hold in 
 common. 
 
 I hope that our great National Education As- 
 sociation, in its unquestioned loyalty to our na- 
 tional ideals, may take steps which shall promote 
 
 1 Payne, Bruce Ryburn. Public elementary school curricula. 
 Silver, Burdett and Company [1905], pp. 15-16. 
 
 2 Idem, p. 182. The four educational systems studied were 
 those of the United States, England, Germany, and France. 
 
118 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 the good understanding now gaining ground 
 among the nations of the earth. Let us send our 
 emissaries to confer with similar bodies in other 
 civilized lands, as we have so often welcomed 
 foreign teachers in our great annual gatherings. 
 Let us take our part in setting up world-standards 
 in the domain of culture and education. Such 
 a movement, I believe, will make for peace; 
 but if so, it will accomplish that end by promot- 
 ing one of the best tendencies in modern educa- 
 tion, a humane tendency, which may be summed 
 up in the saying, Let us see if we cannot under- 
 stand one another. 
 
VIII 
 
 ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE IN 
 THE FIELD OF EDUCATION? 
 
 An Address before the Vassar College Chapter of Phi Beta 
 Kappa, June 10, 1907. Published in Science, August 9, 
 1907. 
 
VIII 
 
 ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE IN THE 
 FIELD OF EDUCATION? 
 
 EVERY invention, I suppose, is made up of 
 individual and social elements, and com- 
 bines them in a way different from that of 
 every other invention. There is no more inter- 
 esting department of literary criticism, or aesthetic 
 criticism generally, than that which seeks to trace 
 out the respective contributions of the race and 
 the individual in any work of art. This is illus- 
 trated in a recent discussion of the distinction 
 between the folk-epic and the art-epic, the char- 
 acteristic difference, for example, between the 
 Iliad and Paradise Lost. 1 Some Homer, in 
 the one instance, whatever his name, gave the 
 final form to a poetic tale that must have been 
 shaping itself in the traditions of his people for 
 many generations. In the other instance, in 
 which we may distinguish the poem from the con- 
 temporary materials out of which it was con- 
 structed, the work of the poet looms large, and 
 
 1 By Professor C. B. Bradley in The University of California 
 Chronicle for June, 1906. 
 
122 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 the work of the people back of him is obscured 
 by his personal fame. Yet, when we analyze 
 even Milton's art, with all of its manifestation of 
 a fearless and independent personality, we find it 
 related in the subtlest ways with the literary tra- 
 dition of his time. 
 
 So it is in the history of mechanical invention. 
 We have seen recently a running discussion of 
 the origin of the electric trolley car. This very 
 modern invention is commonly referred for its 
 beginnings to the electric railway first operated 
 at Richmond, Virginia, in 1888. But it appears 
 that that undertaking had a forerunner, and that 
 forerunner in its turn had a prototype, and the 
 successful American inventor is found to be only 
 the topmost figure of a human pyramid, made up 
 of no one knows how many experimenters in this 
 particular field. The Patent Office has difficulty 
 enough in distinguishing each new invention from 
 its patented predecessors. But when we go aside 
 from the series of formal patents and look to the 
 succession and mingling of motives and ideas, 
 the tangle passes our ability to unravel. We 
 can only see how inextricably the stroke of in- 
 dividual initiative is enmeshed in the movements 
 of a whole people, and that very complication we 
 find it a delight to contemplate. 
 
 Now, this social character of all invention ap- 
 pears in a peculiarly vital way in any original 
 work in education. For education in a special 
 
ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE? 123 
 
 sense not only springs from the people, but in 
 turn creates the people from which it springs. 
 Education is its own father. An over-emphasis 
 on individuality in education would quickly carry 
 us away from the line of direct succession. It 
 would give us isolation and sterility instead of re- 
 creating the spiritual life of the race. 
 
 One cannot add too quickly that in the nature 
 of things the danger of a dead lack of individual- 
 ity is usually a more threatening danger. But let 
 us at once get down to our examples. To begin 
 with, we may take the kindergarten. There has 
 hardly been a more distinct and conspicuous in- 
 vention in the whole history of schools. It is a 
 thoroughly conscious and modern work of art, 
 in which the personal agency of the inventor 
 comes to the fore. That is the very weakness of 
 the invention. To this day it has not been assim- 
 ilated. In our educational concert it is a voice 
 that sweetly sings in tune but that refuses to blend 
 with other voices of the chorus. There may be 
 different explanations of this lack of accord. It 
 may be that the individual note is permanently 
 at variance with anything that can be made uni- 
 versal. Or it may be that the kindergarten is 
 merely in advance of the age and will bring the 
 rest of education round into adjustment with it- 
 self. It seems pretty clear that both explanations 
 are in part correct. The kindergarten, with cer- 
 tain other forces that have worked toward sim- 
 
124 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 ilar ends, has brought our elementary education a 
 long way toward its type of faith and practice. 
 Yet the emphasis on what is distinctively Froebel- 
 ian still keeps it a thing apart, and seems likely to 
 set a permanent limit to its ascendency. 
 
 It will appear, from this reference to the work of 
 Froebel, that we are not now concerned simply or 
 chiefly with those inventions which bear the sharp 
 stamp of one man's individuality. It is a minor 
 consideration that the invention should be known 
 at all as the work of a single inventor. Some of 
 the most marked of immediate successes and ul- 
 timate failures have had that distinctive imprint. 
 Such, for example, was the monitorial system, in 
 the forms given to it by Joseph Lancaster and 
 Doctor Bell. Such a system may have a large 
 usefulness of its own in the course of educational 
 progress, but it is as scaffolding rather than as 
 part of the permanent structure. Its very insist- 
 ence upon that which is one man's makes it less 
 fit to serve the great needs of Everyman. 
 
 So in varying degrees the educational inven- 
 tions of the ages combine the distinct contribution 
 of this or that inventor with the broad tendencies 
 of an inventive people. What are some of the 
 other inventions which Europe has contributed 
 to educational history ? I mention only a few of 
 them and with little thought for sequence of any 
 sort. There is the educational system of the 
 Jesuits, particularly in its seventeenth and eigh- 
 
ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE? 125 
 
 teenth century form. There is the English uni- 
 versity, made up of federated colleges. There is 
 the seminar, which has been such an instrument 
 in the making of German university instruction. 
 There are two recent contributions of the Swedish 
 people, the Sloyd system of hand-work and the 
 Ling system of educational gymnastics. Let us 
 add the seminary for teachers, the school garden, 
 the Hilfsschule or school for backward children, 
 the system of higher institutions for commercial 
 education, the Gouin method and various other 
 successful methods in the teaching of modern 
 languages, the English system of university ex- 
 tension. Many others will, no doubt, occur to 
 you. When w^e come to think over the list, it 
 appears that much has been accomplished, and 
 that European education has not only been 
 greatly widened since the Middle Ages, to reach 
 a manifold larger constituency, but has also been 
 improved to a wonderful degree by the progress 
 of educational invention. 
 
 When we would institute a comparison be- 
 tween European and American contributions to 
 such improvement, it is well that we consider 
 first the wider range of invention. The world at 
 large gives to the Americans the credit of being a 
 highly inventive people as regards mechanical 
 devices. The attention of our people was early 
 turned in this direction. Certain conspicuous 
 successes fired the national imagination, and the 
 
126 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 stress of economic need drove us to the same end. 
 The Patent Office became a centre of national 
 pride. To take out a patent or buy the right to 
 sell a patented article or at least to buy something 
 with the magic patent label attached thereto, be- 
 came a well-nigh universal ambition. And in 
 sober truth our record in the making of useful 
 inventions is really wonderful. At first thought 
 and without an effort you can recall the lightning 
 rod, the steamboat, the cotton gin, the whole 
 series of reaping machines down to the latest 
 combination harvester, the sewing machine, the 
 telegraph, the telephone, the arc and the incan- 
 descent electric light, the phonograph, and twenty 
 other things that are now counted among the nec- 
 essaries of modern life. It is a dazzling list, and 
 may well make us forget the things we have not 
 ourselves invented, but have borrowed from other 
 lands. On second thought, however, we recall 
 those notable creations, the steam engine, the 
 balloon, the power loom, the locomotive engine, 
 the daguerreotype first-fruit of modern photog- 
 raphy, the spectroscope, wireless telegraphy, 
 and many others that the wit of Europe has de- 
 vised. However much we may lead in the num- 
 ber and variety of our cunning contrivances, there 
 is enough for which we are indebted to other 
 lands to check our conceit and assure us that 
 we have competitors. 
 
 On the whole, however, in the domain of 
 
ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE? 127 
 
 mechanism we are undoubtedly in the lead. The 
 fact that the number of patents issued annually 
 in the United States is now only a little less than 
 the whole number issued in all of the rest of the 
 civilized world is not without significance. But 
 when we turn to creative literature and the other 
 arts the case is changed. Here the leadership 
 rests with Europe. We have done good work in 
 this field and are rapidly doing better, but not yet 
 with that confident leadership which we display 
 in mechanical invention. Many of the best short 
 stories are ours. We have a score and more of 
 writers of creditable verse and even Europe 
 does not seem to be over-productive of great 
 poems in these days. We are producing some 
 virile sculpture that is not merely imitative, and 
 our painters can now command the respect and 
 admiration of the world. The superiority of our 
 illustration art is recognized. We are erecting 
 many good buildings and are producing some 
 good music. But, after all, the preponderance of 
 inventive excellence in these departments is still 
 conceded to Europe. Our architects study at 
 the Beaux Arts, our musicians at Leipsic and 
 Berlin, and our young painters are known to the 
 world when they have exhibited at the Paris 
 Salon. 
 
 How, then, does it stand with us in the field of 
 education ? I think any one who reads in the 
 German pedagogical literature of our day has 
 
128 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 now and then a sense of hopelessness of any edu- 
 cational originality. The range of its suggestion 
 is in fact astounding. The new plan and con- 
 ception of educational procedure which is just 
 dawning above his horizon is very likely to appear 
 in some German pamphlet or even in some 
 "Handbuch der Padagogik" as a familiar notion, 
 the boundaries of which have been well marked 
 out and its values weighed in the balance. So any 
 one familiar with the stream of educational in- 
 fluence which has long been crossing the Atlantic 
 in our direction will proceed with caution in 
 naming our American contributions to educa- 
 tional invention. Yet it will be admitted that 
 pedagogic discussion in Germany and in other 
 countries of Europe often outruns by far the prac- 
 tical embodiment of ideas in working institutions, 
 and even the great reach of German educational 
 doctrine still leaves some things to the educa- 
 tional makers of other lands. 
 
 The Europeans themselves are generous in 
 giving us credit for the origination of a variety of 
 educational contrivance. Among the particulars 
 in this bill of credit have been mentioned the 
 American school of library practice, the kitchen 
 garden, the high school laboratory for instruc- 
 tion in natural science, co-education in secondary 
 schools and colleges, the combination school of 
 the Pratt and the Drexel Institute type. It is 
 difficult for us to form a list of our own. We are 
 
ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE? 129 
 
 too close to the facts to be sensible of their dis- 
 tinguishing characters, and besides we know that 
 Europe has many surprises that might trip us if 
 we claimed too much. But at a venture I would 
 suggest the following as among our original con- 
 tributions to education, making no claim, how- 
 ever, that the list is all-inclusive or even includes 
 all of the best that we have done. 
 
 First, the non-sectarian elementary school for 
 all classes of the community, answering to our 
 democratic social organization and our religious 
 liberty. 
 
 Secondly, the American high school, serving at 
 once as a continuation of the elementary school 
 and an introduction to the higher education, with 
 courses meeting a variety of tastes and needs. 
 
 Thirdly, the American university, with its com- 
 bination of instruction and research, of cultural 
 and technological courses, and with liberal and 
 professional departments often dovetailing into 
 each other. To this might be added that notable 
 invention, that new development of personal 
 efficiency, the American university president. 
 
 To these institutions, at the core and center of 
 our educational system, we might easily add a 
 number of minor features of that system, no one 
 of them insignificant in itself. The summer 
 school may be mentioned, with its home-study 
 development, as in the Chautauqua type; the 
 text-book in its better forms, and the better type 
 
130 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 of instruction based on the use of the book ; the 
 college gymnasium, for physical education; the 
 consolidated country school, with provision for 
 the transportation of pupils ; the organization of 
 public libraries and museums in close connection 
 with the work of public schools. How many 
 others there are that come crowding on the atten- 
 tion ! One is tempted to mention Helen Keller 
 as one of our most admirable educational achieve- 
 ments. The story of her training into normal and 
 honored womanhood is one of the most stimulat- 
 ing passages in our educational history. And 
 Tuskegee is another. Then, too, we recall our 
 schools for the training of nurses, which in a very 
 few years have come to enroll twenty thousand 
 students annually. I may speak of another ex- 
 ample, which falls within my own sphere of labor, 
 for as a new invention it was the work of my 
 honored predecessors. I refer to that special 
 type of industrial training which is connected 
 with the introduction of domestic reindeer into 
 Alaska. 
 
 In that northern country the necessity of mak- 
 ing some better provision by which the natives 
 might clothe and feed themselves, was the 
 mother of this combined industrial and educa- 
 tional invention. Reindeer were imported from 
 Siberia. Teachers were brought from Lapland. 
 And the Eskimo were set to the lesson of caring 
 for the deer, of breaking them to the sled, of using 
 
ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE? 131 
 
 them in profitable service of the incoming white 
 population; and so of adjusting their lives to a 
 new industry, by which they might maintain 
 themselves in the face of new conditions which 
 threatened their very existence. Here was a truly 
 constructive treatment of a most difficult racial 
 problem. A new industry was fitted to new con- 
 ditions and a new education was based on that 
 new industry. While the arrangement has not 
 yet shown what its full development may be, it 
 has become well established in these more than 
 fifteen years, and already it has made its place 
 and proved its usefulness. 
 
 But we cannot fairly estimate the measure of 
 our inventiveness unless we turn to the other 
 side, and see what are some of the defects in our 
 system which we have left uncorrected. These 
 are the points where our educational invention 
 has thus far failed to do its work, and they are 
 neither few nor unimportant. I think it will ap- 
 pear that all along the line, from the bottom to 
 the top, our educational system, the object of so 
 great national pride, is still marked by serious 
 inadequacies. 
 
 We have not yet made any great improvement 
 in the nurture of children at home, up to the kin- 
 dergarten age or the age of the primary school. 
 
 We have not yet brought the kindergarten 
 into full adjustment to our educational system 
 nor devised any adequate substitute for the 
 kindergarten. 
 
132 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 We have found ways of keeping one half of our 
 pupils in school up to the sixth or seventh grade, 
 but we have not found ways of keeping all of 
 them to the end of the elementary course. 
 
 We have not yet organized nature studies in the 
 schools into any well-knit adjustment to general 
 education. 
 
 We have not yet carried our instruction in 
 drawing up into fully effective training for the 
 fine arts, in secondary and higher schools. 
 
 We have not yet brought our religious educa- 
 tion, as carried on in Sunday-schools, into any 
 effective parallelism with the secular instruction 
 of the public schools. 
 
 We have not yet brought our normal schools 
 into satisfactory adjustment with our cherished 
 sequence of schools from the kindergarten to the 
 university. 
 
 We have not yet wrought out a satisfactory 
 arrangement for the training of teachers for 
 secondary and higher schools. 
 
 We have hardly as yet established a permanent 
 teaching profession. 
 
 We have not devised adequate means of giving 
 needed cultivation, aesthetic, intellectual, and 
 moral, to the individuals who make up the stu- 
 dent body of our mammoth universities. 
 
 We have yet to work our way through the gas- 
 eous, centrifugal atomism of our college elective 
 courses into an organized and unified national 
 culture. 
 
ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE? 133 
 
 We have not yet achieved a national standard 
 in our academic and professional education, nor 
 have we organized any effective and economical 
 co-operation among our schools of graduate in- 
 struction and research. 
 
 We have not yet devised ways by which pub- 
 lic education can be definitely and adequately 
 focussed upon the improvement of our national 
 morality. 
 
 The list, again, is by no means complete, but 
 it is surely long enough for the purposes of this 
 discussion. 
 
 I do not take a pessimistic view of the situation 
 in which these defects appear. In every one of 
 the particulars enumerated, serious efforts toward 
 improvement are making even now, and we can- 
 not doubt that full success will ultimately be 
 achieved. There have been devoted teachers 
 who have labored long for such improvement, 
 and in some instances their accomplishment has 
 been great and beneficent. But that our triumphs 
 in these particulars have been local and excep- 
 tional rather than permanent and national, will 
 be generally agreed, and it is well that we look 
 this unwelcome fact in the face. 
 
 We may now attempt a direct answer to the 
 question which was asked at the beginning, Are 
 we an inventive people in the field of education ? 
 We are, unmistakably, an inventive people in this 
 field. It can hardly be doubted by any one who 
 
134 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 looks upon the exuberant Americanism of our 
 elementary schools, the great expansion and con- 
 tinued readjustment of our secondary education, 
 the growth of our universities and of univer- 
 sity influence in ways that catch so exactly our 
 national characteristics and turn them to aca- 
 demic ends; nor can it be doubted by any one 
 who watches from year to year the spread of our 
 education into new fields by new and untried 
 processes. We are inventive in our education, 
 but it is not yet clear that we are pre-eminent in 
 this regard, and our educational invention still 
 lags far behind our invention in the domain of 
 mechanism. 
 
 We may easily be misled by the flattering re- 
 ports of foreign visitors. With all of their frank- 
 ness in pointing out our defects, their general 
 criticism of our schools is for the most part ex- 
 tremely favorable. But we must not forget that 
 education with us is in the sweep of a strong tide 
 of popular sentiment. Every invention that we 
 have put forth is carried forward by that current 
 and finds opportunity to do, in full swing, its 
 destined work. Not that individual inventors do 
 their work unhampered and with no discouraging 
 delays. That could never be. But, by contrast 
 with Europe, the way of educational improve- 
 ment here is direct and clear. We cannot yet 
 fairly judge what our education would accomplish 
 under greater difficulties and in the face of closer 
 
ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE? 135 
 
 competition. It is safest for us to take the mod- 
 erate view, and hold that our educational suc- 
 cesses thus far, great and glorious as they are, are 
 only great enough to confirm our hope and confi- 
 dence, and not yet sufficiently great to insure to 
 us the ultimate leadership. 
 
 Our inventiveness in this field is less con- 
 spicuous, as has been said, our education shows 
 less of readiness to seize obscure suggestions and 
 carry them through to unlooked-for triumphs of 
 efficiency, than that which we have long disclosed 
 in our Patent Office reports. Yet this field is at 
 least as interesting as the other. It makes in- 
 tense appeal to widely differing minds, and public 
 attention is often drawn to new educational pro- 
 jects in a measure that is truly astonishing. 
 What is needed is that that public interest 
 should be more sustained and more discriminat- 
 ing; that the inventor in education should have 
 the unfailing stimulus which has goaded our 
 mechanical inventors to their most strenuous en- 
 deavors. And on the part of the inventor him- 
 self there is need of all the patience and resource 
 of the designer of new mechanism ; and of other 
 qualities, subtler far than these, which it may be 
 worth our while to consider at this point. 
 
 The inventor in education does not bring 
 before the people a new object which they are 
 to look upon and admire and use. The people 
 are the very stuff of his invention, public sen- 
 
136 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 timent is his atmosphere, he is an artificer 
 of human society. Accordingly he must have, 
 many times over, the patience of the mechanical 
 inventor. He must be willing to merge his fame 
 in the larger life of the invention. For if it is a 
 real and living invention he will find that there 
 are many collaborators, and it may take genera- 
 tions to bring the design to its perfection. In 
 education it is generally true that an invention 
 that is only of one man size is not large enough 
 to last. Yet the work calls for zest and courage, 
 and there is ground for individual encourage- 
 ment. Social changes are accelerated in these 
 days. The single generation has, more than 
 ever, its chance of striking an arc of appreciable 
 advancement, and there was never a time when 
 one man in his one earthly life had a better chance 
 of doing some work of noble note. I believe the 
 spirit of educational invention can be quickened 
 among the men of America, to meet the larger 
 demands that are upon us. And if this language 
 seems to spread out shield and spear in the house- 
 hold of Lycomedes, it is not that I am seeking 
 Achilles at Vassar. It should be said rather that 
 the highly educated women of America are them- 
 selves to have a most important part in this 
 educational quickening. Indeed, it is not too 
 much to hope that the time is at hand when our 
 men and women will take share and share alike 
 in this work alike but different. And we may 
 
ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE? 137 
 
 trust and pray that the great work that our 
 women are already doing in every phase of social 
 improvement may not cause the men of America 
 to dream that their responsibility can be shifted, 
 but may rather remind them that they must not 
 fail in their part. 
 
 It may be well to enter here upon some brief 
 discussion of three or four of the problems now 
 calling for constructive leadership. In the first 
 place, let us make note of an unfinished move- 
 ment, which demands our best skill and will 
 surely reward its exercise. It has been said that 
 the education of the school and education by 
 apprenticeship, after centuries in which they 
 have gone apart, are drawing near together in 
 these days. It seems fair to expect, in fact, that 
 the school of the future will be the result of their 
 union. The combination appears in many forms. 
 Most familiar of these, up to the present time, 
 is the school laboratory in the natural sciences. 
 Here instruction from the book assumes a subor- 
 dinate place and the pupil learns by what he 
 does. Already, too, the method of the scientific 
 laboratory is permeating other departments of 
 the school. It has influenced the teaching of 
 history and the languages, and we may even see 
 its influence extending to the teaching of law in 
 the professional school. But now the school 
 and the apprentice system are drawing together 
 in other ways. The movement is obvious in 
 manual training and domestic education. 
 
138 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 The actual contact of the two systems, how- 
 ever, has been especially marked in the past 
 two years. At the Carnegie Technical Schools 
 in Pittsburg arrangements have been entered 
 into by which boys will take a part of their 
 training for certain trades in the ordinary 
 course of apprenticeship, under the control of 
 the trades unions, and another part of their 
 training for the same trades in the technical 
 schools. At the University of Cincinnati the 
 experiment is making of combining work for 
 wages in a regular shop with the studies of an 
 engineering course, two young men counting 
 for one in the shop by alternating on one-week 
 shifts, each taking his university studies in the 
 week that he is not at the bench. The experi- 
 ment is watched with the liveliest interest by 
 both shop men and university men and thus far 
 it gives promise of success. In the movement 
 toward the establishment of public trade schools, 
 now under way in Massachusetts and Connecti- 
 cut and in several other states, the relation of the 
 apprenticeship to the school is a question of the 
 utmost importance, both educationally and in 
 its connection with the problems of trades union- 
 ism. From a general pedagogical standpoint the 
 combination of the methods of the literary school 
 with the methods of apprenticeship seems one 
 of the most promising of present opportunities 
 for the exercise of educational invention. 
 
ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE? 139 
 
 May I venture, in the second place, to speak 
 of the present problem in the higher education 
 of women ? I will not say what I think about the 
 subject here and now, when I am so happily 
 indebted to your generous hospitality. I do not 
 think you would care to have me indulge in the 
 language of compliment. But before I came to 
 Vassar, let us say, the question of woman's 
 higher education in America seemed to me to 
 lie about as follows: That, after the great ad- 
 vance we have made in this field, which has com- 
 manded the attention of the world and the 
 admiration of a good part of the world, we have 
 come to something like a standstill, and some of 
 the most important steps have not been taken as 
 yet. It has taken a great struggle to establish 
 fully the higher education of woman as a simple 
 human need. But that battle has been won. 
 The integration of woman's education with the 
 general scheme of education has been brought 
 about. But the differentiation of woman's educa- 
 tion is yet to be accomplished. Let us admit 
 that the task of integration was by far the greater 
 task. But does it follow that the differentiation 
 is no task at all ? Or, to put it in other words : 
 The functions of men and w r omen in society are 
 different in many ways. Do those differences lie 
 wholly beyond the range of education? I am 
 confident that they cannot permanently be left 
 outside of the range of education, but the task 
 
140 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 of bringing them under educational treatment is 
 one of the greatest difficulty. It calls for the 
 highest exercise of inventive skill and patience. 
 In co-educational institutions, under a system of 
 free election, the problem tends to solve itself by 
 the gravitation of women toward certain courses 
 and of men toward certain other courses, while 
 still other courses are common ground. But 
 this solution is only partial and unsatisfactory. 
 Some practicable scheme of preparation for 
 mother- work will, we cannot doubt, be devised 
 in the course of time. There will be, some day, 
 an education for home making and for woman's 
 leading part in the finer forms of social inter- 
 course, which will do on the higher academic 
 plane what was done in a more petty way, gener- 
 ations ago, in popular finishing schools for girls. 
 But this, too, is only a part. There is to be, 
 further, a serious preparation for woman's work 
 in the economic, the industrial, and even the 
 political world. What the all-round solution of 
 this problem will be, I cannot tell nor even guess. 
 But if it meets the need, it will be an educational 
 invention of the highest order of excellence. 
 
 In the third place, there is the international 
 organization of education. Commissioner Draper 
 has recently called attention to the tremendous 
 number of men and women engaged in teach- 
 ing throughout the world to-day. There are 
 not far from three and one-half million of 
 
ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE? 141 
 
 them, according to his estimates. And for the 
 most part they are engaged in what is essentially 
 the same work, wherever they may be. The full 
 realization of the unity of this great body of 
 teachers, when it is attained, must have pro- 
 found consequences for the peace and civiliza- 
 tion of the world. Already we are working toward 
 such unity in a number of definite and special 
 ways. Many of these ways are already familiar 
 to all: The visits of teachers and other educa- 
 tional leaders of one country among the schools 
 of other peoples; systematic efforts of one 
 people to spread a knowledge of their culture 
 and ideals among other peoples, as exemplified 
 in the Alliance Fran9aise; the exchange of 
 university professors; and a variety of other 
 procedure. 
 
 If the diplomatic relations of nations have 
 passed into an economic stage, it should be 
 added that they are passing into an educational 
 stage. Mr. Barrett, the chief of the Bureau of 
 American Republics, urges, with good show of 
 reason, that if we wish better commercial relations 
 with the proud and sensitive peoples of South 
 America, we must first meet them on higher 
 ground, through an understanding and recogni- 
 tion of their culture and education. Already we 
 can see signs of the emergence of world-standards 
 in school education and university education and 
 particularly in professional education. It is an 
 
GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 immediate and practical need that we put our 
 higher education into shape to deserve, and by 
 deserving to compel, recognition, the world over, 
 of our academic and professional degrees. All 
 of these things call for new procedure, new 
 devices, and new co-ordination of existing agen- 
 cies. That is, in the language of this discussion, 
 they call for a new exercise of educational inven- 
 tion in its very widest range. 
 
 Finally, the international need emphasizes 
 the national need. Such a thing has happened 
 repeatedly in the history of international rela- 
 tions. What we must do to take and keep our 
 place among the nations of the earth, reveals to 
 us what we must do at home. No one in his 
 senses, I am sure, would propose a centraliza- 
 tion of American educational systems. But we 
 need as never before an effective co-operation of 
 our state educational organizations, and of our 
 institutions of learning under more private forms 
 of control. And when education is spoken of 
 here, the meaning is education in its widest 
 reach, from the elementary schools through the 
 colleges and universities, from the most general 
 to the most special of its developments, through 
 the several forms of professional instruction, 
 through organized scientific research, through 
 our provision for libraries and museums and 
 those movements which promise for us the mak- 
 ing of a really national art. The organization 
 
ARE WE AN INVENTIVE PEOPLE? 143 
 
 of what may be called our national education in 
 a manner suited to the spirit of our institutions 
 and in forms commensurate with our standing 
 among the nations this is an undertaking 
 which must tax the imagination and make de- 
 mand for administrative originality such as the 
 academic world has seldom seen. But it is a work 
 that is to be done. And it will undoubtedly be 
 the work of many men and women, brought 
 together in intense co-operation, and be extended 
 far beyond the limits of a single generation. It 
 will be a work of national invention. 
 
 Such, as it now appears, is some small part 
 of the task that lies immediately before us. It 
 is a work that may well call for the most serious 
 consideration of this greatly influential society, 
 which aims to make its philosophy a guide into 
 the larger life. The plea which has been offered 
 amounts in sum to this : That by all means you 
 will give encouragement and stimulus and dis- 
 criminating criticism to our already awakened 
 spirit of educational invention; for it takes no 
 second sight to perceive that the times call for 
 the exercise of that spirit in the highest things to 
 which it may aspire. 
 
IX 
 
 CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES: 
 SOME OF THEIR NEEDS 
 
 An Address delivered before the International Congress on 
 the Welfare of the Child at Washington, March, 
 1908. Published in the National Congress of Mothers' 
 Magazine, June, 1908. 
 
IX 
 
 CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES: SOME 
 OF THEIR NEEDS 
 
 THE President of the United States, in 
 assigning to me the high honor of com- 
 ing before you as his representative, 
 expressed his deep and serious interest in your 
 undertaking. To promote the general welfare 
 by way of a betterment of American childhood 
 is, as I understand it, the main object of your ac- 
 tivities. It is a purpose which, in an especial 
 degree, commands the President's warm consid- 
 eration. In this solicitude all patriotic Americans 
 must share. And whatever wise measures you 
 may initiate to carry your high purpose into effect 
 cannot fail to find a response in all groups and 
 sections and parties of our American people. 
 
 In particular, as a schoolman and a member 
 of the National Education Association, may I 
 express my personal gratification that the Moth- 
 ers' Congress is to be one of the organizations 
 to be represented in the new Department of 
 National Organizations of Women, which was 
 authorized by the directors of that association at 
 
148 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 their meeting last summer in Los Angeles. The 
 educational program of these several women's 
 organizations is so well framed, and so much 
 may be done by them to make that program 
 operative in our educational systems, that your 
 participation in our great National Association 
 brings to it a promise of heightened usefulness. 
 It is to be hoped that you may find your new 
 relations with that association altogether helpful 
 and congenial. May you be greatly successful 
 in the educational projects to which so much 
 of your effort has been consecrated. And may 
 your meetings here in Washington happily further 
 your plans for making a joyous childhood uni- 
 versal in this land, as the best introduction to an 
 honorable manhood and womanhood. 
 
 Your purpose is, indeed, the broad purpose of 
 our civilization. We are seeking to make a 
 childhood of wholesome play lead up to a mature 
 life of wholesome work from which the spirit of 
 play has not been altogether lost. We think it 
 worth while to provide for childhood with its 
 play. We think it worth while to provide in a 
 thousand ways for the work of grown-up years. 
 But just at this time we are chiefly interested in 
 the passage from the age of play to the age of 
 work. That is the focus of some of our most 
 anxious thought of to-day. The school is largely 
 concerned with the transformation of a playing 
 child into a working man with some of the play 
 
CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES 149 
 
 left in him. So the question of which I speak 
 is the question of the fitting together of the later 
 years of school with the earlier years of work. 
 Here is one of the most penetrating questions of 
 our time, and one to which you may fairly de- 
 vote your most earnest planning and study. 
 
 It may not be necessary to show the danger 
 of too abrupt a change from one mode of life to 
 another. That danger has been often remarked. 
 For example, it has been noted that the German 
 system of higher education, under which a stu- 
 dent passes at one bound from the close prescrip- 
 tion and supervision of the gymnasium into the 
 unlimited freedom of the university, is a system 
 which subjects many a young student to an over- 
 whelming moral disadvantage. Many lives are 
 undoubtedly wrecked in that first year of unac- 
 customed liberty. On the other hand, the Ger- 
 man points to the hard lot of the American 
 volunteer in time of war. Without preparation of 
 any kind he is plunged from a life of peace into 
 the hardest realities of a military life. It can- 
 not be denied that physically and morally many 
 young men have gone to pieces under such a 
 strain. But what is to be said of a boy in his 
 teens or a girl of the same age who in one day 
 passes from a life in which there is no work to a 
 life that is all work ? The physical strain of 
 such a transition is great, but the moral strain is 
 worse. Yet exactly the strain of such sudden 
 
150 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 change is what we have to guard against in the 
 interest of great numbers of our people. 
 
 Where our population is densely concentrated 
 and the struggle for a living is hard, where in- 
 dustry is organized in enormous units, in facto- 
 ries and mines, and laborers are counted by the 
 thousands or the tens of thousands, there the 
 danger rises to its highest pitch. In a more scat- 
 tered population and under industrial conditions 
 of an earlier type, the danger is less threatening. 
 There, in many individual instances, we may 
 still see the passage from school and play to 
 grown-up life and work accomplished in ways 
 that are wholesome and very good to contemplate. 
 
 It is natural for us to go back in thought to the 
 course of our own lives. I trust I may be par- 
 doned, accordingly, if I appeal for illustration to 
 my own personal recollections. They take me 
 back to a childhood on the farm and in a country 
 village in northern Illinois. Before I was ten 
 years old my village life had begun. Before I 
 was eleven the ambition was moving me to take 
 some share in the family burdens. I could see 
 already that those burdens were pressing heavily 
 on the father and mother. Our family life was an 
 intimate one. We were all partners in the family 
 fortunes. I had my regular round of small duties, 
 known as chores, but I was eager to earn money 
 and pay my part of the costs. So it came about 
 that it was my own desire and no urgency what- 
 
CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES 151 
 
 ever on the part of my parents that made me a 
 wage-earner in my eleventh year. After anxious 
 searching and inquiry I found employment in the 
 village, which did not interfere with the hours of 
 school; in vacation time I began working on 
 neighboring farms ; and before the year was out 
 I had assumed the full responsibility of keeping 
 myself in clothes. By a happy provision of na- 
 ture, as I grew taller and it cost more to clothe 
 me, I grew also stronger and my earning power 
 increased. It was a proud moment when my 
 wages were advanced from fifty to seventy-five 
 cents a day. 
 
 At a later time the home place grew larger, and 
 I was needed there to do my part with other 
 laborers. So I ceased to earn an independent in- 
 come, and once more I was clothed from the 
 family purse. Thus, with various alternations of 
 work and schooling, and later with short terms 
 of teaching school, the time went on until I was 
 prepared to enter regularly upon my chosen 
 profession. 
 
 It was a happy life, on the whole, There was 
 a fair amount of play in it, and I enjoyed the play 
 a good deal more than the work. But there was 
 interest, too, and pride in the work. The rest of 
 the household were doing their part. There were 
 warm neighborhood relationships. And in the 
 home there was music and reading, with table-talk 
 of politics, history, religion, and the daily news. 
 
152 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 It is plain to see that mine was not an isolated 
 case. In many parts of the country it may be 
 duplicated with ten thousand variations to this 
 day. Numerous records parallel with this, to all 
 intents and purposes, may be found in the Con- 
 gressional Directory. And if Who 's Who gave 
 biographical details concerning the first twenty 
 years in the life of each of its inmates, such in- 
 stances might be multiplied almost indefinitely. 
 
 Let me repeat that the point to which attention 
 is here particularly directed is the overlapping, 
 or let us say the dovetailing, of school life with the 
 life of a wage-earner and producer. Such over- 
 lapping belongs to certain years between the ages 
 of twelve and twenty-one. Leaving out of consid- 
 eration now that small percentage of our people 
 for whom schooling is still the main occupation 
 of life for some years past the age of twenty-one, 
 and speaking only of that greater number who 
 have gom over to a life of labor before they have 
 reached their majority, and many of them long 
 before, I would present for your consideration 
 this view : That for that larger proportion of our 
 number ways should be sought by which their 
 school life may be dovetailed into their life of 
 toil. For one or two years at least, and preferably 
 for a longer time, after the law permits them to 
 work for pay, some part of their time should still 
 be reserved for school. The ways by which this 
 may be accomplished will be various, and some 
 
CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES 153 
 
 of them are still to be discovered. But, by what- 
 ever ways may yet be found available, we must 
 seek to prevent the sharp break from school life 
 to a life of hard and unremitting labor, which is 
 now too often the lot of boys and girls at the 
 fourteenth, fifteenth, or sixteenth year of their 
 age. 
 
 The more gradual and irregular transition of 
 which my own boyhood is an ordinary example is 
 in some ways better than any arrangement wilich 
 can be deliberately provided, on a large scale, by 
 legislation and administrative procedure. But in 
 some ways it is not so good. There are surely 
 methods to be found by which a closer interaction 
 may be brought about between the schooling and 
 the labor. Each may be made to give support to 
 the other. Our national inventiveness should be 
 equal to the demand for educational adjustments 
 to meet this rising need. Already, in fact, such 
 devices have begun to appear. In the great agri- 
 cultural states of the West, many boys and young 
 men are dividing their time between farm work 
 in summer and studies in agricultural schools and 
 colleges in winter. In the cities there are robust 
 and ambitious young people who, even after full 
 days of labor, give their evenings to attendance 
 on evening schools. There are department stores 
 in which a part of the time of the younger em- 
 ployees is given to school pursuits in school rooms 
 provided by their employers. At the University 
 
154 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 of Cincinnati and the Carnegie Technical Schools 
 in Pittsburg, young men and boys divide their 
 time between an apprenticeship in the shop and 
 theoretical study in the class room. These 
 varied experiments may be regarded as the skir- 
 mish line of an advance which is to be of great 
 significance for our national character and well- 
 being. It is not too much to hope that laws may 
 be devised and plans of organization carried into 
 effect that will make a midway period, in which 
 part schooling is required and part time labor is 
 permitted, one of the most fruitful periods in all 
 the educational years of youth. I do not look to 
 see such a movement fall short of this consum- 
 mation : That for all of our people there shall be 
 schooling of some sort and in some amount 
 through all the years up to the age of twenty-one ; 
 and that this schooling in its later years shall have 
 a more intimate bearing on the duties and occu- 
 pations of life than we have yet been able to 
 accomplish. 
 
 But while we hold such hopes and expectations 
 in all confidence, it is not to be forgotten that the 
 immediate task is that of securing wise laws for 
 compulsory education, joined with compulsory 
 abstinence from unsuitable wage-earning work. 
 There is clearly this need that the right to an 
 education and freedom from those industrial 
 conditions which would ruin the good results of 
 education should both be provided by law. Of 
 
CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES 155 
 
 our forty-six states, thirty-five have now on their 
 statute books laws varying greatly in their scope, 
 for the accomplishment of both of these purposes ; 
 on the other hand, one state has no laws for 
 either of these purposes, and nine have either 
 child labor laws or laws for compulsory education 
 alone. The District of Columbia is not a satis- 
 factory model for the rest of the country, for its 
 improved statute for compulsory education is not 
 yet matched with a statute for the regulation of 
 child labor. This is a gap which it is hoped the 
 present Congress will supply. 1 
 
 Now, taking account only of those states in 
 which there are both compulsory education laws 
 and child labor laws side by side, let us note the 
 relation between the close of the compulsory edu- 
 cation period and the beginning of the permissive 
 labor period. Some of our child labor laws assign 
 different ages for different occupations, and none 
 of them apply to all possible occupations. But 
 speaking broadly, the present status of the case 
 is about as follows: In eighteen of the states 
 these two points coincide, that is, full-time em- 
 ployment is permitted the day after full-time 
 compulsory education ceases. In one of the states 
 there is a gap of two years between the two. For 
 many children such a gap is a period of danger, a 
 much more serious danger, indeed, than that of 
 the sudden step from school to gainful employ- 
 
 1 Congress has passed a child labor law since this was written. 
 
156 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 ment; for children who may not take employ- 
 ment for wages and are not required to go to 
 school are subject to all of the evils of enforced 
 idleness at an age when impulse is strong and 
 control is weak and characters are ready to take 
 their bent for life. In seven of the states this 
 danger is met by a provision extending the age of 
 compulsory school attendance in the case of chil- 
 dren having no regular employment. In the re- 
 maining seventeen of these states there is some 
 form of overlapping of the compulsory schooling 
 age and the permissive employment age. In these 
 seventeen states there would seem, even at the 
 present time, to be a fair opportunity for judicious 
 experimentation with ways of making a better 
 transition from the school to the work of life. 
 
 More and more, however, it becomes clear that 
 statutory provisions in these matters are not 
 effective without well-developed systems of in- 
 spection and enforcement. And if the best things 
 are to be brought within reach, the enforcement 
 of compulsory education laws must go hand in 
 hand with the enforcement of compulsory non- 
 labor laws. Such combined efficiency is abso- 
 lutely essential if the ends of which I have spoken 
 are to be attained. With adequate guarantees on 
 the sanitary and the educational side, it would be 
 practicable, for many children in the middle of 
 their 'teens, to place the school alongside of the 
 factory or the shop, even under the same roof, and 
 
CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES 157 
 
 to have the pupils divide their time between the 
 two. It is conceivable that such an arrangement 
 might be made of incalculable advantage, not 
 only to industry but equally to education. But 
 it should not be considered for a moment without 
 those adequate guarantees. In every way it would 
 appear that any great progress in these matters 
 is dependent upon a full and harmonious devel- 
 opment of our systems of enforcement. It will 
 be safe to make the laws flexible, to adapt them to 
 a great variety of conditions, in proportion as their 
 administration becomes exact and dependable. 
 To strengthen these provisions on the adminis- 
 trative side is accordingly one of our chief con- 
 cerns at this time ; and this is notably the case, I 
 may repeat, if any such intimate combination of 
 industry and education as is here proposed for a 
 transition period is to be made a safe and sane 
 and practicable undertaking. 
 
 Passing now from this more special considera- 
 tion of the transition period in the lives of our 
 future workers, permit me to remind you of the 
 present urgency of the whole problem of our 
 school attendance. After all of the efforts that 
 have been put forth compulsory attendance 
 laws, varied attractions in the studies offered, and 
 public opinion pressing upon indifferent parents 
 - our school attendance is still far behind what 
 it should be. At a fair estimate every one of our 
 people should receive at least eight years of school- 
 
158 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 ing of approximately two hundred days to the 
 year. As a matter of fact, we fall far short of this 
 standard. In the year 1905 the average schooling 
 per individual of the population for the whole 
 country was only 5.33 years. In the North At- 
 lantic Division, including the New England and 
 Middle Atlantic states, this average went as high 
 as 7.09 years. In the South Central Division it 
 was only 3.06 years. In both cases it was far too 
 low, and it is evident that a great task is still 
 before us to bring this amount up to anything like 
 the point that it should reach. When we try to 
 realize the meaning of the figures, to understand 
 how many children have been kept from their 
 educational inheritance, we are oppressed with 
 the waste of warm, human life and opportunity 
 which such a showing signifies. Yet the figures 
 offer encouragement, too. While the present 
 averages are painfully low, they represent a long- 
 continued improvement. The showing of an 
 average of 5.33 years of schooling per individual 
 of the population in the year 1905 should be set 
 over against an average of 3.96 years in the year 
 1880. This advance of 35 per cent within the 
 term of twenty-five years is a notable gain when 
 we remember that the total number of persons to 
 be educated had increased at a rapid rate within 
 the same period. In the South Central Division, 
 which shows the lowest average at this time, the 
 improvement has been notably rapid, amount- 
 
CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES 159 
 
 ing to 65 per cent within this twenty-five-year 
 period. 
 
 When we turn from the figures for broad 
 sections of our land to a closer examination of rep- 
 resentative cities, we find both stimulus and en- 
 couragement in another form. Here we have the 
 significant tables recently prepared by Professor 
 Thorndike to show the dwindling of public school 
 classes from the lower to the higher grades of the 
 school. The showing here is disheartening if we 
 consider only such facts as these : That one-half 
 of the pupils, generally speaking, have left school 
 before the eighth grade is reached, and only 40 
 per cent go through to the end of the elementary 
 school. But when, on the other hand, we see 
 what progress some of our cities have made, we 
 take new courage for the rest. While in the 
 mean or average the cities show over half of the 
 pupils dropping out before the eighth grade is 
 entered, twelve cities out of twenty-three already 
 carry more than half of their pupils through the 
 seventh grade, seven carry more than half of them 
 through the eighth grade, and two, at least, carry 
 a majority of their pupils through the ninth 
 grade and over into the high school. There is 
 reason, then, for solicitude, and reason as well 
 for hope. 1 
 
 1 Since the above was written, Professor Thorndike 's re- 
 sults have been sharply criticised, but even the figures pre- 
 sented by Mr. Leonard P. Ayres, one of the keenest of the 
 
160 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 What one city or a few cities have done 
 other cities may do. This is the word to be 
 passed on to those parents' associations in con- 
 nection with public schools which the Mothers' 
 Congress has promoted a form of association 
 of the greatest promise in the way of educational 
 improvement. All manner of co-operation and 
 moral influence must be added to all manner of 
 legal and administrative compulsion to bring 
 about the desirable uplift of our schools in this 
 matter of attendance. But such combination of 
 favoring influence has even now accomplished 
 notable improvements, which have been seen and 
 measured and recorded. So much the more may 
 we expect that the efforts of the immediate future 
 will have their wished-for reward. 
 
 The point cannot be too strongly emphasized 
 that the importance of these various statistics lies 
 in the human values that they represent. We 
 are concerned with the difference that it makes 
 in a human life to have eight full years of school- 
 ing in a good school, as compared with three or 
 four fragmentary years in some half-organized 
 makeshift for a school, or even less than that and 
 with no school at all. We are concerned with 
 these values in individual lives, and we are look- 
 ing beyond to the great interests of the corn- 
 critics (Laggards in our schools, pp. 66-72) show only about 
 fifty per cent of the pupils completing the elementary school 
 
 course. 
 
CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES 161 
 
 mon wealth and the nation. As regards school 
 attendance and child labor and all of those high 
 interests to which your organization has devoted 
 its attention, these human values, these state and 
 national interests, come before us with compelling 
 power. 
 
 These interests cannot fall short of a national 
 significance, for it is the oncoming citizenship 
 of the nation with which they have to do. 
 The nation cannot look with unconcern on those 
 things that affect its fundamental character and 
 endurance. It is not my purpose here to discuss 
 any of the ways which have been proposed to give 
 effect to the national concern in these matters 
 through governmental action. I shall do no more 
 than express my conviction that this national 
 concern is too deep and genuine to fail of finding 
 suitable expression. It is not to be supposed for 
 a moment that the nation will do aught to weaken 
 the hands of the states in dealing with the present 
 situation. But the nation has much to do that 
 will strengthen the hands of the states, and will 
 work to the betterment of that great body of 
 young citizens who are the hope alike of the 
 states and of the nation. 
 
 The great need is that the opportunity for 
 sound growth and education shall be equalized 
 for our children and our youth throughout the 
 land. If opportunity is the very thing that our 
 democracy means, then we must realize democ- 
 
 11 
 
162 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 racy, as far as possible, by making the opportunity 
 of the child born in one part of the land as fair 
 and encouraging as that of the child born in any 
 other part of the land. This, in large part, must 
 be the responsibility of governments, both state 
 and national. But as preparatory to govern- 
 mental provisions, and as holding the ground till 
 governments can act with full effect, there is a 
 great work to be done by private and co-opera- 
 tive agencies. And when governments have done 
 their best there will still be large responsibilities 
 devolving on such agencies. Your influential 
 society and other women's societies that share in 
 these undertakings they can do much to fur- 
 ther that equalizing of opportunity which our 
 America still so sorely needs. 
 
 Thus far we have considered the interests of 
 children in the United States with reference, 
 first, to the connection of school life with life in 
 the world of work, and in the second place to the 
 whole question of attendance upon the schools. 
 Before I close may I go back to that earlier and 
 still more difficult problem, which has been given 
 a prominent place among the aims and purposes 
 of this Congress, the problem of preparation for 
 mother- work? I would not venture to advise 
 you with reference to an education which should 
 fit women for their part as mothers in the home. 
 That is a high theme in which others may learn 
 from you. What I should like to urge upon 
 
CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES 163 
 
 your consideration is a narrower and lowlier 
 calling, yet one which may conceivably become 
 of large significance in the life of our people. 
 
 Under modern conditions there is need for a 
 great deal of mothering by those who are not 
 mothers themselves, a need for foster-mothering, 
 if the term may be permitted. In orphanages, 
 in day nurseries, in social settlements, in homes 
 from which the mother has been taken, or in 
 which the living mother is unable to carry all 
 the burdens of her position, there is to-day a 
 wide demand for the services of young women 
 who are expert in the care of little children from 
 the first month of babyhood to the age for kinder- 
 garten or school. This demand is met for the 
 most part by those who have had no special 
 training for the task, because such special train- 
 ing is nowhere to be found. We have trained 
 kindergartners and trained hospital nurses. Some 
 little beginning has been made in the training of 
 nursery maids at babies' hospitals. In Ghent 
 and Paris and London there are schools for 
 mothers among the very poor. But none of 
 these exactly meet the case. What is proposed, 
 in effect, is this: That as in recent years the 
 profession of kindergartner and the profession of 
 hospital nurse have been created, so now an- 
 other new profession for women be established, 
 the profession of babies' nurse or nursery gov- 
 erness. As a profession it would require its 
 
164 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 training schools, its professional literature, its 
 societies maintaining a professional spirit and 
 atmosphere. The training would, in part, re- 
 semble that of the hospital nurse, in part it 
 would draw near to that of the kindergartner, 
 in part it would be different from either, a special 
 training for this new profession alone. A lead- 
 ing place should necessarily be given to the care 
 of the little ones' health and particularly to the 
 problem of nourishment. But there should be 
 a place, too, for the principles of baby education, 
 which might consist mainly of the prevention of 
 too much education and the securing of a healthy 
 nervous system, capable of standing the strain 
 that school life will put upon it in after years. 
 
 There is, however, no need to elaborate de- 
 tails, for these in any case must be supplied for 
 the most part by the teaching of experience. So 
 far as the main contention is concerned, I am 
 persuaded that there is room for this new pro- 
 fession and that it will quickly make a place for 
 itself as soon as a school for such training is pro- 
 vided. In commending such a plan to your 
 consideration let me add that the largest useful- 
 ness of schools for foster-mothers would un- 
 doubtedly come in time to be their indirect 
 service their returning wave of influence upon 
 that subtler and more difficult preparation for 
 real motherhood. That there should be schools 
 and a profession in which the varied knowledge 
 
CHILDREN IN THE UNITED STATES 165 
 
 needed for the care of the youngest children is 
 regularly assembled and communicated such a 
 circumstance could not fail to have the deepest 
 interest for mothers everywhere, who have the 
 most intense and personal desire to know what 
 may be known for their children's good. To 
 give form and coherence and practical effec- 
 tiveness to the knowledge of baby life and the 
 life of the little child, even though it were done 
 in the first instance for the training only of nurses, 
 would be in the end a service rendered to all 
 motherhood. 
 
 It is with the greatest diffidence and deference 
 that I bring these few suggestions to you, upon 
 whom the real responsibilities and honors of 
 mother- work have rested. You will undoubtedly 
 devise wise and liberal things for the children 
 of our land, for no one feels their needs more 
 keenly than you, or seeks more earnestly to supply 
 those needs. Knowing the full weight of anxious 
 care for your own, you have learned to care for 
 the good of all those who are under the simple, 
 common, universal need of childhood through- 
 out the land. And we who must bear those 
 burdens in other ways come to you, deeply mind- 
 ful of all that the ministry of mother and of wife 
 have meant in our own homes, and look to you 
 with confidence for help in those large under- 
 takings for the welfare of all children with which 
 our state and national governments have to do. 
 
X 
 
 TRAINING FOR MOTHER-WORK 
 
 An Address delivered under the title. The Relation of the 
 Home to Moral and Religious Education, before the 
 Religious Education Association at its Meeting in 
 Rochester, New York, February 6, 1907. Published 
 under that title in the Proceedings of the Association, 
 and under the present title in The Independent, April 
 18, 1907. 
 
X 
 
 TRAINING FOR MOTHER-WORK 
 
 EVERY improvement in education involves 
 many factors, and, in the discussion of 
 the plan proposed in this paper, I shall 
 find it necessary to make occasional digressions 
 with a view to noting some of the attendant cir- 
 cumstances which seem to me to condition any 
 successful experiment in the field we are to 
 consider. 
 
 I find it necessary, in fact, to begin with a di- 
 gression. Attention should be called at the outset 
 to the extreme difficulty of making effective any 
 really new departure in education. Every new 
 educational process or institution shows in a 
 marked degree the same conservative tendency 
 which made the first railway coaches take the 
 form of the stage-coach, which they superseded, 
 until they had developed slowly and painfully 
 new forms of their own ; the tendency which made 
 some of the earlier experiments in the use of iron 
 and steel in architectural construction take the 
 form of columns and pilasters cast in the mould 
 of the old Greek orders. This tendency to as- 
 
170 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 similate the new to the old, in such a way as to 
 delay or even defeat the purpose of the new, 
 takes on a special phase in the domain of edu- 
 cation. The success of the school depends upon 
 the teacher. When a new type of school is pro- 
 jected, there are generally at hand few teachers, 
 if even a single teacher, who possess the requisite 
 combination of training, experience, and a clear 
 conception of the new purpose, to do the new 
 work effectively. The problem of bringing a 
 new educational plan into full force and effect 
 is accordingly the problem of getting the new 
 purpose clearly in mind, and then of provid- 
 ing the requisite training and apprenticeship 
 for the teachers who will do the work. So far 
 as the teachers are concerned, the difficulty rises 
 even to a difficulty in the second degree; for 
 if the new work is to be widely extended, one 
 must consider not only the question of the supply 
 of teachers, but the question of providing teach- 
 ers of teachers. 
 
 For reasons which will appear later in this dis- 
 cussion, I should like now to limit my topic to a 
 very small division of the general field. For the 
 present, let us leave altogether out of considera- 
 tion the 'great majority of our American homes, 
 in which the burden of the earliest physical care 
 and moral and religious training of the children 
 will rest almost exclusively upon the mother of 
 the family, and concern ourselves simply with 
 
TRAINING FOR MOTHER-WORK 171 
 
 those homes in which a children's nurse or gov- 
 erness is employed. That is, I should like to 
 consider the question at first merely as a question 
 concerning the training of nurses for very young 
 children. At first sight, it will seem that this is 
 limiting the question to one affecting the homes 
 of the rich. I should say rather that it is limiting 
 the question to one affecting the homes of the rich, 
 motherless homes, and the homes of the very 
 poor ; for with the development of a great vari- 
 ety of college and neighborhood "settlements" 
 in our large cities, and with the increasing 
 clearness of educational purpose in institutions 
 for orphans and other unfortunate children, 
 the range of employment for such children's 
 nurses as I have in mind will undoubtedly be 
 very greatly extended. In this we find a parallel 
 in the history of American kindergartens. Before 
 the kindergarten becomes a part of the public 
 school system, it exists in two forms: as an in- 
 stitution for the children of the rich (the "pay" 
 kindergarten) and an institution for the children 
 of the very poor (the free kindergarten). In 
 more ways than one, indeed, the plan which I 
 am venturing to propose will have somewhat 
 the character of a downward extension of the 
 kindergarten into the earliest years of the life of 
 the child. 
 
 But this is not all. It is to be remembered 
 that the moral education of very young children 
 
172 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 is most intimately bound up with their physical 
 welfare. In fact, the question of survival and 
 of physical health must be kept at the front in 
 this earliest period, and the beginnings which 
 are made at this time in the cultivation of a gen- 
 erally wholesome disposition, and of those regular 
 habits in eating, sleeping, and related activities 
 which have much to do with the welfare of the 
 nervous system, are at the same time both physi- 
 cal and moral. It is accordingly desirable that 
 in training for this service we should break away 
 from the narrower traditions of the kindergarten. 
 Many good precedents may be drawn from the 
 training of nurses in hospitals and sanitariums, 
 but even such precedents must be used with 
 caution. 
 
 It is to our purpose, however, to note the en- 
 couragement which may be drawn for such an 
 undertaking as this from the history of the 
 education of nurses in this country. Within the 
 memory of those here present, the nurse called 
 in to help when the household had been invaded 
 by long-continued illness was either a neighbor 
 or a servant. Except in a few hospitals, the 
 trained nurse, as we now understand the term, 
 was unknown. The occupation was lacking in 
 definite standards. Those who followed it 
 lacked professional spirit or other esprit de corps. 
 Now these conditions are rapidly changing, and 
 the schools for nurses are bringing about the 
 
TRAINING FOR MOTHER-WORK 173 
 
 change. In the year 1901 there were 448 of 
 these schools reporting to the Bureau of Educa- 
 tion, with an attendance of 11,599 students. 
 Five years later, these numbers had increased 
 to 964 schools and about 20,000 students. These 
 schools are rapidly advancing their standards of 
 admission and of scholastic and practical train- 
 ing. Already the best of them are worthy of 
 attentive study from the point of view of our 
 normal schools, because of their handling of the 
 persistent normal school problem, that of the 
 union of theory with practice. The nurses have 
 their associations, their periodical and other 
 publications. In ten states laws have been 
 passed for their registration. In the state of 
 New York, in particular, under the administra- 
 tion of the department of education, the course 
 of training provided in different schools has been 
 unified and strengthened. If nursing is not a 
 profession as medicine is a profession, it has 
 come to have something of the professional 
 character and spirit. And the public is greatly 
 the gainer by the change. 
 
 It is one great merit of a vocational school of 
 any kind that it stamps this professional character 
 upon the occupation for which it prepares. By 
 professional character, I mean that ingrained 
 regard for standards and ideas, for special knowl- 
 edge and special skill, which marks the profes- 
 sional man ; and his readiness to put the claims 
 
174 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 of public service and of intrinsic excellence of 
 performance above considerations of private 
 gain. As compared with any kind of apprentice- 
 ship, a vocational school makes for such profes- 
 sional spirit, by combining the instruction of 
 specialists in different fields, by referring proces- 
 ses to guiding ideas and cultivating practice in 
 its connection with theory, by organizing a co- 
 herent course of training, by making a center of 
 information relating to recent improvements in 
 its particular craft. 
 
 Not only does the school prepare for the vo- 
 cation more quickly and more thoroughly than 
 any ordinary form of apprenticeship, but it 
 tends to improve more rapidly in its methods 
 and appliances. If schools for nurses of the sick 
 have raised an irregular occupation into some- 
 thing so like a profession as we have seen them 
 do within these few past years, it seems not 
 incredible that schools for the nurses of little 
 children may do as much within as brief a period. 
 It is the establishment of such schools, or of 
 special courses for this purpose in universities 
 and other institutions, that is proposed in this 
 discussion. 
 
 The difficulties to be met in the making of 
 such schools are undoubtedly very great. The 
 baby nurse of to-day is ordinarily a servant, and 
 often a foreigner chosen because her speech is 
 that of Paris or Hanover, It would seem ajs 
 
TRAINING FOR MOTHER-WORK 175 
 
 if the superficial demand were for the right 
 accent rather than for skill in the care and nur- 
 ture of the little ones. The real demand is for 
 a variety of knowledge and of judgment. Nu- 
 trition, the prevention of disease, proper care in 
 minor ailments (for the nurse for the sick must 
 be the main reliance in serious illnesses), the 
 correction of faults of temper and disposition, 
 the first steps in learning, supervision of games, 
 the telling of stones, the first hint of the mysteries 
 of religion the range of such requirements is 
 very great indeed. And since the service re- 
 quired is part physical, part educational, part 
 maternal and spiritual, there is no one profes- 
 sional superior who shall guide the practice of 
 the infant nurse. She is not, like the nurse of 
 the sick, a physician's assistant and under the 
 immediate guidance of the family's medical 
 adviser. She must take her directions and ad- 
 vice, first of all, from the parents, if they are at 
 hand to direct ; but also from the physician, the 
 pastor, if there be a pastor, perhaps the teacher, 
 if the family has taken the teacher into such 
 close relations with its inner life; and, most of 
 all, must take counsel with herself, and draw on 
 the resources which she has made her own. 
 
 No good movement ever had a beginning. No 
 matter where we may start in, we find that it is 
 already begun. I have been unable as yet to find 
 notice of any existing institution which exactly 
 
176 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 fills the role which is suggested in this paper. 
 Yet the beginnings have undoubtedly been made. 
 Professor Charles R. Henderson has called my 
 attention to two institutions in Paris which are 
 at least closely related to such training schools 
 as are here contemplated. One is the ficole des 
 Meres, which was founded by Mme. Augusta 
 Moll- Weiss at Bordeaux in 1897 and removed 
 to Paris in 1904. This school provides a section 
 for professors and women of the higher classes; 
 a second section for women intending to enter 
 household service as nurses, cooks, etc. ; a third 
 section for women of the working classes ; and a 
 fourth section for instruction in domestic econ- 
 omy and management of the home. Its pur- 
 poses are extremely varied. It is intended to 
 prepare young women directly for duties as 
 heads of families, to prepare others to become 
 teachers of domestic economy, and to give in- 
 struction to working women in such economic 
 and ethical principles as may be of importance 
 for them to understand, in practical hygiene, 
 sanitation, etc. 
 
 Another Parisian institution is known as the 
 Consultations respecting Nurslings (Consulta- 
 tions de Nourrissons) , and is conducted by Pro- 
 fessor Budin of the Faculty of Medicine of the 
 University of Paris, in connection with the 
 maternity section of a Paris hospital. These 
 consultations are intended to give to young 
 
TRAINING FOR MOTHER-WORK 177 
 
 mothers practical information respecting the 
 nourishment and care of their infants. 
 
 My attention has also been called to an ex- 
 tremely interesting article in the Nineteenth 
 Century for December, 1906, by a member of 
 the Women's Co-operative Guild, on the " Ghent 
 School for Mothers." This school, conducted by 
 Doctor Miele in connection with the Bureau de 
 Bienfaisance, was started about five years ago, 
 and is evidently carrying on a work of the greatest 
 interest. The services which it renders include 
 dispensaries for babies, a milk depot, health 
 talks to mothers, a course of training for girls, 
 and also some theoretical instruction in the care 
 of infants and practice in a number of creches. 
 
 In an open letter relating to " Unskilled 
 Mothers," Mrs. Florence Kelley, in the Cen- 
 tury Magazine for February, 1907, tells of the 
 Association of Practical Housekeeping Centers, 
 which was incorporated in the City of New York 
 in February, 1906, and does a valuable work in 
 the homes of the poor of Manhattan and Brook- 
 lyn. Incidentally, Mrs. Kelley tells in this letter 
 of the instruction provided by the County Coun- 
 cil of London for school children in cottages 
 altogether similar to those in which they live. 
 One of the Mosely party of teachers who recently 
 visited the Bureau of Education has given further 
 information with reference to this cottage instruc- 
 tion. It is carried on in the neighborhood of an 
 
 12 
 
178 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 elementary school, and gives to young girls prac- 
 tical experience, under conditions much like 
 those found in their own homes, in the ordinary 
 duties of housekeeping. 
 
 The Englishwoman's Year Book and Direc- 
 tory for 1903, the latest issue I have at hand, con- 
 tains notices of the Sesame House for Home Life 
 Training and for the Training of Kindergarten 
 Mistresses and Lady Nurses, at St. John's 
 Wood ; and of the Norland Institute in London 
 and the Liverpool Ladies' Sanitary Association, 
 at both of which "ladies are trained as nurses for 
 children." 
 
 Coming nearer home, we find at the Babies' 
 Hospital of the City of New York a training 
 school for nursery maids which has been in 
 operation for the past sixteen years. The recently 
 published report of this hospital, for the year 
 ending September 30, 1906, contains interesting 
 information with reference to this course of 
 training. At the time of this report, there were 
 27 pupils in the school. The course of instruc- 
 tion and training covers the subjects of infant 
 feeding, bathing, hygiene of skin, nursery hy- 
 giene, training of children in proper bodily habits, 
 miscellaneous subjects, nursery emergencies, and 
 the rudiments of kindergarten work. Thirty- 
 four nurses were graduated from this school in 
 the class of 1906. The following additional in- 
 formation concerning the school is conveyed in 
 
TRAINING FOR MOTHER-WORK 179 
 
 a very interesting letter recently received from 
 the secretary of the medical board of the Babies' 
 Hospital, Doctor L. Emmett Holt: 
 
 The girls received are from twenty to twenty-five years 
 of age. The course is eight months; six in the hospital 
 and two months in private families on probation after 
 leaving the hospital. Nurses receive $7 a month during 
 their training. There are trained annually about thirty- 
 five nurses. Nurses receive after graduation $25 a month 
 the first year. After this most of them receive $30. The 
 applications for nurses are greatly in excess of the supply 
 and are often as many as one thousand in a single year. 
 
 Doctor Holt adds that nurses are trained 
 in a somewhat similar way at the following 
 institutions : 
 
 Infants' Hospital in Boston; 
 
 St. Margaret's Home, Albany; 
 
 The Babies' Hospital, Newark, New Jersey; 
 
 St. Christopher's Hospital, Brooklyn; 
 
 ThePittsburg Home for Babies, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania; 
 
 and that there are other similar schools in San 
 Francisco and Buffalo. I have, however, no 
 further information with reference to these other 
 schools. 
 
 The New York Evening Post of December 
 26, 1906, contained a notice of courses which are 
 given by the Harlem Young Women's Christian 
 Association. These courses, it seems, are in- 
 tended for the training of "kindergarten nurses." 
 To be admitted to such courses the girls must 
 
180 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 be more than eighteen years of age and must 
 have had a high school education or its equiva- 
 lent. A certificate is awarded at the end of four 
 months of satisfactory study, but the full course 
 is eight months in length. 1 
 
 There are doubtless other experiments which 
 are in the making and have not yet come to my 
 knowledge. It will be found, I think, that the 
 ground is prepared for such an undertaking as 
 has been outlined above. But what has thus far 
 been done is in the nature of pioneering, of 
 scouting as it were, and the real systematic ad- 
 vance is yet to be made. It may well be believed 
 that the time for such definite advance is al- 
 ready at hand. 
 
 Just what is to be attempted and just how it 
 is to be accomplished are not altogether clear. 
 But these things seem clear at least, that the 
 training to be given should join theory with 
 practice, and that the work must be partly peda- 
 gogical and partly parallel to that of the ordinary 
 nurses' training school. For the purposes of 
 
 1 There has come to my notice, since the above was written, 
 a most interesting volume of over five hundred pages, entitled 
 "L'education domestique des jeunes filles," by Louis Frank 
 (Librairie Larousse, Paris, [1904 ?]). Chapter III, on " La science 
 des meres," contains interesting information concerning schools 
 somewhat similar in character and aim to those here proposed. 
 The author speaks warmly of the "kitchen gardens" devised in 
 this country some twenty-five or thirty years ago by Miss Emily 
 Huntington. 
 
TRAINING FOR MOTHER-WORK 181 
 
 practice, it seems desirable that the student should 
 have access to a babies' hospital, a foundlings' 
 home, a day nursery, or some other institution 
 in which there are children to be cared for. The 
 theoretical instruction can probably best be 
 given in connection with a college or university. 
 The difficulty of working out any standard course 
 of systematic training is obvious, yet is no greater 
 than other difficulties which have been met and 
 overcome in the course of our educational devel- 
 opment. The problem is accordingly referred 
 to the departments of education and of hygiene 
 of our women's colleges, and of universities to 
 which women are admitted, in the confidence 
 that, like Sentimental Tommy, they will "find 
 
 a w'y" 
 
 I look to see the problem ultimately solved by 
 such institutions as these, in co-operation with 
 hospitals and other institutions for the actual 
 care of infants, rather than in institutions of the 
 latter class apart from colleges and universities; 
 for the training which is here proposed is edu- 
 cational in its relationships and purposes, and is 
 intended to attract young women whose pre- 
 liminary training fits them at least for admission 
 to the higher institutions. It may, indeed, be 
 found that the demands of practice will so far 
 outweigh other considerations as to make it 
 necessary to conduct all of the courses in con- 
 nection with the institutions where the babies 
 
182 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 themselves are to be found, rather than in the 
 class rooms of the ordinary college. None of the 
 effort which may be put forth by institutions 
 other than colleges and hospitals to this same 
 end will be lost. The widest experimentation 
 will be needed, and the labor of the pioneer, in 
 this as in other fields, will be not only necessary 
 but also deeply interesting. 
 
 If I have said nothing as yet of the training of 
 mothers, on whom the care and culture of baby 
 children must chiefly rest, it is because such train- 
 ing is particularly difficult to compass by any 
 direct approach. However much young women 
 may look forward, in a wholesome way, to the 
 responsibilities of motherhood, I believe the most 
 of them would shrink from any course of training 
 intended expressly to prepare them for those 
 responsibilities. If such an attitude commonly 
 appears, we may declare it to be unreasonable, 
 but we must reckon with it as a fact. It is, indeed, 
 an attitude which finds some justification in sim- 
 ple human nature. It seems to me very doubtful 
 whether a course in school or college expressly 
 intended to fit young women to be wise mothers 
 of little children would have much chance of 
 success. But I do believe that a professional 
 course, intended to fit young women for the 
 vocation of children's nurse, would have a much 
 better chance of success. It is reasonable to ex- 
 pect that when such courses are well started they 
 
TRAINING FOR MOTHER-WORK 183 
 
 will be largely attended, and that those who have 
 taken them and received certificates or diplomas 
 showing that they have pursued them success- 
 fully, will find employment in abundance await- 
 ing them. Still further, it is not unreasonable to 
 hope that when the vocation of baby nurse or 
 nursery matron or whatever it may be called, 
 shall have become a well-established profession, 
 its influence will spread abroad in many desirable 
 ways. Some of these graduates will become 
 teachers of classes of young mothers in college 
 settlements and Young Women's Christian As- 
 sociations. Many of them will marry and will 
 carry their knowledge and skill into homes of 
 their own. Some young women, already be- 
 trothed, will take the course of training with no 
 other thought than that of fitting themselves for 
 the homes that are to be theirs. And it may be 
 that the special course will gradually lead the 
 way to some more general form of education for 
 the life of the home, which may find its place and 
 do its beneficent work in all our schools and col- 
 leges for women. 
 
 If I have said little in this paper of the reli- 
 gious side of the training here proposed, it is not 
 that I regard the religious side as of subordinate 
 importance. But in these earliest years, it is 
 surely desirable that any over-emphasis of the re- 
 ligious consciousness should be carefully avoided. 
 The simple and sincere suggestion of religious 
 
184 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 conceptions which may safely be attempted 
 should be joined with an equally wholesome 
 mental and physical life, and particularly a life 
 of wholesome companionships, which is the best 
 assurance of all right-mindedness in the later 
 years of childhood. 
 
XI 
 
 THE WORK OF WOMEN'S ORGANIZA- 
 TIONS IN EDUCATION 
 
 Read cat the first Meeting of the Department of National 
 Organizations of Women of the National Education 
 Association, at Cleveland, Ohio, July 2, 1908. Pub- 
 lished in the Proceedings of the Association for the year 
 1908. 
 
XI 
 
 THE WORK OF WOMEN'S ORGANIZATIONS 
 IN EDUCATION 
 
 FOR those who wish to see the National 
 Education Association represent our edu- 
 cational interests in the broadest way, a 
 peculiar significance attaches to the launching 
 of this new department. An educational work 
 of large significance and varied character, already 
 in full progress, is here brought into connection 
 with the comprehensive undertakings of this As- 
 sociation. While the responsibility for the estab- 
 lishment of the new department is widely shared, 
 I should like at this time to recall in particular the 
 part taken by Miss Mary N. Abbott, of Water- 
 town, Connecticut, who shortly before her death 
 had been laboring with great faith and devotion, 
 to bring about the arrangement which has here 
 been consummated. I saw her but once, when 
 she was devoting her best energies to this under- 
 taking, and I had never known her aside from 
 this enterprise; but I was much impressed with 
 the really religious earnestness which she brought 
 to her task. That spirit, I am sure, is shared by 
 many others, and it gives promise that this depart- 
 
188 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 ment is to be one of the most useful branches of 
 our general organization. 
 
 In the beginnings of modern schooling, a great 
 deal depended upon the labors of unpaid or- 
 ganizers and overseers, mostly women, whose 
 benevolent spirit found in the support and im- 
 provement of schools its best way of discharging 
 the responsibility of the well-to-do toward the 
 poor of their neighborhood. Those who have 
 read that interesting work, The Gurneys of 
 Earlham, by Augustus J. C. Hare, will recall 
 the conscientious devotion to the education of the 
 poor displayed by different members of the Gur- 
 ney family, and particularly by its most con- 
 spicuous member, Mrs. Elizabeth Fry. There 
 is much of the same sort to be found in the per- 
 sonal histories of eighteenth- and early nineteenth- 
 century England, and the same spirit reappears 
 in the early education societies of our Amer- 
 ican cities, in New York, in Boston, and in 
 Philadelphia. 
 
 In both England and America the upgrowth of 
 well-ordered systems of public education threw 
 endeavors of this kind into an eclipse. In place 
 of schools supported, with the greatest difficulty, 
 by private subscription, there appeared schools 
 established by law and maintained by taxation. 
 Teaching became both a professional occupa- 
 tion and a branch of the civil service. The re- 
 sponsibility for everything educational, at least 
 
ORGANIZATIONS IN EDUCATION 189 
 
 for everything in the nature of public and organ- 
 ized education, was shifted to a body of profes- 
 sional servants of the commonwealth. The edu- 
 cational societies went out of existence, as did 
 the American Anti-slavery Society when the 
 thirteenth amendment to our Constitution was 
 adopted. The contributions and the benevolent 
 activities of those who had carried the burden of 
 schools were transferred to other charities. Edu- 
 cation had simply ceased to be an eleemosynary 
 and missionary enterprise, and had become a part 
 of the ordinary administration of state and local 
 governments. 
 
 Now, it is plain to see that, while education 
 gained a great deal more than it lost by the 
 change, the loss was real and serious. Fortu- 
 nately, the professional teachers who took up the 
 educational burden were themselves human as 
 well as professional. Some of the finest devotion 
 to the welfare of little children and to the wider 
 purpose of the public weal appears to-day in 
 their activities. It is necessary to their best 
 service that as they become more professional 
 they should become more than professional, and 
 many of them have come up unfailingly to this 
 higher plane. But it takes large natures to carry 
 out so large a program, and it is not surprising 
 that it has been done with varying degrees of 
 success. The best teachers of all see most clearly 
 this need, that new ways shall be found of bring- 
 
190 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 ing to the support of the modern public school 
 some of those finer forces of our community life 
 that once made the school and kept it alive. 
 
 Matters which lie wholly in the field of science 
 - the method of constructing a bridge, of testing 
 our milk or water supply, of combating an epi- 
 demic, of determining a question of legal right 
 these things are professional; and extra-profes- 
 sional interference in such affairs would do more 
 harm than good. In education, too, there is a 
 large field of professional knowledge, in which 
 interference by the general public or even by a 
 board of education representing the public, could 
 only do more harm than good. Within its limits, 
 the professional judgment of the trained and ex- 
 perienced teacher is to be more scrupulously 
 respected to-day than ever before. Not a book 
 sh'ould be placed in the school library nor a pic- 
 ture on the schoolroom wall, no society, no 
 matter how good its object, should be formed 
 within the school under pressure from without, 
 no special method nor device of teaching nor of 
 government should be imposed upon the school, 
 unless it have the approval of the teaching force 
 within the school. 
 
 It is when we come into the field of morals that 
 every man is responsible for a judgment of his 
 own, and cannot shift it to the shoulders of an- 
 other. And education in one of its main aspects 
 is essentially a question of morals. It is a ques- 
 
ORGANIZATIONS IN EDUCATION 191 
 
 tion in which the professional point of view can- 
 not pre-empt the whole field, and in which the 
 non-professional citizen is morally bound to have 
 opinions of his own. Every public question, in 
 like manner, has a moral side. The building of 
 bridges, the conduct of dairies, the practice of the 
 physician and the attorney, these are questions to 
 which the common citizen cannot be indifferent. 
 
 We have then a large range of activities in 
 which the professional teacher should clearly 
 have the right of way, and an equally clear out- 
 lying territory, of great importance, in which we 
 are dealing, not with professional responsibility 
 but with moral and community responsibility. 
 And these two are fringed in together in an inter- 
 mediate shadow-land where some of the most 
 vital questions of to-day are found. 
 
 This new department deals with that outlying 
 field and with that indeterminate shadow-land. 
 Its relation to the schools is non-professional and 
 moral. It is to further a return to the side of 
 popular education of those benevolent and mis- 
 sionary endeavors which were once the main 
 support of popular education. But we are to 
 remember that in the intervening years the spirit 
 of the benevolent missionary has changed. The 
 spirit which did things for others for their good 
 has been transformed into the spirit which does 
 things with others for the common good. In this 
 old spirit, renewed and remade, it is to be hoped 
 
192 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 that the department you have inaugurated may 
 become a rallying point for those good influ- 
 ences in our communities which seek to find ways 
 of working for and with the common schools. 
 
 It is right that women should lead in this cause. 
 They have shown capacity for such leadership. 
 But it is to be hoped that men and women alike 
 who desire that the non-professional responsi- 
 bility of our communities for public education 
 shall be adequately discharged that all of those 
 who have a mind to make education of more 
 worth in their communities than it has been at 
 the best hitherto shall know better what to do 
 and shall do it with better courage for the en- 
 lightenment which this department can give. 
 
 You will not expect my suggestions to take the 
 form of a detailed program of topics for your con- 
 sideration. Much of your work has already been 
 blocked out by the societies that are here repre- 
 sented. Much of it must arise to meet the special 
 need and occasion. The general platform on 
 which you had met by common agreement be- 
 fore this department was organized, embodies a 
 number of the most important proposals for edu- 
 cational improvement on which the friends of ed- 
 ucation generally are agreed. In these matters 
 your work is that of bringing into effective prom- 
 inence a number of improvements in which at 
 least a passive unanimity has already been 
 secured. 
 
ORGANIZATIONS IN EDUCATION 193 
 
 I should like, however, to indicate a general 
 line of advance in the educational affairs of our 
 larger centers of population, a plan which is ex- 
 tremely simple and yet must be regarded for the 
 present as somewhat visionary. I should like 
 to see all of the teachers organized for the con- 
 sideration, from time to time, of definite proposals 
 for the improvement of the schools; and all of 
 the parents of school children organized, with 
 other interested citizens, for a similar purpose. 
 Without hampering our educational authorities 
 in any of their ordinary work, and without re- 
 lieving them of their ultimate responsibility for all 
 of the work of the schools, an informal and habit- 
 ual referendum might well be agreed upon, under 
 which all proposals for far-reaching changes in 
 the plan of education should be considered at 
 length by these two independent bodies. All 
 manner of conference and co-operation between 
 the two should take place, and certain committees 
 of conference and certain other organizations 
 should include teachers and parents on equal 
 terms. 
 
 Endless delays should, of course, be avoided; 
 but by some such arrangement as this we might 
 be reasonably sure that no sweeping change 
 should be made in our systems of education till 
 it should be fairly well understood by those 
 who, next to the pupils themselves, are most 
 concerned with the experiment. 
 
 13 
 
194 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 But such an arrangement should not only pre- 
 vent sudden and ill-considered change. It should 
 prevent long-continued and equally ill-considered 
 lack of change. We need to keep the spirit of in- 
 vention alive in our school systems, for new times 
 call for new measures. In both of the bodies to 
 which I have referred the spirit of initiative 
 should be fostered. In education as in other fields 
 the great majority of new inventions fail and 
 ought to fail. But the hundredth one or the 
 thousandth, that is a thing of great price. Let 
 the body of non-professional friends of educa- 
 tion be one in which a premium is placed upon 
 suggestions for improvement and reform. Let 
 fair consideration be given to suggestions of this 
 kind. If they are widely approved, let them be 
 passed on to the body of practical teachers for a 
 second approval, or for modification or rejection. 
 Or let the procedure be turned about, as the occa- 
 sion may demand. But let us through this means 
 have, from year to year, proposals sent up to the 
 education authorities which shall represent not 
 merely the half-baked enthusiasm of some bright 
 leader who has won a sudden following, but the 
 conviction of those who have looked into the 
 matter with care and conscience, some of them 
 from the side of what the community wants, and 
 some from the side of what the schools can do. 
 
 My own suggestion, as you see, is none too 
 thoroughly wrought out as yet, and it has not yet 
 
ORGANIZATIONS IN EDUCATION 195 
 
 run the gantlet of either a body of teachers or a 
 body of friendly neighbors of the school. I hope 
 it may have criticism, however, from both of 
 these sides. And I venture to put it forward here 
 as one of the many proposals for the good of our 
 education which you are to discuss to some good 
 purpose in this first meeting of your department. 
 
XII 
 
 THE DISTINCTIVE FUNCTIONS OF 
 
 UNIVERSITY AND NORMAL SCHOOL 
 
 IN THE PREPARATION OF 
 
 TEACHERS 
 
 Read at the Meeting of the National Council of Education 
 at Cleveland, Ohio, June 30, 1908. Published in the 
 Proceedings of the National Education Association for 
 the year 1908, and in Education for September, 1908. 
 
XII 
 
 THE DISTINCTIVE FUNCTIONS OF UNIVERSITY 
 AND NORMAL SCHOOL IN THE PREPARA- 
 TION OF TEACHERS 
 
 WHAT I have to present may be summed 
 up as follows: The chief difficulty of 
 adjustment from the side of the nor- 
 mal school arises from the fact that the normal 
 school seems to be out of the main current of 
 our scholastic life, which flows from the ele- 
 mentary school through the high school directly 
 into the university or, the other way round, 
 from the university to the secondary and ele- 
 mentary school. 
 
 The chief difficulty of adjustment from the 
 side of the university arises from the fact that 
 it has been found impossible as yet to organize 
 in the university any system of training in the 
 actual practice of teaching that can be com- 
 pared in efficiency with that to be found in our 
 best normal schools. 
 
 We are now well accustomed to the idea that 
 all grades of education in this country are to be 
 closely bound together, from the lowest to the 
 
200 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 highest. Our fidelity to the spirit of democracy 
 requires this of us, and we are convinced that 
 it is best in the long run both for science and for 
 the national life. Continuity and coherence are 
 watchwords of our educational organization. 
 
 But just because the higher grades of instruc- 
 tion are bound fast to the lower, we see the need 
 of especial care that a steady progression shall 
 be maintained in both the method and the con- 
 tent of our teaching. No grade of instruction 
 shall be allowed to lay a detaining hand of scho- 
 lastic custom and inertia upon the grade above it. 
 At no stage of our scholastic ascent shall we 
 tarry for more than two years with instruction 
 of essentially the same type or the same grade 
 of difficulty. 
 
 Furthermore, we cannot be content with the 
 standards of the past. Not only our own na- 
 tional development, but, more particularly, our 
 closer touch with the rest of the world, has shown 
 us that our standards have been pitched too low. 
 This is true both on the side of knowledge and 
 on the side of skill in teaching. In our new 
 position in the world it is not enough that we 
 win patronizing approval of our science and of 
 our school instruction from the older culture 
 nations. That new position requires of us that 
 we do our full part in determining what the 
 world-standard shall be, both in pure science 
 and in pedagogic practice. This is particularly 
 
UNIVERSITY AND NORMAL SCHOOL 201 
 
 difficult when half our teaching force is a rope of 
 sand and when the profitable pursuits of ap- 
 plied science are luring our scientists away from 
 their laboratories. But these unfavorable cir- 
 cumstances cannot relieve us of our responsi- 
 bility; and a consideration of the higher 
 attainments which the present times demand, as 
 regards both knowledge and teaching skill, has 
 an important bearing on the distribution of 
 function between normal schools and universities. 
 We are pretty well agreed that the knowledge 
 of subject-matter and skill in presentation are 
 both requisite in all grades of teaching, and that, 
 broadly speaking, the skill is of greater relative 
 importance in the earlier grades and the knowl- 
 edge in the later years of schooling. A general 
 recognition of this fact works automatically in 
 the distribution of teachers, tending to place the 
 graduates of colleges and universities in high 
 school positions and the graduates of normal 
 schools in elementary grades, with a fair mingling 
 of the two in the principal ships and teaching po- 
 sitions of grammar schools. Making allowance 
 for many exceptions, I think we should be agreed 
 that the public good is fairly well served by such 
 a distribution. We must recognize the fact that 
 high schools, of the type and standing now ex- 
 pected in our high schools, must be mainly 
 taught by those who have had collegiate or uni- 
 versity training. The same should be said of the 
 
202 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 seventh and eighth grades of our grammar 
 schools when they are taught on the department 
 plan or offer studies of secondary grade. 
 
 We need to get special knowledge and special 
 skill into their right relations to each other, and a 
 third element must be added, namely, special 
 inborn fitness for teaching. The considerations 
 which we have before us, then, range them- 
 selves about as follows : 
 
 It is of first importance that we attract into the 
 business of teaching and into our training schools 
 for teachers those who have the right stuff in 
 them, the right kind of manhood and woman- 
 hood, for such work. 
 
 It is next in importance that these persons 
 shall be well educated, as regards both general 
 culture and special knowledge of some one sub- 
 ject or group of subjects. 
 
 Close after these requirements comes the re- 
 quirement of technical training for the processes 
 of teaching. 
 
 President Alderman remarked, in his recent 
 paper on The Growing South: "The ability of 
 this generation to recognize education as some- 
 thing larger than mere learning or even disci- 
 pline, to perceive it as a great force moulding 
 national character, has caused the enlistment into 
 this field of work of young men and young women 
 of creative capacity and exalted character, who, 
 under other conditions in Southern history, 
 
UNIVERSITY AND NORMAL SCHOOL 203 
 
 would have instinctively turned to political and 
 social fields of distinction and service." 
 
 Such a condition is of the utmost importance 
 for the teaching profession and for teachers' 
 training schools of every kind. It can be brought 
 about only through the concurrence of the whole 
 set of conditions surrounding our educational 
 system. All that can be done, by co-operative 
 action of all persons concerned, will be needed 
 to turn toward education, in the country at large, 
 those who can best do the work of education. 
 
 The second requirement, that the teacher be 
 well educated, is emphasized here for two 
 reasons: First, because a teacher needs such a 
 grade of education as will give him an assured 
 place with the best educated people in his com- 
 munity, and so give to his influence in the school 
 room the added weight of the respect of the com- 
 munity; secondly, because the teacher needs 
 such a standing with his pupils that his influence 
 upon them will outlive their days of schooling. 
 There is a kind of skill in teaching, adequate 
 and successful according to the standard of 
 immediate requirements, sometimes markedly 
 successful, which nevertheless is without depth, 
 and so falls flat when it comes to the need of a 
 lasting influence in the grown-up lives of those 
 on whom it has been exercised. It is particularly 
 unfortunate when it happens, as sometimes it 
 does happen, that the most distinct and conscious 
 
204 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 moral impression is made by a teacher whose 
 skill in teaching is not balanced by impressive 
 and substantial scholastic attainments, a teacher 
 who has become a pathetic memory and noth- 
 ing more when his pupils have reached their 
 maturity. 
 
 The third requirement, that the teacher shall 
 have mastered the art of teaching, is likewise 
 emphasized here for two reasons: First, that 
 his lack of skill may not come between him and 
 his pupils, or indeed come between his pupils 
 and their rightful education. The Apostle Paul, 
 you remember, boasted that he did not frustrate 
 the grace of God. And secondly, that the young 
 teacher, particularly, shall be able to go into 
 team-work with the rest of the teaching force. 
 There is something pitifully lonesome for him- 
 self and hampering to his fellows in the position 
 of a highly educated teacher who has not enough 
 of pedagogic interest and teacher-training to 
 enable him to join hands with others in making 
 the school a school. 
 
 Now let us come back to the actual difficulties 
 of present adjustment. A normal-school presi- 
 dent said to me not long ago, "If you want to do 
 anything for the normal schools, help them to 
 get out of the blind alley in which they find 
 themselves." It was only another way of stating 
 the difficulty which was mentioned at the outset 
 of this paper. Another, a teacher in a normal 
 
UNIVERSITY AND NORMAL SCHOOL 205 
 
 school, put it in this way: "Personal relations 
 within the school are good, but intellectually we 
 are starving." I am well aware of another side 
 to the case. Individual presidents and teachers 
 of normal schools have made their institutions 
 fairly a-tingle with intellectual and aesthetic 
 interest. Strong teachers continue to go into 
 the normal schools, many of them bearing the 
 higher degrees of the most advanced universities. 
 But the blind-alley exists, not as a fault but as 
 a situation. It appears in other unattached pro- 
 fessional schools, in schools of medicine, of law, 
 and of theology. It may be doubted whether 
 an adequate remedy is to be found in empower- 
 ing normal schools to offer collegiate courses and 
 give collegiate degrees, though that plan may be 
 justified where a full course of collegiate grade 
 can be provided without detriment to the wider 
 work of the institution. The obvious remedy 
 is to bring the normal school into more intimate 
 relations with the institutions in which the high- 
 est scientific work is done, to give it an appro- 
 priate place in the university system of its state. 
 Just how this is to be done in any given case, I am 
 not prepared to say. The cases are extremely 
 various. The present disposition on the part 
 of our universities to break the undergraduate 
 course in two at the close of the sophomore year, 
 suggests that in some instances the normal 
 schools might profitably offer, along with their 
 
206 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 other courses, the first two years of the college 
 course. One incidental adjustment which seems 
 worthy of consideration is a regular and syste- 
 matic exchange of instructors between the normal 
 school and a university or certain universities. 
 Such an exchange, when it settled into an ac- 
 cepted routine, would, I believe, have advantages 
 for both of the sides concerned. 
 
 The second difficulty of which I spoke, that 
 on the side of the university, is the difficulty of 
 providing suitable practice teaching, particularly 
 in schools of secondary grade. This difficulty 
 has been partially met, in a variety of ways, at 
 Harvard, Brown, Chicago, and California Uni- 
 versities, at Teachers College, and other institu- 
 tions. It does not seem to me that it has 
 anywhere been fully met. It is comparatively easy 
 to provide practice teaching of a grammar grade 
 or in laboratory courses in the high school, but 
 for high school class work outside of the lab- 
 oratory, it is more difficult. The normal schools, 
 by their successful organization of practice 
 teaching of an elementary grade, have set a 
 standard of practical training. And strong city 
 superintendents and high school principals are 
 demanding, with good show of reason, that they 
 shall not be required to do the breaking-in of 
 high school teachers, when the normal school 
 accomplishes the breaking-in of teachers for 
 elementary schools. 
 
UNIVERSITY AND NORMAL SCHOOL 207 
 
 In the main it seems to me that university 
 authorities have not yet taken this problem seri- 
 ously. Yet it is, I am persuaded, a problem 
 which will have to be taken seriously. It is to 
 be hoped that closer relations between normal 
 schools and universities may lead to wider ex- 
 perimentation in this field. I do not look for 
 an altogether satisfactory outcome, however, 
 till the matter has been taken in hand by some 
 of our state legislatures. In a serious way, as 
 part of the educational system of the state, the 
 professional courses of our universities must, 
 it would seem, be supplemented by regular pro- 
 vision for special high schools organized expressly 
 as schools for practice teaching ; or by apprentice 
 teaching in designated high schools, after the 
 manner of the German Probe jahr; or by both 
 of these provisions with others added thereto. 
 
XIII 
 
 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION AS A 
 NATIONAL INTEREST 
 
 Read before the Department of Superintendence of the Na- 
 tional Education Association at its meeting in Chicago, 
 February 25, 1909. Published in the Proceedings of 
 the Department, 1909. 
 
xm 
 
 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION AS A NATIONAL 
 INTEREST 
 
 THERE can be no doubt that industrial 
 education is needed to perpetuate the 
 prosperity of our industries. This aspect 
 of the case has been widely discussed, and may 
 simply be taken for granted here. 
 
 The point to be chiefly emphasized at the pres- 
 ent time is that the great, dominant need of the 
 United States as regards education is the same 
 now that it has always been. It is the need of 
 a body of citizens who are free, through intelli- 
 gence and self-control. The main business of 
 American education for the future as in the past 
 is the training of our people to genuine freedom. 
 And that means a training to intelligent self- 
 direction in the paths of righteousness. We still 
 believe that such training is possible, and that it 
 is worthy of our best endeavors. 
 
 Does this imply that special training for the 
 industries is unimportant? Far from it. New 
 wine may not be put into old bottles, but old 
 wine must often be put into new bottles. The 
 
212 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 old spirit of our education must pass over into 
 new forms of education to meet our present 
 needs. In dealing with this newer education, 
 we must have due regard for sameness and due 
 regard for difference. Let us speak of differ- 
 ence first. There is danger that our new, indus- 
 trial education will be made so like the older 
 education that its distinctive values will be lost. 
 If we are not exceedingly careful, that will be 
 the result where industrial courses are organ- 
 ized in the old schools. We may get simply the 
 old book-and-laboratory education masquerad- 
 ing as industrial education. Such a fiasco is by 
 all means to be avoided, even if we have to make 
 new schools in which the new training may fully 
 establish its different character. 
 
 Let us next take account of unity. If we can 
 fully secure the requisite difference, there is great 
 gain in having the new courses organized in 
 close connection with the old. We emphasize 
 thereby the unity of our people in all of their 
 classes and employments. But if the new train- 
 ing must to some extent go into separate schools, 
 let us by all means keep those separate schools 
 in the closest spiritual connection with our gen- 
 eral system of education. The special schools 
 need such connection, and the general system 
 needs it equally. A technical training which 
 produces mere manual skill is not what we 
 want. We want a technical training that shall 
 
INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 213 
 
 educate. If our trade schools seek only to cul- 
 tivate skill, they will not contribute to the im- 
 provement of our industries; they will simply 
 turn out superior machines for a stationary 
 industry. On the other hand, if our general 
 education does not eventuate in skill, it will 
 give us a scholastic class, who can only look 
 helplessly on the progress of an industrial life 
 in which they have no part, as Sir Galahad in 
 the castle gazed upon the procession of the Holy 
 Grail. 
 
 The bond of unity between general culture 
 and training for a trade is the later development 
 of our conception of general culture. We are 
 familiar with that form of culture which takes 
 one out of the limitations of daily life by means 
 of ideas and associations which are remote from 
 daily life. This is the liberal or classical culture 
 in its various forms. Such culture is everlast- 
 ingly justified; and a training which has no 
 power to lift the learner out of the pit of present 
 sense and experience can be only a truncated 
 and inorganic fragment of an education. Where 
 vision fails the people fail. But that higher cul- 
 ture, too, is only a part, and it may work a pain- 
 ful isolation of its possessor. Now we are finding 
 ways of seeking out the hidden fire the world- 
 sentiments and world-ideas forever latent in 
 the plainest every-day life. When we have gone 
 farther and have made every common environ- 
 
214 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 ment yield up its inherent educational values, 
 then the connection between scholastic culture 
 and the trades will be confirmed and realized. 
 
 Should the state concern itself with industrial 
 education as herein set forth ? I think it will 
 be under the necessity of so doing, in some meas- 
 ure, both for the sake of its industries and, still 
 more, for the sake of its citizenship. 
 
 Should the national government have a part 
 in the undertaking? That is a more difficult 
 question, but the answer may still, I think, be 
 in the affirmative. The nation cannot be indif- 
 ferent, it cannot but have the liveliest interest, 
 where both its industries and its citizenship are 
 concerned. From the beginning it has con- 
 tributed to the furtherance of education in the 
 states, largely by grants of lands, but in the 
 case of the agricultural and mechanical col- 
 leges by annual grants in money. This policy 
 has been abundantly justified in its results. Its 
 extension to schools of a somewhat different 
 grade or character would be so slight a change 
 that it could not be called a departure from our 
 governmental traditions. 
 
 But any far-reaching measure in this direc- 
 tion should be taken with due care and foresight. 
 It should not be taken at all if the matter can be 
 adequately cared for by the several states. In 
 any case it should not be taken in such a way as 
 greatly to disturb the various state systems of 
 
INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 215 
 
 educational administration. A careful exami- 
 nation of those systems, as related to the pro- 
 posed plan for national subventions, should be 
 undertaken, and the federal government should 
 proceed in the matter only in such way or in 
 such ways as will strengthen the hands of the 
 state educational authorities. 
 
 Many interests, other than governmental, are 
 profoundly involved in the industrial education 
 movement. They must be considered in all 
 fairness, but from the public and national rather 
 than any private point of view. We cannot 
 direct the industrial education in rural schools 
 simply to the end of keeping young people on 
 the farm. Young people in the country should 
 have their fair chance for any honorable career, 
 in city or country. But country life, too, should 
 have its fair chance to make its legitimate appeal 
 to these young people as well as the life of the 
 city. 
 
 The point of view of the employers of labor 
 must be carefully considered, for the wisdom 
 which the direction of great industrial concerns 
 may have taught. But we must not permit in- 
 dustrial education to be directed solely to the 
 increase of production. That would be to sub- 
 ordinate citizens to industries. Broad-minded 
 employers are among the strongest opponents of 
 so short-sighted a policy. 
 
 The point of view of organized labor must be 
 
216 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 carefully considered. However much objection 
 there may be to the methods of any particular 
 labor organizations, it is plain to see that organi- 
 zation is better than disorganization on both 
 sides of the industrial world. Here, again, the 
 public good is the supreme consideration. We 
 cannot willingly permit the policy of trade- 
 unions to keep any number of our young citizens 
 permanently barred from preparation for some 
 honorable manual occupation. On the other 
 hand, we cannot willingly permit industrial 
 schools to be directed to the disorganization of 
 labor. The relation of school training to ap- 
 prenticeship in industrial education calls most 
 urgently for fair and thorough investigation and 
 for many and varied adjustments. 
 
 And now, just here, we come to the main pur- 
 pose of this paper. The national problem of 
 industrial education must be solved by a co- 
 operation of industrialists, politicians, and edu- 
 cators. But the chief burden of the solution 
 will be carried by one or another of these three 
 classes. The men of business and the men of 
 politics wield tremendous forces and bear tre- 
 mendous responsibilities. They are entitled to 
 the respect which these circumstances com- 
 mand. But it is of the utmost importance to 
 our national life that our educational profession 
 shall be found worthy to take the lead in de- 
 termining the course of our industrial education. 
 
INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 217 
 
 The public will be guided by our best judg- 
 ment in this matter, if it shall appear that the 
 school men and women are they who take the 
 broadest, fairest, most genuinely progressive 
 view of our position and our needs ; if they make 
 some approach to unanimity in their attitude 
 toward the newer proposals, which shall not be 
 simply an immovable and unintelligent conser- 
 vatism nor an equally ill-considered stampede in 
 the new direction ; if they devise wise and prac- 
 ticable plans for new undertakings, not asking 
 large outlay for hasty ventures, but standing 
 vigorously for well-thought-out plans of improve- 
 ment. If these characteristics shall be manifest 
 in the teaching profession of this country in the 
 face of the present situation, the solution of the 
 problem of industrial schools will be an educa- 
 tional solution. And that, from the point of 
 view of national interests, is devoutly to be 
 desired. 
 
XIV 
 THE ART OF THE TEACHER 
 
 An Address delivered at the Graduation Exercises of the 
 Winthrop Normal and Industrial College, at Rock 
 Hill, South Carolina, June %, 1908, and before the 
 Department of Pedagogy of Wellesley College, October 
 17, 1908. An earlier draft of this Address appeared 
 under the title, The Fine Art of Teaching, in The Edu- 
 cational Review for November, 1898. 
 
XIV 
 
 THE ART OF THE TEACHER 
 
 IT is a very simple message that I have to 
 bring you to-day. I wish to talk with you 
 about the ordinary work of teaching school. 
 We are spending a great deal of time and thought 
 and money in this country in carrying out a 
 large educational policy. But that large policy 
 and those large expenditures all come back to 
 this, that we are trying to put good teachers into 
 the schools and get the pupils there for them to 
 teach, and then to make sure that their teaching 
 shall be done under such conditions as shall 
 give them the fairest possible chance. What a 
 few of us may do as regards general policies is 
 a necessary circumstance. What the teachers 
 and their pupils shall do in the schools is the 
 main thing and the real thing. As soon as you 
 begin your chosen work of teaching, you will be 
 in the very thick of the conflict between light 
 and darkness, between Ormazd and Ahriman; 
 and some of us, in supervisory offices and bureaus, 
 must look on from a distance, with now and then 
 a pang of regret that we cannot share, at first 
 hand, in your toils and triumphs. For my own 
 
222 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 part, I am sure that some of my most cherished 
 recollections are those of the school room in 
 which I had the daily teaching of every-day 
 boys and girls. 
 
 There are many sides of teaching that we 
 might talk about, but I shall speak of only one. 
 For my text I am indebted to a great Carolinian 
 and Georgian whom I knew as a great Cali- 
 fornian, that venerated teacher, Joseph LeConte. 
 In one of his discussions of education as a sci- 
 ence, Joseph LeConte gave a clew to the un- 
 derstanding of education as an art. It is this 
 education-art that we are to consider to-day. I 
 mean education as one of the fine arts, having 
 much in common with others of the fine arts. 
 
 Professor LeConte, in the paper I have men- 
 tioned, used these words with reference to the 
 methods of education: "Artificial they must 
 ever be ; for education is art, and art must ideal- 
 ize, not merely copy nature. But, like all art, it 
 must be strictly based on nature. It must adopt 
 the methods of nature and improve them." 
 
 The first thing, then, that we are to note at 
 this time is that the fine art of the teacher deals 
 with real things on their ideal side. Natural 
 science insists that we shall see truly, that we 
 shall see things as they are. But art goes further 
 and tells us that we shall see most truly when we 
 see things at their best. Mr. Barrie has put it in 
 one of his stories, "To see the best is to see 
 
THE ART OF THE TEACHER 223 
 
 most clearly " ; and then he adds, "it is the lover's 
 privilege." But the true teacher is a lover of 
 children, and it is his privilege to see the best in 
 them, even the best that is not yet, but may be 
 brought into being. So a clear-eyed teacher 
 knows how faulty at their worst his children are, 
 how dirty they are and silly, how unpleasant in 
 habits and dispositions. But he knows it without 
 knowing it. 
 
 "Be to their faults a little blind, 
 Be to their virtues very kind." 
 
 That is his wisdom for every day. He does not 
 complain much of the naughtiness of his pupils. 
 But he has a genuine glow of appreciation for 
 their better qualities and for their promise of 
 future attainments. 
 
 "Come and let us live with our children," is 
 the version often given to the familiar saying of 
 Froebel. But one who exercises the lover's 
 privilege of seeing the best will be discriminat- 
 ing in this regard. He will draw near to his 
 pupils, but on the higher rather than the lower 
 planes of their being. This is what Froebel 
 himself did and what many another teacher has 
 done. They drew near to their pupils, not by 
 frivolous condescension to any mere childish- 
 ness, but rather by leading those children into the 
 uplands where they were themselves at home. 
 
 Have you never seen a teacher talking easily 
 and naturally with his pupils on higher themes 
 
224 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 than those with which they had been familiar - 
 choosing his tune, when their disposition was 
 prepared for such approach, and choosing his 
 words, that the things spoken might not be too 
 easy nor yet too hard ? And have you not seen 
 those pupils strive and strain to reach that higher 
 ground, unwilling to disappoint the teacher's 
 confidence or lose the new sense of higher powers 
 which he has awakened within them ? It is a 
 rare sight; but it may be met with if you look 
 for it, in crowded primary schools of our great 
 cities and in out-of-the-way country districts all 
 over the land. There is real education in look- 
 ing up and in reaching after something a little 
 beyond our reach. We know it very well from 
 our own experience. You cannot guide your 
 pupils, to be sure, in regions where you are 
 yourself a stranger. But a teacher who is press- 
 ing forward to things barely apprehended as yet 
 and not yet attained, may be the most helpful 
 teacher of all, through a kind of comradeship 
 of hope and aspiration. 
 
 Even in the more external matters of good 
 breeding, it is well for children to make a try at 
 manners a little above their own. And we all 
 know how good and necessary it is to keep try- 
 ing at morals a little above our own. There is an 
 illustration of such teaching as this, drawn from 
 an old-time school in the South, which will carry 
 my meaning more clearly than any general re- 
 
THE ART OF THE TEACHER 225 
 
 mark that I can make. I refer to a letter of 
 Alexander H. Stephens to Richard Malcolm 
 Johnston, in which Mr. Stephens gave an ac- 
 count of a country school teacher whose pupil he 
 had been, that teacher being Mr. Stephens' own 
 father: "He took great pleasure in the act of 
 teaching" -I quote here from the letter: 
 
 His scholars generally were much attached to him. He 
 was on easy and familiar terms with them without losing 
 their respect; and the smallest boys would approach him 
 with confidence, but never with familiarity. He had one 
 custom I never saw or heard of in any other school. About 
 once a month on a Friday evening, after the spelling classes 
 had got through their tasks, he had an exercise on cere- 
 mony, which the scholars called " learning manners," 
 though what he called it if I ever heard him call it 
 anything I cannot remember. The exercise consisted 
 in going through the usual form of salutation on meeting 
 an acquaintance, and introducing persons to each other, 
 with other variations occasionally introduced. . . . These 
 exercises, trivial as the description may seem, were of 
 great use to raw country boys and girls. . . . Cheating, 
 lying, and everything mean and dishonest he held up to 
 scorn and abhorrence. He was, so far as I know, the only 
 old-field teacher of those days on whom the boys never 
 played the prank of " turning out." 
 
 The old-field teacher, I suppose, is now ex- 
 tinct. His work, and a great deal more, has 
 fallen to the young women who graduate from 
 our normal schools and colleges and go out to 
 teach in a regular system of schools. Many of 
 
 15 
 
226 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 them will marry after a time and the more the 
 better, if their hearts go with their hands. But 
 so long as they are in the schools, they are called 
 on to practise as fine an art as was exercised 
 by the best of their predecessors in any age; 
 and that art will not be lost to the world 
 if it be carried over into the narrower and 
 deeper education of the home. President Sharp- 
 less some years ago congratulated himself "that 
 whether our poor children were learning their 
 lessons or not, it was a good thing for them to 
 come into intimate relations for several hours 
 daily with such lady-like teachers as one often 
 
 sees." 
 
 There is one way of reaching up into a larger life 
 that is not always easy for our lady-like teachers 
 themselves to learn, but w T hich they must needs 
 learn in order that they may teach it well in their 
 schools. I refer to the lesson of civic life, the 
 lesson of duty to the community and to the 
 commonwealth . 
 
 The wise woman from whom I learn much 
 every day has been troubled to see children 
 scattering papers and disfiguring trees and side- 
 walks on their way from school. And it has been 
 her dream that some day in our schools they will 
 really come to an understanding of their part in 
 the general responsibility for our community 
 life. It is easy to tell them not to do this or that. 
 May they not come to have things to do, as well 
 
THE ART OF THE TEACHER 227 
 
 as things to leave undone? If some little part 
 might be given to them in making their city or 
 town or district a better place to live, they would 
 be started on one of the largest lessons that our 
 whole people has to learn. I recall with peculiar 
 pleasure the flowers planted about the public 
 square in Scranton, Pennsylvania, by the school 
 children of that city, and other striking exam- 
 ples might be mentioned. 
 
 The life of our neighborhood, of our state and 
 nation it is a thing for which every citizen, in 
 his measure, is responsible: great citizens, and 
 little citizens, too. It is one of the things that 
 take us out of our selfish selves, and make us 
 reach up to the destined stature of our lives. It 
 is one of the ideas that should be at work in our 
 schools everywhere. Here the art of the teacher 
 comes to one of its finest and severest tests : To 
 hitch the wagon of his little school to this star of 
 our national life, and cause the little children of 
 our land to begin to live for the common good. 
 
 But now this look at some large ideals of the 
 teacher's art leads us to another characteristic of 
 all fine art, and that is its care for proportion, its 
 nice discrimination between things large and 
 small. The sense for proportion is as indispen- 
 sable in the school room as in the studio, for too 
 often we waste our time on trifles. "Good taste 
 rejects excessive nicety," as Fenelon said; "it 
 treats little things as little things." And good 
 
228 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 taste will save a teacher from some of the com- 
 monest sins of the teaching craft. 
 
 A teacher cannot afford to attain perfection in 
 any part of his work, at the sacrifice of that which 
 is better than perfection. The perfection which 
 is attainable is too small a result for all our labor. 
 It is not that which is carved to a finish which will 
 satisfy us. We want for ourselves and for our 
 children some vision of majestic, dim, unsculp- 
 tured things. We want to find our studies 
 opening up here and there a vista into some 
 unknown country and tempting us to new ad- 
 venture. The finished arch is good; but we 
 would see through it 
 
 "That untravell'd world, whose margin fades 
 Forever and forever." 
 
 There are those who would say that education, 
 like literature, has had its "age of the carved 
 cherry-stones," and that our primary schools have 
 not* yet advanced beyond that age. And some 
 would charge this over-emphasis on little things 
 to the influence of women in the schools. But 
 women have no monopoly of such influence. A 
 petty man can nowhere be more petty than in a 
 school. Matthew Arnold tried to get some big- 
 ness into the prevalent conception of God. We 
 need, all of us, to get more bigness into our con- 
 ception of education, which is surely one of the 
 works of God. 
 
 Yet perfection in the smaller things has a part 
 
THE ART OF THE TEACHER 229 
 
 and place of its own. I think we may fairly say 
 that all of our instruction has, of right, these two 
 aspects of method running through it. Here we 
 must have our work finished with exactness and 
 nicety ; there it must be sketched in alluring out- 
 lines. Both modes of treatment are needed, but 
 they are differently proportioned and combined 
 in different disciplines. 
 
 Our teachers require, in fact, that same mixing 
 of the elements in themselves that is called for in 
 their instruction. We can be patient with the 
 grand vagueness of a young teacher, full of crude 
 and glowing immensities, provided he show 
 himself able to condense some of his fire-mist 
 into a definite and ordered system. And we can 
 be patient with an old-time schoolmaster's fond- 
 ness for system, if his system have not absorbed 
 and cooled and hardened for him all of that 
 primal nebula with which we may suppose him 
 to have been once endowed. Our teacher shall 
 have system and fire-mist, both at once. Let 
 him show us a true cosmos, but if he have a 
 little, wholesome, unperverted chaos left in him, 
 we shall like him all the better for that. 
 
 You will doubtless recall this fine combination 
 of perfectness in little things with large sugges- 
 tion of the outlying, cosmic things, as you have 
 seen it in some of those by whom you have been 
 taught. The artist makes the large things and 
 the little things go together, as they belong to- 
 
230 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 gether, but each in its own degree and place. At 
 one time it is a matter of supreme importance that 
 c-a-t spells cat, that two and two make four. At 
 another time words and facts, grammar and his- 
 tory, all are subordinate things, mere helps or 
 hindrances, while the thing of import is that a 
 group of young people shall become aware of 
 some great tidal sweep and uplift, as in the Ode 
 on the Intimations of Immortality. 
 
 A class may work long, weary hours for the 
 mastery of a lesson. Then at the end of the 
 task the best thing, not infrequently, is reached 
 in some hint from the teacher of the boundless 
 range of thought upon which that little mastered 
 lesson opens out. Yet that suggestion, too, 
 would not have been possible, if the class had not 
 first learned their plain and definite lesson and 
 learned it well. So the great and the small, the 
 definite and the vague, are intermixed, the one 
 supporting and seconding the other, and neither 
 the one nor the other is overdone ; and there we 
 have in the finished work a well-ordered temper- 
 ateness, with all the saving grace of wide variety. 
 Such a work is a work of art, of one of the finest 
 of all the arts, and such a work, I doubt not, some 
 of you will achieve. 
 
 There is nothing more useful to the maintain- 
 ing of just proportions in this life than a genial 
 sense of humor. A laugh is a dangerous thing in 
 its way. It must needs be handled with judg- 
 
THE ART OF THE TEACHER 231 
 
 ment. But if it carry no sting and have some 
 genuine refinement back of it, it can do a world 
 of good. And its chief value is that it can save us 
 from exaggeration. The old builders put gar- 
 goyles on their cathedrals and we put cartoons 
 into our newspapers. Once let our young teacher 
 get so absorbed with his art that it runs away with 
 his common sense, and the comic valentine, the 
 ever-ready parody, or the surreptitious drawing 
 of the school cartoonist, is likely enough to call 
 him to himself. If he will not abuse it, the 
 teacher, too, may wisely sprinkle a little salt of 
 comedy upon the flat seriousness of his school. 
 Even the forced buffoonery of the Hoosier 
 Schoolmaster helped him over a hard passage in 
 his hard experience. I suppose the tale has been 
 forgotten in this present generation, and it is not 
 good enough to repeat. But I may repeat a bit of 
 college tradition, well known in some circles, but 
 worth the telling even if it has been heard before. 
 I fear it calls for scriptural knowledge which the 
 present generation is none too sure of acquiring. 
 The story as I have heard it is told of Professor 
 Moses Coit Tyler, and belongs to his days in the 
 University of Michigan. He was not always 
 prompt to close his lecture with the end of the 
 hour, and the boys of his class made known their 
 disapproval by vigorous scuffing with their feet. 
 One day the lecture was unusually prolonged and 
 the noise of the students was unusuallv insistent. 
 
232 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 Taking notice at last, the professor raised his 
 hand in deprecation. "One moment, gentle- 
 men," he said, "one moment"; and then he 
 added, thoughtfully, "a few more pearls, a few 
 more pearls! " 
 
 After I have tried my best to characterize that 
 paragon, an artist-teacher, and find how near, at 
 best, my description comes to a catalogue of 
 "moral virtues and their contrary vices," I am 
 disposed to poke a bit of fun even at this frail 
 paper of my own. A genuine human being, though 
 with many imperfections, is so much better than 
 any paragon ! Better, even in that center of all 
 things good and correct which is known as a 
 model school. Any one who has ever loved a 
 living girl knows that half of her charm lies in 
 the fact that he could never by any possibility 
 have invented her himself. And no synthesis of 
 enumerated elements can ever construct for us a 
 live and quickening teacher. 
 
 But I shall have to answer my own gibe, and 
 protest that this is not a paragon at all that I 
 am setting forth and not at all a creature of my 
 invention. It is because I have seen some gen- 
 uine artists and found them teaching in real 
 schools, that I am moved to tell what manner of 
 work they were doing. They were artists in- 
 deed, and for that reason my account of their 
 performance must fall far short of its vivid 
 reality. The human quality of the work, after 
 
THE ART OF THE TEACHER 233 
 
 all, is what I am seeking to bring before you, 
 and it is a human impulse, I am sure, that 
 prompts one to make such an attempt. The 
 hope, moreover, that the account will call up in 
 your thought the image of a human teacher, 
 depends upon the hours that you yourselves 
 have passed in the presence of living teachers 
 who taught with creative power. 
 
 Now, if a sense for proportion, as has been 
 said, is of the essence of an artist's work, a matter 
 of equal importance and still harder to attain is 
 the genuine artist's sense for time. If the artist 
 is genuine, he is willing to take time in order that 
 he may get the better of time, for he is endeavor- 
 ing to do a work that shall last, in spite of all that 
 time may do. 
 
 A spirit which is not the artist spirit is always 
 seeking after the newest things because they are 
 new. Maarten Maartens makes one of his 
 characters say, "Your taste is entirely viti- 
 ated, my dear, because you have no compre- 
 hension of the beautiful out-of-date." In the 
 same spirit Professor Jackman used to speak, 
 with mild satire, to his class in a summer 
 school. "You have come here," he would say, 
 "to learn the latest fashions in the teaching of 
 long division." 
 
 Be sure of this, that what is now the mode and 
 only the mode will after a while be out-of-date. 
 Whatever is new, it shall grow old. The only 
 
234 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 things that do not grow old are the things that 
 never were altogether new. Whoever has the 
 spirit of a true artist seeks to do a work that shall 
 abide. Accordingly, as regards means and meth- 
 ods, he cares more that they shall be true and good 
 than that they shall be the newest of the new. 
 You remember the lines, 
 
 "He knew to bide his time, 
 And can his fame abide." 
 
 And Lincoln, of whom it was said, was one of the 
 great teachers of the American people. Other 
 teachers may well learn that lesson of his large 
 and liberal patience. 
 
 It is difficult to put this matter just right, for 
 there is a patience that is weakness and there is a 
 haste that is timely and necessary. Dawdling and 
 loitering never were artistic processes. In fact, 
 true art is scrupulous as regards waste. It exer- 
 cises the finest economy. But it knows, too, how 
 to spend without stint, how to labor on, quietly 
 and unhurriedly, as nature brings the blossom to 
 its fruit. Even the born artist must learn that 
 perfect way, narrower than the scimitar's edge, 
 between the imperfection of haste and the imper- 
 fection of waste. 
 
 Studies differ in this regard. Some can best be 
 learned under pressure, with keen questioning 
 that calls for quick and definite answer. In some 
 parts of arithmetic this is true, and in the more 
 
THE ART OF THE TEACHER 235 
 
 mechanical parts of grammar and of history. But 
 history in its finer and deeper things, literature, 
 and the larger study of nature these must be 
 lived with, till they warm the soul and tinge the 
 thought and take up their abode in the inner life. 
 Facts are to be learned, sharply and decisively, 
 without temporizing or dilly-dallying. But points 
 of view, appreciations, attitudes of mind, these 
 are gained slowly, and for these we must learn to 
 wait. You may wait, without urging the learner 
 at all, for a week, a month, a year, and it may be 
 for many years. One day you shall see a new in- 
 telligence flash into the eyes, the morning of a new 
 life has dawned, and the teacher has received his 
 great reward. 
 
 Not only do studies differ in this regard: in 
 almost any piece of teaching there is a time to 
 push forward and a time to wait. From experi- 
 ence in the class room, I am inclined to accept the 
 view of those psychologists who say that there are 
 plateaus in the process of learning any new thing. 
 That is, there are times when continued effort 
 fails to bring continued improvement, but when, 
 if practice be carried steadily forward, the upward 
 movement after a little begins again. The time 
 of arrest is found to be a preparation for further 
 gains. It requires fine insight and not a little ex- 
 perience to put these plateau periods to their 
 largest use. It may be best to turn aside to other 
 things, to let that part of the subject lie fallow for 
 
236 GOVERNMENT BY INFLUENCE 
 
 a while. It may be best to go forward, and let the 
 upward trend of improvement set in again when 
 it will. When the children of Israel came to the 
 Red Sea, Moses said, "Stand still, and see the 
 salvation of God." But when he laid the case 
 before Jehovah, the answer came, "Why criest 
 thou to me ? Speak unto the children of Israel 
 that they go forward." 
 
 Now, there is one way that the question of time 
 enters into the inmost soul of teaching. For it 
 has to do with the personal character of the 
 teacher himself, and that is about the most vital 
 thing for any school. There are teachers, and 
 you have known them well, who have power to 
 carry their pupils with them, whatever they may 
 do. It is a power of strong suggestion, and it 
 may become even hypnotic in its degree. It can 
 produce quick and striking results, for it gains an 
 autocratic ascendancy over the pupils' minds. 
 We have all seen the warm enthusiasm which a 
 "magnetic" teacher can arouse. His personal 
 attractiveness lends new life to the school. WTiere 
 others must plod, he lends, as an old writer put it, 
 "not feete, but wings." 
 
 Now, one who has such power as this, has a 
 keen weapon which may cut for good or ill. He 
 may use it for immeasurable good. He may 
 arouse the sluggish, he may give new hope to 
 those who have become discouraged, he may tide 
 over the crisis of some lives by his inspiring influ- 
 
THE ART OF THE TEACHER 237 
 
 ence. But, on the other hand, he may work great 
 harm. He may attach his pupils so closely to 
 himself as to make them dependent upon him for 
 the incentive to all endeavor. 
 
 A test of such a teacher's work may be found 
 in the experience of the teacher who comes after 
 him. Have the pupils become more self-reliant, 
 or is their strength and interest gone with the 
 leader who galvanized them into an artificial life ? 
 The true artist in the school may have much or 
 little of the power to awaken enthusiasm, but the 
 best of his work abides. A great teacher, indeed, 
 is one who leads us to think great thoughts, but 
 the greatest teacher is the one who helps us most 
 after he himself is gone. Jesus said to His disci- 
 ples, "It is expedient for you that I go away." 
 
 But this discussion should not be prolonged. 
 It is meant to do no more than make a small be- 
 ginning on a large subject. You will soon be 
 going out into your great and good work of teach- 
 ing school. Let me bid you God-speed. When 
 Dean Colet founded St. Paul's School in London, 
 in the days of Henry the Eighth, he wrote these 
 words, "I charge the maisters that they teche all- 
 ways that is beste." Let us take his words for the 
 very different work in which you are to engage 
 and yet it is the same; and so I charge you, 
 young women, that you teach always things that 
 are best. 
 
INDEX 
 
INDEX 
 
 [NAMES OF PERSONS ARE IN ITALICS.] 
 
 Abbott, Mary N., 187. 
 
 Adams act, 52-53. 
 
 Agricultural and mechanical col- 
 leges, establishment, 50-53. 
 
 Agricultural education, Adams act, 
 52-53; and Benjamin Franklin, 
 49; Columbia college, 50; de- 
 velopment, 45-59; early interest 
 in, 46^-7; Hatch acts, 52; his- 
 tory, 49-53; Michigan, 50; 
 Michigan state agricultural col- 
 lege, 48, 50; Moor's Indian 
 school, 49; Merrill acts, 50-52; 
 Nelson amendment, 53; Penn- 
 sylvania, 50 ; training of experts, 
 54. 
 
 Agricultural societies, formation, 
 47. 
 
 Agriculture, first seed distribution 
 by Government, 47. 
 
 Alaska, introduction of reindeer, 
 130-131. 
 
 Alderman, E. A., on The Growing 
 South, 202-203. 
 
 Apprenticeship system, 48-49, 138. 
 
 Arbitration, international, and the 
 public schools, 99-109; day of 
 special observance recommended, 
 99-100. 
 
 Art, leadership of Europe, 127; 
 moral im plications, 73. 
 
 Art of the teacher, 221-238. 
 
 Association of practical housekeep- 
 ing centers, New York, 177-178. 
 
 Associations, educational. See Ed- 
 ucational associations. 
 
 Attendance, school, statistics, 157- 
 159. 
 
 Ayers, L. P., on dwindling of pub- 
 lic school classes, 159-160, foot- 
 note. 
 
 BACKWARD CHILDREN, school, 125. 
 
 Barrett, John, on commercial rela- 
 tions with South America, 141. 
 
 Bell, Andrew, monitorial system, 124. 
 
 Bureau of education. See U. S. 
 Bureau of education. 
 
 CARNEGIE TECHNICAL SCHOOLS, 
 Pittsburgh, and apprenticeship, 
 138. 
 
 Child-labor laws, 155-157. 
 
 Children, United States, some of 
 their needs, 147-165. 
 
 Children's nurses, training, 171- 
 172, 174-176, 178-179. 
 
 Christianity, interpretation, 91-92. 
 
 Cincinnati, University of, address 
 delivered at, 27-41; experiment 
 in engineering course, 138. 
 
 Cities, government, 30; higher life, 
 28-30; influence of universities 
 on, 36-41 ; influence on life, 35 ; 
 institutional life, 33; public 
 press, 32 ; public schools, 33-34 ; 
 representative men, 31-33; self- 
 respect of, 27-41. 
 
 16 
 
INDEX 
 
 Cdet, Dean, on teaching, 237-238. 
 
 Columbia college, agricultural edu- 
 cation, 50. 
 
 Compulsory education, 154-157. 
 
 Conference of governors, states and 
 territories, at Washington, D. C., 
 6-7. 
 
 Congress, influence of, 3. 
 
 Connecticut, agricultural societies, 
 47; public trade schools, 138. 
 
 Consultations de nourrissons, Paris, 
 176-177. 
 
 Cottage instruction, children, Lon- 
 don, 177-178. 
 
 Crime and education, 9. 
 
 Curriculum, elementary schools, 
 comparative study (Payne), 116- 
 117. 
 
 DEMOCRACY and education, 67- 
 68. 
 
 Democracy and religion, 71-72. 
 
 Department of agriculture. See 
 U. S. Department of agricul- 
 ture. 
 
 Department of superintendence. 
 See National education associa- 
 tion. 
 
 Draper, A. S., on number of teach- 
 ers, 140-141. 
 
 ECOLE DBS MERES, Paris, 176. 
 
 Education, allied with science, 63- 
 64, 67-68; ally of religion, 71; 
 apprenticeship system, 138; com- 
 pulsory, 154-157 ; curriculum, 
 elementary schools, comparative 
 study (Payne), 116-117; ele- 
 mentary, influence, 8-10; ele- 
 mentary schools, non-sectarian, 
 an original contribution to, 129; 
 emergence of world-standards in 
 school and university, 141-142; 
 and federal government, 21; 
 Germany, leadership, 127-128; 
 Germany, system of higher, effect 
 
 on student, 149 ; high schools, an 
 original contribution to, 129; 
 humanism, new, 114-116; in- 
 dustrial, a national interest, 211- 
 217; invention in field of, 121- 
 143; kindergarten, not assimi- 
 lated in educational system, 123- 
 124; leadership of Germany, 127- 
 128; manual labor schools, 49- 
 50; Massachusetts, 4 ; monitorial 
 system, 124; moral, in Japan, 
 80-81; New England states, 4; 
 normal schools and universities, 
 distinctive functions in prepara- 
 tion of teachers, 199-206; pub- 
 lic schools, city, 33-34; and in- 
 ternational arbitration, 99-109; 
 religious, public schools, 65; 
 religious and secular, 63-73; 
 school attendance, statistics, 157- 
 159; Sloyd system, 125; taxa- 
 tion, support of schools (Web- 
 ster), 4; teachers, international 
 comity, 140-141 ; teachers, train- 
 ing, 199-206; women, higher, 
 139-140 ; women's organiza- 
 tions, work of, 187-195. 
 
 Education and crime, 9. 
 
 Education and democracy, 67-68. 
 
 Education and the state, 9-10, 15- 
 24. 
 
 Educational associations, interna- 
 tional, 140-141; possible co-op- 
 eration between those of differ- 
 ent countries, 113-118; state, 
 co-operation, 142. 
 
 Elementary education, influence, 
 8-10. 
 
 Elementary schools, American, non- 
 sectarian, original contribution 
 to education, 129. 
 
 FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, and educa- 
 tion, 21. 
 
 Franklin, Benjamin, and agricul- 
 tural education, 49. 
 
INDEX 
 
 243 
 
 Froebel F. W. A., 124, 223. 
 Fry, Mrs. Elizabeth, 188. 
 
 GERMANY, leadership in educa- 
 tion, 127-128; system of higher 
 education, effect on student, 
 149. 
 
 Government by influence, 3-24. 
 
 Governors, conference of, state and 
 territorial, at Washington, D. C., 
 6-7. 
 
 HAGUE, The, International peace 
 conference, 99. 
 
 Hare, A. J. C., 188. 
 
 Hatch acts, 52. 
 
 Henderson, C. R., 176. 
 
 High schools, American, an orig- 
 inal contribution to education, 
 129. 
 
 Higher education, German system, 
 effect on student, 149. 
 
 Holt, Dr. L. E., on training of chil- 
 dren's nurses, 179. 
 
 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION, a national 
 interest, 211-217. 
 
 International arbitration. See Ar- 
 bitration, international. 
 
 International congress on the wel- 
 fare of the child, address before, 
 147-165. 
 
 International peace conference, at 
 The Hague, 99, 100. 
 
 Interparliamentary union, 113. 
 
 Inventions, electric railway, first 
 operated, 122 ; field of education, 
 121-143; mechanical, 122. 
 
 JAPAN, Imperial rescript, 80-81. 
 Johnston, R. M., 225. 
 
 Keller, Helen, 130. 
 Kelley, Mrs. Florence, on training 
 for mother-work, 177-178. 
 
 Kindergarten, not assimilated in 
 educational system, 123-124. 
 
 Kindergarten nurses, training, 179- 
 180. 
 
 LABOR, organized, and industrial 
 education, 216. 
 
 Lake Mohonk conference on inter- 
 national arbitration, address be- 
 fore, 99-109. 
 
 Lancaster, Joseph, monitorial sys- 
 tem, 124. 
 
 Le Conte, Joseph, 222. 
 
 Legislation, methods discussed, 13- 
 17. 
 
 Lincoln, Abraham, 234; signing of 
 Morrill act, 51. 
 
 MANUAL LABOR SCHOOLS, agricul- 
 tural education, 49-50. 
 
 Massachusetts, agricultural soci- 
 eties, 47 ; education of youth, 4 ; 
 public trade schools, 138. 
 
 Michigan, agricultural education, 
 50. 
 
 Michigan state agricultural college, 
 48, 50 ; address before, 45-59. 
 
 Miele, Dr., 177. 
 
 Moll-Weiss, Mme. Augusta, 176. 
 
 Monitorial system, success and ul- 
 timate failure, 124. 
 
 Moral instruction, Japan, 80-81. 
 
 Morality, culture, 77-96; and re- 
 ligion, 69-73. 
 
 Morrill, Justin S., and endowment 
 of agricultural and mechanical 
 colleges, 50-52. 
 
 Mothers' congress, 147, 160. 
 
 Mother-work, problem of prepara- 
 tion, 162-165 ; training, 169-184. 
 
 NATIONAL COUNCIL OF EDUCATION, 
 addresses before, 113-118, 199- 
 206. 
 
 National education association, co- 
 operation with similar bodies in 
 
244 
 
 INDEX 
 
 other lands, 113, 117-118; de- 
 partment of national organiza- 
 tions of women, address before, 
 187-195; department of super- 
 intendence, address before, 211- 
 217. 
 
 National government, agricultural 
 education, 50-53; industrial ed- 
 ucation, 214-215. 
 
 National organizations of women, 
 147-148. 
 
 Nelson amendment, 53. 
 
 New England states, instruction of 
 youth, 4. 
 
 New York, agricultural societies, 
 47. 
 
 Normal schools, and universities, 
 distinctive functions of, in prep- 
 aration of teachers, 199-206. 
 
 North Carolina, University of, ad- 
 dress delivered at, 3-24. 
 
 Nurses, children's, training, 171- 
 172, 174-176, 178-179; hospital, 
 training, 172-174; kindergarten, 
 training, 179-180. 
 
 PATENT OFFICE. See U. S. Patent 
 office. 
 
 Payne, B. R., on comparative study 
 of public elementary school cur- 
 ricula of the leading culture na- 
 tions, 116-117. 
 
 Peace conference, international, 
 The Hague, 99, 100. 
 
 Pennsylvania, agricultural educa- 
 tion, 50; agricultural societies, 
 47. 
 
 REINDEER, Alaska, introduction, 
 
 130-131. 
 
 Religion and democracy, 71-72. 
 Religion and morality, 69-73. 
 Religion and science, factors in life, 
 
 66-67. 
 Religious and secular education, 
 
 63-73. 
 
 Religious education, public schools, 
 
 65. 
 Religious education association, 
 
 address before, 63-73, 169-184. 
 
 SCHOOL GARDENS, 125. 
 
 School life, overlapping with life of 
 wage-earner and producer, 152- 
 154. 
 
 Science and education, 63-64, 67- 
 68. 
 
 Science and public service, 20-24. 
 
 Science and religion, 66-67. 
 
 Secondary education. See High 
 schools. 
 
 Secular and religious education, 
 63-73. 
 
 Sharpless, President, on school- 
 teachers, 226. 
 
 Sloyd system, 125. 
 
 Social service and science, 20-24. 
 
 South, the growing (Alderman), 
 202-203. 
 
 South Carolina, agricultural soci- 
 eties, 47. 
 
 State and education, 9-10, 15-24. 
 
 State universities, influence, 10-11; 
 influence on government, 19. 
 
 Stead, W. 2'., 116. 
 
 Stephens, A. H., letter to Richard 
 Malcolm Johnston on old-field 
 teachers, 225. 
 
 TEACHERS, art of, 221-238; inter- 
 national comity, 140-141 ; train- 
 ing, 199-206. 
 
 Th&rndike, E. L., on dwindling of 
 public school classes, 159. 
 
 Trade schools, 138. 
 
 U. S. BUREAU OF EDUCATION, 52; 
 
 and agricultural education, 58- 
 
 59. 
 U. S. Department of agriculture, 
 
 work, 52, 58. 
 
INDEX 
 
 245 
 
 U. S. Patent office, 122; center of 
 national pride, 126. 
 
 Universities, in cities, relation to 
 school system, 37-38; influence, 
 7-8, 34-37, on cities, 36-41, on 
 government, 15-20; and normal 
 schools, distinctive functions, in 
 preparation of teachers, 199-206 ; 
 state, influence, 10-11, on gov- 
 ernment, 15-20. 
 
 University, American, an original 
 contribution to education, 129. 
 
 University extension, 125. 
 
 University of Cincinnati, address 
 delivered at, 27-41; experiment 
 in engineering course, 138. 
 
 University of North Carolina, ad- 
 dress delivered at, 3-24. 
 
 University of West Virginia, ad- 
 dress delivered at, 3-24. 
 
 VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY, address 
 delivered at, 77-96 
 
 Vassar college chapter of Phi Beta 
 Kappa, address before, 121-143. 
 
 Vocational schools, 173-174. See 
 also Trade schools. 
 
 Washington, George, on influence, 3. 
 
 Washington, George, interest in 
 farming, 46. 
 
 Webster, Daniel, on taxation for 
 support of schools, 4. 
 
 Wellesley College, address deliv- 
 ered at, 221-238. 
 
 West Virginia, University of, ad- 
 dress delivered at, 3-24. 
 
 Winthrop normal and industrial 
 college, Rock Hill, S. C., address 
 delivered at, 221-238. 
 
 Women, higher education, 139- 
 140 ; organizations, national, 
 147-148, work in education, 
 187-195. 
 
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