New York State Education Department DRESSES BY ANDREW S. DRAPER LL.B. LL.D., COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION CONTENTS 1 The Mayflower : Fore and Aft 3 2 America's Educational Debt to the Dutch 26 3 The University Presidency 37 4 Address at the Inaugural Exercises of President James at the University of Illinois CQ 5 Remarks at Southern Educational Conference, Columbia, S ' C 55 6 Synopsis of Remarks at State Teachers Association, 1905, at Syracuse, N. Y eg 7 Inborn qualities in the Character of General Grant 60 8 Factors in the Making of the Medical Profession 76 9 Abstract of Remarks at New York State Grange, 1906, at Geneva, N. Y gg The Trend in American Education ox> ALBANY NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 1906 STATE OF NEW YORK EDUCATION DEPARTMENT Regents of the University With years when terms expire 1913 WHITELAW REID M.A. LL.D. Chancellor - - New York 1917 ST CLAIR MCKELWAY M.A. L.H.D. LL.D. D.C.L. Vice Chancellor - - - -- Brooklyn 1908 DANIEL BEACH Ph.D. LL.D. ------ Watkins 1914 PLINY T. SEXTON LL.B. LL.D. Palmyra 1912 T. GUILFORD SMITH M.A. C.E. LL.D. - - - - Buffalo 1907, WILLIAM NOTTINGHAM M.A. Ph.D. LL.D. - - Syracuse 1910 CHARLES A. GARDINER Ph.D. L.H.D.^LL.D. D.C.L. New York 1915 ALBERT VANDER VEER M.D. M.A. Ph.D. LL.D. Albany 1911 EDWARD LAUTERBACH M.A. LL.D. New York 1909 EUGENE A. PHILBIN LL.B. LL.D. New York 1916 LUCIAN L. SHEDDEN LL.B. ------- Plattsburg Commissioner of Education ANDREW S. DRAPER LL.B. LL.D. Assistant Commissioners HOWARD J. ROGERS M.A. LL.D. First Assistant EDWARD J. GOODWIN Lit.D. L.H.D. Second Assistant AUGUSTUS S. DOWNING M.A. Pd.D. LL.D. Third Assistant Secretary to the Commissioner HARLAN H. HORNER B.A. Director of State Library EDWIN H. ANDERSON M.A. Director of Science and State Museum JOHN M. CLARKE Ph.D. LL.D. Chiefs of Divisions Accounts, WILLIAM MASON Attendance, JAMES D. SULLIVAN Educational Extension Examinations, CHARLES F. WHEELOCK B.S. LL.D. Inspections, FRANK H. WOOD M.A. Law, THOMAS E. FINEGAN M.A. School Libraries, CHARLES E. FITCH L.H.D. Statistics, HIRAM C. CASE Visual Instruction, DELANCEY M. ELLIS THE MAYFLOWER : FORE AND AFT FOREFATHERS' ADDRESS, COOPER INSTITUTE, NEW YORK CITY 1905 IN THE POPULAR LECTURE COURSE OF THE BOARD OF EDUCATION Not much is certainly known concerning the architecture or the equipment of the Mayflower. Not even her name is mentioned in the original Pilgrim documents. No authentic description of her exists. It is surely known that she was of about 180 tons burden. The usual type of the English trading vessel of her day is ascer- tained. She was, of course, a wooden vessel. As certainly, she had sails and was propelled by wind. She was probably a " three- master." She must have been about 80 feet long, 22 or 23 feet wide and n or 12 feet deep. She was short and blocky as com- pared with our modern vessels. Doubtless she had relatively high decks, with cabins or staterooms, at the bow and stern, and a low deck in the middle, under which there were also cabins. We must forgive a young scapegrace by the name of Billington, who was one of the ship's famous company, for frightening everybody almost to death by firing off a blunderbuss in his father's cabin, when there was powder scattered about and a fire " between decks," because he unwittingly led Bradford to mention the cabin " between decks," and the fire, and the " many people " warming themselves, in the Governor's record. Very likely such kitchen conveniences as the vessel had, with storerooms, were under the main forward deck. She doubtless carried several relatively large guns on the spar deck amidships, with lighter ones astern, and probably one piece of larger caliber and longer range upon the forecastle. Of course she had several small boats and we know that the Pilgrims had a shallop stowed between the decks, which they had to cut down in order to bring along. Her captain's name was Jones. He probably had a compass box and hanging compass, for that instrument had been invented by an English cleric twelve years before, and Bradford refers to it. He could hardly have been without the crude maps of Cabot, Smith, Gosnold and other daring seamen, but he was without exact charts of the western waters. The ship carried the then new flag of the United Kingdom of England and Scotland, for it had been decreed fourteen years before by the son of the Queen of Scots upon coming to the English throne. It was the old flag of England upon the old flag of Scotland, the red cross of St George upon 2065673 4 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT the white cross of St Andrew. It was not the present flag of the United Kingdom, for since then the flag of Ireland, the cross of St Patrick, has been added. Very little is certainly known of the doings of the Mayflower either before or after her famous voyage. There is some confusion because her name was popular and was used by many English ves- sels. If a log of her great voyage was kept, as doubtless there was, it has been lost. We know that that voyage took sixty-seven days. The ship was so badly strained by storms that little sail was used. There was some alarm about safety. The ship returned from the new Plymouth to London in thirty-one days. Many of the Pilgrims were seasick and were taunted by a profane sailor who told them he hoped to throw half of them overboard before the journey was over and that then he would make merry with their goods. But before they were halfway over, the hardened wretch died with a " grievous disease " and was the first to go overboard. He went, accompanied by the Pilgrim opinion, in which we join, that it was " the just hand of God upon him." The ship was over- crowded, cold, wet and unhealthful. There was great physical discomfort as well as mental anxiety and heartbreaking recol- lections, through a surprisingly long and boisterous voyage. But the " fore and aft " is used not so much with reference to a vessel as to a history. The Mayflower in American thought is not so much a ship as an institution, not so much an instrument as a migration, and not so much a thing as a memory and an inspiration. The " fore and aft " of the Mayflower refers not merely to the bow and the stern of a ship no larger than we send every day to the fishing banks, but to the fore-warnings and the after-results of the not very large but very potential events which transferred the fathers of the Republic from the Old World to the New, and initiated a most astonishing, a most beneficent and an altogether resistless advance in the affairs of men. When this little crude and comfortless vessel reached a port and discharged her burden upon the New England coast she had made her name famous for all generations. She had brought over not only men and women whose character had been cast in heroic mold, but as their instrument she had brought also the founda- tion principles of a new and a better civilization. She opened up a new and a freer intellectual and moral outlook. She started a new scheme of government which would give the equal chance to every one. She initiated a movement which was to quicken the thinking and better the living of men and women for all time and in all quarters of the earth. THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 5 The landing, Thursday, December 21, 1620, made a red-letter day in. the splendid and fascinating story of human progress. On that day the Anglo-Saxon race first got permanent foothold upon the great western world. Other great races had been in American waters and upon the American shores before. Civilization owes much to some of them; but they came short in the qualities which impelled the Saxon stock to possess the land and dedicate it to such a freedom as the world had never known. Other Englishmen had been here before, but they had not been moved by the spirit of the Pilgrims. Jamestown was a dependency, not a colony. There was lack of wives and mothers and daughters at Jamestown. Jamestown was Cavalier in politics and Conformist in religion. Plymouth had even passed the outer gates of Puritanism into the realm of rebellion, separatism and independence. Jamestown bent the knee to the king, with thoughtless readiness, for the sake of his favors. Plymouth, with a more rational love for the motherland than a selfish spirit ever knew, quickly became a self-assertive, a self-governing colony, which would not only plant and water and enlarge English liberty in a wilderness but would save English liberty to the English realm itself. Jamestown was moved by the hope of gain ; Plymouth breathed the pure and inspiring spirit of unselfishness. One was weighted with the narrowing and doomed spirit of autocracy, and in the face of great undertakings melted away; the other, uplifted by the invigorating spirit of democracy, gained the force and fiber and balance which are the best reward of men and women who struggle, conquered the new land, and laid down the great principles upon which free government must rest to be enduring. . . It is a singular and" suggestive fact that the original home of the Pilgrims was lost to the world fcr near two hundred years. It was known that they came from Holland. Their names and their acts surely enough made them Englishmen. Scholars had every reason to believe that they came from somewhere in the eastern counties of England which lay against the North sea and had been, most deeply stirred by the war for religious freedom against the Spaniards in the Netherlands. Those counties were for long years the storm centers of religious and political-religious turmoil in the kingdom. They developed the largest religious independence and' supplied most of the English-Christian martyrs. Many from these- counties had gone over to the continent for religious and political' freedom. It was known that several colonies of these people had found their way to the Low Countries. It was natural to suppose that the Pilgrims came from that region, but for near two centuries 6 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT the Pilgrim story rested upon surmise alone. The thread of authen- tic history was broken and the ends seemed completely lost. They were found by accident. It was known to students that Governor Bradford had left behind him a history of the settlement of Plymouth. It had never been printed. The early writers re- ferred to it down to the year 1767. From that time all trace of it was gone. The historians spoke of it as lost, and guessed about what had become of it. The belief was common that when the British soldiers evacuated Boston in 1776 they carried the manu- script with them. In 1844 Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, a very able man, published a book which was but little read entitled The History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America. It was only after ten more years that some quotations in this book touching Pilgrim history, which the writer said he had obtained from a manuscript found in the library of the Bishop of London, at Fulham, led some one to surmise that the manuscript was none other than the Bradford history. Investigation established the fact beyond a doubt. The priceless value of the unprinted book was not suspected by the eminent prelate in whose possession it was. But there it was, still in manuscript form, the only comprehensive and authentic account of the Pilgrim colony in the world. The Massachusetts Historical Society, in 1856, caused it to be copied and published. Forty years later the original was generously, and with stately ceremonies, returned to Massachusetts by the English authorities through the fraternal offices of the English church and the gracious approval of the English Queen. The manuscript makes a book eleven and one half inches long, seven and one half inches wide, and one and one half inches thick. It has two hundred seventy pages. It is bound in parchment, once white but now brown and worn with age. It has been much scribbled upon by the irreverent children in the Bradford family. It is kept in a safe especially prepared for it in the State Library at Boston. The state of Massachusetts has rendered a distinct public service by publishing it in attractive form and selling it at a nominal price. No true American can ever read a transcript of this book but with absorbing interest and respect. None will ever look upon the original except with awe. for it must forever stand as the main source of information concerning the advance of the forefathers of the Republic from obscurity to the very pinnacle of world fame. This Bradford manuscript locates them at the opening of the seventeenth century at " Sundrie towns and villages, some of Nottinghamshire, some of Lincollinshire. and some of Yorkshire, THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 7 where they border nearest together." Cotton Mather, in a sketch of Bradford, had mentioned that the latter was born at Ansterfield. There is no Ansterfield in England. The loss of the original manu- script and the turning of the u upside down in Mather's copy, had befogged inquirers for nearly two hundred years. No tradi- tion of the Pilgrim exodus, could be found among the people of any English neighborhood. The Bradford manuscript recovered the trail. The " Snndrie towns and villages " were Scrooby, Austerfield, and Gainsborough, on or near the great post road from London to Edinburgh, now the main line of the Great Northern Railway. Now let us go back and see the conditions in England from 1600 to 1620, out of which these people came. It was before the truth about the solar system had been accepted. The telescope was invented, and the first four satellites of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and the phases of Venus were discovered in these two decades. It was while our forefathers were in Holland that Galileo W 7 as punished by the Inquisition for saying that the earth was round and moved in space. Neither the barometer nor the mercurial thermometer was known. The circulation of the blood had not been discovered. There were no clocks with oscillating pendulums. It was sixty years before the discovery of the law of gravitation, Newton's Principia was presented to the Royal Society in 1686. There was no knowledge of the original or prismatic colors, and none of the progressive motion of light. It was more than a century before it was demonstrated that the surface of the earth has an orderly and geological stratification. No one thought of water being composed of oxygen and hydrogen gases. Life was monotonous, slow and serious at the opening of the seventeenth century. Eew of the people could read and write. There were nobles who lacked that accomplishment. There were no free schools. Oxford and Cambridge, with here and there a fitting school for sons of noble birth, comprised the English school system for that and a much later time. Most of the people lived in cottages thatched with straw. There were no stoves: even chimneys were practically unknown. Pewter dishes were aristo- cratic inventions which promised to drive out wooden ones. Table knives were beginning to assert themselves, but fingers did for forks many long years yet. There was no china-, nor even tin- ware upon the table. The weaving was done by hand power. Friction matches were in the future. Looking-glasses were just beginning to come over from France to take the place of little 8 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT steel reflectors. Underclothing was not used. The queen had the monopoly of starch. There was not even a weekly paper in all England; and it was a full hundred years before there was a daily paper in London. There were 225,000 people in London but there was not a street light in the city for an hundred sixty years after this. There were no pavements, or water pipes, or sewage systems. Fires were not uncommon, but there were no fire engines. If one were afflicted by flame he did escape the rough hoof of a professional fire department. The conditions menaced health continually. There was lack of wooden floors and carpets ; the dirt floors were covered with rushes and the houses were often foul. Fens, forty or fifty miles long, reeked with miasm. Where the people gathered in towns the filth gathered also. Bathing was not common. Smallpox, measles and scarlet fever were thought all the same. The masses had no physicians. The death rate was one to twenty-three; now it is one to forty. It was more than two hundred years before illuminating gas, before sails were aided by steam upon the high seas, before railroads, before portraiture by instantaneous processes, before cheap postage and prepayment by stamps. The forests were great and many and the roads very bad. The few letters were carried, at irregular intervals, on horseback, about five miles an hour and for a charge larger than a day's wages. When Elizabeth died it took three days and three hours to carry the news at top speed from London to York, 190 miles. There were no steam engines for any pur- pose. Of course, electricity had not touched life with its revo- lutionizing charm. In short, very little of the conditions of life of three hundred years ago remain to us save the land, and the sea, and the sky. It was the age of faith but not of reason. Moral sense was intense and at times dreadfully perverted. To put all the people of that day in one characterization would be as much a mistake, of course, as to put all the people of our day in one class. There were four classes, viz, the sovereign, citizens, yeomen, and laborers. The larger the class the less control it had. Crimes were frequent and were terribly punished. There were more than two hundred offenses punishable by death. The sheriff was the principal officer of the crown. The gallows appeared at every turn in the king's "highway. Gastly human heads were common sights on London bridge. Life was much more than austere. The pulpit was narrow and unrelenting. The stage was coarse. Sports were gross. Social standards were not what they are now. The great Elizabeth herself was both indelicate and profane in speech. It THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 9 remained for a Puritan parliament to pass an act banishing any who would not promise to attend church, and later to resolve " That pictures in the royal galleries which contained pictures of Jesus and- the Virgin Mother should be burned, and that Greek statues should be given over to Puritan stone-masons to be made decent." If it was the age of faith, it was quite as much the age of superstition. Ordinary happenings brought the 'most grievous omens. Witchcraft was common in Old England before it was in New England. It was believed that the end of the world was near. The common life, the ordinary thought, and the political institutions were impassable barriers to an intellectual advance. The religious revolutions produced armies which broke out the roads for the intellectual and political advance. Luther almost a century before had denounced the sway of the universal church and nailed his ninety-five theses upon the church door at Witten- berg. The world knows the result. Calvin gave the world his coldly logical and thought-provoking creed. All northern Europe was in a great religious strife. The first great battle for religious toleration in the Low Countries was well advanced to its successful issue. It was a long and bloody one. The roar of the battle was heard in England and the heroisms of the Dutch inspired English- men. The English had stood for rights and fought battles them- selves before then. The refusal of the Pope to sanction the divorce of Henry the Eighth from Catharine years before had joined the resentment of the King to the tendencies of the people and made England a Protestant country. The Puritan armies were gathering for all that Puritanism now implies to us. If the England of the beginning of the seventeenth century was ignorant and superstitious, it was by no means insipid. If the great Queen who had ruled more than forty years was as vain and voluptuous as her mother, Anne Boleyn, she was as daring and aggressive as her father, Henry the Eighth. If she lied, she held the exceedingly convenient theory that the word of a queen was not to be kept unless doing so would, as she viewed it, pro- mote the ends of the state. If she swore in a way to abash the troopers of her armies, she doubtless imagined that it had to be done and that whatever queens did they should do right royally. Any woman who in that day could gather three thousand fine gowns was not lacking in the spectacular or in impressiveness. Any woman who could govern her own kingdom completely, and at the same time half govern the kingdoms of France and Spain and Holland was not lacking in assurance, or in force, in sagacity IO NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT or in statesmanship. Whatever else she was, she was a self-reliant, an undaunted, and a- devoted English queen. .And the people were not lacking in spirit, either. Their tradi- tions inspired them: the faith of their leaders made their acts sublime. Their history ran back to great deeds of arms. They had slender ideas of constitutional rights, but they knew what the Great Charters meant: their fathers had put their hands to the hilts of their lumbering old swords in the very presence of the king more than once, and they would do much more when Elizabeth was gone and a weaker monarch was in her place. The Almighty was stirring these hardy people. Men of genius were coming out of the common herd. Those were the years that produced Bacon and Spenser, Sidney and Hooker, Raleigh and Shakspere. The world was soon to know that it produced statesmen and military captains too. And it produced men who could follow with terrific and fateful force, as well as men who could lead. Naturally the northern and eastern counties felt the quickening impulse first. Things' are always moving in Scotland. There was much then doing in Scotland. John Knox had been preaching sermons and printing books and Andrew Lang had told James the Sixth that there were two kingdoms in Scotland and that although he was the king in one he was only a very ordinary member in the other. There was even more doing in Holland. There was much going and coming across the North sea, and it was telling upon the thought of the northeastern counties. Brave little Holland had been fighting Spain and the Inquisition for thirty-five years. An hundred thousand of her sons had laid down their lives for religious liberty. But. thank God, she was succeeding. She was driving the tiger back to his lair. The dread work she had been doing in recovering her northern shores from old ocean and in driving the most dangerous military empire of a thousand years from her southern borders, was making great men and women. They were celebrating their victories by establishing free schools : they were setting up universities upon the little fringe of land they had recovered from the ocean and dedicated to freedom with their best blood. Religious freedom was bringing political free- dom. Political freedom was developing material resources and industrial capacity. The manufactures and commerce of the Netherlands had become first in the world. Spain was not the enemy of Holland alone. An hundred years before. Columbus, in her name, had discovered America. She had become the most powerful kinedom upon earth, and indulged in dreams of world conquest. She was thinking: of world empire. THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT n She was subjugating all the world by methods so horrible as to deserve the execration of mankind for all generations. All Europe became involved. It was the kingdom of Spain and the Pope on one side, and England, France and Protestantism on the other. Holland received the severest blows because she presented the most intrepid front. When William the Silent appealed to Elizabeth for aid she promised it as she did to Henry of Navarre, but she toyed with them both. There was no thought of keeping the promise unless the time should come when it was necessary to strengthen Spain's other enemies in order to keep Spain out of England. That time did come and the Queen dispatched to Holland six thousand troops gathered in the eastern counties. In time they returned and brought back a new knowledge of war and a new and better knowledge of peace, of industries, and particularly of religious and political freedom. Elizabeth also brought over wool- carders and weavers, and other skilled workmen from Flanders, to help on English manufactures. In all this she was unconsciously ripening the eastern counties for revolution. Men and women grow through their work. Labor quickens the thinking and clarifies the moral sense. The thinking and the moral sense force an advance. If resisted they start a revolution. When Henry the Eighth parted company with the Pope, who justly, kindly and courageously refused his divorce, he went about setting up a more accommodating church establishment of his own. Creeds or manners of worship, or protests against them, meant little to him. It was simply a question of kingly or political expediency. He tried to use the Protestant movement for his own ends. The result was an English Protestant state church, and a very great, a very rich, and a very autocratic one it soon became. Protestantism was for half a century a direful and continuing tragedy. Its life was probably saved through its alliances with the kings. It is not so strange that it came to take on kingly ways. Its cathedrals and vestments became so magnificent, its ceremonies so formal, its demands so extravagant, and its power so subversive of liberty that protests arose out of the ranks of the Protestants. These became vehement and the martyr fires were lighted. Out of these protests and out of these fires came Puri- tanism, as noble a spirit as ever breathed among men in troublous times. Its first outbreak was of course in the eastern counties. What historic ground those English eastern counties are ! Up and down their fair meadows, where the walls and the hedges stand in such dignity and peace, over the beautiful landscapes which the 12 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT red poppies color so gorgeously Briton, and Celt, and Roman, and Saxon, and Norman, and Teuton, and Gaul have shaken the very earth beneath their feet in terrific contention. Here imposing Roman walls yet stand in mute testimony of a mighty world- power outdone by the pertinacity, the steadiness, and the heroism of the Saxon. Here great Norman churches yet bear splendid proof of the mighty qualities of a hardy people who ruled Britain for four hundred years, in the end to be absorbed into the British life. Here the hardiest manhood of hardiest nations had combined in the evolution of a yet greater people. They were ripe for great events. They were the first to see the new lights of a new liberty across the German ocean. The impulse sent many of them across that ocean to a freedom not yet ripe in the motherland. Singly and in companies they went over to gain it. But, aside from one immortal company, they who stayed accomplished more than they who went, for they organized a revolution : they struck off the head of a king; they set back the prerogatives of the throne to the mark fixed by the Commons in the Parliament House ; and they secured the new and yet greater liberty for all English colonies, for all time, in all parts of the world. Elizabeth, too, just like her father, played fast and loose with religious questions. She was doubtless devoid of religious feeling. Her diplomacy enabled her to keep her kingdom together through the peril of outside foes, and even after the destruction of the Armada and , the removal of danger from without, her sagacity availed her to the end of her reign. But to her credit be it said that she had the wit to soften the persecutions and consent that " heretics " might move out and carry their " heresies " along with them. When she died in 1603, the man, the people, the conditions, and the policies came together which quickly involved the kingdom in a great conflagration. James, the son of Mary of Scotland, who succeeded the woman who had beheaded his mother, was something of a student and more of a pedant. Of course he was cursed with the nonsense which possessed all the kings. In his view a king ruled by right divine: he claimed the attributes of the living God: he thought he had power to make and unmake laws without being bound to obey them : the duty of his subjects was passive obedience to his will. He also went about shaping the church to his own notions, that it might give strength to his throne. He coerced opinions, sharpened persecutions- and forbade emigration. His pedantry unwittingly did the Puritans and all churchmen a very great service by giving them a new version of the Bible in English. It quickened THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 13 their faith, and became the law of their lives. It intensified in- dividualism. It put God yet higher above church and state. It made the right of private judgment supreme, a cardinal doctrine of their faith, a thing to be upheld, as a matter of course, with their lives. It hastened the revolution. The issue was soon on. Men lined up in sets and factions, in parties, and soon in armies, and the division lines were the same in the church and in the state. There were three of these parties. First, there was the Royalist party in the state, the Conformist party in the church. It was the party of the King. With coddling and flattery it upheld his most extravagant assumptions. It was the party of the bishops, and stood for intensifying the ceremonials and adding to the magnifi- cence of the church. It bound throne and church together and made king and bishop one. Second, there was the party of the opposition in the state, the nonconformists in the church. It was the reform party. It was opposed to regalia, and ceremony, and ostentation. It was for purifying things with a vengeance, but for staying in the church and doing it there. Its members came to be called Purists or Puritans. It is true that its creed was politi- cally accommodating quite as much as religious. It was only, up to its lights. It was not for separating the church from the state. It was for simplifying worship and for purifying the church. But this party, as much as the other, was for controlling the state and for being controlled by the state. A new force came into the world. Puritans accomplished what they undertook. They came to exceed all expectations. And, truth to tell, when they did they fell into some of the very things they had complained of before. They remind us of people we ourselves have seen. Perhaps they remind us of everybody but ourselves. The rank and file were rude and unlettered, narrow and austere men. They had much yet to learn and their descendants have since learned much. They were not free from faults, but their faults were on the outside. They were jeered in their day, and they have been jeered in ours. But they were sound at the heart. With prayer in the camp and song in the saddle, they rode rough- shod over king, and bishop, and aristocracy together. They did much which they might better have left undone. But they did more that religion and liberty had to have done. It is needless to say that here was the great political party and here the mighty army that changed the courses of English history. Then as is usual, there was the small third party. It differed more radically from the other two than thev differed from each 14 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT other. It was English in feeling and purpose, and wanted to remain such, but it was bent upon genuine and complete religious freedom. It was against the king because it believed he usurped _English liberty. It was opposed to a national church because it thought the church should be wholly independent of the state. It had no favors to ask ; and it had no thought of conquest ; no care to control. It believed the established church inherently wrong, and beyond reform. It looked upon the crown as a wholly invulnerable power in the kingdom. It stood for all that the Puri- tan party stood for, and more : for generosity, for toleration, for government on a basis that would live and let live. It knew little of politics and cared nothing about place and power. It did not lack the fighting qualities of Puritanism, but believed it not worth while to fight for the reorganization of a state church which would not cease to be a state church after reorganization. The Brownists, or Separatists, as these third party people were called, were ripe for complete religious freedom now, and because they thought they could get it in no other way they were ready to separate from the English church and the English people and at once cut off associations which they held most dear. Wherever they went, they hoped to carry whatever they loved that was under the English flag, and there was much, but whether they could do that or not, they were bent on separatism because that was the only door to full religious and political freedom. They would go in sorrow ; but their faith made them go. Breeding and environment certainly have much to do with life. It has taken more time than was intended to learn the conditions and the thinking out of which our American forefathers came. We learn quite as much of them as we are likely to find 'out other- wise, when we see that they came out of these hard conditions, out of this rugged people, out of these ultra eastern counties, out of all this turmoil, persecution and suffering, out of this yearning for religious liberty, out of this courage and heroism, out of this small, despised, sane, pious and independent third party in the politics and religion of the English realm. The center of the separatist movement in England was in the region where the counties of Lincoln, York and Nottingham corner together. Here are a dozen small villages, no larger now than three hundred years ago. They are about four hours, and one hundred fifty miles, from London. In these villages a separatist church, afterward the Pilgrim church, was organized in the dawning days of the seventeenth century. Its being was known only to its members. Thev worshiped in secret, for they dared not openly. THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 15 For years its members threaded their way along the bypaths and across the meadow to one house and then to another to satisfy their souls in Christian concourse. The most common meeting place and doubtless the residence of the most members, though probably not the largest village then, and certainly not now, was Scrooby. The American visitor can not but wonder that so small a place could have been the central home of the Pilgrim company. In 1.890 it had a population of two hundred nineteen. Bawtry, one mile, and Austerfield, two miles to the north, with Gains- borough, twelve miles to the east, were well represented in the movement. This last named little village, Gainsborough, is the " St Oggs " of George Eliot's Mill on the Floss. From this same region another congregation of Separatists, under the pastorship of Rev. John Smith, or Smyth, had preceded the Pilgrims to Holland, and settled in Amsterdam. Bradford says of them, " But these afterwards falling into some errors in ye Low Countries for ye most part, buried themselves and their names." Still other English colonies had crossed the North sea and estab- lished churches in the Netherlands : but they have wholly disappeared from history. The congregation of most interest to us decided to go to Holland in 1607, four years after the succession of the pedant king. This congregation was composed of very plain people. Bradford, as his manuscript abundantly proves, was a very well educated man. He had had some experience in the public service. William Brewster had been an undergraduate student at Cambridge. The portrait of but one member of the Mayflower company has come down to us : that of Winslow in the State House at Boston. He did not come from the Pilgrim district, but was a young printer from London, and his brother-in-law, Degory Priest, a hatter; Isaac Allerton was a tailor ; William White a wool carder ; Samuel Fuller a weaver; most of the others were farmers and laborers. A ship was hired and a day appointed for departure from the port of Boston, forty or forty-five miles away. Though they could not remain and worship as their consciences led, yet to go away was to violate the law and the King's command. Elizabeth had the sagacity to allow " heretics " to go out of the country ; James forbade it. After all were on board the master betrayed them into the hands of the King's officers, who rifled them and otherwise subjected them to the sorest indignities. They were thrown into prison for a month ; then the greater part were sent back to their old homes, in popular disgrace, in times of great stress and danger. Seven were bound over to the assizes. It is strange that none were hanged. We know that not long before three Separatists l6 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT were hanged for nothing but their faith, and that the King con- gratulated himself upon having suppressed the sect by the hangings. The next year they secretly bargained with a Dutch shipmaster to take them from a point on the coast remote from any town. The women and children and goods were sent to the place by a round- about way, in a small boat, down the Idle and the Trent rivers. The men walking across the country reached the appointed place first and went aboard the vessel. A storm arising, the master moved out into deeper water ; before the women came the plan was discovered, and the Dutch master put to sea to escape arrest. The women and their little ones, in great sorrow and terror, were taken by the constables, and for weeks were carried from one place to another. They had no homes to be sent to. It was hardly a crime to follow husbands and fathers. In time the officers were glad to be rid of them, and they were allowed to go as best they could. After months of the sorest trials, the families and company were reunited in the Dutch city of Amsterdam, then the first com- mercial city of the world. Here they lived a year. They differed from the Separatist con- gregation which had gone before them from Gainsborough to Amsterdam. That congregation had in the meantime been led over from Calvinism to Arminianism. This, of course, was unthinkable to the Pilgrims. Because of this, and of dissensions in the other English churches there, and to avoid controversy with other people, they determined to move. John Robinson, their great pastor, had determined their attitude with a piety which does him credit, and he also defended that attitude with a sagacity which shows that he was an unusual man. But they wanted Christian quietude. Leyden attracted them. It was the most beautiful city of Holland, forty miles from Amsterdam, with a university and a population of a hundred thousand people. Two years later, May 5, 1611, a house and lot were conveyed to Robinson and three others who were members of the congrega- tion. The fact that the title was taken to four persons jointly indicates that it was something more than a residence. It was doubtless the church and the residence of the pastor combined. It must have been quite a pretentious house, for the purchase price was something like $12,000. It stood between St Peter's church and the canal, and almost under the shadow of the Uni- versity of Leyden. which was established in celebration of the Dutch victory over Spain through the cutting of the dikes. As things went in those days, the colony was evidently thrifty and THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 17 prosperous. The Leyden records are not lacking in proof that they were respected. Hard investigation by students has thrown some light on the eleven years residence in Leyden. The homes were mostly in one neighborhood. Robinson and Brewster did some work in the uni- versity. Their stay in Holland was nearly identical with the period of the truce which the valor of the Dutch arms had forced Spain to make. The country, for the first time in a generation, was at peace. The Pilgrims were at peace, too. They found work and did it. They prospered, met their obligations, and were respected. They avoided contention. They set up a church without inter- ference and worship was entirely free. When put to the test, they practised what they had preached. There was a Scotch Pres- byterian congregation in the city. They had fellowship with it. They received English Walloons and French Huguenots into their membership. Better still, their distinct opponents, members of the Church of England, were received into fellowship. Here was material prosperity and religious peace such as they had never known before. How grateful it must have been to them ! A matter of considerable significance has been brought to light by the English records. William Brewster and Thomas Brewer set up a Pilgrim press in Leyden. Brewer furnished the money, and Brewster some of the brains and a large part of the nerve. They printed some literature, secretly and anonymously, upon the right of worship, and the usurpations of kings, and sent it over to England and Scotland in beer hogsheads. They knew how to make literature and how to put it where it would do the most good. The English King would doubtless have preferred that the hogsheads had contained what they were made for. Indeed, dyna- mite would have pleased him quite as well as Separatist literature. He found it out. In a fury he demanded that the Dutch officials should stop this business, and arrest and send over to him the men who were guilty of it. The Dutch authorities had some need of and stood in some fear of this English King, but the Dutch could always be exceedingly deliberate when they would. There was a formidable and pretty nearly interminable diplomatic cor- respondence. But the frenzy of the King finally forced action. Then the Dutch seized the type, but allowed the man to escape. Brewster was a fugitive for a year, and was never taken. Once when the opportunity did offer they sent a drunken bailiff after him. and the instrument of the law very appropriately brought back the wrong man. The modern methods of Scotland Yard or the Metropolitan Police were not employed. Brewer was im- l8 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT prisoned for a year. But he was quite safe and well fed in a prison of a people who had known what it was to stand in need of rescue from religious persecution themselves. The demands of the English king for his delivery to English officers were many and ferocious but the Dutch found legal obstacles in size and numbers which do them credit. Dutch sympathy and good heartedness and Dutch wits, as well, very likely saved the spilling of this Pilgrim blood. They had in Leyden what they most wanted peace and quiet but in time a new menace developed and a new situation confronted them. In the eleven years they did not much increase in num- bers and the hour was at hand when the war with Spain was to be resumed. Bradford says " There was nothing but beating of drums and preparing for war." It was quite possible that -Spain might yet triumph and then their situation would be worse in Holland than in England. In any event they were more than likely to lose their identity as a society and a church and be swallowed up and obliterated in the Dutch life. Their children began to have ideas and outlook wholly unlike their own. Some of those children were already intermarrying with the children of the Dutch. " We were likely to lose our language and our name of English." Their love for the motherland and for the funda- mental rights guaranteed by the English constitution which their fathers had wrested from the kings in the Great Charters did not abate. They mourned because of " the little good we did or were likely to do the Dutch in reforming the Sabbath," and they longed for the more general and possibly more enduring civic institutions which they knew the English flag ought to imply. Some of them wanted to move again, and to a place where they could have and could themselves interpret and administer the English law without menace from either an alien people or the selfishness and officialism of the English King. About this move they were not agreed. They discussed the mat- ter " not rashly, in a distracted manner, but upon joint and serious deliberation, often seeking the mind of God in fasting and prayer." They did not agree. They divided in nearly equal parts. It was not in anger. They had no acrimonious troubles. Winslow says, and his word is conclusive. " Never people upon earth lived more lovinglv, or parted more sweetly, than we the church at Leyden did." Half of them initiated arrangements to go to the English colonies in America, as yet unoccupied save by savages. Perhaps if all went well the other half would join them by and by. Each com- THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 19 pany was to be a church by itself but membership was to be inter- changeable, '" without further dismission or testimonial " they could go or come at their pleasure. Not many of the other half ever joined them. They did disappear in the Dutch life. After the death of Robinson, five years later, their organization disintegrated. After twenty years more nothing is known of them. There is no trace of their English names in Leyden or Amsterdam today. The half who came over the sea ventured splendidly and suffered un- speakably, but they cut their names deep on the scroll of the immortals. Of the negotiations and the bargains for the " Speedwell " and the " Mayflower," of the final farewells, the disappointments and discomforts consequent upon the wretched condition and the aban- donment of the " Speedwell," of the sufferings on the voyage, and of all the incidents, and particularly of all the surmises and infer- ences which any student may find in the literature of the subject, we can not stop to speak. It was the younger, more ambitious and venturesome of the Leyden church who moved to New England. Nearly all were below middle life and so far as is known but one couple was above fifty years of age. It was a winnowed company. Again and again, in England, at Amsterdam, in Leyden, upon the turning back of the " Speedwell," they had gone out from others and left the less resolute ones behind. But for the youth, hardiness, faith and determination of the expedition it would have wholly failed and probably utterly perished. There were one hundred and two passengers upon the May- flower. One died at sea. A child was born upon the ocean and they called his name " Oceanus." The young wife of Governor Bradford, only twenty-one years of age, was drowned and three others died, and another child was born in Plymouth harbor while the place of embarkation and settlement was being determined. All told there had been one hundred and four but deaths and births made the number ninety-nine. At the landing there were seventy-two males and twenty-seven females. Of these, twenty-four men and eighteen women were heads of families. There were twenty-two sons or male relatives and ten daughters or female relatives in these twenty-four families. Clearly the families were not large; the parents were yet young. There were fifteen single men who came apart from their families. There were fourteen males and one female classed as servants or workmen. The start from Leyden was in July, and from Old Plymouth in September. The landing at New Plymouth was in December. 20 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT They were transplanted from bright summer in the Old World to stern winter in the New, from the comfortable homes of a settled and attractive city to a barren, a rock-bound, and an ice- bound coast. They laid out " the street " where Plymouth looks out across the bay to the northeast. Now it is " Leyden street." On either side they built their crude cabins. Nearest the shore they placed the " Common House," and on the hill, beyond the " sweet brook," they lifted the structure which was to be fort and church together. Next to it, for obvious reasons so far as the fort, but not the church, was concerned, was the abode of Captain Standish. There was little room in these crude cabins, but there would soon be more. Hardy as the forefathers were, many could not with- stand the sorrow and the cold. In the first year thirty-eight males and fifteen females died. It was more than half their number. Of these, thirteen were husbands and fourteen were wives. The deaths of fourteen of the eighteen wives is suggestive. None of the daughters died and but three of the sons, and these sons were in two families in which the parents perished. It is not at all hard to believe that these mothers sacrificed themselves in order that their children might live. Of the 24 households four were completely obliterated. Nine husbands and wives found burial together. Five husbands had been left widowers and one wife a widow. But three couples remained unbroken and but two were not called upon to mourn a member of their families gone. Five children lost both parents, three others were made fatherless, and three more motherless. With old ocean behind and the wilderness in front, and savage life all about them, and grim death continually among them, the spirit of the colony never gave way. Before the Mayflower started on her return voyage at the middle of April forty-seven of them had died, but not one of the survivors turned back with the returning vessel. Again they were separated and winnowed. While they cast furtive and sorrowing glances to the sails that were sinking beneath the eastern sky, the resolute outlook was" to be westward. A new nation had gained foothold in the New World. There is no doubt of the intention to make the landing further south although there is some uncertainty as to why the purpose was not realized. Both the Dutch and the English desired this colony upon their New World soil. The colonists themselves in- clined to the English side and had procured a charter for a situa- tion upon English soil, but to the south of the " North " or " Hud- son " river. Finding themselves out of their own, if not of the THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 21 Captain's, reckoning, and believing that they were outside of the rule of the English law, they made a written, an independent and a self-dependent compact of government, in the cabin of the May- flower, and forty-one men signed it. It was the first pure democ- racy with a written constitution in the world. Bancroft has said that it was the birth of constitutional liberty. For some years they held their goods and labor in common. They had mortgaged their future to serve the world. For their transportation they assumed a debt which they were long years in paying but which they in time discharged to the uttermost farthing. We can not dwell upon the minor incidents of the splendid story. Life was earnest, severe, unrelenting; was borne steadily and buoy- antly. Labor began to be rewarded. Quietude prevailed. Num- bers slowly augmented. Spirit and purpose came out of the gloom. Institutions gradually developed upon unique and enduring lines. That spirit has become the spirit of America. Those institutions have enlarged into the distinguishing institutions of the Republic. In ten years five hundred people had gathered. Some relations with the Indians and with the Dutch at the mouth of the Hudson had been -established. In another ten years an additional five hundred people had gathered and other little villages began to show. These last ten years were the years in which Charles governed England without a Parliament, sharpened persecution, enlarged emigration, prepared the way for a revolution, and led on fatefully to his own tragic doom. When the Long Parlia- ment resumed government in the name of the people, English immi- gration to New England almost ceased. No other immigration than English had really commenced. So the little colony grew but slowly after 1640; but when it was fifty years of age a dozen little settlements were on the map. But the tyranny of the King had wrought other results irr America than the sending of a few more Separatists to the little colony at Plymouth. In the second decade of its struggling life a much stronger English settlement had been made forty miles up the bay, where and from which the city of Boston has since grown. Tn that period quite twenty thousand English men and women had made their homes upon the shore of the upper bay. They were not only much stronger in numbers than the people at Ply- mouth, but, man for man, they doubtless averaged stronger in wealth, in education, and in the power of material accomplishment. Thev certainly outdid Plymouth in their monarchial tendencies, in their aristocratic proclivities, in their aptitudes for managing 22 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT things, and in their spiritual fanaticisms and frenzies. They were Puritans, and like the Puritans in Old England they were Pro- testants against and still the adherents of the English state church, the opposers of the English King and yet the supporters and defenders of the English political system. If we grasp the religious and political situations in Britain at the time of the first migration of the Pilgrims to the Nether- lands, we will the more easily understand the distinctions and the relations of these two English colonies upon the rock-bound Massa- chusetts coast and the ensuing course of political and religious history in America. Between the Puritan and the Pilgrim was little or no difference so far as religious beliefs or theological philosophy were concerned. Both were the products of Calvinism and of repeated revolutions and reformations. Their differences related to forms, ceremonies, ^methods, and to freedom of thinking and independence of action. "But these differences comprise the fundamental and distinguishing -'characteristics of the American nation in the world. The Puritan movement was political more than theological. The inevitable opposition which always develops to the government in a constitutional system took on the feelings and the forms of Puritanism in the British kingdom. The Puritan protested against "the claims of the kings and the doings of the King's party in the -state and in the state church. But he had no thought of leaving ithe kingdom or separating from the church. He was for con- trolling both. He wanted to march at the head of the procession. He wanted to determine where the procession should march, how it should dress, what it should think, and who should be in it. When he could do that he was content ; and when he did it he did much as his Royalist opponents did when they had the power to do it. The Puritan had no understanding of the equality of all men before the law. That was beyond his limitations. As far as he could get in that direction was the equality of Puritans, or, indeed, to be more exact, the equality of those who were in the higher classes, for there were higher and lower classes in the Puritan theocracy. The Puritan knew little of religious freedom. His creed was coldly intellectual and it was not softened by the experiences of his life. His visage was long, his manners strained, his religion exact and often narrow, and his thinking unrelenting. His battles cast him in the heroic mold and made him an effective instrument in changing world history. THE MAYFLOWBR: FORE AND AFT 23 He was certainly a bigot, a timely and necessary bigot, but a bigot all the same. He had his work .to do and he did it. It was his mission to clear the way for something better. He knew little of freedom and democratic institutions but he opened the road for religious freedom and democratic institutions. He wrought even better than he knew. When he had done his work he had to make way for the more tolerant spirit and the wider outlook which his singing, his praying, and his fighting had made possible. The Puritan was not, by -any means, exclusively of English blood and English speech. He developed almost coincidently in other lands. Wherever he developed he was the product of the same causes and the forerunner of the same ends. In many ways he was the spiritual counterpart of, and very likely his religious qualities were in a measure fixed by those of, the Jesuits of the Roman Catholic church. In whatever land he grew and whatever speech he used, he followed his faith and he acted up to his lights. Now a more tolerant and enlightened people than could live in his day may well be predisposed to lift their hats to him. The Pilgrim was a Puritan, but he was more. He was opposed to the English church because he was opposed to any state church. Therefore he had separated from it and he never expected to go back. He held that kings and parliaments had nothing whatever to do with the free flow of religious worship. That was a matter for the individual man and for religious bodies voluntarily asso- ciated together. He was modest, plain and democratic in his own proceedings, but he was for all men and all churches acting upon their own beliefs and following their own sweet will. At Leyden he received members of all churches into his communion. At Plymouth he did the same. He was not carried away by frenzy; there were no hangings for witchcraft by the Pilgrim. He did not lose his head over " Papists," "Anabaptists," and whoever differed with him in opinion. He was hospitable to all. The beleagured Baptist found succor at his door. A Catholic mis- sionary speaks in his journal of Bradford's kindness to him, even of his preparing a fish dinner for him because it was Friday. At the- upper colony they would have let him go hungry, if they had not found grounds enough for sending him to jail for the sin of differing with them not about the fundamental beliefs in a common Christianity but about the mere forms of religious expression and the mere manner of Christian worship. The Pilgrim had no love for the English political system because that system was inseparably associated with the regulation, direc- tion and coercion of religious life. It was using religion for 24 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT political ends. He feared the English crown and he expected no favors. The fundamental political rights which his countrymen had years before wrested from the king were quite as dear to him as to the common run of Englishmen. That is why he was back under the English flag. But he knew that those rights had been almost overturned again by the aggressiveness of the later monarchs. He despaired of regaining them. He lacked the political, property, and educational interests of his Puritan brother in reforming and controlling the state for his own ends. And anyway, he was without the physical strength and the military power. His feelings, his methods and his outlook were far from those of the Puritan. That is why he had separated himself from the state at an early day and was now few in numbers and in the wilderness. He had organized a church of his own and a state of his own but they were separate institutions. The Pilgrim was neither an anarchist nor a usurper. He did not fall short and he did not overreach. He was opposed to political interference with religion and he was opposed to oppres- sion for the mere purpose of enlarging the dangerous power and sustaining the sensual magnificence of the throne. But he believed in as much government as was necessary for the largest good and the best development of all. He took to governing as naturally as men of English speech have always done. From the compact in the cabin of the Mayflower to the merger with the Puritan colony seventy years later, he had all the government that was necessary to govern, and not enough to become a menace and a nuisance. Nine years after landing, a man of the immortal Mayflower company killed a neighbor in a quarrel. There had been no courts for there had been no use for them. But the colony met the emergency and proceeded deliberately and regularly. This little company of four or five hundred souls constituted a court, appointed a public prosecutor, drew a jury, adduced and made record of the proofs, afforded opportunity for defense, found a verdict of guilty, and imposed a sentence of death. Then they carried the record to the Puritan colony, forty miles away, for advice upon its regularity, and after approval they executed the sentence with dignity, with impressive- ness, and with sorrow. Migration over the sea did not quickly change the Pilgrim or the Puritan when neither expected to be changed by it. In the Old World and in the X T ew the Pilgrim was a kindly, tolerant, generous, religious, democratic, quiet and retiring character, who had com- pletely developed into a Separatist and an Independent. In the THE MAYFLOWER: FORE AND AFT 25 Old World and in the New the Puritan was a strong, religious, intolerant, autocratic, aristocratic and aggressive character, with no concept of religious liberty and with every purpose to rule rather than to leave the state. The Puritan came to the New World when forced out of the old one; the Pilgrim came as early as he could and of his own free choice. Looking aft, it is not difficult for us to see which of these peoples was to endure. When the colonial union came it had to be upon the lines settled at Plymouth. The character and rectitude of both and particularly the power and forcefulness of one combined with the political principles and religious freedom of the other in the making of a splendid American state. When the American Union came, it had to be on the lines which the Pilgrims of the May- flower had laid down, enforced by the qualities which were inherent in Puritanism. It would be as absurd as it would be unjust to assert that this country owes all that it has and all that it is to the Pilgrims. The Puritans have had a great part, and other nations than the English have had great parts in the upbuilding of America. Brawn and brain and character have come from all the peoples of the earth to break our soil, and subdue our forests, and open our mines, and develop our industries, and manage our overwhelming enter- prises. Our flag is more attractive, our intelligence is quicker, and our feelings nobler, because all peoples have been welcomed to these shores and because religion is free and all churches may dwell together in Christian quietude and fraternal accord. But it is not too much to say that all the others have had more to do than the Pilgrims had to adjust themselves to the plan and spirit of the Republic. And it is neither absurd nor unjust to any to say that the genesis of our political theories and of our religious separatism and independence goes back with all distinctness to the few and humble but very great men and women who moved out of England into Holland for freedom's sake, who came hither on the Mayflower, and who will always of right be known as the Forefathers of the Republic. AMERICA'S EDUCATIONAL DEBT TO THE DUTCH ADDRESS AT THE ANNUAL DINNER OF THE HOLLAND SOCIETY OF NEW YORK AT THE WALDORF-ASTORIA Reprinted from the published proceedings Mr President: The honor of the invitation to smoke a long pipe and eat a Wiener-ivurst and drink some beer [laughter] with the Holland Society, and incidentally to name some of the things which Holland has conributed to the advance of the world and to the upbuilding of democratic institutions in America was the more distinct to me because of the fact that, unlike all of you, I have no Holland blood. [Laughter] But for the abounding good- fellowship I might feel strange in this glorious company of thoroughbred Dutchmen, in spite of the fact that I have been familiar with the clatter of the wooden shoes of my old friend, Colonel John Vrooman upon the turnpikes of the Commonwealth for a generation. [Laughter and applause] I have studied Dutch history rather attentively and always with the conviction that in the writings of American historians Holland and her people have hardly had a fair show. [Applause] It may as well be said at once that the story of no people is filled with harder thinking or embellished with more splendid heroisms. [Applause] But even under a Holland roof, I am going to pre- pare myself for paying the respect which I feel for your fore- fathers by first paying the respect which I owe to my own. [Laughter] My father was an undiluted and, even after seven generations in America, pretty nearly an unsubdued English Puritan ; and my mother was as pure and true, as cheerful and gentle a Scotch- Irish Covenanter as the. world ever saw. These were two very tolerant and forbearing peoples [laughter] and very likely it is to the mixing of all this toleration that I owe the interest I have in the " reminuisances " [laughter'] of all other peoples. [Applause] Hardly a day's walk from the corners of the three English counties where the original homes of the Mayflower Pilgrims were found after evading the search of scholars for more than two hundred years, lies the little hamlet from which the first pair of my paternal grandparents in America came to Boston with one of the earliest Puritan migrations. For seven generations and 26 AMERICA S EDUCATIONAL DEBT TO THE DUTCH 27 until my mother unsettled the practice each son and grandson in the direct line won a Puritan maiden for his wife. If those six Puritan girls were as winsome as George Bouton makes Priscilla or Katrina, for that matter, [laughter], and I swear that they were, every one of them, then there is proof enough that if any one of those men had gone any farther he would have fared a great deal worse. But the time came when even the Puritan maiden had to stand aside. In 1806 a young man near Belfast in Ireland with the Scotch name of Sloan and the Bible name of Samuel, and with a religion as Scotch as his name, came to the town of Argyle in our county of Washington. Before doing so he plighted his troth with a girl whose name, Rachael MacMinn, was as Scotch and as much of the Bible as his own, and whose body and soul made her as sweet and beautiful a human flower as ever grew in any land, that when he had found the place for their home he would return for her and they would go and make it together. The troth was kept and one of their daughters was the girl who interrupted the sway of the Puritan maiden in our family. It must be admitted, however, that with my marriage it was completely restored. [Laughter] I am rather glad that my blood was mixed. If the ingredients were not vicious or insipid it is quite as well that they should act upon each other. If the English Puritan and the Scotch Covenanter had much in common they surely had enough in difference, and each was sufficiently opinionated to dispute that the other made the world without any help, or set quite all of the stones in the foundations of American institutions. Perhaps it is the mixture that makes me considerate of Dutchmen and it may help me to treat fairly of the ingredients which old Holland contributed to the making of America. [Laughter] A thousand years ago great throngs of people from the parts of middle and northern Europe adjacent to the high seas moved to the westward and compounded a new nation in Britain. Through qualities which were inherent and which were modified and strengthened in the process of assimilation that new nation showed qualities which were then unknown and were very great. It showed appreciation of the natural right of every man and of the true functions of the combined strength. It developed both initiative and self-control. It limited the prerogative of the king without destroying the kingdom. It began to stand for the systematic restraint which is vital to security and for the freedom which is the life current of intellectual progress. It showed considerable 28 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT spiritual life guided by some measure of rational thinking; it advanced very slowly yet steadily in the arts and sciences ; it gained in outlook and accomplishment through doing. Above all it organ- ized representative assemblies and courts to declare rules of law, and it organized armies and navies and used them to command order and enforce law more systematically than had ever been done before. But all this was the slow, heavy, labored process of centuries. Through all this unfolding the power of the king was decisive, most of the time conclusive, and that power distinctly and successfully opposed the uplifting of the people. The masses were sodden and ignorant. There was not democracy enough to break its way through. In the midst of this a new continent was discovered and thinly peopled by slight migrations from all the nations of the world. Here the power and thought and law and methods of Britain were dominant, but remoteness, life in the open, and other new factors which entered in, developed a people very unlike the English people, a nation with ideals wholly different from those of the 'British nation. Frankness would say that pretty nearly all rule became distasteful. Foreign rule became intolerable. Separation had to come. Indeed one of the foremost of recent English writers has said that it had to be in order to save English liberty. It came by violence. A new nation emerged, retaining of necessity the language of England and what was good of the English political system. Because the separation was .by violence there was conse- quent hate, and the process of national differentiation was prompt and decisive. But a little people, with such antecedents and such expectations, were not to be left alone. Soon history began to repeat itself. The very peoples who a thousand years before had sent vast throngs to compound the British nation sent greater throngs over wider seas to coalesce with the resultant stock and compound still another nation. Each of these throngs brought much. Every nation of the earth has given something. The differentiation has become more and more conclusive until there has emerged a mighty peo- ple with characteristics of speech, thought, dress, energy, business versatility and aggressiveness, diplomatic directness, passion for discovery and genius for invention, religious sense and political theories, which are recognizable at once in every part of the world and respected wherever recognized. [Applause] What each people has broueht to us is now a grateful theme for all of us. The chemical affinity has become so complete that AMERICA S EDUCATIONAL DEBT TO THE DUTCH 2Q the sun has gone down on the day of apprehension or of jealousy. We have come to see that the factors of most worth to us are strongest in the men and women who honor their forefathers and are truest to the inspiring memories of their fatherland. [Applause] The factors of the American national life are not numbers alone, not brawn and muscle alone, not mines and farms and factories alone. Bluff and pretense were inevitable with a small but nervy people facing such problems ; and there were some who mistook them for the distinguishing features of the national life. Large numbers, cheerful humor, the genuine culture which comes from ceaseless work, the eligibility of the commercial situation, com- plete agreement upon political theories and an orderly settlement of new questions, with the steadying and broadening which come of increasing accountability, have compounded original factors into a new national entity which does not expect to meddle with other peoples but which does expect to be reckoned with in the general affairs of a globe in which we all have some interest and are charge- able with some responsibility. [Applause] The original factors of our national life came to us because they could not find their opportunity in other lands, because they were rejected by the prevailing political systems of other nations. Free religious feeling which would not be bound by an unre- ligious theological system and would not be used to bind the thought of a people ; industry which would have some reward in accomplishment ; genius which could do things and throbbed for wider opportunities ; imagination which could foresee higher living ; fellowship which insisted that every man should have his fair chance; scientific research which could let in the truth upon the superstitions of the ages ; unfolding social and political opinion which was coming to see that a government must make the most of every one and gain the love of every one to be of account to men ; these were the primary elements of our national life, the factors which- gave fiber and flavor to the American spirit in the world. [Long applause] Of these the share which Holland brought is surely not to be held second to that of any other people. [Cries of "Good"] At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the opening of our period of permanent colonization, she had above all the other nations the qualities which now distinguish the American life. She had gained those qualities through a manner of life which has always made freemen and through decisive democratic tendencies which even then had been ripening for centuries. [Applause] 30 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT Nothing is more manifest and surely nothing is more gratifying to the student of education than the unvarying companionship in all history of the democratic and the educational advance. Even as far back as the fourteenth century the independence of the cities in the Netherlands had led to common schools and universities. The results of the German Reformation were particularly decisive and enduring in the Low Countries. In the early sixteen hundreds primary and secondary schools became common and were opened to boys and girls alike. These prepared the Dutch people for deeds of greatest moment to the world. Work is the making of the worker. Carlyle was right when he said that the lifting of the marshes up above the ocean, and the driving of Spain out of the Netherlands were the making of a free and virile people. It took forty years of unspeakable suffering and a hundred thousand lives to break the grasp of the Inquisition. If the schools quali- fied a people for fighting the first great world battle for liberty to a successful issue the result made the extension of the schools inevitable. Universities became the permanent memorials of mili- tary victories in Holland and the union of Utrecht was followed by an order that " all the inhabitants of towns and villages within six weeks find good and competent scho'olmasters." May says " the whole population was educated ; the higher classes were singularly accomplished." Brodhead says that " schools were everywhere provided, at public expense, with good schoolmasters to instruct the children of all classes in the usual branches of education." Motley says "It was a land where every child went to school, where almost every individual inhabitant could read and write. Where even the middle classes were proficient in mathematics and the classics, and could speak two or more modern languages, and where the whole nation with but few exceptions were pro- ducers of material and intellectual wealth." [Applause] These great impulses appeared directly in the industrial activities and in the fine arts, the literature, the scientific study, the political theories and the common life of the country. Agriculture was diversified and intensified. Science was really used for the first time in trying to ascertain the potential power of an acre of land. The agricultural colleges of America are even now going back to those people for assistance. [Applause] Craftsmanship in wood and metal and leather and in the textile fabrics and dexterity in all household and useful arts reached a development which was notable, and is so still. The Holland art of that period brings us the finest portrayal we have of the best life there was in the generations when society AMERICA S EDUCATIONAL DEBT TO THE DUTCH 3! was getting upon its feet. It turned from impossible angels and men and devils, from weakling princes and slumpy mistresses, to men grown virile in their country's service, to genuine mothers and real babies, to the home and to family life, to horses at work and cattle that could bellow, to windmills and dikes and boats and hardy sailor folks, to golden meadows and gorgeous sunsets, and to all of the scenes and effects which Dutch artists saw. [Applause] In all of these, Dutch art was prolific. But it was more than prolific. In technic, in harmony of color, in quick recognition of the beauty of the scene, in the interpretation of character, in the exemplification of religious feeling, which was both rational and devout, it produced a distinct school of art which stands in a class by itself unto this day. [Applause] Literature was not censored and science was dignified and en- couraged. In the three hundred years after 1573 there were 4700 students from England and the United States in attendance upon the University of Leyden, under the shadow of which our Pilgrim forefathers rested securely for eleven years. All this freedom produced the first near approach to a pure democracy in the world. [Applause] A republic grew and wrote a constitution and each of the seventeen provinces which constituted it had a constitution of its own. Douglas Campbell has traced a score of the salient features of that political system, the powers and limitations of the presidency, the organization of the national senate, religious toleration, freedom of the press, manhood suffrage, written ballots, free schools for girls and boys alike, the inde- pendence of the judiciary, the absence of primogeniture, the record- ing of conveyances, public prosecutors, the protection of persons charged with crime, amenability to the civil laws alone, and many others which are fundamental in our own political system. And in doing that he proved the source from which they came. Now all tliis came to its maturity in the Netherlands just before the great Puritan movement in England and just before the first permanent colonization of America. The center of the Puritan movement was in the northeastern counties, the counties which are against the German ocean. The Dutch controlled the carrying trade of the world. Their seamen were continually in the English ports. Out of these counties Elizabeth had sent six thousand Eng- lish troops to aid the Dutch against the Spanish when duplicity would suffice no longer. She little realized that when they came back they would bring the germs of a revolution with them. Into these counties she had brought spinners and weavers from Flanders without foreseeing that they would teach a great deal besides dex- 32 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT terity in their art. These counties produced the greater part of the early English Christian martyrs and the great body of the 20,000 men and women who migrated to Massachusetts bay in the twenty years following 1630 when Charles was ruling the realm without a Parliament and preparing the way for the notable trial in the Parliament house and the still more notable scene which followed. Perhaps those counties did even better, for they pro- duced the greater part of the Puritan parliamentary leaders. They not only produced old Cromwell but his regiment of Ironsides. They were the seat of the Separatist movement which was the unexpected" and at that time the totally unrecognized climax of Eng- lish Puritanism. They were the homes of the Plymouth Pilgrim Fathers. No one can read the literature of the subject with an open mind, and remember that Englishmen are not very subject to spontaneous combustion, without knowing full well that all these things which meant so much to England and to America followed sharply upon the developments in the Netherlands and were ushered in by the mighty fires which lighted up the dome of Heaven's temple from across the North sea. [Prolonged applause] The Pilgrim Fathers, scattered abroad in England, flew to Hol- land for refuge in the very year in which the Dutch arms had triumphed over Spain and forced a truce of twelve years with Philip. When they applied to the burgomasters of Leyden for leave to reside in that city this indorsement, discovered recently in the Archives at the Hague and sufficient to place every freeman and certainly every American under lasting obligations to the peo- ple of Holland, was placed upon the margin of their petition. " The Court in making a* disposition of this memorial declare thai they refuse no honest persons free ingress to come and have their residence in this city, provided that such persons behave themselves, and submit to the laws and ordinances; and therefore the coming of the Memorialists will be agreeable and welcome. This done at their Council House I2th February, 1609." If I were a Dutch- man, and as thrifty as Dutchmen are. I would write that over my doorway in letters of gold. \ Applause} At the end of the truce they migrated to the New England, coast. They intended to settle at the mouth of the Hudson or below. No one knows now whether it was treachery or an honest mistake which landed them on the " rock-bound coast." While the Pilgrims were in Leyden the Dutch settled here upon Manhattan island; then the Pilgrims settled at Plymouth; and later the Puri- tans at Boston. These were the first permanent settlements of civilized peoples in America. The Dutch and the Pilgrims were AMERICA'S EDUCATIONAL DEBT TO THE DUTCH 33 weak in numbers and in resources. Up to 1630 neither numbered a thousand souls. The Puritans were strong in numbers, gaining 20,000 people in twenty years ; speaking relatively they were rich, powerful and learned. Each of these peoples brought with them to the new country the beliefs and the institutions which were theirs in the old country. The Dutch brought the democratic theories which they had developed through a splendid and heroic history. The Pilgrims held to the faith and the thinking which had made them Separatists from the English state church and caused them to be hunted out of the English state, with such modifications and growth as twelve years in Holland had given to them. The Dutch came for com- merce which was no less legitimate then than now. [Applause] They assumed, as of course, that the manner of life and the thinking of the fatherland would continue here. The Pilgrims came because of their love for their English speech and English ways, because they feared that if they remained in Holland they would wholly disappear in the Dutch life (of the half of the company remaining in Ley den no trace can be found after twenty-five years), and because they must have the religious and political freedom which they could not have in England. The Puritans were not seeking religious or political freedom. They maintained class distinctions and distinguished between the nobles and the commons. They were an intolerant religious sect; and with the same sternness which cut off the head of the king and set up the commonwealth in the mother country, they imprisoned, banished and hanged any man or woman who differed with them and gave promise of destroying the harmony of the sect. They were associated with a party which was the same in the state religion and in the politics of England, and they had no thought of separateness or inde- pendence. They believed in the union of church and state. Their government erected the church building, paid the minister, and managed the affairs of the church. No man had any part in the government who was not a member of the church. But neither numbers nor wealth, nor even scholarship nor re- ligious enthusiasm, were to determine the character of American institutions. ] Applause] When the Pilgrims ^and the Puritans coalesced in the colony of Massachusetts it had to be upon prin- ciples which started in those northeastern English counties and came to their full flower in the Netherlands. Old England with the help of New England mip-ht overthrow by force the little Dutch colonv at the mouth of the Hudson but when union came in America it had to be upon the principles for which those Dutch- 34 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION" DEPARTMENT men stood, and which even in the dark hour of overthrow they never surrendered. [Prolonged applause] It has been a very common habit to credit the origin of our com- mon school system to England and to Puritanism although England has never had a system of common schools. The English edu- cational system comprised colleges with preparatory schools for sons of noble birth; not until w r ithin the memory of men of middle age has English policy undertaken to enforce elementary teaching upon all the children of the people. New England followed Old England. The first New England school was a college and the next was a Latin school. All of the New England schools before 1670 were classical schools established to be tributary to the col- lege. Very likely they had to bend their work to the elementary branches to make up for what was not done at home but the universal plan was that the primary work should be at home by the parents if they could or the minister i they could not. Happily they recorded all they did but there is no evidence of any school whatever in the Plymouth colony for full fifty years after the landing or of any elementary or common school among the 20,600 people at Boston for more than forty years after the founding of the city. The Massachusetts schools received no girls until 1789, one hundred and fifty years after the settlement, and re- ceived them for only half time for forty years after that. The Puritans had nothing in common with other people. How were they to have common schools? If the old heroes could return to earth and hear some things which their descendants claim there would be some castigations without formal trials if not some hang- ings without the benefit of clergy. [Laughter] The Dutch colonial charter of 1629 decreed that " the colonists shall, in the speediest manner, endeavor to find out ways and means to support a minister and a schoolmaster that thus the service of God and zeal for religion may not grow cold and be neglected among them." That is quite as good as the phrase about not letting learning " perish in the graves of their fathers " in the Massachusetts law enacted 18 years later. [Applause] A Dutch schoolmaster was an official of the state and when he was sent a school resulted. Upon the petition of the colonists an official schoolmaster was sent over from Holland in 1633 and a school was opened upon this island of Manhattan. It was the first school of which there is any record in America. It was open to all and it was supported out of the common moneys of the colony. It has continued under changing political conditions and therefore tinder differing: auspices until this day. Other similar AMERICA'S EDUCATIONAL DEBT TO THE DUTCH 35 schools, two public schools of secondary grade, and a dozen schools under private management with the government approval, were established upon this island in the thirty years before the English arms took possession of it. [Applause] In the ensuing century and down to the opening of the Revolu- tion the English royal governor and the Dutch colonial legislature were in frequent conflict over schools. The result was that prac- tically nothing was done. No act of the English government favor- able to schools appears in all that time except the reluctant approval of two Latin schools for limited periods ; there was no act and no consent which was inconsistent with the uniform English policy of advanced schools for the nobles and no schools at all for the people. If the democratic advance and the common enlightenment first brought from Holland to America the germs of the great free elementary school system of the country and give New York the honor of the first free school of the land, her Dutch antecedents give New York her primacy in being the first state to appropriate state moneys to encourage primary education, the first to establish state supervision of schools, and the first to relate all the schools in a uniform system which has become universal. [Applause] And surely there is something of their differing origins signi- fied in the fact that all of her sister states preceded Massachusetts in writing the guaranty of religious freedom in their constitutions; while New York, which never had a state church and was never tinctured with intolerance, was the first organized government in the world to enshrine in her fundamental law the sacred pledge of absolute spiritual independence and of political action without ecclesiastical intervention. [Applause] But it must not be surmised that the forefathers of the Holland Society were an unreligious people. There were forty editions of the Bible or of the New Testament printed in Holland before there was one in England. It was their religion which made them refuse to permit their religion to be bound, which enabled them to anticipate by two hundred years the attitude of America and refused to be taxed without their corfsent, which impelled them, with little return save the duplicity of the English queen, to stand as the shield and helper of England until the very seas were crimson with their blood. It was their religion which led them to become the heroic and historic representatives of the principles upon which democracy may advance and free institu- tions may endure. [Applause] 3 36 NfcW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT The Dutch were a little people but they were greater than the largest. Their thinking, their religion, and their valor broke out ihe roads over which democracy was to find the way to a new civilization. All Americans are under special and enduring obliga- tions to them for surely they were the first to declare the funda- mental principles of our Republic. [Long applause] THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENCY ADDRESS AT NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF UNIVERSITY TRUSTEES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS IN CONNECTION WITH THE INAUGURATION OF PRESIDENT JAMES By courtesy of the Atlantic Monthly There are at least four features which distinguish university work in America and exercise a decisive influence upon the form of government in American universities. The first grows out of the universal democracy of the country and the common ambitions of the people. Every one who shares in the spirit of the country wants to go to the top and continually hears that he may if he will seize his opportunities. He has no thought of following his father's work unless, as is quite improb- able, it is in line with his special ambitions. The need of the best training is now everywhere recognized. The secondary schools have become a part of the common school system and every teacher in high school or academy leads his students very near to the point of thinking that they will lose their chance in life and even be discredited if they do not advance to college or university. The university life is now specially attractive to the young and they want a share in the pleasure and enthusiasm of it. This brings to the universities great numbers who in other days never went to college ; who in other lands would not go now. Many of these must be both led and pushed. Then, the common thought about liberal education has changed. It is no longer only classical, culturing, disciplinary ; it must pre- pare students not only for the multiplying professions but for the multiplying industries. It trains one for work which may dis- tinguish him. Cultivated aimlessness is no longer the accepted 1 ideal of American scholarship. Culture which is not the product of work, either mental or manual, with some definite point to it, is held to be at secondhand, only skin-deep, and not to be taken seriously. It must not be said that mere strength and steadiness in holding a job are the marks of an educated man. There must be native resourcefulness and versatility, sound training and serious: study, discrimination in means and methods, and rational appli- cation to real things in life in ways that bring results of some distinct worth to the world. It makes little difference what one does, but he must do something. The all-important fact is not 37 38 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT that real learning may now be found in all businesses though that is important but that one must do something of recognized value to be held a scholar. It may be not only in letters, or science, or law, or medicine, or theology, but it may also be in administra- tion, in planning and constructing, in mechanics, in agriculture, .in banking, in public service, in anything else worth while. If one's powers of observation, of investigation, of expression and of accomplishment, lead him to do something of real concern, to do it completely and quite as well as, or better than, others can do it, and impel him to open up new vistas and methods of doing other things of larger moment, he has a better right to be held an educated man than he who incubates the unattainable and brings forth nothing. And not only have educational values changed, but educational instrumentalities have changed. Books and aca- demic discussions have their part, but in many directions it is now a minor part. Things are taught and learned, new insight and the power to do are gained, through actual doing. And not only is the training through doing rather than through reading and talking but the opportunity of selection extends to every sub- ject and every study. It requires buildings and equipment and teachers never before within the means of an institution. It has revolutionized the scope, the possessions, the plans and methods, the offerings and the outlook of the universities. While this is com- ing to be true in a measure in other countries, the unconventional freedom, the industrial aggressiveness, and the unparalleled volume of money going into university operations in this country have given us the leadership of a world movement in higher education. Again, university revenues come from men who have done things and want other things done. It is exclusively so in the private institutions, and the people and their representatives who vote appropriations to the state universities have no other thought. While few are so short-sighted as to be opposed to a balanced and harmonious university evolution, still money is provided more freely for the kinds of instruction in which the providers are most inter- ested. This, of course, gives shape and trend to the development. But it does more: it creates the need of teachers not heretofore adequately prepared or not prepared in adequate numbers. The vastness, the newness and the unpreparedness of it all create the need of general oversight and close administration. Even more, when teachers are not supported by student fees, but are paid from the university treasury without reference to the number of students they have or very sharp discrimination about the quality of work they do, there is no automatic way of getting rid of THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENCY 39 teachers who do not teach or of investigators who do not produce. Some competent and protected authority must accomplish this and continually reinforce the teaching staff with virile men. The competition between institutions rather than between men, and the natural reluctance at deposing a teacher, are producing pathetic situations at different points in many American universities and are likely to become the occasion of more weakness in our university system than has been widely realized. Yet again, the sentiment of this country does not agree, and doubtless will never agree, that American universities shall stand for more " scholarship " without reference to character, or that boys shall be allowed to go to the devil without hindrance for the lack of university leadership or to accommodate administrative cowardice or convenience. Students will have to be controlled and guided in this country, and American universities will have to have leaders who are leaders of morals as well as of learning and who will stir the common sense and use the common senti- ment through the authoritative word spoken in the crowd. One may lament that our universities are not copied upon Ger- man or English models ; that overwhelming numbers of students are going to them ; that all who go are not serious students ; that we are moving in new educational directions; that our professors are not made to live on fees; and that there is neither a care for superficial culture without much regard for true scholarship, nor a vaunting of mere scholarship without reference to moral character. The labor is lost. These things are so ; they are right because they are so; because they are the outgrowth of the com- pounding of a great new nation in the world and because they are the logical outworkings of a marvelous advance in the thinking; of men who are free to do some thinking for themselves. It is hardly worth while to be troubled because we can not see the road beyond the turns that are ahead. There is a road beyond the turns or one will be made. President Pritchett of the Massa- chusetts Institute, in a recent address at the University of Michi- gan, published in the September Atlantic, discusses, without answering, the question " Shall the University become a business corporation?" Dr Pritchett ordinarily does things exactly and" completely. He can answer questions particularly when he asks them of himself. He did not answer this one because the answer is so obvious. He used his question to express a very common skepticism. Of course the university can not become a business corporation with a business corporation's ordinary implications. Such a corporation is without what is being called spiritual aim 40 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT is without moral methods. Universities are to unlock the truth and turn out the test and the greatest men and women; business corporations are mainly to make money. If this is a harsh char- acterization, it can not be denied that it has been earned by the great business corporations with which the great uni- versities must be compared if they are to be compared with any. A university can not become such a corporation without ceasing to be a university. The distinguishing earmarks of an American university are its moral purpose, its scientific aim, its unselfish public service, its inspirations to all men in all noble things, and its incorruptibility by commercialism. But that is no reason why sane and essential business methods should not be applied to the management of its business affairs. It is a business concern as well as a moral and intellectual instrumentality and if business methods are not applied to its management it will break down. If they are not to be employed, the university with its vast accumulations of materials and men must be a mistake or, worse yet, a wrong. It is neither a mistake nor a wrong or it would not be here. It is neither an accident nor an impulse: it is a growth, the deliberate product of conditions, of means and of thought. It is a great combina- tion of material resources and moral forces essential to modern competitions, the needed inspiration of all factors in the popula- tion for large areas of territory, and its usefulness depends upon giving the management both moral sense and worldly knowledge. The responsible authorities in the management of a university are the trustees, the president, and the faculty. Legal enactments settle in some measure the exact functions of each, but common knowledge of the kinds of government which succeed when much property and many interests are involved, as well as the imperative necessities of the particular situation, have gone much further to establish the governmental procedure in the university. While the immediate purpose is to exploit the functions and powers of the university president, some reference, necessarily brief, must be made to the prerogatives and duties of the trustees and faculty. A vital principle in all government involving many cares and interests is tersely expressed in the statement that bodies legislate and individuals execute. It goes without saying that legislation must be by a body which is both morally responsible and legally competent, and common observation proves to us that it must con- cern a real situation, to be of any real worth. If it involves special knowledge, it must be by men who have the knowledge or who will respect the opinions of others who have. THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENCY 4! The trustees of a university are charged by law, either statutory or judge-made, or by widely acknowledged usage, with that general oversight and that legislative direction which will make sure of the true execution of the trust. They are to secure revenues and control expenditures. They are to prevent waste and assure results. They are never to forget that they represent the people who created and who maintain the university. They are not to rep- resent these people as a tombstone might but as living men may. They are to do the things their principals would assuredly do if in their places to enlarge the advantage to the cestui que trust. This is a heavy burden. It must be assumed that it is given to picked men who are especially able to bear it; who would not give their time to it for mere money compensation, but are happy in doing it for the sake of promoting the best and noblest things. The trustees do not live upon the campus and they are not assumed to be professional educationists. Their judgment is likely to be quite as good upon the relations of the work to the public interests and as to what the institution should do to fulfil its mission as that of any expert would be. To get done what they want done, they must enact directions and appoint competent agents. The individual trustee has no power of supervision or direction not given to him by the recorded action of the board. What they do is to be done in session after the modification of individual opinions through joint discussion. It must be reduced to exact form and stand in a permanent record. Trustees make a mess of it when they usurp executive functions and they sow dragons' teeth when they intrigue with a teacher or hunt a job for a patriot who thinks he is in need of it. They are bound to regard expert opinion and to appoint agents who can render a more expert service than any others who can be procured. They are to keep the experts sane, on the earth, in touch with the world, as it were. They are to sustain agents and help them to succeed, and they are to remove agents who are not successful. From a point of view remote enough and high enough, they are to inspect the whole field. They are bound to be familiar with all that the institution is doing. They are to be alert in keeping the whole organization free from whatever may corrupt, and up to the very top notch of efficient public service. There is too much money involved to per- mit of foolishness, too high interests at stake to allow of vacilla- tion and uhcertainty. Under a responsibility that is unceasing and unrelenting they must learn the truth and never hesitate to act. And they must find their abundant reward, not in any material return to themselves, but in the splendid fact that the 42 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT great aggregation of land and structure and equipment, of great teachers and aspiring students, of sacred memories and precious hope and potential possibilities, is doing the work of God and man in the most perfect way and in the largest measure which their knowledge and experience, their entire freedom and their combined energy can devise. The business of university faculties is teaching. It is not legislation and it is not administration, certainly not beyond the absolute necessities. There is just complaint because the neces- sities of administration take much time from teaching. It lessens the most expert and essential work which the world is doing. It seldom enlarges opportunity or enhances reputation. It is true that teachers have great fun legislating but it is not quite certain that, outside of their specialties, they will ever come to conclusions or that, if they do, their conclusions will stand. The main advant- age of it is the relaxation and dissipation they get out of it. That is great. And, in a way, it may be as necessary as it is great. Of course teachers could not endure it if they were always to conduct themselves out of the classroom as they do in it. Perhaps others would also have difficulty in enduring it. They are given to disorderliness and argumentation beyond any other class who stands so thoroughly for doing things in regular order. It is not strange. It is the inevitable reaction, what some of them would call the psychological antithesis, I suppose. Nor is it to be repressed or regretted for it adds to the effectiveness and attractiveness of the most effective and attractive people in the world. All this is often particularly true of the past masters in the art. No wonder that Professor North, who taught Greek for sixty years at Hamilton College " Old Greek," as many generations of students fondly called him wrote in his diary that it would have to be cut in the granite of his tombstone that he " died of faculty meetings," for he was sure that some day he would drop off before one would come to an end. But the needs of the profession ought to be met by directing the surplus of physical and intellectual energy into really useful and potential channels, such as athletics, or battling over academic questions with the doughty warriors of other universities. Speak- ing seriously, university policies are not to be settled by majority vote. They are to be determined by expert opinion. The very fact of extreme expertness in one direction is as likely as not to imply lack of it in other directions. Experts are no more successful than other people in settling things outside of their zone of expertness. Within that they are to have their way so long as they sustain THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENCY 43 themselves and the money holds out. But the resources are not to be equally divided. University rivalries are not to be adjusted by treaties between the rivals. More of university success depends upon keeping unimportant things from being done in a mistaken way than in developing useful policies and pursuing them in the correct way. Department experts are to determine depart- ment policies, college experts college policies, and university ex- perts university policies. What the President of the United States is to the federal Con- gress, the president of the university is to the board of trustees. It has not long been so, because American universities are recent creations. When colleges wer'e small, when the care of their property was no task, when all of a college were of one sect and theology was the main if not the only purpose, when there was but one course of study and the instruction was only bookish and catechetical administration was no problem at all. There was nothing to put a strain on the ship. Even though there was no specific responsibility and no delegation of special functions with immediate accountability, possessions did not go to waste, frauds did not creep in, and injustice and paralysis did not ensue. It may easily be so now in the smaller colleges ; it can not be so in the great universities. The attendance of thousands of students, the enlargement of wealth and of the number of students who go to college without any very definite aim, the admission of women, the more luxurious and complex life, the greater need of just and forceful guidance of students, the multiplication of departments, the substitution of the laboratory for the book, the new and numberless processes, the care of millions of property and the handling of very large amounts of money, and the con- tinual and complete meeting of all the responsibilities which this great aggregation of materials and of moral and industrial power owes to the public, have slowly but logically and as a matter of course developed the modern university presidency. It is the centralized and responsible headship of a balanced administrative organization, with specialized functions running out to all of the innumerable cares and activities of the great institution. It is the essential office which holds the right of leadership, which has the responsibility of initiative, which is chargeable with full in- formation and held to be endowed with sound discretion, which may act decisively and immediately to conserve every interest and promote every purpose for which the university was established. It may be well to specify and illustrate. Conditions are not whollv ideal in a university. Men and women not altogether ripe 44 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT for translation have to be dealt with. Real conditions, often un- precedented, -have to be met. Not only effectiveness within, but decent and helpful relations with neighbors, constituents and the world are to be assured. Some authority must be able to do things at once and some word must often be spoken to or for the university community. When spoken, it must be a free word, uttered out of an ample right to speak. An American university may be possessed of property worth from three to thirty millions of dollars. This is in lands and build- ings and appliances and securities. These things may be legis- lated about, but that is not the care of them. To keep them from spoliation and make the most of them there must be expert care through a competent department but in harmonious relations with an ever present power which has the right and responsibility of. declaring and doing things. The very life of the institution depends upon eliminating weak and unproductive teachers and upon reinforcing the teaching body with the very best in the world. Unless there is scientific aggres- siveness in the search of new knowledge some very serious claims must be abandoned and some attitudes completely changed. No board ever got rid of a teacher or an investigator no matter how weak or absurd except for immorality known to the public. The reason why a board can not deal with such a matter is the lack of individual confidence about what to do and of individual re- sponsibility for doing nothing. But. with three or four hundred in the faculty, the need of attention to this vital matter is always present. No board knows where new men of first quality are to be found : no board can conduct the negotiations for them or fit them into an harmonious and effective whole. The man who is fitted for this great burden and who puts his conscience up against his responsibility can hardly be expected to tolerate the opposition of an unsubstantial sentiment which would protect a teacher at all hazards, or the more subtle combination of selfish influences which puts personal over and above public interests when the upbuilding of a university is the task in hand. Not only must the teaching staff be developed, the work must be organized. It must develop a following, connect with the cir- cumstances and purposes of a constituency, and lead as well as it can up to the peaks of knowledge. It is not necessary that all universities cover the same lines of work or have the same standards. It is not imperative that all have the same courses or courses of the same length. It is necessary that all serve and uplift their people. But how? A master of literature will say THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENCY 45 through classical training and literary style; a scientist will say through laboratories; a political economist will say through his- tory and figures and logic; an engineer will say through roads and bridges and knowledge of materials, and the generation and transmission of power, and skill at construction ; and a professional man will say through building up professional schools, providing no mistake be made about the particular kind of school. Some one of wide experience, having a scholar's training and sympathies, possessed of a judicial temperament and with decisiveness as well, must have the responsibility and the initiative of distributing re- sources justly as between the multifarious interests and binding them all into an harmonious and effective whole. Difficult as that is, it is not the heaviest burden of university leadership. Ideals must be upheld and made attractive: they must be sane ideals which appeal to real men, and not only to old men, but to young men. There must be no mistaking of dyspepsia for principle, no assumption that character grows only when powers fail ; but a rational philosophy of life by which men may live as well as die. Nor is this all. There must be forehandedness. Someone must be charged with the responsibility of peering into the future and leading forward. New and yet more difficult roads must be broken out. Someone in position to do it must be active in initiating things. He must see what will go and, quite as clearly, what will not go. Subtle but fallacious logic and a vast deal of it must be resisted, greed combated, conceits punctured, resources augmented, influences enlarged, forces marshaled for practical undertakings, and the whole enterprise made to give a steadily increasing service to the industrial, professional, political and moral interests of a whole people. Then there is the management and guidance of students. One may as well complain because this country is a democracy as to repine because the sons and daughters of the masses want to go to college. There is no ground for regret in the fact that our universities are not just like some universities over the seas. We have much to learn from them and we are likely to learn much. We have quite as much to avoid. It seems too much to expect to work un-American ideas, and perhaps loose habits, out of American students who study in Europe, when they come home. We are different from them because of our circumstances and political history, because of our spirit and outlook. That is reason enough why our universities are different from theirs. It is useless to question whether all who come to the higher educational institutions are wise in coming. They are coming 1 . 46 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT The work will have to be broad enough to meet their needs. Nor is it worth while to bewail the fact that all who come are not serious students. Their purposes are good enough and serious enough according to their lights. Their preparation is what has been exacted by the university and provided by the high school. Some of them have to be pulled up and pushed along but the process often brings out most unexpected results. Students are not all angels, but every student is worth being helped by an angel up to an angel's place. The task is upon the people who undertake to manage universities. Students have to be directed in companies but dealt with individually. They may be directed by a rule : when they break the rule they must be dealt with by a man. It must be a man who can stand pat for all that ought to inhere in a university; but such a man will get on best if in addition to being able to stand pat he is able to like boys ; he is likely to' get on still better if he was once a rather lively boy himself; or, at least, if he is a kind of man for whom a boy with some ginger in him can find it in his heart to have not only considerable respect but some regard and admiration. This is not saying that college students are to be treated like children. It is not implied that they are to be excused for being ruffians. Quite the contrary is true. They are to be held exactly responsible to law and rule and all well known standards of decent living. There must be less viciousness in the life of American universities or they must and ought to suffer seriously for it. It is to be resented and punished far more forcefully than it has been. Students who get into this kind of thing and persist in staying in are to be punished, even to the point of being thrust out and even though it changes the course of their lives and breaks the hearts of fathers and mothers. The good of all is the overwhelming consideration. A university is to be a university and not something else. Of all institutions it is to stand for char- acter and ideals. The universities are not to be closed and all youth denied their advantages because a few abuse their privileges. The punishment of the bad, if there are any bad, is the protec- tion of all the rest. It is an essential safeguard to safe adminis- tration and the wholesome living of the crowd. But is it not better to hold all the boys we can from going to the dogs by keeping in sympathy and touch with them, than it is to encourage them into deviltry through the coldness or the downright dulness or nervelessness or cowardliness of an administration? The logic of the situation puts this burden upon the president, or upon one working: with singleness of purpose with him. Likely THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENCY 47 the president can not deal with all directly, but that is no reason why he should not go as far as he may. He must assume responsi- bility for management, giving the right turn and inspiration to it. It is essentially an executive function. The sun may well avail himself of the assistance of a cloud to save his face when a board of trustees begins to make preachments filled with benevolent advice to a body of students ; and even the man in the moon may be excused if he shuts one eye in contemplation, at the spectacle of a university senate undertaking to deal with a college boy in a scrape. So much in reference to routine. The president who only fol- lows routine of course falls short. He is to construct as well as administer. He must initiate measures which will result in larger facilities, in added offerings and enterprises, in searching out new knowledge, in the wider application of principles to work, and not only in the usual but in the better training of men and women for distinct usefulness in life. He is not only to see that plans are within the limits of revenues, that the physical condition of the plant improves, that everything is clean and attractive, that the faculty is scientifically productive, that the instruction is exact and the spirit true; but he is to take the steps which will keep the whole organization moving ahead. He must adopt and pro- mote and give full credit for movements initiated by others when their propositions are safe and practicable, but he must also be alert in stopping movements which will not go. Perhaps more important than all, the president is to declare from time to time the best university opinion concerning popular move- ments and the serious interests of the state. He must connect the university with the life of the multitude and exert its in- fluence for the quickening and guidance of that public opinion which, as Talleyrand said, is more powerful than all the monarchs who ever lived or all the laws which were ever declared. The unity and security of a university can only be assured through accountability to a central office. While every one is to have free- dom to do in his own way the thing he is set to do, so long as his way proves to be a good way, the harmony of the whole depends upon the parts fitting together and upon definiteness of responsibility and frequency of accountability. No self-respecting man is going to administer a great office, or an office responsible for great results, and have any doubts about possessing the powers necessary or incident to the performance of his work. He will have enough to think of without having any doubt upon that sub- ject. There need be no fear of his being too much inflated with, 48 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT power. There will be enough to take the conceits out of him and keep him upon the earth. If he can not exercise the powers of his great office and yet keep steady and sane there is no hope for him and he will speedily come to official ruin. It is not a matter of uplifting or of inflating a man, but of getting a man who can meet the demands of a great situation. Of course, no one can realize the hopes which center in a uni- versity presidency without being able to work harmoniously with others. There must be true deference to the opinions of many and scrupulous recognition of the just, though unexpressed, claims of all. But he must never forget that administrative freedom is quite as inviolable as any other freedom, even in a university. He must mark out his official course for himself and bear the responsibility of it without cavil. He must expect to suffer criticism and oppo- sition, even contumely. He can not expect that the work he has to do will make every one happy. It will discomfit many. In one way or another they will give him all the trouble they can. The protests will be the loudest because of the very acts for which his office has been developed. But he may comfort him- self with the reflection that if the job were not so heavy they would have a cheaper man to do it, and that the extent of the opposition is often the measure of real presidential business that is being performed. In any event, his only hope is in success, and he can not go around the duty which confronts him without inevitable failure. Conditions may easily make a mere compro- miser of him. If they do, the waves will speedily close over his official remains forever. Some choice and magnanimous spirits will help him ; but he need entertain no doubt that there will be plenty more on every side to try out the stuff that is in him, and that they will diligently attend to the trying out process until enough occurs to convince them that his wisdom, his rational conception of his task, his love of justice and sense of humor, his constructive planning, his independence, and his fearlessness, are sufficient to prove him worthy of as great an opportunity for usefulness and honor as ever comes to any man. All this calls for a rare man. He ought, in the first place, to be reasonably at peace with mankind and in love with youth. He must have the gift of organizing and the qualities of leadership. He ought to have been trained in the universities, not only for the sake of his own scholarship, but that he may be wholly at home in their routine and imbued with their purposes. He must be moved by public spirit as distinguished from university routine or mere scholarly purpose. He must be a scholar but not neces- THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENCY 49 sarily in literature or science or moral philosophy. It is quite as well if it is in law, or engineering, or political history. He must be sympathetic with all learning. He can no longer hope to be a scholar in every study. He can hardly hope to administer such a trust or fill such a post without some knowledge of and considerable aptitude for law. His sense of justice must be keen, his power of discrimination quick, his judgment of men and women accurate; his patience and politeness must give no sign of tiring, and the strength of his purpose to accomplish what needs to be done must endure to the very end. Yet he must determine dif- ferences and decide things. He must have the power of expression as well as the more substantial attainments. Beyond possessing sense, training, outlook, experience, resistive power, decisiveness, and aggressiveness, he ought to be a forceful and graceful writer and at least an acceptable public speaker. In a word the presi- dent of an American university is bound to be not only one of the most profound scholars but quite as much one of the very great, all round men of his generation. ADDRESS AT THE INAUGURAL EXERCISES OF PRESI- DENT JAMES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS Mr Chairman and Men and Women of the University of Illinois: The distinguished presence, the impressive procedure, and the function and purpose of this great university convocation are surely sufficient to make it memorable. Other gatherings for the discussion of many subjects of the highest import to higher edu- cation in America have been associated with this assemblage. The effort to accompany an installation with an educational advance has been evident. The gracious attendance of the representatives of many American and of some foreign universities lends very sub- stantial assistance to this effort. Taken together, the exercises may rival if not surpass any previous undertaking in the interests of the higher learning in the Mississippi valley. Of very considerable interest to all, the occasion is certainly of profound significance to this university. We are now at the heart of the business for which we invited so many. We are taking a step of the very first magnitude in our affairs. We are conferring a very great honor. We are imposing a very great burden. It is through the bestowal of a very great office. We are come not merely to ratify an appointment or to deliver keys but to give a new leader the expression of our confidence and the assurance of our help. We would not disguise our understand- ing of what it all implies to him, to us, and to all of the interests of this institution. We would invest this occasion with all serious- ness. With solemnity we pledge our support. Realizing both the need and the meaning of it, we offer words of cheer and the best wishes which a buoyant and expectant people can lay at the feet of a new administration. This is not the day for reminiscence, but it is the day for reflec- tion, as well as the day of hope. Rational outlook rests upon a true understanding of what is and what has been. In university building the future can lift high its turrets only upon foundations laid sure and true. There is no better exemplification of American spirit anywhere than is found in the history of this university. Without any aid from nature but a rich soil, without a single helpful feature in the landscape, upon almost an exact plain, with- out hill or tree or rock or river, it has made a campus as home- like and ennobling as any one of us has seen. Without building materials in the neighborhood, it has erected buildings at once ADDRESS AT THE INAUGURAL EXERCISES OF PRESIDENT JAMES $1 spacious and serviceable. With a school of architecture of its own, without close association with the best architecture of the world, with considerable of the feeling that a new building belonged to an architect who had been trained by the university, and that in time every graduate in architecture ought to be represented by a building, it has, in one way or another, which need not be specified here, worked out or worried out a very respectable col- lection of architectural effects. Located between and across the border line of two small cities, it has risen above their rivalries, made them useful suburbs, and given them a happy mission even the housing of the people of a university. Started in an environment not specially conducive to scholarly pursuits, it has developed a setting which is beginning to support its work admir- ably. Far from the geographical or popular center of the state, it has overcome distances and become a conspicuous spot on the map of Illinois. Without a large city to draw upon for students, even beset with deep prejudices and sharp rivalries, it has filled all the highways with happy young men and maidens, coming to or going from its work. At a distance from large libraries and without free association with the centers of scholarship, and until now with very inadequate support, it has built up an instructional force exceptionally able at many points and of very satisfactory average strength. Under the disadvantages as well as the advan- tages of a popular support and a democratic management it has become widely celebrated for its unparalleled growth, and has fought its way to a very high place in the list of large American universities. One hundred out of the one hundred and two coun- ties of Illinois, forty-three other states, and eight foreign countries are represented in its student body. In the breadth of its offer- ings and the measure and the loftiness of its ambitions it is second to none. When it was robbed of most of its invested and much of its operating funds, it succeeded in three weeks with the help of the Legislature and Governor in converting its discomfiture into better securities than universities ordinarily have, good, five per cent everlasting bonds of the commonwealth of Illinois. Later than all neighboring state universities in getting started, and ex ceedingly slow in gaining moneyed support, it has at last won the genuine pride and generous confidence of a state which can do whatever it will for which all of us make most sincere acknowl- edgments in the hope of yet larger favors still to come. Drawing upon other universities and all other sources of supply for all it can get. it is increasing its contributions to the scholarship of the country and doing more than was ever foreseen to train the 52 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT young men and women of a rich and imperial state to the serious business of making the most of themselves through intelligent and tiring work of every kind and through a rational use of the results of commercial and industrial prosperity. This state is fortunate in that its state university and its agri- cultural and mechanical colleges are .being developed together. The work of each supports the other. It is producing a very large institution, one with broad foundations and innumerable offerings. With all of the departments here where there is small need of physicians, its medical colleges are where medical men are most in demand and at the largest center of medical education in the world. All in all, it is accumulating students with a rapidity which is creating a responsibility beyond compute. We all know this, but it is well to express it. It gives us strength. We are equal to it. By common assent and intuitive impulse this institution is now to be made great as well as big. The state university development in America is one of the very greatest as well as the" most surprising movements in world edu- cation. It is the logical outgrowth of the democratic advance. Few will say that the state universities are not already as potential as the universities which have preceded them. In opportunities to serve a people through the applications of learning to diversified life, as well as in the aspiration and the strength to make that service great, they are ranking university operations everywhere. Illinois expects to lag behind no other state in the generosity and the intelligence of her doing for the higher learning. She provides the means and calls the best men she can get fo*- her service. Then she wants a new advance. She will not temporize with oppor- tunity. She will not tolerate excuses. She will go forward. With profound regard for all the states around her, with the warmest appreciation of the aid she is getting from other universities, and the most unqualified assurances of reciprocity, the keynote of this great week at the University of Illinois sounds a decided advance to higher and stronger ground. One who has the gifts and the strength to lead this advance is to be envied the opportunity. I wish I could compound the thinking and express the reflections and the hopefulness of us all. The suggestions, born of my thinking and my experience, which bear upon this hour and the future of this university, are in these plain and fundamental, briefly stated propositions: Serve the commonwealth of Illinois, not only in her industries, but in her political theories and practices, in rearing noble ideals of true culture, and in strengthening her conception of the moral ADDRESS AT THE INAUGURAL EXERCISES OF PRESIDENT JAMES 53 obligations of such a people. Do it when sure of your ground, even though it compels the saying of some things which, at the moment, many of her people may not like to hear. Aid every educational activity, whether public school or parish school or proprietary school, whether endowed college or profes- sional school, or private or public library, or study club, or what- ever else it may be, if it has the purpose of enlarging knowledge or extending culture in or out of the schools. Be true to every other university. Never forget that meanness defeats itself. In. education the way to get rich is through enriching others. Bring to this university the best scholars who can be procured" in any part of the world. There are no artificial barriers and no political boundaries in the democracy of learning. Pay what you have to pay in order to have the best instruction in the country. That is one of the leading things for which the last administration was disposed to give way to the new one. The old one could have gone on in the old way. It was believed that a new leader could take some important steps more surely than the old one. If not taken, an opportunity will be lost. He is here to fill the gap of opportunity to the full. Let the fact be established and let the country come to know that no more new truth is likely to be dug out anywhere, and no better instruction provided anywhere, than at the University of Illinois. Develop young men in the faculties by giving them their oppor- tunities ; and assure them just credit for all the work they do. Do not stunt them by letting them think that they are so very much larger than they really are. Enter into student sympathies and share student outlook. Brace up the timid and the hesitating. Find ways to put surplus energies to useful ends. Give all plenty of good work to do. Forgive the ones who are a trifle too active but not so very bad. Let the vicious know that there is no place for viciousness in the affairs of a university. Command the situation through the stirring of sentiment, through the development of opinion, and through re- liance upon that moral sense which in the last analysis is always overwhelming in a university crowd. Let justice and sense stand, whoever falls. Let there be a day in court for all. Be as just to a student when a teacher is at fault as to a teacher when a student is in trouble. Fight for absolute cleanness. Insist that everything shall com- port with the purposes of such an institution. Demand that every one in the service shall have undivided devotion to the work which he undertakes. Avoid expenditures which do not commend them- $4 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT selves to the good sense of sane and experienced men. Reject all extravagancies. When money is expended see that a dollar buys the value of a dollar. Stand for nothing until convinced; shrink from nothing merely because some one may be discomfited. Mr President, administer your splendid estate, and execute the high purpose for which this great aggregation of material things and of intellectual and moral forces is maintained. Do it without fear or favor, without thinking much of the hazards or of the compensations, and the people of the commonwealth of Illinois, and the Almighty God, will take care of you. The real growth and strength of this university have hardly appeared. The future will overshadow the past. Hearts, minds, money, boundless energy, the public interests and the common pride are all enlisted to carry the University of Illinois to a place of the very first significance in American education. All that is wanted is a scholarly, a sane, and a fearless leadership. If one -can not supply it, another will. With one accord we think we have "found the man who can. I am transferring to him not only a title but an opportunity; Tiot only an office but my hope and my confidence that he may ^enlarge it. I did not impair this office : it is a greater office than it "used to be. It is as precious a thing as I shall ever have to give. Before I could transfer it with cheerfulness and with confidence I have been obliged to think more deeply than have many others of the needs of the situation here and in another state, and of the adaptation of men to differing work. My attachments are no stronger there than here. The decision came out of a mental process which has tried out feeling and broken some strings. The new president has been an all-important factor in the case. But I am ready. The attributes of the new leader give me confidence and the universal acclaim makes me know that all is well. A true son of Illinois ; with the fine lineage of her best pioneers ; with native pride in her history; with scholarly appreciation of her resources and of her intellectual development; with a mature and balanced understanding of her needs, as well as with patriotic enthusiasm for all that may uplift her ; a severe student, trained in the best schools of the world; a virile teacher; a publicist of wide reputation ; an experienced and trenchant administrator ; we envy him the gifts and the opportunity which will let him impress lives, shape ends, weave his name into the history of this university, and add to the greatness of his state; and we give him all the cheer that can spring out of song, with all the sincerity that can breathe through prayer. REMARKS AT SOUTHERN EDUCATIONAL CONFER- ENCE, COLUMBIA, S. C. Reprinted from the published proceedings Mr President, and You My Friends of the Southern Educa- tional Conference: I am sure I should have been very glad indeed if my name could have been omitted from the list of speakers, because of the lateness of the hour and particularly because we are all waiting to hear the concluding speech, by His Excellency, the Governor. But as the way is open, I am glad to express the pleasure I have found in my visit to Columbia and in the proceedings of the conference. It is my first visit to Columbia and my first attendance upon the conference. I am bound to tell you that I came with high expectations. I have experienced southern hospitality before and I knew that we would be graciously entertained. I knew you would not invite us here unless you were anxious to follow your invitation with a sincere and genuine welcome. For the last ten years I have been associated with one of the great state univer- sities, and that has led me to know something more than I other- wise might about the State College of South Carolina, located here. I knew that that institution, with other educational activities of the city, must have cooperated with the prevailing conditions to develop a society of rich and unusual culture at the South Carolina capital. Yet, Mr President, I am bound to say that some of us surely, and perhaps all of us, have had some object lessons in generous hospitality and magnificent kindliness which exceeded our expectations and which have made us fast friend* for life. [Applause] I have heard a great deal said from this platform about " problems." All earnest people have problems. I do not want you to think you have a monopoly of them in the South. In the great metropolis of the Union there are educational problems quite as serious as any in the Southern States. I suppose that in the heart of the city of New York there are three quarters of a million of people who know little or nothing of democratic government or of American institutions. They hardly know th#- English language at all. They are as yet foreign to our life and our outlook. They are to be absorbed into our citizenship. Their 56 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT children, and they have lots of them, are to be trained in our schools. And those very people have a considerable part in estab- lishing and managing the schools which are to do that work. If educational problems made people poor, I suspect that each of us would be as poor as any two of you put together. [Laughter] We who have been together in this conference understand each other pretty well. We all have some form of citizenship in the democracy of learning. We know something of the fundamental principles of that institution 1 . We have come down from the North not to parade our intellectual estate or to patronize you, but to learn something and if possible to give you a word of cheer and enrich ourselves by the giving. In the democracy of learn- ing, the only way to get gain is to give away as much as one can. [Laughter and applause] About the only way one can get much in such work as this is by lifting all the rest as much as he can. In the democracy of learning there are no political, sectarian, state or sectional lines. We all mingle together to put in our experiences and our thinking and to take out of the common accumulations whatever we most need. Before the good-fellow- ship, the generosity, the energy, and the enthusiasm generated in these conferences, difficulties give way and the mountains shrink into mole hills. [Applause] Educational work in America is unique. This is the land of opportunity. It is the national policy that every man and woman, every boy and girl, shall have a right to an education suitable to his situation. Every one is to have a chance to lift himself above the situation in which he was born. Even more, it is the national belief that it is a sound national policy to aid and encourage every one to make the most of himself. The more we can make of each one of the individual units in our citizenship the greater and stronger does the nation become. All the nations do not accept that. In some lands statesmen are afraid of it. But we "believe in it. It is the plan of the North and it is the plan of the South. The same thing that brings us into common fellowship and stirs our common sympathies in our educational conferences distinguishes the American nation in the world. [Applause] I have been especially interested in the reports made to the conference by the different state superintendents of schools from nearly all of the Southern States. I was prepared for a good ^howing for it recently devolved upon me to review, for publica- tion, the educational legislation of the last year in all of the states, and from that examination I knew that there was an educational revival sweeping across the Southland [applause], but the definite REMARKS AT SOUTHERN EDUCATIONAL CONFERENCE 57 reports of new buildings, more teachers, enlarged salaries, im- proved preparation of teachers, and all of the accessories of a better school system are most gratifying. And let me say that nothing in this conference has stirred my admiration more than the able and heroic treatment of the matter of school attendance and of the illiteracy consequent upon nonattendance, presented to us by Superintendent W. H. Hand of Chester in this state. [Applause] One must face the real facts when he would accom- plish a great work. He who knows a subject of importance to his people and tells them the truth even though it be distasteful, renders the public a distinct service and deserves the highest commenda- tion. [Applause] I must not detain you longer. I thank you with all my heart for all that my journey to this beautiful old city and to this con- ference has meant to me, and I trust that the opening year may be surcharged with pleasure and progress for all of you. [Applause] SYNOPSIS OF REMARKS AT STATE TEACHERS ASSO- CIATION, 1905, SYRACUSE, N. Y. The Commissioner opened the discussion by a casual allusion to an article on Needed Educational Legislation printed on the official program, and relating to teachers' salaries, pensions, permanency of tenure, etc., and remarked that the article did not seem to be " surcharged with spiritual aim." He thought such matters all right as mere incidents, but not entitled to highest rank in the deliberations of a great state association of teachers. He would help increase the salaries of teachers whenever the oppor- tunity came, and would promote pension legislation whenever there could be any general or logical agreement upon the subject, but was hardly prepared to put the major share of productivity into such matters. As to permanency of tenure, there was not much more to be desired. Dr Draper proceeded to say that since the unification act went into effect the time had been largely occupied in combining and reorganizing the Department forces and methods of procedure. This difficult task had been about completed and the Department was now ready to take up some new educational business. Not much had been accomplished as yet, but the time had come for a distinct revival of educational activity. He thought that, speaking generally, the teaching force had improved decisively in the last two decades, and not much was necessary in that connection except to keep on doing what had already been commenced, with such occasional incidental changes in plans as experience would suggest. The Commissioner thought the Department and all interested in the educational work of the State should join forces to accomplish the following ends which he discussed: . 1 Better professional supervision of the teaching in the country schools. 2 The raising of low grade secondary schools up to the standards, whether they were large schools or small ones. 3 The more complete enforcement of compulsory attendance and child labor laws with a view to the reduction of illiteracy, which was much too great in the State, and particularly in the rural districts. 53 REMARKS AT STATE TEACHERS ASSOCIATION 59 4 A more distinct college and university influence in all of the middle and lower schools and in all of the other educational activi- ties of the State. 5 A stronger feeling of fraternity" between public and private schools and between all agencies for uplifting the intellectual level. The Commissioner spoke of the work the State Department was doing in the asylums and prisons; also of the work in the way of establishing and developing libraries and other agencies for aiding people to improve themselves outside of the schools. He asked all teachers to study in the next year the subject of business and trade schools, with particular reference to young children who will probably not go to high school and almost certainly will not go to college. He thought something more decisive and logical would have to be done in this direction and the attitude of the State Department should be taken advisedly and should accord with the best sentiment of the teachers of the State. The Commissioner spoke of the great need of a new State building for the State Department, including the State Library and State Museum, suggesting the stimulating influence of such a building upon the intellectual interests of the State, and asking the support of all in securing it. In conclusion, Dr Draper urged the consolidation of all edu- cational interests and the truest cooperation between all educational forces, giving assurance of the best help, without fear or favor, that the Education Department could give and soliciting the best support that all interested could give the Department. v INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT GRANT'S BIRTHDAY EXERCISES, STATE NORMAL COLLEGE ALBANY, N. Y. On the bluff overlooking the old town of Galena, in the very northwestern corner of Illinois, stands a small and very ordinary brick house. Nothing distinguishes it from other houses that are common in the neighborhood. While this house, in that place, forty-six years ago was doubtless a comfortable habitation, yet the unpainted front, the small panes in the windows, the wooden steps, the little front door, and the narrow hall with the steep stairs com- ing down to the entrance, tell us plainly that it was not above the common run and that the people who then lived in it must have been either in trying circumstances or exceedingly unpretentious. In the summer of 1860 a man, wife, and four children three boys and a girl, the oldest eleven years of age became tenants of this house. The man was thirty-eight years of age. He had been born in Ohio of very intelligent and well to do, but not conspicuous, parents. In his boyhood his father operated a tannery and owned a farm. The lad detested the tannery, did not like manual work anyway, but had to do it and preferred that upon the farm, and particularly that in which horses were used. He went to school but little. In one way and another he managed to travel about more and gained wider general knowledge than any other boy in town. At seventeen his father procured him an appointment to West Point. He did not want to go, but his father provided the necessary reso- lution. He showed but little interest in strictly military affairs. His study of the tactics was not enthusiastic and the drill seemed a nuisance. When made a sergeant, the seventeenth, and there were only eighteen in the battalion, he did so poorly that they lost little time in making him a private again. But his sound character, his readiness in mathematics, and his superior horsemanship saved him, and in 1843 ne graduated, number twenty-one in a class of thirty- nine. Stationed at Jefferson Barracks at St Louis, as a brevet second lieutenant of the 4th Infantry, he employed the time he could get away from the routine of the post in cultivating the acquaintance of a worthy young w r oman, whose family was of considerable promi- nence and lived comfortably five miles out of town. He had been so assiduous about this that when he was ordered away to the war in Mexico she promised to become his wife. 60 INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 6 1 He thought the war with Mexico was unholy, but he followed the flag and gained some distinction as a strategist and a straight, hard fighter. The war over, he married and then served with the troops upon the Pacific coast until 1854. The army in time of peace had no attractions for him, certainly none which compensated for isolation from his wife and children. He became a captain, but the pay of that rank would not support his family on the other side of the mountains and the. enforced separation became wholly intoler- able. He resigned his commission and came home. The reasons for resigning and the manner of his life for the next six years have been called in question by some writers. There is no reason for it. The impulses which led to his retirement from the army were in his nature and they are worthy of commendation. Aside from that, he was not in strong health : he inherited some tendencies to consump- tion. He has told us of his reasons for leaving the army and of his manner of life in the following years. His word removes uncer- tainty. He engaged in unimportant, natural, honorable enterprises which he hoped would enable him to live with and support his family. His undertakings did not succeed and he went to Galena to share in the leather trade with his father and brothers. Old residents of Galena say he made but little impression upon the town. He was quiet, unobtrusive, serious. Once or twice he was asked to look after the procession at a local celebration, and did it noiselessly and well. Beyond this he was unknown and little seen except in the store and on his coming and going between that and the house on the hill. On these walks he was frequently accom- panied by some of his children, and at times had a basket on his arm. for he did the family marketing and then carried the meats and vegetables himself, according to the custom of the time and the place. The woman of the family was substantial, educated above the average woman of the time, a good mother and a genuine housewife. The children were like other children. The family life moved for- ward in the ordinary way. We can readily believe that there was much to discourage, for there was nothing to foreshadow future prominence. But we know that the family was happy, for it was bound together by love which could endure stress and storm. On the bluff overlooking the Hudson and the Palisades, in the upper part of the city of New York, upon ground at once pictur- esque and historic, hard by one of the very first of American uni- versities, stands a magnificent mausoleum. It compares favorably with any structure in the great city, or indeed in the land. The tombs of Britain's great men at Westminster, of Napoleon in the 62 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT heart of Paris, of the Hohenzollern kings at Potsdam, of Washing- ton at Mount Vernon, of Lincoln at Springfield, are not more magnificent, more dignified, more impressive. It is a voluntary testimonial to a great national character. The states contended with each other for the honor of providing it; but the people estab- lished it without invoking any governmental function. In the crypt under the great dome stand, side by side, a noble pair of granite coffins. One holds all that was mortal of the father at Galena, and the other, by his special stipulation, has since received the body of the mother. Over all, in heroic letters, is the name of " GRANT." Between me modest home at Galena and the great mausoleum at Morningside Heights there developed a unique career of universal human interest. It extended through a period of twenty-five years. It was a decisive factor in making the course of history in America. It will never cease to influence the thought and the life of the world. We can not today trace all the lines or fill in all the details of that marvelous career. The picture is a completed one and our country- men are familiar with it. The purpose of the hour is to point out the qualities which, when the opportunity came, led that career to move out of obscurity, to increase steadily in volume and in power, and to push through the gravest obstacles and the severest criticism to the very pinnacle of world fame with such apparent ease and such clockwork naturalness as to surprise mankind. There is no need to idealize the character of General Grant: in its humanity and its reality it appeals to the world. His name and his fame became great because of the things he did. But what he did was not by chance. It came of qualities which were inherent in his character. Those qualities were sharpened by training and seasoned by hard experience, it is true. But they were peculiarly his own, and they vere so independent and so unexpected, were expressed in ways so unlike those commonly associated with con- spicuous military achievement, and were so invariably successful that the character which embodied them speedily advanced to first place in the esteem of his countrymen and the thought of mankind. The conditions which were to require him, to find him, and to make him very great through service to his country, had not arisen when he went to make his home in the Illinois town. They came in the following year. When they came he was the first to recog- nize them. He began military operations at ,once. He organized a company, and rejected the proffer of its command. He offered his service to the government and expressed some confidence in his ability to command a regiment. His overture was overlooked. He went to the capital of Illinois and engaged in military work. Some- INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 63 thing has been said about his return to the army being accidental; about the possibility of his being out of the Civil War altogether. He recognized no such accident or possibility. Circumstances of time or place or rank were uncertain. He had some feeling about what he could best do or about what might belong to him. He was ready to pocket it if need be, but not unless it need be. He has told us that not for a moment did he doubt of being in the army through the war; that in war one does not have to ask leave of anybody to fight for his country. As a fact he was in the service from the very beginning. In a few weeks he was commanding a regiment, and in a few months an army. First and above all the character of Grant was sincere. In mili- tary affairs his judgment was entirely confident and almost unerring; in business matters it might slip ; but it was always sincere and just, always natural and always genuine, always modest and steadfast. The world had associated glittering show and spectacular effect with military genius. He hated them. He wore nothing in the way of a uniform beyond the requirements of the regulations. His dress in active service conformed to the rough conditions. It hardly seemed to be a uniform. There was little or nothing about it to sustain his rank. In his eating and sleeping he accepted the lot of the ordinary soldier. In his work he could outlast them all. He loved a good horse. He never exhibited himself on horseback. There was no riding along the lines before the onset, no cavorting on parade. There was no parade unless for discipline. But he could ride through wind and storm, mud and slush, days and nights together, sick or well, to accomplish military ends. No reality ever did or ever will appeal to the American heart more than that of the commanding general, upon a good horse, in the Wilderness, in the pelting rain and sleet, in the now historic blue overcoat of the common soldier, with the wounded and fluttering life of the nation in his keeping, yet as calm as a summer morning, as precise as clock- work, as confident as fate, as grim as death itself. The first years of the Civil War, at the fields of military interest in the east, were marked by dress and parade, by marching and countermarching, by the pomp of officers, the multiplicity of orders, the ready assurances of early and overwhelming victories. But not much ground was gained. Commanders lacked aggressiveness or feared failure, and when the sentiment of the country forced a move- ment the slaughter was appalling, and without compensating results. The gloom was deep and the feeling ominous. In these conditions an obscure man, without bluster, had worked his way up to an opportunity in the west. He got poor encourage- 64 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT ment from his superiors ; jealousies assailed and intrigue encom- passed him, but he seized the opportunity all the same. He drove the enemy out of Fort Henry, took possession, and moved at once upon Fort Donaldson. He had perhaps fifteen thousand men : there were twenty-one thousand defending the fort. He invited battle upon an open field, without avail. He made ready for the assault by land and water. Just as the advance was ordered he received a note from the Confederate commander his old comrade at West Point and in the Mexican War asking for delay, and the appoint- ment of commissioners to arrange capitulation. Any other man would have accepted the overture with joy. He thought one could settle the terms easier than two, and better without commissioners than with them, and replied, " No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.'' The surrender came instantly and upon his terms. A portion of the garrison had escaped in the night, but sixteen thousand men marched out, stacked arms, ate his rations, and were sent to the north as prisoners of war. The man who had done it said nothing beyond his official reports, and they were the briefest possible statements of facts, devoid of self-lauda- tion, free from gush and speculation, but filled with the confidence and outlook of one who could accomplish things even upon the dread field of an overwhelming fratricidal war. The surprise of the country was only exceeded by its joy. Could it really be that a man had done something of consequence, and without talking about it? How the great heart of the nation throbbed at the news of a substantial and unclouded victory ! And how the people stood amazed at the silence and the modesty of the victor! What an official babel there must have been when a man became conspicuous by his very silence! But there were other officers and older generals in the service who had not planned all this. There was enough of official consternation and shameful self- love in high military places to remove the man from command ; but the voice of the people soon put him beyond danger from such things. The nation gave him its admiration and its confidence. His brief reply to Buckner became the slogan of the Union cause in the camps, and at the battle front of the armies, and in the homes and upon the hustings of the people. Could the man sustain all this? Had he the qualities which could stand such prosperity? Steadiness and quiet, with Shiloh, and then Vicksburg with its thirty thousand prisoners of war, soon gave the answer. After Chattanooga and Missionary Ridge he was accepted as the coming general in chief of all the armies. Congressional thanks, and INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 65 medals, and presentation swords, and promotions, came speedily. A special rank was created for him, and before long he was moved to the center of the fearful carnage in the east and made commander in chief of all the armies of the Union. He had himself become greater and stronger through the two years of wondrous doing. The armies and the people had been educated also. Steadily, silently, confidently, he moved on to the mighty climax, leading greater armies, exercising larger powers, assuming weightier re- sponsibilities, forcing heavier battles, winning yet grander victories. Spottsylvania, Five Forks, the Wilderness, Petersburg, Appomatox these brief words tell the fearful and the wondrous story. It is certainly an inspiration to see an obscure man, in a brief period and without favoring circumstances, recognized as the fore- most military commander produced by the world in a long cycle of time. Other qualities than sincerity were necessary to make this possible. What were they? He proved to be a great organizer. The objective point in his military organization was the highest efficiency of the individual soldier. The soldiers of his legions were citizens and freemen. He knew the value of patriotic devotion and of free and safe indi- vidual initiative in the ranks ; he understood the methods which would produce such efficiency as could be secured from mercenaries, and what other treatment would gain that higher efficiency which marks the cooperative work of heroic and conscientious freemen. In his own character he combined ^the spirit of the patriotic citizen with the ways of the trained and experienced officer of the regular army. Commander and men were fighting together, not for pay, not for conquest, not for a soldier's fame, but for the freedom of the oppressed, for the life of the Republic, for the rehabilitation and the continuance of democratic government in the world. His mili- tary discipline recognized and reckoned with this great fact. Free- dom of opportunity and adequate support, forceful and trustworthy leadership with a modicum of control would enable such men to swing the sword of the nation to the overthrow of its enemies, and then bind up the wounds and bring together the sections for the yet greater unfolding of its unparalleled career. The supply and medical departments of his armies had first and best care. He knew the need of rations and the worth of shoes. The law of the camp and the march made for whatever comfort could be obtained, for freedom of action, for self-control, for enthusiasm, for elasticity, and for fighting power. His sense of justice was clear and balanced, quick and stern. He never spoke in sepulchral tones to make himself impressive. He was never 66 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT known to be excited and never heard to use an oath. He tolerated no nonsense: he accepted no lame excuses: he regarded no rank. He would remove a division commander in the front of the battle line if the facts seemed to require it : he would do it with real and manifest regret, but he would not hesitate about it. If in time he found he had made a mistake or gone too far, he would have genuine satisfaction in making the best amends he could in the presence of the army, or before the country. He acted upon small matters and large matters with equal readiness. He dealt with every problem presented : he decided at once : his ways were modest and quiet : his words were few, but every one counted: when he had spoken the thing seemed to be settled. He was serious but he did not trouble himself about results. He knew his ground and he knew his men. There might be an immaterial slip here and there, but the general results were the ones he wanted. The armies solidified : they grew in strength and waxed in spirit: they gained veteran form. Led by such a citizen and such a soldier, the Union Army of citizen soldiers became the most intelligent and the most scien- tific, the most extended, the freest, and yet the most homogenous and effective fighting machine in all history. Grant proved to be a strategist. He knew personally or he knew all about the leading men to whom he was opposed, and reasoned with much accuracy as to the course they would take. He studied the field and saw where the vantage ground would be. He seemed able to see from the beginning to the end of a campaign, and events happened as he expected. He seldom got into a tight place. If he was surprised, no one knew it. He moved his forces with celerity and in ways which ensured the results he had planned. But if he was a strategist by intuition, the quality was not the factor he depended on most to gain his triumphs. His battles were won by straight, hard fighting. He took the initiative and forced the issue. He gave his enemy no rest. He never seemed to care about what his enemy might do, and always reasoned that the fellows on the other side were as tired and certainly as scared as he was himself. No one will ever know how he would have con- ducted a defensive campaign. He was fitted by nature to lead offensive campaigns. He did not rest when a campaign was won. Before one end was gained he had started towards another. His self-confidence was and is startling. In the Vicksburg campaign he called in the division commanders and asked their opinions. He did not agree with them and he disregarded their conclusions, and says in his " Memoirs " that that was as near as he ever came to a council of war. He was quite accustomed to close his brief report INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 67 of a battle won by saying what would be done next and at once. This trait appeared early and remained to the close of his military activity. Nothing appalled him. In the midst of awful events, when the intricacies of the situation w r ere paralyzing and the com- motion distracting, when tens of thousands of lives and the fate of the nation seemed to depend upon what he did, he wrote his orders and reports with readiness, clearness, and confidence most amazing. Hear anew his words to the War Department in the darkest hotfr of the Wilderness campaign : " We have ended the sixth day of very hard fighting. The result up to this time is very much in our favor. But our losses have been heavy, as well as those of the enemy. We have lost to this time eleven general officers killed, wounded and missing, and probably twenty thousand men. I think the loss of the enemy must be greater. I am now sending back all my wagons for a fresh supply of provisions and ammunition, and propose to -fight it out on this line if it takes all summer." He set at naught the science of warfare laid down in the books. He was criticized for it. He hunted and haunted the enemy. He sought battle on terms equal or unequal. Again and again he hurled the legions of the Union against a brave, and alert, and desperate foe. The slaughter was heartrending. At home, a thousand miles from danger, the weaklings quailed and the poltroons called him a butcher. Nothing could be more outrageous. There was not a coarse or a gross thing in his character. No man was ever moved by a spirit more gentle, or directed by feelings more tender. He hated war. He realized his responsibility and knew for what he stood. He felt that the lives of his armies, and to an extent the lives of his enemies, were in his hands. He was an economist in human life, and a conservator of human sorrow. He knew that the quicker the order, the heavier the onset, the hotter the pursuit, the sooner would the bright sun of peace break through the awful clouds, and shed its light over a Republic which had proved its right to live. The inside character of Grant is revealed in the close of the war even clearer than in its conduct. He had taken for the guide of his personal conduct the motto, " Treat your friend so that if he be- comes your enemy he can do you no harm, and treat your enemy so that he may become your friend without humiliation." He acted upon it in all the events of his military career. It barred familiari- ties on the one side and left no room for jealousies on the other. No one ever doubted his independence: no one ever dreamed of coerc- ing him. But the commanders of armies, Sherman, Sheridan, Thomas, McPherson, and a host of others great in our history, for- 5 68 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT got that their training had been broader and their experience greater than his, as they gave him their friendship and submitted to his clearer vision, his surer guidance, his more unerring justice. So it was in the momentous events which marked the very climax of his military career. When the glad hour of surrender came he yielded all that a chivalrous and generous soul could give. He did what he could to make peace real, and to have industry and pros- perity follow in the footsteps of peace. But he knew his ground and stood to it. When an erratic President would disavow his parole of the insurgent armies and try their leaders for treason, he threatened to resign his place at the head of the army and espouse the cause of his former enemies. When Sherman made terms with Johnson, which mixed political with military matters, because upon the march to the sea he had been out of touch with the authorities for many weeks ; when Stanton charged Sherman with treason, and the country was in an uproar, and the government ordered Grant to hasten to Sherman's headquarters, take command of his army and renew hostilities, the General in Chief slipped down into the Caro- linas, set Sherman straight, told him how to fix the matter himself, and left before the army or the enemy knew of his presence. All that he said and all that he did in those days, so great in our history, was guided by generosity to his brothers in arms, by his keen sense of justice to all the world, and by the longing of his soul for a genuine and lasting peace. . Doubtless the fame of Ulysses S. Grant will for all time rest mainly upon his military achievements. Great as those achieve- ments were, however, they are very far from constituting the sum of his service to the country. He was twice nominated to the presi- dency without a dissenting voice in the national convention, and twice elected by overwhelming popular majorities. History has not yet done, but will in time do, his two terms in the presidency ade- quate justice. No executive ever stood for the dignity and integrity of the Union more steadfastly than he, or did it in more troublous times. He followed a Presidewt who was not in sympathy with his party, or any party, whose erratic qualities had practically paralyzed the executive departments of the government for four years. Nothing had been done towards reconstructing governments in the insurrec- tionary states, nothing towards recovering the law where war had overthrown it, nothing towards settling the obligations entailed by the war and resuming the normal business standards and financial methods of peace, nothing towards resuming the relations of brotherhood and restoring a true Union, nothing towards adjusting INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 69 the strained relations which the unusual incidents of the war had made with many foreign powers. There were scandals touching the federal service. The President may have been too confiding. He knew more of military men with their trained obedience to regime than of men who make their living out of politics. On all sides the hatreds were deep, the controversies acrimonious, the out- look overcast and foreboding. The man was in a new place, and military ways would no longer suffice. But the fundamental qualities of his character, his sim- plicity, and his genuineness, still served him. He held opinions and expressed them. He exercised the veto power freely. He sat at the head of the council table, every inch the President. After full opportunity for discussion, the quiet man at the head of the table exerted a decisive influence upon the result. There was new aggres- siveness in the routine of administration. The star route thieves were punished. Irresponsible clans, which met new conditions and much provocation with unlawful and murderous methods, were hunted down. The moonshine distilleries were destroyed. The government mails and the government engineers began to go freely on their way. The feeling that there was a federal power strong enough to protect its officers and agents in the performance of their work, and honest enough to punish those who abused its trust, began to abound in the land. But this is far from being all. Reconstruction of the dismantled governments in the insurrectionary states went forward. There was great bitterness it is true. There were many mistakes undoubtedly. The conditions were unprecedented. It was the accepted belief that the control of the South could not at once be placed in the hands which had but just prostrated all government there. The present understandings were impossible then. The men through whom the administration had to act were frequently a hard lot. But reconstruction went forward all the same. Before the end of his second administration the Soldier President saw the legal and con- stitutional union of the states completely restored. Happily the immaterial things in administration, the things which cause the most commotion because all can talk about them, are in time forgotten. The great things undertaken by a steady soul and a free hand remain and become greater. There were great things done by President Grant which will become yet greater in the light of history. He helped on popular education : the excellent scientific work of the government is largely traceable to his sympathetic feeling: he inaugurated a humane and rational treatment of our Indian wards: he was the first President to stand for reform in 7 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT appointments, promotion on the basis of merit, and protection in the civil service. The fifteenth amendment, giving citizenship, regard- less of color, the logical sequence of our political theories and of emancipation, became a part of the Constitution in his first term. While legal rehabilitation was going forward, the outlines of a new Union were shaped and the spirit of the new Union was tempered by the sense and the sympathy of the President. The chief instrument of war became the main reliance of peace. A concrete example, which may never have been in print, will illustrate. Just after General Grant became President, at the hey- day of patriotic exultation, the Republican members of the Senate determined in conference to erect in the city of Washington a more elaborate memorial of the triumph of the Union than had been dreamed of before. The intention was to represent all the forces of the Nation the Congress, the regular and volunteer armies, the navy, the auxiliary organizations, and all the rest, which had com- "bined to overthrow the Rebellion, in a costly and enduring group of statuary which should signify the fact to future generations. It was easily settled in the party caucus that the figure of General Grant should typify the regular army in this group. Then a com- mittee was appointed to wait upon the President and ask his cooper- ation in the enterprise and his advice as to other figures which might be included. A member of the committee has since described the interview to me. The impatience of the President was scarcely con- cealed while the plan was being unfolded to him. As soon as it was laid bare he said with much feeling that the scheme was in his judgment a bad one, that he had no claim upon his countrymen beyond that of all other men and women who had done what they could, that the last things the nation needed were reminders of the war, that the representatives and the people of the South were to enjoy Washington with the representatives and the people of the North, and that nothing should be erected in the streets of that city which would be disagreeable to any section or class of the people, and that the committee must be assured not only that the judgment of the President was opposed to their conception but that the official attitude of the President would be positively antagonistic to it. That ended the particular matter, but the incident illustrates quali- ties which were inherent in a great man. Two great, conspicuous acts in national statesmanship will forever do honor to the sound judgment and testify of the personal courage of President Grant in civic administration. Each of these acts requires a book for adequate exploitation. They must be passed with a paragraph. INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 7 1 The first was the complete settlement of our troubles with Great Britain, growing out of the unsympathetic attitude of many leaders of the party in power in English politics during our Civil War, and the consequent building (in English ports) of the Confederate cruis- ers, which in our sore straits had taken the attention of our armed vessels away from the suppression of the Rebellion and driven our merchant marine from the seas. For years our State Department had been asserting the claims of American citizens to reparation. The demands had been met by ridicule in the English press and dis- dain in the English foreign office. The American jingoes talked w y ar. The President caused our claims to be asserted with dignity and directness, but he avowed his confidence that the time would come when the English sense of justice, and the desirability of international comity, would lead to a recognition of our demands. War for the collection of money was unthinkable. He neither sneaked nor blustered. His words made a more profound impres- sion abroad than at home. When the Franco-Prussian War threatened the equilibrium of Europe, apprehension quickened the English sense of international justice. A joint high commission was appointed to take the matter up. When the commission met the British representatives refused to proceed, or even to consider the arbitration of the subject, if indirect damages were to be insisted upon. Direct damages meant the loss directly resulting from the destruction of property, and were finally measured at fifteen million five hundred thousand dollars. Indirect damages covered the cost of the prolongation of the war, smart money for injured feelings, and the like, and were estimated at from two to three thousand millions of dollars. The talking element of the dominant party was for the larger demands : the fellows who, in the main, fight but with their tongues were for war : the opposition party was for any- thing to harass and sever the dominant party. The President said we could not honorably demand what Britain could not honorably pay, and that we should be content with an expression of regret and the payment of the direct losses. There was a great political uproar. There was intrigue in the administration councils. But Grant had his way. His way recalled Mr Motley from the English mission, and removed Senator Sumner from the chairmanship of the committee on foreign relations of the Senate, and precipitated such a breach in his party that a large element refused to support him for reelection. He had his way all the same: and his way secured fifteen million five hundred thousand dollars for American claimants, a suitable apology from the government of Great Britain, modifications of the law of the high seas which have come to be 72 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT recognized by all the nations, and a firmer peace with the mother country and all the world. And his way resulted in his reelection with a decisiveness both unexpected and unprecedented. The other great act of General Grant's presidency was the veto of the bill further inflating the currency and further deferring the time for making good the promise of the government to redeem its paper obligations in coin. His trial was a sore one. The times were hard. The country had just passed through a financial panic. The demand for more circulating currency was imperative. The apparent necessities of party were urgent. A clear majority of the cabinet, of his party associates in Congress, and doubtless of the rank and file of the party which had twice made him President, hoped the bill would be signed. The President listened. At the last hour he went to his library late at night and all by himself he wrote one message to Congress signifying his reluctant approval of the bill, and another vetoing it. He made each paper as strong as he could. He was trying himself. .When through, he determined that the veto message was the more logical and sound. He sent it in. The integrity, the business sense of the country came quickly to the support of his attitude. That message advanced the credit of the country in every market of the world and strengthened the foundations of a system of national finance capable of supporting the industrial and commercial evolution of our rapidly accumulating population. It did more. It put a premium upon moral courage and developed more steadiness and stamina in the homes, and the shops, and the factories, and the centers of trade throughout the land. And it gained us larger respect at every seat of learning and at every political capital in the world. In a tour around the world, following his presidency, the General received every mark of respect and honor that the people and the governments of other nations could show him, and reached home, by way of the Pacific, amid the universal acclaim of his countrymen. So warm and enthusiastic was the expression of regard that mis- guided party leaders conjured with his great name once again for the presidency. The move \vas not of his seeking. His attitude was that of modest and passive acquiescence in the wishes of his people. But the results were acrimonious, humiliating, in some ways tragic. But his fine metal never lost its splendid edge. The casual acquaintance which it had been my privilege to establish with him when serving as a member of the committee of the Legislature appointed for his reception and entertainment in 1881 made it proper for me to pay my respects to him when we met in a Chicago hotel INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 73 in 1882. As we conversed there came a knock at the door. Open- ing it, the General read the name upon a card that was handed him and instantly said to the boy, " You will tell this person that I do not want to see him." Partly closing the door and then opening it again he repeated, " Boy, please remember precisely what I say : you will tell this person that I do not want to see him." His man- ner was as unruffled as the summer sun. " Why did you not say that you were engaged," inquired Mrs Grant. " Because, if I had he would have come again," was the reply. Wifely interest forced an immediate though somewhat reluctant and embarrassing explana- tion : " Well, that was a reporter from a daily paper which wants an interview," the General said. " Yesterday this paper abused Presi- dent Arthur for appointing Colonel Walter Evans of Louisville as Commissioner of Internal Revenue, on the ground that he had once supported me. The paper has the right to condemn the President and also the right to criticize me, but when it condemns the Presi- dent for nothing but because he appoints an old and entirely worthy friend of mine to office it is time that I resent it." Who shall say that this was not proper discrimination prompted by commendable self-respect ? His remaining years were encompassed by bitter suffering and sorrow. He thought his sons might be as successful in the business as he had been in the military world. Who can blame him for that? He gave his name to a firm in Wall street embracing his sons and another. The other proved a polished scoundrel and pulled down financial ruin and debt and intense humiliation upon an honored head. The General gathered up all he had, and pawned his medals and presentation swords, to meet his obligations. But this was by no means the sum of his suffering. Although his sturdy will gave him great endurance, his body was never strong. Pain was very familiar to him and he seemed spe- cially susceptible to accidents and hurts. Many times in his cam- paigns he had to rise above serious bodily suffering to command the issue of great events. In 1884 he had a fall which compelled him to go upon crutches for months, and from which he never recovered. The last time I saw him was when he came into Mr Elaine's room at the Fifth Avenue Hotel on crutches to pay his respects to the candidate of his party, although the two men had never been in personal accord. Just after this, disease in its dreadest form fastened upon him. He commenced to write the history of his life, that the proceeds might provide his family the means of living. The dread mes- senger stood at his elbow and withheld the service of the summons 74 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT that he might complete his self-imposed and gracious task. The cancerous growth in his throat made the suffering intense and in time speech became impossible. He never murmured : his calm- ness and steadiness were as sure as ever : his heart grew yet warmer to his people, his mind yet clearer upon the enduring interests of his country, as he went on with his writing. And as he wrote of reconciliation between the sections and the factions, the old bitter- ness did give way, the love of all his countrymen gathered around him, and the people became united in a common sorrow. To his physicians he expressed the hope that they could be instru- mental in prolonging his life that he might finish his work. As he worked, the last act of the Forty-eighth Congress created for him anew the grade of General in the army, which he had vacated upon his accession to the presidency, and the final act of President Arthur's administration placed him in it. In all this, partizanship receded and was stilled. With one accord the people of all sections and all opinions demanded it. His life was prolonged until his task was finished. He closed the book with the words, " Man pro- poses, but God disposes." It was his last will. It ensured his family a competency. It gave to his country a noble example, a benediction, and an inspiration. It was all he had to give. But it was much. It was more than any other of his generation could give. With work finished, he waited the end with composure and with confidence, and the thought of all the people gathered at the cottage on the mountain top to await the end. On the morning of July 23, 1885, on my usual walk to daily duties in the capital of the nation, I had stopped a moment, as was my wont, to admire the beautiful equestrian statue of McPherson, the gallant commander of the Army of the Tennessee, whose life was given to his country before Atlanta. There was a sharp stroke by the fire alarm on the city's bells. I looked up to the flag on the Treasury Department, and instantly it dropped half way down the staff. Looking at my watch it was 8.24; and I knew that but a moment before the light had flickered out on Mt McGregor, that a devoted husband and father had passed out of a loving family circle, that a great national character had passed on to the inexorable judgment of history, and that a kingly spirit which had put itself at peace with all the world was at one with the hereafter. We knew before today that General Grant had the gift of military genius. The ground over which the hour has carried us must have illustrated the fact that he had other qualities which were very great. They by no means made for strife ; they by no means pointed to war. They were factors in civic as well as in military leadership. INBORN QUALITIES IN THE CHARACTER OF GRANT 75 Sincerity, genuineness, gentleness, patience, steadiness, judgment, force, endurance, self-respect and patriotism were inborn qualities of his character, and peace was the best loved word in his vocabulary. The last public scene in the career of this great captain was not what he would have made it, but it was very properly an imposing one. The people moved by common impulse to our great city by the sea. The offices, and shops, and marts of trade were closed. The press, the pulpit, the schools, the clubs, gave expression to the universal grief. The army and navy of the United States were there in impressive form. The veterans of the Union armies he had commanded, and of the Confederate armies he had opposed, gathered in fraternal concord, to signify their affectionate and patriotic sorrow. The President and his Cabinet; the Congress; the Supreme Court ; the officers, the legislatures and the militia of the states ; and civic organizations without number, joined in the long march to the tomb. The cortege reached from the Battery to Morningside, and beyond. And through the August heat of the great city, through a throng of sorrowing people so great that no man could number it, the endless line of civic black and military white, and crimson, and blue, and gold, with arms reversed and banners draped, with slow music and measured tread, bore the mortal remains of Grant to their dignified and historic resting place on the banks of the Hudson, to the shade of a great university, and to that peace which he had longed for so fondly and had done so much to conquer. "Ashes to ashes : dust to dust." He has gone ; but the memory of such an one remains and becomes the splendid inspiration of the nation, the priceless heritage of the generations which follow after. ADDRESS AT THE COMMENCEMENT EXERCISES OF THE ALBANY MEDICAL COLLEGE, UNION UNIVERSITY Mr Chancellor, Mr Dean, and more especially you, Young Men of the Class of 1906: You are entering the medical profession. You have had a very substantial preparatory training and have been given about all your heads will hold of the theoretical technic and methods of medicine. The difference in capacity between now and when you have come to be fifty years of age, and the difference in quality between what you get through lectures and will get from practice are rather delicate matters which I haven't the heart to obtrude upon you in the presence of your mothers and sisters, and other fellow's sisters, who have come to add to the gaieties of your graduation day. Moreover, I am without the knowledge, and trust I am lacking in the temerity, to attempt to discuss the technical or scholarly or professional side of medicine. Happily it is unnecessary because you are so full of theory that you could not absorb more of that kind of thing just now. Moreover since assuming the burden of this address, and in contemplation of it, I have read a recent maga- zine article on the Ebers papyrus, found between the legs of a mummy laid away some seven thousand years ago, which shows that doctors were earnest if not so common, that diseases were about as well known and as well classified, and that the uses of drugs were about as well recognized then as now. Instead of aiding me, this article has forced me to abandon some 'contemplated observations upon the later history of the medical profession and the marvelous progress of modern medicine. But there are some things which any intelligent or experienced layman may say which ought to command the interest of the medical profession. From a point of view outside of the profession, and yet out of an experience that no one can say is very brief, and also out of my every day official business, some observations ought to be evolved which are worthy of your graduation hour and of a moment's thought. You are entering into relations with the medical profession. What is a profession, anyway? It is an association of persons united in spirit because engaged in the same business, occupied by the same studies, and moved by the same aims. The business can not be performed by mere physical effort, nor indeed by mere 76 FACTORS IN THE MAKING OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION 77 repetition and copying. It is intellectual business and must rest upon a scientific basis. There must be training for it which will enable one to recognize somewhat obscure indications, to ascertain facts on his own account, to reason logically about them, and to come to independent conclusions worthy of the common support of all because the conclusions are the inevitable result of man's sincere, intellectual, experimental, study of God's unalterable truths. Between these persons there must be respect and frater- nity: there must be genuineness and generosity. Jealous regard for the honor of the gild must control the meannesses which were given in some measure to all of us, and genuine enthusiasm for the success of the gild's business must travel in double harness with earnest desire for the progress of the world's good. Moving and inspiring these persons there must be a proud history, stirring traditions, time-honored usages, mountain peaks of particular achievement, and a literature with substance, flavor, and inspiration in it. There is no profession with a longer or a more eventful history than medicine: there is none marked by such serious study or such splendid accomplishment: there is none whose work must not of necessity be expressed by tongue or pen which has such a volumi- nous literature: there is none upon which men and women are so absolutely dependent ; and there is none so attractive to scoundrels and so sheltering to scoundrelism, in spite of all that multitudes of anxious physicians and all decent people have seemed able to do. Not until recent years has it been deemed necessary in America to surround the medical profession with legal safeguards and regulations. In all of the leading countries of Europe England, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, admissions to the medical profession were regulated by law and conditioned upon serious scientific training before there was much done in that direction by any American state. In all of these countries the conditions of admis- sion are probably more exacting now than in any American state. In this land of the free, where so many people seem to think that nobody is to be prevented from doing anything, the time is very distinctly remembered when the very common usage implied that holding a doctor's horse, attending the door, and picking up the catchwords and forms of medical practice, were about all that was needed to qualify one for the legal right to practise in the medical profession. The laws, made by the legislatures and laid down by the judges, assumed without sufficient reason that the natural intelligence and self-interest of the people were all that were neces- 78 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT sary to protect them from imposition. Not until long after the universities had developed medical faculties and these faculties, with the more commercial and ephemeral medical schools, had turned out many men who were trained in general culture, in scientific research, and in practical experience, was the medical practice placed upon any lawful or professional footing. Nineteen years ago it was my honor and pleasure, as now, to make the commencement address to the graduating class of the Albany Medical College. At that time only five states in the Union exacted an examination for a license to practise medicine. The only sure basis of training graduation from a recognized and approved school of medicine was nowhere insisted upon. Now a diploma from a recognized medical college, in addition to a licensing examination defined by statute, is required in 26 states. In 31 states a medical diploma alone does not confer the right to practise, and but eight of these states require nothing more than an examination. It is not too much to say that in erecting this legal and recog- nizable basis for medical practice in America, New York has been distinctly foremost among the states. Her experience has shown her the necessary steps: she has been the first and gone the furthest in taking those steps, and, wherever professional self-respect is the keenest and public sentiment is the ripest, other states are following her footsteps in the effort to gain her plane. And it takes nothing from the great credit which belongs to many others to say that the largest single share of honor for this splendid advance is due to one whose professional skill and reputation has recently led to his advancement to the presidency of the American Surgical Association; who is just now on his way from Europe where he has been to represent the American medical profession at the International Congress of Physicians and Surgeons; who, happily, was only last week and in his absence again elected a Regent of the University of the State of New York by the Legislature because of the distinct need which the State has of his service to medical learning, the enthusiastic though gentle guide of the Albany Medical College Dr Albert Vander Veer. When we specify the conditions of admission to medical practice in New York, we point out the most exacting requirements in America. They have been fixed by men of large experience and very high ideals in the profession and by courageous men in public life who have been willing to follow the best professional leadership. All admissions to practice must be upon examination by a state board of medical examiners, appointed by and under the supervision FACTORS IN THE MAKING OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION 79 of the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York, and before one is allowed to take the examination the following facts must appear: 1 He must be 21 years of age. If nature has its course, that is easily met. 2 He must have good moral character. So long as this may be proved by the certificates of friends, it will not be difficult. 3 He must have four years of satisfactory preliminary prepara- tion in an approved school of academic grade. This is arbitrary and there is no dodging it. 4 He must have four years of satisfactory work in an approved school of medicine. This is also arbitrary and has to be completely performed. The specified work in institutions of approved aca- demic and professional standards is the all-important advance. Plans for establishing a combined college and professional course, which will shorten the time one year, are in progress. It is clearly desirable that everything be done to economize time and encourage the scientific preparation in the universities. Institutions are stronger than individuals: organized and public training is more substantial than individual and private tutoring. The universities train in the fundamental sciences much better than the average school of medicine is likely to do. 5 He must have the degree of bachelor or doctor of medicine, conferred by an approved and registered medical school having authority to confer it. One who has all these qualifications, and in addition thereto is fortified with $25, may enter the State medical examination, and if he passes it the board of examiners will certify that fact and he will then receive from the Regents of the University a license to practise medicine in New York State, which he must register in the clerk's office of the county in which he is to try to do business, and then he may practise the healing art upon all who think they stand in need of it, and will permit him. Now it would be wholly unjust to exact all this of our own medical schools and our own medical students, and then allow physicians and surgeons who have been licensed in other states, where the schools are less substantial and the exactions are less severe, to come in here on the same plane as our own practitioners. To stop this, no one is allowed to come in from another state without exam- ination, but the University is authorized to register and recognize work in medical schools in other states, and, indeed, in other coun- tries, where the minimum graduation standard is not less than that fixed by our statutes for New York medical schools, and to admit 80 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT their graduates to the examination provided they have the other qualifications required; and the University may also accept not less than five years' reputable practice by a practitioner in another state in lieu of both the preliminary and professional training, but only to the extent of permitting him to try the examination. The statutes also authorize the University to indorse medical licenses granted in another state so as to make them good in this State, when satisfied that the requirements in the other state are as exacting as in this State, and that the other state will reciprocate in like manner ; but little has yet definitely resulted from this author- ity because but one or two states are able to meet our standards of requirement. The only states with legal standards fixed in the law which permit reciprocity are New Jersey and Michigan. We have recently had negotiations with New Jersey which have led to an acceptance of their medical licenses here and of ours there. Some other advances in that direction have been made. Some discussion of the matter is now in progress with the medical authorities of Pennsylvania. But there must clearly be legislation in Pennsylvania, as in prac- tically all other states, before we can accept their licenses. But many are moving. At a conference of state medical examining and licensing boards held last week at Columbus, O., at which Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Kentucky, Wisconsin, and per- haps some other states, were represented, three determinations of very considerable importance were reached: 1 It was determined to adopt in the different states the New York standards of measurement of preliminary education. The term "count" is to be used and is to uniformly mean one recita- tion a week for a year in a recognized high school or academy. 2 It was determined to recommend that a medical student's certificate entitling to admission to a professional school shall represent 60 counts, 30 of these counts to be in specified subjects, of which 10 shall be in English, 10 in mathematics, 5 in Latin and 5 in physics, with the further provision that after 1908 there shall be required 10 counts in Latin. This is of course not enough, but it is a fair start. 3 A committee was appointed to arrange a medical school course which shall be at least uniformly required as the basis of the medical license, and it was determined that this must em- brace bacteriology, histology, embryology, osteology, anatomy, physiology, toxicology and chemistry. Again, it must be said that this is not enough but it is a good start. FACTORS IN THE MAKING OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION 8l All of these determinations were reached with unanimity. These conferences and the boards which they represent are without legal competency to enforce these determinations, but the best profes- sional sentiment is setting rightly in the western states, and when those states really start to do a thing they do it very abundantly. New York has peculiar satisfaction in seeing her policies accepted with such courage in the great central states as to promise their general adoption in the nation. The New England states are singularly delinquent about state standards for admission to the medical profession. The reasons are obvious but the fact is likely to stand in the way of inter- state professional comity for a considerable time. However, it must not be overlooked that there are many medical schools of high grade in New England, graduating large numbers of thor- oughly trained young men, and it would be manifestly unreason- able to doubt that the leaders of the medical profession in several of the eastern cities are at least as learned, as skilled and as high minded as any in the world. The trouble is not that New England is lacking in learned medical men but that she does not shut out the ignorant or dishonest ones. California, Michigan, New Hampshire (a good and lonely exception in the New England States), New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Wisconsin are the only states which require a full high school course before the medical school and the state examination. In the other states the admission requirements at the medical schools are very slight. No state requires a col- lege course in advance of the professional school, but the schools of medicine of Harvard and Johns Hopkins universities do re- quire it. In twenty-six states a diploma from a recognized medical school must precede and be followed by a state licens- ing examination, and in nine other states there must be a licensing examination, without the medical school diploma, but of course there are schools and schools, and examinations and examinations. There are many other statutory provisions, and many penal- ties for evading the law in New York which are intended, so far as lawmaking can do it, to insure substantial character and scientific competency in the medical profession, and to protect the people against charlatanism and chicanery and violations of the law are now being prosecuted with considerable vigor. But I have already given more time to this side of my theme than I can afford, for I want to present another. 82 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT Not because of any suspicion that you are not all honorable men, but because you hear so much and must needs think so much upon the laws which fix the conditions of admission to the medical profession, and because the profession claims such excep- tional manhood, I must remind you that the wisest laws can only protect and can not make a profession, and that he who enters here with any expectation of winning honorable place in this pro- fession must more than meet the bare demands of the laws. He must have plans in his mind and purposes in his heart which will help enforce the laws but are wholly above and independent of the law. The gist and essence of a learned profession must appear in the learning and high mindedness of its members ; in their pride in its history; in their jealous regard for its good name; in their eagerness for their share in the fraternal spirit which pervades it, and in their sincere desire and intelligent power to give it character and make it serviceable to mankind. No man has any right to become a load upon a profession. If he enters one think- ing of the commercial advantage it is going to be to him, rather than of the inspiration to self-activity he may get out of it, and of the support and honor which his hard labor and serious study may bring to it, he is wanting in the first and most vital require- ments for admission. The services of different men to a pro- fession must be very different in kind and extent, but all may bring it honor and respect; and all who are not anxious to do that and who will not do valiant battle for it on occasion ought to get the benefit of a professional boot at the point where the stairway of shame descends to a wide back door. The medical profession has" some special attributes which claim particular reflections. If any men ought to exemplify and en- force physical, intellectual and moral cleanliness, they are the men in the medical profession. They know about aseptic dress- ings, and they ought to apply them to themselves. Because he is chargeable with a knowledge which recognizes filth at first sight, and is bound to stand for health, strength and cleanliness at all times and in all things, the doctor who is weak, immoral, or unclean becomes a conspicuous and contemptible spectacle among men. The medical profession is in a special sense a scientific pro- fession. It runs down to and rests upon the fundamental and exact sciences. It applies them to the highest interests of men. There has been too much ignorant and heartrending blundering in medical practice by men who claimed an expert knowledge which they did not possess. Experience has shown that society FACTORS IN THE MAKING OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION 83 must protect itself. No amount of scientific training can make men honest: a smattering of it seems to make men dishonest, for it almost inevitably leads to false pretenses. A frank and honest man with no scientific training but a very large practical experience is a safer practitioner and a more respectable char- acter than one who assumes to base his treatment of injury and disease upon a scientific knowledge which every true scientist knows is halting, inaccurate, and uncertain. One without a very full knowledge of chemistry and bacteriology, and a very considerable knowledge of physics and of physiology, zoology, histology, and embryology, and one without a sharp nose for investigation and without scientific methods which will reach down to a foundation that will stand and lead out to conclusions that are definite has no business dealing with the serious problems of human physical life. Young man, you have the fundamentals of scientific knowledge and this studious method ; or, if you have not, you have it in you to get it ; or, if it is not in you to get it, then you are trying to break into the wrong profession. And the very least that the medical profession can ask and the public can demand of you is that when a sufferer asks your aid you shall with the utmost pains and by the fullest physical examination ascertain what the trouble is, if it is in )iou to know, and if it is not that you shall claim the assistance of a true pathologist who can find out. When you know what the matter is, you will be more likely to know what to do to take care of it, and when you do know, proceed with assid- uity and courage and exactness and completeness to do it, or claim the aid of another who will. If you do not know and if you can not do, at least spare people the infliction of any unnecessary lying about it, or of any treatment which may be worse than the disease. There is much to tempt one into wrong in the medical profession. The respect of men and professional success alike depend upon your not giving way to it. You will be found out when you do. The judgment of a community is intuitive and inexorable. There are fussy and fidgety and weak-headed people who enjoy bad health and will have no physicians who do not encourage their belief that they must necessarily have it. And there are physicians who fall in with that sort of thing for the sake of the fees. But such physicians have to be content with such patients, for other patients do not want them. And where there is one person of that kind there is an hundred of the other kind who want health and prefer to employ an honest and genuine man who will tell them the truth and help them to have health. Of course, a little harmless bam- 84 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT boozling of an heroic soul may be warranted in a real exigency now and then, but the doctor who is fool enough to attempt to bamboozle the wrong man when there is no exigency ought not to complain if he pays for his mistake by the loss of his job and the destruction of any reputation he may have. You may possibly be forgiven for not telling unfortunates that they are as sick as they are; but if you tell people that they are worse than they are, so that if they die you will be on the safe side, and if in some way they live you will get credit for a miraculous cure, your over smartness will surely find you out. If you fondle and deceive patients in order to enlarge your fees you will do your patients a great wrong but you will do yourselves a greater wrong because while you are doing it you will be polluting your own soul and robbing yourselves of ambitious and enlarging reputations. It will be much better in the long run to keep in the middle of the road and in company with the truth. The medical profession is a sympathetic as well as a scientific profession. The very soul and spirit of it must spring out of human sympathy. As fine traditions as any that have grown out of man's experiences are associated with the work of the family doctor. There is some reason to fear that he may be passing away. The conditions of modern living, the methods of modern business, the vast extent of really skilled specialization in medical practice, and the growth of hospitals, all tend to commercialize the medical profession. In two great buildings directly opposite each other on State street in Chicago there are the offices of a thousand doctors. They never see the homes of many of their patients, and too many of them never see any home life at all for they live in hotels and boarding houses themselves. They are excellent men and they are better educated than doctors were in other days, but they must miss some of the factors which are needful to the harmonious evolution of a true physician's life, because that life relates to the homes and the family circumstances and relations of his clientele. Be true to the men and women who employ you. Don't be gab- blers. Keep their secrets and serve them with undivided regard for their interests rather than your own. Don't nurse jobs instead of patients. Do your work ; do it thoroughly ; be gentle and true, at times resolute and decisive; attend to your business with all the expedition you have, and then get out. It will be infinitely the better policy. It is too bad that people seem so unable to get rid of a doctor who has become a piece of the family bric-a-brac, when they really want to. The only national society yet to be organized, which I can FACTORS IN THE MAKING OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION 85 think of, is one which will give the members courage to get rid of physicians of whom they have tired, and who have more nerve than they have themselves. If one doesn't like a lawyer he goes to another with his next case, but if he doesn't like his physician he holds on to him with a sternness which philosophy has never ex- plained and experimental psychology has never yet solved. If men and women were not so subject to claptrap and pretense, they would have better health, pretenders would not be so common nor so persistent, and physicians of worth would be more widely recog- nized and more uniformly regarded. There is room here for just one more philanthropic national organization and we ought all to give support to one that would take this good cause in hand. It needs no mere theory and no bare logic, to show that science and sympathy must go together in the successful practice of medi- cine. The life of every successful physician makes it obvious enough. The lower ranks of the profession are full of men who blunder along and hold on to a weakling or an unfortunate with all of the persistence which credulity permits ; but the upper ranks of the profession hold the really successful men in whom humane sympathy unites with learning to develop the great souls whom the world recognizes on the instant and for whom it is always eager to remove its hat. The men who are capable of service and who are anxious to serve are the only men worthy of recognition in the medical profession. Help the poor. Do not be imposed upon, but do not withhold service because one can not pay. It is not the function of the medical profession to regulate fees. Do all the work you can get for what- ever you can get and do it just as loyally as you can, whatever the pay. It is about all you will be good for for a dozen years. You won't be entitled to dictate terms for a good while. If you accept this theory you will soon have work, you will grow in skill and in repute, and you will in time be able to dictate terms. Don't expect to gain the position of an eminent physician or surgeon without going through the long, many, hard years of service and of anxiety that that man has bravely, studiously and generously given to gain learning, skill, eminence and respect. And all of us have some sort of a claim upon the most eminent and successful medical men, and the quaities that have made those men successful lead them to respect it. One who has served who- ever called, for small fees or no fees, at all times of day or night, and has come to the time when he can do it no longer and must of necessity discriminate and may in a way fix his own terms, may no longer be bound to respond to every call ; but he is bound to have 86 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT young men around him who will, and to keep them under his guid- ance, and to go himself when the exigency demands it. If I can not afford to pay the Dean of this medical college for attending me in my distresses and am obliged to take up with one so inexperienced as you, I am at least entitled to have" Dr Ward come in and see me before you let me die without any reason, and have him tell you in my presence how well you have been doing, and then take you out in the other room and tell you to stop and do something else. They tell a story of my friend, Dr Newell Dwight Hillis of Plymouth Church, that I do not vouch for but that may easily be true. The story is that when Dr Hillis was serving a small church in Evanston, Mrs Hillis being desperately sick the young preacher called an eminent specialist.Dr John C. Webster, of Chicago, whose ministrations were completely successful. Dr Hillis worried about the bill and after a little went over and said, " Dr Webster, I can not pay you at once but I want to know what your bill is and I will soon arrange it. Here is $50. It is all that I can pay now. Money can never discharge my debt for such eminent services as yours. If you will tell me the amount of your bill so that I may have it in mind I will pay it in full just as soon as I can." Dr Webster replied, " You keep your money. I owe you as much as you do me and doubtless I shall need you as much as you will need me. You have made as good in theology as I have in medicine. I would like to exchange works with you. I will keep Mrs Hillis out of Heaven as long as I can, if you will keep me out of Hell as long as you can.'' I can not hope to get in the high station of Dr Hillis but I submit that I ought not to be compelled to forego the services of the Dean of the Medical College on an exceptional occasion only because he may stand in need of more theology than I am able to provide. The medical profession is bound to be more than clean and pure and square, more than scientific, and more than sympathetic. It must be steady, cheerful, courageous, optimistic and confident. It is bound to put courage into people to the end that doctor and patient may work together in meeting exigencies and finding the way back to normal health. Half the worth of half the doctors is in their buoyant and bracing temperaments. The medical profession is more than all that : it is a patriotic pro- fession. It is expert upon the principles which the state must observe to be healthful, and concerning the practices which society must prevent if we are to live in crowded settlements with any degree of comfort and safety. We look to this profession to set up the machinery which may assure the common heilth and to provide FACTORS IN THE MAKING OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION 87 schools, laboratories and hospitals, always expensive, which will make modern scientific knowledge available to the mass and meet the needs of the many who must inevitably be overtaken by acci- dent and disease under the swiftly moving and dangerous conditions of our complex life. You are entering an ancient, a learned and an honorable profes- sion. It is a profession which lays equal claim upon the funda- mental sciences and the manly virtues. It is distinguished by the fact that it is itself largely responsible for the marvelous scientific advance of the last generation. It is filled with sympathy and gener- osity. It is a courageous and patriotic profession. It attracts scoundrels and is often used to shelter meanness and vice. It is a laborious profession. You will have to earn your bread in the sweat of your brows and you will have to win any fame you get by a nobility of purpose that will stand all tests, by study which will keep you at the front of the scientific advance, and by zeal for service which always opens the door of opportunity. You have just as high rights as any body. Do not fear. Take your self-confidence in your hand. The outcome is with you. You will have to elect and you will do it soon. You will stumble along in uncertainty, think- ing much of yourself, wondering why you are not appreciated, and soon coming to mediocrity out of which you can never rise ; or you will at once give yourselves up to a splendid service and in time bring honor to a great profession. No one is going to plead with you or stay with you forever to get you to do it. If you haven't got fiber and force enough to move out and up on your own account, there are plenty of others who have. And they are the ones who are entitled to the world's best help because they have got it in them to help the world. ABSTRACT OF REMARKS AT NEW YORK STATE GRANGE, 1906, AT GENEVA, N. Y. More than seventy per cent of the people of this State are living in cities. New York city is doubling in size in thirty years. This means that city interests and theories are likely to predominate in the political, social, religious and industrial life of the State. Then farmers will have to readjust themselves. Our State agriculture is waking up. The splendid advance in dairying, in truck farming particularly on Long Island, in fruit culture particularly in western New York, in flowers and orna- mental plants, and in the canning of fruits and vegetables, is all very encouraging. But agriculture does not wake up as fast as the other businesses of the State. We have a State that can do anything. There is no good rea- son why the New York farmers should let the western farmers carry much more than corn and wheat past their doors to the great eastern markets. W r hy do we not raise more beef cattle, more draft horses, more sheep and more swine for New York, Phila- delphia and Boston and for Europe? If it is said that it is because of lack of feed, it may be answered that the State can raise any- thing. The fault is not so much with the farms as with the farmers. If the farmers do not know how to do it, the Agri- cultural Experiment Station and the Agricultural College must tell them. What is needed is farming on a larger scale, a better chemi- cal knowledge of the soils and a closer adaptation of crops to soils, a better understanding of the demands of the markets, good relations with the railroads, and more courage. The Agricultural Experiment Stations serve every farmer in the Mississippi valley. There is none in the country better than the one here in Geneva. It is anxious to serve. The only uncertainty is about the anxiety of the farmers to make use of it. Farming, the success or failure of it, has much to do with the farmer, with the manner of his life and that of his wife and children, with his intelligence, and with his happiness. If New York farmers can make more money they will have better schools. With railroads, and trolleys, and telephones, and newspapers, and the daily free delivery of mails, the farmers ought to have better homes and quite as good schools as the people in the cities 88 REMARKS AT NEW YORK STATE GRANGE, 1906, GENEVA N. Y. 89 * have. There must be not only a good elementary school within walking distance of every farmhouse, but a good high school within easy driving distance of it. The little roadside schools must be connected with village high schools. The supervisory district must be so small that a superintendent can visit each country school once a month and that the teachers can all come together for in- struction as often. All the people of the State are to live together. We are to live and help live. Every resident of New York city has interest in the prosperity of every New York farmer. The reverse should be true also. Farmers must dispel prejudices and get rid of old routine that does not fit new conditions. Cooperation, not criticism, is the essence of modern success. There is no greater State in the Union. . Look at her history, her splendid commercial situation, her wealth and her opportunities. Let all the people work together to make the most of these things. Those who do will make most headway for themselves. THE TREND IN AMERICAN EDUCATION Reprinted from Appleton's magazine by courtesy of Messrs D. Appleton & Co. Americans are ever ready to try out new propositions. Not many Americans are very discriminating about projects. The spirit of the country is not satisfied until suggestions have been put to the practical test. If individual and personal initiative is needed, any number of people will supply it; if public action is necessary, nearly everybody will support it. As individuals, and even more as a people, we are bound to get all of the possibilities out of all the things we chance to think of. Our native energy and common optimism are ever disposed to experiment, and our free-flowing democracy and our much legislation make it easy enough to do so. If something results we are very happy for we have made an addition tOL our already very good collection of national assets; if nothing results there is no harm we have had the fun which we get out of experimenting, and the laugh which we associate with failure. It all stimulates productivity. It puts a premium upon the novel; but it makes headway and brings out great results. Our energy and our optimism are valuable national properties. They lead us into some passing blunders, but they give us many enduring results. It is strikingly so in matters educational. It is the intention of the people who control the destiny of the" United States to do every- thing, to try out every manner of experiment, which may raise the common level of intelligence and enlarge the opportunity of the boy or girl, the man or woman, in the crowd. It comes pretty near being the national religion. It leads to some incidental absurdities, but to more very striking and permanent advances. There is apparently some growing doubt in the land about all men being created equal. There is even some skepticism about the laws being wholly without favor, or at least about their being administered so that the rights of all are exactly alike ; but there is no doubt whatever of the common determination that every American boy or girl shall have his or her full opportunity through an absolute equality of right to an education. That, at least, has by the common impulse become the first law of our land. The sense of proprietorship in the educational system is universal, and the purpose to make that system the widest and the best in the world is not at all obscure. 9 THE TREND IN AMERICAN EDUCATION QI The early thought of the nation about education the thought which our English forefathers brought from over the sea has completely changed. It is not something good which government is to encourage, but something vital which government must provide. And the government which is to provide it must of necessity be sovereign as well as local and administrative. The educational system is no longer a system which shall supply the elements of knowledge or the primary instruments for gaining knowledge, but a system which is expected to supply all the knowledge which any son or daughter of the State has the preparation and the will to come and take. It no longer acts through schools alone, but through libraries, museums, clubs, lectures, publications, -and all other instrumentalities which may po'ssibly raise the level of the intellectual plane. And when so much in every direction is being attempted at public expense, through officials who are not always experienced and who get no credit for being conservative, there must be a good deal of commotion much of the time, and no little uncertainty about the net results. Teachers and other professional managers naturally respond to the popular impulse ; not a few of them capitalize it. When the vox populi uniformly sounds an advance, when the educational associations are ravenous for something new to discuss, when the daily newspapers discriminate in favor of things that are novel, when celebrity is dependent upon proposing something out of the ordinary, teachers, like other classes of our resourceful fellow countrymen, are not likely to be weighed in the balance and found wanting. And it must be admitted that they enjoy it. Even if discussion and agitation do not bring forth results that are lasting, they supply the intellectual pastime which teachers sorely need. But propositions and projects are not tendencies. Even dis- cussions which entertain for an interminable time and movements which take forever to come to something or nothing, are not trends, but only persistencies, in education. The national character goes on unfolding in its own exclusive and imperial way. It adopts and adapts what can enlarge and enrich the soul of the Republic: all the rest comes to naught. American education accepts and incorporates what can add to the intellectual stores, the mental culture, the philosophical sense, and the industrial productivity of a free people ; the rest is forgotten. One can not traverse the last twenty-five years of American educational progress without seeing many developments which are so substantial and decisive, and withal so completely accom- 92 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT plished, that they must have become permanent. That period has been marked by truly marvelous advances, not only in the pro- fessional but in the common thought of the nation. It i* not too much to say that no such educational advance has been made in all the other history of democratic government and of the English- speaking race. So rapidly and confidently has universal education moved in this country and in our generation that the outlines of the national educational system of the future begin to appear. A very distinct differentiation of the schools into elementary, secondary and higher grades, for the purpose of administration, is going forward. The professional mind is making it and the lay mind is accepting it. It is advantageous to each grade of schools because it puts each upon its own ground and holds each to its own responsibilities. It makes educational values more stable and constant, and it fixes standards capable of wider use. It discredits pretenders and helps to clear away popular confusion. In the last thirty or thirty-five years the system of collegiate schools has advanced in numbers, in character, in attendance, in the multiplicity of offerings, and in the measure of public support and popular interest, to an extent which is alike surprising and gratifying to educationists. The college system is giving far more uplift and direction to all schools than the people realize. True as to all parts of the country, this is most emphatically true in the newer parts where democracy has little to hamper it, where new institutions have not come into conflict with older ones which had pretty good rights to the ground and could neither give way nor easily change in character, theory, spirit, relations, or outlook. The sure trend of our educational system is certainly more clearly apparent in the newer states where both the national and state governments have freedom and disposition to cooperate with ex- ceedingly ambitious people who are setting up new institutions. It is particularly true concerning institutions of advanced grade which are providing a general rather than a local service. Of course no unfavorable implications are cast upon the eastern and older colleges. Indeed, it is doubtless true that some of them are entitled to more credit for having broken away from educa- tionally hide-bound constituencies and supposedly settled theories, for having accepted the guidance of liberal and masterful leaders, and for having possessed the courage and asserted the freedom necessary to wider service, than the western pioneers with a necessarily wider because a later outlook and with less hindrances than the eastern pioneers are for drawing upon the world's later experiences and making at first hand, controlling, supporting and THE TREND IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 93 shaping to their own ends what the country most needs in the way of both upper and lower schools. Any substantial uplift in a system of education must come from above. Any great improvement or advance in" a class of schools must come from a class of schools higher up. This fact is now actually coming to be recognized by the lower schools themselves in America, and that of itself is giving unwonted trend and charac- ter to the national school system. But it necessarily follows that the factors which enter into the scheme and give turns to the plans of the upper schools exert a very strong influence upon the Icind of uplift and the direction of the development which those schools give to the middle and lower schools. In the older states three or four of the better colleges of our fathers have in the last generation developed into leading univer- sities with most of the faculties which educational traditions and modern philosophical and material development make needful. In the meantime the other earlier colleges are getting their ratings and finding their real work in a somewhat exclusive field, but finding new satisfaction in occupying that field with added useful- ness and honor. And many new institutions have been established, to fall into one class or another of the higher institutions. The stronger of these institutions in a very great measure, and the others in some measure, are giving tone and breadth to our national scholarship. But on the whole it must be said that they are doing this through their graduates, through our professional and business affairs, through the teachers they have trained for other colleges and universities, rather than through any very direct bearing which they have had upon the lower schools. They have sustained no organic, nor indeed any very sympathetic, connection with lower schools and their main influence upon the middle schools has had reference to getting students for themselves and to having them prepared to meet their- own circumstances and their particu- lar demands. Not more than two or three of the older universities, of which Harvard and Columbia are conspicuous examples, have provided substantial offerings in educational science and adminis- tration, or really undertaken in a rational way to study, to train teachers for, or to give energy and direction to the schools below them. With these very rare exceptions, the older universities and colleges have given only very indirect and disjointed, and often very self-interested, aid to the -primary and secondary school systems which have been maturing very rapidly and substantially all around them. In all states west of New York and Pennsylvania, and in many 94 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT of the southern states, a distinctly new class of advanced institu- tions has grown up. In many cases they came into being before the Civil War, and often they were established and provided with revenues by the state Constitutions. In several instances the state universities already established were given the federal grants of common lands and public moneys for research; in other cases these grants resulted in new institutions of the more distinctly agricultural and mechanical type. With or without this aid, the state universities began to enlist the enthusiastic interest and financial support of the people of their states in the seventies and eighties, which became even more decisive in the nineties, and has now gone so far as to completely assure not only their continuance but their continually enlarging and absolutely decisive influence upon all of the educational activities of their states. If we were to name twenty of the largest American universities, counting by buildings, equipment, faculties, revenues, offerings, libraries and attendance, fully fifteen of them would be state universities. Several of these have faculties numbering from three hundred to five hundred teachers, representing every culturing, professional, philosophical and industrial interest of our widely diversified modern education; and their student bodies often include from three thousand to five thousand people. Their assured sup- port in popular sympathy and public money is alike munificent and magnificent. Several have conferred more than a thousand degrees each at their recent June commencements. Their gradu- ates are of course most numerous in their own states, but they are not unknown in any part of the country, nor indeed in any part of any country where something worth while is going on. The influence of Columbia and Harvard and Yale and some others upon these western universities will always be gratefully admitted, but that should not disguise the fact that they have individuality, purpose and outlook very thoroughly their own. Refraining from comparisons as idle as odious it is moderate to say that in ambition and energy, in the variety of their work and the plane of their standards, in the seriousness and the democratic resourcefulness of their students and the steadily augmenting power of their graduates, and particularly in what they are doing for the industrial development and the sane thinking of the coun- try, they have come to give a decisive trend to the future of Ameri- can education. To bring out the special bearing of this work, under the particu- lar environing influences, on literary culture, on the political sciences, on scientific research, on law, medicine and architecture, THE TREND IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 95 on all lines of engineering, and upon the constructive and agricul- tural industries, very much might be justly said. But we must now be content with briefly pointing out its relations to the middle and the lower schools. In all parts of the country the secondary schools have become an integral part of the public educational system. In all of the Central, Rocky Mountain, and Pacific states the universities have also become a part of that system. In the East the public school system has twelve grades ; in the West it has sixteen. The extent to which the university has become a part of the common school system may be seen from the following bare statements: (a) It lays out the courses for the high schools. (6) It supplies a very considerable part of the high school teachers, (c) It inspects the high schools regularly by its own officer, (d) It admits students to the university without examination, from approved high schools, and under the stimulus of popular demand all of the high schools must become worthy of approval, (e) The university takes a keen interest in elementary school questions and is an ever present influence in the teachers associations. (/) It makes the common schools the laboratories of its education department, (g) It re- sponds to all popular demands and becomes a potent factor in determining educational legislation and shaping educational policy. (h) It is free and all ambitious eyes are turned toward it; it is popular and all boys and girls in the high schools think about going to it. (i) It naturally comes to be looked upon as belong- ing to all the people and as the responsible head and guide of the public educational system. Of course, this affects the university itself as much as the rest of the system, and again of course, it brings out a university suited to the needs of a busy, prosperous and ambitious people, who want the best in the world educationally and are determined to make very free use of their power to have -it. In other words, it is bring- ing out in our states a new style of university which is already giving decisive trend to the national system of education. And a process which has gone so far in all the states save a half dozen seems likely to be adopted in every state where existing universi- ties do not meet every need at a nominal cost. In newer and older states it is sure to become yet more decisive in its influence. Again let it be said that in all this there is no element of implica- tion against the older universities or the literary colleges, which find all the work which they can do thoroughly and well. In- heriting much from European thought and forms, shaped by American conditions when classical training was the sum and 96 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT professional employments the goal of college work, they^have aided and been themselves influenced by the development of a distinctly new class of institutions of higher learning, which have been obliged by the democratic advance in political science and industrial prosperity to defy both English and German models, train for both scholarship and character, and provide practically free instruction in any study to any qualified person. If one will realize that this great and popular university develop- ment within the public educational system is universal in the states which embrace the centers of population, of industrial pro- ductivity, and of political control in our country, one will be able to appreciate something of the overwhelming trend which it is giving to our education. There is nothing like it anywhere in the world, for there are no other political institutions which must give every one his chance; there is no other nation which realizes so keenly that its true greatness depends upon making the most of every individual unit, without regard to sex, or circumstances of birth, or church associations; and there is no other people with whom education comes so near being an absolute and universal passion. Passing now from what seems to be the overwhelming trend in our comprehensive system of education, namely the development and diffusion of the higher learning as an integral part of the system of common schools, let us inquire about the more specific results of this and some associate influences which are operating in our intellectual affairs. Our entire system of schools, higher and lower, is moving toward resourcefulness, to the training which fits one for successful living in our complex civilization. The mere rudiments which enable a child to read and write are far from sufficient in the elementary schools, and the linguistic studies which are merely culturing, in the old sense of the term, are no longer in the highest favor in the advanced schools. The early ideals are passing away. The little child must be trained to see, to think, to do, and to express him- self; the college student must get the knowledge, the purpose, the power, the steadiness, and the endurance which accomplish sub- stantial results, through mental or manual labor. Culture which gains recognition in this country must be more than skin-deep and must come from the reactionary discipline of work upon the work- man. The trend of our higher education, up to the present generation, was toward respectable polish for the idle rich, and toward some preparation for the learned professions. The trend of our higher THE TREND IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 97 education now is toward a much better preparation for the pro- fessions and toward very complete preparation for all of the skilled employments, all of the constructive industries, and all of the com- mercial activities. The more complete preparation for the professions has arisen from within the professions themselves and has resulted very largely from legislation limiting admissions to the professions. It is but just to say that in this the State of New York has been fore- most. In requiring (a) four years' satisfactory work in an approved school of academic grade; (b) four years' satisfactory work in an approved professional school, with the bachelor's degree from an institution duly empowered to confer it, as conditions for admis- sion to the State licensing examination, and (c) in sharply limiting the use of the terms college and university, New York has given real trend to professional education and professional standards, which many of the states about her are happily beginning to adopt. In this connection it would be a mistake to omit mention of the decisive tendency to prepare for the professions in professional schools which are associated with the universities, rather than in offices or in independent institutions. This has led many inde- pendent professional schools to seek alliances with universities. It is surely making both the preliminary and professional training much stronger and it is leading a much larger number of students to more thorough training than they would otherwise get. When we recall how recently there was little preparation, either scholastic or technical, for the professions in America, and how superficial much of the training in independent schools by lecturers who were carrying on regular practice has been, we have special satisfaction in realizing the extent and excellence of the work which the univer- sities are now doing for professional learning and expertness in America. The aggressive work of the universities, other than that which is in preparation for the learned professions, has come to be in the courses which are fundamental in administration and in the most successful carrying on of the commercial activities and the con- structive and manufacturing industries. There is large demand for training in the chemistry which enters into agricultural and manufacturing activities, in all lines of engineering, in the econom- ics of productivity and trade, and in the technic of all the businesses which follow after them. There is more demand also for the basic work of the political sciences. The demand is the largest where the equipment and teaching are the best. Of course this 98 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT all relates back to and shapes the courses in the high schools, and in some measure in the elementary schools. It is doing more than causing the lower schools to prepare stu- dents for the higher schools. It is developing a rather common belief in the crowd that a university which does little besides berate the lower schools about suitably training students for itself, is not doing overmuch for education; that young people must be trained for subordinate places in business and for manual skill in the trades as well as for the colleges and for positions claiming deep scientific knowledge; that the high schools have not yet accomplished all they ought *in this direction, and that there is "something lacking in the way of training the masses of children in the elementary schools for efficiency and contentment in the situations in life which they are likely to occupy; that something in the way of public trade schools must be established for the children of the masses at a rather early age, and that the universities and colleges are called upon to recognize that fact and help realize it. In a word, the very development of the higher learning is creating the common thought that more must be done for the elementary learning, that not so much is being done for those who do not go to college as for those who do, and that more must be done to adapt the training of the masses to probable environment and to the inevitable conditions of hand labor and other self-respecting and useful employments. One of the most gratifying developments of recent years in School administration relates not more to the better understand- ings and the warmer friendships between schools of different grades than between public and private schools, and between schools in one section of the country with those in another. Presi- dents and principals and superintendents and teachers are begin- ning to learn that one gets rich in education not by withholding but by giving, and that prosperity attends an institution which knows enough to adhere to its own business when it ought and to aid other institutions when it may. This knowledge is propa- gating deeper mutual respect and closer fraternal regard. Coopera- tion, rather than competition, is coming to be the policy of the schools. This growing disposition toward mutual helpfulness recognizes no state lines or other political boundaries. It is indifferent to provincialism, to sectarianism, to politics, and to all other forms of exclusiveness. That there is a "democracy -of learning" which embraces men and women who live in every state and every land, and which gives its ennobling inspiration to persons of every class THE TREND IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 99 or race, or church or party, and which is going to aid every intellec- tual and moral interest of mankind at every opportunity, is coming to be known wherever there are men and women who are moved by the spirit which God has placed in every human breast. It is making the widest, the finest, the most inspiring, and the most influential fraternity that the world has ever known. In later years there has been a very significant enlargement of the understanding that the true functions of a democratic state justify it in entering upon divers educational activities outside of the schools. It is coming to be accepted without cavil that the state may not only build up a state library for the use of state officials, legislators and judges, but a state library for the aid of the professions, or for any other interest which may be aided by a collection of books which it can not itself easily secure or maintain; that books may be loaned from the state library to any one needing them; that local libraries are to be encouraged, subsidized and guided ; and that traveling libraries may be sent about the state to quicken study in every direction. This tendency goes beyond libraries: it extends to museums and all collections which may interest and instruct the crowd; it is very jealous of original his- toric manuscripts and mementos; it sends standard pictures to the schools and all manner of institutions, and it gives helps to art centers, reading circles, study clubs, lecture assemblies, and all other intellectual activities whether they are individual or asso- ciated. The tendency is going yet further. It is extending scientific research to matters concerning the public health, and even to commercial and industrial activities. It would extend every facility to sane and logical thinking and to all rational doing. One state erects laboratories for the chemical, microscopical, and bacterial examination of diseased tissue; another analyzes all drinking water sent to its scientific laboratories and determines whether or not the specimens are free from contamination ; another conserves the animals in its forests and propagates the fishes in its waters; another works up its clays into forms both useful and beautiful; another measures the carbon in its coals; another tells its farmers how to add to the potentiality of their acres and what crops will command the readiest markets; and yet another shows its railroads how to get a maximum of speed and hauling power at a minimum of cost. All this and much more is going on often all of these things, and more, in the same state. The tendency is growing rapidly. It seems destined to give even more decisive turns to the future of our education and our civilization. IOO NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT The truly significant thing about it is that the more and the better it is done the stronger is the popular support. There is no socialism or paternalism about it. It is merely the outworking of the fundamental American doctrine that in education the masses have the same right of opportunity as the classes. It is using the combined political power to gain the educational results in a short time which without that power a few favored people may get in a long time, and often keep to themselves for a yet longer time. It is all illustrative of the inherent spirit of the country and of the roads which that spirit is bound to break out and follow. The growing culture -as well as the ever developing business of the country is quickly reflected in our schools. There is no country in which the changes .are so frequent and the accumulations so apparent, and the progress so rapid; and there is none in which all this so quickly affects the situations and policies of the schools. This is well illustrated in the architecture and the multiplying adornments of the newer school buildings at nearly all of the centers of population." It appears also in the art courses which are making their way into the programs of the schools. The great wealth of the country which embellishes and cultures so many homes does the same for the schools with this difference, that the influence of it is even more widely and sanely exerted in the schools than in the homes, because the schools are not so likely to be inherited by the superficial and idle rich, with all that is implied thereby. The schools are, in a way, becoming more and more the accumulating and distributing points of the country's culture as well as of the country's justice and prosperity. Of course, the large fortunes are producing some excessive and unwholesome luxury in the life at some of the universities, but there is no more democratic and leveling institution in the world than an American university, and the 4 students who use their wealth grossly and live riotously are no less likely to lose standing in the common sentiment of the crowd than they are to meet their fate in the semester examinations. The physical training which is now required very uniformly of the mass of college students, and the extent to which sports have been organized are giving manifest turns to our newer education. There is a new respect for health and a new enthusiasm for physical accomplishment. There is a new valuation upon sport and a wider interest in keeping it clean. The whole thing is doing much to attract youth to the high schools and colleges and is exercising an unmistakable influence upon the life in the elementary schools. Of course there are and will be excesses, but on the whole the in- THE TREND IN AMERICAN EDUCATION IOI fluence is good. Children endure pain with less whimpering; life in the open is not only generating new power but creating new ideals ; and the thinking of young people in both city and country grows more sane and ambitious through the striking development of physical training in the schools and of organized interscholastic sport. No one can foresee the destiny of the Republic, but that there is an educational purpose abroad in the land which has never before been so pervasive and so ambitious in any land seems clear. It is the spirit of a mighty people, gathered from the ends of the earth, enlightened by the world experiences of a thousand years. It is the spirit of a people with outlook and expectancy. They expect to use the wealth and the political power of the nation to make certain that every son and daughter of the nation shall have the fullest and freest educational opportunity. The functions of the state concerning every manner of educational activity, in and out of the schools, are being steadily enlarged and strengthened through the initiative or the common desire of the multitude. Growing appreciation is giving greater heed to the advanced insti- tutions and bringing them to the aid of all institutions and there- fore to the intellectual quickening of the entire country. Every- thing that the nation, the state or the municipality can do to aid true learning, without any injustice, it is to be made to do. And the learning which aids doing and the culture which is the product of labor are to be of the most worth. DC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY A 000 038 636 7