LB 875 .D66 190S" New York State Education Department 1909 Copy 1 ADDRESSES AND PAPERS BY ANDREW S. DRAPER, LL.B., LL.D. Commissioner of Education I908-I9O9 ALBANY, N. Y. p4061n.D8.3soo (r-iSgo) STATE OF NEW YORK Regents of the University With years when terms expire 1913 Wi-iiTELAW Rbid M.A. LL.D. D.-C.L. Chancellor New York 1 9 17 St Clair McKelway M. A. LL.D. Vice Chancellor Brooklyn 1919 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 1918 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 1920 Eugene A. Philbin LL.B. _ LL.D. - - - - - New York- 19 16 LuciAN L. Shedden LL.B. LL.D. ----- Plattsburg. 1921 Francis M. Carpenter - Mount Kisco Commissioner of Education Andrew S. Draper LL.B. LL.D. Assistant Cornmissioners Augustus S. Downing M.A. Pd.D. LL.D. First Assistant ^ Y^K:^vi'KoiAAv.^^.K.Vh..Y>. Second Assistant Thomas E. Finegan M.A. Third Assistant Director of State Library James L V/yer, Jr, M.L.S. Director of Science and State Museum John M. Clarke Ph.D. LL.D. Chiefs of Divisions Administration, Harlan H. Horner B. A. Attendance, James D. Sullivan . Educational Extension, William R. Eastman M.A. M.L.S. Exarninations, Charles F. Wheelock B.S. LL.D. Inspections, Frank H. Wood M.A. Law, Frank B. Gilbert B. A. School Libraries, Charles E. Fitch L.H.D. Statistics. Hiram C. Case Trades Schools, Arthur D. Dean B.S. Visual Instruction, DeLancey M. Ellis New York State Education Department ADDRESSES AND PAPERS BY ANDREW S. DRAPER, LL.B., LL.D. Commissioner of Education I908-I9O9 ALBANY, N. Y. L^ 87 SI 1 J) (0(P^ r. CONTENTS . PAGE. The Rational Limits of Academic Freedom 3 Desirable Uniformity and Diversity in American Education 21 From Manual Training to Technical and Trades Schools 44 The Democratic Advance in American Universities 54 The Adaptation of the Schools to Industry and Efficiency 71 The School Needs of a City 88 Suggestions to the Staff of the Education Department 103 Agriculture and its Educational Needs no Conserving Childhood 140 Lincoln 1 Introduction to the Lincoln Centenary brochure 156 2 What Makes Lincoln Great ? 158 3 The Moral Advances in Lincoln's Political Career 169 O.OF 1UN S2 THE RATIONAL LIMITS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM ADDRESS DELIVERED ON THE OCCASION OF THE SIXTY-SIXTH CON- VOCATION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, HELD IN THE LEON MANDEL ASSEMBLY HALL, CHICAGO, ILL., MARCH 17, 1908 I have had the feehng that I was coming to the home of an old acquaintance. For ten years we were neighbors. In ways we knew not, we spurred each other to make them good, fat years in the history of university upbuilding in Illinois. When I was being urged to accept the presidency of the University of Illinois, and a few hours before the formal election, and in dread of what might be the possibilities of the event, I came to this university and met Presi- dent Harper for the first time. If he had spoken in Hebrew and undertaken to examine me in Old Testament criticism, it would hardly have conflicted with what I knew of him, or with my very imperfect understanding of a modern university president. But he spoke in very kindly English, and you may be assured that he was not so unmindful of his diplomacy as to fail to urge me to come to Illinois. Neither presidents nor universities were disposed to flatter each other when events followed pleasantries and when the contacts were mainly upon surging fields of students in noisy contests, but the respect which I always had for his learning and his genius was in time enriched by the largeness of his heart and the obligations which were imposed by the tender of his friendship. And even then. Dean Judson was wont to say that state universities had the right to be ; and perhaps he did more than any other to teach us all that the way to get rich in education is by giving, and that the sound prosperity of one institution of higher learning helps rather than harms another. So, as I come into the University of Chicago for a brief hour once again, there would be something unnatural, if not untrue, if I did not pay my respects to the memory of its first great president, and express my satisfaction that this university, so young and yet so great, maintains the pace and keeps the faith under a second president whose qualities and experience make him a leader of no ordinary worth to American education. And I would not have the students of this university infer that my associations have been exclusively with the presidents. Many times I have been in the crowd which has felt the impact of your [3] 4 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMLNT stern and unpitying hand, and I have given my weak but willing support to the crowd which has often flagellated you. Mr George William Curtis once remarked to me that before he had the grippe he had nothing but contempt for it, but when he got out of it he had nothing but respect for it. The grip of the University of Chicago bears no comparison with the kind of grippe to which Mr Curtis referred, for no one can remember the time when there was nothing but contempt for it; but I suspect that we shall all agree that neither of these neighboring universities has ever felt the loosening of the other's grip in sport without a noticeable enlargement of respect for the strength and the skill which were behind it. The candidates for degrees today may be comforted with the assurance that in their triumphant university hour they are not to be oppressed with admonition and preachment. I come to you with a little of the feeling of Dr Henry Van Dyke, who once said something to the effect that he stopped preaching to a great New York city church and went down to Princeton to teach the boys, because he felt the irony of exhortation or argument with veteran parishioners who had been many times saved or were apparently past all hope. Your new found veteran standing shall exempt you. Your degrees will evidence your secular salvation, and even though you were limping spiritually, as I do not suppose you are, benevo- lent words would seem commonplace today. The theme of the hour shall be academic freedom and the limits of conduct which will let the truth thrive. The literature of the subject is prolific but there is no clamor in the forum just now. There has been no recent crucifixion without cause. There is no one in the stocks. There is no impending trial. There is no omi- noi^s raven on a bust of the goddess of wisdom above the chamber door. Freedom may be discussed with freedom. An academic question may be treated in an academic way. v;^;: . : j THc Evolution of our Higher Education The development of college and university teaching in America m?ikes a surprising and fascinating story. Looking for the mere statistics of it, we find none of much service to us before 1870, when the reports of the Bureau of Education begin to be available. Even in 1870 the classification was much less rigid than it has sineef become. In that year there were 369 institutions, with 3201 tmoheis' 'and 54,500 students. In 1906 — rigidly excluding all THE RATIONAL LIMITS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM 5 schools of actual secondary grade, all preparatory departments, and all professional schools not associated with a university, but including the advanced technical schools — there were 508 institu- tions, 21,849 teachers, and 135,834 students. In 1880 the income of the colleges and universities was $2,225,915; in 1890 it was $10,801,918; in 1900 it was $26,550,967; and in 1906, 5i>42,537,979. In 1880 the value of buildings and grounds was $48,427,875 ; in 1890 it was $80,654,520; in 1900 it was $154,203,031 ; and in 1906 it was $247,610,356. It is not necessary to remind a university which has been a most conspicuous leader in this great advance, how little even these figures really express. To gather and expend thl? money honestly and beneficiently has been a task of no ordinary difficulty, but to develop such a great throng of uniformly satisfactory college and university teachers in this brief time, we may admit between our- selves, has been practically impossible. ; i.jilT In this single human generation all of the essential factors of a unique system of university education have developtd in America. If it is not better than any other, it is better for us than any other. It is within bounds to say that there is no longer need of forcing students into the foreign life which President Harper used to lament, in order to give them as scholarly instruction as is provided anywhere in the world. We will not deny that, upon the whole, that system is different from every other. In this generation the sciences as well as the classics compelled recognition and forced their methods upon all the rest. They created colleges of their own. The applications of scientific study to the constructive and manufacturing industries came and made other colleges of their own. The higher education of women, upon an entire equality with men, and the carrying of liberal learning into numberless phases of the natural activities of women, made the men move around, and forced so much moving that some of the wise men of the East, with the best intentions and the utmost effort, have not yet been able to become quite reconciled to it. The imperative needs of the professions, and of a continually increasing number of professions, have taken up large tracts of university territory because they could not be met outside of the university enclosure. To make it possible, a great and universal system of middle schools, peculiar to the country, had to be estab- lished to connect the universities and the elementary schools ; and such a system has been so highly developed that it is doing more 6 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT thau the colleges did before 1870. Then the free right to get what one wants without submitting to so much that he does not want, and the liberalized methods of investigation and instruction, added overwhelming and often unmanageable features to the unfolding character of American universities. The obvious educational advan- tage to each college or school of association with other colleges and schools, and manifest economy, educational and pecuniary, grouped them about the same campus, while it added to the intricacies of life and the difficulties of administration. In a word, the offering of all there is in learning to all who want it and will fit themselves to come and take it, and the application of the higher learning to every human activity, has become the self -assumed and the meas- urably accomplished task of American universities. Democracy and Unique University Features This would not have been attempted, and it could not have been realized, but for the political philosophy of the country. But the political thinking which inspired the undertaking would never have accomplished it without putting into it two great factors which are essentially unknown to the universities of other lands. One is the board of trustees composed of educational laymen, chosen for their character, their benevolence, and their experience in managing affairs ; and the other is the payment of teachers without reference, or often in inverse proportion, to the number of students whom they instruct. Not many universities in other countries owe their being to private benefactions, or to the efiforts of a representative democracy to work out its theories and prove its worth through education; and not many of them are sustained by means and influences which are most concerned that every son and daughter of the people shall have their utmost chance. The universities of other nations are expressive of the national intelligence and progress, of the national experiences and needs, and of the national attitudes and power. Beyond their revenues from fees they are but meagerly supported by government funds. Their internal organization and administra- tion rest, with the educational faculty or the leaders of it; and within the ordinary activities of accepted procedure they are unham- pered. They undertake less than we do and perhaps accomplish some things that they undertake more exactly than we do. The means of expansion are seldom within themselves, however, and the exter- nal powers which limit their possibilities are themselves limited by THE RATIONAL LIMITS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM 7 social, religious, political, and pecuniary conditions which those powers could hardly change if they would, and probably would not change if they could. No one can fail to note that regularly recurring salary warrants and the absence of a system which automatically rids an institution of teachers who do not teach what is wanted, or in the way wanted, have a very decisive bearing upon the freedom and the expansion of universities. But the direct bearing of the board of trustees upon the life and growth of a university, while no less potential, is not quite so obvious. An English or German university professor has only amazement at the presence of a lay court of last resort in the government of an American university. He holds it to be a limitation upon university freedom and a desecration of very holy ground. On the contrary, it brings into the affairs of a university a factor which makes for freedom and particularly for growth. Standing for donors in time past and in time to come, no matter whether the donors be individuals or a state, the trustees come into sympathy with the teaching, and add the factor which gives the institution very complete independence. It completes the essential elements of self-expansion. Ordinarily composed of men or women of represent- ative character, the board of trustees regulates the business affairs of the institution and holds the confidence of the public concerning its needs. They are themselves sorely perplexed about its instruc- tional and research work, but after their freshman year they realize that they have limitations of their own, and then matters run smoothly enough. The constant presence in university councils of representatives of the external world, to which the institution must look for support of every kind, and of which it must be a part if it is to give back an acceptable intellectual service, doubtless goes further than anything else to explain the wholly unparalleled advance of the higher learning, in the last generation, in this country. Freedom of American Universities However the matter analyzes, and whatever the explanation, these American universities are the finest illustrations of human power and human reason and human freedom, working together for beneficent ends, that the minds and hearts of men and women have brought about. They pursue their great courses, controlled by both centripetal and centrifugal forces, as freely as a planet 8 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT revolves about its sun. They exemplify free government in its most refined form because a university will be free anywhere, and here a university is in the midst of the freest government in the world. They stimulate every human interest and respond to every rational demand. Their very existence is wrapped up in their freedom. They attract munificent gifts of money and affection because they are free to administer them for the enlargement of human efficiency and good will. But their power is in their freedom to resist as well as in their freedom to do. Their moral forces are energized and their spiritual aims quickened because they are free enough to resist mere ecclesiasticism. They enrich the rich through intel- lectual association with the poor, and the poor through the same association with the rich. In their affairs men and women find the places to which they are entitled, and are thrust out of the places which they lack the moral and intellectual right to hold. The semester examinations are no more inexorable than is the sentiment of the campus. Always surrounded by politics in a state of erup- tion, they easily defy political intrusion and are expected to refuse to promote any political end. Giving instruction in every study, they try out educational values through processes which are unre- lenting and by standards which will not give way. They make their own organization, they administer their own estate, they hold the right of initiative as to every undertaking, they may refuse as well as accept, and they have within themselves the men and the women, the powers and tiie means, of steadily enlarging their reach and of continually enriching their lives and their work. In sane and unselfish hands, guided by scholarship and by moral sense, they grow large because they accord with the prevailing opinions of the Republic, and their very enlargement, as well as their learning, makes for the freedom of the truth. Basis of Academic Freedom Fortunately something happens now and then to remind us that these universities are very human institutions. They are in the world ; the people who are making them great are not yet ripened for translation. Their officers and teachers have been gathered quickly, and opportunity acquired suddenly is often misused. In his inexperience and enthusiasm, particularly in his unfamiliarity with the thinking and the pace of the Mississippi valley, a young professor from New York might forget that the intellectual capital of the ages may exceed the brief output of a New York, a German, THE RATIONAL LIMITS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM 9 or an English sdiool. And ambition, vaulting ambition, may impel a mere human to overlook the need of time, labor, and the forget- fulness of self by which academic preference may be secured, or held when conferred. Academic freedom rests upon the same principles as political freedom ; but it rests upon other principles also. Formal law is an insufficient basis for academic freedom. Mere inclination can not prevail in a university so much as it may outside of it. The asso- ciations of the academic body are freer than those in the civic state. The propriety and the possibility of that depend upon a clearer understanding of freedom and a surer capacity for it. It rests not upon legal obligation so much as upon generosity; not so much upon possibility and opportunity as upon the subordination of self to the atmosphere of the place and the common good. Academic freedom is not for the teacher so much as for the truth. Scientific truth goes further than civic truth. It is dis- tinctly higher than social truth. The Puritan doctrine, that he who hears untruth or partial truth and fails to rebuke it participates in it, has never prevailed and ought not to prevail in the civic state or in social life. All of the truth about the mere incidents of life, happily, does not at all times have to be spoken. Untruth about mere matters of opinion does not always have to be corrected. But the main function of academic freedom is the unlocking of scien- tific truth. There can be no academic freedom which is opposed to it. Scientific truth invites and stands the last analysis. There can be no compromise about it. Scholarship covets an opposition which reveals misapprehension or gives added significance and strength to the truth. The acceptance of alleged truth without evidence is bad enough in a university, but not quite so bad as the self-interest and conceit which necessarily protect it in the name of academic free- dom. Academic freedom which is self-seeking more than truth- seeking is mere license and can not live in the academic atmosphere. Happily, it is governed by the higher law. It is an attribute of normal lives. One who can not safely exercise it may not have it; and from one who can exercise it safely it may not be withheld. It goes with one who can appreciate not only his obligations to a human institution — to its donors, its officers, its teachers, its stu- dents, and its graduates — but also the responsibilities of that in- stitution to the constituency it is bound to serve, and to the world it is bound to enlighten and make better ; and it departs from one who is so academically abnormal as really to put his mere liberty 10 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT of personal movement above the institution which gives him his opportunity, and above the truth which he assumes to think he is endeavoring to set free. Universities Must Discriminate Universities are very great, and very complex, and very human organizations. They have to care for property, they have to handle much money, and they are obliged to account in very worldly fashion for what they do. They must break out new roads, and they must equip themselves with a great array of educational imple- ments ; they must lay hold of rational educational theories, and they must have a superior knowledge of educational values. That has to be done through experts and teachers, for whom they have to assume responsibility. The freedom and the accountability have to balance each other, or there can be no harmony and efficiency ; and without these there can be no internal enthusiasm and no external confidence and growth. It all depends upon a true educational spirit which enriches itself by giving, and upon a balanced organization which assumes responsibility without limiting educational opportunity. Our great American universities, above any others in the world, are forced to the necessity of discrimination. Their very lives depend upon it, and their peril is in the lack of men who can dis- criminate with justice and confidence, and who will not be turned from doing it by fallacious theories about freedom. Not only because of their youth, and their rapid growth, and the fixed com- pensations, and the permanent tenures of their teachers, but because of the universal ambitions and the intellectual traits of the country, they are at all times encompassed with difficult and serious ques- tions; and they can not hope to meet the expectations and gather the confidence of the country, unless individuality is made to respect organization, while organization is moved by the academic spirit and responds to educational opportunity. There are some spiritual educationists who seem to think that Garfield was assuming to describe a university when he said that a log with Mark Hopkins on one end and a student on the other would make one. He was doing nothing of the kind. His fine imagination was paying a fine compliment to his fine old college president. If there is one in a university who permits such an ideal to beat against the imperative factors of organization, it would be well for himself and the rest of the world if he would go out THE RATIONAL LIMITS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM II and find a log, impress a student into his experiment, pass his hat for sustenance, and work his ideal out to a conclusion. If there are minor disadvantages, they have to go with the superior advantages of organization. The mighty results of cooperative life and effort far outweigh any sweets which the recluse may gather by himself. The intellectual and the moral, the civic and the legal advances have come through yielding the mere independence of self to the advantage of Hving together. Make no mistake. The trend of the world is not in the wrong direction. Individualism, the opportunity of selfishness to have its own sweet way, will have to reckon with organization inside, as outside, of universities. Organization protects against want and associates thinking with fact, energizes intellectual productivity, and gives scholarship its real opportunity. The laws of society and of organization will have to prevail. The organization, as well as the individual, has rights, and a university invades no sound prin- ciple when it maps out its own course, builds its own character, gets the best it can in scholarship and in teaching, loses no just opportunity to reinforce its strength, holds the good of all above the interest of one, insists upon good citizenship in the democracy of learning, and gives the world the benefit of it. Process of Elimination Now let us come nearer to the concrete. By a process of elim- ination let us see how little will remain about which academic free- dom need be apprehensive. Self-seeking must go out at once. Maneuvering for promotion or for pay, combining to control policies, and agitation to limit the freedom of any other officer or teacher in the institution, must lay no claim to academic freedom. A little of this is exceedingly re- pugnant to academic truth. If one will resort to it he must abide the result without any thought of making a respectable martyr of himself. The choice of studies in a university is not wholly free. Certain studies are required to be taken before others may be. What shall be required is often a matter of opinion and it may be a means of abuse. It might happen that the weaker a teacher is the more preference he must have in the requirements. There are tariffs in university schedules as well as schedules in commercial tariffs. The arranging of schedules for favor or for monopoly is no more within academic policy than within the political policy of the country. If 12 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT one will indulge in it he must take his academic life in his hand and abide the issue. Sensationalism has no rights of any kind in a university. Yet we must have learned that it is not to be kept out by the saying. Novelty of theme or of statement, suited to newspaper exploitation and to personal notoriety, are as repugnant to the traditions, the philosophic basis, the moral sense, and the freedom of a university, as illiteracy is a menace to government in a democratic state, or as greed is repugnant to fellowship in a philanthropic guild. One may not be allowed to propagate his vagaries upon the time and in the name of a university that would like to be thought prudent and rational. If one wants to be a professor of myths and ghosts, he ought to go out in the woods and sit on a log and pursue his inquiries on his own time and in the most appropriate place. Every- thing which lacks complete intellectual sanity and sincerity is not only without the bounds of the academic privilege, but is a menace to academic freedom. It has occurred in academic experience that one has had credit for the work which another has done, or has transferred the respon- sibility for his own shortcomings. This may happen without wrongful intent, through subtle reasoning or lack of reason upon a subject about which one's mind is exclusive and intense. It is surely outlawed in a university, and it must be settled by the ordi- nary processes and standards of intellectual integrity. Again, the mind of the scholar is jealous of the prerogative to do things agreeable to others, and utterly opposed to doing things which are against the interests of other people. Yet in academic upbuilding the bitter must go with the sweet, and responsibility must be associated with opportunity. When Seth Low was presi- dent of Columbia he said that the function of a college president was both to give and receive pain. Perhaps so, but that is no reason why he must monopolize the double function, or why his opportunities to give and receive pleasure shall not be as open as they may be through the ready recognition of his functions in college administration. The processes of learning must operate freely, but they can not extend to every field of inquiry in one institution. There is no academic right to force an institution into undertakings it can not afford, or to extend processes once started to lengths which are extravagant in time and money, and unpromising in result. And th^re is no actual hardship about it, because experience shows that THE RATIONAL LIMITS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM 1 3 the man and the institution who gratify inchnations without refer- ence to the material cost, are less productive in new scientific truth than those who are compelled to square their work with the usual limitations upon human conduct. There is less difficulty about all this in the field of the physical sciences than in that of the mental sciences. A university which would call back an investigator who is anywhere in the region of a grain of new truth in nature would cease to be a university, and the moment it was done the doors of every true university in the world would swing wide open to him. But when we come to the philoso- phical sciences, to matters of opinion, we will have to say that while the right of individual theory and expression is free, the right of place, and of association, and of time, and of opportunity, is not without its very decisive limitations. There is scarcely an institution of higher learning in this coun- try in which the Christian religion is not a matter of both philosophy and feeling. It is expressed in the life and functions of the institutions. Would the denunciation of Christianity and the propa- gation of some other religion be within the academic privilege in an institution founded upon, and nurtured by, Christianity? There are differing philosophical attitudes and different under- standings of history, concerning Christianity. Would an interpre- tation of history and a theory of religion consonant with Protestantism, be within the academic privilege at the Roman Catholic University at Washington, and would such interpretation and such theory be without that privilege at Yale? ,,, , ., ; < All of our higher institutions are chartered by, and many. of them are supported by, a democratic state. Would the contention that democracy is a vicious system, or that all government is an improper constraint upon the governed, be within the rights of free teaching in one of these institutions? May theory pull down the roof that shelters it? May a mere doctrinaire overturn the fundamental political philosophy which has been worked out in this country by hard thinking, by consecration, and by blood ? Even Germany does not allow that, and it well may be doubted whether the United States ever will go, or ought to go, as far as Germany does in regard to what teachers teach ^ and what stu- dents do in the name of " scholarship," without reference to the balanced character and moral fiber which we hold to be vital to its genuineness and its worth. There is little difficulty about what shall be taught in the schools, 14 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT or the freedom with which it shall be taught, until we come to topics which, for the time being, are subjects of party warfare. And there is no ground for difficulty about those if teachers observe the reasonable proprieties of the teacher's office. That office is not that of the advocate; it is not that of the agitator; it is not that of the executor ; it is not that of the legislator. It certainly is not that of the dictator. It is that of the judge. Its function is to ascertain and enlarge and expound the truth. It must do that judicially. It may be well to observe that there is no other judicial power in the organization of a university than what inheres in the essential attributes of its officers and teachers. The university has the powers of determination, and expression, and propagation, and expansion, wholly within itself. Beyond all other human institu- tions the American university is without limitations. There is no court to say that any educational policy of the corporation is in con- flict with the constitution, and therefore void and of no effect. And we are easily able to " construe " all formal words that relate to education in ways which easily paralyze the profane minds which are not acclimated to the atmosphere of the universities. Upon what may be called " live questions " we are dependent upon the judicial sense, the good breeding, the common sense, the sense of the proprieties, and the sense of humor, of the teacher. Happily, he fails us in only one case in a thousand. In the excep- tional instance the sense of others comes to his rescue. There is no limitation whatever upon the sincere effort of such a one to ascer- tain the truth or to express his conclusions as to what is the truth. The intelligence of the country would sharply resent any inter- ference with such effort or such expression within the well under- stood conventionalities of the professorial office. But as there are conventionalities which one must observe in order to be a judge, so there are those which one must observe in order to be a teacher, certainly in order to be a university professor. For common example, a professor of economics may believe in inter- national commercial freedom of trade. It is a mere matter of opin- ion. He has the clear right to express his opinions, but surely he has no right to enforce them upon students without telling them of the objections and the arguments upon the other side. Indeed, an intellectually honest man in such a situation will be specially careful to elucidate all the contentions of those who believe in pro- tection, because he does not agree with them. I can have no valid objection to a professor being a free trader. I can not object to THE RATIONAL LIMITS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM 15 his telling students the reasons why. But I have abundant reason for objecting to his hiding from students the arguments which support the policy of protection, and to his enforcing his partizan view upon mere youth with the ponderous solemnity and entire certainty of a military execution. Again, there are limitations upon the time and place for the proper exercise of the professorial, as of the judicial, office. These limitations aid rather than destroy the mental balance. One who would appear upon the hustings and say, " I am a judge. I have been elected. I have taken the office. I know the law, and the right of this matter is thus and so," would divest himself of all right to respect, and his office of all right to prerogative and power. He must sit upon the bench; he must have jurisdiction; he must have an issue properly joined; he must give the parties in interest their day in court; he must hear the contending views patiently; he must determine only what he has the right to decide, and he must do that without bias, with deliberation, and with dignity, if he expects to give potency and effect to his judicial office. The pro- fessor, no less than the judge, is in quest of the right and of the truth. To have result, or to have weight, his quest must be within the domain of his professorship, must be pursued with an open mind, and must be conducted with a scrupulous regard for the amenities of his office. Standing for his science and for the truth, and for the university which gives him his right and his oppor- tunity, he may reasonably be expected to refrain from conduct which, in the judgment of responsible authority, is not compatible with either. But suppose he is unable to see that it is not the freedom of teaching, but only the misconception of the teacher, which is in- volved. If he is worthy of a university, the matter will correct itself in time, and more than the requisite time is always allowed; if unworthy, he will assert misuse, and have things said, and invoke sympathy, and perhaps enjoy " martyrdom." He will have the news- papers and educational journals largely to himself. The presidents and trustees of colleges and universities will doubtless have enough to answer for, but there is reason to believe that it will be well atoned for by the truths they might have told but considerately kept to themselves. But shall there be no determination? There are those who say, " Let it all go : it is the price we must pay for academic freedom." The price may be wholly unnecessary or far too high. May one promulgate as truth mere opinions which are l6 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT not sustained by the body of his colleagues in his branch of study? May he proclaim to the public as discovered truth that which is still hidden? May he propagate partizan views and possible untruth in his classroom indefinitely and without hindrance? May he employ sensational methods to attract attention? May he assume to speak authoritatively upon subjects foreign to his own? May he bring ridicule upon his university by going to the world upon propositions about which he has had no expenience ? May he outrage the rights and reasonable expectations of students, and subject donors and trustees and colleagues and alumni to humiliation? May he do all this and more, and there be no proper remedy? The sense of the world, even of the academic world, will not assent to it. If honest, give him time, and consideration, and perhaps opportunity for a " call " to some other place. There will be some solution. If his intellectual integrity limps, give him the admonition of the saints and the prayers of the congregation. Paul adjured the Thessalonians that they should " study to be quiet," and to such a professor a sermon on that text might well be preached. If nothing else avails, submit the matter to the sound discretion of the board of trustees, and pray that they will not allow fear or favor to interrupt the high purposes which a discriminating Providence had in view when it disposed that they should be trustees. University Forces in Equilibrium Our democracy is developing a unique system of education in America. It is bringing out a type of university peculiar to the country. There can be no university without scientific teaching. There can be no great university without teaching that is scholarly, free, and aggressive. But there will never be a university strongly sustained in this country in which balanced sense does not combat unscientific teaching. And we may safely go further and say that an American univer- sity must be the home of other things than mere scientific research. It will not be projected in a groove ; it will not be based upon a single idea ; it will not consent to serve a single interest. An Ameri- can university will have to give free play to the political philosophy of the nation. It will have to stand for character as well as scholar- ship. It will have to be the conscience as well as the brains of its constituent factors. Opposing points of view are vital to the unlocking of the zvhoie truth, and opposing intellectual forces will have to enter into the training in moral sense and manliness and THE RATIONAL LIMITS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM I7 womanliness, which the Republic claims for her college youth. There is more danger to the future of some American universities through the fettering of administrative, than of academic, freedom. And there will never be a representative American university, with virile and growing power in it, where the forces which are essential to self -expansion and to its representative character are not all present, are not held in common respect, and do not balance one another in rational equilibrium. Those forces are the public, the donors, the trustees, the presi- dent, the teachers, the students, and the alumni. Each is to have its independence. Each is to be aggressive. None is to trench upon the independence of any other. Each is to regard the funda- mental principles and the imperative limitations of cooperative and organized effectiveness. There is no cause for conflict which is not alien to a university and which in an institution worthy of the name will not in due time and by natural processes be pushed into its subordinate and impotent place, or forced out of the fellowship. In a university, as nowhere else, selfishness defeats its own ends. Generosity and truth fit together, and where they join forces learn- ing will be uplifted, and multitudes of men and women will gather about its home. The freedom of American sentiment, the history and traditions, the temperament and ambitions, the moral fiber and sense of humor, the indifference to hurts and confidence in the future, the feeling of common proprietorship and the exactions of common sense, are all mighty forces in the evolution of a university which can endure in the United States. President Hyde, of Bowdoin, in one of the best magazine articles to be found in the literature of this subject, sounds one note that seems to me discordant. Speaking of the donor, he says, " He may give or he may not give. After he has given he has no rights." I can hardly think that he meant to say that a man with millions, which he can never use except by giving, is quite as free not to give as he is to give ; and I hesitate not a moment in saying that after one has given, his rights to the reafization of his expectations are as fixed as law and as sacred as honor can make them. Doubt- less the intent was to say that we may accept or we may not accept. A university will not accept an absurd bequest, and it is powerless to accept an unconscionable one. But obviously the best practical realization of a donor's thought is vital in a country where univer- l8 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT sities have grown out of beneficence in a way and in a measure wholly new to educational history in the world. All interested in a university are the moral custodians of the trust, but the trustees are also the legal custodians of it. We have already noted the peculiar advantage which a university derives from having all the factors of government and of expansion within itself. We have so complete and independent an entity that we seldom think of the limitations which must necessarily follow exclusive external control by parliament or minister. The Ameri- can university board of trustees is itself at all times under the spell of the university. It is an influence so elevating and enlightening that it beautifully balances that commercial sense and worldly sagacity which are the first requisites of the office of trustee. But it ought never to be forgotten that the opportunity of the true teacher and the health of the institution depend upon the freedom of the trustee from bias, from maudlin sympathy, from fear, and from selfishness, quite as much as upon any other freedom which is bound to find its home in a university. The presidency, like the trusteeship, has developed in, and is peculiar to, the American universities. It is the essential executive office, the logical product of the necessities of such an organization. The president does not legislate and he does not appoint or pro- mote teachers. But he holds the educational initiative. All ex- perience shows that it can not be reposed in a board. It is incon- sistent with the legislative function. If he holds it safely, if his outlook is clear, and his sense just, and his purposes will not be turned aside, and if he is sustained, the university waxes strong and great. If not, his administration fails. He must be a great leader in education, and he must hold many interests in equipoise. He can not lead and he can not bind many interests together in an effective whole unless justice and patience and steadiness and firm- ness abide with him and he keeps his administrative freedom under his own hat. And fortunate is an institution which has found the man who can do that ; and more fortunate still is the university which has come to see that the freedom of all will be enlarged by making it easy, rather than hard, for him to lead when he has proved that with reasonable support he is able to lead. The teacher who seeks and uplifts the truth will have in this country a measure of freedom larger than that of any other coun- try, to the accomplishment of his end. If he can not do it in one place, there will be plenty of other places where he may. If one THE RATIONAL LIMITS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM I9 man opposes him, there will be plenty more to give him a helping- hand. The measure of his support will be in very close proportion to the sincerity of his purpose and the intellectual sanity and in- tegrity of his effort. But I accept no theory concerning the rela- tions, no rule concerning the treatment, of a teacher, which does not make him a well rounded, independent, manly, attractive character, who asks no special privilege and avoids no ordinary obligation. The just freedom of the student is as sacred as that of any one else in the university. Like all others he is responsible to law and order. If he violates the penal code he should suffer its pen- alties. If he dishonors the institution, he should be excluded from it. The modern enlargement of his freedom has made him a better, a stronger, and a juicier character than he used to be. In his quest for learning he is just as free as the teacher. The freedom of the student is often the main assurance of the virility of the teaching. He must know that somewhere in the institution there is a court of last resort that will give him justice, no matter who is involved. And any course which would repress the free word of the alumni in the affairs of a university would certainly be a fatuous one. Of course, they may not have thrown off their student feelings or de- parted altogether from the student point of view, but their word may be no worse on that account ; and whether it is or not, the heart beats of the great organization will quicken a little when it is spoken. If the guardianship of law, through the protection of powers and the enforcement of limitations, by the judiciary, is the greatest contribution of America to the science of politics, as Secretary Root has said ; then the guardianship of truth in every branch of human study, through the amplitude of powers, the balance of forces, the freedom of procedure, and the limitations upon mere hu- man inclinations in American universities, may yet prove to be the greatest gift which America will make to world education. There are no limitations upon learning in the United States. Ecclesiasticism, monarchism, militarism, officialism, or tyranny of any other kind, will never be allowed to get in the way of edu- cation in this country. Every grade of school will be open to every moral, intellectual, and industrial interest of every man and woman in the land. But there will never cease to be limitations 20 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT upon men and women who are promoting learning. Limitations are what earnest men need and what great men impose upon them- selves. University courtesy may be a hindrance to the truth and a curse to teaching. When academic freedom is permitted to further the merely human inclinations, it is more than likely to thwart the interests of learning. The truth will have to be unlocked and trans- mitted through diligence, and patience, and self-abnegation, and love of men, and love of the truth, and the compensation for the service will have to be in the gold coin of heaven. DESIRABLE UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERI- CAN EDUCATION ADDRESS BEFORE THE DEPARTMENT OF SUPERINTENDENCE OF THE NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION, WASHINGTON, D. C, FEBRUARY 26, 1908 I can scarcely begin without mention of the fact that my entrance into the affairs of the National Education Association was twenty years ago, in this month, in this department, and in this city. It was the beginning of personal, professional, and official relations which have been a constant satisfaction to me. I had the temerity to present a paper on determining the qualifications of teachers. It took ground for state regulation, for the subordination of local methods to a state system which would at least protect every dis- trict against the relatives, and dependents, and supporters, and adherents, of school officials, unless they could pass examinations and teach; but it stood for the freedom of all who could stand up among men and women and exercise freedom without harm. If any one should recall that it was a bit crude, he will at least do me the favor of remembering that the speaker was then very young. Crude or not, it started an intellectual and pedagogical ruction in the department. But what provided the basis for a very earnest discussion then, is everywhere accepted now, unless it be in isolated sections which I lack the hardihood or the courage to mention. The next year at Nashville I became president of the department. The record sets forth that sixteen votes were thrown for me, that fourteen went for Mr Moffett of Alabama, that there were eight scattering, and that an open resolution, without a ballot, was re- quired to effectuate my election. Mr Moffett was considerate enough to join in the conclusion very heartily, and I held the office. The next year, with a much larger attendance, I was continued with every expression of unanimity, and the New York and Phila- delphia meetings of the department are among the grateful memo- ries of my association with the doings of the schools. I should therefore be false to much that I cherish, and descend to the depths of ingratitude, if I were not to respond heartily to your invitation to present this address. [21] 22 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT Growing Uniformity In the last twenty years the growth o£ uniformity in the plans and policies of the schools has been marked. We all know the reasons. In part they are internal and in part external. We are good travelers and great readers. We are all moved by the same ambitions. We would have as efficient and progressive schools as any people have. We are moved by the very uniform, and cer- tainly the almost universal, advances in the thinking and the doing of the country. We have gained in bigness and in weight, and the inertia which oppressed us before there was a great ball to roll has given place to the new difficulty of safely applying the tre- mendous energy of a mighty ball in motion. Rejecting the attitude of a wise old man apprehensive about something new, and without pessimism, of which I have not a grain, I am going to query to- night whether our information is not more general than our dis- crimination in its applications, whether the diversity in our situa- tions ought not to play a freer part in the determination of our policies, and even whether we ought not to be upon our guard against a uniformity of educational organization which may either overreach or fall short of the educational need of imperative situa- tions. And, notwithstanding the difficulty of the task, I am going to try to reason out and lay down some propositions upon which we may stand concerning desirable uniformity in the logic, and diversity in the instrumentalities, of American education. Illustrations in Uniformity A dozen years ago the president of the University of Illinois had some small part in securing the appropriations for a fine new library building, and then indulged in some pardonable reflections about where it should stand. It was his first experience in the matter of placing buildings in Illinois. He reasoned that it might well be placed so that it would " quarter " a little upon the course of the sun, so that the rather plain stack rooms in the rear might be as unobtrusive as possible, and so that the front, when taken in connection with other buildings, mig'ht present a sort of crescent to the main entrances to the grounds and add a little oneness and warmth of feeling to what the architects call " the ensemble." He figured it out, had the plat staked out on the exact ground where all this might be accomplished, and made it all very graphic by causing ropes to be strung around the stakes, so that none could lose the effect. He procured the governor to come and look, and UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 23 the great head of the state said it was " good." He led the board of trustees to the scene and exploited to them the sentimental magnificence of the prospect. He could not fail to observe that they appeared to have some latent doubts about the matter, but he noted with satisfaction equal to his appreciation of their good- ness, that their skepticism was suppressed by their consideration for himself. Returning to the council chamber, they too, in formal resolution, pronounced it all " good." Then, at high noon of the next day, there was an alumni feast which was attended by revelry and mirth and much freedom of talk. In the midst of the hilarity one unsubmissive unregenerate got up and said only this and nothing more: " Before the trustees break ground for that library building, it is to be hoped that they will have sense enough to pull it around square with the world " ; and the uproarious acclaim which he evoked drove the information into the soul of the president that his ambitions and ideals about landscape gardening and archi- tectural effect were being quickly prepared for a peace offering to the Illinois reverence for the cardinal points of the Illinois com- pass. His later information was correct. The ceremony was marked by a sympathy for the sacrifice, but by entire firmness and determination ; and that building stands upon an exact east and west line with its beautiful face squarely turned toward the mathe- matical but evasive great north pole, with what seems to me a serious and worried look because the curvature of the earth de- feats its eternal effort. Yet it was well. It is seldom that anything in which we are interested is as important as it seems to us at the time. It was better that the building should conform to common and harmless thought, than that it should for all time be obliged to encounter the universal standards of its owners about the fitness of things. There are some things that are not likely to be changed. The highways of New England will always follow the streams, seek the easy grades, wind about the mountains, and be grateful for the woods, no matter how long, or how crooked, or how heavy, the road may be. The highways of the prairies will always be as straight as an arrow, exactly a mile apart, both north and south and east and west, and they will never get in conflict with mag- netism nor with mathematics. But in each case they advance on lines of least resistance, and adjust the advantages of the situation to the uses of the people. There are usages or whims, as well as mountains and streams, which can not be changed. In the ceme- 24 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT teries about my New York home the graves are laid with reference to the size of the lot, and the trees that are upon it, and the number who are to occupy it, and without much thought of where the sun rises ; but about my Illinois home the dead are laid on east and west lines, with the head to the west, so that when the trump of the archangel shall sound the sleeper shall sit up and look to the east, lose no time in the bewilderment of turning around, and suffer no prejudice in the preferences of the Eternal Kingdom. It is better to conform to it than to be distressed by futile attempts to reform it. Preaching is a good thing, but much of it is wasted because irrational, unspiritual, or aimed at the unchangeable. Uni- formity is often a good thing, but it will find its match in the Yankee notions of Connecticut. Multiformity is often a good thing, but diversified agriculture will not stir enthusiasm among the wheat growers of Minnesota and the Eastern Dakotas, nor among the corn growers of Illinois and Iowa, nor among the cotton growers of Georgia and Alabama. Ignorance is unpardonable. Information comes easily. But what is well depends upon conditions. Reason must deal with facts. Policies must adapt themselves to situations. No matter how in- formed one may be about a movement which lias somewhere been successful, no matter how contagious is his enthusiasm ; no matter hov/ good the motive ; it is all wasted if the thing can not go where it is to be tried, or if it must cost in one way or another more than it can come to. If time is of no value, if energy is not occupied, if novices or geniuses are only wandering in intellectual forests and wondering about game, there is no harm : there may be possible good. But seasoned and intensive lives can not wait upon mere possibilities; certainly not upon those that are too remote. Even discovery and invention have come from lives that were balanced and intense, that evolved theories that are rational, and that fol- lowed probabilities that were at least within the realm of realization. And no matter how much we owe to research, to discovery, or to invention, the world's work has been borne and the world's advance has been made by men and women who are able to see zvhaf may be done, and who have the force and the discrimination which can do it. No Obstacles to Education Education comes pretty near being the American universal pas- sion. All the people believe in it. If that is not literally true it is so near it that no one can disbelieve in it without ostracism. If UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 25 one is indifferent to it, it is because he is a mental toper or an intellectual degenerate. All the people believe in all the people having all they will take of it. If there is one who does not it is because he is un-American, out of sympathy with the fundamental philosophy of the nation. All the people believe in all kinds of education for all the people. That belief stirs some trouble of its own. Some do not stop to think whether or not the kind of educa- tion will go in a particular place, whether or not it will profit a particular people, whether or not it will make misfits, whether or not it may break the intellectual and industrial equilibrium of the country, and therefore impair the individual happiness and the moral and economic strength of the nation. Now do not infer too quickly that the speaker may be lost in some sort of a wilderness; may have become blinded to the lights of a lifetime by some stupefying and profane influences. Every boy and girl, every man and woman, in America, is to have the utmost of educational opportunity that the country, having regard to the national unity and the rights of all, can provide. Every one is to be helped to the attainment of any distinct purpose which he may acquire. Every one is to be given aid in forming his purposes, and cheer on the road to their realization. We are in no danger of ever thinking that lowly birth may be an obstacle to intellectual great- ness. We shall be nearer right in thinking that high birth is a greater obstacle. We shall never think that one kind of training is good for one class, and that the people in another class are not to be allowed to partake of it; or that there is another kind of education which is suited to one class, and that none in another class can ever want anything to do with it. The suggestion is so repugnant to the thinking of the country that it merits neither refutation nor consideration. The democracy, the very atmosphere, of America, dissolves social sets, redistributes professional and business inheritances, and intermingles the wealthier and the work- ing classes, very quickly. The son of poor parents has about as good a chance as any other boy to be the rich man of tomorrow; the child of the wage-earner has as much prospect of intellectual conspicuity or commanding influence in the next generation as the child of the president of a university, or the president of the nation. Indeed, we carry our philosophy to such an extreme that it often puts an undue handicap upon the child of momentary prosperity. Fortunes in lands and securities, and in mental acquisition and in political preferment as well, are not much transmitted, or they are 26 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT SO much divided in the transmission, or so dissipated by the in- heritors, that they count but httle. The exceptional legatee has burdens and troubles of his own. Not much but work counts. It may be by the hand, it may be mental, it may be moral. It counts most if it embraces all. It must be adapted to qualities and environment. It must reckon with conditions and possibilities. It must be incessant, sustained, dis- ciplined, progressive. The worker must regard other workers; the work must articulate with other work. There must be ideals, but they must be rational. It matters little what the work is, if it is of a kind that the world wants done, and if the one who under- takes it really does it. It matters much if it is of no account, or if the one who undertakes it has no habit of taking care, no interest in the process, no pride in the finished product. If it is well done, no matter what it is, the world will appreciate the work and regard the man who does it. And more than by inheritance, more than by situation, more than by favor or by chance, the qualities and the worth of the man are determined by the measure and the fineness of his work. The efficiency of the worker, the fineness of the work, the con- sequent worth of the work to the country, and the reflex influence of the work upon the worker, turn very largely upon the free and natural, rather than upon the constrained, selection of work by the worker. To assure the results which are desirable he must choose for himself. Of course he must have incentives and inspirations; of course he must have lights and opportunities; but he must be left to his internal inclinations, tastes, and gifts, as well as to his external inspirations and opportunities, to choose the work which he wants to do, if there is to be much promise that he will do it well enough to be happy in the doing of it, and thus make it of some account to other people and therefore of more account to himself. I make bold to raise the query whether the educational system of America has not had an overwhelming trend which has taken away much of the freedom of choice and naturalness of selection which are necessary to the best individual and public results from the adaptation of people to work. I suggest a question as to whether we do not have an abnormal, indeed an alarming, number of misfits between workers and work. It might not be amiss to go even further and raise a question as to whether there is not something in the common thought and common ambitions of the country. UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 2/ and, as a consequence, something in the prevalent theories and plans of the schools, which actually leaves us with great quantities of work to do which goes undone, and also with great numbers of men and women who are not doing what they might do, and not doing much of anything anyway, when the very unfolding of their humanity depends upon the number of those who do tiring and productive work. Perhaps the difficulty, if there is a difficulty, may be expressed more clearly, and possibly a remedy may be signified in this way : There are great, powerful, and productive nations where the over- whelming and successful policy is to keep the masses down. The laws are so made, the professions so guarded, the expression of political opinion so obstructed, the political assemblies so unrepre- sentative, and the social classes so incrusted and segregated, that the door of opportunity is practically or completely closed to a child of the people. The thing is definitely fixed and steadfastly maintained in a way which will enable the few, and their children for indefinite generations, to enjoy privileges that they never earned, through the political subordination and the physical labor of the multitude. In this country we hold all that in abhorrence. Our political fathers, no matter where our natural parents lived, deter- mined that any law or usage which efifected or continued that policy must go down, wherever the flag of the Union should signify the thought of the nation. We have not departed from the attitude of our fathers. We have worked out their philosophy in a large- ness of fact and through a wilderness of difficulties of which they never had the slightest expectation or conception. We are now committed to that philosophy, not only because it was the philoso- phy of the fathers, but because it lias gained strength through the difficulties it has experienced, and shown its beneficence through its practical applications. We have undoubting confidence that we have the brains and whatever physical strength may be necessary to work it out completely, no matter how wide the territory over which the flag floats and no matter how many or how diverse the people who live beneath its beautiful folds. And we surrender no tithe of all this when we raise the question whether, in the severity of our determination to avoid the subordination of the many to the few, as in other lands, we have not gone too far towards the other extreme and advanced conceptions which, acting upon the suscep- tible and ambitious temperament of the people of the United States, have led too many to think that they can succeed by wits without 28 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT work, and can manage the business of other people before there is evidence that they are able to manage their own. In our rhetoric and declamation every American is a king. This is idealistic, but very often it is misunderstood. For any practical end it lacks the necessary discrimination between kings and between people. On the whole, it must be admitted that the kings have been rather a poor lot, and on the whole it must be said, if we say any- thing about it, that we have plenty of people who are kingly in that sense alone. In the theory, the intent, and the outworking of our pure democracy, every man stands equal with every other man in the making and the protection of the law. But that is far from all. The rest depends upon himself. As to the rest, he is unequal with other men. And the rest is largely in liquid state until it is given form and consistency in the schools. The schools have many fallacies. The boys are pointed to the millionaires, to the inventors and discoverers, to presidents of banks and railroads, to military and naval heroes, and to the presidency of the nation. One who lacks ambition for these places is deemed to be hardly worth the counting. Ambition, training in the cultur- ing studies, wits, and luck, are thought to be the stairs to eminence and glory. Yet the men who have reached altitudes by such means are rare in the extreme, and with rare exceptions they have been unsubstantial and unreliable when they got there. The men who have attained eminence and held it securely have been hard, severe, long-continued, uncomplaining, and unrelenting workers. The signboards at the crossroads, in the courses of the schools have pointed the boys to professional occupations. The road to these seems easy to a boy, and it is a rare boy that will not choose the easier thing. Yet, as a good friend, a natural lawyer, an honored judge, and a senator of the United States, wrote in my autograph album when I was a law student, " The successful lawyer, above almost all other men, must earn his bread in the sweat of his brow." The physician who is not a systematic, joyous, seasoned laborer, is a dangerous character to have about your house. It is so with clergymen and engineers and bankers and merchants, and all the rest who make any real impression upon life. The schools not only overlook or undervalue the processes which are essential to any success worth talking about in commercial, pro- fessional, and political life, but they are exceedingly undiscrimi- nating about the situations in life which are of most account to the UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 29 particular liver, as well as about the studies and processes and the hard labor by which they are to be reached. The man who has a craft and comes somewhere near being the master of it, is to be envied in comparison with the man who has got into a bank or a printing office and can not get to the fore in it. And the man who has developed a farm, with all its interesting and inspiring attri- butes, is a veritable king when compared with those who have taken rooms in the basements of the professions. Neither the successful craftsman nor the efficient farmer has to ask special favors. Both grow balanced and hardy through the demands and the limitations of their work, and both are doing work which the world has to have. Both are as independent as need be, and independence makes for influence and respect in the common life. But the control and direction of children have been much re- laxed, and we have had a pretty hard attack of something which has struck at educational values, rejected known roads, indulged in novel speculations which can be neither demonstrated nor disproved, points to everything and gets nowhere. The trouble with the schools, certainly the lower schools (and there is trouble with the lower schools, at least) is that they lack definite aims, unless they are aims which ought not to appeal to more than a moiety of the people. They do not train into the child the habit of taking extreme care, and they do not demand clearness of process and completeness of result. They do not sufficiently recognize the imperative demands of labor and exactness as the essential basis of a national system of education. So much must come first, in any event, and after that there may be free choice, when the child is old enough to make a choice. There is not only the lack of the essential foundation, but also of the opportunity for the subsequent free choice. The overwhelming influences of the schools are all in the direction of a superficial culture, although sus- tained and successful work is the instrument of all true culture; and of professional and managing vocations, although the places are overfull. Children have to leave the schools to escape their trend. If they do not leave for that purpose, they certainly do leave because it is not made worth while for them to stay. Only one third of the children in the elementary schools continue to the end. Only a part of these go to the high schools ; only one third of those who go to the high schools remain beyond the second year; and only one sixth to one tenth of those who go continue to their 30 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT graduation. All the rest drop out along the way, either because the majority of our people have a low estimate of the advantages of education, or because they think that it is more to their advan- tage to have their children leave school than to remain. It is not saying that a child should not have his free choice in determining what he shall do, nor is it implying that he shall not be helped to any opportunity for which he wants to try, to say that there is exclusiveness and repression in such a situation, and that in the outworking of our democracy in our education the forcing of children to such an alternative as that must disappear. Freedom of choice does not imply that all our children shall have a literary or professional training; it does not demand that in all parts of the country there must be the same kind or the same grade of schools; it does not demand that in its name children shall be guided into vocations that are overstocked, or for which they are not adapted; it does not demand, most certainly, that children shall be led into vocations that misfit them, or given the alternative of going, without training, into a vocation which they might want, and which it would be profitable to the country for them to have. The demand of our democracy is for equality of opportunity. We have gone too far or we have not gone far enough. We can not avoid the question. We can not escape the attitude of the Constitu- tion ; but perhaps we may understand it more perfectly. The de- mand of the economic situation and of common justice, that there shall be schools suited to the needs of all people and leading to all manner of vocations, will have to be heeded. The fact is that we men and women of the schools keep close track of one another. The news of the schools is all printed and we read it. We travel a great deal. We each undertake to keep up with all the rest. The discussions have all been of the same general character, and the projections have all been in one general direction. We have each added whatever subjects of a culturing curriculum the people would stand, and brought in all the incidental novelties, the conventions could suggest. The school boards have been almost paralyzed. Obstacles to education are not allowed in this country ; but may not some obstacles to some education in some places be healthful ? There has been skepticism, but no man of the world has felt just confidence enough in his skepticism to say bluntly, " Pull that building around square with the world before we go any further about it." UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 3I Schools to Suit Conditions We are eternally conforming and standardizing. What we need is not schools that are alike, but principles that are fundamental and schools as diverse as the conditions are. Of course, all schools must have standards, but they must be standards of sense, stand- ards of character, standards of information, and not standards of uniform courses, or uniform methods, for all the schools of a state or of the country. The universal comparisons between state sys- tems and between city systems, and the universal effort to have as good as any other state or city has, lead to results which are as remote as can be imagined from the needs of the greater part of the constituencies of the schools. What is needed is to bring the teacher and the parents and the children near enough together to make it possible for them to understand the needs and make the most of the possibilities of one another. For years the tendency of one enthusiast after another in the community has put more and more upon the schools. There are societies to effect everything that ever developed in a dream, and an average school superintendent or an ordinary school board is a weak defense to the onset of a society of enthusiasts, particularly of women enthusiasts. Politeness and platitudes have to suffice, when policemen and fortifications are necessary. Newspapers agi- tate, just as a matter of " newspaper policy," which means a policy that will sell more papers. A mere sentiment comes to be a " cause " of the people, and what confuses and takes from the con- centration and efficiency of the schools gains a place in their cur- riculums. Authorship and the publishing business play a part in the multi- plicity of studies, and a worse part in prolonging and attenuating studies beyond their right. The school life of the child is within limits of age. It is none too long. It is precious time. Whatever takes more than its right, subtracts just so much from something else that is vital to the rounding out of the child's life to its utmost. Whatever does not give him added power to do makes for insip- idity and saps his strength. Say all we will, and say it truly, about a child needing a complex education to fit him for life in a complex civilization, the fact remains that the things which make for com- plexity should not be permitted to begin so early as to endanger his imperative need of oral and written language and of the simple processes of mathematics. 32 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT We are a considerate and tolerant people. For a score of years good people whose minds seem to live in an inflated atmosphere have pretty nearly monopolized the attention in the schools where teachers are trained. In the colleges and universities — their proper field, if they have a proper field — their doctrines and propo- sitions are rather sharply resisted by other departments, and the zone of their research and confusion is healthfully circumscribed. But "researching" in the normal and training schools has few limitations, and the consequent uncertainty attains a density that brings average minds to prostration. The effect upon the young girl teachers is pathetic. They are not only called upon to do more things than they can do in order to meet the demands of enthusiasts, but they are invoking the aid of occult sciences, and feel obliged to accomplish ends by constrained methods and devices which are destructive of that freedom which is the essence of effectiveness in teaching. Useless illustration and exploitations con- sume time, if they do not obscure the point and defeat the end. Out of it all the children do not have trained into them the ability to do some particular thing. The parents are confounded. The school boards have become nearly helpless. The general public is restless and anxious. It is imperative that there be a closer adaptation of schools to situations, and that schools have more and longer control over children, and move forward to definite ends. There is much being said now, and it is necessarily said, about the development of technical and trades schools in the towns. But that is but one mani- festation of a wider difficulty. The schools must meet the needs of a particular people, whether these needs are high or low, academic, professional, commercial, agricultural, or manufacturing. We can not expect the people to adjust themselves wholly to schools. We must adjust the schools in very considerable measure to people. For some reasons it is better to describe a farm by saying that it is in the northern half of the 20th section in township no. 9 in the north range no. 3, west of the 6th prime meridian, as they do in Nebraska, than it is to say that 63 acres, more or less, are in the town of Long Lake, in the county of Aroostook, and bounded by stone fences or lanes, monumented by a blazed tree, a deer's antlers, a fox's hole, or a red heifer, as they may do in the Maine woods. But one system will have to prevail until a better one comes in, and there are more im- portant things than prime meridians in locating boundary lines. UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 33 when the lands go down in the family, and you don't have to give, and nobody wants to take, a mortgage upon them. It is well if people have got far enough to need and to support high schools and colleges, but if they have not, there is even greater necessity that they shall have elementary schools suited to their exact needs, and whether they have or not, their elementary schools must be ad- justed to their conditions and look forward to their work, or the bottom will fall out of the high schools, or there will come an educational cleavage which is repugnant to that theory of govern- ment which has been the backbone of our prosperity and is the hope of our future. We hear a great deal about consolidating schools and carrying children long 'distances to central schools, in order to have graded schools and finer buildings. It is well where the people with such lights as they have, or will have, want it so, but there is no peda- gogical reason why it should be forced upon them. There are diffi- culties about children being carried several miles to school, and there are pretty strong reasons why it is well to have a school within walking distance of every home. Graded schools have troubles of their own. A school does not have to be a big school in order to be a very good one. The teacher who has to reckon with the life of the family and the outlook of the child, may be, and often is, doing much better teaching than the teacher who is bent upon conforming her processes to the creed of a training school or the philosophy of the books, without such an understanding of doctrines as will enable her to know that dogma is not of much account where it fails to meet situations. The percentage of strong and balanced characters who come out of the country schools, where the teach- ing is personal and direct, is greater than that of similar characters growing out of schools where classification is imperative and the teaching necessarily much less personal and direct. IV.Iodern con- veniences are lessening the difficulties of the country schools. There is no overwhelming advantage in huddling people or pupils together more than they do it themselves under the necessities of the case. And it is a great pity that there is so much educational confidence or courtesy as to keep some doctrines about conformity in education from meeting with something like the frigid reception which bulls about conformity in religion would encounter in the General Assembly of my church. Sweeping generalizations are as inapplicable in one field as in the other. 34 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT This principle holds as good in the upper schools as in the lower ones. Some are " standardizing " American universities just now. You can not standardize American universities any more than you can standardize the color of American apples, or the height of American women. There are apples that command the top of the market even though they are not red, and there are women who are mighty, even though they do not approach the altitude of the Broad- way squad of the Metropolitan police. So there are colleges and universities which are first-class, even though they have less than a thousand students and do not attempt many things that the larger ones make much of ; and there are others which are second-class or third-class with two thousand or three thousand students, who are offered everything that can be named in an educational bill of fare. Classifying and standardizing are difficult and often dangerous processes in this country. They are impossible in American educa- tion. If it is a mere matter of association or congeniality none will object, for that is a harmless matter of feeling and of tastes. If it is a means of educational helpfulness, it well might use better descriptive words. If it is a process of discrimination, of exclu- siveness, of depreciation, then it must end where all meanness in education eventually does. There is no conclusive argument against the big college or the little college, the rich college or the poor college, the classical college or the industrial college. It is a question of fitness and eflficiency, of adaptation and of accomplish- ment. No matter what other attributes it may have or may lack, that college is of the first rank in America which sends its flag furthest into the ranks of ignorance and meanness by turning out the largest percentage of true and productive men and women. A few years ago Harvard University put the entrance require- ments at the schools of law and medicine upon the basis of an approved baccalaureate degree. That was well. The schools suf- fered somewhat in attendance, but advanced scholarship gained by it. Then other universities discussed it, some attempted it, and a small number accomplished it. It was all well enough. But there was an assumption in the discussion that a move which might be a good one at one institution must therefore be good at another. That is not necessarily true. By far the greater number of professional schools could not exist upon that basis, and it is desirable that such of them as are honest and doing the best they can shall exist. All intending professional students can not follow a prescribed course UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 35 of scientific training until they are twenty-six or twenty-eight years old before they are allowed to begin practising a profession, and all people can not afiford to pay the fees which professional men so trained feel entitled to exact. You may tell me that I am stand- ing for the lower rather than the higher ideals in scholarship. No, I am standing for the rational, the serviceable, and the fruitful ideals in scholarship. I am standing for schools that can serve the country. I am glad that some institutions are reaching the highest altitudes, glad that the time has come when students no longer need go to foreign universities for the very best instruction. But every school is to have its chance, and every student is to have his chance. You may well believe that the time will never come when all or nearly all of the great men in any profession will be enrolled in the alumni of a single professional school, no matter what its ad- mission requirements may have been. A full proportion of the great men will always come from small or weak schools in which there is some ordinary teacher who fires their lives. Schools are to meet situations that exist, and uplift constituencies of their own. They can not do that by merely copying or conforming. Lack of Aim and Efficiency The advanced schools, or their departments, have become so much differentiated that each has a very definite aim. By the time students are old enough to enter them they have gained rather clear purposes, and they select the school and the department which can do for them just what they want to have done. That is so in some measure, though much less so, with the middle schools. They are too often afflicted with more of a desire to undertake the natural work of the colleges and the professional schools, which they can not do well because they can not have the instructors, the equip- ment or the basis of preparation for it, than they are endowed with a proud ambition to do the legitimate work of schools of their grade, so that when pupils have finished it is known that they are in possession of the information and the power to do some definite thing which can be given a valuation in the world of education and in the world of fact and of affairs. Still, the pupils who remain after the second year in the high school do begin the process of sat- isfying ambitions which have begun to take definite form; and if they are clear enough of vision and strong enough of purpose, they often find the helps of which their particular ambitions stand in need. 36 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT There is practically nothing of this in the elementary schools. That is a most serious and menacing fact in American education. If it is said that there can not be, because of the immaturity of the pupils, it is answered that there is no such difficulty in other great national systems of education, and that the pupils are quite as im- mature there as here. The only aim in our lower schools is the grade above, and the one above that, and the road leads either to intellectual culture without any definite vocational aims, or to em- ployments that are professional or at least semiprofessional in char- acter. As a result the multitudes tire of it. The minority follow it, and, notwithstanding the steadily increasing exactions, more gain access to the professional and managing vocations than is good for them, good for such vocations, or good for the country. But the majority quit the road all along the line because they can not see that it is going to lead to any definite acquisition that will make it to their advantage to remain. It is a very common impression among the poor, and among some who are not so poor, that there is really more advantage to the child in going to work than in continuing in school. And if there really were work for them, and if they were actually being trained into it, how many of us could justly say that the conclusion is devoid of reason? But the grave fact is that the sixty per cent of the children who drop out of the elementary schools without finishing them are not prepared for any definite work, no matter how simple, and the work they do find does not lead to self-im- provement, because it is of a kind which grinds the heart and bone out of them for the enlargement of dividends. There are other facts associated with this one which must be mentioned but need not be argued. Any great work having rela- tion to both sexes imperatively claims the cooperative effort of both men and women. The number of women teachers, the consequent low basis of wages, the agitation about equal pay for similar work in spite of all economic and educational considerations, and partic- ularly the pernicious manipulation of party politics by organizations of women teachers in the larger cities, is preventing, speaking gener- - ally, the stronger men from engaging in teaching, and is forcing out some who have already commenced. For obvious reasons it is a menace to that balance in the work of the schools which is impera- tive to the interests of both boys and girls who are to form ambi- tions and find employments in a balanced world. UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 37 The doings of the primary schools in the great cities have undue influence upon the operations of the primary schools in the entire country, and this is particularly illustrated in the growing disposi- tion to make a teacher's position a comfortable subsistence for life, protected by law, rather than an imperative and responsible instru- ment of common needs and of the best public opinion. Of course it has groA^n out of the very largeness of the system, and of the unjust and reprehensible treatment which has sometimes been in- flicted upon teachers by weak, or worse than weak, superintendents and boards of education. It all illustrates the difficulties which jus- tice and effectiveness have to encounter at the hands of democratic government, and it particularly exemplifies the importance of thrusting all partizanship out of the management of the schools. These things contribute to a situation which wastes the lives of pupils. With the unnecessary studies, the undue prolongation of studies through a series of books in a single study, and the undue emphasis upon mere methods and exploitation ; with the fact that the pupils are not reaching forward to some definite thing in which they are interested; with the further fact that the home is no longer of much help because the character of the home has changed and because the work and processes of the schools are so changed that parents are unable to comprehend them, there is little wonder that the work is often behind the age of the pupil, as it is. Then there is the further fact that there is a very common national indifference if not repugnance to enforced attendance upon the schools. So there is no lack of explanation of the wastage in the work of our elementary schools, and of a percentage of illiteracy m the United States whicli exceeds that of any other favored nation in the world. ? "All Men are Created Equal " What is the matter and what is to be done ? Our democracy has often been misinterpreted and misunderstood. It is not strange that it has been misinterpreted, because there is no other democracy like it. Something very important happened in this country on the 4th day of July 1776, and because of that, some things even more important have happened since. Our independence enlarged the freedom of a people who inherited and never gave up their full share of the liberty of the nation which had gone further in making laws, and in defining human rights under human laws, than 38 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT any other nation in the world. Independence of itself gave us some rather inflated ideas about freedom, and those ideas have been still more inflated by the rather loose thinking of the millions who have come to us with the notion that freedom was offered and exempli- fied by the absence of the army or of the police, more than by the free play of moral sense, the equal rights of all, not some, of the people, and the binding obligations and limitations of moral as well as civic law. The trouble has been that in the prevalent thought freedom has been regarded without much concern for the founda- tions upon which it must rest, and the limitations within which it must operate, and the processes by which it must be enlarged, if it is to be secure or is to be enlarged at all. For a familiar but excellent illustration of this, see the difficulty we have in getting children in and keeping them in the schools. The attendance upon school is more irregular in the United States than in any other nation with whom we would be willing to be com- pared. It is not merely because there are people here who are indifferent to schools. There are such in all nations. It is not because we have more of these than other nations have. It is because the measure of control is less here than there, and because of the common misunderstanding in this country of what freedom truly is, and of how it is to be retained or enlarged. In a word, it is because public sentiment is not quick about seeing the need, nor keen about sustaining the processes for enforcing attendance upon the schools. We hold out more freedom of choice than do other peoples. Our schools attempt more than theirs. They do what they undertake more completely than we do. The habit of sending all children to school is much better established with them than with us. It has been established by law and by force. Our fal- lacious reasoning about freedom forces upon us a percentage of illiteracy several times larger than that of any other well organized and well governed country in the world. What is to be done ? Laws and educational systems — and edu- cational systems are one expression of laws — have to be recast frequently in order to correspond with the growth and progress of peoples. It is not necessary to conclude that our national and po- litical fundamentals are wrong, as some seem disposed to do. It is only necessary to give those fundamentals a rational interpretation and erect a more perfect superstructure upon them. One says, " Everybody who is well informed now sees that the declaration that 'all men are created equal" is only a o-Htterincr UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 39 platitude." This is not true. That phrase was neither a perversity nor a pleasantry. Far from its being mere rhetoric or bombast, it is, in my conception of the great soul of the nation, a tremendous basic fact, and I am proud of being one of the people who have confidently entered upon and successfully moved along the rugged road to its most complete realization in human history. I do not believe that the men in the Continental Congress were either capable of mere bumptiousness or incapable of expressing what they intended in very good English phrase. Of course, their manner of expression was of their day and generation. Within that limitation they succeeded very well in expressing the things to which they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. Has any one ever supposed that, when they declared as a politi- cal truism that all men are created equal, they intended to say that men are equal in height or in width or in weight? Has any one supposed that they intended to say that all men are equal in the tenseness of their feelings, or in the direction and the strength of their thinking? Or has any one imagined that they intended to be understood as thinking that all men are equal in their possessions, their attributes, or their opportunities? Washington's armies fought for no such idle contention, for no such absurd ideal, as this. It was a lawyer's phrase. It was the phrase of good lawyers and it was a good phrase. The lives and training of the men who framed it, the only logical hypothesis upon which it can be made consistent with all the other things they said, and the only inter- pretation which makes the Declaration worth the struggle of the Revolution — all combine to make it clear that the laws of this country were to guarantee all men and women an entire equality of legal protection and legal right, that the common power should not be used to keep one down nor to lift another up, and that the laws of the land should articulate with God's justice in holding out to every one the legal right to the equal chance to make the most of himself. All that we have to do in order to enable our schools to promote our national ideals is to go back to the fundamentals of our political faith, square our theories with their obvious intent, and create in- strumentalities which enable rational ideals to run their natural course, as the waters of the uplands follow their even channels to the sea. Every xA.merican child is to have his chance. It is not to be thwarted by any law of the government or any usage of the people. 40 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT It is not to be long hindered by the lack of educational instrumen- talities which may aid it. Of course, the large factor is in the personal qualities which are looking for a chance, which can recog- nize a chance when they see it, and which have wits, and force, and endurance, and patience enough to make the most of it. But these are not the only factors. A child's destiny is not settled in this country by the circumstances of birth. It is a great thing to live in a land where experience proves that riches quite as much as poverty, the city quite as much as the country, and conceit quite as much as necessity, are barriers on the roads to the elevations. But even this is not all. A child's future is not to be clouded or obstructed by any assignments which a teacher may make, by any false valuations of the prizes of life, by any fallacious theories about the kind of success which is of the most worth, by any wasting of his time in order to accommodate the rigidity of an organiza- tion, or try out the vagaries of pedagogical speculation, or by any forced misfits which must logically follow official, legislative, or professional misconceptions of the relations of our democracy to the free opportunities of men and women. It is time to stop prac- tising upon children in the schools ; it is time to stop implying that work with the head is better than work with the hands ; it is time to stop forcing them into grooves which satisfy notions that are too common, but in most cases lead to a loss of every kind of efficiency and to ends which are alike humiliating to the individuals most concerned and opposed to the general welfare of the nation. It is time to put the emphasis upon work, no matter what it is about ; it is time to inspire expertness, no matter what in ; it is time to help qualities adapt themselves to productivity, no matter in what direction. Charity is not to be confused with the work of the schools. The right to an education is inherent. With that right the child must sink or swim, and more will swim if there is no confusion about it. But the schools must reach every child, no matter whether his parents will it or not. We must have more definite aims, and we must assure more concrete results. We may expect the complexity of the educational system to meet the com- plexities of our modern civilization, but in some way each school must have a simpler life which will help, and not confound, all who are concerned in it. Every American child must have an open, free, clear, legal, American chance. So far as he is constrained or guided, it must be only in aid of his own freedom and in the direc- tion of his own best possibilities. UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 4! Uniformity in Principles To help every one gain his best chance, we must know what we are after. We must have a better understanding of the principles which we are trying to make good. Every child, every one in the land, must be recorded, to the end that his rights may be assured. Every one must have an elementary education, and, before every- thing else, an elementary education must mean the power to read and write and master the simple processes of mathematics. The school must have equal respect for every manner of Avork. It must know that without application and endurance there is no hope, and that with them there will be some result of just as much moment as any other result which it might have gained. The work of the school must have definite aim, and its ends must be assured. There is too much scattering. Before a child is per- mitted to leave the school it must be known that he has a definite possession which never can be taken from him. The schools must carry him as far as under the conditions of his life they can be of help to him. The schools must train for every vocation for which there is any reasonable demand, and the child must be under the control of the school until there is ground for confidence that he has some need of finding his chance, some desire and application, some fitness for employment which will enable him to begin to earn a living. The child must be allowed his free election of vocation after he has acquired the simpler work of the elementary schools. But he must know that he is not to drop out and not to be allowed to waste his time, at least until he reaches an age or a situation where the case is apparently helpless and hopeless. The work of each school, being simpler and more definite, must be more intensive. Unnecessary time is consumed. It is worse to waste the time of a child than to take away any other right that he may have. He must get the larger part of his culture through his work. It will be a finer and truer culture than can be gained in any other way. What culture comes through mere instruction is well, but it is secondary and must wait upon the essentials. The same with mere information : if he has the elements which give him the power to get it, he will get it when he needs it or when he wants it. If he does not, the public can not help it. All of the children of the United States are entitled to be taken out of the list of the illiterates and to be tauefht to do some definite 42 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT thing, and to be made to know that their success depends upon their doing it better than others do. Then the unexpected and the surprising successes will doubtless be multiplied, and, whether they are ot not, the nation will be the stronger. Diversity in Means and Methods With some reasonable agreement about the measure of oppor- tunity which the educational activities of the nation are bound to hold out to every American child, and with our abundant knowledge of what is going on in every part of the country, there will be all of the uniformity that is desirable, if we encourage the freest diversity and individuality in means and methods. It is not necessary that the schoolhouses be of the sarhe height and color. They need not all have heating plants that balk when called upon for special effort, and forbid an open window at all times. The schools do not all have to have identical courses of study, and there is no reason why they should use the same books. The teachers do not have to have the same convolutions in their brains that have formed in the brains of those physiological psychologists who fall down in their physiology and get beside themselves over their psychology. It is of less moment what one knows when he enters a school than what he knows when he leaves it. It is enough if he has the power and the will to do the work. With some reasonable promise of that, he is to have his chance. The most unpromising freshman often develops into the particular star of the commencement morning. Tliere are to be standards, but they are to be the standards of indi- vidual institutions. The degrees of all the colleges ought not to be expected to represent the same thing. We are to prevent fakes and frauds. It is well for a state to protect academic terms from such abuse by fixing the attributes which an institution must have before it can hold itself out to be a high school, an academy, a college, or a university. But, being within the legal requirements, and being honest, it must find its own level and abide its own doings. The pupil, the student, and the teacher, are to use the means they have or can get, in their own way, to their own advantage, and to the common good. The glory of the American school system is in the fact that it is not to be fixed, and shaped, and determined, and limited by a minister, but by a representative government answerable to a pure democracy. It is in its flexibility, its adaptability to all conditions. This leads some to confuse the process of determination with the UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 43 process of carrying out what has been determined upon; or, in other words, to confuse legislative with executive functions. We are to develop policies which hold out to every one his chance, by the use of the best means we have, and having estabHshed the policies and appropriated the means, we are to exercise whatever of the common power may be needed to accomplish the designated ends. But we are never to forget that the worst results are likely to flow from adopting methods which can not be adapted, and from setting up instrumentalities which do not fit situations. The sanguine tem- perament, the prevailing ambition of the people, may be relied upon to do its part; but if temperament and ambition be unwisely played upon, there is danger of unfortunate result. The information we have of world education, the intellectual and physical work we have to do, the logical adaptation of people to work, the free chance for all, the obligation to reduce illiteracy to an absolute minimum and see that no child is robbed of his right, and the natural rather than forced flow of our national life, will combine to produce an educa- tional system which is much broader at the base than at the top ; which makes the most of the child and accomplishes some definite thing for him; which makes him know that he must work, aids his choice and fits him for his best vocation, and carries him as far as he wants to go in acquiring a balanced conception of life, as well as in mastering what is in the books. Conclusion I recall a good story which President Roosevelt tells upon him- self, in one of his hunting tales, of an exasperating experience with blacktail deer. At the sunset of a weary day a fine buck appeared at an opening in the woods at the sky-line of a mountain, and within fair rifle shot. The President fired both barrels, and says he heard his guide heave a sigh as the deer threw up his head and trotted ofif unhurt. Directly another appeared at the same opening, and he grasped another rifle and gave him the possibilities of two more shots. The guide sighed clear to his toes as the deer bounded away unhurt. In disgust which words could not express the two mounted their horses and started for the cabin. After going a mile, the guide gathered his courage to oflfer consolation. " Never mind ! I s'pose ye done the best ye could." " No, I'll be blanked if I did," was the answer. The expletive was justified. It was not the best that he could do. He has made few so bad, and many better, shots since. If we admit that we have made many miss-shots, let us believe that they have not been the best that we can do. FROM MANUAL TRAINING TO TECHNICAL AND TRADES SCHOOLS REPRINTED FROM THE EDUCATIONAL REVIEW OF APRIL I908, BY COUR- TESY OF THE EDUCATIONAL REVIEW PUBLISHING COMPANY It can not be doubted, and ought not to be disguised, that the early and general belief (before the days of public high schools and so many colleges) that the elementary school system was amply adequate to the needs of the country has been much shaken in the last quarter century. It is not because of the lessening of either highly trained or popular interest in education; indeed, it is because all manner and grades of education have become more and more a passion with all classes of our people. It is not because of any waning confidence in our educational theories, or in the basic principles of our public schools. The " equal chance for all " becomes more and more valued and jealously guarded as our funda- mental political theory works its way out in our governmental practices. The American people have become so accustomed to making and managing schools that they have but indifferent interest about those in which they do not have some sense of proprietor- ship. But common sentiment, uncertain for a long time, has reached a very confident belief that new situations have arisen which the elementary schools do not reach, and that something rather decisive must be done to adapt their work to the possible expectations of children who are not going to the high schools. It is seen that they must have more definite aims, and must make sure of more exact industrial conclusions, if they are to meet the imperative needs of the children of the wage-earners, as well as the economic, intellectual, and moral necessities of the country. This development ought not to surprise us. It has come upon schedule time. It is in the natural order and it is healthful. Schools supported and managed by the public can hardly be expected to anticipate conditions or to outrun popular needs. Neither the fore- sight nor the warnings of the schoolmasters make much impression; In their essentials the schools respond to public opinion. Before they create new social states they are the instruments of older social situations. New understandings stir and solidify sentiment, and then the school boards and the schoolmasters make the plans for giving effect to it. [44] FROM MANUAL TRAINING TO TECHNICAL AND TRADES SCHOOLS 45 The situation results from the fact that every American is en- titled to his chance, and because of American temperaments and ambitions. We tell the children in the schools that they are of small account if they neglect their chance. They hear less about increasing their efficiency in ordinary undertakings than they do about going higher up. The " higher up " refers to lawyers, and surgeons, and engineers, and masters of great works, and admirals in the navy, and the presidency itself. The schools which are thought to lead to these positions are literary and classical; if they are scientific, their interest is only in the sciences which are vital to the professions. Our high schools are therefore literary and scien- tific in this sense. It is true that they have done a little something in manual training, but they have taken good care not to do enough of it, or not to do the kind of it, which would create the danger of their pupils learning a trade. About all of our educa- tional activities have led away from craftsmanship. We have gone on training for the professional and managing vocations until the educational system is unbalanced. If we were to train for vocations at all, we were bound to give all vocations an equal chance. Either we have not seen the greatest need or we have not dared to do the thing most needed because it was not in line with the usual inspira- tions and ambitions. We have made ourselves believe what, when generally applied, was fallacious and simply impossible. We have misled children and that has made misfits. For perhaps three decades we have had a vague notion that there was something wrong about our educational system because so many children were going away from the manual industries. To meet the difficulty, we have, in an awkward kind of way, and without any very consistent theory or any very definite plan about it, added manual training annexes to our high schools. We have listened to the manual training leaders with some condescension because we have realized that something in the direction of what they were talking about was desirable, but we have listened to them with so little confidence that (in order to float at all) they have had to spend most of their time looking out for snags. The people who do things only or mainly w^ith their heads have looked upon the manual training exhibits with a kind of admiration which was not psychologically any too clear, and the real mechanics have viewed them with feelings in which skepticism and amusement were mixed. We have placed the little work in our schools which has any application to manual dexterity so high up in the system that the 46 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT children who are to work with their hands never see it, and we have distinctly said that our manual training schools were not in- tended to train for any particular vocation. We have even said that they were to be nothing but culturing institutions which would develop all the attributes of the human being harmoniously, and, very particularly, that they were to quicken the intellect by increas- ing the dexterity of the hand. In practice we have kept faith with this theory, for the public educational system of the country has taught no trades, and, without intending any slight, it must be added that its industrial schools have been arranged and taught by men who were essentially theorists and not specially skilful as craftsmen themselves. The result has been that our industrial training until now has had' practically no relation to our common hand industries. Of course the public school system has exerted some very desirable influences and accomplished some very good things. It has done something towards preparing pupils for the higher technical schools and the mechanical colleges. It has recently begun to establish advanced technical schools in the larger cities which have many factories where the work is done mainly by machinery. Nothing can be more desirable than keeping the operator ahead of the machine. That has not gone beyond a half dozen cities, however, except in discussion, and in a discussion which deems it prudent to avoid issues with the labor unions by asserting its good purposes not to teach trades. While much has been done in the public educational system towards training for professional vocations and positions of leadership, practically nothing has been done in the way of training hand workmen. The net result has, on the whole, actually discredited real craftsmanship. The public school system has shunted this thing off so persistently and completely that private philanthropic and proprietary schools and a few of the great manufacturing establishments have taken it up, either as a charity, or for gain, or from necessity. But private schools have made, and are likely to make, but a slight impression upon the large problem, for the American people are too much accustomed to proprietorship in education to give much adhesion to schools in which they have no fixed rights. While this situation has been developing, the old way of training boys for work through apprenticeship has practically disappeared. Employers do not want to be bothered with apprentices, and work- men not only have some of the same feeling but are apprehensive FROM MANUAL TRAINING TO TECHNICAL AND TRADES SCHOOLS 47 about more workmen lowering wages. On both sides the motive relates, in much greater measure than it should, to the present hour and to immediate profits or wages. Even the number of appren- tices approved by the rules of the labor organizations is not being trained in the factories or the trades. Meanwhile the manner of family living has greatly changed, and girls in vast numbers, wdio are no longer trained in the household arts, are becoming generally inefficient, or are seeking public employ- ments at low wages, and excluding boys therefrom. With all these things, and some other things, the primary schools are in trouble. They are better supported and better organized than ever before. They are taught by teachers who are uniformly better trained for their work than ever before. But specialists and en- thusiasts have overloaded them with work and theories that con- sume time unprofitably, and they undoubtedly come short of meet- ing some of the most urgent needs of a new situation. It is not that all of the difficulty is outside of the schools. Some of it is inside. They are to be judged frankly but truly. And, anyway, the real question is. what is the matter and how can it be mended? It has been widely assumed that the children in the elementary schools remain to finish them ; but not more than one third of them do so. At least, that is so in the cities, and in the country there is neither beginning nor end. Half of the children in the primary schools of the cities do not go beyond the fifth of the eight grades. The law compels attendance only till the age of fourteen, and parents often reason that obedience to the mere letter of the law is all that is necessary. Not a few parents fall short of that ; and the people in general give very little support to the officers who try to enforce the attendance laws. We not only need to modify our ideals about the work that is of the most worth to the country and its people, but quite as much we need to take a reef or two in the sails which we are presenting to the breezes of freedom. In any event, some authority will have to assume control over children, and we shall have to come squarely to the point of requiring children to be in school when they ought to be there. No nation has ever prospered which did not do that, and we are not likely to be an exception to the universal rule. Then, the primary schools have no definite aim unless it be to send children to the high schools, and thus to some professional or managing vocation, and wage-earning fathers are not much interested in that. Thev reason, doubtless, that their children will 48 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT not be better prepared by staying in school to earn a living in the way they must earn it, and that they might as well try to have them pick up some earnings at once. Again, it must be admitted, I think, that the schools are behind the ages of the children. A boy at fourteen becomes restless under the direction of a woman teacher, and tires of the work which is set for him in the fifth grade. If the studies in the elementary schools are not too many, they are certainly too much drawn out. There are too many books in one branch and there is too much rather fanciful exploitation. The educational conventions give too much time to novelties. There are so many conventions that the dis- cussions run afield. The schools illustrate and experiment too much. They are indifferent about the time of pupils, and they do not fit children for any definite work unless it is professional or semiprofessional. So, two thirds of the children do not remain to finish the primary schools, and, even though they remain to the end, there is much complaint that they are not prepared to do any definite thing unless it be to go to the high school. The high schools and academies, the colleges and universities, the advanced technical schools, and the professional schools, which are either public or exact only low fees and offer many scholarships, are more than adequate to the training of all the " professionals " or " intellectuals " that the country can use. Indeed, they are so overstocking the professions with misfits, and turning youth from craftsmanship, that if the thing goes on indefinitely the country must be the poorer by it. But there is a rather virile democracy in this country. It has not yet gone so far in education and industries as in politics and re- ligion. It is getting under way, however. It wants all that belongs to it and intends to have it. It is being waked up by the trades schools and all of the industrialism of Europe, and particularly of Germany. It sees that in twenty-five years the German exports of home manufactures have grown more rapidly than the American, notwithstanding the great expansion of our occupied territory, the great enlargement of our towns, and the splendid intellectual advance of our population, and it does not fail to see that labor and skill are larger factors than materials in making it so. It is beginning to discern the fact that the universality of labor and the development of skill are great factors in generating moral and intellectual power in men and women, and in adding to the strength of nations, as well as in operating factories and in enlarging profits. FROM MANUAL TRAINING TO TECHNICAL AND TRADES SCHOOLS 49 Our democracy is beginning to complain that the school system discriminates in behalf of the well-to-do and in favor of the intel- lectual employments. It really sees that there is less actual democracy in education in America than in some countries which have kings ; that in some inscrutable way we have done more for the top of our educational system, which has few votes but is best able to care for itself, than for the bottom, with more votes and less power; and it reasons, erroneously no doubt, that the part which was best able to care for itself has done it with some selfish- ness. If it was through selfishness, it was as misguided as selfish- ness usually is. But our democracy takes little account of reasons, or of processes, or of mistakes. It sees a situation and is bent upon changing it. Happily these thoughts are not monopolized by any class of people ; nor is this democracy exercised by any exclusive set of people. The interests and opinions of all classes are at last coming into accord. It is seen that there must be a new, a far more diver- sified, and a much more universal industrialism ; and it is also seen that there is no escape from the fact that the public schools must be made to take the burden of it. The newspapers and conventions are declaring for " industrial training," the schools and charitable institutions are trying to meet the demand, states are legislating for it, and a national organization has been established to promote it. The only hesitating interests are the corporations and the labor organizations. They have to think about where they will come out in such matters as profits, and bread and butter ; and, with reason enough, based upon experience, they are skeptical about the schools being able to train real mechanics and turn out real work- men. The hesitating interests may be expected to be willing to experiment, however, under the pressure of popular opinion and in the presence of a great national movement. Certainly so in view of the fact that we have reached the point where there is no longer any efficient agency outside of the schools for training workmen; and where it is clear enough that the schools, with some reconstruc- tion, may do it much more satisfactorily than any other instru- mentality that can be provided. What shall be done? First of all we must have a plan. It must be definite. It must have all of the support that can be brought to it. To that end it must be fundamentally sound. It must be based upon our democratic philosophy and it must be work- 50 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT able. It must not avoid issues. It must be a plan which will commend itself to the interests of capital and which will appeal to the sense and reason of labor. It must help capital to safe and profitable activity ; and it must hold out the utmost of opportunity to the children of the poor. It can not do that if in any way it aids one at the expense of the other. If it is a real educational advance it will go, because no one in America can then stand against it. One who hinders the opportunities of capital is a fool. One who would lay sticks in the way of any son or daughter of the nation making the most of himself or herself is not an American. Even though his blood traces back to the Mayflower he is an alien and not of us. The clock is striking the hour for the full exploitation of our democracy in our education and in our industries, and no one shall stop the wheels or turn the hands back upon the dial. But the plan must be thoroughly American. It can not be English, or French, or German, no matter how much there may be in their systems to commend them. Their ideals and their methods are not ours, for the inherent thought of the Republic is very exclusively its own. It will be absurd not to have full information. It will be ridiculous to reject what will serve us simply because another people has worked it out before we have. But there is no other people with our outlook and ex- pectations. We may adapt but well may be cautious about adopt- ing. Essentially we must create. And if we go ahead in the spirit of the Republic, guided by its political philosophy, we may do it without fear and with confidence. Any arrangement which does not articulate with the work of the elementary schools, and which does not recognize the need of progressive continuity, with some definite aim, from the first grade in the primary school up to the point where the child is capable of earning a living, will not succeed or endure. Of course it involves much recasting of the plan of the elementary schools. They will have to be relieved of many studies, of much tiring attenuation and repetition in the same studies, of much psychological speculation and wearying preaching about methods in teaching. In the elementary schools, at least, the teach- ers will have to be allowed to teach, and not be kept from it by officials who are wandering and wondering about what kind of teaching is of the most worth. The value of the time element in the life of the child will have to be recognized. He will have to be taken in hand early, taught exact things, given power rather than information, and pushed along rapidly enough to be in pos- FROM MANUAL TRAINING TO TECHNICAL AND TRADES SCHOOLS 5 1 session of the implements of an intellectual Avorkshop by the time he is fourteen years of age. The class of work which the school is doing will have to be abreast of the age and capacity of the pupils, and public sentiment will have to refuse to tolerate the superintend- ent or the teacher who wastes the life of a child. More regular attendance must be exacted, more intensiveness put into the work, and the child brought to the end of the essential parts of the present elementary course by the time at which the law now allows him to leave the schools altogether. Then, in all considerable towns there will have to be established a wholly new order of public schools. These new schools will have to come immediately after and connect with the work in the primary schools. They will have to teach trades. They will have to respond to the local situation, teaching any trade when, say, twenty pupils apply for it. From the very be- ginning the elementary schools will have to have this in view. Aside from, these schools, teaching individual trades, it will be necessary to develop another kind of school of a more general character for the children who are to go into the offices and stores and factories. The evening schools, which have got started upon a very indefinite plane, may be utilized, but they will need much more support and a substantial reorganization. We must cease declaring that we are attempting only to train all-around mechanics, trying only to dignify labor, trying only to culture the mind through the hand, and have no thought of teach- ing those who are to work with their hands how to do something definite. That is the very trouble with the schools now. They are without exactness ; they are profligate of boys and girls ; they lack definite ends which the masses may see are worth gaining. They must advance from " manual training " to technical schools and trades schools. The " culturists " must not be allowed to appro- priate the technical and trades schools to their own refined uses. If the trades schools are to succeed they must have the sympathy and aid of the labor organizations. And they will have that aid and sympathy if they are at least as much shops as schools ; if they magnify doing and minimize talking; if they are taught by artisans who can establish their power to train, rather than by theorists who are indifferent mechanics ; if they really prepare children to begin work, and train out of them the conceit that they know all that can be learned only through much work and many years ; and if, in the imfortunate but inevitable contentions between capital and labor, they stand fair and evenly helpful to both. The 52 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT higher technical schools must of course multiply and strengthen. They are the main hope of superior products in factories where the work is done by machinery, and it is hardly too much to say that they are the main hope of superior manhood and womanhood in a land given to invention and almost submerged in machinery. But they have little to do with the great army who are to work outside of factories and without machinery, in carrying on the building industries. There is no conflict. Let us have whatever kind of a school the interests of a town demand. It is only neces- sary to recognize the fact that the common power must establish, and the common purse must support, schools which will qualify hand workers quite as much as head workers, for their vocations; and that schools which do it must be flexible enough to meet local sit- uations. It seems as though the trades schools and technical schools must have oversight and necessary control over children for three or four years after they finish the primary schools and until they are seventeen or eighteen years of age, but not so far as to preclude them from regular employment and some wages. The industrial schools will have to be open afternoons and evenings and have such time of the pupil as he can give, with a minimum of four or five hours each week, and the employers will have to reckon with this public exaction upon the time of the pupil. As a child comes to the end of the elementary school his parents and he may well elect whether he shall go to a trades school, or to a technical school, or to the high school, or to work. If he has a liking for hand work and is in a nonmanufacturing city, he may well choose a trades school; if in a manufacturing city, he will probably go to work in a factory, unless he has a fancy for a particular trade. It should be quite possible for him to take advantage of a trades school, or of a technical school, or of an all-around evening school, where the work will be of real interest to him. And in any event he should be required to respond to the oversight of the schools until he is prepared to begin, and has gained some interest in, an indus- trial vocation, or has started on the road towards a professional vocation, or has proved that his is a hopeless case. It will be said that all this means many more schools, many more buildings, the training of many more teachers, the recasting of present courses, great changes in the common thought and the common talk, much new legislation, and much additional expense to municipalities and to states. Of course that will be said. And it will be true. But there is no transgression about the movement that will have to be FROM MANUAL TRAINING TO TECHNICAL AND TRADES SCHOOLS 53 repented of. It has no smack of paternalism, or of socialism, or of charity. It does not make gifts. It does not provide din- ners, or clothes, or even medical attendance, for anybody. It means nothing but work. It preaches the gospel of self-dependence and of self-respect. Having gone as far as we have, to be just we must do this much more. It is now within the rights of every child, as much as the elementary and the secondary schools are within his rights. But even that is not all. The rational equilibrium between the ex- clusively intellectual and the decidedly industrial interests of the country must be restored and can hardly be restored without it. And not only the industrial efficiency, and the strength and balance of the nation, but the moral and intellectual health, and the solidar- ity, and soundness, and aggressiveness of the nation seem to de- pend upon it. The democracy of the nation will have to do it. Even more, the success of democracy rests upon it. THE DEMOCRATIC ADVANCE IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES ADDRESS AT THE COMMENCEMENT EXERCISES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MAINE, JUNE 9, 1908 The differences already well developed in the universities of the older and the newer states of the Union, and the relations which those differences sustain to the history and the outlook of each university and of the people of each state, make as fascinating a chapter as any to be found in the absorbing story of American education. And the futures of the institutions to which such dif- ferences point, and the bearing of those futures upon the common and progressive community life in the East and West of the country, are as encouraging to those who have interest and confidence in the body of the people as they are bewildering to those who are unable to suppress a shiver at the natural advance of democracy in America. The departures of our newer universities from the foundations, the government, the plans, and the ideals of the older ones are many and decisive enough, but there is no reason why they should be very surprising. The evolution of universities in all countries has been very consistent. Political and economic conditions have ordi- narily given them form and outlook, and the general intellectual freedom and balanced sanity of their constituencies have determined their undertakings and gauged the true value of their accomplish- ments. Our universities in the newer West have responded, and are responding, more readily and decisively than those in the older East to the universal rule. The reasons for this are discoverable. An institution whose function is to prove a thesis rather than to find the truth is not a university. An institution set up to propa- gate a spiritual philosophy, or a political theory, or a scientific belief, or a cult of any kind, is not a university. An institution limited by social exclusiveness, or religious bigotry, or overheated partizanship of any kind, is not a university. An institution which merely polishes the rich who will never gain much strength through work, never know the pleasure of real accomplishment, never have the genuine culture which grows out of association and service, is not a university. Of course, universities will propagate religious [54] THE DEMOCRATIC ADVANCE IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 55 philosophies, and political constitutions, and scientific opinions; of course, universities will support some partizan views and activities, as they will discourage others; and of course, universities will minis- ter to one community, and sometimes to one class in a community, more than to another : but unless an institution puts the truth above theory, while it repels the fanciful and unsubstantial; unless it opens the door of opportunity to all, while it aids the intellectual interests of every part, and applies scientific principle and fact to the doings of every class; and unless it seeks the light of all knowl- edge, quickens all who may come within its influence, and takes the initiative in drawing men and women into it through reaching out and doing things, it certainly lacks the essential attributes of a typical university in America. The intellectual advance has been along a rough road. Some- thing had to occur which would put faith above submission, and doing above dreaming: that something was Christianity. Some- tliing had to occur which would set the world in motion : that some- thing was Protestantism. Then something further had to occur, because the new religion became as intellectually unrelenting as the old : that something was denominationalism. Then toleration, that is, freedom for all religion, and obedience to law rather than force, had to come ; and that was constitutionalism. With this, men had their chance and study gained its free opportunity. In- vestigation, discovery and invention did their splendid work, made the accumulated knowledge of the ages available to all, and proved that concord was better than strife, and that cooperation was yet better than competition in helping on the great ends of civilization : and that is modernism. Names and forms are often misleading. There is more real democracy among some peoples who live under monarchial forms of government which they have inherited, than among some peoples who live under republican forms which have grown out of acci- dent more than intelligent design. There is more real subservi- ency among some peoples whose government is republican in form, than among other peoples whose government is monarchial in form. But wherever real religious freedom is and is valued, there intel- lectual freedom and civic freedom find an abiding place also. And where these have come to be, there the noblest universities have developed and there they have steadily grown, through the increas- ing volume and strength of the mighty forces which support them. Nowhere have these forces sprung into luxuriance of life more 5^ NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT freely or more rapidly than in this country. Nowhere have uni- versities responded to the freedom and the force of democracy more admirably than here. In no other land has the building of new states marked the advance of democracy, of constitutionalism, of modernism, as has the march of the armies of pioneers in the last half century from' the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean, across North America. And nowhere else in all the world has the birth and the progress of real universities illustrated the universal rules of intellectual progress as they are exemplified by the advance of the tax-supported university movement in America. The mental processes, the optimistic temperaments, the disposi- tion to tolerate one another and to work together for the upbuild- ing of common institutions, everywhere manifest in the Mississippi valley. Rocky mountain, and Pacific coast states, and very often in the Southern States, are further removed from those which prevail in the North Atlantic States than those which are common in New England ;-re removed from those which were common in Old England at the time of the Puritan revolution. The Western States have had a free intellectual field, and they have had the kind of people who knew that they possessed the political power, and were not afraid to make the most of it. They have had solid satisfaction in sacrificing and suffering to the end that their insti- tutions might be .better than any others, and that their children and their children's children might fare better than they themselves did. Their S].irit has been transmitted and diffused: it prevails universally. They are not only disposed ; they are informed. They know infinitely more of the East than the people of the East know of the West. They not only know: they are determined. That is the reason why in every state from the Ohio river to the Pacific coast, there is a real and a free university which has built upon the old models where it would and departed from them when it liked, and thereby well expresses the age, the strength, the intelligence! and the aspirations of the state. And their thinking is such that they would be ashamed if it were not so. Colleges came quickly after the beginnings of the English settle- ments m America. They were ecclesiastical and denominational. They were not only Puritan or Cavalier, Conformist or Noncon- formist, but their chief ends were the mere creeds and forms which the sects worshipped. Classical literature and sectarian theology measured the breadth of their arbitrary courses, and dogmatic mstruction and catechetical inquiry as arbitrarily fixed the limits of THE DEMOCRATIC ADVANCE IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 57 their intellectual freedom. The independence of America propa- gated sects, and sects propagated sectarian colleges. Opposed as these were to any learning which did not support the theses to which they gave their lives, there was energy in the very rivalry and hope in the very opposition. Learning made some headway; real religion had a better chance; the common needs and the com- pounded sense opened the way for toleration, and the absolute demands of respectability, if not of existence, made policies which rendered imperative the leveling or the ignoring of the fences between the sects. Progress came in the natural order. In the early days religion and politics, the church and the state, went together. It had not yet developed that there could be a democracy of learning in an autocratic state, or that learning could be fettered through constitutions and laws and usages which assume to be very democratic and free. Indeed, there were those in high station who were foolish enough to think that they could use a college to fetter freedom, for an English court granted a college charter to what is now one of the greatest and most justly hon- ored of American universities, in order " to prevent the spread of republican principles which were already become altogether too common." It was part of a fatuous but fruitful policy; in twenty- five years the gun which signaled the greatest democratic advance that mankind has ever known in learning as well as in political progress " was heard round the world." The early secondary school system, that is, the academies, of the Atlantic States, was projected from the top down, rather than from the bottom up as it was in the West. It sprang out of the need of the colleges for feeders, rather than out of the impulse of the masses for higher schools. The earlier colleges and academies were naturally, and perhaps necessarily enough, aristocratic rather than democratic institutions. They followed the English political thought and the English educational plan. The public high school movement was infinitely more democratic than aristocratic and it developed relatively very much earlier and very much more freely and luxuriantly in the West than in the East, because there it found a more democratic atmosphere and did not meet the indiflference of the leaders of education and the active opposition of institutions already upon the ground. The early colleges in the West, like those in the East, were eccle- siastical and denominational, but commonly they were little more than high schools, and often their support was so precarious that 58 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT they could assert but little opposition to a popular educational ad- vance. In practically every case the tendency to advance educa- tionally was so democratic and popular as to be overwhelming, no matter what the sectarian opposition or educational blindness. Every western town grew up with an enthusiastic purpose to have all that the East had educationally, with something to spare. The East felt sorry for the West, and the spirit that would go West could not endure that. In every town, from the Ohio river to the Pacific coast, the most conspicuous building is that of the public high school, and it seldom happens that that building does not shelter a school which is quite as well organized and quite as effi- cient as the school in any eastern town of similar size and equal wealth. Very often it is better organized and much more efficient. And it must not be forgotten that the towns all the way to the Pacific coast are no longer small, and certainly it must not be overlooked that they are no longer poor. Very generally they have come to be strong and rich, and very commonly their high schools are the best expression of their wealth and their intellectual prog- ress. There is a keen and universal pride in the institution, a sense of common proprietorship in it, and a wide appreciation of the fact that it is a unique American institution, a " people's college," a connecting link between the public schools and a real college or a real university, all of which is much more marked than in the Atlantic States. Soon the Western States came to be quite as enthusiastic about colleges as about high schools. The natural order proceeded. It was stronger because it rested upon the earth and grew upward. Long before the Civil War, nearly every western state that had then been admitted to the Union had come in with a provision in its constitution for a state university, and since that time there has doubtless been no exception whatever. It was no mere form. In nearly every case that provision has been conscientiously and gen- erously observed. The result appears in a very systematic, a very coherent, and a highly efficient state educational system with a con- tinuing road leading from every primary school through sixteen grades to the graduate school in the state university. It will not do to assume that the western state universities estab- lished in the constitutions, and, in fact, before the war, were merely low grade industrial affairs. They were more classical than indus- trial. They did not at first break away, to any great extent, from eastern and old world ideals. They were organized, planned and THE DEMOCRATIC ADVANCE IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 59 administered, in nearly every case, by classical scholars. Of course they were under democratic influences and of course they soon began to bend to the practical needs of the people of their states, but it took long years to break away from the roads which edu- cational conventionalism had made for them, and break out the new roads which would give learning its largest and widest oppor- tunity among a people who had put themselves at the fore of national progress. But in time they found the way to realize their fundamental political thought and give every one his chance ; and they also found the way to put those universities to the uses of democratic states. Before the Civil War there was no real university in this country, either East or West — that is, real in its strength, its offerings, its outlook, its freedom, and its spirit. The greatest uplift which has ever come to university education in America, or in any land, came in the Federal Land Grant Act on the darkest day of the Civil War. The day after the awful disaster on the Chickahominy, the day upon vvhich Lincoln called for 300,000 more men and hundreds of millions more of money, he made a law of the act of Congress giving to each state for higher education 30,000 acres of land for each senator and representative that the state had in Congress. There has been much discussion, and there is yet some, as to the intent of this act, as between classical and industrial education. The discussion is now academic and no longer fascinating. The intent has been construed and determined in action accomplished. In spirit and situation the West was able to take the benefits of the act much more clearly and strongly than was the East. Fathered by a Vermont senator, it was yet essentially a western act. It pro- ceeded from the agitation of Jonathan Turner, an Illinois teacher. The act laid down some conditions. Three or four things must be done. There was little or no eastern sentiment in favor of those things, and the educational puritanism at Harvard and Yale and Columbia and Princeton was too solemn and ponderous to com- promise a classical orthodoxy for lands or money. The act con- templated that each state should use its avails to enlarge existent institutions, or join forces and build up new institutions. The New England States managed in one way and another to get hold of the proceeds of the federal act, but they have never entered into the spirit of it. It is doubtful if any one of them has given as much to the joint enterprise as it has received from the federal grants. It is certain that they have never made the most, nor much, 6o NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT of them. The spirit of New York was no better; perhaps not even as good. But the scholarship and intuitions of Andrew D. White, formerly a professor at the University of Michigan, and then in the New York Senate, and the philanthropy and sagacity of Ezra Cornell, then also in the New York Senate, did something to save the State from its annoying indifference and stupidity. Beyond the Alleganies, moneys and opportunities have never been allowed to escape. In many states mechanical and agricultural col- leges were annexed to colleges of liberal arts already established. In others technical colleges were started, and, where this was done, classical attachments were soon added. As a consequence, there is no state west of the Ohio river which does not possess, and is not committed to, a common university for common ends. In its foundations, and generally in its superstructure, it is a real univer- sity. Whenever a new state has been formed, it has come into the Union with plans for a common university, as well matured and as strongly sustained as the state's plans for common schools. All learning is the universal passion. It is hardly too much to say that there is no state beyond the Ohio which has not supplemented the federal grants with much more than it has ever received from them,, and it is certain that many of those states give much more to their universities every year than they have received from the general government from the beginning. Of course there are results ; and of course the results are largest where the democracy is the freest, where there is the most unity of ambition and of purpose, and where the people hold the initia- tive and the power and are fully aware of it. The country will in time discover, if it has not done so already, that that is the most encouraging factor in our national life. It is not possible to name any number of higher American insti- tutions, in the order of number of teachers and of students, cubage under roofs, libraries, laboratories and equipment, range of offer- ings, recognized standards of efficiency, number of degrees con- ferred, annual revenues, and influence upon life, without finding that more than half of them are tax-supported institutions. Forty- one states have institutions which confer the A.B. degree; the five others have institutions which do not confer this degree, and four of the five are in New England. No one can justly say that the 'growth of democratic universities in the United States is not one of the most marvelous and gratifying movements in the entire history of world education. THE DEMOCRATIC ADVANCE IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 6l The phases of this movement which exemplify its democracy are more surprising and significant than are its proportions. The com- mon assumption, the inherited tradition, of the old universities is ex- clusiveness. They have decided what learning is worth propagating : only choice spirits of their own selection have been admitted. The tests of admission have related exclusively to the things which they are accustomed to do, rather than to universality of oppor- tunity ; to culture, rather than to the work which makes for culture ; to the mere ability to pass written examinations set by teachers who know nothing of the other attributes of the candidates, rather than to the general qualities and experiences which make it reason- able to expect that the candidates will do their work. The funda- mental basis of tax-supported institutions is that all learning is of worth which bears upon the common life and applies scientific principles to the ordinary and useful occupations ; that every one, who has given evidence of desire and of reasonable capacity for it, shall have his opportunity; and that the institution itself must initiate movements, take up inquiries, and pursue policies which will quicken the intellectual activities, sharpen the moral sense, and help on the business interests of as many factors as possible in a constituency that recognizes no special privileges but worships universal rights. The lack of information, indeed the persistent misinformation, in the Eastern States concerning these institutions, makes it well to be exact. I will briefly describe one of them so that he who cares to verify may do so. It is not the oldest, or the largest, or the greatest. It is typical of the others — the normal product of the intellectual outlook, the industrial conditions, the prosperous up- building, and the religious freedom and virile politics which have grown up around the flag of the Union as it has moved to the westward. This university was established forty years ago. It was erected upon the " Grand Prairie," a great region Where ordinary farm lands are worth $150 to $200 per acre. It ov/ns and uses six hun- dred and twenty acres of the best land. It has cultivated and planted until it has as attractive grounds as any university in America. It has produced environing cities. It has twenty-five substantial buildings, and is adding one or two more every year. Probably it has more cubage under roof than any other educa- tional institution in the country. It has revenues of more than a million a year for operating expenses, without a dissenting voice ^2 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT in the Legislature. It has more than 500 in its faculties and more than 4700 students taking courses in the university proper, in its colleges of arts, science, engineering, agriculture, law, medi- cine, and dentistry, and in its schools of library science, music, pharmacy and education. Associated with the university are the United States Agricultural Experiment Station, the State Engi- neering Experiment Station, the State Laboratory of Natural His- tory, the State Water Survey, and the State Geological Survey. Of course, most of the students come from the state, but more than forty other states and ten foreign countries are represented in the student body. But for ihe fact that some good souls have a hardened disdain for "cornfield universities," it might not be worth mentioning that this institution has rather more than the ordinary university equip- ment of fraternities and fraternity houses, sororities and sorority houses, clubs and clubhouses, dress suits and dress gowns, and all the other solidities and frivolities which offset the things that crucified the flesh in ancient scholasticism. Its ordinary procession- als are as impressively academic as one ever sees in an eastern state save when a new college president is inaugurated or a centennial is observed ; and its receptions are as radiant and as " formal " as ordinary people can endure. Its life is much in the open ; some form of athletics is universal. Its athletics and its intercollegiate contests have been clean. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Pennsyl- vania are very well aware that it can play ball. For a dozen years much care has been given to the military department in this university. It is popular. It is in charge of a veteran officer of the regular army with a record which appeals to young men of spirit. All freshmen and sophomores drill about two hours a week. The cadet organization consists of a band of fifty men, an infantry regiment of thirteen hundred men, a battery of artillery with two field guns, a signal corps, hospital corps, etc. On occasions, such as a university celebration or the inauguration of a governor, it makes a profound public impression. On Saturday afternoons, once a month, through the winter it holds a " hop " at the armory. Young men and women go together, in daylight, and there is ndthing wonderful about it: they present themselves to a receiving line of members of the faculties and officers of the regi- ment, and learn, and observe, and are advantaged by, the forms of polite society. The military organization is wholesome and in- spiring. It " sets up " men : it makes one place at least where THE DEMOCRATIC ADVANCE IN AAIERICAN UNIVERSITIES 63 authority and obedience are absolute; and it appeals to the pride and patriotism, while it adds to the strength, of the state. In this university there is a Christian Association for men and another for women. They have probably two thousand members and own buildings, overlooking the campus, w^orth $150,000, which friends and teachers and students have given. And they are quite as active and efficient, and religion is quite as virile and as free, as in any denominational institution. It is but the truth to say that this university is the best expres- sion, and the best inspiration, of the great soul of a sane and prop- erly ambitious people, and of a prosperous and zestful state which is able to govern and proposes to do so. Happily, in nearly every other American state there is a similar exemplification and inspira- tion of the thinking of a people who know the throbbings of indi- vidual spirit and of a public soul. This university has recently been invited to membership in the Association of American Universities, which comprises the fifteen leading universities of the country. Its graduate school, or the university proper, has grown steadily since 1892. There are now one himdred and eighty students doing research work, and fifty- two other colleges and universities are represented. The last Legis- lature gave, without dissent, $50,000 per annum for additional in- struction in the graduate school alone. Now let us point out the very decisive differences between this and the traditional universities of the world. First of all, the warp and woof are of a wholly new kind of material. The atmosphere that blows across the campus has a new stimulus in it. It is a people's university: it is supported by the people. There is no as- sumption from that that every man who comes along, or every society that has a mission, can dictate its policies or coerce its action. Neither is there an assumption that a few men monopolize the knowledge of what is good for a whole people. Its trustees are elected at the general election, and are commonly reelected. They are not unreasonable in their thinking : never more than one or two at a time are disposed to selfishness, and such at once learn that they can not gratify their greed. The policies of the institution are wrought out upon the anvil of public discussions, at the council tables of the trustees and the faculties, and in the great forum of the state, and are expressive of the compounded thought of scholarship and of the whole people. The institution does not have to plead with donors ; it is not limited by conditions in deeds of trust: it does not Jw-ve 64 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT to worship tombs. Its government is that of a constitutional de- mocracy; not even that of a constitutional monarchy. It is not fettered by crown, or cabinet, or minister; by primate, or caste, or party. It has all the factors of self -expansion within its own organization, and it has more liberty in working out its destiny than has ever been enjoyed by any other kind of university in the world. Tuition is free. It was the original scheme of the land grant act that, in order to make certain that all of its proceeds should be used for instruction, each state should provide buildings. The state did this and began charging a term fee of less than $25 per year to each student, to meet the expense of repairs to buildings. The need of this fee has long since disappeared, and, indeed, the reason of it has for the most part been forgotten, but its influence upon the student body has been so salutary that it has been con- tinued. When its abolition has been suggested, the students have protested and have taken occasion to propose the ways in which they would be glad to have the money used. But there are some- thing like a thousand meritorious and absolutely free scholarships, and the door never swings against a student because he has a lean or empty pocketbook. This democratic university is a part of the public school system of the state. It is the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth and six- teenth grades in that system. Its officers and agents lay out the work of the high schools and inspect and rate them for organization and efficiency; then it admits to its work all who are certified to have completed the work in the approved high school courses : this ordinarily requires four years, but is sometimes done in three. The plan unifies the whole educational system. It keeps the high schools up to grade. Their faculties can not afford to have it said that their work does not have the approval of the State University. The admission requirements at the university have steadily ad- vanced: they are above the average of the leading universities. Still, the State University cares less about who is admitted than who is graduated. The western people want every one to have his chance. They say if he falls down after having his chance, it is his fault. The western students have a tradition that it is not difficult to get into a western university, but exceedingly hard to maintain one's self and get a degree ; while it is harder to get into an eastern university, but that one who gets in always gets through. There is something in that. In any event, the western method unifies and THE DEMOCRATIC ADVANCE IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 65 energizes the educational system, and affords the open chance for a college degree to an extent which is wholly unappreciated in the Eastern States. The western university is coeducational. In the one described there are a thousand women, that is, one in four students. There have never been any scandals. There is less foolishness on the part of one sex concerning the other than there is in either a man's college or a woman's college. There is no evasion. Men and women measure up in the presence of one another. Once in a while a " match " results, and in practically every case it is a good one. It is the only way of assuring entire educational justice and equality to women. It enforces university attention for the special interests of women as well as for those of men. Accepted in the spirit it is, it exerts a sane and keen influence upon all of the activi- ties of the university and upon many of the higher interests of the state. But perhaps a more potential difference than any other appears in the fact that the state university feels bound to take the initiative in promoting every intellectual interest, and in aiding every business interest of the people of the state. The common thought is not merely that the university is a place where students may go if some exclusive authority will let them in, but that it is a place where all who are qualified to partake of the highest, the broadest, and the most diversified learning may go as of right, and a place to which the people may turn for the solution of their problems, whether those problems are intellectual or industrial, whether they are public or private, and whether they concern the nation, the state, or a county, or municipality thereof. Its library school propagates libraries everywhere. Its political science departments supply information upon timely political and economic subjects. Its department of sanitary engineering tells towns how to lay sewers, and supplies specifications for pavements. Its department of chemistry analyzes several thousand specimens of drinking water for the people every year, without charge. Its department of railway engineering has test cars of its own running over all the steam and electric roads of the state to aid the com- panies in improving the right of way and in getting a maximum of speed and safety at a minimum of cost. Its department of me- chanical engineering shows the towns how to abate the smoke nui- sance. Its engineering experiment station works with the manu- 66 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT facturiiig and constructive interests to assure the best methods and machinery. Its colleges of medicine and law not only assume responsibility about training for, but undertake to guard the door- ways to, those professions. Its department of art looks after the drawing in all of the schools, and its department of architecture exerts an influence upon large buildings from one side of the state to the other. Its college of agriculture tells the farmers how lands may be put to more profitable use, how particular soils need to be treated, and what processes will put more fat matter into corn and into cattle as well. This spring the university I have referred to sent one of its leading professors to the Argentine Republic to see if some of the vast herds of heavy cattle in South America can be brought into our markets ; another to Denmark, to study dairying m the most successful dairy country in the world; and this summer it is sending its president to the different countries of Europe to get into the heart of veterinary science, with a view to the or- ganization of a great veterinary college for the benefit of a great city and a great state that have vast investments in the animal industries. Illustrations might be multiplied to the wearying point, but these few are sufficiently significant. Of course, men seasoned in the old conceptions of colleges and universities have things to say about this outworking of our de- mocracy in our higher education. They say, for example, that it is no function of the state to supply such advanced training. The overwhelming sentiment and the laws of the country have deter- mined that it is. They talk about the public universities having their " hands in the public treasury." It would be as senseless, but no more senseless, to retort that some people have their hands in private pockets. Ours is a representative democracy, and when so important a matter as this is well understood among the people for half a century, and the lawmaking power decrees it again and again with practical or entire unanimity, it is time to assume that it has the right to be and that it is well. Again, they say that the influence of a large institution upon the individual student is not so good as that of the small institution, that the stronger teachers are in the small colleges, and that the students come in closer contact with them. That is a matter of opinion. In my opinion the influence of the great institution is the better. The association with many other students levels conceits and stimulates ambition. There is great advantage in the multi- THE DEMOCRATIC ADVANCE IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 67 plicity of work, in the many entertainments, lectures, and discus- sions, m the innumerable activities of every thinkable kind. Students absorb much from the larger world and from the courses other than their own. The assumption that there are teachers of stronger character and firmer moral sense, and of better training and teach- ing power, in the smaller institutions than in the larger ones and in the older ones than in the newer ones, is wholly unwarranted. And the lack of contact between teacher and student in the larger institutions is purely imaginative. They say, sometimes, that the state universities are " Godless " because undenominational. On the contrary, religion is freer, re- ligious discussion more spontaneous, and religious activities more numerous and potential, because they are many-denominational. This consideration goes far in explanation of the unprecedented growth of the state universities. Real universities do not exist to propagate a creed or bind youth to a denomination, and most parents, who do not put sectarianism above religion and form above substance, think of this when planning about the future of their children. Yet again "tliey say," that the public universities are dominated by politics. Nothing could be further from the truth There is absolutely nothing of it. Of course, when a state is being formed and an institution is being born, the mere politicians will seek control of everything, and two or three instances of this in connec- lon with the formative period of public universities have attracted the a tention of the country. But even in such cases the imperative and fundamental principles of university life and efficiency soon assert themselves. The people quickly resent it. The state univer- sities which have got their bearings, as practically all have are wholly free from politics. Indeed, the people are exceedingly' sen- sitive about this matter, and the interests of all parties give the best assurance of protection from the depredations of politics And moreover it is but just to observe that the essential basis of a tat supported university makes it particularly independent of caste wealth social blindness, educational bigotry, party politics, or pa': tizanship of any other kind. ^ Still again, it is said tliat the state universities have grown up in states where there was a lack of colleges, and because of that fa t Th>s ,s not so. The states having the strongest state universitie have more good colleges than has any state in New England Ohto has th.rty, Michigan ten, Wisconsin eight, Minnesota d^^ht,' ll.fn™ 68 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT twenty-eight, of which t^vo are great universities with more than four thousand students each; Indiana fifteen, Kansas nineteen, Nebraska nine, Iowa twenty-four, Missouri twenty, etc., etc. But this is not all. It is a notable fact that where these other colleges have taken rather kindly to the principles of the state university, have recognized its right to be, have helped it along and been them- selves influenced by it, they have prospered ; and where they have opposed it, they have suffered. If notable it ought not to be sur- prising, for it accords with the universal rule in morals and educa- tion, that the best way to help yourself is to help another; but it is significant of the feeling and purpose in America concerning education. Once more, it is said or implied that the plane of scholarship in the state universities is low. That is a question of fact about v/hich it is better to seek information than to indulge in epithet. A fair sample of the minimum admission requirements in a state univer- sity is 15 units of preparatory work, a unit representing 180 recita- tions of 45 minutes each. This exacts four years work in four designated secondary subjects. The secondary schools are as effi- cient as similar institutions in the East. The students are as earnest and zestful. Few of them are very rich, and fewer still very poor ; they have come from good average homes, they are as enthusiastic, ambitious, and proud as any similar number of students anywhere in the country. The university offerings are even more numerous and varied than in the traditional universities. If there is anything that they want in the way of investigation or instruction, they can get it. It is true that the demands for classical languages, litera- tures, and history, are not overwhelming, but any who want them can get their fill. In the multiplicity of work of real human interest, bearing upon vocations and upon life and upon the prevailing activities and the common interests, or actually fundamental to real professions, the universities west of the Ohio are often far ahead of their eastern colleagues. They keep students much more regularly at work and their semester examinations are more ex- acting, arbitrary, and resultful. Often their law and medical schools are not yet up to the grade of such professional schools in the" East, but in the natural and political sciences which provide founda- tions to the professions, they are inferior to none. And they are breaking out roads with their professional schools and with all of their graduate work. THE DEMOCRATIC ADVANCE IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 69 Sneering at tax-supported colleges and universities evidences paucity of information, or logic that limps. Many new institutions have been developed in this country. Many old institutions have taken new form here. Oftener than otherwise this has been so in our pioneer life while our society was yet, as it were, in the liquid state. Educational ambition and freedom had some opportunity and made some headway upon the Atlantic seaboard, and in tlie early days of our history. The miles of sea and land between the habits and the organized life of the old world and the needs of the new world, gave some chance to progress and some opportunity to the instruments of progress, from the very beginning. Antl much happened in a colonial life which led up to, and gained, and was able to preserve, independence and nationality. But aside from that, there was not much advance in the way of religious toleration, or political freedom, or of educational organization, or of the ex- pression of a people's life in a distinctive literature, until after national independence. That not only made a rew nation but it made a new life. With it the march of great pioneer armies to the Pacific was commenced. Those armies have augmented in numbers and gained in strength as they have gone westward. They have had quite as much ambition and exaltation of purpose, quite as much information and intellectual power, as New England and New York in their pioneer days. They have found far richer lands, and far more productive mines than their fathers ever dreamed of ; and that fact has already become great in the nation's evolution, and is doubtless to be far greater. Material prosperity has given them the wealth with which to build and the strength with which to do. With all the newness, they have never lacked in the power to govern ; but even better than that, they have never permitted government enough to hinder or subvert the freedom of their intellectual and moral initiative. So, new and typical institutions of learning have grown out of the steady advance and the gradual unfolding of the nation toward the setting sun. The Atlantic States have often scouted these new institutions just as Old England scouted some of the early ideas of New England. But the result will be the same. Perhaps the most con- spicuous of these new institutions is the public university. It does not accord with the " New England idea " which a committee of the Legislature of Maine has defined as '' free public schools and a degree of compulsory attendance, with higher education and pro- 70 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT fessional training at the cost of the individual rather than of the state." But the " New England idea " will have to give way. Wherever our society has become well congealed, there has been stout opposition to every advance of the mass toward higher educa- tion. New England and New York developed quite as stubborn opposition to the public high school as is likely to appear against the tax-supported university. The thing is going. The movement is now from the West to the East. The city of New York, the other day, dedicated buildings costing $7,000,000 for a new and free university. In twenty-five years' time the boys and girls of the East, as well as those of the West, will have their open chance in state or municipal universities as broad and as efficient as any in the land ; and cities and states will use universities to break out the roads for their own intellectual and industrial upbuilding. Very likely, in states where there are already excellent universities upon private foundations, there will be some adjustments to that fact on the part of the newer institutions ; but, if there are, there will have to be very considerable readjustment on the part of the older institutions also. The democracy of the United States is working its way out in education. Our circumstances are special and our tendencies very distinct. There is a spirit moving among the masses, and it will not stop short of the equal chance for every one. In the democracy of learning which is being erected in this country there will be ultimately no state lines, no zones of ignor- ance and learning bounded by rivers or mountains, and no barriers established by artificial exclusiveness. The basis of opportunity will be manhood and womanhood ; and the right to make the most of one's self will depend only upon the desire and the power to do. The time will come when every state and every considerable municipality will use a real and a free university to gain the great ends for which democracies exist. The higher learning will be still higher in the future than now. The assurance of it is in the open chance for all assured by our fundamental political beliefs and in the political power of the common people. THE ADAPTATION OF THE SCHOOLS TO INDUSTRY AND EFFICIENCY ADDRESS BEFORE THE NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION, AT CLEVE- LAND, OHIO, JUNE 29, 1908 Mr President mid Ladies and Gentlemen of the National Educa- tion Association, and, incidentally but particularly, you, my long- time friends of the Cleveland Public Schools: The honor of a summons to address this association, so com- pletely representative of American schools , so great in its history, and so wide in its influence, is accompanied by an obligation which one may well accept with hesitation and approach with humility. And when the subject assigned is one which has the attention of the nation and looks to the decisive re-forming of the schools, and particularly when it is one which lends itself to the round-table much better than to the general assembly, and, more particularly still, when you evince such a decided preference for song and violin as you have tonight, one must bespeak your consideration, if he does not fall upon his knees and plead for your patience. We are within the territory which the first great moral act of the Republic, looking to the upbuilding of the nation, in words as solemn as any a statute could employ, dedicated to freedom, to virtue, and to learning forever. We are met at the very heart of the " Reserve " where New England and New York pioneers, as sincere and forceful men and women as ever came out of the mass to seek opportunity and advance civilization, in prayer and act even more meaningful than an ordinance of congress, dedicated them- selves and their posterity to the propositions that men and women are created with equality of moral and intellectual, as well as of legal right ; that government is a common need and a common good when moved by moral sense ; and that government for any other end than the moral good of the governed deserves the enmity, rather than the adhesion, of men. We are met in a great, busy, prosperous city, which has never given over its moral sense, which has always been alert about its freedom, and which has therefore never been indifferent about its schools. And, while I well know that not a very large number will under- stand it, I am glad to feel assured that there are still some good people in this great throbbing city, and not a few fine teachers in its excellent schools, who will believe that grateful memories and fruitful recollections crowd to the fore as I look over this radiant assembly and offer another word about the things which this asso- ciation and this city hold to be of first concern. 72 NEW YORK STATE EDUCi^TION DEPARTMENT A Message from England We have just had an illuminating message from an accomplished officer of the English schools. His distinguished service to educa- tion, our undiramed recollections of the inspiring address he gave us seven years ago, and his resultful work since then in relating schools to industries, have led us to insist that he cross the sea again and speak to us once more upon the subject which is claiming the first attention of our people and our schools. His message is timely because it comes out of the full information and the sagacious out- look of a man who has put his own country and our country under obligations to him: it is more helpful than it otherwise would be because it comes out of the life of a mighty people, whose estab- lished habits of industry, whose sane and steady thinking, and whose unbending passion for freedom and for right, have given point and force to their influence upon every sea and in every land. His message is none the less instructive because our national tem- peraments and political philosophies are at some points divergent, and because our dissimilarity of industrial conditions makes it im- possible to adopt it in every detail. It will be even more instructive if we are able to associate the universality of fundamental prin- ciples with inevitable national differences in political and material situations. It would be as fatal for us to assume that a scheme of school organization or a plan of procedure which is adapted to one country must be adapted to another, as it would be to refuse to believe that the universal laws of sense, and the universal gospel of work, are as binding upon one people as upon another. Half a dozen years ago it was my pleasure to show another dis- tinguished officer of the English schools about one of our American free universities. We wandered through offices, and classrooms, and laboratories, and libraries, and shops, and gymnasiums, and then we drove through long avenues of shade trees, until he asked me to stop that he might look about and get a comprehensive view of the whole at once. As it all gathered in his mind he said, " And do you say that all this is free to all the people, and supported by self- imposed taxes upon all the people ? " " Yes," I said, " and it is the tax which is voted without dissent and of which one never hears." He raised his face and hand, in expression more significant than his words, when he said, " There is nothing like it in human history." Even true, it was not all of the truth. One must have an eye quickened by the American spirit and clarified by American history to see at once all the parts of the educational temple of which that THE ADAPTATION OF THE SCHOOLS TO INDUSTRY AND EFFICIENCY 73 university is but one gem in a resplendent crown. No other eye can take in at a glance the universal systems of primary, and secondary, and collegiate, and professional schools, associated in an educational plan of unprecedented symmetry, closeness, and completeness, which affords to all the equal chance declared in our laws and enshrined in the hearts of all true Americans. Other peoples do many things better than we do. In some di- rections their schools are more definite and efficient than ours. It is surely so with the simple schools for the peasant people. But there are no peasants in America. No other nation grasps the doctrine of all education for all the people as we do. We will never let go of that. It is the hope and the heritage of the nation. It is the boon which our democracy holds out to the honest, the am- bitious, and the oppressed, in all the world. It creates difficulties, and we must admit them. All education for all the people has been self-expansive and has come to be ex- pressed in new ways with the advancement of the nation. We all know how situations and needs change in America. Plans laid yesterday have to be modified today. And remedy can not follow upon need as quickly in a country where conclusions must be reached through popular discussion and opinion must crystallize in free legislation, as in a country where a few do the most of the thinking and a minister or a cabinet exercises the political power for all of the rest. My friend who has preceded me will not imagine that I am so unmindful of English history as to assume that Britain is a nation where a few men do the thinking and exercise the power for all of the rest. She settled that at Runnymede and again at Naseby, and Dunbar, and Marston Moor, and more than once on Tower Hill. She not only settled it for herself but for us. And since England's best writer of history, in the best history of the American Revolution that has been written, says that American heroism saved English freedom, my English friend will not mind if I say that ive settled the question, for England as well as for ourselves, at Sara- toga and at Trenton and at Yorktown, and then at Plattsburg and again at New Orleans, and many times by the gallantry of a little navy upon the high seas. The proudest jewel in England's crown doubtless is that we learned so well the great lessons which her statesmen and heroes taught us, and then supplemented them with some experiences and some independence of our own. All the stars upon our flag are the brighter because we have defended our democracy and our security so well. The foundations and the 74 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT buttresses of law are as firmly laid in America as in Britain, and they are no better grounded in any land. We are as sensitive about the learning and the independence of the courts as are the people who look up with keenest pride to the red cross of Saint George — and more than that can not be claimed in any land. England has always set us a fine example of industry. She has not juggled with opportuneness so much as we have, perhaps be- cause she has had less disposition to juggle, and less opportuneness to juggle with. Democracy, opportunities, and optimism have to be reckoned with in America: they often cause us to be misunderstood by England. Whether or not we have a fateful craze for wealth, we hold in special honor riches justly gained and sanely used. Our adven- turers and our weaklings gamble much upon the unlimited chances which the conditions present; a few win; the greater number go to " the deeps that are dumb." But the country is not all adventurer or weakling. The overwhelming sentiment is sane, and sound, and strong. We believe in capacity more than in chance, and in work more than in opportunity. We put manhood above either riches or poverty. We know that labor, and skill, and prudence, and steadi- ness, rather than great wealth, make the reliable character and the substantial citizen, and that these spring in the largest numbers and in the most virile type out of all education for the laborer just as much as for the millionaire, and for the commoner just as much as for the prince. Britain has something of that to learn, and so with her consti- tutionalism and with the unfettered intellectual freedom of the Saxon race she has her own educational difficulties. If the mother country has fewer new situations to deal with, she seems to have greater difficulty about the principles which will have to be ap- plied to all situations. The fact that her situations do not change so often is offset by the other fact that her more settled political and social organization yields less easily to the inevitable advance of the common people: and perhaps it is more than offset by the further fact that her statesmen are not quite as responsive to the demo- cratic advance as ours, and that she does not change statesmen as often or as easily as we do. But we will both console ourselves with the reflection that educational troubles are the proof of educational energy and the assurance of educational progress ; and we will be happy in the oneness of purpose which enables us to balance one another and quicken education in all the vast domains where the people understand the English tongue. THE ADAPTATIOX OF THE SCHOOLS TO INDUSTRY AND EFFICIENCY 75 Lack of Industrialism in the Schools Americans are as free in their right of censure as in any other of their freedoms. The elementary schools are everywhere, and often they find themselves within the intellectual limitations of senseless criticism. The loosening obligations of domestic duty and the very weaknesses of the schools have produced an undue supply of people of superficial culture and of " professionals " without employment ; and the universal interest in education makes it quite possible for these to occupy themselves and perhaps gain a little standing by endless propositions about the schools. There is evi- dence enough that they are not slow to take advantage of it. The factors which these people have added and would add to the schools are the essential cause of a widespread difficulty to which it is high time that we address ourselves with determination and with force. When but one third of the children remain to the end of the elementary course in a country where education is such a universal passion, there is something the matter with the schools. When half of the men who are responsible for the business activities and who are guiding the political life of the country tell us that children from the elementary schools are not able to do definite things re- quired in the world's real aftairs, there is something the matter with the schools. When work seeks workers, and young men and women are indififerent to it or do not know how to do it, there is something the matter with the schools. The length of the school period and the productive value of the citizen are closely related. Industrialism is the great basis of a nation's true strength and real culture. Knowing this we have seen that there is not sufficient articulation between the educational and the industrial systems of the country. We have seen the in- definite expansion of instruction and the unlimited multiplication of appliances leading to literary, and professional, and managing occupations, without any real solicitude about the vital industrial foundations of the nation's happiness and power. A situation mani- festly unjust to the greater number, even unjust to those for whom it has done the most, has resulted. Notwithstanding our boasted universality of educational opportunity, there has grown up an ab- surd hiatus in the educational system, which denies the just rights of the wage-earning masses and grievously menaces the industrial efficiency and the material prosperity of the country. The overwhelming trend of the programs of the schools and of the influences of the tc?.cliers. acting upon our national tempera- ^6 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT ment and aspirations, has led an undue proportion of youth to hterary and scientific study which too often ends either in idleness and insipidity, or in professional or managing occupations for which they are not well prepared and which are already overcrowded. Nor is the inevitable disappointment the worst of it. There is a glare, a gamble, and a subtlety about it which is demoralizing to all youth. In the marvelous advance and by some legerdemain, men get to be generals who have never been captains, and over- seers who have never been workmen. That affronts the sense of the country. We believe in the natural order of progress. While we hold that any one may aspire to any place, we hold also that he must win it, not by pretence, nor by subtlety, nor by favor, but through the work which leads to it, and by the gradual accretion of the substantial qualities which are the only true basis of his right to it. We care very little what the work is. We say that one who may work and will not work is not to be taken seriously. We have more love for a forceful corporal than for an insipid colonel. We say that the only way to proficiency and the only claim upon respect, come through the reflex influence of much work upon the worker. We believe that one whose labor, either mental or manual, adds to the power and the assets of the v/orld, has a wealth and a joy of his own to which the idler, no matter how rich, has no claim whatsoever. I am aware that I am on sensitive ground and may be mis- understood, but I am confident that if I can make myself clear I shall be sustained by the substantial sentiment of the country. I am not urging manual as against intellectual labor, any more than intellectual as against manual labor. I am not saying that one should remain in the " class " in which he was born, for I know nothing of " classes " in America and I do not admit that any one in this country is ever born in a " class." Work makes the worker. The vv^illing workman, whatever his poverty or his work, is likely to be a better citizen and a better man than the willing idler, whatever his riches or his superficial accomplish- ments. It is not a matter of " class " at all, but of the adaptation of men and women in general to the work which they can do best. I am not treating of exceptional cases, but surely I am not discouraging those of exceptional gifts, for all experience proves that the exceptional and the great have at first been inured to the severe labor which v/as at hand and that that very fact opened the door of opportunity, pointed the way to the thing which they could do best, and seasoned them for the doing of it. THE ADAPTATION OF THE SCHOOLS TO INDUSTRY AND EFFICIENCY yj It is a matter of efficiency, and therefore of happiness and growth, in occupation. What I am urging is that the schools must keep abreast, now and in time to come as they have been doing in time past, with the natural outworking of our democracy; that they shall not be exclusive in any sense, but must be no less con- cerned about industrial than about intellectual education. It is because I believe as ardently as I do in the open chance for every American child, that I say that the implications and the influences of the schools m^ust not lead boys who might become excellent cabinetmakers into being no-account lawyers, and girls who might be first-class breadmakers or dressmakers into being fourth-class music teachers. The best chance of every one is through the thing that he can do best, and while the schools are to inspire and encourage him, they may well be on their guard lest in mis- guided enthusiasm of their own they turn him from the course which is likely to be the best for him. All education must be provided in American schools, but con- clusions about life occupations are not to be forced — not even by implications. Determinations are to be left to natural inclinations and to the fates which are kindly to those who have real in- clination to actual work of any kind. All this leads us to see that the school system lias grown de- formed : it is one-sided and not broad enough at the base. The trouble is not that the higher institutions have grown abnormally. They are doing what colleges and universities ought to do. They are not doing what they ought not to do. Free universities have become tlie finest expression of the souls of great states, and they are beginning to be the best expression of the souls of great cities, in all parts of the country. Nor is the difficulty in the secondary schools, although they are afifected by it. The ailment is in the elementary schools. Waste in the Elementary Schools Our elementary schools train for no industrial employments. They lead to nothing but the secondary school, which in turn leads to the college, the university, and the professional school, and so very exclusively to professional and managing occupations. One who goes out of the school system before the end or at the end of the elementary course is not only unprepared for any vocation which will be open to him, but too commonly he is Vv^ithout that in- tellectual training which should make him eager for opportunity and 78 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT incite him to the utmost effort to do just as well as he can what- ever may open to him. He goes without respect for the manual industries, where he might find work if he could do it. He is with- out the simple preparation necessary to definite work in an office or a store. He is neither clear about his English, nor certain about his figures. Parents often take their children from the elementary school before the end of the course, not only because they can not comprehend much that is being done, but because they feel that their children will not have more earning capacity for the work which they must expect to do if they stay than if they go. The programs in the elementary schools are overloaded, and the teachers are overtaxed. The terms have become too short and the vacations too long, in the interest of teachers who are often over- worked by schools that are too large and by programs that are too crowded and complex. But that is not the worst. There is too much pedagogy and too little teaching. There is too much arti- ficial, and superficial, and therefore false, culture, and too little of the only thing that makes true culture. There are too many classes, too many books, too many visionary appliances. The teachers are forced into fanciful speculation and airy methods in order to be thought at the fore of pedagogical progress. There are pedagogical and psychological wretches who seem to think that they can. ex- periment upon children as physiologists and bacteriologists practise upon guinea pigs, and that without any equivalent basis of scien- tific knowledge. The result upon the child is confused conceit rather than mental clarity, and a little information about every- thing rather than exact efficiency in any definite thing. There is lack of concentration and drill upon any one thing until it is mastered, and therefore there is little exultation over accom- plishment, small inspiration to new undertakings, and a dearth of either information or power that is permanently retained. It wearies the teacher and mystifies the child ; it confounds the father and mother and deprives the school of the intelligent cooperation of the home. Even that is not all. We are more prodigal of the lives of chil- dren than is any other constitutional nation upon the globe. We let them commence school late and come irregularly and loiter along through a confused course at their pleasure or discomfiture, as you please. Between subordinating our elementary schools to the re- quirements for admission to a literary high school, and the indif- THE ADAPTATION OF THE SCHOOLS TO INDUSTRY AND EFFICIENCY 79 ference of legislators and petty magistrates about making and en- forcing attendance laws, we are doing a great wrong to millions of children, we show a larger percentage of illiteracy than other favored nations, and we withhold the support which the schools are bound to give to the strength and character of the Republic. Everybody sees the results but not many appreciate the reason. The root of the trouble is not where the uninitiated are looking for it. It is not, for example, with what the editorial writers call the •" fads and frills." Drawing, basketry, modeling, sloyd, joinery, cooking, and sewing, for an hour or two each week, impose no burden. They afford relaxation, open the way for healthful com- radeship and rivalry, supply motive, and lay a little of the ground- work for happy lives, by looking toward both the manual and mental efficiency so sorely needed. But we do not lay the first courses in the building with sufficient exactness and strength to enable our young men and women to erect either successful pro- fessional or successful industrial lives upon them. Good house- wifery and good craftsmanship are not forging ahead. The bake- shop is a menace to stomachs and to homes. The woman who can not bake a light loaf of bread, or broil a steak and keep the juices in it, or happily employ her odd moments with a needle, may be a very charming institution ; she may keep us posted about the new novels and the opera ; she may amply make up for shortcom- ings by teaching school ; but, she is an inefficient home maker, and it is not given to many to make up for that. The lack of house- keepers is as serious as the dearth of mechanics, and whatever the schools have done to correct the trouble, in either case, has been but little and it has not been a waste of time. The only legitimate criticism upon it is that there has not been enough of it, nor enough definiteness about it, to make sure of results. If more of the time of the schools were given to these things, with a stern eye to effi- ciency; and if there were less waste of time in connection with books, we would soon see a new and a more golden epoch in American education and in American life. The things that are weighing down the schools are the multi- plicity of studies which are only informatory, the prolongation of branches so as to require many textbooks, and the prolixity of treatment and illustration which will accommodate psychological theory and sustain pedagogical methods which have some basis of reason but which have been most ingeniously overdone. I have no right to say this without more definiteness, even though it tax your patience. There is a waste of time and productivity 80 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT in all of the grades of the elementary schools. If a school is to be graded, then a grade should mean something. A child is worse oil in a graded school than in an ungraded one, if the work of a grade is not capable of some specific valuation, and if each added grade does not provide some added power. The first two grades run much to entertainment and amusement. The third and fourth grades repeat the work supposed to have been done in the first tYW. Too many unimportant and unrelated facts are taught. It is like the v/earying orator who reels off stories only to amuse, seem.s incapable of choosing an incident to enforce a point, and makes no progress toward a logical conclusion. The early grades constitute the period of imitation, and the work should be miainly drill based on memory and imitation. It is not the period of much thinking; it requires such drill as will result in exact knowledge of the rudiments when the time for using them really comes. Thought should not be much expected in these grades. The reading should be for the quick recognition of the word and the proper expression of it, rather than to germinate thought. When thinking is possible arid normal, the time to encourage it has arrived. Then it is done too slowly. The work of the first four grades is too much extended, and that of the last four is not com- menced early enough. Let us illustrate: The backbone of our elementary work should be the English language — not language lessons learned and recited, but a progressive knowledge of grammatical analysis, much readir.g for the pleasure there is in it, and a use of the language in accurate and forceful statement. If this is really the point, it will be seen how much of what we are now ^'oing may be omitted. There is much in our elementary mathematics that is of little value as m.ental discipline and of little use in life. In the lower grades the pupils should be made " letter perfect " in the tables and the funda- mental processes. This perfect knowledge will, a little later, master fractions, decimals, and percentage, which are the same things in different forms. The rest in the books is of little value except in particular employments which few of the pupils will ever enter. There is too much geography in present courses, and much is gone over again and again. Only the relations of the great natural and political divisions of land and water, the location of the great centers of population, with more of the details of one's own state, need find an early place in the schools. The rest is unremunerative to small children, and they will get it in a few minutes by and by, if it ever becomes necessary for them to know it. In physiology THE ADAPTATION OF THE SCHOOLS TO INDUSTRY AND EFFICIENCY 8l we are trying much which only a physician can understand, and which there is no present call for the child to know, and we are doing it badly and using the time wastefully. We reach after too much mere information in the lower grades, and in the later ones we are not up with the normal powers of the healthy child. And the full and proper exercise of the intellectual as of the physical powers is the essential condition of mental health. The larger part of this w^aste, as it seems to me, is due to two very plausible and very baneful doctrines which pretty nearly have taken possession of the schools in the last quarter-century. Their disciples have been sincere enough and I have nothing in the world against them except a radical difference of opinion. Sometimes their theories have been presented attractively enough to carry asso- ciations of teachers into pedagogical ecstatics and hysteria. Those theories have had enough learning and truth to make them danger- ous, and not enough to make them potential. I refer to the unsub- stantial and delusive theories about speculative psychology, and the cure for all educational ailments which is falsely called " culture." I am far from saying that psychology, or deduction, or imagi- nation, or sentiment, has no place in a system of education. Each has a large place Vvdiere sense is free to ridicule its excesses and science may impose limitations upon its license. I am far from being indiflferent to the forms and accomplishments of polite society : but mere manners may be only boorishness and brutality refined, or insipidity but little disguised. Culture worth seeking, in or out of the schools, must come from labor upon things worth doing, and from the influence of the power to do and the pleasure of real accomplishment upon the soul of the one who does. The external forms of culture do not make real men and women, but enough work, and true teachers, and a healthful and attractive environment are more than likely to start boys and girls on the road to culture worth the having. There are people who worship theory as though it were greater tlian life, and culture as though it were something to be put on like a jacket instead of the refining of the soul through the labor and the experiences of life. Emotion, and ecstasy, and affectation, are made to do duty for sincerity and power, and for religion and patri- otism too. These people ignore the culturing value of labor, and of deprivation, and of sorrow. They are flippant about the Bible without feeling its inspirations or studying its translations. They are not much stirred by the flag, for they know little of the heroism that has reddened so many stripes, and they feel little of the aspi- 82 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT ration that is emblazoned in every star. Mind you, it is not said that these people are the rich. Quite as often they are people who make "culture" do duty for riches. Frequently they are people who have gained wealth faster than they can assimilate it. Who- ever they are, they should no longer be permitted to tear out the substantial underpinnings of the schools. These things are said only in explanation of the difficulties and in hope of finding a remedy for the troubles of the elementary schools. Whatever the explanation, the difficulty is manifest and the need of remedy is imperative. We must know what children of school age there are in a state, and where they are when the schools are open. We must stand for simplifying the course and shorten- ing the time of the elementary schools, and for making their teach- ing of more definite worth. We must try very hard to have the child able to do some definite thing, no matter at what age we lose him. We must organize an entirely new system of general industrial and trades schools which will make it worth while for all children to remain in school ; and which will provide for the children of the masses, and for the great manufacturing and constructive indus- tries, something of an equivalent for what we are doing for the children of the more well-to-do and for the professional interests and the managing activities of the country. Factory and Trades Schools It is time to organize a wholly new order of schools as a part of the public school system. We may separate the new order into two general classes. One class may train all-round mechanics for work in factories, where workmen act in cooperation, where each is part of an organization, and where much machinery is used ; and these may be called factory schools. The other class may train mechanics who work independently, mainly with their own tools, and without much machinery; and these may be called trades schools. We say " a new order of schools " because the new schools ought to be sharply distinguished from any schools that are now known in America. They ought to be wholly apart from the manual training schools. They will have a distinct individuality and a definite object of their own. They are neither, primarily, to quicken mentality nor to develop culture: those things will come in the regular order. The " culturists " are not to appropriate these new schools. They are not to train mechanical or electrical engineers; THE ADAPTATION OF THE SCHOOLS TO INDUSTRY AND EFFICIENCY 83 the literary and technical schools are doing that very amply. They are not even to develop foremen ; leaders will develop themselves for they will forge ahead of their fellows by reason of their own ability, assiduity, and force. The new schools are to contain noth- ing which naturally leads away from the shop. They are to train zcorkmcn to do better zvork that they may earn more bread and but- ter. A tentative plan would make these new schools more shoppish than schoolish; put them in plain but large buildings, sometimes using idle factories of which many cities have a supply; use books somewhat, but make reading subordinate to manual work; refuse to permit our charming friends, who write and print and sell books, to inflate these schools, as they have the elementary schools, to the bursting point; put them in charge of craftsmen who can teach, rather than of teachers who are primitive mechanics; keep them open day and evening ; make the instruction largely individual ; adjust them to the needs of those who must work a part of the time at least in order to earn a living ; and make them for boys and guds and men and women, and of every kind and description which may be necessary to meet the demands of the local factories and trades. These schools will have to be an integral part of the public school system, for the double reason that they can not be successful with- out articulating with that system and that they will not be accepted either by capital or organized labor without standing upon a legal footing which is independent of both and fair between them. It may as well be said at once that any school teaching a definite trade will fail without the sympathy of both the capital and the organized workmen engaged in that trade. They can not be expected to sup- port it, if it can be used in favor of another interest and so ar- rayed against their own. Capital will take care of itself under economic laws that are well understood. If it can not venture with reasonable expectation of profit, it will retreat; but it will exist. Capital has a strong enough motive for activity in the hope of profits, but labor has a stronger one in the need of bread. In this country it is not in the nature of either to brook injustice, and the needs of each make it unnecessary that the other do so. In the last analysis each will have to square with the plan that stands fair, that encourages capital to provide labor for workmen by pro- tecting all of the just rights of capital, and that encourages the man to make the most of himself by assuring all of his just rights m his individual industry and skill. 84 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT That is an American plan and it ought to prevail. It is the only- one which holds out the equal chance to every one. Such a plan can not in the nature of things be left to private enterprise. It can not be dominated by any forces which are in the least exclusive. American workmen are not willing to depend upon philanthropy. They will not widely accept the training schools set up by the manufacturing corporations. They are entitled to the same, or equivalent, rights as those which are already granted to the pro- fessional and employing classes. They know that, and will exact what belongs to them. Whatever is done they want done so com.- pletely as to command the respect of the best skill. They will tol- erate no false pretense about mechanical skill, but they will be glad to shorten the time in which their boys may become real journey- men. In any event, they know very well, at least their leaders do, that when these things are so they will have to accept them. All this can come in no other way than upon the basis of, and in association with, the public schools. The new schools can not displace, nor half displace, the common, elementary school. They will have to follow and' supplement it. The reason is both in educational necessity and in the likes and the needs of the people. But it is quite possible that the compul- sory attendance age, in cities at least, may be so extended as to cover the time of these industrial schools. Easily so if the element- ary course can be shortened or children can be brought to the end of it earlier than they are. The law should see that a child is either in school or at work up to his seventeenth or eighteenth year. How far we can succeed in establishing these purely industrial schools is, of course, problematic. Cities and towns will have to be encouraged by liberal State support. No trades schools have ever been successful without government aid. The experiences of other lands — and there have been rich experiences in other lands — will have to become well known among our people. In any event, it is certain that the extent to which the movement takes hold upon our life seems to be filled with a significance to which no intelligent - American can remain indifferent. Re-forming the Public School System It remains for me to suggest, as briefly as I may, the location and relations of these new schools in and to the public school system, and the extent of the re-form.ing which will be incident to their admission. THE ADAPTATION OF THE SCHOOLS TO INDUSTRY AND EFFICIENCY 85 It is proposed to reduce the compulsory attendance age to seven years in cities and towns, and to take definite measures for a far more complete and regular attendance; to lengthen the term and lighten the work; to simplify the courses and to give them a more industrial and efficient trend through the simple forms of hand work, such as paper cutting and folding, molding in sand and clay, plain knife and needle work, and the like, which can be done in the regular schoolrooms from the very beginning of the primary grades; and to push children along so that they will at all times have work which appeals to their years, and will complete the present work up to the end of the sixth grade at an earlier age than now. If the present eight grades can be shortened by one or two grades and a year or two of time, so much the better. At the end of the present sixth grade it is proposed to have the system begin to separate into three very distinct branches. The larger part of the work of the present seventh and eighth grades would be uniform, but some differentiation, looking to very com- plete separation, would begin with the present seventh grade. The three distinct classes of schools to follow the elementary schools would be ; Urst, the present high school system, which would be somewhat relieved because of the new arrangement; second, business schools looking to work in offices, stores, etc.; and third, factory and trades schools looking to the training of workmen. With the work of the present seventh grade there might be com- menced some study of modern foreign languages by pupils destined for the literary and classical high schools ; some special commercial subjects by pupils destined for the advanced business schools ; and some special training at benches with tools, and in the household and dom>estic arts, for those who are to stop with the elementary schools or are to go to the factory schools or trades schools. At least half of the teachers in the seventh and eighth grades should be men ; and these grades may well be housed in central and specially prepared rooms. We might hope to economize the time and increase the efficiency and productivity through the gram.mar grades to such an extent that a part of the compulsory school life of the child would remain at the end of the eighth grade; and we might also hope that there would be schools beyond the eighth grade which would be able to 50 increase the earning power of the child, no matter what his life work should be, that it would be clearly to his interest to remain in school. Then, as he approaches what is now the seventh grade, he and his teachers and parents would begin to think of the work 86 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT ' he is ultimately to do, and by the time he is through the elementary course he would find abundant opportunity and have some enthu- siasm for a school which may exactly qualify him for that work, no matter whether it is professional, or in business activities, or in purely industrial lines. Conclusion We can discuss the subject no longer tonight. The sure basis of a nation's strength is in industry as much as in intellect, and in skill as much as in resources. The assurance of a nation's great- ness is in the equipoise of mental and manual activities. We do well to open treasure-houses of higher and liberal learning, but they will avail little if we permit inefficient primary schools and if we turn away from the labor of the hand. We do well to conserve material resources, but it will not count for much unless we con- serve the time of boys and girls and enlarge the efficiency and versatility of the craftsmanship which must convert resources into merchantable goods. It is idle to pursue a course which is destruc- tive of the equilibrium of the common life and ignores the decisive influence of work upon the worker. Heads and hands and hearts, acting together, are larger factors than wood and iron and water in the economic problems of the world, and they are infinitely larger factors in the moral, and constitutional, and international, and eter- nal problems of men and women. We can not escape the fact that the elementary schools are wast- ing time, and that the lack of balance in the educational system is menacing the balance of the country. Children, schools, and country, are being ground out between fanciful and conflicting educational theories. The demand that there shall be less mystery and exploita- tion, less prolixity and parade, that the programs of the schools shall be more rational and that the work of the teachers shall fit children for definite duties with more exactness, is heard on every side. It does not mean that we must give over the work which goes to literary accomplishment, or art sense, or refined manners, or pro- fessional equipment, or scientific learning of whatsoever kind. It does mean that the equilibrium between intellectuals and indus- trials is being lost and must be restored. It does mean that children are being misdirected into misfits and that it must cease. It means more concern for life, increased productivity in the elementary schools, and incidentally, more rational courses in the secondary schools. THE ADAPTATION OF THE SCHOOLS TO INDUSTRY AND EFFICIENCY 87 It is not for a great national association of teachers to dodge or to deny a palpable difficulty in the schools. The fault is no more inside than outside of the schools. It is the product of our political freedom, of our quick temperament and universal ambitions, of our aptness in making and acting upon propositions, of our tendency to do everything at once, of our bad habit of not taking care, and of the toleration and good nature which allow people to try out at the common cost any philosophy that the brightest and wildest imaginations in the world may bring forth. In a way it is credi- table to us. We would rather be all that we are than be with- out the open chance and without the common alertness. But it is for the National Education Association to recognize difficulties an 1 meet them. We may not all see just how to do it tonight but we will find the way tomorrow. And no matter what we do, the glorious optimism of the nation will rise to greet the morning sun with an eye as clear and a soul as confident as ever. THE SCHOOL NEEDS OF A CITY •ABDJRESS BEFORE THE CURRENT TOPICS CLUB OF THE Y. M. C. A. OF TROY, N. Y., APRIL 2, I908 Mr Toastmaster and Gentlemen of the Current Topics Cluh: The opportunity to discuss with you the needs of this city con- cerning schools, is one which I keenly appreciate. Troy is an ener- getic, thrifty, business city, and I am assured that your organization consists very largely of men who are active in its business affairs. Such men are much interested in the good repute and prosperity of their city; their influence upon its sentiment is very consider- able; their views of public policies are, as a rule, very rational and sane. As their business is closely related to the prosperity and repute of the city, and as their methods must be determined by sound business principles, they have both the motive and the means for doing things, and preventing things, in ways that make for the common good. Troy has had many difficulties about its schools, and I have therefore accepted, with pleasure, your invitation to present my views concerning the proper organization and admin- istration of the schools in such a city. The Cause of Difficulties I have said that you have had very considerable difficulties in connection with your schools. I doubt if any of you will be dis- posed to deny it. I have had cause enough to know it, and I am sure that you know that I know it. I do not mean to say that in the long run you have had more difficulties than other cities : you have had an epidemic of difficulties in the last year or two. It is to the credit of your city that your people have been indignant about it, and have shown determination and ability to remove the cause. The irritating cause of the trouble may be expressed in the word " politics." A system of public schools is vitally dependent upon immunity from all partizanship, which is well enough when kept within its legitimate bounds. Common schools rest upon a basis of unalloyed patriotism. The intrusion of any special interest is resented by the common thought of the people, and is provided against by the laws as completely as lav/s can regulate the doings of people who are blinded by their [88] THE SCHOOL NEEDS OF A CITY S<) intensity of feeling, or who resort to mischievous and subtle meth- ods for gaining their particular ends. Any intrusion of the par- tizanship which is expressed by the word " politics," into a system of common schools, is an unmitigated nuisance. Politics has bur- rowed its way into the school system of Troy, In saying that, I by no means attribute the responsibility to the managers of any one party. I have no doubt that there are artists on both sides of politics in Troy, who would use the schools to promote party ends, so long as it is possible for either one side or the other to do it. Certainly I do not mean to say that Troy is worse than many other cities : indeed, in some respects, I think it is better. It has Lad good schools in the past ; and in the force and positive- ness of the determination to have good schools in the future, which it has shown in the last year, it is to be commended above many other cities. It may just as well be understood, first as last, and here as elsewhere, that an efficient system of common schools must be very responsive and sensitive to a wholesome and informed popular sentiment which will brook no interference by special and selfish interests. The Board of Education The first need, the one that is fundamental to all the others, is a board of education consisting of sane and balanced members. The board stands for the people. It is not expected that it will consist of teachers or of others who are familiar with the history and philos- ophy of education, or who have had much intimate experience with the internal operations of the schools. It is not only unnecessary that the members of the board shall be experts in the administration of the schools, but, generally speaking, it is undesirable. It is neces- sary that they shall be honorable and intelligent citizens, who are able to understand and to express the better sentiment of the people concerning the schools. Public sentinient must have its opportunity. There is an all-important factor in school administration which is wholly apart from making courses of study and methods of teach- ing. The people are to be free to say what, in a general way, their schools shall do. They are to retain the power to locate and de- termine the character of buildings, to map out the roads that are to be pursued, and to control the quality of the instruction. The laws prescribe certain minimum requirements, and fix a few im- perative regulations. Usage has gone further than law in settling the general procedure of the scliools. Aside from assuring 90 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT reasonably efficient elementary schools in every community, both law and usage leave it to that community to do about what it will in its schools. This the community does through the common sen- timent and through the board of education. If the board of educa- tion consists of men — or men and women — who are imbued with the American spirit and are bent upon giving the best chance to every child; who can keep in touch with the people while they inspire, draw out, and make the most of the better purposes that are to be found in all American cities ; who will not believe that they knew so very much more nor so very much less than other people do about what is good for the schools ; and who, moreover, will lay hold of all available information, and have the courage to stand for what is right and what is good in the training of the young, there will not be very much trouble about the schools. It would be idle to discuss here how a city is to get such a board. There is a rather common saying among men who are prominent in the educational work of the country, that whatever method of appointment is employed only proves that some other method would be better. Doubtless the method which obtains in Troy, namely, appointment by the mayor, is as good as any. Wherever public opinion is keen, sensitive and alert, a community will not long suffer itself to be misrepresented by a board of education which makes plunder out of securing supplies for the schools, and patronage out of the appointment of teachers. In such a com- munity, where such a board of education has in some inscrutable way come into being, the people will find some plan for " cleaning house," and putting representatives of ordinary integrity and ordinary intelligence in control. Experience has abundantly proved that a small board of educa- tion, with concentrated and centralized responsibility, works more satisfactorily than a large one in which it is difficult to locate meannesses. Experience has also amply demonstrated that a board in which all the members stand for the school interests of the entire city, and not for those of a ward or other subdivision of the city, is far more likely to deal justly with all sections, and to promote all the interests of all the people, than a board in which the members represent subdivisions of territory and population, and scheme to secure a special advantage to the special interests for which they stand. ^ In general, it may be said that a board which is small enough to sit around a council table and confer in moderate tones, is very THE SCHOOL NEEDS OF A CITY 9I preferable to a board in which there is much display of oratory and much worthless but inevitable talk to the galleries. The city having a board that is small enough for real conference, modest enough to learn, honest enough to treat patrons and teachers with justice, and courageous enough to compel all selfish interests to keep their hands off the schools, is to be congratulated; and the city which is with- out such a board will do well to agitate and contend until it secures one. Business Management The board of education must, of course, be reUed upon to man- age the financial affairs of a city school system in ways which will command public confidence. This is essentially a business matter, and it ought not to be a difificult task for any man who is entitled to be considered for appointment to such a board. The ideal man for a board of education is one of sound business habits and con- siderable business experience, who is genuinely sympathetic with the popular interests and the work of the schools. Certainly with such men, there is very little difficulty about managing the business affairs of the school system. The books are to be always open, and whatever is done is to be without any element of secrecy about it. It may as well be said here as elsewhere that it is a vicious practice f^r the members of a board to divide matters between themselves so that one member shall have it in his power to determine what is to be done, when the law contemplates that all such determinations shall be reached in conference and by the board itself. Of course, it is well enough, and often necessary, for one member to see that a thing which has been determined upon, or a course which has been outlined, is actually carried out; but the discretion of one member of a board about what had better be done is never to be substi- tuted for the discretion of the entire board, or of a clear major- ity of it. A board of education is frequently called upon to determine the location of new school buildings. In rapidly growing cities this calls for the exercise of considerable foresight, which, it is needless to say, is not a very plentiful article. Yet, if the matter is discussed somewhat in the newspapers and among the people, and if there is a purpose to meet real needs, and not to favor a particular section or a man of influence, there will not be a great deal of difficulty about it. The architecture of new school buildings ought to have more care than is usually given it. It is a 92 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT great pity that the opportunity to erect a really artistic and attractive building- is so frequently lost by reason of the disposition to favor local architects, who can not design an artistic structure and who have had little or no experience in making plans for school buildings. It is idle to suppose that an inexpensive schoolhouse must be an ugly looking one. Architectural effects are not dependent alone upon the size of the structure, and materials to be used, nor the amount of ornamentation. Any building in which the public has the sense of proprietorship — whether it is by the roadside or in a country village ; whether it is a ward school in a city of a hun- dred thousand people ; or whether it is the De Witt Clinton or the Erasmus Hall High School, costing millions, in the city of New York — ought to be erected upon plans which appeal to the pride of the people, and, consciously or unconsciously, promote: the art taste of the multitude. I am not standing for extravagance in schoolhouses or in their equipment. They should express something of the wealth, and a great deal of the intelligence, of the people whom they .are to serve. While it is no economy to go without good school accommo- dations, and while it is a positive wrong to send children to school in a building that is unclean or bady lighted and ventilated, there is no strong reason why the schools should be maintained in pal- aces. Of course, if a city has wealth to spend upon palaces, it may as well put it into palaces for the schools, as for any other purpose. While the efficiency of the school is not dependent upon the cost of the building, a public schoolhouse ought to stand in about the same relation to a community that a residence bears to a good citizen. Boards of education sometimes overreach in the matter of school expenditures, and quite as often they do not go as far as the better sentiment of the city would sustain them in going. Timidity is a poor attribute for a board of education, but sound judgment, cour- age, and frankness, which produce buildings to be proud of, and give character, culture, and energy to the work of the schools, will find abundant support in American cities. This is perhaps a good time and place to say that it ought to be realized more commonly than it is, that the school system of a city is a part of a state system of education, and is not responsible to the city government. Boards of education, in particular, oug-ht to appreciate that important legal fact. It is true, that it is often provided by law that the members of a board of education shall be appointed by the mayor of the city. That is for convenience: it THE SCHOOL NEEDS OF A CITY 93 does not make the board of education responsible to the mayor. It is true, that the law frequently provides that the school budget shall be passed upon by a city board, which determines the amount to be raised for each public purpose within the city ; but this again is for convenience. Perhaps the advantage of collecting all taxes through the same machinery, and the desirability of avoiding con- flicts over the sums to be raised for school and other purposes, are sufficient justification for this arrangement; but there is nothing in or about it which may legitimately give any officer of the city government either the legal or the moral right to interfere with the appointment of teachers, to fix the salaries for individual posi- tions in the schools, or to do anything else w^hich has a bearing upon their organization or administration. All that is, by the law of the state, committed to the state school authorities, and to the local board of education. The Superintendent of Instruction I have no doubt that the appointment of the superintendent of instruction, or superintendent of schools as he is commonly called, is the most far-reaching duty which the board of education ever has to perform. The functions of the office call for a man who is entitled to the community's confidence and respect. He is bound to be a manly man, whom the teachers, and, particularly, the chil- dren in the schools, may justly admire. He ought to be a man whose very carriage, and whose doings and sayings, will stir the teaching body to its very best, and will be an inspiration to the children in long after years. An efifeminate man may do many things well enough, but he can not fill the position of superintendent of schools. The superintendent is bound to be a scholar who hns not stopped studying. He must be familiar with educational history and theory, and yet he must not let these things have a complete monopoly of his thought and his work, because he must enter into all of the real interests, and many of the activities, of the city, to the end that he may best enable the schools to serve the purposes for which they are maintained. He must be filled with the kind- hness which will be sensitive to the right of every parent to the best possible training for his children, and jealous of the utmost opportunity for every child. He must have a sense of justice wliich will require him to hear all sides ; a measure of patience which is not easily exhausted; a power of reasoning which will 94 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT enable him to come rather quickly to conclusions that will stand, and a decisiveness which will command confidence because of its logical basis and its definite and positive attitudes. He must be a man who can lead, and organize, and administer. He must be able to see what will work, and, quite as much, he must be able to see what will not work. There must be order, and system, and result, about his doings. He must see the defects in the schools, and when he does, he need not be afraid to speak of them; but he must have remedies for defects, and definite ways for resisting and curing the evils which incessantly creep in at all of the open doors of every large system or organization. Possibly above all else, he must be a man who can work harmoniously with other people, seemg their point of view and gi/ing the fullest opportunity for the expression of their opinions, up to the time when policies and courses are decided upon, and then commanding the good will and the support of all in the onset which accomplishes things. The men who are qualified for this position are scarce. This is particularly true when the position is in a city of 50,000 inhabitants or more. Still, there are such men and they may be found. Cer- tainly they may be found by a board of education which will treat them as they are entitled to be treated, and pay them as they are entitled to be compensated. A truly efficient city superintendent of schools is an economical investment, no matter how much his salary; and a weak one is costly, no matter how low his salary may be. It makes little difference whether, at the time of his appointment, he lives in the city, or in some other city in the state, or even in some other state. Of course, if there is a really qualified super- mtendent developed in a city school system, there is a large element of justice in giving him the place, not only because he has earned It, but because of the inspiration which his appointment must give to the ambitious and aggressive teachers who have worked long in the system. There is a certain advantage, too, in the appointment of one who is already familiar with the city — its ideas and disposi- tion—as there is also an advantage in a new man not being called upon to learn the special laws and discover the prevalent feelings of a state which is new to him. But these things should not have too much weight: a resourceful and efficient man can adapt himself to new conditions. I am sorry to say that it often happens that a city which thinks it has an excellent school system, has in fact a very poor one. Sometimes superintendents and teachers who have THE SCHOOL NEEDS OF A CITY 95 practically gone to seed, have told the people so often and so vehe- mently that they have the best schools in the country, that they have really come to believe it ; when what they need, above all else, is a new superintendent who knows what really good school work is. The opportunity to appoint a superintendent of schools does not come every day, and when it does come the board of education ought to look the broad field over, and, finding the man who is adapted to the position, pay him whatever is necessary to command his services. Of course, it must be borne in mind that a man who is really capable of serving a community as superintendent of its schools, will not tolerate ill treatment by the board of education. He is likely to be obliged to tolerate a great deal from other people, but the essentials of his office are such that he can hardly hope to suc- ceed in his work without the support of the board of education. Moreover, he must be given freedom in the discharge of his duties. He is an expert in organizing schools, in laying out courses of study, in judging of teaching, and in adapting teachers to par- ticular places. This is an expert and professional service, which nobody expects the members of the board to render. If they are to assume that they know more about the particular things for which a superintendent is employed, than the superintendent him- self does, they might as well dispense with the services of a super- intendent and manage the whole thing themselves. Modern schools are vitally dependent upon the expertness of the supervision, and this, in turn, is dependent upon a real expert who has freedom of action. No real expert will permit himself to be defeated and humiliated about matters which are within his professional knowl- edge and experience, and which are committed to his care, by men who have the mere physical or political power, and not the special knowledge nor the moral right, to do so. The weakest sort of a modern school system that I know of, is one in which a weak super- intendent becomes a mere figurehead, while laymen appoint favorites to teach the schools, and join with the superintendent in frequently assuring the people that they are blessed with the best school system in the world. Of course, I know that there are men who claim to be super- intendents of schools, without any reason. Certainly I am aware that there are men who have in some way got into the position of superintendent, who can not safely be trusted with the free exer- cise of a superintendent's normal powers and functions. Wherever 96 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT this is true there is but one thing to do, and that is, to have a change. I know many cases where a superintendent who never had much real ag-gressiveness, or who has outlived such as he may have had, has been in one place so long that the children who once looked up to him from their desks with the feeling that he was very great, have grown to manhood and womanhood, and give him their best support because of their personal feelings towards him, notwithstanding the fact that what their schools most need now is a new superintendent. I sum this phase of the subject up in a few words by saying that it is the business of a board of education to make sure that it has an energetic, just, and up-to-date superintendent of schools, and then to support him in all that relates to the teachers and the teaching. Of course, the best results will not be secured , unless the board and the superintendent are glad to confer, and enjoy working together. No man is so great as to be above being called upon for the reasons which sustain what he proposes and what he does. That is what decent men expect, and what strong men enjoy. But, in the last analysis, what the superintendent of instruction proposes concerning the teachers and the teaching must be upheld in all essential particulars, or the time has come for a radical change in the composition of the board of education, or for bringing in a new superintendent whose propositions and ways will command confidence and support. The Teaching Service The one prime object in a large school system, the object to which everything else must bend and with which nothing must be allowed to interfere, is the development of a teaching service of reasonably uniform excellence. The point is not to get a few good teachers, but to avoid having any poor teachers. We are bound to preserve all of the rights of parents, and to promote all of the interests of children. The forces that are against us are many, and they are strong; but there is no way of developing a corps of teachers w^hich will meet all of the demands, save by uniform, procedure persistently followed for a long time. Teachers must, of course, be proficient in subject-matter. They must know a great deal more than the mere work which they are to teach. Primary teachers should have had, at least, the advan- tage of a high school training: it is not unreasonable to expect that some of them shall have had the advantage of college courses. THE SCHOOL NEEDS OF A CITY 97 High school teachers should be college graduates. I can conceive of circumstances which would justify the appointment of a primary teacher who had not graduated from the high school, and of a high school teacher who had not graduated from college, but in an overwhelming number of cases it would not be so. There is no excuse now for a narrow education on the part of a teacher, because the opportunities for liberal learning are all about us, and one who is likely to make a fair teacher will lay hold upon some cf these opportunities. Teachers have to be trained for their work just as any other professional people have to be trained for the work which they are to undertake. One must know the history and the philosophy of education; must know what other states and other countries are doing for and in their schools ; must know the relations which one class, grade, or kind of school sustains to the other branches of the school system ; and must have some special knowledge of ways for quickening the minds of children so that they will have some inter- est in doing the work which strengthens the mind and sharpens the appetite for knowing things. All this can not be trained into a person who is altogether without aptitude and enthusiasm for teaching; but one who has predisposition for it may be greatly aided by normal and training schools and classes. I have grown much in favor, of late years, of city training schools, because experience has shown me that they are likely to be more efficient than schools located outside of the city in develop- ing teachers suited to the special needs of a particular city. Of course, I have in mind cities of considerable size, where many new teachers are needed every year, and where a training school must have a considerable number of students in order to meet the annual demands of the city schools for teachers. This is certainly so where a city has a highly efficient superintendent, who knows what the schools need, who has distinct ideas about what ought to be done to meet those needs, and who is glad to have the ordinary schools and the training school, the teachers and those who are candidates for teachers, work together to accomplish definite ends. Even after this, the fact remains that some teachers are thor- oughly successful in some places, and as thoroughly unsuccessful in other places. Therefore, not only general knowledge and pro- fessional training, but adaptation to particular pupils and particular kinds of work, rnust be considered. Often a teacher does not know what she would most like to do, or what she can do best, until after 98 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT she has tried. A failure in one place is not always conclusive evi- dence of general failure. The superintendent and the teacher must work it out together. If the superintendent can help the teacher, he is bound to do it. If she will not be helped, or can not be helped, she must be required to make way for one who can fill the place. All this points to the importance of a teaching spirit, a spirit that likes children and enjoys teaching, that is anxious to be proficient, that can appeal to intelligent parents, that can work harmoniously with other teachers, and can submit to the regime which is vital to the proficiency of all large organizations. Practically all of this must be left to the superintendent of schools. If a city has not a superintendent to whom it may be safely and wisely left, it needs a new one. If it has one to whom it may well be left, the board of education is derelict if it does not leave it to him. The statutes of this State protect the tenure of teachers in the cities of the first and second class. In time the same protection will doubtless be extended to cities of the third class. This is desirable, not only because of the rights of the teachers, but also because of the aid which it gives to the development and efficiency of the entire teaching force. These statutes have sometimes been misunderstood by boards of education, and sometimes by teachers. It is not their purpose to protect an inefficient teacher. Their purpose is to protect reasonably efficient teachers against malevolent influences from the outside, and against hasty and inconsiderate, or even malicious, action on the part of the board of education. A teacher's entire capital is often summed up in her reputation as a teacher. It may be easily and quickly injured. That is not to be done lightly. An act concerning a teacher, which would be proper at one time, might be improper at another time. By common usage and by manifest right, a teacher who enters upon a year of teaching should be allowed to go on to its conclusion, unless some special and strong reason comes in to make an immediate change necessary in the interest of the school. Where it does, there is no injustice to the teacher, because parents are entitled to have their children taught, and no individual or minor interest tmay be allowed to overthrow the conclusive right of the parent of the child. All these things, and perhaps many more, are to be considered by an honest board of education, whose main business is to develop in the schools under its charge a company of men and women who THE SCHOOL NEEDS OF A CITY 99 can work peacefully and enthusiastically together in training the children as they need, and in quickening the intellectual activities of all the people. What is to be Done in the Schools? Up to this time I have been speaking, in the main, about the organization and administration of the schools. I have dwelt upon the character and qualities that must be found in the officers and teachers. Now, what is this all for? It certainly is not to provide work for people. The point of it all is to give every American child the utmost opportunity guaranteed to him by our political system. Indeed, I might properly go further, and say that it is not only to give to every child his best chance, but it is to make sure that he has the benefit of it, whether he or his parents are eager for it or not. To this end it is vital that every child in the city shall have the elements of an education; at least, he must be able to read under- standingly, to write legibly, and to use figures to the extent of making ordinary computations and preventing others from over- reaching him. This is his right, whether or not his parents are interested in his having it. It is a right which must be enforced and made good to him, not only in his own interest, but in the interest of the city and of the nation. This is by no means the sum of his personal rights, nor the measure of the public concern about him. He must be trained in morals and in manners, he must be made obedient to authority, and made to recognize the rights of others. Having to live in our modern complex civilization, he must be trained in the things which will enable him to hold his own in that civilization, and even to make some contributions to it, to the end that he may not be a load upon it, but may give it strength and make it a support and an inspiration to others now living, and still others who are to follow after. Things must be done to draw out the better side of his nature, to culture his spirit, and to open to him all of the possibilities into which a harmoniously developed human character may enter and make the most of himself. This is not all. Since we have gone so far in this country to urge our children to be ambitious, and to seek the highest places in our professional and political life ; since we have so commonly assumed that their best opportunity is in a purely intellectual development. ICO NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT as distinguished from mechanical or industrial proficiency ; since we have gone so far in encouraging them to enter the high school and go to college — which lead almost conclusively to professional careers ; and, since we have provided the instrumentalities for train- ing them for purely intellectual vocations, we must, as it seems to me, in order to be just to all, and in order to restore the industrial equilibrium of the country, take some decisive steps to dignify the manual industries, to urge more children to engage in industrial vocations, and to provide the instrumentalities which will enable them to acquire proficiency in industrial life and fit them for particular vocations therein. From this it does not necessarily follow that we have pursued a mistaken policy in doing what we have done to develop the liter- ary schools so strongly. They were much needed, and it is quite possible that they would never have been so strongly developed, if they had not been developed first. They are the natural product of the outlook and genius of the country, the inevitable outgrowth of our national temperament and the genius which has resulted from the mingling of races and the building of national institu- tions ; but we can hardly fail to see — indeed, the manifest break in the equilibrium between intellectual and manual vocations is compelling us to see — that we need a new class of schools which will make a special point of training our youth to manual industry, and of fitting them for particular trades. If we are to provide special training for those who are to follow intellectual pursuits, we are also bound to do it for those who are to follow manual pur- suits. We must do less than we have been doing, or we must do more. There is no danger of our doing less. Nor does all this imply any criticism whatever of the literary high schools, colleges, universities, and professional schools. The high school is in a special sense an American creation. In other national systems of education, there is hardly any class of schools to compare with it. It is the bridge which carries the children of the masses from the common elementary school over into the field where endless opportunities abound and where liberal learning- flourishes. It is properly classified with American common schools, and everywhere in this country it has now become a part of the common school system. Indeed, everywhere in the country, save in the North Atlantic States, colleges and universities have become a part of the common school system. There is reason enough to believe that this will yet be the case in the old-time Middle and THE SCHOOL NEEDS OF A CITY lOI New England States. It certainly will be so unless the colleges and universities already established keep so close to the ground and so near to the people as to make it unnecessary. However that may be, there can be no question about the fact that high schools, colleges, and universities are vital to the best efficiency of the elementary schools. Schools of every grade are quickened and inspired by the schools above, and an American city would make a deplorable mistake if it were to begin to think that the only schools which really deserve public encouragement and support, are those which teach the elementary branches. In one way or another, upon one plan or another, every intelligent community will do whatever k may do to make sure that it has up-to-date elemen- tary schools and that all of its children attend such schools — either public or private ; and also that the widest opportunities for general culture and for liberal learning are held out to all those who can be induced to lay hold upon them. Conclusion We have now considered, in a very general way, the essential factors of a school system in a city of some size. As my mind goes over the whole subject and I recur to what I have said, I am led to fear that you may think I have paid too much atten- tion to the technical or professional side of the large problem. It is true that that side is of first and vital importance. It must have the largest attention and the freest opportunity. It must have this from the board of education, which stands for the intelligence, the generosity, and the civic pride of the city. I am very far from being disposed to underestimate the importance of the popular ele- ment in the upbuilding of a system of schools. A superintendent and teachers can accomplish little without rational and generous public support. Teachers, without the help of the public, would probably make as bad a fist of it as the public would make without the help of teachers. A system of schools in this country is bound not only to give every child his chance, but it is also to be shaped with some reference to the local situation and the particular inter- ests of a community. The public, through the board of education, is derelict if it does not see to it that all this is done; the board of education is derelict if it does not freely take the initiative and exercise such decisive control as is necessary to keep the schools in line with the popular trend and up to the maximum of popular ex- pectations. To this end it is bound to demand whatever amount 102 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT of money may be necessary to support the schools ; to provide build- ings which comport with the wealth and culture of the city ; and to install libraries, scientific apparatus, furnishings, and all appli- aiices which are needed by the teachers and which enlarge the self-respect and incite the ambition of the pupils and lead every sane citizen to feel proud of the fact that he has some sense of proprietorship in such splendid institutions. All this can result from nothing but generous and sincere cooperation between good citi- zens and good teachers. Where either of these factors is wanting, there can hardly be an efficient system of schools, and where both are present and are working in cooperation, there can not fail to be an admirable school system. SUGGESTIONS TO THE STAFF OF THE STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT BY THE COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION These notes were the basis of a talk to the Assistant Commissioners of Education and the Directors and Chiefs of divisions on the 23d of Septem- ber 1908. 1 System Daily routine must be maintained. All employees must render seven hours of service daily. They must be ready to begin work at 9 o'clock, and not take more than an hour for lunch. This may be relaxed somewhat as to officers who do not limit their service to seven hours but give all their time to the service, without reference to the clock — but the proceedings of every day must be character- ized by system, order and regularity. 2 Visiting The visiting habit among clerks must be sharply repressed. There is too much of it in the corridors, as well as in workrooms. An efficient employee will find plenty to do. He will be happier for do- ing it. If there is time for idleness, there are too many employees. The one who keeps busy and accomplishes things should have pref- erence when there is opportunity for promotion. 3 Going to the Legislature Employees should not frequent, in office hours, the Senate or Assembly. It reflects upon the Department. They are never to go in groups or companies. 4 Gossip Caution employees about loose talk in public places, such, for example, as the street cars. False and vicious stories start in this way. Caution all about talking among themselves, or with outside people, about Department matters of which they are not fully informed. 5 Relations of employees Encourage self-respect and independence among employees. Let each attend to his own tasks and not interfere in the business of others. Discourage the borrowing or loaning of money between [103] 104 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT one another. Let it be known that good standing in the Department requires that all ordinary living expenses be promptly met. 6 Concessions Concessions to employees, such as absence, should be made very conservatively, only for substantial reasons, and to those who are diligent, proficient, and right-spirited in their work. 7 Transfers We lose many employees by transfer to other Departments. We do not object to this; indeed, we are proud of it, if it is upon the initiative of the other Department, and not upon that of the em- ployee. Any wire-pulling on the part of the employee to effect a transfer is censurable and will be sufficient ground for refusing it. But when it is asked by the other Department because of the worth of the employee, and when it promises to be of permanent advantage to the employee, it will be cheerfully acceded to, even though it be to the disadvantage of the Education Department. When this De- partment desires to transfer an employee from another Department to this one I will go to the head of the other Department and ask him about it, and when another Department wants to take one of our employees it is but proper that the head of that Department should communicate with me about the matter. 8 Discipline If an employee disregards reasonable requirements, recommend dismissal. 9 Relations of officers Assistant Commissioners are to handle the Department business upon the field, i. e. throughout the State. The " divisions " are to handle the business within the Department. An Assistant Commis- sioner is to call upon the Chief of a division for any service which he needs. He is not to give directions. If his call is not resultful when he thinks it should be, he is to report the matter to the Com- missioner of Education. The Commissioner of Education, through the Chief of the Administration Division, is responsible for the effi- ciency and the integrity of the organization in each division. On the other hand. Chiefs of divisions will carefully refrain from in- vading that discretion in the handling of business which is vested essentially in the Assistant Commissioners. The divisions carry out SUGGESTIONS TO THE STAFF 1 IO5 plans that are well settled. The Assistant Commissioners exercise discretion upon current questions. The Chief of a division should be extremely careful about any act, such, for example, as the writ- ing of a letter, which is outside of well established routine, or which in any way goes beyond the specific thing which it is committed to him to do. ID Appointments The law gives to the heads of divisions the initiative concerning appointments. This is as I wish it, and I expect to observe the spirit, as well as the letter, of the arrangement. I am always willing to confer about an appointment or promotion. I do not exact confer- ence — it will ordinarily be found best. I shall always maintain entire freedom about approvals. Not only the letter, but the spirit, of the civil service laws must be observed. There must be no maneuvering. If the civil service laws produce unfortunate results in any particular case, bring the matter to attention, and if need be we will go to the Civil Service Commission about it. In general, those laws are efficacious, and we must not only observe, but sus- tain, them. Do whatever may be done to increase the efficiency of employees under your supervision. If they are inefficient, try to change things about so as to help them. If they can not be helped, create vacancies and try other people. 11 Promotions There are constant changes going on in the Department by reason of advancements to fill vacancies. Give preference to the most de- serving. It is not always necessary to make a promotion as soon as a vacancy occurs ; it is often well to let employees work for it. It is not always necessary to pay the maximum salary ; it is often well to let one prove that he deserves it. There are some of you who study ways for increasing the salaries of employees, more than you do ways for increasing their usefulness and efficiency. The temptation to do this is recognized. Be upon your guard about it. 12 Answering letters We speak often about promptness in answering letters, and yet, every few days a case comes to my attention where a letter has been neglected. Some answer should be made to a letter the day it is received. Certainly it should never go beyond the second day. If you can not give a complete answer at once, write and say as much as that, and indicate when you will do it. If you are away, your I06 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT Stenographer should attend to it. If the correspondence is volu- minous and delay is unavoidable, have a form for use in acknowl- edging receipt of letters. The credit of the Department is staked upon promptness in correspondence. It is a vital matter and there will be no compromising about it. 13 System concerning letters The Department is now so well organized that there should be no difficulty in knowing where letters belong. If a letter gets into the wrong hands, it should be sent to the proper officer at once. Two officers should not be corresponding with the same person on the same subject. This may be avoided if one will make sure of his own responsibility and attend to his own business. 14 Money in letters All letters containing money are supposed to be opened by the mailing clerks, who are under bonds. If by accident a letter con- taining money is opened by you, you should indorse the amount upon the letter at once, and send it without delay to the Cashier. 15 Avoid extravagance Our postage, and express, and printing bills are necessarily large. Do not multiply sendings unnecessarily, and do not advise printing for the sake of printing. We do not have to make a show of doing things. Our business will grow in spite of us. We are to let it grow normally, but we are to avoid inflating it abnormally; and certainly we are to avoid any unnecessary expense. 16 Stenographers The stenographers often need more direction than they have. They are to be made responsible for good order in the office, and for the systematic handling of business. Of course, the unsystem- atic and disorderly habits of an Assistant Commissioner or the Di- rector or the Chief of a division, may make it next to impossible for a stenographer to do her work and his work systematically, but it is to be hoped that where this is the case, stenographers will be ener- getic and patient in training their Chiefs in habits of order and system. It is well not to have too many papers upon the desk at once. Indeed, the ideal way is to maintain perfect files, and have but one subject upon the table at a time. Whether the head of the office is orderly or not, however, the stenographer is bound to be: SUGGESTIONS TO THE STAFF I07 that is an essential part of the stenographer's training. In the ab- sence of the head of the ofifice, the stenographer must do whatever she can to meet the wishes of the correspondents, and she must cer- tainly see to it that nothing lies upon the table, without attention, long enough to bring reproach upon the service. 17 Form All Department documents and letters should be in excellent form. I assume, of course, that good literary style and correctness in orthography and punctuation never will be lacking. I mean more than this ; namely, that letters and papers must be in good style, in good physical form and marked by absolute neatness. 18 Signatures Something has been said heretofore about signatures. There must be responsibility about the matter. When the signature of an officer vitalizes a paper, no one else should assume to sign it. A rubber stamp does not make a real signature. No one should sign any other name than his own without at the same time adding some- thing which clearly signifies that it is not an original signature. When the validity of a paper depends upon the signature, it should never be signed before the blanks are all filled and it is in all respects complete. 1 9 Traveling Aside from those officers of the Department whose particular business it is to travel, there should not be a great deal of it. Even such officers may waste time in traveling. It very commonly happens that it is better to send for local school officials to come here, than it is to go to see them. There is a serious break in handling the business of the Department when officers are away. They should not be away unless it is certain that the service will gain more by their going, than by their staying. When one travels on our business he should live comfortably, without ostentation, entering all expenses in his notebook and making a bill with such detail and in such form that it explains and justifies itself. Whenever any officer of the Department is upon the roads he must remember that he is the representative of New York. When he makes an address or reads a paper, he should prepare for it as completely as he may, and present it just as well as is possible. I08 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 20 Hesitation and haste Do not hesitate long about deciding and acting. You are likely to be as well able to do the thing rightly today as tomorrow. Prob- lems accumulate with surprising rapidity. Do not fear mistakes; correct them openly as soon as discovered. Yet take the time that each duty requires. Do not let one duty jostle another. Do one thing at a time. It is remarkable how much more may be done in a given time if one thing is taken up at a time, attended to reso- lutely, and not done too hastily. It is quite as remarkable how little is accomplished, and how ,much demoralization results from hesita- tion and apprehension, or from impulsiveness and undue hurrying. 21 Helpfulness Never let a visitor go away from the Department with ground for feeling that he has not been well treated. Advance to him and render him every possible service. Outside, as well as inside, of the Department, try to extend and uplift the educational service of the State, and be of every possible assistance to every one who may be assisted, whether he asks your help or not. 22 Training employees We owe it to those who are under our direction that we direct and train them. They should never fail, or partially fail, for lack of firmness and steadiness in holding them to their responsibilities. Get them together and tell them what in general is wanted. Do not let them get into trouble because they are not told. If the fault is per- sonal and specific, try to correct it by personal and direct, though kind and genuine, words. Cultivate kindness but avoid insipidity. Commend when you may, but do not do and say the pleasant things alone, when there are unpleasant duties which the good of an in- dividual and the efficiency of the service require us to perform. 23 Freedom and independence of action The theory of the departmental organization is that there is some one below the Commissioner of Education who will take care of all ordinary Department business which the law permits another to do. In doing this, act freely and independently. Do not trouble me with routine matters. Hold down your own job and fill your own place. Go ahead and reach out, if you can do it without getting in a mess. Spare me from annoyances as much as you can. When there is SUGGESTIONS TO THE STAFF IO9 something of real import which is not amply provided for, come to me without hesitation. I will give every help to you in my power, but I have many things, and very important things, that I want to do, and my doing of them depends upon your successful handling of all the ordinary business of the Department. 24 Conferences Whenever I am not occupied I am glad to see any one in the De- partment for a word of greeting. When one wishes to confer with me about a matter of business it is necessary that he make the fact known to my Secretary to the end that an appointment may be arranged. It is idle for one to come to me about matters that an- other is charged with the duty of attending to and can attend to better than I. But when it is a matter that I should attend to I want to attend to it, and at a convenient time, so that it may be completely gone over. If it is of importance it will be better if I am advised of the nature of it in advance so that I may get it in mind and be as well prepared for the conference as may be. 25 Acknowledgments If any one has imagined that I have been disposed to complain, he is mistaken. I am trying only to enlarge the pleasure and increase the usefulness of men and women who, in nearly every case, are ideally fitted for the work they are doing. I have never known an organization embracing three hundred people to operate, on the whole, more smoothly, or to be more capable and efficient. I am personally under endless obligations to you and to many others in the Department, and I want you to know that I keenly appreciate my obligations, and the obligations of the State, to you. But the highest measure of efficiency, and therefore of pleasure, in work, must always come from being busy, from being interested and en- thusiastic, from accomplishing things, and from occasional reminders about the evils that menace a large organization and interfere with large undertakings. 26 Opportunities We have a more comprehensive State educational organization than we ever had in this State before. There is nothing to com- pare with it in any other state. We have the opportunities to help numberless people, to raise the intellectual plane of the State, and so to distinguish the State in the eyes of the country. One is un- worthy who would not make the most of such opportunities. AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS ADDRESS BEFORE THE JOINT MEETING OF THE ASSOCIATED ACADEMIC PRINCIPALS AND THE STATE TEACHERS ASSOCIATION, AT SYRACUSE, N. Y._, DECEMBER 29, I908 We are trying very hard in New York to bring the work of our schools to the support of our industries. A year ago when I dis- cussed the relations of public schools to the mechanical industries, I observed that the reasoning would be different as to the agricultural industries because the situations are unlike, and that I would take up that theme at some future time. I turn to it now. Differing Situations The success of the farmer depends upon balanced character, love of the earth and of Hfe in the open, knowledge of his farm and the ability to make some scientific applications, practical experience, a grasp of market conditions, sound relations with railroads, aggressiveness in planning, and good business methods, more than upon expertness in craftsmanship. The farmer is his own capitalist. In New York we had 226,000 farms in 1900. They averaged almost exactly one hundred acres to the farm. Quite 200,000 of them were operated wholly or in part by the owners. There was little room for capital to dictate. Hardly any other man has the earning capacity of so much property dependent upon his personal attributes as the farmer. The mechanic's equipment is in his skill of hand, and in his not expensive tools if he works by himself, or in a plant owned by others if he works in a factory. In^ either case he may move readily. The farmer's equipment is in his farm and in his trained and dependable judgment. He is very much a fixtm-e wherever he is. In the mechanical industries men live and think and plan and work collectively. They go out much of nights ; they associate in organizations easily. In the agricultural industries men live and work very individually. They come to conclusions and carry out plans by themselves. In the cities, centralized capital on the one hand, and the leaders of labor organizations on the other, struggle with each other, to the frequent disadvantage of both. There much depends upon others. The farmer controls a considerable property, and the responsibility of prosperity or penury is very largely upon [no] AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS III himself. With both the fanner and the mechanic the personahty is of overwhehning importance, but the conditions give the indi- viduahty of the farmer larger opportunities and make his success or failure more notable. Essentially, the farmer lives at home. The family life is by itself. The work is at home. The family all have part in it. There is less mingling with fellow craftsmen and with the men and women of other crafts. Trades unionism is absent. The blacklist and the boycott are almost unknown. The farmer is both a capitalist and a laborer. If there are combinations to control the prices of labor, they will not hold together; and if there are combinations to control the prices of products, they are made by manipulators who get the advantages. It all makes so distinct a manner, of life that it must create instrumentalities and policies of its own. We live in an industrial democracy. We are to work out our political freedom and our political theories in our politics, our religion, our education, and our industries. People are to do what they can for themselves. What can be done only in combination and through the use of common power may be done in that way so long as the fundamental equality of right is preserved. With this simple limitation, the state must aid all of its industries. And the manner of its aid must be specific, and the measure of it must regard the significance of the industry. New York Agricultural Conditions In days when the term " agriculture " embraced everything per- taining to the farm ; when all there was of agriculture was " practi- cal " ; when we were almost wholly an agricultural people ; when there were no glittering and gilded cities to allure the youth, and no rail- roads to carry them there ; when our tillable lands were as potential as any which had been broken; when the farm raised all that it needed, gloried in its independence, and was the attractive abiding place of its youth ; and when a simple school in cooperation with a simple and yet noble civilization sufiiced to meet the essential needs of a virile people, New York was the first agricultural state of the Union. All that is much changed. You will not ask me to weary you with the details, available to all, which would prove an obvious fact. Taking our wheat, corn, oats, barley, rye, and buckwheat together, we have less in acreage and are producing less in quantity than forty years ago. The total value and the average value of lands, buildings, implements, machinery and live stock are less than thirty 112 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT years ago. We have come to be the first manufacturing state in the Union. Our agriculture has not advanced with our manufactures. In the cereals other states, for sufficient reasons, have forged ahead of us, and it seems to me that we have not recouped where we might. The situation, in general, doubtless is that agriculturally we are worse off than thirty or more years ago, and a little better off than ten or fifteen years ago. Relatively we have lost much ground in many lines, and gained ground in a few. The responsibility for some of the losses is outside of ourselves. But, while we could not avoid some losses, we liave developed new situations and new demands out of which we might have made our losses more than good. We have started towards doing it, but we have not done it. It is not enough to give thanks that we are not worse off than we are. We must lay hold of the forces that will make us better off than we are, and perhaps better off than we ever were. Those forces lie in scientific knowledge and in combined action, not com- bined action which merely complains and tries to make other people pay for our losses, but combined action which will do things that we can not either of us do alone, and which will make it easier for the man who has juice and generosity and force in him to prosper above other men ; and which, on the whole, will enable New York agriculture to come to its own again. Admittedly, there are some conditions that are against it, but there are more new conditions that are in favor of it. If we can get the sentiment of the State in the way of reasoning that the government of New York should do as much for agriculture as for any other interest, or even a little more, and if we will lay hold of accumulated knowledge and apply it, and if we will organize a system of education which will support it, the somewhat heavy task may in time be accomplished. Our Natural Advantages There are natural advantages in our favor of which Vv^e are either unmindful or to which we give no fair value. Take for example the hills, the woods, the rocks, and the streams, the ma- terials for building and for roads ; the topographical, climatic, esthetic, healthful, and moral factors connected with them. I have lived for ten years in the Middle West upon a prairie where one can see the headlight of a locomotive for twenty-five miles. The soil is deep and black, without a stone in it. The people generally AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS II3 abhor hills as nature does a vacuum. If some freak of nature has formed a knoll, they call it a hill and try to plane it off. I have seen a fine row of maples half a mile long- cut down because they lessened the number of rows of corn, and a man of wealth thought he could not afford it. The roads are often impassable, and the cost of hard roads almost prohibitive. Farmers live in rubber boots for months together. The motive for moving to town is much greater there than here, and when a farmer lives in town there is trouble at both ends of his route: at one end the tenant lets the farm look like Hardscrabble's shanty, and at the other the farmer wants to keep a horse, and cow, and pig, and chickens, to the annoyance of his neighbors, and does what he can to avoid the cost of walks and pavements and sewers and electric lights. It is all natural enough, and only proves that the farmer is likely to be happier, and other people happier too, when he makes his farm an attractive and pro- ductive place and lives upon it. During my residence in Illinois, the farm lands in all the region advanced in price from about $60 to about $200 per acre. The regular crops of corn and oats make very sure returns of eight or ten per cent upon the latter valuation. The farmers are rational, and intense about making money, and all have bank accounts. But you do not have to get as much income out of land that you can buy for $25 per acre, as out of land that is worth $200 per acre, in order to make it pay; and the farm- houses and their conveniences and connections are no better there than here. In New York, above almost any other state in the Union, we have the hills and lowlands, the woods and streams, the diver- sity of soil, and the stimulation of climate, which may easily make rural life the finest and the noblest in all the world. If we can adjust the best kind of education to it all, the great leader of the states will have no difficulty in indefinitely maintaining her su- premacy. We have eighteen hundred miles of state roads. Put end to end they would reach from New York to Buffalo four times over. Over eight hundred miles were finished during the past year. There are five hundred other miles of road under contract, and still another thousand miles awaiting contract. We have expended less than a quarter of the $150,000,000 we have agreed to expend. With the good roads, and the telephones, and the trolleys, and the daily free deliveries of mails in all sections, the rural difficulties ought to measurably disappear. 114 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT Rural Life Gaining in Attractivsness Of course, there have been discouragements. It takes brawn, and brains, and confidence, and contentment, to till our New York farms. So does real success in all places and in all work. The weaklings have to fall down, wherever they are. The cities have attracted many vigorous and ambitious young men and women from the country. Often that has been well. One is entitled to do what he may love to do, if he loves to do anything. One is to be commended for casting his lot where he will, if he has head enough to think it out for himself. Such men carve out success, and many are heard of in the cities. ^ The failures are never celebrated and the volume of them is never known. The farming sections have, of course, suffered because of the drift to the cities. There has not been much return drift. The reasons for it are not hard to find. Those reasons are, however, beginning to disappear. The return drift is setting in and seems likely to be strong in the next generation. State Sentiment The thinking of the State has hardly been balanced in the last decade. We have been having more solicitude about forest lands than farm lands, about forest trees than shade trees or fruit trees, about wild animals than tame ones, and about trotting horses than work horses. Last fall we had serious forest fires, which stirred our concern and aroused our interest. We seemed to be well provided with men, machinery, and implements for fighting them. We have developed a fine sentiment about our forest preserve. We have created an efficient State department to look after it. We have even got something about it in the Constitution. It is admirable, and we are proud of it. We are protecting our wild animals. One has to pay for it, and be disgraced everlastingly, if he has a wild hen in his larder at any time in eleven months of the year, if it can be proved that the hen, when in life, zvas wild. Just now they are trying to mulct a man in penalties and punish him for killing deer that were tame and that he bred and raised in his own pad- dock. Last winter the Legislature made it a misdemeanor for a farmer's boy to shoot weasels and woodchucks beyond the narrow limit of his father's farm, at any time of the year, without paying a dollar for a license to try it. We will not worry about that: it will eventuate all right. But insect pests destroy more value in farm products every year than fires destroy in value of forest AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS II 5 products in a generation. Our Science Division conservatively esti- mates that the annual insect destruction to our farm products amounts to $24,000,000. Eastern Massachusetts has lately had to fight the g>'psy moth, a great destroyer of shade trees. It is said that in 1907 that state, in cooperation with the municipalities affected, expended $750,000 to fight this pest. Now it is added that these little scoundrels are migrating to the westward on parallel lines of latitude, and that the first division has even got as far as Springfield, and is advancing upon us with grim and sullen de- termination. If they get up to the New York line, we shall be likely to fight them with resources and energy enough to make them pale, because we shall be in comparison with Massachusetts and there will be some flavor of patriotism and rivalry about it. But fruit trees are as vital as forest trees ! Hens are as much entitled to our respectful consideration as partridges! Jersey cows have as many claims upon us as deer ! I recall a saying of Mr Beecher, that it was a great pity that people had to be born in India in order to hear Henry Scudder, the missionary, preach. Must we move to the mountains and the woods and live irregular lives in order to get that help for our common interests which none but the State can give? How to Increase Earnings There are ways by which our New York lands can earn more money, and the State is bound to help find them. We are not to do just as other states do. We have not the corn lands of Illinois and Iowa, nor the wheat lands of Minnesota and the Dakotas. But we have abundant facilities for producing things they can not grow, and we are close by great markets from which they are remote. It would be well, however, if we could see how much they are ahead of us in an all-important matter. That is, in the kind of education which they are sustaining, in the applications of the scientific knowledge which bears upon the productivity, and therefore upon the life and pleasure, of the farm. There are two great lines of State policy which our combined action ought to assure. We ought to very carefully work them out in our minds, have them established by law, follow them persistently, and bide our time. One concerns a system of education which is calculated to sustain modern agriculture, and the other relates to the things which our combined intelligence and power may carry directly into all of the agricultural parts of the State to help the people of readiest wits who are most disposed to help themselves. Il6 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT I have much in common with the practical farmer; I join him In his amusement over " gentlemen farmers," but remind him that he ought not to begrudge them the pleasure they get out of it, nor be unspeakably cut up about the money they spend in the country. I am with him in his contempt for " scientific " farming which will not work, but I remind him that there is much scientific farming which will work, with his practical help ; and that his practical ex- perience will not accomplish a great deal without scientific help. The Rural Schools I am, of course, far from contending that all that agriculture needs is to be supplied by public schools. There are other great factors in the problem. With agriculture, as with every other great interest and its attendant life, there is as much to be reckoned with outside as inside of the schools. But it is not too much to say that agriculture above almost any other great human or commercial interest, now claims the support of an adequate and comprehensive educational system. Primary schools alone, no matter how good, can not supply the education which is required to make the most of the agricultural industries. The man who says high schools are unnecessary, in the country or anywhere else, is behind the times, and as much out of touch with rational educational policy as with the spirit of the coun- try in which he lives. Nor is it going too far to say that colleges are as vital as high schools to a system of instruction which will be equal to the demands of agricultural necessity. The first national industry, which supplies the larger part of the raw material for our manufactures and produces four times as much in value as our mines and oil wells together, brings good policy to the aid of neces- sity in claiming the support of a universal system of education. It is not merely that the farmers' boys and girls, like all other Ameri- can boys and girls, are entitled to their utmost chance : the nation's educational purpose has combined with situations and the importance of the industry to settle it. I have many times discussed the improvement of the rural element- ary schools and shall doubtless do so again, but I shall not go into that now beyond treating of the factors of an educational system which will support agricultural needs. It seems to me that there is not much to be said in criticism of the rural schools so far as general elementary instruction is con- cerned. It is true that there is a lack of grading and an absence of AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS II7 plan by which pupils may progress from one plane to another and continually look forward to higher work. But it is also true that the instruction is more individual, and that all of the pupils hear all of the instruction and all of the recitations in all subjects and in all grades of work. The rural schools are at least reasonably free from the overcrowding, the overdoing, and the overexploitation for all manner of ends that are so common in the cities. The teaching is by young women of an average competency which is now remark- ably high, and no one is allowed to teach without proved compe- tency which is reasonable. If there could be a uniform system of supervision by superintendents, who hold or can earn teachers' cer- tificates, in districts that are small enough to make actual super- vision possible ; if such a system of supervision could be free from all partizanship ; and if the supervisory districts could be arranged so as to have the village high schools at the centers, and relate all of the elementary schools to them in a way, tliere might be a univer- sal system of schools for teaching elementary English branches in the country, quite as well adapted to the general needs of the coun- try as those in the cities are adapted to the needs of the cities. And this might all very easily be. But while the schools of both elementary and secondary grade in the country are serving, or may without difficulty be made to serve, the needs of the country in the ordinary branches of an English education, they are doing nothing to train specially for the vocation of farming. We have apparently come to the imperative need of training for the industrial vocations in the cities. We have been training for the professional vocations for more than a gen- eration. There is quite as much basis of reason and right in popular education for the vocation of farming, as for mechanical, con- structive, commercial, and professional businesses. The agricultural situation is absolutely distinct from any other industrial situation, and if it is ever met efficiently it will have to be met in a very distinct way. It w^ill never be met by making agricultural schools of the country primary schools. The children in the elementary schools are too young to want much agriculture; they want English, and mathematics, and the elementary sciences there. The primary children in the cities stand more in need of agriculture, than the primary children in the country. The primary schools in both city and country are all-around schools. Some of the city children will go to the country: some of the country chil- dren will go to the city. The education of the country child is not to be narrowed down to things rural. His books are not to exclude Il8 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT illustrations from, and all other recognition of, rural life; but neither are they to exclude all else. His primary school is to be able to train him in the fundamentals of an all-around man, who will be free from all exclusiveness, and able to study and to do to the best advantage anything that his qualities and his tastes may dispose him to study and to do when the time comes. We could not establish exclusive agricultural schools of primary grade even if we were to get wrongheaded and undertake it. All schools require balanced work until the time for specialization comes. Balanced work requires elements that relate to the country as well as those that relate to the cities, and vice versa. There are higher laws and fundamental principles concerning education, and they bear alike upon all parts of the country and upon all manner of people. If we violate these laws or break these principles, the people soon come to realize it and trouble is, as it ought to be, let loose upon us. We bave heard much about nature study. I recognize its value. I intend no offense to those who have much pleasure in it. It is good. But it is equally good for all children, as cutting paper, and weaving mats, and molding clay, and the like, are good for all children. All of these things make for all-around culture, for all- around outlook, and for all-around love for work and for facility in doing. Nature study is quite likely to appeal less to the country child than to the city child for obvious reasons, and, while it is to be encouraged in the country as in the city, it apparently has about the same relation to real agriculture that sloyd has to laying out an electric plant for a city, or laying down the keel for a battleship. In other words, it is a good thing — a good thing everywhere, because it helps mold the character of boys and girls and keeps the way open for what may come after, but calling it agricultural instruction will not increase its importance so much as it will confuse some minds and subject us to the criticism that we are not doing what we proclaim. We are asked to encourage the teaching of agriculture in the elementary schools. I am for doing it so far as is practically possible. I admit, however, that I am at a loss to know what are the phases of real agriculture which are adaptable to the primary schools or how to install them in ways that will dispose children to become interested in them. I know of many things which look to quickening and dignifying the different agricultural industries, in which the children of farmers are likely to find in- AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS II9 terest and which are not incompatible with the plan and purpose of the elementary schools, and I am for introducing them into the course of study ; but I confess that I am unable to see the reason- ableness or the practicability of teaching real agriculture, any more than engineering or medicine, in the elementary schools. Agri- culture is not an elementary subject. We are asked to have the normal schools train teachers of agri- culture for the elementary and secondary schools. Some of the normal school teachers know something about some of the sciences that are fundamental to agriculture, and some of them know some- thing about some of the practical methods of farming, although I suspect that not many of them would claim overmuch. The fact is that nine tenths of the students in the normal schools who will ever teach at all are girls. It is so, and doubtless it will continue to be so. Ambitious men who go beyond the high schools are going to the colleges. And the gods of the Greeks, mean and sordid as they were, would laugh at the spectacle of girl teachers training farmers' boys old enough to receive it, in the intricacies of real agriculture. Generations will come and go before there is any substantial result to agriculture through the girls in the normal schools. In the last year or two the State has made appropriations to establish three secondary schools of agriculture. This has been in response to a general sentiment in favor of agricultural educa- tion, made without very full consideration of the true relations which education must sustain to agriculture in order to be effectual, and without any definite general plan about agricultural education in New York. These schools will be of little avail to education, unless they are made a part of the educational system, and they will not be of much ultimate service to agriculture unless they are made to articulate with schools below and schools above them ; and it will be well, before we go further, to thresh out the whole subject and determine upon a plan which will be comprehensive enough to be worthy of the State and of real worth to its agriculture and all of its other interests. Wholly aside from the absence of plan about where we are going or where we are coming out, it is a very open question whether it will be well for the State to set up a few schools of a secondary grade in agriculture, or whether we should expect counties or town- ships to do it, or whether we should develop agricultural instruction in the existing high schools. The Education Department has been multiplying and enlarging agricultural subjects in the academic syllabus for the village high schools, and we are to be guided some- 120 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT what by the ultimate pohcy of the State in the premises. The high schools, unlike the elementary schools, are upon an educational grade where the fundamentals of agriculture are quite practicable, and where the pupils are old enough to begin to have some real interest in the subject. Without discussing that, the interests of the State in general, and of agriculture in particular, clearly call for discus- sion and for a plan of procedure to the end that time, effort, and money be not wasted and substantial results indefinitely delayed. It has not been the American plan to segregate instruction and students — certainly it has not been the plan where circumstances have not compelled it. The strength of the universities has been increased by the very coordination of their colleges; the strength of teachers and the potentiality of teaching have been enhanced by association with other teachers and other teaching; and the efficiency of students has been promoted by contacts with other subjects and with other students than those within the limitations of their own particular subject and their own particular class. It has not been common anywhere in the country to establish State schools below the college grade except for defectives or dependents, unless in association with a large and comprehensive institution, and it is not too much to say that no school of agriculture in this or in any other country has become markedly successful which was not associated with a real university or had not become in fact, if not in name, a real university itself. And I am bound to look with some regret upon any New York policy which would put students of agriculture in an inclosure by themselves and deny to them the associations with other students which their interests im- peratively demand. There are practical as well as educational difficulties. For ex- ample, the courses at these schools will have to be progressive and extend over a term of years in order to have any respectable result; and unless their number is to be indefinitely extended — unless, for example, there shall be at least one in every county — students will have to be separated from home and live at these schools for terms, semesters, and years together. The break with the home will have to be practically as complete as it is with college students. And the break will have to come before the college age. The State will probably not multiply these schools to the number of forty or sixty, and the interests of the home, of the pupils, and of the schools, will hardly suffer the separation from the home before the college age. Then why not do the best we can for agriculture and for farmers' boys and girls, as for all scientific subjects and for all voca- AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS 121 tional training", in the existing local high schools, and when pupils are able and disposed to go away from home to school, prepare them for college and send them to an adequate college, and have the benefit of it? And, looking at the other side of it, why enter upon or pursue a policy which must make the public high school in the smaller villages merely a preparatory school for the lit- erary colleges ? These high schools are the people's colleges. 82.8^ of all public high schools and academic departments in the State are to be found in villages of less than 5000 inhabitants, and 71.7^ are in villages of less than 2000. It must of necessity work great harm to these village high schools if agricultural work is to be sharply separated from them. Why enter upon a course which will weaken them on the literary and scientific side, and with- hold the aid which they can give to the agricultural side better than any schools that are likely to be established? Why be- gin to exclude from them the things which are and must continue to be of the widest popular concern? Why not determine that the high schools shall be broadened so that they will meet every need of all of their constituents, at least up to the time when pupils are mature enough to go from home to go to college? Science and agriculture are inseparable. Scientific training and research, associated with practical demonstrations, are the sum and substance of any real agricultural advance. No one who has had any experience in organizing a school of agriculture, with lands and implements and animals for practical demonstrations, and who knows the difnculties and expense of organization and maintenance, will believe that there will be any considerable num- ber of such schools established and efficiently sustained in this State. Such as are not in articulation with an institution of higher learning will not be efficient. Nor, if established, will they be largely at- tended by pupils of high school age who have to go far from home. And all around the village high schools there is already " practical " agriculture in abundance. It is fully vip to the high school plane. Unless there is extreme care at the point where the ways are likely to part, there is great danger of projecting roads which will lead from, rather than to, the greatest good, not only to New York agriculture, but to New York education as well. An Agricultural College No educational system capable of adequately supporting the agri- culture of a state will be complete without an agricultural college. 122 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT One with experience in developing an agricultural college worthy of the name will know that there will not be many of these insti- tutions in the same state, no matter how great the state may be. In such a college the best scientific training and the deepest scien- tific research are imperative. If they are not of the best and the deepest they will be of no avail, and they can hardly be such apart from the teachers, the investigators, and the laboratories to be found at a real university. At a real agricultural college the most exact and reliable experiments and demonstrations are also im- perative and there are both educational and financial reasons in abundance why these wtll not be much duplicated, or often realized apart from a university. In all phases of higher education what is good is not cheap, and what is cheap is not good. It is no less true — doubtless it is more true — in the higher study of agricul- ture than in any other phase of advanced education. And the higher learning is quite as vital to agriculture as to any other interest of the people. Then, a real agricultural college, associated with a true university, is the true policy in this State, and such a college may be expected to vitalize whatever is done in connection with agricul- ture in the high schools ; and whatever has a bearing upon agricul- ture in the elementary schools : and it may also be expected to incite and uplift profitable agricultural operations among the people. Then, whether or not an erroneous initiative has been given to provision for agricultural instruction of elementary and second- ary grades in this State, we have made no mistake concerning agri- cultural teaching of the college grade. The State has recently built new agricultural college buildings, and provided for developing a real agricultural college, at Cornell University. There are those who ask, " Why has not Cornell, with New York's share of the land grant funds, developed a real agri- cultural college before now? " I am not one of these, because I know something of the difficulties which have been in the way. These difficulties have persisted until now, but happily they are giving way. They have related to the scarcity of competent teach- ers with enthusiasm in the subject; to the absence of students who could matriculate in a college; to the absence of any actual and intelligent interest in agriculture on the part of the universities; and to the absence of any rational plan of the agriculturists for agricultural education. The western farmers have had more value at stake in their farms than we have, and they have had to be more aggressive; and the measure of influence, if not of control, which AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS I23 they have had over the State universities has enabled them to solve difficulties and find ways for making agricultural colleges actually serviceable. Out of it all, the ways to that end are much clearer there and here than they used to be. The available funds of Cor- nell have all been used in other directions, and if anything worth while was to be done the State has had to do it, and I have been very glad that it has done it and not made the mistake, in agricul- tural college work at least, of so scattering its benefactions and its directions that there would be only indifferent results. The Need of Democracy in Agricultural Education So far, so good — but that is far from the sum of the matter. Before any system of higher education can be of substantial advan- tage to farming, it will have to have its head in a democratic and a sympathetic, as well as a real, university. Cornell University is a real university. Its ideals and its scholarship have been high. Its offerings have extended into wide fields, and its equipment has been measurably sufficient. But its disposition has never been so democratic as its management has desired it to be, or believed that it was, and its sympathy with the agricultural industries has never been so consuming as to lead it to rise to very high altitudes in things agricultural, or to surmount the real obstacles to agricul- tural investigation and instruction. It is not the fault of a board of trustees, a president, a dean, or a professor. The trouble is beyond either. It will never be cured unless the university becomes the real instrument of the State, nor until there is a strong factor in the board of trustees so keenly interested in agriculture that it will use its power to compel the university to accomplish the really great agricultural ends which can be effected in no other way. In other words, the erection of buildings for a college of agri- culture at Cornell University is not enough to insure much result to New York agriculture. The gathering of a faculty, the laying down of offerings, and the installation of an equipment, are not enough. That college will not only have to be as educationally respectable as any other college in the university, but it will have to stand in vital and living relations with every other. No matter how elaborately equipped it may be, it will accomplish relatively Httle unless it has the fellowship and the stimulus of the union of colleges and graduate school which we call the university. It will not bear large fruits unless it has to respond to the demands of a real constituency with large interests, nor until the purposes of 124 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT representatives of that constituency, who have the intelligence and the authority to undertake to accomplish particular things, have to be met. All of the natural sciences, physics, chemistry, zoology, physi- ology, bacteriology, embryology, thremmatology ; the social and polit- ical sciences, history, economics, the mechanical arts, and divers phases of engineering; great practical experience, and a large amount of horse sense, are inseparably involved in that high agricultural development which must be had in the State of New York if her agriculture is to keep pace with the other commercial and intellectual activities of the State; Of course, all the people engaged in farm- ing can not be equipped with all of this knowledge, but a consider- able part of them must be, to the end that they may lead the way; and when such men lead the way all the rest will be copying larger men and better methods than they have sufficient opportunity to copy now. And there must be a place which will not only initiate new undertakings and lift old ones to higher planes, but to which any occult difficulty may be taken for investigation and report. And investigation and teaching, scientific research and the training of teachers and superintendents, must go together because one is as vital as the other, and each inspires and energizes the other. And with it all there must be, in the agricultural college at least, the ever present feeling that agriculture is our most im- portant business, and that the college which can quicken it has a larger mission and is entitled to a fuller reward than any other kind of a college which the ingenuity of man and the generosity of a people have ever been able to put upon its feet. These specifications call for nothing short of a real university under some considerable measure of popular control. Things Outside of the Schools There are things to be done in the interests of New York agri- culture, outside of the schools. There need be no squeamishness about doing them. There need be no hesitation about asking the State to do them when only the State can do them. It is clearly within the scope of the political power of the people to promote an over- whelming common interest by combined action, when it can not be done individually. It is unmistakably so when the people acting together actually do so much to enlighten the political and pro- fessional life and culture of the State, and when they do so much to support so many of the commercial interests of the people. After AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS 1 25 all that has been done in many other directions, agriculture need not hesitate ; and others need not sneer, when agriculture ventures and asks. For example, we ought to have a competent and complete agricul- tural survey made of all of the farming lands of this State. The farmers should be told rather closely of the general attributes of the soil of the different counties and of its chemical elements as well. They should be told, in a general way but with some particularity and definiteness, how^ it may be used to the best advantage. One may say that they do know. Certainly they know much about it, but if the subject were to be intensively inquired into they would themselves be surprised at the number of things which have not yet occurred to them. Quite as certainly there are some things which common usage shows that many of them do not realize. They should be told of the additions which are needed to restore what has been taken out, or to adapt it to the demands of new situations. They should not have to take this from commercial corporations that are selling fertilizers. They should not go on putting on stuff that contains nitrogen and no phosphorus, when what the ground needs is phosphorus and not nitrogen. They should not go on selling products containing constituents that the soil requires, when they are worth more to keep than to sell. The common belief among farmers, that mere rotation of crops rests and recuperates the soil, is doubtless fallacious beyond the fact that some crops do not deplete soil as rapidly as others do. What has been taken out, what needs to be restored, should be declared by competent author- ity acting for and responsible to the farming interests. What may be profitably grown, having in view the factors in the soil, and the facilities for changing those factors, and the new facilities for transportation, and the new demands of the markets, ought to be asserted by undoubted authority. For example, again, if four fifths of all of the farm animals in New York were to be destroyed by some noxious disease, it would seem a great hardship, but if the pest would discriminate in favor of the one fifth w^hich it spared the fact would in the end be a real gain. We are continuing the propagation of great herds of mongrel animals which are commonly less serviceable than those which we might breed, and which often are not worth their keep. We fall far short of producing the best horses sufficient for our needs, either for all-around or particular service. Every farm ought to have at least one new colt every spring. He should have a pedigree that he could be as proud of as a Son of the Revolution, or a member of the Mayflower Society. 126 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT He should not be expected to trot a mile in less than three minutes, but by the time he is four years old he should be worth at least three hundred dollars and create a sort of savings bank account for his owner. We are the first dairy state in the Union, but we have much to learn about milk cows and scientific dairying before we can be the first dairy country in the world. Of course, we have some fine dairy herds, and of course we have some up-to-date dairymen, but do any of us doubt that we have hundreds of thou- sands of dairy cattle which are too mean to keep, or that the very common practices of handling dairy products are alike a menace and a disgrace to us? Ample knowledge upon the subject is avail- able, and the real prosperity and pleasure of dairying, as well as the common safety of the people, depend upon observing it. Why not have the State make it known and compel us all to observe it? Indeed, why not have the State propagate the most desirable and profitable animals of the farm, and actually aid farmers in propa- gating such for themselves? There are a half dozen German states which have more money invested in buildings and grounds for a veterinary college alone, than the State of New York or its people have invested in veterinary science since the Mohawk began to pour into the Hudson. The Imperial Government of Japan has recently been studying the matter of hens, and, with its customary habit of taking care, has just sent two trusted representa- tives to England to select the finest specimens of two breeds which it has decided are best adapted of any in the world to the needs of Japan. Why did they not take American hens ? Doubtless because they found that all chickens look much alike to most Americans. The proof of our indifference to domestic chickens is cumulative. Yet our State has $15,000,000 invested in poultry, and there is as much difference in the individuality, and the productivity, and the respectability, and the value, of hens, as there is in horses, or cattle, or sheep, or swine, or people. This is an ideal State for first-class chickens and plenty of them, and why should we permit ourselves to be the seventh State in the Union when it comes to such attractive and money-making creatures of the farm? We smile about it, but other peoples make them the subject of governmental care. Then there are the other large matters of small fruits, and vegetables, and flowers for the markets. Here and there one gets rich through the discriminating propagation of one or the other, but most of us seem to blindly suppose that they are wholly dependent upon their own spontaneity, and that there is nothing to do but to leave them AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS 12/ to nature and to chance. Yet there are other states and other nations which see that it is worth much more than it costs to make each of them the subject of the investigations and the teachings of a distinct department of a university. Then there is the vital sub- ject of horticulture in its larger aspects, with its infinite claims and its unspeakable possibilities. The apples, pears, grapes, and nuts ; the forests ; the shade trees ; all phases of landscape architecture and gardening, demand the oversight and the leadership and the aid of the State on both the scientific and practical sides. \et again, there is the still larger subject of tlie homemaking, with its archi- tecture and sanitation, the matter of decorations, the comforts and conveniences, with the adaptation of foods to the family needs, and the thousand things which with attention will make the life of the mother an easier one, and the possibilities of the children different and greater than they otherwise would be. And right there is the overwhelming consideration to which all others must be contribu- tory, and before which every other pales into insignificance, and that is the public need of knowing that boys and girls are the first concern of a State; the public obligation to do the material things which will dispose every farm boy and farm girl to look upon farm- ing not for the sake of the farm more than for their own sake, not as repellent drudgery, but as the high grade business that it is. All these things are outside of the schools, but they have to pro- ceed from the prevalent system of education and they all relate back to the schools. In a word, from which there can hardly be any dissent, the prosperity and the pleasure of a great industry depend upon the completeness, the symmetry, and the cooperative efficiency of the parts of the educational system which enter into its details and give rationale and character to it as a whole. And in another word, from which I do not expect dissent, the states which lay the most emphasis upon those phases of learning which bear directly upon the mechanical and agricultural industries, and which carry them right to the homes of the people, will enjoy the largest commercial prosperity and will have the happiest and the strongest populations. New York Behind in Agricultural Education I do not often find myself in the attitude of a critic of the Empire State, but it must be said that New York is far from the front in developing policies and establishing instrumentalities to aid either the mechanical or the agricultural industries. With the prestige 128 NE'W YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT and the advantage of being an old state, it would be strange if we did not suffer some of the disadvantages of it. Let me point out what the educational disadvantages concerning agriculture are, and why they are, and let us believe that we may cure them if we will. The federal Constitution left, as it was bound to leave, univer- sities, as all other schools, to be propagated by the states. In every state formed after the adoption of " the more perfect union " the state Constitution provided for a system of schools, and ordinarily for a state university. The western pioneers had a dreadfully hard time, but they had the pride and nerve which kept it to themselves. They were bound to build up new states to rival the old ones, and they realized that a comprehensive educational system was the only corner stone which such a new state could have. If they had little to do with, they were at least fortunate in the fact that there was nothing in the way. Even public universities were established in all of the newer states. The people laid the foundations of com- prehensive educational systems, and crowned the systems with public universities. The potential power of all this has not been realized until the coming of wealth within the last twenty-five years. Forty-six years ago the general government provided a gift of thirty thousand acres of land to each state for each senator and representative in Congress, upon condition that the state would use the proceeds for the propagation of a university which, without ignoring other branches of liberal learning, would lay particular emphasis upon those bearing upon agriculture and the mechanic arts. The act was passed after a long struggle. It was passed more than once. It was vetoed by Buchanan. It was signed by the great Lincoln. This act was as epoch making in education as the Declaration of Independence was in political progress, or as the Ordinance of ^^y was in the advance of public enlightenment and morality. The newer states had the larger part in procuring its passage, and they were the quickest and the keenest to claim their rights under it. They had the freer democracy. They were in the pioneer stage. They lacked nothing in assertiveness. They wanted all that the older states had, and much more. Universal education became speedily a universal passion. Their institutions were yet in the liquid state. The federal grant would aid their already existent state universities, or support others. They had the system which could seize the opportunity. Every one of them managed to comply with the terms and lay hold upon the grants. For the twenty-five AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS I29 years following the war, they often had a hard time complying with the requirements, but they held on. Then the country had filled up. More acres were put under the plow, and all the acres were made more productive. Wealth grew. In the eighties, and still more in the nineties, land grant institutions had developed more highly edu- cated constituencies, and, quite as important, they began to show the people who were engaged in the commercial, manufacturing, transportation, and agricultural industries, how to make more money. That settled it. Nothing succeeds like success. They went after more 'money and now each gets $50,000 per year beyond the proceeds of the land grants. And now, again, every one of the newer states puts into its state university or land grant college more than it gets from the federal grants, and some of them twenty times as much. They are not fools : they are more intent than ever on having all of the education that any state has, with some to spare; the roads are filled with the coming and going of students. Nebraska and Wisconsin each has a larger proportion of college students than either New York or Massachusetts. There are grad- uates, and therefore trained agents, of the universities in every village and upon almost every farm ; and all the people stand ready to make further investments where they will pay. They are not doing it for mere love. They see that there is money in it. Added to the natural educational enthusiasm, that concludes matters. The older states did practically nothing. They are only now open- ing their eyes. Their ignorance of patent facts is as monumental as it is stupid. Of course, the old order is in the way. It is the habit of the old order to question the academic quality of the new order of institutions. One college president laments that the people put their hands into the people's treasury to promote higher educa- tion. Another challenges the applicability of liberal learning to the industries. Still another says, as bluntly as it can be said in classical phrase, that it is all wrong to educate people out of their environ- ment. And yet another looks through spectacles that are befogged with the literary and philosophical training of the ages, and stoutly denies that what actually is, can be. It is not strange. Neither men nor institutions can be made over in a minute, after they are fifty years of age. The old order is the persistent expression of social, political, and educational aristocracy. The new order is the advance agent of educational and industrial democracy. The new order is as sure to persist as the Republic is to endure, for it is only the logical outworking of the democracy of the nation. It is sure to go in every 130 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT State, for the nation will never endure half slave and half free educationally, any more than politically. In New York we are as yet in the old order. We are not quite so hidebound as some who live in the still more educationally effete East. Some men and some facts have helped us. But we are a long way from being out in the clear sunlight. We almost lost the advantage of the federal grants to higher learning for the masses and the industries of the people, and would have done so absolutely but for Andrew D. White and Ezra Cornell, both senators of this State ; one a scholar and educational organizer, who had been a professor in the State University of Michigan, and the other an inventor and industrial organizer, a millionaire, and withal a philan- thropist. Between them, with these qualities, and being in the Senate, they got up the best scheme that was practicable under the circumstances, rescued the grant to New York from utter failure by providing an endowment and creating an institution which could take it and try to meet the State's obligations concerning it. The State did nothing. It merely stood by and benevolently let the thing be done. The result was Cornell University. I have never been quite able to see how the scheme held together and worked out legally, but I imagine that, as it cost the State nothing, it was looked upon with a good measure of legal and administrative considerate- ness, as it certainly deserved to be. By reason of the sagacious loca- tion of the State lands, by other gifts, and by hard struggling, a great and influential university has grown up on the hillside at Ithaca. By reason of the circumstances of its origin, of its impera- tive legal obligations, and of the fact that its first two presidents — with joint terms of twenty- four years ^ — were professors from the University of Michigan, it partook of the form, of many of the factors, and of much of the spirit of the state universities. Because of the scholarships, and for other reasons, it stands in rather close relations to our State system of education. All honor to the men who have done it, and to all of the men and women whose sym- pathies have entered into it. But it would be idle to say that in any essential way it sustains the relation of either a state university or an industrial college to the Empire State. It does not, and it can" not, because it is not under popular control, and can not be respon- sive to the natural impulses of our unfolding political and indus- trial : democracy, nor can its practical ministrations be accepted by the people as they would be if there were the sense of public pro- prietorship in it. AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS I3I Aid to Wives and Daughters Up to this time we have been thinking about the training which essentially relates to men, and about farming operations outside of the house. It would be a mistake to leave the subject without a word as to the special training of the women who live in the coun- try, and as to the education which enters directly into the making of the farmer's home. To accomplish any large results men and Avomen must not only work together, but they must have equal advantages ; they must be equally enthusiastic and aggressive, and the work of each must be equally regarded and respected by the other. There is a lack of such equality of outlook and opportunity in New York education. The women have less chance ; not so much special training either in or out of the schools, not so many social contacts, not so many implements to do with, and not so much to stimulate and liberalize their work either within their own homes or in comparisons between ■ different homes. There are notable exceptions, but we have necessarily to deal with generalities. Of course, I intend no reflections upon a class of women who are as justly entitled to the highest respect for doing all they do under circumstances that are often discouraging, as they are entitled to an open educational chance with the men, which very commonly they do not get. If the women could be put in charge of the farm, the operations would doubtless go quite as well as they do now ; but if the men were to be put in charge of the house, the better part of them would either lie down under the burden or there would be so many changes and so many new conveniences and fixings and im- plements that the treasury would be bankrupted. I am not saying that all of the fault is with the men, although a good share of it belongs to some men. I once sat behind two farmers' wives through an admirable cooking demonstration at a county " domestic science " association. At the conclusion one said to the other, " I suppose this thing is all right for these city and university women, but I can cook without any of their help." Doubtless she could, and quite as doubtless she belonged to a class who have as much to learn about the most desirable and economical food supplies, and the question of nutrition, and the manner of preparation, and the time for use. and the manner of serving, as I have to learn about a million things. And that is far from all there is of it. It reaches to the making, the sanitation, and the decoration of the house, to the furnishings and conveniences of the home, to the deep subject of home economics and household management, and to all that most 132 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT effectually brings the vital support of the home to the support of the work upon the farm. It may make the life of the family some- thing to which ambitious boys and girls will cling; even something to which, being added to the rational and cordial welcome of their fathers and mothers, they will be proud to invite their friends. In a word, in considering the educational needs of New York agriculture, the education, the liberal and special education, of women claims quite as much as that of men. There is quite as much necessity of specialization for girls as for boys, when the time for specialization comes. The courses in the secondary schools, whatever form the school is to take, are bound to regard the work of girls as well as that of boys, and there will be no com- plete or symmetrical college of agriculture unless there is associated with it a department of household economy, with the many Ofiferings which go to the bottom of all the problems of the household upon the farm. Nor will there be sufficient result until the need of it is recognized among the people. And it may as well be added that, when such courses are provided, there will not be much result unless girls can go and take them with just as much independence, and security, and common respect as any boy upon the grounds. If this can not be until boys are taught some lessons, the date of enter- ing upon that process should not be long postponed. Suggestions In summary, I submit the following suggestions concerning the educational basis of the agricultural industries : There should be a complete and interrelated system of schools, elementary, secondary, and higher, open to all, and essentially under the control of the people of the State. The elementary school should be within reach of every farmer's home. So long as the school is adequately sustained and com- petently taught, the location may be left to the people of the district. It is more a question of expediency than of educational principle, and there is no balance of advantages in school concentration to justify forcefully overthrowing an established order. The elementary schools are to teach the elements of an all- around English education. They can not specialize much, and they are not to be in any sense exclusive. They are to aim at fitting children for the choice of any vocation they may prefer and for beginning the preparation therefor. They are always to preach the gospel of work, and to use books, objects and methods to stimulate AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS 1 33 quite as much interest — and in the country perhaps more interest — in agriculture as in any other industry. This should be guarded in making the elementary syllabus. The work of the elementary schools, in the country as in the cities, should not dawdle and waste time through the multiplicity of books and the idle exploitation of pedagogical theories and methods. It should be definite quantitively, as well as efficient qualitively. The attendance laws should be en- forced in the country as in the cities, even though the extent of child labor upon the farm, and the distance of the school makes neglect of the law very frequent and the difficulties of enforcement very great. The course should be simplified and shortened, and the child brought to the end of it with the assurance that he has some defi- nite knowledge and measure of efficiency, by the time he is fourteen years of age. Better professional supervision should establish some satisfactory basis of graduation from a country elementary school, and graduation should qualify the pupil for admission to the high school, or to a distinct agricultural school. There should be an approved high school within driving dis- tance of every home. In this school there must be provision for an all-around high school training which will fit for college or tech- nical school, and there should be a distinct cleavage in the interest of agriculture where pupils will elect it. Where there is sufficient demand for it to justify a distinct agricultural school of secondary grade, on a parallel with the trades schools which we are beginning to organize in the cities, and such course can be taken without weakening the established high schools, as it may be in the cities, argument will go some way to support a distinct agricultural as well as a distinct trades school ; but I never expect to concede that agri- culture does not rest upon a broader basis than mechanics, and that the management of a farm does not exact a wider field of knowl- edge than the training of workmen. Whether special training in agriculture be carried on in the established high schools or in dis- tinct schools is largely a matter of expediency and convenience. Let it be done in the neighboring village high school, or in a dis- tinct school to be developed by a combination of districts or towns, or possibly by all the towns of a county, or wherever it promises to be most convenient and best. But, wherever done, it must train both boys and girls, and expect that they will live at home. The work must be fundamental to agriculture : that is. it must teach the natural sciences, something of economics, much of common business usage, and a great deal of the simpler phases of agronomy, horti- 134 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT culture, floriculture, vegetable culture, animal husbandry including dairying, home making, or anything else connected with the indus- tries of the farm, so long as it can be done with the facilities which are practicable in such a school, with the life of the home and all the surrounding environment for illustration and experiment. But the general training should go far enough to largely relieve the student from the study of the English branches if he goes to the agricultural college. It is of a grade of book work which may be quite as well done in the local school, and the student should not be sent to the college so -deficient in the ordinary English branches as to make it necessary for the college to devote much time to it to the exclusion of work in technical ag'riculture. And the technical agriculture in the high school should count as much as any other work in credits, and also for admission to the agricultural college for those who will be disposed to go there. It would have been better if we could have well considered, and have reached definite conclusions concerning schools of agri- culture of secondary grade, before any such schools were at- tempted by the State. Certainly others should not be provided for unless after full consideration and upon some well understood plan. If the established schools are not to undertake this work, and the State is to do it directly, and there are to be forty or sixty of these schools, and if they are to meet real educational standards, then there is little to regret. If not, and if some agricultural work is to be done in the present high schools, and if a small number of these State schools can be firmly established between the existent high schools and the agricultural college, they might justify their cost. But there are real difficulties in the way. It is likely to be hard enough for them to secure enough intending' agricultural students and provide enough real agricultural instruction to justify their cost, when they are associated with a college or university, as at St Lawrence and Alfred. It is quite possible, however. It will prove impossible for one which is wholly independent of a college to do that, unless the State is to make a college, and not a high school, of it ; and that would mean an expense which has not been thought of, and a rival to the State College at Cornell which has not been intended. It has been suggested that the proposed school at Morrisville, which is as yet wholly unorganized, be transferred to Colgate University, an excellent institution but five or six miles away, and the suggestion seems worthy of serious considera- tion. It might be held to be unthinkably cruel for the State to AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS 1 35 wholly recall any institution of this kind which it had once agreed to provide, and I would be glad enough if the State would establish such a school at every college in the State which would be strength- ened by, or be hospitable to it, if, after discussion, it should be thought well to make that the general plan. But the State educa- tional system would like to know just what the educational policy of the State concerning secondary instruction in agriculture is to be. It will be good State policy to give liberal support to the State College of Agriculture and expect to make large demands upon it. An agricultural college is bound to be a college as much as any other kind of institution which claims the name of college. Strong teachers and many offerings will have to precede the coming of students. No state will be likely to support more than one that will make much of an impression upon its agriculture. The offerings must be largely in agricultural technique. The equipment should be even larger in fields and barns and herds, than in libraries and lab- oratories, because the student should have a reasonable English education before he goes to college, and because when an agricul- tural college has the large advantage of being a college in a univer- sity, it may count much upon the privileges which are common to all. By the time one who is to live on a farm goes awa)'' from home to an agricultural college, it is time he was given his fill of agricul- tural instruction that is actual and real. But a real college, properly sustained by the schools below, will gather students who can matriculate and thus make an impression upon the State which will endure. The State Agricultural College must be sensitive to rational and responsible agricultural initiative. It must not only train men to manage farms, but it must train teachers for agricultural work in the schools below. It must be scholarly, but it must be as demo- cratic as it is scholarly. There are people who think that impossible. Therein lies the difference between the old academic scholarship and the newer industrial scholarship. Other states have found that difference and reckoned with it more than once. We can beat them all if we will. The State Agricultural College must not only be sensitive to the initiative of others ; it must have an initiative of its own. It must find out the things which New York agriculture needs to have done and go right ahead doing them, knowing that if they work it will get the glory, and if they fail it will be damned for it. Teaching and research must go together. They always help one another. The State College of Agriculture and the United States and New York State Agricultural Experiment Stations are 136 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT bound to supplement each other. Ithaca and Geneva are not far apart, and the roads between them are very pleasant. Between them they are bound to investigate, supply information, and have an opinion upon every problem a New York farmer will bring to them, and when they do it the New York farmers are bound to listen to them. They are to supply energy and guidance to every farmers' organization and every agricultural enterprise. In theory and in fact they are to assume the leadership in a great system of education which adequately supports our fundamental and our greatest industry. We should enter upon a great system of agricultural extension. The schools, from highest to lowest, should act in accord, not only in training students and in scientific research, but in carrying knowl- edge to the very doors of the farmers. Evangelistic work in agri- culture should go everywhere. Seed specials should be run over the railroads. The blood of the best farm animals should be dis- tributed throughout the State. Object lessons of special interest to both men and women should be carried in all directions. The applications should be especially adapted to every section, and the fullest attention should be given to the less favored rather than to the more favored counties of the State. I hesitate not a moment in saying that the State might well send a commission of practical farmers and trained scientists, or, perhaps better, a commissioner who is experienced in farming, informed in economics, and trained scientifically, to any country in the world that seems able to send us anything in the way of farm products or domestic animals that will be of advantage to us, with authority to buy, and directions to learn whatever would be of advantage to our agriculture. I noticed in the New York papers of this morning that New Jersey has just imported fourteen Percheron and Clydesdale horses to extend the breeding of these magnificent draft horses among her people. And I know of another State which has sent one man to Germany to study veterinary colleges, another to Denmark to study dairying, and a third to Argentine to investigate beef cattle. There are scores of similar subjects which individuals can not ex- ploit because they do not know what to do, or are without the money or the inclination to engage in large undertakings. In such cir- cumstances it is clearly within the functions of the State to act. There is no smack of paternalism or socialism about it. All good governments do it in order to aid the industries of the people. It involves no large amount of money, in view of the sums to which AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS 1 37 the State is accustomed. But it can not be done by agents who know Httle about it or who are more concerned about themselves than about the enduring interests of a great State. If honestly and capably done, the sentiment of the State would cordially sustain it. And if it were done through the State Agricultural College, or the Agricultural Experiment Station, or one of the State schools of agriculture, there would be sufficient assurance that whatever was undertaken would be scientifically initiated and well and wisely carried out. Conclusion There are perhaps three great fundamental factors in the dis- tributive wealth of a state; namely, natural resources, commercial situation, and the intelligence which puts them to the very best use. The largest factor in natural resources is doubtless the tillable soil. We can not claim that the proportion of our potential soil to acreage is equal to that of some of the prairie states, but there is no doubt whatever that, with existing farm values, our soil may be made to yield quite as large a return upon investment as that of any other state. Aside from that, nature has been exceedingly kind to us. In the association of arable lands with mountains, and rivers, and lakes, and forests, and glens, and waterfalls, and with rainfalls and climate, and all that stimulates the imagination and makes for the physical and moral health of the people, we stand second to no state in the Union. In the association of all this with commercial situa- tion, we easily have the advantage of them all. And we will never admit that we lack the sense or the wits to act together and make the most of what nature and situation have done for us. We have much to demoralize our thinking, but we may well remember that the things in the life of a people which are of utmost and enduring worth invariably go back to Mother Earth. Manufactures are dependent. Importations are uncertain. We may not always take toll of the commerce that comes through both our eastern and our western doors and is carried over our highways. Our great metropolitan city may not always be the clearing house of the nation's business, and even though it is, the profits will con- tinue to go into relatively few hands. Mother Earth will never forsake and 'she will never deceive us. Neither will she permit us to trifle with her. One who can not afiford to lose, can not afford to speculate in uncertain and demoralizing crops any more than in uncertain and demoralizing securities. Nor can he afford to go on in the way which did well enough when we were wholly an agricul- 138 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT tural people, when children were seasoned through doing their share of the work, when books were few, and when the simple dis- trict school joined with the work of the farm to support a simple, but none the less a noble, civilization. We will be misguided if we do not continue to abide with Mother Earth and follow the course which will continue to make the most of her. And we shall be a witless as well as a misguided people if we do not combine to ascertain from the reports of the markets and the work of the laboratories what may be done without much risk, and if we do not adjust ourselves to the more complex, the more intelli- gent, and the better life' of our day in a way which will enable our properties to get our share out of it. The farmhouse will have to have the essential conveniences and connections of the city house. The boys and girls will have to have the things which they know other boys and girls have. The young men and maidens will have to have a good time of it and be able to find the ways for meeting their reasonable ambitions. The shorter working day and all the better conditions of labor will have to be reckoned with. The com- fort, and the enlightenment, and the moral betterment of all in the household will have to be sedulously studied and generously pro- vided for. Of course the' social, and educational, and industrial combination will give help to such as accord with it and are capable of making use of its advantages, but the personal equation will have to settle things upon each farm, and the personal attributes of the individual farmer will have to prevail. But while, no matter what the general level of intelligence and sagacity, some will fail and complain, and some will prosper and be happy, yet, there is no doubt about the public attitudes and the common undertakings of a people being often vital to the progress of men and women who deserve to prosper. In this sense the people and the government of New York have occasion enough to do much to widen the door of opportunity to all of our agricultural industries. To find the true and sure ways for widening that door, a new body of learning is quite as necessary as old-time practical experi- ence in farming. It is no easy task. Both educationists and farm- ers will have to bury their conceits and enter upon the breaking out of new roads with all modesty of opinion. Governor Hughes has given us an admirable Commissioner of Agriculture. Liberally and specially educated, in full sympathy with the new spirit of agriculture, with youth and ambition and yet with AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS 1 39 considerable experience and undoubted effectiveness in administra- tion, the appointment of JMr Pearson to the headship of the agri- cultural activities of the State is altogether timely and encouraging. I am anxious that the forces which he and I represent shall work in rational cooperation, and that each shall bring out the best there is in learning and in labor. A new system of agriculture and a new system of education will have to join forces. Farmers and educa- tionists will have to join hands in arranging the details of a new system of education and in making new plans about work. I am sure we have all come to the time when we shall be glad to have it so. If we have, the rest of it will not be so difficult after all. Both agriculture and education will be the gainers by it. Our education will more completely aid the evolution of our industrial democracy, our education will be quickened by enlarged industrial efficiency, and our agriculture will more surely come into the possession of its own again. CONSERVING CHILDHOOD ADDRESS BEFORE THE NATIONAL CHILD LABOR COMMITTEE AT ITS FIFTH ANNUAL MEETING, CHICAGO, ILL., JANUARY 22, I9O9 It is yet to be proved that a wide-open democracy like ours can do some of the things which a well ordered political society needs to have done, as well as more centralized forms of government do them with apparent ease. Indeed, it is yet to appear that we can make good the fundamental principle of our political creed and assure equality of right and opportunity to every one. Of course, there are compensations for the fact, but it is a fact. The door of opportunity opens wider here than in any other nation in the world. The passion of the United States is that every one shall have his chance. We provide primary, second- ary, and higher instruction, practically free of cost, to all. The teaching is efficient and the equipment is ample, often sumptuous. The spirit that supports it all is delightful. The school budget is the one tax of which no good American has the hardihood to complain. The road to and through and between the schools is a broad highway. It has no breaks and no very heavy grades. No sect, no party, no social set, no commercial interest, is allowed to obstruct it. So much is settled and everywhere accepted. It is more than settled and accepted. Wealth, society, business, re- ligion and political sagacity find their security, and their pleasure in continually enlarging and strengthening the educational ideal. The road to accomplishment, and to fame, is as open and as free as that to the schools. Education is not only the universal Amer- ican passion, but hope, cheer, courage, are the words which the most beautiful and brilliant flag in the world whispers in the ears of all, native born or adopted, who live where it casts its shadow. A national temperament which is being warmed by the interming- ling of the blood, the experiences, and the ideals of all the peoples of the world; which has been ennobled by the constantly enlarging opportunities and continually increasing influence of women ; which has been incited by innumerable individual successes ; and which has been made very confident if not very vain by the always un- folding magnificence of the governmental plan, is stirred to its very depths by the opportunities and the inspirations of the Amer- [140] CONSERVING CHILDHOOD I4I ican Republic. The millions who are mature enough to feel it, and who have not been borne down by conditions which are well nigh insurmountable, are struggling, in season and out of season, to make the most of it. The spectacle is brilliant enough to stir the wonder, if not the jealousy, of the world. Nothing short of the Gloria in excelsis can express our heartfelt appreciation of it all. Would that there were no word of qualification or ground for apprehension. But there is, and we are old enough and strong enough to look each other in the face and say it. Our general characterization expresses great and proud truths, and perhaps the larger part of the whole truth ; but still it is only a part of the whole truth. The undisclosed" part is that we count a mere open- ing for some as the equal chance for all. It is not so : one must be helped to a place where he may enter the door of opportunity, before he has any share in the equal chance for all. Leaving further applications of the principle to be made by others, it is .ny mission to this conference to say that all American children must be given the implements with which to make their way in our busy civilization, before it can be said that our political system is sufficiently efficient, or that equality of chance is held out to every one. Fifty years ago we were discussing just such a question as this, and the great Lincoln, right here in the city of Qiicago and the state of Illinois, was piercing the fallacy that political freedom covered the right to do wrong. Senator Douglas, a very great man, was saying that the territories should have free constitutions and be left to vote slavery up or down according to their inclinations ; but the greatest of all Illinoisans and the greatest of all Americans, answered, " No, that is but temporizing with an inherent wrong." It would be logical, he said, if slavery were ever right; but for one man to claim the right to eat his bread in the sweat of another man's brow, save as the result of free contract or pursuant to bad laws already duly enacted, was essentially immoral. Slavery might be tolerated for a time where it was established by law. be- cause even that might be better than a fratricidal war which might sever the union of the states and present an insuperable obstacle to a further democratic advance; but freedom was to be voted up and slavery must be voted down by the common action of a free nation, when it came to territory that was already free. The moral sense of the people saw the point, and used the man to carry tlie great principle to a consummation which saved the nation. 142 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT Slavery to ignorance is no less slavery than the slavery of a serf to an overlord. It is the inherent right of the American child to be or to become free from both. The possession of at least the ele- mentary powers to read and write, by which he may gain knowledge and make the most of himself, is an essential part of his freedom. Such possession by all the people of a free country is the country's most valuable property. It is the property of all. Every one under a free constitution has just as much of a property interest in the literacy and the efficiency of every other as he has in the perform- ance of any other legal or moral compact. No one can waive it for himself, through his youth or his ignorance, because of the mutual- ity of all the obligations of the universal compact. He can not lose it by misfortune for which he is not responsible. If he is inca- pable of asserting the right for himself, the legal organization set to enforce the terms of the compact is bound to enforce it for him. The right of every one to read is not to be voted up or down, as a eity, a county, a district, or a parent may please to vote. This is essentially so in a democracy, and more particularly in a democracy with ideals like ours. The illiteracy of an American citizen whose childhood has been passed in America is unlawful and essentially immoral. Education, an essential of freedom, is always to be voted up and everywhere enforced in a republic. These are not idle words. In America, where we offer more education to every citizen than does any other country in the world, there are more people who can not read or write in any language than there are in any other constitutional country in the world. The attendance upon the primary schools is less complete and regular than in any other well ordered nation upon the globe. In Chicago or New York tliere is a much larger percentage of people ten years old or more who can neither read nor write, than there is in London, or Paris, or Berlin, or Zurich, or Copenhagen, or even Tokio. Illiteracy is almost a negligible quantity in the German Empire, in France, Switzerland, the Scandinavian countries, and even in Japan. As I was preparing this address I had the pleasure of a call from Dr Koht, professor of modern history in the University of Christiania. I asked him how many children there were in the Scandinavian countries, ten years old, who could neither read nor write. He said not any. He seemed surprised at the question. In the State of New York there are 55 in a thousand, and in Illinois 42 in a thousand. CONSERVING CHILDHOOD I43 It is easily explained. The immigration is an inadequate explana- tion. Immigrants from the highly or uniformly educated nations go far to offset those from the peoples where education is less diffused. Immigrants are often more jealous than native Americans of their opportunities in the schools. They commonly settle in the cities, where the schools are convenient and where all the people are accustomed to some measure of compulsion. There is a larger percentage of illiterate children of native born than of foreign, born parents in the State of New York. This statement is also true of Illinois. There is often a larger percentage of illiteracy in the country than in the cities. The explanation is not a very com- placent one. It is in the fact that we know little of national eco- nomics ; that we have not acquired the habit of taking care, and particularly in the fact that we have a popular conception of free- dom which does not include the vital necessity of proper restraint and compulsion as to all. It is because of our unfortunate dis- position to let people do as they please, upon condition that they let us do as we please. It is because we are so indift'erent in our self-confidence, so wilful, resourceful, and optimistic. Probably no one will deny that we have as complete a system of school attendance and child labor laws in New York as in any state. They are not complete, but are measurably so for America. They are harmonious. The Labor and Education Departments are in accord. It looks as though the labor laws are very well en- forced. Behind them there are strong, influential, and determined bodies of citizens — the labor organizations, who have direct in- terest in the execution of the laws which prescribe the ages, the hours, and all of the conditions where many people work together. These organizations not only enforce the laws but they create sentiment. Even the execution of the laws of itself makes senti- ment. Direct interest gives energy and strength to the arm of the law. And even those people who have no direct interest, and who do not think much about it anyway, get in the habit of think- ing that what happens all of the time ought to happen. School attendance laws are without organized help. Sentiment is quite indifferent. Indeed, there is a not uncommon feeling that it is below the dignity of the State to be hunting up little children to make them go to school, and quite apart from the proper feel- ings of the well-to-do to be punishing poor or unworthy parents for not keeping their children in school. This feeling is much more common in the country and in smaller towns than in the larger 144 ^EW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT cities. But it exists everywhere. The officers of the law look upon the enforcement of school laws as beyond their realm. The police very nearly revolt against it. The local magistrates refuse to impose punishments. It is not strange ; it is not wholly unworthy : they have sympathy, and they deal with so much squalor and with what seems to them so much more serious matters, that they are glad to take a promise and let the thing go : sometimes they are think- ing about votes at the next election, but oftener they are simply expressing the very common feeling or indifference of the country. The execution of the school laws is largely left to school officers and, without the interested aid of the officers charged with the enforcement of the penal laws, the school officers are pretty nearly helpless. The mercury which measures American public sentiment upon enforcing school attendance is well down to the freezing point. Legislators dislike to add to the efficiency of attendance laws, and governors are even more reluctant to suggest discipline upon sub- ordinate officers who persistently refuse to make them effective. In other words, we have the disadvantages as well as the advantages of democracy. If our country were simply one great business corporation, with " no body to be kicked and no soul to be damned," which was ex- pecting to continue indefinitely and was always looking for profits, its officers! would do all they could to enlarge the efficiency of boys and girls, because they would know that such efficiency was the thing above all others to reinforce life and assure the repetition of divi- dends. If we had a king whom we sustained in the delusion or pretense that he was a sort of father to us all, he would be likely to adopt methods to enlarge our productivity, without letting any of us get out of what he conceived to be our proper places, because productivity would be translated into revenues. If our country were an empire, bounded by rival empires, and likely at any time to have to fight for territory and for life, things would be arranged to make each of us contribute to the military power of the empire. And intellectual acumen, versatility, craftsmanship, the working habit, are larger factors than mere physical strength in the con- stituent elements of military power. If our country were a con- stitutional monarchy, or even a republic where thought and polit- ical power were not very free ; where there was an inherited autoc- racy and superimposed aristocracy, with a false " culture " which inbreeding was degrading into insipidity, every one of us would be used for what there was in us to hold up the props which sup- port the roofs. CONSERVING CHILDHOOD I45 Our scheme of government is not like that of any other people. Our thinking and our outlook are peculiar to ourselves. We have shown that we can govern ourselves. We have shown that in infinite and overwhelming ways our plan is stable and secure enough, and our ways open the door of opportunity to the individual and the mass. The great heart of our nation is not yearning for aristocracy, or empire, or military power. It does not even want a kind or a measure of learning that is not in equilibrium and in sympathy with work. We want to bear a great nation's honorable and instructive part in the progress of the world. Beyond what good neighborliness and good morals impose, we do not wish to meddle with the affairs of other peoples. We do not wish them to do more concerning our affairs. As they do not seem so disposed, and as no one suspects that we would allow it if they did, there is no occasion to bluster about it. But in the interests of neighborliness and good morals we have some lessons to learn, as well as some to impart. We do not believe in the government using the people, but we do believe in the people using the government. We would use this government for a double purpose — to keep us all in good legal and moral relations with all the world, and to assure peace, security, equality of right and the utmost of opportunity to every soul in the Republic. All that is inbred in us, but there is one thing that is not, and that is regard for common possessions and responsibility for the brother who is in bonds. It would of course be absurd to say that this is true of all of us, because those among us who have been the most successful in business have commonly become our noblest benefactors, and because vital occasions always develop a moral sense which may be counted upon ; but it is not too much to say that, with all of our opportunities and all of our encouragement, there is no national policy and no national conscience in America which use the authority of the nation to universalize and conserve the efficiency of men and women. We are a wasteful people. We have never studied economy. We have never acquired the habit of taking care. Other peoples would live sumptuously out of the difference between what they would get and what we do get out of our properties. We know nothing of the potentiality of our resources. When we fall short we start out to find new fields rather than to find ways for increasing the productivity of old fields. And, unhappily, loose habits react upon ourselves. They actually make us profligate of our boys and girls. 146 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT Just now we are enjoying a little breeze of prudence about natural resources. For once the statesmen and the orators and the magazines and the newspapers are en rapport with the professors of economics and the political economists generally, to make us more saving of wood and water and coal and oil and iron than we are. The agricultural colleges are telling us how to get more out of our lands, and admonishing us that if we don't treat them better and use more fertilizers they will stop yielding their fruits in sea- son. We do more to conserve wild animals than tame ones. All the states are protecting moose and deer and fish and wild chickens. In New York we have taken up the cause of chipmunks and wood- chucks, and would have done it for wolverines and gophers and badgers and prairie dogs if there were any. Such a wave of pru- dence is as exhilarating and encouraging as it is unprecedented and timely in America. When we get started in conserving we are likely to do a great deal of it. Surely we will not stop at the border line of human interest, and when the issue comes to be a moral one we will not forever hesitate at the point where it is necessary to compel people to do some things as well as not to do other things. Resources alone can never provide the ballast necessary to the equipoise of a nation. The vital factors in a nation's existence, to say nothing of a nation's beneficence and moral progress, are human. In the economics of nation building, the overwhelming concern will have to be about boys and girls. In all history, men and women have overcome the scarcity of resources and the difficul- ties of situation. There are compensations in the economics of God. Strong and sane peoples have used slender resources and hard situations to work out overwhelming results. Unsubstantial and frivolous peoples have been overcome by the very plentitude of materials and the very advantage of situation. Great peoples have made themselves the greater by overcoming the hardness of situation. But no people has ever grown great unless tradition or the force of circumstances or intellectual prescience was larger than the material factors in the compounding of its future. Poverty or a sufficiency rather than inordinate wealth helps nations as well as individual men and women. We are wealthy in natural resources. In woods and waters and mines we are a " millionaire " nation. We have no conception of the potential possibilities of our boundless areas of tillable lands, for we have never had to make the most of them. We hold a low estimate of the possibilities of domestic animals. We do not realize CONSERVING CHILDHOOD I47 the wealth that is yet in our mountains. We have even less appre- ciation of the associated worth of our hills and valleys and low- lands; of our lakes and streams and cascades; of the rains and dews that nourish us, and of the climate that stimulates us to make the most of material things. We have endless coasts washed by the two great oceans ; deep, sheltered harbors in all latitudes ; and the busy highways of the nations are and must ever be across the lands and waters that are under our flag. But we have more than wealth of natural resources. History, tradition, severe fighting for freedom, the hard struggles of pioneers, much thinking, and strong moral j)urpose, have been the warp, as the wealth of a new continent has been the woof, of our civilization. There was something in the blood of our fathers; there is something in the blood which all the nations are continually sending to us ; something in the compounding of the English nation, and something more in the compounding of the American nation ; something in the factors which have produced, and something in the results which have grown out of, the steady advance of religious and political freedom through a thousand years, to make us a keen, quick, alert, and ambitious people. This in turn is disclosing our enormous natural wealth. It is also disclosing our cunning, our avarice, our pertinacity. Is our political system going to be equal to the new strains which the new situations put upon it? We have no doubt of it. But there is enough about it all to challenge the wisdom of the generation that is here, and to quicken the red blood of the one that is coming on. " Conserving natural resources," if not an American phrase, has an American meaning. It describes a movement to stop a few great characters, through a few overpowering corporations to which we have delegated much of the power which belongs to all of us in common, from getting our common possessions into their own hands, or from despoiling great inheritances which have come to us in common. This does not necessarily mean anything against these great characters : most of us admire most of them. Often they are as great in their patriotism and in their rational generosity as in their business sagacity. It means nothing, necessarily, against the corporations. Their development of resources has been a neces- sary^ force in the development of a new country. It means merely that the time has come for a little more assertion of common rights in common property. It is more against a further absorption that is coming to amount to sequestration of our goods, than against a 148 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT national profligacy that has riot yet put us in sore straits. The out- come of so much of " conservation " seems hopeful. Certainly it is grateful. But it is to be feared that greater prudence in the use of whatever goods each of us can lawfully gather will not seize upon us until we are in a tighter pinch than now. And with all of our national wastefulness we are more profligate of childhood than of any other factor in the nation's life. We are not only lax about requiring attendance upon the schools, but we have pretty nearly given over the control and direction of children who live at home and exist in the regular order. The common au- thority presumes too much upon the proper exercise of the author- ity of parents. It does not take into account the number of parents who are so vicious or weak that they have no right to have children, or the number of unfortunate children who would be better off if they were orphans. And, largely through the influence of a senti- mentalism that is fully half bad, the children in three quarters of the better homes and in the schools are given their own sweet way to an extent which weakens their characters for life. And we can not exculpate the schools. They are as wasteful of child life as are the homes. From the bottom to the top of the American educational system we take little account of the time of the child. We are anxious to do everything under the sun, and to put into the young head of a child all that he is ever expected to know. The sentimental and well-meaning people load everything upon us. So we have eight or nine elementary grades for work which would be done in six if we were working for productivity and power. We have shaped our secondary schools so that they confuse the thinking of youth and break the equilibrium between education, and vocations, and people, and industries. And our uni- versity faculties divide up the time of students between their de- partments with as much enthusiasm as a young surgeon goes at an autopsy. The departments get what they must have to sustain themselves and the subjects get the consequences of it. They pay for it in time or in attenuated courses and unremunerated work. The training is for the professions, and if the universities are let alone the students will not be ready for life before they are thirty years of age. That keeps yotmg people unmarried and unsettled too long, and it works havoc in life in obvious wa3^s. In the graded elementary schools of the State of New York less than half of the children remain to the end of the course. They do not start early enough. They do not CONSERVING CHILDHCXDD I49 attend regularly enough. The course is too full of mere peda- gogical method, exploitation, and illustration, if not of kinds and classes of work. The terms are too short, and the vacations too long. It all overworks and worries teachers so that to live at all they have to have short terms. More than half the children drop out by the time they are fourteen or fifteen, the limits of the com- pulsory attendance age, because the work of the schools is behind the age of the pupils and we do not teach them the things which lead them and their parents to think it will be worth their while to remain. The compulsory attendance age should begin at six, or at seven at the most, and the course should be freed from everything not of fundamental importance to the early training of a child. I am not for going back to the simple work of a half century ago. I am quite aware of the fact that the child is to live in a complex civiliza- tion. But I am sure that there is no need to teach him, before he is fourteen years of age, everything that it may ever be well for him to know. I am quite sure that it is desirable to induce society to ex- pend its devotion to culture upon the school grounds and the school- house, and leave the children to bathe in the sunlight of these things while the teachers are allowed to train them in the things they must know in order to be self-supporting and a support to the state. And I am no less sure that the multiplicity of books and appliances, and the endless exploitation and illustration in the teaching, may well be severely reduced. Anyway, it is not often a question of what or how it may be well to teach a child if the element of time is not to 'be considered : generally it is a question of what we can teach him before he is fourteen years old that will be of most worth to him in after years. There is another side of this subject that is staring right at us. That is the unpreparedness of children for any vocation which is not literary or professional ; the undue public and school influence upon ambitious temperaments to choose mental rather than manual work ; and the utter indifference of the educational system in the past to the intellectual and industrial equilibrium of the country. Now I am not saying or implying that a poor boy shall not enter a profession or aspire to any position in the land. That is for him to settle. The roads are to be open to every child no matter under what sort of a roof he is born. There is not only one road, but many: and he is not to be persuaded by always present injunctions and implications to ent^r one particular road when there is grave doubt about it being the best one for him. All the roads are to be 150 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT made good, and his all-around qualities are to be trained until he sees the road which seems the best to himself. The finest successes come not so much from learning as from doing, and an educational system which does not recognize that fact and act up to it needs radical reforming. The conspicuous successes in life do not attend those who are the star students upon commencement morning, more than those who find something that they can do and who do it with all their might. I have been sur- prised at the number of college men who gain success, although for one reason or another they left college without a degree. The captains are those who can command. We have been trying to im- pose upon labor a leadership which was not accustomed to labor and did not know any too much about the details of labor. We have trained for culture and for expertness and for examinations. It is time to train for craftsmanship, and let workmen of character and efficiency forge to the front. They will do it anyway even though the signals are set against them, or else there will be little accomplishment and small progress. Why not arrange the scheme so as to make it easier for them to do it? If we are to do anything substantial in the way of conserving American childhood, we shall have to control it; we shall have to insure its attendance upon instruction, and we shall have to train it to efficiency of hand even more than smartness of head. Character will come out of labor before competency will come out of mere culture of mind. How long shall we proceed upon the fundamental mistake that there is any culture worth the name which does not grow out of work, or any real manliness or womanliness which has not proceeded from things that have been done? I am not saying that, necessarily, the things done must have been done by the hand, but I do think that the culture is likely to be deeper and the char- acter stronger if the things done have been done in the sweat of the brow. We need a new order of public schools ; a system on parallel lines with the literary high schools; a system which will train in hand work and which will not assume to train captains but work- men; a system which will permit no short cuts to the position of master workman, but will fit for that of journeyman in shorter time ; a system which will stand fair between every interest of all the people ; a system which will do definite things and open the door of opportunity to a multitude against whom it is now closed; and a system which will dignify hand labor and go a long way to restore CONSERVING CHILDHOOD I5I the balance that we have been losing, to the diminution of our efficiency and therefore of our happiness at home, as well as to the injury of our trade relations with the other nations of the world. Of course the people whose feelings are expressed in this notable assemblage need no other argument than the exclusively moral one to quicken their interest in the conservation of American childhood. It has been the political assumption of the Republic that none other is necessary. But it must begin to be evident that even the economic interests of an empire, even the apprehensions and aspirations of the man on horseback, may go further than the moral sense of a democracy must necessarily go to make an ele- mental training of the children universal. Something beyond the open chance, and something beyond our encouragement and good wishes, will have to operate if we are to conserve the youth of the United States and steadily advance the efficiency, and therefore the character, the happiness, and the prosperity of the country. We shall have to have an always up-to-date enrolment of every child in the land, and some responsible central authority will have to see that every one gets that fundamental training in useful things, which, under the theories of all respectable governments, is his in his own right, and which the manifest interests of every country inexorably demand that he shall have. As already observed, when we really commence a good thing we do much of it. President Roosevelt is following his notable move- ment for conserving natural resources with another, which is to have the attention of a distinguished conference in Washington next week, in the interests of neglected and defective children. That is admirable. It will be one of the many good things which will make the administration of Roosevelt prominent in the history of the country. But we must go still further. We must take up the claims of the overwhelming number of children who are reasonably normal and not very destitute. We must conserve their time, their mental and manual efficiency, and their morals. We must have them all recorded, and see that every one has the benefit of his birthright. We must exercise more control. We must see that every one is trained to read and write, and prepared for some voca- tion by w^hich he can make a living. Then there will not be so many degenerates and waifs in the next generation or in the one after that. There seems to be little room for issues of fact or differences of opinion among us. In college vocabulary, we offer to all the people 152 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT more wide-open electives in our educational system from top to bottom, and require less, than does any other country. They offer less and require more than we do. They certainly get more in a circumscribed but exact elementary training universally diffused than we do. We shall withdraw no offerings : we shall doubtless make more. But that is not enough. In the moral interests of boys and girls, in the interests of industrial prosperity, in the inter- ests of the Republic, and in the interests of democracy and freedom in the world, we are bound not only to see that every child can read and write, but to follow him until he has the chance to enter upon a vocation which will make him respectable and of worth to the world. In the advance of our educational system we have not maintained the balance. The unequal chance, the fallacious outlook, works in- justice to multitudes of people and to many industries. Our educa- tion should put a premium upon work of hand. It is the only way to enlarge the open chance without confusing and misleading boys and girls. We should all stand for laws establishing better and safer condi- tions for labor, and particularly for laws which try to keep greed from robbing children of their American birthright. But when we exclude children from work, we must include them in the schools. Too much work is bad, but too much idleness is infinitely worse. The schools are bound to be of a kind and character which will enable them to count organized labor among their strongest sup- ports. We are in the midst of a great task. We are working out the basis and the details of the greatest industrial democracy in human history. Let us lose nothing of our good humor. Let us abate nothing of our confidence and our courage. Let us prove that our indifference is more apparent than real. Let us tone down our con- ceits and our boasting. Let us cultivate toleration of opinion and be generous in our estimates. Let us think straight, with an open mind, expecting to give and take and come to common conclusions. Let us use our political power without fear, when with good pur- pose. Let us say nothing for mere novelty; nothing to catch the eye of a newspaper which scares itself for revenue only. Let us go on getting harder and stronger, exercising more and more control in the interests of decency and thrift, and making the forces of right- eousness more aggressive than the forces of evil dare to be. There is no need of misgivings. What is upon us was bound to come. We should have expected it, and we can handle it. When CONSERVING CHILDHOOD I53 the moral sense of the nation is once stirred it acts quickly and forcefully. A democracy with the finest possibilities for every one is better than a monarchy which, in one way or another, keeps a whole people in bondage. Of course, there are difficulties. It is harder for a people to agree together and execute their purpose, than for a monarch or minister who reckons not with the popular mind to settle things. But even old Talleyrand declared that public opinion was mightier than any monarch who ever lived. We have broken out roads and we will break out more. We will consider until we conclude what ought to be done, and then we shall not be so squeamish about vesting executive officers with the power to carry it out. Our plan of government has already justified its being. It will do so more completely. And when it has solved our problems upon a basis of reason and of right, as it will, the people will be the happier and the State the stronger, because in our education we shall be better balanced, in our industries we shall be more efficient, and in our politics and our religion we shall be more free. LINCOLN CENTENARY ABRAHAM LINCOLN \P man has expressed the feelings cf America so well as President Lincoln; and no man in this or any other land has been more truly great. He was the child of poor parents. He was born in a log cabin. He went to school but little because he lived where there were no schools. When a boy and young man he worked hard with his hands and it gave him a healthy body. He studied a few good books and it gave him a clear head. He liked history. He mastered mathematics and did surveying. He was interested in politics, and his mind grasped the laws easily. He read about the principles of government, and thought about the rights of men. He became a lawyer. He was elected to the Legislature of Illinois, and then to the Congress of the United States. The experiences thus gained helped to make him a successful lawyer. He was much interested in the affairs of the people, in universal justice, and in the good of his country. He thought for himself, and he thought hard and straight. He had a keen sense of humor and a fine gift of wit. He wrote so plainly, and he spoke in public so clearly, that all the people could understand him. But he had even greater qualities. His habits were simple and he lived without great show. He was true and sincere, and the people believed in him. All these things made him a leader, a statesman, and a very great man. The country was deeply agitated about slavery. It had existed in all of the states in earlier years ; and it then existed in all of the Southern States, where there were five millions of slaves. He abhorred human bondage, but he abhorred war also. The laws allowed From the Lincoln Centenary pamphlet, issued by the State Education Department, for February 12, 1909 156 slavery in the South, and he thought it impossible to change the laws and abolish slavery without bringing on a war between the Northern and the Southern States. He hoped for an easier and better way. But many tried to carry slavery into the new states and territories that were being formed beyond the Mississippi river. He was opposed to that, whether war came or not. He spoke hundreds of times against it, and what he said made him President of the United States. This brought on a dreadful war, which lasted four years. Great armies of citizens were organized to save the Union. Half a million of the best men in the country. North and South, lost their lives. There was sorrow in nearly every family, and distress in almost every home. In the midst of the war President Lincoln issued the Emancipation ProC' lamation, freeing all the slaves, it was the greatest act of a great and noble President, who was right in his reasoning, clear in his statements, courageous in his acts, and humane in his treatment of all upon whom the war brought misfortune. He thought little of himself. He wanted, above all things, to save t!ie Union. He was very happy when he came to believe that he could make the nation wholly free and save the Union at the same time. Guided by God, in whom he believed, he led the forces of Freedom and Union to a splendid national triumph ; and all, including the people of the South, are now glad of it. The abolition of slavery brought freedom to all who live under the flag of the Union, and opened the way for us to become a more united and a very much greater nation. Just as the war ended, when President Lincoln was fifty' six years old, he was assassinated, and all the people mourned as never before or since. His life was the best expression we have ever had of the humanity, the industry, the sense, the conscience, the freedom, the justice, the progress, the unity, and the destiny of the Nation. His memory is our best human inspiration. 157 WHAT MAKES LINCOLN GREAT ^\DDRESS AT THE CELEBBIATION OF THE CENTENARY OF THE BIRTH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, HELD UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK, AT THE GREAT HALL OF THE COLLEGE OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 12, I909 From the close of the Revolution to the crisis of the Civil War slavery was the ever present obstacle to the union of the states. It was not a live questjion until union was possible and necessary. The mother country had approved slavery, and all the colonies had par- ticipated in it. It had vanished in the North because not right and not profitable, and it had become established in the South because all the conditions favored it and the moral sense did not disapprove it. The South was rich in property and weak in numbers, and the North was strong in people and poor in pocket. And the South was not lacking in moral sensibilities. Society was quite as highly developed and religion quite as much a force in the Carolinas as in New England. All the colonies had planned and fought together for independence, and all had done much that was vital for the Union. But slavery obstructed the formation of a Union that could live ; it menaced the constitutional convention almost to the point of dissolution ; it threatened to destroy the Union after it had been created. The " more perfect union " was the result of a necessity that was absolute. The constitution was the splendid creation of educated and sagacious statesmanship, of superior patriotism, and of proper concessions to situations and opinions. In all this the North and the South had equal share. The recognition of slavery and the ex- press protection of the foreign slave trade for twenty years was the heavy price which had to be paid for the constitution itself. Heavy as it was, it was well to pay it, and there is no ground for recrimina- tion about it now. All the states agreed to the rendition of slaves, to the counting of slaves on the basis of representation, and to a tax upon slaves imported. For the protection of the slave trade, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut voted with Mary- land, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, while Virginia voted against it. The lives of states, like the lives of men, have their inconsis- tencies. When the adoption of the constitution had been wrested from reluctant states, the bondage of men and women, within cir- cumscribed limits, became legalized in the Republic which was being dedicated to the principle that all men stand equal before the law. [158] WHAT AIAKES UNCOLN GREAT I59 Then commenced the long and acrimonious struggle for the ad- mission of slavery into common territory and into new states. Com- munication was slow and contacts were few. The sections came together but little, either directly or through the press. There were large accessions of territory and other great states were coming into view. Washington was the arena in which freedom and slavery battled for their own. Learning and oratory were the in- struments of each. But slavery was more aggressive because the more directly concerned. War was frequently threatened, and once employed. The Union was at all times in danger. Compromise followed compromise. From each conflict slavery emerged with the advantage upon her side. At the turning point of the last cen- tury the hope of the makers of the constitution had not been real- ized. Freedom was more crippled and humiliated ; slavery was more aggressive and defiant. The nation was not becoming wholly free. It was apparently becoming wholly slave. The constitution prohibited Congress from legislating against the slave trade until 1808. In the next year, in a hovel in the Ken- tucky wilderness, a man child was born. It is lacking nothing in reverence to say that he was to be " a man of sorrows and ac- quainted with grief," or that he was to " deliver his people from an overwhelming sin." He came to his full stature at the turning point of the century, just as the freedom of his country stood most vitally in need of a prophet and a knight. Abraham Lincoln was surely a child of those whom, with apt discrimination, he called the " plain people." The study of his genealog\' may fascinate students, but his ancestry is not material to his memory. His forefathers are interesting to us because he is in- teresting to us, but they can neither help nor harm his fame. The little child who appeared in the log cabin a hundred years ago, was fifty-six years later carried to his burial amid profound and uni- versal mourning. That is the ground of his rights to greatness in America. His life was great. He had a noble mission in the world and nobly he fulfilled it. It was but well begun when death over- took him. His memory looms greater with every passing year. His life was the finest expression we have of the best attributes of American character, and his memory is our highest inspiration to be plain, sane, true, tolerant, patient, aggressive, and hopeful, as a nation. In preeminent degree he was the embodiment of the homely virtues. He lived plainly and soberly. He refused to overreach and he met all of his personal obligations. He was a good neighbor l6o NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT and a firm friend. He discouraged unprofitable controversy. He tried his lawsuits without embittering his adversaries. He helped the ward, the town, the county, and the state, in which he lived. He had wit and humor. He could tell an apt story and make a good speech. Admirable as these qualities were, they were in themselves only enough to save him from mediocrity and lift him into re- spectability. Genius may win fame without them. Though noble and perhaps necessary contributions to real greatness, other qualities must supplement the common virtues before greatness is attained. n Lincoln had not an orderly and legal mind by nature, it was early and easily made so by youthful study of a few of the books which could give it texture and vitality. The mathematics which he loved made it click with exactness. He laid a boy's firm grasp upon the fundamentals of the law — its history, its philosophy, its spirit, its purposes, and its methods. Decisions were only incidents. He reasoned from the groundwork of society up to the matter in hand. His purposes were sound and his logic inexorable. He was successful. He tried more cases at the Circuit, and argued more appeals in the Supreme Court, than any other man in Illinois, This contributed to, but it did not reach the height of his greatness. Much, but not too much, has been made of his activity in politics. He looked after the political organization. He saw to it that the delegates were to his liking. He did much thinking for the con- ventions. He husbanded the patronage and used it. He joined issues and wrote platforms. He led his party, and laid intellectual pitfalls and political ambushes for his adversaries. He was often a candidate for ofiice, was often chosen, and often beaten. He spent weeks and months together " preaching the gospel " and " cultivat- ing the vineyard " from Galena to Cairo. But he derived no com- mercial profit from politics. Rather, he contributed much more than his share. He was always poor. Frequently he left politics and returned to the law to earn a living. He never seems to us — nor was he, in fact — a mere office seeker. He never depended upon place. He never dissipated in politics. He was in public life for a purpose. He absolved himself from all political activity for years together when he saw no principles at stake, nor new ground to be gained. He cared nothing for ward, city, or county places. Statecraft fascinated him. He thought deeply. He had a sur- prisingly clear outlook. He was concerned about the rights of men and about a government that could endure. He knew the people, for he was one of them ; and he spoke so plainly and convincingly that he gained a following. We now know that he had become a WHAT MAKES LINCOLN GREAT l6l Statesman, and we now see that his poHtics was but a mere incident to his statesmanship. Some of the elements of his real greatness began to appear, as his activity in politics was an accessory to it ; but rustling in politics was far, very far, from the summit of it. It is not to be denied that he was fortunate in his opportunity. Manifestly he did not think so. Few other men would have thought so. The man who thought only of that at the time would have missed the opportunity. But looking backward we see it. Stephen A. Douglas was a great man. History will not deny his patriotism or his statesmanship. He was the foremost political orator of his time, until he met Lincoln in joint debate. If he then ceased to be, it was because Lincoln had the qualities which could make the most of his freer opportunities and the better cause. Douglas was not only a senatorial star of the first magnitude, but he was unques- tionably the recognized leader of the great political party which had been dominant in the country since that fateful morning when, at the break of day, Adams started off for Massachusetts in a pet which refused to let him induct Jefferson into the great office for which the senator was supremely ambitious and which it was the common expectation that he would reach. Illinois was a democratic state. Illinois was the political " borough " of Douglas, and political arts had been employed to set the lines so that he could hold it against any popular majority which a passing storm might throw up against him. To contest the political position, and the very political life, of Senator Douglas, among a people who had long considered him their greatest man, could not have seemed an enviable oppor- tunity to Lincoln. But something beyond our ken rules great events, and that some- thing, without his knowing it, made it Lincoln's opportunity. The repeal of the " Compromises " opened up the slavery question anew and with unprecedented fury. More than once Lincoln had shown his independence of party in the interest of the freedom of black men, but his veneration for the constitution and the laws kept him from abolitionism. Abhorring slavery with all his great soul, he ab- horred war also. He knew, above almost every other man, that slavery was intrenched in law ; that an invasion of territory or a violation of the compacts of the constitution, to free the slaves, would force a war which might not remove the evil, and which might sever the union of the states and obstruct the advance o£ democracy in the world. He grasped a vain hope in the unex- pected. Before the extreme of overt war, slavery might be rooted out by a tidal wave of feeling, or restricted by negotiation. The l62 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT slaves might 1)6 paid for by the government and set free. And if war were to come, there was nothing more important than that it should not come before the nation could sustain it, and that even then it should be a war of the slave power against the Union, rather than a war of freedom against an institution which was sanctioned by long usage and supported by the fundamental law. The people were dazed by the menace of a cataclysm. Parties were disintegrating and a new alignment was at hand. The Whig party was at an end. The Democratic party was dividing; the Democratic national leader and the Democratic president had parted company. The Republican party was beginning to show some coherency, but was without aggressive organization. Some of the men who were yet to lead it were playing small politics with one faction or the other of the opposition. At this juncture Senator Douglas devised the doctrine that the new states should settle the slavery question for themselves ; that it should be held to be a local and not a national question ; that each state should vote slavery up or down as the majority saw fit. It was a specious doctrine, and upon it the great r-enator went back to Illinois to seek a re- election to the Senate. Lincoln joined the issue. A voice that was familiar to Illinois now began to be heard by the nation. It was heard because it had something to say, and because Senator Douglas was obliged to reply to it. It said that a house divided against itself could not stand; that the nation would become all slave or all free; that whereas there had been reason to expect it would become all free, there was now extreme danger that it would become all slave ; that the natural state of the country was one of freedom ; that if there were reasons why slavery should be endured in old slave territory, there was no reason why it should be allowed to come into territory already and inherently free; that slavery was a moral wrong and no majority could make it right; and that the power to vote the slave system into free territory was never to be upheld and never to be conferred by a free people. It was the greatest political debate in our history. It was carried to every part of the state. It raged from July to November. There were hundreds of meetings, and seven of them in representa- tive centers of the state were joint, and attended by vast multitudes. At the onset the senator alluded to his adversary as a " kind, amiable, intelligent gentleman," but such patronizing pleasantry soon ceased, for ample cause. There was much sparring for position, WHAT MAKES LINCOLN GREAT 163 great parades and much noise and clatter, plenty of humor and assumed politeness, no dearth of invective, and no lack of serious- ness and ardor. Lincoln was a lance so free that not even his friends could limit or direct him, and very often his thrusts reached a vital part. If he had the stronger moral argument, he was no less equipped in legal learning, and he kept the better natured. Without apparent thought of self, he did a master's work upon the ship of state. When the election came, the Legislature was with Douglas, but the popular majority was with Lincoln. He had, fortunately, lost the senatorship ; tout he had come to be the available candidate of a rapidly consolidating party for the presidency. And he had shown the intellectual virility and the moral courage which did so much to make him great. The election of Lincoln made war inevitable. He knew this bet- ter than any other man in the country. The men of the .South ex- pected secession, because they anticipated Lincoln's election and quickly realized the meaning of it. Before the election was held they began to assemble the machinery of separation and inde- pendence, and the moment the result was reached they started it with all celerity. Before the inauguration, seven states had formally assumed to go out of the Union. Their natural rectitude, their consistent thinking, and their pride, left no other course open to the statesmen of the South. But they had no reason to count upon a sanguinary war. They had reason enough to think that the North would not accept the gauge of battle. Some of the strongest friends of freedom and union were advising that they be allowed to depart in peace. In the election the North had spoken, but the South did not know the North, and the South looked upon Lincoln as a mere lawyer and politician. No better did the North know the South. Nor did the North know itself. Neither realized the conscientiousness, the caliber, or the heroism of the other. Indeed, neither knew the fighting qualities that were within itself. When the dogs of war were once let loose all the packs were eager enough, but before the chase was really on neither side knew its own strength, and each underestimated the resources and the spirit of the other. No one. North or South, unless it were Lincoln, suspected that such a war was close at hand. But Lincoln knew both peoples — the people of the North and the people of the South — as well as did any living man. By birth and knowledge of the situations and temperament of the people of the South, he was almost as much a southern man as the President of 164 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT the Southern Confederacy himself. When war came his family- relatives and friends were in both armies. He was at the center of information, and a keen student of the rights, the logic, and the ad- vantages of situations. He knew also about the things in the con- stitution which protected slavery in the slave states. He knew about all the other things in the constitution. He regarded all parts of the constitution. He understood, moreover, the powers and the responsibilities of the presidential office. He knew the sacred char- acter of the Union. He believed there could be no union with slavery. He believed there could be no liberty without union. It was not more a matter of opinion than of fervor ; not so much a matter of policy as of conscience. He knew the terms of the oath he was to take. That oath was as inviolable as the Bible upon which it was taken. That constitution and that oath meant that the government revenues were to ibe collected in every port, and the government mails were to go unhindered upon every highway. The rights of men, the legal system, the temples of freedom, estab- lished by the armies of Washington, were to be upheld. Nothing but the inability to maintain the Union by supreme physical effort could determine that the Union was without the power to maintain itself. Of all men, Lincoln knew that war was at hand. His knowledge of the fact and the reasons which made the fact inevitable were among the elements which made him great. It was a serious, weird, prophetic figure that moved slowly out of the pioneer West to the helm of state. He spoke many times, but he said he was not ready to speak : he declared that he was anxious to hear, but that when the time came he would speak with no un- certain sound. He did so speak. He spoke in an English style so pure that it has become distinctive v^^herever English is upon the tongues of men. He spoke in sorrow and with affection. He spoke with all caution and yet with all distinctness. He left no room for doubt. He put the burden of the war upon those who in unhappy passion would paralyze the laws and sever the Union. Arguing that " no state upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union," and that " resolves or ordinances to that effect are legally void; and acts of violence against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary," he declared with all solemnity that he would execute the laws ; that there need be no bloodshed and would be none unless forced upon the national authority; and just as the last moment came he took the inaugural address upon his WHAT MAKES LINCOLN GREAT 1 65 knee, and in genuine affection added, " In your hands, my dis- satisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is tiie momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy it, while I shall have a solemn one to protect, preserve, and defend it." But there was no other way. War had to be. Nothing less than the magnificent repulse of the heroic charge of Pickett's division at Gettysburg could settle the question. Lincoln could lay the field of diplomacy and arrange the plan of war, as well as the groundwork of legal or political discussion. Much more, this sagacious and gentle knight of the forum and the hustings proved at once that he could be the very reservoir of power, the very genius of administration, the very incarnation of war. Without much reverence for form, without any false worship of precedent, he used practical ways to accomplish practical ends. Quickly he rose above the commonplace. He would attend to little things when beseeched, but his mind sought the great things. There were great men in Congress, but he led them. There were very great men, who were very unlike, in the Cabinet, but he domi- nated their every important act. He hesitated not a moment in de- termining the foreign relations of the government. But of course the vital concerns were at his hand. He coaxed and coerced and held the states that were upon the border line of conflict. He was always kind and always stern. The sufferings of a soldier, or the grief of a woman unnerved him, but he lacked nothing in steadiness or strength when it came to using the resources of the country for the saving of the Union. With a great heart which brooded over the agonies of conflict, he gathered all the forces and sharpened all the instruments of war. He knew the temper of soldiers who were American freemen. He was impatient at inaction. He lost no opportunity to aid a private soldier or inspire an army. He gave all the credit and the glory to a general who won victories, and he visited his grieved and stinging censure upon one who refused the opportunity of battle after a success in the fear of loss of personal and professional prestige. He would hold a general's horse, or re- move him from co'mmand, if he thought that the one thing or the other would bring another victory. When success came, he made it the base of broader undertakings which could not be attempted without it. H disaster overtook the Union arms, as it often did, he stood with bowed head and bleeding heart, but still dauntless, in its awful presence. He effaced himself completely and. partizan 1 66 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT though he was, he rose above all partizanship. He proposed to give over his place to the political opposition if that would more completely unify the North, but when it would not, and he had to fight for reelection, he did it with his old-time sagacity. The result proved that he above any other could unify the North. And the consolidating sentiment of the North carried the awful struggle to its consummation. Manassas, Antietam, Shiloh, Chickamauga, Vicksburg, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, are some of the names that exemplify the vicissitudes of the long struggle and express the gallantry of Americans, North and South. When the white light of peace broke at Appomattox it lighted a Union that would need time for convalescence, but was free enough to live: and the lifting clouds revealed something of the enduring proportions of Lincoln. War changed the legal status of slavery. States could not both repudiate and invoke the constitution. The slave system could not claim protection from a government whose very life it was seeking to undo. Property is the lawful prize of war. It is singularly so when the property is in slaves who are made to add human energy to the inert forces of war. The first flash at Sumter changed the legal situation. Accommodation was possible no longer. Slavery or the Union was to die. New laws were to come right speedily. The goddess of justice, which had always protected the master, made ready to help the slave. If the Union were to live, the falling of the sword which would shatter the shackles and set men and women free had come to be a question of strength and of events. Happily, the man who had so fondly wished that " all men every- where might be free " was to determine when the powers of the commander in chief, and the physical strength of the army and navy of the United States, made it both possible and expedient to set men free. Patriots and moralists could see no room for hesitation. The North ivas divided. The war drew heavily upon its resources. There was mourning in every home. The result was far from certain. Success depended upon sentiment. The border states were always in the balance. With those who urged the moral rights of man were the many who insisted that the President should find express au- thority for all he did in the constitution and the laws which had never anticipated such a crisis, and those others in overwhelming numbers who demanded that a war for the Union should never be changed into a war for abolition. Old friends left him. The blind- WHAT MAKES LINCOLN GREAT 167 ing storm raged all about him, and the rolling waves of bitterness and abuse broke at his very feet. With the proclamation in his own handwriting in his private desk, known to none but himself and his God, he was the fortress of the situation. " What I do or leave undone about slavery, I do or I abstain from doing to save the Union." The Union was the only temple upon which Liberty could rest her foot. In his waiting, as in his doing, he exemplified the qualities which make him great. The supreme satisfaction in Lincoln's life must have come when he could believe that emancipation would give added strength to the armies and help save the Union. None knew better than he that it meant more to the white man than to the black. If it gave the one his chance, it saved the other from his sin. If it freed a race, it freed a nation also. If it gave a race its physical freedom, it gave the nation its moral opportunity. It made possible such a unity of the Republic as had never been, and it opened the way for an outworking of democracy in industry, in politics, in educa- tion, and in religion, which is the marvel of the world, and which projects its light and its power into the obscure recesses of the coming ages. It would be a frightful perversion of this Imndredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln if a word should ibe spoken which is out of key with the spirit of the man. In the very midst of war he had no words but those of considerateness and kindness for the people of the South. Only two months before he died he tried without avail to convert his Cabinet to compensation for the slaves. In his great second inaugural he declared the national, rather than the sectional, responsibility for slavery. A week before he died he walked up the streets of Richmond with " Tad's " hand in his, and went around the block to call at the home of General Pickett, who led the awful charge at Gettysburg. Mrs Pickett opened the door, with a baby in her arms. " I am Abraham Lincoln," he said. " Oh ! you are the President," the surprised woman an- swered. " No, I am George Pickett's old friend from Illinois." Then he took the baby in his arms and kissed it. This restored the L'f^nion at one point at least. He expressly informed the War Department and the generals in the field that they must not assume to settle any political questions. He was, and he intended to be, the best friend the South could have, and its overwhelming mis- fortune came in his melancholy death. Yet we must not dare to forget that more than generosity was in his soul. Justice, as well l68 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT as gentleness ; sternness, as well as magnanimity ; " faith in the right," as well as " charity for all " ; greatness, as well as generosity, were all his. The occasions determined the applications. Through it all, he left no rough word and no mean act to degrade the great things he did. In what he said, in what he did, in what he fore- bore, appear the qualities which make him great. Forty- four years have come and gone since Lincoln died. There were great men and -great leaders before him, and there have been great men and great leaders since him. Another generation is here. It is a free and a discriminating generation. It ranks him above all others. He is one of us, the child of American opportunity. He has given the truest ring and the sweetest harmony to the spirit of his country. No man, no combination of men, could change it: the spirit of the nation is attuned to the spirit of Lincoln, and so it will remain forever. That is the overwhelming thing which makes Lincoln great. There is one star in the heavens which men know before all the other stars. Taken by itself alone, it is an ordinary star among the stars. It is not of the first magnitude : yet it is in good com- pany. It is one of a brilliant constellation which always attracts the eye. It has supreme importance in itself, for it is so near the polar axis of the earth that the world and all the stars seem to swing around it. It is always in sight in the United States. Its fixedness and stability make it the guide and the helper of prac- tical men. The magnetic needles point to it. On land or sea, the traveler looks to it and feels sure upon his course. What the north star is to the natural life of the world, Lincoln is to the political science of the Republic and the moral sense of men. Do any of us think that it was a matter of chance? Then we think that day and night, the rains and the dew, the winds and the tides, the fertility of the earth, the crops in their seasons, the colors and the fragrance of the flovv^ers, magnetism and electricity, the sun and the stars, are matters of chance. It was in the divine plan, and not the mere accident of chance. The God who put the north star in the heavens made Lincoln. The God of the Bible and of the creation, the God of the Hebrew prophets and of the Christians, the God of the unfolding centuries, the God who has helped freedom in all ages and in all lands, the God who gave wisdom to the men of the Constitutional Convention and victory to the arms of the Union at Gettysburg — He made Lincoln great. And in the plentitude of His powers, and in the outworking of His plans, He makes Lincoln greater and greater, year by year. THE MORAL ADVANCES IN LINCOLN'S POLITICAL CAREER ADDRESS AT THE SERVICE HELD IN OBSERVANCE OF THE lOOTH ANNI- VERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, AT THE FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ALBANY, N. Y., SUNDAY EVENING, FEB- RUARY 14, 1909 Next Friday it will be eight and forty years since Abraham Lin- coln was the guest of this State and of this city. He was the presi- dent elect. He was on a journey which has become historic. He was going to a place which was already great, but which he was to make very much greater in human history. The schools were closed, and I saw him emerge from the train where the railroad crosses north Broadway, kept abreast of his carriage upon the slow march down Broadway and up State street to the old Capitol, and heard his brief address from the porch, beyond which boys of twelve, who were without influence, very properly were not allowed to go. His was an unusual figure. His extreme height was accentuated by his leanness and by a silk hat which was tall and straight like its owner. Yet there was nothing odd, nothing amusing, nothing un- gainly, in the appearance of the man. He was the child of western pioneers, and a pioneer of pioneers himself, but in figure, face and dress he would have looked very much at home in a Congregational cnurcL in New England. He was sinewy, strong, and stalwart — the figure of an athlete, for an artist. He could take an axe by the end of the helve and hold it straight, with his arm upon a line with his shoulder. In the state convention which determined to present him for the presidency, some enthusiasts from his early country home brought in some walnut rails which they said he had split, and the convention undertook to have him say whether or not that were so. He answered that there was no way of iden- tifying those particular rails, but he could say in truth that he had split a great many that were just as good. He was always at his ease on horseback. Coming up our Capitol hill over the cobble- stone pavement, he stood erect, true, and imposing in his jolting carriage, and removed his tall hat to the cheering crowds upon either side, with a grace that was a part of the absolute naturalness and genuineness of the man. Too much has been said about his awkwardness and his forbidding dress. There was no more sham- [169] 170 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT ble in his gait than in his mind or in his morals. He sometimes wore a shawl, but the shawl was an article of men's street apparel in his day. His dress was as unconventional as the man was original and independent. But there was nothing- extreme, cer- tainly nothing freakish, about it all. The physical man, and his dress, and his stalwart character, and his sane and independent thinking went together, and together they fitted into the body of the people of whom he was one, while they seemed appropriate enough to the great station which he was called upon to fill. He was then fifty-two years old. He was born in a cabin in the western wilderness, of a father who never succeeded, and of a mother who had some of the blood and many of the traits of gentle- ness. He has said that his childhood could all be expressed by the one line in Grey's Elegy which speaks of " The short and simple annals of the poor." In youth he was accustomed to severe labor of the hand. He worked in a store and became a leader in the badinage of the neighborhood. At odd moments he read the Bible and Shakespeare many times, and studied Euclid until he had mastered the demonstrations. He became fascinated with the structure of society and with the sources, the forces, the history, the philosophy, and the applications of the law. He had enough to say. He developed a pure, a distinct, and now a well known English style in which to say it. He wrote with all clearness. He spoke with great distinctness. He came to be the foremost lawyer in his state. He came to make as well as to interpret and apply the law. Politics went with the law, and he attracted, managed, and marshaled men. With on-rushing events he became the great war- president of the United States, the great emancipator of the Ameri- can Republic. We have no need to dwell upon the external or physical character- istics of this man, for we all know them by heart. But we may well reflect upon the more striking advances of the steadily unfold- ing moral character which was the soul of Abraham Lincoln, and which gave initiative, direction, and always increasing power to all that he did. It is one of the elements of his greatness, and one of the satisfac- tions of his country, that he never lacked in moral character. From first to last he did nothing to bring shame, and said nothing to be taken back. To the conventional he seems unconventional. In childhood, in youth, in manhood, he lived upon the border line be- tween broken and unbroken territory. It is the compensation of MORAL ADVANCES IN LINCOLN'S POLITICAL CAREER 171 primitive life that it is broad and free. Lincoln was a veritable child of nature. He was a product of the wilderness, and of the prairie, and of society in its Hquid state. But he was the heir of the opportunities, as well as of the hindrances, of open situations. He knew both the external and the hidden life of a wondrous peo- ple. He was disposed to be like his people. He did not think there was anything very unusual about himself. He was not a radical. He was much censured for it. He was not a conservative. He was much censured for that. He aspired to be an ordinary leader of an ordinary people. He was a practical man of affairs and he used practical means to practical ends. He was part and parcel of the manner of life of his people. His ways were severely plain. He would change places with the humblest. He drew his illustra- tions from situations and incidents which all could understand. He would have seemed out of place, and perhaps occasions came when he did seem out of place, in the midst of a culture which some one has described as mere lassitude refined. But he was at home wherever there was virile thinking that bore upon the actuali- ties of life. If one knew him only superficially he might seem in- consistent. He was gentle and severe, kind and stern, cautious and aggressive, humorous and melancholy, modest and mighty. From first to last he effaced himself. Within the limitations of the law he venerated, he listened to the great heart which told him what to do. He gained the confidence of his people because, through a life that was full of menace, his personal morals remained un- scathed. Love of truth and of justice was the paramount quality in his character, from the wilderness in Kentucky to the presidency. He was always in a struggle, and the struggling gave him strength. Abuse, of which he received more than his share, disciplined but did not embitter him. He towered higher and higher because he attached no undue importance to individuals or to episodes ; because he broke through barriers and gained strength by it ; because he accomplished things, and mounted upon results to accomplish things that were higher than what had gone before. His nature was not merely moral. It was religious. His life was moved by something more than a mind which recognized the needs of sane and decent living, and the obligations of men to men. His was a nature which without ostentation expressed its religious feeling. He did not parade, but he did not hide, his feeling. God moved in the life of Lincoln. He did not suppress God in his nature, but made himself the instrument of God's freedom, oppor- 172 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT tunity, and effectiveness. From first to last he spoke of this. He spoke of it more commonly to his close friends and in the writings which he did not expect the world to see. But he never withheld the expression when the situation made it seemly and the occasion was serious enough to keep it from being misunderstood. And with Lincoln religion was not an occasional sentiment. It was not an ecstatic state. It was not an empty form. It was not even a thing satisfied and concluded by membership in a Christian church. It was not alone a thing which made him a devoted hus- band, and a loving father, and an efficient townsman. It was God in a great mind and in an heroic man. It did not keep him from the affairs of men. It did not narrow him. It never made him ex- clusive. It did not close his eyes to the realities of life and the at- tributes of men. It plunged him into struggles. It kept him straight and gave him power in the Legislature, at the hustings, and upon the Illinois circuit. The outworking of it in the places which really try out the souls of men gave him the texture and the fiber and the superb moral and patriotic purpose which could rescue his country, and perhaps self-government in all countries, from what appeared to be insuperable obstacles and opposition. It is that out- working, and that alone, which, in a single generation, has taken Lincoln out of all partizanship and made him a proper theme for our reflections at the regular service of a Christian church. But all true men grow strong and great not by bounds, but by steps. They grow greater and greater by reason of the greater and greater things done. Let us find some of the particular steps, some of the things done, by which the moral nature of Lincoln grew to such heroic size and such splendid strength. The Illinois Legislature in 1837, following the ordinary thinking of the times, resolved that " the right of property in slaves is sacred to the slave-holding states." It was twenty-four years before the Civil War. It was a commonplace deduction from the federal Con- stitution and the laws of Congress and of the states, which was accepted by all save the few ultra and impractical people — the very salt of the earth — who were for abolition without regard for such human things as laws and constitutions. Lincoln, then a mem- ber of the State Legislature, was not an abolitionist. He knew about the legal basis and structure of society, and he venerated the Constitution and the laws. That makes it the nobler still that the mere boy of twenty-eight revolted. He opposed, but his opposition was unavailing. Ordinary men would not have felt called upon to MORAL ADN'ANCES IN LINCOLN'S POLITICAL CAREER 1 73 go beyond the bounds of ordinary opposition. But despite his own estimate, he was not an ordinary man. He prepared his personal protest in writing, declared that " slavery is founded on both in- justice and bad policy," procured his colleague from Sangamon county, in which is the city of Springfield, to sign it with him, and required the House to express this protest upon its journal. It was heroic because it invaded a common usage and an accepted doctrine, and struck a note to which no party had dared listen, and at which no lawyer and no leader of opinion had dared strike. We now see what a significant step it was, and we ought to see how it aided harder and longer steps. With an always growing practice of the law, and an always en- larging leadership in politics, in ten years more Lincoln was a mem- ber of the thirtieth Congress. It embraced a galaxy of great men. Webster, Calhoun, Benton, Cass, Corwin, Collamer, Sam Houston, Simon Cameron. Robert C. Winthrop, Hannibal Hamlin, Horace Greeley, John A. Dix, Jefferson Davis, Alexander H. Stephens, Robert Toombs, and Andrew Johnson, were there. Stephen A. Douglas was promoted from the House to the Senate the day Lincoln entered the House. It was a congress of great events, as well as of great men. Liberty and slavery were in an evert and paroxysmal struggle. The only unholy war in our his- tory, that with Mexico for more slave territory, was on. Ordinary new memhers at thirty-eight would have been restrained in such a presence and in the midst of such events. But the pro- test in the Illinois Legislature made further protests easier. Lin- coln's conscience told him that it was an aggressive war of the slave power for more territory in the Southwest to offset the open- ing and enlarging free territory of the Northwest. The Presi- dent, who had permitted and helped the war, contended that Mexico had invaded our territory and shed our blood. In thirty days after entering the House, Lincoln broke through a line of great men and through forbidding situations, and offered carefully prepared reso- lutions in which it was demanded that the President indicate the spot within American territory where the first blood had been shed, and he addressed the House at length in support of his demand. Let us recall what the fledgling in Congress could say to the Presi- dent of the United States: " Let the President " he said, " answer the interrogatories I propose, fully, fairly, candidly, with facts and not with arguments. Let him remember that he sits where Wash- ington sat, and let him answer as Washington would answer. As 1/4 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT a nation should not, and the Almighty will not, be evaded, so let him attempt no equivocation. If, so answering, he can show that the soil was ours where the first blood of the war was shed, I am with him for his justification." He always voted against the war, but as uniformly voted supplies to the army on the ground that the soldiers were not responsible and must be fed. His opponents in Illinois undertook to call him " Spot " Lincoln and charged him with disloyalty, for all this. He had to meet it many times in the debates with Senator Douglas. But conscience was becoming freer and the expression of it easier and stronger through its exercise in the face of opposition. Another advance was made through his resolutions in this Con- gress for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. It is true he satisfied his lawyer mind by providing that it should be upon the majority vote of the District, and that owners should be paid for their slaves, but it gave fresh help to freedom and it went further in cheering Lincoln's sense of justice and his moral courage on their way. In another ten years we come to the greatest voluntary and moral advance in Lincoln's purely political career. They were years of events which would themselves seem very great but for the greater and nobler ones for which they were unexpectedly opening the way. The hope of the convention that formed the Constitution, that the nation would become wholly free, had proved vain. It was only too apparent that it was in peril of becoming wholly slave. Twice in these ten years Congress had swept away the most solemn com- pacts which established the bulwarks of at least a sectional free- dom. The Supreme Court had decided that slaves might be taken into the territories and yet held and trafficked in. Lincoln feared, with reason enough, that the court would go on and hold that slavery might, with only technical legal limitations, be carried into the free states. The spirit of slavery, rather than that of free- dom, was finding hospitality in the courts, and opportunity through the law. The machinery for apprehending and returning fugitive slaves had been made more and more drastic. Political parties had been avoiding exact issues, shuffling for votes, and dissolving into factions. Under such circumstances, in the early summer of 1858, Senator Douglas, the recognized leader of the dominant party in his state and in the nation, the readiest political orator of the decade, an undoubted patriot, the friend and rival of Lincoln for twenty-five years, went back to Illinois to prosecute a campaign MORAL ADVANCES IN LINCOLN'S POLITICAL CAREER 175 for re-election to the Senate upon a platform empowering the ter- ritories and the new states to have slavery or not as they should see fit. Lincoln more than challenged the proposition. He opened up the whole broad question. We had sought peace in compromise, and there was none. Understandings were not kept. The Consti- tution recognized slavery in the states where it was, and for the Sivke of the Union he would stand by the Constitution. But he insisted that slavery was inherently wrong, and that there was no moral right and no constitutional power to vote it into territory where it was not. " Senator Douglas is logical," he said, " if you do not admit that slavery is wrong. If you do admit that it is wrong, no one can logically say that he does not care whether it is voted up or voted down." That met the issue: but he went much further. Hope was breaking and extreme patience was wearing out; "A house divided against itself can not stand. This govern- ment can not permanently endure half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall. I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other." Illinois was the best example among the states of a house divided against itself. In sentiment and sympathy, if not in legal structure, it was half slave and half free. The northern boundary is in the latitude of Albany. The southern point is four hundred miles away, in the latitude of Richmond. The northern half was set- tled by people from New York and New England: the southern half by people from Virginia and Kentucky. He had good reason to understand the irrepressibility of the conflict of opinion. He was the first man of recognized attainments who was the acknowl- edged leader of a party to be reckoned wath, who had the moral courage to present an exact issue and stand for an exact result. He was not an abolitionist. He would leave slavery where it was, rather than invoke war. He cared nothing about social equality; that was a matter aside from the real question and apart from the law. He venerated the Union. It was the very ark of liberty in America and the hope of real liberty in all the world. He knew what it had cost ; he understood its legal basis and framework perfectly ; he knew what it was worth. He had made friends with Webster in Congress, had been at his table many times, and was his ardent disciple. He was for " Liberty and union." There was peril in any separation of the one from the other. He bound them 1/6 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT together as Webster did, and made them his watchwords. It had been manifest enough that without union Hberty could not be. It had now become manifest to him that without Hberty union could not be. He abhorred war, and he would not afford a ground for Vv^ar which was repugnant to the Constitution. But he would say definitely that slavery should go no further, and then " rest in the belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction." If this could not be, he expected it to " become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new, north as well as south." Then all liberty would be gone, for slavery fetters the master quite as much as the slave. In the midst of this memorable discussion, Lincoln took one very distinct attitude upon an all-important subject, which strikingly illustrates his legal learning, his familiarity with history, and his moral courage. It concerned the authority and the right of the people to change the Supreme Court, as well as the statute law, when the court persisted in construing the laws so as to vitalize political policies with which the majority had come to be funda- mentally at variance. Without questioning the learning or the motives of the court he boldly charged that political feeling was hav- ing its expression through the decisions of the court. He unhesi- tatingly denied any ultimate obligations of the people to be bound by decisions of the courts upon questions of political opinion and policy. He would obey the determination, for he was against chaos and revolution, but he would hesitate not at all in seeking new laws or a new court, to the end that courts might express progress as well as precedents, and that liberty rather than slavery might have its opportunity. He called Jefferson and Jackson to the support of his contention, and he convincingly exemplified the attitudes of many leading men of all parties. Of course, he was charged with an assault upon the Supreme Court, but the immediate result marked another decisive moral advance in his political career, which perhaps gave him the courage to reassert the proposition in his first inaugural, with an ultimate result which appeared in new laws and a new court. From first to last in all this, Lincoln had acted practically or completely alone. He had gone forward without support from out of the state, and in spite of the protests of his close friends within the state. Indeed, the support of the weightiest influences in his party in the nation was given to his great rival to widen the breach in the opposition party ; and his intimate associates within the state, who were of a caliber second only to his own, followed him with MORAL ADVANCES IN LINCOLN S POLITICAL CAREER 1 77 hesitancy and apprehension. With devotion to the equaHty before the law which in the great fundamental of our political system, with entire self-effacement, with faith in his own opinions, with absolute freedom of movement, and with undoubting confidence in the people, he opened a new chapter in the political history of his country. Senator Douglas won reelection in the Legislature, but the popular sentiment and decisive majority supported the con- tentions of Mr Lincoln. Freedom had the moral victory. That gave a new and decisive turn to the course of politics in the country, for it showed discerning leaders whither they must lead unless they were disposed to lose. And it made him the presidential nominee, and in due course the president elect. The point tonight is the influence of it all upon the man. He hardly seemed the same after this. Happily he never lost his humor, but he jested less. He grew in seriousness. He abated not in plainness, but he grew more rugged. He lost nothing of his gen- tleness and helpfulness, but there was a new reserve in what he said. His practical sagacity never lessened, but his always deepen- ing purposes and his steadily enlarging responsibility kept him more surely in the very middle of the way. At once he became a national figure, but a national figure was not known to the people then as now. Before the result in Illinois he was suggested for the presidential nomination by the more discerning, and with that re- sult the question was more nearly settled than the mere politicians knew. He carried himself to the political culmination with steadi- ness and firmness. He said nothing to embitter. His lank figure and lean face grew in attractiveness. When it was settled that his course was to be the course of his country, he said what he could to conciliate the opposition, both north and south, but again and again he took precautions to make sure that nothing which had been gained should be lost in weakness or traded away for any temporary political end. With the departure from Springfield for Washington there was a yet more frequently expressed confidence in the people, and a yet more freely avowed dependence upon God. " I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I shall return, with a task upon me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I can not succeed. With that assistance, I can not fail." All this became more and more pronounced through the presidential years. 178 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT We all know the full, fascinating, pathetic, heroic story of his presidency. It was a repetition, day by day, of joys and sorrows, of superb humility and of the fearless exercise of extraordinary powers, of dealings with a cabinet of great men who had nothing but patriotism in common with each other or with him, of efforts to get captains who could command, of apprehension, of victories and defeats, of deaths, of fast days, of deprivations and hardships, of more money and more men, of mitigating the misfortunes of war, of misunderstanding and abuse, of unyielding grip upon all the forces that could maintain the Union which he adored, and of undeviating plan to win the universal freedom which was his pas- sion. The presidential office is a great school for a great man. It is so at all times. It is even more truly so in war. War takes little notice of the law. In a crisis, monarchs ignore the regular order. But American freemen will not accept the ways of either m^onarchs or rulers. Happily, Lincoln was not of the stuff of which monarchs are made. He was the leader, not the ruler, of the people. He was the executive of a democracy, the expression of the physical, in- tellectual, and moral forces that were inherent in twenty millions of freemen. It was for him to make the precedents for the presi- dential office in a time of civil war. And the precedents which he established have become a priceless inheritance of the nation. Of course his supreme official responsibilities concerned the con- duct of the war and relations with foreign nations. History deals freely with the former, but for obvious reasons is rather reticent about the latter. There were idealists and hotheads who would have embroiled us in foreign wars, for there were foreign powers that would have looked with equanimity upon the dissolution of the Union and the failure of democracy. Lincoln had the responsibil- ity both of war and diplomacy, and hesitated at neither. Manage- ment served him with the English. He had to tolerate the antagonistic presence of the French in Mexico. Perhaps he held both in check through the definite and declared friendship of the Czar of all the Russias. With such things as mere interludes to the greater acts which bore upon conflicts in the field and upon the seas, and with the knowledge that he was only the executive of the will of a people, he bore as heavy burdens as ever tried out the soul of man. Other matters were perhaps quite as trying, though less import- ant, because more immediate and direct. Traders who wanted op- MORAL ADVANCES IN LINCOLN S POLITICAL CAREER 179 portunities, sycophants who wanted jobs, captains who wanted to be colonels, committees of senators who wanted the cabinet changed, delegations who wanted generals removed, and doctrinaires who wanted to go through the lines to stop bloodshed by negotiations, thronged the White House day by day. Happily, there were some things which brought balm to the spirit. Conventions assured him that they trusted him. Men and women told him that they prayed for him. His " plain people " never de- serted him. Through all the grave vicissitudes of the situation, the great heart of the nation throbbed strong and true. And he did things to mitigate the misfortunes of war. In helping the worthy he soothed himself. In the hall of the White House he one day found a sick woman, with a baby in her arms, mourning to see her husband who was in the Army of the Potomac. He sent her to the hospital and telegraphed the general in command of the division to send that private soldier to Washington to see his wife. He closed his desk one afternoon and crossed the river to see an honest-hearted Ver- mont farmer boy under sentence of death for going to sleep upon a sentry's post. He talked to him as his father would, pardoned him, and gave him the opportunity to die honorably for his country upon the field of battle. Upon one of his visits to the hospitals his team came upon a mere boy, in the army blue, groping in the roadway. The coachman was annoyed, but the President left his carriage to find that a rifle shot had destroyed both of the soldier's eyes. He comforted the youth with the kindliness of greatness, and the next morning made him a lieutenant in the army and transferred him to the retired list, which provided for him for life. When a Washington newspaper that was his severe critic, spoke in com- mendation of Stonewall Jackson at the time of the melancholy death of that gallant Puritan captain of the Confederacy, Lincoln wrote a note to the editor and thanked him for it. He romped with his boys betimes. He defended the noise that they made, and protected their dogs and goats and ponies. When Willie died, he was close upon the brink. But the exigencies of state allowed little time for a father's grief. Listening to the people through the day, he did the work of the state until late into the night, often with the little boy who was left playing about his chair, and after the child would fall asleep upon the floor the weary father would work on until nature's protest had to be heeded, and then he would gather up the tired child and bear him to the bed they would occupy together. l8o NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT There were no vacations ; no going back to Illinois ; until the clouds broke and the final rest came. But duty, responsibility, greatness, never submerged the human interest that from first to last was in the man. Evenness, steadiness, durability, reliability in full measure, helpfulness for every proper end whether great or small, were all his, and they were given to his country in the hour of her need. It was a« spirit pure by nature and grown great by works, a spirit that had suffered inexpressibly but was capable of no resentment; it was the mighty leader of a grief -stricken but triumphant people, that spoke in the second inaugural. The words are as sacred as the scriptures, of which in part they are. Above all men, Lincoln then knew that peace was at hand, as well as he, of all men, knew, at the time his first inaugural was spoken, that war was at hand. In neither case could he say quite all he knew. If there is sorrow and pleading and firmness in the one case, there is poetry and prophecy in the other. With no note of exultation for the victors, with nothing that could touch the sensibilities of the vanquished, he says, " Let us judge not that we be not judged." " With malice toward none: with charity for all." There was no letting down because the culmination was in view. " With firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right." As peace was breaking, " Let it be a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." In a few weeks he had joined the world's immortals. With others I waited at the head of the broader 'State street at the hour of midnight as the cortege came up the street, and governors, sena- tors, and judges, and all the plain people removed their hats as eight sergeants of the army carried the body of Lincoln into the old Capitol. It was an impressive hour, deepened by the darkness, and the overhanging lights and the stars, and tremendously solemn by reason of the grief that filled all hearts. It was said that none would be admitted to the building before eight o'clock in the morn- ing. Then I would hold my place till eight o'clock. But at two o'clock the gates were opened and I passed by the coffin once, and then went around and passed again, to look a second time upon the face that had grown both gentler and stronger through the urgings of a pure and lofty purpose and under the discipline of overwhelm- ing events. He had passed through the wilderness and by the Red sea. Upon his soul and upon his face, God and country had done their perfect work. The moral advance had been unceasing, and he who had become one of the world's immortals had ripened for the immortality of the skies. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS _019 845 561 1 I