through the masses, the right of all to be uplifted by the knowledge and discipline hitherto enjoyed by the few came to be recognized, and slowly old theories dissolved, old systems crumbled, and the faith of a broader creed of humanity supplanted the ancient exclusivism. Schools multiplied, the circle of intelligence widened, and at length whole peoples entered into the struggle for social and industrial equality. The final outcome is the popular power, enterprise, and thrift of our own time.

The facilities of distribution and the marvellous productive power which modern discoveries and inventions have given to nations, by opening the resources and markets of the world to the skill of intelligent labor, have imparted a compass and lucrativeness to business inconceivable under any former conditions of life. No extremes of climate, no national policy of isolation, no remoteness of locality, no mountain barriers or interflowing seas, can arrest the resistless activity of this spirit of the age, which, with creative energy, is brooding over sea and land and lifting into forms of value the unutilized resources of nature.

In this intense and universal industrial rivalry, there are conditions essential to national success. There must be the genius of invention born of a subtle and clear intelligence; the acquired skill which can put into convenient and pleasing material forms, the conceptions of the mind; the masses must be thoroughly informed in respect to the natural forces and mechanical agencies employed in production; must understand the economic policy and laws of exchange established by experience; must possess the intellectual power to originate and combine new ideas and to organize comprehensive and complex schemes of business. These and such as these, are the elements of success in the

competitions of our day. To outstrip others, we must have the foremost intellectual faculty, the cunningest manual facility and a temperament of exhaustless vitality. There have been races which furnished splendid exemplifications of some one of these, standing out in solitary granduer, but the resistless march of their combined power, has seldom been witnessed. The Greek mind excelled in the realm of thought, the Roman in that of action, but both lacked the dexterous handicraft of the stagnant East. These are the personal qualities which have demonstrated their value in the eager industrial activity which characterizes our time. Machinery, directed by educated labor is pouring forth from factory and farm, unmeasured products to meet the insatiable demands of commerce, and new fields of supply and new markets of consumption are daily added to the statistics of trade, and we are in the forefront of this Olympiad of business.

There is a popular impression, and, in some quarters, a positive conviction, that our schools in all their grades, as at present organized, fail to impart the qualifications necessary to victory in this contest. Our systems of instruction have come down from the period of the humanists, and are strong on the intellectual side but weak on the practical. Sciences are treated as abstractions which can only be taught, to any useful purpose, in the laboratory and field. Our children lumber the memory with what can only be known through the understanding, and so fail in an encounter with the students of the work-shop. They can analyze a syllogism and demonstrate a theorem, but cannot comprehend the simplest machine or measure a pile of boards. Experiment is artificial experience, and must be used in all our acquisitions if we would be able to apply them to practical uses. The old methods in

chemistry, physics and languages should be relegated to the memory of the antiquary, as things out of date. Knowledge should enter the mind, as it will have to proceed from the mind, through the senses and in concrete forms. It will then be practical and discharge its highest function in the discipline of the intellect.

To supplement the defects of our higher institutions, and to impart to the rising generation the elements of success, special schools of technical and industrial education have been established in a few of our centers of wealth and population. They are doing a good, and some of them a great work, in pointing the way to improved methods of teaching and by sending forth into every enterprise, men of large directive capacity. It would be well if other institutions of similar character could be established in sufficient numbers to meet the demands of society. But in the management of these schools, while they develop all the skill in the manipulation of mechanical tools, all the knowledge in respect to methods of work, and the nature and uses of materials compatible with a curriculum of study, while they exalt the dignity and foster a taste for manual labor, it should not be forgotten, that brain power is the most practical of all power, as it is both creative and executive and touches every human interest. It is this which conquers in the rivalries of business and of empire. Developed intellect is many-sided, and if it cannot mould, it adapts itself to the public will and is master of the world. It is only when the thought embodied in our multifarious wares is more valuable or beautiful than the thought of other nations, that we are successful in the rivalries of trade. There may be as much skill and as much labor in a Chinese trinket as in an American engine, but its inutility gives it but a narrow market

and a scanty income. The loom of thought is more practical and more profitable than the loom of any material fabric. It will not pay to cultivate the hand at the expense of the brain.

There are certain oracular expressions coming to be quite common in the pedagogic philosophy of our day, which are too deep for my apprehension. We are exhorted to educate the hand and the eye, and the mind through these, as though each was gifted with a separate intelligence. I know of no way to give facility and accuracy to the organs of the body except through the mind. We educate the will by constant repetition to act with rapidity and exactness through the organs of sense, but the will is a faculty of the mind. We may as well talk of educating a sword, as the hand, for in each case the language would be figurative and not exact. We are also urged to discipline our intellectual faculties through the physical organs, and properly so, if the language is correctly understood. But no action of the hand or eye or other member, has any tendency to educate, till the mind has formed the habit of meditating upon the perceptions that reach it through the senses. Otherwise the ballet girl, the seamstress and the blacksmith ought to be the ablest and best informed people in the community. It is intellectual action that brings personal power, and our chief work as teachers is with the mind.

If these endowed institutions, so justly the pride and boast of our cities, shall ever forego the broad and generous culture through the practical methods, which they now employ, and degenerate into mere work-shops and trade-factories, they will cease to be educational agencies and can claim no right of existence.

But the difficult problem to be solved in this connec

tion, is how to bring industrial education to bear upon the popular mind through the public schools. The subject has been voluminously and eloquently discussed, but little has been said that is definite and practical. Two plans have been suggested in connection with secondary instruction. First; That the manual training school be made a separate institution. Second; That the entire secondary system of instruction should be so changed, that both kinds of training, the classical and the industrial, could be carried on in parallel lines, in the same school. There seems to be no serious objection to either plan, except that both are limited and partial. They make no provision for the ungraded rural districts, nor for the children of the work-people who never enter the secondary schools, and they are the vast majority of the whole number.

It would be urged, doubtless, that this would be class legislation and therefore in violation of the spirit of our laws. This is the familiar objection to the accepted courses in most of our High schools. Tested by old standards, the reasoning is unsound and fallacious.

The duty of providing for the education of all the children of the state, at public expense, arises from the fact that general intelligence is essential to the safety of popular governments and the welfare of society. That the possibility and security of free institutions have their source in the intellectual and moral discipline of the people; that vice and poverty are abated by knowledge; and that it is cheaper to foster virtue than to repress crime, are truths too generally accepted to justify debate, even in an age that questions the foundations of social order. The right of self-defence and self-development which belongs to individuals, holds when they organize and act