gence is the result of a right exercise of the faculties, and virtue is the offspring of a true intelligence.

It requires a common and universal education of the people to make them homogeneous. They cannot act together in harmony unless they have been trained to think alike, and to be conscious of the same wants.

It is the great business of a free people to educate themselves in their own public schools, organized and controlled by their own wisdom and will. To establish a limit, not found in ability to the amount of learning and cultivation a free people may provide for themselves, is to set a boundary to their intelligence and virtue. It is to measure out to them the degree of civilization to which they may attain. It is to determine how permanent and progressive shall be the governments and institutions which a free people have established.

What results are High Schools adapted to accomplish?

The immediate results which our secondary schools are fitted to produce are two, the communication of general knowledge, and the cultivation of the reflective faculties. The elementary products of the mind have for their objects the simple existence of things. By the term things, is here meant whatever may be the object of consciousness material objects-language and mental

states.

It will be at once seen that elementary knowledge is valuable only as it may become the occasion of general knowledge, or of that activity of the mind which develops the powers of observation and the powers which represent to us our past mental states.

Simple elementary knowledge as an end has no practical value. If we had no power of connecting the facts

we observe with what is likely to be true in all cases, we should be deprived of all foresight, and future events would never become the objects of our thoughts. The proper functions of the High School is not to teach technical knowledge, nor to train its members directly for any of the professions or occupations of practical life. is good policy for a country or state to provide schools for the accomplishment of these ends. But it is not good policy for the student to enter upon their courses of study until he can bring to them a liberal training of his faculties. At this point we are now in danger of making serious mistakes in forming our ideas of what the public schools should accomplish for the children, before their activities are narrowed to the pursuits of common life. If we direct the eyes and hands of the youth from the first to occupations and trades, their minds like their bodies will become mere machines. Labor of every kind, to be economical and result in a right development, must be produced and directed by intelligence. To pursue a trade simply as a trade will have a tendency to blot out the differences that should exist between the man and the animal, and leave the former to be moved by the same principle of action as the latter, without the inclination or ability to make an intelligent progress. John Stuart Mill said, in his inaugural address, "That men are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or manufacturers, and if you make them sensible men they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers and physicians." "What professional men should carry away with them from the University is not professional knowledge, but that which should direct the use of professional knowledge, and bring the light of general culture to illuminate the technicalities of any special

pursuit." "Education makes a man a more intelligent shoemaker, if that be his occupation, not by teaching him how to make shoes, but by the mental strength it gives and the habits it impresses."

The public High Schools will of necessity, and will properly, confine their efforts to the cultivation of general intelligence, and that philosophic spirit which will bring the youth of the country to their particular pursuits in life with strong minds and good hearts. In doing this with all that is implied in it, they will accomplish enough

for they will produce an education which will prevent a man from being lost in his business. They will furnish him with a knowledge of principles which will be a source of endless progress in all the affairs of practical life. They will prevent him from placing a higher value on the means of living than on the life itself. No greater or more disastrous fallacy can effect the judgments of men than the .one which leads them to believe that the best way to train the young into skillful laborers of any kind is by putting them at once to labor. The sure effect of narrowing their experiences to the formalities of any occupation, will be to deprive them of the power of discovering and using the general principles upon which the intelligent pursuits of an occupation or profession depends. A liberal education has always been considered necessary to a respectable position in the professions, but unnecessary to success in the manual occupations of life.

Young people intending to go into business, as it is called, frequently leave school before their courses of study are completed, believing that the abstractions of science and the refinements of literature have no appropriate place among the acquisitions of a business man.

The experiences of intelligent business men are lead

ing them to change their opinion, and now they are choosing the graduates of the High School and the Colleges rather than the uneducated for the business capacity which a generous culture is adapted to produce. Secondary instruction, they find, is as necessary to guide the hands to successful physical as it is to guide the faculties to successful mental labor.

A knowledge of general principles and of the best means for the accomplishment of desired ends, holds the same relation to success in business as it does to success in the prosecution of any one of the learned professions.

The artisan as well as the artist, the business man as well as the professional, the private citizen as well as the law maker, must be lifted above the mere mechanical operations of their work by a knowledge of causes, and by skill in the application of principles, or their activity will be like the going round of the wheels of a mill, not being directed by foresight nor urged on by the vision of final results.

This leads me to say a few words concerning the value to practical men of some of the branches of study presented in the secondary school.

The value of a branch of learning depends upon two things: first, upon the relation the knowledge gained by its study holds to other knowledge, and second, upon its utility as a means of mental discipline.

There is a strange controversy going on among educators of the present day on the question whether secondary education should take on a literary or a scientific character. The dispute is carried on more by a reference to individual experiences than to any general principle, and so will end in a wrangle of words without illuminating any doctrine or furnishing a guide to any practice.

Let it end in that way ·

the result of the dispute cannot be of much consequence, for it is well known by every successful thinker on the subject that the study of literature and of science should never be separated in any complete course of instruction. A scientific education prepares the mind to think with certainty, and a literary education enables the mind to express its thoughts with propriety. Science is general knowledge of things. Literature is a knowledge of language considered to be signs of knowledge. There is a science of language; it directs our attention to those forms and arrangements of words by the use of which they are constructed into propositions, and to those styles of discourse best adapted to express our mental states. At first the young pupil will be set to observing things and in associating his acquired ideas with their proper signs. This he will do under the topic, Language Lessons. Later in his course, and by a natural process, the mind of the learner will turn to the construction of the language he has before employed, and will make the construction the exclusive object of thought. This he will do under the scientific topic called Grammar. Later still he will turn his attention to the right use of figurative langnage, and to the properties of style, which every author stamps upon his own speech and which are expressions of himself and his times. Now he studies the rhetoric of language and gains a knowledge of those general principles that guide to its right use. Combining his knowledge of the facts of language with his knowledge of the universal principles that regulate its construction and use, he will be prepared to direct his attention to its literature and learn from it what the past has contributed to human wisdom and human progress. Such a study must pro