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of travel they have been reading at home. With a little help from the teacher, this exercise can be made extremely interesting and profitable.

One of the most practical ways of interesting the class, under the head of life is derived from the judicious use of pictures. Objects are, of course, far better for illustrations than pictures, but pictures can be more extensively employed, and are more easily obtained. Pictures convey to the young more correct ideas than words, stimulate the imagination and convey correct information in a short time. Only a few pictures should be shown at one time, and these should always bear upon the topics under consideration. Available pictures can be found in the various geographies, juvenile books of science and travel, adult books of travel, illustrated papers and magazines. These pictures are mostly wood-cuts, and while answering every purpose with small children, are inferior in beauty and accuracy to photographs. Stereoscopic pictures which can now be purchased from sixty cents to three dollars per dozen, can be used with advantage in the school-room, where the stereoscope should be no stranger. An album of a trip round the world, giving one hundred pictures of characteristic cities, is sold for fifty cents. Several teachers in Boston are making picture-albums of unmounted photographs, for use in the school-room. Unmounted photographs suitable for this use are sold by the Soule Photograph Co., Boston, at one dollar and a half to three dollars per dozen. The most perfect pictures for school purposes are of course photographic slides, thrown upon the screen by an oxy-hydrogen lantern, or solar camera. These pictures can be enlarged in the school-room to ten feet square, and can thus be seen by every pupil at the same time. After examining

several stereopticons, cameras, heliostats, porte-lumieres, etc., preference is given to the "School Solar Camera," invented and manufactured by Prof. Charles F. Adams, Normal School, Worcester, Mass., because it is so simple, so strong, and produces with so little trouble such grand pictures.

The topical method would not be considered a success if it did not stand so well the test of hard examinations. The united testimony of all the teachers who have tried teaching geography by topics, is strongly in its favor.

[One of the chief characteristics of this lecture consisted in the elaborate illustrations which accompanied it. One end of the great tabernacle was completely covered with various charts, maps, black-board illustrations, and pictures. Several tables were covered with hundreds of test-papers, books on geography, objects from the different countries, and numerous smaller illustrations pertaining to the teaching of geography, all of which were examined by the audience at the close of the lecture. ED.]

V.

SPECIAL PREPARATION FOR CITIZENSHIP.

By G. H. MARTIN, AGENT OF MASS. BD. OF EDUCATION.

The men who settled New England came here not to get a living, but to found a state. All their early actions are consistent with this purpose and are to be interpreted by it. They were men of rare discernment, men who knew the kind of stuff that states should be built of; and they shaped their early legislation to prepare the stuff, not for the sake of the stuff, but for the sake of the state.

So they demanded schools. Their state was to be the

But the Puritan church It was born of discussion.

In this spirit they legislated for the children. They required that children should be taught to work, not because industry was good for the child, but because an industrious child was a squared stone fit to be builded into the edifice they were rearing. Far-seeing men were these. bulwark of a Puritan church. was a child of the intellect. From its earliest days it had been forced to maintain by argument its right to exist. Its enemies had not only the advantage of wealth and social distinction; they had almost a monopoly of learning and culture. They had the great schools and the universities. Puritanism, too, was getting into politics, and no shallow politics either, but great deeps whose fountains seemed to be breaking What the outcome of it all might be, who could tell?

up.

But one thing was certain: the infant state in the new world would need men who could think as well as work; robust thinkers too. This was what they set up schools for and founded colleges. Theirs was not a paternal government. The paternal idea is not found in the infancy. of a state. They did not educate to relieve the parent nor to help the child, but to prepare a generation which should be capable of maintaining the state and defending the church, whatever exigencies might arise.

Their idea of education coincided exactly with John Stuart Mill's definition: "The culture which each generation purposely gives to those who are to be its successors in order to qualify them for at least keeping up, and if possible for raising, the level of improvement which has been attained."

Preparation for citizenship, then, is the true function of the public schools; not preparation for trades, or professions, or business. This forces us to ask, What are the - qualifications of a good citizen?

First of all, he must be a good man, industrious and frugal, that he may be self-supporting; honest, that he may merit the public confidence; temperate, that he may not weaken himself or his children. He must not debauch the community by vice, nor disturb its peace by crime. So thought the fathers when, in Massachusetts, they made that famous provision for moral instruction ; not because it was the business of the state to make men moral, but because, as they said, these virtues are the basis on which a republican constitution is founded.

Second, the good citizen must be an intelligent man. He should bring to the affairs of life a mind stored with the fruit of a wide observation of men and things. He should have a good judgment, be quick to discern

things that differ, have power to grasp general principles and to apply them to the practical needs of life. All this gives breadth, and lifts above prejudice and pettiness.

Third, he must be a skillful workman. The prosperity of the country and the perpetuity of its institutions demands the full development of all its material resources. This calls for skill. Business enterprises cannot be carried to success by amateurs. The wealth that is in the soil and in the mines will yield itself fully only to experts. The work of the school tends to furnish these qualifications, to make good men, well-trained and intelligent. The sciences, the literature, the mathematics, each in its way and all together are furnishing this general preparation for citizenship. We need not less, but more of all these, furnished to more children and for a longer time.

A good citizen must be all that we have said.

But a There

man may be all these and be a very poor citizen. are thousands of men to-day, good husbands and fathers, great scholars, shrewd, energetic business men, who would let, nay are letting the state drift toward shipwreck. The ship of state is nothing to them compared with their own dug-outs. Some are too nice, some are too busy to meddle with politics. So, by and by, in the lurid glare of sacked and burning buildings, with barricaded streets and the rattle of musketry and the howls of an infuriated mob, politics meddles with them.

It is evident that we have not enumerated all the qualities of the good citizen. The school must do some special work over and above the general work of which we have spoken. The fathers saw this. Very early they said that the children should be taught the English tongue and a knowledge of the capital laws. Here was embodied both the general and the special preparation for citizenship.

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