harshness of compulsory education we have sometimes made school work too easy, so in outgrowing corporal punishment we have sometimes made school discipline too slack. Mr. Dooley, you remember, describes a scene at a Kindergarten in which one child is pulling another's hair, while the teacher observes that the child whose hair is pulled is learning patience, and the child who is pulling the hair is discovering the futility of human endeavor. There is, however, a reasonable theory somewhere; and, at the risk of being commonplace, I am going to say what seems reasonable to me, and what, so far as my experience goes, has brought the best result. No school or college discipline can be perfect; but school and college discipline become more nearly perfect according as the teachers possess, beside strong character, unquestioned sympathy with young people and unquestioned integrity. When I say "unquestioned," I imply tact, cour

tesy, and possibly humor; for without at least the first of these qualities no sympathy can be unquestioned, and without the others some sympathy misses fire. Tact, courtesy, and a sense of humor are in most of us intermittent, and hence some of our failures. Men may be able, upright, and genuinely sympathetic, yet quite unable to make young people know their sympathy or even feel their uprightness, except on long acquaintance. Such men are, among young people, ineffective. A just teacher may be hated and an unjust teacher loved, if the just man cannot show sympathy at short notice and the unjust man cannot help showing it.

The foundation of school discipline should be laid by parents; for they can best lead children to expect sympathy and straightforwardness in older people. One of the surprises to a disciplinary officer in a school or a college is the want of confidence between many

boys and their parents. Instead of being the first persons to whom boys turn in times of trouble, parents are frequently the last, not necessarily because they are unjust or cold-hearted (they may be quite the reverse) but because they have never succeeded in showing their children that kind of sympathy to which a son naturally turns. No one who deals with boys at school or college can fail to see how much should be forgiven to those boys whose fathers have never stood toward them in a relation of straightforward affection.

In teachers of boys ready sympathy and absolute straightforwardness are so important, that I, for one, place them above high scholarship. That brilliant writer, Professor Münsterberg, justly deplores the lack of learning in American teachers. If all learned men had the vigor and the magnetism of Professor Münsterberg, his complaint would have even more weight than it has now. The

difficulty is that, though no teacher can have learned too much, yet, the love of learning may unfit a man to be a teacher of boys. A scholar who becomes absorbed in a scholar's life may lose patience with immature minds; and his naturally human feeling toward men may be weakened by his interest in books. In human relations he may fail to rub off what Dryden would call the "rust that he contracted while laying in his stock of learning," and may take his Doctor's degree remote from men and still more remote from boys. The modern schoolmaster's work is vastly more than having or even imparting knowledge. It penetrates and compasses the boy's whole living; it cannot be done without enthusiastic drudgery in small and unlearned things, without a devotion to commonplace details, such as characterizes a good mother's care of a young child, without what a man of remote learning regards as wasting time, without a de

liberate putting into the background of what people call the development and expansion of one's own self. "I want," young teachers write, "a larger field for my own growth and my own career." Yet often, as Dr. Holmes would say, in the place they already occupy they "rattle round;" they fail to know their farreaching power where they are for good or for evil, and to know that out of the very things they are shirking now come the growth and the career. As I see every year the number of Doctors of Philosophy who are let loose upon the world, and as I know that there are not nearly enough college places for them all, I fear that the time will come when we shall be in danger not of overeducated but of over-learned schoolmasters, when we shall overestimate the higher learning in the men who teach our boys. The influence of a schoolmaster for good or for evil cannot be escaped. The more learning the better, if in his