It has been introduced into the schools of Massachusetts because, as the chairman of the drawing committee in Boston, Mr. Charles C. Perkins, says:

At least three-quarters of the children in our public schools are destined to get their living in industries which demand a knowledge of drawing. It has a bearing upon the manufacturing interests of the community, and these can only be vivified by the cultivation of public taste. As a matter of material gain, this question of uniting art and industry is now looked upon all the world over as paramount.

A French commission appointed to examine matters pertaining to industrial success reported, in the year 1863, as follows:

Among all the branches of instruction which, in different degrees, from the highest to the lowest grade, can contribute to the technical education of either sex, drawing, in all its forms and applications, has been unanimously regarded as the one it is most important to make common.

I have already quoted the opinion of the French commission of 1876, that "France ought to devote herself to the study of drawing and reinvigorate her productive powers at the very sources of art."

Drawing is now generally regarded as essentially educational, taught, as it is at present, as a workthing, not as a plaything. Let it be stated that without a knowledge of drawing skilled labor in industry is impossible, and, if we remember that what this country stands most in need of to-day is skilled labor, I think that argument on behalf of drawing is unnecessary.

To make it both proficient and popular, it must be taught by the regular teachers in the public schools, in every grade of them, to all pupils. This involves the previous instruction of those teachers, and by this action the cost of introducing the subject into the scheme of instruction is reduced to a minimum. We know this to be practicable, because it has already been done in Boston and in a large number of the most important cities in the United States.

That the public is interested in the matter is also unquestioned. At the last public exhibition of the drawings made in all the public schools of Boston, by actual count at the doors, more than thirty thousand persons attended the exhibition in three days.

The regular teachers of the public schools there are now teaching drawing more systematically than it is being taught in all grades of schools in any European country, and are, moreover, producing more originality and executive power in their pupils; and I have good reason for believing that wherever the subject has been equally systematically taught the results have been equally good.

There are, of course, more ways than that of cultivating public taste and thereby elevating the industries of the country. But as this subject of drawing lies at the foundation of all technical education, and as it can be easily and efficiently taught at a very nominal expense, this seems the place to begin the introduction of a practical element into public education. Judging from the experience of other countries, as

well as the result of what has already been done in this, it seems to me that the following plan is the most economical and successful method by which technical education may be promoted in this country:

1. That industrial drawing should be taught in the public day schools as an elementary part of all general education, and that industrial drawing and modelling be taught in free evening classes to persons of both sexes who are not in attendance at day schools. To become general, this should be accomplished by an act of the legislature of each State.

2. That a State normal art school for the training of teachers and designers be established in each capital city or other convenient centre, in connection with an industrial museum and art gallery.

3. That the teachers of drawing in normal schools, evening drawing classes, or schools of art, or persons acting as supervisors of drawing in public schools, be required to possess the certificate of qualification to act as teachers awarded, upon examination, by the State normal art schools.

4. That the National Government establish or assist in the establishment of a great technical school of industrial art at Washington.

Concerning these proposals, I have only time to summarize briefly. They are not mere theories to meet an imaginary evil; similar agencies have all been successfully carried out in other countries, and have met with success in correcting great national deficiencies.

It may be objected that there are not in the country sufficient works of art to fill museums and galleries; but to this I would reply that, for a very little money, reproductions of the finest works in the British Museum, the South Kensington Museum, the Louvre, and other great national collections can be obtained, and are as good for the purposes of instruction as the originals.

Besides this, public museums and galleries are like a vacuum-they fill themselves. The empty rooms of a museum and the bare walls of a picture gallery have an attractiveness and cohesiveness about them for works of art in the possession of private persons, that are simply irresistible. The law of gravitation applied to choice works of art takes them in a straight line into public galleries, when such galleries exist. The owners of such works try, in the first place, to soothe their sense of possession by loaning their treasures to the public; then they make a clean breast of it, and change the loan into a donation or bequest. That is how the South Kensington Museum and the Louvre have been made the glories of the earth: by a little knowledge of human nature on the part of their projectors.

The proposal to establish normal art schools is not so formidable as it may at first sight appear. They may form a part of one central art school, which every State ought to have, but it should be recognized that we cannot get the most efficient teachers without normal training, whatever may be the manual skill of the art students who offer them

selves as teachers. The French people found this out in 1865. When the minister for public instruction required that all applicants for teacherships of drawing in the city of Paris should be examined before appointment, 193 applicants offered themselves, and out of these only 27 passed in the artistic and 13 in the geometrical subjects. In the next year, out of 182 candidates who were examined, only 30 were passed. Had it not been for this test, all of these unfit persons might have been appointed. That was sufficient evidence of the need for a normal school, and one was established by the government the same year at Cluny.

It has been well said that teachers are not a natural product, nor has private enterprise yet undertaken to produce them; so that, if they are to be made, the State must provide them, here as elsewhere.

To establish good normal instruction is also by far the most economical way of diffusing sound education, because by it the whole people are reached in time and in the way that the best experience suggests. Through the normal school may be regulated to a nicety the public education of a State.

Concerning the proposal to establish a central school of industrial art at Washington, one department of which might be for instruction in fine art exclusively, this appears to me to be essential as an example for the whole country and in order that the treasure houses of material now existing here for such a purpose may be utilized and made fruitful. It may be necessary for the protection of this nation that the sword be kept bright at West Point, but it would conduce as much to its greatness and its glory if the ploughshare were made radiant at Washington.

I cannot close without emphasizing, with the strongest language I can command, that, as educators and political economists, we must look out for the interests of the industrial classes more than has hitherto been done.

In the conflict that is imminent between aggregated capital on the one hand and ignorant, unskilled labor on the other, lurks the greatest danger to our whole social and political organism.

It is the province of public education to mitigate, if not entirely remove, these dangers. In view, therefore, of these vast annual expenditures for public instruction, I warn you against ignoring the interests of the industrial classes in education. To the public schools all classes should be taught to look as the very bulwark of their salvation; while to the state these schools should be what embankments are to the Dutch, or what its fleet is to the English people.

A miserable three-R's education is neither the one nor the other in this half of the nineteenth century. In this great industrial battle let us give honor to whom honor is due. The present mayor of Boston recently told the boys confined in the reform school of the city that, if he could bring it about, every one of them should be taught some trade while in the school, by which to earn an honest living when he left it. As part

of this education, every boy learns industrial drawing, and the same is true of the State Reform School boys at Westboro'. This is done for economical reasons, not for show.

All honor be to the pioneer city and State that have done so much. This, and all the work done for the same reason by people who are more farseeing than mere noisy politicians, has been done under fire.

Only a few days since, a leading journal in Boston, referring to the geometrical drawing taught in the schools, ignorant of the fact that geometry is the common basis of both fine and industrial art, asked in astonishment, What is the use of this trash? Yet the most distinguished American art critic has deliberately written that over the door of every workshop in the land should be printed the old Greek inscription "None but the skilled in geometry can enter here."

In conclusion, I feel that I have trespassed too much and too long on your indulgence and forbearance, and that my subject has been too much for me, whatever it may have been for you.

If, however, the devotion of a lifetime to this subject has given me the right to speak, if my transatlantic origin and education have enabled me to see oursel as ithers see us," then it has not been altogether an unqualified audacity that has brought me here to night.

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This, therefore, must be my apology, that though many of my stiff necked fellow countrymen come to this country to idle away their time and then go home to find fault with its institutions, I have come here to work, and to stay, and to do my share in improving them. And here, in my own home and in the home of my children, I have only asserted the Anglo-Saxon right of free speech, which as an American citizen I feel that I shall never forfeit, because it is the common inheritance of the English speaking race.

The PRESIDENT. The hour of adjournment having arrived, I am pleased to announce that the regular session will take place to-morrow morning at 9.30, when the meeting will open with remarks from Dr. John D. Philbrick, of Boston, on "Education at the Paris Exposition." I also have the honor to announce that to-morrow at half past twelve o'clock it will be the pleasure of the Department to return the visit of the President of the United States which he has so kindly paid us to-night. The Department stands adjourned until to-morrow at the usual hour.

FIFTH SESSION-THURSDAY MORNING.

The Department met at 9.30 A. M.

WASHINGTON, February 6, 1879.

Mr. J. O. WILSON offered the following preambles and resolution: Whereas this convention of State and city superintendents of schools recognizes the necessity of industrial education in the public schools of America; and

Whereas, if a part of the time now given to writing in our day schools were devoted to drawing, the writing would be better and the power of drawing be a clear gain: Therefore

Resolved, That industrial drawing-consisting of geometrical drawing, free hand drawing, and elementary design—being now regarded as the common basis of technical education, should be taught in the public day schools as an elementary part of all general education; and that industrial drawing, modelling, and applied design for trades and manufactures should be taught to persons of both sexes in free evening classes for those who are not in attendance on the day schools.

The preambles and resolution were referred to the committee on resolutions.

On motion, it was agreed that the matter of a programme of exercises for the Department of Superintendence in connection with the meeting of the National Education Association at Philadelphia, in July next, be referred to the officers of the Department to act as they shall deem best.

Hon. GEORGE J. LUCKEY, superintendent of schools, Pittsburgh, Pa., addressed the convention respecting Professor Smith's paper. Himself a firm believer in industrial education, he agreed with Professor Smith in the main; but if Professor Smith would have us believe that the public schools in this country are on trial and are being condemned by the press and the public because their curriculum does not include industrial training, he would have to dissent entirely. On the contrary, he believed that the schools have never been so criticised and opposed as since the effort to introduce industrial training into their curriculum has begun. He could say positively that this was the case in Pittsburgh. In fact the superintendents and teachers of the country are in advance of public sentiment. He was not afraid of the result, nor did he apprehend any danger to the public school system from any such clamor. Professor Smith, he thought, was wrong in presenting this one thing as everything; though, being a specialist, it was only natural. The elocutionist, the teacher of writing, the teacher of music, undoubtedly think their specialties as important as Professor Smith does

his.

Hon. M. A. NEWELL, superintendent of public instruction for the State of Maryland, agreed with Mr. Luckey that the people are not eager for industrial training; he thought them opposed to instruction in drawing. It is quite evident that there is some public discontent with the public schools, but the public as evidently does not know what change will be best for it. He was quite in favor of Mr. Wilson's motion.

Dr. HANCOCK believed that industrial training would, when affairs would admit, become a component part of the public school course. He thought the most dangerous tendency in the minds of many is to underestimate the value of a good general education; this is far more valuable than any partial course, whether industrial or not.

Dr. PHILBRICK said that it was by his efforts that Professor Smith had been invited to his present duty in Massachusetts. He therefore