ability and honesty to frame just ones. emphasized this thought in the following:

President Roosevelt last Friday

Oh, my fellow-countrymen, as we face these infinitely difficult problems, let us ever keep in mind that tho we need the highest qualities of intellect in order to work out practical schemes for their solution, yet we need a thousand times more what counts for many, many times as much as intellect we need character. Character, that compound of honesty and courage and common sense, will avail us more in the long run than any brilliancy on the stump, or any adverse legislative means and methods. The brilliancy is good. We need the intellect; we need the best intellect we can get; we need the best intelligence; we need more still - character.

As someone has wisely said, we can execute the anarchist, but that does not affect anarchy. When the anarchist believes that he is benefiting the human race by his act, then his execution becomes to him and his fellows martyrdom, and their cause seems sanctified. It is our duty to strike at the spirit of the movement. Can we not, and must we not, inculcate reverence for the great laws which say: "Thou shalt not kill," and "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself"? And can we not bear in upon young minds that these rules have no exceptions?

And now, fellow-teachers, out of your days for rest and recreation you have eagerly offered this week on the altar of your vocation. We shall enjoy the friendly greetings, the opportunities of renewing those dearest friendships that were formed in days of yore, and learn of the new ideas on education which are to be analyzed and tested.

We know from the words of welcome we have heard that temptations of pleasure will assail us this week from all sides; and already, like Ulysses, we feel the need of being bound to our posts; but still, thru all, we know we are here in the interests of a sacred and solemn calling, and I trust that the labors of this week may be as productive of good to the great cause of education as they must be replete with pleasure to those who participate in them.

THEODORE B. NOSS, PRINCIPAL OF STATE NORMAL SCHOOL, CALIFORNIA, PA. Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:

The welcome extended by these distinguished gentlemen has been cordial, but not beyond our expectations. By us eastern folks everything is expected to be done in a large and generous way in the West.

We are glad to meet again in your state. Minnesota is a state of magnificent opportunities. Her size is nearly double that of the so-called. Empire State, and is equal to six of the average Atlantic states and to sixty of the smallest. Your state is central in the continent of North America, and the streams which flow from your ten thousand lakes reach the Atlantic ocean through Hudson's Bay on the north, the St. Lawrence on the east, and the Gulf of Mexico on the south. These geographical facts are but suggestive of your position and influence in those realms of

industry and thought which make a people truly great. In some lines of activity you have distanced all your competitors. Your vast agricultural developments and your mighty industries excite the admiration of the world, and your educational enterprise has kept pace with your material progress. Taken all in all, it seems to me that we find in Minnesota a true type of the best things in American life.

It is well, therefore, that this great army of teachers should meet here. We shall find a tonic in your atmosphere, and shall catch something of your enthusiasm. There are many good things to be gained by holding such a convention here. I will refer to but one, and that is the help that may and should come to the most conservative of all professions from contact with your progressive spirit.

It was a fancy of my youth that for an eastern man to achieve greatness a western experience is necessary. This has been illustrated in the lives of many, and of some here present. Only four days ago I witnessed a scene which I shall not soon forget. Sixty or seventy thousand people covered the hill-slope in Schenley Park, Pittsburg, to hear a man discuss questions of national and international importance. He used no notes, and spoke with great vigor, faultless diction, and with perfect candor and freedom. Who was this man? He is an eastern man with some western experience and a great deal of western progressiveness. He is the youngest man who has ever sat in the presidential chair, and a man whom the republican state convention of Minnesota a few days ago nominated for the presidential chair again in 1904-Theodore Roosevelt.

I am told that your state was settled, and her career determined, by New England Yankees, whose natural caution was out here transmuted into enterprise, whose sagacity became audacity, and who added to their. reverence for the old an eager quest for the new. The world knows the result. The cause of education owes a debt to the bold pioneers of the West and Northwest.

No class of workers, whether artists or artisans, have more need of being spurred forward than teachers. The gravities of our calling all tend toward the dead level of conservatism. Spain has been condemned for attempting to force an eighteenth-century civilization upon a twentiethcentury people. I fear this mistake is being made continually in the name of education. Our faces are ever turned toward the past. We have memory, but no imagination. If the schoolmasters of the land were left to themselves, I fear they would degenerate.

Mr. President, our emancipation from old methods and trivial aims must come from outside our own calling. Much of the matter that fills our text-books is obsolete in real life. When we convince the teacher that what he teaches, with almost religious zeal, is practically useless, he takes refuge in what he calls "discipline," and there he is impregnable. In any calling, except teaching, discipline consists in doing something.

worth doing, and doing it well; but the schoolmaster holds fast the traditions of the elders and contends for the faith once delivered to the saints just as it was once delivered to the saints. Thus, the forces of education are well organized for defense, but not for attack or exploration.

Of course, Mr. President, I speak of the tendencies or the gravities of our calling, and not of those educators who fight successfully against these tendencies, nor even of those who fail in the fight. As a class, our faces are set toward the past, and yet it is not the past but the future with which we shall have to deal. The old educational folly continues of putting new wine into old bottles and new cloth on to an old garment. We shackle the forces of education with the worn-out forms and theories of the Middle Ages. We belong to a profession that is more bent upon talking over the fruits of victory than upon risking life or limb to win new victories. It is not much to our taste to blaze a new road thru the forest; we would rather expose the defects of the road after it has been opened by other hands. In short, we don't "cut much of a figure" as pioneers. In the main, we follow custom, and of all despotisms the most inexorable is custom. Were it not for modern British law in India, widows would still be burned by thousands upon the funeral pyres of their husbands. As it is, all girls are required to marry at from ten to twelve years of age, and tens of thousands of these, left widows, many of them less than twelve years of age, are doomed to a life of contempt and misery that is worse than death. When educated Hindus are asked why such practices are continued, their stereotyped reply is "It is our custom." Conservatism holds India and China in much the same condition century after century. National character depends less upon geographical position than upon an attitude of mind toward progress. Japan, in the East, advances; Spain, in the West, retrogrades.

At the close of the Napoleonic wars the kingdom of Prussia was in the depths of weakness and humiliaton, but within the lifetime of one man, say von Moltke or Bismarck, Prussia traveled all the way from Jena to Sedan. Within sixty years, she rose thru common sense in common schools to be one of the first powers of Europe, and to make her soldiers feared and her scholars admired the world over. She abolished illiteracy within two generations. How was all this achieved? By a teachable spirit and a willingness to adopt new methods in elementary education. Much as Bismarck did for Prussia, Pestalozzi, tho not a German, did

more.

Now you, in these happy new states of the West, where the sway of custom is less felt, can more easily advance from one stage of progress to another, but with us in the East it is a more serious thing to do something in education that our fathers did not do. We judge every educational method by the standard of long usage. Whatever has been for a long time is right.

But, Mr. President, altho progress may be slow, it is sure. The forces that make for improvement will prevail. Some of you will recall the excellent painting by William Morris Hunt in the Philadelphia Academy of Arts, “The Flight of Night." As a female figure in a chariot bears the light of civilization into the realms of superstition and error, a manslave, holding in his hand an inverted torch, vainly essays to check the speed of the plunging steeds. The educators who play the rôle of the man-slave in Hunt's picture are those who protest against innovations and fads.

I have yet to know of any educator to whom we owe a lasting debt who, with tongue or pen, ridiculed fads. Opposition to the new is a mark of self-complacency and conceit. Where there is due knowledge of our present limitations and great deficiencies, there is always a hospitable feeling toward any sincere effort to improve. Concerning innovations the advice of Gamaliel is always timely: "Refrain from these men and let them alone, for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to naught, but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it." Education needs the forward look. The world's great benefactors are those who cherished and pursued their ideals thru the fad stage. It requires more courage to face the ridicule of opinionated conservatives with new truth than to follow a leader into battle. The heroism of Columbus is not shown so much in driving his ships into unknown seas and quelling a mutiny among his sailors as in maintaining before the philosophers of Salamanca that the earth is round. The truest and best things in education are the things once der ounced as fads, even by good people. The best work of Pestalozzi, Froebel, Horace Mann, and Colonel Parker was called a fad. The new education, with all such features as the word-method in reading, manual training, laboratory methods in science and literature, child study, etc., was called a fad. When Paul the apostle once visited the church at Ephesus he brought to the church an entirely new idea. He said to the brethren, "Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?” Their honest and ingenuous reply was, "We have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost." If some of our present-day educators had been there, they would have replied: "We fear the Holy Ghost is a fad."

In short, all that we now care for or cling to in education was once a fad. Even the three R's, which are now valued far above their deserts, were an innovation and a fad but a century or so ago. The fact is, a fad, like the tail of a tadpole, seems to be a necessary stage in all progress. Every reform that has blessed mankind has had to fight with fad-hunters for its existence. Within the memory of some here present the use of anæsthetics to relieve a patient of agony during a surgical operation was denounced as a sin. Within my own memory the abolition of human slavery was denounced as fanaticism. The business of these fad-hunters, like Herod of old, is to slaughter infant reforms by the wholesale. Sad

will be the day when there are no fads. That day will mark the beginning of the end. If the thousands of teachers who assemble here catch something of the progressive spirit that has made the West and Northwest what they are, our meeting will not have been in vain.

In the Boston Public Library I have recently seen for the first time Sargent's great mural painting of "The Prophets." The hall, whose sides and ceiling are to be covered with this work, is perhaps one hundred feet long. The work already done, altho justly celebrated, is but a beginning. It covers merely the end and not more than ten feet of the sides and ceiling. Most of the prophets are dejected and in despair. Three of them, however, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, point hopefully to the wall yet to be painted, where, doubtless, will appear the triumphs of Christianity. In education, as in this masterpiece of art, the best work is yet to be done. Education should be dominated by the future, not by the past. What prophets shall we follow-those who worship the past or those who hail the future?

Gladly and expectantly do we come to Minneapolis for this convention, believing that to breathe your air and see your progress will inspire courage and turn our eyes toward the future into which we must go and for which we should prepare.

PRESIDENT JOSEPH SWAIN, SWARTHMORE COLLEGE, SWARTHMORE, PA.

As one

Out on Puget Sound, looking to the eastward, one sees a beautiful mountain in the form of a cone. Its base is covered with a dark pine forest and its top is wrapped in perennial snow. The people of Seattle call this mountain Mt. Ranier; those of Tacoma, Mt. Tacoma. travels about the Sound region one can tell where the person with whom he is talking lives by the name he gives the mountain. By a similar course of reasoning I realize this meeting is held in Minneapolis, not in St. Paul.

I am reminded of a story told of Simon Newcomb. He was attending a wedding. The numerous guests were greeting the bride and groom. The great philosopher stood in a corner of the room, silent. He was asked why he did not greet the newly married pair. In a true scientific spirit he responded: "I have no new facts to communicate." At this stage of the program I am placed in the condition of Mr. Newcomb. I have no new facts to communicate. Following the good example of our Methodist brethren, I vote to say "amen" to the responses which have been so heartily given to the cordial welcome which the National Educational Association has received today in Minneapolis. I am sure also that all the teachers sympathize with the words of George Eliot, "I like to be loved, and I like to be told that I am loved." The teachers like to be welcome, and they like to be told that they are wel

come.