The other day, in southern Indiana, I met a successful college graduate, who said to me that he would rather his boy should have a good education and a good character than to have a million dollars. This is an old truth, but it was so evidently the prayer of the father's heart that his boy should be a trained; cultured, good man above everything else, that his way of expressing his thought clung to me. This is the prayer

of the fathers and mothers who send their boys and girls to the schools which this Association represents today. The two things above everything else which this Association stands for are training and character.

When Booker T. Washington wishes to lift the colored people from the shackles that bind them, he offers them education. When Rockefeller, Stanford, and Carnegie wish to use their millions for the benefit of the race, they endow colleges and build libraries. When the states in this Mississippi valley wish to make strong the civilization of this new land, they build educational systems extending from the district school to the university. When Cecil Rhodes undertakes to promote the peace of the world and extend and perpetuate the ideas and ideals of his country, he gives millions for the education of young men. A president of a denominational school recently said in a pamphlet addressed to his church, "If you would save the church you must keep up your colleges, for the church needs and must have educated leaders for her work." This one thing upon which church and state and mankind are united is the necessity of education for national and individual development and prosperity.

To intellectual training must be added character. If the stars and stripes of our beloved country shall continue to float over a nation of freemen, to knowledge and power must be added conscience and charac

ter.

"Character is reiterated choice between good and evil." If day after day, as you come to the parting of the ways between the good and the bad, you choose the good, then you have a good character; if the bad, then you have a bad character. It was Maria Mitchell who said: "If I were sure of the right way, I could find the strength to follow it." This is the essence of character. The beauty of it is that good character can be attained by all. We differ in physical strength. We differ in intellectual power. We differ in spiritual insight. But to seek to know and to do the right is equally open to all.

I will probably not be able to prove this proposition to you, that success or failure is more a question of character than of anything else. It is like the proof of the existence of God. It does not come by a syllogism. When the idea of His existence once takes hold of the mind, whether it comes as an original intuition, a revelation, or like the nebular hypothesis, everything in nature is a witness to its truth; so when you come to a realization of the importance of good character in a truly successful life, you see its illustration in the life of every man and woman

whom you admire and love. You can read it in the life of your friends and associates, you can read it in the lives of the greatest men the world has produced. It is confined to no walk of life.

If we should make a list of the most successful men of the world

today, certainly Abraham Lincoln would be one. An analysis of his career will show that the greatest element in his success lay in his high character. This is illustrated by an incident which I remember my mother told me when a boy. At a cabinet meeting Mr. Lincoln had read his great document, the Emancipation Proclamation. His cabinet members said: "Mr. President, the time has not come for that document to go out to the American people." But he had made a thoro study of the situation, and it presented itself to him in the light of a duty. He had thought over it day and night, and finally he resolved to do it. Thus, when the objection came up in the cabinet, he said, "I will issue that document, for I promised God I would." Having decided what his duty was, he did it. Force of character was the dominating element in his life.

So, fellow-teachers, as we gather here today from all parts of this great republic, accepting the gracious hospitality of this great state and city, we dedicate ourselves anew to the service of the people of this democratic land, to the end that the rising generation of all classes, rich and poor, weak and strong, may grow in knowledge, in power, and in character.

ADDRESSES

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

THE THREE H'S IN EDUCATION

W. M. BEARDSHEAR, PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATION, AMES, IOWA

The progress of education is akin to the evolution of thought in the history of the art of the Madonnas. The artist first placed the Madonna and the child in the consciousness of the Infinite, as suggested by a background of mist and cloud, thereby sharing largely the magnanimity and limitlessness of early myth, legend, and philosophy. Then came the Madonna as enthroned. The Virgin and the child were placed in the most costly enthronement known to history and to art. In the third period the Madonna is enskied, in which position motherhood and childhood were portrayed upon the limitless expanse of the heavens, environed by beauty of cloud and the profundity of the ethereal depths. Next, the Madonnas were portrayed in the out-of-doors, in some beautiful landscape, garden, or meadow, so that the matchless envelopment of the entire earth, generous and fragrant, formed a background for the expression of motherhood and the innocence of childhood. Finally, the Madonna and child were exhibited in the home, prefiguring the sanctities and dignities, emblematic of the fathomless relations of love. This is a befitting evolution of a noble life for a human being. The infinity and limitlessness of early folklore, the supremacy and royalty arising from the epoch of enthronement of Madonna and child in art, the enskyment of womanhood and childhood, the generous beauty and expanse of meadow and landscape, and the empicturing in the homes of earth the many mansions of heaven preparing thru the master-love of the truth--all these epochal meanings have enwrought, under the magnanimous influences of education, the primer of knowledge with which our youth is fed. By these we are coming to embody Buisson's definition of education in the International Congress of Education, at Chicago, in '93, and harmoniously build up the character of the child, "not by means of the three R's, but rather by means of the three H's-Head, Heart, and Hand-and make him fit for self-government, self-control, self-help: a living, thinking being."

THE H'S VERSUS THE R'S

The celebrated three R's reciprocate the commercial spirit that gave them birth. One trouble with our educational work today is that the three R's appeal more strongly to the average citizen than do the three H's, and a money-value, rather than a soul-value, of education is still dominant in the esteem of the masses. Many of the teaching profession have taken up their work for the little ready money there is in it, rather than from the love of learning and a love of life, with their ceaseless unfolding of wondrous possibilities. True education is not merely to give us material progress and supremacy. Everyone who does not know how to write his own love letters and business letters today, and read his own ballot, is in serious subjection to his fellow, but there are not enough of them living in America, illiterate as it is, to give remunerative employment on this technical ground of the three H's. The opening of mendingparlors gives better returns than the establishment of such a bureau of information. The three R's are for figures and dates that make full money drawers, large bank accounts, and too often scant heads and hearts. The three H's assume the stock values of the R's, and make for a perfected life and a just nation. The three R's study history and science in the light of Roger Ascham's precept "A small area well cultivated," almost solely for the earth of the area, and their highest outcome could be only a paid critic of new books or a salaried professor of belleslettres. The three H's take up history and science to discover what is true and false, to exalt the noble and dethrone the ignoble, to admire the beautiful and ignore the ugly. Their truest aim is to make an intelligent being still more intelligent. And their highest outcome is the perfection and supremacy of our humanity and the making of Bishop Wilson's "right reason and the will of God prevail in the world."

The hand is a twin with the brain. The dispositions, temperaments, habits, thought, and lives are written upon the human hand. There is a phrenology in the palms of the hands as well as in the contour of the skull. He that neglects the brains of his hands is as faulty as he that slights the brains of his skull. He who thinks he can't make anything or do some things that are reasonable is plunged into the inabilities of fear and inexperience that besmall the soul. One of the severest blights that can come into the mind of the child or man is the fear of certain inabilities. Fear is a Hercules with "don'ts" and a weakling in "I can's." A person with the brains of his hand uncultivated is incapacitated in a large measure for usefulness and enjoyment. Whatever our youth expect to do in future life, the educational worth of the culture of the hands is comparable with that of any other form of education. The intellectual imagination of the pupil is appealed to over and over in the books and elementary science, but thru the hand the constructive imagination, which is the most vital to the originality and individuality of the child, is still too largely ignored in education.

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT IN THE INDUSTRIAL PROFESSIONS

The education of the hand still has to struggle against the prejudice and vice of the head in past ages. Too many share the sentiment Matthew Arnold expressed in the preface to his Culture. He spoke of a really noble monument of munificence, in regard to one of our American universities, and concluded by stating as to its foundation, "yet seems to rest on a misconception of what culture really is, and to be calculated to produce miners, engineers, or architects, not sweetness and light." But by what philosophy, other than the rote of custom, are sweetness and light in education confined to the purely Hellenistic culture? Why cannot reason and the will of God prevail in the hand arts as well as in the classic arts? In fact, the new education of the hand is making reputable avenues to the completest development of life. The bias of the learned. professors has shut out a vast amount of sweetness from the old educa-. tion. The laboring professions have not yet caught up with the literary professions in the scope and efficiency of their culture. Their practical utilities, however, have induced new methods and infused fresh life into the so-called learned professions. They have disclosed the warp in the professions of literary culture of the past. The miner, the engineer, the agriculturalist, or the tradesman can be an embodiment of sweetness and light, and this is the ultimate goal of the widest education of the masses. We have educated some of them just enough to be restless and discontented. The need of the hour is a higher spirit of learning, not begotten by any hole-and-corner organization, but an outgrowth of the best there is in the human mind. A holy discontent is at the foundation of all real progress. How much does the well-directed culture of the hand differ in its noble elevation from that of the brain? It also has an inward activity, having for its characters "increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, and increased sympathy."

THE SUPREMACY OF THE HEART

Wholesome senti

Some belittle sentiment as a work of weakness. ment is stronger than intellectuality. The heart sees farther than the eye, feels more deeply than the hand, and understands more profoundly than the brain. The heart is the seer in the kingdom of life. It knows divine writ in sky, in field, in friend, and in God. The heart is the comrade of the hand, and the shekinah of the understanding. Half-hearted is half lost; whole-hearted is the beginning of salvation. The badge of the heart is,

"A chaplet from the tree of life."

The plea of a great English writer was for "a shade more soul" in the aristocratic barbarians of his countrymen; and a shade more soul is the need of our civilization and the crying want of our entire educational system today. We are bound too much by the mechanics of our