profession and have stiffened by the whale-bone of preconceived rule. Welcome method, hail system of pedagogy, commend convention, and hasten interchange of ideas, but, like the hallelujah chorus of the Messiah, rise all with reverend heads in honor of the heart in education.

With the graduates of our schools and colleges there arises the serious difficulty of leavening the crowd. From one of our great universities we have the striking array of 777 graduates this year. The marked increase of attendance in public schools, colleges, and universities must be wisely leavened with increased facilities, or it possesses elements threatening the scholarship and character of our youth. This gathering of the masses in our schools and colleges too frequently means over-crowded classes, over-worked teachers, and a low grade of school work. An English poet has said-

"Join twenty tapers of unequal height,

And light them joined, and you will see the less
How 'twill burn down the taller, and they all
Shall prey upon the tallest."

The teacher is constantly amid these influences that prey upon the tall-
est. It is a great privilege and honor to be thus preyed upon, but the
tallest taper cannot exist for any considerable time without the self-
estrangement of solitude. We have made of the presidents of our col-
leges and universities business managers. The tendency is to pervert the
city superintendent and town principal along the same line. "The nurse
of full-grown souls is solitude.” And too many of our teachers and
school leaders are deprived of this divine nursery.
All successful per-

sons, especially in the field of art and letters, have experienced much of solitude. Crabbe said

Men feel their weaknesses and to numbers run,
Themselves to strengthen or themselves to shun.

There is a strength in the crowd, but it is not the strength that will exist, enjoy, and aspire without the crowd. It is not the strength that will inspire, uplift, and regenerate the crowd. Solitude is the insulation of the Almighty in which a man is filled with electric energies of a higher life, and a great need of the American teacher today is leisure for this insulation. The birds that throng all about us with their sweetest songs are in the highest trees, and their coziest nests the most secluded retreats. Solitude is a patch of the infinite letting in the light of a limitless life. It is silence "open-doored to God," and therefore open-skied to the heart of man.

HOUSEHOLD ECONOMICS

It has been said that young women taking higher education in America "should have more Greek and less gravy." A number of us who have toiled thru the magnificences and the beneficences of Greek have no fault to find with its culture, but in comparison with the two, it

seems to me the grave need in the domestic education of our youth is more gravy, old fashioned gravy like mother's, abounding in the ingredients of life. This does not mean more grease, more stuffy kitchens, more haphazard cooking and ill-tempered stomachs; but it means more science with practice in the gravy; the be-scenting of the kitchen with the aroma. of foods, and the enriching of the stomach of the people with the wholesome red blood that shall nerve the brain, sustain the muscle, and fortify the soul in magnanimous livelihood. Victor Hugo conceives man possessed of three centers the brain, the heart, the stomach, and says, "Civilization is but a mass, science is matter, religion is blessed with hams, feudality with digests, royalty is obese." He gives the characteristics of the stomach as appetite, satiety, and putrefaction. He makes it break the equilibrium between the soul and the body, and makes Rabelais the discoverer of the stomach's place in history. This conception of Hugo is still too prevalent. Education has overlooked this third center

the stomach in civilization. Learning and science are beginning to hear the divine call of the stomach, to displace its satiety with purity of flesh and its putrefaction with nobility of soul. Household economics is fundamental in the humanities. It is not a few practical lessons in cooking at the summer Chautauqua, but the crowning of a four-year course of higher education beyond graduation from the high school. Household economics makes for the redemption of this third center in civilization. A stomach's god shall no longer be Silenus, as Hugo claims, but the goddess Hygeia; its emperor no longer Vitellius, but the empress Victoria; its animal not the pig, but an exalted man. The stomach shall not be the weight of history, but the generous stay of its stupendous forces, uniting soul and body in safest and wholesomest ministry of life. We determine scientifically the balanced ration that will fit a steer for the market, a horse for strength or speed, a sheep for long or short wool; the whole realm of animal industry is far better provided with scientific information than the nursery of our youth. Now it is high time to feed a human being more fittingly to make a man. The skillet is mightier than the sword.

RE-EMPHASIS OF OLD-TIME VIRTUES

Under these H's some old-time virtues need re-emphasizing. The rapid development of our physical resources, and the consequent ease of multi-millionaires, has begotten a spirit of wrong stature of life. Many of our people have roamed the continent for a better place and greater ease; many have rushed into the cities in hopes of having less work to do; parents declare in the presence of their children that these children shall not have to work as hard as they; these children dream of elysian fields, in the language of the old hymn "dressed in living green," without the intervention of calloused hands and hardened nerves to produce them. We used to hear, “labor conquers all things." Now, luck, chance,

and a piece of good fortune secure all things, and the world goes dreaming after it, forgetting that luck is a fool and pluck is a hero. Instead of the certainty and never-failing increase of honest labor, too many have changed the old hymn,

"Sure I must fight if I would win,

Increase my courage, Lord!"

to "sure I must speculate if I would win," and it doesn't make much difference whether the Lord is in it or not. Even the laboring people have taken up the idea of there being a laboring class, and we are all making false divisions of our American society by wrong standards of classification. In fitting American girls and boys for truest citizenship, the old doctrine of the nobility of labor must be reiterated to the child of the banker as well as to the child of the hod-carrier. The meanest aristocracy in the world is that assumed thru the pocket or the empty brain. We must ground the youth of our schools in that newest of the old-time doctrine, that labor is the basis of the worth of the soul, as well as the foundation of the value of the dollar.

"So for all men the law of work is plain;

It gives them food, strength, knowledge, victory, peace;

It makes joy possible and lessens pain;

From passion's lawless power it wins release,

Confirms the heart, and widens reason's reign,

Makes men like God, whose work can never cease."

ATHLETICS

The emphasis of physical culture in the education of these recent years makes the question of athletics ever new. The physical education of the youth should be brought still more nearly to the teacher and the school. authorities. There is a great waste in the athletics of the hour. Such a waste cannot be fully estimated. There is a severe waste in the number of youngsters that drop out of school because they have gone to seed in play. There is a question about the desirability of an athletic board of a college spending thousands of money, aggregating in some cases $60,000 annually, in maintaining the athletics of the season. It is debatable on which side of the balance sheet will fall the benefits and influences of frequent trips of school and college teams to different sections of the state and of the country fulfilling the reciprocity of games. The matter of football still raises serious problems. Useful means of culture must not destroy that which it is designed to build up. The injuring of life and limb in the training of the physical man has ever been incident of severe exercises, and the injuries and fatalities attending the development of football in our American schools are still causes of rightful alarm. In addition to these we have the "football heart" and the "boat heart" added to the medical terminology of the age. These results emphasize the necessity of the gymnasium, under intelligent management, as the

basis of the severe tests in the athletics of the day. There is a tendency to have too many inter-school and inter-collegiate contests; and a diminution of the number would help greatly. Fair home contests among the individuals and classes of the same institution bring, upon the whole, the most desirable results. Conducted in a spirit of more wholesome rivalry, they are freer from abuses, and hence more accordant with the true purposes of education. They eliminate professionalism and avoid the serious loss of time and extra training and extra trips from college to college, and the undue anxiety preceding and following inter-collegiate contests. They secure and maintain quite largely the good results incident to public contests.

But I am not yet ready to advocate the abolishment of inter-collegiate contests. I believe our American youth ought to be so trained in these initial schools of their lives that they can enter into the most intense and partisan struggles with their fellows of other schools and colleges with an unswerving regard for honor, integrity, and fair play. They ought to be so imbued with the spirit of manly conduct that they would count defeat more honorable, in the face of superior strength and skill, than success by foul play and unmanly endeavor. A serious curse of our politics, our business competition, our social emulations, our professional strifes, is the too frequent prevalence of cut-throat methods that have little regard for the welfare, the honor, or the life of an opponent. The ethics of true athletics must make for a higher life among our citizens. I believe that it is in the games which not only the children, but the entire youth of the schools play, that they learn most thoroly the principles of justice, and to yield to public opinion. "Fair play is the earliest conception of justice which enters into the mind of a child," and we must keep sweet these fountains of public life for the health of the nation. The spirit of the old-time contests along the highways, at times of military muster and festive gatherings, and the playgrounds of our public schools, in which everything in a man's possession, his jack-knife, his gun, his horse, his muscle, and wit were put up in friendly struggle with those of his fellows and must come up smiling, even out of defeat, bears wholesome hints for our modern athletics. Football is a soldier's game. If we cannot have it attended with less maimed bodies, broken necks, and shattered nervous systems, it will have a Clevelandic dose of innocuous desuetude.

MENTAL AND MORAL GYMNASTICS

There is a field of athletics whose serious side is still illy understood by parents and teachers—that of mental and moral gymnastics. I still remember the wonderment excited by a venerable professor in college when he said to our class, "Young gentlemen, you have a risky road to travel in coming to be conscious somebodies in the world." In after months the sympathy of his tones became a heaven-born solace, as his

meaning dawned thru personal experiences. Unless such periods bring on nervous prostration or suicide, the people, and too often teachers, are largely ignorant of the risks and dangers of mental and moral gymnas tics. A broken limb is serious, but a broken spirit is thrice sad. A maimed body is lamentable, but a maimed soul is doubly so. Deformed souls beget deformed thoughts, defective customs and statutes, warped dominance, diseased life and civilization.

"A people is but the attempt of many

To rise to the completer life of one;

And those who live as models for the mass
Are singly of more value than them all."

But a serious problem is that, as in physical parentage so in mental parentage, our citizenship and civilization bear the marks of the models, "gross and fair," living singly and perpetually among the masses. Untimely deaths upon the playground in life's young spring tax sympathy to its utmost, but when a soul goes out forever by the ungoverned forces of its own awakening, we break down in wonderment and despair in view of the sad spectacle. Next to the destinies of eternity stand the destinies of time's limit and life in the pupil. The average youth does not face the problem of his life's pursuit without the most serious revolutions and evolutions of being; and the finer his metal the keener his struggle. He is thus a chaos, a world-former, a miniature philosopher, demi-devil, and semi-god, and the issues largely are fought out that make for diabolism or for divinity.

The more thoughtful are taking into consideration the seriousness of this life-and-death struggle in the education of the youth. The sanctity and the skill embraced in the delicate conception of Socrates that a true educator is a sort of midwife in aiding the birth of ideas, has not fully entered our method and practice. Too long the spirit prevailed in our educational methods that actuated rude boys in teaching each other to swim. The subject was caught by head and limb and heaved into water over his head, to sink or swim, survive or perish, if he expected to exhibit. his personal declaration of educational independence. The hazing and rude initiations of beginners and freshmen, that were long-lived in our country and yet too frequent, were at times the hidden spirit of the master out-cropping wild in his pupils. It was a sort of "let him prove himself a man before showing signs of helping him to become a man." Even the past year a professor in one of our prominent colleges is quoted as favoring hazing because it helps to make a man of a student. Such an instructor has not gotten out of the swaddling clothes of his first summer dresses in college. If public education cannot make a youth respectful for law and authority rightfully expressed, it is a signal failure. Of all places in the world, the student at college must be law-abiding. Barbarous college customs of long-boasted and reputable standing must not blind the goddess of justice. A law-breaker in college must not be