allowed to hide behind the nobility of his pursuit or the prestige of class custom, but must answer for his wrongs as any other outlaw. Yet this should be approached with an all-things-are-yours spirit, upon the part of those in authority, that will keep in successful control the world-wide claims of the bounteously generous periods of youthful presumption and assumption.

The fact that inter-class feeling in our institutions of learning is mollified, that the banquet, friendly reception, and good will have taken the place of the pump-spout, the midfield, snipe-like excursions, and midnight orgies is a most wholesome sign of a larger and better heart in our education. The rivalries of our schools and colleges must be saturated with a magnanimity that will appreciate all this soul-worth. The sensitive nature, the right to one's own individuality, feelings, the ideals, the life of each pupil or student, must be sacred and honored by every other. The spirit of the Arab and the barbarian must be abolished from every class, and from rivalries of every character. One does not much blame Shelley, the poet, for his morbid feelings against conventionality, creed, and man himself, after reading the injustice and tyrannies exerted over his delicate nature on the playground by his schoolmates. Yet in school and college today the barbarities of the ape and the tiger of the past come to issue on the part of a number of young stalwarts first awakened to the conscious power of their physical endowments in measurement with those of their fellows. The school atmosphere is not to be one of sickly sentiment, undue fostering, and blind sympathy, but a place of friendly helpfulness, truest fellowship, soul deliverance, and of indirection finding direction out.

HIGHER EDUCATION IN AMERICA

Lower forms of education cannot be eminently successful without clear outlets above. You cannot place a planet alongside of the world without thinking and knowing of the entire system in which it is to serve its part. The most crying need of the times is for the higher education of our teachers and people. Many reputable writers claim that a republican form of government cannot produce great thinkers and the highest form of education. This I do not believe. Yet, as a nation, we can scarcely claim the credit of one great university in the ranks of world-wide light. A very creditable authority too truthfully says that, for what there is best in thought, America, in soberness, is still "a province of England." This humiliates our pride, but should stimulate our holiest ambition. Our educational system has succeeded well in reaching the people as a common family of man. Our aim to educate all people alike has rightfully attracted the attention of the world.

"A noble aim

Faithfully kept is a noble deed."

Our educational system is in touch with the masses yet. "The popular breath, even when winnowed by the winds of centuries, is hardly

pure." Our poets and painters have scored their successes from the groundwork of our boundless landscapes, ocean-wide fields, and seas of nature. "Earth's crammed with Heaven,

Every common bush afire with God,

But only he who sees takes off his shoes."

And the trouble is many of our people still stand in their shoes amid these wondrous revelations. Grecian culture, the best in the world, has the scent of the outdoors upon it. We have the conditions of a Hellenistic culture, but not yet the attainments. A philosopher has said, "There are ten thousand chances to one that genius, talent, and virtue shall issue from a farmhouse rather than from a palace." We have the genius of the farmhouse prolific, but not the leisure and the ideals to make it live to the strictest and noblest uses. Descartes, an apostle of literary humility, says, "Those who wish to know how to speak of everything and to acquire reputation for learning will succeed most easily if they content themselves with a semblance of truth which may readily be found." Too sadly, many of our educational folk "know how to speak of everything," but few of them know how to speak everything of anything. We have academic universities, business universities, normal universities, college universities, but scarcely a university. This should not detract from the merit of many higher institutions of learning in our land that are doing the best they can with the material at hand. Higher education is allsidedness. A trenchant writer has said, "The American people seem still to be somewhat in the position of our new millionaires. Their fortune is above them; it overshadows and oppresses them; they live in fine houses and have common things, they have costly libraries and cheap culture, and their rich clothing poorly hides their coarse breeding." We can allow such words only from a fellow countryman and a patriotic American. They are the truth for the ears of our inner household circles. Some of our millionaires as patrons of learning are doing nobly in establishing great libraries, universities of learning, conservatories of music, and museums of art. Emerson says, "It is a rule that holds in economy as well as in hydraulics that you must have a source higher than your tap; the mills, the shops, the theaters, and the caucuses, the college, and the church have all found out this secret." But these higher sources on tap must be kept scrupulously wholesome. You may remember several years ago how a frightful epidemic raged in one of the cities of the Alleghanies because in the water supply of the mountain heights fever germs had gained harborage. Mountain heights alone are not sufficient in advanced education.

Out of the short ranges of today grow the dangers of the school-desk. Educational leaders must live back into the ages and then secure new births and give "foreign shape," as bespoken by Schiller for artists incarnated of the centuries and home made to these youth and this present-day civilization. Higher education is myriad-horizoned. Like

66

Shakespeare's plays its thousand-mindedness makes the college and the university graduate, who is a college and a university graduate, composed amid many conflicting planes and visions, theories and doctrines, problems and solutions, conflictions and triumphs, middays and midnights, a nursling from "the milk of a better time." Metternich said: "Revolutions begin in the best heads and run steadily down to the populace." The higher education of the country leavens our civilization with the learning of the best heads, enlightening like a meridian sun hovel and mansion alike. In learning there is a solid gold chain of enlinked highers-higher mathematics, higher English, higher history, higher literature, higher physiology, higher astronomy, higher science, higher art, higher philosophy, and now we must add higher business education, higher household economics, higher agriculture, higher mechanic arts, higher government, all culminating in the higher life. The most encouraging thing about the system of our higher education is the

"Effort and expectation and desire,

And something ever more about to be,"

so markedly prevalent in the hearts of our scholars and youth. And, tho of Wordsworth's glorious creatures in higher education only one is to be found in ten thousand, yet our institutions, our free government, and liberal education of the people predict an affirmative answer to the question of higher education in America.

THE MOST RECENT IMPETUS OF HIGHER EDUCATION

The past year chronicles two centuryfull marvels in effort for higher education: the Carnegie Institution at Washington and the Rhodes' bestowal of American scholarships for Oxford. The Carnegie plan of research is as universal as the aspiration of man for knowledge. Its scope is more extensive than that of a university. The Carnegie benefaction bestirs and fosters the originalities of a student, an inventor, or an institution aiming at the supreme merit of man and the universal welfare of mankind. The Rhodes benefaction tends to brotherhood and cosmopolitanism in education. Its outcome should be to foster learning for learning's sake and the man's sake, apart from provincialism and sectionalism. These bestowments for higher education in the world hasten the embodiment of universal life, subordinating station, geography, and nation. In the scholarship of the new ages they should prefigure

"The season by gifted ones foretold,

When man shall live by reason and not alone by gold,
When man to man united-"

not as an American, nor as an Englishman, nor as a Frenchman, nor as a German, but as a cosmopolitan whose supreme citizenship is of the universe.

SOME PRESSING PROBLEMS

DR. NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER, PRESIDENT OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK CITY

[STENOGRAPHICALLY REPORTED]

Mr. President, My Fellow- Teachers, Ladies and Gentlemen:

No one who meets year by year with the membership of this vast national Association, and no one who rises to face an audience like this, can permit himself to doubt for an instant the vitality and public importance of our present-day educational problems. As a great people, we seem to the world to be more concerned with matters of government, of finance, of commerce, and of trade; but every true American citizen knows that deep down in the heart and conscience of the people lies serious concern for questions of public education. We have convinced ourselves, and it may prove to be our lot to convince the world, that education lies at the basis of democratic institutions, of material prosperity, and of the public weal.

We, who are born, as it were with the golden spoon of a rich and ripened civilization in our mouths, hardly realize how new this point of view is, or how recently it has obtained recognition among the peoples of the earth. It is, as the studious teacher knows, the offspring of the thought of the century which has but just closed. So rapidly has that thought progressed, so manifold have been its conquests, that we accept as axioms propositions of which our grandfathers had hardly ever heard. They might have read of them in the writings of the philosopher or the publicist, but it was beyond the dream of their wildest imagination that these great truths and principles should within any reasonable time conquer the intelligence and the conscience of a great nation of freemen.

I hold that we have not come together here merely to discuss and consider questions of technical and professional concern. Some of the questions which we consider, and some of the papers and addresses to which we listen, relate themselves more directly, it is true, to general public interest than do others, but there is no question, whatever the topic, presented to the members of this Association assembled in their great annual meeting, which is not in a sense a question that touches the public welfare, because it bears upon the life-history of some one individual child.

It goes without saying that if we were dealing with a series of problems which had been solved, if we were dealing with a series of events which had been halted, and with a scientific life which had been lived, our task here and elsewhere would be little more than one of anatomical dissection. We might pick apart the limbs of the dead body to allay and satisfy our curiosity, but the public at large would care little for what we said and did. It is just because the reverse is true, and because we

are dealing with living truths, developing before us and thrusting living problems upon us while we speak-it is because of this that these discussions of ours are of such vital and far-reaching public importance.

It is because I believe so absolutely in the practical importance of these problems, and because I am so entirely convinced of the general public interest in their right solution, that I shall undertake this evening in a few brief moments to discuss with you two matters which seem to me at this time to deserve most careful attention from us and from our fellow-citizens. I do not undertake to say that I have chosen for discussion the two most important and the two most significant problems, because as to that we might honestly differ; but I do hold that the two matters which I propose briefly to discuss are problems pressing for solution at your hands and mine, and important in the highest degree.

I wish to speak, first, of the problem presented by what I conceive to be the waste in our present educational system. My observation and reflection have convinced me that as matters now are we take too long to do too little. I wish to expand that thesis for a few moments in order to make clear just what I mean.

You do not need to be reminded that among the nations of the world we have the reputation of being a wasteful people. Nature has dealt kindly with us, fortune and Providence have smiled upon us, and our colossal growth and great material expansion have produced an economic waste which, if translated into concrete figures, would reach amazing proportions. I hold that this same element of waste has crept into our educational system, and that it has tended to increase during the last generation, and that it has now reached the point where it is our duty to consider seriously whether we may not check and overcome it.

I judge that there is waste in our educational system because of two series of facts that are open to the observation of anyone. The first is the fact that the boy who goes thru our educational system from top to bottom has grown to mature manhood and has used up much more than one-third of his probable life before he is ready to enter upon a practical career. Add to the years of the kindergarten the eight and sometimes. nine years of the elementary school, the four years of the secondary school, the four years of the college, and the three and now four years in the professional schools of law, medicine, engineering, and the rest, together with the necessary years of almost unpaid apprenticeship, and the boy is quite unprepared to face the world as an independent, selfsupporting man until he is nearly thirty years of age. Those of us who have to deal with the higher education are vitally impressed with that aspect of the problem, but there is another. I take into consideration also the fact that the average total education of an American citizen is five years of two hundred days each, or only one thousand days. There