high order of technical and scientific training throughout the country. The extent to which the South is participating in the general movement for manual and industrial training should not be overlooked. The colleges of agriculture and the mechanic arts in Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi have materially increased their equipment for practical work during the year; the legislature of Georgia has appropriated $65,000 for the building and furnishing of a technological school; the Tuskegee Normal School, Alabama, is developing a work for the colored people of that state which embodies the best features of the Hampton Institute; and Tulane University has thrown its powerful influence on the side of a full, rounded, symmetrical education in which manual training is a recognized feature."

Those who question the importance of such training will do well to read the recent address of Sir Lyon Playfair before the Liberal Club of London, on the causes of industrial depression. Speaking of this country, he said: "In 1885 there was a displacement of the labor of one million of men in the United States, but by the versatility of the American intellect they were soon absorbed into other kinds of labor." This versatility is the outcome of a flexible educational system and schools of varied character, conditions of excellence which have been fostered to a high degree in the United States, and which are very clearly and truthfully exhibited in the Commissioner's report. The work, indeed, bears throughout the stamp of an earnest endeavor to use figures according to the principles controlling "the science of statistics," which, upon so high an authority as Mr. Goschen, we are permitted to call "an exact science."

The following resolution was introduced by Prof. J. A. B. Lovett, and adopted at the meeting of the Department of Superintendence of the National Educational Association, in session at Washington, February 16, 1888.

Resolved, that this Department bears emphatic testimony to the continued value of the United States Bureau of Education to the teaching profession; to the wise conduct of the office under the present Commissioner; to the faithful and efficient service of his subordinates, and also to the great value of its recent contributions to American educational history, which it is hoped will be continued in the line that has been so successfully commenced.

PERH

EDITORIAL.

ERHAPS no charge is more persistently made by a portion of the daily press than the impeachment of the public school system, as awakening great expectations in ordinary American children which can never be realized. "The public schools turn out the boys with extravagant aspirations for professional and public life, and the girls fired with longing for elegant life upstairs, or genteel work in some of the attractive new callings open to women. No public school graduate willingly comes down to manual labor, and nobody desires to be a common person." Some of the over-zealous advocates of manual training in public education appear to be largely influenced by this consideration, and urge industrial education, as one eminent advocate puts it, on the ground that, thus modified, "the common schools may be good for something for common people."

But in no region of American life is there so little of this unhealthy expectation, either inculcated or encouraged, as in the better class of our public schools. If the teacher is a true American he will impress on boys and girls the fact that American citizenship is the noblest heritage of opportunity and responsibility. Beyond this we believe there is no real basis for the charge above mentioned. But in several ways the press itself, with all its unquestionable merits, does work the very demoralization spoken of, by the present methods of journalism. One intolerable nuisance is the growing habit of magnifying the social standing of multitudes of excitable young people in the foolish "society column," where the dress, the style, the most insignificant doings and ordinary movements of many commonplace youth are seriously put forth as matters of social importance; of course inflating said youngsters with an absurd sense of their own magnificence. Another more serious offence is the magnifying of the semi-criminal lower strata of the community where crime is chiefly bred, by long descriptions and elaborate record of such of the number as actually get before the courts. Thousands of people of whom a well-ordered community knows nothing in

their ordinary condition are thus galvanized into a disgusting or hideous notoriety, and the impression goes abroad that vice and crime are rife among the respectable classes. Another great stimulant to imaginative children is found in the detailed descriptions of high life, boundless wealth, and marvelous changes of fortune, in the current fiction and the "correspondence columns" of the great journals. Anybody that can push a facile pen can write up anything: all the better if he knows little or nothing valuable about it. But, somehow, the boys and girls who hang over the bewitching description get the idea that to see, enjoy, and be all this is "as easy as preaching." It is unfortunate that a great many "ready writers" for the press, even great lights of literature, have never enjoyed a school discipline sufficiently thorough to learn that nothing brings down a flighty girl or reduces the "big head" in a self-sufficient boy like a solid course of study, with the accompanying training in character, habits, and manners that is found nowhere better than in a good public school.

A

LATE reading of the excellent essay, "The Advance of Science in the Last Half Century," by Professor T. H. Huxley, confirms the oft-repeated statement that the great men of science are most conspicuous for absence of pretension or pressing the results of scientific research beyond the boundary lines of philosophy and speculation on matters essentially spiritual. The great professor emphasizes the fact that the most important aid to scientific discovery is "the invention of hypotheses which, not unfrequently, turn out to be wholly erroneous"; just the point, according to the blatant advocate of "Science," where lies its infinite superiority to theology and philosophy. In all these directions the "anticipation of nature," through the use of working hypotheses, will ever be the most fruitful method of discovery. It is refreshing to mark with what extreme caution Professor Huxley avoids dogmatism concerning the awful boundary line between the material and the spiritual, leaving the ultimate question of creative intelligence exactly where it always has been and must remain in a healthy mind. Here, as well as in a singular moderation of style and modesty of bearing, one of the foremost of the few who really know what physical science has accomplished is an admirable example to the throng of half-fledged

naturalists, young doctors, and fiery specialists who, "knowing it all," go about with airs of scientific supremacy before which the doctrine of papal infallibility dwindles to a moderate assertion of knowing better than others what it most concerns all men to know.

IT only needs an examination of the present status of the

common school in the South, in all save favored spots, to puncture the inflated representation which has been the mainstay of journals like The New York Nation in their crusade against the Blair bill. A recent visit to some of the oldest sections of the southern Atlantic coast, now rather distinguished for educational activity and the expenditure of money according to its ability, not inferior to New England, shows that not over half the children needing instruction are in any school worthy the name. In some of the states flourished aloft by The Nation and other journals as the rivals of New England in school attendance, there is yet no reliable method of collecting school statistics, and these formidable tables of figures are largely the enthusiastic guesses or "hit or miss" estimates of home officials, magnified and paraded by the northern opponents of national aid. The South has done enough in the upbuilding of popular education during the past fifteen years to earn the respect of all fair-minded schoolmen, and entitle these states to a new application of the old habit of fertilizing public education by national appropriations. But the poorest sort of friends the southern people now have in the North are found in these violent opponents of educational aid who abuse their present achievements by making them the ground of obstinate national neglect.

THE necessity of teaching a sound and healthy Americanism

in the common schools is arousing a very general public interest and calling out the opinions of many prominent men, who strongly urge upon teachers the imperative need of earnest and enthusiastic work on this subject. Such a need is peculiar to our country, and with our common schools rests the solution of the problem of how to make good American citizens of the children of the Germans, Italians, and Irish that throng our land.

GOOD BOOKS.1

BY MISS LUCY LARCOM.

As a sky that has no constellations,
As a country unwatered by brooks,
As a house that is empty of kindred,
Unillumined by loving looks,

So dull is the life of the people

Who know not the blessing of books.

Good books are the best of companions;
They help us to see with the eyes

Of the great ones in ages historic.

Dead saints at their bidding arise

From the moss-mounded graveyards to teach us
That the truth which is lived never dies.

Good books are the kindest of neighbors;
They help us to know one another;
They show how the words "man" and "
Have always meant "sister" and "brother."
So they fan to life feelings fraternal

Woman

That the dust of the workday might smother.

The books that we cherish are human;

They are written from heart unto heart;
Now they move us to singing and laughter;
Now they cause the warm tear-drop to start;
We feel -as we read their fresh pages

By the rose-breath of love blown apart.

Good books are an inspiration;

A spirit within stirs their leaves

With the sigh of a burden prophetic,

That warms, and rejoices, and grieves;

And the ear that is open to hear it

The word of the vision receives.

1 This beautiful poem was read at the dedication of a new Public Library Building, preented to the town of Norton, Mass., by Mrs. Eliza B. Wheaton, February 1, 1888.