that determine and fix the destiny of the peoples on the planet. This new era is one of great portent to the statesmen of America. All legislation hereafter must be scrutinized, in view of its influence upon our international relations. We cannot any longer have that smug sense of security and isolation which has permitted us to legislate without considering the effect on foreign nations. Hereafter our foremost national interest must be the foreign one, and consequently our highest studies must be made on the characters, inclinations, and interests of foreign peoples. It is obvious that this study requires a greater breadth of education, more specializing in history, and in the manners and customs of European nations; their methods of organizing industries, as well as their methods of organizing armies and navies. We must even master foreign literatures and see what are the fundamental aspirations of the people. This points to the function of the system of education in the future of this country. This indicates the vocation of the schoolmaster in the coming time.

The new burden of preparing our united people for the responsibilities of a closer union with Europe, and for a share in the dominion over the islands and continents of the Orient, this new burden will fall on the school systems in the several states, and more particularly on the colleges and universities that furnish the higher education. For it is higher education that must furnish the studies in history and in the psychology of peoples which will provide our ministers and ambassadors abroad with their numerous retinue of experts and specialists, thoroly versed in the habits and traditions of the several nations. The knowledge required by our members of Congress and our executive departments will make a demand upon higher education for post-graduate students who have concentrated their investigations upon points in international law and the philosophy of history. Diplomacy will become a great branch of

learning for us.

This has been felt for some time, altho it has not been consciously realized. In the past twenty-five years the enrollment in higher education, in college work alone, has increased from 590 to 1,215 in the million; it has more than doubled in each million of people. The post-graduate work of training experts or specialists has been multiplied by twenty-five; for it has increased from a total of 200 to a total of 5,000 in the nation. The education of the elementary school fits the citizen for most of his routine work in agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and mining. But the deeper problems of uniting our nation with the other great nations, and harmonizing our unit of force with that greater unit, must be solved by higher education, for it alone can make the wide combinations that are necessary. Shallow elementary studies give us the explanation of that which lies near us. They help us to understand our immediate environment, but for the understanding of deep national differences, and

for the management of all that is alien to our part of the world, deeper studies are required. The student must penetrate the underlying fundamental principles of the world history in order to see how such different fruits have grown on the same tree of humanity. We must look to our universities and colleges for the people who have learned to understand the fashions and daily customs of a foreign people, and who have learned to connect the surface of their everyday life with the deep national principles and aspirations which mold and govern their individual and. social action. Hence the significance of this epoch in which you are. assembled to discuss the principles of education and its methods of practice. There have been great emergencies, and great careers have opened to American teachers, in our former history; but you stand today on the vestibule of a still more important age, the age of the union of the new world with the old world.

HON. WEBSTER DAVIS, ASSISTANT

SECRETARY, DEPARTMENT

OF THE

INTERIOR, WASHINGTON, D. C.

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:

For many years it has been my pleasure to know personally President Greenwood of your association. No man in the West has done more for the cause of education than he. It was largely thru his efforts that the public schools of Kansas City, Mo., became famous thruout the country for their high standard and excellence. And his countless deeds of charity and acts of kindness toward poor, unfortunate boys and girls, struggling for education in the years of the past, will live in the immortality that blooms beyond the grave. This association is to be congratulated on having such a noble president.

Doubtless the reason for my name appearing on the program tonight is because the Department of the Interior is especially friendly to school-teachers. Secretary Bliss, tho a very handsome man, is much older than I, and married, too; hence he has not the nerve that I have in facing good-looking schoolma'ams. But, nevertheless, he and President McKinley are about the best friends they have in this country; for not long ago, after putting their heads together for a moment, they concluded to break the record by appointing a western schoolma'am to the distinguished and responsible position of superintendent of Indian schools. And this is all right, for any administration that recognizes woman's right to make an honest living, if she is compelled to, by hard work, and then offers a reward for her honest toil, makes no mistake.

I have always had great sympathy for the teachers in our public schools; for I came very near becoming one once, but failed to pass the examination for a certificate. But, seriously, they do deserve sympathy; for a harder working, more patient lot of men and women cannot be

found. And they are the poorest-paid laborers, for the amount of hard work they do, in the world's vineyard. I have known good teachers who would walk two or three miles into the country each morning, during the coldest winter weather, to the district schoolhouse, carry in the wood and build the fires, and labor hard all day teaching the good little boys and girls, and thrashing the bad ones, all for the munificent salary of twenty dollars a month, and board themselves.

While we honor the noble school trustees, who without salary look after the schools, yet we do believe that all teachers in the public schools thruout our country should be better paid. But we should not be discouraged with our lot in this world, for all things will be better by and by. To be sure, everyone at some time in this life feels that every fond ideal that gleams like a star on life's wave is wrecked on the shores of the real, and sleeps like a dream in a grave. And we often realize that

"In the spring the small boy's fancy

Lightly turns to ponds and brooks,
With about a quart of angleworms
And a nickel's worth of hooks;
Also a ton of patience,
And of faith an ample store,
To withdraw the wary bullhead
From his covert to the shore.
And that fancy never leaves us,
As we stand beside life's sea,
With painted bobs seducing
Great results that ne'er can be;
To discover, late at sundown,
We have not attained our wish,

But have traded off two pounds of worms
To get one pound of fish."

However, the true, brave-hearted man or woman goes forward, regardless of the smarting cuffs administered by Dame Fortune in her peevish moments, to meet the demands of the age, the true exponent of common sense, wisdom, pluck, and real grit; devoting their time and talents to the actual needs and necessities of their country and its people.

It is upon the education of the masses that this country must depend for its still greater progress in the future. Not that education whose aim is especially to make experts; not simply to make a man a great navigator, to be able to plow the waters of unknown seas in search of unknown worlds, and nothing more; or simply to enable him to become a great classical scholar, to have at his tongue's end the writings of those wonderful geniuses who are enshrined in history and have been adorned by the poets with their rhythmic flowers; not to become an expert and exact in chemistry or higher mathematics; or to become a great geologist, to delve into the recesses of the earth and read its history in its layers of rock, clay, granite, and mineral; or to become a great geographer, and able to

give the dimensions of mountains, plains, or valleys, and the extent of rivers, lakes, and seas; or to become an expert philosopher, who can with ease read and interpret the phenomena of nature, and place her marvelous wonders before the minds of men, and cause her to contribute of her stores to the comfort and happiness of mankind; or to become a great expert astronomer, whose comprehensive mind is able to scan the universe, whose heaven-aspiring spirit is able to soar beyond the boundaries of time and discover new worlds revolving in the realms of space, to watch them in their journeys, to view them in their grandeur, to tell the story of their past history, and to prophesy of their future. It should not be the object of education to tax to the utmost the tender minds of the young by drilling into them Greek and Latin, compelling them to wrestle with Xenophon's Anabasis and Cæsar's Commentaries, before they can read McGuffey's old English second reader; or require them to master Horace and Livy, Virgil and Homer, before they can understand the pure English of Hume or Macaulay, Shakespeare or Milton, or before they are able to read intelligently the federal constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Nor is it the aim of education, as Professor Huxley would teach, to make a clear, cold, logic engine of a man or woman; for that always wrecks manhood and womanhood; or, as Matthew Arnold would teach, to make a man a Greek of the age of Sophocles, to Bring in by literary culture that old age of "sweetness and light" and of "sweet reasonableness."

No, it is not the aim of education to make of man or woman a shriveled, selfish, dyspeptic, sniveling, hunchbacked, intellectual genius; but its real object is to develop human power, to make complete, thoroly finished men and women; to make the intellect the best inspirer of the heart and the servant of the will in all noble work; in short, to make good, first-class men and women, who are able to hold their own in the great battle of life. For a nation's wealth consists, not alone in its broad domain and its natural resources, but in the intelligence and virtue of its citizens. Its nobles are not the men of royal birth, but the men of sober thoughts and righteous deeds.

In the public schools of this country the men and women must be educated who, under God, are to guide the old ship of state to a still more glorious destiny thru the beckoning seas of the future. That future demands that these schools shall be liberally supported, so that all citizens shall be sufficiently instructed to fit them for the manifold duties. of good citizenship.

The public school is, indeed, a priceless boon to every poor man, for it will give his children a chance for elevation in our social and political systems. And the American farmer and laborer should realize that it is the very ark of his safety, the bridge across which his little ones may reach place and power and higher planes of usefulness in life. It is, indeed,

the Aladdin's cave wherein they can find the bright jewels of education that will fit them to be sovereigns and rulers in the grandest of republics.

Parsimony to the public schools means death to all the grand hopes of free labor; death to all the wonderful possibilities in store for the children of those who toil. Liberty is not the child of ignorance, superstition, and barbarism, but the child of intelligence and of education. The love of liberty is a passion that has been wont to spring in the hearts of men since time began; so soon as their minds began to expand under education, however crude, in their breasts the fires of liberty began to burn. In all centuries and in all lands that passion has lived and defied rocks and chains and dungeons to crush it. It has strewn the earth with its monuments, and shed undying luster on a thousand fields wherein it has battled thru the night of ages.

And there seems to be something in the scenes of nature in this new republic, something in its beautiful landscapes, in its cascades and cataracts, in its luxurious vineyards, and orchards full of bud and blossom, in its waving fields, and in the dim vistas of its mighty woodlands; in the beauty of bud, of bird, of tree and flower, and in the pure and exhilarating air of its hills and mountains, that inspires its children with an ardent love for liberty and knowledge. As in the olden days, when the imperial eagle looked down upon a consolidated empire, from the Orient to the Occident all roads led to Rome, so now in the passing centuries, in this new world of vaster extent and more varied interests, all roads lead to this republic; whatever there is elsewhere of thrift, of energy, of education, of culture, and of progress - this republic gathers tribute of the harvest. Here is the reservoir of the world's wealth, and of the world's energies. Here are collecting the great intellectual forces of the nations. Why is it that Egypt, with her pyramids and temples, stony records of the dawn of history; Greece, with her wondrous works of art, her power and renown, with her temples and statues crowning the Acropolis, and the golden splendor of her Athens; and Rome, with her grandeur and might as an empire, when contrasted with this republic, in this evening of the nineteenth century, dwindle into mere fragments of history? The answer is to be found in the ever-increasing intelligence of the people, behind whom stand the public schools.

With continued efforts to increase the opportunities, and to stimulate a stronger desire in the minds of the people, for education, what marvelous progress may we not expect of the generations of the future? "Oh, royal mind, nor cease thy flight,

While sun and stars dispense their light,

And roll in grand array;

And when those orbs shall cease to shine,

When suns decay and stars decline,
Let onward progress still be thine,

And upward hold thy way."