cense-breathing morn," and the jargon and clamor of court and forum drown the busy hum of honest industry. Mere physical labor the children of our schools and age may properly disdain as the lot of the ignorant and unfortunate. But with the active brain we need to ally the discerning eye and the skillful hand, and to our acquaintance with books to add the knowledge of things. We must seek to furnish to our pupils something of that which the field and forest, the garden and the workshop, supply to his brother in the country.

The three learned professions of our fathers no longer monopolize the trained intellect of to-day; and in the ability to perceive, to think, to do, many a one whose academic escutcheon is all covered over with the heraldic devices, "This certifies," "This certifies," and "This certifies," must give place to his unlaureate neighbor. Aside from the field of mechanical invention and skill, the upheaval, as it were, of society in the line of decorative art-we can hardly call it a development—is opening many new channels of mental and manual activity. For all of these a correct training in drawing and design is the first requisite; nor is there, in fact, any department of business or professional life where its want is not felt. The use of the pencil can be as readily learned as that of the pen, and might well be as universal.

But as the child can be pleased with the little simplytold tale ere yet it knows a word or letter; as in reading there should be some careful study of words, united with their ready and discriminating use their only worth— so should the elementary lines and curves be interspersed with some picture-making, some attempts at shading and design. A fairly proportioned figure and a meritorious design may be accomplished long before the perfect straight line can be achieved. What kind of industrial

training could or should be made a part of our curriculum is the question of the day, but not the purpose of this paper. One enthusiast is partially successful in this, and another in that; but just what shall finally take its place alongside of the reader and arithmetic still awaits the successful wooer. But, however this may be, we should seek by some means-a few of which it has been my purpose to suggest to cultivate in our pupils a quicker and more accurate perception; a clearer and closer logic; a sounder judgment; a nicer and truer taste; a wiser forecast and more skillful adaptation of means to ends; how better to observe, to think, to do; to show him that, whatever his advantages, the true man is always a self-made man; that the highest acquisition is the full possession of all his powers of body and mind; and in a free land the only wise ruler he who can control all those powers, and direct them to high and noble ends.

V.

THE SCHOLARSHIP AIMED AT IN THE SCHOOL.

THE quickened interest of thoughtful minds under the impulse of what we are pleased to call the new education, finds its fullest expression in the discussion of new and improved methods. But methods are not for their own sake; they are but means to an end, and the value of any instrumentality must be largely judged by the worthiness of the purpose which it is designed to accomplish. It matters little how smoothly and swiftly the wheels of our machinery run or how generous the product they may furnish if the product itself be useless.

The purpose of the public school, as seen in its origin and history, is intellectual culture, and those methods only can have a strong and lasting hold on the public mind which best promote this. However pleasing and attractive the work may be, however we may for the time command the public ear and listen delighted to its words of praise, that system and those methods alone must win. in the end and enjoy a lasting reputation, which continue to send forth their pupils with a better knowledge, a higher intelligence, a clearer understanding, a more thorough scholarship, than their fellows.

Not long ago I was present at an exercise conducted by an accomplished and progressive teacher, the immediate subject of which was the use of the tendrils of a vine in the pupil's hand. After a satisfactory conclusion had been reached, the teacher remarked in closing: “I don't care at all about your knowing the use of the tendril, but merely the proper method of investigation.'

But, pleasing as the exercise had been, I could not help asking myself as I came away, What was the use of a proper method if there was nothing of value to be learned; why build a good road, plated though it be, that leads nowhere, or the need of study at all, or the development of strength for such study when the knowledge to be secured is of no worth? As Mrs. Browning so pathetically has it:

But that's out of nature. We all

Have been patriots, yet each house must always keep one; 'Twere imbecile, hewing out roads to a wall.

And, when Italy's made, for what end is it done,
If we have not a son?

"Do men labor for that which is not bread, which is food for neither body nor mind? What encouragement

for future investigation when nothing of worth remains from our present pains?

The blessing of labor we admit; but the arm is best nerved by the hope of the harvest, and the growth of our powers is best served in the pursuit of that at which all our efforts aim at the last-the acquisition of knowledge, all that is highest, purest, noblest, best.

The old talk of the threefold nature of man and the necessity of a full, complete development, barren of fruit as it sometimes seems in our schools, had become so familiar as to be almost a by-word a whole generation ago. Yet our schools were not established and are not sustained for the purpose of physical culture. Better to that end would have been the gymnasium, or a base-ball club, or in the country a turn with the shovel and the hoe. It is, of course, for the wise teacher to see that in the work of intellectual culture the health and physical grace of the pupil shall not deteriorate, making him with all his mental equipments but a bundle of bodily woes and weaknesses.

Nor was it for moral training and the formation of character, except as the mental culture shall tend to that result, that the public school was instituted. Morals are not taught in fourteen weeks or in any number of stated recitations, but should be like the prayer of the Christian:

The teacher's vital breath,

The teacher's native air,

Her watchword at the school-room door. '

Her self-hood everywhere,

that with bodily health unimpaired, strong in the integrity of a high and noble character induced by a cultured intellect and the habits of industry and self-restraint by which it may best be secured, our pupils without fear

and without reproach may go forth like true knights to battle for the right in the complete panoply of a true scholarship—a scholarship which, knowing the experiences of the past with its errors and failures, may be the better able to discern and follow the paths of honor and success; a scholarship which, in so far as it has been attained, has ever been one of the most efficient agents in lifting men from the sloughs of idleness and degradation, dignifying labor and providing even for their idle hours the resources of happiness and noble virtues. For this intellectual furnishing we believe in the new education, though we ourselves were never guided by its smiles nor ever felt the enlivening influence of its wiser methods. Yet many of us can doubtless recall some individual teacher, some man, some woman, whose finer nature or truer sympathy has changed the current of our school, our world life, perchance, "made this and that other world another world" to our wakened thought; and we believe there is a new education, though there may not be and probably is not anything in it that has not in some degree been practiced by good teachers ever since schools began.

We believe in the new education as we believe in a new tune, though it contains not a tone that was not in the old despised one. We believe in it for the spirit of humanity underlying, overlying it, inspiring it, which makes the living child its subject, its untiring study, its ceaseless hope; for its truer appreciation of the child-nature in its restless eagerness, its longings, its love of nature and of life, and its ceaseless strivings to acquaint itself with its powers, its capabilities, and its surroundings; and for the wiser presentation of subjects suited to each stage of its advance and development, skillfully guiding its unrepressed and gladsome activities into the