New York State Education department • £TW ADDRESSES AND PAPERS BY ANDREW S. DRAPER, LL.B. LL,D Commissioner of Education I9O9-I9IO ALBANY, N, Y D.iJ3m-Apio-40co Class Book '£' to /9*?-/9/» New York State Education Department ADDRESSES AND PAPERS „-r- BY e *l \V* ANDREW S. DRAPER, LL.B., LL.D. Commissioner of Education I9O9- I9IO ALBANY, N.Y. D4i3m-Apio-4ooo (7-11043) CONTENTS PAGE The Call of the Flag 3 The Lake Champlain Tercentenary 6 The Hudson- Fulton Celebration p Schools and Municipalities I2 Dedication of New Buildings of the State Normal College 16 The Relative Educational Standing of New York State 29 Motive in Education 4 e Public Morals and Public Schools 61 The Church Influence in Education - A The Essential Groundwork of Industrial Training 85 The Lay Influence in School Management IO i New York Colleges and the State System of Education n 2 The Lincoln-Douglas Debates T ^g Election as Commissioner of Education 167 The Law of Equipoise ; I7 g D. OF D. SFF 12 .-no THE CALL OF THE FLAG The strong colors and the glorious beauty of the American flag express well the overwhelming fact of modern history — the evolu- tion of the American Republic. Wherever it may be, the flag is both attractive and assertive. In the home the colors do not clash with other colors. If they do not blend, neither do they repel. In the remotest distance the flag may be seen above every other object and distinguished from every other flag. The red and white stripes standing for the original states, and the silvery stars representing the Union, radiate and scintillate as far as the eye can reach. Far or near, the American flag is true and sure, brilliant and radiant, cordial and independent. It is a modern flag. There are no myths or legends, no ruins or heraldry, no armour or castles about it. It expresses the political independence of a plain people, the advance of a new nation, the self-conscious power, the confident aspirations, and the universal good will of popular government. What has been said of the flag has largely been inspired by war. Souls must be aflame to give out oratory and poetry. The flag has many times been at the battle front. The sight of it has inspired many a boy to do and die for his country. It was in the crucial campaign of the Revolution, that for the possession of New York, beginning at Fort Schuyler, continuing at Oriskany, and ending with the surrender of Burgoyne's entire army at Saratoga, that the flag was first given to the air in the face of an enemy. In this state it began to gather the deep love of a free people. That love has since grown deeper and yet deeper through the hail and flame, the heroisms and deaths, of an hundred battles. It is sad that war had to be, but for us there was no other way. Independence of Britain could not come by arbitration. The Union could not be saved by negotiation. Fighting is bad business, but there are times when it is better than submission. The strength and courage of a people are the guardians of their peace, of their freedom, and of their progress. The perils, the sufferings, and the heroisms of the country have made the literature of the flag. But the flag of the American Union, now as never before, tells of toleration and of good will, of education and of industry. It has welcomed millions from all nations of the world and has held out Introduction to State Education Department publication on The American Flag, June 1910. [3] 4 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT the equal chance to all who came under its folds. Every new star added to its blue field has told of a new state, and every new state tells of more farms cleared, more factories opened, more churches and schools set in motion, and more laws and courts to regulate them all and to assure the equal rights of every one. Out of the equal chance of freemen, out of the farms and forests and mines, out of the majestic rivers and charming valleys and lofty mountains, and out of the bracing air that is filled with sun- shine, mighty public works and marvelous institutions of culture have sprung. Railways and roadways, tunnels and aqueducts, newspapers and magazines, theaters and art galleries, cathedrals and universities, have grown. They are the products and the promoters of civilization and they give strength and stateliness to the flag. The American flag has looked down upon the writing of more constitutions and the making of more laws than any other flag in history. Some of this lawmaking has been crude, and perhaps some of it has been mistaken, but it has been both the necessary ac- companiment and the stimulating cause of our wonderful national evolution. As man does so is he. All of these industrial, educational, reli- gious, and political doings have produced a new nation of keen, alert, sinewy, and right-minded people, who have power and know it. They have the traits of a young nation. But they are lacking neither in in- trospection, nor in imagination, nor in humor. More knowledge of other peoples than their fathers had and increasing responsibilities are sobering and steadying them. In their dealings with other peoples they intend to be just, frank, magnanimous. Their political philosophy is only the logical outworking of the Golden Rule. They have undoubting faith in democracy and would exemplify it in ways to commend and extend it. The American flag expresses a glorious history, but it does not hark back to it overmuch. It looks forward more than backward. It calls upon us to do for this generation and to regard all the generations that will follow after. It knows that some time there will be five hundred or a thousand millions of people in the United States instead of one hundred millions. It expects still greater public works and many more public conveniences. It sees better than any one of us does how hard it will be for such a self-governing people to hold what belongs to them in common, and to manage their great enterprises without frauds and for the good of all. The people of the United States are not only the proprietors of THE CALL OF THE FLAG 5 great natural possessions; they are inheritors of the natural rights of man, fought for by their ancestors in the mother country, granted in the great charters of English liberty, and established in the English common law. They have added to this what seemed worth taking from other systems of jurisprudence and from the manifold experiences of other lands ; they have proved their capacity to administer their inheritance, and to their natural and political estates they have added the experiences of their own successful and notable national career. The flag not only adjures us to guard what we have in property and in law, but to train the children so that the men and women of the future may administer their inheritance better than we have ours or than our fathers did theirs. The flag does more than emblazon a momentous and glorious history; it declares the purposes and heralds the ideals of the Re- public ; it admonishes us to uphold the inherent rights of all men ; it tells us to stand for international justice and conciliation, and it encourages us to accept the consequences without fear. It hails us to individual duties and the cooperation which alone can maintain equality of rights and fullness of opportunity in America. It in- sists that we set a compelling example which will enlarge both security and freedom, both peace and prosperity, in all parts of the world. A flag of glowing splendor calls to a nation oi infinite possibilities. It calls upon the American people to conserve property, health, and morals ; to preach the gospel of work and protect the accumulations of thrift; to open every kind of school to all manner of people ; and to spare neither alertness nor force in keeping clean the springs of political action and in punishing venality in public life. That is the call of the radiant flag of the Union to the self-governing nation of the western world which is being compounded out of all the nations and is creating a new manner of civilization out of all the civiliza- tions of the earth. LAKE CHAMPLAIN TERCENTENARY There is reason enough for the two great celebrations which the state of New York is to hold in July and September next. Lake Champlain and the Hudson river were discovered and ex- plored in the same year, 1609, the lake in July, and the river in September. Each took the name of the discoverer. Champlain was a French sea captain, in the service of France, and Hudson was an English sea captain, in the employ of the Dutch. Lake Champlain is about ninety miles long in a straight line. In width it varies from a half mile to fifteen miles. It has about fifty attractive islands. Its shores are broken by innumerable bays and inlets. The Adirondack mountains form the background on the New York side, and the Green mountains on the Vermont side. On the shores of the lake and at the foot of the mountains there are many fine towns and pretty villages, and a great number of sumptuous summer homes. The lake has been well stocked with fish, and the surrounding forests abound in game. Magnificent steamers and beautiful sailboats and pleasure yachts traverse its waters. Excellent railroads skirt its borders. It has come to be a playground for the whole nation. Taken altogether, it makes one of the most attractive and impressive regions to be seen any- where in the world. Celebrated as Lake Champlain is for its natural beauty and its energetic life, it is even more celebrated for its history. Song and story and legend, forts and battlefields, heroisms and tragedies which stir and appall mankind, and victories of the utmost im- portance to America and to all civilization, are all associated with Lake Champlain. It is hardly too much to say that upon its beau- tiful waters the American navy was born, that it witnessed the contests which decided that the Iroquois and not the Algonquins or the Hurons, that civilization and not savagery, that the English and not the French, that the Republic of the United States and not the British Empire, should be dominant, successively, in the western continent. Lake Champlain, with the Hudson, forms a natural highway of momentous import from the Atlantic ocean to the St Lawrence river. The Indians knew this road well and followed it much. Written for the Lake Champlain Tercentenary pamphlet issued by the State Education Department in honor of the celebration, July 4-10, 1909. [6] LAKE CHAMPLAIN TERCENTENARY 7 They could paddle their canoes, by carrying them overland only twenty miles, all the way from the mouth of the Hudson to the St Lawrence. If they followed the trails along the shores, they encountered no elevation of more than one hundred and fifty feet above the level of the sea. The rival tribes often fought for the possession of these waters and this road. It was the " dark and bloody ground " and became the great warpath of the Iroquois, who controlled it until they met white men. The French, who came with Champlain, and the Dutch who came with Hudson, and the English who followed him, soon found this great highway between the north and the south. They took it from the Indians, only to fight for it between themselves. Whether English or French civilization was to be uppermost in America had to be de- cided by war. Vessels were built and a little navy was constructed. Bloody campaigns surged over these waters and along these trails in northern New York. Thousands perished through hardship and battle. Old Ticonderoga saw the English triumph. Soon the war- path of the Iroquois became the veritable warpath of the Revolu- tion. Again the battle coursed back and forth along Lake Cham- plain. Now Canada was English instead of French, and from their homes at the north and their base of supplies at New York the armies of Britain sought to join forces upon this road and sever the patriots of New England from their fellows in the Middle and the Southern States. Again Ticonderoga, Crown Point, and Platts- burg became invaluable strategic points, and once more they and all of the Champlain valley were at the very vortex of the dread- ful forces of war. The control of this great thoroughfare was to determine the issue of American independence; the first British forts seized by the Patriots were up<_>rt u s and upon it, near Sara- toga, the most strategic battle of the Revolution was fought, and the most overwhelming victory of the Patriots was won. In the war which confirmed American independence the Cham- plain country was again the vantage ground. An invading army of fourteen thousand men, half of whom were regulars and vet- erans fresh from British battles in France and Spain, was driven back by New York militiamen at and around Plattsburg. In Platts- burg bay the Americans fought the severest naval battle and won the most decisive naval victory of the war. Before the onset the American commander called the crew of the flagship to the quarter- deck and prayed for the victory which the gallantry of the little squadron speedily gained. In the battle of Plattsburg bay there 8 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT were fifty-two Americans killed, and upon two of the vessels there was hardly a man who was not wounded. Not less than two thou- sand Americans have given up their lives in battles upon and about Lake Champlain in order to create and protect American institutions. These events make the Champlain country even more sacred to all patriotic Americans than it is fascinating to all the world. All the men and women of our state, and all the boys and girls in the schools should study the details of the history which I can here no more than suggest. The celebration, which will occur in the week commencing with the 4th of July, must not be a pastime alone. It should quicken the minds of all the people of the state of New York with an interest in the beautiful valley and the particular places where great events have happened. The way to do that most completely is to do it through the children in the schools. The teachers are asked to cooperate with the state in accomplishing this end. They are particularly asked to dwell upon the horrors, as well as the heroisms, of war. Nations are more rational, and wars are happily less common than they used to be. France, our early foe and our long-time friend, has now many worthy descendants in the Champlain valley ; and to them we will express our gratitude for the vital aid which their country gave to our struggling cause. Old Britain and the United States have come to understand each other better and respect each other more, and now they will meet upon historic ground to enter into a yet more absolute union for the peace, security and progress of the world. This celebration is being arranged jointly between the states of New York and Vermont, and it is to be participated in by the gov- ernment and the people of the Dominion of Canada. Everything said and everything done will be in the interests of universal good- will. This does not imply that we must forget, or that we must omit to speak of, what has helped to break out the highways of civilization and open the way for the advance of democratic free- dom and independence. Let the lesson be of what our fathers were obliged to do and to suffer; of our obligations to make the most of what they transmitted to us, and of our purpose to do all that we may for the good of our country and all mankind. While it is not practicable to name any one day for holding exer- cises in the schools, it is suggested that teachers take frequent occasion to speak upon the subject; that the children be induced to read and write about it, and that, before the close of the schools for the year, an afternoon be taken for exercises calculated to create interest in the theme and in the celebration. THE HUDSON-FULTON CELEBRATION The state of New York is arranging an elaborate celebration in honor of the Hudson river and of the great events associated with its waters and its shores. The celebration will begin on the 25th of September, 1909, and continue at different points and with varying features to the 9th of October. Wednesday, September 29th, will be the Educational day of the celebration. The time chosen is the three hundredth anniversary of the first exploration of the river by Captain Henry Hudson, in the little sailing ship " Half Moon," sent out by the good people of Holland. It is a little more than a hundred years from the time when Robert Fulton, in the " Clermont," proved that steam power might be relied upon to propel boats. The Hudson river has borne many names. Some of the Indians called it " Mah-i-can-i-tuk," which meant the " place of the Mohicans," and others, " Ca-ho-ha-ta-tea," or " river that flows from the mountains." The Dutch named it the " Mauritius " in honor of Prince Maurice, the great son and successor of William the Silent. The French called it " La Grande river," and the Spanish, the " River of the Mountains." The English more often gave it the name of the "North river" (the Delaware being the South river), and by that name it is frequently called now. But the popular sense of justice came to call it " Hudson's river," and that finally settled down to the " Hudson river." The common fair- ness has now been confirmed by many laws. None of its great names has been too good for it. It is a splendid, deep, free-flowing stream. It is the outlet of great mountains and magnificent valleys. It has tides all the way to Troy. It is bordered by beautiful slopes and stately peaks ; by the Palisades, a great stone wall fifteen miles in length; and by thrifty cities and splendid residences as well. In picturesqueness, in always changing, and quickly changing, views, it is hardly equaled by any other river in America or in the world. It is a river which has long been useful and dear to a great and prosperous civilization. Although Hudson sailed for the Dutch, he first made known his discovery to the English; and although the English king required him, an English subject, not to leave the Written for the Hudson-Fulton Celebration pamphlet, issued by the State Education Department in honor of the celebration, September 25 to October 9, I909- r . [9] IO NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT English service again, the Dutch were the first to establish trading posts and settlements upon the Hudson river. The Dutch were a iittle people, but in some things they were greater than the largest. In manufactures and trade upon the sea, in fighting power, and in schools of all grades and kinds, they were then the foremost nation in the world. They had just had a forty years' war and had laid down a hundred thousand lives for liberty. It had made them the freest nation in the world. Of course, they brought their personal traits and their national feeling to the Hudson. For full fifty years those traits and feelings had their free opportunity in " New Amsterdam " and " New Netherland," and of course they have a large share in the foundational history of the state of New York. Just as Hudson was exploring, and Dutch settlers were beginning to locate upon the Hudson river, our Pilgrim forefathers were hunted out of England by religious bigotry. They were welcomed in Holland. A dozen years later they migrated to America, in- tending to settle upon the Hudson, but were landed upon the Massa- chusetts coast by reason of bad weather or the captain's fraud. The Pilgrims and the Dutch had common feelings and cordial relations. Neither had any love for the king and the Royalists in England, who in 1664 sent an armed fleet and took possession of New Am- sterdam and called it New York. In the meantime, twenty or thirty thousand English Puritans, and some Royalists, had settled in New England. A few had come over into New York. They were up- right, religious, intolerant, autocratic, aggressive people. The English knew much, very much for their day, about human rights. They had fought for their rights within as well as without the kingdom. They had set limits to the power of the king. They brought " Magna Charta " and a good system of laws and of courts to America with them. They were divided among themselves and had, the Royalists particularly, much friction with the Dutch. But by the time the English Puritans and the Dutch had combined their forces and overwhelmed the English government in the American War for Independence, and by the time they had forced the British armies to surrender and had driven the Royalists or " Tories " out of the country, they were fused into a united people. They had learned to tolerate each other, and to tolerate other people also. They welcomed people from all the nations. Working together, they became generous-minded and made the great qualities of each even greater than they were before. Out of it all came the " Empire State " and other great states and the great Union of the states. THE HUDSON-FULTON CELEBRATION II All this and much more, in infinite detail, is associated with the valley of the Hudson river, and must be made much of in our celebration. There is not a point upon the river, not a stream or a valley that leads into it, not a peak that looks down upon it, that is without its legend and its story. War, with its horrors and its heroisms, has had a large part in it. Treason left its stain upon it. Learning, literature, the arts and sciences, agriculture, manufactures, banking, law, politics, statesmanship, have run as freely in the Hudson valley as the ever-flowing waters of the river. The first school in the United States ; the first federal Congress ; the initial and the decisive battles of the Revolution; and the ap- proval of the federal Constitution were in sight of the Hudson. The convention that framed the first state Constitution of New York was forced by the British army up the river from New York to White Plains, then to Harlem, then to Kingsbridge, then to Odell's in the Philipse Manor, then to Fishkill, then to Poughkeepsie, and then to Kingston, where, with the scales of justice in one hand and the drawn sword in the other, on Sunday, April 20, 1777, it completed its splendid work, only to have advancing war at once compel it to move again. Let us think of what the names of Clinton, Tompkins, Yates, Woodhull, Gansevoort, Schuyler, Tallmadge, Root, Scott, Liv- ingston, Duane, VanCortlandt, VanRensselaer, particularly Hamil- ton and Jay, and a host of others, signify in the early history of the Hudson ; let us think of the teachers, and preachers, and scholars, and writers, who have wrought upon its shores; let us enter into the enlightened policy of the state which long ago made it the greatest highway of travel and commerce in the country, and let us have a share in the new purpose that such it shall remain forever. ■ The schools may do more than any other agencies to put red blood and a true spirit into the coming celebration. New York has never been very generously treated — it has sometimes been badly treated — by the professional writers of American history. Let us enter in no haphazard or half-hearted way into a great celebration which is being arranged to arouse a keener appreciation of the doings of our fathers. Let the pupils read much of the history which makes the Empire State so great. Let them write upon it. Let the exercises upon the 29th of September be public and popular, the worthy expression of a fine school system, and the vital inspiration of a great state. SCHOOLS AND MUNICIPALITIES At the joint hearing upon the education chapter of the proposed New York City Charter, held by the cities committees of the Legis- lature on the 6th inst., Senator McCarren very pertinently asked why the management of the schools should not be through a de- partment of the city government, as well as the management of the police service, or the fire service, etc. The answer was not given as completely as it seems to me it should be. The reason is that the state constitution [art. IX, § i], directs that " the Legislature shall provide for the maintenance and sup- port of a system of free common schools." The Constitution does not require the Legislature to provide for the maintenance and support of policemen, or firemen, or street cleaners. The federal Constitution omitted all reference to the education of the people, evidently because that was deemed to be a matter for the states. All states have assumed control over it. It has not been left to inference or implication. Every state has erected a state system of education, by positive provision in its Constitution and laws. In no case has a state permitted it to become a matter for a munici- pality, as such, to deal with. Often a state has utilized the ma- chinery of a municipality to care for some interest of the schools, but that has been only for convenience or from the necessities of the case. Following the mandate of the Constitution, the state has enacted general educational laws and constituted general educational au- thorities for the specific purpose of assuring adequate and suitable schools in every part of the state. The state has constituted a local educational organization for every rod of its territory, which local organization becomes a part of the state's general educational system; but if the people of any city or district, through such local organization, omit to maintain schools, or maintain inadequate or inefficient schools, the law and the authority of the state at once step in to provide them. Ordinarily the local interest in education is sufficient for all ends. Commonly, there is enough good sense in a community to prevent the use of the schools for other than educational ends. The American spirit is generally to be relied upon to carry out the state's educational plan according to its letter and intent. But it is not always so. Comments on the proposed changes in the education chapter of the New York City Charter, April 8, 1909. [12] SCHOOLS AND MUNICIPALITIES , 13 In every part of the state, and ever since the educational system began to grow, the public schools have been part and parcel of the state system, designed to assure equality of opportunity to all the people of the state. The New York State Constitution throws upon the Legislature direct and immediate responsibility for the maintenance and support of a system of schools " wherein all the children of this state may be educated." This of course charges the Legislature with responsibility for a system of schools which shall be suitable and adequate for the purpose named. It has come to be fundamental that the educational system is a state system, and in no sense a municipal system. Public education is completely differentiated from those municipal activities for which the mu- nicipal government should be charged with primary responsibility. This state raises by tax, and pays from its treasury, something like $7,000,000 a year for the support and maintenance of its edu- cational activities. Where the money of the state goes, the respon- sibility, care and direction of the state go also. This is not the mere theory of an education officer. It is fixed by the holdings of the courts of last resort in all the states where the subject has had the advantage of judicial determination. There is no lack of determinations to this effect by the Court of Appeals of the State of New York. There are no well considered legal authorities op- posed to this fundamental principle of the educational system. It is the only principle upon which a reasonably efficient educational system may be assured in all parts of a state. The New York State Legislature has uniformly observed this principle in the making of laws, whenever laws have not been smuggled through the Legislature without real consideration. The Legislature has also observed this principle in the interpretation, as well as in the making of laws. The state Constitution provides that no person shall be eligible to the Legislature who at the time of his election is " an officer under any city government." In 1876 a school inspector in the city of New York was elected to the state Senate. His seat was contested on the ground that as such school officer he was an officer under the government of New York city. The Senate decided that the Board of Education of the City of New York was possessed of powers and liable to the perform- ance of duties not of a local character, and hence was not under the city government. The charter of the city of Albany, through a piece of legal bungling, enumerates members of the Board of Education among the city officers. A member of that Board of Education was elected to the Legislature. His seat was contested 14 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT on the ground that he was constitutionally ineligible. After full consideration of the subject, men of all parties in the committee of investigation agreed that, notwithstanding the provision in the Albany City Charter, a member of the Board of Education was not and could not be a city officer, and therefore was not ineligible to the Legislature, and the House adopted the report without dissent. In view of all this, the provisions in the proposed New York City Charter, including members of the Board of Education in the list of city officers, and specifically constituting the education de- partment an administrative department of the government of the city of New York, are both meaningless and confusing. The education laws of this state, and of many other states, have provided for the appointment of members of the Board of Educa- tion by the mayor — not because he is mayor, but in spite of that fact and because he is the only general officer upon whom it seems at all feasible to confer the power of appointment. Upon the whole, appointment in that way has perhaps worked as well as the creation of the board in any other way would have done. But the provision in this proposed charter, that the mayor may remove any member of the Board of Education at his pleasure, is a vicious novelty in legislation which has never been invented until now. It goes without saying that the educational system must neces- sarily be separated just as far as may be from the political activi- ties of a municipality. Of course, there are likely to be points of inevitable contact. No one has been disposed to complain much about the school budget going to a central board of estimate and apportionment for consideration with other public expenditures, because of the almost imperative necessities of the case. But any arrangement which empowers any board or officer of the city to fix or change a teacher's salary, or to do anything else bearing upon the freedom and efficiency of the schools, and which does not give the management of the schools absolutely and completely to the officials who are chosen for that particular purpose, ought to be stoutly resisted by every one who is interested in the welfare of the schools. The provision in the proposed charter that the Board of Educa- tion of the City of New York shall not possess the powers or privileges of a corporation, taken in connection with many other provisions, to some of which I have only alluded, submerges the educational interests of the city in the corporation and the politics SCHOOLS AND MUNICIPALITIES v 1 5 of the city itself. That would take away all vestige of educational independence. It would deprive the people of the city of New York of important educational rights which the rest of the people of the state of New York enjoy. In a word, the educational chapter of the proposed charter is drawn upon a theory which has never been legally established, which is repugnant to universally established legal and educational theories of the country, and which is absolutely antagonistic to the interests of education. THE STATE NORMAL COLLEGE Mr President, Governor Hughes, and teachers, students, graduates and friends of the State Normal College: The manage- ment of this old and excellent institution has peculiar pleasure in the aid of this distinguished company in these dedica- tion exercises. The attendance of the Board of Regents and of so many of the leading school superintendents of the state is gratify- ing. The presence and the words of Governor Hughes are inspir- ing. The school has had influential friends all its life. The act creating it was signed by Governor William C. Bouck. The appropriation for its first real home was signed by Hamilton Fish; that providing for the second building by Grover Cleveland ; that providing for these beautiful buildings by Governor Frank Wayland Higgins ; and that for their furnishings and equipment by Governor Hughes. In fact, there has been no governor or legislator in many years who has not had the opportunity to do something for us. We acknowledge all these favors in the hope of other favors yet to come. It is sixty-five years since the state established this institution. New York was the first state to appropriate moneys for the train- ing of teachers, but not the first to establish a separate state normal school. As early as 1818 Governor DeWitt Clinton recommended some rather fanciful schools for the training of teachers, which, however fanciful, contained the real fundamentals of the present normal school system. In his succeeding annual messages for ten years he evinced his deep interest in the subject, and for another ten years his successors, Van Buren, Throop, Marcy, and Seward, discussed it with political caution and educational enthusiasm that were mixed by masterful hands. The idea of separate normal schools was taking form, but it was opposed by strong forces, for the colleges and the academies and the Regents were against it. Azariah C. Flagg, a great superintendent of common schools from 1826 to 1833, favored separate normal schools. John A. Dix, an equally great superintendent of common schools from 1833 to 1839, was with the academies and the Regents. So was his distinguished successor, John C. Spencer. In 1827 the Legislature, evidently upon the initiative of Clinton, added $150,000 to the literature fund " to promote the education of teachers," and in 1834, at the instance Address at dedication of new buildings, October 28, 1909. [16] THE STATE NORMAL COLLEGE 1 7 of Dix and the Regents, it passed an act providing for a " normal department " in one academy in each of eight judicial districts. Sharp disagreements and futile efforts at the unification of the dual system of school administration were in the air even then. In 1839 Massachusetts received a gift which induced her to set up the first state normal school upon an independent footing in the country. Public opinion gradually came to the support of this plan, and in five years the New York Legislature decided to try it in co- operation with the other which had theretofore been adopted as the exclusive policy of the Empire State. In 1844 the first normal school of the state, under whose splendid new roof we meet today, was established. In the succeeding half century, ten similar state schools were established, and with them a system of city training schools. The training classes which had been introduced into the academies had been many times multiplied and carried into one or more union schools in nearly every county. All these, in connection with new pedagogical departments in the colleges and universities and with our uniform system of examining teachers, comprise a compre- hensive plan for securing capable teachers which is quite unique in American education. At the beginning the state appropriated $10,000 for the normal school upon the understanding that the city of Albany would pro- vide a building, and in the following summer the city placed at its service for five years the building between State street and Maiden Lane, just east of Eagle street, which had recently been vacated by the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad Company. It has been remod- eled several times, but some of the original building remains. It is now known as Van Vechten Hall. The city paid $1000 per year for five years for rent, and $500 toward preparing the building for use. The state paid over $3000 to get the place in condition. Even that was better for the state than is usual when the state and a city undertake to share expenses. The school was opened Decem- ber 18, 1844. Tuition and books were free, and board was nearly so. Male pupils were paid one dollar per week, and female pupils one dollar and a half per week, to induce attendance. None will dispute the propriety of the discrimination. Twenty-nine students came at the beginning, and before the close of the term there were one hundred. In 1848 the lot at the corner of Lodge and Howard streets was secured for a permanent building, and the state appropriated $25,- 000 for the very spacious structure, with flights of stairs that were 1 8 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT as long and steep as ladders, which was used from 1849 *° l &&5- The records tell us that two plans were prepared, that one was more ornamental and required $700 more than the other, and that the more ornamental and costly was taken. This building is now owned by the Roman Catholic Church and is occupied by the Christian Brothers Academy. I myself sold the same to the present owners at public auction, at the front door of the Albany City Hall, on March 6, 1886, pursuant to section 1 of chapter 280, Laws of 1885. In January 1883, the present vice chancellor, Dr McKelway, and I had become members of the board in charge of the school, and at the first meeting we heard the statement that the walls were out of plumb, that the building was cracked and in danger of falling, but that little must be said of it lest the attend- ance of pupils might be affected. Refusing the custody of such an exclusive and cheerful secret, we drew a resolution for the Senate, directing the finance committee to inquire and report as to the safety of the old building. In a few days the committee, upon the advice of a firm of Albany architects and the chief engineer of the Albany fire department, reported that the building was menaced by quick- sand and that the walls had settled and cracked; that "there is no immediate danger of a catastrophe, but that danger is inevitable at an uncertain time in the future unless measures are taken to avert it." That was twenty-seven years ago, but even yet the old build- ing looks us right in the face and stands up bravely for education. The measure to avert the possible " catastrophe " appropriated $125,000 for a new site and building. The site on Willett street was picked out of a dozen that were offered. The building there erected was much criticized. Its external architecture was com- monplace, though not specially bad, and its internal arrangement was intolerable. But the president of the school and two of the five members of the board had trained me to think as they did in earlier days in the Albany Academy, and continued it even then. I fear Dr McKelway had no such excuse. When, from my front porch, I saw that ill formed and ill fated sclioolhouse go heaven- ward in flame and smoke, on that keen winter evening in January 1906, I was as officially affected as was proper, but my personal grief was not of the kind which is altogether uncontrollable. It surely would have been greater, however, could all the troubles over plans for the new buildings have been foreseen. The Legislature of 1906 appropriated $350,000, with an unex- pended appropriation for additional land on Madison avenue amounting to some $17,000, together with the insurance upon the THE STATE NORMAL COLLEGE 19 old building amounting to $75,000, for the new structures. The act authorized an exchange of sites : that is why we are here rather than at the other end of our beautiful park. It authorized " a fire- proof building or buildings " : that is why there are four of them. It provided that the plans should be prepared by the State Archi- tect, subject to the approval of the Commissioner of Education and the trustees in charge of the college : that is why these particular buildings are here. The site which we occupied on Willett street was never sufficient, and more room was needed. We had for several years been acquir- ing separate adjoining parcels of land on Madison avenue, with a view to securing all of them, but as our purpose was divined the remaining lots came to possess about as much value in the minds of the owners as if there were a gold mine or a well of oil under them. The prospect was not encouraging, for, aside from the cost, the situation was not well suited to our purposes. Then a fortu- nate opportunity presented itself. The Albany Orphan Asylum had occupied the site where we now are for more than eighty years. At the beginning it was out in the country, but the city had grown up around it so that it was not as well adapted to the purposes of the asylum as it had been, and it had acquired a value which the trustees of the asylum wished to convert into better buildings upon a less expensive site at the outskirts of the city. An exchange of properties was effected. The trustees of the asylum took our old site and sold it, and conveyed this site to us in consideration of a difference of $75,000, and then acquired their new site at the south- ern end of Lake avenue, and erected their beautiful new buildings. It was an arrangement very satisfactory to all the parties in inter- est, and manifestly for the good of the college, the asylum, and the city. Using the amount received from insurance to secure this more eligible site, we had about $367,000 for new buildings. The Legisla- ture thought the appropriation very liberal, but it was evident enough from the beginning that to secure the needed space and accommo- dations, we would have to dispense with costly or ornamental con- struction. Yet it was as necessary that we have attractive buildings as spacious ones. The time is here when one who has anything to do with the erection of a public building is bound to see that it is architecturally effective as well as practically useful; and one who permits the erection of a public building, and particularly a con- spicuous state school building, without assuring good architecture and without making the most of the opportunity to promote the 20 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT interests of art among the people, deserves nothing but censure for his ignorance or his indifference. There was much trouble and delay about agreeing upon plans for the new buildings. Possibly the story ought to have been placed in a cornerstone of the building, and quite as likely it is one of the things which it is as well to have forgotten. Certainly there is no occasion to repeat it now ; and there would have been no reason to mention it but for the inconvenience and distress which it in- flicted upon this institution for a number of recent years. In the midst of the delay there was one episode which may well be mentioned and ought to be instructive to young men. In the summer of 1906, when the scheme for the architectural competi- tion upon the State Education Building was being developed, Mr Albert R. Ross, a young architect, came into the Education Depart- ment and showed me photographs of several beautiful and striking buildings which he had designed. His words were modest and sane. He made an impression. Six months later, when the issue over the designs for the Normal College buildings had become sharp and we were almost at the end of our resources, I wrote Mr Ross that I could guarantee him no definite employment or com- pensation, but appealed to his patriotism and professional spirit to come and see if he could help us. His home was in New York, but the next morning he called me by telephone from Boston, thanked me for the mere opportunity to aid us, and said he would be here on the following day for whatever he could do. I showed him the designs of the Woman's Building at the University of Illi- nois, and colored prints of the front elevations of the main build- ings of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. These were all by the New York architects, McKim, Mead and White. To my gratification, he told me he had helped design the plans for the University of Virginia and was in love with them. He thought the architecture admirably adapted to our situation and needs. He studied the site and said he would give us a sketch in two weeks. It came on schedule time and was highly pleasing to all the mem- bers of our board. It represented these buildings essentially as they stand today. Discussion led to minor changes, and in two weeks more he brought us a beautiful finished sketch, which has now been exactly executed. But before the Ross designs could be adopted, the whole matter had to have the final arbitrament of the legislative committees, and it had to have, as it did have, the helpful aid of Comptroller Martin H. Glynn. THE STATE NORMAL COLLEGE 21 The interior plans were worked out most acceptably by President Milne and State Architect George A. Heins, and the supervision of construction was under the competent care of Mr Franklin B. Ware, who succeeded to the office of State Architect upon the very regrettable death of Mr Heins. It would be wholly unjust to omit to say that no such large work was ever executed with less friction between owners and contrac- tors. The A. E. Stephens Company, of Binghamton, have done their work without bluster or complaint. The changes from the plans were very few, and the contractors were at all times anxious to help us realize our highest expectations. There is satisfaction in the feeling that we have buildings which we can like, and that the state has its money's worth without having had to use a big stick or go to the courts to get what belonged to it. And if the con- tractors have gained the reasonable profit to which their work en- titles them, all concerned will be heartily glad of it. As to the finances of this undertaking, we are upon strong ground. The garment was cut according to the cloth. There are no balances on the building account. We have used practically every dollar. There are and will be no deficiencies. The appro- priation for furnishings and equipment was liberal and just. The enthusiastic faculty scheduled up a demand for $109,000. The Edu- cation Department asked for $50,000 and got it. The amount went through the legislative committees with only the ordinary pleading, and Governor Hughes approved it without frightening us, when it was well known that he was looking hard for things to veto. It has furnished the building with what it needs and supplied a good equipment for the teaching. It has put the walks and grounds in order, and for this a good German gardener is entitled to just as much credit as the rest of us. It has even topped everything out with a fine flagstaff and a beautiful flag, " With the red for love And the white for law And the blue for the hope that our fathers saw Of a larger liberty." We turn our thoughts now from the building to the life of the school. This delightful situation and these beautiful and impressive buildings would seem a dream to us if we were willing to' be dream- ers. We have longed for them and waited doubtfully. We can hardly realize it all. But we are not dreamers : they are real. We 22 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT are to enter a new epoch, seize a new opportunity, and make new history. When this first normal school of the state was established, edu- cational theory was young and feeble. It was just opening one eye to the fundamental doctrine of normal schools. There were schools, but not a system ; branches, but not courses ; recitations, but not schedules. Even trained and disciplined teachers were few, and there was little public recognition of the need of specially prepared teachers in the common schools. Institutions and instruments for training such teachers were wholly lacking. More than that was true. If we were to admit that " he who knows a subject can teach it," there was still no adequate provision for training teachers, for there was a lack of advanced schools of any kind. There was not a university in the land. There were a few colleges, but only a few young men, and no women, went to them. Laboratories were unknown. Even books were scarce, and few of what there were appealed to youth. We were essentially an agricultural people. A few proprietary " seminaries," and more academies, which in spite of good intentions were necessarily exclusive, held aloft the flicker- ing lights of the more liberal learning. There were no public high schools. Surely there was need enough of a normal school. Re- gardless of the later day refinements of educational theory, there was room enough for a tax-supported and free advanced school, call it by whatever name they would. And so in the beginning there were not many to take exception, and probably no exception to be taken, to whatever kind or grade of educational work the normal school might do. This is all changed now. There are a half dozen universities and a score of colleges in this state alone. One hundred and sixty- two of the old academies continue. A public high school — 691 in all — has grown up in practically every town; and where there is none, the pupils may go to a neighboring school and the state will pay the tuition. Then there is every manner of endowed and in- corporated school that special professional or scientific needs, or religious zeal, or commercial energy can suggest, to say nothing of the polishing schools for the rather exclusive girls, and the mili- tary schools for the rather swift boys. And all of these are filled with all the libraries and apparatus and illustrative appliances that genius and liberality can bring to our hands. And out of it all has grown up an organization to make sure that no delinquent community shall be permitted to go without the advantages of it. Normal schools do not have to teach elementary branches of THE STATE NORMAL COLLEGE 23 knowledge as they used to be obliged to do. They get, or if they are proficient will get, an abundance of students who are better prepared for advanced work than those who used to come. It is good policy to leave all of the instruction possible to the local schools, and to pursue in the state schools only such necessary work as the ordinary schools can not or do not do. If that is done, the state normal school may, if they will, make greater headway in the philosophy and the art of teaching, and they may respond to the reasonable expectation that they shall provide the inspiration and leadership needed by the elementary schools. But we are confronting new situations which call for new plans. Our public schools seem about to undergo some very marked changes in organization and procedure. It is to be hoped that every child in the state will be brought into a school and kept there until he has acquired the essential elements of an English education. To have that so, and to provide for other necessary training, the essen- tials of an English education will have to be covered in less than eight years, and the work will have to be of a kind which will make it clearly worth the time of the child to remain to the end of it. This is likely to prove difficult but by no means impossible. When it is accomplished, all the children may well go from the ele- mentary schools to more advanced schools, as a very small number of them do now. When that is effectuated, opportunity will be much enlarged, many more children will gain by it, and the state will be the stronger for it. But before it can be effectuated the pupils will not only have to be ready for a more advanced school, or a secondary school, at a somewhat earlier age than now, but the secondary schools will have to be of kinds which will suit the needs of all children, or at least of a very much larger proportion of the children, and which will keep the intellectual and the industrial activities of the state in reasonable equilibrium. There is reason enough to think that this is neither fanciful nor remote. We are very rapidly developing a great system of sec- ondary schools which will separate at the very beginning into three clearly differentiated divisions. One of these will be the literary and classical divisions, such as we now have, and will lead to what we used to regard as the professions, and to general culture. The second will train for trade and commerce. And the third will train workmen, both those who work collectively and with machinery owned by the shop, and those who work individually and with their own tools. It is not difficult to believe that the time is' not remote when the employers of labor will require that employees, and the 24 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT more advanced technical schools will require that freshmen, shall have the training of these industrial schools just as the literary colleges and the intellectual and scientific professions require that their beginners shall have the training of the literary or classical schools of secondary grade. So teachers must be trained for these different divisions of sec- ondary schools. Whether it would be good policy to undertake to train teachers in the State Normal College for all three of these divisions is doubtful. The teachers for the industrial division will, it would seem, have to be trained very largely in shops, because those schools will have to depend upon the equipment, and the ways and the atmosphere of the factory and the shop. At least it would seem that they will have to be trained in schools that are much like shops and in a community that is much interested in mechanical and constructive employments. For this and other reasons it has occurred to me that it might be well to begin to shape the Buffalo Normal School for training teachers for the distinctly industrial schools. But, whatever plans may be determined upon in that re- gard, it is clear enough that we have reached the point where the distinct functions of the state schools should be somewhat closely defined. Specialization is as needful to the highest efficiency of a school as of an individual looking to expert service ; and economy of time and money for the state, the school, and the individual, will be promoted by it. The state normal schools should have very definite work and be equipped with reference to' it, and apparently there is no doubt that nearly or quite all of them must be expected to bear the burden of training the best teachers for the great ele- mentary school system. But there is a distinct need in our educational system for which no adequate provision has been made. That is better training for teachers in the secondary school system as it now exists or may develop. Our high schools grew from the ground up. They did not, like the academies, come from the colleges down. Indeed, many of the high schools have but one, two, or three years of the high school course. It is not strange that not all of the people, nor all of the boards of education, have appreciated these scholastic needs. There is not only lack of appreciation of these needs ; there is lack of provision for them. There is a sort of hiatus right here in the American educational system, and possibly because of the manner of our high school evolution, it is more pronounced in New York than in many of the states. It must be accepted that the least the high school teachers require is the training of a college. The THE STATE NORMAL COLLEGE 25 normal schools are not broad enough or deep enough in subject- matter to train high school teachers. They can not be made so without neglect of the elementary schools or without a cost to the state which is unnecessary and would be unfruitful. The ele- mentary schools and the secondary schools are much differentiated ; their teaching is upon very different footings. The secondary schools have advanced to a point where they claim teachers of a distinctly different training than either the normal schools or the or- dinary colleges provide. But that is not all. Most of the colleges train for nearly every other professional employment better than for teaching. They are not very hospitable to pedagogy, anyway. Indeed, not a few of the college and university men deny that there is any such thing as a science of teaching. But they are in a decided minority. The weight of opinion in this country, and in all coun- tries where education is advanced, is against them. Therefore, the training of supervisory school officers and of teachers in the sec- ondary schools requires not only a college, but a pedagogical college. That function and duty have been devolved upon this institution. Its age, its individuality, its long history and special traditions, its independent government, and its location at the capital, supply the reasons for that. Almost twenty years ago, long before there was any very distinct point about it, the Board of Regents gave it a col- lege charter and authorized it to confer the bachelor's, master's, and doctor's degrees in pedagogy. In very recent years the fur- ther action of the Board of Regents has given real point to this distinction which, years ago, the prestige of the old school brought to it. First it was made a college. Later it has been given a spe- cial mission, necessary to the state, and which required a college for its performance. Of all states, New York sets its ban upon high grade educational names for low grade institutions. It does not permit the title " college " to be used by any institution, much less a state institu- tion, which in fact is not a college. Our statute requires that a college must have property of the value of $500,000. It so hap- pens that there is more than that value in these lands and buildings. But that is far from all. There is no better college endowment than the support of an American state. But this state will not provide that and then permit academic degrees to be conferred in its name without an ample basis of learning. To make a real normal college out of a normal school, some old features must be put away and some new ones added. It is harder to make an institution over than to make a new one. Courses 26 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT suited to those who intend only to teach in the elementary schools may be discontinued. So also may primary practice schools. The admission requirements must be advanced to a level with those of all the good colleges, and then exactly enforced. It takes more conscience and force to enforce requirements than to adopt them. Courses of four years in the liberal arts and pedagogics must be offered. Every graduate must have four years' work of college quality in the accepted studies of a liberal education, and such professional courses as are deemed to be fundamental in the liberal training of teachers. And, in every way, the institution must be enveloped in the academic atmosphere, take on the academic forms, and perhaps assume the academic airs, of a college. Neither here nor at any other state school has the prosperity of tradesmen or the growth of the town any legitimate relation to the subject. If the institution is highly efficient, students will mul- tiply and the town will get the benefit of it. But that is wholly a secondary matter. Proper economy of expense and clean-cut edu- cational efficiency are the primary considerations. This is to be a pedagogical college. It is to give a liberal training to men and women who will be teachers. It has not heretofore advanced as might have been desired, but there has been reasonable excuse. It is not intended that it shall grow into a state university. Only a pedagogical college is in mind, and nothing short of that can be accepted. It is not only to teach ; it is to study. It is not only to train ; it is to investigate and try to add to the sum of ped- agogical knowledge and experience. It is to dig deep, and, if pos- sible, more deeply than others have yet done, into the sciences which relate to life, into the philosophies which bear upon the thinking of mankind, and into the most efficient ways for transmitting these things to others. This college is not to be content with the external forms : it is to get into the substance of things that have to do with education. If there is anything the matter with New York education, as I now and then suspect there is, this institution ought to be the first to tell us what it is. Its great field is to be found in the educational system of the Empire State. If we generally accept the theories of the normal schools about methods and management and disci- pline and practice teaching under critic teachers, we need not accept all of them for the more advanced work of the normal college. There need not be so much made of methods, because the students will be more mature and advanced, will know something about the forms of organization and of teaching, and will have come to the THE STATE NORMAL COLLEGE 27 time when they must have serious work of college grade and be free to apply it and exploit it in the great educational system of the state, rather than in selected or special schools, if their expec- tations are to be met. The difficulties have been serious. It is a wonder that this college has held together at all through the four years that we have been trying to carry on the work in three or four places, and without the libraries, laboratories, classrooms and appliances that such an institution imperatively requires. But now the day of jubilee has come, and every one having anything to do with the State Normal College must move up to a higher plane, that the old school may meet the newer and heavier and holier burdens which the state of New York is placing upon it. A splendid history ought to incite us. David P. Page, and George R. Perkins, and Samuel B. Woolworth, and David H. Cochrane, and Joseph Alden, and Edward P. Waterbury, were great teachers and natural leaders of schools. William J. Milne is such a teacher and such a leader. They and others like them have here trained more than twenty thousand men and women to fine and heroic service. When the Civil War came, this school sent a fine company of its men, with Professors Kimball and Husted in command, into a famous regiment — the " People's Ellsworth Regiment," the 44th New York — to fight the battles of the country. It was inspired by the lamentable and heroic death at the very outbreak of the war of Colonel Elmer E. Ellsworth, who lies buried only twenty miles from here. I remember, when a boy, seeing that regiment go down lower State street. It was distinguished from all the other regi- ments by the white moccasins worn by the men. It was a selected regiment of tall men. In it there were many men of the schools. It was so strong in numbers that it filled the street from the old Capitol to the Exchange, with the company fronts stretching from curb to curb or even over the sidewalks. That broad street has seen many military pageants to be remembered but it never wit- nessed a scene that will be remembered longer or more vividly than when that regiment halted for a moment to receive from the hand of Mrs Erastus Corning the flags it was to carry through Antietam, and Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, and the Wilderness, to Appomattox. When the regiment came back, the street was wide enough for its numbers, but it was then distin- guished by more than white moccasins and tall men. To have had an heroic part with that regiment gives this old school a special 28 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT right to float a fine flag upon its campus. But let us not forget that women as well as men, and more of them, have gone out from this school to give a sacrificial and resultful public service, which must quicken the pulse beats and give zest to what is to be under- taken now. Starting out in the old Mohawk and Hudson Railroad building on State street the school was there five years. It was in the build- ing erected upon " the more ornamental plan " thirty-four years. It was in its last home on Willett street twenty-three years. For nearly four years it must have felt like an orphaned and homeless child. It must now feel proud in this fine new home, so pure and so truly American in its architecture that the lovers of classic art, and of classic art as seen through American eyes, will be glad to travel far to see it. Pride in home is no mean inspiration. Here may the State Normal College live long and prosper ! To the uses of the higher learning and the betterment of the higher teaching, to the upbuilding of a great college of pedagogy, and to the service of a noble state, we set apart these grounds and these buildings, and to all that and more we dedicate the life within, for a thousand years ! THE RELATIVE EDUCATIONAL STANDING OF NEW YORK STATE There is no harm in a little reasonable boasting of the state of New York; but that is not the thought of this paper. Com- parisons are not odious if made to ascertain what one ought to do. The effort will be to make a just comparison of our educa- tional situation with that in nine other leading and representative states, to see in what we lack more than in what we have a surplus. The states selected are Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois. Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri and California. More could not be taken without unprofitably extending the inquiry. These are taken because they are all good strong- states, not remote from our latitude, and well known for their educational activities. Absolute exactness of figures is not claimed. This is not the work of a professor of civil engineer- ing. There are no needles to meet under the North river, and millions of money are not to be predicated upon my deductions. The figures are from the United States Bureau of Education Reports for 1907 and 1908, or directly from the states, and are sufficient for our general purposes. There are no very marked differences between the kinds of people who have settled these 10 states. In the pioneer days when the educational plans were taking form, New York was doubtless more heterogeneous than any of the rest, and so con- tinues. AM have felt the common impulses of our American civilization. The Western States have been intellectually less hidebound and they have known how to use their political power rather more freely than the Eastern States; they have used it for educational ends ; they have had the benefit of the Address at the 47th University Convocation of the State of New York, Senate Chamber, Albany, October 29, 1909. [29] ?o NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT experiences of the older states and the advantage of laying their educational foundations without being obliged to grub out any- other foundations, and after it was settled that education was to be the passion of the Republic. No doubt density of population has some relation to educa- tional efficiency, where conditions are so generally alike as in our American states. Of course the presence of very large cities must be kept in mind. The following table shows average density of population: I Cal 2 Minn .... S Mo 4 Mich. . . . S Ill 6 Iowa. . . . 7 N. Y... . 8 Penn .... Ohio IO Mass. . . . Total. United States. Total to United States AREA SQ. MI. 158 360 83 365 69 415 58 9i5 56 650 56 025 49 x 7° 45 215 41 060 8 3i5 626 490 3 6l <5 484 I approx. 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 N. Y. Penn. 111. . . Ohio. Mo. . Mass. Mich. Iowa. Minn. Cal. . POPULATION 386 032 518 497 405 083 611 201 071 675 673 9i5 190 198 901 013 790 33i 3i8 211 40 483 540 85 526 761 47% 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Mass . . N. Y.. Penn. . Ohio. . 111.... Mo. . . . Mich.. Iowa. . Minn. . Cal. . . POP. OF EACH SQ. MI. 371 171 156 no £97 49 44 39 1.25 11 64 24 The number of pupils in school per square mile was: Massa- chusetts 62, New York 27, Pennsylvania 27, Ohio 20, Illinois 17, Missouri 11, Iowa 10, Michigan 9, Minnesota 5, California 2. The percentage of the population in school was : Iowa 24, Missouri 22, Minnesota 21, Michigan 20, California 20, Ohio 18, Illinois 18, Pennsylvania 17, Massachusetts 17, New York 16. The average number of days the schools were in session was : New York 189, Massachusetts 187, California 171, Iowa 170, Illinois 169, Michigan 169, Pennsylvania 168, Ohio 160, Minne- sota 145, Missouri 145. The average number of days attended by each pupil enrolled was: Massachusetts 153, New York 145, Michigan 137, Illinois 132, Pennsylvania 127, California 126, Ohio 121, Iowa 117, Min- nesota 108, Missouri 96. EDUCATIONAL STANDING OF NEW YORK STATE -u The percentage of enrolled pupils in daily attendance in 1907 was: Massachusetts 81.8, Michigan 80.8, Illinois 78.3, New York yj, Pennsylvania 76.2, Ohio 75.9, California 73.9, Michigan 72.6, Iowa 68.8, Missouri 67.9. The following table gives us some light: NO. STATE TEACHERS NO. STATE % MEN TEACHERS NO. STATE MONTHLY SALARY I 2 3 4 N. Y. Penn. Iowa. Ill . . . 41 197 33 449 28 508 28 083 26 517 17 847 17 286 14 449 13 928 9 7i4 I 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Ohio. . Mo . . . Penn. . 111. . . . Mich. . Cal . . . N. Y.. Minn. . Iowa. . Maw 31-9 28.3 22 . 7 I9.8 14-5 J 3-i n-5 "■3 10 .9 8.6 I 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 N. Y.. Cal. . . Mass. . Mo. . . Iowa. . 111... . Minn. . Penn. . Ohio. . $88 88 80 54 66 73 48 31 46 48 46 36 46 26 43 28 41 79 40 12 5 6 Ohio. Mo.. . 7 8 9 10 Mich. Mass. Minn. Cal. . . Tota I 230 978 17.8 $54 87 United States. . 481 316 21.7 $50 30 % to Stc tal Uni1 ites. . . . ;ed 48 The following table is informing but possibly not very perti- nent to our inquiry : ESTIMATED VALUE OF ALL PUBLIC SCHOOL PROPERTY [b. E. I907]. TOTAL REVENUE FROM FUNDS, TAXES AND OTHER SOURCES (EX- CLUDING BALANCES AND PROCEEDS FROM BOND SALES ) NO. STATE PROPERTY NO. STATE INCOME N. Y $157 536 256 83 457 418 069 141 580 61 944 637 56 782 999 36 680 310 30 944 034 27 846 833 26 OOO OOO 24 950 104 I 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 N. Y Penn Ill $54 646 490 36 970 311 30 958 130 21 571 478 17 757 672 15 259 737 II 619 405 II 084 697 10 9*3 730 10 853 212 2 Penn Ill 4 Mass Ohio Mass Mich Iowa Minn Cal Mo 5 6 Ohio Cal 7 8 Mich Mo 9 10 Minn Iowa Tota Unitf 1 $575 284 171 $221 634 862 id States $858 655 209 $355 016 173 a 1905-6. ?2 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT The following table, showing the number of pupils in second- ary schools — public and private — of each state, and the number of persons in the population to each secondary pupil, is both informing and pertinent : NO. STATE STUDENTS NO. STATE ONE STUDENT TO I N. Y 109 807 69 362 66 973 61 842 55 052 40 388 37 799 36 826 32 679 26 666 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Cal 52 persons 54 57 2 Penn Iowa 3 4 Ill Mass Ohio Mich 5 Mass Ohio 74 78 79 84 95 6 Iowa N. Y 7 8 Mich Minn Mo Ill 9 IO Cal Mo Minn Penn 1 . . . . Tota Unit 1 537 394 77 ed States 954 720 91 So is this table, showing the same information as to pupils in the higher institutions, i. e. institutions above the secondary : NO. STATE STUDENTS NO. STATE ONE STUDENT TO I N. Y 28 405 25 566 24 8l2 17 413 14 967 13 032 12 632 10 953 8 984 8 025 I 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Mass 179 persons 189 Penn Cal Ill Mass 4 Mich 203 226 5 6 Ohio Ill Mich Minn 264 276 279 301 3°4 7 8 Mo Mo Iowa Penn 9 Cal N. Y Minn Ohio Tota Unit 1 164 789 250 ed States 298 627 291 From this data we may easily say that when we consider mere numbers of people or money values, New York leads all the rest. That shows the largeness of our problem and that the people of the state are trying to solve it, but taken alone it is not satisfying. EDUCATIONAL STANDING OF NEW YORK STATE 33 The fact appears that New York has a longer annual term of school than any other state, and that the average number of days attended by each pupil is greater than in any other state save Massachusetts. In the percentage of attendance to en- rolled, she is surpassed by Massachusetts, Michigan and Illinois. New York stands 7 in the percentage of men teachers, and Massachusetts 10. New York pays a larger average monthly salary to teachers than any other state, and this is very signifi- cant because she has a longer annual term than any other. It is important to know that 5 of the 10 states have a larger percentage of pupils to population in the secondary schools than we have, and that 8 of the 10 states have a larger percentage of college students to population than we. In the latter regard Ohio alone is below us, but Ohio has a larger percentage of students in secondary schools than we. California, Iowa, Massa- chusetts and Michigan each has a larger percentage of students in both the high schools and colleges than New York. And in addition to these four states, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri and Pennsylvania each has a larger percentage of college students than New York. The following- table discloses the percentage of pupils enrolled in common schools to total population, in the 10 states, by decades, since 1870, omitting fractions: 1870 1880 1890 1900 I906 N. Y 23 18 23 26 23 25 24 28 18 15 20 17 21 22 22 22 23 26 22 18 17 16 19 21 20 20 21 25 23 18 16 16 18 19 20 19 22 25 23 18 l6 Mass l6 Penn 17 l8 Ohio Mich 20 Ill 17 20 Minn Iowa 24 2 I Mo Cal 20 The number attending to each 100 enrolled in 1906-7 was as follows : Missouri 67, Iowa 68, Minnesota 72, California 73, Ohio 75, New York 76, Pennsylvania j6, Illinois 78, Michigan 80, Massachusetts 81. The sum per capita expended for schools in 1906-7 was : Missouri $2.49, Pennsylvania $4.45, Michigan $4.63, Ohio $4.65, Iowa S4.85, Minnesota $5.22, Illinois $5.46, Massachusetts $5.76, New York $6.34, California $7.30. 34 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT While these different sets of figures throw some light upon our subject, they are perhaps as expressive of well known economic conditions and of the distribution of population between city and country, as suggestive of differing measures of efficiency in educational systems. It is interesting to note that in 1850 we had one teacher to each 182 persons in the state, that in i860 it was one to 207, in 1870 one to 236, in 1880 one to 186, in 1890 one to 141, in 1900 one to 164 and in 1905 one to 188. The percentage of teachers who hold certificates as graduates of colleges or normal schools to the whole number of teachers is, in Michigan 12, in Pennsylvania 16, in Minnesota 26, in New York 33, in California 48, in Illinois 50 and in Massachusetts 53. This statement includes, as clearly it should, the holders of state certificates in New York. It excludes the holders of training class certificates. If they were included the percentage would be 61. And when it is remembered that admission to the training classes is now upon a very substantial academic foot- ing, and that all of the lower grade certificates granted in the state are based upon uniform written examinations, which is probably true in no other state, it is not unreasonable to say, that the general average of the teaching force of the state must be held to stand very well with that of the other states with which we are comparing. Apart from the figures, I am going to say that I am confident that there is no state better equipped with state normal schools, city normal schools, teachers training classes in secondary schools, pedagogical departments in universities, teachers insti- tutes, and a uniform and universal system for testing and ad- vancing the proficiency of teachers, than is New York. If it is the fact that no other state has had more difficulty in enforcing attendance laws, so it is also the fact that no state has more harmonious, complete and exacting child labor and school attendance laws than we have. If they are not as effective as they should be, it is because of the inefficiency of local officers and the indifference of the people. We are improving, in each regard, but we ought to improve more steadily and surely. It may also be said that the laws of no other state go so far in requiring good schoolhouses, suitably equipped with furnishings and appliances, as do those of our state. If a building is un- sanitary and the people indifferent, it is not difficult to require the building to be torn down; if one is lacking conveniences, they may be required to be supplied. We are without as effi- cient and professional supervision in the rural districts as is EDUCATIONAL STANDING OF NEW YORK STATE 35 possessed by most of the states with which we are comparing, but we have a system of inspection by the state which no other state carries down to the elementary schools as we do; and any citizen may bring" any school question to a speedy, inexpensive, conclusive and resultful determination, as is not possible in any other state. The work in our elementary schools has responded to the demands of culture, scientific knowledge, and industry quite as completely as the work in any state system of schools. In all of the cities and towns few features are. neglected, and if the grades have become too many and the courses too complex, as many of us think they have, we are doing what we can to sim- plify them. In recent years the very common sentiment of the country has demanded substantial provision for training in the indus- trial vocations on the basis of the common schools. We very early espoused the cause and developed a plan. We started none too soon and pushed none too hard. Massachusetts alone preceded us in serious study of the subject, but when she came to legislate she made — as it seemed to us at the time and has since proved — the vital mistake of separating the proposed trades schools from the public schools, and of giving the man- agement of the new movement to a distinct state board instead of to the State Board of Education. The immediate product was an educational ruction which assumed, without success, to rival the one in which New York indulged within the memory of living men, and the result has been a unification on the very lines which New York first invented. While they have been doing that, we have been setting up trades schools. It has taken time because local sentiment had to concentrate, the local board of education had to initiate definite proceedings, and the financial machinery had to provide the money. Even then the trades school had to be in operation the better part of a year before the city could make legal claim to an allotment of state moneys under the trades school act passed in 1908. Even so, such claims upon the next state apportionment are antici- pated from the cities of Albany, Buffalo, Gloversville, Hudson, New York, Rochester, Schenectady and Yonkers, as well as from a number of union school districts, and other cities and districts will get schools started this year and have claims upon the apportionment next year. We are fairly started in a move- ment of great significance and promise, in substantial advance not only of all the states with which we have been comparing 36 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT but also of all the others. Therefore, while there is, and always will be, no end of things to be done to increase the efficiency of our system of elementary schools, we may fairly say that, except as to our system of supervision in the rural districts, it does not seem to suffer in comparison with the system of any other state. Now let us speak of the secondary schools. We have 853 academic departments of public schools, high schools and academies. State funds have given these schools an equipment of libraries and apparatus which, judging' by the cost, ought to surpass any other considerable system of secondary schools in the world. In the last 15 years the state has paid out $559,477 to duplicate the same amount expended for libraries, apparatus and pictures in the academies and schools maintaining academic departments, and the state pays to a limit of $268 and $2 for each teacher employed in the school, for libraries, apparatus and pictures, per school each year. Cities which maintain more than one high school get an additional allowance of $250 for each additional high school. The total expenditures in the 15 3'ears must have been much in excess of twice the sum named. The basis is very slight for comparing the scholarship and efficiency of these schools with those of the other nine states which have been named. The proportion of college trained teachers in the faculties should certainly have some significance. New York appears to be the only state of the 10 in which the chief educational officer seems to have exact figures. Of the 6227 teachers who were employed some part of the year in New York secondary schools, 3154 — practically one half — are col- lege graduates. There is an element of satisfaction in definite- ness, even though the information is not sufficiently comforting. In Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Kansas and California, the proportion is apparently not known, nor is the superintendent disposed to try a good guess at it. In Massachusetts it is estimated that 1500 of the 1807 secondary teachers are college trained; in Iowa that is true of 1000 out of 1480 teachers; in Minnesota that is true of 1000 out of 1200. In New York 410 of 814 principals are college trained, but our requests for information upon this point from the other states in comparison have not elicited the information, except in Min- nesota, where 200 of 206 principals are college graduates. It is worthy of remark, however, that in Maine 154 out of 206 prin- cipals, in New Hampshire 74 out of 75, in New Jersey 60 out of 80, and in Vermont 83 out of 87, are graduates of colleges. EDUCATIONAL STANDING OF NEW YORK STATE 2)7 I am forced to. believe that our plane in this very important regard is distinctly lower than that of several of the states with which we are comparing - . The reason for it would be found in the educational history of the state. In Massachusetts the college influence has been decisive in the secondary schools from the very beginning, because the secondary schools so often came down from the colleges. In the states with strong state universities which lay out the courses for the high schools, in- spect the teaching and approve the teachers, and receive fresh- men on the diplomas of the high schools, there is reason enough for expecting to find college graduates in the high school facul- ties. The smaller proportion in New York is not the fault of the teachers, nor is it altogether conclusive upon the standing of the schools; but none will deny that it is a fact to be re- gretted, nor that it is one that in. some way in the next 20 years ought to be very completely remedied. It was pointed out yesterday at the Normal College that there is something of an hiatus in our system of training teachers, in that we have laid no special emphasis upon the preparation of teachers for the secondary schools. It is hoped that provision for this need may now be made through the Normal College. But it ought to be said here that one of the weakest places in our system of certifying and employing teachers is the total lack of special exactions upon teachers in the secondary schools. And it seems to me that at an early day we ought to introduce into our plan a distinct demand that teachers hereafter em- ployed in the high schools, shall have earned the baccalaureate degree from an approved college, or gained a state certificate by examination. A recent writer in the Educational Review (Mr Alden H. Abbott), one trained in the Massachusetts schools, makes a very judicial comparison of the Massachusetts and New York secondary school systems. He says this, for example : " The New York educational system is the most highly central- ized one in the United States, while that of Massachusetts is nearly at the other extreme. The New York high schools are therefore on a somewhat uniform plane of excellence. On the other hand, the Massachusetts system of extreme respect for the individualism of communities produces some of the best high schools in the world and also a few very poor ones." He thinks our plan of state aid to high schools is more helpful to those standing most in need of help, and that the results are somewhat noticeable, and he notes with approval our larger ex- ?8 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT actions as a condition to state aid. The fact is, Massachusetts has not been in the business of giving state aid to education as much as New York, and in her early efforts in that direction she is not giving so much, and has not systematized or grounded her giving as well as we have. He speaks of our more complete state supervision, and of what he thinks is their better local supervision, and also of our stronger control over the licensing of teachers. We must not delude ourselves with the idea that either the Massachusetts or New York high schools are all the good high schools there are. Very far from it. But there is satisfaction in the confidence that as a system we are upon a fair plane of com- parison with Massachusetts, and that our system is noticeable for its uniformity of excellence. If we can keep on closing up the gaps, making such minor changes here and there as ex- perience may suggest, and assuring more and more of the col- lege and university influence upon the life of the secondary schools, others will be making comparisons with us. We may say safely enough that our exactions upon candidates for admission to the learned professions have become more sub- stantial than, or at least have preceded in substance, those in any other state with which we are comparing. New York was the first state to adopt the principle that training in an approved school is of larger educational value than study by one's self. We require long study in the schools, both preliminary and pro- fessional, and also the passing of state professional examina- tions, and we extend this to all of the professions for which the Education Department is made responsible. No other state goes anything like so far as we do as to all of the professions. The following table will show the quantity of high school study required by law for beginning professional study in the 10 states, as to law, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, veterinary medicine, registered nursing, certified public accounting, and optometry. The figures indicate years of high school require- ments as measured by New York standards. Where there is no statute the fact is indicated by a dash, " n " indicates no re- quirement in the existing statute. " o " indicates no high school requirement. EDUCATIONAL STANDING OF NEW YORK STATE 39 CERTI- VETER- FIED MEDI- DENT- PHAR- INARY NURS- PUBLIC OPTOM- STATE LAW CINE ISTRY MACY MEDI- CINE ING AC- COUNT- ING ETRY N. Y. . Ill Iowa. . Ohio . . Penn . . Mo.... Mass. . Cal . . . Mich . . 4 4 4 4 4 4 n 4 4 4 n n 4 4 n n n 3 n n 3 4 I O n n n n n o o 4 n n n o n n n n i n n n o 4 4 2 2 4 n o n n n n n n o o n 2 Minn.. n n n n n o n n The following- table shows the legal requirements in the io states as to professional training in approved schools (s), and as to experience in association with a professional practi- tioner (e), and as to both (s & e). The symbols have the same significance as in the preceding table. STATE LAW MEDI- CINE DENT- ISTRY PHAR- MACY VETER- INARY MEDI- CINE NURS- ING CERTI- FIED PUBLIC AC- COUNT- ING OPTOM- ETRY N. Y... Ill la Ohio . . . Penn . . . Mo Mass . . . Cal Mich . . . Minn . . . 3s or e 3s or e 3s or e 3s or e 3s or e n n n 3s or e 3s or e 4S 4S 4S 4S 4s 4S n 4S 4S 4S 3S 3S 3S 3S 3S 3S n 3S 3S 3S 2S & e 4e 4e 4e 2S & 4e 3e n 5e 4e 4e 3S n 3S n 3S n n 2S 3S 3S 2S 2S n 3e n 2S or 3e 3S 3e n 2S 2S n n n 3e 3S 2S 3S n 2e n Generally the states hold examinations as the final test for admission to the professions, although in a few instances the diplomas of institutions admit. In New York, in every case, in addition to the required preliminary and professional training, we hold state examinations, supervised by the Education De- partment but prepared and rated by professional boards of ex- aminers. These professional examiners are appointed by the Board of Regents, except the law examiners who are appointed by the Court of Appeals. Of course, it must be remembered 40 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT that two or three universities or professional schools require high school diplomas or even college degrees for admission to professional courses when the law of their states is silent about the matter. By law the Board of Regents may admit medical practitioners from other states to practise in this state when the requirements for admission to medical practice in the other state are equivalent to our own. Under this we have been able to enter into reciprocal relations with only Ohio and Michigan, of the 10 states with which we are comparing. In fairness it ought to be said that we have such relations with Vermont, New Jersey, Delaware, Wisconsin and Utah. Lawyers from other states are, under the rules of the Court of Appeals, admitted in certain cases to practise in this state, without examination, upon ap- plication to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court. There is no way by which a person can secure admission to any one of the professions in this state, except by complying with the legal requirements just set forth. And no one will venture to say that any other state has led the way to pro- fessional reform and character so strongly as New York. But, on the other hand, our professions are overcrowded, and even something more than schools and examinations is necessary to keep them as clean as they are capable. It is hardly asserted in any quarter that New York is not doing as much in the way of educational extension as any other state, and much more than most. We are not only subsidizing and augmenting public libraries with liberal state appropria- tions, but we are enlarging their practical uses in most stimu- lating ways ; and we are giving practical aid to every pro- fessional interest and every self-culturing activity with a free hand and in rational ways. I should like to express confidence that as large a percentage of our people make ready use of the opportunities so afforded as in some other states, but doubt if it would be justified. That is only another way of saying that because the social conditions were more settled and fixed before so much extension work was undertaken, and because we have to bear the heaviest burden of foreign immigration, the task of se- curing the same response is heavier here than in any other state. It also means that we are bound to do more in this way than is any other state. It seems to me that we are trying to do it. No one would venture to deny that we have as great and effi- cient universities, colleges and professional schools as any of the states with which we are comparing, but it is doubted, as already suggested, whether the influences of the advanced EDUCATIONAL STANDING OF NEW YORK STATE 4 1 schools permeate and quicken the lower schools and the in- tellectual life of the state as much as in the other nine states, with not more than one or two exceptions. We are between two very strong and very dissimilar college influences. The old time colleges in New England exerted very decisive influences upon the many and strong Massachusetts academies, and did not cease doing so upon the public high schools when they came. The state universities in the states west of us are parts of the same system as the high schools themselves. If the academies grew out of the colleges, the state universities grew out of the high schools. Moreover, our high schools, which have often supplanted the old time academies, and have grown up in innumerable places where there were no academies, have grown up or are growing up, it must be admitted, in too many cases without the vital college or university connections which they need. Except in two or three cases, and then in a roundabout way, the state gives no state aid to her colleges and universities. And it must be said that our New York universities and col- leges, with a few notable exceptions and in spite of the best intentions and of some very definite efforts, have a terribly hard time about doing things to connect with and quicken the lower schools. Even when we endeavor to get the college men to come and help us in this annual conference, many of them have " married a wife," or must " go and try oxen," or engage in some other worldly pursuit. Possibly there is some connection between the two facts just noted. Of course it is not because of any want of general interest in education, and of course these men are tied up with prior engagements and heavily burdened with the regular routine. Certainly their first obligation is to the upbuilding of the great institutions for which they are respon- sible. But there is a very direct obligation to all the schools. In any virile educational system the schools of differing grades are interdependent. The lower schools are no more dependent than the upper schools. And it may be suspected that the way to promote the greatness as well as the usefulness of a univer- sity, is to quicken and enrich the schools below it. There is one all-important lesson in education which we in New York have not yet learned as we ought, and that is that the prosperity of each university promotes the good of all universities, and that the energy and efficiency of each grade of educational work is very dependent upon the energy and effi- ciency of the other grades. The Massachusetts people had a 42 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT part of that forced upon them whether they would or not. The mixing and going qualities of the West made it easy for her people to learn it. Michigan knows it much better than Massachusetts, and Massachusetts somewhat better than we. New York must learn it, and when New York learns it the college men of New York will have learned it first. We have all the colleges, universities, and professional schools that even our great population of nine millions of people needs. We have got in the way of making exactions, not only upon students who want to enter the universities, but also upon those who want to begin professional study, as well as upon those who have completed professional courses and who apply for admission to the professions. We have a very complete scheme covering this whole matter, established in law and in prac- tice. But it must be said that we have colleges, universities, and professional schools that connive with students to avoid the requirements. We are admitting far more candidates to the learned professions than is good for the students, the profes- sions, or the people of the state. We do not need to advance requirements so much — although I suspect that the Court of Appeals might well give fresh consideration to the requirements for admission, and the details of the examinations for admission to the bar — as we need to see that we get what we assume to require. My cursory examination of the large and all-important in- quiry leads me to the conclusion that we have a most compre- hensive educational system, very well knit together and grow- ing in solidarity. Its most noticeable defect is the lack of the college influence in the affairs of the middle and lower schools. That is more apparent in the body of the state than in New York city. It is due not to the lack of universities and colleges, but to the fact that those we have are not related to the state or to each other, and are without vital connection with the state system of education. We have not yet broken much from the old order so far as the colleges are concerned, and we have not yet entered upon the new order in any appreciable degree or in any adequate or rational way. There are boys and girls in this state who want to go to college and are reasonably prepared to go, who can not go because of the expense. The higher institutions have not got down to the heart of the lower ones. It is a hard problem. It will be remedied because it is right in the pathway of the universal trend in American educa- tion. The remedy will not come from fitful and piecemeal state EDUCATIONAL STANDING OF NEW YORK STATE 43 aid to an institution here and there. Whether it will come from a scheme of general state aid to all of the higher institutions upon some equitable basis which will bind all together and bind all to the entire system of education as contemplated in the original thought of the University of the State of New York, or through free municipal colleges, or through a real state univer- sity with campus, and buildings, and faculties which will pro- vide instruction in any study, free to all prepared to take it, is a large and pressing matter which ought to be addressing itself very seriously to the educational opinion of the state. As suggested at the beginning, this very offhand comparison of state educational systems has not aimed at mathematical ex- actness. The purpose was not to commend one state, or convict another. If such had been the aim and purpose, there would have been no result, or an unjust result, because it is practically impossible to compare the spirit and outlook of the states; because there is an absence of uniform statistics, and because every one of the states strives for the most and the best in education, and is entirely capable of acting up to its ideas and accomplishing what it undertakes. What is more serious than the absence of data for comparison is the notable absence of information necessary to the rational upbuilding of a reliable and uniformly efficient system of education. From this charge New York is not exempt. We are without the definite knowl- edge of the children of the state which is vital to our planning, and which must be available to the people of the state before we can expect our plans to have the required public support. The machinery for securing a part of this, which we have attempted through the Act of 1908 providing for an always up-to-date en- rollment of all the children of the state between 4 and 18 years, is just being set in operation. It is anticipated that this will not only give us ground for the more complete execution of attendance laws, but also that it will support us in other ways. There is danger that it will not be very well done, but it is that or nothing, and it may lead to something better. It is the one step at a time and the step which one is able to take, that makes the only possible headway. And we not only need more exact statistics, but we need a more expert and and scientific inter- pretation of statistics. All this is admittedly true in New York; but it is clearly within the fact to say that no other state has approached us in gathering information about children or in collating and interpreting data covering the conditions and the doinsrs in all grades °^ scno °l s - 44 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT It ought to be said that there can be no comparison with other state systems of education without seeing how much more concentrated our system of administration is than any other. Ours is " the New York system." It is the product of the very uniform thinking and the very consistent legislation of the state for more than a century. There is no other state educational organization to be compared with ours in the number of its officers and employees or in the centralization of authority to accomplish ends. In no other way can the state deal efficiently with its always enlarging stream of immigration and with its always more complex social and economic situa- tions. In no other way can it measurably provide training suited to the circumstances of every one and assure to every child what belongs to him. It is the only measurably efficient method for advancing, or even for maintaining, the intellectual, industrial, and humanitarian plane of the Empire State. Because it was entered upon early, it is the more readily accepted now. We need have no misgivings. Of course, organization is only a means to an end, but in this case it is a vital means to an imperative end. Of course, organization is capable of both good and evil. We can not remind ourselves too often that this organization is required to work, without effrontery or offense, with all those who would enlarge educational opportunity and increase the efficiency of the schools. But, quite as much, it must work rationally and firmly against ignorance, inexperience, in- difference, and all selfishness. It must recognize and respond to the public educational needs. It must initiate and aid popu- lar sentiment. Certainly it must encourage local initiative and give absolute home rule to all who are really trying to make better schools, within the limitations which have been made general by the well settled opinion and the law of the state. But upon this basis it need not fear, and it may derive satisfac- tion from the fact that the invariable trend in other states which have difficulties akin to ours, is in the direction of the essential features of our system. But let this paper have this definite conclusion : New York has reason enough for feeling very well over the peace and promise of her educational situation. But that is not all. She has educational needs. She needs better supervision of the country schools; she needs more complete vital statistics and more informing school statistics; and she needs that the work and the influence of the colleges and universities shall bear much more strongly upon the organization and the work of the middle and the lower schools. MOTIVE IN EDUCATION Men of genius and courage are discovering and applying new forms of " energy " and power in the physical world. Upon the earth, and through the air, and upon the waters and beneath them, they are driving physical bodies with new shapes, in new ways, and in ever increasing celerity and force. Railroads are making " runs " that have never before been equaled. Motor cars are making some people crazy. An ocean liner comes in every week with a new " world record." Men are flying many miles and whither they will through the air, with machines that are heavier than air. American explorers have just accomplished the heroic task of centuries and gained the north pole, while gallant officers and men of the English navy have come within a hundred miles of the south polar axis of the earth. New " world records " no longer surprise us, but we ask quickly about the motive power and want to know exactly how the thing was brought about. The motive and the power have quite as much to do with accom- plishment in the intellectual as in the physical world. The situation, the outlook, the reason, the inspiration, the purpose, the organized effort, the applications, the instrumentalities, and the processes, all have to do with the diffusion of common knowledge and with the gaining of new learning. Let us, with imperative brevity, look back over world history and try to see what has been the motive power of all educational progress, and then let us interpret as best we can the motives that are impelling education in America, and try to realize what the schools ought to do to meet the ideals of the people who have established and who sustain them. We look in vain for educational motive or progress anywhere in the world before the Christian era, and there has been practically none among the Oriental nations up to the present time, with the one exception of Japan. Of course, some would not agree with me. The disagreement would be more a matter of terms than of fact. Certainly a few scholars grew up among the ancients. Cer- tainly a few of the arts were highly cultivated by a small number of persons. Certainly monarchs used men like beasts of burden to construct a few great works. But this was because they controlled millions upon millions of human beings, and not quite all of them Address before the Kansas State Teachers Association, Topeka, Kansas, November 4, 1909. [45] 46 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT could be kept from doing something, by the sodden ignorance and inertness of the great mass. Of course, these great peoples have not altogether escaped the contacts of modernism. It has blown some fresh breezes into their wrinkled faces. Their commercial nerves have been somewhat quickened, and their rulers and leaders have seen enough of the armies and navies and missionaries and consuls of civilization to be compelled to adjust themselves a little to the wonderful development of mediaeval and modern times in Europe and America. No people not absolutely savage — and prob- ably the savage peoples should not be excepted — have failed to give at least some rough tutoring to their children, and ordinarily they have developed some manner of schools. It is far from the pur- pose to ignore or belittle this tutoring, or the manner of schools which have obtained among the Asiatic peoples. But it is idle to look for modern educational motive among a people numbering hundreds of millions who for the most part live in damp and dis- mal houses ; who believe that disease is a conflict within the man between the spirits of light and the spirits of darkness ; two thirds of whose children never grow up, and whose every habit is fixed by superstitious fear. Any real scholarship of such a people is accidental or exotic, and their schools are as heavy and inert as themselves. The Japanese are so unlike other Asiatic peoples that some ex- perts insist that they are not, like all of their original neighbors, of the Mongolian race. However that may be, something that was apparently inherent led them to move out of themselves and lay hold of the philosophy and the methods of modern education. Forty years ago their government made formal application to the govern- ment of the United States to send men of standing to Japan to organize a system of schools upon a basis as much like that of the United States as was consistent with the conditions. The results have been so surprising, so exceedingly creditable to such a people, that they are often credited with more than is strictly true. But much, very much, is true. They have established religious free- dom. Of course but one religion prevails, and that is not Christian- ity. Their schools are of all grades, open to all, and, true to the national characteristics, are highly efficient. As in all countries where hereditary monarchs rule and classes prevail, limited educa- tion is practically universal, and liberal education is much circum- scribed. In other words, all of the younger children are in efficient elementary schools, and the opportunities for those who are favored by birth or are enough stronger than their fellows to seize what MOTIVE IN EDUCATION 47 may be reached with difficulty, are almost unlimited. The net re- sult is national educational progress which for celerity of movement stands alone in history. What the real impelling cause has been will probably never be definitely known. With this exception, the Asiatic nations have exhibited no inher- ent force which has lifted them up into the white light of civiliza- tion. None of them, China, Korea, Egypt or India, has ever, except in a most limited way, come under the influences of Christianity, and it is difficult to understand how any who' read history can fail to see that Christianity has been, from first to last, the vital moving cause of educational progress. It broke its way over Europe only by force and through agony. But the force was of the heart; it was inherent in the men and women of the great Aryan family, and the agony was the birth pains of a new order of things. The fateful opposition of the kings nerved and the rich blood of the martyrs nourished it. It stirred faith, and faith never considers the bulwarks of ignorance or self- interest. It set men and women and in time it set the nations in motion. Explorations and discoveries, of intense interest to all capable of being interested, followed one another, and revolutions of world-wide moral and intellectual significance quickly succeeded each other. The Crusades, the discovery of America, new inven- tions for ascertaining and transmitting knowledge, the profound power of the truth, and the triumphs of the armies which, whatever their reasoning, fought for the freedom of the truth, all sprung from the same original cause — the quickening and the independ- ence of the souls of men. Of course these great acts were shaded by the attributes of the actors. The physical situations and the intellectual opportunities and possibilities of the nations gave different colorings to what they did. But they were all of kindred origin, and they brought the peoples of Europe into some sort of relations in a movement which was to run through the centuries and be of great moment to the world. They even created a wholly new nation in Britain. And what is of vastly more importance, they recast the political as well as the religious thinking of Europe, and brought monarchs and monarchies to their terms, or hurried them on to their dooms. Even kings espoused the new order of things, or from obvious necessity pretended that they did, and the masses began to think of the in- herent rights of men and women, and to find both expression for their thinking and a guide to better thinking in representative as- semblies. Out of it all came constitutionalism, the opportunity of 48 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT a people to make their laws, and the obligations of all, no matter how weak and no matter how great, even of kings and nobles, to abide by them. And out of this has emerged the varying measures and the dif- fering forms of constitutionalism. In one country the class dis- tinctions are sharp and always observed, the forms of social life and political procedure are rigid, and the monarch or a ruling class gives distinct shadings to all the doings of the nation, until some incident arises to stir resistance which has to be respected. In an- other there has developed pure democracy, where every one stands, and knows that he stands, equal before the law; and where all of the plain people hold, and know that they hold, the power which settles the procedure of the nation. Year by year they become more accustomed to it, and more determined to exercise it without fear of any other power. Each of these, of course, shows educa- tional motive, and accordingly has educational policies that are peculiar to itself. Between these come governments with all sorts of social and political organizations ; public opinion expressed with differing degrees of freedom and in all manner of forms, and edu- cational motive in every stage of evolution operating according to its lights and its possibilities. One can not hope to gain any real appreciation of American opportunity if, on the one hand, he imagines that America is the only land where opportunity has set her foot; or if, on the other hand, he fails to see that the open chance for every one is a freer chance in America than in any other land for those not favored by birth and fortune. One can hardly plan intelligently for the future of American education unless he has some conception of the history, and the moving causes in the history, of other countries. One must recognize the strong points and ascertain the weak points in other school systems, and he must have abundant care lest he exaggerate the strong points and the weak points unduly, or at- tribute them to other than the real causes. He must surely bear in mind that names may mislead him ; that a nation with a repub- lican form of government may for other reasons be really more arbitrary and autocratic, may offer less of political power and in- dividual opportunity to the multitude, than another with a mon- archal form of government. And of course he must remember that an old nation with inherited laws, traditions, usages, and in- stitutions, and particularly with upper and lower classes, is almost barred from initiating movements, and often must be blind to the desirability of movements, which may be quite obvious and easy MOTIVE IN EDUCATION 49 in a new country. And there is not a country in Europe that is not old according to our standards, nor one in which there is not a far more distinct cleavage between classes than is possible under the laws and the political philosophy of the United States. The two great peninsulas of southern Europe are occupied by nations of Roman origin. They derived their laws from the great law-giving nation of the ancients. Their people are polite and affable. They have imagination and have given much of the fine arts to the world. They possess great churches and art galleries. They have a long history. They have exercised strong military power. One of them has absolutely suppressed more than one civilization as advanced as its own, and would probably have ruled the world but for the bravery of the Dutchmen in the Netherlands. With the broadest opportunities and with many of the finest at- tributes, she has become a skeleton among nations and a warning to the world. Military men tell us that the infantry of each of these nations is among the most efficient in the world. Each is a constitutional monarchy with the emphasis upon the monarchy. In the body of neither of these peoples is the educational initiative strong. Each has schools, but such schools only as the government thinks well to give to or even to impose upon the people. Their schools lack the vital forces which the people themselves must put into them to make them virile. Both nations recognize and sustain the Christian religion. In one of them one denomination of Chris- tians is practically exclusive of all others ; in the other the same denomination is dominant, but toleration has in the last generation made fine advances. In the first case there is not only a lack of educational initiative, but a lack of advanced schools to quicken the lower ones. There is little in the way of requiring attendance upon schools. By a census taken in 1900 it was shown that 630 in every 1000 people could neither read nor write. The number has lessened but slowly during all the throbbing world activities of the last generation. In the other case, where toleration has made some progress, there are more free elementary schools and some advanced schools ; attendance upon primary schools is required, but only up to the ninth year of age, and the percentage of illiteracy is about 35, having been reduced by about half in the last generation. Ap- parently the advance of religious toleration and the reduction of illiteracy have been coincident and related. But neither country has held its rightful place in the onward march of the world. The northern peninsula of Europe provides a home for two nations which are constitutional monarchies, with the greater em- 50 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT phasis upon the constitutional. Motive has its opportunity and grows richer and stronger through accomplishment. Each sustains the Christian religion, and in each one denomination prevails, but there is no lack of toleration. Nor is there lack of schools of any grade, and there is practically no one who is unable to read and write. Attendance is compulsory up to the fourteenth year. Nothing, not even the sickness or poverty of parents, is allowed to excuse absence. The hand industries are held in esteem and recog- nized in the schools, and this seems to be the basis of a highly developed culture that is respected by all the enlightened nations of the world. About the same things may be said of Denmark, Netherlands, and Switzerland : two of these are very free monarchies, and the other a very free republic. These names certainly signify some differences in the national traditions and outlooks, but not so much as one who has not seen them might think. Each has large religious and political freedom, excellent schools of all grades, required at- tendance, and much industry; and in each illiteracy is practically negligible. Extending across the body of Europe are three of the very great nations of the world. Russia has more than the population and five times the area of both the others. It is an arbitrary monarchy. There has been considerable unrest and some movements in the direction of a more liberal political system, but nothing amounting to a substantial and successful revolution. The people are stalwart enough in body and strong enough in mind. They have likable traits. But in some way the nation fails to get on. It has a great army and a great navy which get thrashed by smaller ones. The royal family has a very large measure of the world's respect and shows many benevolent intentions, but is at all times in apparent peril of its life. The nation upholds a church as arbitrarily as the throne upholds itself. Men and women are kept in that church by compulsion, and it pursues a philosophy of religion which seems to contain the seeds of its own ultimate destruction. Accordingly, we would expect to find, as we do find, that the education of the nobility is well provided for, but that there is no breaking out of an intolerable situation by the peasant class. There is little educa- tional initiative among the commoners, and little in the way of a comprehensive system of schools. There are palaces and univer- sities, but one looks in vain for exact information concerning any general system of elementary schools. MOTIVE IN EDUCATION 51 Next, on the east, is the now consolidated German Empire, with the freest, the most philosophical, the most exactly efficient and the most universally accepted educational system of any of the great powers of Europe. It has a school for every purpose; it exacts the attendance of every child, and it pays attention to every detail. Illiteracy is reduced to the vanishing point. Germany holds religion in esteem. The emperor enjoins it and with all sincerity, but religious toleration is almost complete. That emperor is a real emperor : he rules. He thinks he gets his title and his right to rule from God direct; but often something happens to remind him that the people have something to say about it and are not afraid to say it, and before they force a break he adjusts himself to the situa- tion with celerity and grace which do him infinite credit. The emperor and the people alike have educational motive, and upon that subject at least they get on admirably together. Together they have developed a system of education which has some elements that America may envy. But taken all in all, it would not suffice for us because in some way it seems to put scientific attainment above balanced and efficient character, and it breaks the progressive educational continuity which is the main hope of the people who are not specially favored by fortune. France is a republic grown out of the severest military monarchy of modern history. The thinking of the people could not be recast in a day. They are accustomed to much governance, to having their religion impressed upon them, and to thinking in fixed and rather rigid grooves. They are an exceedingly affable people, are proficient in all the ordinary arts, are studious of the sciences, and have developed a certain culture which is unexcelled. They in- herited the Roman law as they did the Roman blood, and they have improved upon both. They have the advantages and the disadvan- tages of a long and strenuous history; of a magnificent situation which is threatened by ambitious and military power of the first rank, and of very considerable liberalization, both religious and political, in recent years. Yet they do have a republican form of government. It has helped the liberalization quite as much as it has sprung from it. It has certainly given opportunity to the edu- cational initiative which is quite prevalent among the people. All this is reflected in the schools. They are given to the arts and sciences, they extend to all grades and to all the people, but they are exceedingly rigid in their lines and they lack the flexibility which adapts them to all situations. They are lacking in local color. Everything, even the making as well as the execution of $2 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT policies, is clone in a central office. The freedom of excellent universities does not project much freedom into the teaching of the lower schools, and the break in continuity is more pronounced there than in Germany. The rate of illiteracy is about one in six- teen, which is not unsatisfactory and is very significant. Doubtless France affords the best illustration of the efficient results of a sys- tem of schools imposed by a government, as against one developed by a great people. Britain is a new nation, as the nations of Europe go. It was compounded out of other peoples and came from great migrations a thousand years ago. It started after the fashions of other peoples of the time. But the migrators were virile men, and the com- pounding produced yet more virile ones. Of course, the kingship started very large, but those forceful men said some things and did some things which shrunk it to a size and put it in a place which made it possible to be endured. The personal and property rights of man were established, and constitutions and laws grew. But a church was used to bolster up the state, and the state used its arms to enforce the religious and philosophical contentions of the church. We know that revolutions, and battles, and burnings, and the beheading of a king resulted, but do we see that all this only mitigated and did not cure a situation? In the very van of world progress, Britain could not then develop, nor has she yet developed, the political institutions which would give the same measure of opportunity as of security to all her people. Her schools have been limited by the special interests of her church. She has never had a universal system of free schools. Through the last generation numbers of her people have struck strenuous blows and met with the stoutest resistance in trying to effect it. No one can foretell the result. There is a clear break in her school system which is very sure to balk any purpose that the children of her common people may have to gain a liberal education ; and. what seems worse to us, there is a very apparent disposition on the part of the aristocracy to resist any change in order to prevent their gaining it ; and there is far too general assent on the part of the masses that things may go on as they are. There is little posi- tive illiteracy, but the great serving class is very content with the merest rudiments of knowledge. Indeed, this class is so self- contained and withal so happy in serving, that we hear questions on this side of the sea as to whether their serenity ought to be dis- turbed. Letting that go, it is clear enough that the classes and the interdependence of church and state deaden educational motive MOTIVE IN EDUCATION e-? and limit educational advance among the great people who have perhaps gone further than any other to throw the security of the law about the persons and the property of men and women. And we may get a still more graphic illustration of our thought from within Britain herself, if we will recall the earlier and larger religious independence of Scotland, and that coincidently with it there emerged such a comprehensive and universal system of schools as England has never known. Now, how can we observe these marked differences in intellec- tual aptitude and resulting systems of schools between nations of differing physical origins and situations, and between peoples of the same great family and inhabiting the same latitudes, but of differing religious and political histories, without appreciating that even the inherent motive which would break down barriers and cre- ate opportunities is much helped or hindered by the character of political and religious institutions and by the relations which exist between them? How can we see succeeding revolutions giving larger liberty to masses of men in sufficient numbers to enable them to maintain their positions, and behold them steadily advanc- ing to higher intellectual planes, and not have confidence in the mass of men and women? Political and religious history go far to influence educational out- look and purpose, as well as to explain educational situations. And it disparages nothing of what the new world owes to the old, to say that in this all-important matter the new world has gone far beyond anything that the old world ever taught her. The early American settlers did not do that accidentally or blunderingly; they did not do it by clear thinking; they did not have a plan ; nor did they do it immediately. A few English Pil- grims, a few Scotch Dissenters, a few French Huguenots, a few Dutch Walloons, and a few other glorious extremists of their day came to America for religious freedom, but for ample reasons they did nothing further about schools for long years in the new world, than they and their fathers had been accustomed to do in the old world. And that was little indeed. Nor did the greater throng that came in the ensuing century and a half of American settle- ment go much further. So long as the political and military gov- ernance of the old world continued in the new, there was no appre- ciable enlargement of educational motive. There was no school system worth the name in either the eastern, the middle, or the southern colonies, till old world control was thrown off and those colonies became independent states. For fifty years after the settle- 54 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT ment there were no schools at Plymouth, and none at Massachu- setts Bay save a denominational college and a tributary fitting school. England successfully resisted in New York the disposi- tion to maintain free schools which the Dutch had acquired in the Netherland Republic. Not until the Dutch and the English had fought together for independence did they learn to work together for education. The organization of a system of common schools followed close upon the organization of a free state. Educational purpose has grown out of the plan of government that our fathers had the great wisdom and the sublime courage to enshrine in our fundamental laws in the very midst of battles, and more rapidly and efficiently as soon as the glowing embers of the successful Revolution began to cool down. It grew slowly and fitfully at first ; but it has become almost a consuming passion now. Racial distinctions may have something to do with it; mountains and rivers and shores and climate may have some connection with it ; experiences may have borne upon it ; but it is the common feel- ing of a people towards a Supreme Being, and the free right and responsibility of doing for themselves, that give mental and moral direction to the physical energies of human life. The new nation compounded in this country out of the more restless and choice spirits of the world, was the first to get a good understanding of that fact ; and with the favoring advantages of a stimulating climate and a free field, they have made the most of the understanding they have gained. It proves two things which we are bound to keep in our memo- ries : first, it proves affirmatively, what the history of Europe shows negatively, that the innate forces of human nature are helped or hindered by the relations which political and religious institutions bear to each other; and, second, not only that churches multiply and thrive more without than through manipulation by the politics of the state, but also that the state flourishes when freed from the exigencies and limitations which are inherent in a church based not exclusively upon religious feeling, but in some measure, and neces- sarily, upon one or another human philosophy of religion, or upon forms held sacred because of the thinking and the feeling, for a long time, of good men and women. Of course we all understand this in a way, but it is well to put it in the best form we can and express it in the throng now and then. It enables us to see that a new continent was discovered at the time when new room was required for a moral and intellectual advance ; it sharpens appreciation of the free home in which we MOTIVE IN EDUCATION 55 live ; it strengthens the bonds of both political concord and religious unity ; and it gives edge to the ambitions which can make the most of this land of opportunity. Now if we have gathered a few rays of new light upon the great fact that educational motive has had its best opportunity in Amer- ica, let us ask what has become the real point of its aim and what has been the method and the measure of its progress. It has gone to the very root of the matter. It has not been con- tent with an isolated result, no matter how meritorious that result might be. It has not searched merely for scientific discovery; it has not been satisfied with idle culture; it has not sought mere riches ; it has not stood transfixed before even the masterpieces of art; it has not permitted itself to be used by royal and ambitious leaders to add land to the territory or power to the military strength of an empire. It has tolerated no exclusiveness ; it has not been for the rich as against the poor, nor for the poor as against those who have grown rich without parting company with integrity. It has had self-confidence and been able to do what it undertook. It has been serious without solemnity. It has had humor and been able to smile. It has felt consideration and it has made for coop- eration. It has stood for nothing short of the even chance for every one; and for nothing less than helping all men and women to make the most of themselves. That is the mission of the American schools, and nothing less humane, generous and ambitious than that must be allowed to give trend and glow and endurance to the work of American teachers. Every child must have his American birthright — an elementary education. It must be so, no matter how unfortunate his birth may have been. If his parents can not or do not assure it, the state must. It must do so in future much more completely than is now done. Every one must be aided to go forward upon every manner of educational highway just as far as he will. And the schools must permit him to select what he will, and help him to move into what he thinks he likes best. If it is a profession, good; if it is trade, good ; if it is labor of the hand, just as good. There must be no bias nor discrimination about employments. Every aim of the state and every interest of the child demand that the schools stand fair. The child must decide for himself, as soon as may be; and the schools must stir in him some manner of ambition, and aid him to realize his particular ambition, as best they can. 56 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT It can not be done without hard work, without intellectual hard knocks. The old-time coarse brutality that was in the schools has gone. There is some reason to fear that we have gone to the other extreme. One who grows up without rebuffs, grows up without force. Work, and more work, and difficulties and setbacks, and still more work, are vital to the balance and strength of men and women. The passing sentiment in a community or a club which puts unsubstantial details upon the schools is to be defied. The shortsighted sentiment which merely coddles children in a school is to be discredited. Equal justice under whatever circumstances, and untiring work of whatever kind, are the watchwords of the American schools. Of course there must be culture in the schools. But what is culture? Pictures and music may evidence it; they may draw it out and give it expression; but they do not create it. Culture is not of the eye ; it is not a bloom upon the skin. . It is of the heart ; it is something in the feelings; it is a growth of the soul. It is the result of work and experience reacting upon life. It comes less from looking and talking than from doing. It is the com- panion of skill, and skill is the trained child of a master who is either a mental or a manual toiler. The schools are to work for it with all their might ; but they are not to go after it by putting the cart ahead of the horse; and they will never get it through mis- apprehension of what it is. The schools must surely uphold scholarship. They are rather naturally subject to conceits. Neither the university president nor the elementary teacher is altogether immune. This is well, for occasional attacks are not unhealthful. They are associated with our business. But truth is the object of the schools. The surest truth comes from the higher learning. It is a poor, weak system of schools which has no schools higher up. Perhaps that is what is the matter with some of the experts. It is a strong system of schools in which the ones below look to the ones above ; in which the ones above are quickening the ones below and are dependent upon them ; in which the live currents of real truth are always coursing up and down the whole structure from the turrets to the foundation stones. The North Central and Western States of our Union have had a freer opportunity than the Eastern States had to make this so, and they have done it more completely. Some of the Eastern States have some advantage over their western sisters ; but it ought to be said and appreciated that there is no system of schools in the world with height, and depth, and breadth, and co- MOTIVE IN EDUCATION 57 ordination, and continuity, and diversification, and interdependence, and sustained by public moneys and open to all, like that which is unfolding in the great Western States that lie in the watershed of the Mississippi river and to the west of it. The schools are to keep strictly in the middle of the road of moral sense. They are to make no fanciful discriminations between morals and religion. Avoiding sectarian doctrine, they need not avoid the God who is the giver of all life. They may well follow the Father of their Country, and the common usages and the un- prejudiced thinking of their countrymen, about all that. They may at least do it until some one tells them they must stop; and then they may take time to find out from competent authority whether they must stop or not. But whether the Bible is read, and the hymn sung, and the simple prayer uttered or not, every process of the schools is to repel untruth and indirection, and promote habits of thinking and a manner of life which are exact. The schools must offer incentives and stir enthusiasms. Ambi- tions must be awakened and pointed to their goal. When (boys and girls are disposed to do what is decent, let us try to have them do what they want to do, lest the spark be quenched and they lose the purpose to do anything at all. If one is long on sport and a little short on work, let us give in somewhat to his love of sport in the hope that he will begin to like companionship with us and recipro- cate by giving in to the work which we must require him to do. It is not always well to hold a slow and poky, studious and cooi- fortable boy up as a model to a live and trying one. It is better to bump them together so that their differing virtues and draw- backs will be somewhat transfused. The unexpected often happens in this country, and the teacher may well be cautious lest the time come when the urchin who distracted him because he could manage a horse better than he could manage a book, shall invite him to ride on the president's car on the railroad. It is better to see that it takes something of a boy to manage a horse, and use that fact to get him into the intricacies of the book, so that the time may come when he will bless his old teacher for it, and the teacher may be able to ride in that private car without any disturbing recollections. The great crime in the American schools is intellectual slovenli- ness. It may be due in part to the fact that we are doing so many new things in a great new country. It may grow out of the inexact training of teachers. It may have resulted in part from fantastic theories about the management of children which the experimental psychologists have been aggressively pushing upon us, without 58 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT enough reason, for a generation. It may have some relation to the very wide open election of studies which the universities and col- leges have encouraged in the same generation, and which some are trying to push down into the secondary schools. From whatever cause it arises, the complaint is general and seems justified, that we do not train children to do definite things; that the completion of courses can not be reckoned in efficiency, and that our proceedings do not generate the intellectual resourcefulness and power which they ought. It is a serious charge. We are entitled to generosity for all we are attempting, and to consideration for all of our newness; but we must get results, or dare a fate. We shall not be excused for training teachers in vague and unsubstantial theories which ignore the economic value of child life and defy his right to be •trained just as rapidly as the schools can do it in the proficiency and the accomplishments which will enable him to do the most for himself. There is no imperative reason for doing exactly the same things or perhaps for exacting precisely the same standards in all schools ; but there is need enough that the courses in the schools shall be translatable into some definite grasp of the subject and into some real power to go out and do the real things of which they treat. There is every reason why young men and maidens shall be allowed to prepare themselves for the work of their choice, but there is no reason why the schools should leave to immature minds, as much as they do, the determination of what constitutes preparation for the work which they choose. It is well to conserve the resources of nature; but so it is to conserve the lives of children. It is well to be more exact and resultful in the use of materials and the processes of trade; but it will be even better to assert what we actually know in the planning of work, and to make sure that we teach what we undertake in the routine of the schools. But neither teaching to read, nor training to work, nor offering opportunity, nor enforcing the truth, nor all of that together, com- prises the sum of the burden that is upon the American schools. The major part is the imparting to the pupil the desire to know, and the power to do, and the purpose to find the truth for himself and act up to it. He must know what men and women have done in the world ; where they have succeeded and when they have failed, and why. He must know what manner of social life, what kind of business conduct, has succeeded, and what has failed, and why. He must know that work is a blessing, that participation in the opportunities which rational society creates is a privilege, that MOTIVE IN EDUCATION 59 public service is a duty, and that government is a burden which all good citizens are bound to bear. In other words, his motives must be aroused, and brought into' conformity with the motives which are the groundwork of the schools. The state of New York has just held two monster celebrations in honor of the discovery of Lake Champlain and of the Hudson river, and of the application of steam to the commerce of the world. Champlain and Hudson considerately made their discov- eries in the same year, and Fulton made his steamboat go against wind and tide so very near the anniyersary year that the state could combine demonstrations with a minimum of time and a maximum of glare, of noise, and of joy. Surely it was a great time. The little Half Moon and the old Clermont were there to receive not only the acclaim of our people, but of all peoples ; not only the salutations of our navy, but of the leading battleships of all the navies of the world. There were meetings in every town ; oration and poetry seemed to be the easy expression of those days. Beacon fires lighted every hilltop, from the St Lawrence to the mouth of the Hudson. The old bloody ground of the Iroquois, the great warpath of the Revolution upon which national independ- ence was won, was all ablaze. All along the old road there were great military and civic pageants. British grenadiers strode in a stately way to the strains of the air which has long called out every energy of the Britons; and Scotch Highlanders in brilliant plaids were enough to make one know that the Campbells were really coming. The flags and the arms of all the nations brightened the scene. The tricolor of France, and the German, and the Rus- sian, and the Roman Eagles were all there. But the American Eagle was the greatest eagle of all. The regulars of our army and the bluejackets of our navy marched in happy competition with every manner of organization that a bright and complex civilization which loves organization, has had the ingenuity to devise. It was the proclamation of New York that novelists and New Englanders shall no longer be allowed to write her history for her. But perhaps better than all else, certainly no less significant than the expression of our own history, was the graphic portrayal of the intellectual contributions which America has inherited from all the nations of the world. As the great floats went by, each of the national societies told of the work of the great teachers, and writers, and workers, and painters, and poets, and discoverers, and inventors, and martyrs, and statesmen, and heroes, which the fatherlands of all of them had given to the I 6o NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT country of their new home, and so had really made it the land of opportunity. There was the Dutchman at the right of the line, and close upon his heels the Englishman, and the Scotchman, and the Irishman, and the Frenchman, and the German, and the Swiss, and the Scandinavian, and the Italian, and the Jew, and the Jap, and all the rest who have had a share in the making of America. And all that has entered into the genius of America, enters into the making and the motive of the American schools. HATS off ! 'Hats off! Along the street there comes A blare of bugles, a ruffle of drums, A flash of color beneath the sky : Hats off! The flag is passing by ! Blue and crimson and white it shines, Over the steel-tipped, ordered lines. Hats off! The colors before us fly; But more than the Hag is passing by." PUBLIC MORALS AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS It is being asserted with some persistence that in recent years there has been a letting down of moral plane among the people of the United States. It is being bruited about that the moral sense of our later years is less acute than in the earlier years in our country, and that the moral standards of America are less exact than those of other countries. Those who say this are quick to attribute the cause to the ab- sence of religious instruction in the common or tax-supported schools. The charge has been given new point since the state universities have grown so great. The men who make this charge are those who are specially inter- ested in church schools of elementary grade, and those who are in charge of, or are particularly concerned about the prosperity of, the denominational colleges. It is a serious charge, from a quarter which, of course, has our entire respect. If the moral sensibilities of our people are less pervasive and acute than those of other peoples are, or than those of our fathers were, our religious teachers would be derelict if they did not present and protest the fact. If they also think that this is because of the nonsectarian character of the common schools, they ought to say so. But 'before saying that, they ought to realize that they will be discredited in that public opinion of the country which is above every sect, if their belief in the decadence of morals is not justified. And they ought not to fail to see that if there is such moral depression as they think they see, and if it is due to the cause they assert it is, it proves nothing short of the breakdown of the political philosophy and institutions of the Republic. The thing goes to the very foundations of the splendid and costly temple in which the people of the United States live and which they have erected in the belief that it would give them not only shelter and security, but also opportunity to develop the purest and highest type of Christian civilization ever conceived by the heart and mind of man. There is the possibility that all of the people who have had part in the building of this house may have been in error; that the lives which have been lost and the sorrows which have been endured in the doing of it have been in vain ; but an educated Address before the Iowa State Teachers Association, Des Moines, Iowa, November 6, iooo. [61] 62 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT man who must be assumed to know something of political and religious history, who may be expected to put a just valuation upon political equality and religious freedom, is bound to feel the respon- sibility, and the solemnity, and the vital necessity of such a charge, before making it. If a teacher, or a leader of religious teachers, is free to make it, leaders of lesser weight will be free to follow, and many of the plain people will be free to think it. Doubtless all this has been considered. We must either ignore this charge or examine it rather criti- cally. It does not comport with our regard for the good intentions and the piety of those who make it, to ignore it. It may be exam- ined without anger, and it ought to be discussed without giving offense. A government which makes for irreligion is a mistake. We make here no fine distinctions between religion and morals. No matter what incidental advantages there may be about such a government, they can not be sufficiently compensatory. But the founders of our government did not imagine that they were setting up such a government as that. They were religionists of the severest type. They had fled from other lands that they might be free from governments which governed in the name of religion but yet took away all religious freedom. The governments they had left behind them made them know that there must be a new plan before there could be more freedom. The experiences of a hundred and fifty years in this country gradually settled the plan which they believed would suffice. The men who framed the national and state constitutions of the United States saw, and the results enable us to see it even more clearly than they, that the vitality of a state depends upon moral freedom, and that moral freedom depends upon opportunity without interference by the state. But they saw also that the self-interests of men, the urgency of theorists, the ambitions of human organi- zation, assuming to move in the name of God, are menacing to the freedom of a state. Therefore, when they framed the first constitutions that had ever been reduced to written form for a people, they wrote it large and plain that religion should be encour- aged, that preferment in or exclusion from the state should depend upon no particular religious belief, that there should be complete separation between church and state, and that all the people should have equality of right and opportunity under the law. They thought they were laying foundations which could sustain all manner of civic institutions for enlarging the opportunities of men, and that they were opening the way for a larger and freer stream of the human PUBLIC MORALS AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS 63 feeling which is the sum and substance of moral character and religious life. Religion is inherent in men and women. Freedom of thought and of the expression oi it is a vital factor in religion. Where the attempt has been made to suppress it, or to control the form in which it should be expressed, there has been sharp resistance. Wherever the attempt has been imposed upon men of Caucasian blood it has failed. For this reason, all governments for or over educated people which have not had a large measure of democracy have failed. It was not so much because men wanted to govern as because faith would not be bound. Of course, there are mon- archial governments that have not failed. But there is no govern- ment that has not permitted an advance in educational opportunity and religious freedom, or that has not recognized the rights of men and felt the political power of the plain people, which is not breaking down. Our government has succeeded so strongly because it was the first to see all this. It was not only all provided for in the constitutions, but it was amply provided that nothing could come in to interfere with it. In the outworking of these provisions we have rapidly grown to be a mighty people ; but that is of no avail if we have grown to be an unmoral people. The founders of the Republic had reason enough to fear a state buttressed by the deep religious feeling of a church, and a church which could call to its aid the political and military power of a state. They knew full well that the worst blots upon the great page of human history were there by reason of things done falsely in the name of religion, but with the sanction of a church. Our Dutch forefathers had part in the world's first and greatest war for religious and political freedom in the Netherlands. Our English forefathers had been hunted out of Britain for refusing to let the combined state and church bind their thinking and fix their ways of worship. And the builders of this nation have come from every people under the sun for nothing but to escape the political and religious limitations of old systems, and to enter into the larger liberty of the land where the state may govern without cant, and religion go forward unhindered by any needs or tendencies of the state, and unhampered by the self-interest of any leaders of the state. We have not only inherited religious feeling, but we have inher- ited Christianity. We have not only inherited Christianity, but under the plan of government which our fathers set up, we have enlarged it. We are neither going back to Confucianism nor 64 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT searching for a new religion. Christianity has always made for human progress above all the forces which have come into human life. It is not the only religion. It is not the only one permitted here. But it is overwhelmingly the religion of the United States. It has acted upon, and it has been acted upon by, the United States, to the enlargement of both. It is in our feeling and in our thinking. We set apart one day of the week in recognition of it. It is in almost every verse of our poetry. We proclaim it in our sorrow and in our thanksgiving. It is diffused in all our institutions. It is invoked on all public occasions. Democracy is the best and the greatest expression of the Golden Rule, and the Golden Rule is the gist and essence of kinship with God. This thing is the warp and woof of our laws. It is recognized in all of our great state papers. Magna Charta, the Declaration of Independence, the Arti- cles of Confederation, the federal Constitution, the Constitutions of all the states, proclaim it. Washington avowed it in the Farewell Address, and Lincoln departed from his manuscript at Gettysburg to introduce the words " under God " into the prayer " that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth." When the words " In God we trust " were removed from our coins, the protest of the people restored them. "Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just. And this be our motto : ' In God is our trust.' " In the constitutional convention of our little ward, the island of Cuba, the most violent discussion of the entire convention was provoked by the motion to strike out the provision concerning God and the freedom of religion, and the most overwhelming vote cast in the convention retained it. We had transmitted a lesson. No representative man or assemblage sitting under the flag of the United States has ever had the hardihood to dispute or even ignore this fundamental basis of our social and legal systems. Our scheme of popular education is the logical and necessary accompaniment of a plan of political government based upon free- dom of feeling, and thinking, and acting, with the utmost of oppor- tunity to every one. If religion enters into the making and the maintenance of the American nation and the several states, it enters into the schools of American states. They are the creations of the states. They came into being by the exercise of the sovereign PUBLIC MORALS AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS 65 political power of taxation. They could come in no other way. The schools rest upon precisely the same basis as the state. If the state were to be overthrown, the schools would fall. They are not only the opportunity of the citizen, they are the safety of the state. If the schools were to cease, the state would come to an end. If all of the training were to be in sectarian schools, the dif- ferences in the state might be expected to be as sharp as the differ- ence between the sects. Differences between the sects are not very serious when the sects make no laws and carry no swords, but with such powers such differences in the state might once again become very dangerous. And so, if the sects can not be recognized in the state, they can not be in the schools. The founders of the nation did very little about education or schools. They knew the importance of both, for the average of culture among them was high, but they reasoned that these inter- ests would take care of themselves. But the generation that came after them, and the succeeding generations more and more, saw that that was not so, and that schools would have to be maintained as well as encouraged by the state. Aid was first given to denomi- national colleges, but that was in the early colonial days when sub- stantially all the people in each colony were of one religious sect. It was the continuance of old world policies. When there were many sects, the aid had to be discontinued. The test came with the manifest necessity of public elementary schools. Then the schools had to rest upon the same basis as the state. And when it became clear that high schools and colleges would also have to be supported by taxation if we were to have a virile and balanced educational system, they too had to rest upon the same basis as the state. Nonsectarian schools are the only instruments by which our democracy can maintain itself and hold out the equal chance and the utmost of opportunity to every one. It is as true of the higher as of the lower schools. The state university rests upon precisely the same legal and philosophical footing as the public elementary school, and universities are quite as vital as elementary schools to a system of education equal to the demands of America in the twen- tieth century. The public college or university is needed in the American state for two great purposes; first, that there may be equality of educational opportunity, that every boy and girl may have his or her chance; and second, that the university may ener- gize the educational system and hold its parts in equilibrium while it stimulates all the intellectual activities of all the people. 66 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT But religion and sectarianism are very different things, and re- ligion may enter into the American state and its schools when a church or a sect may not. If the perfervid denominationalists do not see that, all the other people do. And all the other people are vastly in the majority. Religion is the outflowing of the soul to a Supreme Being, with all that that implies. A church is a human creation to promote religious ends. Denominationalism rests upon one or another system of philosophy, that is, of human rea- soning, concerning religion. Of course, these philosophies are entitled to great regard, for they have come from great minds, have stood hard tests, have gathered many disciples, and accomplished large results. They have been the vehicles for carrying religion to the millions. But because it has become clear enough that it is bad, both for the state and the church, for a state to be mixed up with a church — even a good church — it is not in the possibilities that a democratic state can be without, or can fail to sustain, religious culture. God goes where He will. Religion is not barred from the schools, except when the leaders of the sects refuse to put religion above sectarianism and refuse to go where they can not propagate the particular tenets of their denomination, or except as denominationalists object to any ex- pression of religion in. the schools unless it be their own. The state does not object to the reading of the Bible in the schools. The legislative charter of the greatest city of the country even provides that it shall be done. The reading of the Bible was formerly very common in all the schools, and there is reason to think that it is more common now than many suppose. Doubtless this is the prac- tice in all our state universities, and in nearly all the high schools. If it is less common than formerly, it is because religious people have objected to its being done by any but themselves because of their fear that it would be done in ways or accompanied by expres- sions which would be inimical to their particular sectarian doctrines and interests. But while religion in the school might be helped by formal religious exercises, it is not suppressed by the omission of them. Religious feeling and culture are as inherent in the school as in the state, and if one form of expression is barred there will be others. There have been others. We have not suppressed and lessened the religion or the Qiristianity that we have inherited: we have expanded and enriched it. We have done this by distinguishing it from sectarianism. We have done it by putting it above sects, above a human organization called a church, above an intellectual PUBLIC MORALS AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS 67 philosophy called theology, and above a platform grown old called a creed. Religious expression may be even freer and richer in undenominational than in denominational institutions of higher learning, because discussion will be rife and free under the roof of a university, because there can be no sectarian limitation upon freedom of feeling and opinion, and because there can be no formalism and no venerated doctrine in the way of the pervasive and progressive power of God. Parenthetically, let it be said that this does not imply any dispar- agement of or disbelief in denominationalism. I will not be a mere theorist on either side of the question. Sectarianism is impor- tant, but not of the highest importance. It is itself the product of freedom, and it has enlarged freedom. It has kept and is keeping the beacon fires burning. It is to be sustained, but not to be taken too seriously. It is a means ; not the end. It was the logical result of religious persecution, and it is not a thing to die for when there is no persecution. Admitting that one church might be more con- genial to me than another, I would ask admission to any church, Protestant or Roman Catholic, which was much more convenient than any other. Perhaps one of the divine ends of the denomina- tional system is toleration, that religious toleration which is the groundwork of our American civilization. Possibly that may make us the most mutually helpful, and it ought to make us the most genuinely religious people in the world. And let no word here be construed into adverse comment upon such manifestations of sectarianism as parochial schools or so called Christian colleges. There were reasons enough for them, and the fruits which they have borne claim the greatest respect. Their work often is worthy of the highest commendation. There will always be enough for them to do. None opposes their continuance and all wish them well. In many cases they preceded the ample provision for education made by the state or its subdivisions; often they fill a place which would otherwise be vacant ; commonly the state owes them a debt which can never be paid. It is to be regretted that we can not come to agreement upon some basis of popular educa- tion and religious culture which would be repugnant to none, and which would relieve the denominations and the churches from the effort and expense for instruction that the most forceful of them feel bound to make. And we should stand always ready to take any step not inconsistent with our fundamental plan which will contribute to that end. 68 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT We will allow for the differing points of view. We will do what we can to make good fellowship. We will ask critics to see that any scarcity of candidates for the Christian ministry is not due to so called " godless state universities " which in the nature of things can not be godless. The democratic university was destined to come in any event, and is one of the logical products and instru- ments of a great civilization ; and the civilization which has brought it forth is one of the most remarkable in all human history. All should join in making the nonsectarian schools just as religious as possible ; believing that the prosperity of every higher institution of learning will add to the prosperity of every other which tries unselfishly to promote the common good of men. But now to the question which has been too long delayed. Have we been retrograding in morals ? We have been progressing in every other way. All manner of people keep coming to us in ever increasing numbers. We have always feared that they might make self-government unsafe. But they have not : we have assimi- lated them. Democracy is stronger than it ever was. We have been making intellectual progress. The United States is accumu- lating a fine literature, and is now carrying on the greatest pub- lishing business in the world. We have forged ahead industrially, and we are beginning to conserve resources and apply science to our industries. And we have been making political progress too. The understanding of public questions grows clearer and more universal, and the voting of the people more intelligent. The moral right was never more splendidly asserted in public life, and the issue of political contests was never to be relied upon more con- fidently than now. While all this has been going on, have we been growing morally obtuse and degenerate? There is nothing to signify it. One who is frightened about that has hardly read the literature of the times with a student's care. We are surely enough none too good, but that there has been any general breaking down of moral sense, any increase in the ratio of crimes or of little meannesses out of proportion to the increase of population, appears to be without evidence and against the evidence. Of course, we have more people to govern. Certainly they are not as homogeneous as the people used to be. This throng not only has to be governed, but the governing must be done by and through themselves. It is harder for ninety millions than for nine millions to govern themselves. We have more crimes of every kind because there are more people, just as we have more accidents because there are more railroads. It is hard to keep our criminal laws and our PUBLIC MORALS AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS 69 judicial procedure up to the needs of such a rapidly growing throng and of a civilization that quickly becomes more and more complex. While the people have increased twentyfold, the opportunities and the temptations for wrong have increased an hundredfold. We have more banks and more embezzlements than we used to have, but every banker in the land knows that the measure of integrity among the officers and employees of banks has steadily advanced; and all the world ought to know that the moral fiber of the men whose business it is to handle money is infinitely stronger than that of those who are not subjected to such temptations. Undoubt- edly our vast mining, and manufacturing, and transportation in- dustries, have produced some very artistic scoundrelism, and the influence upon the plain people, and certainly upon the very poor, is bad ; but it looks as though the excrescences incident to new and great undertakings were being brought to the level of right and to the bar of the law. The standards which ought to be applied to new situations are becoming more clearly understood and more firmly established, and the demand for their enforcement is one which no public officer dare trifle with. And on the whole, munificence outruns meanness, and the purpose to be a decent citizen and of some real use in the world was never stronger or more pointed than it is being made in this country by the leveling and inspiring influence of American public opinion. We ought not to forget either that we know more, at least we read more, of the badness than of the goodness that is among us, because the newspapers find it more profitable to publish it, and the newspapers are in every hand. But every one knows that there is infinitely more goodness than badness in the crowd, and it is by no means certain that the laying bare of what is wrong does not develop the purpose to punish it, rather than the disposition to participate in it. Men and women are the creatures of environment and of work, and the character of a whole people is marvelously influenced by the institutions under which they live and the privileges which they become accustomed to exercise. No one can fail to know that this is the land of opportunity, and few can fail to see that people are uplifted by doing things; and the percentage of those who go to the bad or amount to nothing is smaller than it would be without the freedom of opportunity and the prizes and responsibilities which accompany results. This is a poor place for one who be- lieves that people must be kept from the activities and temptations yO NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT of life to be made good. It is a good country for those who have confidence in the qualities which God has implanted in human nature, and are not apprehensive about the evolution of those qualities to their logical possibilities. It must be rather a trying place for narrow and cynical souls who imagine that they were created to sit in judgment upon the motives of other people, but it does very well for all who can realize that, " There is so much bad in the best of us, And so much good in the worst of us, That it hardly behooves any of us To talk about the rest of us." With toleration as the groundwork of our American life, our judgment of personal conduct has become less severe. There is reason enough to believe that it has become more, rather than less, just. We have come to admit the good, as well- as the bad, in men whose lives do not move in the same grooves as our own, and of whose habits we are often bound to disapprove. Our standards change, and the change does not imperil the moral situation. Years ago I had an acquaintance who would never have been thought of as a religious man. He was generous, loyal, and heroic to a fault, and he paid his debts, but very often his walk and conversation did not square with our standards. He was the political " ward boss." He was the foreman of a steam fire engine company. At a large fire his daring led him into great peril, and a wall fell upon and crushed him. As they carried him up the street on a stretcher, just at the dawn of a summer morning, he broke out in a clear tenor voice and sang correctly three verses of " Jesus, lover of my soul, Let me to thy bosom fly," then turned over and died. It involves no apology for the irregularities of his life to ask, Was this man without religious feeling? Were not his faults superficial and his virtues fundamental? Would it not re- quire unwarranted assurance and conceit to say that the prayer of the old hymn which he sang at the gate of Heaven was denied him ? Surely we see into some of these things a little more clearly than our good fathers did, and let us not forget that we see them more clearly because the progress of our country has clarified the atmos- phere through which we have to look. It must be admitted that the police power is not exercised in this country as in the older countries which maintain large armies, have many great cities, and are thoroughly accustomed to the constant and harsh rule of the military and the police. We are PUBLIC MORALS AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS JI fretted by the delays in the execution of laws which can hardly keep pace with advances in population and the multiplying com- plexities of our civilization; but we want no standing army except to meet necessities for protection against insurrection, and no police which is not keyed to the spirit of the country. The popular con- fidence in democratic government is absolute, and wherever there is any real exigency the resources of the country prove equal to it. The liberalizing which has been going on generally has of course extended to the children and to the schools. There is less control in the schools. A liberalized philosophy of education may have gone to extremes. It is to be feared that children are less respect- ful and obedient than was once the case. They too partake of what goes on about them, but of the good as well as of the bad; and as they advance in years the most of them get more of the good than the bad. Children do some lying and pilfering of sweetmeats, but so did we when we were children. But on the whole children live more rational lives; the influences of intellectual culture have marvelously augmented; there is a wider range of healthful sports; there is less whining and sniveling ; the value of work is taught ; every influence of the school is distinctly moral ; children are made to know, just as well as they can know, what are the conditions of success and of gaining respect in the world. Perhaps the superfi- cial faults are more manifest, but possibly the fundamental virtues are more sure. And, whether or no the morals of the people and of the children are better or worse than they used to be, when was it determined that the homes and the churches might shift upon the schools the responsibility for a distinct moral and religious training? There is some reason for believing that in general parents are more dere- lict than teachers about the conduct of children; and if there is any reason to fear that the work of some of the churches is less vitalizing and controlling than it might be, it is desirable that a frank and searching analysis of the reasons should be made by those who are in a situation to make it. The schools do not dictate our policies : they follow them. They do not determine our civilization : they respond to it. The public schools are certainly secular. They must avoid sectarian contentions, and church distinctions, and the mere theology upon which religious scholars often indulge in combat for their intellec- tual health. But the schools can not avoid the enforcement of moral conduct, the exemplification of the basis of correct living, and the exploitation of religious principles. They will go as far in this as J2 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT they are allowed to go. And they ought to be able to go a long way without invading the exclusive domain of the religious denom- inations. Let the Bible be read in the schools and let songs of praise be •sung, until some external authority tells them they must stop. Let the schools be a little more forceful in control, and a little more specific in commanding obedience and respect. Let them seek with new earnestness to create motive in the mind of the child. Let them accentuate the vital need which men and women have to work ; and the vital importance to themselves that they shall lend a hand to others and give service to the village and the city, the state and the nation. Let them never forget that there can be no real strength, either moral or physical, without the opportunity to do, and without both doing what is rational and right and resisting what is senseless or wrong. And let them realize, more and more keenly, that the way to put all this into the hearts and heads of children is by the teachers thinking it and by the schools acting upon it themselves. Above all, let them remember that character must go with intelligence, and that character is not a mere matter of form but a drawing out of the spirit into helpful relations with the world. "All are but parts of one stupendous whole Whose body nature is, and God the soul." And whatever the schools do, let them do it with a purpose to give no offense to any whose thought and outlook are not exactly like their own. All manner of schools, of every kind and under all auspices, constitute the educational system of America. That system is the freest, and the most flexible and adaptable of the educational sys- tems of the world. It is developing broad and strong scholarship. Its doors swing to every one. It is showing what a people can do for their own advancement, and what it has already done is the best proof of what it can yet do. There is no ground for apprehension. We have a sense of humor and the courage of our situation. We are developing insti- tutions to promote our every thought. There is overwhelming good, unmeasured progress, and little, mighty little, that is bad in Our laws and institutions. We inherited much from the mother country, and we have gathered much from all countries ; but we have done more for ourselves than any other land ever did for us. And, " We, the people," have done it. No monarch, no lords, no PUBLIC MORALS AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS 73 man on horseback, no sect, and no professional or other class, have either been asked to permit, or allowed to limit us in doing it. The Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation declared in the name of the states; but in the Constitution " we, the people," established the more perfect union. And the laws of the Union and the constitutions and laws of all the states declare so plainly that they come from the same great source, that no rep- resentative or officer of any standing can be so blind as to fail to see it, or so stupid as to obstruct the opinion of the country. There is no fiction about it ; it is serious, pervasive, continuing fact. And how could the people exercise all of this freedom, and bear all of this burden, without the mixing and the training of common schools, . reaching from the kindergarten to the university? And how can a people exercise all of this freedom, and create all of this opportunity, without either growing in grace or going to the bad? Surely there will be no middle ground. We shall never be an inane, insipid people. We have done much to dis- tinguish ourselves; we shall do much more. There is no doubt about the road we shall take. There is no ground for skepticism about the moral purpose of the plain people. There is much more goodness than badness among us. It will keep us in the middle of the road, and guide us to a success which will enlarge spiritu- ality, as well as liberty, in all the world. This is a poor country for one who lives wholly in himself. It is a good country for all who trust in God and have confidence in men and women. There is no better religious teacher in America than my friend Henry Van Dyke, and we are all glad to join in the refrain of the song he wrote upon his last voyage from Europe. "Oh, it's home again, and home again, America for me, My heart is turning home again to God's countrie, To the land of youth and freedom, beyond the ocean bars Where the air is full of sunshine, and the flag is full of stars. So it's home again and home again, America for me, My heart is turning home again to God's countrie, To the blessed land of Room Enough, beyond the ocean bars ^ Where the air is full of sunshine, and the flag is full of stars. THE CHURCH INFLUENCE IN EDUCATION We are under a tolerant and hospitable roof today. This would not be a university if it limited discussion or excluded any rational opinion. It could not be the university of a splendid free state in which a common religion is the predominant bond of union, if it were to do anything to submerge religious feeling, or to subvert religious theory. On the other hand, it is to discriminate between what is of God and what is of man ; and it is to analyze what is only human opinion although it concerns religious things. There have been and there are many religions. None of them is to be tabooed so long as its fruits are good. People often, and scholars sometimes, differ over mere names, or because of opposing sympathies, traditions, and outlooks. The glory of the American State University is that it is as religious as the people who sustain it, and that its reasoning about religion is as tolerant as the con- stitution of the state for which it stands. Here of all places feel- ing should have free flow, and any errors which usage and habit have brought down to us should be hammered out on the anvil of rational and generous discussion. On the other hand, this is no place for insipidity or inanity. We believe in something beyond flesh and blood; something that is beyond the earth and sun, be- yond the planets and the stars. Let it be something that will sus- tain men and women; something that bears a rational relation to life and progress, and something that is worthy of a university. Conceit must not limit the meaning of education. There is an education of the heart as well as an education of the mind; there is an education of the body which ought to go with the healthful training of the intellectual powers, as well as with the healthful governance of the emotions. Education is not confined to what is found in books or taught in schools. It would be a pity if it were. The greater part of education comes from environment and con- tacts — from the external influences which bear down upon us. Experience is a great teacher. One may turn the rough ore into iron beams, or steel rails, or razor blades, or cambric needles, or watch springs; it all depends upon the kind and extent of the treatment. It is the tempering and the hammering that fix the value of the finished product. It is so with the human faculties. ' Address at University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, Sunday, November 7, I9 ° 9 ' ' r- 1 [74] THE CHURCH INFLUENCE IN EDUCATION 75 The influence of the schools has a momentous bearing upon the development of the mind and soul — momentous in itself, and still more momentous because it prepares the ground for all other in- fluences, and makes other contacts fruitful. But the other influ- ences may outnumber and outweigh the influences of the schools. The whole world is relative. What we are depends very largely upon the road we have traveled, the persons to whom and the things to which we have been related. The education of the nation is measured by the extent to which the life of the people has been energized. National energy is gen- erated by the contacts which result from freedom of movement, freedom of thought, and freedom of expression among the people. Mere knowledge may not be power. Action produces power. Great movements among the people have invariably sharpened their wits and advanced their civilization. There is nothing so discouraging as stagnation. Slavery in whatever form — to ignorance, to caste, to superstition, to kingly or military power — is the greatest enemy of education. When a nation is in bondage of any kind the will of the individual counts for little and the national thought is weak. Nothing but a movement of intense energy and of wide proportions can break the bonds, liberate the truth, and open the way for na- tional feeling, for intellectual and spiritual development, and for individual action. Great national movements follow neither sentiment, nor passion, nor caprice. They rest upon the impulses of the heart and the convictions of the mind. They are moved by the spirit of the Almighty God working in the lives of men. Conscience movements never fail. They may be delayed, but they always accumulate in numbers as they gain in power, and they succeed in the end. Christianity is the prevailing religion of America, and an Amer- ican university can not help seeing that Christianity has been more potent than any other force in breaking the bonds of ignorance and superstition, of greed and caste, in which the world's people were held through long cycles of time. Educationally as well as religiously considered, the birth of Christ is the most wonderful and consequential event in all the world's history. Before that time all is involved in mystery. Two> or three bright spots appear upon the great, dark sea of uncertain history. We know that the Persians and Egyptians left evidences of mechanical skill, but the pyramids are proof of the absolute power of the monarch rather than of the intellectual virility of the people. We know that Greece made great advances in art, but we know, also, /6 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT that four fifths of her people were slaves to one fifth, and that her temples crumbled because her moral and civic conditions could not sustain them. We know about the Roman republic, the growth of the Roman law, and the power of the Roman legions ; but we know, also, that the Roman republic was a republic in name only; that the law was the harsh instrument of absolutism ; and that the strength of the legions rested, not upon conscience, but upon ac- customed obedience to the commands of the master. The common life of each of these peoples was honeycombed with the most de- grading and undisguised immorality. No matter what some of them did ; no matter what many of them did at the behest of a few, the plane of their lives was low and the trend of their thought was vicious and brutal. They worshipped idols, and the gods they set up were cunning, depraved and brutal. Their conceptions of God are the revelation of themselves. Besides these two or three points upon the map of the ancient world where the breaking day first began to dawn, all was ignorance and barbarism. All the known world was upon the borders of the Mediterranean, and all beyond was as black as the darkest night upon the waters of that great, blue sea. But a star shone over the hills of Bethlehem. It heralded not only the birth of a Savior, but it marked the advent of a new force which was to break bonds and conquer superstition, and educate men more thoroughly and rapidly than all the other forces the world had yet known. The Savior came to fulfill prophecy and die upon the cross, and then His disciples were to take the instru- ment of His death as the emblem of their faith, and, multiplying as they went, they were to carry the banner of the cross over every sea and into every clime, and extend the new force around and around and around the world, until its energizing influence should impel the self-consciousness of men to- work out the world's regen- eration and enlightenment. We can not see electricity, but we know that there is such an agent for we see its results. We can not see magnetism, but we know what it does. We can not see the human conscience, but do we doubt that there is such a thing? We see the results of truth. We know about the organization and operations of the early church, narrated both by biblical and profane history. We know how strong the truth was, and how effective that church was, because they aroused bitter persecutions and yet endured. We see an end- less line of martyrs for conscience sake, and in turn we see that the blood of the martyrs multiplies the followers of the Nazarene. THE CHURCH INFLUENCE IN EDUCATION 77 As churches multiplied they became centers of instruction. Free conscience and instruction create widespread energy in the world. Great armies, under the sign of the cross, march thousands of miles to reclaim a mere tomb, because a sacred one, from the hands of the profane. They fail in the attempt, but they shake the na- tions ; they enlarge knowledge ; they sharpen intelligence ; they put a new meaning and a new energy into life, and they open the way for a new civilization. Truth will not be bound. It is as free as electricity, and like that agent it needs only vehicles of transmission. As men come and go and the outposts of the old ignorance move backward, other followers gather about the standard and the spires of many more churches point heavenward. As each repeats the wondrous story, how it more and more stirs the conscience, sharpens the wits, and multiplies and quickens the activities of the people ! But an evil day came upon Mother Church. Her base was not strong enough for her superstructure. Greed was rampant. There was intrigue with the adversary. She sought to control the earth more than to conquer evil. She undertook to manage states. Her organization and her power were put to base uses. The most dreadful things were done in her fair name. The end was a mighty conflagration which overthrew her priesthood and broke down her temples. The end, did I say? Ah! that was but the beginning, not the end. The plans of the Almighty do not come to naught through the weakness or the machinations of men. The Spirit of Christian- ity arose phoenixlike above the flames, purer, stronger, freer, be- cause refined by bitter experience and purged of the things which had brought destruction upon the earthly house in which she lived. The mighty work of the church upon the people, the intelligence which they had derived from her teachings, proved equal to her regeneration. There was revolt and revolution. New creeds were framed which expressed many phases o>f human feelings and human thought, but all blended in a very common purpose and pointed to a very common end. New forms of worship accommodated the tastes and the means of all. Out of it all came the sects and de- nominations. And how these sects and denominations have ex- tended and grown ! How God used the low state of his church to multiply his instruments and extend his power! There have been disagreeable phases of denominationalism, but more good than 78 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT harm has resulted. The friction points have become fewer in number and less irritating as the centuries have run their course. While the sects have rivalled each other in energy they have grown to respect one another more and more, and they are nearer to- gether in feeling and purpose today than ever before since they sprung out of the deplorable state of the church which marked the beginning of the fifteenth century. It is of course impossible and unnecessary to follow these sects in detail, but two or three illustrations will show how denomina- tionalism has been enlightening the world. Take for example the work of the Jesuits of the old Roman church. Much reproach has been cast upon them. Doubtless some of it has been with, but much of it has been without, justice. The history of the world shows nothing comparable with their labors for the christianization of the world and the regeneration of the church. Composed of young men sworn to chastity and to poverty, to unhesitating compliance with regime and implicit obedience to authority, the members of this order took their lives in their hands in the darkest day of human progress, and went hither and yon among the people, pushing their way up the streams and into the forests of the unexplored and the unknown, to convert sinners. Taking as their motto, " I go out, but I shall not return," they went unhesitatingly to savage torture and to death. And when one fell, another as unhesitatingly took his life in his hands and filled the place. In simple garb and with winning ways they pushed on and on, not only preaching but trying to exemplify the gospel of their Christ. They believed some things to which we would not now subscribe. They surrendered individuality to a great system to an extent from which many of us, at least, would dissent. But we have too generous feelings, we have advanced too far towards one- ness of feeling, we have all become too intelligent, to withhold our sympathy and respect from men and women who devote their lives to the conversion of the world, and whose one ambition in life is to carry the banner of the cross furthest into the ranks of the enemies of their Redeemer and of the church of their love. And how these Jesuits provided the object lesson for the devel- oping spirit of Protestantism ! That spirit could not see their vir- tues, but it could not fail to be influenced by their self-sacrifice, their aggressiveness, and their intrepidity. If the work of the Jesuits added fuel to the flame of the old-time Protestant hatred of the Romish church, it also added strength and power to the THE CHURCH INFLUENCE IN EDUCATION 79 fiber of Protestant life. How things do work together for good! How the things to which we have alluded have worked together for the regeneration of the world ! For another example, take a subdivision of the Protestant church — that other uncompromising and austere sect with which many of us are doubtless in closer sympathy, the Puritans, using the term not in a particular but in a general way. Their creed has been o like much preaching. Involved argument, whether they digested it or not, was acceptable to them, for it was about all the intellectual food they had. Their moral natures were intense and easily wrought up, and oratorical play upon them was not disagreeable. The masses have no end of things to think about now. They partake of the spirit of the age. They want a rational philosophy and they like to accomplish things. They not only partake of the spirit, but they sympathize with the methods of the age. It is an age of organization. Some one has said that the first exclamation of the young American in his cradle is " Mr President." Then the preaching must be the simple truth as discerned by revelation, and the application thereof to important subjects of common and timely interest. The effec- tiveness of the church will not depend more upon the capability 84 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT of the minister as a preacher than as a worker and organizer. The number of organizations for good ends, the number of people who are interested in them, the extent to which all can be kept active, will go far to determine the measure of success. The state has assumed charge of education in all its grades. It rears the primary school and the university alike. It extends its hand to people of all conditions. This is so in the United States more than in any other country in the world, and it is more con- spicuously so in the Western States than in any other states in the Union. This plan has of course grown out of the world's experience, out of our own necessities, and out of our self-conscious power. It has been found imperative to the safety of universal suffrage. The United States puts into her schools the moneys which other nations put into their standing armies. Would that the same could be said about her navy. But that is far from the whole of it. She has made her unrivalled educational system more for opportunity than for security. In this half hour we have been traveling over a long, great road. We have been on a limited train and we have been going faster than we ever did before. We have looked out of a clouded win- dow once in a thousand miles. University students need to tramp along that road afoot and turn over every stone they come upon. It will help fit them for life in the land of opportunity. Iowa is a favored spot in that land. Its soil and climate are unsurpassed. Its situation with reference to travel and transporta- tion is fortunate. Better than all else, it was settled by the bravest and best of pioneers, and it has at all times held a conspicuous place in the front rank of industrial thrift and of intellectual progress. All that will continue. You, young men and women of Iowa, have small occasion to worry about your state. You may well have some solicitude about yourselves. The next generation will be an even greater generation than the last one. Your place in it will have to be determined by yourselves. But if you will know about the influences which have made and the lights which have illumined the world, if you will do your own thinking and keep in company with the truth, if you will be tolerant and generous and work agreeably with other people, and if you will appreciate what Iowa is doing for you, you will be very worthy and very promising citizens of a noble commonwealth. THE ESSENTIAL GROUNDWORK OF INDUSTRIAL TRAINING During more years than our memories cover, the plain people of this country, in their homes and assemblies, through their maga- zines and newspapers, have urged a kind of education which would be of actual service to the hand industries and to the men and women who pursue them. Here and there the imperative need of skilled workmen has led a manufacturing corporation to set up a school for its own very restricted purposes, without making any impression upon the general situation. Now and then a philan- thropist has established, and perhaps endowed, an industrial school and so helped a few people, but the net result has proved little more than the good intentions of a man and the utter inability of charity to deal with a large subject of common import to very independent American freemen. The common feeling was well known but no one saw just how to satisfy the demand, and the country was probably not ready for a movement which could meet it even measurably. The schools have never shown real grasp of the subject or proposed substantial measures for its solution. They made some rather encouraging advances in the direction of it when they estab- lished manual training in the high schools, and separate manual training high schools in the larger cities ; but it is now evident enough that that movement, with all of its excellencies, has gone around the real question, and has not had, and is not likely to have, any substantial result in the training of workmen. The manual training movement' has played upon the very com- mon but often misguided ambitions of the youth of the country. It has created schools, which like all the other schools, were cal- culated to lead to higher schools. It has provided one section in a roadway leading to a profession. Of course it was a profession concerning mechanics, but a profession all the same. It has aimed at a calling which would be carried on in an office or which would manage a business and direct men, and would avoid the smut that is inherent in the factory and the grime that comes with the handling of tools, machinery, and materials. Its most enthusiastic advocates have commonly asserted that its real end was intellectual Address before the Massachusetts State Teachers Association, Worcester, Mass., November 26, 1909. [85] 86 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT culture by means of hand culture, rather than mechanical efficiency itself. For its avowed purposes the reasoning and the plan were logical enough. But let us not shut our eyes to the fact that it does not embody the logic or present the plan of procedure which the country and the greater number of its youth most need. It has been managed by men who were speciously theoretical rather than mechanically skillful. It has aimed at culture, but such cul- ture as has resulted is essentially superficial. If not so, then it has been a kind of culture which was of small concern to the country and little advantage to youth. It has aided a kind of progress, individually and collectively, educationally and commercially, which needs little stimulus in view of the American temperament and the manifold and inevitable activities of our American life. It has done little to maintain or to restore the equilibrium between the intellectual and the industrial life of the country. In shorter and stronger phrase, it has done little to train workmen, when what the larger part of the children most needed was to be trained into workmen, and when what the country most needed was that more workmen should be trained. In the meantime, the industries of the country have claimed more and more workmen and the number of skilled workmen has, relatively at least, grown smaller and smaller. The trades have been exceedingly conservative about training workmen lest thereby they reduce the wage, and probably it is not too much to say that while a high and a still higher measure of mechanical skill has been more and more in demand, the trades have grown more and more incapable of training, as well as more and more unwilling to train that skill into their children. The net result has been that boys who might have been glorious mechanics have often become very inglorious lawyers and physicians ; and both the prosperity of the country and the happiness of innumerable men and women have been lessened because of it. Children have hardly been free to choose the calling to which they were best adapted or which they might like best. By inevitable implication, if not by direct word, they have been told, nearly every day and both in the schools and out, that unless they worked with their heads rather than with their hands, that unless they came to be managers of great enterprises or captains of men, they would miss the great goal which it was the opportunity and the business of the American child to gain. And while this has been going on the schools have been sub- merged in educational theory which seems better suited to the THE ESSENTIAL GROUNDWORK OF INDUSTRIAL TRAINING 87 next world, or at most to some other world, than to this. It has anticipated the aeroplane, and while heavier than air it has flown among clouds. The men and women of the schools have rather liked it, without always swallowing it, because it added to the gayety of the educational conventions and provided rather fas- cinating copy for the educational journals. The men and women outside of the schools have distrusted without being able or much concerned to refute it. Education has been the passion of the country; the country has been as profligate of its child life as of its other resources ; all have been disposed to have everything tried in the interests of the schools. So the sentimentalists have con- sented, the practicalists have doubted, and the multitude, with mixed feelings and conflicting emotions, has generally stood mute. What a first-class mechanic thinks of a first-class mechanical school may be illustrated by an actual Massachusetts case. Twenty- five years ago a hard-headed man who was for forty years the gen- eral manager of one of the largest manufactories of Massachusetts had an only son who had just finished the high school and wanted to go to Yale. As they lived in the western half of the state, he may perhaps have been excused for that. The father said, " No, Lester, I won't agree to it. If I let you go down there at your age and with what you know, those professors will spoil you. You come into the shop and I'll see if I can't train something into you that even professors can't ever get out." The boy went into the shop and worked with pipes and valves and machines and engines for three years. He was a facile youth and made himself acquainted with some of the officers and engineers of the Boston and Albany Railroad, which has later had the honor of being adopted by the " New York Central Lines." He studied and even tested locomotives. One summer his father said, " Now I think I have got you fixed so you can take care of yourself no matter what the professors say to you, and if you can get in at Yale you may go." He " got in " and graduated from the Sheffield Scientific School. That his father's course and confidence were justified is evidenced by the fact that he quickly became an instructor in mechanical engineering at Lehigh, and then a professor at the Michigan Col- lege of Agriculture ; that he built up a great department of mechan- ical engineering at the University of Illinois which is widely known, and became the first director of the first engineering experiment station in the country ; has for years been in charge of the govern- ment coal tests; and last winter responded to the urging of Yale 88 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT that he come and take charge of the department of mechanical en- gineering at the very institution where his father feared professors might mislead a youth who was not very well grounded in me- chanics. What his father trained into him and what Yale trained into him, and no doubt the former quite as much as the latter, have made him both a workman and a teacher, and a sane and suc- cessful constructionist in what has come to be one of the great professions in the country. The point is that the skepticism of his father was justified, that his course was wise, that the boy became a skilled workman before he became a teacher, and a better teacher because he was a workman ; and because of the fact that he loves to work in a blouse as well as with a book he is widely influential in curing just such difficulties as those which caused his father's doubts. Now, passing from the doubts and difficulties and heroisms of pioneer work in industrial education in America, and profiting by the experiences of our own and other lands, let me try to point out what seems to me the essential groundwork of further plans which will be enduring and generally resultful. First, it will have to be frequently recalled that our political in- stitutions and the overwhelming feelings and tendencies of our people are democratic. Our democracy is trying to work its way out in our education and our industries as well as in our politics and our religion. There are not many aristocrats and there is not much room for aristocracy in our education. Schools must provide free opportunities to all the people and all the common interests of the country, and every one must have his open chance, and every public interest its equal recognition. It is the nation's aim and the people who hold the political power of the country expect to use that power to come as near as possible to that end. It may bear rather hard upon some theories, some interests, and some institutions, but that is only incidental and in the long run not important. Again, it will have to be often recalled that the industrial interests are more important than the intellectual, or professional, or cultural interests of the country. The well-being of the country and of the people require that more people work with their hands than only with their heads. This involves no disparagement of one kind of work or the other. It makes little difference to the community, and not so much to the individual, what kind of work one does so long as he does something which he does well. That is both pro- THE ESSENTIAL GROUNDWORK OF INDUSTRIAL TRAINING 89 ductive and culturing: it adds to the prosperity of the country and the happiness and moral worth of the man. The point is that the country must offer quite as much opportunity to the child who would do one kind of work as to the child who would do another. This ideal can not be completely realized, but the ordinary think- ing and the public policy of the country must not hinder its realiza- tion. We must see the worth and the honor of skill of hand and tell the children of it. We must lessen the volume of common talk in the schools which makes children believe that they must do something for which they may have little taste and adaptation, in order to be successful and respected. This is not saying, by any means, that children whose parents have worked with their hands must themselves necessarily work with their hands. It is only saying that the American chance is to be a free and open one, and that it is not to be closed or even half way closed by the schools sending all the children on to classical or technical high schools and professional colleges on the one hand, or out into the world only half trained in the elements of an English education, prepared to do nothing efficiently, and without real ambition or clear thought about work and life, on the other hand. The child is to have his free chance ; the schools are to train him so that he will make his election freely and as rationally as may be; they certainly are not to prejudice his mind about it; and when he has made his free choice they are to help him become just as enthusiastic and efficient as possible. We must clearly differentiate not only between schools which work mainly with books and those which work mainly with me- chanical tools, but also between kinds of schools that are under- stood to be working largely with tools. Practically all of the in- dustrial and technical schools now operating in the United States are to be classified as manual training high schools ; they are giving a good and useful service; they train candidates for the higher technical schools or they make it a little easier for boys who would rather work with tools than with books ; they differ very little from our other secondary schools ; their admission requirements, think- ing processes, aims and results, are much the same; they are essentially college preparatory schools ; they do not direct children .towards the industrial life and they do not train workmen. And what the country and the people need is a better appreciation of all that, and a turn which will get us back into the middle of the road. We need an educational uplift to the work of the man who 90 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT works with his hands. That is the best possible way, almost the only way, to give such an uplift to the man himself. And we not only need to give an educational uplift to craftsmanship and to the craftsman, but we need the help of the workman and of his better work in our education. We ought to realize better than we do the interdependent relations between our common education and our common industries, and we must go much further than we have yet gone to give the aid of our education to our industries if we would gain the reflex and stimulating influences which our indus- tries ought to bring to our education. This can be effectuated only through a system of industrial schools which shall be common throughout the country, which shall be differentiated from the manual training high schools, and which shall actually train millions of workmen. Labor does not and can not train workmen as the American workman has the in- herent right to be trained. The educational work of the country, as of all countries, including the training of workmen, is being centered upon the schools. The educational system of the country has discriminated against the work that is done by the hand, and therefore against the children of the people who work with their hands. There will be no cure for this until the work of the public elementary school is done more expeditiously, less fancifully, and more completely than it is now done, nor until those schools are supplemented by a system of schools which will provide real in- struction in the mechanical trades wherever there is a sufficient number of candidates in any one place to create a reasonable de- mand for it. There are educational and economic and utilitarian reasons enough why such a system of schools must be a component part of the common school system of the country. They must be so obvious to an educational assembly that I will not take much time to discuss them. All the strands are so warp and woof of the same fabric that there is no other way. The logic of the situation is aggressive and inexorable. We must go forward and do more, or we must go back and undo much that we have already done. Americans never retreat from educational positions once gained unless they find that those positions are illogical and untenable. Our present situations are neither illogical nor untenable. They are both logical and strategic. We have not wished to discriminate against hand- work or handworkmen. We have made rapid advances on the lines of least resistance. We will go forward to the universal THE ESSENTIAL GROUNDWORK OF INDUSTRIAL TRAINING QI educational conquest of a wide field. It is a conspicuous field and the world is looking on ; it is being conquered by the self-conscious- ness and the political power of plain people, and wherever there is intelligence in the world it is beginning to take notice of that too. Beyond the reasons for developing a system of trades schools as a component part of the public school system, to which allusion has been made, there is a practical reason which is quite as im- perative, and I think quite as logical, as any of the other reasons. That is in the reasoning and the attitude of organized labor. It would be absurd to think that a general system of education in craftsmanship could be successfully inaugurated without the favor of the organized craftsmen of the country. It not only requires their favor but it also requires, in a very vital measure, their advice, guidance, and direction. That means that it must not only be interlaced with the common instruction of the country, but also that it must be upon a basis to which capitalists and manufacturers can not object on any logical or substantial ground. It must be upon territory in which all have equal rights, and upon a basis which is alike patriotic and educational. The only such basis is that of the common school. Separate industrial and tax-supported schools in absolute articulation with and under the same manage- ment as the public schools, was the plan enunciated by the New York State Education Department more than two years ago. It was without any conference with the labor leaders, but in the con- fidence that it was so logical and right that the interest of the working masses in their work, and particularly in their children, as well as their common honesty and patriotism, would impel them to accept it. That confidence has now been very completely realized. The attitude of organized labor has been taken with cautious deliberation and an intelligent appreciation of the importance and the difficulties of the matter involved. The subject has been much discussed in many labor unions and in labor journals. Last winter the New York State Department of Labor addressed the question: "Do you favor a public industrial or preparatory trade school which shall endeavor to reach boys and girls between fourteen and six- teen that now leave the schools in large numbers before gradua- tion? " to all of the labor unions in the state, and 1500 unions an- swered " yes," 349 "no," 23 a qualified " yes," and 5 a qualified " no." The whole matter has also had the very favorable consid- eration of the New York State Workingmen's Assembly, of the 92 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT State Federation of Women's Clubs, and of many other influential and representative bodies. And the special committee — of which John Mitchell is chairman — of the American Federation of Labor, after considering it for a year and calling to their aid many men prominent in the educational work of the country, reported two weeks ago in favor of trades schools upon the basis of the public schools and with practically the same details of procedure as pro- mulgated by the New York State Education Department two years ago. The following extracts are taken from this report: " If the American workman is to maintain the high standard of efficiency, the boys and girls of the country must have an oppor- tunity to acquire educated hands and brains such as may enable them to earn a living in a self-selected vocation, and acquire an intelligent understanding of the duties of good citizenship." " We favor the establishment of schools in connection with the public school system, at which pupils between the ages of fourteen and sixteen may be taught the principles of the trades, not neces- sarily in separate buildings but in separate schools adapted to this particular education, and by competent and trained teachers." " The course of instruction in such a school should be English, mathematics, physics, chemistry, elementary mechanics, and draw- ing; the shop instruction for particular trades, and for each trade represented, the drawing, mathematics, mechanics, physical and biological science applicable to the trade, the history of that trade, and a sound system of economics, including and emphasizing the philosophy of collective bargaining." " In order to keep such schools in close touch with the trades, there should be local advisory boards, including representatives of the industries, employers, and organized labor." " The committee recommends that any technical education of the workers in trade and industry being a public necessity, it should not be a private but a public function, conducted by the public and the expense involved at public cost." " There is a strong reaction coming in general methods of edu- cation, and that growing feeling, which is gaining rapidly in strength, that the human element must be recognized, and can not be so dis- regarded as to make the future workers mere automatic machines." " Experience has shown that manual training school teachers without actual trade experience, do not and can not successfully solve this great problem, and that progress will necessarily be slow, as new teachers must be provided, a new set of textbooks wil! have THE ESSENTIAL GROUNDWORK OF INDUSTRIAL TRAINING 93 to be written, and the subjects taught in a sympathetic and sys- tematic manner." The Executive Council of the Federation approved this report and recommended " that the committee be continued for at least another year, and that they cooperate with the Executive Council and all other bodies having for their purpose extending public industrial education." Organized labor in America is thus deliberately com- mitted to the training of workmen in cooperation with the public schools. The sagaciousness of this is worth remarking. It is the only hope of industrial education, efficiency and progress in America. Nothing can be accomplished without the sympathy of workmen. But workmen are dependent upon education. American workmen are alike apprehensive of corporate domination in educational plans and independent of charitable provision for training workmen. The apprenticeship system has fallen into disuse, and, aside from that, it could not now give the training, either on the literary or mechan- ical side, which is the necessary equipment of American workmen. The public school plan is the only one that is free from objections that are deemed valid by millions of very worthy men, or that is at all adequate for the overwhelming work in view. The industries will not be hampered for long in America by the rival claims of capital and labor. The plan which will mitigate them has to come and it was sagacious for labor to help it on. Now let me set forth the details of the New York plan with some definiteness, but as briefly as may be. We believe that very generally the courses in the elementary schools are too much prolonged; that the grades and the years are more than need be; that some unnecessary branches are included and that some others are too much attenuated; that there are often more grades of textbooks than are desirable in the same branch ; that there are often too much fanciful exploitation and illustration to be meaningful and helpful, and that in consequence it all wearies pupils and mystifies parents, and very commonly leads away from the environment in which the greater number of children will live, and away from the work they would naturally do. It results in too many misfits, and too often unfits for any work at all. As things are now going in our education, boys and girls often find that they can make as much money by their work if they drop out of the elementary schools at the end of the fifth or sixth grade as if they remain to the end of the eighth. As they have very 94 NE W YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT commonly reached the age where the law no longer requires attend- ance upon school, by the time they are through the fifth or sixth grade, they do then drop out in very large numbers if they have opportunities to work. And as the department stores and the markets and the offices are looking for cheap labor and are not much concerned about the good of the child or the permanency of em- ployees, they offer such children work at a beggarly wage, and in a year or two will repeat the operation as to other children. The shops are not seeking children to train them into workmen. So the schools fall short in thorough work as to very many children, and the children go to work which is neither remunerative, perma- nent, nor helpful. In a few years they are upon the world with- out being able to do anything well enough to command employment which will support an individual, much less a family. And, worse than that, they are by that time commonly without the opportunity to learn something which will provide support and afford oppor- tunities. They have by that time grown too old in years to take up a child's work of learning to do something. It must be admitted that the same thing is essentially true if the child remains to the end of the elementary school or even goes through the high school, except that he may go to college or to a professional school. He does not command much more pay than he could get at the end of the sixth grade, and he has lost his opportunity as to nearly every- thing but a profession where the power to earn a living does not develop before perhaps the twenty-fifth or even the twenty-eighth year. Giildren can not all wait until the twenty-fifth year to begin to earn a living, and they ought not to lose their real opportunities in life because the scheme of the schools is set to send them to a higher literary, scientific, or professional school, or turn them into the world without any kind of efficiency. The schools are bound to recognize the fact that more skillful workmen who are happy in their work, rather than more professional men, are required ; that the genius of the country demands that all young people have their free choice of vocation and their open opportunity without hindrance by the plan of the schools ; and that a scheme of education which creates so many misfits, or forces so many into inefficiency or idle- ness, requires radical reformation. The schools must create a higher earning capacity at an earlier age. They must also create the power to make a rational choice of vocation before the oppor- tunity of such choice is practically taken away. THE ESSENTIAL GROUNDWORK OF INDUSTRIAL TRAINING 95 We think the work of the elementary schools must not only be made shorter but stronger and more vital; that it must not only be made worth the while of all pupils to remain to the end of it, but must be finished enough earlier to make it easier to keep all pupils to the end of it. We think the work of the elementary schools must be capable of a more definite educational valuation, so that when children have finished it the public may believe that they have the knowledge and ability to do some definite things, and also a disposition and power to learn to do other things whether they ever go to another school or not. We think that the value of child life must be more regarded by the educational system, and that it must be assumed that the elementary schools will train the mind in elementary knowledge, so that if the child were never to go to another school where books were much employed, he would not be without the mental training which would enable him and dispose him to pursue further work, either mental or manual, without being seriously handicapped. We think that these schools should be substantially the same for all the children of the land, without reference to probable or possible careers, and that there should be no compromise about requiring the attendance of every child upon such a school or its reasonable equivalent. Therefore, we shall soon recommend an elementary course of study with but six grades and normally occupying six years instead of eight, in the confidence that it will be more rather than less educationally efficient. Pending the general discussion and agree- ment which are now moving to favorable conclusions, I am not at liberty to go into details, and there would be no advantage in doing so in a large assemblage. We would follow this great and universal elementary school sys- tem, so simplified and strengthened, with a system of secondary schools which for the present and in our state shall be distinctly separated at the very beginning into three great classes : first, the present literary high schools ; second, commercial or business schools, and third, general industrial or trade schools. The schools of the third branch are of immediate interest now. We propose that they occupy buildings that look like shops ; that they be taught by skilled workmen who can teach, rather than by teachers with a little mechanical skill ; that to a moderate extent they use books which are really germane to the work to be taught, but that their main instruments be machinery and tools ; and that they be much more shoppish than bookish. We propose that these g6 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT schools be of two general classes, namely, general industrial schools training in general mechanics for those who will work in factories with machinery and many other workmen, and trades schools for those who will own their own tools and work essentially by them- selves. It is proposed that these schools be of a character which will be adaptable to almost any industrial conditions, and that wherever there are twenty or twenty-five boys or girls who want instruction in any vocation, they shall have it; that these schools shall be open day and evening to accommodate the circumstances of as many as may be ; that the school attendance and child labor laws shall always be consistent, and that the time of school attend- ance shall be extended until it may be believed that the great body of the children of the country will be prepared for some useful vocation, or at least until every child shall have had his fair chance with every other child to enter upon a career with real promise in it. We are not going to assume that the training of our industrial schools will make finished workmen any more than the training of our law schools makes finished lawyers. We are aiming at a surer fundamental English education for workmen and a mechanical training which will shorten the time required to make a good journeyman, and which in time will make a more intelligent and skillful mechanic than is promised in any other way. We hope to have the continuing and keen interest in each school of the craft allied to the work of that school. We want the ideals of craftsmanship to be high, and know that that can not be unless the most skilled workmen are interested in the school which is train- ing for their kind of work. The public can not divest its own duly chosen representatives of the management of the public schools, but we have arranged for a system of advisory committees con- sisting of workmen in the allied industries, to be appointed by the boards of education to guide the technical work of technical schools. We are not going to give ourselves much anxiety about the pro- fessions, except to keep putting up the requirements and making it harder to get in. We know that there will be no scarcity of pro- fessional men and women. Nor are we going to have solicitude about captains and managers, for we know that there will be no lack of them, and that there will be more capable captains and managers if we put our energy into training workmen and leave it to the best of them to work their way to the front. You are warranted in inquiring just how much has actually been THE ESSENTIAL GROUNDWORK OF INDUSTRIAL TRAINING 97 accomplished. The law looking to such schools as a part of the public school system, authorizing the certificating of teachers and the approval of courses for them by the State Education Department, and assuring them the definite financial aid of the State, went into operation a year and a half ago. Before schools could actually be opened the sentiment in each city or large town had to concentrate, the funds had to be provided through the ordinary financial machin- ery, teachers had to be secured and buildings and equipment had to be arranged. But we have schools operating under this law in Albany, Buffalo, Gloversville, Hudson, New York, Rochester, Sche- nectady and Yonkers. The public opinion of the state is strongly in favor of the movement, and it seems very certain to gather in volume and force very rapidly. Another year will see the organiza- tion of many more schools. This is a matter of first concern to the United States, and doubt- less it is not too much to say that among the states it concerns Massachusetts and New York preeminently. When New York was only thinking about it, Massachusetts created her state commissions to deal with it, and those commissions gave it serious study and published their luminous reports. That work, in 1 905-1 906-1 907, placed all of the states, and New York in a special degree, under obligations to her. It at least accelerated our action and lighted our way. The fact that it seemed to me that at one or two points the commission had made a mistaken turn in laying out a pioneer road reduced the obligation not a whit. It is easier to criticize, or even correct, than it is to construct. And an error in itself is often illuminating. Speaking and publishing in 1907, I made this comment upon the attitude of Massachusetts : " The report of the two Massachusetts commissions are substantial contributions to the literature of the subject. It seems to me that a serious mistake is made in com- mitting the organization and administration of industrial schools to a special commission and not to the public school authorities of the state and of the subdivisions thereof ; and it seems to me also that the commission falls into fundamental error in looking to higher technical schools, teaching no one trade, to the exclusion of voca- tional trades schools. It is obviously because of the prevalent in- dustrial situation in the state." From the course of this address it is clear to you that the opinion then expressed has been confirmed rather than shaken, and from the course of events in Massachusetts it is clear to me ^8 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT that Massachusetts has gone back to the point of digression from the best route and has entered upon the building of a broader and better educational highway than would have been undertaken if the byway started upon had not led into a thicket. It reinforces my thinking, which grows stronger with the passing years, that the honest mistakes of men and women trying to accomplish desirable ends are often the means of wholly unexpected good. Without of course intending to express an opinion in commendation of one man or in opposition to another, I entertain no doubt that the con- solidation of organization, and the enlargement of the legal powers of the Massachusetts school system, which was occasioned by the division and the inevitable conflict of authority over this matter, will be of more advantage to the state than it yet realizes, and therefore of no little moment to educational progress in the nation. This consolidation and enlargement of function is peculiarly fortunate at this time because it is made to coordinate industrial education with all the other education of the state, while the whole is to be guided by serious students of industries as well as of education. And quite possibly it may turn out that the recent appointment of Dr David S. Snedden as State Commissioner of Education is the most important factor in the whole proceeding because of his rank as a scholar, his serious study of plans and processes in education, his experience as a teacher and writer, and his grasp of the great fact that education and vocation must be very vitally related if civilization is to be aggressive. But let us not underestimate the imperative character of our undertaking or the largeness of its difficulties. This undertaking is imperative to the balance and soundness of our education, to the prosperity of our manufactures, and to the moral health of our people. A system of education which, no matter what its intent, in fact results in a liberal education for a class and only a partial or an indifferent education for the mass, is not the normal and logical educational system of a democracy. Commercial prosperity and preeminence are more dependent upon the skill and industry of the mass than upon the scientific knowledge or the philosophic think- ing of a class. And the moral sense of the multitude is more de- pendent upon reducing the percentage of illiteracy to the vanishing point, as is done in many of the European nations, and upon train- ing all of the people to efficiency or at least up to their opportunities in some kind of work, as is also done in many European nations, than upon the gifts of millionaires or the benevolent purposes of THE ESSENTIAL GROUNDWORK OF INDUSTRIAL TRAINING 99 the pure in heart. The thing will have to be worked out: let us hope that it will be worked out soon. The movement will not only have to be grounded upon founda- tions that will stand, but it will have to be projected upon lines that are very exact as well as very large. We are a sincere, en- thusiastic, hilarious, and indifferent people. We are as profligate in our education and as wasteful of the children of the mass, as we are indifferent about the natural resources of which we have lately heard so much. If we are to go on in our reckless disregard of things which are of the most worth, misapprehending the true basis of real culture, offering everything and enforcing nothing, evolving an educational system with more towers than foundations to it, we will surely come to a time when the sufficiency of democracy may be tested and the progress of the nation may be menaced and arrested by it. I do not believe that we shall go over a brink or come out against a stone wall, because I am sure we shall cure difficulties and take the correct turn in the road just before we get to such a place. Possibly these labor unions which many of us have doubted and some of us have feared, are to help us do it now. All great com- binations of either capital or labor do things at times which those who are not in the combination, and some who are in, dislike and disapprove. It is often so where the matter excepted to is without the sanction of the general authority, and it is sometimes so when it is with that sanction. In this regard honors are easy as between capital and labor. But none can be so blind as to fail to see the need and the desirability of labor being organized. No more can one who is intelligent fail to see that the labor organizations must be rational and just in order to be vital ; or one who is honest and a good citizen fail to wish them well. Now if, with its well known steadfastness and aggressiveness, the organized labor of the United States will insist upon reestablishing the balance in our education, and upon setting up a class of schools which will give an uplift to work, who can estimate the great service the workingmen will render to a nation which they love quite as sincerely as do any of us, and particularly, who can realize the great advantage they may gain to themselves and their children for many generations? Let us try to act in cooperation with them to have it so. That which improves work uplifts the workman more than his work. Democracy has its difficulties as well as its advantages. When we discover that our educational system is one-sided, and out of IOO NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT balance, and turning out too many " professionals " and too few " industrials," we can not cure it by a speech as the German Em- peror could and did when he discovered the same thing in Germany fifteen years ago, but we will not doubt that there are forces in our democracy which are equal to its salvation. This is the land of opportunity: it is the land of sagacity, of resourcefulness, and of common honesty as well. Our Uncle Samuel is a hard-headed character. He may seem a little indifferent about some matters until he realizes the importance of them, and when he comes to know that something must be done it takes a little time to get his people together and agree about doing it. He dislikes to compel his own flesh and blood. With his people reason accomplishes when force fails. Things which have to be done are done. We have been dealing with a question which will have to be met. It is infinitely more fundamental than tariffs, and much more far-reaching than interstate trade or the greed of corporations. It goes to the balance, and strength, and moral sense, and permanency, and happiness of the nation. The educational people have brought it up and discussed it rather thor- oughly. The labor people are becoming much interested in it. The manufacturers, and the tradesmen, and the transporters, and the statesmen, and all the rest, will in time give their great support to the movement which seems to us so vitally important and which nromises so much. THE LAY INFLUENCE IN SCHOOL MANAGEMENT There is no officer in the United States so common as the school trustee or director. He is even more common than the justice of the peace or the police magistrate who settles petty controversies and punishes petty offenses. He is found not only in every city, town and village, but on almost every second or third mile of all the highways of the nation. In the cities and towns he is generally one of a board of education and acts with others in providing for and managing the schools for hundreds or thousands of children, but in the country he very commonly acts individually and alone as the representative of his neighbors in providing school accommoda- tions for the few children of his neighborhood. Under very differ- ent circumstances and confronted by widely differing burdens of responsibility, his functions are everywhere essentially the same. He must provide the necessary buildings and appliances, and employ and pay the proper teachers for the training of the children. He is not expected to teach. Indeed, it is not required that he be able to teach. He is not bound to supervise the teaching. That is provided for in other ways. But it is necessary that he be a man of ordinary business sagacity and that he manage the business affairs of the schools in the interests of the people who have author- ized him to represent them in doing so. This forbids his having any pecuniary or other personal interest in any of the business which he transacts. He must be wholly unselfish, and exercise ordinary sense, and show a genuine interest in universal education in all the transactions of his office. He must provide for as many schools, and for schools of as many grades, as the people authorize. He must employ the best teachers he can get for the compensation he is authorized to pay; he must treat such teachers justly; he must leave them free to teach in their own way, remembering that there are other officers whose duty it is to certify the qualifications of the teachers and supervise the teaching. He must advise with the officers who supervise the teaching, with reference to the employ- ment and continuance of teachers. He must do whatever he can to give opportunity to the most enlightened intelligence and the highest expectations of his constituents concerning their schools. He must not only do things that need to be done but he must also Address before a convention of school directors of Allegheny county, at Pittsburg, Pa., December u, 1909. [101] 102 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT resist all selfish influences and all vicious propositions which are opposed to the best good of the schools. In a word, he must do all he can to express that sane and sound public opinion which is practically sure to be held by the majority of his people concerning the steady upbuilding of the schools. As common as the officer is who does all this in the United States, he is almost unknown in other lands. Not many other peoples choose their own representatives to manage their schools. From this it must not be inferred that there arc not many other lauds with many schools that are quite as good as ours. It must not be sus- pected that there are not other peoples as uniformly educated as our own. In fact, there are not a few nations in which all the people can read and write much more surely and uniformly than is true of the American people. The reason why the local school trustee or director is not common in other nations is because they are accustomed to minister their school affairs, like all of their other affairs, in autocratic ways, while we are accustomed to do it in democratic ways. Because of this the laws of nearly all the other nations make no provision for local school officers to manage the schools. They appoint national ministers of education, or possibly national boards, who arrange and direct all the affairs of their schools from a central office in the national capital. In this office it is ordered how all the schoolhouses shall be provided : here the teachers are appointed, and very often they are appointed for life and become permanent officers of the government ; and here it is determined just what shall be taught, and when, and just what methods of teaching shall be employed. Every detail of the schools is fixed by the central government, and the people of a city, town or village have little or nothing to say about it. This way of doing things has in some cases provided very excellent systems of schools ; in fact, better systems than the people would have established them- selves. It avoids some difficulties and attains many excellent re- sults which, in view of the economic conditions and the political thinking and institutions of other lands, could not be assured in any other way. But, for reasons which we understand very well, it would not work in this country. The office of superintendent of schools is pretty nearly an Amer- ican creation. In other lands the schools are much less complicated in their organization and their operations, not only on the side of their business affairs but also in relation to their courses of study and the teaching. The teachers generallv have a life tenure. Com- THE LAY INFLUENCE IN SCHOOL MANAGEMENT 103 monly they are paid by the government, and often they have a pen- sion when they can teach no longer. Naturally enough, they follow in every detail the minute directions of the national minister of education. Often there are inspectors who visit the schools and report upon them to the minister, but a city or county superintend- ent who visits the schools regularly and sympathetically, criticises and encourages the teachers, looks after the adaptation of teachers to particular schools or grades of work, and stands between the board of education, or the trustees, and the teachers, while he works for educational uniformity and pedagogical efficiency, is practically unknown. The same thing distinguishes the administration of American and foreign colleges. All American colleges have a board of trus- tees, while such a board is practically unknown in foreign colleges. There every immediate activity of the college is directed by the faculty. The colleges are essentially under government control which is regulated by the national Legislature and exercised by the minister of education, but for all practical and ordinary purposes the affairs of the college are managed by the faculty. Indeed the office of college president — an executive officer standing between the board of trustees and the faculty, and striving for cooperative efficiency — is lacking. A professor in a foreign college or uni- versity would look with apprehension upon an innovation which would subject any interest or policy of the institution to the deter- mination of any authority but the faculty or of any man but a " scholar." So it appears that in other countries the educational system, from top to bottom, is almost exclusively under the management of pro- fessional teachers, while in this country it is, from the bottom to the top, under the joint management of professional teachers, pro- fessional executive and administrative officers, and laymen chosen by and representing the people who support it or the institutions which form the parts of it. Of course there is a reason for this, and the reason is in our democracy. The governments or the monarchs of other countries have formed and are imposing upon their people such educational systems as the governments or the monarchs think well for their people. We are evolving such an educational system as we think good for ourselves. Their way is easier than our way, and it must be admitted that often it is more efficient than our way, because their people know no other way. Very often their way has been 104 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT a wise and good and resultful way. It has accomplished many very definite and very desirable ends which our way has not yet accom- plished. Nevertheless we believe that their way is not capable of accomplishing all of the ends, nor all of the absolutely vital ends, for which we are striving. We think that if an educational system is to afford every one his equal chance, or is to do the most that it is desirable that such a system shall do for a people, it must be evolved out of their free intelligence and capacity, and must readily respond to their outlook and intellectual progress, and that this can not be so unless from the beginning to the end of it the popular in- telligence and sentiment have a very large measure of free control over it. We say without hesitation that it is better that the people control their own schools, even though they fail at some points, than that the schools be controlled by some authority independent of the people which might do some things better than they are done under popular control. We say that experience has already established the soundness of our contention, and that results have already been attained which in their fullness and their further promise are sur- prising even to ourselves. We have gained confidence through our doing. It was not all thought out at the beginning. When we became independent states, and even through the eighty years that the states were coalescing into a nation with substantial cohesiveness about it, we had no popular or confident educational plan. Our purposes, our theories, our methods of procedure, had to be worked out through our ex- periences. One step had to be taken before we could anticipate the next. Through all of that time our education moved with con- siderable sluggishness and difficulty. The elementary schools were dissociated and unsystematic, often undisciplined and weak. The secondary schools had no relations with the elementary schools and exercised very limited functions. Many of them gave much aid to the culture of circumscribed communities, and sent a few boys to colleges that were no broader and only a little stronger than them- selves. There was no lack of interest, but evolution was slow be- cause government hesitated at the exercise of authority in Amer- ica, and because the political understanding and power of the com- mon people had not become firmly established. But as we have taken one step after another and found that we did not fall, we have come to believe in our own educational capacity and we have gone on shaping an educational system which in the opportunities that it offers to all the people undoubtedly surpasses the other edu- THE LAY INFLUENCE IN SCHOOL MANAGEMENT • 105 cational systems of the world. All manner of educational oppor- tunity for all manner of people, and a free choice of opportunity without influence or hindrance, has come to be the national passion of the United States. And it has come because no part of it — so much and no more — was impressed upon us by some external authority, and because we found that we had the opportunity and went on managing the business for ourselves. A community, a state, or a nation, quite as much as an individual, likes to see the results of its own handiwork. A whole people, no less than an individual, grows in strength and power through the doing of what it does for its advancement. I have had occasion to point out in another place the great in- fluence of the boards of trustees in bringing large revenues to the better type of American colleges and universities. The colleges and universities of other lands have no such munificent revenues. It is because our colleges have within their own organization a board of laymen who are responsible for the financial management and who shape the institutions to the needs and the wishes of their constituencies. In other words, the American colleges have within themselves the most powerful instrument of their own self-expan- sion. If it is an endowed college the high character of the trustees appeals to people who are wondering what ought to be done with their money, either now or when they die. The unselfishness of the trustees gives point to their appeal for aid to accomplish definite things. These officers stimulate giving as teachers are not able to do. It is no less so with the state universities. The people and the legislatures have confidence in the university boards they have created. They often think, and often unjustly, that teachers are only theorists and impracticables, but such charges, or excuses, do not lie against the hard-headed laymen who constitute the boards of trustees. The lay influences associated with American colleges and universities, acting in cooperation with the professional facul- ties, are bringing them to the very front rank of world institutions of the higher learning. It may yet develop them into a class by themselves. This lay influence, representing and expressing the feelings of the body of the people, is no less potent in the elementary and the secondary schools than in the colleges and universities. It con- stantly expresses the difference between schools created by the people for their own uses and upbuilding, and schools imposed upon the people by a government more or less remote, because that gov- IOG NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT eminent is benevolent enough to be interested in them or is sagacious enough to want to convert them into instruments of national strength. It is this which causes the school tax to be borne more cheerfully than any other tax, even though it be the largest. Indeed it is this which causes the school tax to be borne with an absolute enthusiasm that surprises all the other nations of the world. I am bound to say also that it makes the schools better. It would be absurd to indulge in any reflections upon scholarship, no matter how exclusive it may be. If one has given his life to re- search in a new field, no matter how narrow, he may have acted wisely and well. If he can go beyond the outposts of world knowl- edge and ascertain a single scientific truth that adds to the exact in- formation of the world, he will put the world under obligations to him. Even a human life may not be too high a price to pay for such a new truth. But such work and such heroisms as that are individual. No such exclusiveness, uncertainty, mystery, and sacri- fice as they involve are inherent or usual in the elementary, second- ary, or collegiate schools of the people. The schools that are of most worth to a self-conscious people, trying to afford the utmost of opportunity to every one, will respond to their free impulses. Their public opinion will not often limp or go astray. It will be compounded out of the circumstances, the work, the reading, the discussions of laborers, craftsmen, manu- facturers, merchants, lawyers, physicians, editors, preachers, teach- ers, and all the rest ; it will be reached with pretty full information of the thinking and the doings of other people in all parts of the world and in all generations ; it will be limited and guided by the moral sense which seldom fails in the mass ; and it will be an alto- gether sufficient basis for the ordinary schools. Whatever matured public opinion wants in the way of schools, it may well have. It is a safer guide and a surer support than the reasoning of any one class, even though that class be composed of teachers. Let this not be taken as a flippant and unworthy implication. There is no better guild than that which the teachers form. No other class works more conscientiously or with more self-sacrifice for self-improve- ment and the good of others. None is so unappreciated or so under- paid. Far be it from me to seem to fall short in the expression of the esteem in which I hold them. But, like all other people, they are much influenced by their life and their work. Too many of them see but one phase of life and often it is a narrow one. Too many of them live very exclusively with immature minds, and deal with THE LAY INFLUENCE IN SCHOOL MANAGEMENT IO7 routine to an extent which is likely to be intellectually warping if not dwarfing. Nevertheless their opinions have opportunity ; they enter into the making of public opinion. If the teacher mingles with the people as well as works in the school ; if he is a free, re- ceptive, juicy and generous character as well as an exact and con- scientious one, he has a very large part in forming public opinion concerning the schools. A board of education composed of laymen has a hard time differing with such an one about what, or how, things shall be done in the schools. As to the laying out of courses, the making of schedules, and the methods of teaching, the teacher is necessarily and properly almost supreme. So there is no difficulty at all if the teachers are reasonably capable and well disposed, and the directors or trustees are honest. If they are not, the teacher should be discontinued or the trustee locked up. If they are, they settle details in discussion, giving and taking, and influencing each other, until they act together in ways that vitally adapt the school to the needs of the people to whom it ministers. That makes the teacher a stronger and more rational teacher and the school a broader and more useful school, than would be without this organic association with the world. There is quite as much danger of trustees overreaching as of teachers falling short. Sometimes a school trustee in the country has the hallucination that he owns the school and is to operate it to his own personal advantage rather than as the representative of his neighbors and for the equal good of all ; but there are not many such. I have seen people come into a city board of education and into the board of trustees of a great university with the very mani- fest purpose of seeing what they could get out of it for themselves ; but there are relatively very few of these, and such as I have seen have come to grief. Such people defeat their own ends. Such mat- ters ordinarily regulate themselves. There is possibly more danger that the lay officers, and some- times the teachers, of the school system will concoct sentimental un- dertakings which have no very substantial basis. Oftener they will yield to the importunity of sentimental people in the community who want to foist something new upon the schools. It is all honest enough. When it is useless or impracticable, the main trouble with it is that it is sincere. It is hard to fight honest people about school policies; it is particularly hard for men to oppose women senti- mentalists, and especially so when they have a whole woman's club united to propagate one sentiment. One of the best grounds for IOS NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT having women in school boards is that they are valiant in opposing women sentimentalists outside of school boards. In this way or in some other way the difficulty regulates itself in the course of time. The schools can not do everything, not even every good thing. In my opinion they might better undertake less than they do, and ac- complish what they assume more definitely and completely than they do. The evidences are not lacking that the public opinion of the country is tending towards that conclusion. But, again, all of these things regulate themselves in the course of time. The distinctly representative character of the American school system keeps it in equilibrium and in close association with the life of the republic. The popular administration of it makes it expressive of the popular thinking and feeling beyond any other national system of education. The professional leadership of it steadily grows in scholarship and solidity. The two balance each other to the advantage of both and to the good of all. And the greatest good results in the communities where the personnel of each is such that each may thoroughly respect the other. It is not to be denied that the local and popular, the extreme democratic and decentralized, support and administration of our educational system has often worked to the disadvantage of com- munities which were poor in pocket or lacking in educational initia- tive and energy. With one accord we would say that it is even better so than that central school authority shall be beyond the influence and control of the people. But we see more clearly than we used to many things that need to be done, and we realize as never before that these things will not be done save under general laws enforced by general authority. We understand the advantages of cooperation better than we used to and we are not so solicitous about the rule of usurpers as we once were. We know how to use political power more effectually than our fathers did, and it makes us less apprehensive than they were about delegating the authority to do necessary things. Accordingly, the extreme individualism of towns is giving way even in the most conservative of states. And all the states which must necessarily exercise the sovereign author- ity over our tax-supported educational system, and must create and regulate our educational corporations, like all other corporations, are more and more disposed to assure uniform excellencies in the educational system, without lessening the popular control in all sections where popular educational sentiment is rational and at all aggressive. THE LAY INFLUENCE IN SCHOOL MANAGEMENT IO9 It is not too much to say that New York has in this regard differed decisively from all the other states. Her educational policies grew out of her history, out of the early struggles and the later fusion of English autocracy and Dutch democracy, which she inherited from the successes of the English royalists and the Dutch revolu- tionists in the mother countries. Those policies were not made in fear of all government save local and primary government, as in New England. Neither were they made in ignorance of the rights of freemen nor in disregard of the new-born freedom of local initia- tive and opportunity which were quite as zealous and forceful in New York as in other parts of the country. There has never been any appreciable dissent in the state from these well established educational policies. Indeed, they have gathered popular and legal support, and they have grown in definiteness and firmness with the advances in population and the increasing strength and conspicuity of the state. With the necessary reservation that in the last analysis any fun- damental question may be settled in the Legislature, she has created a state educational administration and delegated to it ample liberty to legislate upon future educational policies along lines not incon- sistent with the law and usage of the state, and with sufficient au- thority to assure the execution of the policies of the state touching every manner of educational activity about which the general opinion of the state is concerned. Requiring without hesitation that so much be done in the interests of education in every part of the state, it stimulates and aids every community to do just as much more as its intelligence and its means will suggest. It does this upon both the material and the professional sides of the schools, and not only of the schools but also of all the culturing agencies, all the scientific or philosophical institutions, and all the organized professions which seek some share in the public com- mendation or some right in the public authority, whenever their intellectual and moral standards enter into the weal or the woe of the state. For example, New York undertakes to prevent the use of an unsanitary schoolhouse, but does not discourage as elaborate and elegant a schoolhouse as any community will erect. She requires that at least so much be taught in the schools, and encourages the teaching of as much more as any community will support. She allows no one to teach in any public school who has not earned the right to do so in regular courses in approved schools or in written IIO NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT examinations set and rated by the State Education Department, but she never meddles about the employment of teachers upon whom in an entirely impersonal way she has set the mark of her appro- bation. She does not admit that all districts will at all times main- tain suitable schools without more inspection and regulation than they will establish for themselves, but so long as districts do, and she can give their procedure the sign of her approbation, she with- holds directions and proffers only the aid which by that time they ordinarily desire. She retains the right of reasonable control over all institutions which derive their corporate existence from her, but when their life is of a character which helps her, she leaves them to themselves to do as much better as they can. She controls the gate- ways to all the professions, but she leaves the professional life of the state very much to its own courses and its own discipline. Ex- ercising a measure of general control which is not equalled in any other state, she never impedes the right of initiative or interdicts local control, so long as the motives of the local managers are not clearly of a character which demand her censure rather than her approbation or her help. She is in no sense a theorist. She is intensely practical. But she does not intend to be unscientific. She believes in adapting educational facilities to people ; that this must be done through the people themselves ; and that where this is done the most freely the schools will be the best and the people will be most progressed through the doing of it. All of the states are necessarily tending with more or less de- cisiveness towards this attitude. This movement is not so much accelerated by the men of the schools as by the people themselves. It is the lay factors in our civilization who are doing it for their own protection and their own progress, rather than the professional factors who are doing it for their own aggrandizement. It is the inevitable accompaniment, or perhaps the forerunner, of real pro- gress in growing populations with steadily enlarging educational and professional needs. And New York is rather happy in the fact that she is in such a situation and not obliged to contend for it now ; that she is not forced to discard the limping theories of a cen- tury in order to be in company with the overwhelming trend of our American life and our national institutions. But it is not very important outside of the state what that state has done, neither is the division of responsibility between the officers of the state and those who are local, of overwhelming im- portance, because we have the habit in the United States of grad- THE LAY INFLUENCE IN SCHOOL MANAGEMENT III ually doing what needs to be done in the interest of the schools. But it is important that we never forget that the schools are the schools of the people, and that the well-being of the schools and the good of the people require that they be kept in close and continuous association. It is vital that laymen who are associated with pro- fessional superintendents and teachers in the management of the schools shall concede to such professional men and women a free hand in shaping and directing activities of the schools which bear upon instruction, and it is just as vital that superintendents and teachers shall concede to the laymen who are chosen by the people to manage their schools that freedom and responsibility which must keep schools in touch with the people they are expected to serve and the situations they are bound to aid. It is this distribution of function, and this balancing of responsi- bility, between the people and the teachers and between the state and the town or the district, which is the most distinguishing fea- ture of the American system of education. To disturb this equilib- rium would be to menace the brightest jewel in our crown. It is the lay influence which promises every child his chance without lessening the opportunities of professional scholarship. NEW YORK COLLEGES AND THE STATE SYSTEM OF EDUCATION It is time to initiate, if possible, a serious discussion of the rela- tions which our colleges, using the term freely for convenience and referring to all the higher institutions of learning, do sustain and ought to sustain to each other, to the people of the state, and to the state system of education. There should be a freer op- portunity to go to college; and the college influence should reach down into the secondary and the elementary schools, and into all the affairs of the people, more freely and unselfishly than it does. Even though this general statement is commonly admitted, as very likely it will be, it is necessary not only to examine the present situation somewhat in detail, but also to look into the history out of which the situation has been evolved, in order to realize what is needed and how much it is needed, and in order to discuss the steps which may possibly attain the desired ends. And it may as well be said at the outset that I have not come, and do not expect in this paper to come, to any definite or unalterable conclusions a? to particular policies which the state ought to adopt. There are so many great interests involved ; there are so many strong men and women concerned, and new steps are so very difficult and may be so far-reaching, that nothing more can be expected than that I shall open the subject, point out some of the facts, try to adduce some of the reasoning which bears upon it, and ask that it may have unprejudiced consideration by the State Board of Regents, by the college officers and boards and faculties and graduates, and by the educational associations, the more popular assemblages, and the newspaper press of the state. Then public opinion ought to take form, and more liberal and positive and fruitful educational policies, which will push their way into the future history of the state, ought to result. It is not too much to say that of all the original 13 states, New York tried at least as hard as any other to erect a collegiate sys- tem which would extend liberal learning and work to the advan- tage of its intellectual affairs. But while the system or organiza- tion created was framed by the leading men in the early history of Written as the Commissioner's special theme for the Annual Report of the State Education Department for the year 1909. [112] COLLEGES AND THE STATE SYSTEM OF EDUCATION 113, tlie state, wlio were also statesmen of the very first rank in the na- tion, and while the organization they created has never been logically attacked, it must be admitted that the outworking of the scheme has been marked by much controversy so far as colleges have been con- cerned. For many years, certainly for more than half a century of the early history of the state, the State Board of Regents, set to represent the state in the upbuilding of its colleges, did not get on well with the separate colleges which the state had created. It might quite as well be put the other way and said that the colleges did not get on well with the Board of Regents. Nor is it too much to add that this purpose to have the college influence permeate the lower schools and all the affairs of the state has been in a very con- siderable measure thwarted by the unfortunate separateness in the administration of the state's educational activities and by the preju- diced discussion of the state's educational policies which began im- mediately after the creation of the " University of the State of New York " by the Legislature, or as soon as the Board of Regents was sharply resisted when it moved to develop, under its auspices, a state system of elementary schools. The strain continued until the educational unification act of 1904. That act has been accepted generally and cordially, and with the elimination of the separateness in educational administration it is not too much to hope that the persistent prejudice or one-sided point of view in the discussion of educational policy may disappear. It may or it may not be profitable to discuss old controversies. That depends upon the spirit and the purpose. In this case it is necessary if we are to have any intelligent discussion at all. To ignore them is to admit that there is a skeleton in one of our old closets which we dare not investigate. The Board of Regents and the University of the State of New York have become fixed in the Constitution of the state and are here to stay. They were incor- porated in the Constitution by the convention and by the people after no years of trial. It is not for any one of us to say that this fundamental situation was not wisely arranged. It is for us to ac- cept the situation. Accepting it without cavil or reservation, we are bound to know what it was that put a strain upon the relations of this Board with the colleges of the state, which has continued even to our time, and what it is that has caused such a break be- tween the state and its colleges and also between the colleges and the lower schools. Knowing what the cause is, we are bound to remove it. We are old enough and strong enough to go about it 114 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT without vituperation or continuing prejudice. And we ought to see that while every interest of the state is involved the college interests have at least as much at stake as any other interests. The only college in the state established by royal charter broke down with the Revolution. It broke down not only because New York was the seat of war, but because the royal aims that had entered into it were frustrated by independence. The act reviving it was passed at the first session of the Legislature after the war. It not only revived King's College and changed its name to Columbia, but it created " The Regents of the University of the State of New York." This Board was charged with the adminis- tration of the resurrected college. The men who petitioned for the new charter were all prominent men and many of them were promi- nent officers of the state. The governor, secretary of state, treas- urer, and attorney general were among them. They represented to the Legislature that many parts of the old charter " are in- consistent with that liberality and that civil and religious freedom which our present happy Constitution points out," and prayed for an enlargement of the privileges of the college " so as to render it the mother of an university to be established within this state." The Legislature responded to the spirit and purpose of the petition. The intent to create a university, not for the city, nor for any ex- clusive class, but of the state, is too clear to be mistaken. The members of the Board were representative of the several sections of the state. The expectation was to have a considerable number of both schools and colleges created and bound together in a state university, and the Board of Regents was empowered to found such colleges " in such parts of the state as may seem expedient to them," and to do what was necessary to maintain and administer them. Such schools and colleges were ""' at all times to be deemed a part of the University." The " University " was the " University of the State of New York " and invested with full powers over Columbia College and also all authority to establish both colleges and academies and to develop and maintain the " University of the State of New York," which was to be comprised of all the colleges and academies of the state. And it should be borne in mind that at a time when there were few elementary schools, either public or private, and no public high schools, the " schools " here referred to were academies which would feed the colleges. The " schools " were to be pushed down from the colleges, not to spring from the ground up to them. Democracy had then made but little headway in education. COLLEGES AND THE STATE SYSTEM OF EDUCATION 115 This scheme failed almost at once so far as the government of Columbia College was concerned, because the Regents lived too far from the college. There may have been other reasons to make it unworkable. But the failure should not obscure our vision as to the thought of the founders of the state. They were clearly trying to accomplish an organization of colleges and academies in the state. It was to be an organization authorized, aided, and controlled by the state. The governor of the state was made chancellor, and the lieutenant governor, vice chancellor, of this first Board, and so of Columbia College. Ecclesiastical differences were attempted to be harmonized by inviting each of the religious denominations to elect one Regent. The organization was to be all-inclusive. The " fellows, professors, or tutors " of each col- lege were constituted Regents to the extent of being authorized to vote upon the affairs of their respective colleges. That part of the scheme was primitive and inexperienced, but the central thought is plain enough and the general plan was excellent. Democracy was taking its early, unsteady steps in New York education, but it had a goal, was getting some confidence, and was moving towards the realization of a splendid purpose, as no other state undertook to move. Even in six months another act had to be passed. It moved in the wrong direction: it sought to assure the transaction of busi- ness by reducing the number required for a quorum to eight and by creating 33 more Regents. The Board was coming to be some- thing like a general assembly of the state if all the members at- tended, and the business to be managed was of a kind which an as- sembly can not handle. But whatever else this act did, it brought into the Board John Jay and Alexander Hamilton. In passing it is interesting to note that the name of Aaron Burr appeared in the first draft of the bill, but that before the bill was matured the name of Morgan Lewis was substituted for that of Burr. It was provided that the annual meetings of the Board should be held " at the time and place where the Legislature shall first be con- vened after the first Monday of July in every year, and that at every such meeting the acts and proceedings of the Regents of said LTniversity shall be reported and examined." This second act provided for an advance of 2552 pounds sterling to Columbia College, for which " the Regents shall be accountable out of the funds of Columbia College." It is both pathetic and amusing to read the regrets of the Regents on April 4th of the Il6 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT next year that " the regency " was without funds available to Columbia College which would enable them " to offer such a salary as will be an inducement to a respectable character to accept tlie office of president/' and it is gratifying to know that the difficulty was not to be an everlasting one. The second act of the Legislature went no further than the first to make a workable plan, except that it did bring into the Board of Regents the men who could make such a plan. That certainly was much. In January 1787, in the face of a breakdown, the Board of Regents appointed a committee " to consider measures necessary to carry into effect the views of the Legislature with respect to the University and particularly with respect to Columbia College." Jay and Hamilton were both members of this committee, and there is sufficient reason for thinking that Hamilton drew the report. After noting objections to certain matters of form in the legisla- tive acts and excusing them on account of " the multiplicity of business which employed the attention of the Legislature during the first session after the peace," the report proceeds to matters of substance. Indeed, the following two paragraphs of this report are exceedingly substantial : " But your committee are of opinion that to render the University beneficial according to the liberal views of the Legislature, altera- tions will also be necessary in the substance of its Constitution. At present, the Regents are the only body corporate for literary pur- poses. In them are not only the funds, but the government and direction of every college are exclusively vested, while from their dispersed situation, it must be out of their power to bestow all the care and attention which are peculiarly necessary for the well-being and prosperity of such institutions. Experience has already shown that Regents living remote from each other can not with any con- venience form a board for business. The remedy adopted by the second act was to reduce the quorum to a small number; but thus placing the rights of every college in the hands of a few individuals, your committee have reason to believe, excited jealousy and dis- satisfaction, when the interests of literature require that all should be united. These reasons, without entering into a more full dis- cussion, your committee conceive to ground their opinion that each respective college ought to be intrusted to a distinct corporation, with competent powers and privileges, under such subordination to the Regents as shall be thought wise and salutary. " Your committee are of opinion that liberal protection and en- couragement ought to be given to academies for the instructionof youth in the languages and useful knowledge; these academies, though under the grade of colleges, are highly beneficial, but owing their establishment to private benevolences, labor under disadvan- COLLEGES AND THE STATE SYSTEM OF EDUCATION 117 tages which ought to be removed; their property can only be ef- fectually preserved and secured by vesting them in incorporated trustees. This act of justice to the benefactors and to the county town wherein any such institution may have taken place, by fixing a permanent superintendence, would greatly contribute to the in- troduction of able teachers and the preservation of the morals of the students as well as their progress in learning. Your committee also conceive that privileges may be granted to such academies, which will render them more respectable, and be a strong incitement to emulation and diligence both in the teachers and scholars." In view of the fact that the leading men in the Board of Regents were almost without exception leading men in the Legislature, it is not strange that as soon as this report was adopted by the Regents it was quickly put into statutory form and enacted by the Legis- lature. This act made a board of 21 Regents — the governor and lieutenant governor, and 19 elected by the Legislature. It is the carefully and ably framed original and general law constituting the Board of Regents the supreme authority upon higher education in New York from the state's point of view, and, except as the prog- ress of events and the changes in circumstances have made some of its provisions obsolete, and except as the educational unification act of 1904 wrought some modifications in the interest of educa- tional solidarity, it has never been impaired and is the law today. It created a separate board of trustees for the " College of the Province of New York," and directed that it should thence be called " Columbia College," and it provided for a similar board in the case of all colleges and schools thereafter established. It also named the separate board of trustees of Columbia College and trans- ferred Hamilton from the Board of Regents to the college board. It divested the Board of Regents of the direct charge of all insti- tutions. But it established the "University of the State of New York " upon a firmer footing than before, and it renewed and con- firmed and enlarged the powers of the Board of Regents of that University. It empowered that Board to grant educational charters, and directed all citizens desiring to form an educational institution to apply to the Regents for incorporation. And while the Legisla- ture has occasionally since then ignored this act and given charters direct, it must be said that such instances have been few and ex- ceptional, and in recent years have ceased altogether. The 'settled practice now is to deal with no such matters in the Legislature, and manifestly that is the only sound practice. This act of 1787 con- ferred upon the Regents of the University not only the power to Il8 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT create educational corporations but also large supervisory powers over all incorporated educational institutions. They were required to visit and inspect them, and report to the Legislature as to their state and progress. They were authorized to hold property, and administer funds, and make rules, and do whatever might need to be done to make institutions efficient and to advance sound learning throughout the state. And this " University of the State of New York " and this " Board of Regents " of such University have been repeatedly broadened and strengthened by legislation, and in 1894 were incorporated and established in the state Constitution. The writer was not embarrassed by any old notions or any former expressions, and he was not in need of acquiring any new or en- larged regard for this scheme or this Board when, in addition to other duties, he became charged with executing its decrees as the executive officer of the University of the State of New York, in 1904. He has nothing but veneration for an educational scheme conceived as this one was, and which has endured since " the first session after ihe peace." He has always though: the scheme an admirable one. He has long had a keen appreciation of the sig- nificance and importance of the lay influence in education; he has realized its vital relation to American education ; and for many years he has cherished the good opinion of the eminent men of New York who have constituted this most dignified and influential board of public education in the country. It is true there has been some confusion of mind over the title " The University of the State of New York " in view of the very common use to which the term " university " has been put since the State of New York laid hands upon it. Doubtless our use of it has prejudiced the organization which bears it in the minds of people who are accustomed to associate the term exclusively with teaching or investigating institutions. Probably some have even assumed that New York used the term in a false or mislead- ing, or at least in an overambitious and unwarranted "way. There has been no sufficient reason for any of this, and no ground what- ever for the most of it. The title was thoughtfully and logically chosen, and with pride we may always point to the fact that no state has stood out against and prohibited by law the use of high sounding educational names for low grade institutions as New York has from the very beginning. Indeed, that purpose was one of the large factors which entered into the creation of the " University of the State of New York " and that purpose has been exemplified COLLEGES AND THE STATE SYSTEM OF EDUCATION II9 by that " University " from " the first session after the peace " until now. In 1784 there was not an institution in the United States with the spirit, the philosophic basis, or the faculties of a university, as the term was then or is now understood. It can hardly be said that there was one that claimed the name, and if there was one that did it had no good right to it. The plan that reestablished the one college of the State of New York, which had been laid low by the fierce fires of the Revolution; that provided for establishing other colleges and academies of every kind and in all parts of the state, and that bound them all together in a supervisory university, was the bold, strong conception of very great men. It requires not a little assumption to contend that George Clinton, James Duane, the Livingstons, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, Richard Morris, Philip Schuyler, Robert Harpur, Richard Varrick, and their like, acted heedlessly in creating the University of the State of New York. They proceeded thoughtfully in an effort to take time by the fore- lock. It was the first movement in America to organize the educa- tional work of a state upon a nonpolitical, nonsectarian, and every way nonexclusive basis which would bring the sovereign authority and the financial aid of the state to the practical support of educa- tion that should be unlimited and free. It is not too much to say that it was the first really strong educational conception in America, and that it was by a group of men than which there has not been a greater in the land. The plan at first provided that the Board of Regents should be legally possessed of all the properties and should exercise the powers of appointment and all the other governing powers over all col- leges and schools. But it was immediately seen that this would not work, and a reform was initiated in the Board itself. This reform provided for separate and local boards of trustees in all the institu- tions, with all of the powers over property, courses, appointments, and administration. The " University " was to be a supervisory university. The state began at once to aid Columbia College, and expected not only to continue to do so, but also to give its financial support and its supervisory helpfulness to all colleges and schools which should be created. The idea was to bind all together, and bind all to the state, to the end that the newer and the weaker institutions might have the fraternal aid of the older and the stronger ones, and that all the people and every part of the state might have the uplifting influence of this general organization of 120 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT the more advanced institutions of learning in the state. In other words, New York was setting up a state organization supervisory of her higher learning. She was expecting to support and she was bound to advise. Nor was that all she had to do. These colleges and academies, organized and to be organized, required incorpora- tion by the state so that they might hold property and make con- tracts and do all the acts incidental to institutional life. And when the state exercised its authority to endow institutions with the power to hold property and do business, it was bound to see to it that each institution followed paths and did its work in ways which would comport with the character and promote the greatness of the state. It would have defeated the very ends of the plan to have left all this to the mere filing of papers of incorporation in the office of the secretary of state. That would have established no bond of union between one institution and another, or between the institutions and the state. Only rivalry and no mutuality of good will would have resulted. It would have been manifestly unwise to retain the ordinary exercise of the power of incorporation and educationally impossible to keep the powers of supervision in the Legislature itself. The only logical or even possible thing to do was done when the Board of Regents was created to grant, amend, and annul charters, to distribute the money of the state to institu- tions, and to assure grades and kinds of work which would accom- plish the ends that the founders of the state had in view. It has been said that the plan of the University of the State of New York was taken from France. Some features of it doubtless were. In framework it is very like that of the French system of higher education then and now. The French influence was particu- larly strong in America for the dozen years following the Revolu- tion and until Washington settled it that we were not going to have any foreign entanglements. The French troops and the French fleets had hardly left our shores after helping us to win independence, when this University was created. We were not drawing our plans of organization from England just then, although nothing could prevent or should have prevented the new individual colleges from having the largest interest in the studies that were common in the higher schools of England and Scotland, from which nearly all of the highly educated men of the United States had come. In view of all we have heard in recent years, it is amusing to read that Columbia College established a professorship in agriculture in 1793. We did send an agent to France immediately after the organization COLLEGES AND THE STATE SYSTEM OF EDUCATION 121 of the University to beg for financial aid, and it is likely that at least the framework of our plan was suggested by the educational organization of our ally and aid in the war from which we had just emerged battle-stained and poor, yet triumphant, with moral cour- age unabated, and with new found educational ambition. It must be admitted, I think, that this plan lias not worked very satisfactorily so far as the unity of the colleges of the state and cooperation between the colleges and the state have been concerned. The famous report made to the Board of Regents in 1787 made decisive allusion to the desirability of state aid to and supervision over academies as well as colleges, and this was speedily provided for in the act perfecting the University and in legislation which followed. And it must be said that, so far as the academies and the high schools have been concerned, the plan has worked very smoothly and probably produced all in the way of harmony in rela- tions and efficiency in operations that could have been expected. But it has not been so with the colleges, and, without implying personal animosities or anything more disagreeable than is clearly said, it seems to me best to plainly avow it in the hope of curing it. With every effort and desire to see the matter in its true light, I am convinced that any difficulties which may have hindered that cooperation of effort between the state and her colleges standing in truly fraternal relations to each other, which the University of the State was organized to promote, have arisen from officialism, from standing for prerogative, perhaps from the inevitable weak- nesses and uncertainties of first steps, rather than from inherent or structural defects in the legal and educational scheme. The strain upon the ship came early, and first in connection with Columbia, the college which derived its corporate existence, rights and powers in the new state from the very act creating the Uni- versity of the State of New York. It would be profitless to search out the details. It is enough to know that the Board of Regents and the board of trustees of Columbia differed over prerogative, and that this difference matured into dispute with inflammatory embellishments, into the discontinuance of the state's financial sup- port, and, probably worse than all else, into a practical severance of reciprocal relations. It defeated for generations, if not forever, the purpose of the founders of the state to make Columbia a state college and the mother of many colleges and schools which should together constitute a real state university. It was doubtless in- evitable, and probably necessary, but surely it was a heavy penalty, 122 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT both upon the state and the college, for the inability of a few men to adjust their official powers so as to make a workable and effec- tive educational organization. The same thing happened, in even more aggravated form, with the first new college chartered by the Board of Regents. Refus- ing many applications for many years on the ground of insufficient property and endowment, the Board finally yielded to long continued importunity and chartered " Union College " in 1795. It was to ex- press not only educational, but also religious and political, " union." It was agreed that the board of trustees should never have a ma- jority of any one religious denomination, and that the president or a professor being a clergyman should not have the pastoral charge of a church. It was a college upon a new plane, for its charter rigidly excluded partisanship and guaranteed all educational freedom. It differed from all of the 12 colleges which had pre- ceded it in America in that it was not to be private, local or ex- clusive. All were welcome and all had equal rights. The state was even providing for the support of poor students. Democracy was taking a new step in education. In a word, it came as near be- coming a state college as could be in that day. In the first 20 years of its life the state gave it, in lands and funds, more than $350,- 000. Then in the succeeding 10 years the question of prerogative broke out in heroic proportions. The Board of Regents and the President and the Board of Trustees each had their partisans. The atmosphere was surcharged with invective and legal learning. It was just after the Dartmouth College case and the lawyers relished the discussion. The controversy lasted long years and resulted, like the Dartmouth case, in breaking the relations between the col- lege and the state. It was determined in the end that the Regents had no control over courses and instruction, at least until such manifest educational fraud should be perpetrated as to call for a revocation of the charter for cause. The state naturally made no more appropriations to Union College, and Union naturally became more concerned about its own life than about the intellectual prog- ress of the commonwealth. There were losses all around but they were doubtless necessary, for college individuality and freedom had to be. Hamilton, the fine, small, classical college on the hill at Clinton, was chartered by the Regents in 181 2 after Being required to se- cure $50,000 in addition to investments in grounds and buildings. The state gave it in 30 years $120,000, and it has well deserved COLLEGES AND THE STATE SYSTEM OF EDUCATION 1 23 more. But with all that had occurred in connection with Columbia and Union it was easy to stop state aid, and, with the feeling that had become rife, that brought relations and sympathies to an end. About the same thing happened, in ways perhaps less marked, as to the University of the City of New York and several other institutions. Then came the National Land Grant Act of 1862, giving to each state the right to 30,000 acres of national lands for each repre- sentative in Congress to aid a state college or university which would accentuate the industrial arts. Other large federal grants have followed it. Aside from the advantage of the direct grants, this national policy has incited most of the states to give very much more than the national grants to their state universities, and it is not too much to say that half of the great universities of the country have grown out of it. New York would doubtless have absolutely lost her large interests in this but for Andrew D. White and Ezra Cornell. Through them Cornell University was founded by a legislative charter, and given the avails of the national grant on condition that the University would establish a free scholar- ship each year for each assembly district of the state. For nearly 20 years not much came of this arrangement about scholarships. When I became State Superintendent of Public Instruction in 1886, not more than one third of these scholarships was occupied. In the majority of cases there was no one in the assembly district who was qualified for it and wanted it. I started a bill in the Legis- lature amending the charter so as to allow the Superintendent to fill vacant scholarships from surplus candidates in other districts, and that started a real paroxysm in the university. A joint hearing was arranged, and ex-President White, President Adams, and Judge Douglas Boardman came and forcefully urged divers arguments to show that the Legislature had no legal power to do it, would commit a moral wrong if it attempted it, and would ruin the university if it could accomplish such a thing. The Superintendent spoke his feeble word and the committee went into executive session. As we with- drew ex-President White put his strong educational arm through my frail one and said, " Young man ! Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian." He and other Cornellians must have been al- together persuaded since then. As we talked on he even expressed apprehension lest the university officers might have said too much and the committee might do something wrong, but I was able to give him some comfort upon that point, and very soon the com- 124 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT mittee voted unanimously to report the bill and it became a law. It filled up the state scholarships at Cornell through a system of competition and appointment which brought the state and the uni- versity into workable and somewhat reciprocal relations. The uni- versity has made the most of those relations and in turn has ac- quired a little of the feeling and a few of the attributes of a state university. The university occupies a situation peculiar to itself. It seems no nearer being a real state university than other colleges of the state have been at some time in their history. True, the number of free scholars it has trained form something of a factor in our population and rather an influential factor in our professional and political life. Aside from the scholarships, the state has only moral claims upon it. There is no sense of public ownership in it. Such relations as subsist between the state and the university seem commercial rather than educational, businesslike rather than in- spirational. And it is more than likely that neither the people of the state, the other higher institutions of learning in the state, nor the weight of opinion and feeling in Cornell University would be disposed to go far enough to make Cornell a real state university. In the meantime several good and a few strong institutions have developed. Vassar is one of the few excellent and strong women's colleges of the country. Colgate is a mature, small, growing, good institution. St Lawrence is doing considerable for large rural sec- tions where the college influence is much needed. The same may be said of Alfred. Several colleges under the auspices of the Roman Catholic church are pushing ahead with commendable vigor, while their relations with all the rest become more and more agree- able. The University of Rochester has long been an excellent in- stitution, never more capably led than now. Syracuse University has surprised not only the state but the country by its phenomenal advances in property, in the number of instructors and offerings and students, and in the virile fashion in which it welcomes the spirit of democracy and strives to push its way up the steep hills of higher learning. It is not practicable to even mention the professional or technical colleges and schools associated with or independent of universities. Some of them are of the first rank, some are honestly and per- severingly moving up to that rank, and some are so ambitious and yet so dependent upon tuition fees that they delude themselves into thinking that they are better than they are. And, unhappily, when schools do that, most of the people in their neighborhood or under their influence think that what the schools claim must be so. COLLEGES AND THE STATE SYSTEM OF EDUCATION I25 But there have developed three tax-supported institutions which it would be inexcusable not to mention. Quite possibly they may be the advance guard of others of their kind. One is the State Normal College at Albany, the outgrowth of the first state normal school, which is now being raised to college grade and set to train- ing superintendents of schools and teachers for the secondary schools. The second is the Normal College of the City of New York, an old and large and cherished institution for the training of women teachers for the city schools. And the third is the Col- lege of the City of New York, an old institution, which has just been provided by the municipality with beautiful and elaborate buildings, and put in the way of being a great college or even of becoming a real university, and which happily seems to be coming to realize its great opportunities. But none of the higher institutions of the state, save these three, are free to students, and it would seem as though it must be said that the very largeness of many of them and the very greatness of some of them, and particularly the efforts which they are all mak- ing to be strong and great, must, while on the basis of privately endowed institutions, work against oneness of educational spirit and get in the way of inspirational helpfulness to the educational sys- tem of the state. At least it seems as though it had been so, and must continue to be so in the absence of special and concentrated effort to avoid it. And this implies no imputation that the men and women of these colleges and universities are disposed to have it so. It is said, with knowledge, that they wish not to have it so, and that many of them are very ready to go to the limits of time and strength to prevent it being so. But it is said in the hope that by some possibility it may initiate a movement which will swing college doors more freely to the youth of the state who may wish to enter them, or whom it is to the interest of the state to have enter them ; and which will also bring a more generous, a less self- interested, college influence into the middle and lower schools and into all the educational activities of the state. The writer is bound to be careful lest his long association with the philosophy and the feelings of a tax-supported state university of the Middle West befog his reasoning about the educational poli- cies of the Empire State, but on the other hand he is bound to try to give to his state anything growing out of that association which may be of advantage to her. 126 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT I do not believe that it is desirable that all people should go to college. It would be quite as well if some who do go should do something else. But it ought to be fundamental, and it is going to be, in this country that none who really want to go and are pre- pared to go, shall be prevented from going by reason of tuition charges which they dare not assume. So much is already well settled in most of the states of the Union. The causes which have produced a great state university in nearly every state, which have produced as great universities in 40 years as those that have been two or three hundred years in the making, ought to be realized and reckoned with in the State of New York. It shows that de- mocracy is quite as much interested in and quite as able to endow colleges and universities as is aristocracy. And that only means that each will accomplish the most when they work in cooperation. It does not meet the question to say that there are innumerable scholarships in established institutions, and that the managers of universities are amiable and benevolent people. It is a question of fundamental right in this land of universal opportunity; and the democracy of every state will in time decree that every one shall have the utmost of educational opportunity which he seeks and is qualified to enter upon, without encountering the hazards of a single examination set by strangers who know nothing of his char- acter, earnestness or intellectual power, and without depending upon the favor of a faculty or a board of trustees. Moreover, there is occasion enough to expect, in the interest of all the schools, that the colleges and universities will relax their admission requirements in the interests of all round intellectual power to do their work, and of general earnestness and assiduity; and stop imposing upon those seeking admission just so much of this, that, and the other particular study as may result from the concessions, and courtesies, and refined log rolling of faculty con- ferences. In other words, the aristocratic view of intellectual worth, as well as the aristocratic view of property values, will have to give way, half way at least, to the democratic, in America. Let us not deceive ourselves or let the knights of the old order mis- lead us. There is infinitely less danger to education from political influence in tax-supported universities than there is from the money influence and the social influence in the universities that live upon gifts and reason that only an exclusive and favored class deserve their ministrations. This is not saying that the old manner of in- stitutions should give way, but only that they should modify some COLLEGES AND THE STATE SYSTEM OF EDUCATION \2J of their thinking as much and as fast as they can. It is saying that the intellectual power, and therefore the industrial and com- mercial as well as the professional power, of the country is to be reinforced overwhelmingly from the plain people, and that there- fore the advantages of the colleges and universities ought to be hedged about by no conditions which defeat the open chance for every one, and should be governed by no motive which tends to warp or thwart the educational policies of the schools below them. And it is saying that the college men of the state should find ways for doing something of this and for helping all the ambitious youths of the state to have what the genius of their country ac- cords to them, and for enabling the public opinion of the state tc acquire what it is reaching for without having very clear ideas about how to get it. It is very imperative to the physical, moral, and political health of our leading state that all the sciences shall be carried down with more exactness from the very top to the very bottom of the educa- tional system, and distributed more surely and more freely among all the people. For example, there has been found in the last quarter of a century a new scientific basis for medical practice. New York is certainly doing no less than any other state to protect and promote the health of the people, and she is leading decisively in guarding admissions to the medical profession. Yet there are medical colleges turning out scores or even hundreds of young people with the degree of " doctor of medicine " without training them in 25 per cent of the well ascertained scientific knowledge that is fundamental in the medical profession. This can only be corrected by the outspoken and even indignant protest of the men in charge of the great chemical, physiological, and bacteriological laboratories of the leading universities, acting together or through some authori- tative means of expression. For" example, again, there is no less need of associated and not antagonistic expression of scientific opinion upon the economic interests and the business and political policies of the state, than upon matters of physical health. All this and more can come only through more unity among our higher institutions of learning, and closer relations between them and all the schools and all the people of the state, and through some au- thoritative and disinterested expression that is able to command public attention and popular confidence. In a word, it is exceedingly desirable that the colleges and universities of New York be more decisively effective in the affairs of the state, and assuredly it is 128 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT no less desirable that the popular opinion of the state be more concerned about and have more respect for the college and uni- versity influences in our affairs. How is it to be brought about ? Of course, there is the rub, but we ought to try to meet it. I can not assume to say how. Of course, I do not know. If given a clean sheet of paper and asked to sketch out a plan, I could not do it. I can only try to initiate a serious discussion in the hope that many wise heads will get to- gether, put the interests of all above the interests of some, and evolve a plan that will command the public support. It is more than likely that a teaching and investigating state uni- versity, like those at Ann Arbor and Madison and Champaign, is out of the question. It is not at all certain that it would be wise to try to establish one here and now. It could probably come only through the conversion of Cornell University into a real state uni- versity, and, as already suggested, that is not practicable because the people, the other institutions, and Cornell itself, would not unite upon the advisability of it. It is not practicable to found another because our educational system is so far matured and has so many high grade institutions, as well as because Cornell is entitled to the avails of the federal grants. Do not the conditions point to the wisdom of a series of free municipal universities stretching across the state ? The city of New York has already established such an institution, in the College of the City of New York, and, as already said, given it a costly home and an elaborate equipment. There are a quarter of a million people within practical trolley distances at the junction of the Hudson and the Mohawk, and among them is old " Union College," with several professional schools loosely affiliated into Union University. That institution and every one of its schools stand seriously in need of, and richly deserve, financial assistance ; and the people about them no less seriously need to have some ownership in them to the end that they may have some rights in those schools and get more benefits out of them. The cities of Albany, Troy, Sche- nectady, Cohoes, Rensselaer and Watervliet might, it would seem wisely, put money into Union University and get the larger ad- vantages which it might give to their children and their municipal affairs. Syracuse and Rochester practically have municipal uni- versities now, for they have each put their money into institu- tions, made excellent ones of them, and received and assured better returns than they have ever gained upon any other invest- COLLEGES AND THE STATE SYSTEM OF EDUCATION 120, ment. Buffalo, strong, prosperous and wealthy, the second city of the state, has a good nucleus of a municipal university, and ought not to hesitate a moment about putting into it the millions which would make it worthy of the city whose name it bears. And this policy could be acted upon in every part of the state where there are people enough and the wealth sufficient to justify it. And the great state itself might very properly and with compensating advantages to itself aid such enterprises from its treasury. Why can not the " University of the State of New York " be made the active agency of the state for coordinating such insti- tutions with the endowed institutions, for giving all in some way the aid of the state, and for making all more potent in the affairs of the state? The University of the State is here, it is old, and it is to stay. After more than a hundred years of life it was es- tablished in the state Constitution. True, it has not fulfilled the expectations of the founders of the state so far as the colleges have been concerned, although it may be truly said that it has done much more than that as to the academies and high schools. If the difficulty as to the colleges was not inherent in the law, was it not temporary as well as temperamental ? Have we not all got truer bearings about official powers, and have we not lived long enough to know that there is small excuse for haggling among educational men over official prerogative? Are we not able to see by this time that the " University of the State of New York " is dependent upon the colleges of the state for substance .and for influence ? The mere powers to grant and amend charters are perfunctory and mechanical ones. Any rational public officer could do that. More, much more, than that is needed. It is nothing less than the entering of the col- leges and universities into a plan which will give a state organization of advanced schools the vitality that will warm the blood of the weakest and bring the stimulating help of all to the moral and in- tellectual support of every great interest of the people of the state. There is no occasion whatever for exactions by the state upon reputable educational institutions of the state. Of course the state is entitled to and bound to have annual statements of the es- sential business affairs of every corporation to which it has given corporate life; and of course the Education Department of the state government is bound to have an annual statement of the salient fea- tures of the educational work of every institution which exists by the authority of the state, shares in the munificence of the state, and bears some part of the responsibility for doing the educational I3O NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT work of the state. So much is as necessary to prevent fraud and imposition as it is necessary to an understanding of what is being done. Beyond this I am sure the state has nothing to impose, at least upon institutions that are well up to the top of the system or institutions that are doing the best they can. It asks their help and offers them such assistance as it can. It makes no disguise of its thought that it is quite as dependent, probably more dependent, upon them than they are upon it. And it puts away all suggestion of any course which might be obnoxious to any successful institution of the higher learning. Then, as this instrumentality is here and to stay, and even though its name may have seemed confusing to some, and notwithstanding that there were some old disputes over prerogative, and as there is no other open way in sight, why can not the col- leges and universities of the state really join with us in the " Uni- versity of the State of New York " and use it to their own good, while they make of it what they may for the promotion of all the high interests to which the lives of their people and their corporate existence have been dedicated? There is reason enough for saying that this will increase the will- ingness of the state to practically aid the higher learning. The state is strong and rich so far as money goes, and it ought to do that much more liberally and somewhat more rationally than it has done, to the end that it may be strong and rich intellectually. Uni- versities and colleges are quite as important in the affairs of a state as are canals or highways, or even tariffs or the control of railroads and commercial trusts. The great soul of the people of the State of New York is right and will respond, as it has always responded, warmly to any rational scheme for the promotion of the higher scientific interests as well as the common intelligence of the state. But the state can not move in any large matter with any confi- dence until those who ought to agree do agree, not only upon the desirability of a movement, but also upon the plan of procedure. It is not for the writer to have, and to try to enforce, a plan, for it will have to be the plan of many. Some features have been advanced here and there. It has been suggested that the state create a fund for the aid of all deserving institutions upon some mutually equitable basis; that the state increase the scholarships in different institutions; that the state pay the tuition of certain students in the colleges in something like the manner it now pays the tuition of nonresident pupils in the high schools; it has even been proposed that the state in some way reimburse certain or all COLLEGES AND THE STATE SYSTEM OF EDUCATION I31 institutions for tuition fees of graduates of the secondary schools who wish to go to the colleges of the state. It has been proposed to found a distinct state university ; to seek to make Cornell into a state university; to develop the State Normal College into a state university ; to expand the scientific work of the Science Divi- sion of the State Education Department ; to encourage the evolution of municipal universities by new legislation and with some meas- ure of state aid; and to take many other steps in the direction of freer opportunities for the youth of the state in the colleges, and the larger influence of the colleges upon the schools and the affairs of the state. No one of these suggestions has been much considered, and to none of them do I now give approval or express disapproval. The first thing effected should be a college and university organi- zation in the state which would be strong enough, tall enough, and courageous enough to look above the getting of money and students for one institution, and strive to quicken all the educa- tional activities of the state. If we will do that, the ways will open to us. Frankly, it seems as though if we are to do this at all, we shall have to do it through the " University of the State of New York." It is at our hand, and it is the only instrument likely to be at our hand. I have come to believe that if it did not exist we could not create a better. It was the work of the founders of the state. Their sons did not do very well with it, but their grandsons did a little better, and their great-grandsons ought to do a great deal better. The scheme needs money and a great deal of it. But when we show that we have oneness of spirit and will be safe and sane administrators of it, we are quite likely to have it. The state will perhaps give it to us; and it is not difficult to believe that wealthy residents of the state would be glad to find confidence in an organization which was really representative of all the higher educa- tional interests of the state and would surely and safely execute their bequests for the equitable and rational promotion of all the interests of all the people. DEGREE-CONFERRING INSTITUTIONS OF NEW YORK STATE Showing date of origin; by what authority organized; students and faculty for year 1908-9, and graduates from date of origin. The information in this paper was collected in the preparation of the preceding special theme, and shows very reliably the development and present strength of New York State colleges and universities. The statistics are ac- curately transcribed from the reports of the several institutions on file in the Education Department so far as these reports include the necessary information. Where reports are lacking, the most reliable data available have been used. Degrees not recognized by the University of the State of New York have been omitted. Statistics for summer schools and extension courses are not included. NAME OF INSTITUTION INCORPO- RATED Date bBy 1908-9 Stu- dents Fac- ulty GRADUATED THROUGH JUNB 1909 First degrees Higher degrees With- out degrees Total a Universities Columbia University Originally King's College . . Became Columbia College . . Became Columbia Univer- sity Cornell University New York University Originally University of the City of New York Became New York Univer- sity St Lawrence University Syracuse University Originally Genesee College. . Became Syracuse University Union University Originally Union College . . Became Union University. University of Buffalo I7S4 1784 1896 1865 Kin< L 183 1 1896 1856 1849 1870 L GL 1795 1873 1846 3 985 3 724 S06 3 101 720 466 578 297 34 239 146 175 10 030 18 523 1 140 4 938 12 246 4 489 I IOC I 5,61 259 93 340 Total . 75 694 6 173 Graduate departments Columbia Univ., graduate dep't Made up of: Faculty of Political Sci- ence Faculty of Philosophy. . . Faculty of Pure Science . . Cornell Univ., graduate dep't. New York Univ., graduate sch 1896 1880 1890 1892 1896 1886 310 282 199 31 Total . Colleges for men Canisius College Colgate University. . . . Originally Madison Univer- sity Became Colgate University. College of St Francis Xavier. . College of the City of New York Columbia College Originally King's College. Became Columbia College Fordham Univ., St John's College Became part of Fordham University 1 607 54 312 1846 1890 1861 1854 1754 1784 1846 King L R 80 445 667 ISO 650 464 562 807 5 8 3»o 26 11 130 20 343 I 495 5 566 12 64s 4 551 85 039 166 678 1 215 5ii 562 866 a Under " Universities " are included statistics for all departments of which the Uni- versity is composed. As these statistics, except for higher degrees, are also given under the separate departments they are of course duplicates of what follow. Under " Higher degrees " are reported all higher degrees conferred upon examination in all departments of the universities. These degrees are omitted under the separate departments except for the departments of St Lawrence University, Union University and the University of Buffalo. b L indicates this institution was incorporated by special act of the Legislature; R indi- cates incorporation by the Regents; E indicates that the department was established by the board of trustees of the institution of which the school is a department; GL indicates incorporation with the Secretary of State under the general law. c Wherever higher degrees have been granted in this department they are included in the total for the University. DEGREE-CONFERRING INSTITUTIONS 133 Degree-conferring institutions of New York State (continued) NAME OF INSTITUTION Colleges for men {continued) Hamilton College Hobart College Originally Geneva College . . Became Hobart Free College Became Hobart College .... Manhattan College New York University College . Niagara Univ., collegiate dep't Polytechnic Inst, of Brooklyn . Originally Brooklyn Colle- giate and Polytechnic In- stitute Became Polytechnic Insti- tute of Brooklyn St Bonaventure's College St Francis College St John's College, Brooklyn. . St Joseph's Seminary & College St Stephen's College Union College Total , St Colleges for women College of New Rochelle. . k Originally College cf Angela Became College of New Rochelle Columbia Univ., Barnard Col- lege D'Youville College & Academy of the Holy Angels. Elmira College Originally Elmira Female Col Became Elmira College Normal College of the City of New York Vassar College Originally Vassar Female Col Became Vassar College. . . . Wells College Originally Wells Seminary. Became Wells College William Smith College Established by Hobart Col Total . INCORPO- RATED 1908-9 GRADUATED THROUGH JUNE 1909 Date 1812 1825 1852 i860 1863 1831 1883 1869 187S 1884 1871 1908 i860 1795 1904 IQIO 1889 I908 1855 I89O l86l 1867 1868 l870 I908 Colleges for men and women Adelphi College Alfred Univ., College of Liberal Arts Cornell Univ., College of Arts and Science Keuka College St Lawrence Univ., College of Letters and Science Syracuse Univ., College of Liberal Arts Originally Genesee College . . Became Syracuse Univ., Col. of Lib. Arts University of Rochester Total . 1857 1S56 1849 1S70 1851 aBy R R R L GL R L R L GL GL R Stu- dents 186 107 74 517 65 250 88 34 5S 86 46 332 4 5°8 498 16 290 836 018 180 454 127 90 28 191 396 352 Fac- First Higher ulty degrees degrees 3 450 2 676 911 79i 493 117 358 182 178 155 330 5 591 570 24 310 69 50 101 685 012 381 222 13 24 408 329 5c 829 38 6 6 10 1 737 80 28 669 137 With- out degrees Total 109 689 919, 87r 493 124 385 182 178 189 31 355 5 610 800 012 500 379 335 507 829 38 747 C2 719 1 775 9 950 a L indicates this institution was incorporated by special act of the Legislature; R indi- cates incorporation by the Regents; E indicates that the department was established by the board of trustees of the institution of which the school is a department; GL indicates incorporation with the Secretary of State under the general law. b Wherever higher degrees have been granted in this department they are included in the total for the university. cThis total does not include higher degrees if any have ever been conferred in this de- partment. 134 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT Degree-conferring institutions of New York State (continued) NAME OP INSTITUTION INCORPO- RATED Date aBy Stu- dents Fac- ulty GRADUATED THROUGH JUNE 1909 First degrees Higher ^ith. degrees out degrees Total 18 1890 1822 Theology A'fred Univ., A fred Theologi- cal Seminary 1857 Auburn Theological Seminary. 1820 Colgate Univ., Hamilton Theo- logical Seminary Originally Hamilton Theo. Sem Became part of Colgate Univ General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church Hartwick Sem., theological dep't I 1816 Niagara Univ., Seminary of Our Lady of Angels Originally The Seminary of Our Lady of Angels 1863 Became part of Niagara Univ Rochester Theological Semi- nary 1854 St Bernard's Seminary St Bonaventure's Col., theo logical dep't 1875 St John's Col., theological dep't St Joseph's Seminary & College Originally St Joseph's Sem. . I 1886 Became St Joseph's Sem. & College 1 908 St Lawrence University, Can ton Theological School 1856 Union Theological Seminary. . 1839 Total . Education Columbia Univ., Teachers Col- lege Originally New York College for the Training of Teach- ers Became Teachers College. . . Became affiliated with Co- lumbia University New York State Normal Col- lege Originally Albany Normal Sch Became N. Y. S. Normal College New York Univ., School of Pedagogy Syracuse Univ., Teachers Col- lege Total . 1889 1844 1890 1890 1906 L R L GL R E GL R L L 108 S 55 16 169 1 028 187 63 9 78 I 896 So 28 16s 50 205 648 143 17 1 523 454 818 726 29 267 993 195 162 64 253 039 1 364 63 286 40 iS 6 647 18 458 872 726 52 267 048 212 162 64 234 303 244 C2 60S 2 097 d 3 286 ci 43 8 188 a L indicates this institution was incorporated by special act of the Legislature; R indi- cates incorporation by the Regents; E indicates that the department was established by the board of trustees of the institution of which the school is a department; GL indicates incorporation with the Secretary of State under the general law. b Wherever higher degrees have been granted in this department they are included in the total for the university. c This total does not include higher degrees if any have ever been conferred in this de- partment. d Normal diplomas granted by Albany Normal School before it became New York Stats Normal College. DEGREE-CONFERRING INSTITUTIONS 135 Degree-conferring institutions of New York State (continued) NAME OF INSTITUTION INCORPO- RATED Date &By GRADUATED THROUGH JUNE I909 Stu- dents Fac- ulty First degrees Higher degrees With- out degrees Total Law Univ., Faculty of Columbia Law. . . Cornell Univ., College of Law. . Fordham Univ., School of Law Originally St John's College, School of Law Became Fordham Univer- sity, School of Law New York Law School New York University Law School Metropolis Law School United with above St Lawrence Univ., Brooklyn Law School Syracuse Univ., School of Law Union Univ., Albany Law School Originally law department, University of Albany. . . . Became Union University, Albany Law School University of Buffalo, Buffalo Law School Part of Niagara University until 1891 1858 1886 1904 1907 1891 1858 1891 1895 1901 1895 1851 1873 1887 Total. Medicine aColumbia Univ., College of Physicians and Surgeons Originally College of Physi- cians and Surgeons Became part of Columbia . Cornell Univ., Medical College Eclectic Medical College Fordham Univ., School of Medicine Originally St John's College medical dep't Became Fordham Univ. School of Medicine Long Island College Hospital. N. Y. Homeopathic Med. Col lege & Flower Hospital . Originally Homeopathic Medical College of the State of New York Became New York Homeo- pathic Medical College . . . Became the N. Y. Homeo- pathic Med. College and Hospital Became the N. Y. Homeo- pathic Med. Col. & Flower Hospital N. Y. Medical College and Hospital for Women 1807 i860 1907 1858 1869 1908 1863 3S8 225 146 83 5 770 249 179 346 221 96 364 94 28 5 °97 1 102 2 544 3 0S4 436 3 4o 163 173 4S 7 469 637 847 2 3 I 693 369 445 d$ 097 01 102 2 665 <*3 133 436 ^340 3 146 16 48s 7 469 63 7 847 2 389 I 706 369 a The original medical department of Columbia University was established in 1767 as the medical faculty of Kings College but was discontinued in 1813. g . b L indicates this institution was incorporated by special act of the Legislature; R indi- cates incorporation by the Regents; E indicates that the department was established by the board of trustees of the institution of which the school is a department; GL indicates incorporation with the Secretary of State under the general law. p .. c Wherever higher degrees have been granted in this department they are included in the total for the university. ; d This total does not include higher degrees if any have ever been conferred in this de- partment. 136 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT Degree-conferring institutions of New York State {continued) NAME OF INSTITUTION INCORPO- RATED Date aBy Stu- dents Fac- ulty GRADUATED THROUGH JUNE 1909 First degrees Higher| WitJ,. de S rees degrees Total of Medicine (.continued) Syracuse Univ., College Medicine Originally Geneva Med. Col- lege Transferred and established as College of Physicians and Surgeons of Syracuse Univ Became Syracuse Univ., College of Medicine Union Univ., Albany Medical College Became part of Union Univ. University and Bellevue Hos- pital Medical College University Medical College.. Bellevue Hospital Med. Col- lege United to form University and Bellevue Hospital Med. College Univ. of Buffalo, Medical Dep't Niagara Univ., medical dep't Transferred to Buffalo 1835 1872 1875 1839 1873 1837 1861 1846 Total . Dentistry College of Dental and Oral Sur- gery of New York Originally N. Y. College of Dental Surgery (Never in operation) New York Dental School . . . Above institutions consoli- dated as College of Dental and Oral Surgery of N. Y. New York College of Dentistry Univ. of Buffalo, College of Dentistry 1852 1892 1905 1865 Total . Pharmacy Brooklyn College of Pharmacy Columbia Univ., College of Pharmacy of the City of New York Became a department of Columbia Union Univ., Albany College of Pharmacy Univ. of Buffalo, College of Pharmacy 1831 1904 Potal . Veterinary Cornell Univ., New York State Veterinary College 1894 03 94 164 2 694 2 456 3C4 73 46 I 941 738 492 190 267 73 116 109 19 14 2 956 824 3 547 55 7j 632 646 5 56o 2 694 12 447 32 396 1 941 738 2 956 947 £3 547 584 663 a L indicates this institution was incorporated by special act of the Legislature; R indi- cates incorporation by the Regents; E indicates that the department was established by the board of trustees of the institution of which the school is a department; GL indicates incorporation with the Secretary of State under the general law. b Wherever higher degrees have been granted in this department they are included in the total for the university. c This total does not include higher degrees if any have ever been conferred in this de- partment. DEGREE-CONFERRING INSTITUTIONS" *37 Degree-conferring institutions of New York State (concluded) INCORPO- RATED 190 8-9 GRADUATED THROUGH J UNE 1909 NAME OF INSTITUTION Date aBy Stu- dents Fac- ulty First Higher degrees degrees 1 With- out degrees Total Veterinary (continued) New York Univ., New York American Veterinary Col. . 16 17 1 009 N. Y. Col. of Vet. Surgeons. American Veterinary College Columbia Vet. Col. was merged in Amer. Vet .Col. Above institutions combined under name of New York American Veterinary Col. 1857 187s 1884 1899 L GL Total 1 10 697 S69 1 162 223 667 401 94 46 108 35 70 37 55 31 16 1 210 2 065 ' 3 713 J 296 1 694 285 91 Engineering and technology Columbia Univ., Faculty of 1864 1868 1868 1862 E E E E b b b d.2 064; Cornell Univ., College of Civil Cornell Univ., Sibley College of Mechanical Eng. & Mech. Arts di 713 New York Univ., School of ^296 1 694 Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst. Incorporated as Rensselaer 1826 183s 1861 1901 1896 L L L E R b 33 Became Rensselaer Institute Became Rensselaer Poly- technic Institute Syracuse Univ., Lyman Cor- neous Smith Col. of Applied ^285 124 Thomas S. Clarkson Memorial School of Technology Total 3 813 158 941 352 14 37 8 144 53 455 33 8 177 Art Columbia Univ., Faculty of Fine Arts 1906 1873 E E Syracuse Univ., College of Fine Arts 138 593 1 099 415 63 5 1 77 5 508 310 138 646 Agriculture Cornell Univ., College of Agri- 1868 1906 E L St Lawrence Univ., School of Agriculture 9 Total 478 34 133 45 956 82 12 9 45 31 3io 14 238 131 205 9 Other Alfred Univ., N. Y. State School of Clay-working and Ceramics 1900 1871 1887 1900 L E E E 319 Cornell Univ., Col. of Archi- 238 183 261 N. Y. State Library School. . . New York Univ., School of| Commerce, Accounts & Fi-I 52 56 Total 588 108 696 Grand total excluding dupli- 27 859*3 485 112 733 7 232I SI5 913 CI35 878 a L indicates this institution was incorporated by special act of the Legislature; R indi- cates incorporation by the Regents; E indicates that the department was established by the board of trustees of the institution of which the school is a department; GL indicates incorporation with the Secretary of State under the general law. b Wherever higher degrees have been granted in this department they are included in the total for the university. cThis total includes 3286 diplomas granted by the Albany Normal School before it became the New York State Normal College. dThis total does not include higher degrees if any have ever been conferred in this department. THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES The success of the Union armies in the Civil War expressed much more than the triumph of physical force. The war was not waged on either side for the mere subjugation of men or the enlargement of empire. The awful sacrifices were neither to ambition nor to greed. They were to democracy and the natural right of man. No arbiter was left save the sword. The sword was held by the Almighty and decided for the right. But the issue was moral, intel- lectual, political, legal. Both armies were comprised of American patriots. On either side the captains and the men were so earnest in their feelings, so sincere in their thinking, that they freely pledged their devotion with their lives. The issue was moral, and when the battles were over the South was wrong. People act according to their lights. Men are right or wrong as they think they are. Historic and patriotic traditions were no less binding, intellectual culture no less marked, religious feeling no less common, in the South than in the North. But the sections had inherited differing situations, and had been trained in differing schools. The differences became fundamental in morals and in politics and had to be settled on the field. And the great court of last resort had to bend to the progress of the world. It was union, therefore democracy established in law and able to govern, therefore liberty and the Golden Rule, that triumphed through the victories of the armies of the Union. Freedom, equality, security, opportunity, are vital to religion that is genuine, to education that is of worth, to politics that inspire, to work that makes much of the workman. They are empty words without law and the power to enforce it. The democracy which in combination they create had taken long strides, in the old world and particularly in the new, before our Civil War, but democracy was overweighted until the manhood, the legal philosophy, the state- craft of Lincoln shaped the politics which forced the war and opened the way for the logical evolution of the nation. He did it in public discussion with the foremost statesman of the day. It is this that lifts the Lincoln-Douglas debates to the very highest plane in the history of America. Slavery had existed in the North and it existed throughout the South when the Union was formed. It was much discussed in the convention which formed the Constitution. No word of the Con- Address before the Albany Institute and Art Society, Albany N. Y., February 10, 1910. Map of ILLINOIS SHOWING CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICTS IN 1858 AND PLACES OF THE LINCOLN -DOUGLAS JOINT DEBATES THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES I39 stitution forbade it. The instrument recognized it in fixing the representation in Congress ; it even went so far as to forbid pro- hibition of the foreign slave trade for twenty years. All the im- plications of the Constitution accorded the legal right to ownership and trade in human property within territorial limits. Without this the " more perfect union " could not be. And " union " had to be : without it the Revolution had been in vain, and independence and democracy would be but bursting bubbles. The only course was taken. Not in apology but in fairness it should be said that slavery had been common the world over, that its forms and its evils were not in very aggravated form in America, and that its ad- herents were not all in the South nor its opponents altogether in the North. But as the country grew in population and in territory, the slave system grew in strength and in inherent viciousness. It created more adherents and opponents, and the contentions which it forced became serious and threatening. From the beginning to the end only a glorious few dealt with it on moral grounds. There were incidents enough to stir the moral sensibilities in the North. The moral sensibilities of the South were never much disturbed. But let it not be implied that the South was without moral sensibilities. The South recognized theoretical wrong in slavery, but believed that the actual wrongs would be more and greater without it than with it. But moral issues do not down. As the lines formed, freedom gained in conviction and in determination, and slavery grew in resourcefulness, in speciousness, in legal subtle- ties, and in oratorical power. Politics clouded and confused the issues. Political parties tried to get in or to keep in power. Of course their attitudes were shifty until moral sense forced its political and its legal opportunity. Pre- tense, subterfuge, and bargaining, delayed the issue which organ- ized parties feared to meet. While the lawyers and statesmen were practically agreed that there could be no forcible outlawry of slavery by Congress in the states which had it when they came into the Union, the question as to the power of Congress over national territory beyond the organized states, and in reference to states seeking admission to the Union, was a large and difficult one. Congress had, before the Con- stitution, assumed to prohibit slavery in the old North West Terri- tory, out of which the states of Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana have been constituted, but that was when the general expectation was that the whole country would become free, and the 140 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT legal powers and intendments were then not much considered. The " Missouri Compromise " admitted that state to the Union in 1820 with slavery, but prohibited it in all common territory north of 36 30', the state's northern boundary line. It gave the slave sys- tem more territory and more voting power. It seemed also to con- cede that Congress had control of the question in all common terri- tory. Of the original states, seven were northern, and six southern. The admission of Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee during the administrations of Washington and Adams, established an equilib- rium between the North and the South in the Senate. This was continued for fifty years by the admission, in pairs, of Ohio and Louisiana, Indiana and Mississippi, Illinois and Alabama, Maine and Missouri, Arkansas and Michigan, Florida and Iowa, Texas and Wisconsin. In the meantime, the vast expanse of territory stretching to the Pacific had been acquired, and much more of it lay north of the Missouri Compromise line (36 30') than south of it. Adhering to that agreement, there would be more free than slave states. Slavery must do something or lose the equilibrium. The something was the only unconscionable war in our history — the war with Mexico. It succeeded in its immediate but not in its ultimate aim. The unexpected happens. Gold was found in Cal- ifornia, and it speedily formed and forced the admission of a state that had not been foreseen. And that state decided for itself that it would be a free state. And, aside from that, the Northwest grew much faster than the Southwest. Without legal stimulants or fet- ters, freedom outruns slavery. So, other free states were coming along in the natural order. By 1850 slavery saw that much more, and something drastic and far-reaching, must be done to hold the voting equilibrium in the Senate. This time the something was the destruction of the slavery limita- tion in the Missouri Compromise so far as New Mexico and Utah were concerned. Therefore they were organized as territories and empowered to have slavery or not as they pleased. There were associated propositions, but the partial destruction of the long settled line between slave territory and free, with a more forceful fugitive slave law, contained the milk in the cocoanut. The debate was great. It was pathetic too. Both of the political parties bent the knee. Clay, the great leader of the Whigs, came back to the Senate from his final illness to champion another compromise. Calhoun, the mighty captain of the southern Democrats, got up THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES I4I from his deathbed to hear his speech read by another in the Senate debate. Cass's hopes led him to accept the new departure rather easily. Webster did so less easily, but he did it. Ambition makes cowards of great as well as small. With his " seventh of March " speech, he passed into the long shadows and soon on to his grave. Freedom wept. Certainly it was a great debate, but surely the explanations, the self-accusing speciousness, the pathos, and the re- sult, take away the satisfaction of it. The measures passed. A New York president, as well as a Massachusetts senator, ap- proved. Political parties had saved themselves for the time, but they had lost their opportunities. Chase, Douglas, Seward, and Sumner now came to the fore in the Senate. The inevitable reaction, the natural apprehension of results made for quiet for a time. Slavery had triumphed and was quiescent. The hunting and the rescue of slaves were distract- ing in the North. The determination of the Supreme Court that an owner might take his slave into free territory and that there was no power in Congress nor in a state or territory to hold him free upon ground that had been solemnly dedicated to freedom, was dis- concerting. " Uncle Tom's Cabin " was inflaming. Yet statesmen were much at peace for four years. When Nebraska asked admis- sion to the Union in 1854, Douglas set the fire which was to be consuming. The territory of Nebraska comprised the present states of Kan- sas, Nebraska, both Dakotas, part of Colorado, and Wyoming. As chairman of the Senate committee on territories, Douglas presented a bill for the admission of Nebraska. Soon he amended it so as to provide for two states, Nebraska and Kansas, doubtless expect- ing that one would be a free and the other a slave state. His bill offered to the South more than the South had ever asked. No one had proposed so much. He has said that he prepared the measure alone and wholly upon his own initiative. He proposed to remove the states already formed, and those to be formed thereafter, from all action by Congress so far as slavery was concerned. They were to settle the question for themselves, subject only to the determina- tion of the Supreme Court under the Constitution as it was. As at first drawn, the bill left the repeal of the prohibition against slavery in the Missouri Act of 1820 to implication, but the Senator soon modified the measure so as to repeal it expressly. The South was so surprised that it could hardly make itself believe there was not a hidden pitfall. The South and Douglas were more than a I42 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT match for the North alone. The debate in both houses was the ablest and the bitterest in our parliamentary history. History will always say that all this was " mere politics," so far as Douglas was concerned. He was making a present to the South to solidify southern support of his presidential aspirations. He must have reasoned that sophistry and organization could hold the North sufficiently. He was also avoiding the responsibility of vot- ing in the Senate directly for or against slavery every time a new state was admitted to the Union, for whichever way he voted it would endanger his seat either in northern or southern Illinois. As a national statesman it must necessarily put him to embarrass- ment either in the Northern States or in the Southern. But his action gave him little comfort. He was not so strong in the nomi- nating convention of 1856 as in that of 1852. He had already quarreled with Buchanan. The patronage was being used against him and the cleavage in the Democratic party was' in sight. In Illinois, the sentiment, the apportionment, and the political organi- zation which his twelve years in the Senate created, made him practically invincible. The political traditions of Illinois were all with him. The state had always, even in the election of the first Harrison, cast its electoral vote for the Democratic candidate. Yet there was a cloud rising over it all, and with the election of the Legislature in 1858, which would choose his successor, a day for something of a reckoning was at hand. Illinois was a great country for political reckonings. The state was yet in its pioneer days. Half of the black loam prairies that are now worth two hundred dollars or more per acre, had not been broken by the plow. Indeed, they were often so wet that there were doubts about their ever being of much value, and the new and scattered cabins were set upon the knolls or at the edges of the occasional growths of timber that appeared. The roads were few, and for months together the mud was bottomless. There were hardly stones enough to mark the corners of the mile square sections, and Lincoln had never split rails enough to make any show of fences. The osage orange hedges were not yet grown. The " prairie schooners,'' with migrating settlers, often sailed across the open prairies by sun or compass, as the vessel does at sea. The people were few and the towns small. The Illinois Central Railroad, from Chicago to Cairo, had been opened but two years before. Life was arduous and severe. But the people gloried in it. Their common joke was, and sometimes is, that Ohio and THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES 143 Indiana were settled by " fellers " who started to go out West and lost their nerve just before they ought to. There is nothing like American pioneering to make hospitable, tolerant, independent, and heroic men and women. But the life was often solitary, and the people liked to get together. The agricultural fairs and the political hustings afforded their best opportunities for mixing. Fairs ordinarily dissolved into political discussions. The county fairs rounded up the politics of the counties, and the state fairs the politics of the state. The meetings were in the open, on the fair grounds or in the grove. It made some difference who spoke, but not so much what party he represented. Throngs would sit all after- noon to hear a lusty orator, and then mutually agree to go to " supper," come back at early candle light, and sit on hard benches under the trees for hours together, to enjoy the jibes and jokes and give the other side its fair show. There was no other state with the differing political situations of Illinois. The state is four hundred miles north and south. The northern boundary is farther north than Albany, and the south- ern point is farther south than Richmond or Louisville. The northern half of the state was settled from New York and New England, and the southern half from Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. There was a " North " and a " South " in Illinois as in no other state. A third of the boundary line of the state was bordered by slave territory. The southern part was settled before the northern. Indeed, the state had a rather narrow escape from becoming a slave state in law, and in 1858 its senti- ment seemed quite as much slave as free. Before Douglas went to Illinois for the campaign, the Dem- ocratic State Convention (April 21, 1858) had indorsed his course, but this caused a considerable number of delegates to withdraw, hold another convention (June 9), denounce Doug- las, and give adhesion to the Buchanan administration. The elements which were fusing into the Republican party met in state convention (June 17) and nominated Abraham Lincoln for senator. But the Republican factors were by no means solidly for Lincoln. Many in the state and out, even including Mr Greeley and the Tribune, were for the absurd political strategy of supporting Douglas in the hope of further embar- rassing the Democratic National administration. To the conven- tion which nominated him Lincoln made his carefully considered 144 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT " house divided against itself " speech. He intended it to mean that something very decisive would have to be done. Douglas arrived at Chicago amidst great acclaim on July 9, and on that night made a speech in which he referred to Lincoln as a " kind, amiable, high-minded gentleman," but censured him for easy-going disloyalty and for benevolent short-sightedness. Lincoln was present and " had a good seat " as he said, and the next evening answered Douglas at the same place. Each of these men was to speak every day, and often more than once a day, for four months. From July until November, crowds, pro- cessions, cavalcades, decorations, torches, drums, feasts, oratory and shouting were to feature the passing days in the little towns and over the boundless prairies of the expansive state of Illinois. The intellectual battle royal in the history of American politics was on. Lincoln and Douglas presented sharp contrasts. Douglas was born in Vermont; Lincoln in Kentucky. Douglas was always in comfortable, and Lincoln in exceedingly moderate circum- stances. Douglas was well educated at fine old academies at Brandon, Vermont, and Canandaigua, New York ; Lincoln was self-educated. Douglas was very short and well rounded, with massive head; Lincoln was exceedingly tall and angular. Doug- las was never physically robust; Lincoln was an athlete. Doug- las was very free in habits of life; Lincoln was exceedingly sim- ple. Lincoln was modest but unyielding; Douglas was self- confident and aggressive. Douglas easily gained admission to the bar, but abandoned the practice for politics without winning much professional standing ; Lincoln was trying more oases at the circuit and arguing more appeals in the Supreme Court of the state than any other lawyer in Illinois. Lincoln loved state- craft and was expert enough in politics, but was not an office seeker save as he was carried along by the political interests he espoused. Lincoln was in office but little ; Douglas was in office continually. He was a member of the Legislature at twenty- three, a judge of the Supreme Court of the state at twenty- eight, a member of Congress at thirty, and a United States Sen- ator at thirty-three. The only places Lincoln held were in the Legislature from 1834 to 1842, in Congress in 1847-48, and the presidency. The Legislature sat for short sessions and only bi- ennially; the pay was practically nothing; membership was not looked upon as holding an office. He abjured politics for years THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES 145 together that he might earn a living at his profession. Douglas was a ready and fascinating political speaker and forensic orator. Yet it is difficult to find paragraphs in his speeches which one feels warranted in quoting, either for their substance or their style. Lincoln's speeches are practically all quotable, because they were filled with logical and convincing reasoning, because of their clarity of statement, and because they are models of a distinguishing and beautiful English style. The two men knew each other well. They lived in the same town for ten years. They were in the Legislature and in Con- gress at the same time. Douglas was transferred from the House of Representatives to the Senate the day that Lincoln entered the House for his only term in Congress. Both have declared that there was no personal ill will between them. They were good friends. The two men were of very unequal public exper- ience and standing. Lincoln was forty-nine years of age, and Douglas forty-five. Lincoln was somewhat known for character and ability in Illinois, but had made no impression beyond the state. Douglas's personal integrity and his patriotism were not doubted. His position in public life was above that of any other man of the year 1858. Six years before he had strong support in the national convention of his party for the presidency, and it was commonly assumed that he would reach that high station. For more than eleven years he had been in the Senate, and for half of that time was the preeminent leader of the great party which had controlled the federal government from Jefferson's administration. In the most painstaking address Mr Blaine ever delivered, the eulogy of Garfield, he said that Douglas was one of the three great parliamentary leaders this country has produced. Lincoln requested the joint debates. Douglas granted the re- quest reluctantly. Both had engagements extending through the entire campaign. Seven joint debates were arranged, one in a county town in each of the Congressional districts of the state, except the Chicago and Springfield districts where both had spoken. Douglas named the places and the debates, and stipu- lated that on each occasion one speaker should have an hour, the other an hour and a half, and then the first a half hour in closing, and that he himself should have the opening and the close at four of the seven meetings. Lincoln suggested that this was hardly just, but accepted the arrangement. The towns I46 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT were all small. Two of them were remote from railroads. All of the meetings were in the open air. The crowds embraced thousands of people, who sometimes traveled all of the night before to be on hand at the appointed time. Partisanship was rife, but the crowds were good natured and tolerant, and each of the speakers had a quiet hearing except as Douglas said some- thing like personal affront to the listeners. The Senator opened the debate at Ottawa by saying that prior to 1854 the Whig and Democratic parties were not sec- tional ; that they had differed about banks and money and tariffs, but not about slavery; that they had united in the compromise measures of 1850, particularly in Illinois, that none but the few ultra abolitionists had dissented; that in 1854 he introduced the Nebraska bill allowing states to decide for themselves whether or not they would have slavery; that thereupon Abraham Lin- coln and Lyman Trumbull, one a Whig and the other a Demo- crat, had agreed to act together in the formation of the Repub- lican party, for the purpose of effecting their election as United State senators, one to succeed General Shields in 1856, and the other to succeed himself in 1859. Lincoln was to bring in all the Whigs, and transfer them, as Douglas said, " to Giddings, Chase, Fred Douglass, and Parson Lovejoy," and Trumbull was to " bring old Democrats, 'handcuffed and bound hand and foot, into the abolition camp." He then assumed to read the platform of the first Republican State Convention held at Springfield in 1854, favoring separation from old parties and the organization of a new one ; opposing any extension of slavery and demanding the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law. He charged Lincoln with this and wanted to know whether he occupied the same attitude in 1858 as in 1854. He made personal allusions which are worth repeating. "I have known him (Lincoln) for nearly twenty-five years. There were many points of sympathy between us when we first got acquainted. We were both comparatively boys, both strug- gling with poverty in a strange land. I was a school teacher in the town of Winchester, and he a flourishing grocery-keeper in the town of Salem. He was more successful in his occupa- tion than I was in mine, and hence more fortunate in this world's goods. Lincoln is one of those peculiar men who per- form with admirable skill everything which they undertake. I made as good a school teacher as I could, and when a cabinet- maker I made a good bedstead and tables, although my old boss said I succeeded better with bureaus and secretaries than THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES H7 with anything else; but I believe that Lincoln was always more successful in business than I, for his business enabled him to get into the Legislature. I met him there, however, and had sympathy with him, because of the uphill struggle we both had in life. He was then just as good at telling an anecdote as now. He could beat any of the boys wrestling, or running a foot race, in pitching quoits or tossing a copper; could ruin more liquor than all the boys of the town together, and the dignity and impartiality with which he presided at a horse race or fist fight excited the admiration and won the praise of everybody that was present and participated. I sympathized with him because he was struggling with difficulties, and so was I." He then charged Lincoln with opposing the Mexican War, when in Congress, and " taking the side of the common enemy against his country." He said things about Lincoln's friend, Lyman Trumbull, too, and alleged that Trumbull had overreached Lincoln in the sena- torial election of 1856, and got for himself the place which it had been arranged that Lincoln should have. He then read the famous passage from Lincoln's speech to the convention which nominated him for senator in June. It is as follows : " In my opinion it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. _ 'A house divided against itself can not stand.' I believe this government can not endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dis- solved — I do not expect the house to fall ; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the fur- ther spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest, m the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike law- ful in all the states — old as well as new, North as well as South." He insisted that this was not only absurd because the Union had existed part slave and part free from the beginning, but that it was revolutionary and would wreck the Union unless repudiated. He called Lincoln to account for "warfare on the Supreme Court," because its decision in the Dred Scott case deprived negroes " of the rights and privileges of citizenship." _ He argued his points with great force. His repeated allu- sions to " Black " Republicans stirred irritation in the audience which was openly expressed, but he had made a telling speech I48 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT and his closing - sentences against sectional warfare commanded general approbation. Mr Lincoln opened with the remark that misrepresentation provokes a man, but gross misrepresentation amuses him. He denied that he had anything to do with the platform of 1854 which Douglas had read ; denied that there had been any agree- between Trumbull and himself about the senatorship ; said Lovejoy had tried to get him into the Republican Convention of 1854 but he had refused, and although they had named him on a committee he had had nothing to do with that organiza- tion. He demanded that the Judge should prove his allegations, and read from a speech he (Lincoln) made at Peoria in 1854 to show that Douglas knew what his attitudes were at that time and misrepresented them. He disavowed any desire for " social and political equality with the negro,'' and suggested that a man who could get up a " fantastic arrangement of words " to prove that he had such desire might be able to prove " that a horse-chestnut was a chestnut horse." He said there was a physical difference between the races which would probably forbid their living together on terms of perfect equality, " but in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, the negro is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man." He showed no resentment and made no answer to the Senator's unjust and probably facetious allusions to his personal career, further than to deny that he had kept a grocery, to observe that it would have been a credit to him if he had, and to volun- teer that he had worked for a short time " in a still, at the end of a hollow." It may as well be said here, that from the begin- ning to the end of the debates Lincoln's absolute good nature gave him an advantage with his hearers, while Douglas's fre- quent irritation cost him rather heavily. He appealed to the record to show that he had voted in Congress against approving the Mexican War but in favor of clothing and feeding the soldiers. Apparently he talked under some excitement, for at this point he noted that he had not consumed as much of his hour and a half as he had supposed, and so he turned back. Referring to his saying that " a house divided against itself can not stand," he exclaimed "Does the Judge say it can stand? If he does then there is a question of veracity, not between him and me, but between the Judge and an authority of a somewhat higher character." THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES I49 He admitted that the Union had continued for eighty years part slave and part free, but because slavery was restricted to a section and was expected to disappear. The Constitution did not contemplate the extension of slavery into territory already free, and looked to the suppression of the slave trade. He urged that the Dred Scott case, the new Fugitive Slave Law, and par- ticularly Douglas's Nebraska Act, had put the " institution on a new basis which looks to the perpetuity and nationalization of slavery." He described " popular sovereignty " as a device which " would allow the people of a territory to have slavery if they want to, but not allow them not to have it if they do not want to," and showed that Douglas had refused to accept an amendment offered to his bill in the Senate by Chase, expressly empowering the people of a territory to prohibit slavery therein, if they saw fit. He took distinct issue with the decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case, and charged that it would be as easy for the court to go further and hold that even a state already organized could not exclude slavery without invading the im- plications and intentions of the federal Constitution, as to do what it had done. He charged collusion between the Congres- sional leaders and the Supreme Court, as evidenced in the Dred Scott decision and the Nebraska bill, in the effort to make the extension of slavery easy and the extension of freedom difficult. Let us read two or three closing paragraphs from Lincoln's extemporaneous speaking in this first joint debate: " This man sticks to a decision which forbids the people of a territory from excluding slavery, and he does so, not because he says it is right in itself — he does not give any opinion on that — but because it has been decided by the court, and being decided by the court, he is, and you are, bound to take it in your political action as law, not that he judges at all of its merits, but because a decision of the court is to him a ' Thus saith the Lord.' He places it on that ground alone, and you will bear in mind that thus committing himself unreservedly to this decision commits him to the next one just as firmly as to this. He did not commit himself on account of the merit or demerit of the decision, but it is a ' Thus saith the Lord.' The next decision, as much as this, will be a ' Thus saith the Lord.' " There is nothing that can divert or turn him away from this decision. It is nothing that I point out to him that his great prototype, General Jackson, did not believe in the binding force of decisions. It is nothing to him that Jefferson did not so 150 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT believe. I have said that I have often heard him approve of Jackson's course in disregarding- the decision of the Supreme Court pronouncing a national bank constitutional. He says, I did not hear him say so. He denies the accuracy of my recol- lection. I say he ought to know better than I, but I will make no question about this thing, though it still seems to me that I heard him say it twenty times. I will tell him, though, that he now claims to stand on the Cincinnati platform, which af- firms that Congress can not charter a national bank, in the teeth of that old standing decision that Congress can charter a bank. "And I remind him of another piece of history on the question of respect for judicial decisions: and it is a piece of Illinois history belonging to a time when the large party to which Judge Douglas belonged were displeased with a decision of the Supreme Court of Illinois; because they had decided that a Governor could not remove a Secretary of State. You will find the whole story in Ford's History of Illinois, and I know that Judge Douglas will not deny that he was then in favor of over- slaughing that decision by the mode of adding five new judges, so as to vote down the four old ones. Not only so, but it ended in the Judge's sitting down on that very bench as one of the five nezv judges to break dozvn the four old ones. It was in this way pre- cisely that he got his title of judge. Now, when the Judge tells me that men appointed conditionally to sit as members of a court will have to be catechised beforehand upon some subject, I say, ' You know, Judge ; you have tried it.' When he says a court of this kind will lose the confidence of all men, will be prostituted and disgraced by such a proceeding, I say ' You know best, Judge; you have been through the mill.' " Judge Douglas is going back to the era of our Revolution, and, to the extent of his ability, muzzling the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return. When he invites any people, willing to have slavery, to establish it, he is blowing out the moral lights around us. When he says he ' cares not whether slavery is voted down or voted up ' — that it is a sacred right of self-government — he is, in my judgment, penetrating the human soul and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty in this American people. And now I will only say that when, by all these means and appliances, Judge Douglas shall succeed in bringing public sentiment to an exact accordance with his own views; when these vast assemblages shall echo back all these sentiments, when they shall come to repeat his views and to avow his principles, and to say all that he says on these mighty questions — then it needs only the formality of the second Dred Scott decision, which he indorses in advance, to make slavery alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new, North as well as South." Senator Douglas opened his concluding half hour by reiterat- ing that the Republican State Convention in 1854, with Lin- THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES 151 coin's participation, had declared for the unconditional repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law. Lincoln here interrupted to inter- ject a denial that he had anything to do with that platform, and a short colloquy ensued which was more angry and disturb- ing, as between the men and the parties in the audience, than any other in the seven debates. The Senator made much of the fact that this Republican state platform in 1854 had declared (a) for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, (b) for the exclusion of slavery from all the territories both north and south of the Missouri Compromise line over which the general government had control, and (c) against the acquisition of any more terri- tory unless slavery should be forever excluded therefrom. He asserted that he had asked Lincoln whether as a Senator, he would vote to admit a state to the Union with or without slavery as the people of that state might decide, and declared that Lincoln had refused to answer. He claimed that Lincoln was seeking election by keeping the people in the dark as to his definite purposes, and was asserting or implying views upon these questions in northern Illinois which he would not avow in southern Illinois, but that he should make Lincoln refuse to answer in the north, and then " trot him down into ' Egypt ' " (as the southern part of the state was called) and make him refuse to answer them there. The Senator pronounced the charge about the collusion be- tween Congress and the Supreme Court " an infamous lie." He occupied some time in explaining the different provisions which were in, or which he had refused to put in, the Nebraska bill, and concluded by declaring that his antagonist was an aboli- tionist, an alarmist, a disturber, who would declare one thing in one place and another thing in another place only for votes, while he himself was seeking the independence and equality of sovereign states, and the concord and fraternity of the sections. At Freeport, six days later, Lincoln had the advantage of the opening and the close. He commenced by saying that Judge Douglas had propounded some questions to him at Ottawa, and then assumed that he had refused to answer them. He had not refused. He would answer them now if the Senator would agree to answer an equal number which he would like to put to him. He waited for Douglas to assent. Douglas did not assent. Then he would answer them anyway, and put his ques- 152 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT tions to the Senator anyway. He presented the questions as printed in the Douglas organ since the debate and answered them as follows : " Question. 1 I desire to know whether Lincoln today stands as he did in 1854, in favor of the unconditional repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law? Answer. I do not now, nor ever did, stand in favor of the unconditional repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law. Q. 2 I desire him to answer whether he stands pledged today, as he did in 1854, against the admission of any more slave states into the Union, even if the people want them? A. I do not now, nor ever did, stand pledged against the admission of any more slave states into the Union. Q. 3 I want to know whether he stands pledged against the admission of a new state into the Union with such a Constitu- tion as the people of that state may see fit to make? A. I do not stand pledged against the admission of a new state into the Union, with such a Constitution as the people of that state may see fit to make. Q. 4 I want to know whether he stands today pledged to the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia? A. I do not stand today pledged to the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. Q. 5 I desire him to answer whether he stands pledged to the prohibition of the slave trade between the different states? A. I do not stand pledged to the prohibition of the slave trade between the different states. Q. 6 I desire to know whether he stands pledged to prohibit slavery in all the territories of the United States, north as well as south of the Missouri Compromise line? A. I am impliedly, if not expressly, pledged to a belief in the right and duty of Congress to prohibit slavery in all the United States territories. Q. 7 I desire him to answer whether he is opposed to the acquisition of any new territory unless slavery is first prohibited therein? A. I am not generally opposed to honest acquisition of ter- ritory; and, in any given case, I would or would not oppose such acquisition, accordingly as I might think such acquisition would or would not aggravate the slavery question among ourselves." Observing that he had only answered that he was not pledged to this, that, and the other proposition, because the Judge had only asked if he were pledged, he expressed his willingness to go on and say what he thought of these matters. He thought the people of the South were legally entitled to a fugitive slave law as long as the laws of the land recognized slavery. He had THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES 1 53 objections to some of the features of the Fugitive Slave Law then prevailing. He would regret to have to vote upon the ad- mission of another slave state, and would be glad to know that there would never be another admitted, but if slavery should be kept out of a given territory until the people therein freely formed a Constitution recognizing slavery, he did not see how such a state could be rejected on that account. He would like to see slavery abolished in the District of Columbia and thought Congress had the power to abolish it, and as a Senator he would so vote on condition that emancipation be gradual, be sustained by a majority of the qualified electors, and that compensation should be made to unwilling owners. He said the abolition of the slave trade between different states was an involved legal question which he had not yet considered sufficiently to justify an ultimate opinion. If satisfied that Congress was legally com- petent to prohibit such trade between states, he would not vote to exercise the power except on conservative principles. Now he had some questions for the Senator. He had only four ready, but would have some more when he could get them ready. They were as follows : " Question, i If the people of Kansas shall, by means entirely unobjectionable in all other respects, adopt a State Constitution, and ask admission into the Union under it, before they have the requisite number of inhabitants according to the English bill — some ninety-three thousand — will you vote to admit them? Q. 2 Can the people of a United States territory, in any lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a State Constitution? Q. j If the Supreme Court of the United States shall decree that states can not exclude slavery from their limits, are you in favor of acquiescing in, adopting, and following, such decision as a rule of political action? Q. 4 Are you in favor of acquiring additional territory, in disregard of how such acquisition may affect the nation on the slavery question ? " After the Ottawa debate Lincoln ascertained, what he had not known at that time, that the platform which Douglas there presented as that of the Republican State Convention of 1854, and which he made Lincoln responsible for in spite of his denial, was not that of a Republican State Convention at all. Indeed, there was no Republican State Convention in Springfield in 1854. The resolu- 154 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT tions had been adopted by a county convention in Kane county. Lincoln had nothing to do with them and had never assented to their provisions. Douglas was actually surprised: he had been misled. Lincoln now charged him with false pretenses. Douglas later de- nied the charge of fraud, explained his error, but insisted that the resolutions he had read expressed the attitudes of Lincoln's party. Lincoln vehemently declared that Douglas had had considerable to say all along about his superior knowledge of political history and his " conscientiousness," and lost few opportunities that presented themselves in the next three months to cite this incident in proof that the Judge did not know what he was talking about. He insisted that Douglas had not made his charge upon information and belief but as upon his own knowledge, when in reality he had no knowl- edge. Reminding his hearers of Douglas's charges of false pre- tenses against himself, and asking if they had ever discovered any- thing that he had said or done to compare with " that sort of vul- garity," he rang the changes on the Senator's " conscientiousness " with an industry that contributed to the gayeties of the debates, there and thereafter. Douglas now had the long speech, and he must have known, as well as Lincoln, the heaviness of his burden. But he shouldered it heroically. He addressed himself at once to Lincoln's questions. In relation to the admission of Kansas with an inadequate popula- tion, he said " if she had people enough to constitute a slave state, she has enough for a free state." As to the question whether he would acquiesce in a decision of the Supreme Court that states could not exclude slavery from their limits, and follow it as a rule of po- litical action, he was indignant. Of course he would. The Supreme Court was final. Lincoln should know better than to ask such a question. To the fourth question he said that whenever it was well to acquire more territory he was in favor of it without reference to slavery. He would leave the people free to have slavery or not as they pleased. Lincoln's second question at Freeport, as to whether Douglas held that the people of a territory could in any lawful zvay exclude slavery before the formation of a State Constitution, was the merci- less one. It was doubtless intended to bear upon the Senator's presidential prospects. When the Supreme Court held that Con- gress could not exclude slavery from a territory, it followed that the people of the territory could not do it either. Was there any zvay under our system in which free territories could be kept free? The North would not stand for the man who said no, nor the South THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES 1 55 for the man who said yes. One in the Senator's situation needed the help of a multiplicity of strange gods to balance the contingencies and contribute to the confusion of the popular mind. His reply was ingenious but necessarily inadequate. He said there was no constitutional or legal way, but slavery could not exist among a people who were opposed to it, because of the police regulations their Legislatures might make. In other words, they could not law- fully prohibit or prevent it, but they could freeze it out. The sub- stance of the answer was with slavery and the South, but not suf- ficiently so to be satisfying to the South. It was unsatisfying and disconcerting in the North. The Senator had much to say in explanation of what Lincoln called the fraudulent platform, and more about social and political equality with negroes, but the substance of his address was in answer to Lincoln's questions. Lincoln's reply was rather dignified raillery, which must have entertained the audience and annoyed his antagonist, but it added little that was new to the substance of the debate. His real work of the day was in the questions he had carefully prepared. The third debate, at Jonesboro, nearly three weeks later, was in the far southern part of the state. The sentiment was strongly southern. The speakers traversed much of the ground gone over at Ottawa and Freeport. The Senator played upon southern feel- ings very adroitly, ridiculing the abolitionists, classing Lincoln with the most ultra of them, and calling upon him to say the same things in the South that he had at the North. Lincoln responded to the call very exactly. Saying that the fathers had made the best Constitution they could have made under the circumstances, that slavery was a vicious institution and would have died out, as the fathers expected, if the laws had been left as the fathers made them, he asserted that the laws had been changed by the Supreme Court and Douglas so as to fetter freedom and let slavery go where it would. Declaring for peace, he insisted that there had been concord between the sections until the movement to extend slavery. He ridiculed the Senator's suggestion that slavery could be pre- vented by the exercise of police powers. He recalled that when one is elected to the Legislature he swears to support the Consti- tution of the United States, and inquired if it would not be false swearing to do that and then vote for laws to subvert the intentions of the Constitution as declared by the Supreme Court? Is not I56 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT Congress bound to give effect to the intentions of the Constitution, and is not the Supreme Court bound to overthrow police regulations that are inimical to the Constitution? Then he propounded his fifth formal interrogatory to Douglas, thus: " If the slaveholding citizens of a United States territory should need and demand Congressional legislation for the protection of their slave property in such territory, would you, as a mem- ber of Congress, vote for or against such legislation?" Douglas answered this question by saying that he thought there should be no interference by Congress with slavery in the states or territories alike. There were great and fantastic processions across the prairies to Charleston on the 15th of September. It was in his opening at Charleston that Lincoln let slip the re- mark that has been so well remembered, " I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife." He then led Douglas a long chase about Douglas's criticisms of Senator Trumbull, and Douglas used his hour and a half sustaining his contentions about Trumbull. Lincoln was apparently willing that the Senator should use his time about collateral and not very material matters in a debate where Lincoln had the last speech. By this time he was actually playing with the Judge. Having put Douglas to much reiteration and even to the extreme of talking about liars, Lincoln covered the old ground rather carefully and closed the debate with the words, " I say to him that it will not avail him at all that he swells himself up, takes on dignity, and calls people liars. If you have ever studied geometry, you remember that by a course of reasoning Euclid proves that all the angles in a triangle are equal to two right angles. Now would you prove that to be false by calling Euclid a liar ? " The fifth joint debate, October 7th, was on the campus of Knox College at Galesburg. The place and the people seem to have made the discussion particularly serious. Douglas used the opening hour in condemning Lincoln for thinking that when the Declaration of Independence asserted that " all men are created equal," it in- cluded black men as well as white men and referred to social and political equality ; as well as for arraying the sections against each other and for pretending different beliefs in different places. There was nothing new in this, but apparently the vehemence of it forced Lincoln to higher ground than he had before taken. He said the THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES 1 57 records of the country would be searched in vain to show that before Judge Douglas and the present campaign, any one had ever asserted that the Declaration of Independence did not include black men. Neither Washington, Jefferson, nor any other president, nor any member of Congress, including Douglas himself, had ever said that until present extremities forced the Judge to say it. He asserted that all of his own speeches in the present debates, in the South as well as in the North, had been put in print, and he knew that no conflicts could be found in them. He had tolerated slavery, and had never contended for the abstract right to abolish slavery where it already existed; but when slavery tried to enter new territory freedom was bound to stand fast. The practical necessity for it had been contended for in the Southern States, and partly and re- luctantly acquiesced in in the Northern States, but the theoretical wrong of slavery had always been admitted, North and South. Now political exigency was forcing Douglas, he said, to deny the moral wrong of it. Here are two brief but illuminating paragraphs : "Everything that emanates from him (Douglas) or his coad- jutors in their course of policy carefully excludes the thought that there is anything wrong in slavery. All their arguments, if you will consider them, will be seen to exclude the thought that there is anything wrong in slavery. If you will take the Judge's speeches, and select the short and pointed sentences expressed by him — as his declaration that he ' don't care whether slavery is voted up or down' — you will see at once that this is perfectly logical, if you do not admit that slavery is wrong. If you do admit that it is wrong, Judge Douglas can not logically say he don't care whether a wrong is voted up or down. " Now, I confess myself as belonging to that class in the coun- try who contemplate slavery as a moral, social, and political evil, having due regard for its actual existence amongst us and the difficulties of getting rid of it in any satisfactory way, and to all the constitutional obligations which have been thrown about it ; but, nevertheless, I desire a policy that looks to the prevention of it as a wrong, and looks hopefully to the time when as a wrong it may come to an end." He quoted the assertion in the prevailing opinion in the Dred Scott case that " the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution," and repudiated it with un- equaled logic and force. Of course the decision of the Supreme Court was to be observed so long as it remained the law, but there was no reason why it should be accepted as a permanent rule of political action. The people had the right to make their own en- I58 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT during rules of political action by amending Constitutions, by en- acting laws, or even by changing courts. He charged the Senator with striving to prepare the public mind for a yet more sweeping and objectionable decision of the Court, and exclaimed: " He is blowing out the moral lights around us, when he con- tends that whoever wants slaves has a right to hold them ; he is penetrating, so far as lies in his power, the human soul, and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty, when he is in every possible way preparing the public mind, by his vast influence, for making the institution of slavery perpetual and. national." The Senator's final half hour was spent in grieving over Lincoln's construction of the Declaration of Independence and in repining over his appeals from the decision of the Supreme Court to the political hustings and the town meetings of the country. At Quincy, six days after Galesburg, Lincoln evidenced his thought that the debate transcended the mere election of a senator in Illinois, and related to a question which concerned the very life of the nation and would have to be determined by all of the people of the country. He suggested that the question was moral and political rather than personal, and resented some personal strictures which the Senator had made upon him. " I was not sure that I should be able to hold my own with him. He asks if I wish to push this matter to the point of personal difficulty. I tell him no. He made no mistake when he called me an ' amiable man,' though per- haps he did when he called me an ' intelligent ' man. I very much prefer when this canvass is over, however it may result, that we part without any bitter recollections of personal difficulties. But I shall not ask any favors. I will not be the first to cry ' hold.' " His evident annoyance inspired some of his finest sentences, which deserve to be repeated here : " We have in this nation this element of domestic slavery. It is a disturbing element. We keep up a controversy in regard to it. The difference of opinion, reduced to its lowest terms, is no other than the difference between men who think slavery wrong and those who do not think it wrong. We think it a moral, a social, and a political wrong. It is a wrong that ex- tends itself to the existence of the whole nation. Because we think it wrong we deal with it as a wrong. W r e deal with it as with any other wrong, by preventing it growing larger, so that in the course of time there may be some promise of an end of it. We have a due regard to the actual presence of it amongst us. I suppose that, in reference to our constitutional THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES 1 59 obligations, we have no right to disturb it in the states where it exists, and we have no more inclination to disturb it than we have the right to do. When Dred Scott has been decided to be a slave by the Court we, a mob, shall not decide him to be free. When any other one, or one thousand, shall be decided by the Court to be slaves, we shall not in any violent way dis- turb the rights of property thus settled. But we do not pro- pose to be bound by it as a political rule in any way, because it lays the foundation for the spread of an evil. We propose to have it reversed if we can, and a new rule established upon this subject. " If there is any man who does not believe slavery is wrong, he ought to leave us. If there is any man in my party who is impatient of the constitutional guarantees thrown around it, and would act in disregard to these, he too, is misplaced. Judge Douglas never says slavery is right or wrong. Almost every one else says one thing or the other, but he never does. He can not say that he ' don't care whether slavery is voted up or voted down ' if he admits that slavery is wrong." Senator Douglas returned to personalities. Declaring what two men had said, he exclaimed, " No man on earth who knows them and knows Lincoln, would take his oath as against their word." He charged that the Dred Scott case was a feigned issue for political purposes ; that the negro was owned by an abolition member of Congress from Springfield, Mass. ; and that both sides in court were represented by abolition lawyers. Assuming to restate Lincoln's views about negro rights and classing him with the ex- treme abolitionists, he exclaimed, " Did old Giddings when he came down among you four years ago preach more radical abolitionism than this ? Did Lovejoy or Lloyd Garrison, or Wendell Phillips, or Fred Douglass ever take higher abolition ground than that? " The fact is Douglas was being worn out. The long continued abrasion was telling. He was a great man, but he was contending with a matchless one. He lacked the equable temperament, the intellectual equipoise, the physical endurance of Lincoln. But happily he was experienced and ingenious and strong enough to put Lincoln to his best. Here are two paragraphs which are good samples of Doug- las's contentions and his style: " He tells you that I will not argue the question whether slavery is right or wrong. I tell you why I will not do it. I hold that, under the Constitution of the United States, each state of this Union has a right to do as it pleases on the subject of slavery. In Illinois we have exercised that sovereign right by prohibiting slavery within our own limits. I approve of that line of policy. We have performed our whole duty in Illinois. l6o NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT We have gone as far as we have a right to go under the Con- stitution of our common country. It is none of our business whether slavery exists in Missouri or not. Missouri is a sov- ereign state of this Union, and has the same right to decide the slavery question for herself that Illinois has to decide it for herself. Hence I do not choose to occupy the time allotted to me in discussing a question that we have no right to act upon. " He tells you that he does not like the Dred Scott decision. Suppose he does not, how is" he going to help himself? He says that he will reverse it. How will he reverse it? I know of but one mode of reversing judicial decisions, and that is by appealing from the inferior to the superior court. But I have never yet learned how or where an appeal could be taken from the Supreme Court of the United States. The Dred Scott de- cision was pronounced by the highest tribunal on earth. From that decision there is no appeal, this side of Heaven. Yet, Mr Lincoln says he is going to reverse that decision. By what tribunal will he reverse it? Will he appeal to a mob? Does he intend to appeal to violence, to lynch law? Will he stir up strife and rebellion in the land, and overthrow the court by violence? He does not deign to tell you how he will reverse the Dred Scott decision, but keeps appealing each day from the Supreme Court of the United States to political meetings in the country." Lincoln was ready with his answer, and here is a paragraph of it : "But he (Douglas) is desirous of knowing how we are going to reverse the Dred Scott decision. Judge Douglas ought to know how. Did not he and his political friends find a way to reverse the decision of that same Court in favor of the con- stitutionality of the national bank? Didn't they find a way to do it so effectually that they have reversed it as completely as any decision ever was reversed, so far as its practical operation is concerned? And let me ask you, didn't Judge Douglas find a way to reverse the decision of our Supreme Court when it decided that Carlin's father — old Governor Carlin — had not the constitutional power to remove a Secretary of State? Did he not appeal to the " MOBS," as he calls them? Did he not make speeches in the lobby to show how villainous that decision was, and how it ought to be overthrown? Did he not succeed, too, in getting an act passed by the Legislature to have it over- thrown? And didn't he himself sit down on that bench as one of the five added judges, who were to overslaugh the four old ones, getting his name of Judge in that way, and no other? If there is a villainy in using disrespect or making opposition to Supreme Court decisions, I commend it to Judge Douglas's earnest consideration. I know of no man in the State of Illinois who ought to know so well about how much villainy it takes to oppose a decision of the Supreme Court as our honor- able friend Stephen A. Douglas." THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES l6l In opening the final debate, at Alton, October 15, Senator Douglas advanced nothing new beyond a bitter lamentation and criticism of President Buchanan's opposition to him. Here it is : " In this State, every postmaster, every route agent, every col- lector of the ports, and every federal officeholder forfeits his head the moment he expresses a preference for the Democratic candidates against Lincoln and his abolition associates. A Democratic administration which we helped to bring into power deems it consistent with its fidelity to principle and its regard to duty to wield its power in this state in behalf of the Repub- lican abolition candidates in every county and every Con- gressional district against the Democratic party. All I have to say in reference to the matter is, that if that administration have not regard enough for principle, if they are not sufficiently attached to the creed of the Democratic party, to bury forever their personal hostilities in order to succeed in carrying out our glorious principles, I have. I have no personal difficulty with Mr Buchanan or his Cabinet. He chose to make certain recommendations to Congress, as he had a right to do, on the Lecompton question. I could not vote in favor of them. I had as much right to judge for myself how I should vote as he had how he should recommend. He undertook to say to me, ' If you do not vote as I tell you, I will take off the heads of your friends.' I replied to him, ' You did not elect me. I represent Illinois, and I am accountable to Illinois, to my constituency, and to God; but not to the President or to any other power on earth.' " Lincoln's commendation of this was not delayed. Here that is : " This is the seventh time Judge Douglas and myself have met in these joint discussions, and he has been gradually improving in regard to his war with the administration. At Quincy, day before yesterday, he was a little more severe upon the adminis- tration than I had heard him upon any occasion, and I took pains to compliment him for it. I then told him to ' Give it to them with "all the power he had ' ; and as some of them were present, I told them I would be very much obliged if they would give it to him in about the same way. I take it he has now vastly improved upon the attack he made then upon the administration. I flatter myself he has really taken my advice on this subject. All I can say now is to recommend to him and to them what I then commended — to prosecute the war against one another in the most vigorous manner. I say to them again : ' Go it, hus- band ! Go it, bear ! ' "There is one other thing I will mention before I leave this branch of the discussion — although I do not consider it much of my business, anyway. I refer to that part of the Judge's remarks where he undertakes to invoke Mr Buchanan in an in- l62 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT consistency. He reads something from Mr Buchanan, from which he undertakes to involve him in an inconsistency; and he gets something of a cheer for having done so. I would only remind the Judge that while he is very valiantly fighting for the Nebraska bill and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, it has been but a little while since he was the valiant advocate of the Missouri Compromise. I want to know if Buchanan has not as much right to be inconsistent as Douglas has? Has Douglas the exclusive right, in this country of being on all sides of all questions? Is nobody allowed that high privilege but himself? Is he to have an entire monopoly on that subject? " With so much for fun he proceeded to sum up. There was no suggestion of rhetoric or oratory. He used no studied phrases and attempted no climax. He was much in earnest, and allowed nothing that was material to escape him. He said, in brief and in sub- stance, that the fact that the founders of the Republic forbade slavery in organizing the Northwest Territory - — all of the land controlled in common at that time — and also provided for the ex- tinction of the slave trade in twenty years, was significant of their understanding and their purpose. They were cutting off the supply of slaves on the one side and prohibiting the spread of slavery on the other. The only ground for that was the common assumption that slavery was an evil and a wrong. The only meaning of it was that the evil should remain localized. The manifest hope of it was that the slave system would be extinguished. With that understanding and purpose and hope, the nation had endured. That understand- ing had now been thwarted. It had been done by force and threats. The men who had thwarted it were the aggressors and disturbers. The slave system itself had been content with extensions by piece- meal as the population had advanced and new Southern States were organized. Now Judge Douglas, the great leader of a great party, had provided in the Nebraska bill that it might go everywhere, North as well as South, and for all time. The same political party was dominant in the three branches of the government, and all three were promoting all this or acquiescing in it. It must arouse the national conscience. It menaced the national unity. It was be- ginning to look as though the movement had already gone so far that it would have to go on to its conclusions or be utterly repudiated or destroyed. It was quite apparent now that the nation would eventually become all slave or all free. It might be so very soon. The nation could not endure if slavery were to be perpetuated and nationalized. The possibility of it was already dividing the great moral agencies of the nation, as was evidenced by the cleavage in THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES 163 the Methodist Church, by the disturbance in the General Assemblies of the Presbyterian and Unitarian Churches, and by the splitting open of the American Tract Society. He would have been content to acquiesce in the work of the fathers, if the slave system had re- spected their work. He was for peace, but the overthrow of the pur- pose and hope of the fathers, that slavery should remain localized so long as it continued, and should finally cease, was destroying the possibility of unity and of peace. He had never been an abolitionist. He recognized the legal right of property in slaves and would not destroy it unless by conservative methods and through the com- pensation of owners. He was not for interfering with the legal powers of states. If any of the slave states wanted to become free states, he was for letting them do it. None of the old states that were free states wanted to become slave states. The trouble was in the territories, and the territories were the common property of all. Whether they were to become free or slave was necessarily a national question, and being a moral question also it went to the perpetuity of the nation itself. And as Judge Douglas and the Supreme Court had forced that question upon the nation, it must be met now. It could not be met by leaving it to the territories to decide for themselves. Judge Douglas had been arranging it so that slavery would have the advantage of freedom in new territory. Freemen did not want to go to a new country where there was any possibility of slavery, and would remain away unless freedom was assured. Lincoln was for fixing it so that liberty-loving men from all parts of the world — Hans and Baptiste and Patrick — could come and go to our territories and be sure that freedom would reign there. It was absurd to pretend that through the police power " a thing may be lawfully driven away from a place where it has a lawful right to go." But all that, and the talk about negro equality, and the menace of strife between free states and slave states, was subordi- nate in any event. The real question was a moral one which went to the very life of the nation, and the nation would have to assume the responsibility of meeting it, and probably very soon. Douglas's reply traversed the beaten paths in the usual way. His final words were: "All you have a right to ask is that the people shall do as they please: if they want slavery, let them have it; if they do not want it, allow them to refuse to encourage it. " My friends, if, as I have said before, we will only live up to this great fundamental principle, there will be peace between the 164 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT North and the South. Mr Lincoln admits that, under the Con- stitution, on all domestic questions, except slavery, we ought not to interfere with the people of each state. What right have we to interfere with slavery any more than we have to interfere with any other question? He says that this slavery question is now the bone of contention. Why? Simply because agi- tators have combined in all the free states to make war upon it. Suppose the agitators in the states should combine in one half of the Union to make war upon the railroad system of the other half? They would thus be driven to the same sectional strife. Suppose one section makes war upon any other peculiar institu- tion of the opposite section, and the same strife is produced. The only remedy and safety is that we shall stand by the Con- stitution as our fathers made it, obey the laws as they are passed, while they stand the proper test, and sustain the decisions of the Supreme Court and the constituted authorities." The joint debates were over. In the thousands attending, in the general good nature, in the newspaper comments and discussions, in- the moral and political education of the masses, they had been eminently successful. They had been serious. Neither of the speakers had related an anecdote in the twenty-one hours of joint and popular discussion. Whatever the result of the election, it was evident that it would be big with fate. It was evident too that American freedom had developed a wise prophet and found a valiant knight. Election day and the several days preceding it were marked by incessant rains. One who has not experienced it will not appreciate what days of rain upon the rich black soil of Illinois will do. The mud was without bottom. Many were unable to vote. When the returns were in Douglas and Buchanan together had fourteen senators and forty representatives, and Lincoln eleven senators and thirty-five representatives. But Lincoln had a decisive popular majority. The legislative districts were so laid out that the Lincoln representative districts had an average population of 19,635, and the Douglas districts 15,675, while the Lincoln senatorial districts averaged 58,900 people and the Douglas districts 47,100. If the representation had been equalized, Lincoln would have been elected. Douglas had won the senatorship, but he had lost the presidency. His state, which had never before cast its electoral vote for any other than the party of Douglas, was to throw its electoral vote for Lincoln and against Douglas at the next election. Before these debates Lincoln had not been seriously considered for the presidency. The St Louis Republican of June 24, 1858, re- ports a straw vote for the Republican candidate for president, among THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES T65 the delegates and others on a train to the State Convention that nominated Lincoln " as its first, last and only choice " for senator, as follows: Seward 139, Fremont 32, McLean 13, Trumbull 7, Giase 6. There was none for Lincoln. But he was thought of enough immediately after the election which settled the senatorship. Indeed, every student of American politics must know that his nomination by the Republican party for president was logical and almost inevitable. The election of Lincoln to the presidency necessarily committed the executive administration of the nation to his views, his legal reasoning, and his political attitudes. The South understood it perfectly. Her situation made revolution inevitable. War was certain unless Lincoln failed. He was the one man in the nation who most wanted peace and who best knew that war was at hand. He pleaded that the bonds of friendship be not broken. But he had sworn to execute the laws and protect the property of the United States, and of course he would do it. Of course there would be resistance. Of course that meant war. Lincoln's legal reasoning halted the slave system at the borders of free territory. Then his mind extended or constructed a basis of law for meeting the insurrection which resulted and for prosecuting the war to a successful culmination. He wavered not at all. With anguish of soul, he evolved legal theory and exercised unusual powers as the quickly moving events required. That theory, and those events, put him quickly in command of millions of freemen armed for the saving of the Union. In the awful conflict all possi- bility of compromise or neutrality disappeared. If the Union lived slavery would have to go. If the Union were dissevered, slavery would triumph after being abolished in every other form of govern- ment formed and directed by Saxon and Teuton peoples. Democracy would be dishonored. Lincoln strained legal theory and exercised his executive powers to their limit. It made him an abolitionist and the Great Emancipator. Legal theory, and political policy, and military force, definitely and distinctly combined with moral principle to bring the nation that was near to death, back to life. " Union and Liberty " survived. We can not leave the subject without a kindly thought of Douglas. True, he made a political mistake which changed the course of his country's history. True, freedom had the right to expect that one born and trained as he was should take other than a neutral course upon the extension of slavery. But his short- 1 66 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT comings were incidental. He was a great figure the night that he rose in the Senate, half an hour before midnight, and spoke until the rays of the sun broke over the Capitol, in closing the argument upon his Nebraska bill. The fundamental principle of his bill was unsound, but it is not given to all men to know that there are times when a middle course is not enough. He was struggling, amid the portending clouds, with the contending forces of a great party and the gathering perils of a great national crisis. We are sorry that he took a middle course. We can but wish that he had stood firmly for the intuitions that the Green Mountain State and the Empire State must have planted in him. We can not fail to wonder what it might have brought to him — possibly the presidency, certainly the deeper regard of a country destined to become wholly free. But when he held Lincoln's hat at the inauguration, and when his last words were " There can be no neutrals in this war," we must de- clare the basic attributes of sincerity and patriotism which filled his soul. And we do it with more pleasure when we recall that the course of Douglas brought to the headship of the nation the " malice towards none," the " charity for all," the " firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right," the broad and deep human sym- pathy, the legal learning, the unrivaled gift of statement, the per- spective which placed the Union above all else, the statesmanship that rose above all partisanship, and the commanding genius which could lead the Republic through the Red sea ; for these were the great attributes of Abraham Lincoln. ELECTION AS COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION 1 Remarks and motion of Vice Chancellor McKelway Gentlemen of the Board of Regents: Before we proceed to any- other business at this meeting, I wish to provide for the orderly progress of our transactions for future years. My intention is to ask the Board to elect a Commissioner of Education to serve dur- ing the pleasure of the Board, and I shall nominate Dr Andrew S. Draper to succeed himself. I know this is the unanimous intention of the Board, and the unanimous desire of the universities, academies, common schools, and of all the bodies whatever in any way affected by an interest in education or by a responsibility for it, in our Commonwealth. I know also that Dr Draper's election will confirm the expectation of every state in our Union and of every nation abroad with which we officially have educational relations of any kind. This is Dr Draper's first election by us. It is his reelection, how- ever, to this office. Six years ago he was elected to the office by the Legislature and the law prescribed that, after his first term, the Board of Regents should itself choose his successors. That method of procedure was wise when it was adopted. It signal- ized the effected unification of our state educational system. It substituted unity for duality, and harmony for inherent liabilities of discord, division and like factors of friction. The prescribed system and the prescribed man to be its executive have got along well together. The Board of Regents can claim that their choice of the Commissioner for a life term is a vindication of the first choice of him for this office by the Legislature and of the action of the Legislature in its investment of us with the choice of future commissioners. I should like to say many things in merited eulogy of Dr Draper's administration, but our unanimous designation of him for life will substitute vindication for praise, and action speaks louder and tells longer than words. I am restrained from tribute because he is in our presence, and does not like being praised when he is around. I am further restrained because when we praise his administration we praise ourselves as a part of it. Praise to the face is the first line of a rhymed couplet I would not even suggest, and praise of ourselves can well be outwardly omitted, no matter how much we may inwardly feel it is deserved. 1 Reprinted from Journal of Regents Meeting, March 31, 1910. l68 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT I will be excused from more than saying that we are content to let Dr Draper be judged by his record, and ourselves to be judged by our continuance of him and by our identification with him in the educational work of the state. He has been faithful, industrious, untiring, wise, firm, conservative, patient, tactful, just, and sanely progressive. Less should not, and more, when fully interpreted, could not be said of him, and naught better can be said of us, if it can be said that we have been, or have sought to be, as true to his best intendments as he has been to our best intendments in the cognate work the state has required of ourselves and of him. Gentlemen, I nominate Dr Draper for State Commissioner of Education, and await your further pleasure. Remarks of Regent Pliny T. Sexton Mr Vice Chancellor: You have with such felicitous phrase and fitting feeling spoken, as I feel sure, the thoughts of all of us, that added words can be but those of needless iteration. But yet, husbands and wives delight to tell, over and over, of their love for each other, and the more so, perhaps, the more sure they feel of their mutual affection. And I am glad to avail myself of the privilege, which my relative seniority in this Board may allow me, of being the first to second the nomination of the Hon. Andrew S. Draper for reelection as Commissioner of Education of the State of New York. In some countries where freedom is less understood and freedom of action less known than in ours, marriages are often made for people, and not by them. They are brought together as compara- tive strangers and have to learn to love and trust each other after- ward, if at all. And, continuing a little the simile of the marriage relation, I may say that the union between Commissioner Draper and the Board of Regents was not, in its origin, one of mutual agreement. It was forced upon us by an act of the Legislature which did not have our approval. We met him after our legislative marriage, six years ago, with minds full of questioning, on our part, and doubtless he had thoughts of uncertainty and apprehension. But his frankness of speech, cordiality of spirit, and evident large mindedness and singleness of purpose to devote himself and all of his manifested great powers to the promotion of the educational welfare of this state, cleared the atmosphere and won us to him at once. As he then revealed himself to us, we realized his eminent fitness for his place, and I said to myself, at the close of that first ELECTION AS COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATON 169 meeting, " There is a man to stand by, and I am going to stand by him." Such, I believe, was the impression which he made upon us all, and it has been abundantly justified. The Legislature did not, by its enactment of 1904, unify the edu- cational system of the state. It stopped far short of that. It left the door open for possibly greater abuses and dissensions than had before prevailed. But, by a compact made at that first meeting be- tween the Commissioner of Education and the Board of Regents — a compact which would have been impossible with a man of less greatness of thought and sincerity of purpose — the actual educational unification which thoughtful educators had so long prayerfully hoped for became an accomplished fact and has since existed as an immeasurable blessing to the people of this Common- wealth. We have learned to love and trust Commissioner Draper, since our official marriage with him. We have come to feel that he is entitled to our unquestioning confidence and admiration, not only as to his sincerity of purpose, but as to his great, almost un- paralleled capacity for the special duty in life to which he has been called. I do not regard the action we are about to take on this occasion, except in a formal or technical sense, as his reelection. Rather, we are here today to reaffirm, gladly, the vows of unity with him which we plighted six years ago with no little trepidation. The union then begun has come to be regarded as providentially ar- ranged and, borrowing from the church a ritualistic phrase — bene- dictive words — I would say, " Those whom God hath joined to- gether let no man put asunder." Remarks of Regent Albert Vander Veer Mr Vice Chancellor, may I be permitted to occupy just a moment? I want to say that it gives me great pleasure to speak of the loyal atmosphere that I know prevails within the walls of this building toward one who has been our executive officer and for whom we have this morning demonstrated our loyalty and affection, as has been mentioned in the nomination by the Vice Chancellor and in the seconding of the same by Regent Sexton. I wish, Mr Vice Chancellor, to refer to one sentence in your re- marks — " We have to confirm the expectation of our sister states." It has been my good fortune during the past few months in hotel drawing-rooms to talk of our educational institutions in this state, 170 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT with men of other states, and in every instance there has been a ready and cordial reference to the excellent work that is being done in this state, and especially to that done by the Commissioner of Education. I only wish to add these few words in seconding this nomination. Thereupon Vice Chancellor McKelway announced that a ballot upon the question of the choice of a Commissioner of Education would be had and appointed Regents Shedden and Carpenter to re- ceive and record the ballot. After the ballot had been taken Vice Chancellor McKelway announced that each Regent present had voted and that each vote cast was for Dr Andrew S. Draper for Commissioner of Education. He also announced that all of the Regents who were unavoidably absent from the meeting had ex- pressed a desire to have their intentions and preferences for the election of Dr Draper recorded in the minutes. Response of the Commissioner of Education Gentlemen of the Board of Regents: The remarks of Vice Chan- cellor McKelway and of Regents Sexton and Vander Veer, as well as the messages from all absent members, not even excepting Chan- cellor Reid, the Ambassador of the United States to Great Britain, have touched me deeply. The evident sincerity and the entire unanimity of these expressions give new charm and value to the one treasure that is of most worth in life or that can long endure after death. Knowing that your protestations are genuine, I can not seem to be unaware that they are overgenerous. The fact is that we are more than officials ; we are friends. The law and the Legislature brought us together. Neither of us promoted the passage of the law or prompted the course of the Legislature in electing the Com- missioner of Education. It was because New York meant so much to me, and because I could refuse nothing that she would ask, that I again accepted her commission. But it was accepted with appre- hension. Both before and after the beginning of the term there were days when I was sorry the responsibility had not gone to an- other. The two departments that were to be unified were hostile camps, and tense feeling extended to all parts of the state. Even you and I could not interpret the new statute to mean the same things. But the responsibility and the opportunity steadied us. It would be humiliating to have the supreme effort of the state for educational unity end in worse confusion than before. It would ELECTION AS COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATON 171 mean much to effect what the state had hoped for in vain for an hundred years. We talked soberly and earnestly. We drew upon all the sense we had. We gathered all of our legal powers together and reassigned them upon a plan that was workable because logical and sane. We entered into a troth. For six years the orderly and efficient procedure of the greatest public educational organization in America has rested upon that compact. I have never before worked with a board to whose meetings I looked forward with anticipations of such unmixed pleasure. You have given me your confidence and you have had mine. You have kept nothing from me, and while I can not mention everything that transpires in the Department, I have kept from you nothing which, if I were in your places, I would think I ought to know. We ap- proached our task from experiences that were unlike and from points of view that were often opposed. The organization has been the stronger for that. Since getting started we have had little ap- prehension because we knew that men who were not self-seeking could settle mere differences of thought in quiet discussion about the council board. We have had these discussions, often and in earnest, but you have never had to put a divided vote upon the record, and we have never been in sight of the point of personal estrangement, or anywhere in the realm of danger to the high trusts committed to our care. So we have tried each other out. That has enabled us to agree upon a general revision of the Education Law which is well on its way through the Legislature and which promises to make all that we have done secure. 1 Out of our ex- periences, respect and regard and success have grown. It is that which makes your expressions concerning me overgenerous, and creates the possibility of your giving me credit which belongs to yourselves and to others. In accepting and thanking you for the indefinite extension of my commission, as I do, I thank you even more for the encourage- ment, the abstinence from all that could embarrass me, and all of the delightful personal relations that have preceded, have led up to, and are associated with it. It is a boon to have the health and the capacity and the desire for work, no matter what the work may be. It is a distinct opportunity in life to be privileged to do such work as this, and with such men. For it I thank you with all my heart. It would be absurd to assume that any of us or all of us monopo- lize the credit for this excellent work. There are many men and 1 This bill became a law April 22, 19 10. 172 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT women in the Education Department, and more in both official and private station in every city and town in the state, who have had their share in the burden and are entitled to an undivided part in the credit of it. Passing from the more personal to the more public aspects of the situation, it must be said that the election of a Commissioner of Education by the Board of Regents signalizes the consummation of the legal scheme of educational unification in New York which was decreed in the statute of 1904. It does more : It marks the end of an old order and completes the inauguration of a new. In infinite ways the old order brought strength, power and distinction to the state, but we will fondly believe that the new order will be firmer in its structure than the old, and will bring more strength, more power, and more distinction to the state. It is impossible and unnecessary to refer in any detail to the events of the six j^ears that have gone. They are summed up in our complete agreement upon rules of procedure and upon a new educa- tion law that will make us secure ; in a great organization of three hundred people that was compounded out of two antagonistic or- ganizations without much commotion, and that operates without friction and is highly efficient ; in the monumental building that is well advanced to completion for our accommodation ; in the fact that we have administered more than thirty millions of dollars without a scandal or criticism ; in the now universally accepted fact that we have eliminated all politics from that organization and put education above partisanship of whatever kind ; and in the further fact, greater than all, that universal comity and good will have been established in all parts of the state, and that we are able to see new energy and added promise in all that pertains to New York educa- tion. That we and others concerned have brought out the possibilities of good rather than of further confusion that were latent in the new law, lends peculiar satisfaction to this quiet election; but the significance of it ought not to be obscured by the fact that it has been preceded by no canvass, attended by no excitement, and marked by no differences of opinion. Wholly regardless of our relation to it, this little election is what New York has needed, and what the thinking people of the state have hoped for, for a century and a quarter. New York was the first American state to establish a state edu- cational organization. The University of the State of New York is ELECTION AS COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATON 173 the oldest, as it is the most authoritative, state educational organiza- tion in the Union. The Board which I have the honor to address is encompassed by more maturity, dignity, authority, and entranc- ing traditions than any other public educational body that ever sat in America. But for one hundred and twenty years the democratic thought of the state, often and steadily, refused to give this Board any control over the elementary school system. So strong was this feeling that it sometimes menaced the very existence of the Board itself. The Educational Unification Act of 1904 was the first real concession by those who, with or without reason, had looked with apprehension upon the possibility of subordinating the public schools to the interests or the control of the academies and colleges. An expression of confidence in the men who constitute the Board of Regents ; the desire to separate all the schools from all partisanship ; an admission of the necessity of abating a sepa- rateness and ill feeling that had become intolerable; and the hope of bringing the quickening influence of the higher schools to the uplift of the lower ones, are the factors that may be found in that concession. In all this there was some fortunate breaking down of the old and tenacious feeling that the higher learning was not prac- ticable, and some happy yielding of the old prejudice against a directorate that was widely believed, though unjustly, to be more aristocratic and theoretical than sympathetic and real. The Board of Regents, as well as the democratic and educational progress of the state, will feel the influences of this. The higher learning will be yet more practical. The sympathies as well as the prerogatives of the Board of Regents will be broadened. Out of it there will emerge a new purpose to keep the educational system in equilibrium while adapting it to all the people and all the situations and voca- tions of the state. Tomorrow morning it will be twenty-four years since I came into this room as State Superintendent of Public Instruction. I have always had some special satisfaction in the fact that sixteen years ago — ten years before the Unification Act of 1904, and when I ex- pected that I would not again have any official relation with New York education — I responded to an invitation of the State Con- stitutional Convention and advised that the Board of Regents be empowered to fill the office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. But that office was far removed from the one you have filled today. Had the suggestion been accepted, some little headway would doubt- less have been accomplished, but nothing like the present possibili- 174 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT ties would have been opened to us. In other words, the Unifica- tion Act of 1904 as we have executed it, and now the new Educa- tion Law, extend indefinitely both the legislative and executive powers of our educational government. The conflicts and confusion are disappearing because functions have been separated scientifically and powers are being exercised along rational, distinct, and effective lines. As I said to you six years ago, " Bodies legislate : indi- viduals execute. We shall invite failure if we confuse legislative and executive functions. The people of a democracy prefer that policies shall be settled by more than one person ; executive functions can not be exercised effectually by a board." I had thought much upon it. I knew it meant a new and a necessary departure in the educational administration of the state. Your board does not sit in judgment upon the individual acts of the Commissioner. It enter- tains no appeals from any determination of his. Neither does it assume any responsibility for anything he may do or say. It legis- lates upon educational policies. It controls the integrity of the educational organization. It assumes that the acts of the Commis- sioner of Education will accord with the law and the rules and reso- lutions of the Board. If they should persistently fail to do so, the Board would elect another engineer who could see the lights more clearly. If the Board is not responsible for what the Commis- sioner says or does, so long as he keeps within the law and the declared policies of the Board, so the Commissioner is not re- sponsible for the action of the Board. He is to keep his right of expression and exercise it with deference, but he is to accustom himself to the duty of an executive. The duty of an executive is the execution of the law. If the Commissioner has views upon questions of policy and expediency, as he ought to have, he is bound to express them, and to express them even more freely to you than to others, but when you have voted he is to carry your action into effect. I have no mental reservations about this. If the pending education bill becomes a law, and so far as we safely may until it becomes a law, the Board of Regents will freely exercise legislative power and directory authority over all of the state's educational activities. What you do you will do by resolution and write it in your journal. That will make the chart by which the Commissioner will try to guide the ship. He will carefully and cheerfully observe it. The Commissioner of Education will have the initiative about all appointments. He will promote the spirit as well as observe the ELECTION AS COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATON 175 letter of the civil service laws, and he will respect, so far as prac- ticable, the opinions of all concerned about the character and com- petency of public service. You will have the approval of all ap- pointments. You will also have joint control with the Commis- sioner over the organization of divisions in the Education Depart- ment, and in the classifying and assignment of work. So you will exercise a large measure of control over the integrity, the respon- siveness, and potentiality of the Department. But whatever you do you will do as a Board. The present members of the Board have never shown any disposition to do things which a Board as such can not or should not do, and it is to be hoped that all future mem- bers will be guided by your excellent example. Administrative free- dom is just as vital as legislative freedom, or judicial freedom, or teaching freedom, or any other kind of freedom. Within his sphere the Commissioner of Education is to be just as free as you are in yours, or as the Governor of the state is in his. It is so not only because it is good policy that it should be so, but because the law arranges that it shall be so. The office which you have filled today finds its standing and its attributes in the law. Its beginnings go back an hundred years to a time when no other state thought of such an office. Long years ago it was made a judicial office. It construes the school laws and determines what acts are within or without the laws. Its determinations of such matters can not be called in question in the courts or in any other place. But as the Legislature may amend the laws so as to avoid or change the construction which the Commissioner might put upon them, so the Board of Regents may do the same as to all acts over which its legislative authority extends. Wholly apart from this, the office inherited much in the way of usage and tradition from its predecessors, the office of Superintendent of Public Instruction and that of Secretary of the Board of Regents. I fondly hope that in the last six years it has grown greater than either or both of those were. But it is far from its maximum of influence and its possibili- ties of accomplishment. There are no upper limits in such work as ours. I used to hear it said in Illinois, and I have heard it suggested here, that the Board might think differently in some ways about the standing and the independence of the executive office if satisfied that the present incumbent would live forever, or if it could be known what kind of a successor there would be. That is compli- mentary but unconvincing. The office of Commissioner of Educa- 176 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT tion in New York is a great office, the office of greatest educational possibilities in the United States. Not at the expense of any man ; not by the diminution of any other office; only by making it use- ful and influential, I am going to make it just as much greater as I can. That is to be done not by any self-aggrandizement, not by trying to make it a stepping-stone to something else, not by limit- ing and harassing other people, but by making the most of every other office, and by getting the most out of every individual in any way related to it. It is to be done by uplifting the Board of Regents ; by giving the utmost freedom to each Assistant Commissioner, each Director, each Chief of Division, every worker in the Department no matter how high or how humble his station ; and by rendering every possible service to every organization and every person in the state who has any interest about self-culture or any concern about general welfare. You have the filling of this office. You have the shaping of the policies it is to follow. You have ample power to keep it from mistakes. That is enough. I am not to limit the growth of this office because of the possibility of your making a mistake when you elect another Commissioner of Education. The time might come when there would be even as much trouble about getting the right Regents, as the right Commissioner. The law provides that the Commissioner " may be elected without regard to the place of his residence, whether it be within or without the State of New York." I am proud to recall that that was put in so that I might be elected. It may possibly be of interest to you again. It is not likely that you will have to go outside of New York, but if there is need you may. You may go wherever you will in all the broad world. It implies the presumption of which I am not guilty, or the indifference with which you have never been charged, to doubt that you will find a greater man when the occasion comes. And whether there be com- fort in it or not, I tell you that I am going to make the task just as difficult for you as I can. If I can raise the office of Commis- sioner of Education to a plane where the people will expect much of you, and will give you trouble if you do not search far and ex- ercise soundly the free discretion which you have, when it is to be filled again, then one of the great ambitions of my life will have been attained. We have a finely organized, even a unique, system of public edu- cation in New York. It is firmly established in the history, the ex- pectations, the confidence, and the law of the state. It has great ELECTION AS COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATON 1 77 possibilities. We have proved that we can work together to de- velop the possibilities of good rather than of evil that are in this system. We will go on working together. We have now passed the trial stages of this movement. We will go on with confidence and courage, without too much sentiment and without hesitation. We will have as little foolishness as possible, and there are too many of us to have any foolishness much prolonged. Of course, there will be mishaps and mistakes now and then, but we will try to accomplish so much that the mistakes will not be very conspicu- ous. We will help one another in leading all men and women in the state, and in all the states, to believe that the New York Educa- tion Department is without a peer. We will try to compel all men to see that the New York system of education holds out the equal chance to every one in the state, and also lifts the plane of intelli- gence and enlarges the free intellectual power of the mass, above any other system of education in the world. THE LAW OF EQUIPOISE President Thiving, Gentlemen of the Board of Trustees, Ladies and Gentlemen, and, more particularly, you, Young Men and Women of the Class of 1910: This is a radiant scene. It is a scene which is almost peculiar to this country. There is no more fas- cinating spectacle than a college class on a Commencement morning in June, waiting for the degrees which they have earned in an American university. You have come from every walk in life; you are young and in ruddy health ; you have minds that are keen and have been somewhat trained in one of the great schools of the land; you have hearts that are both sympathetic and cour- ageous; you have ambitions that have been a little seasoned by rebuff's and are yet wholly undaunted ; you are ready for work and looking for achievement. Therefore you arouse the interest and challenge the admiration of the world. What is said to you, or about you, is not empty compliment. It may be impulsive, but it comes from substantial impulses. It is sincere. It flows from feelings which you will understand some day better than now. There is no one against you. All the world wishes you well. The full, free, open chance of American youth is yours. Good wishes and genuine hopes, quite as much as plaud- its and presents and congratulations, are yours today. But the world will not carry you upon its hands for long. You will have to assume the responsibilities of your own characters. You will have to make your own places. Your characters will have to advance against resistance : they will have to withstand assaults without much snivelling or wabbling. If they are of the kind that can do that, the places which you will make for your- selves will be both respectable and secure. As you go down out of this Commencement hall you will turn your faces to a busy world; one that throbs with energy and spirit, in which the prizes are many and the competitions sharp; one in which the accidents do not count as much as some people think ; one in which the trained, and seasoned, and genuine, and balanced, men and women will make the largest places and gather the most fruits. Your relatives and friends, certainly those who have had a part in your training, have little disposition to urge unwelcome preachments upon you, but they can not help wondering what the world contains for you. f ; ; Address at the commencement exercises of Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, June 16, 1910. THE LAW OF EQUIPOISE 1 79 The world sets up different standards of success, but by no one of them will you succeed ill equal measure. A generation from now you will be at the full of mature development, and then you will be upon very different planes. No one can tell now which of you will be in the lead. Some of you will exert a greater influence and gain a richer share of the world's respect and rewards than others. Some of you will make more of life for yourselves and for all about you than others will, but we know that no one can now tell which of your number they will be. My thought for you today is that God has created the world in equipoise, and that that life will become the richest, will reach the furthest and accomplish the most, which obeys the laws of the Almighty and stands in harmonious relations with a universal plan. The sun and the planets and their moons, the star-suns and very likely the unseen planets and their satellites of other systems to a number and a distance where human vision, aided by mechanical devices and supported by the known laws of matter and by mathe- matical computations, fades into uncertainty and where human com- prehension loses itself in chaos — all balance each other and hold to their courses in eternal and infinite space. And with our own world, and with other worlds, the days and the seasons alternate steadily. Temperature and precipitation average alike. The tides rise and fall. So it lias been always. The rivers run to the sea, but " unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again." " The wind whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits." [Eccl. 1 : 6-7] The soils are decaying as well as producing. The paths of nature run into themselves again. Matter moves in cycles and under the law of equipoise. We know little of light, heat, sound, or electricity, but we seem to see that they move in cycles and seek their equilibrium. And the great movements of matter, the great periodic forces of nature, seem to have relations with the greatest phenomena in life. The turning of the earth upon its axis, the circuits of the earth about the sun and of the moon about the earth, seem to fix the periodicity of the most vital changes in the world's life. It may safely be said that the application of the laws of periodic- ity and of equipoise has given us the most notable discoveries in all of the natural and physical sciences that have enriched the store of the world's information. And as with matter and with motion and with life, so with thought. The history of our race, which has been made and written l8o NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT by the world's thought, is but the record of affairs moving in great cycles of time. There has been an ebb and flow in the great tide of human thought. Civilizations have come and gone. Governments have arisen and perished. Inventions and discoveries have run in epochs. Marked advances in knowledge and skill have been fol- lowed by marked depressions. Great waves of human sympathy and great outbursts of human passion have alternated. Peace and war have followed each other. Let the spirit of a community be in equilibrium, alive and yet content, and all is well. It means shelter and food and clothing, added strength and greater possessions for all who will work for them. It sets up a common power to secure the rights of person and property to all. There is plenty and there is security where there is no disturbance and where economic law is given free sway and universal application. Disturbances of what we have accepted as the regular order only prove, as our vision widens, the perfection of the equilibrium which is beyond our ken. The seeming irregularity of a planet indicated the existence and led to the discovery of another planet ; and now the perturbations of that other planet indicate that there is another, and possibly still others, beyond. We have recently had a brilliant and heroic visitor in our skies. His dimensions are mentioned in millions and his course in billions of miles. His velocity is more than forty miles to the second. He has not only whirled around our heavens, but he has dashed across the orbits of this earth and the other worlds of our planetary sys- tem. He has been here before. He comes about every seventy- five years. He has observed the period so closely that we know he has periodicity, and yet, perhaps stranger than all, the period has varied as much as two years in the last three centuries. That such a vast body should come out of and then return into infinite space for such a period amazes us, and his known irregularity amazes us even more. There is but one refuge. Halley's comet like all else is within God's infinite law of equipoise. If the earth and sun and planets and stars and moons, and the comets, are all governed by that law, what can justify our rebelling against it? There is something stupendously grand and solemn about this unceasing, onward, balanced, periodic, rhythmic motion of every- thing in matter and every energy in life. We are foolish if we do not see that it is all under the control of a Power above and out- side of ourselves, and all pursuant to universal law. If it is grand and solemn to see that all created things are obedient to a law THE LAW OF EQUIPOISE l8l that is broader and higher than the things of our world, it is still more so to realize that we should face chaos and must abandon hope in the absence of such law. In the very fact that the routine is un- ceasing and progressive we find satisfaction and inspiration. It does open to our weak vision the uncertain pathway of human progress. It gives confidence in a higher destiny and strengthens the purpose to reckon with it. If all matter and all energy and all thought are subject to God's omniscient law of equipoise and advancement, a single being can not hope to disregard it and still be successful in the small things of life. The law is constant: man is the free agent and the un- certain factor in the problem. Individuals who start from the same point, with even oppor- tunities and purposes equally correct, come out at very different ends. Few mark out a precise roadway in life and no one precisely follows the road which his mind may have outlined. There are elements in ourselves which we do not know and can not estimate, and time will find us in environing conditions which time alone can reveal. Plans will miscarry and expectations be disappointed. It does not necessarily follow that the departure from our plan will be the worse for us. What you now think you most want you are more than likely not to get. This is not a reflection upon the in- experience of youth. At no time in life can we decide with entire confidence what is most desirable in the future. It is said that in early life General Grant cherished the hope of becoming a physi- cian, and always regretted that the hope was not realized. The fact is, we can not see and we do not know about things in advance of us. Failure to accomplish an undertaking has more than once opened the way for something of vastly more importance. Many lives are barren of results because many men insist upon predicating present action upon events which are a long way in the future and which they can not foresee. They are so cautious, or so cowardly, that they accomplish nothing. We are to make the best plans we can, seek to make every cycle of our lives an advance upon the last one, and take with composure whatever may come to us. If we can take what comes with equanimity it is quite possible that we shall obtain more rather than less than we now expect. It is more than likely to be so if we build our characters to balance themselves - and then keep them in equilibrium with the people and the con- ditions about us. Find the point of equipoise between seeing and aiming and do- ing. Some spend their lives in gaping; others aim high but seldom l82 NliVV YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT hit the target; still others are always doing, without either looking or aiming, and of course they are continually blundering. To me the most trying ones of all are those who mean well and do ill continually, as some good people seem prone to do. Some men de- liberate so wisely and so long that they never get to the point of ex- ercising their energies, and the powers which make for advance- ment shrink to the vanishing point for lack of use. Some look wise and say little, and though they are dreadfully trying at times, it must be confessed that others who know more and are stronger than they, would often fare better and be less trying by following their example. The life that accomplishes things is the one that has ideals, sees with what eyes it has, exercises the judgment it pos- sesses within the limits of time which the occasion allows, and goes ahead doing something. And the life that accomplishes the most things is the one that has the noblest ideals, is trained to the greatest acuteness of vision, is capable of the most rational reason- ing, has the greatest courage and force of execution, and above all is able to keep these high endowments in equilibrium. Live in harmonious and enthusiastic relations with your work. There is work of some sort for every one to do. If one has not adjusted himself to some sort of work, there is something the mat- ter. We may not find work exactly to our liking ; indeed, there are people who find it difficult to fall in love with any kind of work. But you will be at fault if you do not in a little time find congenial employment. Work is largely what we make it, and, if we make of it all we may, it commonly leads to something better, for the world honors the man who is in love with his work and who is proud of it, no matter what the work may be. Fortunate indeed is the man who has the opportunity and the disposition to work; who does not make the hours tedious by watching the clock; who does not grieve for lack of moneyed reward, but who works for work's sake and finds the hours speeding cheerily on, because of the satisfaction he feels in producing results. Do the work that comes to your hands, and assume other and yet other things to do. Dwell not so much upon the wages as upon health and knowledge and skill to do more and better work. The rewards will take care of themselves more surely than in the case of the man who spends so much energy in bringing about an increase in wages that he has little life and pride in the prosecution of his work. Be prudent, but do not be overprudent, as we commonly under- stand the word ; at least see that prudence does not develop into cowardliness and meanness. "A penny saved is a penny earned " THE LAW OF EQUIPOISE 183 is a maxim which is not true, and one which has stood in the way of many a man's success. The penny earned and rightly used is what makes wealth. In many an instance the penny saved is a dollar lost. Indeed, in many an instance the penny saved is public respect and fraternal regard lost. There is wealth which is not measured in gold, and yet is better worth the having. At the end of life some men have plenty of money and no culture of mind or heart; and some have culture and no money. But there is substantial wealth in both. They should supplement each other. It is pitiable to have culture and lack the means to gratify it ; and it is lamentable to have money and so lack in culture that you do not know what to do with it, and hold it as a miser or spend it like a fool. It is infinitely better to so manage matters that you are likely to have wealth of both kinds. It is not always wise to avoid all risks. He who waits for sure things that are of much moment is liable to lose the greatest oppor- tunities and die while yet waiting. We have no right to involve others, but we have the right to weigh some chances against our own individuality. The student who has health and mental capacity but no money, but who borrows money to gain an education which he knows he wants, and who insures his life to secure the lender, does not do an unwise or an imprudent thing. The man who accum- ulates is the man who assumes obligations and takes risks with the confidence that he can work them off, as ordinarily he does, rather than the man who spends his time in saving his money while denying his body and his mind and his heart the nourishment they need. Forty years ago twin Quaker brothers purchased the site for a summer resort in the heart of the mountains that give beauty and grandeur to the western shore of the Hudson river, and paid for it a moderate sum, which, however, was ten thousand dollars more than they were both worth. Since then they have refused overtures running into the millions for their property. Beyond that, they have made the mountains teem with life and have given health and unspeakable pleasure to multitudes. Even more than that, they have called people there in conference, whose declarations have affected the acts of nations and modified the thought of the world. The man who sets and keeps the world's wheels in motion and makes of himself a leader in our common humanity, while he lifts us all to a higher plane, is not the man who waits until movements are successful and then tries to board the train and take advantage of what some one else has done, but rather he is the man who sees 184 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT and feels and acts, asking only for an even chance, in the con- fidence that his own weight and energy will accomplish the rest. Let the will balance the emotions. If we throttle the feelings we are little more than mechanism refined: if we become hysteric we defeat our own desires and make of ourselves a laughingstock. We are to nourish and restrain them. He who lacks integrity of feeling lacks effectiveness of action. It is spirit that lifts the indi- vidual and drives the world ; but it is spirit that is guided by intelli- gence and controlled by the will, which makes headway and gains respect. Bear disappointment with composure, and affliction with forti- tude. The noise one makes does not measure the sorrow he suf- fers. Let the hatreds be outlawed by a short statute of limitations. After a hard blow straighten up as soon as may be and readjust yourselves to the new conditions as quickly as you can. Carry your steadiness with you and do not leave your civility and generosity at home when you move among the people and push into the activities of the world. General Horace Porter tells us that in the Battle of the Wilder- ness a Confederate general, Edward Johnson, was captured. He showed so much character that the officer at the battle front, into whose hands he had fallen, gave him a horse and directed him im- mediately to General Grant's headquarters. He had been in the Mili- tary Academy at West Point with General Mead, and in the Mexican War with General Grant. He was disheartened in spirit, exhausted in body and bedraggled with the stains of battle. He did not forget to take his civility and his power to adjust himself along with him when he went, a prisoner of war, up to the headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief of the Union armies. As he dis- mounted and saluted, the highest officers in the army grasped his hand warmly and expressed sympathy with their distinguished prisoner. Grant referred to their last meeting and the Confederate replied respectfully and expressed chagrin at the present situation. Grant said : " It is one of the fortunes of war : it may be me next time," and with his own hand he placed a chair near the fire, offered a cigar as a token of peace, and added : " Be seated, and we will do all in our power to make you as comfortable as we can." General Johnson accepted the proffered courtesies with " Thank you, General, thank you. I knew you would be civil to me, but your kindness surprises and sustains me." After pleasant conversation about old times and the chances of war, he was given another horse and sent back to the base of supplies, and that time THE LAW OF EQUIPOISE 185 he took with him the respect and good wishes of men whose respect then was and thereafter would be of some account to him. On the same day General Hancock captured another general officer of the Confederacy. Hancock had known him in the old army, and rode up to shake his hand. The unhappy man drew back and said haughtily: " Under present circumstances Sir, I must decline to take your hand." The superb Union officer answered, with spirit, " Under any other circumstances, General, I should not have offered it," and sent him trudging to the rear on foot, to enable him to have ample time to get the mental discipline he needed by chewing the cud of sadness and bitterness along the way. We may walk or ride, be comfortable or miserable, be respected or contemned, just as we are able to control ourselves. " There's nothing so kingly as kindness," but it is very unkingly to let kindness descend into insipidity. Help your fellow creature when you can, if your help will really aid him. Support the weak and assist the unfortunate. Remove your hat and extend your arm to the aged. Put your shoulder under public institutions which minister to the suffering, and those other public institutions which promote the higher life of all. But remember that the world is cursed with mistaken kindness. He who feeds a common tramp at his door only exposes his home to danger and supports and propagates pestiferous people without helping them. Nothing is more prolific of mendicancy than giving support to people who are able to support themselves. First they will ask it as a favor, then lean upon it as a necessity, and then demand it as a right. If you would prolong and multiply your friendships, do not bor- row and do not lend except on a business basis and for sufficient security. It is true that honor is sometimes adequate security, but it is equally true that the man of honor dislikes personal obliga- tions or special favors and prefers to insure his friend against loss in a way which will surely enable him to realize in the coin of the realm. It is well to have it settled in advance whether a transfer of value is but the discharge of an honorable obligation which you owe, or is a gift to aid a person in whom you are interested or a cause in which you believe, or is a loan upon a business footing; for it is well to have the credit of giving what you ought, to have the satis- faction of giving when a loan is likely to become a gift m any event and to permit the other party to retain his entire independence if it is but a business loan. In a word, scatter gifts when the spirit 1 86 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT moves, and try to have the spirit move when it ought; extend honors when the opportunity offers ; grant a favor when you may, if your favor is likely to help another, but grant it as a boon and refuse it unhesitatingly and peremptorily when it is demanded as a right, for when you go beyond that point you are destroying your own independence and dealing harm rather than good to all the persons and all the interests concerned. Think now and then of the point of equipoise between personal independence and good citizenship. " Independence " seems to be born and bred in us. The very word has a rhythmic, musical sound to the American ear. Independence and self-dependence are taught from the kindergarten to the university. Because our citizenship is free and the suffrage universal, we hear talk about every man being an " uncrowned king." Political parties seek support on the declaration that they care nothing for the view of any other nation. Yet we are each but a single fiber of a single strand of a single thread of a broad fabric which has been centuries in the weaving and which has been slowly put together under the rule of economic law. Remember how much all the people and all the things about you mean. Recall the family circle, the neighborhood set, the social structure, the church organization, the fraternal order, the city, state, and national institutions, and see how helpless you would be if they were taken out of your life. After all, success is measured by the number of friendships, the depth of the sympathy, and the extent of the training we get, through our contacts with the people and the institutions about us. We are not, and in the nature of things we can not be, a law unto ourselves. There are obligations between friends, acquaint- ances, citizens, which are personal and mutual. We are all subject to the common customs, traditions and understandings of the race. One wfluo does not know this and act upon it is a social and public burden. The organizations, establishments and institutions of the civil state spring from the people. The people never ordained them to afford us a living, but to supply the opportunities and facilities for self-culture, and to give us security in the right to work peace- fully and enjoy the fruits of our labor without interference. He who tries to reverse the natural order of things and get his living out of the organizations and institutions which the people have es- tablished for their common good ; he who withholds from them the full measure of his enthusiastic support, becomes a pitiable depend- ent, a poor if not a bad citizen, and generally a discredited man. THE LAW OF EQUIPOISE 187 Every man who builds a house, paves a street, lays a sewer, mows a lawn, starts a factory, stands up for a better school, supports a church, cheers for a party, fights for the integrity of the suffrage and sternly punishes venality in political life, contributes to the common good, and, more surely than in any other way, to his own permanent advancement. Don't be a knocker and a pessimist: be a builder and an optimist. But, above all, be frank and honest. The man who neglects to do these things when he can and ought, shrinks into insignificance. Selfishness defeats itself. Have an individuality of your own, and as you pass out of this university commence a work and a manner of life which in time will put the world under obligations to you. Do not spend too much time seeking devices to save labor ; do not lay plans to get something for nothing; do not deceive yourselves into thinking that there may be a road to prosperity and eminence which is not paved with anxiety and filled with intelligent and honest toil ; do not sponge on fraternal orders ; do not think you are better than other people, when you are only narrow and mean ; never tap the life currents of civilization ; and never advertise your business on the fair face of the flag. The world has come to its present state through long centuries of wise and heroic effort, as well as through appalling suffering. The world's progress and your opportunities and rights are predicated upon all this labor and sorrow. Every missionary who has car- ried the banner of the cross into the fastnesses of ignorance and superstition ; every statesman who has promoted the enlargement of the world's civilization ; every soldier who has laid down his life to extend the limits of popular freedom and more firmly es- tablish the foundations of government by the people under the forms of law ; every one who has stood for the integrity of free institu- tions ; every ministering angel who has given succor to a suffering one ; every one who has quickened intelligence or aroused ambition ; every artist who has developed the beautiful ; every scholar who has unlocked the truth; every one who has stood for the right upon any field or resisted the wrong under whatever guise, has been a force in working out the world's regeneration and placed every one of us under enduring obligations to him. It is the people who have sense enough to appreciate these obli- gations, and who have vitality and honor enough to attempt to discharge them, rather than the people who are only able to reason that the world owes them a living, who must inevitably count most heavily and come to be of the most consequence in the world's affairs. ISO NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT We are not only in debt to the past, but we are dependent upon the present and the future. The one who starts in life with the idea that he can be independent is the one who soon finds himself under a debt so large and with effects so small that he is discouraged before the race is half run, and ends it in utter distress and humiliation. All of the great and true interests of the world are interdependent. I do not lose sight of nature's different gifts to different individuals, and I know that they are variable ; but I know, also, that the laws of heredity do not determine the success or fail- ure of life so much as training and experience do. The habits of mind, the trend of the feelings, the scope of the outlook, the dis- position and spirit, settle the question ; and these are acquired from the people with whom we associate and the circumstances and events with which we are in contact. Of course the will plays a part in the matter, but the will also is not independent of environ- ment and cultivation. The whole world is relative. What we be- come and what we acquire we must get out of the people by whom and the conditions by which we are surrounded. The success we attain will be measured by the clearness and exactness with which we understand the relations we sustain to the world in which we move. We can not hope for more than that we and our acts shall constitute a small and respectable part of the mass of people and the round of events which make up the aggregate of humanity and give direction and force to the world's activities. That part may be unique and it must rest upon a footing of its own in exerting in- fluence upon others. But the beauty and strength of individuality will depend upon the correct understanding of the fact that he who aspires to be a master among men must not only have ideas, but ideas which are of advantage to the race; must have tact as well as tenacity and courage in advancing those ideas, and above all, must become the generous servant of the interests which he would pro- mote. The writers and speakers who address young people very fre- quently compare life to a great battle. I myself have implied that. The implication is that force and strategy are the main elements which count for success. The simile is often unfortunate and the in- ference unsound. The people are not all at war. Those who are waste their substance and lose their chances, while their more rational associates enjoy the rewards of peace in a serene old age. Mere brute force does not govern the world. Perhaps it once did, but certainly it does no longer. Despite the pessimists and alarmists, the world grows better as it grows older, and intellect THE LAW OF EQUIPOISE 189 and emotion are the controlling influences in its affairs. Life is a struggle, to be sure, but it is a generous rivalry of brain and spirit rather than a bitter struggle of muskets and battle ships. Success in business is to be sought. It is dependent upon nothing more than upon a sound view of the relations we sustain to all with whom we casually come in contact. And how likely that view is to be an unsound one ! Twenty years ago I was in a jewelry and bric-a-brac store in a distant city. The proprietor, behind the counter, was a young man of high character and of excellent pur- poses. He was trying to get a fair share of the trade of a consider- able city, and had succeeded reasonably well. The patronage of people of moderate circumstances was quite disposed to run his way. There was no good reason why he should not in a little time need a larger store, show a richer stock, get the trade of the people of the most liberal means, and maintain the foremost establishment of the kind in the city. I had known this young man long enough and well enough to become interested in him. The door opened and a gentle- man entered with whom I was also well acquainted. Mr R. was the man of the largest wealth in town. He could have bought the building in which we were and the entire stock of goods if the value had been a hundred times what it was, and could have given his check for it at that moment. He said to the young merchant: " I am going to New York this afternoon and expect to sail for Europe tomorrow. Upon getting ready I find that the little clock I carry in my steamer trunk is out of order. Can't you put it in shape for me by the middle of the afternoon?'' " No, we can't do it, we have too much on our hands," was the crisp and brittle reply. The gentleman was evidently very much disappointed, and saying: " I am sorry : I shall be inconvenienced, but shall have to get it done in New York in some way," he went out. The young merchant turning to me said : " When he wants to buy diamonds and bric-a-brac to cost a thousand dollars he goes to New York. When he wants a clock tinkered for fifty cents he comes here. I could have done it, but I wouldn't please him enough." What a false idea of relationship there was behind this refusal and this remark! I said plainly: "I think you have made the greatest mistake possible. You appear to think that Mr R. owes you some- thing, but he does not. You imagine he is bound to come here with his trade, but he is not. His wealth has been acquired legitimately and he may do what he pleases with it. There would be no an- tagonism between him and you unless you made it; but you have 190 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT made it. And, unfortunately for you, you are more dependent upon him than he is upon you. You have lost the greatest oppor- tunity you have had in many a day, or will have in many a day; not the opportunity to earn fifty cents, but the opportunity to put him under obligations to you. If you had been quick to help him about this matter he would have seen and appreciated it, for he is keen to see such things. He is quick to see the spirit of young men. The time would doubtless come when he would do some- thing substantial that would please you. The best thing you can do now is to go down to the bank as quickly as you can and say: ' Mr R. I made a mistake. I was thoughtless and I am sorry. If you will tell me where I can get that clock I will see that it is ready for you in time.' It may be a little humiliating for you to do this, but the mistake has been yours and you ought to accept the humiliation; and if you do, you will be a larger man and a richer merchant in time than you otherwise will." This is a real incident. It illustrates the false ideas which inexperienced or light-headed people have concerning those who are larger and stronger than they are. I am not asking for obsequiousness to wealth or position. Wealth honestly gained ; position acquired by sane living, are al- ways entitled to respect, never to servility. Honest service by free contract is never servility, and anxiety to accommodate is a factor that is vital to a character which deserves to succeed. The wise ones of the world have learned, and learned very rapidly in these later years, that there is more to be gained through agreement than through strife, through combination and construc- tiveness than through antagonism and destructiveness. The igno- rant very commonly base prosperity upon an absolutely false premise. The relations of men who hire and men who serve, of men who trade together, of lawyer and client, of physician and patient, are bereft of their possibilities for both of the parties unless each is trying to do the best he can for the other. I am justified in stand- ing for my wage or doing what I may to enlarge it, but having agreed to accept it for my service I am bound to do, not as little as I may but as much as I can for the man who pays it to me. The same is true of trade, and of all the relations of life. Any other course takes something of what I owe him from the man with whom I deal. That is a small matter with him: it is a large one with me, for it degrades and debauches me. It keeps me from the habit of doing the best I can and making the most of myself. THE LAW OF EQUIPOISE I9I It accustoms me to meanness and inures me to dishonesty. It is the hard rule of actual compensations. It is the law of equipoise. It is to be hoped that you have long before this balanced the fundamental principles of our political system with the inevitable facts of all rational life. Uphold and extend the cardinal prin- ciples of our republican system, while you strengthen the bonds which attach you to others whose companionship thrills the cham- bers of your soul. Reason deliberately and make alliances which will be agreeable to your feelings and promote your beliefs. But be careful that your associations do not dwarf your minds and overthrow your judgments. Because we are specially attached to some it does not follow that we must be opposed to others. Culti- vate the associations which mean the most to you. Take the steps which your intelligence must tell you ought to promote your indi- vidual development, but recognize the inalienable rights and secure the good opinion of every member of the human race so far as you can. If you are servile to the rich, only because they are rich, you will be smaller at the end of your life than you are now. But so you will be, also, if you refuse to respect the man whose indus- try and frugality have acquired wealth. If you are against the poor only because they are poor, you show a defect in character which must put you out of relations with honorable men. But if you are not against indifference and shiftlessness and dissipation you also show a defect in character which will cost you the good opinion of all people whose good opinion is worth possessing. Give sympathy where it is most needed, but give honor and regard where it is due. You ought to become leaders ; not merely leaders of platoons, but leaders of battalions and brigades and divisions in life's army. But you never will, unless you can bring yourselves to have the same regard for the man below you as for the man above you, provided he is equally loyal in the place in which he is. The humble policeman at your door may or may not be as agreeable a companion as the superintendent in his office would be, but he may be a better citizen and a stauncher man ; and if he is an effi- cient officer, if he wears the stripes of honorable service upon his sleeve, if he has interposed his life to protect your person and secure your home, he is entitled to your support and your esteem. Perhaps, and perhaps not, the measure of your esteem for him should be larger than that for his superior officer. That is not to be determined alone by the titles to the positions which they hold, by the salaries which they receive, or by the grade of service which they are expected to render. It is to be determined by the character 19- NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT of each man, and the intelligence and fidelity with which each seizes the opportunity and performs the duty that has fallen to him. It is more than certain that the clearness with which you look at these things and the feelings which animate your lives in these regards, will gauge the measure of respect you will gain and of influence you will exert in the coming years. Let no preconceived notions lead you away from the path of greatest usefulness, and therefore of the greatest honor in the world : let no artificial or imaginary barriers keep you from going as far and as high as you may. Young men, undertake to round out your lives in a way which will enable you to feel comfortable in the centers of trade, upon the world's high ways, in the ward caucus, in the governor's office, in the centers of intellectual and social life, or wherever else you may chance to be. Young women, be not content to cultivate the graces alone, but secure the things which will make you versatile and efficient in life, and which will increase the debt the world will always owe to sensible and honorable womanhood. You will all, of both sexes, find the things that will help you most, not in selfishness, not in a narrow life, but in a life which knows about the world's affairs, is in close sympathy with all of God's creatures, and feels in accord with every self-respecting member of the human race. It is a satisfaction to believe that each great cycle of the world's life leads the race up to a higher plane. As with the physical world, so it is with intellectual and moral life. So let it be with you as the years turn oft' the periods of your lives. It is said that the solar system, perhaps the whole stellar system, is advancing to- wards one point — the great center of gravity of the infinite uni- verse. Is it not possibly true that the infinite universe of life is moving along God's greatest and most wondrous cycle to the point of everlasting rest? How do we know, indeed why should we not think, that the experiences through which the great human family passes are but the beatings of the truth upon the universe of thought, and the breakings of the bonds which finally shall set the whole race free ; yes free at the great center of infinite rest ? May your characters round out and come into perfect equipoise. May your stores increase. May you be steady when the strain comes. May your influence widen and strengthen. May each suc- ceeding cycle of your lives advance you to a higher plane. May you take on the multiplying years gracefully. May the end be perfect peace.