What is wanted more than anything else is true men, men of principle, men fearing God, loving their neighbor, loving their whole country, and cherishing its free institutions; men who stand for the right as immovable as the eternal pyramids; whose word, whose look is truth itself; whose honor can no more be tarnished than a sun-beam can be soiled; in whose breasts the ruling maxim is not "Cotton is king," nor "Gold is king," but everywhere, both in their most secret retirement, as well as in public position, reigns, enthroned in their hearts and obeyed in their lives, the divine principle-DUTY IS KING FOREVER!

Now, the child is not all intellect, any more than it is all conscience; it has a sense of right and wrong, and this sense is silently addressed in a hundred different ways, as the questions arise whether the pupil shall do this thing or not, whether he shall confess or conceal a certain fault, &c. I know that the importance of this subject is adequately felt by the public school teachers of San Francisco, and that much attention is paid by them to moral instruction, and pains taken to impress upon the minds of their pupils the great religious truths in which all are agreed. At the same time, while this is done, all sectarianism is carefully avoided.

I would have this moral sense carefully cherished as the voice of God; I would have it kept sensitive and acute, and properly trained and educated. I would have every part of the nature of the pupil well and proportionately exercised and developed the physical, the intellectual, and the moral, the body, the mind, and the heart; the last the most carefully of all, since out of it are the issues of life. I would tell the pupil that the acquisition of knowledge is valuable, but that, though his attainments in science and art, and in all learning, were transcendent, though he might "speak with the tongues of men and of angels," and "understand all mysteries and all knowledge," yet, if he had not a good character, sound moral principles, he would be nothing but a miserable failure. With all the energy I possessed, and all the different methods of appeal I could invent, I would enjoin it upon him to strive to become a good, true, and noble man.

And such words, addressed in the spirit of affection to the young, go directly to their hearts. Their impulses can easily be turned into the right channel. They have a desire after excellence in the acquisition of knowledge; but if their sense of right and wrong is properly appealed to, I believe it can be made the ruling power of their lives. When this result is accomplished, how blessed is the work! It is beautiful to look upon the young, with their clear and honest eyes, their frank and beaming countenances, their warm and pure hearts beating high with aspirations after goodness and truth, and desiring that every evening may find them more worthy of the approbation of their teachers, their parents, and of Heaven.

Fellow Teachers! from our connection with the Public Schools, we must take a deep interest in their prosperity and success, and earnestly wish that each revolving year may render them more efficient. The Common School System is the child of the people, in which they take great pride. The Public Schools are emphatically the People's College. From them graduate the bone and sinew of

the community-men of sound common sense, of good principles, and with stout hearts, who will stand by the Common Schools as the bulwark of their rights and liberties, and who will defend them against bold and open attack, or vile and secret slander. Their crowning glory is, that their doors are open freely to all; that in them the poorest child is the equal of the richest, and may lay the foundation of an education which may lead him to employment, to competence, to respectability, nay, even to high station and to a glorious fame. Many a poor man has denied himself in order that his little ones might attend school decently attired, and has had his last moments cheered by the thoughts that he had faithfully given his children every advantage afforded by the Public Schools-feeling in that fact a strong assurance of their future good conduct and welfare.

The Common Schools can show upon their rolls the names of distinguished men who laid in them the foundation of a world-wide renown. Franklin, of whom I have spoken; Clay, in the log cabin school-house of Peter Deacon, with no floor but the earth, and no window but the door; Webster, in the log school-house kept by Master Tappan in the wilds of New Hampshire; George Stephenson, the founder, and, to a great extent, the inventor, of the present system of locomotion on railroads, commencing at eighteen years of age in a village school to learn his A, B, C, like a little child; Fulton, Bowditch, and hosts of others. They commenced life in poverty. Had not the Common School afforded them an opportunity to begin their education free of expense, how few of them might ever have been known to the world? How many of those yet unborn, and destined to immortal renown in their various capacities, would, but for the Free Common School, be lost in eternal night! We have a right, then, to feel an honest pride in this great system with which we are connected.

Our profession is humble, laborious, and exhausting. The services of the teacher are not adequately appreciated in any community. Neither fame nor wealth belongs to him. He is not allowed even the designation-Honorable. He is overworked and underpaid. And yet his life has its compensations. I know nothing more touching and more grateful to the teacher than, at the close of the year, when he is bidding farewell to those who are passing forever from his care, for him to see every countenance turned towards him with affection and gratitude to know that these minds have received from him wholesome knowledge--that, by his influence and example, good principles have been implanted in their hearts-and that he has troops of friends growing up and becoming every year more numerous, who will voluntarily pay him that honor, love, and obedience, which they feel to be due to the benefactor of their youth.

The faithful teacher has another reward, of which nothing can deprive him. It is the approbation of his own conscience; it is the consciousness that he is humbly imitating the Creator and Preserver of all, in doing good. "Think not," said Sydney Smith to an aged, poverty-stricken master teaching the art of reading or writing to some tattered scholars, "you are teaching that alone; you are pro

tecting life, insuring property, fencing the altar, guarding the government, giving space and liberty to all the fine powers of man, and lifting him up to his own place in the order of creation." This well describes the nature of the teacher's office.

It was the boast of the Emperor Augustus, that he found Rome brick, and left it marble. Let it be the higher praise of the Public School teachers, that California was found a wilderness, but that they have contributed by their exertions to fill its valleys and cities with a virtuous and intelligent population-a richer treasure than all her nodding harvests, than all her mines of gold.

4. CONCERNING COMMON SENSE IN TEACHING.*

It is one of the highest compliments we can pay a man to say that he possesses good common sense. The article in question is certainly one of the most important qualifications of a successful teacher. Call it "tact," or "knack," or "faculty," or "gift," or whatever you please, it implies always a clear conception of things as they exist, and an adaptation of means to the end sought.

In broaching this subject, I feel that I may place myself in the situation of the learned divine, whose third and principal division of his discourse was "concerning that of which we know nothing." I do not propose to treat of a course of instruction for graded schools, where children are presumed to be in regular attendance for a series of years, and where provision is made for a specific course of learning for all the faculties of the mind; but to consider briefly those schools remote from cities, and continued only a part of the year. What are they expected to accomplish, and what view should the common sense teacher take of his field of labor? Many of our public schools, in the sparsely settled districts of the State, are kept less than six months in the year, and even then the attendance is irregular and inconstant. Pupils may be expected to attend school from the age of six to fourteen; and allowing six months attendance in each year-a high average when one-fourth attend only three months of the year-the actual time at school will be reduced to four years. The question propounded by common sense is: What course of instruction will impart the greatest amount of useful information, and best fit the children for the duties of common life?

Now, hardly any course of study or mental exercise can be sought out which shall be utterly useless. The driest and dullest style of memorizing musty text books, and the most parrot-like verbatim recitations, involve some thought, and are not without some advantages. The thoughtful man of wealth, who, in order that his son. should not grow up in idleness, compelled him to wheel a huge pile of stones from one part of his garden to another, and then wheel them back again, and so kept him wheeling them back and forth each day of the year, was wiser than the parent who allows his son to do nothing. But it would have been more sensible in the man of

*Read before California State Teachers' Institute, 1863.

wealth had he set his boy at work upon some useful labor, which would have interested his attention, instead of keeping him engaged in unprofitable drudgery.

I cannot help thinking that sometimes in our schools we set the boys to wheeling stones, instead of building walls, or clearing fields. for future harvests. For instance, keeping a boy for years drilling on the stereotyped forms of solving Mental Arithmetic, committing a great mass of routine verbiage, when he ought to learn the simple forms of Written Arithmetic used in business life, is undoubtedly "wheeling stones." The boy may repeat the "solution," and the "forms," and the "conclusion," and the "therefores," and "wherefores," with a marvelous skill, and yet it is not common-sense teaching. A man was brought before an Eastern king, and extolled by the courtiers for his wonderful powers of endurance, because he could stand on one leg for twenty-four hours. "A goose can stand longer than that," said the king.

When, in school, we teach boys and girls the abstract rules and scientific mysteries and technicalities of grammar, training them skillfully to analyze complex, compound, and involved sentences, but omitting to teach them by daily practice how to express common thoughts in correct English, or how to talk correctly in ordinary conversation, without using provincialisms or cant phrases what are we doing but keeping them "wheeling stones," and feeding on husks?

When children study for years the columns of uncommon and obsolescent words, piled up in perpendicular obelisks, staring them in the face like huge exclamation marks of wonder and surprise, and then leave school unable to write a list of articles wanted from the corner grocery without exciting the risibilities of the groceryman, or are unable to write a friendly letter without offending the eye by misspelling the commonest words-what have they been doing but "wheeling stones?"

So when scholars are kept forever drilling on elementary principles and minute particulars, it is not in accordance with common sense. "Be thorough," is a good maxim ; but there is such a thing as being too thorough-of dwelling on particulars, to the neglect of essentials. A teacher may be painfully particular, like a good aunt of mine, years ago, who was so distressingly neat that nobody ever took any comfort in her house.

In Arithmetic, for instance, it is keeping a boy wheeling stones "to discipline his mind" a month in learning to explain in due form the reason of "inverting the divisor in dividing one fraction by another," if thereby he should fail to learn how to write a prommissory note, compute simple interest, or make out a bill. A teacher from a graded city school would fail in an unclassified school, should he attempt to apply the same test of thoroughness, or to pursue the same exact course of study. Certain results must be obtained, to the sacrifice of many particulars which are all good in themselves. One great reason why self-educated men are practical workers, is that they learn nothing they do not want to use, and so learn it well. Concentration gives them strength. Napoleon dispensed with tents and luggage in his great armies, taking only what he wanted to use-the sword and the bayonet.

It seems to me-and the conclusion has been growing stronger each year, during twelve years' experience in public school teaching --that no small part of what children are required to learn might appropriately be headed: "Things worth forgetting." Nature is wiser than we are, and casts off the useless surplus of facts and figures into utter oblivion. Run through an ordinary school geography, and see how many bushels of chaff to a single grain of wheat. Look at the compendious arithmetics, strike out ninetenths of which, and the remainder would be more than sufficient. Look at the bulky grammar, grown fat by feeding on all other grammars printed since Lindley Murray's, of which, not even the authors could carry in their heads a moiety. Look at the school histories of our country, full to repletion of dates and chronological tables, containing more of details than any grown man in the United States could learn in a lifetime. I allude to these only to show how much a teacher must omit in the school text books, and how essential that he should have common sense to guide him in selecting.

A four years' course of study in an unclassified school can neither be very complicated nor very extensive. A matter-of-fact teacher would look at his work in something of this manner : These boys are, most of them, to become farmers, miners, mechanics, and laborers. All the scholastic education they receive will be gained here. These girls will, most of them, become the wives of farmers, miners, mechanics, and laborers. What instruction is absolutely essential to these boys and girls to fit them to grow up respectable men and women? Letting alone the geniuses and the prodigies, they are of average mental capacity. What shall be done with them? First, they must learn to read, write, and spell the English language. Reading is usually taught well enough for all practical purposes, whether according to elocutionary rules or not; but penmanship and spelling are too often sadly neglected. Almost every man, in whatever occupation engaged, is called upon to write, more or less, every day of his life. Writing involves spelling, and both are unmistakable evidences of culture, or want of it. Teach these three things thoroughly, so that every child fifteen years of age shall be able to read readily, to write legibly, and to spell correctly, the words in the English language most used in common life. Sacrifice everything to this--even let algebra remain a minus quantity, and the higher branches take a back seat. They are of vastly more practical value than arithmetic-the trite and venerable maxim, that the study of arithmetic is the best discipline of the mind, so often quoted by arithmetic-run-mad teachers, to the contrary notwithstanding. A knowledge of arithmetic sufficient to enable men and women to keep accounts correctly, will suffice, letting alone the mental discipline of the reasoning faculties, so often harped about. Ben. Franklin was a dullard in arithmetic; he grew up with pretty tolerable reasoning faculties, because he kept his perceptives wide awake. Don't let arithmetic, then, be the great nightmare of the school to squeeze out all the vitality from the scholars. Most Americans take naturally to reckoning dollars and cents, without the aid of text books.