and the best methods of farm management could be practically learned. The committee, among whom I find the names of Marshal P. Wilder and George B. Loring, said: "If a person, who had the ability to perform whatever he undertook, should offer to the people of this commonwealth a secret, by which in twenty years the productive value of the lands throughout the whole State would be doubled, what would that secret be worth? The diffusion of general agricultural education would accomplish that object; nay, go far beyond it, in less time than has been named, and at an expense that would be trifling in proportion to the benefits that would flow

from it."

Other States have taken similar action. The farmers of the West have recommended a revision of the school course, with this object in view.

In Illinois, an able defender of industrial education said: "We take the child out of God's natural industrial university and send him to school, where, at best, only a fraction of his entire manhood can be properly developed; and, after all, we do not fit pupils for actual life, even in those elemental studies after forty weeks' school per annum, as well as they were fitted in ten weeks, half a century ago. One prime cause of this is, that the bookmakers and publishers have assumed about as absolute control of our public schools as the politicians have of our post-offices. Rich publishing houses have offered as high as $70,000 for the introduction of a single text-book into a State. And yet not one of those books teaches us the things which it is our chief interest to know, and our protracted school drill leaves little time for anything else.

"I wish," says Professor Turner, "to make room for some of the subjects which underlie the industrial arts, botany, entomology, and zoology, for instance. The State of Illinois spends, say $12,000,000 a year on her public schools, and loses from $10,000,000 to $20,000,000 from obnoxious insects. Now, I would have every one of these insects, about a hundred in all, with pins in their backs, put up in a show-case in every public school in the State; and I would have every child know them as well as he knows his father's cows and horses; instead of having one or two lone men looking after them, I would turn millions of intelligent young eyes upon them, and thus prepare for their extermination. I would have this, whether the child knew there was such a word as 'en-tom-ol-o-gy' or not! "The hard-working American people want to know something about our continent-our life-work, our bodies, and bones, and souls, our duties and destinies in the great republic in which we live.

"I look upon the agricultural classes to lift us out of this monkeydom of precedent, into the true freedom of American citizenship. All that is needed is that every man should quietly set about improving his own school, in his own district, as fast and as fully as he can.

I shall make no apology for quoting these educational authorities. I warn all those classes who do not believe in industrial education, that Broderick's words are fast coming to be true, that—

The State Superintendent of Public Instruction in Connecticut, Mr. Northrop (and he has been saying these things from that office a good many years), says: "Every child's education is deficient who has not learned to work at some useful form of industry. Labor aids in disciplining the intellect, and energizing the character. Especially does farm work task and test the mind, leading a boy to plan and contrive to adapt means to ends. With all our improved gymnastics, none is better than manual labor, cheerfully and intelligently performed, especially farm work. The ambition for easier lives, and more genteel employments, and the silly but common notion that labor is menial, that the tools of the trades and the farms are badges of servility, have greatly lessened apprenticeships, and ought to be refuted in our common schools.

"Our youth should there be taught the dignity and necessity of labor, and its vital relations to all human excellence and progress, the evils of indolence, the absurdity of the present fashion for city life, and the wide-spread aversion to manual labor. A practical knowledge of some industrial pursuit is an important element in intellectual culture."

I fully indorse these sentiments. Whatever you would have appear in a nation's life must be put into its schools," is a Prussian motto, and we put the same idea into section 1702 of our code, which makes it "the duty of teachers to instruct pupils to avoid idleness, and to train them to a comprehension of the rights, duties, and dignity of American citizenship." But Prussia enforces her principles in the most universal system of "real," or technical schools, which turn out able young farmers, carpenters, blacksmiths, and housekeepers, and nurses, while with us it all ends in an admonition to "avoid idleness.

The State must go further than this; it must fit its children for their places in the industrial ranks. The nation has two technical schools—one for training of navy, the other of army, officers. Each State has one for the training of teachers, and a few have real training schools or colleges of agriculture and the mechanic arts. If these are what they should be, they will do for those pursuits what West Point and Annapolis do for the army and navy, viz.: make men who are proud of their business. I wish some of the kid glove gentry who think the base-ball club and the boating club furnishes a more dignified employment for the muscles of our young men than manual labor, could have been with me at the annual examination of one of the nation's training schools, where high born and low born, without distinction of nationality or religion, learn-what? To scrub a deck, to furl a sail, to use every tool in the carpenter's shop, in the blacksmith's shop, to make and to mend everything that belongs to a ship, to be considerate, gentlemanly, orderly, to command themselves and others, to obey, to love their country's flag, and to die for it without a murmur, to go down with the ship if need be—all this while they learn everything that is required in literature and science for an education of the first class.

And must one be a soldier, or a sailor, to be thus furnished for

his country's service, for his own service in the industrial state? Shall a man be trained in all manliness to walk the quarter deck, worthy of all obedience because he understands what he requires, and has himself performed, not once, but a thousand times, all that he exacts from subordinates; and may he not have an equal training for the post of foreman in a mechanic's shop, for the management of his own broad acres, and the laborers he requires to cultivate them? Do you suppose they would put a man in charge of the Naval Academy, or tolerate a single professor in West Point, who thought practical education in war and navigation would prove "a failure"-was, at best, a doubtful experiment? No; that isn't the way they manage. Those old admirals and army officers are seamen and soldiers through and through, from boots to buttons; they believe in their business. The men who lead in industrial education must believe in it also.

The kind of education wanted to-day is not that which has passed current, and which has proved a dead failure in making a generation of nobler youth, stronger in body, clearer in mind, and firmer in conscience, than the half-schooled frontier gave us a hundred years ago. Don't take this on my authority, but look through the Governors' messages and State Superintendents' reports. Why, only last year the Education Committee of the Massachusetts Legislature said: "The public school system of Massachusetts fails to meet the demands of modern civilization.' Why and how? Civilization now demands skilled, intelligent labor; and, as Scott Russell says, Occupations which require no skill, but only brute force, will necessarily be vacated by human hands." The substitution of steam culture for hand labor has thrown thousands of English workmen out of employment.

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Society, in the march of improvement, is as certain to do without the unskilled, the unintelligent, and uneducated, as it is to do without wild plants and animals. Nor will the laws be unjust which forbid those who cannot create their food to subsist on the labor of others."

Governor Hartranft, of Pennsylvania, calls attention to the scarcity of skilled labor in that State, and says, that although $10,000,000 are annually expended for education, none of the children who complete their terms in the public schools have any special fitness for trade, and few become artisans. He recommends schools where boys can be instructed in trades, and urges compulsory education. I might amplify this testimony almost indefinitely, but I turn to other aspects of the question.

I am not one of those who think a thing must be good because it is baldheaded with antiquity. Education is essentially conservative. You cannot make a move in the way of improvement without disturbing somebody, and we shall have to disturb a good many people sitting in comfortable chairs before we get our educational stream to turning mills and grinding corn.

While I do not think that bodily labor is specially desirable for its own sake, I think any scheme which leaves physical education out of the account is radically defective. If you can have this with training in useful arts, so much the better, but have it we must.

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There was a training in those primitive New England times when a fellow had to lie down to his Lindley Murray before a fire of pine knots, after milking the cows, cutting the wood, and doing the chores;" when the girl added the daily skein to the festoons of yarn for the family clothing, which is hard to get in these days. As soon as a child was old enough to pick up a basket of chips, it became an element in the productive wealth of the home. Surely it was none the worse for it to be taught by the statutes of law and filial duty that service was due for the care and support of its helpless years. These views may seem sordid, but the looseness with which children grow up to think their parents and the rest of the world owe them a living is filling our streets with hoodlums and with animated fashion plates, ready to be blown away by the first ill wind of temptation. What is a hoodlum? A boy gone to waste, rotten before he is ripe, because society does not know enough to preserve and economize him.

The education required by a people is not a fixed quantity, either in kind or degree, and the condition and circumstances of laboring men of every class have greatly changed since the idea of public education first dawned. Why, do you know that the experiment is historically so recent that a good many countries have not had time to make it?

The history of education fully explains why it is not more practical. Colleges and seminaries grew up out of the monasteries, which, for a long time, treasured all the learning there was in the world. Learning was a monopoly; first of the priest, then of priests and the nobles, then of these and the judges, and finally, and not without hard squeezing, the leech or doctor got into this good company, and then came the printed Bible to carry the art of reading wherever religious zeal could take it. There was nothing but literature for education to use; it covered the whole field, except mathematics. Columbus invented geography, and Galileo and Copernicus astronomy, long after the great European universities were founded. In England, where our college system came from, the aristocratic classes only were benefited by it, and it suited them very well. And when the common school got started, it simply took a few of the first leaves out of the college book. It is not so very long since men learned to read and spell in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. It took several centuries of human progress to bring rulers to consent that common folks should learn the alphabet; and, again, to get permission for women to tamper with the dangerous thing. It took a good while to get a spinning-jenny, and a power wheel, and a steam plow; and the education of the Oxford time don't suit the spinning-jenny age, as England has learned to her cost.

Until about the time of the gold discovery in California, England was domineering over the rest of Europe, through her commercial supremacy, and her command of the supplies of raw materials, which enabled her to take the lead in manufactures. These advantages she was likely to retain. But France and Germany, by the most magnificent provisions for technical schools, set themselves to compete with her on her own ground of manufactures, and not only dis

tanced her completely, but almost drove her from the field. The Exposition of '67 proved that Germany could make better steel, and France better locomotives; "that England was beaten, not only on some points, but, by some nation, on nearly all the points on which she had prided herself." The English government then sent eighty skilled workmen over to the Continent, to find out the causes of defeat. The unanimous reply was: "Their industrial education has caused it."

Lord Stanley addressed the most careful inquiries to all the foreign Consuls in France, Prussia, Saxony, Switzerland, Belgium, and got the same answer, "industrial education." And lately there comes a plan from England for a national system of industrial instruction for the whole people, beginning in primary schools, and ending in a great "central technical university " for training professors and teachers of institutions of lower rank, devoted to raising the standard of industrial well-being. Instead of believing that money is the root of evil, the Englishman believes it to be the root of industry, and so of all good, and this change in the direction of popular education is due to the lesson the English nation received at Paris and Vienna.

The great natural advantages which we possess will not give us industrial supremacy, unless we follow these examples. The “International Magazine" emphasizes our duty and our opportunity in strong language: "With an agricultural wealth to which no limit can be assigned, with mineral riches everywhere bursting through the surface, with water power which no mills can exhaust; not to advance, not to rival the skilled industry of Europe, is not a loss merely, it is a crime." The California wheat-grower and woolgrower must compete in the Liverpool market with the wheat and wool of the world. Competition, in every branch of industry, has become world-wide, and unless the American farmer and manufacturer does his best, he is sure to take the lower place in the world's market.

With gold and silver mines that supply all nations, with forests shading our hillsides, with flocks, and vineyards, and great valleys. teeming with their abundant harvests, we cannot be rich or great, unless we can compete in the enlightened employment of these natural means and forces. The experience of all Europe teaches, "Industrial supremacy is the prize of industrial education." Let us lay the foundation of this supremacy in

OUR PRIMARY SCHOOLS.

Carry it forward by a well-devised system of secondary technical schools, and complete it in a University where prominence is given to different branches of learning, according to the directness and value of these as applied to the occupations and pursuits of our people.

Perhaps there was never a time when the relations of the Government to education need to be discussed so thoroughly, and yet so temperately. That universal intelligence is the only guarantee of universal liberty, is one of the fundamental ideas of the American's political faith; but the right and duty of the State to educate has been better stated in monarchical Germany than in republican