teacher who wont speak a lie;. I want a teacher who wont look or live a lie. Touching the matter of religion, I have no desire in any sense to be critical, but there is one part of religion which is widely taught in our schools, which I think, has developed in the youth of our land, and as a result has been more or less demoralizing to the community; I mean the doctrine that there is any way of escaping the awful consequences of wrong doing. I think this has worked incalculable harm to our children. We should hold up to the children the thought that the least sin on their part is utterly demoralizing to them. I saw one day at Cornell College a model of the human organs which were utterly perverted as the result of vicious living. I said it was worth all the sermons that ever were preached. This, more than anything else, would teach our children that there is absolutely no escape from the moral and physical effects of wrong doing; that no one is coming in to wipe away their sins and leave them by any magic to the rewards of virtue. If we could simply impress that thought in our schools, we should have, I believe, such a moral influence as would work an immense good to the children and consequently to the community. I will now leave you to the good talk of Mrs. SEWALL, who is a practical teacher.

The Chairman:-We have had our good word from the East, now we will have our good word from the West. I have the pleasure of introducing Mrs. MAY WRIGHT SEWALL, of Indiana.

Mrs. SEWALL said :

Ladies and Gentlemen, I feel that there is no East and no West in the consideration of this great question of education. With your permission I will read a little testimony prepared by myself and endorsed I think by Miss EASTMAN, as the basis of the few remarks I shall make to you.

(The testimony will be found in its appropriate place.)

It seems to me that we should cultivate in our teachers selfrespect; a respect for every pupil and for the pupil's rights. While the child is sometimes humiliated and called mean and

selfish for standing up for his rights, it seems to me that one of the first things a child should know, is that he not only has rights, but that he should stand up for those rights; for from that self-respect must flow a respect for the rights of others. I endorse heartily the sentiments of my predecessor, that the child must be taught to stand by what he has done; that he must take the consequences of what he has done and bear them conscientiously, whether they be agreeable or disagreeable. Is is the duty of the teacher to keep the school in that degree of good order which will make it possible for the studies to go on properly; then if the child is at fault he must abide by the rules. Most children have, before they come to school, learned in the very unphilosophical atmosphere of the average unsophisticated home, that good is a thing to be rewarded and bad is a thing which may or may not be punished. If the child is tardy in coming to his meals, the mother excuses him in many cases, but in school tardiness is a fault and must go on record. That is, I think, a great moral lesson to the child. It very early teaches him, and then he grows up with the conviction, that he must abide the consequences. I think there is much moral instruction to be imparted in physical training. It is very difficult in any branch of studies, except perhaps mathematics, to pronounce a child's lesson absolutely right or absolutely wrong, because there are all shades of right and wrong in the average answer, but when the child goes into the gymnasium and takes an exercise on the parallel bars or on the swing, there the exercise is either absolutely right or absolutely wrong, and it makes no difference how slight the deflection from the exact movement that should be made, the thing is wrong altogether and should be so recorded.

The great defect in our schools to-day is, I think, in teaching the pupil to discriminate between what is absolutely right and what is pretty nearly right. Now, the child must recognize there is no such thing as pretty nearly right. Self government is the basis of our Constitution. The children of our land must be fitted in school for the Republican form of govern

ment, and the very idea of the Republican form of government is self-government. Teach the scholar that we are selfcontrolled individuals, capable of self-government, so that the school which is well managed is self-governed. Another thing upon which I wish to speak is the decline of culture in the men of our land. It is a fact to be deprecated that the average age of male pupils leaving our schools each year is decreasing, while the average age of females is on the increase. This is undoubtedly true, and it is a serious question for us to consider. The consequence is that the average of culture is broadening between girls and boys. Formerly it was in favor of the boys, now the thing is reversed and the average girl leaves school with more mental cultivation than the average boy. I hope Miss Eastman will make correction of these statistics if they do not apply to the country in general. They do apply to that large section of the country which we call the West. My personal interest has been with the education of girls, and if the subject this afternoon had been limited to that I could have talked about them with much more enthusiasm. The three things desirable to be secured in the education of girls, are high standards of education; faithful and exact tests of knowledge; the highest and noblest incentives of personal effort. None of our Women's Colleges have what a thoroughly educated person can properly call a high standard. I believe this must be true as long as these Colleges alter their standards to suit the pockets of the people. They lower their standards to allow all persons to enter their halls. We have much to do in creating in the non-professional public, a sentiment in favor of a high standard for the education of girls in colleges. Now as to tests; tests always correspond to standards. The incentives here come from two directions. If the public is in favor of keeping the girls in school longer, year after year, they are for taking the boys out of the schools earlier and earlier year after year, because the incentive to which the average American boy is most susceptible, is the incentive to wealth, and the sooner the boy goes to earning that

mighty dollar the sooner he will be a worthy citizen. To my mind this is something greatly to be deplored. The families which one generation ago were all college-bred men, now have, perhaps, only one collegian in the whole circle of relations, and the tendency is to leave school by far too early, in order to go into business. In connection with this tendency in our Western States, is growing up the idea of industrial training. Not the industrial education to which Miss Eastman alluded. It is, rather, with us, to take a certain class of the people, at a certain age, and put them into the industrial school instead of into the high school. That is the way we are talking about industrial education in the West. The thought is this that the children should have the same education in the graded schools until they are ready to enter the high school, and then there should be a division,-then the children, whose parents do not wish them to pursue more cultured studies, should be admitted to the industrial school that shall be open to all who apply for admission. This would immediately divide us into a cultured and non-cultured class by an almost arbitrary division. Is this best? Our practical parents are the class that will put their boys and girls into the industrial schools, regardless of the inclination of the child. This, our teachers, as a general thing, deprecate. We can give no better definition of the primary object of education now than what Socrates gave us a long time ago. He says: "The primary education must always be that development of the individual soul which shall make it the most that it can possibly become, and make it the most helpful that it can possibly be made." To my mind, what are ordinarily called the practical sides of education, are not those sides which make the most of the individual. To make the most of the individual is to teach him that, after all, he must be his own educator in the end. I fancy there is a very false notion prevalent in regard to which kind of education results in the best good to man and woman. It is, that the practical man, who has been practically educated, that is, educated in some

industrial pursuit, is best able to earn bread and butter. I sometimes wish statistics could be collected on this point. I don't think there are more incompetent clergymen than incompetent bricklayers. I believe there are no more incompetent physicians to-day than there are incompetent and slipshod carpenters. I wish that the public, which is interested in having our coming citizens well and wisely educated, that they may more thoroughly enjoy life and be able to magnify its usefulness and beauty, would gather statistics upon this point, and we may do something to hinder the crime which takes our boys at fourteen out of schools and puts them into the shops and fills them with the idea that they are doing the best thing, because they have entered business.

Mrs. SEWALL was followed by Mrs. CORA PENNOCK, who sang "The Promised Land To-morrow."

The Chairman:-The question is now open for discussion from the floor and we shall be very glad to hear from any of the friends who may be moved to speak upon it.

Mr. REYNOLDS: The last words that fell from the last speaker led me to think a little. I have no doubt that it is strictly true that in the West the age at which boys leave school is declining, I think it grows largely out of the fact that the West with all its present culture and activity, is largely undeveloped. There is an immense demand for labor of the body and labor of the mind, and where that demand is somewhat in excess of the supply, there education so far as it is school education is apt to cease early. I am absolutely sure that the age at which boys leave school in the state of Massachusetts now is not less than it was forty years ago. I am sure that the age on the whole is greater. I want to bring a fact or two from my own recollection. A boy in a grammar school in Boston, at the time that I reached the highest class in that school, a class of twenty-four or five, only three or four at most went into the High School. So that you see one in eight was probably the number that passed into the High School, and at the time of my entrance there were some seventy-seven