clearly conscious of the new aim, its nature and requirements, and so our education oscillates purposelessly between the old and the new. Ask our teachers what they are educating their pupils for, and not one in ten will be able to tell you, while those who can will tell you very different things. Now, the moving principle of everything is its aim. The entire character of our education, therefore, depends on its aim, and, if it have no unity of aim, it will have no unity of character, but will be a mere aggregate of fragments. And this is just what our education is. The results are most lamentable, showing themselves everywhere in superficialty, frivolity and unreliability. It is foolish to hope that we can ever have a systematic education, training all the human faculties in an orderly way into harmony, until we make clear to ourselves what the purpose of education is, what result we wish to attain by means of it. And this we have not done.

In the third place, any complete system of education must be a preparation for all the duties of life, personal, domestic, social, political. These, I think, include all the possible duties --even the religious; for that is only a name for all these together, or rather, perhaps, for the spirit and attitude in which they ought all to be performed. Does, then, our present education offer any such preparation? Evidently it does not. As regards preparation for personal duties, how few people, old or young, teachers or taught, have any clear notion what a man's duties to himself are, to his body, to his soul, to his spirit! How few know by what means-what food, what exercise, what air, what employment-the health of the body can be secured and maintained! How little systematic and practical instruction is given in this matter! Not one child in a hundred either has the needs of its body fully attended to, or learns to attend to them itself in later life. Not one child in a hundred ever learns the one simple lesson, that it must not eat and drink things merely because it likes them; and yet this is not only a fundamental lesson in hygiene, but a most valuable exercise for the will, one that can be begun in the earliest years

of the child's life. As to the hygiene of the soul, the regulation of the passions, appetites, ambitions, not only is nothing done in our schools to further it, but much is done in the opposite direction. The tone of the schools is essentially selfish. Few, indeed, are the children in whom personal ambition, the desire of "getting on," is not nourished in a thousand ways, both in the family and in school, few of those who learn that virtue ought to be man's first consideration. Few even know what virtue is, in any definite way. Vanity is fostered in a thousand ways in our schools, and must be so, as long as emulation is used as a motive power. The whole marking and reporting system is a carefully devised lesson in selfish vanity, while our school exhibitions are, I say it advisedly, one of the most successful inventions of the devil to degrade human nature. Some of the very worst features of our American life, our frivolity, our love of hollow show, our unwillingness to do quiet, unapplauded work, in obscure ways and places, are due, in large measures, to our school exhibitions. A book might easily be written on this subject. Of the hygiene of the spirit, the careful, harmonious development of all its powers, I have already spoken, and shown how sadly it is neglected.

As to domestic duties, whether of a moral or economic sort, how little is done to further the knowledge or practice of them in our education! Consequently, how many persons enter upon the married state with any clear notion of what it means, and what responsibilities it involves? Is not marriage, that most important of all human relations, most frequently entered into for the sake of passion, caprice or ambition? Does one man or one woman in a thousand enter upon it for the noblest reasons? Is not marriage very frequently simply legalized incontinence? And how can it be otherwise, when no moral instruction is given in regard to marriage and the family? And how many parents are guided in the training of children by any other principle than their own feelings and their own convenience? And how can it be otherwise with our present education?

Nor are the economic duties of family life any better provided for than the moral duties. How many persons who enter upon marriage have been taught what the material conditions of a human, virtuous, family life are, and how they are to be realized? In ancient times the science of economy, which means properly the management of a household, formed a very essential part of education, and some of the greatest philosophers, notably Aristotle, wrote books upon it. At the present day it is hardly thought of, and so we find thousands of families utterly unacquainted with the science, and living in squalor, misery and consequent vice and degradation, and not a few in riotous wealth, whose consequences are equally fatal. Worse than all, our present education not only leaves young people in ignorance of the material conditions of domestic life, but it leaves many of them unfit to realize these conditions, even if they knew them, for want of skill in productive labor. All the material conditions of family life are due to labor, and can be honestly obtained in sufficient quantity only by those who are skilled to labor, either with head or with hand. A system of education that leaves any class of people unprepared, by knowledge and skill, to earn an honest, independent livelihood for self and family, necessarily condemns that class either to dishonesty, dependence or poverty, or to all these together. And, indeed, our whole present threatening economic condition is an irrefragable proof of this. I am, of course, well aware that no amount of economic instruction or manual training will make it possible for laboring men to earn an honest livelihood, unless they have access to the correlates of labor the earth and its products, a subject of which I shall speak directly; nevertheless, such instruction and such training are absolutely and fundamentally essential in every system of education. And yet they are almost entirely neglected, not only in our common schools, but even in our high schools and colleges. The latter are teaching Greek and Latin and astronomy and differential calculus, and neglecting the most essential portions of life education. Is it any wonder that the cry

rises for a more practical education in our schools?

From domestic duties we pass to social duties. What instruction in these do our schools provide? Apart from the apish instruction given in ladies' schools with regard to superficial social etiquette, which often is but elegant hypocrisy, almost none, either of a moral or economic kind. What instruction, for example, is anywhere given with regard to the duties of employer and employed, of buyer and seller, of strong and weak, of rich and poor, of cultivated and uncultivated, of wise and ignorant? Again, what instruction is given with regard to the relations of land, capital and labor most conducive to social well-being? Indeed, even in our highest educational institutions, which profess in some degree, to teach social (miscalled political) economy, this fundamental question is rarely, if ever asked, much less answered. Indeed, very few persons have ever realized the simple and obvious truth that no man can earn an honest, independent livelihood who has not free access to the correlates of labor-land and its products. And yet it is the failure to realize this truth that goes far to place our social order in its present condition, wherein class is divided against class, and socialism and anarchism stare us in the face. Unless the soil and its products are made accessible to all citizens, we must of necessity have one or other of two things, wage-slavery or socialism. At present, we have the former, and are threatened with the latter. Yet how few persons see this! It is, indeed, utterly incredible, how far social education is neglected in our schools and colleges, even at the moment when we are threatened with social destruction for want of it,

Nor is the case much better with political education. History is usually so wretchedly taught that it conveys no political lesson, and political economy in its present form is little more than a record of social, economic and political abuses, dignified with the name of science. In what school or college is there imparted a regular course of instruction in the duties of citizens and corporations to the State and of the State to

them? In what school are the children of rich parents taught the baseness and perdition of buying a vote, or those of poor parents the baseness and perdition of selling one? I know of none. And yet we wonder that the rich bribe and the poor are bribed! We wonder that corporations buy Representatives and Senators, nay even Houses of Representatives and Senates, and that the latter are bought. The truth is that we have taken no trouble to educate them into anything better.

I have now gone over the whole list of human duties, and I have shown that our present systems of education give almost. no instruction, either theoretical or practical, that can adequately prepare for any of them. The truth is though we have gone so far as to drop the old mediæval notion of preparing for another life, we have not made any arrangements to prepare for the duties of this. Our education is still mediæval, a shell without a kernel, a body without a soul, a mass of material without a form. So much for the failure of our education to prepare for the duties of life.

I come now, lastly, to speak of its failure to educate continuously. As every one knows, our school education occupies but a few hours every week for a certain number of months during a brief period of years. During much of the remaining time children and young people are left largely to themselves, their education receiving no care. This is especially true of them during their hours of play, when they are usually left entirely to their own devices. Now there is no time when character is more deeply influenced than during play, and there is hardly any greater safeguard to character than the power to find amusement in noble things. I am entirely convinced that, if we could trace the origin of evil habits and tendencies, we should find that three-quarters of them were acquired in hours of leisure and amusement, and are persisted in largely because the bearers of them have not been educated in the art of finding amusement in noble ways. I am, by no means, unaware that it is of the utmost importance that young people should learn betimes to guide themselves, and