This is a practical age. One of the first questions we ask in regard to any proposed scheme of action or thought is: of what use is it? We have come to regard utility as the only excuse for being, and not utility in a very high, broad or far-seeing sense, but in rather an external, transient and materialistic sense, the immediate and mechanical view of things as useful or not useful. Does this course furnish bread and butter? does it mean money? will it diffuse the necessaries of physical sustenance? These are very important aspects of utility and concern us to a very wide extent as we meet the problem of life face to face. Especially in a work of beneficence for the mass of humanity, we are compelled to emphasize this phase of utility, at least before we attempt a larger interpretation. The exigencies of the destitute and the ignorant seem to lie in that plane; we must help them to the means of obtaining food, clothing, shelter and warmth. But even for this class the idea of utility has a much deeper and fuller significance. Is not the life more than meat and the body than raiment? Life is by the poorest felt to include feeling, knowledge and progress in the scale of being.

We find ourselves in the midst of an era of material and physical development, and we are led to form the notion of physical and material supply as the summum bonum for all mankind. To train the muscles to perfect manipulation, to lay the foundation. of industries, to prepare the child for successful trade and to occupy him physically, is the educational ultimatum of to-day. Let him learn so much of reading and writing and arithmetic as will enable him to elbow his way through the world; let him study so as to provide himself with what he needs for a livelihood; let him understand that honesty is the best policy, and, if he may be made so fashionable as to catch such unworthy notions of morality, that the virtues are on the whole worth acquiring as a safe and useful accomplishment, then he has started on the course which will give him at least a chance in the "survival of the fittest" so far as this world is concerned.

Now, have we done the best we can for the race when we have thus blotted out the ideals of life and have reduced all activities to one mechanical level? We have taken out of our educational philosophy all that is inspirational; we are reduced to