so marked that they cannot be dulled or blunted by any amount of conventional training, the collective method of education destroys individuality, nips originality in the bud, and tends to make the child a weakling, or an imitator, instead of an original, forceful, distinct entity.

One of the best features of the much-discussed Gary method of education is that which provides for the development of the individual tastes and aptitudes of pupils. This is certainly a step in the direction of the education for which the world is ripe.

True education is unfoldment; calling out possibilities, developing original and individual talent, fostering self-reliance, encouraging and stimulating initiative power and executive ability, cultivating all the human faculties, and exercising, strengthening, and buttressing them.

Society needs leaders and originators more than it needs followers and imitators. We have enough, and to spare, of those who are willing to copy, and to lean on others. We want our young people to depend on themselves. We want them to be so educated that their qualities of leadership, their originality, and their individuality will be emphasized and strengthened instead of obliterated.

"Imitation is suicide," says Emerson, "though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on

that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature."

We must till our own little spot of ground or we shall starve. The human soil is full of all kinds of potencies which will respond in proportion to its cultivation.

We cannot borrow even a kernel of brain wheat from our neighbor. Our growth of manhood or womanhood, our moral and mental proportions, will be in exact proportion to the effort we put forth ourselves. What our fathers and mothers have raised on their plot of ground will not keep us from starvation. Although their barns and bins may be overflowing, we cannot touch them. It is only self-deception to think we can. We cannot add one particle of strength to our muscles or power to our brain by what others have done or what others do for us. We stand before our Maker starved, rattling skeletons, or we are fat with all the good things of soul and body, according to our endeavor, our personal effort. No one in the universe can help another so far as one's real self is concerned; one must stand or fall upon his own record, not that of his brother.

But for those splendid women who refused to be imitators, who refused to accept wrongs, to conform to false standards because they were intrenched in the stronghold of tradition, there would be no women's colleges to-day; women would have no legal right to their own children,

to their own bodies, even to their own earnings or their own clothes. They would have no voice in the affairs of church or school or state. Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone Blackwell, Mary A. Livermore, and all the brave pioneer women thinkers and leaders of the past stepped out of the crowd and blazed the freer, broader, pleasanter path in which the women of to-day are walking.

Talleyrand said, "History is not a record of events, it is a record of ideas." Our great ocean liners are developments of Robert Fulton's revolutionary idea, the original steamboat. The crowd of imitators in that day called Fulton a fool, and his invention "Fulton's Folly." The telegraph, the sewing machine, the telephone, every great invention which is the commonplace of to-day, is the result of some new idea, some one's originality, and the inventor of each was at first derided as a "dreamer," or a "fool."

All leaders of man have ever been precedent breakers. Fearlessness and originality are characteristic of men and women of progress. They always look forward not backward, toward the light of the future, not toward the twilight of the past. They hold their minds open, receptive to new ideas.

But to the rank and file, the crowd of imitators, a new idea, a thing that has not been done before, a new way of doing an old task is looked upon

with suspicion. They are afraid to think along new lines, to blaze a new path. They want to follow the beaten road; to do things the way father or mother did them. This timidity, this habit of leaning on the past, or accepting as final what some one else has done in any line, has kept many otherwise bright minds from doing great things, because they never could get away from the tethers which hampered their progress.

If you are a leaner, a copyist, a hanger-on, always waiting for somebody else to take the lead, to think for you, to tell you what to do and how to do it, you will never exert much influence in your home or in your community; you need to cultivate more projectile power. A bullet starts from the rifle with what we call the vigor of projection. There must be sufficient force back of every such initiative effort to carry it to its goal. Originality is what gives projectile force to a man or a woman. It is the mind that thinks its own thoughts that is creative; it is the original mind that makes one a vital living force.

Imitation is negative, and all negative things, negative thinking, all negative mental attitudes, such as doubting one's ability, hesitating to trust one's own opinion or judgment, hesitating to undertake things, the habit of putting off, waiting for more favorable conditions, fearing to begin, reconsidering one's decisions, vacillating, these are all deadly enemies of originality and initiative. Have

nothing to do with them. If one does not cultivate a positive mental attitude, self-confidence, selfreliance, courage, and initiative, one will have a weak, wishy-washy character. He will be unmagnetic, uninteresting, non-progressive. It is the original person, the one who is different, more vital, more forceful who interests and holds our attention.

It does not matter how humble your sphere, you can elevate it by being natural; by being yourself. You can put the stamp of superiority upon whatever you do by doing it in an original way, in an individual way, in the spirit of a master, not that of a slave or a copyist. Many a woman has put more art into her housework because of the personal pride, the painstaking thought, the distinctive individuality she has put into it, than thousands of others have put into their more pretentious professions. There is many a politician who still cobbles and copies although he is in the Senate or in Congress, and there is many a shoemaker who is a master, because of his distinctive work.

There are a large number of patents for improved household devices in the patent office at Washington which have made fortunes for the women patentees. These women were not content to make bread or pies, or do their housework "just as mother did it." They thought for themselves; the final word in household economies had not been said for them. They had new ideas; they put