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to these critics that the whole life of the child outside the schoolroom is just this stimulation of his individuality. The pupil comes to the school from the family where his personality is more magnified than it ever possibly can be afterwards. His whole life with other children outside is a battle, in which he is perpetually stimulated to assert himself. In the church and Sunday school he is taught that the supreme object in this life is his own salvation in the life to come, though all the world beside should be lost. In business he finds himself goaded to an assertion of his own interest which lands half the world in materialistic selfishness. Society is the same pitiless "struggle for existence," in which only one in the ten thousand scores a success. Our partisan politics are practically a state of civil war for every man who attempts to perform the duties of an American citizen. In this world of contention the children happily find themselves for a few short years in the one place where all classes, sorts and conditions are brought together first to acquire the common knowledge and use of their faculties essential to a successful life; but above all to learn the supreme art of living and working together for the common good, "the general welfare." So far from "intellectual training being the prime function of the college," as declared by President Jordan, even in the university it is a secondary consideration. It is true that young people in college are of themselves capable of working out the moral, social and public discipline which, beyond and above all their personal superiorities and rivalries, is the highest function of the higher education. Washington looked to a national university not for the magnifying of intellectual training, but for the living together of a body of superior young men representing the discordant elements of the colonial life, who by their mutual acquaintance and respect should form a patriotic phalanx that would hold the new republic together. But this work, which practically is the highest ideal of a "Christian education," not on theological and sectarian ecclesiastical lines, but "according to the pattern shown in the mount," is far more the work of the teacher in the secondary school, and in the primary department is so essential that without it any school is a dismal failure. So far from its being the chief function of the school-mistress to be "sizing up" the especial peculiarities, aptitudes and whims of her little community, her great ministry is to find out those things in which they agree; how they can be taught to forget the strifes, rivalries, bitter separations and jealousies by which they are stung as by a swarm of bees every day outside, and to realize that each is worthy of the love. of all, and that the highest use of life is the Master's formula, "Let him that is greatest among you be your servant.” Sooner or later

the world will teach all these little ones their own limitations and superiorities. Here in school for a few years they are learning what to do with such knowledge as they may acquire, and how to use their own peculiar ability to supplement the defects of their neighbors and make this world a kingdom of heaven on earth. The very sameness of the course of study in this department is its great excellence, since these few common studies are, as our great educator declares, the open windows of the soul, and the mental faculties thus trained are absolutely essential to success in manhood and womanhood in private and public station. And what an absurdity is involved in this persistent clamor that the five hundred thousand teachers of the country should concentrate their energies upon that profound study of personal character and aptitudes which not only requires the insight of the philosopher but the personal balance of the saint as a qualification. How many children of ordinary school age can be trusted to give any reliable account either of their own abilities or desires? One boy began, in a Western city by a great river, with a consuming ambition to be a captain of a steamboat, and is now a successful musician. Another boy entered college and studied under the inspiration for the Christian ministry, and is to-day the president of the Long Island Railroad. With the very occasional exceptions of precocious talent or genius the vast majority of successful people, even in the higher walks of life, find themselves out only after a long experience of "trying" on this or that, following a succession of will-o'-the-wisps until in the wilderness the path they are forced to tread turns out the highway of their destiny. There is nothing. more destructive to good school-keeping than this incessant nagging of the ordinary teacher to awaken visionary aspirations, and wreck herself in the vain effort to accomplish impossibilities. The teacher is not the one leader in life, but simply one of an honorable companionship, working often against great odds and amid great discouragements with the supreme end, in the common school, of training the children to live together according to the gospel of the great Teacher for the uplifting of all. This spirit can be awakened in a school of fifty children wherever there is a teacher unselfish, intelligent and industrious; so filled with love for the little ones that she moves them by a sweet compulsion, first to worship herself, and through her to act out the golden rule and the law of love, which is "the greatest thing in the world." And as soon as these children learn that highest lesson of all they will teach each other by ways that no pedagogue can fathom and no science analyze.

THE

HE appointment of Hon. William A. Bell as president of Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, will awaken a new hope in the friends of this institution. It will be remembered that Antioch College was founded in the fifties of the present century, by the religious denomination of Christians as distinguished from the larger body known as Campbellites, at that time and to-day a numerous people in the southern portions of the Western and some of the Southwestern States. It was the first venture of the sect in the very difficult enterprise of establishing a denominational college; and the time of its establishment was unfortunately at a period when the mischievous practice of founding colleges on what was known as the scholarship system was in vogue. In this instance it was easy to obtain a large number of the holders of a scholarship of one hundred dollars; the payment of six dollars interest annually giving the right to the free tuition of a student. A generous pile of buildings was thrown together in a charming locality, and Horace Mann, just then retiring from his brief political career that followed his great educational work in New England and the whole country, was invited to the presidency of the new institution. Of course the college was doomed to financial collapse from the beginning; built upon credit, with no endowment and a most uncertain tuition income, before the days of great gifts for education, it needed the mighty faith and tireless energy of the greatest American educator of his day to hold it at arm's length for a few years before he finally sank in death under his impossible task. But it is doubtful if any American institution of the higher education, in so brief a season, under anything like such financial disadvantages, has ever accomplished so much. After his long and notable service in New England, which resulted in the practical reorganization of the American common school to meet the conditions of the coming half century, Horace Mann went to Ohio, then as now the foremost of the free States beyond the Alleghanies, to set up in the New West his own broad ideal of the secondary and higher education. At that time both these grades of instruction, everywhere, were largely in the charge of the different religious denominations; their presidents, professors and boards of managers were largely clergymen or zealous lay churchmen, and the movement for improved methods of instruction and discipline, known as The New Education, just beginning in the common school, had hardly stirred the placid waters of the academy, female seminary and sectarian college. With two or three exceptions in the West and a larger number in the South, the state universities were struggling into life against the determined opposition of the ecclesiastical forces of the country. It

is said that Horace Mann was the first layman called to the presidency of any important college in the Northwest. The State of Ohio had so mismanaged its National University land grant that two small rival institutions were all it had to show for a state institution. It had neither state nor city public normal school, and there were probably not a dozen free high schools in the State. Everything was propitious for a new departure on the lines of the great revival in the common school in which the new President of Antioch had been the most conspicuous leader. His fame at once attracted a crowd of the more ambitious and able youth of these half dozen States. Taking his reputation as a college president, like his life, in his hand, Mr. Mann at once not only made Antioch College coeducational in regard to sex but to race. He took upon himself the duties of a clergyman, and on Sundays and almost every morning in the week-day preached to his admiring student congregation such a series of sermons and addresses as probably never woke the echoes of any other college in the Union. He attacked the time-honored heresy of the "honor system" in student life; which is only a respectable form of the "honor among thieves" that makes the whole student body practically particeps criminis in the offense of every member. In its place he organized one of the most difficult and heterogeneous assemblages of young people that ever tested the patience of a college faculty into a system of self-government, more complete and successful than was probably ever achieved in our own or any other country. Though greatly embarrassed by sectarian jealousies in his choice of teachers, he succeeded in bringing to Antioch a succession of brilliant young men and women who made the instruction also a new revelation. But the blight of financial impecuniosity was over Antioch from the beginning; and only by the herculean efforts of the President, aided by personal gifts from the East, was the final catastrophe staved off until the year of his death. The breaking out of the Civil War emptied its halls of young men, and only at the close was the institution rallied with an endowment of a hundred thousand dollars and placed under a practically Eastern administration. But, meanwhile, the great educational awakening of the West had occurred, and Antioch for a succession of years was left with a fair attendance of students, under the control of a faculty largely from the older States, the leading idea seeming to be that the college should be for the West a representative of Harvard in thoroughness of instruction and general, undefined superiority. The best thing about it was the succession of able young men and women who at different times were called to its chairs.

The two Hosmers, father and son; the late President Orton;

Russell, afterward acting President of Cornell; President Stanley Hall of Clark; Langley in science, and a notable group of men and women afterwards distinguished in various parts of the country, at different times appeared at Antioch. Its second financial collapse would have taken the life out of any other school; but the spirit of Horace Mann seemed to abide, and everywhere through the West could be found notable men and women who had first been awakened to the education which is manhood and womanhood, by the spirit which like a mighty wind swept through the halls of their Alma Mater. Of these graduates none has made a better record than Dr. William A. Bell, for many years teacher and the conductor of a wellknown leading school journal in Indianapolis. His coming to Antioch as President will awaken a new hope in all its friends throughout the country. An especial feature proposed is what Mr. Mann had fully in mind from the beginning: the establishment of "The Horace Mann Teachers' College," with a full three years' course of study according to the standard set by the Teachers' College at Columbia University and other higher institutions of learning. We congratulate Antioch and President Bell on the opportunity to take up the work of his great master almost half a century after his death. And if one result of the new normal department should be to awaken the State of Ohio from its amazing indifference to its duty to establish a State Normal School, it may be that Horace Mann "builded better than he knew" in the last and possibly the greatest work of his life.

MUST WE OBTAIN THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED?

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F the bitter discussion now raging around the great national experiment of a colonial policy, at present so lamentably disfigured by the malignant personal and partisan spirit of many of its leading disputants, should result in turning the mind of the American people to a realization of what was actually meant by the fathers in the notable words in the Declaration of Independence, it might be one of the most notable results of any great political discussion. On every hand we hear the present administration, which probably represents the large majority of the people, charged with a betrayal of republican ideas, which amounts to a change of the entire form of our Government from an American democracy to a European Imperialism." In the particular instance of the Philippine Islands that have now come into the possession of the National Government by the fate of war, according to the law of nations it is

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