beneficial to prospective teachers and to educational interests. It seems obvious to students of New England public education that the college should stand in closer relationship to normal and other professional schools. Such improved relation is possible, and would be conducive to the prosperity and usefulness of all schools and to the educational welfare of New England.

While the New England colleges and universities have no formal connection with public education, they send forth a large number whose lives are devoted to teaching in the public schools. These higher institutions have been defective in provisions for the training of teachers. Until recently all have failed to give due place to the scientific and historical treatment of education as one of the great subjects in liberal training and in opportunities for specific pedagogical study. Some institutions have not yet remedied this defect. It is to these higher institutions that many important public school positions look for trained men and women. The higher educational officials who serve as state, county,* town, or city superintendents of education, principals, heads of departments and the like, require the discipline of liberal studies as a basis for professional training and success. The public

schools cannot be conducted without the service of able and properly trained instructors. Public education in the magnitude of its work furnishes one of the highest and most useful spheres of action for talent, energy and character. In recent years college and university are turning their attention to these interests. Pedagogical and kindred studies are given more prominence than formerly. A closer connection with teachers and practical school work is cultivated. The new departures at Harvard, Brown and Yale Universities, and other New England institutions, in pedagogical work must prove advantageous to future teachers, and increase the number of instructors who combine learning with teaching power.

The qualifications for successful teaching have been frequently discussed. Among them is the power to awaken the pupil's interest in study. Some have the faculty of inspiring others with a love of learning. They kindle enthusiasm in susceptible minds, and move the dullest to new and unusual effort. These

*The New England States, unlike the other American States, have as yet made little use of the county in public education.

high qualities of mind and character appear in both eminent and humble spheres, and characterize those who have a genius for the vocation of teaching.

The faculty of communicating knowledge in a simple and natural way characterizes the best teaching. It involves insight into the laws of mental receptivity and the logical arrangement of thought. The learner's path is thus cleared from needless difficulties. While the impartation of knowledge always requires appropriate effort, it meets, when rightly conducted, the mental instincts of the learner, and contributes to good mental habits. Here the teacher's art is akin to other great arts, as of poet, orator, artist, who have to do with the expression and communication of ideas.

How far the possession of exceptional learning contributes to the teacher's work, has been the subject of an interesting debate, revived from time to time. Prof. John Seeley writes of university work in a way that is suggestive for all schools and teachers. He says of examinations and learning * :—

I think it is the greatest misfortune in a university that success in an examination should be held up by the teaching class in general as the principal object of study.

The truth is that a university in which there are large and all-influential examinations is like a country invaded by the Sphinx. To answer the monster's conundrums becomes the one absorbing occupation. All other pursuits are suspended, everything less urgent seems unimportant and fantastic; the learner ridicules the love of knowledge, and the teacher with more or less shame gradually acquiesces.

Continuing, he refers to a false attitude to learning or research affecting university life. It influences in a measure a multitude of teachers and schools:

Those who propose to sacrifice learning for what they consider the good of the students, do not seem to me distinctly to conceive the magnitude of the sacrifice they propose. They propose to sacrifice the intellectual rank and character of the country, which is left to chance when the universities renounce learning. Private thinkers and amateur writers may by accident rise to supply our credit, just as, if we should disband our

Essays on a Liberal Education, by John Seeley, M.A., and others. Edited by Rev. F. W. Farrar. London, 1867.

↑ Edinburgh Review, January, 1868, p. 83.

But

army, volunteers might succeed in defending the coasts. how much we all lose, nay, how much we have already lost, by our strange system, may be judged by any one who will consider what has been done by university professors in the countries where the professional system is pursued. If we take the single department of philosophy, is it not evident that, if the English system had been followed in the Scotch universities, there would have been no Scotch school of philosophy? And has not the German school sprung entirely from the universities? Were not Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, without exception, university professors? That barrenness in ideas, that contempt for principles, that Philistinism which we hardly dare deny to be an English characteristic now, was not always so. In the seventeenth century, the author of "Argenis" considered the principal fault of English people to be their reckless hardihood in speculation, their love of everything new and untried. In the eighteenth century, Montesquieu calls us the philosophic nation; and at the same date, Holberg, the Dane, describes England as the land of heroes and philosophers. It is not, then, the English character which is averse to thought; we are not naturally the plain, practical people that we sometimes boast, and sometimes blush, to be. If in the present century we have fallen somewhat behind, and instead of overrunning the continent with our ideas, as in the days of Locke, Newton and Bentley, have suffered in our own island the invasion of French and German philosophies, it is assuredly from no inherent weakness. We must seek for other causes, and among them we shall find this, that in the warfare of thought we have hoped to resist regular troops with volunteers.

The truth seems to be that the teacher can never cease to be a learner without losing something of teaching power. His own intellectual life must be progressive. By a sincere example he provokes and incites to learning. He who would make the path of knowledge a bright and shining way must, like the wise virgin, carry oil in the vessel with his lamp.

The value of a great teacher to a country is often celebrated by grateful pupils. The fidelity and excellence of the service of teachers in the common schools have done much for the making of New England. The dignity and worth of teaching are not likely to be overestimated. The teacher holds a high place among the forces which mold and move society.

ΤΗ

IS THE TEACHER A PROLETARIAN?

MRS. WM. D. CABELL, MINNEAPOLIS, MINN.

HIS question is the keynote to a discussion recently conducted with some warmth by two eminent French writers, M. Francisque Sarcey and M. Henry Bérenger. While it should be wholly irrelevant to the dignified and highly esteemed teachers of the United States, it is yet interesting from the light it throws upon the condition of the profession in France, and upon a point of view (hardly to be appreciated by us) bearing upon the great problem of human happiness.

Between the two distinguished disputants there is no difference of opinion as to the actual rate of compensation enjoyed by the body of French teachers, to whom, as to their more fortunate brothers and sisters on this side of the Atlantic, is confided the greatest of all responsibilities, the education of the young. Statistics establish this point. The rates appear to range from a salary of eight hundred francs to, in rare cases, two thousand francs per year for teachers, and up to three thousand francs and even five thousand francs for professors of colleges and lyceums. In other words, a learned doctor of letters, a professor in a French lyceum, may hope to attain the noble salary of one thousand dollars a year.

The point upon which the discussion turns is whether the members of a profession so salaried are or are not to be included in the ranks of those whose condition borders upon destitution; who are properly objects of such public compassion as should lead to reforms in their behalf.

It is proper to note in this connection that in France provision is made for the old age of teachers who, at the end of their long years of service, are forced to retire without having accumulated the means of livelihood; a very likely condition, it would seem to us, upon the scale of compensation quoted.

The first note of this discussion was sounded by M. Henry Bérenger in an article published in the Revue des Revues, in which he states that the real proletarians of France, at this period, are not only the classes usually so designated,-the paupers and the day laborers working for the pittance essential

day by day to bare existence-but the "Intellectuals," the educated classes, the professionals, who, despite or because of their education, are unable to adequately support themselves. In these classes he includes physicians, lawyers, engineers, government employees and teachers. It is on account of the last named profession that the war of words waxed warm.

M. Francisque Sarcey, in the Annales Politiques et Littéraires, takes the position that the terms employed by M. Bérenger are unfortunate, in that they seem to humiliate the noble army of teachers by including them, on any ground, in a class so far beneath them. He disputes the correctness, not of the premises, of course, but of the conclusions, claiming that only dissatisfaction with existing circumstances and undue longings for impossible or unlikely advancement could degrade the teacher into the proletarian. He declares that happiness consists only in frankly accepting existing circumstances, and concludes by quoting the wise and witty observation of Mentor to Telemachus, "He only is happy who believes himself to be so."

The reply of M. Henry Bérenger, dated Paris, February 28th, deserves to be printed at length, but the exigencies of space permit only a few extracts.

TO MONSIEUR FRANCISQUE SARCEY:

Dear and Honored Sir.,-I became aware, through your able article in the Revue Hebdomadaire, that you were greatly interested in my work in the Revue des Revues on "The Intellectual Proletarians of France," and it is probably through your courtesy that this work has had the honor to be reproduced and popularized in the Annales. . . . I had written in my "Intellectual Proletarians" that of one hundred and fifty thousand teachers, more than one hundred thousand were paid between one thousand and fifteen hundred francs (between two hundred and three hundred dollars); that is to say, were in a condition akin to penury.

I wrote this with grief, because I dearly love the teachers, because I honor their conscientious labor, because I recognize their disinterested devotion, and desire for them a material existence worthy of their intellectual and moral efforts. After having formerly, in the Revue Bleue and the Revue de Paris, displayed the gratuitous action of the teachers in the instruction of adults, I expected not to be misunderstood in depicting their