From his studies of the rate of progress of children through the grades in these same thirty-one cities he reaches. the following conclusions:

(1) The number of children who make slow progress is far greater than the number who make rapid progress, and the time lost by the former is far greater than the time saved by the latter.

(2) That for every pupil making rapid progress there are from eight to ten making slow progress, and for every term of school gained by the rapid pupils there are from ten to twelve terms lost by the slow ones.

(3) The courses of study of our school systems are adjusted to the powers of the brighter pupils. They are beyond the powers of the average pupils and far beyond the powers of the slower ones.

(4) The average pupil can not complete the work of eight grades in eight

Enormous leaks exist in our incom

ing school revenues and large ones in improper expenditures of the school revenues. Better and more stringent laws are not needed to prevent these leaks, but a more effective and exacting enforcement and administration of existing laws. The large outflow of pupils from the grades and high schools could be largely checked by a course of study better adapted to the life interests of the children, and by better sanitary conditions. Better salaries and greater security in the positions, and less overtaxing of their energies will do much to prevent the annual exodus of teachers. The relating of all knowledge taught to real life interests and the teaching of only such knowledge as has a direct and specific. purpose will prevent in large measure the leaks in knowledge. With larger revenues, with a more efficient corps of teachers, and with a well balanced and properly adjusted course of study, the leaks of knowledge and the losses. in the pupils' time will be largely eliminated.

This letter is especially for those who are hungry for education and badly behind.

There are thousands of you and you are not indifferent people, either. I know it is true that there are those who believe that if a young man or woman of eighteen years is not a high school graduate, then that man or woman is poor cloth. To begin with, I want to get that conclusion out of your mind. You are simply cloth, and not made. up. To say you are poor cloth, shoddy, is all assumed. You may be. the best of cloth. There is another assumption that has not been proved and that is that those who have taken a course, either in high school or college, are good cloth. Such may be counted as a garment, made in the high school or college, but the high school and college cannot make cloth. The fact is that it is very common now to put very poor cloth into the factory (school) with the hope that the result will be not only a garment, but one made of good cloth. That is an error, too. Again, I say, the school does not make cloth. It can take very poor cloth and make it into a garment that will sell. The schools can label their garments "High School Graduate," "College Graduate," "Master of Arts," "Bachelor of Arts," "Ph. D.," etc., etc., but while all this labeling enhances the price and in a large way the value of the garment, yet the fact remains that if poor cloth goes into the school, it comes out poor cloth. This accounts for what we so often see-that one person with none of these labels, is able

to do much more effective service in life than another who is labeled with the most popular degrees. The world is finding these things out. At this time there is a big rush to the schools for these labels. In many cases they are overestimated and there are many who are so poor in cloth that they feel they must make up in the making what they lack in material. Now, I come back to where I started. You have felt that the world has condemned you as poor in material just because you have delayed the making up. It is yet to be proven that a young man must be made up by the time he is twenty or twenty-five; that if he delays this until he is that old, he is spoiled, as material. Indeed, I deny this. So I want to say to you that you must not give up, because that for some reason, good or bad, you have not been made up into one or another educational form. But there is one cause for apprehension on your part, and I want to call your attention to it. The educators of the country, especially those who work in the public schools, have in the last few years. made what I would call haste in getting children into the high school. Indeed, I think they have gone to extremes in this matter. tremes in this matter. To enter upon the high school career requires both preparation and maturity, beyond what is often required, and I believe that in the process of forcing, the garment is ill-fitting and the wearer is awkward and does not possess that ease and grace that comes from a good fit. It might turn out to be true that you

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ple have been getting experience in life by which they have created a real appetite for real school life, I'll call the period of "shrinking," and this experience is the "shrinking" process. Your mother or sister will tell you how she asks the merchant if the goods she is buying has been "fulled" or "shrunk." Maybe, my boy, you have had some experience in wearing a garment that had not been shrunk. Well, the time to shrink goods is before it is made up. Our fathers used to make their breeches of buckskins and they had no way of "fulling" them. So they were subjected to the dreadful inconvenience , of having them shrink after they were made up and in many cases while they were wearing them.

As applied to education this accounts for the many misfits we see in educated men. Indeed, many a good piece of cloth is spoiled in this fashion. Many a poor fellow has felt the power of public opinion shrinking him, when his degrees or labels had placed him in a position where only a man well "fulled" should have been. Hence, my good boys, you who have awakened to the importance of "making something out of yourselves," you who have been told that you have lost the golden opportunity in not passing on immediately from one school to another, may be after all your experiences have "shrunk" you in a way, bringing the

fibers of your nature into a compactness of mental, moral and spiritual fabric that really prepares you for the "making," fits you for the school. If so, and I believe it, and my faith is based on much experience, then you can give all your energies to that yielding up process, to which the school will call you, and in which process you will be unhindered by the conventionalities of college life, such as college fraternities, college athletics, snap courses and the like. You can, and you will, plow a clean, straight and well-turned furrow through your college career. Then a second period of real life comes to you. This is the man's period. You are responsible here. Mistakes here count to your fearful hurt. You have passed the time when, as a manly man, you can practice on the world. It matters little how much Latin, Greek, mathematics or chemistry abides, except as you may use these in some specialty in life's work, but it matters somewhat the kind of stuff you are made of, and what kind of supernatural man you and the school have made out of the stuff.

Question: Should there not be some. kind of “shrinking" process between the high school and the university? Teaching in the public school, business, work, or a few terms in a small college.

My subject is "Digging the Canal." One may be puzzled to know how a school article is to be made to consist with this subject. The connection is just here: Those in authority here are making every dollar invested contribute directly or indirectly to the construction of our Uncle Samuel's "Big Ditch." The whole proposition is and should be strictly a business one. In a matter involving the expenditure of a third of a billion dollars, and the safety and well-being of the nation, as those best informed believe this to do, philanthropy as affecting a few thousand individuals can have little, if any, place. The business of building the canal is one so involved, so intricate, so myriad-sided, so stupendous, as to make it, of necessity, a cold business proposition. There is a larger philanthropy which has in mind the security of that nation whose geographical position makes it one of the two barriers against a danger which must be viewed as something more than an imaginary creation. But philanthropy as concerning a few individuals has no place here. Every dollar must be made to contribute to that larger end in which the best part of civilization is vitally concerned.

It is not, then, to relieve suffering or to save life that the government has constructed and is maintaining at Colon and Ancon the largest and best hospitals in the world; it is not to make men happy that the commission furnishes its employes with good homes and wholesome food; it is not to make men better that churches are

established. The hospital and the well furnished home are shops where machines are mended and sheltered. Because, on the average, men of families are more desirable, the family is here; but the desirable man is likely to demand churches, and will demand school facilities for his children. Hence the church and school-they are business necessities. Let it not be understood that the men in charge of the work here are unsympathetic-quite the contrary. But they understand what many have failed to understand: that the appropriations were made for the purpose of building the canal.

It is, then, not inappropriate to head this article "Digging the Canal," for that is just what every good teacher here is helping to do. The school system is essentially a part of the gigantic machine which is to part the two continents by 1915. Ask any boy of twelve. what he is doing here, and he will tell you "Helpin' to dig the ditch," and he is not overestimating himself, for what man will not shovel more dirt who intelligently realizes the responsibilities of fatherhood? So the boy is "helpin' to dig the ditch," and his presence here. has made it necessary that school facilities be furnished him.

A well-known Pennsylvanian said to me once, "What an opportunity you have here!" In explanation he offered the statement that there is every opportunity to build up a school system peculiar to itself—one which will answer up to the most advanced ideals in the way of curriculum, methods, discipline, etc. Like many first impres