philosophical activities; it lives also in its artistic activities. America needs to know what the Greeks knew so well, who had one word both for virtue and beauty. To them virtue was a form of beauty, and beauty was a form of virtue. Goodness, beauty, truth - these are but three aspects of the one great reality. It is in vain that Mr. Carnegie multiplies his libraries if we are not multiplying intelligent readers to get life out of them. It is in vain that Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan endows and enriches the Metropolitan Museum if we are not educating boys and girls to take delight in statuary and in pictures. It is in vain that we build music-halls and opera-houses if our boys and girls are not so educated that their life will be expressed and enriched by the music which is there rendered.

What is all this but saying that we must educate for life and by means of life? We must attach our schools to life. We must bring them forth from life. We must make education the process from a child's experience to a man's experience, as the growth of the plant is from the seed. Some teachers tell me that in their schools they find the children of the rich more awkward than the children of the poor, because the children of the poor have been expected to take care of themselves and the children of the rich have been taken

care of so much that they do not know how to move with gracefulness. Some teachers tell me that the children of the poor grapple with intellectual problems better than the children of the rich, because the children of the poor have been thrown upon their own resources and compelled to grapple, while the children of the rich have been taken out of life by a mistaken kindness. Perhaps this is too broad a generalization from too narrow an experience; I do not know; but this I do know, that wherever a child is robbed of the experience of life he is robbed of the benefits of education. Education must begin with experience and go through experience to a perfected experience. Pestalozzi went at one period of his career to Paris, and a friend endeavored to present him to Napoleon the Great. Napoleon declined. "I have no time for A B C," he said. When Pestalozzi returned to his home, his friends asked him, "Did you see Napoleon the Great ?" "No, I did not see Napoleon the Great, and Napoleon the Great did not see me." Napoleon the Great lived to see the empire which he had founded on soldiers crumble to pieces because he had had no time to attend to A B C.

The builders of this Nation are not the men at Washington; the builders of this Nation are the fathers, the mothers, the teachers. To educate

the child from the cradle, to habituate him to obedience, to develop in him the sense of justice and of truthfulness, to train him to habits of a divine manhood, then, with this training, to launch him into the school, and there, not to work against the school, as some mothers do, not to be indifferent to the school, as many fathers are, but to coöperate with the teacher, in support of her authority, in sympathy with her instruction, in aid of her work, and in that coöperation to connect all that teaching with the home and with the life, so that this child, growing to manhood, may learn how to support himself, to do his own thinking, to understand the thoughts of his neighbor, to live with that neighbor in harmony, in justice, righteousness, and fair dealing; to give the child splendid ideals beckoning him on, to give him the lessons of past history holding him in check, to give him the joy that comes through beauty, and to make all his teaching grow out of his life and fit him for his life-this is the work of education in a self-educating community preparing itself for self-government.

CHAPTER VII

PRESENT CONDITIONS IN INDUSTRY

A RECENT English writer has thus described a scene which one may witness any Sunday morning in the streets of one of the greatest commercial capitals of Christendom, the city of London:

Sunday morning witnesses the strangest sight in these streets. The lodgers hold a bazaar. From end to end the railings are hung with fusty and almost moving rags, the refuse of the week's picking and stealing, which no pawnbroker can be brought to buy. Neighbors, barely dressed, many of them with black eyes, bandaged heads, and broken mouths, turn out to inspect this frightful collection of rags. There is bargaining, buying, and exchanging. Practically naked children look on and learn the tricks of the trade. If you could see the bareheaded women, with their hanging hair, their ferocious eyes, their brutal mouths; if you could see them there, half dressed, and that in a draggle-tailed slovenliness incomparably horrible; and if you could hear the appalling language loading their hoarse voices, and from their phrases receive into your mind some impression of their modes of thought, you would say that human nature in the earliest and most barbarous of its evolutionary changes had never, could never have, been like this; that these people are mov

ing on in a line of their own; that they have produced something definitely non-human, which is as distinct from humanity as the anthropoid ape. Ruth, or even Mary of Magdala, at the beginning of the line; two thousand years of progress; and then these corrupt and mangy things at the end! This is not to be believed. No; they do not belong to the advancing line, they have never been human. For the honor of humanity one rejects them.1

The picture is not too dark. Any one who has visited the slums of London can attest its photographic reality; and although I think the slums of London are probably the worst slums in Christendom, worse than those of Paris or Naples, worse than those of New York or Chicago, yet almost every civilized city contains a population somewhat answering to the description from which I have taken this paragraph. Different in degree, but not different in kind, of misery, vice, and degradation, such are some of our neighbors in most of our great cities. How came they here?

What responsibility have we for them? I recall that story of the rich man who dressed in fine linen and fared sumptuously every day, and forgot the beggar at his door. You and I, reader, are not rich men, as we sometimes count riches, and perhaps fare not very sumptuously every day,

1 Harold Begbie, Twice-Born Men, pp. 34, 35.