The New Education: Its Organization. Ii

IN a former paper¹ we have seen that several good American schools, variously called scientific, polytechnic, or technological, now offer to young men who are not inclined to go to college a liberal and practical education in preparation for active pursuits and the scientific professions. These schools receive boys of from sixteen to eighteen years of age, and usually endeavor to carry them through a systematic four years’ course of study ; they thus cover the same period of life, on the average, as the ordinary college course. With a single exception, these schools do not require of candidates for admission any knowledge of either Latin or Greek, and in none of them are the classics taught. The sciences, modern literature, and philosophy form the basis of their instruction.

What, then, should be the preliminary training of a boy who is to be prepared to enter a scientific or technological school by the time he is seventeen years old ? This question may best be answered in the course of a more general discussion.

The proper studies of boyhood may be classified under three heads, — language, mathematics, and science, both natural and exact. Without going into much detail, we wish, first, to consider what the training of all boys whose parents can afford to let them study until they are twenty-one should be in each of these principal subdivisions up to about the seventeenth year.

In language, the first thing which a child should study with persistence and thoroughness is his native tongue ; and this, not through its formal grammar, but by reading aloud, by committing to memory choice bits, and by listening to a good teacher’s commentary

upon passages selected from standard authors on purpose to illustrate the capacities and varieties of the English sentence, the nature of its parts, the significance of the order, of words, and the use of epithets. A child can drink in and instinctively appreciate the beauties of a refined or noble style years before he can understand grammar and rhetoric, just as he admires the flaming woods of autumn long before he even thinks to inquire into the elements and explanations of their sudden glory. The mother tongue should come to a child by unconscious imitation of good examples, by impregnation unawares with the idiomatic essence of the native speech. But to this end the best examples, in prose and poetry, must be kept constantly before him from the time when he can first commit to memory a bit of poetry (not doggerel) or a verse of the Bible. Almost all American schools utterly neglect this kind of training. French and German boys study their own languages in the manner above indicated early and late ; but in England and the United States the study of formal grammar has unfortunately replaced the true study of English. When a boy has learned by imitation to know and use his mother tongue, it will be time enough for him to look at it as an instrument of thought ; and before this time comes it is to be hoped that he will have studied grammar in some other language than his own. English literature should be the first literature which an American boy studies. It is a shame that so many boys of seventeen read the Georgies before the Midsummer Night’s Dream, Horace before Milton, and Xenophon before Napier. The boys’ school ought to teach English systematically and amply, so that no child’s knowledge of his native language should be left to the chance influences of his home, the street, and the newspaper.

After English, the most desirable language for a boy to study is Latin. Its study imparts knowledge of language as a vehicle of thought better than the study of less regular and less inflected languages. Moreover, by learning to read Latin, access is gained to a splendid literature which has exerted, and still exerts, a wonderful influence over the modern civilized communities. The living languages and recent literatures of Western Europe are all impregnated with the Roman speech and thought, and no man can be thoroughly at home in any one of them, not even in his own, without some knowledge of Latin. It is sometimes said that nothing is worth teaching which is not worth remembering, and that the man forgets all the Latin which the boy knew. But it is not true that the man loses the mental habits which the boy acquired in studying Latin. Most of the technical ideas which a boy gets while he studies Latin can be transferred to other languages ; most of the ways of thinking which become natural to him will be applicable to other subjects of thought. The distinctions between subject, predicate, and object, between active and passive, between different moods and tenses, the various connections of time and place, the relations of dependence, sequence, and contingency, the definitions of technical terms, each of which contains a philosophical distinction, — these are things which can be made familiar to a boy of seventeen ; and even if he never after open a Latin book, he will have acquired notions and habits which go far to fix his mental tone. His mind will have been already furnished with a literary stock of the best quality. It is possible, or perhaps probable, that this intellectual furniture, this mental discipline, may be obtained by hard work over any language and literature. The Gettysburg speech proves that it can be got out of English. But in the actual state of educational appliances, the study of Latin is the readiest means of obtaining it. As the world stands, Latin is the best medium, after the mother tongue, through which to study language in general, and to acquire the powers of clear conception and adequate expression. Young men who are to devote themselves chiefly to other than linguistic studies after their seventeenth or eighteenth year have special reason to give a large portion of their time before that year to the study of language. No men have greater need of the power of expressing their ideas with clearness, conciseness, and vigor than those whose avocations require them to describe and discuss material resources, industrial processes, public works, mining enterprises, and the complicated problems of trade and finance. In such writings embellishment may be dispensed with, but the chief merits of style — precision, simplicity, perspicuity, and force — are never more necessary.

When sound arguments are so abundant, it is a woful blunder to use false ones. Nobody ought to teach Latin to boys on the ground that it is indispensable to professional men. Any doctor, lawyer, or popular exhorter, who cannot learn by heart in a week all the technical terms and phrases of Latin origin which he encounters in his common professional occupations, has not wits enough for his calling. To give the Latin origin of some scientific names, some legal phrases, and a few doctors’ hieroglyphics as a reason why all boys should learn Latin, is to assign the feeblest possible reason for doing what is on other grounds a very good thing. The vulgar argument that the study of the classics is necessary to “make a gentleman” is beneath contempt. Honor and gentleness are not a dye or a lacquer, but warp and woof. It is true that a certain social consideration attaches to persons who are supposed to know Latin and Greek, whether they are gentlemen or not. The reason is that for many generations Latin and Greek stood for all education, and society has not yet sufficiently enlarged its old definition of an educated man.

The great need of a more thorough Study of language than has lately been common among scientific men plainly appears in many of the scientific writings of the day. Many a genuine discoverer in science is quite unable to describe a fact, or series of facts, methodically, clearly, and accurately. Many an inventor whose mind is full of original and curious ideas is at a, loss for language in which to convey them to others.

It is doubtless their experience of the losses, direct and indirect, suffered by boys who are ignorant of Latin, which has induced the two leadingpolytechnic schools of this country — the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Sheffield Scientific School—to recommend their pupils to study Latin before entering.

After Latin, or rather with Latin, should come French. Nothing need be said of the necessity of this language for all educated men. It can hardly be begun too early. Latin and French go admirably together, and these two languages, with English, should occupy more than half of every boy’s time up to the seventeenth or eighteenth year.

Next comes the second principal subdivision of the studies proper to boyhood, namely, the mathematics. Arithmetic, algebra to equations of the second degree, and plane geometry, is a moderate requisition in this subdivision. The numerous American transcripts of French treatises on elementary algebra and geometry, happily much better than the corresponding English treatises, are sufficiently good schoolbooks. The worst taught of the three subjects is usually arithmetic. Many a boy of seventeen, who has studied arithmetic ever since he was seven, is unable to divide a whole number by 0.2 with ease and confidence. The abovementioned amount of mathematics is about the quantity required by the best colleges for admission, and it is almost the sole requisition for admission to the scientific and technical schools. The preparatory schools are therefore accustomed to teach these subjects.

The science which may be judiciously taught to boys under seventeen years of age is, we believe, of much less bulk and variety than is commonly imagined. Chemistry, physics, zoology, physiology, and all the other sciences which deal much in theories, and require strong powers of imagination and combination, are unsuited to the undeveloped mind of boyhood. They may be played with by children so far as to take off the edge of an appetite which ought to be reserved in all its strength for profitable indulgence in future years ; but to comprehend their reasoning and really profit by their serious study, the stronger thinking powers of opening manhood are requisite. To master a new phenomenon, and at the same time to refer it to its natural connections and grasp its theory and its explanation, requires a strong bead and a retentive memory. Most of the sciences, if attacked in earnest, are much too hard for young boys. Of the natural sciences, physical geography wit glimpse of geology, and botany taught from flowers and plants, not from books, are well adapted to the boyish mind. Of the exact sciences, the elementary mechanics, taught by the simultaneous use of books and models, is the subject which may be most easily grasped in its reasoning, and most effectively illustrated in what the boy daily sees and handles. The six mechanical powers may be really comprehended, if well illustrated, by an average boy of fifteen ; but electricity, sound, heat, light, and chemical combination by equivalents, are beyond his powers, He may enjoy seeing experiments in these sciences, just as he likes fireworks and magic-lanterns, but at the best it is only a very superficial acquaintance which he gets with these really difficult subjects. We have seen many cases in which too early dabbling with the physical sciences proved a positive injury in later years, when the serious study of these subjects was to be entered upon. An unfounded notion that he is already acquainted with physics and chemistry is a grave injury to a boy of seventeen.

Lest misconceptions arise, brief allusion may here be made to two pregnant considerations which are reserved for full discussion in another connection. The first of these considerations is, that one cannot too early teach a child the distinction between a fact and an inference from a fact. Few adults appreciate this fundamental difference in its full strength. But it may, nevertheless, be very early impressed upon a child’s mind, and daily illustrated from his own experience and observation. The second consideration is, that a familiar acquaintance with many of the phenomena which constitute the raw material of the sciences is attainable at an early age. Scientific study will proceed in maturer years with greater ease and firmness, if the common phenomena with which science deals have become domesticated in the mind during childhood. We use the term “phenomena” advisedly. It is to the appearances of things that a child’s attention should be directed, not to their explanations or supposed final causes. The boy of seventeen will take to scientific chemistry much more kindly if lie has been always encouraged to consider exactly what it is which happens to his father’s tools when they are left out in the wet, or what becomes of the log put on the fire, or of the sugar in the tumbler of water. Geology will not be a wholly strange thing to a boy who has really noticed how, when sudden showers flood the roads, the sand and little stones are swept into the gutters, and hurried down the hill, and then dropped gently in the first level expanse. He has made early acquaintance with the transporting power of water. A boy who has observed with real attention the annual course of events in his father’s market-garden — merely the events without cause or consequence— has unconsciously assimilated a mass of facts which he will be agreeably surprised to find already a part of himself, when he meets them again in the grave sciences of vegetable physiology, chemistry, and meteorology. This early assimilation of the countless common facts which form the main staple of the sciences is of great advantage in education. If, however, the facts are confounded with, or obscured by, theories and speculations, the gain is straightway converted into a loss.

There remains one other subject which some people would desire to see made matter of early study at school, namely, history, or at least the history of the United States. Many think, on the contrary, that so much of history as a child finds interesting will be picked up as a part of home reading, and as to the uninteresting parts, the dates and names of kings and queens, that it is as useless to learn a list of dates as of atomic weights, and that genealogies and tariffs are as unsuitable food for a child’s mind as tables of the conducting power of the metals, or the baker’s score by the kitchen window.

Judicious parents will see that their boys learn to draw and sing, either in school or out of school. It is a common mistake to consider these things the luxuries of education ; they are both of great practical advantage to every man. Drawing, especially, is admirable training of eye and hand and imagination ; provided only that it be the lithographs or of other people’s drawing of objects, not the copying of drawings. The only legitimate use of copies is to show how the effects of light and shade, which a boy sees on a real object, can be effectively and rapidly imitated on paper. Mere manual dexterity in drawing is of great practical use in all the scientific professions, and to a good degree in common life. All children can learn to draw more or less, and most children can learn to sing.

Having thus sketched the proper preliminary training for boys destined for the scientific or technological schools, let us inquire how such a school-training is to be obtained at this day in this country. The answer is plain. It can only be obtained in the best schools, both public and private, which make it an important part of their business to fit boys for college. The programme of study which has been detailed is not exactly the actual course of study which boys now pass through who are well prepared to enter Harvard, Yale, Columbia, or any other good college ; but it is very nearly what such boys ought to accomplish besides their elementary study of Greek. At present the colleges require for admission a modicum of Greek. So long as this is the case, the preparatory schools must teach Greek; but this is the one study of such schools which boys destined for scientific or technological schools should omit. There is no necessity of putting Greek on the same ground with Latin in a scheme of education. The two languages are very unlike, and are entirely separable in discussion and in teaching. Greek has very little to do with the languages of modern Europe. It is Roman law, and not Greek law, which is the basis of the modern states. Tt is in Latin, and not in Greek, that European science, philosophy, and history are written down to the time of the French Revolution. Greek is indeed an essential part of high literary culture. It is a marvellous instrument of thought, the vehicle of an unsurpassed literature, and it is the language of the Gospels. But art is immensely broader and deeper than it was two generations ago, and average life is only a few months longer. Not every good thing can be eaten or studied at once. The welfare of the great mass of boys must not be sacrificed in school arrangements to that of the few who are to be ministers and literary men. A heavy responsibility rests on college examiners in this regard; the schools are very much what the colleges make them.

Let the best preparatory schools, therefore, keep in the same classes the boys for college and the boys for technical schools in all subjects except Greek ; and let the study of Greek be put off as late as possible, in order to keep the boys together until the last practicable moment. If the necessity of giving the boys destined for college a considerable time for the study of Greek, compel a reduction for them in the studies enumerated above as best suited for the boys going to a technological school, let this reduction be made upon the geometry, elementary mechanics, and English subjects, which the boys destined for science need to study more thoroughly than the boys who will subsequently pass through the semiclassical college course. But the time assigned to the study of Greek must not be exaggerated. The Phillips Academy at Exeter, than which there is certainly no better preparatory school i n this country, teaches thoroughly, in a course of three years, all the Latin, Greek, and mathematics required for admission to college. There have been many good college students who have learned in two years all the Latin and Greek demanded for admission.

It is a great object, worth some sacrifices, to keep all the boys together until the last year or eighteen months of their school life. A boy’s course of study should be representative ; it should be so selected as to reveal to him, or at least to his parents and teachers, his capacities and tastes before he is seventeen years old. Teachers are apt not to believe much in natural bents. They observe that the boy who is fond of mathematics is generally good in the classics also ; that the boy who takes kindly to language is generally respectable in all other subjects. The observation is correct, but the inference from it is not a just one. The boy who loves mathematical reasoning learns to concentrate all his powers upon that subject. This power of thinking, once acquired, he applies successfully to other subjects. Another boy, who has a natural gift for languages, acquires this power of concentrated attention while studying Latin or Greek ; he then applies it to his other studies, which he succeeds in mastering in spite of their distastefulness. But this general fact does not in the least invalidate the fundamental proposition, that a man will be productive and happy in his life-work just in proportion to Ids natural fitness for it. The teacher, mother, or father can do nothing better fora boy than to find out, or help him to find out, this innate aptitude. But to this end the boy’s course of study at school must be fairly representative. It must be neither language, science, nor mathematics chiefly, but all combined in due proportion. Parents who are able to do the best thing for their children, which is attainable in the actual state of American society may be sure that their boys’ training up to sixteen years of age has not been right if it has not made possible for them all careers which start at or near that point.

But some indignant father says : “ I spent two years of my boyhood in committing to memory Andrews and Stoddard’s Latin Grammar, and learning the ancient geography of the countries about the Mediterranean. Nothing shall induce me to have my boy condemned to the same sickening drudgery.” We would not gainsay this dictum. But high authorities now recommend Latin grammars which are much smaller than those of twenty and thirty years ago ; and good teachers omit large portions even of these diminished grammars, especially the long lists of exceptions in etymology and the greater part of the syntax. Common sense has reformed to a good degree the teaching of the dead languages, and every year sees changes for the better. By thus reducing the teaching of formal grammar, time is gained for better things, — for reading Latin, lor English and French, botany and drawing.

There is great need of broadening and deepening the course of study in the schools which receive the American boy from ten to seventeen. Reasonable parents justly complain of the very small number of subjects in which their boys are instructed at this forming period of their lives. It is indisputable that French and German boys, though inferior as a rule to American boys in reach and liveliness of mind, are better trained at seventeen than their American contemporaries, and in a larger variety of subjects. It is necessary to teach the very elements of French to a large part of the Senior class at Yale College. Not a few Harvard Sophomores were rather doubtful where the joke was, when one of their number announced that the Rhine is an African river. Many of the applicants for admission to the Troy Polytechnic School might be quite unable to divide by a fraction, if they should happen to forget the mechanical rule, invert the divisor, and proceed as in multiplication.”

A very interesting work is before the younger men who are now establishing or conducting preparatory schools. The school programmes are to be extended and enriched, the unprofitable subjects cut out, a greater variety of studies introduced, and the course of study so modified as to make it as available for boys who are going to polytechnic schools as for those who are going to college. We venture the prediction that the teachers who first or best effect these changes will find their account in them. The process of adaptation has already begun.

The country will shortly need more polytechnic schools of the highest grade than it now has. The four or five existing schools will be filled, and new ones will be established. The number of trained young men entering the scientific professions every year, becoming engineers, architects, teachers of science, chemists, superintendents of mines and works, and constructors of machinery, ought to bear some comparison with the number of those who enter the professions of law and medicine. The polytechnic schools may also play an important part in the much-hoped-for reform of the civil service of the country. It is a mistake to suppose that the growth of the technical schools will injure the colleges. On the contrary, the polytechnic schools, though claiming young men of the college age, and perhaps diverting a few from academic life, will do the colleges good service by relieving them of all necessity of meeting the demand for practical instruction, and leaving them at ease for their legitimate work.

A polytechnic or technological school is best placed in a large city, in a great industrial centre. A college needs quiet and seclusion ; a technical school, on the contrary, should be within easy reach of works, mills, forges, machineshops, and mines. The professors of a scientific school have need to be brought into daily contact with practical affairs, to watch the progress of new inventions as they develop from day to day. and to know the men who are improving special industries. The students of a scientific school have a like need. They need to see as much as possible of the actual conditions of practical mining, manufacturing, constructing, and inventing, while they are students, because, when they leave the school, they are almost invariably thrown directly into the vortex of business, and have not that interval of little work and much leisure through which the young lawyer or doctor is gradually initiated into the practical details of his profession.

The amount of money required to establish securely a polytechnic school of the best sort, capable of receiving four or five hundred pupils, is considerable, but yet within the means of many individuals in this country. One man provided all the buildings, apparatus, and money needed to found, and carry on for many years, the Ecole Cent rale at Paris. He saw the school grow into a famous institution, resorted to by all nations, and of the first importance to French science and industry, and finally presented it to the state. For several years it has been a government school of large size and the highest rank. It would be impossible to estimate the good effects upon French industry of that one man’s sagacity and good management.

To house and equip such a school, in any of our large cities, requires the expenditure of three or four hundred thousand dollars. To provide for the running expenses of the school, once equipped, requires the interest of invested funds to about the same amount, besides the students’ fees. American trustees for educational establishments are apt to be ignorant of the fact that no school or college of high grade can be worthily conducted on the principle of making it pay its own expenses. The original “plant” must be given by individuals or the state, and the income of permanent funds must eke out the receipts from students. The fees will necessarily be high, unless the invested property of the school be large ; for technical education is the most expensive kind ot education, because of the costly apparatus and collections which are absolutely required. All attempts to domesticate in this country the foreign custom of paying professors by the fees of the students they attract, instead of by fixed salaries, have signally failed. Wherever it has been tried in this country, the tone of the instruction has been lowered by the too direct money relation between teacher and taught. The American boy is not well adapted to hold that attitude towards his instructors ; and the American man cannot abide such a relation to his pupils.

It is of the first importance that the schools which train American boys for the scientific professions should be American. European schools teach American students a great many things which are not only inapplicable in America, but positively misleading and dangerous. The prices of labor, fuel, and transportation are so very unlike in Europe and in this country, that methods and processes which are profitable there are ruinous here, in spite of the fact that scientific principles do not change with the latitude and longitude. The conditions of success in all manufacturing and mining industries are very different in a thinly peopled country of immense distances from what they are in compact, crowded communities ; so that it is not to be wondered at, if men thoroughly imbued with the spirit of European schools, and taught only the practices and results of established European industries, are less successful than could be wished when they attempt to put their school knowledge in practice under the novel American conditions. A man who has spent all his apprenticeship in building Dutch galliots is not likely to excel in building Baltimore clippers. An uneducated Welsh miner, perfectly familiar with every detail of his trade at home, is utterly lost if he is put clown among strange rocks and minerals. His home experience is almost useless to him. A well-trained man, perfectly competent to superintend zinc-works in Belgium or Silesia, may easily prove an unsafe guide in Pennsylvania or Illinois. An architect, who would have no difficulty in finishing a tasteful house or handsome church in Paris within his estimates, might be quite unable to make feasible plans and binding specifications in New York. Conditions of business and ways of living in America are fundamentally different from European habits and conditions. An average American does not eat. drink, sleep, work, or amuse’ himself like an average European. He wants different tools, carriages, cars, steamboats, clothes, medicines, and houses. His necessities and his luxuries are both unlike those of the European. The industries which exist to supply American wants are therefore not like the corresponding European industries. They will be better learned at home than abroad. The whole spirit of the school at home will be in conformity with American requirements. The spirit of a European school cannot but be foreign in many respects to American habits. It is not now as it was thirty years ago, when an American boy had to go to Europe if he wanted to learn chemical analysis or the elements of engineering. Now one might as well go to Europe to learn the multiplicationtable, as to study the common subjects in chemistry, physics, mechanics, and engineering. The instruction in these and many other scientific subjects is as good in several American schools and colleges as it is anywhere in Europe. More schools are needed ; but even now the American should do all his student-work at home. When he has become a master in his art, he may well go to Europe to see how his business is there conducted.

Three difficulties beset the establishment of such new schools in this country. The first danger is the tendency to reckless preliminary expenditure upon buildings and mechanical fittings. Many American schools and colleges have been wrecked on this rock. The American trustee has a deplorable propensity to put what should be quick capital into more or less unsuitable bricks and mortar. This danger escaped, the second difficulty is the scarcity of teachers having the necessary training and the equally necessary enthusiasm. There must be brought together a harmonious body of teachers, young, if possible, both in years and spirit, but at any rate in spirit, allowed the leisure necessary for men to keep themselves on a level with the rapid progress of the arts and sciences, and paid enough to have a mind at ease. High reputation is not necessary ; but conscientiousness in the discharge of routine duties, fair talents well improved, and a genuine enthusiasm are essential. If to these qualifications there can be added personal devotion to the head of the institution, the happiest conditions are united. The American scientific schools and colleges and the European universities have trained a few Americans to such functions ; but they are still scarce, because the active industries of the country absorb the greater number of energetic young men possessed of the requisite training. The supreme difficulty remains. Men competent to administer a large school of science are rare in all communities ; they are not only rare in this country, but are here peculiarly liable to be drawn into other pursuits. A steady, careful, and kindly administration is required, not thrusting itself into notice, but quietly felt alike by teachers, students, and servants. The building up in any new place of a great school for the new education must be in the main the work of a single man, or, in rare cases, of two or three men animated by the same spirit. To find this man should always be the first step ; it will certainly be the hardest in the whole undertaking.

The American colleges have taken, and still take, their presidents from the clerical profession almost exclusively. This course has been perfectly natural for the colleges, because almost all of them have been founded expressly to propagate and perpetuate the Gospel as the founders understood it, or, in other words, to breed ministers and laymen of some particular religious communion. It is gradually becomingapparent that even the colleges are suffering from this too exclusively clerical administration. Fortunately for the country, education is getting to be a profession by itself. For the discharge of the highest functions in this profession, the training of a divinity student, years of weekly preaching, and much practice in the discharge of pastoral duties, are no longer supposed to be the best, or at least the only preparation. Several other classes of men are now as cultivated as the clergy. As a class, ministers are as fit to be suddenly transferred to the bench at forty-five or fifty years of age, as they are to be put at the head of large educational establishments. The legal profession would be somewhat astonished at such an intrusion. Yet in their capacity of trustees, lawyers and men of business are constantly putting clergymen into the highest posts of the profession of education, which is thus robbed of its few prizes, and subjected to such indignity as soldiers feel when untried civilians are put over their heads, But, however it may be with the colleges, to transplant a successful clergyman in the prime of life from the charge of a parish to the charge of a polytechnic school would be felt to be absurd. The difficulty of finding a good head is not to be surmounted in any such ready fashion.

But now some one may ask. To what good end all this discourse about the improvement of technical education ? Are not Americans already the most ingenious people on the earth ? Have we not invented mowers, and sewingmachines, and the best printing-presses ? Are we not doing countless things by machinery which other people do by hand? Is there really any need of instructing Americans in the application of science to the arts ? The answers to these incredulous suggestions are not far to seek. In the first place, it is emphatically true that Americans have invented a large number of labor-saving machines of the greatest value. They are powerfully incited to this sort of invention by the dearness of labor in this country. Secondly, this same scarcity of laborers, and the consequent abundance of work for all willing hands, enable an American to pursue the precarious rewards ot invention, perhaps for years, with the certainty that if, after all, he wins no prize in the lottery, he can readily find some steady employment to keep his old age from absolute want. But if a European once falls out of the ranks of industry, he has infinite trouble, in case lie fails in his adventures, to recover any standing room whatever in society. An American may do with impunity, and without real wrong perhaps, what a European could only do in the spirit of the most reckless gambler or in the confidence of inspired genius. Freedom, and the newness and breadth of the land, explain this favored condition of the American. But it is to be noticed that the chief American successes in invention are of one sort, — machinery and mechanical appliances. In other departments ot invention, which require greater knowledge, we are obviously borrowers, rather than lenders. How many millions of dollars are sunk every few years in mining enterprises, through sheer ignorance ? Freiberg and Swansea have to be called upon to smelt American ores. The best managers of American print-works receive patterns of the latest French designs by every steamer. The aniline colors are not American discoveries. There are hardly twenty miles of good road, in the European sense, in the whole United States. The various chemical industries are chiefly foreign. American ingenuity has been of more limited range than is commonly imagined. Not a few reputed American inventions are really of European origin. But, however this may be, we may zealously endeavor to strengthen the scientific professions in this country without being a whit less proud of the undisputed achievements of American ingenuity. It is not a question of promoting fertility of invention by improving technical education. Inventors are a law unto themselves. What the country needs is a steady supply of men well trained in recognized principles of science and art, and well informed about established practice. We need engineers who thoroughly understand what is already known at home and abroad about mining, road and bridge building, railways, canals, water-powers, and steam machinery ; architects who have thoroughly studied their art; builders who can at least construct buildings which will not fall down; chemists and metallurgists who know what the world has done and is doing in the chemical arts, and in the extraction and working of metals ; manufacturers who appreciate what science and technical skill can do for the works which they superintend.

Americans must not sit down contented with their position among the industrial nations. We have inherited civil liberty, social mobility, and immense native resources. The advantages we thus hold over the European nations are inestimable. The question is, not how much our freedom can do for us unaided, but how much we can help freedom by judicious education. We appreciate better than we did ten years ago that true progress in this country means progress for the world. In organizing the new education, we do not labor for ourselves alone. Freedom will be glorified in her works.