cation or of technical training as a reason for education and for training. The room at the top motto has been overworked. To urge upon young men the advantages of college education and of college training, because this engineer or that chemist has achieved extraordinary financial or popular success, is in some ways similar to inviting them to invest in a lottery. Schools and colleges exist, not for the preparation of the few great successes, but because we believe that the education for which they stand is a preparation for a wiser and more useful and more contented life. It is equally desirable that the state should say to a still larger class of citizens that in the pursuits of commerce and industry they may find a life which satisfies the intellectual and artistic and moral aspirations of men; to commend to them the life of industrial and commercial effort for its own sake.

And finally, such schools seem to me most desirable in a democratic government as a means of holding together by a common thread of interest the whole body of citizens. It will be a bad day for our institutions when those who work with their hands come to feel that they have any smaller interest in our common schools than have any other class of citizens. Men have seen, during the last generation, the conserving influences in society weakened at many points. Two generations ago master and apprentice met on a common plane at the meeting house. To-day it is a far cry from the man who sits in a pew to the man who tends the dynamo supplying the light by which the minister reads his sermon. In the problems that face us in the future it is most necessary that distinctions of class be not further accentuated. There is no surer way to promote the desired solidarity than by a system of education in which those who direct the education are kept in touch with the great body of citizens. There is no common thread of interest running through the whole fabric of our political life better calculated to exert a unifying touch upon all classes of citizens than that which has to do with public education. For this reason, if for no other, it is vital that education in a republic minister to the whole people and that it consider in its ministry the needs of those whom it is to serve.

And now one naturally asks, what is the practical change which should be made in order to make our public school system minister to the wants of all the people? What schools can be added to those already maintained which shall serve the double purpose of education and training? How should they be organized, by whom controlled, and how maintained in order to serve in the widest sense the whole people?

First of all, it seems to me that if one suddenly found in his hands the arbitrary power to make changes in our system of popular instruction he would neither add to it new features nor take from it old ones for the present; that, looking back over the evolution of our present schemes of education (we can scarcely call them a system), he would recognize that these educational processes are still in a transition stage. Following the civil war, a mighty desire for education came upon us. For a time we believed that all education was good, and the more of it the better. Every institution in the land strained to the utmost to teach every subject-a theory which found its perfect fruit in the idea that every institution must teach every subject to every student. All the doctors in education have been allopaths.

After a while we discovered that this was all wrong, and a new set of doctors came in who believed in educational specifics. The number of special studies and methods of training which have been put forward in the last twenty years, warranted to be infallible educators for man and beast, would almost equal the number of patent medicines. The experience of our schools is painfully like that of a gentle Oriental nation which undertook to found a university. Those who had in their hands the appointment of professors had a theory that any American or any Englishman could teach any subject. Accordingly a faculty was selected at the nearest seaport from amongst the butchers and sailors. The results were interesting, but hardly satisfactory. There were periods when the entire faculty was disabled for days as the result of prolonged investigation of the physical qualities of spiritus frumenti. Gradually the officials in charge of the university arrived at the generalization that not all foreigners could teach. The sailors were accordingly sent about their business and a faculty

selected who were all missionaries. The result was an enormous improvement, but still not all that was hoped for. Modern dynamos and problems in recent chemical processes were troublesome to men educated in Latin and Greek and theology. After five years more that pleasing Oriental government made another generalization, and it was one worth acquiring even at the price paid, and this was the decision that it was not only true that all foreigners could not teach all subjects, but that, if a given subject was to be effectively taught, a teacher must be secured who had fitted himself to teach that particular subject.

It seems to me that we have arrived at a point in our experiments in popular education when certain generalizations are possible. Some of them would seem to be the following: One school cannot teach every subject, still less can it teach every subject to every student.

There is such a thing as too much teaching, and there is such a thing as teaching too much.

There are no specifics in education. No subject and no special method of presenting that subject, and no particular process of training, can be warranted to make an educated man out of an uneducated boy, or a trained man out of an untrained boy.

On the other hand, the outcome of our universal human experience goes to show that no man may any longer call any branch of human knowledge common or unclean, or the teaching of it without value to some soul, if one only knew when and how and to whom to teach it.

And, having accepted these generalizations, it would seem to follow that the things to be taught a given class of students will depend, to a degree at least, on the environment and the life purpose of the students. And so, after all, one comes back to the thought that since the life in school or in college is not an isolated one, but a part of the life of the world, the teaching in it should have relation to the life in the world. But the question what teaching shall minister to a particular class of lives is, after all, a question of individual human judgment. And having come thus far, I am inclined to feel that I would follow the example of my Oriental friends and ask the assist

ance of those whose judgment seems on the whole the best worth following. And from this standpoint the question of adding to our present public school system that which shall minister to industrial training becomes simply a part of the larger and more important question, what ought that system to be and how ought it to be conducted?

In a very real sense we are struggling with this question in every American city to-day. We struggle with it perennially in Boston whenever we undertake to elect a school committee. No one who has at heart the true interest of the city can fail to understand the need for the election of capable and honest men to the body which controls and which conducts our schools. And yet, after all, this is only at best the first step in the problem. The school committee itself is a part of a system which was effective a hundred years ago, but long since obsolete. At some time or other, and in some way or other, we shall need to undertake the serious consideration of what the school shall endeavor to do in the education and in the training of the whole people, and for the solution of this question we shall need to summon to our aid, not only those who are intellectually able and intellectually sincere, but those who represent, as well, the convictions and the aspirations of our entire citizenship.

By some such intelligent effort as this, and only in some such way, shall we finally come to a solution of what ought to be taught in a system of popular education; and only by such means shall we arrive at a solution which is consistent, rational, and democratic, and which shall embody in it with a fair perspective that which aims toward a wider culture of the soul, and that which aims toward economic efficiency. In any system so devised by thoughtful and representative men, industrial and technical schools, adapted to the needs of those they are to serve, will assuredly find a place.

THE AMERICAN COLLEGE.

BY NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER.

[Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia university; born April 2, 1862, at Elizabeth, New Jersey; was graduated from Columbia university in 1882 and studied in Berlin and Paris in 1884-5; in 1885 he became assistant in the department of philosophy at Columbia; in 1886, tutor; in 1889, adjunct professor in the same department; in 1890, dean of the faculty of philosophy and professor of philosophy; he was the founder and for five years the president of the Teachers' college of New York; 1887-95, was a member of the New Jersey State Board of Education and in 1889, special commissioner from New Jersey to the Paris exposition; in 1895 he was made president and life director of the National Educational association; in 1902, president of Columbia, and in 1904, chairman of the administrative board of the International Congress of Arts and Science at the Louisiana Purchase exposition; he is editor of the Educational Review, the Great Educators Series, Teachers' Professional Library, Columbia University Contributions to Philosophy and Education and co-editor of the Internationale Padagogische Bibliothek. He is the author of The Meaning of Education and other books.]

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 1820 the American college, as the term is traditionally used and popularly understood, came into existence. Before 1820 it would be difficult to distinguish the college, except perhaps in two or three instances, from the secondary school of familiar form to-day, the high school or academy. This college uniformly (so far as I know) gave a four years' course of instruction in prescribed studies. The students came at the age of fifteen or sixteen and were graduated at nineteen or twenty. They were disciplined carefully in a narrow intellectual field, and it did most of them great good. They were obliged to do many things they did not like in ways not of their own choosing, and they gained in strength and fiber of character thereby. Ambitious boys who looked forward to law or theology, and often to medicine too, as a professional career, sought the college training and college association as a basis and groundwork for their studies and their active careers. For the most part they acquitted themselves well, and the sort of training that the college gave commended itself to the intelligent people of the country.

The nation was young and crude in those days, and it was pushing far out into new and unbroken territory. It had rivers to bridge, forests to hew, fields to clear and to sow,