photographs. The committee on physical training investigated and reported on rules for good health, gathered interesting statistics concerning recess and swimming, and conducted a physical examination of a large number of children. The hygienic conditions of the schoolrooms of the town had also been investigated. The school library committee succeeded in inducing the town to establish a school reference room in the public library at an expense of five thousand dollars. The portfolio committee made collections of books, photographs, and prints, which have been properly grouped in portfolios and prepared for use as illustrative material in the schools.

One distinctive feature of this society is that its membership has included people from all the churches of the town, and the clergymen have been among the most active members. After years of discussion and effort, such as has been indicated, it may safely be affirmed that there is a much heartier spirit of co-operation on the part of the various forces of the town than could otherwise have been possible.

This, then, is a movement, now fairly under way in this country, which promises much for the cause of education.

FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF AMERICAN

EDUCATION.

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.]

shall endeavor to place before you, though with necessary brevity, some principles which appear to me to be fundamental in our American educational system and policy. I am the more ready to do this because, during the last two or three years, in important debates, I have observed that some of these considerations have been overlooked or their existence flatly denied.

First and foremost, I name this proposition and hold it to be fundamental to our American educational system:

While all forms of education may be under government control, yet government control of education is not exclusive, and the national system of education in the United States includes schools and institutions carried on without direct governmental oversight and support, as well as those that are maintained by public tax and administered by governmental agencies.

Some very important consequences follow the acceptance of this principle. A nation's life is much more than an inventory of its governmental activities. For example, the sum total of the educational activity of the United States is not to be ascertained by making an inventory of what the

government-national, state, and local-is doing, but only by taking account of all that the people of the United States are doing, partly through governmental forms and processes and partly in non governmental ways and by non governmental systems. In other words, the so-called public education of the United States, that which is tax supported and under the direct control of a governmental agency, is not the entire national educational system. To get at what the people of the United States are doing for education and to measure the full length and breadth of the nation's educational system, we must add to public or tax supported education, all activities of similar kind that are carried on by private corporations, by voluntary associations, and by individuals. The nation is represented partly by each of these undertakings, wholly by no one of them. The terms national and governmental are happily not convertible in the United States, whether it be of universities, of morals, or of efficiency that we are speaking.

This point is of far reaching importance, for it has become one of the political assumptions of our time that any undertaking to be representative of the nation must be one which is under governmental control. Should this view ever command the deliberate assent of a majority of the American people, our institutions would undergo radical change and our liberties and right of initiative would be only such as the government of the moment might vouchsafe to us. But we are still clear sighted enough to realize that our national ideals and our national spirit find expression in and through the churches, the newspaper press, the benefactions to letters, science, and art, the spontaneous uprisings in behalf of stricken humanity and oppressed peoples, and a hundred other similar forms, quite as truly as they find expression in and through legislative acts and appropriations, judicial opinions, and administrative orders. The latter are governmental in form and in effect; the former are not. Both are national in the sense that both represent characteristics of the national life and character.

The confusion between a nation's life and a nation's government is common enough, but so pernicious that I may be permitted a few words concerning it.

When Hegel asserted that morality is the ultimate end for which the state that is, politically organized mankindexists, he stated one of the profoundest moral and political truths. But it is pointed out to us by political science that before any such ultimate end can be gained, the proximate end of the development of national states must be aimed at. The state operates to develop the principle of nationality which exists among persons knit together by common origin, common speech, and common habitat, through creating and perfecting two things-government and liberty. The first step out of barbarism is the establishment of a government strong enough to preserve peace and order at home and to resist successfully attack from without. This accomplished, the state must turn to the setting up of a system of individual liberty. It does this by marking out the limits within which individual initiative and autonomy are permitted, and by directing the government to refrain from crossing these limits itself and to prevent anyone else from crossing them. After government and liberty have both been established, then all subsequent history is the story of a continually changing line of demarcation between them, according as circumstances suggest or dictate. In the United States, for example, the postoffice is in the domain of government; the express business and the sending of telegrams are in the domain of liberty. In different countries, and in the same country at different times, the line between the sphere of government and the sphere of liberty is differently drawn. In Germany the conduct of railways is largely an affair of government; in the United States it is largely an affair of liberty. Schools, for example, are to-day much more an affair of government than ever before, but they are still an affair which falls in the domain of liberty as well. In short, government plus liberty, each being the same for a field of activity, gives the complete life of the state; government alone does so just as little as the sphere of liberty alone would do so. These principles are all set forth with great lucidity and skill by my colleague, Professor Burgess, in his work entitled Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law. In discussing this distinction he writes:

"It is often said that the state does nothing for certain causes, as, for instance, religion or the higher education, when the government does not exercise its powers in their behalf. This does not at all follow. If the state guarantees the liberty of conscience and of thought and expression, and permits the association of individuals for the purposes of religion and education, and protects such associations in the exercise of their rights, it does a vast deal for religion and education; vastly more, under certain social conditions, than if it should authorize the government to interfere in these domains. The confusion of thought upon this subject arises from the erroneous assumptions that the state does nothing except what it does through the government; that the state is not the creator of liberty; that liberty is natural right, and that the state only imposes a certain necessary restraint upon the same. There never was, and there never can be, any liberty on this earth and among human beings outside of state organization.

Mankind does not begin with liberty. Mankind acquires liberty through civilization. Liberty is as truly a creation of the state as is government."

A written constitution, it may be added, is a formal act of creation of a government and a careful delimitation of its powers. It also defines the sphere of individual liberty, directly or indirectly, and so the individual is protected by the state against the government. Through the government he is also protected against encroachment from elsewhere. In the constitution of the United States, for example, the individual is guaranteed by the state the rights peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances, and the government must both refrain from invading those rights and prevent others from invading them. If the government should fail to do this, the state which created the government would surely remodel or destroy it.

I shall not apologize for this excursion into the domain of political science, inasmuch as I hold the distinction between state and government to be of crucial importance for right thinking upon the larger problems of our educational polity. When once the distinction between state and government is grasped, and also the farther distinction between the sphere of

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