them with occupation. There is no idleness, there is no laziness, in our manual training school. The boys have learned industry. I never see them on the street corners or engaging in any vicious occupation. We cannot get these boys to take a holiday. If we give them Washing. ton's birthday or Saturdays they want to go into the workshops and make their drawings, and to their work every day in the week. So that they are acquiring better habits. If "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do," there is nothing left for Satan to do in that direction.

Another decided advantage, and one which I think is destined to do a great work in manual training throughout this country, is that it dignifies and exalts labor and the laborer. A boy no longer looks upon manual work as the exercise of mere brute force. He sees in that skill and power to develop, and I know that these boys have more respect for a mechanic and for those industries that produce wealth in this country than they have ever had before. The other day I saw two of these boys watching a blacksmith as he finished the iron upon his anvil. They seemed to gaze upon his every motion. I asked them what they were interested in, and they said they were watching him handle his tongs, &c.

So it is I find them going to the machine shops about the city, informing themselves, criticising and learning every day; and if we thus lay the foundation of the mechanic arts and of the trades we do not care anything about teaching special trades, and we will awaken in these boys and girls sympathy and admiration for that which produces the wealth of this country, for the laboring man.

Discipline is one of the greatest benefits which manual training will confer upon the schools and people of our country. I think it will introduce in the boys sounder judgment. These boys know the qualities of the materials, and they become critics. If they ever become merchants or foremen of great manufacturing interests themselves they can never be imposed upon by the wiles of incompetent men or by poor material. They can be their own inspectors. A year or so ago I undertook to build a house, and I never felt until that time what a loss I had been the victim of in not having had manual training in my education. In the absence of superintendent or architect I was almost helpless. Some of the boys came out to see the house. They could detect the poor material and the incompetent workman, and they could criticise the tools, and tell when they were handled in the proper way, while I could not. This is simply an illustration of what these boys will be able to do as men when they are grown up, when they have great responsibilities resting upon them. In whatever occupation they may be engaged they will be perfectly competent to manage their own affairs.

And now I should say a word about the girls. The girls, as is usual in most cases, have succeeded admirably. They have taken up woodcarving, &c., and have done work which is equal in its perfection and

beauty with anything that the boys have ever done. They made cases, screens, &c., and they have gone on to higher tasks also. They have made beautiful tools which can be used in the shop. Occasionally an accident occurs, and very little is needed in the way of replacing tools. Now, the girls have done their work with success, and their mental work is done with uniformity. Occasionally the boys become careless, but the work of the girls has been beautiful throughout.

Recently we introduced the department of domestic economy, to teach the young girls how to prepare food on economic principles. We have a special teacher for this department. I would like to have some of those who are here attend that department and see those girls at work on the ranges and tables. I would like to have you go there and see the food which they prepare, and taste it. I think Dr. Dickinson would like that department if he were to go there, especially if he were hungry and had been boarding long in a Washington hotel. That food is well prepared and palatable, as I know from having tasted it often. Any one who comes in there and sees these girls at work making their recipes, &c., another division sitting on the seats waiting for their turn to come, would say this is practical education, here is something that is of value to the people.

As to the theory of education whether this ought to be in the schools or not I do not think that has anything to do with it. If it educates, if it develops the mind, if it prepares these hands and minds for the battle of life, if the people want it, if they are willing to levy taxes for it, why they ought to have it. It makes a symmetrical education, it develops the whole nature, and is of value.

I will close, then, by saying simply this: That we think manual training has come to stay; it has come to be regarded by us not as a good thing theoretically, but as a good thing in its practical study; we intend to keep it, for we believe in it.

We are going to do all that we can to spread it abroad, and before I sit down I want to say that I think one of the greatest enemies of manual training is the lamentable ignorance that prevails as to what it is and what it should be. I get letters, two or three a week, from villages where they are trying to have manual training schools, and they get a few tools and a few boards, and then get the village carpenter and begin in this way. You cannot have a manual training school until you get some one who can teach it, not teach boys and girls some manual dexterity and a few other things which they will learn by mere imitation. Ι you will go into a box factory you will find a machine there which takes a piece of pasteboard and a pot of paste, cuts the board, folds it and pastes the ends and puts it away. That is what the imitator really does, and this is just the difference between our boys and the factory. In the factory the finished product is the great desideratum; that is what is wanted; the apprentice who makes it is of no account at all. We say

that the best, the most important, thing is the boy; we do not care any. thing about the product.

Maj. R. BINGHAM, of the Bingham School, N. C.: I have not heard the words "North" and "South" since this meeting began. But I come here as a Southern man, looking for the advancement of my own State, and I am perfectly willing to leave the advancement of other sections in the hands of those who have carried the other sections so far ahead of ours already. We must look at this thing from our standpoint. With us we are in a condition of change. Old things have passed away, and the change is for us vastly for the better. If there is not a new heaven and a new earth, there is a changed heaven and a changed earth, and the changed heaven has no war cloud on the horizon and the changed earth no volcano under its surface. We have begun a condition of prosperity much better than we had before and much more stable.

We have stability, and we know it and feel it; so that when we look ahead we look with clearer vision, we see farther and we see more clearly than our fathers did, who looked through the smoked glass of their peculiar conditions and who looked at things distorted. We look at ourselves, and we see one very disagreeable thing about ourselves; we see that we have done nothing, or but very little, in the past to develop the rich material which we have; that we have been, and are still, in some sense, hewers of wood and drawers of water to those who combine mechanical skill and the raw material, who take a pound of cotton and manufacture it into $2, or $3, or $5; who create wealth by using this raw material which we turn loose and make nothing more of it; who create wealth for themselves by putting increased values into this raw material, in some cases as much as a thousand-fold. They tell me that a pound of steel manufactured into the hair-springs of watches is increased one thousand times. The best we have ever done is to increase two or three times, and we have only begun to do that lately. We see further that, comparing my own State of North Carolina and Massachusetts, for instance, for we take the North as having done much of this manual work and ourselves as having done very little, and just see the result. With advantages of soil and climate, with about the same population, we see that the State of Massachusetts is worth per capita $10 to our $1, and it does not take a man very learned in the schools to understand what that means. We see further that these people who have wedded the manual skill to the raw material have been successful in every work that they ever undertook, and war is a crucial test of the power to recover. We see that this people, who began upon that basis, and who have continued upon that basis, defeated the Indians, that they defeated the French and Indians, that they defeated the British in 1776 and again in 1812, and some of us who were at Appomattox Court House have a distinct recollection of some one else that they defeated. One great difficulty with us was that we did not have the material power

to oppose their material power. We had men enough to do most won. derful fighting, but our material gave out; we had no material power. They had it all. We had depended upon them for everything, and when we came to depend upon ourselves we did not have the material. It was a question of heavier guns, and we came out of the little end of the horn. We have learned a most valuable lesson thereby. We see further that technical education has been the condition of mankind for all the ages. Even away back in the time of the prophets there were schools that gave technical training, tech nical schools, training lawyers and doctors and teachers; we see that the different governments had schools to train officers and sold iers, as we see that all this has been going on in the past, and we look distinctly at the fact that we have no technical or manual training schools of any kind in the South. There are two or three supported by endowment, but none where any really valuable technical training can be obtained. There is a good deal of talk of manual training. Man has been called a knowing animal, a talking animal, a thinking animal; perhaps one of the best possible definitions is a tool-using animal.

Now look at the human hand. Many animals have five digits, just as man has, but man is the only one that has this power of presenting the thumb either in the same plane or out of it at right angles with the fingers. The other digits make man a tool-using animal, the thumb serving as the hand-screw to the otherwise useless jaws of the vise. He clamps the tool with the fingers and holds it. Consequently man is the only animal that has this simple power of turning the hand over upon the elbow joint.

No other animal has it. Our common English ancestry saw this fact and they crystallized it in their common speech. A lazy person won't do “a hand's turn." An ingenious person can "turn his hand” to anything. There it is. It is this power which enables man to grasp a tool with his hand and then to present that tool in any direction. He strikes it up or down, to the right and left; without any hesitation at all it is laid down. We of the South absolutely have not the respectable training schools necessary for the purpose of getting the skill out of that hand and arm. I say without any hesitation that as a practical question we cannot introduce manual training into the schools of the South. Much as it ought to be introduced, and as we need it, the conditions there do not justify it now. There is already too much stuffing in our public schools. The average teacher, I believe, seems to think that the average child is an empty gun and that he must load it; whereas the child is a loaded gun, and a magazine gun at that, loaded by the Almighty, and it is the business of the teacher to fire that gun. We do not want to stuff the child. We want to give him the power to think, to make an intellectual gymnast of him, and a physical gymnast. German schools are far ahead of us in this. They go through the laborious process of training the mind with an accuracy that we hardly

realize in this country. A child goes from one school to another. There was there a great outcry from the schools of technology and scientific schools that their pupils were not allowed to go to the university. The idea was that they would take a university course in science and excel all others, but when they got there it was found that they were rapidly distanced by the men who had studied science for the first time in the university; the men who had been studying science all their lives were distanced by the men who had not studied science at all.

A gentleman who had been on a trip up the Nile told me that the most remarkable talent he had ever witnessed was in some of the natives. There he found an Egyptian servant boy who spoke ten languages. He asked him how he had learned, and he said that he had gone up the Nile with a family of English nobility; that he knew that they were rich and spent a great deal of money; he wanted some of the money, and so he had learned to speak the languages in order that he might obtain it. He had a great deal of lingual skill, but he had no mental skill; he had a skilful tongue, but no mind; that was the defect. We cannot in the South do anything without mechanical skill. The people there hardly realize the difficulty that they have to contend with. Take, for instance, Massachusetts and North Carolina. We are seven times as large, but have only one-tenth the manufactures of Massachusetts. Take nine-tenths of the money away from Massachusetts and spread the one-tenth that they have left over seven times the people they have.

Another thing. Take Massachusetts again. A large part of the people of Massachusetts live in cities and towns where they can get access to each other. With us one twenty-third of our people live in cities and towns, and you cannot get at the rest.

It is extremely difficult for us to get enough together to make a good school. We labor under difficulties that people do not appreciate at all, and we have done a great deal more than other people would do under these peculiar circumstances. It is very difficult for us to get any good teachers. If you put upon the teacher this mechanical training, which he does not know and has had no opportunity to learn, and put upon the child a mechanical training when he cannot read or write, what progress are you going to make? We see you from the North, where you have the advantages which money can give, and by seeing this thing done, we see you disputing about this, we see you saying that it has come to stay, and saying that it has not come to stay, &c. We look at it and draw our own conclusions about it; and we have resolved this, at least, that we are to educate the public sentiment of our people, to call their attention to this fact of our weakness and to the source of the strength of other communities. We will call our people's attention to the fact that there are millions in it, and they will begin to try to get millions out of it. We have as good a right to them as any one, and we are going to have them. Those who have been called upon to talk upon