if its operation does not tend toward this end. Then we should carefully study life to determine what would fit the children for their lives. We should find out from this study what qualities and what knowledge they would need. Then, with these as our purposes, we should carefully work out the steps necessary to attain these purposes. Then we should look around for means to aid the children in taking these steps. These means would be a course of study," as it is called. I should prefer to call it a course of living. Then we should apply these means carefully, always remembering that the ultimate principles are those of evolution and that the children, and not ourselves, should go thru the processes. Children cannot possibly be wisely interested in a state of passive receptiveness. How contrary to every principle of the attainment of qualities is it when teachers will persist in going thru the processes themselves! For example, a teacher desires her pupils to learn to think and "to speak on their feet," as we say. Yet the teacher does all the talking. It is just the same thing as if Lou Dillon's trainer should hitch her to the fence while he ran around the track to make her swift. In the better view-point, the schoolroom will be considered the practice ground for processes for the children, for processes planned to attain certain qualities necessary to fit the child to live. And what a pruning there will be! What a brush-pile of arithmetic, names of capes, ancient languages, and memorized but not comprehended definitions! And what joy as the children, with long-suppressed shouts, dance around that bonfire! We shall teach them to follow directions as a first quality necessary for life. We shall teach them initiative, and how to plan, and to will and to be prompt; how to care for their bodies, and many other things without which life must be a failure. We shall not be content until these things are habits, not mere possessions of knowledge. We shall diagnose our patients day by day as does the physician who has the true method. We shall give them the rational freedom which is demanded by both their self-activity and the conditions of life. We shall cease to be jug funnels, and become directors of the energies of children. We shall walk hand in hand with the children thru the dark valleys of processes. We shall climb with them, not for them, the rocks and mountains of the difficulties of life. We shall diagnose before we treat. We shall learn from the piano teacher that the pupil, and not the teacher, must do the practicing. O let us break down the wall of tradition of the old view-point! Let us remember that books are only about things, only men's opinions about things. Let us lead our children, as did the immortal founder of the kindergarten, back to things, back to realities. Let us purpose more wisely. Let us not treat till we have diagnosed. Then we shall no longer treasure our normal school notebooks of devices; for every stick and stone and leaf and living thing will, in response to our search for a means to attain a clear life-purpose leap up and say, “Take me!” DISCUSSION J. F. KEATING, superintendent of schools, Pueblo, Colo.-The great objection to the paper just read is that it does not represent the educational thought and spirit of this representative body of educators. The paper will give the impression abroad that the educators of this country are opposed to manual training, domestic science, and other practical phases of school work; whereas the fact is that they have long ago accepted these reforms and are adopting them as rapidly as conditions will permit. It is this misrepresentation of the attitude of the great teaching forces of the country that calls for direct and positive refutation. Here, too, we must challenge the statement that the children get too much arithmetic. Too much time may be spent in the learning the little they get, but it remains to be proved that any of them have an excessive amount of arithmetical training. Neither is the statement true that honor men are failures in life. The fact is that the great leaders come from those who stand in the front ranks of their classes. The statement of the paper, carried to its logical effect, would discourage effort and place a premium on the mediocre and the trifler. The best answer to all this is the progress of this country whose citizenship has received its training in the public schools. It is time to substitute constructive criticism for such destructive criticism. In this regard the paper of Superintendent Carr has the right ring. He proposes, as one means of increasing the efficiency of the schools, paying teachers salaries that will encourage preparation for their work, and will also invite to the ranks of the profession the best minds. Everything possible should be done to promote this idea. GEORGE H. MARTIN, secretary, State Board of Education, Boston, Mass.-The view-point presented by Mr. Crane is not wholly new. It has been presented many times before this body, and the superintendents of the county are wholly in sympathy with it and have been endeavoring to modify school practices in accordance with it. How far they have succeeded may be inferred from the testimony of the members of the Mosely Commission, many of whom in their reports express their interest in American methods of instruction as tending to develop initiative, self-direction, and independence. They found less bondage to text-books in America than in England. It would appear from this testimony that things are not quite so bad as Mr. Crane has represented in his paper, and that the members of this department may take courage and go forward. SOME OF THE CONDITIONS WHICH CAUSE VARIATION IN THE RATE OF SCHOOL EXPENDITURES IN DIFFER ENT LOCALITIES W. T. HARRIS, UNITED STATES COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION, WASHINGTON, D. C. THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SCHOOL FINANCES Political economy has borne the name of "the dismal science." It has deserved this name when it stood for Malthusianism-the doctrine that the world will in time become so thickly populated that there will not be food enough to support the people. "Population increases in a geometric ratio, while food increases only in an arithmetical ratio." This is a dismal outlook surely. The doctrine which this suggests is: Let there be no charities, and no studies with a view to public hygiene. For it is the support of the poor, and the prevention of pestilence and famine and epidemics, that will hasten the dreadful day when the strong will struggle with the weak for a morsel of food-the strong getting the morsel and the weak growing weaker from hunger. Such a political economy is not only dismal, but it is subversion of all moral ideals of the race of men. No thorofare to civilization on that road; only retrogression to savagery; for it says that "vice and crime are beneficent checks to the increase of population"! People of this generation need not be told that the one hundred years following the publication, in 1798, of the Malthusian doctrine of overpopulation was a progressive demonstration of its falsity; for it was found that food increased in a geometric ratio, while population fell to an arithmetric ratio, on the whole, in the most highly civilized populations, as in France and generally in families of wealth and nobility. Then there was another dismal doctrine—a theory of rent, advanced by Ricardo about the year 1820. The richest soils are first taken possession of by man; the less fertile soils later when the rich lands have all been taken up. Then rent begins; the rich soils demand enough rent to make up the difference in value of crops between them and the poorer lands, which may be had free by the people who will take them. By and by all the rich soils will be occupied-and all the poor soils, too, for that matter—and human labor will be rewarded by a continually decreasing product of food and creature comforts. This Ricardian view assisted Malthusianism in discrediting the ideas of a Christian civilization that sent out its devoted missionaries, "from Greenland's icy mountains to India's coral strand," to deliver the lower and lowest races from error and superstition, and all manner of savagery. At home this Christian civilization preached other-worldliness; and if it practiced worldliness, it did it in the name of other-worldliness. And what has been the verdict of the century following Ricardo? An age of rapid transportation has followed an age of exploration and discovery. We have learned that the soils of northern Europe, of which Ricardo wrote as the rich soils first taken possession of, are as nothing in the matter of fertility to the soils of the tropical regions as yet scarcely occupied by man. The Amazon valley, with its two million square miles, alone, when cultivated to its full capacity, will supply ten times the food and clothing needed by the present population of the entire globe. The age of machinery has come upon us—a new Avatar succeeding upon the Avatar of hard labor and physical drudgery; and men are called up higher into directive power out of mere muscular labor. The intelligent mind armed with science the tools of the mind-is commanding the forces of nature; the elemental powers of heat and electricity, reinforcing the bodily force of man by multipliers of ten, one hundred, one thousand; annihilating, by commerce and its means of transportation, the intervals of distance that separate man from man in space to such an extent that food, clothing, and shelter come everywhere they are wanted; and a myriad of natural productions that were formerly not property, but only a useless incumbrance where nature had placed them, now by transportation become real wealth to the distant people who need them. At the beginning of the nineteenth century political economy was a dismal science. At the end of the nineteenth century everybody is buoyant with hope, so far as food, clothing, and shelter are concerned; a plenty is in sight even for the poorest races of mankind, and possibilities of migration are right at hand for any countries that are really overpopulated. Gladstone estimated in 1870 that labor-saving machinery was doubling the world's production of wealth once every seven years. Eight millions of laborers in Great Britain, armed by machinery, were at that time producing as much as one or two hundred millions of laborers of the entire world at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This was the cheerful response of political economy at the end of the nineteenth century to the dismal Sphinx-riddle propounded by Malthus and Ricardo at the beginning of that century. Altho there are dismal enough doctrines preached even at the end of that century, they are not doctrines of starvation, but only of relative poverty with plenty to eat and wear. Luxury and an abundance of creature comforts, it says, shall be forbidden to the poor household. Henry George thought that the persistence of poverty in the midst of advancing wealth is due to private ownership of land. But careful investigation has shown that the rental of land in the United States is a small burden, only one-eighteenth of the annual earnings of the people in 1880-two and one-fifth cents per day, as against an actual average production of more than forty cents a day for each inhabitant. A grain of economy or thrift on the part of individuals will compensate for all the rental of land in the United States. Even in Great Britain the land value had not doubled in eighty years, altho the values of other property-houses and machinery and means of transportation, and creature comforts-had increased seven times. Land for the purposes of mere agriculture is everywhere cheap; it is only for building purposes that land commands a high price. The land on which New York city stands is worth one-seventh of all the land in the United States. The same amount of acreage on a rich borderland can be had for thirty thousand dollars, but the land of New York city is assessed at three billion dollars, and is worth much more in market; it is worth one hundred thousand times as much per acre for international business purposes as for mere agricultural land without a city market near by for its produce. Karl Marx, the father of recent socialism, in his famous work on Capital, about 1870, wrote the German words which I translate as follows: "Along with the constantly diminishing number of great capitalists who monopolize the instruments of production, there is a constantly increasing mass of misery, oppression, bondage, deformity, and extortion." But this law of Karl Marx, which has been adopted by Henry George in the terse form of the epigram, "The rich are growing richer, and the poor are growing poorer," has not been found to be valid even in England, where Marx made his generalization; for the income-tax returns showed in 1885 that the class of the very poor had decreased by the transfer of a large number to the lower middle class, which lower middle class was nearly three and one-half times as large in each million of the population as it had been thirty years before. The same transference of the lower middle class into the higher middle class had been going on, and from the higher middle class to the wealthy class, and so on to the very wealthy class, so that there were three times as many in each of the higher classes per million as thirty years before.1. And the average earnings of the lowest class, that of people who get less than $750 per family and do not pay an income tax, had nearly doubled in thirty years (it had been $265 in 1851, and had risen to $415 in 1881). It had increased whether measured in money or in the comforts of life that can be bought for the increased wages. The question of present annual earnings, in the form of wages, salaries, or profits from a business, is only a single one of the many items that have to be considered in the year's income. There goes down from the savings of a people a certain amount of wealth from one year to another and from one generation to another. The people that come after do not have to earn this money over again, but they have the annual use and benefit of it as an inheritance. Thus the previous generations, in so far as they were thrifty and accumulated property in the form of permanent improvements, assist the later generations to live. Public buildings, business houses, and dwelling-houses belong to this kind of property; also highways, bridges, railroads, canals, waterworks, sewers, ships and steamboats, etc. The rental of these buildings and the use of the railways as a means of transportation, as well as the improvements on the farms, appear in the annual output of productions; but the actual rental value of the dwelling-houses is a separate affair, and must be added to the bulk of productions as tho it were actual earnings for the year. The growth of the United States in production has been carefully estimated and re-estimated by the directors of the United States census. The bulk of the wealth transmitted from year to year did not amount to any considerable sum until after the introduction of steam navigation on rivers, lakes, and the ocean, and after the first building of railroads. This had begun and was an appreciable item by 1850, when the valuation of the United States was reckoned at 7 billions of dollars. In the decade 1850 to 1860 this had increased to 16 billions; in twenty years-that is, by 1870-to 30 billions; in 1880, to 44 billions; in * See Leoni Levi, Wages and Earnings of the Working Classes (London: John Murray, 1885), pp. 48 and 58; also see Robert Giffen, The Progress of the Working Classes, "Economic Tracts" No. 16 (New York). Leoni Levi reports incomes from $750 to $1,500 in 1880 as three and one-half times as many as in 1850; incomes of $1,500 to $2,500, three times as many; incomes of $2,500 to $5,000, two and one-half times as many; incomes of $5,000 to $10,000, two and one-half times as many; incomes of $10,000 to $15,000, two and three-quarter times as many. The laboring class, whose annual incomes are less than $750, averaged $265 in 1851, and in 1881, $415. One hundred and eighty thousand of these had ascended to the class of incomes between $750 and $1,500, during the thirty years after 1850. |