solutions. What will become of the youths who have been taught that education consists in knowing where to look for facts? The world is today filled with those who want to know where to look for readymade opportunities. There are a few who are making the opportunities, and the rest of the world is their debtor. Arithmetic is, perhaps, next to English composition, the most unsocial of subjects. Make a child set problems for himself in arithmetic, and you will find that the social element will soon appear. A girl of eleven was asked how much a factory hand in a woolen mill would spend in the course of a year if he had a wife and two small girls. She folded her hands helplessly and said: "I can't get any answer to a problem like that." She was told that the answer was not so important as the statement of the problem in all its details. She lived not far from a woolen mill, and after a few suggestions she began to work to find the elements of the problem. She visited a grocery near the mill and learned what eatables were commonly purchased. She met and talked with some little girls, daughters of the operatives. She noticed what they wore, and, finding that they were really human, became very much interested in them. Again and again she submitted the details of the problem to find that they were incomplete. She persevered until her estimates were reasonably complete, but she was surprised to find that her problem, like the most of life's problems, from the cost of building a house to the profits per acre in market-gardening, had more than one answer. setting that problem she had grown in intellectual power and in sympathy with humanity. horses needed. But in A boy was at the same time asked how many horseshoe nails a blacksmith would need in the course of a year. The only details furnished were that this blacksmith was the only one in a little town of three hundred, and that he drew his custom from that and from an agricultural community of four square miles. The boy took an imaginary town and determined the probable occupation of every one of the inhabitants. Next he plotted on paper the four square miles, fixing the woods, hills, and streams, the farm acreage, the kinds of crops raised, the number of Then he talked with blacksmiths and found that they were human. He blew the bellows, listened to the merry anvil chorus, stroked the noses of the horses, and found that they liked sympathy. surprised boy to learn that if he worked up his own arithmetical problems, they had something to do with real practical human life. If a teacher would be both a social and an economic power, he must teach his pupils, not to lop off their wants, but to want more and more things of the right kind. Dean Swift rightly said that to satisfy our desires by lopping off our wants is like cutting off our feet when we need shoes. Some English traders went into central Africa, thinking to find a ready market for their wares. But the Africans wanted nothing; they He was a were satisfied with their ignorance, squalor, unprogressiveness, and idola try. The Englishmen said that before trade could be profitable there, the Africans must be taught to want something. When men lop off their wants in the material world, hard times and a panic ensue and children cry for bread. When men lop off their wants in the intellectual and emotional and moral world, the ideals of the nation are lowered. comes loss of Eden until greater teachers restore us. Then Finally, we may say that when a teacher has mastered the law of suggestion on its social side; when he has brought into play the intelligent imitation of the best; when he has developed the potential capacity for sympathy; when he has influenced children to do things for others; when he has ceased to tell them that education consists in knowing where to look for facts, and has taught them how to set problems of their own to solve; when he has impressed on them that wealth depends not so much on mere saving as on the original use made of those savings; when he has made them understand that intellectual, moral, and social culture comes in larger measure, not so much in learning by rote other people's knowledge in those branches, as in drawing knowledge from the living well of experience; when he has taught them to have increasing wants, the result of high ideals—then, and only then, can the teacher become the needed social-economic power and raise to a higher plane the world with which he comes in contact. OUR NATIONAL FLORAL EMBLEM · MISS EDNA DEAN PROCTOR, SOUTH FRAMINGHAM, MASS. If we are to have a national floral emblem, let us choose one that is continental and worthy; one that will vividly suggest America whenever its name is heard or its real or pictured form is seen; one whose story is blended with our past and is in accord with our greatness and our destiny. A national emblem must be something full of significance to the country it represents. The rose and the lily are dear to England and to France because for centuries in camp and court, in council and fray, they have been an expression of the national life. The shamrock thrills the Irish heart because St. Patrick, when preaching to the chiefs and their clans, plucked a plant growing beside him and illustrated by its trifoliate leaves the mysterious doctrine of the Trinity. Scotland honors the thistle because it pricked the foot of one of the Danish invaders stealing upon the army at night, and his cry roused the camp, and the enemy was overWe all love the trailing arbutus, the columbine, the golden-rod, come. but to choose one of these, or any other flower, as a national emblem, simply for its beauty of color, or for some fancied meaning in its form, is as incongruous and unworthy as it would be to select some pleasing song and say: "This shall be our national hymn." National hymns are not made thus! They are born of stress and passionate devotion, and consecrated in the nation's hours of grief and of peril, of triumph and of joy. So a national floral emblem is not a thing of unrelated, arbitrary choice. To be truly symbolic it must have been interwoven with the story of the land and the people, and its associations with them must be potent and enduring. One plant we have, widespread enough and distinguished enough to symbolize our country, and that is our stately maize-the golden Corn. It is wholly and absolutely American never a kernel in the world elsewhere till carried from here by Columbus. It grows from the lakes to the gulf and from ocean to ocean. It was the grain of the primitive peoples here- the aboriginal Americans-and with religious ceremonies of prayer and dance and song they invoked the blessing of their gods upon its planting and its harvest; they buried it with their dead, and offered it to the sun in their temples. It saved the lives of the first European settlers here, and it has been a vast factor in the civilization of the continent. From stalk to blade, from tassel to golden ear, it is uniquely and nobly beautiful, and it lends itself with grace and superb effect to varied forms of decoration. Our eminent historian, John Fiske, says of it: Maize is more widely and completely identified with the western hemisphere than any other plant. . . . . In adopting it for the national emblem we do not invent anything out of our fancy, but simply recognize an existing fact. . . . . It is (I believe) richer in æsthetic suggestiveness than any other that has ever served as a national emblem. .... How completely it is identified with our country was shown to a recent traveler among the fjords of Norway. Surprised to see some small stalks growing in the garden, she said to the innkeeper's daughter: "Why do you plant the maize when its grain can never ripen ?" "Oh," replied the child, "we plant it to please the Americans! They smile when they see say that in their land it grows like a forest, and the bins are filled with its golden ears before the snows can fall." it, and Do you say it is "commercial"? It is commercial, royally and grandly commercial; but this is its least claim upon us as a national floral emblem. It is a part of the history of the New World, and is invested with the tradition and sentiment and poetry of all the American ages. Each state will choose its device after its own heart. California will have her poppy, Vermont the red clover, Kansas the golden-rod, and so on and on thru the long, bright list; but for the broad country how can we fail to adopt the beautiful, distinguished, historic, American plantthe maize, the Corn? COLUMBIA'S EMBLEM Blazon Columbia's emblem The bounteous, golden Corn! Eons ago, of the great sun's glow And the joy of the earth, 'twas born. From Superior's shore to Chili, From the ocean of dawn to the west, With its banners of green and silken sheen It sprang at the sun's behest; And by dew and shower, from its natal hour, Till on slope and plain the gods were fain For the rarest boon to the land they loved Nor star nor breeze o'er the farthest seas Grains wrought of gold, in a silver fold, And its harvest came to the wandering tribes And Montezuma's festal bread Was made of its sacred meal. Narrow their cherished fields; but ours Are broad as the continent's breast, Bring plenty and joy and rest; For they strew the plains and crowd the wains Till blithe cheers ring and west winds sing The rose may bloom for England, But the shield of the great republic, The glory of the West, Shall bear a stalk of the tasseled corn The sun's supreme bequest! The arbutus and the golden-rod The heart of the North may cheer, And jasmine and magnolia THE EDUCATIONAL CRISIS IN ENGLAND CLOUDESLEY S. H. BRERETON, MELTON CONSTABLE, ENGLAND Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: My first duty must be - and it is a very pleasant duty—to thank you most heartily for the great honor you have conferred upon me in asking me over to America to lecture to you on English education. I little thought a year ago, when I had the privilege of studying and appraising your excellent educational section at the Paris Exhibition, I should so soon have the opportunity of seeing on the spot the actual working of your schools and of meeting face to face the pick and flower of those who have built up, or are building up, this magnificent and unparalleled system of national education. The most casual observer cannot fail to be struck by the intense and fervent belief of American democracy in its schools, which is only to be matched by the fervent belief of the schools in American democracy. Such a happy conjunction between the two seems fraught with limitless possibilities. Every year the schools grow richer as more money and thought are poured into them. Every year they turn out a higher and more efficient type of citizens, ready, when their time of giving comes, to give as freely as they themselves have received. Believe me, deeply as I value the honor of being invited over here to speak on the problems of English education, I am still more grateful to you for giving me the chance of gaining some insight into your own. No doubt, in part, some of this immense and rapid progress is due to the fact that you were able to begin, so to say, at the beginning, untrammeled by the excessive top hamper with which all countries of an older civilization are encumbered. I do not know how often, in seeing the ease and rapidity with which you have solved, or are solving, the various educational problems which confront you, I have experienced a regret that the age of miracles is past and that we, as a nation, cannot be re-created and born again, so that we too might start with a blank sheet, or tabula rasa so to say, on which we might erect a brand-new system of national education. And yet a moment's reflection has always convinced me that even the worst and most antiquated of our traditions, by which we are at times so sore let and hindered, are not without their uses. fact, the problem is to modify rather than to abolish them. The curious habits and customs, the various modes of belief, the conception and ways of looking at things which have impressed themselves so strongly on English education, are not mere scaffolding by which we have been able to raise up, tier by tier, the mighty structure of national life, but are verily and indeed part and parcel of that structure, reaching down and extending to its very foundation and base, so that their complete removal, if it possible, would be a distinct loss of certain elemental things essentially national, and their radical excision would be a mutilation of part were In |