blighted English industrial art is problematical. But with the founders of our nation antagonistic, or indifferent, to artistic forms, what might have been a reasonable growth for a new country was seriously retarded. We are at present the most faithful pupils and imitators of French art. Paris is the school of our artists, the critic of our work. The art jury, with Chipiez at its head, in examining the architectural drawings of the United States exhibit, commented in a pleased manner on the evident influence of the French school. What particularly struck them in our free-hand drawing was boldness of outline and strength of treatment, and, in seeking for the reasons, the object-drawing of our elementary grades was freely accepted as a potential factor. Our color work, however, was subjected to severe criticism as inharmonious and often glaring.

In Class 5, agriculture, the United States exhibit, which was to have been installed in the agricultural section, was a failure, owing to a misunderstanding arising in the committee on experiment-station work. Consequently a class in which we might have shown most advanced processes was, but for the masterly monograph of Dr. Dabney on the subject, left practically untouched. A portion of the French agricultural exhibit from which we can draw the greatest profit was tree-culture. I don't mean shrubs, or plants, or vines, but trees. The planting, the caring for, and the transplanting and preservation of large trees are much neglected here. If a tree is in our way, we cut it down; in France, if a possibility, it will be transplanted to some place where it is needed. This was well illustrated on the exposition grounds. In preparing the Champ de Mars and Esplanade des Invalides for the large buildings, many hundred trees ranging, I should judge, from six to twelve inches in diameter, were taken up and replanted in the Bois de Boulogne, three miles distant. I saw them flourishing there like a small forest. When the buildings disappear and the parks are restored, the trees will be taken up and replaced in their original positions. Thruout France the care of trees is a principle thoroly grounded in the minds of the people.

An interesting minor feature of the Belgian exhibit-minor only because it did not affect the methods of instruction was the medical inspection of communal schools. In addition to the sanitary inspection, and the regular visits which an appointed staff of medical inspectors makes, at least once in ten days, to each school, a dentist visits the schools at regular periods and cares for the teeth of the children. The effect which this has on the general health and attendance of the pupils is most marked.

In the matter of school equipment, schoolbooks, school appliances, and school devices, no foreign nation could approach the United States. Convenience with them is a secondary consideration. I could scarcely convince the jury that the prices quoted for desks in the school-furniture exhibit were regular trade prices. In the city of Paris, in none of the

schools which I visited did I see what would rank in this country as a well-equipped class-room. In one famous lycée I recall particularly an antiquated, painted blackboard, where the marks were erased with a cloth. I gave to one school principal a dustless eraser, which he took home to show as a curiosity. So, in the matter of text-books, the large type, fine paper, clear illustrations, and durable binding of our American editions were matters of the greatest interest and favorable comment thruout the exposition period.

The Exposition Universelle of 1900 was a great school, which had its lessons for all nations. It was a school of effort, a school of progress, a school of commerce, and a school of peace. France has never failed to profit from lessons taught by international expositions. Why should we? Surely it is not vainglory, nor a desire simply to outshow other nations, which leads to the enormous expenditures involved in every international exposition. It is rather an honest competition of the best that each nation can produce, brought together in the hope of its proving a benefit and necessity to other nations, and in the further hope of finding something of reciprocal value and interest to itself.

So far as the benefits of the educational exhibit are concerned, I hope I may be pardoned if I did not bring back a basket overladen with suggestions and innovations. Frankly, I think the greatest lesson which the schoolmen of the United States can draw from the Paris Exposition is contentment. Pray, do not misunderstand this word. I do not mean that we have everything we ought to have; far from it. But, rather, that there is little new in foreign education that we need to have. strong, virile system of schools, colleges, and universities, intrenched in the love of the people and built to meet their necessities. Let us not jeopardize it by introducing those features adapted to a state of society to escape which this country was founded.

We have a

At a luncheon given, as it happens, by the distinguished foreign. gentleman who is to address you later in the week, there were among the guests an ex-minister of public instruction and an ex-director of primary education. In response to an argument put forward, the latter replied: "I object to the conclusion. In the United States, for example . . . . ; "Ah!" broke in the ex-minister, "the United States is never an example in point; the spirit of the people sanctions any advance; their institutions are totally different."

This impatient tribute is the keynote of the whole situation.

DISCUSSION

CLOUDESLEY S. H. BRERETON, Melton Constable, England.- Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: I wish to add my testimony to that of the gentleman who has just sat down, in favor of the thoroness and thoughtfulness of the two papers we have

just heard on the lessons to be learned at the Paris Exposition. I find myself, in fact, so much in harmony with so many views they have expressed that I feel sorely inclined to copy the example of a speaker who had once to follow the famous orator, Mr. Burke. Despairing of being able to improve on what Mr. Burke had already said, he merely rose and ejaculated: "I say ditto to Mr. Burke." Still, if I have no chance of improving on what we have already heard, there is still a useful rôle open to me. If I cannot break fresh ground, I can at least enforce and indorse the views which have been presented with such eloquence and lucidity. You are all well aware of the advantage of a second opinion for adding weight and importance to a particular set of views. My aim, therefore, will be to hammer in the conclusions already presented.

I am sorry to say a breakdown in the commissariat of my hotel deprived me of hearing more than half of Miss Smith's highly suggestive paper. Yet I think it would be difficult to imagine she reached a profounder point than that which she seemed to me to be setting forth when I came onto the platform. If I understand her aright, she seemed to me to be defining with wonderful penetration and felicity the fundamental ideas that lie at the back of the American, English, and French conceptions of education. Here in America it seems to me that the principal aim of the teacher is to increase the receptivity of the child, and with this idea in view everything is done to make the milieu or environment of the child as attractive to him as possible. You adapt, in school, the milieu to him in the hope he will later on adapt himself to the milieu. You are firmly convinced it is only necessary to bring a child to the waters of knowledge to make him freely drink of them, especially when you have explained that they are really the waters of knowledge. In this optimistic view of the child, which consists in giving him his head, as we say in England, you seem to me to have been largely imbued with the ideas of Rousseau and his favorite theory that man is born foncièrement bon, and only let his interests and appetites have full play, and he will find out instinctively the best road for himself.

The English conception, on the other hand, seems to me to be based on the more or less conscious belief that education is the training of the will.

The child is often set down alone with a text-book which he has somehow or other got to master; not infrequently he masters it badly, yet what he masters is his very own. The discipline is often stern. We see the word "must" peeping up out of it like a rock coming up to the surface. But the seeming harshness, the apparent disregard of the child's weakness, has also its philosophy, even if it is often unaware of it. It reminds one of the categorical imperative of Kant; it says "thou shalt, thou must," because its conscious premise, derived, not indeed from reason, but from the heart, implies the postulate "thou canst."

Different, again, seems to me the root-idea of French education. Here the appeal thruout is to the logical instincts of the child. This passionate belief in an innate and perfectly comprehensible reason finds its expression in the teacher's attitude. His effort is to make things as clear as possible, to render them visible, patent, self-evident; hence all his teaching is cast in a logical mold; there is an almost mechanical inevitableness with which one proposition depends on another. At first the pupils seem rather to copy the teacher and take upon trust what he says, but the innate logical faculty within soon comes to life, and they begin to cast their ideas in a logical form and develop them in a logical. order. One seems to see in them a sort of perpetual renaissance of the old culture - the coming to life of a culture that has become a sort of second nature and only requires the school to develop it. Certainly, anyone present at a lesson of French boys of fifteen and sixteen must be struck with their powers in the way of building up paragraphs and, indeed, whole compositions. This belief in the self-evidence of clear ideas clearly presented takes us surely back to Descartes and his restatement of the foundations of knowledge. It is, indeed, curious, but it seems to me that the more the French regard their so-called self-evident truths, the more they see the unity and oneness of them; whereas we English, the more we look into what we call self-evident, the less self-evident does it

become, because we begin to see it breaking up into countless and often discordant details under our eyes. The French mind is rather synthetic, ours analytic. The French takes in the forest; we are specialists in the trees.

There is also another point Miss Smith touched on, to wit, the reasons why the French republic decided to cast a sort of technical net over the whole of their primary education in order to divert the best of the elementary children into trade or industrial callings. To her admirable analysis I will only add one further factor. It seems to me one of the reasons worthy of mention was that the French, like many other older countries in which national expansion is slower than with you, and the chance of rising less, have already produced, thru a variety of reasons not to be enumerated here, a literary proletariat whose tastes have been sufficiently cultivated to unfit them for anything but professional work. To have directed the education of the poorer children toward these already overcrowded professions would have merely brought them up to starve at the gates of a paradise they could never enter. Success in professional life in France today demands, as an almost sine qua non, the possession of independent means.

Another most important point made by Miss Smith was her insistence on the seriousness of the ethical training the French are attempting to introduce into their schools. The famous reforms of Jules Ferry are probably well known to you. Certainly they speak volumes for the strength and vitality of the democratic spirit among the lower orders in France. They represent the reply of the republic to the gibe that she has changed in nothing the physiognomy of France. As far as they go, they are the true embodiment of the liberty, equality, fraternity of the Revolution. Probably the world has never witnessed a more astonishing revolution than the apparently successful effort to raise, lift, and shift the entire national education from a Catholic to a merely ethical foundation, and that, apparently, with no net loss to the education of the country, but with even a considerable gain. Such an astonishing feat can be paralleled only by the engineering exploits you sometimes attempt in America, when you raise a huge hotel upon rollers and transfer it to a new basis. Now, this ethical instruction is merely an attempt to “underpin” the old structure on its new foundation, and, as such, should have the sympathy of all.

Before I sit down you will, however, probably expect me to say a few words about American education. The last speaker very justly insisted on the extreme difficulty of exhibiting the most vital part of education, to wit, its atmosphere and influence on character. Well, thanks to the admirable order and arrangement with which your educational exhibit was put together, it is probable that the American exhibit explained to the ordinary visitor the real aims and ideals of the American schools better than any other exhibit. If you should ask me the effect it produced on me, I should say that the American educational army struck me as likely to be the most efficient in the world, for three reasons that I consider essential. First, it enjoys practically unlimited supplies. American democracy is ready to plank down its last sou on American schools. But, in addition to the sinews of war, you have also a thoroly effective force of teachers ready to go anywhere and do anything; and finally you have a leader of tried and rare efficiency; and how important a really competent leader is we learned to our cost in the early stages of the South African war. In Dr. Harris you possess the Nestor of educational leaders. This is not merely the opinion of a humble individual like myself, but that of the whole of the international jury at the Paris Exposition. When the name of Dr. Harris was mentioned for a grand prize, it was voted by acclamation, an honor accorded to no other person, and only vouchsafed to one or two institutions.

REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON A NATIONAL

UNIVERSITY

WILLIAM. R. HARPER, PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CHAIRMAN

To the National Council of Education:

The undersigned members of the committee to investigate the entire subject of a national university and to report to the Council do now report, as follows:

The appointment of the committee was authorized by the Council at their meeting at Washington, D. C., on July 11, 1898, in the passage of the following resolution, offered by Mr. Dougherty, of Illinois :

Resolved, That the chair appoint a committee of fifteen, the majority of whom shall be members of the Council, who shall investigate the entire subject of the establishment of a national university and report to the Council.

MEMBERSHIP

The president of the Council subsequently appointed the committee, as follows:

WILLIAM R. HARPER (chairman), president of the University of Chicago. EDWIN A. ALDERMAN, president of the University of North Carolina (now president of Tulane University of Louisiana).

JAMES B. ANGELL, president of the University of Michigan.

NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER, professor of philosophy and education in Columbia University.

JAMES H. CANFIELD, president of Ohio State University (now librarian of Columbia University).

J. L. M. CURRY, agent of the Peabody and Slater educational funds.
NEWTON C. DOUGHERTY, superintendent of schools, Peoria, Ill.
ANDREW S. DRAPER, president of the University of Illinois.
CHARLES W. ELIOT, president of Harvard University.

EDMUND J. JAMES, professor of public administration in the University of Chicago.

WILLIAM H. MAXWELL, superintendent of schools, New York, N. Y. BERNARD J. MOSES, professor of history and political economy in the University of California.

J. G. SCHURMAN, president of Cornell University.

F. LOUIS SOLDAN, superintendent of schools, St. Louis, Mo. WILLIAM L. WILSON, president of Washington and Lee University.

MEETINGS

The committee have held three protracted meetings: at Washington, D. C., on November 2, 3, and 4, 1899; at Chicago, Ill., on February