36.4 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Such are the lessons of war. The history of peaceful industrial 

 effort tells the same story. No nation is truly prosperous until every 

 man has become not merely a consumer but a producer. As Emerson 

 most truly said : A man fails to make his place good in the world, unless 

 he not only pays his debt, but also adds something to the common 

 wealth. Efficient universal education that makes men producers as 

 well as consumers is the surest guarantee of progress in the arts of 

 peace — is the mother of national prosperity. 



' But/ exclaims an objector. ' this is gross materialism.' Not so. 

 The history of the world shows that a nation improves morally and 

 intellectually only as its physical condition is strengthened. The 

 futility of religious missionary effort, when unaccompanied by physical 

 betterment, is of itself sufficient to prove the thesis. Better shelter, 

 better food, better clothing, are the necessary antecedents and accom- 

 paniments of higher thinking, greater self-respect and more resolute 

 independence. 



True, material prosperity too often brings with it a train of evils 

 all its own; sensual indulgence or slothful ease, it may be; or the 

 grasping at monopoly and ' man's inhumanity to man ' ; or a feverish 

 pursuit of material things to the neglect of the. spiritual. True, enor- 

 mous wealth is often accompanied, particularly in crowded centers of 

 population, by extreme poverty. These, however, are but temporary 

 reversions to barbarism — the price we must pay for progress. The best 

 correctives of the evils generated by the accumulation of wealth are 

 not anti-trust laws or other repressive legislation, but a system of 

 schools which provides a training for all that is equal to the best which 

 money can buy; which discovers and reveals genius born in low estate 

 and enables it to fructify for the common good; and which guarantees 

 to every child the full development of all his powers. The trained 

 man will demand and will, in the long run, receive his due share. 

 Education is a chief cause of wealth and the most certain corrective 

 of its abuse. In a community in which every man was trained to 

 his highest efficiency, monopoly and poverty would be alike impossible. 



In the light of these historic truths you will permit me, as a prelude 

 to the addresses that are to be delivered before the meetings, general 

 and departmental, of this convention, to state very briefly — I do not 

 venture to say, discuss — a few of the burning educational questions of 

 the day. 



The first of these questions is: What does education for efficiency 

 mean? It does not mean that every man should be trained to be a 

 soldier. True, the man who is well trained for the duties of peace is, 

 in these days of scientific instruments of destruction, well prepared for 

 war; but military prowess can never become the ideal of education 

 among a great industrial people. It does not mean merely that each 

 citizen should be able to read the newspapers and magazines so that 



