STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 103 



its own sake, I think any scheme which leaves physical education 

 out of the account is radically defective. If you can have this with 

 training in useful arts, so much the better, but have it we must. 

 There was a training in those primitive New England times when a 

 fellow had to lie down to his Lindley Murray before a fire of pine 

 knots, after milking the cows, cutting the wood, and doing the 

 " chores ; " when the girl added the daily skein to the festoons of 

 yarn for the family clothing, which is hard to get in these days. As 

 soon as a child was old enough to pick up a basket of chips, it became 

 an element in the productive wealth of the home. Surely it was 

 none the worse for it to be taught by the statutes of law and filial 

 duty that service was due for the care and support of its helpless 

 years. These views may seem sordid, but the looseness with which 

 children grow up to think their parents and the rest of the world 

 owe them a living is filling our streets with hoodlums and with 

 animated fashion plates, ready to be blown away by the first ill wind 

 of temptation. What is a hoodlum ? A boy gone to waste, rotten 

 before he is ripe, because society does not know enough to preserve 

 and economize him. 



The education required by a people is not a fixed quantity, either 

 in kind or degree, and the condition and circumstances of laboring 

 men of every class has greatly changed since the idea of public edu- 

 cation first dawned. Why, do you know that the experiment is his- 

 torically so recent that a good many countries have not had time to 

 make it? 



The history of education fully explains why it is not more practi- 

 cal. Colleges and seminaries grew up out of the monasteries, which for 

 a long time treasured all the learning there was in the world. Learn- 

 ing was a monopoly, first of the priests, then of the priests and the 

 nobles, then of these and the judges, and finally, and not without 

 hard squeezing, the leech or doctor got into this good company, and 

 then came the printed Bible to carry the art of reading wherever 

 religious zeal could take it. There was nothing but literature for 

 education to use; it covered the whole field except mathematics. 

 Columbus invented geography, and Galileo and Copernicus astron- 

 omy, long after the great European universities were founded. In 

 England, where our college system came from, the aristocratic classes 

 only were benefited by it, and it suited them very well. And when 

 'the common school got started, it simply took a few of the first leaves 

 out of the college book. It is not so very long since men learned to 

 read and spell in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. It took 

 several centuries of human progress to bring rulers to consent that 

 common folks should learn the alphabet, and again to get permission 

 for women to tamper with the dangerous thing. It took a good while 

 to get a spinning jenny, and a power loom, and a steam plow; and 

 the education of the Oxford time don't suit the spinning jenny age, 

 as England has learned to her cost. 



Until about the time of the gold discovery in California, England 

 was domineering over the rest of Europe, through her commercial 

 supremacy and her command of the supplies of raw materials, which 

 enabled her to take the lead in manufactures. These advantages she 

 was likely to retain. But France and Germany, by the most magnif- 

 icent provisions for technical schools, set themselves to compete with 

 her on her own ground of manufactures, and not only distanced her 

 completely, but almost drove her from the field. The Exposition of 



