1902.] THE EDUCATION OF BOOKS AND OF NATURE. 279 



company that crowded Tremont Temple in Boston to its very 

 doors. From the furthest corner to the furthest gallery 

 that great edifice was fillpd, and filled in the middle of a 

 Saturday morning. I saw there, not only women of leisure 

 and the earnest teachers who teach a large percentage of the 

 children of the city, and in that great company (perhaps a 

 majority of that great audience were men), there were simply 

 not merely teachers who were at leisure at that time, but 

 there were ministers of the city on their busiest day, bankers 

 in the middle of banking hours, lawyers and merchants and 

 manufacturers, young and old. As the audience gathered 

 it was hard to find one's way to a seat, as the entrances were 

 crowded away out upon the street-car line. As I sat and 

 watched that great audience assembled during the business 

 hours of a busy morning, it interested me and comforted me 

 to reflect that there were so many who should be willing 

 to step aside from the world of work in the metropolis of 

 New England on that November day to hear what? Not a bril- 

 liant new president from Washington, not any famous foreign 

 ambassador, not any great questions of public policy, or any 

 great question of trade or commerce; oh, no, it was not that. 

 That great gathering, crowding the temple to its very doors, 

 had come together for what? It was to hear the president of 

 the oldest university in our country read a paper an hour 

 long on the triumphs and disappointments of public school 

 education of the last generation. I thought as I listened 

 in that great company how happy are we plain men and 

 women who are doing the plain work of our democracy, that 

 at the beginning of our new century a subject of this nature 

 could interest such an audience; I thought how happy we 

 ought to be, and what a good sign it was that it should ex- 

 cite such interest. The daily papers had their reporters there 

 taking their notes of the important discussion of what we 

 had done, and what we hoped to do, and on our failures and 

 our successes in educating the children, — all of the children 

 of the people. 



What are our successes and our prospects in education? 

 Most of us have lived long enough to know, even the 

 youngest of us, that education does not close any more with 

 the closing of the text-books in the schoolroom, no matter 

 whether the school be upon one of our New England wind- 



