1902.] THE EDUCATION OF BOOKS AND OF NATURE. 28I 



in quite a few more sixteen weeks of education are required 

 for our little children, and in a few twenty weeks, but there 

 are only three states that require the children to be in school 

 through the school year ; that is, that make it mandatory that 

 they shall be in attendance up to a certain age through the 

 whole of the school weeks in the year, and those three states 

 are Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York. We are 

 glad of it, and we have the right to rejoice in it. And yet, as 

 I work in one of those three happy states on its board of _ 

 education, do you know what I ask myself sometimes? I go 

 down to the dock in East Boston. I might go week by 

 week, as you might go, and see the steamers coming in 

 crowded to the rails with strange passengers. We see them 

 as they come down the gang plank with their little children 

 clinging to their skirts, and in their arms, for not much 

 else have they to bring us. We see there these fathers and 

 mothers not as twenty or thirty or forty years ago from 

 Norway, Sweden, Germany, Scotland, and from all the 

 countries of northern Europe, with their fresh blood, and 

 their ardent ambition, and their ideals of personal liberty, but 

 they are from Sicily and southern Italy, the islands of the 

 Mediterranean, and from the persecuted lands of southeastern 

 Europe. From Hungary and the shores of the Danube, from 

 the mountains of Austria, and from all that section these 

 people have been coming to the shores of New England 

 during the last few years in increasing numbers, or since the 

 fresh persecutions of the Jewish people in Europe began. 

 How they throng to our ports, and, as I have said, with not 

 much else besides their arms full of little children with their 

 earnest, questioning eyes. Speaking not one word of our 

 English language, and with none of our ideals of liberty or 

 citizenship, puzzled they come into our city streets by the 

 hundreds and thousands. And, what do you do? What 

 do you do in Connecticut, and we in Massachusetts, and in 

 New York, those three states that I have mentioned as having 

 compulsory education laws? We lay the heavy hand of the 

 law on their little children at seven or eight, and we say to 

 those parents through the interpreter: " Whether you like it 

 or not, whether you believe in it or not, in this strange new 

 land to which you have hurried, we shall, for the sake of our 

 sons and daughters, and the sake of the future of our dear 



