640 STATE BOARD OP AGRICULTURE. 



are rightly treated. We face, then, as educators and as thinkers on these 

 questions, the problem of the man and the woman — not the simpler one 

 of the boy and the girl — and the State has too vital a stake in the matter 

 to be indifferent or careless as to the result. If we turn back to study 

 the lesson of history on these questions, we shall find that up to the period 

 of the Civil War of 1861-65. society offered two alternatives in most walks 

 of life. The young man was either apprenticed to a master to learn his 

 trade or calling, or he went to a college or university with a view to 

 further culture if he could afford it. I am speaking of the condition in 

 England in the time when Dickens wrote, when doctors graduated from 

 the mortar and pestle, and lawyers entered the labyrinth of technicalities 

 by serving as clerks and copyists of forms. There were faculties of law 

 and medicine in a few European centres of university life — notably Ger- 

 man — and a consecrated young man might enter the church through the 

 classical university course which led him to his theological seminary. But 

 at the period of which I speak, by far the greater number entered their 

 life-work through the apprentice system in some of its forms. The univer- 

 sity life was for the leisured class — the wealthy, the highborn, the nobility, 

 the aristocracy, the few. The needs of the many were as yet unconsidered. 

 I need not stop long to point out the origin of this apprentice system, 

 and the relation of master and learner. It runs deep into our inherit- 

 ance of chivalry, and our histories and romances and ballads are full of 

 the lives where the noble scion of a lordly house learned his arts of war 

 and sport and deportment by serving as page and squire until he won his 

 spurs as knight. It belongs, however, to the feudal period, and to a 

 somewhat inflexible social order which is not that under which we 

 breathe freely. It belongs to the time in which war was still the ac- 

 cepted path to preferment and worldly success, and the history of the 

 king and his nobles is the history of the campaigns which they led, either 

 as depredators themselves, or as defenders against the encroachments 

 of others. It is a period of lower standards in every department, ex- 

 cept those of literature and physical prowess — observe the suggestive- 

 ness of the union — when medicine was outgrowing herb-simples and con- 

 tageous disease was still a divine visitation. We say our trade-unions 

 are responsible for the disappearance of the apprentice system in in- 

 dustrial life. I believe the explanation is deeper and wider than that, 

 and that in the economy of our brightr day its disappearance is not to be 

 mourned as an unmitigated sorrow. 



There are also many of us — too many of us — who have never out-grown 

 our inherited notion as to the place of the university under that older 

 atmosphere. Our sons must be toilers amid practical affairs — not dream- 

 ers in cloisters, nor hair-splitting controversialists, nor any variety of the 

 mere talker about abstractions. Hence, think we, we have no need of 

 a school after the high school, and our State has done its full duty by us 

 when this opportunity has been provided for our sons. 

 My friends, this is not so. 



The first group to separate itself from the apprentice system was nat- 

 urally that in which fell the experts in military and naval matters. It 

 was early appreciated that for the conduct of modern warfare training 

 different from that then procurable at the universities was called for, and 

 one which yet should be no less exacting along the lines of mental cul- 

 ture. Here the French have been our leaders in matters military, and 



