78o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



" Heaven help us all, this good city of Boston, this rich Common- 

 wealth of Massachusetts, this boundless wealth of America, that we 

 should so starve our children, these children of the State, starve them 

 both in body and in soul ! " Their only crime, poor little ones, is that 

 their fathers are idle, or ill, or dead. Did you know that savage tribes 

 are less unkind? I met an old woman on the street. She had an 

 honest, patient face, and sad, appealing eyes. She was very frail. 

 Her dress was much too thin for the bitter east wind that was then 

 blowing. She carried a very heavy bundle, and was fairly stagger- 

 ing under its weight. She was suffering visibly. On the other side 

 of the curbstone another woman of the same age was driving past. 

 She was quite alone, save for the coachman, and had ample room. She 

 did not stop. She passed quickly, l^o one was surprised. No one 

 noticed it. Yet both were women. Both had been the possible 

 mother of our Lord. 



But these are gentle sights. You may see them for yourselves 

 any day on the best of our many highways. If it were right to 

 occupy your time and so play upon your feelings, I could take you 

 to highways less esteemed, and show you sights less gentle. But 

 perhaps this is enough. The point I want to make is this: that the 

 rational scheme of education that we are seeking will include the cul- 

 tivation of a social conscience which will make sights such as this 

 impossible. We want a scheme that Avill concern itself with the 

 helplessness of childhood and old age quite as devotedly as with the 

 buoyant self-sufficiency of youth. 



I take it, then, that this scheme of education is to prepare all 

 boys and girls to enter college, and to open the door to an increasing 

 number of them, and that it is to include with just as loving care the 

 children of the poor as those of the more fortunately placed. And 

 I take it that the fourteen years which it contemplates — from four to 

 eighteen — are to be just as jealously guarded as a miser does his 

 gold. For these years are of all the most valuable. The growing 

 organism is more jDlastic than at any other time. The very motion of 

 growth makes those molecular rearrangements possible, upon which 

 skill and knowledge and character depend. You know that a piece 

 of iron may remain idle in a warehouse for years and suffer no 

 change of internal structure, but when this same piece of iron is put 

 into a bridge, and subject to the incessant vibration of wind and 

 traffic, it rapidly becomes crystallized, and must be replaced from 

 time to time by more fibrous metal. The moving particles are more 

 responsive to the crystallizing force. This is not an analogy, but a 

 strict parallelism. The movements of growth make possible the 

 physical changes in the organism. The priceless years are those under 

 twenty. It must not be thought for a moment that I conceive educa- 



