Kansas Academy of Science. 



THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 



WORTH AND DIGNITY OP THE TEACHERS' 

 VOCATION. 



By J. M. McWharf, Ottawa. 

 (Delivered at the forty-fourth annual meeting.) 



THE suggestive thought of our theme is, first, the superior ma- 

 terial upon which the teacher works. All useful labor is 

 respectable and honorable. Labor is God's first ordinance to man. 

 He does violence to his constitution and faculties, both physical 

 and mental, who repudiates labor as a means of educing, invigorat- 

 ing and enriching those faculties, and advancing the general in- 

 terests of humanity, and yet we can not avoid considering a higher 

 and more dignified grade of labor, that works upon a more valuable 

 and precious material and produces a more dignified and impor- 

 tant result. The man who builds a wagon is as truly respectable, 

 if he builds it well, as he who constructs a locomotive, and yet the 

 one is a higher grade of mechanical pursuit than the other. The 

 potter who rudely fashions a jug from common clay is as respect- 

 able as the artist who shapes the graceful vase from the delicate 

 porcelain, yet the latter occupies a higher department of labor than 

 the former. The man who paints your house, if he does it well, is 

 as truly respectable as the artist who transfers to canvas the love- 

 liest or sublimest scenes of nature; yet is there no distinction in 

 their vocations as to the scale of dignity ? The man who quarries 

 the marble from the bowels of the mountain may be as respectable 

 as the one who from the rude, unsightly block brings forth a form 

 of commanding dignity or surpassing loveliness, but you do not 

 place him in the same rank with the sculptor. Shall a man who 

 molds a brick, however respectable a brickmaker he may be, rank 

 in the same grade with one who designs and erects a magnificent 

 cathedral ? 



The common sense of mankind universally graduates the dig- 

 nity of any vocation according to the nature of the material with 

 which it works and the results which it produces. If this princi- 

 ple is applied to the teacher's vocation, how forcibly does it illus- 

 trate the worth and dignity of that vocation. The material on 



