ADDRESSES 39 
for this demonstration: and I have no hesitancy in saying that, 
action and reaction being equal, the debt is being repaid in 
local helpfulness. The Academy has met already in normal 
schools; the prediction is safe that in holding future meetings 
under such auspices, the Academy will further its natural 
functions, growing in efficiency through every helpful effort. 
We are invited to hold an early meeting at Joliet. If the invi- 
tation is accepted, the meeting can be made one of the best in 
our history: for Joliet is not only an enterprising industrial 
city, but one which makes provision for home instruction not 
only up to the customary school limits, but half way through 
the college curriculum. 
Changing standards of value and their bearing on the vari- 
ous strata of society have received so much discussion of 
late that we have all become familiar with the fact that a com- 
munity consists of producers, distributors, and consumers. 
Every one of us falls into the last-named of these three classes, 
though he may figure also in either or both of the others and 
perhaps primarily in one of them. ‘The primitive nomadic 
and agrarian simplicity of producing everything material that 
one needed has long since passed except for barbarous peoples 
or under temporary pioneer conditions, and even then, though 
life might be sustained on one’s own productivity, it has en- 
listed trade for its amplification. Today consumer and pro- 
ducer are coming to a general agreement that increased cost to 
the former does not yield generally an inordinate profit to the 
latter, but that the middle man absorbs the larger part of the 
difference between cost of production and retail price; and if 
just in the analysis, they recognize that in the main this is a 
reasonable reward for bringing into our lives material and 
intellectual opportunities that nothing but commerce could 
afford, or for giving us an open market. 
A somewhat similar analysis of our educational system 
shows that, as in commerce, three classes exist—producers, dis- 
tributors and users of knowledge—we call them discoverers, 
teachers, and pupils, unless we coin for them more high-sound- 
ing names under the impression that we increase their impor- 
tance or dignity by this. It is within our memory, and some of 
us have enjoyed personal association with men who passed 
through the experience, that men have worked literally and in 
the best sense of the word as amateurs in broadening the field 
