METHODS OF NINETEENTH CENTURY 25 



vidual powers of work and means of happiness as fully as we can; 

 but it is a bad thing to encourage the individual to think that his 

 success and his happiness are the ultimate ends for which he is to 

 work. We do not exactly teach this in so many words; but we teach 

 it in deeds whenever we make it a principle to regard the thing which 

 is agreeable and playful to the pupil as presumably useful, and the 

 thing which is disagreeable or fatiguing to the pupil as presumably 

 useless. 



We are not far enough away from the nineteenth century itself to 

 get it into right historic perspective or judge how the good and the 

 evil of its educational movements may balance. But I will venture 

 the prediction that the educational principles and methods of the 

 nineteenth century will have the same kind of fate which befell the 

 political and economic principles of that century. The introduction 

 of the idea of libert}^ in politics and in economics did great and 

 overwhelming good. The Declaration of Independence, with its 

 emphasis on man's rights where older documents had spoken ex- 

 clusively of man's duties, with its assertion of the claim of liberty 

 where others had spoken only of the claim of authority, and with its 

 glorification of the pursuit of happiness where previous writers had 

 preached nothing but self-subordination, marked the opening of a 

 great era of political development and was the starting-point for the 

 success and prosperity of almost every nation that adopted its prin- 

 ciples. In like manner the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of 

 Nations, with its cardinal principle that self-interest in trade, instead 

 of being wicked or obnoxious, might be made an unrivaled means of 

 public service, marked the opening of a new era of industrial effi- 

 ciency and physical welfare. But there came a point when people 

 thought so much of their rights that they forgot the existence of such 

 things as duty, a point when the pursuit of liberty resulted in anarchy, 

 a point when men sought to obtain their own happiness at the sacri- 

 fice of the happiness of others. There came also a point when in- 

 dustrial self-interest could not be made a means to the public welfare, 

 and when those who preached its universal beneficence found their 

 previsions unfulfilled. We have so "many of these instances before 

 our eyes that we no longer rely with the childlike optimism of our 

 fathers on the universal beneficence of liberty in politics or in in- 

 dustry. We have learned that the ideals of the nineteenth century, 

 though far better than those of the eighteenth, could not be regarded 

 as goals of all effort or postulates of all thinking; that there was yet 

 a word for the twentieth century to speak in a different sense from 

 that of the nineteenth, and perhaps in a language different from that 

 which those who had most to do in accomplishing nineteenth-century 

 progress would have understood. So I believe it will be in matters of 

 education. I believe that our present-day emphasis on the develop- 



