GEOGRAPHIC EDUCATION — BEIGHAM. 495 
men. Not a few costly errors have been made during recent settle- 
ments and in the wars and diplomacy of centuries because public 
men were ignorant of geography. 
Those who are to be statesmen can not, in general, be selected 
while young and trained for their careers. At least in a democracy, 
public officials may come from any class and any home. Statesmen 
will in the long run be made out of the material in our schools and 
their course will in turn be shaped by public opinion. If the public 
is ignorant of the world, their action will be haphazard, based on 
ignorance and on desire for party advantage. We are facing 
economic readjustments which have to do with the resources, the 
transportation, the tastes, and the industrial conditions of every 
country in the world. We would not debar our diplomats from 
training in politics or from the experience and graces of the drawing 
room, but we would give them knowledge and a consequent sense of 
being at home in the lands to which they are accredited. Such train- 
ing is to a large degree in the sphere of geographic education. 
In brief summary we may say that down to the year 1850 geo- 
graphic textbooks in America were of the gazeteer type, valuable 
as stores of information but having small value in education. Dur- 
ing the following 40 years the atlas type of geography prevailed, 
placing thus a new value upon the use of maps, and locational geo- 
graphy was in the forefront and marked by excess of emphasis. The 
period, however, shared in the impulse that came with the emergence 
of the doctrine of evolution and was enriched by the anthropo- 
geographic studies of the Germans and the French and by the rise 
of scientific physiography in America. Rapid progress, however, as 
shown in geographic education and geographic research, goes back 
in the main through the 30-year period to which reference has been 
made. 
The next 30 years will go far to achieve the growth and realize the 
aims that will round out a century since gazeteer geography held the 
field. Geography will, we believe, become a cardinal theme in ele- 
mentary and secondary teaching, that our youth may be fitted to 
live in a world of nature, of resources, of races and nations. There 
is, perhaps, no other subject which so well pictures what that world is 
and so effectively links together and utilizes the combined harvest of 
the natural and the social sciences. 
Out of such perfected geographic training will come not only 
effective intelligence for citizenship but the training of experts for 
commercial undertakings, for military necessities, for consular and 
diplomatic work, and for the intensive study of new or little-known 
regions. 
Along with strong development in education from lowest to high- 
est will proceed the perfecting of our maps, those summaries of 
