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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

Our educational theories, on paper and in text-books, are well nigh perfect; in actual operation why should they fail? Like a great machine, fed with the material of thought, the crank turns, the wheels go round, and the whole world is a-buzz with the work and noise, but the creature upon whom all this power is expended, is only in rare instances a truly educated man or woman. What, then, is the defect? If the machine is right, then the material with which it is fed must be defective. If the material is right, then the machine has every virtue except that cf adaptation to the use for which it was intended.

Since the whole end and aim of education is to develop, not the ideal mental con­stitution, but the real mind, just as we find it—the real creature, just as he is, and since we can not change the human mind to make it fit the machine, the effort should be to adapt the educational process to suit the human mind. To what extent they are doing this is one of the great questions for teachers of the present day. To what extent— admitting that now in some particulars they fail—it may be possible to modify and adapt methods to the actual and genuine needs of human nature, is certainly a prob­lem worthy of the earnest thought of the broadest and best cultured minds. In attempts at adaptation we have fallen into a process of analyzing the youthful human creature. Having discovered that he possesses mathematical capacity, we have supplied him with mathematical training and have in this department thrust upon him all, and some­times more hard work than he can bear. Having found he possessed religious faculty we have emptied upon him the theologies and psychologies, and when we have sup­plied him in these and other directions we look for the educated man. Judge of our disappointment. We find the faculties, we find the modifications produced by the training, but we look in vain for the man. With all our multiplied facilities for pro­ducing a trained and disciplined nature, what we think we have a right to expect— but what we do not find—is a creature conscious of his own heritage, conscious of his kinship with all humanity, of his kingship over the universe, of his power to grapple with the world outside of himself and of his rightful dominance over both the life without and the grander life within. Instead, we find men weak where they should be most purposeful and brave. We find him the slave of the body, who should be able to make the body the servant of his soul. We find hands untrained to practical uses, minds unequal to grasping the common wants of existence, hearts in which the high ideals of character and strong impulses toward true usefulness are overswept by that consideration for self that makes one’s own interests seem the very center of the universe of God.

The day needs giants; it produces pygmies. It needs men to fight; it produces men to run. It needs women with minds broad enough to think and hearts large enough to love. It needs motherhood that, while it bends protectingly over the cradle of its own child, reaches out a mother heart to all the suffering childhood of the race. It needs the capacity for heroism; it yields the tendency to cowardice. In the midst of learning ignorance triumphs, vice rules and sensualism thrives; and all this not because of education, but in spite of it. And when we consider that our schools in their lower grades, our kindergartens and our primary and Sunday-schools take the infant mind before the tendency to vice has had any chance for development, and that the next higher grades take them on through successive years without being able to prevent such results as those mentioned above, we naturally feel that at the very out­set, our educational system must be wrong. However it may be suited to the ideal conditions it can not be adapted to the average human creature, taken exactly as he is. The lack, which begins at the very basis of our so-called intelligent discipline, runs through the whole, in constantly increasing ratio. Brain is stimulated, and heart and soul are left to starve, and nothing is more neglected than the cunning of the hand. Even where some attempt is made at the training of the whole nature, it is done with­out recognition of the infinite variety in the human mind. Processes ought to be adapted, not only to the universal, but to the individual need. It does not follow that the universal need is necessarily or invariably unlike the individual need, or that indi-