grammar school teacher shall be appointed who has not had the equivalent of a four years' high school course and of a two years' normal school course; and (2) no high school teacher shall be appointed who has not had the equivalent of a college course and of at least one year of professional training.

3. Additional help by the State to the smaller towns, particularly to towns upon whom new and unprecedented obligations have been or may be placed, to the end that they may afford to secure and be able to retain competent teachers.

4. The assurance to every properly qualified child in the Commonwealth of as clear a right to first grade high school instruction and to the usual option therein as is now guaranteed by legislative action to children in towns of more than 4,000 inhabitants. Anomalous as it may seem, this larger right belongs to children in towns whose valuation is less than $500,000 and whose expenditures for high school tuition the State reimburses, while for children in towns of higher valuation but of less than 4,000 inhabitants this larger right either does not exist or it is exceedingly cloudy.

5. An increase in the appropriations for the educational museum and the State examination and certification of teachers, so that competent directorship for them under the general guidance of the office may be possible.

For the discussion of the first four recommendations, reference should be made not only to reports of the Board and the secretary, but particularly to the contributions on supervision, the professional training of teachers, the problem of the rural schools and the approval of high schools, to be found elsewhere in this volume, by Messrs. Edson, Prince, Fletcher and MacDonald.

The fifth recommendation is considered at length on pages 124-128.

6. The report of Mr. Henry T. Bailey on the present condition of manual training in Massachusetts, to be found elsewhere in this volume, when taken in connection with recent legislative action making high manual training compulsory for nearly a million and a half of the population, suggests two queries: (1) whether an agent of the Board whose special field shall be manual training is not desirable; and (2) what new

provisions, if any, are needed for the normal training of manual training teachers.

"

7. In the last report of the secretary the recommendations of preceding reports were renewed that a State agent should be employed to aid in the enforcement of the school attendance laws, and that the State should assume the payment of $2 per week for the support of truants in the truant schools. It may be added that the by-laws" which figure so conspicuously in the consolidated attendance laws are a source of serious annoyance and obstruction in attempts at enforcement. It is a question whether any good reason now exists for having them at all. A State law so important as that relating to school attendance ought not to be so conditioned on by-laws as to become inoperative whenever a town neglects or refuses to pass by-laws or blunders in making them. For recommendations relating to truancy and non-attendance, reference should be made to the special report of the Board of Education on the truancy conditions of the State. This report was prepared under the Board's direction by Mr. George A. Walton, in response to an order from the last Legislature.

CONCLUSION.

Whatever educational means and machinery State and local enactments may provide, the supreme purpose of them all is the welfare of the children, their high serviceableness to themselves, to the State and to those who come after them. They are citizens in training; the potency of the coming State is in them. The enlightened interest of the citizen in his own prosperity, the enlightened interest of the State in its own integrity, these admit no antagonism between them. The welfare of the one is bound up in the welfare of the other. Measures that help the one help the other also, and among these measures it is the verdict of history that those relating to public education, whatever their shortcomings, are of highest efficiency. Dangerous as is the intelligence of bad men, the danger that confronts the State from such intelligence is as nothing beside that which confronts it from ignorance. But, whatever the dangers from either source, the only defence against them must be sought in the intelligence of good men.

If more than $10,000,000 was expended on the public schools

last year, it by no means follows that the State has been unduly taxed or even that it has taxed itself enough. If without burden to itself it expends more per pupil than its sister States or than it expended itself ten years ago, it is something to take pride in, provided better school conditions can be shown as a result. To assign our relatively high level of expenditure for the public schools as a reason for descending to a lower level would not be creditable to us. Large as this sum of $10,000,000 is, it averages- salaries, buildings, equipment and all -only $4 per capita for the population of the State. The pettiest luxuries of the people average more. It is an expenditure that pays for itself many times over. Sentimental dividends are not meant just now, but only those of plain hard cash or its equivalent. Hon. William T. Harris, United States Commissioner of Education, in his preface to "The Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System," by George H. Martin, makes the following impressive statement :

I find, by returns made to the National Bureau of Education, that the total amount of school education that each inhabitant of Massachusetts is receiving on an average-basing the calculation on the attendance in public and private schools and the length of the annual school term is nearly seven years of two hundred days each, while the average given each citizen in the whole nation is only four and three tenths of such years. No other State is giving so much education to its people as Massachusetts, and yet all the education given in all its institutions does not amount on an average to so much as seven eighths of an elementary education of eight years. Even Massachusetts is not overeducating the people. But there would seem to be some connection between the fact that, while her citizens get nearly twice the national average amount of education, her wealth-producing power as compared with other States stands almost in the same ratio, namely (in 1885), at seventy-three cents per day for each man, woman and child, while the average for the whole nation was only forty cents.

Consider for a moment what is implied in this ratio of seventy-three to forty. It means for every man, woman and child in the State an average wealth-producing power of thirtythree cents a day in excess of the average of the nation at large, or more than $100 a year. It means that the 2,500,000 people in Massachusetts produce $250,000,000 a year more than they would produce if they were only average earners. This is

twenty-five times the annual expenditure for schools.

It is

not necessary to attribute to the schools this vast excess of production above the average for the country to prove that they pay enormous material dividends. The exact share that the schools, with all the activities and agencies fostered by them, have in wealth-producing power can, of course, never be known. Hon. George F. Hoar said, in the United States House of Representatives in 1872. that "education, the simple capacity to read and write, adds twenty-five per cent. to the wages of the working classes of a State, and of course tends so much to the creation and distribution of its wealth." And yet this, as Mr. Hoar conclusively showed, is but the beginning of the service that education renders a State. It is the great stimulus of material wants; it makes them more numerous, complex and refined. And all this makes a louder call for skilled labor and high directive ability. Thus education furnishes not only widening fields for production, but also husbandmen who can till them to advantage. If so humble a fraction as a tithe of this excess of $250,000,000 can be traced to the schools, they are yet securities that each year return to the State their annual cost two or three times over. The increased stress placed on drawing and other industrial aspects of education in our elementary schools, the extension of high manual training to over a million and a half of our population, the establishment of textile schools, the granting of aid through scholarships or money or both to high scientific institutions, all such educational agencies in conjunction with others of private origin promise a still further gain, both absolute and relative, in our wealth-producing power. view of the overwhelming importance of education to material prosperity, it seems to show a lack of common business sagacity and courage to flinch from the necessary cost of any measure whose adoption would enhance that importance. The main question in such a case is not so much "Can we afford to do it?" as "Can we afford not to do it ?"

But the schools pay in a far higher sense than any mentioned. The founders of the Commonwealth did not rest their argument for public education on the mere material advantages that should follow in its train. And it is an equally significant fact that the more thoughtful advocates of manual training to

day find their strongest reasons for it not in its purely commercial aspects but in those higher ones rather that concern mental and moral progress. The founders were right about it. In Sanders Theatre at Cambridge, high up on the wall that fronts the cultured audiences that assemble there, may be seen an inscription, the story of what these founders early thought and did about education and the impressive tribute the sons of Harvard have paid to their work and memory: "Hic in silvestribus et incultis locis Angli, domo profugi, . sapientiam rati ante omnia colendam, scholam publice condiderunt." They believed, in short, that wisdom should be cherished before all things else, and so they set up a school in the wilderness. They consecrated it to Christ and the Church, the story goes on to say; and those that are taught, we are told in conclusion, shall shine as the firmament, and those that lead multitudes to righteousness as the stars forever.

And these founders had sympathetic successors in those sturdy men who, while the war of the Revolution was still on, set the following gem in our diadem of sovereignty:

Wisdom, and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates, in all future periods of this commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them; especially the university at Cambridge, public schools and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings; sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments, among the people (Constitution, chapter 5, section 2).

The only new thought that our times can add to the exalted exposition of the fathers is the growing one that schemes of education may contemplate more directly than in the past the so-called utilitarian values without dethroning at all the his