Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 10 / Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers

e was so little—the place was so big—by what right could he ask to be admitted?

Finally he boldly entered, and in a voice meant to be firm, but which was very shaky, said, "I am here!" and pointed to the bosom of his hickory shirt.

The Yankee woman motioned him to a chair. Negroes coming there were plentiful. Usually they wanted to live the Ideal Life. They had a call to preach—and the girls wanted to be music-teachers.

The test was simple and severe: would they and could they do one useful piece of work well?

Booker sat and waited, not knowing that his patience was being put to the test.

Then Miss Priscilla, in a hard, Neill Burgess voice, "guessed" that the adjoining recitation-room needed sweeping and dusting. She handed Booker a broom and dust-cloth, motioned to the room, and went away.

Oho! Little did she know her lad. The colored boy smiled to himself—sweeping and dusting were his specialties—he had learned the trade from a Yankee woman from Vermont! He smiled.

Then he swept that room—moved every chair, the table, the desk. He dusted each piece of furniture four times. He polished each rung and followed around the baseboard on hands and knees.

Miss Priscilla came back—pushed the table around and saw at once that the dirt had not been concealed beneath it. She took out her handkerchief and wiped the table top, then the desk.

She turned, looked at the boy, and her smile met his half-suppressed triumphant grin.

"You'll do," she said.

eneral Samuel C. Armstrong, the founder of Hampton Institute, and the grandfather of Tuskegee, was a white man who fought the South valiantly and well.

He seems about the only man in the North who, at the close of the war, clearly realized that the war had just begun—that the real enemies were not subdued, and that these enemies were ignorance, superstition and incompetence.

The pitiable condition of four million human beings, flung from slavery into freedom, thrown upon their own resources, with no thought of responsibility, and with no preparation for the change, meant for them only another kind of slavery.

General Armstrong's heart went out to them—he desired to show them how to be useful, helpful, self-reliant, healthy. For the whites of the South he had only high regard and friendship. He, of all men, knew how they had suffered from the war—and he realized also that they had fought for what they believed was right. In his heart there was no hate. He resolved to give himself—his life—his fortune—his intellect—his love—his all, for the upbuilding of the South. He saw with the vision of a prophet that indolence and pride were the actual enemies of white and black alike. The blacks must be taught to work—to know the dignity of human labor—to serve society—to help themselves by helping others. He realized that there are no menial tasks—that all which serves is sacred.

And this is the man who sowed the seeds of truth in the heart of the nameless black boy—Booker Washington. Armstrong's shibboleth, too, was, "With malice toward none, but with charity for all, let us finish the work God has given us to do."

do not know very much about this subject of education, yet I believe I know as much about what others know about it as most people. I have visited the principal colleges of America and Europe, and the methods of Preparatory and High Schools are to me familiar. I know the night-schools of the cities, the "Ungraded Rooms," the Schools for Defectives, the educational schemes in prisons, the Manual-Training Schools, the New Education (first suggested by Socrates) as carried out by G. Stanley Hall, John Dewey, and dozens of other good men and women in America. I am familiar with the School for the Deaf at Malone, New York, and the School for the Blind at Batavia, where even the sorely stricken are taught to be self-sufficient, self-supporting and happy. I have tumbled down the circular fire-escape at Lapeer with the inmates of the Home of Epileptics, and heard the shouts of laughter from lips that never laughed before. I have seen the Jewish Manual Training School of Chicago transform Russian refugees into useful citizens—capable, earnest and excellent. I know a little about Swarthmore, Wellesley, Vassar, Radcliffe, and have put my head into West Point and Annapolis, and had nobody cry, "Genius!"

Of Harvard, Yale and Princeton I know something, having done time in each. I have also given jobs to graduates of Oxford, Cambridge and Heidelberg, to my sorrow and their chagrin. This does not prove that graduates of the great universities are, as a rule, out of work, or that they are incompetent. It simply means that it is possible for a man to graduate at these institutions and secure his diploma and yet be a man who has nothing the world really wants, either in way of ideas or services.

The reason that my "cum laude" friends did not like me, and the cause of my having to part with them—getting them a little free transportation from your Uncle George—was not because they lacked intelligence, but because they wanted to secure a position, while I simply offered them a job.

They were like Cave-of-the-Winds of Oshkosh, who is an ice-cutter in August, and in winter is an out-of-door horticulturist—a hired man is something else.

As a general proposition, I believe this will not now be disputed: the object of education is that a man may benefit himself by serving society.

To benefit others, you must be reasonably happy: there must be animation through useful activity, good-cheer, kindness and health—health of mind and health of body. And to benefit society you must also have patience, persistency, and a firm determination to do the right thing, and to mind your own business so that others, too, may mind theirs. Then all should be tinctured with a dash of discontent with past achievements, so you will constantly put forth an effort to do more and better work.

When what you have done in the past looks large to you, you haven't done much today.

So there you get the formula of Education: health and happiness through useful activity—animation, kindness, good-cheer, patience, persistency, willingness to give and take, seasoned with enough discontent to prevent smugness, which is the scum that grows over every stagnant pond.

Of course no college can fill this prescription—no institution can supply the ingredients—all that the college can do is to supply the conditions so that these things can spring into being. Plants need the sunlight—mushrooms are different.

The question is, then, what teaching concern in America supplies the best quality of actinic ray?

And I answer, Tuskegee is the place, and Booker Washington is the man.

"What!" you exclaim. "The Ideal School a school for Negroes, instituted by a Negro, where only Negroes teach, and only Negroes are allowed to enter as students?"

And the answer is, "Exactly so."

At Tuskegee there are nearly two thousand students, and over one hundred fifty teachers. There are two classes of students—"day-school" and "night-school" students. The night-school students work all day at any kind of task they are called upon to do. They receive their board, clothing and a home—they pay no tuition, but are paid for their labor, the amount being placed to their credit, so when fifty dollars is accumulated they can enter as "day students."

The "day students" make up the bulk of the scholars. Each pays fifty dollars a year. These all work every other day at manual labor or some useful trade.

Tuskegee has fully twice as many applicants as it can accommodate; but there is one kind of applicant who never receives any favor. This is the man who says he has the money to pay his way, and wishes to take the academic course only. The answer always is: "Please go elsewhere—there are plenty of schools that want your money. The fact that you have money will not exempt you here from useful labor."

This is exactly what every college in the world should say.

The Tuskegee farm consists of about three thousand acres. There are four hundred head of cattle, about five hundred hogs, two hundred horses, great flocks of chickens, geese, ducks and turkeys, and many swarms of bees. It is the intention to raise all the food that is consumed on the place, and to manufacture all supplies. There are wagon-shops, a sawmill, a harness-shop, a shoe-shop, a tailor-shop, a printing-plant, a model laundry, a canning establishment. Finer fruit and vegetables I have never seen, and the thousands of peach, plum and apple trees, and the vast acreage of berries that have been planted, will surely some day be a goodly source of revenue.

The place is religious, but not dogmatically so—the religion being merely the natural safety-valve for emotion. At Tuskegee there is no lacrimose appeal to confess your sins—they do better—they forget them.

I never heard more inspiring congregational singing, and the use of the piano, organ, orchestra and brass band are important factors in the curriculum. In the chapel I spoke to an audience so attentive, so alert, so receptive, so filled with animation, that the whole place looked like a vast advertisement for Sozodont.

No prohibitive signs are seen at Tuskegee. All is affirmative, yet it is understood that some things are tabu—tobacco, for instance, and strong drink, of course.

We have all heard of Harvard Beer and Yale Mixture, but be it said in sober justice, Harvard runs no brewery, and Yale has no official brand of tobacco. Yet Harvard men consume much beer, and many men at Yale smoke. And if you want to see the cigarette-fiend on his native heath, you'll find him like the locust on the campus at Cambridge and New Haven. But if you want to see the acme of all cigarette-bazaars, just ride out of Boylston Street, Boston, any day at noon, and watch the boys coming out of the Institute of Technology.

I once asked a Tech Professor if cigarette-smoking was compulsory in his institution. "Yes," he replied; "but the rule is not strictly enforced, as I know three students who do not smoke."

Tuskegee stands for order, system, cleanliness, industry, courtesy and usefulness. There are no sink-holes around the place, no "back yards." Everything is beautiful, wholesome and sanitary. All trades are represented. The day is crammed so full of work from sunrise to sunset that there is no time for complaining, misery or faultfinding—three things that are usually born of idleness. At Tuskegee there are no servants. All of the work is done by the students and teachers—everybody works—everybody is a student, and all are teachers.

We are all teachers, whether we will it or not—we teach by example, and all students who do good work are good teachers.

When the Negro is able to do skilled work, he ceases to be a problem—he is a man. The fact that Alexandre Dumas was a Negro does not count against him in the world's assize.

The old-time academic college, that cultivated the cerebrum and gave a man his exercise in an indoor gymnasium, or not at all, has ruined its tens of thousands. To have top—head and no lungs—is not wholly desirable. The student was made exempt from every useful thing, just as the freshly freed slave hoped and expected to be, and after four years it was often impossible for him to take up the practical lessons of life. He had gotten used to the idea of one set of men doing all the work and another set of men having the culture. To a large degree he came to regard culture as the aim of life. And when a man begins to pride himself upon his culture, he hasn't any to speak of. Culture must be merely incidental, and to clutch it is like capturing a butterfly: you do not secure the butterfly at all—you get only a grub.

Let us say right here that there is only one way in which a Negro, or a white man, can ever make himself respected. Statute law will not do it; rights voted him by the State are of small avail; making demands will not secure the desired sesame. If we ever gain the paradise of freedom it will be because we have earned it—because we deserve it. A make-believe education may suffice for a white man—especially if he has a rich father, but a Negro who has to carve out his own destiny must be taught order, system, and quiet, persistent, useful effort.

A college that has its students devote one-half their time to actual, useful work is so in line with commonsense that we are amazed that the idea had to be put into execution by the ex-slave as a life-saver for his disenfranchised race. Our great discoveries are always accidents: we work for one thing and get another. I expect that the day will come, and erelong, when the great universities of the world will have to put the Tuskegee Idea into execution in order to save themselves from being distanced by the Colored Race.

If life were one thing and education another, it might be all right to separate them. Culture of the head over a desk, and indoor gymnastics for the body, are not the ideal, and that many succeed in spite of the handicap is no proof of the excellence of the plan. Ships that go around the world accumulate many barnacles, but barnacles as a help to the navigator are an iridescent dream.

A little regular manual labor, rightly mixed with the mental, eliminates draw-poker, highballs, brawls, broils, Harvard Beer, Yale Mixture, Princeton Pinochle, Chippee dances, hazing, roistering, rowdyism and the bulldog propensity. The Heidelberg article of cocked hat and insolent ways is not produced at Tuskegee. At Tuskegee there is no place for those who lie in wait for insults and regard scrapping as a fine art. As for college athletics at the Orthodox Universities, only one man out of ten ever does anything at it anyway—the college man who needs the gymnasium most is practically debarred from everything in it and serves as a laughing-stock whenever he strips. Coffee, cocaine, bromide, tobacco and strong drink often serve in lieu of exercise and ozone, and Princeton winks her woozy eye in innocency.

Freedom can not be bestowed—it must be achieved. Education can not be given—it must be earned. Lincoln did not free the slaves—he only freed himself. The Negroes did not know they were slaves, and so they had no idea of what freedom meant. Until a man wants to be free, each kind of freedom is only another form of slavery. Booker Washington is showing the colored man how to secure a genuine freedom through useful activity. To get freedom you must shoulder responsibility.

If college education were made compulsory by the State, and one-half of the curriculum consisted of actual, useful manual labor, most of our social ills would be solved, and we would be well out on the highway towards the Ideal City.

Without animation, man is naught—nothing is accomplished, nothing done. People who inspire other people have animation plus.

And animation plus is ecstasy. In ecstasy the spirit rushes out, runs over and saturates all. Oratory is an ecstasy that inundates the hearer and makes him ride upon the crest of another's ideas.

Art is born of ecstasy—art is ecstasy in the concrete. Beautiful music is ecstasy expressed in sound, regulated into rhythm, cadence and form. "Statuary is frozen music," said Heine.

A man who is not moved into ecstasy by ecstasy is hopeless. A people that has not the surging, uplifting, onward power that ecstasy gives, is decadent—dead.

The Negro is easily moved to ecstasy. Very little musical training makes him a power in song. At Tuskegee the congregational singing is a feature that, once heard, is never to be forgotten. Fifteen hundred people lifting up their hearts in an outburst of emotion—song! Fifteen hundred people of one mind, doing anything in unison—do you know what it means? Ecstasy is essentially a matter of sex. In art and religion sex can not be left out of the equation. The simple fact that in forty years the Negro race in America has increased from four million to ten million tells of their ecstasy as a people. "Only happy beings reproduce themselves," says Darwin. Depress your animal and it ceases to breed; so there are a whole round of animals that do not reproduce in captivity. But in slavery or freedom the Negro sings, and reproduces—he is not doomed nor depressed—his soul arises superior to circumstance.

Without animation, education is impossible. And the problem of the educator is to direct this singing, flowing, moving spirit of the hive into useful channels.

Education is simply the encouragement of right habits—the fixing of good habits until they become a part of one's nature, and are exercised automatically.

The man who is industrious by habit is the only man who wins. The man who is not industrious except when driven to it, or when it occurs to him, accomplishes little.

Man gets his happiness by doing: and work to a slave is always distasteful. The power of mimicry and imitation is omitted—the owner does not work—the strong man does not work. Ergo—to grow strong means to cease work. To be strong means to be free—to be free means no work!

It has been a frightfully bad education that the Negro has had—work distasteful, and work disgraceful! And the slave-owner suffered most of all, for he came to regard work as debasing.

And now a Negro is teaching the Negro that work is beautiful—that work is a privilege—that only through willing service can he ever win his freedom. Architecture is fixed ecstasy, inspired always by a strong man who gives a feeling of security. Athens was an ecstasy in marble.

Tuskegee is an ecstasy in brick and mortar.

Don't talk about the education of the Negro! The experiment has really never been tried, except spasmodically, of educating either the whites or the blacks in the South—or elsewhere.

A Negro is laying hold upon the natural ecstasy of the Negro, and directing it into channels of usefulness and excellence. Can you foretell where this will end—this formation of habits of industry, sobriety and continued, persistent effort towards the right?

Booker Washington, child of a despised race, has done and is doing what the combined pedagogic and priestly wisdom of ages has failed to do. He is the Moses who by his example is leading the children of his former oppressors out into the light of social, mental, moral and economic freedom.

I am familiar in detail with every criticism brought against Tuskegee. On examination these criticisms all reduce themselves down to three:

1. A vast sum of money has been collected by Booker Washington for his own aggrandizement and benefit.

2. Tuskegee is a show-place where all the really good work is done by picked men from the North.

3. Booker Washington is a tyrant, a dictator and an egotist.

If I were counsel for Tuskegee—as I am not—I would follow the example of the worthy accusers, and submit the matter without argument. Booker Washington can afford to plead guilty to every charge; and he has never belittled himself by answering his accusers.

But let the facts be known, that this man has collected upward of six million dollars, mostly from the people of the North, and has built up the nearest perfect educational institution in the world.

It is probably true that many of his teachers and best workers are picked people—but they are Negroes, and were selected by a Negro. The great general reveals his greatness in the selection of his generals: it was the marshals whom Napoleon appointed who won for him his victories; but his spirit animated theirs, and he chose them for this one reason—he could dominate them. He infused into their souls a goodly dash of his own enthusiasm.

Booker Washington is a greater general than Napoleon. For the Tuskegee idea no Waterloo awaits. And as near as I can judge, Booker Washington's most noisy critics are merely camp-followers.

That the man is a tyrant and a dictator there is no doubt. He is a beneficent tyrant, but a tyrant still, for he always, invariably, has his own way in weighty matters—in trivialities others can have theirs. And as for dictatorship, the man who advances on chaos and transforms it into cosmos is perforce a dictator and an egotist.

Booker Washington believes he is in the right, and he makes no effort to conceal the fact that he is on earth. In him there is no disposition to run and peep about, and find himself a dishonorable grave. All live men are egotists, and they are egotists just in proportion as they have life. Dead men are not egotists. Booker Washington has life in abundance, and through him I truly believe runs the spirit of Divinity, if ever a living man had it. A man like this is the instrument of Deity.

Tuskegee Institute has applications ahead all the time, from all over America, for competent colored men and women who can take charge of important work and do it. Dressmakers, housekeepers, cooks, farmers, stockmen, builders, gardeners, are in demand. The world has never yet had enough people to bear its burdens.

Recently we have heard much of the unemployed, but a very little search will show that the people out of work are those of bad habits, which make them unreliable and untrustworthy. The South, especially, needs the willing worker and the practical man. And best of all the South knows it, and stands ready to pay for the service.

A few years ago there was a fine storm of protest from Northern Negroes to the effect that Booker Washington was endeavoring to limit the Negro to menial service—that is, thrust him back into servility. The first ambition of the Negro was to get an education so that he might become a Baptist preacher. To him, education meant freedom from toil, and of course we do not have to look far to see where he got the idea. Then when Tuskegee came forward and wanted to make blacksmiths, carpenters and brick-masons out of black men, there was a cry, "If this means education, we will none of it—treason, treason!" It was assumed that the Negro who set other Negroes to work was not their friend. This phase of the matter requires neither denial nor apology. We smile and pass on.

In Eighteen Hundred Seventy-seven, the Negro was practically disenfranchised throughout the South, by being excluded from the primaries. He had no recognized ticket in the field. For both the blacks and the whites this has been well. To most of the blacks freedom meant simply exemption from work. So there quickly grew up a roistering, turbulent, idle and dangerous class of black men who were used by the most ambitious of their kind for political ends. To preserve the peace of the community, the whites were forced to adopt heroic measures, with the result that we now have the disenfranchised Negro.

Early in the Eighties, Booker Washington realized that, politically, there was no hope for his race. He saw, however, that commerce recognized no color line. We would buy, sell and trade with the black man on absolute equality. Life-insurance companies would insure him, banks would receive his deposits, and if honest and competent, would loan him money. If he could shoe a horse, we waived his complexion; and in every sort and kind of craftsmanship he stood on absolute equality with the whites. The only question ever asked was, "Can you do the work?"

And Booker Washington set out to help the Negro win success for himself by serving society through becoming skilled in doing useful things. And so it became Head, Hand and Heart. The manual was played off against the intellectual.

But over and beyond the great achievement of Booker Washington in founding and carrying to a successful issue the most complete educational scheme of this age, or any other, stands the man himself. He is one without hate, heat or prejudice. No one can write on the lintels of his doorpost the word, "Whim." He is half-white, but calls himself a Negro. He sides with the disgraced and outcast black woman who gave him birth, rather than with the respectable white man who was his sire.

He rides in the Jim Crow cars, and on long trips, if it is deemed expedient to use a sleeping-car, he hires the stateroom, so that he may not trespass or presume upon those who would be troubled by the presence of a colored man. Often in traveling he goes for food and shelter to the humble home of one of his own people. At hotels he receives and accepts, without protest or resentment, the occasional contumely of the inferior whites—whites too ignorant to appreciate that one of God's noblemen stands before them. For the whites of the South he has only words of kindness and respect; the worst he says about them is that they do not understand. His modesty, his patience, his forbearance, are sublime. He is a true Fabian—he does what he can, like the royal Roycroft opportunist that he is. Every petty annoyance is passed over; the gibes and jeers and the ingratitude of his own race are forgotten. "They do not understand," he calmly says. He does his work. He is respected by the best people of North and South. He has the confidence of the men of affairs—he is a safe man.

THOMAS ARNOLD

THOMAS ARNOLD

homas Arnold was born in Seventeen Hundred Ninety-five, and died in Eighteen Hundred Forty-two. His life was short, as men count time, but he lived long enough to make for himself a name and a fame that are both lasting and luminous. Though he was neither a great writer nor a great preacher, yet there were times when he thought he was both. He was only a schoolteacher. However, he was an artist in schoolteaching, and art is not a thing—it is a way. It is the beautiful way—the effective way.

Schoolteachers have no means of proving their prowess by conspicuous waste, and no time to convince the world of their excellence through conspicuous leisure; consequently, for histrionic purposes, a schoolteacher's cosmos is a plain, slaty gray. Schoolteachers do not wallow in wealth nor feed fat at the public trough. No one ever accuses them of belonging to the class known as the predatory rich, nor of being millionaire malefactors. They have to do their work every day at certain hours and dedicate its results to time.

For many years Thomas Arnold has been known as the father of his son. Several great men have been thus overshadowed. The father of Disraeli, for instance, was favored by fame and fortune, until his gifted son moved into the limelight, and after that Pater shone mostly in a reflected glory. Jacopo Bellini was the greatest painter in Venice until his two sons, Gian and Gentile, surpassed him, and history writes him down as the father of the Bellinis. Lyman Beecher was regarded as America's greatest preacher until Henry Ward moved the mark up a few notches. The elder Pitt was looked upon as a genuine statesman until his son graduated into the Cabinet, and then "the terrible cornet of horse" became known as the father of Pitt. Now that both are dust, and we are getting the proper perspective, we see that "the great commoner" was indeed a great man, and so they move down the corridors of time together, arm in arm, this father and son. That excellent person who carried the gripsacks of greatness so long that he thought the luggage was his own, Major James B. Pond, launched at least one good thing. It was this: "Matthew Arnold gave fifty lectures in America, and nobody ever heard one of them; those in his audience who could no longer endure the silence slipped quietly out."

Matthew Arnold was a critic and writer who, having secured a tuppence worth of success through being the son of his father, and thus securing the speaker's eye, finally got an oratorical bee in his bonnet and went a-barnstorming. He cultivated reserve and indifference, both of which he was told were necessary factors of success in a public speaker.

And this is true. But they will not make an orator, any more than long hair, a peculiar necktie, and a queer hat will float a poet on the tide of time safely into the Hall of Fame.

Matthew Arnold cultivated repose, but instead of convincing the audience that he had power, he only made them think he was sleepy. Major Pond, having lived much with orators, and thinking the trick easy, tried oratory on his own account, and succeeded as well as did Matthew Arnold. No one ever heard Major Pond: his voice fell over the footlights, dead, into the orchestra; only those with opera-glasses knew he was talking.

But to be unintelligible is not a special recommendation. Men may be moderate for two reasons—through excess of feeling and because they are actually dull.

Matthew Arnold has slipped back into his true position—that of a man of letters. The genius is a man of affairs. Humanity is the theme, not books. Books are usually written about the thoughts of men who wrote books. Books die and disintegrate, but humanity is an endless procession, and the souls that go marching on are those who fought for freedom, not those who speculate on abstrusities.

The credential of Thomas Arnold to immortality is not that he was the father of Matthew and eight other little Arnolds, but it lies in the fact that he fought for a wider horizon in life through education. He lifted his voice for liberty. He believed in the divinity of the child, not in its depravity. Arnold of Rugby was a teacher of teachers, as every great teacher is. The pedagogic world is now going back to his philosophy, just as in statesmanship we are reverting to Thomas Jefferson. These men who spoke classic truth, not transient—truth that fits in spite of fashion, time and place—are the true prophets of mankind. Such was Thomas Arnold!

f Thomas Arnold had been just a little bigger, the world probably would never have heard of him, for an interdict would have been placed upon his work. The miracle is that, as it was, the Church and the State did not snuff him out.

He stood for sweet reasonableness, but unintentionally created much opposition. His life was a warfare. Yet he managed to make himself acceptable to a few; so for fourteen years this head master of a preparatory school for boys lived his life and did his work. He sent out his radiating gleams, and grew straight in the strength of his spirit, and lived out his life in the light.

His sudden death sanctified and sealed his work before he was subdued and ironed out by the conventions.

Happy Arnold! If he had lived, he might have met the fate of Arnold of Brescia, who was also a great teacher. Arnold of Brescia was a pupil of Abelard, and was condemned by the Church as a disturber of the peace for speaking in eulogy of his master. Later, he attacked the profligacy of the idle prelates, as did Luther, Savonarola and all the other great church-reformers. When ordered into exile and silence, he still protested his right to speak. He was strangled on order of the Pope, his body burned, and the ashes thrown into the Tiber. The Baptists, I believe, claim Arnold of Brescia as the forerunner of their sect, and certain it is that he was of the true Roger Williams type.

Thomas Arnold, too, was filled with a passion for righteousness. His zeal for the upright, manly life constituted his strength. Of course he would not have been executed, as was Arnold of Brescia—the times had changed—he would simply have been shelved, pooh-poohed, deprived of his living and socially Crapseyized. Death saved him—aged forty-seven—and his soul goes marching on!

he parents of Thomas Arnold belonged to the great Middle Class—that class which Disraeli said never did any thinking on its own account, but to the best of its ability deferred to and imitated the idle rich in matters of religion, education and politics.

Doctor Johnson maintained that if members of the Middle Class worked hard and economized, it was in the hope that they might leave money and name for their children and make them exempt from all useful effort.

"To indict a class," said Burke, "is neither reasonable nor right." But certain it is that a vast number of fairly intelligent people in England and elsewhere regard the life of the "aristocracy" as very desirable and beautiful.

To this end they want their boys to become clergymen, lawyers, doctors or army officers.

"Only two avenues of honor are open to aspiring youth in England," said Gladstone—"the Army and the Church."

The father of Thomas Arnold was Collector of Customs at Cowes, Isle of Wight. Holding this petty office under the Government, with a half-dozen men at his command, we can easily guess his caliber, habits, belief and mode of life. He was respectable; and to be respectable, a Collector of Customs must be punctilious in Church matters, in order to be acceptable to Church people, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. The parents of Thomas Arnold very naturally centered their ambitions for him on the Church, as he was not very strong.

When the child was only six years old, the father died from "spasm of the heart." At this time the boy had begun to take Latin, and his education was being looked after by a worthy governess, who daily drilled his mental processes and took him walking, leading him by the hand. On Sundays he wore a wide, white collar, shiny boots and a stiff hat. The governess cautioned him not to soil his collar, nor to get mud on his boots.

In later years he told how he looked covetously at the boys who wore neither hats nor boots, and who did not have a governess.

His mother had a fair income, and so this prim, precise, exact and crystallized mode of education was continued. Out of her great love for her child, the mother sent him away from home when he was eight years old. Of course there were tears on both sides; but now a male man must educate him, and women were to be dropped out of the equation—this that the evil in the child should be curbed, his spirit chastened, and his mind disciplined.

The fact that a child rather liked to be fondled by his mother, or that his mother cared to fondle him, was proof of total depravity on the part of both.

The Reverend Doctor Griffiths, who took charge of the boy for two years, was certainly not cruel, but at the same time he was not exactly human. In Nature we never hear of a she-lion sending her cubs away to be looked after by a denatured lion. It is really doubtful whether you could ever raise a lion to lionhood by this method. Some goat would come along and butt the life out of him, even after he had evolved whiskers and a mane.

After two years with Doctor Griffiths, young Arnold was sent to Manchester, where he remained in a boys' boarding-house from his tenth to his fourteenth year. To the teachers here—all men—he often paid tribute, but uttered a few heretical doubts as to whether discipline as a substitute for mother-love was not an error of pious but overzealous educators.

At sixteen years of age he was transferred to Corpus Christi College at Oxford. In Eighteen Hundred Fifteen, being then twenty years of age, he was elected a Fellow of Oriel College, and there he resided until he was twenty-four.

He was a prizeman in Latin, Greek and English, and was considered a star scholar—both by himself and by others. Ten years afterwards he took a backward glance, and said: "At twenty-two I was proud, precise, stiff, formal, uncomfortable, unhappy, and unintentionally made everybody else unhappy with whom I came in contact. The only people I really mixed with were those whose lives were dedicated to the ablative."

When twenty-four he was made a deacon and used to read prayers at neighboring chapels, for which service he was paid five shillings. Being now thrown on his own resources, he did the thing a prizeman always does: he showed others how. As a tutor he was a success: more scholars came to him than he could really take care of. But he did not like the work, since all the pupil desired, and all the parents desired, was that he should help the backward one get his marks, and glide through the eye of a needle into pedagogic paradise.

At twenty-six he was preaching, teaching and writing learned essays about things he did not understand.

From this brief sketch it will be seen that the early education of Thomas Arnold was of the kind and type that any fond parent of the well-to-do Middle Class would most desire. He had been shielded from all temptations of the world; he could do no useful thing with his hands; his knowledge of economics—ways and means—was that of a child; of the living present he knew little, but of the dead past he assumed and believed he knew much.

It was purely priestly, institutional education. It was the kind of education that every well-to-do Briton would like to have his sons receive. It was, in short, England's Ideal.

ugby Grammar School was endowed in Sixteen Hundred Fifty-three by one Laurence Sherif, a worthy grocer. The original gift was comparatively small, but the investment being in London real estate, has increased in value until it yields now an income of about thirty-five thousand dollars a year.

In the time of Arnold there were about three hundred pupils. It is not a large school now; there are high schools in a hundred cities of America that surpass it in many ways.

Rugby's claim to special notice lies in its traditions—the great men who were once Rugby boys, and the great men who were Rugby teachers. Also, in the fact that Thomas Hughes wrote a famous story called, "Tom Brown at Rugby."

Rugby Grammar School was one hundred twenty-five years old when Sir Joshua Reynolds commissioned Lord Cornwallis to go to America and fetch George Washington to England, that Sir Joshua might paint his portrait.

For a hundred years prior to the time of Arnold, there had not been a perceptible change in the methods of teaching. The boys were herded together. They fought, quarreled, divided into cliques; the big boys bullied the little ones. Fagging was the law; so the upper forms enslaved the lower ones. There was no home life, and the studies were made irksome and severe, purposely, as it was thought that pleasant things were sinful.

If any better plan could have been devised to make study absolutely repulsive, so the student would shun it as soon as he was out of school, we can not guess it.

The system was probably born of inertia on the part of the teachers. The pastor who pushes through his prescribed services, with mind on other things, and thus absolves his conscience for letting his congregation go drifting straight to Gehenna, was duplicated in the teacher. He did his duty—and nothing more.

Selfishness, heartlessness and brutality manipulated the birch. Head was all; heart and hand nothing. This was schoolteaching. As a punishment for failure to memorize lessons, there were various plans to disgrace and discourage the luckless ones. Standing in the corner with face to the wall, and the dunce-cap, had given place to a system of fines, whereby "ten lines of Vergil for failure to attend prayers," and ten more for failure to get the first, often placed the boy in hopeless bankruptcy. If he was a fag, or slave of a higher-form boy, cleaning the other's boots, scrubbing stairs, running on foolish and needless errands, getting cuffs and kicks by way of encouragement, he saw his fines piling up and no way ever to clear them off and gain freedom by promotion.

Viewed from our standpoint, the thing has a ludicrous bouffe air that makes us smile. But to the boy caught in the toils it was tragic. To work and evolve in an environment of such brutality was impossible to certain temperaments. Success lay in becoming calloused and indifferent. If the boy of gentle habits and slight physical force did not sink into mental nothingness, he was in danger of being bowled over by disease and death.

Indeed, the physical condition of the pupils was very bad: smallpox, fevers, consumption, and breaking out with sores and boils, were common.

Thomas Arnold was thirty-three years old when he was called as head master to Rugby. He was married, and babies were coming along with astonishing regularity. He had taken priestly orders and was passing rich on one hundred pounds a year. Poverty and responsibility had given him ballast, and love for his own little brood had softened his heart and vitalized his soul.

As a writer and speaker he had made his presence felt at various college commencements and clergymen's meetings. He had challenged the brutal, indifferent, lazy and so-called disciplinary methods of teaching.

And so far as we know, he is the first man in England to declare that the teacher should be the foster-parent of the child, and that all successful teaching must be born of love.

The well-upholstered conservatives twiddled their thumbs, coughed, and asked: "How about the doctrine of total depravity? Do you mean to say that the child should not be disciplined? What does Solomon say about the use of the rod? Does the Bible say that the child is good by nature?"

But Thomas Arnold could not explain all he knew. Moreover, he did not wish to fight the Church—he believed in the Church—to him it was a divine institution. But there were methods and practises in the Church that he would have liked to forget.

"My sympathies go out to inferiority," he said. The weakling often needed encouragement, not discipline. The bad boy must be won, not suppressed.

In one of these conferences of clergymen, Arnold said:

"I once chided a pupil, a little, pale, stupid boy—undersized and seemingly half-sick—for not being able to recite his very simple lesson. He looked up at me and said with a touch of spirit: 'Sir, why do you get angry with me? Do you not know I am doing the best I can?'"

One of the clergymen present asked Arnold how he punished the boy for his impudence.

And Arnold replied: "I did not punish him—he had properly punished me. I begged his pardon."

The idea of a teacher begging the pardon of a pupil was a brand-new thing.

Several clergymen present laughed—one scowled—two sneezed. But a Bishop, shortly after this, urged the name of Thomas Arnold as master of Rugby, and added to his recommendation this line: "If elected to the office he will change the methods of schoolteaching in every public school in England."

The ayes had it, and Arnold was called to Rugby. The salary was so-so, the pupils between two and three hundred in number—many were home on sick-leave—the Sixth Form was in charge.

The genius of Arnold was made manifest, almost as soon as he went to Rugby, by the way in which he managed the boys who bullied the whole school, and what is worse, did it legally.

Fagging was official.

The Sixth Form was composed of thirty boys who stood at the top, and these boys ran the school. They were boys who, by reason of their size, strength, aggressiveness and mental ability, got the markings that gave them this autocratic power. They were now immune from authority—they were free. In a year they would gravitate to the University.

We can hardly understand now how a bully could get markings through his bullying propensities; but a rudimentary survival of the idea may yet be seen in big football-players, who are given good marks, and very gentle mental massage in class. If the same scholars were small and skinny, they would certainly be plucked.

The faculty found freedom in shifting responsibility for discipline to the Sixth Form.

Read the diary of Arnold, and you will be amazed on seeing how he fought against taking from the Sixth Form the right to bodily chastise any scholar in the school that the king of the Sixth Form declared deserved it.

If a teacher thought a pupil needed punishment, he turned the luckless one over to the Sixth Form. Can we now conceive of a system where the duty of certain scholars was to whip other scholars? Not only to whip them, but to beat them into insensibility if they fought back?

Such was schoolteaching in the public schools of England in Eighteen Hundred Thirty.

Against this brutality there was now a growing sentiment—a piping voice bidding the tide to stay!

But now that Arnold was in charge of Rugby, he got the ill-will of his directors by declaring that he did not intend to curtail the powers of the Sixth Form—he proposed to civilize it. To try out the new master, the Sixth Form, proud in their prowess, sent him word that if he interfered with them in any way, they would first "bust up the school," and then resign in a body. Moreover, they gave it out that if any pupil complained to the master concerning the Sixth Form, the one so complaining would be taken out by night and drowned in the classic Avon.

There were legends among the younger boys of strange disappearances, and these were attributed to the swift vengeance of "The Bloody Sixth."

Above the Sixth Form there was no law.

Every scholar took off his hat to a "Sixth." A Sixth uncovered to nobody, and touched his cap only to a teacher.

And custom had become so rooted that the Sixth Form was regarded as a sort of police necessity—a caste which served the school just as the Army served the Church. To reach the Sixth Form were paradise—it meant liberty and power—liberty to do as you pleased, and power to punish all who questioned your authority.

To uproot the power of the Sixth Form was the intent of a few reformers in pedagogics.

There were two ways to deal with the boys of the Sixth—fight them or educate them.

Arnold called the Rugby Sixth together and assured them that he could not do without their help. He needed them: he wanted to make Rugby a model school, a school that would influence all England—would they help him?

The dogged faces before him showed signs of interest. He continued, without waiting for their reply, to set before them his ideal of an English Gentleman. He persuaded them, melted them by his glowing personality, shook hands with each, and sent them away.

The next day he again met them in the same intimate way, and one of the boys made bold to assure him that if he wanted anybody licked—pupils or teachers—they stood ready to do his bidding.

He thanked the boy, but assured him that he was of the opinion that it would not be necessary to do violence to any one; he was going to unfold to them another way—a new way, which was very old, but which as yet England had not tried.