We have said the different nations are competing with each other, and watching each other's movements upon the field of art industry, as eagerly as ever they have done so on the field of battle. This matter of competition between nations is becoming of overwhelming importance. Owing to the multiplication of railroads, steamships, and telegraphs, our competitors are not our neighbors only, but "the whole world beyond the seas and on the opposite side of the planet." Distance counts for less and less every year, while skill rises in value in the same ratio. It is of the utmost importance, then, that we know what other nations and states are doing in this matter of drawing and industrial art training. If your antagonist is armed with a revolver you do not care to meet him in deadly conflict, if armed only with a pop-gun. If European nations are sending forth into their workshops thousands of trained artisans every year, we cannot cope with them by native ability alone. We cannot protect our home market by tariffs. Tariffs may prevent our buying what our higher tastes desire, by excluding it from the market, but they cannot force us to buy that which our taste condemns. "There is but one way for any country to meet foreign competition in its home market, and that is, to put as much taste and skill in its home manufacture as the foreigner puts into his." Let us inquire what some of the leading foreign countries are doing for the advancement of art manufactures. At the Universal Exposition of 1851, England found herself, by general consent, almost at the bottom of the list, among all the countries of the world, in respect of her art manufactures. Only the United States among the great nations stood below her." She became alarmed at this state of affairs and appointed commissioners to investigate the cause. She discovered that her competitors were giving more attention to industrial drawing than she had been doing. She immediately established art schools all over the kingdom. At the Exposition of 1862 she found she was making creditable progress in art manufactures. At the Paris Exposition of 1867, England stood among the foremost, and in some branches of manufacture, distanced the most artistic nations. It was the schools of art that accomplished this great result in the period of sixteen years. "The United States still held her place at the foot of the column," and, we are sorry to say it, remains too near the foot yet.

For a hundred years or more, drawing has played an important part in the industrial education of the French. Their wealth, according to good authority, is owing principally to their drawing schools, which are said to be the mainstays of their art industry to-day. By means of this art culture in their schools, they have raised themselves to the mastery of the departments of art and art manufacture. Although France has been engaged in many costly wars and her national debt is burdensome, she surprised Germany and all the rest of the world, by paying off her late war-indebtedness before it was due. How was she enabled to do this? Her art manufactures are demanded by every civilized country in the world. Her industrial products having more of taste and skill than of bulk, cost less for transportation than breadstuffs and raw materials; hence she commands the markets of the world for just those manufactures that it is to the interest of any nation to produce. A late writer in

the commercial department of the New-York Independent says: We are now paying a good many millions of dollars yearly to France for mere style in cotton goods, and calicoes may be seen lying on the same counters in our dry goods stores, not very different in material value, which differ in price full five hundred per cent. It is the elegance, the superior taste, the artistic designs of French calicoes which impart to them a value in ladies' eyes which our own calicoes do not possess, and it should be the aim of our manufacturers to compete with them either in our own or in foreign markets."

It would be interesting to show how the remaining European countries regard this matter of industrial drawing. Suffice it to say that Germany, Austria, Belgium, and Russia stand in the front rank with France and England while all are vying with each other for excellency in industrial art manufactures.

This impulse in favor of educating all so as to give the seeing eye and the ready hand has been wafted over the Atlantic Ocean and has found its first lodgment on Plymouth Rock. Massachusetts, with a never-failing instinct as to how money is to be made, has passed a law, (in 1870,) requiring drawing to be taught in all her common schools, and establishing evening schools for giving instruction in drawing to all persons over fifteen years of age. We find these evening schools filled with persons of all ages from fifteen to sixty years. Even these older students are eager to learn, and as they become sensible of what they have lost, they bemoan the fate that prevented their learning to draw when younger.

In the spring of 1875, the State of New York, following the example of Massachusetts, passed a law making drawing a compulsory study. This law went into operation the first day of October, of the same year, and the school authorities are doing all they can to make the introduction of this study universal. Within the last year we understand that Pennsylvania has been making earnest efforts for the advancement of industrial drawing in her common schools.

It requires no prophet to foresee what is to be the result. It seems almost useless to say, that unless the Western, Southern, and Southwestern States begin to meet this advanced movement in favor of drawing by a similar movement in our schools, these Eastern States, on account of the superior skill of their workmen, will bring us under a more exacting tribute than we are at present. They will continue to send us calicoes, carpets, furniture, and other art manufactures which we ought to produce at home, and we shall continue to delve in the earth in order to produce the raw material to send to them in exchange. We shall find it will take a great deal of corn, wheat, cotton, and wool, to buy a small quantity of prints and other finer fabrics which we consider desirable.

We feel that it is useless to say more in favor of the practical and disciplinary value of drawing. The American people are said to be eminently practical. Hence it would seem only necessary to show them that a want exists in order to have it supplied. The Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia last year has given us a strong push in the right direction. We have come home convinced, I have no doubt, that we are behind other first-class countries in the matter of art education, and that if we wish to

hold our own in the markets of the world, we must give our children the best possible advantages for training their eyes and their hands. We ought to be convinced, I think, that no other subject of study is now so much needed in our schools; that "nothing else could add such rapid wealth to the country-wealth of tasteful production, and wealth of enjoyment of tasteful products."

Let us now turn to the æsthetic phase of the subject and contemplate some of the pleasures and enjoyments that may be enlarged, if not created, by a training in drawing. A person trained in art, in the language of Addison, "is let into a great many pleasures that the vulgar are not capable of receiving. He can converse with a picture, and find an agreeable companion in a statue. He meets with a secret refreshment in a description, and often feels a greater satisfaction in the prospect of fields and meadows than another does in the possession. It gives him, indeed, a kind of property in everything he sees, and makes the most rude, uncultivated parts of nature administer to his pleasures; so that he looks upon the world, as it were, in another light, and discovers in it a multitude of charms that conceal themselves from the generality of mankind." The love of the beautiful and the desire for ornament, are as natural and universal as any other desire of human nature. "For some gratification of taste, what privations have not men submitted to, and those the very last of their race whom it would be proper to call foolish or visionary." The universal efforts of mankind show that "beauty of effect and decoration are no more a luxury in a civilized state of society than warmth and clothing are a luxury to any state." They make manifest a positive want that cannot be neglected without great injury to human character. This desire is one of the earliest to manifest itself. Man in a savage state frequently feels the need of ornamenting his body even before he feels the need of clothing it. This longing for ornament is entirely absent in none, and it grows in the same ratio as progress in civilization. As man advances in culture and refinement he is no more satisfied with the decoration of his rude tent or wigwam, but he seeks gratification in the beauties of architecture, painting, and sculpture.

Ideality, or a love of the beautiful, being a constituent element of man's nature, we find the world affords abundant opportunity for the exercise of this faculty. We are surrounded by beauty on all sides. "Nature is one vast galaxy of beauty." "All along the wild old forest God has carved the forms of beauty. Every cliff, and mountain, and tree is a statue of beauty. Every leaf, and stem, and vine, and flower, is a form of beauty. Every hill, and dale, and landscape, is a picture of beauty. Every cloud, and mist-wreath, and vapor-vail, is a shadowy reflection of beauty. Every spring and rivulet, lakelet, river, and ocean, is a glassy mirror of beauty. Every diamond, and rock, and pebbly beach, is a mine of beauty. Every sun, and planet, and star, is a blazing face of beauty. All along the aisles of earth, all over the arches of heaven, all through the expanses of the universe, are scattered in rich and infinite profusion the life-gems of beauty." "From the mote that plays its little frolic in the sunbeam, to the world that blazes along the sapphire spaces of the firmament, are visible the ever-varying features of the enrapturing spirit of beauty." And

yet these enchanting scenes of beauty are a comparatively sealed book to the great mass of mankind. We are made conscious of all this beauty only by means of sight, the noblest of the senses. Ruskin says: "The more I think of it, I find this conclusion more impressed upon me, that the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and to tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk to one who thinks, but thousands can think to one who can see."

Something more than eyes are necessary, however, that we may see. Right seeing comes from training. Anything that cultivates the power of correct vision, really enlarges the world for us, for whatever is not seen or perceived by us, might as well not exist, so far as we are concerned. Drawing is a means to open our blind eyes to the beauties of nature and art which surround us, in the greatest profusion, but of which many of us are entirely unconscious. It brings us into contact with nature in her most pleasing and elevating aspect; and through "that elder scripture, writ by God's own hand," we are led to "look through nature up to nature's God.” Cousin says "God is necessarily the last reason, the ultimate foundation, the completed ideal of all beauty. This is the marvellous beauty that DIOTIMUS had caught a glimpse of, and thus paints to SOCRATES in the Banquet: "Eternal beauty, unbegotten and imperishable, exempt from decay as well as increase, which is not beautiful in such a part and ugly in such another, beautiful only, at such a time, in such a place, in such a relation, beautiful for some, ugly for others, beauty that has no sensible form, no visage, no hands, nothing corporeal, which is not such a thought, or such a particular science, which resides not in any being different from itself, as an animal, the earth, or the heavens, or any other thing, which is absolutely identical and invariable by itself, in which all other beauties participate, in such a way, nevertheless, that their birth or their destruction neither diminishes nor increases, nor in the least changes it!

In order to arrive at this perfect beauty, it is necessary to commence with the beauties of this lower world, and, the eyes being fixed upon the supreme beauty, to elevate ourselves unceasingly towards it, by passing, thus to speak, through all the degrees of the scale, from a single beautiful body to two, from two to all others, from beautiful bodies to beautiful sentiments, from beautiful sentiments to beautiful thoughts, until from thought to thought we arrive at the highest thought, which has no other object than the beautiful itself, until we end by knowing it as it is itself."

Finally, of the youth who has been properly trained in drawing and art, and who has learned to love the beautiful forms that everywhere surround him, we may say, in the language of another, that, "God's glory of the sunset-all of the divine offerings in the natural world—will be his while life lasts, and when the white veil of flesh standing between him and his hereafter falls away from him into the bosom of demanding earth, memory will keep her seat in the mysterious intelligence he calls his soul, and hold them sacred to him forever."

The following resolutions offered by the Committee on The Bureau of Education were read and adopted:

The committee to which was referred the resolutions relating to the National Bureau of Education having had the same under consideration respectfully submit the following

REPORT:

The Bureau of Education was brought into existence by an act of Congress passed and approved in the year 1866, in accordance with the request of this Association, represented by the Department of Superintendence, at its meeting held in Washington during that year. It is, therefore, in a large sense the ward of the Association, and is especially entitled to our earnest support and active influence in the prosecution of the important work committed to its hands.

The objects of the Bureau are, first, to collect, compile, and publish, all available information concerning the history, condition, and progress of education, not only in our own country, but throughout the civilized world.

Second, to disseminate this information through annual and special reports, circulars of information, and such other publications as may be available for the purpose, and by official and personal correspondence. It has no power over education, educational institutions, agencies or authorities in the several States. Its influence is, so to speak, simply a moral one, appealing to and securing the voluntary efforts of school officers and the friends of education generally.

The results already achieved by the Bureau have hitherto fully met, if they have not surpassed, the expectations of the active friends of education throughout the country, although it must be confessed that it has been obliged to perform its functions, almost from the beginning, under circumstances of peculiar embarrassment, owing primarily to inadequate appropriations. It has prepared, published, and distributed seven annual reports of the most comprehensive and valuable character. The number of these documents thus distributed to institutions, school officers, and educators, as well as to foreign governments, mounts up into the hundreds of thousands. It has published and disseminated tens of thousands of circulars of information upon special subjects, such as Art Education, and Normal Schools, together with several on the Systems of Education in foreign countries, and other topics. It issued last year an elaborate, illustrated volume upon the public libraries of the United States, crowded with information upon every topic connected with these great educational agencies, even to the details of binding, arranging, cataloguing, and shelving the volumes. This work is probably the most comprehensive and valuable ever issued upon the subject, and is a monument to the intelligence, industry, and efficiency of the Bureau, and an honor to the country. A similar volume on Art Education and Art Schools which will be a complete compendium of Art Education in the United States is nearly ready and will in due time appear. Through its immense correspondence with individuals, school officials, and foreign governments, giving information and advice upon every phase of the educational work, the Bureau