knows how deadening to sympathy is a constant association with either superiors or inferiors; she therefore would give the child this benefit of social contact with his equals, by placing him in the kindergarten. Clara Conway-whose name no association of Memphis educators can afford to forget-once said that the best thing a person could do for the world was to be happy in it. The club woman believes that everything that adds to the happiness of children makes for righteousness. Knowing that the colored people must be the "hewers of wood and drawers of water" for this part of the country, she believes that in place of the little Latin and less Greek they are now getting in some of their schools, they should have manual training in the avocations by which they will have to earn their bread; that colored girls should be taught not only the practical part of domestic service, but its amenities and aesthetics as well. Do not misunderstand me-the colored youth of exceptional abilities may study what he will, but Pegasus has few riders; the majority (white or black) are not geniuses, and I would give to the world's worker all the joy and uplift there is in being master, and not slave, of his craft. The club woman believes that no child can do honest work in very many studies at the same time, without drawing on his hours of rest and recreation. The midnight oil may do for the philosopher, but it is not good for growing children. Too great a number of studies either robs the pupil of rest, or forces him to the alternative of superficial studying. There is a moral question back of this; the pupil, who is hurried into getting his lessons just well enough to recite them, becomes by degrees willing to receive credit for work that he has not honestly done. No one need be surprised that from the superficial student is evolved the dishonest politician. These, then, are the questions we would leave with your honorable body for discussion: Adding kindergartens to the public school system; manual training schools for colored children; limiting the number of studies a pupil may take at one time. "And they said to the angel, 'we will go on earth and teach the diffusion of intelligence. We will heal America by knowledge.' And the angel said, 'Go; you will be efficient, but not sufficient.'"* The education derived from text-books needs to be ac companied by that larger culture which has been defined as a knowledge of the best that has been said and done in the world. While men continue to be born and reared in homes, it is in the home they begin to acquire this knowledge, and just in proportion as it is presided over by the intelligent woman. In her club, with its various departments, the house-mother touches all the rounds of human experience. With other alert-minded women she studies and discusses history and philosophy, social economics, literature, philanthropy, art and music. She has no time for petty gossip, or to become morbid and nurse imaginary grievances. In short, she is a round woman, capable of not only loving, but understanding a man,-sometimes a much harder. thing to do. To paraphrase the words of Steele: It is a liberal education to have a club woman for a mother. She is a satisfaction not alone as a mother-her husband rejoices in that "marriage of true minds," to which Shakespeare would admit no impediment; that vital interchange of thought and feeling, which it is worth paying the price of life and death to have experienced. When he comes home to lunch, she no longer greets him with tragic tales of the misdoings of the servants, but rather of the morning studies of the Current Topic Department, and he goes away charmed with her infinite variety, and thinking what a what a dull money-grubber he would be without her,-which, as all club women know, is a very proper state of mind for a husband. While watching from a balcony the great procession in Chicago, a few weeks ago, chance gave me for a neighbor an Ann Arbor student. The young gentleman asked permission to smoke a cigarette. With cheerful friendliness, he remarked that his physician gave him but a year to live unless he stopped smoking; that the excessive use of cigarettes had put him in bed six weeks during the summer. I mildly suggested that it would be the part of wisdom to obey his physician; to which he returned, that a short life and a merry one was his motto. What an extraordinary idea of merriment! I believe that a failure to recognize the true value of things lies at the bottom of most of our troubles. On that last sad day Guinevere says: "It was my duty to have loved the highest. It surely was my profit had I known. It would have been my pleasure had I seen." It is a great thing to have a sane idea as to what consti tutes pleasure. It may not profit the average person much to know that the diagonals of a parallelopiped bisect each other; but if he is to have any correct idea of his own civilization and the goal toward which it is set, he must know that it is their ideals of political liberty, equality of women and sanctity of marriage, which have made the Teutonic peoples the great worldcompelling powers. So, when the club woman speaks of the all-compelling, all-satisfying power of righteousness, it is not a sentimental theory she is advancing; it is a fact which she is prepared to prove by all history and literature. When she has taught her child this, she has done the most that is necessary to insure the health of his body and the salvation of his soul. man can escape his mother; for good or for ill, she has helped to shape his ideals. This, then, is the real educational influence. of the woman's club; it is a quickening of the spirit to the mothers of men. No A LECTURE ON ENGLISH SPELLING. BY J. B. HEISKELL, MEMPHIS. As an outsider, not connected with the guild of pedagogues, I have some hesitation in addressing this congregation of intelligent and progressive educators. But I have sought this opportunity from a strong desire to impress upon you the incalculable importance of the subject-matter of my discourse, so little considered by the people of the English speaking races. You will say, not so; we are fully impressed with its importance as the test and touchstone of culture, and sign of good breeding and early training. Ah, that is just what I do not mean and just what I am here to protest against. A discreet writer has recently declared that it is a much greater reproach for a man not to know that a whale is not a fish than it is for him not to know how to spell. Spelling is a false test of education, while it is a pretty sure test of drill and teaching. But it is in an entirely different sense that I want to impress the subject upon your minds as thinkers and reformers. The greatest gift to man, if it be a gift, or his greatest achievement, if achievement it be, is speech. Fire, steam, electricity, telegraphy, all the acquisitions and inventions of man pale before the institution of speech. Even the cave-dwellers and the primeval man, without means of communication, would have found his miseries of cold and hunger aggravated by the want of speech; and all social joy and comfort, all arts of civilization and all progress would be impossible without it. Words are the highest human achievement, the source of all progress, the preservers of all knowledge, the means of all intercourse, the vehicles of all intelligence. They afford color to the poet, inspiration to the painter, motive to the sculptor, living figures to the orator. They move us to tears or laughter, approval or indignation, love or scorn. They are eyes to the blind, ears to the deaf, tongues to the dumb, experience to youth, full of endless good or unmeasurable evil-all things to all men. Sculpture may present to us form; painting, form and color; but language, though incapable of so clearly defining and conveying form and color, has a scope infinitely beyond either, in that it conveys thought, abstract ideas, facts, truths, conceptions, incidents, relations of things to each other, logical sequences, conclusions, subtleties, moral and religious truths or beliefs. But oral speech, until the telephone came, reached no further in space than the human ear could accurately record the vibra tions of the air produced by the human voice, nor did it continue in time beyond the moment of its utterance. To transmit it through space and time was the consequence of writing, acquired through the effort of ages in picture writing, hieroglyphics, hieratic and phonetic signs, and, finally, letters. Written speech has given us a pawl or ratchet by means of which the wheel of time can no more turn back, and the record of ages has become ineffaceable. No more can arts be lost to man, since written speech, fortified by printed writing, records in places by thousands and in copies by millions every achievement of the human race, in science, in art, in morals, in religion, in law, in philosophy and poetry. Thus speech is transmitted through space and perpetuated through time. "If all the material documents of antiquity," writes Mr. Hogarth, "had vanished off the earth, we could still construct. a living and just, though imperfect, picture of antiquity. But were it, on the other hand, literature that had perished utterly, while the natural remains of all past civilization survived everywhere in soils as fecund and as preservative as the sands of Egypt, nothing of that picture could be drawn beyond the most nebulous outline." But words are things, and a small drop of ink, That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think: 'Tis strange, the shortest letter which man uses Instead of speech, may form a lasting link -Don Juan M. 88. Written language, then, by which speech is transmitted beyond the reach of oral speech, in space and beyond its duration in time, by which it is communicated to those beyond its reach by sound and preserved and prolonged (projected) into the future, is only second in importance to speech itself; but, as a means of progress and dissemination of thought, it is more advanced and important than oral speech. It is indispensable to social life that every being have this means of communicating or absorbing thought. No high degree, or even tolerable degree, of civilization or culture is practicable without the use of written speech and the power to extract the thought of others from its visible signs,-the knowledge of how to read. The signs by which thought is conveyed are, therefore, the media, the implements, the tools, the instruments, most important to the human individual in his social relation and in his progress in improvement. As these implements are needed by every human being, by all who desire to know, or assume to teach, it is desirable, not to say indispensable, that they should be as perfect and simple as possible-as easily and cheaply acquired as skill and science can make them, and within the reach of all with the least possible expenditure of time and labor and money in their acquisition. The spelling of English, if it exhibits any evidence of contrivance, seems to have been contrived to make these implements the most cumbersome, complicated, obscure, inefficient and imperfect possible; and they have been made the most difficult of acquisition that human perversity or diabolical malevolence |