was soon discovered that any kind of work which helps to divert a man's mind from himself hastens his cure.

One of the chief difficulties which we have had in carrying on this work thus far has been the people at home. They have urged that the wounded and sick men be discharged before their wounds were healed or they were well. Fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sweethearts, legislators, and congressmen have brought pressure to bear upon the War Department and upon the commanding officers of the general hospitals to hasten the discharge of individual soldiers, forgetting that the best educational and medical treatment that this country could provide was centered in these places, and that it was only by keeping men there that a safe, sure cure was likely to be secured.

It is an interesting fact that as the educational service developt the commanding officers of the general hospitals grew more and more enthusiastic about it. The statement was not infrequently made by them that this work was a most necessary supplement to the medical and surgical treatment, and also that it helpt more than any other one thing to preserve the discipline and to maintain the morale of the men while they were in the hospitals.

The great danger which we now face is that when the work is over the idea which was responsible for it will become a mere matter of history. For months now we have stood for the proposition that what this country owes the men who fought for it is an opportunity to obtain a livelihood and to live a wholesome life. Our problem was that of raising the disabled again and alleviating their lot by restoring them to the joy in life which comes from the feeling of the renewed capacity to work and of mastery over themselves and their disabilities.

The reconstruction of disabled soldiers is but an incident in a wider movement. It is but an expression of a more fundamental and more important thing, and that is the conservation of human resources-a movement which is intended to express the dignity and worth of human life and to make every individual feel his peculiar obligations as a member of a social group. The fact that in the neighborhood of 60,000 men have felt the touch and spirit of this new movement should act as a leaven for us all. The fact that thousands of doctors and surgeons have come into contact with it and have seen and recognized its beneficent influences upon the men is a thing that should not be lost. But human life cannot be saved without money, and with everyone concerned with the mounting cost of living, the adjustment of the wage scale, and the social unrest which is expressing itself in the industrial and agricultural centers, there is danger that these finer and more important things will be lost from view. The United States has done more for the restoration of disabled soldiers than any other of the great nations engaged in the war, and upon her rests the same peculiar obligation in this matter that rests upon her in the determination of peace,

and that is the obligation of perpetuating the idea of reconstruction, of insuring its expression in practice, and of making it serve as a model for the rest of the world.

To stop with the salvaging of the men who offered themselves as sacrifices, if need be, in the greatest cause that ever stirred the human imagination, and who have returned to us maimed, wounded, or physically brokento stop with these, to whom we and all succeeding generations owe a peculiar obligation, and to forget the thousands of children who are dying of hunger, the hundreds of thousands who are the victims of industrial plants, and the millions who are in the clutches of disease, means that we have not yet. learned the lessons of reconstruction. Only when the social conscience of mankind includes all these in its schemes of restoration to usefulness and service will the lessons have been fully learned. Then opportunity will be valued higher than dependence, manhood higher than business, and the right to contribute and to serve higher than the extending and the acceptance of sympathy.

BOYS' WORKING RESERVE

H. W. WELLS, DEPARTMENT OF LABOR, WASHINGTON, D.C.

The United States Boys' Working Reserve is a registered army of patriotic youth, organized under the Department of Labor, with branches in every state of the Union and in the territory of Hawaii. Its purpose is to mobilize for productive service, chiefly upon American farms, all physically fit boys of the United States of the ages of sixteen to twenty inclusive, to provide for the continuance of their education and training, and to prevent their exploitation while they are so mobilized.

The program of the United States Boys' Working Reserve exhibits these significant items:

1. To enrol, chiefly in the high schools of the United States, all boys physically fit for service on the farms.

2. To anticipate the actual work upon the farm by such a course in the elements of farm practice as shall enable them to meet the reasonable expectations of their farmer employers.

3. To supervise at their work the boys mobilized, by the appointment of a supervisor for every group of 25 boys employed, so that the morale of the boys shall be sustained, their differences with their employers adjusted, the discouragements inherent in their new surroundings alleviated, and their efficiency maintained and increast.

4. To devise a program of wholesome and recreational activity for their leisure hours; to create and to sustain their esprit de corps, and to give them a sense of the national and patriotic character of their service.

5. To inspect the work places of would-be employers in order that the living and working conditions of such places may be found to be, or may be made to be, in conformity with accepted standards.

The training of boys is accomplisht first by the introduction into every high school of the United States the now famous Farm Craft Lessons, edited and almost wholly written by Eugene Davenport, dean of the College of Agriculture, University of Illinois. These lessons consist of a series of four-page monographs, every one of which deals with some element of farm practice general thruout the United States. The series is loose-leaf and capable of indefinite expansion. It is too, by its loose-leaf character, easily subject to a process of selection that chooses those lessons that are particularly applicable to conditions that obtain in various sections and localities. . Whereas the Farm Craft Lessons make a text of very high quality in vocational education, their purpose will easily be mist if they are regarded merely as a text and not, as they are meant to be, as a manual of instruction to be taken to the laboratory, to the barns, to the implement-makers, to the fields, in order that in living touch with the actual conditions and equipments of farms they may help to illustrate the elements of farm practice.

Training of boys is furthered in the next place by the establishment, in cooperation and in connection with agricultural colleges and schools, of central farm training camps, in which camps the boys are subjected to military discipline, are taught by the faculties of the colleges and schools, are brought into contact with the superior equipment of such colleges and schools, and so are sent forth to their work with a training a little more definite than that which it is possible to obtain thru the use of the Farm Craft Lessons.

Professor William J. Spillman, recently and for eighteen years chief of the Bureau of Farm Management of the Department of Agriculture, says that the United States Boys' Working Reserve "provides a permanent solution of the increasingly difficult problem of harvest labor on the farm." One of the problems of schoolmasters in this country has been to devise a program that should be coextensive with the public-school system of the United States for the wise and helpful employment of the long vacation period. The common experience of schoolmasters with boys who return to school from their long vacation is that that vacation leads very commonly to a demoralization which only the discipline of several weeks of the autumn semester can overcome. Character is invaded, and the time and energy of the teaching faculty are wasted. The United States Boys' Working Reserve provides an occupation for the vacation period that conserves the schoolboy's morale, increases it, builds him up in body and mind, adds immensely to his practical knowledge of affairs, and returns him to school thoroly fit immediately to undertake the education and training provided by his school.

Because of the sanity of this program and its immense practicality, and because the Reserve is the only organization that affects the whole publicschool system of the United States, the Reserve desires the hearty support of superintendents, principals, and teachers of the public schools.

Some change in schedules, some speeding of courses, and some elimination of nonessential studies and of nonessential elements of essential studies will be necessary on the part of the schools to secure a frictionless cooperation with the Reserve. But enlightened schoolmasters in every state of the Union are quick to see the advantages of such cooperation and are in increasing numbers supporting the work of the Reserve.

REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON SALARIES, TENURE, AND PENSIONS

JOSEPH SWAIN, CHAIRMAN

The Committee which was appointed in 1911 has now discharged two of the duties that were intrusted to it. Three reports on teachers' salaries have already been issued. An interim report on state pension systems for public-school teachers was issued in 1916. During the past year a final report was made on the subject of pensions, which embodies the results of investigations and conferences held at the meetings of the Department of Superintendence and of the National Education Association during the past three years. The Committee had the cooperation of the Carnegie Foundation, which has devoted especial attention to and has accumulated a considerable amount of information on the subject of pensions since its establishment in 1906.

A report publisht for the Committee by the Carnegie Foundation as Bulletin No. 12, Pensions for Public School Teachers, may be obtained without cost on application to the Foundation, 576, 5th Avenue, New York, N.Y. The report has already had a wide circulation, not only among teachers, but also among civic, industrial, and commercial organizations interested in the subject of pensions, and has met everywhere with very favorable comment. The report itself is a clear and simple statement of the problem, free from the technicalities usually involved in such studies. It discusses pensions from the point of view, not only of the teacher, but also of the public and of the requirements of the school.

In cooperation with the Commissioner of Education for Vermont the Foundation was able to secure complete data relating to the life of the teacher, on the basis of which a "Suggested System of Retiring Allowances for Teachers in the Public Schools of the State of Vermont" is presented. The system so suggested has been considered and discust by a pension committee representing the teachers of the state and was submitted to local actuaries. The plan has received the sympathetic interest and approval of both the teachers and the specialists. A bill has now been prepared by the Vermont teachers' pension committee embodying the suggestions contained in the report and will be presented to the legislature at its present session. The bill incorporates the principle of a savings scheme and the

purchase of annuities with the accumulations. It distributes the cost equitably between the teachers and the state, insures simplicity of administration, provides for protection in the case of disability and for the return of contributions in the case of death, dismissal, or resignation, and takes care of the vexed problem of accrued liabilities.

The report has already led to numerous inquiries, and a number of states have been stimulated either to inaugurate or to reorganize pension systems in accordance with the sound principles there involved. It is essential at this juncture, when the great need of the country is to attract good teachers to the school and to offer them a life-career, to consider carefully the economic conditions involved. The problem of salaries is acute, and if suitable candidates are to be attracted into the teaching profession a wholesale upward revision is essential. Salaries alone, however, will not keep persons within a profession; they must have some prospect of protection against the major risks of life, the loss of earning power thru disability or old age; at the same time the educational interests of the public must be safeguarded against teachers who become inefficient from the same causes. The only solution is a system of pensions that will provide generously for the teacher, will be fair to the public, and will promote the efficiency of the school. Such a system the Committee feels is presented in the report made at its request by the Carnegie Foundation.

THE SCHOOLS AS THEY HAVE AFFECTED GOVERNMENT ACTIVITIES

G. STANTON FORD, NATIONAL SCHOOL SERVICE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

The preceding speakers have discust government activities as affecting the schools. Six such necessarily brief accounts could in no way cover all phases of the effect of the war upon the schools. Yet one cannot listen to the addresses without realizing that the nation in the recent crisis has reacht out as never before and laid its hand upon the shoulder of the school teacher and said: If the war is to be won and the nation saved, you must help. If the people are to be fed at home and starvation abroad checkt, you must help. If the savings of the people are to furnish forth an army, you must teach saving. If the products of the farm are to be garnered, you must enlist your boys. If soldiers are to be trained, the teacher must prepare the way for the commander. If the heart of America is to be toucht and the heralds of mercy sent ladened with evidences of America's generosity, then the message of the Red Cross must be a part of the curriculum of world-citizenship. No appeal to the schools has gone unheard. The result is a part, and no small part, of the history of the successful prosecution of the war.

There remains for my equally brief summary the topic of the schools as they, in their turn, have affected the government activities. We are at the