by means of what we teach them and partly by means of what we withhold from them to keep them on the farm. We are always interested in keeping farmers' children on the farm and view with alarm their coming to town to live. It does not occur to us that if the farm possesses so many advantages over the city as a place in which to live and to make a career our first duty is to our own children, whom we should be bringing up with a desire to live in the country and till the soil.

In a democracy the utmost freedom in the choice of an occupation is the fundamental right of every child, and this right must not be abridged. If the public schools of the city sought to make blacksmiths of the sons of the blacksmith and to train the sons of bank directors to follow in the footsteps of their fathers the country would be shaken with protest because the public school, the most powerful agency left us with which to promote democracy, was being employed to break down democracy and to build up class aristocracy.

Children born in the country are entitled to as much freedom of choice of occupation as are those brought up in town and are entitled to as substantial help from the public schools in making an intelligent choice. Besides, if we should put to use the rural schools as a means of forcing country children to stay on the farm we would meet with failure. Every effort along this line which has ignored the fundamental principle of equality of opportunity has been futile.

Indeed I think it may be accepted as axiomatic that the intelligence of the people on the farm in any country finally is directly related to the income derived from the farming business as compared with that from similar enterprises in the same community. People will stay on the farms if the opportunities are as good in agriculture as in other industries. If the opportunities are not as good the intelligent and ambitious will leave the farm. In a word, if farming is allowed to become unprofitable as compared with other occupations it will be given over to a less efficient class than that which now tills our soil.

I would sum up as the basis of a sound and permanent rural civilization those principles which the American farmer thru his various organizations sought without avail to have incorporated in the covenant of the League of Nations, a part of which is as follows:

1. Equality of pay, opportunity, and social reward for equal skill and equal work in agriculture as compared with other occupations.

2. Universal free education for farm children universally accessible.

3. Extension of benefits of modern civilization to the open country in spite of added cost, part of which should be borne by general taxation.

4. Recognition of the principle that the depreciation of agriculture constitutes the central danger to civilization and that the demand for cheap food at the expense of a decent standard of living on the farm leads to agricultural disintegration and general decay.

The proper adjustment of these great questions between the different states and communities of the country demands a strong, effective national

department of education and the recognition of education as one of our principal interests by having it represented in the highest council of the nation. Our present system of public education grew largely out of the wastes of the Napoleonic war. The present American system of vocational education had its birth during the Civil War. Why should not the greatest step America shall take immediately follow the glorious achievements of the world-war?

C. AMERICAN HOMES

ELLA S. STEWART, PRESIDENT, DEPARTMENT OF SCHOOL PATRONS,
NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION, CHICAGO, ILL.

I am not inclined to dispute the optimistic implications of the general topic of this meeting, nor of mine in particular.

None of the reactions of the war has proved more surprising to the world than that upon the status of women. Changes have taken place which are of tremendous importance in the future relation of women to industry, politics, public welfare, and the advancement of the race. Seeds of justice, of opportunity, of recognition, which had been dormant to the point of despair, have burst into immediate fruitage under the forcing processes of war necessities and a purifying patriotism. The student of the woman movement is not surprised at its romantic progress during this period of upheaval. Every right obtained by women from the frightened, chastened, bared soul of the man-world was long overdue. It had been argued out on every forum from hearthstone to throne in all civilized governments. The enfranchisement of the women of several of the warring nations was not merely coincidental. The subconscious national mind on this question was plowed up by the enginery of death. It was the conscience of nations squaring itself with the slogan, "A war for democracy." Now behold men and women of great and boastful nations standing outside the gates of their fool's paradise, behind them a flaming sword, but before them, thank God, a new chance!

With coequal powers and a growing willingness to blend the wisdom. of men and the wisdom of women, imagination, nay faith, forecasts an era when spiritual rather than material values shall predominate; when democratic government becomes a guaranty of that most sacred right of all-the right of everybody to be somebody. I congratulate the United States Congress in following the lead of old monarchies in the necessary procedure for the enfranchisement of women.

The irony of the situation is that even if thirty-six states ratify the federal constitutional amendment at the first opportunity the women of Germany, the British Isles, Russia, Hungary, and South Africa will have had a long exercise of the franchise before we begin. Nevertheless, in spite of our discrepancies between theory and practice, we have pride in the

belief that America is the mother of democracy and democracy the motherspirit of the world. The last statement is the point I wish to stress in what I shall say about the new world from the woman's point of view.

The word "reconstruction" has its feminine implications. The work of salvage-mending, healing, conserving-has traditionally belonged to women, and no durable structure of society can now be reared without the aid of women. It has come to pass that woman and the state are meeting in woman's ancient domain-in the cultivation of the arts of peace, the conservation of human life, the ministration of the needy, and the promotion of morality, order, and beauty.

There is no nook or corner of her home which the state has not invaded. Perhaps four-fifths of the subjects of legislation have a bearing upon the home and family. The supreme task of both home and state is to work plastic human clay into nobler forms and to cooperate in making the community home a safe enough place that little children may be born and reared in it. We are developing a courage to believe that no social wrong or public evil is unconquerable. Therefore I deem myself honored to stand in this Education Association as a representative of the organized women who form your Department of School Patrons. The General Federation of Women's Clubs, the National Council of Mothers and Parent-Teacher Association, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Southern Association of College Women, and the Association of Collegiate Alumnae are typical of many other organizations without whose ideals, experience, and. cooperation reconstruction problems cannot be solved.

A century ago woman was still practically at the zero-point of opportunity. Up to the last third of the nineteenth, called woman's century, she was struggling to get her hands and feet free. In 1850 she had but seven industrial occupations. Today over 10,000,000 women are earning their own and others' bread in more than three hundred occupations.

There were two liberating forces that shook her prison house at about the same time: the invention of labor-saving machinery and free compulsory education. The door of the house opened for women to follow their looms to the steam-driven factories. It opened for children to troop out to their place in the new social order. No longer could the mother keep them in the sanctum she had glorified. The state exercised a superior claim. Children must go to school.

The women who were left in the house-children at school, drudgery being done by their sisters in factories-found themselves endowed with a precious leisure, at least two or three hours a day for the busiest-time for self-culture, exploration, organization. To be sure some women have used this leisure in experiments with cosmetics and vanities, self-indulgence and follies, and worse. But it is to the everlasting glory of American women that opportunity has spelled obligation, and service is the passion of the woman movement.

The most significant victory of organized mother-power in America was the establishment of the Children's Bureau as a department of the national government. It meant that the womanhood of the land had at last got its small foot thrust thru the crack of the governmental door, and that that door would soon have to swing wide enough to admit her resolute body.

Simultaneously with efforts for child-welfare legislation in all the states women for years were troubling the national government by pointing to the millions of dollars spent in the departments of plant and animal industry by a government which spent nothing to discover the vaster and more valuable needs of American children.

Why must three hundred thousand babies die in their first year in this land? Is it the fault of heredity? Bad housing? Alcoholism or venereal disease? How much of this slaughter of the innocents is because the mothers are in industry? Why are the mothers in industry? The organized women of the land have constituted themselves into several million interrogation marks, and at last scientific investigations have been started under the direction of Julia Lathrop. Under the leadership of Miss Lathrop the last year was proclaimed Children's Year, and the measuring and weighing of babies became a sacred ceremonial. A general interest has been aroused in all questions of safeguarding child life, and this forecasts the time when, as far as it is possible for governments to control, every baby shall have his rights-his first right to good heredity-to clear brains and clean blood.

This campaign for child welfare dovetails with the national education bill in keeping the child in good health before school age so that he may enter unhampered by physical defects.

The century of the child follows woman's century in logical sequence, and the child in government as in the home adds completion to the divine triangle, man, woman, and child, the greatest of which is the child, the upborne hypotenuse.

Reconstruction calls for the last ounce of service of the awakened woman for the downtrodden and belated ones of her own sex. The wise ones know that the few cannot keep the heights while so many are in a pit, that no woman is free while others are in slavery, and that none is safe while traps are set for one.

The womanhood of the world not only has shared the burden and the woe and led in ministration on battlefield and hospital and held the home lines for food production and conservation, but has assumed the obligation of industrial creation which changed the weights and balances of the struggle to the side of victory.

To secure the utmost output of these women, as well as to give expression to the fine, unselfish emotions of the war, standards were adopted by the war government for women in industry which the good-will of a world at peace must maintain and advance. The right of women to work should

never again be questioned, with compensation depending upon the character of the work or output rather than upon the sex of the worker. They should be granted a minimum wage which will permit a standard of life conducive to health, education, and recreation, daytime work and one day of rest in seven, equal opportunity in trade and technical training, equal pay for equal work, freedom to organize, and representation in the organizations of labor in which they participate. They need social insurance against sickness, accident, industrial disease, and unemployment. In fact, women workers in the new world must have every right which shall be guaranteed to their brothers, for their motives in entering industry and their human needs are the same.

In carrying over the social program to which women are committed, which I have so hastily and inadequately sketcht, it is apparent that there must be a great army of intelligent, highly trained experts which the public schools, colleges, and universities must supply.

This brings me to a conclusion which is obviously as follows: A nation which lays upon the doorstep of its schools its most important function must have the foresight, the plain common sense, to endow its teaching ministry with superior attainments.

How shall they give out what they do not have? How can they possess unless they have received? Adequate normal training must be freely provided to all who are willing to serve the general good in the training of American citizens.

The public must be educated by the National Education Association and all its auxiliary lay organizations to believe that the public money spent to educate teachers is its very best investment. Then the taxpaying public and governments must be shamed by their gross ingratitude to the public servants who render by far the greatest national good. No one in public life should be better paid than those upon whom we place such great responsibility, and I pledge the strength of the Department of School Patrons to support the efforts of those who are working for such salaries for teachers as will furnish them the means to lead self-respecting, respect-commanding lives in every community, where they should stand as the most honored and conspicuous representatives of the state.

D. WAR EDUCATION ABROAD

FRANK E. SPAULDING, HEAD OF AMERICAN EDUCATION IN FRANCE,
PARIS, FRANCE

I. The exigencies of the Great War have revealed and emphasized the following serious defects and weaknesses in the citizenry of the United States of America, viz.:

1. A startling percentage of physical defects and weaknesses, largely remediable under suitable treatment.