dent who is not to get the college education; nor could they exact such preparation if they would. Entrance examinations may test for information and to some extent for the results of intellectual discipline, but they cannot label with per cents. the more elusive effects upon the student of these distinctively culture subjects. These studies need a discursive treatment. Time must be given, in history, to acquire familiarity from many points of view, and for the slow growth of historical conceptions.

Belief in the value of this kind of historical work is gaining ground, and if we look upon the high school in its other function, and place the stress we ought upon the needs of those for whom it is the finishing-school, we may confidently hope that more space will soon be accorded history and literature, at least in optional courses, than has yet been given them; even though they encroach upon the domain of the mathematics and dead languages. Much of the so-called "practical" movement in education is mistaken in means and low in aim. We revolt rightly against any educational theory that makes an engine of more account than an Iliad, or that hints at any science as comparable in importance with the science of noble living. But we must grant the need of an educational system more practical in the proper sense. Our earnest consideration at least must go to any innovation that promises to secure more power at less expense of means, and to develop sounder citizenship and higher manhood. And upon its fitness for these ends, the study of history may rest its claims to more attention than it has yet received.

These claims are being recognized slowly in theory, but the practice so far is sad enough. "No branch so widely taught," said G. Stanley Hall a few years ago, "is so badly taught." To be sure, we have heard something very similar from hobbyists (and Dr. Hall claims to be a hobbyist in history) of every branch known to our schools-and a pessimist might be tempted to exclaim, with good ground in every case; but there do seem to be peculiar reasons in the conditions of our schools for assenting to Dr. Hall's statement. The first of these conditions to demand notice is the preparation, or rather, lack of preparation, our high-school pupil brings from the lower grades. He has "studied" United States history a year, perhaps—under a teacher hardly less ignorant than himself, probably-what history means; and he has acquired the date 1492, the fact that we once whipped the British, and the firm conviction that we can do the same thing again for them or any other nation. Aside from these lofty incentives to patriotism, he brings to the high school little of a historical flavor, except bad habits of studying, a more or less pronounced dislike for the subject, and a colossal ignorance.

There are signs, however, that this state of affairs has begun to mend. Good libraries are no longer confined to the high schools, but are being introduced into lower rooms; courses of historical stories are beginning to make part of the work in our intermediate grades; in our grammar schools, the old, scrappy reader has pretty well given way to classic books, a good place among which is accorded the myth and the historical story- Haw

thorne's, Scott's, Kingsley's, Greenwood's, Plutarch's; and whether this reading and story-telling work become systematized, after the German ideal, or not, it must help give us pupils better prepared for high-school work.

Another difficulty lies in the fact that history hardly ranks as a study yet, even from the teacher's standpoint. Many colleges require little of it for admission; it won't help get bread and butter; and, even if it is a good thing, anyone can read history at home. So say practical parents; and oftentimes the only fault the teacher can find with this plea is, that very few people do read it at home.

Of course parents and pupils must find out that the teacher is as necessary in history as in algebra or chemistry; but first the teacher must find it out, and be so necessary. Special training has long been demanded of teachers of mathematics and the classics, and more recently of science teachers; but any girl just out of the high school, with pleasant voice and lady-like bearing, is thought moderately fit to teach high-school history, or, if convenient, classes may be assigned the special teachers of other subjects. What wonder that most teaching of history has been chiefly valuable, as some one puts it, as an illustration of how it ought not to be done! In the preface to the 1872 edition of the Science of Wealth, Amasa Walker intimates that while it is of course desirable for the teacher of political economy to have some acquaintance with the subject, it is not necessary if he have a good text-book. Until very recently a similar idea regarding history has obtained in colleges even, and some of them still look for no other special qualifications in a teacher than are possessed by any cultivated gentleman. What can we expect of the high school?

This lack of specially trained teachers, and of any demand for them, is the most serious condition we have to face. But here, too, the future promises well. That the better colleges are beginning to send out teachers fitted for the work has already been alluded to, and it is a familiar fact in social economy that a supply of this kind creates the demand for itself.

But beyond these unfavorable conditions, which may be surmounted, lie the difficulties in the subject itself, requiring higher ability in the teacher than does any other high-school study. Into these difficulties, and the vexed questions of methods arising from them, I shall enter no further than I can help. But there are some references to methods inseparable from any consideration of the purpose of the study. In this assembly it is not necessary to enter any protest against that teaching which consists in asking questions from the margin of the text-book-the stock occasion for the critic's wit — though something very like that does pass often, even now; so that the name of history is still usurped in many schools by what Herbert Spencer thirty years ago called "that mere tissue of names and dates and unmeaning events."

No good teacher will fail to establish a clear outline of definite facts in the pupil's memory as a groundwork for something better; but all good teachers will do more than this. The teacher's mind must of course be saturated with

the spirit of history and stored with copious illustrations of its lessons. His judgment must be wide and catholic, that he may not be hampered by narrow prejudice, or swept off his feet by novel ideas or false analogies; but his sympathies must be ardent and his imagination glowing, that he may see and present the men of past ages, not as colorless abstractions, but with throbbing human hearts.

For most young people, reading history soon becomes stale and unprofitable. They lack imagination to see back of the words, and they want knowledge to give coherence and interest. The teacher must flash light upon dark and dreary spaces, by suggesting new meanings and unthought-of relationships. He must clothe these dry bones, and breath life into this dust. But still more must he rouse the student's self-activity, and make him something better than a passive recipient of the best history.

The laboratory method is just as practicable with high-school pupils, and just as essential to effective work in history as in botany or physics. Only the better ones of course can do any original work, and none can do much of it in either history or chemistry, but in both they can get a taste of what original investigation means. Current politics, debates, reports of different branches of the local and national government, afford material for students' historical scrap-books, and for occasional written topics. Local history, the town or city, the school district, the high school, a library, militia company, and various corporations and local industries, provide fields for fuller original investigation by the abler and more ambitious students. Their productions will usually be of no value in themselves, though sometimes a local paper will be glad to publish the better ones; but the pupils will get a glimmer of historical method, and will be better able to do laboratory work under a teacher's direction in the history of past times, with some appreciation of its value.

For the reading expected of all students in connection with the daily work, the references should be specific to chapter and page, and should be placed upon the blackboard (not dictated in class) several days in advance. Pupils do not have time to ransack a library each week upon a dozen different topics; but they do or should have time for reading, and the teacher should leave them no excuse for not taking hold at some definite point. It is as absurd to turn a child loose in a library, without guidance for class-work in history, as to do the same thing in a chemical laboratory; as in the latter case the beginner must have at least specific instruction for performing experiments, and for their order, and often for what to look in each experiment, so in the library young students should be told where to look for information upon specific points. It is enough if they know how to collate the matter when they find it. Alternative readings may often be indicated, and additional references at the student's option should frequently be suggested; and these need not be so precisely marked, but the line between the required and optional readings should be kept distinct.

The abler students can do more library work. Nearly all pupils in the

upper years can work up good reports upon collateral topics. These are best presented orally from blackboard synopses, and sometimes the class may be required to copy these outlines and be held responsible for the topic; but as the chief benefit accrues to the one who prepares the recitation, the topics, however important, should not be essential to the continuity of the study.

It might be noted that such topics as a consideration of the causes of the Norse migrations and of their success in other countries, in connection with the Norman conquest of England, prepared by the whole class with full statement of their authorities, and with all the time needed, afford excellent and wholly unobjectionable examinations-a true test of ability in the study. Another more important field for individual effort is to be found in the exercise of the historical imagination. Let the pupil during the term absorb everything he can about some one period, and then try to reproduce some leading event or character of that period from the inside, with local coloring in names, terms, and ideas. A dialogue between Socrates and Xantippe, an address by a revolted Helot to his compatriots, a Persian captive's views of Greek institutions, a Norman's account of the return of Godwin and his welcome by the great Witan, are among the topics I have known treated successfully by children thirteen to sixteen years old. Some pupils, of course, utterly deficient in dramatic instinct, must be allowed to sum up their study from the standpoint of a reviewer, not an actor.

Doubtless college students can do all this better; but at the risk of being accused of recommending university methods for children, I would insist that high-school students with proper training can do such work profitably.

For the individual reports upon short topics, and still more for this work last mentioned, the pupils should not be given specific references, as in the daily work. Here they have an opportunity to practice that art of reading that consists in judicious skipping-to learn to use indexes and catalogues, and to run down a subject in a library. At first they need guidance; but there is no reason why the average high-school student should not acquire this desirable element of power to a greater degree than the average college student has done in the past.

Effective library work requires some system of "reserve" libraries, in which the books most needed may be kept easily and constantly accessible, without the intervention of glass doors or librarians; but the details of the system. must vary with the size of the school.

A library for historical work should contain not only the standard modern works, but, even more indispensably, from the laboratory standpoint, contemporary authorities. To illustrate: For Greek and Roman history, Herodotus, Homer, Thucydides, Demosthenes, Livy, Tacitus, Plutarch, Cicero; for English history, Bede, the Anglo-Saxon and other chronicles, the diaries of Pepys and Evelyn, volumes of charters, and such works as F. York Powell's English History from Contemporary Sources.

Historical fiction, of course, will be given a prominent place both in the

library and the class-room. Historical novels are probably best read in groups, even though some periods be wholly neglected. For instance, I would rather a pupil should read and compare Kingsley's Hereward, and Bulwer's and Tennyson's Harolds, than that he should read three times as many volumes without special relationship. For one thing, he is more apt to perceive that a novel is something more than a story, and is to be read for something more than to find how it comes out. A proper use of fiction, indeed, may best rid the pupil of the haunting idea that history is mainly valuable for the information it contains. He may not come to think it a compliment to call a history a work of the imagination, but he should learn that all great histories do contain the poetic element in large measure; that they are, in a true sense, imaginative, and inspired and pervaded by great ideas; that those histories are worth his reading that widen his views of life and of man's destiny, that make his pulse beat higher, and incite him to noble action; so that he will turn away from the book-agent's compendiums of useful information, to the Motleys and Carlyles, whose works belong, like the great poems and novels and Bibles of the world, to the literature of inspiration and power.

This may involve work in literature, but one of the incidental purposes of historical study is to open up the world of books. It pays both from a historical and literary standpoint for the teacher to give two or three short bibliographical talks early in each term, chiefly, of course, about the works accessible in school, city, or Sunday-school libraries. It goes without saying, that this and all other library work will help free the pupil from the too common idolatry of print; though the teacher is bound to see that it does not, on the other hand, lead to a carping conceit.

The pupil should acquire also some comprehension of the different kinds of historical evidence, and of the value of indirect testimony. He should understand, for example, why the Iliad gives us fuller and more reliable knowledge of the social and political life of the Heroic age, in all that we care about, even if Achilles never lived and sulked and fought, and though Hector's body was never dragged around the walls of lofty Troy, than could have been given in any express treatise upon Argive polity by the most conscientious Hellenic Dry-as-Dust of the year 1000 B.C.-if there had been

one.

He should realize, too, something of the history of historical writingfrom the old legends and ballads, through the barren chronicle and romantic tale, up through the special pleading of a Clarendon, a Gibbon, Hume, or Macaulay, to the conscientious, judicial, scientific researches of a Stubbs or a Green; all the better, of course, if clothed in the poetic imagery of a Freeman or Carlyle.

Besides all these intellectual and esthetic ends, and the broader culture that comes from the realization that "beyond the Alps there are men also," the study has high ethical value. It gives the youth lofty ideals, animates him with heroic conceptions, and makes for him a vast Westminster Abbey of every land; it broadens his sympathies, and fosters a wider love of his kind.