of what handiwork did has been displaced by labor-saving machinery. Guiding the plow with the hand, mowing grass with the scythe, cutting grain with the cradlethis is fast disappearing from enlightened communities. The steam harvester and thrasher have rendered the work of saving the grain crops more rapid and less arduons. Science has found practical application, and ceases to be mere theory; it has allied itself with the useful arts. Machinery has released thousands from a weary struggle for supply of mere animal wants, and has permitted them to take up other pursuits, such as mining, manufactures, mechanical arts, gardening, fruit raising, etc., but this wealth-creating industry demands intelligence, thrift, and saving. Industry has thus received great benefit; the people have gained hope, inspiration, and life from the applications of the principles of science, have gained, finally, command of all of the resources of nature and have had opened for themselves the highest rewards of intelligent industry.

It needs to be repeated and emphasized that national wealth is not the result of chance, or fraud, or legislative hocus-pocus, or stockjobbing manipulations or adroit dealing in futures. It is the result of honest, intelligent labor. The elements of wealth exist in nature in manifold forms, but must be fitted for human wants by labor. Through all transitions from natural condition to finished and useful artificial state, each successive process adds to the value. To utilize the powers of nature, the elements of property and wealth, is, in beneficent results, proportionate to the intelligence employed. The value created is almost in the direct ratio of the skill of the worker. Labor is not spontaneous nor self-willed, but must have behind it an intelligent control. Stupid labor is confined to a narrow routine, to a few, simple products. Unskilled labor is degraded necessarily to coarser employments. What makes work honorable, productive, remunerative, what elevates a man above a brute, is work directed by intelligence. The best method of applying power might be illustrated by such common processes as turning a grindstone, shoveling manure, harnessing a horse, driving a nail. Among the aristocracy of the old world and the Bourbons of the new is a current theory that it is best for the lower classes, the mudsills of society, the common laborers, to remain in ignorance. I have no patience with men who say that education for the ordinary occupations of life is a wasted investment, or who deny the utility or the feasibleness of furnishing to wage earners and breadwinners an education suited to the industries of real life. Will our impoverished people never see that ignorant labor is terribly expensive, that it is a tax, indirect but enormous, bringing injury to the material worked, to the tools or implements employed, wasting force and lessening and making less valuable what is produced?

The president has declared what was intended as the burden of my address. While there are local interests and concerns that may interest you, there is one question, overtopping all others, that goes into the very household, that concerns every individual, that is allied to every interest; and that is how to furnish cheaper and more efficient means of education for the boys and girls of the State. When I speak of this being the paramount subject of legislation, I mean to say that the duty of the legislator is not only to look after education in Clarke County, in Cobb County, but to have the means of education carried to every child, black and white, to every citizen within the limits of the State. I mean universal education; free education; the best education; without money and without price. The great mistake in legislators and people is that, while they profess to be friends of education, and satisfy themselves that they are, they are talking and thinking of the public schools as poor schools for poor children, and not as good schools, the best schools, for the education of all. Here is field and scope for the exercise of the highest powers of statesmanship. This universal education is the basis of civilization, the one vital condition of prosperity, the support of free institutions. All civilized governments support and maintain schools. In semicivilized countries there is no recognition of the right to improvement, nor of the duty of the government to support universal education. William Ewart Gladstone is the greatest statesman of this century. Financier, scholar, orator, with marvellous administrative capacity, even to the minutest details of departmental and governmental work, and shows his appreciation of education by giving to the vice-president of the council of education a seat in his cabinet, and he is the only British prime minister who has so honored education. Last year I was reading brief biographical sketches of the candidates of the Republican and Democratic parties of Massachusetts for the various State offices-governor, attorney-general, etc.-and every one of them, with one exception, had been trained in the common schools of the State, and, therefore, when in office, they would understand what people were talking about when they advocated common schools, and would feel as Emerson said, that if Massachusetts had no beautiful scenery, no mountains abounding in minerals, yet she had an inexhaustible wealth in the children of the Commonwealth. None of you, perhaps, were educated in the public schools. How many times do you visit the public schools? How many times in the last year have you gone into a public school and sat down

on the rear bench and watched the teacher teaching, in order to know what is being done in these great civilizing agencies of the State?

A few years ago the King of Prussia, through Bismarck, issued a call for an educational conference, and he took part with educators and scholars in the discussions. In my journeys through the South, pleading for the children, I have found one governor from whom I never fail to receive a sympathetic response to every demand or argument that I may present for higher or general education. In days that are to come, when you shall record what Rabun did, what Troup, what Clarke, what McDonald, what Johnson, what Gilmer, what Jenkins, what Brown, what Gordon, what Stephens, and what other governors of Georgia have done, there will be no brighter page, none more luminous with patriotism, broad-minded, honest, intelligent, beneficent patriotism, devotion to the highest interests of the State, than that which shall record the fact that the great school governor of the South was William J. Northen. [Great applause.]

The most interesting and profitable changes that have been made in the ends of modern education is the incorporation of manual training in the curriculum, so as to bring education into contact with the pursuits of every day. The three r's, reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic, used to be the standard. We should add the three h's, and develop, pari passn with the three r's, the hand, head, and heart, so that we may develop the child intellectually, physically, and morally, and so have the completest manhood and womanhood. Oh! it is a sad spectacle to see the ordinary graduate from one of our colleges, with an armful of diplomas, standing on the platform receiving bouquets, and ready to step across the threshhold and enter the arena of active life. You congratulate him because he has acquired knowledge in the schoolroom. But what can he do? What can he produce? What wealth can he create? What aid can he render civilization? He may be a lawyer. Alawyer never yet made two blades of grass grow where only one grew before. [Laughter.] Now, you show that you agree with what I am saying. [Laughter.] I have no sympathy, however, allow me to say it, with the vulgar, ignorant, stupid prejudice that some people have against lawyers. None in the world. [Applause.] You may trace the history of free government in all the struggles for right and liberty, you may study with profoundest admiration the constitutions, the embodiments of political wisdom, and every page of that history you will find illuminated by the wisdom of lawyers. But I say of lawyers what I say of doctors. Doctors do not add one cent to the wealth of the community. Neither do preachers. They are valuable; you can not do without them. But the lawyer, the doctor, the preacher, the editor, do not add one cent to the assessed value of the property in Georgia. Wealth comes from productive labor, and wealth is in proportion to the skill of the labor. It is the mechanic, the farmer, the miner, the manufacturer, the fruit grower, who add wealth to the community and to the country. The others are indispensable in the distribution of the products of labor, in the transactions of business between man and man, and in a thousand ways, but they do not create wealth.

Let me come back to what I was saying, that the graduate of your college is educated to be a clerk, doctor, lawyer, preacher. You may turn him out of college and he will tramp the streets of your cities, of Atlanta, Augusta, Savannah, to find some place in the bank, or some place in a doctor's or lawyer's office. He has been educated away from business, from ordinary productive pursuits, and has a distaste for labor. If his natural bent had been followed, if he had been taught the application of science to business, made familiar with tools and constructive machinery, he would have turned out, in very many cases, something more useful than he will be after having entered one of the learned professions.

I wish some of you would stop over some time on your way to New York at Washington or Philadelphia and go through the public schools. You would see that from the kindergarten to the high school there is no schoolroom where the pupils can not be taught the application of scientific principles to everyday life, and from which they can not come with a knowledge of the common tools and their uses. England learned that in order to hold the markets of the world she had to teach her children in industrial schools. She discovered that her trade was slipping away from her because of the lack of industrial training on the part of her working people. France gives manual training to both sexes.

Saxony, a manufacturing country, had in 1889 115 trade or industrial schools, it being discovered that "a thorough professional education alone can aid the tradesman in his struggle for life." Statistics show a constant improvement of economic conditions. The flourishing orchards, with their world-renowned wealth of fruit, in Austria, Hungary, Bavaria, and Oldenburg, are directly traceable to the introduction of practical instruction in the school gardens. Prussia has introduced into the normal schools instruction in the culture of fruit and forest trees, and "the admirably managed forests and vast orchards of Prussia owe their existence and excellent yield in no small degree to the unostentatious influence of the country schoolmaster who teaches his pupils in school and the adult villagers in agricultural clubs."

As much as we may boast of our free institutions we are far behind the rest of the world in industrial education, in the application of scientific principles to daily life. We abuse Russia, but Russia has 1,200 technological schools; Belgium has 25,000 pupils in her trade schools; Denmark, 6,000; Italy, 16,000. Georgia has no trade school for white children. She has, fortunately, one noble technological school, which I commend to your support and your encouragement. The other day I went to Newport News, which, as you know, is at the month of James River, on Hampton Bay, in the State of Virginia. The largest shipbuilding works and the largest dry dock in the United States are at Newport News. They recently received contracts for the construction of United States vessels, and are prepared to do all such work in the best possible manner. I went through the works. I had an old Confederate soldier to pilot me. When I asked about the improvements in the place his heart rejoiced. I was there when the dinner hour arrived. From the shops and works men came in great numbers, until it seemed there must have been 1,000. I said to my friend, "Where do these men come from?" He replied that they came from various parts of the world. "Are there any from the South?" said I. "Oh, yes," said he. "What do you pay these men?" I asked. "From one dollar a day up to eight or ten." "Do any of these old Confederates get the eight or ten?" With a deep sigh and with a tear in his eye, he said: "No; no Confederate among them. The Confederate soldiers," he continued, "and the negroes get a dollar a day; the Northern and European laborers get the six or ten dollars a day. "Why is this?" I asked. "Because," said he, "they have had industrial training at home. They come from their shops and from their training schools, and they put intelligence into their work, and they get for it the best wages.”

And yet, when I stand here and appeal to Georgians for manual-labor schools, you say that man is a theorizer; he is taking up the time of the legislature, which should be passing an act to declare Goose Creek a highway, or to build a road across Possum Swamp, or a bridge over Terrapin Hollow! [Laughter.]

Last year, Mr. President, I was in Asia Minor. If any of you have read The Prince of India you will remember some account of the town of Brusa, southeast of Constantinople. I saw there hundreds of donkeys and women with loads of mulberry leaves. A few years ago the silk trade seemed likely to become extinct, because of an insect that was destroying the mulberry trees and attacking the cocoons. Thousands of trees were cut down. The people are now replanting the mulberry trees, and trade is springing up again. It is because Pasteur, the great curer of hydrophobia, subjected the cocoons to a microscopic examination, discovered the insect and applied a remedy. He applied scientific knowledge to the work of saving the silk trade. A school of sericulture has been established, the mulberry trees are being planted, and the people are growing prosperous again.

When you came here you took the oath to support the Constitution, and it says that there shall be a thorough system of common schools, free to all children, for education in the elementary branches of an English education. This mandate requires general, or State, and local supervision, neat and healthy houses, grading and classifying of the pupils, adequate local and State revenues. A valued friend said to me last night that Georgia is spending too much money for public schools. Let us see how this is. Agricultural depression is more serious and more harmful in Mississippi than in any other State, because it is so exclusively agricultural, having few manufacturing interests, little commerce, and no big cities. And yet Mississippi pays for her public schools $7.80 on every thousand dollars of the taxable value of property; Illinois pays $14.40; Texas, $1.80; Nebraska, $18.70; Massachusetts, $3.80; New York, $4.50. Georgia's educational tax proper for the support of the public schools is $1.40 on the thousand dollars! What do you say to that? Can you expect to equal other States in school advantages unless you increase the revenues going to the public schools? Let it be borne in mind that outside the cities, the local or extraState revenues are very meager. The Southern States raise on an average about 36 cents per capita of population.

But you need not only to increase the revenues supporting the common schoolsyou need promptly and properly paid teachers. The worst thing that I have ever heard about my native State, Georgia, is that she has permitted the teachers in her public schools-poorly paid as they are-to go month after month without receiving the pittance of their hard-earned salaries! [Applause.] If I were the legislature I would not let the sun go down before I wiped away this crime against the teachers of the State. I only echo what you will find in the governor's message, in the report of Captain Bradwell, and in the lamentations of the teachers.

The training of the teachers is implicitly contained in the compulsory establishment of schools. By making education an integral part of the government you are under strongest obligation to provide good schools. The teacher is the school. You can not have a thorough system of common schools without good teachers. You can not have good teachers without paying them promptly their salaries and without training them to teach. Unfortunately our normal schools are handicapped by the

unpreparedness of the pupils to be taught how to teach. Thorough general training should precede professional training, and is its best preparation for it. Take a school of medicine or of law and combine it with elementary education. It would be absurd. It is none the less absurd to combine elementary instruction with professional training for teaching. Teachers should know the history of education and of educational methods, and practical and definite application of the principles of education; and these things should not be dead rules. The teacher goes from the concrete to the abstract; from special to general; from known to unknown; from idea to the word; from thought to clear expression; and these should be applied habitually, unconsciously, and govern spontaneously every act and element in teaching. Students can become habituated to best methods by being kept in the true path, under the guidance of those familiar with the right methods and principles. I went to Milledgeville the other day to see and inspect the Normal and Industrial College. It is a most remarkable school. It has been in existence only three years, and has 322 girls; 121 engaged in preparing themselves for teaching school. Although in its infancy, it has sent out 100 teachers to teach in Georgia. I went into the different departments. I wish you could see Professor Branson's teaching in the normal department; it would do you good. You could not do a better thing than to spend a day in going through the school and seeing what they teach there. If you do not go yourselves, send your committees and let them see how the thing is done.

Here is a map, which is an object lesson. It shows the normal schools in the United States. It is not accurate in all its details; yet the general facts are correctly stated. In the States that are most wealthy and most advanced there are the greater number of these black dots, which represent normal schools. The person who made the map did not recognize the fact that in Georgia you have an excellent normal school at Milledgeville. It is industrial and normal, and the work done is excellent. The Peabody fund gave $1,800 last year to this school. I wish I could persuade you to establish coeducation of the sexes at Milledgeville. In the name of patriotism, why do not you teach the boys as well as the girls how to teach school?

Teaching good teaching, I ought to say-has much of the persuasive power of oratory. It is a glorious sight to see a live teacher-not one of these old moss-back teachers, who has not learned anything since the flood, but a live teacher, who appreciates his vocation-standing before his classes! How it arouses enthusiasm, fortifies the will, inspires the soul; and what a criminal waste of time and money and labor and energy it is to put an incompetent teacher before a class of boys and girls! We see sometimes a picture of Herod murdering the innocents. How we grieve over it! I went into a school the other day in the mountains. There sat the teacher, ignorant, stolid, indifferent, incapable, with the boys and girls gathered around him, studying the a-b, ab; b-a, ba, k-e-r, ker, baker; and I thought then, Mr. President, that we ought to have another painter to draw another picture of the murder of the innocents. It is not the teachers who ought to be painted in that picture; it is the legislatures who are murdering the innocents, when they refuse to establish normal schools for the proper training of teachers. How does the old hymn go? "How tedious and tasteless the hour"--some of you have sung it. How unutterably tedious are the hours spent in such schools, poring over lessons day after day. Some are mechanics when they ought to be artists, for these teachers have no plan nor method, no inspiration nor striving to teach and stimulate all the many sides of a child's nature to higher attainments, higher thoughts and more vigorous action. Time does not permit me to speak of secondary schools, of rural schools, of six-months schools. Some one in writing about me in the paper said that I was growing old. That may be true as to years, but not in thought, not in patriotism, not in loyalty to the South, not in loyalty to the Union. not in loyalty to this country of ours, and to the Stars and Stripes. I am not growing old in my interest in the cause of education. And yet when I hear that your people are about to celebrate the semicentennial of Atlanta, it recalls to mind the time when I used to pass this place and there was no city here, nothing but old Whitehall Tavern. That was in 1841-42. During that period a town was started which was called Marthasville. I used to ride through this section of the country, by Decatur and Stone Mountain, on my way from my home in Alabama to the college at Athens. It then took me five days to make the journey. Now I can go the distance in six hours. What a mighty change! From Marthasville in 1842 to Atlanta in 1893! Five days of travel cut down to six hours; five days on horseback or in stage coach to six hours in a Pullman palace car! Steam has revolutionized the business and travel of the world. We have gone from the stage coach to the steam car, and the sails of the old ships have been superseded by the ocean steamships. The telegraph and telephone and steam have brought the continents into one neighborhood and given solidarity to the business of the world. The merchant can telegraph to China or to Japan for a bill of goods; and before he goes to bed to-night word comes from the other end of the world that the goods have been delivered to the ship and they will leave in the morning. What a revolution has been wrought in our methods of business. Improved machinery of transportation

has reduced freight expenses from 2 cents per ton per mile to about one-half cent per ton per mile. Civilization creates new kinds of property. In Africa the inhabitants know nothing about bills of exchange, promissory notes, choses in actionnothing about the modern methods of business. Just in proportion as you grow in civilization, and advance in the scale of education and intelligence, you have more kinds of property. It is because of diffused education, because of the work of intelligence, because the forces of nature have been harnessed to the business of life. Science and religion are both evangels of democracy. Wherever these go shackles fall off, tyranny ceases, and the great masses are lifted up to the recognition of their rights and their privileges. Prerogative of mental development is no longer confined to the few, but is conceded to all who bear the image of the Son of Man.

Only one more remark. I said awhile ago that I was a Georgia boy. I am a native of Lincoln County-the dark corner of Lincoln. I graduated from the University of Georgia, growing up in my college days with such men as Tom Cobb, Linton Stephens, Ben Hill, Jud Glenn, and others. In my political life I associated on terms of intimacy with such men as Stephens, Toombs, Hill, and Cobb. I come to you as a Georgian, appealing for the interests of the children of Georgia, and appealing to the representatives of the State. How inspiring it is to deeds of noble statesmanship to read the names of the counties you represent. Some of them recall in imperishable words the names of founders of the State, of men who stood for her rights, of men who bore the brunt of the Revolutionary struggle, such as Oglethorpe, Richmond, Burke, Chatham, Wilkes, and Camden; Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Carroll, Sumter, Putnam, Jasper, Greene, the German De Kalb, Hancock, Lincoln; to them add the names of the men of the days succeeding the Revolution, Calhoun, Webster, Clay, Lowndes, Polk, Pierce, Douglas, Randolph, Taylor, and Quitmanmen from other States, but allied to you in close sympathy. Not these only, for your own great men have their names linked with the destinies of your counties. What an inspiration it must be to represent the county of Berrien, or Bartow, or Cobb, or Clayton, or Dawson, or Dooly, or Dougherty, or Forsyth, or Gilmer, or Hall, or Jackson, or Johnson, or Lumpkin, or McDuffie, or Miller, or Meriwether, or Murray, or Troup, or Walton. I think that if I were a representative from such a county, with such a name, I should be inspired with patriotism to do something high and useful, and to help the State I lived in to bear worthily the name of the "Empire State of the South." [Applause.] I appeal to you for the common schools of Georgia, for the future men and women of the State The women of the State touch my heart very deeply. My grandmother, mother, daughter-in-law, granddaughter, Georgia born, names suggestive of holiest affection and tenderest memories, which make me, not less than my nativity, a Georgian. In all of womankind, whether or not history has recorded or romance described or poesy sung her virtues, there has been no type of female excellence, no example of purity or loveliness or heroism more exalted and noble than that furnished by Georgia mother or wife, fit representatives of the unsurpassed southern matron. In their names I plead.

Mr. President, a friend told me of a girl in the northern part of the State, not prince-begotten nor palace-cradled, growing up in glad joyousness and innocency, amid the rich, virgin growth of wild trees, who was seen plowing an ox on rolling hillside to earn subsistence for an invalid father, a bed-ridden Confederate soldier, who lay helpless in an adjacent log cabin. Touched by such heroism and filial fidelity, a gentleman sent her to school, and last year at the examination one thousand people, who had come from the mountains to show their interest in the education of the children, saw that girl, who had labored for the support of herself and her bed-ridden father, stand on the platform and take the prize offered for the best essay. Refusing to abandon her old father during vacation, she went back to her mountain home and to labor, but she is now teaching in the school which brought to light her latent powers. There are thousands of Georgia boys, in the wire grass and middle Georgia and in the mountains, who, if educated, would, like Stephens, be patriotic and honored servants of the State. There are thousands of young maidens, who, like our heroine, require but the helping hand of the State and the warmth of generous culture to emerge from humble homes of obscurity and poverty to places of usefulness and honor. [Long applause.]

LOUISIANA.

THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE PUBLIC-SCHOOL SYSTEM IN LOUISIANA. [Paper prepared for Louisiana Educational Association, by John R. Ficklen, professor of history in Tulane University.]

"If I had as many sons as Priam, I would send them all to the public schools."-Daniel Webster. Mr. PRESIDENT, LADIES, AND GENTLEMEN: It seems eminently wise that the Louisiana Educational Association at this period of its honored career should devote a portion of its time and attention to the origin and development of the public-school