or seventy-eight pupils in the High School. Only one-sixth of the whole number graduated from the High School. The age of the boys who graduate from the High and Grammar schools now is at least a year or two more than when I graduated. To pass on to another fact, when I was a boy, the state of Massachusetts had from five to six hundred thousand people in it, and there were classes in college at that time running from forty-five to fifty and sixty at least. The state of Massachusetts is hardly four times as large, I think it is only about three times as large as it was when I was a boy, and there enter Cambridge classes very nearly five times as many as there used to when I was a boy. These are of course little facts and point to this conclusion-that whenever a state becomes filled up, whenever the rough work of subduing the earth is to a certain extent accomplished, then the tendency is to keep children longer at school, and my encouragement to the friend from the West is, that in the course of thirty years she will find the children leaving not at an earlier, but a later age. I agreed with the friend who first spoke who presented the ideal of education. She was succeeded by our friend who spoke of education as it looks to her when she is in the thickest of the fight. Our friend who spoke of the ideal of education made much of the influence of the teacher. Now education has two meanings. First it seems to me, you take up education and propose to construct man and woman on a certain pattern and out of the material you possess. Second, the thought is to lead out from the soul of the child, as was well said, enable it to make the best and the most possible of itself and to become in the highest possible degree helpful to the world; but if you observe, the present system of education as pursued in our schools, is faulty, especially when our large centres are considered, in its theory of the division of labor. The teacher takes a certain number of children and they pass from her hands in three or six months and in that time she must bring them to a certain point. If it is found in the course of a little experience that she does not bring them up to that

point, she ceases to be a teacher. She has failed to do what she must be required to do, for a large school is a machine which takes into its remorseless grasp everything, and the boys and girls go through the hands of the teachers in our public schools as through a machine. They pass through all the classes in succession, and have no advantage of the moral influence which is to be derived from the life and character of any one teacher. When a child remains long enough with a teacher to feel the force of the character and life and love that is in the mind and heart of that teacher, it is under such circumstances that the moral influence comes into play, and that is why I have observed that in our country schools, a teacher of no more superior capacity, of no more earnest purpose, still somehow exerts this influence to purify and lift the purpose of the pupil and encourage him to reach for that which is the highest and best. So while I am not prepared to say that our present school system is the wrong one, I am prepared to say that if the method pursued in the schools of our large cities is continued, it will reduce the influence of the teacher to a minimum, while in the country teacher it is raised to a maximum. When I reached the age of twelve years, I was put in charge of a teacher in the High School in Boston. As fortune would have it, I was promoted with that teacher to a second, then to a third class, in other words, in the three years I was there, I was two and three-quarter years in charge of my one teacher. A teacher whose personal character was influence; a teacher whose absolute veracity in the school-room was influence; a teacher whose purpose to render exact justice to every pupil, was influence; a teacher whose utter hatred and horror of all that was base and improper, was influence. And whatever may be my theories about the system of school teaching, I say the brightest influence outside of my own home in all my past life, was the influence of that grand man, with whose truth and justice and purity and love of the right, I was brought into daily contact for nearly three years of the formative period of my life. And I say, nothing is to be gained by intellectual in

struction or by division of labor, if it is to be gained by the loss of this tender, beautiful, sacred, supreme influence that a good man or woman has over a boy or girl.

Rev. Mr. HINCKLEY, of Newburg, said:-What is our theme? Education. What does it mean? The development to the highest point of personal character one can reach, and to the largest usefulness to humanity which one can accomplish. And how is this to be done? By agencies. Not by any one agency, important as that may be. This afternoon we have talked mostly of public schools, a system grand as an institution, especially characteristic and pertaining to a republican form of government I agree to all that has been said of the value of this education to the government. But the school is not the only agency of education, not the only influence, not the only power, not the only instrument that we are to recognize and employ for the accomplishment of this education. Do we understand what we mean by that word education? We have just defined it here, but do we take in the full significance of it? The development of the boy and the girl into the man and the woman-whence comes the boy or girl? We do not find them in the school first, but in the family. That is another of the educational agencies. And do they live in the home alone or in the school alone? Not at all. The church is also an educational influence and not less so if instead of calling it a church, you call it a religious society. Here is a Friends' Meeting. It may be held as a Yearly Meeting, or it may be held as a Monthly Meeting, but more or less, it is always an educational influence. In one form or another, and to a greater or less extent, you have been developing the child through this influence, which has been in existence here not for thirty-three years alone, but through all the years. And that is not all. Society, the customs, and the habits of life about us, are a part of the educational agencies. We ask too much of the public school system, of the public school teachers, when we ask them to be instructors of the mind and heart, of the soul and of the whole being of the child. I do not expect them to do all this

work. The church has something to do, the home has something to do, all the agencies we can command should be brought into play. I think sometimes even our good friends, the teachers, claim a little too much of their associates when they talk so much about the moral education which the public school has to accomplish for its students. The leading work of the public schools is intellectual culture. It is not to leave out the moral element; that is to come mainly from the teacher, and blessed are the children, and blessed is the teacher, and blessed is the school where that moral influence is exerted. But that influence must be limited.

There is, however, one way in which the public schools can legitimately create and exercise an influence in the matter of good manners. Let me tell a story. A friend of mine, who is a teacher, or who was a teacher at a time when I was on a visit to Connecticut, came in to see me, and he said, talking of the matter of education, a gentleman told me the other day that he was very much troubled by the dishonesty of his pupils. He did not mean that they told falsehoods; he did not mean that they stole anybody's property; but that they were not honest in their work; that they were guilty of the shams which our teacher spoke of awhile ago. He asked me how he could make them honest. Be honest yourself. He meant in your professional work, in your teaching, in your demands of the scholar. Well, I don't know any better way for the teacher to exercise a decided moral influence over his pupils, than to specially emphasize the claims of, to demand and insist upon and be content only with, honest intellectual work, thorough application and thorough study. I have only one other word to offer in the matter of moral education, applying not to the school but to the home.

Moral education, what is that? The development, as I take it, of the moral sense, the sense of right, and also the development of the will, and one of the best ways for the accomplishment of this is found in the home. Teach the child there to be honest in all his dealings, and thoroughly moral in all his transactions.

And I want, just here, to tell another story:-A friend of mine had two little boys that were bright, active and ingenious, constantly doing something. One of them, one day, came across an envelope with a postage stamp that had been cancelled, and he thought he could get that stamp off the letter and then find some way of wiping out the mark, and he did so. He had just written a letter to his aunt, and what does he do but put it on the letter and send it away. He went straight to his father, who happened to be one of those good men who make confidants of their children, and he told hin: what he had done. His father said, "George, you just go over to your bank and take out three cents and go to the post office and buy a stamp." He did so, and he knew enough of his father to be aware that he had some good reason for asking him to do this. When he brought it to him, his father said, "George, throw that stamp into the fire." He did so. "Now, George, you and the Government are square." A very simple lesson of honesty in small things, and one which goes to show the importance of developing this sense of right at the earliest possible period, and in the smallest possible things in the home, is the best method of developing and carrying on the work of moral education.

After a few remarks by J. WILLIAMS THORNE, Miss TURNER sang "Come Unto Me," and the meeting adjourned.

SIXTH-DAY MORNING.

Promptly at 10 o'clock the meeting was opened with singing, "Nearer My God to Thee," by Mr. and Mrs. FRED. M. PENNOCK.

The CHAIRMAN-The subject for this morning's consideration is "Religion." It will be opened by a gentleman who has been with you once or twice in years past when a resident of Washington-the Rev. FREDERIC HINCKLEY, of Newburgh, N. Y.

Mr. HINCKLEY said: "Nearer My God to Thee," we have just been singing, some with their voices, others with their