PROPOSITION.

The Longwood Yearly Meeting Financial Association, an organization composed of persons interested in the success of the Longwood Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends, hereby proposes to furnish the funds necessary for the needs of said Yearly Meeting, except for printing its proceedings, provided the said Yearly Meeting will recognize the Executive Committee of said Financial Association in conjunction with the Clerks and Treasurer of the Yearly Meeting, as its Repre sentative Committee, to have charge of all business during its This proposition if accepted to continue as long as it shall prove satisfactory to both parties.

recess.

RESCLUTION.

Resolved, That the Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends accepts the proposition made by the Longwood Yearly Meeting Financial Association, the same to be continued as long as the arrangement shall prove satisfactory to the Yearly Meeting.

On motion, it was agreed that the hours for holding the morning sessions, should be from 10 a. m. until 12 m., and for the afternoon sessions, from 2 until 4 p. m. and that all speeches except the opening addresses be limited to ten minutes, no one person to occupy the floor twice upon the same subject until all who wish to speak have done so.

After singing by Miss TURNER of the song entitled "London Bridge," the meeting adjourned.

FIFTH-DAY AFTERNOON.

The meeting was opened at 2 o'clock with singing by Miss LAURA E. JOHNSON, "Let Thine Hand Lead Me."

The Chairman then announced the subject for consideration to be Education and the interests of the Young. We are very fortunate in having with us, said he, two ladies well versed in this question, for not only have both of them given it careful study as students, but they have had practical experience as teachers. The first to whom we shall listen will be Miss MARY F. EASTMAN, whom I now have the pleasure of presenting to you.

Miss EASTMAN said:

I was most anxious that Mrs. Sewall, fresh from her daily work, should open for you this great topic of education. Upon her as upon myself, the subject was, in a measure sprung, The difficulty is not, I think, in our not having pronounced convictions upon our topic, but rather in the fact that we are both so earnestly interested, so packed with vital feeling on the subject, that it is extremely difficult to condense into a few minutes talk what we would say, or to extract from the many lines of consideration the one that is best worthy our attention. That the work is of general interest, there is no denying, in a nation where one hundred millions of dollars are yearly spent in its behalf. It is said that no test of public interest, is after all so delicate as a financial one. What people pay for, for that they care. There is therefore no question that the people wish to educate the children in the best way. A late writer on political science has said, "Unhappy is that people, which leaves all the interests of education to the teachers by profession." Teaching is not only the work of those who are engaged in it as a profession, but it is the work of every one. And yet, after all our expenditure and personal sacrifice it is one of the sad things that one who turns to the pages of history finds that the very methods that our Boards of Directors are bringing forward to day, run back hundreds of years. In the days of Queen Elizabeth, Sir Roger Ascham put forth the same ideas that are coming just as slowly to the people now as if three hundred years ago a wise man had not advanced them. Still though slowly not less surely those very ideas that were once so restricted in their spread are being scattered far and wide now. But so broad is this question that no adequate consideration of it can follow a single line. We have for example the great question of what it is to educate, and as in the Constitution, they say, it is well that we frequently recur to the fundamental principles of Government, so in education it is well that we recur constantly to fundamental aims. Thousands of schools run year by year without that

recourse to those first principles which is absolutely essential to keep the important end in view. All we are trying to do for the child in its earlier years, when he is under the tutelage of his leaders, is so to train him as to make the most of the individual when he is grown up. This is a question affecting all living, and so we may well spend our whole afternoon in considering methods of training, mental, moral, physical. Industrial perhaps, also, as that question is now largely before the people. It seems to me that in our schools we have two sorts of atmospheres, and we are very careful now-a-days, or at least we ought to be, in regard to the atmosphere for the body. We are very anxious that that shall be pure, that there shall be no malarial influence; that the temperature shall be what it ought to be; and yet I think there is another atmosphere of just as great importance and that is the spiritual atmosphere. This atmosphere the teacher brings in with her. She brings it with her, for good or for harm. I am sure no question is of more delicate consideration than what is the influence of the teacher who enters the school-room in the position which gives her so large a control over the lives that are before her. In the school-room on Monday morning when the physical atmosphere has not been kept right over Sunday, the children are sent home. I wish when the spiritual temperature drops be. low the healthy level the children might be sent home too; I think they have a right to a perfectly pure mental, and moral atmosphere. This is not always secured. Annually we take very young teachers who enter over-wrought with the great responsibility of getting their work done, and the children feel the high pressure, and never get, in some schools into an atmosphere which is helpful and inspiriting. The teachers have yet to learn the lesson which Froebel gave us in his life, and eventuated in his beautiful system of Kindergartens. We all feel so much the great weight of responsibility of having the child do just what it ought to do, that we have not had time to let it grow. We hear often that men and women like to be Well I think little children like to be let alone and

let alone.

we cannot educate them wisely without studying their natures. We enter with our theories, we enter with our persistent determination, and back of us perhaps is the parent who says such a child did so much and such a child must do so much or die. He must do so much or the teacher is not a success. Back of the teacher is the parent, and back of the parent is the committee, and back of the committee is the community, and I speak to it as the power behind the throne. Unless you have a teacher of rare personal sense of obligation to the child your teacher is worthless. I wish I might induce you to make a requisition for that quiet, placid, beautiful atmosphere in which children would grow as naturally as plants and flowers grow. I incidentally referred to the Kindergarten and we have an immense lesson to learn from it. I have the greatest satisfaction in going now and then into the Kindergarten near my own home, and watching how much time the children have to think and to decide and to choose and to do those very things which seem so little when we watch the child doing them and yet which are so essential to the work of its life. The old idea that the child came into the school-room empty, and the teacher with the patent nostrums with which to fill it, is still too largely prevalent. Having conceived the idea that the child should have this medicine poured into it, the teacher often has the notion that the child should be very still while the process goes on, and so thinks one of her particular duties is to put her thumb on it and keep the effervescence down. In the Kindergarten we have altogether a different spirit. The Kindergartener in a sense, waits on the pupil. She recognizes that it has a mind to make up, and requires time to make it up, and that when it has decided for itself placidly and calmly, it is then in exactly the state for any quiet suggestion which is helpful. When I think of the discipline of our school-rooms I marvel that we have made so much of it in the way we have. When I consider that the teacher has all the advantages of years and of a mind which has been at work for a long time, and is therefore in an influential position; when I consider the authority

Why

of the position which she occupies, supported by the schoolboard and the community; it seems to me one of the most absurd things in the world, that she should be seeking for artificial methods of increasing her influence. A teacher once said to me, "I feel if I had a ruler to punish the children with, I should gain something in power." I said, "Is it possible that with all your advantage of position and years you still want physically to hurt the child?" And yet being young and inexperienced, she conceived that there was an immense potency in physical punishment. This view greatly underrates the mental influence which all thoroughly good teachers possess. I feel that the very advantage of position and years should make me careful in exercising any despotism of will and authority. We need to watch ourselves carefully that we do not wrongfully exercise our influence. I am often surprised at the fierceness of the contest between will and law in our school-rooms. should we not say of our school-rooms, as we say of our front door? No man expects to walk out in front of his door and have a contest with an intoxicated person, No, I have a right to quiet and order, and this man if he be offensive shall be removed by the proper guardians of the peace. He shall be properly cared for, till reason returns to him, but the community in the meantime must be simply and quictly protected. Why should not the school-room be protected in the same way? In Massachusetts we not only give a considerable sum, but we add books and paper and everything down to a slate pencil, as a free donation to the child. The school-room should be a place of quiet study, reasonably quiet, not abnormally quiet. I have a secret horror of abnormal stillness. I have not the slightest interest in one of those school-rooms in which somebody says, "You can hear a pin drop," as if the great business of life were to hear a pin drop. You want nothing of the sort. You want a quiet which means work, a regard for others rights, a kindly consideration of others. I think that is the limit of the quiet we want in our school-rooms; the quiet of industry, the same quiet that ten or twelve working men or