because they cannot find anything else to do. They drift into the profession unprepared, and desultorily take up their duties; and they remain in the profession because they do not seem able to get out of it. They are the quasiteachers, the pseudo-schoolmasters, pedagogues by courtesy. But not every man who comes to teaching with no special preparation but an A.B. degree is doomed to be a pariah of the caste; were that so, where should I be, and many another? The obligation resting upon each teacher is that he should spend some of every working day and much of every play day in preparing, not the lesson of the day, but the subject he is teaching; not the subject either as a thing remote and apart, but the background of that subject, with all its multifarious lights and shades, its foreground and its background. Imagine the cheap, imitation drops against which some teachers are daily miming before their classes! The rich setting that ought to adorn their stage is, I fear, a thing that even the most ignorant pupil is quick to miss if it be not there. How can a man teach, with the enthusiasm and vitality that ought to mark all teaching, the deadly grind of English grammar if he be ignorant of Shakespeare's syntax or of Chaucer's quaint inflections? How can a Latin master hope to vitalize his paradigms if he be ignorant of Cicero and Catullus, of Ovid and Horace? How can the French master hope to raise from the dead a French irregular if he be ignorant of the magic touch of French literature from Montaigne to Rostand? Not one of these things may be mentioned in the day's "perpetual cycle of declensions, conjugations, syntaxes, and prosodies;" but the teacher knows that he knows, and the boy knows that the teacher knows or does not know-knows it through some kind of canine nostril sense-and there you have all the difference. But there are not many classes in which the rich treasuries of the teacher's background may not be rifled for the pupil's enrichment-and there, again, you have all the difference.

Nor does the teacher's obligation end with never-ceasing preparation of his subject. Lamb was right when he said that the schoolmaster must be superficially omniscient. He must know something of other subjects than his own. More than that, he must know much of professional technic. The history of education, the results of the study of child psychology, the recent develop ment in the science of pedagogy, should be his mental pabulum. The plea that the teacher has no time for many, perhaps for any, of these things is a natural rejoinder. The answer, I suppose, is that he seems to take time for many things that are less worth while. In so far as he does so, is he not confessing that he is only a teacher by sufferance, and that he is not so wholly and interestedly devoted to his profession as are most lawyers and physicians and

preachers to theirs? I hold the profession of teaching second to none of these. Should I, then, absolve the teacher from reading his professional literature when I should berate that physician who did not keep up with the latest practice in appendectomy? Should you employ a doctor who did not subscribe to and regularly read the "Medical Journal"? Should you employ a lawyer whom you knew to be ignorant of the latest principles of legal practice? Should you pay $1,000 a year to send your son to a school whose masters were ignorant of the best thought of ancient and modern authorities on how to do the thing you paid them to do; who were confessedly ignorant of those principles knowledge of which alone can qualify a man as an expert in the thing he undertakes to do? Teachers owe it to themselves, to their pupils, to their school, to their profession, to make of themselves skilled artisans, qualified to work in the materials they are set to fashion.

This stern regimen should be in no wise a damper to enthusiasm nor a lion in the path. It should be, and will be, to. every right-thinking teacher a challenge and an inspiration. If earnest and never-ceasing thirst for knowledge is not his, how can he, in all conscience, ever again speak word of reproof to dull, reluctant youth? Let him not, in any event, be hypocritical; let him not strive to cast out the mote from the student's astigmatic eye until he has first cast out the beam from his own purblind one.

May we not, then, summarize the whole matter of the obligation of the teacher, and do it simply and broadly? It is his duty to grow, and to become increasingly productive.

THE

Privileges and the Rewards. "Yes," says the disgruntled schoolmaster, "it is a rare privilege to 'have a boy at your board, in your path, in all your movements; to be boy-rid, sick of perpetual boy.' It is a privilege, indeed, to live a life of killing routine, the bodyslave of bells, the servile minion of monotony. It is a privilege to be the hired man of an autocratic principal,' seldom praised, often blamed, and in danger each year of summary or of polite dismissal. It is a privilege, I suppose, to grub for a pittance and die in a poorhouse, content to accept my final reward in heaven, since none has been vouchsafed me here."

Now, every one of these plaints is literally true; and yet I quarrel with the schoolmaster who makes them, for the very reason that in the making he has deliberately classified himself in that group of pedagogues described by Lamb and sneered at by the critics. Unless the schoolmaster can magnify his joys and minimize his sorrows, play a strong crescendo on the theme of his privileges and rewards and soft-pedal his misfortunes-unless he can do these things in a spirit of essential optimism, he might as well part company with his pupils and, like poor old Mr. Mell, fold up his

flute and steal out into the night. But any right-minded teacher will maximize his, blessings, and a count of these will certainly be a long one.

In the first place, ours (and here, you see, I adopt the first person) is a consecrated profession. We are set apart for a great and a notable work. We should never for a moment forget this fact; its fundamental character is too obvious. We are priests before the altar-fires of childhood and youth, and it is ours to see that the incense burned is fragrant and that it is not offered up to Baal or Dagon. Some may object to the Levitical character of the figure; they can hardly object, however, to the fundamental truth of the imagery. I have long remembered and often repeated what a high school teacher said .to me when I was a boy: "The profession of teaching is more important than the profession of preaching; the teacher forms, the preacher reforms. When the time shall have come that the teacher does his work as it should be done, the preacher will have left him little or nothing to do." I place first, therefore, among the amenities of our profession this sense of satisfaction that comes (or ought to come) from the realization of the importance of the work we have to do. There is no greater work, for it is work upon the foundations of human society. To vary the figure, we are preparing the soil, planting the seed, cultivating the growing plant. Without us there could be no harvest, no reaping and gathering into barns, no food for the nourishing of human society, no onward progress in the strength of that nourishment. Let every teacher, then-not in conceit, but in humility-remember the importance of his work, and take comfort therein.

Closely analogous to my first point is my second: we are active in a profession whose work is the most widely discussed of any in the world to-day. As I remarked earlier, whatever the contempt in which the pedagogue is held, there is a generally popular conception of the dignity and worth of education. This popular conception is fostered by the widest possible publicity given by press, forum, and pulpit. From these sources come discussions of education in its wider aspects; from our own multifarious journals, pamphlets, and papers come discussions of education in its narrower aspects-method, technic, proce dure. It is generally felt, both in and out of the profession, that education is the largest single problem with which the world wrestles to-day; that it is the cure for all national ills and the panacea for world sickness. There is prevalent, too, the feeling that we are on the threshold of new discoveries in educational method; that there will burst a great and sudden light which will illumine the whole field; that there will be turned up the philosopher's stone, which shall transmute all educational endeavor into the gold of intellectualism. To live and to work in the midst of this universal glow is worth something; to

be active in a profession dealing with problems acknowledged SO great is surely rich compensation in itself.

In the third place, it is given us, if we choose to embrace the opportunity, to contribute to that universal discussion which has made the problem of education the most talked of problem in the world. We are able to write papers for this or that learned (or quasilearned) society; to compose diatribes to be read at clubs; to edit a book or deliver an address; to kick up a little dust in the world, and watch it settle on quite inoffensive and indifferent people, who are thus made aware of our existence; to exhibit our bit of ego, in other words, in such a way as to stir our pride, soothe our vanity, and heal our wounds. The President of the United States can really get no more out of his activities than we out of oursand I fancy he works much. harder than we to get what he gets in the way of egotistical satisfactions.

L

ET us progress, then, to my fourth of the schoolmaster's amenities: he works in an unusually congenial atmosphere. Boys and girls are good fun, after all, and a man's colleagues in most good schools are men and women of parts. The least attractive of us has something of social grace; the most stupid has something of intellectual interest. We are, moreover, at work as a unit on a common problem, and that a fascinating one. There is esprit de corps among us. We like one another, despite occasional bickerings; and we trust one another, despite occasional interdepartmental jealousies. Let us not underrate the value of this congenial atmosphere when we come to list our assets and liabilities as teachers.

We may regard, in the next place, our good fortune in being out of the uncongenial atmosphere of modern industrial life. The world is money-mad. It is filled with the inane strife and senseless racket of money-grubbing and moneygrabbing. And money was never before so eagerly sought as an end in itself, not as a means to an end. The fortune is the thing, not the durable satisfactions of life which money may, when rightly spent, assist in buying. When I left my home in the Middle West eighteen years ago, I left a city of 20,000 people whose paramount characteristic was simple tastes and simple pleasures. When I go back now, I find a city of 70,000 people; a city grimy with factory smoke, reeking with gasoline fumes, a city aping metropolitan ways and seeking metropolitan pleasures. A few of the simple old friends remain; but many have grown rich, and with their riches have purchased the cheap pleasures which only the rich can buy. It is on the occasions of these visits that I am glad to be poor, glad to have preserved the old simple tastes, glad to be a teacher.

This, then, is my sixth of the amenities: the fact that we are compelled to

cultivate simple tastes and to find our pleasures in the simple but real satisfactions of life. We may be poor in this world's goods, but we are rich in the moral and spiritual benefits that necessarily accrue from that very poverty. We do not have to be constantly reminding ourselves that happiness is not a purchasable commodity, but comes from within, out of the rich fullness of heart and soul. That is a truism which we daily accept because of its personal demonstration in our lives. We are spared the classic plaint of poor old Bridget Elia. "I wish the good old times would come again," she said, "when we were not quite so rich. . . . A purchase is but a purchase now that you have money enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph. . . . A thing was worth buying then, when we felt the money that we paid for it. ... There was pleasure in eating strawberries before they became quite common. . . . What treat can we have now?" As teachers, our treasures are of the heart, our pleasures are of the mind. We are rich indeed.

Akin to the last is another substantial benefit that is ours. We are constantly under the goad to live cleanly, constantly under strong moral pressure to be our best, for we are constantly under the fiercest scrutiny as examples for the young. "This makes for hypocrisy," you say. I can only enter my strong denial. This fact prompts the right kind of teacher not so much to cover his faults in hypocritical fashion as to strive to make his real self square with his outward bearing. Such an impulse, long continued, is bound to bear fruit in better impulses, nobler aspirations. Let us be grateful, as we summarize our blessings, that we are spared some of the moral pitfalls so prevalent in business and in many of the professions.

Another, perhaps one of the greatest, of our advantages is that we are conscious of intellectual growth in the very prosecution of our professional duties. Those of my friends who have any intellectual interests at all are constantly reminding me of my conspicuous advantage over them. I live in an atmosphere of books; but they, if they are to acquire any bookishness whatever, must snatch a moment here and a moment there as a pittance of time is allowed them from the treadmill of their daily occupation. Perhaps teachers are, as the critic quoted says, "diluters and retailers of the ideas of their superiors." But this should prove no very great stigma, after all. The infant takes his cow's milk diluted when he is weaned; and surely this same critic himself would not advocate feeding an adolescent on "Prejudices, First and Second Series." The point here is that, while we may constantly be stooping to inferior minds in our class-rooms, we are constantly too in the presence of our superiors, whose ideas we "dilute and retail." Ours is a profession which lives, through books, with the great minds of every age. We

do lead intellectual lives-or at least we may. I understand fully, therefore, the tone of envy that is heard from every one of my old business friends who comes to visit me: "If only I could live in an atmosphere such as surrounds you!"

Not only do we find intellectual growth in the pursuit of our profession, but also do we find a large part of every year ours to do with as we please-to study, to travel, to grow. The poorest teacher in the world is rich in time. "The cost of a thing," says Thoreau, "is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, imme diately or in the long run." And Robert Louis Stevenson adds: "The price we have to pay for money is paid in liberty." If liberty be the great human medium of exchange, the gold standard of human values, then are we rich indeed, for of liberty we have more than four full months every year-a third of every twelvemonth. How pitiful seems the "two weeks off" of the usual young man of business! How inadequate the month to which he treats himself when he has achieved some measure of independence! We are millionaires-in time. It is only a question as to how we squander our patrimony. But if we will, we can use it to purchase the best that life has to offer.

I

HAVE come to my last point-and the most important. It is this: We are in our daily tasks at work with the most valuable of all materials set to men's hands for fashioning, and it is, of all materials, the most plastic. We may sometimes doubt the plastic character of our raw material, but it is clay to the potter's hand nevertheless. We do fashion lives. We do accomplish things with human souls. This is the prime privilege, the chief reward, in one. I have elsewhere said that "work with boys is at once the most inspiring and the most discouraging of labors. In no other profession do results come so slowly or seem so uncertain; in no other field of labor does fruitage seem so long deferred." But the fruitage does come, and come in ways that are often past our comprehension. We curse day by day the sievelike memories of our pupils, and as we continue to pour we wonder if anything is ever going to stick. But who can estimate how much remains or of what kind? I had the pertinence of this query borne in on me some weeks ago when a friend was telling me in simple and undramatic fashion of the recent death of his only daughter, a girl of eighteen. She knew she was to die that day, and just before dawn sent for each of the members of the family to say good-by. To her older brother, nearly twice. her age, she said: "You have been the best brother in the world. You never even scolded me when I turned over your type." Her allusion was not clear to those about the bedside until they remembered that when the girl was a child of three she had, in mere mischievousness, turned over a

full font of type which her brother had just been distributing. He patiently picked up the type and redistributed them, with no word of reproof to the child. Through all the fifteen years that had elapsed no mention of this incident had ever been made; it was nearly forgotten. But the girl of eighteen remembered it on her deathbed as one of the salient impressions of her whole life; and on that incident of her babyhood hung the sum total of her impressions of her brother.

The fruitage of our work, though many times long deferred, is real.

Definite satisfactions come to teachers who see their old pupils, perhaps many, perhaps few, but always some, taking a real part on the stage of the world's affairs. The teacher's name is not blazoned in electric bulbs as producer or manager before the theater of the pupil's achievements; but the teacher is conscious of being in the wings, somewhere behind the footlights. Something of the drama he prepared is being enacted there upon the stage, and he is satisfied not to be under the spotlight. He is content, with Milton, to remember that

Fame is no plant that grows on mor

tal soil,

Nor in the glistering foil

Set off to the world, nor in broad rumor lies,

But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes

And perfect witness of all-judging Jove;

As he pronounces lastly on each deed, Of so much fame in heaven expect

thy meed.

The teacher, the true teacher, is willing to work and to wait. The teacher, the true teacher, knows the worth of what he is doing, and is content.

ment of all serious disputes by voluntary arbitration. His speech was more or less of the "cross of service" variety. His plea for good wages was based on the declaration that labor was entitled to good wages, but was at the same time under obligation to do an honest full day's work. The labor leader was just as emphatic that the employer must do the square thing. He must play fair with both the worker and the public.

Half an hour later we were seated in the smoking compartment of a Pullman car bound from Harrisburg to Philadelphia. Mr. Voll looked me over and said:

"Mr. Rogers, I agree with a great deal of your speech. We have most of the fundamental principles you talked of in our organization. We have industrial representation. That is, each shop has its own committee to deal with the management. The business agent exists, but his power for autocratic practice is curbed. I will explain to you, a little later on, why and how. This shop committee, composed of workmen inside the factory, takes up all grievances arising with the management. If, however, they fail to agree after thrashing the matter out thoroughly, the International President of the union is called in. He settles about ninety per cent of the disputes that he is requested to adjudicate. If, however, the management and the President are unable to arrive at an agreement, the President temporarily makes a decision in the matter and the dispute is carried before the sessions of the Final Wage Conference. In other words, in the glass bottle industry, composed of nearly 10,000 workers and many manufacturers both large and small, we have an arbitration committee that has functioned for a great many years.

"This arbitration board is composed of about ten union leaders who are selected at the Glass Bottle Blowers Workers' annual Convention and the same number of manufacturers who are appointed by the Chairman of the National Bottle Manufacturers' Association.

We have this annual arbitration conference to settle all disputes instead of resorting to strikes, and for the last twenty years we have not had one generally affecting the industry.

"The twenty members that meet at this general conference select a chairman. We have always, by unanimous approval, selected the Chairman of the Manufacturers' Association for that position. The decisions have always been fair. Many times when the conference would deadlock we have called on the Chairman to hand down a decision, and it has practically always been favorable to us. In fact, I think it always has been-but our industry is organized on a basis whereby there is no loose talk on either side. When we get to our general conference, every statement made is a statement of sincerity, and the party making the statement, whether he represents the employers or employees, finds out where he stands before he makes it. Several times delegates of both workers and manufacturers have made statements in the final wage conference that were not based on fact. They were quickly eliminated from the picture, and, as a result, we have no rash statements made by either side in our industry.

"Now I'll explain what I mean by the 'curbing' of the business agent. The shop committee, or direct representation between the committee of workmen and the manufacturer, does not eliminate the business agent as an official, but it does place him in a position where he cannot call men out; it also places him in a position where he cannot make a misstatement regarding the worker to the employer or the employer to the worker. His hand would be immediately 'called' if he did. It has not curbed him in his legitimate authority. Grievances between the men and management are adjudicated by the workmen's committee and the management, instead of the business agent being the sole arbiter between the men and the management. The workmen's committee, the business agent, and the management, naturally, have got to predicate their contentions on facts, because they know that, in event of a dispute, the case is reviewed by the final arbitration board, and if either side has made any misstatements they are going to be brought to light and the offending parties are not only censured but quickly lose their established position. Therefore we have had harmony in our industry because we have established a relationship that engenders both confidence and respect and compels conservative deliberation."

By this time I was doubly interested in the organization Mr. Voll represented. Here was a union and a manufacturers' association working on a basis where the prosperity of the industry was the first consideration and where the prosperity of both the worker and the company was not jeopardized by hasty, illconsidered, or ill-informed action by either side. Here was an arbitration

board set up for an entire industry which brought the possibility of a strike to a negligible minimum.

There was a very interesting story told about one of the recent conventions. Concessions had been asked by the manufacturers of the union.

The wage conference arbitration board had been in session for a week. Nothing had been accomplished. The leaders of both sides were on "feather edge." They were irascible and unconciliatory. Finally, on Saturday night, several of the delegates had their transportation engaged. A motion was made that the conference adjourn, which would mean that anything might happen in the interim. The manufacturers' organization might break up; open shop might be declared or disintegration of the workers' organization might take place. Yet, in the face of this, both sides in their distraught mental condition were unable to reach a compromise. A manufacturer proposed a resolution to adjourn. The resolution was seconded.

At this juncture another manufacturer arose and said:

"Gentlemen, my conscience would bother me a great deal if we were to adjourn this conference in this manner. We are not so far apart but what we can agree on a solution. Our nerves are all on edge. I propose that we adjourn the meeting for the day and meet again next Monday morning. That will give us all of to-night, to-morrow, and tomorrow night to think this matter over. We will meet Monday morning feeling different than we do now. I don't think we have a moral right to bring this conference to a close without coming to some agreement on the question involved."

His proposal was accepted. The meeting adjourned and the men left for their respective hotels. Monday morning, when the session was resumed, it took only a very few moments for the board to reach an amicable adjustment.

The most noteworthy feature of this permanent, annual arbitration conference is the fact that both sides speak their hearts out. They are cool, clear, and each side puts up a strong argument. They leave nothing unsaid, but the fact that they must tell the truth places a ban on unnecessary misunderstanding.

M

The relationship that has been established in the glass bottle industry means a great deal to me. It settles one of the contentions that have been brought to my attention rather forcibly during the last two years by union labor leaders. These leaders have pointed out that industrial representation should work just as successfully under union conditions as under conditions where men were not unionized. I have always agreed with them, but I could not find a place where they had it in operationthat is, where closed-shop conditions existed. I know of several labor organizations that practically work on an open-shop basis with committee representation and it is successful, but here

it works out in both an efficient and successful manner under closed-shop rules.

I have for several years bitterly opposed the czarlike authority vested by many local unions in the business agent or "walking delegate." He has been able to keep the employer and employee from understanding each other. Providing that he was mentally dishonest. it was very easy for him to make a lot of rash, untruthful statements to the workmen, because they would have no way of learning the truth. But in the case of the glass bottle industry the contact established between the office and the shop prevents the business agent from making false statements to the men about the employer and vice versa.

If the American Federation of Labor would apply this same system all over the country, about nine-tenths of public prejudice would be immediately eliminated. If they had industrial representation as the basic principle of adjudicating shop troubles, with an arbitration board to settle cases that the management and men could not settle, the workers would at once gain the confidence and sympathy of the public, and there is no employer big enough to ignore, at the present time, an adverse public sentiment.

The remarkable part of the glass bottle workers' arbitration conference is in the fact that the minutes of the meetings are published by the union and distributed broadcast among their membership. This gives every worker in the industry a chance to realize the difficulties confronting the employers; knowing this, they base their wage agreements and working conditions on facts instead of some agitator's imagination. In other words, the glass bottle workers have a thorough knowledge of the industry, and therefore have no illusions about criminal profits on the part of the employer. A wonderful result is only natural. There is no body of workmen in America where the efficiency is greater than in the glass bottle industry. Men work because they know why they must work. They know the amount of work they must do to give themselves a decent wage.

The glass bottle worker has three protections: First, he is immune from I. W. W. doctrines-he knows better because he knows the truth. Second, he has confidence in his wage schedules because he understands the conditions existing throughout the industry that he is engaged in. Third, he is satisfied because he knows that his employer cannot take advantage of him, even if he wants to. In other words, he knows he can get justice without striking for it; therefore he is not thinking about a strike.

The glass bottle manufacturers and workers have made a great step in the direction of peace and progress in industry. They recognize the most important factor in industrial relations by realizing that "the rights of one citizen end where those of another begin."