more valuable to him, doing better work and receiving more compensation. In response to the natural inquiry as to what progress a child can make after she has once bound a book, the instructor will immediately explain that this elementary course has taught only forwarding. The finishing of a book offers unlimited opportunity for advanced courses which might extend into the high school. All that a pupil has learned about drawing and design could be directly applied to making a suitable pattern for the cover. These more advanced stages of cover designing and "tooling" of the leather, as the tracery of line and gilding are called, may be developed indefinitely. Advanced pupils could learn to repair and rebind school-books and thus help to turn back to the school part of what they have already learned at public expense. The mending and cleaning of old books, the guarding of fine illustrations, could be taught more advanced classes. Such work as that has a commercial value, for there is a demand for experts, especially in library work. An enormous amount of this repairing and cleaning is done in such places as the Congressional Library. In the few months these girls have been at work they have developed a new feeling of reverence for books. The girl who thoughtlessly dropped her schoolbooks on the floor during the first months of the course now handles them with care and respect. Many of the girls love the work so that they want to continue next year, and several girls have bound extra books for the sheer joy of it. These are but hints of a growth of spirit finer than the mere training of fingers to make something marketable. Whether or not bookbinding ever becomes widely adopted by educators in public schools, the work of the classes at Haverhill is rich in suggestion as well as craftsmanlike in achievement. 880 TWILIGHT BY MARY BALDWIN Crested waves and a long gray beach Twilight falling on tide and foam, On a little pool left by the spendthrift sea Down in the west are the far ships gone, The deeps of the night and the sounding sea,-- TWO LEADERS IN THE NEW T RECONSTRUCTION HERE is but one way of destroying the spirit of sectionalism: it is by the slow process of education. The men who have been engaged in combating that ugly spirit, therefore, are in the truest sense educators. Among these men there are none whose services have been more conspicuous than Mr. Robert C. Ogden and Mr. George Foster Peabody. Mr. Ogden was seventy years old in June. His birthday was made the occasion of special observance by many notable people. Mr. Peabody has recently retired from business, in order to devote himself to his philanthropic undertakings. These two men have been leaders in the real period of Reconstruction. The era which bears that name in American history was really one of misunderstanding and alienation. Whether alienation and misunderstanding after so desperate a struggle as that of the Civil War could have been avoided by the exercise of the highest statesmanship is a question that does not bear upon this point. Whether it was due to the perverse folly of smallminded men or to the irresistible force of circumstances, the product of the period immediately following, the war was, in part at least, a long-enduring bitterness. On the part of Southerners it has taken the form of resentment, aroused, not by the war itself, but by what they regarded as the oppressive misgovernment of conquerors after the war; on the part of Northerners it has taken the form of suspicious repugnance for people whom they believed to be trying to preserve the substance of slavery. The task of restoring mutual confidence between the people of the sections has been a long one; but it has been undertaken by men who do not shrink from a task because it is either long or hard. In the educational movement of the South these men saw their opportunity. One of the foremost leaders in that movement, the late Dr. J. L. M. Curry, a Southerner proud of the South's history and traditions, said, "Ignorance is a cure for nothing," and that may be said to be the motto of those who have sought to restore the unity of the country. To dispel ignorance has meant with them to scatter the whole brood of prejudices. The new period of Reconstruction has thus been one of education, and though its manifestations have been chiefly in the South, its results have extended to the whole Nation. This is why the Conference for Education in the South has been of National significance. It has stimulated the building of school-houses, the enactment of compulsory education laws, the increase of school taxes, and the endowment of educational institutions. But it has done even greater service than this. It has given the real leaders of the South a platform from which they could speak to the North as well as to the South; it has afforded Southerners and Northerners a chance to co-operate in a common enterprise; it has directed the attention of the Nation to the specially difficult problems of the South; and it has been the channel through which the South has communicated to the North some needed lessons in education. Of the Southern leaders in this Conference The Outlook has heretofore had occasion to speak. It is under their guidance that the Conference has been developed. Such men as the late Dr. Hill, of Georgia, Dr. Alderman, of the University of Virginia, Dr. McIver, of North Carolina, and Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy, of Alabama, have shaped its course. The place of Mr. Ogden in the movement, however, has been distinctive. For at least part of the time the only Northerner among its officers, he has for several years taken to each annual Conference as his guests a large number of Northern people. An invitation to join this company is like a summons to perform some high public of the ruling people of the South. It is a fact that a good many Northern people, otherwise well informed, have lived in practical ignorance of their Southern countrymen. They have known of them only through the medium of the press and the speeches of politicians. Now they have become acquainted with them in their homes. They have engaged with them in a common enterprise, and they have found that they are intrinsically like themselves, governed by the same motives, and applying to different conditions of life much the same standards. Some of these Northern visitors have frankly acknowledged that their eyes have been opened. These journeys, in the second place, have given to Northerners a glimpse of an educational movement very different from anything of the sort that they have seen in the North. They have heard there very little of methods, of pedagogy, of intellectual principles in education; instead they have heard pleas, almost impassioned, for the right of children to an education, arguments for compulsory education, triumphant accounts of success in educational propaganda, tales of waves of popular opinion and feeling on behalf of education like the stories of religious revivals. It has been like living for a few days in the midst of the Renaissance. It has been to them an awakening to the value of education, especially of public education, which they had never before rightly estimated. In the third place, these journeys have enabled them to see how a country in the midst of an industrial revolution, as the South is still, has been forced to search out anew the fundamentals of education, which are likely to be forgotten in a region industrially more stable; and they have learned not only to have a new respect for the making of character by the training of the hands, but have come to realize that the South, by having to re-examine the whole process of education for itself, had discovered much which it could justifiably proffer to its complacent neighbor to the North. If this Conference has been in no small degree a Conference for the Education of Northerners in the South, it is largely due to Mr. Robert C. Ogden. While Mr. Ogden, a Northerner, has many of the qualities that are commonly considered characteristic of the South, Mr. George Foster Peabody, a native of Georgia, has some of the characteristics for which the Puritan has been praised. If he can be said to have a trait more conspicuous than others, it is that of an uncompromising intellectual sincerity in seeking moral ends. He is a democrat in both the political and generic senses of the word. In his democracy he is as unwilling to compromise as in his devotion to humanity he is unflagging. Like Mr. Ogden, he has been an important member of the Conferences in the South. His mental attitude, not altogether unlike that of the anti-slavery reformers, and his Southern birth and Southern associations put him into an almost unique relation with both South and North. His philanthropy is of the type that is concerned with the intellectual and moral welfare of men, and his benefactions have thus been directed largely toward education and religion. Mr. Peabody is a loyal and candid churchman. These two, the one a merchant, the other a banker, are examples of that fine type of men who, in a commercial age, engaged in commercial pursuits, infuse their whole activity with idealism. We have heard much lately in the press of the sort of rich man whose standards are those of the gambler or the peddler, and whose interest in society is limited by his desire to make as much out of society as possible. We have heard also much of the sort of man who attempts to express his pride of country, of section, or of race in terms of contempt for others. In contrast with both these types stand Mr. Ogden and Mr. Peabody, who value wealth for the service it can render, and whose activities are nourished by faith in man, a hope for human future, and a love that is not stayed even by degradation and ignorance. |