Finally, my life is not so unprofitable financially as some believe. Forced to save at the beginning of my career, I formed a habit of saving, and with the help of my family organized an economic home, supplied rather by the spirit of service than by the magic lamp that gives its bounty only after a rub. That rub I escape, unlike my friend, the accountant, who can abide neither chickens nor corn, but must support a car, a dog and a bed of roses, each of which requires infinite care. Wild-flowers and a few shrubs that can stand our climate without being wrapt in burlap and straw, supply my horticultural demands, and my farm helps to suppress the everlasting high cost of living. Thus, altho my house has been in order only a decade-I fear to tell it, lest I seem to some too vulgar, to others too simple-I could die today leaving my family the $16,000, and $10,000 of life insurance money, that the National Education Association's committee suggested was beyond the ability of the average teacher to leave. That is, on a salary that has averaged but $116 a month and an additional income from public-speaking, tutoring, real estate investments amounting to not more than $500 a year, I have been able to fulfil the expectations of a recent writer who wonders why nine out of ten men are dependent on others after their sixtieth year, in spite of their knowledge that a dollar a year saved will amount to $13.21 in ten years or nearly $70 in thirty years. I see no reason why in another ten years I should not possess more of lucre besides more happiness than the stock broker of our city whose excited plunges on the board of trade in thirty years netted his wife and children $15,000.

I rejoice that in the midst of the grind of school work, in the midst of home cares, even the hauling of dressing upon the garden that nourishes my family so well, in the midst of church work of various kinds and community enterprises, I have been able to read something besides magazines, to take a master's degree and to write, if only for my own edification. Finally, I am glad that in the midst of the hurly-burly of life, I still find time to teach boys and girls.

E. DUDLEY PARSONS

MINNEAPOLIS, MINN.

VI

MILTON'S VIEWS ON EDUCATION, THEIR PRESENT

SIGNIFICANCE AND VALUE 1

To Master Samuel Hartlib, a German gentleman of Polish extraction who resided in England during the Revolution, the people of his adopted land were deeply indebted, not only for his efforts to advance piety, learning and morality in the schools, but also for his practical contributions in the field of agricultural and industrial reform. His friendship was sought after and appreciated by some of the most illustrious of his contemporaries, both at home and abroad, and it was due to him that the writings of the Moravian reformer Comenius were introduced into England. The variety of his interests and the generosity of his nature, the latter illustrated by the liberality of his gifts to the poor scholars of the day, which sometimes reduced him to actual want, would have saved his name from oblivion, but later generations have cherished his memory mainly because it was thru his influence that John Milton in 1644 was persuaded to write out his views on education which, published in the same year as the Areopagitica, might very well serve as a sort of preface to the better-known essay. Thru them both runs the same compelling purpose. The tractate on education of hardly a dozen pages expresses no less than his splendid Speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing, his unswerving faith in the efficacy of free thought and free speech. In them both he pleads for "the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience." In them both he makes freedom based upon willing obedience to the moral law the undergirding principle of principle of individual rectitude and national integrity.

' President's Address delivered before the meeting of the Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools of the Southern States at Atlanta, Ga., November 15, 1917.

The tractate, like most of his prose pamphlets, was at protest-Milton was ever a protestant—in this case a protest against the prevailing methods of education, which, instead of offering nourishing food to the young, too frequently placed before them only "an asinine feast of sow-thistles and brambles." But the tractate was more than a protest. It was a declaration of Milton's faith in the power of education "to principle the minds of men in virtue, the only genuine source of political and individual liberty, the only true safeguard of states, the bulwark of their prosperity and renown." Such he himself declared in the autobiographic section of the Second defense of the English people, written some ten years later, to be the specific purpose he had in mind in its composition. It, therefore, falls naturally into its appropriate place in the cycle of his more important prose writings, for like them it revolves about the great central conception of responsible liberty, which is the controlling passion of his soul.

When Milton composed his essay he was already famous as a poet and scholar and was in all probability the most cultured man in England, if not in Europe. His scholarship embraced an intimate and an exact knowledge of the languages and literatures of both ancient and modern times, and he counted among his friends and acquaintances some of the most eminent scholars, statesmen and writers of the Continent. His patriotism had already been severely tested. In Italy at the outbreak of the Civil War, he had promptly broken off his journey and returned to England because he thought it base to be traveling for amusement abroad while his fellow citizens were fighting for liberty at home. Nor was he without experience in dealing with the practical problems of the classroom. For some years after his return. from abroad, he conducted a small school for boys, first in Aldergate Street and later in Barbican Street. But his wide scholarship and his varied experiences, first as a scholar and student in St. Paul's and the University, and later as a teacher in his own school, did not save his views on educational matters from severe arraignment. Even to some of

our modern students of education, the tractate is still a block of stumbling. The scheme of instruction proposed, they say, is impracticable, the course of study impossible and the goal of achievement utterly beyond the range of any group of students less precocious than a whole college of Miltons. His critics are right. The demands he proposed to make upon the energy of his youthful scholars, if literally carried out, were simply stupendous. The modern languages, Italian for example, he casually suggests might readily be picked up at any odd moments, and after the pupils have once mastered the elements of Latin and Greek there is no reason, he thinks, why they should not utilize their Sundays by learning Hebrew and the Syriac and Chaldee dialects. Geometry was to be studied as a sort of pleasant game between the masters and the scholars, and a knowledge of the physical sciences including agriculture, architecture, navigation and astronomy, was to be obtained thru Latin textbooks. It is not surprizing that a recent writer in one of the standard encyclopedias refuses to believe that Milton could have been a successful teacher, and frankly declares that his excursion into the field of education is only another example of the truth that it is not much use putting Pegasus into harness. This writer, however, should not be too severely criticized; he was only following in the footsteps of the great Dr. Samuel Johnson, himself the most noted schoolmaster in English letters after Milton, who exprest doubts about the results of this "wonder-working academy" from whose walls, so far as he knew, there had never proceeded any man eminent for knowledge. But Dr. Johnson was a High-Churchman and a loyalist and was hardly prepared to do justice to the champion of the Independents who praised Cromwell and defended the regicides.

But these are not the only charges, nor the most serious ones, that might be brought against the famous essay if one were inclined to measure its shortcomings by modern. standards and ideals. The students for whom Milton planned his scheme of education were the sons, and sons only, of gentle and noble parentage. The needs of the

opposite sex did not come within the scope of his discussion, and he had not caught the vision splendid of our modern democratic conception of public education which offers equal opportunity to all without distinction of sex or social position. But the very limitations of Milton's vision added to the intensity of his convictions. He had dedicated himself, soul and body, to the advancement of the principles of the Revolution and the establishment of the Commonwealth. His eyesight itself was not too precious a sacrifice for the altar of his country. He had cheerfully laid aside his "garland and singing robes" and for long years had purposely postponed the composition of his masterpiece, in order that he might perform the "lowliest duties" in behalf of his native land. The tractate is a leaf torn from his own experience and its characters are written in his heart's best blood. A brief analysis of it will show how keenly he appreciated some of the deeper problems of education and how essential he felt their proper solution was to the realization of the high ideals of citizenship which he ever exemplified in his own life and consistently taught his countrymen both by precept and example.

In the very foreground of his discourse he declares that the true aim of all educational effort is to train the man and the citizen. Not learning, not scholarship, not intellectual supremacy—as highly as he appreciated these things of themselves-but manhood in its noblest reaches is to be the high argument of his thought and the chief goal of his endeavors. In language that is couched in the theological phraseology of the day, he declares that the end of all learning is “to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love Him, to imitate Him, to be like Him, as we may the nearest, by possessing our souls of true virtue, which, being united to the heavenly grace of faith, makes up the highest perfection." The poet who was to invoke as the inspiration of his immortal epic a divinity no less exalted than the heavenly muse herself was not willing to place the foundation stone of his temple of learning on any less secure basis than the