and habits come from actions repeated, and actions come from motive, and motive comes from reflection. What makes people reflect? What is usually the meaning of reflection in man, woman and child at the present time? In this age of wide reading you won't question that this process is started very largely by reading. Follow the process the other way. Reading begets reflection, reflection begets motive, motive begets action, actions repeated beget habits and habits beget that supreme thing character. I believe profoundly that this education, to which most of us have given our lives, with its great aim in building char acter is dependent more and more on this question of reading, which must be shaped and guided chiefly through libraries. echo heartily every word that Inspector Williams has said, that it is altogether the most important work with which we have to deal. The library is today more than simply a collection of books. All these things just at the end of the century are in a state of unrest. The daily newspaper is publishing a weekly supplement on Sunday. Many of our weeklies are publishing a monthly magazine. The publishers of our magazines are also publishing books and in some instances, like the Anglo-Saxon, the magazine itself is a sumptuously bound volume. The whole matter is in the air and it is our privilege to live in a time when these things are being settled. I saw the other day in a little New York village a great bundle of newspapers come in for that community to read. I looked them over and found the whole package made up of what we know as yellow journals. Not one of our best or better or even mediocre journals could be seen in that package; and that is what the whole village was reading as its mental pabulum! I am an optimist, I am full of hope, I believe that the right will triumph, but when I see some of these things I sometimes feel inclined to steady myself somewhere with a good hold and say "I believe, help thou mine unbelief."

Dr Canfield spoke wisely and eloquently of the inspiration of the best books, and then we come face to face with ugly facts. Do you know that the majority of Americans can not read, do not read? Of course they read their business papers and ledgers and letters, but they have not learned to go to books for recreation even, much less for inspiration and information. A great many of them read the daily newspapers, but nothing else.

When people have really learned to read, to think other's thoughts, to live the life of the book, they find it the most fascinating amusement, the greatest source of new strength and happiness, and the last thing they would part with. They can read and meet the requirement of the illiteracy test. So also, the ability to keep from sinking by a wild struggle with arms and legs would entitle them to say they could swim, but how ridicu lous a figure they cut beside the real swimmer who can support himself for hours in the water or swim for miles and come out refreshed rather than exhausted. The simple truth must be faced. Most of these people have not yet learned to read in the broad and best sense of the words. You represent here the reading class preeminently; you associate with that class. You are less likely to appreciate how little others read. But how many of the men and women you know do not read a good book from month's end to month's end; read nothing but newspapers, and often those that do not represent the current history of the world brought out with dignity and power and ability, but the kind that magnifies what is petty and mean and sensual, that in our hearts we despise. Now really that is the great problem that confronts us when we are talking about reading, that so many people do not read at all, and that so many people choose their limited reading not from the world's best but from its worst. Reading is a mighty engine for good or ill. The boy or girl that reads is not necessarily improving his moral or intellectual life; he may be doing directly the opposite. It is the greatest problem with which we have to deal and the libraries and the schools together have to carry the responsibility. The modern library is no longer a mere collection of books. It is that accumulated wisdom and knowledge and inspiration of the past expressed very largely in books. But it covers also pictures, the work of study clubs, all those interests of which I have so often spoken to you that we know as "home education."

We must work together in all these things. The schools must give to their boys and girls a taste for reading, the libraries must supply the best. We must begin the work each one of us, not so much concerned with what we give them today if we know that they will read something better tomorrow. You who know how earnestly my life has been given to this question will:

understand how deeply I feel its importance. I want to urge that you think on these things, that you believe with a belief that shall lead to active work, so that we may make this state of New York, that has been a pioneer in so much connected with libraries and reading, the place in all the world where there is the highest average of good reading.

It is a great thing to have a library for information, it is a great thing to know and it is more to feel and to do, but above all to be and to believe, and you believe today that the thing that exerts the greatest influence on what men and women are and on what boys and girls are going to be as they grow older, is reading. To know, to feel and to do, but above all to be, these things are shaped chiefly by reading, which is therefore the chiefest concern of those who are giving their lives to education and the building of national and individual character.

Tuesday evening, 26 June

AMERICAN OPPORTUNITIES AND EDUCATION

BY HAMILTON W. MABIE

Education shares with religion, science, art and institutional life that general movement of change and expansion through growth which keeps it always fresh in our interest and foremost in our attention. There will always be a new education because there will always be a new perception, through vital experience, of the things which men need to know, and of the processes by which these fresh perceptions convert knowledge effectively into power. The time anxiously expected by those who are weary of change, when the lines of education shall be defined, the scope of education determined, and the methods of education finally settled, will come only when men have done with experience, with thinking and with action. So long as we are dealing with new conditions, so long as the pressure of the accumulated tendencies of the past are pushing us along new lines of development-to the very end of the historical process, we shall be revising our

ideas of education and reorganizing its methods. It is this which saves education from taking its place with the things which are complete because they are dead. It is this vital element in education, this necessity laid on us to modify in every decade its processes, which makes the dealing with educational matters itself an education, and gives the very process of teaching in all its forms pedagogic value.

Sooner or later every experience must disclose its value in vital education; if it has no educational value, it does not count. One of the chief uses of the crises through which individuals and nations are constantly passing is the light they throw on those organized ideas which constitute individual and national character. When a man is in the full tide of activity, putting forth his entire strength in the management of a great range of interests, neither he nor those who look at his career are aware at every moment of his interior aims; those ideas at the very center of his life which dominate him and shape his career among men. These ideas are concealed by the rush and sweep of his energy. In like manner, when national activity is running with tidal force and volume, those ideas which lie in the heart of the nation and which are organized into its political character are often invisible for long periods of time. No one thinks of them save the philosophical observer of life; the nation is not aware of them. But when this tremendous energy is arrested by some great crisis; when in mid career of action a nation's character is challenged by some searching experience, then the ideas which lie in its heart are suddenly struck into light. When these critical experiences come to a nation and call a halt in the midday of its activity, then suddenly the things which it believes in its heart rise into its consciousness and become clear to the whole world.

Now these fundamental ideas, these formative convictions which are the roots of character, are the deposit of education in its large sense. They are the product of that silent process by which institutions, inherited faiths, political traditions, formal training and physical circumstances are distilled into a few fixed habits, a few organizing ideas of life. The English-speaking races are holding their places and doing their work in the world today by virtue of their political education; they are everywhere the representatives of that full development of individuality, that

free play of personality, which involve definiteness of aim, concentration of will, courage adequate to all emergencies, and the power of standing alone, and if necessary, dying alone at the place where one's work is to be done. This is the reaction on character of a form of government and a body of political institutions which have constituted for many centuries a school of popular education; political in form, but vital in essence. This education has been the result of the working out of certain rational ideas, modified by physical surroundings and historical conditions. No attempt has ever yet been made on an adequate scale to definitely shape by educational processes the development of national character; that character is, nevertheless, the product of education, and that which is the product of education may be definitely modified by educational methods which shall be intentional and conscious rather than purely instinctive. It is a matter of secondary importance whether one political policy or another prevails. What happens to a man of strong character is always of less moment than that which happens within him; what happens to a powerful race is of little moment to that which happens within the race. If right and adequate ideas of life can be planted in the character of a people, their progress in any given decade may be advanced or retarded by the adoption or rejection of certain policies, but their destiny is determined, whatever policies are adopted or rejected.

The educational question is, therefore, in this large sense, always the first question; if it could be answered rightly other questions might almost be left to take care of themselves. Sound and adequate political education would do the work of a host of specific reforms. It is lack or imperfection of political education which makes it possible to practically arrest the workings of free institutions and to deprive the electors of any real control of government. A people live in those fundamental ideas which are implanted and developed by education, and it is education of this vital sort which determines national character, and therefore settles national destiny.

The life of a great people is both inward and outward. It is a life of the spirit, and it is a life of action; and the greatness of a race is determined by the depth and volume of its life in the spirit and the adequacy of its action to express that life. There is in