responsibility for a single child rests upon us, we are not an
unimportant part. Society must reckon with you and me perhaps in an
infinitesimal degree, but it must reckon with the institution which we
represent as it reckons with no other institution that it has reared to
subserve its needs.

In a certain sense these statements are platitudes. We have repeated
them over and over again until the words have lost their tremendous
significance. And it behooves us now and again to revive the old
substance in a new form,--to come afresh to a self-consciousness of our
function. It is not good for any man to hold a debased and inferior
opinion of himself or of his work, and in the field of schoolcraft it is
easy to fall into this self-depreciating habit of thought. We cannot
hope that the general public will ever come to view our work in the true
perspective that I have very briefly outlined. It would probably not be
wise to promulgate publicly so pronounced an affirmation of our
function and of our worth. The popular mind must think in concrete
details rather than in comprehensive principles, when the subject of
thought is a specialized vocation. You and I have crude ideas, no doubt,
of the lawyer's function, of the physician's function, of the
clergyman's function. Not less crude are their ideas of our function.
Even when they patronize us by saying that our work is the noblest that
any man or woman would engage in, they have but a vague and shadowy
perception of its real significance. I doubt not that, with the majority
of those who thus pat us verbally upon the back, the words that they use
are words only. They do not envy us our privileges,--unless it is our
summer vacations,--nor do they encourage their sons to enter service in
our craft. The popular mind--the nontechnical mind,--must work in the
concrete;--it must have visible evidences of power and influence before
it pays homage to a man or to an institution.