by the annual growth in mind, morals, health, physique, ability, and
knowledge, all taken together. Instead of seeking soft, ready-made
places near home, such education impels to the frontier, to strike out
new careers, to start at the bottom and rise by merit, beginning so
low that every change must be a rise. Wherever youth thus trained are
thrown, they land like a cat on all-fours and are armed _cap-a-pie_
for the struggle of life. Agriculture, manufacture, and commerce are
the bases of national prosperity; and on them all professions,
institutions, and even culture, are more and more dependent, while the
old ideals of mere study and brain-work are fast becoming obsolete. We
really retain only the knowledge we apply. We should get up interest
in new processes like that of a naturalist in new species. Those who
leave school at any age or stage should be best fitted to take up
their life work instead of leaving unfitted for it, aimless and
discouraged. Instead of dropping out limp and disheartened, we should
train "struggle-for-lifeurs," in Daudet's phrase, and that betimes, so
that the young come back to it not too late for securing the best
benefits, after having wasted the years best fitted for it in
profitless studies or in the hard school of failure. By such methods
many of our flabby, undeveloped, anemic, easy-living city youth would
be regenerated in body and spirit. Some of the now oldest, richest,
and most famous schools of the world were at first established by
charity for poor boys who worked their way, and such institutions have
an undreamed-of future. No others so well fit for a life of
respectable and successful muscle work, and perhaps this should be
central for all at this stage. This diversity of training develops the
muscular activities rendered necessary by man's early development,
which were so largely concerned with food, shelter, clothing, making
and selling commodities necessary for life, comfort and safety. The
natural state of man is not war, hot peace; and perhaps Dawson[4] is