to take the step beyond seeing and memorizing to doing,—­the step, as Emerson says, “out of a chalk circle of imbecility into fruitfulness.”  Emerson carried this doctrine right on into mature life.  He taught that nature arms each man with some faculty, large or small, which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other, and thus makes him necessary to society; and that this faculty should determine the man’s career.  The advocates of the elective system have insisted that its results were advantageous for society as a whole, as well as for the individual.  Emerson put this argument in a nutshell at least fifty years ago:  “Society can never prosper, but must always be bankrupt, until every man does that which he was created to do.”

Education used to be given almost exclusively through books.  In recent years there has come in another sort of education through tools, machines, gardens, drawings, casts, and pictures.  Manual training, shop-work, sloyd, and gardening have come into use for the school ages; the teaching of trades has been admitted to some public school systems; and, in general, the use of the hands and eyes in productive labor has been recognized as having good educational effects.  The education of men by manual labor was a favorite doctrine with Emerson.  He had fully developed it as early as 1837, and he frequently recurred to it afterwards.  In December of that year, in a course of lectures on Human Culture, he devoted one lecture to The Hands.  He saw clearly that manual labor might be made to develop not only good mental qualities, but good moral qualities.  To-day, it is frequently necessary for practical teachers, who are urging measures of improvement, to point this out, and to say, just as Emerson said two generations ago, that any falseness in mechanical work immediately appears; that a teacher can judge of the moral quality of each boy in the class before him better and sooner from manual work than from book-work.  Emerson taught that manual labor is the study of the external world; that the use of manual labor never grows obsolete, and is inapplicable to no person.  He said explicitly that “a man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture”; that there is not only health, but education in garden work; that when a man gets sugar, hominy, cotton, buckets, crockery ware, and letter paper by simply signing his name to a cheque, it is the producers and carriers of these articles that have got the education they yield, he only the commodity; and that labor is God’s education.  This was Emerson’s doctrine more than sixty years ago.  It is only ten years since the Mechanic Arts High School was opened in Boston.

We are all of us aware that within the last twenty years there has been a determined movement of the American people toward the cultivation of art, and toward the public provision of objects which open the sense of beauty and increase public enjoyment.  It is curious to see how literally Emerson prophesied the actual direction of these efforts:—­