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splendidly conceived idea of the school city, that the movement for actual participation in government came to be established on a substantial and permanent basis.

It is to the school city in particular that your attention is invited, as being in many respects the best type of junior representative government for both schools and clubs, and as best illustrating our topic, "The Civic Idea in Work with Boys." Devised by Mr. Wilson L. Gill now living in Germantown, Pennsylvania, it has steadily made its way into hundreds of places in both hemispheres, and lately the Board of Education of Philadelphia has adopted it as an essential feature of school administration in that city, as indeed Cuba had done three years ago. Through the various departments and activities of this organization, the entire aim is to build up healthy civic ideals and to afford practice in carrying them out, and to effect this, the genius and resources both of pupils and faculty are taxed to the utmost. Summarizing, then, the underlying purposes of this politico-social educational organization, and noting that the educational principle involved throughout is, invariably, "learning by doing," we may say that it is admirably adapted— 1. To make boys and girls acquainted with the practical workings of the political machinery of representative government.

2. To train them in the actual use of the ballot as a means for really modifying their environment, thus establishing their confidence in and respect for this instrument for recording the popular will.

3. To develop the idea of social service and responsibility, as well as to inculcate a lofty civic spirit.

The theory of government and the complexity of administrative machinery cannot begin to be appreciated by our citizens unless they receive much practical training. Text-book study is astonishingly inadequate. Come face to face with any phase of political or governmental procedure, and see if it is an easy matter to describe step by step the modus operandi of carrying it into execution. It is small wonder that a population so inadequately trained as ours can be easily duped or its will thwarted and its ballot rendered powerless by unscrupulous politicians. It is not remarkable, either, that with many people confidence in the value of the ballot has been weakened. But let a generation or two of our young people come up through a system where day after day they find that their ballots do amount to something, and are continually modifying their environment, and they will not be so likely to say, when they reach the age of twenty-one, and are called on to participate in the government of the nation, "What is the use of voting? We can do nothing. It is all cut and dried for us, and everything predetermined by bosses and manipulators before we can get into the voting-booth."

THE BOY IN THE CITY

A COUNTRY SCHOOL AND CAMP FOR CITY BOYS

MR. EDWARD A. BENNER

PRINCIPAL WELLESLEY SCHOOL FOR BOYS, WELLESLEY, MASSACHUSETTS

In offering the present paper I wish to be understood as giving the results of my own experience, and I do not desire to appear as an advocate of a special plan of an education which, under other conditions and in other hands, might fail to realize as much good as the present instance may seem to indicate.

The Wellesley Camp was undertaken seven years ago, on Lake Wentworth, in New Hampshire, and is now permanently settled on the east shore of Ossipee Lake, in New Hampshire. Nowhere has nature a greater charm, nor anywhere are her features more inspiring than here where woods, a level expanse of water, the mountains and the plain, constitute the perfection of natural beauty and offer a permanent inspiration and joy to the mind. The contrast of such scenes with the dungeon life of the city is very impressive upon the mind of a boy. He never saw before, it may be, so wide a sky.

The Wellesley Camp has always required of the campers a certain amount of work. Life is reduced to simple elements. There we cannot press a button and have a machine do the rest. We do not think it well to have an Ethiopian in a white su't wait upon the whims of the boys. Under tactful and inspiring men, boys love to work, and the instances are rare in which they do not submit to it willingly. The rooms must be swept, the verandas kept clear, the grounds policed and improved, the wood cut and brought, water carried perhaps from the spring, vegetables prepared for the cook, tables waited upon, boats calked and painted, a flag-staff cut and trimmed. The Wellesley campers do all these things, and they like it.

In educating resourceful men, nothing has ever taken the place of the farm. We imitate it feebly in our sloyd schools, basketry, pyrography, arts and crafts devices; but it was nature and the farm that made the men. No system of heroic play like basket-ball or football can equally discipline the spirit. Men and boys grow strong by the submission of the soul to difficult and sometimes hateful labor. A camp and a school, too, if possible should so instruct boys that they would feel it a point of honor to attack any kind of necessary work. Does anybody remember Xenophon's story of the Anabasis, and the

joyous leadership of the Young Pretender? There is in it a passage that is fine for every boy to dig out of the Greek by himself It is where Cyrus's wagons stuck in the mud. When he saw the troops working too leisurely to extricate them, he turned as in rage, and commanded the proudest nobles about him to get the wagons out. Here, says Xenophon, was a chance to see discipline. Tearing off their splendid cloaks where each man stood, they hurled themselves in their rich garments down the incline as one would run for victory; and, leaping with their chains and bracelets into the mud, lifted and lugged the wagons out. That should be the spirit of our well-born and highbred American boys.

In all discussions of the deterioration of American citizenship through the immigration of undesirable foreigners, we are assured that our American ideals in education, business, and social life are able to assimilate and redeem this vast mass of strangers. Not American ideals alone, but change of climate and soil and the necessity of adapting themselves to new conditions so that they may earn a living, produce such a mighty renewal in these foreigners who come to us. Change of scene in the limits of our own country has done the same for the sons and daughters of the East, who have made their homes in the middle or far West. Any family or race, kept for many generations in the cradle of its origin, inevitably declines. Our own people are kept progressive and vital largely by the mingling of elements widely separated in locality and manners. A given brand of wheat or potatoes will yield satisfactory crops in a given locality for a series of years, and then the seed will run out. The same grain or tuber, transplanted to a different locality, will often produce beyond belief. The analogy is significant. Physicians employ the fact when they send sick people to California "for a change of air." But who realizes that the same change of air" may be of inestimable value to young persons during their period of growth?

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The chief result of the change physically seemed to be a great increase of vitality. They seemed more alive than when they came, abler to do things, more willing to attack a difficult labor. This improvement was especially marked in the case of one or two delicate boys. One, for example, was so frail that his mother had hardly permitted him to draw a deep breath, lest some injury should result. He became so rugged that after a few weeks he was able to dance up and down the five-mile climb of Chocorua, ten miles in all, like a mountain goat.

But the most significant result of this close contact with nature

is a moral one. The whole scheme seems to make the boys more serious and more manly. The appeal to justice and honor comes closer to them than it did before. To sit by a little camp-fire and view the immeasurable darkness around and above; to be within a forest where one might be lost; to see the spread of deep, engulfing water; to feel the vast solitude around, all these make a boy feel his insignificance, and nothing is better for a boy. Especially is this true of the city boy, who is too apt to consider himself the model and cynosure of the world.

The studies are arranged so that the afternoons can be given up to out-door occupation. Rowing or sailing with the masters, a great variety of excursions by boat or afoot, mountain-climbing, and occasional coaching trips, diversified by the various games on the playground, form the diversions of the boys. To build a camp-fire in a big stone oven, to cook potatoes in it, are among the supreme joys of boys 12 and 14 years old and under.

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The condition most favorable for study and for growth is the silence, and the absence of artificial distractions. In the wilderness of the great Ossipee there are no footlights and no kinematoscopes. The elevated no longer thunders its din into your ears, and the rare whistle of the locomotive is faint and far. No discord enters to mar the sweet sights and sounds of nature. The din and excitement of the city bear hard upon children, although they often appear to pass unnoticed by them.

The excitements of city life are indurating to the intellect and the disposition. No child can steadily do his best when subjected to their influence, and positive injury is likely to result unless relief and protection are afforded them.

The simple life is needed most of all by children to produce calmness of nerve and poise of character. The decisions of the mind are clearer amid simple conditions. The greatest hope of city-bred children is to give them deep drafts of country life; to engage their activities in the labors incident to it, and to give them free scope and encouragement in the observations and studies of nature.

THE JUVENILE CITY LEAGUE OF NEW YORK

MR. WILLIAM C. LANGDON

PRATT INSTITUTE, BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

The Juvenile City League is an organization of street-boys in New York City with the purpose of training them toward a true attitude of citizenship. It does this by getting them to look out for such simple matters in connection with the city departments as are appropriate for boys living in a city; for example, keeping their streets clean; the removal of dead cats and dogs; the waste of water at the faucets in the tenement hallway sinks; miscellaneous spitting; the proper separation and disposal of garbage, ashes, and rubbish.

The work was started in June, 1903, in a district of the West Side of the borough of Manhattan (New York proper). It originated with Miss Catherine S. Leverich, chairman of the Committee on Streets of the Woman's Municipal League of New York. She has raised the money for the work, and in fact has personally contributed most of it herself. The speaker has been in charge of the work as its director, having the assistance, at various times, of from one to four workers in each of the league's four districts.

Miss Leverich got her idea for the league from Colonel George E. Waring, who instituted clubs amongst the children of New York to interest and guide them in helping to keep the streets clean. The idea of the present league at the start was to revive these street-cleaning clubs with the development of enlarging the scope of the work to include matters concerning other city departments, the board of health, the department of tenement-houses, of water, of charities, as well as the department of street-cleaning. The question was, How can the boys of New York be brought to look at civic duties from the right point of view-that of doing them-and to feel that the city is a great home community and business firm, in which, when they reach the proper age, they will be partners; that, taken literally, they are to be members of the corporation of the city of New York. In answer, the Juvenile City League set itself to work out by experiment such a scheme of civic work for the boys of New York City as might be wholesome in character and adaptable to the varying conditions-local, financial, racial-of the different neighborhoods in all the five boroughs of Greater New York.

The athletic life is the boy's normal state of existence. The proper

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