ecognize the one great law of her being,--the law
of progression.

II Social Change

How well does this principle of change apply to the organization of
society! The absolute monarchy of one age yields to the semi-democracy
of the next. Yesterday the church itself traded in men's
bodies,--holding slaves, and accepting, without question, the proceeds
of slavery. To-day machines replace men in a thousand industries.
To-morrow slavery is called into question, until in the dim-glowering
nineteenth century, men will struggle and die by tens of thousands;--on
the one side, those who believe that the man should be the slave; on the
other, those who hold that the slavery of the machine is alone necessary
and just. Thus is every social institution altered from age to age. Thus
is effected that transformation which men have chosen to call progress.

How profoundly does this truth apply to the raw material of
education,--the children who enroll in the schools! Under your very eyes
they lose their childish ways, feel their steps along the precipice of
adolescence, enter the wonderland of imagery and idealism, and pass on
into the maturity of life. How vain is our hope that the child may
remain a child; how worthless our prayer that adult life shall never lay
her heavy burden of cares and responsibilities upon his beloved
shoulders. Even while you raise your hands in supplication, the child
has passed from your life forever, leaving naught save a man to confront
you.

From these mighty scythe strokes which change sweeps across the meadows
of time, naught is exempt. The petals fall from the fairest flower; the
bluest sky becomes overcast; the greatest feats of history are
surpassed; and the social machinery, adequate for the needs of one age,
sinks into the insignificance of desuetude in the age which follows.
Thus does the inevitable come to pass. Thus does the social institution,
wrought through centuries of turmoil and anguish, become useless in the
newer civilization which is arising on every hand. The educational
system in its inception was well founded, but the changes of time
invalidate the original idea. Yesterday the school fulfilled the needs
of men. To-day it fails to meet a situation which reshapes itself with
each rising and each setting of the sun.

Each epoch must have its institutions. With the work of the past as a
background, the present must constantly reshape the institutions which
the past has bequeathed