eat, at the other, are making serious inroads
upon the health and well-being of the population.

The Chancellor, von
Bethmann-Hollweg, speaking in the Reichstag February 11, 1911, said:
"The fear that we may not be working along the right lines in the
education of our youth is a cause of great anxiety to many people in
Germany. We shall not solve this problem by shunning it!"

Many social
economists hold that higher education is unfitting numbers of young
men from following the humbler pursuits, while at the same time it is
not making them as efficient as are their ambitions; and such men are
recognized as the most potent chemical in making the milk of human
kindness to turn sour. At a meeting of the Goethebund this year,
advocating school reform, it was evident that many intelligent men in
Germany were not satisfied with present methods of education, which
were characterized as wasting energy in mechanical methods of
teaching, and so robbing youth of its youth. It is beginning to be
understood in Germany, as it has been understood by wise men in all
ages, that "to spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them
too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their
rules is the humour of the scholar." This commentary of Bacon should
be on the walls of every school and university in Germany. An
education can do nothing more for a man than to make him less fearful
of what he does not know, and to save him from the vulgarity of being
pre-empted wholly by the present, because he knows something of the
past. You cannot educate a man to be a poet or a preacher or a
pianist; that we know. We are only just discovering that the much-lauded
technical education will not make him an engineer or a
shipbuilder or an architect. You may give him the tools and the
elementary rules, but the rest he must do himself. Nine-tenths of the
technically educated men to-day are working for men who were liberally
educated, or who educated themselves. Germany is producing a race of
first-rate clerks and skilled mechanics, who are working hard to
enrich the Jews.

In America, it is true, we have gone ahead along
educational lines. In 1800, it is said, the average adult American had
82 days of school attendance; in 1900, 146 days. In the last quarter
of a century our secondary schools have increased in number from 1,400
to 12,000; and during the last eighteen years the proportion of our
youth receiving high-school instruct