has made the teacher more
expert, contribute, to a surprising degree, to increased interest in the
class.

EGERTON RYERSON

One of the objects of instruction in civics is to create in the pupils
ideals of citizenship that may influence their conduct in after life.
The most powerful agency to use for this object is the life of some
useful and patriotic citizen who gave his talents and energy to the
bettering of his country. In using biography for this purpose the pupils
should be given only such facts as they can comprehend, and these facts
should be made as real, vivid, and interesting as possible by
appropriate personal details and concrete description. The following
sketch may serve as an example:

Dr. Ryerson, in speaking of his birth and parentage, said:

I was born on March 24th, 1803, in the township of Charlotteville,
near the village of Vittoria, in the then London district, now the
County of Norfolk. My father had been an officer in the British
army during the American Revolution, being a volunteer in the
Prince of Wales' Regiment of New Jersey, of which place he was a
native. His forefathers were from Holland, and his more remote
ancestors were from Denmark. At the close of the American
revolutionary war, he, with many others of the same class, went to
New Brunswick, where he married my mother, whose maiden name was
Stickney, a descendant of one of the early Massachusetts Puritan
settlers. Near the close of the last century, my father with his
family followed an elder brother to Canada, where he drew some
2,500 acres of land from the Government for his services in the
army, besides his pension.

Ryerson's mother had a very strong influence over him. She was a very
religious woman with a great love for her children, and from her Egerton
learned lessons that never ceased to influence him. After telling how
she treated him when he had done something naughty, he says that "though
thoughtless and full of playful mischief, I never afterwards knowingly
grieved my mother, or gave her other than respectful and kind words."

The whole family had to work hard at clearing the land and farming it.
Before he was twenty-one years of age he "had ploughed every acre of
ground for the season, cradled every stalk of wheat, rye, and oats, and
mowed every spear of grass, pitched the whole first on a wagon, and
then from the wagon to the haymow or stack