wer,--it is for this reason that the
"sloughs of despond" still have their function in our new attitude
toward drill.

But do not mistake me: I have no sympathy with that educational
"stand-pattism" that would multiply these needlessly, or fail to build
solid and comfortable highways across them wherever it is possible to do
so. I have no sympathy with that philosophy of education which approves
the placing of artificial barriers in the learner's path. But if I build
highways across the morasses, it is only that youth may the more readily
traverse the region and come the more quickly to the points where
struggle is absolutely necessary.

You remember in George Eliot's _Daniel Deronda_ the story of Gwendolen
Harleth. Gwendolen was a butterfly of society, a young woman in whose
childhood drill and discipline had found no place. In early womanhood,
she was, through family misfortune, thrown upon her own resources. In
casting about for some means of self-support her first recourse was to
music, for which she had some taste and in which she had had some
slight training. She sought out her old German music teacher, Klesmer,
and asked him what she might do to turn this taste and this training to
financial account. Klesmer's reply sums up in a nutshell the psychology
of skill:

"Any great achievement in acting or in music grows with the growth.
Whenever an artist has been able to say, 'I came, I saw, I
conquered,' it has been at the end of patient practice. Genius, at
first, is little more than a great capacity for receiving
discipline. Singing and acting, like the fine dexterity of the
juggler with his cup and balls, require a shaping of the organs
toward a finer and finer certainty of effect. Your muscles, your
whole frame, must go like a watch,--true, true, true, to a hair.
This is the work of the springtime of life before the habits have
been formed."

And I can formulate my own conception of the work of habit building in
education no better than by paraphrasing Klesmer's epigram. To increase
in our pupils the capacity to receive discipline; to show them, through
concrete example, over and over again, how persistence and effort and
concentration bring results that are worth while; to choose from their
own childish experiences the illustrations that will force this lesson
home; to supplement, from the stories of great achievements, those
illustrations which will inspire