children there, but there is one phase of the question which was not touched
on in Miss Davies' paper that I would like to speak of, and that is the
influence which the children themselves have in the homes in which they are
placed. The criticism is sometimes made that the work of the state school
is not of a religious nature; that, being a state institution, we cannot in-
fluence the children along religious lines. We are, however, making an ef-
fort to teach the children along that line, and I think successfully. In order
to show something of the work which the school has done and its influence
over the children I want to relate a little incident which came to our notice
a short time ago. A little child was taken by a family living not far from
Owatonna, who had made no profession of active Christianity, yet who
were good, moral people and who desired to be known in a broad sense as
Christian people. This was a small child. When she went into the home,
at the first meal the first thing the child did was to fold her little hands
and bow her head and wait a moment for grace to be said by her new
papa. Not noticing the action of the child, he went on with his effort to
serve the food at the table, and in a moment she looked up and said, "Talk,
papa, talk." Not understanding the child fully, he continued with his work,
and she, with folded hands, dropped her head and waited a moment; and
as he did not respond, she looked up and showed her little hands and said,
"Talk, papa; say something." This had effect enough upon him to cause
him to cease his work, and he dropped his knife and fork and waited a
moment, and again she folded her little hands and, dropping her head, re-
peated a little form of grace which she had learned. They thought the mat-
ter over and it caused them a good deal of anxiety; they talked it over to-
gether between themselves and after a little while they concluded that it
was only right that this child should have the teaching and training they
could give it in establishing religious worship. In a short time the practice
of saying grace at the table was established in that family; a little later
family worship was established, and I am glad to say that the report comes
to us from a sister of the lady that the whole family have now become ac-
tive members of the church and are known as good Christian people in the
neighborhood.

This phase of the question, of course, does not always appear, and yet I think that in a great many instances the influence of the child in the home is very beneficial. I have known instances where people who had no particular love for children have taken a child into their home, and the taking of that child built up in them a very strong affection for not only this particular child they had taken, but for other children, also, and the result of the placing of that child with these people and arousing within them parental influence and love for that child has induced them to labor with other people in the neighborhood and thus secure for us a number of other good homes in that neighborhood.

HON. JOHN W. WILLIS, St. Paul: Mr. President, I am very glad to hear a concession of the principle, often disputed, that religious education is absolutely necessary to the formation of a character useful to society and beneficial to the state. I am delighted to hear it from the representative of an institution which must, under our law, be absolutely colorless so far as religion is concerned, because the State of Minnesota cannot undertake to teach even the fact that there is a God, cannot undertake even to teach the fact that Christ died for the salvation of mankind. And yet, in a transgression of that principle (which, under the circumstances, can be tolerated; because these non-sectarian institutions would perish unless they did transgress the principle), the state public school teaches that there is a God, that there is a system of redemption, and that there is a moral law underlying the universe, and therein and thereby only does that school succeed.

Now, a great deal has been said this morning about the salvation of the child through purely mechanical methods, through statutes, through the organization of societies to prevent children from entering saloons, through restraints that must operate solely through physical force. The great way to save the children is to build up the character, to fortify the child with principles, and until you have religious education for every child in America

4

your state will not be safe, your society will not be on the highway toward preservation. The salvation of the state depends upon the salvation of the child; the salvation of the child depends upon a religious education.

Now, let me call your attention, Mr. President, to a very practical example of the proposition which I advance, one which will not offend any sectarian impulse that may arise in any breast, because there is no representative here of any religious system that can criticise or look askance upon the great Jewish race of which I am to speak. I desire to place before this conference for the attentive consideration of every member the fact that you may search through the penitentiaries of the United States and hardly find a Jew within their walls. The commissioners, trustees and managers of workhouses will tell you that it is only at the rarest intervals, and in the smallest numbers that Hebrews enter within the walls of those institutions. Search the poorhouses of the country, from end to end-go from Massachusetts to Alabama, from Alabama to Texas, and from Texas to California and back again, and you will not find a single Hebrew; or if, peradventure, you find one, he will be an exception so glittering and so conspicuous as to prove beyond question the proposition which I am advancing. The Jew does not commit crime. He is not a pauper. He is not a disorderly person in the community. And when you range up in all their ghastly array the prostitutes of the country you find no Jewish women among them.

Now, why is this, Mr. President? Why is it? Why does the so-called Christian world bow in reverence before the superior morality and social instinct of the Hebrew? It is, sir, simply because back of that race lies a principle of morality which has been fundamentally inculcated, which has been wrought into the very nature of the child, and which renders the adult obedient not only to racial instincts, but to the principles which were incalculated in childhood. And, therefore, against all these propositions of physical restraint, against all these propositions to engraft more statutes upon our statute books, I raise my voice in a plea for an extension of the principles of education and religious education, the inculcation of principle as opposed to physical force, and the elevation of society and the salvation of the state through spreading abroad those great dogmas which lie at the basis of human salvation in society and human salvation in the world to come. [Applause.]

MR. SMALLWOOD, Minneapolis: Mr. Chairman, I think I might correct Judge Willis in one respect especially, the fact that there are no Hebrew or Jew paupers. In my experience of eleven years I have come across a good many Jew paupers. In Minneapolis, two of the worst families we have are paupers and Jews. In almost every city there are Hebrew societies for the care of the Hebrew poor, and a careful study of the question will reveal the fact that there are Hebrew paupers, else there would not be such Hebrew societies. I also correct the statement that there are no Hebrew prostitutes. In my own experience I have come across a number of Hebrew prostitutes.

MR. WILLIS: Now, Mr. Chairman, I insist that I am correct, and I should like very much to have the proof furnished for these statements. I will also venture the assertion that the Hebrew paupers of whom my friend speaks are persons who have recently arrived in this country and have been cast upon our shores as exiles from Russia, a country where they have been persecuted to an intolerable degree, where they were first taken from their farms and compelled to go into the villages, and then expelled from the villages to other districts, and finally hurled upon the shores of America, absolutely penniless. And I also challenge any contradiction of this statement which I now proceed to make: that, even though by some chance exception, the Jew may be a pauper, he does not remain so long. He speedily becomes self-supporting and independent. And as for the statement in regard to Jewish prostitutes, I beg to call as witnesses all the great authorities upon the subject of sociology the world over.

MR. SMALLWOOD: Judge Willis can have the proof as to the existence of Jewish paupers by coming to my office in Minneapolis. As to the existence of Jewish prostitutes, I cannot furnish proof, and can only offer Judge Willis my word.

MR. W. A. GATES, St. Paul: Mr. President, I think that this last topic is the most important one that we have had to consider in this conference. The prevention of crime, or the prevention of poverty, by the saving of the child is a subject that ought to appeal to every person. It was unquestionably that idea that led our former secretary, Mr. Hart, to give up his broader work in this state and take the narrower field of child saving. And how is the child going to be saved except through a system of education? The home is all right, it does its part, but we cannot reach the home and improve it to the extent that we can the child, if we get hold of him. We have heard considerable about heredity taints, and so forth, but I do not believe there is as much in heredity as there is in environment and education. There are many things which we lay to heredity that are really the result of bad environment at home. But if the child can be reached, and if he can be properly educated and managed until he reaches manhood, in many instances we will have saved him to a life of useful citizenship; and the key-note, it seems to me, in any system of education to save these children whom we are talking about, is a system of industrial training, a system that all our towns and cities ought to have. We are spending thousands of dollars in St. Paul and Minneapolis to give to the smaller class of children a higher education, when that money ought first to be spent to educate the larger class in industrial work. We are educating in our high schools in the large cities those who, in many instances, are able to go to college or to the state university, or to some other school of higher learning, while we are neglecting that industrial training which ought to be given to every child. Now, we have some industrial training in St. Paul. We have a manual training high school, but what is it? The children get no industrial training until they have passed through all the common school course. Instead of introducing the Sloyd system or some other system of industrial training in the lower grades, the children have to go without it until they reach the upper grades. The same is true in Minneapolis. Theoretically, they have had the Sloyd system in the lower grades in Minneapolis. I know they haven't it now. • Why? It was suspended a few years ago on account of the hard times. Was the high school suspended? Was there a thing cut out of the high school course to save expense there? No.

MR. FOLWELL: They cut out Greek.

MR. GATES: Good! I didn't know that, but they did cut out this system of Sloyd which was taught in the primary grade of the public schools. Now, I believe that a true system of education is a system which gives the children in the lower grades manual training. Commence in the beginning and give the child an opportunity to develop his whole nature, his industrial nature, his hand, his eye; they need developing as much as his mind; and perhaps by the time the child has reached the sixth or seventh grade his future possibilities may be determined and the line of his future life may be mapped out. In order to do this, he must be developed on all sides, on the industrial as well as the mental. I have seen, in my experience as a teacher, children that could not be held in the public schools at all when they had a pure system of studying books, but who could be held there without any trouble in regard to truancy, when they were put in a manual training department, or put where they were taught, a portion of the time, the use of tools.

Now, there is another reason for this. There are many trades in the country that to-day limit apprenticeship through the trades unions. A boy wants to learn the plumber's trade, but he cannot do it until he gets permission from a trades union to be an apprentice. Almost every trade wishes to limit the number of people who take it up and follow it. Now, I don't believe in that system. I believe that the schools, in a large measure, should prepare these children so that when they are ready to go out they do not have to ask permission of a labor union to study a given trade, or to be an apprentice to a given trade, but they can go out ready to take up that work, I wish to say this in reference to the manual training school in St. Paul. I know of one boy who went out from that school and went into the wood

carving department of a furniture manufactory and was pronounced by the proprietor to be better than the older men that he had in his employ. I know of another boy who went into a factory in New York City. He was taken directly from here, and never had any experience except what he got in the manual training school; and the superintendent of that factory told me himself, after he had been there a year, that he had made great progress, that he was one of the most valuable men they had, and he is not yet twenty-one. Now, that is merely in the manual training department. That is only one department. But the boy does not go into that until he has reached the age to enter high school. This training does not come down and reach the great mass of the children, those whom it especially ought to reach; it ought to go down to the bottom and take these boys and girls when they start going to school, and not only give them industrial training, but also teach them a better way of living. The old school system as it has existed heretofore, educated into them wants without giving them the power to supply those wants. That was the cause of the failure of the early education of the negro of the South, and it was not a success until Booker Washington and some others inaugurated schools down there that taught the negro as he went on in education how to do something to supply the wants that his education had put into him. And when we reach down into the lower classes and get those who are the sons and daughters of parents who come over here from foreign countries, we must take them and give them the power to acquire the means of satisfying the wants which we educate into them. Don't send them through our schools and turn them out giving them a taste of a higher life, and yet not educating them into a single power which will enable them to satisfy that life. We can only do it, I say, by this system of training. If we wish to get a true system let us cut off, if necessary-I say, if necessary-the higher education and give proper attention to the lower education. Why does the state educate, if it is not to make citizenship? Why should not the state devote its money first to educating the great mass and making them true citizens, instead of using its money to give the few a higher education? I say, get down, and when we do this then I think the money of the state will be better expended than it is now; and if we have something left then, let us devote it to the higher education. But the masses should be educated first and the select few afterwards. [Applause.]

THE ELIMINATION OF CRIME BY CHILD-TRAINING.

BY MRS. HENRY C. MARSHALL, DULUTH.

If I seem to take a purely utilitarian view of child-training and to disregard those higher attributes of the child the development of which we are accustomed to consider, the chief aim of education, I must ask you to remember that the child's physical and economic well being must be secured to him before any advance can be made along the line of higher development. I would not seem for a moment to underestimate the value of higher education, but I am considering the training of the child entirely from the point of view of social efficiency. I need not remind you that social efficiency implies moral and spiritual growth as well as physical and industrial.

A careful study of the new thought on education both at home and abroad shows that the whole trend is toward a more thorough training in practical things. It has been found that the child's mind is injured and the development arrested when it is too early brought into contact with abstract ideas that are related to nothing in its experience. A reaction has set in in

favor of leading the child by gradual steps from the known to the unknown by the use of his natural faculties. 'By play, by manual work, by experiment and investigation, the modern educator follows nature's method in reaching the inner citadel of the child's mind. When we urge the kindergarten, manual training and the industrial schools as the training which reaches the need of the poor most directly, we are not speaking for class education, but are recognizing a scientific principle upon which all modern education is based.

There is such unity of aim and purpose on this subject that it gives us a common starting place.

The modern idea of education is the outgrowth of the knowledge of the value and importance of every individual in the state. With this democratic idea of individuality has arisen the idea of social solidarity, and we realize as never before that we are all members of one body, healthy or diseased in proportion to the health of the whole body.

Two generations ago, before the tide of immigration set in from the old world, we congratulated ourselves that we had no pauper class and no socalled social problems. We were to a large extent an agricultural people, with comfortable living secured to every honest and industrious workman. The ignorance and pauperism of the old world were still remote from our civilization. Our public school system had secured us the class of citizens which made the life of the young republic strong and wholesome. Men of intelligence and adaptability were bred on our farms and in our shops. Women still possessed the knowledge of domestic science that had been handed down to them by mothers and grandmothers who had been dependent upon their own skill of head and hand before new inventions came to make and unmake the modern housewife. But there came a time when the overflowing misery of the old world began to knock at our doors for admission. This came at a time when there was an impulse toward expansion within our country; new industries and new lands were opening up, and we gladly welcomed these workers from without. They came by the thousands and hundreds of thousands, bringing their burden of old age and incapables with them, and in their arms and at their sides a host of little children upon whom the misery and the poverty of their past had already cast its shadow. They were for the most part untrained and unskilled, were hewers of wood and drawers of water, but they furnished the physical strength that enabled us to complete the conquest of the new world.

Soon subtle social and economic changes began to be felt among us. We found that our city population was growing out of all proportions to our country population. There was a tendency for the least capable of these immigrants to stay within the city limits. The massing together of great numbers of these foreigners under new conditions lowered the scale of living in our cities. Our system of government could not extend rapidly enough to bring these new citizens into proper relations with their new surroundings. We had no provision for their proper housing, sanitation or education. The children, of course, suffered most from this condition, and began to show the evil influence of tenement-house, street education and saloon environment. Every town produced its share of young criminals and vagrants among the boys and girls.