torch aloft and would fill the whole land with its effulgence. I have no words to fitly praise your exalted calling; I could not criticise it if I were worthy to do so. What I may properly say has probably occurred to most of you and has doubtless been seriously considered by each of you before this evening. If popular education is essential to the stability of our government, then the instructors of the land have resting upon them at this moment a great responsibility, for I need not tell you, as acute and observing citizens, that we are fast approaching, if we have not already approached, a crisis in our national existence. I allude, of course, to the prevalent contest between labor and capital. Pray do not suppose that I am going to hold you responsible for these disturbances, but the thought which occurred to me was that in your hands largely lay the corrective. The generation you now have in training will quickly step upon the stage. They should come to their share of the world's work not only mentally fitted to do it with success, but their moral natures should be braced, their love of country fully developed, and they should fully value and be prepared to resolutely preserve justice and public order. Two of the greatest instructors in Great Britain were Doctor Arnold and Doctor Birch. Two of the greatest in this country were Doctor Nott and Mark Hopkins. Their great distinction came not so much from the sound scholarship of their pupils, as from the sterling manhood and high character they imbued them withal. You might say that character is chiefly the result of home training. True, but it may be so supplemented by the teacher, that those most important elements of the true citizen, patriotism and respect for and obedience to law, shall not be wanting. Since the war that saved the country, unselfish patriotism as a science has fallen into neglect. A class of sudden millionaires, made so by chicanery and sharp practice, by overriding laws, by diverting and monopolizing the national resources, has made the people of the country either emulous to share its prosperity by aid of the same illicit means, or if not fitted for such an effort to become disaffected and rebellious and patent to the malign influences of foreign socialists. Of this foreign socialism, which threatens to poison our national life and blight our allegiance to our institutions, a recent French writer has said: [socialism] has become a kind of cosmopolitan religion. It oversteps frontiers, it obliterates race antipathies, and above all it eradicates patriotism and tries to efface the very idea of it. Fellow countrymen are enemies if they are employers; foreigners are brothers if they live by wages." That this is the effect of socialistic influence, recent events abundantly demonstrate. It is totally un-American and subversive of everything national which we have been accustomed to hold as sacred and essential. The treatment of this evil must be radical. The roots of this foreign, poisonous growth must be torn from our soil or it will choke and destroy our national life. After all, ladies and gentlemen, what is education if it is not the establishment of character? To what end do you produce bright scholars, if they do not also come from your forming and directing hand, good citizens as well? These new theories and ideas so seductive to the working people are false and fallacious. True instruction and enlightenment to the approaching generation, now at its receptive age, will be like Paris Green upon the curculio. It will destroy the next crop of eggs and the pest will go with it. It is a disease resulting in large part from our sudden and unexampled national prosperity. I have too much faith in my country to believe that it will be more than a temporary menace. But it may happen that by reason of it we as a nation may get very sick before we are well of it. You have the prophylactic in your hands, and as the cause of education is indissolubly welded with the cause of our national life, you should subserve and vindicate both by applying it diligently. Proceeding from the same source, viz.: too sudden and too great national prosperity, are other evils which address themselves, it seems to me, to your practical consideration. The complex and ornate methods of modern life have largely diminished the reverence for knowledge and learning merely as such. The practical education is now most sought after. A course at school is estimated more than ever at its money producing value. While this practical consideration should not be overlooked, while it is true, as Doctor Johnson said, that a man cannot be more innocently and justly employed than in the honest getting of money, and while it is furthermore true that one should acquire an education with reference to success at his real work in life, yet the notion of school training which leaves out of view the elevation of character along with the development of the mind, and thinks only how knowledge may be coined into cash, is a sordid and degrading notion. It will be a sad day for this republic, it will be the beginning of the end prophesied by its earliest enemies and by the enemies of human freedom and progress everywhere, when the words of the poet may be truly said of our nation "Plain living and high thinking are no more. It is well, of course, to consider how to best infiltrate grammar and geography into the adolescent mind, and how best to succeed in making arithmetic penetrate the obdurate skull without a surgical operation, but may you not also properly consider how grammar and arithmetic and geography once in may serve as a means of grace to their possessor? Whether you are imparting "the higher education" or whether it is a curriculum limited to the three R's, I pray you along with it try to provide for the transfer of the obedience, respect, and order of the school to the after life of the pupil as a citizen, so that with his fellows he may stand as a wall of adamant against arnachy, communism, and riot on the one hand, and the unjust aggressions of money on the other, vindicating in his life and conduct the supremacy of the law, without which nothing can ensure the peace and perpetuity of this republic. Ladies and gentlemen of the National Educational Association, I bid you heartily welcome to Topeka and to the State, and trust that your deliberations will be fruitful of great good to the rising generation and generations of Americans yet to rise, and that the Giver of all Good may bless and fructify your work to the healing and saving of the nation. Prof. P. J. Williams, of the State University of Kansas, in behalf of the Teachers of the State, welcomed the visitors as follows:Mr. President and Fellow Teachers: It is my pleasant privilege on behalf of the teachers of Kansas, to welcome you, and I assure you in the first place we propose to give you a warm welcome. There are two factors that enter into this problem of salutation. The one factor is, whom do we welcome? The other is, are we in a condition to welcome them? Let us speak very briefly of each. And who are these, our guests? They have come from all parts of our broad land. Whom do we see before us this evening? Not governors, not statesmen, not law makers, not physicians, not farmers, not Knights of Labor, but we see the trainers of thousands of good men and women. We see also those that make our homes. And if we could select an audience to welcome, above all others we would choose you. Ladies and gentlemen, we welcome you here to-night because there is a battle to be fought. There is a victory to be won. An infinitely greater battle than that of Gettysburg, of the Wilderness, of Yorktown, or of Waterloo. We have our convictions that the great battle to which I refer is to be fought here in the West; and 'we want to have a council of war, and you are the men and women whose counsel we want in the great exigency. Look at our history. It has been a history of earnest contention, and it is to be one to the end. There was a great prophet in the Eastone of the greatest scholars America has ever produced. This man said fifty years ago, with the spirit of prophesy upon him, "The great battle of the world is to be fought, not among the 350 millions of China, not among the 250 millions of India; it is not to be fought in the States of the Danube, in the Italian States, in the German States, in the New England States, or in any of the great Middle States, but the battle of the world is to be fought West of the Mississippi River.” We believe in prophets here, and hence we believe that this great battle is to be fought here on our plains. This battle is to be fought here because the world is here. Asia is here, Europe is here, and the States of America are here. It is here in the West where the soldiers for this war are to be prepared. They are to be prepared in every schoolhouse on our great plains. The speaker that preceded me spoke very truthfully about the foes we have to meet. He spoke about socialism, he spoke about nihilism, and he spoke about absolutism. These are our foes, and we are to meet them here. We want your advice; we want you in great earnestness to tell these teachers of our State how to prepare young men and young women for citizenship. The problem before you is, how can a great nation continue to become greater and greater and mount higher and higher as the ages move along, and not reproduce the terrible histories of the old world. GOVERNOR MARTIN:-The President of your Association, ladies and gentlemen, needs no introduction to you. He will respond to the address of welcome. I have the pleasure of presenting Professor Calkins, of New York. RESPONSE TO THE ADDRESSES OF WELCOME BY PRESIDENT N. A. CALKINS. To His Excellency, the Governor of Kansas: I thank you for the honor which your presence and your words of greeting have conferred upon the Association of educators now assembled at the capitol of this State. To the Hon. W. H. Rossington, who, in behalf of the State of Kansas, and of the city of Topeka, has extended the welcome of each to the National Educational Association, and To Prof. P. J. Williams, who, in behalf of the teachers of Kansas, has welcomed their fellow-laborers from all other states with fraternal greetings on this occasion, I thank you. I thank you in behalf of the National Educational Association for the hearty welcome which each of you has extended to us to-night. In behalf of those who have come hither from the New England and the other Atlantic states, and of those from the sunny South, and of those from the states of the great lakes and of the great plains,-in behalf of all those who have heard your earnest words of welcome, I thank you, and I thank those whom you represent, and assure you, each and all, that we cordially accept your welcome. We are assembled to-night to open the twenty-fifth meeting of the National Educational Association. The existence of this organization began on the banks of the Delaware, in the City of Brotherly love. Its earlier years have been passed east of the Mississippi River, only twice coming to its banks,-at St. Louis in 1871, at Minneapolis in 1875. To-day, for the first time in the history of the Association, having passed the broad valley of the Mississippi and crossed the Missouri River, it meets in the capital of this great state of the plains, near the geographical center of the Union, in the Garden City of the West, where the citizens and the soil have risen up to welcome us. We, who have come hither from the shores of the Atlantic, and from the cities and towns and hamlets all along the way to the Father of Waters, bring educational greetings from elder brothers and sisters to |