tude of the politicians on and off the platform, has meant an insidious growth of local self-complacency, itself the greatest obstacle to the logical and necessary development of the school." Such were the words of Professor Edward C. Elliott, of the University of Wisconsin.

"If we want to get more out of the schools," said Superintendent Fairchild, "we must put more into them. We can never have the best rural schools until we have aroused public interest in them." To secure public interest, organized interest and help from outside the rural districts themselves must be secured to create conditions which will develop and foster a new community spirit. Parents and teachers must be brought together to discuss matters of common interest, and the school must become the great social centre where recreation and culture for the whole

community go hand in hand. "Agencies now devoting time and money to social uplift should be invited and urged to join in an effort to investigate thoroughly rural school conditions, to propose remedies, to direct public attention, to suggest remedial legislation. Withal, there must be a nation-wide campaign of publicity and organized help."

The United States Commissioner of Education, Philander P. Claxton, in an address on America's Most Important Unsolved Education Problems, said, "The greatest question with which the American educator has to deal to-day is the rural school. We have been helping the schools everywhere, except in the country, where our best and greatest men and women were born, reared, and educated. But the time has come when the rural schools must be looked after, and for this reason I am going to ask Congress to make a special appropriation of $40,000 with which to carry on an investigation of their needs. When the faults have been discovered, it will be easy, I believe, to find a remedy. There are in the United States more than 6,000,000 men and women who can neither read nor write. Democracy without universal intelligence of a high order is only the prelude to a comedy, a tragedy, or to both. Hence the great question with us is to educate all our people."

COST OF ELEMENTARY AND HIGH-SCHOOL EDUCATION. Superintendent E. O. Holland, of Louisville, Ky.,

spoke of the increased cost of elementary education, owing to the two facts (a) that most of the special types of schools established within recent years care for elementary children and therefore the funds for them are taken from the elementary budget, and (b) that the compulsory education laws have brought about a larger enrolment in the grades. While he believed that no city in the country was spending too much on its elementary schools, he raised the question whether some are not spending relatively too much on their high schools. He instanced, in support of his question, the recent study made by Doctor Updegraff, of the Bureau of Education, of the expenses of the school systems of cities of 30,000 and over, which shows that the median city of the 103 listed shows an expenditure of $2.16 per pupil upon its high schools for every dollar spent in the education of the elementary school child, while some of the cities listed spent as much as $2.60 per high school child as against every dollar spent on the child in the grades. A city that pays its kindergarten teachers as much as, but no more than, its cooks receive," said Superintendent William E. Chancellor of Norwalk, Conn., "displays its contempt for the school idea. . . . A city of 100,000 that pays its superintendent less than the ordinary bank cashier is paid, simply and clearly displays therein its contempt for education. Among other important criteria of efficiency are the actual salaries paid the educational persons. Unlike the salaries of janitors, these are mainly matters of sentiment, not of demand and supply. Cities that pay the highest salaries thereby show their affection for their schools. Here is another striking instance in which the efficiency of the city school system is both cause and effect."

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CHAPTER XIII

MEETINGS (Continued).

The International Congress on Hygiene and
Demography.

THE fifteenth meeting of this Congress, but the first held in America, met in Washington, D. C., during the week beginning September 23. Among the more than 2000 delegates were men with international reputations on questions involving the safeguarding of health. A number of important discoveries which show the activity and painstaking effort of medical men were announced at the meeting. According to Guy E. Mitchell, in an article in the Review of Reviews for November, these discoveries" should give a mighty impetus to the rapidly growing movement for better sanitary conditions, bringing about a better popular understanding of hygienic principles, and accomplish a standardization of hygienic methods throughout the world." The importance of wide-spread health knowledge and health practice was emphasized by Doctor Frederick Zahn, of Munich, Germany. He referred to the health and vigor of a nation as its best capital-the kind of capital that yields the highest interest and compound interest. The people and the people's strength is the greatest asset of the nation," he said. It is not a mass, not a negligible quantity, but organic, national capital whose further meaning represents the foundation of culture and of commercial productivity. Judging of the wealth of a country to-day depends to a large extent upon the quantitative maturity of the inhabitants. To make the greatest use and to secure the greatest developments of the people, it is necessary, therefore, to have a systematic conservation of the national capital; and the interest and compound interest of the capital represented by the people must be obtained without diminution of the intrinsic value of this capital." He also added that the foundation of every far-sighted social policy

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must be based more on energy-reserve than on moneyreserve, and that the aim should always be to secure the greatest possible reserve stores, in every individual of the nation, of bodily and mental force and power, as well as of physical and moral health. He especially emphasized the need of conserving the health and moral welfare of women if the nation wishes to retain its greatest capital. Good citizenship is at once menaced by any other course, because women, as mothers, educators, and the souls of the nation's homes, are by far the most important factor.

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Doctor Harvey W. Wiley, in speaking of the conservation of man in so far as the prevention of disease is concerned, said that diseases naturally divide themselves into two classes, those which are communicated and those which are produced by the conditions of the personal environment. By segregation and an entire removal of all germ-carrying agencies we can remove the former, and by entirely sanitary conditions we take away the cause of the latter. By these means and the living of the kind of life that promotes physical vigor, the death-rate can be greatly lowered from the present death-rate, which he stated to be between 15 and 16 per 1000. The average length of life, which is now in this country about 44 years, he said also could thereby be greatly increased. Why should we be content," he said, with an average life of forty-four years? There is historical evidence to show that man's greatest activities are developed with experience and that the age between 60 and 70 is the most productive for one who has lived in accordance with nature. It is shown from statistics that we die sixteen years before we reach the maximum of usefulness of man. I would like to see more old age. I would like to see more men and women with gray hair and more wrinkled faces than I can see today. To all this objection may be made that a place must be made for the young men and women; that the old man and woman keep the young from development and usefulness. But to this I reply that there is infinite opportunity for good work offered to all. If we can secure a race free from disease, endowed with all those qualities of mind and body which make for human efficiency, we need not ask that every one become eminent and wealthy, but each can

perform the duties which come to him in a way to develop a uniform excellence of the human race. We have room in this country for millions more of people. We welcome the infant and the child, but let us keep the man and the woman. There is room for all."

NUTRITION OF SCHOOL CHILDREN.-Doctor S. Josephine Baker, of Chicago, declared that serious school problems arose from the lack of nutrition for the children of the public schools in the poorer sections of our large cities. She said that often the poor mental showing made by children is directly traceable to the fact that they are suffering from a lack of proper nutrition. Statistics of an investigation made by the University of Chicago in the stock-yards district of that city showed that fully 50 per cent of the school children there are retarded in their mental development by this cause. These statistics also showed that the children are physically deficient in proportion to the lack of good nourishing food.

Doctor Max Rubner, who was introduced to the congress as the "Doctor Wiley of Germany," delivered a special address on the Nutriment of the People. "One of the greatest, if not the greatest, of problems now confronting mankind," said Doctor Rubner, "is that of providing the race with proper nourishment. It is of such importance, in fact, that every large city should have a department in its government clothed with plenary powers of caring for this branch of the people's welfare." He also told the convention that malnutrition in children, even from homes where it was absolutely unnecessary, had become so general and had reached such a critical stage in all parts of the world that, unless the State and municipal authorities made provisions to enforce proper feeding of the younger generation, it was an open question if the human race was to be saved from degeneration. The doctor said further: "Then, too, cooking is a lost art so far as most women in this modern age are concerned. This condition should not be so, and is a big factor in the high cost of living. Housekeeping is a noble art, an interesting and high vocation. Cases of actual starvation are not numerous, but cases of under-nourishment are common to an extent that is horri

fying."