36 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
‘n this country in sections, and at cross purposes, and with a lack of com- 
mon consciousness and unity of aim. 
The old-fashioned college, when I was a boy, was a sort of mythical 
institution that stood away in the clouds, remote from connection with 
she common schools, and even with the secondary schools ; and the great 
mass of boys and girls had not a much more distinct idea of what went on 
within its walls than they have of what goes on in the mosque at Mecca 
to-night. Thank God that day of isolation of the college is passed. But 
we still have room to draw the ranks closer together all the way from the 
women in the kindergarten up to the very highest teacher in the univer- 
sity, and to have a consecutiveness of purpose and of aim and methods 
that shall bring us all to one result. For my own part, I never looked upon 
a woman teaching a primary class of twenty pupils, or a woman teaching a 
class of a like number in the kindergarten, without having a feeling akin 
to reverence for her in her work ; and I have often said that it seems to 
me that many of them display more genius than I have ever been able to 
show in trying to manage a university. I have great respect for them, 
and I hope that we shall go out from these meetings with a stronger feel- 
ing than we have ever had before, that our work is one work from the 
beginning to the end. Therefore let us go back to our schoolhouses and 
bo our classrooms with a strength and an inspiration of that mighty con- 
sciousness that we are, every one of us, a part of the great army whose 
shundering tread is shaking the land. Let us go feeling this power, and 
-hat we are working as a part of it. (Applause.) 
{ want even our humble teachers to have some higher appreciation of 
‘he honor and dignity that belongs to their work. As they come here 
and see the noble army of men and women who are engaged in it, I can- 
not but think that they may return to their work with some new pride in 
it. Let them reflect for a moment what is the dignity and grandeur of 
;he material upon which they work. It is the soul, the mind of the child, 
finitely nobler than the canvas on which Raphael painted the Madonna 
with a purity born in the heaven; purer and nobler than the whitest 
[talian marble from which Michael Angelo freed from its imprisonment 
the form of a Moses or of a David. The materials with which they work 
are not the mere pigments of the painter or the chisel of the sculptor; 
put the humblest ¢schoolmarm,” the humblest kindergartner that is 
crying to teach her child some idea of geometrical forms, should remem- 
ser that she is planting forever in his mind one of the great ideas by 
which God has builded the world. The humblest schoolmarm” in the 
remotest log-house in northern Michigan or Wisconsin should remember 
that when she is teaching the A-B’s to the stammering boy at her feet 
she is placing before him a ladder on which he may yet climb to the 
stars. That is the work in which you are engaged. Be proud of it! 
Never be ashamed of it] The rewards in money are small, but the 
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