ble that she will become the wretched victim of masculine oppression she is declared to be by some excited orators of her sex. She will have the making of American society, and can have whatever she believes essential to her lot.

The only hindrance to her almost exclusive occupation of the school-room now, is her lack of vigorous health and her want of thorough culture. If the more favored class of American young women aspire to greater influence, they must mend their physical habits essentially. If they have not the resolution to lift themselves out of the enervating slavery to destructive fashions, they must be content to be left outside the pale of effective workers in society. I believe this reform has already begun, and I find in every community many noble young women courageous enough to keep themselves in good health for the sake of consecrating that health to the service of God and man. The want of thorough culture among young women is known to every educated person. As a rule, girls in our female seminaries and private schools do not know the meaning of study as every diligent boy in college is compelled to know it. The establishment of girls' normal schools in Massachusetts was a new era in the education of the young women of that State. The girls trained in those admirable institutions can be found in every State of the Union in the highest positions of instruction. The training school at Oswego, N. Y., is filling the west with a similar class of admirable female principals and teachers of the highest grade. Here is demonstrated the capacity of woman to be educated to any point demanded for instruction in our common schools. The normal school is the precise thing needed by numbers of our superior young women for their development into first rate teachers, and through the influence of normal training we may reasonably hope for constant progress among this large body of public servants and a corresponding elevation of the whole realm of common school instruction.

One of the most marked improvements in modern systems of teaching, is the increased attention and skill bestowed upon the training of little children. There are few people of adult years who have forgotten the dreary and painful highway which led through their earliest years of school life to the period when knowledge began to assume an attractive look. The loss of time and wear and tear of body and soul in teaching little children to read under the old system, is fearful to contemplate. Let any man sit an hour in a room where fifty children are being taught

at once to read, spell, write, and think by the "phonic method", now being introduced in our city schools, and mark the beautiful harmony between teacher and pupils, the electric eagerness with which the little ones bound along the gradual ascent, and he will understand what I mean.

But this sort of teaching requires an artist's head and hand. The primary teacher must bring to her sublime task professional knowledge and skill. Of course this reform is the death knell of the whole race of mechanical and faithless teachers. No longer can a blockhead, masculine or feminine, stand behind a text-book compelling a crowd of persecuted children to repeat by rote what they do not understand, enforcing the outrage with the help of the birch. The teacher of the lowest grades of pupils must now be the animating soul of the school-room; must understand the varied avenues of approach to that sacred shrine, the soul of childhood; must inspire with her own enthusiasm and evoke the power by which the little ones can apprehend, in gradual process, the mysteries of knowledge. A mere pedagogue in one of our best city schools is in a condition very like a blind and deaf man among the tracks at a grand railroad junction. The only thing to be done with him is to get him off the track before he is pulverized by the rushing trains filled with shouting children.

We are coming to understand that the most accomplished teachers should be placed in charge of the youngest classes. It has been well said that, if it were possible, every child should be taught by God himself. Every child is taught by a Divine providence that perpetually undoes the mischief which our folly and wickedness inflict, and the best recognition we can make of this fact, is to place our largest-minded and largest-hearted teachers over the youngest children in the school-room. The worst feature in our present system is the fact, that the lowest grades of our city schools are taught by inexperienced and untrained young women, who, at the best, must blunder through a year or two of experimenting before they can even comprehend the work they are set to do.

The remedy for this state of things is found in the normal school. The standard of professional training must be raised over our primary schools, and their teachers must be rigidly held to the duty of mastering at least the elements of the teaching art. Let this be done a few years, and there will be an incalculable advance in primary instruction,-and every point gained in the lower grades of the schools will tell on the whole

mental and moral career of the child. For almost the only thing we can hope to do in school education, is to awaken the soul, develop the faculties in their natural order, lay the deep foundations of culture on the adamant of eternal spiritual laws, and open highways to the infinite universe of truth, love, and beauty. This done, Providence can be trusted to open a school of life, and set the lessons appropriate to be learned at every stage of man's progress through eternity.

CULTURE.

BY W. H. VENABLE.

The word culture frequently appears in modern literature, and it is growing very familiar to the lips of American readers and talkers, both in the east and the west. It is an excellent word, and one for which there is a real demand, though as yet its meaning is variously understood. Different sets of "kindred spirits" claim to represent in their peculiar accomplishments the result true "culture." Emerson, Arnold, and other highpriests of personal perfection have each announced a doctrine of culture; each has his disciples and his dissenters. Boston has its general idea of "culture",-so have New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Cincinnati, their idea. Each great publishinghouse stands for a certain form or phase of "culture." Almost every town, village, and country-neighborhood in the United States holds within its limits a few, at least, who enjoy or suffer the distinction of being called people of "culture."

It is not surprising that this term culture, the definition of which is so unsettled, should be grossly misapplied, as it often is. Like every other word that, properly used, stands for something peculiarly valuable, it is liable to abuse. The word aristocracy, which originally meant "the best," is no longer full of noble signification. The word gentleman is sometimes narrowed down to mean simply a polite person, or degraded to mean a fop. Education implies to many merely book-learning; politics suggests only partisanship; and even religion sometimes conveys the narrow idea of sectarian dogmatism,-that and nothing more. America is not without her self-complacent, spurious dilletanti, her superfine, transcendental literati, her self-constituted hypercritics of fine art, all arrogating to themselves the exclusive

right to be honored as men and women of culture, par excellence. Men and women though to whom "youth can not be imputed as a crime or as a virtue, for youth is almost unknown in these days, in which, by a ludicrous conventionalism, the youngest lad in college is pompously called a man, and when gray-headed professors lecturing girls of ten, must address them as ladies. Men and women, (!) fresh from school, with the delectable flavor of the graduating speech yet in their mouths, are much disposed to talk culture." Their definition of culture is "that indefinite something which one acquires by association with superior minds," or "that peculiar richness of mind which one absorbs by living in the atmosphere of learning and taste, you know." They imagine that the road to culture lies no where else than through a literary society with a long Greek name, or a class course of text-book criticism in rhetoric conducted by Prof. Equation, A.B. To them the ultimatum of culture is to be able to repeat Tennyson's thinnest and obscurist lyric, and call it the essence of subjective beauty, and the distillation of essential music.

There is a handsome young fellow belonging to the Esthetic and Belletristic Circle, who in his own opinion has reached the very pinnacle of the temple of culture. His air is that of a person who has nothing to learn or to unlearn. He talks with an easy indifference on all subjects · "from God to foam-bells dancing down a stream." Here are specimens of his oracular utterance: "The slip-shod and vicious style of Mister Dickens repels readers of taste. I can not endure his mannerisms." "We have no literature in America." "The western people are crude, and notably vulgar." "Ristori's histrionic powers are overestimated; she is a second rate artiste." "I can not conceive how persons can be affected to tears by a stage-play. Acting never moves my sympathy. I look upon it merely as art with which the intellect is concerned and not the feelings."

Save us from culture if it leads to this! Better be the most illiterate laborer on the remotest backwoods or prairie farm than to come to such a condition of head and heart as, to judge from his words, has been reached by this member of the Esthetic and Belletristic Circle! Save us from the culture which is at war with common sense, or which creates an artificial taste while it destroys the natural kindly emotions of the heart. Save us from the culture which gets no enjoyment from the finest productions of genius, except through the petty channels of technical criti

cism marked out by bookish theorizers. Save us from the culture which takes all the relish out of the simple pleasures of life; which refuses to admire anything until it is pronounced admirable in the canons of some school of authors or censors; which considers all enthusiasm as barbarous, and does more reverence to the little piping mandates of an exclusive clique of critics than to the deep voice of nature sounding in the soul.

It is a noticeable fact that many of those who regard themselves as persons of culture, who put forth opinions with confidence and sit in judgment upon the words and works of the rest of the world, are themselves not producers. They sit apart in regions of inaccessible refinement,-contemplate and condemn, but never create. Behold the disciple of sham culture! Perpetual disapproval perches at the sensitive corners of his mouth. Censure and disparagement are written upon his forehead. Infinite scorn of crudity and vulgarity is in the exquisite curl of his nose. He seems to take it for granted that anybody who tries to do any thing, is, according to the eternal fitness of things, a special target for his cynical arrows. He smiles disdainfully at bad grammar, but he won't write himself. He goes to the lecture, and pronounces it a failure, but he can not himself deliver two paragraphs in public on any subject. He goes to church occasionally in a condescending way, but is visibly bored by the sermon, and disgusted with the singing. Himself will not preach nor sing. He leaves it to be understood that he can do thing better than it has ever been done, if he would only deign to make the effort. But with a God-like consciousness of latent ability, he cares not so far to identify himself with the common herd as even to set them a high example. He has a secret conviction that casting pearls before swine is not his mission.

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What is culture? It is certainly not the process which produces finikin young men and women whose fine tastes are shocked at nine-tenths of all things human and divine, and to whom the remaining one-tenth is barely tolerable. It is certainly not that which produces conceit, coldness, fault-finding, indolence, insufferable vanity, and general discontent. It is nothing little and mean and exclusive. It is quite the reverse of this. It is the grandest education possible. True culture for man is that which gives him vast knowledge, deep wisdom, and boundless love to God and his creatures. True culture is that treatment of the soul that causes it to bring forth in abundance whatever is fair and good in human nature.