Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/804

780 "Heaven help us all, this good city of Boston, this rich Commonwealth of Massachusetts, this boundless wealth of America, that we should so starve our children, these children of the State, starve them both in body and in soul!" Their only crime, poor little ones, is that their fathers are idle, or ill, or dead. Did you know that savage tribes are less unkind? I met an old woman on the street. She had an honest, patient face, and sad, appealing eyes. She was very frail. Her dress was much too thin for the bitter east wind that was then blowing. She carried a very heavy bundle, and was fairly staggering under its weight. She was suffering visibly. On the other side of the curbstone another woman of the same age was driving past. She was quite alone, save for the coachman, and had ample room. She did not stop. She passed quickly, lo one was surprised. No one noticed it. Yet both were women. Both had been the possible mother of our Lord.

But these are gentle sights. You may see them for yourselves any day on the best of our many highways. If it were right to occupy your time and so play upon your feelings, I could take you to highways less esteemed, and show you sights less gentle. But perhaps this is enough. The point I want to make is this: that the rational scheme of education that we are seeking will include the cultivation of a social conscience which will make sights such as this impossible. We want a scheme that will concern itself with the helplessness of childhood and old age quite as devotedly as with the buoyant self-sufficiency of youth.

I take it, then, that this scheme of education is to prepare all boys and girls to enter college, and to open the door to an increasing number of them, and that it is to include with just as loving care the children of the poor as those of the more fortunately placed. And I take it that the fourteen years which it contemplates—from four to eighteen—are to be just as jealously guarded as a miser does his gold. For these years are of all the most valuable. The growing organism is more plastic than at any other time. The very motion of growth makes those molecular rearrangements possible, upon which skill and knowledge and character depend. You know that a piece of iron may remain idle in a warehouse for years and suffer no change of internal structure, but when this same piece of iron is put into a bridge, and subject to the incessant vibration of wind and traffic, it rapidly becomes crystallized, and must be replaced from time to time by more fibrous metal. The moving particles are more responsive to the crystallizing force. This is not an analogy, but a strict parallelism. The movements of growth make possible the physical changes in the organism. The priceless years are those under twenty. It must not be thought for a moment that I conceive