The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-07-13

Wltn the Dalt oHered Of an increase of salary Chat might never be forthcom- lhg), preferring to try for what I could get in the way of private teach ing. After many failures in this direc- ton, at last struck out form of ad- Vertisement which soon brought me plenty of pupils-of kind. It might be amusing, but not profitable, to expose the pecuniary value of tutors ser wees as estimated by many worthy people, In America the teacher in @ good school gets much more than he uoes Tn the average school in Britain;
 put when it comes to private tuition conditions seem to be reversed, and the reason, or at least the chief reason, IS not far to seek. The public school in America takes a good deal of the ground from under the feet of a pri- Nate teacher, because it not only im- parts an elementary training to the children of all classes who chose to avail themselves of it, but it also large, " serves the same purpose as the mid dle class secondary school of Great
 Britain. In America one has to go up step or two in the social scale to reach people with the means for em- ploylng private tutors. The possession or such means implies also a certain
 degree of culture, and consequently private tutor is better off in America
 than could be expected in a country
 Where the influence of a public school
 system extends to almost every rank of
 the community. As it is, large num-
 bers of people, intelligent but not par
 ticularly cultivated have means enough
 TO hire private teachers for special purposes at rates more directly depend-
 ent on the general trend of business
 than is the case in England and Scot
 land. And there is no such demand for
 the services of the private teacher in
 the United States as there is in Britain
 in connection with the competitive ex-
 aminations for the various branches of
 the civil services, as well as for the
 preliminary examinations of certain
 professional bodies. Civil service reform
 is still in it's first stages in America,
 and it is questionable, under the pres
 ent system of government, if its princi- pies can ever be very generally put in
 practice.
 It was among this large and thriving
 class of citizens that my work now lay
 for some time, and my most pleasant
 memories date from this intercourse, for several of my patrons were not only
 satisfactory pupils (adultsl in two-
 fold sense, but also extremely sympa-
 thetic and companionable as fellow
 sojourners in this vale of the teachers
 and the taught. I had pupils of every
 age above childhood, of both sexes, and
 of almost every European nationality
 and condition of life. prepared young
 men for college entrance examinations
 and brushed up squads of young clerks
 in their grammar and arithmetic, but
 could never get them Cor my young
 lady pupils, either, fluent and stimulat-
 ing as they might be in their tallS) to
 write down their thoughts in simple, idiomatio English I read Latin with
 patient and reasonable lawyers-who
 almost invariably make satisfactory students-and German with testy and
 unreasonable physicians, who, in their burning impatience to be put in the
 way of reading the German medical periodicals. required of their teachers
 an exercise of power which they would have called miraculous if demanded of
 themselves by their patients. I taught heads of families their English) let ters, and graybeards the extraction of the cube root and the solution of tri- angles.
 And almost in every case found the | foreign born pupil or the pupil born of foreign parents, whether German, or Swede, or Irish, or Cuban, or South American q had none British ), to be both brighter and more persevering than the descendants of long, establish ed American ancestry-a fact to be
 accounted for by the anthropologist and not by the teacher, who must take
 men as he nds them i'll that seething caldron of the nations henceforward to be known as Greater New York. The
 chief faults of those of American des- l cendent, especially of young men in business who came to me to be intel lectually groomed were engrossment in
 social dissipation and raw haste, half
 sister to delay" They were amiable
 and even- termpered to a degree, but | fickle and easily discouraged; even those of them with more backbone than i the average were at the bid of call of pleasure or too impatient of results | from their work The heritage of even 2O~dnedu lelllpeIdHleill IS Ilbl WllHoul l it's disadvantages, as enlightened Americans will readily admit.
 | One day a tall, stylishly dressed | young person came to me on some- | body's recommendation, and was not | long in letting me into the secret that | had leanings toward a career on the | stage. She wished, before entering a
 school of acting, to read portions of the | English drama under my guidance, with the view both of making some &C., quaintance with the literature of the
 stage and of improving her pronuncia- | tion She spoke with @ strong German accent, appeared to be very illiterate, | but also very positive and self-suffici-
 ent. I took down the comedy of She | Stoops to Conquer" to test her reading 1 and expression, and when she had | floundered through a scene or two in an eXecrable manner, she suddenly asked me to explain the meaning of the | title. But my explanation fell flat; the | two notions of ''stooping" and "con- quering'' were so incongruous to her mind that she could not bring them to-
 ,gether in consciousness. Such dense
 yellow primrose" literariness of intel l lect, I never met with in any human | being before or since.
 Another time I was visited by a TO- | bust looking man in the prime of life, | ctotad that ha wnc Sto ar