The Portland daily press., 1898-01-17
THE OLD LECTURE SYSTEM
Once a Powerful and Popular Means
of Public Instruction.
CAUSES OF ITS DECLINE AND HOW
1T CAN BE RESUSCITATED.


A Interesting Letter from w. III. ii. Muir
ray.
To the Editor of the Press:
Every man who is big enough to fill
his profession well, is bigger than his
profession. A great lawyer mustbe more
than lawyer. The civic, the religious
and the domestic side of him is, perhaps,
more representative than the legal. AS
a lawyer he can be measured. AS man,
citizen, father, he is measureless. Or
was there ever a great preacher that
wasn't bigger than his pulpit? Bigger
as man than as minister? 1t was the
man, Christ Jesus, who moved the world,
who; with his manhood as the center OF
a system, sung the centuries into constel-
lations and made them orbital-he be-
ing the central reffulgence. Take the
teacher-the educator-not the oompla-
cent chef of our educational bakeries who
takes our youth as so much organic
dough and crimps them into convention n
al forms and graduates them Of one size
and shape as pretty little crisp and we'll
Drowned human gingersnaps. No, do
not mean such one--and their name is
legion and are being bred In our conyen-
tional schools faster than microbes. But
l mean the real educetor-the man who
knows and feels that education Is the
leading forth and up of the natural gifts
and faculties of child and whose highest
ambition is to leave his pupils just as un-
like when he sends them from his school
as when he took them in; such an educa-
tor as England had in Arnold of Rugby,
or we had in Gum of Washington,
Conn, whose fame is less because his
chance was less and his biography inade.
quate. Such men are rare, rare as the
true orator. or re II poet, or the masterful
musician, or the natural astronomer, who
with patience and Imagination enough
to tire out the stars in their courses,
watches night after night, until they
yield to the might of his insistenoe and
tel! him their secret.
Now, have not such men something to
tell the people of this continent? Shall
the great advocate be smothered in the
little dingy courtroom? Shall the great
of pleading from Justinian to our day,
not be able to explain and expound the
principles by which men and nations
alike must live unless they would go
down to their destruction? Would not
New England pay we'll to see Webster
and Choate, Beecher and Phillips, Hor-
ace Mann and Garrison-aIl children of
4 ala,
platforms once more? Would it not be
worth year OF life to hear the applause
and laughter, the kissing and the cheer
ing; to see the flashing eyes, the flushed
faces, the falling tears, and feel the house
shake to the jar of feet and the smiting of
applauding palms as the speakers thought
himself on tire-burned slowly into
them until they kindled to its ardor and
broke into spontaneous flames? It was a
good time to live when we had men
among us able to take the moral Eslug-
gishness of concentrated New England
up and shake spiritual conception into
itl
Do you tell me that these great men
have passed, that we have come to the
era and are living in the age of the con-
ventional the ordinary and the lumi-
nous commonplace; that the great ques-
tions are settled and the need of high
thinking and deep feeling is no longer
on us; that the seas we sail are all char
tered and hence there is no need of stars
You are mistaken. Do you not know
that in 250 years on this continent We
have settled only two things-the right to
elect our own rulers and the right to be
free. That is all, unless you add this
other thing, the right of woman to own
her own property and her own person. |
And SO you think all the great questions |
that relate to the form and extent Of our |
government, to the individual and socie- |
ty, to the minds and souls Of us all, are |
settled! Verify, if the majority think as |
thou thinkest, then, indeed are we in |
peril; for we stand blinddfolded on the |
crumbling edge of an abyss. For here
we are an empire Of inconyenient size, |
heterogeneous in population, whose
different sections, industrially, are at
many points antagonistic governed BY
politicians and not statesmen, with civ |
ilization that abnormally develops the
individual and denies the communal,
with the conservative influence Of landed
estates and home life wholly lost to US
with capital and labor distrustful and
belIigerent; with the marriage connec-
Non so fiokle that many are actually pro.
posing to make, what is often fool act,
} sacrament, and compel people to love