rience; but the administration of that government has been determined by the experience of the people since 1789.

It is this principle that the organization and the administration of civil government follow civil experience that we think of a fundamental nature in teaching civics. Government is not a term describing a permanent, unchanging factor in human affairs. Government is only a ceremonious expression of hard experience in the direction and control of human interests founded in human rights. Government is itself a change in organization and in administration which follows, generally far in the rear, the experience of the people.

This principle is more abundantly illustrated by the numerous constitutions which have been framed by the various states. If we include the constitutions framed by the four territories now organizing into states, one hundred and twenty-nine constitutions have been adopted by the two and forty states of the Union since 1776. The number adopted by a state varies from one in Massachusetts to six in Georgia, and each state has proposed and the majority have adopted various amendments from time to time. It is true that the making of constitutions has been the regular occupation of the Americans, but this occupation has not been a mere pastime. Experience has compelled constitutional changes. This experience forges the link between American history and American government, and the place of these two studies is side by side in the schools. It is as a solemn experience of the people that civil government is to be studied, not alone as the solution of a scheme for winning votes. The state governments were organized, and, in some cases, for many years administered, on a narrower plan than the federal government. Numerous restrictions limited the people. Religious and property qualifications prevailed in the majority of the original thirteen states, and did not wholly disappear till the first quarter of this century had passed. But the experience of the people was not limited to that of the freedom of the right to vote; it extended widely into affairs. The earlier constitutions made no provision for that elaborate economic life into which the Americans moved. Canals; railroads; corporations; inventions affecting social life; the development of educational, charitable and reformatory institutions; the acquisition of the public domain and the general civilizing movements of the world, effected radical changes in the state constitutions in conformity

with the experience of the people. In some states the changes in the people led to a new state constitution, as in Pennsylvania in 1838, occasioned chiefly by the growth of corporations, and specially of the banks and of the railroads. In other states, as notably in the southern states in 1865, new social conditions compelled new constitutions in eleven of the states. The periods when public experience has led to fundamental changes in the civil government of the states may perhaps be grouped as follows:

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1. 1776-1789. The revision of colonial into state government; the constitutional provisions being based upon colonial experience, and illustrating the authority of governmental principles based upon local, representative democracy.

2. 1789-1835. The rise and fall of the idea of religious and property qualifications as necessary to the exercise of the franchise. The earlier constitutions had generally embodied these provisions. The disappearance of them was chiefly due to the rapid spread of the principles of a "free democracy," advocated by Jefferson and his followers, and first embodied in constitutions when the states west of the original thirteen were organized.

3. 1835-1860. The response of constitutional conventions to the popular demand for provisions regarding internal improvements characterizes the civil phenomena of this period, and the approaching struggle between free and slave institutions is discernible.

4. 1860-1865. Slavery and anti-slavery re-wrote nearly all the state constitutions. The supremacy of the federal government was formally set forth in state constitutions for the first time in our civil history. The constitutions of this period made by the seceding states illustrate the extreme opinions of the slaveocracy and of men advocating states' rights doctrines.

5. 1865-1889. These constitutions embody the experience of the people in attempting to solve the problems, inter alia, of the suffrage; the relation of the state to corporations; the functions of the state in such matters as education, internal improvements, transportation, immigration, public charities, public lands, the power of the legislature, of the governor, and of the judiciary, etc. The recent debites in the conventions of the two Dakotas, of Montana, and of Washington, illustrate directly the demands of the people of those territories as interpreted by experience. A peculiar feature of the Dakota debites is the evident desire of the conven

tions to anticipate some of the evils of over-legislation by limiting the powers of the legislature and increasing the powers of the executive a desire born out of the complaining experience of some of the eastern states from which the delegates to the convention originally came.

We might further illustrate our views by showing that not only the organization of our governments, but also the administration of them, is after experience, not after theory. The administration of government is the opportunity of political parties and gives rise to their platforms, their books, the speeches of their orators, the opinions of their newspapers, and the expenditure of their wealth and their energies in campaigns.

ence.

It is our desire only to call attention to the place and the purpose of the study of civil government in our schools. We do not believe that the critical examination of the text of a constitution is the best manner of beginning the study of civil government. We would approach that study by the path of experience. We would attempt to know and to teach that constitutions and the entity which we call "government" are the records of hard experiWe may consider such a constitution and such a government as a civil monument, but a monument of interest to us only as it is, or has been, the expression of human wants and of hum in satisfaction. Constitutions are the clothes of government and change. with the changes in the people. Sometimes they seem to change. to a worse fashion, sometimes to a better, but they change, and usually with the ideas of each generation. It may safely be said, that each generation in America revises the frame of government. Upon closer examination we discover that it is in the administration rather than in the organization of government that these changes are made. But whether in administration or in organization, the change indicates the pulse of public experience.

It follows, then, that the purpose of studying civil government in the schools is to understand the past, and, if possible, to interpret the present and the future. Young pupils, those in public schools, may learn the story of civil experience in the technical schools, and in a truer sense, in the school of daily life, we may learn what changes in our governmental affairs are desirable and imminent. From the nature of our civil institutions we must be always revising them. Great social, industrial, political and moral questions remain unsettled. These questions find solutions, or

attempted solutions in the work of constitutional conventions and of legislatures; some of which, like the recently proposed prohibitory amendments in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, indicate changes in the relations of the state to certain great interests which the people are earnestly seeking to make. Whatever form this public thought may ultimately take, whether in a constitutional amendment or in a fixed custom of legislative enactment, from time to time to meet public exigency, the principle of the response of popular government to popular demand will be illustrated.

We have purposely confined ourselves in this paper to the examination of the dictum of Madam de Staël, and having reversed the dictum have sought to indicate a method in the study of civics. We would teach civil government as the record of civil experience, and we would awaken in our students the vital realization that they are a part of the experience of the future which will organize anew and administer the government. We would have one great end in view: This government, state and federal, is the government of the people, and we are a part of the people. Self-responsibility is more apparent when we discover that our lives in their civil phenomena solidify for a time in civil government. "The state," said Emerson, "was once a private thought"; in teaching civil government we would have the state again, in every mind a private thought, and that thought should be nurtured and should bear fruit in individual life and in public life. When civil government becomes to each of us only the formal record, the outer casing of a living organism, the state, growing with our growth, decaying with our decay, based upon human experience and dependent upon the will of men and of God, then, and not till then, will every citizen be a high priest, serving in the sacred interests of government.

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APHORISMS; FROM THE GERMAN OF HEINRICH BYRON.

TRANSLATED BY HERBERT E. JENNESS.

TRUTH hits the mark; falsehood rebounds and strikes him who utters it.

ILL-TREATED children and oppressed peoples are apt to have their reason and sensibilities dwarfed and blunted.

TEACHERS SOW in young minds, seeds whose fulness of blessings can never be known nor even estimated. What a noble calling!

How much

WHAT agriculture is to the soil, education is to man. fruit, then, may be taken from the uncultivated human mind?

LOVE is the sun of life; train thy child in love and it will, like a flower in the broad sunlight, unfold and flourish most naturally.

As man polishes the rough diamond, and shapes a divine form from the rude stone, so we shape and polish human nature by education.

NOT all those who are called teachers teach the most or the best. The words of the wise and the deeds of the noble instruct mankind.

THAT which the world calls education is often only mechanical, for mere drilling makes one more dexterous, but true education should make us nobler.

ONE may be born with a defective intellect as well as with a crooked physical member. But generally the young mind may be given the right direction by a corrective education.

POWERFUL is habit — the force of perseverance in the moral and spiritual world; and for that reason education effects such a transformation of mankind, - because it is a selection of proven habits.

EVEN in the noblest endeavors to educate mind and heart by the continual acquisition of fresh knowledge, some degree of selfishness steals in. We often think only of learning, when we might also instruct; we forget in the high enjoyment of enriching our spiritual selves the still higher pleasure of imparting to others of our accumulated treasures. Man before books.