TOWNSHIP SYSTEM.—We have been deterred from presenting a synopsis of the Bill offered to the Legislature, as we proposed last month, until our next issue. In the meantime we commend to all interested what is said upon the subject in the last Report of the State Superintendent, and particularly the article copied from it into our January number. We hope the matter will be discussed at every school meeting, institute, association or other gathering having reference to our schools. Let it not be said next winter that the people have not thought about the change.

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OUR CONTRIBUTORS.-We are under obligations to Mr. Searing for his thoughtful and timely defence of the value of classical training as contrasted with the narrowness of mathematics and the superficiality of scientific courses so called; to "Commor School" for his no less timely reply to Madame "College,"-for whose excellent letter see the last January number; to "Old School Master," "Hopeful" and the rest of our friends who have furnished us articles for this number. One object and use of a State Educational Journal should be to cultivate an educational literature of its own. Of course young writers may not be expected to furnish articles as valuable as a Horace Mann would write, but we do not wish the Journal to live wholly or chiefly by borrowing.

ARITHMETICAL EXAMPLES; or Test Exercises for the use of Advanced Classes, by 9 D. W. Fish. New York: Ivison, Phinney, Blakeman & Co. Chicago: S. C. Griggs & Co. 12 mo., pp. 212.

Works of this kind are very useful supplements to our arithmetics, especially for reviews and drills. Properly used, they speedily “test” the question whether the pupil has merely learned the book or mastered principles, and is prepared to make a practical application of his attainments. The present work, which is added to the "Robinson Series," but may of course be used in connection with any arithmetic, is copious in its "examples" which are judiciously arranged and precceded by a full and instructive presentation of "Measures" and other Tables. The price is 60 cents by mail. See advt.

We have received some very curious old Maps republished by Messrs. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia, which are designed to accompany the New Comprehensive Geography, and which represent the eastern and western continents as depicted in Europe three hundred and fifty years ago.

We are under obligations to Hon. John Swett, State Superintendent of California, for a copy of his late excellent Report in the Spanish language, re-, i minding us that the descendants of the followers of Cortes still have a foothold to in that occidental region.

See the new advertisements of Messrs. Barnes & Burr, and Sheldon & Co.

Late Secretary of the Mass. Board of Education, and President of Antioch College, Ohio. ALL labor is delightful or irksome; noble or ignoble; and right or wrong in the sight of God, according to the quality of the motive that prompts its performance. That the moral quality of an action is always determined by the nature of the motive that begets it is a truism. But this is not the whole of the truth which is contained in that truism; the perseverance; the sustaining and uplifting energy with which we prosecute a purpose: the joy or loathing that wings or bemires our steps, in whatever we undertake, depend upon the motive that inspires us. Motive may hallow the most servile or desecrate the most sacred employment; may elevate into piety the menial office of washing a Savior's feet, or profane into perfidy and murder the privilege of saluting the Savior with a kiss.

Every body knows that the scale of motive is infinite in extent. It reaches upward to God, who is at the moral zenith; and it sinks to the moral nadir of all that is anti-god-like. Some motives are born of nature, and are what are called spontaneous. Some are the offspring of a cultivated intellect, and others of a moral and religious education. In cases of high necessity, nature prepares special motives to meet special exigencies. In the brute creation, the love of the young lies dormant, until awakened by the birth of their own offspring, but as soon as that event occurs, there is sure to flame up the blind, resistless organism of maternal love. I have seen a barn-yard fowl fly defiantly at a railroad locomotive with its attendant train, for daring to invade her walks

* This Address, which was delivered at over thirty Conventions or Associations of Teachers, in seven different States, is one of the most valuable of Mr. Mann's productions, and will be continued in future numbers of the Journal.-EDE.

when she clucked forth her chickens. I have had the most timid and wild of all our wild-fowl,-the partridge, fly in my face when accidentally obtruding upon her brood, in a woodland ramble. There is something which seems far more heroic and poetic, in the scream and swoop of the eagle, when her nest is invaded, than in her loftiest, sunward flights; and the lioness bears about in her breast a latent magazine of rage, which nature stored there for the protection of her whelps. A mother is transfigured, when her babe is in peril. Fearlessly she climbs mountain heights, or plunges into ocean depths. During a child's sickness, her spirit seems to perform the miracle of abrogating or suspending the laws of the body. She can labor without rest, watch without sleep, subsist without food. An exaltation of motive works the seeming

miracles.

There are other motives which exist to some extent in all men, at all times; but they are variously combined, and they operate with various degrees of intensity. According to their several natures, they form the character and determine the destiny of their possessor. What made Columbus hold on in his course, while all his crew mutinied, and while nature herself, acting through the magnet which she had lent him as a guide, seemed to remonstrate against his audacity? What upheld those self-exiles, the Pilgrim Fathers of New England, as they went from England to Leyden, and from Leyden to Plymouth Rock, but a motive that was founded upon the Rock of Ages? In fine, motive determines every thing. It makes the same external act or course of conduct, high or low, joyous or painful, sacred or profane. It gives fertility to our life, or smites it with barrenness. It makes a king on his throne tremble, or a martyr on his scaffold triumph.

Before considering the motives by which you as teachers should be animated, I deem it proper to lay open for your inspection, my own motives for addressing you on this subject.

I come before you, my friends, feeling an unspeakable interest in your personal advancement and professional success. If there be any class of persons toward whom my heart yearns with a tender, gushing, and deathless affection, it is the teachers of our youth. My nerves are intertwined with their nerves; my heart thrills or throbs with theirs; and so close is the affinity I feel for them, that their good or ill fortune is matter of personality to me. If I have any earthly ambition, it is that which can be gratified only by their success; and all the high hopes which I do avowedly entertain of a more glorious future for the human race, are built upon the elevation of the teacher's profession and the enlargement of the teacher's usefulness. Whatever ground of confidence there may be for the perpetuation of our civil and religious liberties; whatever prospect of the elevation of our posterity; whatever faith in the general Christianization of the world; these aspirations and this faith depend upon teachers, more than upon any, more than upon all other instrumentalities united. And if in the councils of God, there be a gracious purpose of

restoring His lost image to the human race, I believe that He will choose and annoint the teachers of youth among the choicest of His ministers for the holy work. In addressing teachers, therefore, I feel that I stand upon holy ground; for I am in the august presence of the highest interests, mortal and immortal; and I am in the midst of the eternal principles of moral life and moral death. God's law, human accountability, the unending consequences of our conduct, encompass me about. Amid these awful concernments, the most splendid of earth's objects fade into dimness; the most magnificent of earthly ambitions wane and recede, and I am admonished, as with no mortal voice, to speak alike in the love and in the fear of truth.

This, therefore, my friends, is no occasion for flattery. I come not here to feast praise-loving hearts with honeyed words, or to sing lullabies over disquieted consciences. If the worm gnaws in any breast, let it gnaw, until it shall eat out the very pith and core of vanity and egotism. If the fire burns, let it not be quenched, until the dross shall be purged from the gold. If there be a noble-hearted teacher here present, I know that he or she would rebuke me if I should spend the passing hour in magnifying his rights, forgetful of his duties; if I should extol the dignity of his profession, as though he had created it, instead of being obligated by it; or in telling him that because he grasped the implement of Solomon in his hand, he, therefore, must have the wisdom of Solomon in his head. As it is the duty of the faithful physician to probe a wound to the bottom, though the patient does flinch; so it is the office of the faithful friend to unmask any low or unworthy motive which may lurk in the heart of his friend. Would that I could so unfold our resposibilities to the rising generation, and our duties to heaven, that each one of us should clothe himself in the sackcloth of humility, and cry out from the bottom of his heart, "Woe is me, that in performing the great work which the Lord has committed to my hands, I have been so unprofitable a servant."

In considering the motives by which teachers should be governed, I shall begin with the lowest.

I maintain that it is not only right and proper for a teacher, but that it is his duty also, to have reference to the recompense of reward; I mean pecuniary reward, or in the vernacular, dollars and cents. In this, as in every other vocation, the workman is worthy of his hire. To say that in proportion as a work is invested with high and sacred attributes, it is therefore to go unpaid for, transcends transcendentalism. When it shall be found that a man's natural appetites for food and beverage shall die out, one after another, as he enlists in more sacred callings, it will be good evidence, that a life devoted to holy labor should forego those natural supplies which it no longer needs. When a minister of the gospel, with a family to be educated, can subsist, as the chameleon was once said to do, on the air; when a missionary to the Arctic regions can keep his blood at the temperature of 98°, without clothing or shelter; or when an apostle, or one greater than an apostle, can sequester

himself from all worldly cares and pursuits, and devote his life to training up children in the way they should go, and the ravens shall bring him his food and raiment; then I shall believe that all our teachers ought to do, as some of them are now almost compelled to do-work for nothing and find themselves. But so far as I can learn, the experience is universal in our times, that a healthy stomach, after a strict abstinence of twelve or fifteen hours, will crave food, however pure the conscience may be; or in other words, a conscience void of offence will not replenish a stomach void of nourishment. So a missionary, sent naked to Iceland or Spitzbergen, will freeze, however ardent his benevolence; and the most exalted piety will not be a sufficiently tenacious cement to hold body and soul together, without a little alloy of animal food; or at least, without some chemical amalgam whose principal ingredients are bread and butter.

But while I maintain that it is right for a teacher to make sure of an honorable and equitable salary;-nay, that it would be inexcusable in him to make no provision for his own household-whether that household be in the plural or have just passed into the dual, or still remain in the singular number,still, when he has deliberately agreed upon a price for his services, all pecuniary considerations should forthwith be dismissed from his thoughts. He has then come under the most solemn obligations to perform a certain amount of duties, and no inadequacy in his compensation, however great, can excuse any neglect in his duties, however small. The pilot must not sleep and suffer the vessel to be wrecked, on the plea of short pay.

What then shall we think of a teacher, who having secured the most liberal salary, seeks to contract his duties within a narrower and narrower limit, and grudgingly performs even those which are embraced within the contracted circle; who spends his purloined leisure in pleasure-seeking, in pecuniary speculations, or without the most cogent reasons in the lottery of school-book making? What of him who clips a half hour from the morning or afternoon session,-which however it may stand in the civil code, is a greater offence in the moral one of clipping the king's coin? What of him who carries his body only to the school-room, while his soul plays truant; and who, when his classes are hungering and thirsting for spiritual food, gives them for bread, a stone; for a fish, a serpent; and for an egg, a scorpion? There is no neglect on earth so criminal as the neglect of a teacher to do his duties to his scholars; and the darkest dungeon in the realms of "outer darkness" will be reserved for those teachers who through sloth or worldliness suffer these little ones to perish.

There is another class of motives, not indeed of a very high or meritorious character, but which incur no censure, unless indulged in to excess. I refer to the teacher's desire of general approval, and especially to the mature and time-satisfied opinions of those who have been his pupils. The common credit or discredit, which inures to a workman, for doing his work well or ill, is an