The Democratic Leader

Drilling the Children to Death.

I traveled once on the Rhine with a highly educated German long resident in England, who used to say, when we saw the groups of demure little boys and girls going to school at 8 in the morning, with their knapsacks of books on their shoulders, "That is what is stupefying the German nation; they are being drilled to death; they have no games, no lively sports, no vivacity; one wide awake English school boy is worth the whole of them."

He had never been in America, but we, who find the English children dull and slow to mature compared with Americans, can make the needful addition to this statement. No one can deny the sure tendency of the German training to produce thorough investigators and admirable analysts; but, after all, our system, with all its faults, produces mental alertness, and theirs does not. Compare an American boy at 18 with a German or even an English boy of the same age: which is it that has originality, impulse, initiative? That quality which makes us develop early and assume leadership while others are under tutelage seems ingrained in the transplanted race. - T. W. Higginson in Harper's Bazar.