results would justify any trouble taken, and the object of schools is not to save teachers trouble. It is not enough that the teacher have liberty to excuse the tired or delicate scholar now and then. The system itself should provide for and invite partial courses. It is one of the worst evils of schools that the full attendance, which is none too short for the healthiest children, is required of all who would avail themselves of a common school education, yet, apparently, it is an evil which is not difficult of remedy.

3. But the gravest offense against health remains to be considered. It is a result of the methods themselves. It grows out of customs which are firmly established. It is not, therefore, as easily recognized nor as easily dealt with as evils which are due to external arrangement and length of sessions. It is known in England as overpressure, and in America as overwork. The charge is that, for a considerable proportion of scholars, the demands and incentives which are distinguishing characteristics of the school system, produce an excessive nervous strain, and that, in consequence, complete breakdown is not infrequent, while nervous disorders and impaired health are very common. Or, in brief, the charge is, that a good many scholars are overworked.

Now, no sooner is this charge made than teachers by the score deny it indignantly, if not contemptuously. It is their settled and solemn conviction that the impaired health of scholars is invariably due to causes for which the schools are not responsible; that late hours, social excitements, bad diet, unsuitable clothing, are the real causes; that if these evils were eliminated no complaint would be made of schools; that not one scholar in ten thousand is injured in health from studying too hard; that it is study plus something else, not study alone, from which certain children and youth suffer. Thus at the recent annual meeting of the Massachusetts teachers, after a paper had been read on School Hygiene, discussion followed, of which the newspaper report stated that, with the exception of Mr. Prince, of Waltham, none of the speakers agreed with Dr. Wells, and especially scouted the idea of overwork in schools. The result would be the same under similar circumstances anywhere.

In justice to teachers it should be admitted that they do not see the worst results of overwork, since they do not follow their pupils home at the end of the day or the term. It should also be remembered that it is human nature to exalt the importance of one's own pursuit, and not to estimate other interests at their full value. But there is good reason to believe that this confidence as to overwork is somewhat mistaken. A tall, slender, pale girl of sixteen walks through the room, and the caller who is seated there asks, "Is not Josephine well?" "Not very," is the mother's reply. "She complains all of the time that she is tired, and she has little appetite. I am dreadfully worried about her." "She has had to leave school, then?" "No; the school is near, you know, there is but one session (of five hours, to be sure); she says that even now she will not graduate till she is twenty, and she would be mortified to be in school

after that; and besides, it takes her out of doors once a day, at any rate. Sometimes the master excuses her when she is unusually tired." A teacher will, perhaps, say that such a girl should be taken out of school; that it is folly on the part of parents to allow her to go at all. Very true; but the difficulties are almost insuperable on account of the inflexibleness of the system. Ambition to graduate with the class, the disproportionate value put upon a successful career in the school, the unwillingness to prolong indefinitely the period of school life, are forces too potent for the control of average parents. Risk to health is a trifle compared with the completion of the full course and the honor of graduation. The system means all or nothing. It has little elasticity. It has few, if any, compromises and adjustments in the interests of safety. A young lady who had won the valedictory honors appeared on the platform to read her essay, but after a few sentences hesitated, and then, having stumbled on a little farther, stopped altogether in complete failure. She had strained every nerve to carry off the honors and get through the public exercises, and, as might be expected, was ill for weeks afterwards. In scores of cases the reaction comes a day or two later, and the public knows nothing of it. In this case the nervous force failed a few hours too soon. It was said that her parents and teachers were mortified; they ought to have been incarcerated. Will any one have the temerity to assert that there is nothing wrong in a system when its incentives can produce such results? The system of rank and rewards is especially bad for girls, since it induces intense nervous emotions, such as fear of failure and over excitement with success. Every physician of extensive practice has had patients nervously prostrated by such a strain. A physician in one of our largest cities, whose specialty is nervous disorders, is of opinion that not less than one third of his cases are persons who have suffered from the pressure of the school system.

It is a little singular that in England overpressure is felt chiefly by dull, backward scholars, but in America by the bright, ambitious pupils. There, the teacher receives a cash payment for every scholar who passes the prescribed examination, and pressure is consequently applied to bring up the rear, since the rest of the procession will get through without difficulty. Here, the ambition of scholars is the motive worked, through the announcement of percentages of rank and the honors of graduation. Hence the pressure is on the bright, sensitive, nervous scholars, and is scarcely appreciable with the rank and file. It may be said, by the way, of the marking system, that it is an incentive to those who need no incentive, and has little or no effect on those who do need urging. The twenty-third scholar in a class of thirty-five will not forego the pleasures of this life in order to become the twenty-first.

It is not claimed that all, or even a majority, of pupils are overworked. The average boy is sturdy enough to bear up under the exactions of the school room. He is sufficiently sensible, or natural, to know that base ball, and tennis, and coasting impose duties which he must not neglect. His

healthy instinct informs him that it is better to attain unto perfection in athletics than in books. Neither boys nor girls in primary schools are in danger, provided sessions are not too long. But a very large fraction, if not a majority, of girls in grammar and high schools are under a nervous pressure, either from the demands or the incentives of study, which is bad for them. American girls are thought, and with some reason, to be deficient on the side of health. Delicacy is the rule, and robustness the exception. Inasmuch as they spend the larger and best part of their time from ten to twenty-one years of age in school, and in study at home which school requires, and as the system is contrived to quicken ambition, to appeal to pride, and to create sensitiveness to public opinion, it is not improbable that the prolonged school life of girls has much to do with the subsequent lack of physical tone and vigor. In many instances the effect is so plainly traceable to this cause, that it is legitimate to generalize broadly and to lay large part of the blame for the unhealthiness of American girls upon the objectionable methods of our public schools.

In some instances, though more rarely, dull scholars are pressed out of measure. The dull or slow boy who is conscientious may have to work harder to remain in his class at all than the bright boy, who is away beyond him, to keep his place at the front. Slowness, however, is not usually nervous. Its discouragements do not often lead to serious illness. Besides, the slow boy will have his compensations by and by, when he is the man of affairs and the bright boy is his book-keeper.

There is something wrong in an educational system when nearly all scholars in the upper grades, after spending five or six hours in the school room, are in the habit of taking their books home for evening study. Must they carry their fetters with them everywhere? May they not go home in peace? To say nothing of the monotony of such a life, nor of the fatal effect as to habits of study by spreading work over so many hours, it is bad for health to keep young people poring over books from morning till night, and into the night. The brain, even a child's brain, cannot work as it ought such a length of time. There is not one literary man in a hundred who can work his brain more than six or seven hours a day, and not as long as that in intense intellectual labor. A child does not apply himself as a man does, but then he has only a child's brain and a child's power. It has been estimated by a high authority that a child from six to seven years of age is able to attend to one lesson not more than fifteen minutes, a child from seven to ten not more than twenty minutes, a child from ten to twelve not more than thirty minutes. These figures carry their own rebuke to a system which sends children home with books under their arms, and with tasks assigned for hours which ought to be their own, or ought to be given to sleep. If laws could avail in such a province, there should be a law that no child should be allowed to carry a school book through the streets, except at the beginning and end of a term, on pain of a pecuniary fine to be imposed on parent or teacher.

But the last defense of teachers is to shift the blame on other causes.

It is not study but unhealthy amusements, not the school but the home, not books but late hours with social excitements, which are responsible.

An extremely cool assumption is concealed under this defense. It is, that the object of life for everybody, from the seventh to the twenty-first year, is to go to school; that all other interests should go down before this. The assumption is, that children are born and grow up in order that schools may have free course and be glorified; that the final cause of children and youth is the study of books; that if they reserve any time or strength for other uses they are thwarting the plan of Divine Providence in their creation.

But a child's life is many sided. Its nature needs to be fed from various sources. There should be time, and plenty of time, for social enjoyment, amusement, familiarity with practical things, use of tools, woodcraft, trout-fishing, entertaining reading, running errands, helping in the household, and even for snatches of absolute idleness. There should not be excess, nor practices intrinsically unhealthy; also, there should be that knowledge which comes from books and study. But the American family is quite generous enough to the school already in giving it the children during the best hours of the day and the best seasons of the year. The family and society may properly enough demand the remainder of the time and some of the zest of its children for its own use and enjoyment. It certainly is ungenerous on the part of the school to expect further concessions from the home, and from other real interests of life, by insisting that children shall be cut off from much that makes their life worth living in order that the demands of school may not be too much for them. As between the two, it is better that a young person's interest in other occupations or in diversions should somewhat reduce his ardor for study than that his (her) zeal for study should reduce interest in amusements and practical affairs. Teachers lament the effect of a young people's party on the next day's study. The girls can think and talk of nothing else. It would be better, then, to have the party Friday evening. But we are heretical enough on the educational doctrine to prefer that the enjoyment of the party should overflow into study than that absorption in study, or the exactions of study, should prevent the complete enjoyment of the party. Our sympathies would be with parents who had taken the trouble to give children and their friends a pleasant evening, yet who could not help seeing that many were too tired from study, or too anxious about it, to enjoy themselves, than with teachers who are half angry that the pupils are not yet as old and sedate as themselves. We will not grudge the five, or even six, hours at school, but we make a stand there, and insist on having our children the rest of the time, and on their having some of the other rational uses of life in addition to the knowledge which comes from books.

It is also to be remembered, besides the fact that life has other uses than schooling, that those scholars who do give up all their time to the demands of the school are the very scholars whose health suffers from

overwork, while those who enter into other pursuits and into recreations are less subject to nervous disorders.

It may be said that to relax methods so as to meet all these conditions of health would impair the working of the system; that public education has been brought to a high degree of perfection, and must not be interfered with; and that there is so much ground to be covered that the courses of study should be enlarged rather than restricted. To all which argumentation we reply that the system was made for scholars and not scholars for the system; that it is the essence of idolatry to exalt the means above the ends; and that much of the evil which has grown up along with unquestionable advantages is due to excessive regard for the methods, the classifications, the comprehensiveness of an elaborate system, and to comparative neglect of the variety of individual needs.

It may also be said that parents themselves are to be blamed, for they urge their children on, and are proud of their progress. In too many cases this is true, showing that the bad influences of the system have infected parents also. But by the side of this folly is a serious fact which educators do well to ponder. It is, that intelligent and prosperous parents are withdrawing their children from the common schools, so that those pupils who, by their good manners, cleanliness, and brightness, interest teachers most are diminishing in numbers annually. Our schools are made up in an increasing ratio of the children of day laborers and foreigners. The teacher has the proud satisfaction of knowing that children are sent to him from such families quite as much to get them out of the way as to have them well educated. Self-interest, if no better motive, should force teachers to give such a flexibility to the system that it will retain desirable scholars. If there were partial courses many children would be left in the public schools who are now sent elsewhere. How long will it be in the cities and large towns before the vocation of a teacher will be exclusively restricted to the instruction and care of children from the poorer classes of society?

In view of what we have now urged concerning health we hold ourselves justified in contending that there are evils connected with our common schools which are more than the necessary incidents of a nearly perfect system, and that we have reason to expect of educators corresponding modifications such as their wisdom may be able to devise.

THE CONFIDENCE OF THE DEAD.

THE unrestricted use of private correspondence and diaries in some recent biographies has caused the question to be raised afresh how far the sacredness of confidential disclosures is affected by the death of the person making them. The rapidly growing demand for biography, and the temptation which it brings to use every means of gratifying the curiosity of the public, certainly give good reason for the discussion. General acquiescence in disregard of a delicate right injures society, even though