in the trades organized in unions means lessening the boys' opportunities to learn useful and paying handicrafts. If all the mills and all the stores and all the offices that now employ boys as helpers, messengers and minor clerks should become organized in unions, the primary, and even the grammar school, graduates would not be able to find employment at all.

The second reason why it is steadily growing harder for persons to succeed is that life itself is steadily becoming more complicated and difficult. It requires more ability, character and education to succeed nowadays than it did even a generation ago. In other words, while there never was a time when there were so many opportunities always open as there are now, these opportunities can neither be understood nor taken advantage of by persons who are not well educated. As a school superintendent, upon whom manufacturers and merchants are all the time calling for boys and young men to fill this or that opening, I see this side of the matter very plainly.

THE INCREASING DIFFICULTY OF LIFE.

Now there is a practical aspect which I wish to call to your attention vigorously and fully. It is harder every decade for a boy to go through a grammar school. The studies grow harder and more numerous. It is growing harder to get through the high school, and much harder to get into college. And some parents object to this fact. There is a cause for this steadily increasing difficulty, and this cause lies outside of the school. Life itself is steadily growing harder. In every trade the work grows more difficult. In every profession more and more complicated conditions must be met and successfully resolved into their simple factors. We expect more of our fellowmen than our ancestors used to expect. A mason does more work in an hour than masons used to do, and he works on a higher building, with thicker walls and more angles and corners. The fabrics of staple goods to-day are much more complicated and various than they used to be; we expect more colors to be fast and to be beautiful than were worked with commonly a hundred years ago. The making of roads has become a science. When disease kills a man nowa

days we are apt to say that a better doctor would have saved him. Everybody nowadays expects more of everybody else than our forefathers used to expect. The conclusion is obvious-our boys who are to succeed in life must take a longer time in school to prepare for life than boys used to take.

Run over this list of a dozen occupations-machinist, engineer, mechanic, plumber, carpenter, decorator, railroader, post-office clerk, salesman, farmer, dyer, hatter. Is there any place of importance in any of these occupations for a boy under sixteen years of age? Is there really any place for a boy under eighteen years of age? Remember, too, that we expect every man to be not only a wage-earner worth his wages, but also a good and intelligent citizen. Is the grammar school course too full and too long and too elaborate for any boy who means to be successful in any of these occupations? Does the boy graduate of a grammar school start from too high up the ladder of knowledge to become a good machinist, engineer, carpenter?

Again run over this list of occupations-drug clerk, tradesman, bank clerk, foreman, printer, reporter. Is there any place of any importance in any of these lines for a man who as a boy has not had at least a grammar school education? Would a technical high school education be too much as a foundation for entering any of them?

ROOM ENOUGH FOR THE EXCEPTIONALLY WELL EDUCATED.

We desire our boys to succeed. The desire ought to become a purpose. The purpose ought to become an accepted plan. We must recognize that in many lines of effort there are even now too many workers. We must force up every available boy, lest we have a great surplus of laborers on the market. who will force the great mass of laborers down. We can get rid of the excessive competition for work only by educating as many as possible for new, higher and more difficult kinds of work. The inventors who created the great departments of electrical engineering and handicraft did two great things for mankind: they created new markets for labor, relieving to that

extent the old over-crowded markets, and they made life itself more comfortable and convenient. Everything that we can do to make some boys different from other boys and more intelligent than average boys helps not only the fortunate boy who is well educated, but also the boy who is less educated, since it removes another rival for inferior work and makes the superior worker, whose work itself necessarily benefits others, including the less fortunate.

Therefore, I welcome the technical school that makes skilled workmen in new lines in which unions are not necessary, because the workmen are so few that the demand is greater than the supply. I welcome the higher scientific school that opens up new fields for industries and prepares for those fields. There is no crowd at the top of any mountain of endeavor. There is no limit to the height to which culture can be developed. There are no bounds to the spread of civilization. The harvest of success and prosperity is always ready for the coming of the man competent to gather it in.

The prayer of every parent and every teacher for our boys should be not for opportunity which calls often to ears that cannot hear, but for adequate preparation for the opportunity. To undertake anything before one has the trained ability to carry it out spells failure; that dread word, once attached to a boy or man, has often blighted his career forever. I close by saying what seems to me not less important than anything else that I have been able to say: one of the very best results of an adequate education for life is the self-understanding which tells us what we ought not to undertake because we are not ready. The boy trained for some opportunity is not likely to undertake work for which he is not fit. The mothers and fathers who can send well-educated boys into the world are not only insuring their success; they are making the world itself better worth living in for everybody else.

Hon. Frank Alpine Hill, Litt.D.

RAY GREENE HULING

HE life of a teacher is not unlike the falling of a stone into a pool: there is a slight commotion around the spot upon which the stone has fallen, a few waves circle off in constantly failing impulse, and the pool is apparently as before. Only he who knows nature and her laws could discern that force had been communicated. Few who observe the quiet labors of a faithful teacher comprehend how mighty is the power of personal contact between him and his pupils, or have a thought of the mysterious contagions of intellect and spirit by which nature's noblemen impart their strength and greatness to others. But when death interrupts the labor of love, and by its shock quickens memory and appreciation, then all see clearly and with fullness of vision what inspiration of power has been lost. So this autumn has revealed to us more distinctly than ever before the value of the personality and of the life work of the subject of this sketch.

Dr. Hill was born October 12, 1841, in Biddeford, Me., the son of Joseph S. and Nancy (Hill) Hill, and a lineal descendant of Peter Hill, who came from Plymouth, England, in 1633, and settled in what is now Maine. He graduated from the Biddeford High School at the age of fifteen, entered Bowdoin College at sixteen, and graduated at twenty. In school and college alike his interests were broader than mere academic pursuits, for we find him playing first base on the college nine, active in the debating club, editor of the Bowdoin Bugle, curator of the Natural History Society, and Class Prophet on Class Day. His studies, however, had not suffered, for he received election to the Phi Beta Kappa, and delivered an oration on Class Day. In paying his way through college he had utilized the long vacations in teaching. After graduation (1862) he became principal of the Limington Academy for one term and then was chosen principal of the Biddeford High School, in