It appeared to me, in the few days I was permitted to enjoy the delightful hospitality of the university and the citizens of Morgantown, that West Virginia is now in a fair way of including in its State University the best results of the modern experiment of combining in the circle of the higher education all the applications of science to industrial life. With the arrangement of its academical faculties for all departments of culture; its superb situation; its admission of women to university opportunities; its interesting experimenting in a department of pedagogy; the rapid development of its departments of agriculture and mechanics; and its good work in other directions; there would seem to be in its organization a safeguard against any popular upheaval which would separate and thus dissipate the moderate resources of the State. With the gradual development of the secondary education and the increase of fit preparatory schools, there should be no reason for the neglect to secure the correlation of all public and a friendly relation with all superior private schools which will make for the greatest good of the Commonwealth.

Sixth. Ninety of every one hundred men and women who have graduated even from superior schools never return to thorough study after their graduation, save in the direction of their own occupation or profession, but depend on reading for their entire mental growth as far as it is derived from books. The crying need of the entire Southern section of our country, as I have observed it during the past fifteen years, is the lack of good reading matter to supplement the instruction in the schools. It is almost incredible that, through entire sections of the country, outside of occasional private collections, this dearth of opportunity for good reading should be so marked. The inevitable result of the absence of good reading is the coming in of the deluge of weak, mischievous, and often abominable matter, that makes a thoughtful man almost deny the value of learning to read at all. Every country railroad station or village news stand in the South is becoming a depot for this literary "fodder,” which finds its physical parallel only among the unfortunate creatures represented as washing down a meal of dirt with a swash of moonshine whisky. In our late visit we were encouraged to find in several of the larger towns and cities of West Virginia the hopeful beginning of a public library; with collections of valuable reading matter in some of the larger public schools. But the great need is in the open country; and one of the first movements by the State legislature should be a law to encourage the formation of libraries in every school district, by an offer of a moderate State bounty conditioned on the effort of the people to help themselves in this way. The great revival of the common school in 1837-1848, under the leadership of Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, and like-minded reformers, was signalized by the effort to establish common school libraries in the leading States of the North. In Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio, and other States, this plan was carried out with a good measure of success. The library everywhere became one of the most powerful auxiliaries to the building up of an effective system of public instruction. To-day, in all the foremost centers of education in the Union, the public library has become a practical annex to the public school; the teachers using it to awaken and develop a correct taste for reading in their pupils with the happiest results. One of the results of this habit of making district school collections of good books in the open country will be the final establishment of good free circulating libraries in all considerable villages. Nothing will so conduce to the arrest of the present alarming depopulation of extensive country districts, by which the best young people are being swept away into the vortex of city or the chances of new village life, as the multiplication of good schools, libraries, and the means of good inexpensive education amid the surroundings of unspoiled nature; where the great open volume of the visible world is all the time supplementing the best work of the teacher in the schoolroom.

Seventh. There remains but one further topic connected with the development of the common school in West Virginia to be considered; but that is so important that it might well have been treated at first, rather than at the close of this essay; were it not that industrial education can not be separated from the proper training of the schools without degenerating to that narrow teaching of a trade which gives us the mechanic without the furnishing of the man. In no State visited during our ministry of education in the South has there been found such an imperative necessity for a great organization of industrial education, in all classes, as in this and the corresponding region of southwestern Virginia. But in no States, deficient as are all the States of the South in this respect, is there so little apparent interest in this great subject as here. Outside the agricultural and mechanical departments of the State University, now first coming into prominence, and perhaps two or three schools for the whites, and the State school for colored youth, we saw little indication that the educational public had seriously considered the question. Even the very important subject of drawing in the public schools appeared to be handled with little regard to its bearing on industrial training and with no great degree of success.

But surely, if this State is ever to realize her "manifest destiny" amid her sister Commonwealths, it must be in the development of her prodigious resources in mineral

wealth, manufactures, and a skilled agriculture. Fortunately, West Virginia has not yet been ravaged, as all the Atlantic and Gulf States of the South have been, by that wasteful style of farming which George Washington predicted, a century ago, would change Northern Virginia to the wilderness so much of it is to-day. It is only by such a training as will bring to the front a generation, native to the State; a body of people competent to appreciate the great opportunities in her abundance of woods, the cultivation of grasses, grains, fruits, and garden crops, that the agricultural capabilities of Western Virginia can be fully developed. The day has passed when any American State can ever again hold such political relations to the Union as Virginia maintained for half a century. No Commonwealth in the future can have that dominating public influence that Virginia, Kentucky, South Carolina, Ohio, New York, and Massachusetts have had at different periods of American history. Rapid transit is the death of local and even State superiority in such directions. It is now only by the superiority in the skilled industry which concentrates all the scientific research and knowledge of the day upon the improvement and enlargement of our human life that any State can hope to excel or even maintain what has already been gained. Every feature of the country; every material deposit in mines, "burning springs," forest, or water power, calls aloud to the Mountain State to prepare for that coming of the Lord which, in the gospel of American life, means the fit development of the resources with which the God of nature has endowed the great mountain world, of which West Virginia is at present the head, and of which she may be the pioneer of a success impossible now to predict.

The problem of industrial education in both the Virginias, especially in West Virginia, to-day, is a plain statement of facts and a preparation for impending conditions. Within twenty years many thousands of skilled workmen and workwomen in all the varied industries that must be developed in States so favored by nature will be called for, with such opportunities for honorable success in life as have never been offered to the masses of their people before. The youth of this State are not inferior in any of the natural gifts that make the trained worker, the inventor, the supervisor of industries, the leader of those great industrial combinations that have built up the civilization of the foremost States of the Union. Will the Commonwealth of West Virginia let slip the present opportunity to give to the present generation of her children and youth that training of the hand and development of executive faculty, without which the culture of the mind and even the development of right living may yet leave a people unfitted to face the opening opportunities and stern demands of the day and hour? If twenty years hence, perhaps earlier than that, this call finds no large response from the native youth of the State, the inevitable result will be that they will be crowded out of their own heritage; pushed onward toward the setting sun, to fill some gap of border civilization, and repeat the hard life of the fathers and mothers in settling another new country; while the young men and women of liberal commonwealths will come in and reap the harvest.

It is not a year too early for the people of this Commonwealth to consider this matter. For whatever statesmen, not to say politicians, may affirm, this simple enterprise of developing the industrial faculty of a generation is a hundredfold more important to the future destiny of an American State than the solution of the vexed problems that now agitate the American Congress and divide the great political parties into hostile armies, contending for the administration of the Government. For there is nothing that a generation of well-schooled, industrially trained American young men and women can not do in the line of the development of agriculture, manufactures, and commerce, even in the face of the disabilities of natural environment, the hindrance to prosperity from false economic ideas, and foolish legislation against the eternal laws of national development.

Every considerable city in West Virginia should at once make haste to establish an industrial department in connection with its public schools, in which, at least, all who are disposed may have the opportunity to prepare for success in life. And here is the opportunity for the prosperous men of all these communities, whose wealth has been amassed through the industrial developments of the past thirty years, to aid in the foundation and support of such an annex to the common schools. Almost every considerable city in the leading States of the Union now has a foundation of this sort, which offers to the ambitions youth of either sex the opportunity to prepare for what is before them. Only by this broad development of public industrial training shall we be able to lift our operative and mechanical classes out of the rut of that narrow policy, inaugurated by the labor union, which seeks to close up the avenues to the apprenticeship of trades, and amounts, practically, to shutting the American youth outside the opportunity to earn his bread by the training of the brain as well as by the sweat of the brow. It will be wise if the intelligent farmers of the State close round the agricultural and mechanical department of the State University, and insist that every inducement and opportunity shall be given in connection with it for the training of the skilled captains of the soil, the commanders of manufacturing and engineering industries, and especially, that

the cultivated young women of the State shall avail themselves of the extraordinary opportunities now offered there for instruction in gardening, fruit culture, and all that makes the country home the paradise of which we read in the poets, but which in reality it so rarely is.

For a generation or more, West Virginia will hold the educational and industrial leadership of this great mountain land at the center of this old Republic. Here is to be witnessed, in the near future, a repetition of the rapid growth on the far Western border, with no danger of the fearful reaction and collapse which now threatens vast regions of that inhospitable country. An intelligent comprehension of the situation and a resolute effort at making herself, not only the foremost in the schooling, but a pioneer in the trained industrial educational movement of the time, will not only build up the Commonwealth at home, but render, perhaps, the best service now possible to the Republic. For, surely, nothing can more certainly make for the future welfare of the new Republic than this strengthening of the old East and the original Northwest, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, by building up at their center this magnificent mountain realm, in which is now garnered up the future prosperity of half a dozen States. Here, with the judicious support of the wealth of the great Commonwealths; the concentration of their educational, religious, social, and skilled industrial forces, may be wrought out among these mountains and valleys a civilization that will attract a new tide of immigration from every section of the Union, and mightily strengthen those great conservative agencies on which we now rely for the salvation of the nation. Surely, the call of Providence was never more distinctly heard than to-day, to the people of this most interesting of the new States of the Union-that the splendid inauguration of the Commonwealth, a generation ago, shall become a prophecy of a larger and nobler life through centuries to

come.

CHAPTER IX.

REPORT ON EDUCATIONAL AFFAIRS IN ALASKA.

DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR,

BUREAU OF EDUCATION, ALASKA DIVISION,

Washington, D. C., June 30, 1893.

SIR: I have the honor to submit the following annual report of the general agent of education for Alaska for the year ending June 30, 1893:

In the summer of 1890, in accordance with your instructions, I visited northern Alaska and established schools for the Arctic Eskimo at Cape Prince of Wales, Point Hope, and Point Barrow. Through the courtesy of the Secretary of the Treasury and of Capt. L. G. Shepard, chief of the Revenue Marine Division of the Treasury Department, was permitted to accompany the U. S. revenue marine steamer Bear, Capt. M. A. Healy, commanding, on her annual cruise in Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean. In addition to conveying me to the points designated, Captain Healy was under instructions from the Secretary of the Treasury to visit the coast of Siberia and distribute presents to the Koraks around Cape Navarin in return for shelter and food furnished shipwrecked American whalers. He was also under commission from Superintendent Porter, of the Census Office, to take a census of the native population along the Arctic coast of Alaska and the islands of Bering Sea, which population could not be reached by the usual enumerators.

The trip to Siberia enabled me to make a cruise of 700 miles along that littleknown coast, and study somewhat the character of the native population under conditions corresponding with those under which life must be maintained in Alaska. I found them to be a hardy, active, and well-fed people, owning tens of thousands of head of domestic reindeer.

The taking of the census of Arctic Alaska furnished me even more extensive facilities for studying the condition of the Eskimo of Alaska. I found them, like their neighbors on the Siberian side, to be a hardy and active people, but because they had never been instructed to depend upon the raising of reindeer as a support, unlike the Siberians, they were on the verge of starvation. The whale and walrus that formerly had constituted the principal portion of their food have been destroyed or driven off by the whalers, and the wild reindeer that once abounded in their country have been killed off by the introduction of breech-loading firearms.

The thorough canvass of the native population for enumeration, necessitating a landing wherever even one or two tents were seen on the beach, furnished unusual opportunities for observing the educational needs of that people and learning the great difficulties under which schools will have to be carried on.

Upon my return to Washington I had the honor on November 12 to address you a preliminary report of the season's work, emphasizing the destitute condition of the Alaskan Eskimo.

On the 5th of December this report was transmitted by you to the Secretary of the Interior for his information and on the 15th transmitted to the Senate by Hon. George Chandler, Acting Secretary of the Interior. On the following day it was referred by the Senate to the Committee on Education and Labor.

On the 19th of December, Hon. Louis E. McComas, of Maryland, introduced into the House of Representatives a joint resolution (H. R. No. 258) providing that the act of Congress approved March 2, 1887, "An act to establish agricultural experiment stations in connection with the colleges established in the several States under the provisions of an act approved July 2, 1862, and of the acts supplementary thereto" and an act approved August 30, 1890, entitled "An act to apply a portion of the proceeds of the public lands to the more complete endowment and support of the colleges for the benefit of agriculture and the mechanic arts, established under the provisions of an act of Congress approved July 2, 1862," should be extended by the Secretary of the Interior over Alaska, with the expectation that the purchase, improvement, and management of domestic reindeer should be made a part of the industrial education of the proposed college.