axophone player and landscape
gardener. He was brilliant in all these lines and ready to make a living
at any one of them. And if all these trades should fail, he was yet a
scientific farmer and could go to the land anywhere and make it produce
bigger crops than the untrained man who was born on the soil.

What other school in the world will give a boy at eighteen an equipment
like that? I ask this, not to disparage the old-fashioned schools, but
to call their attention to what the new are doing.

CHAPTER XLVII. LIFE'S PROBLEMS

Mooseheart is at once a farm, a school and a town. The boys help handle
the crops and herds under the guidance of the experts who teach the
classes in agriculture. For extra work in the fields the boys receive
pay. They save their money to buy the tools of their trade. The bandsmen
when they graduate go out with fine instruments bought with their own
earnings during their school years. "Preparation for life" is the
one aim of Mooseheart. Therefore at Mooseheart the boy or girl will
encounter every problem that he will encounter in his struggle in the
wider world. Nothing is done for him that he can do for himself. He is
taught no false theories. But every fact of life is placed before him
in due time. The first wealth of facts comes to these city-bred children
when they are set down in the middle of this great, busy, beautiful
farm. John Burrows says: "No race that does not take to the soil can
long hold its country. In the struggle for survival it will lose its
country to some incoming race that loves the soil." Already the Japanese
farmers in California have shown that if we should let them in they
would take this whole country in a few years. They drive the American
farmer out because they have a passion for the soil, and they turn their
whole families in to till it. What is the answer? Teach our young to
love the soil and to till it well, or else an alien race will take away
their heritage. The first lesson in Mooseheart is to till the soil.

But in addition to being a farm, Mooseheart is a town. The young folk
live in cottages and do their own cooking and house-keeping. There are
no great dormitories where hundreds sleep, and no vast dining-room where
they march in to the goose-step. We are preparing them for a free life,
and the only place they use the goose-step is in the penitentiary.
Mooseheart is a town instead of an institution. All "institutionalism"
is cast away. In each co