hools of philosophers. Locke
took the ground that the mind of every child born into the world is
like a piece of blank paper; that you may write thereon whatever you
will, but science has long since proved that such idealists as
Descartes were nearer right, that the human family come into the world
with ideas, with marked individual proclivities; that the pre-natal
conditions have more influence than all the education that comes
after. If family peculiarities are transmitted to the third and fourth
generation, the grandson clothed with the same gait, gesture, mode of
thought and expression as the grandfather he has never seen, it is
evident that each individual may reap some advantage and development
from those predecessors whose lives in all matters great and small are
governed by law, by a conscientious sense of duty, not by feeling,
chance, or appetite.

If there is a class of educators who need special preparation
for their high and holy duties, it is those who assume the
responsibilities of parents. Shall they give less thought to immortal
beings than the artist to his landscape or statue.

We wander through the galleries in the old world, and linger before
the works of the great masters, transfixed with the grace and beauty
of the ideals that surround us. And with equal preparation, greater
than these are possible in living, breathing humanity. Go in
imagination from the gallery to the studio of the poor artist, watch
him through the restless days, as he struggles with the conception of
some grand ideal, and then see how patiently he moulds and remoulds
the clay, and when at last, through weary years, the block of marble
is transformed into an angel of light, he worships it, and weeps that
he cannot breathe into it the breath of life. And lo! by his side are
growing up immortal beings to whom he has never given one half the
care and thought bestowed on the silent ones that grace his walls. And
yet the same devotion to a high ideal of human character, would soon
give the world a generation of saints and scholars, of scientists and
statesmen, of glorified humanity such as the world has not yet seen.
Many good people lose heart in trying to improve their surroundings
because they say the influence of one amounts to so little. Remember
it was by the patient toil of generations through centuries that the
Colossus of Rhodes, Diana's Temple at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at
Halicarnassus, the Pyramids at Egypt, the Pharos a