ell-considered and important verdicts were of a nature to restore
public confidence, which had been disquieted by questionings as to
whether so young a teacher would be qualified to take so large a class as
70,000,000, distributed over so extensive a schoolhouse as America, and
pull it through without assistance.

I was even disquieted myself, although I am of a cold, calm temperament,
and not easily disturbed. I feared for my country. And I was not wholly
tranquilized by the verdicts rendered as above. It seemed to me that
there was still room for doubt. In fact, in looking the ground over I
became more disturbed than I was before. Many worrying questions came up
in my mind. Two were prominent. Where had the teacher gotten his
equipment? What was his method?

He had gotten his equipment in France.

Then as to his method! I saw by his own intimations that he was an
Observer, and had a System that used by naturalists and other scientists.
The naturalist collects many bugs and reptiles and butterflies and
studies their ways a long time patiently. By this means he is presently
able to group these creatures into families and subdivisions of families
by nice shadings of differences observable in their characters. Then he
labels all those shaded bugs and things with nicely descriptive group
names, and is now happy, for his great work is completed, and as a result
he intimately knows every bug and shade of a bug there, inside and out.
It may be true, but a person who was not a naturalist would feel safer
about it if he had the opinion of the bug. I think it is a pleasant
System, but subject to error.

The Observer of Peoples has to be a Classifier, a Grouper, a Deducer, a
Generalizer, a Psychologizer; and, first and last, a Thinker. He has to
be all these, and when he is at home, observing his own folk, he is often
able to prove competency. But history has shown that when he is abroad
observing unfamiliar peoples the chances are heavily against him. He is
then a naturalist observing a bug, with no more than a naturalist's
chance of being able to tell the bug anything new about itself, and no
more than a naturalist's chance of being able to teach it any new ways
which it will prefer to its own.

To return to that first question. M. Bourget, as teacher, would simply
be France teaching America. It seemed to me that the outlook was dark
--almost Egyptian, in fact. What would the new teacher, representing
Fra