With sadness let us confess that our age is sinning grievously against this principle of self-care and self-love. Individual worth is being sorely neglected. An age is great not through a large census roll, but through a multitude of great souls, just as a book is valuable not by having many pages, but by containing great ideas. The paving-stones in our streets are very different from sapphires. The bringing together of 65,000,000 small granite blocks will not turn these stones into diamonds. It is only when each stone is a gem that the increase of number means the increase of beauty. No nation is moving forward toward supremacy merely because the weak individuals began to go in droves. In our education we are singing peans and praise about our schools and new methods of education. Meanwhile Frederic Harrison insists that in fifty years the public schools of Great Britain have turned out not one mind of the first order. Some of those who have achieved renown in literature or statecraft were self-educated. The rest enjoyed the help of some parent or friend, who very early in the child's career took the pains to search out the child's strongest faculty, and then asked some tutor or teacher to assist in nourishing the special talent toward greatness. At home, President White is telling us that our authors and poets are dead, and have no successors. Nor could it be otherwise. When a skillful driver wishes to develop the speed of a thoroughbred colt, he specializes upon this one animal. No sensible horseman would put forty colts upon a track and try to develop their speed by driving them around in a drove. It remains for the parents of this country to adopt the method of training their children in droves, and educating them in herds. Our common-school system began in the necessity for the division of labor. Settling in the wilds of New England, the men went into the forests with axes, or to the field with their hoes. The mothers went into the garden or to the loom. Rather than that their children should have no education, many parents came together and asked some one man or woman to do the work for all. Thus our common schools were born out of poverty and emergency.