for you numbers have come to have that significance which makes them beautiful; an island may have touched your imagination as it has Conrad’s, who calls it “a great ship anchored in the open sea”; you have seen that beauty which lies behind facts when they fall, as with a click, into the mechanism of things. So must children be taught to realize at the very beginning something of that great unity which pervades the world of thought and of matter. Some comprehension must be given to them of that marvelous sense of fitting together, of perfect correspondence, which all nature reveals and which is ultimately beauty. It is this quality, residing in every subject, which constitutes the justification for our insistence on beauty as a part of education. With our present systems of education all ideality is crushed, for this ideality is a personal quality, whereas all we are, we are in mass. “You are trying to make that boy into another you,” said Emerson, some fifty years ago; “one’s enough.” Modern education, subject to constant whims, has become a capacious maw into which our children are thrown. Everything for use, nothing for beauty; for use means money, while beauty--what is beauty good for?--(a question which Lowell, in one of his essays, says “would be death to the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage”). This is indeed an old thesis, but never has it more needed stating than now. It applies everywhere. Literature taught as beauty is uplifting and joyful; taught as syntax it is dead and cheerless. All other forms of instruction lose their force if they are detached from that poetic harmony of which they are a part. Numbers, cities, machines, symphonies, the objects on your table, you yourself,--all these are to be seen as belonging to this harmony, without which the world is Bedlam. American children are musical, American adults are not, and the chief reason lies in the wasted opportunities of childhood. If the natural taste of our children for music were properly developed, they would continue to practice it and to find pleasure in doing so, and thus would avoid the fatal error of _postponing their heaven to another time_--the great mistake of life and of theology. I desire therefore to deal here with the possibilities which music offers to children, not to a few children in playing the pianoforte, but to all children in love and understanding. It is obviously desirable to make them all love music, and, since few of them ever attain satisfactory proficiency in playing instruments, our chief problem lies in trying to develop their taste and thereby keeping their allegiance. II. THE VALUE OF SINGING