Has history a practical value? It depends on the ends. The narrowest specialist as well as the broadest humanitarian will both agree upon the usefulness and desirability of history to meet their respective ends, but they disagree upon what the ends are. The specialist is interested in history for its own sake; to him the element of history is the fact; the tradition of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries has forced him to select his facts in the fields of politics, war and diplomacy; the method he uses is rather a one-sided use of the natural-scientific method. He is interested in the facts for their own sake: he is often too little interested in their value, importance and inter-relations. He has performed a great service in the nineteenth century in correcting old facts and in finding new ones. But now he has such mountains of facts that he is overawed by their mass, and long practice in his method prevents him from using them. So a great Harvard professor is reported as saying, “Keep on piling up facts, their weight will squeeze out some kind of order.” In his attempt to be scientific the specialist has used only one side of the scientist’s method; he has forgotten that the scientist works not only with matter, but with the activities and relations of matter. He loves to brush the mold off the dry bones of the past. Perhaps he even has a dream of articulating a few of the bones into a cross section of the skeleton of the political past. This is a rightful part of the work in the university and graduate school, unfortunately often the all-dominating part. I have spoken at length of this work for the reason that in this state there is required of all high school teachers a year of graduate work in some university of the American Association. The specialist’s method received there is all too often taken, without adaptation into the high school and occasionally even into the grades. So “art for art’s sake” is perpetuated. The boy is prepared for carrying on research when he expects to carry on business, and the girl is drilled in turning out monographs when she expects to turn out biscuits. Here is where the parents, and others, raise the question, what is the use? The answer and the reform must come from the top downwards. On the other hand the humanitarian is often so broad that his work contains but little of history; it is so thin and transparent that it may justly be called culturine. His pupils learn answers, but not the steps to the answers; or they learn the fashion phrase of the “example,” but not the steps of solution. At every point in their journey through the past they are dependent on their Bædecker. Here again is where the question is raised, what is the use?