books as late as twenty-five, and in some cases they are studying even at thirty. Statisticians have shown that the age of graduation from college into professional or business positions is being raised constantly as the years go by. The courses in all grades of schools are being made harder from decade to decade; the examinations for entrance to college are growing stiffer all the time; the requirements for entering upon one's life-work are made more exacting each year; and as a result many young men are not beginning to help themselves until the race is half run. And as a corrective it is urged that we cut down the college course at least by one-fourth; and it is even suggested that we grant the bachelor's degree at the completion of two years of study. This will enable boys to get into business earlier; if they engage in mercantile pursuits, or if they desire to prepare themselves for the professions, they can in any event save a couple of years by this arrangement. This plan in a moderate form has already been in operation in a few of the universities for some time, for there may be finished in six years the regular college course and a professional course, which together required seven years for completion heretofore, thus practically shortening the scholastic period by one year.

It should be emphasized that the considerations urged in favor of curtailing the educational period are strictly practical, perhaps one might say financial, and they take account only of the affairs of the individual and ignore the needs of the society of which he is a member. It is represented that boys do not become self-supporting early enough; but, so far as I have been able to ascertain, no one has shown, or has even thought it necessary to show, that from the standpoint of the community there is a demand for more men in the professions or in business, which could be supplied if young men would only get started earlier. If one may place any faith in popular belief, there is an overcrowded condition in every profession now; law and medicine and teaching and engineering and commerce have all the men, such as they are, that can be employed, so that there is, as a matter of fact, no call for boys to get under way

younger than is the custom at present, so that the ship of state may be kept sailing on.

Those who assert that young men of today dally too long in schools before taking up the burdens of real life are determined in their views, not by any present public need of their services, not by any bad social condition, but simply by their feeling (which we all possess to a greater or less degree) that as soon as a boy comes of age he ought to shift for himself. And the age at which he is assumed to arrive at his majority has been passed down unchanged from remote times. Many of us do not consider that the period of immaturity may be continually lengthening, due alike to transformations in the social organism and to gradual modifications in human nature itself. It has never occurred to some persons that it is exceedingly arbitrary to say on just what day a boy attains that development of mind and body which should fit him to live a perfectly independent life. The neurologists are telling us today that the brain goes on developing until the age of thirty-three at any rate, and it would be more rational from one point of view to make the latter rather than the earlier age the age of majority.

Few seem fully to appreciate a point to which John Fiske called attention some years ago, and which others have exploited at some length since, that the long period of unripeness in the individual of the human species has been one of the primary factors in the advancement of mankind. The chick comes of age very soon after birth. Before the expiration of its fourth or fifth month of terrestrial experience it has achieved the summit of its evolution; it can earn its own living by this time, and look out for itself generally without assistance from its parents. The same is true in principle of the colt and calf and kitten and puppy. But the human child is compelled to mewl in its nurse's arms for many long months; and for many long years he requires the constant care and protection of his elders. As Mr. Russell has said:

It is written that he is born like the wild ass's colt; but this overstates the fact in his favor, for the wild ass's colt is greatly his superior at birth. And

not only does man thus begin life at the very bottom of the ladder, but he "crawls to maturity" at a slower pace by far than any of the animal species. Long before he reaches manhood most of the brute contemporaries and playmates of his infant years will have had their day and declined into decrepitude or died of old age.

And, again, every student of anthropology knows that the period of immaturity or plasticity has been continually lengthening even in the human species. The individual attains manhood at an earlier age among primitive than among highly developed peoples. An Indian child of ten is better able to care for himself than a white child of that age, who has been reared under the protection and in the seclusion of the schools, and who has thus been spared the necessity of taking his own part in the struggle for existence. Says Chamberlain :

Among the Athka Aleuts the boy is an independent hunter at ten and may marry; the boy of the Bismarck Archipelago, who goes out with his father very early, knows as much as he does by his tenth or twelfth year; in Tahiti the ease with which food can be obtained allows children to become practically free from paternal control, and by their eighth year to set up a sort of group-life by themselves; among the Khevsurs of the Caucasus children early begin to fight, and "by their eighth or tenth year may and do speak their word in public;" and many more examples from all over the world might be cited.

But if one will compare a child of civilization and a child of savagery at fifteen, again at twenty, and still again at thirty, he will appreciate that the relative immaturity, and helplessness perhaps, in the younger years of the child of civilization is essential for his later superiority.

Any community where most of the children are required to provide for themselves at a tender age cannot expect to progress rapidly or to attain a high position in the scale of civilization, for the reason that the new generations are not plastic and educable long enough to adapt themselves to an increasingly complex social environment; they could not assimilate elaborate achievements of their predecessors, even if these were made. If the race of Indians now on the boards could in a day develop a degree of culture equal to our own, but if their young continued to ripen as early as they now do, the accomplishments of

the present age would be largely lost, because their successors would have neither time nor adaptability to master them, and so to conserve and perpetuate them. When the child hastens with too fleet a foot toward maturity, it means that he must adjust himself to some low sphere of thought and conduct. All complex and intricate things in intellect or achievement elaborated in the later stages of development he cannot appropriate.

Children on the streets of our great cities, who are condemned to shift for a livelihood before they have entered their 'teens, reach the dead line betimes, and consequently their growth ceases when those under more favorable circumstances are still pushing forward, and possessing themselves of ever higher and more complex products of civilization. Of course, I am not speaking of the exceptional case of the genius, who usually manifests his superiority very early in life, as Sully, Galton, and others have shown; but even the genius, whether musician, or painter, or poet, or scholar, or scientist, or philosopher, has a prolonged development. He does not get his set until late in his career, and in some cases his plasticity (which means his power of adaptation to new conditions) lasts until the very end.

One who is moving onward constantly in his development does not contract any system of mechanical habits concerned with some form of bread-winning, and this is a necessary condition for continual growth. But the case is quite different with one who has to do all for himself in the fight for life. Just as soon as the mind and body get organized for accomplishing certain definite ends which are required for self-preservation, just then the energies of the whole being tend to expand themselves in the support of these activities, and the acquisition of other and higher modes of action is exceedingly difficult. The individual may become able to do these simple things well enough, but he jeopardizes his chances of ever being able to handle himself in more complicated situations. The street gamin, living in his simple but precarious way, becomes adept in the ways of the street shortly after he emerges from the cradle, but he is apt not to get beyond this point ever. While

his mate in the school keeps forging ahead, this little unfortunate soon comes to a dead stop, because untoward conditions force him to solve the practical problems of existence too early, and he lives out his days in the circle of ideas and feelings and volitions which are appropriate to his more or less primitive environment. If every child born in America during the next quarter of a century should receive such a training as do the street arabs on Clark street, in Chicago, our civilization would revert to the stage of semi-barbarism through which it passed ages ago.

The principle I wish to impress is that the stability and constant advancement of the race require a continual lengthening of the plastic age, so that each new generation may master all that has been accomplished by those who have gone before. We have pushed beyond the Indian in the development of culture because, for one reason, our youth remain in the acquisitive condition for a longer period, and our social regulations happily are such that we gladly protect them in their immaturity. In this way all that comes into the possession of the race at any age is acquired by the age following. And as our people have become more intelligent, as knowledge and skill have accumulated, that is to say, as our race has evolved, the period of plasticity in our youth has been lengthening at a corresponding rate. Just as soon as the extending of this period of acquisition ceases, just then will the development of our people be arrested; the one thing conditions the other. You cannot have a race pushing ahead uninterruptedly, while the new generations assume the functions of maturity as early as the preceding ones.

A study of the evolution of races will show, I think, that those only are leading in the march of civilization which do not require their youths to enter into the bread-and-butter relation with their environments until they have mastered all that has been achieved in the different fields in which they are to labor. This must be the guiding principle in every progressive community-one generation must care for the next until the new one has made itself master of all the intellectual and moral and motor attainments that the older one possesses. Each genera