clothing and shelter to guarantee him a good physique; enough training in coöperation and mutual helpfulness to give him the vision of a Super Race; and a supply of enthusiasm sufficient to enable him to work with increasing energy for the fulfillment of those things in which he believes. In order that the home may supply these things, it must have an income sufficient to provide all of the necessaries and some of the comforts of life. It must further be dominated by a spirit of sympathetic democracy.

While the present system of wealth distribution is so grotesquely unscientific that men are forced to rear families on incomes that will not provide the necessaries, to say nothing of the comforts, of life, no true home can be established nor can a Super Race be produced. If the child is an asset to the state, the state should support the child, guaranteeing to it an income sufficient to provide for its material welfare.

Why prate of home virtue? Why discourse learnedly on the possibilities of a developed manhood to a father earning nine dollars a week? If you can guarantee such a man an income of three dollars a week for each child, in addition to the nine dollars for his wife and himself, you may well air your views regarding a Super Race; but until your lowest income is high enough to guarantee the necessaries of life to a family of five; or until the state guarantees an income to each child in its early life, “You may as well go stand upon the beach and bid the main flood bate his usual height,” as to demand that a man, working for starvation wages, provide a home in which Super Men can be reared.

When income has been provided; when there is food for every mouth, warm clothing for every back, enough fuel for winter, and a few pennies each week for recreation, then indeed you may begin to speak in terms of social improvement. Then, and then only, you may tell the father and the mother that upon their efforts during the first seven years of their children’s lives depends the attitude which those children will assume when they go out into the world; that the home in which tyranny is unknown, in which the family rules the family, will produce the noblest citizens for the noblest state; that the home is still the most fundamental institution in civilization, the conservator of our ideals, and visions of the better things that are to come in the future—these things you may say, emphasizing the fact, that without a well rounded home-training in youth, even the noblest talents cannot come to their full fruition.

The school is a specialized form of home. In early days, when life was simple, and specialization was unknown, education was given almost wholly in the home; but with the growth of specialized tasks, the home could no longer fulfill its function as educator and the school was introduced. Education, whether given in the home or in the school, has as its object a complete life. The purpose of education is to enable the pupil to live completely—to be a rounded being, in whatever station he may be called upon to fill.

Would you mold the school to fit the needs of the children? Then, the system of education must be so shaped that children are prepared to live their lives completely. They must understand themselves. “Know thyself” is a command worthy of their attention. The child’s body, in the period of change from childhood to adulthood, is an organism of the most delicate nature, barely reaching adjustment under the most auspicious conditions, and more than frequently failing signally from a lack of knowledge, or from the absence of sympathetic understanding. The child—the father of the man—must be taught to appreciate the human machine of which he is given charge. It is in the school, with its corps of specialists, that this work can be most effectively done.

Then, one by one, the school may take up and foster the qualities of the Super Man. Physique must come first. It is blatant mockery to speak of educating minds that dwell in anæmic bodies. Every boy and girl has a right to a strong, well knit frame, and the school must teach the best methods of securing it. Mental grasp—the power to see and judge a situation or combination of facts, may also come through the school. In fact, the school course, as at present organized, aims to secure that and little else. As the science of education advances, the same material which now comprises the entire course will be taught in less time and in wiser ways, so that the child shall be free to learn some of those other things so important to his soul’s welfare. Aggressiveness and concentration are methods rather than ends, and can be made a part of every game, every competition, and every study, so that the child absorbs them as he absorbs the atmosphere, without knowing that they become a part of his being. Whether the school can instill sympathy and inspire vision is a question that the future alone must decide. Both may be given by individual teachers, and both may be possible to the school, though, if the home is doing its work, these things will come more effectively there than through the school. Most or all of the essential qualities of the Super Man can and will come through a well organized and properly directed educational system.

The government—providing the machinery of state administration, furnishing the school, the playground, and the library; affording an opportunity for the exercise of citizenship and the expression of those advancing ideas which must gradually remold the social institutions of each age in response to the demands of the new generation—affords one of the most potent forces for the development of the Super Man.

The school is the big home; the government is the big school. The child leaves the home, and enters the school; leaves the school and enters the state. In the home he is acted upon; in the school he, himself, begins to act; but in the government he is the sole actor—he is the state. A home must be higher than the children; the school must be more advanced than the pupils; but the state reflects exactly the character of its citizens. It is in the state that the Super Man, crystallizing his convictions and beliefs into the form of legislative enactments, must prepare the way for the Super Race.

The Super Race is the produce of heredity, of social environment, and of individual development. Heredity supplies the raw material—the individual human being, while education and social environment, operating upon this raw stuff, determine the course of its development. Steel is not made from bee’s wax, nor is the Super Man created out of a defective heredity. In like manner, since those who are in Rome do as the Romans do, the raw material, no matter what its quality, is shaped by its surroundings. The old saying “as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined,” should be modified in this one particular—the force which bends the twig must continue in the tree, else the latter will turn and grow toward the sky.