The first of these relates to citizenship and the defense of the Nation.

We have a Military Academy at West Point and a Naval Academy at Annapolis, and with the men trained in them with a small Army and a reasonable Navy we are safe against enemies from without. Therefore the danger to our Republic lies in the votes of an unintelligent constituency.

Our recent war disclosed the astonishing fact that one quarter of the men drafted for service were illiterate, and many others could not understand, much less give orders. To correct this defect in the men in the service, the Secretary of War established schools in the Army while in service, as had already been in practice in the Navy.

Since the war the efforts of the several States have been directed to correcting this evil. The heavy burden required is the reason for the existence of this bill.

We have heard very urgent arguments why this bill should not pass on account of education being a State function, but it must be acknowledged that during the past when left to the States we had 25 per cent of illiteracy; therefore, taken as a whole, the States have not met the needs.

Furthermore, this subject of education has not been sufficiently studied from the side of orderly and natural development of the individual.

The home and the locality are undeniably the only place for the education of children, but when we come to age of puberty we must deal with a youth and not with a child, and the frank acknowledgment of the difference between childhood and youth on the part of parents, school boards, and teachers must be had, if we are to cure many of the ills which now are quite generally recognized.

Many of the objections to this bill have been the result of not recognizing these differences between childhood and youth.

It is in the period of budding youth that the child wants to assert his own independence and it is just at this time that he should be given an opportunity to seek his physical, mental, and may I say, moral development, under the guidance of his State assisted by the United States Government in such an academy as is suggested in amended section 9 of this bill.

He would not be dependent on his family or the local taxpayers for his education but on his State and the Nation as a whole, and for his physical maintenance dependent only on his own productive capacity. This system would greatly reduce the cost of education by making each unit self-supporting, but it would also develop self-reliance, courage, and a spirit service to the good of the whole so necessary to American citizenship.

It would help insure allegiance to the home, the locality, and finally to the State and the Nation.

No one will deny the importance or the wisdom of this allegiance. I think it important to have the civil academies in conjunction with the State agricultural colleges because of their established and recognized usefulness to the Nation, and the great advantage to the younger students to be associated with those who are pursuing a scientific study of the laws of nature through agriculture.

Great as has been the blessing resulting from the invention of the printing press, it is not an unalloyed good for we have so lost sight of the great open book of nature that some people do not know it exists. Books are a storehouse of knowledge and everyone should know how to use them; but to really live one must know life at first hand and have the spirit of research.

It is from such environment that many great men have come and from such training as is here proposed in self-reliance, with a broadening vision we are sure to raise the average of intelligence and make possible more men of genius in the arts and sciences.

Gentlemen, I think it is unanswerable that the tilling of the soil is fundamental, and I believe that it is a heritage of every child that is born in this land of ours that he should know how to produce out of the soil the necessary food for his physical maintenance, and the lack of such articulation with the simple life of the country I think is one of the perils in which we now stand as a nation.

The greatness of a nation and the strength of a nation has always been in the strength of the agricultural resources, and the pages of history are filled with the loss of power of nations in proportion as the population is divorced from the soil. When this country was founded we had a population of about 3,000,000. Probably the entire population was more or less associated with the tilling of the soil. The city of Philadelphia, the largest city in the country at that time, had a population of something like 40,000, and Boston and New York had a population of less than 20,000 each.

I only call to your minds these facts because as we have grown and developed as a nation with ever increasing proportion of our people living in big cities and large towns, until now over half of our population are living an urban life, and the discontent and troubles of our laboring class are always engendered in our dense populations. I think it can be shown by the statistics of several States that those States which have the greater proportion of their population interested and getting their living from the soil, as the State of Iowa, for instance, which has no great large towns, a greater proportion of the people are saving their money, with more wealth in proportion to the population than the other States, fewer illiterates, criminals, and indigents, and consequently they have more real happiness distributed with the people.

Now, I do not want to burden you with a long argument on this subject. I think all of you are more or less familiar with these outlines of facts which I have stated, and I would like to quote George Washington who said that "the tilling of the soil was the most wholesome, the finest and most ennobling occupation of man,' and what was true then I think is true now. We have, unfortunately. a splendid system of education wherein most all of it is the vision of the city life and where the accumulation of wealth and the desire for-I will not say leisure-but say the desire for idleness is the average vision that comes to the average youth.

The supposed advantages and opportunities of the city life makes a constant flow of population from the country to the city and there is much less movement the other way.

One of our humorists said that "Man is an animal that always wants to be somewhere else." There is an element of truth in this, and there would be a natural migration from the city to the country

if it were not for the fact that a city-bred person has much more to learn in adapting himself to country life than a country-bred person has to learn when moving to the city. Therefore in order to equalize these differences we have provided for city children to be taught tilling the soil as a means to physical development and this would naturally lead to the enrollment in the State civil academies of the youth of our cities. In this way we will build up a noble race of men and women fully developed physically, mentally, and morally, capable of taking their places in the affairs of American life, and equal to any emergency, with an added reverence for the laws of God, for the President of the United States, for the governors of the States, and all in authority, for the sacred life of the family, and, lastly, the noble privelege of being a citizen of the United States with its Constitution guaranteeing our liberty of self-development. From an economic standpoint there would be a better interchange between city and country in the matter of labor and a larger proportion of our people live on the soil or associated with it.

By thus enobling country life and making it interchangeable with life in the city we can broaden the vision and equalize the opportunities and rewards of all the people and thereby increase our joys and reduce our perils of life.

The Christian religion is the religion of individual character. The spirit of American civilization is, similarly, the opportunity for the individual, and the Constitution is the fulfillment of the Declaration of Independence which says, that "every one has the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' The greatest pursuit of happiness is the development of one's-self to the maximum of one's capacity.

This is the concern of the Nation as a whole, and can be attained most easily by the establishment of these academies associated with the State agricultural colleges where the only question for admission would be, "what can you do to become the best you are capable of."

I believe such a form of education would reduce our insane, criminal, and indigent classes by over 50 per cent, and that alone would more than justify the slight expansion of the attention of the Government in education as a whole, and not endanger any rights possessed by the several States.

Are you short for time?

The CHAIRMAN. Yes; we want to have an executive session.

Mr. BUSH-BROWN. I will close, then, with a few words on the desirability of having the fine arts made a part of this bill.

The apex of every education and civilization are the expressions in the fine arts. When you seek the greatness of a nation, you ask what they have done in science, what they have done in music, in poetry, in sculpture, in architecture, and in painting. Therefore that constitutes the highest phase of our educational function as a people, and it ought to be under the protection and under the guidance, and under the encouragement of the Nation as a whole, just as it is in France and in other countries, especially in Italy.

If, however, this bill is not soon to become a law, I would like to point out that the Government is already pledged to develop the fine arts in having accepted the bequest of Smithson, which established the Smithsonian Institute. It was for the arts and sciences. The

vision of Congress has seen the wisdom of development of the sciences until it is the finest institution in the world, but only lately has the Bureau of the Fine Arts been established, and fortunately we have at the head of it Dr. William H. Holmes, not only an artist of distinction, but also a man eminent in science. There is no one in the counary so well qualified as he is to develop his bureau along the lines suggested in the amendment to this bill."

What we need is a broader vision on the part of the public and Members of Congress that the fine arts are as important to the growth of the Nation as the sciences. One for the material things and the other for the things of the spirit.

We have everything with which to make the greatest research in creative art except appropriation with a mandate to use American inspiration and American motives.

When that is furnished then we will find that what the lotus was to Egyptian art and the acanthus was to Greek art our American forms may be the future of American art.

I would like to close by saying a little formula which I have arranged to partly illustrate these things:

Work is the salvation of man.
The joy of work is production.
The flower of production is art.

The production of art enters the realm of creation.

Creation, the understanding of the principles of our existence, the laws of nature, leads to religion.

And if we are to succeed as a Nation we must make a religion of our liberties. And there is just one quotation I would like to make from one of our minor poets, which says these things in verse:

I ask not wealth, but power to take and use the things I have aright;
Not years, but wisdom that shall make my life a profit and delight.

I ask not for me the plan of ill and good be set aside,

But that the common lot of man be nobly borne and glorified.

The CHAIRMAN. We thank you very much.

(Thereupon the committee went into executive session, after which it adjourned.)

COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION,
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,
Wednesday, May 7, 1924.

The committee met at 10 o'clock a. m., Hon. E. Hart Fenn presiding.

Mr. FENN. Gentlemen of the committee, please come to order. We have before us the bill (H. R. 3923) to create a Department of Education, etc. The clerk has told me that Doctor Finegan desires to be heard, as he has to leave shortly. Doctor Finegan, we will be glad to hear you now.

STATEMENT OF DR. THOMAS E. FINEGAN, HARRISBURG, PA.

Doctor FINEGAN. Mr. Chairman, I should like to give the committee the background from which I view this bill. My elementary education was obtained in a one-room rural school. I also had the experience as a young man of teaching in rural schools for six years, and later of supervising the schools of a county in New York State

for two years. From this field I went into the State department of education in New York, where I served for 27 years, for part of the last two years having been acting the commissioner of the State.

Mr. TUCKER. Of education?

Doctor FINEGAN. Yes; of education. In 1919, on the invitation of Governor Sproul, I went into Pennsylvania as the head of the State department of public instruction to reorganize the school system of that State and served in that capacity for four years.

I am giving you this background for the purpose of bringing out the point that I have the outlook and the viewpoint in education of a State administrator.

A fundamental principle that is recognized everywhere in American education is that education is a subject which always has been, and which I hope always will be, a State affair a subject always to be under the control and regulation of the several States. It is from this viewpoint that I wish to express briefly some of the reasons why I am favoring the bill known as the Sterling-Reed bill. I have no fear whatever about the centralization of authority in the Federal Government to control and regulate the educational systems of the several States. If I thought for a moment that the enactment of this measure into law would take from the States the control, power, and authority over education which they have exercised since the formation of our Government, I would stand here and ask you to report adversely upon this bill; but with the experience I have had as an administrator in this field, and with the knowledge I have of the inequalities of education prevailing, not only within States but between the States, I believe that this is a measure which ought to receive your serious consideration. My experiences in educational administration and my knowledge of conditions throughout the country compel me to give the measure my hearty support.

You have three bills before you which are related to this subject. I have followed the hearings given by congressional committees. I have attended several of them in the Senate as well as those given by this committee. I have also read the reports in the press, and have been in all of the important national educational meetings where these measures have been discussed, and have not yet found a person who has a State or national reputation in public education who does not say that the present situation is ineffective and intolerable and that the interests of the country require a more definite and a broader interest on the part of the National Government in educational affairs. Nearly all who have spoken on this subject have said that, while education is regarded as a matter of State concern, to be controlled and regulated by the States instead of the Federal Government, nevertheless, the Federal Government does have and always has had a concern in education.

Let us briefly examine the Towner-Sterling bill to ascertain definitely what machinery is set up and what activities in education on the part of the Government are contemplated by this measure. First, the bill creates a Federal department of education and the head of such department shall be known as the secretary of education who shall be a member of the President's Cabinet. We are told by the opponents of this measure that the creation of such officer with a seat in the President's Cabinet will inevitably result in a centralization of authority in Washington over the educational affairs of the