The Collected Letters of Henry Northrup Castle

By Henry Northrup Castle, George Herbert Mead, Barbara Spackman and 2 more

George Herbert Mead, one of America’s most important and influential philosophers, a founder of pragmatism, social psychology, and symbolic interactionism, was also a keen observer of American culture and early modernism. In the period from the 1870s to 1895, Henry Northrup Castle maintained a correspondence with family members and with Mead—his best friend at Oberlin College and brother-in-law—that reveals many of the intellectual, economic, and cultural forces that shaped American thought in that complex era. Close friends of John Dewey, Jane Addams, and other leading Chicago Progressives, the author of these often intimate letters comments frankly on pivotal events affecting higher education, developments at Oberlin College, Hawaii (where the Castles lived), progressivism, and the general angst that many young intellectuals were experiencing in early modern America.

The letters, drawn from the Mead-Castle collection at the University of Chicago, were collected and edited by Mead after the tragic death of Henry Castle in a shipping accident in the North Sea. Working with his wife Helen Castle (one of Henry’s sisters), he privately published fifty copies of the letters to record an important relationship and as an intellectual history of two progressive thinkers at the end of the nineteenth century. American historians, such as Robert Crunden and Gary Cook, have noted the importance of the letters to historians of the late nineteenth century.

The letters are made available here using the basic Mead text of 1902. Additional insights into the connection between Mead, John Dewey, Henry and Harriet Castle, and Hawaii’s progressive kindergarten system are provided by the foundation’s executive director Alfred L. Castle. Marvin Krislov, president of Oberlin College, has added additional comments on the importance of the letters to understanding the intellectual relationship that flourished at Oberlin College.

Published with the support of the Samuel N. and Mary Castle Foundation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Release date: Dec 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9780821444313

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ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

The Collected Letters of Henry Northrup Castle:

"I am delighted to learn that The Collected Letters of Henry Northrup Castle, originally prepared for limited distribution in 1902 by Castle’s sister and brother-in-law (Helen Castle Mead and George Herbert Mead), will be made available to a much wider audience by Ohio University Press.

"Henry Castle, who died tragically in an accident at sea when he was in his early thirties, exerted a strong influence upon the early intellectual development of the American philosopher and social psychologist, George Herbert Mead, during their shared days as students at Oberlin College, Harvard, and Leipzig University. He was also a gifted writer whose letters shed light upon contemporary political events during his brief career as a newspaperman in Honolulu.

Alfred L. Castle deserves great credit for making possible the republication of these letters and for writing an elegant introduction in which he clearly outlines their historical significance.

—Gary A. Cook, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy,

Beloit College, and author of George Herbert Mead:

The Making of a Social Pragmatist

THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF

HENRY NORTHRUP CASTLE

THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF

HENRY

NORTHRUP

CASTLE

Edited by George Herbert Mead and Helen Castle Mead

Introduction by Alfred L. Castle Foreword by Marvin Krislov

OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS

ATHENS, OHIO

IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE

SAMUEL N. AND MARY CASTLE FOUNDATION

HONOLULU, HAWAII

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

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© 2012 by Ohio University Press

All rights reserved

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department at [phone] or [phone] (fax).

Letters originally published 1902 in a private printing

in London as Henry Northrup Castle: Letters.

Printed in the United States of America

Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper Fimage ™

22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12        5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Castle, Henry Northrup, 1862—1895.

[Correspondence]

The collected letters of Henry Northrup Castle / edited by George Herbert Mead and Helen Castle Mead; introduction by Alfred L. Castle; foreword by Martin Krislov.

     p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

Originally issued as: Letters. London: [privately printed], 1902.

ISBN 978-0-8214-2011-9 (pb: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8214-4431-3 (electronic) 1. Castle, Henry Northrup, 1862–1895—Correspondence. 2. Mead, George Herbert, 1863–1931—Correspondence. 3. United States—Intellectual life—1865— 1918. I. Mead, George Herbert, 1863–1931. II. Mead, Helen Castle, 1860. III. Title.

E169.1. C37 2012

973.8092 — dc23

2012039072

CONTENTS

Foreword by Marvin Krislov

Introduction by Alfred L. Castle

Note

A Few Recollections of Henry’s Childhood by Helen Castle Mead

The Collected Letters of Henry Northrup Castle

FOREWORD

George Herbert Mead began corresponding with Henry Northrup Castle in the summer of 1883, shortly after they graduated from Oberlin College. During their time on our campus, the two had become close friends. They edited the Oberlin Review, our student newspaper, fueled each other’s deep interest in literature and culture, and delighted in debating philosophy with Professor John M. Ellis, and with James H. Fairchild, Oberlin’s third president (1866—89). In a letter to his parents in the fall of 1882, Castle wrote, I wonder what Prof. Ellis thinks of George and myself. He must regard us as a perfect nuisance, because hardly a day passes in Mental Philosophy when we do not start a discussion with him. We have lots of fun, too, asking questions of Pres. Fairchild, who has our Bible class.

I am certain neither teacher was surprised when Mead and Castle went on to become nationally prominent thinkers and philosophers. Since Oberlin’s founding in 1833, its graduates have been expected to employ their education and energies to bring about positive social changes benefiting all humankind. That ethos can be traced back to the teachings of John Frederick Oberlin, the extraordinary French pastor whose belief in enlightened education as the path to social improvement, economic betterment, and democracy inspired our founders. Belief in the uplifting power of education inspired Mead, Castle, and John Dewey to become pioneers of progressive education and influenced Harriet Castle, Henry’s sister and a fellow Oberlin grad, to spearhead the free kindergarten movement in Hawaii after Henry’s tragic death in 1895.

At Oberlin, George Mead and Henry Castle’s friendship grew from their shared love of learning and insatiable intellectual curiosity. As undergraduates, they read, studied, discussed, wrote, and developed a driving scholarly ambition. They learned to cherish the life of the mind, to think and reason independently, to teach themselves and others, and to accept responsibility for improving society. Through their thinking, teaching, and writing they passed those values on to generations of young people. Henry Castle’s letters offer an intimate and important perspective on how their friendship and ideas grew and evolved. It is the hope of all of us at Oberlin College that the republication of the letters of Henry Northrup Castle will help educate and inspire new generations of students, teachers and scholars, in Hawaii and the world.

Marvin Krislov

President, Oberlin College

Oberlin, Ohio

INTRODUCTION

It is with great pleasure that the Samuel N. and Mary Castle Foundation, one of America’s oldest family foundations, has supported the reissuing of the substantial correspondence of George Herbert Mead and Henry Northrup Castle. These letters, the originals of which reside in the University of Chicago’s Castle and Mead Collection, contain valuable information about the intellectual biography of Mead, one of America’s most important pragmatists, social psychologists, and philosophers of mind as well as of his close friend and eventual brother-in-law, Henry Castle. Originally edited by Mead and his wife, Helen Castle Mead, the letters were first published in 1902 in London. The fifty copies of the leather-bound book were made available to a few University of Chicago and Oberlin friends and a few research libraries, as well as to family. The reissue of the edited letters serves to render these valuable historical resources more easily accessible to scholars.

Historians of American progressivism have long known of the importance of these letters. As the prominent American historian Robert M. Crunden notes in his groundbreaking cohort study of leading progressives, Scholars should note that these letters may well contain one of the most detailed available accounts of the evolution of an important philosophical mind . . . and students of the influence of Darwin and Kant in America will find important material here. The letters deserve publication for the history both of civilization and philosophy.¹ Biographers of Mead and intellectual historians interested in the transition from Victorian America to progressive and early modernism have found the letters to be illuminating. The letters also reveal much about the history of Oberlin College and its importance to Mead and Castle as well as to higher education in America during the fin de siècle era. Because of Henry Castle’s important role as a political observer and journalist in Hawaii during the years surrounding the end of the monarchy, the letters contain valuable, even controversial insights into Hawaii’s history.

For historians of Hawaii and American education and philanthropy, the important role Castle, Mead, and their close friend John Dewey played in influencing the Samuel N. and Mary Castle Foundation’s support for progressive kindergartens in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is sketched in provocative fashion in the letters. The latter may be especially interesting to students of Mead’s progressivism and commitment to social change. Few know, for example, that through Henry Castle and his sister Helen, Dewey was able to make contact with a pioneer foundation committed to social change and greater equity through progressive kindergartens made available in Hawaii to residents of any race, class, ethnicity, or gender. At Henry’s tragic and early death due to a steamship accident on the North Sea in 1895, the Foundation assisted Dewey’s innovative University of Chicago Lab School as it trained Hawaii’s first kindergarten teachers. For Mead, Castle, and Dewey, Hawaii itself would be the ultimate lab school for educational change in a multiracial, multicultural environment. When the Territory of Hawaii created one of America’s oldest publicly supported full-day kindergarten systems in 1943, few in the country recalled the key role Dewey, Mead, and the Castle family played in introducing experimentation to early childhood education in Hawaii. It was through the emergence of the progressive education kindergarten that Henry Castle’s and G. H. Mead’s legacy is best revealed in Hawaii.

The late nineteenth century saw a number of changes in the focus of Euro-American philosophical thought. The general thrust of these changes concentrated on becoming, rather than being. Thinkers such as John Dewey (1859—1952), drawing on the advances of anthropology and biology, gave philosophic expression to the dynamic character of experience. Many philosophers, dissatisfied with pure speculation, sought ways to make philosophy directly relevant to practical affairs. Such changes in philosophic orientation would affect many American institutions. In Hawaii, Dewey’s ideas were first introduced by Henry Castle (1862—1895) and made an early impact on the teaching practices of kindergartens in Honolulu from 1894 to 1900.

The idea of kindergartens began in Germany with Friedrich Froebel (1782—1852) and was later transported to the United States. Its first partisans were Germans who, having despaired of living in Germany after the collapse of the Revolution of 1848, pulled up their stakes and journeyed to the American Middle West. There in 1855, in Watertown, Wisconsin, Mrs. Carl Schurz, a former student of Froebel, established America’s first kindergarten. Five years later the first English-speaking kindergarten, owned and managed by Elizabeth Peabody, was established in Boston.² In 1873, the city of St. Louis opened the first tax-supported kindergarten in the United States.³

In Hawaii, kindergartens were begun under private auspices. The first kindergarten there was established by Francis M. Damon in 1892. It was connected to the Chinese Mission of which he had charge. Because of the success of this experiment, the Woman’s Board of Missions, founded in 1878, organized four kindergartens in 1893. Separated along racial lines, they were organized for Japanese, Portuguese, Hawaiians, and a group classified as other races.

The Portuguese kindergarten was started on Miller Street by Reverend Henry Soares. By 1895, the Chinese kindergarten enrolled 36, the Portuguese kindergarten 53, the Hawaiian kindergarten 40, the Japanese kindergarten 28, and the foreign (Caucasian) kindergarten 48.⁴ All of these were early attempts to provide free coeducational education to underserved or unserved children of working parents.

As imperfect as these poorly funded and struggling initial kindergartens were, they represented a growing awareness in Hawaii that a heterogeneous, non-English-speaking population of children was presenting a serious problem to grade school work. Indeed, crowded classes had forced a ruling by which the Republic’s Department of Public Instruction forbade the attendance of children under six years of age in grade schools. With crowding, furthermore, came a growing concern that the ideal of universal education could never be realized. Public school enrollment reached 14,522 in 1897, while private school enrollment reached 3,954.⁵

Mary Tenney Castle (1810—1907), the abolitionist wife of Samuel Northrup Castle, had raised her children to accept responsibility for improving society. Educated in New England, she had been closely involved with childhood education reform, abolition, feminism, and prison reform before coming to Hawaii in 1841. In the 1890s, she and her daughter Harriet and son Henry would be early supporters of changing kindergartens organized by race. They were two of the early supporters of offering a greater number of kindergartens for Hawaii’s children. More importantly, as they saw it, traditional formalist instruction, which stressed repetition, memorization, and rigid discipline, was no longer adequate preparation for a rapidly changing world. The various private kindergartens could be rendered more effective if unified along the new and progressive direction being set by Dewey.

In 1895, supported by Mary Tenney Castle’s gift of $10,000, the various free kindergartens were unified under the direction of the newly organized Free Kindergarten and Children’s Aid Association of the Hawaiian Islands (FKCAA). Its key leaders were Charles M. Hyde (1832—1899), its first president; Harriet Castle, its financial secretary and driving force; and Mabel (Mrs. Henry) Castle (1864—1950), its publicist. Other prominent members included the wives of business and civic leaders: Clara Bingham, Emma Dillingham, Cornelia Bishop, Cherilla Lowrey, Frances Hobron, Mary Whitney, and Agnes Judd.⁶ With the separation of the new association from its old Woman’s Board of Missions connection, a nonsectarian policy was adopted. The FKCAA’s common goal, pursued with considerable zeal, was to provide lifetime learning and moral and citizenship skills to the underserved population of children of working parents. Such schools, it was thought, would provide needed education in addition to early social skills in an increasingly economically complex and culturally diverse Hawaii.

Because of its newness, the FKCAA was soon in search of an educational methodology to implement its mission. Harriet Castle and her brother Henry were the guiding spirits of the association and would be responsible for shaping this direction through importing the pedagogical views of John Dewey, a friend of the Mead and Castle families. Although the general role of Dewey was noted in Charlotte Dodge’s history of the FKCAA, his specific link to the association through Henry Castle and his sister Harriet has not previously been examined.⁷ At Oberlin College in Ohio in 1879, Henry Castle became the roommate and fast friend of George Herbert Mead. Indeed, Mead married Henry’s older sister, Helen K. Castle, in 1891. It was through Mead, an outstanding philosopher in his own right, that Henry and Harriet met and came to understand John Dewey’s philosophy and to recognize how it might revolutionize early education in Hawaii.⁸

As undergraduate students at Oberlin College and later as graduate students at Harvard, Mead and Castle spent many hours speaking of the instrumentalist and pragmatist challenges to traditional, more static, idealist philosophical systems. Mead, who later became one of the nation’s leading pragmatist philosophers from his important post as chairman of the University of Chicago’s Philosophy Department, spent many hours testing his ideas in conversations with Henry Castle.⁹ Later, after his marriage to Helen Castle, he served as a frequent host to Harriet Castle and John Dewey at the Mead home in Chicago. Thus, prior to the founding of the Kindergarten and Children’s Aid Association in 1895, Harriet was fully impressed with, and knowledgeable of, the Dewey-Mead orientation to philosophical analysis and pedagogy. Through personal correspondence, reading, and lengthy discussions with Mead, Dewey, and her brother Henry, Harriet became convinced that early education should reflect the new view of human development being discussed in the highest corridors of academia.¹⁰

With Dewey, Mead and Castle understood that if education was to be relevant and meaningful in a modernist era, it would need to be transformed. Moreover, they wanted education to constantly expand the range of social situations in which individuals perceived issues and made and acted upon choices. They wanted schools to inculcate habits that would enable individuals to control their surroundings rather than merely adapt to them. Traditional formal education, which emphasized memorization and conformity to lessons taught by an authoritarian teacher, was incapable of providing an education that would improve society by making it more worthy and harmonious.¹¹ No longer isolated from the reality of a quickly changing society, the progressive school would become an embryonic community life active with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society. As Dewey said:

When the school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely and harmonious.¹²

Dewey’s educational theory included a condemnation of the old school for the passivity of its methods and the rigid uniformity of its curriculum. For too long the educational center of gravity had been in the teacher, the textbook, anywhere and everywhere you please except in the immediate instincts and activities of the child himself.¹³ The essence of the new pedagogy was to shift this center of gravity back to the child. The business of the new school would be to

not only facilitate and enrich the growth of the individual child, but also to supply the same results, and for some, technical information and discipline that have been the ideas of education in the past.¹⁴

Throughout the 1890s, Harriet Castle traveled to leading kindergartens on the mainland and visited with leaders of the incipient movement of progressive education and teacher training. In 1897, she toured Chicago’s famed Hull House as a guest of Jane Addams and Addams’s assistant, Alice Holden. Harriet was particularly interested in the efforts of the distinguished Hull House staff to apply some of the innovative ideas of Dewey to educational conditions in Chicago.¹⁵ Most importantly, she grew increasingly confident that Hawaii could also have success with Dewey’s educational innovation.¹⁶

As financial secretary for the FKCAA, Harriet was responsible for raising funds to make the organization viable, as well as for selecting personnel and preparing the annual report. In both her fund-raising and her personnel selection, she played a crucial role in setting the path for the organization for years to come. Her influence would prove to be crucial to the FKCAA’s implementation of Dewey’s ideas.

In her appeals to local businessmen, gifts to progressive kindergartens were presented as good investments and a saver of future tax expenses for jails, prisons, and almshouses in Hawaii. Further, adequately funded kindergartens were good influences against the great cloud of anarchy that has been slowly gathering and spreading over the civilized nations of the earth.¹⁷ One appeal, written to prospective donors in February of 1895, concluded that we long to gather in all of the little ones whom we constantly see about the city, but our borders are so limited.¹⁸ Other letters would give emphasis to the need by concluding, The hope of the world lies in the children.

After Henry’s death in 1895, Harriet’s interest in training teachers for progressive education began in earnest in 1896. In that year, she participated in the Chicago Froebel Association’s Training School for Kindergartners led by John Dewey. In this month-long seminar, she received intensive study in Dewey’s pedagogy and psychology. The Meads hosted her during her lengthy stay, and one can imagine that the day’s expert instruction became the evening’s source of penetrating discussion.

Harriet’s notes, which for a period were used to guide FKCAA education, emphasized the role kindergarten teachers could play in producing independent future citizens. Obedience was a means, not an end. Further, teachers must guide their immature charges, but the true object of education would be the development of reasoning, thinking individuals responsible for their own behavior. Most specifically, to become this thinking, reasoning, intelligent, self-directing individual, the child must begin by assuming responsibilities as soon as he or she is able to do so, adding to them from year to year. At ten, with but slight supervision, the child should be able to take care of his or her body, take baths, dress and undress, put clothes away, and keep possessions in order.¹⁹

In an important pamphlet prepared by Harriet to support her plea for funding, she gave clear expression to her faith in Dewey-style education. The pamphlet, entitled The Kindergarten and the Public School, was prepared after a lengthy 1897 tour of Columbia University Teachers College and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Both institutions were early leaders in the field of progressive education. The pamphlet was widely distributed to donors, community leaders, and prospective leaders alike. In it, Harriet argues that the object of the kindergarten is to develop the whole child in a balanced fashion. For her, the foundations of this method are the facts attested to by science and experience. These, as she saw it, were:

1.   The brain grows with the greatest rapidity between the ages of three and seven. The increase of later years is small compared with its growth in these years.

2.   Two weeks practice of holding objects in his right hand will make the infant in his first year right handed for life.

3.   This is the age of sense perception; the child learns from what he sees, hears, tastes, touches, and smells; and, therefore, as his environment is, so will he be.

4.   If the child is saved to a good life, there will be no grown-up man to punish.

5.   Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.²⁰

The pamphlet quotes authorities who supported Mead’s vision of a kindergarten. For example, William T. Harris, U.S. commissioner of education under President Grover Cleveland (1893—1897), had claimed that two years of the child’s life in the kindergarten will start into development activities of muscle and brain which will secure deftness and delicacy of industrial power in all after life.²¹ Harriet added her own observation that the kindergarten would lead to permanent character changes. Specifically, kindergarten would mean fewer saloons and better homes, fewer policemen, fewer courts, fewer prisons, fewer paupers, less insanity, and consequently less public expense along these lines and more money for other purposes.²² Such thinking was, of course, common among supporters of progressive reforms in education across the United States.

For Harriet, education at the kindergarten level must develop in these citizens of today as well as tomorrow the habits, attitudes, appreciations, and skills necessary for the life in democracy.²³ Furthermore, this primary instruction would provide miniature democracies where situations arise which give opportunity for the development of . . . habits, attitudes, appreciations, and skills necessary for life. Perhaps most importantly, young pupils would be taught to think for themselves, to reason, to judge, and to evaluate the facts of experience. Since environments change, set and static standards of conduct would not be enough. Morality, correctly understood, is an active attitude, not a passive one. Habit must be formed through action. We must learn to be good. Kindergarten education, through teaching perseverance, flexibility, cooperation, initiative, self-control, and lifelong reasoning skills, would produce citizens capable of sustaining both democracy and progress in social institutions.²⁴

Mead and Harriet Castle, like Dewey, viewed the teacher’s role as that of a skilled guide. The kindergarten teacher should create ideal situations for both sense training and discipline of thought. All instruction should recall that thinking does not occur for its own sake. Rather, it arises from the need of meeting some difficulty, in reflecting upon the best way of overcoming it, and thus leads to planning . . . mentally the results to be reached, and deciding upon the steps necessary and their serial order.²⁵ With Dewey, Harriet Castle felt that this was the best preparation for pure speculation or abstract investigation. Thought, she argued with Dewey, begins with a difficulty, moves through a resolution, and may appropriately end with an abstract speculation or abstraction. In this last stage, solutions to difficulties or problems may be generalized to similar difficulties or problems.

Harriet left her most immediate stamp on the training of teachers and the education of young ones through her choice of the FKCAA’s first permanent supervisor. In 1896, while spending the summer with the Meads, she devoted her free hours to reviewing applications from aspirants responding to her letters sent to school district leaders. Harriet’s dream of finding an enthusiastic supporter of Dewey’s ideas was fulfilled when she met the brilliant Chicagoan Frances Lawrence (1876—1935) and hired her away from the Sheboygan, Wisconsin, school system on August 1. Frances would guide instruction at the FKCAA for the next thirty-nine years.

Chicago-born Frances Lawrence, an 1893 graduate of the Chicago Kindergarten College, had studied and absorbed the pedagogy of John Dewey. With Harriet’s mandate to be daring in applying Dewey’s ideas to kindergarten education in Hawaii, Superintendent Lawrence arrived in Hawaii in 1896 and made some immediate changes. For example, she abandoned paper pricking, mat weaving, and the formal use of Froebel’s gifts used in the early free kindergartens in favor of free play, rhythm construction, and creative art on open lanais or outside.²⁶ These child-centered improvements would allow children to develop their senses, their imagination, and their capacity to live cooperatively with other children.

Lawrence’s reforms also included giving children free access to suitable art materials so as to encourage drawing, modeling, painting, and construction. In more traditional education, access to these materials was limited, and young artists were encouraged to imitate accepted drawings rather than to experiment. In the same way, Lawrence felt music and rhythm were important in the educational process. Her kindergartens avoided the mechanical lessons and emphasis on accuracy of tone characteristic of formalist education. Instead, they stressed opportunities for voluntary play, experimentation with sounds, and creative initiative. Spontaneity of response and freedom for joyous participation, rather than precision of movement and controlled or ordered action, became the aim of Lawrence’s kindergartens. These were typically taught in situations involving rhythmic play and games, in singing, and in free experimentation with simple musical instruments such as the gourd or drum. Marching games and outdoor experiences on the swing and the seesaw provided opportunities for rhythmic movement. Lawrence saw the additional benefit from this expression being the development of self-confidence and a renewed interest in learning. Her ideal was to work with nature, not against it. Like Dewey, she taught that a child’s best chance for happy, useful living lies in the effort to develop the child’s capacities, not to punish his or her deficiencies.

The same general idea was true of the social arts of drama, pageantry, storytelling, and reading. Unlike traditional kindergartens, which stressed control, memorization, and repetition of stories read by the teacher, Lawrence’s progressive sense was that children’s love of acting was natural and should be encouraged. Children were expected to invent stories and to relate them to the class. The teacher was more of a facilitator of discussion than an authoritarian figure requiring right answers to questions about standard stories read to a group. Furthermore, Lawrence saw that Hawaii presented special opportunities for the exercise of dramatic talent and story use.

In her concern to integrate the social arts into the academic curriculum, then, Lawrence revealed her Deweyite lack of relish for the historic separation of labor and leisure, man and nature, thought and action, individuality and association, method and subject matter, mind and behavior. For her, intelligence in the child was, as for Dewey, the purposeful reorganization, through action, of the material of experience.

After 1900, the policy of segregation would gradually be replaced with complete integration.²⁷ This was partly because of Hawaii’s ethnic diversity and partly because of the progressive assumption that democracy would be achieved only as schooling was popularized in character as well as clientele. Democracy could not flourish, progressives tended to feel, where there was segregated education. Democracy demanded a universal education in the problems of living together and of advancing society’s interests. Segregated schools could not reflect reality in Hawaii and, therefore, could not be the center of the struggle for a better life.²⁸

By 1900, the FKCAA had committed itself to desegregated education. It also committed itself to admit children of all ethnic groups in approximately the ratio found in Honolulu’s population. Further, since the Castle family had been joined by other generous donors, children could be admitted without consideration as to their parents’ economic or social status. For placement purposes, applicants were examined for physical size, mental age, maturation, and evidence that they could profit from the education offered. Only children of severe mental incapacity were excluded. In the twentieth century, as the application lists grew longer, the demand for more schools increased.²⁹

Although the private sector provided the major initiative, the territorial government entered the field in 1919. In a tentative fashion, funds were provided for kindergartens at Waialua on Oahu, Kahului on Maui, and Hilo on the Big Island. In June 1921, enrollment reached 587, but fell to 52 a year later. Because of discontinued funding, and perhaps because the private sector dominated the field at no cost to the public, public kindergartens disappeared until 1943.

In addition to her guidance of the kindergarten curriculum along progressive lines, Frances Lawrence continued the training of teachers, most of whom were high school graduates, in Dewey’s ideas. In 1894, the training school represented Harriet Castle’s goal of training Hawaiian and foreign girls for community service. Many of the early trainees came from the Kawaiahao Seminary, which later merged with Mill’s Institute to become today’s Mid-Pacific Institute. Others later came from the Kohala and Maunaolu Seminaries. During Frances Lawrence’s thirty-year tenure, fifty-nine young women received training in Dewey’s methods and took teaching positions in kindergartens. Gradually, however, the growing task of training teachers was absorbed by the Honolulu Normal School, created in 1896 and, after 1931, by the University of Hawaii.³⁰

By 1900, Mead and the Castle Foundation’s goal of a comprehensive progressive education for Hawaii was still to be realized. Nonetheless, when Harriet reviewed the changes in the first five years of the FKCAA, she saw a continuing role for women such as Lawrence in the future direction of early childhood education in Hawaii. Later, representatives of Columbia University, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Kindergarten Department of Los Angeles would rate the progressive education offered by the FKCAA as among the best in the country. Indeed, in 1920, John Dewey would visit Hawaii en route to Japan and China and would himself comment on the excellence of progressive kindergarten instruction then available through the FKCAA. His belief that the FKCAA and the Castle Kindergarten had bridged the gap between theory and practice gave perhaps the ultimate stamp of approval on years of hard work.³¹

Progressive education, as it existed in 1900, possessed an experimental curriculum directed toward the challenges of the future. With full faith in rational exploration, the unlimited potential of intellect to solve problems, and the sense that education held the key to social improvement in the twentieth century, progressive educators in Hawaii optimistically viewed the presets for a new century.³² However, the actual record of accomplishment of progressive education in Hawaii, seen in retrospect, was somewhat less successful than early adherents had hoped. Progressive elementary and kindergarten education never succeeded in its quest to provide educational opportunity for all ethnic and class groups in Hawaii. As Ralph Steuber, historian of educational theory and education in Hawaii, noted in an interview, progressivism also failed to provide the social integration and progress that reformers had hoped. This failure, however, may have been due to the inability to apply progressive theory to actual teaching practice, rather than to the shortcomings of Dewey’s ideas.³³

Despite a continuing debate about the role formal pedagogic structure should play in the curriculum, today progressivism is a generally accepted element in elementary and secondary education. Dewey’s and Mead’s central assumptions that the school is a community builder and that self and knowledge are both social constructs are given assumptions of teacher training in contemporary Hawaii. This is particularly true of the unspecialized curriculum of the kindergarten and the elementary school. Moreover, today, as in 1900, the private school often leads the public school in curricular innovation. Brief visits to the public University Lab School and to private schools such as Punahou, Hanahau’oli, and Holy Nativity reveal that basic progressivistic assumptions regarding education are alive and well.

Despite the practical difficulty of translating progressive theory into reality, the early efforts of Harriet Castle and the FKCAA established an educational framework that endures. The basic optimistic and secular faith that trained human intelligence can change the world for the better continues to be attractive. The progressive faith Henry Castle and G. H. Mead had in transmuting theological faith into secular engagement with social reform and change left Hawaii an educational legacy we still enjoy today. In 1943, the Territorial Department of Education would adopt a publicly supported full-day kindergarten that drew on the ideas of the Castles, Mead, and Dewey. In the twenty-first century, the Samuel N. and Mary Castle Foundation honors George and Henry with its continuing commitment to universal high-quality early education for three-and four-year-olds.

Alfred L. Castle

Samuel N. and Mary Castle Foundation

Honolulu, Hawaii

October 2012

NOTES

1. Robert M. Crunden, Ministers of Reform: The Progressives’ Achievement in American Civilization, 1889—1920 (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984). See also Gary A. Cook, George Herbert Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993) and Alfred L. Castle, A Century of Philanthropy: A History of the Samuel N. and Mary Castle Foundation (Honolulu: Hawaiian Historical Society, 2004).

2. Luella Cole, A History of Education: Socrates to Montessori (New York: Rinehart, 1950), 525. See also Benjamin O. Wist, A Century of Public Education in Hawaii (Honolulu: Hawaii Educational Review Press, 1940), 134—35.

3. Adolph E. Meyer, An Educational History of the Western World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 377.

4. Annual Report for 1895, FKCAA Archives, Mother Rice Kindergarten, Honolulu.

5. Wist, Century of Public Education, 135.

6. Charter of the Free Kindergarten and Children’s Aid Association of the Hawaiian Islands, FKCAA Archives.

7. Charlotte Dodge, A History of the Free Kindergarten and Children’s Aid Association of the Hawaiian Islands, 1895—1945 ([Honolulu]: [FKCAA], n.d.), FKCAA Archives.

8. Ermine Cross, The Story of the Henry and Dorothy Castle Memorial Kindergarten (Honolulu: Paradise Engraving and Printing, 1923), 3.

9. Henry Castle, letter to Sister Carrie, March 1882, Henry Castle Letters (London: Sands and Company, 1902), 106.

10. Henry Castle, letter to Mary Castle, June 1885, Henry Castle Letters, 201.

11. Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, l876—1957 (New York: Vintage, 1964), 118.

12. John Dewey, The School and Society (Chicago: D. Appleton-Century, 1899), 43–44.

13. Ibid., 51.

14. Ibid., 70.

15. Harriet Castle Letters, 1897, FKCAA Archives.

16. J. N. Grouse, Chicago Kindergarten College, letter to Harriet Castle, Castle Correspondence, FKCAA Archives.

17. Dodge, History of the Free Kindergarten, 9.

18. Castle Correspondence, FKCAA Archives.

19. Harriet Castle, Notes, FKCAA Archives.

20. Harriet Castle, The Kindergarten and the Public School, Castle File, FKCAA Archives.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid.

23. Harriet Castle, Kindergarten Objectives, KG Magazine, May 1923.

24. Ibid.

25. Castle File, Notes, FKCAA Archives.

26. Dodge, History of the Free Kindergarten, 5.

27. Ibid., 13.

28. Cremin, Transformation of the School, 125—26.

29. Adeline E. Babbitt, A Program for Children from 18 to 72 Months in the Hawaiian Situation (New York: Columbia University, 1948), 96.

30. Wist, Century of Public Education, 135.

31. Cross, Henry and Dorothy Castle Memorial Kindergarten, 4—6.

32. Herbert Zimiles, Teachers College Record, Progressive Education (Winter 1987): 205.

33. Dr. Ralph Steuber, personal interview, 10 May 1988.

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Henry Northrup Castle

Letters

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London

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MARY CASTLE

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Her Children

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A FEW RECOLLECTIONS OF HENRY’S CHILDHOOD.

My first distinct recollection of Henry is in connection with a visit to Molokai, where Edward and Mary Hitchcock were living with their young family of growing children. Mother took the three youngest children, Carrie, Henry, and myself. Henry must have been about two years old, perhaps more, but I am uncertain as to dates. In comparing reminiscences with Henry a few years ago, I found he had preserved from the Molokai visit one vivid picture of a vast shining sheet of water, but everything else was blurred and dim. The shining water was no doubt a great fishpond, perhaps a royal preserve; at all events this fishpond played the largest part in our memories of the Island. It was the earliest scene of aquatic sports that I remember, the terrific excitement attendant upon Edward’s efforts to teach us to swim being quite unforgettable. I seem to have no more distinct recollection of Henry in connection with our Molokai visit, although I believe he may have had some dim memories. Carrie and I slept together, in a little room off from the lanai, and when I was not occupied in teasing poor patient Carrie, we were both absolutely absorbed in terror of an old Catholic priest, who, in his long black robes, paced up and down in the grounds of the little Catholic Mission adjoining the Hitchcocks’ place. The explanation of our terror probably lay in the unaccustomed character of his dress, as children appear to have a certain fear of anything out of the usual course. There was a little schoolhouse on a hill, at the back of the Hitchcock home, which was presided over by the sweet spirit of Miss Mary Paris, who was always kind to children, who had beautiful hair, and who long remained my ideal of feminine charm. That small hill was, however, a sort of Golgotha, for it was thickly covered with a detestable little thorn called tutu, which got into our clothes and pricked our little bare legs, so that a journey to the schoolhouse was like some sweet martyrdom.

When Henry was six years old, and I eight, Mother took us again to visit Sister Mary, who, with her family, had then removed to Hawaii, and was living at Papaikou. Never shall I forget our voyage in the schooner Kate Lee. I presume Mother never will either, but for different reasons. The voyage lasted six days, the distance being about two hundred miles. Poor Mother must have suffered tortures from seasickness, and had it not been for the ministrations of Brother Edward, I do not see how she could have survived the miseries of such an experience. We were becalmed; we had to go to the assistance of some smaller schooner which had got itself into an unfortunate situation; we had some bad weather, but Henry’s and my satisfaction suffered no diminution, for as long as we stayed in the ship we might have as much plum-duff and water-melon as our small stomachs could manage. We were rolled up in blankets, and lay on the deck, and perhaps we slept there.

The voyage came to an end finally in Hilo Harbor. We were carried to the shore in boats, or on the backs of natives. The town seemed unspeakably charming to my childish mind, and the odd experiences that fell to us added to the charm. I suppose Henry had to ride double, but I was considered sufficiently advanced in age and wisdom to sally forth alone on a pony of modest dimensions, and the wild country roads perfectly covered with luxuriant tropic growths, the great streams which we crossed by means of primitive ferries, made a great impression on me. We stayed on the plantation, ate innumerable Kalo cakes, and rode down the flume. I think the trip in the flume was arranged in honor of Henry’s, Reky’s, and my birthdays, which all took place in the month of August. This was the biggest social event of our career up to this period. All the members of Hilo society, as well as many from the neighboring plantations, were asked to the feast, and came in throngs. When the guests were all assembled, we went up above the manager’s house, and were each carefully deposited on a bunch of ferns in the flume, which was barely wide enough to permit of a sitting posture, with arms closely fixed to our sides, and hands grasping tightly the small bunch of ferns, which served as an upholstered seat. The water in the flume was only a few inches deep, but its descent was so decided that the velocity was terrific, and one’s sensations in flying over deep ravines where one could look down one or two hundred feet into a deep river at the bottom, were indescribable. We were prevented from shooting into the seething ocean by a clever and experienced native, who caught and deposited us on the ground, happy, and very excited and hungry. We proceeded then into the boiling-house, transformed for the day into a bower by means of masses of ferns and flowering plants, and turned our earnest attention to the magnificent luau which had been provided for the great party by Edward and Mary. I find that my memory of this entire visit is a dreamy haze full of agreeable light and no shadow. I do not recollect anything about our return to Honolulu, and assume there must have been a great diminution of plum-duff. It must have been about or near this period that we went to Mrs Coleman’s little school, our first experience in any school, and my recollection of it is generally cheerful but indistinct. About this time, or a little later, perhaps, Henry and I began to develop a yearning to know the wickedness of the world. We tried to learn to play cards, but experienced great difficulties, as we had to invent both the cards ‘and the games, and it did not seem very wicked. We investigated a bottle of port wine also, but had to confess that this road to ruin was unattractive too. Then we had read enough books of adventure to feel that a great future lay before us if we could but run far enough away to catch it. Once we provided ourselves with a vast demijohn of drinking water, and tugged it between us with the greatest difficulty to the beach, where there was a canoe-house with thatched roof and open sides. Children’s vagaries are certainly queer. We fully intended to carry on a simple kind of housekeeping; Henry was to provide fish for our sustenance, while I should sew, probably for the native women who lived about in huts. It is pleasant to think what enormous brains we should have developed after a steady diet of fish! I do not know whether we felt any misgivings as to our plan at first or not. The canoe-house was not more than half a mile from home, and it is hardly conceivable that we did not expect to be found out in due course of time; yet I can only recollect perfect sincerity in this plan. We got as far as the canoe-house, and deposited our heavy demijohn with relief, after which we began to reconnoitre. It seemed uncommonly quiet, and I have no doubt our hearts quailed somewhat before our future, but this feeling was first confessed when we came suddenly upon a large and, to us, perfectly unknown animal, which I suppose was a dog, but was for us, without a shadow of doubt, a sea-lion. This was too much for us, and we turned and fled. I can reproduce our sensations to this very day. I was grown up before I admitted that the animal might have been a dog.

A less elaborate attempt to run away preceded the one recounted above. It consisted in our starting off bare-footed, of course, but also bare-headed (which latter fact inclines me to believe that we could not at that time have intended to separate ourselves permanently from the parent stem), down the road toward Waikiki. This began to be really an adventure, for it was on the high road, and the passers-by looked inquisitively at us, one old gentleman going so far as to ask us, after some slight hesitation; where we were going, and not seeming quite satisfied by our embarrassed responses, asked us to get into his carriage and let him drive us home. As we were going in the opposite direction we recognized that we were found out, but we kept on in determined fashion for some time, when our own carriage, at that time known as the ark, caught up with us. I think we made only one more attempt to leave home permanently, but succeeded in being absent only a few minutes, being frightened by the shades of evening, and also by our neighbor, Mrs Kinney, who asked us where we were going, and told us we must run back home. We were about half-way across the paddock, but running fast to get out of sight as soon as possible. We had provided ourselves this time with a quart of milk and a bottle of pie-fruit. This last we recognized as a theft—I believe the milk was ours—and although mother did not learn of our nefarious plan except by our own confession, we were too unhappy about the theft of the fruit to keep our secret, which shows what well-brought-up children we were, although I do not know exactly why we drew the line at stealing, and not at running away.

One of the joys of Carrie’s and my childhood was to hear Henry preach. Mr Henry Parker was his model—whether consciously or not I do not know—a Hawaiian jargon his tongue, his audience the chickens, Carrie and myself, and the native washwomen, scrubbing clothes under a big tree behind the house. He was most eloquent, and kept the natives and ourselves at a very high pitch of excitement and enthusiasm as long as he preached. He may have been seven or eight years old at the time.

My remembrance of Henry’s childhood is filled with pictures of him leaning over a table absorbed in some book, and twisting a little lock of hair—a habit he retained till well into college. He loved history, and I have no doubt it was he who originated the most glorious game of our childhood—the Franco-Prussian War — which occupied our minds night and day. Henry and Willie Kinney were the French, while Minnie Kinney, Carrie, and I represented the Prussians. Our battles were long and furious, and broke out at any moment and at any place, the most potent point being the tamarind tree, though I do not know whether it was supposed to belong to one of the warring elements or not. It may have been a point of dispute, perhaps Alsace-Lorraine, though I must confess to having had no knowledge of these far-off provinces. I think that Henry, who swallowed all he heard on warlike topics with avidity, probably conceived the whole plan of the game, while I, less interested in distant realities than immediate pleasures, readily accepted the part of a Prussian soldier in order to have my amusement.

The tamarind tree played the largest possible role in our childhood. We half lived in its fairy branches, and many is the volume I have read perched high among its leaves. In its old age a worm gnawed at its root, and it was felled midst the moans and wails of a grief-stricken family.

When I was a child I used to indulge in glorious day-dreams, and I remember once looking about for sympathy and lighting on Henry, who confessed to similar weaknesses. But when he related his visions, they proved to be of such magnificent proportions that mine sank into insignificance. He had employed his waking hours in leading vast armies across Russia and Austria, and gave all the details of different sieges, always resulting in victory. Our chief sources of historical information at that time seem to have been various delusively interesting volumes by J. S. C. Abbot, which could not be regarded as sound, but which were certainly successful in inspiring Henry’s mind with an undying interest in History. So absorbing was this interest, however, — so completely did it take possession of him — that he began to lie awake at night, and finally developed a light attack of brain fever, serious enough, however, to frighten the family. Alfred said Henry ought to go to the country and not see a book for a year, and it may have been a result of this illness that he was sent to Hilo, whence his first letter was written.

HELEN CASTLE MEAD.

PARIS, FRANCE,

January 15, 1902.

NOTE

THE following letters have been subjected to no editing beyond the sacrifice of some passages, which reflected rather the personality of others than Henry’s own. As they are intended only for the eyes of his own intimate circle, we have felt that there was no revelation of himself which was too intimate for these readers. There has been no thought of a literary whole; on the contrary, the trifles, catch-words, and repetitions of familiar correspondence have been retained, to be filled in by the memories of those to whom he wrote. It has not been our task to construct Henry out of his letters, but simply to present materials from which the readers of these pages will mentally reproduce the personality with which they were familiar. We have presumed upon the confidence reposed in us as collators of this correspondence only in the two added chapters of recollections; and the only excuse we offer for them is, that they sprang almost without premeditation, and quite inevitably, from the months spent with Henry by the medium of his letters.

"For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,

Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.

Who would not sing for Lycidas? He knew

Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.

He must not float upon his watery bier

Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,

Without the meed of some melodious tear."

"Alas, that Spring should vanish with the rose!

That youth’s sweet-scented manuscript should close!

The nightingale that in the branches sang,

Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows I"

—OMAR KHAYYAM.

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HILO, June 25, ’76.

DEAR MOTHER,

I want to see you very much. I intend to enjoy myself up here, though I am afraid I am going to be homesick. I am afraid my knee is not getting any better. I think it is about the same as it was when I left Honolulu. Please send the clothes up as soon as possible, for I will need them, I think. I wish Father could have stayed up here and enjoyed himself. Did he have a comfortable passage down? I was real glad Father went up with me; he was a great comfort to me. How are all the folks at home? Give them all my love, including everybody in the three houses. Give Eloise and Ethelwyn each a kiss from me, and tell them I will write to them if I have time. Since we left Honolulu, I have lost one pound and Reky has lost four. Edward says we have run it off, and we have been doing something all the time. Yesterday we went to bathe in the Wailuku, and Edward went with us. That was in the afternoon. In the morning over to Cocoanut Island, on horseback. Nobody can take cocoanuts without Governor Kipi’s permission, so we asked him, and he said we might have as many as we pleased; but when we got there, the man would not believe Kipi said we might, and would not get us any, which was very provoking, indeed; so we came home.

In a little while it will be time to go to church, so I guess I will adjourn writing for the present, and brush my hair. I have got a piece of news that will rejoice Helen’s heart. It is that up here I brush my hair three times a day, and on Sunday I brush it four times. Now will not Helen rejoice? I go down to Mrs Sisson’s every day and practice. Tell Ellie that. I wish I had the Home Circle up here to practice in, besides my Richardson’s. The whole of Uncle Dave’s family are going away to-morrow, and we have their cows and peaches and everything else. Last night we went up to Uncle Dave’s to play, but Reky stuck a nail into his foot, and had to go home. We went over to Uncle Reky’s and played on the drums and other instruments, and had a jolly time playing band. After that Howard and I went to boxing, while the girls sat on the steps and watched us. I had a jolly time. When we got up to Uncle Dave’s we went with Howard down to Mr Reed’s, to shoot a cat, and it was there Reky stuck a nail in his foot. After Howard had shot the cat we went back to Uncle Dave’s, when Edward told Reky to go home and get a piece of pork on his foot. I wash my feet every night before I go to bed, and I eat a great deal. We are going to go up to Uncle Dave’s pasture and milk the cows every morning. I do not eat half as much bread-stuff up here as at Honolulu. I hardly ever eat bread except at lunch, and then I generally make half my lunch on rice. We are going to keep quiet this week.

From your Affectionate Son,

HENRY.

June 28, ’76.

DEAR HELEN,

I have barely time to answer yours. I am having a jolly time up here, despite the fact that I am absent from you. I eat lots up here. I am very sorry that I cannot be in Honolulu to see the fun. How I wish I could see the big sights that are going to be seen on the Fourth. I have been out to Papaikou once since I have been here. I expected to have had a miserable time going out and coming in, but instead of that I enjoyed the ride, both in and out. It looks a little familiar, but not much. We have had very little milk, and I have hardly tasted it since I have been up here, but David Hitchcock and all are going to Kona in the steamer this week, and so we will have their cows; so we will have plenty of milk. I have had four or five water-lemons since I have been up here. Ellie has been sick. She is not quite well yet.

Yours truly,

HENRY.

P’S.—Your school has a vacation now, has it not? Goodbye.

CLEVELAND, O., March 10, ’78.

DEAR FOLKS AT HOME,

We mail the letters to-morrow for Honolulu, and I must send a little, just to let you know that I am alive and kicking. Jamie decided to go up to Cleveland, and I thought I should like to go with him, so here I am at Henry’s. Will and I slept on the floor last night, and got along very well indeed. I study Grecian history next term, and am trying to make it up this vacation, as it will save me so much time next term. I think I shall succeed in doing so. The book has 240 pages. I have now read about 230. School begins next Tuesday at 12 o’clock, so I will have two more days to review in. Jamie and Cousin Henry have gone to church, like good boys, while Will and I stay at home; but Will and I are aiming at long life. They have a great deal of respect for Sunday here. Our ears are saluted by the sound of a little girl skipping rope in the hall, while we have but to turn toward the window to see a parcel of boys engaged in a game of base-ball. So you see these games are able to tempt folks to do evil, as well as some others which are looked upon as very wicked. So we see the wrongfulness of a game consists in the use made of it, not in the game itself. Therefore one game, however much it may be the custom to make a wrong use of it, is as lawful as another, provided the right use is made of it. Therefore cards is as lawful as base-ball. What nonsense I am writing! I expect you will learn a great deal and get a great many new ideas from this homily.

Will and I took a long walk this morning before breakfast. We went out to the park, and then went way down to the end of some long piers, at the ends of which were two lighthouses. Jamie and I got breakfast at a restaurant, but Will and the other Henry, my illustrious namesake, are boarding themselves.

I have had a very good time this vacation, and am sorry it is coming to an end. It hardly has time to get fairly commenced before it ends. But such is life: ‘Tis but a vapor that vanisheth away, etc. Jamie and Henry have come home. Those boys that were playing ball are now varying their amusement by pegging a top, and their loud voices come up here through my window, dispelling the Sabbath stillness, it ought to be, but there is not much stillness to dispel around here just now. The boys are eating oranges now, and I suppose I ought to help them. We get oranges very cheap at Oberlin now, at about thirty cents a dozen, and I think they are pretty good too. There are cocoanuts, too. around at the groceries, but I imagine they are some that Noah—he lived in a tropical climate, did he not?—had left over from his supply in the ark, and I am not anxious to try them. It is possible that I may be mistaken, however.

My sheet is coming to an end, and my ideas never had a beginning, so I will cease to bore you.

Affectionately yours,

HENRY.

OBERLIN, OHIO, May 6, ’78.

DEAR SISTER MARY,

I believe your birthday is approaching, and I am able to give you nothing better than to bore you with a letter—a pretty thin present, I think, especially from such a poor hand at letter-writing as I am; but I will do my best, and you can take this juvenile spurt at what it is worth. We had a lecture from a gentleman by the name of Mr Phillips a few weeks ago for Thursday lecture. We have had a good many missionary addresses lately, all interesting, this being no exception. He spoke upon the missionary field in India, and told us a good many interesting and funny stories, so that the lecture was very interesting and entertaining. One of these stories was about the degradation of women there. The children, that is, the girls, they never send to school, regarding them as entirely incapable of learning. They would about as soon think of sending a cow to school as a girl. Sensible! Don’t you think so? It is one of the most repulsive things to me, of anything in this world, to see every single day girls—yes, girls—beat the boys in Latin. It makes the hot blush of shame mantle high on my cheek, to see my sex so put to shame by paltry girls. I think girls should keep their proper place, I do! (Hem!) But to return to my story. Some missionary finally succeeded in persuading some parents to let their girls go to school for an experiment, and two girls went. Well, after a while, there was a general examination of all the schools, and four or five hundred boys were assembled, and those two girls. Well, those two girls spelt down the whole five hundred boys. One girl stood until there were about five boys left standing, and then went down. The other girl spelt them all down. Disgusting fact! A fact repulsive, exceedingly repulsive, to my feelings as an individual of the superior sex. Women, as I said before, should be kept down. They are an inferior class anyhow. Another story that he told us was as follows: Monkeys are among their gods. One time a whole troop of these came down into a village and commenced to eat up all the cucumbers and other vegetables in the gardens. The people dared not touch them themselves, but they entreated Mr Phillips and his