President Lowell, in his highly significant and suggestive annual report, is certainly justified in the conclusion which he reaches that a change in university methods, in the direction of purely graduate 'work, cannot be made suddenly. It is no new discovery of his--nor would he claim it is such--that American colleges, as compared with European institutions, are doing a great deal of work that belongs to the secondary schools. The question is whether, the difference in American life and American practical requirements being considered, this grade of work properly belongs to the secondary schools. Our high schools, and beneath them the elementary schools, are by these fundamental American conditions, which are very practical conditions, compelled to carry as heavy a load as they can bear. Our educational system includes, and apparently must continue to include, scientific, industrial and commercial instruction, which is in no distinct sense a part of the systems of Europe. It is universally admitted that, in all matters related to language, to literature, to purely social culture, the French lycees, for example, carry their graduates as far as does the sophomore year in our colleges. But the education, truly admirable in its kind, which the French lycees, give, is almost purely literary. In order to match it in this country, we should have to present everywhere in our secondary schools the division into separate interests such as that represented by the Boston Latin School on one hand and the English High and the various industrial and technical preparatory schools on the other.

Our secondary schools are loaded so heavily with requirements outside the practice of the European lycees because our life, our industry, our practical achievements demand and exact that condition. Nor can we change the situation so long as this difference between the European and the American culture exists. Perhaps the relief for the colleges to which President Lowell looks forward will have to rest, as he suggests, on the commencement of serious teaching at a younger age on the carrying on of early instruction at a more rapid and intensive rate. And here, once more, we come into conflict with the American psychology. As a people, we are very tender of our children's minds. We regard life as a severe practical struggle as a battle of the strong. And we want our children to be strong enough to sustain it before they begin it. The solution of the problem thus presented seems to rest on the development of means to train the very young mind without menace to its health and happiness. In other words the problem is one which we have to work out for ourselves. We cannot borrow the method from Europe, where the conditions peculiar to our life have not arisen. Boston Transcript.