THE NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATION.
The National Educational Association held one of its great assemblages on the New Jersey coast during the first week of July. No official report •of the registration was given out, but the attendance was estimated at 15,000, some newspapers placing it as high as 20,000. The association has been called an institute for the promotion of summer travel, and this is certainly one •of its functions. Favorable arrangements are made with the railways, and teachers with their relations and friends are thus enabled to enjoy a trip of which the meeting is only an incident. Under these conditions the attendance has increased in an extraordinary manner. The registration was only 625 at the Saratoga meeting •of 1885. At the previous Asbury Park meeting of 1894 it was 5,915. At the subsequent meetings it has been as follows. Denver, 11,297; Buffalo, 9,072 Milwaukee, 7,111; Washington, 10,533 Los Angeles, 13,056; Charleston, 4,641 Detroit, 10,182; Minneapolis, 10,350 Boston, 34,984; St. Louis, 8,109.
Asbury Park and Ocean Grove offered •an attractive place of meeting to those who wished to visit the cities, the seaside or the mountains of the Atlantic seaboard, and in addition to the usual features of the program, addresses were made by the mayor of New York City and the president of the United States. Dr. W. H. Maxwell delivered on the first day the presidential address, which we are able to print in advance of its publication in the proceedings. Dr. Maxwell, who came to this country from Ireland at the age of twenty-two, was assistant superintendent and then superintendent of the Brooklyn schools, and has since 1898 been head of the public school system of Greater New York. This is the most responsible educational position in the country. There are in New York City nearly one million children of school age, and the annual budget for the public schools is about $30,000,000. Compared with the vast responsibility of administering this system, the presidency of Harvard University or the commissionership of education is comparatively unimportant. The responsibility is obviously increased by the political conditions and by the fact that in New York City are enormously emphasized the two increasing difficulties of education, to which Dr. Maxwell referred in his address—the crowding into cities and the quantity and quality of immigration.
In addition to addresses by the president of the association, by President Roosevelt and by Mayor McClellan, there were a number of papers presented before the general sessions. Dr. W. T. Harris, U. S. Commissioner of Education, without whom a meeting of the association would be incomplete, read a paper on 'The Future of Teachers' Salaries'; Dr. Andrew S. Draper, state commissioner of education, spoke of 'The Nation's Educational Purpose'; Mr. William Barclay Parsons, the eminent New York engineer, discussed 'The Practical Utility of Manual and Technical Training'; the question of child labor and compulsory education was treated by Mr. George H. Martin, secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, and by Dr. Franklin P. Giddings, professor of sociology at Columbia University, who considered the perplexing topic of the relation of compulsory education and the prohibition
