"The School Commissioner of this Assembly district is Mr. C. C. Church, of Potsdam, from whom I received a certificate based upon the recommendation of Commissioner Allen Wight of the first district. The School Trustees are E. L. Beardsley, Hiram Harris, and Jeptha Clark. The present term will be my first experience in the profession I have adopted. I do hope it will prove a useful one, for I am of opinion that a teacher's first experience is apt to give color to his whole future career." The day after this entry he adds that "only a small attendance greeted me upon opening my school," and after consoling himself with the reflection that this will leave him plenty of time for study, he adopted a single rule--"Do right;" and an additional motto, "A time and place for everything and everything in its time and place."
It will thus be seen that he had already acquired a clear idea of the importance of order in every pursuit, and knew that method gives to an ordinary mortal Briærean arms with which to accomplish whatever he may desire to do. How few attain to this knowledge until it is too late!
As a writer, whose words we think worthy of remembrance, has said:
"This is an era of doing things scientifically. People make scientific calculations of the weather, and the average number of murders for the next year. They measure the stars and they measure the affections, both scientifically. The only thing they fail to do scientifically is, to manage themselves. As a rule, they _drift_, and then find fault with fate and Providence because they don't drift into the right port. They drift _into_ life with a multiplicity of vague dreams, which are somehow to be realized; but they have a very dim idea of ways and means. They drift _through_ it, carelessly, with an inadequate knowledge of their own resources, and a still more inadequate notion of using them to the best advantage; they drift _out_ of it with a melancholy sense of failure, both absolutely as to themselves and relatively as to the world. Of all their splendid possibilities, none are realized. Nothing is completed. They start wrong or they make one fatal step, and everything goes wrong all the way through. It seems as if most lives were only experiments. Now and then one is turned out which fits in its niche and is tolerably symmetrical. The rest are all awry, unfinished, misplaced, and merely faint suggestions of what might have been. Much of this is doubtless beyond mortal control, but a far greater portion is due to the lack of a nice direction of forces. The human mechanism is complicated, and a very slight flaw sets it all wrong. There may be too much steam or too much friction, or too little power or too little balance. But clearly the first step is to strengthen the weak points, to gauge its capabilities, to set it running smoothly, and to give it a definite aim. If existence were simply passive and the mission of man was to _be_ instead of to _do_, he might perhaps be left to develop as the trees do, according to his own will or fancy or according to certain natural laws. But as it is the universal wish wherever one is, to be somewhere else, a little higher in the scale, it seems to be a part of wisdom, as well as humanity, to fit one for climbing. But many an aspirant finds his wings clipped in the beginning of his career, through the ignorance or carelessness of his friends, who never took the trouble of measuring his capabilities. He is treated as a receptacle into which a certain amount of ideas are to be poured, no matter whether they may answer to anything within him or not. He is turned out of an educational mill with five hundred others, and with plenty of loose knowledge, but without the remotest idea of what to do with it, or what nature intended him for, and with no especial fitness for any one thing. He can _think_, probably, if he has the requisite amount of brains, but how to establish a relation between thought and bread and butter is the problem. He has the requisite motive power, but it is not attached to anything. _He_ does not know how to attach it, so he revolves in a circle, or makes a series of floundering experiments, that bear meagre fruit, perhaps when the better part of his life is gone. He knows _books_, but he does _not_ know men. He is a master of theories, but cannot apply them. If he has a small amount of brains, his case is still more hopeless. To be sure, a proper amount of knowledge has been poured in, but it has all slipped through. He might have assimilated some other kind of knowledge, but that particular kind has left him with mental dyspepsia, and a vague feeling of hopelessness which is likely to prove fatal to all useful effort.