Public Education

In Chapter X I tried to show that teachers are now slowly inventing educational expedients, by which, even under the conditions of modern large-scale civilization, potential thinkers can be helped during their school years to acquire the elements of that art of thought which they will use in adult life. But the invention of educational expedients will not increase the output of creative thought, except in so far as those expedients are actually brought to bear upon the potential thinkers of each generation; and the degree to which that is done will depend largely upon the policy of the administrative persons and bodies who build schools, appoint and control teachers, enforce attendance, and draw up model time-tables.

In all modern industrialized communities, at least four-fifths of education from six to fourteen, and a rapidly increasing proportion of education after fourteen, is now “public,” that is to say, is provided from funds raised wholly or mainly by taxation, and appropriated to educational purposes by bodies dependent on popular election. And almost everywhere, public education, at least from six to fourteen, is compulsory. The whole of this world-wide system is almost incredibly new; the political demand which created it only became important less than a century ago, and five-sixths of the present vast expenditure on public education probably dates from not more than forty years ago. Any administrative system so rapidly developed in answer to a necessarily simple political demand, is certain, especially if it makes large use of the expedient of compulsion, to be at first insufficiently adapted to the complexity of the problem with which it deals. And in England, as compared, for instance, with the United States, or Prussia, or Scotland, public education is specially new, and was at first specially clumsy; it was not till 1870 that the elementary state-aided creedal schools were fitted into something like a public system, and not till 1876 that educational compulsion was made general.

The history of English public educational administration during the last forty years may be described as a series of attempts to remedy the defects which were found to have resulted from the over-simplicity of the original conception of the problem. The most obvious of these discoveries was the fact that the “average” child—say, the sixty per cent. of the children in each school who are mentally and physically nearest the mean—is a much more complex being, with much more complex needs during his school years, than was assumed in the eighteen-sixties and seventies. The legislation of 1870 followed soon after the adoption in 1861 by the English government of the policy of “Payment by Results,” the ‘payment’ being the state grants towards the salaries of the teachers, and the “results” being the percentage of the children who, on the annual inspection-day, passed certain minimum tests in the use of the conventional symbols of reading, writing, and arithmetic. That policy has been abandoned, and the modern “public elementary school” has gradually come to provide for the acquirement by the average child of many other forms of knowledge and skill as well as the “3 R’s”; and, through handicraft, organized games, school visits, etc., now aims at stimulating many parts of his nature besides those concerned either in the memorizing of elementary information, or in that class-room discipline which makes collective memorizing possible.

The second fact which English administrative authorities have gradually come to recognize during the last forty years, is the existence of children ‘who, because of their intellectual or physical subnormality or supernormality, have educational needs different from those of the average child. While reading the Parliamentary debates on the English Education Acts of 1870 and 1876, I do not remember meeting with any sign that any Member of Parliament then realized that the innate or acquired individual differences among the working-class children who were to be compelled to attend school constituted an administrative problem. In England the existence of that problem was first recognized—not by Parliament, but by the local educational authorities—in the case of extreme mental and physical subnormality. The English School Boards, which were established in 1870, found that they were required by law to bring into their schools a number of children who were wholly or partially blind or deaf, or so seriously deficient mentally that they learnt nothing themselves and hindered the education of the others; and that neither funds nor statutory powers had been provided by the State which would make it possible to create separate schools for such cases. The number of blind and deaf children was very small, and almost from the first the London School Board experimented, without help from the State, in the provision of instruction for them by peripatetic teachers and otherwise. There were at least ten times as many “physically and mentally defective” children, and it was only in 1892 that the Board opened a few “special schools” for them, and only in 1899 that Parliament gave the local authorities power to deal systematically with the problem. It was not at first realized that the diagnosis of the various types and grades of subnormality involved a difficult problem of technical administration. When I became a member of the London School Board in 1894, I found that most of those members and officials who had initiated the movement for special schools still thought of “feeblemindedness” as a temporary condition which could be easily detected by non-specialist observers, and easily cured. The selection of mentally defective children was, therefore, at first left almost entirely to the head teachers of the schools which the children were attending before selection. Only in 1898 selection in London was given to specially appointed medical officers, who began to work out a technique of diagnosis.

Mental supernormality obviously presents a more important administrative problem than mental subnormality; and mental supernormality is remarkable for the extent of its range; the difference between the physical stature of an average man of five feet seven and a giant of six feet eight is about twelve per cent., while the innate intellectual difference between a man of average “general intelligence” and Aristotle or Einstein may be of the order of five thousand per cent. But in England the recognition of supernormality as affecting public educational administration came a few years later than the first attempts to deal with subnormality. The delay was due partly to the fact that very little scientific work had been done on innate intellectual supernormality; partly to a social tradition which in England, at the end of the nineteenth century, still assigned compulsory-primary and non-compulsory-secondary education to different social classes; partly to the consequent fact that the local School Boards ( which administered the compulsory system till 1903-4, when they were superseded by the County Councils) were confined by law, as afterwards judicially interpreted, to the provision of “elementary” education; and partly, perhaps, to the fact that, as long as the tradition of “Payment by Results” lasted, an elementary schoolmaster gained much more in reputation and income by forcing a sickly or mentally subnormal child to memorize the required minimum of the ‘3 R’s” than by helping a mentally supernormal child to develop his powers. The London School Board held, it is true, in trust, certain “scholarships” enabling a very few selected children to proceed from the public elementary schools to endowed non-compulsory-secondary schools; but the examinations by which candidates were chosen for these scholarships were not based on any conscious recognition of a distinction between innate ability and acquired knowledge.‘ The first large-scale attempt in London to diagnose innate intellectual supernormality, as a condition for the entrance of the supernormal members of the child population upon a special public educational course, was made by the London County Council. In 1894 that body offered scholarships, in the new municipally-aided secondary schools, for competition among elementary school children. In 1904 I was elected to the London County Council, which had taken over the work of the School Board. In 1905 the Council, under the guidance of Mr. Sidney Webb, established a much larger scholarship system, which was intended as a step towards the realization of the then revolutionary idea that equal educational opportunities should be offered to all the abler children of all social classes. And in the London scholarship competitions the tests used were (on Dr. William Garnett’s advice) consciously aimed at the diagnosis of innate ability as distinguished from educational acquirement.*

Meanwhile the methods and interests of psychological science were beginning to be extended from a survey of the general human type to the observation and measurement of individual mental variations. As early as 1883 Francis Galton had argued that the measurement of intellectual qualities was possible. The subject was later studied on experimental lines by psychologists in America (by Cattell), Germany, and France. Binet and Ebbinghaus, between 1890 and 1900, began to collaborate with educational authorities in contriving (mainly for the detection of subnormality) tests which should reveal different grades of “general intelligence.” By 1911 the Binet-Simon tests were in administrative use in Paris, and in 1917 the whole system received an immense advertisement from the adoption of the Terman modification of the Binet-Simon tests for the grading of recruits in the new American army, and from the considerable success of its use in rapidly selecting men fit for intensive training as non-commissioned officers. Intelligence tests have led to much exaggeration, and many hasty generalizations as to the political and social rights of “Nordics” and other people. But their introduction has been the occasion for a general advance, which is still going on, in the technique of diagnosing innate mental ability; and any education authority which desires to do so can now adopt, with some prospect of success, a policy of special treatment for supernormal as well as for subnormal children.*

Neither England, however, nor any other community possessing a system of public education, has yet progressed far towards developing the full powers of each generation of potential thinkers. In populations where there has been so much racial intermixture as in Germany, France, and England, it is probably the case that innate intellectual power is distributed with some approach to equality among the social classes. If that is so, and if every class enjoyed equal intellectual opportunities, the five-sixths of the population which consists of manual workers and their social equals ought in those countries to provide five-sixths of the highest intellectual work. But a rapid glance over Who’s Who, or any other dictionary of contemporary biography, indicates that in England, and probably in France and Germany, at least five-sixths of the highest work during the last thirty years has been done by the small minority of the population who do not pass through the elementary schools. The position becomes clearer if we examine the cases where persons of working-class origin have been successful in pursuits involving intellectual work: their success has been greatest in politics and in commerce, where an able man finds it most easy to make up in later life for early disadvantages, and where full experience of the conditions of life among the average population is sometimes a positive advantage: they have been least successful in literature, science, philosophy, fine art, and those occupations where continuous effort prolonged from childhood onward is necessary for the highest achievements.

The main causes of the fact that a supernormal English child of working-class origin is much less likely to be a creative thinker than an equally supernormal child of middle-class origin are, of course, to be found in the present distribution of the national income. The ordinary English working-class home contains few books, and is too crowded and noisy for much leisure and day-dreaming. ‘The father spends the day in severe manual labour, is too tired in the evening to answer the questions of a clever child, and has little intellectual experience of his own; the mother either goes out to work or spends the day in housework. Above all, in a middle-class home, unusual ability in a child is certain to be detected by the parents; and the supernormal middle-class boy, and to a less extent the supernormal girl, grows up in an atmosphere of constant expectation of a life of successful intellectual work. In this respect the average English workingclass home is changing rapidly, but has not yet acquired the tradition of the average middle-class home, or even working-class Scottish or Jewish home.

The question, therefore, before us is not how far has compulsory public education prevented those who would otherwise have done conspicuous intellectual service from doing so, but how far has it been so organized as to counteract with the greatest practicable efficiency the social conditions which would otherwise have made such service impossible. In attempting to answer this question, it is best to divide the elementary course into the “junior” elementary course from 5 to 11 +, and the “senior” elementary course from 11 + till, at present, 14. My own impression is that, excellent as the junior course often is for the child of average ability, it is not often suitable for the supernormal child, for whom the classwork is almost always much too slow, and for whom it is difficult, in an elementary school, to arrange individual work. Therefore, even at that early age, school organization should, I believe, be based, to a much greater extent than is at present attempted, on innate intellectual difference, either by forming classes inside all large schools where supernormal children can, without being unduly pressed, work at the pace which is best suited to them, or by setting up, in closely populated districts, a few small schools for such children within easy reach of their homes.

The provision of public education for children of the “senior elementary” age of 11 + to 14 is at present in England, and indeed throughout the modern industrialized world, admittedly unsatisfactory. Too many children leave school after fourteen on the first day that it is legally possible for them to do so, and often do so, not merely because their parents require their wages, but because they themselves are “sick of schooling.” Mr. R. H. Tawney, for instance, in the pamphlet on Secondary Education for All, which he edited in 1922 for the British Labour Party, after describing the defects of the existing system, says “the burden of the parent’s complaint is that between twelve and fourteen the child is marking time in the primary school; that the child himself (as he well may be) is sick of schooling; and that it is no good raising the school age because, as it is, the later years are largely wasted” (p. 76); and, “Too often [public education] .. . is in the nature of a course which must be covered because the law requires it, but which ends in a cul de sac, and leaves the child eager to start its real life elsewhere, when school is happily over” (p. 76). Because of this boredom supernormal children whose parents might have kept them longer at school often go willingly at fourteen into some monotonous “blind-alley” occupation. An English local Director of Education states that “head teachers of elementary schools aver that, year by year, boys of exceptional promise, who are potentially valuable assets to the community, are lost in the vast industrial whirlpool” (Tawney, l.c., p. 72). And, since release from school at fourteen coincides with the mental and physical changes which accompany puberty, the knowledge and mental habits acquired at school are at that age most easily forgotten. There is, therefore, at this moment, an important political movement in favour of raising the age of compulsory attendance at least to sixteen. That movement is most definitely supported by the Labour Party. At the conference, for instance, of the Independent Labour Party in April, 1924, after a speech by Mr. C. P. Trevelyan, then Minister of Education in the Labour Government, a resolution was unanimously passed that the party educational policy should be to “raise the school-leaving age to eighteen, and provide maintenance grants where necessary” (Daily Herald, April 22, 1924). The British Labour Party is based mainly on the trade unions, and, in a time of unemployment like the present, a trade union audience is certain to be attracted by a proposal which not only seems to give to the working-class boy or girl educational advantages which have hitherto been confined to the property-owning classes, but postpones for two or three years the entrance of many hundreds of thousands of new competitors into the labour market.

The Conservative Party has not yet (largely, it seems, for financial reasons) declared itself in favour of any raising of the compulsory age; and the Liberal Party, in the manifesto of the National Convention of Liberals on January 29, 1925, confined itself to the aim of “securing for young persons of fourteen to eighteen years of age some form of continued education.” But it is probable that an agitation for raising the “school age” would meet with much support both within the Conservative and Liberal parties, and, outside the party organizations, from the teachers, and from the officials who administer the present system. The Director, for instance, of Education for the county of Gloucestershire, when submitting, in 1920, his scheme for secondary educational development in the county, said, “When secondary education becomes free and compulsory up to the age of sixteen, as no doubt it will within such time as Authorities in their schemes should survey and provide for...” (Tawney, l.c., p. 59). But, just because a raising of the English school-leaving age is likely to take place in the near future, it is necessary that we should realize the complexity of the problem on which we are legislating, instead of discovering, as we did after the legislation of fifty years ago, the over-simplicity of our ideas by later experience. It is no light matter for any state to assume the responsibility of compelling by police power the attendance of the whole population at school past the age when Milton was already a poet, Nelson a naval officer, Napoleon a lieutenant of artillery, Alexander Hamilton a political writer, Bentham an Oxford graduate, Sir Philip Sidney a formed scholar, Mrs. Siddons, Sarah Bernhardt and Ellen Terry professional actresses, and Mozart and Beethoven famous musicians. It is clear, for one thing, that if we are to pass a law extending educational compulsion even to sixteen, we should reconsider our existing machinery of compulsion. The machinery which was set up in 1870 and 1876 was intended to break down the immemorial habit among the poorer working families of either sending the children out to work as soon as they could earn, or keeping them, and especially the elder girls, intermittently at home to help in the housework or in some domestic industry. In the country villages, where compulsion was often directed by bodies a majority of whom were well-to-do farmers, who wanted as much child labour as they could get, the law was often at first ineffective. In the northern manufacturing towns a “half-time” system was allowed which dovetailed a gradually increasing measure of compulsion into the existing factory regulations. In London and the large Southern and Midland cities, where compulsion was directed by keen educationalists on the School Board, the law was drastically enforced. I myself took part in that enforcement in London, at a time when it was still a new experiment, and when the change in family habits which it involved was still incomplete. From 1889 until I became (in 1894) a member of the London School Board, I used, as a “school manager,” to hold a sort of local court in which I decided, with official advice, what working-class parents in a very poor district should be recommended for prosecution for the nonattendance, or irregular attendance, of their children,* and therefore (since neither the London School Board nor the London magistrates, in whose courts all prosecutions took place, had much time to give to individual school-attendance cases) practically what parents in my district should be fined, and, in case of default, imprisoned.

I was carrying out a policy laid down both by Parliament and by the elected School Board, and I myself believed that almost any hardship was better than that a child should grow up without education. But I am now surprised when I remember how severe was the system which I helped to administer. In some cases I recommended the prosecution of a working widow with young children for keeping the eldest daughter at home; although I knew that the result might be to send the whole family into the workhouse. The system bore with equal severity on the children themselves; occasional truancy was dealt with by corporal punishment at school, and, since the reputation of an English elementary head teacher then depended largely on the percentage of attendance made by the children on his roll, some head masters and head mistresses were known to force up their percentages by continual caning. Boys guilty of inveterate truancy were sentenced by the magistrate, at the request of the School Board, either to long terms of imprisonment in “Industrial Schools,’ or to short terms in penal “Truant Schools.” On his second appearance at such a Truant School a boy received, as a matter of routine, a heavy flogging. It was only at the end of the nineteenth century, when, after thirty years of compulsion, the habit of school attendance had been created in the working-class districts of London, that the London Truant Schools were closed, and the severity of the whole system was diminished.* But meanwhile the perpetual presence of young rebels whom only the fear of imprisonment kept in school at all, and whom it was practically impossible to expel, made the preservation of mass-discipline in large classes the supreme duty of every elementary teacher, and that fact reacted disastrously on the intellectual atmosphere of the schools.

But if compulsion is to be extended to sixteen or eighteen, those who administer it will have to deal not only with instinctive truancy, or with the desire of careless or selfish parents to profit by their children’s labour (a desire which can be partially obviated by a system of “maintenance allowances”); but with cases where both child and parent are intensely, and sometimes rightly, convinced that some form of “real life” would be better for the child both now and in the future than the prolongation of school attendance. They should, therefore, remember that education is only a means of attaining human excellence, and compulsion only a very crude means of attaining education; and that, if the excellence desired, or any approximation to it, can be obtained with less compulsion or no compulsion, the presumption should always be against compulsion and in favour of liberty and of the greater personal happiness and subtler adaptation to individual conditions which liberty makes possible. They should think of themselves as a doctor might who gives his patients a drug which is often necessary, but who is constantly on the look-out for opportunities either of not giving it at all, or of giving it in the smallest effective dose. The local superintendents of compulsion and their assistants should, therefore, be chosen from men and women of wide outlook and fresh sympathy, in close contact both with the realities of working-class life, and with the after-careers of those who have left the schools. In their offices the children and young persons whose cases come before them should be represented, not by a list of names, but by case-papers at least as full as those of a good hospital and containing all relevant information known to those local authorities who are responsible for the prevention of disease and crime and the relief of destitution; and the educational case-papers should be open to the officials of those “juvenile employment committees” who might wisely have their offices in the same building. However complex such a system might seem, it would be less complex than the facts as to each individual child which the educational authority is now tempted to treat with rough uniformity.

One of the simplest tasks of the superintendent would be to risk, in consultation with the head teachers and school doctors, some loss in regularity of attendance if thereby they can secure for the working-class child the advantage of such occasional bona fide breaks in the routine of school life as the middle-class child now enjoys. But his main duty would be to increase the element, throughout the whole system of public education, of individual educational adaptation and freedom of choice. When new school accommodation is required in a large town the attendance superintendent should preside over a technical inquiry which should report whether, instead of an “ordinary” school, one or more “special schools” should not be provided, to which children, after medical and educational advice and consultation with parents, should be assigned, or admission to which should be open to the most suitable among those qualified candidates who voluntarily presented themselves. In any case the existing law, by which no compulsion applies to a child whose parents can convince a fair-minded magistrate that he is probably being efficiently educated outside the compulsory system, should be retained, and in such decisions a wide connotation should be given to the word “educated.” Perhaps all prosecutions either of children or parents for resistance to compulsion should come before a “children’s court,” the magistrate of which had special qualifications and experience. Where no prosecution was involved, the superintendent of compulsion or his representative would deal with all difficult problems as far as possible in direct contact with the parents, and in the temper rather of a wise and authoritative adviser than of a policeman.

When I was a member of the London Technical Education Board five and twenty years ago, a boy appeared in one of the elementary schools with a marked genius for design. We took trouble to secure him the best teaching, and, after his course at a school of art, a public-spirited maker of stained glass who was one of our members took him as an apprentice. But the boy soon found that he could sell his drawings, as Holbein did at his age, and went away, to become later the editor of rather an aggressively modern art magazine. His action may have been unwise, but if we had been required to compel, if necessary by imprisonment, his full-time attendance at schools and classes till sixteen or eighteen, the effect on his artistic development and personal happiness would not, I am sure, have been good. The superintendent of compulsion would attach special importance to the cases of those few boys and girls as to whom there was evidence that they might be capable of doing conspicuous intellectual service to the community. He would study the lives both of men and women who had done such service in the past, and of those who in the past had failed to fulfil their early promise; and would listen open-mindedly to every doubt in his own mind, and every suggestion from the parents or the student himself, that some way of spending his time other than school routine would at that moment and for that student be better.

It is equally necessary that when we are making “secondary” education compulsory we should be clear as to what we mean by that term. In the minds of most members of Parliament the words “secondary education” probably represent a vague combination of three ideas—education given to persons between the age of twelve and eighteen, education such as is now given in “secondary” schools, and education which is not “technical” (in the sense of preparing for some definite occupation) but “general.” In the official statement of policy edited for the Labour Party by Mr. Tawney all these ideas are combined. Compulsory full-time education is to be given to all children except the subnormal, which is defined as meaning to at least three children out of every four (p. 67). Secondary education is to be varied according to local needs, “it must reflect the varying social traditions, and moral atmospheres and economic conditions of different localities” (p. 28), it must “develop so as to keep pace with the development of the pupils” (p. 29); but the cost per student of all secondary education must be the same, and students must not be sent to different schools because of an expectation that they will in their adult life undertake different kinds of work; “children should not be segregated in different institutions at eleven or twelve merely because at sixteen or seventeen they may enter different occupations” (p. 111); “We have not yet gone so far as to establish vocational schools for intending doctors, lawyers, or those who intend to take the higher branches of engineering. A good general education is the first essential, whatever calling a boy or girl proposes to follow” (p. 110); “a boy does not need less opportunity for games because he is going to be a blacksmith and not a business man; nor has Providence provided the future clerk with smaller lungs than the future director; nor should teachers be paid less for teaching boys and girls in central schools [i.e., the proposed subtechnical schools] than for teaching their brothers and sisters in secondary schools” (p. 112); and all secondary teachers, in whatever type of school, “must have had a university education and training” (p. 114).

In order to show that the proposals of his party are practicable, Mr. Tawney refers to the United States, where “secondary education is normally a continuation of primary education; not, as in England, a separate and parallel system, to which some slender bridges have been thrown” (p. 56), and where “some twenty-eight per cent. of the children entering the primary schools pass to high schools” (p. 26). This reference to the United States indicates exactly the considerations which convince me that the proposals of Mr. Tawney’s party would not be sufficient to protect the intellectual life of the nation from the dangers arising from the extension till sixteen or eighteen of anything like the existing system of educational compulsion. The American high schools are part of a unified course of public education; their teachers have nearly all passed through a university; the curriculum is often carefully adapted to the social and economic conditions of the localities in which the schools are situated; and yet it is generally agreed by American educationalists that the high schools are the weakest element in the American educational system. Mr. Leon B. Richardson, for instance, of Dartmouth College, in a studiously moderate discussion of the problem (The Liberal College, 1924), concludes that “speaking generally the college labours under this handicap, that the students who come to it are not sufficiently trained by the schools below in boldness in facing intellectual problems, and in habits of intellectual concentration, to enter as profitably as they might on the later stages of their educational careers.” An American educationalist who is in as good a position as any one to know the facts wrote to me (in June 1925) that “it is a matter of general agreement that

. . the secondary school is the weakest part of the American system of education.” He gives as a cause of this the fact that America is “apparently becoming committed, in one way or another, to universal secondary education”; that there are several states in the Union requiring attendance upon a full-time basis up to and including the age of 16 +, and 28 states which require the part-time attendance at the secondary schools of employed youths of the secondary age; and that there is a “general belief that youths of different types or even with different objectives should not be segregated in separate schools. . . . The Intelligence Quotients of youths enrolled in High Schools range, from 75 or 80 to 150, or the point of genius.” When in 1925 the Bureau of Women in Industry in the state of New York reported that “many of the children went to work not on account of any great need of wages, but apparently because of boredom in the class-room,”[1] they seem to have referred to the early years of the high school as well as to the more elementary grades. For the potential thinker “boredom in the class-room” means, not merely a temporary loss of happiness, but the compulsory production of intellectual habits which will be fatal to his future efficiency.

Notes

1A few of the old endowed “public schools” in England were, during the last third of the nineteenth century, tending to base their competitions for the “scholarships” offered to specially prepared upper-class boys rather on innate ability than on acquired knowledge. When, between 1881 and 1884, I was employed to prepare boys for such scholarships, I was told that the Winchester College authorities drew up their examination questions mainly with the intention of testing innate ability; and my main work was the production in my pupils of those mental habits which would enable a naturally clever boy to show his cleverness.

1 E.g., the competitive examination (at the age of 11+) for the London County Council Junior Scholarships was confined to an English essay and a few arithmetical problems whose solution required intelligence rather than knowledge and which, in fact, closely resembled the problems afterwards set in the upper grades of the Binet-Simon tests. This was partly due to a desire to prevent the more ambitious elementary schools from neglecting, as it was thought, their own proper function in order to compete with the secondary schools; but it was mainly due to a policy of selecting the naturally able children for special education. 2 F. Galton, Enquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (1883), especially pp. 49-55, 83-112, and 185-202.

1 See the Report of the Consultative Committee to the English Board of Education, on “Psychological Tests of Educable Capacity” (1924).

1 I was supposed to be acting as a member of the “Notice B” committee of local managers, but as a rule no other member of the committee used to attend.

* Compulsion of such severity would have been politically impossible if it had been applied to the more articulate middle classes; but the school attendance officers in London were told not to visit houses whose annual rental, judged from the outside, was £40 or over (though the attendance of children from such houses if they were once put on the register of a public elementary school was compulsory); and a corresponding limitation was made in other parts of England. It was assumed that parents from all homes economically above those of the working classes would either educate their children at home or send them to schools with higher fees than could be paid by the working class,

1 New Republic, April 8, 1925.