The short visit I made yesterday to Eagleswood suggested some thoughts which as I may not see [you] again for some time I should like to communicate in writing. I have, however, but a few minutes to spare from my engagements & must give them crudely.

Looking back at my own experience, I see plainly a great advantage in education which my son would have over me, if I sent him to your school. There are certain others which I imagine possible which, as things are, he would not enjoy to the extent I should wish, and finally I see certain advantages which I enjoyed that your boys do not. These latter came to me chiefly not by systematic arrangment or deliberate and intelligent forethought on the part of my educational superintendents but through opportunities incidentally or accidentally presented to me & which I used with good will. Yet I feel that they have been worth a great deal to me and that education of the same kind might have been systematically given me to a much greater extent with greater advantage [than your boys will get from much that you now offer them].

Reflecting upon this I am convinced that a boy who has no opportunities and inducements to educate himself, should have systematic instruction & practice in a great variety of matters with regard to which I saw little or no provision at Eagleswood. Yet the large majority of boys who spend four years there are very unlikely to have good opportunities for the kind of education [127] to which I refer, after they leave you, or if they have, are unlikely to have time, inclination or to be constrained to make good use of them.

To show you what I mean I will ask you to consider what would be the value to every boy on leaving Eagleswood to be able to do such things as these following, and to instruct and superintend others efficiently in matters involving them. To saddle & bridle a horse—to harness him. To make temporary repairs in harness & carriage. To ride, drive, pack, clean, feed, bleed & phisic a horse. To put on a shoe or a substitute, to take care of his hoofs, to detect & treat with some advantage in the absence of a farrier, sprains, corns, heaves &c. To make a fire, & cook under difficulties. To swim, with & without support; to aid others in swimming, to rescue drowning persons; to come ashore in surf; to resusitate drowned or smothered persons, to avoid & treat sun stroke. To make & use a raft. To stop a leak in a boat. To keep an overloaded boat from swamping in rough water. To land in breakers with a boat or raft. To make and understand common signals & signs of seamen & woods-men. To measure distances by the eye—by pacing—by trignometry without instruments. To graduate the sights of a rifle—to keep a rifle in good order. To serve artillery with safety. To take care of ammunition. To deal with a fire. To take horses from a burning stable. To ford a river. To kill animals without cruelty; to preserve meat. To preserve life & health under difficulties when ordinary provisions are lacking—from cold, from heat, hunger & thirst—fatigue, debility, nervous prostration, excessive excitements. To make rough maps in the field and under embarrassments. To make slight repairs in & run a steam engine safely. To take care of a watch; To preserve clothing from moths. To ventilate a house, to take care of the outside of a house; To paint & glaze. To keep turf & trees in order; To graft a tree; To train & prune a grapevine. To solder and weld; to box the compass; To know the north side of a tree; To distinguish the north star; To judge the weather; To judge & describe the conditions of a soil; To drain land. To observe conditions of malaria; To avoid or overcome conditions of malaria.

There are many more such accomplishments which would be valuable and which are easily acquired. With very little assistance comparatively, a clever boy could I think acquire an amount of knowledge in all these matters which would be likely to serve him well in an emergency (even if he could not become absolutely accomplished in them), by instruction & practice in them for an hour a day, during a period of four years, and I should be glad if my boy was to be at Eagleswood four years that he should have such use of one hour a day, even if several other things commonly taught at schools had to take their chance afterwards—Moral Philosophy, Theoretical Geometry, Rhetoric, Declamation & even French, an elegant handwriting & Gymnastics under cover, for instance.

Another thing: I should regard no boy’s education as tolerably good, even as preparatory to college or other advanced schools, who could not trot [128] 12 miles in two hours or walk 16 miles in four hours or from twenty to thirty miles in a day without painful fatigue, or who could not with a few days’ special practice walk from forty to sixty miles in a day without serious inconvenience. A boy not having a great deal of active physical exercise in other ways, who would not in any weather & under all ordinary circumstances, rather take a walk of ten or twelve miles some time in the course of every day than stay quietly about a house all day, must be suffering from disease or a defective education. And a school system is not a good one which so fully occupies his time and supplies him with exercise that he has no opportunity or does not enjoy to use it for acquiring the habit of daily letting himself out in this way. It is more essential to real cleanliness of skin and lungs than washing with water; and the latter, however important to be looked after, would be better dispensed with than the former. Military drill & the Gymnasium will be a snare and a delusion if they stand in the way of it. I don’t think they need.

You do a good deal to train your boys in habits of neatness, good carriage & good manners. Consequently they appear to great advantage personally. But this training is not carried out in all things. The boys are educated by example not to be neat, not to be provident, not to be elegant or refined but to be satisfied with a common and moderate degree of neatness if not to a positively shabby, neglected and careless style of manners and dressing in many respects. Your lawn, your footpaths, your roads, fences, out-buildings, your roofs, the field pieces on the parade [ground], the areas under the galleries, the neglect of etiquette in the matter of the ensign, all come at once to my mind as affording instances of this incompleteness, which from what you said, it appeared were as obvious to you as to me. I refer to them again, mainly because it seems to me that the cadets should be employed for educational reasons in nearly all the practical measures which you will doubtless take to improve the appearance of these things. If a boy should be taught to make his hair, & his teeth, his clothes & his boots clean and elegant, without the assistance of servants, should he not also be taught to make such other matters as I have indicated neat and elegant? It is as much a soldier’s business to keep his barracks and parade ground in order when in garrison—to sod the glacis, gravel the ramps and sweep the platforms of a fort, as it is to black his boots and air his bedding—quite. And in respect to the practical usefulness of what would be acquired; it is much easier to get servants to brush clothes & boots properly than it is to get them to take proper care of walks and lawns. For these things a man often has to depend upon his own special knowledge & skill or go shabby; when for keeping in respectable personal attire, he can look with confidence to his tailor & household servants.

Am I not one of your “advisory Board”?