< MOOSEHEART MAGAZINE Conversations With Six Hundred Thousand WHAT IS A MOOSEHEARTP but a Faintheart, if it had not the daily evidence of the personal affection of the members of the Order. Lodges which have sent children here follow them up with visits and gifts. Childless men And a pleasure in doing something- special for these little folks. Some critics have raised the point that Mooseheart children were too well off; that other institutions could not be expected to keep up such a standard. 0.ur per capita expenditure is higher than that of most similar places because we set a better table, build more spacious and healthful dormitories, provide better school buildings, insist on superior medical care. It is exactly what the Order desires. “A Mooseheart” is a place where children are physically as well off as they would be in a good home. We take special and unending pride in our Mooseheart because of the unceasing and expensive system of protecting the moral and physical health of the children. We believe in our formal system of religious care; every Catholic child under the spiritual direction of a priest of his or her church; every Protestant expected to attend the Sunday preaching service and Sunday School. The Governors look for men and women of character who can sympathize with young life and yet insist on high standards of conduct as teachers and officers and employees. They believe that there is no better form of moral instruction than the life and behavior of those who are set to give instruction and to regulate the life of the young folks. That is no more than most schools intend, but the Mooseheart children live along side the authorities of Mooseheart twenty-four hours of each of the three hundred and sixty-five days of the year. A real Mooseheart is not only a teacher, a proctor, a means of discipline, but so far as is humanely possible it is father and mother to seven hundred of the fatherless. The right kind of a Mooseheart is bound to have an influence far outside its boundaries. An old school has many valuable traditions and inherited friends; but a new school enjoys the freshness and delight of trying out more daring methods. There is a Mooseheart course of study which will include many things that would startle the old fashioned school teacher. Plenty of good solid drill in Reading, ’Riting and ’Rithmetic, but less in proportion than in older times, so as to allow elementary science, which opens the wonders of the world to the child. Lots of History, which teaches him the greatness of man. Mooseheart calls itself “The School that Trains for Life”, it therefore, intends that no boy or girl shall graduate without carrying along a knowledge of the social world about him, without knowing how men and women are gathered into families and groups and communities and nations; without Understanding how their whole country is made up, what are its officers and what its duties. Mooseheart means to send out not only graduates but good citizens. “Man shall not live by bread alone,” says the Scripture, and “we are everyone members one of another.” That is the greatest thing that comes from our Mooseheart. The first duty is to feed, clothe and nourish the children whom the Order commits to Mooseheart. The second thing is to bring them up to be men and women of character who can take their place in the community, a place which might have been lost to them but for the warm hearts of the Order. The third thing is to see to it that they are “Trained for Life”. Few children will spend ten years at Mooseheart; many will carry what they learn and become here, through half a century. Beyond that, tell the inquirer that “A Mooseheart” is a place where whatever is done and accomplished is intended not only for the benefit of the Order that gives and the children that receive, but for the U. S. A. for our fellow citizens everywhere. We expect a thousand towns and villages to thank us for sending them men and women of the right stamp. We expect a hundred other schools to profit by the results of our experiments. We hope that not only the Mooseheart children but the Mooseheart influence will stretch out throughout the land. The right kind of Moose heart will create other Moosehearts; for what the children, the grown-ups and the American nation most need today is the carrying out of the great principles adopted by THE SCHOOL THAT TRAINS FOR LIFE. By PROFESSOR ALBERT BUSHNELL HART, Harvard University---------Mooseheart Governor list of them in the annual report covers several columns, ranging all the way from a portable wooden one-room cottage to the big Assembly Hall with its soaring arch ceiling. Mooseheart will be one of the most carefully planned and most endur-ingly built of all the institutions of the United States intended for the public welfare. There is something to build upon in the concrete blocks, with their granite finish laid up in the strong and homeful structures. We love Mooseheart for its youthful citizens, all the way from the baby too young to toddle, who gurgles out his unsyllabled thanks for the joy of his life, to the bronzed young athlete who professes to be still a schoolboy, though he is a graduate In a few days and to jump out of his nest into the big, dusty world. After all, the man or woman who does not love children never ought to have been a child, and must have been born old and grumpy. Even the unlover of children is likely to be melted at the sight of the little folks moving to and fro over the place like so many bumblebees. Carefree, though it was the death of a protector that opened to them the gates of Mooseheart; happy in the freedom of the equality and safety of the village life. Rolling through the slides, tumbling out of the swings, catapulting down the new ocean wave, everybody beating everybody else in a foot race] What is a Mooseheart? Ask a Mooseheart _ child ? A hearty, healthy, normal young American; the same kind that you find all over the country, in schools, in the yards and in the streets; no little drilled manikins here. We .believe In Mooseheart for its school system which, whiic it follows the usual American practices of school foo;ns and teachers and lessons and compositions and examinations and promotions; has many features peculiar to f‘A Mooseheart”. The school year of forty-eight week?, with suitable brief breaks between terms, is a new and-, very successful arrangement. . All the children spend as many hours as possible outdoors; all the children are watched by a skilled Physician-in-Charge; among all the seven hundred, there is not one who has not the unquestioned right to state his conditions and his grievances, to teachers and matrons and proctors who will listen. The Superintendent’s office overflows with folks in knickerbockers or short skirts who bring their wants or their woes with absolute assurance that they will be duly and heartily considered. No rigid, iron discipline, no confinement in desolate rooms; this is a place where the children wear no uniform and are subject to no machine. Mooseheart is, of course, a private institution in the sense that it is supported without tax or public grants. It is not a private institution in the sense that a few persons make the final decisions as to the property or the work of the Institution. Mooseheart is simply a part of that immense community of men called the Loyal Order of Moose, an assemblage at present near a thousand times as numerous as the Children of the Order. “A Mooseheart,” if you please, is the expression of the fraternal spirit; of the interest of men in each other; of the habit of the race to band together in groups of like minded people; of the sense of the obligation the strong owe to the weak; of the tenderness of fathers of families for children who have no father. Numerous are the asylums and children’s homes throughout the country, founded by the gifts of a dead benefactor or the subscriptions׳ of people who come down from above in order to aid their little countrymen and countrywomen. The glory of Moose is that it is not a superior group looking after a group less fortunate, but an enormous family which acts on its sense of responsibility for all its members. This would not be a Mooseheart, An hour by train and twenty minutes in the official Chevrolet will bring the banker close to a better knowledge of what a Mooseheart has been, is and will be. He will quickly learn that Mooseheart, like the megosaurus, is a big thing out on the prairies. That it is always on the move; and that a better investment cannot be found in the whole country. He will suddenly realize that Mooseheart is not a creature but a place, the name of which will sometime be as widely spread as the Big Trees or Pikes Peak, or the City of Boston. He will at once discover that it is not “A Mooseheart” but “The Mooseheart,” that well posted bankers ought to know. Even then' after spending half a day on the' estate, the banker will know less about it than the members of the Order who have taken in the‘ lore through their Lodges, through the Moosehgart Magazine, through their own experience on the ground and through the annual reports of the Governors and Departments. Any outsider may enjoy the picturesque entrance to the grounds, the wide expanse of the thousand-acre estate, the attractive buildings scattered over the rolling land which rises so gracefully from the river to the high ground westward. A chance passerby may notice the children possessing the face of the parks and playgrounds, may hear the whistle blow for school or for meal time; but none except the initiated really know the real Mooseheart or realize the reasons for the pride and affection felt toward the Institution by the members of the mighty Order of Moose. For Mooseheart is more than a place, it is a system, a frame of mind, a theo» v> an ideal, a guide, “the substance of things hoped ‘for, the evidence of things not seen”. For Mooseheartls׳ *“X!?6 gcljool that Trains for Life”. This is the time of ye2£ when those who are interested have a special opportunity to ״ size up a Mooseheart, and to recall their reafimSjtor enthusiasm because the Governors have just issUe4._th®lr Year Book in time to surprise the Convention wfck its statement of what the previous twelve months has brought, in children and improvements and new ideas. Anybody may read the Year Book, or if too busy to read may turn the leaves and regale himself with the pictures of officers and children, of buildings and boys’ shacks, of prize cattle, and prize students. Many things may be scooped up by the searcher; but even the modest chapter reserved by the Governors for their own portion of this immortal work is ten thousand _ words long. Who could be expected to beguile his time in a trolley car by filling his mind with, say, five sclid pages of the Mooseheart Magazine, even if it were a Detective Story by Conan Doyle, instead of an annual report ? Right here in this cozy club corner of the Magazine, let us sit down and talk over together the things that count in Mooseheart, the things that would be new to the man or woman who yearns to know “what is a Mooseheart”. Every Moose knows why he is a Moose; everyone of the half million joint proprietors ought to know why he believes in Mooseheart. One reason why the legion of lovers of Mooseheart admire it and praise it to their friends is the beauty of its setting. Many are the fair slopes and hillsides in the United States, many the silvery rivers, many the rolling prairies; few spots are so well fitted for the seat of an Institution of learning and of mercy. It is fronted by the Lincoln Highway, a ribbon of concrete that binds the Atlantic to the Pacific. It lies upon an interurban trolley midway between two of the magnificent railroad systems radiating from Chicago. It is in a lovely countryside studded with handsome houses, set in the midst of beautiful trees. Good roads link it up with any place in North America which you would like to reach by automobile. We are proud of Mooseheart because of the lay of the land inside the gateways of the estate. The lake meandering below the historic sites of Indian camps and pioneer log cabins lends its charm to the view, and, in addition the boys say, there is a first class swimming hole. The buildings are distributed on a plan, the convenience and attractiveness of which comes out more and more as the buildings thicken up and reveal the lines of the avenue. All sorts of buildings are to be found, a The next of this series of Conversations ivill discuss the question of the place of the United States among the nations of the world. “Have you ever seen Mooseheart?” said the Dictator of the Lodge of one of those plain unassuming Chicago Bank presidents. “A Mooseheart, what’s that? Anything like one of those megosauruses wandering around in the mahogany forests of Illinois two or three millions of years ago? Or is it a movie, something like “Hearts of Oak?” Or is it an investment in a new canned food company, guaranteed profits tivelve per cent?”