which is often a matter of surprise in a people so efficient in all practical affairs as the New England populations of that period, may be found in the fact that outside of Massachusetts this work of reform was largely in the hands of educators and schoolmen many of whom were not especially connected with public school life. The characteristic of the eminent teacher is seldom that of the politician or states. man. His interest is centered on the individual pupil or at farthest on the group of youth that marks the limit of the school, college, or community over which he presides. Unless a person of unusual breadth of mind and generosity of temperament, he falls into the habit of dealing with people which of all others disqualifies for American statesmanship of the higher or more complex type. His theories too often make little account of the actual state of mind of his constituents and his plans go to wreck on the reef of details he is tempted to ridicule or entirely overlook. Only in this way can we account for the apparently stolid temper in which the legislatures of several of these States seem to have received the admirable educational literature that like a gospel cried aloud to the people during the entire generation from 1830 to 1860. With all grateful acknowledgment for the labors of the recent European schoolmen in seeking to lay broad and deep in our human nature the foundations of the new education, we must still believe that in no language has so vast an amount of eloquent presentation of the relations of education to personal and public welfare, of wise and practical discrimination, of workable theories, of ingenious plans for the adaptation of educational systems to present needs, and especially in the adjustment of the entire work of the schools to the influence of that marvelous university, the new American life, been found as in the literature of common-school reports, in which the period now under consideration was especially rich.

Only in Horace Mann in any eminent degree was the office of chief educational executive in any of these New England States held during this period by a man of great administrative faculty, a veritable statesman, although several of the men who, for a brief period, served in educational supervision afterwards rose to high political station. Mr. Mann at once recognized the fact, as by instinct accepted in New York, that any important reform in popular education must be understood, organized, and engineered by great public men in whom the masses of the people had confidence. The average American citizen has a lurking suspicion that a clergyman of pronounced sectarian associations, a college or academical president or professor, especially a literary man or popular journalist, is no man to follow in a matter so vital and delicate as the organization of a public-school system for all the children of the State. He seems to find in this sort of man a want of roundabout common sense in theory and a lack of adaptability to present conditions that forces him into a corner and compels him to act without the full consideration of what should be done. Acting upon this well

known state of the public mind, Mr. Mann at once secured the cooperation of the most distinguished public men of his own State-Daniel Webster, Edward Everett, George N. Briggs, George S. Hillard, Robert C. Winthrop, John Quincy Adams, Governor Boutwell. Rising young men like Nathaniel P. Banks and Charles Sumner in turn appeared at his conventions and added their powerful encouragement to his great enterprise. Indeed, there is no record that his own efforts were seriously opposed by any distinguished public man in the State, although himself the most positive and at times one of the most exasperating of men and almost a failure as a successful statesman in political life. For this reason the work of Horace Mann bore fruit at a much earlier period than that of many of his educational colleagues in other New England States.

All these and other important facts concerning the organization of public education and its gradual uplift to its present condition can be studied at great advantage in the history of these years in the States where the common school had its birth and has moved on with the strong and steady impetus of fate to its present condition of eminent success. And especially is this record of value in the half of our Republic where the common school to-day is virtually, in the great open country, in the condition of New England sixty years ago, and where the great leaders are yet to appear who shall guide the people through the wilderness of fruitless experiment and irritating opposition safe over the forty years' wandering in the desert into the promised land.

NEW YORK.

No State in the Union in 1837 was in a more favorable condition to follow the lead of the revival of the American common school than New York. For twenty-five years its public-school system had been under the direction of competent supervision-first by Gideon Hawley, a State superintendent from 1813 to 1820, working an improved code of school legislation, and afterwards under the able direction of a series of distinguished statesmen, who combined the honorable post of secretary of state with the superintendency of public education. During this period, while the common schools of New England, including Massachusetts and Connecticut, were under a partial eclipse, the common school was largely introduced and fostered by New England influence in the State of New York, and gradually improved and became more deserving the confidence of the people. As early as 1835 the chairman of the committee of education in the New York assembly, in an able report, urged the establishment of a department of education. with a secretary of public instruction, anticipating by two years the first action of an American legislature in Massachusetts in 1837. In the same year was passed the first law for the establishment of districtschool libraries, whereby $20 might be appropriated the first year and $10 during successive years by any school district, to be supplemented

by State aid, for the establishment of a district-school library. By the enthusiastic cooperation of Hon. Samuel Young, James Wadsworth, and others, the law at once became a reality, and this important annex to the country district school was introduced as a permanent feature of the institution.

Governor William L. Marcy, in his message of 1833, speaks of increasing interest in public education. In 1836 there were in New York 10,000 school districts, in which 541,000 children and youth received more or less instruction during eight months of the year. This estimate did not include the city of New York, where the only system subsidized by public funds was still "the public school society," with many thousand children under private and parochial instruction and 15,000 entirely outside the schoolhouse. Under the loose method of reporting attendance, which only dealt with the enrollment, it was estimated that 2,000 children in excess of the whole number from 5 to 15 were at school. This neglect of an accurate enumeration of the numbers in average daily attendance for years to come was a source of perpetual delusion to the people-even to the school authorities of the Commonwealth.

In 1837 Governor Marcy recommended that a portion of the United States deposit fund distributed among all the States should be added to the State school fund, and the legislature applied $160,000 from this source; $55,000 to the library fund, and the remainder for general distribution. The secretary of state during the administration of Governor Marcy was John A. Dix, then at the beginning of a long and illustrious career of statesmanship, and at no time during his crowded life were his services of more value than in his persistent devotion to and vigorous administration of the educational interests of the State. But with all this public effort there was a chronic weakness in the system, centered at the points of public indifference, incompetent teachers, and careless or neglected supervision. The attendance was steadily falling behind at the rate of 8,000 to 10,000 a year, and the public dissatisfaction was plainly on the increase.

The administration of Secretary Dix overlapped the advent of William II. Seward as the first Whig governor of New York by several months, and his final report contained much to awaken the interest of all friends of education. He wrote:

No plan of education can now be considered as complete which does not embrace a full development of the intellectual faculties, a systematic and careful discipline of the moral feelings, and a preparation of the pupil for the social and political relations which he is destined to sustain in manhood.

The great reform so imperatively demanded would only be accomplished "by furnishing each school district with a competent teacher." Secretary Dix also urged the passage of a law for the protection of children in manufacturing establishments, founded on the statute of Massachusetts.

At the advent of Governor Seward there was an investment of $2,000,000 in school property, and $1,000,000 was annually expended

for the instruction of more than 500,000 children. The secretary's remarks on moral and religious instruction were broad, excluding all sectarian bias, but approving the use of the Bible, which was still retained as a reading book in more than one hundred towns of the State.

If it was a providential event that Edward Everett was governor of Massachusetts in 1837, in the opening year of the great revival of the common school, it was no less a happy circumstance that, in 1839, William H. Seward was elected governor of New York, and during four of the most important years of the educational reformation in that State was its chief executive. During the first two years his educational right hand as secretary of state and superintendent of schools was Hon. John C. Spencer, and after this distinguished statesman was called to a Cabinet ministry at Washington his place was supplied, first, by Mr. S. S. Randall as deputy (his first appearance in educational affairs), and subsequently by Hon. Samuel Young. A more powerful combination in favor of public education could hardly have been made in the capitol, supported and advised during the entire administration of Governor Seward by Dr. Eliphalet Nott, president of Union College, a most reliable expert in all things pertaining to this department of public affairs.

William H. Seward did not come to the great post of governor of the Empire State without a long previous training in this as in other departments of public life. He was born in 1801 in the little village of Florida, Orange County, N. Y., one of the old counties of the valley of the Hudson. His ancestry represented a blending of Welsh, Irish, and English stock. His grandfather was a colonel in the Revolutionary war, and his father was well educated and by profession a physician as well as farmer, merchant, county politician, magistrate, judge, and a member of the State legislature-a good citizen of moderate. wealth and high respectability. William was the fourth of a family of six children, none of whom ever seem to have arrived at any considerable distinction save himself. From his childhood he was a lover of learning. He says: "I remember only one short period when the schoolroom and the class ambitions were not quite as attractive to me as the hours of recess and vacation." And this when the schools were so imperfect that at an early age he saw through its numerous shams, and learned to gather out of its ash heap of pedantic and mechanical fumbling with childhood the golden gems of a rare culture.

It may encourage the despondency of the boy of to-day to learn that this man, himself one of the most convincing speakers and writers of his period, began his first school composition on "Virtue" with the important announcement, "Virtue is the best of all the vices," having taken his cue from an older boy who had stated in his own "original composition," "Drunkenness is the worst of all the vices." It is also encouraging that the future statesman, who, of all others, prophesied

the magnificent destiny of the Republic, invoked all the great latent powers of the General Government and added to its area the Territory of Alaska, a region as extensive as the original American colonies, protested in his college club in an elaborate essay against the building of the Erie Canal by the State of New York as the precursor of financial ruin. His schooling in two or three country academies prepared him for the junior class of Union College at the age of 15.

Here he met the most important human influence in the formation of his character-as Thomas Jefferson in Professor Small at the college of William and Mary, Virginia-in Dr. Eliphalet Nott, then president of Union College. His admiration of President Nott as a great educational statesman never waned. But he had little faith in the fragmentary style of instruction, which, even to the student of 15, was seen to be rather "a beating of the bush" of knowledge than a training of the mind and character of the scholar. His teacher in the classics was Francis Wayland, afterwards the celebrated president of Brown University, but then, by his account, an absent-minded and somewhat repellent young man. In good time Seward became a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and always regarded the training in composi tion and debating in that association the best mental result of his college course.

He fell out with a portion of the college faculty in his senior year and left college, traveling as far as Georgia, where he spent six months as teacher of a private school in the new hamlet of Edenton, Washington County. Here he was first introduced to the great world he was to know in future as his proper university, for he had unusual opportunities for observing good society in this new Commonwealth claiming the proud title "the Empire State of the South." Here, also, he first saw the institution of negro slavery and came to those profound conclusions regarding it which were the great motive power of his future career in national affairs. He carried on a friendly correspondence upon this subject with the gentleman who entertained him as a beloved guest during his Georgia experience until the outbreak of the civil war. Returning to college at the entreaty of his mother and the hearty invitation of Dr. Nott, he graduated with high class honors at the age of 18, having spent six months meanwhile in the study of the law at home. His college debts were paid by a strict personal economy. The history of his residence at Schenectady was a prophecy of his future. In 1820 the violent agitation stirred up through the entire country by the Missouri Compromise legislation in Congress had divided the two literary societies of Union College into hostile clans so embittered that for many years the members of the one refused to speak to their old classmates in the other.

From this period through the twenty years when at the age of 38 William H. Seward was elected first of the Whig governors of New York his entire personal, social, and political life was largely influenced