students from the best families of New England were thus schooled in the intermediate time before the present elaborate orgnization of the common school. And, although the present high school of Massachusetts, to which every child has free access, is often a better school, especially in the breadth of its course of study and superior methods of instruction, yet there went forth from the old-time academy a peculiar and powerful influence to bind together the rising hope of the land, which no longer is enjoyed or even understood by the present favored generation.

But the people of Massachusetts were not satisfied even with this opportunity, and, in 1826, the law now in force was passed, compelling every town of 500 families to support a free English high school, and every town of 4,000 inhabitants a high school where pupils could be fitted for college. This has now become a permissive law for all the remaining towns in the State, with a provision that children in communities not supporting a high school may be educated at public expense in a neighboring

town.

In 1826 all towns were required to elect a school committee, which exercised a restraint on the conduct of "the prudential committees" of the districts, also examined teachers, and in a general way supervised all the schools. This could be made an admirable system of supervision. The school committee of 3, or some number divisible by 3, elected in successive years, was generally composed of the clergymen and other leading citizens who, with small compensation, rendered valuable service to the people by a constant and affectionate oversight of the school children. The school districts after 1827 were empowered to hire their own teachers, but their power was limited by the examining board, consisting of the school committee of the town. Outside of this there was no supervision of the common schools. The county is a comparatively uninfluential factor in the civil administration of New England and only in one State, Massachusetts, has a system been recently established of district supervision whereby several towns unite for this purpose. Boston did not recognize the need of a city superintendent until 1851, and few of the cities of New England followed her example till a considerably later period. The obstinate faith in the Yankee mind and heart that the people, by their direct representatives, themselves watched and supervised by everybody in town, were capable of managing their own educational affairs, had its good and evil side. It did build up a wondrous public sentiment and a remarkable capacity for dealing with the largest affairs of the country. It sent forth thousands of young men and women to all parts of the nation, competent to any demand of public responsibility. It kept alive the love for education, growing year by year, and to-day, under conditions so widely different, it holds up New England, on the extreme corner of the Union, to an excellence in educational matters not only confessed at home but well understood in all the great centers of good learning in christendom.

The city of Boston, from the first the head and front of New England culture, industrial enterprise, and philanthropic zeal, always had its own "notion" concerning public school matters. It was deeply concerned in the establishment and support of Harvard College in Cambridge, and for a century the great school of the city. The legislature that established the school sat in Boston and it was only an hour's walk from the old State House to College Green. At first Harvard was only a grammar school, and later a secondary school was set up by its side. The faculty were chiefly taken from the most distinguished classes of the city, and the Puritan preachers generally were educated there. For sixty-five years the graduates numbered only 8 a year; but out of its student population came a body of men that made a deep impression on the provincial life. Some of them were from England and returned to achieve high distinction in important positions. The ministers and teachers of New England for a century, and especially of Massachusetts, were largely drawn from this favored class. While the original endowment of £400 came from the colonial legislature, and the first private gift of importance from a young English gentleman, John Harvard, hardly domiciled in the province, the college, for more than half a century, was cherished in the heart of the people. The leading New England colonies

were assessed in private and public contributions for its support, and until the Revolution there was a steady wind of benefaction blowing across the ocean from Great Britain. But Boston was always at its right hand for material and spiritual aid. A marvelous and almost pathetic combination of gifts was all the time flowing in. Such was the early habit of giving for education that there can be no doubt that this city, for regular and systematic contributions to education, charity, science, and arts, is unsurpassed by any community anywhere.

The Boston Latin School, established about the same time, was from the first the pride of the city. A second school of the same type, afterwards set up, was abolished and the present institution is now one of the best known and highly esteemed schools of the higher secondary grade in the United States. Up to the period now in review, the schools of Boston were classed as "reading" and "writing;" the former proper academies, and the latter a meager arrangement, generally in session at the off hours of the regular school. The children, before the age of 7, were instructed entirely in private. The ability to read English was the condition of admittance to the grammar school. The girls were only permitted to attend the writing schools until 1789. Then Caleb Bingham opened a private school of a superior grade, which at once attracted a crowd of young women, and so prevailed with the fathers of the town that they "broke the record" of a century and a half and reconstructed the school system, giving the boys and girls alternate sessions in a double-headed grammar school course. This arrangement held on for forty years. Still the girls were allowed to attend but six months in a year, from April to October; though all this time, and long before, the common schools of the rural districts and villages were coeducational. The Latin school at this time taught only Latin, and its pupils were obliged to go to the grammar schools or to private schools taught by the regular teachers for what they could gather in English. At this time a school board of 12 members was established, taking the place of the "selectmen" of the town and volunteering assistance in the management of the schools; and among them are found the names of the most distinguished men of the city.

The Latin School dates from 1649; the grammar schools from 1684. In 1685 there were 4 grammar schools in the city. In 1812 a special school was established for colored children. In 1818 $5,000 was appropriated for the schooling of children from 4 to 7 years of age, the beginning of public primary education in Boston. In 1821 the present English High School for boys was established; and in 1828 a similar school was opened for girls. But Boston was not yet enlightened on the "woman question" in education, and abandoned this school after a few years, granting in its place an extra two years in the grammar schools to the girls. In 1828, 10 schools, 1 in each primary district, were established as intermediate between the grammar and the primary schools.

The Boston "master," from the days of old Master Cheever down, was a mighty man in the land. He did not lose his importance as the years rolled on. One of the most strenuous of the many battles of Horace Mann was fought against a combination of these Boston masters who were dissatisfied with his upsetting policy; and not until 1851 did they bend their necks under the easy yoke and the light burden of the amiable régime of a Boston school superintendency, which has always been the mildest method by which a supervising man could persuade, coax, and, often by indirect policy, bring in the most important educational reforms.

It is a difficult, almost an impossible task, to determine the quality of the instruction in the schools of Massachusetts during this period. Beginning with Harvard University, it may be said in general that, while the fifty years between 1790 and 1840 were not the period of its greatest celebrity, compared with the present administration a day of small things, yet there was on several lines a steady advance, and at no time did this institution lose its original character as the foremost of American universities.

One cause of its apparent loss of ground during these years was the theological and ecclesiastical entanglement into which it was forced by the logic of its original

unsectarian foundation. In common with all the public grammar schools of the colony Harvard, in its original charter, set up no restraint in the direction of religious belief as concerning its student population. The fundamental idea of the college was that of an institution of learning, sworn to fidelity to the Christian religion, and consecrated to the training of young men for the Christian ministry. The first college seal which, after two changes, still remains the one authorized by the college record "three open Bibles on the field of an heraldic shield with a syllable of 'veritas' upon each of them"-was significant at once of Christian discipleship and confidence in the power of truth. The sentences, "In Christi gloriam" and "Christo et ecclesiæ," marked the force of the Puritan influence near the beginning of the eighteenth century. But despite the pressure of a portion of the more zealous clergy and the almost complete occupation of all its positions of eminence by this class, Harvard at heart always seems to have been a layman's college, and in all her dealings with ecclesiastical affairs to have gravitated to the convictions of the foremost civic, literary, and educational leaders of the State.

At the period now spoken of, owing to the notable change in the theological complexion of many of the old Puritan churches, which, following the lead of Dr. Channing, were carried over to a position of extreme independency and a sympathy with what was known as the Unitarian belief, the body of overseers, drawn from public men and the clergymen of the six towns adjacent to Boston, became identified with what was regarded the new heresy; the clergy and laity representing churches with which many of those of the "Evangelical" persuasion would hold no "communion." This change for a generation threw the university almost entirely in charge of a management drawn largely from the membership of the fifty leading churches of the Unitarian faith in and around Boston. The theological school became the headquarters for the clerical supply of these churches, and the president and professors of Harvard, with few exceptions, were of similar type. This did not in the least change the theoretical attitude of the college, which remained open to the utmost freedom of thought with no spirit of persecution to opponents in the faith. As all but one of the remaining colleges of New England, now several in number, were directly connected with one of these great evangelical bodies, and all offered respectable opportunities to their students at smaller pecuniary cost than Harvard, it was not strange that its patronage did not rapidly increase, and that it fell somewhat under the imputation of being a Boston preserve-a sort of educational "chapel of ease" for the sons of wealthy families of city proclivities, moderately reinforced by a similar class from other States.

Another cause of this partial suspension of activity and influence was the habit, half a century ago confirmed in all American colleges, of raising clergymen or professional scholars to the presidency. For an academy or a small college of the denominational type this was a good enough policy, and many of the most eminent presidents and professors of the country have been drawn from the clerical ranks. But it is not often that the large financial and executive capacity and the knowledge of and broad cosmopolitan sympathy with the world now essential to maneuver a great collegiate school through the tempestuous seas of American life is found in connection with this profession. The presidents of Harvard during this half century were a body of admirable men, several of great scholarship and some on the way to distinguished public station. But it was evident that the college was still in a degree local in its sympathies, representing the spirit of the eastern New England religious, literary, and social class, and not sufficiently open to impressions from other parts of the Union. The growing alienation of the Southern States from the North, especially from New England, which was regarded as the head and front of the great political heresy of "abolitionism," also diverted from the college a considerable number of students from this quarter. The university was still in theory largely under the influence of the State; its board of overseers, the governor, lieutenant-governor, senate, and the State still claiming a sort of authority as a final court of appeal. But its real "steering committee" was, as now, the

corporation of Fellows, a body of 7 men, practically a close corporation where all important matters originated, and without whose consent nothing could be done. But as far as concerned the discipline, the curriculum, methods of instruction, general spirit, and steady increase of educational force, this period was one of the first importance. During these years, apparently uneventful, the old Harvard was steadily renewing itself and laying the strong foundations on which could be erected the imposing superstructure of its present great prosperity and world-wide fame. More than 20 of the most important professorships and lectureships were either founded or fully endowed between 1790 and 1840. Several of these chairs were occupied at different times by men like Buckminster and Channing, Parker and Story, Pierce, Longfellow, Frisbie, Ticknor, Follen, and Sparks, while the latter, with Everett, Walker, and Felton, sat in the presidential chair. The type of instruction was not inferior, indeed confessedly superior, to anything then in vogue in the country. The course of study had been greatly enlarged. It was during this period that the first attempt was made to introduce the present elective system of study. In the year 1824 the old ironclad scheme of two centuries was first broken into, and under the influence of Prof. George Ticknor and Judge Story a new arrangement of studies was effected in 1825-1827. This movement continued with variable results until 1849, when the college fell back, and until 1886 Harvard went on in a course of study not dissimilar to that of the larger American colleges, although of somewhat broader scope and adorned by the eminent scholarship and literary power of some of its great professors.

Jared Sparks, Andrew Peabody, F. H. Hedge, James Walker, Charles Follen, Francis Bowen, Thomas Hill, and others, had a reputation far beyond university walls. In the theological department were found Norton, Palfrey, Francis, Noyes, Stearns, Abbot, Peabody, and the two Wares, and from this school went out a body of clergymen of the Unitarian faith who became largely identified with the support of education, philanthropy, and reform politics in all portions of the Union.

But perhaps the most evident change in Harvard during this period was the complete abolition of the old semimonastic type of discipline, in which it had writhed, as in an iron cage, for two centuries. The reading of the original body of "rules and regulations" under which, with slight modifications, the college went on for one hundred years, is like witnessing a sort of dumb show of human nature on the rack of a scheme of life that in aiming at spirituality and the supernatural is all the time hovering on the verge of a half-savage brutality. The result was that for more than a century the reputation of Harvard as a college for disorder of many kinds made it a byword and a warning to the country. It was only after a generation of this experience that the authorities of the institution learned that after all a college student is a man in the making, and that a boy, a mischievous or even a wicked boy, can be handled best along the lines of a Christian sympathy and confidence combined with the example of a faith which, even in learned pundits and doctors in spectacles, has not parted with humanity and common sense.

From a condition of affairs in which the members of the lower classes lived in a state of perpetual humiliation toward their superiors; when the solemn farce of trouncing a bad boy was opened and closed with prayer by the venerable president, himself the executioner; when a system of constant suspicion and tireless vigilance in spying out offenses was in full blast; when the relation between student and professor was, at best, a sort of "armed neutrality," to the present state, with the improved relations between the classes; the college gymnasium and "athletics" in which the bounding animal spirits of the young men can be duly exploded, and the perpetual stimulus of a course of study that by its variety, thoroughness, and adaptation to all grades of capacity and taste, appeals to all but invincible dullness or incurable levity or vice, is one of the most striking proofs of the growth of a wise and Christian educational theory and practice during the lifetime of one set of college men. The two rival colleges, Williams and Amherst, coming up at a later date, were never encumbered with this absurd mechanism of instruction and discipline.

Under the admirable presidency of Mark Hopkins and Dr. Humphrey, sustained by a remarkable body of scholarly and devoted professors, these schools grew steadily in favor with the New England people. Within the past twenty years they have shared in the prodigious expansion of endowment and patronage enjoyed by all the New England colleges, and at present are not excelled by any similar institutions of the higher education in the country.

It is unnecessary to add to what has already been said respecting the change from the old-time system of public grammar schools to the academical régime of this period. In one respect it was not an advantage; for while, as late as 1840, probably not a dozen towns in Massachusetts were supporting a free high school of special merit, there was space for all that the 50 or more academies and private seminaries in the Commonwealth could accomplish. Some of these during these years achieved a commanding reputation, and to-day, for a thorough and extended course of study, rank with many colleges of other States. A few had little cause for existence and "died a natural death." But the majority, while sharing the defects of the prevailing secondary educational methods and generally short in teaching force, were a real opportunity to the youth of the adjoining regions. Without them it would have been impossible that the work of the secondary education could have been carried on. While, doubtless, in some ways a barrier to the more rapid advancement of the common school, they were not often found in public opposition to it. The teachers of the common schools for fifty years found in them the only competent instruction for their work, a large proportion of their students being engaged during the winter and midsummer months in the district and village schools of their respective neighborhoods. Notwithstanding the opposition of some of the more conservative principals, the majority of the smaller academies gracefully yielded to the necessity of the more complete system of high schools which came in with the new development of village and city life, the attractions of manufacturing industry, and the concentration of population. Many of them were finally merged, with their buildings and funds, in the new high school of the town, and bear an honorable record of the educational life of the neighborhood seminary from its earliest settlement.

Such was the organization of the common school system of Massachusetts up to the year 1837, when, by the establishment of the State board of education and the appointment of Horace Mann as its first secretary, the State for the first time laid its powerful hand in earnest to the gigantic work of revising the entire system of public instruction. The early reports of Secretary Mann revealed the actual condition of educational affairs at this time as respects the elementary district schools of the several districts and villages of the State. Without entering on the complete discussion of these famous reports, we now refer, in passing, to the results achieved for popular education by the support of the common school system two hundred years in this the first American State to adopt it, and, in several important particulars, the Commonwealth which has the honor of establishing the present system of the American common school.

At the close of the first half century of the Republic, 1840, the State of Massachusetts had a population, in round numbers, of 700,000, and a taxable valuation of $206,500,000. There were 3,000 public schools in the State, with 265,000 pupils, and an average attendance of 207,000, six months and twenty-five days in the year. There were 6,000 teachers of all grades; two-fifths of the number men. These teachers were paid on an average $25.44 for men and $11.38 for women per month, with board in families of the district or at a permanent place. There was raised by taxation for public schools $465,000, by a tax of .0022, $2.63 for each child between 4 and 16. There were 854 academies and private schools in the Commonwealth, attended by 27,000 pupils, costing the people $340,000. The country teachers often were supported by the system of "boarding round," each family entertaining in proportion to its number of children in school. It will be seen that Massachusetts at that time was expending for the education of 27,000 children and youth-one-tenth