doubtless, for a time, a hindrance to the legitimate results of this obstinate policy of noninterference by the State in matters educational.

But, as always must be true, the final outcome of all ultra individual theories of life leads inevitably to the semibarbarism of "every man for himself;" the most extreme form of a privileged class in sharp contrast with dense ignorance and a low grade of morality at the opposite pole. The Colony of Rhode Island found itself at the middle of the nineteenth century in the unenviable condion of having, for one hundred and fifty years, denied to the children of the poor man the one chance of rising to that equality of opportunity and rights without which society is only another name for slavery. It is a somewhat discouraging result that this long agitation for "personal liberty," in a State so favored by nature and an exceptional population, drove the mass of its people finally into a revolution which trembled on the precipice of a civil war to earn the common rights so completely enjoyed by other States.

Until the year 1799, Rhode Island has no common-school history. Brown University was founded in 1764, seventh in the roll of the American clerical collegiate schools that survive to the present day. Its foundation was not from within but from the demands of a convention representative of the Baptist people, held in New Jersey, that, after the successful building up of an academic and theological seminary at Hopewell, N. J., something should be attempted on a larger scale. The fact that the Baptist people of New England had concentrated in Rhode Island was deemed a reason for founding the university in that State, and Jared Manning, a graduate of Princeton, and a young minister of shining abilities and great zeal, was sent to Newport to feel the educational pulse of the Colony. According to the explanation of Manning and his associates, he was outwitted by Dr. Stiles, whom he employed to draw up a charter for the proposed school. The doctor "fixed" the board of fellows, the governing board, as an anti-Baptist "ring." The discovery of this in the legislature postponed the movement. But in 1764 it had its foundation, beginning practically as a parish school kept by Rev. Mr. Manning, who had removed to Warren, where he opened a private Latin school in connection with the college department. In a few years the institution was removed to Providence, then a town of 4,000 people, being invited by a gift of £400. The larger offer of Newport was rejected and the larger city made a sharp effort at the establishment of a rival college. But this plan having failed, Providence was left to support the "College of Rhode Island" as it might.

The first Baptist church of Providence, whose pulpit had been left vacant by the secession of Roger Williams, gladly accepted Rev. Mr. Manning, who, with a college class of 20 and a united salary of $500, worked on with small encouragement until his death in 1798. The president was of Scotch descent; trained in the old-time discipline of the classics; translating Greek and English into Latin as a condition of admission to college; with a severe ideal of discipline. At Princeton, his alma mater, the student was expected to "take off his hat within 10 yards of the president and 5 of the tutor," while the freshman was required to act as a fag, in the sense of always being ready to run on an errand for a superior student or teacher. It was high time this large and devout body of Baptist Christians moved in education. The president of Brown testified that but two clergymen of the sect had a liberal education, and "they not clear in the doctrines of grace." Both in England and America, during its early days, this now great and progressive denomination of Christians was under the eclipse of a strong prejudice against learning among the clergy and a great lack of education in the laity.

But President Manning had no faith in ignorance, and toiled on, with an heroic and patient devotion during this early period. At the first commencement, in 1769, 7 graduates were sent abroad, and out of this little early class a majority became known and honored for ability, public usefulness, and good culture. The college was supported by subscriptions gathered from various portions of the country. The South sent £500. Every member of the denomination was urged to contribute a

sixpence a year for three years. A gift of £800 came from England, with the names of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin West, and Hollis, the benefactor of Harvard, among the contributors. The corner stone of the first building was laid in 1770 by one of the numerous and generous family of Brown, which, after the munificent gift of $158,000 by a younger member of the family, bequeathed its name to the university in 1804. But during the life of President Manning the school languished with 20 to 40 students, 1 additional professor, and several outside lecturers; the president acting as pastor of the great church, teacher of the Latin school, and general representative of the educational spirit of the time. He commanded the respect and affection of the people at home, and was sent as a representative of Rhode Island to the Congress of the Confederation by the legislature.

The war of the Revolution came upon the new enterprise with crushing force. The buildings were occupied as barracks by the American and French soldiery. Newport was once in the hands of the enemy and poverty and distress were the order of the day. In 1777 the school was suspended till 1780. From the depreciation of the currency of the colony, four-fifths the president's salary was cut off and he was left in dire extremity for a livelihood. He "freed his mind," in good old-time clerical fashion, by declaring that “a more infernal set of men, under the name of a legislature, never, I believe, disgraced the world." But he persisted in his good work. Invited to open with prayer the session of the convention of Massachusetts that was wrestling with the problem of coming into the new Union, he fell on his knees and prayed for the Union with an eloquence and pathos that greatly contributed to the final decision. He labored against some of his own clergy in Rhode Island to the same good result.

He was a firm friend of popular education, and his last work, as the chairman of a committee, was the drawing up of a forcible petition for the establishment of a system of free schools for Providence. This was presented to the town meeting ten days after his death, in 1791. Whether his constant plaint on "the decadence of religion" during the Revolutionary epoch was more than a formal disapproval of all religious sects except that to which he had so faithfully consecrated his life, is not evident. But the dense bigotry of creed and the narrow code of social morality at that day was responsible for a good deal of dissent that broke out into a violent prejudice against the church, clergy, and all that was held up as the religion of Jesus Christ.

In 1790 President Washington, accompanied by Thomas Jefferson, his Secretary of State, visited Providence and was received with honor by the college. He made the usual official speech in reply. It would be interesting to read the speech that was not made by Jefferson, then the foremost educational philosopher and the coming statesman of the Union."

A gift of 1,300 volumes from Rev. Mr. Richards, of Wales, was a great boon to the college. Indeed, at the death of President Manning, the institution was a great way from being an accomplished fact. In 1792 there were but 22 students, and the library numbered 150 volumes; the philosophical apparatus consisted of an electrical machine and a microscope, with an air pump in prospect. Its entire endowment was but £900. Good President Manning was often grieved to the heart by the depravity of his students, some of whom had broken the windows of the Friends' meeting house. Mr. Hart, of South Carolina, writes urging him not to "spare the rod" in the discipline of his son John. Through the entire administration of the first president, the college of Rhode Island had but one building over its head, and the students and teachers boarded at $1 a week. It was out of such beginnings that the great American universities of to-day were built up; every brick and beam of the structure being consecrated by the prayers and tears and lifeblood of their devoted friends.

The thirty-six years between the death of President Manning and the beginning of the long and powerful administration of President Francis Wayland, 1791-1827, were marked by a gradual increase of attendance and greater ease in matters financial ED 95-51*

than this disheartening beginning. Until 1802 the college moved on under the change of its new president, Maxcy, who still retains the reputation of an accomplished scholar; two professors, 2 nonresident lecturers, 3 medical lecturers, and 2 tutors. The vacancy occasioned by the departure of President Maxcy was filled by President Messer, who held the position till 1827. This long period of service by a president who, with great imputed professional and scholastic merits, seems to have combined an eccentricity of personal character and manners, brought the institution into a state satisfactory to none of its friends. The methods of instruction seem to have been superficial, the teachers too often only partially attached to their classes, and the college was getting a bad name for the disorder among the students, which is the inevitable result of placing even a worthy and able man of grotesque and obstinately repulsive personality over a college full of young Americans. From 1804 dates the new baptism of the school into the name of Brown University, under which it has acquired its present reputation among American colleges. The generous and distinguished family to which the university owed its financial success during the coming fifty years of its history contributed in the neighborhood of $158,000 to its endowment and placed on the ground the buildings which were Brown University until a considerably later date than 1850.

Meanwhile the absence of theological teaching and the general liberal spirit of the institution were a strong point in its favor, in a measure compensating for the absence of better educational facilities. Brown University had its roll of celebrated men from the beginning. The repudiation of the common school by the people of Rhode Island for three-fourths of a century from its establishment forced the college into an intimate and popular attitude before the people. Its Latin school annex was one of a number of good secondary schools which came at the demand of the increasing wealth, culture, and public importance of the State. It was in the period including this chapter of our essay, previous to 1845, that it numbered among its graduates Horace Mann and Barnas Sears, the two great apostles of the American common school in the northern and southern sections of the Union, and George William Curtis, for twenty-five years the most conspicuous representative of the higher journalism of the country. Its two greatest presidents, Wayland and Sears, have been more conspicuously identified with the common-school interest of the Republic than any similar officials of the older colleges of the New England States. Brown was the first university of large reputation that established a professorship of didactics, and in Prof. S. S. Green, who held this chair, the State of Rhode Island and the country possessed one of the most charming lecturers and wisest experts developed by the later movement we call the "new education."

The advent of Francis Wayland to the presidency of the university in 1827 ushered in the period of the renaissance of Brown University. He came to the post unburdened by the narrow college methods and ideals of the day, and beyond all other men, except President Mark Hopkins, at Williams College, was the most conspicuous representative of the higher education in New England for a full third of a century. A native of New York, a graduate of Union College, and, as far as such a man could be, a disciple of the great college reformer of the period, Dr. Eliphalet Nott; with an established reputation, and on the high road to fame as one of the foremost preachers and thinkers in the American Protestant Church, he had just accepted an important professorship in his alma mater when called to the presidency of Brown. It was an experiment that might have appalled even an abler and more positive man than himself, for the problem was, in a State that still persisted in opposing the general sentiment concerning popular education in the northern section of the Republic, among a people celebrated for a personal independence that verged on the border of impracticability, dependent on the most aristocratic social class of New England, to lift a college that for more than half a century had been struggling for existence, with dilapidated buildings, a wreck of a library, and not sufficient material to do proper work, with a reputation for scholastic inferiority and a disorderly student population, up to the level of the leading colleges of the time.

But the work was done; so well done, from the beginning, that there has never come the necessity of doing it over. Whatever may have been the original opinions and expectations of President Wayland, the earlier years of his presidency wero wisely and firmly given to establishing the university on solid educational foundations. With an iron hand, but in a spirit eminently judicial, he suppressed the "glorious independence" of the student contingent, and during his entire administration could boast that hazing the freshmen at Brown was "a lost art," and "rebellion" a practical impossibility. He dusted out the corps of temporary tutors, who "drop in" upon a college recitation room to eke out a subsistence, or illustrate a professional reputation by "substituting" in place of a professor. He insisted that, only in the last necessity, should the text-book be seen open in the recitation room, both teacher and student being required to have, the substantial contents of the lesson of the day in mind, and so well in hand that the treatment of a subject and not a mechanical recitation should be the work of the hour. He awoke confidence among the men of wealth and influence in the State; obtained money for a new outfit of illustrative apparatus, library, and buildings, and raised the institution from the reputation of financial impecuniosity to educational respectability. All these years, at the risk of being stranded by what was regarded an undue severity of discipline and an unpopular demand for thorough scholarship, in the face of the lingering jealousy of the higher education and the clamor for a cheap and superficial outfit, even for the ministry, he persisted in these reforms.

It was a providential coincidence that this period of President Wayland's service at Brown University covered the first years of serious effort by the people of Rhode Island to establish a genuine system of common schools. How much the known sympathy of the great president upon the hill in Providence contributed to the result is not easy to be determined. Even more, the persistent effort of the head of the college to raise the standard of scholarship would force upon the thoughtful people of the State the necessity of laying broader foundations in the better schooling of the masses below. But when the hour struck and the decisive day had fully come, Dr. Wayland was found all ready for the new departure in college life, which was the real initiative in the readjustment of studies and the inauguration of the elective system in every American college and university of the first class.

Meanwhile, alongside the new administration at Brown, was found in John Kingsbury, one of its early graduates, a reformer equally efficient, if less widely known, in the neglected sphere of the superior education of young women. A class companion in college of Prof. Edwards Park, of Andover, and Bishop Burgess, of Maine, Mr. Kingsbury, near the time of the appearance of Dr. Wayland at Brown, opened a school for girls in Providence, which, during the thirty years of its existence, educated 5,000 young women in a way rarely experienced in New England before. He began with an exposure of the quality of "educational hash" served to its students by the average female seminary of the day. According to Dr. Kingsbury, there was, "beyond the elements, a little history, a smatter of French, Latin, algebra, and geography only in a few schools outside of Boston." He challenged his patrons with declarations like these: "No school can remain good which is not in some things distasteful to the young and clashes with the current sentiment of much called good society;" "to educate the whole number well, rather than to educate a few to distinction;" "common sense more valuable than literary or scientific culture;" "adopting every improvement, whether demanded by public sentiment or not, rejecting all that does not commend itself, whether demanded or not;" "daily seeking aid of heavenly wisdom and guidance."

He discarded at once the mischievous and exhausting habit of elaborate examinations and public exhibitions; placed his girls and their instructors upon their honor; never but three times in thirty years was late at his desk, and generally "toned up” the entire realm of woman's education. Besides all this, he was active in the American Institue of Instruction; a great friend of Sunday schools and missions; the secretary of Brown University, and, in his later years, one of the commissioners of common schools for the State.

Another valuable institution, largely favored by the bounty of another of the numerous family of Brown, was the Providence Athenæum, which became a literary center for the city of Providence, as the Redwood Library, at one time second in importance in the United States, had for many years occupied a similar place in Newport.

The Friends' school, one of the most substantial and useful of the secondary seminaries of New England, owes a debt of gratitude to the benevolence of another member of the Brown family. Inaugurated as a representative school of this religious body in 1794, it was kept alive from year to year by personal contributions. But not till its removal to Providence, through the liberality of Moses Brown, in 1819, did it take the position it has since occupied. At present it seems not only to be an excellent school of a genuine academical order, but furnishes an advanced course of study. For several years its faculty included several members of the Smiley family, so well known of late as enlightened friends of Vassar College and deeply interested in the work of home evangelization.

It is one of the characteristic and most hopeful features of our American civilization that, even when the masses of any community, State, or section of the country for a long period seem indifferent or hostile to the universal education which is the highest interest of republican society, the entire system of the secondary and higher education, so fixed and unalterable abroad, becomes flexible, leans downward, and goes out of its way, sometimes "across lots," to repair the damage and avert the uttermost consequences of this radical neglect. Even in the vast realm below the Potomac and Ohio rivers, including a region as extensive as Central Europe, this was done, in a measure, by extending the opportunities of the best schooling to the superior children of the humbler classes; even putting in peril the integrity of the secondary and higher instruction to meet the wants of the great varieties of pupils drifted in reach of the sheltering arms of the academy and college. But in Rhode Island, the most compact of American Commonwealths, only 1,250 square miles in extent, with more than three-fourths its population of 345,000 in 1890 massed in its two chief cities, two-thirds of it being in Providence, this adjustment of the higher to meet the crying need of the less intelligent strata of citizenship was most evident. It was, perhaps, because of the excellence of much that was in active operation in these larger cities and towns, and the satisfaction of the well-to-do classes in this direction, with the constant lifting up from the lowest estate that is only found in our American life, that the organization of common schools was so long delayed.

We have already indicated the residence of Bishop Berkeley at an early day in Newport and the gathering in that city of a brilliant and cultivated society as one of the incitements to the first building up of Brown University, and afterwards to the establishment of the private schools of Newport, Providence, and the lesser capital cities of the little Commonwealth.

But all this was only the old story of the past order of affairs, wherein the precious opportunity of acquiring the knowledge and mental discipline of the schools is withholden from the masses. Until the close of the eighteenth century the colony from its settlement was a protest against religious bigotry; but neither the State government nor the leading class seem to have been strongly moved with an intimation of the duty of every civilized and Christian community to care for the improvement of a majority of the people on whom the very material existence of a State depends. The attempt of President Manning, representing the latent sense of this obligation, which, after the State fully allied itself to the new Republic, was somewhat more evident than before, to persuade the city of Providence to assume the schooling of her own children, failed. It was not till ten years later that a sharp reminder from the opposite quarter of society brought the legislature face to face with that imperious question of public education which "will not take no for an answer," and finally prevails despite every form of private, social, ecclesiastical, and public hostility. The first apostle of the common school in Rhode Island was found in John Howland, an influential member of the Mechanics' Association of Providence, and himself