since he had begun by rhyming the name munity is the conduct of the average peoof the great German poet and dramatist ple, and in many parts of the West and with "teeth," and had reached the point South schools are still inchoate. There is a where he made it rhyme with "boat." district in Kentucky where a teacher is But if popular education, intelligence, and known to have been employed who could natural keenness make up civilization, the neither read nor write; his function was West is a highly civilized community; and to draw his district's share of the State there are many reasons for supposing that school-fund. There have been schools on it has the conditions for a broader intel- the frontier in which the only pupils lectual growth. First of all, it is freer were the children of the one man who than any other great area of the earth's surface from the trammels of an official religion; several of the coast colonies had established churches, but not one community in the Mississippi Valley except Louisiana. To be sure, as in other parts of the United States, there is an almost comical multiplication of sects. Doubt less it is wasteful to keep up several struggling churches in a little town, but the right to think out one's own theology, or to select amid various theologies, has in it elements of intellectual discipline; and from the earliest days the Western churches have been the principal centres of the intellectual life of the community. Schools are not necessarily civilizers. The real standard of education in any com

lived in the district, and the teacher was their mother, while the non-resident owners of real-estate paid the school-taxes. Although country schools are already weakening by the draining of the more likely people into the towns, the district schools in the West are probably as good as those in the remote parts of New England; and the great city systems are, upon the whole, superior to those of the East. The best organization of school government in the country is that of Cleveland, and the best system of buildings is probably that of Minneapolis. Chicago public schools are more efficient than those of Philadelphia or New York, and probably than those of Boston.

In secondary education the West has

ps good public high-schools as those of ings. Certainly no such group of magnifi

ther parts of the country, though it has ever developed a system of endowed acadmies in country towns, which still seem o furnish a special and much - desired raining in New England.

When it comes to universities, the averge provision in the West is excellent, and nost of the newer States have a general 3ystem of complete government education, for the State universities have direct relations with the public schools, and are superior in equipment and prestige to the denominational colleges. Two of the greatest and most famous Western universities, Chicago and Michigan, chance to lie just outside the rim of the Mississippi Valley, but the renowned universities of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Nebraska, and the steadily enlarging universities of Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, show a willingness to provide at the expense of the commonwealth an education of a thoroughness and advancement which cannot be had in any Eastern State except by the payment of considerable fees to endowed universities. Almost every branch of human learning is now taught thoroughly and practically somewhere between the Appalachians and the Rockies.

cent structures has ever been seen in America, outside of fabled Norumbega, as the Court of Honor at the Chicago Fair.

Western literature is made up partly of books written by Western people, and partly by books about the West. Of late years there has sprung up a generation of poets and novelists who find enduring themes in the breeziness of the frontier, the monotony of the farm, and the crudity of the workman's life. A very encouraging sign is the growth of a school of historical writers who have learned the romance of the Indian hunter and the French trapper, and who insist upon arousing the public to a sense of the importance in our national history of the development of the West.

The difficulty about intellectual life in the Mississippi Valley is not so much a lack of interest in the things of the mind as a lack of local traditions. Hence in some Southern cities of feeble intellectual opportunities we find a delightful and refined society of old-fashioned people who read Shakespeare and Milton and Addison because that has for a hundred years been the right thing for respectable people to do. How can there be traditions in a city like Minneapolis, where not one adult Two important tests of intellectuality, in twenty was born in the place or perthough not the only ones, are art and haps in the State? The North and Northliterature. The Rookwood pottery is one west are now undergoing a tremendous of the few indigenous Western arts known social change through the renting of great at home and abroad; and though there are farms to new-comers, while the owners several art-schools, there is no school of live in villages or towns. This means Western art, and no such school is likely; that the children will not know "the old for painters are cosmopolitan; they must place," and the grandchildren will have be educated where there are the best col- not so much as a myth of the old oaken lections of notable pictures. The only bucket. Even in old cities like Albany and claim which the West has well establish- Baltimore it is hard to build up a civic ed to artistic distinction is in architect- sentiment—a sense of gratitude to ancesure. Fortunately Cleveland is not within tors and responsibility to posterity. Perthe Mississippi basin, and therefore the haps as population becomes more stable valley has not to weep for the confused this feeling will grow up in the West, but heap of stone-cutting which has been set it is hard to realize the effect upon a up there as a soldiers' monument; but community of such rapid changes of life Imost of the State of Ohio is in the Ohio Valley, and the legislature forced that abomination upon the people of Cleve- When critics say that no intellectual land against their will. On the other inventiveness can be expected in a flat and hand, the city of Pittsburg has the most monotonous country they forget that beautiful and suitable county buildings Russia, in spite of the restraint of the in the country; while the city of Boston censor, is one of the most active and has one of the most dreadful county build- creative of European countries. Art has

that not one child in twenty will live in the house of his grandfather.

really no local habitation. Artists are founded country communities with contrained where there are the collections of stitutions which work-with some creakgreat works, and there is no more reason ing-for populous States, including great for a Western school of painters than for cities. The greatest danger for the Misa distinct Austrian or Australian school. sissippi Valley is the discontent of men The application of the principle of beauty and women upon the farms and in little to human life grows steadily throughout villages, who feel that society takes from the West, and attractive houses, clean them to give to the manufacturer and to streets, beautiful parks, and tasteful furni- the city. The greatest security of the West ture more and more abound. Browning is its widely advanced intelligence and the societies do not make culture nor nourish honesty and intelligence of the average new poets; but none can fail to observe man. The foundations of society are sound, throughout the valley the intelligent in the framework is trusty, and, so far as we terest in the things which make for civil- can look into the future, the Mississippi ization in education, in literature, in art, Valley is destined to be the home of a great and in human life. community. The Mississippi Valley is an empire because it keeps fast hold of East and West; because it is the heart and core of a great republic.

Of the continued material wealth of the Mississippi Valley there is no reason to doubt, and a political structure designed for small agricultural communities has somehow proved at least moderately successful for large States containing great cities. But for ages to come the principal output and wealth of the Mississippi Valley must be agricultural; and the greatest danger is a separation of interest between the tiller of the soil (allied, perhaps, with the workman at the forge) on the one side, and the capitalist and the professional and business man on the other side. At present the social forces are well balanced, and immigration has not brought the great dangers usually ascribed to it; but if the farms are to fall into the hands of a rent-paying peasantry, and the owners are not to live in the midst of that peasantry and to share their interests, as do the landowners in European countries, then the Mississippi Valley may yet see social contests which will make the French Revolution seem mild. The two bases of the present happiness and prosperity of that great region are first, the intelligence, honesty, and orderliness of the average man, and secondly, the belief that the farmer and the wage-earner get a fair share of the output.

Hart, CHARLES HENRY, author; born in Philadelphia, Feb. 4, 1847; graduated at the University of Pennsylvania in 1869. In 1893 he was appointed chairman of the committee on retrospective American art in the World's Fair exhibition. He is the author of Historical Sketch of National Medals; Gilbert Stuart's Portraits of Women; Portraits of Washington; Browere's Life Masks of Great Americans; and biographical works on Lincoln and Webster; Memoirs of William H. Prescott and George Ticknor.

Hart, JOHN, signer of the Declaration of Independence; born in Hopewell, N. J., in 1708; was a farmer, scantily educated, but a man of strong common-sense, pa triotism, and moral excellence. He was in Congress from 1774 till 1777, and suffered much at the hands of the loyalists. He was compelled to flee from his home, and was hunted from place to place until the capture of the Hessians at Trenton (see TRENTON, BATTLE OF). He was called "honest John Hart." He died in Hopewell, in 1780.

Hart, JONATHAN, military officer; born in Kensington, Conn., in 1748; gradThe founders of the great Western com- uated at Yale in 1768; enlisted in the munity used the plain and common rules Continental army, serving throughout the of the life with which they were familiar; War of the Revolution, attaining the rank but they put into their organization a of captain. After the war he entered the strength and vitality which have enabled regular army as captain; was promoted to it to stand under the most unexpected major. He participated in various camconditions. They founded a common paigns against the Indians under Generals wealth for Americans which has proved Scott, Harmar, and St. Clair. In the batadequate for people of all races; they tle with the Miami Indians, while pro

eting the rear of the army, he and his several lines of railroads and steamers. mmand were overwhelmed by superior It is one of the wealthiest cities in the imbers and almost all were killed. He United States for its size, and the greatest as the author of the "Native Inhabit- insurance city in the world. Among its its of the Western Country," which ap- noteworthy buildings are the State Capieared in vol. iii. of the Transactions of tol, Trinity College, Hartford Theological e American Society. He died on Miami Seminary, Wadsworth Atheneum, Ameriiver, O., Nov. 4, 1791. can School for Deaf Mutes, Colt Memorial Church, State Armory, and many elegant residences. The State library, in the Capitol, contains pictures of the governors of the colony and State, and in the park are statues of General Putnam and Dr. Horace Wells, one of the alleged discoverers of anesthesia, and a Soldiers' and Sailors' Memorial Arch. The city is noted also for the extent and variety of its manufactures, which include machinery, bicycles, fire-arms, motor vehicles, silk goods, drop - forgings, metal castings, cyclometers, envelopes, etc.

Hart, NANCY, patriot; born in Elbert ounty, Ga., in 1765. During the Revoluionary War she was an ardent patriot, nd upon one occasion captured five BritIsh soldiers, who were pillaging her house. She concealed their arms and killed two of them who attempted to escape, and held the remaining three until she received assistance from the neighbors. She died

in 1840.

Harte, FRANCIS BRET, author; born in Albany, N. Y., Aug. 25, 1839; went to California early in life and took up mining, but later engaged in newspaper work. In 1864-67 he was secretary of the United States branch mint at San Francisco, and afterwards editor of the Overland Monthly. In 1878 he was appointed United States consul at Crefeld, Germany, where he served two years, and held the similar office at Glasgow, Scotland, till 1885. He is the author of many works, among them The Luck of Roaring Camp; The Outcasts of Poker Flat; The Heathen Chinee; Echoes of the Foot-Hills; Drift from Two Shores; A Waif of the Plains; In a Hollow of the Hills; Narker's Luck;

English emigrants from Cambridge, Mass., reached the vicinity of the present city in 1635, and in the following year a considerable number of members of the church at Cambridge (then Newtown) settled here under the leadership of the Revs. Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone. The new settlement was first named Newtown, which was changed to its present name in honor of Stone's birthplace in England in 1637. On Jan. 14, 1639, at a gathering of the people of the towns of Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield, in Hartford, the first written American con

1873 it again became the sole capital. In in paper for $1 in coin; and they advised 1900 the city had an assessed property a general convention at Philadelphia at valuation of about $70,000,000 and a population of 79,850. See CONNECTICUT.

the beginning of 1780, to adopt a scheme for all the colonies. Congress approved the suggestion of the convention, but urged the States to adopt the regulation at once, without waiting for a general convention.

Hartford Conventions. Two noteworthy conventions have been held in Hartford, Conn. The first was on Oct. 20, 1779, when the alarming depreciation of The second, politically known as "the the Continental paper-money was produc- Hartford Convention," was convened on ing great anxiety throughout the colonies. Dec. 15, 1814. Because the Massachusetts There were delegates from five of the militia had not been placed under General Eastern States. They proposed a new Dearborn's orders, the Secretary of State, regulation of prices, on the basis of $20 in an official letter to Governor Strong,