appreciated, that this hostility to the common schooling of all American children for a common citizenship has been overcome in Pennsylvania, even in these later years. But the most notable educational scheme inaugurated by Franklin was the establishment of the "Academy and Charitable School of Pennsylvania," in 1743. In 1749 this infant enterprise was initiated by a board, of which Franklin was the chairman. A pamphlet, entitled "Proposals relating to the education of the people of Pennsylvania," was one of the earliest and still remains one of the ablest educational documents prepared in America. It develops, with great clearness and wonderful common sense, an ideal of a seminary of learning, remarkable for that day. His ideas of a suitable location, of school buildings, methods of instruction and use of apparatus, the advanced idea that the "rector should be a correct, pure speaker of the English tongue," drawing, elegant writing, instruction in English, etc., were the nearest approach to the most approved way of instruction by our present system of "language lessons." The training of the voice in elocution and debate; the thorough study of the classic and modern languages, without neglect of the mother tongue; a broader study of the natural sciences than prevailed anywhere in America at that time; the constant regard to moral discipline and correct living by the students; the annex of charity schools, which, beginning in the Friends' School, continued till 1876 a feature in the present University of Pennsylvania-all these were set forth in this early programme of the secondary and higher education, not surpassed in any subsequent publication in the country.

The reasons assigned for the establishment of this school in a later appeal to the city council of Philadelphia were (1) the necessity of educating American children at home; (2) that a larger class could be trained for the growing duties of public life; (3) that the present type of common-school teachers could be superseded by a body of trained scholars and respectable young men; (4) that the people themselves, of different nationalities and classes, could be fused in a common citizenship; (5) that the city which originated such an institution would greatly profit by it in all ways.

Founded by a combination of public and municipal contributions, placed under the control of a corporation representing various sects in religion, Franklin himself elected as "an honest man of no sect," the school was chartered in 1753 as an academy, and in 1755 by the provincial assembly with the three departments of charity school, academy, and college. At once it received 300 students; in 1763, 400, one-third in the college department, many from the South and the West Indies, with a sprinkling of Indian boys. Dr. William Smith was the first president, and remained in this position till the college was developed into the University of Pennsylvania at the close of the Revolutionary war. The indefatigable president raised $30,000, and is said to have added $100,000 to the funds of the new institution. The medical department, established in 1765, was the earliest of all schools of medicine in the Union. The law school came later. The college lost its charter and property during the tumult of the war, but emerged at the formation of the Republic in 1789 with more than its usual prestige.

Much of this valuable service of Franklin was rendered before the birth of Thomas Jefferson and much during Jefferson's school days. At the age of 44 Franklin, the great American "man of all work," retired from private business, ostensibly for literary leisure, but only to step out and up into the broader sphere of activity which landed him in the Colonial Congress at the age of 70, in many respects the most remarkable contribution of the colonial life to the new Republic.

It is impossible to estimate the intensity of the influence of such a man at such a critical period of the development of a people. Dr. Franklin was the splendid early contribution of New England to the life of the Central American colonies. He represented not the original Puritan influence that had wrought out the essential elements of the native civilization, but that broader element of cosmopolitanism in religion, government, society, and education, without which all other gifts ld

have remained the special possession of a few prosperous provinces and not the characterization of an American civilization. Old England, with all its obstinacy and conceit of private personality and narrow and involved habits of life, has given to the modern world a group of the broadest-minded leaders of the race. In the same way New England, with a large body of its home-loving class so immersed in making its own town or city a model community that it can not appreciate the fact that the nation can not be a magnified Massachusetts or Connecticut, has yet given to the Republic, in every department of American life, an abundant share of the broadestminded and progressive leadership of the country. And nowhere better than in the Pennsylvania of the colonial epoch could such a man find the most conspicuous opportunity to put forth his unique and all-pervading influence, to set in motion agencies and institutions which, in the progress of the years, would bring into harmony the most antagonistic classes and, out of the most hopeless diversity, build a State in more than one respect a model Commonwealth.

It was largely through the influence of this greatest of American popular educators that Philadelphia, the city of his adoption, at the breaking out of the war was found to be the foremost of American communities in science, letters, and polite society, and was eminently the fit place for the session of the first Colonial Congress, the Declaration of Independence, and the formation of the new nationality; all represented by the old bell that once more, on the late memorial year, renewed its travels, passing from its home to the great representative city of the new Northwest; wherever it went, as in the old time, "proclaiming liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof."

THE EPOCH OF THE REVOLUTION AND ESTABLISHMENT OF THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT, 1775-1800.

We have now reviewed, somewhat in detail, the course of educational development in the thirteen American colonies, from the settlement of each to the breaking out of the war of Independence. Our aim in this examination has not been the recapitulation of the details of educational history so much as the endeavor to ascertain to what extent the educational practices in each of these provinces were an anticipation of the American common school.

The one characteristic quality of the American system of common-school education which differentiates it from the public schools of all European countries is that, from the foundation stone upward, it is the attempt of a free people to educate itself. In the American common school the responsible people, armed with the right of suffrage, initiate the movement for a system of public education through their legal representatives, chosen by free election or by legal process in towns, counties, municipalities, and States. They put the system in legal shape; support it by permanent State or local funds and taxation, all under the control of the people; establish the conditions of attendance and the rules and regulations for the conduct of teachers and pupils; determine the character and extent of the courses of study and methods of mental, moral, æsthetic, and industrial training. In short, through the republican agency of a flexible majority, always open for correction at the polls, the people, organized as the Commonwealth, take in charge everything connected with the educational training of children and youth, so far as concerns the qualification for good American citizenship.

But, while more than one-half the States of the Union have assumed the right to demand a certain amount of schooling for all children, no State has presumed to interfere with the right of the parent in respect to the method by which this shall be secured-whether by home, neighborhood, private, public, or any system that produces the desired result. On the contrary, all the States, at different times, have aided and encouraged many sorts of schools by subsidies, exemption from taxation, and other favorable legislation, although the tendency everywhere at present is to limit Government aid strictly to institutions under State control.

This idea of universal education underlies the action of the Government of the United States in its vast system of national subsidies for education, by perpetual grants of public domain, gifts of money, and the support of a National Bureau of Education. The Government is also involved in the practice of national, State, and local encouragement of literature, art, music, the founding of libraries and museums, and whatever directly and often indirectly ministers to the education of a people. It is also in intimate connection with the national and State laws for the freedom of religion and the protection of all forms of worship against public or private interference, even to the extent of exempting vast amounts of ecclesiastical property from taxation. And even more intimately connected with the educational system is the entire body of legislation, every year becoming more stringent, for the limitation of exclusive and arbitrary parental authority and the protection of children from the injustice of home or corporate tyranny and greed through vagrant, labor, and industrial laws. The State even follows the child and youth into the house of correction and the prison, and, by a wise and humane direction of his mental, moral, and manual training there, seeks to dry up the fountains of youthful depravity.

In this sense what we call the American system of universal education is nothing more nor less than the chief motive power of our American civilization, so inextricably intertwined with our republican form of government and order of society that to abolish or to essentially modify it would be equivalent to placing a new soul inside the body of our entire American life.

It is therefore absolutely essential to the rectitude of history that in telling the story of the American common school the author of this essay should endeavor to show, as clearly as possible, the educational habits of the American people from the beginning as the best guide to the characteristics and career of each State and section of the Republic. For only by a careful consideration of this "making of a people" during the earliest period of its occupation of a new country can any fair judgment be passed on any portion of its subsequent history. We have endeavored to set forth, with such accuracy and fairness as we could command, the facts concerning education in the thirteen New England, Central, and Southern American colonies before the opening of the great epoch of the war of Independence. If these facts have been correctly stated and their relations to the general development of individual, social, and civic affairs have been actually indicated, a new light will be shed upon the history of the epoch of the Revolution and the establishment of the National Government, including the twenty-five years from the beginning of the war to the opening of the nineteenth century.

An analysis of the system of education inaugurated at the settlement of Massachusetts and Connecticut, and incorporated into the permanent policy of the New England colonies during the one hundred and fifty years previous to the Revolution, and the relations which that system of youthful training bore to the formation of what is regarded as the Puritan Society, finds complete illustration in the history of New England during the war for independence. We have shown how, by a fortunate unity of sentiment on the fundamental question of all civilization, the control of public affairs by the mass of the people in the New England colonies, the direction of the church, government, education, and in large degree of social and private life were practically in the hands of the responsible people of each community. The New England school from the first, in all its departments, was the people's method of educating the children for the duties of American life. Thus, while the development of a stalwart and obstinate personal independence was the inevitable result of the Puritan idea of sole direct responsibility to God in thought and action, this harmony of feeling and opinion produced the most compact form of society then on the globe. Nowhere in the American provinces had there been such a triumphant success among a free people in the art of living together as in these colonies. Thus at the breaking out of the war, after the first "big lift," that landed the small upper-class Tory contingent over in the Province of Nova

Scotia, there was virtually no conflict of political opinion in New England till the end of the war. These four colonies, though inferior to the central and southern in population, furnished one-half, probably a majority, of the permanent soldiery. Washington stated that at the close of the war the majority of the soldiers were from New England, with the hearty addition: "God bless the New England troops." But just this unanimity of sentiment and action was doubtless somewhat a bar to the development of eminent civil and military leadership. Fortunately, by all odds the greatest son of New England was no longer an inhabitant of his own native city. The great agitators, like Sam Adams, Otis, Mayhew, and Warren, the statesmen of the John Adams type, and the military men, with the exception of Greene, were hardly in the foremost rank. The social and public atmosphere of colonial New England was not then favorable to the growth of men of great executive capacity in military or civic affairs. A people individually the most obstinate and unmanageable and unitedly the most compact and uncompromising on the face of the earth did not relish the habit of "training under" great leaders in any department of life.

It was reserved for the central and southern colonies to furnish this indispensable leadership during the memorable era of twenty-five years from the opening gun at Lexington to the close of the century. Owing to the great diversity of the national origin, religious belief, and social status of the populations of the Central States— New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey-there had been no effective general system of education there for the masses of the people during the long years since the advent of the Dutch, Swedish, and British settlers on the banks of the Hudson and the Delaware. The schooling of these generations had been in family, neighborhood, private, and parochial schools, with a moderate supply of academical and higher seminaries, generally under the control of religious sects or private close corporations.

Thus the peculiar characteristics of every set of people had been perpetuated and fixed with the passing years. At the breaking out of the war the Germans and the different classes of the British people in Pennsylvania and the Dutch and English of New York were to a great extent separate peoples, even the unity of language was not yet achieved. The wide difference of religious ereeds and politics intensified this separation. The extremes of social life, all the way from the feudal patroon to the feeble tenant on his estate, added to this inevitable distinction.

In such a condition of affairs it was unreasonable to expect the same almost unanimous response of the mass of the people to the call of the united provinces as in New England. These colonies from the first, though in their public policy not behind others, were greatly disturbed by a widespread disloyalty to the patriot cause. At the darkest erisis of the conflict there was almost seen in some sections danger of a "stampede" of submission to the royalist cause. All the leading cities of these colonies, excepting Albany, were at different times in possession of the enemy. New York was almost destroyed by its occupation during the entire period of the war.

But from this inevitable separation of the superior class from the masses of the people and their education in private and collegiate schools at home and abroad these colonies found themselves in possession of a body of remarkable men of great social and civic reputation who, at the outbreak of hostilities, grasped the reins of public affairs and held these important provinces up to their duty through the discouragements and perils of the conflict. At the head of this illustrious company was Benjamin Franklin, the great public schoolmaster of the central colony of Pennsylvania for fifty years, to whom the country owed more than to any other man for such political unanimity as was secured among the people. It is only necessary to recall the long list of eminent statesmen, jurists, financiers, and administrators in these colonies during the turbulent years succeeding the advent of peace, the formative period of the National Government, to see that here was illustrated the peculiar

PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN THE COLONIAL PERIOD.

power of such an order of society to develop strong and politic leaders of communities in the hour of imminent peril. 711

Even more conspicuous was the illustration of this fact in the Southern States. From the settlement of Virginia, in 1607, to the first bloodshed of the great war, in North Carolina in 1771, there had been no effective system of public education seriously attempted. While the superior class in various ways did secure moderate scholastic training for their own children, there was at the bottom of society a great body of people almost entirely deprived of the opportunity of schooling, to say nothing of the negro slaves who were simply a burden and hindrance from the first.

But through the concentrated force of the Southern colonial governments and the high aristocratic type of social and educational life there had been developed a splendid superior class; not an aristocracy of blood and heritage, in the European sense, but a group of the descendants of the powerful conservative class that was drifted into the section, as one stratum of British immigration. The more favored of these people sent their sons to England for education or supplied the want at home, as in the case of William and Mary College, Virginia.

The result was the remarkable body of men, especially from the Old Dominion, who, at the beginning, came to the front and for a long generation were the chief administrators of the Continental and National Government. It can not be denied that this original constitution of Southern society was highly favorable, in its superior class, to the development of a habit of command in private and executive capacity in certain departments of public affairs, in peace and war. appears nothing less than a Providential circumstance that, while the foundation of the new government was in constant peril of wreck on the reef of an obstinate idea of colonial independence, while each colony was esteeming itself a little nation and And it contending, amid a noisy crowd of rival nationalities, for its uttermost rights and privileges, the leaders of public affairs should so largely have come from the South, where this tendency was strongest. We owe it greatly to the firmness of Washington, Marshall, and Madison, and to the comprehensive and intense patriotism of Jefferson and the statesmen that adopted the opposing theories of these great leaders, that the influential class of the Southern colonies, the planters, were persuaded to come into the Union on the basis of a nationality which proved itself powerful enough, in the day of peril in 1860, to overwhelm the entire industrial and social organism of their States in absolute ruin and place in the amended Constitution of the United States a repudiation of the extreme theory of State independence, which was the radical question involved in the civil war.

In 1788 it would have been impossible to form a union had it not been for the wise and patriotic mediation of this group of statesmen, with Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin towering above the heads of all contemporaries as beacon lights for the ship of state, tossed on a stormy sea. statesmen have been trained for this emergency than in the Southern society before the war of the Revolution And in no other school could this body of of the people's common training school of citizenship; indeed, it was to be deferred The time had not yet come there for the establishment yet more than half a century, and only to come after a conflict more terrible tha the original struggle for republican institutions. But there was something during the closing twenty-five years of the eighteenth century more important than this the possibility of a union that would insure a great republican nationality in New World. This secured, all good things were bound to come in due time.

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