Early in the morning of the first day of December, 1847, I left Providence for the fifth time in the service of the Public High School of Hartford, by the way of Worcester, to take my part in the dedicatory exercises of the building then just completed on the corner of Asylum and Ann streets. Owing to a detention of the cars at Springfield, I passed direct from the depot to the platform in the upper ball of of the school, and with my head full of the jar and rumbling of the cars, opened and closed my address substantially as follows:*

Hopes long cherished although often deferred, and efforts earnestly and persistently put forth for many years by persons, some of whom are near me, and more, I trust, are in this crowded hall, have their fulfillment and reward in this occasion. This spacious, convenient, and attractive structure, inferior to no other of its grade in New England in the essential features of a good schoolhouse, and superior to any other within my knowledge, for its cost, is unique in the history of public buildings for the unpaid or self-paid services of the committee, from their careful study of the best models before and after the specifications were drawn, and their firm determination to have the material provided, and the work done in the best manner, according to contract, under their daily supervision, and within the amount appropriated by the Society, even if the furniture and equipment of apparatus should be paid for by themselves. For this unprecedented liberality, personal interest, and fidelity in the discharge of a public trust, they have received the formal and recorded thanks of the Society, and entitled themselves to the lasting gratitude of the teachers and pupils who will in successive years enter into the enjoyment of their sacrifices.

Within these walls, now consecrated with ascriptions of praise and thanksgiving to Him who planted this vineyard in the wilderness, and inspired the hearts of our fathers to ordain "institutions of good learning," as well as of elementary knowledge, and provide "for the breeding up of hopeful youth both at the grammar school and the college, for the public service of the country in future times," and "for a life of active usefulness," is to be solved not only for this community, but to some extent, for the whole country, the problem of higher education. I say deliberately, for the whole country, for if the efforts which have been put forth here, and which the deep conviction of the same necessity has caused to be put forth in other States, fail to incorporate this feature into our system of common schools, then will higher education-every thing beyond the merest rudiments, pass into the irrevocable keeping of religious bodies, and adventure schools, over which the public will exercise no control, and parents can have no guarantee of the value of the education their children will receive. Associated with this growing antagonism of a rival system, which every ecclesiastical organization will adopt in self-defence, the public school will suffer from the withdrawal of all children destined for, what are wrongfully, if exclusively named, the learned professions, or the occupations of society which require trained intellects and systematized and special knowledge, and finally degenerate into elementary schools of the lowest sort. There can not be there never has been-an efficient system of primary instruction whose teachers and officers were not supplied from public institutions of a higher grade.

The course of instruction which is here provided for the physical, intellectual, and moral training of the pupils, resting on the solid basis of thorough systematic teaching in the schools below, which its plan of admission by open examination in certain specified requirements will help to secure, and the want of which in any of the lower schools will be sure to be exposed, in the failure of its candidates to gain admission here,—and rising and spreading out into all

• From notes recently recovered, on which is indorsed “Used at the dedication of the Public High School at Hartford Dec. 1, 1847. and at the opening of the Free Academy at Norwich in 1856. Both of these institutions originated in the legislation of 1838, and the agitation of questious of educational reform, which followed." These notes were written out for publication, and may have been printed with an account of the proceedings at the dedication of the first building, of which, if printed, I have no copy.

of those studies which in one direction take hold of all the occupations of society, the farm, the workshop, the counting-room, the deck, the home, and on the other, discipline and inform the mind, and fit it for the acquisition and retention of all sound learning, and for the perception and assimilation of truth. and beauty in all the works of God, as unfolded in our colleges and still higher seminaries-such a course of study seems to me eminently judicious. It meets the demands of our age for an education in science which shall make the wind and the stream, and the still more subtle agents of nature, minister to our material wants, and stimulates in all directions, the inventive faculties of man, by which mere muscular toil can be abridged, and made more effective. At the same time it does not ignore those apparently less practical studies, especially the mathematics and classics, which the gathered experience of successive generations of teachers, and the profoundest study of the requirements of the mind of youth, and the disciplinary and informing capabilities of different kinds of kuowledge, have settled to be the best, although not, as I hold, the only basis of a truly liberal scheme of general or professional education. I do not believe that any amount of applied science, and the largest amount practicable should be given in this and other institutions of higher learning, or that any attention which may be bestowed on the English language only,-and whatever else is taught or omitted, the English language and literature should ever hold a prominent, the prominent place in the actual aims and results of your scheme of study, can ever train the three great faculties of reason, memory, and imagination, to their full, natural, and harmonious development. But while I hold this not hastily formed opinion, I see no reason why the instruction of our schools, from the oral or primary, up to the university, should not deal with common things, with the principles, the phenomena and duties of every-day life;-why sewing, and a practical knowledge of domestic economy should not find a place somewhere in the training of every girl; and a "round about common sense," the power of applying the mind and the hands readily to all sorts of work in helping himself and other people, about the house, the shop, or the farm, be the result of the house and school training of every boy. This was, and still is to some extent, the glory of our best New England school and domestic education. And to all this should now be added the modern developments of science in their applications to all our great national industries.

One of the great advantages of the Public High School to this community, in connection with the reorganization and improved teaching of the schools below, is the opportunity it affords of the highest advantages of public education,— the free struggle of children and youth of the same age, of both sexes, and of every condition, for the mastery of the same knowledge, and the acquisition of the same mental habits, in the same class-rooms, under accomplished teachers, with the protection of parental vigilance at home, and that education of the heart and the hand which comes from the constant exercise of mutual help and courtesy, from innocent sports and rambles, and the practice of household and rural industry. These advantages of home and school education, are in the plans of this institution, extended to the female sex. My hopes for the regeneration of society, and especially for the infusion of a more refined culture in manners and morals, into the family and the school, rest on the influence of pious and educated women as mothers and teachers; and in the appropriate training of such women, this school will become an important instrumentality.

You need not be told, that an institution of learning can not flourish in this country, if removed from the sympathy and coöperation of the people whose educational wants it is designed to supply. But to make that sympathy warm, and that cooperation liberal and effective, the result of your work here must be seen and felt. This community must, as rapidly as successive classes can be taught and graduated, see the fruits of their expenditures in the merchants, foremen of shops, leaders of industries and professions, men and women in every walk of life, who have grown up under the better instruction and influences of this school. The schools below must gradually be brought up to a higher uniform standard of scholarship than they have yet reached. Unless these results are realized, the promises, founded on the experience of similar institutions and systems elsewhere, will be falsified, and the withdrawal of public

favor will inevitably follow. But I have no misgiving as to the future-it rises bright and glorious before me, and on its forehead is the morning star-the herald of a brighter day than our schools have yet seen. That enthusiasm which started this enterprise on the 8th of March on the flood tide of popular favor, will carry your committees and teachers on until you have time enough to put your institution on to a well digested course of study, which you will from time to time modify and adjust to the educational wants of the people, whom your own work here will help to train to a higher and higher standard. With this wise adjustment of your course of instruction so as to impart the best preparation which the diversified professions and occupations of the community require, this High School will stand a monument of wise liberality and large public spirit, a measure of the progress of intelligence slowly but surely diffused over honest convictions firmly held because embedded in the habits of a half century of opposite practice, a shrine at whose altar-fire many ingenuous minds will be kindled with the true love of science, a fountain of living waters whose branching streams will flow on with ever deepening and widening current, which will bear on its bosom noble argosies, and nourish all along its banks, trees, whose leaves will be for the healing of the nations.

I have thus noted rapidly, but not briefly as you desired in your letter, the chief, although not all the efforts to establish in the First School Society of Hartford, a Public School of a grade higher than the District Schools, so far as I was personally conversant with the same, from the first formal announcement of the subject in the Center Church on the evening of July 4, 1838, to the ded; ication of the building erected for its accommodation on the 1st of December, 1847. You will please receive this communication, long as it is, as a contribu tion only to the history of the English and Classical High School of the Town of Hartford, for which other citizens labored, if not so long, with equal earnestness and with more ability. The names of several, from their connection with committees, reports, and speeches, have been incidentally introduced, and before the final record is made up (which should in my judgment include the history of the bequests of Edward Hopkins and other benefactors, and as far as practicable, the teachers of the old Town Grammar, and County Free Schools, of which the institution over which you preside, is the lineal descendant and legal representative), the names of others, with their special work by voice or pen, or personal influence, should be appropriately noticed-although the growth of a public institution, whose establishment involves a radical change in public opinion and the habits of families, and the imposition for the first time, or a large increase of property taxation, is the sum total of innumerable contributions made at different times, of which some of the most important may never be recorded,* and the names of their authors not even be known, or have been purposely concealed. Such laborers, in obscure or conspicuous portions of the field, find their true inspiration and reward in the ever extending results of educational efforts wisely put forth. No human eye can follow, no human hand record, the influences which go out from one, much less from many,

The fact of being appointed to preside over a public meeting, or to serve on a committee to inquire into the expediency of a proposed measure, is no evidence that the persons so appointed are in favor of the same, or join in the final recommendation. Thus the presiding officer of the meeting on the 11th of January, 1847, and two of the members of the committee appointed to consider and report on the expediency and expense of a school of a higher grade than the District Schools, spoke and voted against the resolution to establish a Free High School on the 8th of March following. So of other members of this and other committees several were put on more from their relations to local or political interests, and from confidence in their character for intelligence and fairness generally, than from having taken any active part in previous discussions.

institutions of learning thus established or improved-from even one intellect, otherwise dead as the clod of the valley, or fickle as the wave, made strong by its teaching to discover and defend the truth in some hour of popular delusion, or one heart inspired with love to God and man to work on in some forlorn cause of human suffering and calamity, like Todd, or Gallaudet, or Wells, until the mute can speak, the insane be clothed again in their right mind, and the mangled victims of disaster and the battle-field be treated without pain.

In conclusion, let me say, while at no period of our history has the original school policy of the State, in providing a higher as well as an clementary grade, been so generally realized as in our District Graded and Town High Schools; or the obligation on the Town of Hartford to discharge the trust, assumed in accepting the early bequests made for the specific purpose of maintaining a school of the higher grade, been so fully discharged as in its provision for our English and Classical High School-there is not only room, but urgent necessity, for still further development of the system in the State generally, and in its local administration and application here. Our town organization of schools is still fragmentary and disjointed; the opportunities of even elementary instruction are very unequally distributed; the actual attendance, any day in the year, of children of the teachable age in public schools of every grade is about one-half of the whole number enumerated (only 3,720 out of 7,834); the management and inspection of our schools in reference to securing the highest uniform excellence throughout all public schools of every grade, in the most economical and productive results of the large sums collected by taxation for school purposes, through ten independent committees, if applied to any private enterprise involving the same number of persons, the same capital, and the same expenditure, would be deemed loose and ruinous; the subjects and courses of study, although very numerous and carefully prepared, need both reduction in some directions and enlargement in others, and such practical readjustment throughout as will make systematic instruction in music, drawing, and gymnastics universal, and give our future machinists, engineers, builders, mechanics and chemical technologists as well as merchants, teachers, and aspirants of regular professions of every name and both sexes, that practical knowledge of the sciences which is essential to the highest and earliest success in every occupation.

With my best thanks, as a citizen, to you for your judicious and faithful work as the teacher of our highest school, and for your eminent success in so adminis trating your delicate and difficult office of principal as to harmonize and consolidate two institutions which might under other auspices have proved hostile and mutually injurious; and, to your immediate associates, and fellowlaborers generally, who together now make the liberality of the State, the town, and of benevolent and public-spirited individuals (amounting in 1869 and 1870 to $272.352 for all objects), accomplish the noble purposes for which our public schools were originally instituted, more broadly and thoroughly than at any period of our history since John Higginson taught the first school in Hartford in 1637,

I remain your obedient servant and friend,

HARTFORD, January 14, 1871.

HENRY BARNARD.

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MR. CAPRON: Since sending you my "Contribution to the History of the Public High School" so far as I was personally mixed up with the same, and with subjects adjacent thereto" from 1838 to 1848, it has occurred to me, in passing the site of the structure erected for its accommodation in 1847, and which it cost so many years of agitation to evoke from the hearts of the taxpayers of the First School Society, and of which not one stone or brick now remains in the solid and orderly proportions in which, with ascriptions of thanksgiving and songs of praise, and invocations of the Divine blessing, they were "dedicated to the cause of good learning and the breeding up of hopeful youth for the public service of the country, and a life of active employment," that you and your associates in the work of instruction, and all the living graduates, might be glad to have some memorial of the building in its external appearance and internal arrangements, as they were engraved for my School Architecture in 1848. Those plates are at your service; and with them I send a wood-cut of a plan drawn in 1828 by I. Spencer Jr. (now in the possession of William Hamersley), of a portion of "South Side," in which may be seen its predecessor erected in 1828 still standing on Linden Place (then Wells Alley). and the spacious lot, on which lawyers, doctors. clergymen, governors, and seuators, then boys in their teens, kicked foot-ball with commendable vigor. H. B.

STREETS-(1) Main; (2) Linden Place, originally a Lane leading to House erected by Thomas Y. Seymour, and afterwards occupied by Doctor Sylvester Wells, and known in his day as WellsAlley; (3) College street as projected after burning of Whitman mansion in 1827; (4) Buckingham street before it was straightened, and the west end made part of College street in 1828; (5) Buckingham after the completion of the new (M) and removal of (N) old South Meeting House; (6) Whitman Court, laid out by I. Spencer, Jr., purchaser of the Whitman estate (e e e e). A. GRAMMAR SCHOOL HOUSE (still standing as a double tenement), erected in 1828, just north of its predecessor, which was erected in 1808 (and bought and removed by D. Crowell to lot (k) corner of Whitman Court), in place of school house which stood on north side of Arch street, midway between Main and Prospect street, bought for this purpose in 1755; (b) John Russ; (c) Enoch Perkins; (d) John M. Niles; (f) Asa Francis, with carriage-shop on lot (g) (house occupied by George Francis); (h) C. Bull; (4) Russ house; (4) Dr. Wells.