years was enriched with more Latin and Greek if desired. It had no sociology, no psychology except the results of introspection. It was a bare, rugged skeleton, without flesh, skin, or beauty; and the wonder is that it could contain life as it did. Such as it was, it drew to itself a few hundreds of young men, ambitious to enter what were called the learned professions, and very few others. Schools of science were few and all of them young; and business men rarely thought of the college as a preparation for their work.

Apparatus for teaching was insignificant. A student in astronomy might possibly get a chance to look at the moon through an inferior telescope; the class in chemistry could look on, while the professor performed various more or less successful experiments with his chemicals; the class in natural philosophy could see how an old air-pump, Atwood's machine, and a few other things, worked; and the class in geology could see the various kinds of stones and minerals, and handle them if so disposed. But it was all lecture and text-book work;* nothing was learned by personal experiment, and by doing for one's self the things which were exhibited by the professors in their experiments. As a result, the men were rare who had any knowledge of science that was worth much. In short, most men came out of college about as it was intended that they should, not knowing much, but trained to study and fully capable of mastering other subjects in future if they got a chance.

DEVELOPMENT OF OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM.

The Hon. W. T. Harris, United States Commissioner of Education, has said that "by common consent the teachers of the United States would choose Massachussetts as the state possessing the most interesting educational history." How numerous and important are the educational problems which Massachusetts has solved for her own good, and incidentally for the good of other states, will clearly appear from an enumeration of some of the most important, as given by Mr. Harris. "The adoption of a course of study and the fixing of the amount of instruction to be given in each branch, and the time when it is best to begin it; the relative position of the disciplinary and the information studies; the use and disuse of

corporal punishment; the education of girls; written examinations; the grading of schools; the relation of principal and assistant teachers; professional instruction in normal schools; religious instruction; unsectarian moral instruction, and secular instruction; the separation of church and state; government by centralized power, and then by distribution of power to districts, realizing the extreme of local self government, and then the recovery of central authority; public high schools, and private academies; coeducation and separate education of the sexes; educational support by tuition fees, rate bills, general taxation and local taxation; general and local supervision by committees and by experts; educational associations and teachers' institutes; large and small school buildings and their division into rooms, their heating, ventilation, and lighting; evening schools, kindergartens, industrial art instruction, free text books,-all these problems have been agitated in Massachusetts."

Many of these problems had been solved fifty years ago, but some of the most important did not find a solution till some time within the last half century. How persistent the conservative element has been in resisting changes may be seen in "the long battle against the district system, lasting over fifty years," with six victories won alternately by the opposing factions, until at last the opponents of the district system won a final victory in 1882 and the district system was abolished, only forty-five towns out of three hundred and fifty having retained it up to that time. From the experience of Massachusetts the other New England states and many western states largely settled by New England people learned wisdom, and were able to settle their educational policy wisely without passing through the contention and experiments by which Massachusetts had felt out her course.

Fifty years ago the district school was still in its glory in a large part of New England. "Each school district," as a writer has said, "became a center of semi-political activity. Here was exhibited, in all its force, what Guizot so aptly terms 'the energy of local liberty.' The violence of ebullition is inversely as the size of the pot. Questions involving the fate of nations have been decided with less expenditure of time, less stirring of

passions, less vociferation of declamation and denunciation, than the location of a fifteen by twenty district schoolhouse. I have known such a question to call for ten district meetings, scattered over two years, bringing down from mountain farms three miles away men who had no children to be schooled, and who had not taken the trouble to vote in a presidential election during the period."

These were not the only contests. The district committee was an important matter. This committee could usually hire the teacher, and either because some family was angry at the teacher, or because some other family had a relative whom they desired for teacher, there was constant and sometimes acrimonious contention over the election of the school committee.

But on one point there was entire harmony. This I know both by my own observation and the testimony of others. This point was as to what was essential for the site of a schoolhouse. "The land must be valueless, or as nearly so as possible, for frugality was ever a New England virtue. A barren ledge by the roadside, a gravelly knoll, the steeply sloping side of a bosky ravine, the apex of the angle of intersecting roads, such as these were choice spots." The schoolhouse where I first went to school, in Connecticut, stood in such an angle where four roads converged or diverged, the inclosed space being in the highest degree rocky; and the schoolhouse stands there today, the building somewhat better than its predecessor, but the environment substantially as it was, the site of the schoolhouse not having cost the district a penny for a hundred and fifty years.

Of the rude equipment of the schoolhouse, the absence of desks and chairs, the absence of every thing conducive to comfort except the chance to learn such elementary subjects as the untrained teacher was able to teach, I need not speak. It is a wonder that so much was accomplished, where so little was expended to make learning either attractive or possible.

Time will not permit me to speak at length of the teachers of the district schools, whether men or women, whether ugly or sweet, whether experienced or fresh. I have already indicated the range of study in these schools. It is customary, I believe, to regard these district schools as mighty factors in

the production of a noble generation of clear-thinking and intelligent men. Undoubtedly there were many such men fifty years ago, and undoubtedly the district school had something to do with making them what they were. That is, the district school started them towards their career. As some one has said: "The power and majesty with which the Mississippi sweeps by New Orleans to the Gulf were not brought by it out of lake Itasca. But let us give the lake credit for what it did do, it set the rill a flowing. So did the district school. It gave the key to the world's literature. What that key was worth, depended on the use made of it."

If there had been nothing more invigorating fifty years ago than the district school, the children could not have known much, for little was taught; and they could not have had very lofty ideals, for none were to be found in the district schools. As the intellectual life of a majority of the people was bounded by these schools, the vigor of the age must have been small indeed but for forces outside, forces to which I can only allude, -the pulpit, religion, religious thought, argument on high themes of state and of future destiny, being a few of the most potent.

Happily for the boy with a bright mind, a taste for knowledge, and an ambition to be and to do something more than his sluggish school-mates, there opened that gate to all possibilities, the old-fashioned country academy. There he could begin studies that would lead to the college, studies of which the district school never dreamed. And these New England academies, narrow in their scope, compared with our high schools, but intense and thorough, transformed tens of thousands of men who could not go to college into able and influential public men, and gave a breadth to culture in the community that the colleges alone could never have produced.

Dummer Academy, the first of the noble company, founded in 1761, educated under its first master fifteen members of Congress, two chief justices of the Supreme Court, one president of Harvard College, and four college professors. The record of Leicester, Munson, Williston, Andover, and a multitude of other schools of the same type, would show results quite as interesting and creditable.

Of course, every boy who went to an academy had to pay tuition. There was no free education of so high a type as that furnished by the academy. Of course, also, as a consequence it was only the sons of the wealthier class, at least it was very rarely the sons of the very poor, who went to the academy.

If that state of things had continued to the present time, the sharply defined distinction of classes at the present day would be very much more evident than it is. For nothing has done so much to rub out the lines of separation among our people as free public education from primary school to university.

This magnificent system of public education, free to all, is wholly the development of the last half century; and nowhere does it exist in nobler form or with more beneficent influence than here in the Northwest. By a well arranged order of schools of different grades, the children of the state are enabled to advance from the lowest to the highest grade without interruption and without hindrance because of charges for tuition. The high schools, coming into existence about thirty years ago, and multiplying everywhere until they cover the country far better than the academies ever covered even New England, not only furnish to all their students an education quite equal to that of the colleges not so very many years ago, but they fit them in an admirable manner for the larger work of the modern university.

NORMAL SCHOOLS.

It is only sixty years since the first normal school was established in this country for the systematic training of teachers. Up to that time teaching had not been regarded as an art for acquiring which special training was needed. Knowledge was imparted in various ways according to the taste and temperament of the teacher. Such things as method and science to be used in ordinary teaching were unknown. While the object of teaching was to enlighten, fructify, and stimulate the mind of the pupil, no one thought of making the mind of the pupil a study in order to know how best to affect it.

Systematically trained teachers would have been an incalculable blessing in the olden time, when the things to be taught and the pupils to be instructed were alike comparatively few. In the present age, with the multitude of subjects, and with