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make its schools a public charge. Compared with the scanty numbers and resources of the men of Plymouth, the colony of Massachusetts seemed from the beginning strong and prosperous. Among its first settlers were men of some wealth and much learning. Such men were quick to see the need of teachers for their children and were equally prompt to supply it. In 1635 a town meeting in Boston voted to hire a schoolmaster and thus founded the Boston Latin School, which has brought an honorable record down to our own day. This institution was supported largely by the generosity of the wealthier citizens, but a few years later a school was established at Dorchester and maintained entirely by a public tax. Other Latin schools were soon built in the more progressive townships, and in 1642 an ordinance of the colony made education compulsory.

The law of 1642 called to public attention the failure of many parents and guardians to train the children in their charge in learning and labor. It gave the town authorities the power to punish by fines those who refused to give an account of the instruction received by their children, "especially of their ability to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of this country." In case a child's education were persistently

neglected, the officials of the town had the right to apprentice him in some fit occupation where his - improvement would be better looked after. If this ambitious ordinance could have been enforced to the letter, Massachusetts would never have had a boy or girl within her borders who could not read and write, pursue a useful trade, and pass an examination in civics. But it was one thing to require instruction and another to provide it. Not every parent could furnish the means for private teaching, and not all the towns were equally forward in establishing free schools.

To remedy the lack of adequate facilities for learning, the colony in 1647 made it obligatory on every township of fifty householders to employ some one competent to teach reading and writing. Every township of a hundred families was compelled in addition to establish a grammar school capable of preparing boys for college. The schools thus established were not necessarily free, since fees were sometimes charged, nor were children compelled to attend if their parents preferred to give them private instruction. But three main principles were established by this early law which. have characterized American education ever since: that the duty of public instruction is one which no

community, however small and poor, may be permitted to evade, that the government of the public schools in matters of detail is lodged not in some distant central authority but in the immediate neighborhood where the schools are situated; and that the elementary schools are distinct from the secondary schools which prepare for college or university.

Such promising beginnings, however, did not lead to rapid and continuous progress. Some towns found it cheaper to pay the fines imposed upon them for neglect of the law than to hire a schoolmaster and openly disregarded the ordinance of 1647. Many of the later immigrants to Massachusetts had less of that zeal for learning which distinguished the first settlers; and, being busy practical men engaged in trade or agriculture, they did not see the need of Latin for their children. Apart from these discouragements within, Indian raids on the backwoods settlements proved to be another obstacle to learning, the strength of which can readily be appreciated from the following pathetic petition from Dover, New Hampshire1:

That whereas the said town is one of the most exposed towns in this Province to the insults of the Indian enemy, and also whereas by an act of the General As

1 Walter H. Small, Early New England Schools (1914), p. 51.

sembly of this Province the said town of Dover (amongst others) is obliged by said act to keep and maintain a grammar school, and whereas the circumstances and situation or settlements of the inhabitants of said town lying and being in such a manner as it is, the houses being so scattered over the whole township that in no one place six houses are within call, by which inconveniency the inhabitants of said town can have no benefit of such grammar school, for at the times fit for children to go and come from school, is generally the chief time of the Indians doing mischief, so that the inhabitants are afraid to send their children to school, and the children dare not venture; so that the salary to said schoolmaster is wholly lost to said town.

Within a few years of the first settlements, all the New England colonies except Rhode Island made public provision for education. Newport and Providence gave generous donations of land for the establishment of town schools, but in Rhode Island before 1800 there was no general law authorizing towns to maintain public schools. The backwardness of the little colony in matters of education was due largely to the fact that, since there was no union between Church and State, the Government was not concerned, as it was in Massachusetts, to sustain an educated ministry. Education was regarded in Rhode Island, just as it was in England and in most of the English colonies outside the

region of Puritan influence, as a need to be met by private initiative. New Hampshire followed the school system of Massachusetts, and Maine, as a part of Massachusetts throughout the colonial period, shared the same laws. In her Constitution of 1777 Vermont enjoined upon the Legislature the duty of establishing a school or schools in each town "for the convenient instruction of the youth.”

Connecticut has an educational record rivaling that of Massachusetts. Schools were well established in Hartford before the middle of the seventeenth century, and soon schools were made compulsory throughout the entire colony. The selectmen of each town were required to see that none "shall suffer so much barbarism in any of their families, as not to endeavor to teach by themselves or others their children and apprentices so much learning as may enable them perfectly to read the English tongue, and knowledge of the capital laws." Towns of fifty householders were obliged to maintain teachers of reading and writing, and towns of a hundred householders were required to establish a grammar school. New Haven colony, before it was united with the towns on the Connecticut, enacted similar laws. In 1672 six hundred acres of land were assigned to