The number of married artificers under twentyfive who wanted to borrow from $65 to $300 "for setting up their business" fell off in the course of years until, in 1890, the Philadelphia fund reached only $86,280 instead of the $655,000 which Franklin had calculated. Of the Boston fund, after passing through the inevitable period of litigation, $400,000 was available in 1908. This amount was doubled by Andrew Carnegie, and with it there was erected the Franklin Union for evening courses in industrial education.

manacs.

Franklin's best work as an educator of the American people was, after all, not accomplished through these various institutions but directly through the medium of his pamphlets, newspapers, and alPoor Richard's Almanack was the only book in thousands of homesteads, and his proverbial philosophy became the common coin of conversation from which his image and superscription have long been obliterated through constant usage. Father Abraham's speech at the vendue on how to remedy hard times, a medley of Poor Richard's sayings, has been translated into all languages and reprinted four hundred times.

Franklin was as much of an economist as a man could be before the science of economics was born.

He anticipated Malthus in the law of the relation of population to sustenance and Adam Smith in the measure of value by the labor involved. Franklin's experimental proof of the similar nature of lightning and the Leyden spark was a scientific discovery of the first order, and his "one-fluid" theory of electricity, his conception of positive and negative electrification, has not only served as a useful hypothesis ever since but is strikingly in keeping with the modern electron theory. But Franklin himself did not get so much gratification out of such contributions to science as he did from the thought that he had taught some millions of people such homely truths as these:

He that goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing. Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn at no other.

It is hard for an empty sack to stand upright.

He who by the plow would thrive

Himself must either hold or drive.

CHAPTER VI

JEFFERSON AND STATE EDUCATION

A system of education which shall reach every description of citizen from the richest to the poorest, as it was the earliest, so will it be the latest of all public concerns in which I shall permit myself to take an interest. Nor am I tenacious of the form in which it shall be introduced. Thomas Jefferson (1817).

THE founders of the Republic were men of long stride, and the United States has found it hard to keep up the pace they set. Certain phrases that Jefferson put into the Declaration of Independence as too obvious to need argument still arouse admiration or despair when Americans listen to the reading of their political creed on the Fourth of July. What Jefferson actually accomplished in education was little; but what he aspired to and inspired others to was immense. The appraisal of his achievement depends upon whether the balancesheet is drawn during his life or a hundred years later. In an aristocratic environment he cherished a democratic ideal, and he converted to the

principle of free schools and state support a people who had been committed to restricted education and individual responsibility.

Jefferson said that he was not "tenacious of the form" in which his idea of universal education should be introduced and, indeed, the realization of his project came about in a way very different from his plan and much later than he had hoped. His native State was slow to follow his leadership. It was not until 1870 that a public school system was established in Virginia, and even at the beginning of the twentieth century 60 per cent of the children were not in the schools.

The power of a personality, like the strength of an electric current, may be measured by the resistance it can overcome. An appreciation of Jefferson's achievement involves a brief review of the earlier history of education in Virginia which had a very different beginning from New England. The Mayflower in 1620 brought to the New World 53 men, 21 women, and 28 children. The three ships coming to Virginia in 1609 contained 100 "settlers," among whom there were 55 gentlemen and 12 servants, but no children. Ten years later, when it occurred to the London Company of Virginia that children were desirable in a colony, they

V

66

shipped over a batch of one hundred assorted 'orphants" to be apprenticed to the planters on condition that they be taught some useful trade and the Christian religion. This was the origin of that apprentice system which, in Virginia and other colonies, was the first form of compulsory education for poor children.

Later in the seventeenth century some "free" schools were established by bequests from philanthropic persons. Among these may be mentioned the Symms School, which received from its founder two hundred acres of land and an endowment of the calves and milk of eight cows. The Eaton Free School was more wealthy. It possessed five hundred acres of land, stocked with "two negroes, twelve cows, two bulls, and twenty hogs."

But such efforts at the extension of education among the lower classes did not meet with much encouragement from the wealthier colonists. The planters employed private tutors or engaged the leisure of Church of England clergymen but did not think it wise to educate the poorer people above their proper station. The Lords Commissioners of Trades and Plantations inquired, in 1671: "What course is taken about instructing the people within your government in the Christian religion and