discussions, which rarely came to a decisive vote, attracted more public attention than the going on of the schools. In 1854 the expenditure for public education in New Hampshire amounted to $212,324, and the average wages of male teachers rose to $16.42 and female to $7.18 per month, evidently the result of the increasing number of women in the service and the employment of men chiefly in the higher department of the schools.

Mr. King S. Hall, secretary of the board of education for 1855, somewhat moved the placid waters by advocating the introduction of drawing and music in the schools. The attendance on the schools, length of term, and wages of teachers showed no sign of increase, although the general expenditure was slowly rising, a gain of nearly $20,000 in a year-$231,435.

In 1856 Jonathan Tenney, secretary, appears as the author of the annual report. The teachers' institutes of New Hampshire had for several years been relatively a more important factor in the school system than in other States. As a logical result, the topic of a State normal school now first appears. A bill for its establishment was passed unanimously by the house of representatives of the State legislature in the session of 1855 and postponed to the following session by the senate. In 1854 a State association of teachers was formed and held regular sessions twice a year, with local associations in each county. The reports of the county commissioners and abstracts of local returns are especially full and interesting.

Mr. Tenney in 1857 remained in the office of secretary of the board. This year a new educational worker appears in New Hampshire in the person of Mr. Warren Burton, afterwards widely known as the author of two charming books, The District School as It Was, and The Scenery Shower, and numbers of essays especially devoted to the union of home education with the upbuilding and improvement of the schools. Mr. Burton was born in Wilton, N. H., a town then of 1,161 people, which had sent from thirty to forty young men to college, many of them afterwards men of mark. He graduated at college in 1821 and for thirty years was a clergyman, never "settled" in a parish, but always working in a home mission among the people; for a time city missionary in Boston and Worcester, Mass. In 1850 he entered on the great ministry of his life, the importance of home education as the source and soul of all successful schooling. He went about the country as a "revivalist” of the genuine stamp; a most efficient worker also in the great revival upon which the people of New Hampshire were entering in a way all too moderate to satisfy the ardent friends of popular education. He faces the people of the State of New Hamp shire with a series of twenty-six questions, which might well set every family not "dead in trespasses and sins" reflecting on its obligations to its children and the community.

In 1858 the school system of New Hampshire received a powerful

impetus by the appointment of Mr. J. W. Patterson as secretary of the State board of education. Mr. Patterson represented Hanover and was already in connection with Dartmouth College, in which he was afterwards a professor. He left his professorship to serve for a term in the Senate of the United States, returned to the college at a later date, and closed his public career with perhaps the most important educational service ever rendered to the Commonwealth. During this administration of the office of State superintendent of education, entered upon in 1858, he inaugurated reforms of great importance. In his report for 1858 he boldly enters the lists as the out and out apostle of popular education. He compares the pitiful wages of the teachers with those of the military officials of the United States Army. "The salary of a common foot soldier in the United States Army is greater than the salary of the best female teacher in the public schools of New Hampshire, and we pay a bookkeeper more than the president of a college." He rightly says that the fundamental work is "to awaken a deep general interest in education." He recommends the appointment of county commissioners for a term of five years, urges the importance of school training in good manners, and through several forcible pages of the report discusses the general needs of the schools. The amount appropriated for the schools was $233,581-82.86 for each scholar. The wages of the men had risen to $26.31 and of women teachers to $14.74 per month, including board. One-fifth of the schoolhouses in the State are reported "unfit for their purpose."

In his report for 1859 Secretary Patterson boldly faces the actual situation. He gives a brief and forcible history of popular education in New Hampshire from the first union of the colony with Massachusetts in 1641. In 1638 Philemon Purmont, first invited to the mastership of the original common school of Boston, settled in Exeter, and in 1642 Mr. Daniel Maud, first master of the new school, was called to Dover, N. H., both as clergymen. In 1682 there were 71 households in Portsmouth, 61 in Dover, 57 in Hampton, and 20 in Exeter-the largest towns in the colony. From this early period the secretary traces with pride the efforts of the people, under great stress of poverty and hardship, to support a school in every township supported by a local tax. We commend this forcible and illuminating statement of the progress of common-school education by Secretary Patterson as a model of similar compositions, and refer to it for more detailed information than the limits of the present essay permit.

But all this, in the opinion of the secretary, is preliminary to the final decision of the real question of the hour, Should the inefficient system of the present State board of education, composed of ten county commissioners, each in turn a secretary, be continued, or should the State honestly meet the demand for a more thorough supervision and a great awakening of the people by returning to the method of a State school superintendency? The question is argued with great

force and tact, and its presentation evidently marks a new departure in the public-school keeping of the State.

Professor Patterson held the post of secretary of the board for two years longer, an entire period of four years. His final report, in 1861, is a continuation of his powerful and wise discussion of the entire subject of educational reform. He sums up the educational problem in the State in the following paragraph:

We believe the schools of the State should be reorganized on the principle of gradation and a high school established in all except a few of the smaller towns, as the head of the general system, and so connected with it as to awaken aspiration and stimulate study in the departments below it. The high school should be made the connecting link between the common school and the college.

In his report to the county of Grafton, of which he was local school commissioner, he says:

When our whole population come to perceive that it is the first duty of a State and of Governments to educate, in the broadest import of that term, the rising generation, and manifest a corresponding interest in the work; when our towns have been redistricted, the schools reorganized and graded, and a uniform course of study adopted; when we are willing to pay for a more skillful and thoroughly educated class of teachers, we may begin to hope for good schools, and not till then.

These inspiring words read like a prophecy of the work this eminent educator was called to perform thirty years later on the other side of the great civil war, which had so powerfully stirred the oldest and most conservative States of New England. He died with the satisfaction afforded to few men of having the system of education advocated. in his earlier years adopted and organized into the common practice of his native State. In 1860 the sum appropriated in New Hampshire for popular education was $296,000, and the average attendance on the schools, 54,550. The investment in school property was $814,387, with 55,000 volumes in district, town, and school libraries.

MAINE.

Until the year 1820 the public-school system of Maine was that of Massachusetts, of which State it was the great "down-east" outlying section, in itself more extensive in area than the remainder of New England, with one county, Aroostook, as large as Connecticut and Rhode Island. A fair supply of district schools, several well-established academies, and two colleges, celebrated by graduates like Hawthorne, Longfellow, and other notable characters, had laid a solid foundation for future educational growth. The State had also retained a portion of its own public lands, sufficient to warrant the establishment of 20 townships, still under State ownership, valued at $100,000.

The second legislature of the new Commonwealth in 1821 enacted a general school law differing from that of Massachusetts in the one feature that, whereas the town in the Bay State was required to support a common school or schools for a given time, the town in Maine was

required to raise and expend a certain sum of money. Each town was required to raise by tax a sum equivalent to not less than 40 cents for each inhabitant, to be appropriated among the several districts for schools free to all children and youth between the ages of 4 and 21. The inhabitants of the several districts were empowered to build and repair schoolhouses. The town elected annually a general superintending committee of not less than three nor more than seven persons, and an agent for each district, whose duty it was to hire the teacher and generally oversee the "prudential" affairs of his beat. The school committee examined teachers, selected text-books, and visited the schools. At the next session of the legislature the election of the local agent was given to the district by consent of the town, and the city of Portland was allowed a special organization of its system of schools.

In 1825 various changes were made in the school laws, chiefly with a view of defining the powers of the officials and making the machinery more effective for the control alike of unwilling school boards and disobedient towns refusing or neglecting to conform to the statute. One clause compelled the selectmen of the town to make returns to the secretary of state once in three years, the secretary of state being the one official who represented the Commonwealth in educational administration.

A subsequent revision of the school statutes in 1827 contains the earliest general provision for a gradation of schools, the only exception being the special act for Portland in 1820. In 1828 the State school fund was finally established by setting apart 20 townships of land and appropriating certain moneys due the State from the General Government. By 1832 Bath and Bangor were added to Portland as special school districts, and the first grant of authority for the payment of salaries to school committees was by the city of Bangor. In 1833 the bank tax, levied by requiring every bank in the State to pay into the State treasury semiannually one-half of 1 per cent on the capital stock invested, was appropriated among the towns for the benefit of the schools, and stringent measures were devised for securing more frequent and correct returns of school statistics. Under a general revision of the school laws and their consolidation in a general statute in 1834 the power to organize as a special district confined to the three principal cities of the State was made general. In 1835 the clause appropriating moneys due from the United States to the school fund was repealed.

By 1839 there was a general feeling that the system of public education was defective and the schools inefficient. But the only movement was the order to the secretary of state to make an abstract of such statistics as were in his possession, with comparisons and deductions that might be regarded useful, and to send a copy to each school district in the State. This was, in fact, the first public manifestation of sympathy in the State with the great revival of the common school that

was now sweeping over New England and invading every portion of the country. Here, as elsewhere, it began in the demand for accurate information on the condition of popular education. In another general revision of the school laws in 1841 the power to compensate school committees, heretofore restricted to one city, Bangor, was made general. After a three-years distribution of the abstracts of statistics in the office of the secretary of state the law was repealed, it being evident that the returns were so defective as to be of no considerable value.

It was not till 1843 that the long-suppressed disapprobation of the public-school system found expression in the legislature. Under the vigorous leadership of Mr. E. M. Thurston, chairman of the committee on education in the house of representatives, a strong effort was made toward State supervision. A bill was introduced and debated to establish a board of thirteen commissioners, one from each county, appointed by the governor and council. The wording of the bill reminds us of the grim satire of old English Dr. Johnson, of dictionary fame, concerning the demand of the average housekeeper on her woman servant for "all the Christian graces at three and sixpence a week." In this bill the work assigned to the county commissioner would overtask the most energetic expert during three hundred and sixty-five days and six hours of the year, for which he was to be paid $2 a day and $1 in addition for expenses-"Provided, however, That no commissioner shall be paid for a greater number of days than the number of towns he actually visits in the discharge of the duties of his commission." Although it was confessed on all hands that as at present administered the tendency of the school system was downward, yet, after a thorough discussion in the lower house, the bill was sent to the senate, the regulation legislative "cooler" of exuberant lawmaking, and without examination was "indefinitely postponed."

But enough had been revealed to convince the thoughtful people of Maine that their common-school system was a failure-at least the partial failure of local government "run mad." In more than 4,000 separate school districts the business of separate school keeping was carried on in almost absolute indifference to similar work anywhere else in the State, under local authorities from whom there was no appeal, by 7,000 teachers without previous training, in whom the State was prac tically taking no interest, beside 500 towns and plantations absolutely independent of each other, and the reports of this work were so defective that the people of the State had no reliable knowledge of the use made of the public-school moneys or the result of the working of the system apart from a general conviction that things were steadily "going to the bad." The only legislation that immediately resulted from this beginning of agitation was the passage of the first permissive law to establish school libraries. At the session of 1845 the subject came again to the front, and a new bill was introduced which provided for a State school board of education, appointed by the governor, whose