that of the superintendent of schools having finally passed. Mr. S. S. Randall was called from his former position, so long held with distinguished fidelity and ability, the State deputy superintendency of education, to the city superintendency of the public schools of the city of New York. The administration of State Superintendent Rice was a step forward and a positive addition to the cause of educational reform in the State. He recommended the establishment of school commissioners for city and village supervision, with additional compensation, the appropriation of one-third the public-school money to districts in charge of qualified teachers, the empowering of the district elementary schools to raise a tax for their maintenance, with other suggestions of importance. The war against the rate bill, more and more vigorous, was renewed by the proposition to impose a tax of three-fourths of a mill upon the entire valuation of the State. In 1856 the legislature adopted the advice of the superintendent and established the office of school commissioners in districts formed by the boards of county supervisors corresponding to the legislative assembly districts. One hundred and twelve commissioners of public schools were then elected and entered on their positions, heretofore occupied by their predecessors, the county commissioners of schools, appointed by the county supervisors, drawing their salaries of $500. The tax of three-fourths of a mill on the dollar was substituted for the $800,000 previously raised. The onethird added to the school schedule was divided into two parts, one to be distributed according to the number of scholars and one according to the average daily attendance. The interest of the school fund now reached the sum of $867,000, and the annual expenditure for schools was more than $1,000,000.

The administration of Hon. Henry Van Dyke extended from 1857 to 1862, when he was promoted to the important office of assistant treasurer of the United States at the city of New York. His assistant secretary, Mr. Emerson W. Keyes, held the position during the remainder of the term and prepared the report. His exposure of the decline of the famous district-school library system of New York is a melancholy picture of the unaccountable popular indifference to a magnificent public privilege. One million two hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars had been appropriated to this purpose during the past twenty-four years; but Superintendent Keyes finds as the result "a motley collection of books, 1,500,000 in number, distributed among families, neglected, torn, and soiled."

He is constrained to believe that no plunder-burdened contractor or bribe-stained official ever yielded to the State so poor return for his spoil as have the people of this State derived from their liberal and beneficent appropriation through their own reckless and improvident care of it.

Mr. Keyes was one of the most accomplished and energetic of the younger school men of the State, and his report was one of the most valuable in its common-school literature. His failure to reach the posi

tion of State superintendent, by the reelection of Hon. Victor M. Rice, was mitigated by his immediate reappointment to his original post of deputy superintendent.

In 1860 the population of New York was 3,550,735. There were 49,000 free colored persons in the State for whose children provision was made in separate schools. Not until a period subsequent to the civil war were colored children and youth admitted to the full privilege of the common schools.

The period included in this essay closes during the second administration of Superintendent Rice. The six years 1862-1868 were not a period of educational decline. The condition of the district-school teachers was improved. A more just arrangement for the disbursement of public school funds had been adopted. In the country the schools held on seven months in the year. Eight-tenths of the towns made returns. In 1865 upward of $4,500,000 were expended on the schools in a time of great public financial stringency. Eighty-six academies had under instruction 1,500 pupils four months in the year in preparation for teaching. The conclusion of all things recorded in this essay during the thirty years from 1837 to 1867 was reached by the abolition of the rate bill in 1867, which declared the common schools of the Empire State free to every person of school age. The one-mill tax for education had also been increased to one and one-fourth mills on every dollar of the enormous property valuation of the Commonwealth.

The limitations of the present essay have confined it to the presenta tion of the gradual development of the common school in New York during the period of the great educational revival from 1830 to 1867 as a system. During this period it had expanded from a condition of the most extreme isolation in 10,000 independent school districts up to that powerful and well-ordered organization of district, county, and State supervision declared by Horace Mann and Henry Barnard the most complete at that time existing in any country. It would have been a grateful task to enliven this somewhat formal sketch by a local coloring of the actual school-keeping of the Empire State during this momentous period, not only in the history of education, but of the country; for it is impossible to understand the real significance of the American common school in any State without some adequate comprehension of its environment in the intellectual, social, religious, literary, artistic, and political conditions cooperating therewith.

The period from 1830 to 1867 in New York was especially significant in all these directions. It was the era of the first physical consolidation of the different portions of this great State with each other, and its even more important communication with the East and West by the completion of the extended railroad system reaching from the Atlantic coast to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley. With this came in the era, through rapid transit at home and steam navigation abroad, of an immense immigration from Europe and the movement which relieved

the rural districts of multitudes of their ablest young people to build up the wealthy cities and flourishing villages which now contain so large a proportion of the population of our Eastern and Central States. The city of New York and its immediate suburbs forged ahead from the somewhat moderate burg it was found at the Revolutionary war, in the rear of half a dozen larger towns in all forms of industrial enterprise, to the metropolis of the Western Continent.

Never in the history of the Republic has any Commonwealth been served by a more eminent body of public men than has New York during these thirty years. The settlement of the western portion of the State, the real beginning of the new Northwest during the past half century of the national life, had trained a group of statesmen of whom Mr. Seward was the most eminent, who, through the entire generation before the civil war, had lifted the Empire State to the most conspicuous position in the public affairs of the country.

And by one of those providential political blunders that often open the door to a great public opportunity, the act of the "council of appointments" in 1820 removing Gideon Hawley from the office of first State superintendent of common schools resulted in the practical elevation of the office through the transfer of its increasing interests to the charge of the secretary of state. And as the men who filled this honorable and influential department of state were among the most distinguished and broad-minded statesmen of the Commonwealth, it happened that their supervision of popular education was such as probably no American State outside of Massachusetts has enjoyed. During this period appeared on the field a new and mighty agency, the metropolitan journalism of New York, inaugurated by Horace Greeley, Henry J. Raymond, William Cullen Bryant, and others. The corresponding establishment of the district school library gave a new impulse to popular intelligence, and both wrought mightily in behalf of the new education. The beginnings of the later American literature in the group of authors clustered about Washington Irving, and the appearance of the first and so far the most eminent school of native artists, especially in the delineation of American scenery in church, the Harts, Page, Durant, Kensett, and others only less celebrated, were characteristic of the time. And the new democratic organization of social life begun in western New York, so largely settled and molded by the best New England immigration with a broader social ideal and a more generous patriotic cultivation, greatly modified the intensely aristocratic type of the old Hudson River country, the capital city, and the metropolis.

This rapid elevation of New York to its present eminence as the Empire State carried along with it and was greatly reacted upon by the common school. Here was indeed, as Governor Seward so forcibly declared, the vital center of the Commonwealth. While there was all the time in the old collegiate, academic, sectarian, and more conservative educational and social circles an evident jealousy of, sometimes hos

tility to, the common school, yet it was a great support that the two most celebrated institutions of learning then in the State, Union College and the Troy Female Seminary, under the presidency of Dr. Elipha let Nott and Mrs. Emma Willard, were established at first on the threshold of the new New York, and were the firm and powerful friends of popular education. In Dr. Nott, Mrs. Willard, Prof. Alonzo Potter, and the group of admirable educators that hailed from these and schools of similar spirit farther west, the pioneers and supporters of the common school found their most efficient backing and their most persistent support. So, when the most respectable corporation that ever ruled the city of New York, the Public School Society, was sidetracked by the final organization of the metropolitan school system, in accordance with the remainder of the State, the last bulwark of opposition was surmounted.

That this great work did not proceed with the speed and decision. which characterized it in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, under the leadership of Mann and Barnard, was due largely to the fact that in New York meanwhile was being wrought out in the common-school policy of the State the most difficult educational problem of the new Republic, the fusing of a cosmopolitan people, representing all the political hostilities and obstinate religious differences of the past thousand years of European life, in one homogeneous civilization. In this respect, until the outbreak of the civil war, New York was the great school-teacher of the young West and the civic object lesson of the North. And by no achievement of masterly statesmanship did this Commonwealth so contribute to the solution of this vital and almost impossible national problem as by the final success in 1867 in placing the American common school, not only in her rural districts but especially in all the great cities of the State, so thoroughly on its present basis that several of these cities and of the more important villages had established the free graded system of education, with the high school and effective supervision, and were looking toward the improved methods of the new education. And meanwhile the country district school had been, first in its history, placed under an effective local and county administration and relieved from the incubus of the tuition fee.

If there is a spectacle in modern history more inspiring and more encouraging to the believer in the American order of society than this record of the Empire State of the Union during this period of its development, we have not been permitted to find it in the studies of a lifetime. And this great achievement of a cosmopolitan people, representing the various political systems, churches and creeds, and industrial habits that had dominated Europe for centuries, by their own effort lifting a Commonwealth to the uplands of American life by educating their children together for a common citizenship, can only be understood by one who also understands that the keynote of American nationality was sounded in the American idea of universal education.

NEW JERSEY.

In New Jersey, as in all the States of the North, there had been a gradual preparation for the revival of the common school. As early as 1825 Philip Lindsley, acting president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton), afterwards the father of the important movement in Tennessee, the founding of the University of Nashville, now best known by its connection with the Peabody Normal College, had spoken out plainly in favor of State normal schools. In 1828 the first convention in behalf of popular education was held in Trenton, and the able report from its committee greatly influenced the effort of the people at the founding of something like a general system of popular education in the State. The school law of 1828, referred to in a previous essay, was the first effective demonstration in New Jersey in favor of universal education. But it was at best a permissive statute, and after being twice emasculated it was finally repealed in 1831 and the State fell back into its former unsatisfactory condition. A group of associations, the Literary and Scientific Society in 1825, the New Jersey Lyceum in 1828, with other similar movements, however, kept the spirit alive. Several of the foremost men of the State, now of national historical reputation, were conspicuous in this movement. Chief Justice Hornblower, Hon. Theodore Frelinghuysen, Hon. William L. Dayton, Prof. John McLane, of Princeton, and Prof. E. C. Wines, of Brunswick College, with numbers of others, were indefatigable in the good work.

It was by their efforts, with the hearty cooperation of some of the leading educators and public men of New England and New York, who by lectures, letters, and their personal presence greatly encouraged the home educational public, that the common school law of 1838 was passed. At that time New Jersey had a population of 372,000. In the year 1828 the school fund of the State amounted to $222,000, and there was a great desire for its appropriation for the establishment of a system of common schools. By the law of that year $20,000 was appropriated by the State, with a request that each township should duplicate the amount received by its distribution. There were then 15,000 children between the ages of 5 and 15 for whom there was no provision for schooling, and another 15,000 unable to read, with 5,000 illiterate voters. But the ten years before 1838 had not been encouraging to the friends of popular education. Indeed, under the loose administration of what was adopted, there was a growing indisposition among the people to support the common schools. Dr. Wayland, of Brown University, in a letter to the friends of popular education in New Jersey about this time, had written, "In devising a system of instruction, I should proceed on the principle that all of our present teaching is nearly as bad as it can be." It was mechanical to the last degree, and the president of Brown University also declared that the best teaching could be found in the schools for infants, then being ED 98-30