A board of commissioners had been appointed to codify, revise, and extend the school laws of the State. In 13 of the 17 counties teachers' institutes had been attended by 560 teachers. The State had distributed 700 copies of Webster's Dictionaries among the schools. The State school educational fund had been increased to $413,000.

In 1859 131,000 children were enrolled, and nearly half of this num ber-65,400-were in average daily attendance on the schools. Free schools had been held in 48 cities and townships, and in 18 no money had been raised. $539,000 was expended. Of 2,116 teachers 933 were women. Since its opening in 1855 the State normal school had graduated 356 pupils, and in 1859 140 were in attendance. The model school and also the annex, already mentioned, were well spoken of. All the coun ties of the State had received the benefit of the teachers' institutes. The local district organization, as in other States, had been so pushed that the object of the school laws had been frustrated, and it had become a hindrance to the progress of popular education. Free schools had been established through one-fourth of the State, and a township board of education was urged as a cure for the great evil of isolated district organization. There was the same deep chasm between the country and cities of the State as everywhere, and the perpetual insisting on the necessity of the examination of teachers and better supervision is the main theme of the report.

. We have now traced the record of the proper inauguration of popu lar education in New Jersey, under the stimulant of the great revival of the common school from 1830 to 1860, to a successful close. A new superintendent, Mr. F. W. Record, appears in the report of 1860, made January 1, 1861. The work of his administration properly comes within the period of the second revival of popular education that followed the close of the civil war.

An examination of this eventful history of the development of the common school system of New Jersey shows that after the great revival of 1831 there was no reaction similar to that which occurred in Connecticut and New York. The long experience of the existence of an incomplete system seems to have been ground into the soul of the people, and when once the reform movement began, although the progress was slow, the results achieved were never lost. In 1851 the three colleges and 231 academies of the State contained 10,500 students and possessed an income of $300,000, while there was only $25,000 more-$325,000-given to the 96,000 children who received all of their education in the public schools. This fact throws a strong light on the slow progress of the public school system in New Jersey. In no Northern State of the Union had the idea of a sharp distinction of social classes, the college and academy developed for the training of the children of the more favored, while the masses of the people were left with such a schooling as they could procure-so strong a hold as in New Jersey. But as in the educational record of our American States it has been seen that no Commonwealth can permanently remain unfriendly

to the cause of popular education, the States that have longest resisted it have been found in the end foremost in its support. And of these States New Jersey is perhaps one of the foremost in the Republic to-day.

PENNSYLVANIA.

The school law of 1834-35 was the result of an agitation that had never let the State of Pennsylvania sleep during the entire previous generation. The spirit of William Penn, Franklin, and Rush was still alive in the land. The reasons why the people did not sooner respond to this first victory for popular education, but even then waited ten years for a second, and still another decade for the final step that carried the Keystone Commonwealth well over the threshold of the American common school, are well set forth in the closing address of Hon. Thomas H. Burrowes on his retirement from the office of secretary of state and superintendent of public instruction in 1862.

Dr. Burrowes above all others deserves the reverence of the educational public of Pennsylvania. For although the energy, courage, and tact of Breck and Stevens in the legislature and the righteous obstinacy of Governors Wolf and Ritner in 1834–35 in a dire emergency lifted and held the Commonwealth to a higher level, it was the wise and persistent administration of Superintendent Burrowes, who during the three years 1836, 1837, and 1838 was secretary of state and ex officio superintendent of the new system of public schools, which clothed the skeleton system with flesh and breathed into it a breath of life that never was lost during the many years of partial success and reaction to come.

He began in 1836, in a day of small things. Only 156 of the school districts in the State had organized under the new permissive law. There were 700 public schools in operation, with 808 teachers employed and 32,544 pupils in attendance three months and twelve days in the year. Forty thousand nine hundred and fifty-two dollars was paid to teachers, and the average expense for tuition was $1.125 per capita.

As the whole number of school districts in the State was 907, of which a little more than one-half (536) had accepted the law, and the number of children of school age in the State 301,000, there appeared no great cause for jubilation. Still, under what the superintendent often calls "the old pauper system," only 23,000 children had been gathered into the schoolhouse, such as it was, and the expense of the arrangement was only $112,000. In one year the number of pupils had risen to 132,000, with a corresponding expansion of funds, and there was good reason for a mighty hope that the labors of the friends of education during the past century had not been in vain.

While thoroughly sound on the fundamental idea of the commonschool system, that it contemplated the training of the entire youthful population of the State together for good citizenship, the superintend ent threw out more than one anchor to the windward, possibly through

an underestimate of the educational spirit of the people. He advised that each district should have an opportunity once in three years to decide on retaining or rejecting the system, that the schools should only admit children between the ages of 5 and 15, and not attempt to cover the proper ground of the secondary education. But he clearly saw that nothing can permanently commend the schools to the favor of any reliable class of people save the increasing competency of the teachers. Here is the fatal defect that will finally destroy any system of public instruction, however liberally supported. He urges the establishment of two seminaries for teachers-one in each end of the State-or, if this can not be, the subsidizing of a number of colleges to this end. He believes "in three years from the passage of a proper act on this subject the whole business of common-school teaching might be rejuvenated in Pennsylvania."

But the apprehensions of the cautious superintendent were not shared by the more progressive and hopeful friends of education in the State. In the same year that this report appeared a meeting was held in Philadelphia, at which a valuable document was read by Mr. Philip Maguire, late president of the Western University. No paper read before any assembly of Pennsylvania educators previous to 1836 more thoroughly exposes the fatal weakness of the old or more heartily indorses the nobler ideals of the new time in Pennsylvania than this.

The speaker shows how the State has been led into a wasteful and inefficient habit of subsidizing educational institutions generally on the "ragged edge" of financial despair and rarely doing the work of a respectable academy. Under the loosely worded clause in the State constitution, the "arts and sciences shall be promoted in one or more seminaries," colleges had been multiplied until twenty, with not students enough for two, and sixty academies had obtained not less than 60,000 or 70,000 acres of valuable land and $300,000 "from an empty treasury." Some 200 laws, chiefly for the chartering of local schools, encumbered the statute books, the mere cost of executing which represented $200,000. The remedy suggested was a State board of education authorized to reform the whole system of appropriations and confine the bounty of the State within practical and moderate limits, composed of the chief public officials and leading educators of the Commonwealth. All public gifts should be dispensed on the principle of "helping those who help themselves." The elevation of one of these institutions to the rank and title of a proper university was urged. The plan of a normal school there presented has not yet been accepted by the State of Pennsylvania. It included a proper seminary of the broadest character with a model school. The fate of the deplorable folly of the system of a costly development of pedagogues from the academical and collegiate graduates of the State is forcibly explained.

The indorsement of such an out-and-out demonstration by a prominent assembly of distinguished people was evidently a great encourage.

ment to the State superintendent. His second report, 1837, is one of the most illuminating of all the public educational documents of the State, in that it sets clearly forth the real obstacles to the rapid development of the common schools. He shows that the resistance to the new system does not come from the ignorant, but rather from the more substantial and well-informed classes.

The city of Philadelphia and the four adjacent counties were largely, in their influential classes, still dominated by the religious sect of the Friends or Quakers. This body, from the first, had been strongly attached to a special parochial system of education, and had built up, not only for the higher but largely for the poorer classes, including the neglected colored people, an educational system satisfactory to itself. In this, still the most influential, wealthy, and cultivated section of the State, after a three-years experiment, little more than one-half of the districts in these counties had accepted the common schools. To meet this condition the law had been modified in the interest of the prevailing system to subsidize all schools willing to come under a merely nominal control of the State, retaining the power of appointing their own teachers.

Next in order came the 14 German counties in the center of the State. We have seen how the effort of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, seventyfive years before, to establish a general system of education among these people, had been frustrated by the jealousy of the German clergy and the indisposition of the population to use the English language. But the permission to conduct the schools in the German language had modified this spirit of opposition, and in the third year of the experi-. ment 135 of the 255 districts had fallen into line.

In a third division of the 24 counties, stretching from the middle mountain to the western and southwestern portion of the State, inhabited by a cosmopolitan population, a more favorable state of affairs was found. The new system was gaining favor as a compromise between the captious opponents who hitherto had rendered any practical agreement hopeless. Three hundred and seventy-seven of the 431 districts. in 1838 were in the field. These counties contained a large element of the Scotch and north Irish peoples, whose zeal for education we have had occasion to notice from their earliest appearance in the States along the vast Appalachian mountain range. In a group of ten counties found on the northern border of the State, settled largely from New England and New York, there was not found a single hostile district. It was in this region that the first settlement in the beautiful Wyoming Valley by a Connecticut colony had established the New England system of common schools before the Revolutionary war. These counties were not only intensely patriotic, but they also forced the brief acknowledgment of universal education into the constitutions of 1779 and 1790. And here had been found the solid column of support for the gallant leadership of Thaddeus Stevens, which had upheld the new school law during the assault that followed its enactment.

Twenty-five years later Dr. Burrowes, called in his old age to preside over the reformed public school system during the years of the civil war, closed his connection with the schools by an interesting statement of the peculiar conditions which had compelled the State of Pennsylvania to adopt a system of public education at first radically different from that of New England and New York. He ascribes the early founding and steady progress of the common school system of New England to the homogeneity of this people and the radical ideas of government that possessed the Puritan mind, according to which the people were acknowledged as the source of authority in church, state, and school, all the creation of a responsible majority and only existing by the permission and under the absolute control of their creator, the sovereign people. Here the entire scheme of education, from the elementary country district through the free grammar school, came up substantially at first and never received a serious check dur ing the two hundred and fifty years of its existence.

But Pennsylvania was colonized by a variety of people, the majority of whom were from the European classes that held fully to the right and duty of the Christian church as the exclusive educator of the generations, separated by obstinate differences of nationality, language, and class, and scattered over a new country of vast extent, which by its native fertility and abundant resources enabled the colonists from the first to live in the enjoyment of a rude comfort without the influence of universal education. No American State was so disposed to cherish the educational department of its religious organizations as Pennsylvania, but so powerful is the centripetal force of the American school idea that despite almost insurmountable obstacles the Commonwealth is found to-day among the first in its provisions for universal education; indeed in all, save its habit of subsidizing academies for normal instruction, is it in no essential way out of line with the entire Union.

Superintendent Burrowes ascribes the apparent reaction from the first movement that established the common school system to defects of legislation, the influence of the general public apathy against a vigorous start to the schools, and the conservative habit of looking askance on any public movement that proposed a change so radical. Of the general scheme he says:

Yet through the toil of clearing away the rubbish for the rock-foundation of the future edifice the labor of the friends of common schools in Pennsylvania has heretofore provided for it little else than a firm basis. We have now a system, an admitted, permanent, and well-understood starting point, a class of men set apart to watch over the cause of education in every neighborhood. Security is fixed upon the qualifications of teachers. The former carelessness with regard to the business of bringing together and the methods of instruction employed in primary schools has been overcome. The inconvenient localities and abnormal construction of schoolhouses have been in a great measure remedied and will hereafter be prevented. Here we have the first fruits of the common school. The possession of the spirit which accomplished this is well worth the half million dollars expended in the attempt.