working of our educational system. But no one of these theories can have a vital force in our educational training for good American citizenship until the present ideal of government and all things involved in the republican order of affairs is entirely changed in the deliberate convictions of a working majority of the people of the United States.

It is only a narrow literalism or an obstinate and almost invincible provincialism that insists on holding the American common school to the type of the fathers, or even to what seemed a finality to the educators of a generation ago. Whatever may be the truth in the political theory of "strict construction" in the written constitutions of States or of the nation, none but a confirmed educational pedant can deny the right and obligation of the American people to adjust the agencies and institutions that depend on their own voluntary activity to the expanding movements of national growth and the progress of civilization.

For, despite the assertion of all sorts of educational pundits who, in learned style, demonstrate that this or that right to educate the child is reserved to family and church and is altogether fenced off from public interference by the very constitution of human nature; yet now, as always since the dawn of civilization, every healthy, national life asserts the obligation to educate the growing generation for the functions of citizenship, and surely in our Republic, where there is no government save the annual expression of the will of the whole people, through methods created by and changeable by the people; where a system of public education by the state is only the people combining for the most practical method of doing an essentially good thing, it is evidently in the power of the state to expand the system of training for citizenship according to the growing demand of the common weal.

When we are referred to the old-time country district school of the early New England colonies, or the later seminary of the secondary or higher education as the just limit of state interference with the private or natural right of the parent to educate, we may well remember the changes that, like successive tidal waves of a revolution, have submerged the manners, customs, and entire habits of living of the least progressive of our American commonwealths within a short generation.

Perhaps the most notable of these changes is the declining power and influence of great men, even in political-much more in the religious-social, and industrial life of our American society. Two hundred years ago the virtual government of every American colony was, at best, in the hands of a small fraction of its people, and even they were dominated with almost imperial mastery by a very few eminent men. But the day has already passed when any man in public affairs can become the master of his country or swing a people as Bismarck and Gladstone in our time have turned about great masses of their countrymen. More and more is the nation and every State and community now ruled by the prodigious force of great combinations of people, representing an overwhelming public or private interest; their leaders are only the spokesmen of what appears to be the wise and right thing to the more intelligent mass below.

In such a condition of affairs, which is bound to become a confirmed national habit, it is little short of pedantic folly to insist on confining public education within the narrow lines of the common school, private academy, and denominational college of half a century ago. Worthy of all praise in their own day and generation for the great and good results they wrought in the development of the national life, they are now as incompetent to meet the people's greater need as the ox or mule team, the stagecoach, the one-horse plow, the log cabin, and the entire machinery and environment of the old American life would be to deal with the commercial, manufacturing, governmental, industrial, and domestic necessities of to-day. A century ago, even in America, it might be all that was possible to trajn up a small class of energetic and able men who, by sheer weight of character and public service, could force upon a distracted and half-indifferent people a constitution and form of government that remains still the admiration of the world. But to preserve that Government, to rise to and abide on that mount of vision occupied by the fathers,

requires now far more than the uttermost wisdom and patriotism of any body of statesmen. If our country is to remain the sort of Republic to which our foremost people aspire, it will be only when a permanent majority of the people becomes so much better, wiser, and more thoroughly trained in executive faculty than now that no statesman or party will fancy itself powerful enough to override the "sober second thought" of the constituency that has become the controlling force in public affairs. And if there is any other agency save a vast and beneficent system of popular education that will furnish that constituency, all the teaching of history is vain. If there is one truth established by the experience of mankind, in every age, under every form of government, it is that no set of men is able, sacred, or impartial enough to be long intrusted with the exclusive direction of a people's life. Whatever may be the inherent defects of popular government, it is the best school yet devised by man, under fit conditions and limitations, for securing that enjoyment of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," declared in our Declaration of Independence among the "natural and inalienable" human rights. And only by the successive broadening out of a national scheme that lifts the school above the domination of classes, castes, sects, and parties, into range with the best thought, life, and practical experience of a whole people, can these conditions and limitations of absolute personal independence be gradually established, without which even an American republic falls into the abyss of anarchy.

So it is not through heresy against any hard and fast divine scheme of training the child and informing the youth that the people's common school of this Republic has grown from its old-time modest pretension to a dominating influence in the national life. It has only responded to the rapidly growing demands of the American people for a system of common culture and discipline that shall occupy the great common territory outside and exclusive of all private, political, social, industrial, and sectional preserves and bring the children, though for only a few short years, together in an arrangement which, at its best, is the only possible rehearsal of the common relations and activities of citizenship in the new American life.

From these considerations we are prepared to estimate the value of the frequent declarations along more than one line of criticism that the American common school up to the present time has been, if not an absolute failure, a grievous and unnecessary disappointment to the people. The weight of this positive assertion depends, of course, on the ideal of the critic and the point of view from which the methods of our school organization, administration, instruction, and discipline are surveyed. It requires no extended observation to perceive that these critics judge the American common school from other ideals than that of the people who have established and still, in good faith, support it.

If the object of a system of popular education in this Republic be the production of a generation of zealous and active churchmen of the different religious sects; or of a body of youthful scholars, according to the severe tests of modern scholarships; or the sending forth of a multitude of boys and girls, from the age of 12 to 15, competent to practice a trade or push out at once on a career of successful self-support, or to produce a graduate to respond to anyone of a score of standards set up by the numerous critics of our present educational affairs, the cause of the common school would certainly go by default. The American people have never proposed either of these results as the ideal of its policy of universal education, although in no respect is the American common school indifferent or hostile to any of these precious interests. And if the critic assumes the possibility of any such all-embracing and allcompelling supervision of school administration by public officials, or despotic control of teachers by superintendents, as he finds in Continental Europe, he will not only be disappointed and disgusted, but may learn that he has quite mistaken the method by which any important public interest can be safely furthered in our country.

But if he will take the pains to study the genius, history, and achievements of the American people and its method of doing all good things during the past hundred

years, he can not resist the conclusion that least of all has the educational department of the national life been a failure or in any special way a disappointment. The ideal of the true educational public, which from the first has been responsible for the development of our common school, has been mental instruction and discipline, blended with moral and practical training. This, under the conditions of a republican order of society, will contribute to the peculiar style of manhood and womanhood essential to good American citizenship. It has not been regarded a wise educational or political policy to enslave the parent, to enforce the schooling of the child, or to do, by public edict, either of several things regarded as indispensable to the training of the subject of a European continental empire. The ideal has been to create and support a generous system of common schools, free to all, with somewhat better facilities every year, so attractive that every parent might be persuaded to use it for his children; to protect childhood at every point, and especially to secure to it the precious opportunity of elementary education, and keep it out of the clutches of the ignorant and vicious parent and brutal employer; to make that school a rehearsal of civic life, a place where vulgarity and vice shall be suppressed, and all "sorts and conditions" of youth taught to live under the benign protection of wise and just law; to awaken the mental faculties, impart essential information, discipline the powers of acquisition, and fling open the highways of learning, with reasonable incentive to superior ability and to the honorable ambition of all; to make every common schoolhouse a practical training school of virtuous manhood and womanhood, according to the loftiest standards of morality, by its very environment and atmosphere, the arrangement of courses of study, the hourly habits of the child and its established discipline; above all, by the influence of the character, "walk and conversation" of the teacher, to make him an object lesson of worthy manhood; by placing the children during their most impressible age under the direct charge of women, that the coming generation may share the most refining influences, thus prolonging the ministry of good motherhood to the verge of responsible youth; to develop the executive and personal faculty by including the industrial side of the new education, without exposing the child to the labor of learning a trade in infancy; in short, to enable the pupil to become intelligent without the pretense of expert scholarship; industrious and effective without becoming a professional workman; moral and religious without imposing the trammels of sectarianism; well informed in the history of his country and intensely patriotic without landing him in the slough of partisan politics-such a man or woman as the country needs more than all things else. This is the ideal that from the first, like the Star in the East, has gone before the people in their journey toward the Promised Land.

This is the people's ideal, in more than one respect original and comprehensive beyond that of any nation in the past or present. But in working toward this exalted purpose the American people have not deluded themselves with the fancy that all this is of immediate or other than gradual achievement. They remember that two long centuries of colonial life barely sufficed to hold the 3,000,000 of our early population together through the strain of an eight-years' war of independence and the more perilous era of the formation of general government; that even the original Constitution of the United States was the result of a compromise that left the two great rival ideas concerning the national integrity so obscured that, after seventy years of fierce agitation, the whole people flew to arms to solve the problem by "the dread arbitrament of war;" and that reconstruction, under an amended Constitution, after the destruction of society in sixteen Commonwealths, left on hand more than one open question more perilous than the controversies that have wrecked successive empires in the Old World. They realize how slow and tortuous and often disheartening has been the progress of the people out from the social semibarbarism, the terrible religions bigotry, the obstinate provincialism, and the rockribbed inclosures of nationality, class, and culture, from which the different bodies of immigrants have ascended to the broad uplands of the new national life.

They have not looked for miracles in educational progress and achievement in the working of their favorite institution, the common school. All that could reasonably be expected was the same gradual progress and increasing efficiency as in every other department of the national life. As the years have gone by, the people of every State, in succession, have shouldered new burdens at the call of their trusted educators, justified by their own observation of the importance of the emergency and the outcome of educational results.

And in view of this ideal and this method of development, seen to be the only possible way to the accomplishment of a work so vast as training the coming generation of American youth for American citizenship, who is prepared to say that the common school in all its grades has not scored a success corresponding to any department of the national life? What is better to-day and what has come up to its present estate with as few mishaps by the way as the common school? Have the politicians and statesmen, who sometimes affect to ignore and are always ready to offer positive opinions on the education of the people, done better with their record of contention? Have the theologians and ecclesiastics who, with an opportunity of boundless freedom and activity, are still at sea on effectual means of bringing the masses in range of the gospel, and are still arrayed in hostile, rival sects? Have the leaders of the labor movement, who seem to have found no method of bettering their constituency than a chronic state of warfare between labor and capital? Is it the magnates of the exchange, who confess that, under the present system, 80 per cent of the young men who enter business fail? Is it the leaders of society who, in the commercial metropolis of the Union, are posing in the absurd attempt to establish an upper caste of "400" on the basis of birth and wealth? Or have the science, literature, art, or even the higher education in our country, so far excelled the common school in satisfying the reasonable expectations of the people that their representatives can afford to ignore or denounce the people's seminary as an evident failure? And, pray, what record of great and good things done for the 20,000,000 of young America has the expert to show as his warrant to sentence all save a portion of the 350,000 common school teachers to a limbo of "unscientific" uselessness? Every professional, industrial, social, and political group of leaders in the country is to-day under a fire of criticism as contemptuous, remorseless, and positive as the educational public that is responsible for the common school. "There is none of them that doeth good; no, not one," is the verdict when tried by the Olympic type of judgment now affected by an infallible class in its estimation of the national schoolhouse. Yet, despite these manifold failures in the conduct of every great interest of the national life, the nation survives; the world moves; "old things pass away and all things become new;" and, by a method that no man fully understands, though every man must recognize, every department of American life is to-day on a broader, firmer, more intelligent, and humane basis than a generation ago.

What does all this signify, if not that, on the whole, the majority of honest and active workers in the foremost ranks of every great institution and agency of American civilization are learning, year by year, better ways of navigating the unknown sea of our new republican life? Nothing is at once so cheap, so tempting to halfknowledge and the conceit of all-round wisdom, inspired by special training in one corner of expert research, as the reckless habit of judging the movements of a whole people by the maneuverings, failures, and absurdities even of their chosen representative men. Yet it is by this type of criticism that the people's school is now assailed, often from quarters so influential and with such assumption of infallibility as sometimes to shake the faith of "the very elect."

But, after all just acknowledgment of the evident defects and incompleteness of the American system of universal education, he must indeed be a careless observer or quite gone in prejudice who can not look with thankfulness and a mighty hope on what is going on in the national schoolhouse, day by day, in the sight of all men. Is there really anything better done in the United States of America than this commonplace work of the teachers among the little children; correcting vulgar and

́s, viking up drowsy or vagrant minds; reforming evil character; ave u “housands hopeless before; sending forth increasing multiter aspiration for nobler living, more exalted position, or with age vere.nation to be somebody and do something in the new Ameri

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agy meget dr de walking expert to circulate through a hundred city schooltheir methods of instruction and discipline as antiquated or Den nap:'s to the imbe of the unwashed and condemn the » Tersal procense of education, sending forth a generation of chilvhemselves. But why, then, do we find these same incompewys and pris mwenty years later swarming in all the avenues of antipase in the fore-front of every great and good cause, successful in i deepening the current of every art, occupation, and prose doing better things than any previous generation under thirty sworld has yet seen? Under all our pessimistic estimates that the 274 ne dge of doom, as certain of the doleful doctors affirm, there must meocin and effective cause for the prodigious growth in all directions, ghi thai, that has lifted this Republic within the past thirty years in cacest nationalities of the earth. That most powerful and permaa sady te fuence of the people's common school system in all its 2. Paragl its own increasing efficiency, but through the correspondevery department of educational life. The secondary, higher induscocasemal w deel; the new journalism; the Chautauqua assembly, summer så ta dediy extension; the improved public speaking; the whole side 100 vast arrangements for universal education-all these agencies ...s have been greatly dependent upon the American common school y of the new elementary education during the past half century. ace by the past, is it not safe to predict that through the years Food Ountry must depend upon the same mighty formative agency, as on air and sunlight and early and later rain, for the preservaowing toward perfection of all that shall make this Republic dese tod is the Lord ?"

we szopose to trace briefly the progress of the common school carance in New England; to trace the essays at popular cs before the war of independence, and the first awakening he revolutionary period in the dedication of vast areas to the use of the children. The reader who compreY period, which practically includes the first two no fail to discern in the educational ideas and a roca colonies the prophecy and, in more than one at has been noted in the introduction of cas American common school.

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