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tory longs to know is the trend of thought and sentiment among the influential people of all these colonies which, half conscious to themselves and often quite apart from public expression, was the irresistible undertow sweeping all things toward the open sea of political independence, union, and republican nationality. Here alone can be found a sufficient explanation of the marvelous outbreak which, in 1776, attracted the attention of Christendom; of the successful revolt from the most powerful empire on the globe and the later establishment of a form of government which the foremost living European statesman has styled "the most memorable achievement of political wisdom in history."

Unfortunately, it is in this direction that the student of American history, from its beginnings in the early years of the seventeenth to the closing decade of the eighteenth century, finds least satisfaction. It does not help the thoughtful inquirer to plod through the regulation History of the United States, wherein a group of extempore demigods strikes into existence the world's great Republic. Just as little comfort is found in the wearisome wandering through the endless tangle of anterevolutionary politics; wars, Indian or French, or the even more impassable wilderness of the early controversies of the contentious religious sects. We come nearer the core of the matter in a work like Prof. Moses Coit Tyler's admirable history of American literature. Still further light glimmers through the crevices in a book like the recent treatise of Mr. William B. Weeden, The Early Industrial and Social Life of New England. The Johns Hopkins University also gives hopeful outlook in a series of suggestive monographs on different phases of the colonial life. But the historian of American thought before the revolutionary epoch has not yet appeared, and the ambitious attempt at forcing this intense period of mental activity in the New World into conformity with a preconceived scientific or philosophic theory of civilization gives little satisfaction.

By the nature of the case, the materials for such an investigation must be meager. Of literature, in its general acceptation, there was next to none during the long reach of almost two centuries, when the colonial mind "went sounding on its dim and perilous way," pondering the mighty issues of the new life in its new home. The physical conditions of existence were all unfavorable to that intimate communion between, or even the frequent meeting together, of thoughtful people, out of which a dominating public opinion can be generated. The different colonies were really separate little nationalities, governed, led in social fashions, directed in their industries, and swayed or antagonized in their religious movements from across the sea. They were separated even more by the inevitable jealousies of their populations, representing in their widely different nationalities, creeds and classes, the rival, often hostile interests of their native countries. Democratic and concentrated New England, the cosmopolitan structure of society in the middle colonies, a British rural aristocracy intensified by the rising slave-power and provincial local pride along the Southern Atlantic Coast, made an almost hopeless condition for any save the most formal union forced upon all by the presence of a common danger. Besides, in communities so peculiar in their relations to a jealous and domineering home government, there grew up a habit of suppression of the most vital thought and speech by their best informed people until the very eve of revolt in open war.

Altogether, it remains one of the most difficult, as the most interesting, task yet open to the modern American historian to correctly map out the lines of thought, trace the half-formed plans, and indicate the prophetic expectations of these 3,000,000 people, which, like the under-world beneath the pavement of a great city, is at once a mystery to all save the expert engineer, although the only explanation of what we see above, in the daylight of its crowded life. But through the drifting mist of this realm of half knowledge, more evident with every generation from the earliest years, appears the remarkable phenomenon of the consolidation of society in the New England colonies. While every community beyond the Hudson River was distracted by the contentions of the rival elements of its population; unable to combine for the accomplishment of anything of special moment; in this bleak, far

away corner of the half dozen little northeastern Puritan settlements, there was going on a steady process of combination for all social and civic results, by a people more pronounced in their individuality than any that came across the sea. If in human history another 20,000 people has ever been thus led apart by Providence and for two centuries kept out of elbow-touch with all antagonistic conditions, to accomplish a greater task of hard thinking, meanwhile toiling at the novel experiment of welding a race of men, the most original, obstinate, and self-asserting in personal opinions, into a state where all great common interests should walk abreast and every man become a vital part of a compact whole, its record has been lost.

Here lies the peculiar "faculty" of that wonderful New England civilization, often so exaggerated and misrepresented, even by its own historians, as an ideal condition of society. No people in history present more sharp and irritating points of repulsion to the critical observer, who fails to apprehend its "hiding place of power." That central characteristic to which, under God, this Republic owes so much was a positive genius for republican citizenship; the "saving common sense," below all the extremes of personal conviction, which enabled these little neighborhoods of obstinate, contentious, personally despotic, exceptionally able and intelligent folk to come together as by instinct and close up into communities in which no man would be a subject and no man could be a lord, a priest, or a king, but each, in his fit place, must be a “member of society" so vital that his casting out would dissolve the entire copartnership. A New England town of the old time was in no sense a confederation, but rather a blending of all into a new organism, wherein the individual gifts and powers of every citizen were wrought into the forces of a new society.

It was this perfect union and vitalization of the whole body of citizens in a common organism which gave to these towns and the Commonwealths into which they developed such a capacity for steady progress out of the narrowness, fanaticism, social despotism, and obstructive individualism with which they were originally burdened. Never before was the profound truth, announced in his inimitably characteristic way by Abraham Lincoln, "You can cheat some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but you can't cheat all the people all the time," so demonstrated in history as in this original condition of New England society through the one hundred and fifty years before the war of independence. The nearest approach to the voice of God of which a fallible human organization is capable is along this open highway, surveyed by New England in these memorable years; the developing, expanding, perpetually "revised and corrected" verdict of a community of superior people, tried and tested in the solemn work of building a new civilization, burdened with the sense of a personal and social responsibility to Almighty God.

And the more we look for the innermost hiding place of this marvelous genius for republican civilization, we find it not in the policy of church or state, in the habits of society, or the methods of industry, though all these were the outcome of the radical conviction silently and persistently at work below. It was the conviction that every child born into this world is the child of God, capable of becoming a vital and useful member of society; and the corresponding obligation of the community to give to it the opportunity of that training at home, in the church, and in the school, which would send it forth at early manhood or womanhood a self-directing, competent person and a reputable citizen of a self-governed state.

This conviction was the corner stone of every respectable New England home, and explains the domestic life of that people as nothing else can. And out of the New England home, not from the church or state, but out of the very heart of the fatherhood and motherhood and childhood and youth of the home, was born the early New England school. It outwardly took on the form of the old English organization of education. It was largely under the influence of the church. But beneath these it was the firstborn child out of the deepest heart of Puritan New England. It first appeared at home, where the instruction was given by the parents or relatives, often

specially competent to teach in letters as in morals and manners. Gradually, in the neighborhood, it grew into the primitive country district school. Step by step it expanded into the grammar school and college. Before the first generation had passed away the colony of Massachusetts Bay virtually had on the ground, for the first time in human history, a system of public education over which neither state nor church nor municipality nor corporation nor the despotic personal control of private beneficence had full domination; where every responsible citizen was a working partner in the community or state that had burdened itself with the heavy responsibility of educating every child for worthy manhood and womanhood and competent citizenship by the combined agencies of private and public wealth. Here was the beginning of the American common school, the most precious and permanent gift to the Republic from the genius of New England, the stone for two hundred and fifty years so persistently "rejected by the builders" of other commonwealths, but, in these later days, now recognized as "the head of the corner,” the corner stone of the new Republic that "can not be broken," but "upon whomsoever it shall fall it shall grind him to powder."

The failure to appreciate this peculiar union of all responsible people in a community to establish, govern, and stand behind private effort for the support of a school for all children, through the agency of an essentially democratic State, as the one distinctive feature of the American common-school system, accounts for the frequent suggestion that the early Dutch settlers of New York brought to the country the idea of this great national institution. Through the cloud of controversy that has recently gathered around the positive assertion of this proposition, like a summer morning fog on the Hudson River and bay of New York, a few incontrovertible facts appear, like the headlands of that superb region, overtopping the mist below.

(1) We observe that the United Netherlands, in the seventeenth century, did probably enjoy the distinction of the best-schooled population in Europe. But there is no reliable evidence that the system by which this was accomplished had its origin in or was dependent upon the initiative of the masses of the people. The schools of Holland were of various kinds. Until the Protestant Reformation they were largely in the hands of the Catholic priesthood; although, perhaps, of a more energetic and popular sort than elsewhere. The Reformation precipitated the memorable conflict between the states of Holland and Belgium and the Spanish Empire, which resulted in the existence for a period of what is called the Dutch Republic. This was a confederacy of the states of Holland, without a king, but still abiding in an intensely aristocratic form of society, in which the feudalism of the open country and the turbulent assertion of independence by the people of the cities made a political combination almost inconceivable in our own time. In these cities, through the agency of the Reformed Church, grants from the civic authorities, private donations, and the action of industrial guilds, supplemented by taxation imposed by the municipal governments, there came up, on the whole, the best opportunity for general culture yet offered to any European people. But as we leave the ranks of the superior class and come down to the masses of the people, we find little evidence of the enlightenment on which the advocates of the Dutch origin of the common school insist. Indeed, there is no positive proof that any but the most meager opportunity for elementary schooling was offered to the ordinary boy or girl of the humbler sort. Certainly there was nothing like the school system of the New England colonies in vogue even in Holland, when, in 1614, the West India Company, for trading with the Indians, established its three stations at New York, Rondout, and Albany.

(2) In this revival of learning there was no monopoly of interest in education by Holland. As early as 1567 the Scottish Presbyterian Church began its great work of educating the people, in which it persisted with such constancy that by 1696 there was nothing to boast above it in Europe, and the Scotch people have never fallen below Holland in this essential respect. In Germany, Sweden, and Geneva, every where among the reformed communities of Continental Europe, the revival of

learning and the disposition to carry the torch of knowledge down among the masses of the people was apparent. In Great Britain it took on the characteristic British method of coming up from the people, rather than descending from the national or municipal government. England was becoming well supplied with private and corporate grammar schools at the time of the Puritan migration. The leading men of this migrating body, itself the flower of middle-class intelligence, enterprise, and progressive ideas in ecclesiastical and civil polity, were the graduates of these schools and in an unusual degree had been students of the universities.

(3) Aside from the general influence of Holland upon the progressive class in England, which has probably been underrated, it is now asserted in the new literature of the subject originating from New York that the origin of the common school of the United States was the work of the Dutch settlers of the island of Manhattan. But there is no evidence that the early schools of the Massachusetts colony were in any special way imitations from the Dutch. In their organization, courses of study, and methods of discipline they were copies of the English schools in which their authors had been educated at home. The claim that the settlers of Plymouth brought the school system of Holland from their twelve years' residence at Leyden is disproved by every source of reliable historical information on the condition of these people. The little Puritan colony in Leyden was a forlorn band of foreigners, separated from the people around it by the barriers of language, a radical difference of church polity, a sleepless jealousy concerning the perversion of their children by the contagion of continental manners, and the longing for the dear English life left behind that always broods over the emigrant from the "seagirt isle." It was the feeling that the original members of this company were growing old and unable longer to endure the strain of self-support; that their children were in danger of estrangement by what they regarded the loose examples around them; the irrepressible desire to establish a community of their own in "God's country" over the sea, that sent forth at first a detachment and afterwards the entire body of these people.

The somewhat equivocal connection of the one scholar of the body, Robinson, with the university of Leyden, evidently favored by his espousal of the illiberal side in the theological controversy that agitated it, has been worked for a good deal more than its worth in this matter. Moreover, the years of this occupation were among the most distracted in the history of the Netherlands. They were on the verge of a renewal of the awful struggle that tore away Belgium and. later, forced the Patch Republic back into the fold of European monarchical states, where it still abides. And it is remarkable, if the Pilgrims brought the common school from Leyden to Flymonth in the hall of the Mayflower, that they let it “lie moldering in the grave" for fifty years, as the advocates of this theory assert, but actually fifteen years before a school was established in that ecozy.

Nothing but a strange misapprehension of the one distinguishing characteristic of the American common school, its origin from the people and growth, through the agency of the State by the support and administration of its creators, could transform the early parochial schools in the Patch colony of New Amsterdam to the beginnings of the American common-skool system. The famous school of the Dutch Reformed Church, established: in 1535, was simply a parochial school whose teachers were appointed by the ecclesiastical, ficials; as certainly spart from popular origin, direction, and support as the Columbia University of the New York of the presext day. Indeed, there Lad been in the Dutch settleder is of the valley of the Hudson and Mohawk up to 1964, when the colony passed to let the Pigid oartról. no such ting as "pepelar sovereignty” azal a few years presions, whân ofta s li tret contek, an inefective pop Llar partitipation u the 1. at sgomont á. rested from the decott von merriki ei rp, cation, the 11 est entire valley of the Frison was scilled at fist or a terave abod approach we the expirag feudal.si di retiral Furopa Uh, fanate a

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no rights under a patroon, who was a virtual "lord of all power and might" in civil and ecclesiastical affairs. Even the right of appeal to the company at New York was commonly signed away on entering upon this relation. The education of the tenantry was absolutely dependent on the lord of the manor and the right was exercised according to his narrow or liberal views. And there is no proof that anything like the early schools of New England were found on these great estates. The little villages, even the principal towns, New York, Brooklyn, and Albany, where the best educational opportunities were enjoyed, had no such method of developing the educational life of a whole people as we find in communities like Boston, Dorchester, Roxbury, and all the leading towns of New England. Whatever of public support was given to these schools by the government of the company was withdrawn by the English authorities, on the ground that they were really parochial schools of the Dutch Reformed Church and taught in the Dutch language. The crowning evidence of this view is the fact that, though until the close of the eighteenth century the population of this entire district was largely of the original Dutch occupancy, there seems to have been no protest and no general movement for anything like the present common-school facilities. In 1800 there were only parochial and private schools in the city of New York, and the Public School Society was formed by eminent citizens to bring in the increasing number of children that were left out of school by this ineffectual method of instructing the masses. The occupation of this splendid valley by the Dutch as a company trading with the Indians, the original medieval tenure of the land by the early settlers, the obstinate contentions that rent the colony by the growing efforts of the masses of the people for representation in the government, the cosmopolitan character of the population, from the first, all made the establishment of any system like the present American common school a virtual impossibility.

So we are compelled to come back to the Massachusetts Colony on the Atlantic Coast for the beginning of the great American institution, the American common school. And for the full understanding of this fact we must take into consideration several indirect influences which, like the environment of climate, air, and the general habit of living, have a powerful influence upon the institutions of any people. (1) We notice the intelligence of the early settlers of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, and of the two colonies, Connecticut and New Haven. The immigration of native-born Englishmen of the more progressive middle class; the class represented at home by Milton, Newton, and the illustrious men who later brought on the revolution of 1688-was confined to the twenty years between 1620 and 1640, and hardly exceeded 20,000 souls. In the Massachusetts colonies 1 man in every 250 people had been a graduate of an English university, and many of the clergy and laity brought from home a good reputation for superior scholarship and honorable service in church and college. Some of them returned and became eminent in the history of that turbulent period. In no body of immigrants up to that date, possibly in no body of people of similar origin and surroundings, were there garnered up larger possibilities for the building of a new order of human affairs in which the sovereign people should take the old place of priest and king.

The religious fanaticism, social severity, and personal intensity and eccen** of the Puritan in New England, even then, was largely the armor of de which alone he could hold himself erect amid the storm and stress of a hoi cution that, for an entire generation, made England almost uninhabita dissenter from the established church. The only way in which ". live at all in the enjoyment of their own religious, civic, and s country, out of elbow touch with all opposing influences. any similar people, inspired by common sense and practical planted themselves in a new country, with an ocean betwee. land, and "gave notice to quit,” on the one hand, to the state would have brought to the New World the same persecution the the sea, and, on the other, to the intolerant "come-outer" or disor