be taken on the proposal to establish a "frée school"; the affirmative to be ted by draining and turning down upon the table the glass which each member held filled with generous wine. Every glass was emptied and turned upside down upon the table, and the Winyaw Indigo Society School sprung at once into a vigorous and useful existence.

For one hundred and forty years this local school had been a great blessing to that neighborhood, the sons of the gentlemen of the adjoining country being educated there, with a generous provision for orphans. Not a few of the famous men of the State are numbered in its reports. But in the course of time the great industry of the county, rice culture, was broken up; the region became densely populated by negroes, and the town lost a good deal of its ancient importance.

In 1886, on an educational tour through the State, we learned that the public funds for common schools in the county were chiefly monopolized by the colored people, and that the white children, many of them unable to attend a tuition academy, were in danger of educational destitution. The immediate object of our visit with the State superintendent of education was to persuade the members of the old club to give their schoolhouse, still a suitable building, and such funds as the organization retained to the city as a contribution to the founding of an efficient public "graded school," to supplement the colored side of the State system.

We found Georgetown a fairyland of greenery; a verdant island amid the great marshes at the mouth of two rivers that here pour their waters into the Atlantic, slumbering under the shade of its majestic live oaks, with the most attractive old colonial church we had yet seen; a striking reproduction of a fine parish church of the old England of a century ago; its cemetery and grounds inclosed in high walls and shadowed by overhanging trees. At the rink, the only modern building we saw, we talked out the evening hour, facing a most attentive audience; the leading white people in the center of the great hall, surrounded and brooded over by a mighty crowd of the colored folk gathered in a semicircle behind. Our host was of the Alston family and an excellent specimen of a rector of the Episcopal Church, compelled to do the work of a bishop of souls through a region as large as some of the United States. On the following day we appeared before the members of the Indigo Club, including a venerable gentleman who still rejoiced to have come from Boston fifty years before. The eloquent State superintendent surpassed himself in his plea for the dedication of the old seminary to the broader uses of a free public graded school. We left the same day, but soon after our plan was adopted and, at the last account, this community rejoiced in the possession of a suitable arrangement for the education of all classes and both races, free to all under the law for graded village and city schools in the State.

It will be a most attractive study to note the successive attempts of the people of South Carolina to establish a suitable system of public instruction for the masses of white children; to note the splendid service of some of the noblest of South Carolina's sons in behalf of the common school; the attempt of several different legislatures to put a system in operation, and the causes of failure, until the one inveterate and perpetual foe of the American common school, the institution of negro slavery, went to its own place in 1865.

As a companion picture to Mr. McCrady's glowing representation of the sufficiency of the colonial school arrangement for the 60,000 white people of South Carolina, we may call attention to the account given in Horry & Weems's Life of Gen. Francis Marion of a remarkable deliverance on education by a most characteristic representative of the "common people" of this State at the close of the Revolutionary

war.

The educational record of the colony of Georgia previous to the Revolution is soon presented. In some respects the settlement of the province was fortunate. General Oglethorpe was an amiable enthusiast, inspired with a desire to found in a new land a refuge for a class of poor debtors for whom there was no hope in England. Around

this class, doubtless containing a fair amount of good material, he established a group of little communities-Hebrews, Catholics, Highland Scotchmen, New England yankees, Salzburgers, Moravians, etc.—each planted on his own territory, separated beyond the possibility of immediate hearty cooperation. This cosmopolitan assemblage he proposed to hold together by a form of government that no American colony was then willing to live under; which forbade the two luxuries of a new society organized in a semitropical country, negro slavery and strong drink. Of course the experiment went out in a general wrangle, and both the negro slave and plenty of good liquor came in. The colony in due time drifted into the regulation condition of all things provincial. At the breaking out of the Revolution Georgia seems to have been under the administration of a colonial governor so popular that, for a time, the movement for independence was arrested and only the people in St. John's Parish, of New England origin, sent a delegate to the first Colonial Congress.

Whatever there may have been of educational spirit in the little separate nationalities of which the new colony was composed during the brief period of its colonial existence, the most notable enterprise was the attempt to convert and school the Indians by a colony of Moravians, who soon abandoned the work and moved to Pennsylvania. Afterwards, George Whitfield, the great Methodist evangelist, who, with John Wesley, made Georgia the scene of some of his most devoted early labors, built up the celebrated Bethesda Orphan House.

The idea was suggested by Wesley in 1737, and taken up by Whitfield in 1740 with his usual enthusiasm and energy. He contributed £1,000 for its foundation, a 500acre tract of ground was located 10 miles from Savannah, and a venture, quite beyond the immediate means of the zealous founders, was at once made with 24 orphans. From this time until the death of the great preacher in Massachusetts in 1770 Whitfield spared no pains to keep this enterprise before the benevolent people of England and all the American provinces. He even went to the length of buying a plantation in South Carolina and stocking it with negro slaves to increase the fund for the education and training of his white orphans. At the time of his death the whole number of pupils and workers on the estate amounted to 150 people, entirely dependent on his own efforts.

At one time Whitfield conceived the idea of elevating the establishment into a seminary of the same sort as the Log College of Pennsylvania, from whose original inception was finally evolved Princeton in New Jersey. At that time, 1764, he states that there was no college south of Virginia, and the new town of Savannah might be made an educational center for the adjacent country, Florida, and the West Indies. But all things of this sort depended on royal favor, and the powers in England failed to see the point and refused the charter. Foiled in this, Whitfield fell back on the organization of an academy at Bethesda, and he was at work in New England in behalf of this project at the time of his death.

The demise of the great evangelist was speedily followed by the failure of his school of benevolence and education, which had been kept alive by passing around his clerical hat on two continents. A series of fires and tornadoes twice leveled the building to the ground. Finally, in 1808, the legislature of Georgia settled up the affairs of the defunct institution and divided the proceeds among several charitable and educational institutions. A peculiar interest attaches to this movement from the fact that here was a project for a college in this distant and feeble colony before North or South Carolina had started in this direction. A portion of this fund was given to the Chatham Academy, which later became a celebrated school and remains to-day as the upper grade of the free public school system of the beautiful and thriving city of Savannah.

But out of this cosmopolitan population of the colony was evolved an energetic and executive force, which, in time, has given to the people of Georgia the habit, by common consent, of declaring their Commonwealth "the Empire State of the

South." While very different from other Southern States, it can not be questioned that out of this original mixture of intelligent and ambitious people, from the first attracted thither, the State of Georgia has grown in industrial and general executive ability in a remarkable degree.

Here we leave the six Southern colonies, at the breaking out of the Revolutionary war, nearly equal in population to the remaining seven Central and New England provinces. We have noted the differences in their conditions of life, the organization of society, and the form of colonial government in all, which made it next to impossible that more should have been achieved in the direction of popular education than we have found. But we have shown that, among the superior class of them all, there was no special lack of educational zeal in their own behalf, and that their opportunities of home, foreign, and Northern training had been so well improved that, on the appearance of the general emergency, a group of leaders in civic and one supreme commander in military affairs appeared, whose names have become household words in the annals of the Republic.

POPULAR EDUCATION IN THE CENTRAL AMERICAN COLONIES BEFORE THE REVO

LUTION.

NEW YORK.

The vast unknown realm between the icy coast of Labrador and Cape Henlopen, on the southern shore of Delaware Bay, had been given by the Pope of Rome to Spain, and the French had explored and partially occupied the Canadas, when Henry Hudson, an Englishman in the service of Holland, first sailed up the "great river of the mountains" to the present site of Albany, N. Y., in 1609. The habit of "claiming the earth," now the prerogative of every American citizen, three centuries ago was monopolized by the emperors, kings, popes, and “high mightinesses" of Europe. On the strength of this voyage, the States General of Holland, in 1614, gave permission to trade, and in 1621 granted a general dispensation to the Dutch West India Company, an association of merchants, to occupy and govern an imperial domain. This New Netherlands, in the fertile imagination of this "syndicate,” included the whole region between the Connecticut River and the Far West, from the St. Lawrence River southward, claiming New Jersey and Delaware, besides all of New England below Cape Cod.

But the French had their own views about the Lake Champlain country. The obstinate Yankee struck Plymouth Rock, pushed himself "out West" as far as Springfield, Mass., claimed Connecticut and Vermont, and finally drove the afflicted Dutchman within the present eastern boundary of New York. An eminent descendant of the original occupants in 1861 informed us that "now the Union was about to break up, New York would resume its claim on the whole country west of the Connecticut River." We advised him to study a township map of New England, reminding him that each of these little empires had fought over its boundary for two hundred years, till their outlines were "as ragged as a hetchel," and by the time that New York had finished with the first "tier" on the west slope of the mountains there would probably be a call for a "compromise."

Gradually, by successive reductions, at the beginning of the century the State of New York settled down content with the 47,620 square miles of its present area; an extent of 311 miles from north to south, and, including Long Island, 412 miles from east to west. And surely the Commonwealth beyond the Berkshires may well be satisfied with a State more than two-thirds the size of all New England and incomparably more productive; in all but the absence of coal one of the most favored; unsurpassed in varied and picturesque natural scenery; the military strategic point of the Northern States between the Atlantic and the Mississippi, according to the testimony of Washington, Scott, and Grant. Only through the open gate of the Lake Erie shore can the East reach the great West without scaling the uplands of

the Alleghany range, as far south as the lowlands of the Gulf States. The harbor of New York is the natural home of the commerce of the Atlantic. From the first all things pointed to New York as the Empire State of the New World.

To-day this magnificent Commonwealth has 6,000,000 people-twice the number of the new Republic when Washington was inaugurated in Wall street as first President of the United States. Its property valuation is $3,000,000,000. One-third the entire population of the State is grouped in what is already known as "the greater metropolis," not only foremost as the financial but also as the national center of art, music, the drama, journalism, and the periodical authorship, out of which our characteristic American literature is beginning to emerge. Here are concentrating the most vital interests of the Republic. Both the political parties look to New York as the decisive battle ground in the hard-fought conflict for the Presidency. And the burning issue of the final triumph of the American common school over its enemies will be achieved where the old Dutchmen sat on Manhattan Island two hundred and seventy years ago, "with their gable ends to the street," imbibing good liquor, in the jolly days when one-fourth the houses in New Amsterdam were temples dedicated to St. Gambrinus.

Mr. Emerson used to say that "in America, Old England extends to the Alleghanies and New England begins out West." But in fact the America of the future, as respects the quality and mingling of its people, began in New York. It is true that for forty years a colony of Dutch traders and great landowners held the spacious realm of the Hudson and eastern Mohawk valleys under the rule of what we now call a big syndicate, the Dutch West India Company, in a very indefinite way backed by the States General of Holland. Little Holland, during the forty years of the Dutch occupation of New York, was the foremost of European nations in respect to wealth, skilled industry, popular culture, art, eminent scholarship, and the outward forms of free government. But the history of that great people at home is only another illustration that no European continental State contains, in its radical social organization, the elements of a permanent constitutional republic. In 1709 Dean Swift, one of the shrewdest men in Europe, said of the Dutch: "They are a commonwealth founded on a sudden, by a desperate attempt, in a desperate condition, not formed or digested into a regular system by mature thought or reason, but huddled up under the pressure of sudden exigencies; calculated for no long duration, and hitherto subsisting by accident in the midst of contending powers who can not yet agree about sharing it among them." Society in Holland was feudal in the country; the free cities ruled virtually by a powerful aristocracy; the people torn in pieces by the bitter contentions of sect and party. Holland to-day is, consequently, the most prosperous, intelligent, and contented of the smaller kingdoms of Europe.

Unfortunately, unlike New England, which represented the most progressive element of England, New Amsterdam represented the least advanced element of Holland. It was a distant colony, absorbed in trade, controlled by a trading company which appointed its governors. The offer of 8 miles of land on each side, or 16 miles on one side of the Hudson, with an indefinite extension beyond, with feudal powers to the owner, developed the patroon, the nearest approach to the European feudal lord of the manor that ever lifted his head this side of the water. After two hundred years of vain attempt to grapple with its difficulties, this absurd arrangement exploded in "the patroon war" of fifty years ago, the only agricultural rebeltion ever known in the North. With a fair per cent of respectable personal ability and character, an intermittent policy of religious toleration, with a state church and a few parochial schools, the history of New Netherlands for forty years is a dreary record of petty quarrels between the company and the landowners, savage Indian outbreaks, with all the adjuncts of an intensely aristocratic society. Not until twenty years after the settlement was the little gain of a sort of advisory council to represent the people accorded by the tyrannical governors. At last the masses were so worn out with this exasperating conflict that they "struck" on the appearance of

a British fleet in 1664, refused to defend the city, and compelled testy old Governor Stuyvesant to haul down the Dutch flag for "unconditional surrender."

Had the States General accepted the offer of Parson Robinson to send 400 families of Puritans to Manhattan things might have gone faster. Even then the colony was known for the mixture of population that made up the 8,000 people encamped on this imperial domain. The influence of the better side of Holland really never appeared until after the English occupation. Then, goaded into activity by the rivalry of the Englishman, Scotchman, Protestant Irishman, Huguenot, Yankee, and various other peoples, the superior class of the Holland settlers developed into a valuable social, industrial, and political element, largely conservative, with a few eminent exceptions, having little part or lot in the making of the New York.

Already was the keynote of the cosmopolitan civilization which dominated the great central region of the old colonies between Virginia and New England struck with the change of its name from Dutch New Amsterdam to English New York. For the next one hundred years of British occupation the old eastern New York slowly plodded on, almost in the rear of the colonial procession. The great landowners held to their vast estates with a death grip, although the class of smaller farmers was gradually developed. North of Albany and west of Schenectady extended the vast, sparsely peopled wilderness fought over in the almost perpetual French and Indian wars. But the population all the time was becoming more cosmopolitan; and, spite of the tyrannical policy of the home government, all the time irritating the people, the rule of a great nation like England was a prodigious advance upon the petty worriment by a testy and narrow syndicate of traders. Next to Virginia, colonial New York was the most aristocratic of the thirteen colonies. Yet the assembly struck out at an early day with courage, and a majority of the best people, with an eminent leadership, were thoroughly patriotic, and the new State had the distinguished honor of witnessing the inauguration of Washington as first President of the United States in its metropolis.

At the close of the war New York was the fifth State in the Union, in 1780 the city and Long Island containing 50,000 and the State 233,000—in the rear of Virginia, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Maryland. Mr. Seward tells a story that at this time it was thought New York City might become an educational center, but could hardly aspire to the commercial importance of Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston. It is said that the ten leading patriot statesmen of the colony represented ten nationalities. More than that number of languages were spoken on Manhattan Island. Even the little frontier village of Utica, with its ninety houses, had nine languages on hand.

The colonial history of New York in respect to education must be regarded from the standpoint of this peculiar organization of society and strangely cosmopolitan mingling of all sorts and conditions of men. The historian of education in New York, Mr. Randall, remarks: "Prior to the close of the Revolutionary war and the organization of the State government very little general attention seems to have been bestowed upon the subject of popular education."

There is no reliable foundation for the assumption that the type of limited education found in the New Netherlands during the forty years prior to the English occupation was anything more than the regulation parochial school of the Dutch Reformed Church, assisted or modified to a certain extent by such methods as were at hand. The careful author of Colonial New York says: "In New Netherlands education was neglected. The first colonists, except the officers of the affairs of the company, were laborers, artisans, servants, with a few clerks and tradesmen who had been educated at the common schools, but never been within the walls of a college. Their time belonged to others, to whom was left the duty of establishing schools and churches. After a while, when the monopolizing grasp of the company was loosed and freemen began to immigrate, they were not of the highly educated class, but burghers, merchants, and traders, who came to better their fortunes. Of educated men, therefore, few