ference with religious belief or practice, or with the education of children, which, like religion, was considered strictly a parental and individual duty." When the English Commissioners of Foreign Plantations asked what course was taken in Virginia for instructing the people in the Christian religion, Governor Berkeley replied, "The same that is taken in England out of towns, every man according to his ability instructing his children." But he also added, what has become historic, though little understood in its connections: "I thank God there are no free schools nor printing-presses, and I hope we shall not have them these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them and libels against the best of governments: God keep us from both!" And the hope of Berkeley was fulfilled, for he spoke in 1671, and there was no system of schools in Virginia attempted before Thomas Jefferson.

There was one school in South Carolina whose founding and career are deserving of mention. It was the Dorchester Seminary, established by a body of Massachusetts Congregationalists who colonized in the South about 1734. This seemed more like the New England academy than any other school in that section; and, with the four other grammar-schools claimed for the colony, probably justified Mr. Ramsay's assertion that, "from this time, all who wanted might find in South Carolina the best of classical instruction."

The Battle Creek School of Maryland, also, was older even than this last, and of nearly equal rank, and was the type, both in function and organization, of the later county academies.

It can not be said that any of the colonies were indifferent to education of any grade, any more than they were to the claims of religion and individual honesty. But to some of them these were not matters of public control. It was not schools, but free schools, which Governor Berkeley denounced. During his short administration he was more

than once a generous subscriber to funds for private academies-a policy of conduct entirely consistent with his own and the South's views concerning the means of education; consistent too, with the practice of all the colonies, or parts of them at some period, even in New England. Only seventy years ago in Boston, primary instruction was first made public, and elsewhere even later. As a fact, the taking on of general education as a function of government was yet an experiment, well into the present century. The question of how much, has carried with it a multitude of others, whose answers are the way-marks in the growth of American educational ideas.

Bibliography.

The only comprehensive reference on the colonial schools and school systems is Barnard's "American Journal of Education," begun 1855. Its republication of original papers, legal enactments, and early educational documents, gives it a peculiar and unquestioned authority. Consult also "Ezekiel Cheever and his Descendants," in "New England Historical Register," vol. xxxiii, p. 164, and "Colonial Education in the South,' "De Bow's Review," vol. xx, p. 622; also "Local Government and Free Schools in South Carolina," by B. J. Ramage, 1883.

PART SECOND.

THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD.

CHAPTER IV.

ELEMENTARY EDUCATION IN THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD.

FROM the first vigorous colonial resistance to English aggression it took America fifty years to establish an independence among nations. The Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 were two culminating incidents in the conflict. How much more than this was necessary before national equality was granted, how much of diplomacy and invention, advancement in learning, and domestic control, can scarcely be estimated. The period was not altogether one of revolution; but the ideas and the type of men dominant in 1783 ruled still in civil and administrative and social affairs for a quarter of a century. They enacted laws, erected schools, shaped education, and gave direction to sentiments of industry and refinement and the means of progress. In a history of culture, the period of the Revolution in America may be said to include the War of 1812. Indeed, the next period, that of reorganization, can not be said to have had a recognized beginning until twenty-five years later (1837).

The two chapters following seek to sketch the conditions of elementary, secondary, and collegiate education during the period named.

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1. "Pauper Schools."

Francis Adams, speaking for his own country, recently (1875) said:* “Our public elementary schools of England have always been regarded as charitable schools."

The same idea prevailed for many years in this country, in Pennsylvania, almost wholly throughout the South, rarely in the West, but more or less in New England, though not extensively in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Rhode Island held that elementary instruction might not safely be interfered with by the State except in the interest of those who were unable to provide for their own; and, contradictory as it seems, when John Howland and his mechanic friends undertook (1785) to establish the free school in Rhode Island, it was objected to chiefly "by the poorer sort of people."

A generation later, Governor Hammond, of South Carolina, in his annual message, animadverting upon the common schools, but evidently speaking in the atmosphere of a local unfriendly sentiment, took occasion to say: "The freeschool system has failed. Its failure is owing to the fact that it does not suit our people, our government, our institutions. The paupers for whose children it is intended need them at home to work." The sentiment was not peculiar to this State: Governor Hammond was only more emphatic. In half the original colonies the idea was a ruling factor in more or less of the educational legislation through the early constitutional period. By the Maryland act of 1723, and following, visitors for the counties were empowered to select certain children to be taught gratis. The literary fund of Virginia (1810) was set apart for the exclusive benefit of the poor, as was a special Georgia appropriation of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars seven years later. In the same year also New Jersey began the foundation of a

"Free Schools of the United States," p. 52.

+ Rev. James Fraser's report, p. 10; quoted there from an address by Dr. B. G. Northrop, delivered 1864.

school-fund, but almost immediately provided for an optional taxation of townships "for the education of paupers." Even Ohio, as late as 1821, attached a charity clause, and so defeated the purpose of an otherwise liberal enactment. In Pennsylvania, also, throughout both the colonial and the early constitutional periods, the public-school idea was compassed by the care which it was thought the State should take of the dependent and unfortunate classes. Public schools in the early history of Pennsylvania were "pauper schools." This appeared in the Penn School, Philadelphia, and was reaffirmed in the Constitution of 1790.

Such schools raised and maintained a well-meant, charitably intended, but unfortunate distinction between rich and poor, so as in time to frustrate the design of the schools and the generous charity of their founders. The poor despised the provision as a public badge of their debasement; the wealthy shunned them as degrading. That this was not merely the bias of legislation imposed upon the public appears in the constant misinterpretation of the spirit and function of the common schools by the people themselves. Not till far into the present century was even Philadelphia freed from the invidious distinction, while the emancipation of the rural districts came later.

Elsewhere a similar antipathy resulted from very different conditions. The "school fees" in England and the "rate-bills" in the United States were designed to throw a part of the burden of maintaining the schools upon patrons. While doing this they had the effect in every State where tried either to exclude those from the privileges of the school who could not afford them, or to subject them to the odium of "pauper patrons" when school fees were remitted. In either case the "odious rate-bill" has been the occasion of setting off society into classes, excluding some, and so limiting the efficiency of the schools.*

* See this question of rate-bills discussed, in the light of both English and American experience, in Mr. Adams's "Theory of Free Schools," "Free-School System," pp. 45-57.